Christians in Afghanistan
July 20, 2010
Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. – Hebrews 13:3
In all the news about the war in Afghanistan, it is rarely mentioned that the “new” government that the US has supported in place of the Taliban has no freedom of religion at all. Shockingly, a member of the Afghan parliament recently openly called for the execution of Christians in Afghanistan. Even more shocking is that our government continues to work closely with the Afghan government rather than addresses this fundamental injustice. Amazingly, Americans seem concerned about terrorism, but completely ignorant of the fact that the government we support in that nation is willing to execute Christians as policy. May God touch you with the reality of their persecution as you read the letter below from the Afghan Christian community. Here the ache in their voice and the fear that their pain is unfelt and ignored in the rest of the world.
To the Body of Christ:
“This letter is written by the Afghan Christian Community in India which is a small community of 150 Afghan Christian refugees and asylum seekers.
“We left our country because we were sentenced to death on the account of our Christian faith (conversion), as Afghanistan is a Muslim Country, the Afghan Government is an Islamic government, and Islam is the only formal religion of the country, and according to the Constitutional law of the Afghan Islamic Republic, conversion is considered as a big crime, Christian are called pagans and infidels and are sentenced to death by the Afghan Government. Christians are considered criminals. Death penalty is waiting for all those who want to leave the darkness and come to the true light, repent from their sins, and put their faith on the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Lord and Savior of all human being.
“We believe that you (the Body of Christ) have already heard that some pictures and movies of the Afghan believers (from Delhi and Kabul) were shown by an Afghan Private TV (Noorin TV), this TV channel showed these picture in a especial program (Sarzameen Man), and the Government and people were encouraged and provoked to think about the issue of conversion, to make a stand against it and to take serious and practical measures and actions to destroy Afghan Converted Christians (Sons of God) and those who share the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Lost.
“The Afghan Parliament, Senate, Religious Council and Islamic Parties and leaders made statements that the Afghan Government has to search, find, arrest, deliver to courts and executes all Afghan Christians, and the Christian NGOs and Organization have to be stopped too. University students protested against Afghan Christians in Kabul and Herat Provinces, and the Afghan Government also made a statement that all Afghan Christians will be arrested and executed, and the Christian NGOs and Organizations which involved with the issues of conversion will be closed.
“Mr. Mujajdi, the Chairman Of Afghan Senate, said that if the Afghan Government does not take serious action, he and other Islamic leaders will call and request the Afghan people to take practical measures to kill all Afghan Christians. President Karzai himself showed his personal interest in this regard and said that all Afghan Christians will be arrested and executed and Christian organizations which are involved with this issue will be stopped. He ordered the Afghan security organs to take serious measures in this regard.”’
“The Afghan Home Minister and the Chairman of the Afghan Intelligence told the Afghan Parliament that 4 Afghan Christian individuals and one family have been arrested and they are under investigation, 13 NGOs have been named and suspended, the names of Afghan Christians have been listed, and the Afghan Intelligence agency is trying to arrest them. Two Church organizations have been closed. As we are in contact with our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan, many believers are arrested, our houses are checked by police and intelligence people in Afghanistan, our families and parents (though they are Muslim) are under investigation and even arrested, and all Afghan believers are misplaced.”
The letter-writers, “(Afghan Christian Community) along with our other Afghan Christian brothers and sisters who are in Afghanistan” request you to:
“Pray for us and for this critical situation, pray for those who are arrested, and those who are under investigation. Please come together and help your Afghan brothers and sisters in Christ, as we are sentenced to death, we are arrested, we are under investigation, the Afghan Government kills us because we believe on Jesus Christ, we know that we should consider it pure joy when we suffer (James 1: 1 -4), and we are enjoying all suffering all joy. But we also know that faith without deeds is useless (James 2: 14 – 17), and this is the time to raise your voice for your brothers and sisters, for our children, for our old parents, for the execution of thousand Afghan believers. “This is the day that all of us should come together and pray, think, help and raise our voices to the International Community, to put pressure on the Afghan Government to stop killing, persecuting and executing Afghan Christians, to give us freedom of religion, to respect and accept us as Afghan Christians.
“We do not know how the whole world and especially the Global Church is silent and closing their eyes, while thousand of their brothers and sisters (Body of Christ) are in pain, facing life danger and death penalty, and are tortured, persecuted and called criminals because they believe in the Truth.
“We need to wake up, get up and speak up today, and to prove it that we are really in concern, and care for our brothers and sisters in Christ, we should help the persecuted part of the body of Christ, for His Glory. If we really believe that Lord Jesus Christ is God, then, He commands us to love Him and to love our neighbor, if our own brothers and sisters, are in pain and suffering, and we are silent and we ignore them and their suffering, then the question is that do we really obey Lord Jesus’ commandment to love Him and our neighbor?”
The letter concludes: “So, dear brothers and sister (the Body of Christ), we (Afghan Christian Community in New Delhi) on behalf of all Afghan Christians request you to support us by your prayers and practical measures, let us tell the Afghan Government that we are not pagans and infidels, we are not criminals because of our Christian faith, and let us tell them not to sentence us to death.”
The Need of Sent Laborers
March 31, 2010
The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into His fields. – Matthew 9:37b-38 (NLT)
No one would deny the great need for laborers for the gospel in this hour. Not only is there the great need among the nations of the, but previously evangelized cultures in the western world are growing more and more ignorant of the gospel and more and more in need of a gospel witness.
The need for the gospel to go forth with power is clear and the need is as great as it has ever been in history. There are more men lost and in bondage on the earth now than ever before in human history. God is laying this burden on the hearts of believers all over the earth, but it is imperative that we do not merely respond to the call but that we return to the apostolic method of missions whether we have in view missions to the lost in our neighborhood or to an unreached people group.
What are we to do when are hearts are burdened by the great need of the gospel to go forth in power? Though our first impulse is to zealously enter into activity, Jesus summarizes the apostolic missionary method in Matthew 9:38. Before we undertake any activity, if we are truly burdened for the overripe harvest fields, we are to enter the place of intercession asking God to send out laborers into the fields and I fear that our familiarity with the language of the Scripture has masked just how radical Jesus’ instructions are.
Human Zeal
Most of us, burdened with the great need of the gospel to go forth, immediately devise ways of motivating others to the call. We find new and innovative ways to call people to the great need of the sharing the gospel. We use charts and graphs to clearly indicate the great need. We devise powerful sermons that move the human heart to respond. We create training programs to equip individuals to evangelize. We teach new and innovative methods to communicate the gospel. In other words, once we get even a hint of the burden of God’s heart for the gospel we set ourselves immediately to activity and completely bypass Jesus’ instructions on how to respond to an overly ripe harvest.
We fall prey to this error for many reasons, but one reason this course of action is so deceptive is because the activities we have already listed are all necessary to the cause of world evangelism. Individuals must be called to share the gospel. They must be trained and equipped. Believers must understand how critical the hour we are living in is. It is not that what we are doing is wrong, the issue is that, in the rush to activity; we are setting the cart before the horse. Matthew 9:38 exposes our error in clearly declaring that laboring for an apostolic sending of men from heaven is the horse that must pull the cart of missions.
Saints, we have had a lot of gospel activity but the reality is what we have had little fruit. A lot of sweat, tears, blood, effort, and money have been expended and yet we have not seen the kind of results that the apostles saw. While there are many reasons for our lack of fruit, Matthew 9:38 identifies one of the critical errors.
The Apostolic Pattern
Saints, if we desire to again see apostolic missionaries of the same kind as the early apostles were, we must return to the apostolic method of missions and the apostolic method is to first pray to the Lord of the harvest to send laborers. The most well known apostolic missionary, Paul, was sent out of a community in Antioch that was obedient to the apostolic pattern. In Acts 13:2, the saints were in the place of prayer and the Spirit expressly sent Paul and Barnabas forth to the gentiles and so began the career of one of the greatest apostolic missionaries of all time.
Part of the secret of Paul’s success was that he did not just go to the gentiles with a burden and under the compulsion of human emotion, but he was sent by the Spirit. After all, that is exactly what is means to be apostolic. Apostolic simple means a “sent one.” In fact, it is a clear indicator of our lack of understanding of what it means to be apostolic that we constantly attempt to define what is apostolic according to role and function. We define an apostle by what he does, but an apostle is defined by who his is. To be apostolic is to be sent and only the Holy Spirit can effect a sending. When we begin defining what is apostolic by the activities that accompany it rather than by the God initiated sending that is the basis of all that is apostolic, we have already lost the essential elements of what it means to be apostolic.
The Holy Spirit is the Grand Architect
We must understand that man is not the grand architect, nor even the executor, of the plan of world evangelism, but rather that the Holy Spirit is the architect of the cause of Jesus on the earth. In the book of Acts we clearly see the Holy Spirit actively directing the work of the church. While we would acknowledge the work of the Holy Spirit, we are much more prone to use the “wisdom” of 2,000 years of history to prop up human effort while we give the Holy Spirit lip service and then ask Him to provide the miraculous power when we need a “sign” or a “wonder” to back up our gospel claims.
And is it not part of our fundamental problem that our gospel campaigns our often our campaigns and not His? Saints, the Holy Spirit has not changed His role. He is still God. He is still the grand architect of the church as He is the one that makes known to us the mind of Jesus and tells us what is on His heart. Is it not the height of arrogance that we build so much of our gospel activity on human wisdom and human zeal and then ask the Holy Spirit to sprinkle a few miracles on it as though He is simply power for our programs?
We ignore the Holy Spirit as a person and as the all-wise God and instead use Him for power and then we stand amazed that so little power is on the gospel. Frustrated, we read the accounts of the apostles and become disillusioned that there is not power on the gospel, but when we have not followed the apostolic pattern, we should not wonder that the Holy Spirit does not gives His full endorsement to our activities.
We must again give the Holy Spirit His place as the grand master architect of missions and as the possessor of the mind of God if we expect His power to accompany our proclamation. It is true that He always uses men and that is precisely where the confusion comes in. He uses men and then we come to believe that something is intrinsic in man and so we seek to duplicate the pattern we see played out in a man rather than go back to the place of the sending of the Holy Spirit that is what made the man unique in the first place.
Apostolic Sending
The issue of missions then is putting the Holy Spirit back in His place through the application of Matthew 9:38 and one of His primary roles, as the initiator of gospel activity, is to send men and women. As already noted, this is foundational to the understanding of what is apostolic because contained within the very definition of apostolic is the understanding that one who is apostolic is one who is sent.
It is true that the community of saints must send and individual, but that sending must be a secondary sending. When a community sends an individual whether it is to pastor a local church, or to go labor across the earth that sending must be an affirmation and acknowledgement of a sending that has already taken place, because before one can be properly sent by men they must have been marked as a sent one by the Holy Spirit.
Saints, one sent men can do more to turn the world upside down then a thousand believers sent by human effort and motivated by human zeal. The great need of the earth right now is not laborers, it is sent laborers and there is a tremendous difference. There is a reason that Isaiah 6, Jeremiah 1, and Acts 9 are such pivotal passages and the reason is that they mark the sending of a man from heaven. Men that are sent from heaven change history. Men that are sent from man merely increase activity. God, in His kindness, may give some measure of blessing to man’s efforts, but He will not give an apostolic outcome where the apostolic pattern is not followed.
If the great need then is sent men is there any way we can increase the number of heaven sent laborers in our generation? Matthew 9:38 holds the promise for us. Are you burdened for the gospel? Do you feel the Lord’s heart both for your own nation and for the nations of the earth? If so, then the first thing is not to preach your burden or call others to missions, although that may very well come, the first thing to do is drop to your knees and ask the Lord of the Harvest to send men.
If you truly understand the great need of the harvest and the vast need for laborers you will understand the gross inadequacy of human effort and be pressed into the place of intercession crying out that God would send men knowing that a sending from heaven is the only solution to the great need of the earth in our hour.
Contending for Sent Laborers
The place of prayer is the place where the great missions enterprise is lost or won, for it is only in that place that we can secure the favor of heaven to send men for white harvest fields demand sent men, not merely laborers sent of energy, zeal, and humanistic motivations. Jesus’ instructions to His disciples were radical. They were ready for His call to lay down their lives and labor in the harvest fields, but I suspect they were surprised to hear Jesus’ admonition to rather pray that God might send men. As a measure of how significant Jesus’ words were, Acts 6 reveals that the apostles learned this lesson well as they gave themselves to prayer and the Word that sent ones might go forth and they shook the powers in their generation because their labor in prayer secured sent ones.
How different Jesus’ value system is from ours! We rush to activity, and the fact that we rush so quickly to activity betrays the fact that we have so little confidence in prayer and the reason we have little confidence in prayer is that we have little confidence in God Himself. We are more confident in our ability to labor than we are in God’s ability to send, though it is the heaven sent ones that are truly apostolic and that change history.
Does laboring on our knees preclude laboring in works? Certainly not. We must put our hands to the tasks in front of us in obedience to Jesus. He certainly calls us to labor, but He calls us first and foremost to the labor of prayer. He calls us first to gaze upward and cry out for sent ones to again walk among us and advance the gospel with power as the apostles of old did. We will labor until our bodies are exhausted and spent, but we must labor as sent ones from heaven, and it is the place of prayer that will secure this sending. Jesus’ command does not give us the luxury of praying and then refusing to go when sent.
The Holy Spirit has not changed. He is still jealous for Jesus’ glory. He is still the grand architect of the gospel enterprise. He waits only for a company of people who will resist human initiative and lay hold of Him in prayer beseeching Him to send men of His own initiative into the harvest. He will send men if we stand before Him and ask for apostolic witnesses. He will anoint the gospel with power when it goes forth according to the apostolic pattern.
Demystifying the Kingdom of God
January 12, 2010
We often speak of the “Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven” in Christian circles but I am afraid that very few of us actually know what we are talking about. I say this because there seems to be volume upon volume written on the kingdom, each volume trying to present the kingdom slightly differently and, at the end of the day, it seems most believers are confused as to what the kingdom actually is and are unable to clearly articulate the kingdom when asked to define exactly what the kingdom of God is. I have seen a teacher pose that question to seasoned believers and the saints questioned looked dumbfounded and were at a loss for words to clearly articulate exactly what the kingdom is. It is a significant issue that we struggle to understand something that is at the cornerstone of Christian theology and is at the heart of the apostolic proclamation of the gospel.
Now, obviously I cannot give the kingdom a full treatment in one post. Volumes have been written on the kingdom so any small thing I can post here cannot even begin to be exhaustive. However, I believe a few short words about the essence of what the apostles, and Jesus, actually meant when they used the term “The Kingdom of God” may help to demystify the kingdom making it much more approachable and understandable.
Two Primary Misunderstandings
I believe there are two primary misunderstandings that have caused confusion about what the kingdom actually is. The first misunderstanding arises in the fact that the word kingdom is a foreign word to the western mind. We operate in governmental structures that are rooted in the ideas of democracy and, to a lesser extent, a republic and so the word kingdom is foreign to us. For us it is a word that we encounter only in fairly tales and ancient history. It is not something that we can tangibly relate to. Dictator would probably be the closest word to kingdom that we could understand, but it has negative connotations that make its use unsuitable.
The second misunderstanding that causes confusion is the influence of Greek thought on Christianity. Because of Greek influence on western thought and culture, we spend more time looking for the “ultimate meaning” of a passage rather than wrestling with the literal words in front of us as the Hebrews would. Compounding the issue is Matthew’s description of the kingdom as the “Kingdom of Heaven” which, because of the Greek dualism which separates “heaven” and “earth” that we have embraced, makes the kingdom even more ethereal. So, because of our heritage of Greek thought, we are looking for the ultimate meaning of a kingdom that seems just as ethereal and mystical as “heaven.” Because we think that “heaven” is some other ethereal realm, we struggle to create ways to make the “kingdom of heaven” relevant and tangible to existence on the earth. Understanding the misunderstandings that have clouded the definition of the kingdom for us, let’s now look at a few simple concepts that will help us gain a better understanding of what the kingdom actually is.
The Kingdom is Simply a Government
The simplest way to properly view the kingdom, coming from a western perspective, is to use the word government rather than kingdom. When you swap this word it is amazing how clear Biblical passages become. When Jesus or the apostles declare the “kingdom of God” they are essentially declaring the “government of God.” When you read a passage and substitute the word government for kingdom, just that word substitution will immediately enable the western mind to better understand the passage as the apostles intended.
The second concept that can help us understand the kingdom, or government of God, is understanding why Matthew uses “Kingdom of Heaven” rather than “Kingdom of God.” First, Matthew never wrote “Kingdom of Heaven.” He wrote “Kingdom of Heavens.” (Use any Bible software, or consult commentaries, and you will see clearly that heaven in the book of Matthew is always plural even though it is translated in English in the singular.) Now, this did not make sense to the Greek mind and so translators have rendered it “Kingdom of Heaven” in accordance with the Greek concept and model of reality which defined two distinct realities consisting of “heaven” and the physical, or earthly, realm rather than according to the Hebraic understanding of one unified reality consisting of both the heavens and the earth.
So what is the “Kingdom of Heavens”? This is explained in Genesis 1:1 when we are told that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. God created the heavens as the place of His throne, or His government, and then created the earth as man’s place of government. The earth then was under the heavens, or subservient, to God’s throne. This idea is all throughout the Old Testament once you understand what the language means and understand that the word “heaven” is never in the Old Testament as a singular but is always plural.
The Old Testament is filled with consistent references to the heavens as God’s dwelling place and as the seat of all power and authority over the earth. This was the Jewish, and apostolic, understanding of the universe. The key is understanding that the Greek idea of “heaven” is foreign to the Jewish mind. Once you understand the basics of the Jewish concept of “the heavens” the Old Testament becomes much more understandable and the simplicity of the Jewish understanding of the cosmos becomes very apparent when you read the Scriptures.
The Apostolic Proclamation of the Kingdom
Now it is a popular misconception that earth is under satan’s rule until Jesus returns. This is actually false. The earth is still completely under the power of the heavens. This is actually the correct understanding of the sovereignty of God. The sovereignty of God is not primarily His ability to manipulate events to produce a desired outcome, but rather His present rule over all of creation. The Bible makes this completely clear in multiple places. Just a few references that are helpful on this subject are Daniel 4:32, Psalm 103:19, Romans 13:1-2, and 1 Peter 2:13-23. (Leave a note in the comments if you are struggling to understand the present authority of God and I’ll try to write a post on that topic in the future.)
So we now can understand that “kingdom” is another word for government and “heaven,” or the more accurately “the heavens” is a reference to the throne of that government. Now notice how Young’s Literal Translation helps us understand this even futher:
And in those days cometh John the Baptist, proclaiming in the wilderness of Judea, and saying, ‘Reform, for come nigh hath the reign of the heavens,’ – Matthew 3:1-2 (YLT)
Young’s translation, being literal, makes the text clear. John was proclaiming the the ruler of the heavens, in other words God Himself, was coming near to them. Can you see now why the people flocked to John to repent and to cleanse themselves in an act of baptism? John was not announcing some sort of ethereal or “spiritual” kingdom, but rather was declaring that the ruler from the throne over all creation was coming near among the people. The ruler of the heavens, the location of God’s throne, was now coming near His people as a man.
If ever anything would drive men to repentance this would be it! And so it did with the people flocking to John to prepare their hearts for his arrival. They knew full well how disastrous it was when God appeared to His people in the wilderness during the Exodus so they were now preparing their hearts for His visitation in their day and time. You can see now also why Matthew used the phrase “Kingdom of the Heavens.” He was writing to a Jewish audience so that phrase clearly conveyed what he was trying to convey which is that the very ruler of the government of God was among them. In addition, the Jews would have read “the Heavens” as a euphemism for God since the heavens are His dwelling place. This would allow Matthew to clearly convey the Kingdom of God to a Jewish audience.
The other writers were targeted on a wider audience than Matthew so they used the phrase the Kingdom of God because the Greeks, and others, did not necessarily have the same understanding as the Jews of the heavens so they, rather than using the euphemism that Matthew used, just plainly used the term the kingdom of God which clearly communicated that they were referencing the very government of God.
And Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus – Acts 17:7 (ESV)
We can see clearly that the apostolic presentation of the gospel continued in this same vein. They clearly preached the government of God. In fact, this is one of the major factors in the early persecution of the Christians. The Jews shared the morality and monotheism of the Christians, but it was the aggressive message of the early apostles of a real and present government over the government of Caesar and the coming of the ruler of that government, Jesus, to shatter all the governments of the earth that caused such an uproar. The Romans could not tolerate such preaching because they were declaring another kingdom that was going to usurp Rome.
In fact the Greek words used to refer to the preaching of the gospel in the New Testament are the same words that were used of a messenger of Caesar who was delivering Caesar’s decree to the people in remote places. In other words, the proclamation of the gospel was a governmental decree carried by messengers of God’s government called “apostles,” which simply means “sent ones.” The apostles were offering the people redemption and forgiveness that they might have right standing with God’s government and be kept safe in the hour when God Himself chose to smash the rebellion of the nations and to move His governmental headquarters from the heavens to the earth.
Can you see now why Paul who write letters encouraging the saints of their citizenship in the kingdom of the heavens and their role as ambassadors of this government? The early church clearly understood the “Kingdom of God” to be a governmental reality that they were declaring, both as a present reality and as a coming reality in the installment of Jesus as an earthly, as well as in the heavens, king and the destruction of all unrighteous government. This why the church in Thessalonica, though Paul was only with them a very short time, had been taught eschatology. Paul simply declared the government of God and the repentance that was necessary before that government destroyed the rebellion of other governments. The apostolic proclamation of the kingdom was governmental.
This is also why Jesus could say that the kingdom was within us when our hearts were submitted to His government. The earth at present is in rebellion against His government and is in the delusion that the rebellion is successful. Those who have repented understand that there is a higher government consisting of a present king that is also coming to destroy the delusion and rebellion on earth. In their repentance, they now become messengers of this government, carrying the reality of it in their hearts and in their witness. This coming government, along with the offer of redemption and immorality through the Spirit, is the cornerstone of the apostolic proclamation of the gospel.
Why is the kingdom demonstrated when signs and wonders occur? It is simple. Healing and other signs serve two purposes. First they demonstrate the nature of God’s government. Satan has deceived man that God is a tyrant who desires to inhibit man from true freedom. Healing and deliverance oppose that lie by demonstrating the true nature of God’s government. These signs clearly demonstrate that satan is actually the tyrant and it is God’s government that brings the maximum freedom and pleasure to man.
The second purpose these signs serve is to validate the governmental proclamation of the gospel. We are to declare a present ruling King as well as a King that is coming. How are men, under the delusion of the present rebellion, to know that this proclamation is valid? In order that men might know, God grants signs and wonders as a miraculous testimony that our proclamation is true because they demonstrate an authority beyond that which man, or satan, can exert.
There is much more than can be written on this topic, but this should help to simplify the issue of the “Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven.” Hopefully you can see that it is much simpler than we have made it out to be. It is simply God’s present government which also includes a future military action, led by Jesus, in which He will destroy all rebellion and relocate the headquarters of His government from the heavens to the earth. Many valid insights have been taught over the years, but I fear we have made the kingdom too mystical and not as practical and real as it is.
Let us return to the roots of the faith and the simplicity of the gospel proclamation rather than trying to examine the apostolic proclamation through hundreds of years of philosophy and cultural mindsets that are different from the cultural understanding that Jesus and the apostles preached from.
What Other Nation has a God so Near?
September 8, 2009
“For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? – Deuteronomy 4:7 (ESV)
This phrase “a god so near” should cause us all to fall down in worship before the God who would utter such a great phrase. The word itself has the literal meaning of “near kinsman.” Truly do we grasp that God describes Himself, in relation to those who follow His statutes, as a “near kinsman?” How can we fail to encounter the God that draws near? How faithless must we be that we are content with the concept of an absent God rather than gazing upward, crying out to Him out of a heart in pain that He might remove everything in our hearts that obstructs the experience of God as a near kinsman? How much more, at this time, is God a near kinsman than when Moses penned these words?
At that time God was in close proximity to the people but it was a nearness that also created distance and separation due to the requirement of God’s holiness and the condition of the people. Truly God was near, but the people were terrified of that nearness as it caused death and separation. Truly His nearness was a fascination to Moses, Joshua, and other but a terror to the nation at large. Sadly, this condition has not changed and today there is still a minority few who find God’s declaration of His nearness as an invitation to the pursuit of the gloriously terrifying God, while most of the people demonstrate the coldness of their hearts by being content with a distant God, even having the audacity to accuse God of causing the issue.
The children of Israel struggled with this nearness and In Deuteronomy 18:17 God declares that the people are correct in their expression of the need for a human intermediary, or intercessor, to properly relate to God. God affirms their need and promises a prophet who will arise as that mediator. The people then expected another man like Moses, but God had a shocking move in store. His desire for nearness to His people was so great and so strong that He Himself had chosen to become that mediator.
He would become the One that at the same time was God among the people and also the mediator preparing and introducing people to the uncreated God. He did not just send us another Moses, He Himself became a better Moses. We should be bursting with amazement and joy at the mystery of the incarnation. If we just had an accurate perspective, we would realize how truly radical it is that the transcendent God put on human flesh and how unfathomably near He now is.
Have we allowed the incarnation to show us how deeply God’s heart yearns for nearness to His people? Jesus is God’s plainly spoken declaration of His desire for nearness. First, He declared that He was God among us. It was a thought that was blasphemy to the Jewish mind, so rightfully lofty was their concept of the divine, and yet Jesus was clear that He was God actually living among us, speaking face to face with us.
Not content with this, Jesus then poured out God’s Spirit on us that we might have the living God indwelling us. How radical was that? God had become one of us but He was not content with interacting with us only externally as that limited His nearness to us to those who could come into close physical proximity. In God’s heart a nearness limited to physical proximity was unacceptable and therefore He poured out His Spirit into our very hearts. Who among us has considered this fully?
How can God even place Himself in fallen man? How is it that your frame and mine can actually carry the living God? God has come to dwell inside, not just in one man, but in every redeemed man (Note that we still must maintain the proper division between Jesus’ divinity and our non-divinity). Saints, if we could only perceive the majesty and mystery of this thing! I fear our language and our doctrinal statements have numbed our hearts to the glorious reality of the indwelling God and the implications to our experience of Him.
Our pursuit of “power by the Spirit” has obscured the very real indwelling of God which has power as its side effect and the revelation of God to the human heart as its primary effect. He desires to be our near kinsman, and too often we are taking that gift and trying to manipulate it for a more powerful ministry or to solve the problem of our boredom with Christianity.
Finally, as though all this nearness was not enough, God closes out Scripture with the very clear promise in Revelation 21 and 22 that when Jesus takes the throne in Jerusalem, leading the earth in the millennial reign, His express purpose will be to prepare us for face to face interaction with the Father. He will draw us near to the One whom the Israelites in the desert found unbearable. Can we not see how intense God’s pursuit of being a near kinsman to us has been? God agreed in the desert with the people that His nearness was unbearable, so He gave us Himself as an intermediary and having become the ultimate near kinsman, He continues to pursue nearness with us until He gets the nearness that He Himself desires.
Can we not see that history is the very story of a God doing all that He might be near to us? How can we be content with a distant concept of God when God has so invested Himself in us? Is the radical passion in God’s heart for nearness, illustrated by His ongoing pursuit of nearness with us, not brilliantly clear, or are our hearts too blind to see? If it is not clear to us, we must ask, “Why is my heart so blind to God’s desire?” If God’s desire for nearness is clear to our hearts and yet we are content with distance, we must ask, “Why am I so dull in heart that I am content to remain apart from the glorious God?”
Saints, God wants a people that are near and He will get that people. The question for you and me is whether or not we will be part of that company. God has done all that He can. He has clearly demonstrated and declared His intentions to us, and yet we remain distant. To address the question of “why do we remain distant?” is to put our heart on full display. It is to uncover the hidden things and expose what is truly there, seeing just why it is that we avoid God.
We place the blame on the God who is distant, but He, with eyes of fire, looks directly into our hearts melting all our excuses exposing our lack of desire for His nearness. It is one of the greatest tragedies that we as believers in the 21st century consider God aloof and distant. We must allow the Spirit to expose and search our hearts that it may be clear to us just why we have settled for the distant God when the story of history clearly shows God’s increasingly radical steps to draw near to us. Why then do we do not believe that He is near to us? Perhaps there are many reasons, but there are two that stand out clearly.
For one, we do not have ears to hear the invitation. Jesus often cried out to them that have “ears to hear.” There are two common reasons that we do not have ears. For one there are few trumpets declaring to God’s people that they must ascend the hill. Sadly, often instead ministers protect their ministry by unconsciously promoting a model where they ascend rather than the people. This breaks God’s heart and yet it is a pattern that we continue to follow even though we’ve broken the tyranny of Roman theology and all nod our heads in assent to the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Those who love God deepest and are given a place to minister must, like Moses, call the people to the mountain of nearness with God, not be content to be an intermediary.
God Himself alone is the intermediary now. For a minister to place himself in that place is a dangerous place and, even when accidental, is in active opposition to God’s desire for His people. This does not invalidate ministerial gifts, but rather sets the standard for them. Valid ministerial gifts do not serve as an intermediary between God and the people but rather function as a friend of the bridegroom (John 3:29), exhorting and leading the people to face to face communion with the living God with no intermediary other than the man Jesus. For those that minister, there is safety in ministering as though you were trying to work yourself out of a job, freely giving all you have to those under your ministry and actively calling and empowering them to the place where you are in God.
The second issue with regard to “ears to hear” is that our ears are so dull and continually filled with other voices and amusements that we do not have ears to hear the voice of God inviting us up the hill. We spend precious little time meditating on the Word of God and hearing the Spirit breathe on it until we know the heart of God for us. We turn our imagination lesser things, becoming satisfied by cheap, empty thrills rather than allowing our ears and appetites to change until only a word from God will satisfy the longings of our hearts. We must cut off lesser voices that we might hear the voice of reality from the throne beckoning us to come near.
The second primary obstacle with God’s nearness is that we do not ascend the hill due to the issue of cost. Like the Israelites of old, we are afraid of what it will cost us to draw near to the place where the fire burns and the voice speaks. We are content to remain with dark, dull hearts because it might be costly to draw near to God. Deep within we know that what we are is painfully short of what we are made for, but like a madman we continue to resist the radical change necessary that our hearts may be fully alive. Can we imagine what an affront this is to God? He has provided the intercessor that was necessary, freely places the fire of the mountain in us by the Spirit, and concludes Scripture with the promise of face to face interaction, yet we remain unresponsive.
Our God promises to be near to our call. His promises it not be be near our whim, but our call. Our call contains within it a cry and desire for Him that offers up all of our being. It holds nothing back but invites the fire of God to purge everything in our heart that we might be near Him. It is this sort of cry that brings His nearness. A lesser cry will not suffice. It is the lack of a cry of this kind that causes us to remain distant from the One who is ever near.
We must call out and cry to Him with a longing heart. We must cry, with the Spirit and the bride (Revelation 22:17) that He come, no matter what the cost to us or, ultimately, the cost to the planet in the day of the Lord. When He comes the mountain quakes and our heart is filled with fear, but if we have a proper cry in our heart none of this matters so long as He comes. A valid cry is one that says, “even if I die, I must have Him near. Let Him come near and my being be burnt up, let every other thing I love be shattered, but just let Him come because I cannot remain living so long as He is distant.”
He has left us with a promise to respond to a cry and with no obstacle to drawing near, but our response, typically not in words but in lifestyle, is to remain distant in our own hearts while blaming God for how distant He is. The demands of nearness have caused us, like the children of Israel, to stand back content to ask others to go to God for us. Again, have we really comprehended what a rejection of God this is?
He has called us near and provided the one and only intercessor and still we continue to look to others to ascend the hill for us. He has paid an awful price to enable us to ascend the hill and yet we spurn His invitation content to fill our lives with much lesser pleasures. This is heresy in a day and age when all men have been given access to the living God. Whatever the cost may be to live in the manifest nearness of God, it is truly far less than the cost of living a dull life in bondage to lesser things.
Saints, have we considered how deeply this must hurt His heart? Our God is near. Let anyone who doubts that fact be silenced. It is us who are distant. Let us set our hearts to pay the cost and draw near to the heart of the living One. Let us be those that fill His heart with joy. Man’s consistent rejection of the God that is in pursuit has already caused our God more pain than a human frame can comprehend. Our God has promised to be near when we call. Seeing as our God cannot lie, the issue must remain in our lack of calling rather than in His lack of nearness
As a final note, there are those desperately longing for God who are enduring seasons of wilderness. For those dry and lonely and yet longing for God with every fiber of your being, willing to obey any call for Him to be near, do not feel condemned, but rather encouraged that the God who holds your days in His hand longs for nearness greater than you do and is, in truth, much nearer than you perceive Him to be. Remain steady. He is near. Your perception of His nearness will change if you remain faithful.
Blessed are the Poor in Spirit Part 2
September 5, 2009
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. – Matthew 5:3 (ESV)
One of the core issues of embracing poverty is the issue of self-existence. What makes God unique in all the universe is that He is self-sustaining. Only He can sustain Himself by Himself. All the rest of the creation is dependent on God both for its very existence and for its continued sustenance. When Moses pressed God for a name in Exodus, God declared Himself to be the self-sustaining One that exists with no dependencies on anyone or anything. He is the One that exists irrespective of the existence of any other.
Man, on the other hand, as a created being requires the sustenance from God that He might live and this is at the root of the issue in the garden. The enemy was attempting to divorce man from His reliance on God. He presented this as a deception so that man would imagine that becoming self sustaining, choosing for himself what things are good and evil, would allow Him to ascend to a place like God when in reality it would bring him into a place of death and decay. The glorious life that man was given required the sustenance of the Creator. Man is not self-existent, but lucifer was determined to deceive man because of the tragedy of his own revolt.
As the most beautiful being yet created, lucifer challenged God because his heart was so full of pride that he imagined he could sustain his own beauty. When he staged a rebellion based on the confidence that he could sustain himself without the Creator, to his own horror he became the most horrific and corrupt creature in all of creation. No longer exalted and beautiful, a death of a sorts came in when he attempted independence from the sustainer and it destroyed the beauty in him corrupting all that was beautiful into something horrific and hideous. Lucifer now became satan.
Satan, filled with pride and now finding himself in this horrible place where he was still in subjection to God but now as a hideous, evil being rather than one of beauty, expressed his anger towards God by taking aim to corrupt God’s prize creation. He immediately went to man in the garden and offered man the same decision that he himself had made without telling man of the horrific consequences. Man fell to the same temptation that had seized satan’s heart, that of being self-sustaining or independent of God’s wisdom and sustaining power, and immediately man’s being fell from a place of glory to a place of death. The most beautiful of God’s creatures in the heavens, lucifer, had fallen and become infected with death. Now, the very height of God’s creation, man, had also fallen for the same ruse and now death infected man in that same way that evil had destroyed lucifer’s beauty.
We find this same foundational issue in the next great temptation in human history when satan comes to Jesus in the desert again trying to thwart God’s plan by taking advantage of Jesus’ humanity in the same way that he destroyed the man in the garden. The scene is no longer a plush garden, but this time it is a barren wilderness. When satan first tempted man, he had to convince man there was something better than the beauty and provision of the garden. This time, Jesus was in a barren wasteland. He was surrounded by a hard place and desperately hungry. Surely satan imagined he had the advantage. In the garden, he had to be deceive a man that was completely provided for, living in bliss and in communion with God. This time he only needed to offer a deception of relief to a man exhausted in a dry and barren place that so illustrated man’s fallen condition. Surely he could get Jesus to escape this place. Surely Jesus would long for the place of comfort and sustenance.
With this in my mind, satan went straight to the primary issue and attacked Jesus with the temptation of self sustenance. Satan came and immediately challenged Him to use His divine power to self-sustain Himself as a man in turning bread to stone. Jesus clearly understood what was at state and quickly replied, from the Scripture, that man should not live by bread alone but by every word proceeding from the mouth of God. In other words, man must rely on something proceeding from God to live. Even if He could turn the stones to bread, the issue was that He, as a man, would be sustained by God and not by Himself. Jesus refused self sufficiency as a man, even when it could be obtained using His own divine power, rebuking the enemy by declaring that man, as a creature, was designed to live dependent on God. Satan had begun with the temptation that caused his own fall and that he used to effect the fall of man, but this time Jesus immediately resisted.
In order to make the issue even more clear, God has also given us a parable in our own bodies. Scientists tells us how our bodies are self-sustaining with the cells constantly replenishing themselves until the aging process shuts down cell replacement and we slowly die. From this we can see that the human body was made to sustain itself and live immortally as the Bible teaches. However, no matter how marvelous the human body’s capacity may be, it requires food. Though the body can sustain itself once it obtains fuel, we are still dependent on an external source of nutrients to supply our bodies with the fuel necessary to sustain life. Though our bodies were designed to live forever, they were designed so that they cannot live without any external nutrients. We are dependent on external food sources to fuel the life that is in our bodies.
So too our spirits are designed to live forever and yet are dependent on a fuel which we receive from the only One that is ultimately self-sustaining. We can live in a delusion that we have enough to supply ourselves because we may be popular or talented in ministry, but the reality is that our spirits starve and die if we are not constantly being fueled from the One who is the sustainer of all things. It is those who, like Jesus, live in that place of dependence on the eternal One for daily fuel for their spirits that will be fit to participate in the heavenly government. The poor and the hungry eat everything that is offered to them. It is only those that imagine themselves to be full that push away the gift of food from another. When we truly know our inner poverty, it will cause us to lay hold of the One that can supply and sustain us. Living in that manner will fit us to stand before the One who alone is self-sustaining as we understand, acknowledge, and even celebrate our great need of His abundance.
Really the root issue is dependence. Creation is made to be dependent on God for its supply. Not because God is some sort of ego, but rather because He simply is the only self-sustaining One that exists and He sustains His creation with love and tender care. However, when creation refuses this dependence, death enters the equation because once you cut yourself off from the One that is eternal life the only option is death. If you get the root of the issue with those in the western world that mock the gospel and are the most vocal opponents of the gospel it will come down to the issue of dependence. The mockers of the gospel refuse to be in the place of dependence. They do not want to depend on Him for their life and they refuse to depend upon Him for the definition of morality. Man desires to do what he wants, the way he wants, even when it ends in death. This is the corruption whose only remedy is poverty of spirit.
This is why in John 17 Jesus defined eternal life as the intimate knowledge of God (John 17:3). Apart from intimate communion with Him from a heart posture of poverty, there is no life. I fear that we are too full in our spirits and unaware of how much fuel we really need from the One upon the throne that our spirits may have the fuel that is necessary. Let us go to Him daily in poverty of spirit that He might fuel us with Himself.
Blessed are the Poor in Spirit
September 3, 2009
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. – Matthew 5:3 (ESV)
Jesus promises a governmental position in the government, or rule, of the heavens to all those that are poor in spirit. Remembering that the heavens, being the location of God’s governmental throne, are clearly above the earth, we can see that Jesus is promising a place of authority in His own personal government that is ruling over all that exists both on the earth and above it. What is clearly implicated here is that poverty of spirit is a necessary requirement for ruling in God’s government. Lucifer was cast down because he lost poverty of spirit and chose to embrace the power and strength of his own spirit. This led to him becoming so deluded that he challenged God in his own might, resulting in a flash when God cast him down from his privileged, governmental position.
When lucifer embraced personal power in his own spirit, he changed from being one of the most beautiful of all creatures to being the most dark and terrible of all beings. He was transformed from one filled with light to one filled with oppressive darkness. His rejection of poverty of spirit transformed his being into a selfish, dark, and evil being with a capacity to destroy that has brought destruction not just to his own nature, but has also brought manifold destruction to others in his corruption of one third of the angels and his subsquent acts in corrupting all the earth. Lucifer so successfully transmitted this disease to humanity, that we too embraced strength in our own spirit, with the end result being that our inner man became corrupt and depraved as well and human history has became the tale of the dark deeds of humanity. Do we consider the disastrous consequences of embracing the strengh of our own spirit, rather than the poverty of it as Jesus exhorts us to do? Do we consider that strength of spirit may be cloked in religious language and religious ambition so that we may end up pursuinig the very thing Jesus desires us to reject within a religious framework?
Jesus, on the other hand, calls us to poverty of spirit. He calls us to return to the primary issue of the garden and re-embrace the leadership of God in refusing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Rather than embracing the promise of its fruit, we are to bring our spirit in poverty before God desiring to once again know the thrill of being filled with His spirit rather than dominating others with our own. His Spirit alone is capable of ruling over others while keeping the well being of others as His first priority. Our spirits are not equipped to rule as His is and so any time we attempt to live out of our own spirits, the inevitable result is selfishness, pain, and suffering. Only God’s Spirit has the capacity to rule others in a way that is ultimately selfless. We do not have that capacity in our own spirits and to thing otherwise is delusional, though it be couched in religious language.
For this reason, only those that embrace poverty of spirit will be equipped to rule in the government of God. This is truly a high call because Jesus is offering us access, not just to the government of the earth, but to the government of the heavens. As we noted at the start, the government of the heavens sits over all creation and is the location of God’s very own throne. How high an exaltation Jesus offers us! Yet, at the same time, the qualifications for that exaltation are paradoxical. To ascend to the high place, our spirits must embrace a low place. We sit enthroned in government with God only when we acknowledge our total lack and poverty, not when we stand on our own accomplishments and power. Who can embrace such a thing? Who will empty themselves that they might be exalted by God? Who can lay aside from our natural methods of improving ourselves? Who can reject our human ideals of embracing power, ability, and stature thinking that our strength offers something to God that is necessary to His government? Do we desire what Jesus offers or do we have the secret desire that we may rule over our brethren in the age to come?
Only the poor in spirit can stand in the place God desires us to stand. Only the poor in spirit will endure in that place. Anyone else, no matter how talented, gifted, or accomplished, when raised to the right hand of God will fall in corruption just as lucifer did, corrupting both himself and others. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything any creature in creation does reverberates throughout creation impacting others. For that reason, God cannot allow an individual to be open to the place of corruption because an individual’s corruption never remains isolated. When you and I fall, others fall as well. Our corruption touches all those that we make contact with and so our corruption is not just an issue of our own personal nature, but it is an issue of our effect upon others. For this reason, a ruler in God’s government must lay aside his own strength, which will enslave and corrupt others, that he might be filled with the strength and Spirit of God which alone is fit to rule over others in a benevolent way.
Poverty in spirit is not just a phrase, it is a critical reality that you and I are called to embrace. To neglect this offer is to suffer great loss for Jesus is offering us an incredible place of privilege if we are willing to embrace His requirement. The offer is great, but the cost of that position is high as well. Forget your own achievements, ministerial or otherwise. In Matthew 5:3 Jesus gives you what He wants to see on your resume if you desire a place in His government, and it’s a poverty in your own spirit, not the massive strength that sadly we spend so much time pursuing. Let us embrace His paradigm so that on that great day, He can invite us with joy in His voice to sit on His very own throne with Him participating in His brilliant rule.
In short, the answer is clear. Embrace lack that you might prosper. Ask for emptiness that you may be filled. Beware the temptation of your own spiritual fullness though and in your filling, stay in the place of poverty.
Gao Zhinsheng
May 22, 2009
Recently the Chinese government has re-arrested Gao Zhinsheng. His crime is publicizing the kinds of abuses the Chinese government regularly inflicts on its own people. A website named “Free Gao” has published information about Gao including a video re-enacting Gao’s first imprisonment. As you watch the video consider that this is the kind of reality that believers in many parts of China face each day. They know that following Jesus may lead them into this kind of torture and yet they continue to evangelize passionately knowing that Jesus is the only hope for China. Older believers even teach the younger ones how to escape the police and how to endure persecution when caught.
For most of us, China is a little unreal. It is a place very far away possessing a culture we find unusual. Sadly, China in the America mind is often merely a collection of labor and factories producing all our consumer goods at cheap prices. It is the country that we both love and hate. We love its low prices and efficient industry even as we decry the fact that it’s “cheap” and “communist.”
In the church, we often hear of Chinese Christians but their experience is also more of a detached reality for us. Take a few minutes and allow God to knit your heart together with the Chinese, not only enjoying their stories of evangelistic success, but also sharing in their pain.
Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself. Remember also those being mistreated, as if you felt their pain in your own bodies. – Hebrews 13:3 (NLT)
Visit the Free Gao site and take a moment to learn more of what happens behind closed doors in China. Remember, the saints there are part of our family.
Here’s the link: http://www.freegao.com/ .
The Anatomy of Deception
April 16, 2009
I wanted to make everyone aware of a new work available by Art Katz titled The Anatomy of Deception. This book was published posthumously from Art’s messages. Recently a friend was kind enough to send me a copy of it before I was even aware that it was available for purchase and I am very grateful for his kindness. Years ago Art’s writings were for me a deep drink of refreshing water amidst an arid land. He gave perspective to yearnings in my soul and helped form the basis of a Biblical, New Testament theology in my heart. After just spending a few moments in the introduction of this book, my heart was again stirred in a similar manner. As I read through this work, Art’s words were again proving to be a deep drink of refreshing water.
In this Art takes aim at the critical issues in the church which, when unaddressed, lead us into deception and become avenues for even greater deceptions and delusions. While manifestations of power are important to the church, Art takes aim at the deeper issues of our heart before the Lord and our life, both individually and together as believers, and demonstrates how, when these things are lacking, power can become a dangerous thing and ultimately even a means to deception. This book is an excellent examination of things that we often fail to examine and in so doing cause great harm to ourselves and the church. If you have a burden to see a church that is genuinely apostolic and prophetic, you would do well to spend a few hours in this book and let it test and try your soul.
In the days ahead, we are going to desperately need the kind of truth that is found in this little book, so I have to encourage you to get a copy of it and read it. I also wanted to make a note of the fact that this is a relatively small book and I also found it to be one of Art’s easiest books to read. In fact, if you’ve never read Art before this would be a fabulous book to begin with as it’s relatively short and very approachable while clearly communicating Art’s burden.
I wanted to add one last comment about the issue of signs and wonders. Some saints might walk away from Art’s writings with a cynical heart towards the miraculous. I want to encourage us all, as saints, to not become cynical towards signs and wonders simply because of their misuse. Signs were an important component of Jesus’ ministry as well as that of the early apostles. When we hear of God working in an extraordinary way, we should be like the Bereans who were both excited to hear of what God was doing and, at the same time, verified the word to be sure that it was true.
The reality is that we desperately need the power of God accompanying the gospel in our day and we must understand that God sometimes works in amazing ways through individuals that are imperfect and that imperfection does not necessarily invalidate the signs themselves. In fact, we even see apostolic correction and tension even in the New Testament between Paul and Peter at one point. My point here is to ensure that we properly apply Art’s message and do not let the enemy twist it so that we develop a cynical spirit.
That having been said, Art’s message may seem to some to be very strong but remember that when the pendulum swings too far in one direction we often need an equally exaggerated message to bring us back to the full counsel of the Lord. While I have warned against developing a cynical spirit, at the same time realize that without the word Art brings in this book being applied, we will not have the ultimate depth that God requires and any signs in our mist will not be capable of having God’s intended effect and could even end up being tools in the hands of the enemy.
You can get a copy of The Anatomy of Deception at the Art Katz Ministries Online Bookstore which is located at http://artkatzministries.org/online_bookstore/. If you have not read Art’s other major works such as Apostolic Foundations and the Spirit of Truth, go ahead and order those as well. They will add a depth to your life will be greatly needed for the days ahead. While you are visiting the Art Katz Ministries site you may want to sign up for updates because I believe there are also some other new works that will be coming out in the future that you will want to take advantage of.
Works such as The Anatomy of Deception are rare and valuable.
Politics and Government
February 23, 2009
Politics is like marrying and crying and laughing and buying. We should do it, but only as though not doing it – John Piper.
The Christian response to the recent elections has been somewhat troubling to me. On one side, there are the despondent ones. These act as though the Kingdom of God is almost subservient to the government and seem to believe that God is finished with America since the government is in the control of the “liberals.” On the other hand there are those that are engaging in a bitter spirit of political contention. They tend to appear to be more passionate about conservative talk show hosts than Christ, and are more energized by the liberal versus conservative debate than they are the eternal elements of the kingdom. They seem to have forgotten that God is not a Republican, nor a Democrat, and that no system of man, moral or not, is a substitute for the coming kingdom and the coming King.
Please do not understand. I know the moral policies that the government embraces are significant and have significant consequences. I believe in passionate intercession for the nation and understanding the criticality of the hour the western nations are in. Yes, we must vote and maintain a voice for righteousness. By all means let us cry out that God might have mercy and overturn unjust laws and give us righteous leaders. However, let us always keep this in eternal perspective and realize just whose kingdom we truly are citizens of. I believe you will find John Piper’s post election comments to be a refreshing exhortation that is valuable in mainting the proper perspective.
Read on here for the rest of what he had to say:
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/14639
I have had some tell me that when they click the link, they cannot read the entire article. Apparently the article is available if you are referred by Google, but not by other sites. Here is how to read the article:
- Go to Google. Enter the following as your search: “Marry. Cry. Rejoice. Buy. john piper”
- The article will be the first search result. Click on it and World magazine will display the entire article. Yes, I know this is bizarre, but it works.
John Piper also wrote essentially the same thing before the election and you can read it at the Desiring God block by clicking on this link.
Greater Works than These
February 12, 2009
I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, if anyone steadfastly believes in Me, he will himself be able to do the things that I do; and he will do even greater things than these, because I go to the Father. – John 14:12
Many of us have heard this passage preached many times with various interpretations of the passage. While I do not want to try to evaluate what the proper interpretation of the passage is, I do want to propose that there is a nugget in this passage that could radically affect the culture of ministry that we operate in.
The Ministry Culture of Jesus
If you examine Jesus’ ministry, one thing that immediately stands out is how limited His sphere of ministry actually was. While His ministry was spectacular, it is also amazing how He limited Himself to a specific area, refused the promotion of men, devoted only 3 years of His life to public ministry, and poured Himself into His disciples. To understand why Jesus orchestrated His ministry in this way, it is critical that we examine how He launched the gospel through the disciples.
What is so amazing is that rather than seeking the largest public platform, Jesus poured Himself into the disciples. In some cases, His ministry was limited to the 12 and in other cases it was the 70, and at times it included some other followers. Regardless of the exact number, the point is that Jesus really only gave Himself to a small number of followers. He also freely shared His power with them even when they were immature. Not only did He send the disciples out with power, He even sent Judas out with supernatural power on him. That alone should astound most of us.
Have you considered that Jesus invested His life in this small group of people and then He entrusted them with the propagation of the gospel to the nations? If you think about it, it is almost inconceivable that Jesus would ascend just after His moment of triumph and leave the declaration of His victory to a handful of unstable followers. If we are honest, we have to admit that we would consider Jesus’ ministry strategy to be ridiculous.
How many of us would adopt that kind of strategy? How many of us would repel the crowds that were ready to exalt us and instead invest in a small group that were struggling with proper theology? How many of us would put power on a group of young men still struggling with their own egos? How many of us, at the very height of victory, would step aside from visible ministry and instead give our spirit to others that they might be empowered to take the gospel to world and do great exploits?
Now, understand the point here and don’t read too much theology into it, but if you judge Jesus purely by ministry output you will see that the apostles superseded Him in virtually every way. Most of them had much longer ministries, affected much wider areas, and produced more converts. What was so radically different about Jesus’ value system that caused Him to minister in this way? The answer has profound implications for just how deep our own ministry can go. Continue Reading Greater Works than These »
The Law – Part Five – Christ is Supreme
January 7, 2009
In the last post we attempted to put some definition around the New Testament law. We are now brought to the climax of the law, which is the person of Jesus Christ. As we have seen in these last installments, God’s requirement of mankind in the New Testament, far from being minimized, is actually filled up and maximized in the revelation of Jesus Christ. As God has now indwelt man, He now has every legal right to make inner requirements of man that far exceed the Law of Moses. We have seen how this dramatically affects our evangelism and our understanding of our own calling.
The Great Need of Mercy
You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. – Matthew 5:48 (AMP)
As we consider the requirements of God’s morality upon the inner man, we see that absolute need of Christ. We see that there is no way any living human being will ever be able to assert any measure of morality against the standard of God, for we are all left completely helpless before His requirements. When we finish the words of the Sermon on the Mount, if we have truly understood it, our hearts cry out, “What shall we do?”
The requirement of God is so deep, so vast, and yet so just that you and are are left without excuse and without hope before the judgment bar of God. This is not without purpose however, for we are left in this great place that God may be all in all. God Himself, in His own perfect love for man in our predicament, brings salvation through His own right hand in the person of Jesus. By understanding the law, and its present application, we can understand more than ever the great need of the person of Jesus. Jesus said, “those who are forgiven much love much,” and as the law of God penetrates our heart, our inner man should sing the highest praises to the One who has made a way for us to be redeemed from the just and proper condemnation of God’s law.
Let us now see that great paradox that God uses our very violation of the law to bring us into the demonstration of its requirements. As the gospel is proclaimed in truth and power our hearts become heavy under the weight of condemnation and conviction. This condemnation is just and true for we can never fulfill God’s requirements on us. Many avoid this pressure point by lessening God’s requirements, but the solution is not to lessen God’s requirements, but to come into the reality of our spirit’s situation and then receive God’s solution.
While we struggle under the weight of our own condemnation and the black hell of hopelessness closes in on our hearts which have been awakened to God’s law, God comes in like a shaft of light and presents Himself as the ultimate sacrifice and rescue from our own black heart. We see Him in that instant as the liberator from all that we are and all that we have become. This experience is slow for some and quicker for others, but for all there is that moment when light dawns and we see that the very One who has condemned us by making just requirements of our heart, now offers Himself to us as the very redeemer for our blackness. At this moment, we are born again as we grab onto the glorious hope of God whose love is so vast that He is, in that moment, both the One who condemns and the One who rescues.
God’s plan is so glorious though, that it continues from there. Being liberated by His glorious love, the natural response of the human heart is then to love Him desperately, passionately, and completely for His act of redemption from our own condemnation. In the wisdom of God then, it is the pressure of our condemnation that forms in a heart a love for the God who rescues us and this love then naturally begins fulfilling the first great commandment of God’s law to love God with all our hearts.
You see, it is the knowledge of the depth of our depravity and condemnation that leads us to the heights of love. We become those with the capacity to fulfill the law only once we have been awakened to our birth position as those under the condemnation of the law. Only the wisdom of God could take the very thing that condemns us and sets us at odds with Him and use it as the seed of eternal love and holiness in His redeemed people. Once again, we find that God is all and all and that Jesus is worth of supreme adulation for His great redemption. He alone provides mercy for our sins as we stand helpless before the judgment bar of God. Let us love Him desperately for the mercy He provides and then vigorously share that mercy with others understanding that God uses the tool of condemnation as the key to open the door to divine mercy. Continue Reading The Law – Part Five – Christ is Supreme »
The Law – Part Four – The New Testament Law
January 6, 2009
In the last post, we discussed how a proper understanding of God’s law affects our evangelism and saw that our evangelism is a strong indicator of our theology and also has serious implications for the future vitality of the church itself. As we have discussed the New Testament law in this series, we have made a few observations. One is that Jesus extended the reach of the law by pressing it past man’s outward behavior into the thoughts and intents of the heart. We have also noted that Jesus came to complete God’s law that it might accomplish the thing that He gave it to accomplish.
In addition, the point has been made repeatedly that it is critical that we live in light of the fact that we are still under a divine law and in light of that, we must acknowledge that God continues to have the right to place demands upon on. While we have examined these characteristics of the New Testament Law, we have not examined what the declarations of the New Testament law are. We have seen clearly that the scope of the law extends to all things, and we have seen that the depth of the law presses it deep in the heart of man, but is there a clear list of the directives of this law? Well, though it receives little attention, Jesus clearly details for us the requirements of the New Testament law.
The Definition of the Law
In a very real sense, the Sermon on the Mount could be seen as a law giving moment. Just as Moses ascended a hill and descended with the written requirements of God, so to Jesus ascended the hillside and clearly spoke forth the code and law He came to bring. In that sense, we should see the Sermon on the Mount, not just as a nostalgic ideal, but as the present requirement of God. God does not simply give us instructions and values that we might then live “under grace” in the commonly understood meaning of the term. We can never discount grace, and we will address it in the final post, but God desires that grace become something that empowers us to live within that which He demands. To understand the New Testament law, the Sermon on the Mount then is the proper starting place so long as we can begin to see it as Jesus’ parallel to Moses’ directives given from Sinai and not just as an idyllic sermon that is not actually binding on every day life.
While the Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the foundational passage for the New Testament law, there are a few other passages we should examine. These passages are all familiar, but we have not considered these passages to be as weighty as they truly are. Consider Jesus’ answer to one seeking salvation:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. These two commandments sum up and upon them depend all the Law and the Prophets. – Matthew 22:37-40 (AMP)
Notice that just before the cross, Jesus affirms this requirement to His disciples:
If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love and live on in it, just as I have obeyed My Father’s commandments and live on in His love…This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than to lay down his own life for his friends…You are My friends if you keep on doing the things which I command you to do…This is what I command you: that you love one another. – John 15:10, 12-14, 17 (AMP)
Again, we are familiar with these Scriptures, but we must ask ourselves if we see these passages as Jesus’ requirements for His people or do we see them as cute phrases and New Testament ideals? I fear that because of a misunderstanding of grace that we do not consider the full weight of these passages. In these passages, Jesus is putting a requirement on us and defining the way that He expects His people to live.
No one would deny that believers often fail to experience the full materialization of the promises recorded in Scripture, but could is be that we fail to obtain some of the benefits of the gospel because we have not esteemed the requirements of the gospel as such? Perhaps if we saw these commands as just as binding upon us as Moses’ Law was on the nation gathered around Sinai, we might become a radically different people.
The Weight of the Law
We began by pointing out that Jesus filled up the law and turned its requirements inward that He might deal with the very root of sin rather than merely prescribe good behavior. That consideration alone has the power to greatly alter our understanding of Jesus’ statements. After coming into that understanding, we have now considered some of the direct commands that Jesus gave to believers.
Now, we must ask an honest question which is who can fulfill such a law? While we are rightfully grateful that Jesus freed us from the outward bondage of Moses’ law, we fail to consider with much gravity the requirements of the law Jesus instituted. While Moses’ law was full of outward obligations that one might follow in some measure, Jesus law completely supersedes all outward observances and leaves men under greater condemnation than before.
If we honestly examine what He required, we must say, “who can fulfill such things?” for Jesus’ law is all encompassing. Can we not honestly say that every mode of life comes under the requirement to love God with all that we have and then extend love to others just the same as we would love ourselves? Beloved, this is a weighty requirement indeed. Moses’ law at least had specific requirements and limited scope, but Jesus’ law decrees that every thought, every desire, and every action are to be with regard to the supreme love of God and love of one another.
Can anyone among us have the audacity to declare that they could fulfill such a law? Can you see now that when the Spirit gives unction to preach such a law that there is no man who can stand in smug, self-righteousness? Saints we need to pray that God puts power on us again for the proclamation of this gospel. We have awkwardly proclaimed, at the same time, both the conviction of the Mosaic Law and the freedom from it, but we have not pressed men with the Law of Christ.
The reality is that God has not changed His demands upon man; He has only now intensified them in the revelation of Jesus. In the revelation of Jesus, He reveals what he created man for all along. You see, God does not intend to have a people that can merely follow a few moral axioms or fulfill religions ceremonies, He desires a people that are a physical display on earth of Himself. This is what it means that man is made in the image of God.
We are made in His image and so He presses upon us the same law that He Himself demonstrates in all that He does. He makes a requirement on us that no man can possibly fulfill, and yet He has every right to demand it because He made us in His own image that we might live as a physical demonstration of Himself and spread the knowledge of God by our very living. This requirement should crush all our righteousness and drive us to Christ both for forgiveness and for transformation to live in this manner, but tragically our gospel proclamation seems to have lost the weightiness of both of these values in its rush to declare us free from Moses’ prescribed diet and ceremonies!
Because we have lost these values, our evangelism is weak and anemic and our proclamation to the saints is hollow. We are content to gaze horizontally at our own righteousness and not gaze upwardly that we might demonstrate Him; the very thing to which we are called! We are content to demonstrate something a little better than other men rather than putting on display the glory of God and that is the fundamental issue. Continue Reading The Law – Part Four – The New Testament Law »
The Call to Dunkirk
January 2, 2009
Saints, why do we continue to send Christian children to schools that are dedicated to challenging our values? Honestly, I do not believe there is any way we can keep our kids short of taking drastic measures with their education and socialization. We must begin raising children in Christ infused greenhouses or they will all be lost.
The Law – Part Three – Evangelism
December 24, 2008
In the last post in this series we discussed the issue of genuine repentance. At this point we must discuss a related topic which is the issue of evangelism, so let’s take a moment and examine evangelism in light of the New Testament law. Evangelism is always a critical indicator of what our practical theology is. I use the word practical because most of us would assent to correct doctrine if we were given a test on proper belief systems, however often there is a great gulf between our mental theology and our practical theology. Our practical theology is on display in the way that we live and interact with others. In our daily living we demonstrate what we truly believe rather than what we may simply assent to or think that we believe.
Beyond our theology, there are also three things that evangelism uniquely reveals. First, it reveals how we view man’s interaction with God. The way that we communicate the context and requirements of the gospel reveal how we practically believe that man and God relate. Secondly, it reveals how we view ourselves. In our interactions with others and the sharing of our “testimony,” we reveal in a great measure how we view ourselves in general, and in particular how we view ourselves before God. Thirdly, our evangelism reveals what we think about others. The way that we relate the gospel to others, or whether we relate it at all to others, shows how we view those who are presently dead in sin.
The Effects of the Law on our Gospel Presentation
As we have demonstrated, most believers have a decidedly Old Testament understanding to God’s law rather than the New Testament understanding that Jesus clearly laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. While many might dispute that point, the reality is that our methods of evangelism illustrate this disconnect perhaps better than any other place. Let’s examine a few characteristics of western evangelism that illustrate the great ignorance of the church with regard to the law.
To begin there is the issue that we have already covered which is that we know only how to apply the law to outward behavior, rather than to the inward motives of the heart. This brings several problems both to our gospel presentation and also to our own understanding of ourselves. For one, because we are so outwardly focused, we tend to be quite ignorant of our own inward depravity. The depravity, or wickedness, of man as it is inherited from Adam is one of those things that we might be able to check off on a theology quiz, but it is not a doctrine that we believe to the point that it affects the way we view ourselves and others.
Because we do not truly grasp our own inward depravity, we are at a loss to press the gospel upon another individual who appears to be relatively moral outwardly. We are at a loss for words when they fail to have an interest in a salvation that they do not see the need of. Why do they not see the need of salvation? Because we have largely presented them with an outward salvation over an inward one and this flows from the fact that we do not articulate the inner requirements of God’s law, only the outward requirements of a law that, once they are saved, we argue against lest we embrace “legalism” over grace.
Because we do not truly understand, or perhaps even believe, in the depravity of man, we are also tempted to justify wicked behavior in both ourselves and others. As we noted, the people we present the gospel to often have a level of moral conduct that is very similar to our own. When we try to present the need for Christ, we fail because we do not know how to properly convict the heart at the root of the issue. We struggle and stumble to present to an individual their great need of Christ because the reality is that we are not really convinced that the person is all that bad, mostly because we have not ever considered ourselves to be “that bad.”
In fact, from this lack of understanding of depravity has arisen various modes of comparison, such as “good person” compared with “bad person” and the idea that some sin is worse than others. True, some sin has more extensive effects in this age, but in the eternal age, all wickedness is evil. We fail to understand this because we fail to see unredeemed man, “good” or “bad” as essentially wicked. We fail to see them as essentially wicked, because we do not clearly see how the law of God cuts beyond behavior into the very essence of each thought and impulse of the heart. The proof of man’s wickedness lies not in what impulses he restrains and what impulses he allows, the proof of man’s wickedness is that fact that the evil impulse arises at all within his being. Continue Reading The Law – Part Three – Evangelism »
The Law – Part Two – Defining Repentance
December 22, 2008
In the first post in this series, we introduced the idea of the law in the New Testament by referring to Jesus’ statements in the Sermon on the Mount. Now that we are considering that the law was not discarded by Jesus but rather fulfilled so that God might accomplish through the law that which He desired to accomplish, we must address the issue of repentance. If you remember from the first post, the critical understanding that Jesus brought is that while the law given to Moses was primarily an external law, the law in the New Testament was to be an internal law. While this may appear to be a superficial point, it has deep implications for how we, as believers, live with regard to the law.
Defining Repentance
Repentance is a fundamental concept to the Christian faith. John Baptist and Jesus both began their ministries preaching repentance. With such a clear precedent, we can likewise expect that the church in our day should be preaching repentance as well. So, if the church has a requirement to preach repentance, and many churches do preach repentance, why is it that it seems to have so little effect? Well, a significant part of the problem could be whether or not we actually know how to define repentance.
When we define repentance in the church at large, what we generally have in mind is turning from sinful behavior to holy behavior. Different streams of theology would define exactly what that looks like in practice a little differently, but that is the essence of the understanding that commonly persists. The problem is that there is a fundamental error in this definition of repentance and that is that this is a distinctly Mosaic view of repentance and it is at odds with the New Testament directive regarding repentance.
New Testament Repentance
Remember now, that the critical issue is that the law in the New Testament goes right into the heart of man whereas the Old Testament law focused on external behavior. New Testament repentance then is not focused on external behavior, but on the inward life of the heart. If you do not understand this, you will never understand the ministry of Jesus. This understanding is crucial to seeing how Jesus could minister to tax collectors and prostitutues with greater success than He could minister to moral, religious individuals. When you can see outward evil in your life, it makes it easier to accept inward depravity. Conversely, when you believe your outward morals to be sound, it makes it harder to receive the message of inward depravity.
In light of this, a true New Testament repentance preacher will bypass externals and pierce men directly in their heart. This sort of preaching may well expose the life long church-goer as a man more in need of repentance than the town drunk because the root of iniquity can exist in a religious man just as strongly as it can in an irreligious man. In fact, at times it can persist even more strongly in a religious heart as it provides fertile ground for the sins of pride and self-righteousness.
The New Testament message properly sees external behavior as a secondary issue that is at best a symptom of sickness of the heart. The call to repentance is not primarily a call towards behavior modification, but rather the call to repentance is to dig deep within. It is a call like unto Abraham’s whereby each individual is called to take their own personal Isaac, which is their own inner morality, up the dark mountain of sacrifice. Once on that mountain, you must bind him to the altar, and allow God to replace your treasured Isaac with Himself. Once would think that this is elementary. Who would not want God’s rule over him? Who would not think that God is the most perfect one to rule and reign in a man’s heart?
Saints, if nothing else illuminates for you the depravity of man, let this one example illustrate for you the sickness of the human heart. There is no battle known to man, even to Christian men, that is akin to the battle one faces when God comes into take over. The very One we should welcome with open arms we resist with all our strength. This is the issue of heart repentance. This battle shows our inner animosity towards God no matter how moral our outward behavior. Praise God that He alone can conquer such a heart and fill it with His own Spirit.
Genuine repentance bypasses everything external and requires this sort of turning within a man. The call for repentance goes deep into the essence of the man, confronts him with the supremacy of God and the right of God to rule the individual and then calls for that man to turn whole heartedly from his own life, religious or not, to a life consumed by God.
This turning from a life where man is obsessed with himself, which may or may not be moral and religious, to a life where man is wholly given over to God is repentance in the Biblical sense. Many of the problems in our churches arise because we are dealing with individuals that have never truly repented and part of the reason they have never repented is because they have never heard a proper message of repentance that has the power to cut through their soul and their behavior to the essence of what God is after. If we are to see men genuinely repent, we must begin to proclaim a message of genuine repentance to them. Continue Reading The Law – Part Two – Defining Repentance »
The Law – Part One – Introduction
December 22, 2008
Do not think that I have come to do away with or undo the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to do away with or undo but to complete and fulfill them. – Matthew 5:17 (AMP)
I was reading through a message by John G. Lake on the question of Sunday or Saturday worship and found in it some startling insights into the relationship between the law and the believer. As I considered what John was saying the implications of what he was saying hit me, and what hit me was far beyond the question of whether or not our primary worship gathering should be on a Saturday or a Sunday. As I continued to ponder this issue, I began to realize that what I was seeing was so simple and so clearly the gospel and yet at the same time, I believe there is something here of the relationship of the believer to the law that has been lost. I believe it is vital that we understand with a new clarity the appropriate relationship between the believer and the law because it vitally impacts many different areas. With that in mind, I’ll break out these thoughts across several posts so that each can be digested separately. Each part of the series will build up to the conclusion, so you’ll want to read through each one to participate in the complete conversation.
The Mosaic Law
The first thing we must consider is that the Mosaic Law, as a means to the sanctification and redemption of God’s people, utterly failed. There are obviously many purposes for which God gave the Mosaic Law, but for one He gave it that men might demonstrate whether they had the ability to adhere to even an outward display of righteousness. God dealt with men on the basis of outward behavior during this time and men fell woefully short. When the Israelites were given over to judgment, it was not just the judgment of a nation, but the judgment of systems of external morality. It was not just the failure of the Jewish nation; it was the failure of mankind to keep covenant with God by virtue of man’s own will.
What we find then is that outward requirements were incapable of dealing with inward corruption. While this may sound like an elementary principle, we will find a little later that most of the church has not yet fully grasped this issue. Seeing as the law could not produce a righteous man then, we must see that the law is powerless to do anything but demonstrate that man has a corruption that cannot be cured by himself. As an aside, the astute reader might notice that to fully grasp this statement is also to bring a question around much of our present evangelism. Our evangelism primarily revolves around telling “lost” people, whom the Bible actually calls dead not lost, that they need to make a decision of their will to choose Jesus. Without exploring this topic here, if the wills of the ancient Israelites did not have the capacity to choose good even in the face of the demonstrations on Mt. Sinai, what makes us think modern man’s will has the capacity to make a choice that brings salvation?
The Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount, the height of the gospel declaration, gives us insight into the operation and direction of the law in the New Testament. As quoted at the top, in Matthew 5:17, Jesus makes the bold claim that He has come to fulfill the law. Most of us read that merely in the sense that Jesus is ending the Mosaic law, but if you look at the Greek word for fulfill, which is “pleroo” you will notice the meaning includes the following: “to make something full, or fill it up, or render it full or complete.”
Jesus follows this in verse 18 to say that nothing will pass away until the law has been accomplished. In other words, the law was given for a purpose that has not yet been accomplished. What is that purpose? The purpose is to have a people set apart, or sanctified, unto God. The law was given towards that purpose, but it failed to accomplish it and thus God injected Himself into the process in the person of His Son in order that God’s law might be extended and come to its marvelous conclusion. Do we consider that God is looking for an accomplishment to His law, or are we so eager to loose ourselves from the Mosaic requirements that we fail to consider the great accomplishment of God’s law that Jesus desires? Saints, God has in mind something more grand and glorious than our liberation from a ceremonial law. His law is going to accomplish something of eternal significance.
Jesus continues from this statement to declare that the righteousness of the people must exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees (vs. 20). In other words, God is about to require a righteousness greater than those that best understood, best kept, and publicly contended for the Mosaic law. Now this created a very real problem for the people of God listening to Jesus. Not only was there no one who could obtain righteousness under the law, but now they find that God is going to require an even greater righteousness of the people.
Jesus then explains that statement by giving examples of the righteousness that God requires (vs. 21-32). He begins each shocking new example with the phrase, “you have heard that it was said,” clearly referencing the law, in which He makes examples of what we would consider to be “major sins.” In order to be perfectly clear, Jesus does not use the example of “small sins,” (as if there were such a thing) but rather he uses the blatant sins like murder and adultery so that no one will misunderstand the gravity of His message.
Jesus then continues to destroy every man’s hope for righteousness by looking at the most holy among then and declaring, “You have looked at a woman and become sexually aroused and that is the same as the adultery for which you would convict a brother.” He looks then to a religious leader and declares, “Your anger with a fellow Jew is the same act before God as the one who murders another.” The audience is now spell bound. What will Jesus say next? Their very hope of standing with God, the law, now that it has been expounded by Jesus has been found to be their greatest enemy.
Furthermore, Jesus is filling up and completing this law that it might come to God’s glorious conclusion, but in that filling up the requirement of the law is enlarged. Who will be able to stand before this new law? Understand though that this was entirely within the expectation of the people because of John Baptists’s ministry. John’s ministry had been, “repent for the ruler of God’s kingdom (the Messiah) is coming.” People responded to John and repented precisely because they wanted to cleanse their hearts before His appearing so that they would be numbered among the righteous and not the wicked when Messiah executed judgment. Now the people, already having trembling hearts, are sitting before Messiah Himself and He is enlarging the concept of righteousness beyond what they had already failed to keep.
What we miss is that Jesus is introducing the basis here for the New Testament law. We sometimes are so pre-occupied with the desire to be free of modes of worship and kosher foods that we fail to see that while Jesus did liberate us from the Mosaic Law, He also brought it to fullness and brought into place a complete law which we fail to examine or consider.
What is Apostolic?
December 18, 2008
I realize that title of this post is a little misleading as it is a question that cannot be answered in a single post. In fact, books have been written on this subject and I would propose that there are still books that need to be written on this subject. Up front I have to say that, as always, I highly recommend Art Katz’s classic Apostolic Foundations when seeking illumination on the apostolic church. So, while I cannot examine the subject in one post, I want to add a few thoughts to the discussion and perhaps even re-direct our common considerations of the apostolic and the prophetic.
I have to admit that recently I have become a little weary of the phrase “Apostolic and Prophetic.” It is probably because the phrase seems to have become yet another buzzword. At the moment it seems like everyone is posturing their ministries to make sure they are “Apostolic” or “Apostolically aligned,” and, while I am not criticizing for that, I have to wonder if we have lost something in the mix.
Most definitions of what is “apostolic” seem to revolve around leadership structures or functions and I believe this is where we go astray. For example, if someone leads a large enough group then they are apostolic or if they can plant another fellowship and send out individuals then they are considered apostolic. I believe it is fair to say that if we examined most of our present teaching and our actions around the words “apostolic and prophetic” it would revolve around authority structures or functions. The question I think we need to ask is what if that is not the essence of the apostolic and the prophetic? What if they are defined by something entirely difficult than a leadership role or a function? What if there is something entirely different to be demonstrated in these gifts that we are missing but is very necessary? Could it be that the very progress of the church is impaired for want of a correct understanding of these terms?
For those of you, like me, that get confused or wearisome of some of the apostolic and prophetic rhetoric, for a moment let’s lay aside all that we have previously known and examine this for a moment and see if God does not open up something entirely different. Continue Reading What is Apostolic? »
The Issue of Dispensational Thinking
December 2, 2008
My heart has been stirred lately on the issue of dispensationalism. Proponents of dispensationalism would argue that it has been taught in the Scriptures since the New Testament. For the sake of clarification, what we need to examine is more what we might call the effects of the dispensational theology that was initially formalized in the 19th century. Now many might wonder why it is significant to examine this issue. Others might point out that more recent dispensationalists seem to have moderated their position and perhaps corrected the errors of earlier dispensationalists. While that may be true, that is not the fundamental issue.
One of the crisises that may well be brewing in the church in America is that the average churchgoer has little appetite for theology. Now, lest you think I am promoting intellectually driven seminaries (some would call them “cemeteries”) or large, dusty books written by well educated men debating nuances of doctrine let me explain myself. Theology is simply the study of God. It is what we believe about God. Now, the core essence of God is perceived by the Spirit and transcends human understanding. It is important that we understand that, or we will be given to boxing God into human models of understanding. With that being said, God gave us a capacity to think and to know. This capacity is modeled after His capacity because we are made in His image and yet it is far beneath His capacity.
While this capacity must necessarily operate below the revelation of God’s Spirit to man’s spirit, it is still a vital part of our makeup. Because of this it is vitally important how and what we think about God. When we do not think rightly about God, it causes great loss to the believer and ultimately the church. We must become very jealous for the issue of theology. We must always be careful not to reduce God to diagrams and systems of theology that man can comprehend, and we must remain ever vigilant of a concept of God that is man derived and man comprehended. With those proper guardians watching over our heart, we must then make every effort to allow God to reveal Himself to us that we might think great thoughts about Him. We must also be ruthless in discerning and rejecting thoughts and ideas about God that are untrue. These ideas can taint the lens through which we view the world causing us to miss God’s revelation and fall into error.
Now with that being said, let me set a few caveats in place. Dispensationalism, like any other movement or doctrine, does exist across a wide spectrum. An examination of every particular flavor of it is certainly beyond the scope of a blog post, so let it suffice to say that we will examine specific effects of the results of dispensationalism thinking rather than examining every individual dispensational tenet. I am not attempting to paint all dispensationalists as heretics with a single broad stroke, but rather want to examine specific ideas that have been associated with or have come as a result of various streams of dispensational thought.
I also acknowledge up front that I am not an expert in dispensational theology, so theologians of that persuasion may have addressed some of the issues that I raise; however my primary concern over specific tenets of doctrine is the effect of this way of thinking on believers at large. So, again, I am dealing with the effects of ideas and ways of thinking over specific beliefs and have no desire to paint a broad stroke of “heresy” on anyone. In that spirit, just because we see some dangerous ideas, let us not label everyone from here on that uses the word “dispensation” as a heretic. Let’s continue in Christian love and charity contending for proper ideas and thoughts about God, but not allowing ourselves to execute improper judgment on individuals simply because of the use of a single word or phrase. With these warnings and caveats out of the way, let’s now examine the effects of dispensational thinking. Continue Reading The Issue of Dispensational Thinking »
Two Powerful Quotes
December 1, 2008
While working on a new post, I came across two powerful quotes I wanted to pass along. Both are worth some time and consideration. Thanks to Becky over at IHOP for posting these.
First from John Piper, Hunger for God, p. 14 -
The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of the triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:18-20). The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.
The Second from Allen Hood, The Excellencies of Christ -
Satan the adversary, the ‘bringer of light,’ opposes the advances of the Gospel primarily through the realm of ideas and deception. The object of his deception and the subject matter of his deception is who? It is Jesus.
That is why for the first four-hundred years the Church fought vigorously for the Person of Christ, to the shedding of blood to the laying down of their life. There is a reason why they could not worship at the emperor’s altar. Beloved, if Jesus is just a good teacher, if He just shows you the way to God, then they can easily worship at the altar of the emperor. Yet hundreds and hundreds of thousands of believers year after year after year were led to the lions, were filleted alive, were skinned alive, were run through, were crucified upside down, were hung on crosses, they were burned and set on fire. Why?
Because He is not optional. He is the unique, supreme, revelation of the Living God. When you have Him you have it all. When you do not, you do not. Satan will oppose that revelation over everything, and he will do it through the most popular polished people on the globe. He does not mind feeding the poor. He minds the testimony of Jesus who is the only King who will return and set the poor truly free… [The testimony of Jesus Christ] is the subject matter that will enflame our hearts and set us on fire and make us fearless before the most powerful men and women of the earth.
The Prophet’s Cosmic View
November 19, 2008
Bryan Purtle wrote an excellent article on the Prophet’s Cosmic view. We desperately need this kind of understanding so that we might have a more complete picture of the prophet and what God desires. Take a few minutes and read it. It’s worth the time to let God speak to your heart on a issue that is vital in our day and time. We desperately need to recover and demonstrate this reality.
http://pilgrimagetozion.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/the-prophets-cosmic-view/
Powerful Message from Abortion Survivor
November 12, 2008
This is an excellent message from the mildly handicapped abortion survivor Gianna Jessen. It is one of the most striking presentations against abortion that you will ever hear. That being said, there are other elements here to consider. In this address she is speaking at Queen’s Hall, Parliment House in Victoria, Australia. In other words, this is not a church it is a public forum. No doubt many in the audience are hostile to her views. Her topic was abortion and she spoke the day before a debate on decriminalizing abortion in the province. However, beyond her impassioned plea for abortion, she demonstrates something that really moves my heart. Though abortion is her topic, she utilizes the opportunity to make confrontational statements that engage the conscience with regard to the issue of Christ and human morality. Without using these specific words, she calls them to the fact that their very humanity demands Christian morality.
In an age where, sadly, the church is losing young people at a rate that will threaten its very survival without some sort of awakening, she is a powerful example of how a young person can use their testimony and their gift to confront men with the gospel. As I mentioned, the setting is not a church and she’s not a preacher, but I dare say she exposes the heart more in these 15 minutes than most preachers in America do in their 45 minutes on Sunday. Though my words are awkward in this post, I hope you can see what I’m driving at. My heart burns for a generation that will present an authentic witness to the earth of Jesus. They will be preachers that confront men and drive the wedge of Christianity right into their consciences with no regard for the superficial civility of society that embraces barbarisms such as abortion. As you watch this brief message, please cry out with me that God would give us 10,000 Giannas who do not just address abortion, but serve as prophets to men’s souls and are not ashamed of the issue of Jesus, the most divisive issue in history.
Part 1
Part 2
Economic Crash Course
November 4, 2008
No doubt the economy is one of the biggest topics around right now. That being said, what is startling is how little the average American really knows about our economic system and how it really works. This was startlingly obvious recently when the bailout bills were being debated. The reality is that if the average citizen really understood what the nation was facing, they would be terrified. That terror would in turn lead them to alter their lifestyle and this lifestyle subsequently would even further negatively affect the system due to its inherent flaws. That leaves us with a system that is fatally flawed being run by power brokers who have a massive investment is maintaining the status quo for as long as possible. Tragically, this is terribly irresponsible. We are like those on the Titanic that are swaying to the music on the deck rather than saving those in the icy waters on the hope that we will be dead and gone before the ship sinks and forces us into the cold, icy waters. I believe our current refusal to deal with these issues is criminal with regard to what we are going to be leaving our children. Sadly, politicians and power brokers do not communicate the reality of things because they know they cannot get elected on that platform, and apparently no one has the leadership and character to stand up to the nation and tell us that we need to make some hard decisions and make some sacrifices or risk a certain catastrophe.
If nothing else, the year 2008 has shown the cracks in our economic foundations. Sure, many will tell us that it is patched, but it like applying a patch to the Titanic. We are still steadily taking on a lot of water. Do not believe that this is limited to Wall Street either because Wall Street and Main Street have become inseparably joined. If we are going to be leaders, as believers and as citizens we must educate ourselves about the risks our economy faces and the immense challenges that are coming. We must do this to prepare ourselves and our families. We must be wise and prepared for the days ahead. We do not prepare out of fear, but out of sobriety that we might be prepared when the financial system that has been built by the ingenuity and greed of man begins to collapse. How tragic it will be if believers are swallowed in the collapse rather than being lighthouses that can rescue their neighbors and demonstrate a life established on eternal realities!
With this in mind, I want to offer an excellent tool to educate yourself. Chris Martenson has put together a free video class that explains both how our economic system works and the challenges it faces in the years ahead. He is not alarmist, nor is it full of propaganda. He remains serious and let upbeat and stays very factual. He uses easy to understand language so that you can clearly understand what is going on. In fact, if you and your children understand his material, you will know more about economics than the vast amount of Americans and you will be well prepared for the days to come. His class is also broken up into short topics and videos (3-20 minutes in length) to make it easy to view a little each day and still grasp the material. For the sake of yourself and your family, please view this material and pass it along to other believers that we might be prepared for the days to come.
Here’s the link to his presentation:
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crash-course/chapter-1-three-beliefs
The End of the Bull
September 30, 2008
In a prayer meeting recently, a parable came to me. Let me be clear that this is not a prophecy, but merely a parable. Recently, I was considering the golden calf that Israelites worshiped in the desert. This calf provides a picture that could be very significant to us in our day. To best understand what follows, before you proceed you must read Exodus 32.
To begin with, let’s make a few observations about the worship of the calf. First note that Moses was in the place of prayer and fasting upon the hill in the wilderness when the itching for the calf began. Note also that Moses was receiving the Law, or the requirements of God when the people became restless and demanded an idol. Note also that this calf was setup by the priesthood. A foreign priesthood did not come in, but rather it was Aaron who led the construction of this calf when the mood of the people called for a false god. Note that once Aaron setup the calf, he did not lead the people away to another god, but rather declared the calf to be the god that lead them out of Egypt. In other words, he did not replace God, he merely redefined Him. Note also that worship to the calf included many of Israel’s religious practices such as burnt offerings and peace offerings, but that the worship focused on sensual pleasures and frivolity. Let’s take a look here because I believe these events form a parallel and a parable for what is taking place in the nation at this moment. Continue Reading The End of the Bull »
Are you Jealous?
September 5, 2008
I have been deeply moved the last few days over the issue of Jealousy for the Lord and for His name. Are we truly jealous for the name “Jesus” and the demonstration that are attributed to His name? As the world continues to use that precious name as nothing more than an expletive and ministers use it for their own purposes, I wonder if we are truly jealous for His name or if we have slowly become desensitized to it all. Recently I have watched some videos of various ministers and ministries that have simply made my heart sick. The antics on stage, if not blasphemy, were probably as close as you can get and yet the crowd loved it. In all of this I wondered, where are those that are jealous for the Lord and for His name? As I noticed the crowd laughing and taking it all in, I wondered where are those jealous for the bride? I mean this is Jesus’ wife we are talking about and these men are making a spectacle of the Lord before His own bride and she is drinking it all in. In a dream I had recently there was both a deep anger and a deep weeping over things.
Something within is burning and asking the deep question, are we not jealous for Him? I understand there are differences in ministry styles, personalities, and giftings and we have to give grace to different members of the body, but I was observing things that were clearly demeaning to the Lord and His people and they were being opening attributed to the Lord and His Spirit. They were allowing the Lord, His name, and His Spirit to be demeaned and mocked by men claiming to be ministers. Where are those who will stand and separate the holy from the profance? Where is the holy jealousy that caused Jesus to overturn money tables?
As I considered this issue of jealousy, I began considering what a pure and holy jealousy really is. After all, many are “jealous for the Lord,” but what they often mean is that they are jealous for their ministries, or their own perception of how things should be. Often “jealousy for the Lord” is really the desire to criticise and tear down those you do not agree with. Seeing then as jealousy for the Lord is an urgent need in our time and, at the same time, there is much jealousy that is not truly jealousy for the Lord, how are we to discern the difference? Continue Reading Are you Jealous? »