The World Is Against You: Fighting To Keep Our First Love

Article by Tony Reinke

September 20, 2017

Desiring God

Sooner or later the hard truth settles in that this world is out to kill you. Brown rivers swell up in Houston and Bangladesh to wash away everything you own, even wash you away if you don’t watch your step. Even on a calm, pristine beach day, the ocean’s sub-currents are silently trying to grab hold of you, and pull you out to sea, under the surface of the water before you even know what happened.

Forget sharks. The gentle tug of submerged water is our true ocean enemy. Look away for a moment and water attempts to assassinate — one reason why no one objects to bestowing upon the red-clad guardians the exalted title of “Life Guards” at the neighborhood pool.

But dried off and standing on solid ground, we fare little better because the air silently carries around invisible particles to slip in to our lungs and cultivate a little patch of cancer that can kill us from the inside. Or the burning rays of the sun might do the same from the outside.

And then of course there are the much less subtle forms of dangers. About one hundred times a second, bolt-action lightning snipers with an ungratified desire to spite mighty trees and tall steeples, and who occasionally take aim at arrogant creatures who dare to walk about on two legs. Under us, at any moment of the day or night, the ground can rumble and split and we can fall into an earthquake crack in the earth. Whole houses can get sucked down into a sinkhole without warning, or the gigantic white swirl of a hurricane or the wobbly freight train of a tornado can chase us off in a high-speed escape.

The world seizes one ankle and we pull it away and escape. For now. The world — as full as it is of wonder, and it is full of incredible wonders — surrounds us on all sides with deadly dangers.

Death of Love

Likewise, “this evil age” is perpetually trying to kill our loves — not through blunt force, but through coercion by seduction. The world tempts us daily to leave greater loves for lesser lusts.

“The moment we care for anything deeply, the world — that is, all the other miscellaneous interests — becomes our enemy,” wrote G. K. Chesterton. “The moment you love anything the world becomes your foe” (Works 1:59–60).

To love something genuinely is to immediately face all the second loves that are making an attempt at killing your first love. It is the wink of the adulteress to the married man. It is the invitation from a clique to abandon a true friendship. It is the ignoring of the familiar gifts around you, in search of the next thing to charge on your credit card. Worldliness kills because it exchanges loves. The world becomes your foe.

To Love Is to Fight

This is why true love must fight. “In every romance there must be the twin elements of loving and fighting,” writes Chesterton. “In every romance there must be the three characters: there must be the Princess, who is a thing to be loved; there must be the Dragon, who is a thing to be fought; and there must be St. George, who is a thing that both loves and fights.” The same is true of all our loves. In fact, “To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust” (Works 15:255).

A man who has stopped fighting for his marriage will not fight against the lure of adulterous flirting, because he is driven by the passivity of lust, not the earnestness of love. Which means that true love must be fought for.

Misdirected Love

Theologically speaking, this is why to love the world is to lose the love of God. It’s a horrible trade, but we do it all the time.

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world — the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life — is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:15–17)

Misdirected love is the root cause of worldliness. Worldliness sucks the sap from our greatest love until it becomes a dried-up branch.

So we can love and treasure the day Christ will return. Or we can love the world. But we cannot go on trying to love the world and love the day of Christ’s return (2 Timothy 4:8–10). In the same way, we cannot love darkness and love the light (John 3:16–21). Love for the light will die once the heart falls in love with the darkness. And this is how the world proves to be our love-killer.

Heart of Worldliness

When we talk about worldliness, primarily we are not talking about the substitutes of adultery and materialism and money. We are not simply warning against television shows too graphic and media too lewd and skirts too short. All of those things are secondary matters. Curing the true heart of worldliness is not in the forbidding or what is forbidden; mending the true heart of worldliness must always begin with finding a core love worth fighting for — a love so precious that we will guard it with the proper holy jealousy it deserves.

The problem of worldliness only emerges with any real clarity in our lives once we have discovered our “first love,” a fundamental love, a central love for our Savior Jesus Christ (Revelation 2:4).

If talk of worldliness falls into hard times and does not surface much in our thoughts and conversations, it is not a sign that the dangers have disappeared. It is a sign that we have grown careless with the exclusivity of delight in Christ at the center of the Christian life. And once the jealous love is gone, the danger of worldliness grows more deadly and more invisible at the same time.

Tony Reinke (@tonyreinke) is senior writer for Desiring God and author of 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You (2017), John Newton on the Christian Life (2015), and Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books (2011). He hosts the Ask Pastor John podcast and lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and three children.

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This post was shared from the Desiring God website. Original publication at http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-world-is-against-you

Becoming More Impressed With Christ

Luke 22:37 For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment.”

Prior to heading up to the Mount of Olives, the Lord Jesus makes this statement to his disciples. It is in the context of Jesus telling them to get a money-bag, knapsack and a sword in preparation of the coming days.

The Scripture reference that the Savior sites are from the prophet Isaiah, specifically the twelfth verse of chapter 53. Of course, this chapter of Isaiah is one of the clearest conglomerations of Messianic prophecy contained in the Old Testament. Isaiah writes with prophetic precision as he foretells of the manner in which the Son of David would suffer and die while accomplishing redemption.

Notice though as you read this passage the articulation of resolve by Jesus, this Scripture must be fulfilled in me. Jesus interprets Isaiah as referring to him and the necessity of it being fulfilled. Jesus was intent on doing exactly what the Scripture said because Scripture says exactly what God wanted to be done. Here we see the beautiful marriage between the Word and will of God. What God has spoken shall indeed come to pass.

In addition, we see the reality of Christ being numbered with the transgressors. Exhale. This is still hard to fathom, particularly in light of the perfect life that we see modeled in the Gospel narratives. Jesus Christ, the incarnation of beauty, perfection, holiness, and purity is going to be brushing up and punished with the ungodly, unrighteous, evil, rebellious and sinful people. This is what Jesus said he must do.

I love reading this passage and hearing Jesus grab that pronoun he and velcro it to his chest, he is the suffering servant, he is the son of David, he is the one who would justify the many as he is pierced for our transgressions.

I read this passage and I find myself more impressed with my Savior who loves the Word of God, the will of God, the elect of God all and the glory of God.

Jesus Christ has it all together as he goes to die for people who can’t ever seem to get it right.

I love him because he is so different from me, so perfect and so full of a holy zeal for the glory of God. I love him because he is different from me and is everything that I want to be. Simply, I love him because he is Jesus, the one and only.

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This post was originally shared on The Gospel Coalition website at: https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/erikraymond/2017/09/01/jesus-grabs-that-pronoun-and-velcros-it-to-his-chest/

It Is Impossible To Read The Bible

Article by John Piper at Desiring God

July 16, 2017

Originally posted at: http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/it-is-impossible-to-read-the-bible

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO READ THE BIBLE

Reading the Bible should always be a supernatural act.

By “supernatural act,” I don’t mean that humans are supernatural. We are not God, and we are not angels or demons. What I mean is that the act of reading, in order to be done as God intended, must be done in dependence on God’s supernatural help.

The Bible gives two decisive reasons: Satan and sin. That is, we have a blinding enemy outside and a blinding disease inside. Together these two forces make it impossible for human beings to read the Bible, as God intended, without supernatural help.

It seems to me that thousands of people approach the Bible with little sense of their own helplessness in reading the way God wants them to. This proverb applies as much to Bible reading as to anything else: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6). At every turn of the page, rely on God. That is a supernatural transaction.

If more people approached the Bible with a deep sense of helplessness, and hope-filled reliance on God’s merciful assistance, there would be a far more seeing and savoring and transformation than there is.

Blinding Enemy Outside

Satan is real. His main identity is “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). His way of lying is more by deception that bold-face falsehoods. He “is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9).

Jesus described how Satan takes away the word: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart” (Matthew 13:19). How does that happen? It might be by sheer forgetfulness. Or Satan may draw a person from Bible reading to an entertaining video, with the result that any thought of Christ’s worth and beauty is quickly lost in the ash of fire and skin.

Or Satan may simply blind the mind to the worth and beauty of Christ, which the Scriptures reveal. This is what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 4:3–4:

Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

“The god of this world” is Satan. He is called “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30), and John says that “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). It is this enormous blinding power that puts us in need of a supernatural deliverer. The thought that we could overcome this satanic force on our own is naïve.

No Divine Power, No Open Eyes

When the risen Christ sent Paul “to open the eyes [of the Gentiles], so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18), he did not mean that Paul could do this in human strength. Paul made that clear: “My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:3–4). That is what it takes to overcome the blinding effects of Satan.

Let it not be missed that the specific focus of Satan’s blinding work is the gospel. That is, his focus is on our reading — or hearing — the heart of the message of the Christian Scriptures. Satan “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” Satan would be happy for people to believe ten thousand true facts, as long as they are blind to “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.”

Let them make A’s on a hundred Bible-fact quizzes as long as they can’t see the glory of Christ in the gospel—that is, as long as they can’t read (or listen) with the ability to see what is really there.

Satan Loves Some Bible Reading

So, Jesus (Matthew 13:19), Paul (2 Corinthians 4:3–4), and John (1 John 5:19) warn that Satan is a great enemy of Bible reading that sees what is really there. Bible reading that only collects facts, or relieves a guilty conscience, or gathers doctrinal arguments, or titillates esthetic literary tastes, or feeds historical curiosities — this kind of Bible reading Satan is perfectly happy to leave alone. He has already won the battle.

But reading that hopes to see the supreme worth and beauty of God — reading that aims to be satisfied with all that God is for us in Christ, reading that seeks to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8) — this reading Satan will oppose with all his might. And his might is supernatural. Therefore, any reading that hopes to overcome his blinding power will be a supernatural reading.

Complicit in Deception

When we speak of the power of Satan over the human heart, we are not saying that all spiritual blindness is the sole work of Satan. We are not implying that Satan can take innocent people and make them slaves of deceit. There are no innocent people. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We are complicit in all our deception.

There is a terrible interweaving of satanic influence and human sinfulness in all our blindness to divine glory. No one will ever be able to scapegoat at the judgment, claiming, “Satan made me do it.” Our own sinfulness is another source of our spiritual blindness that puts us in need of supernatural help, if we hope to see the glory of God in Scripture.

Mind of the Flesh

Paul tells us in Romans 8:7–8: “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”

These are very strong words: “It does not submit to God’s law [God’s instruction, God’s word]; indeed it cannot.” This is our rebellion prior to, and underneath, all satanic blinding. Before Satan adds his blinding effects, we are already in rebellion against God. And, Paul says, this rebellion makes it impossible (“cannot”) for us to submit to the word of God.

This inability is not the inability of a person who prefers God but is not allowed to cherish him. No. This is the inability of a person who does notprefer God and therefore cannot cherish him. It is not an inability that keeps you from doing what you want. It is an inability to want what you don’t want. You can’t see as beautiful what you see as ugly. You can’t embrace the glory of God as most valuable when you feel yourself to be more valuable.

Ignorance Is Not Our Deepest Problem

One of the implications of this pervasive human condition is that ignorance is not our deepest problem. There is a hardness of rebellion against God that is deeper than ignorance. That is why every natural attempt at enlightenment is resisted. This hardness of rebellion cannot submit to God’s revelation.

Paul issues an urgent call to all Christians at Ephesus to decisively turn away from this condition, which, he says, is typical of their Gentile roots:

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorancethat is in them, due to their hardness of heart. (Ephesians 4:17–18)

Notice the relationship between “ignorance” and “hardness of heart” as Paul describes it: “ignorance due to their hardness of heart.” Hardness is more basic. Hardness is the cause. This is our deepest problem. Not ignorance.

This is the condition of all mankind, apart from the saving work of the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:9–10). And it makes reading the Bible impossible — if our aim is to read the way God wants us to read. We cannot prefer the light when we love the dark. “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light” (John 3:19). Our problem is not that there is insufficient light shining from the Scriptures. Our problem is that we love the darkness.

God’s Word Radiates His Wisdom

The Scriptures are radiant with divine wisdom. This wisdom shines with the glory of God — and shows us the glory to come, which is the way Paul describes his own inspired teaching:

We impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. . . . We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. (1 Corinthians 2:6–7, 12–13)

The problem is that apart from the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, we are not “spiritual,” but “natural.” Reading the inspired Scriptures must be a supernatural act if we are to “accept the things of the Spirit of God,” and if we are to “understand what is spiritually discerned.” Without God’s supernatural aid, we are merely natural and cannot see the glory of God in the Bible for what it really is — supremely beautiful and all-satisfying.

God's Faithfulness For The Unfaithful

Article by Courtney Deagon

June 4, 2017

Originally published at  https://littlefaithblessedgrace.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/gods-faithfulness-for-the-unfaithful/

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Many people claim the Old Testament features an ‘angry God’ or a ‘different God to the one in the New Testament’, but I think this couldn’t be further from the truth. The whole bible is written by God, about Himself; and when we look at each book, chapter and verse through the lens of “what does this say about God/Jesus?”, our eyes are opened by His Spirit to see, know and enjoy more of Him. My quiet times have been a perfect example of this of late.

I’ve been slowly but surely returning to my readings in Ezekiel for my quiet times, and let me tell you – it’s not a bed-time read. There are few books in the bible like the Prophets: so immensely powerful, direct, and densely packed with stark reminders of who God is.

Ezekiel 16 is such a compelling chapter within this awe-inspiring book. It outlines God’s response to Jerusalem’s unfaithfulness, by comparing her to a prostitute. Not only that, He goes on to say:

“Was your prostitution not enough? You slaughtered (my) children and sacrificed them to idols.” (v. 20b-21);

“Samaria (and Sodom) did not commit half the sins you did. You have done more detestable things than they, and have made your sisters seem righteous by all these things you have done.” (v. 51)

The picture God paints of the desires, actions and consequences of the sins of Jerusalem is grotesque and shocking. No words are minced here – we see the full evil of sin through the lens of God’s absolute holiness.

And yet, even after centuries of contempt and unfaithfulness on the part of Israel, God still shows mercy!

“‘So I will establish my covenant with you, and you will know that I am the Lord. Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done, you will remember and be ashamed and never again open your mouth because of your humiliation, declares the Sovereign Lord.’” (v. 62-63).

And reading this, I was reminded of some gentle words our Lord and Saviour spoke to a woman found guilty of adultery (and facing death as punishment):

“‘… neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.’”

(John 8:11b).

Notice the title of this post refers to the ‘unfaithful’, not the ‘faithless’ – believers are never completely without faith, but the remnant of sin in us means we are still capable of unfaithfulness.

And yet, we have a God and Saviour so faithful, and at the same time, so holy and willing to save – despite our own imperfection and unfaithfulness! I find this so convicting, and so freeing – because this grace God extends to me, He extends to all people. Through our faith in Christ, our continued fight against sin, and knowing God more, we are conformed to the image and likeness of Christ. Praise God!

YOU ARE THE CHANGE YOUR CHURCH NEEDS

Article by Phylicia Masonheimer - phyliciadelta.com

January 24, 2017

Excerpt:

"It’s easy to complain about the church. I’ve heard professing Christians claim they are “done” with it; that they “follow Christ, but don’t need the church”. Facts are, if you follow Christ – you are the church. If you don’t like something, you’re the one who needs to change it.

Christ loves the church. The church is His bride, closest and dearest to His heart..."

BOASTING ONLY IN THE CROSS: THE INFAMOUS 'SEA SHELLS' SERMON

Sermon by Pastor John Piper - Passion's OneDay 2000 Conference

May 20, 2000

Scripture: Galatians 6:14

HOLINESS AND HUMILITY

By Pastor Matt Chandler - The Village Church

August 17, 2014

Scripture: 2 Chronicles 26