Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 60

Holy Hunger

A baby is born hungry. No one needs to teach a baby about hunger. And so it is that those who have been born again are also hungry. This is what we might call a holy hunger. 

In many ways coming to Christ satisfies so many things. Outside of Christ everything is barren and dry. And so everything looks like food. This is essentially what idolatry is. It tries to turn the gifts of God into gods, which is to say, it is basically trying to turn various gifts into food that aren’t really food. Marriage is a great gift, but it is not your food. Children are great gifts, but they are not your food. Good health is a gift, but it is not your food. Respect is not your food. Success is not your food. But when you’re starving everything looks edible. And it can seem to give short term relief to the gnawing in your gut, but it’s not really feeding you. It’s not really giving you life. 

But when you come to Christ, you find your hunger satisfied. And yet that doesn’t mean you’re done eating. When you come to Christ, you actually find that you have more of an appetite than ever before. And this is by design. God wants you to grow. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. But that is why this is a continual feast. We hunger for God’s wisdom and goodness and righteousness, and He gives it, and we are filled, and we are always hungry for more, not hungry in a desperate, dying way – hungry in that pleasantly surprised sense that you can have another piece of pie and you really won’t regret it. 

So this table is set for the hungry. If you have been away for a long time and you have been feeding on other things, as a minister of the gospel, I invite you to eat real food here by coming to Christ by faith. And if you have been coming week after week, you too are most welcome to come again: it’s real food, and so of course you want more, of course you need more. You’ve fed on the Word preached, now feed on the Word broken and poured out. Turn to Christ, surrender to Him, thank Him, praise Him, read His word, feast on His word. You’ve been born again, and you were born again hungry.

So, Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ.

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The Friendly Accountant

There are relatively few things the Bible associates with putting people in danger of the devil. But if the Bible says that certain things can invite the devil to mess with your life, you really ought to sit up and take notice. One of those things is letting the sun go down on your wrath. 

“Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: Neither give place to the devil” (Eph. 4:26-27).

Remember that Satan transforms himself into an angel of light. He doesn’t show up dressed for Halloween. He shows up justifying your anger. The devil is the friendly accountant who doesn’t mind going over the offenses again, adding up your good deeds in one column and their thoughtless words and actions in the other. The devil is a friend with a cup of tea willing to sit up late listening to you going over what he said, what he did, asking you to repeat the particularly painful parts one more time.

Going to bed angry is like going to bed with your front door wide open like an open invitation to thieves. It’s like leaving raw meat out on the counter all night long. It’s not safe; it’s inviting trouble. Remember in the parable of the field, the enemy came while the man slept and sowed tares among the wheat. And the next morning you wouldn’t notice right away. Bitterness takes root before anything obvious has happened, like rot in the meat, like cancer in the bones. 

It’s not always possible to agree on something, and sometimes there really is something that needs addressing. But when you have done everything you can today, you need to put the matter in the Lord’s keeping. Put your grievances and hurt in the Lord’s strongbox. If you keep the matter with you, you’re inviting the devil in, but if you let the Lord keep it, the Lord will keep it and keep the devil out. 

So, is it something your dad or mom did or said? Your husband, your wife? Your boss? Did a deal go south with someone in this room, a friendship go sour? Surrender it to the Lord now. He knows exactly what happened. Let Him take it from here.

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Loving Enemies as Resistance

Christians are not to get personal revenge for wrongs, but rather, Christians are commanded to love their enemies, do good to them, and to overcome evil with good. What many Christians do not understand is that this is a strategy of resistance. The whole point of loving enemies is to disarm them, subvert their evil purposes, and convert them to Christ. 

We know this because this is what the gospel has done for us: for while we were still enemies Christ died for us. God doesn’t save anyone but His enemies. You were an enemy of God in your sins, and God offered you mercy. He offered to pour out His wrath on His own Son on the cross instead of you. He offered to give you the bread of His body and the wine of His own blood instead of the death you deserve. And the really glorious thing is that He still does that. When God reconciles us to Himself, He declares us righteous knowing full well just how filthy our hearts still are. He declares us righteous, knowing all of the sins we will commit, all the treason, all the filth still to come. And so you are invited here once again as the friends of God: your debts are all paid, your sins are forgiven, you are washed clean and there is a seat with your name at this table. And if that doesn’t seem crazy, you aren’t paying attention.  

God does not do this in apathy about our sin. He does this in order to conquer our sin. He doesn’t justify sinners in order to justify our sin. He does this because the grace of His blood is the only detergent that will actually remove all our stains. 

And if this is true of us, then we must not forget that it is true for the whole world. Who are the most hardened sinners in your life? Who are the most rebellious, the most vile, the most offensive, the most difficult for you? They are good candidates for God’s grace. Pray for them. Do good to them. When they are hungry, feed them. When they are thirsty, give them something to drink. And so heap up burning coals on their heads. Set them on fire with the mercy and kindness of God because that is what God is doing with you here at this table. And Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ.

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Why We Baptize the Children of Believers

[Note: I delivered this sermon at our recent Greyfriars Hall Preaching Retreat Spring 2019]

 “Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” (Acts 2:37-39)

Introduction

This is one of the key passages that Christians turn to in order to defend the practice of baptizing infants and young children. And I want to briefly explain why. 

Covenant Inclusion

The first thing to understand is how the Old Covenant functioned. If there has been a change in the New Covenant, we need to understand the nature of the change, but this means beginning with what the Old Covenant actually was. What did it change from? We see that God clearly and explicitly included children in the Old Covenant, “And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee… This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; every man child among you shall be circumcised… He who is eight days old among you shall be circumcised. Every male throughout your generations, whether born in your house or bought with your money from any foreigner who is not of your offspring, both he who is born in your house and he who is bought with your money, shall surely be circumcised. So shall my covenant be in your flesh an everlasting covenant” (Gen. 17:7, 10, 12-13). There are two things to note here: first, God explicitly calls this covenant an “everlasting” covenant. Second, the covenant included infants as well as servants – everyone under the care and responsibility of the head of the household.

This external sign of the covenant in the Old Testament was an outward sign and seal of what needed to happen inwardly, namely the circumcision of the heart: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked” (Deut. 10:16, cf. Jer. 4:4). And this command could only be obeyed ultimately if God Himself performed this: “And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live” (Deut. 30:6). And Paul explicitly explains this: “But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God” (Rom. 2:29). So the Old Covenant included everyone in the household of a believer. This covenant inclusion was a call to a renewal of the heart, a renewal that would enable an individual to love God with all their heart and soul and thereby live, a renewal that only God could perform, and God graciously promised to do this both for adults and for their children. And this covenant was an everlasting covenant. 

When we get to the New covenant, this basic shape of the covenant remains the same. When Peter tells the Jews gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost that the promise is to them and to their children, no Jew would have heard that as anything other than covenantal language. The New Testament clearly and repeatedly flags the things that are passing away in the New Covenant (blood sacrifices, circumcision, clean and unclean, holy days), but Peter makes no clarifying comments here, nor does Luke later in Acts where we are told that whole households are being baptized (Acts 16:15, 16:33).

In other words, references to “household” baptisms really do prove the infant baptism case. The issue is not whether the word “household” logically requires the presence of infants or young children. Of course it doesn’t require it. But the question is whether anyone in the ancient world would have ever thought to exclude infants or young children from a head of household’s decision to follow Christ, especially given what we know about how God treated Jewish households in the Old Testament explicitly. Given the entire Old Testament and the explicit changes noted in the New Testament, the absence of any notification of a change for membership in the New Covenant is a gaping hole. The Old Covenant was an external call to receive a new heart and believe, just like the New Covenant. Therefore, I submit that we should simply admit that there is no essential change in the shape of covenantal membership from Old to New Covenant. The one obvious and explicit change in membership is that gentiles are now welcomed, and the sign of the covenant has changed, from circumcision to baptism, but the New Covenant still includes households, believers and their children and any other willing dependents.    

How the Covenant Cuts Both Ways

Two more points need to be made briefly: First, to the common objection that the New Covenant is only for those who are truly saved and regenerated, we point to the numerous New Testament passages that indicate otherwise. In John 15, Jesus says that He is the vine and we are the branches, and those branches that do not abide in Christ will be cut out and thrown into the fire. What is that relationship that people can be cut out of? For Christians who believe in the perseverance of the saints, that those who have been truly regenerated can never fall from grace (Jn. 6), what are these people in danger of? What do we call that relationship to Christ that some can be removed from? The biblical word you’re looking for is “covenant.” Romans 11 likewise, describes God’s people Israel, many of whom are cut out of the olive vine, so that the Gentiles might be grafted in. The language of “cutting” was used commonly in the Old Testament for both making a covenant (the Hebrew is often literally “cut a covenant”) and for those who had broken covenant (e.g. Gen. 15:18, 17:14). What was Israel cut out of? What were the Gentiles grafted/cut into? Again, the biblical word you’re looking for is “covenant.”

Likewise, in 1 Cor. 10 Paul says that all of Israel was baptized in the cloud and the sea, they ate spiritual food and drink, and the Rock that followed them was Christ. And yet with many of them, God was not pleased and they fell in the wilderness. And these things were written for our sakes in the Church, in the New Covenant. First, notice that all of Israel was baptized – even the children (Ex. 10:9-10). Second, Paul explicitly says that they had what we have in the New Covenant. In terms of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we have exactly what they had. That’s what Paul says. It is simply not possible to claim that baptism must only be administered to those who are truly regenerated. Otherwise, Paul is wrong in 1 Cor. 10 because they were baptized and many of them fell. Paul’s entire point is to warn the Christians in Corinth that they must walk by faith or else they too will come under the curses of the covenant.

Hebrews 10:29 also describes the danger of trampling the blood of the covenant by which people have been sanctified. While no mention is made of baptism, the point stands that it’s possible to be in the New Covenant and be “sanctified” in some sense and yet trample Christ’s blood underfoot. This connection between being “sanctified” and the “blood of the covenant,” is no doubt what Paul was referring to when he said that the children of at least one believing parent are “holy” or “sanctified” (1 Cor. 7:14). They are included in the covenant.    

Paedo-Baptism is Believers Baptism

Lastly, Peter teaches us here to understand paedo-baptism as a “believers” baptism. We do not insist that every child baptized is regenerated (neither do our Baptist brothers claim this for their baptisms), but we do insist that children are “professors” of the true faith with their parents and that they do make a “credible” profession of faith in and with their parents. Jesus has no trouble speaking of the faith of children: “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18:3). Baptists (and even many paedo-baptists) functionally turn this around and insist that what Jesus meant was that children must be converted and become like adults in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. But Jesus says that adults must learn to believe like children. Every single regenerate heart is an absolutely supernatural miracle and therefore we claim no ability whatsoever to effect regeneration by including our children in baptism and the covenant, and yet we also trust God’s word that clearly maintains that God ordinarily works through parents teaching their children so that they grow up believing.

Conclusion

So what is the newness of the New Covenant? The newness is in the efficacy, the clarity, and the expanse of the gospel. Remember, the gospel was preached in the Old Testament (Heb. 4:2). But in the New Testament, the gospel has been manifested in far greater clarity in the death and resurrection of Jesus. What was proclaimed in types and shadows has now appeared to us face to face in history. This clarity drives the efficacy and expanse of the New Covenant. What was limited mostly to Israel under shadows and types has now been revealed in Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. This is the everlasting covenant made with Abraham. It is the same covenant glorified. It is the same promise raised with power and glory. And the promise is to you and to your children and to all who are afar off.

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The Joy Vest

The joy of the Lord is not feeling happy every minute of your life. In fact, if the Psalms are any indication, the people of God can and do go through many trials and tribulations. The gospel moves from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, and so do many times in our lives.

The joy of the Lord is not like a stainless steel box that makes you impervious to the storms of life. The joy of the Lord is more like the perfect life vest. It does not guarantee that you will never go under the water. In fact, sometimes you can even go down pretty far below the surface of the water. But the joy of the Lord is the presence of God with you, always bringing you back up, always bringing you back up into the light. Sometimes there is sin that needs to be dealt with, sometimes there are external circumstances to face, sometimes it is health related, and sometimes you don’t know why you feel down.

But know this: if you belong to Christ, then the joy of the Lord is not something you need to go find, or something you need to get back to, even if we sometimes experience it that way. No, when you became a Christian, the joy of the Lord found you. The joy of the Lord bound Himself to you, and now the joy of the Lord goes with you wherever you go. And when the storm clouds come in, when the waves go over your head, when you sink down into the dark, the joy of the Lord goes with you all the way down, and then it always lifts you back up, brings you back up into the light. 

The joy of the Lord does not make you invincible to trouble and tribulation. The joy of the Lord is not a guarantee that you will always feel happy. The joy of the Lord is God’s powerful working in you, continuously drawing you to the light, carrying you through the waves, lifting you up when you are sinking, reminding you of His love, and finally taking you home to glory.

That is the joy of the Lord, and that is why the joy of the Lord is your strength.

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These Idols Cannot Save Us

American media has been rocked by another shooting, this time the Chabad of Poway synagogue was targeted by a 19 year old male this last Saturday during services. After killing one woman and wounding several others, the shooter left the scene and surrendered to police shortly thereafter. Later that day John Earnest was charged with one count of first-degree murder and three counts of first-degree attempted murder. He has also been charged with setting fire to a mosque earlier this year. 

Of course five people were killed and twenty-eight people were wounded in Chicago over the weekend, but that hasn’t gotten nearly as much media hysteria or progressive sermonizing. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative. Actually it’s worse. It not only doesn’t fit the narrative, it explodes the narrative. Let me explain.

Details are still emerging, but the family of the shooter has been identified as a Christian family, members of a Reformed Presbyterian church (OPC), where the father apparently served as an elder. The reason this story has legs, the reason the media hyperventilates over this tragedy (and it really was a horrific tragedy), but reports Chicago shootings like the weather is because anti-semitism and fundamentalist Christianity are the real targets of the progressive agenda. Now let me be clear: there certainly should be some soul searching among the heartbroken members of the shooter’s family and congregation. But Joy Behar helpfully voiced what all the liberals want to do with this incident: place all of the blame on Donald Trump and all the evangelical Christians who refuse to be bullied by liberal outrage tactics and victim weaponizing. In her comments, Behar specifically called Trump the “culprit” because he refuses to condemn Americans who happen to think Robert E. Lee was a noble man worth remembering with public statutes. 

Meanwhile in Chicago, home of progressive policy paradise, five people were killed in shootings and skies are partly cloudy with a 15% chance that anyone will notice. 

Remember at the back of all of this is a clash of gods. Of course secularists will raise their eye brows and sip their tea and ask you whatever could you possibly be talking about. Surely, in this modern, most enlightened age, there’s no need to speak of “gods.” How barbaric, how medieval, how quaint. Thus spake Science, and thus spake psychology, and thus spake Joe “let me breathe my spirit on you” Biden. 

Every society has a Grand Myth, the overarching Narrative that grants meaning and teleology and hope to the culture, and we are living in the midst of a great clash of narratives, a collision of worldviews. The one that has been gaining momentum since the Endarkenment under the auspices of rationalism and Darwinism is the Grand Narrative of Secularism. The High Priests of Salvation by Pure Reason Alone announced in solemn voices that the world was now free of all gods, goddesses, fairies, demons, sprites, leprechauns, unicorns, elves, and rainbows. Then, having banished the supernatural and magical, they spread their false gospel of secularism through the most modern form of alchemy called Darwinism, with the help of the theatrical swooning of 19th century media and academia. The promise of materialistic evolution and secular statism was the good news that religion was dead, the gods have been banished, and now people can get along through the use of pure reason and science and logic. No need for fighting or wars anymore. Beat your swords into plowshares, the great boogey man of religion was dead. Long live secularism, the state, rationalism, and “nature.” 

Turns out just because officious men in trim suits announce that the demons and leprechauns are gone doesn’t mean anything. Men have been announcing that the world sprang out of nothing all by itself for lo these many moons and that doesn’t make it so either. Today, there are even people trying to get money to spring out of thin air, but so far they’ve only convinced a lot of very rich people to let them rob them silly and call that proof of that rocks can be turned to gold. If you wish upon a star! And speaking of devilish schemes, let’s just put this simply: when men banish the demons in the name of science, reason, and nature, those men are in the process of becoming demons. This is for two very solid and unassailable reasons. The first reason is that Science, Reason, and Nature are no match for supernatural beings like demons and fairies. And second, demons like nothing quite so much as naive and arrogant men to do their thuggary. 

C.S. Lewis says in some place that many moderns suppose that the Devil and his minions go about doing their dirty deeds dressed in bad Halloween costumes, but in reality they are something like tedious and tidy bureaucrats sucking the life out of the world, one parliamentary motion at a time. 

Now all of this relates to the Poway synagogue shooting and Chicago politics because whenever something like this happens, everyone turns to their gods. Joy Behar blames Trump because her god is the Secular State. In this case, she’s peeved because Trump is being a non-compliant god, but she’s still looking to her “savior.” Others will simply blame “religion” and “fundamentalism” for “radicalizing” young men. And others will hasten to point to a lack of diversity and tolerance and the need for more education and multiculturalism. Cue the music, the New York Times is right on schedule:

The state’s diversity [speaking of California] has increased tolerance among many people who live and work close to others who are different from themselves, but for others it has fueled a sense of alienation and threat, said Lawrence Rosenthal, the chairman of the Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. “California is obviously the largest state, and it is already majority minority. Which is the nationalists’ and the nativists’ nightmare,” he said.

Translated: “diversity” causes most people to grow more tolerant of others different from themselves, but it also scares people who are already deeply committed to their beliefs. All rise, that gorgeous goddess “Diversity.” She’s actually made it into the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition this year in a hijab and burkini. And here, for those with eyes to see, is the point. You cannot banish the gods with secularism. Secularism sweeps the room clean of one demon only to find seven more far worse demons. In the name of tolerance, we are now on third base with Islam. In the name of diversity, we neuter boys with chemicals and wonder why such large numbers of them turn to opioids and shooting up schools and places of worship.  

Why do we keep doing this? Chicago stares us right in the face. And the shootings are only increasing in other places where the progressives have sunk their talons into culture. We just need to educate the children. We just need to explain to them more clearly that you can be anything you want to be. Boys can be girls, girls can be boys. You can have sex with anything and anyone. Now, everybody be nice. 

Let me translate: you can pour gasoline on everything and you can play with matches. Now, don’t start any fires. 

And when conservatives object, the progressives shriek: if you would just stop calling the fire department, we wouldn’t have so many fires! All that loud honking and blaring sirens makes people get stressed out. Right. 

At bottom, Christians need to see secularism and multiculturalism as false gods and false gospels. In secularism and materialism, there are only chemicals, only the physical, and evolution is the good news that if you mix a bunch of material stuff together out comes intelligence, morality, and progress. But that’s not simply a bunch of logical bosh. It’s worse than that. They aren’t just mixing up harmless folly. No, folly is always toxic. Folly is flammable. Folly is always explosive. You can’t go down the path of folly and come out intact. Folly disfigures and maims. And this is because secularism and multiculturalism are not merely empty promises, they are actually dark and demonic principalities and powers. But they are dressed up like a businessman in a suit and tie. They are dressed up like slick politicians. They are strife and tyranny and violence in an aw-shucks burkini in Sports Illustrated.  

And so this is the point: secularism and multiculturalism are false gospels that will continue to stir up violence. You cannot banish the “gods” though you try. The “gods” are always at war and therefore so are their people. Secularism is a demonic lie: there is no neutrality. People are not basically good. And therefore, crowding a bunch of different people together does not create peace and harmony. People are basically evil, descended from Adam their father. They love sin, they hate righteousness, and they are inherently selfish. Secularism and multiculturalism cannot even consistently condemn the Poway shooting or the Chicago shooting. What’s the problem exactly? If someone can be anything he wants to be, why can’t he be a shooter? Why can’t he be a murderer? Didn’t Darwin teach us that only the strong survive? And if everything boils down to blood and ethnicity, why can’t white supremacists fight for their survival? You see, it’s not merely that secularism and multiculturalism are not helping. It’s that secularism and multiculturalism are what’s creating this mess. Chicago is what America becomes if the progressives win. 

But God has given us the gift of this moment so that Christians may speak clearly into the mic. We condemn all of these shootings because man is made in the image of God because there is a transcendent Word – the Word of God, the Word that created the heavens and the earth from nothing, the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. That Word establishes truth and justice, that Word condemns all sinful violence and bloodshed and hatred, and that Word suffered, bled, and died for the sins of the world. That Holy Word defines love. Apart from this Word, a Word from the outside, a Word that stands over all other words, we have nothing. Apart from that authoritative Word, this world is just a Hellish stream of Youtube comments. But the Word really was made flesh. He came, He lived, He died, He rose again, and now He reigns forever. And all our Babeling is like ants plotting to ascend Mt. Everest. And the Lord looks down, way, way, way down on all our pomposity and pretentiousness and He laughs. 

But He also has compassion, and He is God over all the gods. He is Lord over all the lords. And He must reign until all of His enemies have been put beneath His feet. These idols cannot save us, but Jesus still saves. There is true peace and reconciliation in His blood.

The Meek Magistrate

Though revenge may be contrary to meekness, yet not but that a magistrate may revenge the quarrels of others. Indeed, it is not revenge in him, but doing justice. The magistrate is God’s lieutenant on earth. God has put the sword in his hand, and he is not ‘to bear the sword in vain’. He must be ‘for punishment of evil-doers’ (1 Pet. 2:14). Though a private person must not render to any man ‘evil for evil’ (Rom. 12:17), yet a magistrate may; the evil of punishment for the evil of offense. This rendering of evil is good. Private men must ‘put their sword in their sheath’, but the magistrate sins if he does not draw it out. As his sword must not surfeit through cruelty, so neither must it rust through partiality. Too much lenity in a magistrate is not meekness, but injustice. For him to indulge offenses, and say with a gentle reproof as Eli, ‘Why do you such things? Nay, my sons, for it is no good report that I hear’ (1 Sam. 2:23-24), this is but to shave the head that deserves to be cut off. Such a magistrate makes himself guilty.

-Thomas Watson, The Beatitudes, 109.

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Run to Jesus

On the first Easter there was quite a bit of running. The women who first came to the tomb ran away after the angel told them Jesus was risen. Mary Magdalene ran to tell Simon Peter and John that the stone was rolled away. Then John and Simon Peter had a foot race to the tomb. When the two disciples met Jesus on the road to Emmaus, after their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread and they recognized Him and He vanished, they hurried that very hour back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples. And some time later, when Simon Peter realized it was Jesus on the shore, he plunged into the sea to go meet Jesus. 

The application is two simple things this Easter Sunday. First, run to Jesus. Today, if you hear His voice, hurry to Him. Perhaps you have been busy with life, with sin weighing you down, trying to avoid the gnawing sensation that there is some distance between you and the Lord, putting off something you need to make right. Stop putting it off. Run to Him. And the good news is that He is waiting for You, and when you stop avoiding Him, and turn to Him, He is right there. In fact, in the parable of the prodigal Son, the Father is looking down the road for His Son and when He sees him, the Father runs for him. Easter if for running home to your Father, running to Jesus. 

Second, run to put things right. Have you said something to someone that you know you shouldn’t have? Have you stolen and tried to justify it? Have you lied and tried to forget about it? No one in the world may know about it, but Jesus does. Jesus knows what you did. So as you run to Him, run to put things right. Confess your sins of bitterness, hatred, lying, stealing. Run and make it right. Plunge into the sea. It might be a little cold, but it’s completely worth it. The Lord is waiting for you, and there’s a warm fire and plenty of food. Remember, it’s always better with Jesus. He has peace and joy and pleasures forevermore. Nothing compares to Him.

So, Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ.

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Evangelical Easter Joy

Today is Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, the annual celebration of what we mark every Sunday, every Lord’s Day, and if we truly know Jesus, it is a reality that is ours every day of the year.

It is good to remember the resurrection and to celebrate, but we really must be careful not to mistake respectable religious forms for true, evangelical Easter joy. It is still relatively respectable to go to church on Easter Sunday. It is respectable to have big dinners, to buy new dresses, to give gifts, to hunt for Easter eggs. You can even put a Bible verse on a Hallmark card or invite a friend to church, and that is still considered respectable. But that is not necessarily the same thing as knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection. 

To know Christ and the power of His resurrection is to know the joy of forgiveness, to know the joy of fellowship with God and those around you, to know the joy of confessing sins and making things right as quickly as possible, to know the joy of obedience, the joy of suffering reproach and slander and hatred for loyalty to Jesus. 

Do you have that joy? Do not say, well, I’m in church aren’t I? Yes, very good, you are in church, but are you in Christ? Another way to ask the same question is: Are you rich in Christ? Knowing Christ means that you have come into unspeakable wealth, and now you find that you have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, and self-control sloshing out of you at every turn. And the more you confess your sins and forgive and obey, the more you have to give.  

So as you worship today, do not look at the songs, at the people, at the sermon, or at the table. You will not find joy in any of these things in themselves. They are all signs pointing to our Joy, pointing to the One who is our Joy. They are windows for you to look through. But if you came here to do something respectable on Easter, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place. We are not here to do respectable religious things. We are here because a man named Jesus rose from the dead, and we have met Him. He is alive and He is here with us by His Spirit. He has forgiven us all our sins. And we are here to praise Him with all that we are.

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Good Friday 2019

Death looms over all. 

“…through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned…” (Rom. 5:12). A few verses down, Paul says that sin reigns in death. Those who are slaves of sin are slaves of death. The wages of sin is inevitable death. You are dying because you are a sinner, because you have sinned. There is a hook in the soul of every son or daughter of Adam. The hook is sin, and it has a chain that leads to the grave and from there to the outer darkness, to eternal separation from God, to judgment, isolation, and torment.

And so the human race fears death. We fear death because we know that we deserve death. We have sinned and so death must come. And so the fear of death reigns over all. The fear of death is that constant tugging, the pull of the hook in the soul. And the devil is the one tugging, pointing to the record of your sins, the record of your wrongs, the accusations written against you. The devil is the accuser, and he reminds you of your vile lust, your laziness, your angry outbursts, the lies, the betrayals, the seething bitterness, the envy, and then simmering over it all is the guilt and shame and regret and despair. And the devil says, what can be done now? What can be done when you’ve failed? What can be done when you’ve sinned? When you’ve broken things that cannot be put back together? What can be done when years and decades have been wasted and thrown away? It’s too late, the Accuser in your head says. And maybe excuses come as well – there was nothing else I could do. If my parents hadn’t…, if my husband hadn’t…, if my children, if my wife, but at the bottom of it all, we know that we sinned. We willfully chose evil. We are guilty. And now there is this hook in our soul that we cannot shake free of.  

And death is coming. And we will stand before the Living God of all the earth. And there will be no secrets. All will be revealed. All will be laid bare. The record of our wrongs will be read, and the only reasonable and just response will be the verdict of guilty. And so the terror grows, as death comes day by day: cancer, car accidents, natural disasters, violent crime, suicide, taking our parents, grandparents, siblings, children, neighbors, friends, strangers. Death looms over all. 

And it was into this world that our Lord Jesus came. 

Hebrews says, “Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” (Heb. 2:14-15). So Jesus became a man so that He could die, and He went down into death in order to destroy the devil who had the power of death and release those who through fear of death were in bondage all their lives. Jesus died in order to destroy the fear of death, which is the power of the devil. Why is the fear of death the power of the devil? The fear of death is the power of the devil because sinners deserve to die. The devil manipulates sinners by yanking the chain connected to the hook of sin in every sinner’s heart. The devil’s power is in his name, Satan, which means Accuser. So Jesus died in order to destroy the devil’s power over sinners. This is what John says elsewhere as well: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil. (1 Jn. 3:8). How did Jesus destroy the works of the devil? How did Jesus destroy the power of the devil? In the same chapter John writes, “And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins” (1 Jn. 3:5). Notice that repeated verb manifested. He was manifest to destroy the works of the devil and He was manifested to take away our sins. And it turns out that He did both of those things in one single act. Or to put it another way, the only works the devil has, the only power he has is directly tied to our sins. And therefore, if our sins are taken away, the works of the devil have been destroyed, his power is no more. If the hook is taken away, the chain is destroyed. 

And so, this is precisely what God has done in Jesus. All we like sheep have gone astray, everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Is. 53:6). He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him (Is. 53:5). There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus… for what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us…” (Rom. 8:1, 3). On the cross, God wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us. He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross, having disarmed the principalities and powers, making a public spectacle over them, triumphing over them in it. 

Do you see? Do you understand? Christ went down into death for me and for you. He went down into death, the just for the unjust, the righteous for the unrighteous, the good for the evil, and bore our sins in His body on the tree. And having suffered the wages of our sin, having endured the just wrath of God against our sin, he destroyed the power of the devil. If you are in Christ, if he died for your sin, then the devil has no more power. His power was the fear of death. His power was His ability to accuse you of sin, to bring up the handwriting of requirements against us. But in the Cross, God wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us. He took it away and nailed it to the cross. And this is how He disarmed all our demons, our devils, every satan, every accusation. If there is now no condemnation, there is no accusation. Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? 

And if all our debts are paid, if all our sins have been taken away, then we are not afraid of death anymore. Whatever death is for those who are in Christ, it is no longer judgment, it is no longer fearful, it is no longer darkness, isolation, or torment. This is why the New Testament routinely speaks of believers who have died as “falling asleep in the Lord” (e.g. Acts 7:60, 1 Cor. 15:6, 1 Thess. 4:13). When believers die, they do not come under the power of death, and so we insist with Jesus that believers do not really die. When believers die, they yet live, because those who live in Christ can never die. How could we? We have been set free from all our sin and guilt and fear. 

And so this is what we celebrate tonight. This is what we celebrate this weekend. This is what we proclaim continually. Jesus died in order to take away all our sins. Jesus died in order to destroy the works of the devil and his power over us in the fear of death. 

Remember, in Revelation, when John sees Jesus standing in Heaven, and Jesus says, “I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death” (Rev. 1:18).Who holds the keys of Hades and Death? Who is the Lord of the grave now? Our Lord Jesus is. He holds the keys. He took away our sins and destroyed the works of the devil, and now we are not afraid of death anymore. Amen.

Photo by Wendy Scofield on Unsplash