over-desires and idolatry, and the Gospel - part 2

Now what do we do about these idols. You have to believe and have your heart riveted by some things:

the idols of your heart cannot simply be removed, they can only be replaced. We are slaves to _____ . Most people, once realized to their condition, will white-knuckle it saying, 'I am not going to be controlled by these things!' But it will never work, at least not for very long. There is not one personal transformation in which the heart is not left with an object of ultimate beauty and joy. The heart's desire for one particular object can be conquerable, but its desire to have some object is unconquerable. Something you grasp with the mind, has to be something that rivets and captures your heart, that is the only things that is going to save you, change you. That is the only thing that will move you into the "you have died" "and your real life is with Christ". This is radical.

First there is a truth. What is it? We are being told here: when you become a Christian, when you say "I believe!!!" What makes you a Christian is not now I am living in a certain way (though change does come - we are not saved by our "fruit" but there never is "fruitless" faith), what makes you a Christian is now you are IN Christ. It means God sees you as so one with Him. He looks as you as though you have died and have been raised with Him because you have in a sense. This means that God sees you free from the guilt of anything you have done wrong, having died on the cross to pay for it. But it was already paid by Him! Jesus has THE place of highest honor having come down and been brought back up victoriously. It says here that you are raised with Him. You are seated with Him. That means that if you give yourself to Jesus Christ, God now delights so much in you as if you had done everything that He had done. God delights in you as much as He delights in His own Son. Unless you know these things can you even begin to be free of people's approval, family relationships, parental expectations, the way the world sees money and power and sexual beauty. These very things that drive you, with anxiety, addictions. The only way is to first know this. Do you believe that? That is the Gospel. The Gospel is not that we give God a good record and then God blesses us, BUT rather that God, through Jesus Christ, gives us a perfect record and delights in us through Him and then we cannot help but live for Him out of the freeness of that.

You have to set your heart on that. (now what does that REALLY mean?)
If live for a career my whole life and fail it will beat me up for the rest of my life. But if I fail Jesus... He died for me to forgive me. Jesus is the only Savior who will satisfy you. And if you fail Him, and we do, He died for you.

Religious people, when they get down cast they start putting their emphasis on the will, and they say buck up! be strong!
Non religious people, when they are downcast put all of their emphasis on their emotions. And they say feel better about yourself, do nice things for yourself.

The REAL solution is worship. Paul is saying in Colossians 3 - go back into what Jesus has done for you. Go back into your story. You are there! He is doing that for you!

If you saw a sculptor run into the path of a bulldozer that was about to take out a prized sculpture of his you would say, 'That sculpture must have been his life!'

Jesus died for us. We were His life. When that moves you, when you see Him doing that for you, when you see yourself as being apart of that story, it changes your heart... You can then look at anything and say 'you are not my life!' Paul always does it this way. 2 Corinthians 8 - he doesn't work on the will, or the emotions, he says you know the generosity of Jesus on the cross for you, he was infinitely rich and became infinitely poor so that you through His poverty can become rich. you are freed from the need to have a lot of money... Paul takes you back into the story. You don't do it by working through the will, the emotions... Ephesians 5 - you know that Jesus was infinitely faithful to you on the cross, you now have the freedom from going to some other woman... Instead of just being generous, being faithful because I want to feel better about myself, the Gospel utterly changes you in the heart, in the root, and it frees you to live as He intended. Free from death, and free to venture into love, hope, and life to the fullest.

over-desires and idolatry - part 1

Colossians 3:1-14

"Put to death whatever belongs to your earthly nature" - anger, rage, malice, slander, bitterness - I would love to be free from these things, but they keep coming back. Here is the reason why: (in verse 5) evil desires, idolatry

translated from the Greek "evil desire" is "epithumian" which more sharply is defined as: an over desire, an excessive desire - it is very hard to translate and we are not able to see its significance usually (the word is in the New Testament basically every time it mentions character change) because when we see "evil desire" or, as it sometimes is translated, "sinful desire", we see it as desiring something evil. We see a forbidden list, things you are not supposed to do... This is wrong... "Epithumian" is an "over-desire" for something that is good. That is what is wrong.

Why is this a bad thing? Connect with another word seen in verse 5 "idolatry". Taking a good thing and making it an ultimate thing. This is how your heart works, according to the Bible, unless God changes it. Exodus Chapter 20. The first commandment: "I am God. Have no other gods before me." There are only 2 options: you either worship the uncreated, true God, or you will worship some created thing as a false god. There is no third alternative. You either are going to worship God or you are going to worship something else. It is NOT possible for your heart NOT to build its identity on something, NOT to build its significance on something, NOT to make something your life...


How do you know what those things are? How do I know what those good things are that I have turned into ultimate things, things I have turned into saviors, those things I have turned into my meaning, my hope, my life?

a question to find out: What things, if you lost them, if you failed them or they failed you (financial means, relationships, family, professional identity, human approval, power, control of your environment, etc), would cause you to not want to live? ... Be honest. You have something.

There are two types of people that answer this question as such: the religious - I believe in God, Jesus! I have accepted Him as savior! I don't have any idols in my life! ... oh yes you do. There is something that is your functional savior that is not Him. There is something that you look to know that can make you feel good, that gives you meaning/security/hope for the future... the secular - I don't have any idols, I don't worship! ... Yes you do. This is true of everybody!

To get further clarification on your idols: follow the over-desires back to the source... if a good thing in your life is jeopardized, you worry, but if it is an ultimate thing, you are paralyzed. If a good thing in your life is blocked by somebody, you get mad at them, but if an ultimate thing is blocked, you get embittered, enraged! If a good thing in your life is lost, you are very sad, but if it is an ultimate thing, you ready to throw your self off of a bridge.

Do you understand your emotions? Do you see that there are somethings that absolutely cast you down? Do you understand why you find yourself doing things you thought you would never ever do? It is because these things drive you. When you give your "heart" (your most inward part that is yourself) to a functional savior, (everybody is doing this) and don't understand that, you cannot change. And whatever you have given your heart to, it converts you. It gives you your identity. It gives you a sense of worth. And as a result it drives you and you will spend all of your life never getting enough of it, always being desperately afraid, always being thrown about by inadequate desires that do not satisfy. Have you dug down to see what those things are? Until you have done that you will be enslaved to things that are slowly killing you...

You have to dig down and REALLY see what's down there, what's driving you. The Gospel calls you to do this because it is NOT basically about a list of dos and donts. It is about making God your Savior and Lord through Jesus. And as you see THAT as the Gospel, it throws everything in your life into a new light... to be continued...

Lamenting, Innerancy of Scripture, and God's Empathy

*A lot of this was taken from and built around a great sermon by Tim Keller. That sermon is here.
David's lament in Psalm 39 is amazing and disturbing at the same time with emphasis on the last two verses:

I said, “I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue; I will guard my mouth with a muzzle, so long as the wicked are in my presence.” I was mute and silent; I held my peace to no avail, and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue: “O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Surely a man goes about as a shadow! Surely for nothing they are in turmoil; man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather! “And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool! I am mute; I do not open my mouth, for it is you who have done it. Remove your stroke from me; I am spent by the hostility of your hand. When you discipline a man with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him; surely all mankind is a mere breath!

--“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not your peace at my tears! For I am a sojourner with you, a guest, like all my fathers. Look away from me, that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more!--

1. God in His grace understands your weeping. It’s safe to pour your heart out to Him.

“Look away from me” ?? This Psalm has been a struggle to accept because it seems to just not fit. Yes other Psalms are filled with wrestling, weeping, crying, but they always end with a note of triumph, at peace, or confidence/trust in God.

But in Psalm 39 it ends in absolute theological incorrectness. He is saying to God, ‘look away so I might have a little bit of peace before I die’. David ends here with such an overwhelming feeling that he ends by telling God the opposite of what he is “suppose to”. We aren’t “suppose to” talk/pray/feel/be like this! Are we?? What is it doing in my Bible? He is “suppose to” be telling me what to do. And what does this mean to the idea of the Bible being without error. Isn’t this an error?

And then I ran into this: “The prayer ‘look away from me’ makes no more sense then Peter’s ‘depart from me’, yet God knows when to treat this plea, as He does to Peter in Luke 5 or when the crowd says it in Matthew 8. The very presence of such prayers in the scriptures is a witness to His understanding, He knows how we speak when we are desperate.” -- Tim Keller

That blew my mind.

In Psalm 39, God gives us a glimpse of His empathy, understanding, assurance: its inclusion in the Bible means it is safe to pray to Him like this. It shows us that our deepest emotions, anger, fears belong, not in some managed, manufactured confessional prayer, but belong in a pre-reflected (God wants you to know yourself) outburst from the very depth of your being in the presence of God. This may or may not be how we are “suppose to” speak, but God knows us better than ourselves and He says it is safe to do so in His presence.


2. 'Plant your tears' (taken from Psalm 126) in the vision of the cross.

Why is He so understanding? It is because God Himself came down and became a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53) even saying the night before His crucifixion, “My soul is sorrowful even unto death”. He was so sorrowful that He thought His sorrows could actually kill Him before He even got to the cross.

God knows what it is like to look to God and have Heaven barred (apparently). God knows what it is like to look to Heaven and feel nothing. God knows what it is like to cry out desperately: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me??” God is able to keep coming to us even after we have said “turn away” because when Jesus said, ‘Come to me!’ God turned away from Him. Jesus was calling for God and God turned His face away, or in other words, Jesus got the abandonment we deserved. And so now when we turn our face, God will come because He experienced what we should have received and therefore He is understanding.

If you look at Jesus on the cross saying, ‘Why me?’ You will still sometimes cry 'why me?', but you will never cry 'why me?' in the same way. Jesus’ tears in the cross produced joy. It produced our welcome into the embrace of God. Whenever we see that here is what you can do: take your tears and think about Him crying out on the cross, think about Him looking for God and God turning away from Him... and here’s what will happen, your tears will change because whenever bad things happen we have a tendency to feel guilty. Right? Be honest. Don’t we say: what’s wrong, why me, am I being punished, am I a bad person? Get rid of that! How? Look at the cross and you can say: 'even though I feel like I am being abandoned by God I am not. Even though it feels like God is punishing me for my sins He is not'. Why? Because He was punished for my sins. Even though it feels like God is abandoning me it is only an apparent abandonment because on the cross Jesus got real abandonment so I didn’t have to. And so if you ever feel, during your suffering, that God has rejected you, abandoned you, or you feel like a terrible person or weighed down with shame and guilt... look at Him die for you. God has not rejected you because Jesus was rejected for you.

And if you process your sorrows through the reality of the cross here is something else that will happen: you will get rid of that self-pity. The thing that will really kill you! Weeping, grief, disappointment are all fine. Jesus was always weeping, but weeping in self-pity? NO. That will make you a small little person who can’t forgive, who is always feeling ill-used, who gets incredibly touchy and incredibly oversensitive.... Look at the cross! And you can say, ‘you have really suffered for me. My sufferings are nothing compared to yours. If you suffered for me, I can be patient with this suffering for you.'

What if you are weeping and you say: I don’t see what God is doing in this??!! Impatient tears and you don’t see what God is doing... Look at the cross. and think of all the people who went home that night, who saw Jesus dieing on the cross (which was the greatest act of wisdom, salvation, grace, and love in history) and went home and lost their faith. Do you realize that many people looked at the cross, and not understanding it said, ‘I don’t even believe in God anymore. I don’t see what good God could be bringing out of this!’ They looked right smack into the face of the greatest thing that God ever did and said because I don’t understand - I don’t believe. (Why is it the greatest thing God ever did? It is because without it, Jesus abandonment here on the cross would have been ours.) When you see Jesus dieing on the cross and you can’t figure out what God is doing in your life, remember that.

Revelation 21:5 - making all things new