by RobertCummins | May 2, 2014 | 18. The Cross
“And they all said, “Are You the Son of God, then?” And He said to them, “Yes, I am.” (Luke 22:70)
What would you say if the assembly asked, “So are you a son of God?” Would you have to pause and take inventory before you answer? Or would you say, without hesitation, “Yes, I am a son of God.” It is mostly to those who paused that I want to share this morning. The uncertainty that necessitated your pause might seem humble because of the grandiose nature of the claim – a son of God. You might have reacted, “Really! That’s just a few thousand notches above my pay grade. I wouldn’t dare make such a confident assertion about myself!” This particular line of thinking betrays something that truly needs to be addressed. It is your identity – the foundation of the Christian life.
You might have also had these kind of thoughts (as I once did): “I’m a pretty good person. I have not hurt others. (which in my case was not in the least true). I should be fine with God.” Or, “I attend church regularly. I give when the plate is passed.” Or possibly, “I am an elder or I lead worship (or insert whatever the appropriate title might be) with the sense that through your service and/or achievements you have attained good standing with God. I assure you this foundation is faulty and nothing built upon it will stand. I truly hope you are still in pause-mode because I would like to share some really good news with you while your heart has come to attention.
However before that, I have to first share some news that may strike you as bad. It is this. You can’t play the piano well or regularly enough to please God. Neither can you give enough to please Him. Your title, no matter how hard you worked for it has no merit with God. His standards are so infinitely high, even the most noble and pure human thoughts and deeds are defiled in comparison. An ancient prophet said it like this…
All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.
No, it’s not good news to learn that, in believing the lie of our adequacy, we have been standing on shifting sand. Its even worse to discover that, as a New Testament apostle put it….
All have sinned and fall short of the glory (standard if you will) of God.
It would be a glorious day indeed if you are moving just now, in your heart’s posture, from pause to prostrate, that place of authentic God-gifted humility where the Holy Spirit takes men that God is claiming as His own, where they have grasped the nature of their personal bankruptcy before God and find themselves positioned to finally receive good news…. That even though….
….we all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us having turned to our own way; the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
This is singularly the greatest news that has ever been stated in the realm of man or angel. All our sin (all stemming from our alien natures), ranging from deficient works to heinous behavior was all laid upon the Son of God so that we could become the sons of God. If the absurdity that the quality of your life might qualify you before God has dawned upon you, you are being granted the first stage of a gift that will address this foundational identity issue. That is the gift of repentance.
Repentance is a work of grace in the human heart. It is essentially our heart’s agreeing with God and saying, “I was utterly wrong. I was 180 degrees out of sync with you God – thinking I might have been good enough to win your approve and get to heaven.”
If it were not for the conspiracy between the world, the flesh and the devil, it would be so very, very simple. But….
The god of this age (Satan) has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
It’s simple because the new foundation of identity is a gift and gifts cannot be earned. Even an iota of attempted payment undoes the gift – undermines the foundation. Again our N.T. apostle….
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
For those who believe this in their hearts and are willing to confess it with their mouths, the old foundation is demolished and a new foundational identity is established. An intimate friend of Jesus’ put it like this….
Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.And by him we cry, “Abba,Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. (Romans 8:15-16)
Going from having the identity of one alienated and condemned to becoming a son of God is not just merely good. It is stunningly revolutionary news! Those of you who stayed in pause-mode may accuse us of fanaticism – going so far as to say with confidence, “Yes, I am a son of God.” Atheists and agnostics will scoff, saying that we deluded fools have simply played a convenient psychological trick on ourselves – inventing a God to cope with the existential angst that naturally comes from being an evolved piece of cosmic nothingness.
All I can say is that neither we nor God are rattled by your position. We have all been there. Those of us who have had our identity-replacement in Christ can only say, “You might not believe us when we say, “We are sons and daughters of God but, my oh my, would you ever be entertained be the details and extent of our delusion!”
The gift is free to us but it was not cheap to God. He had to come to earth and take upon himself the wrath that was due you and I. The Cross is fashionable today but in the time of Christ it was the unmistaken symbol of death, well marketed by the Romans. If one did not submit to the Roman’s authority, to a cross you would go. It was the inhumanity and brutality of the Cross absorbed by God in Christ alone that facilitates our good news. It was supremely costly.
The extravengance of this gift betrays the value the Giver of the gift places on those He would bestow it upon. It exposes his motive as well as his plan. This is why John made this comment….
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
In the collective pause of one assembly in the first century who heard this same message…..
….they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Father, I pray that your good news might be preached with the same punch that it had originally when Peter first heard it escaping his lips. May all those you are calling pause to reconcile these eternal mattes in their hearts. May the simplicity and the clarity of your good news pierce the darkness that has been cast on this earth and in our hearts. Prevail Holy Spirit among those working to please you and convey the futility of their labors as well as the glory of the gift. May the Bride of Christ soon face off with your enemies with their confident declarations, “Yes, absolutely, we are the sons of God.” Amen.
by RobertCummins | May 1, 2014 | 18. The Cross
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Truly…
….we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)
What is the greatest temptation men face? What is your greatest temptation? Is it covetousness? Lust? Greed? Lying? Anger? Jesus faced all those as well as all the ones going unmentioned here. That means for Jesus, like us, there was an appeal, an enticement, a recognized potential pleasure in giving-in. And just like us, there was a junction where He had to choose which path he would take. As the Son of Man, like us sons of men, he knew this juncture well.
When Jesus was bone weary at the end of the day when the flesh, as we all know is particularly weak and is longing for some relief or pleasure, he did not open the wine bottle to mute the disappointment that no one really knew or undertsood Him. He did not pour a jigger of Scotch to celebrate a miracle of healing or deliverance. He didn’t turn on the TV so that he could escape his awareness that He was not climbing an earthly ladder of success or was not looking forward to a family vacation. He could not surf the internet, attend a conference, go to a movie, read a magazine to distract Himself from the reality that even His disciples were nearly clueless. So, how did this Son of Man, living in human flesh, just as we do, face those moment by moment temptations to give-in to despair and turn down the well rationalized, socially and culturally accepted pathways of least resistance?
Are we really conscious of what we are doing to ourselves with all our varied diversions? (If you care to be awakened from our slumber, by all means read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman).
I have a theory. It is that at the root of most (if not all) our temptations there is a primal complaint native to Adam’s nature-in us that complains, in question form (with no want for self pity) . It is this….
“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
Yet, Jesus stood in for us in the extreme. He wasn’t just facing run of the mill temptations as we do when we ask ourselves, “Why was I fired? …Why was I was abused?… Why did my spouse rejected me …Why am I misunderstood? …. Why do I screw everything up?”…..Why doesn’t my life work?” No, Jesus’ “why” was being asked as the apparent brunt of the ultimate and cruel cosmic prank.
He was asking “why” after having had spikes driven through His wrists and ankles; after having had a thorny crown rammed into His scalp; after having the skin shredded from His back by a lead tip whip; after having been slugged and spit upon and beaten with a pole; after having been abandoned at His greatest point of human need by His closest friends; after being stripped naked and exposed to a throng of ungrateful mean-spirited mocking souls; after having done His very best and never once yielding to the temptation to ask “why?” until this moment on the cross.
Here Jesus faces down mankind’s primal fear that we have been abandoned to the malignant, cruel and random powers of this world. He looks our core nightmare of meaningless and abandonment in the eye and says, “Abandonment, you are an illusion. I shall crush you forevermore!” By draining the cup of this root temptation down to the dregs He swallowed what we would have had to otherwise drink. That is why the writer of Hebrews goes on to say….
Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16)
Perhaps our battles with the world, our flesh and the devil will be more victorious if we understand the fundamental battle ground – this juncture where our idea of justice and God’s collide. It will be no small affair to grasp that our time of need, that moment of help, that place where we really need grace is when we are tempted to despair and depression because our circumstances are seemingly intolerable, impossible, inconvenient or unwelcome, where in our heart of hearts we are asking “Why?” Perhaps if we can see that this arena of justice is our heart’s truest trench warfare we shall become those over-comers that He suffered in order to establish.
So, when we hear the enemy’s initial taunts in the form of the socially acceptable sarcasm we have entertained rising up so familiar in our thoughts, we must grasp, at this very juncture Jesus paid the price so that we could be over-comers, people who draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that they may receive mercy and find grace to help in (this particular) time of need; people who instead of faltering with a “Why?” in their heart instead say,,,
Thank you Father that You have not only become an example of the life that we must attempt to live but that you have become in reality our very Life – Life that can establish our destinies as over-comers, those who have been equipped with new hearts to overcome in our primary battle grounds of unbelief, self pity, resentment, fear and hopelessness. Amen.
by RobertCummins | Apr 30, 2014 | 18. The Cross
There is much we know at one level and it may even be that those things are our creed – the things we say we believe. However, if we are honest, we know there is a danger that those stated beliefs go without expression. Let’s call that danger sleep. In Gethsemane, as Jesus is entering into the first stages of the agony of His Cross, the disciples are entering into the dreamland of sleep. While Jesus has gone a little ahead, falling to the ground praying for a way out: “Father, you can—can’t you—get me out of this? Take this cup away from me. But please, not what I want—what do you want.” , the disciples were doing what they felt they must – sleep.
He came back and found them sound asleep. He said to Peter, “Simon, you went to sleep on me? Can’t you stick it out with me a single hour? Stay alert, be in prayer, so you don’t enter the danger zone without even knowing it. Don’t be naive. Part of you is eager, ready for anything in God; but another part is as lazy as an old dog sleeping by the fire.” (Need I say? The Message)
Surely, you would think, a direct word from God would have enough effect on one to keep him awake a bit longer but no……
Jesus then went back and prayed the same prayer. Returning, he again found them sound asleep. They simply couldn’t keep their eyes open, and they didn’t have a plausible excuse.
The disciples know at one level that Jesus is going to be betrayed. (He just told them again in the Upper Room.) At one level they know He is the Messiah. At some level they honor Him as the Messiah and know that He loves them. They were all unified (less Judas) in their creed and declared that they were prepared even to die with Him if it was to come to that. We know as the cock crowed their beliefs had gone without expression. They had entered a zone of danger without even knowing it.
Paul recognized the danger of sleep as well. Keying off of Isaiah, he says,
Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall make the day dawn upon you and give you light. [Isa. 26:19; 60:1, 2.]
Isaiah actually goes a bit further than just saying, “Wake up.”
Arise from the depression and prostration in which circumstances have kept you–rise to a new life! Be radiant with the glory of the Lord, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you! For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and dense darkness all peoples, but the Lord shall arise upon you, and His glory shall be seen on you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.
While Isaiah the prophet may be more dramatic, Paul the teacher is more explicit and specific in his wake up call to us. Before I relate the council of this true apostolic heart, please understand the kingdom-inheritance motivation of an apostle’s heart.
Paul knew what Jesus suffered. In fact he was privileged to even share in some of the sufferings of Christ. He was keen that both God and the saints realize their inheritance – not someday but now. An important backdrop to anything said in scripture is that God’s inheritance is the saints themselves and, if the saints can wake up and grasp it, God Himself is theirs. Paul does not teach a passive, God-will-work-it-out life with Christ. He teaches that it is our job to wake up and live with deliberation and intentionality.
Paul’s specifics include the wisdom that says, “Be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil.” No doubt he had been influenced by the Psalmist’s counsel, “Teach me to number my days that I may present to Thee a heart of wisdom.”
Paul was consistently prodding us out of our sleep so that we can actively enjoy our inheritance and God can enjoy the fruit of His Spirit being expressed in our lives. When we hear him say, “Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord”, we see that Paul clearly envisioned an experiential interaction with the Spirit of God that would result in a visible glorious display of God’s life in this earth.
Surely the tides of war will have shifted when the nations begin coming to the Church to see
our light, and kings to the brightness of His rising. But perhaps we should not fast forward quite so far. For the sake of an immediate hope and personal application let’s say we shall see our victory when we have awakened and the light is shining upon us when our neighbor (those we have been called to walk along side) see that we have awakened from our slumber and the light of Christ is shining upon us.
Another wake up-word from Paul involves our heart’s orientation to our circumstances. “Give thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father.” He specifically instructs us to replace our course language with the language of gratitude; There must be no filthiness and silly talk, or coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks.”
Intentionally voicing our gratitude to God and to each other prevents us from having some flimsy creed about God’s goodness and sovereignty that never finds expression. Giving of thanks enables us to begin receiving our kingdom-inheritance of God now. And, when our hearts are made joyful (and therefore strong), God has certainly begun receiving His inheritance in us. We must be clear that if we are grumbling verbally or inwardly we are living in creed-only and little if any light is being emitted.
No doubt the New Testament Narrative in its entirety might be said to be the waking up-vision of our lives but here is one last specific wake up-word from Paul from Ephesians 5….
Be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.
Those next to us are not there by happenstance. They are the appointed and specific place of those good works we have been told that were prepared before hand that we should walk in. These very people are holy components of God’s inheritance and whether we are awake to it or not, we are joined to them for eternal reasons that God is wanting us to be awakened to. With God, the bottom line is always love. I can hear Jesus saying even now…
“Are you going to sleep all night? No—you’ve slept long enough. Time’s up. Get up. Let’s get going.
I can also hear Paul say in the present tense…
Be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
Father, expose our flimsy excuses and hollow creeds; awaken us to the glory round about us. May our spirits fully awaken to who you are and what you are doing in our lives right now. Teach us to stay alert in prayer that we would not enter that arena of tempting slumber. Father, you who never slumber and never sleep, teach us to imitate you, living intentionally with our eyes wide open. Help us to convert our creeds into action, with our wise choices, making investments in that realm where moth and rust do not destroy. In the darkness that deepens may the Light of Christ be seen in the greatest contrast and point many toward Your loving plan.
I am in awe of You. I love you Lord.
