Hope to the Broken

“The life of Jesus offers hope to the broken, to those who recognize their inability to keep God’s law, and to those who are frustrated with their falling and failings. The gospel is the life of Jesus for sinners. His righteousness is our righteousness, and this gives us hope and confidence before God. Here the broken find encouragement, for in Christ we are righteous.”

— Joe Thorn, Note To Self
(Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2011), 31

Hat Tip: Of First Importance

The Gospel vs. Hyper-Spirituality

The Gospel Against Hyper-Spirituality:

The best way I can illustrate hyper-spirituality is like this:

Imagine I give my daughters a new dollhouse. It’s a beauty. It’s four stories tall, ornately detailed, equipped with working lights and windows that slide up and down, and contains ample room for all their many dollies and dolly accessories. I give it to them and tell them I love them. But for some reason they think I don’t really expect them to play with it, but rather to spend any awareness they have of the dollhouse standing before me, thanking me for it. They somehow get it into their heads that to go into another room and play with the dollhouse is ingratitude, that I won’t feel properly thanked (or even pleasure in giving them the gift) except in their direct thanks to me. They don’t ever enjoy the dollhouse; they just show how much they love the gift of it by thinking of ways to thank me other than actually playing with it.

This is the view of God that belongs to the hyper-spiritual.

In the illustration—hypothetical, I assure you, since my daughters would be exponentially more enamored with a new dollhouse than with their lame ol’ dad—my daughters are zealous for something good: thanking their dad for the gift. But they have missed the point of both the gift and my relationship to them as a loving Father who gives good gifts. Echoing Romans 10:2, they have a zeal, but not according to knowledge.

Hyper-spirituality is what happens when we (usually implicitly) think that obedience to God and giving glory to God is about payback. We turn astonishment over the gospel into fuel for measuring up. We assume God requires a nearly monastic attention from us, a focus so self-consciously rigorous it must understand the concept of freedom in Christ in ways that don’t sound much like freedom.

Excerpt from Gospel Wakefulness by Jared Wilson

Blogger Down: We Now Rejoin Your Regularly Scheduled Program...

Okay, Google's "Blogger" platform has been down for most of yesterday and today. I, along with many other bloggers using that system, have lost some posts.

Upsetting? Yes.  Frustrating? Yes. Some work necessary to restore things? Yes.

But Jesus is still Lord, God is still in control.  Life goes on.  We now rejoin your regularly scheduled blogging, already in progress.

What a Concept! - Shallow Small Groups

This is funny - but too close to reality for a lot of people and churches.



God save us from shallowness. May God bring about true community in our churches!

Hat Tip: The Blazing Center, Nine Marks

How To Shock An Angel

I have shocked the angels! I have astounded the heavens! You probably have also. The quote below is from The Blazing Center » How To Shock An Angel:

What could cause an angel to be appalled? What could so deeply stun an angel he would describe himself as desolate? Angels have seen Satan and demons. They’ve seen the gamut of every kind of human atrocity. They’ve seen the foulest evil men and women can perpetrate. You’d think nothing could shock them. Yet there is something that completely desolates, bewilders and undoes the heavenly beings.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
be shocked, be utterly desolate,
declares the Lord,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water. (JE 2.12-13)

The heavens aren’t surprised by the actions of demons. They’re not shocked by the behavior of wicked men and women. But what stupefies and bewilders them is when God’s people forsake the soul-quenching fountain of living waters for muddy dilapidated wells. They’re stunned and horrified when believers seek joy from the world rather than Jesus.

May the angels be less shocked and Jesus be more pleased and glorified by my future response to his grace.

Talking - What a Concept!

Maybe we should just talk to each other! What a concept.  Some thoughts from Bob at Wilderness Fandango:

"Social media has weighted these "conversations" against the local and in favor of the "digital." In other words, a lot of digital voices talking among themselves, agreeing and disagreeing, having their weighty say, while down at the street-level there's relative silence. So it seems to me.

Just musing here, but what if we all just, well, shut up. I mean, we don't really need more books, do we? More and more and more every year? We don't need more marketing? We don't need more promises . . . if you'll only attend the conference, buy the book, sign up for the daily edevotional. What maybe we need is "faith working through love," (Gal. 5:6) which happens relationally, locally, after we put down the book, look up from the smart phone, close the lap top, and actually talk to the person next to us."

That's what church fellowship should be like, or at least include - a place and atmosphere where people can actually talk to each other openly, and not via text messaging or twittter feed. I can't survive without it, and  I bet you can't either.
 

Look Up - Not In

When you are hurting or in trouble, do you look inward or outward / upward. Here's some Gospel soaked wisdom from Tullian Tchividjian on Where To Look When You’re In Trouble

When you’re on the brink of despair–looking into the abyss of darkness, experiencing a dark-night of the soul–turning to the internal quality of your faith will bring you no hope, no rescue, no relief. Every internal answer will collapse underneath you. Turning to the external object of your faith, namely Christ and his finished work on your behalf, is the only place to find peace, re-orientation, and help. The gospel always directs you to something, Someone, outside you instead of to something inside you for the assurance you crave and need in seasons of desperation and doubt. The surety you long for when everything seems to be falling apart won’t come from discovering the dedicated “hero within” but only from the realization that no matter how you feel or what you’re going through, you’ve already been discovered by the “Hero without.”

As Sinclair Ferguson writes in his book The Christian Life:

True faith takes its character and quality from its object and not from itself. Faith gets a man out of himself and into Christ. Its strength therefore depends on the character of Christ. Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!

By his Spirit, Christ’s continuing subjective work in me consists of his constant, daily driving me back to his completed objective work for me. Sanctification feeds on justification, not the other way around. To be sure, both doctrine and devotion go hand in hand, but the gospel is the good news announcing Christ’s devotion to us, not our devotion to him. The gospel is not a command to hang onto Jesus. Rather, it’s a promise that no matter how weak your faith may be in seasons of spiritual depression, God is always holding on to you.

Martin Luther had a term for the debilitating danger that comes from locating our hope in anything inside us: monstrum incertitudinis (the monster of uncertainty). It’s a danger that has always plagued Christians since the fall but especially Christians in our highly subjectivistic age. And it’s a monster that can only be destroyed by the external promises of God in Jesus.

Romans 5:1 says, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is a bonafide peace that’s built on a real change in status before God—from standing guilty before God the judge to standing righteous before God our Father. This is the objective custody of even the weakest believer. It’s a peace that rests squarely on the fact that we’ve already been “reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (v. 10), justified before God once and for all through faith in Christ’s finished work. It will surely produce real feelings and robust action, but this peace with God that Paul describes rests securely on the work of Christ for us, outside us. The truth is, that the more I look into my own heart for peace, the less I find. On the other hand, the more I look to Christ and his promises for peace, the more I find.

So, when pressed in on every side, look up. In God’s economy, the only way out is always up, not in.

As one who has often battled the monstrum incertitudinis, I find these are good and needed words!

A Tuesday Link List

Some random links from my Internet browsing:

How to Listen to Joel Osteen Unto the Glory of God

Why Won't God Just Tell Me What to Do?

Matthew 18 and the Internet

How Many Chinese Christians Are There?

Lot's of other bloggers post these link lists. Perhaps it is time for me to make an occasional foray into this style of blogging. What do you think?

More Zahnd Stuff

If you have enjoyed and benefited from the content I've been quoting from Brian Zahnd's book Unconditional: The Call of Jesus to Radical Forgiveness, then you should check out his website for the book (unconditionalthebook.com) and his blog (brianzahnd.com).

Oh, you should also buy and read the book!

Ugliness Transformed to Beauty

"Don't miss this miracle! The miracle of the redeemed Roman cross! Ugliness transformed into beauty.  A miracle achieved not by erasing its history but be transforming its identity. The miracle of forgiving grace! And if the forgiveness of Christ can save a symbol from its ugly association with torture and death and transform it into a symbol of grace and beauty, then no sinner is beyond the reach and saving grace of God's love.  The history of the cross is not obliterated through forgiveness - it retains its history of death - but the identity of the cross is transformed by forgiveness."

 - Brian Zahnd, Unconditional, pages 193-194