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At or near the top of the New York Times bestseller list for many months, Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now) has a significant audience. What is his thesis? He reveals his motivation on page 1, telling the story of a man who had some success. While on vacation in Hawaii, this man saw a beautiful home, but knew he wouldn’t live in a home like that because he reasoned, “as long as you can’t imagine it, as long as you can’t see it, then it is not going to happen for you.” Osteen then comments,
“The man correctly realized that his own thoughts and attitudes were condemning him to mediocrity. He determined then and there to start believing better of himself, and believing better of God. It’s the same way with us. We have to conceive it on the inside before we’re ever going to receive it on the outside. If you don’t think you can have something good, you never will. The barrier is in your mind. It’s not God’s lack of resources or your own lack of talent that prevents you from prospering. Your own wrong thinking can keep you from God’s best.”
So, says this contemporary “prophet,” the sign of God’s blessing is material prosperity and peace. [In a recent interview, he also said, “Think big. Think increase. Think abundance. Think more than enough....I believe God wants us to prosper. But prosperity may mean a better relationship with your wife and your family. I’m just saying I don’t believe God’s wants us to be poor. God wants us to be happy, to pay the bills, to send our kids to college and to help other people.” I wonder if he’s read Matthew 10:34-39; 2 Cor. 8:1-5; 2 Timothy 3:10-12; or 1 Peter 4:12-16.] It sounds like he should also read Jeremiah 28. Perhaps the message of peace by a self-proclaimed prophet is for his own benefit, rather than the benefit of the people he “serves.” D. A. Carson said it well when he commented on this passage,
Jeremiah does not deny that a faithful and godly prophet, in a particular historical circumstance, might prophecy peace. But he treats the possibility as so improbable that implicitly he advocates a certain healthy skepticism until the predicted peace has actually come to pass. By contrast, the normal and expected themes of faithful prophets have to do with prophesying “war, disaster and plague against many countries and kingdoms.” This is not because prophets are a dour and morbid lot. It is because faithful prophets deal with sin and its horrible consequences, and call people to flee from the wrath to come. Jeremiah insists that this lies at the heart of genuinely prophetic ministry. [For the Love of God, vol. 2; my emphasis.]
I believe all our contemporary prophets of good fortune and prosperity (and we ourselves) could use more ministries like Jeremiah’s.
Yesterday Elizabeth asked me what Martin Luther said in his 95 theses (declarations) to the church in Wittenberg. You may read the theses here. The statements were his attempt to bring the church to a point of repentance for its corruption of the truth of the gospel -- that man is saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. His first declaration summarizes the rest very well: "When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said 'Repent,' He called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance."
For more information about Luther's life and influence, you may read or listen to John Piper's biographical message that he did at the Bethlehem Baptist Church pastor's conference ten years ago.
In honor of Tuesday being Reformation Day (the 489th anniversary of the posting of Martin Luther's 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg), here is the first in a series of quotes from some of the reformers on the importance of the gospel:
"Either sin is with you, lying on your shoulders, or it is lying on Christ, the Lamb of God. Now if it is lying on your back, you are lost; but if it is resting on Christ, you are free, and you will be saved. Now choose what you want." [Martin Luther]
Why someone wants to be saved is no small question. It penetrates the heart of our motives and offers a clear view of the desire of our heart. (Do we want God or do we want a gift that God gives?)
If God is not your ultimate joy and desire, you may not be saved. If you don’t care about heaven (and seeing God), but you only care about your bank account and television and clothes and video games and sex and food and having a headache relieved -- and heaven and seeing the face of God are no attraction to you, then you have every reason to question whether you are saved, because the essence of salvation is that we are saved from God’s wrath so that we can enjoy God’s presence.
John Piper summarizes the issue well in his recent book, God is the Gospel (p. 47):
If we believe [propitiation, redemption, forgiveness, imputation, sanctification, liberation, healing and heaven] have happened to us, but do not embrace them for the sake of getting to God, they have not happened to us. Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It’s a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don’t want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.
Those who are saved are saved eternally by the work of the eternal Godhead on their behalf. What does each member of the Godhead do for believers in Christ? [This list is nowhere near exhaustive, but it is a good starting point.] The work of the Father to secure you
- He has sovereign purposes and has made an unconditional promise (Jn. 3:16; 5:24; 6:37; 2 Tim. 1:1; Titus 1:1-2) — it is an inter-trinitarian promise that cannot be broken!
- He has infinite power to save and keep you (Jn. 10:29; Rom. 8:31, 38-39; Eph. 1:19-21
- He has infinite love for the Son (and you) to keep you (Rom. 5:7-10)
- He has joy in fulfilling the prayer of the Son to keep you (Jn. 17:9-12, 20)
The work of the Son to secure you
- His substitutionary death secures you (Rom. 8:1; 1 Jn. 2:1-2; 2 Cor. 5:20-21)
- His resurrection secures your resurrection (1 Cor 15:20-23; Eph. 2:5-6)
- His eternal work as your advocate (Rom. 8:31-34; Heb. 9:24)
- His eternal priestly work for you (Heb. 7:23-25)
The work of the Spirit to secure you
- He regenerates you (Jn. 1:13; 3:3-6; Tt. 3:4-6)
- He indwells you (Rom. 5:5; 8:9; Jn. 7:37-39)
- He baptizes you (1 Cor. 12:13)
- He seals you (as a guarantee of a future promise, Eph. 1:13-14; 4:30)
-----------------------------
This morning I came across the following statement from Oswald Chambers:
I am not saved by believing; I realize I am saved by believing. It is not repentance that saves me, repentance is the sign that I realize what God has done in Christ Jesus. The danger is to put the emphasis on the effect instead of on the cause. It is my obedience that puts me right with God, my consecration. Never! I am put right with God because prior to all, Christ died. When I turn to God and by belief accept what God reveals I can accept, instantly the stupendous Atonement of Jesus Christ rushes me into a right relationship with God; and by the supernatural miracle of God’s grace I stand justified, not because I am sorry for my sin, not because I have repented, but because of what Jesus has done. The Spirit of God brings it with a breaking, all-over light, and I know, though I do not know how, that I am saved.
The salvation of God does not stand on human logic, it stands on the sacrificial Death of Jesus. We can be born again because of the Atonement of Our Lord. Sinful men and women can be changed into new creatures, not by their repentance or their belief, but by the marvellous work of God in Christ Jesus which is prior to all experience. The impregnable safety of justification and sanctification is God Himself. We have not to work out these things ourselves; they have been worked out by the Atonement. The supernatural becomes natural by the miracle of God; there is the realization of what Jesus Christ has already done — “It is finished.” [Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, October 28.]
“Consider the excellency of the scriptures. There is a transcendent glory in them, which whoso discern cannot miss to hug and embrace them. To commend the bible to you, I shall say these eight things of it. [Here is the first only.] 1. It is the best of books. They may know much, ye think, that have many good books; but have ye the bible, and ye have the best book in the world. It is the book of the Lord, dictated by unerring, infinite wisdom. There is no dross here with the gold, no chaff with the corn. Every word of God is pure. There is nothing for our salvation to be had in other books, but what is learned from this. They are but the rivulets that run from this fountain, and all shine with light borrowed from hence. And it has a blessing annexed to it, a glory and a majesty in it, an efficacy with it, that no other book has the like. Therefore Luther professed he would burn his books he had writ, rather than they should divert people from reading the scriptures.” [Thomas Boston (1676-1732)]
HT: Coty Pinckney (4/14/05)
I thought about the grace of God as I read the newspaper this week, because the writers of two essays didn’t.
The first essay, “Control Issues” by Daniel Akst rightly evaluates the lack of self-control that is rampant in our culture. He perceptively writes,
Most of us who live with children and computers know about software for controlling how the former use the latter. But what about the grownups who can’t control themselves?
For adult Internet users ready to admit that they're in the grip of a higher power, there is Covenant Eyes, a Web site that will keep track of all the other Web sites you visit –- and e-mail this potentially incriminating list to an “accountability partner” of your choosing.
The existence of Covenant Eyes is a measure of just how hard it can be to control ourselves nowadays in a landscape of boundless temptation. Thanks to rising affluence, loosening social constraints and the inexorable march of technology, most of us have more opportunities to overindulge than ever before. Life in modern Western cultures is like living at a giant all-you-can-eat buffet offering more calories, credit, sex, intoxicants and just about anything else one could take to excess than our forebears might ever have imagined.
While temptations have multiplied like fast-food outlets in the suburbs, the superstructure of external restraint that once helped check our impulses has been seriously eroded, in part by the same inexorably subversive force — capitalism — that has given us the wherewithal to indulge.…
Stigma, the ugly form of social shame that once helped keep so many of us in line, has withered like a cold soufflé.…Financial constraints, meanwhile, once a ready substitute for willpower, have been swept away by surging affluence and the remarkable openhandedness of lenders.…
Nor is the family, that other traditional brake on behavior, anything like the force it once was, here or elsewhere.
…the eyes of neighbors are no longer upon us.…
‘Self-regulation failure is the major social pathology of the present time,’ say psychologists Roy F. Baumeister, Todd F. Heatherton and Dianne M. Tice, who explore the subject in their book Losing Control: How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation.…
As the structures of constraint come tumbling down, the ability to control ourselves only grows in importance.
Yet for all his helpful insights about the culture, his analysis of where and how we live stops far short of providing assistance. His concluding sentence demonstrates his failure to understand the significance of the issue and what can be done: “Self-regulation is a challenge, but one not nearly so daunting as the poverty and tyranny that are its most effective substitutes.”
The other essay, “What's the point of the success treadmill?” appeared on Monday. It lamented the lives of college students who are already weary of a “hurry, hurry” pace of life at 18 and 20 years of age garnered from the expectations of success (foisted on them by their own desires and an ever-present set of cultural mores). “They drink coffee and run ragged for 18 hours trying to beef up the resumes we tell them their very survival is dependent upon.”
What do people who can’t control their appetites and can’t control their desires (or have no direction in life) need? They need the grace of God.
People struggle with self-control because of heredity — the heredity of the sinful flesh inherited from Adam. They struggle because they are sinners. And until they acknowledge that their sin has infiltrated every fiber of their being, corrupting all that they do and are, they will never be able to be free (Rom. 6:20).
People struggle with a pace of life and expectations (from themselves and others) because they have not learned that there is only one thing worth living for — the glory of God (Rom. 11:36).
Only when sin is acknowledged can the grace of God be applied. Only when the direction of life is towards God is His gracious strengthening made available.
We struggle because we have thought too much about ourselves and too little about the grace of God.
Al Mohler's synthesis of yesterday's decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court to grant the rights and privileges of marital status to those in same-sex relationships is particularly worth reading. He offers a clear summary of the decision and then several important paragraphs of analysis.
The supreme gift given by the Father to the Son is a redeemed people that will eternally glorify and delight in the Son. That means that we who are saved are God’s great gift to His Son. And those whom the Father has given to the Son not only will not be lost by the Son, they cannot be lost by the Son. Why? Because “the Son views every soul given by the Father to Him as an expression of the Father’s irresistible love” [John MacArthur].
That also means that the salvation offered by Christ is not offered begrudgingly. Jesus does not have to be coerced into offering Himself a sacrifice for mankind. God doesn’t have to have an “attitude change” from wrath to mercy. Rather, this is the great means by which He demonstrates His love to the Son and glorifies both Himself and the Son.
Three closing quotes:
- “External familiarity with Christ means absolutely nothing if there’s no internal transformation.” [MacArthur]
- “It is not because of the excellence of our lives that we have been called [by God] but because of the love of our Savior.” [Theodoret]
- “At no point does the Gospel encourage us to believe that every man will hearken to it, charm we never so wisely. The prophets, for all their passionate sincerity, for all their courageous simplifyings of the Gospel, will meet many deaf adders who stop their ears. We must reckon with this certain fact, and refuse to be daunted by it. But also there comes a point where accommodation can go no further. It is the Gospel we have to present, however we do it. We cannot hope to do it unless we walk humbly with the modern man, as well as with God, unless we are much more eager to learn from him and about him, than to instruct him. God help us, it is all very difficult. But was there ever a task better worth trying to do, or one in which, whether we fail or succeed, we more surely find our freedom?” [Roger Lloyd]
Of the 111+ million households in America, less than 50% are now comprised of married couples (with or without children). So says new analysis done by the New York Times of data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.
There are multiple reasons for this growing cultural transformation — young adults marrying at later and later ages, and an increasing life expectancy that has resulted in more and more elderly people living as widows and widowers. Of course two other factors remain: a significant divorce rate that results in many becoming single again, and the large number of couples who cohabitate without marriage.
The Times assures “The numbers by no means suggests marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry.” Yet the Times also acknowledges that these changing numbers are significant: “…the potential social and economic implications are profound.”
In times past, the church has responded to news like this with the message of the sanctity of marriage, and that surely would have a measure of usefulness today. Yet we also need to hear the message that marriage is not only good, but needed. It is wise to consider singleness, so one might serve God with greater devotion (1 Cor. 7:32-35). But we also need to remind our singles that the intention of God at creation was that man and woman would live together in a married state. Marriage is a good gift and, in a sense, an urgent privilege (1 Cor. 7:1ff). For those who are unmarried and of marital age and yet remaining unmarried for unbiblical reasons, it is time to ask, “Why?”
I took a few days of vacation this past weekend. The heat of summer has receded to make camping a more reasonable option again, so we made our plans. Raye Jeanne and I would pack up on Friday morning, take out the girls early from school and make a short road trip to a nearby state park.
The weather couldn’t have been better on Friday. Clear, blue skies and comfortable temperatures abounded. A nice camping site was located, the tent went up quickly (the girls did it together for the first time!), a successful dinner was soon completed, and we had the beginnings of a weekend long competition of Mexican Train and a reading session around a roaring campfire. We couldn’t have asked for a better time.
Saturday morning, we awoke to clouds. No matter, they appeared to be the kind that would quickly dissipate. They didn’t.
We went to the park ranger’s office for ice, and asked for the weather report: “Twenty percent chance of rain today, 60% chance tonight and tomorrow. But there’s nothing on the radar anywhere near us. We should be ok through the afternoon.” Twenty minutes later it was raining.
This is, by our recollection, at least the fourth consecutive time we have camped in the rain. Now I appreciate rain as much as most people in North Texas, but packing a wet tent and then setting it up in my front yard or garage (it was the garage this time) to dry out is not a favored experience.
Some might think this a string of bad luck (actually, several have asked if I would please go camping in August). I prefer to think of it as God’s sovereignly good hand giving me gifts that are best for me. Evidently, the Lord believes that I need rain to sharpen my contentment with Him, instead of being dependent on circumstances for my happiness. That makes the combination of camping, rain and wet tents a good combination.
In fact, I think the term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien might fit. He said we needed a term that combined the ideas of catastrophe and goodness, so he offered the word “eucatastrophe.” That’s what camping in the rain (and all hard things) can be — a euchatastrophe — a hardship sovereignly designed by our kind and benevolent God to produce gratitude in us for His many graces.
From Mark Dever (The Deliberate Church):
While our individual walks are crucial, we are impoverished in our personal pursuit of God if we do not avial ourselves of the help that is avaiable through mutually edifying relationships in our covenant church family (Eph. 4:15-16; Heb. 10:24-25).
...the corporate life of the congregation should be central to the life of the individual believer (John 13:34-35; Eph. 3:10-11; 4:11-16; Heb. 10:24-25; 1 Jn. 4:20-21). We can't live the Christian life alone. We are saved individually from our sins, yet we are not saved into a vacuum. We're saved into a mutually edifying community of believers who are building each other up and spurring each other on to love and good deeds.
That last paragraph particularly is worth reading again (and again).
A. W. Tozer summarized the dangers of entertainment for our day (and he wrote this some 45 years ago) in his essay "The Great God Entertainment" (published in The Root of the Righteous):
…the ominous thing is that [entertainment's] power is almost exclusively evil, rotting the inner life, crowding out the long eternal thoughts which would fill the souls of men if they were but worthy to entertain them. And the whole thing has grown into a veritable religion which holds its devotees with a strange fascination, and a religion, incidentally, against which it is now dangerous to speak.
Find a copy of this book and read the rest of this penetrating essay!
The Handwriting Is on the Wall, says the Washington Post. On the 2006 SAT, only 15% of the test takers completed the essay portion in long hand. The rest printed their essays. Why? Writing in cursive is an art lost to the presence of keyboard, researchers say.
So my question is, if the keyboard has killed handwriting, has the Internet harmed reading? (And by reading, I mean books, not blogs.) Do people read more or less because of their internet experience? My suspicion, based on observation only (and I know the limitations of that), is that for all the proliferation of internet book sellers and box bookstore chains, we are not only writing less, but we are reading less too.
(HT: Al Mohler's Daily Links)
Seven times in the gospel of John Jesus makes a declarative statement about His deity by using the formula "I am..." These statements not only affirm His deity (with an allusion back to Exodus 3:14), but also reveal something about His character. They are:
- I am the bread of life (6:35)
- I am the light of the world (8:12)
- I am a gate for the sheep (10:7)
- I am the good shepherd (10:11, 14)
- I am the resurrection and the life (11:25)
- I am the way, the truth, the life (14:6)
- I am the true vine (15:1)
A leftover thought (or two) from Sunday's sermon.....
Near the end of the sermon on Sunday, I made the statement, “If Christ is not satisfying to you, you have likely never really tasted of His greatness and goodness.”
If Christ doesn’t quench your thirst and make you happy and glad with Him, then you probably have been drinking from empty and broken cisterns (Jer. 2:13), not to mention polluted well (Prov. 25:26).
So our task is to learn to be satisfied with Christ.
As I mentioned, one way to do that is to read the gospels, returning to our first love (Rev. 2:5) by filling our minds with the unsurpassed greatness of Christ.
Another way is to read books and listen to sermons of people who bask in the delight of Christ. Here are the kinds of writers and comments that stimulate that in me:
- “Believing in Jesus means coming to him for the quenching of our soul’s thirst. Faith in Christ is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.” [John Piper]
- Contemplating Matthew 21:31, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous are in that danger.”
- “The first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord.” [George Mueller]
- “…if Christ is the most majestic reality in the universe, then what must his love to us be? Sure not making much of us. That would not satisfy our souls. We were made for something much greater. If we are to be as happy as we can be, we must see and savor the most glorious person of all, Jesus Christ himself. This means that to love us, Jesus must seek the fullness of his glory and offer it to us for our enjoyment. That is why he prayed, the night before he died, ‘Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory’ (John 17:24). That was love. ‘I will show them my glory.’” [John Piper]
- “The endless stream of new goods and services which keeps us running at ‘breathless pace’…looks utterly worldly, and yet inscribed all over it is a misdirected desire for God.” [Miroslav Volf]
A left-over thought (or two) from Sunday's sermon.....
In 2 Timothy 4:8, 18, Paul again mentions the hope of heaven as his “crowning” joy. It has long seemed to me that, in general, believers long too little for heaven and are satisfied too quickly with earthly joys (and dissatisfied too deeply with earthly sorrows). Two passages from C. S. Lewis stimulated further thinking about that for me this weekend.
Saturday evening, in my preparation for Sunday morning, I reread C. S. Lewis’s chapter “Heaven” in The Problem of Pain. There he makes the commonly quoted statement that appeared in the sermon outline on Sunday morning (which I quote more fully here):
Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of heaven into the scale against the sufferings of earth, and no solution of the problem of pain which does not do so can be called a Christian one. We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about “pie in the sky,” and of being told that we are trying to “escape” from the duty of making a happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But either there is “pie in the sky” or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced whether it is useful at political meetings or no. Again, we are afraid that heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. There are re, wards that do not sully motives. A man’s love for a woman is not mercenary because be wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because be wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition seeks to enjoy its object.
In the chapter I also came across the following statement, which give us further reason for heaven to be our great desire. Lewis’s comments are made in the context of his consideration of Rev. 2:17. He writes,
What can be more a man’s own than this new name, which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.
Let our longing for heaven be deeper and our sorrows and pains on earth be shallower!
