Inherent Bias (07/24/25)

Okay, settle in.  This is, by all appearances, going to be another long set of considerations.  The main thrust of the passage is clear enough.  We are continuing the thought that began the chapter, which comes in contrast to the humility and obedience displayed in the previous chapter.  So, then, we are once more contemplating the conflict between law and grace, between works and faith.  And I hope we shall come to recognize that this is less a conflict than a harmonization.  But we must make a beginning, and where I want to begin is in observing our inclusion in the conflict.  What we may readily lose sight of is that, rather like Paul, we have been on both sides of this divide.  More critically, it seems to me entirely likely that we continue to be on both sides of this divide.

Barnes observes that, “All people by nature seek salvation by the law.”  Allow me to soften that stance just the least bit, and suggest that all people by nature seek salvation by a law.  In fairness, Barnes reaches the same point almost immediately, pointing out that this statement holds true regardless what standard we define as law.  And therein lies the rub.  In present parlance, we identify this as virtue signaling.  Now, we may find cause to question whether those we construe as virtue signaling actually put any stock in the various concerns they espouse.  That is to say, we may have reason to question how truly they hold to these supposed virtues, and how much is just for show.  Ah, but beware!  The very same clouds of doubt must surely apply to our own case!  Now, I verge on the subject I have reserved for the next portion of this exercise, but keep it in view.  Virtues are of little value if they are not practiced.  Perspectives of right and wrong count for nothing if they don’t shape character.  And that, I would maintain, applies as readily to the Christian as to the reprobate.

Here is our fundamental problem:  How are we to define what is virtuous, what is good and true?  As good Christians, we shall no doubt jump to the correct answer, and declare that God determines what is good and what is true, and we have a pretty clear description of that in the Ten Commandments, in the case law of Deuteronomy, and in the clarifying exposition of Christ in the Gospels.  Very good, then.  What are we doing with it?  When we look at the rich young ruler and his dilemma, do we take time for introspection, or do we merely shake our heads at his inability?  When we encounter the Pharisees, do we join them in the temple courts, saying, “Well, at least I’m not like them”?  And do we recognize, as we do so, that we have just put the lie to our claim?

Okay, then, here is the Law, informing us in clear terms, clarified further by the Law-giver, in case we tried to over-simplify the matter.  What do we do with it?  Do we set ourselves to try harder?  Do we throw up our hands in defeat?  I’m going to guess the former.  We try harder.  And we kick ourselves a bit more often, because however hard we try, we just can’t seem to manage compliance.  Or, perhaps, again like the Pharisees, we try and shift the boundaries a bit.  Now, in their case, to be fair, the original intent had been to guardband the boundary, to make sure we stopped well short of crossing the line.  But over time, it became a lowering of the bar.  We settle for the achievable.  We can’t face the impossible, so we cut back the requirements until we can manage.  You know, achievable goals are, generally speaking, a good thing.  Keep setting yourself impossible demands, and giving up will soon result.  But if we break down the impossible into possible steps, we may manage a step or two.  And if we don’t stop after those first few steps, but look for next steps, well and good.  Progress is made towards the true goal.  Problem is, we tend to stop, to plateau, to say, “good enough.”

Do you remember back to those days when you were first encountering a believer seeking to stir up interest?  Oh, you need a Savior!  But for most of us, I expect the response was much like my own.  Why?  I’m a good man.  Well, good enough.  I’m certainly better than many, aren’t I?  I mean, surely you can see that.  Else, why would you even associate with me?  But in such assessments, we have become victims of our own standards.  How so?  Primarily because all such standards are deficient.  You will not, of your own accord, come to a definition of goodness which precludes your membership.  There’s that famous remark from Grouch Marx, along the lines of, “I would never become a member of any club that would accept me.”  Clever enough, but in effect, it’s just defining a bar low enough to achieve.  Worse, it’s pure pride.  I’m better than that.  I’m too good for them.  I have higher standards.  Well, no.  Just different ones.

This is our great problem.  Works-righteousness ever depends on obedience.  And, as we’re dealing with God, it depends on perfect obedience.  Well, now we’re in trouble!  We begin life with a mark already against us, and no way to achieve retroactive compliance.  We’re doomed from the outset.  What to do?  The natural response is to redefine righteousness, because we are, I think, incapable of accepting our own unrighteousness.  That’s not to say that we can’t admit to error, although there are some who appear to do so, and some of us may very well appear to be in their number.  No, we’ll admit to error readily enough, but then jump straight to justifying our error.  Well, everybody does that.  Well, I didn’t mean it.  Oh, but there were extenuating circumstances, don’t you see?  You just don’t understand.  People kept pushing, and of course, I was going to snap.  Or, it’s the fault of society and its influences.  It’s all because of poor parenting, poor education, the Internet, the government, choose your target.  Go back to Flip Wilson, as we so often do, and say, “The devil made me do it.”  But that’s just another excuse, another cope, another attempt to maintain a righteousness we’ve never possessed.

Honestly, it’s hard even to accept Paul’s accounting.  “It’s not me, but sin in me.”  Yet, that much is true.  Yet if sin is in me, it’s because I’m a sinner.  And how am I supposed to live with that reality?  So, we come to another factor of our nature.  We incline towards cognitive dissonance.  We see it well enough in those whom we account the opposition on whatever topic.  It is something of the general diagnosis conservatives have for progressives.  And it would be hard not to see it in the current climate.  Really, this is what you claim to believe about gender, and yet you claim to follow the science?  How can you follow science and ignore basic biology?  You claim to adhere to the tenets of Darwinism, and yet do everything in your power (which ain’t much, honestly) to maintain a freeze on the current order.  Oh!  We daren’t allow any species to die off?  Well, why not, Mr. Darwinist?

But I digress.  What of us?  Enough looking outward, let’s look inward.  All my righteousness is as filthy rags, and yet the call upon me is to be perfectly holy as my Father in heaven is perfectly holy.  I serve a God who cannot so much as abide the proximity of sin, and yet hold that He is everywhere, that He, in His perfect, unfailing goodness, created this universe, this existence, complete with not just the propensity for sin, but the absolute certainty of it.  How do we deal with these things?  For myself, I must come to the conclusion that God, being so very much far and away beyond my capacities in thought and wisdom, has purpose in what He has created.  To be sure, the initial moments of Creation unfolded with the certainty of the Cross already established.  Adam was created, let it be accepted, with the certainty that he would, of his own inclination, fail to comply with the one prohibition set upon him, would fail, as well, with the one duty he had to lead in righteousness.  But he was created, as well, with the known outcome that the Son must come, take up the life of mankind, die the death of mankind, and so redeem that portion of mankind that had been determined.  And in that God is glorified by having achieved the impossible in this redemption, it is good.

Let me state my conclusion differently.  We don’t know the full definition of good.  We have our own standard for goodness, primarily based on what makes us comfortable, or better still, what allows us to look good in current form.  If we live in an honor-driven culture, we account what is honorable to be good.  But then, we must discover a proper standard for honor.  If we consider ourselves honest, we will likely promote honesty as the highest good, even if we must very often be accounted brutally honest.  Mind you, it may just be that we have no kindness, no mercy, or, as we would put it, we have no filters.  We don’t deign to lower ourselves to social considerations.  We will tell you the truth, and the truth shall set you free, don’t you know.  But then, we must discover a proper basis for truth.  Generosity?  Certainly, Judaism was all over that, and Christianity follows suit, doesn’t it?  But how generous is enough?  When does generosity become enablement of sin?  When does generosity become unloving?

Let us understand this, and perhaps it might just give us a bit more sympathy for our fellow man.  I don’t believe you can find a man (or woman, if you get stuck on recognizing the universal application of man), who has no principles.  I do believe we can make this statement, that nobody is without principles.  It’s the big question of just what those principles are.  I would suppose even the most heinous psychopath has something he would account as principles.  It doesn’t render him any less evil, does it?  Neither do our standards render us any better.  For our standards are just as likely to be off, just as likely to be tailored to fit our current state and show us (at least to ourselves) in the best possible light.  And here is trouble!

Take religion and objective truth out of the equation for the moment.  Everybody you meet in life has some worldview to which they subscribe.  Whether that view is firmly considered, or the product of environment, or mere habit, it really doesn’t matter.  They are invested in it.  And the older they are the more invested.  Nobody, at any stage of life, wishes to hear that everything they have believed until now has been a lie.  Nobody, at any stage of life, is going to be happy to learn that they’ve been doing it all wrong.

You know, I think of the rising generations, even those which should have achieved a bit of maturity by now.  I hear my daughter and her peers talk about not wanting to live to work, not wanting to be tied down to a job, a mortgage, and so on.  They want to live free, don’t you know, to keep it simple.  They will decry the evils of capitalism, so long as they can enjoy its fruits.  And maybe, just maybe, they have a point in there somewhere, and maybe we, who have at this stage a rather vested interest in our own worldview, just can’t stand to hear that we’ve been wrong about that worldview all along.  Now, I would have to say that as far as this particular example goes, I think it purely hypothetical.  But what if it weren’t?  Could we accept the call to toss aside the life we’ve known lo, these many decades, to pursue a different way?

Well, then, don’t be surprised at the vehemence of the rejection you face when you present just such a crisis of worldview to those around you!  Be merciful.  Be, dare I say, realistic.  It is unlikely in the extreme that, presented with the call to dismiss all they thought they knew of goodness and truth, and come pursue a different lifestyle, a different set of values, a different purpose, they will simply jump to it.  Far more likely that they would react as you may react to those whose views are polar opposites of your own, rejecting you outright, and quite possibly with utmost vehemence.  It’s a natural, defensive response, isn’t it?  It’s rather like fight or flight, but on a philosophical, and therefore deeper, level.

Okay.  Let me try to draw things to something like a conclusion, as regards this section of the study.  We are legalists by nature.  We want to know the rules.  But we want the rules as easy as they can be.  We want to be right in our own eyes.  Who wouldn’t?  So, we create whatever sort of standards we feel we can maintain, and if we find we can’t, we adjust our standards rather than our actions.  And then we build us a god in our own image.  What else to make of idolatry, really?  We want a god like our standards, a god we can manage.  And we will adjust our views of this god until it proves manageable.  And so, even if we are seeking the God Who Is, if we allow ourselves to rewrite the rulebook, if we insist on perceiving Him only through the filters of our own opinions, preferences, and abilities, we will inevitably come to hold in our minds a conception of God that is completely at odd with who He is, with who He declares Himself to be.

Here is the fatal flaw of Universalism, and its sundry echoes.  Honestly, if everybody gets saved in the end, then life has been a cruel joke.  If everybody gets saved in the end, what was the point in punishing the rebellion of Korah?  What was the point of building the temple, of destroying the temple, of Egypt or Babylon?  Indeed, why religion at all, if it winds up not mattering when all is said and done?  And the same fatal flaw cuts the earth out from under any supposed path to self-justification, or works-righteousness.  If works could get you there, then what sort of God is it who would send His only son to die so needlessly?  If man could make his own way, it is cruelty of the worst sort to force such a thing on your son.  And it changes nothing that He went to His death willingly.  Willingness doesn’t change the needlessness.  But the need was there.  The need is there.  The need remains, even for the redeemed.  We do not outgrow our dependence upon a Savior.  He didn’t just get the ball rolling, and now we’ve got this.  No. 

“All people by nature seek salvation by the law.”  And all people fall irrevocably short of it.  They twist their perception of God, and they twist their perception of self.  And so, all these efforts at self-justification prove to be far worse than merely vanity and wind, as the Preacher discovered such things to be.  No, they are actively injurious.  Every legalistic effort we may seek to engage in must, in the end, lead us to a deadly over-estimation of our character, must result in our failure to embrace true faith.  As such, every legalistic effort we may seek to engage in must leave us further from God.  As Paul tells the Galatians, keep after this, and you have severed yourself from Christ.

I will come back to the fallout of this realization in a later section, I expect.  But understand that letting go of our reliance on legal justification by our works does not mean that we just go on doing what we please, and leave it to God to sort out.  That goes right back to the lie of Universalism, doesn’t it?  It assumes that He has to save us because that would be good, as we understand good to be.  It gets us back to a capricious God with no real standards.  And honestly, I can’t think of a more disastrous reality.  Better no god at all than one with no standards.  So, we go back to the lead up to this section.   We go back to the call to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.  But we go back to that with the clear recognition that this God we have come to know and love is at work in us, such that we may indeed be both willing and able to the good works prepared in advance in order that we might do them (Php 2:11-12, Eph 2:10).  We get back to work, but in confidence and love.  We begin to work from a place of rest, putting no confidence in the flesh, but trusting wholly and implicitly in Christ our Savior for any good that may come of it.

Works of Hypocrisy (07/25/25)

I have labeled this part of my study, “Works of Hypocrisy.”  At first, I had the order reversed, but it is needful to be clear that works in and of themselves are not the issue.  Indeed, as James says, faith that is devoid of works is a dead and worthless faith (Jas 2:20, Jas 2:26).  And I keep coming back to that central message of this epistle, to work out our salvation in fear and trembling (Php 2:11).  It’s inescapable, this call to be about doing the works of our Father.  But works are only of value in that they reflect the inward work of God in us.  If we think to display our works as merit badges, whether to man or to God, then we have entered into the realm of the hypocrite.

We have to get this.  Our works stink.  It is inevitably true.  For however hard we try, our works are ever and always fleshly.  I don’t care if you’re a monk hidden away in some private retreat, muttering wordless litanies of worship under your breath hours on end.  It’s still fleshly.  It cannot help but be so, for you are involved, and you are a creature of flesh, even with your renewed spirit.  Try as we might, it shall remain the case that the very best we have to offer is rubbish.  Even though we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God Himself, and even though He guides us into a place of true, spiritual worship, and even though He filters and restates our prayers that they may reach heaven’s ear in appropriate holiness, still all of this comes via the flesh, and the flesh is not renewed.  The flesh remains in the old order, the worldly order, and requires subduing.  But that lies ahead yet in our letter, so we’ll save it for its proper time.

Here, I want the firm reminder that in all that we seek to do for God, in all the ways we seek to live godly lives, the fundamental fact remains:  Either He is doing it, or it isn’t getting done.  Now, I must immediately lay that aside, once more, that call to get to work and to give it our all.  I conclude that God is not inclined to work with one who isn’t willing to work alongside Him.  We have sufficient evidence that the sluggard is rejected.  But then, we also have that wonderful companion verse, Philippians 2:12, reminding us that God is in fact working in us both to render us willing and to empower the ability to pursue His will.  So, yes, we work, and we work hard at this life of godliness.  And it is hard work.  If you do not find it so, I must wonder if you have begun the work at all.  Or perhaps God, who will not test us beyond our capacity, deems your incapacity near to crippling.  Let me be clear, if I say, “you,” I include me, too.

Now, when I say that our best works stink, I am, of course, in mind of Paul’s assessment here.  “I count all things but rubbish.”  I follow the NASB with that, if loosely.  But the term we have here as rubbish is of debatable significance.  Are we talking excrement or offal?  Perhaps both?  But I am currently leaning more towards the idea of offal, and this, because of what we had in the previous part of this chapter.  “Beware of the dogs” (Php 3:2).  We looked at how this turned things upside-down, applying to these who would force Jewish custom on the Gentile believers the very name by which they expressed their opinion of those Gentiles.  They are dogs, wild and immoral, eating whatever, mating wherever, no sense of decency whatsoever.  Might as well hang a sign on these people, declaring them unclean, like the lepers.

Well, then, this idea of offal gets us somewhere south of table scraps.  You recall the Syro-Phoenecian woman who came to Jesus.  “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that drop from the master’s table” (Mt 15:27).  This is something even less enticing.  This is the bits of the chicken or the lamb that were fit neither for offering nor consumption, valueless and perhaps even unhealthy to contemplate eating.  All one could do is toss them out.  But in a land with no trash pick-up, tossing such things into the streets to remain there would be inviting disease.  Enter the dogs.  They don’t care.  They’ll eat anything.  Consider them the cleanup crew.  Except there is nothing of cleanliness.

All this to say that, having rejected these Judaizers and their insistence on ritual observances, Pharisaic traditions, and so on, as being the dogs in this picture, he now takes it up a step and effectively says, “not only are you the dogs, but these things you seek to impose on the church are nothing but offal, fit only for dogs.”  I come back to it.  Your works stink.  The best you’ve got is barely fit for the dump.  These outward observances, except they reflect inward realities, are less than worthless.  They are a danger to the soul.

What becomes demonstrably evident in their case is that they really didn’t know God at all.  They knew a bunch of rules, and in their vehement demands that all join them at the rulebook, they arrived at a conception of God as tyrant.  They’re trying to stave off inevitable punishment, and can’t even see that the punishment they would avoid remains just as inevitable as before.  Indeed, it can only get worse, because now, by their demeanor and their demands, they present to the world God as He isn’t.  And alongside that, they think they have presented themselves with a holiness that they by no means possess. 

But if we leave this as an exercise of, “look at them,” then we fail.  We must look at ourselves.  We are no different, really.  And we need to beware ourselves.  We need to beware of ourselves.  For, we, too, will shut ourselves out from Christ should we come to rely on our own righteousness.  And we do so, except we remain diligent to root out all thought of self-reliance in this matter of sanctification.  Matthew Henry’s warning is apt here.  “We are undone without a righteousness wherein to appear before God, for we are guilty.”  This is our condition.  We are guilty, every one of us.  If our only defense before the court is to be our deeds, we are indeed undone.  We have no cause for confidence if confidence is in ourselves, in our ‘good enough’ attempts at being as we ought.

Praise be to God, He has in fact provided for us a true, complete, and perfect righteousness.  It is provided in Christ Jesus, and no other.  It’s this or nothing.  It’s this, or condemnation assured.  Any attempt to stand before Him on the basis of any other claim can only expect the response given the goats.  “Depart from Me.  I never knew you.”  What we can expect as an assessment is that we are but white-washed tombs full of dead men’s bones.

Listen up!  God will not be mocked.  He is not pleased to have false claims made upon His name.  Don’t call yourself a Christian and then get on with living like a heathen.  Don’t call yourself saved by faith, and then parade your list of, “I did this,” and, “I didn’t do that.” You don’t need a tee shirt boldly proclaiming, “Look at me!  I am a child of God!”  No.  You need to have God so working in you that when people do look at you, they can see that for themselves.  I have said before that humility doesn’t advertise.  I think we can say the same of faith.  Real faith, rooted and grounded in Christ, and putting no confidence in the flesh, doesn’t advertise.  It has no need to do so.  If faith feels the need to advertise, to boast of its scrupulous pursuit of righteousness, then I fear that such faith has fallen into the self-same error as these whom Paul rebukes so thoroughly.  They, as I said, have failed to actually know God.  They know some terrible tyrant of their own imagining.  But they don’t proclaim the God Who Is.  To the degree we boast of our compliance, we do the same.

This is rank hypocrisy, to claim to trust in Jesus, but then make it all about your list of habits and accomplishments.  Get yourself around the full force of this! “It’s all refuse!”  All that has value in this pursuit of holiness is Christ, knowing Him.  And let me stress, it’s not enough to know about Him, to accept that He exists.  It’s not even sufficient to acknowledge the basic fact of His deity.  This is experiential knowledge that is in view.  It’s the sort of knowledge that comes of living the life of Micah 6:8, and walking humbly with Him.  It’s the experiential knowledge that comes of daily taking up your cross and following Him.  It’s the experiential knowledge that must leave us looking upon ourselves with clear eyes, seeing that indeed any good in us is Christ’s doing.

As to this life of works?  Well, as I have observed, I suspect, several times in the course of pursuing this epistle, such a life leaves no place for rest.  The one who would live by the Law can’t let up, not even for a moment.  Let it be supposed, though Scripture will not allow it, that one were truly born sinless.  Still, do you truly think such a one could make it through his first day without sin?  A baby, after all, is all about self.  Where, then, is putting others first?  A baby is all about demands.  I want food now.  I need changing now.  Now, now, now.  And some of us, admittedly, haven’t much grown out of that mindset.  But leave that aside.  All this to say that if we are going to base our righteousness on our works, we shall soon have exhausted ourselves, and still be left with a record, and a debt due to the court.  And however much we may have managed to do – and let it be assumed that there is any sort of worth to that which we have done – it will never suffice to erase that debt.  The works of finite man cannot hope to address infinite guilt, and that’s what we have obtained – infinite guilt.  For we have sinned against infinite God, and Him only.

So, let me reiterate what I noted at the outset.  Nothing here ought to be taken as suggesting we should cease from our striving.  Nothing here is to be construed as setting aside the doing of good works.  No!  But, beloved, let us learn to work from the place of rest.  Jesus called to the lost sheep, “Come to Me, you who are heavy burdened.  I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me.  For I am gentle, humble in heart, and you shall find rest for your souls.  My yoke is easy, and My load is light” (Mt 11:28-30).  Do you see it?  Do you get it?  What is that load?  Let us consider how Jesus answered the man who asked how to do the work of God.  Now, no doubt, that one had in mind the power to perform miracles as Jesus was doing.  But His answer calls for attention.  “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (Jn 6:29).  There’s your burden.  There’s the work assigned to you:  Believe.  Trust.  Rely.  Take up His yoke, for He has taken up your burden.  He has given you rest.  Why, then, do you wear yourself out with your striving?  Why do you seek to wear Him out with your striving?  Rest.  Trust and obey.   Follow His lead, walk with Him.  If the path includes suffering, as it surely will, know that He walks with you, and His rod and His staff are in His hand.  Walk on.  Whatever the trials, you are secure.  Walk on.  Where He points you, go.  Fear no evil, for God is with you.  Who can stand against Him?  Who can touch you, the apple of His eye?

Can I offer a suggestion here?  Fear is the result of self-reliance.  Fear comes of not relying on God.  He informs us that perfect love casts out all fear (1Jn 4:18).  How so?  Because perfect love flows into and out of that priceless, experiential knowledge of Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior.  John continues, in that passage, to observe that “fear involves punishment.”  That’s back to the legalistic mindset yet again.  And that holds whether we’re contemplating eternal outcomes, or just the immediate trial before us.  If we are afraid of suffering, it must, at some level, reflect doubt as to the outcome.  It doesn’t trust God to bring good out of the event.  It doesn’t yet set the resurrection hope as central to our being.  That point also lies ahead in a subsequent passage.  But I am reminded just how fundamental this hope of the resurrection unto life is to Christian faith.  Let us, then, face the day with that hope firmly established, with full assurance that the Lord our God is with us, ever and always.  He’s got this.  He’s got us.  Enter into His rest.

What Really Matters (07/26/25)

Something happens in our thinking when we read about gain and loss.  We go immediately to fiduciary thoughts.  We may translate it to something akin to a profit and loss statement.  I was reading something yesterday that spoke of the perspective the English had of New Englanders back at the dawn of the nation, and their sense that no conversation whatsoever would transpire without mention of the dollar.  Even the casual greeting, it seems, carried this constant concern for profit and loss.  So, it is not unnatural, then, that we find ourselves caught up in like thinking.  But when we come to the message of Scripture, we must train ourselves away from such ideas.  In the matter of salvation, there’s really no place for calculations.

Now, I have to be careful here.  After all, Scripture has plentiful calls to count the cost.  The kingdom of God is compared to a pearl of such great worth as would lead even a New Englander to sell everything he owns to purchase that gem.  We’re out here in the relative wilds of Vermont today, and all around you see evidence of dreams held dear.  There are the farms that some brave soul cleared out of the woodlands, plowed in hope or desperation, and sought by whatever means to turn into provision to maintain himself and his household.  I look across the street from this little cabin we’ve been in, and there are earth-movers poised to carve yet another homestead out of the mountainside.  But imagine, if you will, such a homesteader, clearing his land, plowing the rocky soil, and in the process uncovering some buried trunk of coin hidden back when the land was young.  What won’t that man do to make certain the land, and its contents, remain his own?  That is the sort of profit and loss assessment we are called to when it comes to discovering that we have been called by Christ to come up higher.  So, yes, there is something of a balance sheet to be considered, and on that balance sheet, there is precisely one entry in the deposit column.  All else is a debit.

But again, while we are called to such assessment, to count the cost, knowing we shall have to lose all in order to gain our goal of heaven, we need to get beyond the transactional aspect, to what is really happening.  Calvin, among others, notes an allusion to the act of a sailor or ship-owner facing shipwreck.  If this is indeed the case, Paul has fairly recent memory to draw on.  After all, that fateful voyage from Crete had only been a few years ago, and he had seen first-hand how sailors respond.  Throw it all overboard!  Toss anything and everything, that we may lighten this ship and perhaps avoid tearing the hull out on some hidden reef.  Anything, to keep the gunwales above the waterline.

What has happened?  This is no longer a matter of accounts and paychecks.  Such things have become unimportant in the face of imminent risk of death.  What value these earthly goods, if holding onto them means today we die?  Or, as Jesus asked, what will it profit a man to save his life, if he loses his soul?  That’s the thing set before us in the offer of the Gospel.  Here is your one recourse to retain your soul.  Set aside the hope of eternal life for just this moment.  What of today?  What of next week, or next year?  Would you wish to live to see it?  What of your loved ones?  Would you wish that they, too, might continue alive and well, to be part of your life, your environment?  Maybe it’s a function of aging, but these are questions that seem to take on more life of late.  Even last night, in the restlessness of a vacation coming to an end, I felt the title of the song I’ve been working on this last year or so shifting from, “Here but Not Here,” to, “What Happens When You’re Gone?”  It’s not a question the mind likes to contemplate, to be honest.  But it becomes a legitimate concern.  We’re not getting younger.

For the believer, there is at least an answer to be had.  We may not yet be at the same place Paul has gained, where we, too, can boldly, truthfully proclaim that for us, to live is Christ and to die is gain (Php 1:21).  I mean, we’ve likely made progress on that first clause, though even there, I would venture we’re not entirely onboard.  But, to die is gain?  Yeah, that’s a harder sell.  I feel it sometimes, but generally as response to worldly frustrations.  Perhaps that’s not so bad a basis.  We are, after all, having our grip on this world gently loosened.  That’s at least a part of this sanctification process.

But back to gain and loss.  Here’s the deal.  We come into this Christian life as a vessel laden with wares.  We come carrying with us everything we thought valuable, meaningful.  For some of us, that includes, as it did with Paul, firmly held convictions about how to be good, what is right and what is wrong, and perhaps even what we must do to please whatever conception of God we might hold. 

Time was that we could probably at least assume something like a Christian worldview would apply, but that’s becoming less and less likely for those coming up after us.  I recall the surprise I felt at learning one of my friends from school did not attend any church.  I mean, it was odd enough, from my upbringing, to deal with Catholics, and the one Jewish family in town.  But nothing?  Your parents are just leaving you to sort it out for yourself?  Wild.  Now, young me didn’t really recognize the weight of that upbringing.  Young me didn’t particularly care that the pastor in our Christian church was teaching the youth group to play around with Transcendental Meditation.  Hey, why not?  So, yeah, ours was a bit of a comfortable Christianity, sort of a roll your own affair.  Morals were good and all, but the basis for moral judgment got a bit murky.

Now?  Now, we have Christians who decry the very idea of an organized church.  We have churches that would count it utterly offensive to insist that the Bible is true, and the things God declares sinful are to be considered, well, sinful.  We have entire denominations that are far more concerned with being found socially acceptable – oh, we’re so welcoming! – than with anything God might have to say.  I think of that funeral I went to some years back, in an ostensibly Christian church, but the songs and prayers were more concerned with the environmental goddess than anything the Bible might have to say.  Oh, I pray I did not offend the grass by my footsteps.  Really?  How far we have fallen!

Come around the other side, and let us contemplate the legalists, such as Paul sets before us, such as Paul was prior to that encounter on the Damascus Road.  And, if I have not said it already, I’ll say it now:  We are all legalists.  We are all of us what the navy used to term ship’s lawyers.  We have our set of rules and regulations by which we live our lives.  They may be a bit flexible in spots, to accommodate our vagaries, or they may be ever so rigid and unyielding, as we flail ourselves for our shortcomings.  And upon these, however they be formulated, we hang our hope and our judgment.  Herein lies my salvation.  Here’s how I shall make clear that I’m a good guy.  And you, if you wish to be accounted a good guy, had best be doing likewise.  Mind you, you’ll never be as good as I am, but you’ve got to work, work, work!  You’ve got to toe the line, keep your nose clean, choose your cliché.

As I say, Paul was right there with us.  He knew the rulebook inside and out.  And he had zero tolerance for anybody with a different rulebook, or anybody who simply disregarded the rules entirely.  Now, they say he mellowed after conversion, but I honestly don’t see it.  He could be just as vehement in defense of the Truth, now that he had come to it.  Just look at his denouncement of those legalists here!  Beware these dogs, these mutilators of the flesh!  Watch out!  They’re trying to get you caught up in their net of laws, and it’s a trap!

He is just as vehement in his rejection of his former approach.  All those rules, all that careful attention to outward act, ritual compliance, keeping the old ways pure; he had put heavy stock in such things.  He was on his way, excelling his peers.  He was surely among the righteous.  Why, just look at his record!  And he counted himself secure in the hope of Israel, signed and sealed against that day of the Lord.  This was the gain he had in view.  It was not a matter of wealth and prosperity.  It was a matter of eternal security.  But something of the message of Amos seems to have slipped into his consciousness along with the recognition of Christ as Lord of all.  This comes to mind, admittedly, because we happen to be reading Amos in our evening readings, but there’s that question that comes up.  “Alas, you who are longing for the day of the Lord, for what purpose will the day of the Lord be to you?  It will be darkness and not light” (Am 5:18).  I have to say, there’s a word to bring you up short! 

And here is Saul, sure of his standing, full of his sense that his works prove him righteous, even as he hunts down these upstart Christians.  And suddenly, he hears, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” (Ac 9:4), and all that assurance comes crashing down around him.  All that he had learned of religion to that point had to be unlearned.  All that he thought was aiding him on his way was in fact a leaden weight dragging him down, under the waves of his own sin.  Here is a real case of, “Woe is me!  I am undone!”  Yes, that is Isaiah responding to the vision of heaven, but how different is this?  You have met the living God, and you have been found wanting.  What remains, but certain judgment?  Yet, instead, he is handed hope, along with enrollment in a three year term of personal tutoring in what really counts.  But all he had counted as critical to his eternal security, he has discovered is in fact proving a deadly danger.  This is far more than loss.  This is far more than finding one’s bank account drained by hackers.  This is more like discovering that the flotation device you thought you were gripping was in fact a shark.  The peril is real, and the hope you have been clinging to is not.  Neither can you lay hold of the line that’s been thrown your way except you let go of that false hope to which you’ve been clinging.

And there it is.  There’s your loss.  As Calvin concludes, this loss of everything pertains to anything apart from Christ in which we have placed our confidence.  Whether it’s the vigor of youth, the heft of our bank accounts, the reputation we have amongst our coworkers or our coreligionists, the size of our family, our political views, our education, our medical advances, the work we do for the Church, the perfect record we have for attendance at Sunday School, or Sunday service, the mission trips we’ve undertaken, the sermons we’ve preached, the songs we’ve sung:  Choose your poison.  And then understand.  It’s poison.  It’s not that these are bad things.  Indeed, I am perfectly comfortable in saying that everything I’ve listed is in fact good.  But if these are our hope?  Well, sin has entered the scene.  We’ve fashioned another idol, turned yet another good to evil purpose.

We must come back again and again to this need to disregard our trust in anything we have done.  Look.  I do these studies just about every morning.  It pains me, or at least bothers me, if there’s a morning when I cannot do so, even if it’s set aside because of other matters of faith.  But if I come to suppose these studies make me worthy in God’s sight, I’m in trouble.  I preached a good sermon once, at least I think it was good, and have heard others say as much.  I would say I even adhere to its teaching to some degree.  But is there salvific value to that?  Not for me, certainly.  I cannot speak to what use God might make of it in the lives of others.  I could take a measure of it, I suppose, by my daughter’s response, which somehow managed to strip anything of Christ out of it and make it little more than moral platitudes.  It saddens me, but there it is.  And I know I can be just as off, just as dismissive of the sermons I hear.  So, the mere fact of sitting under the teaching of the Word is not going to suffice, either.  None of these acts, not even the obedient undertaking of baptism, not even heartfelt, soulful participation in Communion, will count for anything.  And if I start to count them as something, I have in equivalent degree let go of Christ.

Look.  Nothing in this call to live godly requires the renouncing of all worldly possessions.  Nothing demands a vow of poverty, or walking about in whatever would be the modern equivalent of sackcloth and ashes.  The only thing disavowed is dependency on our stuff, and here, we must recognize that our stuff includes our actions, our opinions, our best character traits.  Hear it again from our Apostle.  Put no confidence in the flesh (Php 3:3b).  Do you best, by all means, but trust nothing in what you do yourself.  Trust Christ, and Christ alone, for He alone is your salvation, your justification, your hope.

If God has seen fit to provide you with abundant means and pleasant surroundings, praise God!  It’s a gift, and how dare you refuse to enjoy the gift.  If God has seen fit to enter you into a time of greater dependence, job gone, accounts drained, relationships soured, what have you, praise God!  He’s got you.  Those things were never going to be reliable anyway, and here is your opportunity to come to a deeper trust in Christ.  I’m by no means advocating joyful pursuit of poverty, nor am I on board with those who suppose it godliness to throw themselves on the kindness of strangers.  That is not the Way.  Rather, as we saw back in the epistles to Thessalonica, let us be busy about our own work, earning our own bread, and staying out of other peoples’ business.  And, if we happen to have means to spare, let him who won’t work do without bread.  Sounds harsh, but in fact, it’s loving indeed.  For it must, in the end, press the idler back toward depending on God rather than handouts.  Alms have their place, and help for the truly needy remains characteristic of God and His children.  He, after all, causes His sun to shine in saint and sinner alike.  But still, that denunciation of the sluggard.

There was something the JFB points out which is worth some attention.  They note that loss assumes value, whereas refuse assumes nuisance.  Paul speaks in both terms here.  So, on one level, those old ways are not now discounted.  It’s not that circumcision as a sign of the covenant had become inherently unholy, nor that participation in the life of the temple, in the feasts, in the general rhythm of life among the people of God, had become a thing that must be avoided at all cost.  This sets the Judaic practices on a slightly different level than those pagan practices more familiar to his readers.  There is, after all, some underpinning to those practices, established as they were by God Himself.  It’s not the practices, then, that are at issue.  They still have value in Paul’s sight, insofar as they draw one closer to God in thought and practice.  But… change the scale such that we’re measuring worth on the axis of salvation, and now?  Now, it’s not loss, it’s refuse.  In gentlest terms, it’s garbage.  It may be pretty.  It may glitter as it catches the sun, but it’s still garbage.  It’s worthless, and less than worthless.  But it’s not the stuff that’s been rendered worthless, it’s the self.  It’s the clinging to these things as defining our worth.  It’s the supposition that these things, be they possessions or acts or thoughts, somehow render us holy in the sight of the only One whose sight counts.  No!  Our hope is in Christ, and Him alone.  All the rest, if it distracts us from that hope, if it seeks to replace that hope, has become a nuisance, a pest to be swatted away, garbage that has been left uncollected too long and is now stinking up the house.

Ah, but that hope!  In Him we can have confidence.  In Him we do have confidence.  We have full assurance that however badly we manage our end of the deal, He remains faithful.  We have full assurance that His word never fails of its purpose, and we know that we know that we know that He has spoken to us, called us by name.  We know that we know that we know that we are His, and nothing within or without the whole of Creation can take that away from us.  Nothing!  Not even our own fickle ways.

Yet, still, we have the call to strive after that which is already ours.  Still, we have the constant encouragement to not merely stand fast, not merely persevere amidst the current storm, but to stretch ourselves, push past our limits in pursuit of the goal of the upward call of Christ Jesus our Lord (Php 3:14).  And so, we strive, but as I observed yesterday, we strive from a place of rest.  Matthew Henry speaks to the point.  “A holy fear of coming short is an excellent means of perseverance.”  Indeed, anything less would smack of self-reliance once more asserting itself.  We would be back to the task of throwing out our garbage, of reminding ourselves that our hope lies not in any merit of our own, but in Christ.  Let us recognize the true value of those things which grab our attention and our efforts.  Let us test whether they have become idols in our lives, and if so, discern how best to rectify the situation. 

I have known times when certain pleasures needed to be set aside for a season.  I have known others when the setting aside needed to be more permanent.  Let us act, then, with wisdom from on high, not over-reacting, not under-reacting.  Let us pursue the course God has set for us, and let us recognize that the course He has set for our fellow believer may differ in details, differ in intensities.  But let us, whatever the case, keep our hope firmly anchored in Christ alone, and let us undertake to enjoy and rejoice in whatever it may be that our beloved Savior sets before us, this day and every day.  Let us, in all things, rightly discern and assess what really matters.  We needn’t become monkish, but we must be made righteous.

True Fellowship (07/27/25-07/28/25)

Picking up on much the same thought I left off on yesterday, we are in need of finding our balance.  We don’t simply stop working because, oh look, I have faith in Christ, and can now just leave all that working business up to Him.  Neither do we pursue our works as though our lives depend on them.  We work best, we work rightly, when we do so from the place of resting in Christ, relying on Him, trusting in Him, cooperating with Him.  This comment from Ironside resonates with me.  “When we rest in Christ, our confidence in the flesh is forever ended.”  Now, I don’t suppose he has the idea of working from rest in mind, particularly, but I do think it’s there.  When we rest in Christ, all confidence in the flesh must cease.  Yet, the flesh continues until such time as He calls us home, and the question must arise, how are we now to live this life in the flesh?  And the answer must come, that we work.

Calvin observes the condition, insisting, along with James, that there is no true faith that is an inactive faith.  As he points out, an inactive faith could never produce a fruitful life.  An inactive faith, we might say, is like a fruit tree that fails to produce.  And what does one do with such a tree?  It gets trimmed at best, cutting away the deadwood to allow fruitful growth.  And, as the parable goes, if that tree still fails to be fruitful, it will be cut down and burned.  It is clearly diseased and dying, and there is no hope of a harvest from it.  It’s just using up valuable nutrients to no purpose.  So, yes, we strive, and are encouraged to strive for Christ with all we are, every fiber of our being.  We desire to be fruitful.  But then, the fruit does not grow of its own accord does it?  It grows because of the life in the seed.  It grows because of the nourishment received from soil and water and sun.  Indeed, given those conditions, the seed cannot help but bear fruit.  And this, I think, brings us far nearer our own condition.  If the seed of the Spirit is indeed in us, and the soil of our lives is watered and fed upon the Word of God, the fruit cannot help but grow.

So, we strive, but not as depending on those works.  We strive because it is the natural outflow of this new life within.  We strive because we have tasted and seen that the Lord is good, and His goodness commends these works.  It is pleasing in His sight, and He having loved us so incredibly, so unbelievably, and so consistently, it is our greatest desire to return that love in kind.  And we hear the words of our beloved Savior echoing within.  “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (Jn 14:15).  And we do love Him.  And we do strive to keep His commandments.  And we do often fail of our desire and His, finding it yet again needful to resort to His forgiveness, confessing our failure, our sins.  And He does forgive, and we are restored, and we get up and do it again.  But we don’t fret.  We don’t cringe in fear of reprisals.  We don’t account every little thing that happens to us in the course of our day as some sort of retribution meted out by an angry God.  He loves us.  He may have cause to discipline us, and if so, we can trust that He will.  But retribution?  No, not upon those He loves.

Now, I am supposed to be considering true fellowship here, according to my headings.  But this matter of true fellowship comes up in the context of sorting out the place and the value of works.  I have noted already, I believe, that this mindset of works-righteousness inevitably leads us to possess a conception of God that is at odds with reality.  The same must be said for the opposing antinomian tendency, that wishes to find faith free of works entirely.  Having faith, in that mindset, consists in doing as you please, and pretty much ignoring God, other than to trust that He has to forgive all your little peccadillos, and your big ones, too.  Both courses set out after a god who isn’t God, but simply a construct of ill-informed imagination.  God is powerful to save, but He is not constrained to save.  Go back to His naming of Himself to Moses.  “I will have compassion on whom I choose to have compassion” (Ex 33:19).  We must conclude, together with Paul, that it does not depend on man willing, or man working, but on God who has mercy (Ro 9:16).

And this conclusion must come of having fellowship with Him.  It cannot come of studious familiarity with Scripture alone.  I see in the Scriptures that our enemy, Satan, has a great proficiency with the text.  He is certainly entirely familiar with the Law and the teachings.  Go back to the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, and he’s right there, quoting scriptures to back his ideas, like any good legalist.  He’s got his proof texts at the ready, and he can talk a good game.  But he doesn’t know God, not really, not from fellowship.  I would say not experientially, but he has had, so far as we understand it, experience of God.  He has walked in God’s courts, though no more.  By some accounts, he led the worship as heaven’s choir master.  There may even have been a time when he actually adored God in earnest.  But if so, that was long ago, and any real fellowship with God was severed, seared from memory by his devotion to himself.  And isn’t that a warning for us all!

For us, though, the trajectory has gone the opposite way.  We began, it seems, with no conscious knowledge of God, and as we came to know of Him, we really didn’t particularly want anything to do with Him.  He would cramp our style.  We rather prefer the genie who just grants our wishes, preferably without the fabled tendency to twist our requests to our detriment.  But God chooses to have mercy.  He sends forth His Spirit to address our inward man, to plant the seed of faith and tend to it until it becomes irresistible.  We are reborn.  And rather than try to hyper-spiritualize our natural birth by supposing we had some say in the matter, we will be far better off to recognize that, like our natural birth, we had no say in the matter of our spiritual rebirth.  God spoke, and it was.  Thus begins the story.  Thus ends the story.

Well, now the seed of faith is planted, and as the Spirit speaks to our spirit, as we come to realize not just the doctrinal beauty of this revealed Word of God that has come into our possession, but to feel the full force of God’s goodness experienced, we truly are coming to know God.  He has made Himself known, stooped down to make Himself knowable.  Man did not conceive of the plot of this book we study.  For one, there are too many authors involved to suppose any such thing.  Add that they must, of necessity, write in isolation one from the other, sometimes in parallel efforts at similar points in time, sometimes separated by centuries.  All thought of contrivance or of conspiracy must be seen as absurd.  God spoke, and it was.  Man wrote, yes, and he wrote as he thought.  The voice of Paul is quite distinct from that of Moses, or of John.  Isaiah prophesies with a different flavor than Amos, than Ezekiel.  Yet, the fundamental message remains unified.  The epic that unfolds is one epic, revealing one God, who never changes.  He is who He is.  Start to finish.

He set forth the Law, and indeed, He declares that the one who practices the Law shall live by the Law.  That is to say, if the Law can be obeyed perfectly, it will assuredly result in eternal life.  But we have seen, repeatedly, that it’s too late for perfection.  It was already too late before ever we began to try.  And the correcting of that first imperfection is beyond us.  So, we must conclude that the Law, as clearly and correctly as it sets forth the code of conduct which defines righteousness, cannot itself be our source of righteousness.  And the Spirit, speaking to our spirit, testifies that now, in this state of rebirth, our source is indeed not God’s Law, but God Himself.  He came, as was intended before ever the project of Creation began, and achieved the impossible.  Born without our burden of original sin inherited from Adam, He lived a sinless, though truly human life.  Somehow, He navigated infancy without that sinful proclivity for demanding instant gratification.  Somehow, He survived His teens without a rebellious phase.  Somehow, in spite of being so used and abused by kinsman and foreigner alike, He never responded in anger, never sought His own revenge, never hated and cursed, but only loved.  Where He rebuked, even where He rebuked severely, removing all hope, He did so in righteousness, proclaiming not His human opinion, but God’s pure judgment.

He is our source.  And He has called us to Himself.  You know, this is an image I can’t get over.  God the Father has given us to His Son as a gift.  Now, I don’t know about you, but at least in this setting, I cannot very well look at myself as much of a gift.  Seriously?  I need look no farther than the middle of last week, when frustrations were granted full bloom, anger took the reins, and my tongue forgot all decency, let alone love.  No, wounded pride was all, and any care for holiness fled the scene.  And there again lies sin against eternal God, and no hope in this flesh of ever setting the books to rights.  But hope remains, for my hope lies not in any dream of perfected compliance, but in Him.  Hope remains because He has made Himself known to me.  He has shown Himself to me.  Repeatedly.  He has slowly, gently, caused me to look back on those past events which I thought showed me so terribly skillful, or clever, or wise, and let me see that no, they only showed me as so terrible.  They only made it necessary for Him to step in a bit more forcefully to prevent me from doing myself in by my foolishness.

Knowing Him, coming to recognize His loving guidance, His tender care of me long before I would even acknowledge His existence, even while I was busily looking most anywhere else but to Him in hopes of some supernatural experience; this changes things.  He loves me!  In spite of my flaws, in spite of my stupidity and stubbornness, He loves me.  What a wonder!  And He shows me, as I come to perceive the true impossibility of legal compliance, that the Law is not the foundation for my reliance.  He has already complied.  My righteousness remains that righteousness which comes of the perfect keeping of God’s holy Law, but it’s not my perfect keeping of the Law, it’s His.  He has realized perfect holiness in His humanity.  Now, I don’t wish to get tangled in matters of the interplay between His humanity and His divinity.  But I must insist that had His perfect record come of His divinity, it would have no particular value to us.  Surely, God the Father has just as perfect a record of compliance with His own will.  How could He not?  But Jesus came and obeyed in His humanity.  As Paul has written earlier, He divested Himself of His divine prerogatives, and humbled Himself in obedience (Php 2:7-8).  He was perfected, says the author of Hebrews, by suffering, and that, by God’s direction (Heb 2:10).  In Him, in His humanity, perfection is realized.  That is rendered clear by His resurrection, the proof of God’s acceptance of His sacrifice.  And, because He is likewise and simultaneously God, His perfection, His acceptance, comes to be a pledge of our own perfection and acceptance.  Holiness will be realized in us who are with Him by faith, as the JFB observes.

Yet, I still have not brought us to the matter of true fellowship.  True fellowship stands close-coupled to experiential knowledge, and it is just that sort of experiential knowledge which Paul holds forth to us here as being of surpassing value.  To know Christ Jesus my Lord, not just know about Him, not just acknowledge the fact of His Lordship, but to have experience of Him.  I mean, there is a certain wonder to be had in understanding that here is one of dual nature, both divine and human.  And it’s not merely the wonder of trying to come to grips with that idea.  This is, after all, a concept with which the church wrestled for centuries, and still, to try and put it into words without straying into error proves challenging.  But we have experience of His divinity.  We have met Him, somehow, and found that He has taken up residence in our own bodies, not as some possessing spirit but as a loving Savior and companion.  We have experience of His humanity, discovering in Him a man such as ourselves, familiar with the aches and the joys, the limitations of finitude, the wonder of walking in this world He created.  We have experience, then, of His sympathy for our condition, and His care for us in this condition.  And we may, at some juncture, come to a full appreciation of why it was necessary that He be both God and man so as to be the one, perfect Mediator between God and man, representing both parties from a place of experiential knowledge on His own part, and supplying from His unique condition, a full satisfaction for sin that could satisfy the eternal holiness of God, and meet the need of fallen humanity.

This we know.  This we know, even if we don’t fathom the intricacies of doctrine.  We know that He has saved us and is somehow achieving in us a remodeling, a rebirth and regrowth into a perfection of holiness akin to His own.  And we know Him!  We know Him not just in matters of facts and data, but with that same sort of intimate knowledge we have of our spouse or of our closest friends.  We have lost somewhat of that closeness in modern life, I think.  Used to be your closest friends were likely to be with you life-long.  But with mobility has come something of a dissolution of community.  We don’t stay put.  We don’t put down roots early, but rather, flit from place to place, from community to community.  And each time, we must once more seek to make connections.  And each time, I think, those connections become more tenuous, and more difficult to establish in the first place. 

Close friends came naturally as a child, even if the selection from which to choose may have been rather minimal.  Where I spent most of my youth, simple matters of geography served to limit the options.  We had, what, maybe two houses within sight of our own, maybe twenty within easy reach by bicycle.  You might expand that to a hundred, perhaps two hundred with a bit more range to your cycling, but how many had children your own age?  Not so many.  And among those, how many were what you would seek for friendship?  How many were of the sort you could trust with your inner thoughts, or at least, so you thought at the time?  It reduced quickly.  I would probably have accounted perhaps three as friends as close as all that, and could perhaps add another ten or so on the level of frequent acquaintances.

But we were a mobile family, and moved on.  And in that new setting, though houses were more numerable, friends really were not.  It took time to sort out the who’s who, and now with the added anxieties of the teenage years.  Can’t say as I chose wisely, nor that there were many at all that could truly be accounted friends of a trustworthy, confiding sort.  And the ones I trusted, well, as I say, I did not choose wisely.  But the moves continue, and those friends I knew from youth fell away from awareness, with no particularly close friends to fill the gap.  Enter married life, and the opportunities for friends, apart, of course, from your spouse, drop off significantly.  Begin to settle into home-ownership, and the flow of the workplace, and so on, and pretty soon you’re all but on a desert island, for all that there is a town around you.

But, behold!  Christ comes, the God-man, and somehow, through the means of various people encountered, makes Himself known.  He makes known His interest in fellowship, in being such a close and true friend as maybe you can still recall from some early stage of life.  And more!  Oh, we come to know the longing that has been in us all these long years, and here is One who actually satisfies that longing.  This may be rather an odd way to view what has happened.  I don’t know.  But it fits my experience, I think.  And having met this Jesus, having discovered in Him the friend good and true that I have always sought and never before found, I just want to know Him more, and to know myself known by Him.

It was interesting to come off the first half of this part of my study into a sermon from Psalm 42, which managed to explore many of the same themes that I have either been exploring, or had in mind looking forward to the second half.  But here is God revealed to us as one with intimate, experiential knowledge of us.  He knows our inmost thoughts.  He knows our quiet struggles, as well as our occasional triumphs.  And withal, He loves us.  He loves us expressively, unreservedly, patiently.  And He is open to hearing us, even when we are overwhelmed, even when we cannot really sense His closeness.  He is there.  He is listening.  He is answering.  And He is not put off by our frailty, by our fickleness.  He is with us yet.  He is experiencing our situation right alongside us, sharing the pain, sharing the struggle, sharing His strength to carry us through.  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me (Ps 23:4a).  Somehow, that verse just demands the King James treatment.  But that’s our experience.  Though I am in the midst, and may not feel it as I would prefer, Thou art with me.  There will come again the full-system recognition that You are the defense of my life, my Light, my Salvation.  Whom shall I fear (Ps 27:1)?  Or what?  If God is for us, who can stand against us (Ro 8:31)?  And faith stirs once more.  And confidence soars once more.  Our God is with us yet.

But we are talking here about matters of salvation and sanctification.  We are talking about attaining to righteousness not just in our own eyes, perhaps not even in our own eyes, but on a plane far more important:  in the eyes of God Himself.  As we have come to walk with Jesus, to converse with Him and learn from Him, one thing must surely come clear – the only righteousness we’re going to find in this life comes from Him, for He is truly righteous.  Whatever we may have done to improve our self-image and account ourselves good enough was never actually good enough, and never could be.  We must, I think, come to a place of hopelessness before we can gain true appreciation for what our Lord has done for us.

I was reading something from C.S. Lewis last night, talking about the challenges of evangelizing the then-current generation of Englishmen.  It still holds, perhaps more than at the time.  He was writing shortly after the end of World War II, and found his countrymen really had no particular conception of sin, certainly not in their own actions.  They might still account certain behaviors wrong, but many of the social pressures that would have helped define sin a bit more clearly had been eroded to the degree that what used to be recognized as sinful now seemed harmless, and if harmless, how could it be sinful?  But until we are convinced of our sin, we shall be hard-pressed to find it worthwhile to pursue a Savior.  What do I need saving from?  That’s the first battle to be won, if we would see people saved.  We need first to establish a more accurate picture of right and wrong, and to frame it in such matters as are more in line with common experience.  Speak of adultery and murder, and as the Pharisees of old, most will simply find themselves clear of all charges.  And trying to bring Jesus’ clarification to bear, that these issues include even the proximate thoughts, probably won’t be to the purpose yet.  But, lying?  Stealing?  Chances are very good that any person you meet has personal experience of those.  Chances are they can even recognize the fact.

Ever eat a grape or two while shopping?  Ever grab a pen from work, or from the bank, back when banks didn’t have them chained to the counter?  And why, after all, did they find it needful to chain them down?  Yeah.  That.  That’s sin.  Oh, but everybody does that.  It’s expected.  Yep.  And these days, we say the same of shoplifting, busting open display cases, rioting in the streets, setting up camp uninvited on public lands and so on.  Ever disregard a speed limit?  Ever take a stop sign as more of a suggestion than a rule?  Ever spoken about somebody as if you had a view to their inward character when all you really had was your own dark thoughts?  That would be false witness, wouldn’t it?  The point is, we all sin, and do so constantly because we are, by our nature, sinners.  And all sin – now it gets a bit deeper – is primarily against God.  Righteousness is, after all, His to define, as the Creator and Controller of all.  To go against His righteous order is to sin against His righteousness, to disregard His rightful rule.  And it won’t avail anything to boldly declare that you don’t recognize His right to rule.  Honestly, we’ve got something like half the country at any given time loudly whining that whoever is in office is ‘not my president.’  But whining doesn’t make it so.  Like it or not, he is.  Agree with him or not, he is.  And, since I’m writing from the US, let me put it in clearly for us:  It doesn’t matter whether you’re thinking Obama, or Biden, or Trump.  Like it or not, for the duration of their term, they are your president, and their word, within constitutional bounds, is law.

Okay, where am I in this?  Let me try and get back on track.  We, by His grace, have come to know Christ, truly, intimately to know Him.  Far more importantly, He knows us.  He has chosen this intimate familiarity, and made it possible for us.  His is the only true righteousness, for He is Righteous and True.  Let me take another bit of a curve here.  We have this image of Christ and His church, portrayed in Scripture as husband and bride.  We have that call in Ephesians and elsewhere, to love our wife as Jesus loves the Church.  We have the mystery of marriage set forth as displaying in this closest of human relationships the relationship of Christ to the believer.  In that relationship, as concerns every believer, Jesus is the husband, and the believer is the wife.  This thought, I confess, is fresh in mind from yet another bit of C.S. Lewis’ writing, this time on the reason for a male clergy.  But that’s not where I’m going with it.  Where I’m going is here.  In our traditional forms of marriage, the wife takes the name of her husband to supplant that of her parents.  Nowadays, that may be up for grabs with many.  Some insist on retaining their own name.  Some may seek to hyphenate.  But let’s stick with tradition for this exercise.  Something’s happening there, and if I may be just a little judgmental, something significant is lost when that gets set aside.

From the outset, the Bible has declared that for this reason, a man shall leave father and mother, and cleave to his wife, becoming one flesh (Ge 2:24).  Now, it is written of the man leaving behind his parents, because there is a certain severing of allegiances here, also something of a rite of passage.  Used to be, the man was responsible to obey his parents, and came under their headship.  But that is now done, and he must himself take up the responsibilities of headship.  This is not, of course, to say that parents are henceforth disregarded.  No, the command to honor one’s parents remains.  But the chain of command has altered.  The husband is now answerable to God more directly, rather than to his parents as delegated authority.  And he now has that delegated authority set upon his shoulders.

For the wife, and here I wander back to my point, there is also a severing of ties.  She is no more the daughter of her parents as belonging to them.  Think of that second tradition, of the father handing his daughter over to her husband.  Now, I can understand why the modern woman might cringe at this concept, for it really is something of a property exchange.  The father is handing over his most precious possession, his daughter, to another.  And who wishes to feel that they are but a property to be bought or sold?  But it’s far more than a business transaction.  It may not always have been so.  Marriages were more often arranged by parents than not, and quite likely looked to certain familial benefits to the arrangement made.  But that is certainly less so in modern experience.  Still, there is the valuation, though.  This is my daughter, flesh born of my flesh, whom I value, to borrow the biblical phrase, as the apple of my eye.  Do her wrong, and you’ve done me wrong.  Hurt her, and you answer to me.  

But for the wife:  There is something of a cutting off of that former life, isn’t there?  It’s a sorry bride who goes running home to mom every time there’s difficulty in the marriage.  It’s a common enough tale, I suppose, but it’s still one in which we recognize that things are not as they should be.  No.  He is your husband.  You should go to him, work out the issue with him, not go home to air your dirty laundry before your parents.  They, after all, no longer have a real say in the matter.  Their authority over you has been ceded, severed.

And this has me back at what I wanted to express in regard to marriage as modeling Christ and the Church.  In that moment of salvation, the authority sin once had over you has been severed.  You were born, like me, a sinner in the line of Adam, our mutual forebear.  We bore the weight of our lineage.  We were bound to the ways of our lineage, owed fealty of a sort to that heritage.  And it was a bondage, the worst of slavery with no escape possible.  But Christ has come, our husband, and has taken us to Himself.  That old lineage and its claims no longer hold.  We have taken His name as our own, and He has taken us as His own.  Those old ties have been cut.  The former chain of command has been severed, and now we answer to another.  He has charge of us, if you will, to have and to hold.  And He holds us dear.  He, if I may jumble metaphors just a bit, has made us the apple of His eye.  I don’t really think that jumbles the metaphor as much as all that, though I previously applied it to the father handing his daughter into the care of her husband.  There’s an assumption there, that this husband will have the same care for her that her father did.  And again, the instruction of Ephesians 5 just emphasizes the point, doesn’t it?  Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church, giving Himself up for her (Eph 5:25), love your wife as you love your own body, nourish her, cherish her, again, just as Christ does the church (Eph 5:28-29).

And if this is as Christ does the church, this is as Christ is to you, for you are His bride, and He your husband.  He loves you.  He gave Himself up for you, not even valuing His own life, if it meant yours was lost.  Wives, if I may, understand your husband, that he feels this call strongly, to love you just as selflessly.  He may not be perfect at it.  I rather doubt he is, or could be.  But he feels the weight of it.  You are precious in his sight, and there is nothing he would not do to see you happy and secure.  But he can’t do it, for he is but a bride himself.  And he must bear you constantly before God, that God Himself would care for you as he does, even more than he does.  And his rest, when he finds it, lies in knowing that God does care for you even more than he does.  And he knows how blessed he is to have a wife who shares his close, intimate, experiential knowledge of, and love for Christ.  This is, after all, the object of surpassing value, this close knowledge of our Lord.  I know Him, and He knows me.  He knows us as His spouse, and has set Himself as our dearest friend, our beloved husband.

But, know this:  Experiential knowledge does not come without closeness and sharing.  It’s true in marriage.  It’s true in friendships.  It’s true in the life of the church.  We are called to unity, but that unity can’t be had without closeness and sharing.  If we can’t do it with one another, I fear we shall never experience true closeness and sharing with Christ.  “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1Jn 4:20).  Exchange love for knowing of this experiential sort, for honestly, the two cannot be separated.  We cannot truly love whom we don’t truly know.  If I don’t have close, experiential knowledge of my brother, whom I see, with whom I can eat and work, and interact, how shall I ever hope to have close, experiential knowledge of my Lord, whom I do not see, with whom I cannot eat and interact in so visceral, so physically manifest a fashion?  Come to the Communion table, and is this not a significant aspect of the practice?  We come together to partake together.  We dine on and with Christ, yes, but we cannot truly touch His presence.  We may feel it in our spirit, but it’s not the visceral stuff of, say, a large, family Thanksgiving meal.  But experienced together, seeing our brothers and sisters gathered around us in this same experience, there is a properly physical experience of our union.  And, as we all seek to bear His image in our lives, we can look upon one another and see Christ perhaps just a little bit.

Look.  We are called by Christ to draw near to Him, so near that He is in us and we in Him.  We are called to intimacy, not mere acquaintance.  We are called to share our inmost thoughts with Him, whether we think those thoughts worthy of Him or not.  When we are at our lowest, it will do no good to pretty up our language for prayer.  Honesty is the prettiest.  All that window dressing we try to put on it is just so much hypocrisy rendering the result less than worthless.  Prayer is a place for rawness, for the honesty that comes of true, intimate acquaintance.  And we have this, which we do not have in earthly marriage:  He knows.  He knows our inmost thought, even before we think it.  He knows everything about us.  Nothing is hidden.  And He hasn’t walked away.  We can trust Him with our ugliest, most ill-informed thoughts and feelings, because He’s already fully aware of them anyway.  Perhaps, no, not perhaps, but assuredly, if we will open up in honesty before Him, He can then help us address the pain, the sorrow, the doubt.  The wound cannot heal without being exposed, and we have some wounds that are in serious need of healing.  Let us, then, expose them to our Healer, that He may attend to our deepest needs, and we may be restored to our deepest joy.

The Place of Suffering (07/29/25-07/30/25)

It may well be one of the most shocking things we read, when Paul speaks of his desire to know and experience the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings.  Something about this makes us want to back away, to find some sense in which to take his statement that differs from the plain text.  But it is a call to fellowship, to koinonia participation in His sufferings.  It would be nice, admittedly, to find that it means simply enjoying the benefit of His sufferings, which we assuredly do.  We gain infinitely from the value of His suffering obedience, even unto death.  And death is never far from sight when we come to this.  Look at Paul’s full desire here:  to know the power of His resurrection, to share His sufferings, to be conformed to His death.  As we observed, resurrection cannot be attained except we first die.  How can we be restored from death except we have entered into it?  The alternative would be merely preservation, avoidance.  That, to be sure, would be welcome.  But it would be nowhere near so powerful.

I want to know the power of His resurrection.  Yes!  We’re on board with that.  To know that whatever this life may dish out, there awaits a blessed eternity ahead is comfort indeed.  But it is impossible that we should know this power except we have entered into this fellowship of sufferings, unless we have been conformed to His death.  And make no mistake.  It’s not you or I somehow conforming ourselves to His death.  It’s the passive result of Him conforming us.  Oh, but we ought rightly to be drawn towards this, to be seeking with all that is in us to be such that He can and will conform us.  But, if we’re honest, I think we should have to admit that letting go of the stuff of this life is harder than we can manage.  We are, I do believe, being weaned from it.  Perhaps it comes with age, but I don’t think it comes unaided.  The Spirit is gently reducing our grip on the fleshly pleasures, the desire of the eyes, the enticements of the world.  We will deal with that more in the next section of this chapter, but it’s there already.  We long for that upward call.  But we must eventually come to recognize that there are prerequisites.  This flesh can’t make the trip.  This fleshly mindset can’t make the trip.

So, perhaps we can join Paul in this pursuit of fellowship in the sufferings of Christ.  Does that mean we go out looking for trouble?  No.  There’s no need to do so.  Trouble will find us readily enough.  But it might just mean we stop asserting our privilege.  It might just mean we stop demanding our rights.  It might just mean we learn to turn the other cheek.  Seems like I’ve read that instruction somewhere.  It may mean we find a lot happening that we have to forgive.  It may mean that we need to stop demanding explanations from God, and accept that He knows what He’s doing, even if it is uncomfortable, even painful.  We are being conformed.  It’s part of being renewed.

Have you ever undergone a remodeling exercise in your house?  We all thrill at the result, or hope to be thrilled by the result.  But the process?  Far better we should leave town until it’s done, were it not for the need of oversight.  Remodeling is messy.  Things must be torn out before they can be replaced.  Walls may need to be demolished.  Plaster is no doubt going to have to be removed.  Who knows what else may be necessary.  It’s not going to be a happy space while that’s going on.  But we must keep the goal in view, must look to that future hope.  This lends strength to persevere through the mess.  This grants us peace in the midst of the turmoil of the ongoing work.

Our spiritual remodeling is much the same.  There is much that needs to be torn out, knocked down, ripped bodily from us, in order that the new may come.  There has been that successful work that came about in the opening moments of salvation.  That’s done.  We’re good with that.  But the work continues.  The remodeling takes a lifetime, in part because were God just to rip out everything that needed to go in one shot, we’d collapse.  But He’s a master craftsman.  He knows which pieces we can withstand as they’re removed, and He knows where new structures need to be put in place to hold us together for the next stage.  Here are the root conditions of our sharing in His sufferings.  It hurts to have those walls ripped apart.  It hurts to feel the wallpaper being scraped off, and the beams exposed.  But we have to trust.  We have to know that the pain is to good purpose.

Now, I think we have to expand to another aspect of this suffering.  When we make it known that we belong to Christ, it will most often not be met with a happy receptiveness.  Oh, those who likewise belong to Christ will surely rejoice together with us, welcome us to the family.  But for those who were our family and friends prior?  At best, they’re going to be amused, waiting for this latest fad we’re following to lose our interest, so we come back to them and rejoin our former ways.  When that doesn’t happen, prepare for loss.  Prepare for rejection.  Prepare for outright hostility.  The world doesn’t like it when it loses its grip on us.  Our friends don’t like it when we, by our change, make plain their need.  If they’re not ready to face the need for change, expect that they shall lash out at your call for change.  And it needn’t be a matter of you preaching at them.  Honestly, I’d rather hope it doesn’t come from that angle, but rather the testimony of a life change that is self-evident.  That is reproach enough for those left unchanged.  That, Lord willing, may open the door for more significant discussion.  But if He is not willing, then we must accept it.  If He does not call, they cannot answer, and no browbeating sermonizing on our part is going to change that.

So, live as examples of godliness.  Live as examples of humility.  Don’t hide your faults, but don’t celebrate them.  Don’t respond in kind.  How our flesh rises up ready to do so!  But you must resist.  You must, by the empowering Holy Spirit within, respond in true godliness, forgiving when forgiving is hard, blessing in the face of cursing, doing what’s right however much you are wronged.  We don’t respond as we deem them to have deserved, for we recognize that God has not responded to us as we have deserved, but rather, has shown mercy.  And we hear His clarion call to go and do likewise.  Now, we have entered into His suffering.  Now we are coming to know true fellowship with Him.  As Ironside writes, “in no other phase of fellowship does the soul enter as fully into communion with Him who was on earth ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.’”  Be not dismayed, but rejoice!  That doesn’t mean we go dancing around, hooting with excitement.  It means we recognize our fellowship.  We recognize that God has found us ready to withstand the trial, and He has graciously shown us that this is so.  Here is cause not for complaint, but for thanksgiving.  Oh God!  How You have changed me!  How You have strengthened me!  How great You are!

This fellowship, if we take the JFB’s read of it, consists both in sharing by the imputation of His sufferings and death to our record, and in bearing the cross given us to bear in accordance with His will.  We have our burdens, our besetting trials.  These may be for a season or for a lifetime.  But no matter the scope and duration, they are not beyond our ability to stand, for God Who appoints the burden knows our frailty, knows our limits.  And His promise is that He will not push us beyond our ability.  As well, He promises that His burden is light, and this, because it is by the power He Himself supplies that we bear it, such that we can rightly say that He bears our burden on our behalf.

I should observe, at this point, that not every burden we choose to pick up is truly undertaken in His will.  We have a tendency to take upon ourselves burdens which are not in fact ours to bear.  I don’t know as I can rightly say why that is, but I observe it often.  Perhaps it feels the righteous thing to do, to bear another’s burden.  Perhaps we feel it our duty.  Or, perhaps it just makes us feel like we’re earning favor by doing so.  It seems to me to run the risk of being yet another form of virtue signaling, achieving nothing of real good, but making us feel good for trying.  These are not the burdens which can be accounted sharing in His sufferings.  These are sufferings we bring upon ourselves, or at the minimum, which we take up outside the scope of His will.

Yet, there is a caution for us if we seek to skate by without entering into this fellowship, if we seek ever and always to evade the trials that come of seeking to be faithful.  Barnes goes so far as to say the true Christian counts it an honor to be like Christ not only in glory, but also in trials.  I have to say, it is rare indeed, in my experience, to find such a Christian.  We may accept the necessity of it, or accede to the inevitability.  But I think we have largely lost the sense of it being an honor to face trials.  Honestly, much of what we account as trials barely leaves an impression.  I think of this vacation we just spent in Vermont, and I must confess, driving into the local city did feel oppressive.  Everywhere was not just evidence of lives overcome by sin and sin’s fallout, but the energetic celebration of sin.  Every church, it seems, (and I struggle to still call them churches), had to boast of their support of the sinful choice.  Oh, yes.  Come on in.  We won’t trouble you about that.  God doesn’t care, and if He does, we don’t care about Him.  Every storefront felt it necessary to make known that they support your lifestyle, whatever it may be, however corrupt, however divorced from reality.  Won’t say a word about it, other than to cheer you on.

Honestly, on what basis does a store need to act to demonstrate its support for the sexual preferences of their clientele?  Do we need to state our proclivities to gain entrance?  Is that next?  I mean, we’ve got sundry communication channels that seek to push us into choosing pronouns for ourselves.  Why not stores that pressure us to wear labels declaring our various depravities?  But to my point, this gets oppressive.  To have sin celebrated on every storefront, every street corner; to be in a place where no least pushback against the moral decay can be contemplated, yes, it weighs on the conscience, weighs on the spirit.  Seeing a young lady wearing her tail, and curling up by the roadside, next to her mailbox to live out her doggie fantasy is disturbing.  You feel for the one so lost in life as to suppose this could be accounted normal.  And you despair the society that seeks to promote such behavior, rather than seeking to supply a cure.

Does this count as suffering in fellowship with Christ?  Perhaps.  It does maybe give us a glimpse into just how great a trial it must have been for the second Person of the Trinity to come dwell among us.  How He must have felt the cry of Psalm 120.  “Woe is me, for I sojourn in Meshech, for I dwell among the tents of Kedar!” (Ps 120:5).  We may not understand the particulars of Meshech or Kedar, but we can feel the anguish, and no doubt, Jesus did as well, as He dwelt among those who ought to have been best prepared to receive their Messiah, and found instead a determined rejection, and corruption on every front.

So, how do we deal with it?  How do we withstand the oppressive atmosphere of modern life?  How do we take up our cross and continue?  It will surely help if we recognize that this is indeed what we are doing.  It will help if we come to the realization that in this suffering we are truly coming alongside our Lord, as He is indeed coming alongside us.  We are moving into depths of fellowship beyond even that of husband and wife.  We are being welcomed into the place of pain, to share sorrow, and in sharing, to find pain and sorrow relieved.  It’s not that pain and sorrow are removed, but in that fellowship there is something comforting, strengthening.  Our Lord is with us yet.  And indeed, He has accounted us sufficiently mature as to stand in the present storm.  What helps even more is the recognition that whatever this life may throw at us, even if it kills us, it alters nothing as to our final state.  “He who believes in Me shall live even if he dies” (Jn 11:25).  That wasn’t just for Lazarus.  After all, though he was restored to earthly life, that was but a temporary reprieve.  The grave remained ahead.  But the grave wasn’t the end then, and it wouldn’t be later.

This begins to drive us towards a point that is somewhat surprisingly central to Paul’s message:  that of the death and resurrection of Christ.  It’s there in this same verse.  “I want to know the power of His resurrection.”  But that cannot come about except we first die.  You cannot resurrect the living.  And the fact of His resurrection is cause to believe for our own.  Now, I know there are those who get very excited about this, and look to see folks lifted of their death beds, brought back to earthly life.  But honestly, I have no particular interest in being resurrected back into this life, nor is this present life what resurrection is about.

Here is a great distinction between the resurrection of Lazarus and the resurrection of Christ.  Lazarus, when he was called forth from his tomb, remained in the same physical body.  He remained subject to death and decay.  He was no different than he had been prior to being interred.  Jesus, on the other hand, arose with a new body.  Whether that new body consists in a transforming of the old, or merely makes use of its composite elements, or how exactly that worked, the body of Christ post resurrection is not the same body He had.  It bore the marks of His crucifixion, clearly, at least on those occasions where He wished those marks evident.  But were they evident when He met Mary in the garden?  I should think that would have been a bit of a giveaway that this wasn’t the gardener.  Were they evident as He walked with those two on the Emmaus road?  Wouldn’t the holes in His hands have given rise to at least some question about His identity?  So, forgive me if I remain unconvinced that these new bodies will be recognizable from the old.  They can be, it seems.  But it also seems to me that they can be quite different.  There appears to be a bit of malleability to this.  But I speculate, and there’s little value in that.

What is critical is to observe that the resurrected Christ did not return to mere physical existence, but to a new sort of existence, at least so far as His humanity; one now suitably equipped for the realms of heavenly eternity.  Here is a body that doesn’t wear out, and won’t that be a blessing!  But it’s so much more!  Here is a pledge, made by the Father, in that He not only raised His Son to new life, but received Him alive and well back into heaven.  His work was a success.  His Church is established.  As concerns His sheep, they have a home and they will come home to it.

This doctrine of the resurrection is the central, distinguishing mark of Christian religion.  As we were discussing in men’s group yesterday, it’s not sufficient to note that Christ died for your sins, though that is quite true.  Yes, He died, and that most ingloriously.  Yes, He was, in truth, in physical reality, crucified, dead, and buried.  He was really and truly dead, by the best measure to be had of death.  The piercing of His side confirmed it.  The three days in the grave made clear that this was no swoon from which He recovered.  But, oh!  The joy!  Death could not hold Him, for death had no proper claim on Him.  Death is the penalty of sin, and sin was not to be found in Him.  And so, notice of His death must drive us to rejoice with the cry of, “He is risen!  He is risen indeed!” Whine all you like about the choice of date on which we celebrate this central, critical truth, or the name by which we call that day, but He is risen!  Were it not so, our religious exercises are without point, and we remain dead in our sins.  That it is so is cause for rejoicing, because it’s cause for hope.  Christ has risen from the dead!  And He has risen, unlike Lazarus, to die no more.  Is it any wonder that Paul accounted this the key doctrine of the gospel?  “I determined to know nothing among you but Christ, and Him crucified” (1Co 2:2).  But not left dead and buried, no!  Resurrected, and ascended to the throne of heaven!  That’s your hope.  That’s your assurance.  The sacrifice of His sinless life has obtained for you what you, in your finitude, could never obtain.  In the acceptance of His atoning death, we have our forgiveness.  Our debt of sin is paid, and the burden of that debt has been lifted from off our shoulders.

Look at how seriously, how centrally, Paul sets this reality before the Corinthians.  Having addressed their several issues, having corrected their misplaced focus on earthly displays of spiritual powers, he turns to what really matters.  “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.”  What was that, again, Paul?  “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.  He was truly dead and buried.  He was also raised the third day, and again, this was in accordance with the Scriptures.  Having risen, He appeared to Peter.  Later, He appeared to the Twelve” (1Co 15:4-5).  This is real, folks!  This is attested.  If the truth is established on the testimony of two or three witnesses, then these facts are more than established.  There’s twelve testimonies right there.  Add the hundreds who stood witness to His ascension.  We are far removed from the stuff of myth and legend.  As this message was spreading out into the Roman empire, there were still these hundreds of witnesses extent, who could be queried, who could have exposed the lie, if there was one.  But no!  It’s all true, historical fact.

C.S. Lewis comes back to those various myths involving what he terms a corn king, basically reflecting the death leading to life motif.  But whereas these posited such a thing in tales, there could be no referring to witnesses.  Nobody could be asked if they had seen Orpheus dead and then later alive.  For all that, nobody could be asked if they had seen Orpheus at all.  He was a fiction.  The various mystery religions had no idea of offering physical proof, or testimony of those who had seen physical proof.  It was all visions and hallucinations.  Buddhism today, or Hinduism, or Taoism, or Islamism; none of these have on offer a tangible, confirmed regaining of life.  If one has been reincarnated as a bug, how exactly would we go about proving that in the first place?  You can’t ask the bug.  It must remain supposition.  I don’t think Islam even has such a concept.  There’s just death and, if you’re particularly careful, fortunate, and male, entry into paradise, such as they conceive of it.  Buddha?  Seems like that just offers entry into the great nothingness, which somehow fails to entice, as peaceful as it may be.  But here is stone cold reality.  And it is, as Paul says, of first importance.  Get this!  Christ died for our sins, and was resurrected for our forgiveness.

Get that in your head, and get this out of it.  Resurrection power isn’t about this present life.  We may be so fortunate as to gain some small experience of it, and I suppose we could say that, our spirit being renewed, we indeed do have experience of it.  But there remains the bodily, physical resurrection ahead.  “If there is no resurrection, not even Christ has been raised, and if He has not been raised, faith is in vain” (1Co 15:13-14).  But the body, this current physical body, is akin to a seed in that it must be sown to the ground, must die in order to produce life.  I go back to that point from Calvin.  We must die before we can live.  “Whoever seeks to keep his life shall lose it, and whoever loses his life shall preserve it” (Lk 17:33).  It’s not a call to sloth and idleness.  No, 1 Thessalonians puts paid to any such thinking.  But it is a call to hold loosely to this life, to value our eternal home more highly, to strive for that upward call of Christ (Php 3:14), which is the resurrection.

In the meantime?  “To the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing, so that also at the revelation of His glory you may rejoice with exultation” (1Pe 4:13).  Have you been honored with the privilege of sharing the sufferings of Christ?  Recognize the honor.  Be grateful for the honor.  And know that here is token evidence of the treasure stored up to your account in heaven.  Now, don’t go out there looking to suffer as means to gain.  That’s not it at all.  Indeed, acting with the thought of reward as your motivator is always going to leave you off base and off course.  This life of godliness isn’t an accounting matter.  It’s a gratitude matter.  It’s a wonder of love matter.  Here is One who loves us, even at our worst, whose love is proven, unshakable.  He has done for us as we could never suppose ourselves to have deserved, done all in spite of what we’re like.  It must surely be our most deep-seated desire to recognize the gift of this love by so acting, so thinking, so speaking as to display a character pleasing in His sight, a character reflective of His own.  Like any child of a loving parent, we must certainly feel a desire to show our love for our parent by acting as they would have us to act, at the very least when they are able to see our actions.  God is our Father, and He always sees.  How strongly, then, ought we feel the urge to live lives of godliness, to be about doing those things which bring Him joy, about being the sorts of sons that give Him cause to rejoice to call us His own?

If that means suffering, so be it.  Christ suffered and died for us, that we might in fact become sons and daughters of the living God.  He taught clearly enough that the disciple can hardly expect better treatment than his teacher, the slave cannot expect greater respect than his master.  “In this life, in the world, you will have tribulation” (Jn 16:33).  But take courage!  “I have overcome the world.”  It may not look like this is so, but it is.  The darkness may appear to be on the increase of late, and it probably is.  But the Truth is unaltered.  The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it (Jn 1:5).  “I, the Light, have overcome the world.”  For us who remain?  Those odd words of encouragement.  “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Ac 14:22).  Rejoice, then, in the fellowship of suffering.

Life and Death (07/31/25)

This remark from Calvin just parked itself in my thinking.  “We must die before we live.”  That is the alarming reality of our new life, and it is assuredly the reality when it comes to our hope of the resurrection, that upward call towards which Paul exerts himself, and urges us to do likewise.  And this, as he made clear in his earliest epistles to Thessalonica, will be the case whether we have gone to our rest prior to Christ’s return, or whether we remain.  We who remain, he says, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep, but the dead in Christ shall rise first, and then, we who are live shall be caught up together with them (1Th 4:15-17).  And here there is a mystery, a known but not wholly explicable matter.  In the merest moment, the blink of an eye, the dead shall be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed (1Co 15:51-53).  The perishable must put on the imperishable.  The mortal must be made immortal.  Even for those who live to see that glorious day, there must be a death of the old body.  The perishable must perish in order that the imperishable may come.

But it’s not solely about this final act.  This is our story now.  We must die before we live.  And one place where it must begin is in our attempts to justify ourselves.  All desire to stand in our own righteousness must die.  Understanding the futility of those efforts, coming to realize more fully, if not in full, that it is entirely beyond us to be righteous by main strength and will, we ought gladly to let go of all such efforts.  But they don’t let go that easily.  It’s hard for us to accept our true condition.  It’s hard to accept that I can do nothing good enough to be good. 

If it’s this hard for the likes of me, who barely cared about righteousness prior to encountering my Lord and King, how must this have crushed Paul?  Think of that litany of achievements he just listed.  He had thrown his everything at this exercise of being holy and righteous.  And he had no doubt convinced himself as well as his peers that indeed, he was a truly righteous young man with a great future ahead.  Had things run their course, he would almost certainly have found himself a place in the Sanhedrin, and likely have become a leading light in that council.  But God had other plans.  He must crush out this trust in self-righteousness, must bring the man to realize the utter worthlessness of all that way of life.  Empty ritual.  That’s all it amounted to.  For all his fervor, it remained empty ritual.  And, we must add, it had become misguided in the extreme, meting out death upon those whose only crime was serving the God of Life.

When such a reversal comes, when we find ourselves having to dispense with all that we held dear, all that we accounted true and worthwhile, it’s going to hurt.  It cannot but hurt.  Even as we progress in this new life we have discovered ourselves born into, there come those moments where entire frameworks of belief must be torn down and left in the junkpile.  We may have held to certain beliefs about this new life for years, only to discover, as the Holy Spirit brings a deeper understanding, as we draw into a deeper fellowship with Christ, that those beliefs were in fact in error.  And, rather like the proverbial ex-smoker, having shifted to this new understanding, we can become somewhat overbearing in our excited proclamation of that understanding.  All well and good, but when it meets with those who still think as we once did, it ought not to surprise us if it meets stiff resistance, and even reviling.  I’m not going to suggest that reviling a brother or his doctrinal particulars is ever the correct response for a Christian, but it happens, doesn’t it?  We become rather defensive of our beliefs when we find them challenged.  We are not happy when we are called to let go of what defined us to take upon ourselves a new defining viewpoint.

Worldviews don’t die easy, and we all have them.  We had a particular worldview when first we came to Christ, and however long you’ve walked with Him, I would pretty well guarantee that remnants of that old worldview remain.  It’s not just the propensity for sin, though that’s certainly a large part of it.  No, it’s how we think about things.  It’s what we consider right and reasonable.  And these things filter how we see Christ, how we perceive His message to us as we come to the Scriptures.  And that, too, must die ere we live.  As I wrote, quite likely in pursuit of some other tangent, “It starts with the thought life.”  Our old worldview must die, in order that this new worldview can come fully to life.  Mind you, thanks to the irresistible grace of God, that process is happening, and it does so, like our attaining to righteousness, by the power of God alone, as often as not, in spite of our lack of engagement, in spite of our active resistance.

You know, driving around the regions of Brattleboro last week, you would see this bold flag flown here and there, with nothing upon it but the one word:  Resist.  No real statement about what it was that was to be resisted or why, but of course, with the present state of affairs, the intent was clear enough.  The bad guy in the White House, and his policies must be resisted.  Efforts to restore some semblance of order and sanity to the life of the nation must be resisted.  The deeper reality is this:  Holiness must be resisted, that sin may thrive.  That’s the true message of the place.  We shall have things our way, and God can just butt out.

The shocking realization that we must eventually come to is that our efforts at self-righteousness are really pushing that same narrative.  From the first sin of Adam, we have been trying to be a law unto ourselves.  We want it our way.  We don’t want to have to care about the rules.  The rules are for other people.  Rules are, perhaps, to give hints as to where the rules can be bent, disregarded.  They show us the safe course, but in doing so, they show us where adventure awaits.  And who doesn’t like a little adventure?  I have probably drifted off my point a bit.  But come back.  It starts with the thought life.  This is the first place where we must die before we live.  We must let go of our preconceptions, our misconceptions.  We must let go of our misguided desires.  We must let go of our idea of what good guys we are, and accept the true judgment.  All our best works are but filthy rags in the sight of God, every last one of them marred beyond recovery by the pollution of our sinful nature.  Salvation has not come as a result of works (Eph 2:9), and we are not, cannot be justified by the works of the Law (Gal 2:16).  We stand in Him, not because of works, but because of Him who calls, He who made His choice of us (Ro 9:11).  All thought of being good enough, of being capable of becoming good enough, must die, that we may live in the full realization of this most wonderful grace of God which has come to be our possession, our condition.  Life is come.  And how can it be that we will cling to this living death?

This is the fundamental message of the Gospel, and it comes to Jew and Gentile alike.  All thought of a righteousness built upon personal achievement must be rejected.  That still holds for the believer.  That still holds years on in the faith.  Here is the great message of Galatians.  It’s not just for some ancient group of Gentiles being pestered by the Judaizers.  It’s for us, pestered by our own legalistic mindset, and our own driving need to feel that we are still somehow, if not in the driver’s seat, at least holding the map and giving directions.  No!  Far be it from us!  Hear it, let it seep in, let it settle.  Let it permeate your consciousness and your being:  Only faith-righteousness matters.  Only that righteousness given us by God, founded in the true righteousness of Christ, indeed an impartation of His own righteousness to our account; only that counts for justification.  Come that final day, when all are brought before the throne of God for judgment, it must be that in us who believe, all thought of offering some body of actions of our own in our defense must be dismissed out of hand.  How dare we suggest that anything in us has served to clear our debt?  Were it not for the promise that we shall have come to our own perfection in that final day, I have little doubt that the thought would be with us still, to point out all the good things we have done, all those occasions where we spoke up for God, acted on His behalf.  But thanks be to God, we shall have the best of Counselors on that day, who will silence any such foolishness on our part and present to the Judge the one thing that matters.  “He is Mine.  I have paid his obligation to this court.”

Only that righteousness which is by faith in Christ, and even that faith, as Paul points out, not by our effort or will, but gained as a gift of God’s grace, leaving us less than nothing of which to boast, is of any value whatsoever.  All reliance on personal achievement must die.  And it’s a slow dying.  It’s a daily dying.  Here, perhaps, is the core of that call to take up our cross daily.  Daily, we must put to death this idea that we can prove ourselves to God, that we can render ourselves acceptable to Him, that we can show Him just how devoted and deserving we are.  Here dies all thought of, “I’m right, and you should acknowledge my wisdom.”  Here, the most we can hope to manage is, “follow me as I follow Christ.”  It still  impresses me to read, “follow my example” (Php 3:17).  Could I ever advise such a thing?  There are aspects of my example I might encourage others to follow, but the whole deal?  Probably not.  I’ve still got too many traces of the old worldview remaining, too many old habits embedded in my character that have yet to be rooted out and replaced.  But as to my hope?  As to my assurance in Christ?  By all means.  Follow me.

Come, let us die together, that we may live together in Christ.  Let us cast aside all reliance on former conceptions of what is right, let us dismiss all those desires that once seemed so important, and enter more deeply into this desire to know our Lord more intimately.  What shall that look like for us?  Is it as I see in the example of my wife?  It may be for some.  I rather doubt it shall be or should be for all.  But where there is a growing, deepening, intimate knowledge of our Lord, there is surely a growing, deepening, intimate experience of His love for us, and as such, a growing, deepening, intimate love for Him.  And there must simultaneously be an accepting of the fact that all previous conceptions of merit must be renounced, left to die on the ground behind us.  There must be a renouncing of all future efforts to earn His love.  After all, we are already the objects of His love, the recipients and glad reflectors of His love.  There’s nothing left to earn.  There is only gratitude to show.

It struck me, in reading through Barnes’ Notes on this passage, that when he comes to this conclusion, that all such supposed merits as we once thought justified us must be renounced, it’s rather a lot like the call set upon one who becomes a sovereign citizen of a nation other than that of his birth.  When a foreigner comes to the place of seeking citizenship, there is a renouncing of their former citizenship.  I understand that there are accommodations for dual citizenship, but leave that aside.  We’re talking real change of allegiance.  Here is a rejecting of all claims that former status of ours may have had on us, and all claims that we may have made on it.  Whatever rights may have conveyed to us as citizens of that country, we accept that they are no longer applicable.  Whatever demands that country’s government may have had upon us, we declare no longer binding.  Whatever customs, whatever perspectives may have been ours as a product of that society, if they are at odds with that of this new country in which we seek citizenship, we solemnly pledge to leave them aside, to sever all ties, to have no other allegiance.  Now, carry that mindset into what has transpired in this matter of salvation, of justification.  As Paul will remind his readers, and us, in short order, “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Php 3:20).  It is not a dual citizenship, nor is any such option on the table.  No.  Our allegiance has been severed wholly from the land of our birth, from the true ruler (albeit not the rightful ruler) of this present age.  While we abide by the law of the land, as instructed by our King, yet neither the land, nor the principalities that exercise dominion over the land have claim on us any longer.  Death has rendered all contracts null and void.

And now, as we walk in this newness of life, there is a matter of care that we must attend to, and it’s a matter of our thought life, a matter of our worldview.  The JFB puts it thusly.  We cannot make other things our gain and think to simultaneously gain Christ.  We cannot have a little bit of works righteousness and still have a righteousness that is by faith alone.  That alone is rather key, isn’t it?  Faith plus nothing.  Yes, we are to do good works.  Why?  Because God prepared them in advance in order that we could do them (Eph 2:10).  And He prepared us in advance in order that we should prove able to do them.  We press on (Php 3:14), casting off what lies behind and stretching towards the goal.  We’re in a race but the prize is already ours.  It remains only to reach the finish line, and Christ is our assurance that we shall indeed do so.

It would be easy to look at the prophecies of the Old Testament and fear for our security in this life of faith.  It would be easy to look at the world around us, as it spirals down, and fear that we might circle the drain as well.  It would be easy to give into crushing, nihilistic futility, to just give up trying, give up bothering, and seek to live out whatever days remain to us with such enjoyment as we can muster.  It would be easy to be driven by all of this, either to despair or to a driving need to get back to earning our salvation by our works.  Stop!  That’s the exit ramp from salvation, not the turnoff that leads towards home.  No.  Hear it one more time.  “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected in the flesh?” (Gal 3:3).  Don’t be foolish!  “The righteous man shall live by faith” (Gal 3:11), which is to say, that man is righteous who lives by faith, not trying to show himself justified by works of  the Law, but showing forth his justification (and that, primarily to himself), by a newfound adherence to the intent of the Law.  We work not to prove ourselves, but because as God has worked this great change upon our character, those works are become more natural to us.  They are the outworking of character formed, not the in-working attempt to be holy.

We are citizens of a new country, the country of our Lord.  Let us, then, live by His righteous rule, seek those things that are befitting a citizen of heaven, and cast off any ties that seek to bind us once more to our former way of life.  And in all, let us rely on Him who saved us, Him who died for us, Him who rose again, and prepares for us a place in heaven’s eternity.  Glory and praise and honor and dominion be unto Him and Him only.  Amen.