In the Blogging Flesh!

Recently much has been transpiring in the blogging world of the Man of Spin.  While this has proved troublesome, the changes will result in some quality material for you.

The first piece of evidence are the following quotations that stood out for the Man of Spin when he read, Tim Keller’s, The Prodigal God, a title that you must visually digest!

To encourage you further, here are some little taste testers, and some notables that are definitely quotable, to this blogger, at least!

Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day.  However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect.  The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avante-garde ones.  We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people.  The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church.  That can only mean one thing.  If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.  If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think.  Pages 15, 16

To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother.  To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.  Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for the very roots of their righteousness, too.  We must learn how to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness – the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord.  We must admit that we’ve put our ultimate hope and trust in things other than God, and that in both our wrongdoing and right doing we have been seeking to get around God or get control of God in order to get hold of other things.

It is only when you see the desire to be your own Savior and Lord – lying beneath both your sins and your moral goodness – that you are on the verge of understanding the gospel and becoming a Christian indeed.  When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink.  If you follow through, it will change everything: how you relate to God, self, others, the world, your work, your sins, your virtue.  It’s called the new birth because it’s so radical.  Pages 77, 78

The younger son gets a Pharisee for a brother instead.

But we do not.

By putting a flawed elder brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to imagine and yearn for a true one.

And we have him.  Think of the kind of brother we need.  We need one who does not just go to the next country to find us but who will come all the way from heaven to earth.  We need one who is willing to pay not just a finite amount of money, but, at the infinite cost of his own life to bring us into God’s family, for our debt is so much greater.  Either as elder brothers or as younger brothers we have rebelled against the father.  We deserve alienation, isolation, and rejection.  The point of the parable is that forgiveness always involves a price – someone has to pay.  There was no way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself.  Our true elder paid our debt, on the cross, in our place.

There Jesus was stripped naked of his robe and dignity so that we could be clothed with a dignity and standing we don’t deserve.  On the cross Jesus was treated as an outcast so that we could be brought into God’s family freely by grace.  There Jesus drank the cup of eternal justice so that we might have the cup of the Father’s joy.  There was no other way for the heavenly Father to bring us in, except at the expense of our true elder brother.  Pages 84, 85

How can the inner workings of the heart be changed from a dynamic of fear and anger to that of love, joy, and gratitude?  Here is how.  You need to be moved by the sight of what it cost to bring you home.  The key difference between a Pharisee and a believer in Jesus is the inner-heart motivation.  Pharisees are bring good but out of a fear-fueled need to control God.  They don’t really trust him or love him.  To them God is an exacting boss, not a loving father.  Christians have seen something that has transformed their hearts toward God so they can finally love and rest in the Father.  Pages 85, 86

Jesus’s salvation is a feast, and therefore when we believe in and rest in his work for us, through the Holy Spirit he becomes real to our hearts.  His love is like honey, or like wine.  Rather than only believing he is loving, we can come to sense the reality, the beauty, and power of his love.  His love can become more real to you than the love of anyone else.  It can delight, galvanize, and console you.  That will lift you up and free you from fear like nothing else.

This makes all the difference.  If you are filled with shame and guilt, you do not merely need to believe in the abstract concept of God’s mercy.  You must sense, on the palate of the heart, as it were, the sweetness of his mercy.  Then you will know you are accepted.  If you are filled with worry and anxiety, you do not only need to believe that God is in control of history.  You must see, with the eyes of the heart, his dazzling majesty.  Then you will know he has things in hand.  Pages 108, 109

Jesus had not come to simply deliver one nation from political oppression, but to save all of us from sin, evil, and death itself.  He came to bring the human race Home.  Therefore he did not come in strength but in weakness.  He came and experienced the exile that we deserved.  He was expelled from the presence of the Father, he was thrust into the darkness, the uttermost despair of spiritual alienation – in our place.  He took upon himself the full curse of human rebellion, cosmic homelessness, so that we could be welcomed into our true home.  Pages 101, 102

The book of Genesis tells us that when God made this world he looked upon the physical creation and called it ‘good.’  He loves and cares for the material world.  The fact of Jesus’s resurrection and the promise of a new heavens and new earth show clearly that he still cares for it.  This world is not simply a theater for individual conversion narratives, to be discarded at the end when we all go to heaven.  No, the ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering, and death.  The climax of history is not a higher form of disembodied consciousness but a feast.  God made the world with all its colors, tastes, lights, sounds, with all its life-forms living in interdependent systems.  It is now marred, stained, and broken, and he will not rest until he has put it right.  Pages 110, 111

Christianity, therefore, is perhaps the most materialistic of the world’s faiths.  Jesus’s miracles were not so much violations of the natural order, but a restoration of the natural order.  God did not create a world with blindness, leprosy, hunger, and death in it.  Jesus’s miracles were signs that someday all these corruptions of his creation would be abolished.  Christians therefore can talk of saving the soul and of building social systems that deliver safe streets amd warm homes in the same sentence.  With integrity.

Jesus hates suffering, injustice, evil, and death so much, he came and experienced it to defeat it and, someday, to wipe the world clean of it.  Knowing all this, Christians cannot be passive about hunger, sickness, and injustice.  Karl Marx and others have charged that religion is ‘the opiate of the masses.’  That is, it is a sedative that makes people passive toward injustice, because there will be ‘pie in the sky bye and bye.’  That may be true of some religions that teach people that this material world is unimportant or illusory.  Christianity, however, teaches that God hates the suffering and oppression of this material world so much, he was willing to get involved in it and to fight against it.  Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people.  It’s more like the smelling salts.  Pages 112, 113

Religion operates on the principle of ‘I obey – therefore I am accepted by God.’  The basic operating principle of the gospel is ‘I am accepted by God through the word of Jesus Christ – therefore I obey.’… We must not think, however, that once believing it, the Christian is now finished with the gospel message.  A fundamental insight of Martin Luther’s was that ‘religion’ is the default mode of the human heart.  Your computer operates automatically in a default mode unless you deliberately tell it to do something else.  So Luther says that even after you are converted by the gospel your heart will go back to operating on other principles unless you deliberately, repeatedly set it to gospel-mode.

We habitually and instinctively look to other things besides God and his grace as our justification, hope, significance, and security.  We believe the gospel at one level, but at deeper levels we do not.  Human approval, professional success, power and influence, family and clan identity – all of these things serve as our heart’s ‘functional trust’ rather than what Christ has done, and as a result we continue to be driven to a great degree by fear, anger, and a lack of self-control.  You cannot change such things through mere willpower, through learning Biblical principles and trying to carry them out.  We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts.  We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting ans making it part of ourselves.  That is how we grow.  Pages 114, 115

The Gospel is therefore not just the ABC’s of the Christian life, but the A to Z of the Christian life.  Our problems arise largely because we don’t continually return to the gospel to work in it and live it out.  That is why Martin Luther wrote, ‘The truth of the Gospel is the principle article of all Christian doctrine… Most necessary is it that we know this article well, teach it to others, and beat it into their heads continually.’  Page 119

Some years ago I met a woman who began coming to Redeemer, the church where I am a minister.  She said that she had gone to a church growing up and she had always heard that God accepts us only if we are sufficiently good and ethical.  She had never heard the message she was now hearing, that we can be accepted by God by sheer grace through the work of Christ regardless of anything we do or have done.  She said, ‘That is a scary idea!  Oh, it’s good scary, but still scary.’

I was intrigued.  I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace?  She replied something like this: ‘If I was saved by my good works – then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through.  I would be like a taxpayer with rights.  I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life.  But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace – at God’s infinite cost – then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.’  Pages 120, 121

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