Jared C. Wilson's Blog, page 48

Saved to the Uttermost

(35) Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. (36) But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. (37) All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. (38) For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. (39) And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.”

– John 6:35-39

Salvation by Christ’s work is a gift of grace received through faith. This salvation is total (Romans 8:30) and we see its totality in John 6. In Christ, we are:

1. Satisfied (vv.35-36)

No more hunger. No more thirst. When we are full of Christ, we are truly full. He is the end of our fruitless searching for satisfaction, our appetites for idols.

2. Secured (v.37,39)

Never cast out, never lost. His securing hand (John 10:28), like his securing love (Romans 8:35-39), is omnipotent. If a Christian is united to Christ, he is as secure as Christ is.

3. Supernaturalized (v.39)

Heaven has come down to invade earth in Christ, and by God’s grace, heaven invades the very souls of his children (John 14:17, Romans 8:9) and sets up shop (Ephesians 2:22). Indwelt by the Spirit who seals (Ephesians 1:13), guarantees (2 Corinthians 1:22), instructs (John 16:13), and empowers (Acts 1:8, Ephesians 3:16), we are new creations (2 Corinthians 5:17), growing in grace (2 Peter 3:18) and bearing capital-S Spiritual fruit (Galatians 5:22-23), consecrated for the day we will receive our inheritance — glorified bodies (1 Corinthians 15:42-49).

By and in Christ, we are utterly saved.

Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God . . .

– Hebrews 7:25

The Everythingness of Grace

Come on, Eileen

Oh I swear

In this moment, you mean everything.

– Dexy’s Midnight Runners

Okay, so it’s not a Bible verse, but it kinda sums up the momentary religion of the flesh, doesn’t it? At any given moment, we are singing subconscious praises to whatever we are desiring — “In this moment, you mean everything.” We are pretty pathetic, when you think about it. One moment we are echoing Dexy’s midnight ode to a person we’re attracted to and in the next to a Five Guys bacon cheeseburger. (Any stress eaters out there? I see that hand.) There are so many things offering so many things. Can you blame us?

The Lord can. He sees our fickle, feeble hearts yearning after every tantalizing morsel put before our eyes. He hears the praise he deserves that we instead sing to work, sex, food, entertainment, family, children, church. “In this moment, you mean everything.” But only he can bear that weight. And when we put the meaning of everything on anything besides him, we abuse it. Then the weight comes back to us, deflating and crushing and condemning.

But the loving God does an amazing thing. He turns around and takes the crushing too. He puts it on his son. In that moment, his son means everything, and in every moment forever after, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” Pretty much covers everything there.

And in his grace, the Lord shares his glory in exciting, satisfying ways. John tells us that “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (John 1:16). So our Savior who is everything, who means everything, who owns everything, takes our nothing into himself in order to actually grant us the everythingness from himself in place of the vacuous everythingness we’ve been seeking in everything else. We don’t deserve it. But we get it. And in this way, the grace of God in Jesus Christ meets all of our needs and satisfies our deepest desires.

Here’s a Bible verse:

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

– Romans 8:32

Sometimes Leaders Need to be Carried

But Moses’ hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.

– Exodus 17:12

Yesterday I sat with Natalie and read to her from 2 Corinthians (at her request). This was our second time through the letter together. She is resonating a lot with Paul’s talk of afflictions and “jars of clay” and thorns and weakness. But I began last night to think something else is at play here, and she might not even be conscious of it. See, Natalie is a leader. I don’t say was, despite her frail state. She still is, though she has withdrawn from the fray of church service and entered a fray of a different kind. And when I read Paul saying “I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls” (2 Corinthians 12:15), I think this describes Natalie to a “T.”

Last night I talked to another one of our deaconesses on the phone and she mentioned John Piper’s little catchphrase “Don’t waste your life,” saying Natalie is a perfect example. She has poured out immeasurably over the years for her family, her friends, her church, and her community. She seemed a tireless servant, sacrificing constantly to live simply and therefore generously. She is our church’s “queen” of benevolence. And she has been a tireless evangelist, maintaining several long-term relationships with unbelievers very dear to her, whose salvation she has labored for over decades. (She has high hopes and prayers her illness and perhaps her death will serve as a turning point for their receiving the gospel.) Given all of the hard work she has engaged in for so long, it has bothered her somewhat to be in this vulnerable position. She has always been the one who helps, the one who takes charge. But sometimes leaders need to be carried too.

Paul assumes so. Continuing in 2 Cor. 12:15, he writes, “If I love you more, am I to be loved less?” Elsewhere: “We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open . . . In return (I speak as to children) widen your hearts also” (2 Cor. 6:11,13). As he opens in greeting, almost immediately discussing his great affliction and need for comfort, he asks for help: “You also must help us by prayer” (2 Cor. 1:11).

The truth is, our leaders need to be carried sometimes. At all times, they need to be carried to the Lord in prayer. This is the single best thing you can do for those who are responsible for your spiritual upbringing. They need your prayers more than than they need your praise, and they certainly need your prayers more than your advice. And while they do need your advice, they moreso need your encouragement, your consideration, your benefit of the doubt. They need you to not rehearse accusations in your mind against them, but advocate for them in your imagination.

Leadership of all kinds is lonely and costly. It is tiring. For every person with a problem, he or she is essentially all that exists. Affliction has its way of self-centering. But all the problems that exist are the leader’s. And for spiritual shepherds who take it all seriously, there is “the daily pressure on them of their anxiety for the whole church” (2 Cor. 11:28, par).

I remember the period of time right after I’d moved to Vermont to pastor Middletown Church. Becky stayed behind in Nashville, keeping her job because we needed her income to cover our mortgage there because our house had not sold. (It didn’t sell for four years, but that’s another story for another time.) I had our daughters with me. For nine months we did this, and while it may not seem like a lot for families accustomed to such separation, it was extremely difficult for all of us. Becky and I both suffered from deep discouragement. The loneliness and “left behind”-ness was crushing her. Trying to pastor and parent in a new place all by myself was crushing me. I began to question our decision, question my calling. I struggled to find any joy in our new home. I was breaking down in the pulpit. I was losing my temper with the girls. I was wandering about, numb and defeated. I was trying to tend to the care of a church full of new friends, and suddenly had to face the need for my own care. I have been through a period of depression before, to the point of entertaining very dark thoughts about myself, and I could feel the murky edges of this darkness closing in on me again.

The Lord came through, and he came through through the grace of our church, carrying me, carrying us in an extraordinary way. (I tell the remarkable story that began with a divinely-timed phone call from Elder Dale in my book on pastoral ministry.) It was in that time that I re-read Exodus 17, by happenstance, and the image of Aaron and Hur pulling up a stone for Moses to sit on and holding up his arms overwhelmed me. That simple, stirring image of the man’s being carried by his brother and his friend made me sob. It’s a beautiful thing to not just read Scripture but to feel it.

Good leaders carry their people when they’ve gotten lost, when they’ve gotten hurt, when they’ve gotten too tired to follow. At the very least, a good leader will sit with them while they gather their strength. Or when their strength is giving way to death. It is part of the calling. But sometimes leaders need to be carried too. Do you carry yours?

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

– Galatians 6:2

Good News for the Weakest Ministers

Like the apostle Paul, it is every minister’s business to glory in his infirmities. The world says, “Pshaw! upon your oratory; it is rough, and rude, and eccentric.” Yet, ’tis even so, but we are content, for God blesses it. Then so much the better that it has infirmities in it; for now shall it be plainly seen that it is not of man or by man, but the work of God, and of God alone.

It is said that once upon a time a man exceedingly curious desired to see the sword with which a mighty hero had fought some desperate battles; casting his eye along the blade, he said, “Well, I don’t see much in this sword.” “Nay,” said the hero, “but you have not examined the arm that wields it.”

And so when men come to hear a successful minister, they are apt to say, “I do not see any thing in him.” No, but you have not examined the eternal arm that reaps its harvest with this sword of the Spirit. If ye had looked at the jaw-bone of the ass in Samson’s hand, you would have said, “What! heaps on heaps with this!” No; bring out some polished blade; bring forth the Damascus steel! NO; but God would have all the glory, and, therefore, not with the polished steel, but with the jaw-bone must Samson get the victory. So with ministers; God has usually blessed the weakest to do the most good.

– Charles Spurgeon, “The Necessity of the Spirit’s Work,” Revival Year Sermons Preached in the Surrey Gardens Music Hall 1859 (Banner of Truth, 2002), 55.

When the Pursuit of Justice Isn’t

For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.

- Genesis 18:19

We keep hearing from confessing Christians the appeal to biblical justice in the question of marriage equality and the like. I think beneath the fundamental redefinition of marriage to something both foreign to and against the Scriptures is the fundamental redefinition of justice, as well.

Justice in the Bible is not some nebulous fairness or sense of altruistic equality. It is the spreading dominion of the righteousness of God. (Note how often justice is paired with righteousness in the Bible.) When God calls us to “do justice,” he is calling us to reflect the life-giving, culture-flourishing, gracious abundance that is in keeping with his glory. Justice includes care for the poor and hungry and sick, for instance, because it is a reflection of God’s righteousness to address the effects of the fall on individuals and systems with gracious provision. In a sense, justice is taking the prelapsarian mandate (Gen. 1:28) into the postlapsarian world. Justice is grounded in the harmonic Eden and aims at the shalom of the new Jerusalem (2 Chron. 9:8, Isaiah 33:5). Justice is sourced in the righteousness of God (Job 37:23), the holiness of God (Deut. 32:4). Therefore, biblical justice is only superficially fairness but more deeply the express manifestation of the righteousness of God.

In that sense, it is not justice for the state to sanction same-sex marriage. It is in fact injustice, because it sanctions as “righteous” what God has called unrighteous. The Bible calls the failure to do justice a “perversion of justice.” Even in seeking to do justice, then, when Christians disconnect biblical justice from the concept of the kingdom of God, they are perverting justice. We are told multiple times in the Scriptures who will not inherit the kingdom of God. It is a rejection of the righteousness of God, therefore, to say those very same excluded will be included.

Christian culture has adopted the imbecile habit of thinking conceptually as the world does. Thus love becomes primarily a romantic feeling disconnected from the holy God who is love and the “definition” we see in 1 Corinthians 13. Peace becomes merely the absence of conflict or judgment or disapproval, functionally disconnected from the holy Lord who is himself peace (Eph. 2:14). Joy is not found in the Lord but instead following your bliss, doing what fulfills you, finding what makes you happy, etc. And justice? Well, justice becomes giving people what they want, because, after all, it’s only fair.

But the Scriptures do not lend us these virtues as merely ideas, amorphous concepts to be shaped by the prevailing cultural Jello mold. No, all of the biblical virtues are embodied in Christ. They have the shape of the risen Lord, are defined by his righteousness. So it is not “keeping the way of the Lord” to call evil good (Mal. 2:17), nor is it just.

Success is Dangerous

And his fame spread far, for he was marvelously helped, till he was strong.

– 2 Chronicles 26:15

Not a single one of us wishes, really, for failure. Oh, sure, there are certainly some spiritual masochists out there, Christians who take great pride in the ministry of Isaiah — “I’m losing 90 per cent? I must be doing something right!” — but there’s a reason God provoked Isaiah’s commitment to the mission before giving him his depressing orders. None of us would want to sign up for that.

When we find ourselves in difficult ministries, where the word seems out of season and the soil inordinately hard, despite our sincere and faithful efforts to share the gospel in contextualized ways and love and serve our neighbors with gladness and kindness, many of us battle discouragement, but we at least theologically understand that sometimes God gives and sometimes he takes away.

There is something biblically beautiful, actually, about such littleness. It appears to be the primary mode of thinking of the apostles about themselves. Paul boasts, but he boasts in his weakness. He considers his successes garbage compared to Christ’s glory. It is God’s bigness he is concerned ultimately with, not his own or that of the churches.

So when we are made little, we can find ourselves in the heart of John the Baptist’s prayer, that Jesus would increase and we would decrease. It’s not the ideal place to be in terms of our dreams and ambitions, but relying totally on God’s sovereignty is right where God wants us. It’s not a call to passivity or to excuse-making. But even the most diligent of workers can say that God has called him to be faithful, not successful.

And then God grants many much visible success. Sometimes God’s people succeed greatly at things he hasn’t actually called them to do, but sometimes in his strange wisdom he grants extraordinary, legitimate successes to his children. But with such glories should come many cautions. We all prefer success to failure but, really, success is more dangerous. In failure, we know we rely totally on God’s approval and sustaining arm. In success, it is easy to begin looking around, surveying all the territories claimed, all the peoples gathered, all the ministry renown redounding, and we think, “Well, lookee here. Look what has been built with my talents, my gifts, my skills, my strategies, my visions, my sweat, my sacrifice.”

It is perfectly normal for humans to prefer success to failure. You’d be a weirdo if you didn’t.

And yet it is perfectly normal for humans to taint all their successes with the swelling of their big fat heads. You’d be a weirdo if you didn’t.

And so we remember the Holy Spirit, the sovereign breath of God Himself in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), without whom we could not receive one single stinking thing (John 3:27). It is the Spirit who directs our paths while we’re making our big plans (Proverbs 16:9) and hijacks our mission statements (James 4:13-15). Oh, we can produce some very exciting enterprises, we can get a lot of stuff done if we’ll just have that can-do attitude and take-charge spirit and gung-ho personality and yada yada yada. That Babel tower was pretty tall too.

Don’t run ahead of the Lord God. You may find yourself in the midst of a great, booming success and therefore very, very vulnerable.

And the dirty little secret is that you don’t really need it. If God wants you to have it, that’s great. But you don’t need “more” to be satisfied in God, to be fully justified by Christ, to be fully filled by the Spirit. God does not measure success the way we do. So whether you are struggling or succeeding, the best position to take is always that of prayer so that you know how to have little and how to have a lot, how to do “all things” through Christ — not know-how. Only Christ is inexhaustible.

Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.

– 1 Corinthians 10:12

Related:

Too Big Not to Fail

On Leadership and Revival

It is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means. There may be a miracle among its antecedent causes, or there may not. The apostles employed miracles, simply as a means by which they arrested attention to their message, and established its Divine authority. But the miracle was not the revival. The miracle was one thing; the revival that followed it was quite another thing. The revivals in the apostles’ days were connected with miracles, but they were not miracles.

I said that a revival is the result of the right use of the appropriate means.

Those are the words of Charles Finney from his Lectures on Revivals of Religion.

I say that Finney is dead wrong. Dangerously wrong.

But Finney’s words here serve as the philosophical precursor to countless church growth strategies today and the prevailing church growth framework in general. As a sort of churched version of “If you build it, they will come,” this approach to the expectation of revival renders the supernatural natural and the providential pragmatic. Finney and his many modern spin-offs conflate the work of the preacher with the work of the word. They confuse the minister’s required work with the Lord’s free prerogative. It is God who says, “I will cause breath to enter you” (Ezek. 37:5), and that, when he does, “You shall know that I am the Lord” (v. 6). When the result is worship of God, the credit does not go to the leader but to God. The entire leadership enterprise, the entire purpose of revival, is the knowing of God and the enjoying of his sovereign lordship.

By way of contrast to Finney, enter the wisdom of Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

A revival is a miracle. It is a miraculous, exceptional phenomenon. It is the hand of the Lord, and it is mighty. A revival, in other words, is something that can only be explained as the direct action and intervention of God. It was God alone who could divide the Red Sea. It was God alone who could divide the waters of the river of Jordan. These were miracles. Hence the reminder of God’s unique action of the mighty acts of God. And revivals belong to that category. . . . These events belong to the order of things that men cannot produce. Men can produce evangelistic campaigns, but they cannot and never have produced a revival. (Revival, 1987)

This knowledge ought both to humble us and to embolden us.

(Adapted from The Storytelling God, pp.137-138)

Remembering the God Who Remembers You

But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided.

– Genesis 8:1

The chapter and verse numbers in the Scriptures are not inspired, of course, but there is something about Genesis 8:1 — specifically in the phrase “But God remembered Noah” — which is a nice correlation to Romans 8:1. In all of the apparent chaos, in the torrent, the danger, the death and destruction, there is therefore now no condemnation for those whom God is pleased to remember.

But Noah was remembering God too. How could he not? All other supports were gone, literally wiped away and overwhelmed by the earth-consuming deluge from heaven. Noah and his family weren’t steering that boat, far as we know. And as big as it was, it was nevertheless compared to the sea-covered planet a mere speck in the vast expanse of the raging torrent, like a cork bobbing about in the Pacific Ocean. God certainly becomes the believer’s only hope precisely when he has become the believer’s only hope.

When the storms are rising in your life, aren’t you closest to God then? Or do you fail to remember God even then and give in to despair and hopelessness and joylessness?

But we see in Genesis 8 that Noah remembered the God that remembered him. He remembered God primarily in 3 ways.

1. Noah remembered God’s timing.

It took him probably 98 years or so to build the ark. All along he had to be trusting in God’s timing, no? The temptation had to have arrived within hour one — “Did God really say…?” Certainly it did not abate hour after hour, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. But Noah walked each step with God, trusting in his timing. And after the thing was built, they went into the ark and were in there 7 days before the floods came! Those 7 days might’ve felt longer than 7 years.

But we also see in the flood’s aftermath, how closely Noah paid attention to God’s perfect timing. Notice this pattern seen by the keen eye over the text:

7 days of waiting for flood (Gen. 7:4)

7 days of waiting for the flood repeated (Gen. 7:10)

40 days of the flood (Gen. 7:17)

150 days of the waters prevailing (Gen. 7:24)

150 days of the waters receding (Gen. 8:3)

40 days of waiting (Gen. 8:6)

7 days of waiting (Gen. 8:10) – after the first dove

7 days of waiting (Gen. 8:12) – after the 2nd sending of the dove

There are patterns like this all over Scripture. But here in this precious palindrome, Noah’s echo and completing of the pattern shows how tuned-in he is to God’s timing.

Now, you may not be following days and hours that closely. Most of us don’t. I don’t. But as we pray and hope and struggle and fear, we have to remember that God’s timing is not our timing, that his timing is perfect. That when he says “No” to something or “Wait”, he has reasons based in his love for us, even if we don’t understand them.

The first deep acquaintance with grief came for my wife and I upon the miscarriage of our second baby. It was the Fourth of July weekend of 2002. We had both lost loved ones before then, but until then we had never been so personally affected, Becky especially.

I remember the first signs that something was wrong, causes enough to head to the doctor for answers. I remember most vividly sitting in a dim ultrasound room, while the technician ran the sonogram probe over my wife’s belly. The technician had an assistant with her, and they talked in very hush tones. They said nothing to us that I recall. They discussed what they were seeing. And what they weren’t seeing. They were keeping us in the dark until the doctor could speak to us, and that is exactly how we felt — like a darkness was overcoming us.

Of course when they finally told us the news. Miscarriage.

We named our baby Angel and we mourned for a long time. A year later we were pregnant again and due on — get this — July 4, 2003. The pregnancy had been difficult. Stress and other factors complicated our baby’s growth and caused Becky lots of discomfort and anxiety. After the miscarriage, we were pretty scared about how things might turn out, but our second daughter was carried all the way to term. I remember her birth, however, and while she came much more quickly than our first child, there was a complication. The doctor was concerned about her position, about the position of the umbilical cord. When our baby was delivered, she did not cry. The silence was unnerving.

I remember the nurse bringing our little baby over to the bassinet. The nurse looked concerned. I had been videotaping the event, but I put the camera down. I could tell something was wrong. Our baby was having trouble breathing. The more frantic the nurse looked, the more frightened I got. After multiple attempts to clear her throat and lungs, however, finally, climatically, our daughter let out the most beautiful wail I’ve ever heard.

We named her Grace. She was born on July 5th, one year plus one day from the day we first mourned Angel.

We don’t know why God decided to take Angel from us. And if we had our preference, we would have all 3 of our children here with us, alive and healthy. But God did a special thing with the timing for his own reasons, that we would come to trust him more deeply, to be refined by his Spirit in our grief. See if we were writing the story, we would have had Grace born exactly a year later, on July 4. That due date seemed just perfect. But God said, “No. One year and one day.” And so we learn that Grace has her own timing. And God’s grace has its own timing.

Secondly:

2. Noah remembered God’s priorities.

A curious thing here. Why did he send out a raven first, then a dove?

“At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made 7 and sent forth a raven. It went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth” (Gen. 8:6-7).

A raven, first of all, is less particular than a dove. It went to and fro over the earth even while the place was still wet. A dove on the other hand will only nest where it is dry and clean. A raven is, well, more of a slob I guess.

But commentator Kent Hughes reminds us that a raven is not a bird considered ritually clean by God. Hughes writes, “Noah released the raven first because as an unclean bird it was expendable, since it was good for neither food nor sacrifice.” (We learn this in Leviticus 11:15 and Deuteronomy 14:15.) We learn a valuable lesson in Noah’s ordering of release of the birds for testing. The first thing he was willing to give up was something God considered unclean and unsuitable.

Is there not a valuable lesson for us in that? So often we protect things in our lives that God has actually called us to let go of. They may not even be things at all — our pride, our comfort, our schedules, our dreams — anything that gets in the way of trusting God and doing what he has called us to do.

Maybe you’re caught in a habit or in a relationship that you know doesn’t honor God, and it’s a huge area of compromise for you in your spiritual life. But you’re not willing to give it up. Why? Because you’ve come to treasure this habit or this pattern of behavior or this inappropriate relationship more than you treasure God. You’ve placed your priorities over God’s.

And you only do that when you don’t trust that God wants what’s best for you. We only do that when we think, “No, God doesn’t know what will satisfy and fulfill me. I know better than he.” But Noah was ready to lose first what was lose-able in God’s eyes.

Thirdly:

3. Noah remembered God’s creative purpose.

One thing Noah had to be trusting was that God wasn’t saving him and his family for some postapocalyptic wasteland. Why would he preserve him and the animals simply to float around on the ark forever? I mean, if that’s what God called him to do, we have good reason to believe Noah would be willing to do that, but he was trusting and counting on God having a plan for restoration. He trusted that as high as the waters got, as dangerous as they seemed, as angry as God was about the sin that provoked him to such subsuming wrath, in the end, God did plan to bring him and his out unscathed, ready to resume the mandate given to his children to be fruitful and multiply.

If Genesis 8:1 predicts Romans 8;1, the subsiding of the waters in Genesis 8 also cast the shadow thrown by the great light of Romans 8:19-23:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

God’s plan for his beloved and his beloved creation is not annihilation but restoration.

Genesis 8:1, then, is a promise that as things get worse, God does not get further away, but actually more near. Brevard Childs says, “God’s remembering always implies his movement toward the object . . . The essence of God’s remembering lies in his acting toward someone because of a previous commitment.” If he takes much away, it is only because he wants us to treasure him only, and if we will treasure him only, how will he not also in the end give us all things besides? (Romans 8:32!)

When Noah was in the ark tossed to and fro on waves of destruction, God remembered him.

When Joseph was in prison, languishing away from crimes he didn’t commit, God remembered him.

When David was crying out in repentance of his horrific sins, God remembered him.

When Daniel was thrown into a den of lions to be torn to pieces, God remembered him.

When Daniel’s friends were thrown into the furnace b/c they refused to bow their knees to idols, God remembered them.

When the disciples were in the boat tossing to and fro from waves of destruction, crying out, “Remember us, lest we die!”, God remembered them.

And Christian, when you were at your moment of deepest danger — sinful and deserving of hell and eternal death — God remembered you (Rom. 5:6).

Look to the cross. It is the proof you need that God has remembered you and given you all that you need. His timing, his priorities, and his purposes are all revealed in Christ’s death and resurrection. He has not forgotten you. Remember that.

The Heart of the True Father

There is this really magical thing that happens in homes all over the world. When you first have a child, you want your child to crawl. And then you want your kid to walk. My first child, Audrey, pulled herself to the coffee table. When she got to the coffee table, she began to bounce on her knees, and then she began to coast along. From there she started letting go and just being wobbly. At that point, we began to get really, really excited about the fact that Audrey is about to walk. Eventually she took her hands off of the coffee table, and we watched physics in motion.

God has created children, specifically young children, with gargantuan heads and tiny little bodies. So when Audrey let go of the coffee table, her gigantic head fell forward, and suddenly she has a decision to make. She can stick that foot out to catch herself or she can die. So she sticks her foot out, and now we’ve got momentum. It’s step, step, step, fall. And do you know what we did? We exploded in celebration.

We picked her up, spun her around, kissed her face, we sat her down and pleaded with her to walk towards us again. And then we were e-mailing, Facebooking, taking pictures, tweeting and all sorts of other things to get the word out that Audrey was walking. We did that with our son Reid, and we’ve done that with our daughter Norah.

What I have learned as I watched all of our friends have children is that there is always this epic celebration around the kid walking. This is news to be declared. “This kid is walking!”

For all the people I have watched go through that process, I’ve never seen anybody watch their kid go step, step, step, fall and say out loud, “Man, this kid is an idiot. Are you serious? Just three steps? Man, I can get the dog to walk two or three steps. Honey, this must be from your side of the family, because my side of the family is full of walkers. This must be some sort of genetic, shallow gene pool on your side of things.”

No father does that. Every father rejoices in the steps of his child. The father celebrates the steps of his child. I think what we have here is a picture of God celebrating us walking. So we step, step, step, fall, and heaven applauds. At what? The obedience to take those three steps. The Father in heaven is crying, “He’s walking!” “She’s doing it!” And maybe the accuser’s saying, “No, he only took a couple of steps. That’s nothing.”

But the celebration is in the steps, even if there are still falls. Because here’s what I know about all of my children: they start to walk farther and farther and farther, and they begin to skip, they begin to run, they begin to jump, they begin to climb and they begin to tear the house up. It’s beautiful. And I knew even when they were step, step, step, falling that that process was the beginning of what would result in climbing trees, dancing, and sprinting. Knowing in my mind what’s to come, the two steps and the stumble was a celebration.

The moralist sees the fall and believes that the Father is ashamed and thinks they’re foolish. So more often than not, they stop trying to walk because they can’t see the Father rejoicing in and celebrating his child.

Church of Jesus, let us please be men and women who understand the difference between moralism and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let’s be careful to preach the do’s and don’t’s of Scripture in the shadow of the cross’s “Done!” Resolve to know nothing but Jesus Christ crucified. We are not looking to conform people to a pattern of religion but pleading with the Holy Spirit to transform people’s lives. Let us move forward according to that upward call, holding firmly to the explicit gospel.

What we see in the Father’s heart in the Bible is its immensity, its bottomless depths. God’s heart is as complex and unfathomable as he is. Shouldn’t the gospel we believe stand firm in, and proclaim reflect the bigness of God’s heart for a fallen world? The cross of Christ and his resurrection are cataclysms of the unsearchable judgments and affections of God. It is this immense gospel that spurs Paul to pray:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

– from Matt Chandler, The Explicit Gospel

What They Need on Sundays

A word to my brother-pastors, who every week labor in preparing to teach the Bible in the weekend gathering while the dark cloud of the new cultural downgrade hangs over them:

Brothers, let’s not go about our weekly sermon preparation and personal discipleship in sackcloth and ashes. Let’s get into the vineyard of God’s word, get some holy sweat worked up, whistling while we work, lifting our hearts in worship. Let’s get into the kitchen of study and prep and start putting together the banquet. And come Sunday let’s spread the feast out rich and sumptuous, beckoning our people to taste and see that the Lord is good. They don’t need our doomsdaying or dimbulbing. Still less do they need our shallow pick-me-ups and spitpolished legalism. Like our brother Wesley, let us set ourselves on fire with gospel truth that our church families might come watch us burn.

And when we gather Sunday with the saints, let us shepherd them to repentance and sincerity, reminding them of the holy God who welcomes them with sin-forgetting forgiveness. When we enter the worship gathering, let us not look back to the ruins lest we all become the wrong kind of salt. Let us look forward to the new Jerusalem, where our citizenship is secured even today and evermore. Let’s get our wits about us and take heart together, for our Lord has overcome the world. Yesterday, today, Sunday, and forever. Let us frighten the kings of the world and shake the kingdom of the devil with how resolute we are in abandoning ourselves to the mighty God.

Our churches don’t need our hand-wringing but our hand-raising. They need our deep, abiding, all-conquering, sin-despairing gospel joy. This and this alone is the hope of the world.