God’s attractions become ever more obvious to the eyes of faith. We realize that he created all things well. Beauty displays his creative goodness. Healthy relationships reflect his Triune love as we—created in his relational image—first receive and then share this love. The Father’s love is expressed in Jesus who wants us to know the Father. And the Spirit lives in us to fulfill that vision.

Heaven is the future of faith—a hope that motivates us and grounds us morally. We are beloved children looking to our homecoming. And Christianity is an eternal community of those who know the Father, love the Son, and walk by the Spirit.

Yet this summary of God’s plan presents a puzzle. Why is it that so few seem to be delighted by Christ? Even among churchgoers? Those of us who do enjoy his beauty assume there should be throngs of captivated devotees. After all, everyone wants what he offers: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and the like. But when God the Son walked among us he was spurned and crucified. And even today he remains a marginal figure in most social circles.

Let’s chase this puzzle.

Jesus pointed to a problem when he engaged Nicodemus in John chapter three. Nick was a major religious leader of the day but he still lacked the life and love of the Spirit. His was a life “in the flesh” and Jesus dismissed it. Flesh is motivated by a love for what comes with darkness rather than light.

What may be missed here is that Jesus in speaking of “the flesh” as “from below” set it over against a life transformed from “above.” God is the sole focus of faith—never a mere option or add-on—and he changes everything. So the language of love is critical: to know God by the Spirit is to respond to God’s love. New life by the Spirit shows up as a heartfelt devotion to God. In this light Nicodemus wasn’t a reprehensible figure; but he was spiritually inert.

In the next chapter of John’s gospel the focus moves to a new place on the moral spectrum: away from the disaffected life of Nicodemus to the more overt ungodliness of the woman at the well. Yet notice how the stories are parallel. Like Nicodemus this woman lacked the Spirit but it showed up in different ways. Jesus offered the Spirit to the morally shiny Nicodemus; and he offered “living water” to the morally shady Samaritan woman.

And against our common sense—but in alignment with Bible texts such as 1 Cor. 1:26-30—it was the shady Samaritan who believed. Jesus, in her words, exposed “everything I ever did” yet he still cared for her. So she responded.

This certainly speaks to our mystery. If church members today are spiritually indifferent could it be the result of un-Spirit-based religion? Nicodemus was a religious leader but he still lacked the crucial connection to God by his Spirit.

Notice that Jesus didn’t call Nicodemus to a religious or creedal formula—but to be born by the Spirit. Nor did the Samaritan woman need to do anything special to receive his promise of living water. The apparent lack of faith on the one hand, and the woman’s spontaneous faith, on the other, set out two options in the narrative of faith. The religious leader didn’t respond—at least in this section—while the woman went off and started a local revival! What accounts for the difference? God knows. What we know is that the difference in the woman’s life was dramatic.

Now let’s return now to the question I raised about the apparently small numbers of devoted and delighted believers in too many churches today. It could be that my sample is too small or peculiar. Or I might be misled by what looks like indifference. Perhaps most believers delight in Christ but for some reason are able to hide it.

The Samaritan woman’s response unmasks such prospects. She became spiritually magnetic as soon as she realized Jesus was the Christ and that he cared for her. He offered her an opportunity to “worship in Spirit and in truth” and she immediately began to collect others.

So the magnetic invitation Jesus offered still stands. If we prefer to look morally shiny while maintaining our spiritual autonomy and indifference . . . well, there’s already plenty of that to go around. But if we respond to his offer of life in the Spirit and find him captivating, feel free to spread the joy!

The post Magnetic Faith first appeared on Cor Deo.

Most of us recall the key points. God’s word may cause a momentary stir in people whose lives are like packed earth so the seed has only a superficial placement. The devil, like a hungry bird chasing exposed seed, then comes and swallows the moment. For other listeners the words land on rocky soil where personal issues keep the truth from taking root. Or, again, there are people with competing concerns—the “cares and riches and pleasures of life”—that, like weeds, choke any growth from the word. But, finally, in some listeners there is a good response that produces multiplied growth.

Here’s a question. Was Jesus being prescriptive in his story? Was he calling his audience to make some changes in life? Was the parable a moral lesson: “So, work hard to become good soil!”?

No, it was actually a description of his experience with crowds. Soil is what it is: either good or bad and people either respond or fail to respond. So the focus was not on the seed: we can be sure it is potentially life changing for all listeners. And the same is true today whenever God’s word is offered. There will always be a range of responses.

Think, for instance, of how many people today are stirred by the message of Christmas—of Jesus who brings “joy to the world.” Yet for some this seed of truth may last about as long as the Christmas tree. Or, if the impact lasts a bit longer, it fades when the entangling pleasures and cares of ordinary life come along.

When responsive hearts do receive God’s word and bear fruit it always comes as a sustained joy: Jesus finds space and freedom in them to bring new life, and that life readily spreads to others through their joy.

But why do some retain this joy while others don’t? Once again, shouldn’t we press people to be more responsive?

Again, that’s not a question Jesus addresses here. What he is saying is that the very same words that fail to touch many people will bring dramatic results in others. So the content of the message has its own power—assuming the words are God’s word—and those who share only need to wait to see results from their preaching, teaching, or simple sharing. The truth of Christ’s teachings has the power—not our rhetoric or brilliant logic.

It also explains why some people who heard Jesus preach would later shout, “crucify him!” And why others, after hearing the same words, would come to worship him: “this is the son of God!” Or why, in John 12, some who believed in him still refused to acknowledge him.

It’s not as if Jesus was callous in telling this parable. In Luke’s gospel the parable is offered in chapter 8. Later we hear how Jesus grieved over the resistant hearts of Jerusalem:

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not” (13:34); “And when he drew near the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes” (19:41). He wept in his longing for fields of fertile soil; but more often than not he found hearts packed down with rocks, footpaths, and flourishing weeds.

Yet there are lessons to be learned elsewhere about what makes soil receptive or unreceptive to the seed of Christ’s words. Hypocrites—the unrighteous moralists of any age—for one, are never good soil. This includes religious leaders who press congregations for better tithing yet “neglect justice and the love of God” (Luke 11:42). Or teachers who love to be honored for their education and academic posts yet who are, in fact, spiritually dead—“like unmarked graves”—that people unwittingly walk across (Luke 11:43-44).

Instead, Jesus tells us, his house will be filled with socially awkward and morally unlikely figures, including “the poor and crippled and blind and lame” (Luke 14:21). We can think, for instance, of the Samaritan woman at the well; or Zachaeus, the tax collector; or the begging man who was born blind, as good soil. Jesus, after all, came for sinners rather than for the self-righteous.

So, as we think about the kind of soil we represent, perhaps God’s grace will be at work this year by running a plow through the soil of our lives: turning up hidden sins, tearing up weedy comfort zones, and making a mess out of our self-sufficiency.

Just be sure to give thanks if and when that happens! And listen for Christ’s comforting words that are sure to come with along with any plowing. He isn’t uncaring—he may even be weeping.

The post Soil Samples first appeared on Cor Deo.

We first meet him in Jeremiah 38 when he rescued Jeremiah. The prophet was in trouble—discarded to die in a muddy cistern—until Ebed-melech acted. In the rescue this African’s faith invites admiration and imitation. And through his story we gain another facet in knowing God.

But before taking up any lessons let’s review the episode.

First, who was Ebed-melech? We don’t know him apart from Jeremiah. His name in the text seems to be a title rather than a personal name. It means “servant of the king.” And so he was: one of the palace staff for Zedekiah, King of Judah. This raises a related question. Was he a free man? Probably not. He was an Ethiopian and a eunuch. Men don’t volunteer to be eunuchs and as an Ethiopian—an African—he was almost certainly a black man serving in a non-African setting. This is the profile of slavery.

Second, who was Jeremiah? God’s iron-like prophet in a nation of balsawood characters. He spoke on God’s behalf to warn Judah, a nation miraculously rescued from an Assyrian invasion only a few decades before, of coming doom. Judeans, with the earlier rescue, felt they were bulletproof because God lived among them in his Jerusalem temple. And with that they were spiritually faithless as this citation reveals, among many, from Jeremiah 18:11-12.

Jeremiah speaking—“Return, every one from his evil way, and amend you ways and your deeds.”

The answer—“But they say, ‘That is in vain! We will follow our own plans, and will every one act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart.’”

The Judeans soon wanted to kill this messenger for exposing their sin. Jeremiah, we should add, was an equal opportunity prophet. His targets included almost everyone: the people, other prophets, the priests, and the kings of his era. Even his own family wanted to kill him. So he was, to say the least, a lonely voice.

Yet Jeremiah was reliable. Whatever God told him, he told the people—and whatever he said came true. So when we pick up the cistern episode the local disaster was nearly at a crescendo. Jeremiah warned that the Babylonian Army would soon defeat Judah; and the Babylonians already had Jerusalem—Judah’s capital—under siege.

Jeremiah was imprisoned at this stage but still safe. The question—given the hostility towards him—was how long this would last. Eventually a group of officials came to King Zedekiah and asked for permission to kill him. The king gave his passive approval—“[I] can do nothing against you”—and Jeremiah was soon in the cistern.

Cisterns—emergency water tanks carved into bedrock stone—didn’t have outlets; so any dirt or debris that collected on roofs and in rain channels were washed into the tank and settled to the bottom over time. With Jerusalem under siege—and her main water springs located outside the city walls—all the free water had already been drawn out of this cistern. All that remained was deep mud. The only way out was by the mouth of the tank and that was beyond Jeremiah’s reach. He was without food and the suffocating ooze would drown him if he tried to sleep. Jeremiah was doomed.

That’s when the African servant had enough. He went to the king and called for a moral reversal: “My lord the king, these men have done evil!” His stunning charge either cowed the king or stirred his conscience—or both. Zedekiah quickly gave new orders, this time for Jeremiah to be rescued and Ebed-melech led the effort. This part of the account was uniquely specific: a looped rope was lowered and Ebed-melech told Jeremiah to use rags to pad his arms against the rope as he was drawn out of the thick muck. Jeremiah survived and was then protected to the end.

The story of Ebed-melech didn’t end with the rescue. It concludes later, in chapter 39:16-18, with another rescue, this one from God who spoke to Ebed-melech through Jeremiah when the Babylonians finally conquered Jerusalem: “For I will surely save you, and you shall not fall by the sword, but you shall have your life as a prize of war, because you have put your trust in me, declares the LORD.”

We leave the story with some final reflections.

First and foremost, Ebed-melech was not passive in the face of evil. Even though he was virtually powerless—an African slave—he stepped out to stir the king’s conscience. God also spoke of Ebed-melech’s conduct as his “trust in me.” By this trust he refused to be intimidated by powerful men. And this, in turn, gives us the source of his courage: a vision of God that matched Jeremiah’s at a moment when it counted most.

This is what faith in God can and should produce: courage and action whenever it’s needed.

The post Faithful first appeared on Cor Deo.

Maybe you haven’t, it’s just a pragmatic moment in the morning to make sure your hair looks right and you don’t have anything stuck in your teeth so you look appropriate for work or whatever. But even as I wrote that with the intention to walk a fine line around the motivational conundrum of a mirror, I couldn’t escape the real ambition for looking in a mirror. Me.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be narcissistic. But to look appropriate for a particular occasion isn’t solely for other people either, really it’s about being accepted in a particular occasion. Maybe at my wedding I wanted to look great for my wife-to-be as she did for me, but I can’t help but think I wanted to look good for me too. That is, having other people tell me I look smart or handsome. I’m confident that this isn’t just my problem; we are motivated by performance of some kind. Whether it is looks, success, job, or whatever concoction you prefer, we are all tainted by the me-motivation.

For those of my friends who might be worried where this blog might be going, I’m not going to go stop looking in the mirror in order to get ready for the day. I wouldn’t want people to be tortured by the smell or the disheveled look that this would cause. I can’t imagine many people wanting to learn from me or listen to what I have to say in such a state. It would be a mountainous distraction to say the least. But maybe instead of reflecting about what others may think of me, I could use that time to reflect on and look forward to the bigger picture. A time when there was or will be no need for a mirror.

Just imagine what life was like for Adam and Eve in the Garden. They were naked and unashamed. They had no reason to look at self; they were completely satisfied with the other. They had the Life of God in them. They enjoyed walking with their God together, the One who generously gave them everything they could possibly ever need or want. They were content.

At this moment, a mirror wouldn’t make any sense. There was no need to look to self for anything with a me-motivation. Adam had the eyes of his heart fixed on God and Eve, and in return Eve had the eyes of her heart captured by Adam and God. As Augustine would say, this reality was the “substance of God” in them. The unifying presence of the Spirit directed their hearts to the other. Therefore they didn’t want to look at self and were happy with that! They were naked and unashamed!

So what went wrong?

A simple skeptical look!

In Genesis 3, just after the climatic conclusion to the creation account we find the “crafty” serpent approached Eve with a skeptical question about God and his provision. “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” Now for Eve this was a no brainer kind of a question. She knew that God hadn’t been holding back, she had been given everything she would ever need or want. Not even for a nanosecond had she thought that something was missing. God had given her and Adam the fruit of every tree to eat from . . . except one.

I think this was the point the serpent was getting at. He needed Eve to quickly fix the blatant mistake of the serpent’s question while hiding the subtle one. Eve responded by correcting him, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden . . .” and then looking to the one tree Adam had told Eve God didn’t want them to eat from, she followed up, “God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” Prior to this, Adam and Eve had no desire to focus on the one tree they couldn’t eat from. They were satisfied in everything else God had given them and they had no reason or desire to distrust God. No to mention, the word “death” was merely a word with no meaning for them. They were happily naked and unashamed.

When the serpent got Eve to look at the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he returned to his skepticism of God’s character.   The serpent enticed Eve with the idea that God was holding out, there was something that she needed that God hadn’t provided. God didn’t want her to be like God (even though she with Adam was the “image of God”). I think when she ignored the prompting of the Holy Spirit, saw the fruit of the tree as good for food and a delight to the eyes, the Spirit was grieved and left her. The fall took place with a simple skeptical look! And Adam gladly joined in.

Here the age of the mirror began. As the substance of God left them, their vacuous hearts curved in on themselves. The Spirit of God was replaced with concupiscence; the lustful desire for self and to violate any prohibition.

Now living in the age of the mirror we can’t fully get away from wanting to make sure our fig leaf is covering our physical and spiritual nakedness. Even with the Spirit living in our hearts, we still live in the time of a broken world and the flesh of Adam.

And there’s the battle, even at the mirror in the morning brushing your teeth. Are you looking forward to the time where a mirror will no longer be needed or do you still want to cover your nakedness?

I can’t wait to live for Christ and others without the gravity of flesh fighting against the Spirit of God who resides in my heart and unites me to Christ.   Where everything is new, where there are no tears, and Christ is there walking with us. Except this time our naiveté will be gone. We will know what death is. What it’s like not to trust God. What it’s like living in the age of a mirror. Praise God, we’ll never want to go back!

The post A Time When No Mirror Was Needed first appeared on Cor Deo.

These kinds of sleeper fault lines are repeatedly found in churches today. Naively, many assume that if people agree on the five solae, on the nature of Jesus, and affirm the inerrancy of the Bible then they’re fundamentally on the same page. I would like to propose that this isn’t necessarily the case.

When disagreements do come up in the church many are shocked that they’re over “non-essentials.” I’m not talking about worship style or church polity but more significant “non-essentials” like the proper use of the Law or the nature of faith in relationship to assurance of salvation. These doctrinal divisions stem from a more foundational disagreement about God, man, sin, and grace.

That’s why at Cor Deo we repeatedly return to the most fundamental questions for … well … everything:

1. Which God?

2. What does it mean to be human?

3. What’s gone wrong?

4. And how is the problem solved?

a. How does this affect my daily life?

Our intentions are to emphasize these foundational issues so that we build our lives and theology on them, or face the danger of building our lives and churches on sand.

Since the answer to the first question affects the answer of the second, and the second shapes the third, and so on, it is most likely that secondary disagreements are actually based upon un-communicated foundational clashes. A brief look at the initial days of the Antinomian Controversy over the nature of faith will, I hope, demonstrate this point.

In the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony there was a hope to create a perfect theocracy in the new world. Gone were the tyrannical days of Archbishop Laud’s censorship. Now the Puritans could freely immerse themselves in and apply their ideas from the Bible.  They certainly indulged in this new opportunity. Each preacher spent 12 hours a day in study and the people gathered to listen to them, sometimes they would preach five days a week to meet the demand. With nothing else to do outside of work, listening to sermons became the pastime of the colony. One could easily fill the week going from town to town listening to various preachers. As things developed, the listeners began to choose their favorites and accentuate differences among the minsters of the colony. This was especially true for those who attended John Cotton’s church in new Boston, who began to challenge the errors of Cotton’s colleagues during the Q&A sessions after their sermons.

The Bostonians accused other ministers of preaching a “Covenant of Works.” They believed that teaching someone to look at their sanctification for assurance was a works-based righteousness. Therefore, the Bostonians thought that works, rather than the person of Christ, became the object of assurance. This was the very opposite of what Cotton had been teaching in Boston.

As the tensions escalated in the new colony, the ministers began to write to one another in order to ascertain whether or not the Bostonians were actually representing Cotton correctly. Much of their initial discussions centered on the nature of faith and the timing of union with Christ.

The elders of the colony argued that faith was a divinely enabled choice to believe in Christ. By meeting this one condition, “God’s free grace would be revealed and received by the believer” and the benefits were union with Christ and justification. Cotton, like Calvin, taught that faith is assurance of having been united to Christ just as cup receives oil. Faith is a response and a direct work of the Spirit who testifies to our spirit that God has loved us first.

The two sides were divided as either seeing faith as passively received or actively enabled.

You might think these differences are merely semantic and pedantic. But if you peel back the onion you discover two dramatically different theological traditions. These traditions would answer the four big questions differently. For illustration purposes let’s just consider third question: what is sin?

Cotton believed that sinners would never produce good works. Anyone who was bound to sin only wanted to do evil. Nothing prior to a nature-change could ever be considered good.

“Is the condition (of works or faith) found in the soul before union with Christ or after? All conditions before union with Christ are corrupt and unsavory, as the corrupt fruits of a corrupt tree; and to such no promises are made all. And all conditions after union with Christ are effects and fruits of that union . . . Indeed faith itself and our adherence to Christ by it, is a fruit of that union; or else we might be believers, i.e. good trees, and bring fourth good fruit before union with Christ which the Gospel accounts impossible.” (Cotton, “Mr. Cotton’s Rejoynder” in The Antinomian Controversy, ed. David Hall, pg. 92).

Cotton’s reading of Matthew 7 wouldn’t allow him to agree with his colleagues’ understanding of faith. Their view was essentially that sin is more of a disease than death, which was much nearer Erasmus’ view than Luther’s.

Cotton didn’t miss this when he suggested his colleagues’ theological arguments reflected the papists more than the reformers.

“Hence it is, that when Catharinus (a learned Papist) went to prove that a believer in Christ might be assured of his salvation by his good works, out of 2 Peter 1.5-10 . . . Whereto Pareus [a Protestant] replies, We acknowledge our former assurance to be before works, from the testimony of the Spirit bearing witness to our spirits that we are sound. (pg. 93)”

By insinuating they were papists, I’m not sure Cotton could draw the line in the sand any thicker or deeper. And the dividing line wasn’t without basis; on the fundamental questions they were miles apart.

So what does conflict between Puritans 375 years ago have anything to do with us? A situation like this should remind us to focus on the essential questions of life. Not to assume that everyone is in agreement on how to answer them. I’d say like any good coach, practice the fundamentals and keep going back to them. Get your nose in God’s story and see what he has to say about these four questions.

The post A History of Assumptions first appeared on Cor Deo.

There’s a lot of what my British friends call a “high cringe-factor” in his sharing: many folks run for cover when he heads their way! He recognizes that response, of course, but treats it as the cost of doing business. Sometimes he recalls Paul saying, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel.” So it doesn’t matter what others think.

And, to be honest, I know he views me as one who doesn’t take Christ’s call to evangelism very seriously. He’s right, of course. At least by his measure. I’ve never seen much fruit in his approach so I don’t use it. But I don’t despise it. If even one person comes to faith by reading a tract he left behind, great. God’s hand isn’t short in using any means to save some.

But recently the time came for me to tell him that I’m also an evangelist. His eyebrows arched in surprise and skepticism. Was I kidding?

I wasn’t.

“My focus is the church,” I told him. “Many ‘Christians’ have never actually met Jesus so whenever I teach or preach I offer what I know I needed to hear before I came to a living faith.”

Here’s my approach. The church is a ready audience because people come each week expecting to hear someone talk about Jesus from the Bible. And lots of these folks are where I once was—assuming they have a proper faith while not actually knowing Jesus.

Call it a social or cultural faith. But—without wanting to be ungracious yet to be honest—it isn’t the kind of faith Jesus affirms.

We can think, for instance, of the flawed faith in John 2:23-24 where “many believed . . . but Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them [lit: “believe in them”]. In other words their faith wasn’t the real thing even though they had was some sort of appreciation for Jesus.

I was once in that place. I thought I was a Christian and then I actually met Jesus. Afterwards I wondered how I had attended church for so many years without ‘getting it.’ My claims of faith amounted to a sincere charade—the art of acting as if I knew him when we had never actually met.

So after meeting him I became an evangelist to the church.

Who needs this evangelism? A group in any given church that is bigger than we realize, but never a group we can know with certainty. That knowledge is God’s turf.

Yet Jesus gives us some clear indicators of the need. Those, for instance, who don’t see Jesus as wonderful are signaling that they’ve never met him. He’s more attractive than any of the things he has created, so to meet him is to taste the greatest goodness of all. And, with that, his impact on all who meet him is consistent: he stirs a spontaneous and persistent love that reciprocates his own love.

So once this encounter takes place the person who meets Jesus begins to read and respond to the Bible as a way to hear from a dear companion. True faith always engages what Jesus says. He said as much to a crowd who professed to have believed in him: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples . . .” (John 8:31).

Yet in this John 8 setting the ‘believers’ he was speaking to only wanted a part of what Jesus offered, not Jesus himself. And this utilitarian approach to faith had a corollary: a distaste for his teachings. And because of that distaste Jesus charged this clan with being aligned with the desires of the devil. Jesus also challenged them with a truism for the ages: “If God were [truly] your father, you would love me.”

Jesus offered another sign of true faith in John 13: a faithful love for others and for other Christians in particular.

This one is tough. It’s one thing to love other Christians who love us, but too many members of the church love very selectively. I can think, for instance, of various fence-building versions of faith where love is conditional: limited to those who affirm particular creedal, behavioral, or denominational commitments that make up their own version of the gospel.

The Pharisees in Jesus’ time were experts at this conditional sort of caring: “we’ll love you if . . .”   Jesus, by contrast, loved the world even as the world moved to kill him. His treatment of Judas at the last supper showed this sort of love.

John, with Jesus in mind, crystallized the point: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

So my evangelism is to those who claim to be Christians yet who hate other Christians. And to those who claim to be Christians but who have no taste for the Bible.

The basis of this evangelism? Christ’s call for us to love God with all our heart, and to love our neighbors too. It’s that simple. Jesus made this the ultimate measure of his own evangelism.   And many of the ordinary people of his day responded but not too many of the scholars.

Many of the religious leaders, in fact, weren’t happy with his emphasis on God’s love. And that’s what got Jesus crucified.

So be alert to the implications of this kind of evangelism—there’s a very high cringe-factor in being crucified! But it’s what Jesus called for in John 12:24 and what Paul affirmed in Galatians 2:20. Read these texts and see what you think.

The post Evangelism first appeared on Cor Deo.

In Christianity at least three ways of determining righteousness have been promoted: an applied measure, a legal measure, and a relational measure. Applied righteousness is easy: any conduct that satisfies God’s demands makes a person righteous. Legal righteousness is broader: if a person has been judged guilty for his sins God is free to offer a reprieve by dismissing the legal charges against him.

Martin Luther, for instance, used this understanding when he spoke of Christians having an “alien righteousness” through faith in Christ. In his view a given believer is granted the full moral standing of the Son—absolute righteousness—through faith, even though the believer’s conduct still falls well short of Christ’s applied righteousness. In other words a person’s applied righteousness isn’t critical; the Father’s forgiveness in Christ through faith is what counts.

This debate was central to the 16th century Protestant Reformation as the Roman Church dismissed Luther’s claim and insisted that Christians must work to achieve actual righteousness through a “faith formed by love”. And the Roman version of love was will-based—a function of self-determined obedience—rather than an affective love. Spirituality, then, grows as a responsibility of the seeker rather than as a response to God’s love. God, in their view, is a righteous judge who demands that his followers rise to his ethical standards. Conduct that falls short remains under God’s righteous wrath.

Luther, on the other hand, believed that God is a lover who draws us into the affective bond of the Father and the Son. Love, in turn, is a shared delight and response to a loving God by his beloved ones. And the devotion of love—our faith—is what changes us to be more and more like the Son in our daily conduct. Our hearts follow after the heart of the one we love.

With that historical sketch in mind I was struck with Paul’s discussion of sin in Romans 3. There the relational righteousness of God comes into focus. The chapter famously declares that all humanity is morally broken: “None is righteous, no, not even one; no one understands; not one seeks for God” (verses 10-11). So human righteousness, by this measure, is nonsense and pretense. No one, apart from Christ, ever achieves actual righteousness.

What catches our attention in the following verses is Paul’s resolution of the problem: of “how the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”

What’s striking is how Paul set out the problem of sin in the earlier verses of the chapter: he began by framing sin as a problem of faithlessness in verse 3—“What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means!” Next, in a restatement in verse 5, Paul set out the same concern but with a new term in place of faith-concerns. “But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? . . . . By no means!” The two expressions are parallel so that unrighteousness is aligned with faithlessness.

Faithfulness and faithlessness are terms that press us towards a relational rather than a legal focus, but the two are coordinate concerns. Think, for instance, of the refrain that comes with so many broken marriages—“The spouse was unfaithful.” In such cases God’s law is certainly broken but the deeper issue is the violation of love.

And that refrain, as it relates to God and his people, jumps off the pages of the Old Testament in any rapid reading of the Bible. Jeremiah, for instance, treats it as a central theme in his warnings to Judah: “You have played the whore with many lovers; and would you return to me? declares the LORD. . . . She saw that for all the adulteries of that faithless one, Israel, I had sent her away with a decree of divorce. Yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but she too went and played the whore” (Jer. 3:1 & 8).

The contrast between the faithful husband-who-is-God and his faithless bride, Israel, is played out again and again in the Old Testament. Hosea’s marriage to faithless Gomer is the vivid picture of God’s anguish over his faithless creation.

In this book the prophet goes beyond Israel to address the faithlessness of humanity as a whole: “But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me” (Hosea 6:7). But God persistently refuses to give his bridal people away to their predilection for evil and promises to draw back at least some to himself: “And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul” (Jer. 32:40-41).

Here’s the point: we will do well to reflect on God’s real “heart” and “soul” desire for us to have a love relationship with him that is sound. We aren’t meant to give our hearts away to the love of success, wealth, security, and the like—to self-love—but to be wholly devoted to Christ. This is what we were made for. And this is what ultimately defines righteousness rather than mere law-keeping. Laws only confront broken relationships; they don’t build faithful hearts. Luther was right in his emphasis on God’s role in restoring us. We won’t ever do it on our own.

So faithfulness and righteousness is the fruit of love. The gospel is God’s call for us to turn back to him, to hear his expressions of faithful love. That alone will stir us to love him in return—both wholly and faithfully.

The post Righteous? first appeared on Cor Deo.

In an early exchange of letters between two of the pastors, Peter Bulkeley asked John Cotton whether he would agree that there must be “the work of faith in us to apprehend” a saving union with Christ—in other words, does a believer apply his or her will in the function of believing?

Cotton responded that a soul does nothing to initiate faith: “the soul receives Christ as an empty vessel receives oil—the receiving is not active but passive.”  Cotton pressed his case by using the biblical analogies of faith being comparable to fruit production: the birth and growth of any fruit depends on the tree or the vine that bears it and not on the fruit itself.

In an allusion to John 15:5 Cotton wrote, “We must either be abiding in Christ, or else existing outside him (that is, without his abiding in us) or else we can do nothing.”  For any other conclusion, Cotton went on, “we must look for it in Aristotle’s Ethics, for it is not revealed in the Gospel of Christ” [in D. Hall, ed., Antinomian Controversy, 37 & 40].

In his response Cotton showed he was alert to Martin Luther’s key point in the Disputation Against Scholastic Theology—a set of 97 theses Luther produced a few weeks before he posted his more famous 95 Theses.

In thesis 40 of the Disputation he made the point that we are not justified by doing just deeds, but having been made just [by God’s work in us] we do just deeds.  Then in thesis 41 he made it clear that he was intentionally challenging Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as the “worst enemy of grace” because in his book Aristotle presumed that virtues come about by practicing virtuous deeds.

This, of course, remains the major question in debate about how salvation is applied: is faith something we offer God in order to be saved, or is it a response God produces in us by his initiative?  The church has long struggled with a straightforward reading of the texts that Luther and Cotton were using.  Just as Cotton faced strong resistance from Bulkeley and Thomas Shepherd, Luther faced similar headwind from the Humanist scholar, Desiderius Erasmus.

As a sidebar, we need to push deeper into the controversy than many do these days.  The language of “believe . . . and be saved” is offered in the Bible and it’s then read as an imperative or command we need to obey.  Okay, but we still need to ask about the context in which such imperatives are properly read.

That is, too many Christians read such texts as unwitting disciples of Aristotle by presuming that everyone has a ‘freedom of the will’ that allows for moral choices.  But the Bible actually teaches that we’re dead in our sins so that we have as much initiative to obey God as a cadaver has for breathing.

At a more sophisticated level, many try to mitigate the issue of spiritual death by holding that God has enabled sin-“damaged” wills to obey once someone is given a restorative grace (“enabling grace”); and this is granted just to some (the “elect”) and not to all—since the rest are assigned to be “reprobates.”  But this is still not a compelling case to the degree that human effort is viewed as crucial to salvation: so that God helps us save ourselves.

Where Cotton differed from Bulkeley—who believed in enabling grace as a necessary precursor to exercising the saving act of faith—was in his view that the heart is dead towards God.  There is nothing to “enable” until God, by the Spirit, comes and reveals Christ’s love to the unbelieving soul in a direct encounter.

In other words, in Cotton’s view, as Luther also believed, the problem of sin is that it operates through heartfelt disaffection and not as a moral and volitional disability.  The problem of our souls is that we don’t really like God as he truly exists or want him to be God to us.

Bulkeley, by contrast, believed that everyone “wants” God but needs a boost of grace—God’s gracious assistance—to achieve a standard called “saving faith” that God demands of us.  Cotton, against Bulkeley and like Luther, believed that our hearts are utterly deceptive and that we may want what God seems to offer—heavenly safety—but not God himself.

The result of this New England controversy was a lot of pejorative labeling.  Cotton’s followers called their opponents “papists” because of their emphasis on human initiative—in treating faith as a human responsibility—which they viewed as the great error of Roman Catholics.  Bulkeley and Shepherd’s followers in turn labeled Cotton’s clan as “antinomians” because they dismissed law-keeping as a legitimate basis for spiritual growth.

To measure the question more broadly let’s turn back now to an even earlier version of this debate: to the 5^th century argument between Augustine and Pelagius.  What triggered the sharpest disagreement was Augustine’s call to “Love and do whatever you want.”  This horrified Pelagius, a British moralist who was trying to clean up the immoral tendencies of the Roman church in Italy.

In a nutshell Augustine also believed that God changes people from the inside-out.  Luther believed that God changes people from the inside-out.  And Cotton believed that God changes people from the inside out.  All believed that when the Spirit of God pours out God’s love in our hearts we start to think and act in ways aligned with God’s heart.  That leads to true godliness.

Pelagius, on the other hand, believed that moral change is something we need to offer God on our own initiative.  So that spirituality is a change from the outside-in.  Erasmus agreed and so did Bulkeley.  We just need some help from God to pull it off.

In practice, then, the difference comes in the way we think.  According to the Augustinian tradition we are captured by God’s love and it changes the way we think.  It changes what and who we think about: Christ replaces self as the focus of our reflections.  And we think of others in light of Christ’s love for them.  And with that our conduct is changed.

Alternatively, we think about how we need to work harder in establishing our obedience of faith. Yet, ironically, the focus is still on ourselves: as long as we remain morally sound, we’re actually thinking about our own welfare and about God as our assistant.

So what do you think?

The post What do you think? first appeared on Cor Deo.

The question presumes that priorities shape the way we live—that some options are more important to us than others.  A corollary for most people is that we can examine and change our priorities. So we ask, “what’s important here?” in order to consider our options.

Maybe our priorities do belong to us.  Or, maybe they don’t.

I realize, of course, that the ability to define our own priorities is treated as a truism of life.  I may, for instance, decide to abandon the immediate pleasure of drinking sugary drinks in favour of long-term health benefits.  Or as I mature I may decide to take up fine arts and painting because I’ve begun to enjoy aesthetic creativity.

But it may be that this apparent freedom blocks our ability to see the bigger biblical reality.  The Bible presumes a single guiding spirit to be at work in shaping our priorities—one Spirit is holy and his competitor is unholy (see Ephesians 2:1-3).  One is from above; the other from below.  One is Christ-focused; the other is self-focused.

This is a topic already traced on this site before now so I’ll just recall that the Bible sets out a binary opposition of “two masters” from beginning to end.  And mastery by either of these two competing masters is spirit-derived.

And it’s in this context that Jesus called his disciples to an unlikely life: “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27).  Jesus is laying down a hard line: the cross was a hideous death device.  So with this in mind think about whether you prefer choosing torture and death instead of comfort and security.

We might be able to conceive of the possibility as an “in theory it could happen” sort of prospect but I think most honest folks will agree that even Christians—often very discretely—treat Christ’s call to bear a cross daily as so much nonsense.  Our real concern is to seek personal security and comfort.  Yet the main ambitions of self-concern, no matter how innocuous, are not priorities for Christ.

The context for Christ’s view is based on his eternal experience of communing with the Father: he knows just one proper destiny.  And every human is moving either toward him or away from him.  So when we speak of priorities we need to remember that they exist in the context of reaching one destination or the other.

It also means that our apparent freedom only operates within the confines of our destiny.  It’s a bit like a passenger on a cruise ship: when the ship is under way a given passenger has freedom within the available deck space but the ultimate option ends at the ship’s rails.  The ship’s captain actually defines the direction and destination.

So the “really” in “what really matters” is a bottom line or boundary: something central to our identity has a final say in what’s acceptable or unacceptable.  For most of us, as suggested above, the ultimate goal is our personal security.  The “cruise ship” of life has a destination of personal welfare in view and any version of “God” needs to support that benefit.

It’s here that Paul followed Christ’s radical call when he announced, “I am crucified with Christ” living by “faith” in Christ.  For him “what really matters” was to know Christ and to make him known.  Paul teaches, then, that an ambition to please the Lord is the one great priority of life.  All other ambitions belong to the “world” and the “flesh” in that their underlying devotion is to self and not to God.

A quick read-through of the Bible will underscore this theme.  In Psalm 2, for instance, the dividing line between the nations that “rage” against God and a proper place with God is a desire to kiss the Son.  In John 5 the religious scholars of Christ’s day were condemned—despite their Bible training—because “you don’t have the love of God in you.”  And in John 8 a group of erstwhile believers in Jesus were exposed as frauds because they resisted key features of what Jesus was teaching.  Jesus went right to the heart of the issue: “If God were your Father you would love me.”

Love is what matters most.  And we love God as a response: he first loved us and we return that love.  This is not to focus on love in itself, but to engage God’s love and to live with him as the ultimate object of our love.

The ungodly spirit gains control of the world by promoting self-concern in place of Christ-concern as the ultimate measure of life and meaning.  Call it self-love.  God, in response, sent the Son to die to that world and the Holy Spirit to woo us away from the ambitions that self-love offers.

In sum we learn that apart from him we can do nothing.  And once his winsome love is present nothing else really matters.

The post What Really Matters? first appeared on Cor Deo.

But, as I enjoyed the innocence of my son, I started to ponder the reality that I don’t think much differently.  Instead my thoughts aren’t communicated out loud so directly, they’re a whole lot sadder, no less ironic, and far more deadly. They go something like this, “I’m the weakman, and I can do anything!”  While, I might not consciously include the “weakman” part of the sentence, it’s there nevertheless.

Why do I say this? Well, when fear, false-humility, etc. begin to bear fruit in my life, I know my thoughts have been abiding in the silly notion that I can do anything on my own.  That I, as an individual, can direct my own steps and I have no need of anyone else. Yet the fear that comes from this pride is rooted in something false.

One of the warning signs that anyone is living in the lie of Satan (that God can’t be trusted, and I’m my own god) is their internal conversation.  If you find that your self-talk is a single voice, odds are its self-concerned and self-protective. Your thoughts are rooted in the lie “I can do anything” while protecting yourself from your inability to do so.  This often manifests itself in constantly comparing yourself to others, “I’m better than…” or “I’m not as good as… ” These comparisons can lead to perfectionism, panic-induced paralysis, or prodigal licentiousness. The differing behaviors are only symptoms of the same disease, someone’s habitual value that they are God.

Let’s return to my son’s insightful declaration. It’s essential to abide in the reality that we can do nothing on our own – that God is God, and we are not.  Now our flesh will immediately make this statement primarily about power.  I don’t think it is, however.  It’s a love issue. It’s a trust issue. These are intimate companions, but for the sake of clarity let’s talk about each one separately.

When living in the lie we believe that we’re not loveable, and that God doesn’t really love us. The truth, however, is that God does loves us and therefore we, the unloveable, are made lovely.  This love is not some cheap, fluffy, marshmallow love given to us from a transcendent distance.  No, its the God who stoops down to give us life in his Son, and to give us his Spirit who testifies to this by pouring God’s love into our hearts.   When we respond to him with love, he abides in us and we in him.  And as our triune God is an other-centered communion with an eternal conversation between the Father and Son by their Spirit, it should be no surprise we should start to converse with him by his Spirit.  Our internal conversation becomes a true conversation with our Father and our Bridegroom.   It is a conversation based upon the delight that God is God and I’m not, and my God loves me unfailingly.

We, however, don’t trust this enough.  I find that in 1 John 4:16 we miss the full-stop after “the love that God has for us.”  We tend to do the Step Toe On the Pedal and roll by that God loves us onto what we need to do next, i.e. prove that we are lovers of God.  When we do this, we tend to read in 1 John that it’s our responsibility to love our brother and to love God.  Now I wouldn’t want to give the impression that these aren’t important, they’re vital to John’s epistle.  Yet, John doesn’t see these as a responsibility we have to force ourselves to do, rather he emphatically states we respond in love because God first loved us.  If we don’t abide and dwell in the goodness of our God who is love, we can’t help but make love a responsibility because we trust the statement “I can do anything on my own” rather than “I’m deeply loved, and I can do nothing on my own.”

When we wholeheartedly trust that God is for us we’ll begin to hear another voice in our internal conversation.  The voice will direct our gaze onto God’s beauty. The Spirit will bear his fruit.  And we’ll discover a desire to give ourselves away to others in the way God gave himself to us.

Here the internal conversation changes from being self-concerned, self-protective, or even self-determined.  Rather we’ll depend on God for all things we do. We’ll constantly ask God to join us in our daily activities. We’ll ask God for help in every circumstance, difficult or easy.  We’ll confidently take risks knowing that our identity isn’t wrapped up in our performance or others’ opinions, but upon God’s testimony of us, the God who’s walking with us.   The possibilities are endless when our focus is upon the glorious love of the Trinity, which is manifested in Jesus depending on the Father for everything while fearlessly giving himself away.

I’m thankful my son was right, with one major addition, in Christ I am the strongman, and I can do nothing without him.  Let us confidently depend on Him, even in our internal conversation.

The post Superhero? first appeared on Cor Deo.