God follows Matthew 18, then forgives

Matthew 18 is about the Gospel story. We have sinned and we often think we are the greatest. God came to us as He came to Israel, showing them their fault, with the Law and the Prophets. He sent many prophets, one after another, many witnesses against our sin, but we refused to hear them. But instead of taking that last step and treating us as heathens, He put on tender mercies. He sent His son to us. Now, we should have been thrown in the sea with a heavy rock tied to us, but Jesus jumped in, instead. He is bearing with us and forgiving us. We owed His Father a huge debt, and if we come and beg for mercy, He will give mercy. He releases the whole debt.

2/13/11

Don't indulge grudges

Leviticus 19:15-18
"‘You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. In righteousness you shall judge your neighbor. 16 You shall not go about as a talebearer among your people; nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor: I am the LORD. 17 ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him. 18 You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD."


It is far easier to indulge yourself with annoyance, grudges and hatred than it is to go talk to someone you've come to begrudge or hate. It is far easier to talk about them to someone else, instead of talking to them directly. It is hard to love, but as the Spirit trains us in His ways we come to see they are ways of peace, delight, and joyful fellowship together in the Lord.


2/13/11

Things I missed in Scripture

Saul disobeys God and doesn't kill all the Amalekites (1 Sam 15).
David is anointed and Saul tries to kill him (1 Sam 16-21).
Saul kills all the priests and inhabitants of Nob (1 Sam 22).

When you reject God's anointed, you end up rejecting His people, too.
One way to tell how you are doing with the Lord is to consider how you are treating His people.

We are being changed, thankfully

2 Cor 3:18
"But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord."


As Jesus was transformed and His glory shone out [Transfiguration], so He removes the veil over our minds and hearts as we turn to Him. And now, we see the glory of God in Christ. This means we will be transformed into Christ’s image. The point of our salvation is not just to spare us from punishment for sin. We are to be remade – transfigured - into the image of God. This Table transforms. The two on the road to Emaaus talked with Jesus but did not see Him until they sat at the table and He broke bread. Notice the Bread was not transformed, they were. And so are we. This table is meant to transform us, into the glory of Jesus. It doesn’t happen automatically. It takes trust. So look to Jesus. Seeing Him makes all the difference.


2/6/11

A strenuous life

1 Cor 9:24-27

"Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. ²⁵ And everyone who competesfor the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. ²⁶ Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air. ²⁷ But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified."

As we come to the Lord in the joy of worship, we also know that the Christian life is one of strain and striving. The more godly you try to be the more temptation there is to resist. We must fight it hard, with discipline and temperance. But we tend to redirect our energies away from God’s glory toward more self-serving pursuits. We more zealously guard our time with our spouse than we do our time with God. We delight in Facebook more than God’s Word. Some of us are more intense about our Wii Fit sessions, or the Super Bowl, than we are about following Christ in our family or on the job. Redirect your passion and run the race Christ has set before you.


2/6/11

Things I missed in Scripture

1 Samuel 18:25 - "But Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines."

I never made the connection: when David kills Uriah by sending him to the front lines in battle, he became like Saul, trying to kill HIM. A definite backward step...

In temptation, say this...

"I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God, sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad - as I am now. Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation, they are for such moments as this - when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth - so I have always believed. And if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane - quite insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot."

Jane Eyre, pg 447-448

The undeserving invited - you

2 Samuel 9:7-8

"So David said to [Mephibosheth], “Do not fear, for I will surely show you kindness for Jonathan your father’s sake, and will restore to you all the land of Saul your grandfather; and you shall eat bread at my table continually.” 8 Then he bowed himself, and said, “What is your servant, that you should look upon such a dead dog as I?”

Mephibosheth was invited to King David’s table, and he said he was a dead dog. In other words, he didn’t deserve it. We don’t deserve the invitation to the king’s table, either. But that doesn’t stop King David or King Jesus from inviting us. And it didn’t stop the Canaanite woman from asking for crumbs from the table. Why do we have a place at the table? How dare we ask, sit and wait to be served a portion? We do not earn it by following our traditions or rules, by being American, or by having conservative ideals about politics or family. Our place has been gained by Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. This is our only claim to a place at the table, and it satisfies our God. He doesn’t give temporary crumbs, but an eternal scrumptious feast of all you need.


1/30/11

Hold fast

Col 2:16-23

One way idolatry arises in our lives is when we invite others to judge us according to some outward standard we know we can pass. See, I eat this, or I don’t drink that, or “look how humble I am when I do this.” Verse 19 of Col 2 says we latch on to these regulations, INSTEAD of holding fast to Christ. We look to behavioral rigor to judge us, or to grow us spiritually, instead of holding fast and looking to Christ, our head, who alone causes growth. We try to establish our own righteousness by regulation, instead of trusting Christ’s righteousness to justify us. In our sin, we get defensive and justify ourselves with excuses, instead of repenting and letting God justify us by Christ’s atonement. Of course, Jesus calls us to right behavior, but we tend to make the behavior the center, instead of Christ. Hold fast to Christ. Know your part, and do it. Then look to Him again.


1/30/11

It's not that important

In a nice short piece on figuring out what's important, RC Sproul, Jr has this zinger:


"Conservative talk radio is a virtual propaganda department for the devil, not because what they teach is wrong, but because it isn’t nearly as important as they make it out to be. Talk radio is a mildly more sophisticated soap opera, as we tune in each day to find out what the villain at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has done this time. And like soap operas, if you tune out for a week or twenty you’ll find the same drama, the same issues are still being addressed with the same hysteria."


It seems the devil's approach when lots of people start latching on to some truth, is to get them to get the priority wrong. Make politics more important than loving your wife or husband or children. Make them think the world will end if the wrong guy is elected. Put your trust in elections and democracy and Republicans, or the Tea Party movement. Or, in the church, take the "right way" to apply Scripture, to nurse babies, court ladies, eat food, or discipline children, and judge people with it so a church is torn apart or defined by such issues. The other way is to shrug when liberals reject plain Scriptural truth like the Trinity, Incarnation or the atonement. I've also come to believe it damages the church to remain silently in a church that okay's homosexual practice or women in the office of elder. We need /more/ church fights over these things, and less fights over politics or methodology questions.


When you discover a new truth, you are in the "cage stage," where because of this getting the priority wrong, you need to be locked up for a while before you're unleashed on the world with it. Don't make major decisions for a year or so, while you assimilate this truth into how you think and interact with the world. Be patient. Don't let your discovery of A be the center of the universe. God has B through Z to teach you, so keep learning in humility.

Civil War

Apparently the 150th anniversary of the Civil War is approaching, and I just read a Breakpoint article by Chuck Colson mentioning it, and then talking about how racial reconciliation is advancing in his prison ministry.

The article didn't have much to do with the civil war, per se, though. It seems people slip very quickly from the Civil War to how white people treat black people. These are two very different issues.

So, on the Civil War itself: it seems there is a lot of demonizing that still goes on. Pro-South folks think the north wanted to destroy their way of life, not just free the slaves. Pro-North folks think it was just about slavery, and why would the south be so blind as to fight to maintain such a horrible evil? Both of these tend to attribute purely malicious motives to the other.

I think the truth is that the north became intent to remove the evil of slavery, while getting pinched economically by competition from the south at the same time. Lincoln and Co. believed that slavery wouldn't be eliminated without a complete economic rearrangement in the south. He really wanted to free the slaves for moral reasons, and this also benefited the north economically.

So there are two lessons to learn.
1. For my Lincoln-hating, pro-south friends, when there are two possible ways to judge a man's motives, and you can't tell, go with the gracious one. There are lots of quotes of Lincoln's that get thrown around, both that he meant to destroy the south economically and that he was grieved at the bane of slavery. How about instead of making him a monster, we charitably say that the "uglier" quotes were a hat tip to political reality of the time, which led him to some damaging actions? Thus, the second lesson:

2. For my family and friends who assume the north was right: when you want a revolution to stop a horrible atrocity (abortion comes to mind), be careful not to force action to stop the present evil. That will cause more problems down the road. Lincoln did this, seems to me. Wilberforce worked over time to end slavery peaceably in England, giving the lie to Lincoln's necessary war. The north assumes we would still have slavery in the south if the north didn't go to war to keep the south from seceding. Why is that so? Only if you demonize the south...

Further helpful discussion on the civil war would ask: was it necessary to hold the union together once states began to secede? Why? When should states expect to exercise sovereignty as is their right, and when should they work together for the good of the union?

Texting, and your parents

If you are a young adult who texts, please read this.

National antithesis?

So, that took a while to get back to blogging after the beach.
Something about an insanely busy week back, after vacation...


Here's a great paragraph by Doug Wilson, confessing our sins as American Christians:


"Father, we confess that the Church has not thought of herself the way the Scriptures describe us. We confess that we get too easily caught up in the currents of culture and politics, with out [our, sic] identity shaped by forces that are not in accordance with the work of Your Holy Spirit. Help us to see ourselves as Christians in the first instance, and as Christians who understand obedience in the particular stations assigned to us in this nation."


In other words, we let politics or national identity shape us more than the Spirit. We ought not "locate the antithesis between righteousness and unrighteousness in terms of nations."

Off to the beach

smelling of sunblock...

The Road to Camlann

Road to Camlann: The Death of King Arthur by Rosemary Sutcliff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This tragic tale is a classic, and Sutcliff does fairly well in the retelling. 3 stars for the retelling. 5 stars for the story itself.

Lancelot's illicit love for Guinivere brings the downfall of Camelot, dividing the knights of the round table against each other. The story asserts that Lancelot is the greatest knight in the kingdom, because of his superior fighting skills against all other knights, and also because he heals a wounded foreign knight by laying his hands on him, who had a dream that the best knight of Camelot would heal him.

What the story says less directly is the great treachery and disunity that is caused by the unconfessed sin of Lancelot in pursuing and thinking it right for him to have Guinevere. He returns to Arthur too late to save his kingdom, having destroyed it himself.

Much more could be said about Mordred's deceitful malice, Gawain's fierce but impulsive loyalty, and Guinevere's noble denial of Lancelot's later advances. Suffice it to say that this is a story to think about things that are true, noble, just, pure, lovely, of good report (Phil 4:8), while taking warning from the downfall that comes from eschewing self-control, peace, goodness and faithfulness (Gal 5:22).


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