I am NOT Robot...

So I will admit that I am a ‘Calvinist’, if you please. Perhaps a Lutheran at heart would be more accurate. However you want to describe it, I am one who believes that God accomplishes our salvation completely (in case you couldn’t tell). I don’t want to take responsibility for any part of my salvation, even the believing, because to me that introduces my sin into God’s perfect equation.

There is one thing that I am not though. I am not a robot. The reason I say that is that I often hear it argued that if we are not in any way responsible for our salvation then we are just God’s little robots. We are playthings like dolls that God can do with as he pleases. Of course we don’t find this idea anywhere in scripture, but to our human reasoning it makes sense and so we hold onto it as a means of preserving at least the smallest bit of ownership in our ‘choice’ to be a Christian. To be ‘saved’ by the pure mercy of God is undignified. How could a being created in the image of God need to rely solely upon the same God for salvation? It’s embarrassing. It prevents me from boasting about anything but Christ.

That last bit sounds familiar. It should. Paul repeats it over and over again in many places. For example:

God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:28-31 ESV)

What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it? (1 Corinthians 4:7 ESV)

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9 ESV)

By his own words, Paul would have to be condemned by the same argument as a robot. He clearly does not believe that he or his hearers were in the slightest saved by their own actions. Paul’s thinking is an affront to human dignity. It’s preposterous.

Or is it? I used an analogy a while ago that has been coming back to me again and again. Picture yourself as shipwrecked and drifting in a lifeboat. All you can see in any direction is ocean. Your food and water are gone and you have barely enough strength to lift your head occasionally to scan the horizon for land, knowing that even if you spotted land you have no chance of making it there by your own power. You are alive, but only on borrowed time. You can do nothing to save yourself. The only thing left for you is death.

Then, as you lift your head one time you spot a faint dark cloud on the horizon. The next time you muster your strength to lift your eyes you can see that the cloud is smoke from the funnels of a ship. The next time you can make out the funnels themselves and finally the white hull comes into view. The ship puts a boat in the water and your rescuers row to you, retrieving you from your own boat, and bring you aboard the ship. The captain tells you that they have spent days searching for you and the crew rejoices at finding you.

What would you have to be not to love and appreciate the captain of that ship? A robot. What would you think of someone in this situation who boasted along the lines of, “I am so glad that I recognized your ship in the distance! If not for that I might never have been saved!” And yet that is the very kind of boasting that we reserve for ourselves. We cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge that this rescue was completely and utterly one-sided. 

The problem with us is two-fold. First, we rarely acknowledge what dire straits we were in when we were rescued. We really deep-down believe that we were not that bad. We think that somewhere way down in the recesses of our heart is that image of God that responds to God favorably. We don’t recognize that we have neither the strength nor the inclination to respond to God.

Secondly, and perhaps because we are misguided in our understanding of ourselves, we must boast. To allow that God is completely responsible for our salvation is to be embarrassingly at his mercy. It is to acknowledge that there was not one shred of righteousness within us that would merit God’s favor. We can’t stand that. Most of us won’t endure it. So we say that if we don’t choose God then we must be robots. We must be God’s playthings. That if love is not freely brought forth of our will then it is no love at all.

Try and tell that to our fictional cast-away. Does he will to love the captain, or is love for the captain the most honest and natural response for him? Does he even worry about reserving the right to love the captain or not? Or is he so caught up in the joy of being rescued that his rights don’t even come to mind?

Go ahead and believe that we are robots if we don’t respond to God because we will to respond to God. I don’t think it makes you any less saved. Boast in what you feel you need to. But on the last day, when you face God, there is only one boast that counts for anything. Why not accept that and start living it today rather than waiting for that day? That is the gospel truth.

God Bless

Seeing Christ in Joseph

Genesis Chapter 50 ends the saga from Adam to Joseph in a very sudden fashion. We learn of Israel’s death at the end of chapter 49, and chapter recounts the days of his mourning and that Joseph’s brothers, fearing that Joseph might retaliate for their wrongdoing in selling him into slavery, send him a message stating that Israel had demanded that he forgive them. Joseph of course did forgive them with the famous words, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” (Genesis 50:20 ESV)

In hindsight, we can often see where God has worked things out for good. And if the story of the Israelites in Egypt ended there, with Joseph as the hero who had saved the world from famine, there would be nothing more to say on the matter. All would be good as the Israelites take their ease with their flocks and herds in Goshen.

But the story, skipping a great number of years, picks up again in Exodus 1.

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens. (Exodus 1:8-11 ESV)

So what God originally intended for good had become a form of slavery because God’s delivery through Joseph was forgotten. This happens frequently in our lives when we allow our deliverer to be forgotten. God accomplishes something for great good and we, by forgetting the great good God has brought us, twist it into a form of slavery. We do it all the time. We first embrace the good with gratitude and then we become complacent. We begin to forget that it was God who provided and we idolize the good things he has provided. We place our faith in good rather than God, and we become slaves to it.

Joseph is a wonderful type of Christ. Through obedience in unjust suffering he rises to become the deliverer of the world. Through his action alone is the entire world saved from sure death. But he is also a wonderful type of Christ in that his hard-won deliverance is soon forgotten. And the Israelites, like the proverbial frog in the slowly heated pot, are a wonderful type of us. Once we have become comfortable, we forget that suffering from which we have been delivered. Peter speaks of one who is not growing in Christ as being “so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.” (2 Peter 1:9 ESV) We are indeed often nearsighted to the point of blindness as we seek our ease.

The key to Christian living is to never become comfortable. This seems odd to us (particularly in the west) who have been subtly taught that the Christian life should be the most comfortable of all – that we have in some way earned the salvation that we have received and so can rest in it. We forget that, like Joseph’s brothers, the only part we played in our deliverance was to provide the sin that made it necessary. We are always looking to hit that comfortable spot and coast in it, but as soon as we do we begin to idolize the source of our comfort and become slaves to whatever it is that makes us comfortable.

That discomfort is an important element of Christian life should be evident in the beatitudes. If we want to inherit God’s kingdom we must be poor in spirit and persecuted. If we want to be satisfied we must hunger and thirst. If we want to be comforted, we must mourn. When we seek to be comforted while avoiding mourning, we become complacent. That is the nature of our beast.

So we cannot expect any state of permanent comfort unless we also expect a state of permanent mourning. We must find a balance between them. We cannot live in a state of free grace unaware of the demands of a holy law. There is a tension that must exist between the two which keeps us from forgetting our deliverance and seeking comfort alone. At the same time we must never allow our mourning to drive us from the source of our comfort. To focus on one without the other is to become imbalanced and unhealthy Christians.

Keep in mind also that Egypt was not to be the ultimate destination for Israel.  God has promised Abraham that his offspring would inherit Canaan. Their slavery also had a purpose; it was to drive them to mourning so that they would again seek God’s deliverance. When we refuse to embrace mourning, God will find a way to force us to it. But if we can recognize that in the impossible standard of the law God has given us reason enough to mourn, we will seldom grow complacent. If we will continually allow the law to reveal our spiritual poverty to us and drive us to mourning, the gospel will be our continual comfort. That is the gospel truth.

God Bless

Striving to Enter God’s Rest

In our small group study last night we were talking over Hebrews chapter 4 and the following passage of scripture brought out a lively discussion:

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience. (Hebrews 4:11 ESV)

The disobedience that the writer refers to is the unbelief of the Israelites in the incident where the spies returned from the Promised Land and the people refused to enter due to their unbelief. No one in that generation ever entered the land except Caleb and Joshua, as God had said “They shall not enter my rest.”

The interesting part of the passage is the idea of striving to enter God’s rest. How and why exactly would we need to strive to enter God’s rest, and what rest is spoken of?

The rest that we strive to enter is of course ceasing doing the work of the law as a means of obtaining God’s favor. Many Christians have experienced this rest at some point in their Christian life. When we enter this rest it is as if a tremendous burden has been lifted from our shoulders as we recognize that Christ has done all that needs to be done to satisfy the wrath of God on our behalf and we can finally stop our endless striving to work for God’s approval. That we can relate to. But what of this strange striving to enter the rest? Have we not entered it already?

We use the term “once saved always saved” to describe salvation, which is truthful in that once we are saved God will never let us go (eternal security). We need only be saved one time and we do not fall in and out of the grace of God with each transgression and repentance that we experience (as the writer says in Chapter 6, verse 6, to do so would be “crucifying once again the Son of God”). But we have also associated this phrase with the idea that we, having once entered God’s rest, will always remain in God’s rest, and this is simply (and obviously) not the case. While we are once saved, we must constantly strive to rest in the righteousness of Christ and not some attempted righteousness of our own.

We can perceive this drifting in and out of God’s rest in our own lives, but I think very few are ever able to acknowledge what’s happening to them. In churches whose doctrine allows that we can lose and regain our salvation it is interpreted to be the drifting in and out of salvation. In churches where it is believed that people are “once saved always saved” it may be interpreted as never having experienced saving faith. But it is actually the constant ping-ponging of ourselves between the understanding that we are saved by grace and our human desire to save ourselves by the works of the law. It is alternating between trusting completely in Christ’s righteousness (God’s rest) and our own attempted righteousness (the works of the law – the disobedience of unbelief).

If we are not striving to enter the rest we have in Christ, we will revert to our natural mode of attempting to create a righteousness of our own. I believe this process of striving is exactly what Paul refers to in the book of Philippians when he tells his audience:

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12-13 ESV)

He reminds his readers that salvation is God’s work, not their own. Strive to continue to understand that it is God who works in you both to will and work his pleasure. Once you begin trying to will and work righteousness on your own, you are on dangerous ground. Fear falling into this self-righteousness – the worst of all forms of disobedience.

I like the way the writer of Hebrews puts this because it gives us an effective way to test ourselves. We know whether or not we are at rest, which tells us exactly whose righteousness we are relying on at any given moment. Are we short-tempered today? There is no rest in that so we must, somehow, be relying upon our own righteousness. What must we do to correct this? Need we be saved again or doubt that we were ever saved to begin with? No, we must strive to enter God’s rest once again. We must lay aside our attempts at righteousness and embrace the only righteousness which God accepts – that of Jesus Christ – as ours (dare I say that this is nothing less than true repentance?). We can easily determine whether we are living according to law or grace by whether we are in a state of spiritual rest.

There is much more to be said on this subject, so perhaps I will explore it over this next week. In the meantime, we must continually strive to enter God’s rest. That is the gospel truth.

God Bless.

Not That We Have Loved God

My dad and I were conversing last night. We were celebrating my birthday a couple of days late. He said something to the effect that he was proud of me and wishes he could surrender his life as I have. I certainly don’t see myself as a poster child for surrender, and I related to him that I didn’t like the word surrender because it indicates that I have something of value to defend from God. I have nothing of the sort. He said, in effect, that what he means is that he wishes he were willing to embrace God whole-heartedly. That spoke volumes to me and forced me to think a few things through.

What would you think if I said that the human will has very little to do with faith? I truly believe that it has little to do with our coming to faith (as Jesus said in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”) and I also think it has little to do with our remaining faithful. If the human will were capable of doing such as loving the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul and strength or loving our neighbor as ourself, we would have no need of redemption. We could simply exercise our will to be in line with the will of God and it would be done. Christ on the cross becomes a waste.

How many Christians are sitting in pews every week bemoaning the fact that that they are not willing to serve God with all their heart? I have no idea, but the percentage is probably pretty high. We rail all the time against this attitude we have as a church that we can just tack Jesus onto our already ‘decent’ lives and make them better, and yet that is what we preach. We express the gospel as an exercise of the will; “Turn from your sins and trust in Jesus”. Perhaps it is because words fail to express the depth of the gospel that we preach it as such, but more than likely it is because this idea of ‘willful goodness’ is deeply entrenched in us. It is that one form of self-serving that is considered acceptable in Christians. It appeals to us because it is the last vestige of legalism we can hold onto without people recognizing us as legalists.

I think the best way to get the point across is to speak it plainly: you will never love God completely by an act of your will. It is not possible to do so. You will never surrender your idols as an act of your will. If we could do that, God would not need to dislodge them violently by the intrusion of the gospel. This is where it helps to think back to when you were first saved. There was a sense that you had been aggressively pushed out of the world. You could not have put it in words at the moment, but you could sense that something had been done to you. You were still close enough to the acknowledgment of your sin to know that the changes taking place in your life were not an act of the will. You felt that you had been rescued, and you acted as would a shipwreck survivor who had been plucked from a lifeboat after a lifetime at sea. Every bite of food, every drink of water, every bit of human companionship was special beyond words because of the rescue; because without that rescue you would have not been able to enjoy any of them.

Unfortunately the subtle message of the will is always creeping back in to make us forget that we have been rescued. “Sure you were rescued. We were all rescued. But hey, that was a long time ago. You need to stop being so ridiculously happy about being rescued and get down to the business at hand.” For us, faith ceases to be a miraculous salvation from certain death and becomes a matter of exhausting ourselves trying to repay our rescuer. We work hard at forgetting that we are sinners and covering up our sin, and in the process we lose the joy of being rescued from the reality that sin still plagues us. We are told that as Christians we have it together and we ought to be ‘getting better’ and we believe it. So we put on a happy face and become, by an act of will, the best Christians we can – working with all of our might to love God as we should. When we inevitably fail to do so, rather than scanning the horizon for the funnels of the ship that can rescue us we row harder and harder until we are exhausted.

Hear the words of John: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10 ESV) If you want to love God with all of your heart, if you want to surrender to him, stop depending upon your will. There is nothing you can do by an act of your will that will bring God’s approval. God’s approval of you is wholly dependent on Christ, which means that so far as God is concerned you are wholly dependent on Christ. There is no real ‘love’ in your will to love God. That is nothing more than legalism dressed in Christian clothes – an attempt to make yourself worthy in God’s eyes and earn the approval which has already been given you in Christ.  It is the greatest insult to God that we should, by an act of our will, try to earn something that it cost him dearly to give us. The greatest joy you can find is to rest in his love with gratitude as you would in the company of the captain of a ship that rescued you from sure death in the open sea. That is what God wills for you.

Get hold of the fact that you are desperate and let it sink deep into your soul. Embrace the fact that you are still a sinner and acknowledge your sin out rightly and then out rightly accept God’s rescue from it. Don’t even think in terms of surrender as if you have a leg to stand on, but recognize and openly acknowledge that you have nothing at all to offer God, and yet he rescues you without your having the ability to repay him with something as simple as proper gratitude. We know that he’s okay with that, because if he weren’t he would not have freely given his son for that purpose. That is what it means to be a Christian. That is the gospel truth.

God Bless.