Tullian Tchividjian's Blog, page 16

What Law?

Jono Linebaugh, theologian-in-residence for LIBERATE, asks and then answers the question: Is what Paul refers to as “law” synonymous with the law given to Moses? This is a big question that has received a lot of attention in recent years. Jono writes:

In a recent post entitled “Ifs Kill,” Tullian Tchividjian explored the definition and the effects of the law. His basic claim was this: When Paul refers to the law in his letters he usually means “a command attached to a condition” and it is the conditions – the “ifs” – that diagnose and deal death to sinners. This raised a question for some readers: Is what Paul refers to as “law” synonymous with the law given to Moses or is he attacking a 1st century misunderstanding of the law, or perhaps even some humanly created ordinances masquerading as God’s will? As one commenter on Tullian’s post expressed the concern, when Paul writes “law” he is not referring to “the true law” but “to the additional man-made laws created by the Pharisees during the 1st century.” The evidence given: “Throughout history most theologians have agreed.”

Read the whole thing here.

If’s Kill

My friend Kevin DeYoung has put together a creative dialog with sections of the Westminster Confession of Faith on the role of the law in the life of the Christian. To further this important conversation, I thought I’d repost some thoughts that I posted here just over a year ago. I hope this helps.

One of the problems in the current conversation regarding the relationship between law and gospel is that the term “law” is not always used to mean the same thing. This is understandable since in the Bible “law” does not always mean the same thing.

For example, in Psalm 40:8 we read: “I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.” Here the law is synonymous with God’s revealed will. A Christian seeking to express their love for God and neighbor delights in those passages that declare what God’s will is. When, however, Paul tells Christians that they are no longer under the law (Rom. 6:14) he obviously means more by law than the revealed will of God. He’s talking there about Christians being free from the curse of the law-not needing to depend on adherence to the law to establish our relationship to God: “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom. 10:4).

So, it’s not as simple as you might think. For short hand, I think it’s helpful to say that law is anything in the Bible that says “do”, while gospel is anything in the Bible that says “done”; law equals imperative and gospel equals indicative. However, when you begin to parse things out more precisely, you discover some important nuances that should significantly help the conversation forward so that people who are basically saying the same thing aren’t speaking different languages and talking right past one another.

Discussion of the law and it’s three uses (1) usus theologicus (drives us to Christ), (2) usus politicus (the civil use), and (3) usus practicus (revealing of God’s will for living) are helpful. But I’ve discovered that this outline all by itself raises just as many questions to those I talk to as it does provide answers. So, I’d like to offer some brief thoughts that you might find helpful (big shout-out to my friend Jono Linebaugh who has helped me tremendously in thinking these things through).

When, for instance, the Apostle Paul speaks about the law he routinely speaks of it as a command attached to a condition. In other words, law is a demand within a conditional framework. This is why he selects Leviticus 18:5b (both in Gal. 3 and Rom. 10) as a summary of the salvation-structure of the law: “if you keep the commandments, then you will live.” Here, there is a promise of life linked to the condition of doing the commandments and a corresponding threat for not doing them: “cursed is everyone who does not abide in all the things written in the Book of the Law, to do them” (Gal 3.10 citing Deut 27.26). When this conditional word encounters the sinful human, the outcome is inevitable: “the whole world is guilty before God” (Rom 3.19). It is the condition that does the work of condemnation. “Ifs” kill!

Compare this to a couple examples of New Testament imperatives. First, consider Galatians 5.1. After four chapters of passionate insistence that justification is by faith apart from works of the law, Paul issues a couple of strong imperatives: “It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore stand firm (imperative) and do not be subject (imperative) again to the yoke of slavery.” Are these commandments with conditions? No! Are these imperatives equal to Paul’s description of the law? No! The command here is precisely to not return to the law; it is an imperative to stand firm in freedom from the law.

Let’s say you’re a pastor and a college student comes to you for advice. He’s worn out because of the amount of things he’s involved in. He’s in a fraternity, playing basketball, running track, waiting tables, and taking 16 hours of credit. The pressure he feels from his family to “do it all” and “make something of himself” is making him crazy and wearing him down. After explaining his situation to you, you look at him and explain the gospel-that because Jesus paid it all we are free from the need to do it all. Our identity, worth, and value is not anchored in what we can accomplish but in what Jesus accomplished for us. Then you issue an imperative: “Now, quit track and drop one class.” Does he hear this as bad news or good news? Good news, of course. The very idea of knowing he can let something go brings him much needed relief-he can smell freedom. Like Galatians 5:1, the directive you issue to the student is a directive to not submit to the slavery of a command with a condition (law): “if you do more and try harder, you will make something of yourself and therefore find life.” It’s not an imperative of conditional command; it is an invitation to freedom and fullness. This is good news!

Or take another example, John 8.11. Once the accusers of the adulterous women left, Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you. Depart. From now on, sin no more.” Does this final imperative disqualify the words of mercy? Is this a commandment with a condition? No! Otherwise Jesus would have instead said, “If you go and sin no more, then neither will I condemn you.” But Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” The command is not a condition. “Neither do I condemn you” is categorical and unconditional, it comes with no strings attached. “Neither do I condemn you” creates an unconditional context within which “go and sin no more” is not an “if.” The only “if” the gospel knows is this: “if anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous” (1 John 2.1).

The reason Paul says that Christ is the end of this law is that in the gospel God unconditionally gives the righteousness that the law demands conditionally. So Christ kicks the law out of the conscience by overcoming the voice of condemnation produced by the condition of the law. As I said in my previous post, the conditional voice that says “Do this and live” gets out-volumed by the unconditional voice that says “It is finished.”

When this happens, we are freed from the condemnation of the law’s conditionality (the “law” loses its teeth) and therefore free to hear the law’s content as a description of what a free life looks like. In other words, the gospel ends the law’s role as the regulator of the divine-human relationship and limits the law to being a blueprint for the free life. So, the law serves Christians by showing us what freedom on the ground looks like. But everyday in various ways we disobey and stubbornly ignore the call to be free, “submitting ourselves once again to a yoke of slavery.” And when we do, it is the gospel which brings comfort by reminding us that God’s love for us doesn’t depend on what we do (or fail to do) but on what Christ has done for us. Jesus fulfilled all of God’s holy conditions so that our relationship to God could be wholly unconditional. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). The gospel, therefore, always has the last word over a believer. Always!

For Martin Luther, it is within this unconditional context created by the gospel-the reality he called “living by faith”-that the law understood as God’s good commands can be returned to its proper place. Wilfried Joest sums this up beautifully:

The end of the law for faith does not mean the denial of a Christian ethic…. Luther knows a commandment that gives concrete instruction and an obedience of faith that is consistent with the freedom of faith…. This commandment, however, is no longer the lex implenda [the law that must be fulfilled], but rather comes to us as the lex impleta [the law that is already fulfilled]. It does not speak to salvation-less people saying: ‘You must, in order that…’ It speaks to those who have been given the salvation-gift and say, “You may, because…”

Freed from the burden and bondage of attempting to use the law to establish our righteousness before God, Christians are free to look to “imperatives”, not as conditions, but as descriptions and directions as they seek to serve their neighbor. The law, in other words, norms neighbor love-it shows us what to do and how to do it. Once a person is liberated from the commonsense delusion that keeping the rules makes us right with God, and in faith believes the counter-intuitive reality that being made righteous by God’s forgiving and resurrecting word precedes and produces loving action (defined as serving our neighbor), then the justified person is unlocked to love-which is the fulfillment of the law.

My talk from LIBERATE 2013 on God’s two words–law and gospel–for a worn out world may be helpful as well.

Liberate 2013 – Tullian Tchividjian from Coral Ridge | LIBERATE on Vimeo.

Introduction To One-Way Love

I’ve never been more excited about a writing project than I am about my forthcoming book One-Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (David C. Cook). The final edits have been turned in and it will be released on October 1. It’s a “manifesto” of sorts, where I issue a passionate call back to the heart of the Christian faith–grace. Below is the introduction to give you a sense of what the book is about.

A few years ago, I read something astonishing. Dr. Richard Leahy, a prominent psychologist and anxiety specialist was quoted as saying, “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.” It turns out the problem wasn’t limited to an age group; in 2007 The New York Times reported that three in ten American women confess to taking sleeping pills before bed most nights. The numbers are so high and unprecedented that some are calling it an epidemic.

This came across my screen about the same time that the news broke about the meteoric rise of Americans claiming no religious affiliation, shooting up from 7 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2010. When those under the age of 30 were polled, that percentage more than doubled again, to nearly 35 percent. While the numbers themselves were a bit of a shock, I wish I had been more surprised by the findings. From my vantage point as a pastor, I can tell you, it is truly heartbreaking out there. The good news of God’s inexhaustible grace for an exhausted world has never been more urgent.

What I see more than anything else is an unquestioning embrace of performanicism in all sectors of life. Performancism is the mindset that equates our identity and value directly with our performance and accomplishments. Performancism casts achievements not as something we do or don’t do but as something we are (or aren’t). The colleges those teenagers eventually attend will be more than the place where they are educated— – they will be the labels which define their value as a human being, both in the eyes of their peers, their parents, and themselves. The money we earn, the car we drive, isn’t merely reflective of our occupation,; it is reflective of us, period. How we look, how intelligent we are, and what people think of us is more than descriptive,; it is synonymous with our worth. In the word of performancism, success equals life, and failure is tantamount to death. This is the reason why people would rather end their lives than confess that they’ve lost their job, or made a bad investment.

This is not to say that accomplishments are somehow bad, or even that they aren’t incredibly important. It is simply to say that there is a difference between taking pride in what we do and worshiping it. When we worship at the altar of performance—and make no mistake, performancism is a form of worship—we spend our lives frantically propping up our image or reputation, trying to do it all, and do it all well, often at a cost to ourselves and those we love. Life becomes a hamster wheel of endless earning and proving and maintenance and management and controlling, where all we can see is our own feet. Performancism causes us to live in a constant state of anxiety, fear, and resentment, until we end up heavily medicated, in the hospital, or just really, really unhappy.

The Christian church has sadly not proven to be immune to performancism. Far from it, in fact. In recent years a handful of books have been published urging a more robust, radical, and sacrificial expression of the Christian faith. I even wrote one of them—Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by being Different. I heartily “amen” the desire to take one’s faith seriously and demonstrate before the watching world a willingness to be more than just Sunday churchgoers. That Christians would want to engage the wider community with God’s sacrificial love–living for their neighbor instead of for themselves—is a wonderful thing and should be applauded. The unintended consequence of this push, however, is that if we’re not careful we can give people the impression that Christianity is first and foremost about the sacrifice we make for Jesus rather than the sacrifice Jesus made for us; our performance for him rather than his performance for us; our obedience for him rather than his obedience for us. The hub of Christianity is NOT not “do something for Jesus.” The hub of Christianity is “Jesus has done everything for you,” and I fear that too many people, both inside and outside the church, have heard this plea for intensified devotion and concluded that the focus of the Christian faith is our love for God instead of God’s love for us. Don’t get me wrong, what we do is important. But it is infinitely less important than what Jesus has done for us.

Furthermore, it often seems that the good news of God’s grace has been tragically hijacked by an oppressive religious moralism that is all about rules, rules, and more rules; doing more, trying harder, self-help, getting better, and fixing, fixing, fixing–—ourselves, our kids, our spouse, our friends, our enemies, our culture, our world. Christianity is perceived as being a vehicle for good behavior and clean living—and the judgments that result from them—rather than the only recourse for those who have failed over and over and over again.

Sadly, too many churches have helped to perpetuate the impression that Christianity is primarily concerned with legislating morality. Believe it or not, Christianity is not about good people getting better. If anything, it is good news for bad people coping with their failure to be good. Too many people have walked away from the church not because they’re walking away from Jesus, but because the church has walked away from Jesus. Ask any of “religious nones” who answered their census questions differently in past years, and I guarantee you will hear a story about either spiritual burn-out or heavy-handed condemnation from fellow believers, or both. Author Jerry Bridges puts it perfectly when he writes:

My observation of Christendom is that most of us tend to base our relationship with God on our performance instead of on His grace. If we’ve performed well—whatever “‘well”‘ is in our opinion—then we expect God to bless us. If we haven’t done so well, our expectations are reduced accordingly. In this sense, we live by works, rather than by grace. We are saved by grace, but we are living by the “‘sweat”‘ of our own performance. Moreover, we are always challenging ourselves and one another to ‘”try harder’.” We seem to believe success in the Christian life is basically up to us; our commitment, our discipline, and our zeal, with some help from God along the way. The realization that my daily relationship with God is based on the infinite merit of Christ instead of on my own performance is a very freeing and joyous experience. But it is not meant to be a one-time experience; the truth needs to be reaffirmed daily.

What Bridges describes is nothing less than the human compulsion for taking the reigns of our lives and our salvation back from God, the only One remotely qualified for the job. “Works righteousness” is the word that the Protestant Reformation used to describe spiritual performancism, and it has plagued the church—and the world—since the Garden of Eden. It might not be too much of an overstatement to say that if Jesus came to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, freedom for the oppressed, sight to the blind, then Christianity has come to stand for, and in practice promulgate, the exact opposite of what its founder intended (Luke 4:18–19).

It is a terrible irony that the very pack of people who claim that God has unconditionally saved and continues to sustain them by his free grace are the very ones who push back most violently against it. Far too many professing Christians sound like ungrateful children who can’t stop biting the very hand that feeds them. It amazes me that you will hear great concern from inside the church about “too much grace,” but rarely will you ever hear great concern from inside the church about “too many rules.” Indeed, the absurdity of God’s indiscriminate grace always gets “religious” people up in arms. Why? Because we are by nature glory-hoarding, self-centered control freaks–—God-wannabe’s. That’s why.

But the situation is more than ironic, it is tragic. It is tragic because this kind of moralism can be relied upon to create anxiety, resentment, rebellion, and exhaustion. It can be counted upon to ensure that the church hemorrhages the precise people that Jesus was most concerned with: sinners.

Are you exhausted? Angry? Anxious? Fearful? Guilty? Lonely? In need of some comfort and genuinely good news? In other words, are you at all like me? Then this book is for you. I can’t promise it will answer all your questions or cover every theological base. But I can promise that you won’t hear any “buts,”, you won’t feel the tapping of the brakes, and you won’t read a list of qualifications. What you will encounter is “grace unmeasured, vast and free,”, the kind that will frighten and free you at the same time. That’s what grace does, after all.

It is high time for the church to honor its Founder by embracing sola gratia anew, to reignite the beacon of hope for the hopeless and point all of us bedraggled performancists back to the freedom and rest of the Cross. To leave our “if’s,” “and’s,” or “but’s” behind and get back to proclaiming the only message that matters—and the only message we have—the Word about God’s one-way love for sinners. It is time for us to abandon once and for all our play-it-safe religion, and, as Robert Farrar Capon so memorably put it, get drunk on grace. Two- hundred-proof, unflinching grace. It’s shocking and scary, unnatural and undomesticated—…but it is also the only thing that can set us free and light the church, and the world, on fire.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

The Bible makes it clear that self-righteousness is the premier enemy of the Gospel. And there is perhaps no group of people who better embody the sin of self-righteousness in the Bible than the Pharisees. In fact, Jesus reserved his harshest criticisms for them, calling them whitewashed tombs and hypocrites. Surprisingly to some, this demonstrates that the thing that gets in the way of our love for God and a deep appreciation of his grace is not so much our unrighteous badness but our self-righteous goodness.

In Surprised by Grace: God’s Relentless Pursuit of Rebels, I retell the story of Jonah and show how Jonah was just as much in need of God’s grace as the sailors and the Ninevites. But the fascinating thing about Jonah is that, unlike the pagan sailors and wicked Ninevites, Jonah was one of the “good guys.” He was a prophet. He was moral. He was one who “kept all the rules”, and did everything he was supposed to do. He wasn’t some long-haired, tattooed indie rocker; he was a clean-cut prep. He wasn’t a liberal; he was a conservative. He wasn’t irreligious; he was religious. If you’ve ever read S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, than you’ll immediately see that the Ninevites and the sailors in the story were like the “greasers”, while Jonah was like a “soashe.”

What’s fascinating to me is that, not only in the story of Jonah, but throughout the Bible, it’s always the immoral person that gets the Gospel before the moral person. It’s the prostitute who understands grace; it’s the Pharisee who doesn’t. It’s the unrighteous younger brother who gets it before the self-righteous older brother.

There is, however, another side to self-righteousness that younger-brother types are blind to. There’s an equally dangerous form of self-righteousness that plagues the unconventional and the non-religious types. We “authentic”, anti-legalists can become just as guilty of legalism in the opposite direction. What do I mean?

It’s simple: we become self-righteous against those who are self-righteous. We become Pharisaical about Pharisees.

Many younger Christian’s today are reacting to their parents’ conservative, buttoned-down, rule-keeping flavor of “older brother religion” with a type of liberal, untucked, rule-breaking flavor of “younger brother irreligion” which screams, “That’s right, I know I don’t have it all together and you think you do; I know I’m not good and you think you are. That makes me better than you.”

See the irony?

In other words, some of us are proud that we’re not self-righteous! Hmmm…think about that one.

Listen: self-righteousness is no respecter of persons. It reaches to the religious and the irreligious, the “buttoned down” and the “untucked”, the plastic and the pious, the rule-keepers and the rule-breakers, the “right” and the “wrong.” The entire Bible reveals how shortsighted all of us are when it comes to our own sin. Steve Brown writes:

You will find criticism of Christian fundamentalists by people whose secular fundamentalism dwarfs the fundamentalism of the people being criticized. Political correctness and the attendant feelings of self-righteousness have their equivalent in religious communities with religious correctness. If you look at victims, you’ll find self-righteousness. On the other hand, if you look at the people who wield power, they do it with the self-righteous notion that they know better, understand more, and more informed than others…arrogance, condescension, disdain, contemptuousness, and pomposity are everywhere.

For example, it was easy for Jonah to see the idolatry of the sailors. It was easy for him to see the perverse ways of the Ninevites. What he couldn’t see was his own idolatry, his own perversion. So the question is not whether you are self-righteous, but rather, in which direction does your self-righteousness lean? Depending on who I’m with, mine goes in both directions. Arghhh!

Thankfully, while our self-righteousness reaches far, God’s grace reaches farther. And the good news is, that it reaches in both directions!

Grace Mobilizes Performance

My friend Steve Brown tells a story about a time his daughter Robin found herself in a very difficult English Literature course that she desperately wanted to get out of.

She sat there on her first day and thought, “If I don’t transfer out of this class, I’m going to fail. The other people in this class are much smarter than me. I can’t do this.” She came home and with tears in her eyes begged her dad to help her get out of the class so she could take a regular English course. Steve said, “Of course.”

So the next day he took her down to  the school and went to the head of the English department, who was a Jewish woman and a great teacher. Steve remembers the event in these words:

She (the head of the English department) looked up and saw me standing there by my daughter and could tell that Robin was about to cry. There were some students standing around and, because the teacher didn’t want Robin to be embarrassed, she dismissed the students saying, “I want to talk to these people alone.” As soon as the students left and the door was closed, Robin began to cry. I said, “I’m here to get my daughter out of that English  class. It’s too difficult for her. The problem with my daughter is that she’s too conscientious. So, can you put her into a regular English class?” The teacher said, “Mr. Brown, I understand.” Then she looked at Robin and said, “Can I talk to Robin for a minute?” I said, “Sure.” She said, “Robin, I know how you feel. What if I promised you and A no  matter what you did in the class? If I gave you an A before you even started, would you be willing to take the class?” My daughter is not dumb! She started sniffling and said, “Well, I think I could do that.” The teacher said, “I’m going to give  you and A in the class. You already have an A, so you can go to class.”

Later the teacher explained to Steve what she had done. She explained how she took away the threat of a bad grade so that Robin could learn English. Robin ended up making straight A‘s on her own in that class.

That’s how God deals with us. Because we are, right now, under the completely sufficient imputed righteousness of Christ, Christians already have an A. The threat of failure, judgment, and condemnation has been removed. We’re in-forever! Nothing we do will make our grade better and nothing we do will make our grade worse. We’ve been set free.

Knowing that God’s love for you and approval of you will never be determined by your performance for Jesus but Jesus’ performance for you will actually make you perform more and better, not less and worse. In other words, grace mobilizes performance; performance does not mobilize grace.

If you don’t believe me, ask Robin!

Grace And Activism

Mark Galli of Christianity Today recently sat down with Jono Linebaugh of LIBERATE to discuss both the good and bad of Evangelicalism’s propensity toward activism. As a preacher, Mark’s comments about the unique and specific role of the pulpit in worship were especially enlightening. My prayer is that preachers all over the world will take what he said to heart.

It’s a short conversation and well worth your time.

Enjoy…

Jono and Mark-Vimeo HD from Coral Ridge | LIBERATE on Vimeo.

How Do I Know?

A while back I made the point in this post that confidence in my transformation is not the source of my assurance. Rather, the source of my assurance comes from faith in Christ’s substitution.

As a result, I had a few people raise this question: “But wait a minute…once God saves us and the Spirit begins his renewing work in our lives, shouldn’t that work of inward renewal become a source of our assurance? Isn’t that at least one way we can know we’re right before God?”

To be sure, the sanctifying work of the Spirit in the life of the Christian bears fruit (Galatians 5:22-23). God grows us in the “grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In Christ, we have died to sin and been raised to newness of life (Romans 6:4). And this new life shows itself in new affections, new appetites, new habits. We begin to grow into our new, resurrected skin.

But when the Bible specifically speaks about the grounding or the source of assurance, it’s addressing the question, “How then can man be in the right before God?” (Job 25:4). Assurance has to do, in other words, with the conscience’s confidence in ultimate acquittal before God. When we are talking about assurance we are talking about final judgment–what God’s ultimate verdict on us will be. Our assurance depends on how certain we are that God will say at the final judgment: “Not guilty!”

The Bible is plain that God requires moral perfection. It tells us unambiguously that God is holy and therefore cannot tolerate any hint of unholiness. Defects, blemishes, or stains-to the smallest degree-are unacceptable and deserving of God’s wrath. And just in case I’m deluded enough to think that my Spirit-wrought moral improvement since I became a Christian is making the grade, Jesus (in the Sermon on the Mount) intensifies what God’s required perfection entails: “Not only external actions but internal feelings and motives must be absolutely pure. Jesus condemns not only adultery but lust, not only murder but anger-promising the same judgment for both” (Gene Veith).

In Matthew 5-7, Jesus wants us to see that regardless of how well we think we’re doing or how much better we’re becoming, when “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” becomes the requirement and not “look how much I’ve grown over the years”, we begin to realize that we don’t have a leg to lean on when it comes to answering the question, “How can I stand righteous before God”? Our transformation, our purity, our growth in godliness, our moral advances and spiritual successes-Spirit-animated as it all may be-simply falls short of the sinlessness God demands. And since a “not guilty verdict” depends on sinlessness, assurance is ultimately contingent on perfection, not progress.

So, if God requires perfection and there is no definitive assurance without it (God isn’t grading on a curve, after all), then what hope do I have, imperfect as I am?

The New Testament answer to this question is singular:

For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” (Romans 1:17)

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. (Romans 3:23-25)

And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. (Romans 4:5)

The conscience is given assurance only as living faith is created by the Spirit through the Gospel announcement that God justifies the ungodly. The righteousness we need comes from God “through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.” (Romans 3:22)

The life we live, we live by faith in “the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). So faith is the only touchstone for assurance-the God-gifted miracle of believing the impossible reality that God forgives me and loves me because of what Christ accomplished on my behalf. Assurance happens when the God-given, Spirit-wrought gift of faith enables me to believe that I am forever pardoned, that Christ’s righteousness is counted as my own, that in Christ God does not count my sins against me (2 Corinthians 5:19). We are justified (reckoned righteous) by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. God’s demand for moral perfection has been satisfied by Christ for us (Matthew 5:17). Therefore, assurance can never be found by my looking in. It can only happen by faith-believing in him who was “delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” (Romans 4:25)

Martyn Lloyd-Jones is helpful here:

We can put it this way: the man who has faith is the man who is no longer looking at himself and no longer looking to himself. He no longer looks at anything he once was. He does not look at what he is now. He does not even look at what he hopes to be as the result of his own efforts. He looks entirely to the Lord Jesus Christ and His finished work, and rests on that alone. He has ceased to say, “Ah yes, I used to commit terrible sins but I have done this and that.” He stops saying that. If he goes on saying that, he has not got faith. Faith speaks in an entirely different manner and makes a man say, “Yes I have sinned grievously, I have lived a life of sin, yet I know that I am a child of God because I am not resting on any righteousness of my own; my righteousness is in Jesus Christ and God has put that to my account.”

True assurance, in other words, is grounded not on some word or work from inside us, but on the word of the gospel which comes from outside us and convinces us of what Jesus has done. Our assurance is anchored in the love and grace of God expressed in the glorious exchange: our sin for his righteousness. John Calvin wrote, “Faith is ultimately a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Institutes, 1:551 [3.2.7]). And since our faith is always weak and wavering, we need to be reminded of this good news all the time as it is communicated through preaching and confirmed in the sacraments. There must be a clear, continuous, and unqualified pronouncement of the assurance of salvation on the basis of the fullness of the atonement of Christ.

In the February 2003 issue of New Horizons, Peter Jensen writes:

The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ says that the ground of our assurance is our justification. In Romans 5:1, Paul writes that “since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Faith in Jesus Christ (which is itself a gift from God) has given us access “into this grace in which we now stand” (vs. 2). We do not stand in any experience which we have had, we do not stand in any progress which we have made, we do not stand in our success in the battle against sin. We stand in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which he has justified us.

What we have to keep remembering is that “before the throne of God above” we are (and in ourselves always will be) imperfect-so, no assurance by looking at ourselves. But, “before the throne of God above, I have a strong and perfect plea”-and that strong plea is not my imperfect transformation by grace, it is not my love for God and neighbor, it’s not how much I’ve grown over the years. That strong and perfect plea is Jesus Christ-sola!

Because the sinless Savior died

My sinful soul is counted free.

For God the just is satisfied

To look on Him and pardon me.

So, “when Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within”, if I look in I’m in big trouble. But, if “upward I look and see him there, who made an end of all my sin”, then by the miracle of faith, I can say to the accuser who roars of sins that I have done, “I know them all and thousands more, Jehovah knoweth none.”

It is for this reason (and in this context) that I told the story of the old pastor who, on his deathbed, said to his wife that he was certain he was going to heaven because he couldn’t remember one truly good work he had ever done. His assurance was grounded by faith where only true assurance can ever be grounded: Christ’s perfect work for us, not our imperfect work for him. Similarly, the great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck was asked on his deathbed if he was afraid to die and he replied:

I have my faith, and in this I have all.

Rest assured: Before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we need; before God, the righteousness of Christ is all we have.

The Cause And Cure For Our Exhaustion

As I mentioned in my last post, I had the privilege of speaking at the 6th annual Mockingbird Conference in NYC a few weeks ago. Below is my opening talk on the subject of our exhaustion and how God’s inexhaustible grace is the only hope for our inescapable weariness.

Crunch Time

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of speaking at the 6th annual Mockingbird Conference in NYC. As I’ve said before, in my opinion the work of David Zahl (Founder and Director of Mockingbird) and his team is the best in the business.

In a few days I’ll post my opening talk on the subject of our exhaustion and how God’s inexhaustible grace is the only hope for our inescapable weariness. But before I do that, I really need to post what was, in my opinion, the best talk of the conference.

My good friend (and soon-to-be Editor-in-Chief of Liberate), Nick Lannon, gave an amazing 25 minute talk entitled “Crunch Time: What We Can Learn From Athletes About Dealing With Stress.” Relevant to every human being who has ever lived (athlete or not), I strongly recommend that you take time out of your day to watch this.

Enjoy…

A Father’s Love

When I was 16, my parents kicked me out of the house. They had tried everything. Nothing worked. And it got to the point where my lifestyle had become so disruptive to the rest of the household, that they were left with no choice but to painfully say, “We love you but you can’t continue to live this way and live under our roof.”

A couple years after they kicked me out I was living in an apartment with a couple friends and I called my dad (after losing yet another of my many dead-end jobs–I only called him when I needed something) and said, “Rent’s due and I don’t have any money.” My dad asked, “Well, what happened to your job?” I made up some lie about cutbacks or something. He said, “Meet me at Denny’s in an hour.” I said okay. After we sat down, he signed a blank check and handed it to me, and said, “Take whatever you need. This should hold you over until you can find another job.” He didn’t probe into why I lost my job, or yell at me for doing so. He didn’t give a limit (here’s a $1000).  And I absolutely took advantage! I not only remember taking that check and writing it out for much more than I needed, I remember sneaking into my mom and dad’s house on numerous occasions and stealing checks from out of his checkbook. I had mastered forging his signature. I went six months at one point without a job because I didn’t need one! Any time I needed money I would go steal another check and forge his signature –$500, $300, $700. I completely took advantage of his kindness—and he knew it!

Years later he told me that he saw all those checks being cashed, but he decided not to say anything about it at the time. It didn’t happen immediately (the fruits of grace are always in the future), but that demonstration of unconditional grace was the beginning of God doing a miraculous work in my heart and life. My dad’s literal “turning of the other cheek” gave me a picture of God’s unconditional love that I couldn’t shake.

My father died in 2010, twenty-one years after he sent his disrespectful, ungrateful son on his way. And it was his unconditional, reckless, one-way love for me at my most arrogant and worst that God used to eventually bring me back. Until the day he died, my father was my biggest cheerleader and my best friend. I miss him every day.

Steve Brown once said, “Children will run from law and they’ll run from grace. The ones who run from law rarely come back. But the ones who run from grace always come back. Grace draws its own back home.” I ran from grace. It drew me home.