Growth Pains

This Sunday in church, we sang a new hymn. Actually, it's not a new hymn, per se, just a new hymn for our congregation. Its words were written almost 250 years ago by John Newton (who also wrote Amazing Grace and many other hymns).

In an age where so many in the church seem to promise nothing but smiles and happiness for those who follow Jesus, our own experiences can quickly disavow us of such thinking. Sanctification is a struggle and the march to humble holiness is a long, hard, and (at times) painful one. For this reason, hymns like this one are necessary. I know it speaks to my experience. Perhaps it speaks to yours as well.

A Word for Preachers...Mohler on the Need for Urgency in Preaching

"In all too many pulpits, God has become our next-door neighbor, our great cosmic companion, or the divine leader of our small group, rather than the holy God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Perhaps the lack of urgency in so much preaching today comes from a lack of understanding about humanity's awful predicament. The greatest problem we human beings face is not a shortage of self-esteem. It is that we have rebelled against God, and, in His holiness, God will one day hold us to horrible account for our sin.

"The gospel necessarily comes with an urgent warning, because the distinction between those who obey its call and those who disobey is not merely between a better life and a worse life. It is the difference between life and death. It is an eternal distinction, for the cost of disobedience and the coast of not hearing the gospel is eternal death.

"That is why we must preach with urgency of a dying man. It is because human beings are in desperate need of salvation. Time is short, God's wrath is certain, and eternity hangs in the balance. Moreover, there is for each of us only one way out of this predicament, and that is the salvation God Himself has won through the gospel of his Son, Jesus Christ."

Al Mohler
He Is Not Silent: Preaching in a Postmodern World

Greater Pleasure than Sin

Good friend (and speaker at the upcoming Mid-Michigan Reformation Conference) David Crabb authored a blog post today about sin. I know. What a fun topic to talk about! NOT!!!

Actually, as David recognizes in the post, if we had our druthers we probably wouldn't talk about sin at all. It is not pleasant spending time considering that which has so much power over us. And no matter how often we redouble our efforts to "try harder," it seems that those efforts always end in futility, as we are relentlessly enticed by sin's promises of pleasure (fleeting though it may be).

David writes though that there is a way to defeat sin:

The only way to defeat the pleasure of sin is by faith in the promise of God that there is a greater pleasure. Something more satisfying, more joy-giving than sin. Holiness will not come through man-made regulations or through using fear as a motivation, but through a mind captivated and controlled by Christ. Seeing Christ is what causes us to be like Him. When we see Him partially in this life, we are changed partially into His likeness. When we see Him perfectly in the life to come, we will be changed perfectly into His likeness.

Click here to read the entire post.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...DeYoung on the Gospel and Holiness

"(T)he gospel aids our pursuit of holiness by telling us the truth about who we are. Certain sins become more difficult when we understand our new position in Christ. If we are heirs to the whole world, why should we envy? If we are God's treasured possession, why be jealous? If God is our Father, why be afraid? If we are dead to sin, why live in it? If we've been raised with Christ, why continue in our old sinful ways? If we are seated in the heavenly places, why act like the devil of hell? If we are loved with an everlasting love, why are we trying to prove our worth to the world? If Christ is all in all, why am I so preoccupied with myself?"

Kevin DeYoung
The Hole in our Holiness: Filling the Gap between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness

A Quick Thought About Righteous Anger

In Luke 19:45-48, we read of what is probably the paradigmatic example of righteous anger: Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple. In this passage, we often find for ourselves a pass to experience and express anger. After all, if Jesus did it, it can’t be wrong.

We ought to be very careful about such a line of thinking though. First of all, His anger was ignited not because He had been offended, but because His Father had. My otherwise righteous anger is far too often intertwined with my own self-interest. I am not just angry that a Holy God was sinned against; I am angry that I was sinned against. And even if I try my hardest, it is impossible for me to untangle these strands.

This leads me to a second point: There is indeed a lesson for us to be learned from this passage, where we read of the cleansing of the temple. I believe it is quite informative to consider verses 45-48 in light of verses 41-44. In those immediately preceding verses, we read the following:

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” 

It seems that before Jesus was angry at sin, he was grieved by it. And the same should be true of us. Make no mistake, there is a place for righteous anger. But for every ounce of righteous anger we express, let us first experience 100 pounds of humble sorrow. And for every time our blood boils, let us be sure our tears have first fallen.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...DeYoung on Pleasing God with our Obedience

"Many Christians believe that all their righteous deeds are nothing but filthy rags. After all, that’s what Isaiah 64:6 seems to say: even your best deeds are dirty and worthless. But I don’t think this is what Isaiah means. The “righteous deeds” Isaiah has in mind are most likely the perfunctory rituals offered by Israel without sincere faith and without wholehearted obedience. In Isaiah 65:1–7 the Lord rejects Israel’s sinful sacrifices. They are an insult to the Lord, smoke in his nostrils, just like the ritual “obedience” of Isaiah 58 that did not impress the Lord because his people were oppressing the poor. Their “righteous deeds” were “filthy rags” (64:6, KJV) because they weren’t righteous at all. They looked good but were a sham, a literal smoke screen to cover up their unbelief and disobedience.

"But we should not think that every kind of 'righteous deed' is like a filthy rag before God. In fact the previous verse, Isaiah 64:5, says 'you [God] meet him who joyfully works righteousness, those who remember you in your ways.' It is not impossible for God’s people to commit righteous acts that please God...

"Why do we imagine God to be so unmoved by our heart-felt attempts at obedience? He is, after all, our heavenly Father. What sort of father looks at his daughter’s homemade birthday card and complains that the color scheme is all wrong? What kind of mother says to her son, after he gladly cleaned the garage but put the paint cans on the wrong shelf, “This is worthless in my sight”? What sort of parent rolls his eyes when his child falls off the bike on the first try? There is no righteousness that makes us right with God except for the righteousness of Christ. But for those who have been made right with God by grace alone through faith alone and therefore have been adopted into God’s family, many of our righteous deeds are not only not filthy in God’s eyes, they are exceedingly sweet, precious, and pleasing to him."

Kevin DeYoung
The Hole in our Holiness: Filling the Gap between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness

A Word for Preachers...Boice on the Need for Personal Holiness

"If you keep close to God, you will keep from sin. But if you sin persistently, you will fall away from God. Then you will rename your sin. You will not talk about pride, the great sin; you will call it 'self-esteem,' 'self-worth,' or what is 'due to me.' You will not talk about gluttony and materialism; you will talk about 'the good life.' You will not talk about disobedience; you will talk about 'shortcomings.' You will not talk about the Ten Commandments and your violation of them; you will talk about your 'mistakes.' It is only when you draw close to God that these things will become increasingly sinful in your sight. Only then will they work together to make you a preacher committed to calling men and women to repentance and faith in Christ before the judgment comes."

James Montgomery Boice
Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Chapell on True Standards of Holiness

"It is very hard, but biblically necessary, not to judge others because of their disagreement with our judgment regarding scripturally uncertain issues. An 'Aha! moment' occurred for me in ministry when I learned to ask a key question about advising others: Is it more wrong to allow what God prohibits, or to prohibit what God allows? This is actually a trick question because both alternatives are equally wrong. Either alternative would put me in the position of Lawgiver. God allows only himself the prerogative to determine holy standards."

Bryan Chapell
Holiness by Grace

A Word for Preachers...Sproul on Holiness and the Charge of Hypocrisy

"Ministers are noteworthy of their calling. All preachers are vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In fact, the more faithful preachers are to the Word of God in their preaching, the more liable they are to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful people are to the Word of God, the higher the message is that they will preach. The higher the message, the further they will be from obeying it themselves."

R.C. Sproul
The Holiness of God

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Sproul on Holiness and the Justice of God

"Was it unjust for God to say to Adam and Eve that they would die when they sinned? Think about it. Was it evil for God to impose the death penalty for all sin? If you say yes, be careful. If you say yes, you are saying it as an expression of the very fallen, sinful nature that exposes you to the death penalty in the first place. If you say yes, you slander the character of God. If you say yes,you do violence to His holiness. If you say yes, you assail the righteous Judge of all the earth. If you say yes, you have never come to grips with what sin is. We must not say yes. We must say no and say it with conviction.

R.C. Sproul
The Holiness of God

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Charnock on the Holiness of God

"It is less injury to Him to deny His being, than to deny the purity of it; the one makes Him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and a detestable God. He that saith God is not holy speaks much worse that he that saith there is no God at all."

Stephen Charnock

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Carson on Sanctification

"People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated."

D.A. Carson
For the Love of God, volume 2

Reflections on Ezekiel

I’ve been reading through the book of Ezekiel in my personal devotions lately. I thought it might be helpful (at least to me) if I were to blog some reflections from these times. I have a couple thoughts from the first few chapters that I may develop later, but today I wanted to share some reflections from Ezekiel 5-7.

In sending Ezekiel to speak to Jerusalem in chapter five, God speaks in no uncertain terms of the destruction that will come. Because of their gross and ongoing rebellion against him, God proclaims through the prophet in Ezekiel 5:8-9, “Behold, I, even I, am against you. And I will execute judgments in your midst in the sight of the nations. And because of all your abominations I will do with you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again,”

Now the annals Greek and Roman mythology are replete with examples of gods who become upset at the actions of mortals, and then lash out in anger against them. But we need to understand that what is occurring here is quite different. Far from being the vindictive ragings of a spiteful deity, what we see here are the declarations of the impending righteous judgments of a holy God, judgments that come with a very specific purpose.

What exactly is this purpose? From 5:13 to the end of chapter 7, there is a constant refrain, repeated no fewer than ten times: “I am the LORD.” In seven of these instances, the phrase follows a slightly more expanded formula, pointing us even more directly to the reason that stands behind the LORD’s actions: “They/you shall know that I am the LORD.”  Phrases indicating that someone will “know that I am the LORD” are found in the pages of Scripture 88 times. An astounding 72 of these occur in Ezekiel. Clearly, one of the primary purposes God is trying to accomplish in this book is that people would “know that I am the Lord.”

If we are to truly understand the depth of meaning in this phrase though, the first occasions on which it is used go a long way to helping us. In Exodus 6:7 God says to the nation of Israel, as they are bound in Egyptian slavery, “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.”  One chapter later, God shows that his desire for such knowledge is not limited to the people of Israel when he proclaims in Exodus 7:5, “The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.”

What binds these two uses together is the fact that it is through God's mighty works that both his people and the nations might know who he his: He is the LORD. So his acts of judgment are not a matter of vindictiveness, but of vindication. They are the means by which they (and we) might see who he truly is. This is especially true of his act of judgment at the cross, for there we see most clearly the nexus of his perfect holiness and his steadfast love.

Far too often, I fear, we fall dreadfully short of bringing these two concepts together. Our relativistic culture tends to emphasize the fact that “God is love” (which of course is 100% true) but neglects the fact that God is also holy and demands our holiness (which is equally true). We want to set our own standards, ignoring God's revealed will, and going on thinking that he's content to have people merely give intellectual ascent to the possibility of his existence.

I suppose that there are also some within the church who react to this by swinging too far in the opposite direction, always emphasizing God's holy requirements, but doing so at the expense of his perfect love. Let me be clear that this is equally wrong. God wants us to do neither of these, but rather is jealous that he receive not only partial glory, but the glory due his name.

Even in this, there is a nuance which we need to understand. When we demand that credit be given to us (even when we've earned it) it is usually a betrayal of the fact that we want to be reassured of our own value and adequacy. For God though, when he demands glory, it is not because he has an inferiority complex. Rather it is because he rightly realizes his superiority, and knows that what is best for us is to realize it too.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...D.A. Carson on Holiness and Hypocrisy

"We human beings are a strange lot.  We hear high moral injunctions and glimpse just a little the genuine beauty of perfect holiness, and then prostitute the vision by dreaming about the way others would hold us in high esteem if we were like that.  The demand for genuine perfection loses itself in the lesser goal of external piety; the goal of pleasing the Father is traded for its pygmy cousin, the goal of pleasing men.  It almost seems as if the greater the demand for holiness, the greater the opportunity for hypocrisy.  This is why I suspect that the danger is potentially most serious among religious leaders."

D.A. Carson

A Call to Personal Holiness

Kevin DeYoung has a great post over at his blog today about personal holiness among younger evangelicals.  As I read it I spent half the time nodding enthusiastically in agreement with what he was saying and the other half wincing as I considered how justifiably convicting his words were in my life.

I wholeheartedly affirm that we are all called by God to the same standards of holiness, whether we believe in those standards, or even in God himself.  At the same time though, we within the church have historically spent too much  time and effort concerning ourselves with the holiness of those outside the Church, and not enough on that of those inside.  Kevin's post rightly calls Christians to live like Christ and examines some of the reasons we commonly don't.

Read the whole post here.