Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 66

Even Darth & Luke

[image error]The book of Job opens with fathers and sons in the family of Job, and this theme continues through the rest of the book. The father-son relationship is unique for its joys and challenges, and notorious when it goes sour. Famous duos would include Noah and Ham, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, David and Absalom, Laius and Oedipus, even Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. The relationship holds within its furnace the capacity for both tremendous blessing and horrific cursing. This volatility is tied to the fact that foundational to all human relationships is the relationship of the eternal Father and the eternal Son bound together in the love and fellowship of the eternal Spirit. This Trinitarian life is life itself, and therefore when it is bestowed in human relationships, it is all glorious and noble and wonderful. When sin and folly abound, however, the explosions and pain are always devastating.

– Job Through New Eyes: A Son for Glory, 33-34.

 

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As the Waters Cover the Sea

[image error]In the Old Testament, God promised Israel the land of Canaan, and when the spies searched out the land they brought back signs of that good land, the fruit of the Promised Land. But you know the story: the people saw the signs, they tasted how good it was, and they didn’t believe that God could give it to them. They said there were giants in the land; they would be destroyed. And because they didn’t believe, God required them to wander in the wilderness for forty years.

In the New Testament, we have been given a far greater promise. Jesus, our Joshua, is not leading us merely into a tiny plot of land in the middle east. He has sent us out into all the world to disciple every nation of men. He said that when He was lifted up on the cross, He would draw all people to Himself. The promises of the New Covenant are glorious and clear: The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Is. 11:9). All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before Him (Ps. 22:27). It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills. And all nations shall flow to it (Is. 2:2). And Paul says that Christ has risen from the dead and must reign until all His enemies have been put beneath His feet, and the last enemy that will be destroyed is death (1 Cor. 15:25-26).

These are our promises. The meek shall inherit the earth. And so, as we come to this table week after week, the Lord lays before us signs of the new Promised Land. This bread and this wine are taken from this world, this land, and they are sure promises that the Lord is giving us this world. Do no doubt. Only believe. There are giants in our lands too, but if the Lord is with us no one can stand against us.

So come and welcome to Jesus Christ.

 

New e-book Death by Baptism available here.

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When God’s Blessing Underwrites Us

[image error]“[Throughout the prologue of Job] The word for “cursed” is the word barak, the usual word for “bless,” but it is used here in an apparently euphemistic way to mean “curse.” … part of the question being pondered by the book of Job is whether blessing is really blessing…  The Satan insists that when God removes the hedge of protection, Job will bless/curse God to his face, again suggesting that Job’s blessing of God is superficial and contingent on prosperity. That blessing, the Satan contends, will in actuality be cursing if God allows Job to be struck. The answer to these questions is found in the refusal of Job to actually curse God… While Satan sought to turn blessing into cursing, God turns that attempted curse back into blessing… but this is already retroactively applied to the word of the speakers. They mean to say “curse” but “bless” is all that comes out! Blessing is underwritten or superimposed into the text. As Joseph explains to his brothers, what they meant for evil, God meant for good (Gen. 50:20).”

-Job Through New Eyes: A Son for Glory, 27-29

 

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A Table Without Divisions

[image error]“When ye come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it… When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper” (1 Cor. 11:18, 20).

Paul says that when people gather together in order to celebrate the Lord’s Supper when there are divisions among them, they are not actually eating the Lord’s Supper. You might go to a church service and there might be bread and wine, but if there are divisions, it isn’t the Lord’s Supper. But the result is not just a benign neutrality. Paul says that they come together not for the better but for the worse. Later, he says that people who do this, eating and drinking in an unworthy manner, are guilty of the body and blood of the Lord, eating and drinking damnation upon themselves by not discerning the Lord’s body.

Now this can happen with people in the same room together, between husbands and wives, between parents and children, between elders and deacons or members of the congregation. This is one reason why it’s a good practice to look around during the Lord’s Supper. Make eye contact with the members of your family and those around you. Smile. This meal means fellowship, communion. Is there anyone here that you’d rather not make eye contact with? Why not? Paul says we are to discern the Lord’s body: that’s all of us together. We are His body. We are one loaf.

But recognize that sinful hearts look for work arounds. So, maybe you go to the downtown service so you don’t have to risk seeing someone at the main campus, or the early service to avoid someone at the late service. You can look around and feel pretty comfortable, but that isn’t the same thing as discerning the Lord’s body. It’s entirely possible to bring divisions to the table with you even if the division isn’t visible at the table with you.

So this is the exhortation. This meal signifies the broken body and shed blood of Jesus for all of your sins and for all of the sins of every Christian welcome here. This is the basis for our unity. And therefore, you can cheerfully entrust whatever bumps, tensions, misunderstandings, or sins there have been to Jesus, the Host of this table.

That is a hard thing to do. Do you need that grace? The good news is that part of what He’s doing here is giving you the grace to deal with those challenges faithfully. So if you know that you need that grace, then come and welcome to Jesus Christ.

 

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Queer Eye for The Church Guy

[image error]Introduction

Sodomy has always been associated with creativity. This is because creativity is priestly. And priesthood is submissive authority. Priestly creativity is inescapable. Men will create. Men will serve and guard creation. The only question is submissive to what? To whom? And fundamentally, the only options are God or man. Will you submit to God or will you submit to man. The former results in true glory, that extends and magnifies the glory of God already embedded in creation. The latter offers a faux glory, that seeks to magnify the hubris of rebellious man. The former is fundamentally heterosexual, the latter is essentially homosexual.

Pagan Priesthood

In the Old Testament and ancient world, sodomy was closely related to pagan worship. In Hebrew, the word for sodomite is “holy man” (Dt. 23:17, 1 Kg. 14:24). The sodomites were frequently male temple prostitutes. This has led some queer eye exegetes to argue that the precise sort of homosexuality prohibited in scripture was the pagan ritual kind, but that God never intended to prohibit loving, committed sodomite relationships. Right, but that’s like arguing that God never intended to prohibit theft, it was just Canaanitic theft, the kind done in the name of Baal that God prohibited. Or God never intended to prohibit the veneration of carved or painted images just images of false gods. Um, no. The reason why pagan priests do these things is because of the paganism. Paganism hates God and hates the way He made the world, and it fundamentally wants to remake the world into the image of man and they glory in that shame (Phil. 3:19).

But paganism is parasitic. It is a leech, a tick on the back of God’s good world and His truth. And it picks up steam because it sucks the blood of reality. It vehemently objects to reality, but it does so while stealing many of the basic building blocks of reality, things like meaning, language, rationality, justice, truth, and morality. But if the world is a cosmic mosh pit, with chemicals and debris gurgling in chaos, then where did you get that meaning? What do you mean with words like dignity or human rights or justice? Who cares? And while we’re at it, language is just one more bit of floating flotsam. Words can’t mean a damn thing in that worldview. Language only has meaning if there is a transcendent lexicon, a truth that is fixed and meant by the Creator. So one form of priesthood ministers God’s truth, while pagan priesthood is necessarily committed to making it up as it goes along while shoplifting armloads of contraband truth.

Creativity & Authority

And this is why creativity is always an act of authority — or an attempt at authority. To create is to be an author. To exercise authorship is to exercise authority. It is to look at the world and say, this would be better like that. It is to take some part of the created order and rearrange it. A woman who walks into a house and begins rearranging the furniture is either a nutcase or a tyrant, unless she is the rightful homemaker. You may rearrange a plot of ground and pile a bunch of wood and stone together and build a house. You may rearranged ones and zeros and write a computer program. You may rearrange words and write a story or a poem. And this authority and creativity is either exercised in submission to reality and the authority of Jesus Christ or else it is in rebellion to Him and various elements of the world He has established.

But the association of creativity with the queer eye is — like all sin — a twisting, a leeching off the truth. In truth, creativity is an act of submission to God. It is priestly. When a man submits to God, receiving his assignment from his Creator to live in this world in a masculine way, and to build and invent and create based on the pattern of God’s creation within the limits of His Word, this results in true glory. But rebellious man, hating to submit to God, must mimic this pattern. And since rebellious man wants to glorify man, it is inherently homosexual. It may not always act out that homosexual impulse, but it is flaming gay through and through. This is because man must submit to God or man. And if a man submits to another man, sexually or otherwise, we have the makings of sodomy in principle if not in fact. And this is why God’s word clearly requires pastors and elders to be robustly masculine men. Those who lead God’s people must be men with backbones and calloused hands. They must have soft hearts and hard heads and not soft hands and soft heads and hard hearts.

The Authority of The Feels

This is why, for example, Nate Collins and others involved in the Revoice conference want to be seen as prophetic voices in the wilderness. They may not be acting on their sodomite impulses, but they absolutely do want to carve out a space for “queer treasure” to bring into the New Jerusalem. What is that “queer treasure” we may wonder? It is the authority to pronounce on morality, theology, and Christian sensibility. This is kosher; that is not. This is beautiful; that is not. That is so gauche; this is so shabby chic. This is woke, this is loving, this is inclusive. This is pastoral. And the goal (conscious or no) is to bring this gay authority into the church. And what is this gay authority based on? The authority of human experience. They repeat as a mantra what they have felt, what the world looks like to them, what it feels like to them, what they have been attracted to since before they can remember, how they have been treated, and so on. It is not the authority of God’s word that clearly identifies these things as “degrading passions” and “unclean desires” and “abominations” and things to be hated and repented of. No, they rise up with pursed lips and limp wrists insisting that many of them must remain single and burn with lust — for this is their self-assembled cross they just built out of balsa wood and matches, and they demand to be heard, demand to be ordained, and invited to speak at conferences because of how they feel. But this is nothing less than smuggling pagan authority into the Church. This is the faux authority of hard hearts and soft hands.

Conclusion

It is true that all authority comes via some sort of humiliation. It is either the humiliation of the cross and loyalty to Christ and His plain words or it is some faux humiliation dreamed up by the soiled imaginations of man. You cannot serve two masters. You will either love the One and scorn the other; or else you will ultimately hate the One and submit to the other. But you cannot be utterly divested of priesthood. You will minister something; you will create something, build something, say something. But you will do so either in submission to the Creator or you will submit to a man. But you cannot stand for long between those two stools. You cannot be Christian and gay.

 

 

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Left-Handed Power

[image error]1 Pet. 2:18-3:7

Introduction

One of the results of rebelling against the Lordship of Jesus and His authority over all things is a humanistic obsession with power, hence the proliferation of the word “empower.” When human societies reject the power of the cross as oppressive and tyrannical, the whole point is to create a void for fools to rush into. Under the Lordship of Jesus, all lawful authority is established, delegated, and therefore accountable to Christ. But when Christ is rejected, everything is up for grabs, (and incidentally, when everything is up for grabs, you know that Christ is in the process of being rejected). And Christians are sometimes tempted, in the name of realism, to join one of the factions or embrace some of their tractics. Maybe biblical instructions to servants, wives, husbands, children are nice for ideal situations, but what about when authorities misuse their power? But the Bible is clear that we are called to embrace the Lordship of Jesus, and His assignments in our lives, through embracing His example of what Martin Luther called left-handed power.

The Text: “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully, For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. 21For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously…” (1 Pet. 2:18-3:7)

Value Structures

Part of the problem we have with the commands of God is our flawed value system. We don’t value the things that God values and so His commands can seem strange. It would be a bit like suddenly arriving in a civilization where everyone scrupulously saved pennies but threw away all the quarters. It would seem backward and wasteful. But what if you grew up in that backward civilization and then suddenly arrived back in our present day? You might still have old habits of throwing quarters away and a strange attachment to pennies. This is what it’s like becoming a Christian. But in addition to the old man and the flesh striving with the Spirit and the new man, we have cultural norms and systems that reinforce various sins or virtues.

We see this throughout the passage: What are slaves to value? What are wives to value? What are husbands to value? And woven through the whole thing: What does God value? The consistent pattern is to value what looks like weakness, but which is actually power. The believing slave is to suffer injustice patiently by trusting “him that judgeth righteously” (1 Pet. 2:20-23) – this has the power to change lives (1 Pet. 2:24-25). The wife with a disobedient husband is to submit without a word, adorning her life with the beauty of holiness, trusting in God without fear (1 Pet. 3:1-6) – not merely to cope but that she might win her husband – for this is “in the sight of God of great price” (1 Pet. 3:4). And husbands are to honor their wives as the weaker vessel, that their prayers might be answered (1 Pet. 3:7). A little further down, Peter says, “For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil” (1 Pet. 3:12). What is valuable? What is powerful? Patient obedience and trust in God.

No Guile in the Mouth

The central model for this left-handed power is Jesus, who suffered for us leaving us an example (1 Pet. 2:21). He of all people had the best excuses, the best argument for why everyone around Him was wrong and how they were all going down, but He did no sin, neither was any guile found in His mouth (1 Pet. 2:22). What is guile? Guile is cunning, craftiness, wiliness, slyness, deviousness, plotting, duplicity, or treachery. On the one hand, Peter is likely emphasizing just how perfect Jesus was – He didn’t even sin with His mouth. But the point is also to point out the place every man or woman struggles: the mouth. “For we all stumble in many things. If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body” (Jas. 3:2). And as Jesus insisted: “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:34). And James again: “If anyone among you thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless” (Jas. 1:26). Putting all of this together, the first result of a changed heart will be a changed tongue/mouth. But there are plenty of people who think they are very religious who are setting whole forests on fire with their words (Jas. 3:6). Bitterness is a root that defiles many (Heb. 12:15).

Some professing Christians are straight up bitter and foul – cursing and complaining like verbal terrorists. If this is you, you are self-deceived, and your religion is useless. But most Christians are more self-aware and careful, but they can still be self-deceived. And this brings us back to the idea of guile, which is closely related to the idea of dissembling (Ps. 26:4, Prov. 26:24). To dissemble is to conceal your true motives, feelings, or beliefs. When Jesus suffered unjustly, He was not dissembling. He was not pretending anything. He was not being crafty or duplicitous. His intentions and motives and plans were right out in the open for all to see. And this is the example for slaves, wives, husbands, for all Christians. Christian submission does not mean putting a brave face on it while freaking out inside, muttering threats under your breath, smiling in public while cursing in your heart, or passive-aggressive avoidance of conflict while pushing your agenda – all of that is guile in your mouth. And it is fundamentally not trusting God.

Trusting God Means Loving Him More

In Luke, Jesus says, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk. 14:26). But remember that this is the same Jesus who affirmed the fifth commandment (Lk. 18:20) and condemned building campaigns that functioned as write-offs for financially supporting parents (Mk. 7:10-13). Clearly the point is that Jesus requires absolute loyalty. Love for Jesus must be ultimate, supreme. In Sheldon Vanauken’s book A Severe Mercy, he recounts what it felt like when his wife “Davy” became a Christian before him. He describes her going to church and bible studies without him feeling like “unfaithfulness.” Love for Jesus will sometimes appear dismissive, even hateful of good gifts of God. Why? Because You love Jesus way more.

The biblical name for anything that feels threatened by Jesus is an idol. An idol need not be an actual statue or image. It can just as easily be an image in your head, a scene of happiness, desire for respect and leadership, a theological conviction, a longing for a certain job, church, spouse, sex, children, family, house, friendships, whatever. That’s still a graven image; it’s still an imagined reality that you are placing your hopes in for your joy, happiness, pleasure, or success. But what if that is not God’s plan for your life? What if His assignment means long-suffering with a difficult spouse, poor health, wayward children, an unfulfilling job? What if that is the place where He has determined to display His power in you? The point is not to have low expectations or do a soccer-flop of apathy. The point is true and complete submission. Do you love Jesus more than everything? Do you trust Him to work His power in you?

Conclusion

Left-handed power is God’s power working in history, through men, women, slaves, Christians who trust and obey Him in the midst of injustice, disobedience, weakness, trouble. And that trust is evident in their words that reflect honest, trusting hearts. There is no guile in their mouths because there is no guile in their hearts because they have new hearts. We love Jesus more than anything and anyone because He suffered for us, and now we have died to sin and by His stripes we are healed. We had gone astray, but He has brought us home. And so we trust Him with it all. He is watching. He is listening. And He will judge righteously.

 

 

New e-book Death by Baptism available here.

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Read the Bill, Nancy

[image error]Just two things fairly quickly sort of like two goats for the morning and evening sacrifice to let smolder in your thinks for the day.

And they are related by the common denominator of the specter of democracy, the demon of democracy, the ghoulish freak of democracy. And of course by democracy, I do not mean people having a say or a vote for this or that thing — I mean the tendency to give the people the vote for everything, the tendency toward mob rule.

As the fellow said, if you don’t know your history you’re bound to browbeat it or something like that. A Christian social and political theory always begins with original sin — the tendency for people to royally screw things up apart from the grace of God. And since the grace of God cannot be manufactured, scheduled, summonsed up, or manipulated, for human societies to do anything approaching good or progress they are entirely under the mercy of the God of heaven. But this doesn’t mean that any civil structure is as good as any other. As Churchill once ambiguously quipped: “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”

But what thoughtful Christians have recognized over the centuries is that because of our Adamic nature, society will tend toward tyranny, chaos, coercion, and so on. This is the Christian genius of the American system: a plethora checks and balances. This establishes the principle of personal responsibility and the the principle of accountability, in as many different directions as possible. The passions of the people are checked by different sorts of representatives (senators, representatives, electoral college). But even those representatives are sinful men who need checking. So the House and Senate must work together, and the president can check their work through veto power. Finally, the judicial branch is meant to check all of their work. The whole thing is intentionally slow, grinding, and methodical, doing its best to check the passions of men, assuming at every point that all things being equal, the passions of men are selfish, foolish, and tend to break things. And this sort of set up is what we call a constitutional republic, not a democracy.

But I said there were two goats to sacrifice: the first is education, the second is the passion I’ve been speaking about. So to the first, as Chesterton says somewhere, in education there is much moonshine. And in another place, he points out that the most basic thing to understand about education is that it is not a thing but only a method. To speak of “education” as a thing, and usually as a good, positive thing is utterly ridiculous. The question must be: what sort of education? It turns out that the American people have been voting for unread bills for lo on many decades now without reading them. We laughed at Nancy Pelosi, but we’ve been voting blindly for the bill of “education” with our feet, with our bucks, with our children. And while there have been small squawks and groans here and there (no prayer? no Bibles?), we have overwhelming put up with the liberalization and secularization of the schools and given them more and more money, arguing that math is just math after all and sending our children to the front lines like child soldiers.

But education is like the word love or hate — everything depends on the object of the transitive verb. Love what? Hate what? Learn what? Love Jesus? Great. Hate Jesus? Not great. Learn to hate Jesus? Not great at all. And so Christians really must stop playing along with the game. Of course this means getting out of the public schools but it also means that we must stop voting for education as some kind of automatic good. Nazi education? Racist education? Read the bill, Nancy.

The Christian goal of all education is grounded in the great commission: Go into all the world and preach the gospel, make disciples, and teach them to obey everything Jesus has commanded. In the Law, God commanded parents to teach their children the entire law so that they might love the Lord their God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength — and they were to teach this to their children everywhere, all day long (Dt. 6) — which incidentally doesn’t leave any room for sending kids somewhere for 8 hours a day to be taught that God is irrelevant. And Paul reaffirms this responsibility in Ephesians: Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord — literally, bring them up in the culture and counsel of Jesus. All of this assumes that the purpose of education is first and foremost moral. What good is a bunch of math facts if you hate the Maker of math? What good is it if you can read and write and speak clearly, if you use those skills to scorn the Savior of mankind? Arguable, you are worse off for it.

And this leads to the other goat of passion. The goal of Christian education is the subjugation of sinful passions, the crucifixion of the old man, the training in righteousness, holiness, and Christian virtue. Of course, this cannot be accomplished by the will of man, sacraments, venerable traditions, or conservative politics. At the center of this is the necessity of regeneration, the new birth, which can only be effected by the Spirit of the living God. But despite this impossibility, Jesus sent men into the world to preach the crucified and risen Jesus for sinners that this human impossibility might be accomplished by God’s power.

So damn the humanism that says people are basically good and they just need a little more information about the world. No, they are basically evil and passionately driven toward lies and lust and tyranny and coercion. And the end of that road is initially a mob of well educated fools, like a herd of frat boys doing jello shots in tuxedos at their mom’s house, but fools realize very quickly that real knowledge is a hindrance to what they actually want. The truth has a way of spoiling the fun of insanity. And after a few minutes the Rousseauian flower child gospel kicks in. As a prophet, one of your own once said, we don’t need no education…

All of this to say, the current sensationalism and rising emotions and fomenting feelings is exactly what we’ve signed up for. It’s exactly what the founding fathers foresaw happening in a democratic drift, with a blind belief in “education” that did not teach the sinfulness of man, the holiness of God, and Jesus the only mediator between God and man.

A Meal for Sinners

[image error]One of the great recoveries of the Protestant Reformation was a restoration of the Lord’s Supper to the people of God. Prior to the Reformation, it was relatively rare for lay people to partake of the Lord’s Supper. And when they did, they usually only had a little wafer of bread and no wine. Most of the action of the Supper – the Mass – was in the spectacle, watching the elaborate rituals of the priests as they partook up front.

Since they believed that the crucifixion of Jesus was literally repeated in the Mass, they believed that watching the Mass was something like seeing Jesus crucified and somehow the mere act of seeing made them right with God. But it is not at all enough to merely see Jesus up front. Some of you may have had the experience of having to explain to your toddler that the pastor is not God or Jesus.

But you need to know that the instinct that your toddler has is not so foreign or silly as you might think. Plenty of people come to church week after week and even though they would never say that their pastor is Jesus, if a recording of their thoughts could be played out loud, it would become clear that they are not communing with the God of heaven, they are just doing and saying religious things in a gymnasium (or wherever), which is basically the same thing as thinking the man up front is God.

It’s not enough to see this gospel; it’s not enough to mouth the words. You need this gospel in your mouth, down in your bones. And in order for that to happen, you need to know that you need it to go down into your bones. And so let me say plainly, this meal is for the broken. This meal is for the hungry. This meal is for the sick. This meal is for sinners. This meal is for those who have failed and failed again. This meal is for people who don’t measure up, who aren’t good enough, who know that unless the God of heaven reaches down, they are lost. This meal is for those who know that all of that is true and all they have is rags — and faith in Jesus alone. That’s what we’re doing here. So, come, eat, drink, and believe. And Welcome to Jesus Christ.

 

 

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God On Your Side

[image error]The Protestant Reformation is celebrated throughout the Protestant churches this week, a memorial in time of the great work of God that began in the 16th century with Martin Luther and Martin Bucer and John Calvin and John Knox and Thomas Cranmer and the courageous joy of countless other men and women.

The center of that courageous joy is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. This was the gospel preached by Paul and the other apostles in the first century, but it had been obscured over the centuries by serious theological misunderstandings, lack of access to Scripture, and many ceremonies that implied that God’s approval was dependent on human worthiness.

But when Luther began reading Romans closely, he came across that wonderful phrase, the just shall live by faith. And it was like a roman candle went off in the pitch black silence of Papist confusion. To be just, to be righteous was not a matter of trying to please God, trying to be good enough, trying to be worthy of God’s grace and love. Being just, being righteous was dependent on faith alone. By faith alone, God justifies the ungodly. God doesn’t justify good people. Good people don’t need to be justified. Bad people need to be justified. Bad people are condemned and need to be acquitted. They need a verdict that they cannot provide the grounds for. If you are guilty, you cannot provide the grounds of your innocence. All you have is your guilt.

But God sent His Son into the world as the Just One, the Righteous One to stand in our place. He represented us, and so He was condemned for us. God laid on Him the iniquities of us all. And His righteousness is reckoned freely to all who believe in His name.

This means that we don’t earn His favor in order to become righteous. His free favor gives us the gift of faith. And faith receives the righteousness of Jesus. His righteousness is the ground of our justification. His obedience is the ground of your innocence and therefore your complete acquittal. And when you know that God favors you like that, when you know that God is on your side, it makes you courageous and it gives you a joy that nothing and no one can take away.

 

New e-book Death by Baptism available here.

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Winter Weather Marriage Tune-Up

[image error]Introduction

Many of us are getting our houses and vehicles ready for winter weather, and so why not our marriages? It’s easy to fall into ruts and habits that just seem normal when in fact they are wearing on us and harming our families in ways we do not realize. Likewise, many poor habits leave us incredibly vulnerable when trials and difficulties hit. The question is not whether you will face trials, the only question is when. Will your marriage be ready when the storms come?

The Texts: “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them” (Col. 3:17-19).

“Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered. Finally, be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another, love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous: Not rendering evil for evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing” (1 Pet. 3:7-9).

Fellowship with One Another

John says that if we walk in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin (1 Jn. 1:7). This is not a magical thing, as John proceeds to explain that this has everything to do with regularly confessing our sins (1 Jn. 1:9). The flip side of this is regularly forgiving those who confess their sins to us (Mt. 18:21-22, Lk. 17:4). This is the secret of all Christian fellowship in general and Christian marriage in particular. Doing everything in the name of the Lord Jesus and walking in such a way as to inherit a blessing are ways of describing Christian fellowship. Doing everyone thing in the name of the Lord Jesus means doing everything in the name of your Savior. You need a savior because you are sinner, and you need to do everything in His name because everything you do needs saving. Being a Christian doesn’t mean you don’t sin anymore. Being a Christian means you know what to do about sin. The difference between a clean house and messy house is that in the clean house they pick up. Confession of sin and forgiveness is like taking out the trash and doing the dishes. It’s what you do. For Christians to act shocked and befuddled when sin happens is like being surprised when the two year old drops a meat ball on the floor. That’s just what two year olds do. And remember, there’s no sin so bad that you can’t make it worse by denying it, trying to hide it, making excuses about it, lying about it or blustering or blaming for it. Just confess it and forgive it quickly. Take out the trash. And remember, practice makes perfect (or permanent). So what are you practicing?

Fellowship with God & One Another

Confession and forgiveness flow from fellowship with God (Eph. 4:32) and therefore they are prerequisites for enjoying fellowship with God: “Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift” (Mt. 5:23-24). You cannot come into church to fellowship with God while being out of fellowship with other believers, especially your spouse. Paul says that when there are divisions within the church, whatever we’re doing with the bread and wine, it is not the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:18-20). Better to be 15 minutes late and actually participate in church than to arrive on-time to only pretend to. This is why Peter warns husbands to honor their wives that their prayers be not hindered (1 Pet. 3:7). It may be that Peter is saying that harsh husbands won’t know how to pray, but it seems more likely that Peter is saying that God will only listen to a man as well as he listens to his wife. The same principle should apply to any sort of fellowship gathering. Don’t pretend fellowship with others while being out of fellowship yourselves. Better to have your guests wait in the living room awkwardly for five minutes while you put things right than to lie and pretend you are sharing Christian fellowship with them.

Fellowship & Difference

Understand deep in your bones the difference between being out of fellowship and not having the exact same opinion about everything immediately. You must not go to bed angry at your spouse (or anyone for that matter) (Eph. 4:26), but sometimes you really do need to go to bed and get a full night’s sleep before you’ll be able to think and communicate your various convictions about which math curriculum is the most Reformed. You must be striving for likemindedness, but do not be threatened by differences of opinion or perspective. The glory of heterosexuality is the glory of difference. Some of our differences are sexual, some are personality, others are cultural or experiential. But marriage is signing up to live with someone different from you. This is a blessing if received in faith and obedience. So do not be threatened or alarmed at different perspectives. And at the same time, do not excuse lack of fellowship by claiming you just have very different personalities. Know the difference. Husbands, honor your wives. Honor their opinions. Listen to their input. And wives, recognize that you signed up to follow this man’s lead. You must give your input respectfully and then, like Trumpkin, know the difference between giving counsel and taking orders.

Sweet Fellowship

Marriage should be full of sweet fellowship. Review the descriptions of Christian fellowship surrounding some of the particular commands for husbands and wives (Col. 3:12-14, 1 Pet. 3:8-9). A Christian marriage must not be characterized by bickering, arguing, raised voices, eye rolling, biting words, sarcasm, or frustration. A Christian marriage is singled out to represent Christ and His Bride (Eph. 5). It is to be characterized by mercy, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forbearing, forgiveness, love, like-mindedness, compassion, courtesy, and blessing. And if you say, well, we don’t argue in public (but your home is frequently a place of argument), that’s what we call hypocrisy. Your children can see the difference, and you are telling lies to them. You are telling lies about what matters, about what God sees, about what marriage is like. Not a few kids grow up in so-called Christian homes and want nothing to do with that sort of thing by the time they leave. A Christian marriage is becoming something of a rarity (much to our shame). But a Christian marriage should be one of the most striking things for the world to see: two different people who are strong and intelligent who deeply respect one another and love being with one another.

What You Signed Up For

Husbands, you signed up to learn how to love one woman well. This is what you are commanded to do. In order to do this you must be a student of your wife. This implies that you don’t understand her, and yet you must begin to. And very closely related to this, you must not grow bitter at her or resent her weaknesses but rather you must honor her, think highly of her, and speak graciously to her. The model for this kind of love is Jesus, and this means that studying your wife does not mean giving her everything she asks for. If Jesus gave us everything we asked for, we’d all be doomed. In this is love, not that we knew what we needed, but that God knew what we needed and sent His Son for our sins. Husbands, you must love your wives like that with joy.

Wives, your task is to submit to your own husbands and to let them love you like Christ loves the Church. Your temptation is to resent their faltering attempts to love you, rather than respecting the great difficulty it is to actually love you biblically. Recognize that there’s more than a little Hollywood in your hearts that you need to get rid of. While a real man imitating the real love of Christ is certainly courteous, it’s also deeply offensive to many modern sensibilities. Do not look sideways at Hollywood or the other men or marriages. Look to Christ, look to His word, and then look at your man and respect him in the Lord. The Lord gave you that man, and despite his weaknesses and sin, he is the one God has instructed to love you. Respect that. Honor that. And submit to him in the Lord with joy.

All of this is only possible if you have fellowship with God and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses you from all sin. If you have been set free to do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, living that you might inherit blessing, all of this comes as grace. And remember that if you have not been confessing/forgiving sin, and there’s a big mess that needs picking up, even that was paid for by the blood of Jesus. So what do you do? You walk into the messy room and pick up the thing right in front of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus. And then the next thing. And if you do it in the name of the Lord Jesus, you are doing it in the name of your Savior, who died for that mess. And you can do all that He calls you to, in His name.

 

 

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Photo by Val Vesa on Unsplash