Newness of Life

Yesterday morning (after a very rough night of sleep for our family) I texted my wife:

As surely as Jesus is raised from the dead, you have power today to walk in newness of life.

I grounded that in Paul's statement to the Romans:   

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:4 ESV)

It is true today, and every day, until we see Him face to face.  Through union with Jesus, the Holy Spirit dwells in us, and the very power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us who believe.  While I cherish the gospel truth that we are made right with God and secure in His love through no work of our own, but simply be resting in Christ's perfect obedience in our behalf, let's not minimize the fact that one gospel blessing we get through our union with Jesus is resurrection power to walk in newness of life and bear fruit for God (Romans 7:4). 

Christians, let's stop whining and complaining that we just can't obey Him.  Yes, there is a real struggle between the flesh and the Spirit, and sometimes the struggle just seems too hard to bear.  But the key word there is "seems."  You, Christian, have power to say no to sin.  Power to put sin to death.  Ultimately, "I can't..." is not a knock on yourself, but a knock on the One who dwells in you.

God's Love: Conditional or Unconditional?

I really enjoy the music of Shane & Shane.  On their latest CD is a song called Future Version, which basically celebrates the reality that God loves us as we are, right now, and not just some future, cleaned-up version of ourselves.  Here is the refrain, which is written as if God is addressing us:

You I love
Regardless of the things you've said and done
No mistake can change my mind
Come, seek, and find
My love is yours right now

In John 14:21 and 23 Jesus says,

    Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
(John 14:21-23 ESV)

These verses seem to contradict the lyrics of Shane & Shane, don't they?  "You I love, regardless of things you've said and done."  His love is not conditioned on our obedience.  But then Jesus seems to be saying, "If you demonstrate your love for me through obedience to my commands, my Father will love you."  Sounds conditional to me, no?

So are the Shanes wrong on this one?  Or is defining the love of God maybe more complex than we sometimes think it is?

Questions for Sermon Preparation

In the beginning of my sermon yesterday, I mentioned a list of questions that I work through with each passage to help me think through the text from a number of different angles.  I had a couple of people ask me for the list, so here they are:

1. What does the text tell me about God?

2. What does the text tell me about mankind (examples to follow/avoid, commands to obey, promises to believe)?

3. What key truth(s) is the author communicating in this text?

4. Where do our lives fail to conform to these key truths?  In other words, what areas of unbelief does the text expose or confront?

5. How does the text point to, deepen our understanding of, or flow from the gospel?  How does Jesus' work on the cross come to bear on the text?

6. How would our lives be different if the key truth(s) became explosively alive in our innermost being?

7. How does the text address the unbeliever?  How does it touch on unbelievers' common objections or difficulties with Christianity?

8. Why has God brought this text to us this week?

9. What are the missional implications of this text?

10. How does the text impact our corporate lives together as the church?

11. What aspects of the text highlight areas in which our church flourishing or excelling?

12. What other texts illuminate, expand on, or cross-reference this text?

13. What questions will the congregation have about this text upon the initial reading of the text?

14. Summarize the text's meaning in a sentence

Beware of Blessings

James 1:17 says, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change."  One implication of this (that every gift is from our heavenly Father) is that we ought to give Him thanks for the countless blessings we experience in a given day.

This implication is made explicit in 1 Timothy 4:4-5, "For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer."

Yes, receive the blessings of God (spouse, children, clean water, blooming flowers, chocolate brownies...) with grateful hearts. 

But beware of blessings too.  Specifically, beware of measuring God's goodness and love by those earthly gifts He sends down from above.  The way of thinking goes something like this: You've got a strong marriage? Isn't God good!  You've gotten a promotion at work? Isn't God good!  You're pregnant?  Isn't God good!

And that's all true; it's right.  Indeed, they are expressions of God's goodness.  But in the midst of celebrating these blessings, we must train our eyes to see God's goodness beyond the temporal blessings that He showers on us so liberally, and here's why:

When you say to yourself over and over, "Train your eye on these earthly blessings, and gauge God's goodness by what you see," you'll be  ignoring the fact that life will not always be the accumulation of good things.  And then, when hardship comes, you will look out and have no evidence of God's goodness.  

So praise God today for your blessings.  But beware that you don't use them as the sole barometer of God's goodness.  Training your eye on earthly blessings alone will never produce in a man this sort of heart:

    Though the fig tree should not blossom,
        nor fruit be on the vines,
    the produce of the olive fail
        and the fields yield no food,
    the flock be cut off from the fold
        and there be no herd in the stalls,
    yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
        I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
(Habakkuk 3:17-18 ESV)

Romans for Dummies

The people at Desiring God have put together a summary of the book of Romans, condensing all the great material in that awesome letter to just 45 tweets. Check it out here.

California Redwoods

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,
whose trust is the LORD.
He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
(Jeremiah 17:7-8 ESV)

Psalm 131

This morning I read Psalm 131; I was moved, challenged and encouraged by this little meditation. It reminded me of a reflection I read on this Psalm awhile back from David Powlison. In Powlison's words:

Here’s Anti-Psalm 131:

Self,

my heart is proud (I’m absorbed in myself),
and my eyes are haughty (I look down on other people),
and I chase after things too great and too difficult for me.

So of course I’m noisy and restless inside, it comes naturally,

like a hungry infant fussing on his mother’s lap,
like a hungry infant, I’m restless with my demands and worries.
I scatter my hopes onto anything and everybody all the time.

Contrast that with the real Psalm 131:

O Lord,

my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

So which Psalm describes your heart today?

Humbled

In Job 38, God finally addresses Job after 35 chapters of Job and his friends' speculations about God. God's address unfolds in a series of questions: Have you...? Can you...? Do you know...? Were you there when...?

I think the response God is seeking is pretty clear: No God, I have not. No, I cannot. No, I do not know. No, I was not there. You are God; I am not.

So grant me the grace, Father, to have a heart that is humbled and at rest before You. Give me joy in embracing the reality that I am not God.

The Bible is Precious

Thankful to JT for this wonderful reminder. Let's strive with all God's strength to never become numb to the gift of the Scriptures:

Seeing Jesus on Every Page

I've posted this video before:



But just yesterday I came across this excellent resource from the ESV Study Bible: Vern Poythress highlighting the History of Salvation in the Old Testament.

Bookmark this resource and refer to it as you read through the Old Testament. It looks like a great way of seeing the point that Jesus made to His disciples after the resurrection:

"And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. " Luke 24:27

Bible Reading Plans

As promised to the congregation I have the pleasure of serving, here is a blog post from Justin Taylor with several options of Bible reading plans to use in engaging with the Scriptures in 2011.

Just because we're a week and a half into the New Year does not mean it's too late to pick up a plan that works for you and hold fast to the Scriptures!

How Precious is the Bible?

This Sunday at Joy Community Fellowship I'll be doing my best -- with the Spirit's help -- to motivate, persuade, encourage and inspire our congregation to devote themselves to the Word of God in 2011.

This video was a timely bit of inspiration for me: John Piper at the Lausanne answering these five questions to determine how important the Bible is:

1. What would happen if it did not exist?
2. What would you give to have it or keep it?
3. What does it make possible?
4. How does it weather critics and detractors?
5. How much effort should be given to spread it and preserve it?

John Piper @ GELF Breakfast - Lausanne 2010 from Crossway on Vimeo.

Bible Reading in 2011

I am not a big fan of change. And I am BIG fan of the Bible. So the idea of changing my Bible reading plan is not an easy thing for me to do!

But as of this morning, I've made a change. For the last 6-8 years I have used the Discipleship Journal plan, which takes you through the entire Bible in a year, reading from four different places.

But back in July I mentioned coming across Grant Horner's complex reading plan, which has you read a chapter from ten different places in the Bible each day. Since seeing it, I've been intrigued by it but have felt some reservations about how it might affect my communion with God in His Word.

But after several recommendations, I'm going to give it a try for at least a month. I've tweaked the plan slightly so that I am only reading eight chapters daily, instead of ten. And after one day, I was greatly blessed by time in His Word. So we'll see how it goes.

What plan do you use for doing your Bible reading? If you don't have a formal "plan", how do you decide what you're going to read? I'd be curious to know how other readers mine the riches of God's Word. Leave a comment and let me know.

ESV Update

Last month in preparing to preach on 1 Corinthians 10 I learned that in 2007 that the ESV underwent an unpublicized revision of its text.

If you're curious, here is a listing of all the changes.

Future Hope --> Love Now

Matt Chandler, commenting on Colossians 1:3-5, that the love of the Colossians for all the saints was because of the hope laid up for them in heaven:

"If your only hope is here, on this earth, in this bit of time, you tend to be a miserable person and you’ve got a hard time loving anybody because all you’ve got is right now. So everybody becomes means to your happiness and your satisfaction now. That usually makes you a miserable person, because everybody exists to meet your needs."

I think that's very insightful, and very timely for my often-loveless heart.

Also, see this video update from Chandler with great news on his health!

Who's Going to be Left Behind?

Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' fiction series Left Behind was wildly popular in Christian circles a few years ago. I confess that when I became a believer ten years ago, I devoured the first 7 books in the series in rapid pace.

The idea of people being left behind seems to come from Matthew 24:

37 For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, 39 and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Then two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. 41 Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left.

It seems to me, though, that interpreting this text as the rescue of believers from earthly corruption almost totally reverses the meaning of the passage. The comparison with the days of Noah makes this plain. In the days of Noah, it was the ungodly who were taken away, experiencing God's wrath in judgment for their sin. To be left behind -- as Noah and his family were -- was to experience God's mercy and grace.

So who is it that's going to be left behind?

Lessons in the Field

This morning I read these words from Proverbs 24:

I passed by the field of a sluggard,
by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,
and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns;
the ground was covered with nettles,
and its stone wall was broken down.
Then I saw and considered it;
I looked and received instruction.
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
and want like an armed man.

I want to be a person who can be out for a walk, see a nasty-looking yard and receive instruction from God through it. God is speaking to us everywhere, if our ears are tuned to hear His voice.

Would Paul have prayed in Jesus' name?

In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul says,

To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. 21 To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.

So if Paul had a Jewish family over for dinner, do you think he'd pray in Jesus' name?

Or, more close-to-home, if I have my Jewish family members over for dinner, should I be explicit in naming the name of Jesus when I pray? Or, out of respect for the fact that they do not worship Jesus, should I simply give thanks to God without mentioning Jesus?

Noah Wasn't Righteous

I actually don't agree with that statement, since Genesis 6:9 clearly says that he was a righteous man. Nevertheless, Mark Driscoll makes an interesting and important observation about the story of Noah in this 4-minute clip (if reading in RSS reader, you might need to click through to view the video).

Check it out and let me know what you think...

Total Depravity

Genesis 6:5,

The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

That's pretty deprave; and that's pretty total.