Thou Hast Pleaded the Causes of My Soul

By / Nov 20

“O Lord, thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul.”
Lamentations 3:58

Observe how positively the prophet speaks. He doth not say, “I hope, I trust, I sometimes think, that God hath pleaded the causes of my soul;” but he speaks of it as a matter of fact not to be disputed. “Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul.” Let us, by the aid of the gracious Comforter, shake off those doubts and fears which so much mar our peace and comfort. Be this our prayer, that we may have done with the harsh croaking voice of surmise and suspicion, and may be able to speak with the clear, melodious voice of full assurance. Notice how gratefully the prophet speaks, ascribing all the glory to God alone! You perceive there is not a word concerning himself or his own pleadings. He doth not ascribe his deliverance in any measure to any man, much less to his own merit; but it is “thou”–“O Lord, thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; thou hast redeemed my life.” A grateful spirit should ever be cultivated by the Christian; and especially after deliverances we should prepare a song for our God. Earth should be a temple filled with the songs of grateful saints, and every day should be a censor smoking with the sweet incense of thanksgiving. How joyful Jeremiah seems to be while he records the Lord’s mercy. How triumphantly he lifts up the strain! He has been in the low dungeon, and is even now no other than the weeping prophet; and yet in the very book which is called “Lamentations,” clear as the song of Miriam when she dashed her fingers against the tabor, shrill as the note of Deborah when she met Barak with shouts of victory, we hear the voice of Jeremy going up to heaven–“Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; thou hast redeemed my life.” O children of God, seek after a vital experience of the Lord’s lovingkindness, and when you have it, speak positively of it; sing gratefully; shout triumphantly.



Christine Hoover on What the Average Churchgoer Doesn’t Understand About Their Pastor

By / Nov 19

What does the average churchgoer not understand about their pastor?



Why Honesty is Key to Gospel-Centeredness

By / Nov 19

Paul puts it bluntly in Romans 3:22-23:

 For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God

That’s so offensive to our well put-together ideas of ourselves, isn’t it? All have sinned (past tense) and fall short of the glory of God (present tense). We are all liable to divine judgment.

A proper understanding of sin is necessary for a proper understanding of the gospel. The gospel is good news, but it includes bad news. It tells us that without the Triune God’s intervention, we have no hope of heaven. We have no righteousness on our own.

The gospel makes us really honest people. We live in a country that likes to look good. From our dress to our cars to our homes, we’re all very Instagramable. But the gospel takes the filter off. It shows us for who we really are. And when it does, we have a choice to make. We can choose either to be impressive or to be known. What will we choose? In a gospel-centered church, where the risen Christ’s good news is ever-present, we can take a risk of being known. We can trust Jesus with our sin, and we can trust his people to help us find forgiveness and freedom. The gospel says we aren’t impressive, and that’s embarrassing. But the gospel also says we’re known deeper than we thought possible, and loved for Christ’s sake. When we step inside that circle of honesty with Jesus, we actually become far more impressive than the best of this world. We radiate with the glory of Jesus.

If we are to build and maintain gospel-centered churches, we must allow the gospel to make us honest people. Why? Because total honesty is the only way we grow. Only when we get honest with our sins and struggles will we find help and freedom and forgiveness. Don’t we all want that? Don’t we know deep down that we’re just not okay? If we’ll just admit that and come to Jesus, we will find in him a friend who understands. He is a faithful and merciful high priest in the service of God. He is for you even when you can’t be for yourself. He has covered your sins and failures by his blood. And all he’s asking us to do is walk out in his light, to trust him with all of our life, and to find cleansing by his blood.

It’s risky to live inside a gospel-centered church because it means we don’t set the rules. We can’t limit God. He can go to places in our heart that we’d be fine never entering. But what God wants for us is total renewal, and you can’t get there without him messing with you, opening you up, knocking you around a bit.

C.S. Lewis put it well.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

When we allow God inside, we become new people. We stop comparing ourselves to others. We love to make comparisons and come out on top, don’t we? But God says there is no distinction between us and others. God sees not as we see. Before God, we all stand condemned. God sees not how we compare to another sinner. God sees how we compare to him. And before that holy standard, we all fail.

We think comparison makes us winners. But in God’s eyes, it proves we’re losers because it proves we’re self-justifiers, unwilling to trust his justification by Christ. We’re using others to make us feel better, to give ourselves a boost. That kind of attitude—which we’re all prone to—is a red flag that we’re not trusting the gospel. We’re not taking our sin seriously. We take some sin seriously, but only those we don’t struggle with.

The Devil loves for us to live like that—comparing ourselves to others, always coming out ahead. If he can get us to do that, he can keep us far from God and the gospel. One way we can fail to be a gospel-centered church is by failing to take our personal sins seriously. We can preach the gospel, teach the gospel, share the gospel, but if we fail to take our personal sins seriously, bringing them to the throne of grace for forgiveness, we will say we have a gospel-centered church that even the Devil himself can love. We will say we trust Christ while avoiding him.

But if we get honest with ourselves and stay honest with ourselves about our real need, about our real sin, about our real problem of unrighteousness in our self, we have a chance at maintaining and cultivating a gospel-centered church. God loves a humble people.

Ray Ortlund at Immanuel Church taught me that Isaiah 57:15 says God lives in two places: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit.” He’s way up high where we can’t go, and way down low where we can go. But he doesn’t live in the middle, where okayness is the status quo. A church filled with people who know they’re sinners is a place where God abides, where his gospel shines brighter than anything else. As pastor Tim Keller says, “The church is not a museum for pristine saints, but a hospital ward for broken sinners.”

Making ourselves feel better than others doesn’t free us. What frees us is letting Christ give us his righteousness. When God gathers a group of people and those people open their hearts before him and, by his grace, keep them open, nothing about anybody surprises us anymore. We realize we’re one before the cross of Christ—sinners in need of a savior.

 

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at thingsofthesort.com. 



A Reflection on Kindness from Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See

By / Nov 18

Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See promises a story that “illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.” This intricate work of historical fiction delivers on that promise and provides a compelling journey for any reader; but for the Christian, I believe it offers enduring lessons about kindness.

Kindness transforms us.

In January of 1941 in Saint-Malo, a young French girl named Marie-Laure is unable to get herself out of bed. Her circumstances weigh so heavy even simple tasks prove impossible:

She becomes unreachable, sullen. She does not bathe, does not warm herself by the kitchen fire, ceases to ask if she can go outdoors. She hardly eats.

Like others throughout the book, the cruelty of the world threatens to crush her.

The cook and maid of the Saint-Malo home, Madame Manec, sees this and refuses to watch her suffer alone any longer. Though it is not her responsibility, she takes Marie-Laure out of the house and down to the Breton coastline. As her lungs fill with crisp sea air and her curious fingers trace the frames of surrounding barnacles, Marie-Laure slowly comes back to life.

Madame Manec risks going out of her home during wartime to stand on a cold beach for three hours so a child not her own can feel again. This is kindness: to love another selflessly and without expectation of return.

Reading simple and profound acts of benevolence from All the Light We Cannot See during my own season of depression comforted me. Those who have tasted the bitterness of life know the sweetness of a hand reaching out through the fog of suffering. In many ways, these fictional glimmers of goodness lifted my weary chin to gaze at the transformational kindness of Jesus.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is for the despondent. It is right for our hearts to break when relationships are severed; for sobs to wrack our bodies when death steals the life of one we loved; for us to acknowledge the sheer wrongness of pain’s existence.

We could have been left in the despondent darkness of sin, but God in his lovingkindness sent Jesus to be the light of the world that those who believe in him may be saved.[1] Tasting communion upon our lips regularly reminds us of this love: the body of Christ broken for us, and the blood of Christ shed for us. By Christ’s ultimate act of kindness in laying down his life for us on the cross, we are given new life.

Though it is right for us to recognize the effects of sin, we cannot stay chained by doubt or trapped in despondency, lest we get so caught in looking to ourselves we forget to behold the kindness of the Lord.[2] The Spirit of God graciously helps us in this endeavor: melting our sorrows with the promise of who God is as revealed in General and Specific Revelation.[3] Standing by the measureless sea of God’s grace, our hearts are no longer embittered by this world, but instead long to gift the kindness we’ve been shown in Christ.

Kindness transforms the world.

What greater kindness can we offer a broken world than to guide it to Jesus? As ambassadors of the Kingdom of light, we are entrusted with caring for believers that they may be comforted and unbelievers that they may be saved.

Believer, if you have been transformed by the kindness of Jesus it is your responsibility to demonstrate kindness to others—no matter the cost.

Nestled between the pages of Marie-Laure’s story of pain and healing is a demonstration of courageous compassion from a boy attending a Nazi school. His decision to acknowledge the humanity of another person has devastating consequences for his own life, but the boy still chooses to consider them more significant than himself.

In times of war, famine, and trial, how often is kindness the first thing to go? It is easy to be unkind in the face of difficulty. We see it every day: people choosing to wield their tongues as weapons or sacrificing character while claiming righteousness. Yet true strength is not found in the gritting of teeth or clenching of fists, but in the willingness to lay down at the foot of the cross and trust God as we choose the course of kindness. When the flesh tempts us to raise our voice in justification, the kindness of Jesus whispers for us to die to ourselves and embrace meekness. This kind of response takes humility.

The humility of Christ has direct implications for our kindness to one another. After the Apostle Paul implores the church at Philippi to love others in light of Christ’s willingness to humble himself in love, he gives this command:

Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world…[4]

Kindness looks different from the rest of the world. Those who do not know Christ may be blind to the beauty of the gospel, but our choice to demonstrate unmerited kindness may be the very thing God uses to pull them into the light. Your decision to speak up for the forgotten, dwell with the outcast, or sit silently with the sufferer may cast the first rays of gospel warmth into a life clouded by shadows of death.

My prayer for us as believers is for us to cherish kindness as we ought. Doing so will enable us to more earnestly treasure God and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, help fellow broken humans awaken to all the light they cannot see.

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God Loves Your Desire for Marriage

By / Nov 18

We’d had this conversation before, three times in the previous seven months. I knew exactly what he was going to say because I’d heard it before. You did everything right in your pursuit of her. You’re a godly guy. You are not the problem here. Yet somehow not even the encouragement of the man I trust most could stop my tears.

The consistent pattern of rejection was beginning to wear on me. It still does, even long past this conversation with my mentor. Getting past a second date—let alone actually winning a girl’s heart—increasingly feels like a distance I’ll never be able to cover. Insecurities and fears have plagued me. Perhaps I’m just unattractive and no amount of godliness can make up for that. Perhaps I’m single because God is upset with my dream of being a husband. Perhaps there’s another reason. I’ve stopped asking these questions, though, because I’ve realized that even answers would not change my longing for marriage.

Perhaps this is you. There’s no unrepentant sin in your life, but you still can’t escape the feeling you’re being disciplined. You remain steadfast in prayer because you’re not willing to go around God to get married, but those prayers seem to fall on deaf ears. You’ve followed every piece of advice in Just Do Something, but risk brings ruin more than rejoicing. You know better than to read God’s providence, but still the question haunts you: Does my desire to get married disappoint God?

As if your own doubts weren’t enough, your well-meaning friends offer quick fixes that feel more like subtle rebukes than gentle encouragements. They remind you of the benefits of singleness and the hardships of married life. They quote 1 Corinthians 7 and note how much time you have to serve the Lord. They insist that God takes pleasure in those who are content with their singleness. So you beg God to dampen your desire, hoping that if he won’t grant you marriage, he’ll at least grant you contentment. But he never does. You’ve grown weary of law and long for someone to give you gospel.

If this is you, if your longing for marriage feels like something to be fixed more than embraced, if you are desperate for some indication that God is not disappointed in you, if you’ve grown weary of law, let me offer you a release:

You can rest.

You can rest because God is pleased with you. And not just with you. He’s pleased with your desire for marriage. When Adam greets his wife with a love song, God does not condemn him. When Solomon tells his readers that a wife is a good thing, God does not add an asterisk. When Paul calls marriage a picture of heaven, God does not qualify the line by reminding us that singleness is better. God loves marriage.

And more than that, God loves you. He loved you enough to send his Son to die for you. To atone for every sin you’ve ever committed. To prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is one hundred percent for you. Because of this, there is not a morning you wake up into the condemnation of the Father. And there is not a night that you lay down into his disappointment. Not a millisecond passes in your day where his smile is not on you.

And this love is for the real you. The you who wishes you weren’t so romantic. The you who wonders if you’ve exhausted God’s patience by asking yet again for comfort in the latest rejection. The you who is afraid you’ll never be attractive enough. That is the you God loves. That is the you he is pleased with.

So when you come to God asking for a spouse for the sixth time this week, God does not lecture you on how to steward your singleness well. He does not pause to listen only after reminding you how content you ought to be. He hears your prayers. He sees your desires. And he loves them.

Rest in this.

Enjoy the desire he has given you. Let go of the worry that he would be pleased with you if you could just manage to be more content. Set down the burden of trying to earn his approval. Christ has already borne that weight so you don’t have to.

I don’t know your situation. I don’t know if you’ve lost count of how many times you’ve been rejected. I don’t know if the weight of your singleness feels heavier than anything else in your life. I don’t know if the ill-informed accusation of idolatry has left you feeling condemned or guilty. But I do know this: God is pleased with your desire for marriage.

So to you who have no answers and see no end in sight, to you who feel overwhelmed with the fear of never being enough, to you who wonder if the pain of rejection and loneliness will ever end:

God sees your desire for marriage.

He sees it when no one else sees it.

And he loves it.



Knowing You’re In

By / Nov 17

There was a troubled look on the student’s face as I finished my talk. “I believe that Christ is who He says He is,” he stated, “but I just don’t know if I am really a Christian. What if I’m deceiving myself?”

The question is a reasonable. After all, God put up a huge billboard in 1 Corinthians 6:9 that says, “Do not be deceived!”

So, how do you know you’re a Christian?

First be sure that you understand the basics. Do you believe that Jesus is God? Do you believe that He came to the earth to deliver sinful people from the consequences and power of their sin? Do you believe that Christ lived a perfect life and then died on the cross to pay the penalty that you deserved to pay before a holy God?

Do you believe that He was raised from the dead and has overcome the power of sin and death? And have you, to the best of your knowledge, placed your entire trust in Christ alone as your only way of salvation? Have you rejected the selfish life you have now come to despise? Then you have the basics and may well be a true believer.

In addition to all this, God says that He has given you His Holy Spirit to help you know for sure that you are in the family and truly forgiven. He says, “By this we know that we abide in Him, because He has given us of His Spirit” (1 John 3:13).

God says in Ephesians 1:13-14 that the Holy Spirit is a “deposit guaranteeing the future inheritance.” Like the down-payment on a car or house or college education, the Holy Spirit in you is a pledge that the future with Him will be there as He promised. And this deposit of the Spirit is placed in you by the One who cannot lie.

The Holy Spirit helps you know you’re an authentic Christian in two ways. First, the Bible says that He produces “fruit” in us.

It’s a preposterous idea, but just imagine Michael Jordan (the pre-comeback Jordan) inside your skin when you shoot hoops. You look like you’ve always looked on the outside, but something is coming out of you that nobody has seen there before.

When Christ enters the life through the Holy Spirit, He makes you noticeably different. This word “fruit” is just a way of saying that Christ in you is now working through your own personality in some unique and powerful ways.

When I lived in Orlando, I grew some orange trees in my back yard. They were pitiful and the fruit was, well…not so appetizing. But I could tell I had an orange tree and not a pecan tree. A tree is known by its fruit; even if it is not perfect fruit.

In Galatians 5: 22-23, the Bible describes the fruit of the Holy Spirit as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

Notice that the first fruit is love. Though you cannot see it clearly in our English translations, the passage actually implies that the entire cluster of fruit is about love in its many forms. A true Christian loves others, and shows that love by his acts of kindness, goodness, patience, and respect toward them. It is a giving and forgiving kind of love—even toward parents, teachers, athletic opponents, and enemies.

Love is no small matter. Actually, it is the most often repeated indicator that a person is a true Christian. For instance, in 1 John 4: 7-8 the Bible says, “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

Do you have this God-given love for others? If so, you have reason to believe that you are a true Christian. But if there is no fruit of love, then you have good reason to believe that you are not yet a true child of God. The fruit tells the truth.

But there is a second way that the Holy Spirit helps us know we are in. In Romans 8: 15 we read that the Spirit causes us to “cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’” The word, “Abba” is like “daddy.” This means that the Spirit inside of true Christians is the One that causes us to want to be with God, to know Him well, and to talk to Him as our Father.

In John 3:19-20, Jesus said that non-believers actually run from the Light. But when the Spirit comes you have new desires. You want to know God and to communicate with Him like you do with someone you really care about.

If you have this desire to love God, you ought to be encouraged that you are in the family. But if you can remain apathetic over a long period of time, you have good reason to question if you are a true Christian. Apathy, in fact, is just the quiet form of rebellion.

It is not unusual for you to have doubts from time to time, especially when you are weak in your faith. But when you have those doubts you should be serious about finding out the truth. Too much is at stake.

As a friend of mine said, “Doubts never send anyone to hell, but deception always does.”

 

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published at ccwtoday.org



Episode 144: When You’re Not Feeling It

By / Nov 17

On this episode of the FTC Podcast, Jared Wilson and Ronni Kurtz those discouraging or even depressing seasons of ministry when pastors are tempted to phone it in, fake it until they make it, or even quit altogether.



Good News, Ordinary Pastor! You Don’t Need a Winning Personality

By / Nov 16

All men are created equal. No two men are equally created. On one hand, all people are created in God’s image and every believer enjoys full status as God’s adopted child in union with Christ. On the other hand, our sovereign Creator never employs a single-use template of individuality when designing each of us.

We don’t live long on this earth before we are stung by the sheer “unfairness” of such divinely ordered differentiation. At an early age we come to envy the superior strength, height, speed, or appearance of another boy. It takes longer, but the realization dawns soon enough that we are not as mentally astute, gregarious, witty, or charismatic as some of our peers.

In time such insights inform our self-assessment of pastoral capacity. First, I discern that God did not endow me with the most winning personality. Then I perceive that my personality limits the effectiveness of my ministry as an under-shepherd of God’s flock. I don’t want it to, but it does, and will continue to do so. For us duller types, this realization is a sting that keeps on stinging.

You naturally attain such insight by comparing yourself with more gifted pastors. This reality also slaps you in the face as members of your flock inform you by various ways and means that your personality does not compare favorably with other pastors they have known, or know about, or imagine they know about. They tell you in ways overt and covert that if only you had a more winsome personality the church would thrive or thrive more. Though hard to receive, you know such critique is not entirely devoid of truth. Hey, sometimes you even find yourself boring!

The good news for the unspectacular pastor is this: “winning personality” is not found in the list of pastoral qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 or Titus 1. What is writ large over those passages is character not charisma, faithfulness not magnetism, love for God’s people not an alluring persona. Yes, you must earn the flock’s trust. They must know that you are for them and steadfastly love them. It is not essential, however, that they find you charming, hilarious, dashing, or uniquely winsome. It’s less important that they want to hang out with you. It’s of utmost importance that they know you love God and that with warm zeal and welcoming invitation you long for them to follow Jesus with you all the way to glory (Col 1:28-29).

That said, how should we duller types respond to the debilitating effects of our prosaic constitutions?

First, rejoice!

Be happy, dull guy! God made you with sovereign purpose and fitted you with all the gifts necessary to fulfill any ministry he assigns to you. Might not a more charismatic man do a better job shepherding the flock you oversee? Only if the Chief Shepherd assigns that task to him. If Christ has commissioned you to shepherd a particular flock, rest in his sovereign purposes and faithfully lead that flock with all the love and skill God grants you. Refuse to cast envious eyes on the success of a more winsome shepherd. Weed jealousy from your soul. Stay focused on your standing in Christ. Fulfill the stewardship he has entrusted to you.

Second, recognize that pastors with winning personalities face temptations we duller types seldom do.

While unspectacular pastors tend to struggle with envy or self-pity, those with outsized personalities tend to struggle with prideful self-dependence and a dismissive spirit toward average souls. While they attract more enchanted followers, they also tend to leave more wounded sheep in their wake. Such observations are of scant consolation to those of us who would happily lug about the burden of a heavier backpack of charisma, yet there is grace to celebrate wherever we are spared temptation.

Third, refuse to settle.

We duller types must not settle for pedestrian personalities. As you attend your heart, continue to analyze whether any aspect of your humdrum persona is rooted in laziness, selfishness, ingratitude, the fear of man, self-pity, a lack of love for others, or the like. If you are actively rooting out sin and progressing in Christlikeness, your persona will certainly improve. Don’t settle. Keeping growing.

Fourth, learn to trust the power of Word and Spirit to accomplish what a winning personality never could.

There are some freakishly gifted pastors out there whose personalities serve like a lamp to bugs on a summer night. But remember that while their winsomeness may attract more attention and open more doors of opportunity than you will ever experience, their gifting is incapable of effecting sanctification in the lives of Christ’s flock. The church is formed and purified by Word and Spirit alone. So preach the Word persistently and faithfully. Depend upon the Spirit to save and sanctify souls, remembering McCheyne’s maxim: “It is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus. A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hand of God” (R. M. McCheyne to Dan Edwards, Oct 2, 1840).

Ordinary pastors have a unique privilege to revel in the truth that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world . . . so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor 1:27-29). We duller ones can uniquely revel in the truth that we hold the treasure of the gospel “in jars of clay” so as “to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Cor 4:7). That, ordinary pastor, is your glory: to see God work his surpassing power in and through your ministry despite your clay-pot-like weaknesses, or even because of them.

The Spirit uses ordinary means of grace to accomplish extraordinary works, and Christ uses ordinary stewards of that grace to broker extraordinary influence for his kingdom. Such lasting achievement is never effected by the power of one’s personality. Ever. It is effected only by the power of the living God to save and transform souls. Before his eternal throne, and in his glorious presence, we will boast only of him. Forever.

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared at the 9Marks blog and is used with permission.



Mission in the New Testament

By / Nov 16

What is mission? People may talk about their “mission in life.” Or, someone may go on an important mission, whether a diplomat to rescue a hostage, an astronaut to travel to outer space, or an evangelist to preach the gospel to an unreached people group. Mission involves a sense of purpose and often danger as well.

As a norm, people are sent on a mission by someone else, though, at times, they go on their own initiative. “Mission” is not a word used in the Bible, but the concept of mission is doubtless present. Most importantly, we learn about God’s mission, the missio Dei. This mission is perhaps best articulated in John’s well-known declaration, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16, ESV). Here, we see several truths about God’s mission.

The missio Dei

First, the missio Dei is grounded in God’s love. In his first letter, John affirms that God is love in his very essence and being (1 Jn 4:8). So, even though the fallen world and sinful humanity are unlikely objects of his love, God sets his love on unbelieving, rebellious, obstreperous sinners because it is in his very essence to love even those who are unworthy of his love and not loveable or attractive in and of themselves.

Second, God’s love prompted him to action. In fact, it led him to exceedingly sacrificial action: He freely gave his only Son! I have two sons, but if I were called upon to give up either one of them, it would surely break my heart. In Old Testament times, Abraham was called to give up Isaac, his “only son,” though God spared him at the last minute and provided a substitute offering (Gn. 22:1–14; cf. Heb. 11:17–19). By giving his only Son, God gave the most precious thing he had.

Third, God’s redemptive rescue mission through his Son was successful and effective. At the cross, Jesus cried out, Tetelestai! “It is finished!” (Jn 19:30). By giving his life as a sinless substitute—as an expression of God’s perfect love for sinful, rebellious, and morally dark humanity—Jesus completed his saving mission. This mission was dangerous and costly, but ultimately rewarding and exceedingly God-glorifying.

The mission of love

For those of us who have believed in God’s Son, our life is in him. As John elaborates in his first letter, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 Jn 4:9). If we place our trust in the Son, we live through him!

However, we can take no credit for entering into this new life: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (v. 10).

Before we could love God, he first had to love us. But then, John takes things a decisive step further: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (v. 11). He finishes his thought by adding, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (v. 12; cf. Jn 1:18).

Here, then, is John’s big thought: By loving one another, we can make the invisible God visible to those around us! No one has ever seen God, but people can see him by our love!

You’ve heard it said, “Love God, love others.” But I say to you, in John’s words, “We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn 4:19). As Jesus told his followers, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). And now that Jesus has given his very life for us out of love for the world, he gives all his followers a “new commandment”—“that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (Jn 13:34).

The Mark of a Disciple

In fact, love for others, especially other believers, is the mark of the true disciple of Christ: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35).

In his work Mark of the Christian, the great apologist Francis Schaeffer affirmed, “All men bear the image of God. They have value, not because they are redeemed, but because they are God’s creation in God’s image” (p. 184). He added, “Modern man, who has rejected this, has no clue as to who he is, and because of this he can find no real value for himself or for other men. Hence, he downgrades the value of other men and produces the horrible thing we face today—a sick culture in which men treat men as inhuman, as machines. As Christians, however, we know the value of men.” He continues, “All men are our neighbors…because they are made in the image of God. Therefore, they are to be loved even at great cost.”

Conversely, however, Schaeffer warns, if believers don’t love one another and all people made in the image of God, then the world will likely conclude that God did not send his Son. The “final apologetic,” therefore, calls for us to live in such a way that we proclaim the gospel by our love and by taking loving action toward a world that is languishing in spiritual and moral darkness apart from Christ. Schaeffer’s conclusion is worth quoting in full:

What then shall we conclude but that as the Samaritan loved the wounded man, we as Christians are called upon to love all men as neighbors, loving them as ourselves. Second, that we are to love all true Christian brothers in a way that the world may observe. This means showing love to our brothers in the midst of our differences—great or small—loving our brothers when it costs us something, loving them even under times of tremendous emotional tension, loving them in a way the world can see. In short, we are to practice and exhibit the holiness of God and the love of God, for without this we grieve the Holy Spirit (p. 204).

In our own context, we will do well to listen to Schaeffer’s timeless words which, in turn, echo those of the Lord Jesus Christ himself: “Love—and the unity it attests to—is the mark Christ gave Christians to wear before the world. Only with this mark may the world know that Christians are indeed Christians and that Jesus was sent by the Father.”

Rather than wearing spiritual masks, let us therefore exhibit the marks of the true Christian—none of which is greater than Christlike, redeeming, and forbearing love.



Links for the Church (11/15)

By / Nov 15

In Defense of Something Close to Venting

“Speaking honestly and openly seems both necessary and precarious. So then, how are we to share our stronger thoughts and feelings?”

Corruption Runs Rampant in the Church. Who Should We Hold Responsible? 

“We have turned the evangelical church in America into a commodity, a consumable product, rather than a community of people under Jesus, on mission together. We are contributors to God’s Kingdom, not consumers of a church product.”

Outline for Understanding Issues of Conscience and Legalism 

“The church of Jesus Christ needs men and women of strong conviction. We must, however, submit all of our convictions to the test of God’s Word.”

How Can I Have Assurance of Salvation? 

“One may wander long in the valley of the shadow of doubt. But we need not despair. Not all who wander are lost.”

Where Doctrine Meets the Desolate 

“Sometimes, suffering isn’t about learning to surf the waves but instead clinging to the piece of driftwood God has provided until the storm is over.”