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June 14 - June 18, 2024
Then Heimel added a statement that took my breath away: “I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you, he grants your deepest wish.”
The Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us is building our identity on something besides Jesus.
Jesus says, “You see, if you have me, I will actually fulfill you, and if you fail me, I will always forgive you.
The problem is that we’re looking to something besides Jesus as savior.
C. S. Lewis put this so poetically in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There’s a boy named Eustace, and everybody hates him and he hates everybody. He’s selfish,
I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. . . . The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. . . . Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. . . . Then he caught hold of me . . . and threw me into the water. It smarted
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The fact that we thought getting our deepest wish would heal us, would save us—that was the problem. We had to let Jesus be our Savior.
You can only forgive a sin if it’s against you. That’s why, when Jesus looks at the paralyzed man and says, “Your sins are forgiven,” he’s actually saying, “Your
sins have really been against me.”
But Jesus knows that’s not nearly deep enough. He knows that whether we’re a paralyzed man lying on a mat or a struggling actor or a former struggling actor who’s become a celebrity, we don’t need someone who can just grant our wishes. We need someone who can go deeper than that. Someone who will use his claws, lovingly and carefully, to pierce our self-centeredness and remove the sin that enslaves us and distorts even our beautiful longings. In short, we need to be forgiven. That’s the only way for our discontent to be healed. It will take more than a miracle worker or a divine genie—it
it will take a Savior. Jesus knows that to be our Savior he is going to have to die.
But they all have the same logic: If I perform, if I obey, I’m accepted. The gospel of Jesus is not only different from that but diametrically opposed to it: I’m fully accepted in Jesus Christ, and therefore I obey.
In religion the purpose of obeying the law is to assure you that you’re all right with God. As a result, when you come to the law, what you’re most concerned about is detail.
But in the life of Christians the law of God—though still binding on them—functions in a completely different way. It shows you the life of love you want to live before the God who has done so much for you.
God’s law takes you out of yourself; it shows you how to serve God and others instead of being absorbed with yourself.
When Jesus says, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath,” Jesus means that he is the Sabbath.
He is the source of the deep rest we need. He has come to completely change the way we rest. The one-day-a-week rest we take is just a taste of the deep divine rest we need, and Jesus is its source.
A different reason to rest is to be so satisfied with your work, so utterly satisfied, that you can leave it alone.
Why? Because there’s a work underneath our work that we really need rest from. It’s the work of self-justification. It’s the work that often leads us to take refuge in religion.
you rely on Jesus’s finished work, you know that God is satisfied with you. You can be satisfied with life.
Jesus, however, understands that there is a God who is uncreated, beginningless, infinitely transcendent, who made this world, who keeps everything in the universe going, so that all the molecules, all the stars, all the solar systems
are being held up by the power of this God. And Jesus says, That’s who I am.
He was basically claiming that all sins are against him. Since you can only forgive sins against yourself—and sins are offenses against God—he is claiming to be God.
Here is how historian N. T. Wright puts it:
“How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself became life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that,
or it means n...
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In these countries there were cultural resistance movements; and in Israel that was the Pharisees. They put all their emphasis on living by the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures and putting up big hedges around themselves to prevent contamination by the pagans. See what was going on?
That’s why I say this sentence hints at one of the main themes of the New Testament. The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can’t be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.
and of course we’re the open-minded ones.” In
Western cosmopolitan culture there’s an enormous amount of self-righteousness about self-righteousness.
The gospel says the humble are in and the proud are out.
The gospel says the people who
know they’re not better, not more open-minded, not more moral than anyone else, are in, and the people who think they’re on the right ...
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Jesus is teaching that he has come to call sinners: those who know they are morally and spiritually unable to save themselves.
Because the Lord of the Sabbath said, “It is finished,” we can rest from religion—forever.
One of the marks of an eyewitness account is “irrelevant detail.”
I am rest itself.”
However, if Jesus is who he says he is, there’s another way to look at life. If he’s Lord of the storm, then no matter what shape the world is in—or your life is in—you will find Jesus provides all the healing, all the rest, all the power you could possibly want.
Before Jesus calms the storm, they’re afraid—but after Jesus calms the storm, they’re terrified.
I do allow people I love to go through storms. You had no reason to panic.
Why were they more terrified in the calm than they were in the storm? Because Jesus was as unmanageable as the storm itself.
Nature is indifferent to you, but Jesus is filled with untamable love for you. If the disciples had really known that Jesus loved them, if they had really understood that he is both powerful and loving, they would not have been scared.
The only place you’re safe is in the will of God.
But because he’s God and you’re not, the will of God is necessarily, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond your largest notions of what he is up to. Is he safe? “Of course he’s not safe. Who said anything about being safe? But he’s good. He’s the King.”
By asking the question in this way, Jesus is prompting them to see that the critical factor in their faith is not its strength, but its object.
That’s because it’s not the quality of your faith that saves you; it’s the object of your faith.
People who believe more must not be hard on those who believe less. Why? Because faith ultimately is not a virtue; it’s a gift.
If you want to believe but can’t, stop looking inside; go to Jesus and say, “Help me believe.” Go to him and say, “So you’re the one who gives faith! I’ve been trying to work it out by reasoning and thinking and meditating and going to church in hopes that a sermon will move me—I’ve been trying to get faith by myself. Now I see that you’re the source of faith. Please give it to me.” If you do that, you’ll find that Jesus has been seeking you—he’s the author of faith, the provider of faith, and the object of faith.
Jesus was thrown into the only storm that can actually sink us—the storm of eternal
justice, of what we owe for our wrongdoing. That storm wasn’t calmed—not until it swept him away.
