Reform & Revive

        Recently I was able to listen to an amazing sermon by a pastor named Matt Chandler. The sermon he gave was entitled “What is Missional Living?” Let me start off by saying much thanks to him for inspiring this post. As I listened to his sermon, I thought back to the time when I first became a Christian. Not long after my conversion I began reading John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life. In it, Piper boldly issues a call to this generation to flee from the idol of the “American Dream” and to lay down our lives for the purpose of making Christ known around the world. By no fault of John Piper’s, I believe I fundamentally misunderstood just what this should look like.

In my head I had grand visions of overseas missions and preaching the Gospel in the midst of third-world poverty. I began to think of missions and evangelism as a trip or event that should be mostly left to vocational ministers or “missionaries.” (My apologies if you are cringing right now) But then I read the Bible:

II Corinthians 5:18-20 : “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”

John 17:15-18 : “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one…As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”

I Corinthians 9:22 : “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.”

The first verse here transformed the way I viewed my faith and how it affects my entire life. What Paul is saying here is that God is making his appeal to others through us and that He has entrusted us with both the message and the ministry of reconciliation. Broken people though we may be, we are God’s chosen agents of reconciliation and redemption! Thus, evangelism is not at its heart an event, but rather God working through lives and relationships and our every day living to make his appeal to the lost and reconcile them to Himself. If you are a Christian, you are called by God to be a missionary wherever it is that God places you and to declare and demonstrate the Gospel to those around you. This may not come as a surprise to some, but to other it may.

Is there a call to the church to work collectively to share the Gospel through events and missions trips? Yes. But ultimately God calls us as individuals to be ambassadors for Him in every facet of our daily lives. Our entire lifestyle should be colored by a yearning desire to share the Good News about Jesus with others, both through our actions and our words. We must stop compartmentalizing our faith down to events and allow Christ to truly be Lord of every part of our lives and hearts so that He can change us in such a way that we display his beauty in both our words and deeds to those around us!

So whom has God placed in your path? What connections do you have to certain people that others don’t? Whom has God entrusted you with in terms of the message and ministry of reconciliation? What about that neighbor you wave at on the way out the door? Or the relative of yours who lives alone and doesn’t know Christ? Maybe the barista at your local Starbucks that you see every morning? Or the homeless man you walk by every day? Or maybe the classmates you study with for tests? Or perhaps it’s one of your best friends whom you’ve known for years?

We all know about these different people God has placed in our lives, so here’s my exhortation for you:

Stop thinking of evangelism and missions in terms of events or dates and times. While only some of you will be called to ministry as a vocation, if you are a follower of Christ then you are called to be a full-time minister of the Gospel. Get rid of the compartments in your mind and instead begin to think intentionally about your life, the way you live it, and all the people that you cross paths with every day. How are you displaying and sharing the Gospel to them and with them? How can you allow God to use you as an agent of redemption in their lives?

I am currently working on a longer post to contribute here but I wanted to make one last shorter post in the meantime. As I was reading J.I. Packer’s Knowing God (do yourself a favor and go buy this book), I read this exhortation regarding how we should study theology. It was particularly convicting for me:

“We need to ask ourselves: What is my ultimate aim and object in occupying my mind with these things? What do I intend to do with my knowledge about God, once I have it?…If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited. The very greatness of the subject matter will intoxicate us, and we shall come to think of ourselves as a cut above other Christians because of our interest in it and grasp of it; and we shall look down on those whose theological ideas seem to us crude and inadequate…To be preoccupied with getting theological knowledge as an end in itself, to approach Bible study with no higher motive than a desire to know all the answers, is the direct route to a state of self-satisfied self-deception. We need to guard our hearts against such an attitude, and pray to be kept from it.” - Page 21-22

Packer then acknowledges a common question he has come across in discussing the study of theology:

“Do not all children of God long, with the psalmist, to know just as much about our heavenly Father as we can learn?…Yes, of course…But if you look back to Psalm 119 again, you will see that the psalmist’s concern to get knowledge about God was not a theoretical but a practical concern. His supreme desire was to know and enjoy God Himself, and he valued knowledge about God simply as a means to this end.” - Page 22

     I don’t want to get into the habit of short posts like this one, but I simply couldn’t resist posting a quote from Charles Spurgeon that C.J. Mahaney used this past weekend at the New Attitude conference:

“I once knew a good woman who was the subject of many doubts, and when I got to the bottom of her doubt, it was this: she knew she loved Christ, but she was afraid he did not love her. ‘Oh!’ I said, ‘that is a doubt that will never trouble me; never, by any possibility, because I am sure of this, that the heart is so corrupt, naturally, that love to God never did get there without God putting it there.’ You may rest quite certain, that if you love God, it is a fruit, and not a root. It is the fruit of God’s love to you, and did not get there by the force of any goodness in you. You may conclude, with absolute certainty, that God loves you if you love God.” - Charles Spurgeon

     With school done, I had some free time today to read a bit of John Piper’s book The Future of Justification. In this work, Piper responds to the views of theologian N.T. Wright on the doctrine of justification by faith in Christ. What was stunning to me (and prompted this post) was that as I read what I consider an academic/theological work, I was struck by Piper’s exposition on Romans 3 and God’s Righteousness.    

     Attempting to offer input for how Wright may be mistaken about the doctrine of justification (for example, Wright claims that imputation of God’s (Christ’s) righteousness to sinners is a “category mistake” and “makes no sense at all”), Piper explains how Wright makes his chief mistake in this area by misunderstanding the definition of God’s righteousness. Wright says that God’s righteousness should be understood as “keeping covenants, judging impartially, dealing with sin properly, and advocating for the helpless.”

     Piper points out that none of these actions are what righteousness is, rather he states that these are merely what righteousness does. From here, Piper continues to offer a proper understanding of God’s righteousness. This is where I was absolutely fascinated and enlightened.

     In his book The Justification of God, Piper notes that the simple way of defining God’s righteousness consists in his “unwavering commitment to do what is right.” However, even this definition is lacking as Piper says “we don’t feel like we have gained much in defining ‘righteousness’ if we use the word ‘right’ to define it.” Thus, he shows through several Old Testament texts that “God defines right in terms of Himself.”

     Therefore, Piper shows that “what is right, most ultimately, is what upholds the value and honor of God - what esteems God’s glory.” Moreover, he points out that the highest value that God gives in accounting for His actions is “the glory of God, or sacred and infinite value of His holiness, or sometimes simply His name.”

     Taking this further, Piper adeptly explains how God demonstrated His righteousness through putting forth Christ as a sacrifice for sins. Here is Piper’s excellent explanation:

“But now we find God ‘passing over sin’ - that is, treating sin in a way that makes it look less outrageous than it is. This makes God look as though He does not properly esteem his own glory that sin belittles…In passing over countless belittlings of his glory (sins), he looks as though he counts his glory a small thing. This would be unrighteousness in God - the very essence of unrighteousness. Therefore, he puts Christ forward to vindicate his righteousness…When he justifies the ‘ungodly’…he is not unrighteous, because the death of Christ exhibits God’s wrath against God-belittling sin.” - Page 67

     This leads me to my main point, namely that every single person reading this, in fact, every person on earth, has experienced the loving grace of God. Not everyone will receive it eternally, but every single time we value or love something more than God and His glory (sin), we deserve the full and complete wrath of a just and Holy God. We have loved and cherished other things and people more and the God who is worthy of our love and honor, we have dishonored through our daily sin and turning away from Him.

     Have you ever stopped to consider that apart from God’s love revealed in Christ, we should and would all be in the face of God’s unimaginable wrath for sin at this very moment? And justly so at that.

     In a world where many cry, “Why do bad things happen to ‘good’ people?”, shouldn’t we instead be asking why more bad things don’t happen to us?

First, let me say that the posts made here recently have been amazing. I’m excited to be a part of this and it’s been pretty cool to be in the company of some awesome people who have had some life and heart changing encounters with the living God that words can barely suffice to explain.

Additionally, one thing I have noticed thus far seems to be a certain aversion to the whole concept of “Knowledge” regarding God. It would appear that some of us, including myself, are at times turned off by this idea as it pertains to the great I AM. I should say that there is definitely one sense in which I find this distaste to be justified. No doubt, many of us are familiar with how “Knowledge” of God has been abused and manipulated and often led to the development of cold, dead religion as opposed to the joy and delight that is found in authentic Christianity. Certainly we must seek the latter, reminding ourselves of the caution issued to us by Dr. Wayne Grudem when he said, “The study of theology is not merely an intellectual or mental exercise. It is a study of the living God and of the wonders of all His works in creation and redemption. We cannot study this subject as if our hearts and lives are not involved!”

However, I think we should also be careful not to err too much on the opposite side here, and thus spurn the concept of “Knowledge”, especially when God’s Word itself exhorts us to seek it. Proverbs 9:10 tells us that “Knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Without a right conception of who God is and what God is like, we will inevitably have a flawed perspective on ultimate reality. Moreover, our worship of God will be based on incorrect premises and possibly even lead us into idolatry. This led A.W. Tozer to conclude that, “What comes into our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

To be sure, God does not want us to simply analyze Him like we would with DNA. But I think this verse and others serve as a clear call from God to seek to know who He is in all of His divine attributes, to test the limits of our capacity to know and understand Him, and when we ultimately fail, to erupt in worship, adoration, awe, and wonder.

Listen to these words from the Apostle Paul, written after great revelations of knowledge of the Living God: “O the depths of the riches and wisdom and Knowledge of God!” Furthermore, consider this quote from Jonathan Edwards: “The more you have of a rational knowledge of divine things, the more opportunity there will be when the Spirit shall be breathed into your heart, to see the excellency of these things, and to taste the sweetness of them.”

This belief by Edwards and other convictions have for over two decades now motivated John Piper in his crusade to unite the two seemingly opposed wings of Christendom, one divorcing delight from understanding and the other divorcing understanding from delight. I hope that we will seek to accomplish the same here at Reform and Revive. Thus, let us allow each other freedom to write in such a way that expresses love for God from all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, even if it does not necessarily translate into “sweeping prose, poetry and musings” in every post. Nonetheless, let us also unite under Paul’s call to let our souls and hearts be stirred as often as God allows us that grace.

Sola Gratia (”By Grace Alone”),

- Whit