By the Grace of God I Am What I Am

March 14, 2012 By revheff in Theology Tags: Freedom, grace, salvation, sanctification, sin 2 Comments

One of the great liberating texts of Scripture in my life comes from 1 Corinthians 15:10.

By the grace of God I am what I am.

In spite of Paul’s horrific resume as a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent (1 Tim. 1:13), he counted himself among those who witnessed the resurrected Christ first-hand and became the hardest working apostle of all. And he attributed it all to grace and nothing but grace.

John Bunyan, author of the classic Pilgrim’s Progress, offered this response on an occasion of hearing this verse of divine writ:

I am not what I ought to be. Ah, how imperfect and deficient!

I am not what I wish to be. I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good!

I am not what I hope to be. Soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection.

Yet, though I am not what I ought to be,
nor what I wish to be,
nor what I hope to be,
I can truly say, I am not what I once was;
a slave to sin and Satan;
and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge,
‘By the grace of God I am what I am.’

Though none of us is what we ought, wish, or hope to be, and won’t be until we reach glory, truth is we aren’t what we once were.

May we heartily join with the apostle and declare, By the grace of God I am what I am.

He Brooks No Rival

January 12, 2012 By revheff in Spiritual Life Tags: discipleship, idolatry, sacrifice, sanctification, self-denial Leave a comment

I admit it.

Working through this quarter’s edition of Free Grace Broadcaster on the topic of self-denial has left its share of bruises and wounds on my experience.

For example, consider this paragraph from one of the articles by Charles Spurgeon entitled Family or Christ?:

What, then, is the expense [of following Christ]?…The answer is given by our Savior, not by me. I should not have dared to invent such tests as He has ordained. It is for me to be the echo of His voice and no more. What does He say? Why, first, that if you would be His and have His salvation, you must love Him beyond every other person in this world. Is not that the meaning of this expression, “If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother”? Dear names! Dear names! “Father and mother!” Lives there a man with soul so dead that he can pronounce either of these words without emotion, and especially the last— “mother”? Men and brethren, this is a dear and tender name to us, it touches a chord that thrills our being. Yet far more powerful is the name of Savior, the name of Jesus. Less loved must father and mother be than Jesus Christ. The Lord demands precedence also of the best beloved “wife.” Here He touches another set of heartstrings. Dear is that word wife—partner of our being, comfort of our sorrow, delight of our eyes—“wife!” Yet, Wife, thou must not take the chief place, thou must sit at Jesus’ feet, or else thou art an idol; and Jesus will not brook thy rivalry. And “children,” the dear babes that nestle in the bosom, clamber to the knee, and pronounce the parent’s name in accents of music—they must not be our chief love. They must not come in between the Savior and us. Nor for their sakes—to give them pleasure or to promote their worldly advantage—must we grieve our Lord…If they tempt us to evil, they must be treated as if we hated them! Yea, the evil in them must be hated for Christ’s sake. If ye be Christ’s disciples, your Lord must be first, then father, mother, wife, children, brethren, and sisters will follow in due rank and order.

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Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

December 29, 2011 By revheff in Spiritual Life Tags: Bible reading, discipline, planning, sanctification, spirituality Leave a comment

Whoever coined that little saying, got it right. Making a plan and working a plan can make all the difference on so many fronts in our lives from the physical to the relational to the spiritual.

For over a decade now I have followed a plan of one sort of another of daily Bible reading that ensures I will read through the Scripture from Genesis to Revelation in the course of the calendar year. Elsewhere in this blog I have made my case for this discipline outlining 16 reasons why it makes sense to give oneself to such a practice. You can read that post here.

Rather than repeat myself, I want to direct our readers this year to an excellent post by Justin Taylor called Bible Reading Plans for 2012. It includes motivational, practical, and multiple options on the subject. My favorite link is to The Bible Reading Plan for Shirkers and Slackers, a must for anyone who considers discipline a four-letter word. I considered inserting the link but decided I wanted to make you click through to JT’s blog to do so in hopes that you will read more than just the one option.

I am taking my New Year’s messages on January 1 & 8 from Acts 20:32 which says this:

And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified.

I will argue for our greatest need in 2012 and beyond to be twofold – seeking the Lord in prayer and hearing/reading His word of grace. Why not get a leg up on application for these priorities by settling now on what plan you will pursue in reading through the Bible in 2012?

In choosing a plan we are far more likely to succeed than if we don’t.

How People Change

August 31, 2011 By revheff in Spiritual Life Tags: change, community, gospel, growth groups, sanctification Leave a comment

We’re gearing up this fall for a church-wide growth group emphasis using the How People Change DVD Seminar Curriculum.

You can hear more about this during our congregational meeting this Sunday during the 9:30 hour.

Here’s one description of the material:

In the How People Change Seminar Paul Tripp and Tim Lane explore the truth of the gospel and apply it to life in a fallen world. Through their teaching, they clearly explain and enhance the truths from the How People Change Study Guide that help people to understand how Christ’s life, death, and resurrection can and does change the details of their lives. Through twelve, 30-minute sessions participants will be challenged to experience the deep-down change that the gospel of Jesus Christ brings and given the tools to understand the basic principles in the companion study guide.

For a taste of what’s in store, take ten minutes to view the video below.

Please pray with us for God to use this to shape our lives for change all the more by the power of the gospel.

The Cross Centered Life

June 20, 2011 By revheff in Books Tags: cross, gospel, guilt, legalism, sanctification, spiritual growth Leave a comment

Lately the Lord has seen fit to slap me around a bit about my lack of attention to the gospel as the main thing in my ministry. Believe me, not even someone as thick-headed as me could miss the many messages from on high.

As a consequence I’ve made it my mission the last couple of months to get my hands on as many reading materials as possible to help recalibrate my pastoral trajectory.

Someone lent me C. J. Mahaney’s little jewel The Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel the Main Thing to take on our recent trip to Idaho. Nancy and I read through it for our family worship devotions.

The founder of Sovereign Grace Ministries explains his purpose this way: to restate the obvious, yet oft-neglected, truth of the gospel, to bring it before you one more time (p. 16). Actually he means to bring the reader to the gospel one more time with a view to keeping it everlastingly at the forefront for all time! Mahaney doesn’t say a lot in terms of volume (it’s only 89 pages, small pages at that) but he says an awful lot in those pages just the same.

Candidates for reading included those who often lack joy, aren’t consistently growing in spiritual maturity, their love lacks passion for God, and are always looking for some new technique, some “new truth” or new experience that will pull all the pieces of their faith together.

He tempts the reader right out of the chute with these enticements about learning to live the cross centered life:

breaking free from joy-robbing, legalistic thinking and living
leaving behind the crippling effects of guilt and condemnation
stopping basing your faith on your emotions and circumstances
growing in gratefulness, joy, and holiness

Particularly helpful was his chapter entitled The Cross Centered Day – Practical Ways to Center Every Day around the Cross. He calls these ways to preach the gospel to yourself on a daily basis. They include

memorizing the gospel
praying the gospel
singing the gospel
reviewing how the gospel has changed your life
studying the gospel

Pick up a copy for your own library, read it, and you may end of feeling like Martin Luther who said, I feel as if Jesus had died only yesterday.

God's Astonishing Design for Marriage

May 16, 2011 By revheff in men's ministry Tags: gender differences, marriage, sanctification, Singleness Leave a comment

This Saturday in our Oxford Club meeting for men we will continue our discussion of Richard Phillips’ book The Masculine Mandate.

We will turn from the theological ground work laid in part one of the book to the practical application of those principles especially and primarily within marriage. Phillips says some provocative things in this chapter, particularly in his counsel to single men. That should generate some interesting discussion!

But he makes some profound insights about God’s design in marriage, especially in terms of our sanctification that results from making the choice to “hold fast” or “cleave” or as he calls it “bond” to a wife.

But bonding changes us. It requires us to give things up, to live differently than we did previously. Exactly! God did not make man to live for himself. God did not put Adam in the garden to be infatuated with his tools and his toys and his self-centered lifestyle. He put Adam there to work and keep, cultivating, nurturing, and protecting that which God had entrusted to Him. And the first step for many of us in becoming the men God wants us to be is to become married, so that we will leave behind our selfish ways and begin fulfilling our masculine calling through our relationships with our wives. This is for our good, as any man in a godly marriage can tell you. It is great to have a helper designed by God to love and minister to me. But it is especially good to have to rise up in masculine virtue and strength for the sake of my wife, leaving behind a self-focus that was, at best, only intended for a temporary season of singleness (p. 64).

Gents, why not bring your own breakfast at 7 AM at the church office this Saturday and join us for some iron-sharpening-iron ministry to one another as we seek to fulfill our masculine mandate as men at OGC?

The Power of Moods to Shape the Mood

April 21, 2011 By revheff in Spiritual Life Tags: gospel, moods, sanctification, spiritual growth 3 Comments

For years, even after my conversion, I went about my days often as a pretty moody person.

Back in the time when Tim LaHaye’s temperament categories captured the evangelical imagination, I always got stuck with the same label of the four: melancholy (choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic rounding out the group). Ask Nancy and she will probably tell you that this moody blues pattern in her husband during far too many of those early years made for one of the biggest challenges to her marital adjustment.

I am happy to say after nearly forty years of walking with Jesus that the label doesn’t stick so well anymore. That’s not to say that I don’t struggle with melancholy from time to time. I do. But things have changed by God’s grace and the power of the gospel.

Understanding the power of the gospel and living in the grip of grace that delivers one from melancholy depends a great deal on grasping the relationship between the moods of Greek verbs. Gotcha thinking now, don’t I? You probably didn’t guess that trajectory in my thinking.

But it’s true, entirely true, in the relationship between the indicative and the imperative moods. The indicative mood in languages states what is. The imperative, on the other hand, declares what should be. The former is descriptive; the latter is prescriptive. To put it another way, the indicative tells us who we are in Christ because of the gospel while the imperative tells us how we should live in light of the gospel.

For example, Ephesians 2:4-6 states what is. Because of God’s great love, even when we were dead in sin, He made us alive together with Christ, raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places. We refer to that as positional truth. That’s our position in Christ. Ephesians 4:1-3, on the other hand, declares what should be in light of what is. Because of what God has done for us in Jesus we should walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. The rest of those verses goes on to unpack what worthy walking looks like.

That’s only one of a myriad of examples from the New Testament. Here’s the point. Don’t confuse your who with your do. Don’t switch your indicative with your imperative. The Bible never does. The indicative always precedes the imperative, never the other way around. In Christ what you do does not determine who you are; who you are determines what you do! We don’t obey the commands of Christ in the word of God to make ourselves pleasing to God; we obey the commands of Christ in the word of God because we are pleasing to God in Christ.

This is huge in terms of shaping emotional moods! If you confuse your who with your do, if you switch the moods, you will end up either despairing because you never measure up, or you go the other way and end up bragging at how much you have it together. Neither of those moods pleases God.

I was reminded the other morning just how much the gospel has changed my moods by a rather silly incident. Nancy prepared a dynamite egg & cheese strata for our weekly staff meeting. I get up earlier than she does on Tuesday morning so it fell to me to preheat the oven and get the thing cooking while our guys prayed. Sounds simple enough.

But when she came out to the kitchen I heard a gasp and wondered, What did I do wrong now? Turns out I had preheated the oven but never put the casserole in there! Poor Nanc had to scramble literally, whipping ups some eggs. Plan B she graciously called it. How cool is it to live with a wife constrained by the gospel?

Tell you the truth, I was tempted, really tempted, to do that silly thing I have often done. I thought seriously about playing that game I play so well called beat up on PC. I know it’s silly, but that’s the very kind of thing that can put me into an emotional tailspin!

And then I remembered the gospel. It’s not about my performance; it’s about His provision. He has perfected me for all time (Hebrews 10:14). I am complete in Him (Colossians 2:10). I have been crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20). The pleasure of God with me His child does not depend on remembering to put the strata in the oven or any other assignment for that matter. It depends upon my union with Christ and God’s absolute delight with Him.

If we get this, if we keep our moods in the right order, then the joy of the Lord really will be our strength (Nehemiah 8:10), and our moods will be shaped for the glory of God and testify to the beauty of the gospel.

No More "Nike" Christianity

April 12, 2011 By revheff in Spiritual Life, Uncategorized Tags: gospel, grace, justification, mercy, sanctification, spritual growth 2 Comments

After the picnic on Sunday I crashed in front of the tube to watch the final round of the Masters golf tournament.

Have to admit, I was curious to see if Tiger would rise from the ashes and win his first major since his crash and burn.

As always he sported the Nike insignia on his person, a living billboard for the sportswear giant. Who doesn’t know the motto that goes with the logo?

I wonder how many Christians approach their spiritual lives with the same mentality. I just need to do it. I’ll just try harder. I’ll spend more time in the Bible, pray more, memorize more Scriptures, etc, etc, etc. Just do it. That’s the ticket to God’s being pleased with me.

Don’t get me wrong. These means OF grace matter. But when they become means FOR grace we’ve missed the boat altogether. Means of grace serve to connect us to the One who died for us to wipe the slate clean of the guilt of our sin AND to apply the 100% righteousness of Christ to our spiritual accounts. This is huge. It means that God looks on us and deals with us as if we had perfectly obeyed the law because Jesus obeyed it for us. He is our righteousness and we are complete in Him (Colossians 2:10). They do nothing in the way of meriting acceptance before God. There is nothing more we can do in that regard. Jesus did it all for us.

This is why we must not live a “Nike” form of Christianity, but rather a Cross-centered form of Christianity.

Lane and Tripp explain in How People Change:

Do you know what it means to live a Cross-centered life on a daily basis? Some Christians think that the Cross is what you need to become a Christian and get to heaven. They think, I need my sins forgiven so that I escape God’s judgment when I die. But once that is taken care of, what matters is that I follow Christ’s example. I need to roll up my sleeves and get to work! The tricky thing about this perspective is that it is partially correct. You do actively pursue the obedience that comes from faith (Rom. 1:5; 16:26; Gal. 5:6). You do engage in spiritual warfare! However, you are never to minimize your continuing need for the mercy and power of Christ in the process of becoming like him (emphasis added, p. 183).

This means that we need daily to keep coming back to verses like Romans 12:1 – I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. The mercies of God make us holy and acceptable in His sight. That’s why we can present our bodies to Him for His use.

We need daily to keep coming back to verses like Hebrews 10:14 – For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. Jesus’ death accomplished our perfecting in God’s sight. The tense of the verb communicates a past action with ongoing consequences. This status never changes regardless of our goof ups! It’s on that basis that we experience the ongoing transformation that is our sanctification, being made holy as He is holy.

We need daily to keep coming back to verses like Romans 8:1 – There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. But PC, I just lost my temper for the umpteenth time. I just took another look at that website I had no business clicking on. I just turned yet another time to my idol of choice for comfort in the face of temptation. What do you mean there is no condemnation for me in Christ Jesus? Just what I said. Paul’s words not mine. This deal is not about our performance; it’s about His provision.

Forget about “Nike” Christianity. Just do it gets you no where. Why not rather adopt the Cross-centered Christianity motto?

Just believe it.

I’d like somebody to make a logo for that. I’d put it on my sport shirt in a heartbeat.

The Not-So-Dreaded "P" Word

April 11, 2011 By revheff in Spiritual Life Tags: change, identification with Christ, potential, sanctification, spiritual growth Leave a comment

By “P” word I mean potential.

I used to dread hearing from others, “You have so much potential.” This implied in my mind far too painfully that I still had a long way to go in more ways that I could imagine.

Lately I don’t hear that so much any more. I suspect getting older has something to do with it. If I haven’t reached my potential by age 58, well, it’s probably too late.

But today I found myself contemplating an old-friend verse of Scripture that puts the “P” word in a different light, one that a follower of Jesus and a treasurer of His gospel never outlives or grows.

Galatians 2:20 – I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

This text declares some radical things. By faith in Christ we gain more than the benefits of the cross; we get united to Christ in His death. So much so that we no longer live. That is to say that Christ doesn’t just make us new and improved persons, but that he makes us utterly different at the core.

Lane and Tripp, in their book How People Change, drive home the significance of this truth for understanding the exciting prospect of gospel potential:

When you grasp the fundamental nature of this change within you as a believer, you will begin to grasp your true potential. You are not the same as you once were. You have been forever changed. You no longer live under the weight of the law or the domination of sin. Christ’s death fulfilled the law’s requirements and broke the power of sin. You do not have to give in to sin. You can live in new ways amid the same old situations, because when Christ died physically, you died spiritually. This constitutional change is permanent! Do you view yourself with this kind of potential for a new life in Christ?

Suddenly the “P” word doesn’t look dreadful. It looks downright delightful.

Amazing Grace Behind Bars

April 9, 2011 By revheff in Sunday Morning Tags: grace, John Bunyan, license, preaching, prison, sanctification 2 Comments

As I prepare today for another Lord’s Day and the challenging preaching assignment God has given me from John 12:20-26, particularly vv. 25-26, I find myself decidedly grateful for the grace of Christ and His gospel. That and that alone enables anyone to hate his life in this world that he might keep it in the next.

Reminder that only the grace of God can empower extreme devotion to Christ came to me today from some reading I did in Bryan Chapel’s excellent book, Christ-Centered Preaching: Redeeming the Expository Sermon. In the chapter entitled Developing Redemptive Sermons, he writes of John Bunyan, the famous hymn writer, noting how much of his theology came into focus with clarity from behind bars.

Historians tell us that one of the amazing features of the life of John Bunyan was his refusal to let prison deter him from his pursuit of ministry. The author of Pilgrim’s Progress wrote many of his most influential words while incarcerated. In fact, prison helped strengthen and galvanize much of his thought. Bunyan’s theology took more concrete form when, though facing great deprivations, he debated with fellow religious prisoners whether the assurance of God’s love promoted holiness or license. Fellow prisoners challenged Bunyan saying, “You must not keep assuring people of God’s grace because they will do whatever they want.” Bunyan responded, “That is not true for God’s people. If you keep assuring God’s people of his grace, then they will do whatever he wants” (p. 313).