You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2009.
This title of a question and an answer has been on my mind of late, as I’ve suffered a quadriceps injury and the need to have an unrelated foot surgery, on top of spring sickness – maybe some form of spring fever – and numerous time constraints and relational constraints from various people and tasks to complete. All these things are taking place while I’m working on my commentary on the book of Romans.
This Sunday marks the Lord’s Day of the new covenant, just like every other Sunday. This is the day in which we come together as the church to offer our voices and our actions of worship to the Lord, our words as the tithes of our mouths. God has made this first day, the Lord’s Day, a special day because of the resurrection grace of His Son Jesus. God’s call and command is that we gather together as a peculiar people, an uncommon people, in the name of Christ and sing praises to God our Father because of the resurrection and fruitful grace of God the Son.
What do you do if you’re single and the one you want to fall in love with becomes the one who betrays you with condemning words? This is a question and a test of faith that I have learned to ask as a single man out of the Psalms with the Lord. Singleness for men and women can be a very treacherous path. The man or woman you want to marry could be the best soul mate of all possible choices. Or he or she could rob you of all life and leave you for dead.
One lesson from the book of John that I keep close at hand with me as a test of faith is this: When you encounter places where men and women cut sharply into each other with biting words and self-righteous gossip, do you join in the fun, as it were? Or do you look to avoid the situation and keep your tongue bridled with the Lord? I think this is a good test of faith for upholding friendships and fellowships between Christian men and women, because the sad reality is that men and women often divide against each other by their fallen tongues.
Last Friday evening I finished up the book of Nahum as one of my minor prophet Old Testament studies. And one lesson from Nahum stood out in particular on my mind: Israel’s bearing of arms to defeat the pagan city of Israel’s captivity, and Israel’s instruction from the LORD for anticipating future captivity from paganism and for fighting this paganism at the final judgment.
Over the past couple of days, I came to the conclusion in spiritual communion with the Lord that I was not to continue work on the previously mentioned Easter article on the expiation of Christ, but to continue work on my commentary on Romans. Recently developed illnesses and obstacles have proven to shape that decision for me. I don’t consider the decision a bad one. Nor do I consider the decision the result of bad planning (I had been looking for a week or two to set aside for writing the article). Rather, I consider the decision a result of sitting with the Lord in the inscribed Word and trusting the Lord’s guiding hand over all things of my life, even illnesses and obstacles, in such a way that if plans don’t work out the way I thought they would, I continue following the Lord.
True following of Christ involves seeing Jesus not only as the true and better Priest of sinners, the Priest who cleanses sinners from the power of spiritual leprosy, this sin and our love of sin that grows throughout our bodies, but also seeing Jesus as the Chief Shepherd and King who reigns over the power of sin in our lives at the cross, and who leads us to communion with Himself, even the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We have to delight in Jesus’ washing of our spiritual sickness of sin in such a way that even though we know sin in our lives, and we know its growth in our lives, we know Jesus’ atonement for our lives, and we rejoice in His name. And we have to delight in Jesus’ direction for our lives, that we turn away from our sin, its entangling power of self-worship and self-righteousness, and we come to delight in spiritual communion with the Lord, giving glory to the triune God who reigns over His people from first to last.
I was reading the first book of Chronicles for my quiet time study yesterday morning, and a particular passage of the genealogies struck me, about one of the parents of the genealogies longing for an Egyptian servant to be the parent of Jewish children in place of the Jewish parent. The passage struck me as a reminder of Abram’s wife Sarai and her desire to have a son Ishmael through Hagar instead of trusting in the LORD who dwelled with Abram and his family. And the passage also struck me about Israel’s desire to have Egypt as its true home in place of God, in Israel’s complaint about God’s deliverance power being a burden to them when compared with the dainties of Egypt’s paradise.
If we are to handle the church based on Jesus’ direction, we should really look at Jesus’ ministry for sinners in two parts: Jesus’ suffering service for winning sinners to His atoning grace from the secular city, and Jesus’ gathering of sinners as new believers in His name into the church, a unique body set apart from the city. As sinners, we want to glamorize ourselves in good things apart from God. The correct view of sin from Scripture is not that we simply engage in bad things like pornography or sailor talk. The reality is we take the good things of life, like innovative fashion or flashy art or major metropolitan enterprise, and use them as idols, real substitute gods, apart from the true God.
Four Major Ramifications of the Gospel: Bondservant Humility, Powerful Grace, Communicative Grace, and Spiritual Maturity for Discipleship
March 22, 2009 in "Disciplina Nostra" Bible Commentaries: "The Gospel Born From Above: A Commentary On The Book Of Romans For Skeptics, Muslims, And The Church", Reading the Bible and reading secular culture, Recreation: Culture-conscious and grace-driven | Tags: a.w. pink, bondservice in Christ, communion, commuting, discipleship, freedom of conscience, globalization, john dick, john newton, muslims, penal substitution, prayer, repentance, skeptics, telecommunications, the book of romans, urban shifts | 2 comments
There are four major ramifications, very earth-shattering and life-changing and atonement-liberating potentialities, of the Gospel message that the apostle Paul lays out in the beginning words to the book of Romans for his students. These four ramifications of the Gospel are: bondservant humility, powerful grace, communicative grace, and spiritual maturity for discipleship.
Read the rest of this entry »