Tag Archives: sanctification

What My Four-Year Old Taught Me About Prayer

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Elizabeth taught me something about prayer.

She had cut her lip. I’m not sure exactly how it happened. It was just a collateral injury related her full-throttle enthusiasm in all things. I guess you could call her dramatic: Her lip was hurt, therefore she couldn’t eat. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t go without a bandaid on her face.

And then she got all profound on me.

Tucking her in later that night, I knelt down by her bed to pray aloud for her and Hannah and Micah. I usually ask the Father for their rest in Jesus, both for the night and for forever. I want my children to rest in Jesus. So I began the usual…

“Father, please give Elizabeth and Han—” “Pray for my lip!” she interrupted just like this typeface looks, quick and bold.

Without missing a step I turned the prayer towards her little injury. “Father, please help Elizabeth to trust you in—” “My lip! My lip!“ now with more urgency she jumped in. She said it as if she was feared she was too vague the time before.

I chuckled inside and started again. “Please make Elizabeth’s lip to feel bett…”— “Ask him to heal it!“

This time she said it with a childlike impatience we often chastise. I didn’t say anything now. I just stopped. The only thing rebuked in this moment was how I pray.

It was a simple prayer request from my four-year old. Her lip hurt and she wanted God to heal it. And there I was appointing as many theological governors as I could. It seemed a good time to teach her about what really mattered — you know, not the healing, but faith and Jesus and loving him.

But the kid just wanted her lip to feel better.

She knew God could do it.

My reluctance to get to the point exposed my unbelief: Theological governors are great, but not when they’re used to disguise a lack of faith in God doing what you really ask.

I’m a footnote kind of guy with footnote kind of friends. We like clarity — what we’re saying and what we’re not and so forth. And then there are times when we just need to say it. Or in this case, ask it. Jesus didn’t make it that complicated. Why would we?

Elizabeth taught me something about prayer.

 

Sanctification Rests on a Divine Act

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John Webster:

Sanctification rests on the divine act of salvation accomplished in the death and resurrection of the Son and pronounced in the gospel promulgation of acquittal. Consequently, the agent of the Christian holiness is not the Christian but God. In effect, the rooting of sanctification in justification prohibits any conversion of sanctification into ethical self-improvement, as if justification were merely an initial infusion of capacities which are then activated through moral or spiritual exertion.

Holiness, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 81.

Holiness: It Just Doesn’t Happen

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Josh Etter points readers to a helpful quote by D. A. Carson:

People do not drift toward Holiness.

Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.

We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.
(For the Love of God, Volume 2, paragraphing mine)

Check it out at Desiring God — People Do Not Drift Toward Holiness

The Old Good News and the Frontier of Our Lives

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The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the salvation of those who trust him is old news. It is really old, really good news. What are we after in hearing again and again what we’ve heard before?

The hope of hearing the old, good news is that it would perpetually break new ground in our lives. Have you looked inside lately? It is full of jungle. Inside of me is untamed wilderness and deep dark caves. And there is a claim that lays hold to all of it—  Jesus Christ is Lord.

So while the gospel is not new, there are new, unchartered territories in my life that are not yet under its rule. What I beg for my soul, for my family, for my church… is that the old good news of Jesus Christ would reach into these new territories of my life and establish its dominion. In short, this is sanctification– to be overcome by the gospel.

A Two-Year Old and Her Questions

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“What’s Daddy doing?,” Elizabeth repeats with an inquisitive smile. We think that we are on the brink of entering her question-asking stage. She is putting things together. She is able to perceive a situation, detect a gap in her perception, and then formulate a question to fill the gap. What is most interesting to me is that all her questions deal with activity. She mainly wants to know what so-and-so is doing. And that so-and-so is mainly me. She wants to know what her daddy is doing.

A two-year old and her questions — you know we do the same. “What is going on?” We ask the question like issuing an order, “I’ll take my explanation with verbs, please. And a little adjective on the nouns.” We want to know what is up. What is happening? Life must have exegesis. We can’t go on without commentary. So it is with the nature of her question.

Now to whom her question is directed. Why, it’s me. She asks her daddy what he is doing. “She asks her daddy what he is doing” — does this sentence remind you of prayer? Have you ever prayed this way? You come to the Father and the only thing you can muster is the question: “Daddy, what are you doing?”

A variety of different circumstances can produce the same question. Maybe it is a painful blow that leaves us aching. Maybe it is goodness that makes us shake our heads in awe. Maybe it is both of those at the same time. Either way, we bring our Father a question. “Daddy, what are you doing?” This is a good question to bring him. We are not going the route of the postmodern glorification of doubt here. The goal of our question is not the question, it is the knowing. The goal is to know our Father and know what he is doing in Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit, for his glory and for our good. The question constitutes a part of our faith. We ask because we are not afraid. We ask because we’ve been given grace to believe that he is working for the sake of his name and our benefit.

I’m not sure exactly what my daughter expects me to say when she asks what I am doing. She asks because she has a question. She asks because she knows I’ll say something. And I think she asks because she knows that whatever it is I say, it will be for her good. A two-year old and her questions — yes, you know we do the same.

More of Jesus: The Christian Life, Unoriginality, and Pressing On

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“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:12-14)

The realization that he has not yet attained what he desires (3:10) drives him to action: he presses on. He keeps moving. The basis of this action is the work of Jesus Christ in making Paul his own (v. 12). Paul’s “spirituality” is not original. It is entirely responsive. And if our ‘Christian life’ is truly Christian then it must never be more than that.

The one thing that Paul does contains two aspects: forgetting/straining forward. I think that this is similar to repentance and faith. The two are not really two separate acts but are two interrelated elements of one act. Whereas repentance and faith pertain to a turning from sin and an embracing Christ, this forgetting and straining forward pertain to leaving temptations for boasting and yearning for the ultimate reality of God’s call in Christ.

We often do not consider our good moments to be temptations that can derail us from the ultimate end. But they certainly can. Paul does not let us become complacent and think too highly of our ‘spiritual victories’– new understandings, deepened theology, mortification of sin, more vibrant prayer, good sermons, etc. We are not there yet! We are not where we want to be! So keep going, keeping straining forward.

Christ is who we want. Forget everything else, give me Jesus.


Don’t Loiter in that Ditch

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It is true, religion in the souls of men is the immediate work of God, and all our natural endeavors can neither produce it alone, nor merit those supernatural aids by which it must be wrought: the Holy Ghost must come upon us, and the power of the Highest must overshadow us, before that holy thing can be begotten, and Christ be formed in us: but yet we must not expect that this whole work should be done without any concurring endeavours of our own: we must not lie loitering in the ditch, and wait till Omnipotence pull us from thence; no, no! we must bestir ourselves to our utmost capacities, and then we may hope that, ‘our labour shall not be in vain in the Lord ‘ (1 Corinthians 15:58).

Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man, 97ff.

And then looking back on the “bestirring of ourselves” we will say that it was all of grace.

Day 6: Holiness is Not Metaphysics, Mysticism, or Moralism

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A Christian dogmatics of holiness is not metaphysics, because the holy God, reaching out in the world in Son and Spirit, is the sanctifier; not is it mysticism (or moralism), because human reality is holy only in dependence upon the Spirit of the Son who makes holy. Thus, as Barth puts it, a trinitarian dogmatics of holiness ‘cannot seek to have merely one centre, one subject’ precisely because ‘its subject is God’–God known as holy in the incarnate Word and life-giving Spirit.

John Webster, Holiness, 7

Day 5: This is what is meant by ‘Holiness’

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A dogmatic account of holiness is thus not simply concerned to offer an account of immanent divine properties; nor is it an elaboration of a spirituality or ethics of human sanctification. Rather, its concern is with the path taken by the holy three-in-one who, in the majestic fulfillment of his own freedom, elects, reconciles and perfects the creature for holy obedience. Accordingly, it does not think of divine holiness in abstraction from the sanctifying acts of God pro nobis, nor of human sanctity in isolation from election, salvation and the work of the sanctifying Spirit. This is the difference which the Christian doctrine of the Trinity makes in a theological account of holiness.

John Webster, Holiness, 5

Day 4: On Dogmatics

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Dogmatics attempts a ‘reading’ of the gospel which in its turn assists the Church’s reading. Developing such a ‘reading’ of the gospel entails, of course, the development (or annexation) of conceptual vocabularies and forms of argument whose range and sophistication may seem distant from the more immediate, urgent idioms of Scripture. But though technical sophistication is not without its attendant perils, it is only vicious when allowed to drift free from the proper end of theology, which is the saints’ edification.

John Webster, Holiness, 4