Tullian Tchividjian's Blog, page 35

Too Good To Be True

Having concluded a fourteen week sermon series on the book of James the week before (you can access that entire series for free here), I began a new six-week sermon series this past Sunday entitled "Pictures of Grace." We're going back to the Gospels and looking at various events in the life and ministry of Jesus where the shocking, counter-intuitive nature of amazing grace is on display. Each week we'll look intently at how Jesus wrecks people with his grace, turning everything that makes sense in our conditional world upside-down.

I began the series by pointing out that there's nothing more difficult for us to get our minds around than the unconditional grace of God; it offends our deepest sensibilities. A conditional world is much safer than an unconditional world because a conditional world keeps us in control, it's formulaic–do certain things and certain things are guaranteed to happen. We understand conditions. Conditionality makes sense. Unconditionality on the other hand is incomprehensible to us. We are so conditioned against unconditionality–we are told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment precedes acceptance; that achievement precedes approval.

Society demands two way love. Everything's conditional: if you achieve only then will you receive meaning, security, respect, love and so on. But grace, as Paul Zahl points out, is one way love: "Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. Grace is being loved when you are unlovable."

Like Job's friends, we naturally conclude that good people get good stuff and bad people get bad stuff. The idea that bad people get good stuff is thickly counter-intuitive, it seems radically unfair, it offends our sense of justice. Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace– "don't take it too far; keep it balanced." The truth is, however, that a "yes grace but" posture is the kind of posture that perpetuates slavery in our lives and in the church. Grace is radically unbalanced. It has no "but": it's unconditional, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and undomesticated. As Doug Wilson put it recently, "Grace is wild. Grace unsettles everything. Grace overflows the banks. Grace messes up your hair. Grace is not tame. In fact, unless we are making the devout nervous, we are not preaching grace as we ought."

With this in mind I decided to begin with Luke 7:36-50. This is the famous account of the sinful woman (most likely a prostitute) barging into a party of religious leaders and washing the feet of Jesus with her tears of repentance. I pointed out that two rescues are happening in this passage: the obvious rescue of the immoral person but also the rescue of the moral person.

Normally when we think of people in need of God's rescuing grace, we think of the unrighteous and the immoral. But what's fascinating to me is that throughout the Bible, it's the immoral person that gets the Gospel before the moral person; it's the prostitute who gets grace; it's the Pharisee who doesn't. What we see in this story is that God's grace wrecks and then rescues, not only the promiscuous but the pious. The Pharisee in this story can't understand what Jesus is doing by allowing this woman to touch him because he assumes that God is for the clean and competent. But Jesus here shows him that God is for the unclean and incompetent and that when measured against God's perfect holiness we're all unclean and incompetent. Jesus shows him that the gospel isn't for winners, but losers: it's for the weak and messed up person, not the strong and mighty person. It's not for the well-behaved, but the dead. Remember: Jesus came not to effect a moral reformation but a mortal resurrection (moral reformation's can, and have, taken place throughout history without Jesus. But only Jesus can raise the dead, over and over and over again). As Gerhard Forde put it, "Christianity is not the move from vice to virtue, but rather the move from virtue to grace."

Wrecking every religious category he had, Jesus tells the religious leader that he has a lot to learn from the prostitute, not the other way around.

The prostitute on the other hand walks into a party of religious people and falls at the feet of Jesus without any care regarding what others are thinking and saying. She's at the end of herself. More than avoiding an uncomfortable situation, she wanted to be clean, she needed to be forgiven. She was acutely aware of her guilt and shame–she knew she needed help. She understood at a profound level that God's grace doesn't demand that you get clean before you come to Jesus. Rather, our only hope for getting clean is to come to Jesus. Only in the Gospel does love precede loveliness. Everywhere else loveliness precedes love.

I closed the sermon by recalling a story that Rod Rosenbladt told me when we were together at the recent Gospel Coalition conference in Chicago. It's a story about a middle-aged woman who needed help from her pastor.

She went to her pastor and said, "Pastor, you know that I had an abortion a number of years ago?"  "Yes," the Pastor replied.  "Well, I need to talk to you about the man I've since met."  "Alright," replied the Pastor.

"Well, we met a while back, and started dating and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn't. Then things got more serious between us and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn't. A while later we got engaged and I thought, I need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn't. Then we got married and I thought, I really need to tell him about the abortion. But I just couldn't. So I needed to talk to someone, Pastor, and you're it."

The Pastor replied, "You know, we have a service for this. Let's go through that together." So they did – a service of confession and absolution.

When they were finished, she said to him, "Now I think I have the courage to tell my new husband about my abortion.  Thanks, Pastor."

And the Pastor replied to her, "What abortion?"

What the Pharisee, the prostitute, and all of us need to remember every day is that Christ offers forgiveness full and free from both our self-righteous goodness and our unrighteous badness. This is the hardest thing for us to believe as Christians. We think it's a mark of spiritual maturity to hang onto our guilt and shame. We've sickly  concluded that the worse we feel, the better we actually are. The declaration of Psalm 103:12 is the most difficult for us to grasp and embrace: "As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." Or, as Corrie ten Boom once said, "God takes our sins—the past, present, and future—and dumps them in the sea and puts up a sign that says 'No Fishing allowed.'"

I know this seems too good to be true, but it's true. No strings attached. No but's. No conditions. No need for balance. If you are a Christian, you are right now under the completely sufficient imputed righteousness of Christ. Your pardon is full and final. In Christ, you're forgiven. You're clean. It is finished.

What abortion?

We Are Seasoned Do-It-Yourselfers

Thanks to my good friends Mike Horton, Rod Rosenbladt, and Shane Rosenthal from The White Horse Inn, I was introduced to Harold Senkbeil. Dr. Senkbeil is a confessional Lutheran theologian who for many years served as Associate Professor in the Pastoral Ministry and Missions Department of Concordia Theological Seminary. He's the author of many books including the one I'm reading right now entitled Dying to Live: The Power of Forgiveness. You'll be hearing more from me about Senkbeil, but this section on page 170 that I read last night is too good not to share right away.

Speaking specifically to Christians, he writes:

Our Heavenly Father attaches no strings to His love. His love for us doesn't depend on our love for others. Our relationship with the Father was established long ago, in the body and blood of His Son. Jesus Christ erased all our sins and shouldered all our sorrows. Already now we have a solid relationship with our heavenly Father; there's no need to fret about it. That relationship doesn't depend on our love for Him, but on His love for us. It hinges on the Gospel of God, not the Law of God…Again, the Old Adam betrays us. Our sinful nature would much rather hear Law than Gospel. The sinful nature is a seasoned do-it-yourselfer. We'd rather know what we should do, yet God insists on telling us who we are. The best way to tell you what to do as a Christian is to tell you who you are in Christ. The sinful nature likes to think it can earn (and keep) God's favor. Our Old Adam prefers to base security with God the Father on His Law rather than His Gospel.

What Senkbeil gets at in this section is the fact that we are, without question, a society of doers. Ever since the Enlightenment, we've been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment precedes acceptance; that achievement precedes approval. And since we all long for affirmation and validation, we set out to prove our worth by working. Unwittingly, Christians in this cultural context have absorbed this mentality and taken it into their relationship with God and their understanding of the Christian life. As it was with Martha in Luke 10:38-42, so it is with us: we just have to be doing something. We can't sit still. Achieving, not receiving, has become the mark of spiritual maturity. With this in mind, Martin Luther wrote, "To be convinced in our hearts that we have forgiveness of sins and peace with God by grace alone is the hardest thing." The hardest thing to do even as believers in Christ is to simply sit down and receive something, which is why Mike Horton titled one of the chapters in his book The Gospel-Driven Life, "Don't Just Do Something Sit There."

As I mentioned a few posts ago, preachers these days are expected to provide a practical "to-do" list, rather than announce, "It is finished." They are expected to do something more than placard before their congregations eyes Christ's finished work, preaching a full absolution solely on the basis of the complete righteousness of Another. The application that defines Christians is the application of Christ's work to them, not their work for Christ.

John Piper once asked, "How do you glorify a water fountain? Come thirsty and drink!" Jesus is not glorified by our "doing" things for him. He is glorified by our resting in, and receiving, what he's done for us.

We Are Seasoned Do-It-Yourselfers is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian

Give Them Grace

In a couple weeks the best parenting book ever (IMHO) will be available. Elyse Fitzpatrick and her daughter Jessica Thompson co-wrote a gospel-drenched book for parents entitled Give Them Grace that I had the privilege of writing the foreword to. If you are a parent (as I am) there is no better book to read than this one. Seriously. As I say in the foreword, it's nothing short of revolutionary.

You can read my foreword below to get a sense of what the book is all about and how much I think of it.

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In preparation for writing this foreword, I re-read the opening lines of Michael Horton's book Christless Christianity. He writes:

What would things look like if Satan really took control of a city? Over half a century ago, Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse offered his own scenario in his weekly sermon that was also broadcast nationwide on CBS radio. Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia (the city where Barnhouse pastored), all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, "Yes, sir" and "No ma'am," and the churches would be full every Sunday…where Christ is not preached.

This is scary—mainly because what Barnhouse describes is what most of us want for our children. Jesus or no Jesus we just want them to obey, be polite, not curse or look at pornography, get good jobs, marry a nice person, and not get caught up in the really bad stuff.

It may come as a surprise to you, but God wants much more for your children…and you should to. God wants them to get the gospel. And this means that we're responsible to teach them about the drastic, uncontrollable nature of amazing grace.

The biggest lie about grace that Satan wants Christian parents to buy is the idea that grace is dangerous and therefore needs to be "kept it in check." By believing this we not only prove we don't understand grace, but we violate gospel advancement in the lives of our children. A "yes, grace…but" disposition is the kind of fearful posture that keeps moralism swirling around in their hearts. And if there's anything God hates, it's moralism!

I understand the fear of grace. As a parent of three children (Gabe is 16, Nate is 14, and Genna is 9), one of my responsibilities is to disciple them into a deeper understanding of obedience—teaching them to say "no" to the things God hates and "yes" to the things God loves. But all too often I have (wrongly) concluded that the only way to keep licentious hearts in line is to give more rules. The fact is, however, that the only way licentious people start to obey is when they get a taste of God's radical unconditional acceptance of sinners.

The irony of gospel-based sanctification is that those who end up obeying more are those who increasingly realize that their standing with God is not based on their obedience, but Christ's. In other words, the children who actually end up performing better are those who understand that their relationship with God doesn't depend on their performance for Jesus, but Jesus' performance for them.

With the right mixture of fear and guilt I can get my three children to obey in the short term. But my desire is not that they obey for five minutes or even five days. My desire is that they obey for fifty years! And that will take something bigger and brighter than fear and guilt. The primary reason our children fail in their doing is because they fail to grasp at a deep, heart level what Jesus has already done. They often give up in their efforts to obey because we've unconsciously trained them to obsess more over their feats for Jesus than Jesus' feats for them.

When the Apostle John (or Jesus) talks about keeping God's commands as a way to know whether or not you love Jesus, he's not using the law as a way to motivate. He's simply stating a fact. Those who love God will keep on keeping his commands. The question is how do we keep God's commands? What sustains a long obedience in the same direction? Where does the power come from to do what God commands? As every parent knows, behavioral compliance to rules without heart change will be shallow and short-lived. But shallow and short-lived is not what God wants. God wants a persistent obedience from the heart. How is that possible? Long-term, sustained, gospel-motivated obedience can only come from faith in what Jesus has already done, not fear of what we must do. Any obedience not grounded in or motivated by the gospel is unsustainable. No matter how hard you try, how "radical" you get, any engine smaller than the gospel that you're depending on for power to obey will conk out in due time.

The law of God shows us what God commands (which of course is good) but the law does not possess the power to enable us to do what it says. You could put it this way: the law guides but it does not give. The law shows us what a sanctified life looks like, but it does not have sanctifying power. It's the gospel (what Jesus has done) that alone can give God-honoring animation to our obedience. The power to obey, in other words, comes from being moved and motivated by the completed work of Jesus for us. So, while the law directs us, only the gospel can drive us.

My dear friend Elyse Fitzpatrick and her daughter Jessica understand this. Elyse has taught me a ton about the gospel. Through her many excellent books, she has taken me to gospel depths that have changed my life. During the most difficult year of my life (2009) Elyse provided gospel-drenched counsel and insight that, in a very real sense, saved me.

The book you now hold in your hands is more of the same. It's the best parenting book I've ever read because it takes the radical, untamable, outrageous nature of the gospel seriously and applies it to parenting. It's nothing short of revolutionary—not because the gospel theology in it is so new but because the gospel theology in it is so old.

This book simply, but profoundly, restates the fact that we are justified by grace alone through faith alone in the finished work of Christ alone, and that God sanctifies us by constantly bringing us back to the reality of our justification. This glorious truth should radically impact the way we parent.

Please read it carefully and let it change you… the way it's changed me!

Give Them Grace is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian

Making All Things New (Not All New Things)

Last week I had the privilege of joining my good friends at the ABC Conference in Dallas. The theme of the conference was "The Groaning Cosmos" taken from Romans 8. My last session on Saturday dealt with one of my favorite passages, Romans 8:18-25. Below is the gist of what I said (explained in much more detail in my book Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different).

For a long time now, I've been convinced that the way most Christians think about redemption is influenced more by ancient Greek philosophy than by the Bible. We think of ultimate redemption as being redemption from the body, not of the body; redemption from the world, not of the world; redemption from the material, not of the material. This, however, goes against what the Bible clearly teaches about redemption.

In the Lord's Prayer we see that God's ultimate goal for earth is that it become like heaven.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:9-10)

God's mission is to bring heaven to earth—this planet!

There are many people who believe that God will destroy this present world—all of it—and start over, creating a new world from scratch. As I've talked to people who believe this, most base their conclusion on 2 Peter 3, where the apostle Peter says, "The heavens and earth that now exist are stored up for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly" (verse 7). He goes on to say, "The earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed" (verse 10).

In wrestling with this passage, one pastor recently concluded, "There is virtually no continuity between the present and the new creation. The new creation is truly new. The old passes away; it is burned up and dissolved." Like this pastor, many have tended to see in that last sentence (verse 10) more than what's there, a misunderstanding fueled in part by a questionable translation.

Let me explain.

In the King James Version this verse reads, "The earth . . . and the works that are therein shall be burned up." The same "burned up" phrase appears in some modern English versions rooted in the King James tradition. New Testament scholar Thomas Schreiner points out that, indeed, "some Greek manuscripts have this wording (Greek kataka setai)," but that "the earliest and most reliable manuscripts" have a different Greek phrase, heureth setai, carrying the idea of being "found" or "found out." This is what's represented in other English versions, such as these examples:

• "The earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed." (ESV)

• "The earth and everything in it will be laid bare." (NIV)

These translations indicate, not the obliteration of the earth, but rather a type of purging. Notice, too, that the earthly destruction mentioned in 2 Peter 3:6 (from the flood in Noah's day) is cleansing rather than annihilating.

Schreiner then looks at the bigger picture:

Scholars have debated whether the NT speaks of an annihilation of the present cosmos and the creation of a new universe, or whether it indicates the transformation of the present cosmos, including the earth. The latter seems more likely in light of: (1) the preferred reading of this passage . . . ; (2) Rom. 8:18‑25; (3) many OT prophecies about the renewal of the earth; (4) Christ's resurrection body being in continuity with his earthly body; and (5) the fact that Christ's resurrection body is a pattern for the resurrection bodies of Christians (1 Cor. 15:12‑58). God seems always to renew, not destroy and recreate, parts of his creation that are marred by sin.

The Romans passage referred to in the above quote speaks explicitly about all of creation waiting for its ultimate liberation:

The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19‑21)

God doesn't plan to utterly destroy this present world and build a brand-new world from scratch. Instead he plans a radical renovation project for the world we live in today. The Bible never says that everything will be burned up and replaced. Rather, it says that everything will be purged with fire and restored. God won't destroy everything that now exists, but he will destroy all the corruption, brokenness, and chaos we see in our world, purging from it everything that is impure and sinful.

Matthew 24:37‑41 is another passage some use to justify an escapist theology, approaching this world with a "Why shine the brass on a sinking ship?" attitude. In this passage Jesus likens "the coming of the Son of Man" to the time of Noah, when people "were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away." Then Jesus gives two brief pictures of the effect of his coming: "Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left."

These verses have been employed to support the idea that God will one day evacuate, or "rapture," all the righteous people, leaving behind an evil world destined for annihilation. Therefore, the thinking goes, Christians should focus exclusively on seeking to rescue lost souls rather than waste time trying to fix things that are broken in this doomed world. This perspective is evidenced in a comment I read not long ago from a well-known Bible teacher: "Evangelism is the one reason God's people are still on earth."

But a closer look at the context reveals that in those pictures Jesus gave of men in the field and women at the mill, those "left behind" are the righteous rather than the unrighteous. Like the people in Noah's day who were "swept away," leaving behind Noah and his family to rebuild the world, so the unrighteous are "taken," while the righteous are left behind. Why? Because this world belongs to God, and he's in the process of gaining it all back, not giving it all up.

When it comes to this world's future, God will follow the same pattern he engineered in Noah's day, when he washed away everything that was perverse and wicked but did not obliterate everything. God will not annihilate the cosmos; he'll renew, redeem, and resurrect it. As Randy Alcorn writes, "We will be the same people made new and we will live on the same Earth made new."

Moreover, the comparison between the floodwaters in Noah's day and the fire that Peter wrote about is significant. The wicked things that are "swept away" by water can grow back (as happened in Noah's time). But the wicked things burned up by fire can never come back. The burning-away effect of fire is permanent; the sweeping-away effect of water isn't. Fire, in this case, is better than flood.

One thing all of this means is that God intends to bring redemption into every arena where sin has brought corruption—and that's everywhere! As the beloved Christmas hymn "Joy to the World" puts it:

He comes to make his blessings flow, Far as the curse is found.

In these remarkable lines we broadcast in song a gospel as large as the universe itself. The blessings of redemption "flow as far as the curse is found." This hymn reminds us that the gospel is good news to a world that has, in every imaginable way, been twisted away from the intention of the Creator's design by the powers of sin and death, but that God, in Christ, is putting it back into shape.

Understanding God's mission fuels our hope and summons our engagement in a world that desperately needs to hear that one day the fraying fabric of our world will be perfectly rewoven. That for those who have found forgiveness of sins in Christ, there will one day be no more sickness, no more death, no more tears, no more division, no more tension. For the pardoned children of God, there'll be complete harmony. We'll work and worship in a perfectly renewed earth without the interference of sin. We who believe the gospel will enjoy sinless hearts and minds along with disease-free bodies. All that causes us pain and discomfort will be destroyed, and we will live forever. We'll finally be able, as John Piper says, "to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever."

It's true. God is making all things new!

Making All Things New (Not All New Things) is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian

Where To Look When You're In Trouble

A shift has taken place in the Evangelical church with regard to the way we think about the gospel–and it's far from simply an ivory tower conversation. This shift effects us on the ground of everyday life.

In his book Paul: An Outline of His Theology, famed Dutch Theologian Herman Ridderbos (1909 – 2007) summarizes this shift which took place following Calvin and Luther. It was a sizable but subtle shift which turned the focus of salvation from Christ's external accomplishment to our internal appropriation:

While in Calvin and Luther all the emphasis fell on the redemptive event that took place with Christ's death and resurrection, later under the influence of pietism, mysticism and moralism, the emphasis shifted to the individual appropriation of the salvation given in Christ and to it's mystical and moral effect in the life of the believer. Accordingly, in the history of the interpretation of the epistles of Paul the center of gravity shifted more and more from the forensic to the pneumatic and ethical aspects of his preaching, and there arose an entirely different conception of the structures that lay at the foundation of Paul's preaching.

Donald Bloesch made a similar observation when he wrote, "Among the Evangelicals, it is not the justification of the ungodly (which formed the basic motif in the Reformation) but the sanctification of  the righteous that is given the most attention."

With this shift came a renewed focus on the internal life of the individual. The subjective question, "How am I doing?" became a more dominant feature than the objective question, "What did Jesus do?" As a result, generations of Christians were taught that Christianity was primarily a life-style; that the essence of our faith centered on "how to live"; that real Christianity was demonstrated in the moral change that took place inside those who had a "personal relationship with Jesus." Our ongoing performance for Jesus, therefore, not Jesus' finished performance for us, became the focus of sermons, books, and conferences. What I need to do and who I need to become, became the end game.

Believe it or not, this shift in focus from "the forensic to the pneumatic", from the external to the internal, has enslaving practical consequences.

When you're on the brink of despair–looking into the abyss of darkness, experiencing a dark-night of the soul–turning to the internal quality of your faith will bring you no hope, no rescue, no relief. Every internal answer will collapse underneath you. Turning to the external object of your faith, namely Christ and his finished work on your behalf, is the only place to find peace, re-orientation, and help. The gospel always directs you to something, Someone, outside you instead of to something inside you for the assurance you crave and need in seasons of desperation and doubt. The surety you long for when everything seems to be falling apart won't come from discovering the dedicated "hero within" but only from the realization that no matter how you feel or what you're going through, you've already been discovered by the "Hero without."

As Sinclair Ferguson writes in his book The Christian Life:

True faith takes its character and quality from its object and not from itself. Faith gets a man out of himself and into Christ. Its strength therefore depends on the character of Christ. Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!

By his Spirit, Christ's continuing subjective work in me consists of his constant, daily driving me back to his completed objective work for me. Sanctification feeds on justification, not the other way around. To be sure, both doctrine and devotion go hand in hand, but the gospel is the good news announcing Christ's devotion to us, not our devotion to him. The gospel is not a command to hang onto Jesus. Rather, it's a promise that no matter how weak your faith may be in seasons of spiritual depression, God is always holding on to you.

Martin Luther had a term for the debilitating danger that comes from locating our hope in anything inside us: monstrum incertitudinis (the monster of uncertainty).  It's a danger that has always plagued Christians since the fall but especially Christians in our highly subjectivistic age. And it's a monster that can only be destroyed by the external promises of God in Jesus.

Romans 5:1 says, "Therefore, since we have been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." This is a  bonafide peace that's built on a real change in status before God—from standing guilty before God the judge to standing righteous before God our Father. This is the objective custody of even the weakest believer. It's a peace that rests squarely on the fact that we've already been "reconciled to God by the death of his Son" (v. 10), justified before God once and for all through faith in Christ's finished work. It will surely produce real feelings and robust action, but this peace with God that Paul describes rests securely on the work of Christ for us, outside us. The truth is, that the more I look into my own heart for peace, the less I find. On the other hand, the more I look to Christ and his promises for peace, the more I find.

So, when pressed in on every side, look up. In God's economy, the only way out is always up, not in.

Where To Look When You're In Trouble is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian

Up And Out, Not In

When a lot of Christian's think about "spirituality" they tend to think of it monastically, individualistically. In fact, in his book on sanctification, Harold Senkbeil writes, "What has developed under the guise of the practice of the Christian faith borders on a new monasticism." Many of us, in other words, think about spirituality exclusively in terms of personal piety, internal devotion, and spiritual formation. We focus almost entirely on ourselves and our private disciplines: praying, reading the Bible, and so on. That, we conclude, is what spirituality is first and foremost. And while personal disciplines are indispensable aspects of staying tethered to the truth of gospel (you'll shrink without them), it's interesting that when James makes his strong point in 2:14-26 about faith without works being dead, what he describes are not works of private spirituality but public service:

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and filled," without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? (James 2:15)

As one of my friends wrote recently, "True Christianity may be personal, but it's not private. It is wildly, unashamedly, thoroughly public."

Similarly, in James 1:27 he writes (the only place in the Bible where the word "religion" is used positively):

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

Even in that last phrase "keep oneself unstained from the world", he's not talking about monastic retreat, private meditation, or even personal piety. The contextual implication there  involves the need to "wash our hands of worldliness" which, throughout the book of James, is defined as self-absorption–a "my life for me" approach to life in contrast from a "my life for you" approach to life. Worldliness then, according to James, is me thinking always about me (see James 4:1-3).

Therefore, in both James 1:27 and 2:15, he's making it clear that true spirituality actually take us away from ourselves and into the messy lives of other people. It is, in other words, not introverted, but extroverted—it doesn't take me deeper into me; it sends me away from me. Real spirituality is forgetting about yourself, washing your hands of you.

That's quite different from the current way our individualistic and subjectivistic culture thinks about spirituality. Almost everything that is considered "spirituality" today is private and focuses on the inner life and personal betterment of the individual. This subjectivistic spirit of our age has seeped into the Evangelical church. "The evangelical orientation", writes Sinclair Ferguson, "is inward and subjective. We are far better at looking inward than we are at looking outward." One serious consequence of engaging in this type of morbid introspection, this propensity to "spiritualized navel-gazing", is that when we do we fail to see the needs of our neighbor and serve them–which is James' definition of "good works." After all, as Martin Luther said, "God doesn't need our good works, but our neighbor does."

The biggest difference between the practical effect of sin and the practical effect of the gospel is that sin turns us inward and the gospel turns us upward and outward.  Martin Luther picked up this imagery in the Reformation, arguing that sin actually bends or curves us upon ourselves (homo incurvatus in se). We were designed to embrace God and others, but instead we are now consumed with ourselves. The gospel causes us to look up to Christ and what he did, out to our neighbor and what they need, not in to ourselves and how we're doing. There's nothing about the gospel that fixes my eyes on me. Any version of Christianity, therefore, that encourages you to think mostly about you is detrimental to the faith–whether it's your failures or your successes; your good works or your bad works; your strengths or your weaknesses; your obedience or your disobedience.

The irony, of course, is that you and I are renewed inwardly to the degree that we focus not on inward renewal but upward worship and outward service. The more you see that the gospel isn't about you, the more spiritual you will become.

Up And Out, Not In is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian

How To Answer The Accuser

Martin Luther in his Commentary on Galatians tells us how to answer the Accuser:

Paul does not say that works are objectionable, but to build one's hopes for righteousness on works is disastrous, for that makes Christ good for nothing.  Let us bear this in mind when the devil accuses our conscience.  When that dragon accuses us of having done no good at all, say to him,"You trouble me with the remembrance of my past sins;  you remind me that I have done no good.  But this does not bother me, because if I were to trust in my own good deeds, or despair because I have done no good deeds, Christ would profit me neither way.  I am not going to make Him unprofitable to me.  This I would do if I should presume to purchase for myself the favor of God by my good deeds or if I should despair of my salvation because of my sins."

How To Answer The Accuser is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian

God's Final Word

We Christians have a remarkable tendency to focus almost exclusively on the  fruit of  the problem. We do this as parents with our children, pastors with our parishioners, husbands with wives and wives with husbands. We do this with ourselves. The gospel, on the other hand, always addresses the root of the problem. And the root of the problem is not bad behavior. Bad behavior is the fruit of something deeper.

Harold Senkbeil rightly identifies our real enemy: death. Sins, in other words, are the fruit of a much deeper problem, a problem that only God can solve. Death is the root of the problem.

"This looks good", she thought to herself. Such shiny fruit; it fairly cried out to be eaten, to be enjoyed. And what a broadening experience such enjoyment would be–the knowledge of good and evil, the Mighty One had said. How could He want less than the very best for His own?

"My husband and I will  be like God Himself," she reflected. "Now, could that be so bad?"

The serpent made sense: it would be much better to know both good and evil than to know only good.

"Here, have some." She handed the juicy pulp to her husband.

"This  is  good stuff. By the way, Adam, do you know what God meant by that word–I think it was 'die.'"

All sinful behavior–even in Christians–can be traced back to the death that happened in Eden. To address behavior without addressing death is to perpetuate death. The Pharisees were masters of this and Jesus called them "white-washed tombs." Many of us Christians are guilty of making this same mistake. We tend to think of the gospel as God's program to make bad people good, not dead people live. The fact is, Jesus came first to effect a mortal resurrection, not a moral reformation–as his own death and resurrection demonstrate.

The following excerpt is from Senkbeil's excellent article in Justified: Modern Reformation Essays on the Doctrine of Justification:

Most people think that the human dilemma is that our lives are out of adjustment; we don't meet God's expectations. Salvation then becomes a matter of rearranging our priorities and adjusting our life-style to correspond with God's will. In its crassest form, this error leads people to think they earn their own salvation. More often in today's evangelical world, the error has a more subtle disguise: armed with forgiveness through Jesus, people are urged to practice the techniques and principles Christ gave to bring their life-style back into line.

It is certainly true that sinful lives are out of adjustment. We are all in need of the Spirit's sanctifying power. But that comes only after our real problem is solved. Sins are just the symptom; our real dilemma is death.

God warned Adam and Eve that the knowledge of evil came with a high price tag: ". . . when you eat of (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) you will surely die" (Gen. 2:17). Our first parents wanted to be like God and were willing to pay the price. And we are still paying the price: "the wages of sin is death . . ." (Rom. 6:23); ". . . in Adam all die" (1 Cor. 15:22); ". . . You were dead in your transgressions and sins" (Eph. 2:1).

The real problem we all face is death. Physical death, to be sure. But ultimately and most horribly, spiritual death–being cut off from God forever. And everyone must die. You can either die alone or die in Jesus.

In his death Jesus Christ swallowed up our death, and rose again triumphantly to take all of the teeth out of the grave. In the promise of the resurrection, death loses its power. When we die with Jesus, we really live!

Sanctification consists of the daily realization that in Christ we have died and in Christ we have been raised. Life change happens as the heart daily grasps death and life. Daily reformation is the fruit of daily resurrection. To get it the other way around (which we always do by default) is to miss the power and point of the gospel. In his book God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis makes the obvious point that "You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first." Behavior (good or bad) is a second thing.

Preachers these days are expected to major in "Christian moral renovation." They are expected to provide a practical "to-do" list, rather than announce, "It is finished." They are expected to do something other than, "more than", placarding before their congregations eyes Christ's finished work, preaching a full absolution solely on the basis of the complete righteousness of Another. The irony is, of course, that when preachers cave in to this pressure, moral renovation does not happen. To focus on how I'm doing more than on what Christ has done is Christian narcissism (an oxymoron if I ever heard one)–the poison of self-absorption which undermines the power of the gospel in our lives. Martin Luther noted that "the sin underneath all our sins is the lie of the serpent that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ and that we must take matters into our own hands."

Moral renovation, in other words, is to refocus our eyes away from ourselves to that Man's obedience, to that Man's cross, to that Man's blood–to that Man's death and resurrection!

"In my place condemned he stood, and sealed my pardon with his blood–hallelujah, what a Savior!"

Learning daily to love this glorious exchange, to lean on its finishedness, and to live under its banner is what it means to be morally reformed!

God's Final Word is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian

God's Final Solution

We Christians have a remarkable tendency to focus almost exclusively on the  fruit of  the problem. We do this as parents with our children, pastors with our parishioners, husbands with wives and wives with husbands. We do this with ourselves. The gospel, on the other hand, always addresses the root of the problem. And the root of the problem is not bad behavior. Bad behavior is the fruit of something deeper.

Harold Senkbeil rightly identifies our real enemy: death. Sins, in other words, are the fruit of a much deeper problem, a problem that only God can solve. Death is the root of the problem.

"This looks good", she thought to herself. Such shiny fruit; it fairly cried out to be eaten, to be enjoyed. And what a broadening experience such enjoyment would be–the knowledge of good and evil, the Mighty One had said. How could He want less than the very best for His own?

"My husband and I will  be like God Himself," she reflected. "Now, could that be so bad?"

The serpent made sense: it would be much better to know both good and evil than to know only good.

"Here, have some." She handed the juicy pulp to her husband.

"This  is  good stuff. By the way, Adam, do you know what God meant by that word–I think it was 'die.'"

All sinful behavior–even in Christians–can be traced back to the death that happened in Eden. To address behavior without addressing death is to perpetuate death. The Pharisees were masters of this and Jesus called them "white-washed tombs." Many of us Christians are guilty of making this same mistake. We tend to think of the gospel as God's program to make bad people good, not dead people live. The fact is, Jesus came first to effect a mortal resurrection, not a moral reformation–as his own death and resurrection demonstrate.

The following excerpt is from Senkbeil's excellent article in Justified: Modern Reformation Essays on the Doctrine of Justification:

Most people think that the human dilemma is that our lives are out of adjustment; we don't meet God's expectations. Salvation then becomes a matter of rearranging our priorities and adjusting our life-style to correspond with God's will. In its crassest form, this error leads people to think they earn their own salvation. More often in today's evangelical world, the error has a more subtle disguise: armed with forgiveness through Jesus, people are urged to practice the techniques and principles Christ gave to bring their life-style back into line.

It is certainly true that sinful lives are out of adjustment. We are all in need of the Spirit's sanctifying power. But that comes only after our real problem is solved. Sins are just the symptom; our real dilemma is death.

God warned Adam and Eve that the knowledge of evil came with a high price tag: ". . . when you eat of (the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) you will surely die" (Gen. 2:17). Our first parents wanted to be like God and were willing to pay the price. And we are still paying the price: "the wages of sin is death . . ." (Rom. 6:23); ". . . in Adam all die" (1 Cor. 15:22); ". . . You were dead in your transgressions and sins" (Eph. 2:1).

The real problem we all face is death. Physical death, to be sure. But ultimately and most horribly, spiritual death–being cut off from God forever. And everyone must die. You can either die alone or die in Jesus.

In his death Jesus Christ swallowed up our death, and rose again triumphantly to take all of the teeth out of the grave. In the promise of the resurrection, death loses its power. When we die with Jesus, we really live!

Sanctification consists of the daily realization that in Christ we have died and in Christ we have been raised. Life change happens as the heart daily grasps death and life. Daily reformation is the fruit of daily resurrection. To get it the other way around (which we always do by default) is to miss the power and point of the gospel. In his book God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis makes the obvious point that "You can't get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first."

Preachers these days are expected to major in "Christian moral renovation." They are expected to provide a practical "to-do" list, rather than announce, "It is finished." They are expected to do something other than, "more than", placarding before their congregations eyes Christ's finished work, preaching a full absolution solely on the basis of the complete righteousness of Another. The irony is, of course, that when preachers cave in to this pressure, moral renovation does not happen. To focus on how I'm doing more than on what Christ has done is Christian narcissism (an oxymoron if I ever heard one)–the poison of self-absorption which undermines the power of the gospel in our lives. Martin Luther noted that "the sin underneath all our sins is the lie of the serpent that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ and that we must take matters into our own hands."

Moral renovation, in other words, is to refocus our eyes away from ourselves to that Man's obedience, to that Man's cross, to that Man's blood–to that Man's death and resurrection!

"In my place condemned he stood, and sealed my pardon with his blood–hallelujah, what a Savior!"

Learning daily to love this glorious exchange, to lean on its finishedness, and to live under its banner is what it means to be morally reformed!

God's Final Solution is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian

The Best Is Yet To Come

With Christ's first coming, God began the process of reversing the curse of sin and redeeming all things. In Christ, God was moving in a new way. All of Jesus' ministry—the words he spoke, the miracles he performed—showed that there was a new order in town: God's order. When Jesus healed the diseased, raised the dead, and forgave the desperate, he did so to show that with the arrival of God in the flesh came the restoration of the way God intended things to be.

Tim Keller observes that Christ's miracles were not the suspension of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order. They were a reminder of what once was prior to the fall and a preview of what will eventually be a universal reality once again—a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict.

In his book This Beautiful Mess, Rick McKinley describes the response of a pastor's response to the death of a friend:

A pastor friend of mine told me that as he was preparing for a funeral once, he decided to go through the Gospels to see how Jesus dealt with funerals. What he discovered was that Jesus did not care for them much. Every one He went to He raised the person from the dead. Jesus doesn't do funerals, not even his own.

The resurrection of Jesus is the greatest proof of God's intention to revitalize this broken cosmos. His rising from the dead was "just the beginning of the saving, renewing, resurrecting work of God that will have its climax in the restoration of the entire cosmos," as K. Scott Oliphant and Sinclair Ferguson remind us. The bodily resurrection of Jesus "was the first bit of material order to be redeemed and transfigured," writes John Stott. "It is the divine pledge that the rest will be redeemed and transfigured one day." Christ's resurrection is both the model and the means for our resurrection—and the guarantee that what he started, he will finish.

The day will come when Christ returns and completes this process of transformation (read Revelation 21, for instance). Psalm 96:11‑13 gives us a poetic glimpse of what will happen when Jesus returns to rule the earth:

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;

let the sea roar, and all that fills it;

let the field exult, and everything in it!

Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy

before the Lord, for he comes,

for he comes to rule the earth.

He will rule the world in righteousness,

and the peoples in his faithfulness.

For those who have found forgiveness of sins in Christ, there will one day be no more sickness, no more death, no more tears, no more division, no more tension. For the pardoned children of God, there'll be complete harmony. We'll work and worship in a perfectly renewed earth without the interference of sin. We who believe the gospel will enjoy sinless hearts and minds along with disease-free bodies. All that causes us pain and discomfort will be destroyed, and we will live forever. We'll finally be able, as John Piper says, "to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever."

So take heart, weary soldiers. The best is yet to come.

Happy Resurrection Day!

The Best Is Yet To Come is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian