Marriage and the Gospel

Compromise on Marriage, Lose the Gospel from Crossway on Vimeo.

From Ray Ortlund at Crossway 

"We must not compromise on same-sex marriage. If we had invented marriage, we could reinvent it—there would be no problem with that. We could make it whatever we wanted it to be. But if God created marriage and revealed it—if it came down from above—then it is a unique social institution. It is sacred, it is divine, and it is representative of the gospel itself. If we compromise on marriage, we will lose the gospel."

Never To Be Separated

Why Doctrine and Devotion Must Never Be Separated by Ray Ortlund, Jr.

Doctrine + Devotion

The Bible calls men today to lead in their churches and in their homes through both doctrine and devotion.

What is “doctrine”? The word simply refers to biblical teaching. So no man should fear this word. You can ponder the Lord, by his grace. But if you resist theological thinking, that mentality itself is teaching something, and what it’s saying is really bad doctrine.
What is “devotion”? This word simply refers to heartfelt feeling. So no man should look down on devotion. You can love the Lord, by his grace. But if you resist devotional feeling, that feeling itself is captivating your heart with really bad devotion.

But if your Christianity is both doctrine and devotion, both head and heart, and increasingly so as you grow and mature, then you are truly following the Lord.

Here is where the Bible takes us: All doctrine should be devotional, and all devotion should be doctrinal. This is the full-orbed kind of Christianity that we see everywhere in Scripture.

Sometimes men come from a background where doctrine was under-emphasized, and now they are excited about learning and growing and thinking and understanding. Good! But as you grow, don’t lose devotion. If you have doctrine without devotion, you will become proud, hard, aloof, and superior. And the gospel-team will lose yardage because of you.

One or the Other Just Isn't Enough

Sometimes men come from a background where devotion was under-emphasized, and now they are excited about worship and prayer and sharing and feeling. Good! But as you grow, don’t lose doctrine. If you have devotion without doctrine, you will become self-indulgent, gullible, vulnerable, and shallow. And the gospel-team will lose yardage because of you.

But if you have doctrine with devotion and devotion with doctrine, both head and heart, if your thinking is tenderized with great love for the Lord and your love strengthened with great thoughts of the Lord, you will become a well-rounded, balanced, wise, formidable, attractive man whose influence is the very influence of Jesus himself. And your life will be a touchdown for the team.

Which emphasis do you need to add to your Christianity right now? Are you growing deeper in doctrine and knowledge and insight and understanding? What significant books have you read in 2015? Not just dipped into but read. From cover to cover. And are you growing deeper in devotion and enthusiasm and passion and energy? What tears have you shed in 2015—tears of joy, of longing, of repentance, of worship? Not just a twinge of feeling but ravished by the glory of the Lord. Personal meltdown.

The Bible is God’s primary mechanism for deepening every one of us every day in both doctrine and devotion.

Addition and Subtraction

From "What Does it Mean to Accept Jesus" by Ray Ortlund:

“You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.” 1 Thessalonians 1:9

You and I are not integrated, unified, whole persons. Our hearts are multi-divided. There is something like a board room in every heart. Big table. Leather chairs. Coffee. Bottled water. Whiteboard. A committee sits around the table. There is the social self, the private self, the work self, the sexual self, the recreational self, the religious self, the childhood memories self, and many others. The committee is arguing and debating and voting. Constantly agitated and upset. Rarely can they come to a unanimous, wholehearted decision.

We are like that. We tell ourselves it’s because we are so busy, with so many responsibilities. The truth is, we are just indecisive. We are held back by small thoughts of Jesus.

A person in this condition can “accept Jesus” in either of two ways. One way is to invite him onto the committee. Give Jesus a vote too. But then he is just one influence among many. This way of inviting Jesus into one’s life is common here in the Bible Belt. But it isn’t Christianity, as defined by the New Testament. The other way to “accept Jesus” is to say to him, “My life isn’t working. Please come in and fire my committee, every last one of them. I hand myself over to you now. Please run my whole life for me. Show me how that works.” That is not complication; that is salvation.

“Accepting Jesus” is not just adding Jesus. It is also subtracting the idols.

Heaven Taking Over

“We are not just ordinary. Nothing is just ordinary. ‘The whole earth is full of his glory.’ We keep trying to fill it with monuments to our own glory — kingdoms, businesses, hit songs, athletic victories, and other mechanisms of self-salvation. But the truth is better than all that. Created reality is a continuous explosion of the glory of God. And history is the drama of his grace awakening in us dead sinners eyes to see and taste to enjoy and courage to obey.

“Do you realize that it is God’s will to make this earth into an extension of his throne room in Heaven? Do you realize that it is God’s will for his kingdom of glory to come into your life and for his will to be done in you as it is done in Heaven? Heaven is expanding, spreading in your direction.

“That is the meaning of existence, if you will accept it and enter in.

“Heaven is taking over. Yield.”

– Ray Ortlund, Jr., Isaiah: God Saves Sinners (Preaching the Word Commentary: Crossway, 2005).

HT: Jared Wilson

Needed Rediscovery

"A wave of authentic revival sweeps over the church when three things happen together: teaching the great truths of the gospel with clarity, applying those truths to people’s lives with spiritual power, and extending that experience to large numbers of people. We evangelicals urgently need such an awakening today. We need to rediscover the gospel."

                   - Ray Ortlund,  A Passion for Prayer

HT: Jared Wilson and Darryl Dash

Nothing Like No-Condemnation

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Now. Not five years from now when you are a better Christian. Right now. At this instant.

No. None at all. Not even a little. Zero. Gone. Poof.

For those in Christ Jesus. And only because we are in him. We provide everything that deserves condemnation. He provides everything that deserves acceptance.

This is the plain message of the Bible, because God not only does not condemn us, he also doesn’t want us feeling condemned. He wants us feeling freed. Nothing like no-condemnation to get us riled up for his glory!"

       — Ray Ortlund  "Freed"

HT: Of First Importance

Creating a Beautiful Culture

Some great quotes from Ray Ortlund in Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ. Sounds like one to add to my wish list.

Gospel doctrine creates a gospel culture. The doctrine of grace creates a culture of grace. When the doctrine is clear and the culture is beautiful, that church will be powerful. But there are no shortcuts to getting there. Without the doctrine, the culture will be weak. Without the culture, the doctrine will seem pointless (21).

Every one of us is wired to lean one way or the other—toward emphasizing doctrine or culture. Some of us naturally resonate with truth and standards and definitions. Others of us resonate with feel and vibe and relationships. Whole churches, too, can emphasize one or the other. Left to ourselves, we will get it partly wrong, but we won’t feel wrong, because we’ll be partly right. But only partly. Truth without grace is harsh and ugly. Grace without truth is sentimental and cowardly. The living Christ is full of grace and truth (John 1:14). We cannot represent him, therefore, within the limits of our own personalities and backgrounds. Yet as we depend on him moment by moment, both personally and corporately, he will give us wisdom. He will stretch us and make our churches more like himself (22-23).

What matters most to God is not which sins we’ve committed or not committed, or how we stack up in comparison with other sinners. What matters most to God is whether we’ve bonded by faith with his only Son. In other words, God’s final category for you is not your goodness versus your badness, but your union with Christ versus your distance from Christ. To put it yet another way, what matters most about you in God’s sight is not the bad or good things you’ve done but your trust and openness to Christ versus your self-trust and defensiveness toward Christ (34, italics his).

I apologize for putting this so bluntly, but it’s in the Bible. We need to face it. How can we hope to be true to Christ if we look away from the Bible’s stark portrayal of our natural corruption? The Bible alerts us that a blasphemous attitude lurks in all our hearts. We tell ourselves: “What’s the big deal about this or that compromise? He’ll understand. He’s all about grace, right?” But what man would say: “What’s the big deal about my wife’s adulteries? It’s only marriage. I understand. I’m all about grace”? In the same way, our divine Husband does not think, “Well, she’s brought another lover into our bed, but as long as they let me sleep, what’s the big deal?” The thought is revolting. The love of Jesus is sacred. He gives all, and he demands all, because he is a good Husband. Only an exclusive love is real love. Only a cleansing grace is real grace. Would we even desire a grace that did not cleanse us for Christ (45, italics his)?

The gospel does not hang in midair as an abstraction. By the power of God, the gospel creates something new in the world today. It creates not just a new community, but a new kind of community. Gospel-centered churches are living proof that the good news is true, that Jesus is not a theory but is real, as he gives back to us our humaneness (65).

The "One Anothers" Not in the Bible

From Ray Ortlund - "One Anothers" I Can't Find in the New Testament

Sanctify one another, humble one another, scrutinize one another, pressure one another, embarrass one another, corner one another, interrupt one another, defeat one another, sacrifice one another, shame one another, judge one another, run one another’s lives, confess one another’s sins, intensify one another’s sufferings, point out one another’s failings . . . .

The kind of God we really believe in is revealed in how we treat one another.  The lovely gospel of Jesus positions us to treat one another like royalty, and every non-gospel positions us to treat one another like dirt.  But we will follow through horizontally on whatever we believe vertically.

Our relationships with one another, then, are telling us what we really believe as opposed to what we think we believe, our convictions as opposed to our opinions.  It is possible for the gospel to remain at the shallow level of opinion, even sincere opinion, without penetrating to the level of real conviction.  But when the gospel grips us at the level of conviction, we obey its implications whatever the cost.  Therefore, if we are not treating one another well, then what we’re facing is not a lack of niceness but a lack of gospel.  Our deficit is not primarily personal but theological.  What we need is not only better manners but, far more, true faith.  Then the watching world will know that Jesus has come in among us:

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  John 13:34-35

HT: Aaron Armstrong

Beautiful Reverence

"It is not reverent to erect barriers of icy formality [with God] which Jesus died to tear down. Doing so is pious rebellion. There is no more beautiful reverence in the sight of God than the simple heartcry, ‘Abba! Father!’ "

— Ray Ortlund, Jr. Supernatural Living for Natural People (Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus, 2010), page 85

HT: Of First Importance

Building A Gospel Culture

Interesting excerpt from Ray Ortlund in The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ (Crossway; April 30, 2014). He writes this on pages 82–83:

A gospel culture is harder to lay hold of than gospel doctrine. It requires more relational wisdom and finesse. It involves stepping into a kind of community unlike anything we’ve experienced, where we happily live together on a love we can’t create. A gospel culture requires us not to bank on our own importance or virtues, but to forsake self-assurance and exult together in Christ alone.

This mental adjustment is not easy, but living in this kind of community is wonderful. We find ourselves saying with Paul, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things” — all the trophies of our self-importance, all the wounds of our self-pity, every self-invented thing that we lug around as a way of getting attention — “and count them as dung in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:8–9).

Paul did not regard the loss of his inflated self as sacrificial. Who admires his own dung? It is a relief to be rid of our distasteful egos! And when a whole church together luxuriates in Christ alone, that church embodies a gospel culture. It becomes a surprising new kind of community where sinners and sufferers come alive because the Lord is there, giving himself freely to the desperate and undeserving.

But how easy it is for a church to exist in order to puff itself up! How hard it is to forsake our own glory for a higher glory!

The primary barrier to displaying the beauty of Jesus in our churches comes from the way we re-insert ourselves into that sacred center that belongs to him alone. Exalting ourselves always diminishes his visibility. That is why cultivating a gospel culture requires a profound, moment by moment “unselfing” by every one of us. It is personally costly, even painful.

HT: Tony Reinke via Vitamin Z 

Perspective on Marriage Rulings

The Supreme Court's rulings yesterday on marriage were a disappointment to me - Expected, but still disappointing. However, these two tweets from Ray Ortlund put things in some perspective:

Ray Ortlund ‏@rayortlund

26 JunThe Supreme Court did not rule today that you and I cannot have Christ- honoring marriages. So let's get after it!

Ray Ortlund ‏@rayortlund26 Jun

A prophetic statement we can make today: flaming hot life-long heterosexual marriages to make the world stand in awe.

So Christians, let's live it and demonstrate it to proclaim it!

Reminders

Good reminders via Ray Ortlund:

The longer I live, the more I care about fewer things, and it’s good. Here are those fewer things:

1. God is patient. “. . . the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience” (Romans 2:4). Where would I be now, if God were not patient with me?

2. My wife is my most precious earthly treasure. “An excellent wife is the crown of her husband” (Proverbs 12:4). And how I delight in my family!

3. Everything man-made will fail. But it’s okay. Everything God-made will last. “God’s firm foundation stands” (2 Timothy 2:19).

4. Gospel doctrine creates a gospel culture. “If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11). When the gospel gets through, our relationships become beautiful.

5. I will die in just a few years. What matters now is lifting up a bold new generation for Christ. “I endure everything for the sake of the elect” (2 Timothy 2:10).

6. God visits weakness with power, suffering with blessing, setbacks with progress. “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

7. The Bible is my oxygen. “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). How could I live a single day in this world of illusion without God’s inerrant Word?

8. The grace of God is the endless resource for everything I face. “Be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1).

9. The highest truth is God’s mercy for the undeserving. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). It’s all I want to talk about.

10. Whatever else I lose, I must keep my own walk with the Lord. “But for me, it is good to be near God” (Psalm 73:28).

Hat Tip: Vitamin Z