Faith is not a means by which we earn things from God through our own effort and force of will to believe. Faith is trusting in the Father to give us what Jesus has earned for us and what we could never earn for ourselves–including the strength to believe that the Holy Spirit supplies.
Tag: God
Saving is losing
Every life is going to come into judgment. None of us can escape the inevitable outcome that we must give account to God for our lives (Hebrews 4:13). The worst thing we can do in response to this knowledge is to never attempt to do anything substantial with our lives for fear of failing. There are gifts that we were given when God created us and gifts that come to us as a result both of God’s common grace and His saving grace. We can do one of two things with these talents. We can put them to use and try things and take risks for God’s glory, or we can play it as safe as possible to ensure that we never run the risk of disappointing God with our failures–as if God was not for us! There is actually a greater long-run risk in not stepping out and attempting to do risky and meaningful things for Jesus. It’s the same risk that C. S. Lewis talks about when he says in The Four Loves:
“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
The things we do to keep ourselves from getting hurt and disappointed ultimately killing us. Self-protection becomes self-destruction. Playing it safe turns out to be the most dangerous thing you can do. Lewis goes on:
“I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God’s will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. ‘I knew thee that thou wert a hard man.’ Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.”
Better to take the wildest and most irresponsible risks for a sincere motive without wisdom than to be the smartest self-serving self-preserver ever. Better to blow yourself away in some presumptious and reckless enterprise for the sake of love than to live a life shrunk down to the concern of perpetuating your own comfortable existence. It’s that cautious, careful smart self-seeking that leads to every kind of spiritual and moral poverty. As it says in Proverbs, “One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want.” (11:24, ESV) Save your life, lose it. Lose your life sincerely, however unwisely, in the name of Jesus, and you will find it.
~Andrew
From The Rare Jewel by Burroughs: Enjoying earthly blessings as children of God
I mentioned on the blog on Saturday that I read a book last week called The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by the Puritan pastor Jeremiah Burroughs. I want to quote a passage from that book which really struck me in how it encourages us to interpret our experience of temporal blessings on this earth in terms of the realities of eternal life and eternal death. This is from chapter 3:
“A godly man may very well be content, though he has only a little, for what he does have he has by right of Jesus Christ, by the purchase of Jesus Christ. He has a right to it, a different kind of right to that which a wicked man can have to what he has. Wicked men have certain outward things; I do not say they are usurpers of what they have; they have a right to it, and that before God, but how? It is a right by mere donation, that is, God by his free bounty gives it to them; but the right that the saints have is a right of purchase: it is paid for, and it is their own, and they may in a holy manner and holy way claim whatever they have need of.”
Unbelievers, he says, can own things in a sense. You can say of someone who doesn’t have Jesus, “this is his wife, this is his house,” etc. But these things aren’t properly his because his relationship with the giver of all good things is fundamentally broken. Whatever state of blessedness an lost person enjoys is doomed to fall away from him permanently one day. But there is something different in the relationship that a child of God has with God’s blessings.
Burroughs continues, “a child of God has not a right merely by donation; what he has is his own, through the purchase of Christ. Every bit of bread you eat, if you are a godly man or woman, Jesus Christ has bought it for you.
You go to market and buy your meat and drink with your money, but know that before you buy it, or pay money, Christ has bought it at the hand of God the Father with his blood. You have it at the hands of men for money, but Christ has bought it at the hand of his Father by his blood. Certainly it is a great deal better and sweeter now, though it is but a little.“What a thought, that the blessings we experience in this life are actually something which are ours by right in Jesus Christ! Here’s an idea that is rarely conveyed by modern preachers. Burroughs can say this because he understands two very important theological truths: one, that God is the author and giver of every good thing, and two, that those of us who are in Christ have a rightful claim on God’s blessing.
For some folks this sounds too proud of a way to talk about the blessing of God. They would say that everything God gives them is an unmerited gift of grace and not a response to any rightful claim of theirs. This would be true if we were all left to our own works, our own resumes, and our own reputation in our relationship to God. In and of ourselves, the only thing we have any right to claim for ourselves from God is the punishment that our sin deserves, which Paul calls “the wages of sin” in Romans 3:23.
So when Paul goes on in the early part of Romans chapter 4 to say that “to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation,” he is making a point about what attitude we should have toward God’s blessings. In this world, a person who does work under a contract can lay claim to his wages as one who has a right to them. The employer can’t act as though he’s doing anything generous or magnanimous by paying up; he’s just paying what he owes the worker. What Paul is saying is that the salvation that God offers us in Jesus doesn’t operate on these terms, because we are all already sinners who fall short of God’s glory. We haven’t earned our salvation. How, then, does it end up that we have any rightful claim upon God’s blessings?
It’s because of what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21 when he lays out for us the great legal exchange that has taken place between us and Jesus on the cross in these terms: “For our sake [God] made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus didn’t just become sin for us on the cross; we became His righteousness before God.
We know that Jesus lived a perfect life. He “knew no sin.” Because of Jesus’ perfect life, He has a claim on God’s blessings by way of right. Jesus deserves God’s blessing. But He willingly abandoned that condition on the cross so that we could have it, so that He could be punished in our place, and so that we, in His place, could claim God’s blessings as though we had all lived perfect lives. When we say that we are saved by grace, not works, lest any man should boast, what we mean is that we are saved by Jesus’ good works which are put to our account by God’s free grace instead of being saved by our works. We didn’t do anything to earn the rights of access to God and His blessings that we have, but they are absolutely ours, now and forever, by faith in Jesus. If salvation was just God being good to us in spite of no good we’ve done, there would be no firmness to our present and eternal hope.
And while we do not experience in this life the perfection of blessing which Jesus earned for us in His perfect life and gave to us on the cross, we do experience a kind of firstfruits of our eternal inheritance in Jesus. Even if we have less than the people around us who are not in Christ, we can actually get our hopes up and really get into and enjoy God’s blessings, because we know that for us, while earthly blessings may come and go, whatever we do have is (as Burroughs goes on to say) “an earnest penny for all the glory that is reserved” for us. That is to say, it’s a down payment on our eternal inheritance.
What a better way to look at music and marriage and good food and all the things we have to enjoy on earth than to a. try to find the ultimate fulfillment of our hopes in them or b. deny ourselves or despise what God has given us in this life because we are concerned with “heavenly” things! There is a “foretaste of glory divine” in earthly blessings, and we can consider them ours by right through the rights that grace has given us.
How does all of this help us in contentment? Should knowing that God’s blessings are ours by right in Jesus make us more demanding of immediate blessing? I would think not. If we can see our eternal inheritance not set up against but instead through the smallest of earthly blessings, how can we not be content, even though our earthly blessings may be small, as God has through them conveyed a sight, however dim, of what we will enjoy for eternity? (I want to explore these thoughts further both in comparison and contrast to so-called “prosperity Gospel” teachings, but that will have to wait for another time.)
Burroughs concludes:
“Just as every affliction that the wicked have here is but the beginning of sorrows, and forerunner of those eternal sorrows that they are likely to have hereafter in Hell, so every comfort you have is a forerunner of those eternal mercies you shall have with God in Heaven. Not only are the consolations of God’s Spirit the forerunners of those eternal comforts you shall have in Heaven, but when you sit at your table, and rejoice with your wife and children and friends, you may look upon every one of those but as a forerunner, yea the very earnest penny of eternal life to you. Now if this is so, it is no marvel that a Christian is contented, but this is a mystery to the wicked. I have what I have from the love of God, and I have it sanctified to me by God, and I have it free of cost from God by the purchase of the blood of Jesus Christ, and I have it as a forerunner of those eternal mercies that are reserved for me; and in this my soul rejoices. There is a secret dew of God’s goodness and blessing upon him in his estate that others have not.”
~Andrew
Notice: Scripture quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible.
Sin is always a personal issue
I saw John Mark McMillan and Kings Kaleidoscope in concert this past Saturday, and I want to share a little bit about that. Tomorrow is also Friday, which means that I will have a roundup of all the new music to do, so the concert review may have to wait until Saturday. At any rate. For now I want to spend a few moments on the subject of how God’s personal
God’s word doesn’t teach us that goodness and justice are abstract concepts out there in the universe to which God is accountable. The view of God that we get from Scripture is that goodness and justice and are attributes of His character, that they come from Him and originate from Him. If there was no God, there would be no goodness. If there was no God, there would be no such thing as justice. Moral goodness and justice are personal rather than abstract. All that we will ever experience of goodness and truth and beauty depends on the reality of God, and as a result, God Himself is the standard of what is good and true and beautiful. Goodness, truth, and beauty are because God is, because I AM is I AM. (This is not a doctrine I’m going to explain or defend in detail at the moment, although I probably will attempt to do so at some point.)
Now the most common objection that is thrown up against this is that it makes goodness arbitrary in its contingency on the will of a person, i.e. that God could do whatever He wanted, or expect of us whatever He wanted, and we would be under an obligation to think of it as good, even if it were to go against what we know to be good. But this is actually faulty for two reasons. One, it involves a subtle error of begging the question, re-asserting the very premise that is being challenged (that goodness is an impersonal absolute abstract “out there” to which God is accountable) in order to attempt to prove that premise. Everyone has presuppositions–indeed, it is impossible to begin thinking without them–but we can’t think that restating our presuppositions is the same thing as an argument. But the second and bigger mistake is that it involves a misunderstanding of what Christians are saying when they say that God is the standard of goodness. We are not saying that God decrees what is good, and that good and evil are contingent upon His say-so. We are saying that God is what is good, that goodness is His character, that everything He decrees is consistent with His character, and that one of the other important attributes of His character is that it is immutable, i.e., it never changes. That is very different than setting up the world as contingent upon the say-so of a capricious being that might say or think anything. It does, however, mean that God is accountable ultimately to Himself, and not to us. (Hebrews 6:13) For God to be good is simply for God to be true to Himself, because He is good. However, we are creatures, and on top of that, sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God, which means that we need something more than merely to be true to ourselves in order to be good. We need redemption, and we need to be true to the one who has created and redeemed us.
Where I am going with all of this is to make the point that sin is always a personal issue. When God confronts us about our sin, He is not confronting us about violating a law out there that He has the responsibility of protecting. He’s not coming to us saying, “Hey, I wish this wasn’t necessary, I really hate to break it to you, but I’m responsible to uphold the law here and you’ve blown it.” On the contrary, He is confronting us about the way we have personally violated Him. Every sin is a personal violation of God and that is what makes it wrong. It is precisely because He is immutable goodness that He must punish sin. He could either punish it or go along with it, and He cannot and will not go along with it. Repentance, also, is not about us making things up to a standard of goodness. Repentance is about us leaving sin for God, because to move toward God is to move away from sin. When God disciplines us (which is a very different thing from punishing us, as we will explore some other time), He’s not dealing with us about the way we have gone astray from some standard out there. He’s dealing with us about the way we have gone astray from Him, to urge us and help us to see the need to come back to Him, because He wants us to live with His goodness flowing through us.
~Andrew
Songs of His Pursuit: This Man
I blogged yesterday about how music plays a huge part in the story of God’s grace in my life so far and about my desire to tell that story by sharing about some of the songs that God has used to get through to me the reality of who He is and what He has done, is doing, and will do for me in and through Jesus Christ. Today I’m going to talk about Jeremy Camp’s This Man. This song was a single from his 2004 release Restored. It was a #1 single in early 2006, but to me, it seemed like the song was never played enough. It was one of the handful of songs that I was always searching for when I flipped through the four Christian music radio stations I had access to.
When I was a confused and lonely pre-teen, I really didn’t have a good grasp on the cross of Jesus and what it means for people who put their hope in it. I had some idea that what Jesus did on the cross was supposed to mean something for me in the way of atonement, but I didn’t really understand how. I’ve always been susceptible to being moved emotionally by music, and I remember that this song had a big emotional impact on me. There was something in the words, “Would you take the place of this Man / Would you take the nails from His hands?” sung in this way with this melody that made me realize that there could be hope and beauty and even glory in the midst of suffering, and not just in spite of the suffering, but because of what the suffering meant. It made me feel all the same longings I felt when I read about Narnia (and I lied in Narnia for a few years). Maybe that was the beginning of my hope that a desire for otherworldly love and meaning could be in some way fulfilled in this world instead of being shunted off into fantasies of another world that didn’t really exist. All of this came at me in a mystical sort of way, instead of being anchored in concrete propositional truths about Jesus, who He is, and what He has done. But I can say that it made me feel the sort of things that a person should feel about those truths, and made me suspect that there was a beauty to be found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself that was deeper than the music and the poetry, a beauty which I might somehow be able to find my way into.
Fast forward ten years, and a more perfect realization of what the Gospel is and what it means has only made this song more precious to me. When we really understand the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, all of our efforts at do-it-yourself atonement have to come to an end. This Man, hanging on a cross, rejected by men and carrying the wrath of God, has done something for us that we could never do for ourselves. He has put our sin to death, carried the wrath of God we deserved, and made a way for us to be welcomed into the fullness of God’s presence. And sometimes we simply have to stop ourselves in our efforts of making our way with God through our efforts at being good and our efforts at making up to Him for our failures to be good, and ask ourselves, “How can I ever think that I can take the place of this Man? How could I ever do for myself what He has done for me? Why am I trying to carry for myself a burden that He has taken for me?” I ask myself that question a little more frequently because of this song’s presence in my life, and it’s so good for my heart and my walk with Jesus.
~Andrew
Songs of His Pursuit, introduction
Tonight I was dwelling on a song that was one of my earliest favorites and remains a favorite of mine, “This Man” by Jeremy Camp. As I was thinking about it, and attempting to put into words how it made me feel when I was eleven and twelve years old, and how it makes me feel now, I had the thought of doing a series of posts discussing some of my most favorite songs, why they are my favorite songs, and how God has pursued my heart through them. I’ll be talking about “This Man” in a future post, but for now, I want to say some introductory things to set the stage for what will follow. (Note: these posts will carry on sporadically with no definite end. They will not be an uninterrupted series, but will be interspersed with writings on other subjects.)
When that song was released to radio in 2005, I didn’t have access to an iPod or a high-speed internet connection. Spotify didn’t exist, Youtube was brand new, and our modem connection would, of course, hardly support anything requiring much in the way of data transfer. (I recall how, in the few times a week I was allowed to use our dial-up internet, I would wait patiently for several minutes at a time to load the MLB.com site). Nor did I have much in the way of discretionary income that could be spent on CDs. Add to all of this my parents’ disagreements between themselves about what sort of music they wanted their children to listen to, and my desire to stay out of that conflict, which led me to be secretive about giving too many honest indications to either parent what I really enjoyed or wanted to listen to. The result was that during my pre-teen and early teen years my free experience of the music that resonated with me most was limited mostly to evening hours when one or both parents were out and I could make free use of one of the radios in the house.
At that time I had no personal interest in the popular secular music, and indeed very little experience from which such an interest might arise. What I did enjoy (although at time with some reserve and a nagging sense of guilt, inspired mostly by my mother’s discomfort and general opposition to it) was the mainstream contemporary Christian music which was broadcast on four different FM stations in the suburbs of Chicago where I lived (and still live to the present). Probably in part because it was so much of the all that I had, I connected very deeply with the music. Not that I embraced all of it without any distinction in my preferences. Some songs I liked better than others, and a few songs I found to be annoying. But a few of the Christian songs that were popular on the radio from 2004 or 2005, when I really began paying attention, to 2009 or 2010, when my tastes (due in part to somewhat misguided moral impulses) began to turn in a different direction, provided the real soundtrack of those turbulent, conflicted years of my life (about which more will be written in future).
I had always, to some extent, known that I was a sinner, and also known that the only hope for my redemption was somehow to be found in the cross of Jesus Christ. God, however, seemed for almost all of the time to be very distant to me. This was partly because of brokenness and conflict in my own family that I did not know how to reconcile with the things we all said we believed, which brokenness and conflict led to distance in my relationship with both of my parents (although the distance was more pronounced and more honest in my relationship with my father). I really believe it was these crises, and an attempt to somehow escape the pain of them, which led to battles with ideas like solipsism and atheism in my pre-teen and teen years (about which I may write more later). If my experience is any indicator–and indeed, I think there is more than just my experience or even the experiences of others that speaks to the reality of this–there is no such thing as an honest atheist, or an honest solipsist. Ideas like these, as I understand, are simply ideological compensations for the pain of life in whatever form it comes–guilt, disappointment, grief over our own losses or sympathetic anger about the losses and hardships of others, and so forth. In saying this, I do not in any way mean to ridicule or belittle those who consider themselves atheists or solipsists. If you leave a man on his own (which is where all of us are without Christ), the pain of the world we live in and the life we live in it is a weight that will crush him. There are many, many kinds of suicide, only one of which stops a beating heart. Cutting all sense of connection to God or reality is something that a person might do as deliberately to bring an end to the pain of this life as cutting his own veins. In saying all this, my point is that while there is really no such thing as an honest atheist or an honest solipsist, there are honestly broken people who have chosen to not be honest with themselves and others about what they instinctively know to be true because, for reasons that are not entirely personally their own fault, what they know to be true is more than they can bear. I think those of us who are secure in the knowledge of the love of God should have compassion on them because God has compassion on them. I also think those of us who are not secure in the knowledge of God or His love must look to Jesus, and realize that in Him God has revealed His compassion for us, and having realized this, learn to have for ourselves some of the pity that He has for us.
At any rate, if I can point to any one factor in my life that, more than any other, kept me from letting myself go headlong into the spiritual hypothermia of those doubts about God and reality, it was music made by God’s people. There was something in the songs that tethered me to Hope. There was a love that echoed in the music and the words which, although no lengths of reassurance seemed to be able to convince me that it was really mine for the taking, I still could not let go of (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it would not let go of me). I didn’t know at all how to draw near, or even that I could; but at the same time I dared not forget it and pass it by, or let it pass me by. The moment I began to forget, I felt myself slipping into a nameless lostness in which there was no meaning, no point of reference, and no hope; and with all that I could muster of Puddleglum‘s defiant good sense and resolution, I raged against it, day after day, year after year. It wasn’t until my 16th year that I really for the first time came to understand myself as fully accepted with God through what Jesus did in His death and resurrection. For some people, that understanding (and of course the conviction of sin that must precede it) crashes in while they are going their way without much conscious pursuit of knowing God. For others like me, it comes after a lot of grappling and seeking and getting lost in one’s head and ultimately finding one’s way out into the wide reality of the love of God outside of us in which He beckons us to lose ourselves. Either way, whether we realize it or not, it is God pursuing us.
In the same way that human affection is inclined to attach itself to any place or object or thing which is associated in memory with the fondest experiences of every kind of love (whether it be familial or romantic love, or the love of friendship), my love of music is due in large part to the way that God pursued me through music. To talk about the songs I love is to talk about how God has loved me, and how I have become who I am through that love. There will as a result be some fragments of autobiography in the posts that follow in this series, and I hope those who read them will find in them something of interest that they can connect with and that may help them reflect on their own experiences.
~Andrew
Andrew Micah 