LOVE | ACCEPT | FORGIVE – Page 45 – Revival in Christ's Church

Psalm 52 In Your Name I Will Hope

Why do you boast of evil, you mighty man? Why do you boast all day long, you who are a disgrace in the eyes of God? (v1)

The worshipper looks aghast at the wicked man boasting of his deeds. He knows there is going to be vengeance and that the retribution is not always going to come from the hands of man. He remembers the stones heaped on Achan and the burning sulfur that had rained down on Sodom. Those who had previously shaken their fists at God and continued in their evil had paid the price and he was confident that the price would ultimately be paid by all evildoers as well.

The Psalmist recounts over many verses the evil that men do and the price that will be paid. He saves his fiercest condemnation for the end of his rant:

Here now is the man who did not make God his stronghold but trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others! (v7)

Though our corrupted hearts never cease to imagine new ways of visiting evil on one another, there is no greater failure than to not recognize that one cannot be a god unto himself. Despite your health, wealth, and status, God will always be God and you will not. He demands our obedience and worship and craves our love and to not deliver these things to the king is our ultimate corrupt act.

David leaves a final image of the upright man who is eternal in life and righteous in character. He know his place and his God.

But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God; I trust in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever.

I will praise you forever for what you have done; in your name I will hope, for your name is good.

I will praise you in the presence of your saints. (vv 8-9)

I too will praise you Lord, alone and in the presence of your saints…

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Day Five in the School of Prayer

[In which we follow the Andrew Murray classic With Christ in the School of Prayer]

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)

On the mountainside, the Lord urges us to pray with confidence, assured that the Father hears our prayers and answers them. There are three answers that we are taught to expect as we embark upon our prayer life: Yes, No, or Not Yet. Jesus teaches that we are to be persistent in our prayer, petitioning the Father until we receive an answer. Ask, seek, and knock and the Lord promises it will be answered.

Our petitions must be properly formed. James 4:3 says “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” This is why we sit at the feet of Jesus in the school of prayer, to learn to pray properly for the things of the kingdom first and foremost and trusting in God for all else. It is up to us to take the lessons to heart.

Murray concludes

Let us no make the feeble experiences of our unbelief the measure of what our faith may expect. let us seek, not only just in our seasons of prayer, but at all times, to hold fast the joyful assurances: man’s prayer on earth and God’s answer in heaven are meant for each other. Let us trust Jesus to teach us so to pray that the answer can come. he will do it, if hold fast the word he gives today: “Ask, and ye shall receive.”

Randy Alcorn Addresses the Toughest Issue : If God is Good

Christians and Atheists alike voice the same question over and over again; if God is good then why are evil and suffering so prevalent? The believer may be led to think that the life of the Christian is to be free of pain and suffering only to find that, in most cases, the opposite is true. The Atheist uses the reality of struggle and horror as a foundational argument against the existence of God only to discover adversity strengthening the belief of the followers of Jesus. Is suffering a punishment for sin or an experience that God could readily remove from the world? Is there a bigger picture seen by the Creator of the universe where our troubles serve a larger purpose that we simply cannot see? Randy Alcorn enters this swirling discussion with his excellent new book If God is Good and the core challenge to the reader, what if suffering is God’s way of asking us to trust Him?

The problems of evil’s existence and the suffering of human beings are extraordinarily complex subjects but Alcorn has devoted 500 pages to examining the problems from numerous different angles. He looks at evil and suffering from the perspective of a believer and as a nonbeliever and examines these problems historically, theologically, and philosophically. Alcorn’s writing is what sets this book apart from denser scholastic examinations. He writes for the Christian struggling to understand why God allows evil and suffering to continue in the world. Each of the topical sections is divided into short chapters that address a single issue or question making the book a go-to resource that the reader can open to a specific topic and begin to find the answer.

Randy writes with a pastoral heart and an eye for connecting the truths of Scripture with vignettes of real life. Readers can often encounter a verse such as Isaiah 48:10—See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this.–and be unable to understand how it applies to their lives. Would God actually do this? Would he actually allow us to suffer pain and strife for His glory? When the pain is so close and personal, this seems to be anathema but this is where the book shines. Alcorn’s special talent lies in finding just the right illustration to bring the truth home and he puts that talent to great use throughout these chapters. For example, by showing how the pain of the death of a missionary looks up close, Alcorn can then pull us back to see the effect that he or she had on numbers of people who witnessed their faithfulness and came to know the God they worshipped and embodied.

This is a must-have book for anyone who questions the issue of suffering. This will find a prominent place on my shelf so that I can refer to it often. It is accessible, well structured, and so moving that I often could only read short sections before putting it aside to think about what I had just read. If you have been fortunate enough to have avoided struggle and strife in your life, reading this book will prepare you for the inevitable moment in which it arrives because it will. If your life has been marked by great tragedy, struggle, pain, and suffering, read this book alongside your Bible in order to understand how your pain serves God, His eternal plan, and His glory.

For more information about If God is Good, go here.

Psalm 51 Create In Me a Pure Heart

David and Bathsheba You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (vv 16 – 17)

This truth has very nearly become obsolete in the modern church. We have replaced contrition and brokenness with ministry busyness, our ‘offerings’ and church attendance. Sin has become rule-breaking rather than a personal affront; it has become external instead of internal. Repentance has become little more than ‘I’m sorry…’.

Psalm 51 is traditionally seen as being composed by David after his adultery with Bathsheba (2 Sam 11) and then being confronted by the prophet Nathan (2 Sam 12). We know how the single transgression of Bathsheba leads to further abhorrent behavior on the part of the King and we know all too well the horrible price that he pays for this string of evils. We don’t know how an exemplar like David can succumb to sin in this fashion but we do know that, if it can happen to someone so close to God it can happen to us as well.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.

For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. (vv 1-3)

Is God moved to offer pardon through this string of praise? Exclaiming God’s unfailing love, His great compassion, and His mercy, is this proclamation of what must be entirely self evident to Him what will invite Him to offer grace? He must view these prefaces to our admission of guilt much as we do our teenager’s statements that they love and respect our household standards: we ask them why they performed such and such and act if they hold such great respect for our rules? No, we should believe that God is moved when our hearts finally arrive at the core truth of our relationship with Him voiced in verse 4.

Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge. (v 4)

We must restore the proper understanding of sin in our lives and in His Church. Sin is properly viewed as being personally enacted against God. We have been lured to see sin as an external act, sort of a third party action of simply breaking a rule in which no one gets harmed like running a few miles over the speed limit. No harm, no foul. This is not how God views sin however. He views each act against His holiness personally, as though we look Him in the eye and while defiling His throne. It becomes even more serious when imagine how God must see our sin in the shadow of the Cross.

Statistically, few people read these posts on the Psalms. More people are interested in the Calvinism-Arminianism argument or my posts on the Hebrews warning passages but my prayer is that more will take the time to at least return to their Bibles and prayerfully consider this Psalm. Doctrine is important and it is valuable time spent considering the facts and searching the scriptures for the truths that underlie the doctrines but this cannot be at the expense of our relationship with God and our personal holiness. Far more important in our lives should be a plea similar to David’s:

Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. (vv 10-12)

School of Prayer Day Four

[In which we follow the Andrew Murray classic With Christ in the School of Prayer]

This then, is how you should pray: (Mt 6:9)

Because of the new fashion in which He wants His disciples to pray, the Lord offers a model for our emulation. Jesus offers the prayer as a framework through which our own hearts are to poured and our priorities aligned. It was not meant to be simply copied, though that was not prohibited. It is our model, used to teach us how our own prayers are to be formed and it contains ideas new to the first disciples that were stunning in how they change our approach to the throne.

“Our Father in heaven,”…We may take this entreaty for granted having learned this from an early age but, to fully grasp the depth of this adoration we must be mindful that the disciples had never before considered God as their Father. This revelation links us inextricably with the Lord in the household of God—he is our father and the Father of the Son. All that follows in prayer, our trust for provision, our pleas for protection, our expression of confidence, everything is now in the context of the personal. God is not an abstract concept that sits distant from us and deigns to address our words. He is our loving and merciful Father in whom we seek to live our life.

Murray closes with this,

Children of God! It is thus Jesus would have us pray to the Father in heaven. O let His Name, and Kingdom, and Will, have the first place in our love; His providing, and pardoning, and keeping love will be our sure portion. So the prayer will lead us up to the true child-life: the Father all to the child, the Father all for the child. We shall understand how Father and child, the Thine and the Our, are all one, and how the heart that begins its prayer with the God-devoted Thine, will have the power in faith to speak out the Our too. Such prayer will, indeed, be the fellowship and interchange of love, always bring us back in trust and worship to Him who is not only the Beginning but the End.

The Christus Victor View of Atonement

“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mk 10:45)

It will surprise many readers to discover that the Penal Substitution theory of atonement is a more recent development in the history of the Church and her doctrine. The theory that lays claim to being the standard view for many centuries prior to the Protestant Reformation was the Christus Victor (Christ the Victor) theory in which the atonement was seen as victory over Satan and the forces of evil. The central theme of this classic view is that Christ—Christus Victor—fought against and triumphed over the evil powers of the world to which humankind was in bondage. His demise overcame the hostile spiritual powers and, as a result of His sacrifice and victory, captive sinners were freed and given eternal life. This interpretation (known variously as the Classic, dramatic, or ransom theory) was the dominant church view for 1,000 years and remains the view of some contemporary theologians.

Christus Victor is a complex theory as viewed through the Scriptures. The reader must first see the motif of spiritual warfare that winds its way throughout the Bible. If this motif is placed in a primary position, the entire narrative of the Bible is viewed as the story of God’s ongoing battle with spiritual and human agents who oppose Him and threaten harm to His creation and His ultimate victory. The OT view that what occurred in the spiritual realm affected human history is encapsulated in Job 1-2 (Ps 82; Daniel 10). Yahweh is portrayed as continually at war with these forces and it is through his strength alone that chaos is held at bay. There is an acute awareness that the earth is held hostage to these evil forces such that only a radical move by God would be able to overcome them. Jesus spoke to the belief that Satan was the ruler of this world (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11). [This should not be understood as Satan higher in order than Jesus. Instead, he is to be viewed as the functional lord of this world.] Satan is portrayed as possessing ‘the kingdoms of the world’ (Luke 4:5-6; 1 John 5:19) and as having authority over them. Paul attributed the fundamental evil of the world’s systems (Gal 1:4) to this rule. Viewing the atonement through this prism logically sees Jesus as overcoming this rule and restoring control to the Trinity.

Ireaneus interpreted this motif by seeing Adam’s disobedience as placing humanity under the dominion of Satan. Rising from the dead, Christ conquered Satan releasing sinners from his control. This victory was foreseen in the great proto-evangelism of Genesis 3:15: …he will crush your head. Ireaneus wrote “Redeeming us with his blood, Christ gave himself as a ransom for those who had been led into captivity.” (Ireaneus, Against Heresies) Origen followed suit in this belief maintaining that because of sin, human beings were bound by Satan. He said that as a ransom payment for these souls, Satan demanded the blood of Christ. As God handed over Christ, Satan released his hostages. Later patristic writers such as John of Damascus took umbrage with the trade of the precious blood of Christ to Satan suggesting that what the devil received was an empty shell of Christ, tricking him.

The Theological Advantage of the Christus Victor View

Proponents of this view of atonement suggest that it is the superior theory because all of the other views are encompassed within its framework. It further offers that there is no temptation for people to suppose that they are participating in the kingdom when there is no evidence of the kingdom in their lives in contrast to the individual outlook of the western Church. Its focus is on the demonic dimension of fallen social structures. Theologically, the advantage proposed of the Christus Victor view is that it solves multiple problems simultaneously. Through the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the All-Wise God was able to:

Defeat Satan and his cohort (Heb 2:14; 1 Jn 3:8)
Reconcile all things to Himself (2 Cor 5:18-19; Col 1:20-22)
Forgive our sins (Acts 13:38; Eph 1:7)
Healed our sin-corrupted nature (1 Pet 2:24)
Poured His Spirit on us and empowered us to live in relation to Himself (Rom 8:2-16)
Gave us an example to follow (Eph 5:1-2; 1 Pet 2:21)

Those who apply this theory of atonement see that it encompasses the variety of atonement views under a single theory where the others tend to emphasize one or two of the above points but not all of them.

Conclusion

Christ releasing humanity from the bondage of sin and Satan lies through His sacrifice is core of the Christus Victor view of atonement. It is a theory that spans the whole of the Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 20 and it was the dominant view of the early church. This theory is most often proposed as the framework into which the other narrower views can be organized because it covers such a wide range of theological issues. It also encourages the Christian to take seriously the devil, an idea which has fallen from favor in the modern Church.

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School of Prayer Day Three

[In which we follow the Andrew Murray classic With Christ in the School of Prayer]

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. (Mt 6:6)

Why does the Lord send us to a secret place to pray? If we read the verse above in its context we find that Jesus wants our prayers to be pure, to be lifted to God’s ears alone rather than simply spouted for show. He wants us to realize the intimacy of the act of prayer. Praying is our time of intimate communion with our Heavenly Father not to be shared with or divided by the outside influences that swirl around us at all times. By entering our prayer closet and closing the door behind us, we are shutting out the world both figuratively and literally. We are alone with God and our beating heart.

Jesus also telegraphs to us His understanding of our fallen nature. He knows that we will either pray for the admiration of those around us in our worst state or we will be constrained by the fear of the crowd’s judgment in our least. The privacy of our closet removes the inhibition that clouds true prayer and the joy of nestling in the Father’s presence, allowing its great comfort and security to wash over us and releasing the prayer of our hearts more than that of our heads.

Bruce Wilkinson says You Were Born for This

For most Christians, to serve God is an ongoing desire of the heart that can languish in secret for years. We have in our minds and hearts that we will serve Him whenever and wherever he calls. We daydream about the these encounters, gradually raising the heartbreak quotient that will shade the moment. We’ll gladly help the downtrodden, the persecuted, or those who just need a little help as long as it doesn’t require risk on our part. We wait and we wait on God but sometimes act out of our own conscience when he doesn’t seem to be forthcoming with any tasks for us.

But what if we’re just missing the message? What if we stopped sitting idly by waiting for God to deliver miracles and took to heart the messages our pastors have been teaching us for years, that we are the vessels through which God wants to work?

What if this is what we were born for?

In Bruce Wilkinson’s new book You Were Born for This he takes us on a journey of revelation where, right off the bat, we discover that miracles are much more than the overwhelming workings of God in which seas are parted and thousands are fed from meager supplies. They are, as Wilkinson writes, the everyday appearances and interventions in the lives of the people that God loves. In our initial steps, the first idea that we take to heart is that you and I are intended to be the delivery mechanism for these miracles. The journey of miracles is about learning to recognize the subtle nudges and signals that God sends our way and then having the courage and the confidence in His power to deliver the gifts that He’s sending.

You Were Born for This is not a cultic, Course in Miracles type of book. It is about how you and I can actively participate in the delivery of everyday signs of God’s love to others who have come to His attention. Wilkinson lays out seven keys that are necessary to our active participation. The first four, the Miracle Light Keys, are those that we need to internalize in order to participate in this life and miracles. The last three, which Wilkinson calls the special delivery keys, applied to very specific needs such as forgiveness, money, and a life’s purpose.

I was initially skeptical as I read the book for the first time. As I read and thought about the first four concepts a second time, I came to realize that this was the life that I had preached and written about for many years. For example, the Master Key uses your fervent prayer to God asking to be sent to serve another. We have all delivered this prayer up to heaven in the abstract but, more than likely, we have not made this a daily affirmation. Wilkinson shows how, if we integrate this intentional practice into our daily routine, we become more and more receptive to the gentle nudges and whispers that God sends to move us as servants. The other three Light Keys follow logically from this concept. Once you have expressed your willingness to serve, the People Key aligns your heart with God’s agenda and expels any lingering desires for the glory of the miracle. You turn over your heart to Spirit and rid yourself of any thoughts that miracle you are going to deliver is from you instead of God. With proper humility, Wilkinson says that you are ready to approach the final step, the Risk Key, which builds in you the ability to be intentional about taking risks in faith. It is your commitment to God that, despite your fears and hesitancy, you will trust in His power to deliver the miracle that He wants to send.

You Were Born for This is a volume that you will keep on your desk or nightstand for many months as you ponder and practice the concepts. Wilkinson’s stories of the miracles he has been privileged to be a part of will get your heart pounding to partner with God in the same types of situations. You may be skeptical at first, hesitant to dive in thinking that the material might be some kind of Gnostic text or a light-weight treatise on how to change the world but give it a chance. Read it through a couple of times and then put it aside and think about it some more. Read the Bible and then come back and see if what Wilkinson is saying isn’t true. Better yet, decide that today is the day that you will say to God “Please, send me!”

For more information about this book:

You Were Born for This

Bruce Wilkinson introduces his new book

Psalm 50 Call Upon Me in the Day of Trouble

Consider this, you who forget God, or I will tear you to pieces, with none to rescue:

He who sacrifices thank offerings honors me, and he prepares the way so that I may show him the salvation of God. (vv 22-23)

We read this psalm as a bracing splash of cold water in the midst of our self-centered religious practice. The modern Church gives us countless opportunities to think that it exists for us and by us. As God speaks directly to the assembled worshippers, He not so gently reminds us that this is not the case. It is all about Him and in these verses He calls His people to account.

Hear, O my people, and I will speak, O Israel, and I will testify against you: I am God your God.

I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices or your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.

I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know every bird in the mountains, and the creatures of the field are mine.

If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?

Sacrifice thank offerings to God, fulfill your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me. (vv 7-15)

God needs nothing from us. We need everything from Him. Give Him alone the glory.

Image by Lawrence OP

Rockies Storm into California

Dare we begin to even whisper the word ‘Rocktober?’ The depth and character of this team will be on display in the next several days on a crucial swing through San Diego and San Francisco. I don’t think the Giants know what is headed their way.

Update

Visitor’s frame in the ninth, two outs and two strikes on Torrealba who strokes a bases clearing double off of flamethrower Heath Bell. Boom! It’s a Rockies winner…

The Trolley Dodgers who have laughed off the Rox all year, might be hearing the the Thunder coming up behind them about now. What happened to their comfortable lead in the West?