Grace Taught My Heart to Fear - Grace My Fears Relieved

Steven Dilla post at 843 Acres: The Tension of Justice
 
Wages: When Paul says, “the wages of sin is death,” in Romans 6.23, he echoes what the psalmist speaks, on God’s behalf in Psalm 110, “He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses; he will shatter chiefs over the wide earth.” Reading of God’s action against an entire nation is difficult for modern readers. We long for justice, yet watching it carried out — in full force — is terrifying.

Justice: Among the nations this passage speaks of is that of ancient Edom. The Edomites rebelled against God, savagely pursued his people, and ultimately condemned Christ to death (the line of the Harrods descended from Edom). Although God’s judgement falls on the rebellion of specific nations in this passage, it ultimately extends to the rebellion in all of our lives. All of us have inherited the brokenness of generations past, all of us have found ourselves at opposition with God, and—as passages like this show—not one of us could stand under the judgement of God. We love the justice of God when it acts on our behalf; we fear the reality that, in order to be fully just, it has to move against the sin in our lives as well.

Grace: Yet we are not without hope. Dr. Barry Davis notes, “Psalms 107—109 express anguished pleas for deliverance; Psalms 111— 113 overflow with praise for Yahweh. Psalm 110, the connecting psalm, reveals that the Messiah is both a King and a Priest.”[1] Moreover, the Messiah was the suffering servant. That Christ would face the full judgement of God on our behalf — at such immense cost — is stunning. That he would offer it for free to all who choose him leaves us breathless. There is truly no other way. “T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear. And Grace, my fears relieved,” wrote John Newton in “Amazing Grace.” The Christian understanding of justice leaves us humbled by the grace we’ve received and empowered to join God in the restoration his justice brings.

Prayer: Dear Father, how we long for your justice in our world; for through it we are healed from our greatest affliction. We realize how costly it is — thank you for your son, who endured all things, even excruciating separation from you as he died on a cross, on our behalf. We are renewed and hope-filled by your grace.

Ever Full

The righteous flourish like the palm tree
    and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
13 They are planted in the house of the Lord;
    they flourish in the courts of our God.
14 They still bear fruit in old age;
    they are ever full of sap and green,
15 to declare that the Lord is upright;
    he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.

Ps 92: 12-15

From What's Wrong with Us to What's Right with Christ

Ray Ortlund:  Your church: where Jesus calms the storm

“How wonderful it is to come every Sunday into a liberating church!  All week long we swim in an ocean of judgment and negative scrutiny.  We constantly have to comply with the demands of a touchy world, and we never measure up. . . .

Then on Sunday we walk into a new kind of community where we discover an environment of grace in Christ alone.  It is so refreshing.  Sinners like us can breathe again!  It’s as if God simply changes everyone’s topic of conversation from what’s wrong with us, which is plenty, to what’s right with Christ, which is endless.  He replaces our negativity, finger-pointing, and self-attack with the good news of his grace for the undeserving.  Who couldn’t come alive in a community which inhales that heavenly atmosphere?

Here is where every one of us can happily take our stand right now: ‘The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Galatians 2:20).  Our self-focus was crucified with Christ.  The need to conceal failure and display false superiority no longer lives.  Christ is enough to complete every one of us, without adding anything of ourselves.

As we humbly keep in step with the truth of this gospel, people will find a new kind of community in our churches where sinners and sufferers can thrive.”

Ray Ortlund, The Gospel: How The Church Portrays The Beauty of Christ (Wheaton, 2014), pages 90-91.

Utterly Dependent Creatures

Don Carson:  2 Kings 1; 2 Thessalonians 1; Daniel 5; Psalms 110-111

AFTER NEBUCHADNEZZAR DIED, the Babylonian Empire rapidly declined. In violent coups, several members of the dynasty succeeded each other. Nabonidus eventually imposed some stability, though various vassal states broke away. Nabonidus himself became a religious dilettante. He abandoned the worship of Marduk (chief god in the Babylonian pantheon) and ended up, apparently, excavating buried shrines, restoring ancient religious rituals, and fostering the worship of the moon god Sin. Probably he was on one of these strange religious quests at the time of Daniel 5. As a result he had left the care of Babylon itself in the hands of Belshazzar his son. (The NIV footnote, Dan. 5:2, 11, 13, 18, rightly observes that Nebuchadnezzar was Belshazzar’s “father” only in the sense that he was his “ancestor” or possibly “predecessor”—a common use of the Semitic word, not unlike the usage in 2 Kings 2:12.)

The account makes it clear that the Persian army was outside the walls of the city, but Belshazzar obviously felt that the city was impervious to assault. The bacchanalia he ordered up was worse than an orgy of self-indulgence. Bringing out the golden goblets that had been taken from the temple in Jerusalem was more than a whim. In the sequence of the two chapters, Daniel 4 and 5, it is hard not to see that this was a repudiation of what Belshazzar’s “father” Nebuchadnezzar had learned about the living God. Perhaps Belshazzar thought that Babylon’s fortunes had declined because of the relative neglect of the pagan deities. Nebuchadnezzar had learned to revere the God of Israel; Belshazzar was happy to spit in his eye. So they drank from the goblets and “praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone” (Dan. 5:4). Daniel sees the connection between the two emperors, and this forms part of his stinging rebuke: Belshazzar knew what “the Most High God” had done to Nebuchadnezzar, and how Nebuchadnezzar had come to his senses and acknowledged “that the Most High God is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and sets over them anyone he wishes”—and yet he set himself up “against the Lord of heaven” and refused to “honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways” (Dan. 5:18-24). Somehow Belshazzar thought he could ignore or defy the God who had humbled the far greater Nebuchadnezzar.

So what have we learned? Have we absorbed the lessons of history—that God will not, finally, be mocked or defied? That we are utterly dependent creatures, and if we fail to acknowledge this simple truth our sins are compounded? That God can humble and convert the most unlikely, like Nebuchadnezzar, and destroy those who defy him, like Belshazzar?

Cast All Your Anxieties on Him

Scotty Smith: A Prayer for Offloading Our Anxieties and Cares on God

Casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. 1 Pet. 5:7

     Dear heavenly Father, it’s centering and settling to begin this day knowing how much you care for us, your children. This is always good news to me, but especially this week. The combination of what I’ve taken on, plus the burdens that have been laid at my feet, are way too much for me to carry. I need your kind heart and broad shoulders.

     So, by faith, I offload my cares upon you, gracious Father. Carry my burdens for the people I love—dear friends I so wish I could help or change. Sometimes I foolishly think if you’d only let me be the 4th member of the Trinity for fifteen minutes, I could do a lot of good in the lives of a lot of people. What arrogance. You haven’t called me to fix anyone, but to love as Jesus loves me. And you haven’t called me to vex about anyone; as though you’re not aware, don’t care, or need me to pester you.

     Receive my anxieties about living in a world with a fickle economy, the daily-ness of terror, and the threat of diseases, like Ebola. Father, I cannot add one minute to my life through worry. In fact, I can take a lot away from my life through trying to carry burdens you alone can carry. Turn my “What if’s?” and “If only’s”, into “Now that’s”—now that Jesus has risen from the dead, everythinghas changed.

     Father, you’ve numbered our hairs and days, and you know our fears and bottle our tears. You have the hearts of every king in your hand. Nothing catches you off guard or by surprise. There are no wrinkles in your brow or second-guessing in your courts. You give and you take away—blessed be your name, O Lord.

     Whenever I am tempted to doubt your burden-bearing care, may Jesus’ cross loom large in my gaze. For it was there, Father, where you bore the greatest of all our burdens—my sin, and demonstrated the incomparable extent of your care. So very Amen I pray, in Jesus’ matchless and merciful name.

Down in the River to Pray

Give Me Jesus