Wealth and Honor Come from You!

Wealth and Honor Come from You!

Nov 4, 2022 | Gratitude, Theology

If you’re a sinner, you probably think this post is about you. I won’t say you’re so vain, but you probably get the point. If you read my last post, though, you already know the answer is . . . . God! I wrote about David’s words of praise for God in I Chronicles 29:10-13, but I didn’t get into details about what made this passage so powerful in the last five plus years of my life. I’ll share that below, but before I get there, a great cross reference to David’s declaration is in Deuteronomy 8:

17 You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” 18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.

It looks like “you” is always the temptation, which goes back to the initial bold-faced lie the serpent told Eve in the garden, “you will be like God knowing good and evil” In some ways we are very much like God being made in his image, but the temptation had nothing to do with the imago dei. Rather it had to do with epistemology, which is fascinating to think through. Why did all the misery of sin and death come into God’s good creation with knowing? Man was obviously never meant to know evil, and he already knew good. The problem was we couldn’t handle it because, well, we are not God! Seems pretty simple doesn’t it.

Related to creating wealth, thinking we are in some way God is really the core of the problem. You may say without us there is no wealth, and you would be correct. But without a theology of wealth, and sin, and God, we area easily confused. This is important to my story because I found out I suck at being God (can I do LOL in a blog post?).

First, Paul tells us (Acts 17:25) God “gives to all life and breath and everything else.” So, there’s that. We may think we’re pretty hot stuff, but every single breath is granted to us by God, not to mention “everything else.” He also asks these rhetorical questions: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” All of our abilities and skills and talents and knowledge, all of it comes from him. Even our drive to acquire these things, our ambitions and desires come from him.

When we understand and accept this, that we are not autonomous self-sufficient, self-created beings, it all somehow becomes so much easier. As much as it is up to us, in a way none of it us up to us. This tension is what we call life lived in God’s created salvific reality. It is a thrilling dynamic in which to live in light of ultimate things, in the biggest of big pictures. As Paul yet again puts it perfectly in Romans 8:

28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

I would joke with my kids as they were growing up, and still do when they are, surely Paul didn’t mean all. Maybe 98%. Nope, all!

Which brings me to the I Chronicles 29:10-13 context. A month after we moved down to Florida, I lost my job of 14 years, and that at age 57. Uh oh. Now what. After two months of finding nothing, in desperation I decided to take a job in IT sales on 100% commission, something I’d never done. It was terrifying, and the first year, even two, was miserable. God and me, we did some serious wrestling. It’s hard to explain the intensity of emotions I went through. Many times, often daily, I went back to David’s praise about the greatness of our God.

Right after David says wealth and honor come from God, he declares God is “the ruler of all things.” Not some things, but all things. That is the ultimate existential question: Do we really buy this, believe it when push comes to shove, when we are confronted with, do we trust him or not.

I remember praying something prior to taking the job that reveals what a moron I am. I would pray, “Lord it would be ideal if . . .” One day it struck me like a thunderclap: How the hell would I know what ideal is!!! I’m ashamed to say I had been a Christian by that time for almost 40 years, and was still so clueless about the true Greatness of our God that I would pray something like that. I’m a slow learner, but eventually I get it.

This new job confronted me with the trust question literally every day, and it was often painful. For those old enough, you may remember ABC’s Wide World of Sports, and the video opening every show: It was daily, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Exhilarating and disappointing. Was I going to embrace the God who is “the ruler of all things”? Could I experience equanimity in the face of defeat? Could I obey Jesus and not worry? Obey Paul and not be anxious about anything? Anything?

I even got to the point of telling the Lord, “If you want me to fail, that’s fine. Thy will be done.” But I was going to work my ever-living guts out and pray every day he would bless my efforts, and whatever happens from there is up to him. And he has!

The greatest lesson, I think, was learning my knee jerk reaction is always initially wrong, and I have to fight it. Trusting God takes mental and emotional effort. Takes turning back the fear, worry, anxiety, doubt because it just isn’t necessary. It is our sinful, distrustful imagination that causes those, and we just have to stop it! Rebuke ourselves, repent (I John 1:9, and leave the inner transformation to him), and convince ourselves anew that he’s got our back. It is a wonderfully fulfilling way to live in his promise to us (Is. 26)

You will keep in perfect peace
him whose mind is steadfast,
because he trusts in you.

Perfect peace. 

I Chronicles 29:10-13: David’s Life Transforming Praise for God

I Chronicles 29:10-13: David’s Life Transforming Praise for God

Nov 1, 2022 | Theology

In my current jaunt through Scripture, much quicker than last time, I recently read this passage in I Chronicles and reflected on how significant it has been in the last five years or so of my life. When we moved from the Chicago area to Florida in early June of 2017, these verses were in the bulletin in the second church service we attended. I remember thinking how heavy it was, and decided I needed to memorize it. I couldn’t have realized how significant the truths David proclaims would be for me in the coming years.

The context is near the end of David’s life. He had developed plans and provided the resources for the Temple. Since the Lord would not let him build it because of all the blood he had spilled, he passed those on to his successor, his son Solomon, and he would be the one to build it. Then we read his effusive words of praise for the Lord his God:

10 David praised the Lord in the presence of the whole assembly, saying,

“Praise be to you, Lord,
the God of our father Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.
11 Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power
and the glory and the majesty and the splendor,
for everything in heaven and earth is yours.
Yours, Lord, is the kingdom;
you are exalted as head over all.
12 Wealth and honor come from you;
you are the ruler of all things.
In your hands are strength and power
to exalt and give strength to all.
13 Now, our God, we give you thanks,
and praise your glorious name.

As we know, David had quite the tumultuous life, and while he sinned greatly, the Lord declared that he was a man after his own heart. The two are not mutually exclusive, which I why think his life is such a powerful object lesson, in addition to being a prophetic type of King Jesus.

We all sin greatly to one degree or another because the standard is the perfectly holy Creator God of the universe. Sure, compared to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao I’m a pretty good guy, but compared to God the only thing I deserve is the wages of the sins I commit, death. As I often say to anyone who will listen, I deserve to be a pile of smoldering ashes on the ground, so anything other than that is gravy.

What separated David from the average king was his laser like focus on God. Even when he sinned against Bathsheba and her husband, he said to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” Most of us, dare I say none of us, would have said such a thing, but David realized the essence of sin isn’t my sin against others or others against me, but ours against God. All the personal and interpersonal misery and dysfunction flows out of that. If we get that backward we don’t get the gospel.

For me, David’s praise, especially at that time in my life, helped sharpen my focus on the God he is so effusively praising. The temptation all sinful humanity has is to focus on our circumstances or other people. It’s terribly easy to do because, well, it’s all we can see! So, instead of living by faith, i.e., trust, we live by site, the opposite of what Paul says we should do.

Speaking of trust, that is the I Chronicles 29:10-13 lesson of these last five years, and the focus of the rest of my life; trusting God who worthy of my trust. The lack thereof is my greatest sin, and something for which I repent daily. I know I don’t trust him if I allow fear, worry, anxiety, doubt, frustration, and anything else that cannot be defined as “perfect peace” into my life. I didn’t say it would be easy!

I realized how important this was for me as I began to understand the word faith or belief in the New Testament. When we come across those, or any variations thereof, they do not mean intellectual assent. The Greek word used for both English words is pistis-πίστις, so it is far more than merely intellectually accepting that something is true. We can “believe” something is true, and it make absolutely no difference in our lives. Will that airplane get me to Tuscaloosa, Alabama safe and alive? Trust gets me on it. Or ice fishing. I don’t quite get the appeal (probably because I was born and raised in L.A.), and I believe the ice will hold up, but you would never get me out on the ice. I believe, but don’t trust.

What David’s declaration of praise did for me was convince me the ice will hold up no matter how thin it looks, no matter how many cracks appear. I learned how addicted I am to circumstances, how easily I treat them as more sovereign and powerful than Almighty God. It’s kind of pathetic when you think about it, but the problem is we don’t often think about it; we react. Our peace of mind isn’t determined by who God is, a la David’s accurate declaration, but by how we interpret our circumstances. When the trust challenge comes, as it did for me so often in the early years of our time in Florida, I didn’t pass the test. But in due course because I was determined to focus on this God and his power and glory and majesty and splendor, I slowly developed my trust muscle. You can too!

 

 

 

Rock of Ages and The Double Cure for Sin

Rock of Ages and The Double Cure for Sin

Oct 28, 2022 | Theology

One reason we’ve always gone to churches where hymns are sung is because the best hymnody is theology in song, meaning the study (ology) of God (theos) set to music. Much modern praise music unfortunately is more anthropology, more about man (anthropos), than God. And for my wife and I, something about two or three hundred year-old music lends itself to the sacred. The theology, though, is what we appreciate most, and I often learn or am reminded of truths about our astonishing faith that allow me to marvel all over again at our great God and Savior.

One recent Sunday we sang the theologically rich old hymn every Christian has heard of, Rock of Ages. The author, with one of the best hymn writer names in history, Augustus Toplady (1740-1778), knew his theology. The theme of the Hymn comes from Exodus 33 where Moses asks the Lord to show him his glory, who he really is. In reply, The Lord declares his name, and adds, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” The Lord alone determines who will receive his mercy, or not. This truth is foundational to the revelation of God to his people about who he is. We can’t earn his mercy, or grace; he alone grants it as he will.

The beauty of the salvation for those to whom he grants it, his people, is that it is a complete and total salvation. Thus, in the first stanza, Toplady writes:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
let me hide myself in thee;
let the water and the blood,
from thy wounded side which flowed,
be of sin the double cure;
save from wrath and make me pure.

This double cure saves us from God’s wrath, and at the same time makes us pure. In other words, the salvation granted to us in Christ is for sin’s guilt and power. The problem is that sin’s power over us seems, well, powerful. We fight it, but we often feel like a pummeled boxer down for the count.

The Apostle Paul can relate. He confesses in Roman 7, “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” Who can’t relate to that! In his frustration he cries out:

 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me out of this body of death?

The English doesn’t do justice to Paul’s emphasis in Greek because emphasis is determined by where words are placed unlike in English. He starts, “Wretched I am man.” In other words, he is emphasizing just how wretched he is. The extended meaning of that word captures well our struggle against sin: (beaten-down) from continued strain, leaving a person literally full of callouses (deep misery) – describing a person with severe side-effects from great, ongoing strain (significant hardships). If we haven’t felt that way about our sin, we haven’t really struggled against it.

I’ve heard it said, any dead fish can float downstream; it’s easy to go with the sinful flow because, well, we’re sinners! It’s really hard to fight against our natural sinful inclinations. As soon as we’re spiritually raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit, however, the fight begins; but we are not in this fight alone. Paul answers his question, and affirms Toplady’s double cure:

 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Amen!

Most Christians have no problem believing God saves us from the guilt of sin, justification, but we tend to think the pure part, sanctification, is our job. The good news is that Jesus is both! I never really got this until maybe 10 years ago. Deep down I was under the impression my relationship with God was in some way determined by what I did or did not do.

First, I seemed to believe God would like me more if I was a good little boy, and less if I wasn’t. At some point I realized that wasn’t true at all because God’s wrath was fully satisfied in Christ, the whole enchilada. On the cross, Christ paid for the penalty and guilt of my sin, all of it, past, present, and future. In Isaiah 53 we learn he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; and “the punishment that brought us peace was on him.” So absolutely nothing we do or don’t do can make us any more acceptable to God than we are in Christ, ever.

But Christ is not only our justification, as Paul says in I Cor. 1:30, but he is also our sanctification. We’re not left to deal with the power of sin in us on our own, as if defeating it was up to our choosing, our will, our decisions. It is not!  These are obviously part of the process of our sanctification, but they do not determine it. We tend to think we just need to try harder. Then I can finally live, as it used to be called, the victorious Christian life. Technically we call that hooey.

I want you to chew on something God made apparent to me: we can’t transform ourselves. That’s God’s job. As we read in Zechariah 4:6, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty. As Julia Ward Howe wrote in the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Christ “died to make us holy.” The Apostle John tells us how instead of letting sin defeat us, we trust that Christ too is our sanctification:

 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

This is the double cure! Not only are we forgiven for the guilt, but God promises to purify us from the power of sin. That is his job not ours! It’s even gooder news than I ever thought!

Hurricane Ian: Why?

Hurricane Ian: Why?

Oct 2, 2022 | Theology

During church yesterday, I got a lot of food for thought about the recent hurricane that hit southwest Florida, and as hurricanes are wont to do, caused so much damage and loss of life. I often think when suffering comes upon the world in some catastrophic way, how prone we are to lament it’s happening, and rightly so. The Bible never embraces suffering as a positive moral good. Nor are we to respond in Stoic indifference, and just grin and bear it, but rather always look at it in light of the Creator God of the universe.

When it was apparent Hurricane Ian was heading our way, I thanked God (I Thess. 5:18), and prayed for those who were going to be impacted by it in big and small ways. I often think of the story of the tower of Siloam in Luke 13. Jesus uses these stories of apparently senseless suffering and death to tell us why such things happen. Some Galileans had been killed by Pilate in one, and in the other a tower fell on eighteen unfortunate people and they died. He asks if these people were worse sinners than those who did not die, and then says:

5 I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

 

6 Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. 7 So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, ‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?’

 

8 “‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it.

 

Nothing happens by accident. As Christians, we believe in God’s providence, as David says in I Chronicles 29, that he is “the ruler of all things.” The Hebrew can be translated as to have dominion, or to reign. That includes weather events such as hurricanes.

We’ve been so indoctrinated by secularism and the word “nature,” that we are tempted to see creation as somehow “natural” and that it runs on its own. We’re even tempted to see hurricanes as merely weather events. You know, this high and that low, warm water and air, positive and negatives electrons, it all moves around, and you have a hurricane! Well, yeah, but that’s not the whole story. Jesus stilled a storm by his mere words (and freaked the disciples out!), and he is still sovereign ruler over all of his creation now, including hurricanes like Ian.

Early Tuesday morning I turned on my computer and looked at the hurricane tracker, it was heading directly at Tampa (we leave around 20 miles northeast), which was a bit disturbing. However, as the day wore on that tracker moved consistently south and east, and I thought maybe we’ll get off easy. That, of course means other people would not, and it landed about 100 miles south of Tampa, wreaking the havoc we’ve all seen on our screens. My prayer was and is for all those affected that they might take Jesus’ words to heart, and repent, realize life is terribly short, and there are far more important things than avoiding suffering, pain, and loss in this life. I hate suffering, pain, and loss as much as anyone, but God allows these things in our lives not to define us, but to refine us.

Paul in 2 Corinthian 4 (the text for today’s sermon) gives us the proper perspective when life throws its worst at us:

16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light momentary affliction are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

English cannot do justice to Paul’s description of this eternal glory. He uses the Greek word from which we get hyperbole back-to-back to, so hyperbolēn eis hyperbolēn, and this very emphatic term means superlatively, beyond measure. And it’s ironic when you see the phrase “light momentary affliction,” and realize the extent of Paul’s suffering. You can find his horrific list of these in 2 Corinthians 11:16-33, and he wasn’t using hyperbole!

So, as in all things in life, the reason for hurricanes is to teach us how to trust God and proclaim his sovereign rule over all things for our good and his glory (Rom. 8:28). This is the reason we can give thanks in all circumstances as Paul commands, even when it’s very, very hard. We sing hymns in our church, which I love because that means we sing theology, which means they are about God and not me. We sang “God moves in a mysterious way” by William Cowper, and when life doesn’t seem to make sense, it’s a good hymn to mediate upon to keep our focus where it needs to be, upon Him:

    God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.
    He plants his footsteps on the sea, And rides upon the storm.

     

    Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, The clouds you so much dread,
    Are big with mercy, and shall break, With blessings on your head.

     

    Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But trust him for his grace.
    Behind a frowning providence, He hides a smiling face.

     

    His purposes will ripen fast, Unfolding every hour.
    The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flower.

     

    Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan His work in vain.
    God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain.

    Deuteronomy 4: Theological Implications of God Rescuing His People from Slavery

    Deuteronomy 4: Theological Implications of God Rescuing His People from Slavery

    Aug 13, 2022 | Theology, Uncategorized

    In my last post I focused on some of the uninvented takeaways from this chapter, or why I think it couldn’t be made up. Briefly, if it was, the author was a liar, and the Bible is a worthless piece of trash. Not that I feel strongly about it or anything. You’ll remember the writer (Moses, we believe, and the topic of a future post) kept repeating the eyewitness nature of the Exodus. As God rescued his people from slavery in Egypt, they saw his amazing works among them and heard his voice. Either it happened, and they did see and hear these things, or they did not. There is no in between. If it did not happen pretty much the way portrayed in this chapter and in the Pentateuch, I’m just not interested. I have better things to do than believe lies are true, and then base my life, and death, upon them. Don’t you? But I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the Bible records true history, which is why I wrote Uninvented, hoping I might help other Christians grow in their confidence that the Bible is indeed what it proclaims itself to be, God’s revelation of the redemption of his people.

    There is also, however, the theology to consider, the truths of this redemption for we who believe the Bible is in fact God’s word. Jesus said in Matthew 4:4 quoting himself from Deuteronomy 8:3 that, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This substance we take from his word is theology. You may know theology is the study of God. Any word ending in ology is the study of something, and in this case of theos, or in Greek, God. So, in reading and meditating on Deuteronomy 4 theologically, we’re trying to discover something about the being and nature of God, and there is a lot here to discover. Here is a brief overview of the book of Deuteronomy from Chuck Swindoll:

    Deuteronomy means “second law,” a term mistakenly derived from the Hebrew word mishneh in Deuteronomy 17:18. In that context, Moses simply commands the king to make a “copy of the law.”1 But Deuteronomy does something more than give a simple copy of the Law. The book offers a restatement of the Law for a new generation, rather than a mere copy of what had gone before. Deuteronomy records this “second law”—namely Moses’s series of sermons in which he restated God’s commands originally given to the Israelites some forty years earlier in Exodus and Leviticus.

    The older Israelites are beginning to die off and will not be allowed to enter the promised land because of their rebellion, so Moses is re-telling the law to the new generation following Joshua across the Jordan. Moses himself will only catch a glimpse of the promised land because he too didn’t trust God, but one day he will enter the eternal promised land with us.

    Which brings us to the profound theological truths in this chapter. Our tendency as self-centered sinful human beings is to, no surprise, to be self-centered. As I’ve said a multitude of times in blog posts, sin is well defined as Incurvatus in se, Latin for being turned or curved in on oneself. This is more profound than being selfish or self-centered, an obvious human malady, and for most of us overcome to one degree or another as we grow older and mature. We learn that self-obsession doesn’t really pay, so we are able to see things beyond our own self-interest. Spiritually, however, the self is a more pernicious foe, and deceptively subtle.

    As a young Christian, my faith was primarily about my choices and decisions. God laid out the conditions, and I decided whether I would obey or not. If I jumped through the hoops, God and me, we were good, if not, well, I had to work harder. It was more about what I did for God, than what God had done for me in Christ. When I was introduced to Reformed theology by a “chance” encounter in February of 1985, I experienced a proverbial Copernican revolution. Instead of my Christian faith revolving around me. my experiences, choices, will, decisions, I now saw how it revolved around God’s work for me in Christ. The gentlemen who introduced me to this radical theology, known as Calvinism, suggested I read a systematic theology (I’d never even heard the phrase before) by the great 19th century theologian Charles Hodge.

    Hodge said something that perfectly captured my newfound understanding: Christianity is the work of God in the soul of man. Our self-centered tendency, however, is to see our faith as God responding to our work, and not us to his. In other words, law not gospel. In Deuteronomy 4 we see it is God who initiates the relationship with his people, and it is he alone who saves them:

    20 But as for you, the Lord took you and brought you out of the iron-smelting furnace, out of Egypt, to be the people of his inheritance, as you now are.

    34 Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?

    35 You were shown these things so that you might know that the Lord is God; besides him there is no other. 36 From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, and you heard his words from out of the fire. 37 Because he loved your ancestors and chose their descendants after them, he brought you out of Egypt by his Presence and his great strength, 38 to drive out before you, nations greater and stronger than you and to bring you into their land to give it to you for your inheritance, as it is today.

    And throughout Deuteronomy, he reminds them that they were “slaves in Egypt,” and would still be slaves if not for his mighty saving power. This is true for us too! It is God’s work alone, his power, that raises us spiritually from the dead, changes our sinful heart of stone, to flesh. In theological terms, this is called regeneration, or the transformation of our beings from his enemies to his children. Only then, our hearts transformed, can we put our faith, our trust in Christ. Our rescue from the slavery of sin was “by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord our God did for” us in Christ!

    Embrace The Suck! The Gravitational Pull of Sin

    Embrace The Suck! The Gravitational Pull of Sin

    Mar 13, 2022 | Theology

    I apologize for the semi-vulgarity, but this has become something of a favorite phrase of mine of late. I guess it’s because life can so often seem so sucky to us. Things rarely go like we think we want them to, and even when they go like we think we want them to, they never quite live up to what we think they should. I wonder why. That’s a rhetorical question because, well, we all know the answer, but so often we seem to forget. I’ll give it to you, no charge: We live in a fallen world in a fallen body among fallen people. That means, life is really hard most of the time. I’ll explain why that’s good news below, but first we have to understand why, and fully accept it. The latter part is far more difficult then the former. The reason for the former, the why part, is found in Genesis 3:

    17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

    “Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
    18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
    19 By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
    until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
    for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

    We call this the fall, but for some reason we don’t envision falling as the essence of life, as the thing we have to constantly fight against day in and day out, day out and day in. For some odd, irrational reason, we tend to think things should go smoothly, that the rough patches in life should be few and far between, or at least not be so darn often! When things go off the rails, and not at all like we think we want them to go we conclude . . . something is wrong! Well, no, nothing is wrong; that’s life lived in a fallen world in a fallen body lived among fallen people. I once heard a phrase from a pastor not too many years ago that captured so well this thing we battle against every day: The gravitational pull of sin. Oh, how it weighs us down, and in so many ways. Unfortunately, the way we fight against it is to complain and moan, or react in any number of negative ways. I’ll share a secret. It’s not the negative experiences or situations or people that is the suck; it is us!

    Yes, brothers and sisters, you and me. That is what we must embrace, that we are the problem, not our situations or others. It is that we are incurvatus in se, utterly curved in on ourselves, which determines our negative reactions to situations and others, and why we are problem. We have to get to the point where we embrace the simple fact that it is we who suck, that we are helpless sinners if left to ourselves. It is only when we get to the point of accepting and embracing the spiritual reality of our utter suckiness (pushing this suck thing too far, but hang with me), that we realize our utter unworthiness before the unapproachable holiness of God. Then we can relate to the tax collector in Jesus’ parable:

    13 “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

    It is when our heads are bowed down in a certain kind of shame of our unworthiness before God that sanctification can really take hold in our souls. At that point we finally have nothing to prove, nothing to defend, no excuses to make, and that the only thing we bring to the God in Christ on the cross is our sin. Grasping the true spiritual reality of who we are by (sinful) nature makes this passage in John 3 so powerful:

    14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

    I would implore you to read the passage in Numbers 21 that explains what happened. If someone doesn’t understand something of redemptive history, this will appear absolutely absurd. God punished his people for being ingrates by sending venomous snakes among them to kill them? Seriously? What kind of God is this! Well, he’s a just God, and he’s told them, and us, from the very beginning that the wages of sin is death. Where’s the good news in all this? Jesus!

    The reason the gospel is such good news, which is what the word means, is that when we are bitten by the snake, all we need to do is to look up to him and trust him, and we will live. What do we do, though? We look down at the bite! It hurts, we think, what else are we supposed to do? Look up! The pain and hurt and sorrow are what should cause us to look up to him, to trust him that he has the answer for all of it. That’s what believe means, in Greek, pisteuó-πιστεύω, trust. The reason embracing the suck is so important is so that we don’t look to ourselves, or to our circumstances to save us, to provide the answers to our problems. We are the cause of those problems! All of them. As we learn to trust him, everything falls into place, everything works, and we experience a peace that passes all understanding. Notice what Paul says allows us to have that peace. There is an entire blog post in those verses, but giving thanks is part of it, and as he says elsewhere, in all circumstances. When our knee-jerk reaction when things go south is to give thanks instead of complain, we’ll know real sanctification is happening in our souls.