A Beautiful Scandal

ARTICLE BY WILLIAM BOEKESTEIN

There is a lot to like about the story of John Newton. And Simonetta Carr and Amal tell and illustrate it beautifully (Reformation Heritage Books, 2018). Newton first told the story himself in an 18th century best-seller. A young man with a dead mother and hard-to-please father pursues riches and adventure at sea. After several brushes with death Newton--who married the love of his life--left the sea to pursue poetry and preaching. Along the way he adopted needy relatives, and hosted struggling writers; he even befriended a few domesticated hares. Just months before his death he received news that warmed his soul: the British slave trade, against which he had fought for decades, had been abolished.

But another fact about Newton nearly ruins the story. He himself had been a slave trader. As both captain of a slave ship and later as an investor in the same, Newton profited from the sale of human beings. He willingly participated in the inexcusable degradation of precious lives of people created in the image of God. He is responsible for the misery and death of unknown scores of beautiful people.

Newton, the slave-trader who died as a well-respected minister in the Church of England, is the perfect picture of the kind of person we naturally hate.

The obvious questions flood our minds. How could such a vile person regain the dignity he lost in a dirty trade with the devil? Is it possible that the God who grieved over the death of Newton's victims could ever smile upon that lost, blind, guilty wretch? Could anyone like Newton be spared the eternal consequence of damnation for his sins? How could such a man get a second chance at life? And why should any of us care about his sin-ravaged story?

John Newton had racked up more moral debt than he could ever repay. His only hope was for God's Son to own Newton's sins and give him a righteousness that satisfied divine justice. Newton heard this message of hope in the gospel, the Bible's plainest theme. And by a heaven-sent faith he believed it and received new life in God.

Newton summarized his paradoxical life in his famous hymn. "Amazing grace!--how sweet the sound--that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see."

Newton's story is a beautiful scandal. Like Paul, he increasingly woke to the nightmare of his sin personified by the beautiful black faces of his victims. But God's grace had introduced a new reality: undeserved pardon. The man who should have died a thousand deaths for his sin died at peace in the hope of new life because of the single death of the Savior Jesus.

That story isn't just good news for Newton. It is the only relief for the rest of us whose sins are not as unlike Newton's as we would have others believe.

Read Simonetta Carr's John Newton. Weep over his sins and yours. And with Newton sing with the hope that God's word secures:

And when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease, I shall possess within the veil a life of joy and peace.

William Boekestein Pastors Immanuel Fellowship Church in Kalamazoo, MI. His latest book is A Colorful Past: A Coloring Book of Church History.

Posted at: http://www.reformation21.org/featured/a-beautiful-scandal.php

How to Say ‘God Is Faithful’ When Suffering Won’t Stop

Jon Aragón

It’s been a tough year for me. While 2018 was filled with creative, financial, and relational blessing, 2019 has been much more difficult.

My wife, Quina, and I have dealt with her ministry burnout and discouraging health issues, along with her grandmother’s death, relational strains with people we love, deferred hopes to conceive another child, and the deportation of my aunt and uncle.

After experiencing so much answered prayer in 2018, this year’s unanswered prayers and unmet desires have done a number on our hearts. You pray and fast and act for something—something as good as justice or reconciliation or healing or a child—but the answer is still “No” or “Not yet.” I’ve discovered that my heart can be so easily filled with bitterness against God as I struggle to reconcile his goodness with the suffering happening all around me.

If God is the God of justice, of reconciliation, of deliverance, of life, then what does it look like to trust him when injustice comes, division remains, and death mocks? How can we still confidently proclaim, “Our God is faithful”—and actually mean it?

Deliverance In, Not From

First, we must acknowledge the ways God is delivering us in our trials, even when he hasn’t delivered us from our trials. Or as Elihu put it, “He delivers the afflicted by their affliction and opens their ear by adversity” (Job 36:15).

God is delivering us in our trials, even when he hasn’t delivered us from our trials.

I would be lying if I said God hasn’t been delivering me in the midst of these trials. I have felt my compassion deepen for the oppressed as my family and I have tasted the injustice of a broken immigration system. I’ve learned to better serve my wife in her health limitations and grief. I’ve grown more honest in my prayer life, which has only drawn me closer to God rather than driven me from him.

Perhaps the sweetest balm of grace in my trials this year has been the steady presence, prayers, and support of my friends and church family. They have shared in my trials in such a way that even when I don’t want to believe it, I can’t help but admit that God sees me and cares for me.

Our Wounded Healer

Second, we must know that our God isn’t just a healer, but a wounded healer, as Henri Nouwen put it. How did Jesus heal our wounds of sin? With his own wounds (Isa. 53:5).

We serve the only God with scars (Luke 24:39–40; John 20:20, 27; Rev. 5:12). The only God willing to take on human flesh and the human experience of pain and limitations, who then took on the full weight of human sin and lived to tell the tale.

Do you know this God? He is the wounded healer who sympathizes with your weaknesses and afflictions. He is the God who gave himself as his greatest gift. Even in the darkness, as the pain settles in, we can proclaim, “Our God is faithful”—and truly mean it.

Proclaim Him in Lament

Last, we can use the voice and the gifts God has given us to proclaim his faithfulness. How do we do this? The psalmists knew it well: we lament.

In his book Prophetic Lament, Soong Chan-Rah states, “Lament challenges the church to acknowledge real suffering and plead with God for his intervention.” What would it look like if your family gatherings, your small group, and your church were consistently marked with Godward lament over injustices and suffering? Perhaps it would look a bit more like Christ himself.

Biblical lament calls us to passionately express our grief, our complaints, our questions, even our anger to God. It calls for messy, inarticulate, snot-filled prayers. It calls for honesty when someone asks, “How can I pray for you?” And it demands that our triumphal assumptions about the Christian life be confronted by the Savior who was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3).

As I’m learning soul honesty with God and others, lament has been a challenging yet refreshing opportunity to lean more deeply into the arms of my faithful Father. I pour out my heart to God in lament, and I rise with much greater conviction that he is, indeed, faithful.

More Faithful Representation

It’s easy for us to only see the highlight reel of people’s lives on social media. But I hope that through our various callings, we can more honestly portray the Christian walk.

That walk that includes both mountaintops and valleys. Lots of valleys. The walk acknowledges the deliverance of our wounded healer, even when the darkness hasn’t fully lifted. And the walk is marked by the kind of lament that exalts God’s faithfulness over and above our own.

This is how we’ll be able to say, “God is faithful”—and truly mean it.

Posted at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/say-god-faithful-suffering/

Help! My Teen Is Questioning the Faith

Melissa Kruger

Most days, young children bombard their parents with a series of rapid-fire questions. From the situational (“Why do I have to go to bed at 7:30?”), to the theoretical (“Do you think I could fly off the roof if I made a set of wings?”), to the theological (“Why didn’t God protect me from falling off my bike?”), most parents spend their days offering up answers, advice, and wisdom to satisfy the natural curiosity of their kids.

Once the teen years hit, however, young adults start searching for new sources of information. Parents are no longer seen as the fount of all wisdom. In fact, for many teens, parents are the last place they want to take their questions—especially when it comes to matters of faith. They often internalize or verbalize the words of Will Smith: “Take it from me; parents just don’t understand.” (Although most of them are too young to remember his singing days.)

As our teens search for answers, how can we foster home environments where they can bring their questions, doubts, and insecurities to us? How can we proactively create spaces for discussions and respond to their doubts and questions with a listening ear and prayerful heart?

Here are a few ways we can build homes that allow our children to wrestle with questions of faith.

Proactively: Create an Environment for Spiritual Discussion

If your children are still young, one of the best ways to prepare for spiritual discussions in the teen years is to build a regularly scheduled time of Bible reading in your home. Talk often about God as you go throughout your day. Memorize Bible verses together and discuss what they mean. Let the names of Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and Ruth be as familiar to them as their friends in preschool. Pray before meals, for people you love, and for comfort when they fear the monsters under the bed. Beginning spiritual conversations in the early years builds a foundation for conversations to continue in the teen years.

Beginning spiritual conversations in the early years builds a foundation for conversations to continue in the teen years.

If your children are older, it’s not too late. You can start reading the Bible and learning from it together. If you feel unsure about how to study or what questions to ask, tell your teen your fears. Your honesty and humility may disarm their natural resistance. Search together for a Bible study. Ask friends or ministry leaders what studies they’ve used. It’s never too late to start spiritual discussions in your home. Be willing to search the Bible with them to seek answers to their spiritual questions. Let the Bible be the authority—allow it to speak within the walls of your home.

Reactively: Argue Less, Question More

When teens begin to pose their theological questions, it’s tempting to jump in with all the right answers—which can lead to arguing and debating all sorts of topics that might not be the real issue. Doubting teens (and adults) usually have deeper struggles behind their stated concerns or theological nitpicking.

Asking questions can help you understand your teen rather than just answer your teen. If your child is doubting the inerrancy of the Bible, questions like “When did you first start having doubts about the Bible?” and “Is there something the Bible teaches that is bothering you and making you unsure about God’s goodness?” can provide needed insight.

Asking questions can help you understand your teen rather than just answer your teen.

If they’re doubting God exists, probe into their concerns: “If God doesn’t exist, what do you think is the purpose of life?” Seek to know and understand your child in the midst of doubts. Asking questions communicates your willingness to listen, as well as respect for them as an individual. It helps keep the conversation going and promotes further discussion.

Proactively: Help Them Question Before They Question

During family devotions, my husband and I regularly ask our kids the questions we know they’ll probably hear one day: “How would you answer someone who reads this passage and says there’s no way Jesus could have walked on water; it was probably just a sandbar?” or “What would you say to someone who says it’s not fair for God to judge someone who’s never heard about Jesus?”

Questions help teens read the Bible with increased thoughtfulness. While studying the book of John, I asked our kids, “If you want people to believe a lie, would you give a lot of specific details or just tell a general story of what happened?” After concluding that the best way to lie is to give as few details as possible (trust me, there was a point to this exercise!), I told them to be on the lookout for the multitude of specific details John offered his readers. He mentions names of people and where they lived. He tells the specific places that miracles happened. If John was telling a big lie about Jesus, why would he include so many specific details? Well, John was either a really bad liar or perhaps he was telling the truth—as unbelievable as it may have been.

Asking teens questions is one of the best ways to engage their minds and encourage learning. Questioning them before they question you can proactively answer some of their doubts, as well as let them know your home is an inviting place for questions.

Reactively: Don’t Fear (or Freak Out!) When They Question

If our children start questioning biblical teaching, we often jump to offer quick answers—because we are fearful. We mistakenly view our teen’s acceptance of Christianity as evidence of our parenting. If our children have faith, then we’ve parented them correctly. If our children don’t believe, then we’ve failed. We also may fear because we assume their questions are the first step toward inevitable apostasy.

To answer these fears, we must continually remind ourselves that everyone is saved by grace and by grace alone. Period. No caveats. If our children come to faith, it’s because God chose them before the creation of the world (Eph. 1:4) and rescued them from the dominion of darkness (Col. 1:13). God adopts our children through the work of Christ, not the work of our parenting. And they persevere in the faith not because we keep them, but because he does.

Believing children persevere not because we keep them, but because he does.

Yes, Christian parents are often a means by which God works, but it’s always his plan, his power, and his grace alone that saves our children.

So when your teens start to wrestle with their faith, don’t freak out. Don’t get angry. Don’t be insecure. Don’t fret. Don’t be condescending. Take your concerns to God and entrust your fears to him. Be patient and prayerful, loving and kind. Help your teen find answers to their questions, but know that only the Spirit can give discernment (1 Cor. 2:14). Let them know that just because they have questions they can’t answer (or perhaps you can’t answer) doesn’t mean there aren’t answers. Involve the community of the church—seek advice from pastors or ministry leaders. Find relevant books to help them in their thinking and processing.

Building an inviting home for questions of faith takes time, energy, availability, and prayer. Our children need our presence just as much in the teen years as they do the little years. In the rush of sporting events, dance recitals, and homework, it takes effort to create an environment for discussing questions.

My greatest desire is that my children will always seek the Lord. I hope they walk with God, obey his commands, and find abundant life in Jesus. However, I also want them to know I’ll listen to their doubts, care about their concerns, and love them all their days.

Posted at: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/help-teen-questioning-faith/

17 Quotes from Ed Welch’s “A SMALL BOOK FOR THE ANXIOUS HEART”

by Paul Tautges

A new devotional from Ed Welch released this week. In the same format as his SMALL BOOK ABOUT A BIG PROBLEM (Anger), Ed gently applies biblical truth to our hearts and minds, in order to help us learn how faith in the Lord, and Christ-centered focus, empower us to not be controlled by fear. Here are 17 quotes that renewed my mind, and stirred my affections.

1. “Whenever God speaks to you about your fears, you can be sure he will say something about being close. He even patiently persuades you that he is close. He piles up the evidence. Still, you can be blind to that evidence when fears are close and anxieties ring loud. The process of letting anxieties go takes practice that engages with God himself—which means you will engage with Jesus.”

2. “Jesus heard the words of the Father in the same way that we do—in Scripture—and there can be no doubt that he enjoyed the closeness of the Father through those words.”

3. “Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd’ (John 10:11). When you put your faith in him, then Jesus is your Shepherd. You need a Shepherd; he is pleased to be your full-time, night-and-day Shepherd. As you let go of self-trust and personal strategies for self-protection, you put your trust in him instead.”

4. “[O]ur worries tend to imagine a future without God in it. Without God we have to prepare for those future threats on our own. Life gradually gets smaller. Our mission to trust Jesus and love other people gets temporarily lost amid our future preparations.”

5. “[T]here are good reasons to worry. The dilemma is that worries tell you to take matters into your own hands, but that message needs to be altered to say ‘what a perfect opportunity to trust the God who is strong, loving, and faithful.'”

6. “Faith in Jesus will not replace your fears. Instead your faith will coexist with your fears and begin to quiet them. You will learn, by faith, to see your life from Jesus’s perspective and to trust that he is our ever-present help in trouble (Psalm 46:1).”

7. “It is not the disappearance of our anxieties that makes us most fully human; it is that we call out to the Lord on good days and bad days.”

8. “The Lord will give us all the grace we need for today. Tomorrow he will give us the grace we need for tomorrow. When you try to think about tomorrow without having yet received power for tomorrow, you will be anxious.”

9. “You do not yet have tomorrow’s grace so your imagination will tell an incomplete story of the future. If you are going to venture out into the future, continue far enough out so that the story ends with you welcomed into heaven for an eternity of no more sorrow, tears, and fears (Revelation 21:4).”

10. “Perhaps you think that your God is like a mere human. If another person really knew you, then you are certain they would not want to be associated with you. God, however, is not like us….He doesn’t love you because you have performed well. He loves you simply because He loves you.”

11. “It is natural for God to be gracious and compassionate. It is not natural for us to believe that he shows grace to sinners so he can be close to them. But it is the truth.”

12. “Living in hope means growing in the awareness that Jesus will be with us in the troubles of tomorrow. Hope also looks past tomorrow, all the way to when Jesus will appear in all his glory.”

13. “Fear of failure is a common expression of how we can be controlled by the opinions of others. It can also include a dash of financial fears because failing might affect income. This fear can show up as embarrassment, shame, attempts to cover up, over-committing, never committing, and an interest in the superpower of becoming invisible. Pastors and others who are publicly scrutinized are sure to quickly find this in their thinking.”

14. “We don’t tend to grow in humility and humanity through our success. Failure can lead us to dependence and trust in our successful and competent God. That is true success.”

15. “The Bible makes it clear that we live in a world with endless threats. In this world getting rid of all of your worries is not an option. Instead the Lord counters your fear with comfort.”

16. “What can an enemy do? Quite a bit. But no enemy can restrain God from remembering and acting on your behalf. No enemy will ultimately triumph.”

17. “God is the Watchman. God is the Guardian. He will never let anyone snatch you from him. The evil of others might touch you but not own you.”

Now available from WTS Books.

posted at: http://counselingoneanother.com/2019/10/10/17-quotes-from-ed-welchs-a-small-book-for-the-anxious-heart/

Talk Back To Your Anxiety

Paul Tautges

Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Psalm 37:3-4

Emotions can go wrong in times of grief. This is the case with anger, but it’s often the case with anxiety, too. With loss comes unwelcome changes and also the feel­ing that life is unpredictable and unsafe. All of that is the perfect breeding ground for anxiety. Yet, David’s self-counsel wisely guides us through life’s challenges.

In Psalm 37, we see how David repeatedly talks back to his anxious heart. Three times he tells himself, “fret not yourself ” (vv. 1, 7, 8). But he doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t merely say, “Stop worrying!” He also fights against anxiety by entrusting himself to the Lord and each day gripping tightly to the Lord’s promise of a future that is secure in him (vv. 3, 5, 9, 11). He exchanges his anxiety for trust.

Entrust your way to the Lord. Anxiety de­mands the full understanding of your suffering now, but God is worthy of your trust because of who he is now and forever—our faithful and powerful God. So David fights his anxiety by repeating truths about God and his relationship with him that build upon each other: “Trust in the Lord, and do good” (v. 3); “Delight your­self in the Lord” (v. 4); “Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act” (v. 5); “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him” (v. 7). You can be assured that God is wise and that his plan for you is good.

Be faithful one day at a time. Anxiety pulls your focus away from what is most important today by enlarging tomorrow’s unknowns. David fights back by instructing himself to concentrate on his chief responsibility, that is, to “dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness” (v. 3). Jesus gave the same counsel in Matthew 6:33, by directing us to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [the cares of life that you tend to worry about] will be added to you.” Your heavenly Father knows your needs, and will meet them (Matthew 6:25–32). Reminding yourself of these truths will enable you to make daily faithfulness your lifelong companion.

Delight in the Lord by holding tightly to his promises. Anxiety chains you to the here-and-now by distracting you from all the good that the Lord has promised to those who love him. So David disciplines himself to instead take a long-term view on life. God will never “forsake his saints” (v. 28). Believers possess a heritage that “will remain forever” (v. 18). “The Lord upholds the righteous” (v. 17). Even when you suffer harm, he “upholds [your] hand” because your steps “are established by the Lord” (v. 23). As you “delight yourself in the Lord,” he will give you your heart’s desires, since you will de­sire the right things (v. 4).

Psalm 37 teaches us that the solution to both anger and anxiety is trusting faith in the Lord. No matter how much suffering you may endure on this earth, as a Christian, you have an eternity of blessing awaiting you.

Posted at: http://counselingoneanother.com/2019/10/11/talk-back-to-your-anxiety/

5 Truths from Romans that Help Us to Abound in Hope

Paul Tautges

Earlier this week, my heart was enriched by the teaching of Stephen Yuille at the ACBC conference in Memphis. Dr. Yuille observes that there seems to be an increased level of despair among God’s people, which led him to open the book of Romans to us. He defines hope this way:

Hope is the life-changing certainty that someday we’ll have all that God has promised.

Stephen Yuille

As Stephen walked us through Romans, he made five stops along the way.

1. Hope is fueled by the conviction that God is able to do what He has planned (Rom. 4:18-21).

2. Hope is rooted in the assurance that we have peace with God through Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:1-11).

3. Hope is fixed on the glory that will be revealed to us (Rom. 8:16-25).

4. Hope is cultivated through the encouragement of the Scriptures (Rom. 15:14).

5. Hope abounds by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 15:13).

Take some time in your devotions to meditate on these Bible passages, taking note of the mention of “hope.” You will also be blessed by listening to this podcast episode with Dr. Yuille, talking about Longing for Home.

Posted at: http://counselingoneanother.com/2019/10/12/5-truths-from-romans-that-help-us-to-abound-in-hope/

God Can Heal, He Will Heal, but What If He Doesn’t?

Matt Chandler

All of us will face suffering. We are all only a phone call away from our life changing forever. We will get sick. We will lose loved ones. Trials will come. 

And we don’t know when suffering will hit us. 

For me, it was Thanksgiving morning 2009. I walked into our living room at home to give my youngest, Norah, her bottle. I burped her. I took her back to her Johnny Jump Up. I turned. 

And then I woke up in hospital. I’d had a brain seizure, and I was diagnosed with a primary brain tumor, facing immediate surgery, chemo and radiation—and an estimate of a few years to live.

In that season, I found that my Christian friends tended to fall into one of two camps. The first camp was all about the will of God, and praying for the will of God. The second camp believed that If I had faith and believed that the Lord would heal me, then he would heal.

Those two camps tend not to play too well together. But here’s the thing: I actually believe they can help one another. One tells us how to pray for healing, and the other tells us how to respond when God doesn’t heal. We need both. We see that played out in the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, in Daniel 3.

The Real Story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego

You may well remember the characters of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from felt-board stories in Sunday School, but this Bible story has direct implications for how we think about healing and how we pray for healing.

To recap Daniel 3, King Nebuchadnezzar made a golden image and demanded that the people of God, who had been exiled to Babylon, worship it. Three of God’s servants who had been put in a place of authority in Babylon—Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—refused. When the King threatened to throw them in a fiery furnace because of their disobedience, they responded by saying:

Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up. (Daniel 3:17-18)

In other words; our God can save us, we believe that the Lord will save us, and even if He doesn’t, we will still praise the name of the Lord.

This should be our default position, regardless of what we’re walking through, and especially when we’re walking through the valley of suffering:

• The Lord Can - God is sovereign. He is the Creator of all things, he is the Sustainer of all things, he has the power to do whatever he wills. Whatever suffering we are facing, we know that God has the power to intervene and to redeem and heal our pain and brokenness. Colossians 1:16-17 says, “For by him [Christ] all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

• The Lord Will - God is not only all-powerful, he is also personal. He loves us and cares about us. He bends his ear to the cries of his people. God invites us to pray to him and tells us that he will answer our prayers. Psalm 34:17 says, “When the righteous cry for help, the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.” 

• If He Doesn’t - God is good. We can see throughout the Scriptures, as he reveals who he is and what he is about, that God is a loving Father who knows best and wants what is best for his children. We can trust that if he chooses not to bring healing to us that he knows something we don’t know—and that one day he will end suffering and death once and for all. As Jesus pointed out, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11).

How to Go About Praying 

The Bible frees us up to pray boldly and courageously for healing—not to simply pray God’s will—because we know that he can heal, that he will heal, and that his will will be done regardless of the outcome. We’re not setting low bars. We have this crazy high bar. We come to him believing that he will heal, and believing that if he does not, it will be because he has a better plan and a higher aim in mind.

The Bible calls us to pray and plead with the Lord, asking Him to bring healing. I’m going to ask and believe with all my heart that Jesus Christ is going to heal me and heal the people I’m praying for, but then I’m going to open my hands, knowing that the will of God will take place. That’s the example Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego give to us. That’s how we pray in our trials—Lord, I know you can heal, Lord, I believe you will heal, and Lord, if you don’t, would you bring glory to your name and keep me worshiping you. 

Joy in the Sorrow is the moving story of Matt Chandler’s battle with a potentially fatal brain tumor. But it's also the stories of members of The Village Church, whose lives were marked by suffering of various kinds. How they taught Matt, and continue to teach him, how to walk with joy in sorrow. Pre-order it here.

Posted at: https://www.thegoodbook.com/blog/interestingthoughts/2019/09/24/god-can-heal-he-will-heal-but-what-if-he-doesnt/

Waiting Well in a World of Right Now

Matt Chandler

It seems that all the creativity of man and all the energy we possess is focused on one thing in our day and age: to eradicate from the face of the earth any need to be patient. We are bent on making sure we don’t have to wait for anything… ever. 

And yet the faster things get, the more perpetually impatient we actually are—precisely because we have lost the ability to wait well. I bet that in the last month there has been at least one moment when you were downloading a document, a picture, or something else, and then gave up or grew annoyed because it wasn’t moving fast enough: “This isn’t fast enough. This isn’t happening quickly enough. This is frustrating me.” We’re perpetually impatient these days.

Everything is built for speed, as our technological brilliance focuses in so many ways on us not having to wait. And that hasn’t been good for our souls—because the Christian life calls for patience. Not just the kind of patience that means that we don’t yell at our screen or scream at our spouse or snap at our children. God cares about those things, and he speaks into those things, but God is serious about patience because persevering faith and gladness in God requires it. We Christians are by definition a waiting people, and that requires patience—especially when life brings trials, hardships, or pain.

You Can Wait: Your Father is Coming 

Jesus’ brother James wrote to suffering Christians in the first century, “Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord” (James 5:7). For two millennia, the church has been waiting for Christ to return and make all things new. For the Christian, history is linear. We are moving toward something—to the day Christ returns and consummates all he accomplished in his cross and his resurrection. Our Father is coming to get us.

I remember playing in the backyard with my youngest two, Reid and Norah, several years ago and throwing the football with Reid. Honestly, I was throwing it at him. It just bounced off. He couldn’t catch well quite yet. We’re tossing the ball in the back, and Norah had snuck off. I lost sight of her. Judge me if you want. It happens. She’s alive. 

So I heard this whimper and a cry of “Daaaaad…” I came around the side of the house, and she had climbed up our fence. After she got up there she had apparently enjoyed it for five or six minutes, and then thought, “I don’t know how to get down.”

Stuck on the fence, she began to cry out for me, and she was there until I got to grab her, kiss her, and put her down on the ground. She’d had to wait, but she’d known I would come. This is the Christian hope: “My Dad is coming. My Dad is coming, and I’m getting closer to him getting here.” 

You are closer to seeing Jesus than you were when you started reading this blog. This is a reality, not a vague hope. And that helps you wait patiently, as well as eagerly (Romans 8:23,25). That helps you wait with hope, even when life doesn’t go the route you’d planned or expected.

So be patient. Hold tight. The plan is not off-track. God didn’t take his eye off the ball. Just because he’s not here yet doesn’t mean he’s not coming. Every bit of difficulty, suffering, crawling, weariness, depression, anxiety, sin will be over one day, on that day. God will lift us off the fence. Hang in there. The Lord is coming. But you are going to need to wait.

Every bit of difficulty, suffering, crawling, weariness, depression, anxiety, sin will be over one day, on that day

You Can Wait: Your Father is Working

Not only that, be patient in suffering because God is accomplishing something in you. If you are a child of God, he is at work to make you like the Son of God. He is now sanctifying us, making us more and more like Jesus. And God uses both joys and sorrows to do that. 

If you’re a Christian, difficulty is not punitive. You’re not being punished for not having a long enough quiet time or for messing up again. That’s not how this works. If you trust Christ, you are a fully loved, fully accepted son or daughter of God. 

But that doesn’t mean the Lord doesn’t have work to do in you. He’s our Father.

I love my son. He’s a 13-year-old boy. There’s nothing he could do to make me not love him, but we have some work to do. Part of that work is rewarding what is good and right, and part of that is disciplining what is wrong. And that’s how God treats us: “The Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives … God is treating you as sons” (Hebrews 12:6-7). Our difficulties as we walk home to see Jesus is not God punishing his children, but God shaping and molding his children. 

God is producing in you “the peaceful fruit of righteousness” (v 11). Be patient; the Lord is at work in your struggle. He is at work in your joy. He is at work in your losses. He is at work in your fight. He is at work as he tears some things in you down in order to build you back up. Don’t lose hope. Be patient. God is accomplishing things. 

Waiting in Your Struggles

You may be in a season of struggle right now. If you’re not, then you can know that, at some point between now and the day you see Jesus, you will be. And our world is telling you that when that suffering comes, you need to get it fixed right now. You should demand a solution—from God if you can’t find it in yourself—right now. But God doesn’t work like that. God’s got a longer gameplan than that. The Bible’s full of people who learned that God’s road is longer, and it has bumps in it, but it’s always better. Joseph, Ruth, David, Job, and supremely Jesus… all of them had struggles, and waited patiently through them, knowing that their Father was coming and their Father was working. 

So we need to learn to be patient. We need to learn to do the one thing our world won’t do: to wait. That’s how we can suffer well, with hope, with joy, with faith. Be patient; the Lord is at work in your struggles. Be patient; the Lord is coming and he will put an end to your struggles. Be patient; his return is closer now than it was when you got up this morning. 

Joy in the Sorrow is the moving story of Matt Chandler’s battle with a potentially fatal brain tumor. But it's also the stories of members of The Village Church, whose lives were marked by suffering of various kinds. How they taught Matt, and continue to teach him, how to walk with joy in sorrow.

Posted at: https://www.thegoodbook.com/blog/interestingthoughts/2019/10/04/waiting-well-in-a-world-of-right-now/

WHAT IS THE GOSPEL?

By Barbara Juliani

That was the question I asked the nine- and ten-year-old Sunday school class I was teaching. I wondered if they knew the answer. When I was ten, I thought I knew. After all, I was a pastor’s daughter and went to a Christian school. But I didn’t. I had learned a gospel, but not the true gospel.

WHAT WAS MY GOSPEL?

It started out right: You are a sinner whose only hope is to trust in Jesus, ask him for forgiveness for your sins, and he gives you the free gift of eternal life. But then my gospel took a wrong turn. According to my gospel, you also had to work hard, be the best at what you do, and keep the ten commandments.

It turned out my gospel closely resembled the values of my parents’ upbringing with a dash of Oregonian frontier independence thrown in. It was the gospel-according-to-the-Millers.

FOLLOWING THE RULES—AND FAILING

When I was ten, I remember my Sunday School teacher saying to our class, “You kids think being a Christian is just following a bunch of rules.” Her words caught my attention. Did she mean there was more than rule-following involved in being a Christian? But what could that be? If being a Christian didn’t mean being a good person and following rules, what did it mean?

I tried to be good (when convenient). When it wasn’t convenient, I hid my sins (as best I could). Once I wore my older sister’s blouse without asking. I’m pretty sure she said something like, “Don’t touch my things!”

After I wore it, I washed and ironed it to make sure she didn’t notice anything wrong. But the iron was too hot and burned the blouse. I hid it deep in my closet. Whenever I thought about being a Christian, I remembered the hidden blouse—the stealing, the cover-up, my inability to come clean—and realized Christianity couldn’t be for me.

I wasn’t a good person. Soon that became obvious. I stopped trying to be good and left my home and religion.

THE DEADLY GOSPEL

The gospel-according-to-the-Millers led me far away from the real gospel. It wasn’t about the grace and truth of Jesus Christ; it was what Paul calls “no gospel at all” (Galatians 1:7). This “no gospel,” characterized by trying hard to be good through our own efforts, led my father to quit his job as a pastor and a seminary professor and my mother to announce that she didn’t even know if God existed. It was a deadly gospel. It brought death because it was based on our efforts instead of Jesus’s sacrifice. It brought death because deep down we all knew our efforts weren’t enough to save us. It turns out it wasn’t just me who wasn’t a good person.

We all had a hidden blouse that spoke of our sins. For my dad, it was a failing church and the inability to see an impact as he taught young men to be pastors. For my mom, it was her failures as a mother that kept her up at night. She had tried so hard. Why was her daughter not trying too?

THE TRUE GOSPEL

Paul sums up the true gospel like this: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1 Timothy 1:15).

Jesus came to save sinners. That’s the good news that brings lasting faith, hope, and love into the lives of those who trust Jesus.

But the good news is only for those who know the bad news: I am a sinner who needs saving. That is just as true now as it was when I was a little girl hiding my sister’s blouse. As my dad famously said, “Cheer up! You are worse than you think. Cheer up! God loves you more than you know!”

That bad news/good news combination is not only for becoming a Christian. It’s the power of God for living as a Christian.

WE NEED JESUS EVERY DAY

My dad and mom, good people that they were, had to learn the hard way that they were worse than they thought. It turns out that pride and self-righteousness are deadly sins that need to be repented from. And I, bad girl that I was, also needed to know Jesus came to this world to save sinners.

When my parents learned the true gospel – that they needed daily forgiveness and help from Jesus for their daily sins and struggles – they shared that with me. Not by sitting me down and explaining it, but by living it in front of me.

By then the Miller gospel of self-effort and hard work had kicked in for me, and I had pulled my life together. I was in a stable relationship and going to graduate school at Stanford. My mom and dad had just returned from mission work in war-torn Uganda. My mom told me that she had walked the streets sobbing because she couldn’t love the people there.  

My dad pointed her to the forgiveness and love that was hers in Christ from her heavenly Father. He reminded her that in Christ she now had the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of sonship by which she could call out to her Father in heaven. She did just that and was forgiven and helped.

After listening to her struggle and how God met her, for the first time I thought maybe someone like me could be a Christian. For the first time, my mom sounded like a real person in real trouble who simply turned to God for help.

DRAGGED FROM DARKNESS INTO LIGHT                               

A few weeks later I was walking to class feeling guilty about something I had done. It was a small thing, but I felt the weight of another failure. This time, instead of stuffing my guilt deep down, I remembered that Jesus Christ came to the world to save sinners.

I remembered the forgiveness of sins was mine for the asking. So I asked Jesus to forgive me for that sin and many more. I stepped (was dragged) from darkness and death into the light of God’s love.

That’s the true gospel—the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16). The true gospel was not just for that day. It’s how the power of God flows into my life every day. Every day I am still the worst sinner, and every day I need to turn to Jesus and ask for mercy and help in my time of need.

COMFORT IN THE CROSS

The needs of this day look different today, then they did many years ago, but deep down they are still the same. The overwhelming need of this day is for faith in God’s goodness and love as we grieve the death of our son Gabe from cancer eight months ago. Will I turn to God with my sorrow and grief? Or will I turn away and look to other things to comfort and fulfill me?  

We are wounded by death. But we turn toward the One who was wounded for our transgressions, who died that we might live. We look to Jesus – the author and finisher of our faith – who for the joy set before him endured the cross. We remember the resurrection and that Jesus defeated death. We trust our son into his hands.

We ask for the Spirit to comfort, help, and remind us of the Father’s great love this day. And for his help to endure again another day. I need Jesus today as desperately as I needed him that day long ago when I first asked for forgiveness for my many sins. I feel that need more deeply today than ever before. And he is still forgiving and helping. Because Jesus rose from the dead, I know for sure that there will come a day when he will welcome me to our true home where there is no more death, mourning, crying, or pain. That’s the gospel.

Posted at: https://blog.newgrowthpress.com/what-is-the-gospel/

Gospel Centered Life Questions - Part 2

by Bob Kellemen

In the first part of this two-part blog post, Gospel-Centered Life Questions, I began by quoting Michael Horton, in his fine work, The Gospel-Driven Life, where he notes that:

“… we typically introduce the Bible as the ‘answer to life’s questions.’ This is where the Bible becomes relevant to people ‘where they are’ in their experience. Accordingly, it is often said that we must apply the Scriptures to daily living. But this is to invoke the Bible too late, as if we already knew what ‘life’ or ‘daily living’ meant. The problem is not merely that we lack the right answers, but that we don’t even have the right questions until God introduces us to His interpretation of reality.”

I then started comparing the world’s 8 ultimate life questions to the Word’s 8 ultimate life questions. And we began to see that the world doesn’t even get the questions right!

Today we look at ultimate life questions 5-8—contrasting the world’s shallow questions with the Word’s profound questions—and answers.

Ultimate Life Question # 5 

The World’s Question: “How do people change?”

The Word’s Question: “How does Christ change people?” “How does Christ bring us peace with God?”

The world’s question focuses on human self-effort—which is the very definition of secular thinking. It’s all about me and my self-sufficient efforts to be a “better me” in my power for my good.

The Word’s question focuses on Christ-sufficiency—it’s all about Him, His power, for His glory—and becoming more like Christ, not simply a “better me.” Yes, there is a role that we play—but that role is a grace-empowered role. Already changed by Christ, we now put off the vestiges of the old us and put on the new person we already are in Christ—through the Spirit’s empowerment. And Christ not only changes our inner person; Christ changes our relationship with the Father from enemy to family, from alienation to peace.

Ultimate Life Question # 6 

The World’s Question: “Where can we find help?”

The Word’s Question: “Where can we find a place to believe, belong, and to become—like Christ?”

The world says, “It takes a village.”

The Word says, “It takes a church.” Sanctification is a community journey with our brothers and sisters in Christ. As Ephesians 3:14-21 reminds us, it is together with all the saints that we grasp grace and grow in grace to glorify our gracious God.

Ultimate Life Question # 7 

The World’s Question: “Where are we headed?”

The Word’s Question: “How does our future destiny impact our lives today?”

We all want to know, “What’s the point?” “What’s our purpose?” The world asks these questions in a vacuum.

The Word asks the destiny question knowing the answer and relevantly tying our future to our present. As Christians, our future destiny is eternity with God on a new heaven and a new earth where we have intimacy with God, purity in our hearts, and victory in our lives. Since this is true, the Bible urges us to live today in light of eternity. As saints who struggle against suffering and sin—our future makes all the difference in our lives now.

Ultimate Life Question # 8 

The World’s Question: “Why are we here?”

The Word’s Question: “What’s our calling/purpose?” “How do we become like Christ”?

The world’s take on the question of ultimate meaning begins with a shallow question and responds with an even more superficial answer: “To be a better me.”

The Word sees our purpose as a calling in relationship to God and others. And the Word focuses our answer on Christlikeness. We are here to glorify the Father the way the Son glorified the Father. We are here to increasingly reflect Jesus. Each of us will do so in unique, idiosyncratic ways because we are each fearfully and wonderfully made to reflect Christ in a billion different ways.

The Right Questions and the Right Answers 

I summarized Part 1 with this tweet-size summary, which also summarizes both of these blog posts:

To offer wise & loving biblical counsel, we must ask & answer gospel-centered biblical questions.

The world not only gets the answers wrong, the world’s questions are impoverished.

The Word not only gets the answers right, the Word’s questions are rich, robust, and relevant.

Join the Conversation 

How are you biblically answering life’s second four ultimate questions?

1. “How does Christ change people?” “How does Christ bring us peace with God?”

2. “Where can we find a place to believe, belong, and to become—like Christ?”

3. “How does our future destiny impact our lives today?”

4. “What’s our calling/purpose?” “How do we become like Christ”?

Tweet It 

To offer wise & loving biblical counsel, we must ask & answer gospel-centered biblical questions.

Posted at: https://www.rpmministries.org/2016/02/4-more-gospel-centered-life-questions/