Monthly Archives: November 2009

This is My Story

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I went to church. I was known in church. I spoke up to pray. I spoke up in conversation. The older people liked me. Mothers liked me. I was the nice kid. I could quote Bible verses. I came from a good family. I did not drink alcohol. I did not party. I tried in school. I joked in school. I once cheated in class, but I felt bad about it. I told the teacher. She gave me a C. I played sports. I played baseball. I was okay at baseball. I was polite to adults. I called them sir and maim. Did I say that mothers liked me? I had lots of friends. I had some good friends. I had some girlfriends. Never more than one at a time, though. I was committed. I was a loyalty guy. Well, I lied to my parents some. But I went to church. I listened to Christian music. Did I say that I had memorized some Bible verses? I even wore one of those bracelets. I had a couple of T-shirts. I wanted to go to a Christian school for college. I prayed a lot, you know? Aloud in groups. And they were good prayers. I crashed my car. I almost died. I should have died. I did not die. But I was already dead.

Something happened in those months that followed. Nothing overnight. It took some time. For all that I did, in all the ways that I acted– the person who was most deceived was me. I had fooled myself into thinking that I was good enough. I coated my sin in the words of ‘struggle’ and reminded myself that nobody is perfect. I was a dead man who bought his own lie. It was like Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense. I was a dead man who played the part of one who lived. I played it so well, so freaking well, that I actually believed I was the fictional character I pretended to be. Guilt for my sin was not what I needed. I felt that often. I felt bad many times and it seemed to promise some moral change only to end in bankruptcy time and time again.

I needed to be made alive. I didn’t need a boost to accomplish spiritual duties, I needed a spiritual appetite. I needed a new heart. And I am not sure how it happened. I may have even felt a desire for ministry before I was born again. But somewhere in my first year of college, somewhere during that time, God made me alive. He saved me. I really trusted in Jesus. I really embraced His work on the cross for me and my salvation. I was full of busted morality, fickle desires, deep confusion of who I was and what this thing called life was all about. I would not have said that then but I felt all those things. And Jesus stepped in. He came and He saved me. I don’t know why (I could give you some biblical and theological explanations about His unconditional election and about His own purposes and grace. Those are amazing and they are good news to me). But for now, can I just leave it there?– “I don’t know why.” I don’t know why He saved me. I don’t know why.

I don’t know why, but I am amazed that He did. He saved me. Jesus saved me. I am alive. Jesus saved me and made me alive. Jesus, come and save your people. Save your people from among all the nations. Gather your church and come. Finish this thing. Please, come!

Exegesis and Prayer

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Spurgeon writes, “Texts will often refuse to reveal their treasures till you open them with the key of prayer” (44).

Praying during exegesis is very important. Exegesis in sermon preparation is not the mechanical enterprise of our hermeneutics that then becomes spiritual when we think about our preaching it and souls hearing it. It is spiritual all the way through. If our exegesis is wooden and prayerless then our exegesis must change. Determinant meaning in a text does not make the task of discovering that text’s meaning any less spiritual. This is God’s Word—it is God’s Word! And we will not get it unless the Spirit comes.

John Sailhamer’s ‘The Meaning of the Pentateuch’

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No one has influenced me more in how I read the Bible than John Sailhamer.

His newest work, The Meaning of the Pentateuch, is out and is already being enjoyed by many. Andy Witt and a league of former Sailhamer students are discussing the book on the blog, The Meaning of the Pentateuch.

The discussion begins around Thanksgiving, so ‘save the date’ and tune in later this month to observe some helpful dialogue and analysis on this eagerly anticipated book.

You can learn more from Andy Witt.

The New Covenant, Sanctification, and Longing for Jesus

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“For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.”
Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.”
(2Corinthians 6:16-7:1 ESV)

Paul has shown us that the New Covenant reality has been actualized by the Spirit.

This is seen in the context. Paul claimed in v. 2 that now is the eschatological day of salvation. He spoke of the new creation in 5:17, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” This is the gospel reality of the New Covenant. The new creation has broken into the old. We are those upon whom the end of the age has come! Because of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, because He has ascended and sent His Spirit to gather and indwell His church, the realities of the New Covenant are enjoyed in this broken world.

And it upon this that he makes the command in 7:1: “let us cleanse ourselves of every defilement of flesh and spirit.” The every defilement that we are to cleanse ourselves from is anything in our lives that is a contradiction to the reality of the New Covenant! It is all the old stuff, that although it has passed away and the new has come, the old is still there. And we hate it and we just want it to go away.

How do we cleanse ourselves of it? It keeps coming up. Yes. It does and it will. This is the nitty-gritty stuff of sanctification. We go through our hearts and discover those things that contradict the gospel and when we find those things we declare over them the glorious reality of the gospel! The New Covenant is here and it is real. We are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ by the Spirit. This is how we are sanctified. The gospel of Jesus Christ comes to have its fullest effect on our lives. Sin will be no more and we will be perfectly conformed to His image.

And in our experience, we know that this is not something that we ourselves make happen. Sin is still there. This is the tension that makes us groan. We groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. We mortify our sin and pray, “Come, Lord Jesus!”

Theõsis and the glory of God in Christ

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Theõsis came up in class recently. I was largely unfamiliar with the term and  suspected it to be of Mormon error. Deification is not a definition that sits well with Christians, especially those from Protestant roots, especially within the Reformed tradition. It is an awkward explanation. The deification of Christians? Parktakers of the divine nature in some mystical sense where we ourselves become gods? That is weird and rightly so. It is Eastern and odd for me.

However, there is something amazing and perhaps inexplicable in Western categories when it comes to union with Christ. Paul said, “I don’t live anymore, Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Peter wrote about us becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (2Pet 1:4). I brought the issue up in Table Talk today. Pastor John was right on to leverage the subject by emphasizing that our role is primarily beholding, not becoming. Glorification, the Western term, does involve the transformation of the corruptible man. But it is unto the end that we can become inhabitants of the New Jerusalem, it is for us to become fitting to behold the glory of God forever, completely free from sin’s inhibitions.

The transformation that we undergo should not distract us from the One of Whom and By Whom we are being transformed. Conformity to the image of Christ is less about our conformity and more about Christ. The point is the glory of God manifested in a dead man becoming the workmanship of God, all by and for God (Eph 2:1-10). And it is now that we can take seriously what it means that we are changing from one degree of glory to the next (2 Cor 3:18)…

It is now that we can really feel our identity. It is now that we actually get who we are. It is here that we come to the end of ourselves. The Heidelberg is not mechanical. Really, our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

John Murray on Hating Sin

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Indeed, the more sanctified the person is, the more conformed he is to the image of his Saviour, the more he must recoil against every lack of conformity to the holiness of God. The deeper his apprehension of the majesty of God, the greater the intensity of his love to God, the more persistent his yearning for the attainment of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, the more conscious will he be of the gravity of the sin which remains and the more poignant will be his detestation of it.

John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, 145.

Glorious Contradiction and the Yearning for Consummated Reality

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The end of sanctification is the gospel having its full effect in our lives.

This means perfect conformity to the image of Christ and the eradication of all that contradicts such conformity. Sin is what contradicts it.

So as we are being sanctified, our sin is being ridded or put down and the reality of the gospel is advancing to affect every facet of who we are.

We are a contraction. We are new creatures in Jesus Christ–the old has passed away, the new has come– and yet we are told to cleanse ourselves of every defilement. The old is still there and is a contradiction to the gospel reality of the New Covenant. Sanctification involves the cleansing ourselves of sin which is to say, eradicating all the contradictions within us to the truth that we are new creatures in Jesus Christ.