God’s Love for Us, Fuels Our Service to Him

For until men recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him— they will never yield him willing service. Nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him.

Quoted from Calvin, J., MacNeill, J. T., & Battles, F. L. (1960). Institutes of the Christian religion: In two volumes. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, p. 41. (I.2.i)

La-La Land

For someone like me, here lies the heart of the problem of the New Left: once the concerns of the Left shifted from material, empirical issues—hunger, thirst, nakedness, poverty, disease— to psychological categories, the door was opened for everyone to become a victim and for anyone with a lobby group to make his or her issue the Big One for this generation. “Authenticity” and “inauthenticity” are entirely subjective categories, and forms of oppression are thus whatever the oppressed person claims them to be. This is why the media outrage that greets a perceived racist or homophobic comment often far outstrips that which greets scenes of poverty and famine, and it is what leads the likes of Richard Rorty to compare the Holocaust of the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s to the treatment of homosexuals in America and to do so with an apparently straight face. At that point, we are truly in a la-la land with no moral compass, a place that should provoke nothing but ridicule and contempt. This is not to say that bigotry of any kind is at all acceptable or desirable, but to argue that the Left has lost all sense of proportion with regard to what is and is not of most pressing importance. It has become, by and large, the movement of righteous rhetorical pronouncements on total trivia.

Trueman, C. R. (2010). Republocrat: confessions of a liberal conservative. Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Pub., pp. 17-18.

Confession: Drawing Us Closer to God

Early in my marriage I would haltingly reveal secrets about myself to my wife, secrets I had never told anyone. “Do you still love me?” I would ask. Yes, she would assure me, even when the secrets may have caused her pain. I learned from her a truth I would later understand about God: only if you are fully known can you be fully loved.

My spiritual growth has meant bringing a succession of secrets, in fear and trembling, to God, only to find that God of course knew the secret all along, and loved me anyhow. I have learned that God is hardly surprised by my failure. Knowing me better than I know myself, God expects failure from me. I am more sinful than I ever imagined—and also more loved by God.

“Adam, where are you?” God called out in the garden. It was Adam, not God, who hid. God takes the initiative to come searching; we are the ones who hide. And Jesus, the Great Physician, sees our sins not as disqualifiers but as the reason for his journey from another world to ours. Rescue is God’s business.

A pastor friend told me that when he sits in his office and hears tearful confessions from people who have failed, he realizes at that moment they are closer to God than he is, the religious professional.

 

Quoted from Yancey, P. (2003). Rumors of another world: What on earth are we missing?. Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, p. 156.

How a Flawed Life Entails Communion With the Living God

And so our faith, even one active in loving obedience, is not, by itself, a magical cure for sin. Faith taps into the energy of resurrection life in the Messiah. The exercise of faith is like the shifting of gears which enables an automobile engine to move the car forward. But this energy is available only in a relationship with the indwelling Spirit of God. Victory over sin without communion with God would be a meaningless contradiction, since God’s highest will for our lives is communion with him. A legalistically faultless life lived without fellowship with God would be hollow. But a flawed life which struggles to maintain communion with God is still pleasing to him and may be full of vital spirituality.

 

Quoted from Lovelace, R. F. (1985). Renewal as a way of life: A guidebook for spiritual growth. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, p. 147.

The Demise of Freedom of Religion in the U.S.

Jefferson and the Founders … knew that the State was always tempted to take over everything — including the religious side of people’s lives. So they put a protection in the Constitution that the government could not favor any religion over another… and could not prohibit the free exercise of religion.

They wanted churches and religions to be protected from the government — from Leviathan. Why?  Because they knew that what people believed and their freedom to live out and practice one’s most deeply held beliefs was at the very heart of this radical and fragile experiment they had just launched into the world.

Okay, so where are the threats to Religious Freedom in America today? Well, for one thing, understand we are not talking about Freedom of Worship. In a speech 18 months ago, Hillary Clinton replaced the phrase Freedom of Religion with Freedom of Worship — and my hero and friend Chuck Colson noticed and was disturbed by it.  Why? Because these are radically different things. They have Freedom of Worship in China. But what exactly is Freedom of Worship?

In [Eric Metaxas’] book Bonhoeffer I talk about a meeting between Bonhoeffer’s friend, the Rev. Martin Niemoller, who early on in the Third Reich was one of those fooled by Hitler.  And in that meeting he says something to Hitler about how he, Niemoller, cares about Germany and Third Reich — and Hitler cuts him off and says “I built the Third Reich. You just worry about your sermons!”

There in a few words you have the idea of Freedom of Worship.  Freedom of Worship says you can have your little strange rituals and say whatever you like in your little religious buildings for an hour or two on Sundays, but once you leave that building you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state! We will tell you what to think on the big and important questions. Questions like when life begins and who gets to decide when to end it and what marriage is…  And if you don’t like it, tough luck! That’s Freedom of Worship and that have that in China and they had it in Germany in Bonhoeffer’s day…

But the Founding Fathers said just the opposite! They said the faith inside that church building must live on and flourish outside that building. In fact, the Founders believed the success of the American Experiment depends on it! In Os Guinness’s book — A FREE PEOPLE’S SUICIDE – he reminds us that the Founders believed Freedom of Religion was at the heart of the American Experiment.

In that book he talks about the Golden Triangle of Freedom … He explains that the Founders knew that Freedom and Self-Government were not possible without Virtue. Without virtue, we would simply vote to line our own pockets and elect those leaders who would line our pockets. Sound familiar? But they believed that Freedom required Virtue and Virtue in turn required Faith. It was mainly Faith that motivated citizens toward Virtue.  So Freedom required Virtue and Virtue required Faith — but Faith in turn required Freedom.  Faith requires Freedom. The whole triangle falls apart if you take away any of those three things. They support each other.

Quoted from Eric Metaxas’ CPAC 2013 Speech on Religious Freedom on March 12, 2013 (emphasis added). Video is here.

God’s Anti-Qualification to His Kingdom

.. [T]he kingdom of God the one thing that qualifies us is knowing that we don’t, and the one thing that disqualifies us thinking that we do. In other words, all we need is to know our need. To put it briefly, the only thing to offer is the single statement: ‘I have nothing to offer.’

Quoted from Ortlund, D. C. (2011). Defiant grace: The surprising message and mission of Jesus. Darlington, England: EP Books, p. 37.

 

We Obey God’s Law to Become like Him

“Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy.” (Lev. 19:2)

Thus the intention of the law is to make the people like their God, and this, too, is the thread of unity running through the splendid diversity of the whole chapter. Fifteen times the laws enunciated are driven home by the words ‘I am the LORD/I am the LORD your God’. Thanks to the translational scruple of representing the divine Name, Yahweh, by the English convention ‘LORD’, this repeated sanction attached to the laws sounds like an assertion of authority: you must do this because, as your Lord, I command it. This is a misunderstanding. What is asserted fifteen times over is not the authority vested in the deity but the revealed nature of Israel’s God, the ‘I am what I am’ of Exodus 3:140-15. Consequently, we can paraphrase the situation in Leviticus 19 like this: ‘You are to obey all these laws, applying the law of the Lord to every detail of life in all its multiplicity, because I am what I am. It is for this reason that I legislate how you are to treat your parents, the disabled, the elderly, the alien, the poor… because I AM WHAT I AM’. In a word, the law is the perceptual replica of the divine nature; by obeying the law the Lord’s people become like him.

Quoted from Motyer, J. A. (2004).  Look to the rock: An Old Testament background to our understanding of Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, Publications, p. 77.