Obeying the Gospel

WE CAN’T EXCLUDE GOD AND STILL HAVE HIM (MAY 19)

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"For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual" (1 Corinthians 2:11-13).

RATIONALISM ARGUES THAT WE SHOULD REJECT (OR AT LEAST DE-EMPHASIZE) ALL SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE EXCEPT HUMAN REASON. If knowing a thing requires the operation of something in addition to human reason, that thing should not be classified as “knowledge.” In particular, “faith” is distinguished from “knowledge.” If God exists at all, we cannot “know” that He exists or what His nature is; we can only “believe” . . . and hope for the best.

It is a fact that we could not know much about God if we had nothing but our reason to work with. Paul makes the point that God’s existence and His power can be inferred from the world around us: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20). But if reason had no outside help, God’s existence and power would be about as far as we could go. We would have no way of knowing what God’s nature is or what His will for us might be.

But God has revealed Himself so that we can know a good deal more about Him. (Go back and ponder 1 Corinthians 2:11-13.) And don’t forget this: God’s revealing of Himself culminates in Jesus Christ. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory . . . No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:14,18).

Do you see the dilemma of rationalism? It wants to disallow any knowledge that might come from revelation, yet there are many rationalists who still want to believe in some kind of God. But we can’t have it both ways. If we rule out the possibility of God revealing Himself, then we should get used to the idea of having no God at all. The only God that unaided human reason can believe in is a God who is little more than a question mark. There is no room within rationalism for a God who can save us.

"The failure of rationalism is that it tries to find a place for God in its picture of the world" (William Ralph Inge).

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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OBTAINED WITH CHRIST’S BLOOD (MAY 18)

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"Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood" (Acts 20:28).

WHAT COULD MAKE US VALUE THE LORD’S CHURCH ANY MORE HIGHLY THAN KNOWING IT WAS OBTAINED AT THE COST OF HIS BLOOD? No higher purchase price is imaginable. And if we think we can appreciate the Lord without valuing the church for which He died, we are deluded. John wrote, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him” (1 John 5:1).

Going back to Acts 20:28, Paul’s statement about the church was made to the elders of the church at Ephesus as he said farewell and exhorted them to care for the saints under their oversight. Paul was speaking of the congregation in Ephesus when he said that the elders should “care for the church,” for in the New Testament elders never had oversight over any Christians except those in the local congregation. But what a charge! If those for whom the elders were to care were people who belonged to the Lord — having been paid for with His blood — well might Paul say, “Pay careful attention.” No duty ever deserved an attention more careful.

But if the reference in Acts 20:28 is to the local church, it is no less true that the universal church (the saved in all places) is comprised of blood-bought individuals. In the great throne scene in Revelation, the Lamb, who is Christ, is triumphantly praised: “for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (5:9). That is one reason the Lord loves His church so much. They are His ransomed ones, the people whom He has saved by His blood.

Each of these thoughts points us emphatically to Jesus Christ — His love, His authority, His majesty. If He bought the church with His blood, it is not our church to do with as we wish. It is His church: the Lord’s church. May we never quit calling it what it is. The church of God. The church which He bought with His blood. The church that belongs to Christ. The Lord’s church.

The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is His new creation by water and the word;
From heav’n He came and sought her to be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her, and for her life He died.
(E. E. Hewitt)

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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THE BODY OF CHRIST (MAY 17)

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"And [Christ] is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent" (Colossians 1:18).

STRICTLY SPEAKING, THERE IS NO ONE OVER WHOM CHRIST IS NOT HEAD. But there is a special sense in which He is the head of His body, the church. After having refused His rule, these individuals have returned to their rightful King, sought His forgiveness, and sworn allegiance to Him from now on. Christ is truly their head — not just legally or theoretically, but in the way they live.

We could spend a lifetime unfolding different aspects of the truth that the people of Christ are His “body.” It is a fascinating metaphor, to say the least. All of us have bodies, governed (at least in our best moments) by our heads, so when the Scriptures say we are related to Christ in ways that resemble the link between our own head and body, that is an analogy that resonates with us.

For one thing, the fact that Christ is the head of His body should never become so commonplace that we forget how important that truth is. His rule over the church does not require our permission, nor are His instructions for the church subject to our preferences. We serve Christ, and we do not serve Him in an advisory capacity. To repeat: He is the head of the church.

He is the head of the church because He was made the head of it by God. Paul affirmed this when he wrote, “[God] put all things under [Christ’s] feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22,23). And Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). When this world comes to an end, the kingdom will be turned back to God (1 Corinthians 15:24), but for now, God has put all things under the feet of Christ, the Son who rules from the right hand of His Father (Mark 16:19; Hebrews 1:3) until the last enemy has been defeated.

Every Sunday when Christians observe the Lord’s Supper, they remember that their inclusion in the spiritual body of Christ is possible only because His physical body was sacrificed for them. By submitting to the agonizing limitations of a “body,” He gained a “body” of saved people whose own bodies are no longer prisons.

From his imprisonment my freedoms grow, find wings.
Part of his body, I transcend this flesh.
(Luci Shaw)

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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IF OUR CONCEPT OF GOD IS WRONG (MAY 16)

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"Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen" (Romans 1:24,25).

IF WE THOUGHT THAT “THEOLOGY” WAS AN INTELLECTUAL PURSUIT WITH NO PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCE, WE WOULD BE WRONG. Our theology is our view of God (His existence, His nature, His purposes, His will), and our ideas about God, whether true or false, are more powerful than any of our other ideas. What we think of our Creator is the main determinant of our character and our conduct.

We don’t use the word “idolatry” much anymore, but it is still a concept that needs to be considered. To worship an idol is to worship a god that does not exist. If a person bowed down before a physical object (perhaps one that he himself had made) and called it God, he would be engaging in idolatry. But if we conceive of God in ways that are false, even if it’s only in our minds, we are worshiping not God but an idol, created by our imagination. And that kind of idolatry is still very much a problem in the world.

In the text above, Paul spoke of certain ones who “exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” Tragically, our ignorance of God is often this very kind of willful ignorance, as the apostle indicated a few verses later when he said that “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (v.28). In the final analysis, the person may not have been wrong who said that sin consists of having a wrong idea about God and deliberately acting as if that idea were true.

So out of all the subjects we think about, we should be the most careful when we are thinking about God. False notions about God will derail even the best of our thinking on other subjects, including morality and our treatment of other human beings. And most important of all, if we view God wrongly, we are going to have wrong beliefs about the reality of sin and the question of our fellowship with God. The gospel will mean little to us if our beliefs about God are such that we see no need for what Christ made possible at the cross. We need to be careful about our “theology.”

"The wrong concept of God leads to the wrong concept of sin, self, and salvation" (Richard Owen Roberts).

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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A RANSOM FOR ALL (MAY 15)

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"For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time" (1 Timothy 2:5,6).

BETWEEN GOD AND MANKIND THERE IS A GREAT SEPARATION. We are cut off from our Creator by our sins. And this alienation is a problem we can’t solve by our own wisdom or human effort.

MEDIATOR. Paul states that Jesus Christ is able to serve as a “mediator” between God and us. This does not mean that Jesus serves as an arbiter to work out a compromise between God’s position and ours. It means that He is a “go-between” enabling God to have a relationship with us that would be impossible otherwise.

RANSOM. Jesus makes possible our reconciliation with God because he “gave himself as a ransom for all.” In other words, He paid the price for us to be released from our condemnation, dying in our place and thereby atoning for our sins. So God is now able to forgive us without violating the integrity of His own law. As Paul wrote to the Romans, God is able at once to be both “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).

On one occasion, John the Baptist saw Jesus and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). Freely and voluntarily, He “gave himself” as our ransom. In 1 Peter 2:24, Peter put it this way: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

But notice in our beginning text what Paul said about Jesus. Just as there is one God, there is only one mediator between God and men. Without Him, our sins will kill us. And this is exactly what Jesus said: “I told you that you would die in your sins, for unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins” (John 8:24).

In this life, we can improve ourselves a little bit, but we can’t save ourselves from sin. We may be able to elevate ourselves, but we can’t grasp eternal life. And even when we come to Christ, we can’t have the life He offers except by dying with Him in baptism and accepting the kind of life He has for us in the here and now.

"The death of Jesus is the only entrance into the life he lived. We cannot get into his life by admiring him, or by saying what a beautiful life his was, so pure and holy. To dwell only on his life would drive us to despair. We enter into his life by means of his death" (Oswald Chambers).

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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KNOWING GOD, ETERNAL LIFE (MAY 14)

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"And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3).

IT IS FASCINATING TO CONTEMPLATE WHAT IT MUST HAVE BEEN LIKE FOR ADAM AND EVE TO KNOW GOD. Prior to their tragic decision to rebel against His will, they would have had a perfect relationship with their Creator: knowing Him, revering Him, and loving Him. But once that relationship was broken, the knowledge of God would have become an increasingly distant memory.

In John’s record of Jesus’ prayer on the night of His betrayal, we hear the Son of God praying: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him” (John 17:1,2). And then we have this remarkable statement: “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (v.3).

To “know” God means more than knowing about God. The devil has a good bit of information concerning God, but that doesn’t mean he knows God. And it means more than having feelings of closeness to God, for many people feel that way, even quite passionately, while still being outside of Christ and lost in their sins.

One thing is for sure: there is no knowing God apart from the knowledge of Him made possible by Jesus Christ. In Jesus alone is the truth about God made accessible to mankind (John 14:6). But God cannot be known apart from the Scriptures, even if we seek Him through Jesus Christ. The Scriptures contain the only objective information we have about Jesus’ revelation of the Father.

Obeying the gospel, then, we begin to partake more and more of God’s true nature, anticipating the time when we will meet Him face to face (Revelation 22:4). In Christ, we have what might be considered a foretaste of eternal life — or a down payment on it (Ephesians 1:14) — but the fullness of that life is something that will be ours only in eternity (Titus 1:2; 1 Peter 1:3,4). When it is finally ours, however, it won’t be eternal just in duration — it will be a quality of life no one has ever known before except Jesus, the Son of God, who will graciously share with us the life He has always had.

"[Christianity] is a revelation of the true way of living, the way to know God, the way to live life of eternal quality" (J. B. Phillips).

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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DON’T WE REMEMBER WHAT WE SAW? (MAY 13)

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"O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified" (Galatians 3:1).

THERE IS NOTHING THE HUMAN MIND IS NOT CAPABLE OF FORGETTING, EVEN THE THINGS WE NEED TO REMEMBER THE MOST. Sometimes surprisingly quickly, we get to the point where even the most vivid experiences no longer have any impact. So when the Galatian Christians began to waver in their faith, Paul was amazed. “It was before your eyes,” he said, “that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.” Paul himself had preached the cross to them, and they had understood what Jesus’ death meant. How could they now be drifting away from what they knew?

The problem the Galatians had is one most of us are familiar with: we forget things we need to remember. The truths that should keep us faithful to God slip away from our conscious awareness.

Yet the problem goes deeper than mere forgetfulness. All of us “know” that Jesus died for our sins — but in too many cases, the significance of what we know hasn’t really sunk in. The devil is perfectly content for us to “remember” Christ’s death as long as it never dawns on us what the implications of that event really are.

Even worse, however, we don’t see the personal significance of the cross. We may, on some level, grasp that Jesus’ crucifixion was a monumental event in human history, but rarely does that truth come home to us individually. Do I see that Jesus bled and died for MY sins? Do I understand the personal consequences of really believing that?

Clearly, we need to take two steps. First, what we know of the cross must be constantly deepened. If we don’t understand what happened at the cross more deeply today than we did last year, our love for God is probably not growing and we may be headed in the same direction as the Galatians. But second, what we know must constantly be refreshed. The Lord’s Supper each first day of the week is a public memorial that Christians share, but we need to ponder the cross in our private devotions as well. Every day of the week is not too often to remember what Jesus suffered and feel anew the full, shattering impact of His death. We must make up our minds that having seen Jesus crucified for our own sins, we will not forget what we saw.

O my Savior, make me see
How dearly thou has paid for me.
(Richard Crenshaw)

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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SOUL HEALTH (MAY 12)

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"Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul" (3 John 2).

IN JOHN’S PRAYER FOR GAIUS, HIS BROTHER IN CHRIST, THERE IS AN INTERESTING ORDER OF PRIORITIES. Whereas most people would think first about a friend’s physical state and then also hope they were doing well spiritually, John prays that “you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul.” In other words, John knew that Gaius was doing well spiritually, and that was the main priority. If he was also healthy physically, that would be a nice extra.

There is such a thing as “soul health,” and it is a much more important issue than most people acknowledge. In these days of emphasis on holistic health and wellness, many people do pay attention to “spirit” and “mind,” but in the New Testament, the health of the soul goes a good bit deeper than peace of mind, tranquility, emotional balance, and a sense of oneness with the universe. If the gospel of Christ is true, we are not in good spiritual health if we are not in a right relationship with the God who created us — and that requires the objective, actual forgiveness of our sins through obedience to the message of salvation in Christ.

The evidence of a right relationship with God is not to be found in our feelings but in the text of the Scriptures. If there is consistency between our commitment to Christ and what the New Testament teaches must be true for us to have eternal life, then our soul is in good health. The hope — and therefore the joy — we have is based on the objective promise of God in the Scriptures, and not on the feelings of peace generated by meditation or mindfulness.

This is not to say that the neurological and psychological kinds of tranquility that come from meditation are of no use at all. They can be extremely helpful in many ways — and this writer is a devoted practitioner of mindfulness. But tranquility should not be confused with rightness of relationship to God. And if, not having been saved from our sins by the gospel of Christ, we do not enjoy justification with God, all the tranquility and wellness we might have achieved by worldly means will come to a screeching halt when we die. Bodily health, including emotional serenity, is well enough. But of far greater import is how well our souls are faring.

"Body:  not a home but an inn — and that only briefly" (Seneca).

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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RESPONDING RIGHTLY TO GRACE (MAY 11)

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"But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10).

OBEDIENCE TO THE GOSPEL IS A RESPONSE. We do not initiate the process; God does. Whatever we do, we do in response to what His love has done to make our salvation possible. And surely, God wants our response to be wholehearted. That is, each of the three components of our hearts should respond rightly to the gospel.

INTELLECT. Sin resulted from Satan lying to Adam and Eve about the character of God (Genesis 3:1-6), and ever since then, untruth has been at the root of mankind’s broken relationship with God. The gospel wants to put truth back in its proper place, and if our intention is to respond to God rightly, we’re going to have to study, learn God’s truth, and conform our intellects to that truth.

EMOTION. This part of the gospel is emphasized nowadays, almost exclusively, but even in our emotional response to God we are sometimes dangerously imbalanced. God created us with a very wide range of emotions, all of which are healthy. As we see in the Psalms, we are to respond to God with all of our emotions — not just the warm and fuzzy ones, which most people like the best.

WILL. In its most basic sense, sin is the rebellion of our will against God (1 John 3:4). The gospel proposes not only to forgive our past disobedience but to transform us back into persons who submit to the will of their Creator. So there can be no rightful response to God’s grace without obedience. As Jesus said, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46).

There are, in fact, many ways our response to God might be less than wholehearted, but most of these come down to one thing: a response that is merely passive rather than active. In other words, we do not really respond to the gospel; we are content just to bask in the glow of thinking about how gracious God is. But that was not the response of the apostle Paul, and we need to ponder his words frequently: “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”

"Those things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us also the grace to labor for" (Anonymous).

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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THE SCRIPTURES (MAY 10)

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". . . just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures" (2 Peter 3:15,16).

IN THIS TEXT, PETER, WHO WAS ONE OF THE APOSTLES OF CHRIST, ALLUDES TO THE LETTERS WRITTEN BY PAUL, ANOTHER ONE OF THE APOSTLES. As a Jew, Peter makes an astonishing claim. He classifies the letters of Paul as a part of the “Scriptures,” a Jewish expression referring to the documents accepted as having originated in the mind of God. Peter would have known the Pentateuch, the Hebrew prophets, and certain other books to have been inspired by God; but he also recognized Paul’s writings as a part of this canon, the authoritative collection of books that, taken together, constitute God’s written word to the human race.

Just the other day, I happened to be reading in Deuteronomy where Moses was anticipating the day when Israel would have a king. The king would need to be, above all else, a godly man, faithful in his adherence to God’s teaching. But being a godly man would depend on his attention to the writings that contained that teaching. These writings could not be neglected. “He shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law . . . it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them . . . so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel” (Deuteronomy 17:18-20).

We have to stretch our minds to accept that there could be books written in human language that ultimately came from God’s own spirit (2 Peter 1:21), but that is exactly the claim made for “the Scriptures.” Yes, human writers were involved. They were the agents through whom God brought these books into the world, but somehow, the writings are from God Himself. If we “twist” them, as Peter puts it, we do so to our “own destruction.” The Scriptures are given to us by God’s grace. They can make us “wise for salvation” (2 Timothy 3:15) — but since they are a communication from our Creator, we dare not bandy them about carelessly.

"The Bible is a supernatural book" (A. W. Tozer).

Gary Henry - WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

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