REPENTENANCE - AN UNPOPULAR MESSAGE
REPENTANCE - AN UNPOPULAR MESSAGE
Noah's message from the steps going up to the Ark was not, "Something good is going to happen to you!"
Amos was not confronted by the high priest of Israel for proclaiming, "Confession is possession!"
Jeremiah was not put into the pit for preaching, "I'm O.K., you're O.K.!"
Daniel was not put into the lion's den for telling people, "Possibility thinking will move mountains!"
John the Baptist was not forced to preach in the wilderness and eventually beheaded because he preached, "Smile, God loves you!"
The two prophets of the tribulation will not be killed for preaching, "God is in His heaven and all is right with the world!"
Instead, what was the message of all these men of God? Simple, one word: "Repent!"
THE PROMISES OF GOD
The Fullness of God Colossians 2:9-10
When he wrote the letter to the church at Colosse in Asia Minor, the Apostle Paul was addressing a destructive Judeo-Gnostic heresy that was infiltrating and weakening the church. Though he doesn't define the heresy in his letter, it is easy to see from his emphases the errors which he was correcting. And one of the points where the Colossian Christians had fallen into error was over THE point of Christianity: who Jesus Christ is. The declarative truth which Paul states becomes a promise for every believer: Jesus Christ is the embodiment and fullness of Deity.
Apparently (like today), religious leaders in Paul's day were teaching that Christ was not God. It is very easy to hold Christ in high regard (as did the Gnostics, and as do the Moslems and even many pseudo-Christian cults of our day) without confessing him as God in the flesh. Have you heard that point of view today? Perhaps you have been well into a conversation with a person whom you assumed was a Christian when you discover that they equate Jesus with Paul and the other great "leaders" of Christianity, or even with Buddha or Mohammed or "founders" of other faiths. Does this really matter? According to Paul, very much so. For if Christ is not truly the Living Word of God, then he cannot speak for God. His words to us bear no more import than the words of any other religious leader. And if this is true, then the second part of Paul's statement becomes even more meaningless.
Not only is Christ the fullness of the Deity in bodily form, Paul promises that believers have been given spiritual fullness in Christ - that He is above every other power and authority (including, by implication, the Gnostic teachers). But if Christ's word in us is not the word of God in us, then we have received only the word of a wise man, not the word of God. Have you received Christ? Have you believed His word? Then you have believed and received the very life of God himself, for Jesus Christ is God.
God's Promise to You: "Receiving Christ is receiving me."
RELATIONAL SPIRITUALITY - PART 2
God's Love for Us: Causeless, Measureless, and Ceaseless
We have seen that the love of God is the wellspring of Biblical faith and hope. Consider these truths about the love of God from Paul's epistle to the Romans: In the book of nature, God reveals His eternal power and divine nature (1:20), and in the book of human conscience, He reveals our imperfection and guilt (2:14-16). But it is only in the book of Scripture that God reveals His limitless love that can overcome our guilt and transform us into new creatures in Christ. God's loyal love for us is causeless (5:6), measureless (5:7-8), and ceaseless (5:9-11). There was nothing in us that merited or evoked His love; indeed, Christ died for us when we were His ungodly enemies. God's love is spontaneous and unending - He loved us because He chose to love us, and having responded to Christ's offer of forgiveness and relationship with Him, nothing can separate us from that love or diminish it (8:35-39). This means that we are secure in the Lord's unconditional love; since we belong to Christ, nothing we do can cause God to love us more, and nothing we do can cause God to love us less.
As people who have experienced pain and rejection caused by performance-based acceptance and conditional love, the description above seems too good to be true. Isn't there something we must do to merit God's favor or earn His acceptance? If we are afraid others would reject us if they knew what we are really like inside, what of the holy and perfect Lord of all creation? The Elizabethan poet George Herbert (1593-1633) captured this stinging sense of unworthiness in his superb personification of the love of God:
Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.
"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here."
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
Beyond all human faith, beyond all earthbound hope, the eternal God of love has reached down to us, and in the ultimate act of sacrifice, purchased us and made us His own.
How do we respond to such love? All too often, these revealed truths seem so remote and unreal that they do not grip our minds, emotions, and wills. We may sing about the love of God in worship services and learn about it in Bible classes, but miss its radical implications for our lives. Spiritual truth eludes us when we limit it to the conceptual realm and fail to internalize it. We dilute it through cultural, emotional, and theological filters and reduce it to a mental construct that we affirm more out of orthodoxy than out of profound personal conviction. How do we move in the direction of loving God completely?
Loving God Completely
In the last two years, I have adapted and used this prayer by St. Richard of Chichester (1197-1253) in my own quiet times before the Lord:
Thanks be to Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits which Thou hast given us; for all the pains and insults which Thou hast borne for us. O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother, may we know Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, and follow Thee more nearly; for Thine own sake.
Loving God completely involves our whole personality - our intellect, emotion, and will. "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength" (Mark 12:30). The better we come to know God ("may we know Thee more clearly"), the more we will love Him ("love Thee more dearly"). And the more we love Him, the greater our willingness to trust and obey Him in the things He calls us to do ("follow Thee more nearly").
May We Know Thee More Clearly . . .
The great prayers in Ephesians 1 and 3, Philippians 1, and Colossians 1 reveal that Paul's deepest desire for his readers was that they grow in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. The knowledge the apostle had in mind was not merely propositional, but personal. He prayed that the Lord would give them a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him, that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened, and that they would know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 1:17-18; 3:19).
The occupational hazard of theologians is to become so engrossed in the development of systematic models of understanding that God becomes an abstract intellectual formulation they discuss and write about instead of a living Person they love on bended knees. In the deepest sense, Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship that is borne out of the trinitarian love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
When Thomas Aquinas was pressed by his secretary, Reginald of Piperno, to explain why he stopped working on his uncompleted Summa Theologica, he said, "All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me." According to tradition, in his vision he heard the Lord say, "Thomas, you have written well of me: what shall be your reward?" and his reply was, "No reward but Yourself, Lord." Our greatest mental, physical, and social achievements are as straw compared to one glimpse of the living God (Philippians 3:7-10). Our Lord invites us to the highest calling of all-intimacy with Him - and day after day, we decline the offer, preferring instead to fill our stomachs with the pods of short-lived pleasures and prospects.
What does it take to know Him more clearly? The two essential ingredients are time and obedience. It takes time to cultivate a relationship, and unless we make the choice of setting aside consistent time for disciplines such as solitude, silence, prayer, and the reading of Scripture, we will never become intimate with our Lord. Obedience is the proper response to this communication, since it is our personal expression of trust in the promises of the Person we are coming to know. The more we are impressed by Him, the less we will be impressed by people, power, and things.
The Inside Gatefold
LEGALISM AND HUMAN TRADITIONS
Around 1928, I led a Bible conference at Montrose, Pennsylvania, for about two hundred young people and a few older people. One day two old ladies complained that some of the girls were not wearing stockings. These ladies wanted me to rebuke them. Looking them straight in the eye, I said, "The Virgin Mary never wore stockings." They gasped and said, "She didn't?" I answered, "In Mary's time stockings were unknown.. So far as we know, they were first worn by prostitutes in Italy in the fifteenth century, when the Renaissance began. Later, a lady of the nobility scandalized the people by wearing stockings at a court ball. Before long everyone in the upper classes was wearing stockings, and by Queen Victoria's time stockings had become the badge of the prude." These ladies, who were hold-overs from the Victorian epoch, had no more to say. I did not rebuke the girls for not wearing stockings. A year or two afterward, most girls in the United States were going without stockings in summer and nobody thought anything about it.
Nor do I believe that this led toward disintegration of moral standards in the United States. Times were changing, and the step away from Victorian legalisms was all for the better.
--Donald Barnhouse, Let Me Illustrate