Tag Archives: mission

Suffering Means Knowing Jesus More

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Philippians 3:10–11,

that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

“God helps us prepare for suffering,” John Piper writes, “by teaching us and showing us that through suffering we are meant to go deeper in our relationship with Christ” (“Called to Suffer and Rejoice”). And that was the aim of Paul’s life—a deeper relationship with Jesus.

As we’ve seen in the previous verses, the apostle counted everything as loss, even his pristine religiousity, because of the surpassing worth of knowing his Savior. To gain Christ, to be found in him, to know him — these are all getting at the same reality. Simply put, Paul wanted more intimacy with Jesus. He wanted a closer walk, a deeper, more personal, more real relationship.

“Normal Christianity”

Therefore, he wanted to know Jesus and share in his sufferings. Suffering is, as the Bible shows us, part of the Christian life. Paul told Timothy that all who desire to live a godly life in Christ will be persecuted (2 Timothy 3:12). He wrote to the Romans, and in one of the mountain peaks of the New Testament, explained that being children of God and fellow heirs with Christ means we suffer with him, in order that we may also be glorified with him (Romans 8:17).

This is normal Christianity, as Piper explains.

What Paul is doing [in Philippians 3:7–11] is showing how the teaching of Jesus is to be lived out. For example, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field” (Matthew 13:44). Becoming a Christian means discovering that Christ (the King) is a Treasure Chest of holy joy and writing “Loss” over everything else in the world in order to gain him. “He sold all that he had to buy that field.”

So loss — suffering — is part of the Christian life because we discover the surpassing worth of Jesus over everything else. Everything else is loss. And when these things are taken away we gain more of Jesus.

The Example of John G. Paton

Today, January 28, marks the anniversary of John G. Paton’s death in 1907. The Scottish missionary to the New Hebrides, a chain of islands in the South Pacific, was well acqauinted with loss. In 1858, shortly after leaving the ease of Europe for the hardships of the Hebrides, his wife and newborn child died. Over the next several years his life was characterized by loss and sickness, criticism from respected friends, dangers from the cannibalistic natives, and deep communion with Jesus.

As Philippians 3:10–11 ring true, we should not be surprised about Paton’s fascinating fellowship with God. He experienced loss, yes. But oh the gain! Against the background of so much affliction, Paton walked closer and closer with Jesus. He “shared in his sufferings.” In one particular story, he hid high in a tree as a band of natives hunted him. Shots from their muskets rang out along with their yells, all the while he quietly stayed put.

He tells about it in his autobiography,

Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among those chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy his consoling fellowship. (Autobiography, 200)

To know Jesus! To know him more! Would that we, like Paton, and like Paul, experience the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.

John Piper’s Biography of John G. Paton

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Portrait by Drew Blom

Portrait by Drew Blom

John G. Paton believed in doing missions when dying is gain.

The 19th century Scottish missionary to the New Hebrides, a chain of islands in the South Pacific, was no stranger to suffering. Soon after he arrived to the islands in 1858, he buried both his wife and newborn child.

He had left the ease of Europe for the hardships of the Hebrides, and he would become well acquainted with pain.

Over the next several years his life was characterized by loss and sickness, criticism from respected friends, dangers from the cannibalistic natives, and deep communion with Jesus.

Perhaps it is his fellowship with God that is most fascinating. Against the background of so much affliction, Paton walked close to Jesus. In one particular story, he hid high in a tree as a band of natives hunted him. Shots from their muskets rang out along with their yells, all the while he quietly stayed put.

He tells about it in his autobiography,

Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among those chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy his consoling fellowship. (Autobiography, 200)

Paton lived many years after that night in the tree. January 28 marks the anniversary of when he died in 1907 and met the Savior he knew so deeply. To help commemorate his life, Desiring God would like to highlight John Piper’s ebook biography of John G. Patonwith hopes that you find it inspiring, and even life-changing. Download the ebook for free as PDF, MOBI, or EPUB, and help us spread the word.

Thank you, God, for John G. Paton. Would that we learn from his life and so serve the gospel overseas, in our homes, and on our streets like dying is gain!

How Neighbors Help Us Realize Our Identity

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“Who is my neighbor?”

An earnest lawyer asks Jesus this question in Luke 10:29. We soon learn it’s one of those conversations that’s padded out in advance. He asks a question to set up something he wants to say. He was earnest to “justify himself,” as Luke makes clear. And obviously, he was feeling pretty good about how it was going through verse 28. But then comes the curve ball.

Whatever this lawyer had in mind for the answer, it wasn’t the story Jesus told. And it’s not what we would expect either. Yes, we may all know the parable of the Good Samaritan, but it can be a little confusing. The “neighbor,” it would appear, is the man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho who was beaten and left for dead (Luke 10:30). The neighbor is the object, the one of whom the three other characters encounter. But in the end, Jesus says the Samaritan who helped his man “proved to be the neighbor” (Luke 12:36–37).

So here we are, along with the lawyer, trying to figure out whom we’re supposed to love, and Jesus turns the question around. Look at this man who acts in mercy. Stop asking, “Who is my neighbor?” There are deeper questions to ponder. As John Piper explains, “When we are done trying to establish, ‘Is this my neighbor?’ — the decisive issue of love remains: What kind of person am I?” (What Jesus Demands from the World, [Crossway, 2006], 264).

“Who are you?” — that’s the question.

Are we going to be like this Samaritan who gives help when help is needed? Or are we going to be caught up in questions about who we’re supposed to help, and when and where and how, and what if it will make me late for Sunday School?

What grounds the way we think about neighbors is actually our identity, not theirs. What matters first is who we are.

Grace for Standing and Action

In his book, Union with Christ, Todd Billings builds on Calvin’s teaching on the “double grace of justification and sanctification.” He explains that when we are made new in Christ we receive forgiveness of sins and Christ’s righteousness — we are saved from God’s wrath. And we also receive new life by the Spirit — we are saved to fellowship with God and love others.

This is a radical truth. In Christ we are given a right standing before God (justification), and we are propelled in love for God and others by the new power of his Spirit in us (sanctification).

This affects the way we see those around us. It’s not because they’ve become something different, but because we have. God’s justifying work for us and transforming work in us commissions a path of good works prepared beforehand “that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). On this path are real people with real lives full of real stories. And now when we encounter them, they are a divine call to us. They are an opportunity — a welcomed mandate — for us to be who we are in Christ.

Of course, we could make a thousand qualifiers. The Good Samaritan didn’t give his spare change to fill an empty whiskey bottle, and that’s not the best use of our resources either. But perhaps we should have some concern that we get lost in these qualifiers too often — about when help can hurt and who are the poor and what’s not the Great Commission. These are all important questions, and we do well to give them careful thought.

But while we think — and think we must — may we never lose sight that the central issue has to do with how the gospel miracle bears on our own souls. God has made us new creatures in Christ — righteous before him and empowered to love others for his sake.

Read the original post at Desiring God.

A Prayer for Peace

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Father, we confess that our souls are often far from still. They are filled with sin, windy and volatile, tossing our emotions and our judgments back and forth, morphing into tornadoes that barrel down the streets of our lives with a vengeance to destroy, despising you and worshiping everything else.

And we confess, with our souls (as tumultuous as they are) that we lack the power to still them ourselves. This is what it means to be sinners. We were broken and without an inherent cure, separated from you, blind to our need, the storm of self wreaking its havoc.

And you would have been good to leave us here, destined for wrath.

But you didn’t.

In your rich mercy and great love, you have determined to make for yourself a people from among all nations to know you and love you. You promised that a Redeemer would come to make clean our dirty hearts and reconcile us to you.

And in the fullness of time he did come, Jesus Christ, your holy Son, for us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, he suffered and was buried, and on the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended to heaven and now reigns over his coming kingdom.

And at some point when we heard this word, the voice of Jesus invaded our lives and brought peace to our souls, calming our storms and extinguishing its cause. You have united us with Christ such that now you see us no other way apart from his blood and victory. This fact is our hope: you have made us yours, secure forever by your amazing love, now truly alive, gathered and sent because of the wonderful cross of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Fuel for Mission: Remembering the Person Behind the Message

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Speaking of mission[1], what we are commending or giving to these Cities and the nations is not ultimately a message, but the person Jesus Christ, and it’s not Jesus as a mere person, but Jesus as the King who reigns over all — Jesus in all of his supremacy and power and glory.

Let’s hear Jesus’ own words, Matthew 28:18–20, Matthew tells us that Jesus came and said to his eleven disciples, and to us:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Be going therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

A Message, But Not Ultimately

The gospel of Jesus Christ is a message. It is news. It is the announcement that Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 15:3–4, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…”

This is a message and it’s a powerful message. It flips the wisdom of the world upside down that the word of the cross, an announcement, speaking about a historical event, voicing a reality — this is the way God has chosen to overcome the world. We say things and people’s lives are changed forever. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. That’s the way it happened for us, we heard something, we heard a word and the Spirit gave us eyes and made us new creations.

So the gospel is a message, but it’s not ultimately a message. It is not flat content. It is the declaration of a person, a real person who has done a real work in real space-time history to reconcile real people to a real God. It is not a cerebral exercise. It is a word that takes us off the page, a message that goes deeper than just hearing.

Peter tells us that “Jesus suffered, the righteousness for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). Jesus suffered, Jesus the righteous one, the only Son of God, the eternal Word behind everything that exists, he suffered for the unrighteous. That is us. We who have rebelled against God and replaced him with other things, hoisting up the worship of ourselves and created stuff. We have rebelled against our creatureliness and scoffed at the one who made us. And Jesus suffered for us, which means all the wrath that we deserve for our sins, all the punishment we were headed towards, Jesus took all of it. Jesus took our sins upon himself as if they were his sins and he suffered for them in our place, absorbing the fury of God that was against us, so that we would be brought to God, that our relationship with our Creator would be reconciled. God our Father, Christ our Brother, the Spirit our DNA who testifies of this new relationship.

The Person, Jesus Christ

So do you see how this works? I have said words but you all know that it’s not really just words. Embedded in the good news of Jesus is the person Jesus who offers himself to you. So our telling others the gospel is really our introducing others to the Person, Jesus Christ.

And this is why Jesus said to “go make disciples,” not “go make consumers.” If we are just relaying information or just making noise then the neighbors we encounter have the right to click away or turn it off. Or maybe a more positive result, they sign up or download the app, either way this is a cultural distortion that smudges the truth of what we’re doing. Because when we speak the gospel, we are showing people Jesus — we are introducing them to the person, Jesus — and what you do with that, what you do with your encounter with Jesus, is life or death. If you deny the gospel, you reject a person.

And when you believe the gospel, you embrace a person. Christianity is not an email list, it’s not Liking a blog post through Facebook or checking off on some data. When you believe the message of the gospel you are bowing your life to the Lord Jesus Christ who is seated and reigning at the right hand of the Father and who will come again to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will never end.

Jesus — Last Adam and Son of Man

Here’s the counter-intuitive danger that I want to speak into: in our efforts to be practical and live out what we believe, we are actually running the risk of abstracting the very thing that we are exporting. Because we are on the ground running, and moving, and if we are not careful, then the person of Jesus who is behind all of this can be diminished in our minds as just a product we’re trying to spread.

But it’s not about a product, or a mere message, it’s about the person, Jesus. And here’s where we take the final step to say, it’s not even about Jesus as a mere person, but Jesus as the sovereign King over all. See the progression: it is a message, but not ultimately a message. It’s the person, Jesus. And yet it’s not Jesus as a mere person. It’s Jesus for who he truly is (and this is what the message is getting at).

And Jesus actually makes this clear in how he commissions us. Look back at Matthew 28. This first phrase in v. 18 is huge: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

This is rooted back in the Old Testament and it’s a thread that runs throughout all of Scripture. We can call it “the drama of the Son.” It starts really with Adam being created in God’s image. In his genealogy in the gospel of Luke, Luke calls Adam the son of God (3:38). So there’s this idea that Adam is a son. And then after the fall, what is the promise that God makes to Adam and Eve? Genesis 3:15, the seed of a woman. A son. And so here the drama begins, we are looking for this son. Well Cain and Abel don’t work out. Then later comes along Noah, a righteous man, but doesn’t work out. So he has some sons. And then Shem has some sons. And then later Abraham, the one God chooses and blesses. And we’re not sure if he’s ever to going to have a son. Then later in Egypt, when the people of Israel were too great, what was Pharaoh’s strategy? It’s about the son. So this is developed and it runs through the entire Bible. You get to David and what was the promise to King David: it’s that he would have a son who would be king. Throughout the storyline of Scripture our vision for this son gets sharper so that you see this phrase in Psalm 8 and Ezekiel and Daniel, “son of man.”  And this phrase, the “son of man” is what epitomizes our hope in a son, going back to Adam and the original promise. And the profile of this son of man is filled out amazingly in Daniel 7.

Dan 7:13  “I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.

So this is the son of man we are looking for. The son of man who owns everything. And Jesus steps on the scene in the Gospels and what does he call himself more than anything else? The son of man. And if that’s not clear enough, in Matthew 28 he gets crystal clear and when he commissions his disciples and his church he prefaces the commission with who he is. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. You see it’s not merely a message, it about a person. But not only a person, it is the person who has all authority in heaven and on earth.

Adam was given the original commission to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with image-bearers who reflect God’s glory. But that son failed. And here we have the true son of man, the better and last Adam, Jesus Christ, who takes the original commission to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and he says to his church “make disciples of all nations.” This is a commission that will not fail. The earth will be filled with the glory of God and the way Jesus completes this mission and advances his new-creational reign is by his Spirit filling his people who are sent forth to speak the message of the gospel, that’s not only a message, but is about him, the person, Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Lord, the hope of the world and King over all.

So the point is that we remember him. That we see him and all of his excellency and wonder and majesty. That we know that Jesus is the Who this is all about.

And then we wonder, who could not want to be on mission for a King like that?

For related reading, see Greg Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology.

[1] This devotional was originally delivered at the 2012 SpringOut Retreat of Bethlehem Baptist Church.

What Is the New Testament?

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Greg Beale in A New Testament Biblical Theology (Baker, 2011) —

Jesus’ life, trials, death for sinners, and especially resurrection by the Spirit have launched the fulfillment of the eschatological already-not yet new-creational reign, bestowed by grace through faith and resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to advance this new-creational reign and resulting in judgment for the unbelieving, unto the triune God’s glory. (163)

Believe, Sent, Speak, Heard, Believed, Sent…

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Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord, Paul tells us, will be saved (Romans 10:13).

This is good news.

And then comes the best possible question, and subsequent questions, that could be asked.

How then will they call of him in whom they have not believed? There’s not going to be a confession of the mouth if there’s not a believing of the heart. Okay, okay, next question. How are they going to believe in him of whom they have never heard? There’s not going to be any believing unless they hear about the one worthy of their faith.We’re tracking with him now. Another question: how are they to hear without someone preaching? There’s not going to be any hearing about Jesus unless someone tells about Jesus. Last question: And how are they going to preach unless they are sent? Those who tell others about Jesus have to go forth, leaving one spot and traveling to another.

So the good news of salvation to everyone who calls on Jesus is coupled with a glorious mandate: tell this good news to others. No Uncle Sam posters here. No long, skinny finger is pointing at you. This is a call more amazing than we can imagine.

There is good news! This is good news that’s meant to be told. And we’re the ones, you and me, us, we’re the ones who get to tell it.

Let us be sent. Let us go speak. Let them hear. Let them believe and call on Jesus. Then let them be sent. . . . This is how it works.

Read the original post at Fighterverses.com.

Halloween: Fall Back in Retreat or Move Forward on Mission?

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David Mathis:

What posture would Jesus have us take when we are told that our “adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8)? Naïveté? Retreat? Rather: “Resist him, firm in your faith” (verse 9). What if we had the gospel gall to trust Jesus for this promise: “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” (James 4:7)? And what if resistance meant not only holding our ground, but taking his?

What if we hallowed Jesus at Halloween by pursuing gospel advance and going lovingly on the attack? What if, like Martin Luther, we didn’t cower in fear, but saw October 31 as a chance to serve notice to the threshold of evil? What if we didn’t turn out our lights as if hiding, but went pumpkin-smashing on the very doorstep of the King of Darkness himself?

Read the whole post.