In a letter. To my daughter. After a sermon. (Part I)

Audio: 34 sec.


Most of us understand the cost-benefit concept. And it boils down to a simple question ... Is the benefit (the reward) worth the cost? Every decision that you make, every day of your lives, is controlled by that idea.  Now last week we said that the resurrection is the cornerstone of our hope. So here's the question ... What's the going price for a happy resurrection?

Dear E.,

On Sunday, we heard a sermon together that began with the words above. As I've pondered them, I'd like to share with you some of what's been stirring in my heart. Yes, in a very real sense, it is true that every decision you make, every day of your life, will be controlled by weighing the costs and the benefits as they apply to you.

And yet, on a deeper level, I keep coming back to this question: Does this cost-benefit idea really best describe the method by which we "lay hold" of salvation? Perhaps a cost-benefit approach is less a feature of our awakening, and more a feature of our brokenness. Perhaps it best describes our lot in life as fallen creatures who are in bondage to our own selfish desires. Since the time of Adam and Eve, hasn't our sin centered around having our own view of what's best for "ME", and then acting on it as a way of having control?

I do not say that the words we heard are "wrong". The benefits of faith are real, but perhaps in this case discernment has a bigger role to play. A great preacher named Charles Spurgeon once defined discernment this way: "Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right."

One of the problems of a cost-benefit model is that it characterizes every decision as a "means to an end". My choice ends up nothing more than the means by which I get what benefits me in my own eyes. And yet, do you remember what Paul says in 1st Corinthians, chapter 13?  "Love does not insist on its own way"(RSV). Love "seeketh not her own"(KJV). There you have it. Love, as described here, does not operate as a means to obtain a beneficial end for the self. It seeks something "other".

We catch a glimpe of this even in the ordinary blessings of life.  There will hopefully come a time in your own life when your love for your husband, or your love for your children, will cause you to think and act in ways that have very little regard for yourself. And for a few moments your heart will not entertain even a hint of a cost-benefit analysis. You will see your loved ones in an "other" centered light, not as a means to an end, but as ones who, each in their own right, are ... PRECIOUS.

So love is not bound by the laws of the cost-benefit model. And what's many times hard to grasp is ... neither is the gospel and the salvation that it proclaims. If I could be granted one wish with regard to the gospel and my children it would be this ... that they might fully receive the gospel, not as a means to an end, but as a finished promise that is PRECIOUS in their sight.

Faith is trust in someone "other".  It is not a means by which we lay hold of a benefit. We walk by this trust and not by sight. It is the very substance of what is hoped for, not the prerequisite cost for securing what is in reality a free gift.

There are places in the bible where we catch a glimpse or two of how the gift of God, "the cornerstone of our hope", transcends a cost-benefit view of life. I offer you these few:

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"In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins."  (1 John 4:10)

"We love, because he first loved us."  (1 John 4:19)

"And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."  (John 8:32)

"We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose."  (Romans 8:28)

"I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate."  (Romans 7:15)

"For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do."  (Romans 7:18-19)
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In closing, permit me to state one last time that one of the most precious truths of the gospel is that Christ is not a means to an end. George W. Peters says it well I think:

"Salvation is not a detached gift of God in some gracious and miraculous way bestowed upon man. Salvation is Christ, and to experience salvation is to experience Christ. It is not the experience of something, but of someone.

The Bible does not teach that Christ has salvation and dispenses it like a benevolent master giving gifts to his servants who obey him. Christ is our salvation and gives Himself to us as our salvation. He is our life; He is our strength; He is our peace; He is our joy; He is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption."

All is grace,
Dad

Free will. It's UP TO ME. Or is it?

I attended a sermon on Sunday which reminded me that words alone on the topic of "free will", while defendable and containing much truth, can be approached with differing emphasis that appear to conflict.  Sometimes the wonders of the Good News involve subtleties.  I begin with words from Sunday's sermon, followed by more words for your discernment.
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Audio: 2:06 min.


And God already knew that they weren't going to listen to Him.  He was going to preach to call them to covenant renewal, to faithfulness, to repentance from their sins.  That's what the gospel always calls for.  It says come back to God, which means turn from your sins.  The gospel call, the covenant call, is always a call to repent.  God's way is the way of righteousness.  You always have to turn from your sins to come to God.  To come to Christ.

I'm pleading with you this morning.  Some of you get lost in this idea because you're Calvinist kids like my kids are.  So you've been raised to understand that God's sovereign over everything and then you've become confused to think that God must be to blame for everything.  And you're all mixed up about your own sin.  The bible's just plain.  The bible doesn't neglect the obvious.  God is making an obvious offer of life for all who will believe.

And God is sending out messengers like me, and some better than me, to plead with you to stop it, to listen, to give your life to Jesus Christ, to receive the free gift, to know forgiveness of sins, to know the freedom that comes in Christ.  All you have to do is believe.  Hear, believe.  Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of Christ.

Don't blame God, but wake up.  Would you wake up this morning, and put your faith in Christ.  Some of you are still in desperate need and right this moment God is causing me to offer grace to you.  Do you hear that?  Right this moment, God is extending a kind hand to you.  Far from being to blame for you situation, God's trying to lift you out of it, right now.  Right this second, Jesus is opening His arms to you through the gospel, and I'm telling you, as the bible plainly says, it's up to you to believe it, or not.

Just like it was up to the Jews who walked away that day, it's up to you ... to come to Christ, and I call you to Him.

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Audio: 1:30 min.


Well God has offered Christ, but we have to accept Him.  God has put Christ forward, but we have to believe in Him. God has put Christ out there, He's put the parts in place but we have to assemble it, and make it our own.  Well that of course is exactly wrong.

So Luther drives it home.  When it comes to the work of God, the very power of God to create faith, I believe that I can't believe it.  By my own reason or effort I cannot believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him.

If we believe at all in Christ as our savior, if we have any hope in Him, if we have any faith ... It is not because we've sized Him up and decided He's worth the effort.  It's not because we've taken the bits and pieces of the story of salvation that God has laid on the table and managed to assemble them in such a way that now they fit for us.  It's because the Holy Spirit has reached into our hearts and minds somewhere along the life that we've been living, and has called out of us trust and faith even against ourselves.

And so, with great freedom and courage and honesty, Luther gives us the language to say I believe that I can't believe.  I know this is true.  I see it evidenced in my life every single day.  As I take up the business of god-hood and deity into my own hands and take charge of my own affairs, often at the expense of my neighbor.

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Audio: 4:16 min.


So again, election is the loving choice by God the Father to give to His son a bride, the church.  But now our question is this.  What is the basis of that choice?  Is it conditioned on something man is or does?  Or is it unconditional, dependent on God alone?

Election is not based on what man does.  God's choice had nothing to do with what they did.  The twins were not even born.  They hadn't done anything good or bad.  That means they didn't enter into the equation at all.  That's what it's saying.  You see, it's based on God's pleasure, on God's prerogative.  Look again at verse 16, chapter 9, "So then, it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God, who has mercy."  This is dependent on God.  Salvation is dependent on God, not man.

A sinner cannot believe in Christ.  Because he's enslaved.  He's imprisoned. You see, when Adam sinned, he lost his free will.  He lost his ability to choose Christ.  He and his posterity became slaves to sin, that's why it says there's none who does good.  And he can't even believe the gospel.  This moral impotence extends all the way to his ability to receive Christ.  And thus man's fallen nature in Adam requires God's initiative.  Lest no one be saved.  And that initiative is the election of grace.

God is omni-everything. And therefore He's omni, or all sovereign, even in the matter of salvation.  No one resists His will.  He decides, unilaterally, on whom to have mercy, and whom to reject.  He is the sovereign potter, who does with the clay as He wishes, and we must be content and submissive to that.

God gave His son to redeem sinners, out of His great love, and it all boils down (so it seems and so it is) to one's willingness to believe in Him.  Now here's the UN-biblical assumption:  Man must therefore have the freedom to believe.  If the gift is predicated on his believing, doesn't it seem to follow that man must have the freedom to take that gift.  It would seem that way, but the bible says 'NO'.  God does promise eternal life to all who will believe, but none are able to believe.  And it's not because of election, it's because of sin.  God's electing love is actually the key that unlocks the cell of moral impotence, and marks sinners as recipients of that quickening ray from heaven, and always in the context of the hearing of the gospel.

So if you're here this morning, and you don't know Christ, and you've been tempted to hide behind the doctrine of election.  Oh let's get rid of that excuse right now. And let's not view election as a foe.  Election is a friend. Do you realize, dear sinner, if you're outside of Christ, there's not a chance in the world that you can believe of your own.  You are lost.  You are impotent.  You are morally bankrupt.  I might as well go try and dunk the ball in today's basketball session.  I can't do it, and you can't believe the gospel.

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Audio: 1:15 min.


Whereas faith, biblically understood, connotes an empty receiving, an empty-handed receiving.  Out there is the virtue I need, not in here.  I'm the problem, that's the solution.  Faith welcomes the solution.  That's all it is.

God intends to make it crystal clear the He does the decisive saving outside of us.  That the work and person of Christ are the sole ground of our acceptance with God.  In other words, don't replace faith with any other virtue, because faith is tailor made to say, all I need as the ground of my salvation is out there.

Faith is the peculiarly receiving grace, which none other is.  Were we said to be justified by repentance, by love, [or] by any other grace, it would convey to us the idea that something good in us is the consideration on which the blessing was bestowed.

By far the hardest part of my calling

If I may speak of my own experience, I find that to keep my eye simply on Christ, as my peace and my life, is by far the hardest part of my calling. Through mercy he enables me to avoid what is wrong in the sight of men; but it seems easier to deny self in a thousand instances of outward conduct, than in its ceaseless endeavors to act as a principle of righteousness and power.

-- John Newton


Important note:  The last part of this quote contains grammar that I find difficult to untangle.  I offer my own interpretation here:

It seems easier:

To deny self in a thousand instances of outward conduct,

than

To deny self in the midst of its ceaseless endeavors to act as a principle of righteousness and power.



An interpretation shared by this blogger:

"I have a very real sickness that attempts daily and even hourly to supplant Jesus from His rightful place in my life. It attempts to act, like Newton put it, "as a principle of righteousness and power." Yet what power have I? What righteousness have I?"

Called to carry crosses, not boxes

In a loud world — certainty is what sells. 

People love the hawkers, the big talkers, the bloggers that sell certainty.

Turn on the cranked up experts, click on the screaming headlines —  and what people are shopping for is certainty. Certainty sells because we like to take home our boxes — to put people in boxes, put our life in neat boxes, put parts of the world into manageable boxes.

Turns out what we want most is someone to just sell us some certainty about who is who, and what is what, so we can have this sense of knowing what’s safe — instead of knowing Who is the Savior who calls us to love in dangerous, upside-down ways.

...

But the thing is: Truth isn’t found in trite boxes — Truth’s found in the richness of Christ. Truth doesn’t come marked as simplicity — Truth comes marked with the fullness of grace, or it isn’t Truth. Truth is a Person and He is the complexity and the empathy and the integrity and the certainty and the supremacy of Christ.

...

Because the Truth is: We’re not called to carry boxes — we’re called to carry crosses.

Boxes carriers are about buying certainty for living. Cross carriers are about carrying the complexity of living.    

Box carriers strain for the power of controlled lives. Cross carriers surrender to the power of the Christ life.

Box carriers box things into simple. Cross carriers unpack things and sit with the suffering. 

...

Because it turns out: Christ-followers aren’t called to go buy certainty — we’re called to go walk by faith. 

Christ-followers don’t have a certainty to sell — we have a certainty who saves, and His name is Jesus. The absolute certainty we have is the Truth of Jesus — and He welcomes us into living the humble and complex nuances of a servant Faith.

Faith that says we are all just people who are both His good and our bad and He’s the only One good, Faith that requires His patient love and His merciful understanding and His servant actions and His willingness to suffer with and for the wounded.

--Ann Voskamp
from her blog post: here

When Christian syllogisms are no match for pain and suffering

Nicholas Wolterstorff is a Christian who taught philosophical theology for many years at Yale. He and his wife have six children, but he lost an adult son.  ... He published his journal years later as a book entitled "Lament for a Son".
. . .

Wolterstorff’s harrowing account explodes the tempting notion that if we only grasped God’s will more clearly, if we only knew something we don’t know now, the wound would hurt less. But the Gospel is not ultimately a defense from pain and suffering, rather it is the message of God’s rescue through pain. In fact, it allows us to drop our defenses, to escape not from pain but from the prison of How and Why, to the freedom of Who. The answer to our pain isn’t finally found in a syllogism but in a Savior—a suffering Savior.

We are not responsible for finding the right formula to combat or unlock our suffering. The good news of the Gospel does not consist of theological assertions or some elaborate religious how-to manual. The good news is Jesus Himself, the Man of Sorrows, the crucified God who meets us in our grief.

--Tullian Tchividjian, in a blog post: here


What's a syllogism?

God's presence with us, symbolically stated

The ancient world was a vast field of magnificent temples. Only buildings bespeaking power, permanence, and ultimate authority could adequately proclaim the mystery of divinity. The gods deserved nothing less, or so thought the ancients. 

Then God set up a cross. 

It was forged by nameless servants of imperial authority. A bare, rude thing. A time tested instrument designed to evoke terror and coerce obedience through the application of unspeakable cruelty. Only the very worst, despised offenders suffered the fate of the crucified ones. The Romans lined roadways with them so that passers by would be forced to carry the weight of pitiful suffering and inhale the stench of rotting corpses. It was about as far from divinity as one could get. This is the symbol of God’s presence with us? 

Yes. 

God set up His cross where the four roads we travel most, meet: guilt, failure, spiritual poverty, and willful disobedience. The gift of God’s cross, the baptism into Christ’s death, is not given until I see that nothing in the world – nothing – can address my sickness unto death except this one, impossible, ridiculous sacrifice. For only by the shame, cruelty and utter godlessness of the cross can the true magnitude of our guilt – and God’s merciful love – be measured. The cross proclaims to us what our true position in life really is. No wonder we flee from it for all we’re worth. 

But Christ Jesus did not flee from the cross. He embraced it’s suffering and shame in love – for you. And three days after they laid His battered corpse to rest, God vindicated His trust and raised Him from the dead. 

...And since Christ Jesus embodies hope, He rightly calls us to hope – not in our efforts, our so-called free will or determination, but in Him, the crucified. This is the scandal of the gospel – Jesus appears in the defenseless form of the crucified God to put an end to our pretensions to righteousness in order that we might have a righteousness based on faith. A righteousness won for us, the ungodly, through His death on the bloody cross and His resurrection from the dead, where the true glory of God is revealed.

-- Pastor Mark Anderson

Renounce Your Righteousness

God certainly desires to save us not through our own righteousness, but through the righteousness and wisdom of someone else or by means of a righteousness which does not originate on earth, but comes down from heaven. So, then, we must teach a righteousness which in every way comes from without and is entirely foreign to us. 

Christ desires to have our hearts so free and divested (of our own righteousness and wisdom) that for our sins we fear no denial of grace and for our virtues we seek no glory and vain satisfaction. We even should not boast before men of the righteousness which is ours from Christ; nor should we allow ourselves to be cast down by the sufferings and afflictions which are sent to us by Him. 

A true Christian should renounce all things — (all righteousness and wisdom) — that in honor and dishonor he always remains the same, assured that whatever honor comes to him belongs to Christ, whose righteousness and gifts of grace shine forth from Him, and that whatever reproach he endures is inflicted on Christ, (who is in him).

— Martin Luther
Commentary on Romans

Absolutely everything hangs on this...

Audio: < 2min.

The state of the promise:

The christian faith is all about the promise. At the end of the day, it's all or nothing for us. We live or die on the promises of God. That's it. We add nothing to them, and we hang everything upon them. And that is both its great comfort, and what terrifies us most about it.

Is it really enough to trust God's promise? And all of us, to one degree or another, answer that question with a 'No'. It doesn't matter how long we've been in Christ, how long we've been in the faith, the temptation to abandon faith is always there. And it affects all of us one way or another, from time to time.

... It doesn't matter if it's me, or you, or somebody else that delivers the promise, what matters is that it gets delivered consistently, routinely, to people who can't believe it. And this is exactly why, in Luther's great catechism, he wrote, "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or effort believe in my Lord Jesus Christ, or come to Him. But that He has called me, by the gospel."

Luther was saying that what I believe about my belief is what? ... that I can't believe. And so I turn to the promise that calls me again and again to trust. That is the fundamental business of the preacher and the hearer. You come ... I come ... with my unbelief. And into that unbelief, we preach Christ sufficient, Christ alone ... in spite of unbelief. It is preached to unbelief to create faith.

-- Pastor Mark Anderson

What kind of person receives the gospel?

The sinner is the gospel's reason for existence. You, my friend, if you are undeserving, ill-deserving, hell-deserving, then you are the sort of man for whom the gospel is ordained, and arranged, and proclaimed. God justifies the ungodly.

It does at first seem most amazing to an awakened man that salvation should really be for him as the lost and guilty one. He thinks that it must be for him as a penitent man, forgetting that his penitence is a part of his salvation.

"Oh," says he, "but I must be this and that," but salvation comes to him before he has any of the results of salvation. It comes to him, in fact, while he deserves only this bare, beggarly, base, abominable description... "ungodly." That is all he is when God's gospel comes to justify him.

-- Charles Spurgeon, "All of Grace"

An Effectual Love

A man may love another as his own soul, yet his love may not be able to help him.  He may pity him in prison, but not relieve him, bemoan him in misery, but not help him, suffer with him in trouble, but not ease him.  We cannot love grace into a child, nor mercy into a friend; we cannot love them into heaven, though it may be the greatest desire of our soul. . . . 

But the love of Christ, being the love of God, is effective and fruitful in producing all the good things which he wills for his beloved.  He loves life, grace and holiness into us; he loves us into covenant, loves us into heaven.

--John Owen, Works (Edinburgh, 1980), II:63.