Our Discomforting Savior

Have you seen this? Michael Spencer discussing one of the most uncomfortable (and therefore most avoided) sayings of Jesus. I have a mind to collect such uncomfortable sayings all on one blogpost. It would be a long post, though. The cumulative impact might be rather surprising. I have no desire to set up some kind of dichotomy between the comforting Jesus and the discomforting Jesus, but such a dichotomy is implicit in our avoidance of this category of teaching, always scanning the Scriptures for "comfort" verses. Are we missing something?

Getting back to Michael's post, check this out:

What’s challenging about so much of Luke 14 is how it seems to contradict so many things we take for granted as normal and moral, especially family.

A new landowner assumes he should go see what he’s bought. A farmer buys five oxen- a major purchase- and wants to examine them. A newlywed wants his honeymoon. (Deuteronomy 24:5 gave him a year at home!)

All of these become examples of excuse makers who are more interested in the normal routines of life than the Kingdom of God that is coming.

I would put myself- and all of you- squarely in the group Jesus is describing, by the way. If you think you aren’t an excuse maker who would rather inspect his oxen than enter the Kingdom, you’re not going to see the intent of Jesus.

In the parable where these examples are found (14:15-24), the man giving the banquet (God working through Jesus) must literally drag and force people to come to the banquet. (“Compel them to come.”) Eventually his house is filled with the crippled, the blind, the lame and the assumed uninvited and unwelcome.

As Michael says, Jesus is often "purposely provocative." That's a pretty acute phrasing there. Very true. Like all the true prophets of old, I guess. We are more "of" this world than we like to admit, so the Scriptures, when we hear them clearly, often bring us up short, reveal us to be hiding in the bushes with fig leaves covering our embarrassing parts, and on those fig leaves are scrawled all the comfort verses of the Bible.

I put it this way over at Mount Jesus, apropos of another possible disturbing utterance of the Savior of the world:

if these opening words of Jesus [in the sermon on the mount] are not a little shocking to us, a little disturbing, making us shift in our seat a little (our comfortable seat in the grass with Jesus), if these beatitudes ripple over us like refreshing water instead of piercing us like the arrows of God, then perhaps we are not understanding them after all. That's my take. I want to be pierced by the Word (Heb 4:12), not just comforted. These words of Jesus have sharp points and fly faster than light.

Someday I'm going to need much comfort, I'm sure, and perhaps all that I say here will seem then like utter nonsense. But this is where I'm at right now. The Word is "two-edged," somebody said. Perhaps one edge is for piercing, and the other for healing.

Anyway, I think one of the most uncomfortable concepts of the Bible is that we who believe are "sent" for the purpose of the Gospel. We sing songs about being in the arms of Jesus, having our worry and fear subside as we remember that Jesus loves us, etc. All good. We get together and talk about our needs. When do we get together and talk about our mission? I'm just wondering. I'm sure we've all got cattle to look after, family matters to attend to, even a close relative's funeral to go to . . . then we can talk about following Jesus.

But our very discomforting Savior has another idea.

Friday . . .

Wisdom on Facebook

Jared Wilson, in answer to Facebook's ever-urgent question, "What's on your mind?", wrote this:

If Jesus really is the Alpha and Omega (as Revelation says he is), and if he really is the radiance of God's glory (as Hebrews says he is), if he really is before all things and holding all things together (as Colossians says), and if he really is the way, the truth, and the life (as he himself says), why on earth WOULDN'T we fall to our knees and wash his feet with our hair? After all, we are all prostitutes.

I just had to share.

Okay, I'm not done blogging, but for now it's just all music all the time. I love this song, and I love Chrystal Lewis!

Through the Gates

Announcing: A Conversation

As my occasional reader will know, I've been blogging intermittently about the beatitudes of Jesus. Well, my son Nate told me he's been reading the sermon on the mount over and over lately, so I suggested to him that if we could find at least a third blogger to join us, we might begin a blogging conversation of sorts: three Jesus-followers talking and wondering aloud about the remarkable teachings of Jesus to be found in Matthew 5 to 7.

Well, Nate thought it was a good idea, and soon brought his friend John on board. John is a guy I'd met once, but had heard about often from Nate. He's the guy behind Relevant Revolution sermon jams, the husband of Nicole, and the bubbling with glee new daddy of a little girl named Anna-Joy.

So the three of us had a little discussion about what to call this blog about the sermon on the mount, and we finally decided on Mount Jesus. So there you have it. We're shooting for something along the lines of 1 post per week from each of us at most, with due allowances being made for the fact that one of us is a new papa.

I will be cross-posting my own stuff here as well, but I'm really looking forward to the interaction at Mount Jesus and hope my own readers will click over there and have a look now and then--and join in the conversation!

A word about the three of us. I'm the old guy in the trio. You know me. John and Nate are a couple of young guys who display in their lives the clear indication that the grace of God has had a profound impact on them. I think you might enjoy the conversation!

One more thing. Let me quote from John's first post, where he speaks of his hopes for this conversation:

Personally, I hope this conversation steps outside the typical "commentary talk" and becomes a place where the mature and educated learn how to become young children who climb onto their daddy's lap with a sensitive spirit, mind and heart.

Yup. That's my hope, too.

Spookily Accurate

This is from Bro. Matt's Blog, a post entitled, Taking Care of How You Hear, part iii. The quote is so close to my own experience as to be, well, spooky:

Michael Horton is his new book Christless Christianity serves us well with two scenarios that are often found in our churches. The first service is geared on God’s work for us—the Father’s gracious plan, the Son’s saving life, death, and resurrection, and the Spirit’s work of bring life to the valley of dry bones through the proclamation of Christ. The preaching focuses on God’s work in history found in Genesis to Revelation to redeem sinners from their plight. Trained and ordained to mine the Scriptures’ riches for the benefits of God’s people while the ministers push their agendas in the background so that God’s Word is clearly proclaimed. The congregations are receivers, recipients of grace enjoying the bread of heaven. Having been served the Word, they go into the world filled with praise and thanksgiving for all the God has accomplished through Christ. Because they have been served the Word in its depths, they are able to engage those they encounter with a clear picture of God’s work in history and are able to communicate this with unbelievers they come across.

Contrast this with church #2. The church is it’s own personal community in which people assume they come to do something. The emphasis is on their work for God. The preaching concentrates on principles and steps to living a better life, with a constant stream of exhortations: Be more committed, read your Bible more. Pray more. Witness more. Give more. Get involved in this cause or that movement to save the world. Their calling by God to secular vocations is secondary to finding their ministry in the church. The result is a group who work due to a charismatic leader rather than being motivated by knowledge and godliness. They always serve, but are rarely served. They have to shepherd themselves, and are thus ill-informed about God’s grand work in his history. All they can talk about is their own “personal testimony,” slogans, formulas. They are so busy with church-related activities, they have no time to develop relationships outside the church. Yet, if someone were to bring this friend to church, they would wonder if they would ever hear the gospel!

Processing the Kingdom: Blessed are Those Who Mourn, part 2

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

I want to understand why Jesus should have said, in his first recorded discipleship training session with the twelve, that those who mourn are blessed.

I'm speculating, just for the sake of mulling things over, that this beatitude goes beyond a promise of comfort to those who mourn, but honors the mournful with blessing because the heart of the mourner is in some sense even desirable.

Why do I say this? Well, simply because I take that to be the sense of the other beatitudes that surround it. There is a quality about being “poor in spirit” that God honors. Meekness is quite possibly like this also, and certainly hunger and thirst for righteousness, peacemaking, and all the others are as well. Why should this one beatitude be otherwise?

Okay, that's a thought, as they say. But does this mean that God prefers us to go around sorrowful and burdened all the time? What could possibly be so valuable about mournfulness?

It would be good to remember at this point a simple rule of thumb: all the promises of God are delivered to us through Christ. Got that? Let's just set it off in a blockquote for good measure:

All the promises of God are delivered to us through Christ.

But let's make that a tad more specific:

All the promises of God were purchased for us by Christ at the cross.

So whenever you see a promise in the Scriptures, think to yourself, that promise was purchased for me by Christ with is very lifeblood.

OK: so here is Christ speaking to his disciples, and kind of enumerating some of the major blessings of the kingdom—the kingdom he's been proclaiming from the very start of his ministry, saying it was near at hand—and among those blessings are comfort for those who mourn. But remember, the disciples don't understand (yet) what we understand—that Christ himself will deliver on that promise of comfort by taking the wrath of God at sin upon himself.

To put it another way, then:

The cross comforts those who mourn.

But I started this post by saying that there was something about mourning, even as there is something about, for example, hunger and thirst for righteousness, that God will honor. In other words, mourning may reveal a quality of heart that is receptive to the blessings of the kingdom.

Maybe so, but why? I would say because it helps to position us to carry our our calling as ambassadors of Christ in a broken world. I suggest that God has a kingdom purpose in aligning his children with the broken-hearted. Remember, the beatitudes are a part of a training-session for Christ-followers. The kingdom comes to such as these: the poor in spirit, the broken-hearted, the meek, the hungry for righteousness, the peacemakers, etc., and then, as kingdom representatives, they offer the kingdom to others. When we, not standing aloof but entering into the brokenness of the world as broken ones ourselves, but holding out the word of life, the light of the Gospel, we are then true to our calling as disciples.

Peaceful Pickin'

Processing the Kingdom: Blessed are those who mourn?

What do we do with this completely counter-intuitive beatitude?

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

I've been mulling this one over all week, and I'm just wondering, is this simply an assurance of ultimate comfort for those who mourn, or is it a statement about--an assessment of--the life of the mourner?

Do you understand what I mean? I'm thinking these blessed are statements are not exactly promises, are they? They are something more like divine assessments.

When Mary's sister Elizabeth said to her, "Blessed are you among women," it was this kind of assessment. Prior to that, when the angel of the Lord said to her, "Greetings, oh favored one, the Lord is with you," it was another way of saying the same thing. "Blessed are you."

Similarly, in Psalm 1, which says the man who walks not in the way of the wicked is blessed, this is not a statement about rewards in the future for good behavior now. It doesn't say, "He shall be like a tree planted by streams of water," but he is like that tree.

So you see the difference here? In the case of "blessed are those who mourn," Jesus may not simply be saying someday their mourning will be replaced by joy, or that there will be blessed comfort forever in the great by-and-by, but he's saying that those who mourn--those who are able to mourn--are blessed. Just like Mary was blessed by carrying the savior in her womb, and yet Simeon could say to her, "and a sword shall pierce your heart also." Blessed, yes, but your heart shall break. Broken-hearted, yes, but blessed nevertheless.

You see how none of this has anything to do with the great by-and-by? "Blessed" is more than a promise. It's a divine assessment of the the poor in spirit, the broken-hearted, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, etc.

"They shall be comforted." That is promise. "Blessed are." That is an assessment.

Now if I am right about this, then I have to ask, what's so blessed about mourning? Secondly, everyone mourns, sooner or later. Does that mean everyone is "blessed" in the eyes of God?

I'll take up these questions in the next "Processing the Kingdom" post.

Beautiful!

My friend Lois tipped me off about this one. The sheer beauty of singing together:



Watch all the PS22 Chorus videos you can. They all rock! Like maybe this one:

The Central Strategy in the Fight for Joy

From When I Don't Desire God (p. 91), by John Piper:

Hearing the word of the cross, and preaching it to ourselves, is the central strategy for sinners in the fight for joy. Nothing works without this. Here is where we start. And here is where we stay. We never outgrow the gospel. Here we see the glory of Christ more clearly than anywhere else. Indeed the gospel is "the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God" (2 Cor. 4:4). If seeing Christ is the key to savoring Christ--and it is!--then here is where we must linger. The word of the cross is the revelation of the glory of Christ.

"The Talk"

Last week I had the talk with my pastor. You know, the I-don'think-this-church-is-for-me talk. I respect this guy a whole lot and it was a nice discussion. We kind of agreed to disagree about preaching the gospel every time you preach. I said it was the whole purpose of preaching, he said it was his purpose to preach "the whole council of God," which includes the gospel but goes well beyond it. He said the preaching of the gospel is primarily an evangelistic practice (for reaching the lost), while his role was more of a teacher than an evangelist, preaching "the whole council of God" in order to affect spiritual growth and maturity in the congregation.

I think his assumption was that I meant by "the gospel" the nuts-and-bolts salvation message offered just before an altar call. I guess we never really hashed out what exactly I did mean by "the gospel," or (better) "gospel centrality," so in that sense I'm a little miffed at my own lack of clarity there, but all in all I thought the conversation was a real blessing.

This fellow is a hard-working and thoughtful pastor, but his "whole council of God" understanding (and you would know this from his preaching) is not decisively gospel-centric or Christ-centered. It is fascinating to me how Jesus can be "one of many things" a pastor might teach about, rather than those "many things" being subject to Him who holds all things together.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. Col 1:15-20

"That in everything [Jesus] might be preeminent" is the purpose clause of the passage. You might call it God's mission statement. If our own mission--and our preaching and teaching--does not jibe with that, something is definitely wrong.

Anyway, that's done, and now the decks are nearly cleared. I'm committed to a few more weeks of attendance (obligation, not desire) and after that, we're playing it by ear.

Wow!

Found this over at Gospel Muse:

What does this mean, our being “in the wilderness before the cross?” Simply put, it captures something of what our existence is here. As sojourners, exiles, we find our place outside the camp, outside Jerusalem, outside those alleged strongholds along with our Lord, dying to the World and the World to us. In this dying in (because of) Christ’s dying, there might be found then something of a genuine working of God in making us alive.

The goal is not our getting as alive as we can, as if somehow we entirely (or almost so) put off mortality and corruption. Rather, there is a proper ongoing dying, because of our being brought to the Cross; a dying that only the Cross itself can bring about and sustain. What subsequent making alive that takes place is in spite of us, but only insofar as the dying is ongoing by the Sovereign (albeit merciful) hand. Fact is, oftentimes, there is little of either genuine dying of self or divine life-giving going on.

Our existence now is before the Cross, where we are in ourselves naked (natural condition fully exposed) and yet not ashamed, for Christ alone is our boast and covering. Amen.

Talk about Fandango!

Processing the kingdom 3: The Beatitudes of Lack

I'm still thinking about the beattitudes of Jesus.   They totally floor me.

Let's take just the first four for the time being.  

• Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
• Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
• Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
• Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

Notice that these are all beatitudes that emphasize lack.  They are completely counter-intuitive.  An old boss of mine used to use the third one, "blessed are the meek," as his proof that the Bible was full of, well, I won't say what he said it was full of.  I mean, it didn't make any sense at all to him.  It was a radically stupid think for Jesus to say, he thought.  The truth is, it was a radical challenge to the presiding world-view that all of us labor under to one degree or another.  Jesus is demolishing world-systems with these words--or at least forecasting their demolishment.

So who are the blessed ones, and what are they blessed with?

Take "poor in spirit."  I think that little phrase "in spirit" seems to give us permission to spiritualize this condition so that we who are really not poor in any way shape or form can still say, well, I'm born again, and I know I need God, so that means I'm poor in spirit.  Right?

Here's what I think it means.  Bottom line: shattered.  Broken apparently beyond repair.  Chewed up, spat out, kicked about, laughed at, humiliated, chastized, dismissed, ignored, tossed aside.  A mess.

Ever been there?

God is saying, I'm going to bless those people in a big way.  I'm going to bless them with all the blessing of the kingdom of God!  I'm going to make that kingdom their kingdom.  I'm going to give it to them for free.  The ones who were last will be first.  A lot of people aren't going to believe their eyes!

Now, all the predicate phrases of these beatitudes refer to some aspect of the kingdom of God, which Jesus has been preaching about up till this point.  The kingodom of God is at hand, he's been saying, then healing people right and left.  Then he pulls aside his undoubtedly awe-struck disciples and says, let me tell you more about this kingdom I'm talking about.  It's coming to all the people you least expect!  The broken, the helpless, the mournful, etc.  And it reverses their present condition completely.  You're probably not going to get this just yet, but just keep my words in mind and keep following.  It'll all come clear eventually.

From the beginning of my meditation on these verses I've been wondering if I share any of these condition that Jesus says are blessed.   Am I poor in spirit?  Am I in mourning?  Am I meek?  Am I hungering and thirsting for righteousness?

Umm, well, I mean, well, kind of.  Maybe.  Sometimes.  A little.

But what I am realizing is that Jesus personified all these characteristics.  He lived them, start to finish.  Yes, he was poor in spirit, crying out, My God, my God, why have you foresaken me?  Yes, he mourned.  He mourned for the lost.  He mourned for Jerusalem.  And on the cross, he wept.  And yes he was meek.  Like a lamb to the slaughter, lifting not his voice.  And yes, he hungered and thirsted for righteousness like no other man who ever lived before or sense.

And here's the final point.  What belongs to Jesus, even to his very nature, in some sense through my unity with him in faith, belongs to me.  But unity with Christ does not mean victorious living in any sense that we usually understand it.  The apostle Paul knew that it would mean unity with him in brokeneness, mourning, meekness, and hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Paul's goal was to know Christ, and he knew that the fullest and most intimate form of that knowing would have to include a sharing in his suffering,  even "becoming like him in hs death."

Is it all beginning to pierce your heart yet?  Because that's what's intended.  If your God-view does not leave a lot of room for God to work his blessings through suffering and brokenness, then your God-view needs a rehab.  And you know what?  I can't do that for you.  I can only point the way.  

There.  Over there.  On a hill far away.  Three crosses.  A murderer.  A thief.  And the Son of God.  Go there once again, and be made well.