|
|
| |
 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
|
| |
| The Nashville Statement
|
| |
|
|
| |
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...
|
| |
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
|
| |
|
email
|
|
| 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 |
posted by Daniel @
7:11 AM
7 comment(s)
 
|
|
|
|
| The Heart of Unrepentance.. |
At the core of the unpenitent heart is this one thought - "I will not have you to rule over me!"
Consider the believer who comes to know that looking at pornography feeds his lust and is a wicked offense against God. He sees this because [1] his conscience is informed by the word of God, and [2] because the indwelling Holy Spirit convicts him of sin. Notwithstanding, since he was addicted to porn prior to his salvation, the addiction continues after his salvation - only he feels very, very, bad about it.
Now let us say that this man one day, driven by remorse over his sin, determines that he will no longer look at porn, and from that day on he removes everything in his life that would trigger the temptation - the computer is cleaned of all bad images, the internet is either disconnected or he puts his computer into a public room in the house and makes sure that he is never alone there - he even begins to guard his own thoughts so that whenever a lustful though enters his mind he forces himself to think of something else until the temptation goes away.
Many would say that this man has repented.
He has certainly put himself on morally higher ground. He has recognized his sin, and responded to it by producing in himself morally superior habits. Some understand repentance as being an entirely practical exercise - you simply stop your bad habits, and replace them with better habits and voila! you have repented.
But in Acts 20:21 we read that Paul preached "repentance towards God".
I point out that phrase because it helps us to make a distinction between turning to God and suppressing a sinful habit. A man can suppress a sinful habit without ever turning to God in doing so. He can be motivated by a desire not to offend God, and begin a regimented attack on all the sin in his life, and do so without ever surrendering to God. In fact, he does that -get this now- instead of surrendering to God. He is willing to give up some sin for a season, but he is not willing to surrender Himself to God.
There is no victory over sin in a heart that obeys that spirit of rebellion (small "s") that scripture calls the "old man".
It is entirely possible and I suspect even common for Christians to deal with sin not according to the gospel of grace, that is, not by surrendering themselves to God, but rather by staunching the outward expression of sin as much as is humanly possible without surrendering to God.
Don't think for one second that doing what is right equates to repentance. Repentance produces what is right, but doing what is right does not produce repentance. I have used this illustration before, but it fits here. The young girl who is told to sit and defiantly refuses until threatened then begrudgingly plops herself down in a show of outward obedience betrays her heart when in open rebellion she remarks - "I may be sitting on my bottom, but I am standing in my heart!" - that "heart" illustrates what obedience without surrender looks like - it is not repentance, it is a rebellious servility that was coerced by fear of retribution.
The believer who puts away the porn because way down deep inside he is secretly afraid that by viewing porn he is proving that he was never saved in the first place - and so in order to be free from the fear of damnation he puts aways sin, but does so without really surrendering himself to God - this one hasn't repented, he is doing penance because deep down he is convinced that doing so will appease God. He is catastrophically wrong.
Any "righteousness" that springs from a heart that is motivated to appease God in order to secure for themselves God's favor or pardon - such a "righteousness" is not righteous at all, it is in fact unclean. Such a righteousness is polluted by the flesh, it is counterfeit, an external facade - it is, in biblical terms "=the= world religion" it is Babylon, it is attempting to be like God (righteous) without surrendering to God. It is in no way harmonious with the gospel of grace, but has at its core a concealed, "dressed up as righteousness" rebellion against God.
I repeat - genuine surrender produces genuine repentance and not vice versa. The problem with sin is not the sin, it is the self that is unwilling to surrender to God. The sin is just the outflowing of that rebellion. The real culprit is the old man - and that is why Christ took the old man to the cross with Him - to render him powerless - a reality that while true immediately of every believer, is only experienced when the believer is surrendered, that is, when the believer is "in Christ".
When scripture instructs the believer to walk by the Spirit as the means by which we overcome the lusts of the flesh it isn't some empty slogan - it is life from death. You can battle with sin until the cows come home and you will never get on top of it if you don't surrender yourself to God.
If you are a genuine Christian you know what genuine surrender looks like because that is how you became a Christian - you surrendered yourself to God.
But if you find that sin is your master, then know this: at some point you stopped surrendering - and it was at that point that sin got a foot hold in you again.
What are you to do? Stop trying to perfect yourself in the flesh Christian! Do it spiritually, do it the way you received Christ - by surrendering to him the whole of you. Surrender again, surrender continually - give your very life and all that is in it to God - a living sacrifice - stop cherishing that secret rebellion in your heart! it is killing you, do you understand this? It is killing you, killing your time, killing your inheritance, killing you!
The part of you that wants to rebel was (past tense) crucified in Christ in order that you may now (present tense) no longer obey it. It will call the same old shots, tempt the same old temptations, but only when you are not surrendered to God will these be any problem for you. Being in Christ is being surrendered. Being in the Spirit is being surrendered. Being surrendered is being willing in every moment to do what God asks because God asks. It is the opposite of rebellion - a slippery thing to describe, but easy enough to know, for we know it both by its absence, and by a conscience that knows it is utterly right with God.
I am convinced of these things. Are you?
If these things seem strange to you, talk them out with someone who has been in Christ for a long time - study scripture, see if these things are so. It is not noble to accept these things because some guy on the internet wrote them. Nor is it noble to reject these things because some guy on the internet says they are so. What -is- noble is to examine scripture and see if what I am saying is found there or not. We need to understand repentance if we are going to avoid wasting days, weeks, and years pretending to repent but never overcoming sin's power in our life.Labels: holiness, Instruction, repentance, sanctification, sin, Theology, union with christ, victory |
|
posted by Daniel @
9:54 AM
15 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
| The Atonement Seems To Be A Hot Topic Lately... |
The various, competing atonement models all attempt to answer the same question: "How can a just God forgive a guilty sinner without compromising Himself in doing so?"
I believe the answer is simple, and because it is simple, many people miss it. I present it here, for your consideration. Feel free to correct me or raise any objections.
Perhaps the best place to start would be in James 5:4, "Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts."
Here is a truth that is clearly taught - it is fraudulent to withhold wages. If I agree to pay so much for the labor, and you perform the labor, I must pay what I have promised or I am a liar, a fraud, and unjust.
Now let's look at the other side of the same principle: for that I take you to the end of Romans 6 where we read, "the wages of sin is death."
You see, death is something we earn by sinning, and if God doesn't pay us our wage, that makes Him just as much a Liar and a Fraud, as He would be were He withholding some desirable wage. God cannot simply overlook sin for this reason: sin has a wage associated with it, and God must pay that wage or He is not just.
Likewise, it would be just as unjust to pay a man a wage he didn't earn.
In this same way we understand that Christ cannot receive the wage of death if He hasn't earned death by personally sinning. When David prophesies of Christ in Psalm 16 he says it this way: God will not allow His Holy One to see corruption. That is, God cannot pay Christ a wage he did not earn. Christ mentions the same sort of thing in John 10:18, namely that when He lays down his life He will be able to take it up again.
I see these biblical truths as foundational in my understanding of the atonement: God must pay the sinner the wage He has earned, and likewise, Christ cannot keep a wage He hasn't earned!
The problem is how can God pay the sinner his just wage and redeem the same sinner at the same time?
I believe the answer is found in our union with Christ (see Romans 6).
We were joined to Christ for this reason: so that when God justly poured out his wrath on us (on the cross) He would provide a means to justly raise us from the dead afterwards.
We have said that God could not keep Christ in the grave, and this is the key. The way in which we are atoned for is simple: a guilty sinner is united to Christ by faith alone, such that Christ joins that believer to Himself so that they are united on the cross where God punishes the believer.
I pause here to highlight what I think is a common misconception about what happened on the cross. If your understanding of the atonement is that God poured out His wrath on Jesus instead of on you, I think you have it wrong.
Now hear me out here:
I think what happened on Calvary was that I was joined to Christ (spiritually not physically) and that God poured His wrath out upon my spirit which was joined to Christ's. God wasn't punishing Jesus instead of me, He was punishing me and because I was joined to Christ, Christ received my condemnation. That was always the plan.
If the law required all convicted criminals to receive a lethal injection, and simultaneously required that no innocent man be put to death, then it would be as if Christ knew I was condemned, and in order to save me He made Himself my Siamese twin so that when I received the lethal injection that was due me, it killed both of us, but because the law required that no innocent man be put to death, Christ would have to be "raised up" - but since we were co-joined as siamese twins - Christ could not be raised apart from raising me, and in this way, according to Christ's plan - I was redeemed. I suffered the death, due me so the law was satisfied, it was not some pretend death - I really died, but because I was joined to Christ, I was raised again. Not that Christ was my substitute, but that Christ was in me and I was in Him so that just as my punishment slew us both, so his resurrection raised us both.
This is what scripture means when it says that love is as strong as death (SoS 8:6) My union with Christ could not be broken -- even by death. No one ascends into heaven who did not descend from heaven - no one goes to heaven except that they are united with Christ - He is the only Way and the only truth and the only life - the door of the shepfold.
God could not justly allow Christ to remain in the grave. Christ was innocent, and God -had- to raise Christ if He was going to remain just. But since we were still united together with Christ, in order to raise Christ God had to raise us too.
We were united together with Christ for this very reason - so that when God could not keep him in the grave, we could be justly raised with Him. That was always the plan - Christ would received our "old self" into Himself, and take it to the cross where God would execute His judgment upon it - this union however destroyed not only us, but Christ. But because Christ was innocent God gave him to power to take up his life again - and because of our union, when Christ took up His life, we were raised with Him!
THAT is the atonement.
Those who are united together with Christ are united in His death and in His resurrection - it is more than some stodgy old theology about how many people Jesus died for - it is the foundation upon which the Christian rests all hope of deliverance from sin's power - we died with Christ - literally - and when we begin to see this truth, we begin to understand that when Paul says that we are no longer slaves of sin because we were crucified with Christ, it starts to mean something!
Are you starting to see it?
The cross is where I died in Christ. Not metaphorically: literally. I willLabels: atonement; theology, union with christ |
|
posted by Daniel @
5:41 PM
26 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
| My take on Romans 7 |
 What I want to do, I don't do.
What I don't want to do - that is the thing that I do.
Is Paul describing himself or making an illustration in the first person? If he is describing himself, is he describing his former conduct as a Jew, or his current struggle as a mature Christian?
Sincere, godly men disagree on this point, so I expect some of you who read this to sincerely disagree with my understanding of the text - I take that as a given. There is a lot at stake in this passage, and many of us hold our understanding of it quite passionately - and, if I may be so bold, I would say especially those of us who hold that Paul is describing his current state as a believer - since we who see ourselves in the struggle of Romans 7, and know ourselves to be genuine believers - are apt to make conclusions favorable to our own experiences.
Now, as a preamble, allow me to say that I hadn't intended to make a post on Romans 7 per se, but having mentioned Romans seven in the sermon and having discussed it afterwards with Bryan, (who has disagreed with me for a few years now on our various interpretations on this passage, and having read this post over at Bryan's blog, I thought, and having started to reply to his post over at his blog and finding my response too verbose for a casual comment - I thought it best to reply here on my own blog - and link to it from there. What you see therefore is my reply to Bryan, and subsequently, my understanding of the text in question.
Now, before we continue, I should add that I know all about the "present tense" of Paul's discourse, and while we use the present tense to describe things that are presently true, we also use the present tense linguistically when presenting hypotheticals - so I am not shaken by nor overlooking Paul's use of the present tense in this passage, I am merely regarding it as an hypothetical illustration rather than an autobiographical aside.
My understanding of this portion of Romans 7 is not that it does not describe a "Christian" - but rather that it describes a person who is not experiencing victory over sin by walking in the spirit - it depicts what walking in the flesh looks like.
Paul has just spent the previous chapter saying that we (those who are in Christ) shall not continue in sin - that is, that we shall no longer be in this kind of Romans 7 bondage, because we died with Christ and in doing so we died to our previous bondage.
Let's be honest - anyone can suppress sin in their own strength - in fact, that is what every other moral scheme and world religion is founded on. But the death described in Romans 6 provides the only power in creation to spiritually deal with sin - only this power operates through a very specific, and counter-intuitive means: faith. It manifests itself after one begins trusting that one is in fact dead to sin and alive to God (literally) in Christ Jesus - and after one begins putting all their trust in the fact that it is going to be =this= union with Christ in death that frees an individual from sin's dominion, and that carnal, external obedience (suppressionism) having no power to free you from sin's bondage, will simply save you from expressing the sin within in the moment, and do nothing to deal with the sin within that is producing this stuff.
That is not to say that you sit around and meditate and sin goes away - nor is it to say that you simply auto-suggest your sin's away by suppressing with a better, more spiritual cork. The plain truth is that there is -no- substitute for faith. You can go through the motions, but if you do not really believe that you are dead to sin because Jesus made you dead to sin, you will be in Romans 7 throughout all your effort. =THAT= is what Romans 7 is describing - a struggle to obey God without the power to do so - that is, a struggle in the flesh. Anything that is not of faith is by default of the flesh - no matter how righteous it might look on the outside.
Paul himself explains what Romans 7 is describing, he does so in Romans 7:21-23 "So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. "
Romans 7 describes the law of sin that was "bring[ing] death to [him]"
But Paul does not cave in there and say that we remain in bondage to this law of sin in our members that is producing death in us. He immediately comes to the solution for which he bothered with the parenthetical illustration in the first place. In 7:24 he asks,"...Who will deliver me from this body of death? " he labels the experience he has just described - not as "the normative Christian experience" but as "the body of death" - referring to the fact that this body is controlled by a law of sin that produces death. His question underscores the fact that he is in the middle of teaching a deliverance from the bondage to this law of sin and death that was started in Romans six - this was no autobiographical aside, this was a practical exposition of what Paul means when he says "the law of sin and death" - for when Romans 8:2 tells us that the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets us free from the law of sin and death - we need to know up front what the law of sin and death -is-.
The law of sin and death is that law that is in our members that makes us obey sin - that is what Paul was describing - he begins it in Romans six in summary form: "Sin shall no longer have dominion over you because you are no longer under law but under grace" - as soon as he gives this summary he starts qualifying it because if he doesn't one might imagine that the moment you become a Christian you magically stop sinning. His reponse therefore to the idea that this grace from God allows you to continue in sin is to say, "By no means!" - but he then begins to show that even when you are not a legitimate slave, yet if you present yourselves to a master and obey him, you are (for all intents and purposes) that one's slave whom you obey. In other words even if you have been set free, if you continue to obey your old master, you are are still in bondage - even though you don't have to be. Paul sums up his thoughts there by thanking God that we have been set free from sin by becoming slaves of righteousness, and in doing so he gives us a crucial part of the deliverance plan - you are either obedient to Christ, or you are enslaved to sin - there is no middle ground.
When Paul begins Romans 7 with the question - "do you not know?" he is introducing an expository discourse - arguing from the lesser to the greater - he wants to show to the Jewish mindset that what he is teaching is not contrary to the way in which God's covenant works - by showing that just as the law of marriage binds the wife to her husband while he yet lives, and is no longer binding after the life that held her in bondage (her husband's) is dead, so too when we died in Christ we were set free from something in us that was "aroused by the law" and "at work in our members bearing fruit for death" - but up until this point "that something" that we have been set free from (just as the widow was set free) has yet to be given a label.
This is the context in which Paul begins the discourse in question - after he boldly says that we have been released from the law (that aroused sin in us) having died to that which held us - he then begins to illustrate the very thing we have been set free from - that is, he begins to illustrate how the law does not deliver a person out of bondage to sin - for the one who has the law and tries to obey the law finds that the law has no power against sin - it only demonstrates that he is a sinner because it shows him what is wrong, and he finds himself unable to resist doing what is wrong even though he has the law to tell him that it is wrong. The law in no way empowers him to do what he wants to do (obey the law) and does nothing to deliver him from doing what he does not what to do (disobey the law).
Paul is showing that there is something that the law can not do in that it is powerless to deal with the corruption we inherited from Adam - the "sin" that remains in our flesh.
He is bringing us through this illustration so that when he again states that we are saved from this in Christ, we know what we are saved from.
In Romans six Paul teaches:
[1] that God delivered us from sin in Christ, and
[2] this deliverance is bound up in our union with Christ, that Christ's death on the cross, our union with Him, and God raising us up in Christ is the means by which (through faith) God does in us what the law wasn't able to do - deliver us from sin's power.
This deliverance is brought about by our death in Christ, for that death delivered us from our former bondage - In Romans 7 Paul shows that the way this death delivers us from bondage is not contrary to God's ways, but in fact complementary - for just as the bride is bound to the law so long as that which binds her lives, so too we are bound to law that governs our "flesh" for only as long as the "flesh" lives. He then contrasts this great deliverance with the very bondage one is being delivered from (which is, of course, what is being described in the passage in question) - he contrasts it with the law of sin and death so that when he concludes the description of the law of sin and death, his proclaimation that you are free from that "law of sin and death" has tangible context.
The struggle in Romans seven is not an autobiographical description of Paul's "current" struggle with sin - it is the logical and necessary continuation of a point he began to make in Romans 6 - an illustration of what "the law could not do" an illustration that gives substance to his conclusion: that the Spirit of life has set us free from something in Christ - it sets us free from the law of sin and death - that is, it sets us free from "Romans 7."
I agree therefore with the Piper quote this far: Paul is not teaching that we should make peace with sin - though I would say that Chapter six teaches that we have already won the war against sin (in Christ), as opposed to "will win the war" - but I would word it in such a way that there is no room to use Chapter seven to excuse "tactical defeat" in the battle against sin, and I would be careful to show that tactical defeat was not a necessary, or normative component of the process. I would say chapter 7 illustrates the law of sin and death that Christ delivered us from in Himself, and that the struggle described there is nothing more than the default, carnal approach to trying to obey God when we are doing so in a spiritual vacuum; even if this is our default approach the moment we come to Christ, and I would add, even the default fall back position that we immediately assume the very moment we neglect to walk in faith, or said another way, the moment we fail to walk in the Spirit. When we walk in the spirit we do =not= give into the flesh.
Piper's concluding remark was:
It's the earnestness of the war and the response to defeat that show your Christianity, not perfection.
I don't pretend to correct Piper, but for the sake of this discussion, I would elaborate on that conclusion thus:
The earnestness of our war is demonstrated by our unwillingness to continue to walk (by default) in the flesh. The Christian who is ignorant of the doctrine of deliverance nevertheless abhors in himself this carnal walk even if he cannot describe it in theological terms. This desire to be free from a carnal walk does not originate in his flesh, but is the divine character of the Holy Spirit within him. This abhorrence for sin shows that the Holy Spirit is within him and that he is a genuine child of God, but until he begins to deal with sin spiritually in Christ, that is, according to the only provision God has made - he remains carnal and impotent; though in truth he has been set free from sin's power, that freedom is only in Christ, that is, it is only appropriated his when he walks in Christ by a determined and willful act of faith. The consistency of his walk in Christ (and consequently, his deliverance from sin) reflects his spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity is not a measure of how regenerate you are, it is a measure of how Christ-like you are. When you are in the Spirit you are perfectly Christ-like, and when you are not in the spirit, you are carnal and not Christ-like at all - even if in the strength of your flesh you manage to near-perfectly approximate the character of Christ (through habitual suppression of sin, forming sin breaking habits, and doing good deeds even though your heart is secretly not in it) - yet this asceticism has absolutely no power, and is a mark of immaturity as surely as wanton sin is. An unsaved person can be quite earnest in the war against sin (how many orthodox Jews do we need to know before we understand this?), but his earnestness doesn't suggest he is a Christian - it only shows he is earnest.
The Romans 7 struggle depicts a man trying to obey through means other than grace. That could be a Jew, or it could be a theologically confused believer - it doesn't matter who it is, what matters is that in your flesh the law of sin and death reigns until you stop obeying it - and you cannot stop obeying it except through faith - through reckoning yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ - it is a faith thing, not a grit your teeth and obey thing.
Trying to obey the law is good for you - especially if you are earnest and zealous - because it will wears you out faster - because nothing brings you to Christ faster than trying to keep law and failing miserably because you are unable to do so.
Let me know if that explains it or not.Labels: Q and A, Romans, sanctification, Theology, union with christ |
|
posted by Daniel @
10:07 AM
6 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
| Everyone Wants To Fix The Church. |
 Every now and again, a sense of jealousy rises up in my heart - not over my wife, but rather over the church. I burn with jealousy to see her wooed by (and flirting with) the world and its wisdom and ways.
There is a wonderfully poetic quote that I can't quite remember (and I haven't been able to Google with any success) that, roughly paraphrased, goes like this: One man looks and sees a pile of stone, but another sees a church. I am not really capturing the thrust of the original quote - because upon reading it the first time I was struck with that kind of awe you get when a thing is "well said" - what struck me when I read the real quote (I mention it now because my awkward paraphrase doesn't capture the sense) was that the first person couldn't comprehend the fine masonry and intricate stonework as anything more than a pile of stone. He was correct of course - this ornate structure was a pile of stone - but the other was able to "make sense of it" and see that this pile of stone was in fact a magnificent cathedral.
Remember the Market, er, I mean the Trend, er, I mean the Purpose Driven Church? Remember the prayer of Jabez? How about the New Perspective on Paul? What about the emerging church? Everyone wants to tell us how to "do church" better.
We could discuss the various merits and obvious flaws of the existing methodologies, approaches, philosophies and whatnot - and I sure others are doing that somewhere even as I type this - but frankly, it is a pointless pursuit. In ten years there will be another half dozen or more "better" strategies for building, fixing, motivating, improving or otherwise repairing the existing church - and as many (and likely more) in the decade after that and so on ad nauseum.
Everyone seems convinced that the church is not what it should be - but everyone seems to have a different spin on what "what it should be" is.
I think we could examine every new "solution" with scrutiny to see if this is the "one" final solution - or, if we are like many - perhaps we will simply take a little "good" from here, and a little "good" from there and sew them into our Christian practicum like so many patches on a patchwork quilt. Eventually we may arrive at something that is closer to "the true church" (cue the "holy reverence" background music) - and since that seems to be a good thing to do, and since it is clearly better than nothing - why knock it?
Well, I will knock it, because, as I said, I burn with jealousy on occasion, and since this is my blog, I can vent that jealousy and let the chips fall where they may.
The "problem" with the church is not that we aren't doing church right - it is that we aren't doing Christ right. No one can see the love of God flowing out of someone whose greatest love is themselves. Listen: a stubborn, unsurrendered heart looks to all the world to be just like any other worldly heart. How can someone who always resists the Holy Spirit expect the love of God to be seen in them? You waste your time when the best you do is approximate in practice what surrendering to Christ would look like if you were actually surrendered to Him. Let me tell you, an approximation looks fantastic on the outside - it can even look genuine and fool everyone around you - but it shows itself for what it is in this way - it has absolutely =no= spiritual power whatsoever.
I think it was an unsaved politician in India who once remarked that Christians make such extraordinary claims while living such ordinary lives.
That is just plain sad because, for the most part, it is stingingly accurate.
If you want to improve the church, start at the ground level - the fallow ground level. What the church needs is not a new plan, it needs surrendered saints. The problem isn't that we don't have the right method, it is that we don't have a right heart. There is no room and no provision for mediocrity in the church.
My plea this morning - and going into the weekend - is this: If you are in Christ and as you read this you are not absolutely surrendered to God - stop putting it off! Listen: God loves you and even if as you read this you are nursing your sin - trust in God's forgiveness and love and put away the sin - do that and God will give you grace, but don't just do it in your head - don't just say, "Dear God, I am a sinner, please forgive me - I will do better next time. Amen." - tell God the truth - "Dear God, I know I should love you and love pleasing you, but I have been telling myself that you don't love me because I am such a phony. I have been telling myself that you can't love me until I am a good person - I have been trying to make myself acceptable to you and in doing so I have demonstrated that I don't really believe Christ's death satisfied your wrath towards me - forgive me my unbelief, forgive me my lack of love - and grant me this - that I would trust in your love and in your Christ, and that in the strength of that trust I would walk not only in the coming moments but throughout the day, throughout my life. Cleanse me as you promised, I will turn from the unbelief that separates us, and ask only that you replace in me this unbelief with faith through your Holy Spirit's filling. Grant me the strength in grace to walk right before you. Amen" - or something like that.
I think that if we spent more time fixing Christians we would not be so preoccupied with trying to fix the church.Labels: church, encouragement, union with christ |
|
posted by Daniel @
7:09 AM
14 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
| Are You Having a Hectic Day Christian? |
 When scripture tells us that we do not walk by sight but by faith, it means that the Christian part of everything we do is not what is seen with the eyes, but what is done through faith.
If today my littlest girl insists at some time that I serve her momentary whim, and if I should say "no" to such a request, and if she therefore begins to fuss so that I am in danger of compromising behavioral boundaries that I am are trying to set for her, and if I am leaning towards giving in to her and casting my boundaries aside for no other reason than because I am growing weary of maintaining those boundaries against her full frontal "fussing" assault - that is, if I find maintaining those boundaries "not worth it" because I loathe the hassle... or if I find myself driven in a situation by some emotional charge (in one direction or the other) - it is time for me to step aside from myself and remember that whatever I do in whatever situation I find myself (regardless of how difficult or easy the situation is) I can either walk one way (by faith) or the other (by sight), and the choice I make defines what kind of Christian I am - a (morally superior but ultimately) carnal Christian, or a spiritual Christian.
Oh, I may perform all the "right" actions in any given situation - that is, to the outside observer, whichever path I choose it will look the same: I will be going through the correct external motions, doing what ought to be done. My actions can be genuine and even rise up from a "righteous" disposition - but however morally superior any action on my part might end up being, proper (or even superior) "conduct" is not unique to Christianity. In fact, most world religions share on one level or another, the same moral high ground (conduct-wise). To the outside observer, the paid nurse who reads the book to the sick child is performing the same "good" deed as the mother who reads the book to her sick child - but internally - where it counts - the deeds are as different as night and day. The one is doing a "good deed" for which she is being compensated both financially, and also (perhaps) by keeping her "coincidentally" busy during the time that one of the nurses has to sponge bath that creepy old guy in bed six ~ that is, her good deed can be both self serving/advantageous, and also entirely compensated from beginning to end. The mother however, is acting purely and only out of concern for the child and her efforts are not going to be done in order to avoid something more unpleasant or in order to justify a paycheque.
You see, if you are a genuine Christian you have something that no other religion has, that is, if you have indeed come into union with Christ by grace through faith and in this way you have Christ Himself within you, and not only that - you yourself have been crucified with Christ - and that for a reason: so that sin will no longer have dominion over your mortal life in the here and now.
In Romans eight we read about how the law of the spirit of life has set us free from the law of the sin and death.
What is the law of sin and death?
That is the bondage to sin that Paul describes in Romans 7 - (you know, the whole -what I want to do I don't do, and what I don't want to do I do- thing. Paul describes it as a law that he finds in his flesh, but here in chapter 8 he says that the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets (those who are united with Christ in His death and resurrection) free from that bondage - not later on, but now, and not metaphorically, but literally.
If you find that the Romans 7 experience describes your walk, then (frankly) you are not walking by faith, for when you walk by faith you are made free, and when I say free, I don't mean free from sin's penalty since we were freed from that the moment we were put into Christ - I mean free from the bondage to sin described in Romans 7. If Romans 7 is your experience, even though by grace you have been set free from sin's dominion - yet if you are still living out your faith practically as one who is under the law (that is, if you are not applying the gospel to free you from your sin, but are instead simply resisting sin as "best you can" - then even though you have been set free, you are still in bondage on a practical level. Paul describes that as being carnal in his letter to the Corinthians, and he uses that term correctly - you are not walking in the spirit but in the flesh, not by faith, but by sight.
True, it is the Spirit who motivates us to flee sin, but if we are not fleeing sin through faith, but rather are trying to flee the desires of the flesh in the power of the flesh - we are not going to succeed because, frankly, our flesh is not really on God's side, but is in fact not subject to God's law and never will be, and is described in scripture as being enmity (hatred) against God - our flesh =hates= to be ruled by God.
It is easy to describe doing things "in the flesh" because that is the default way in which a man tries to live righteously (regardless of his religion). But how do we battle sin in the Spirit? How do we get out from under sin's bondage if we find ourselves thus bound? How do we get victory over sin in the Spirit?
First of all we need to ditch our "cause and effect" mindset; our salvation from sin has already happened if we are in Christ, and we cannot make it happen or make it "real" by "doing" anything. The battle isn't fought there - it is fought in the arena of faith. There is a world of difference between trusting that Christ has saved us from sin's dominion and trying to get suddenly spiritual when we are tempted. Anyone can keep a commandment superficially (The Pharisees were experts at this), but no one can really keep Christ's commandments unless (until) they genuinely love Christ more than they love their own sin.
But how can we love Christ more than we love sin? Not by gritting our teeth and trying to love more - that doesn't work. By faith. We need to settle it in our heart that God is for us, and not against us. We need to settle it in our heart that Christ is going to save us from sin not by making us stronger and better able to suppress our nature, but rather that God has done so already, and that because he loved us already, with a love that will not be augmented by our own efforts. Our death in/with Christ satisfied God's wrath toward us, and our having been raised in/with Christ demonstrates that we are eternally acceptable to God in His Beloved. We must let this truth penetrate our thinking - we must trust that God hasn't left us orphans but is working even this very moment to change us from glory to glory, and that it is only when we doubt this that we go about trying to make it happen by other means - the greatest hindrance to genuine holiness is self effort - for self effort springs from UNBELIEF. Who sanctifies? Christ sanctifies, not in response to me, but in spite of me. The only thing that hinders this is unbelief, remember, we are saved from sin by faith - not by works.
My wife likes me to keep it practical, so I will try and wrap up with a practical application of this truth:
If we are sanctified by the same kind of faith that saved us, a faith that came simply by believing that God will do what He said (save those who turn to Him), then we must trust God to save us from sin in the same way - by turning away from it in faith - but our faith is not in the vague goodness of God, but in truths that are as specific as the gospel - in this case the truth is that we are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ, and that it is trusting that when the Holy Spirit through Paul said that it is this union with Christ that is going to save you from sin's power - that God wasn't lying. Take that cheque to the bank and cash it.
We are not set free by our strength, but by the truth and when we are set free, we are set free indeed! Meditate on these truths now, don't wait till you are tempted - choose for yourself today to trust God to do what you have failed to do these long years...Labels: atonement; theology, sanctification, union with christ |
|
posted by Daniel @
10:43 AM
4 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
| 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 |
|
posted by Daniel @
7:39 AM
3 comment(s)
|
|
|
|
|
|
