“Who do you say that I am?”

This is what Jesus asked His disciples. Peter answered “You are the Christ, the Son of God” and Jesus affirmed this answer and told Peter that flesh and blood did not reveal this to him but his heavenly Father. This revelation of who Jesus is the bedrock of genuine Christianity. I felt the need to add the word “genuine” as there is much Christianity that I have encountered that is more cultural. I gave out a survey several years ago at a college campus asking students their thoughts about God, whether they considered themselves Christians and if they considered the Bible to be relevant to their lives. Many considered themselves to be Christian but felt that the Bible wasn’t relevant to them and didn’t believe Jesus was God. I thought, “What makes you a Christian?”

 We are seeing a breakaway from Christian morals at an accelerated rate today, some see this as us becoming more liberated and others see it as “the beginning of the end” for our nation. The Bible states that the moral Law shows us our sinfulness, we are commanded not to do something and we automatically want to do it. Rebellion is revealed more clearly when there are rules that attempt to suppress it. Rebellion by its very essence is to be against something. Rebellion is not the origin of a purpose; it is a response to it. This begs a question: why is rebellion present in our world and what is it ultimately opposing? The problem with even the perfect moral Law (the Ten Commandments) is that it cannot cure rebellion. It almost seems to stimulate it. As we grapple with this we can come to one of two conclusions: there is something wrong with me and I need help outside of rules to help me or there is something wrong with the rules and they need to conform to what is right to me. Another option is not to come a conclusion and ignore the matter altogether.

I think that there are many people who approve of morals and ethics that line up with the Bible. They would agree that people shouldn’t kill or steal from one another or devalue others. What many people have a problem with is labeling these morals as Christian. Biblical morality is not merely goodness for goodness sake it is given to us by a Holy Being who created us for relationship with Him which was supposed to govern how we relate to others. Jesus summed up the entire Law as loving God first and foremost and loving others as ourselves. Most of us are okay with the second part of that but want to remove the first. To love God is to love Him on His terms for who He is. The growing trend is to remove morality from its God-centered foundation under the guise of liberating the individual. It gives the false sense of liberty because there is an absence of accountability to a higher authority.

I sat through a very interesting training about approaching people with a nonjudgmental attitude. This was in the context of assisting disabled individuals and I appreciated the benefit of this training. The Bible tells us not to judge (condemn) others but right after that Jesus instructs us on how to correct someone. Our knee-jerk reaction as people is to condemn the whole person when they say or do something we consider to be wrong. When approaching people to help them I would certainly concur that our faulty judgments must be suspended to help meet a person’s needs. I would call this extending grace, or “unmerited favor,” to someone. Where I parted ways with the teacher of the coarse is when she insisted that morality must never enter the picture as it incites violence.  I would agree but I don’t lay the blame on morality. No doubt there have been many who have oppressed others under the guise of a moral cause but again this reveals more about what is wrong with us.

Somehow we are under the impression that if we can change our ideas or the way we say things that we will attain a sort of enlightenment which will lead to moral living. We simultaneously want to remove morality from its foundation while trying to establish morality that is essentially self-centered. As a whole, we don’t want to take responsibility for the evil in the world as coming from us. One of the realities I have come face to face with repeatedly is that I am no better than people that I could easily judge. I have met people who look horrific on paper because of heinous acts they have committed but when I met them and talked to them I can’t help but see a person with the same problem as me: sin. They acted more outwardly on wrong desires that came from within and, if we’re honest, we all have at some point. Some people’s outward acts of sin have more collateral damage and require more legal involvement. Others get away with what they do and the very thought of it awakens within us a sense of righteousness that demands bad people be punished. Here is the problem; the presence of sin within us is the source of the wrong things we do. If we know in many ways that we are not good inside and yet have a notion of goodness and that wickedness should ultimately be punished – what hope do we ultimately have? I think those of us who are truly honest will have to admit that we’re not entirely good and that evil should be judged as evil that justice demands that evil be punished. Many of us would agree with the concept but we will inevitably differ on the application.

This is one reason why laws or rules will not ultimately solve our problem. Laws come from a law-giver and what God is after is more than behavior-modification or our best attempt to be good. The Law shows us that we aren’t good as God intended. God promised to do something that is entirely outside the scope of human remedy in His New Covenant promise: He promised to forgive our sins and write His Laws on our hearts and minds and that we would come to know Him. This is what I meant t when I said that our help comes from outside the rules but the help from God establishes the purpose or fulfillment of the rules. What we ultimately need is a change from within that we are powerless to enact.

All the striving of the human soul ceases when we turn to Jesus. When we turn to Him, consider Him, pray to Him in recognition of the fact that He came for us we begin to see God as He is. In Him, we receive God’s grace. The need we have to be forgiven of all wrongs in a perfectly just way is met in the person of Jesus. The Bible says we are justified with God through Jesus Christ. The Bible says He was displayed publically as a satisfaction of the punishment we deserved for our sins. In the Old Testament, sacrifices for sins were made inside the temple in the manifest presence of God. What God was displaying with Jesus on the cross was His sacrifice for our sin. 1 John says that this is the expression of His love for us. In His love He met our great need to be redeemed, which is to be restored to our original value.  He gave us value by creating us in His image and when that image was marred through sin He restored it as the representative head of all humanity by being a perfect human and He represented God to us. Jesus is the perfect mediator. This is a mystery to our finite intellect but fills the need we have for what can only be found in God. We were made by Him and for Him. His love did not excuse sin, His love atoned for sin and gave us the opportunity to do away with it in Christ.

I know firsthand what it is to try to follow the rules of the Bible only to find desires within me that find pleasure in what God says is wrong. I justified what was wrong by giving into wisdom that was based on what was “right to me” and it lead to a place of death. Guilt haunted me but God’s grace drew me to Him. I didn’t have to modify my behavior before I started seeking Him but when I found Him I couldn’t ignore Him. I came to find out that He is a Peron who has a personal love for me and I was made for a relationship with Him that fills the eternal, spiritual part of me. How I wish I could give the peace that I have to everyone I know! My actions changed as a result of knowing Him and I found that He is writing His commandments on my heart and mind and they are my path to freedom! Freedom is living in the state for which we were created and we were not made by ourselves and for ourselves! The bondage of living independently from God started with Satan’s lie to the first humans. He lied to them about God’s character and deceived them into thinking that they would be a better version of themselves by disobeying God’s commandments. The worst deception we can have is the one we don’t know we have. The devil’s greatest tactic is masking his work as “good” and what we don’t realize is that when we aren’t serving God we are serving another master.

I am grieved at my core at the thought that God has expressed such a great love for us and we have the ability to dismiss it so easily. But I have hope and I pray that God continues to awaken people the way He awakened me and many others. Not to just the reality of sin but to the reality of His marvelous love and grace. The blood He spilled on the cross gives us entry to be filled with the eternal riches of the knowledge of who He is. He gives us His very life and I cannot express in words what a precious treasure that is. The psalmist said in Psalm 94, “Satisfy us in the morning with Your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” True satisfaction comes from His eternal love and the cross makes it possible for us to reconciled back to Him.

Departing from morality is only a symptom that we are departing from seeing the necessity of being rightly related to God. What I believe we need to see in and out of the church is not merely what is morally right or wrong but what draws us closer to God and what does not. My life isn’t primarily about right versus wrong: it’s about knowing God personally. It’s about knowing who Jesus is and who I am as a result of living in relationship with Him. I am fascinated by Him, He forsook everything to redeem me and make me His own when I wanted nothing to do with Him. I rebelled against Him and He loved me, He brought me under His reign in His gentleness and brought me to the place of being able to make a conscious decision to give Him my heart. A heart that He made and yet He laid His life down so that I could choose Him. No one has ever loved me that way and loving Him means trusting Him and loving others the way He does, which is what happens when His life is in me. This is why He not only died but rose again – so that we might live a different existence altogether. This is what it means to be born again. Knowing Jesus for who He is and following Him even with all of my flaws is what it means to me to be a Christian.

Who do you say that He is?

A Life of Worship

A Life of Worship

“The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. And the LORD said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the people of Israel: ‘You have seen for yourselves that I have talked with you from heaven. You shall not make gods of silver to be with me, nor shall you make for yourselves gods of gold.  An altar of earth you shall make for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your oxen. In every place where I cause my name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you.  If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it. And you shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not exposed on it.’” (Exodus 20:21-26, ESV)

Recently I prayed to God about my worship and asked Him to renew my understanding of what it means to worship Him with my whole life, not merely through music. Musical worship is Biblical but can only be the expression of something that comes from the eternal depths that God placed in the heart of every person. What I seek to guard against in my life is singing songs about worship while not seeking to bring my life into harmony with God for the purpose of worship.

Exodus 20:21-26 details some of the first instructions that God gave to Israel in regard to worship. God delivered these people from Egypt for the purpose of being His inheritance. The psalms say that no other nation was given the privileges that Israel was given in God revealing Himself to them and giving them His laws to walk in so that they might know His ways. They were saved by God’s gracious intervention in Egypt not because they merited being saved but because He remembered the covenant He made with their forefathers. After God delivered them from their oppression He led them into the wilderness to show them the purpose for which they were delivered. He also came down in His manifest presence to dwell with them: “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of Him may be before you, that you may not sin” (Exodus 20:20).  God was revealing His holiness and their sinfulness and showing them He desired to dwell with them without compromising His holiness.

The first thing that God addresses is the tendency in people to fashion for ourselves false gods. Making an idol takes the mystery away from God and ceases to acknowledge His distinct glory as God. Dietrich Bonheffer once said “A god who allowed us to prove his existence would be an idol.” We can point to the evidence of God’s existence but to truly know Him we must come to Him and allow Him to reveal Himself to us and believe that He desires to do so. That is the crux of the Bible and it’s why we cannot interpret the Bible without the Holy Spirit. The Bible is not primarily about applying things to our lives – it is about revealing the person of God in Jesus Christ in all of His beautiful, majestic glory.  God made it clear that He also has good intentions for His people: “In every place where I cause My name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you.”

What also stood out to me was what God said in regard to the altar and the way to approach the altar of worship: “you shall not build it of hewn (human-carved) stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it. And you shall not go up by steps to my altar, that your nakedness be not exposed on it.” They had to use stones that weren’t shaped by their craftsmanship and they couldn’t approach by steps. Steps would imply that it is something they made to approach God. The theme of being naked runs throughout the Bible and is synonymous with exposing sin. Adam and Eve covered their bodies because of the sense of being unclean within. Jesus spoke to the church of Leaodicia to come to Him for white garments so that the shame of their nakedness would not be revealed. The danger of the church is they didn’t know that they were naked and in need of being clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. We cannot approach God without His provided way of approaching Him through Jesus Christ. Works done in self-righteousness in relation to God are the equivalent of being a white-washed tomb. We clean the outside to hide the death inside. God is saying to His people “you cannot approach me this way. Your sin will be exposed and you will die.”

In the Old Testament, laws were given to punish disobedience and create order and blessings were associated with obedience. In this day and age we tend to look at some of the penalties of transgressing the laws under the Old Covenant as severe but Hebrews states: “Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses.  How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?” (Hebrews 10:28-29). The Old Covenant was pointing to a greater reality that has been established in the New Covenant. The Old Covenant provided a way for God’s people to live in light of their national salvation and be spared God’s judgments and the New Covenant provides a way for all of us to live in light of God’s complete salvation from God’s final judgment. Knowing what we have been saved from and saved for is at the heart of why we give thanks and praise to God as “saved” individuals.

I believe the easiest thing to lose sight of in worship is God Himself. The only way I know to remedy this is to fix my mind on who God has revealed Himself to be in the Bible. In Colossians, Paul magnifies the person of Jesus in declaring that He is the source of all created things, pre-eminent in all things, the image of the invisible God (1:15-20). In Him are the treasures of the knowledge of God (2:3). Rather than skipping past that to the “application” part of the letter (i.e. the part that applies to me). I realized the Holy Spirit wanted me to stop and behold Jesus and just worship Him for who He is. There is no one like Him who is the very expression of God. I was made to be fascinated and enamored with His glory. Secondly, we are to praise Him for His wonderful work of salvation in which He revealed the Father’s desire to deliver us from darkness to be His own precious possession. In Him we have redemption – we are redeemed from every lawless deed to be able to serve Him. In Him we have eternal value and our works are precious to Him. I have experienced first-hand that when I worship God this way that I often don’t feel different immediately but over time my emotions come more in alignment with God, I become more enamored with Him and less enamored with lesser things.

In light of this great salvation, Colossians states that taking in God’s word and everything we do in this life can be an act of worship: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (3:16-17). In Christ, we have the privilege of being able to put to death the works that don’t glorify God and which all amount to idolatry (3:5). We can by faith appropriate an inward righteousness, a new nature that “is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (3:10). In Christ we have more than behavior modification – we have spiritual life within us through Jesus by which we can know God and find pleasure in doing what we were divinely designed to do: worship.

Bread Of Life

Bread of Life  

   

I was reading John 6 recently during a time when I was struggling to see how God would provide for the needs of my household. When I have a need, I look at it is an opportunity to trust in God and learn something about Him. I have come to learn that the satisfaction of my perceived needs is not primarily what God is after in the midst of a trial. At our core, we are spiritual beings who have spiritual needs. Our spiritual nature is that in us which was designed to relate to God personally. He has set “eternity in our hearts” Ecclesiastes tells us.  When we don’t realize our need for God Himself, we begin to live on a lower level of existence - becoming enslaved to the pursuit of satisfying lesser, temporal needs. God is concerned with our temporary needs but He calls us to seek Him for something much greater than food and clothing: His kingdom and His righteousness. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that we are not to allow the worry of having enough food and clothing to eclipse the pursuit of God Himself (His righteousness) and the expression of His dominion in our lives (His kingdom). There is a propensity in us to self-preserve and secure our comfort through money and it seems perfectly justifiable in the world’s eyes. When we are in need it is easy in this culture to revert to this vain pursuit. If we give ourselves over to this over and over again something disastrous happens, we can become affluent outwardly and yet be spiritually bankrupt. It is possible to be a Christian and be influenced by the world’s notion of being prosperous.

In John 6, Jesus fed multitudes miraculously with the multiplication of bread and fish. The crowds ate and declared that Jesus was truly a prophet. Their response was so strong that Jesus had to remove Himself from the situation or else they would make Him king “by force” the Scripture says (6:14-15). God’s plan for Jesus being King is not according to man’s ideas or ability. No sooner did the crowds find out that Jesus left the next day did they come to where He was. Jesus addressed them and tried to get them to see that the miracle of provision wasn’t merely to feed their physical appetite: it was to awaken them for their need for Him and to show them that God wanted to meet that need (6:25-34). John’s Gospel is filled with one sign and wonder after another in which Jesus met people’s needs so that they might place their trust in Him.

What God challenged me on in is this: would I be like the crowd or like one of His disciples? Jesus explained in a spiritually literal way that His body and blood was to be given so that we could have life. Jesus’s body was broken and blood spilled out for a very real, eternal need that we have and often don’t realize that we have. Jesus said, “that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life” (John 6:40). The word “look” in the original Greek does not refer to merely seeing with the natural eye but perceiving or contemplation of the mind. It refers to who we believe Jesus to be. For an unbeliever, there has to be an initial recognition of a need that can only be met in Jesus. They may not be able to verbalize the need and, in His compassion, God will meet them in their circumstances through natural needs to lead to trusting in Him for eternal life. For the believer, the challenge is to keep a steady gaze or perception of Jesus. What I felt challenged in is do I seek Jesus for His providential blessings as the crowds did? They praised Him when He met their natural need for food but they left when He diagnosed their eternal need. Jesus was offering them something that would satisfy their eternal needs and they forsook the offer! When Jesus asked His disciples if they too would leave their response was “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:69). What separates a disciple from a member of the crowd is a confession of who Jesus is based on having tasted of Him through His word.

I was challenged as to whether I would seek for the “bread from heaven” that Jesus spoke of. Jesus said to labor for it not because we have to earn it per se but because it is promised to those who will seek Him for it. Jesus promised that anyone who comes to Him He will in no way cast out. This is a glorious promise to the person who realizes that they are a sinner and their ongoing need is to be in union with the One who saves us by His life. This speaks of His finished work on the cross and our experience of trusting in Him on this side of eternity. Not only does He meet our needs but He meets them according to His riches and glory. He meets our needs in a way that will result in Him being glorified in our lives. Psalm 50:15 testifies to this: "call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.” The question is: are we primarily seeking Him or the satisfaction of our need?