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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| Grieving Over Someone Else's Sin can be instructive. |
Imagine that you love the Lord with all your heart, and not in the selfish way that some might imagine - that is, not because you "have" to in order to make God look upon you favorably enough to bless you or something like that. I mean imagine that the love you have for God is the real kind, and not just self preservation dressed up as "love".
Now imagine that you have a son or a daughter who is just coming out of puberty, one who used to, as far as you could tell, love the Lord whom you love. You enjoyed those shared times where you could sing to, and converse about, God together. You enjoyed what you felt was a deepening fellowship with your child, a person whom you have invested yourself in every day of their life; and then imagine that you discover one day that their love of the Lord was not what you thought it was. Imagine that whatever facade had convinced you that they were on the same page as you, has begun to peel back, and you begin to glimpse the horrible truth --that your son or daughter loves their sin more than they love anything else, and that they have just been faking their own love for God because doing so in your house was the most profitable way to live.
Now, get past the sense of betrayal, and the hurt of realizing how much of what you thought was faith was in fact your own aspirations being projected on them, set aside your own hope-driven blindness, and sense of utter failure, and you are left with an ache that cannot be undone by demanding they conform themselves externally to the godly behavior you wish was flowing from within.
This ache is a wound in your own soul that bleeds at the thought that sin, like a devouring lion, is destroying not only who you thought they were, but also everything you had hoped they would be. This ache, if you can imagine it (or worse, if you have actually known it first hand) can be a powerfully instructive, but perhaps not in the way you think.
Can I be blunt with you, dear reader? You would probably love everyone this way if you had the same investment in everyone. That is, if you felt that their loss was in fact your loss, then at the very least you would, for purely selfish reasons, desire that each and every one of us be set free from the bondage to sin. The plain hard truth is that selfishness is still the greatest motivator for much of what we do - and the instruction typically given to people is to try and generate something positive through that same selfishness, rather than to abandon it altogether.
Let me explain that, because it is probably confusing for some.
I say that this sort of ache I described is instructive, not as an example of how we are to love others - good gravy no! I will not call you to generate (or try to spiritually discover) this sort of love/desperation and then apply it to others. That would be pointlessly futile, and even counter-productive to genuine faith.
You see, the reason a person aches for someone else in this way (and simultaneously fails to ache for everyone in this way) is because they expected their investment to produce something for them, and this sudden turn threatens the return on their investment. For all the poetry in the picture above, beneath it all a selfish motive persists.
The instruction I mean to give is not that you should try and mimic investing yourself in others the way you invest yourself in those close to you, in order that you may generate a similarly powerful (but flawed on account of being similarly selfish at its core) affection, whereby you will be motivated to "ache" for others with the same ferocity with which you ache for those close to you. Have I said good gravy already? Good gravy no! I shall not call you to some pragmatic "solution" dressed up as something spiritual.
Rather my instruction began with this (hopefully) powerful imagery, to underscore the fact that even the most visceral motivations we can imagine for such things as intercessory prayer, cannot and do not produce, or even give vent to) the love of God by which we are commanded to love others.
Is your child wayward? That is going to hurt you in proportion to how dearly you love the Lord, and again, how much you have invested in your child. Yet the whole world is wayward, and yet you do not hurt for the world the way you would hurt for your little one. This ought to show you that whatever it is that you feel for your child is (at the very least) mixed with (at the core) something selfish. Your paternal concern is real, painful, and even right and proper, but ultimately, and genuinely, it is self serving at the core of its being.
To extend a metaphor, the love with which God loves your child is by no means superior to the love with which God loves your neighbor, or even your enemy. God's love does not wax or wane depending upon how much you have invested yourself in someone. This you know. So don't imagine that because you ache for someone that this is "God's love" being expressed in you. If you don't ache that way for everyone, it is just your own affections that are being roused because the world isn't doing what you want it to.
With this in mind, I say, perhaps too boldly, that anyone who holds some example of love, powerful or weak, and then teaches you that it is the job of the Christian to imitate that same kind of love --applying it to others, is teaching you to adhere to a form of religious behavior, nothing more.
At this point, I hope that some of you reading will begin to look at the way you love others, and find in your introspection a truth you don't often look at. Are you one who is beginning to see yourself as having failed to truly love others? Let me say something a little provocative: if you don't see yourself in this, you're quite blind.
Consider the thought: if the love that we express for those closest to us is riddled through with selfishness, how worthless will a self-generated imitation of that kind of love be? Knowing then that we are commanded to love others, we are left with one of the most real, and common, Christian dilemmas: we are commanded to do something we most certainly cannot do.
Don't get me wrong, we can certainly put on a show. We can certainly go through the motions externally, and this we can even do with profound emotion and satisfaction, but ultimately, our mimicry is nothing more than self serving pragmatism, and for all our effort, it is spiritually worthless misleading. That which is born of the flesh, is not spiritual.
The truth is that we cannot love others, not the way that God commands, and God isn't in the business of creating in us a well of new, but now "righteous", love out of which we may now, as Christians, love others. Until we receive our redeemed bodies, we remain, at our core, sinfully flawed. We are (and remain in this world) broken vessels that cannot hold water. In other words, the love with which we are called to love others is not our own, tragically flawed love, but rather with Christ's love.
Don't mistake me, I do not deny that we can and do feel affection for others, and we can do nice things for people. We can ache for others and all that - but the love that God calls us to love others with has no self serving component mixed into it. It is a perfect, selfless love - a self sacrificing love. A love that cannot originate in, and ultimately cater to, self. A love that you are so entirely incapable of generating, that the way out of this dilemma will sound impossible, and even incomprehensible to some, and yet is perhaps the most simple thing one might ever learn.
You see the bible tells us that we are to walk by faith. Walking, in this sense, is a metaphor for the way we conduct ourselves on the earth; it describes the things we do, and the way we do them. Walking then is a metaphor for the way we conduct ourselves, and if our conduct includes being commanded to "love others" (and it does), then even loving others is something that must be done by and through faith.
But there is the rub isn't it? How does one "love" another by faith? I mean, for some that question is going to be about as obtuse as asking how to "smell" the color blue. Loving by faith? How does one do that?
The problem with many, I suppose, is that even after you explain to them that their concept of loving others is actually self serving and flawed; and even after you convince them that they need to learn to love as Christ loves, when you actually explain the way that they are supposed to love, they typically, and unconsciously, take what you have said and attempt to apply it in the same framework as the thing you are telling them to step away from. When we ask, "How do I...?" we demonstrate that we are still self centered in our approach.
The question should be, "How does Christ...?"
"Ah", says, the reader, "I am beginning to see the tipping of your hand", but let's not skip ahead. Many will take this tidbit and imagine they know where this is going, and that they get it already, so they don't have to pay attention to what is coming next, but to these I say, "hold up a little, it may not be what you think". You see, many are going to hear me say "How does Christ...?" and will immediately reframe that into the exact same self-o-centric framework that we are trying to get away from. The only difference is they will modified the notion ever so slightly to, "how do I make Christ do it...?"
Obviously, we can't make Christ do anything. Our "faith" is not divine puppet fuel, whereby we exercise it, and God reacts by moving His mighty puppet-arms. Faith means that we trust what God has done, and is doing. It means that we trust that the love of Christ that is in us through the Holy Spirit is sufficient for what God commands. It means we abandon once and for all our failing attempts at producing or "receiving" a love of our own in order to use that love as a motivator from which (hopefully) new obedience can flow.
Do you get it? I mean, I think of the Catholic who imagines that God's grace serves to impart actual, personal, righteousness in the believer. Such that the believer eventually becomes so personally righteous (by grace!) that God becomes obligated to honor their righteousness by granting them salvation. We know how utterly confused and wrong that notion is, but are we not doing the same thing when we think that God imparts new love to us, by which we are supposed to love others? Are we not imagining (or hoping) that Christ eventually will impart enough "love" in us that we may draw from this personal supply of love in order to obey our Lord? When this is our understanding, and we fail to love others, we are left to conclude that Christ isn't doing much in the way of supplying our love --which itself causes many to conclude that they must not be saved (enough), and so they redouble their efforts to try and get Christ to do what they imagine He is "failing" to do - or worse, they conclude that no matter how they work, they will never be able to be perfect enough to warrant the bestowment of this personal love from which all things Christian become easy-peasy. Or alternately they just give up on Christianity because it doesn't "work".
Well, having said this much, one might imagine that I am overlooking the fact that genuine affection can and does show up in our lives, and that we can ache for others even as strongly as we might ache for a wayward spouse or child. I do not mean to diminish our grief - that raw emotion we may feel when someone we care about begins to fall away from the faith, or is struggling against sin. The pain in such instances is real, and there is nothing godly about ignoring it, or making light of, or diminishing it. What I write here, concerning the nature of these emotions, is not meant to suggest that such emotions are out of place or something to avoid. Rather I say only that we must avoid the temptation to create a motivation for obedience by trying to replicate these emotions in other situations as the "magic key" to Christian success in loving others.
The bottom line is this: We are more likely to experience real grief over another person's sin when the person is someone we are intimately acquainted with (such as a spouse, a parent, a close friend, or a son or daughter). That strong desire that forms in us, that they would repent and be restored is not something we feel for others who are sinning, because (frankly) we are not as invested in others. The instruction is not that we try and invest in others in order to generate stronger feelings, and thereby generate an emotional motivation that is a little wider in scope than just family and friends. Rather the instruction is to recognize that the reason we grieve stronger for those close to us, and fail to grieve as strongly for those who are not close to us, is because we have invested in those close to us, and stand to lose more on that account. Our grief is tainted, if you will, with self interest. Because this is so, we are taught not rely upon our emotions - even our most intense emotions, to motivate our obedience (concerning the command to love others). The command to love is a command to depend on Christ's love, and not our own love.
That's probably still a little fuzzy for some, but I am going to put it out there anyway. Perhaps it will help someone anyway.Labels: Grief, love, motivation, sanctification |
posted by Daniel @
7:58 AM
7 comment(s)
 
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| Learning To Love Others |
You have heard, no doubt, someone say that love is an action word. The grammarian in me chafes a little at that, preferring to express this particular thought with less poetry and more precision, thus: love is a verb.
A verb, if you will recall, is an action word. So it may sound unnecessarily pedantic, or perhaps only superficially didactic to say that I prefer to use the word "verb" instead of "action word" when in fact a verb is an action word.
Yet I think the distinction will be seen as a good one to make if I explain what it is that so concerns me, that I would bother to make the distinction. When most of us think of love, we think of an emotion - and not just any emotion, but the most intimate sort of emotion we can conceive of, and in particular, an emotion that cannot be summoned by choice - it is either there, or it is not there. I can't force myself to "feel" love for someone, even if I am commanded to do so.
When I say that love is an action word, the impression many of you will get is that if you or I truly feel the emotion of love, it will cause us to do things in response to that feeling; that is, when I say that love is an action word, you may think I am saying that love provokes me to action; or said in terms of logical order: love is the cause of or motivation for the action.
The biggest problem with thinking of love in terms of experiencing an affection that provokes us to act , is that when we are commanded to love, we are unable to do so because the emotion hasn't shown up. If we expect love to fall on us and thereby empower our obedience, we are going to be pretty confused when it doesn't. We will likely conclude that we are either doing something wrong, or more likely, that God is so displeased with us (on account of the fact that we are not perfect), that He is withholding the love until we can make ourselves acceptable to Him through a greater effort on our part to love Him and obey Him.
It should be obvious, but it isn't always, so I will say it plainly: this is an immature and wrong-headed way of thinking of love.
Yet I suspect that many preachers think (and preach) that the problem isn't a wrong understanding of love, but rather a wrong understanding of the process by which God imparts the love (i.e. emotion) that He (according to this avenue of thought) commands. These will use a passage like the healing of the ten lepers (recall that they were "healed as they went") to suggest that God expects us to act like we love someone (fake it), that is, if we "prime the pump", God will reward our fakery by granting us the genuine article.
This approach, no doubt, will produce (on some level) a positive effect. The question is whether the effect is a spiritual one. Can I give you an example? I used to hate cats. My wife one day "rescued" a cat from the local animal shelter, and I was forced to live with the thing. Guess what? In a few months I started to like the little fur ball. Is this because God enlarged my heart? No. I started to like the cat because it seemed to prefer me to my wife. You know what? I still don't like cats, but I did like that one. We got rid of it however because I found out that I am allergic to cats. In the same way, if you invest yourself in another person - even someone you presently have no affection for, there is a good chance that you will eventually find in that person something that you like. There is nothing spiritual in that, any heathen, secular humanist, atheist, or person in any other world religion can generate this kind of affection - you don't need Jesus for that; and that is why I think it is a carnal, rather than a spiritual, approach to the problem of lovelessness - and worse, it is attempting to create a missing emotion - which was never the problem in the first place.
The scriptures tell me that I love myself, and that you love yourself too. Some of us are so in love with ourselves that we feel the world doesn't love us as much as we deserve - and so we are displeased with our lot, and wish we had more. This sort of narcissism may well produce a very real discontent within, but this is driven by self love, and not indicative of a lack thereof.
If we all know how to love ourselves, and we do, then we can deal biblically with the problem of failing to love others. The Apostle Paul describes our self love in Ephesians 5:29 thus, "for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church" - how is this love expressed? It is expressed in terms of nourishing and cherishing. We feed ourselves, we clothe ourselves, we make arrangements for our needs, and even for our own entertainment. This is described by Paul as on par with how Christ loves the church.
The command to love others as yourself is a command that every last one of us can understand perfectly. There is no reason for this command to remain vague or esoteric. No reason for any believer to wonder how to keep this command, or what is required to be able to keep it. Every last one of us knows how to care for his own flesh - and that same care that instructs everything we do, ought to extend beyond ourselves and into others. If I have food, and you do not, and I eat my food while you go hungry - I am not loving you. It isn't an emotion, it is a verb.
The love that I have for myself is not an emotion, it is selfishness, plain and simple. We love others when we set this self love aside, and instead direct the same care and attention to others. It isn't an emotion, it is an act of worship.
This is the main problem for most of us: everyone wants to go to avoid hell, but practically speaking, who wants to actually worship God? Can't we just go to church, and read our bibles, and attend functions and stuff? I mean, isn't singing a "church" song an act of worship? Yada, yada. How many of us really regard our obedience as worship? Let me tell you that the reason most believers obey, when they are not inclined to obey, is not out of love, but out of fear. That is, it isn't an act of worship, it is an act of self preservation.
I hope the Holy Spirit will connect the dots for you: self love = artificial, fear driven obedience; denying self = worship motivated obedience.
When we say that love casts out fear, we are saying that if you obey as a genuine act of worship, it isn't fear that God is going to damn you (or worse) for failing to do so that is driving you, rather it is the love that God calls you to perform that is driving you. Not an emotion that overwhelms you, but a realization (that the Holy Spirit grants you) that you cannot love your self and love God at the same time - you have to let go of the one in order to grasp the other. It is a lesson that every last one of us is capable of understanding, because we all love our selves. If I know how to love me (and I do), I know what God requires of me when it comes to others. I cannot love God, or anyone else, if my first and primary concern is fulfilling my own desires (loving myself).
I suppose it is sort of like rocket science, in that if you don't know the math, you will never get it no matter how simple someone tries to make it. So also, if you don't understand that "dying to self" is the same as "living for others" or that "loving God" is the same as "denying self", you simply won't get it, because you haven't understood the spiritual math. The equation is pretty simple though, so I will give it to you:
You must, as an act of worship, redirect the love with which you love yourself, at God.
Doing this is called:
- denying yourself, or
- taking up your cross, or
- living the crucified, or
- being spiritually filled, or
- not loving the world, or
- loving God with your whole heart, or
- putting to death the old man/self
To be sure, I could make that list pretty long, but you probably get the point even with such a truncated and beggarly list as this. The point is that if you want to stop floating around in your Christian life wondering what is missing, you should sit down and look at how much you love yourself, and then set your mind and heart on redirecting all that effort away from self and into serving God.
Christ showed you what love looked like when He served you. Now go and do the same in the service of God.Labels: Bunk; self love, Christ, love, sanctification |
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posted by Daniel @
7:40 AM
8 comment(s)
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| Terms of Endearment. |
I have never, to my knowledge, referred to my wife as "Spousie-poo".
Yet as I come to think of it, having invested myself this far in coming up with a silly term of endearment, I wouldn't mind tossing it out there tonight and see if it annoys her or not. You never know. Our sense of humor runs along that line where the absurd is funny.
Notwithstanding, any use of the term "spousie-poo" would be rather forced and affected. It doesn't flow from the heart, but rather is something we say because we think it might have the right affect.
I recall as a young man, in perhaps my first long term relationship (which thankfully did not end in marriage), I was "into" Pink Floyd, and hearing Roger Waters croon on to some hypothetical woman in the song, calling her "babe" I thought I might try spinning that one. For the next few months I tried to call my then girl-friend "babe" and make it sound normal, but even after several months it still came off as thin and insincere.
I remember my father used to call my mom "honey" all the time. I find I sometimes let that one slip with my own wife but it isn't the term I use most often. The term I use most often is sweetie. I don't know why. Sometimes I shorten that to just "sweets". I have never been able to call my wife "sugar" with a straight face, though I have managed to call her "doll" and "doll-face" a few times to my own amusement.
I call my both my sons "buddy" and all my girls "sweetie" (just like their mom!). I think if I had a dog, I might call him "fuzzball" or maybe "Chewie" since I always thought Hans Solo was cool.
I don't know why we use terms of endearment, but I do know that scripture uses a term of endearment to describe Christ, "Beloved".
God's love for Christ ought to give us pause, and fill us with wonder. Then when we can almost catch our breath, we should remember that all of us who are in Christ are so loved.Labels: love |
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posted by Daniel @
11:35 AM
1 comment(s)
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| 1005: Do not be distressed. |
There is a scene in Genesis (c.f. Chapter 45), where Joseph's brothers are reacquainted with him. Recall that as a youth, his brothers despised him first because their father favored him, and again because he had dreamt two dreams that, when interpreted, suggested his brothers would all bow down to him one day. On a day when the brothers were together, and far away from their father, Joseph came to them, and having seen him approaching from a long way off, they determined to kill him.
That's some serious hatred.
Now to be sure, not all the brothers were okay with murdering Joseph. Reuben sought to preserve Joseph by suggesting they kill him by tossing him into a deep and dry pit (where presumably Joseph would die of thirst). That way, I suppose, they can tell themselves they (personally) didn't kill him, they just put him in a pit. Thirst killed him - or something like that. I am speculating of course. What is certain however is that putting him in the pit was intended either to end his life, or perhaps to just hold him while they thought of how they were going to kill him.
It happened of course, and you know the story, that they saw an opportunity in the form of a passing caravan, and rather than simply let Joseph die in a pit (or alternately, kill him themselves), they should sell him, thereby ridding themselves of Joseph, and making a profit at the same time.
That was the last time they saw Joseph, and now he was standing before them endowed with power over them by virtue of both his exalted status, and again by their pronounced and obvious poverty. Here was a man that had it in his power to enslave them all, or worse, have them executed.
Can you imagine? Here was the man they had abused so long ago, and it was he who now had supreme power over them. The roles were reversed big time, and they were cut to the core with this knowledge - stunned by it; suddenly aware that a "biblical proportion" come-uppence had just opened their barred door, and waltzed into the center of their lives, and that they were powerless to do anything. What little squeaks might have come out of them had someone squeezed them in that moment I can only guess, but here is what Joseph said to them, "And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life".
The thing is, even though Joseph clearly forgave them, they didn't really believe it.
Oh sure, they lived as though they were reconciled to Joseph, but deep down they said to themselves, Joseph is only forgiving us for our father's sake. I say this because when Jacob passed away, the brothers resumed their old terror once again, even putting a post mortem command into Jacob's mouth concerning their well being. We see this in the last chapter of Genesis:When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, "It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him." So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, "Your father gave this command before he died, 'Say to Joseph, Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.' And now, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father." This is the not a picture of people who believed Joseph the first time - they doubted his sincerity even as they lived years in the proof of it. How did Joseph respond to their fear and doubt? Read and see:But Joseph said to them, "Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones." Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them. Okay, so what does that picture.
I mean, seriously.
There are believers today who ought rightly to be called doubters. They doubt God loves them, they doubt God *really* has forgiven them. They live their lives in the fear that God will suddenly realize that they still commit sin, and in His wrath He will disown them. They refuse to believe, just as Joseph's brothers refused to believe, that there could truly be forgiveness for them.
Their problem is the same problem as Joseph's brothers were experiencing - just as they didn't trust that Joseph had really forgiven them, so these, though they claim saving faith, do not trust that God will forgive them in the end.
Don't be like that. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Do you doubt God's love or His forgiveness? Maybe you doubt His steadfastness or immutability? These do not persist in you because God's character is lacking, they persist because your knowledge and certainty of God's character is lacking.
If this is you, then I say read the bible ... moron1.
1Of course I mean "moron" in jest, but the admonition to read scripture is dead serious.Labels: Advice, faith, love |
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posted by Daniel @
7:15 AM
2 comment(s)
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| Righteousness vs. Righteousness, etc. |
I must assume, for brevity's sake, that your theology recognizes Christ's own righteousness as the sole (and therefore only) grounds upon which you stand justified before God. I will pause here however, at the outset, to spend a moment making sure you understand the chicken/egg, or rather, the horse/cart relationship between righteousness and obedience.
Whatever righteousness is, it certainly is linked in some way to God's will. We might say that God is perfectly obedient to His own will, and in this way define His obedience to His own will as righteousness. For many people that would be a sufficient definition of righteousness; especially given how well that kind of definition lends itself to scale: Righteousness, they would say, is produced by obeying God's will.
Yet that puts the cart of obedience before the horse of righteousness, so that a person produced new righteousness through present acts of obedience. The truth is that a state of righteousness is not, and cannot be, produced by any number of righteous acts. We cannot reclaim perfection by acts of righteousness subsequent to the fall anymore than we can reclaim virginity by and through abstinence. Thus obedience does not produce righteousness; yet obedience - the kind that is described as worshipping in spirit and in truth - can flow from real righteousness, though not from any righteousness that originates in ourselves.
Consider Jesus. He didn't become righteous by obeying the law of Moses. The reason Jesus obeyed the law of Moses was because Jesus was righteous. That is what righteousness produces: obedience. If it were the other way around, if obedience produced righteousness, then Jesus, during the incarnation, was without righteousness until such time as He could comprehend and obey the world of God. The idea that our unchanging Lord lacked righteousness for a time is, of course, absurd. Jesus never experienced a lack of righteousness, not prior to, during, or following the incarnation - and He never will. He had always been righteous and it was on account of this self existent righteousness that Christ obeyed. His obedience revealed the fact that He was righteous, just as our disobedience reveals that we are not.
Can I restate that last point in a way that might help to put the fact that Christ was righteous into a biblical context? The fact that Jesus was the only righteous man who had ever been born (Adam wasn't born) revealed that Jesus alone was the Messiah. His righteousness proved it. The opposite is also true, and worthy of note: the fact that we are not righteous shows that we are not the Messiah. The law of Moses is the tutor that teaches us who the Messiah is. He is the one who can keep the Law of Moses. The law is the tutor that brings us to Christ, first in that it identifies the Christ, and secondly in that it identifies us as in need of Christ, since it proves to us that we our selves are not righteous. Even if we could keep the law from now until the day we die, it would not undo our current state of unrighteousness.
I mention this because the quick point I hope to make in this post has to do with the distinction between [a] being right with God in Christ, and [b] what we would commonly call acts of righteousness.
Let me give you an example using the virginity/abstinence model again: A widowed mother determines that she will not remarry after the death of her spouse. She raises the children she has without remarrying, and thereby lives a life of perfect celibacy. Does/Can her rigid and perfect celibacy restore her virginity? Unless you are trying to make points in a liberal university for how soft-hearted and tenderly kind you are (not to mention how fluffy and air-headed your thinking tends to be) you are going to answer that no, celibacy cannot restore a person to a state of virginity. In this same way, no righteous act can restore a state of righteousness.
That single truth is foundational to a right understanding of sanctification, by the way.
The person who doesn't understand the relationship between [i] a state of righteousness, and [ii] their own acts of righteousness, will often fall into the error of meritorious works. These may try to "be righteous" in order to recapture (by "righteous" acts of merit) God's favor. In fact, they may well regard sanctification as simply doing things that are "righteous", for the sake of staying in God's good books. People that fall into this error conclude that you become more sanctified as you force yourself to greater and greater acts of righteousness.
Of course in practice few (if any) every progress very far on that road. They try, they fail, they try again, they fail again, and then they start to get used to failure, so they don't bother trying as hard. Then they feel guilty, so then they try really, really hard, maybe even recommitting themselves to Christ, and "getting serious" with all their failure - only to fail at that too (eventually). They continue (usually) until the despondency of their unending failure becomes sufficient to convince them that they are either [1] not Christians, or [2] that God can't (or won't) help them. Either way they make a shipwreck of what they originally were given.
Back to our opening thought for a moment...
What a right thinking believer refers to "his righteousness" is not actually his own righteousness, but the righteousness of Christ that is his through his having been crucified with Christ, having died with Christ, and most importantly, having been raised with Christ. He is a recipient of Christ's righteousness - the same righteousness from which Christ's own acts of obedience flowed, becomes the well from which the believer's acts of righteousness flow. The believer does not merely have Christ's righteousness put to my account for the sake of a justified standing before God - but the believer has access to the Christ's own righteousness through so strong a union that even death was not able to break it. For the believer became a partaker of Christ's own righteousness through faith, and more than having this same righteousness accounted to him, the believer has this righteousness through the union described in Romans six as a baptism into Christ, a union whereby we received the life and righteousness of Christ directly (in the person of the Holy Spirit) who then indwells us and moves us to act in accord with His own righteousness.
I want to be clear about what that means. It means that I am not personally righteous apart from the righteousness of Christ. Succinctly stated: I am not righteous at all (in and of myself), nor do I (or can I) become righteous by engaging in the doing works that are themselves considered righteous. That may confuse some people, but it is true never-the-less. Doing something righteous does not impart righteousness to us.
Here then is the doctrine of righteousness: I am a partaker of Christ's own eternal righteousness, and this by faith, and not by any works of righteousness that I might do. If a work I do is a genuinely righteous work, the work itself does not imbue me with righteousness, nor does the righteous deed flow from my own personal righteousness - but the work flows from Christ who is in me through the indwelling Holy Spirit, and it flows from His righteousness that I have become both [a] a recipient of, and [b] am a vehicle for.
While this is an entirely true accounting of the nature of truly righteous deeds (and when I say "truly righteous" deeds I mean those deeds that flow from Christ's own righteousness and not from any inherent personal righteousness that I might imagine myself to possess.), yet it does not account for those acts that we or anyone else might do, as a personal act of charity or goodness.
Is it Christ who is at work in the Muslim/Buddhist/Atheist/non-Christian who feeds the poor? Is this not simply an adherence to a false religion or moral framework? Don't these people simply believe, deep down, that their adherence to these acts of charity/kindness/goodness increase their odds of a better afterlife, or maybe even just a better reputation in this one? We don't want to confuse acts of self preservation or self promotion - acts that ultimately flow from selfishness, for acts that flow from Christ's own righteousness.
Each of us, regardless of our religion or lack thereof, is inclined by our fallen nature, to serve our own best interests. If we imagine that doing good will produce for us a better afterlife, or that doing evil will secure us a worse one, doesn't it stand to reason that we choose to respond to sense of self preservation or self interest that we will at the very least limit our evil, and attempt to perform (at the very least) some few pacifying "good" deeds? Few people think that deeply about their own motivations. They live in a world where good and evil are defined not by their motivations, but by the act itself. This sort of naivety is as pervasive as it is unchallenged. We might even call it common knowledge.
Self preservation/interest is the underlaying motivation for every single "good" act performed by anyone outside of Christ. That is what Isaiah means when he says that even our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. No one, Christian or otherwise, can do a good work in and of themselves - every such act performed outside of Christ is an act of selfishness dressed up as something better. Whether it benefits someone else or not, whether it is big or little - the outcome of the act does not define whether it is righteous or not - but the heart that it flowed from does. Every wise person puts away money for their retirement. No one enjoys living in the moment with less, but we are willing to do so in order to avoid living without in our old age. Many are willing to do good and forsake evil today because doing so is like putting away something for their future afterlife. Others may benefit from their self preserving efforts, but it is their own comfort which is the ultimate motivation, and not the comfort of others. That is the moral economic that drives every false religion. That's "karma" - do unto others in order to secure the best afterlife for yourself...
The problem with that formula is that it rests upon the flawed idea that we become righteous by doing things that in and of themselves are universally considered righteous: taking in orphans, feeding the poor, etc.. in fact, most of what passes for righteousness today is really just deceitful fruit that grows from our own self service or self preservation.
But this post isn't intended to define the difference between truly righteous acts and those self serving acts that only seem selfless. This post is concerned instead with the subtle distinction between our being righteous, and our doing deeds that flow from that righteousness.
If we think our righteousness is being generated by, or maintained by good works (i.e. righteous deeds), then we not only [a] misunderstand our own righteousness (for we have none in and of our selves, and look only to Christ's righteousness which we are partakers of by faith), but we [b] misunderstand works of righteousness altogether.
I said earlier that a right understanding of this distinction is required for a right understanding of our sanctification. Some are taught that the moment they sin they fall out of a righteous standing, and into an unrighteous one. This is just bad theology, but I fear that needs some qualification...
God doesn't abandon the believer the moment the believer sins. The Spirit of Christ within that believer remains within that believer according to the promise given in the new covenant - God does not leave us, God does not forsake us, but continues to work that same work in us that drew us to Him when we were yet unsaved.
Some cannot accept such a thought without qualifying it in such a way as to make it mean almost the opposite of what they say. I am talking about those who use the language of "broken fellowship". Theses make a distinction between [1] our status as God's children (which they would defend with all their strength as being impeccable, unbreachable, and eternally secure no matter what) and [2] our "fellowship" which they would argue is severed the moment we sin.
Severed fellowship? ...huh??
I know this will shock some of you who have been swallowing this pabulum since the cradle, but I have to say, I think this is a wrong-headed (albeit, well meaning) teaching.
Listen: When my conscience is quiet within me, and I am walking in obedience, I am at peace with my conscience, and so are you. That is what the language of scripture tells us to expect - that is what is supposed to be our personal experience according to God's word. I know (from scripture) that knowingly transcending my conscience not only sears it, but grieves the Holy Spirit within me; but God doesn't walk away from His work in me at this point. God doesn't stand suddenly aloof in His work in me on account of my transgression; neither does He withhold His blessings from me. The story of the prodigal son doesn't have the father leaving the son... When I sin, I lose the joy of my salvation until such time as I repent of my sin. You who are the Lord's and have sinned know by your own witness that this is true.
Some people describe the feelings that are associated with having sinned - the guilt etc. - as experiencing a "broken fellowship" between themselves and God. I understand what they are trying to describe, or at least I understand what the first person who ever used that phrase probably meant. He was describing the sensation of guilt that Satan uses to keep the sinning believer from getting off the ground, where he has fallen on his face, and continuing on in trusting in God. That is the language of severance and separation - the language of the sheep being singled out and separated from the flock - the language of hopelessness and despair. You are out of fellowship with God! Your sin has severed God's love for you! You are unclean and dirty, a hypocrite and a false believer. You don't deserve to be called God's child. You are false and phoney, and until and unless you can prove otherwise, God wants nothing more to do with you. You are out of fellowship.
It is bad enough that our enemy is so well versed in this attack, but he has the most unlikely accomplices in those who are in the church, for many a Joe-has-been-a-Christian-for-years not only falls on his face under that assault, but then becomes a unwitting soldier in the enemies army in promoting this propaganda to others. This one uses the language of broken fellowship to teach that God sets aside those who stumble until such time as they "make things right".
When I first became a believer, I wondered at all the wonders of Christian-ese. God told this person such and such, and showed another this and that. This guy over here is out of fellowship with God, etc. etc. I thought people were hearing voices, seeing things, and experiencing some sort of tangible mystical union that I, for all my fervor, had never known. Surely there was something lacking in my faith, lacking in my walk, lacking in my zeal. The harder I tried to apprehend these wonderful experiences, the more convinced I became that either something was entirely wrong with my faith, or something was entirely wrong with my understanding of these things.
In time I came to see that these people weren't hearing voices - at least not the rational ones. Likewise, God wasn't showing people things visually and in person, this was just the language they adopted so that every intuition they felt (or heartburn for that matter) was explained as being spiritual significant. Many did all kinds of wacky and unbiblical things in the name of these ... er.. passions. They pursued these experiences, and believed their imaginations even when doing so led them to believe that God was directing them to do things that were inexcusably contrary to His word.
I threw all that in the trash early on in my walk of faith - trusting that the same God whose careful stewardship over His eternal commands ended in a book that hasn't changed one jot or tittle over the course of millennia - that is, the same God who went out of His way, as it were, to make sure that His truth came to mankind objectively, and without a shadow of turning (if you will), could not possibly be the God of intuitive, subjective, spiritisms. We are told to test the spirits, and I find the "spirit" of interpreting my own intuition came up lacking.
Yet I held onto the notion of "broken fellowship" for a long time, since I knew that when I purposely and willfully set aside obedience in favor of entertaining some temptation, that I felt absolutely awful, and full of shame, and far, far, away from God. I was told that this was the conviction of the Holy Spirit - but it wasn't conviction I was feeling, it was condemnation.
Do you want to know when the Holy Spirit convicts you of sin? He convicts you before you do it. I marvel that people go to such elaborate lengths to try and articulate the difference between Holy Spirit conviction, and Satanic accusation. Listen: The Holy Spirit convicts you up front: "don't do this, it is a sin" that's Holy Spirit conviction. It works in concert with your conscience, assuming you haven't entirely seared it into deadness. Once you have sinned, then the enemy accuses you. You are not a real believer, you are not God's child, God doesn't love you, God won't forgive you, you alone must atone for your transgression some way, you must so mourn over your sin that God knows you're really, really sorry - and until you do, don't expect to have any fellowship with God!
Hear this: The Holy Spirit, after you sin, is the voice of reconciliation. It is the Holy Spirit who continues to draw you to God even in the onslaught of these accusations. It is the Holy Spirit that comforts you in the mire of your sin, who (through scripture) reminds you that you are God's child and -that- through faith. While the enemy works to devour you, the Holy Spirit continues to draw you to God, just as He was drawing you to God prior to your sin. Notice I don't say that the Holy Spirit is drawing you "back" to God, as though God has gone somewhere. God didn't go anywhere, and His work in you didn't come to a halt just because you fell on your face on the battlefield. All that has happened is that you have served your own flesh instead of God, and in doing so, denied yourself peace and joy. You have become the prodigal son, who has taken all that God gives, and tried to enjoy it apart from Him. He hasn't turned away, but you are trying to take what He gives of Himself, and enjoy it in a vacuum.
I could go on and on (and I am sure my friend David Kjos will testify that I have been doing that for the past ten paragraphs... Thanks David), but the notion of broken fellowship is grossly exaggerated in many congregations, and even out right wrong-headed in some. When a person has this kind of thinking, they embark on trying to "get right" with God, in order to restore this mystical fellowship, that apparently is brokered through their own obedience, or worse, emotional state, or subsequent ability to re-remind themselves that they are acceptable to God in, and only in, Christ.
Thus their sanctification suffers for it, since they are constantly falling flat on their sinful faces, and taking forever to convince themselves that they are back in God's good book, only to once again fall on their face at the next "big" temptation.
Having thought about this problem for many years now, and again, from many angles, I think people fall into this sort thing because they are on some level convinced that the things they do will form the reality of their faith, rather than understanding that it is the reality of their faith that is supposed to form the things they do.
My wife always wants me to take anything I teach, and then reduce it to some practical thing that people can do. I suppose one way to put such a teaching into practice is to ask yourself why you are doing whatever it is you are doing that you regard to be spiritual. Are you going to church this Sunday because you feel that if you don't God will disown you? Are you sharing the gospel this week because you know that if you don't, that probably means you aren't really a Christian? Are you putting the toilet lid down after you use the John because that's just what a good Christian does? Ask yourself why you do what you do, and compare that against the thought that you do what you do, not to make God like you, or to pacify Him, or to satisfy Him, or to stave off His wrath, but rather because [1] you are convinced from scripture that it is the right thing to do, and [2] you know that this conviction is the work of the Holy Spirit in you. Relish in your obedience - not because it makes God like you, but because when you look deep enough into yourself (and are God's child) you will remember that you actually love God; and being biblically literal - you will remember that you only love Him because He first loved you.
If I don't stop there, this post will get too long, and I will not post it, so I will pick it up in the meta if there is anything unclear or weird sounding in what I have writtenLabels: justification, love, righteousness, sanctification |
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posted by Daniel @
11:55 AM
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| What hinders you from loving God with all your heart? |
Did you ever wonder (Christian), why it is that you have difficulty loving the Lord your God with all your heart?
The answer is in scripture, and I will quickly point you to it. In Ecclesiastes 9 we read:...the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives. I know - you thought I was going to jump to Jeremiah 17 first, but I fooled you, I am quoting it second:The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; Seriously, this is describing everyone's heart - Christian, and non-Christian. But you object, right? Isn't the new covenant promise that God will give each one of us a brand spanking new heart? I mean, don't these verses talk about the old heart that we had, and now that we are believers, that heart disappears and we get a new heart?
Well, if you read the bible a little more closely, you would have noticed that the promise of a new heart (c.f. Ezekiel 36:26) was made to Israel as a nation - the old heart was the law, and the new Heart was going to be Christ, when the prophet says that God is going to take the old heart out of Israel and give Israel a new heart, he means that God is going to remove the law as the hub around which the religion of Israel revolves, and replace it with the Messiah - a heart of stone tablets being replaced with a heart of flesh. When we make this promise about us as individuals, it fuddles the whole thing in a way that isn't very helpful.
We make the distinction because when you are joined to Christ through faith, His heart is made available to you through that union and through the indwelling presence of God in the person of the Holy Spirit. In that sense you do have a "new" heart, but not in the sense that it displaces your old one. When you are saved something happens: suddenly, alongside all your old and remaining lusts and sinful desires, you find new and compelling desires - some part of you suddenly want to live a life that is pleasing to God, and you suddenly find yourself aware of, and made guilty over, your sin. This does not come from your "old heart", but from your union with Christ. That is something that the law couldn't do - it (being nothing more than a set of commandments) couldn't produce in you the desire to obey, but when God began to live in you He began to produce a real desire to obey Him. But that desire lives right alongside a desire to indulge yourself in the same old sin you always have indulged yourself in. The flesh and the Spirit are contrary to one another, so that you cannot please one without displeasing the other.
So when we talk about your heart being full of evil and insanity and remaining so all your life, we should not be assuming that because we have come to faith that heart suddenly is vaporized and replaced with a new one. Hardly! Our heart (the core "us") is still more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick, so that when we obey it we cannot please God.
You see, that heart cannot love God at all, and when we try to coax it into loving God, the best we can do is to try and muster up enough guilt or gratitude and hope that doing so will make our old heart suddenly love God. But it can't, and it won't. Love is not something we can coax ourselves into feeling, much less when we realize that our heart is still insane, deceitful and entirely wicked.
How then are we to love the Lord with all our heart?
We do it in Christ, silly!
You see, what we cannot do, God can do. God loves God, and the Holy Spirit within us loves Christ and Loves God, and we can partake of that love - in fact we do partake of that love because it was poured out in us through the Holy Spirit as the scriptures say. Thus instead of trying to muster up a loving feeling towards from your insanely wicked heart, you need to look to God by faith through the Holy Spirit to partake of a love that already is there. It is not being produced by you, but rather it is present with and produced by the Holy Spirit who is in you if you're in Christ. You partake of that love in surrender - thus, you cannot love God unless you surrender to God.
So that's what hinders you from loving God with all your heart.Labels: Holy Spirit, love, union with christ, walking in the Spirit |
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posted by Daniel @
7:11 AM
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| Love One Another. |
If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well - James 2:8 [NASB]
I was reading Kim's blog earlier, and as I came across today's post, I started thinking about the passage above and how we as Christians ought to respond to it. As most of what I write here is no doubt well known to Kim, I opted to comment here in general about the matter rather than clutter her meta with my meandering thoughts, besides, who doesn't like being linked?
Anyone who has tried to read William Gurnall's "The Christian in Complete Armor" will have started their effort by examining the sheer magnitude of what is contained in Ephesians 6:10, "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might." I have been teaching weekly on this passage now for several months, following Gurnall's insights, and am thoroughly thankful for the blessing it has been to my own walk, and instruction.
Summarized, Gurnall shows that in order for Paul to fitly write this encouragement, there must be some substance behind the encouragement. God's must not only make this strength that we are to "be strong in" available to us, but Go must also intend for us to avail ourselves of it.
Gurnall shows that this cannot mean some beggarly portion of God's entire might, but must be, if it is God's strength, all of it at once - the same power and might that raised Christ from the dead. This is the strength that we are called to rely upon, and not as a buttress to our own strength, not as an aid by which we can affect our own deliverance - but a clean break from all self reliance in a moment of trial or temptation. It is an utter dependence upon the God of scripture and what He has made available in Christ to every believer. It is an informed assurance that God does not make such things available in some "optional" sense - but rather by making His might available, He must intend it for our use, and if intended, then to the it is intended not as an augment to our own strength, but as the answer to our own weakness. His strength cannot be supplemental, but must be the very foundation upon which we rest.
When we come to see the depth and utterness of our bankruptcy; that is, when we see that we cannot produce a right motive or a proper affection, that we absolutely lack the means and resources in our selves to stand against even the smallest trial or temptation in true victory - and resign ourselves to the fact that unless the victory is the Lord's the battle is fought in vain, I say when we come to know that there truly is nothing in us (that is, in our flesh) that can produce "love from a pure heart" because our heart, (in the flesh) is not, nor will it ever be, pure; I say, when we come to see that any and every affection we are able to muster up by way of motivation - will always and ultimately serve our own interests and that it cannot be otherwise - then and only then do we actually call upon God, not for help, but for deliverance.
Does scripture say that we will be helped out of our temptations, or delivered out of them? Don't be theologically lazy on this point - there is a huge difference.
We are delivered, not helped. Our victory is in Christ, not in our selves.
But how, one asks, do we apply such vaulted truth? How does that work in the trenches? How can I love my neighbor with unfeigned love from a pure heart, if my flesh is incapable of it? How to do acquire a "right" motive??
These are all questions that any honest believer ought to be asking when they come into this struggle.
Do any of you cherish a blanket, shirt, or some such thing that was hand made specifically for you by a friend or relative? What makes that item more special to you than some store bought merchandise? What I am getting at is the end product is not always the substance of the gift, is it? I mean, it is special to you because the effort that was put into producing it was entirely directed at you - it was not just made for you, but every stitch in that knit blanket is a silent testimony that someone cared about you. You cherish the love that went into it, the blanket or whatever is just a physical manifestation of that love. Getting the shirt or blanket or mitts or scarf, or whatever it is, that is not the point of the gift, that is just the expression the gift takes.
I speak that way because many begin in their faith to think that God wants obedience in the same way a person might like a shirt or a blanket - that if we furnish them with the end product we have fulfilled the duty. Think of Cain and Abel - both offered finished produce to God, but only one was accepted - the one that was offered in faith. It is the same with us today. God isn't concerned with the end product (obedience), he is concerned with how we obey. Do we obey in our own strength (like a store bought blanket), or do we recognize our own inability, and turn to him for His ability in our stead (home made).
I know, the metaphors are not perfect, and may even be confusing, but the point is
that God isn't telling us to love, he is telling us to do what we cannot do, so that we must turn to Him and be delivered from it.
How then do I love - I cannot love, but I can be delivered out of lovelessness. What does that look like? Does it mean that I suddenly have a profound, spiritual love welling up in me that overpowers my sinful slackness?
No.
God isn't making our sinful flesh more Christ-like. I no more love my neighbor now, than I did ten years ago - but Christ in me loves my neighbor, and if I understand myself to be utterly corrupt, then I have the choice between letting my flesh rule me, or letting Christ rule me - and I can act in accord with the loveless dictates of my flesh, or the loving dictates of Christ in me. When I pray for deliverance, rather than help, I am praying not to be made better, but to overcome that which hinders Christ. I am praying for the strength that raised Christ from the dead to overcome the flesh in me.
That overcoming doesn't happen by annihilating the flesh (perfectionism) or by ignoring it (asceticism), it happens by faith - a genuine Christian has something a pretender doesn't: he genuinely desires to be free from sin, because Christ's Spirit is in him. Not simply that he wants to avoid guilt, or condemnation - but he hates sin, and what it is doing to him and others - he wants to be rid of it - and this is the motive that does not come from his flesh, but from God's Spirit. By itself it is not enough to cause a believer to love - and in the strength of that alone, one will only run far enough to understand their own profound depravity - they will desire to be free, but find themselves unable to apprehend that freedom.
This is where deliverance becomes a doctrine that has some teeth. The believer who comes to see that he is a wicked sinner, and continues to be so, in spite of all his external reform - this one is the one who comes to the place where he is no longer looking for help in the Christian endeavor - but is looking for deliverance from sin - and calling upon Jesus Christ to perform that deliverance on his behalf.
Not that he is looking to have his flesh mopped up, but that he is looking to turn away from the desires of the flesh, and obey the desires of the Spirit. Not that he is looking to have strong and godly motives carry him through every tribulation and trial, and temptation - to empower every good work - but rather that he is looking to be delivered from the carnal hindrances so that he is able to obey in the Spirit.
How do we love, when we cannot love? We love not with our own love, but having been delivered from lovelessness, we are free to let Christ love in and through us - and as he does (and not before), we share in it. I say, we share in it, because it isn't ours, nor does it come from us, but we become partakers of it as Christ loves through us - nor does it come before our obedience, as though we should sit around and wait for it to lift us on its wings and carry us into a right activity - rather as we obey, then we climb that holy hill, and fellowship - not before.
What Christ has done is open the door to our obedience, not for obedience's sake, but for fellowship, and in order that His life may be lived out in us, for the benefit of all involved: those whom we love, and even ourselves as we enjoy Christ's love.
Now, having said all that - these things are not, I suppose, plain and obvious in today's church. We seem far more interested in church as a country club, or religion as a theological exercise, than we do in magnifying Christ. These things I write, are supposed to be about what Jesus has done for us, and I intend by relating them to magnify Christ in our lives - to point to what He has done, and is doing, in order that the person of Christ plays a larger role in your life - the role He died (in part) to play. If I am successful, Who Christ is, and what He has done and is doing will have some impact in your walk.Labels: debunking, how to be a Christian, love, sanctification, Soli Deo Gloria, unlovable |
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posted by Daniel @
1:42 PM
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| Attacking The Root... |
Below are three verses that speak (almost) directly to a problem that many Christians face during their infancy as Christians. I am talking about loving God, or rather, a failure to love God.
Now to be sure, I am not talking about a sentiment when I talk about loving God, and (just so the pendulum doesn't wag the other way) I am neither talking about love as some action we do. When I say love, I mean the kind of love that is similar to what flows between a man and woman who are truly infatuated with one another - an adoration that would willingly set aside one's own agenda for something as trivial as merely being in the presence of the other.
The verses illustrate a point - that being that the person who tries to hold onto the world and love God at the same time, is never going to love God while holding onto the world, or the things in it:
But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. - James 1:6-8 [ESV]
And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. - John 3:19 [ESV]
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. - 1 JOhn 2:15 [ESV]
No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." - Luke 16:13 [ESV]
What I want to draw your attention to, is the way in which we deal with our own lack of love. Primarily the immature believer is ignorant of it, but many immature believers remain so, because either they presume that their lack of love is [1] normal, or [2] cannot be helped, or alternately, they believe that what they presently possess is in fact "love" since they either have a sentiment ("...didn't I weep when they whipped that actor in Mel Gibson's movie??") or they imagine (as some teach) that biblical love is all "action" and can be done with a grim, cold determination, utterly void of any attachment to who we are as Christians; love (for such as these) is a duty you do because you have to.
These verses, I hope, shake us out of the notion that we can make ourselves love God by "doing" loving things or that since we have a desire to be pleasing to God this very desire must be all there is to the love that we are supposed to have. But no honest soul is going to be satisfied with these.
How do I love God? First of all, scripture says that God's love was poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us (see Romans 5:5). That is a hard picture, because it starts out with God's love and not our own, and we may confuse what is being said here - imagining that it is saying that God pours into us a love for Himself by the Holy Spirit (and in a way that is true), but that is not what the text is saying. The text says that the love with which God loves us was poured out in our hearts, by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. The Holy Spirit was given to us (those who are in Christ), and by Him God's love literally came into us. I tie that verse to 1 John 4:19 where we are reminded that we love God because He first loved us.
The problem is, how do we get from God's love being poured out in us by the Holy Spirit - that is, how do we get from God first loving us, to us loving God in return? Scripture paints that picture, so why is it that we are not loving God??!?
Sin.
Yeah, it always boils down to sin - but let's not keep it vague at this point. The quoted verses that I began this post with come into play here. You have the capacity to love God right now Christian - to love him with all you have. You have received the Holy Spirit, and by Him God's love has been poured out into your heart. You have been loved by God, and you can love God in return. The reason you don't is that you cannot love two things at the same time.
Okay, you know this already - not many of us are as interested in the "what" as we are in the "how" - and that is fair; yet we have to go in these baby steps sometimes so that we don't lose anyone.
In the moment that you received the ability to truly repent, in that moment you turned away from everything about yourself, and turned to God to receive Christ. However you describe it, in that moment you let go of the world and everything in it, and in that moment you turned 100% to Christ. Those of you who have a genuine faith will nod at this point as I am talking about spiritual things. Those of you who were saved in your childhood may not remember this so well, and some of you who have nothing more than an intellectual persuasion may well balk at it, being deceived as you are, and unwilling to let go of that deception, since it gives you the only comfort you know (however false).
The how question is answered by the gospel - as all how questions in Christianity are. It is surrendering all to God. But I am getting ahead of myself. I merely wanted to tie that in for later.
You see, the moment you were saved two things happened - your old man was condemned - it died with Christ, and you received a new man. Scripture refers to the new man as the new creation that is hid in Christ. This was an act of redemption - Christ redeemed your life, putting to death the old, and providing a new. But that was all spiritual - your flesh, the body that you presently live in - that was not redeemed, and it remains to this day - and it remains corrupted.
Now when I say corrupt, I mean all of: irredeemable, perverse, crooked, fallen, twisted, wicked, worldly etc. I say worldly because our flesh is never going to be part of God's kingdom, it is, and remains in the world system - God's enemy, and our enemy. It is one of the "things in the world." God is going to burn up our flesh one day along with the rest of the world, and for that we should rejoice!
Every true believer hates the fact that they sin. It makes them feel (and rightly so) like hypocrites. The trouble is that we are still in this flesh, and being in this flesh we have the opportunity moment by moment to give into its desires and in doing so - to sin. Understand this: giving into the flesh is an act of love, it is an act of worship. When we truly want what the flesh wants, we are "in the flesh" and this happens because we love the flesh.
That isn't to say that we don't love God, it is to say that we are double minded, and that is the problem. If there were no love for the flesh, the love of God would have no rival - kapiche? Okay, we have identified the problem again, so let's move on to the final "how" question.
I hinted at it there in the last paragraph - God endures no rival - I used to think of it as God being jealous in the way that a man might be jealous - you know, I want to be first in your affections because -I- am so entirely insecure that unless I am first in your affections, and markedly so, I will feel like I could lose you at any moment, and that is a bad feeling rooted in my own desire to be loved at all costs. But God isn't insecure like that. I am convinced that His jealousy is for our benefit and not His own. He wants us to love him above every other love because that is the greatest way to serve us - and we do serve a servant God (did Christ not wash Judas' feet?).
When we find ourselves in the precarious position of loving (worshipping) self more than we love God, the solution is not to try and love God harder - for we do not love God according to our own effort, we love Him because He first loved us (and not because we grit our teeth and made it so), rather the way to deal with our lack of love is to root out the love of the world.
Now, we could go off half-cocked at this point and begin to suppress all the other loves that we have. But let me tell you, if in my dating days, someone had locked my wife in a closet, it would not have stifled my love for her one bit. I would probably sit at the closet door and wait for her - eventually she will come out... No, suppressionism is not the name of the game - we put the deeds of the body to death by the Spirit or not at all.
It starts on one's knees - have you even asked God to take away every false love? If you have, have you knocked on that door until it was opened? Did you wrestle in prayer as Jacob did with the angel - saying I shall not let you go until you bless me? Or did you give up after twenty minutes with a shrug because you didn't believe God would ever do it in the first place?
No one stops loving the world who hasn't been to the throne for grace, and no one who is serious gives up until they have victory. A soldier who lays down on the field as soon as he hears gunshots is not pressing onto victory - no, he charges into the teeth of the fray and starts fighting. Christian, maybe today you see yourself as that one on the ground, afraid of the fray, you see an unwillingness in yourself to go the "whole nine yards" - don't call it weakness, call it worship, for you are as much an idolater as can be. You love your flesh, and you worship it, and so long as you fawn over it like that, you continue on as an idolater. "For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God." - Ephesians 5:5 [ESV]
Listen: the stakes are high. Those who are Christ's are certainly saved - eternally secure - but if you find yourself an idolater who is not willing to repent of it, don't hang your hat on the doctrine of eternal security, don't pretend the fight is over just because you are a believer - make your calling and election sure - enter the fray brother, enter the fray sister - stop playing at Christianity - the time to clean house is at hand - grab hold of God in prayer, and don't let go till you come through the other side. Don't settle for an intellectual assurance - fight until there is nothing left in you but God's love - then you will be assured brother, sister - then you will be assured.Labels: love, sanctification, sin |
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posted by Daniel @
6:49 AM
10 comment(s)
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| The Gap. |
 As a young man in high school, when the guys would get together and kid around, we used to imitate talking like Elvis for laughs, I can still hear my friends trying to master the art of saying, "I'll ah, I'll have a big 'ole cheese bugga, and ken ya put a whole lotta mayo on that darlin'?" We cracked ourselves up thinking we were so clever and funny.
I mention this so that when I say that there is in many of us a "whole lotta" difference between what we intellectually agree to be true and what we put into practice.
Consider the following quote from Walter Marshall, first published in 1692:Consider these things well, and you may easily perceive that our spirits are not in a fit frame for the doing of them, while we apprehend ourselves under the curse and wrath of God, or while we are under prevailing suspicions that God will prove an enemy to us at last. What Marshall is saying here is that you can't really love God if you always hold onto the secret suspicion that God is really your enemy. The context (and you can go and read the whole book at the link) is that until a believer is convinced in a practical way that they are in fact reconciled to God, they will be unable to accept the truth that God loves them in any practical way.
I think the best path for discipleship is to identify the most common obstacles to (genuine) Christian growth, and deal with them first. But often new believers are either left to their own devices (worse case scenario), or given a brief and systematic overview of the core Christian beliefs and encouraged to study the bible and pray (a little better), or thoroughly indoctrinated into both the core beliefs of the Christian faith and a variety of denominationally appropriate theological dogma (magnificent, but still putting the cart before the horse).
You see, you can be a believer, and have your head filled with all the right interpretations of all the various doctrinal stances your theological persuasion allows - and all the while be hopelessly in bondage to sin because in spite of all your "learning" - you didn't believe some of the very first things you were supposed to learn. There is a "Gap" between what you know to be true intellectually, and what you see happening in your faith.
You know, for example, that God loves you. If someone asks you, you have the right answer - "Jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so" - only deep down, you suspect that every time you failed to be perfect, God stopped loving you. Oh, it was your <whispering> deep, dark secret, </whispering> but you imagined that this doubt was either normative, or more likely, that your faith was somehow flawed, and that if you could just obey more genuinely it would go away. But it never did.
You see, the gap? They are trying to generate God's love by their genuine obedience. Oh it looks crazy when we drag it out into the light and look at it, but that is what can happen.
You see, unbelief is spiritual cancer, it grows over time and gets worse - and unless it is identified for what it is, a person may well wonder why they seem to be getting worse in their faith rather than better, why they seem farther away from God now, than ever before. The problem goes back to the basics:
=If= you are in Christ, you are acceptable to God right now, and no sin that you can ever commit will change that. You cannot make God love you by your "genuine obedience" - God's love cannot be purchased - it is freely given, and if you are in Christ, it is already yours.
You are reconciled - the gap between you and God has been filled entirely because you are in Christ. God loves you right now, and so long as you continue to imagine that God's love is conditioned upon your obedience, you will never be able to believe that God loves you. And though you must become a fool to understand this, since it goes against all our logic - THAT must come first. First you trust God's love, and when you do THEN obedience flows naturally out of you.
Brother, sister, are you convinced intellectually that God loves you? Do you find that secretly you aren't loving God? It is because you are wrongly prefacing God's love upon your obedience - and as long as your conscience refuses to trust in a perfect and completed reconciliation - you will never be released from the guilt of your sin, and until you are released thus, you will not be free to love God from your heart. Your mind may well agree that loving God is proper, but your heart won't be convinced.
So if this was written for you, let the Spirit witness that to you, and do something about it. Crack open your bible while it is still today and settle for yourself whether God prefaces his love towards you on your good works. Learn that God's love is real, and stop giving into unbelief. It is true that you are not worthy of this profound love that God has exercised towards you - but it is high time you excusing your guilty conscience as a pious thing - when your conscience is trained not by truth but by suspicion, it is an evil conscience - you must train it again with the truth, for such will set you free.Labels: encouragement, helpful, Instruction, love, Theology |
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posted by Daniel @
8:51 AM
5 comment(s)
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| Valentines Day. |
 I don't love my wife half as much as she deserves.
With each passing year I see her worth more clearly, and my own love seems hardly an adequate match for such a giving person. She runs herself ragged for our family, and though I ought to spend every night praising her for it, I see that I am not doing this. To be sure, I am more inclined to say something if she slackens her break neck pace.
How can such a worm as I be so fortunate as to be gifted with so fine a wife? I hope in this coming year I will give myself for my wife with greater abandon - my goal is to love her with the selfless love that Christ loved the church - a love that no human being can imitate or approach, but must rise from our union with Christ, for I am not to love her with a love that is similar to Christ's love - but with Christ's actual love - the perfect love He has for her.
God grant this grace.Labels: love, union with christ, wife |
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posted by Daniel @
7:39 AM
3 comment(s)
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