Category: Christianity

The restlessness in our lives and the persistence of Jesus

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Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.

— John 4:16-21

At Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, John Piper has been preaching through the book of John. The past weeks they have been looking at the story of Jesus and his encounter with the woman at the well. This past week they examined how Jesus spoke with her concerning her adultery and what it means to us as we read it:

You may move through sexual partners, like she did, or through friends, or jobs, or churches, or hobbies, or hairstyles, or wardrobes, or cars, or locations. Never able to settle with a kind of deeply contented identity in Christ, satisfied daily with the ever-springing water of his fellowship.

I don’t mean that the Christian life is static. But there is a difference between the confident movement of faith and the craving movement of frustration. On the one hand, there is restless movement from one thing to the next because we have no solid, satisfied identity in Christ. And on the other hand, we have Christ as our Fountain of life and we move with purposefulness and creativity in the life and power that this living water gives. There is a difference between the jumping from one thing to the next out of frustration and the moving purposefully out of faith.

Jesus is teaching us about ourselves as well as about his glorious sufficiency as water, prophet, savior, and Messiah.

The other thing that is happening in the story is that the woman, like us, is looking at all kinds of externals (water, adultery, where to worship) and is ignoring the inner issues. Jesus knows this and, while not trying to press her on her sin, is not going there either. Piper addresses this as well:

How many times have you been trying to explain to someone about how Jesus died for sinners and rose again to provide forgiveness and reconciliation and have the persons say, “What about the hate speech of right-wing fanatics?” Or “What about gay rights?” Or “What about the people who have never heard about Jesus?”

The remarkable thing about Jesus here is that he does not say, “Let’s stay on the subject, ma’am. We are talking about your adultery.” But neither does he let her define exactly where they are going next.

Jesus is willing to go with her to her topic, but not to her issue. Her issue is: Where do we worship? Her whole life is one of externals. She is dead on the inside, and all she can relate to now are superficial externals. Her distracting question only deals with geography (verse 20): “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

Jesus won’t deal at that level. He has gone into her heart, and that is what he will deal with. Verse 21: Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.” In other words, “We are at a juncture in history when the place of worship will simply be irrelevant.” Verse 23: “The hour is coming, and is now here [because I am here!], when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” The issue is not in this mountain or that mountain, but spirit and truth.

What you need, ma’am, is a spirit that is alive and a mind in love with truth.

The gospel does away with pride in my abilities

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Thanks much to Of First Importance for this:

“The gospel . . . is the wisdom of God because it doesn’t praise our intellects or advertise our strengths. It causes us to fall on our knees and acknowledge our weakness, our dependence, our terrible need. It causes us to look up to God as the great Savior. ‘It is by his doing that we are in Christ Jesus’ . . .. The gospel teaches us that our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption, and our wisdom are all gifts of God. The message of the gospel scuttles human pride because it reminds us that our life did not start with our choosing God but his choosing us. Therefore, all the glory is God’s.”

– Thomas Schreiner, “The Foolishness of the Cross” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (Fall 2002)

Humility: Clothes I’m having a hard time wearing

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Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

I Peter 5:5-7

Here’s the thing. God, I trust. He knows everything. He is all powerful. He is all wise. He is loving. He is holy. But a man, like me, is sinful. I know that I am a wretch. I have loved these verses for almost all my life as a Christian. I understand the need to be humble. I know God will take my anxieties and care for me because he is great. The part where I stumble is the first part, where it says to be subject to my elders and to clothe myself with humility toward another. And it makes me miserable.

I’m miserable because it shows my trust in God is a lie, and I’m not fooling anyone. Well, maybe myself until I see how I cannot trust God to work in a situation with another person. So, I act like I think God is big and I’m small and yet you’re somehow smaller than me. It’s not a good thing, and I see it like cancer in myself and people around me. These are clothes that we don’t want to wear, this humility to one another. Yes, it is so easy to see the sinfulness in those around us. But that is not the point. The point is to be humble to God, who made that person, and trust him to work things for our good and his glory.

American Idolatry: When your pleasure becomes your god

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There is a danger every day to make an idol out of something or someone in our lives. Because I live in a country and in a time when there is such a great deal of luxury and leisure time, it is a great danger. With that in mind, John Piper has written about 12 ways we can recognize the rise of covetousness in our lives:

Most of us realize that enjoying anything other than God, from the best gift to the basest pleasure, can become idolatry. Paul says in Colossians 3:5, “Covetousness is idolatry.”

“Covetousness” means desiring something other than God in the wrong way. But what does that mean—“in the wrong way”?

The reason this matters is both vertical and horizontal. Idolatry will destroy our relationship with God. And it will destroy our relationships with people.

All human relational problems—from marriage and family to friendship to neighbors to classmates to colleagues—all of them are rooted in various forms of idolatry, that is, wanting things other than God in wrong ways.

Piper goes on to identify 12 ways we can do this when it comes to enjoyment. He says enjoyment is becoming idolatrous when:

  1. It is forbidden by God.
  2. It is disproportionate to the worth of what is desired.
  3. It is not permeated with gratitude
  4. It does not see in God’s gift that God himself is more to be desired than the gift.
  5. It is starting to feel like a right, and our delight is becoming a demand.
  6. It draws us away from our duties.
  7. It starts to awaken a sense of pride that we can experience this delight while others can’t.
  8. It is oblivious or callous to the needs and desires of others.
  9. It does not desire that God be magnified as supremely desired through the enjoyment.
  10. It is not working a deeper capacity for holy delight.
  11. Its loss ruins our trust in the goodness of God.
  12. Its loss paralyzes us emotionally so that we can’t relate lovingly to other people.

This is just the list, read the article to get the full explanation. Be happy in God.

And now, some words for the nonrevolutionaries among us

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Ted Kluck, by way of coauthor Kevin DeYoung’s blog, has some words for you in an excerpt of their latest great book, Why We Love the Church:

A search on a popular Christian bookseller’s Web site revealed no less than sixty-two items with the word manifesto in the title and hundreds containing the term revolutionary. There are revolutionary books for teens. Ditto for stay-at-home moms. There’s a book about how Jesus was a revolutionary communicator, and how you can use His revolutionary communication skills in your home/business/church. The question then becomes, If we’re all revolutionaries, are any of us an actual revolutionary? Being a revolutionary used to mean that you overthrew a government; now it means that you’re a courageous enough visionary to have church on a golf course or in someone’s living room.

My point in all of this is not to make not-so-subtle jabs at revolutionary culture (maybe a little bit); rather, it is to encourage the scores of nonrevolutionaries in our midst, of which I am one. I want to encourage those of us who try really hard to pray for our families and friends, try to read our Bibles consistently, and share the gospel with those around us. Those of us who aren’t ready to chuck centuries worth of church history, and years of unglamorous but God-glorifying growth in the name of revolution.

I’m also a part of the generation that has produced more memoirs before the age of thirty-five than any other in history. We’re crazy about Christian narrative nonfiction, especially those “on the road” stories, no matter how trite or contrived they may be. We’re journeyers. We’re wanderers. We still haven’t found what we’re looking for. Jack Kerouac’s (or Donald Miller’s…or Lauren Winner’s) wayward children are all over the Christian book landscape.

These narrative titles all follow a similar pattern, in that in them experiences are had (a cross-country road trip, a self-finding excursion through Europe, a documentary chronicling the lameness of American Christians, a chronicle on how the author dropped out of church and subsequently “found” Jesus), and then those experiences are shared in book form. Many of these books are supposed to tell us that “community” is the answer, and individualism is bad, but at the end of the day these books are largely about the individual and his or her discoveries.

I am looking forward to this book. Both Ted and Kevin have a great way of getting right to the point in a helpful way. Don’t go find yourself. Find God and love the church.

 

What sustains us — God’s grace

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Matt Perman says this is his favorite John Piper sermon. I would agree with him. And, in light of what I posted yesterday, I say this not because it is John Piper preaching it, but rather because it gets me thinking about God’s grace — his sovereign grace, as Piper puts it – and how wonderful it is. I love the examples Piper uses in this sermon, but we could all come up with other great examples of God’s grace in our lives. Here are four good points to take away from it:

Jeremiah 32:36-41

Now therefore thus says the Lord God of Israel concerning this city of which you say, “It is given into the hand of the king of Babylon by sword, by famine, and by pestilence,”  “Behold, I will gather them out of all the lands to which I have driven them in My anger, in My wrath, and in great indignation; and I will bring them back to this place and make them dwell in safety. And they shall be My people, and I will be their God; and I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear Me always, for their own good, and for the good of their children after them. And I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; and I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me. And I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will faithfully plant them in this land with all My heart and with all My soul.” For thus says the Lord, “Just as I brought all this great disaster on this people, so I am going to bring on them all the good that I am promising them.”

Four Promises of Sovereign, Sustaining Grace

Notice four promises of sovereign, sustaining grace.

1. God Will Be Our God

God promises to be our God. Verse 38: “They will be my people and I will be their God.” All the promises to his people are summed up in this: “I will be your God.” That is, I will use all that I am as God—all my wisdom, all my power, and all my love—to see to it that you remain my people. All that I am as God, I exert for your good.

2. God Promises to Change Our Hearts

God promises to change our hearts and cause us to love and fear him. Verse 39: “I will give them one heart and one way that they may fear me always . . . (v. 40b) I will put the fear of me in their hearts.” In other words, God will not simply stand by to see if we, by our own powers, will fear him; he will sovereignly, supremely, mercifully give us the heart that we need to have, and give us the faith and the fear of God that will lead us home to heaven. This is sovereign, sustaining grace. (See Deuteronomy 30:6; Ezekiel 11:19-20; 36:27.)

3. God Promises We Will Not Turn Away from Him

God promises that he will not turn away from us and we will not turn away from him. Verse 40: “I will make an everlasting covenant with them that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; and I will put the fear of Me in their hearts so that they will not turn away from Me.” In other words, his heart work is so powerful that he guarantees we will not turn from him. This is what’s new about the new covenant: God promises to fulfill by his power the conditions that we have to meet. We must fear him and love him and trust him. And he says, I will see to that. I will “put the fear of me in their hearts”—not to see what they will do with it, but in such a way that “they will not turn from me.” This is sovereign, sustaining grace.

4. God Promises to Do This with Infinite Intensity

Finally, God promises to do this with the greatest intensity imaginable. He expresses this in two ways, one at the beginning and one at the end of verse 41: “And I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will faithfully plant them in this land with all My heart and with all My soul.” First he says that he will exert this sovereign, sustaining grace with joy: “I will rejoice over them to do them good.” Then he says (at the end of verse 41) that he will exert this sovereign, sustaining grace “with all [his] heart and withall [his] soul.”

Don’t let your mind get flabby. Give it some exercise.

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I do a lot of pointing at this blog. I know it. There is a lot of garbage out there and you don’t have to look hard to find it. Conversely, there are many good things that people are writing and saying that I feel are worthwhile and worth not only reading but passing along. That said, I want to remember for myself and point out to you, the reader, that reading worthwhile things (or some not so worthwhile) isn’t a substitute for using the brain God gave you.

Kevin DeYoung, blogging at DeYoung, Restless and Reformed, follows up a great post by John Piper with some great thoughts concerning hero worship and emulation that happens among Christians. Here is a part I found hit home with me, maybe you too:

Learning from a great teacher does not eliminate the need to think for ourselves. We need to make sure we are really convinced of the things we espouse, that we don’t simply believe what the men and women we respect believe. Don’t make the “celebrities” into a new magisterium. Respect their wisdom and experience, but always go back to the Scriptures. And don’t expect them to settle all your issues, because they haven’t faced all your issues. And besides, the men we look up to don’t always agree with each other on how to tackle certain issues.

This is something to really think through. We can appreciate great people we know, but ultimately remember that it’s God who is great and him we need to know best.

The ESV Study Bible now available as an ePub book

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Crossway Books announced Tuesday that the English Standard Version (ESV) Study Bible is now available for $14.99 as an ePub book for the iPhone, iPod Touch or other portable devices. To read it (if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch) use the free application Stanza. And, if you don’t have one of those devices, you can also download the free e-reader for your desktop or laptop (if you’re on a Mac) to have the ESV there if you wish.

If you think taking your tunes with you is cool imagine taking God’s word and the comprehensive, complementary material included with the ESV Study Bible. So, this is what we’re talking about:

  • 2 million words of Bible text and insightful teaching.
  • 20,000 notes-focusing especially on understanding the Bible text and providing answers to frequently raised issues.
  • Over 50 articles-including articles on the Bible’s authority and reliability; on biblical archaeology, theology, ethics, and personal application.
  • 200-plus charts-offering key insights and in-depth analysis in clear, concise outline form; located throughout the Bible.*
  • Over 200 maps-created with the latest digital technology, satellite images, and archaeological research; throughout the Bible.
  • 40 all-new illustrations-including renderings and architectural diagrams of the Tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, Solomon’s temple, Herod’s temple, the city of Jerusalem in Jesus’ time and throughout the history of Israel, and many more.

Overcome the fear of living

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I have mentioned it earlier, but I can’t recommend high enough Kevin DeYoung’s excellent “Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God’s Will.” This little book will have a deep impact on your view of approaching God’s will and what it means. Here is how DeYoung puts it:

The will of God isn’t a special direction here or a bit of secret knowledge there. God doesn’t put us in a maze, turn out the lights, and tell us, “Get out and good luck.” In one sense, we trust in the will of God as His sovereign plan for our future. In another sense, we obey the will of God as His good word for our lives. In no sense should we be scrambling around trying to turn to the right page of our personal choose-your-own-adventure novel.

God’s will for your life and my life is simpler, harder, and easier than that. Simpler, because there are no secrets we must discover. Harder, because denying ourselves, living for others, and obeying God is more difficult than taking a new job and moving to Fargo. Easier, because as Augustine said, God commands what He wills and grants what He commands.

Thank you to Kevin DeYoung for writing this book. Just do something. Buy this book and read it.

How about a little encouragement for a change?

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Kevin DeYoung gives some encouragement via his latest sermon, from Romans 16:

We probably don’t think of Paul has a great encourager, more of a champion of the gospel or defender of the faith, but the only reason we don’t see him encouraging others is because it happens so frequently. Could you find ways to build up those you love in front of others? We tend to put people in their place more easily. We mention the two things that bother us instead of the ten things we appreciate. Or we give a compliment so that we can tear them down (“He’s a good friend. Nice guy. But…” or “Bless her heart…”). Again, God isn’t asking us to be fake. He isn’t telling us to be mindlessly positive about everyone and everything. But frankly that’s not the problem for most of us. We could use the practice–in emails, letters, in everyday conversation –of building people up with encouraging words. How do you publicly talk about your spouse? Your church? Your pastor? The people in your church? Your parents? Your kids? Your co-workers? Are their legitimate opportunities to sincerely encourage them directly or affirm them before others?