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Raking Face
I was listening to a message a few days ago that dealt with our need to repent from sin rather than adjust our definition of sin in order to protect our sin. I paused my run, got off the treadmill, and gathered all the kids together, along with Mo, for a confession.
I know that it’s important to show our kids how to respond, not merely tell them how. I know that yelling at them to stop yelling is an ineffective, let alone ironic, approach.
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Right Behind Isolation
One of the great virtues in Scripture is hospitality. Faithful families in the Old Testament received visitors into their homes, sometimes hosting them for days, providing for and protecting their guests. The apostle Peter urged his readers to “show hospitality to one another without grumbling” (1 Peter 4:9). Paul identified hospitality as a necessary qualification for elders in a church (1 Timothy 3:2).
Hospitality includes welcoming, receiving, hosting, and providing for guests.
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Our Last Names
Many men have made the following observation: we–the people–always get the candidates that we deserve. That perspective is put forward by both unbelieving and believing political pundits. For Christians, the conversation relates to our worship and how our worship relates to our culture.
The biblical principle is that we reap what we sow. The candidates on our ballots are the cream of the crop, so to speak, the fruit of a culture.
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An Accountability Table
The Lord’s Table is a table of community accountability. By God’s grace, our local church has not yet needed to remove anyone from fellowship due to church discipline. He has guarded our flock from gross, ongoing, unrepentant sinners. We have been able to enjoy the sweetness of communion without too much sadness.
This is fellowship worth preserving, worth protecting, and that means that not everyone is invited. In particular, when professing brothers refuse to repent from their sin after they have been personally, lovingly, and repeatedly pursued, they may be formally uninvited from participation.
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Four Bases
I started reading The Odyssey last week. This is yet another book I’m sure I was assigned and am even more sure I ignored. Like Roy Hobbs said to Harriet (sports star serial-killer) Bird, “The only Homer I know has four bases.” While the poem hasn’t “knocked the cover off the ball” for me yet, I’ve still got a couple thousand more lines to swing at.
The part of the story that provoked this post finds our hero, Odysseus, stranded on the island of the Phaiakians trying to get back to his wife, Penelope.
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God Never Wants to Say No
I don’t always want to forgive someone who has sinned against me, at least not immediately. I know the verses about God forgiving us as we forgive others. I know the parable about how my offenses against God are far greater than any offense against me and that, if He forgives me, then I certainly should forgive a lesser offender. I know a lot of biblical truths about forgiveness and yet that doesn’t always translate into my obedient, ready response of forgiveness.
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His Kids' Table
We’ve all been to family events where the table wasn’t big enough to fit everyone. When I was younger, I remember throwing a fit (on more than one occasion) at being relegated to the “kids’ table.” Looking back, I think that the kernel of my desire to be included was good. What I failed to grasp is that was being included.
My parents could have left me at home, could have left me in the car, could have left me in the kitchen doing dishes.
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Guilty of All
The apostle James explained our comprehensive accountability to God in his letter.
For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. (James 2:10).
Of course this affects our confession of sin since, even if we’re doing every other part of the law but we find one sin, then we must admit complete guilt. If a man dies of a heart attack, it doesn’t mean he died in every way he possibly could.
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A Real Mess
Soldiers gather to eat in mess halls or mess tents. In this setting, the word “mess” does not refer to clutter or disarray, though it may eventually look that way. Mess comes from an old French word, mes, meaning “portion of food” or “meal.” The French word comes from the Latin participle missum meaning “something put on the table.” “Mess” eventually appeared in English during the 13th century identified with “liquid or cooked dishes, like soup or porridge.
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Ready to Run
The author of Hebrews urged his readers to join him and “run with endurance the race that is set before us.” While our leg of the race is ahead of us, we know what sort of race it is by looking behind us. The “great cloud of witnesses” are done with their runs, runs that included conquering kingdoms, enforcing justice, escaping the sword’s edge, and putting armies to flight. Others had less visibly successful runs, being tortured, mocked, imprisoned, stoned, sawn in two, and other afflictions.
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A Glorious Certainty
Nothing is more certain in a Christian’s life than change into Christlikeness because He loves us. It doesn’t always feel like it. Sanctification is a dig-your-fingernails-into-the-rock-and-hang-on climb, but it is guaranteed. Christ purchased our passage from justification through to glorification. Paul stirred the Colossians with the purpose of Christ’s work:
He [Christ] has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him.
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Joy That Cannot Be Lost
Jim Elliot famously journaled, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.” There is much wisdom about forsaking temporal things for eternal things in Elliot’s quote. I think the same truth applies to forsaking sinful things for righteous things: “He is no fool who repents from what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
When we choose sin we choose a fool’s paradise.
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A Great Misunderstanding
God is not against a certain sort of misunderstanding. When the Lord delivered Israel out of Egyptian bondage, He instituted an annual feast for them to remember what He did. It was called the Feast of Unleavened Bread, or the Passover Feast, a commemmoration that the death angel passed over the Hebrew families on his way to kill all the firstborn from Pharaoh’s house to the farm.
A common concern with religous externals is that, after a while, someone new will come along who won’t know what all the ceremony is for.
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Cold Ham
As I pedal my tricycle up the driveway to the education I never paid attention to, I finished reading The Codes of Hammurabi and Moses. As with our reading for last week, The Code was in effect while Abram was a pup in Ur. And like Gilgamesh, Hammurabi used every adjective he could for self-decoration.
The Code includes a couple hundred laws that Hammurabi claimed he received from Shamash, the Babylonian sun god.
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Get It Right
This week we will finish our short Confession 101 series. We’ve been reminded that sin is bad, everyone sins, no one else makes us sin, and that my sin is worst. Lesson #5 is that we must confess our sin to whomever we’ve sinned against.
That means that confession of sin always includes confession to God. God defines sin and disciplines sin. He is the One with whom we have to do.
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Comments on John Commentaries
John chapter seven is history and I will hit sermon #50 this coming Sunday on my way through the Fourth Gospel. I’ve studied enough by now to make some informed recommendations on resources. I haven’t preached too much to make the recommendations accessory. You could actually get some of these now for the remaining two-thirds of the trip.
I’m listing these for a couple reasons. First, if you’re in the market for more on John’s gospel, these are the ones I pull off the shelf first (though not literally as you’ll see in the next paragraph).
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Thank God for Gilgamesh
This week our Omnibus class is reading The Epic of Gilgamesh. I’ve read the summary in our textbook and about 70 pages of The Epic itself. Apparently, this ancient story about the gods of Uruk was a best seller in Ur around the time of Abram. This means Abram probably grew up hearing about these gods before Yahweh called him west.
The recurring–more accurately dominating–thought that keeps jumping up and down in my head is thank God that our God is not like Gilgamesh, or any of his gods or his relatives for that matter.
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More Careful Next Time
How do you respond when you receive mercy or when you see mercy received by another? Mercy displayed often results in two responses: some who rejoice and some others who think it’s wrong for the first some to rejoice. How you respond has a lot to do with why you think God shows mercy, with what you believe His merciful motivation to be.
The ones rejoicing over mercy received or displayed know that the deserved sentence was canceled, and Yay!
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Second to None
We’ve gone over three of five lessons in our exhortation series titled Confession 101. First, sin is bad. Second, we all sin. And third, no one else makes us sin. Today we come to lesson number four: my sin is worst.
Because we live with and around other sinners and because we beat the confession drum around here at least once a week, we have to be creative in coming up with strategies to keep ourselves above others.
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No Inside Man
Being saved is not like sinning. When we sin, we do it all on our own. No one makes us do it. Another person cannot sin for us or force us into sin. Salvation, however, is not going the other direction on the same line of individual effort. I sin and have only myself to blame. I’m saved and have only another to thank. I wear the sinners hat but never the Savior’s crown.