Isaiah 53:10

Gospel Oriented Teaching

2011-03-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

I posted this when I was randomly posting onto the blog last year. I think it might be a good jumping off point in my attempt to start wrestling with matters of the Gospel and public school teaching integration. Also, this is my first day as a long-term substitute teacher. I am going to take a break from the blog for a bit (hopefully for about a month or so but it might be until June) so I can more fully focus on the task at hand - my new classroom!! I have been waiting for this day for a long time. By the end of my job (the last day of school in June) I am sure I will have a few more thoughts on how to integrate faith and work in the classroom. But for now I have questions and need inspiration... We spend the majority of our lives in our professions. How does our faith play a part in all of that? I think this insight below gives us a glimpse.

http://deidox.com/films/lindsay/

2:15 - 2:37

"I have been thinking about you all summer. I love you already. You may not believe this but you can't earn my love. You could make straight A's all year and have perfect behavior all year or you can get detention 3 times a week and I am going to love you the same... And then I spend all year trying to prove it."

What does this look like in the classroom? Is this in fact feasible in reality? What specifically can we do to reshape our hearts to start working toward this aim? What are the obstacles that we must face in order to accomplish this aim?

I guess I will be trying to answer those questions in reality rather then theorizing on this blog... God help me!

See you on the flip side internet!

Common Grace - Isaiah 28:23-29

2011-03-11T00:00:00.001-08:00

"When a farmer plows for planting... when he has leveled the surface... does he not plant wheat in its place, barley in it plot, and spelt in its field? His God instructs him and teaches him the right way... Grain must be ground to make bread... all this also comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom."

- the prophet Isaiah (In his twenty-eight chapter, verses twenty-three through twenty-nine)

This is remarkable. Isaiah tells us that anyone who becomes a skillful farmer, or who brings an advancement in farming 'science,' is being taught by God. What appears as a discovery (the proper season and conditions for sowing, farm management, rotation of crops, etc.) is actually the Creator opening his book of creation and revealing his truth.

What an incredible insight into life! Could God really be much more apart of the world then we realize? Is he really active inside and outside of church?

I believe Reformed scholar Louis Berkhof would explain it in terms of God's Common Grace which, "curbs the destructive power of sin, maintains in a measure the moral order of the universe, thus making an orderly life possible, distributes in varying degrees gifts and talents among men, promotes the development of science and art, and showers untold blessings upon the children of men.”

Is this section in Isaiah saying that God is a part of everyone's life, no matter if they 'believe' in him or not? Does every good thing indeed come from his hand?

I think that is what it is saying. What we have held up as our own achievements in scholarship, innovation, and all other aspects of life cannot be claimed as our own. Everything comes from the Creator! There is nothing that the creation (us) can claim as our own. There is nothing that we can give God that was not already his!

And if God imparts knowledge everywhere then it is indeed 'grace' since it is undeserved and bestowed on who He chooses. This does not mean that we stop working hard for excellence, but it does mean that we should take ourselves and our achievements a lot less seriously. We are not as great as we think we are! It is good to let that sink in!

If there is common grace in our greatest achievements in science then God is at work much more then we realize in life. If you accept this notion you might find yourself with new motivation, inspiration, and awe in the discoveries and achievements in life because they are, all of a sudden, not just about you but about something much deeper and beautiful...

We have to Understand the Cost

2011-03-09T00:00:00.001-08:00

What do you think about this old illustration by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones? Do you see the connection to Christianity today?
If you came to see me and you said, "I was at your house the other day and you weren't there and a bill came due and I paid it." I would really not know quite how to respond. I would want to know something about the size of the bill. Was it a package with postage due and you spent a couple of more bucks? Well, then I could say thank you very much and that that was very kind of you... But what if it was that thing I was afraid of getting from the IRS with hundreds of thousands of dollars due in back taxes and you paid that...

I wouldn't know how to respond until I knew how big the debt was!

Humanity must understand the cost of the price paid on the cross to be moved by it. You will respond to the cross in the same manner as you see the greatness of your debt.

Do you owe Christ the amount of a few postage stamps... or do you owe him your life?

How must we come to God? Like a Child (Luke 18:15-17)

2011-03-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

This creation that we are so crazy about has a limit. It does not satisfy our deepest longings. Regardless of the amount of awe stirred in you by creation, it will one day disappear. It will betray each one of us, leaving us wanting something new or wanting something more. No matter how great of a family, husband or wife, friends, or parents you have, they will some day die.

No life ever lasts, something new is always needed and nothing created ever satisfies...

We are blind according to (2 Corinthians 4:4). We cannot see the glory, or, in other words, the significance that God can have in our lives, that our very purpose is to be satisfied only in Him.

We walk in darkness and are dead because of our inability to see this.

(John 15:5)In saying we can do "NOTHING" Jesus is not saying we cannot do ANYTHING, because we of course can. I can get married, move to a different city every 6 months (j/k), go on a bike ride, give money to the poor, live an altruistic lifestyle if I wanted...

But nothing that is going to survive will be accomplished by myself. The only things that will live on after me are those things that are rooted in Jesus, our God who saves. No good or right act lives on into eternity apart from Jesus. Apart from him I can do nothing. Outside of Jesus, we are blind slaves, under a death sentence, that cannot do anything about it.

That is bleak.

Luke 18:15-17 with emphasis on 17.

Babies are born helpless, blind, powerless, in need of saving, in need of an identity, in need of protecting... they are in complete and desperate need of salvation or else they get death. If someone does not intervene and provide the baby will die!

I think the helpless nature of small children is more of what we should be thinking about when we read these verses in Luke. We are not asked to be ignorant or naive in our faith. Is mindless faith honoring to the Creator who gave us our very minds (which are capable of so much)? Is God unable to handle the weight of our questions? I am afraid that we are too fixed upon a child's innocence rather then their helplessness when we read these verses in Luke.

The reality of life is that we are as helpless as little children. We need to accept this if we are going to find a way out of life's dark realities.

We need to receive the Kingdom of God like a child... But how? By feeling the weight of our desperation, just like a child - we need to be saved, to be forgiven, to be healed, to be provided for, to be cared for, to be protected, to be given an identity...

We must come to God like a child comes to a parent - open-handed, filled with hope, trusting that the God of the Universe will do the things that will sustain us.

He has to save us or we are done for, because we cannot save ourselves. We are completely dependent on Him.

We often see faith in adult-like complexity. 'You are too slow God in this so I am going to handle it!' And because of this we do not submit and cry out to God, 'I will trust you! I will obey because I know that you know what is best for me. I am finding what I need in you... you define me.'

Our hope, faith, and trust must be in Him.

How do we get there? Like a child.

There is a lot of crying in the first few years of any life. If the bottle is not gotten there quick enough, if they sit in a dirty diaper for too long, if they get hurt there will be crying. There was a lot of crying at my old job as a Preschool teacher and still some as I meet children in Oakland schools (some are young, others are older, but I still see crying in them all when their most basic needs are not met).

These screams are primal example of how we have to come to the Kingdom of God.

I am hungry, help me!
I hurt, help me!
I am dirty, help me!
I don't know where to go, help me!
I don't know how to fix this, help me!
I am scared, help me!
This is not working, help me!

Saturday Quotes #3

2011-03-05T00:00:00.001-08:00

This Saturday I present Kevin DeYoung's Just Do Something: How to Make a Decision Without Dreams, Visions, Fleeces, Open Doors, Random Bible Verses, Casting Lots, Liver Shivers, Writing in the Sky, etc. What a title! I am not going to lie, I had to pick it because of that title!

The title tells you all you need to know about the book. If you have a weekend and are one of many Christians who uses the will of God as an excuse - look no further then this book for much needed medicine. We are called as Christians to create, influence, love, and live. The Spirit was never given to give man means for hesitation. We are free to work, love, and laugh hard and then we are free to rest. Let God do his job and get going on the job you are supposed to do - worship God with a life that pursues his heart.

“I’d like us to consider that maybe we have difficulty discovering God’s wonderful plan for our lives because, if the truth be told, He doesn’t really intend to tell us what it is. And maybe we’re wrong to expect Him to.”

“God has a wonderful plan for your life – a plan that will take you through trial and triumph as you are transformed into the image of His Son (Romans 8:28-29). Of this we can be absolutely confident. But God’s normal way of operation is not to show this plan to us ahead of time – in retrospect, maybe; in advance, rarely.”

“Passivity is a plague among Christians. It’s not just that we don’t do anything; it’s that we feel spiritual for not doing anything.”

“Live for God. Obey the Scriptures. Think of others before yourself. Be holy. Love Jesus. And as you do these things, do whatever else you like, with whomever you like, wherever you like, and you’ll be walking in the will of God.”

Reconstruction - Part 1 (Happy 150th Lincoln Inauguration Day)

2011-03-04T00:00:00.001-08:00

After the presidential victory of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, six southern states seceded from the United States before he took office in March of 1861. The state to lead the charge was South Carolina. South Carolina officially adopted a declaration of their reasons just a month after the election stating that the threat to their institution of slavery was their primary reason:

"...an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of [the Government's] obligations [to] the Constitution... [Lincoln] has declared that that 'Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction... On the 4th day of March next, [Lincoln] will take possession of the Government. [He] has announced... that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States... The slaveholding States will [then] no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy." SOURCE - http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html

The Civil War was very bloody. The casualties by the War reached to an estimated 620,000 American lives. That is more then the casualties of any other American war, from the Revolution to Afganistan.

The first African slaves on record to be transported to an American colony came in 1619 to Virginia. This, however, was preceded by Spanish colonies (on modern-day American soil) by as early as 1520. By the time Lincoln wrote his Emancipation Proclamation (enacted on January 1, 1863) it is estimated that 3.5 million African slaves were living in the South. That number was equal to over sixty percent of the free population in the South at the time.

And so from 1520 - 1863, generation upon generation of African-Americans grew up only knowing a life of slavery. If you were born in a closet and were not let out you would think that that closet was the entire world. Similarly, slaves lived lives in which they were told they were less then human. That they were property. That they were not free. But in 1863, all of a sudden these slaves were given their freedom.

Jesus compared the human condition to slavery (John 8:34)... The difficulties that followed the Civil War during the Reconstruction are similar, in one sense, to those that Christians face.

Once you, Christian, were a slave to sin, and now you have been set free (Romans 6:17-18). In a very real sense it took most African Americans more then a hundred years to fully realize their identity as free Americans. This is evidence that it could very well take the Christian an entire life to fully realize and embody their freedom in Christ. By Christ's great bloody Emancipation Proclamation on the cross, 'It is finished!' the Christian became fully and finally free from sin... In one sense similar to the African American during Reconstruction, Christians are now charged to be filled with diligent cherishing and preserving of this freedom that Christ attained for us.

African-Americans were free from slavery after 1863. But how did that really effect their lives after that point? Even though a living document declared their freedom in America, was it a real truth that they were able to embody in their lives afterwards. Even though Christ on the cross obtained for us a tangible freedom for us from sin have we come to embody that status? Trying to put myself 'inside the shoes' of the slaves, I feel that former slaves must have had to remind themselves of their freedom everyday. I think Christians must also do the same (in a basic sense this is what we mean by 'Preaching the Gospel to yourself daily'.

Think about those encounters the former slaves had with the white people of their city after that time. What would have happened when they came face to face with their former slave-owners? They were free, but how could one not help but cower in fear in the presence of a former slave owner? Christians will also come face to face with their old oppressors after they received the status as free sons of God. What is your old oppressor? I am sure it still feels like you are in slavery... How will you not cower in fear? 2 Timothy 1:7 says the Spirit of God is in the Christian. Remember that! The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead has the same power to raise you from your death. Trust Him! I know it is hard... Even when you cannot feel Him trust Him! He gave His life for you, He won't let you go now... This is how we grow in faith...

Disclaimer - I am not trying to water-down the brutality of slavery in America and I am not trying to take away anything from the African-American people. I am only struggling to understand how a people who were once enslaved and now are free can struggle to fully become free in a holistic sense (in mindset, culture, livelihood, spirit, etc). In one sense, people everywhere are also slaves, slaves to their passions and desires. The Bible promises the Christian that they have a Savior that will save them from that enslavement.

More on Romans 8:15 and a few more connections a Christian can take from the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction period afterwards on a post next week...

Law or Love - What Would Jesus Say About... Submission?

2011-03-02T00:00:00.001-08:00

There are approximately 613 rules in the Old Testament. That is a lot! Many of the reasons for these Laws are hard to understand today. But according to the Bible they, at the very least, had plenty of meaning and significance for ancient Israel and Jesus. The Laws were meant to shape and guide the lives of Israel toward communion with God.

Today the average American Christian looks to Jesus and the New Testament for their shaping and guidance. American Christians try very hard to follow principles and rules set down for us in the New Testament.

The Pharisees also tried very hard to follow the rules set before them in the Old Testament and now there name is synonymous with 'hypocrite' in our modern world. What might be confusing for them if they were to have found out about such a label is that they very much did what they set out to do. They followed the rules set out in the Old Testament to the T. Their very livelihoods and reputations depended on it! But it is recorded in the New Testament that God came down as a man and exclaimed to the Pharisees, 'You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil?' (Matthew 12:34). Even though they thought that their tireless pursuit of the Law of God would make them righteous before God, God truly saw that it made them evil.

According to God, there is more to a righteous, religious, God-honoring life then just following the rules.

Jesus was not saying in Matthew that following the rules was wrong of the Pharisees. In fact, earlier had He said that He was on earth to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17-18). The Law was good according to Jesus, but later He sums up the Law giving clarity to how He (the author of the Law) truly saw it. In Mark 12:28-31 He is asked to sum up the 613 laws of the Old Testament. Jesus responds by boiling these laws down into "one principle - love, directed to God and to others. Here Jesus is going to the very heart of the core dilemma of ethics. Human thinkers have for centuries felt there was a tension between 'Law' and 'Love.' Do I do the legal thing, or the loving thing?" Today we have a similar tension in the Church.

Very quickly let me explain:

Let's apply this idea to one controversial aspect of the Christian life. Do Christian husbands love if they authoritatively demand submission from their wives? NO! And so even though they are following the letter of the New Testament law they are missing the point. They maybe missing the point as much as the Pharisees who were later instrumental in killing Jesus!

"Jesus is not so much picking one or two rules over the others [in His summary of the Law], nor is He choosing love over the law, but rather He is showing that love is what fulfills the law..."

"The law is not being fulfilled unless it is obeyed as a way of giving and showing love to God or others."

No matter how good we are at following Biblical principles (Law), we are missing the point if it is not obeying the greater law of love. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

Love God with everything you are. Dream about Him, long for Him, think about Him, spend time with Him, spend time doing the things He loves, talk about Him, passionately pursue Him with your heart, creativity, energy, strength... And love people just like you love yourself. Love them with all the energy, creativity, and time you give to loving yourself.

I think Jesus would say if you are not fulfilling New Testament principles (Law) like this then you are missing the point!

If you understand that you are helpless in fulfilling all that Jesus requires of you then you are one step closer to understanding what the Gospel is all about. And only then do you even have a chance at fulfilling what is actually 'required' of the Christian life.

*Everything in quotes in this post is taken from Timothy Keller's book 'King's Cross' on Page 134. I hope I did not take Keller out of context and butcher the incredible book that he has just recently put out with this post. If I have I am sorry. I am very open to critique and criticism.

Postscript (Submission)

2011-03-01T18:43:00.000-08:00

I want to bring a little bit of clarity to my thinking on my last post. I want to briefly address, once again, the MODERN idea of submission in marriage. I am not qualified to address the entire issue of submission in the Bible. I think, though, that I can confidently critique the modern practice of the principle.

This 'principle,' of Christian wives 'submitting' to their husbands, HAS BEEN SIGNIFICANTLY ABUSED. If there is not a way for submission to happen in a loving way (Paul commands husbands to LOVE their wives) then I argued in the last post that we should abandon the law until husbands can learn how to actually love our wives. It might take us our whole lives or it might take until Jesus comes (If that happens to be the case then so be it!)... Maybe we need to learn how to count before we try out trigonometry! The law is only fulfilled through love...

And we are not 'loving' just to slowly get wives to submit. If you, husband, think you have the resources to lead then step up and show her. If you are demanding (vocally or subtly) your role as an exclusive leader then you have lost, not loved, and need to start over. And believe it or not, your wife might just have the ability to lead you too (I say dripping with sarcasm). For the love of God, lay your pride down so you can learn from her and grow in God's grace with each other...

P.P.S. For all of you Reformed nerds out there - I have this view AND consider myself to be on your team... Life is full of contradictions I know!

P.P.P.S. Complementarianism is NOT synonymous for the Gospel!

Wrestling With What the Bible Says About Marriage

2011-02-28T00:00:00.001-08:00

Disclaimer: Please forgive me for this post. This is the hardest topic I have ever written about. There is so much to learn and I know I don't have it right here! This is my best attempt at being faithful to Biblical passages on marriage and that is not saying much. As you will see I wrote out more questions then sentences with periods in this post. I would appreciate any and all feedback you may have!

I have some questions on gender differences before I get into the topic of marriage: If a man and a woman were put into the position of CEO with 2 similar, but different thriving companies, and were given similar goals, would they go about their job using different leadership styles? Do men lead differently then women? By the end, will the man and woman have gotten to their goals in different ways? Is a woman the same type of manager as a man?

I don't think you can answer these questions universally and with absolute certainty. I think the answer is, it depends. Sure, I think generally there is an answer, but it depends when you are speaking about individuals.

I think Ephesians 5:21-33 is similar with the application of the principles it puts down for marriage.

Being a man and being a woman are two different ways of being human and by themselves, the Bible says, they are kind of imbalanced. I believe this is the reason the Bible never puts the same imperative on a man as it does for a woman when they are coupled together, and visa-versa. Both are more complete when they are with each other because they both have resources that the other does not have.

Another point I wanted to make here can be seen in verse 33 when Paul tells us that husbands are supposed to love their wives and wives are supposed to respect their husbands. Does this mean that wives do not have to love their husbands and husbands do not have to respect their wives? No, of course not.

I think that leads to this question: does the Bible give us exact guidelines on how to live, on what to do in every single situation? No, and I don't think that was ever the point. The Bible never gave me the exact answer on whether or not I was supposed to marry Danielle. The name Danielle is not even mentioned once in the Bible!

What are you supposed to do when... you are offered a new job across the country, see a homeless man in need on the streets, when your child does not share with the other kids, when you are not sure how to reconnect with a friend... there are a million scenarios we face everyday that are not specifically addressed in the Bible. What does the Bible say to do in these situations? It depends!

Whether you believe it or not, the Bible is not about us, it is about God. Because we are stamped with His image there will be implications for us in the Bible but we must not get carried away with our own self-importance. I don't think we can take hard-line literal approaches to every section and see ourselves working perfectly into the Biblical passages every single time. We are not God! Only Christ fits into the Bible perfectly every single time. We are to be molded and shaped for sure but through it all we must walk in love, the greatest commandment that Christ left us with, because the world (including ourselves) is messy, full of sin and very corrupt. There is much need for love and grace. And as we try and love with His help we will become more like Him. One of the ways in which He loves us is through the fact that He has given us the Great Helper, the Spirit of God, to help us with wisdom and resources that we do not have when the Bible is not crystal clear in how to exactly move throughout life.

The Bible is not a how-to guide or a manual on life. Wisdom is spoken of much in the Bible. There is much on the Holy Spirit and prayer. This is our help we must tap into when the Bible is not crystal clear. Galatians 4:6 says that our Great Helper, the Holy Spirit, is crying in our hearts, 'Abba, Father!' The Spirit, our Great Help, cries out for the only one who can help! In Him we were made to rest in and trust in.

According to Ephesians 5, who is the man suppose to look to as his example of loving his wife? Christ. Who is the woman supposed to look to in her example of submitting to her husband? Christ...

Let's get to the pink elephant in the room right now. SUBMISSION. Paul calls women to be submissive to their husbands in this selection of Ephesians. What does 'submission' mean? In the Greek it means 'a help.' I think a sharper translation is, 'to use your power in a way that enables and empowers somebody else.' Are not women, IN GENERAL, better at this then men? I think it depends, but I think there is some truth to the fact that, in general, they might be better. Are not some men better at this then women though? I think some might be. Are not both men and women both capable of this? I think so. Would not a marriage be stronger if both submitted, or in other words empowered, the other? (Forget the Bible for a second) Would this not cultivate a great marriage if both the man and wife submitted to each other, if they both empowered the other with resources the other did not have? Do not good marriages survive, inside and outside of the church, because the man and woman love each other in this way?

A person can only submit, can only be 'a help,' if they have resources that the one they are helping is without. I can only help a student with their homework when I have knowledge they do not have. I can only help the student if I know more about the homework then they do. A women can only help their husband if she has got resources that he does not have. And are not there resources that the man has that the woman is without? Is the woman unique in her ability to enable others in this way? Is not this the way women, in general, would take a leadership role (like the CEO position I talked about at first)? I might be wrong with this but I think that in general this may be the case.

Are there deficiencies in husbands that are not in wives? Are there things that husbands cannot do that wives can? Is it not this the case the other way around?

Let's look to Jesus' life as we continue. He was and is the perfect picture of masculinity - real leadership, real authority, no oppressiveness, real love without conditions, and sacrificial love that empowers others. At the same time Christ is our picture of femininity too. The glorifying of someone else with His resources, the enabling and empowering of somebody else in love... (Femininity is much more then this I am sure. Maybe it is not this. I know I do not understand it fully. I would love to hear about any other thoughts on how Christ embodies the strongest elements of femininity because I am sure there is much more to add to this discussion.)

I think the Bible says at least these things about the genders: neither masculinity or femininity are more divine, neither is higher then the other, and both are seen in Christ.

But is Christ's life only relatively an example? What I mean by that is are we supposed to pick and choose what characteristics of Christ we are supposed to emulate according to whether we are a man or woman? Maybe we are given unique gifts and are more apt to love in certain ways like Christ (I think the Bible affirms the general differences in the genders) but does that mean that we are supposed to deny the full influence of how Christ loved us in our lives? Why can't the man submit to his wife if he is empowering her with resources she does not have? Why can't the woman sacrificially love and lead if this is loving and strengthening the marriage?

The Bible gives us important principles about marriage in Ephesians, but is it saying that husbands must demand that your wife submits? Paul also says that husbands should love their wives. Would this kind of demanding, authoritative leadership be loving? Why do some Christian marriages choose submission for the wife and do not give equal attention to the love the husband is commanded to give her wife? If you are sacrificing one for the other you are not being Biblical. Whether you at fault for this or not, husbands should always be asking and being shaped by this question: how exactly does Christ loves the Church?

Christ was both submissive and loving, are not men and women called to be both? Because I am a man am I not to be submissive, am I not supposed to empower others if I have resources they do not have?

Will not the marriage magnify God's glory if we seek to emulate Christ as much as possible? Should we limit Christ's example in our lives?

The Bible is a powerful resource we have in life, but life is messy. The Bible affirms that. Trust the Bible, but also trust the Spirit's lead when the Bible does not give exact instructions and the messiness of life makes it seem less clear. Seek wisdom, seek the Spirit, it is crying out for us in the streets! Proverbs 1:20-23 The Spirit longs for us not to be simpleminded, the Spirit understands how complex life is! And if we had any doubts to that fact, God came down to identify and embody all of the pain and complexities that life gives. Look to Christ. Trust Him, He understands how scary life is, He understands how messy it is. Know you are not perfect (you are not God), and rest in the fact that God is perfect in love. Do your best to love your husband or wife with the gifts and resources you have, know that you will not do it perfectly (only God can!), and rest in the unconditional love that Christ has personally given us when we are shamed for not loving like we should. He is full of grace. He is our perfect husband. Let Him lead and empower our lives and marriages. He is crying out. Are you listening?

Sunday Surfing

2011-02-27T00:00:00.000-08:00

I hope these links provide for some good internet surfing opportunities over the weekend:

(1) Book Review of Timothy Keller's 'King's Cross'
Using a succession of images Keller walks through the book of Mark in a way that will "directs readers’ gaze toward the cross and will not allow them to look away." I am currently reading the book and have found myself frequently just having to stop. I am compelled to process and take it all in. I feel so in love with what Christ did for us as I read this book. And the integration of our world with Christ's life and the explanatory power it has on our world is brought out in the book. I am so thankful to Keller for showing this to me. I wholeheartedly recommend this book. This link is a fair review of the book as well.

(2) Shane Claiborne asks the question: 'What Would Jesus Cut? Bread vs. Bombs'
This is very timely and important for us to all wrestle with as we all face uncertain times in the economy. How would Christ grapple with the situation we are in? Is there any or hope or opportunity for redemption in the bleakness?

(3) Donald Miller's 'Thoughts on Being Worshiped'
I love Donald Miller! As he says himself about John the Baptist in this blog Miller 'takes the pressure off' on being a Christian. We are not perfect! Miller understands this and at the same time is very insightful into Christians need to be seen as perfect. Miller helps me take realistic looks at myself and shows me where I don't match up to Christ but that Christ lived and died so I didn't have to!

(4) Kurt Williams responds to Justin Taylor's critique of Rob Bell's new book
Kurt is a Facebook friend of mine and an old friend of my wife. I like his blog and really appreciate a lot of his posts. This one is quite helpful for me. He critiques a well-known Reformed blogger (I consider myself apart of the Reformed crowd) and in the process shines some much needed light into a weakness of the Reformed shade of Christianity. The critique's most influential section for me is quoted below.
"Ok, my neo-reformed brothers in Christ. Please quit being quick to “cast the first stone.” No, you will not agree with everything that Rob Bell has to say in this book, but lets be clear – you do not speak for all of evangelical orthodox belief. Please quit acting as though you do. It is damaging the larger body of Christ."

Saturday Quotes #2

2011-02-26T00:00:00.000-08:00

Every Saturday I plan to present to you direct quotes from books I have read.

Last week I posted selections from the first 2 chapters of Timothy Keller's Generous Justice. Let me give an overview of the rest of the book this week. I am sure there will be posts in the near-future that are inspired by the book. I will note those posts when they come.

"Jesus did not say that all this done for the poor was a means of getting salvation, but rather it was the sign that you already had salvation, that true, saving faith was already present... This meant that one's heart attitude toward the poor reveals one's heart attitude toward [Christ]."

"What does it mean to love your neighbor? ... Jesus answered that by depicting a man meeting material, physical, and economic needs through deeds. Caring for people's material and economic needs is not an option for Jesus... He said it meant being sacrificially involved with the vulnerable, just as the Samaritan risked his life by stopping on the road... By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbor."

[Referencing the story of the Good Samaritan] "Only if you see that you have been saved graciously by someone who owes you the opposite will you go out into the world looking to help absolutely anyone in need."

"If a person has grasped the meaning of God's grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn't live justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for God's grace, but in his heart he is far from him. If he doesn't care about the poor, it reveals that at best he doesn't understand the grace he has experienced, and at worst he has not really encountered the saving mercy of God. Grace should make you just."

"Many religions teach that if you live as you ought, then God will accept and bless you. But Paul taught that if you receive God's acceptance and blessing as a free gift through Jesus Christ, then you can and will live as you ought."

"If the Lord takes his law so seriously that he could not shrug off our disobedience to it, that he had to become human, come to earth, and die a terrible death - then we must take that law very seriously too. The law of God demands equity and justice, and love of one's neighbor. People who believe strongly in the doctrine of justification by faith alone will have this high regard for God's law and justice. They will be passionate about seeing God's justice honored in the world."

"Many people who are evidently genuine Christians do not demonstrate much concern for the poor. How do we account for that? I would like to believe that a heart for the poor 'sleeps' down in a Christian's soul until it is awakened... When justice for the poor is connected not to guilt but to grace and to the gospel, this 'pushes the button' down deep in believers' souls, and they begin to wake up."

"It is not your money [God] wants, but your happiness."

"It is impossible to separate word and deed ministry from each other in ministry because human beings are integrated wholes - body and soul."

"If you wish to share your faith with needy people, and you do nothing about the painful conditions in which they live, you will fail to show them Christ's beauty."

God's Heart for Social Justice (a very small sample size)

2011-02-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Here is a list I was able to pull together. Do you have anymore to add to the list? There definitely are more verses on this subject in the Bible. A lot more!

Are there verses that are striking to you in particular that are on this list or elsewhere in the Bible? Proverbs 3:27-28 is the most striking on this list to me right now. In other words, it is saying there that our neighbor, who is need, deserves the excess good that I have. We feel entitled to our wealth in this life, but the reality is that the very purpose that God created life was for perfect community to flourish. Nothing that belongs to us on this earth is ours and if God desires for us to have community rather then excess we must take the desire seriously! We have to long for what God longs for... as Christians we must! Our neighbor who is in need has as much right to our stuff as we do - we owe it to him because none of it ours and God's intent is for our neighbor to have it!

God does not call us out here for our money (Everything is already His). Rather He is after our joy..

Deuteronomy 14:28-29
Deuteronomy 15:7-8
Deuteronomy 16:20

Leviticus 23:22
Leviticus 25:8-55
Leviticus 35:35-38

Jeremiah 21:11-12
Jeremiah 22:3
Jeremiah 22:13-17

Ezekiel 16:49-50
Ezekiel 22:29-31

Psalms 72:2-4
Psalm 82:3

Proverbs 3:27-28
Proverbs 14:31
Proverbs 17:5
Proverbs 28:27
Proverbs 29:7
Proverbs 31:9

Isaiah 1:17
Isaiah 11:1-4
Isaiah 58:6-12

Zechariah 7:9-10

Micah 6:8

Amos 2:6-7
Amos 4:1-6
Amos 5:11-15
Amos 5:21-24

Matthew 5:3
Matthew 6:1-4 (take notice of the word 'when')
Matthew 25:31-46

Mark 12:38,40

Luke 3:14
Luke 4:18-19
Luke 10:30-37
Luke 11:38-42

Acts 4:34-35 (This is a direct quote of Deuteronomy 15:4, which was the pinnacle of the social righteousness legislation in the Old Testament)
Acts 20:35 (Paul's last word's to the Ephesian Church, you don't use your last words without saying something that is all-important to you.)

2 Corinthians 8:14

James 1:27
James 2:15-17
James 5:1-5

1 John 3:17-18

Sin

2011-02-23T00:00:00.000-08:00

Luke 11:13

There is a powerful, almost off the cuff reference here by Jesus that is easy to miss. Within Luke 11:13 there is an assumption by Jesus that some of the 'best' human beings (he had picked his disciples) are so corrupt that they can be referred to as "evil." But nevertheless, in spite of seeing his disciples as evil, he loved with unconditional tenderness and delight and was willing to pay an ultimate price for their sake (John 13, 17:20-26).

I think Jesus's view of sin and humanity can be moving for us if we feel the weight of it.

What is Jesus' view of sin?

Well, according to Romans 1:21–25 at least, sin is a dislocation of the heart from its original center in God. This distortion is expressed as a desire from every person to be his or her own savior and lord (the serpent’s original temptation in Genesis 3:5 was “you will be like God”).

Soren Kierkegaard used very modern terms to define sin. I think his definition of sin as 'building your identity on anything besides God' is understandable to the modern ear. I use it as my working definition, which is just another way to convey the biblical themes of idolatry and self-justification.

Sin is something that everyone is doing all the time as we see from Romans 1:18–3:20. People who openly oppose God's moral law are doing this obviously, but it also says that moral, religious people are just as guilty. They are trying to be their own 'gods' by earning justification and trying to prove that they are not as bad as 'sinners' outside the church are. It is just as possible to avoid Jesus as Savior by keeping God’s law as by breaking it. According to the Bible, everyone is separated from God equally, regardless of the external form of behavior.

I think Flannery O’Connor's quick description of one of her characters in Wise Blood: A Novel explains it very well, “The boy didn’t need to hear it. There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.” If Christians are able to live right, they will eventually not need to bother coming to Jesus at all. Sure they will acknowledge Jesus, but are they really holding on to him dearly as the one way to be saved? Acts 4:12: "There is salvation in no one else" [including yourself].

The fundamental motives to justify ourselves (I wrote about that on Monday) move our hearts away from God, where we can get ultimate and lasting justification. Even our greatest acts of altruism are done to the degree of what WE get out of them. I think the Bible says that our most true, self-sacrificing love is only just a shoot out of God's love. What is God's love? Although He was perfectly transcendent and full of love and completeness, He chose to come down to earth and be identified with us as a man. In order to reconcile us back to Him He sacrificed His life to pay OUR debt... This is the only act that can justify our pervasive sinfulness. Even our silly attempts to justify our actions come only out of the grace given to us by God, or to say it in other words, there is nothing we can give Him that is not already His!

And so, unless a person has faith in this God's power to justify our lives (Romans 4), they will never find rest from their sin. Romans 1:19-22 says, in one sense, that every man feels that they need to be reconciled to God, but may not fully ever realize the need with clarity. They know they cannot justify their actions by themselves, they just do not know where to turn.

And so, in an ultimate sense, everyone is equally a sinner in need of Jesus’ salvation by grace alone. No one is able to justify their actions to God by their own merit.

Once this radical view of sin is grasped, it revolutionizes a believer’s attitude toward others who do not share his or her beliefs. Here are two ways it can change you in this regard:

First, it means you sense more than ever a common humanity with others. It is normal for human beings to divide the world into the good and the bad (again, I wrote more about that on Monday). A human's heart is always seeking to justify itself and trying to make the case that it is one of the “good guys." This biblical view significantly changes Christians. If everyone is naturally alienated from God and therefore “evil,” then that goes for absolutely everyone - from murderers to ministers. We are ALL evil. We have no right to look down on anybody.

The biblical teaching on sin shows us the complete pervasiveness of sin and the radical error of dividing the world neatly into sinful people and good people. It eliminates our attitudes of superiority toward others and our practices of being excluded from those with whom we differ.

Second, it means you should expect to be constantly misunderstood - especially about sin. The gospel message is that we are saved by Christ’s work, not by our work. But everyone else (even most people in church) believes that Christianity operates on the principle that you are saved if you live a good life and avoid sin. But this is not the case! Therefore, when others hear a Christian call something “sin,” they believe you are saying, “These are bad people (and I am good). These are people who should be excluded (and I should be welcomed). These are people whom God condemns because of this behavior (but I am accepted by God because I don’t do that).” You may not mean that by the term “sin” at all, but you must realize and expect that others will hear that you are saying it that way. They have to. Until they grasp the profound difference between religion and the Christian faith, they will probably understand your invoking of the word “sin” as self-righteous condemnation, no matter what your disclaimers are.

For example, if most people hear you saying, “People who have sex outside of marriage are sinning,” they will immediately believe you look down on them, that you think they are lost because of that behavior, that you are one of the “good people” who don’t do things like that, and so on. If people hear a Christian say, “Well, these people are sinning, but I don’t think of myself as any better than they are - we are all sinners needing grace,” they will think you have spoken nonsense. They have a completely different paradigm in their minds about how anyone can approach and relate to God, and they are hearing the word “sin” through that worldview.

I think it is wise for Christians, in general, to avoid publicly saying particular behaviors are sinful. Rather, it might be best to help people first hear the radical message of the Bible about the true inward nature of sin, its wide-spread nature, and salvation by grace. And it is also good to try and explain to those in the church that don't get this that we are all ultimately lost and if they are too proud to see that then they are lost and in need of a Savior who saves by sheer grace, just as a drowning person offered a life preserver will only die if he won’t admit he needs it (Luke 5:30-32).

When Christians talk to their friends about sin, I think we must do so in a way that quickly puts the term in context — the context of the full message of Jesus’ salvation.

Justification - Translating Christianese

2011-02-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

Intro - Translating Christianese
Christians share what we believe to be a common language. It carries with it words that we believe to hold common meaning. We don't, for instance, need to explain to one another who is Christ... But then again are we so sure that everyone holds the same view? Christ is Jesus, born of a virgin, was man and God, suffered on a cross, and rose again. Good. End of story. Or is it? How much meaning does Christ hold in your life? Do you see the storyline of the Christ throughout the entire Bible? Can we rely on the stories that talk about him in the Bible or can he only be seen to us today by what we can verify historically? Exactly what can be verified historically about this man? How little or how much of a man was he? Was he completely God or half God or both man and God?

I think we suffer from a common language that the blogosphere has termed Christianese. The term defines the phenomenon when Christians think they are speaking the same language when in fact they may not be. I will put more thoughts down later to this Christianese idea, but in the meantime I thought it would be helpful (at least for me) to try and more thoroughly define some Christianese words that we Christians too often throw around and assume the meaning is defined in stone for everyone when it may not be. This post by no means gives a complete definition of the term, but attempts to give more real world application and meaning to the term for me and, I hope, maybe helps another.

JUSTIFICATION

Luke 10:29

Is it hard for you to ever admit that you are wrong? And if you are able to admit that you are wrong at times, do you at least feel that you were misunderstood and the whole turn of events came about unfairly?

I think we all have an extraordinary ability to justify our actions. This ability is most clearly seen when we think others will see us at fault.

If you don't see this as being the case then permit me continue from another angle. Have you ever seen somebody spin a personal story in such a way that they looked better in their account then in what actually happened? I for one know that I have the peculiar ability to win an argument (every time!) when I recount the episode to another person after the fact.

It is almost as if something very deep inside of us (as if it were part of our very nature) demands that we justify our actions.

Another way in which we justify our actions is seen by how we divide up our world between 'good' and 'bad' people. What I mean by this is that we all see the world as liberal versus conservatives, religious versus secular, patriotic versus communist, or educated versus working-class... And all of it is just another way in which we can find justification for our actions, 'My 'good' people do this and so I am not doing anything out of the ordinary' or 'This may be a bad thing that I am doing, but at least I am not like those 'bad' people.'

And since most of us justify our actions and identify ourselves as being part of the good in the world, there are honestly not many left that actually see themselves as bad. I think this revelation should bring clarity to a few things, which I will get to in just a few paragraphs.

"I am just a businessman, giving the people what they want... All I do is satisfy a public demand... I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man."

That was Al Capone speaking during the early decades of last century. For those that don't know, Capone was one of the most ruthless sociopaths in American history, someone who corrupted law and order in Chicago and destroyed lives at whim so that he could live a luxurious lifestyle.

The warden of the infamous Sing Sing prison was interviewed at about that time revealing some striking insight into man's ability to justify, "Few of the criminals in Sing Sing regard themselves as bad men. They are just as human as you and I. So they rationalize, they explain. They can tell you why they had to crack a safe or be quick on the trigger finger. Most of them attempt by a form of reasoning, fallacious or logical, to justify their antisocial acts even to themselves maintaining that they should never have been imprisoned at all."

Today we see the same justification from modern people. From the infamous Bernie Madoff to Al Quaeda to Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, these people feel justified in their behavior. Whether it was for a 'good cause' or they were misunderstood or others were also in on the behavior too, people must simply find a way to live with themselves and do that by finding the spin on the story that will give them peace.

I will not get into the many stories I know of people who were unable to find that perfect spin and who instead found suicide as their only relief.

Check out this clip from the movie Casino Jack (go to 1:30 for the clip and watch beforehand for a briefing on the man profiled). Kevin Spacey's depiction of the infamous Jack Abramoff justifying his behavior is striking. But is it all that different from what we would do if we ever found ourselves in his place?From the perspective of modern sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and criminologists, "deviance" (behaviors that violate cultural and social norms) is indeed often justified. The Neutralization Theory, proposed by Gresham Sykes and David Matza, explains how deviants justify their behaviors by providing alternative definitions of their actions and by providing explanations, to themselves and others, which explains their lack of guilt.

If Al Capone, the desperate men and women behind prison walls, Madoff, Janobi, Abramoff all don't blame themselves for anything - what about the people with whom you and I come in contact?

I think we all have a primal need to justify our behavior.

Can you take criticism? I have a hard time with it. Are you quick to justify your behavior when criticized? I sure do. Can you take responsibility for something wrong that you did if you know that you can get away with it? Have you EVER viewed yourself as guilty without somebody else pointing out your guilt first? If not, can we really be sure of our ability to judge our own morality and behavior? Are we not biased? Will we not always see ourselves better then we actually are?

Galatians 2:21 says if we were justified to God (the one I believe we all long to be justified with and reconnected to) through the law, or by our own merit, Christ died for nothing. But the Christian's great hope is that we are justified by faith to God that just as "one trespass [Adam's] led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness [Christ's] leads to justification and life for all men." (Romans 5:18). This means that the Christian has been given the freedom to not have to play games. We are given the freedom to rest from man's daily struggle to be seen in the best light. We don't have to justify our behavior because our God already has. Without shame we can assume the responsibility for our mistakes. We can reflect into the dark chasms of our souls with introspection and admit how evil we really indeed are. We do not have to pretend and we can be refreshed in doing so.

And we can look to others and forgive because we understand that we are just as broken. We can look to those people with genuine love because we are loved by God even though we too are evil. And incredibly we are loved by a God who simply does not condone the evil, but paid for it fully HIMSELF. And because of this we are broken and moved to love those who wrong us because we first were forgiven ultimately by the greatest act of love the world has ever seen.

Even while we were enemies of God (in direct opposition to his purposes for creation of wholeness and perfect community of brotherhood and love) he took our punishment to justify our behavior, so that we can live more fully, without shame and guilt, and with vitality and love - the purpose that God had planned for us to thrive under along.

Saturday Quotes #1

2011-02-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

Every Saturday I plan to present to you direct quotes from books I have read.

Today I present to you selections from the first 2 chapters of Timothy Keller's Generous Justice. Maybe next Saturday I will post more from the book.

The Bible is seen by many as a great hindrance in doing justice work. I am so thankful for this book because it lays out how and why the Bible actually is a fundamental source for promoting justice and compassion for those in need. My view of the Bible is renewed and I am excited to read passages that I had at once thought to be excessively boring. And this new insight from the Bible is not just intellectually stimulating. I am surprised and so humbled that it sometimes pours out of me as if I were just a pitcher of water. I want to work for justice because a God who I am in love with is all about it!

Okay, here are the quotes I found to be most striking in the first two chapters:

"Israel was charged [in Old Testament times] to create a culture of social justice for the poor and vulnerable because it was the way the nation could reveal God's glory and character to the world.

"...if you are trying to live a life in accordance with the Bible, the concept and call to justice are inescapable. We do justice when we give all human beings their due as creations of God. Doing justice includes not only righting of wrongs, but generosity and social concern, especially toward the poor and vulnerable. This kind of life reflects the character of God."

"God often tells the Israelites to lend to the poor without interest and to distribute goods to the needy and to defend the fatherless, because, "the LORD your God...defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing (Deuteronomy 10:17-18)."

Referencing Deuteronomy 15:7-8
"The poor man was not to be given merely a token "handout." Rather, credit and help were to be extended until he was completely out of poverty. The generosity extended to the poor could not be cut off until the poor person's need was gone and until he reached a level of self-sufficiency. Now we can understand how the passage could say, "There should be no poor among you." God's concern for the poor is so strong that he gave Israel a host of laws that, if practiced, would have virtually eliminated any permanent underclass."

"Any large-scale improvement in a society's level of poverty will come through a comprehensive array of public and private, spiritual, personal, and corporate measures...

"The three causes of poverty, according to the Bible, are oppression, calamity, and personal moral failure."

The Frailty of Life

2011-02-18T16:25:00.009-08:00

I got a call today with second-hand news that my dad got into a car accident. The grave tone on the other end from a dear friend told me that the rumors he had heard wasn't just pertaining to a fender-bender.

I wanted to throw-up. And then I went numb.

I tried to call my dad's phone as fast as I could. The pleasantries of saying 'I'll call you back when I know more,' and the time it took for our cell phones to connect was an excruciatingly long eternity.

Life is terrifyingly fragile I thought.

My dad picked up the phone. He was okay. We quickly moved to call other family members to check on their safety in case this news just had the first name mixed up. I held my breath before each one picked up. These verses came to mind as painful reminders of our reality in life:

James 4:13-14
1 Peter 1:24-25
James 1:9-11

Everyone is okay as far as we can tell now at the moment. It drives home the point though that I know in one sense but I often forget or do not feel as real.

Our lives are very fragile... and we will find a bitter end if we put too much stock into our life, if we put all of our hopes into it.

Life will betray us. In a moment, a call can confirm it's frailty.

The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). This is our lot.

In John 11, their is a story of Jesus bellowing with rage against death at the funeral of Lazarus. (Most translations soften the anger of Jesus in John 11. Look at the Greek wording if you want to verify all of this.) He is not simply crying for his friend. He knows he is able and will raise him from the dead in minutes. At the moment he sees the devastation of death. He sees everyone at the funeral torn apart. We cry out, 'It should not be this way!!' at the funeral of a friend or a family member.

The utter devastation of death makes Jesus bellow with rage. He knows that it was indeed not supposed to be this way. As God in man he might have seen the funerals we have all attended at that moment, and the ones that we still will yet. At the very least in the face of death there he bellowed with rage and demanded to see the body. With his voice the Word of God penetrated through death and brought Lazarus back to life. For the sake of those around him he revealed his credibility, his prowess over life itself which was destined to be consummated on the cross.

And this is what drove him to finish his course. This is what kept his eyes set on what the cross would bring. In his death he was able to swallow up death's power on those that desperately cling to His grace. In love he took death, the wage we deserve, head on, so that we might have life in full.

Thank God for a savior... one who in perfect love lived and died to save us from the destruction of death.

How Can We Make This Assurance Operative In Our Own Lives? Part 3b

2011-02-16T10:36:00.014-08:00

Romans 8:28-39

(2) You also have to personalize the assurance in Jesus...

When people believe that God loves them and nothing can separate them from that love... A critic may ask - where does the love come from? Is it simply an abstract idea? I think the Christian can point to Jesus in a concrete way and say that He IS the love of God.

In the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross, all of the greatest forces in the universe set their sights against Jesus. He could have stopped the rejection, the torture, the death, and the eternal justice for our sins from coming down on his head by simply giving up on us. All he had to do was walk away. But as Jesus Christ was up on the cross nailed, bleeding, dying, and looking down on the people betraying him, and in the greatest act of love in the history of time, HE STAYED.

Bomb after bomb was coming down on Jesus to try and get him to drop us and to separate him from us, but even hell itself was unable to do it. He stayed. He held on to us and became our savior. He died for us. That is how we know that nothing can separate us from the love of God. And this assurance does not have to be an abstract idea for the Christian. Because incredibly God doesn’t just love us unconditionally, he loves us counter-conditionally. He loves you against conditions because of Jesus.

When you see that Jesus Christ never let YOU go no matter what came down on him then the assurance of his love can be personalized. And I think that is the only way that you can know with absolute certainty that no matter you do inside and what happens outside that God has not abandoned you.

If he wouldn’t abandon us on the cross, when hell itself was coming down on him, then he certainly would not abandon us now! If that couldn’t separate us from him do you think you having a bad week is going to do it? Do you think there is anything WE can do when hell couldn’t even destroy his love for us? When bad things are happening to us from all around and you say, ‘I must be abandoned!’ You must remember that if he didn’t abandon you then he is certainly not going to abandon you now. God’s SON was not even spared. And if he wouldn’t spare his son (think of giving up your own son, daughter, nephew, niece, brother, sister) to give us the ultimate gift of community with him and overwhelming love from him, do you think he is really going to let your life go off the rails now? He is not going to deny you anything you need.

If somebody spends a billions dollars on a present do you think he is going to skimp on the wrapping paper?

This is the love you have been looking for all of your life. No friend love, no married love, no popular acclaim, no parental love, no respect at work will give you what this will give you.

Even the best spouse, friends, and parents will die. You will be forsaken. But nothing, neither death, life, angels, principalities, powers, things present, or anything to come, nor height, depth, or anything in all creation will be able to separate you from the love of God, which is in Jesus.

Are you certain of that?

How Can We Make This Assurance Operative In Our Own Lives? Part 3a

2011-02-15T16:05:00.008-08:00

Romans 8:28-39

Many people in America, inside and outside of the church, hold to a belief in a loving God. They all say that they believe in a God of love, a God that loves unconditionally and loves you no matter what you do...

But is the assurance changing lives?

This assurance will not change your life when God’s love is simply an abstract, cognitive belief. I believe this assurance can only change your life when it becomes 'personalized.'

I think you have to personalize the love of God in two ways. I will write about the first - the assured love of God in you - today and the second - the assured love of God in Christ - tomorrow.

How do you personalize this assurance in you?

It is fine to talk about how freewill and the sovereignty of God is only an apparent contradiction (I wrote about that yesterday). That is fine but it is only an intellectual exercise. We need to apply this to us and our relationship with God.

Do you have a relationship with God? Have you gone to God through Jesus Christ? What does that look like?

Think of a relationship with God as a door. As you are coming up to the door you see above it Matthew 10:32, “Whosoever will confess me before men I will confess before my Father.” In other words, as you are coming up to a relationship with God you are told you have got to do it. You have to make a decision and a commitment. You cannot be passive.

If you bite and cry out, ‘Lord accept me because of what Jesus has done,’ and you walk through the door, the minute you do you see behind you on the other side of the door John 15:16, “You have not chosen me I have chosen you,” and John 6:44, “no man can come to me except the Father draw him.”

Everybody, I believe, who has moved through that door will someday realize that in spite of all of the work that they did and the sweat it took to make the commitment, when they get in and start looking back they will begin to realize that the reason they are a Christian is not because they were more spiritual, more humble then other people, more of a lover of truth then other people... it was simply because God kept pushing and pressing and persistently seeking to love them until he broke them open to him. Therefore, what makes me a Christian is simply the fact that God comes to the Christian, not because they were smarter, better, more repentant, or spiritual. It is both a free AND a sovereign act.

I wrote about Deuteronomy 7:6-8 one time on this blog after hearing Tim Keller speak on it.

Read that passage. Do you see the circular reasoning? God is saying that He didn't love Israel because they were one of the great nations, in fact they were the one of the smallest and had very little going for them. It was because God loved them that he brought them out of Egypt... God is saying to His people here (the nation of Israel then, and now to His people across all borders) that, 'I love you, just because I love you, just because I love you.'

Dani (my wife) might ask me someday, 'Do you love me?' And I will say, 'Yes!' And then Dani might say, 'Why?' This is where I will have to be very careful. I could truthfully say, "You the smartest girl I have ever known, the prettiest girl I have seen. I love how we can talk for hours, I love the ambition and life spark you have, I love how you want to see everything. I love how we can walk and get lost in a city and have such a great time doing it...’ But that answer will not work. I think the only answer in which you can build an entire LIFE of love is, "I love you just because I love you." And this is not just sweet talk, it is not just pillow-talk nonsense. There is no other way for true love to operate.

If you say to another human being that you love them because of a certain factor then all of the identity shifts to that factor because that is the basis for the love. 'Well, then I better keep my figure! I better stay smart! I better keep in good shape so I can keep on walking through cities... But what happens if I somehow can't walk anymore? What happens if I lose my drive and ambition?'

The basis of the identity, of this person's loveliness, the basis of their value is then shifted to these factors, and then slavery to those factors if they seek to remain in that love... But what if God says, 'I love you just because I love you'. And what if the only way we love him is because he kept after us until he finally broke us open... This reality can transform a life.

Why?

It is because finally with this assurance you don’t have to be smart, sophisticated, fun, good looking, or have a lot of money. Those factors are marginalized now because you are finally loved for yourself! If you know the reason why God, people, or your spouse loves you is because... you have a great career, then you will never be able to handle a reversal of that career... or that you are talented, then you will never be able to truly handle competition and failure...

The divine, sovereign, electing grace of God tells us that He loves you just because He loves you. If that assurance is personalized it can transform you.

A Controversial Assurance? Part 2

2011-02-14T16:13:00.009-08:00

Romans 8:28-39

Paul is saying at the end of Romans 8 that there is an assurance that we can have that can absolutely change a life through Christ. But when Paul expresses this assurance we (in a modern-western culture) raise a question. It is very hard in our culture to even receive this assurance that Paul is talking about... to enjoy it and to use it unimpeded.

In our modern-western culture this assurance raises an issue. All of this talk, I will start explaining in the next paragraph, brings up controversial topics like predestination, calling, and election. This bothers us, but as it bothers us I hope we do not forget that other centuries and other cultures have not been bothered by it.
This is a problem for modern-western, enlightenment individualistic people. It is wise to identify the lenses by which we see the world. We must never absolutize any of our objections that our specific to our culture because they always arrive from within our culture. The objections should always be taken seriously because we live within that culture, but we must relativize them because we are not the only culture in the world and therefore should never declare that any cultural objection is an insurmountable obstacle to faith in Christ.

What is the controversy?

When modern-western people (a group which I am of course a part of) hear, ‘Christ will keep you in his love, so that no matter what we do we will never stop loving him and he will never stop loving us, and he is in total control of everything so that everything is working out according to his plan.’ The response could be something like, ‘What about freewill because it sounds like then that God would be doing all of this stuff despite our choices, and if that is the case, then what about human responsibility? What does it matter how we live then if this is true? If it is true and I am a Christian, then can I do anything because God is going to keep me loving him? And if he is going to work out everything into his plan, then what does it matter what I do? What happens to the responsibility of the choices I make?’

These are very good questions.

Today, in this theological debate, we are only given two alternatives to choose from: either we believe that we have freewill and are responsible for our choices and our choices matter, which means that the future is open and undetermined, OR something has set and fixed the future and our choices don’t matter.

But is this an either/or debate?

I think, in the Bible, we are not given a choice between one or the other. It seems to always be, in the Bible, that you are free and responsible for your choices and your choices matter and no one is forcing you to make those choices AND YET every single thing that happens as a result of those choices is working out according to the plan of God. It is not just that God foresees what you are going to do, but rather what you do fits perfectly into the plan he wants and the course he wants history to take.

Here are a few examples of this is in the Bible (there are many more).

The principle of it can be seen in Proverbs 16:1, “To man belongs the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue,” and verse 9, “the heart of man plans his way, but it is the Lord who establishes his steps.” To you belongs the plans of the heart, but the result of the plan comes from God. To you belongs your plans, but when you actually speak or act that ALWAYS fits in with God’s plan. This is amazing. On one hand, your choices belong to you, they are yours and are not coerced and not accomplished or chosen by God and you cannot say you could not help it. You are free and responsible. And yet, the result is always exactly what God wants.

How can this be?

This does not have to be an either/or debate. Isn’t possible that God could fix things and work things out and at the same time not violate your freewill. We might not be able to imagine how we could do it but the question is can GOD do it?

J.I. Packer wrote once, “The relationship of our freewill and responsibility and God’s sovereignty and control of all things is... not a contradiction but an apparent contradiction.” He uses an example of light to explain this. We know that light sometimes behaves as waves and sometimes as particles. Sometimes it acts as if it does not consist of matter and sometimes it acts as if it does. How can this be? We reason that it should not be like this but it is. We do not know how it works, he says, but we know it does work this way and so we work with it, otherwise you are not going to know how to handle light. Just like our knowledge of light, J.I. Packer says, this debate is not a contradiction but an apparent contradiction since we do not have the knowledge to figure and reason everything out.

On the one hand, God is setting and fixing absolutely everything the way he wants it to be. He does not do it despite our choices, but through them. Our choices are part of his plan.

Another example of this put into practice is seen in Acts 27. For the sake of brevity see how this works out in the passage for yourself, but simply put, Paul has a biblical understanding of this debate here. Our choices matter absolutely, but they do not determine the future. Because they matter Paul is not passive in life, he says let’s do things the way they should be done (by trusting God, I think in the case in Acts 27), but because they (his choices) do not determine the future, he is not paralyzed in doubts. He is neither passive nor paralyzed. If you believe everything is fixed despite our choices you will be passive. If you believe that our choices determine our future you will become paralyzed. Paul in this case is neither.

You may say here, ‘Why would you be paralyzed if you believe that our choices determine the future?’ Everything that happens in history is interlocked in an infinite number of ways and any little change to one thing changes everything and if these changes are completely determined by us then we should be floored because we do not have even a speck of the wisdom necessary to make those choices. Take for instance the relatively modern search for a “soulmate” or “the one.” If just one person had children with someone else in the past then whole civilizations might have never have even come to pass.

We cannot possibly anticipate all of the effects and changes that our decisions make. The Bible, thankfully, tells us that we do not have to anticipate and predicate the consequences of our choices. It says on one hand that you are absolutely responsible for your choices, you are free and nobody is forcing you to do them and if you make bad choices there will be bad consequences, BUT God is the one in charge of the future and he is overruling everything so you can do your best and then relax because God will see it all through...

If we truly had freewill then it very well could be paralyzing to get out of bed in the morning since we do not even have the slightest insight as to how one of our choices may devastatingly change the future. Instead though we can be sure that all things work together for good for those that love God, even though it is all very intricate and we very rarely see how it all works out.

Here is my best attempt for us to get more of a glimpse: What would have happened if my great, great grandparents decided only to have eleven children instead of twelve? What would have happened if my grandma’s first husband would have come home alive from the war? What if John Wilkes Booth was stopped before he shot Abraham Lincoln? What if one man decided to launch a nuclear bomb during the Cold War? What would have happened if I had decided not to have become a lifeguard my Sophomore year of High School in which I met my future wife for the first time, which then led to, years later, meeting up with her again and eventually marrying her?

An infinite amount of ‘big’ moments in the past are made up of a difference of inches or seconds or small decisions, which are interwoven in infinitely complex ways that make up our future today... I think a question we have to seriously ask ourselves is: do we think the inches and seconds, that make all of the difference, happen by accident?

The Bible says that ALL things work together for good for those that love God and are called according to his purpose.

Very seldom do we even get a glimpse of how God is working all things together for the good of those that love him, but he is and therefore you can be assured that no matter what bad stuff is happening inside of you and outside of you he has not abandoned you and he loves you.

An Assurance that Can Change Everything

2011-02-13T00:02:00.006-08:00

Romans 8 talks about how Jesus concretely changes your life when He comes into it...

I wanted to focus on the ending of the chapter in a few blog posts - a section that has a very simple, but life-altering point.

Paul is saying that there is an assurance that we can have that can absolutely change your life through Christ. He is saying that this assurance is a thing you can get out everyday and use.

Romans 8:28-39

Today I wanted to write about WHAT the assurance that Paul talks about is, tomorrow WHY we can be assured, and a day after that HOW we can be assured (or HOW we can make this assurance not just an abstraction but an operative thing in our lives)...

WHAT WE CAN BE ASSURED OF in Romans 8:

What is Paul’s point? There is a joy to be had and if you have it, it can enable you to face anything in life without sinking or crumbling. This joy is a certainty that God doesn’t JUST love you now (it is a certainty that he loves you now in Christ), but that he ALWAYS will. It also assures that nothing can shake you from that or separate you from that. The Lord of the universe does not just love you now but always will.

Once you have connected with God through Jesus Christ this assurance is two folded. It means that God loves you no matter what bad stuff is happening inside of you AND no matter what bad stuff is happening outside of you. No matter what happens you can be assured that God still loves you.

Sometimes we do awful things. There is stuff in your heart (mine I am sure more so) that you don’t know about yet and that when it pops up you will say, ‘I cannot believe that I am capable of that!’ When this happens you are going to be very disillusioned and mad at yourself... you could possibly say in response, ‘I can’t believe that God could love me after I have done that...’ And yet here is Paul saying, “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus who died and more then that was raised and is ever at the right hand of God interceding for us...” Not one thing you can possibly do today can bring you back into condemnation. It is ALL covered, it is ALL paid for. When real bad stuff happens inside of us we say, ‘Look at the mess I am in, God could not love me.’ But we are given an assurance here in Romans 8 that says God loves you no matter how much or what kind of bad stuff happens inside of you.

On the other fold, when bad stuff happens to us we say, ‘Look what a mess life is, obviously God has abandoned me’ or ‘There can’t be a loving God!’ But Paul says here, ‘Oh yes there can be.’ Do you see this list in Romans 8: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword... Whenever this bad stuff happens, when everything is going wrong you could feel either that God doesn’t love you, because he would not let all of this stuff happen to me or a loving God is not there. But no matter how bad the mess is on the outside Paul says that you still can be assured that God loves you. He says in verse 28, “All things are working together for good for those that love God.” What does that mean? I think it means taken together, as a whole, looked at from the long-term, in every single thing that happens God is working together into a plan for our good and (as the Bible says) God’s glory.

Let me share two examples from the Bible that displays this principle. They both are found in the Old Testament at a place called Dothan. In Genesis, a man named Joseph is thrown into a pit by his brothers for the purpose of selling him into slavery. He is looking at a whole life of suffering in front of him as he cries out to God to save him. But God is silent and he is sold into slavery and has a horrible life for many years... Many centuries later in Dothan a man named Elisha prays to God. By this time Dothan is a city and it is besieged by an enemy. Elisha cries out to God to save the city from capture. This time God acts, wipes out the enemy army and the city is saved...

If you know the story of Joseph you know that if he hadn’t been sold into slavery and hadn’t gone through all of those years of misery, not only hundreds of thousands of people would have died from famine, but his own family would have been destroyed by their own sin. What all of that means is that God was just as actively working everything for good in Joseph’s life as he was in Elisha’s. He was just as actively working in the seeming slowness and non-answer to Joseph as in the swift noisy answer to Elisha. Paul says that this is ALWAYS the case. No matter how much bad stuff is happening inside or outside of you, you can be assured that God absolutely and infallibly and unchangeably loves you.

When Paul gets to the very end of chapter 8 in Romans he says that he is “absolutely certain.” He uses a word here that means, ‘absolute, intense certainty and persuasion.’ And then he just bursts, pushes and stretches to the limits of possible language to say, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor power, nor heaven, nor hell, nor height, nor death... nothing! can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

There are people, though, who have looked at this passage and have said, ‘Oh yes, but... you can separate yourself from God because if you start out to follow Jesus and you turn back you can lose your salvation and lose his love.’ This is not the right way to read this text because Paul specifically states that CREATION cannot separate us from the love of God. We are all apart of creation last time I checked! Paul is trying to say here that EVERY possible situation that might turn you away from God cannot - even persecution or torture if you want to take it there. God’s love is so powerful that it will keep you facing him, keep you loving him, keep you in his arms - no matter what.

Here is our assurance: no matter how powerful the evil inside of us or outside of us, it is unable to separate us from the love of God. Once you give yourself to God through Christ he is yours, you are his, and NOTHING ever can change that.

Tim Keller on Interpreting the Bible

2010-07-21T16:51:00.001-07:00

Tim Keller on Interpreting the Bible

Gospel Oriented Teaching

2010-07-09T09:55:00.003-07:00

http://deidox.com/films/lindsay/

2:15 - 2:37

"'I have been thinking about you all summer. I love you already. You may not believe this but you can't earn my love. You could make straight A's all year and have perfect behavior all year or you can get detention 3 times a week and I am going to love you the same.'

And then I spend all year trying to prove it."

isaiah 6:8

2010-03-27T07:29:00.001-07:00

Hebrews 11 - Part 1

2010-01-25T19:10:00.008-08:00

Hebrews 11:32-40

In the book of Hebrews the author has been trying to give his/her readers what they need to survive the brutal realities of this world. In chapter 11 he/she offers something, that if you have it you can handle absolutely anything that life hands to you.

What is it?

On the surface the answer is faith, but I implore you to dig deeper! When you read through this section you see a list of great people of faith. I think an interpretive key to this section is the fact that the list of people here has a major division - there is a first list and a second list - verse 32-35 and then 35-38.

Hebrews 11:32-35

All these people are characterized by their weakness turned to strength. They started on the margins, but came to power. They were facing overwhelming odds, but in the end they triumphed. In every case these people looked like they were dead but in the end they came out alive. For example, “By faith [Daniel] shut the mouth of lions,” “[Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego] clenched the fury of the flames.” Overwhelming odds, certain death, but there were always miraculous escapes from death and suffering. They called to God and God saved! “Women received back there dead” - in the Old Testament, there were two women whose sons died and through the power of God, through the prophets Elijah and Elisha, they were raised to life.

We love these stories of faith in our culture today. They really resonate. Those stories such as: ‘The doctor said I was going to live only for one month but I didn’t give up hope and I prayed and I fought and now I am all better and I have recovered and the doctor says it was a miracle!’ or ‘My business was about to go under and I was facing economic disaster, but I prayed and I had faith and I worked really hard and God turned it around and now I am successful.’ These are great stories and we are so glad they exist, but if you understand faith to be this simply, that: ‘If I try hard and if I believe enough I can overcome anything or at least I will always escape or things will work out!’ If your understanding of faith ends here or in other words conceptually ends in verse 35, then you are essentially doomed with life as is, with all of its brutalities...

I have heard of heartbreaking stories such as one of an eighteen year-old girl who broke her neck becoming paralyzed. Her friends told her that if she really had faith God would heal her. And they told her that if she was not healed then it was because SHE did not have enough faith... Their understanding of faith ended conceptually at the end of verse 35 - that 'if you have enough faith you will always escape death and suffering.'

But guess what - the Bible does not end its conception of faith in verse 35....

John 1 part 3

2009-11-20T13:46:00.002-08:00

AND NOW WE HAVE SEEN HIS GLORY

glory - At once the Jewish reader would have thought of the Tabernacle. The place where God would concentrate Himself and where His glory would dwell. There were times that Moses and the Priests had to back off because the glory of God was shining so bright in this place. They had to be careful with the glory. ‘Shakeena' or 'God’s glorious presence’ is the word the Priests would use to refer God’s glory. And Jesus’ flesh now becomes the new Shakeena.

“Shine Jesus shine, fill this land with the Father’s glory” - But there is just one problem to that lyric...

Throughout the rest of the Gospel, John describes the central exhibit of Jesus’ GLORY as the fact that He was killed. In John 12, Jesus finally tells us that His hour has come - up to this point John has been foreshadowing the cross saying that His hour had not yet come - And remarkably Jesus says at that time that the hour has come for the Son of Man to be GLORIFIED! "Truly I tell you that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain. But if it dies, it produces many grains."

Immediately we step back and ask ourselves: how can this be. We are surely not use to seeing the death of our champion as glorious. Only a racist heart glories in the death of a Martin Luther King Jr, only an evil heart glories in the death of a President Lincoln... We are not use to thinking of our champions death as glorious.

Jesus died on the cross, and His followers looked on. He died on a torture instrument that the Romans adopted in order to terrorize their enemies. The Romans took Jesus’ life and His dignity through a state sponsored terror event that was meant for anybody who could see or hear saying to the onlookers -- Cesar is lord and don’t you forget it!

Now where is the glory there? Glory on a cross?? A closer analogy to the onlookers of that day could possibly even be Glory through drug overdose... Glory on an electric chair??

But the Gospel finds glory there! Because the death of Jesus Christ will feed whole nations with the Bread of Life. Jesus body sown like a grain into the ground will send its roots down and its stock up until He bursts from the ground with life. For everybody who will believe in Him, who will believe that He saves...

This is what the Gospel cries out from that day of Resurrection to today. God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

John 1 part 2

2009-11-19T11:57:00.012-08:00

John 1

THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELLED AMONG US...

The Tabernacle is now Jesus' flesh. It is where God concentrates Himself, it is where people can hear God speak. And 'the Word' can speak God's words because He is here. Immanuel, God is with us! The disciples probably knew 'the Word' when He was sick. And Joseph and Mary knew 'the Word' when He was so young He could only babble or on a day that Jesus cut a board too short and was not too happy about it. 'The Word' became flesh, now He could embrace His followers, laugh with His friends, and ask for a second helping of food...

And now He could suffer terribly because He has got a neck and a back and the back’s of His

thighs are crisscrossed with nerve endings that scream when He gets whipped... He’s flesh. So He probably forgot stuff. On some days He might say something and then on the next day He might say ‘Oh I am sorry I meant to say something else.’ He’s flesh. He wept, He got tired, He prayed before calling His disciples and then got Judas as one of the answers to His prayer. He is flesh. He said there were things He didn’t know, like when the end of the world would happen. He is flesh after all.

But He is also God of God and Light of Light. What you see in His life is the MOST remarkable display of the heart and mind of God the earth has ever known. He has the power to send demons away, He has the power to send sickness away, and the power to send sin away and He does it!

And He has the power in the very next chapter, to turn water into wine. Jesus is at a wedding in cana, Jesus’ mother notices a wine shortage, and Jesus goes to work. He makes about 150 gallons of wine. He does, as what Pope Gregory the Great said in the 7th century , “a speeded up version of what God does all the time.” Every Fall God turns water into wine, in the Napa Valley, in the Cayuga Valley. Jesus does a small speeded up version of what God does in the wedding at Cana. So you can say that Jesus speaks for God, but we will see that Jesus keeps on doing what God does, or to use another metaphor - Jesus as the deed. And He does it in the Flesh. And so you now you have the feet of God taking Him to the shack of a leper, and the hand of God reaching out towards flesh that nobody else would touch, and the knees of God that bent as He washed the feet of His disciples, an act that they would not have dreamed of doing for each other, and you got the arms of God stretched out to be nailed for our sins, wounded for our sins. It’s as if the terrifying work of atonement cannot be done without God becoming flesh.

THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELLED AMONG US... Words don’t have meaning until we see action, until there is flesh and blood executing the deed.

"A young man during the Civil War was watching Abraham Lincoln coming into a Hospital Ward as he sat down by a boy that was dieing. The Secretary of War and some Generals wanted to move him on, but he wanted to stay. And so he did, talking to the boy about his home on the Sangamon River. He sat with him two hours before the boy died. The young man commented later, ‘You know I had a good home, I knew from church that God had compassion, but that day when I saw the sadness in the President’s eye and saw the weariness in his face I came to know something about God that I had never known before. Compassion has to have flesh before we can really understand what it truly is, what the Word truly means in our day, the Word becoming flesh."

John 1 part 1

2009-11-18T14:30:00.013-08:00

John 1

THE WORD is like a metaphor for Jesus. Jesus, in a sense, speaks for God.

Jesus is God all over again, Jesus is a chip off the ol’ block... He sounds just like His Father. When someone appears in a place unexpectatly, Jesus says what God would say, “Don’t be afraid.” When Jesus is confronted by religious leaders Jesus said what God would say, “Woe to you! You give your money, but you neglect justice! In fact you run widows right out of their houses.” Jesus speaks for God. At least 5 times Jesus says none of His words come from Him, everything He says He has heard His Father say.

AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH...

He is God, absolutely... and He became flesh.

CS Lewis once wrote, "you want to get the smallest of glimpses to see what this might mean for the Son of God to stuff Himself into human form? Imagine yourself becoming a slug. Your activities would be limited and restrictions would apply."

HE BECAME FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US...

Actually, the Greek is a little sharper than this. The Greek says He tented with us. We are like Israel in the wilderness.

God wants to be with them there so He has them make the Tent of Meeting, a place for Him. It’s got holy places in it and what not, but the basic idea for it is that Israel is going to be okay when God is in His tent and His people can worship Him. In fact, “tenting” becomes part of God’s ID in the Old testament, ‘Who is Israel’s God? Well, He is the one that "tents" in Zion!’

Then at the end of the Bible, John sees a vision beautiful enough to break your heart (in Rev. 21). At the end we don’t go to Heaven, Heaven comes to us! The City of God descends to us, so God can TENT with us here.

Jesus' thoughts on the Bible - How Can We Hear from God, Part 4

2009-11-16T19:59:00.001-08:00

John 5:31-47

(4) How can we hear God? Jesus argues to see everything in the Bible as pointing to Him- He is the TRUE Joshua, the host of the armies of the Lord; He is the TRUE Jonah, the prophet who died for His people who was kept in the belly of the Earth for 3 days...

Until you see every passage of Scripture about Him and not about you... until you read the Bible NOT for information but for formation... until you read the Bible to meet Him you will be reading it just like the people who end up killing Jesus.

The Gospel (the Good News in which Christianity stands on) is NOT that you do things and you offer them to God, BUT that God sent Jesus Christ to live the perfect life and that it is His standing that is now offered to you. If that truth reforms, or in other words, remakes you, then you are starting to stand in what Jesus accomplished in His life. God then sees you as perfect and as blameless as Christ.

Every other religion says that it is your job to rise up and live a divine life... the Gospel says that Jesus came down and lived a human life and did what we were supposed to do for us. When you are united with Him you are accepted through that. If you don’t believe that the story is true, then what you really believe in is a lot of principles that you have to live up to. BUT if you see the story as true, then you can read everything in the Bible as being about Jesus and not about you and what you must do. If it is all about you, you will be mechanical and rigid and will miss the point and will not have internal character change. The weight of the principles will either be absolutely crushing or they will serve as a source and excuse for self-righteousness and ignorant arrogance... If you read it as about Him the love of God will dwell in you (V38).

PLEASE self give the Bible authority over me!! In the areas I don’t want to hear. If I don’t then how can God ever heal me in tough times!! - If He doesn’t have authority over me now then what is going to happen in my life when my heart is broken or when I feel like a failure... when our hearts condemn us the Bible says that God is greater than our hearts BUT how can God be greater then my heart, how can God come in and give me hope and love unless I give the Bible full authority over me in all things. I can't just pick and choose these things creating a god of my own choosing, can I??

For those of you who have Jesus’ “view of the Bible”... how are you reading the Bible? Are you reading it for information or formation? Read it to its logical conclusion. Can you earn your salvation or do you need a savior?

Jesus' thoughts on the Bible - Why we don’t hear God speak, Part 3b

2009-11-16T14:11:00.003-08:00

John 5:31-47

2. Not only did these people miss the purpose of the Bible, but they missed the POINT

Jesus says the Bible testifies about Him like John the Baptist did... During his life, people asked John the Baptist; ‘Are you the one?’ He adamantly said, ‘NO, I am pointing to something beyond me, I am baring witness to the one, I am not the one.’... When Jesus says the Bible is just like John the Baptist I think this is what it means: if we are not seeing in every single part of the Bible pointing beyond itself to Jesus, just like John the Baptist, then we are lost. We are missing the point.

Let’s look at the story of Joseph in Genesis. What is the story of Joseph about? He is sold into slavery. He triumphs through it because he trusts in God. Incredibly at the end he saves the lives of his family because he is at the right hand of the Pharaoh and forgives them... What is that about? Most people would say that the story is pointing to Joseph - ‘If I try hard, no matter how bad people treat me or who betrays me, I can get through it. If I just believe in God I can do anything. If I try hard enough I can forgive.’ If you read it that way you will either become smug and self-righteous OR you will be crushed with despair.

BUT if every part of the Bible is saying, ‘I am not the one, I am pointing to something beyond me!’... There was a real Joseph who was sold and was betrayed by the people that should have loved Him, and He brought about redemption not just in spite of His suffering but through His suffering and now He is seated at the right hand of the Father and He has forgiven us... Until you see yourself as the recipient of what the TRUE Joseph has done you will never have the heart to be able to forgive other people. If Joseph is just an example he will crush you. If He is pointing to Jesus then suddenly there is liberation.

Every part of the Bible is the same...

Look at the “Golden Rule” in Leviticus 19. Anybody who says, ‘we don’t need Jesus, we just need to live by the ‘Golden Rule’ has never really listened to the Golden Rule because it is impossible to keep by itself. The Rule says that you have to meet the needs of other people with all of the creativity, power, and joy that you use to meet your own needs... Do you know what that means?? The ‘Golden Rule’ is saying I AM NOT THE ONE. It is testifying! - It is saying, ‘If you think you can obey me, you are crazy! I am here to show you (as Paul says in Romans 5) that the Law is a school master here to bring you to Jesus.’ If you say I can obey the Law if I try hard enough then you are NOT even listening to the Law because the Law is pointing beyond itself. If you look at the Law as an end and not a means to the end as leading you to the need of a Savior then you are deaf to the great things that God is saying. And I don’t think it really matters if you claim belief in the “inherency” or “infallibility” of the Scripture!

The Bible was meant for the Gospel to be seen in every part of it. Jesus declared that to be so here in John, in Luke 24, in many other places.

Here is another example: in the Garden of Gesthamine Jesus is telling His disciples, ‘I need you to stay awake.’ After three times seeing them asleep He is not irritable at all, He wakes them up, and goes to meet the Roman soldiers... I use to read that and say I need to be like that. I need to not be irritable! But yet I continue to find myself irritable with people who are not meeting the standards I have set for them everyday... There is liberation to the degree that I have meditated and know that that I am not Jesus in this story but am the disciples that fell asleep... If you see Jesus as simply a model of forgiveness (Even forgiving on the cross!), His example will crush you. But IF you see Jesus dieing and forgiving you for YOUR sins, that melts your self-righteousness and it gives you a desire to forgive others’ sins, but only because you have been built up.

Jesus said the Bible will get up on the last day and judge us - even those who have studied it, who know it inside out, and, I think most importantly noteworthy, who have read it for information and NOT for formation. Read V37-38. The very authors of the Bible will judge those who who read the Bible for information and rules and without seeing it pointing to Jesus.

Jesus' thoughts on the Bible - Why we don’t hear God speak, Part 3a

2009-11-16T09:54:00.003-08:00

John 5:31-47

(3) Why do we not hear God speak?
On the last day, Jesus says here in John that Moses and the writers of the Bible will call you into judgment because “you did not listen.” Remember who Jesus is talking to - serious Bible students. This is VERY FRIGHTENING to me and it should to churches across America. Jesus says that it is very possible to believe in the “infallibility”, “inerrancy”, and “inspiration” of the Scripture AND be as deaf to what God is saying as if you did not believe any of it at all. Jesus is telling this to the people that have ‘the right view!’ He is criticizing their use of scripture. In a sense Jesus is saying that although you may have the technical view of the Bible, it can be for naught if you do not use the scripture in the right way.

Jesus is telling the Bible students how they are missing the Bible in 2 ways:

1. They are missing the whole purpose of the Bible. V39 Jesus says that the Pharisees believe that the study of Scripture and the knowledge of the Scripture is how people are going to get favor with God. I would say that this view is NORMAL today. Many people starting out in Christianity often say something like, ‘I am going to be really good now - I am going to start reading the Bible. I am going to read it everyday and then I am going to know that God is in my corner. I will study, read, memorize, know the Bible...’

I am not saying you should not be studying the Bible. I just remember how many times I have gotten up in the morning, or sat down throughout a day, and I would feel so much better after simply doing the deed. It would not be because of a meeting with Jesus or having the Holy Spirit work on my heart, it was often simply that my conscience felt better. I thought I was more in tune with God and that I had more sway with God and that only then would He be answering my prayers and, honestly, only then that He was pleased with me. I was really not doing anything with the Bible, I was not learning, growing, seeing the point... I felt that just by searching and studying the Bible that I would be okay and that God would love me then... and only then.

Do you see how dangerous that is?

One BIG, HUGE reason why people today don’t believe the Bible is because of how conservative Christians use the Bible. Conservative Christians use the Bible in a certain way because of how they study the Bible. The study the Bible like this: to feel good about themselves, to feel superior about themselves, to feel that God must love them because they know the Bible so much... People who study like that cannot judge the central to the less important things in the Bible and so they get into all kinds of theories and calculations about creation or about the ‘end times’ and then fight for absolutely every little bit of ‘their view.’ They buy more into their view of the Scriptures rather then the Scriptures themselves. They hit people over the head with it. They study the Bible simply for facts and information and not for the gist and for what it is really teaching.

This is a very dangerous approach. I should know. I was and still can be there.

Jesus' thoughts on the Bible - How God Speaks, Part 2

2009-11-15T21:02:00.005-08:00

John 5:31-47

(2) How God speaks.
* (Quick Disclaimer - if you have a hard time with this post PLEASE wait until the next post to see it in its context before judging it)

Out of the three evidences the scripture is given the lion’s share of weight. It is the only one that is claimed as the “Father’s testimony.”

We learn important things here about Jesus’ view of scripture. It is a little indirect but it is there. Directly He is attacking the Pharisees/these "Bible studiers" use of scripture but in the process we get Jesus' view of scripture.

We get at least two things:
1. Jesus said that the scripture is Divine and not human. He does not say it was not written by human beings (“Moses wrote of me”), but in V34 He says that human testimony is not enough and so then in 37 He says He is going to give the Father’s testimony and then in 39 He gives scripture.

The Bible often is declared as man’s search for God. Jesus says it is from God. ‘Yes Moses wrote it, but it is actually the Father’s testimony.’ This is not man reaching up for God, it is God reaching down to us.

In Matthew 19 Jesus quotes God and what He quotes is Genesis 2:24. But if you go back to Genesis you will see that the author of the book wrote that, not God, as a comment on what just happened. But Jesus can quote what the author of Genesis wrote as from God just like He is doing here with Moses. ‘It is the Father’s testimony.’

2 Peter 1:20, 21 - “no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus and Peter are both saying that what you have in the Bible, though humans wrote it, is the testimony of God.

2. Another thing Jesus says is that not only is this a divine revelation, it is the most sure divine revelation. Jesus is saying that ‘you have not heard His voice nor seen His form... yet you have the testimony.’ Or in other words, you have never had a vision or heard God’s voice, but you have His testimony anyway.

In 2 Peter 1 - Peter is saying a few verses before twenty that He heard a voice, He saw a vision, but yet the scripture testimony is more sure. Paul in Galatians 1:6-9 says that even if an angel from Heaven came and declared a different message you can dismiss it if it is against Jesus being our full and complete atonement. You can just throw the angel out at that point, even with the ground shake and lightning coming down from the sky!

Jesus, Peter, and Paul are saying that the Bible is better than a vision. I think because honestly there are only three possibilities if you have such a vision: 1. It is a human source, you are making it up in your head or it is a fraud; 2. It can be supernatural outside of God; or 3. It can be a supernatural source from God. If you have a vision or hear a voice you only have a 1/3 chance that it was not a mistake. But with the Bible you are batting 1.000. Jesus is saying you have the real testimony of God in the Bible.

(On my next post, I will get into the fact that you cannot bat 1.000 by simply using the Bible if you use it as an end in itself and not a means in pointing beyond itself or in other words if you don't see the point of the Bible...)

And if this the Scripture sits in judgment against voices and angels from the sky then you have to ask yourself this question: Is your heart going to sit in judgment against the Bible or is it going to sit in judgment against your heart? Listen closely to the authority that Jesus gives the Bible.

Jesus is saying that this is the only way you can really know that God is speaking. What this means is this: You cannot have relationship without believing in the complete authority of the Bible.

I am finding that many people today talk about the Bible like this: ‘If you think of the Bible as truth then you are not having a conversation or intimacy with God because the Bible just has a lot of laws and rules and you cannot have intimacy or a conversation with that. Let us realize that the Bible is not always true, we are enlightened today and we are able to now judge on what parts of the Bible are right and wrong, and only when we do that can we actually have real intimacy or a real conversation with God.’

The Stepford Wives movie is a good example of a point here. I saw the remake years ago. The movie was not good, but I think a good principle can be taken from it. The movie is basically about the husbands of this town are replacing their wives with robots. The robots are programmed to be the ‘perfect’ wife. Relationship and intimacy are the farthest things away from what those couples in the movie had at that point... When you have people that you can turn off whenever they say something that offends you, when you are surrounded by people that only say ‘Yes dear’, when you are surrounded by people that never contradict you, that never challenge you - then you are NOT having a conversation, you are NOT having intimacy. You are not having a personal relationship at all.

When you come to something that offends you in the Bible and say in a sense, ‘I can’t believe in a God that would send people to Hell, I can’t believe in a God that would say that is wrong!!’ When you get to a place where God contradicts you in the Bible, but then say I can’t accept that because it offends me, what you have then there is a Stepford god. It is a god according to your rules, how you think. If you don’t take the Bible as anything but Truth you will not have a conversation, you will not have intimacy.

You cannot ‘know’ Jesus and not have His view of the Bible? Jesus’ view of the Bible was the very foundation on which His entire life was based. He is constantly saying: “It is written...” or talking about the scripture being “fulfilled” while dealing with temptation in the desert, to Peter before the Roman soldiers who are about to take Jesus away... with the cross on His back (Luke 23), on the cross as He is dieing (Psalm 22).

If you say you want Jesus AND you DO NOT want a Bible that you have to obey no matter what it says, what you are really saying then is that you don’t want the real Jesus, you want a Jesus that you can make up, that you can program and turn off. You can’t have Jesus and deny the very basis of His life. Jesus says that the Bible is TESTIMONY - it is personal to Him, testimony is a personal account.

Jesus' thoughts on the Bible - God Speaks, Part 1

2009-11-15T20:52:00.005-08:00

Jesus argued. He often picked debates. I think He had to do this because Jesus said, in a sense, that we do not have a category in our heads for Him and so it would not have worked if He had just said “Think about this”. That is the reason why He argued. We need to look at the hard sayings because we are not perfect, we need to be shaped by the weighty things of God. It is time for me to pay serious attention to this truth myself (I feel a bit foolish that I have had a CS Lewis quote that speaks to this very topic on this blog since day 1 but yet have hardly scratched the surface).

Jesus is arguing about the Scripture here. It is surprising here because He is going after diligent Bible students. I am sure at least thousands of people are meeting in “Bible studies” in our country today. They are diligently studying the Bible. That’s good, right??

Jesus comes here to possibly the most diligent Bible students in the history of the world and He says that, ‘You are as dead wrong as people who don’t even believe in the Bible at all.’ He faces down people here who have a high orthodox view of scripture. That shows us that we have listen to this argument of Jesus’ very carefully because He is speaking to all of us, and more emphatically to those that assume that they have the very view of God... He is zeroing in on "bible-studying, God-believing Christians"...

I think Jesus is telling us in John 5: 31-47four things about God speaking to us: (1) God does speak to us, (2) How does God speak to us, (3) Why we don’t hear what God speaks to us and (4) how we can hear God speaking to us.

(1) The passage here speaks to the fact that God speaks to us.

At the beginning of Chapter 5 Jesus healed a paralyzed man, but He does it on the Sabbath. The Pharisees confront Jesus about His work on the Sabbath and Jesus responds with claims about Himself that must have been absolutely shocking to them. In 5:20 they say horrified to Jesus saying, ‘You are claiming to be equal with God!’.

In our passage Jesus agrees and continues that He does not want them to believe the claim just because He said so. He says He wants to point to testimony or evidence for the claim that He is God, which in turn tells us three ways in which God speaks to us. It is interesting because these three things are evidences that any American has access to today.

I think Jesus is also saying that Faith in Him is more than thinking, but it is certainly not less. It is more than examining the evidence, but it is not less. If you cannot believe in Jesus you have to ask yourself, ‘Have I looked at the evidence?’ Or if you say ‘I don’t hear God speaking to me’ you need to ask yourself, ‘Have I gone to the places where Jesus has said that God speaks? Have I exposed myself to the testimony that God [supposedly] has sent?’

Jesus says here don’t believe just because I am asserting it. Look at the evidence:
1. The first evidence He gives is human. Jesus points to John the Baptist. John was a ‘burning and shining light.’ He is looking to John as, not the prophet, but a radiant human being and a great man who was a burning and shining light. The first way God speaks to us is through personal relationships, through His work through another human - people who point to Christ and whose lives are radiant. There is integrity, an unaccountable radiance there. Unless you have known people like that you have not heard one of the main ways how God gives evidence that He is there.
2. The second is empirical. Jesus says that God has given Him works to do. He is talking about His life, His claims, His miracles, His resurrection.
3. The third is scriptural.

You have not put yourself in the places where God speaks if you have not exposed yourself to these three areas.

Order out of Chaos - Part 2 (the brokenness and true diversity of culture)

2009-11-05T21:48:00.001-08:00

2. We also learn about the brokenness of culture in Isaiah.

I think we first see it here in Isaiah by the way of contrast. We have a perfect culture here. Everything is working right (18 and on): no violence, no exploitation, all of the races are getting together and working together so there is no class, racial conflict, there is no sorrow... but we know that our culture is filled with that.

Why?

Not because cultural activity is wrong, but it is because of the way it is being done, the way it has been done throughout history. The reason why this cultural picture in Isaiah is perfect is because all of the collective cultures are bringing their riches to God and they are doing their work for the glory of God.

The alternative to this can be seen in Genesis 11, where the first city (at least the first the Bible speaks of) is being built - the Tower in the city of Babel. There was nothing wrong with the architecture, the economics, the art, or the physical sciences it would have taken to build it. A city was being built and all of these activities were good, but yet Genesis 11:4 says the reason this was done was so that they could make a name for themselves....

Obviously our work is important to human fulfillment - if God is a worker, and God’s spirit does what it does, and we are made in His image, then doing my job well is crucial to my fulfillment as a human being made in the image of God.

BUT if you get to the place where your work and your job is the only way that you know that you are important or that you have value - when that begins to happen you begin to see destructiveness in the culture. It is natural to say that a job is part of who you are. But when you get to the place where you look at your job and say NOW I know I am important - as you look at your status, your money, what you are doing - then it destroys everything else because you will walk over anything and everyone to get what you think makes you significant... Men and women do not back down lightly when they think their whole reason for getting out of the bed in the morning is compromised.

Maybe I am cynical but I don’t think people become doctors to primarily relieve suffering, but to bring their families up in the world. People become lawyers not because they have a passion for justice in the world, but to bring their families up in the world. We might start off with the noble idea, but if we are honest, I think we would see that the very dark places of our hearts pervert those good intentions quickly and easily.

I think it is worthy to note here an interesting story I have heard about soldiers on the allies side in WW2. It was surprising to hear how some of these people were happy for the very first times in their lives as soldiers. Why? Because, according to their own accounts, for the first time in their lives they found themselves not doing something for the pay, for social standing, but for the sake of working together to get something done that benefited everyone. In a small way, during this war, these soldiers experienced a bit of shalom. Instead of working just to make money, to get ahead, they began to work together for the flourishing of the human community. It was a major step away from making a name for themselves. They found themselves happy, and then helping...

Daniel Bell, writer of the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism has written that economic growth is fueled by thrift, honesty, and delayed gratification. Without getting into it too much here, I think the basic point has some validity here in that those who invest in the community and those who see that there are things more important then individual profit fuel profitableness. They are the ones not walking over everyone else. And they do this when profit is not ultimate or does not define who they are. When profit becomes an end in itself, and not used within the means God created it for, it creates our brokenness.

But if and when you get an identity, a sense of being a special creation of God and a sense of being loved, that is so deep, that is a part from your work; and if and when you get an allegiance that is above and beyond making a profit and finding societal status the way you do, your work will begin to renew your community. We cannot bring in utopia, but if you are able to change in these areas you will become part of cultural renewal. The way in which you manage people, the way in which you treat your own money...

here is an example of how i think this might work: why do we hold onto our money? Because we ‘need’ to live in certain places and we ‘need’ to have certain things, so we can feel a certain way about ourselves because we are not totally secure on the inside with who we are. We have to let people and societal status give us our place in the world. But when God becomes your God, rather then money or when God becomes your security, your identity, your validity, your beauty, then money just becomes money. And then you can give it away, and that brings about justice, that brings about the flourishing of the human community - the culture is broken at its heart and we can begin to be agents of renewal.

3. There is a true diversity of culture in the end. An intriguing thing about Revelation and Isaiah 60, is that national, racial, cultural distinctions are sustained in the renewed earth. “Every tongue, tribe and nation” in Revelation, are now “in the city of God”. There are different tongues, tribes, peoples, and nations here. And notice that every culture brings something different. In Isaiah 60 some cultures bring the herd, some bring the gold, some bring the incense.

Why? What does it mean?

This must mean at least two things:

(1) that God has put His common grace into EVERY single culture, so that every single culture has certain themes and certain strengths and contributions to make to the ENTIRE flourishing of the human race that cannot be replaced. We need them all. God DOES NOT want cultural homogeneity.

And yet, on the other hand, they must bring it all to the Lord. I think this is what this means, (2) every culture has a strength, some the individual is emphasized, some the family, some power, some wisdom, some tradition, some skepticism and questioning, but when these things become ultimate in a life, when they are made into an idols, made into gods, THEN they become destructive. God says that you must be converted in heart, and make Him the center of your life and THEN culture will work the way it is supposed to work where you will be making a contribution rather then basically hurting the human race by the idolization of your particular strength....

Someone might say after this, ‘So even though all of these cultures are good they still need to be converted? That is the trouble with you Christians, you are always trying to convert people, and you must not impose your culture on somebody else by trying to make them a Christian.’

Lemin Sanneh, an African professor at Yale, would like to challenge that. What you seem to be saying is that Christianity belongs to some cultures and not all.

Lemin wrote a book called ‘Whose Religion is Christianity?’ Although I have not read it (it is on my ever growing list of books I need to read) I have read excerpts where Sanneh is very tired of people saying to Christians that they ‘mustn't impose your culture on them, you mustn't try and convert Africans because you are trying to destroy their culture.’ In other words, Sanneh says, ‘you are saying that Christianity belongs to certain peoples and not others.’ HE is upset, HE is offended. In one excerpt of the book he says that every culture has a base line narrative. Paul in the Bible said that the Jews want power and the Greeks want wisdom. Every culture has them, even today, every culture has certain things that they are after. Sanneh says that the African culture knows that the world is filled with spiritual forces, especially dark forces. And so they have asked, as a culture, how are we going to address that? They looked at their tribal religions and although they believed in these forces, they had no answer on how to overcome them. And they looked at the modern secularism that was coming and saw that it laughed at their Africaness because it said that they couldn’t believe in miracles, they can’t believe in demons. He mentioned that that is “cultural totalitarianism”. And then they looked at Christianity, and this is what Sanneh has said has been happening, “Christianity answered the great cultural challenge of our hearts. People sensed in their hearts that [Jesus] did not mock their respect for the sacred, and he did not mock their clamor for an invincible savior, and so they beat their sacred drums for him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies. And after they danced the stars were not little anymore, Christianity helped Africans become renewed Africans, not remade Europeans.”

There is a true cultural diversity here in Isaiah and Revelation. God does not want cultural homogeneity. But He also says, ‘Come to me! And then the great grace that I have given to every single culture, the plot line of the story I have given to every single culture will find its happy ending.'

praying isaiah 1:11-18

2009-11-04T16:14:00.007-08:00

“what makes you think i want all of your sacrifices?”

because I am the one doing something about all of this now. i am trying to fix my own mistakes. i am trying to help fix others. i am godlike in that i have sacrificed my time, my money, my goals... for you!

“i am sick of your burnt offerings”

but i burn them, i hurt when they burn. it is not like this is neglect. i have sacrificed a whole lot!

“when you come to worship me, who asked you to parade through my courts with all of your ceremony?”

i do it for you though! when i have the time to celebrate you, i celebrate you. when i have time to live for you, i do!

“stop bringing me your meaningless gifts; the incense of your offerings disgust me!”

how can you say they are meaningless?! its my life, i need them to mean something! why are you condemning ME!?

“I hate your... celebrations... they are a burden to me. I cannot stand them!”

but i love you in them. i love how i feel in them.

“When you lift up your hands in prayer i will not look.”

then i will beat my hands bloody until you listen

“Though you offer many prayers i will not listen”

jesus... why?

“for your hands are covered with the blood of innocent victims. Wash yourselves and be clean!”

where can i wash myself then?? in my church? in the lake? in my bed?
how?? what can i sacrifice? what can i do? should i pray ‘forgive me’ more? should i give more? should i work more? should i feel more? should i love more?

‘“Get your sins out of my sight. Give up your evil ways.”

... i feel i am god at times....

“Learn to do good. Seek justice. Help the oppressed. Defend the cause of the orphans. Fight for the rights of widows.”

i will prove that i can love you! poverty will end in my lifetime!! ... i am sorry. go on. how can i do this?

“Come now, let’s settle this!,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as wool.”

it is not about me and what i must do. it is about you and what you have done.... thank you, thank you, thank you....

Order out of Chaos - Part 1

2009-10-25T16:03:00.001-07:00

Isaiah 60 and Revelation 21, 22.

Cultural Renewal. Inside the Christian church the phrase might sound unspiritual. Outside of the church it could sound sinister, referring to a takeover of some sort. I think though it summarizes somethings that I have been learning from reading the Bible recently, listening to Tim Keller speak on the Bible, and reflecting on a discussion about related issues with my awesome wife.

Isaiah the prophet is prophesying in chapter 60. What is he prophesying about? It may at first seem to be of some future time where Israel and Judah have a great deal of economic and political power and wealth. It does indeed talk about the wealth of the nations coming and rulers who ‘used to oppress you’ now are coming to them. But if you look closer at this chapter you can see that it is not only referring to something that has never happened in history, but as far as we know could never happen in human history. Notice v 8-10. The view point of the prophecy is standing out and looking at the ocean. Across the whole horizon something white appears. Not clouds, birds, land, but the most massive of fleets. These names don’t mean a lot to us today, unless you do a little study, but Tarshish was the farthest thing West that anybody knew about, Midian and Sheba are lands to the South, Ephah was to the East, and Kedar was to the North. This is saying literally that all the wealth of the nations at this time is streaming into Jeruselem for the honor and glory of God. And not to make money! Over and over it says all of this is coming to proclaim the praise of the Lord (v. 6) and to the honor of the Lord your God. That has never happened and we cannot imagine it ever happening within human history. And then at the end of the passage (v. 18) it talks about a society where there is no violence, disorder, crime of any kind, no more war, no more sadness... and then (v. 19) this place does not even need the sun or moon anymore. I think at that point we can see that we are looking here at the renewed heavens and renewed earth in the future. At the end of Revelation John has a similar vision from God of the same time.

John and Isaiah (the whole Bible as a matter of fact) are unanimous on the future of the human race. What is heaven all about? What will we be spending the rest of eternity doing? Cultural activity. This society is filled with cultural activity here and I think we can at least see 4 things in the Isaiah chapter.

1. The goodness of culture, 2. The brokenness of culture, 3. The true diversity of culture, 4. And How culture can be redeemed

1. Let’s stand back and see what is being said here in Isaiah. Here we have the future state. There is commerce, architecture, science, art... in the future we have all of the cultural activities going on. Why? Because our future is a material future. The book of Revelation is very clear that at the end of time we don’t see God’s people as individuals leaving the material world and going off into spiritual bliss, a disembodied spiritual realm. Instead we see God coming down to cleanse and perfect THIS material world. Look at Jesus after the resurrection eating with his friends, where He was felt and spoken to. We are not going to be balls of light or points of conscienceness. We are going to hug and be hugged! We are LITERALLY going to eat, drink, and dance in the kingdom of God.

At the beginning of the Bible you have God with His hands in the soil making us. Also, keep this in mind here, Eastern religions have always said that the material world is an illusion, that it is not really important, and Western religions (the Greeks and Romans at least) thought the natural world was defiling and debasing. The spirit was good, the body was bad, and the dirt was worse. Unprecedented, compared to the worlds religions, we have God with His hands in the soil making us. And He makes us as gardeners! A gardener cultivates the land, which can also be said like this: a gardener cultures a piece of land. To cultivate or to do cultural activity is to arrange what you are working with in such a way as to draw out all of the enormous potentialities of it for the flourishing of human beings and the human community. For example, we need beauty - there are flowers. We need food - there is vegetation. A gardener is cultivating these things. This is cultural activity.

Mark Noll, a Christian historian, has a great list that is relevant to look at here: “Who formed the world of nature which provides the raw material of all of the physical sciences [which is a cultural activity by the way]? Who formed the universe of human interaction which is the raw material of politics, economics, sociology, and human history? Who is the source of all harmony and narrative patterns which is the raw material for art? Who is the source of the human mind which is the raw material for philosophy and psychology? And who moment by moment maintains the connection between our minds and the world beyond our minds? God did and God continues to do.”

The ‘land’ was and continues to be arranged so it brings forth ‘food’ which we need for the flourishing of human beings and human communities. Let’s continue the list: ‘What’s music? The raw material of sound is fashioned into music. What’s writing? What’s theater? It is taking the raw material of human experience and fashioning it into narrative and story.’ The human race cannot live without stories, beauty, art... these things give our life meaning... This is the same thing as gardening. We are taking the raw material of creation and drawing its potentialities out for the flourishing of human beings and especially for the human community. Even to the point of when someone combs another’s hair they are brining order out of chaos, same as the work of the Spirit in Genesis 1. We are unable to flourish unless someone cleans a house, maintains a car, sweeps the sidewalks - so called “menial work”...

When God, who originally started the world with His hands in the soil and who made the first human beings gardeners, when He became a human being He did not come the way a Greek god would have come, as a philosopher, or the way a Roman god would have come, as a General, but He came as a carpenter. The Biblical worldview has the HIGHEST possible view of the most “menial work” because everything from gardening to combing hair, to even investment banking is cultural activity. It is something that God is most concerned in doing. Starting in Genesis 1, the Spirit bringing order out of chaos, is concerned about creation, over and over again the Bible shows how the Spirit loves creation and cultivates creation...

What do I mean by creation? God existed, and then God decided to take the breath of life, which He alone had, and put it in some other being so there were other personal beings. And He gave them freedom. Knowing that by putting something that He had into these people, allowing them to see the light of day, and giving them free will, He knew that it was going to be incredibly costly. The investment was going to incredibly costly, infinitely so. And so why did He do it? Will it be worth it in the end - to have a whole universe filled with angels, humans, and who knows what else? All loving and praising! I definitely think so. God is actually the ultimate investment banker. Because what He did was He took His resources and risked them, and at infinite cost did something that actually expanded the beauty and glory of the universe.... By the way, when an investor sees a human need and sees a talent to meet that need and then risks their resources to create an enterprise that meets that human need and creates jobs and creates human flourishing - that is not just godly that is God-like...

The American church is continually perpetuating the deception that clergy and pastors are doing God’s work and others work solely to to give money to the church because they are doing God’s work and the people out in the ‘world’ are not. As capitalists they certainly have interest in doing so, but what Revelation and Isaiah are actually saying (as well as the rest of the Bible) is that the purpose of ‘saving souls’, all of the ‘spiritual’ work done in the church, is for the renewal of creation! When we get to the new Heavens and new Earth pastors will be out of a job. All of the souls will be saved, but we will still need musicians, architects, investment bankers... If the spirit of God is a preacher, proclaiming God’s word (John 16), He is also an artist (jeremiah 10:12), a gardener (Psalm 104:30). The spirit is saving souls, but ALSO committed to creation, committed to renewing creation, investing in creation, and drawing out its potentiality. And if the purpose of saving souls is to renew creation, then how dare we say that the church is doing God’s work and the rest are JUST there to give money to the church. How wrong is that?? There is no religion that gives you more reason to do cultural activity then Christianity. Do you know why? There are religions that say this material world isn’t real, others that say it is debasing, and the ‘secular’ that says that the world is eventually going to burn up, but the Bible says that cultural activity will go on forever. And that this is even what that Christianese word ‘redemption’ is about - to get back to the place where we really do the work that God gave us originally to do (cultural activity) - endlessly, unfrustratingly doing our art, doing our business, doing our music, doing our carpentry...

"Justice" in the Bible and a problem in translation if we read it with our American worldview

2009-10-17T09:46:00.006-07:00

The NIV Bible has a word count of 127 for the word "justice". The idea and theme is spoken about a lot more... Does the American church have the right idea when speaking about "justice"? What does the Bible mean when it speaks of ""justice"?

According to the Old Testament, God’s justice means to share food, shelter, and other basic resources with those who have fewer of them (Is 58:6-10.) Injustice happens when people are barred from fair wages and therefore from the same goods and opportunities afforded others. (Lev 19:13, Jer 22:13.)

In Proverbs 3:27-28 it says:
"Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. Do not say to your neighbor, Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give it--when you have it with you."

When you take your time, effort, money, skills - when it is in your power to fill the need of your neighbor, you are doing justice. This is the Biblical understanding of the word.

The Bible says to do good is to use what is in your "power" to do. The skills, time, money, and education that was GIVEN to you by God is this "power". Others have not been given the same "power" as you. You are commanded to give to them what is in their right to have. That is how you do "good". The Christian is in a sense commanded to ask and act on the question: What do I have that enables others to flourish? If we fail we fail on doing justice.

It is worded this way in another translation: "Don't withhold good from them which is their right."

Modern Americans have an incredibly individualistic approach to everything, if we are successful then we think that are success is the product of our individual choices... but let's think this through to the end. In reality, who you are is mainly the product of your community, your family, etc. A number of factors that are outside of our control (If you disagree, the first retort that comes to my mind is to have you think about how far your hard work would take you if you were born on the mountains of Tibet or the streets of southeast Fresno or Anacostia in D.C.... The reality is that a number of things have already gone our way in order for any of our hard work to pay off).

When modern Americans think of justice, they almost exclusively think of it in terms of individual rights. The idea is the opposite of the Biblical understanding of the word. It is the idea of removing individuals from networks so that they can do whatever they want to do. It's actually unraveling people from each other - "you have a right to do whatever you want; you should not worry about family commitments, you should not worry about anyone else, you have to worry about you want to do".

The biblical understanding of justice is that we OWE one another what we have. If I have been given by God education, money, and skills, I then owe it to my community to spread it around. If I hold it in I am actually tearing the very fabric of my community. It is the right of those that do not have that I do this. That is what Proverbs is saying here.

An American might object, 'I worked for my money! I have worked for what I have got! What do you mean it is their right?! Let them work for it, let them do what they want to do! People choose to be poor!'

An American MIGHT have some sense in saying this, but the church does not. We need to stop acting like Americans and start acting like Christians because the reality of the situation is this: (here is one example of reality) millions of kids around the world are stuck in neighborhoods and schools that are absolutely incompetent. By the time that they are in, say, High School they are illiterate, they have no kinds of skills that could make them any decent money in our economy and basically their lives are in a lot of trouble... Why are they in this condition? The answer is argued about by liberals and conservatives, but no one ever blames it on the kid! The truth is that my children will have an infinite amount more of a chance to succeed then these. The world is FULL of these inequitable distributions of resources. That is a fact and it is not the kids' fault! Some may argue that it is the families' or others that it is systematic racism within the city, but it is never the kid's fault. They never have a chance to choose the life they have! The never had a chance to "earn" another life! And if I don't use my "power" to plow into my neighbors (which is of course not meant as a geographical neighbor as we see in the Good Samaritan story) that are without, which is their right according to Proverbs, and say they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps... then I will be faced with the sobering reality that I did not pull myself up by my bootstraps. I worked very hard with what I HAD! I got so much and they got so very little. Americans are the last people in the world to see this... and Christians should be the first to see this. Because Christ came down and invested and plowed Himself into us. If we really believe that we are sinners saved by grace, then we will see how God knew that we could not pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. As Christians we have to identify with the poor because Jesus came down to identify Himself with us while we were poor, while we were lacking. If we don't see this, that all we have is an incredible gift and nothing of it was earned, then we don't have a saving faith (1 John 3:16-17; James 1-2), and we can just go about as all Americans do, fighting for our individual causes of "justice".

A failure in all of this is not just a lack of compassion, not just stinginess, it is a lack of justice. And the Lord of justice will judge with justice in the end...
A parable from Jesus (Matthew 18:23-34) describing the kingdom of God ends with - "Then his master summoned him and said to him, You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you? And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt."

We are called to follow the lead of the one only who was fully just, the one who invested everything in us through His death, that gained Him nothing, except for the opportunity to bring us back to Himself...

reading - day 3

2009-10-08T15:24:00.002-07:00

DISCLAIMER - Today is the third of "ten days" where some people, including myself, are going to try and read through the whole Bible where we hit the 'highlights' in a sense. The third "day" (I guess I should say time period) is scheduled below. This is just a post so we can have a discussion group on the comments section. Everyone feel free to join the discussion at ANYTIME and about ANYTHING (small or big) in the reading.

1 Kings 3, 6-12
1 Kings 17-19, 21
2 Kings 1-2, 6-7, 11-12
2 Kings 17-23
1 Chronicles 15-17, 21-22, 28-29
2 Chronicles 5-10, 14-16
2 Chronicles 24-26, 29-35

Yikes! I know almost nothing about these 4 books... It is funny, I am at the same time both afraid of this reading session to be a trip through Yawnsville and wondering if a thought like that makes any sense if this book indeed contains the very word of God... hhmmmmm.......... Here is to not judging a book by its cover and actually trusting God that He knows what He is doing.....

Reading - Day 2

2009-10-06T05:01:00.003-07:00

DISCLAIMER - Today is the second of "ten days" where some people, including myself, are going to try and read through the whole Bible where we hit the 'highlights' in a sense. The second day is scheduled below. This is just a post so we can have a discussion group on the comments section. Everyone feel free to join the discussion at ANYTIME.

Let's stretch this second day into 2. That was a lot of reading last night and it made a bit tired. This can also be so anyone at anytime can join the "discussion". I will try to put out more questions this time around than points.

Day 2 - Tuesday, October 6 and Wednesday October 7
Joshua 1-6, 23-24
Judges 1-4, 13-16
Ruth 1-4
1 Samuel 7-10, 12
1 Samuel 15-20, 28, 31
2 Samuel 5-8, 11-13, 15, 18

The walls of Jericho go tumblin down by the sound of the Israeli band... I know Ruth's story... I know there was a judge named Gideon and there was a lady judge... I know Samuel was important.... but other than that there is not much else I know before hand about this section in the Bible. This shall be very interesting.

reading

2009-10-05T11:37:00.005-07:00

DISCLAIMER - Today is the first of ten days where some people, including myself, are going to try and read through the whole Bible where we hit the 'highlights' in a sense. The first five days are scheduled below. This is just a post so we can have a discussion group on the comments section.

To begin with, here is a general invitation to anyone who would like to join us at anytime, describing what we are trying to do.
Hi everybody. I have wanted to do this for quite sometime and thought today was a better day then ever to start. I have never read the Bible all of the way before, but am dieing to read it through to understand the arching story of the Bible better. To begin the journey, I am planning to go through the Bible first by hitting the 'highlights' I suppose, in 10 days. The plan is below. This I feel can give me at least a very general sense of the story line. I would be more inclined to actually do this if people actually did it with me. The more the better. I hope this can jump start a fire to burn in us for what's in that book. The very act in itself of course will not do it, but stepping out is the first thing, at times, to do before the Spirit takes a hold of you. 10 days to wet our appetites for a life time in the scriptures and a life desiring God... only by His help. only at the point in which He decides... Feel free to join the discussion that will start today in the comments section.

I think this section in John is relevant as we start in Genesis today:
John 5:39-47 - ³⁹ “You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! ⁴⁰ Yet you refuse to come to me to receive this life. ⁴¹ “Your approval means nothing to me, ⁴² because I know you don’t have God’s love within you. ⁴³ For I have come to you in my Father’s name, and you have rejected me. Yet if others come in their own name, you gladly welcome them. ⁴⁴ No wonder you can’t believe! For you gladly honor each other, but you don’t care about the honor that comes from the one who alone is God.^e]">[e] ⁴⁵ “Yet it isn’t I who will accuse you before the Father. Moses will accuse you! Yes, Moses, in whom you put your hopes. ⁴⁶ If you really believed Moses, you would believe me, because he wrote about me. ⁴⁷ But since you don’t believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?”

and this one in James because reading the Bible does not allow us to just check off our God box for the week, as we read I pray that God will inflame us with what he has in store for us in our actual lives...
James 2:21-24
²¹ Don’t you remember that our ancestor Abraham was shown to be right with God by his actions when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? ²² You see, his faith and his actions worked together. His actions made his faith complete. ²³ And so it happened just as the Scriptures say: “Abraham believed God, and God counted him as righteous because of his faith.”^g]">[g] He was even called the friend of God.^h]">[h] ²⁴ So you see, we are shown to be right with God by what we do, not by faith alone.

THE SCHEDULE
Day 1 - Today, October 5
Genesis 1-3, 12, 15, 22
Exodus 1-5
Exodus 12-14, 20
Leviticus 1, 10, 16, 25
Numbers 3-4, 6, 11-14
Deuteronomy 5-8, 28-31, 34

Day 2 - Tuesday, October 6
Joshua 1-6, 23-24
Judges 1-4, 13-16
Ruth 1-4
1 Samuel 7-10, 12
1 Samuel 15-20, 28, 31
2 Samuel 5-8, 11-13, 15, 18

Day 3 - Wednesday, October 7
1 Kings 3, 6-12
1 Kings 17-19, 21
2 Kings 1-2, 6-7, 11-122
Kings 17-23
1 Chronicles 15-17, 21-22, 28-29
2 Chronicles 5-10, 14-16
2 Chronicles 24-26, 29-35

Day 4 - Thursday, October 8
Ezra 3, 6-7
Nehemiah 1-2, 4, 6
Esther 1-4
Job 1-3, 38-41
Psalms 1, 8, 19, 23
Psalms 51, 100, 103, 139

Day 5 - Friday, October 9
Proverbs 1-3
Ecclesiastes 1-5, 12 and Songs 1-2
Isaiah 1-2, 6, 40, 52-55
Jeremiah 1-5 and Lamentations 3
Ezekiel 1-3, 18, 33

Genesis 1

2009-09-11T19:28:00.005-07:00

20, 21 - Then God said, “Let the waters swarm with fish and other life. Let the skies be filled with birds of every kind.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water, and every sort of bird—each producing offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good.

click on one of the pictures if you have not yet

Coffee - exhaling after being inspired by Anne Lamott

2009-09-01T14:52:00.006-07:00

Let me tell you about my day... Let's do it thematically - 1. Coffee, 2. Letting things go, 3. Sympathizing with addicts because I am one, 4. Feeling like I need to go on a run

1. Good coffee tastes like hot earth. Medium temperature coffee is just that - medium, average. It's like: 'Ok... I guess I just drank some coffee, but I might as well have been drinking air.' Medium temperature coffee makes the coffee not important, taken for granted. Hot coffee makes you say something like, 'I have something here... it's hot and significant!'

The taste of earth, I mean coffee, makes me feel like I am walking the streets of Toronto like I did one day last fall with Dani, like I am waiting to see Arcade Fire in Berkeley, like I am traveling across country...

My coffee is already cooling now. It's hard to appreciate things that are average. Instead of having something else say - "Stop and take notice!!", you are then responsible for your own awareness, your own savoring... See! Even after I just wrote that I downed the rest of my coffee.

2. I am not working today and I did not work yesterday. This is significant because this has not happened for sometime. Yesterday and today I have actually kept myself quite busy with many things, too much left-over anxiety from my now old Preschool teaching job. The day was finally too unaverage though for me not to take notice of it. My body feels good, my head in particular after having an earlier headache. It feels as good as a head does after a brain freeze. The juxtaposing normality of it feels so sweet. Like salt bringing out flavor.

3. I am just beginning to fight off the lingering effects of my Preschool/Bright Horizons teaching anxiety. It had started to feel so normal, like an old comfortable, reliable shoe, but yet even thinking about the job now makes my eyes glaze over. It had been hard to even drink the air that was in front of you.

Not too far away from me are nine kids sitting, standing as though they were taking up space at a high school between classes. They are talking but their only distinguishable words from my distance are: 'sucks', *uck', and 'dipsh*t'. That is honestly all I am hearing right now! 3/9 are smoking. A skater kid comes by. Now its 4/10. 1/10 looks like he is in 5th grade and 5/10 look like they could be aged 14 or 32...

I wonder if cigarettes taste like earth. I wonder if a good cigarette can be savored if it is significant enough. I am thinking certain words of theirs are being decibally emphasized because those are most significant... As I savor coffee I am more inclined to savor life. Cigarettes are at least 10 dollars (I don't know how much they really cost) of significance, and that is a lot for a high schooler the last time I checked. Maybe one of them is the working mom/dad and the cost is not that burdensome... some of them could honestly be in high school or not by a decade...

4. I think we innately look for significance in life. We seek it out. Some might be tired of looking and have momentarily stopped, but to the degree that you are alive, to that same degree we all want our coffee to be hot. In this we are made aware, in this we start breathing the oxygen instead of being forced to down it.

I want God to weigh on me right now because He is the most significant thing I know of, but I don't know how to make it happen because it usually does so unexpectedly - like in the shower, after running recently to where my lungs hurt, in the middle of tending to three kids crying for three different reasons at the Preschool, etc... But it does happen. God does show up and wakes me up. His significance floors me and for that moment, at least, I am undone. For that moment I am opened up to the world because I am not standing in the way, I am on the ground. I am made aware of what is already happening...

God is the hottest coffee I know and my truest parts are addicted to that significance. I often lose my train of thought though and get distracted. I often like less significant things because they feel more comfortable, but then more significant things wake me up to my senses, to more of what is going on... And since I can't control God to have Him weigh on me in a moment's notice, I have decided that I am going to try to have things I have read from the Bible recently weigh on me today because they have reminded me of God's significance and not my own, that significance/glory that moves you into His movement, His shalom (I talked about shalom last post so I won't get into it now)... And one more thing before I list weights I want to put on myself today, I think most things that make me forget about myself are tangible movements of God/His visible glory (I have talked about glory also in other posts...)

1. Jesus said once that you won't understand what He was saying until you actually did it
2. Isaiah 58:6b "remove the chains that bind people"
3. Duet. 7 - God loves His people just because He loves them
4. the end of Job, Job 40:2
5. Psalm 103

I don't have much that I have to for the rest of the day and I am still awake from the coffee to feel like I actually want to go for a run. I did recently run into God (no pun intended) on a run, so I am thinking that is a good place to start??... I am told though that God is everywhere and so then maybe the times when His significance bares down on us so that we are made to feel His glory are moments His of grace. Grace for our heads to be forced up and out of the pit we dig ourselves into in the hoe-hum, comfortable, easy lives we lead.

I want to be ready. I want to be ready for these moments of grace. I want to always have my cup ready. And I think I know its God when He does not let me keep my cup full, but helps me pour it out on others, knocking it out of my hand if He must, because coffee becomes cold if you keep it too long, if you just hold on to it...

I think the Bible is kind of like a coffee sleeve. It keeps me holding onto the significance until it is time to be poured out. I am sure God's significance is everywhere, but only in the Bible have I been able to find a way to make sense of all of that significance and find a way to pour it out to where it's not just about me and my cries of significance as I spill the hot coffee all over me (if I don't have the coffee sleeve) saying, "WOW, OW! That was significantly hot!!" I am sure many others may believe it was hot for me, but nothing felt hot to them. I am sure the temperature was very average without feeling the coffee and the sounds somewhat annoying... I don't know why, but I have found God's love to cry out to be communal, the love loses significance if it is just for me or about me... maybe it is because of God's trinitarian nature...

Lord, your significance burns me. I am scared of myself comfortably numb and neutral to life, the way I often find myself in, because in that I don't really feel love for others, I am mainly thinking of myself, not aware of what is around me. But when your significance burns me, I burn for others... Maybe this awareness is a moment of your grace. Maybe you are weighing down on me right now... All I know is that I feel like I am burning for other people right now, and I don't know how to not keep it just to myself. Break me, burn me, and leave a mark so I cannot help but display your significance... I am sure you would never leave me or anyone to keep your significance to their selves and I am sure I am just saying this for my own benefit... (maybe that is the essence of prayer, an exercise in becoming aware of you Lord, maybe prayer is moments of grace from you... thank you, thank you, thank you...)... ok... I think I am going to go running now.

Shalom, Justice, and Grace

2009-08-23T20:09:00.005-07:00

Isaiah 58:1-14

In verse 2 God begins to describe a particular group of people “seeking” out God. In this it is talking about those worshiping God, going to Temple, the sacrificial system, prayer... These are people that are very diligent in seeking out God, not just a burst and then its over. These are people that sustain. “They seem eager to know my ways.” contrasts with verse 1 and so the translation tries to come to terms with it. In Hebrew, though, it actually says that they are passionate to know my laws. Verse 3 tells us, in spite of the fact that they are religiously diligent, that God is not answering their prayers. Bad things are happening to these people. ‘God, why aren’t you helping?’ they say...

God’s response is startling: ‘Let me tell you what a fast is. Let me tell you what worship is. Let me tell what it really means to seek me. Is it not to loosen the chains of injustice, to untie the cords of the yoke and set the oppressed free, to share your food with the hungry, to provide the poor wonder with shelter, to see the naked and clothe him.’

Matthew 25 draws greatly from Isaiah 58, but also from many other places in the Old Testament. Proverbs 14:31, 19:17... According to Matthew 25, this is what God will say to the people who are lost on the last day: “Depart from me you who are cursed into everlasting fire for I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was naked and you did not clothe me, I was a stranger and you did not give me shelter, I was sick and imprisoned and you did not look after me. ‘Lord when did we see you in these conditions?’ they will say. And the Lord will say what ever you did not do for the least of these you did not do for me.’

Summary: God says, ‘If you do not love the poor, the hungry, then no matter what you say you don’t love me. You do not have a relationship with me. It is a formal relationship full of compliance and ordinances, but you really don’t have a relationship with me. The way you treat the poor tells me the reality of how you regard me. Or a deep social conscience and a life poured out in deeds of service to others, especially the poor, is the inevitable sign of real faith and a real connection with God. This is a real index of the condition of your heart. In other words, justice is the grand symptom of real faith, of a real relationship with God. It will be there, maybe slowly, but it will develop. If it never develops in your life then you don’t have the relationship you think you have.

This is at the heart of Biblical faith.

In Isaiah 1:17 - Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow... If you don’t do this you don’t have me He it in a sense says. ‘You may think you do, but you don’t’ God says in a sense.

The big question we need to ask and eventually answer in some way is why would God say that a deep concern for justice for the poor goes together with a love relationship with Him? that it is the inevitable sign of a love relationship with Him?

Let’s talk about this word ‘justice’ that we see in our Old Testament, that we see in Isaiah 1, 58. We don’t have quite the same definition for justice orignally intended as we do in our western culture. What does the Bible mean by justice? I think we kind see a definition if we look at Isaiah 58 a bit more.

Behind the biblical idea of justice is the rich concept of shalom. Verse 7 - provide the poor wonderer with shelter... What is a poor wonderer? It is more sharply defined as a stranger. According to the Hebrew commentators, a poor wonderer was basically an alien from another country who came into your country with virtually nothing. A refugee basically... Later in the verse it says do not turn away form your own flesh and blood, your own blood relatives, your family. But how can God apply this to a refugee of another race?

In ancient times, family was everything. You never conceived of your individual progress and happiness apart from your family. If your family wasn’t moving ahead in the world then you couldn’t. It was impossible. That was good in a way, but in another way it led to tribalism and racism because blood was everything in this world. And here God is saying that another from a different race who is hungry and poor in your neighborhood, that person is as much your flesh and blood as if you were related to them by blood. God says, ‘I hold you responsible for them’. There is a solidarity between you two that your idolatrous cultural attachment to race and blood has blinded you to, but I am not blind to it.

Shalom is at the very core of the Old Testament, of the whole Bible in fact. Shalom means peace. But it means something much more. God created the world to be a fabric woven together, interdependent. The Bible says that all of the entities of the world were meant to be in a beautiful, harmonious, interdependent, knitted webbed relationship to each other similar to fabric threads stitched and woven together in hundreds and thousands of ways.

3 examples to more clearly define shalom: (1) the human body. When all of the parts of your body are working harmoniously together you experience health. But if you have cancer, it means that part of your body was not working with other parts of your body and you experience the unraveling of physical shalom. Death is the total unraveling of physical shalom. (2) your inner psyche. If your conscience, reason, and feelings are all working together you experience inner shalom. But if your feelings really want something that your conscience says is wrong you experience guilt, the unraveling of psychological shalom. Anger, fear, meaninglessness, emptiness are other expressions... (3) When people have money and resources and they invest it into the human community, into the parks, schools, and community places, the strong social fabric created is social shalom. But when those that have ignore those that have less or none and hold onto everything then the social fabric or shalom unravels.

In It’s A Wonderful Life - George Bailey, head of a family who has been pushing, sharing, and investing their resources into their town for many years meets an angel named Clarence. Clarence shows George what his town would be like if it were without him. Bedford Falls becomes Potterville. When George is taken out, the rich people of that town hold on to their money and the result is the social fabric falling apart.

A definition of shalom as used in the Bible - the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in equity, fulfillment, and delight

We translate shalom in the Bible as peace. It means a lot more then that. Universal flourishing, wholeness and delight, a rich state of affairs where natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts are faithfully employed all under the arc of God’s love. In other words, shalom is the way things ought to be.

This is different then Western culture’s idea of justice. With justice you think of individual rights. Justice as freeing an individual from the constrictions of the group. Freeing individuals to do what they want no matter what the group says. Biblical justice is different. It brings people to see that your stuff is not just yours.

I read in a commentary of Proverbs that whenever your read righteous and wicked here is what you should think if you want to read how it was intended to be read: the righteous people are those who disadvantage themselves for the community and the wicked people are those who see their resources as belonging to just them. Your reading of the Bible dramatically changes when you put that definition in place of our stagnate, just scratching the surface English words of righteousness and wickedness.

According to the Bible, to do justice means that you go to the places that the fabric is breaking down, where the weaker members of the society are falling through, where the interdependence is not happening. Look at the place where it says share your food with the hungry (in Isaiah 58). Hebrew commentators point out that this more sharply means ‘to serve and wait on the hungry’. This is an example of doing justice according to verse 6. If you don’t share your food with others it is not just stinginess, it is unjust. And this is NOT just saying to give money so that somebody else can serve the food. This says literally to get involved. In other words, to do justice means that you take all of the threads of your life (your emotions, your body, your time, your stuff, your money) and interweave it with people through thousands of involvements. Over, under, around, through.... shalom...

In many cities around the world, you have children growing up in which the combination of their families and school put together creates illiteracy. And when you get to High School age in this state this kids are ruined. It is nearly impossible for social and economic flourishing at that point. They are locked into poverty for the rest of their lives. Why is this happening to possibly millions of children around the world? There is a liberal analysis and a conservative economic, political analysis. The liberal would say that is happening because of unjust social structures. The conservative would say that it is happening because of the breakdown of the family. But nobody says it is the kid’s fault. Nobody is saying that the 7 year old should move themselves to another school district, should make sure that their parents read to them at home. It is not their fault. But the simple fact is that my child will have a potentially insurmountable greater percentage of chance of social and economic flourishing (and happiness in general) then those kids in those neighborhoods. This is proof of the enormous inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities in this world. This is just one example of how the shalom of this world has been broken, of the injustice of this world... If I do not share the advantages that this unjust world has shared with me with them then that in itself is unjust.

Isaiah 58 also talks about injustice as a yoke. A yoke is something you put on an animal. This is God talking about unjust situations like the previous situation of kids growing up illiterate. It is a yoke. They are being ground down by this social structure like an animal... Notice also that it says don’t just loosen the yoke, but break the yoke. It does not just say get those kids out of those schools, it says change those schools. Change those neighborhoods. It is not enough to just do individual charity. You have to handle social structures. That is what the Bible says...

Are you feeling guilty yet?

Guilt blows over though. You get use to it. It does not last. As a motivation it does not last. And it will never make anyone do justice as the Bible talks about justice. Guilt will not be enough....

So then what will be enough? What will make a person really do justice?

To answer that question let’s first answer this question - Why would Jesus say (in Matthew 25 and many other places): if you really have a love relationship with me you will care for the poor?

Let us be very careful here. When you look at the three passages that I have written about Isaiah 58, 1, and Matthew 25, you may see it as just another addition to the to do list to get God to answer your prayers, to have Him give you the life you want, to have Him bless you, to have Him take you to Heaven... If that is what you think (and this is what I have ALWAYS thought) then you have missed the whole point of these passages. This is a critique of that kind of religion. What is wrong with the people from Isaiah 58:2-3 is that they are trying to put this pressure on God. They are saying that, ‘We have lived a very good life and now you owe us.’

If you say ‘now I am going to be biblically orthodox, religious, personally moral, I am going to worship and pray, and now I am going to give my money to the poor then God will bless me and take me to Heaven...’ If you do this you have not only done zero to change the fundamental self-absorption of your heart (the self-centered default mode of the human heart which is making this world the unjust mess that it is) then you have made it worse! Now you have hidden it under the guise of religion! Think about it, if you live a moral life, if you read the Bible and pray, you are not doing it for God’s sake, the poor’s sake or even for goodness sake, you are doing it for you. You are being good out of self-absorption. That does not help a thing.

Most of the way we get people to be good is through this way, through self-centeredness. We increase their self-centeredness to make them honest. We use fear and pride. Fear based ways: ‘Be honest and you won’t get in trouble.’ ‘Be good or God will get you.’ Pride based ways: ‘You don’t want to be like those awful people who tell lies do you? You are better then that!’ But why is it that people lie? Because of fear and pride. When you use fear and pride in this way you are nurturing evil in another’s life. You have not changed the heart, you have only restrained it. That will never produce anyone who does justice the way the Bible pleads for it, says how it ought to be - full of radical sacrifice, radical giving, plunging oneself into thousands of involvements into ones community.

What will change soneone then to do justice??? Beauty

The very end of the Isaiah 58 passage speaks of beauty saying when the Sabbath day (a worship ordinance) is done out of delight, not because you have, but as an end in itself, and when your joy is in the Lord...

Why do I like to sit by the lake, listen to music, watch a great movie... Because it is beautiful, because it is satisfying in itself. It is a delight in itself. It is not a means to an end, it is an end...

How can we get to the place where we obey God and love the poor and do good for God’s sake, the poor’s sake and not for our sake? You have to have an experience of beauty.

Overwhelming beauty can get us out of ourself and can distribute our attention to those around us. Beauty can stop us, transfix us, and take us away from our preoccupation with ourself and prompt its distribution to others.

When Jesus says when you love the poor you love me and when you step all over the poor you step on me - it is saying that God identifies with the poor. What does that mean? Is it just empathy, feelings, and sympathy? Only Christianity tells you how far God really went to identify with the poor. When God came to earth He was born in a feeding stall. He grew up as the poorest of the poor (his parents sacrifice during his circumcision was only 2 pigeons which delineated that they were the poorest of the poor). He was essentially homeless at least during the last three years of His life. He ate His last meal in a borrowed room. He died and was buried in a borrowed tomb... God became poor...

God also became oppressed. Centering solely on His final night you can see a blinding example of injustice.

Author JoAnne Terrell - grew up quite bitter, living a life filled with injustice being a black American woman. She wrote about suddenly realizing that Jesus Christ did not just suffer for us, He suffered with us. Jesus Christ had been lynched, lynched by a corrupt justice system. Jesus knew what it was like to be under the lash.

“I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross... In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” - John Stott

Only Christianity says that God was not. Only Christianity says that on the last day, if we say, ‘When did we see you hungry, thirsty, a prisoner?’ Jesus will say, ‘They cast lots for my clothes, while I was naked. I cried out ‘I thirst!’ I was imprisoned, I was beaten, I was flogged.’ God literally became one of the oppressed. He literally went under the yoke. Why? Jesus said, I who deserved justice got condemnation so that you who have torn the shalom of this world to bits, who deserve condemnation get pardon and justice.

Jesus plunged Himself into our lives. He took all of the threads of His glory, at infinite cost to Himself, and threaded Himself into our lives and saved us.... and that is the beauty that will get you out of yourself.

When you see what He did for you that gets rid of your fear - He died for you so what is there to fear... It gets rid of your pride - He had to die for you so what makes you think you are anything but a sinner. And when the fear and the pride go away and all you see is the beauty of what He has done... now you can love Him just because He is beautiful. Because of all He has given me. You can say that you don’t have to do anything to get anything. You just want Him. And in this you can love the poor for the poor’s sake and you can love God for God’s sake. That is the beauty that can change your heart and not just restrain it. That is the beauty that will get you out of yourself forever.

And through this most profound experience of grace, I personally have found myself finally seeing justice for the first time.

John Stott on sin

2009-07-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

"Sin is humanity substituting itself for God."

-- John Stott, "The Cross of Christ"

John Stott on the cross and pain

2009-07-19T07:10:00.001-07:00

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross... In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?"

-- John Stott, "The Cross of Christ"

Cruciformity - How does the cross change and shape our lives? How does it connect us with God? - PART 3

2009-06-26T22:44:00.012-07:00

* A lot of this post as well as the other 2 in this series was taken from and built around some INCREDIBLE talks by Tim Keller. They are here.

Ephesians 2:11-22

How does the cross connect to each other?

Jesus brings us together, unity where there was fragmentation, and the key to that, seen here in Ephesians, is the cross. We are told repeatedly that the cross is the key to making new relationships in the body of Christ.

Verse 11 - Starts with Therefore. Chapter 1 and the first verses of chapter 2 in Ephesians are all about the power of God... and then verse 11 says THEREFORE the church. Power of God, therefore, the church...

Tim Keller, a pastor in New York City, has pointed to statistics and talked about his own experience, in the last 10 - 15 years, basically saying that: Americans have shown at least 2 trends, they are more interested in spirituality, divine connection, and faith, and they are less and less interested in doing that through an institution (especially the church). When you talk about Christ people are more interested and when you talk about the church people are less interested then ever. The majority believe that you can believe and be a really strong Christian without going to church. And that is true, you do not have to be a member of a church to be saved. But this passage is saying that if you want the surpassing power of God to be working in your life, without deeply, deeply involved with the church, it will never happen. The power of God will not be evident in your life without being deeply grafted and deeply involved in the life of a real community of people who also believe in Christ. (just remember, this community does not have to take place in a really old building with traditional western "church" characteristics)

Can we hear this? Bad experiences within a church scar us, but we must fight to not let that keep us apart from God. Keep searching, find another one, God will be faithful, because it is not an option (at least that is what Ephesians is saying). Why? Well the man-centered option has already been stated, ‘if you want the power of God to be in your life...’ But there is a very God-centered to it also: Why is the church a necessity? The hint, I think, comes in the triune character of God you see in this passage.   

Verse 17: through Him, access to the Father, by one Spirit

Verse 22: In Him, God, Spirit

Paul is talking about the church, the church, and then he brings up the church of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Christianity is absolutely unique among the religions of the world in this regard: some religions believe that there is an impersonal God, others one God, others many Gods... but only Christianity teaches that there is an infinite God in a community of three persons. One God who Himself is a community of love and relationship. From all eternity God has been a community and a friendship.

I have already wrote about St Augustine’s take on the Trinity, but here it is one more time very quickly: Do you believe that love, friendship, and community is at the very essence of reality? Only if you believe in the triune God can you believe that. Only then can love, friendship, and community, harmony, diversity, and unity, be at the very essence of reality. Otherwise love would have come in later and would be peripheral... How could you know a God like this individualistically? How could you know a God like that while only showing up amongst a community of believers every so often? The very essence of God is community and friendship and the only possible way of knowing a God like that would be through community. If you were truly to get to know a God like that it would inevitably draw you into deep oneness and community with other people. It cannot just be me and God. It has to be us and God.

When the disciples asked, ‘How do we relate to God? Teach us to pray.’ Jesus taught, “OUR Father, who art in Heaven...” You cannot relate to a God who is a community without praying “Our Father...” There is no alternative to knowing God... it MUST be done in a community of others.

How involved does a person need to be within a community of believers to know this God?

Verse 19 to the end, Paul uses three series of images, metaphors that are increasingly intense: (1) fellow citizens with God’s people - When you become a Christian you become a part of a new humanity, a new nation. When you become a Christian, that means you are a Christian first, and you are from New York or California second, you are white or black second, you are Chinese or Latin American second, you are rich or poor second, you are Republican or Democrat second, Conservative or Liberal second... All of those divisions that are decisive outside of the church, inside of the church they are relatively minor, because the main thing between people within is belief and hope in Christ. (2) members of God’s household - A King relates and lives among His citizens, but a Father lives within the same house. The image of the family speaks of a more intimate bond. It is a more intense metaphor for oneness. (3) in Him, a Holy Temple, built together, a dwelling for God who is a Spirit - We are building blocks built and cemented together in which God’s Spirit dwells. This is the most intense metaphor. It speaks of the Spirit inhabiting the Temple like blood inhabits a body.

In all of these metaphors, intimacy with each other is the way to intimacy with God. Can we square these images with going to church every Sunday, taking notes, and THEN JUST going home? Is being there every Sunday good enough? What if you also go to Sunday School... every single week? Nothing is wrong with this routine in itself, it just does not align with the kinds of images that Paul presents here. You have not gotten deeply enough involved with a church or a community of believers until you have gone beyond just attending.

Here are, I think, two helpful tests that can gauge whether you are involved within the church enough: (1) You have to go to the point of personal accountability and (2) corporate spirituality.

There is accountability within a family that is not there among any other sort of relationship. I am not able to not come home to Dani one night. I am going to call her when I land in San Diego (I am currently on a plane flying across the country right now) to tell her I made it safe. I am going to all my mom and tell here I made it safe.... Only when you find that you are NO longer a person who is able to make independent decisions are you involved enough in your church. In Hebrews 3:13 it says, “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called "today," that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”. How many people in your church or community of believers know your most intimate sins so well because you have told them or that they have spent so much time with you that they can see them? And who have you given the permission to talk to you about those sins? Who have you in a sense given a hunting license to come after you? And who have you made yourself available enough to relationally that they can talk to you about them constantly? Do you have a number of people in your church like that that are talking to you and you are talking to them? Are you personally accountable to your community? One of the problems we have in our culture is that we are not willing to get to this point of accountability, get to this point of intimacy. We do not want our daily decisions, our daily independence to be impeded upon, to be taken away from us.

Until you are able to get to this point of accountability will you actually be in a ‘family’, be a ‘temple’... If anyone moves under you as building blocks you fall. And the blocks over you are depending on you will fall. The metaphor of the wall speaks of incredible accountability... Maybe people will miss you if you stop going once a week to a church service and Sunday School class, but it honestly does not come close to the images that Paul uses for the church. The core structure would still remain in tact.

I think it is pretty neat that it is saying in Ephesians 2:22, "In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit." The Spirit does not indwell the individual building block. It only indwells the building blocks as they are built together. It is together we are inhabited by the Spirit. It is only together... When I say corporate spirituality I mean that we are talking to people about God. We are praying with people. We are letting people see our relationship with God. And most importantly I think, we are letting people see our heart toward God... We all have a problem with this. I am speaking of situations that are too intimate for us. We don’t want to pour our hearts out in front of each other, we don’t want others to see how much we are learning everyday, and what are prayer life is like... And past bad experiences of living within this call feel forced and void of love because we were never able to really show a deep part of our self to another. We lied half-lies to make ourselves look as good as we could to each other. We were too worried about secrets that nobody else knows about getting out, we were worried about our daily independent life and decisions being judged. All we really worried about in the end was getting a pat on the back for a spiritual life we portrayed that we had, but in reality only wished we had...

In the Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis, C.S. talks about a group of friends he bonded very close with (a community of believers he poured himself into). He talks of his two great friends Ronald (J.R.R. Tolkien) and Charles (Charles Williams, also a significant writer like the other two). Tragedy struck with the death of Charles. And when he died, C.S. said, ‘As awful as that is, at least, in some sense, I will have more of Ronald.’ Because now there was no ‘rival’, there was no ‘other best friend’ there was just C.S. But to his shock he found out that he did not have more of Ronald, but he had less of his friend because he had lost a part of Ronald that only Charles could bring out. And when he realized that, he realized that if it is true, that no one human being can bring out all of another human being, that it takes a community, a whole circle of friends to know an individual, he then thought, how much more would that be true of Jesus Christ???

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all of his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically [Charles'] joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him "to myself" now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald... In this, Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the great multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in their own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all of the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah’s vision are crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ to one another (Isaiah 6:3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have.” -- C.S. Lewis, Four Loves, Pages 61 and 62

The only way to know God intimately is know a lot of other Christians intimately. Because every single Christian is going to see a part of God that you won’t see. And if you are trying to know God alone you are not going to know much about Him. And the more Christians you know intimately, and the more you are deeply involved with, and the more Christians you open your heart up to: the more of who God is you will see... And if you want to know Jesus in a way you never knew Him before, get to know a mature Christian from a different race or class very well... And only as you are experiencing God, praying, and worshiping God with a diversity of intimate friends, will you ever be able to know this God who Himself is the essence of unity and diversity - the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What causes this dynamic in the church? the cross

Looking back at the passage in Ephesians, it is saying that “the Law” divides us and keeps us from being the church the way we should be. Why does Paul pick the Law as being the divider? Martin Lloyd-Jones exposition of Ephesians helped me see this. The Law was the thing dividing Jews and Gentiles at that time. But isn’t the Law a good thing, is it not important, is not the pride and joy of the Jews? Yes... Paul is saying that the big problem dividing us from each other is NOT our gifts. It is our PRIDE in our gifts... If you are a part of a cultural or an ethnic group that is much warmer and friendly than another you will look down on that other group as cold-hearted. And if your group is well-educated... and if your group is on time... and more conservative... you will look down and label the group that is not. And feel a sense of hostility towards them for not being more like you...

And what is the remedy? the cross. It takes those who are near and those who are far and it “killing [their] hostility”. If you want to have the cross get rid of the pride that divides you from other people and keeps you from incredible relationships that God has designed you to have and thrive in, then you have to allow the cross to tell you that we are all the same because we are sinners. 'Those who were near and those who were far' is talking about the pagans being far and the Jews being near having the very Law of God and who were obeying the Commandments... and the cross shows that they ALL were sinners. The first thing the cross does is to show you that you are a sinner and that you are lost.

There are 2 ways to be your own savior and lord: (1) to be really bad and to break all of the rules and (2) to be very good, keeping all of the moral rules, reading your Bible everyday, doing everything you can to be good and then saying, ‘God! You now have to take me to Heaven.’ A person who thinks they have put God in their debt has become their own savior and Jesus is not their savior. And people who are living the way they want, breaking all of the rules, are being their own savior... Do you see that EVERYBODY is being their own savior? Everybody is lost! The cross comes in and says, ‘You are all sinners, you are all lost, you are all on your way to Hell. It does not matter how good you are or how bad you are, whether you are white or black, rich or poor, Asian or European, loving and relational or rational and empirical... We are all lost because we are all so proud of our gifts. And we are trying to be our own savior and our own lord. And it is destroying our world, and it is leading to war, conflict and strife, it is leading to broken marriages and poverty. Our self-centeredness is destroying the very fabric of our relationships and the only hope we all have is the cross...

Do you believe that? I don’t think that you can ever be a part of the church, that is spoken in the Bible, until you believe that, that we are all lost...

The other thing you have to see is that on the cross He “killed our hostility”. What’s that mean? There is only one thing that died on the cross: Jesus. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This does not mean that God made Him sinful. Jesus Christ did not become selfish, hostile, or proud. He was treated as sin. In other words, our hostility, our pride, our self-centeredness was slain on the cross, the very same things that are ruining our lives and ruining the lives of your neighbors and ruining the world... Jesus Christ was punished for that! When you see that your hostility was slain on the cross, that will slay the hostility in your heart. When you see that Jesus Christ took what He took in your place, that will humble you. Our pride be damned!! And if our pride was damned and judged on the cross, because it was so objectively, as you understand that it will become more and more subjectively destroyed n your heart. And that will lead to this incredible community relationship, an incredible oneness that you can know with other human beings, that can be as different to you as anyone, but who are now your brothers and sisters in Christ. And through them you can know this God who Himself is a community. All through the cross.

Cruciformity - How does the cross change and shape our lives? How does it connect us with God? - PART 2

2009-06-23T19:34:00.027-07:00

* A lot of this post as well as the other 2 in this series was taken from and built around some INCREDIBLE talks by Tim Keller. They are here.

The way the cross changes our lives has to keep on going because many of the changes when we are first converted are very implicit.

How does the cross continue to shape our lives?

Romans 6:1-7, 11-18

The passage talks about freedom from sin that the cross brings us. Freedom to change. The cross brings the power to change in our lives.

What does the cross free us from? for? and how does it do it?

1. The cross frees us from (spiritual) masters.

The language all through Romans 6 is all about slavery. Everyone is serving something. In this regard it is following the first commandment. 'I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me.' It is saying there is no other third way. There is a not a person serving nobody... This is highly disputed today, but I think that you really can’t understand a critical part of your self until you see this.

Everybody, religious or not, offers themselves to somebody. If you are not then you are not living. You have to live for something. There has to be something that keeps you going. Something that gets you out of bed... And some of these things are really, really good like living for your family, living for your children, for the love of your life, your career, a good cause... But Romans 6 is saying here that whatever you live for is actually a master. Nobody is really independent...

A master is whatever you live for most, the thing that you feel like that gives you meaning and happiness... and this is so regardless of your belief. You may say my master is my Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, my Catholicism, a Protestantism... but I am talking about THE functional master in your life, what you REALLY offer yourself to, what you REALLY live for.

In Romans 6 verse 13, a word in the Greek - "Epithumian" - shows up (it actual shows up quite a bit in the New Testament when change is spoken of). It is almost invisible in the NIV. (I wrote about this in another blog, but quickly here it is again) It is an 'epi' desire, like an 'epi' center. You cannot translate it as an evil desire. It is not necessarily talking about wanting bad things, it is talking more than not about wanting good things too much. This word can be more sharply translated as "over-desire". Good things as ultimate things - If you want something, and it is a good thing, and somebody gets in your way, you get mad, but if it is an ultimate thing you get bitter and furious. You won't be able to deal with this anger, you can't forgive this person. It is inordinate anger. Anger is fine. There really is nothing wrong with anger in these situations. But if this thing is a 'master' in your life, it will control with inordinate, outrageous anger and you won't be able to get over it.

It is like what can happen when a parent wants the best for their children. If it is an over-desire it will look like this: ‘If you turn out happy, and you love me, then I will feel like my life was not completely hopeless. But if you turn out to hate me and you get into drugs and jail, well then I will not even want to live’... There is a difference between letting something your child does get to you and making it a master. I am sure it is only natural for it to effect you if you love them. But there is a difference between making it a good thing and making it an ultimate thing.

When a good thing is threatened you are worried. Really worried! But when an ultimate thing is threatened, you are paralyzed with fear. When a good thing is denied, you are angry. When an ultimate thing is denied, you are uncontrollably angry. When a good thing is lost, you are in despair, but eventually you do come out of it. But when an ultimate thing is lost, you will want to kill yourself, and there is no way out... unless you are willing to admit that this was a spiritual master and it is your fault. When you break up with somebody it is awful! And it takes time to get over it. But if you never get over it then it is because male or female affection has been your master. Down deep you have made it clear that as long as you had it, you had worth... but what is that? That is a master of your life. And EVERYBODY has one. Regardless of what you say you believe or don't believe.

Looking at that first commandment one more time - "I am the Lord your God. Have no other gods before me." It is saying Him or them. You have a choice, but there is no third option. Martin Luther once wrote (paraphrased), 'You never are disobeying the other commandments unless you are first disobeying the first one... Why do you lie? Usually because of human approval, money, reputation... something else is more important to you than it ought to be.' He is talking about spiritual masters. These things that if you don't have will devastate you and you may not even want to face life because of the loss. If there is anything you say that about except God, even at a semi-unconcious level, you are a slave to something besides God. And that's simply why you and I have got the problems we have got.

2. The cross frees us for unconditional love.

Romans 6 verse 13 - the whole New Testament is pretty much about this... It pretty much says, 'Christian you have died with Christ. You have identified yourself with the cross. You have been united with Him in His death.' There is an objective and subjective meaning to that. Subjectively - Jesus died for me. I see the sacrifice that He did and I want to live in the light of that. Ok... but what kind of life comes out of that. How does being brought from ‘death to life through the cross’ change a person? Let’s dig deeper into our Christianese.

The cross is completely counter-intuitive to everything we have been taught in the world. When you look at the cross you see the way up is down, the way to influence is to serve, they way to wealth is to give away, the way to win is to lose... The most powerful being in the universe became weak, poor, died for His enemies, turns the other cheek, gives Himself, takes no political power... and by doing all of this He changes the course of human history. Now what are we supposed to do in the light of that?

Mark 10 - Jesus tells His disciples that He will betrayed and killed, but rose again. Immediately after that James and John ask to be seated at His right hand and left... They did not get it! Jesus says thats how the Gentiles do it. They get in power and forget about everyone else. "But not so with you... the one who will be greatest will be the servant of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and give His life as ransom for many." Jesus is saying that we need to turn our thinking upside down on almost everything. When Jesus says, "not so with you," He is not saying to hole up and not engage the culture. He is saying don't engage the culture like the “Gentiles” do - with money, power, privilege - but pour out your life for your city, impoverish yourself for your city, make it such that the people around you, although they say they don't believe Christianity, could not see 'how the city would survive without the sacrificial loving lives of those people. If those people left the city would collapse.' That's what the church should be! And when others see your good deeds, they will glorify God in heaven.

The cross proves that if you want influence, you go low, you don't go high. You serve. You do not try and take over... AND THEN they will ask you because they know you genuinely care about them. THEN they will want to learn from you and want to see... The only power that is going to make a difference, especially in our modern, cynical world, is freely given influence and power.

The cross turns everything upside down. When it comes to class and race, the cross will move you to a point of zero pride. The cross will move you to incredible generosity of your income, space, and time. "Offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life!" -- as those who have been brought into life from death, who have been brought into wealth through poverty, who have been brought into power though weakness. That's how the cross works. That's what it means to be righteous.

The interpersonal change that happens through the cross does so because of the intrapersonal change. Author, pastor Tim Keller commented on Deuteronomy 7:6-8 and helped me think this through:

"The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt."

It's circular reasoning! Do you see it? God is saying that He didn't 'love you because you were one of the great nations, in fact you were the least, but it was because I loved you that I brought you out of Egypt'... God is saying to His people (the nation of Israel then, and now to His people across all borders) that, 'I love you, just because I love you, just because I love you.'

Dani (my wife) will someday ask, 'Do you love me?' And I will say, 'Of course I love you! A million times over!' And then she will say 'Why???' This is where I will have to be very careful. I could truthfully say, "You the smartest girl I have ever known, the prettiest girl I have seen, I love how we can talk for hours, I love the ambition and life spark you have, I love how you want to see everything, I love how we can walk and get lost in a city and have such a great time doing it, I love how you make me feel good about myself because when someone like you is with me other people will say 'Hey! You must be pretty dang cool!'... But the truth here will not work. I think the only answer in which you can build an entire LIFE of love is, "I love you just because I love you." And this is not just sweet talk, it is not just pillow-talk nonsense. If you say to another human being that you love them because of such and such factor. Then all of the identity shifts to that factor because that is the basis for my love. 'Oh! Well then I better keep my figure! I better stay smart! I better keep in good shape so I can keep on walking through cities. What happens if I somehow can't walk anymore?? What if I lose my drive and ambition??' The basis of the identity, of this person's loveliness, the basis of their value is then shifted to these factors, and now slavery to these factors... But what if God, through the cross, says, 'I love you just because I love you'. 'Not because you are great, moral, cool. I am just going to love you by holy grace, or in other words, grace that is set apart from anything you have ever known. You want to be saved? There it is. I have done it!' Then because of this: You are free! Finally! Because He loves you for you! He loves YOU! He loves you for your sake and therefore He loves you for His sake! And that frees you! Then other external factors are driven into the ground. They do not hold relevance here.

And to the degree you understand the cross by the Holy Spirit (it takes a LONG time to sink in! a whole lifetime to really do so!), to that degree will you experience this freedom.

3. How does the cross actually free you?

Why does this take so long to get?

Supposedly there is a true story about St. Augustine -- He lived loosely among women before his conversion and he ran into one years later. He was kind and nice, but there was a barrier that had not been there before and she could sure sense it. She stopped him and protested, 'Augustine it is I!' 'I know,' he said, 'but it is not I.' St. Augustine is saying with this that he used to be a person that had to have female affection, it was his spiritual master, but he now had a new spiritual master. And to the degree that he could remember who he was in Him he was free!

The reason that we do not live out of the power of the cross is that, although we have a new identity, we don't remember it. This is what Romans 6 is all about. In verse 11 - "consider your self dead", yes we are dead to sin, but it is a struggle to consider our selves as such! That is what Augustine did, but I am sure it was a struggle. It is certainly a struggle for me!!

A women successful, hard working, and rich marries a man lazy and poor. In an instant he is rich!

As soon as you say, 'Father, accept me for what Jesus Christ has done. I give my life to you!!!' When He accepts this plea (and just not when you utter the words, to often we think we can play God by simple cantation) you become objectively rich. When the Father looks at Jesus, does His heart not burst with love and enthusiasm for the beauty of His son, for the magnificence for what He has done? Of course it does! And now, when you are united with Him that is EXACTLY how God sees you! Augustine is saying through this story that when he remembers this he does not need female affection. Will this happen every time? No... But to the degree you are remember your identity in Christ...

Martin Lloyd Jones on Romans 6, verse 11 - came up with an illustration for this struggle to "consider" our selves dad to sin and alive to God through Christ. --- Imagine a country in which one group of people has enslaved another group of people for centuries. A new King comes into power and decrees that all of the enslaved group is to be set free. Do you think it is as simple as that? For all of that time through the enslavement, when the oppressor group saw a slave coming, that oppressor group instantly could have that person beaten up, imprisoned, or even killed. Years go by and NOW the King says that these oppressed people are now free. And only upon dire penalty of prison and death could the oppressor group do anything to a member of the enslaved group... In reality (and our American history proves it), members of the former-enslaved group will still tremble when they would meet a member of the former-oppressing group. They had been trained to do so for centuries. They will still obey what the oppressing group says, and the oppressors will still do anything that they can, within that law, to hold on to what little power they have left. THE MEMBERS OF THE FORMER-ENSLAVED GROUP KEEP ON ACTING LIKE SLAVES DESPITE THEIR CHANGE IN STATUS. They are free, but they have not grasped there freedom. And every Christian is in this same position. Your status has changed! The only reason we don't change is that we don't know who we are in Jesus Christ.

How are we going to overcome this?

The only way you are not going to be a slave anymore is if you see what Jesus Christ did with His freedom.

One more illustration:

There is an incredible movie called Three Seasons. It takes place in Vietnam right after the Vietnam War. In one of the stories within the movie a poor bicycle driver falls in love with a prostitute. He sees her always coming out of beautiful hotels that rich men have paid for her to be with them in. She never stays the whole night and he is always there to take her to the horrible part of town that she lives in. She knows he likes her. But she has come to be a very hard person. All she wants is to be a person who can come into one of these hotels on her own accord and stay over night because that is the world she lives in. She wants to break into that world of comfort and beauty. And it is not working. Prostitution is killing her, even though she does not see it. She says she is not going to do prostitute forever, but she is enslaved. She thinks it will get her out, but he knows the truth and she does as well but does not admit it... And then the bicyclist enters a bicycle race and wins! He wins 50 dollars, which is how much it costs for a night with her (the coincidence was not an accident). He immediately finds her and says, 'come on, let's go to the hotel'. She needs the money and says ok. She is expecting sex, the viewer is expecting sex, but after he tells her to lay on the bed he says, 'I don't want to have sex with you. I am not using the 50 dollars to get you. I am using the 50 dollars just so that you can spend the night here. And I just want to watch you fall asleep.' When she wakes up in the morning she is gone, with a beautiful breakfast in front of her... and now she cannot go back to prostitution because his selfless act changed her. The only money he had in the world he used, not to exploit her, but to serve her. She had never experienced that kind of redemptive love in her life and it has changed her. It has changed her identity and she can't go back! And she is mad at him!! ... and you just need to see the rest of the movie...

Jesus Christ sees us, enslaved by the things that we think are going to get us our freedom (and we know they will not, even if we don’t admit to it). Not just at the risk of His wealth with the Father, but at the cost of His life, He comes down and becomes a slave, and He is put in chains, and He is nailed to the cross... not to exploit us, but to serve us, to free us... If this woman in the movie was changed and freed by the knowledge of the bicyclist's redemptive act, of his using the power he had to serve her and not exploit her, having never experienced anything like it in her life... then the selfless act of Jesus Christ going to the cross and becoming a slave will free you! You have to bring this into the center of your self. It is not just who I am in Jesus, but it is what He did to make me who I am! If you put that together and keep that alive in your 'religion,’ it will change your life. It will shape your life.

How does the cross unite us? How does the cross effect our relationships? to be continued...

Cruciformity - How does the cross change and shape our lives? How does it connect us with God? - PART 1

2009-06-22T21:00:00.009-07:00

* A lot of this post as well as the next 2 was taken from and built around some INCREDIBLE talks by Tim Keller. They are here.

Acts 8:26-39, the conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch

The cross changes the structure of our identity, through a holistic grasp of substitutionary atonement...

Acts 8 is a vivid climax of the first 8 chapter of the book thus far: Jesus said to go and make disciples of all nations. In Acts 2, the sermon was in every language present, a clear indication that God was saying that no culture or people group had a leg-up... and yet the disciples still struggled with Jewish superiority. In Acts 8, persecution finally pushes them out, and the Spirit takes over. In any other circumstance, Philip would have nothing to do with this black, sexually altered, high-powered man. But the Spirit said, ‘stay with him!’ ... Jesus said that the Spirit would manifest His teaching when it came down. Why does the Spirit keep going after us to connect with others outside of our own people? the Cross. The Cross gives a new identity if you really get the implications of it. When the Spirit moves the very core of yourself to get the cross, then one sign will be that you will want to be with others you would have wanted nothing to do with before.

As different as “conservative” to “liberal”, “religious” to “secular” is, everyone has a works based righteousness system in place. In traditional, religious areas, people build their character on achievement - follow the rules and perform according to what is expected of you. In a secular area, in a relative, no-morality environment, there is enormous pressure to achieve. You have to make something of yourself. You have to show the world that you matter. In both areas, people build their identity on performance.

Everyone has an identity factor.

When you build your identity on something, you have to feel superior to others that don’t have your identity factor. That’s how you get an identity. That’s how you feel good about yourself, that’s how you feel valuable. Even if the way you feel good about yourself is that you are a hard working person. You then look down on others who are lazy. If education is your identity, you look down on those without an education... If religion is your identity, you look down on those without religion.

Conservative v. liberal. One will say, ‘those liberals are ruining my culture’, the other would say ‘those religious conservatives are narrow minded bigots.’

I think -- all identities demonize others who do not have their identity factor. All identities divide the human race.

What if there was another way of building your identity?

What if instead of the religious call of ‘God has given you all of the rules to follow Him into Heaven’... What if instead God has come down, fulfilling all of the requirements for us... Those that actually get this will say: ‘Well then, I am no better then anyone else. I am a sinner saved by God’s mercy.’ THEN this person will realize, ‘since God loves me through Christ (not because of what I have done to prove my worth, BUT what HE HAS DONE) I must change!’

IF the Spirit has really taken the cross so deep inside of you that you know that is why and how you have value, that is who you really are, why you have hope, THEN it removes the need and basis for feeling superior to other people.

The cross renews your identity, because Christianity is not the function of one particular culture. The cross transforms you from within your culture.

“100 years ago 9 percent of Africa was Christian. Today it is roughly 50 percent... How did this happen? The old religions provided rules rewarding good conduct and punishing wrong conduct. But they could not help us change. Christianity answered this historic challenge by a reorientation. People in Africa sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred, nor their clamor for an invincible savior. And so they beat their sacred drums for Him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies. And after that dance the stars were not little anymore. Christianity made Africans into renewed Africans, not remade Europeans.” -- Lamin Sanneh

What if Africans became secular?

Lamin Sanneh continues: “The idea that there are is no supernatural, no miracles, no demons, no angels, everything has a natural cause was destructive to our Africaness... Christianity says yes there is the supernatural... there are evil forces everywhere, but Jesus Christ on the cross triumphed over those evil forces. When Christianity comes into my Aricaness it does not turn me into a European or an American. I am no longer the African I was, but I am a renewed African. My identity is changed. I have a certain distance to my Africaness, making me look at non-Afircans differently... because I have an unshakable peace, I don’t have to fear the dark anymore. I have an invincible Savior.”

If this is true, then it is almost like every single people, every single culture, every single life, has its own story line, but only in Jesus Christ will the story lines of all these people ever find a happy ending... provided that you don’t just believe in the cross in some general way, but that the Holy Spirit takes it within the very center of your life and being.

How does that happen?

I think the key to real conversion happens when you get a holistic grasp of Jesus' substitutionary sacrificial atonement. Holistic meaning it has to makes sense coherently and it has to be inwardly gripping to you. This is when change can come.

Why was this man a eunuch in Acts 8? He was a high ranking official. If you were a commoner, rising up, working with the royal family, you would not be trusted unless you were sexually altered. If you wanted to be rich and get power, you would then have to say good bye to family and descendants (in a culture where family and descendants were everything!).

In New York City, it is almost impossible to maintain a family while you are on the fast track to the top of any of the high esteemed professions. It is almost impossible to get to the top without committing the same sacrifice the eunuch decided upon.

This eunuch, incredibly lonely and unfulfilled -- An Ethiopian going to Israel to worship! This is so far-fetched that some feel this disproves the accuracy of the Bible. The distance traveled was far!! This had to have been an incredibly long and dangerous trip. The only explanation (if we believe the Bible) for this man to make the trip was that he was spiritually hungry! He must have heard or read about the God of Israel and wanted to worship in His presence.. but he also must have been turned away from the Temple because Old Testament ceremonial law forbid any eunuch from going into the presence of God. He would have gone all that way, desperately seeking connection to the divine, and would have been turned away. He must have felt so deformed, so uncleaned.... But as he is riding back we see that he was reading Isaiah 53. Now if he were reading these ‘servant passages’ in Isaiah he would have certainly read:

Isaiah 56:3-5 -- “Don’t let foreigners who commit themselves to the Lord say, ‘The Lord will never let me be part of his people.’ And don’t let the EUNUCHS say, ‘I’m a dried-up tree with no children and no future.’ For this is what the Lord says: I will bless those EUNUCHS who keep my Sabbath days holy and who choose to do what pleases me and commit their lives to me. I will give them—within the walls of my house—a memorial and a name far greater than sons and daughters could give. For the name I give them is an everlasting one. It will never disappear!”

Just as the Holy Spirit says, ‘Go get that guy!’ to Philip the Eunuch now reads in Isaiah 53 about the one who gets cut off. Somebody who has been excluded, “and who can speak of His descendants?” It seems like this person has been voluntarily cut off, voluntarily excluded. Somebody who has essentially become a eunuch, someone who has essentially become unclean, somebody who has been slain... Who is this?

Just at that moment... Philip is desperately trying to keep up by running along side the carriage:

“It’s Jesus.”

In Jesus Christ, God has come as a leper for the lepers, a eunuch for the eunuchs... He become unclean so that we can become eternally clean. He was cast out so that we can be brought in. He paid the penalty for our sins. He stood as the eunuch for us, so that we do not have to stand as a eunuch anymore in His sight. He took upon Himself our penalty... He took it! So that we can now walk into the presence of God, clothed as and seen as Jesus Christ.

God substitutes Himself for us. He pays the penalty that we deserve. Substitution is at the heart of it all. Once you understand that and it grips you, conversion and change can happen.

In the Tale of Two Cities -- the two main character look alike, but are very different. And in it all they love the same girl. One does not get the girl and the other marries her. At the end of the book, however, the one married is found guilty (the book takes place within the context of the French Revolution) and he is in prison waiting to be executed. He is in a hopeless situation. Except for that the other man sneaks into the prison at night, knocks out his friend in prison, others he was with take his friend away, and this other man puts on his friends clothes, awaiting to be executed. (if you watch, watch the clip to at least 1:40)

“Are you dieing for him?”

“Yes, and for his wife and child.”

“I am really, really frightened, but if I can hold your hand, a brave person like you, I think I will be alright.”

-- goes the dialogue between another waiting for execution and the other man. This man’s substitutionary sacrifice changed her, and it was not even for her! ... and so if this does that, even though it was not even for her, how much could Jesus’ substitutionary sacrifice change us. What will it enable us to face? How will it change our ability to handle suffering? How will it change the very structure of our life??? ... IF you see that He did not just die for others, He died for you... for you!

When the substitutionary sacrifice gets to the very bottom of our being, becoming intellectually understandable and emotionally and physically gripping, it will change us. How else do you explain a Jewish man putting his arms around a sexually altered African man and calling him brother? That’s a sign of changed identity. That’s how the cross does it.

The cross will convert you and will keep converting you the rest of your life... to be continued...

look for the cross and let it move you...

2009-06-17T16:52:00.012-07:00

The cross was in the heart of God before the world was created. So at the heart of all things we have the sense that there should be a sacrifice for our sin that leads to death, or in other words, separates from the author of life, or in another way, there should be something that restores the world to how it ought to be... and so there should be pointers to this key component in life: life rising out of death, life rising out of sorrow, life rising out of sacrifice, life rising out of redemption...

The cross is in our blood. White pus that forms on an infection is a collection of dead skin cells and dead white blood cells that are fighting off infection. White blood cells that had been floating through our bodies find and attack infection and then die so that we might live.

The cross is in our muscle. Muscle tissue must be torn in order to be built back stronger.

The cross is in our instinct. A mother will protect her young by sacrificing her own life.

The cross is at the heart of nations. Soldiers that die to protect the integrity of their country are honored.

The cross is in our popular culture. We are inspired by those who are redeemed and are lifted up.

The cross is in our history. The lives of those who died for another are lived on.

The cross is in botanical growth. The seed must break and die before more seeds are grown to produce fruit.

The cross is in sports culture. The redemption of a player inspires the faithful.

If this is the highest principle found on earth, and if their is a Creator of this earth, wouldn't we expect the highest sacrifice from the creator of humans... otherwise the creature would be greater than the Creator.

And we say their is a God who did show this love for us, even while we were His enemies.

And in our best moments we bare our Creator's image.

The cross is the answer from the Creator of human nature for the basic human problem.

John 15:13
There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

paraphrasing St. Augustine on the Trinity

2009-06-15T15:41:00.005-07:00

Do you believe that love, friendship, and community are at the very essence of reality?

Only if you believe in the triune God can you believe that.

Why?

If God is a single uni-personal God, you would then need to ask this question: when did this God first begin to love? When did this God first enter into relationships, friendships, and communication? It would not have been until this God would have created the first being, the first angel, the first human, the first whatever. And therefore love would not be at the very essence of this God because it came later, it would have been peripheral. And so then love could not be at the very essence of this reality.

If you believe in many gods, then you believe that ultimate reality is basically a power struggle.

Only if you believe in a Creator who is the triune God, a God who is a community of beings that love and serve one another, that enjoy one another and defer to each other... only when you believe in this God can you believe that love, harmony, unity, diversity, friendship, and communication are at the very essence of reality.

Otherwise you have to believe that the very essence of reality is a power play or something impersonal with love coming in later.

- I think this is a very interesting take on the trinity. A sort of philosophical, logical apologetic that rallies the 'faithful', but can easily leave those outside of the 'Christianese' speaking, 'inner circle', uneasy and confused with its mystical, esoteric nature. So here is the reason why its so important to us all:

How can you know a God like this individualistically?

When the very essence of God is community, the only way you can possibly know a God like that is THROUGH community.

or to put it another way

If you were to really get to know a God like that it would inevitably draw you into deep oneness and community with other people.

thoughts on John 17:22-24 - only in Jesus, our true neighbor, is community possible - further defining 'gospel community'

2009-06-12T21:02:00.013-07:00

John 17:22-24
22 “I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one. 23 I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me. 24 Father, I want these whom you have given me to be with me where I am. Then they can see all the glory you gave me because you loved me even before the world began!

Jesus’ disciples, those that desire to obey all the commands given by Him, that desire to live like Him, have been given a weight to be able to do so. A weight that is heavier than their very self, that can move their deeply rooted character. This weight or glory is the very glory that the Father gave to Jesus. It was the very weight and significance that Jesus had that made Him ONE with God, that characterized Him and spoke of His very essence as God. When His Followers are one, just as the Trinity (Father, Son, and Spirit) are one, the fruit or the outcome is the very significance of God or why He matters. When His disciples are one, we bare His image (our very purpose for being made - Genesis 1:27) and when anything created accomplishes or works to accomplish its very purpose for being made, it works with utmost fluidity (e.g. a boat sails best on water, a lion lives most wild outside of a cage).

Jesus is in us, IF we are His, and so (we cannot forget this point) God is in us! The very creator of EVERYTHING... (I was really excited to talk to Tom Hanks when I ran into him in a crazy, random way where he had to strike up a conversation with me. I was so excited because he basically made Apollo 13, Saving Private Ryan. I was awe struck - but so then, logically, how much more awe struck should I be then with the one who created my very life, my wife, sunsets, Cayuga Lake, laughing, sex, the very idea of a good picnic, etc.). And this Creator of EVERYTHING is in our very selves - IF we are one of whom the Father gave to Jesus. And we know we are His by the fruit of our faith (We will never be saved because of what we have done/our fruit, BUT we will never be saved by fruitless faith). Faith is real when it produces change. But what change and how can we really know we are His?

We are given the glory of God for a few very important reasons. First, so we honestly never have to take a class on street evangelism, on apologetics. This is done so we can live our lives as genuinely as possible as we bare witness of God. Jesus gives us His glory so our very lives will proclaim His existence to the world. He does this because it is only by it will we be able to live in any human community as ONE.

When I am hungry, I get cynical, then cranky, and then mad. My whole entire being, it seems, focuses on my need to fill my stomach because I hurt. Stomach pains hurt (And I am sure I have never even felt REAL hunger)! Sometimes I cannot even sleep a whole night because my stomach pains wake me up... When I don’t have clothes on I find clothes to put on. When I am in danger, my full thought is on survival... Basically I immediately and fully take care of my important needs... This is how we are called to act within the Church, in this community or “perfect unity” that Jesus calls those that are His to be in. If we are to be one we should act as though we are one. We are called to love our neighbor as our very self (Mark 12:31 and Leviticus 19:18). When our neighbor is hungry, it should wake us up in the middle of the night. Their pains should be our pain. We should feel it deeply, just as we feel our pains deeply, and we should act to relieve the pain, just as we act to relieve our own. We should act so we don’t have to hurt so bad... This is how we evangelize to the world. In 2009 we are drowning in information - argument, persuasion are around every corner. Apologetics do not work. In my 25 years I have not seen anything good ever coming out of a ‘Top 10 things to say to a ________’. It just does not work. It only puffs up the chest and reinforces the ‘back against the wall’ way of doing church - retreating and making sure to swing the first punch... But it is our very lives that Jesus means for us to speak with in this world. And we see that, especially today, that this is the only way to credibly speak. You cannot pull a fast one when your life is laid out as evidence - when all someone has, lives for, has sacrificed, is, and has worked towards speaks directly on their behalf... If we are honest with ourselves this should sober us up to how grave the situation is for church evangelism. If our lives alone, laid out on its own merit is all we have, our situation is quite hopeless...

But the good news (or in other words the Gospel) is that in this very real way to view reality, we can judge the true character of another, we see the character of Jesus, and that He is definitely for us. Because He gave us His very life (slaughtered it to take our punishment), so He could give our lives weight and purpose, making the hopeless hopeful. He took on the very things that made us weightless, our very guilt that blows us every which way in the never-ending turbulence of this world, and gave us His glory, or in other words, His anchor, that roots us down deep so we can be made unshakable. Only then will we be able to have enough stability in life to be able to reach out to our neighbor and become one with them. Only when we have the weight, glory, significance of God will we be able to do something as incredible as this - to live in community so completely as to be one as God is one, as God is whole... And when we experience this “perfect unity” it is assurance, evidence for our very selves and for others, because when we “experience” it we will know that (1) Jesus was sent by God, which would make His testimony of Himself true, and (2) we will know that the Father loves us as much as He loves Himself (Jesus)...

We love ourselves. We long for our own happiness, comfort and we do everything in our power to get it. It is our own concerns, worries, triumphs, and joys that consume us... Now if this is so for a created (imperfect) being, how much more would it be so for a (perfect) Creator, God. I honestly think I would love myself more if I were better looking, funnier, more athletic, more musical. How much more would this be for a God, who even created every good thing... Now if God were simply for Himself, as we are for ourselves (we hardly, if ever, love others when it is not a benefit, love to ourselves), there would be nothing we could do about it. I mean He is God our Creator! But our God is not for Himself because His very character is community (Genesis 1 “let us make man in our image” - God’s very essence is community, the Trinity - God in 3 persons). And His very character and person came down in Jesus, who lived the perfect life and died as the perfect sacrifice, so as to bring our very selves in community with Him and with each other. He loved us so much that our hurt was His hurt. And so He sacrificed His very self on a bloody cross so our pain became His pain, our sin became His sin, the death we deserved would became His death, and our deserved separation from the God of Holy, or in other words, infinitely unique and superfluous love and justice would be His separation and isolation on the cross... so that His glory/weight/significance would become our glory/weight/significance, that His perfect standing, or in other words, community with God would become our community with God, so that the very embrace of the Father that He deserved became the very embrace that we receive. If our very purpose is to bare the image of our God, a God in community, won’t He give this to us freely, IF we are those that Jesus speaks of in John 17...

When we experience this God-given gift of complete community, we “experience” God’s love, the very love He has for Himself. And this love is not a love that was earned or has grown because of what we have done or will do. This love was there for us even before our universe was created. We have done nothing to earn this! This love is unconditional. No matter what we have done or will do we are loved as much as God loves Himself. If we do not feel this love it is because we are not in this ‘gospel community’ that Jesus speaks of here (according to this prayer of Jesus). It is only when we are in perfect unity with each other do we “experience” the very love of the Father God for His Son Jesus, for ourselves. But if we are honest with ourselves, perfect unity with each other is impossible... AND YET the deepest parts of our selves long to be connected (random fact - human connection is THE number one deterrent of suicide). Something else is at war within ourselves that will ruin it every time (Paul speaks of this battle in Romans 7). But we should not lose hope even though we know fully well that by our own doing "perfect" community is hopeless (it has been tried over and over again in history and has not worked)... Our only hope is to look to our perfect neighbor, who came down to our level, and broke into our world. Because our situation was so impossible, Jesus came down to feel our pain and then bare it. Because of His communal love for us, He saw us hungry and thirsty for a great number of unfulfilled desires we sought to fill elsewhere outside of Him, or in other words, when we sinned. And so He sacrificed Himself so we could go to Him when we are consumed with the hunger pains that comes from this broken world. In Him we can be satisfied and given weight, given food so we do not collapse due to this hunger, so that we will be able to look towards our own neighbors and extend the same love we received from God to them. We will then fill them up as He filled us up. We will then embrace since He first embraced. Whenever desires for our own comforts become perverted and trump “perfect unity” with each other, we can now look to Him (who first sought us and remains in perfect community with us).

And all of this has been made so without us earning it! We were loved completely before we were ever made! (the idea slightly resembles declaring a favorite movie that will come out ten years from now). And so how can we live pridefully when the very thing that we were made for, the only thing that matters, that has weight/glory, that can only really move us towards community, was given to us without our say (even before we had a mouth to say). Our condition was and is completely helpless (and your right, it does feel like it is not fair we are in this place! Why would God make it so?? I think the short answer (with more behind it) is that it is what it is, just as if your head was inside of the closing jaws of a wild lion), but the good news, or in other words, the Gospel is that we were saved and loved more than we could have ever thought was possible. We were given the very significance of God that allows us to live in “perfect” community with each other so that we can “experience” the very love of God, the very love that He has for Himself and that He has for us, even before an action in us was and has been performed (because the Father's love for Jesus was reconciled and redeemed to us on the cross)...

And Jesus gives us this glory so that we can be where He is. In these ‘gospel communities’ we are put on a trajectory. In this oneness we look away from ourselves, our pride is slowly peeled away, because that isolates us from the one body of Christ, and love for our neighbor grows because it makes us one with the body of Christ, giving us purpose and affection for God. When His glory is given, it is called regeneration or spiritual rebirth. The Holy, or in other words, infinitely set apart in uniqueness and superfluous Spirit of God moves and reshapes the very deepest parts of your heart, in regeneration, so that you can fulfill your desires of real, deep, and sacrificial community. Our deepest desires are realized and we want to live in and for our very purpose. We can glorify God, showing His weight and significance to others when they see our unnaturally love-filled life for each other. We are shaped and given glory (moved and restructured) in regeneration for communal love...
BUT THEN the Romans 7 fight swings towards your rebellious, prideful, sinful nature, and your glory is drained. Within a 'gospel community', the very love of Christ is extended by another, at this time, you are in “unity” with, and God is given glory by you and those that see your life. Only in and through the love of the God of love is this possible. Only by His power and love are we given enough weight to stand so we can reach out a communal hand to our geographic neighbor. Only by looking to our perfect neighbor, Jesus, will our very pride and selfishness melt and ‘gospel community’ will be made possible. And in this our eternal fate will be decided. Our trajectory, our final destination with Him in unimaginable joy for eternity will be set (Revelation 21). It is then where we will “experience” His full embrace, because it is only then will we be able to live in “perfect unity” without messing it up. Because only then will His complete neighborly love, His perfect united love for Himself will be made one within us once and for all. Since He decided to come down and make us one with Him on earth, our future is set. The wedding supper of the Lamb of God is before us, where God and His people will become one for all time.

But we were not called to just to sit around and wait for our afterlife, wait for Heaven. We are called to live new lives, where we “experience” the very love of God here on earth. We can see God, start living in Heaven, feel and “know” His full embrace as we become "one" with each other. And this is only possible because He first initiated it. Initiated a love that was undeserved and all-satisfying (Psalm 103:2-5). Our perfect neighbor, our perfect God, came and loved us first, with ALL of our baggage. Since His love for us was complete, even before the world began, we are humbled. Since nothing can snatch us out of His hand (John 10:29-30) we are justified in the presence of a fully just God, even though we have sinned, rebelled, hated, replaced God in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

And so how again can this neighborly love exist with a God of Holy love AND Holy justice. Because we have all wronged others, we have all done evil to each other, we have all had our part in DESTROYING community... And the deepest part of ourselves knows that it all has to be accounted for under God, the Creator.

But the Gospel, or in other words, the great news is that the cost was accredited to our God. In perfect community with us He became the curse, He became our evil, on the cross, so we could live in community with a a perfect and Holy God. In this great exchange, He made it possible for us to become one with Him as He has always been with us. This was foreshadowed in the Old Testament when the Israelites set up the tent of God in the desert. And it was fulfilled when He came down to earth as Jesus. And doing so He made possible the trajectory towards a most assured ending in Revelation 21 where God dwells with His people and wipes away tears and sadness forever... Only in Him we are able to live as one with each other. With the glory of His Spirit out-weighing and replacing our selfishness, or in other words, our over-desires that lead us away from Him. In Him we are united to each other because He is most glorious, moving all obstacles out of our way. In Him is it only possible to love someone fully (who has and/or will hurt and offend you), as though they were your very self. This can happen because we are all forgiven, justified in Him. And if we really believe that, believe in His name, His glory will move our pride and we will be able to forgive and love... Only in Him is real community possible.

a Pause in the Poetry and Rhythm of God's Creation - His image and Community

2009-06-08T16:30:00.010-07:00

In the beginning God created.

God said, and it was. Evening and Morning - the first day.
God said, and it was. Evening and Morning - the next day.
God said, and it was. Evening and Morning - the next day......

This rhythm is interrupted in Genesis 1:26 -
Let us make man in our own image.

You are meant to reflect, as disruption in any good piece of poetry would make you do.

God is now engaging in a conversation, with His triune self:

Genesis 1:26 - Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

and then the thesis:

Genesis 1:27 - So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Man and woman TOGETHER, in community, is what bears the image of God. Not a single individual.

In Chapter 2 we see the rhythm of "good" creation being established until:

Genesis 2:18 - It is not good for man to be alone.

The one thing in a good creation that was not good was Adam's solitude. Why? Adam could not bare the divine image of God on His own, as an individual.

Being in community is where we experience what it means to be truly human. Our very nature cries out for it because are very purpose is to bare the image of God.

We are made in the image of our Creator, in an image of our God whose very character is community.

-- for those who are interested in Gospel Community I would HIGHLY recommend Total Church By, Steve Timmis and Tim Chester

Feeling the Gospel -- Part 1

2009-06-01T11:09:00.014-07:00

Do I feel the Gospel in my heart?? Or is this all merely an intellectual exercise?

Do I have Gospel lenses in which I see the world in such a way that I am constantly aware of my own depravity, the goodness of God despite my depravity, in the cross, and the grace afforded to me in a thousand different places stirring up in my heart towards biblical themes like gratitude, thankfulness, worship?

Slow down. Breath. With a renewed mind (Romans 12:2) you see God everywhere.

Proverbs 18:22 "He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord."

God gave me Dani - this very beautiful, gifted, smart, determined woman, who loves ME - despite who I am. She is an incredible gift.

As Saint Augustine looked towards the sea several centuries ago he wrote down, "If these are the pleasures afforded to sinful men, what does God have in store for those whose hearts are His?" Romans 1:20 says, "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made."

Ithaca is beautiful. This is on my bike ride to and from work. Amazing.

to the degree that God is a reality in your life - Concept versus Reality -- Part 2

2009-05-31T12:48:00.004-07:00

Isaiah 6

How do you know that God has moved from being a concept to being a reality? Verses 5-8

Isaiah heard the seraphim call out, "Holy, holy, holy!" In Hebrew, magnitude was gotten a cross by doubling a word. Nowhere but here in the Old Testament is there a tripling of a word. There is a category beyond categories here.

What is holiness? Holy wisdom is wisdom that is infinitely beyond anybody else's wisdom. Holy love is infinitely beyond and infinitely more perfect than anybody else's love... Holiness also means brilliance and beauty. The seraphim were constantly singing and praising. They were/are fascinated and love His holiness. They can't get enough of it, they were/are enamored by it.

There are people that say that they used to believe in God, I used to go to church, but He didn't come through for me. He let this and that happen and I don't know why He let my life go in this direction and I asked for this and He let me down... If this is true for us then we are in a sense 'marrying' God 'for His money'. He is an object, a concept, in these cases, without weight... But the seraphim are adoring and serving God just because of the beauty of who He is. For the seraphim His holiness is not useful, it is beautiful... (tangent) What good do you get out of listening to great music by yourself? Does it make money for you, move you along in your career? No. It is a good in itself. It is not useful, it is beautiful. Isaiah 6 is telling us here that is how God should be if you knew who He really was. (My heart longs to find Him to be that much of a reality in my life!!)

How can someone, though, find the complete and unique holiness of God as beautiful in itself? The power of God is a benefit to you, the wisdom of God is a benefit to you, the mercy of God is a benefit to you, but (Jonathan Edwards said it like this) "God's holiness is of no use to us at all." And so we cannot attack it with our selfish ambition. On the surface, it seems God's holiness is nothing but a threat. But anyone who really worships God's holiness, is loving Him for who He is in Himself because it is of no help to us.

How on earth could we possibly get to this place? That we see the beauty of His holiness because, again, on the surface it is only a threat. You cannot overpower, question, escape God because of his Holy power, His Holy wisdom, and His Holy presence. How can this be beautiful?

Verse 5 "Woe to me!" Isaiah is putting a curse on himself... A friend of mine in Ithaca, who, in a sense, dismantles me in Chess every time, went up against a "Chess Master" at the Ithaca Fest this weekend and became undone. HE was absolutely dismantled. There was nothing he could do about it. He was overwhelmed from the beginning. He had a "Woes me!" moment in the face of human holiness.

Jewish tradition says that Isaiah's father was brother to the King. This would have made Him one of the elites. We know from Isaiah's book that He was a man of artistic and communicative genius. He was a man with masterful speech, masterful "lips". In an oral culture, this would have meant great power. In a time of great upheaval in his country ("King Uzziah" had died), at a time where he wielded great influence, he would have most certainly been, as we do today, proclaiming the errors of the old generation, the establishment... But then He meets God and he sees that He was the problem. Even his "lips", the best part of his self were unclean, flawed, wrong, twisted... Every time someone in the Bible sees God as a reality they start to hate themselves... Reaction to this could be: 'This sounds like low self-esteem and I believe in a God of love.’ Okay. Let's suppose that there is a God that is nothing but love. No holiness. No justice. No wrath. You would still hate yourself in the presence of a god who is just pure love. You would say, 'I am so cruel! so unloving! I thought I loved people, but I now know I really haven't loved anybody!' ... If in the presence of human holiness you can be undone, how much more than would it be so with God.

This is how you know that God has begun to move into your life as a reality. You think you are "sinner", you think you are "lost". You think you are more capable of cruelty, evil, more selfish, more petty, more small-minded, more impatient than you thought you ever could be. You know you are a sinner and you can only be saved by grace... If there is a real God it would have to feel like this! How could it be otherwise! And I think we can move this beyond ‘it is this way because that is what the Bible says’. I think this is common sense, if you think through the implications of the reality of God...

But this was not all that happened to Isaiah. People with low self-esteem who find themselves in the presence of God realize to a great degree that their low self-esteem was self absorption. The only way that they could ever get out of their low self esteem is if something gets them to think outside of themselves. And this something must be heavier than their very self or they will remain unshaken.

As soon as Isaiah confesses, as soon as he talked about the reality of his sin (at his point of the lowest self esteem you'd ever want), God begins to explode into his life. The angel of God flies towards him. Isaiah sees the fire in his hand and he would have thought he was a goner. The fire of God represents judgment and wrath in the Old Testament. Fire consumed people in the presence of God and Isaiah probably would have expected to be wiped out here. He saw that he deserved it, he saw the magnitude of his sin undone by the weightiness, the "glory" of God. But as soon as the fire got to his mouth, it must of hurt, but it did not consume. He had been cleaned...

One second after Isaiah realized he didn't deserve to live, that he was more wicked and flawed then he ever dared believe. He was then more affirmed valued and wanted than he ever dared to hope. Because God is saying at this point in Isaiah 6, 'I am saving the world and I need a new partner. And by the way you are going to be utterly ineffective and persecuted.' Isaiah immediately says, 'send me!' What happened to Isaiah? His self image had been deconstructed and reconstructed on the spot. Before he thought he was good by a performance standard... If there are performance standards: if I do this, if I live like this... If you are living up to your standards, you are bold and confident, but not humble, you are arrogant. If you are not living up to your standards, you are humble and kind of sensitive to other people, but you are not confident. in the grace of God you are both bold and humble at the same time because you are more wicked than you ever dared believe and you are more loved than you ever dared to hope. This gives you a new stability. Nothing in this world now can move you then. When you fail, you can remember the affirmation of God, which is there by grace, not performance. When you succeed you are not arrogant because you remember that you are nothing more than a sinner saved by grace. Bold AND humble at the same time. Theoretically you can handle anything... to the degree that God is a reality in your life. When God starts sliding towards becoming a concept again, you got to make sure He is a reality. And then you can handle anything.

Now how is that possible? How could the fire of God (here in Isaiah 6) be an agent of cleansing? Centuries later almost the same thing happened. The temple was shaken. There was an earthquake because God came down. The very veil of God in the Temple ripped. Do you know when that happened? Matthew 27

In the Garden before He was taken Jesus said, "I am sorrowful even onto death." In other words He was saying, 'Woes me I am undone! I feel like I am coming apart!' ... But no angel came down that time and said that his sin was atoned for because Jesus was the sacrifice. Jesus Christ became our sin and was shaken by the judgment of God so that you and I could be unshakable. So that our sin could be atoned for... If this is really true, that we are accepted completely in Him, not on the basis of our performance, His holiness than will truly be beautiful! You then will not serve God on the basis of getting things because you have already gotten everything! ... WHY THEN SERVE GOD??? BECAUSE OF THE BEAUTY OF WHO HE IS and WHAT HE IS DONE! Because you want to know Him, resemble Him, because you want to be apart of this new business of Him in saving the world...

Weight and Glory - God as a Concept versus God as a Reality -- Part 1

2009-05-31T08:50:00.006-07:00

Isaiah 6

Isaiah 6:3 - the whole earth is full of His "glory"
The Hebrew word "glory" is a word that is more sharply, more literally defined as WEIGHT. The substantial or important instead of the unimportant. Compared to anything else: God alone is real, God alone is permanent, and God alone matters.

A rock has more "glory" than the water, in this picture, and replaces and disrupts. The water's reality is completely rearranged... The reality of God coming into our lives is similar. Everything changes.

There is a difference in believing in God and actually having an experience of God's glory. Isaiah believed in God before Isaiah 6, but God was just a concept until this moment... and then God became a reality.

What is the difference between a concept and reality? It is all a matter of "glory". God as a concept is lighter than you. When you bring God as a concept into your life you shape it. It fits in around your existing patterns. It does not move you around. A God concept cannot change your beliefs around, it just fits in with your existing beliefs. We have to remember that our beliefs come from a cultural moment (our great grandchildren are going to be just as embarrassed about the beliefs we hold today as we are about the beliefs our great grandparent held). They seem so real, and we give it weight and glory and then we go shape our god with it. We do not have a real God when we do this. We have god as a concept. We do not have a God that could actually change some of our deepest held beliefs. He fits into us. We shape the concept. We have more "glory" and rearrange it. And this leads to the god as a concept being arranged around our existing plans, agendas, and goals. Plenty of people become religious because they need help in getting to their goals...

God as a concept is lighter than us, but God as a reality is heavier then us. When you get into the presence of the real God, things give way in your life to His "glory". Things you have always believed very deeply are changed by His word because God has more "glory" than my beliefs. He can change things I think. And instead of working God into your agenda, God becomes your agenda. He radically redefines your priorities...

Our agenda apart from God is to have a nice and safe, tidy little life. And to watch your back, looking out only for yourself. But God says, 'Be brave! Sacrifice your individual needs because I am more real, I have more glory!'

I don't think the question of whether or not you are a Christian should ever be: have you prayed the prayer. I don't even think that should be a question! For one's own self I think a worthwhile question is, however, has God moved from being a concept to becoming a reality. I am sure He will only be an absolute reality to us when we meet up with Him face to face. But if God is real and Jesus really came down for us, it tells us that He is here in our world now and He can rearrange us now. I feel like I am in this process where God is making Himself more and more of a reality. I am not at the end and will only be there at the end of my life, but the renovation has started. Whether I am willing or not is not the issue, the overwhelming weight of His very self has floored me and I am undone.

And one more thing... You are not going to have an experience like Isaiah :> ... Nobody else in the history of the world has. Even Jeremiah 1 is very different than Isaiah 6 because these men were very different. Isaiah was proud, Jeremiah was filled with self-deprecation. God tells Jeremiah "Stop trembling!" and God tells Isaiah "Start trembling!" But in both cases He showed up.

the Gospel - Did Jesus come to be our example? or is it more than that...

2009-05-31T07:29:00.013-07:00

If Jesus came as a model and example for us in order to redeem ourselves, He is an utter failure. If this were so, I would then wish he would have never have come, because nobody can care like Jesus cared, nobody can love like Jesus loved, and nobody can give like Jesus gave...

And if He is my model and all He gives me is just one more shot to be like Him, all He shows me is that I can NEVER redeem myself. As a model He discourages me, He DOES NOT encourage me. He devastates me, He demolishes me! He leaves me in the darkness if that is all...

But the Bible tells us that Jesus came and died to pay the penalty of our failures. And if we receive Him, His record becomes our record. He isn't the god of second chances, 'let's get it right this time!'. Instead He says in a sense, 'Your doing will never get you there. Looking at me proves that! I have done all the good deeds for you. I have lived the perfect life. I have died the perfect death. I put myself in your place and took your penalties, so that if you trust FULLY in me and you lay your doing down, the Father will welcome you as complete.'

-----------------------------------------------------------

Martin Luther used to pray, "You are my goodness, I was your punishment. You assumed everything I deserved and was, so that I can receive everything you deserved and are."

"This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ's, and the righteousness of Christ not Christ's but ours. He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it and fill us with it; and he has taken our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them." -- Martin Luther

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

2009-05-28T19:48:00.005-07:00

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

2009-05-28T18:19:00.008-07:00

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

2009-05-24T17:38:00.024-07:00

*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

2009-05-24T10:05:00.002-07:00

good music and movies and to where one longs to go after

2009-05-05T19:42:00.007-07:00

"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited."
Clive Staples Lewis -- The Weight of Glory

I remember listening to Sufjan Stevens play Predatory Wasp... for the first time and it made me feel overwhelmed with breathing correctly. I remember watching Magnolia and feeling like I had not felt enough. I remember listening to Sigur Ros at Coachella and being broken to my most inner core. I remember watching Saving Private Ryan and breaking down. I remember listening to Is This It by The Strokes with my brothers and feeling like life really was finally about to begin.

Each one of these feelings have failed me in my life. I tore through each one like a hungry man hungry for life... until I saw Jesus as the fulfillment of them all. And only now I feel I have just tasted Him for the most briefest of moments. fire, redemption, hope... I am starting to listen again to music I have not listened to in awhile and now I cannot help but worship Him. His creation is breath taking. I can only imagine the beauty of its Creator. Meeting Him face to face is going to be awesome.

Romans 8:19-23 -- For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. 20 Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, 21 the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. 22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.

Revelation 21 -- 1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. 4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.” 5 And the one sitting on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new!”

thinking about truth

2009-04-29T17:06:00.002-07:00

any system of thought that denies truth denies itself

Resurrection

2009-04-12T16:24:00.017-07:00

.
.
.
demands of my dead religion - empty. numb. chokes. suffocate.
.
but the stone fist of His heart began to bang on that cold stiff chest.
breath spilled over into His battered body, and now
.
resurrection of my life. mercy. love. and new breath.
.
walk with others. in their pain. in their happiness. as you breath out His breath that fills your lungs
.
.
.

Jesus Wants the Rose! -- the point of the Gospel

2009-04-08T18:21:00.001-07:00

a poem

2009-04-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

He thought to keep himself from Hell
by knowing and by loving well.
His work and vision, his desire
Would keep him climbing up the stair.

At limit now of flesh and bone,
He cannot climb for holding on.
"I fear the drop, I feel the blaze --
Lord, grant thy mercy and thy grace."

Wendell Berry from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p108.

true religion

2009-03-28T16:31:00.003-07:00

James 1:27
"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world."

-- I am going to venture a guess and say that James is not talking about sitting down with orphans and widows for a cup of coffee while on a mini-vacation to a town called Affliction....

I honestly don't know what to do with this... What an excruciating death it's going to be for me to really love my neighbor as I do myself, to store treasure up in heaven and not on earth, to love as commanded by our Lord on earth... This is going to hurt. I don't even know how to start... Lord show me the way!!

hospital church

2009-03-10T10:40:00.002-07:00

The Church should be seen no greater then an emergency room where all are sick and only one physician is sufficient.

Luke 5:30-32
30 And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” 31 And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

There is a problem with the church when only the sinners are called to repent of their sin... the religious must also be called to repent of their religion.

death by love

2009-03-09T17:12:00.010-07:00

Love is not defined by abstract concepts, love is defined by an event... and that event is the cross. It is very humbling, but it is our only hope to submit to this, for we are helpless to desire real love without it, that is devoid of ourselves, that is truly genuine...

1 John 4:7-12
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

"God calls us to cruci-formed love, love that shapes itself to the cross of Jesus Christ... which can be defined as willing self sacrifice, for the redemptive good of another, that doesn't demand reciprocation or the person that is being loved is deserving." -- Paul Tripp

... our hope can only be in the cross, because no one is deserving, everyone fails, all are prideful, all need to be redeemed...

How to see into the heart...

2009-03-07T21:38:00.001-08:00

"The true dimensions of a soul are seen in its delights. Not what we dutifully will but what we passionately want reveals our excellence or evil."

—John Piper, The Pleasures of God, p. 18.

avoiding Jesus

2009-01-10T16:35:00.002-08:00

"there was a deep, black, wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin"

The Fruit(s??) of the Spirit - Where is the "s"??

2009-01-05T18:17:00.007-08:00

-
Galatians 5:22-23

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

I am sorry but we can not individually grade these characteristics. The fruit of the spirit is SINGULAR not plural. Love grows together with peace! Patience grows together with faithfulness! Joy grows with self-control!

This is an impossible calling. But we have a true example... we have an empathetic priest... Christ's slaughtered himself to bring us to this place.

What is the Gospel? -- By C.J. Mahaney

2009-01-04T17:16:00.001-08:00

1) What is the gospel?
No question is more important, and biblical clarity in response to this question is critical. Sadly, confusion about the gospel is quite common among professing evangelicals today. I find Graeme Goldsworthy’s comment all too relevant: “The main message of the Bible about Jesus Christ can easily become mixed with all sorts of things that are related to it. We see this in the way people define or preach the gospel. But it is important to keep the gospel itself clearly distinct from our response to it or from the results of it in our lives and in the world.” So here is my attempt to heed the counsel of Dr. Goldsworthy and keep the gospel “clearly distinct.”

The following definition of the gospel, provided by Jeff Purswell, the Dean of our Pastors College, seeks to capture the substance of the gospel: “The gospel is the good news of God’s saving activity in the person and work of Christ. This includes his incarnation in which he took to himself full (yet sinless) human nature; his sinless life which fulfilled the perfect law of God; his substitutionary death which paid the penalty for man’s sin and satisfied the righteous wrath of God; his resurrection demonstrating God’s satisfaction with his sacrifice; and his glorification and ascension to the right hand of the Father where he now reigns and intercedes for the church.

“Such news is specific: there is a defined ‘thatness’ to the gospel which sets forth the content of both our saving faith and our proclamation. It is objective, and not to be confused with our response. It is sufficient: we can add nothing to what Christ has accomplished for us--it falls to us simply to believe this news, turning from our sins and receiving by faith all that God has done for us in Christ.”

I find this definition of the gospel faithful to the presentation of the four Gospels—they present the person and work of Christ as the good news. In the Apostle Paul’s concise summation of the gospel, he focuses more particularly on Christ’s death and resurrection as the core of his proclamation:

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures….” 1 Cor 15:3-4

Focusing more specifically still, the apostle encapsulates the work of Christ by focusing on the cross: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” 1 Cor. 2:2

So that is the gospel: God’s saving work in and through Christ. And the cross is the pinnacle of that work. Knox Chamblin helpfully notes this emphasis in Paul’s writing and ministry: “His gospel is ‘the word of the cross’ (1 Cor. 1:17-18); nowhere is there a comparable reference to ‘the word of the resurrection.’ In I Corinthians 1:23-24 it is ‘Christ crucified’ who is identified as ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God,’ not as we might have expected (especially in the case of ‘power’), Christ resurrected…. Both the cross and the resurrection are ‘of first importance’ in Paul’s gospel (I Cor. 15:3-4). Unless Christ has risen from the dead, the preaching of the cross (and of the resurrection) is a waste of time (15:14); but once the resurrection has occurred, the cross remains central.”

And the centrality of the cross isn’t temporary. The cross remains on center stage even when we receive a glimpse of eternity in the New Testament’s final book: “One is taken aback by the emphasis upon the Cross in Revelation. Heaven does not ‘get over’ the cross, as if there are better things to think about; heaven is not only Christ-centered, but cross-centered, and quite blaring about it.” Jim Elliff

There is nothing more important than getting the gospel right. Years ago, John Stott made the following frightening observation of the evangelical church when he wrote, “All around us we see Christians relaxing their grasp on the gospel, fumbling it, and in danger of letting it drop from their hands altogether.” It is my prayer that God would use the Together for the Gospel conference to strengthen our grip upon the glorious gospel.

2) What is the most serious threat to the gospel?
For this question I think J.C. Ryle provides us with enduring discernment: “You may spoil the gospel by substitution. You have only to withdraw from the eyes of the sinner the grand object which the Bible proposes to faith--Jesus Christ--and to substitute another object in His place… and the mischief is done.

“You may spoil the gospel by addition. You have only to add to Christ, the grand object of faith, some other objects as equally worthy of honor, and the mischief is done.

“You may spoil the gospel by disproportion. You have only to attach an exaggerated importance to the secondary things of Christianity, and a diminished importance to the first things, and the mischief is done.

“Lastly, but not least, you may completely spoil the gospel by confused and contradictory directions… Confused and disorderly statements about Christianity are almost as bad as no statement at all. Religion of this sort is not evangelical."

3) Personal Application
It’s not difficult to identify distortions of the gospel. But as a pastor, one of my main concerns for genuine Christians is a more subtle one: either assuming the gospel or neglecting the gospel. I have found this to be the greatest threat to the gospel in my own life. Jerry Bridges echoes this concern when he writes, “The gospel is not only the most important message in all of history; it is the only essential message in all of history. Yet we allow thousands of professing Christians to live their entire lives without clearly understanding it and experiencing the joy of living by it.”

So let us not only apply discernment to the church at large, but to our own hearts as well. Let us, in the words of Jerry Bridges, “Preach the gospel to ourselves daily.” Let us heed Charles Spurgeon’s exhortation: “Abide hard by the cross and search the mystery of his wounds.” Let us respond to John Stott’s invitation: “The Cross is a blazing fire at which the flame of our love is kindled, but we have to get near enough for its sparks to fall on us.”

So how can we get near enough? The following are books that will position you to experience the transforming sparks of the gospel:

The Cross of Christ by John Stott. A personal favorite. Stott says of the Savior, “It was by his death that he wished above all else to be remembered.” This book won’t let you forget.

The Gospel for Real Life by Jerry Bridges. The man who taught me how to preach the gospel to myself will teach you to do the same.

The Message of Salvation by Philip Ryken. This excellent book deserves a broad readership. My oldest daughter recently thanked me for recommending this book to her and told me how much she was benefiting from this book. You will benefit as well.

The Message of the New Testament by Mark Dever. My good friend reveals the storyline of the Bible in each and every book of the New Testament. A must read for pastors but highly recommended for all. My wife has really enjoyed reading Mark’s book.

The Cross and Christian Ministry by D.A. Carson. For pastors this is another must-read. I’m indebted to Dr. Carson for this book. It has defined effective pastoral ministry for me, and I pray it will do the same for you.

That ought to get you started. Each of these books will draw you near enough to the “blazing fire of the cross so that its sparks” will fall on you and kindle fresh love for the Savior in your soul.