6 posts tagged “teaching”

Over the weekend we visited Stockdales in Poland and this morning was Stockdale's house church meeting, it was a great time.

Jack shared on the idea of God's value system as we can see in 1 and 2 Peter. He shared on 5 things that are valuable and precious in God's sight according to Peter:

1. Our faith (1 Peter 1:7)
2. Us (1 Peter 1:18-19)
3. Jesus as our cornerstone (1 Peter 2:5-8)
4. Our character (1 Peter 3:3-4)
5. His promises (2 Peter 1:3-4)

Two things struck me. One was the thought I've had before that when a "buyer" declares a price on something, it makes the object valuable relative to (subjective to) the buyer. However, when God declares something to be valuable, it thereby has objective, intrinsic value. The example that comes to mind is that piece of toast where someone thought you could see an image of Mary on its side that that casino paid tens of thousands of dollars for on Ebay. Its intrinsic value was still that it was a simple piece of toast. But our intrinsic value is determined by God's declaration that we are truly worth the life of His Son.

The second thing that struck me was simply the verse in 1 Peter 2 that says "anyone who believes in Him will never be disappointed (= put to shame)". That's a quote from Isaiah 28:16. What an incredible promise. It of course mustn't be understood as meaning that we'll never be emotionally disappointed, but rather that God will never let us down, and we will never. ever. regret trusting in Him in any and every situation.

Lord, transform my mind that it may increasingly reflect your value system.

I was listening to the Mark Driscoll teaching on "Death By Love - Reflections On The Cross", and was really touched by Mark's passion for not "emasculating" the offensiveness of the cross, not hiding the "bad" news about our sin and the wrath of Holy Almighty God.
One part of the teaching, however, struck especially close to home. He was talking about how he heard a guy on Christian radio on Easter Sunday compare the cross to investment banking, basically saying that the cross shows how valuable we are, that God knew the cross was worth it, because we are of such high value to God. Mark said he just went ballistic seeing the cross being misused to place humans and humans' value at the center of the cross.

What struck home is that I distinctly remember having eerily similar thoughts about our value and the cross as the guy on the radio. Check it out here. Note I didn't use the investment banking example, but basically my thought went along the lines of the fact that because God declared that the price for us would be the death of His Son, He thereby also declared our value to be worth the death of His Son.

Now I've been wrestling with this ever since I heard the teaching. Am I over-emphasizing our value as people - going in the direction of humanism?

Then today God gave me a great thought which kind of cleared stuff up for me:

The cross does not prove our value, rather the cross gives us value.

That is, without the cross, we all have become truly worthless (2 Kings 17:15, Romans 3:12). However, one thing that happened at the cross was that God gave us worth and value while we were worthless (Romans 5:8). In other words, yes, my thoughts I had back then are still true: The thing to remember, though, is that without the cross and without that declaration of our value, we are all worthless. Our value is completely dependent upon the cross and the objective love of God.

So we have yet one more tension in the Christian life to keep in mind: Without the cross, we would have been worthless because we all turned from Him, but with the cross, God declared us to be as valuable to Him as His own Son. Our value is not the centerpiece of the cross, nor the reason for the cross, rather it is one of many consequences of the cross.

On Saturday at church I did the first part of the "Rock Berlin DNA" series about who we are as a church, what our purpose is as a church, and how we go about fulfilling our purpose. At Rock Berlin, our mission statement is that "we exist to glorify God by knowing Him personally, and spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ in both word and deed." We do this by Caring, Inviting, Deepening, and Multiplying.

The first part was on "Inviting" - we looked at the parable of the Wedding Banquet in Luke 14. Among other things, we talked about the three excuses people had for declining the invitation to the Banquet: Wealth, Work, and People.

Something that struck me while preparing for the time, but especially while sharing, was the fact that God invites all people to have a close relationship with Him. Not just non-Christians - everyone! The door Jesus is knocking on in Revelation 3:20, asking to be let in, is first and foremost a church door, not the heart to an unbeliever!

Every day you and I, whether we know it or not, have an invitation from God to live in close community with Him, led by Him. And I realize that far too often I consciously or sub-consciously decide to decline or ignore the invitation because of one of those three reasons:

I stay up too late playing a game and am too tired to re-focus on God the next morning. (Wealth)

I get frazzled and worried at all that's going on at work, and lose my focus on God. (Work)

I allow others to influence me in a wrong direction, away from God and towards other things. (People)

Lord, I choose to freshly accept your invitation to walk with you. Help me to remember this invitation is there every day for me to either accept, decline, or ignore.

On Saturday, the pastor I talked about in my last post from the mission team taught on grace.

He basically summarized grace by comparing it to mercy and justice - it wasn't a completely new concept to me, I had heard it shared in that way before somewhere (can't remember where though). Basically the idea is:

Justice is receiving exactly what you deserve - no more, no less

Mercy is receiving less (punishment) than you deserve.

Grace is receiving favor when you realize you deserve justice and can only barely hope for mercy.

The perfect picture of this is of course the Prodigal Son: the son realizes he justly deserves separation from his father, but hopes maybe his father will show enough mercy to at least let him be a servant and stay in his barn or something.

But the Father shows grace: He runs to meet the son, hugs him, kisses him, interrupts him in the middle of his repentance speech, gives him an expensive ring, the best clothes, and throws a huge party for him.

Christ paid the full price of our sins (because of the perfect justice of God). When we accept Christ, God not only completely erases our debt (out of mercy), but He also creates us anew, gives us His Holy Spirit as a deposit guaranteeing even more to come, and gives us many, many promises - out of grace.

Thank God for (frikkin') amazing Grace.

The teaching this Saturday was on the second part of James 2, the part which caused Martin Luther to say

St. James' Epistle is really an epistle of straw, compared to [Paul's epistles], for it has nothing of the nature of the Gospel about it.

What rubbed Luther the wrong way was the emphasis James puts on works: Faith is dead without works, we show our faith by our works, and he even goes so far as to say "a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone" (v. 24) - seemingly a direct contradiction to Romans 3:28 "we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law."

Something I noticed while we went through the passage is that in verses 21-23 he talks about how Abraham proved and validated his faith by sacrificing Isaac. This exact story is used by Paul in Romans 4 to prove the point that Abraham was saved apart from works!

It seems to me some people in the churches James was writing to were taking Paul's teaching of faith apart from works so far as to say faith was possible without works. James' point is loud and clear: Faith without works is not faith! Faith is completed by works.

I was challenged once again by the fact that we are told so often in the New Testament that one of the main reasons we are created is to do good works (which God in fact prepares for us to do!). Salvation does not come by good works, and James never says otherwise - but he does say if I look at my life and I don't see myself giving myself for others, helping others, serving others, doing good deeds - something is seriously very wrong.

Living a life of good works is as natural a consequence of true faith as a beating heart is to a living body - our bodies are not alive because our hearts are beating, rather our hearts should be beating if we are alive.

Oh Lord, freely give me true faith in you, that I may walk in the works you are preparing for me even as I write these words.

According to John 4:23, God "seeks" worshippers. According to 2 Chronicles 16:9, God's eyes search to and fro to strongly support the one whose heart is completely His. According to Revelation 3:20, God knocks on the door and asks us to let Him in, rather than kicking the door down.

The only thing that God does not own, in all of Creation, is our heart. All of these passages seem to point to the fact that God has decided to never force someone to truly worship him against their will or give Him their heart. Of course, God could if He wanted to. But then it would be a robotic, cheap version of the true love God wants to inspire in us, therefore God has decided He can't.

It's so humbling to realize that God gives us the ability to withhold from Him the very thing He wants most - our hearts. That I can bring such joy to the God of the universe by freely offering my heart and my life to Him is astounding.