Becoming A Pure Vessel

Have you ever prayed and asked the Lord to purify your heart--to purify your motives and your secret thoughts and desires? You should! We all should do this, because this is why he chose us... to "purify for himself a people for his own possession"(Titus 2:14). He does this purifying by exposing the secret thoughts and intentions of our hearts by the use of His word--through the Bible! Hebrews 4:12 says, "For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart."

Let the word of God do its discerning work, rooting out the impurities and exposing them to yourself; for this to happen you must read it, seeking diligently to learn what is right and true before God, asking him by his Spirit to make you willing to take action on what he shows you (James 1:22, 23). Only in this way can you become one who is zealous for good works, a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.

Angling Our Lives Toward God

Alec Motyer comments on James 5:13:

Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise.
"Our whole life, we might say, should be so angled towards God that whatever strikes upon us, whether sorrow or joy, should be deflected upwards at once into his presence. In particular, this is an exercise in glad acceptance of the will of God. This is the common denominator of prayer and praise. In praise, we say to him, 'Your will is good, perfect and acceptable; this is what you have done for me and I rejoice.' And as for prayer in times of trouble, it attempts--however poorly we may succeed--to copy the Gethsemane prayer of Jesus in saying, 'Not my will but yours.' R.V.G. Tasker notes helpfully that when Jesus was in agony, 'wrestling with the forces of evil at the moment of their strongest attack, he "prayed more earnestly" (Luke 22:44). Prayer may not remove the affliction but it most certainly can transform it.'

"This, then, is the individual at prayer. He is reflecting all his life upward, acknowledging the sufficiency and sovereignty of God, practicing the grace of acceptance and rejecting the disgrace of stubbornness. In this the voice of prayer and the voice of praise are at one, for alike they say that the will of God is good."

(I've been reading Motyer's wonderful commentary on James in the past weeks. Read a bit about his love for the Bible here.)

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How Did Jesus See the Old Testament?

Are we as Christians missing out on much of the meaning of the New Testament because we don't understand the Old? Alec Motyer speaks on Jesus' and his disciples' view of the OT Scriptures:

"It would not have surprised his disciples that our Lord affirmed the enduring validity of the Old Testament (Matthew 5:18). They would have taken it for granted that God's word is imperishable. It is we who must candidly face the Lord's estimate of the Bible as he knew it and, out of reverence for him, adjust our misunderstandings until we see the beautiful wholeness of the word of God, the Old and New Testaments as divine revelation" (The Story of the Old Testament, p. 10).

Feelings Follow Behavior

Wow. Here's a truth that needs to be promoted with all seriousness in our churches. Psychology has introduced us to a failed model of therapeutic "truth" that has even permeated the church. But David M. Tyler in his book God's Funeral argues that ungodliness (idolatry) leads to unrighteousness (wrong behavior) and thus is the cause of much of our mental sufferings:

"'Feelings follow behavior' is a principle found first in Genesis 3 and throughout the whole Bible.

"The Bible teaches that there is a relationship between behavior and feelings. Ungodliness leads to unrighteousness which leads to guilt, depression, anxiety, fear, shame, etc. After they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve fled from the presence of God because they were "afraid" (Genesis 3:10). When God rejected Cain's offering he became angry and depressed. God asked Cain, 'Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen?' God said to Cain, 'If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up?' (Genesis 4:6-7). If Cain would change his behavior his feelings would change. God's rhetorical question to Cain sets forth the important principle that behavior determines feelings."

I'm convinced that this principle holds true for kiddies as well as their mommas and daddies.

The Cost of Discipleship

"And they said to him, 'The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink.' And Jesus said to them, 'Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days'" (Luke 5:33-35).

"When they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God. And when they had appointed elders for them in every church, with prayer and fasting they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed" (Acts 14:21-23).

"Jesus takes it for granted that his disciples will observe the pious custom of fasting. Strict exercise of self-control is an essential feature of the Christian's life. Such customs have only one purpose--to make the disciples more ready and cheerful to accomplish those things which God would have done" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, quoted by John Piper in A Hunger for God).

Fasting is a lost discipline of Christ's church. May we recover it for his glory.

Some Thoughts on Cross-Shaped Worship

I was thinking this morning that our worship of God is Cross-shaped. The daily working out of our salvation is not only vertical, toward him, but horizontal, toward one another, as the gospels and epistles so consistently show. The Bible doesn't separate vertical from horizontal; worship isn't worship without both, just as a Cross is not a Cross without both. "So if you are offering your gift at the altar (vertical) and there remember that your brother has something against you (horizontal), leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift" (Matthew 5:23,24).

What other god is so uncompromisingly solicitous of the love of his followers for each other? But our God is always mindful of his children, his heritage, and we're called to imitate him in that mindfulness. We're never to forget each other in our worship of him, even in our corporate singing, because even there he tells us that we're speaking to one another, teaching and admonishing one another, in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:19, Colossians 3:16).

I'm seeing more and more that this is the Cross-shaped life he's calling us to in his church.

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A New Evangelical Consituency

"In the last two or three decades evangelicals have discovered culture. That actually sounds more flattering than I intend. I would welcome a serious discussion about culture. We should be exploring what it is and how it works, rather than just looking at polls to see what is hot. A serious engagement with culture, though, is not what most evangelicals are about.

"What they want to know about culture is simple and easy to unearth. They want to know what the trends and fashions are that are ruffling the surface of contemporary life. They have no interest at all in what lies beneath the trends, none on how our modernized culture in the West shapes personal horizons, produces appetites, and provides us ways of processing the meaning of life. All of that seems like pretty complex and useless stuff. Pragmatists to the last drop of blood, these evangelicals are now in the cultural waters, not to understand what is there, but to get some movement. They are there with their surfboards trying to get a little forward motion as each tiny ripple makes its way toward the shore. This quest for success, which passes under the language of 'relevance,' is what is partitioning the evangelical world into its three segments."

David Wells, The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers and Emergents in the Postmodern World, p.3

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