Faith That Acknowledges Our Dependence Upon God

Don Carson post:  GENESIS 15; MATTHEW 14; NEHEMIAH 4; ACTS 14

GOD’S TIME SCALE is so different from ours. Abram wants a son, and feels his time is running out; God envisages a race with countless millions of descendants. Abram feels his life is approaching its termination with nothing very much settled as to God’s purpose in calling him out of Ur of the Chaldeans; God sees the entire course of redemptive history.

What God does in Genesis 15 is promise Abraham that his offspring will constitute a vast number. At one level, God’s promise is enough: “Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness” (Gen 15:6). Abram’s faith is simple and profound: he believed God’s promises, taking God at his word. And that faith, in God’s eyes, was credited as righteousness. This does not mean that Abram earned brownie points for deploying such a righteous faith. Rather, the idea is that what God demands of his image-bearers, what he has always demanded, is righteousness — but in this sinful race what he accepts, crediting it as righteousness, is faith, faith that acknowledges our dependence upon God and takes God at his word. This faith of Abram is what makes him the “father” of those who believe (Rom. 4; Gal.3).

Yet however genuine this faith, some of the details of God’s promise Abram has trouble imagining. God tells him of a time when his descendants will possess all the land around him, and Abram wavers and asks for a sign (Gen. 15:8). Graciously, God provides one: in a vision, Abram is enabled to see God entering into a covenant with him. Probably the pieces of the animals between which “a smoking firepot with a blazing torch” (Gen. 15:17) passes represent a way of saying, “May those who enter into this covenant similarly be torn apart if they break the terms of this covenant.” What a visionary act of kindness to anchor Abram’s faith is also an instance of God’s long-range plans, his vast frame of reference: he is establishing his covenant with Abram and his offspring, a covenant relation into which Christians enter today (Gal. 3:6-9).

There is one more strand in this chapter that depicts God’s long-term view of things. One reason why Abram cannot begin to take over the Promised Land immediately is that “the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure” (Gen 15:16). God’s sovereign timing so matches his moral sensibilities that by the time the children of Abraham are ready to take over the Promised Land, the inhabitants of that land will have so sunk in degradation that judgment must be meted out. That time, God says, is coming, but in this chapter it has not yet arrived.

Relinquish Control

The Real Reason We’re Uncomfortable With Miracles

BY STEVEN DILLA

Daily ReadingGenesis 15 (Listen – 2:53)Matthew 14 (Listen – 4:14)

Matthew 14.25Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake.

We’ve become remarkably good at explaining miracles. There are modern theories that posit the blind could have been healed with herbs transferred from Jesus’ hands. Others that propose those raised from the dead weren’t really dead, but in shock. There is even an academic paper which models the “hydrodynamic situation” of the sea parting in Exodus. “The Crossing is possible provided that a low-tide phase and a storm-induced drop in water level occur in the northern part of the Gulf of Suez.” [1]

Rather than saying miracles didn’t happen (Pew Research says nearly 80% of Americans believe they are possible) we explain how they happened via natural means. We’re comfortable with miracles so-long as God plays by our rules. 

God becomes dangerous the moment he does something we cannot do for ourselves. We’ve seen the ways in which we can manipulate our own world, create our own cures, and solve life’s problems through our own ingenuity. When a problem exceeds those limits we want to know that we’ve reached the impossible, not the realm of dependence. 

Increasing in understanding is a sign of a growing believer. The sign of a mature believer is that they don’t allow their pursuit of explanation to eclipse the realities of why God works and what he has done. Some of the Bible’s miracles might well have material explanation. God created everything; it’s no less a miracle when he orchestrates his creation for his purposes. Some of the Bible’s miracles likely don’t (or can’t) have such an explanation. Regardless of how each miracle occurred, natural or otherwise, the reason why they happened will always be supernatural. Christ’s miracles were practical expressions of God’s radical, persistent, and sacrificial love for humanity — and this is perhaps the greatest miracle.

This realization removes our facade of control. The single thing every miracle in scripture has in common is that the recipient had given up on, or exhausted, any natural way to solve their own problems or grow in their own faith. Our root problem is not the plausibility of miracles, but the in the belief that God is good. We struggle to trust that when we relinquish control to him our lives become immeasurably better as he does what we cannot do for ourselves.

PrayerGod, you demonstrated your own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5.8) Thank you for the miracle of your love. We cannot explain it, but it has changed us forever. Help us not only to understand you, but to trust you.

Better Than Anything

Jonathan Parnell:  Who Else But You?

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:25–26)

The deepest desires of the redeemed heart perhaps find no truer expression than in the words of Psalm 73:23–28. “Whom have I in heaven but you?” verse 25 goes, “And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.”

We read these words and say amen. We read them and we want to speak them with every bit of the same sincerity the psalmist had when he penned them. We want to desire God like this. We want him to be supreme in our affections like this. The verse becomes both our anthem, and our earnest prayer. “Lord, I want to yearn for you,” we plead and sing.

This isn’t fabricated spirituality. It isn’t our attempt to posture ourselves a certain way in order to earn God’s grace. These are words by God’s grace that crave for more. God, you and only you occupy this place in my heart. You and only you.

This is the most important thing in the universe. This is our testimony of experiencing God’s love, as the apostle John says: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

Our Greatest Passion

Knowing Jesus and loving him matters more than anything else in our lives. To be sure, other things are important. Faithful theology matters, walking in integrity matters, loving the church matters, a healthy marriage and good parenting matter — but what is knowledge and integrity and helping others when our hearts are not enthralled by Jesus? What lasting, sustainable impact will any of these things have if our hearts are not overcome by the glory of God’s grace? What is our understanding of the cross if the bleeding-dying-raising mercy of Christ doesn’t captivate our soul’s deepest gaze?

Better then, by God’s grace, is that our knowledge of God — and our holiness and our serving and our relationships — flow from a life consumed by our Savior. This is the life surrendered to his supremacy, the life of grace that yearns for the One who gives us our life and breath, the One in whom we live and move.

You and Only You

Here, in this longing, is where we confess that Jesus is better than anything in the world. Here is where we stop and say that whatever it is that we have going on in our lives, of all the good things God has given us, Jesus is absolutely better. We pray with St. Augustine, “Lord, bring to me a sweetness surpassing all the seductive delights that I once pursued. Enable me to love you with all my strength that I may clasp your hand with all my heart. . . . You, Lord, are my king and my God.”

Desiring God has partnered with Shane & Shane’s The Worship Initiative to write short meditations for more than one hundred popular worship songs and hymns. The Worship Initiative is an online platform devoted to training musicians for worship leading and songwriting. “Yearn” is included in their The Worship Initiative, Vol. 8, available through iTunes.

Mercy

Go and Learn

BY STEVEN DILLA

Daily ReadingGenesis 9-10 (Listen – 7:19)Matthew 9 (Listen – 4:56)*We’re reading and listening to the NIV this year. See why.

Matthew 9.13[Jesus said,] “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

The Pharisees were liberal in their view of who could have God’s presence, says Hebrew University Historian Daniel Schwartz. [1] There was no debate among Jewish scholars in Jesus’ day that Israel had broken God’s covenant with them. The key question of their time was how the covenant could be restored — and the answer extended from theology into the reality of everyday life.

The Sadducees believed God’s presence could only reside in a certain kind of person: those born of the proper lineage and actively participating in Temple life in Jerusalem. This was a significant problem for most ancient Jews as they were spread throughout the Near East. Moving was almost always an unthinkable risk since land was life in an agrarian society. The Pharisees grew in power because they offered Jews outside of Jerusalem an alternative. In short, they believed keeping the law was the way a person’s standing with God was restored. They were fastidious about the law because it was their only hope.

The Pharisees and Sadducees each crafted a way for a person to restore their relationship with God through their own volition. The Sadducees wanted people to give up on their cities, neighborhoods, and vocations, believing God’s plan was limited to a particular culture and place. The Pharisees looked at their Scriptures like a rulebook, missing—in Jesus’ opinion—the entire point of the Scriptures.

“Go and learn” is a rabbinic phrase which means the hearer has missed something in the Scriptures and needs to study with greater attention. Jesus wasn’t a sage who commanded his followers to study the laws and do their best to conduct flawless lives. Any prophet could have done that. Jesus’ foundational claim was that he was the Son of God who came to extend God’s mercy to the world. Restoration was possible through him.

Prayer

Thank you, Father, for extending your mercy to us. Thank you that your love isn’t limited to those who obey best, or are born to the right family, or live in a particular culture. Guide us to read Scripture in such a way that leads us to be dependent on you and not on our own strength. Help us to extend your mercy to those around us in ways that lead them to you. 

After Ten Thousand Years

Dave Radford post: Heaven Will Never Be Boring

What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived—
the things God has prepared for those who love him.

Have you ever worried that you might grow bored in heaven, that things may lose their luster or taste, that the whole novelty and intrigue of heaven might fade as do most things on earth? When you sing, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years . . . we’ve no less days to sing his praise than when we’d first begun,” do you wonder whether or not to be encouraged by such a statement?

Sure, eternal life sounds wonderful at first. But unless you have a firm grasp on what the Bible has to say about eternal life, you may begin to wonder. “Eternity really is a long time,” you might think. “Is this something I really desire? After ten million years, will I really have the same desire I once had to go on existing here?” At the heart of these existential questions lies a deep concern for whether eternal joy actually exists.

If at this point Jonathan Edwards were still alive and knew what you were thinking, he would probably put his hand on your shoulder and lay your fears to rest.

In his sermon, “Heaven, A World Of Love,” Jonathan Edwards — in a way that is nothing short of breath-taking — brilliantly unpacks the staggering realities of our joy in heaven.

Here are just a few of these realities:

1. You Will Have Greater Capacity for Joy

In heaven, your resurrected body will come equipped with unimaginable capacity for joy (1 Corinthians 15:42–44).

The Bible says you will have a resurrected body far better than anything you knew on earth. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, says that your body will be stronger, fuller, more spiritual, more glorious, and everlasting. Your delight, your knowledge, your intellect, and all your affections will be renewed and restored so that you might enjoy Christ with perfected bodies. Edwards states: “[Our earthly soul] had only a little spark of divine love in it, in heaven shall be, as it were, turned into a bright and ardent flame, like the sun in its fullest brightness, when it has no spot upon it.”

So far so good. An enormous amount of joy. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of complacency. Isn’t it still possible that the joy will fizzle out? Edwards, again, would say: “No way!” 

2. You Will Have an Ever-Increasing Capacity for Joy

In heaven, your capacity for joy will never cease to grow. 

Never. According to Edwards, you will be “enraptured with joys that are forever increasing, and yet forever full.”

Sam Storms argues that your capacity for love, knowledge, understanding, and yes, joy are “ever-expansive, progressive, incremental” (“Joy’s Eternal Increase”). Never-ending. The implications of this are staggering.

First, it pummels any idea of heaven becoming boring, static, or all-too-familiar. How can it? If your ability to enjoy God and his gifts are always expanding, your perception of heaven will always be fuller, deeper, and richer. You will never look upon the same reality twice without some new way in which to enjoy it. You will look at each day through some new lens, where you see more clearly, understand more fully, and feel more deeply the truest joy — ever-increasing, ever-full joy for all eternity.

How, you may ask, is this possible? Won’t you run out of things to enjoy after ten million years? Again, Edwards would say: “No!” Why not? 

3. You Worship an Infinite God

Because God is infinite, he can be infinitely enjoyed. Jesus Christ is not concerned about running out of ways to keep up with your ever-increasing ability to enjoy him. His character is endlessly deep, unsearchable, and inexhaustible. Imagine the scope of the entire universe: trillions of shining stars, burning brighter than the sun; magnificent constellations; billions of spinning galaxies, all magnificent and vast, colorful and mysterious. Yet, they are finite. Brilliant, though they are, they fall utterly short in comparison to the breadth, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ. His love, grace, kindness, wisdom, power, and mercy each stand as never-ending, infinite universes for all your affections to delight in. 

Here’s the other cool bit. If God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him, the ever-increasing enjoyment of God for all eternity will simultaneously become the ever-increasing glorification of himself. This is genius! 

Now when you sing, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years,” you have no need of dread or doubt. You will not be the same person as you once were. After ten thousand years, you will look back and say, “How little I knew of him then. How much I have grown in my love for him. Yet, how much more I still have yet to know of his character!” Further up and further into it you grow! 

After ten thousand years, you will look back and say, “How little I knew of him!”Tweet

C.S. Lewis once defined joy in this life as “an unsatisfied desire, more desirable than any satisfaction.” I think he’s right. God doesn’t want your hope to be in this life but in the life to come. He wants you to long for your homecoming, when you meet him face to face. When you do this, you have access to a joy “more desirable than any satisfaction” here and now. Pray, then, for an ever-increasing capacity to know and enjoy him as you long for eternity.

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Remember God

Jonathan Parnell post:  Three Facts for Your Fret

We tend to fret.

It is a fact about creatures that we are derivative beings who can’t ultimately control the world around us. We have questions about whether we should do this or that, and about what might happen if we do this or that, which quickly turns into worries about how badly this or that might turn out. Before long, we’re in the storm of outright anxiety. It begins to bear down on us with hurricane-force winds — all the facts and would-be’s, the haywire of things gone sideways, and our incapacity to determine results. What are we supposed to do?

Remember God. That is what we are supposed to do. We remember that these worries are as ancient as our earliest forefathers, and that God has been in the business of answering them since the beginning, and better, that the way he answers them is not by ignoring the complexity, but by stepping into it. In short, we should know we’re not alone, that God hears, and that God works in the middle of our mess.

1. You’re Not Alone

The psalms are incomparable in making this point. Not only do they show us again and again that God cares, but they, in one sense, come alongside us to feel what we feel. We can forget sometimes that the psalmists were real people like us, and that their situations were as literal as anything we’d experience. We shouldn’t lose that in the poetry. When David says, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” (Psalm 23:4), we should remember that actual enemies were trying to kill him. Now, that’s a beautiful metaphor — the valley and the shadow and all that — but it works only because death was seriously all around him.

The psalms are real life, and that’s why they help us. Whatever circumstances we are going through, as different as they might be from the psalmist’s so many years ago, there are wonderful similarities. Psalm 37 stands out.

The psalm opens: “Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers!” (Psalm 37:1). Again, “Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil” (Psalm 37:8). The point is that we don’t worry. Granted, there are various reasons for why any of God’s people might worry over the course of centuries, but the command not to worry and the basis of not worrying are the same. Whatever worries we have, we are not alone. Our brothers and sisters have been there.

2. God Hears You

A psalmist is writing about fret, which means it’s happened before. But also, and more specifically, the psalmist is exhorting God’s people about fret, which means God knows what’s going on. God isn’t a stranger to this. He has heard his people then, and he hears us now.

The psalms as a whole make this wonderfully clear. It is even thematic, as I think we can see in the first few psalms. What begins to stand out when we read the first handful together is that David has this unremitting confidence in God’s nearness — that God listens to him and cares. “I cried aloud the the Lᴏʀᴅ, and he answered me from his holy hill” (Psalm 3:4); “The Lᴏʀᴅ has set apart the godly for himself; the Lᴏʀᴅ hears when I call to him” (Psalm 4:1, 3); “O Lᴏʀᴅ, in the morning you hear my voice” (Psalm 5:3); “The Lᴏʀᴅ has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lᴏʀᴅ has heard my plea; the Lᴏʀᴅ accepts my prayer” (Psalm 6:8–9).

Even in the thick of our fret, we never find God indifferent or helpless or caught by surprise.Tweet

This is the great reminder that even in the thick of our fret, we never find God “indifferent or helpless or caught by surprise.” And that even when it seems like no one else hears, that our friends have all deserted us, we can turn the page with David to Psalm 38:9, “O Lord, all my longing is before you; my sighing is not hidden from you.” God hears, always.

3. God Works for You

But he doesn’t just hear, he also responds. The exhortations of Psalm 37 are filled with reminders of God’s action. It’s like the psalmist calls us up from the fog and invites us to see the way God does. “[The evil] will soon fade like grass” (Psalm 37:2); “For the evildoers will be cut off” (Psalm 37:9); “In just a little while the wicked will be no more” (Psalm 37:10). In fact, “the Lᴏʀᴅ laughs at the wicked, for he sees his day is coming” (Psalm 37:13). We need God’s promise about the future to be so certain to us that we pick up his sense of humor.

God steps into our complexity, our questions, our worry, and he works. As David reminds us, “the Lᴏʀᴅ upholds the righteous” (Psalm 37:17); “the Lᴏʀᴅ knows the days of the blameless” (Psalm 37:18); “the Lᴏʀᴅ upholds his hand” (Psalm 37:24); “the Lᴏʀᴅ loves justice; he will not forsake his saints” (Psalm 37:28); “The Lᴏʀᴅ will not abandon [the righteous] to the power [of the wicked]” (Psalm 37:33). “The salvation of the righteous is from the Lᴏʀᴅ; he is their stronghold in the time of trouble” (Psalm 37:39).

And to make it more clear, to rid away the idea that this is mere sentiment, that we only need to believe hard enough, God doesn’t just have a good word to say to us, but he is his very Word to us. He doesn’t just drop spiritual platitudes on us from afar, but he rolled up his sleeves, as it were, and he came here. “The Word became flesh and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message). Jesus lived for us. He died for us. He was raised for us. He showed us God up close and personal, full of grace and truth.

And he said to us creatures who fret, “Let not your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1).

Our Joy

Jon Bloom post:  Ask Whatever You Wish

This promise that Jesus made to us is so sweeping in its scope and seems beyond the experience of many of us that it can strike us as unbelievable:

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. (John 15:7)

We don’t even attempt to cash this check at the bank of heaven. There must be insufficient funds in our account. Whatever we wish will be done for us? Having desired and asked God for so many things that haven’t been done for us, we figure either 1) Jesus is using hyperbole or 2) this promise is only for super-saints who experience a kind of connection with God that we don’t seem to have.

Neither is true. Jesus doesn’t exaggerate and he chooses weak, foolish people (1 Corinthians 1:26), people whose faith is small (Matthew 14:31), people just like us, to be his disciples.

No, this promise is real and Jesus is making this promise to us. It is not to be passed over with a shrug. It is a check to be grasped, taken to the bank of Heaven where there is no lack of treasure, and cashed. Jesus wants us to cash it.

But there are two conditions we must meet for the check to be valid. The first is that we must abide in Jesus. Remember the context of the previous six verses. We are to abide in Jesus just as branches abide (are embedded) in a vine. Apart from Jesus we can do nothing (verse 5) and, in fact, we wither. Abiding branches have the sap of the Holy Spirit running through them, which means that the branches receive and share the affections and wishes of the vine.

The second condition we must meet is that Jesus’s words must abide in us. What this means is all of Jesus’s words, not just the words in John 15:1–6. We know that because of what Jesus says in verse 10: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” Jesus loves us by telling us the truth (John 17:8, 26) and we love him by believing and therefore obeying/living what he says (John 14:15).

So by these two conditions — staying in Jesus and having Jesus’s words stay in us — he shapes our desires and our thoughts through the Holy Spirit so that our wishes and his are increasingly the same. You see, it is only natural that a branch should receive exactly what it needs from the vine.

The only times our prayers seem to go unanswered are when 1) we don’t share Jesus’s wishes because we aren’t abiding in him (James 4:3) or 2) we don’t share Jesus’s timeline, or 3) we don’t recognize Jesus’s unexpected answers.

Our joy doesn’t spring from Jesus giving us what we want but Jesus being what we want.Tweet

This is a promise that Jesus wants you to believe and one he loves to fulfill. Because through it we discover that our joy doesn’t spring from Jesus giving us what we want but Jesus being what we want.

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