Salvation Accomplished and Anticipated

November 30, 2014 in Bible - OT - Psalms, Christmas, Church Calendar, King Jesus, Meditations, Prayer, Singing Psalms
Psalm 9:13–14 (NKJV)
13 Have mercy on me, O LORD! Consider my trouble from those who hate me, You who lift me up from the gates of death, 14 That I may tell of all Your praise In the gates of the daughter of Zion. I will rejoice in Your salvation.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent, a time of year when we look both backwards and forwards. We look backwards – recalling God’s fulfillment of the promise to our fathers that one day He would send a Child of Eve to rescue us from sin and death. Jesus has come to save us – hallelujah! But we also look forwards – anticpating the fulfillment of God’s promise that one day that same Son shall return in glory to vindicate all who trust Him. Jesus will come to save us – hallelujah!
This Advent our sermons focus once again on Jesus in the Psalms – and today we consider Psalm 9 a portion of which we have just read. In Psalm 9, David praises God for maintaining David’s right and cause in the world in the face of those who oppose Him. But he not only praises God for what He has done in the past, he prays that God would deliver him yet again – and it is this request that God vindicate him again which we just read. Have mercy on me, O LORD! Consider my trouble from those who hate me, You who lift me up from the gates of death – David recognizes that it is the Lord who has vindicated him and who must do so again. To the Lord our God belong escapes from death.
So why did David want God to rescue him from his troubles? Listen closely: Have mercy on me, O LORD! Consider my trouble from those who hate me, You who lift me up from the gates of death, That I may tell of all Your praise In the gates of the daughter of Zion. I will rejoice in Your salvation. David petitioned God to rescue him so that he could sing further praises to God in the future. He wanted God to deliver him so that he could go to the Temple and declare: listen what God has done for me! He wanted to sing God’s praises in the company of His people.
So as we remember God’s act of kindness in sending His Son Jesus to rescue us from sin and death; and as we pray that God would yet again send Jesus to vindicate those who trust in Him – why do we do it? So that we might praise His Name in the company of His people! God saved you that you might proclaim His praises, that you might offer up spiritual sacrifices, that you might offer up the fruit of your lips in the gates of the daughter of Zion, in the Heavenly Jerusalem, in the Church. Singing praise to God is the goal of our salvation – it is the reason God delivered you from your sin. So sing; don’t be self-conscious. Sing; don’t make excuses. Sing; don’t deprive the assembly of your voice.

And as we gather in His presence to sing, let us acknowledge that we often are so consumed with our own selves or troubles or desires that we neglect to bring praise and petition to God. Reminded of this, let us kneel and seek the Lord’s forgiveness through Christ.

Christianity is NOT a Means to an End

November 12, 2014 in Bible - NT - Luke, Bible - NT - Matthew, Coeur d'Alene Issues, Ecclesiology, King Jesus, Politics, Quotations

“…Christianity refuses to be regarded as a mere means to a higher end. Our Lord made that perfectly clear when He said: ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother…he cannot be my disciple’ (Lk 14:26). Whatever else those stupendous words may mean, they certainly mean that the relationship to Christ takes precedence of all other relationships, even the holiest of relationships like those that exist between husband and wife and parent and child. Those other relationships exist for the sake of Christianity and not Christianity for the sake of them. Christianity will indeed accomplish many useful things in this world, but if it is accepted in order to accomplish those useful things it is not Christianity. Christianity will combat Bolshevism; but if it is accepted in order to combat Bolshevism, it is not Christianity: Christianity will produce a unified nation, in a slow but satisfactory way; but if it is accepted in order to produce a unified nation, it is not Christianity: Christianity will produce a healthy community; but if it is accepted in order to produce a healthy community, it is not Christianity: Christianity will promote international peace; but if it is accepted in order to promote international peace, it is not Christianity. Our Lord said, ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ But if you seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness in order that all those other things may be added unto you, you will miss both those other things and the Kingdom of God as well.”

J.Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, pp. 127-128.

Neither Barren nor Unfruitful

November 9, 2014 in Bible - NT - 2 Peter, Bible - NT - John, Holy Spirit, King Jesus, Meditations, Sanctification
2 Peter 1:5–9 (NKJV)
5 But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, 6 to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, 7 to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. 8 For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.
Our Lord Jesus has called us to faith, has brought us to Himself, that we might be fruitful servants. He has poured out His Spirit upon us that our lives might manifest the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control. These graces of the Spirit Peter catalogues as faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love. As followers of Jesus Christ we are to bear fruit in our lives. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Peter borrowed this fruitfulness imagery from Jesus. In John 15 Jesus spoke to the disciples and said:
“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples.
What Jesus declares and Peter reasserts is that fruitfulness is not optional but mandatory. The one who is savingly connected to Jesus, connected to Him not merely formally but by a living and active faith, will bear fruit to the glory of His Name. And he will do so precisely because God gives His Spirit to produce such fruit in our lives. The Spirit grants us faith in Jesus that we might abide in Him and bear fruit. Thus, if we do not abide in Jesus, if we are without fruit, if we are barren and unfruitful, then we bear evidence that we have no living connection with the vine.
So Peter would remind us again today, even as our Lord Jesus told Peter himself, to give all diligence to our pursuit of virtue. By living in obedience to the Lord Jesus we reveal the reality of our faith and give witness to all men that Jesus has risen from the dead.

Reminded of our calling to be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of Jesus, let us kneel and confess our sins as one fruit of His work in our lives.

Shall We Not Accept Adversity?

August 17, 2014 in Bible - OT - Job, King Jesus, Meditations, Sovereignty of God, Trials
Job 2:9–10 (NKJV)
9 Then [Job’s] wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!” 10 But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
Our sermon today considers God’s words to Adam and Eve following our rebellion against God. We will find that the various troubles that exist in the world have their origin in our rebellion. Toil, severe pain, animal suffering, weeds, strife, death – all these things entered the world as a consequence of our rebellion.
But it is important for us to understand, simultaneously, that none of these things took God by surprise or happened apart from His Sovereign control. God is the Lord. He rules over men and nations. Nothing happens apart from His decree, including the Fall.
Consequently, when we face the consequences of living in a fallen world – when, like Job, we begin to suffer: we lose our wealth; our health is compromised; our loved ones die – when these things happen, as Christians we know that they come from the hand of God. As Job reminds his wife, Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity? God sends the one as well as the other; the heart of wisdom takes them from His hand and trusts Him in the midst of them.
If you are suffering, be assured that God is still in control, still ordaining and overseeing and governing all things. The question is not, “Has God sent this adversity?” – for we know most certainly that he has. No one can say to Him, what have you done?! The question rather is, “Why has God sent this thing?” Has he sent it because He hates you or because He loves you?
Hear the good news: if you have turned from your sins and sought forgiveness in Christ’s Name; if you serve God through Jesus, then God loves you. He has sent this suffering because He delights in you and delights to show through you the wonder of His power. So trust Him, rely upon Him, and know that not a hair falls from your head without your Father’s say.

Reminded that our God reigns and that he sends even adversity for the good of His chosen people, let us confess that we are often tempted to respond to adversity like Job’s wife; we’re often tempted to curse God. So let us kneel as we confess our sins together.

The Fullness of Deity

August 10, 2014 in Bible - NT - Colossians, King Jesus, Meditations, Temptation, Trinity
Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.
Colossians 2:6-10
One temptation that routinely faces us is to substitute our own religious ideas for the Word of God. Today we will see that Satan strives to persuade us to abandon God’s Word so that he can unmoor us. Without God’s Word we’re like a boat adrift, left to try and find some substitute meaning and purpose to life. So Paul warns us to beware lest we be cheated by such trifles, expressions of human tradition and not divine truth.
Paul informs us that the reason these various substitutes are vanity is because they are not connected to Christ in whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. Jesus was God Himself in human flesh. So the reason it is folly to reject Christ is because when He spoke, God spoke; when He acted, God acted; when He wept, God wept; when He thundered, God thundered. Our Lord Jesus Christ was the full embodiment of the deity and so we can know that the things he spoke, thought, and did were infallible revelations of God’s person and will. No clearer revelation was or is possible.
The apostles, therefore, reserve some of their most severe denunciations for those who preach a “false Christ” – a Christ other than the one who lived and breathed and spoke in human history. Jesus really was born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, baptized in the Jordan, ministered in Galilee, died on Golgotha, raised in a garden near Jerusalem, and ascended from a mountain near Bethany. So it is to this Jesus we cling – the Jesus who was and is God Himself clothed in human flesh.
If Jesus is not God then the things he revealed are no more solid and sure than the teachings of Plato or Aristotle or Hume or Sartre. If Jesus is not God, then we are left with the mere opinions and traditions of men. But glory be to God, the Jesus of history was and is fully God and fully man. He is fully capable of revealing the Father to us and fully capable of identifying with us – because He bears in His one person the two natures – divine and human.
Hence, it is no coincidence that of all the differences between non-Christian religions and pseudo-Christian movements like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the one thing they hold in common is a rejection of the full deity of our Lord Jesus. This is the center point of Satan’s attack – obscure the Person of Jesus. But Paul tells us quite plainly today – in Him all the fullness of the deity dwells in bodily form.

And so, knowing that our Lord Jesus Christ was indeed God Himself clothed in human flesh, let us confess that rather than pay attention to His Word as we ought, we frequently resort to the opinions and traditions of men that can bring only vanity and emptiness. Let us kneel and confess our failure to listen to our Lord.

Justification and Sanctification

July 24, 2014 in Bible - NT - Galatians, Bible - NT - John, Bible - NT - Romans, Cross of Christ, Federal Vision, Justification, King Jesus, Law and Gospel, Rome, Sanctification

“Of course, we must also teach good works and love, but it must be done in the right place – that is, when we are dealing with works, not justification. Here the question is how we are justified and attain eternal life, and so we reject and condemn all good works, for this passage will not allow any argument based on good works.

“Indeed, ‘the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good’ (Romans 7:12). But when we are dealing with justification, it is not the time or place to speak about the law. The question is, who is Christ, and what benefit has he brought us? Christ is not the law; he is not what I have done or what the law has done; he is not my love, my obedience, my poverty. He is the Lord of life and death, a mediator, the Savior, the redeemer of those who are under the law and sin. By faith we are in him and he in us….

“Christ is no law, and therefore he does not exact the law and its observance. He is ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29). It is only faith that takes hold of this, not love. Love, however, must follow faith, as a sort of thankfulness. Victory over sin and death, then, and salvation and everlasting life too, did not come through the law, nor through the observance of the law, nor yet through the power of free will, but through the Lord Jesus Christ alone.”

Martin Luther, Galatians, p. 91.

Sin in our Context

June 26, 2014 in King Jesus, Quotations, Sin, Sovereignty of God, Word of God

“Only 17 percent of Americans define sin in relation to God, so for the overwhelming majority sin has become a trivial matter, no more serious than having violated some church rule about something quite inconsequential… [But] Sin is all about taking issue with God, defying him, refusing to submit to him, and displacing him from the center of our existence… We imagine that within ourselves we have power enough, wisdom enough, and strength enough to live in security, in the fullness of happiness, as we want to live, amidst all the conflicts and opportunities of life… But all expressions of sin break apart what God has put together. Sin began by breaking apart our relation to God, and from this followed every other breach that has left life in pain, confusion, and disarray.”

David Wells, The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World, pp. 102-104.

The Lord of Glory

June 23, 2014 in Bible - NT - 1 Corinthians, Bible - NT - John, Church History, Cross of Christ, King Jesus, Quotations, Trinity

“When the Apostle says of the Jews that they crucified the Lord of Glory, and when the Son of man being on earth affirms that the Son of man was in heaven at the same instant, there is in these two speeches that mutual [sharing] before mentioned. In the one, there is attributed to God or the Lord of Glory death, whereof Divine nature is not capable; in the other ubiquity unto man which human nature admitteth not. Therefore by the Lord of Glory we must needs understand the whole person of Christ, who being Lord of Glory, was indeed crucified, but not in that nature for which he is termed the Lord of Glory. In like manner by the Son of man the whole person of Christ must necessarily be meant, who being man upon earth, filled heaven with his glorious presence, but not according to that nature for which the title of man is given Him.”

Hooker as quoted footnote 3 of Cassian’s Seven Books in NPNF, p. 577.

Eternal Father, Eternal Son

June 23, 2014 in Christmas, Church History, King Jesus, Quotations, Trinity

“Tell me then, before the Lord Jesus Christ was born of His mother Mary, had God a Son or had He not? You cannot deny that He had, for never yet was there either a son without a father, or a father without a son: because as a son is so called with reference to a father, so is a father so named with reference to a son.” 

John Cassian (c. 360-485), The Seven Books of John Cassian on the Incarnation of our Lord, Against Nestorius, NPNF, p. 574.