Hitting the wall, finding grace

Paul Tripp writes about the mid-life crisis in his book, Lost in the Middle. Walking us through the challenges and conflicts of heart that can erupt at these times, he makes this excellent point:

The presence, power, practicality, and glory of God’s grace in Christ Jesus are most evident and effective when we have hit the wall of our own weakness, inability, and sin (176).

No question: it isn’t fun to hit the wall.  Having the “weakness, inability, and sin” of our hearts exposed can be crushing, humiliating, infuriating.  It can feel like someone has suddenly removed all of the oxygen from the world.  But, like the devastating process that turns coal into diamonds, when find “the presence, power, practicality, and glory of God’s grace in Christ Jesus” our hardships, trials, and emotions find their peace.  We have received what we could never earn or deserve, that treasure hidden in the field, the pearl of great price.  We have found grace because we have found Christ.  And that makes it all worth it–not easy or pleasant, but worth it.

-Daniel Baker

Knowing God as our Father

I am wondering if there are two truths more-or-less universal for us:  (1) our earthly fathers profoundly affect us; and (2) we have deep longings that a father must provide.

Some of us had fathers that chose their career over their families.  Others seemed to carry a godly balance.  Some were abusive with their words or fists.  Others worked hard to offer godly discipline and instruction.  Some seemed absorbed only in themselves and indifferent to their wives and children.  Others tried to invest time in their family.  Some seemed inept at natural conversation or encouragement in the flow of life.  Others seemed to have a word in season at key points in our lives.

All of these actions by our earthly fathers affect us.  Even if your father “succeeded” in his task as a father, he did so as a man and not as God.  His sins flavored all of his words and actions toward you.  In all of the time you had with him, he never fully escaped his sinfulness.

Connected to that are longings in each of us for love that only a father can provide.  At some level these longings are hard-wired into our souls.  At times they can spill over the edges of our lives and wreak havoc in our relationships when the longings become controlling for us.

If we can distill what it is that we long for,

Pride, despair, and the balance

Reading from Ed Welch’s book, Depression, he cited a great quip by Blaise Pascal:

“Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.

Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.

Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.”

May you grow in your knowledge and love of Jesus Christ, who reveals both the love and wrath of God in all their stunning glory.

DJB

False Innocence?

At times our church and others like them are criticized for placing too much emphasis on the doctrine of sin.  Here is a response from John Stott to that kind of charge:

Is it then, healthy or unhealthy to insist on the gravity of sin and the necessity of atonement, to hold people responsible for their actions, to warm them of the peril of divine judgment, and to urge them to confess, repent and turn to Christ?  It is healthy.  For if there is ‘false guilt’ (feeling bad about evil we have not done), there is also ‘false innocence’ (feeling good about the evil we have done).  If false contrition is unhealthy (an ungrounded weeping over guilt), so is false assurance (an ungrounded rejoicing over forgiveness).  It may be, therefore, that it is not we who exaggerate when we stress the seriousness of sin, but our critics, who underestimate it.  God said of the false prophets in Old Testament days: ‘They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious.  ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, there there is no peace’ (Jer 6:14; 8:11).  Superficial remedies are always due to a faulty diagnosis.  Those who prescribe them have fallen victim to the deceiving spirit of modernity which denies the gravity of sin.  To make a true diagnosis of our condition, however, grave as it is, could never be unhealthy, provided that we go on immediately to the remedy.  So the law that condemns us is nevertheless God’s good gift because it sends us to Christ to be justified.  And the Holy Spirit came to ‘convict the world of guilt,’ but only in order that he might more effectively bear witness to Christ as the Savior from guilt (Jn 16:8; 15:26-27).  There is no joy comparable to the joy of the forgiven (The Cross of Christ, 100-101).

May your guilt be true guilt so that your forgiveness may be true forgiveness so that your joy may be the true and unparalleled joy of the forgiven.

DJB

The Glory of our God

This morning’s sermon is a reflection on the glory of God.  Herman Bavinck wonderfully summarized the way that God’s glory motivates all that he does.  Perhaps the Scripture references could be ones to meditate upon in your morning prayers.  Writing almost a century ago in words fresh as the morning coolness, he says:

“Scripture…says that all of nature is a revelation of God’s attributes and a proclaimer of his praise (Ps 19:1; Rom 1:19). God created man after his image and for his glory (Gen 1:26; Isa 43:7). He glorified himself in the Pharaoh of the Exodus (Exod 14:17) and in the man born blind (John 9:3), and made the wicked for the day of trouble (Pro 16:4; Rom 9:22). Christ came to glorify God (Jn 17:4), and he bestows all the benefits of grace for his name’s sake: redemption, forgiveness, sanctification, and so forth (Ps 105:8; 78:9ff; Isa 43:25; 48:11; 60:21; 61:3; Rom 9:23; Eph 1:6ff). God gives his glory to no other (Isa 42:8). The final purpose is that all kingdoms will be subjected to him and every creature will yield to him (Dan 7:27; Isa 2:2-22; Mal 1:11; 1 Cor 15:24f). Even on earth already he is given glory by all his people (Ps 115:1; Mat 6:13 KJV). Someday God alone will be great (Isa 2:2-22) and receive glory from all his creatures (Rev 4:11; 19:6). He is the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega (Isa 44:6; 48:12; Rev 1:8; 22:13). Of him, through him, and to him are all things (Rom 11:36). On this basis Christian theology almost unanimously teaches that the glory of God is the final purpose of all God’s works….Inasmuch as he is the supreme and only good, perfection itself, it is the highest kind of justice that in all creatures he seek his own honor. And so little does this pursuit of his own honor have anything in common with human egotistical self-interest that, where it is wrongfully withheld from him, God will, in the way of law and justice, even more urgently claim that honor. Voluntarily or involuntarily, every creature will someday bow his knee before him. Obedience in love or subjection by force is the final destiny of all creatures” (Reformed Dogmatics, II:433, 434).

God Doubters

“In contrast to the modern view that religious doubt is something to reject, fear, or merely tolerate, doubt not only can be seen as an inevitable aspect of our humanity but also can be celebrated as a vital part of faith.” (Peter Rollins, “How Not to Speak of God).

“Post evangelicals also want room to express doubt without having someone rush around in a mad panic trying to deliver them from unbelief. Far too often doubt is portrayed simply as an enemy rather than a potential friend; as something mature Christians should not suffer from, rather than a vital means by which Christians mature.” (Tomlinson, The Post Evangelical)

The emergent emphasis on doubt as a friend of faith stems from their belief that we can’t truly know anything about God, since the Bible is just human words…and God would never use human words to reveal Himself (see last post). Therefore, they teach that any doctrines held by orthodox Christianity are merely man made and cannot be trusted in, and that we should trust in a personal God instead. They challenge people to doubt anything that they know (or think they know) about God, and to seek a relationship with Him instead.

If this is the case, what is our faith based on? Is not faith “The assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1)? If we can’t believe what the Bible says to be true about God, how are we to have assurance and conviction in His promises laid out in the Bible? It would seem to me that doubt is the enemy of faith, not the friend of faith. But I don’t want to just say that because it seems that way to me that it must be right. Here is what the Bible says about doubt and faith:

Mark 9:24

“I believe. Help my unbelief.”. Here a man’s prayer to Jesus is that Jesus would help His unbelief. He doesn’t say, “I doubt. Help me doubt more!”

Matthew 6:30
30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

Matthew 21:21
21 And Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen.

John 20:27
27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”

James 1:6
6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.

So what should our interactions with those who hold this view look like? Jude 22 says it well…”Have mercy on those who doubt.”

The Bible is very clear that we are not to doubt the truths it contains and that we are, while not exhaustively, able to know God. He has revealed Himself to us through His Holy Spirit. We can understand and know to a degree, “the mind of God”, because we have the Holy Spirit. And His Word is His primary way of revealing those truths to us.

However, I think that we can indeed learn something from the emergent view of doubting God. We should never rest content in our desire to know more about God. While we should not doubt Him, we should always seek to know more about Him and to be willing to have our views corrected if they are wrong. We must be humble in our pursuit of God, but we must not doubt God or doubt the Bible. Doubt is not humility.

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-DJB

Emergent Agnosticism

“To say Scripture is the Word of God is to employ a metaphor. God cannot be thought of as literally speaking words, since they are an entirely human phenomenon that could never prove adequate as a medium for the speech of an infinite God.” (Tomlinson)

“Our words aren’t absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to talk about Him. (Rob Bell)

 

That is the predominant thought on Scripture and the knowability of God among the emergent church. How sad. Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck do an excellent job addressing the danger of holding these views and call the emergent church out on these things by saying that their views , “fly in the face of redemptive history.” (DeYoung, 37). These emergent leaders are questioning whether or not we can have any real, certain knowledge about God. Brian McLaren actually has said that as soon as we say we know something about God that we are speaking heresy because it is impossible to speak about God using our human formulations.

The view that God is unknowable is what has lead to the emergent church’s over-use of the word “mystery.” The authors agree that the Christian faith has elements of mystery…we will NEVER know everything about God. But the emergent church sees that the Christian Faith starts with mystery:

“The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and being that ultimately can’t be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not…The mystery is the truth.” (Bell, Velvet Elvis)

The authors rightly state that this sounds a lot like the Hindu conception of Brahman that the Christian notion of God, revelation, and authority.

It is interesting to read Acts 17:23, where Paul is addressing the men of Athens: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I will proclaim to you.” Paul found the Athenians worshipping an unknown God and he CORRECTED them for it and showed them how the Christian God, through Jesus Christ, can be known! In light of the emergent emphasis on living as Jesus lived (which I agree with the importance of that!), you would think that because Jesus viewed the Scriptures as the Word of God, that they would too.

The emergent leaders hold to the view that we need not strive to know anything about God, since we can’t know anything about Him anyways. Rather, we must have a confident trust in God and be focused on a relationship with Him. HELLO??? Does this not seem impossible to anyone? How can you have a relationship with someone that you don’t know? The authors of Why We’re Not Emergent say the following

“ I can’t love my wife without knowing facts about her, otherwise my love for her is love of love, or worse, love for the sake of being loved. Unless I love her for the facts of who she is, what she has done, and what she does, I am loving a shapeless, formless void. No matter how much I rightly stress the importance of relationship with my wife beyond mere knowledge about her, I must have knowledge about her in order to have a relationship. After all, if I don’t know any of the “abstract” and “impersonal” facts about my wife, how can I have a personal relationship with her? I won’t even be able to pick her out in a crowd!” (DeYoung, 36)

This, as DeYoung says, all flies in the face of redemptive history (DeYoung, 37) and every page of Scripture.

“The God of the Bible is nothing if He is not a God who speaks to His people. To be sure , none of us ever infinitely understand God in a nice, neat package of affirmations and denials, but we can know Him truly, both personally and propositionally. God can speak. He can use human language to communicate truth about Himself that is accurate and knowable, without ceasing to be God because we’ve somehow got Him all figured out. We may all be, by nature, like blind men touching the elephant without knowing whether what we are feeling is a trunk, tail, or ear. But what if the elephant spoke and said, “Quit calling me crocodile, or peacock, or paradox. I’m an elephant for crying out loud! That long thing is my trunk. That little frayed thing is my tail. That big floppy thing is my ear.” And what if the elephant gave us ears to hear his voice and a mind to understand his message (cf 1 Cor 2:14-15)? Would our professed ignorance about the elephant and our unwillingness to make any confident assertions about his nature mean we were especially humble, or just deaf?” (DeYoung, 37).

A Sufficient Bible, A Prophetic Spirit – Sam Storms

If the Bible is inspired and sufficient, why do we still believe in prophecy? Great question. Sam Storms wrestles with that in his chapter called, “God Still Speaks,” from his book, Convergence. The entire discussion is wonderful, but here are a great couple of paragraphs to chew on:

[We] need to be more precise about what we mean by the sufficiency of Scripture. What is the Bible sufficient for? I believe it is sufficient and perfectly adequate to provide us with every doctrine and ethical principle necessary for us to believe and behave as we should. But the doctrine of the sufficiency of the Bible is not meant to suggest that we don’t need to hear from God or receive particular guidance in areas on which the Bible is silent. The close of the biblical canon marks the point at which the general principles of God’s universal will are complete. All the doctrines, as well as all ethical principles, essential for the life of God’s people have been revealed. Nothing further will be said by God to extend or expand or contradict them. The Bible establishes the theological and ethical boundaries of what God will ever say.

“But guidance and revelation and wisdom by which we gain the knowledge of how to apply these principles and truths in the practical details and decisions of life are ongoing. When we listen to God we do not expect him to say anything doctrinally or ethically new. But we do expect him to speak to the situation in which we find ourselves with wisdom and direction and insight and encouragement in living out the truths he has written in” (182-183).

Prayer and Study – From Sam Storms

“The person who only thinks and does not pray is as bad and dangerous and unbalanced as the person who only prays and never thinks.”

–Sam Storms, Convergence