Marks of Christ-like Love

Jon Bloom:  Lord, Break My Heart

We love it when God delivers us from distress. Rightly do we celebrate that he is “a refuge in the day of [our] distress” (Psalm 59:16). “Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me free” (Psalm 118:5). We all experience such relief from distress in different times and various ways.

But there are certain kinds of distress we should not be delivered from; rather, we should plead with God to give us more. 

Break My Heart for the Lost

In arguably the greatest letter ever written, after the most glorious explanation of the gospel recorded in human language, and immediately after unparalleled reveling in unconquerable Christian hope, the apostle Paul jarringly breaks into a lament:

I am speaking the truth in Christ — I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit — that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. (Romans 9:1–3)

Standing on the summit of hope that nothing in the world, visible or invisible, could separate him from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:37–39), Paul mourns for those in the hopeless valley and almost wishes he could be separated from Christ, if only it resulted in his Jewish kinsmen reaching the summit. 

Paul was distressed over Jewish unbelief in Jesus. He felt distress on a personal level: he was a Jew and knew and loved hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews personally. He felt distress on a corporate level: ethnic Israel was God’s chosen people to whom “belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship . . . the promises . . . the patriarchs, and from their race . . . the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever” (Romans 9:4–5). Jews were rejecting their own Christ, and this caused Paul “unceasing anguish.” 

This text undoes me whenever I stop to think about it. Paul’s anguish in view of my frequent lack of it troubles me. It ought to trouble me. Paul’s distress was not due to his weak grasp on God’s sovereignty in election, as we see from the rest of Romans 9. Paul’s distress demonstrates just how deeply he understood its truth, complexity, mystery, and his intellectual limits. Those of us who do not feel such anguish demonstrate that we do not. For Jesus felt the same anguish when he cried out,

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! (Luke 13:34)

If we can speak of God’s election and people’s spiritual blindness and hardness and Christ-rejection as abstract categories without being regularly moved deeply, we do not yet know as we ought to know. So we must plead with God for the gift of distress over perishing unbelievers, for it is such distress that moves us into action. 

Break My Heart for the Persecuted

Of course, in the early church many Christians were Jews, and Jesus-rejecting Jews, ones Jesus and Paul anguished over, who at times persecuted them. Jewish Christians experiencing such persecution were likely the recipients of the letter to the Hebrews. 

And in Hebrews 13:3, the author wrote, “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body.” Another way to say this is “share suffering Christians’ distress as though in distress with them.” 

Is that possible? With man, no, it’s not. It’s humanly impossible to even want to share someone else’s suffering as our own, much less do it. It was humanly impossible for the original Hebrew readers, who knew the imprisoned and mistreated, much less us modern Western Christians, most of whom don’t know anyone suffering beatings and property-plundering (Hebrews 10:32–34). They are distant and hard to remember. And yet in this verse, God commands us to share in mistreated Christians’ distress nonetheless, for “with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). 

Since it is impossible with us, we must plead with God for the gift of distress over the persecuted church, for it is such distress that moves us into action.

Break My Heart for the Poor

There is another distress people suffer that Christians are called to enter into, summed up in these three words: “Remember the poor” (Galatians 2:10). This is especially true for the poor of “the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). 

Jesus remembered the poor. He came to proclaim good news to them (Luke 4:18). And the priority he gave to giving to them is seen in the priority his followers gave to giving to them. Think of Zacchaeus giving half his goods to the poor (Luke 19:8). Think of Jesus’s disciples assuming that Judas abruptly left the Passover meal to again give to the poor (John 13:29). 

But such remembering is perhaps most beautifully portrayed in Acts 2:44–45, where “all who believed were together and had all things in common [and] were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.” This is a sign and wonder: to be so moved, so distressed, by another’s distress, that one gives his wealth away to provide for the other’s need. But again we remember what Jesus said, in fact, when someone would not give his wealth to the poor, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God” (Mark 10:27).

So again, since it is impossible with us, we must plead with God for the gift of distress over the destitute poor, for it is such distress that moves us into action.

Whatever It Takes, Lord

These kinds of distress are to be desired, not delivered from, for they are not evils, but evidences of grace in the soul. They are the marks of Christ-like love. Therefore, we must plead with God: 

Whatever it takes, Lord, increase my distress for perishing unbelievers, the persecuted church, and destitute poor and my resolve to do what I can to bring them deliverance and relief through the whole gospel of Christ.

Ninevites Believed God

5 The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.

6 When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh:

“By the decree of the king and his nobles:

Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”

10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
 

Jonah 3 (emphasis added)

We Offer You Praise and Thanksgiving

Prayer of Thanksgiving 
from an undated and anonymous papyrus

On you we call, Lord God, all-wise, all-surveying, holy, the only true Sovereign. Your will is that all should be saved and come to knowledge of the truth.

With one voice we offer you praise and thanksgiving; full-hearted, full-throated we sing you the hymn you have right to at this hour. In your mercy you called us (holy the calling!), taught us and trained us, gave understanding, wisdom, and truth to us—gave us life eternal.

You brought us back with the pure and precious blood of your only Son, freed us from lies and error, from bitter enslavement, released us from the Devil’s clutches and gave us the glory of freedom. We were dead and you renewed the life of our souls and bodies in the Spirit.

Give us the strength of your support. Give us encouragement, give the light that goes with it. Make us live by the faith preached by your holy apostles and the high teachings of the gospels of our Savior, Jesus Christ. May we not be content only to hear and speak of them, but behave and act as they bid us.

Teach us to look upwards, to seek out and search the heavenly, not the earthly. If that is our attitude and if you act in us, what glory for your power, all-holy, omnipotent, worthy of all praise; glory through Jesus Christ, your beloved, with the Holy Spirit, now and through the ages. Amen.

*Prayer abridged and adapted from an undated and anonymous papyrus, on display in Berlin, published in Patrologia Orientalis (18:442), 1907. 

posted on Park Forum

Generosity

Kevin DeYoung post:  A Case for Christian Magnanimity

In case you hadn’t heard, Mike Pence went to see Hamiltonlast week, and it turns out that the people who star in Hamilton and buy tickets for Hamilton are not a natural constituency for Donald Trump. What this says about Broadway and Main Street, or Red States and Blue States I’ll leave for others to dissect. And whether lecturing the Vice President-Elect was an act of courageous resistance or blinkered rudeness is not what this post is about.

Instead, I want to talk about an old fashioned word: magnanimity.

What is magnanimity? Merriam-Webster defines it as “loftiness of spirit enabling one to bear trouble calmly, to disdain meanness and pettiness, and to display a noble generosity.”

In other words, see Mike Pence’s response to Hamilton Gate (and not so much Donald Trump’s tweets). I understand there is a time to fight, a time to stand your ground, a time to give as good as you get. But this was not one of those times. We must not confuse personal pique with national security. In fact, for most of us, most of the time, we would do well to take Pence’s approach: minimize our own offendedness and praise what we can, even in those who oppose us.

In September 1775, and in again in September 1787, the founding father John Witherspoon preached a sermon to the senior class at Princeton entitled “Christian Magnanimity.” He listed five principles of magnanimity:

1. To attempt great and difficult things.
2. To aspire after great and valuable possessions.
3. To encounter dangers with resolution.
4. To struggle against difficulties with perseverance.
5. To bear sufferings with fortitude and patience.

It is this last point that shapes the way we use the word today. The magnanimous person is the one who does not bear petty grudges, does not wallow in self-pity, does not demand penance, does not advertise his suffering, and does not stoop to settle every score. In an age where everyone is scrambling to be more aggrieved than everyone else, where we think nothing of retweeting praise and retweeting insults (to prove our aggrieved status), where apologies are routinely demanded and offendedness is next to godliness, surely we have much to learn about magnanimity.

It’s not only the right thing to do. It’s the smart thing to do. While we certainly want to stand up to real physical violence and insist on all the rights accorded us by God and by the laws of the land, when it comes to insults, rudeness, and social media scrappiness, killing them with kindness is usually the way to go. Whatever you think of the commentary from the cast of Hamilton, the post-play lecturing is apt to look brave when the President-elect demands an apology, and rudely self-important when the Vice President-elect says the show was terrific. We would do well to be more like David pardoning Shimei than the sons of Zeruiah looking for the next enemy to execute. Magnanimity is often its own reward.

Pastors, parents, politicians, pundits, internet pugilists–where can we show the sort of Christian magnanimity our world needs but rarely displays? For bearing burdens, eschewing meanness, and setting an example of noble generosity is not simply the way to win friends and influence people. It is the way of the cross. And the way of the One who hung there saying, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Thank You, Father

David Mathis post:  The True History of Thanksgiving

Come Thanksgiving Day each year, many of us give the nod to Pilgrims and Indians and talk of making ready for a harsh first winter in the New World.

But for the Christian, the deepest roots of our thanksgiving go back to the Old World, way back before the Pilgrims, to a story as old as creation, with a two-millennia-old climax. It’s a story that keeps going right on into the present and gives meaning to our little lives, even when we’re a half a globe removed from history’s ground zero at a place called Golgotha.

You could call it the true story of thanksgiving — or you could call it the Christian gospel viewed through the lens of that often undervalued virtue known as “gratitude.” It opens up a few biblical texts we otherwise may be prone to downplay.

Here’s the true story of thanksgiving in four stages.

Created for Thanksgiving

First, God created humanity for gratitude. You exist to appreciate God. He created you to honor him by giving him thanks. Appreciating both who God is and his actions for us — in creating us and sustaining our lives — is fundamental to proper human life in God’s created world.

“God created humanity for gratitude. You exist to appreciate God.”

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As he describes in Romans 1 what’s gone wrong with the world, the apostle Paul gives us this glimpse of the place of appreciation in the created order:

Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:21)

Part of what the first man and woman were created to do was honor God by being thankful. And part of what we exist to do is honor God by being thankful — and thus the numerous biblical commands enjoining gratitude.

Humanity was created to appreciate God. But as we’ve already seen from Romans 1, ingratitude wasn’t far away.

Fallen from Thanksgiving

Second, we all have failed miserably in appreciating God as we should. In her book on gratitude, Ann Voskamp gives memorable expression to the failure of the first man and woman — and the devil before them — to rightly experience and express gratitude.

From all of our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story. 

Satan, he wanted more. More power, more glory. Ultimately, in his essence, Satan is an ingrate. And he sinks his venom into the heart of Eden. Satan’s sin becomes the first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude. Adam and Eve are, simply, painfully ungrateful for what God gave. 

Isn’t that the catalyst of all my sin? 

Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other. (One Thousand Gifts, 15) 

Satan the ingrate spawns unthankfulness in Adam and Eve, who pass it along to all of us. Both before our conversion and after, we are unthankful people. This is so painfully true.

“Our fall was, and has always been, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what he gives. We hunger for something more.”

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And we not only fail to be thankful like we ought, but we also fail to get the balance right between physical and spiritual. Two obstacles often stand in our way to God-exalting gratitude. You could call them “hyperspirituality” and “hyperphysicality.”

Perhaps hyperphysicality is all too well known in 21st-century Western society at large. A milieu of materialists is so unaware of spiritual reality that even when there is gratitude for the physical, the spiritual is neglected, if not outright rejected. We can be thankful for the temporal, even while we couldn’t care less about the eternal.

But hyperspirituality is often particularly dangerous among the so-called “spiritual” types, even in the church. We can be prone to mute God’s physical goodness to us out of fear that appreciation for such would somehow detract from our thanksgiving for spiritual blessings.

In our sin, we fail again and again to get the proportions right. Only with divine redemption are we able to grow toward a balance that goes something like this: Christians are thankful for all God’s gifts, especially his eternal gifts, and especially the surpassing value of knowing his Son (Philippians 3:8), the Spirit-become-physical.

Redeemed by Thanksgiving

Third, God himself, in the person of his Son, Jesus, entered into our thankless world, lived in flawless appreciation of his Father, and died on our behalf for our chronic ingratitude. It is Jesus, the God-man, who has manifested the perfect life of thankfulness. If you’ve ever tracked the texts where Jesus gives his Father thanks, you’ll know it’s quite an impressive list.

Matthew 11:25 [also Luke 10:21]: “At that time [note the context of unrepentant and unthankful “cities where most of his mighty works had been done,” verse 20] Jesus declared, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.’” 

John 11:41: “ . . . they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me.’” [Jesus then raises Lazarus from the dead.]

Matthew 15:36 [also Mark 8:6]: Jesus “took the seven loaves and the fish, and having given thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples . . . ” [See also John 6:11 and John 6:23 which refer to the location as “the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks.”] 

Luke 22:17–20 [also Matthew 26:27 and Mark 14:23]: “He took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, ‘Take this, and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.’ And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.’” [And so following Jesus’s pattern, Paul in Acts 27:35 “took bread, and giving thanks to God in the presence of all he broke it . . . ”] 

First Corinthians 11:23–24: Our “Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it . . . ”

“Christians are thankful for all God’s gifts, especially his eternal gifts.”

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Jesus is not only God himself but also the quintessentially thankful human. The God-man not only died to forgive our failures in giving God the thanks he’s due, but also lived the perfect life of appreciation on our behalf toward his Father.

Freed for Thanksgiving

Finally, by faith in Jesus, we are redeemed from ingratitude and its just eternal penalty in hell, and freed to enjoy the pleasure of being doubly thankful for God’s favor toward us — not only as his creatures, but also as his redeemed.

It is fitting for a creature to be in a continuous posture of gratitude toward his Creator. And it is even more fitting for a redeemed rebel to be in an ongoing posture of gratitude toward his Redeemer. The kind of life that flows from such amazing grace is the life of continual thankfulness. This is the kind of life in which the born-again Christian is being continually renewed, progressively being made more like Jesus.

And so the apostle Paul encourages Christians to have lives characterized by thanksgiving.

Colossians 1:11–12: May you be “strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.” 

Colossians 2:6–7: “as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” 

Colossians 3:15–17 [note the hat trick (3x) in this one text]: “And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” 

Ephesians 5:20: “ . . . giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

“Only in Jesus are we able to become the kind of persistently thankful people God created us to be.”

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First Thessalonians 5:18: “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 

Only in Jesus, the paragon of creaturely appreciation, are we able to become the kind of persistently thankful people God created us to be and fulfill the human destiny of thanksgiving. For the Christian, with both feet standing firmly in the good news of Jesus, there are possibilities for a true thanksgiving which we otherwise would never know.