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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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| Stop acting like you've lost your muse. |
Have you ever heard the sermon where you are told that you have to love the unlovable? I want to share something about that today.
It is easy to love my children, my spouse, and my friends, and by easy, I mean that I have an affection for them that motivates me. I don't have to work up this affection, nor do I have to work to draw it from some place within me in order to bring it out. It is just there, and it makes showing affection for these people natural and easy.
But my affections are necessarily limited. I don't know everyone that there is, and so when I try to love people in the world, I cannot draw that love out of some pre-existing personal affection I have for them.
It should come as no shock then that many of the "love the unlovable" sermons you will likely hear these days end up being about finding the right muse. The reason you aren't loving the unlovable (I am speaking as though I am preaching one of these sermons) is because you don't spend enough time with, or prayer on, such people. If you pray for them every day, and make an effort to spend time with them - they will become people that you care about - and loving them will become easier and more natural. In other words the reason you do not love is because you are not investing yourself in other people.
I have a serious problem with that sort of psycho-babble. First, it isn't biblical. God no where instructs us to foster affection in order to motivate love. That is just a human-o-centric crutch that many hold up to justify to themselves their own disobedience. I can't love my neighbor, they say, because the love isn't there. "Why isn't the love there?", asks the preacher who is about to answer his own question, "because you are not doing the work that fosters it."
Do you understand what is being suggested? It is easy for you to love your family, therefore, in order to make the command to love others easy, you need to do whatever it takes to make loving someone else easy also. In other words, you have to learn some trick that will make the yoke of loving others as light and easy as loving your family - and the best way to do that is by investing yourself in someone whom you don't presently show a lot of affection for.
Here is the thing though: the love I have, even for my family, is insufficient. How many times have I failed to love them with a perfect love? How many times has some selfishness in me trumped the love I ought to be expressing to them? Frankly, when I stop to think about it, I know that I could spend the rest of my life trying to love "properly" those who I already love the most - and I would never succeed. The very people who are easiest to love are loved insufficiently and -dare I say it- corruptly.
The notion then, that I should foster a better affection in order to make the command to love others more palatable not only contradicts, but in some congregations, supplants the biblical instruction. Listen: it is great that you find it easy to show affection for your family - but that affection is never going to be sufficient for you to love them the way Christ commands you to. How much less when you are trying to foster a similar, but ultimately lesser affection? How much less, I say, when this plan is being put forward as the way to make God's commands doable? Hello Pharisee? Have you found some way to make God's commands doable in the strength of your own flesh?
I contend therefore that the way to love others is not to try to make loving them easier. You can't even love those in your family with a perfect love, so trying to foster a better imperfect love for the "unlovable" is futile. Even if you do manage to make showing affection for someone you previously weren't "loving" - all you have done is found some muse by which you imagine you can do what God commands more easily. But I tell you that if God were satisfied with such buffoonery, He would have sent you a better muse instead of His Son.
The way to love others is to stop satisfying your own desires, that is, to set them aside, and (as an act of worship) do what God commands. You will not desire, nor will you ever desire (in your flesh) to love the unlovable. But you can deny that flesh, and allow the Spirit to do what God would have you do through you. This surrendering of self to the will of God is an act of worship - that is, your obedience is an act of exalting God. This is what it means to crucify yourself or to die daily, as Paul writes - it is the Christian "way" that we read about in scripture, that has been supplanted by religion.
Can I be forthright and frank? Of course I can, it's my blog. If you find it difficult to obey God, and are looking for some way to make it easier - what you are doing is setting the Christian way aside, and trying to find some other way to be a Christian. There is only one way to live as a Christian, and that way requires you to take up your cross - which is a metaphor for denying yourself the things that you want to do, and instead obeying the commands of God as an act of worship.
These are spiritual truths, and by that I mean, you will not really understand them unless or until God opens your understanding. But you can understand this: the problem is not that you haven't got the right motivation - the reason you are not obedient is not because you haven't found the right motivation, it is because you are trying to "spiritualize" your walk in the flesh.
Hear this: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit - Pagans are not walking in the Spirit when they love their children, spouse, or friends; neither are you. Thus the advice to try and foster a similar love for the unlovable is (for all the smoke and mirrors) actually just a call to find the "bestest" way to walk in the flesh. Your problem isn't that you lack the right motivation - it is that you are trying to find the best way to make the flesh "act" spiritually.
Christians are not called to act spiritually, they are called to be spiritual. Since there is nothing in our flesh that is in and of it self spiritual, we are commanded to walk in the Spirit - a Spirit who is both with us but also foreign to us. We cannot walk in obedience to the Spirit while we are doing the will of our flesh, so to walk in the Spirit we must deny the desires of our flesh. Everyone who is born of Christ is -able- to do this because the Holy Spirit who is in us, not only enables us to do so, but yearns for us to do it - a yearning that we share as our own - a yearning that runs contrary to the yearnings of our mortal frame.
You see, we want to gratify both the yearnings of our flesh, and the yearnings of the Spirit, and that is why people invent crazy schemes like trying to find the right motivation for obedience. They refuse to surrender control of their life to God, refuse to deny their flesh the right to do as it pleases - but mitigate this failure, by trying to find someway to please God without setting the flesh aside - to find a way to make their flesh pleasing to God - but those who are in the flesh, or so the scriptures teach - cannot please God.
The solution is, as I have been saying, to stop trying to please God in your flesh. Stop trying to find some way to motivate your flesh to act spiritual. Even if you do find some way to motivate your flesh - you will be doing nothing spiritual - you will just be deceiving yourself into thinking that you have finally found a way to obey God in your flesh. No: the solution is to decide today whom you will serve - your flesh, or God.
Do you want to love the unlovable? No, you don't. God wants to. The only way God can do that in you is to do it through you when you get out of His way - that is, when you set aside your own desires, and present yourself to God as a willing servant.
I am not saying you are going to be perfect in this, you won't but this is what it means to walk in the Spirit, and as you learn to do so, you will find your love for God exploding. Godly desires will well up unclogged within. It is good stuff - real joy, real peace. The flesh wants none of it, but it is waiting for everyone who walks in the Spirit.Labels: sanctification, walking in the Spirit |
posted by Daniel @
7:28 AM
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| 1023: Applying a simple proverb. |
In the 18 years of my marriage my wife and I have had many disagreements I suppose. Certainly in the first five years of my marriage (years when I was far from the Lord in my heart) there were many arguments and we came very close to destroying our marriage forever. Of course that all turned around on the day I, by God's grace, was able to turn my heart to follow Him in earnest. So I can say before the Lord without shame, that in the past 13 years of marriage each year has been better than the last, more joy filled, and more peaceful, meaning we have learned to settle our differences in a timely and godly manner before such things grow into anything more.
My Dad was a committed atheist, and my mom a superstitious, biblically ignorant catholic. My wife's mother and father were likewise pseudo-religious, but lacking in genuine faith during her upbringing. It is enough to say that we did not want to our children to see us "resolve" our differences according to the patterns we had inherited as children ourselves.
So, for the benefit of those who are newly wed, or new to the Christian walk, or perhaps just interested in learning how Christian couples with children resolve conflicts in front of their children, I thought I would share a disagreement my wife and I had last night.
After we came home from prayer meeting, we set our two eldest to doing those supper dishes that we had left behind when we frantically dashed out the door to get to prayer meeting (late). For supper I had made a sweet and spicy fried chicken that my wife liked, and later blamed for the gas (and painful cramps) that the baby was tearfully experiencing (our fifth child is now five weeks old).
As I sat in the living room rocking the baby first this way, then that, to try and alleviate the cramps she was experiencing (and thereby stop her crying), I noticed on the family computer that my eldest daughter was going to be getting her bangs cut next week. She had spoken to her grandmother, and her grandmother had made a hair dressing appointment, and because it was left as open mail on the monitor and a small message, I picked up that much information in a single glance.
I should explain that I had had several conversations with my daughter in the past week about getting her bangs cut. Her best friend just had her bangs cut, and so my daughter wanted to cut her bangs too.
This was not something new, when her friend had her hair dyed pink, my daughter wanted to dye her hair too. At that time I exercised my parental veto and forbid it for two reasons - first I think that women in our culture are fed a vile lie from the cradle, that being that augmenting the way God made you is not vain, but is merely "feminine", and I don't want my daughter running around with pink hair. I want her to learn to be content in God's design, that is, in her looks (plus pink hair is trashy as far as I am concerned, but that's just a personal preference).
Well, long before the dye faded in her friends hair the desire in my daughter to dye her own hair likewise faded. It was just one of those passing fancies that young people are inclined to indulge because they are young. Depending on your life philosophy, you may be inclined to indulge such things or not. I am of the "or not" persuasion, and my wife is of the contrary persuasion.
So it was when my daughter began to speak of parroting her friends bang cutting, that I expressed my concern for where this was coming from. At the end of each of a few conversations we had had, I made it clear that this was not something I would ever endorse. Not that I am a hair-Nazi or anything, but my concern is primarily tied to weeding out motives and making sure that my little ones learn to discern peer pressure and worldly thinking, and to react to these things in a godly way.
Well, at least in theory. I also just happen to think that long hair is pretty, and cutting a straight line across your eyebrows is ugly. As a father, and as someone who has a carnal nature just like everyone else, I am inclined by that sinful nature to use my position of authority to furnish myself according to my desires, whether petty or profound.
So when I read about the hair appointment, I was indignant. It didn't help that the baby was also being rather vociferously indignant, but for other reasons. Now I wasn't angry in the sense that some might thing - you know, the creased brow, the loud voice, or what have you. Rather I called my daughter into the room and asked her what this was all about.
Now, my wife knew that I not only had a preference, but she knew what my preference was: that my daughter keep her bangs long. I described above two godly sounding reasons for my preference, but in truth, the petty reason I gave (I just don`t like them!) was far more significant a factor in my concern than even I was aware. So my wife was okay with my daughter getting the hair cut.
So in the moment I read the email, I found myself both at odds with my daughter, for not respecting my wishes, and again, at odds with my wife for knowingly allowing something she knew I wouldn't approve of. I felt in the moment I read the email, not that I was being petty and controlling, but rather that my role as father and husband was being ignored and disrespected.
So, being fluent in scripture, I recalled to my wife the passage in the OT concerning vows - that one role God intends the father to play, is that of a decision maker, so much so that upon hearing of a vow that his daughter makes, or even his own wife makes, the father/husband may exercise this divine prerogative given to fathers/husbands by God, and veto the vow. My intention was not to exercise the veto, but rather to brow beat my wife with the verse until she obliged of her own accord.
It is fair to say that at this point we were "arguing" and our two eldest were right there listening to it. Anytime parents argue, children worry, and so it was with our kids. They listened as they did the dishes, and (as I found out later) were praying for us. My wife didn't want to have an argument in front of the children because when she was growing up that's what her parents did. But because I wanted our children to see that even Christians can argue, and again, to see the process of reconciliation that follows, I insisted that the children continue doing their dishes.
Our "argument" wouldn't even pass for a heated discussion in many homes, but it did get to the point where you start venting about other things you don't like. By the time we got there, my wife had said a few things I knew she would regret, and like the proverbial son who suddenly realizes that he is wallowing in the mire, I found myself realizing that for all my spiritual pretense, quoting verses, and defending my opinions from scripture, I was not actually in the Spirit, but rather firmly in the grip of the flesh.
I hate it when that happens, because it is like the man who by his constant digging has set himself in a large hole, such that even after coming to his senses and suspending his digging, still has the problem before him of being in a large hole.
So it was that I found myself, in the wrong, in the flesh, under the perturbed stare of my wife, trying to soothe my littlest one, and wishing I hadn't dug so deep a hole for myself. In those moments my silent prayers seem to me to be jumbled and desperate - like I am clambering to surrender to God in my heart, but doing so not to draw near to God, but only to satisfy a religious check box, and I have to press on beyond the superficial, and humble myself in my heart - to pass "from this is what a Christian ought to do", and into, "I desperately need God for real".
We took a break to put the kids to bed, and as we did I was genuine in my desire to find a godly path out of the mess I was making. My son is only twelve, but he knows the word of God, and I believe knows the Lord and loves Him. I asked him to give me his honest opinion of my side of the discussion, and he looked me solemnly in the eye and said that perhaps instead of quoting the bible on what it says about father's I should try quoting what it says about arguing.
God bless that boy, for in the moment he said this the words of Proverbs 26:20 came to mind, "For lack of wood the fire goes out" - immediately I knew that the "wood" in the fire of this present contention was my own self interest. How blessed is the man whose children love the Lord!
I got on my knees right then and there and thanked my son for speaking the truth to me, and thanked God that the Holy Spirit was able to find that traction to instruct me through my son's wisdom.
When I returned to my wife, the argument was more than over because the point of contention had been dealt with by God, even as my children had been praying, and as I had called on the Lord to do.
After my wife and I asked one another for forgiveness, we went to our children and explained our faults to them, and how in spite of these, the moment we sought the Lord in earnest, we were blessed. This we did in order that they might have an example to follow in their own lives.
We are all going to fall on our faces from time to time, spiritually speaking - but if we are parents, let us be sure that our children who witness our fall, witness also the way in which the Lord raises us up afterwards.
Oh, and just in case you were wondering ...my daughter is going to have her bangs cut, and I am fine with that.Labels: arguing, marriage, reconciliation., walking in the Spirit |
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posted by Daniel @
7:09 AM
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| Not Like A Glass Of Water... |
Have you ever known a genuine conspiracy theory buff? You know the sort I mean right? The ones who believe the government is covering up something - maybe aliens at area 51, or maybe the moon landing was a hoax, etc. For the sake of this illustration it doesn't really matter what their particular poison is, it only matters that you recognize a few things about such a person.
First of all no matter what you talk about, their particular fixation always enters into it. Did you buy milk this morning? Yeah, well listen man, I never drink milk from the store because the government is putting stuff in the milk. Lotta snow this morning? Yeah man, the Republicans are cloud seeding the U.S. in order to hinder the Obama administration. Okay, maybe that's a bit far fetched for most, but my point will ride on it even if it were more subdued, my point being: these people are so full of their conspiracy theories that these theories end up influencing everything they think and do.
We can, with tongue in cheek, pronounce the classic double entendre upon them when we say, "They are full of it."
We mean by that that they are at once "full of bunk" and again, that they are overly abounding in conspiracy theory stuff.
To use another illustration, the father loves his only child who was born blind, and cares for him, and always looks out for him, only to one day reach back into the car to get something, and fail to see his little one walk into the street, and you know the rest - the grief that grips this man's heart can only be described in terms like "overwhelming" or "incapacitating" - there is no balm stout enough to sooth this man's grief and remorse - he is, as we say, filled with grief, or filled with remorse.
When we use the word "fill" here - we are not suggesting that the conspiracy theory dude's life was like a cup that had to be emptied of normal things in order to be filled with conspiracy theories. We are not saying that the grieving father could not grieve until he first emptied himself of everything else. We are just using the expression as a way of painting the level of saturation - it is an entirely saturated situation.
I am using "fill" then in the same way that I might say that wind "fills" a sail, I mean that the wind exerts itself on every part of the sail, so that the sail conforms, as much as it is able, to the pressure the wind is putting on it.
The word the scripture uses to translate "fill" is πληρoω. It is pronounced: Play-raw'-oh, and it is the word that scripture uses (or derivatives of this word) when it is commonly describing being full of or being filled with/by the Holy Spirit.
When I first read the scriptures and learned that I was commanded by God to be being kept filled by/with the Holy Spirit (c.f. Ephesians 5:18) I sort of pictured that as a command to become a Spirit controlled zombie, and that I would enter into this state of pious zombification by "emptying myself of me" at which point I was certain I would receive some sort of mystical experience where by I felt in some tangible way, the immediate presence of the Holy Spirit.
I mention that because I know that my readership is wide enough (and thanks to Blogger™) random enough that some will be reading this who are trying to be filled with the Spirit, but haven't the first clue what that really means, or how to go about doing it.
I will explain it this way: Being filled with the Spirit simply means allow the conviction that comes from the Holy Spirit to saturate the choices you make. If you know a thing is sinful, you obey the conviction that to pursue that would be sin, and you instead pursue what is righteous. If you know that failure to do something would be likewise sinful, you obey the same conviction and do it.
Now when I say conviction I don't mean that you receive some kind of mystical impression, or any such nonsense. I mean that you simply are convicted that this one thing is sinful in the same way you are convicted that the sky is blue. You don't get zapped by some sort of "sky is blue" impression, nor do you go about like an open antenna trying to pick up "spiritual" signals. As you become familiar with God's word (through the reading of it) you become more and more familiar with what God expects from you. The Holy Spirit convicts your conscience that you should or should not do something, and so long as (and is as much as) your conscience is biblically informed, all you need to do to "walk in the Spirit" is walk without transgressing, or suppressing, your conscience. Being "filled" with the Holy Spirit means only that you are consciously examining your actions in light of your biblically informed, and Spirit provoked, conscience. You don't have to "empty" yourself of anything in order to be filled by the Spirit, but you do need to be obedient. When you resist the Holy Spirit's conviction, the bible calls that quenching the Holy Spirit - like dousing a fire; or more pictorially, like dousing the Holy Spirit's conviction by justifying yourself in what you do that is contrary to what you ought to do. When you quench the Holy Spirit, you are grieving the Holy Spirit, and we are told not to do that.
I know, I know. Some people really, really want an experience. They look to the passages in scripture where there was a present and experientially measurable manifestation of the Holy Spirit (the building shook! etc.), and using these passages from the book of Acts they teach that the Holy Spirit always works, or at least prefers to work, through manifesting Himself in some profound way. It can happen that something unusual will happen in your life, perhaps more than once, but again, perhaps not at all. But such phenomenon has nothing whatsoever to do with the command to be being kept filled by the Holy Spirit.
So if you every find yourself wondering what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit, it just means to keep your affections such that you are always obeying the convictions of a biblically informed, and Spiritually provoked, conscience.
Note: One of the flakiest things I see some Christians doing is interpreting their own stray thoughts as promptings from the Holy Spirit. I blame it on the sad habit many exercise when they talk with other Christians about "spiritual" things. Pretend that you overhear this side of a phone conversation:
"Yeah, Marge? Hi, it's me Pam. I was just sitting here and I suddenly felt pressure from the Lord that I should call you..."
Here is what is really happening, Pam has become convinced that everything and anything that happens in her life might be a sign from God. She is daydreaming, or whatever, and suddenly a stray thought about Marge comes into her head. She then interprets this to mean that God wants her to call Marge.
Do you see the problem with that? God sent an angel to tell John the Apostle what the vision he had seen (c.f. the book of revelation) meant, but when God impressed something just as "God ordained" on Pam, He decided to leave it open to interpretation so that Pam has to rely upon her best, subjective, guess. Follow that kind of reasoning to its abusrd conclusion (God "told" me to marry you, or alternately (why not?) divorce you!) Once we set our own subjectivity as the traffic cop that decides what "impressions" are from God and which are just stray thoughts - we embark upon a road that leads to chaos.
God doesn't speak to me in stray thoughts and questionable impressions. He speaks to me through His word, and through conviction that is provoked by knowledge of His word. To be filled with God's Spirit then is not to be filled with my own stray thoughts that I think God is sending me, nor is it to be waiting on, or being led by some sort of mystical experience or experiences - it is simply this: you determine to do what you know God intends for you to do, and you know what God intends for you to do by informing your mind and your conscience through reading (and correctly undertanding) scripture.Labels: Holy Spirit, mysticism, walking in the Spirit |
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posted by Daniel @
12:38 PM
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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
7 comment(s)
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| ἡ ὁδός |
 I was at a prayer meeting one morning - a men's breakfast for evangelicals in my area, and was struck as one fellow, in the context of the conversation, began to remark, "Well, it is just like the bible says,..." - which to me, is a very good beginning to any just about any statement you could make in a mixed company of Christians. Only he followed it up with, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!"
Now, I know what you are thinking - isn't that a Shakespearean quote? Well, no actually. This quote is adapted from a line in the play "The Mourning Bride" by William Congreve. The actual line reads, "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned" Congreve was a late 17th century (and early 18th century) author and playwright. Another famous quote of his is likewise often erroneously attributed to Shakespeare is a line from the same play, "Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast"
I mention that not to impress you with my ability to "Google" quotes and thereby present to the blogging community the facade of one who is quite artsy and well read - but rather, I mention it because it demonstrates how some of us, I would even suggest many of us, have some ideas or notions in our heads that we attribute to incorrect sources.
I take to task, for instance the words of Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence: "all men are created equal" - taken out of its context, we might imagine that this reflects a biblical truth, and some would even argue that, but the bible neither says it nor implies it. The bible certainly teaches that God is an impartial Judge, and shows no personal favoritism, but it does not suggest in any way that that all people are in every possible way equal.
I mentioned that this Sunday from the pulpit by way of illustrating how we as a culture have progressed into a sort of moral relativism that can blind us to seeing the righteousness of God.
My text was Matthew 19:16 - Matthew 20:16, which begins with the rich young ruler and ends with the parable of the workers in the vineyard. I wanted to illustrate this one truth - that God is righteous, and when we can't see God's righteousness it is because our own sense of righteousness has been corrupted by the world system.
I used our cultures "pursuit of equality" to illustrate the secular mindset - we began with such high ideals - even that all men were created by the same hand and therefore the politics of the new world would not cater to a class system that gives more rights to some and less to others depending upon their birth status, etc. etc. That is a wonderful ideal - and a good solid point - God made us all, so we ought not to exalt ourselves one against another. But the full thrust of that statement was truncated over time so that it no longer dealt with the inequality of political class systems, but was rather applied to individuals, which in itself is not bad thing - but it lost the idea of the class system, and began to mean only that all people are equal in pretty much every way possible.
Many schools continue today to enforce a "no fail" policy - why? Because we are all equal, it isn't right to demand some minimum requirement. The United Nations has for years been promoting the idea that spanking your children is child abuse - why? Because children are equal to us, and if spanking an adult is abuse, so too is spanking children. It doesn't take too many examples to show how corruption sets in after time. What begins as something good, becomes corrupted as the stink of the world system begins to taint it.
This is why we have moral relativism today. That is why my truth is true, and your truth is true even though we disagree - the only evil is to suggest that anyone is wrong - since we are all equally right.
Now, I mentioned these things on Sunday in the pulpit to illustrate how inclined we are to think of something as good and proper just because everyone else thinks it is good and proper - because perhaps long ago, the root that gave birth to that branch may have been a much better thing - and the sentiment attached to the root seems to linger in the branch - which was to say that as we read that portion of scripture, I wanted us to read it in perfect freedom from that worldly taint - to see God's righteousness and marvel, rather than to stand in judgment of it.
So I explained just the last part of the parable of the workers in the vineyard - the pay out, where the householder calls his servants to pay the laborers and starting with the ones who showed up at the end of the day - and progressing to the ones who had been there all day - he had his servants pay them all the same wage, yet the ones who had worked all day supposed they would receive more because they had worked more - and in doing so betrayed themselves as having misunderstood the generosity of the householder.
You see, I explained, they weren't being paid that day because they had worked. They were being paid because that morning the householder went out into the square and elected to choose them. They were being paid right now because that householder gone out that morning and hand picked them to come and work for him. The wages that were being paid to them did not find their origin in their own labor as they imagined, but rather it was ultimately dependent upon the choice of the householder. They didn't see it because they couldn't take their eyes off their own merit - they could not rightly comprehend that it was by grace and only by grace that they received employment - and that it was this same grace that had put them there in front of the money table at the end of the day. It had been the householders prerogative to provide employment for them, not his duty - the same prerogative that he exercised in hiring the others. The wage each one received was received first and foremost because the householder was a man given to grace - their labor was not what had merited their selection, because they were selected before they had embarked upon the labor - not because of their merit, but because of his choice of them. Each one therefore received the same wage - a wage that wasn't dependent upon merit, but upon grace - and since it was by grace, it was not according to their labor that they were paid, but according to the generosity of the householder.
Yes, we can talk about how this parable pictures the Gentile inclusion in the Jewish church, it certainly does picture that - but our focus was on the righteousness of God - the grace of God, the choice that was made without our merit - really, our focus was the God exalting gospel - the truth that God's grace in all things is not extended to us as a matter of merit, but as a living testimony to the beauty and grace of our Living God. We were gathered together to bring God glory, and that was the way it was going to be done - by looking at why Christ told this parable: to explain what He meant when He said that the last would be first, and the first would be last, and in doing so to exalt the name of God on earth.
Recall that Peter had seen that the rich young ruler refused to give up all and follow Christ, and so Peter said hey - we did give up everything and follow you - what are we going to get for it? A little impertinent I suppose, but Christ didn't rebuke him, instead he answered him that in the regeneration (that is, not in this lifetime but after Christ is enthroned) everyone who followed Christ thus would receive a reward - but that those who were first (presumably in this life - such as the rich young ruler) would be last, and those who were last (such as those who gave up all) would be first - in the regeneration.
Then Christ immediately tells this parable, and I think it was to underscore the error that Peter was making when he basically asked Christ, hey, what do we get for all the work we are doing? what do we get for our efforts? For giving up all? - the answer was, you will receive, not because of your labor, but because you are chosen - an answer that, when rightly understood, defeats the wage mentality, and puts one back on the path of genuine worship in the Spirit.
Listen: The one thing that is going to make you impotent as a Christian is a pious form of navel gazing. What do you have that you didn't receive? Let's extend that thought - what will you do for Christ in the future that will not have been given you by Him to do? Oh - brother, sister, please don't stop there, there is one more step: when are you going to stop thinking that Jesus has no interest in you or the things that you do? There is a road set before you, just for you even today - a road that has long been waiting for your feet to walk on it. A road that can only be walked upon by those who are willing to say - "God has put me here!" - and can never by found by all who would try to walk it otherwise - but if you know your father has placed the road beneath your feet - brother, sister, walk.Labels: encouragement, sanctification, walking in the Spirit |
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posted by Daniel @
11:27 AM
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