My heart is broken

I don’t mean that I’m sad. Or that I have coronary issues.

What I mean is that I’m unable to have perfect affection — proper, God-honoring affection — for anything. Every like and dislike, every desire and disgust, every craving and contentment, all the jonesing and resignation is flawed. Some days are better than others. But then I read in the Bible, “Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”

This makes me despair.

Then I read, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

In the person of Jesus Christ, who was “crucified according to the Scriptures, and was buried and raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,” --- and this in real time and space, not as some bit of undigested beef --- God paid for my broken heart with His own.

Get a plan

If, like me, you’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve set out to read the Bible through in a year, you should know that I’m on track to finish the entire thing (New Testament & Psalms twice, rest of the Old Testament once) by Monday, December 31. This is not a cause for bragging (see “lost count” above) but to recommend the one thing that made the definite difference: a plan.

There is today a famine of hearing the Word of God, of not knowing what He has said (cf. Amos 8:11). Make it your goal next year and get a plan.

If you’ve read Radical by David Platt, you know that he recommends getting a plan. He doesn’t recommend any one over another. If you do a Google (or Yahoo or Bing or whatever) search for “bible reading plan,” you get a bazillion links, many of them redundant. Making a choice among them can be bewildering.

So here’s the deal: Justin Taylor of the Gospel Coalition has digested a big batch of the best-known plans, and summarized each one. You can find a plan that matches your preferences and the amount of time you have. The plan I used this year was just a list of references, which meant I could use whatever translation I prefer. Pick any one of them — I don’t care which. But get a plan.

Philippians 3

This is the outline of a Sunday School lesson I taught on March 3, 2011. I have no idea how closely I stuck to the outline. Sometimes I can‘t read my own typing.

Intro: A common expression

Have you ever heard the expression “so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good”? If that’s true of someone, then the one thing you can count on is that the thing that’s that person’s mind is not Heaven as it’s talked about in the Bible.

2 things inside the church that will rob your joy.

• Not talking about the obvious things like drunkenness, violence, etc.
• These are temptations for all of us.
• These will keep our minds and our lives from moving where they should be moving. I.e., they will distract us from Christ, who is our life. (Colossians 3:4)

What are the monsters that will rob our joy?

I.e., what are the wrong ways to think about heaven?

Legalism

Legalism is any notion that you can achieve a right standing with God by personal effort. It is to put “confidence in the flesh”.
“My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.” Everything else is less!
There are different forms of this:

• Roman Catholics who believe that performing a ritual guarantees the results.
  
  • Church of Christ believes this about baptism.
• People like the preacher in the movie Footloose, who believe that avoiding sins guarantees your acceptance by God.

What is Paul’s response?
“not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.”
What is Paul’s goal?
“that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

Perfectionism

This is similar to (but different from) Legalism. Some Methodists believe you can reach the place where you no longer sin or no longer have great sins.
What’s the problem? If perfectionism is true, then

• Why does Paul say he, the guy writing over half the books in the New Testament, hasn’t got there yet?
• Why is Romans 7 there at all?
• Why, in I Corinthians, the book written against the most sins, does Paul end with the statement of the Gospel? Of all the things he could have built up to (more law, higher spiritual “levels”) does he end with: “This is of first importance &dots; Christ was crucified according to the scriptures, was buried, and was raised on the third day according to the scriptures”

The problem is not with faith, it’s with the object of our faith, with what we have our faith in.

• We put our faith in our obedience.
• We put our faith in our ability to not sin in some way.
• We put our faith in our having overcome some particular sin.
• We forget that God is infinite, and that the smallest sin against him is therefore infinite.

Pursuit of Christ

Paul’s attitude about his past:

• Garbage
• Rubbish
• Dung

Paul’s attitude about his present:

• I have no righteousness of my own.
• Whatever righteousness I have is by faith.
• The faith I have is in the Jesus who was really there, and not the Jesus I imagine.
• I haven’t reached the end yet.
• I press on to know Christ — the Christ who’s really there.

How can we pursue Christ?

• Bible
  
  • Reading — just to know what it says
  • Study — to understand
    • the depth of the “easy” parts
    • the truth of the “hard” parts
  • To find Christ
• Prayer
• Worship
• Fellowship
• Serving our neighbor.

You should be ashamed if this is true of you

“I just spent an evening about a month ago with very close friends of mine who are Mormons. We had a very interesting conversation as we always do when it comes back around to the Gospel, and my friend’s wife said, ‘You know, I just don’t know all the debates between these different churches and denominations … I know evangelicals in town; our kids play together … I’ve even been to their churches a few times … There’s nothing different … My kids wear the bracelet [WWJD] … Look up there on the wall: There’s a picture of Jesus. We teach our children every day who Jesus is and the teachings that Jesus gave us to follow. As long as our children are being taught to follow Jesus, what’s all this division over doctrine?’”

— Mike Horton

The many and the few

Tim Challies is a baseball fan (if you call what they play in Toronto “baseball”) but he manages to hit this one out of the park.

Two motions

At the risk of 2 Doug Wilson quotes in a row, I offer this:

The unregenerate heart has only two motions it can make -- that of trying to climb to God on its own, or trying to run away from God.

The unregenerate heart can understand the holiness of God and flee from Him, or misunderstand it, and try to attain to it on its own. Only the converted heart can see the holiness as gladness, and the gladness as righteousness, and the righteousness as glory, and love all of it. As John Piper has argued concerning 1 Tim. 1:11, we have to have our eyes opened so that we see the gospel of the glory of the gladness of God. Would this really resolve all these issues? Taste and see.

— Doug Wilson

Far worse

As I periodically tell people in counseling, there is no problem you might have that you can't, by diligent effort, make far worse.

—Doug Wilson

Not necessarily warm and comforting

Phil Johnson once again splits the goalpost.

I keep thinking I'd like to try my hand at debating Frank Turk, but there are 2 problems:

• He's smarter than me.
• I can't find anything we disagree on.

Here's an example.

The End

Regarding the death and end of Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse magazine, Albert Mohler said

You will no doubt hear many Christians who are going to be tempted to say they would not want to be Bob Guccione on the day of judgement. Well, that is certainly true, but in truth every single sinner who does not come to know salvation in Jesus Christ is going to face the full justice and judgement of God. On that day, Bob Guccione will not stand out from the mass of sinners, because every single sinner will be seen with his or her sin fully exposed.

What we see in the death of Bob Guccione is another signal of the fact that human sinfulness is just as ugly as we must know it to be.