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June 9 - June 15, 2019
an infinite creator, not a factory.
But one of the great discoveries of the Christian life is coming to see our failings as occasions to praise Christ for his complete sufficiency. Welsh preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones puts it, “We must never look at any sin in our past life in any way except that which leads us to praise God and magnify his grace in Christ Jesus.”
Leo Tolstoy once defined boredom as “the desire for desires.”
Writer Søren Kierkegaard sums up our last chapter by saying, “Now, with God’s help, I shall become myself.” 1 Your life is a quest to discover, and more and more to live into, the person God originally made you to be; for the image of God to be restored in you; for Christ to take form in the contours of your life. That
He didn’t save them because they were morally superior; he made that clear (Deut. 9:5).
In a recent interview, actress Keira Knightley said, “If only I wasn’t an atheist, I could get away with anything. You’d just ask for forgiveness and then you’d be forgiven.” 6 And that’s how the gospel is sometimes misrepresented—as a blank check—which might explain why there are so many people who believe in God but so few who love godliness. In rightly emphasizing what God has saved us from, too often we lose sight of what God has saved us for.
C. Ryle puts it this way: “Jesus is a complete Saviour. He does not merely take away the guilt of a believer’s sin, he does more—he breaks its power.” 10 Or, as we sing with the old hymn “Rock of Ages”: Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its guilt and pow’r. 11 Jesus cleanses us from both the penalty and the power of our sins—he is the double cure. He not only declares us holy, but he also empowers us to be holy.
One of the underdog sports movies I mentioned in the previous chapter was Rudy, based on the true story of a young man who loved Notre Dame football and wanted nothing more than to play for the team. He was a walk-on, undersized, too small, too slow—but he practiced harder and worked harder than anyone else on the team. At one point in the film, the coach says, “I wish God would put your heart in some of my players’ bodies.” And that’s exactly what God has done for us. He’s taken the heart of Christ and placed it in all his players. Do you see what power we have?
“You are in Christ” gives you assurance. “Christ is in you” gives you power. Together they help us move out in confidence.
Jerry Bridges provides a summary: No one can attain any degree of holiness without God working in his life, but just as surely no one will attain it without effort on his own part. God has made it possible for us to walk in holiness. But He has given to us the responsibility of doing the walking. 15
Use the presence of Christ to stand firm against anything that threatens you.
Where does the strength come from to move out in joy and peace? It begins with the assurance that God is for you—that’s your anchor! And the knowledge that God is in you—that’s your engine! And the confidence that God is with you and not disappointed in you—that’s the hand on your back. These can only come from laying hold of your union with Christ.
What is Jesus doing at the right hand of God? Did you notice? He is seated. “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1). It’s a visual picture of Jesus’s words “It is finished” (John 19:30). He’s sitting down because the work he came to do is done. The work of atoning for our sins is complete (Heb. 10:10). The record of our debt has been canceled (Col. 2:14).
that without something beyond us, outside ourselves, there can be no atonement.
Jesus became both sacrificing priest and sacrificial lamb.
Jesus as our high priest means that our confidence to approach God does not rest on ourselves. Our confidence is not in our obedience. Our confidence is not in our faith, our understanding, our feelings, or even our sincerity. God’s acceptance of you does not depend on the depth of your understanding that acceptance. Your faith is absolutely necessary, but it is the object of your faith, not the strength of it, that matters most.
C. S. Lewis shows us the folly of this assumption: No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
In Los Angeles, advancement in the entertainment industry often depends on who you know. Networking is so vital, you will sometimes hear someone say, “Feel free to use my name if it will help.” We all understand that some names open doors that would otherwise be closed. Jesus, our advocate, says, “Go ahead and use my name; it will help.” But Christ doesn’t just open the door. He takes our hand in his, ushers us to the Father’s throne, and stands beside us and pleads for us.
In one of his poems, Robert Hass describes a couple deeply in love: … and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man, I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized that you could not, as much as I love you, dear heart, cure my loneliness. 21
We are always dependent on a power outside of ourselves. We need the wind.
Your life with God is all of grace. Period. And God’s grace invites, even requires, your participation. “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.” 1
if we passively wait for an experience of Christ’s presence to fall afresh on us each morning and it doesn’t, or if we don’t feel his presence, then we will complain of periods of being “dry.”
On the other hand, abiding is an action. Here is something you must choose to do. Jesus commands us, “Abide in me.” He commands us to rest in him. Like a dog commanded to stay, we must exert ourselves not to become distracted or move away from our Master. And Jesus makes it clear that the amount of fruit that comes out of our lives will be a direct result of how much (John 15:5) or how little (v. 6) we heed his commandments. In fact, he goes on to say, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love” (v. 10).
Life with God is not like a motorboat, where we are in control of the power and direction. But neither is it like a raft, where we just sit back and are carried along. It’s like sailing. While we can’t control the most important thing—the wind that makes us move—that doesn’t mean there is nothing left for us to do. We have to draw the sail to catch the wind. We must labor to be brought near.
The journey of choosing God will be a daily fight, a clash of wills, an inner conflict that will play out over and over, in a thousand little ways.
St. Teresa of Avila, “Oh God, I don’t love you, I don’t even want to love you, but I want to want to love you”?
One of the most common metaphors for life with God in the Bible is not sailing, but walking (e.g., Eph. 5:15; Col. 2:6). It seems rather simple, even trite, after the grand high call to know Christ. After all, nothing is more pedestrian than walking. Even a toddler can do it; but it makes an instructive point. Life lived in communion with God is not meant to be rare or extraordinary. It’s not the reward of some secret knowledge. The Bible doesn’t say, “Grasp the secret of the Spirit”; it says, “Keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25). Walking. Keep in step.
We might prefer to fly. We may wonder if there are any shortcuts. And there are some, but once you find out what they are—humiliation and suffering—you’ll probably prefer to walk.
T. F. Torrance, the great twentieth-century English theologian, tells of his service as an army chaplain during World War II. In the heat of battle one day, he came across a young soldier at the point of death: As I knelt down and bent over him, he said, “Padre, is God really like Jesus?” I assured him that he was—the only God that there is, the God who had come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Saviour. As I prayed and commended him to the Lord Jesus, he passed away. 9 I appreciate this story because it acknowledges the cruelty of life. Pain and death,
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If sin is running from God to get control of our lives, then repentance is turning back to God and yielding control to him. In that clash of wills—Jesus or you?—repentance is letting God’s quiet voice become louder, larger, and stronger in your life. And because we are turning back to the one who has already accepted and forgiven us, repentance is not only marked by weeping and mourning, but it is also marked by relief and joy. We do mourn (Matt. 5:4) because we hate to grieve him who loves us best (Eph. 4:30). But we also rejoice as we realize that the primary one we have offended (Ps. 51:4)
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that by a lifestyle of belief and repentance, by breathing in and breathing out, you’ve rehearsed this so often that you’re able to do it “without ceasing”
illustration, the dynamic of repenting and believing works like a pendulum. The further it goes in one direction; the further it can go in the other. The more you believe the gospel (God is good; he has united himself to me; I am accepted as I am; he is worth it), the more you will repent (my sin runs even deeper than I thought, but I don’t want to stay as I am; I want to trust him; I want to live for him who loved me and gave himself for me). The more you obey God, the more you will believe God. And the more you believe God, the more you will want to obey him. Back and forth it goes, swinging
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Every morning I wake up and find my heart has reverted to its default position: I need to prove myself today, handle things, make a name for myself. Part of “preparing my mind for action” is choosing instead to reorient myself toward God and his mercies, which are new every morning; to remember God relates to me by his grace, not by my performance.
We must labor to keep our union with Christ in front of us day after day or we will drift. To return to the sailboat analogy with which we began this chapter—what does it take for a boat to drift away? Nothing. If it is not anchored or tied down, it will drift away. “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away”
The reader of the Bible comes to the text not as a stranger to Christ—who is the central subject of all Scripture—but as one who is actually connected to Christ by the Holy Spirit, as one who is really in the real presence of the risen Lord in the prayerful reading of Scripture. Meditating on Scripture can and should be a real-time experience of communion with the living Christ. 3
This doesn’t mean you always experience the feeling of God’s presence. You can’t control the wind! But it does mean you can always hoist the sail and come into his presence expecting to hear a word from him.
Eugene Peterson says meditating on God’s Word is like what a dog does with a bone. 4 By prayer and through the Holy Spirit, you gnaw and chew on God’s Word until it metabolizes and gets into your bloodstream. You take it in, and you expect it to nourish you.
writer Oscar Wilde once wrote: “When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.”
Because God is better than anything we could be asking for, better even than life itself (Ps. 63:3–4), the call to persist in prayer is not for God’s sake, but for ours—to train and purify our desires. Prayer is integral to abiding because the real point of prayer is not something but someone
As Søren Kierkegaard put it, “This is our comfort because God answers every prayer, for either he gives what we pray for or something far better.”
This allows us to come into worship expecting to hear from God, as opposed to evaluating the music or the quality of the sermon.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes one reason we need to abide in community: The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure. 16
The doldrums are an important, even necessary, part of learning to abide. They protect us from the dangerous temptation of enthroning our experience of Christ over the real Christ.
It’s a terrifying truth, but in order for it to become life giving to us, we have to be made aware, sometimes painfully so, that we can’t coerce or control God by our own frantic maneuvering.
There will be, even must be, times when you draw the sail and nothing happens. You are doing everything “right.” You are reading the living Word, but it does not seem alive. You are praying to the living God, but it seems like no one’s listening. You are worshipping, but it just sounds like noise. You’re doing all you know how to do, yet you are stuck.
This means the most important periods of your communion with God will almost necessarily be those when you are “not getting anything out of it.” The doldrums. The most important seasons of growth will often be the ones you feel the least growth. The doldrums. They are training you to put your trust in the wind. Waiting for the wind, and being out of control, forces us to let go of our cherished idol of instant gratification. “For God alone my soul waits in silence” (Ps. 62:1).
Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French mathematician and scientist. He was a genius (as a child, he discovered all the theorems of Euclid before he’d ever even heard of Euclid!), and some of his mathematical theorems are still studied today. Then when he was thirty-one, something life-altering happened to him. And we know this because eight years later, when he died an untimely death, a worn parchment was found sown into his coat. Written on it was the following testimony: The year of Grace 1654. Monday, 23 November From about half past ten in the evening until about half past
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And like any relationship that you want to develop, you must invest time and choose to do certain things that magnify the priority of that relationship. That’s how any relationship grows.
the unglamorous habit of repetition sparks creativity and adds to productivity.
To be clear, the love of God for us does not change, but our experience of his love does.
