The Peace of God

So I have been, ever so slowly, working through the writings of John Owen this summer.  There have been numerous times that I find myself reading without comprehending, only to go back and re-read what I missed and be pierced to the heart.  These past few days have been no different as I have wrestled over a grand total of three or four pages.  Part of this, to be fair, is because old English grammar and sentence structure still make my brain hurt.  But primarily I have been struck by Owen's profound insights into peace that is from God and peace that is from man.  For example, today's club over the side of the head was this:

"When peace is spoken, if it be not attended with the detestation and abhorrency of that sin which was the wound and caused the disquietment, this is no peace of God's creating, but of our own purchasing.... Let not the poor soulds that walk in such a path as this, who are more sensible of the trouble of sin than of the pollution of uncleanness that attends it; who address themselves for mercy, yea, to the Lord in Christ they address themselves for mercy, but yet will keep the sweet morsel of their sin under their tongue - let them, I say never think to have true and solid peace."

How often do we cry out to God over our sin, often in the presence of others, only to hold on to that sin in the recesses of our hearts?  Any peace that comes from this is not peace from God.  Indeed, as Owens points out, we are more like those in Psalms 78:35-37, "They remembered that God was their rock, the Most High God their redeemer.  But they flattered him with their mouths; they lied to him with their tongues.  Their heart was not steadfast toward him; they were not faithful to his covenant."  Do we hate our sin?  Is our grief over the consequence of sin, or do is our grief over the moral repulsiveness of our sin that keeps us from sweet communion with the Holy One?  One brings peace that is from God and will turn us from our sin, the other brings a semblance of peace that soothes the wound but does not heal it, and guarantees a return of that sin, more vengeful and harmful than the first occurrence.

Who is in control

How often does God do things out of the ordinary just to prove to us that it is He who is in control, not us? This morning I was reading Jeremiah and in Jeremiah 34 the Lord tells the king of Israel that Babylon is going to level Jerusalem, and the king will be captured.  Now in ancient warfare (and even modern warfare), when the enemy king is captured, he is killed lest he be given the chance to regroup and mount a counter-offensive.  However, the Lord tells the Zedekiah (the king) that he will not be killed, but will die in peace in Babylon.  Why put that in there?  Why mention that?  I think it is because God goes out of His way to make sure everyone knows who is really in control.  For when we lose our confidence in ourselves and our ability to control things, then we run to Him.  Take the earthquakes from the past few days.  Nothing speaks to our inability to control things like terra firma (the solid earth) shaking underneath our feet.  Run to the One who is in control, rest in Him and His ability to bring about His desires.

Grace, the power against Sin

I think grace often gets confused for forgiveness in the modern American mind.  More and more I hear myself and others using the term grace when in reality I think they should use grace, and probably are having in their mind the definition of forgiveness when they use the term grace.  For example, I sin and call out to God for grace what I mean in actuality is that I desire His forgiveness.  We see this in every day life as well.  How often do we ask for grace from people, be it spouses, children, bosses, co-workers, you name it, when in reality we are asking for forgiveness for our foolishness and shortcomings.  Unfortunately, this strips grace of its power in our lives and cheapens the Grace of God to a mere "get out of jail free" card.

Grace is, by definition, the free and unmerited favor of God to those who do not deserve it.  Where we often miss the boat is that we think, either consciously or unconsciously, that we deserve it.  This, I think, is where much of the confusion comes from.  We tend to think God owes us His grace and that His grace is demonstrated to us by His forgiving our sins.  We tend to think of our sins in light of our singular offenses against other people or society, not in regard to our rebellion against God and His holy nature, and thus the whole thing becomes a jumbled, convoluted mess.  And in the process we lose sight of the fact that grace is the primary means God gives us to fight against sin (not our singular offenses, but the wicked nature that causes those singular offenses).

Paul's primary argument in Romans for Christians to live radically changed lives is that we live under the grace of God.  That statement has no effect on a heart that has never actually experienced grace but to the heart that has glimpsed its own wickedness and tasted of the grace of God, that statement causes your heart to leap in humility and joy.  That the holy God of the universe would reveal Himself to sinners is the ultimate grace, and it is that grace that allows the sinner to walk humbly with their God, not relying on their own strength or merit, but on God, and His holy nature, and His ability to call into the darkness and save unto Himself a people who delight in His presence.  The grace of God is so much more than forgiveness.  It is the weapon with which sin's power will ultimately be loosened in the life of the one who chases after Christ.

Finite Man and Infinite God

I have been struck all summer with how small and finite mankind really is.  Conversely, I have also been struck with the infinite grandeur and magnificence of who God is.  I love the story of Job on this account.  Job is most famous for getting thoroughly destroyed by life and it is in this context that he is most often referred to.  He is the patron saint of all those going through a rough season in life for good reason.  But the part of Job's story I love the most is the last five chapters.  For almost the entire book Job's friends, who really fall under the "with friends like these who needs enemies" category, have been accusing him of wrong doing.  Job continually, throughout the book, pleads his case and demands a hearing before God that he may prove his innocence.  And in the last five chapters, beginning in chapter 38, God shows up, and it is because of these last five chapters that I love the story of Job.

Beginning in chapter 38 of Job, God unleashes for four chapters on who He is and what He has done.  He demands that Job answer Him like a man as God asks Job where Job was when He laid the foundation of the earth.  From the stars to the mountains, from beasts of the field to fishes in the ocean, from weather patterns to seasons, for four chapters we read of the might and majesty of God.  It both humbles and excites my heart at the same time to read these chapters.  The vastness of God.  The power of God.  His beauty, His character, His nature, all on magnificent display.  I resonate with Job's response in chapter 42 every time I read these chapters.  For when God is done, Job is undone.  Job's response in 42:1-6 is beautiful, but I love verse 5-6, "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you, therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes."  Job, just two verses later, is referred to by God as "My servant" and instructed to make sacrifices for his friends who have angered God.  Yet Job is the one who is repenting.  He is not repenting because of a specific sin, but because of his sin nature, a nature that is in essence set in opposition to God, and he saw the beauty and perfection of the holy God and there was no other course to take but to repent.

Do we have an appropriately small view of ourselves?  Do we understand that God is God and is not someone to be trifled with?  He is the ultimate good, the supreme being, that which is to be desired above all other things and people.  He is infinitely beautiful.  He is more than our hearts can imagine or grasp.  Just a glimpse of Him is enough to make the hardest heart melt and weep over its wickedness.  Let us be people who seek the Lord's face and ask Him to enlarge our hearts for Him and our capacity to enjoy His presence.  For we are all but a mist, here and gone in the blink of an eye.  Yet He remains unchanged, and the heart that belongs to Him yearns for the day that it gets to spend eternity in the presence of He who is the Great I AM.

Science, Faith, and Academia

There is an interesting article I read today (here) on evangelical scholars publicly stating their belief that Adam and Eve were not historical people.  As one can imagine this topic quickly involves the evolution verse creation debate, with the usual suspects lining up on their respective sides of the battle: those who think Adam and Eve were historical figures on the creation side, those who do not on the evolution side.  The author also gives (from my perspective) a somewhat one sided opinion about scholars being dismissed from Christian Universities for disagreeing with the statement of faith of that particular university (as if it were the institution had no right to say "this is what we believe" - but that is a different topic for a different day).  

The part I found most interesting, however, was the author's use of Galileo.  I found it interesting because this argument seems to be popping up everywhere these days.  Anytime anyone, on the grounds of faith, disagrees with a scientist, or anyone for that matter on the topic of science, Galileo seems to get tossed out rather quickly.  For those not up to speed on history, Galileo was an Italian scientist in the late 1500 and early 1600's.  He has been referred to as the father of modern science, the father of modern physics, and is a hero to anyone who likes to look at stars through a telescope.  Galileo was charged and convicted of heresy for supporting a round earth theory rather than the official Catholic church stance of a flat earth.  The common argument today, as made in the article above, is that Christians better get on board with science or they will end up looking like idiots just like the Catholic church did with Galileo.  I have three main problems with this logic.

First, the church, in the Galileo incident, is often portrayed as always having adopted a flat earth theory.  This is not true.  In fact, for most of history, the church was either indifferent or actually supported a round earth.  However, with the rise of the renaissance, and a new emphasis on man centered philosophy, science, and religion, the Aristotle (classical Greek) theory of an earth-centered universe was widely accepted due to its inherent man-centeredness.  Thus, the flat earth theory was not always held by the church and was held in error by the church at the time of Galileo.  This does not exonerate the Church, but it does provide some perspective into the conflict.

Second, the flat earth theory was originally Greek, not Christian.  How the Christian church got blamed for this fallacy is beyond me because it came from Greece originally.  Yes, the Catholic church held this view for a time, but anyone who blames the Church for the theory is either very jaded in their approach or just not a student of history.

Finally, and this is on a much broader scope, Galileo gets used as a trump card, as if science has never gotten anything wrong.  I mean a hundred years ago most scientists, although they knew about DNA, thought proteins were the key to your specific features.  No one thought anything, including tools for surgery, needed to be disinfected until the late 1800's.  At the time of Galileo scientists thought the liver, not the heart, circulated the blood through the body.  The point is, science itself is often wrong.  Just because Galileo got it right doesn't mean science always gets it right. I am amazed sometimes at the hubris of modern man to think that in just the past 10 or 20 years we have somehow figured everything out and unlocked the secrets of the universe.  Give it a few hundred years and I'm sure, if Jesus has not come back, our descendants will be looking back on us as if we were absolute idiots about most things.  Case in point right here (if you don't want to read it: scientists are now postulating that if we don't curb greenhouse gases, aliens will destroy us so we don't threaten the rest of the galaxy with our self-destructive habits).....

Holiness

So tonight I was privileged enough to speak to the CCU student leaders about holiness and what that practically looks like in the life of a believer.  The message was short and the point was simply this: holiness only comes from making much of Jesus in our life and in the lives of others.  Without a single minded pursuit of Jesus Christ, "holiness" isn't really holiness, but rather moralistic deism (what I mean by that is we do moral things in the name of a supreme being who has little to no bearing on our actual lives).

It is in the pursuit of Jesus that we walk closer with Him and see ourselves more for who we are: morally bankrupt rebels incapable of holiness.  I say incapable of holiness rather than incapable of good because the second phrase, while true, often gets lost in translation.  Sure, we are able to do things that the world sees as morally upright, but the prophet Isaiah is pretty clear as to how God sees those morally good deeds (it's not good).  The problem isn't that God is a killjoy, but rather than our baseline for moral good is so skewed that we can't fathom a perfect, holy God and his inability to be around sin.  We must become people who passionately run after Christ because it is only Christ's righteousness that matters.  It is his holiness, his righteousness, his character that we are given and that God sees, thus we must run hard after him.  It is not always fun, nor easy.  It will not at the end of the day leave you with a warm fuzzy about yourself and your character, but it will get you Jesus Christ.  And he is infinitely worthy, infinitely beautiful, and infinitely wonderful.

So my challenge to the leaders was simple, let us be people who make much of Jesus in all that we say and do and think.  Think about him.  Talk about him.  Run to him always.  Make much of him in life.  For, to paraphrase A.W. Tozer, the day is surely coming when all we have will fail us, health, wealth, friends, and prestige will be gone.  All we will have is Jesus Christ.  And that thought makes the heart that has been regenerate dance with joy, and leave the heart that is in darkness wondering what in the world I am talking about.

Christian Chameleon

So the emphasis at CCU this year is to be on holiness and what it means to be holy.  I very much have mixed emotions about this, primarily because I think that on a whole, when an institution focuses on something it tends to, well, institutionalize what they are focusing on.  Whether it be churches, business, or schools, I think this is the norm and not the exception (when a school or the military focuses on decreasing dui's, guess what almost inevitably rises... dui's). To do this with holiness would be a travesty as the very real danger is to turn holiness into a list of dos and don'ts.  On the flip side, this is something that very much needs to be emphasized for several reasons I will expound on.

First, our culture does not understand holiness at all.  And worst of all, the lack of understanding is not ignorance but rather wrong thinking.  Ignorance would be easier.  It is always easier to explain and demonstrate a principle to someone who is a proverbial blank slate.  If they did not have a pre conceived idea of what holiness was, it would be easier to explain.  No, the lack of understanding is rather a misunderstanding, and that misunderstanding stems largely from an unholy church.  The stat's don't lie.  You are just as likely, if not more likely, to divorce in the church as you are out of it.  And divorce is just the easy one to pick on.  If you took any moral statistic, from divorce to abortion to sleeping with your significant other before marriage to lying (in any setting from white lies to lying for a promotion, etc) to stealing to raising kids, the statistics don't lie: the church is no different than the world.  I use the word different on purpose.  Because the fact of the matter is, the church has bought into the lie that says the world needs more of what it has, only with a Christian spin.  The reality is, the world needs Christ and they are getting Him from the church because His bride, the church, is too infatuated with the world.  So the emphasis on holy living is a good emphasis, a necessary emphasis, as a Christian who is not radically different than when he or she was not a Christian has reason to worry that they may just be giving mental assent to a set of creeds while denying the very savior they profess to believe in. We have become chameleon's.  We blend in so well that no one can tell the difference.

This leads to my second reason, which is more of a hope.  It is my hope is that this emphasis will change hearts.  My hope is that this emphasis on holy living will awaken in people a realization that not only are they not holy (none of us are apart from Christ) but that a complete lack of holiness in one's life is indicative of a deeper, more serious problem.  Namely, that they never meet Jesus to begin with.  The best example of this I ever heard was this (and I am straight ripping this from a dude named Paul Washer).  Suppose I was late to a very important meeting and as I walked in I was confronted by a very angry boss who demanded to know why I was late.  Suppose further that I told him I was late because on my way to the meeting I got a flat tire on the highway and as I was changing the tire, I fumbled the lug nuts.  They rolled out into the highway and I completely lost track of where I was and ran out into the highway to get them.  As I picked them up, I looked up and right in front of me was a semi.  It all happened so fast there was no time for him to put his brakes on and he hit me going about 70 mph.  So I am late because I got hit by a semi on the highway going 70 mph.  My boss would look at me and there would be only two logical conclusions.  One, I was lying to him.  Or two, I was certifiably nuts.  Why?  Because you don't have an encounter 10,000 pounds of steel going 70 mph without being radically altered.  And the question then is, what is bigger, God or a truck?  And why are so many people claiming to have had an encounter with the living God without being radically altered?  The logical conclusion: they haven't, and they have deceived themselves with the help of our society and worst of all our churches, patting them on the back for it.  We have become chameleons.  Ask yourself this: if Christians in America vanished would the world even notice?  The statistics say no.

Wake Up Call

Do not love the world or the things in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For all that is in the world - the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions - is not from the Father but is from the world.  And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. ~1 John 1:15-17

There is nothing in life that will sustain you besides a deep and abiding joy in Jesus Christ.  Everything else will fail at some point.  This is not to say that without Christ you walk around looking for ways to off yourself.  In fact, I was quite a happy heathen before meeting Christ.  But all that the world has to offer is fleeting.  Life is but a vapor, and we waste so much of it chasing after stupid stuff.  Whether that be money, fame, power, professional respect, houses, cars, you name it.  We chase after all these things and then act surprised when they fail us.  Even if we attain them, they will fail us.  Just look at the news. The stock market is crashing, the world economy is in the toilet, war is raging, and yet most of us have our heads in the sand pretending everything will just blow over.  Worse than that, rather than repenting of our worldliness, the church goes on looking and acting just like the rest of the world.

Recently the governor of Texas held a prayer rally.  If you haven't read the transcript, you can read it here.  While I commend the governor for praying and  I encourage everyone to pray for our country, do not expect the answer to look a certain way, specifically when praying for a blessing.  God's blessings always bring us closer to Him.  And what we often consider a blessing (wealth, power, influence, comfort, food, etc) are not always, and usually aren't ever, the things that bring us to Him.  So by all means pray that He would bless our country, but understand that the blessing we need to be seeking is Him, and not His stuff.

We don't need our economy to recover, we don't need comfort, we don't need all the stuff we chase after so fervently, we need the church to repent of their worldliness, grow a spine, and run hard after Jesus.  He does not care about our comfort.  He is not consumed with our safety.  How foolish are we to place our hopes in anything except Him.  And for everyone who just nodded their heads in agreement, I'm talking to you.  We express great faith in Christ and then live as if He doesn't exist.  We say our hope is in Him, and yet we run after and chase after all the things the world has to offer, we just do it with the Christian language dressing up our actions.  Repent.  Turn to Jesus.  He is jealous after His own name, and He will share His glory with no one, for He is that which is ultimate in the universe.  He alone is good.  He alone is holy.  He alone is righteous.  He alone is lovely.  He alone is worthy.  And He alone is coming back and He alone will receive worship.  Stop acting like the world, and live a life set apart for Christ.

Pseudo-Faith

I've been reading quite a bit of A.W. Tozer lately... here is a quote from him that is a bit lengthy, but quite relevant to our modern day and age.
“To many Christians Christ is little more than an idea, or at best an ideal; He is not a fact.  Millions of professed believers talk as if He were real and act as if He were not.  And always, our actual position is to be discovered by the way we act, not by the way we talk.

We can prove our faith by our committal to it and in no other way.  Any belief that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only.  And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face-to-face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living.

Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by it implications.  We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it.  We boast in the Lord but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him.  “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Pseudo faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails it.  Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of any second way or makeshift substitutes.  For true faith, it is either God or total collapse.  And not since Adam first stood up on the earth has God failed a single man or woman who trusted Him.

The man of pseudo faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get into a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true.  He always provides himself with secondary ways of escape so he will have a way out if the roof caves in….

… For each of us the time is surely coming when we shall have nothing but God. Health and wealth and friends and hiding places will all be swept away and we shall have only God.  To the man of pseudo faith that is a terrifying thought, but to real faith it is one of the most comforting thoughts the heart can entertain.” 
...We languish for men who feel themselves expendable in the warfare of the soul because they have already died to the allurements of this world."  ~A. W. Tozer
Do we live our lives in a such a way that if God doesn't show up we are finished?  I know the answer in my life is all too often no.  We are so good at making things happen, so good at manipulating situations, working hard, and getting results, that we very rarely find ourselves in a position that if God doesn't show up, we are done for.  And yet around the world God is showing up in amazing ways and showing Himself powerfully to those living on "the edge," the place that if He didn't show up, nothing would happen, or worse, terrible things would happen.  It is interesting to note that the verses immediately preceding Jeremiah 17:9 (which Tozer quotes above) are these:
"Curse is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord.  He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come.  He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land.  Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is in 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 17:5-8)
We love to speak about great faith, we love to say we have great faith.  And yet all too often we trust ourselves.  Our hope is in man and our ability to make ourselves better.  Yet flesh will inevitably fail us.  Yes, we are able to do amazing things. Yes, if I put my mind too it, I will probably succeed.  But the truth is that there is so much more of God to experience.  There is so much more of Himself that He wants to give us, but we are so in love with the world.  We are so love with what the world has to offer and our ability to gain it, that we often miss out on promise of the ultimate blessing: knowing, experiencing, and savoring the beauty of Jesus Christ.  
We are comfortable, and in that comfort and our pursuit of that comfort, we have become complacent.  Complacent and deceived into thinking that what this world has to offer is all that there is.  And then we dress up what the world has to offer in spiritual words and spiritual phrases, thinking that we are in some way close to God because of it.  We are a living, breathing fulfillment of 2 Timothy 3:5, having an appearance of godliness but denying its power.  Lord have mercy on all of us and grant us a heart of repentance that turns to Him and Him alone, for the day is coming when the world will fail us, and fail us miserably, and it is coming faster than many of us realize.