God's Glory...Your Happiness

"God is as committed to your happiness in him, as he is committed to his glory in you." -- John Piper

Entitled?

"Entitlement is the enemy of thanksgiving."  -- Burk Parsons

"Blessed are the peacemakers (shalombuilders)..."

‘Blessed are the peacemakers – the shalom-builders – for they bear the family resemblance of the Father.’ Blessed are those who make peace, the full-fledged kind of peace that the Bible describes (shalom). Shalom is the way things are supposed to be, that blessed blend of flourishing, security and righteousness that God created, Man vandalized, and God is re-creating again.

So, blessed are those who participate in God’s good program, making things better in whatever sphere or situation in which they find themselves – promoting solutions and outcomes marked by what’s right and wise and good – solutions that really work in a world where so much has gone wrong, and where many foolishly, lazily or rebelliously continue to sabotage the good God has intended. Ultimately, they are sure to fail, for God is determined to remake this cosmo into a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness is at home (2 Pet. 3:13), at the time when God will vindicate, establish and reward all who have followed his lead.

No wonder Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called [recognize as] sons of God.” (Matt. 5:9)

Obedience...

"Obedience to the will of God is the pathway to perpetual honor and everlasting joy!" -- Charles Spurgeon

Centering Your Life on God and His Love

...the alternative is idolatry...

"You shall have no other gods before me. (Ex. 20:3)
“Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.” (1 Jn. 5:21)

'Most people think of sin primarily as breaking divine commandments, but the very first commandment is to “have no other gods before me.”

'So, according to the Bible, the primary way to understand sin is not just the doing of bad things, the making of even good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose and happiness than your relationship to God.

'Only if your identity is built on God and his love and grace can you have a self that can venture anything, face anything.' (Tim Keller)

The Alternative?: Living in Idolatry (‘God-substitutes’)

Here is a list of various ‘god-substitutes’ and the particular kinds of brokenness and damage that each one brings into a life:

• If you center your life and identity on your spouse, you will be emotionally dependent, jealous, and controlling. The other person’s problems and flaws will be overwhelming to you.

• If you center your life and identity on your family and children, you will try to live your life through your children until they resent you or have no self of their own. At worst, you may abuse them when they displease you.

• If you center your life and identity on your work and career, you will be a driven workaholic and a boring, shallow person. At worst you will lose family and friends and, if your career goes poorly, develop deep depression.

• If you center your life and identity on money and possessions, you’ll be eaten up by worry or jealousy about money. You’ll be willing to do unethical things to maintain your lifestyle, which will eventually blow up your life.

• If you center your life and identity on pleasure, gratification, and comfort, you will find yourself getting addicted to something. You will become chained to the ‘escape strategies’ by which you try to avoid the hardness of life.

• If you center your life and identity on relationships and approval, you will be constantly overly hurt by criticism and thus always losing friends. You will fear confronting others and therefore will be a useless friend.

• If you center your life and identity on a ‘noble cause,’ you will divide the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and demonize your opponents. Ironically, you will be controlled by your enemies. Without them, you have no purpose.

• If you center your life and identity on religion and morality, you will, if you are living up to your moral standards, be proud, self-righteous, and cruel. If you don’t live up to your standards, you guilt will be devastating.

In pride we become obsessed with whatever interferes with people making much of us.

Our besetting sins are warning signs that our characteristic idolatry is at work.

‘Only if your identity is built on God and his love and grace can you have a self that can venture anything, face anything.’


-- based on chapter 10 (“The Problem of Sin”) of Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God” (Dutton)

The Bible's Purpose...

"The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life. The Bible’s purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome.

"Religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference."

— Tim Keller

The Curse or the Crown

"Behold, what manner of love is this, that Christ should be arraigned and we adorned, that the curse should be laid on His head and the crown set on ours." - Thomas Watson

Credo

I should live joyfully, courageously and purposefully before God everyday as his loved child (being renewed in his image) in the obedience of faith, faith [belief that engenders vital confidence] in his contrary-to-what-I-deserve love/grace/goodness towards me in Christ my Savior/Mediator (by his atoning cross and victorious resurrection), in accordance with his Gospel-centered Word, empowered by His gracious Spirit, trusting in his loving fatherly Providence that extends to every detail of my life and situation now, and hoping in the perfect happiness and glory that he has promised me for eternity.

C.S. Lewis: "The Really Foolish Thing People Often Say About Christ"

On the 50th anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite quotes:

‎"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

-- C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"

The Devil Makes the Law Out of the Gospel

“It is the supreme art of the devil that he can make the law out of the gospel.  If I can hold on to the distinction between law and gospel, I can say to him any and every time that he should kiss my backside.  Even if I sinned I would say, ‘Should I deny the gospeI on this account?’ . . . Once I debate about what I have done and left undone, I am finished.  But if I reply on the basis of the gospel, ‘The forgiveness of sins covers it all,’ I have won.”

-- Martin Luther, quoted in Reinhard Slenczka, “Luther’s Care of Souls for Our Times,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 67 (2003): 42.

The Gettysburg Address

Today is the 150th Anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

"Can Life Have Meaning without God?"

A fascinating discussion/debate focused on the question, "Can life have meaning without God?" -- featuring Tim Keller (author and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church of NYC) and Greg Epstein (humanist chaplain at Harvard).  This webcast begins with Max McLean presenting a compelling rendition of C.S. Lewis's essay, "On Living in an Atomic Age."

The Functions of the Law and the Gospel

"The office [function] of the law is to show us the disease, in such a way as to show us, at the same time, no hope of cure: the office [function] of the gospel is, to bring a remedy to those that were past hope. For as the law leaves a man to himself, it condemns him, of necessity, to death; while the gospel, bringing him to Christ, opens the gate of life."


— John Calvin
Commentary on 2 Corinthians

'Your sins move him to pity more than anger...'

"We may have the strongest consolations and encouragements against our sins. . . . There is comfort, in that your very sins move him to pity more than to anger. . . . Christ takes part with you, and is far from being provoked against you, as all his anger is turned upon your sin to ruin it; yea, his pity is increased the more towards you, even as the heart of a father is to a child that hath some loathsome disease, or as one is to a member of his body that hath the leprosy, he hates not the member, for it is his flesh, but the disease, and that provokes him to pity the part affected the more. . . . The greater the misery is, the more is the pity when the party is beloved.

"Now of all miseries, sin is the greatest, and while you look at it as such, Christ will look upon it as such also. And he, loving your persons, and hating only the sin, his hatred shall all fall, and that only upon the sin, to free you of it by its ruin and destruction, but his affections shall be the more drawn out to you; and this as much when you lie under sin as under any other affliction. Therefore fear not."

-- Thomas Goodwin on Jeremiah 31:20 in "The Heart of Christ"

Corrie Ten Boom on Trusting God

"Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God." --Corrie Ten Boom