ASSURANCE OF SALVATION DOES NOT REST ON OUR FEELINGS

From “Basking in the Benefits” by Dr. Kim Riddlebarger, Tabletalk Magazine February 2009

Even though God saves us through the doing and dying of Jesus (objective, historical, and not at all dependent upon how we feel), our feelings about ourselves at any given moment (whether we have peace or turmoil) are too often the basis of our own understanding of the assurance of salvation. Our emotional state and personal circumstances then become the standard by which we evaluate our progress in the Christian life. Our gaze shifts from the cross to our own navels, and the benefits of what Christ has accomplished for us seem to be lost, even though our Good Shepherd will never let us slip from His grasp (John 10:27-29).

AN IMPREGNABLE FORTRESS

from The Blazing Center:

 

One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul (AC 16.14).

What a miracle is conversion!

Before God opened our hearts we were spiritually dead – darkened, blind, deaf, ignorant and unable to understand the things of God.  Hardened, deceived and enslaved by Satan. We hated God and loved wallowing in the mudpits of our rebellion, flinging God’s word behind us (PS 50.17).

The unregenerate heart is an impregnable fortress.

No amount of human reasoning can crack this stronghold’s walls.  Pleading, begging, or dangling someone over the very pit of hell won’t.  Jonathan Edwards tag teaming with George Whitefield wouldn’t.  Jesus said that even if someone came back from afterlife it wouldn’t convince the wicked heart (LK 16.31).

Unregenerate hearts are invincible – except to Christ.  To break through the bunkers of our blindness and ignorance requires the divine lightning bolt power of the Lord of Hosts.  Charles Spurgeon said that in order to save us, Jesus stormed our hearts like a mighty warrior and demolished every wall opposing him.  But he didn’t stop there.  He gave us new hearts, infused with life and the Spirit of God, new hearts that long for his word, like newborns for milk.

Enlightening the human heart is a miracle of greater magnitude than creation, when God said “Let there be light” (2 CO 4.6).  A miracle even more amazing than when Jesus spoke to Lazarus, who’d been dead and in the tomb for 4 days and raised him to life.

Do you see Jesus as your beautiful God and Savior?  Then praise your Heavenly Father today for his awesome, miraculous power that opened your heart.  And keep praying that Christ will open the hearts of your unsaved friends and family members.  He has the power to tear down the mightiest walls.

photo by Portugese_eyes

Do you still truly think that you chose salvation? ~JB

THE MOST IMPORTANT WORD IN THE UNIVERSE

From Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross, Nancy Guthrie, Ed. Excerpted from “The Most Important Word in the Universe,” sermon by Raymond C. Ortland Jr.

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith….” Romans 3:23-25

The word “propitiation” comes from the Latin propitio, meaning “to render favorable, to appease, to conciliate.” To propitiate God means to appease his anger. Propitiation is all about God’s wrath.

God’s wrath? Wait a minute. Is God a fuming, frustrated person? Does he have a temper? Is he subject to mood swings? Is biblical propitiation like the pagan concept of throwing a virgin into the volcano to placate the pineapple god? and what if God changes back to anger? After all, we keep sinning-in the same old ways, too.

The first thing to say is that the wrath of God is a part of the gospel. It’s the part we tend to ignore. Yet we don’t mind our own anger. There is a lot of anger in us, a lot of righteous indignation. Listen to talk radio. In our culture it’s acceptable to vent our moral fervor at one another…. But the thought of God being angry-well, who does he think he is?

Great question. Who is God? He’s the most balanced personality imaginable. He is normal. His wrath is not an irrational outburst. God’s wrath is worthy of God. It is his morally appropriate, carefully considered, justly intense reaction to our evil demeaning his worth and destroying our own capacity to enjoy him. God cares about that. He is not a passive observer. He’s involved emotionally.

The Bible says, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). It never says, “God is anger.” But it couldn’t say that God is love without his anger, because God’s anger shows how serious his love is.

What we must understand is that God’s wrath is perfect, no less perfect than “the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience” (Romans 2:4). His wrath is the solemn determination of a doctor cutting away the cancer that’s killing his patient. And this Doctor hates the cancer. He will rid his universe of it all. He has scheduled a “day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed” (Rom. 2:5).

God presented Christ Jesus as a propitiation by his blood (see Rom. 3:24-35). Do you see the beauty in that? In human religions, it’s the worshiper who placates the offended deity with rituals and sacrifices and bribes. But in the gospel, it’s God himself who provides the offering. At the cross of Christ, God put something forward. He declared something to the whole world. He presented, he displayed, the clearest statement about himself he has ever made. What was he saying? Two things.

One, he detests our evil with all the intensity of the divine personality. If you want to know what your sin deserves from God, don’t look within yourself, don’t look at your own emotions. Look at that man on the cross-tormented, gasping,  bleeding. Take a long, thoughtful look. God was presenting something to you there. God was saying something about his perfect emotions toward your sin. He was displaying his wrath.

Two-here is the other thing God was presenting at the cross-the God you have offended doesn’t demand your blood; he gives his own in Christ Jesus. He knows what you deserve, but he wants to give you what you don’t deserve. He himself has opened the way. He took the initiative. How could it be otherwise? We can’t avert the wrath of God. We’re the problem, not the answer. We’re helpless before God. But “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son…” (John 3:16). At the cross, his love satisfied his own wrath….

IF A HOLY GOD IS DEALING WITH OUR SIN WE SHALL BE HOLY

Thanks to Against Heresies for this post.

I have the privilege this evening of speaking at Aberystwyth University Christian Union. They have asked me to speak on “Knowing God: Holy One.”

In my preparation I came across this helpful comment by R. A. Finlayson:

The great implication of holiness in the personal life is sin-consciousness, and where there is little sin-consciousness there is little conception of the holiness of God. The holiness of God becomes significant to us only when it reveals our own sinfulness in relation to God.

Sin is a wilful act of trespass on a holy God, and penitence results in self-loathing before God and a desire, not to escape from the holiness of God, but to accept it, to open up the life to its scrutiny, and receive its just judgment. Thus comes the repentance that leads, not to despair and death, but to hope and life.

If God is holy, there is still hope that the sinner may be holy; if a holy God is dealing with our sin we shall be holy.

HE DESCENDED INTO HELL AND ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN

From Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross, Nancy Guthrie, Ed. Excerpted from Growing In Christ by J. I. Packer.

“He descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven…” -from the Apostles’ Creed

….The English is misleading, for “hell” has changed its sense since the English form of the Creed was fixed. Originally, “hell” meant the place of the departed as such, corresponding to the Greek Hades and the Hebrew Sheol. That is what it means here, where the Creed echoes Peter’s statement that Psalm 16:10, “thou wilt not abandon my soul to Hades” (so RSV: AV has “hell”), was a prophecy fulfilled when Jesus rose (see Acts 2:27-31). But since the seventeenth century, “hell” has been used to signify only the state of final retribution for the godless for which the New Testament name is Gehenna.

What the Creed means, however, is that Jesus entered, not Gehenna, but Hades-that is, that he really died, and that it was a genuine death, not a simulated one, that he rose.

Perhaps it should be said (though one shrinks from laboring something so obvious) that “descended” does not imply that the way from Palestine to Hades is down into the ground, any more than “rose” implies that Jesus returned to surface level up the equivalent of a mine shaft! The language of descent is used because Hades, being the place of the disembodied, is lower in worth and dignity than is life on earth, where body and soul are together and humanity is in that sense whole.

“Being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18), Jesus entered Hades, and Scripture tells us briefly what he did there.

First, by his presence he made Hades into Paradise (a place of pleasure) for the penitent thief (cf. Luke 23:43), and presumably for all others who die trusting him during his earthly ministry, just as he does now for the faithful departed (see Philippians 1:21-23; 2 Corinthians 5:6-8).

Second, he perfected the spirits of the Old Testament believers (Hebrews 12:23; cf. 11:40), bringing them out of the gloom which Sheol, the “pit,” had hitherto been for them (cf. Psalm 88:3-6; 10-12), into this same Paradise experience. This is the core of truth in Medieval fantasies of the “harrowing of hell.”

Third, 1 Peter 3:19 tells us that he “made proclamation” (presumably, of his kingdom and appointment as the world’s judge) to the imprisoned “spirits” who had rebelled in antediluvian times (presumably, the fallen angels of 2 Peter 2:4ff., who are also the “sons of God” of Genesis 6:1-4).

What makes Jesus’ entry into Hades important for us is not, however, any of this, but simply the fact that now we can face death knowing that when it comes we shall not find ourselves alone. He has been there before us, and he will see us through….

“He ascended” echoes Jesus’ “I ascend” (John 20:17). “Into heaven” echoes “taken up from you into heaven,” the angels’ words in the ascension story (Acts 1:10). But what is “heaven”? Is it the sky, or outer space? Does the Creed mean that Jesus was the first astronaut? No, both it and the Bible are making a different point.

“Heaven” in the Bible means three things: (1) The endless, self-sustaining life of God.  In this sense, God always dwelt “in  heaven,” even when there was no earth. (2) The state of angels or men as they share the life of God, whether in foretaste now or in fullness hereafter. In this sense, the Christian’s reward, treasure, and inheritance are all “in  heaven” and heaven is shorthand for the Christian’s final hope. (3) The sky, which being above us and more like infinity than anything else we know, is an emblem in space and time of God’s eternal life, just as the rainbow is an emblem of his everlasting covenant (see Genesis 9:8-17).

Bible and Creed proclaim that in the ascension, forty days after his rising, Jesus entered heaven in sense 2-in a new and momentous way: thenceforth he “sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty,” ruling all things in his Father’s name and with his Father’s almightiness for the long-term good of his people. “On the right hand of God” signifies not a palatial location but a regal function: see Acts 2:23ff.; Romans 8:34; Ephesians 1:20ff.; Hebrews 1:3, 13; 10:12ff.; 12:2. He “ascended far above the heavens” (that is, reentered his pre-incarnate life, a life unrestricted by anything created) “that he might fill all things” (that is, make his kingly power effective everywhere; see Ephesians 4:10). “Ascended” is, of course, a picture-word implying exaltation (“going up!”) to a condition of supreme dignity and power.

What happened at the ascension, then, was not that Jesus became a spaceman, but that his disciples were shown a sign, just as at the transfiguration. As C. S. Lewis put it, “they saw first a short vertical movement and then a vague luminosity (that is what ‘cloud’ presumably means…) and then nothing.”[1] In other words, Jesus’ final withdrawal from human sight, to rule till he returns to judgment, was presented to the disciples’ outward eye as going up into heaven in sense 3. This should not puzzle us. Withdrawal had to take place somehow, and going up, down, or sideways, failing to appear or suddenly vanishing were the only possible ways. Which would signify most clearly that Jesus would henceforth be reigning in glory? That answers itself. So the message of the ascension story is: Jesus the Savior reigns!

 

---

[1] C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: MacMillan, 1947), 186.

from 1517

“It is God we have to deal with.”

“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”

- 2 Timothy 2:15

“The source of all doctrinal disputes is that clever men wish to show off their abilities before the world, and Paul here lays down the best and most fitting remedy for this by telling Timothy to keep his eyes fixed on God.

“It is as if he had said, ‘Some men seek popular applause, but let it be your aim to approve yourself and your ministry to God.’ There is indeed nothing more likely to check a foolish desire for display than to remember that it is God we have to deal with.”

- John Calvin

DISINFECTING MY MIND

Stephen Altrogge has some thoughts re Bible reading that are well worth considering:

Several weeks ago I heard someone make the following simple, profound comment:

Christians need to have their minds disinfected every day.

At first this comment sounds somewhat ominous. Disinfected every day? You mean like Big Brother? 1984? Propaganda? Go back to your robots Mr. Thought Police, because I don’t want to have my mind disinfected!

But take a moment to pause and ponder. The truth is, we do need to have our minds spiritually disinfected every day. Each day several things are certain:

• I’ll be tempted to think “hard thoughts” of God instead of gospel thoughts. My default M.O. is legalism. Trying to earn God’s favor. Fearing the loss of God’s favor when I sin. Doubting the compassion of God. Failing to see the mercy of God in every circumstance.

• I’ll be tempted to evaluate circumstance based upon my feelings rather than God’s word. Trouble at work with an impossible boss? There’s no good coming from this situation and I need another job. Conflict with your spouse? I’ll never change and there’s no hope for my marriage. Struggling with an overwhelming workload? I hate my life and I hate school.

Let me put this in Biblical terms. In Romans 12:2 Paul says:

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (emphasis mine)

If I don’t regularly renew my mind with the truth of God’s word, I’ll perpetually operate from one of these mindsets. If I don’t use the gospel to kill hard thoughts of God I’ll wallow in legalism. If I don’t interpret my circumstances through the lens of scripture I’ll miss God’s perspective and be a miserable mess.

Simple application questions:

• Do you renew your mind on a regular basis by reading, meditating upon, and memorizing the word of God?

• Do you regularly revisit the gospel?

THE NEED FOR PROPHETIC VISION

 ”We need a baptism of clear seeing. We desperately need seers who can see through the mist–Christian leaders with prophetic vision. Unless they come soon it will be too late for this generation. And if they do come we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy.” – A.W. Tozer

HT: 1517

FEEDING SHEEP OR AMUSING GOATS

The mission of amusement fails to effect the end desired.

An evil resides in the professed camp of the Lord so gross in its impudence that the most shortsighted can hardly fail to notice it. During the past few years it has developed at an abnormal rate evil for evil. It has worked like leaven until the whole lump ferments. The devil has seldom done a cleverer thing than hinting to the Church that part of their mission is to provide entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them. From speaking out as the Puritans did, the Church has gradually toned down her testimony, then winked at and excused the frivolities of the day. Then she tolerated them in her borders. Now she has adopted them under the plea of reaching the masses.

My first contention is that providing amusement for the people is nowhere spoken of in the Scriptures as a function of the Church. If it is a Christian work why did not Christ speak of it? “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” That is clear enough. So it would have been if He has added, “and provide amusement for those who do not relish the gospel.” No such words, however, are to be found. It did not seem to occur to Him. Then again, “He gave some apostles, some prophets, some pastors and teachers, for the work of the ministry.” Where do entertainers come in? The Holy Spirit is silent concerning them. Were the prophets persecuted because they amused the people or because they refused? The concert has no martyr roll.

Again, providing amusement is in direct antagonism to the teaching and life of Christ and all His apostles. What was the attitude of the Church to the world? “Ye are the salt,” not sugar candy-something the world will spite out, not swallow. Short and sharp was the utterance, “Let the dead bury their dead.” He was in awful earnestness!

Had Christ introduced more of the bright and pleasant elements into His mission, He would have been more popular when they went back, because of the searching nature of His teaching. I do not hear Him say, “Run after these people, Peter, and tell them we will have a different style of service tomorrow, something short and attractive with little preaching. We will have a pleasant evening for the people. Tell them they will be sure to enjoy it. Be quick, Peter, we must get the people somehow!” Jesus pitied sinners, sighed and wept over them, but never sought to amuse them. In vain will the Epistles be searched to find any trace of the gospel amusement. Their message is, “Come out, keep out, keep clean out!” Anything approaching fooling is conspicuous by its absence. They had boundless confidence in the gospel and employed no other weapon. After Peter and John were locked up for preaching, the Church had a prayer meeting, but they did not pray, “Lord grant Thy servants that by a wise and discriminating use of innocent recreation we may show these people how happy we are.” If they ceased not for preaching Christ, they had not time for arranging entertainments. Scattered by persecution, they went everywhere preaching the gospel. They “turned the world upside down.” That is the difference! Lord, clear the Church of all the rot and rubbish the devil has imposed on her and bring us back to apostolic methods.

Lastly, the mission of amusement fails to affect the end desired. It works havoc among young converts. Let the careless and scoffers, who thank God because the Church met them halfway, speak and testify. Let the heavy-laden who found peace through the concert not keep silent! Let the drunkard to whom the dramatic entertainment has been God’s link in the chain of their conversion, stand up! There are none to answer. The mission of amusement produces no converts. The need of the hour for today’s ministry is believing scholarship joined with earnest spirituality, the one springing from the other as fruit from the root. The need is biblical doctrine, so understood and felt, that it sets men on fire.

C. H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)

HE NEVER SOUGHT TO AMUSE THEM

(Archibald Brown, “The Devil’s Mission of Amusement“)

Jesus pitied sinners, pleaded with them, sighed over them, warned them, and wept over them; but He never sought to amuse them!

When many of His disciples turned away, because of the  searching nature of His preaching–I do not find there was any attempt to bring them back, by resorting to something more pleasant to the flesh. I do not hear Him saying, “We must keep up the gatherings at any cost! So run after the
people, Peter, and tell them we will have a different style of service tomorrow! Something very short and attractive, with little, if any, preaching. Today was a service for God –but tomorrow we will have a pleasant evening for the people! Tell them they will be sure to enjoy it, and have a pleasant time. Be quick, Peter! We must get the people somehow; if not by Gospel–then by entertainment!”

No, this was not how He argued. Gazing in sorrow on those who would not hear the Word–He simply turns to the twelve, and asks, “Will you go away also?”