“Look to the right and see:
there is none who takes notice of me;
no refuge remains to me;
no one cares for my soul.”
—Psalm 142:4
"Humble yourselves . . . under the mighty hand of God,
casting all your anxieties on him,
because he cares for you.”
—1 Peter 5:6-7
The first step to real gospel joy is real gospel brokenness. We cannot get to real happiness in God until we get to real despair of our sin. “Til sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet,” Thomas Watson tells us.I'm determined to walk in the grace and acceptance of God in Christ, not look idolatrously on anything or anyone else to meet my emotional or spiritual needs, and thereby be free to enjoy the quiddity of all he gives me (including a good steak for tonight's dinner). How about you?
But once we have despaired of all sin and the gods at their genesis, we are free. Really, truly free. To eat fat juicy steaks and drink rich red wine.
In fact, we cannot really enjoy the good gifts God gives us until he as their Giver is our greatest joy. Until he as their Giver is our greatest joy, we will left trying to enjoy his gifts for things they are not, rather than the things they are.
In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis credited a close friend with cultivating in him “a determination to rub one’s nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being so magnificently what it was.” John Piper echoes this enjoyment of quiddity, commenting on this kind of awareness: “To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things… “ This is in Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life.
If I don’t believe the gospel, I will miss out on the joy of the it-ness of things. I will be looking to these things as drugs, as appetite-fillers, as fulfillers, as powers, as gods, as worshipers of the god of myself.
If coffee or chocolate or anything else other than God is the highlight of my day or the ultimate joy of my heart, my joy is temporary, hollow, thin.
But if I believe in the gospel, I can finally enjoy the chocolate-ness of chocolate and the coffee-ness of coffee. Only the gospel frees me to enjoy things as they truly are and as they someday will be.
—John Bunyan, Note to Reader, “Saved by Grace,” in The Works of John Bunyan, 1:336."If thou findest me short in things, impute that to my love of brevity.
If thou findest me besides the truth in aught [any respect], impute that to my infirmity.
But if thou findest anything here that serves to your furtherance and joy of the faith, impute that to the mercy of God bestowed on thee and me.
Yours to serve you with what little I have."
“One of the things we don’t preach well is that ministry that looks fruitless is constantly happening in the Scriptures. We don’t do conferences on that.”"Update: Check out The EPIC FAIL Pastors' Conference.
Matt Chandler:
I am not what I ought to be.
Ah! how imperfect and deficient.
Not what I might be,
considering my privileges and opportunities.
Not what I wish to be.
God, who knows my heart, knows I wish to be like him.
I am not what I hope to be;
ere long to drop this clay tabernacle, to be like him and see him as He is.
Not what I once was,
a child of sin, and slave of the devil.
Thought not all these,
not what I ought to be,I think I can truly say with the apostle,
not what I might be,
not what I wish or hope to be, and
not what once was,
“By the grace of God I am what I am.”—Cited in Letters of John Newton, p. 400.
Amen, Dr. Packer, Amen!"First, with his flair for didactic communication he coined some new and pointed ways of expressing old thoughts (the “true truth” or revelation, the “mannishness” of human beings, the “upper story” and “lower story” of the divided Western mind, etc.).
Second, with his gift of empathy he listened to and dialogued with the modern secular world as it expressed itself in literature and art, which most evangelicals were too cocooned in their own subculture to do.
Third, he threw light on the things that today’s secularists take for granted by tracing them, however sketchily, to their source in the history of thought, a task for which few evangelicals outside the seminaries had the skill.
Fourth, he cherished a vivid sense of the ongoing historical process of which we are all part, and offered shrewd analysis of the Megatrends-Future Shock type concerning the likely effect of current Christian and secular developments.
Fifth, he felt, focused, and dwelt on the dignity and tragedy of sinful human beings rather than their grossness and nastiness.
Sixth, he linked the passion for orthodoxy with a life of love to others as the necessary expression of gospel truth, and censured the all-too-common unlovingness of front-line fighters for that truth, including the Presbyterian separatists with whom in the thirties he had thrown in his lot.
Seventh, he celebrated the wholeness of created reality under God, and stressed that the Christian life must be a corresponding whole—that is, a life in which truth, goodness, and beauty are valued together and sought with equal zeal. Having these emphases institutionally incarnated at L’Abri, his ministry understandably attracted attention. For it was intrinsically masterful, and it was also badly needed."
"We need to ponder the superiority of God as our great reward over all that the world has to offer.
If we don’t, we will love the world like everyone else and live like every one else.
So take the things that drive the world and ponder how much better and more abiding God is: take money or sex or power or popularity. Think about these things.
First think about them in relation to death. Death will take away every one of them: money, sex, power, and popularity. If that is what you live for, you won’t get much, and what you get, you lose. But God’s treasure is “abiding.” It lasts. It goes beyond death.
It’s better than money because God owns all the money and he is our Father. “All things are yours, and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:22-23).
It’s better than sex. Jesus never had sexual relations, and he was the most full and complete human that ever will exist. Sex is a shadow, an image, of a greater reality—of a relationship and pleasure that will make sex seem like a yawn.
The reward of God is better than power. There is no greater human power than to be a child of the Almighty God. “Do you not know that we shall judge angels” (1 Corinthians 6:3)?
It’s better than popularity. Fame is a pipe dream if you are only known by human nobodies. But if the greatest beings know you, that is a popularity of another kind. The greatest popularity is to be known by God (1 Corinthians 8:3; Galatians 4:9). And when it comes to angels: “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14)?
And so it goes on and on. Everything the world has to offer, God is better and more abiding. There is no comparison. God wins—every time.
The question is: will we have him? Will we wake up from the trance of this stupefying world and see and believe and rejoice and love? And suffer?
When emphatic evangelicalism degenerates into reductionist evangelicalism, it is always because it has lost touch with the all-encompassing truth of its Trinitarian theology....
...What is needed is not a change of emphasis but a restoration of the background, of the big picture from which the emphasized elements have been selected....
...A blade is not all cutting edge. In fact, the cutting edge is the smallest part of the knife. The rest of the knife is the heavy heft of the broad, flat sides and the handle. Considered all by itself, the cutting edge is vanishingly small—a geometric concept instead of a useable object. Isolated from the great storehouse of all Christian truth, reductionist evangelicalism is a vanishingly small thing. It came from emphatic evangelicalism, and it must return to being emphatic evangelicalism or vanish to nothing....
...[The doctrine of the Trinity] constitutes the hefty, solid steel behind the cutting edge. We do not need to use the T-word in evangelism or proclaim everything about the threeness and oneness of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in every sermon. But the Trinity belongs to the necessary presuppositions of the gospel.From pp. 15-19 of The Deep Things of God.
“God’s people in God’s place under God’s rule living God’s way enjoying shalom in God’s holy and loving presence to God’s glory” (God the Peacemaker, p. 229).Sounds better (and more comprehensive) than just going to heaven when you die.
