Sunday, March 18, 2012
One-Way Love
We love the “if/then” proposition: “If” you do this, “then” I will do
that; we are inveterate slaves (at worst) or grumpy employees (at
best). We militate against the freedom of inheritance and the dependency
of sonship. We love living as though “what goes around comes around”
conditionality were true. That kind of conditionality makes us feel
safe. It’s easy to comprehend. It’s appropriately formulaic. And best of
all, it keeps us in control. We get to keep our ledgers and scorecards.
The equation: “If I do this, then you are obligated to do that” makes
perfect sense to our grace-shy hearts.
Unconditionality, on the other hand, is incomprehensible. We are deeply conditioned against unconditionality because we’ve been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment always precedes acceptance, that achievement always precedes approval. When we hear, “Of course you don’t deserve it, but I’m giving it to you anyway,” we wonder, “What is this really about? What’s the catch?” Internal bells and alarms start to go off, and we begin saying “wait a minute…this sounds too good to be true.”
You see, everything in our world demands two-way love. Everything is conditional. If I achieve, we reason, only then will I receive everything I long for: love, approval, significance, respect, and so on. Be good. Bring home the bacon. Keep your act together….Then (and only then) will you have what you want. That’s how our world works. But grace isn’t from our world. It’s otherworldly. It’s unconditional. Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It’s one-way love.
Like Job’s friends, we naturally conclude that good people deserve good stuff and bad people deserve bad stuff. What goes around comes around sums up the mechanism at work in the world we’re at home in. The idea that bad people get good stuff is so counter-intuitive as to be utterly implausible. It seems terribly unfair. It offends our sense of justice. Of course, when we talk of justice and good people earning God’s blessing, we’re forgetting that the Bible is a not a record of the blessed good, but rather the blessed bad. No, that’s not a typo. The Bible is the record of the blessed bad. But how can that be? It can be (and is) because a good Someone else earned blessing for the bad. We say that we believe in a God of grace and then live lives completely skeptical of that grace. We’ve forgotten the one-way love of Calvary.
Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace. Don’t take it too far! Keep it balanced! Tamp it down! we warn. But grace–one-way love–is by its own definition, unbalanced. Grace is a gift, not a wage. It’s a gift of love, and lavish love gifts never sit quite right with the bookkeeping, wage-earning, responsible citizen that resides in our own hearts.
Need proof? We need look no farther than Mary’s profligate anointing of the Savior in preparation for his death (John 12:3f) for a snapshot of our own hearts. She was both misunderstood and censured by those ever-so-responsible disciples in attendance. The giving of something costly to another simply because one loves, without expecting anything in return, is inequity in action. We recoil at it. What could ever be balanced about something as lopsided as one-way love? One-way love has no qualifiers, no conditions, no buts. It’s unconditional, unpredictable, and undomesticated. You can’t put brakes on it because it’s not yours to measure out or control.
Grace makes us nervous, it scares us to death because it strips us of our beloved “you owe me” religion. It snatches control out of our hands. It tears up the timecard we were counting on to be assured of that nice, big paycheck on Friday. It forces us to rely on the naked goodness of Another and that is simply terrifying. However much we may hate having to get up and go to the salt mines everyday, we distrust the thought of completely resting in the promised, unmanageable generosity of God even more.
By nature we’re all perpetually suspicious of promises that seem too good to be true. We’re wary of grace. We wonder about the ulterior motives of the excessively generous. What’s the catch? What’s in it for him? So we try to domesticate the message of one-way love–after all, who could trust in or believe something so radically unbelievable?
Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! It’s the truest truth in the entire universe. No strings attached! No fine print to read. No buts. No conditions. No qualifications. No footnotes. And especially, no need for balance.
If
you’re a Christian, you have been given the most extravagant gift ever:
the completely sufficient imputed righteousness of Christ. That means
that his perfect timecard has your name on it and every single penny
that was owed him for a life of devoted labor in your salt mine has been
deposited directly into your account. It also means that you’ve been
completely forgiven for every single time you lazed out, came in late,
left early, cut corners, dawdled on FaceBook, stole paperclips, despised
the boss, backstabbed your co-worker, and generally acted like an
apathetic, hateful slave. You’re completely, totally, unashamedly
forgiven. You’ve been forgiven because Jesus took your record and
applied it to himself, receiving in your place every lash of the wrath
you had earned and transferring his record to you.
Won’t you suspend your incredulity and conditionality for just one moment and believe? Won’t you stop yourself from saying, “Yes, but…” for just one hour? Sure, it seems dangerous, but doesn’t that ride look like fun? Haven’t you grown tired of the taste of that gritty salt? How many times do you have to say, “the harder I work, the behind-er I get” before you give up and believe?
Who deserves this kind of lavish one-way love? No one. No one deserves it—that’s why God calls it grace: undeserved favor. But if you believe it, your pardon is already full and final. In Christ, you’re forgiven. You’re clean. Now. It is finished. And as scary as it may seem, wading into this ocean of grace will be the most freeing and blissful dive you’ll ever take.
Tullian Tchividjian
Unconditionality, on the other hand, is incomprehensible. We are deeply conditioned against unconditionality because we’ve been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment always precedes acceptance, that achievement always precedes approval. When we hear, “Of course you don’t deserve it, but I’m giving it to you anyway,” we wonder, “What is this really about? What’s the catch?” Internal bells and alarms start to go off, and we begin saying “wait a minute…this sounds too good to be true.”
You see, everything in our world demands two-way love. Everything is conditional. If I achieve, we reason, only then will I receive everything I long for: love, approval, significance, respect, and so on. Be good. Bring home the bacon. Keep your act together….Then (and only then) will you have what you want. That’s how our world works. But grace isn’t from our world. It’s otherworldly. It’s unconditional. Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It’s one-way love.
Like Job’s friends, we naturally conclude that good people deserve good stuff and bad people deserve bad stuff. What goes around comes around sums up the mechanism at work in the world we’re at home in. The idea that bad people get good stuff is so counter-intuitive as to be utterly implausible. It seems terribly unfair. It offends our sense of justice. Of course, when we talk of justice and good people earning God’s blessing, we’re forgetting that the Bible is a not a record of the blessed good, but rather the blessed bad. No, that’s not a typo. The Bible is the record of the blessed bad. But how can that be? It can be (and is) because a good Someone else earned blessing for the bad. We say that we believe in a God of grace and then live lives completely skeptical of that grace. We’ve forgotten the one-way love of Calvary.
Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult not to put conditions on grace. Don’t take it too far! Keep it balanced! Tamp it down! we warn. But grace–one-way love–is by its own definition, unbalanced. Grace is a gift, not a wage. It’s a gift of love, and lavish love gifts never sit quite right with the bookkeeping, wage-earning, responsible citizen that resides in our own hearts.
Need proof? We need look no farther than Mary’s profligate anointing of the Savior in preparation for his death (John 12:3f) for a snapshot of our own hearts. She was both misunderstood and censured by those ever-so-responsible disciples in attendance. The giving of something costly to another simply because one loves, without expecting anything in return, is inequity in action. We recoil at it. What could ever be balanced about something as lopsided as one-way love? One-way love has no qualifiers, no conditions, no buts. It’s unconditional, unpredictable, and undomesticated. You can’t put brakes on it because it’s not yours to measure out or control.
Grace makes us nervous, it scares us to death because it strips us of our beloved “you owe me” religion. It snatches control out of our hands. It tears up the timecard we were counting on to be assured of that nice, big paycheck on Friday. It forces us to rely on the naked goodness of Another and that is simply terrifying. However much we may hate having to get up and go to the salt mines everyday, we distrust the thought of completely resting in the promised, unmanageable generosity of God even more.
By nature we’re all perpetually suspicious of promises that seem too good to be true. We’re wary of grace. We wonder about the ulterior motives of the excessively generous. What’s the catch? What’s in it for him? So we try to domesticate the message of one-way love–after all, who could trust in or believe something so radically unbelievable?
Contrary to what we conclude naturally, the gospel is not too good to be true. It is true! It’s the truest truth in the entire universe. No strings attached! No fine print to read. No buts. No conditions. No qualifications. No footnotes. And especially, no need for balance.
If
you’re a Christian, you have been given the most extravagant gift ever:
the completely sufficient imputed righteousness of Christ. That means
that his perfect timecard has your name on it and every single penny
that was owed him for a life of devoted labor in your salt mine has been
deposited directly into your account. It also means that you’ve been
completely forgiven for every single time you lazed out, came in late,
left early, cut corners, dawdled on FaceBook, stole paperclips, despised
the boss, backstabbed your co-worker, and generally acted like an
apathetic, hateful slave. You’re completely, totally, unashamedly
forgiven. You’ve been forgiven because Jesus took your record and
applied it to himself, receiving in your place every lash of the wrath
you had earned and transferring his record to you.Won’t you suspend your incredulity and conditionality for just one moment and believe? Won’t you stop yourself from saying, “Yes, but…” for just one hour? Sure, it seems dangerous, but doesn’t that ride look like fun? Haven’t you grown tired of the taste of that gritty salt? How many times do you have to say, “the harder I work, the behind-er I get” before you give up and believe?
Who deserves this kind of lavish one-way love? No one. No one deserves it—that’s why God calls it grace: undeserved favor. But if you believe it, your pardon is already full and final. In Christ, you’re forgiven. You’re clean. Now. It is finished. And as scary as it may seem, wading into this ocean of grace will be the most freeing and blissful dive you’ll ever take.
Tullian Tchividjian
Saturday, March 17, 2012
The Foundation-Graces
Jonathan Edwards, in the sermon 'Profitable Hearers of the Word':
We wage warfare by knowing that the war is over. The main weapon is our peace.
Fight, fight with all your might, with the gospel.
As Paul told Timothy: '. . . wage the good warfare, having faith. . . .' (1 Tim 1:18-19)
Dane Ortlund
Be most intent upon increasing the foundation-graces, such as the knowledge of God, the understanding of his Word, believing the truth of the gospel, a realizing sense of a future state of rewards and punishments. Labor to get your heart all enflamed with love to God and abased by humility and a sense of your own unworthiness. These are the foundation-graces, and as these are increased, all other graces will most certainly increase proportionably.The Christian life is earnest, strenuous effort. But it is effort flowing from 'the foundation-graces'--knowing God, understanding His Word, believing the gospel, knowing our unworthiness.
And all these things you must do with the utmost diligence and application of mind. The work of a Christian is compared to running, and wrestling, and fighting, and those exercises which require the greatest labor. (Works, Yale ed., 14:277)
We wage warfare by knowing that the war is over. The main weapon is our peace.
Fight, fight with all your might, with the gospel.
As Paul told Timothy: '. . . wage the good warfare, having faith. . . .' (1 Tim 1:18-19)
Dane Ortlund
Friday, March 16, 2012
Just A Blues Jam - Mark Freer
We had just finished setting up a recording studio and were testing it out. This jam is the result. it is unmixed, has some mistakes, its raw, but we were just having fun.
Jesus Wasn't Crucified for Being Boring
It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man. . . . If this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore--on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certifying Him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.--Dorothy Sayers, Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World: A Selection of Essays (1969), 13
Dane Ortlund
Thursday, March 15, 2012
My Hope Is Built On Nothing Less
So then, have we nothing to do to obtain righteousness? No, nothing at
all! For this righteousness comes by doing nothing, hearing nothing,
knowing nothing, but rather in knowing and believing this only–that
Christ has gone to the right hand of the Father, not to become our
judge, but to become for us our wisdom, our righteousness, our holiness,
our salvation!
Now God sees no sin in us. For in this heavenly righteousness, sin has no place. So now we may certainly think, “Although I still sin, I don’t despair, because Christ lives–who is both my righteousness and my eternal life.” In that righteousness I have no sin, no fear, no guilty conscience, no fear of death. I am indeed a sinner in this life of mine and in my own righteousness, but I have another life, another righteousness above this life, which is in Christ, the Son of God, who knows no sin or death, but is eternal righteousness and eternal life. For if the truth of being justified by Christ alone (not by our works) is lost, then all Christian truths are lost…On this truth and only on this truth the Church is built and has its being.
Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Preface
Now God sees no sin in us. For in this heavenly righteousness, sin has no place. So now we may certainly think, “Although I still sin, I don’t despair, because Christ lives–who is both my righteousness and my eternal life.” In that righteousness I have no sin, no fear, no guilty conscience, no fear of death. I am indeed a sinner in this life of mine and in my own righteousness, but I have another life, another righteousness above this life, which is in Christ, the Son of God, who knows no sin or death, but is eternal righteousness and eternal life. For if the truth of being justified by Christ alone (not by our works) is lost, then all Christian truths are lost…On this truth and only on this truth the Church is built and has its being.
Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Preface
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Packer on Justification
As understood by the Reformers and their followers, and by Paul as I read him, [justification] is theological, declaring a work of amazing grace; anthropological, demonstrating that we cannot save ourselves; Christological, resting on incarnation and atonement; pneumatological, rooted in Spirit-wrought faith-union with Jesus; ecclesiological, determining both the definition and the health of the church; eschatological, proclaiming God's truly final verdict on believers here and now; evangelistic, inviting troubled souls into everlasting peace; pastoral, making our identity as forgiven sinners basic to our fellowship; and liturgical, being decisive for interpreting the sacraments and shaping sacramental services.--J. I. Packer et al, Here We Stand: Justification by Faith Today (Hodder and Stoughton 1986), 5; quoted in Anthony Hoekema, Saved by Grace (Eerdmans 1994), 153
No other biblical doctrine holds together so much that is precious and enlivening.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
God's Word Is The Soul's Only Foundation
“Feelings come and feelings go,
And feelings are deceiving;
My warrant is the Word of God--
Naught else is worth believing.
Though all my heart should feel condemned
For want of some sweet token,
There is One greater than my heart
Whose Word cannot be broken.
I'll trust in God's unchanging Word
Till soul and body sever,
For, though all things shall pass away,
HIS WORD SHALL STAND FOREVER!”
― Martin Luther
And feelings are deceiving;
My warrant is the Word of God--
Naught else is worth believing.
Though all my heart should feel condemned
For want of some sweet token,
There is One greater than my heart
Whose Word cannot be broken.
I'll trust in God's unchanging Word
Till soul and body sever,
For, though all things shall pass away,
HIS WORD SHALL STAND FOREVER!”
― Martin Luther
Defining Good
“The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot
his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a
good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”
― G.K. Chesterton
― G.K. Chesterton
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