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That is what death does: It takes us into more intimacy with Christ.
the best is yet to come! And I don’t mean a fat pension and a luxury condominium. I mean Christ.
If We Learn to Die Well, We Will Live Well
Death makes visible where our treasure is. The way we die reveals the worth of Christ in our hearts. Christ is magnified in my death when I am satisfied with him in my dying—when I experience death as gain because I gain him.
“In him I have everything and more. To die is gain.” If we learn to die like this, we will be ready to live.
“If we love Christ, how can he be magnified in my behavior this afternoon, this evening, this week?”
He himself is what we need.
If we only trust Christ to give us gifts and not himself as the all-satisfying gift, then we do not trust him in a way that honors him as our treasure. We simply honor the gifts.
The dying I have in mind is the dying of comfort and security and reputation and health and family and friends and wealth and homeland.
In other words, the way we honor Christ in death is to treasure Jesus above the gift of life, and the way we honor Christ in life is to treasure Jesus above life’s gifts.
How We Handle Loss Shows Who Our Treasure Is
The health, wealth, and prosperity “gospel” swallows up the beauty of Christ in the beauty of his gifts and turns the gifts into idols.
This sermon is available online at www.desiringGod.org (http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/ByDate/1980/1823).
Is losing life the same as wasting it?
Why is there such a thing as risk? Because there is such a thing as ignorance.
One of my aims is to explode the myth of safety and to somehow deliver you from the enchantment of security. Because it’s a mirage. It doesn’t exist. Every direction you turn there are unknowns and things beyond your control.
the Christian life is a call to risk.
When we risk losing face or money or life because we believe God will always help us and use our loss, in the end, to make us more glad in his glory, then it’s not we who get the praise because of our courage; it’s God who gets the praise because of his care.
Like Jesus, Paul says that the love of Christ for us does not eliminate our suffering. On the contrary, our very attachment to Christ will bring suffering.
The reason these things will not separate us from the love of Christ is not because they don’t happen to people whom Christ loves. They do.
I Can Do All Things Through Christ, Even Starve
In other words, no misery that a true Christian ever experiences is evidence that he has been cut off from the love of Christ.
Affliction is made the servant of godliness and humility and love. Satan meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
We will not gladly risk to make people glad in God if we hate them, or hold grudges against them, or are repelled by their faults and foibles. We must become forgiving people.
The question is, do we lean toward mercy? Do we default to grace?
Forgiveness is essentially God’s way of removing the great obstacle to our fellowship with him. By canceling our sin and paying for it with the death of his own Son, God opens the way for us to see him and know him and enjoy him forever.
At great cost to himself God gave us what we needed above all things: himself for our enjoyment forever. God’s forgiveness is important for one reason: It gives us God!
If God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, as we argued in Chapter 2, then living for the glory of God must mean that we live to gladly make others glad in God.
In other words, if we look like our lives are devoted to getting and maintaining things, we will look like the world, and that will not make Christ look great.
Why don’t people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do.
Our lives don’t look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don’t need to be rewarded in this life.
“Fifteen percent of everything Christ said relates to this topic—more than his teachings on heaven and hell combined.”
We are at war, whether the stocks are falling or climbing, whether the terrorists are hitting or hiding, whether we are healthy or sick. Both pleasure and pain are laced with poison, ready to kill us with the diseases of pride or despair.
Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves.4
rebuke me for my frivolous living and inspire me to make my life count for something more than comfort and worldly success—something God-exalting and eternal.
So, yes, by all means, use all the images of Scripture (not just war) to shape your life. And then let your radically Christian, God-enthralled, Christ-treasuring, giving-oriented life engage and shape your culture.
In wartime we ask different questions about what to do with our lives than we do in peacetime. We ask: What can I do to advance the cause? What can I do to bring the victory? What sacrifice can I make or what risk can I take to insure the joy of triumph? In peacetime we tend to ask, What can I do to be more comfortable? To have more fun? To avoid trouble and, possibly, avoid sin?
avoidance
Prevenção, evasão
The Wrong Questions and the Right Ones People who are content with the avoidance ethic generally ask the wrong question about behavior. They ask, What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with this movie? Or this music? Or this game? Or these companions? Or this way of relaxing? Or this investment? Or this restaurant? Or shopping at this store? What’s wrong with going to the cabin every weekend? Or having a cabin? This kind of question will rarely yield a lifestyle that commends Christ as all-satisfying and makes people glad in God. It simply results in a list of don’ts. It feeds the avoidance ethic.
How will this help me treasure Christ more? How will it help me show that I do treasure Christ? How will it help me know Christ or display Christ?
How can I portray God as glorious in this action?
When you go home Tell them for us and say For your tomorrow We gave our today
“For your tomorrow, I gave my today. Not just for your tomorrow on earth, but for the countless tomorrows of your ever-increasing gladness in God.”
To clarify the relation between Satan’s freedom and God’s sovereignty, I would stress that Satan is real and that God gives him permission (lengthening his leash, as it were) to exploit the divine curse on creation because of sin (Romans 8:20-23), but that God remains in control of the world in all of its parts.
You don’t waste you life by where you work, but how and why.
Please don’t hear in the phrase “secular vocation” any unspiritual or inferior comparison to “church vocation” or “mission vocation” or “spiritual vocation.” I simply mean the vocations that are not structurally connected to the church.
Enclaves of Christians living only with Christians and working only with Christians would not accomplish God’s whole purpose in the world.
God has put me here, and I should now display his worth in this job.
Christians do not just go to work. They go to work “with God.” They do not just do a job. They do their job “with God.” God is with them.
All your faculties of sight and hearing and touch, all your motor skills with hands and legs, all your mental acts of observing and organizing and assessing, all your skills that make you good at this particular job—all these things are God’s gifts. To know this can fill you with a sense of continual thankfulness offered up to God in prayer. “I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever” (Psalm 86:12). Sometimes the wonder of who God is will rise up in us while we work, and we will whisper his praise: “Bless the LORD, O my soul! O LORD my God,
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