The Joy of all Our Joys

A friend of mine recently sent me a brief article by Francis Frangipane. Frangipane writes:

People give their lives to Jesus Christ for many reasons. Some need physical or emotional healing; others are in search of peace and forgiveness. Whatever our condition, God meets us in the valley of our need. Indeed, the Lord reveals Himself to man as heaven's answer for our needs. He is a "father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows." He even makes "a home for the lonely" and leads "out the prisoners into prosperity" (Ps. 68:5-6).

God uses our need to draw us to Christ. Yet, the consciousness of our need narrows our revelation of God, limiting His activity in our lives to the boundaries of our struggles. Thus, many Christians never awakened spiritually to the deeper call of God, which is to attain the likeness of Christ. We are forgiven, healed and blessed, but we experience a ceiling on our spiritual growth.

I'm not necessarily in accord with where Frangipane goes with all this in his article, but he does draw a fairly accurate portrait of many churches, in my opinion. We limit Christ to the "boundary of our struggles." And it seems to me that churches often encourage this limiting. It is, in essence, the default position of much preaching. I have addressed this issue often myself, under the label of the therapeutic gospel.

Frangipane said that "the consciousness of our need narrows our revelation of God." To that I would add, we don't even know what we really need. We think we need healing, or that we need a loved one to get right with God, or that we need to beat an addiction, or to forget a nightmarish past. But what we really need, above and beyond all that, is to know Christ, the height and depth and length and breadth of his love, and the power of his resurrection, and yes even the fellowship of his suffering.

And here's the thing. I don't truly understand any of this and I'm willing to bet you don't either. I don't understand my own need. I don't understand Christ. I have not been so "renewed in knowledge," as Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, that Christ is truly all in all to me.

If we are really to understand our own need, we will have to learn with a keener and more ruthless insight just what sin is and what sin has done to us. Sin leads to death, but there is an author of life who has conquered sin and death, and he did so at the cross. To even grasp one thin thread of this knowledge, like the woman who grasped the hem of Christ's garment, is not only to be healed, but to be saved.

Here's my point: the solution to the problem identified by Frangipane is the cross of Christ. Look upon that scene. Perhaps we cannot fully grasp the full worth of that which took place at Calvary that day, but we can see at least that it is awesome and majestic and world-shaking and paradigm-shifting and presumption-shattering beyond all human kin, and that it is, as John Piper says, the sweetest thing we've ever seen, "the light which is the joy of all our joys."

[Check out this brief clip of John Piper for a sense of what I'm talking about. HT: Jared Wilson.]