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Living, breath by breath.
On Monday I posted some thoughts on prayer compiled from the writings of the Puritans. The last part of the post gave a quick list of steps for living our whole day in the strength of Christ. It reminded me of some passages from A.B. Simpson’s book Wholly Sanctified. I posted these a couple years ago on the blog, but they’re ripe for reposting. Seriously, this 121-page book is well worth the dollars and minutes you’ll spend reading it. I recommend it as a great meal for the soul. Here are the quotes Monday’s post reminded me of:
Sanctification brings the soul into harmony with God and the laws of the Son’s own being. There must be peace, there can be in no other way. Sanctification brings into the [human] spirit the abiding presence of the very God of peace Himself. True peace is nothing less than the deep, divine tranquility of His own eternal calm.
We must not live by long intervals, but by the breath and by the moment. Each instant must be dedicated and presented to God, a ceaseless sacrifice, and each breath be poured into His bosom and received back from His being.
Oh, let us yield ourselves unto God.
Let us receive Him into every pore and fiber of our beings.
Let every chord and every member be a channel for His indwelling and inworking, and our whole spirit, soul and body sanctified wholly and presented blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Then will these bodies leap into that higher plane and rise to that nobler destiny of which He has given us now the earnest and the foretaste even in this mortal flesh.
Solid help for your praying.
Some very helpful thoughts on prayer, from the Puritans, compiled and written by Joel Beeke:
Prayer and work belong together. They are like two oars that, when used together, keep a rowboat moving forward. If you use only one oar—praying without working or working without praying—you will row in circles.
Piety and prayer are closely related because prayer is the primary means of maintaining communion with God. Here are five important guidelines the Puritans offer about praying:
- Give priority to prayer. Prayer is the first and most important thing you are called to do. “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed,” John Bunyan writes. “Pray often, for prayer is a shield to the soul, a sacrifice to God, and a scourge to Satan.”
- Give yourself—not just your time—to prayer. Remember that prayer is not an appendix to your life and your work, it is your life—your real, spiritual life—and your work. Prayer is the thermometer of the soul.
- Give room to prayer. The Puritans did this in three ways. First, they had real prayer closets—rooms or small spaces where they habitually met with God. When one of Thomas Shepard’s parishoners showed him a floor plan of the new house he hoped to build, Shephard noticed that there was no prayer room and lamented that homes without prayer rooms would be the downfall of the church and society. Second, block out stated times for prayer in your daily life. The Puritans did this every morning and evening. Third, between those stated times of prayer, commit yourself to pray in response to the least impulse to do so. That will help you develop the “habit” of praying so that you will pray your way through the day without ceasing. Remember that conversing with God through Christ is our most effective way of bringing glory to God and of having a ready antidote to ward off all kinds of spiritual diseases.
- Give the Word to prayer. The way to pray, said the Puritans, is to bring God his own Word. That can be done in two ways. First, pray with Scripture. God is tender of his own handwriting. Take his promises, turn them inside out, and send them back up to God by prayer, pleading with him to do as he has said. Second, pray through Scripture. Pray over each thought in a specific Scripture verse.
- Give theocentricity to prayer. Pour out your heart to your heavenly Father. Plead on the basis of Christ’s intercessions. Plead to God with the groanings of the Holy Spirit (Rom 8:26). Recognize that true prayer is a gift of the Father, who gives it through the Son and works it within you by the Spirit who, in turn, enables it to ascend back to the Son, who sanctifies it and presents it acceptable to the Father. Prayer is thus a theocentric chain, if you will—moving from the Father through the Son by the Spirit back to the Son and the Father.
Genuine piety calls for well-planned, hard, and sweat-inducing prayer and work, the Puritans said. Careful planning as to how you are going to live for the Lord is necessary if you want to achieve much of abiding value for him. Yet the Puritans were not self-reliant.
…Great stuff, right? And I want to emphasize this last part, because I’ve found it to be so true in my own life. I’ve shared something like this with many of you as well, since it’s the only way I know to live the Christian life…
They understood that daily living for a Christian must go something like this:
1. Look ahead and see what you have to do.
2. Go to the Lord in prayer and say, “Lord, I do not have what it takes to do this; I need divine help.”
3. Rely on the Lord to answer the prayer you have offered, then proceed expectantly to the task that lies before you.
4. After completing the task, return to the Lord to thank him for the help he gave.
5. Ask his forgiveness for all your failures and sins in the process, and ask for grace to fulfill your task more faithfully next time.
The Puritan method of daily piety includes earnest prayer and hard work without self-reliance; all the exertion of energy is done by faith. By grace, exercising piety is both faithful effort and fruitful effort.
Choose your story. It means everything.
I stumbled on this promo for a conference the other day.
[tvideo type=”vimeo” clip_id=”117870540″]
Aside from the fact that I hope the conference is helpful, the video contains these three sentences that I think are very profound:
“The Christian Gospel speaks into this confusion with revolutionary clarity. God sovereignly assigns a gender to people created in his image. The powerful grace of Jesus Christ redeems and restores to sanity and our thinking which has been corrupted by sin.”
First, I love the idea of clarity being revolutionary. That’s just interesting. But more importantly, my first though when I heard this was to think of the average person’s reaction, which I would imagine could run something like this:
“Right, but of course, I totally don’t believe that ‘God sovereignly assigns gender’ at all. That’s the whole point. Your statements are meaningless because that’s exactly the issue–I believe no one has the right to ‘assign’ gender. It’s an individual choice. And to say that GOD is doing the assigning is even worse. Now you’re taking your opinions and saying people are disagreeing with God if they disagree with you. That’s just mean. It might be evil.”
I think I would agree with this imaginary commenter in one way–this is the point of the whole thing.
And yet, I don’t think the promoters of this conference did anything wrong by simply, flatly contradicting the culture and everyone who disagrees with them. In other words, this is the essence of Christian witness to the world we live in: we simply state the truth. We understand that the truths we are stating are precisely the things our culture disagrees with. We understand that the ideas which underlie these truths (these foundational truths) are denied just as vigorously. If someone doesn’t think God created humans in any meaningful way to begin with, they certainly won’t think God assigns gender.
And maybe, right here, we Christians can get some clarity as to why we’d continue to keep saying things people disagree with. Maybe we could see that one thing we’re doing for those around us is inviting them to choose–choose the story you want to live in. Choose the story you want to get inside of, define yourself by, interpret the world through, and live out from within.
The world is full of competing, mutually contradictory stories. Are you made by lonely, aloof Allah, from a clot of blood, waiting for the spirit to grab the prophet while commanding him to recite? Are you a chance collection of molecules, coughed up by accident from an impersonal, blind universe, headed toward oblivion while you experience the illusion of consciousness for a few years? Are you a drop from the ocean of the Oversoul, destined to be absorbed back into the Everything? Are you a bag of hormones here to propagate DNA? Are you a mystic being of light who strives to transcend all distinction and boundary on your way to divinity?
See, so many people write off the Christian explanation of the world as absurd (“Who could believe that?”)–but then, let everyone produce their stories. Let’s have them all spoken openly, written systematically, and then lived out consistently. If people have a story that actually describes the whole of our existence, matches our experience, and guides their lives, maybe we’ll listen. But no, what actually happens is that people reject the good news of Christ and then live lives which are inconsistent at best, or consistently wrong at worst.
Which gets us to the real point: we’re not simply preaching that people should pick a story, as if all stories are equal, and it doesn’t matter which one you pick. Only one of these stories can be true, and to truly reject the Christian story, you’ve got to personally appraise and personally reject the historical man Jesus, including his claims, his actions, and most of all his resurrection. So which story you pick is the most important decision a person will ever make.
The strength of speaking about things this way, in terms of “choosing a story” is that it describes what it actually feels like to accept the gospel. It is to hear another narrative which claims to include you, and then to step inside of it and let it become your story. This seems to be exactly what Jesus did with a lot of his parables. He would tell a little story and people would have the choice–does this story include them or not? Would they step inside the story and see things from within its confines? If not, they rejected Jesus as any kind of authority. But then, his life was telling the Big Story, and he was calling all people to acknowledge that it was their story too, and that they were in it, whether they liked it or not. Everything he did was to validate that his story was the story.
And so we continue his work. We know people are living out of other stories. We know their stories are often unexamined. But we preach the Gospel. We invite people to see the power and reality of the True Story. We invite them to finally find their place within what is.
We have found that what is real is better news than any other story that’s ever been told.
Love, Joy, and Peace. (Notes from Last night)
Last night on the field we looked at some key things if we want to make our Summer count. Here are the notes:
Ephesians 5:15-16
Whether summer or winter, the days are evil. He does not say we should fear the times we live in, or that we should run from the times we live in. Our reaction to realizing that the times we live in are evil should be to make the best possible use of our time (according to God’s standard). So how do you redeem a summer according to God’s standards? (see Chapter 5 and 6)
- We examine our lives honestly… to make sure that
- we live deliberately and carefully … so that
- we make the best use of all the opportunities our times grant us.
Galatians 5:13-26
v.13 The freedom of the believer—a real thing! But it is not to be used as an opportunity to indulge the appetites we would have without God. Instead, freedom makes us the kind of people that can afford to love.
v.16 How can we have freedom without dissolving into sin and non-sense?
The power of the Spirit. (The Spirit is the true God who is present with us, with the power to interact with us in a way that changes us, so that we take on his characteristics.)
v.22 What does the Spirit of God produce in someone’s life? Love, Joy, Peace. As I recently heard it said: “These are not doctrines, these are emotions.” Christians: do you really have these things in your lives?
- Mt 24:12 This is a Love that doesn’t fade even with all the sin which is ruining the world.
- James 1:2 This is a Joy that doesn’t depend on personal good times.
- Phil 4:6-7 This is a Peace that isn’t ruined by situations which could cause anxiety.
This is love, joy, peace that is bigger than friends and good times! It doesn’t come from having our situation just right. It comes from knowing an eternal, ever-present friend who guarantees that eternal, universal good times are coming! He himself is full of love, joy and peace. And he brings it to those who turn to him, and who carefully see that their lives depend on him, communicate with him, and follow his lead on a minute by minute basis. Am I starving for the next good time, so I can get a little peace and joy in my life? Or am I getting acquainted with the Spirit of God so he can share HIS with me?
What keeps me from these things? What ruins my ability to share in God’s love, joy and peace?
Not messed up people ruining things. Not difficult situations that come into my life. Not scary news and tense geo-political environments.
v.17 The issue isn’t situational, it’s spiritual. The issue is desire.
Whoever commits sin is a slave of sin.
v.19-21 The beginning and end of this list things constitutes what most people want out of summer. If I want the beginning and the end of the list, I get what’s in the middle.
Summarizing Challenges:
For Christians:
Honestly: is my inner, private life characterized by love joy and peace? Is my social life characterized by love, joy and peace? Whenever it’s not, I am allowing old desires to dominate me at some level. I am not allowing the Spirit of God, through God’s word, to lead me through life by directing my thoughts and actions. As a result, no matter how many good times I try to have, the days that we live in, with all their evil, will squeeze out my love, joy, and peace. I’ll find myself growing cold, hard and anxious. The solution is to settle it once and for all that I am not going to live to try to gratify the old desires I have in my heart, but instead I will learn what the Spirit of God desires, and allow his desires to direct my choices. This keeps me in close friendship with him, and he is such an influence on me that his qualities shape me. He shares his love, joy, and peace with me. I become a person of total freedom: generous, strong, unworried and smiling whether I’m on the beach with my friends or I’m sitting in the hospital, waiting for news from the doctor, next to a stranger, reading the world news. Whether I’m in a boat on the lake or at work with my boss. I will understand how to redeem my time, and how to make it eternally significant.
For Non-Christians:
Where is your source of love, joy and peace in life? Are you really finding it in the things we’re all told we should want? God offers a life that transcends the things we call normal. You don’t find God or spiritual experiences by doing things to try to get happy. You find him by realizing he’s reaching out to you, the Spirit of God is near you, desiring to introduce you to Jesus and bring you into a close relationship with God as your father. He’s inviting you to turn away from the things your inner desires drive you to do, and to be reborn and remade in His image. This is the way to find huge, eternal, unshakeable love, joy, and peace.
Our Summer Community Groups
On Monday night we announced our line up of Young Adult Community Groups for this Summer.
All the groups are open for you to join, just email Gabby Leposki at gleposki@ccphilly.org if you need more information or want a group leader to get in touch with you.
(All groups have one membership stipulation, that participants would be in the Young Adults age range–out of high school, under 30.)
Men’s Fellowship
We’re a group of young men specifically meeting to encourage and edify each other using the Word, activities of service, mutual interests and the relationships that will form as a consequence.
Invited: Men
Leaders: Binu Mathew & Luke Riddell
Location: Warminster
Meetings: Every other week, Saturdays and Fridays
Start Date: Continuing from the Spring Session
Girl’s Fellowship
Rotating Bible Study nights and fellowship nights for Ladies.
Invited: Women
Leaders: Toni Valentini, Megan Homes, and Corinne Fisher
Location: Ivyland
Reading: The Book of Exodus
Meetings: Selected Thursdays
Dates: May 21, May 28, June 11, June 18, July 16, July 23, August 6, August 13
Running Club
Invited: Anyone who wants to run. (Don’t be scared, this will be beginner-friendly.)
Leader: Chris Lucas
Location: Feasterville + Local Parks
Meetings: Weekly, Thursday nights or Saturday mornings.
Start Date: Continuing from the Spring Session
College Student Group
We want to get together to stay connected to church and grow together during the semester.
Invited: Anyone who is currently an undergraduate student at a college or university.
Leader: Jake Lanetti
Location: Bensalem
Reading: The Book of 1 Timothy
Meetings: Every other Saturday
Start Date: May 23rd
Arts Fellowship
The purpose of this group is to build a community of Christ-centered artists where we can know and worship God, provide outreach opportunities for artists to engage in the community.
Invited: Anyone interested in the Arts
Leader: Frank Arroyo
Location: Bensalem
Meetings: Every other Saturday or Sunday
Start Date: May 31st
Theology Club [NOW FULL]
Focused Discussion about the Trinity based from the book ‘The Deep Things of God.’
Invited: Anyone
Leaders: Brian and Veronica Weed
Location: Bristol
Reading: The Deep Things of God by Fred Sanders
Meeting: Thursday Evenings at 8
Dates: May 28th, June 11, June 25, July 16, August 6
Street Evangelism
Evangelism and opportunities to bless the homeless throughout the Streets of Center City Philadelphia
Invited: Anyone
Leader: Josh Marcinik
Location: Center City Philadelphia
Meeting: Friday Nights, Saturday Nights, or Sunday Day
Dates: TBA
Medical Group
As a group we will be looking at specific books or articles about medicine from the Christian perspective and times of prayer not only for each other but specifically for various ailments / illnesses and for God’s healing power.
Invited: Anyone Studding or Working in the Medical Field
Leader: Matt Wilfred
Location: Abington
Reading: Medical Ethics by John Frame
Meeting TBA
Community Groups: Your place to build friendship in a small group.
We understand that the sanctuary at Calvary Chapel is big and full of people. The Monday night Young Adults meeting is still rather large, and many who come are looking for an easier way to meet people and build friendships.
Community Groups are a way for those in the Young Adults fellowship at Calvary Chapel to build Christian community, cultivate ministry to the body of Christ, and reach out to those in need of Christ. They range in format from Bible reading and discussion groups where people in a certain locality gather at a house, to reading groups where specific books are read and discussed together, to interest-based groups where members pursue a shared passion.
Why do we have them?
As we read the chronicle of the birth of the Church in the second chapter of the book of Acts, we see that Christians were committed to several things, one of which was regular gathering for different purposes. Among other things, we see that they gathered “from house to house.” No doubt this was because they had no church buildings in those days. But from their example we can learn a commitment to being together—in short, to living in real Christian community. They ate together, they studied together, they worshiped together, and they spread the gospel among non-believers together.
Our Community Groups are one way of helping the young adults of Calvary Chapel pursue this part of the Christian’s calling. Specifically, Community Groups are our way of pursuing the need for personal relationships with each other—so we can be the kind of family (where every person is a sibling), and body (where every person is a member), and building (where every person is a living stone) that the scriptures call us to be.
In addition, we see community groups as a way to help build relationships for life—relationships that become part of the lifeblood of our church here at Calvary Chapel and that extend beyond your time in the Young Adults fellowship.
What are they like?
Groups of five to fifteen or so. They may meet in homes, in coffee shops, at local parks, or anywhere else where they can pursue their specific purpose. The core of the group are a few committed members of our Young Adults fellowship, and a leader or two who are specifically designated to coordinate the group and lend it vision and focus. These groups are ideal for people to check out after they’ve been to a Monday night bible study and want to find friendships.
What kind of commitment does joining require?
The “community” part of Community Groups requires that you get together with your group regularly, so you can build and maintain real relationships. Let’s state the obvious: relationships require time. You could even say that they are time, time spent together, communicating and accomplishing things together. So if you’re going to sign up, we’d ask that you are ready to make as many of the meetings as possible for the length of the session.
How long do groups run?
They run for about three months (with sessions in the Spring, Summer, and Fall) and break over the holidays in December. Most groups meet every other week for that length of time. If everyone in your groups loves the group, and doesn’t want to stop meeting, group members will have the ability to sign up first for the next session, so that no on has to lose their place in the group. Then you can keep hanging out, indefinitely. Conceivably a group could form and run on for years until everyone gets too old for Young Adults and they disband or they let it turn into a Calvary Philly Home Fellowship. (So, literally, the group could run the rest of your life!).
Can I bring a friend to my group?
Absolutely. Community groups are ideal places to introduce someone to our fellowship. We would just ask that:
1. You let the group leaders know they’re coming
2. They would be the right age to be part of our Young Adults fellowship (out of high school, under 30)
Can I bring a friend who’s not a Christian?
Please do. One of our hopes for these groups is that they provide us for a very genuine form of outreach. In a day and age where it is often difficult to find a ways to engage people with Christian truth, we hope to see these groups become places where you can invite your friends to witness real Christianity being lived out. So invite people and bring them.
How do I get involved?
Three times a year we will have sign up nights for Community Groups. Signing up then is the easiest way to join a group.
During the rest of the year, email Brian at bweed@ccphilly.org and inquire about the group you’re interested in. You’ll get contacted by someone from that group with details about where and when they’re meeting.
“By registering, you agree to be bound by the terms of Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia’s Resolution on Participation in Church Activities found at www.ccphilly.org/church-activities-resolution/. If you do not have internet access, you may obtain a copy of the Resolution on Participation in Church Activities from the church office.”
Our bodies, the enemies of the new freedom.
This month’s issue of First Things includes an excellent editorial by R.R. Reno regarding the marriage case currently before the Supreme Court and the assumptions behind the worldviews involved in the discussion. I especially appreciated his discussion of the way many in our culture view the human body–and it matches some things we’ve looked at on Monday nights in the past year or so. How can we answer questions about what we should or shouldn’t do with our bodies unless we know what our bodies are and are for? And how can we answer those questions unless we know what we are? Determining what a human is may be the most fundamental question before our culture. Without our creator’s definition, who decides what we are? Will the powerful among us simply attempt to remake humanity in their own image? Reno points out what an odd and disastrous thing this new definition will be for our bodies in particular.
Today, we’re seeing a shift in consensus, at least in the Establishment. It’s moving from Washington’s view of religion as, on the whole, good to one that sees religion as oppressive. That’s not because religion has changed. It’s because our view of freedom has.
The human body has become an enemy of freedom, and because Judaism and Christianity affirm the body, we’re now seen as allies of the enemy.
We can see this metaphysical revolution in the dark consistency of the pro-abortion position. The willingness to kill in the womb stems from a fundamental judgment about equality: Limiting abortion burdens women unjustly, because they’re vulnerable to pregnancy in a way that men aren’t. In what sense, the defender of the American abortion regime asks, can women enjoy an equal freedom with men if they must live in bondage to the natural fertility of their bodies? Therefore, to be equal under the law, women must be free from any law that binds them to their naturally fertile bodies.
In the battle to defend the sanctity of life, we sometimes fail to see the depth of this revolution. We rightly focus on the absurdity of determining, as the Court has done, that the life of the child in the womb does not constitute a just reason—a supremely just reason—to override a woman’s personal decision to abort. If the sanctity of life is not a limit on personal freedom, what can be?
Abortion-rights advocates simply refuse this logic. Planned Parenthood doggedly fights against any restriction on the abortion license. This implacable stance indicates the depth and significance of the metaphysical revolution. It transforms a woman’s fertility into an enemy of freedom…
As we have learned in doctor-assisted suicide cases, as well as gay-rights cases, the logic of [court decisions] Roe and Casey is expansive: No fact about our bodies can constitute a legitimate reason to limit our freedom…
Traditional moral principles depend on metaphysical assumptions about the moral meaning of our bodies and our bodily acts. These are dismissed (rarely with arguments) as irrational and unjustified. So we’re left with the principle of utility, which gives the appearance of objectivity but is in practice vague and malleable.
Reno goes on to discuss how this same view of the body affects the debate on transgender issues, adoption rights, and doctor-assisted suicide. He ends by applying scripture to the current situation:
St. Paul asked, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” (1 Cor. 6:19) Our bodies are not our own. We have them on loan, as it were, and a large part of what it means to live with dignity involves respecting the natural order of bodily existence, especially its male–female complementarity, which includes, but is by no means limited to, fertility.
By contrast, today’s secular culture sees the human body as a canvas for us to write on, a machine for us to use as we see fit, an instrument of our will. We tattoo and pierce—and, if we’re so inclined, we pay doctors to amputate and rearrange and reconfigure… We treat our natural fertility as an impediment, a burden—until we want children, at which point we quickly resort to technological manipulation if our bodies refuse to cooperate… We preempt our mortality with suicide. We cremate. In our era, the body has no moral meaning.
There are close legal arguments to be made against this expansion of pseudo-liberty. There are moral arguments to be made in hopes of restoring a degree of sanity to Western culture. But as we make those arguments we need always to remember a fundamental truth: We have become metaphysical heretics in an era that denies the body any moral meaning. This makes us the bad guys in today’s culture wars, the enemies of postmodern freedoms, which are no longer political but personal.
It’s worth it to read the whole thing.
Truth in the Secret Place (Notes from last night)
Last night we continued our study through the Sermon on the Mount. Here are the notes:
Truth in the Secret Place // Matthew 6:1-8, 16-17
1. Active “Righteousness” (6:1) these activities seem to be assumed parts of a righteous life.
- Giving to needy people (6:2-4). See 1 Jo 3:17-19 Whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?
- Praying (6:5-6)
- Fasting (6:16-17) not eating food for a set time
So, “Doing things” is part of the greater righteousness that characterizes the true followers of Jesus. But doing them is not the essence of being a follower of Christ. Simply doing these things doesn’t make us righteous. Something else is key, which is why Jesus teaches about right and wrong ways to do these things.
2. The issue: living our lives “to be seen” by people… (v. 1, 5, 16) Note: The issue is not being seen in general. See 5:13-16. … in order to get “glory” from people, (v. 2) as opposed to a general life that brings glory to God.
3. If that’s why I do things, then I get what I want (v.2, 5, 16), and that is all the reward I get. (v.1)
4. Instead, practice your righteousness in secret…
v.3 Don’t publicize giving, don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing,
v.5 Don’t pray just so people can see/hear you, go into an inner room
v.16 Don’t look sad for people, be normal (v. 17) , so only God can see (your hunger)
5. …because God is in the secret place, and he sees. (v. 4, 6, 17)
If he’s infinite, he’s everywhere all at once. In other words, he’s fully in everyplace. For followers of Christ, we fully relate to God through His Spirit, which is everywhere.
If he’s personal, alone time is one-on-one time with God. This is the most important part of our relationship with him. As we follow Christ, we learn to reprioritized our lives, and take all the value off of our public lives, and the eyes of people, and put it on our private lives, and the eyes of God.
6. …and He sees, and he rewards. (v. 4, 6, 17)
7. Humanity needs to repent of its obsession with being seen by others. (4:17)
A Helpful Question for everyone: who do you want to see you?
If people? Why? (you have your reward: applause, esteem, people’s admiration)
Also: Who do you want people to see?…notice?…think about?…admire?…praise?…to want?
Another Question: Why are humans obsessed with being seen?
1. …because we think that other people are the only ones there to notice.
2. …because we think that the only things that have value in our lives are the things others see
The Antidote: Know that you have a father who sees in secret.
If there really was no one there in the universe except other humans, this teaching of Jesus would make no sense. But if there is a God who sees all things, if everything is equally exposed to him, public and private—that changes everything. Now even the most secret moments in our lives are inhabited by Someone else, and in fact, by the most important Person in the universe…in fact, the only person whose opinion matters. And, since this Someone is the one who made us, and since he made us specifically to have real personal connection to him, then our relational life with Him is actually the most important thing to us. It’s the thing we should think most about, invest the most in, and derive the most joy from. (For instance, see Psalm 139:1-13 and Hebrews 4:13)
Is the universe empty for you? Or is Someone there? Is it all a big random machine—huge spaces of emptiness with a populated rock flying in loops through the dark? Or is every cubic inch inhabited by a loving Father?
Horizontal, Relational Perfection (Notes from last night)
Last night we continued our study of the Sermon on the Mount by looking at Matthew 5:31-48. Here are the notes:
5:31-37 Speaking Truth and Keeping Your Word.
31-32 If you make marriage vows. Keep them.
Lifelong faithfulness within the relationship God created between man and woman. (Mt 19)
The point: the culture allowed easy divorce. Jesus calls them out for it.
33-37 Simple Truthfulness.
Lying was so prevalent that oaths were used to convince others that people weren’t lying.
The Point: The followers of Jesus are called to be thoroughly trustworthy, since their purity of heart (5:8) is always coming out of their mouths (See Mark 7). Now, why is this? Because God is perfect (5:48). He always speaks what is true, and therefore he is totally trustworthy, and totally reliable. He calls the followers of Christ to embody God’s reliability in the world—to be a light in the darkness of the culture of lying. Lying at every level of society breaks down the fabric of society, so the followers of Christ are called to be salt to stem the decay. By teaching his followers to be this way, Jesus is calling on all of humanity to repent of faithlessness and lying (4:17).
5:38-48 Doing good to all.
39. a slap – a serious insult, honor shame culture, you could take legal action against this.
40. you couldn’t legally sue for the tunic (“cloak”), but disciples offer them up freely. (see 1 Cor 6:7)
41. Roman occupiers could demand this.
So:
Respond to personal insult by showing willingness to be insulted further
Respond to legal action by freely offering up more than could be legally demanded
Respond to military oppression and occupation by going beyond what they demand.
42. Freely give and lend to those asking from you.
44. Hating is not an option. (permanent, deep seated hostility)
We must love all, from our wives, to friends, to strangers, to occupiers, and to personal enemies.
45-48. in order to “be” and to show that we are sons of the Father.
See Luke 6:32-38 – when God bestows “natural” blessing on people, it doesn’t “condone” their behavior, it just shows his kindness (see also Acts 14:17). Followers of Christ are freed up to give to everyone, bless everyone, regardless of what that person is like. We extend these things even to those who oppose us.
The Point: Followers of Jesus represent their father in heaven by being like him, especially in his kindness towards a world of people who oppose him and his ways. When people oppose us, they oppose small, fallible, imperfect humans like themselves. But when they oppose God, they oppose their creator and source of life. And yet he still extends kindness to them.
And–everyone says they like the teachings of Jesus, but are they ready for this? What does Jesus say to a world where every grievance is prosecuted, grudges are nursed from every insult, and every injustice brings calls for revolution? Is the world ready to follow a man who teaches kindness as the only legitimate retaliation? A quick scan of the news says no. Jesus’ response to all this is to say, “repent.”
Summing it up: The teachings of Christ confront humanity at gut level. He calls his followers to be distinct from their cultures in ways that contradict some of the most basic assumptions of human existence—like the need to retaliate in the name of justice. He calls us to see our poverty of spirit (5:3) in the face of his teachings, and to repent and follow his way. The rest of the bible shows that Jesus invites us to go to him and ask for a whole new life—which includes a new spiritual power that allows us to live in ways that reflect God’s character.
That moment when they call you evil, and then they glorify God.
Reading in 1 Peter the other morning, I was struck by this sentence:
“Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.”
That’s chapter two, verse twelve, from the English Standard Version. The NIV says people will “accuse of doing wrong” and then afterwards see your good works. With that sitting in my thoughts, I picked up an older paraphrase I sometimes read, by J.B. Phillips. He rendered the verse like this:
“Your conduct among the surrounding peoples in your different countries should always be good and right, so that although they may in the usual way slander you as evil-doers yet when disasters come, they may glorify God when they see how well you conduct yourselves.”
I’m telling you, 1 Peter is feeling tangibly relevant these days. It’s like he sent me a long email just last week. The first phrase that got me thinking was this assumption Peter seems to make that people will malign Christians as those who actively do evil things. We harm society. We’re dangerous. We should be stopped. If those things sound outrageous to you, I would just offer the fact that I’ve had them personally said or written to me, or heard them in the media, just in the last couple of years. It’s always a little odd to me. Us? You mean the ones feeding homeless people and digging wells and teaching literacy and doing relief work and…well, why go on?
Of course, we know the Lord does not want us to descend into any kind of bitterness or discouragement (after all, he told us it would be this way, right?), instead, the first part of Peter’s sentence should guide our response to any situation when we’ve been slandered, that is, called evil, because of our association with Christ. He says first of all we should already have been living lives of consistent, active good. We need to be doing things that even a culture who doesn’t acknowledge God’s law will recognize as good. There are lots of verses that say this kind of thing. A Christian’s response to evil is not evil, or shut-down, it is to do good. This sets us up to win as many possible when the situation begins to change.
It’s this change in situation, or “day of visitation” as Peter calls it, that provides us the incentive to press through otherwise disheartening situations. Phillips paraphrases this idea, somewhat provocatively, as “when disasters come.” That sent me searching commentaries and lexicons to see if it’s really what Peter meant. Was he saying that if we kept doing good, then whenever crazy stuff would happen the people who used to slander Christians would turn and glorify God instead? That just sounds so applicable to our world. It turns out that the word could be rendered that way (based on some parallels in Isaiah), but then I read Karen Jobes’ commentary on 1 Peter, who observes:
The day of visitation should probably be understood as a reference to the future final judgment, by which time Peter hopes that the unbelievers who have observed the good works of the Christians they have slandered will have come to faith in Christ. The future visitation of God in Christ will be a day of blessing for God’s holy nation but a day of judgment and condemnation for the “nations” who are not God’s people.
The witness of a sustained good lifestyle by Christians who are being maligned by their society will be a testimony on the final day of judgment, which will vindicate the Christian’s faith.
What’s the upshot? When Christians find themselves maligned, Peter directs us to continue doing what he assumes we’ve always done–continue blessing those who oppose us and being kind and generous to everyone. Our hope in this? First, the knowledge that we have a future vindication ahead of us. Second, that before it’s too late, this consistent witness against the grain of opposition will lead many people, who might have otherwise faced judgment from God’s throne, to be able to give God the glory of grateful praise instead.
Truth in the Inner Place (Notes from Last Night)
Last night we continued our exploration of Jesus’ teaching recorded in chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew’s account of the Gospel (better known as “The Sermon on the Mount). Incidentally, I wasn’t able to post the notes for the last couple Monday nights, so if you want to download them, you can use these links:
Study #2: Matthew 5:17-20
Study #3: Matthew 5:1-16
Below are the notes for last night, for Matthew 5:21-30:
1: The truth about Anger: It’s from the same kind of evil as murder.
5:21-22
Anger is the root of Murder, therefore, it deserves the same penalty.
…whether it lives in the heart (where murder comes from, 15:19)
…or comes out of the mouth (even in the form of common insults)
To get a sense of what it must have been like to hear Jesus say these things, imagine a hearing a news report about a situation where someone curses at someone else on the street, and the cops come running up, cuff the guy who did the insulting, throw him in the car, and take him to the court house. In court he’s tried for exhibiting anger in his heart which shows how little he values his fellow man. That’s what this probably sounded like to Jesus’ first hearers.
5:23-26
Because this is the case, followers of Christ must oppose this kind of anger, not only in ourselves, but in our relationships with others as well.
Two examples to illustrate how this principle works:
- (5:23-24) If you’ve traveled to Jerusalem to worship, and as you’re in the middle of the sacrifice, remember a broken relationship, stop worshipping, and go fix the situation. Care about anger in others as much as you care about it in yourself. It’s as important as worship. (see 5:9 blessed are the “peacemakers”)
- (5:25-26) If you happen to be involved in a dispute with him, do your best to resolve it before someone else has to resolve it for you.
The Point: You can’t truly worship God and be ok with anger in your heart or in the hearts of those you have relationships with. This means that true disciples, followers of Christ, aren’t OK with angry hearts in themselves or others. They take it seriously, like they take murder.
2: The Truth about Lust: It’s from the same kind of evil as adultery.
5:27-28
Looking at someone for the purpose of stirring up desire is the same species of sin as actually sleeping with someone’s spouse. Even if it is never acted on. Not simply sexual attraction per se, but intentionally stirring up that attraction to passion directed at individuals (real or made-up), especially using the eyes to do it.
5:29-30
Because this is true, a follower of Jesus will take dramatic and decisive action to eliminate sin in their life. They will treat it with “life or death” intensity. They won’t make excuses. They will make decisions that factor in eternity.
The Point:
Jesus is confronting humanity’s messed up perspective. People tend to think both of these things are not a big deal. We humans let anger and hate live in our hearts, and we say all kinds of bad things about other people, and go through our days like that’s fine. We let lust live in our hearts—in fact, we have an entire section of the world economy devoted specifically to helping everyone think about sex with people they’re not married to. We pepper little bits of visual lust inducers into all of our entertainment.
Jesus is stressing how out of sync with him and his teachings all this is. The normal way of looking at things is twisted. We think it’s all ok because we compare ourselves with each other. But remember 5:20 and 5:48… he’s bringing in a greater kind of righteousness, a greater kind of humanity. The standard for the kingdom of is Jesus himself—the perfect man.
Only he sets humanity’s vision straight. We need to repent. Otherwise we have nothing to do with his kingdom—we’re not in it now, and we won’t stand a chance to be in it when it comes all the way.
Challenges:
- Jesus calls humanity to “repent” because his kingdom is coming. In his kingdom there won’t be any killing and there’s not going to be any ripping each other off sexually—and there’s also not going to be anyone even hating each other in their hearts, or looking around wishing they could do those things. Therefore, if we want to be part of his kingdom, we’ll turn away from these ways of anger and sensuality now, voluntarily. If we’re true disciples of Christ we will stop murdering and sinning sexually, and we’ll also treat the attitudes of our hearts that lead to those sins with equal seriousness. True disciples take all sin very seriously.
- Do we take these things in our hearts this seriously? Do we take anger this seriously? Do we take sinful desires in our hearts this seriously? Have we demonstrated it by taking action in our lives to change? For instance, have we taken action to control our mouths and our eyes and our hands?
- For the Christian, God provides all the power we need to have real change happen in our hearts. The God gives us his, Holy Spirit which is God himself, who comes and lives inside us, with our spirits, and gives us the power to do his will. He really changes us. Our part is to believe him when he speaks and ask him for his help.
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