Be Rich in Good Deeds

Steven Dilla at The Park Forum:  Infinite Happiness

1 Timothy 6.17

As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy.

 

*Editor’s Note: Today we hear the voice of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. (The Park Forum’s Scripture reading plan is based off his design.) In this sermon from 1848, M’Cheyne affirms our life in Christ as much as he rebukes our love for the world.

 

Infinite Happiness

By Robert Murray M'Cheyne (1813-1843)

 

We know very little of God; but we know that he is infinitely happy. You cannot add to his happiness, nor take from it. The Bible shows that his happiness mainly consists in giving, not in receiving:

1. His giving food to all creatures is very wonderful — not one sparrow is forgotten before God. 
2. He gives to the wicked: “He makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and unjust.” Just think for a moment how many thousands God feeds every day who blaspheme his name, and profane his Sabbaths.
3. But, most of all, he gave his own Son. Although he was emptying his own bosom, yet he would not keep back the gift. 

Now, some of you pray night and day to be made like God: If you will be like him, be like him in giving. It is God’s chief happiness, be like him in it. [And yet, you will object:]

 

My money is my own.

Christ might have said, My blood is my own, my life is my own; no man forces it from me: then where should we have been?

 

Would you have me give to wicked people, who will go and abuse it?

Christ might have said the same, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet; that most would despise it; that many would make it an excuse for sinning more; yet he gave his own blood.

 

God gives to wicked people, who go and abuse it; yet that does not diminish his happiness. God makes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and pours down rain on the just and on the unjust.

 

Oh, my dear Christians! if you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and the poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy, and so will you be. It is not your money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own word: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

 

 

*Abridged and language updated from Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s sermon, More Blessed To Give Than To Receive.

 

Both a Sovereign and Suffering God

Excerpt from Steven Dilla post:  Finding Meaning in Suffering

...

While it is possible to suffer without purpose, something David Brooks acknowledges in his exploration of What Suffering Does, the gospel draws us to the way Christ renews even our deepest pains. Keller continues:

On the one hand, God is absolutely sovereign over suffering. It’s never out of his control. It’s always part of his plan. On the other hand, God has come into the world himself and actually suffered with us.

No other religion says that God is both a sovereign and a suffering God. This is the theological foundation for why Christians can be so realistic and yet so hopeful about suffering at the same time.

Because there is meaning in suffering we can refocus our attention toward the outcome. Brooks concludes,

Notice this phenomenon. When people remember the past, they don’t only talk about happiness. It is often the ordeals that seem most significant. People shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering.

This is, of course, the joy Paul found in his many sufferings. His heart for the first Christians was that they would experience it, too, “We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Every Desire for Goodness

11 With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may bring to fruition your every desire for goodness and your every deed prompted by faith. 12 We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

2 Thessalonians 1

How I Love You

Loving God

S.O. post:  Give It to God

Where do you run to when the doors close off?
     And who do you call on when it all goes wrong?
     The devil is telling me to feed my fears.
     “Why don’t you pack your bags and disappear?”
     I’d rather give it to God.

I lost my dad in a car crash when I was a teenager. He was a family man, a businessman, and most importantly a disciple of Christ. In an instant, my mother lost her husband, and my sisters and I lost our father.

Suicidal thoughts ran through my mind on a daily basis. Killing myself seemed like the easiest option to deal with the pain. My father and I had planned a number of things — from music business to family security — but it seemed at the time that these things were no longer a possibility. To date, this is the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with — and I’ve dealt with a lot.

At this point in my life, I thought giving God everything meant going to church, reading my Bible, and praying. But when faced with the reality that God wants more than twenty minutes of my day or a day of the week, the foundation I stood on was shaken.

Since I had placed God in a box, I didn’t have a category for him in my pain and suffering. School, love, family, friendships, food, and even pain were my responsibility. I knew that he was supposed to comfort those who were suffering, but when I was confronted with misery, I thought that it was my job to deal with it.

Believing the Lie

What do you do when you have wept and cannot weep anymore? What do you do when everything crumbles and falls right in front of you? If we are honest, our initial response is not to pray, nor is it to run to God. We are not quick to say, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15).

I knew the Scriptures. I knew that God is the “Father to fatherless and defender of widows” (Psalms 68:5). But I wrestled with that reality in the moment. Instead of listening to God, I listened to myself. I believed Satan’s lies and wallowed in my fears and depressive thoughts. I didn’t know that I didn’t have to carry this burden alone.

But one day I opened the Scriptures: “You shall love the LORD with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Matthew 22:37). Eventually I understood that loving God meant that I was to love him with everything that was in me. God doesn’t simply want a day or even an act — God wants to be cherished and glorified in everything I do.

He wants me to lay everything at his feet, including my pain. In order to love God at all, I must give him my all. I could no longer simply include God in what I knew belonged to him. Just as he declares that every square inch of this universe exists under his sovereignty, so does every aspect of my life — including my pain.

God Wants Your Pain

Along with everything else in my life, God wanted me to trust him with my pain. He wanted me to be vulnerable with him and trust that he would deliver me out of my despair. He pursued my hard heart. He wanted me to rest in his sovereignty. He wanted me to rest in his fatherhood. He began to display what it truly meant for him to be a “father to the fatherless.”

We pray “our Father in heaven” but often struggle to believe he’s truly good. We wrestle to see God as warm, gracious, kind, patient, and loving. We envision God as a tyrant, with a big stick in heaven, beating us on the head when we do wrong.

Jesus, the God-man, corrects our damaged understanding of the Father. He says, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:11). God is so good that when humans are comparatively mentioned in the same sentence, we have to be referred to as evil. He’s that good.

Give It to God in Prayer

This is why Jesus, in the previous chapter, teaches, “This is how you should pray” (Matthew 6:9). He teaches us to run to our Father. The fatherhood of God reminded me that though my earthly father had passed, my heavenly Father loved me dearly, and I could cast my burdens and sorrows upon him.

I finally learned to give my problems and pain to God. We live in a fallen world — a world that groans for the return of the Savior. Pain will exist from the cradle to the grave, but even in this, God invites us to know him and be comforted through prayer. There is a peace that surpasses all understanding that is readily available for those who make everything known to God in prayer (Philippians 4:6–8). Through prayer, intimacy with Christ is readily available for the weary and heavy-laden (Matthew 11:28).

---

The leading lyrics are from S.O.’s song “Give It to God” off his latest album So It Ends, now available on iTunes, Amazon and at the Lamp Mode Store.

Cry Out to God

Jon Bloom:  I Need Thee Every Hour

One of the sweetest refrains in English Christian hymnody is this:

I need Thee, O I need Thee; Every hour I need Thee; O bless me now, my Savior, I come to Thee.

Thank God for Annie S. Hawks who wrote these lyrics and her pastor, Robert Lowry, who composed the music. The lyrics could hardly be simpler, and yet they capture one of our heart’s most profound longings and can be prayed in the sweetest, most sorrowful, or most mundane moments in life. The prosody of the music, the way the melody and meter aligns with the wording, could hardly be more perfect.

But it is not the skill of the hymn’s construction that makes it so powerful. It is the colossal truth it so beautifully expresses.

O I Need Thee!

We need God.

It is not until we feel in the depths of our souls our utter poverty without Christ, our bankruptcy of any inherent righteousness, the impotence of our own strength and self-sufficient planning, our inconsolable loneliness when we are out of fellowship with God, the pathetic pretentiousness of our pathological pride, the hollow emptiness of all the godless gain of the world, our utter helplessness in the face of personal, institutional, cosmic, and molecular evil, that we know just how much we need God.

Every Hour I Need Thee!

Yes, we need to feel our need. Where real need is not felt, there is rarely any real praying. When Paul tells us to keep “praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication . . . for all the saints” (Ephesians 6:18), it’s in the context of grasping the nature of the war we’re in and our helplessness without God in the face of the overwhelming power of our enemy.

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, Jesus gave them the Lord’s prayer as a sort of prayer template or structure (Luke 11:1–4). But in Acts 4:24–31, we see a prayerful exposition of “your kingdom come.” Those early Christians felt their desperate situation in the face of potentially lethal threats and cried out to God. And God answered, just as he promised:

“Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me” (Psalm 50:15).

Desperation drove our ancient brothers and sisters to prayer and it’s what drives us to prayer too. Our places of desperation are the places of God’s revelation of his power (2 Corinthians 12:8).

Need drives us to prayer, and our need is great. We need God every hour and we need him to show us this level of need. If we’re not really praying, we must plead with God to teach us. And his answer likely will not be a new method but a heightened awareness of our desperate need. And when he does this for us it is a priceless gift to us. It is key to not wasting our lives. An unceasing awareness of our need leads to unceasing prayer. And the constant practice of praying will teach us the methods of prayer most helpful to us. And constant prayer leads to new breakthroughs.

O Bless Me Now, My Savior

“Come to me,” Jesus says to us, “all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Jesus calls the desperate and burdened. He calls the sin-sick (Mark 2:17). These are the ones who know their need.

When we really come to Christ, we find in him all the rest and all the forgiveness for our sin-infected burdens that we need. In Christ is all our provision (Philippians 4:19). In Christ is all our wealth (Ephesians 3:8). In Christ is all our righteousness (Philippians 3:9). Through Christ comes the abounding grace (2 Corinthians 9:8), not of mere talk but of real power (1 Corinthians 4:20). Through Christ we draw near to God and he draws near to us and we are never alone (James 4:8; Hebrews 13:5). In Christ we discover the unexpected and exalted joy of loving, servant-hearted humility (Philippians 2:3–11), knowing Christ is our greatest gain (Philippians 3:7–8), and in the power of Christ all evil at every level will be overcome and destroyed (Romans 16:20; Hebrews 2:14; Philippians 2:11).

All the blessings of God the Father come through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I Come to Thee

When we feel deeply our need, not merely know it abstractly, we come to Christ. We come asking, seeking, knocking (Luke 11:9). We come alone and we come together. And we come continually, because we know we must abide in Christ our Vine or we won’t be able to do anything (John 15:5).

So let us come to Christ. Let us cry out to show us our need. Let us go to him for all our needs. And let us allow Annie Hawks and Robert Lowry to lead us in singing before the throne of grace this prayer that glorifies our triune God:

     I need Thee every hour, most gracious Lord;
     No tender voice like Thine can peace afford.

     I need Thee every hour, stay Thou nearby;
     Temptations lose their power when Thou art nigh.

     I need Thee every hour, in joy or pain;
     Come quickly and abide, or life is in vain.

     I need Thee every hour; teach me Thy will; 
     And Thy rich promises in me fulfill.

     I need Thee every hour, most Holy One; 
     O make me Thine indeed, Thou blessèd Son.

     I need Thee, O I need Thee; 
     Every hour I need Thee; 
     O bless me now, my Savior, 
     I come to Thee.

---

A modern version of the hymn is provided by Indelible Grace and lyrics by Annie S. Hawks.

Neither Asceticism Nor Hedonism

Steven Dilla at Park Forum:  Pride, the Enemy of Pleasure

Colossians 3.2
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

The pilgrim is not to despise the comforts which he may meet with by the way, but he is not to tarry among them, or leave them with regret. — John Eadie

Only when a person is not dependent on an object or experience for pleasure are they truly free to enjoy it. We know this, of course, because things we’ve built anticipation for regularly find a way of letting us down. On the other hand, things for which we have little- or low-expectations find ways of impressing us greatly.

In response, some people cultivate perpetually low expectations toward everything and everyone. It’s a compensatory mechanism in which they seek to avoid life’s disappointments and, if all goes well, find themselves “pleasantly surprised.” This soothes the symptoms, but leaves the cause to fester.

The problem is not in the objects and experiences themselves, but our dependence on them to cultivate joy and happiness. It is another manifestation of the root of pride — our desire to derive primary satisfaction, pleasure, and identity from our personal experiences and achievements.

“True humility,” C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, “is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” When our lives take on a posture of humility it affects not just our relationships with others, but our relationships with the objects and pleasures of this world.

Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.

Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him.

If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all. — C.S. Lewis

The Christian posture toward the objects and pleasures of the world is neither asceticism nor hedonism. Instead, our attention, passions, and desires have been so captured by the gospel that we are free to enjoy the many pleasures of this world without falling in love with them. Boasting in the cross makes us humble toward the world.