Monthly Archives: May 2009

Psalm 81:11-12 (ESV)

“But my people did not listen to my voice;

Israel would not submit to me.

[12] So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,

to follow their own counsels.

When Israel got stubborn in their sin and refused to return to God, God’s eventual response was to let them do what their evil hearts told them to do. Many people think that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want. But Psalm 80:12 tells us that the ability to do whatever you want is a sign that God has given up on you.

A child who is never disciplined, corrected or taught, is a child who is not loved or one whose parents, in frustration have given up on because they simply cannot make any progress anymore. The ability to do whatever they want is an indication that a people are under the judgement of God, that they are left alone by God to do whatever they want. License to sin means that God has given up on you.

This is precisely what Romans 1:28 tells us.

28And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

God’s mercy is not eternal. There actually are people and cultures who are beyond the mercy of God whom God has given up on and who are guaranteed eternal judgement just as sure as if they were already in it. This is truly frightening.

People should not presume upon the mercy of God. There is no evidence in the Bible that God’s mercy is always available or always wanted. There is plenty of evidence that it is not. The tragedy of this grows worse when we consider that God holds out His hand of mercy to a stubborn and rebellious people every day. What He offers is vastly superior and better for people than anything they have chosen instead. People choose things that will hurt them and eventually, God allows them to have it.

Of course, only God knows who is beyond His mercy. Our job is to make sure it is not us, by responding with repentance to God’s correction.

Also, Christians should never presume to know who is beyond mercy. God puts us in our culture and puts people in our lives with the task of influencing them for good with the Gospel message and Gospel living. The people you rub shoulders with day by day are not in your life by coincidence. God put them there.  Today, thank God that He preserves whole cultures through the faithful living of His people. Make your small corner of the world a better place.

Galatians 3:1-6 (ESV)

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. [2] Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? [3] Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? [4] Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? [5] Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith— [6] just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?

Note the several ways Paul challenges the heresy that is threatening the Galatian churches:

1) To believe it is to be under some sort of spell. To embrace the Gospel and then add to the glorious work of Christ is to be duped big time. Of course Paul does not think that someone has actually cast a spell upon the Galatians, but his point is that to add anything to the Gospel is to believe some horribly bad stuff.

2) To abandon the Gospel for a system of works is foolish. The Galatians are playing the fool. We may like to blame others for the cleverness of their arguments, the slickness of their presentation, or the attractiveness of the presenters, but in the end we are the ones responsible for what we believe. To fall for a false Gospel after having had it so plainly demonstrated and explained to them, is foolish, no matter how the opposite arguments came to them. People who abandon the Gospel are people who never had it. That is who the real fools are.

3)They are denying the things that they were taught. People who know the Gospel should be able to detect when a denial of it surfaces. Believers have a responsibility to know and study the Gospel and the truths that come out of it. The Gospel we have been taught is for the praise of God’s glory. Anything that puts credit to us for coming to Christ is missing the grand teaching of the Gospel.

We have a glorious Gospel. It should thrill our hearts. We must be on our guard that we never misrepresent it. We must not be so foolish as to as to give it up for stupid counterfeits. And we must grow in our understanding of the Gospel and remember that it will always give God, not us or anyone else, the glory.

Galatians 2:17-21

17But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not! 18For if I rebuild what I tore down, I prove myself to be a transgressor. 19For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. 20I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.

Paul continues to argue why it is unthinkable to add works of the law to salvation by faith alone in Christ alone, in order to be saved. Verse 18 – To uphold one is to destroy the other. If Paul, who has preached the Gospel, now begins to promote the Law, he will be building up what he already tore down.

It is the death of Christ that brings us to die to sin. The work of the cross is complete. Our sin was completely dealt with at the cross and to say that we must do something in order to merit salvation is to make the cross insufficient. We live by faith in Christ and nothing else.

Far from causing people to live godless lives, the Gospel of the cross liberates people from their slavery to sin and produces people who long to grow in holiness and who show true grace in repentant living. This needs to be emphasized very greatly. There are some, maybe even many, who say that if we preach salvation in Christ alone by faith alone, and do not mention that good works must follow, that we are going to produce Christians who live unholy lives. This is a denial of the Gospel’s power.

It is quite right to say that conversion must produce holy living. But it also needs to be emphasized that a real reception of Christ by faith will always produce a change. People do not start living holy because they are taught well by us. They start living well because they now belong to Christ. To say that the problem with modern evangelism is lack of follow-up is to believe that someone may be a Christian and not live holy, or it is to believe that people can lose their salvation.

People need to be taught. Christians can be overtaken in some sins. But there is no such thing as a true believer who wants to continue on in his sins, with a ticket to heaven in his back pocket. The Holy Spirit does something far more wonderful than that. Do not claim to be a Christian if your life has not turned around toward Him. That is self deceit and it will kill you – forever.

But to say that your holiness is earning points for eternal life is to deny the Gospel altogether. Today, demonstrate the power of the Gospel of faith alone in Christ alone.

Psalm 69:1-6

1Save me, O God!

For the waters have come up to my neck.

2I sink in deep mire,

where there is no foothold;

I have come into deep waters,

and the flood sweeps over me.

3 I am weary with my crying out;

my throat is parched.

My eyes grow dim

with waiting for my God.

4 More in number than the hairs of my head

are those who hate me without cause;

mighty are those who would destroy me,

those who attack me with lies.

What I did not steal

must I now restore?

5O God, you know my folly;

the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you.

6Let not those who hope in you be put to shame through me,

O Lord GOD of hosts;

let not those who seek you be brought to dishonor through me,

O God of Israel.

David, as is common in his poetry, is calling out to God because of the constant abuse of his enemies. David is innocent of the charges that his enemies have levied against him (verse 4), but he knows that he is not innocent in the eyes of God. We are all sinners and no matter how unjust our suffering may be, we can never say that we are completely without fault. David knows this too. He acknowledges that his sins are folly and known to God.

Then, in the midst of great suffering he prays a remarkable thing in verses 5 and 6. “Let not those who put their hope in you be put to shame through me”. There is a godly heart and a godly prayer and we would do well to pray it. “O Lord, do not allow my sins to make other followers of you be put to shame”.

We live in an age when even in the Christian camp almost anything goes. Sexual sin, broken marriages, ethical misconduct in churches and businesses are all practised by professing Christians and they all bring the church into disrepute. It is highly doubtful whether Christians guilty of reputation damaging sins prayed this. In light of how many times the sins get repeated by the same people it makes one wonder if repentance was ever an issue.

We need to pray for strength to persevere in holiness by the power of the Holy Spirit. We need to truly repent when we fall. And we need to love God and His church enough that one of our concerns about our sin is that God’s name and the reputation of His people is brought into shame when we fall. May the fear of that help us stay on the straight and narrow and may we love our brothers and sisters so much that we would never hurt them with our sin or our response to it.

In Colossians 1: 24 the apostle Paul makes a statement that contains two words that most folks would argue should never be found in the same sentence. Paul says, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake”.

Now, by nature, nobody in their right mind would ever use the word rejoice anywhere near the word suffering. If I took a little survey and asked people what words came to their mind when I say the word suffering, I’d be willing to bet that “rejoicing” wouldn’t be on anybody’s list. That would be the exact opposite of what you would think. I’d probably get words like “STOP” and “OUCH”…not “rejoicing”.

But Paul says to the Colossian, ”…I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake”. Crazy!

Now what on earth would possess a man to rejoice in the face of suffering the way that Paul did? Well, I think we learn a couple of things from Colossians 1:24. Notice that Paul says he rejoices in his suffering “for your sake” that is, for the sake of the Colossian believers, and then he says that he is “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” There are two things that enable Paul to have joy in suffering: 1) He knows that his suffering is for the benefit of other believers & 2) He knows that is suffering is because of his Union with Christ.

Paul’s was able to rejoice because he knew that his suffering was not in vain. His suffering was for the good of other believers and his suffering was evidence of his union with Christ. Because Paul knew well what it meant to suffer for the sake of the gospel, he was better able to sympathize with other Christians who suffered. And not only that, but he was also able to comfort them. In 2 Corinthians 1 Paul writes,

 “For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same suffering we suffer (2 Corinthians 1:5-6)

Paul saw his suffering as a way of strengthening and encouraging the faith of other Christians. And on top of that, he saw his suffering as evidence of his union with Christ. Paul saw himself as “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church.” What is he saying? What does he mean…he’s filling up what’s lacking in Christ’s suffering?

Well, let’s start with what we know he doesn’t mean. We know he can’t mean that Christ’s sacrifice is somehow insufficient (not good enough) and that his suffering somehow adds to what Christ has already done. The Bible is very clear about the sufficiency of Christ’s work on the cross.

“Christ suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God” 1 Peter 3:18

In other words, Christ’s ONE sacrifice was sufficient, it was good enough.

Hebrews 1:3 says of Jesus, “ after He had made purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the majesty of high.”

He sat down because His work was complete. It was finished. There was nothing left to be done.

Hebrews 10:11-12 says, “And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. but when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice, he sat down at the right hand of God.”

Paul is not saying that his suffering adds anything to the sacrifice of Christ. Christ and his work are sufficient. You can’t add anything to them. Paul is simply saying that he’s doing his share as a follower of Jesus. Anyone who is united to Christ by faith will suffer. The Bible is clear about that. 2 Tim. 3:12 says,

“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”

Part of being a follower of Christ…being united to him is sharing in His sufferings. When you follow Christ, that’s part of what you sign up for. Suffering for being a follower of Christ is to be expected. And when you suffer for being a Christian, don’t look at it as an indication that the LORD has abandoned you. Suffering is part of what Jesus himself promised to those who belong to him! So…be encouraged. Be like Paul…and rejoice!