The Proper Use of Freedom, Galatians 5:16-26

6th Sunday After Pentecost, 2013
Shiloh Lutheran Church

Americans talk a lot about freedom. We talk about living in a free society, and we react when we sense that someone is trying to take away, or restrict, our freedom. Freedom is at the very center of what America is about. And, for the most part, modern Americans understand freedom as a lack of restraint, the liberty to do whatever I want with my life. Supporters of the “right to die” often make their argument along these lines: “it’s my life, and I should be free to end it whenever I choose.” Freedom is negative, nothing more than a lack of restraint. But listen to this description by Richard John Neuhaus: “Nothing good can be done without freedom, but freedom is not the highest value in itself. Freedom is given to man in order to make possible the free obedience to truth and free gift of oneself in love” (Doing Well and Doing Good, p. 169). Freedom is a gift of God, but it’s not an end in itself. It’s not the main thing. God has given us freedom, not so we can do whatever we feel like doing, but so we can live in loving obedience under His lordship.

Paul is concerned, in this letter, about freedom. Following Jesus Christ means being free from the Law. The Galatians were in the process of turning away from the gospel of grace and were hoping to please God by obeying the Old Testament Law. He begins the letter, after a brief introduction, with these words: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel–which is really no gospel at all” (Galatians 1:6). Over and over again throughout this letter, Paul shows the Galatians that by turning to the Law they are defecting from Jesus Chist. Rather than bringing them closer to God, this new direction is leading them away from Him.

Having made all his theological arguments in the earlier chapters, he says this at the beginning of chapter 5: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (5:1). The Galatians had been set free to follow Jesus Christ, and now they were bringing themselves into bondage to the Law. Paul wants them to hold firmly to the freedom God has given them in Christ. But that raises a question: what does a free life in Christ look like? Is the freedom we’ve been given a simple lack of restraint, a lack of boundaries so that we can fulfill our dreams by doing whatever we feel like doing? In this passage in the last half of chapter 5, Paul gives us a picture of what the free life in Christ looks like.

Paul wants the Galatians to be living in the freedom of the Spirit. But there’s always a danger in preaching this message. Paul had been accused, over and over again, of lowering the standards of godly living by preaching the message of free grace: “It’s simply perverse to say, ‘If my lies serve to show off God’s truth all the more gloriously, why blame me? I’m doing God a favor.’ Some people are actually trying to put such words in our mouths, claiming that we go around saying, ‘The more evil we do, the more good God does, so let’s just do it!’ That’s pure slander” (Romans 3:8, The Message).

There are two opposite dangers in responding to the gospel of free grace. The first danger, and this is the one Paul is most concerned with in this letter, is legalism. We see the potential for abusing the message, so we try to guard against this danger by introducing stricter standards. Several years ago I read an article by a Mennonite scholar who was unhappy with the direction some Mennonite churches were taking. They had been influenced by the doctrine of free grace, he said, and as a result the centrality of the peace position had been weakened. In his view, a more legalistic approach to the gospel would make it easier to safeguard some of the Anabaptist distinctives which were being lost. Legalism is safer. It enables us to stay in control. The opposite danger is antinomianism, living as if our actions don’t matter, because God is going to forgive us anyway. This is what Paul is concerned about when he says: “do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature.” If we’re really worried about morality, we’ll be tempted to some form of legalism. And if we’re especially concerned about freedom, we’ll be tempted by antinomianism.

But what does Paul mean when he talks about freedom? Clearly it’s not the freedom to do whatever we feel like. That’s the way people in our society often use the word, but Paul has something else in mind. When we do whatever we feel like doing, it destroys us, because we’re going against the grain of our nature. We’re not capable of exercising absolute freedom, and when we try it leads only to bondage. Our freedom is defined by our nature as creatures made in God’s image. When Paul says “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” he’s saying that we’ve been set free to live in obedience to God by the power of the Holy Spirit. We’re created to be servants. We can’t help it. We can’t escape it. When we refuse to serve God our Creator, we just end up serving something else. True freedom is found in obedience to God our Creator and Lord, not in obedience to our selfish whims.

Here’s how The Message translates vv. 19-21, describing a life seeking freedom from God’s Lordship: “It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community; I could go on.” When we try to grasp for absolute freedom, the freedom to do whatever we want, whatever we feel like doing, we dehumanize ourselves and we end up living in bondage to our impulses. We set out trying to be free, and we find ourselves enslaved.

Paul only presents us with two options in these verses. Either we are living by the flesh, with the kinds of results he lists in verses 19-21, or we are living by the Spirit. There’s no neutral position between these two. The flesh, or sinful nature, as it reads in the NIV, refers to the whole person in rebellion against God. The NIV uses the term sinful nature because it’s easy to misunderstand Paul’s use of the word flesh. He’s not talking about our bodies. Some of the works of the flesh include things that result from the misuse of our bodies: sexual immorality, impurity, drunkenness, orgies, etc. But the works of the flesh also include spiritual sins: idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, selfish ambition, envy. So the flesh doesn’t refer to our bodies, but to the kind of life that results from the Fall, a life lived in the corruption of sin and rebellion. Living in the flesh is living within the limited perspective of a world that is alienated from the life of God. Here’s what one Bible dictionary says: “The man whose horizon is limited by the flesh is by that very fact opposed to God.... The flesh in this sense denotes the whole personality of man as organized in the wrong direction, as directed to earthly pursuits rather than the service of God” (New Bible Dictionary, p. 371). When we become swallowed up by the values of our culture and live for ourselves, grasping for everything we can, we’re living by the flesh. When we’re living according to the flesh, we are at the center, and everything revolves around our own desires. When we’re living this way, our own needs and desires seem to be the only thing that matters, and if we think about God at all it’s only because we’re hoping we can use Him to get the things we want. Living by the Spirit is living under God’s lordship, with Him at the center of our lives, and living by the flesh is living for ourselves.

It’s important to notice Paul’s terminology in verse 22. He speaks, in verse 19, of the works of the flesh. These are the things that are produced naturally from our fallen nature. When we’re living on our own, apart from God, this is the natural result. These are the kinds of things the flesh is capable of producing. He says the same thing in Romans 8: “Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God” (vv. 5-8).

In verse 22, Paul speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. These 9 qualities he lists in verses 22-23 are things that result from the Spirit’s transforming power in our lives. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard.” The works of the flesh flow from us, but the fruit of the Spirit comes about through influences outside ourselves. We can’t produce the fruit of the Spirit through determined self-effort. It’s no use writing these things down in your day-timer and determining that you’re going to learn to live like this no matter what. We can’t do it, and when we try, we only end up with counterfeits. We can produce qualities that look like the real thing. But the similarities are only on the surface. The real thing can only appear in our lives through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. The free life in Christ is a life that leads to the kinds of qualities Paul lists in these verses.

So how do we get the fruit of the Spirit in our lives? Do we just wait passively and say, “oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it; I guess if God wants these things to appear in my life it’s up to Him to do the work”? No. It’s true that we can’t produce these things, any more than we can make fruit grow without those things God provides, like sun, water and the right temperatures. But just as we cultivate gardens and orchards, there are things we can do to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit.

The first thing is to ask whether the Spirit is part of our lives. Paul says in Romans 8, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (v. 19). He says, in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Is this true of you? Is there evidence in your life of this new creation? The Church easily becomes just a sub-culture. We learn all the rules and say the right things, and as long as we don’t get caught up in certain behaviors, we can assume that everything is fine. But it’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever becoming a new creature. It’s possible to spend a lifetime in the Church without ever knowing anything of the transforming power of the Spirit in our lives. We can be good moral people, who fit very nicely into the Christian sub-culture, without ever being reconciled to God. We may avoid the more blatant things, like “sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft.” But what about “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy”? Paul is also speaking about these things when he says “those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Do you have evidence of the presence of the Spirit in your life? Many people who’ve spent a lifetime in the church will one day hear Jesus say “Depart from me; I never knew you.”

But, having become new creatures in Christ, knowing the power of the Spirit in our lives, the fruit of the Spirit still doesn’t appear automatically. Paul says, in verse 24: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” John Stott does a good job of explaining this verse: “What does it mean? Paul borrows the image of crucifixion, of course, from Christ Himself who said: ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Mk. 8:34). To ‘take up the cross’ was our Lord’s vivid figure of speech for self-denial. Every follower of Christ is to behave like a condemned criminal and carry his cross to the place of execution. Now Paul takes the metaphor to its logical conclusion. We must not only take up our cross and walk with it, but actually see that the execution takes place. We are actually to take the flesh, our wilful and wayward self, and (metaphorically speaking) nail it to the cross. This is Paul’s graphic description of repentance, of turning our back on the old life of selfishness and sin, repudiating it finally and utterly” (Only One Way: The Message of Galatians, p. 150). Remember this definition I read a few minutes ago: “the flesh denotes the whole personality... organized in the wrong direction.” Repentance is turning around and going the other way.

What he’s describing has often been referred to as the mortification of sin, putting to death those old habits that lead us into sin. It’s what Jesus was talking about when He said: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). When our sinful, self-centered tendencies begin to assert themselves, we refuse to submit. It may even help to visualize our old selves on the cross, having died to our old way of life. John Stott goes on to say this: “The first great secret of holiness lies in the degree and the decisiveness of our repentance. If besetting sins persistently plague us, it is either because we have never truly repented, or because, having repented, we have not maintained our repentance. It is as if, having nailed our old nature to the cross, we keep wistfully returning to the scene of its execution. We begin to fondle it, to caress it, to long for its release, even to try to take it down again from the cross. We need to learn to leave it there. When some jealous, or proud, or malicious, or impure thought invades our mind we must kick it out at once. It is fatal to begin to examine it and consider whether we are going to give in or not. We have declared war on it; we are not going to resume negotiations. We have settled the issue for good; we are not going to re-open it. We have crucified the flesh; we are never going to draw the nails” (pp. 151-52). “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires.” Crucify the sinful nature, and then leave it there on the cross.

But that’s only the first step. We deny ourselves–we say “no” to our old, selfish way of life–and then we go on to walk with the Spirit: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” We walk in the Spirit by looking to Him, inviting Him into every area of our lives and seeking to live under His Lordship. Here’s John Stott once more: “This will be seen in our whole way of life–in the leisure occupations we pursue, the books we read, the friendships we make. Above all in what older authors called ‘a diligent use of the means of grace’, that is, in a disciplined practice of prayer and Scripture meditation, in fellowship with believers who provoke us to love and good works, in keeping the Lord’s day as the Lord’s day, and in attending public worship and the Lord’s Supper. In all these ways we occupy ourselves in spiritual things. It is not enough to yield passively to the Spirit’s control; we must also walk actively in the Spirit’s way. Only so will the fruit of the Spirit appear” (p. 154). We cultivate the fruit of the Spirit by refusing to allow the weeds of the flesh to grow in our lives and by seeking to walk daily in active obedience to God’s Word, trusting in His power to transform us into the image of His Son.

Here’s a good description of what Paul is saying in these verses: “Christian spirituality forces a primary question: Is growth of the person totally open, as if we were clay to be formed? [In other words, is freedom in Christ open-ended, nothing more than a lack of restraint enabling us to do what we want?] Christianity firmly insists that the answer is no. The apt analogy is the relationship of acorn to oak. If an acorn were given ‘freedom,’ it could not become a maple. Instead, the options would be to become a healthy oak or a contorted self-contradiction. So with humans, for the ‘image of God’ is so structured within each person that the options are (1) to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds, or (2) to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures” (W. Paul Jones, The Art of Spiritual Direction, p. 31). So these are the choices: “to become twisted, tortured, and frustrated creatures,” the kind of people described in the works of the flesh. Both legalism and antinomianism lead in this direction. The other choice is “to love God with all our hearts, souls, strength, and minds,” to become the kind of people God created us to be, the kind of people who increasingly bear the fruit of the Spirit. The message of free grace sets us free to be truly and fully human.

Living in the Presence of the Eternal God, Psalm 90 (Knowing God Series)

We live in a world of constant change, but God has created us with a longing for permanence and stability. At the beginning of this series, I quoted from the book of Ecclesiastes, which describes the futility of life in this fallen world: “Smoke, nothing but smoke.... There’s nothing to anything–it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again–the same old round.... Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing” (1:2-5, 8, The Message). Generations come and go, people live and die, empires rise and fall. Later in the book, the author points to the hopelessness of living in a world where both good and evil people face death: “The same destiny ultimately awaits everyone, whether they are righteous or wicked, good or bad, ceremonially clean or unclean, religious or irreligious. Good people receive the same treatment as sinners, and people who take oaths are treated like people who don’t. It seems so tragic that one fate comes to all. That is why people are not more careful to do good. Instead, they choose their own mad course, for they have no hope. There is nothing ahead but death anyway” (9:2-3, NLT).

The author of this psalm is aware of the futility of life in this fallen world. We don’t know who he was. In most Bibles there’s a superscription at the beginning of many psalms. The superscription for Psalm 90 reads, “A prayer of Moses the man of God.” But these superscriptions were added hundreds of years after the text was written. They’re often helpful, but they are not part of the Scripture. This prayer could have come from Moses, or it could have been written by someone else with Moses in mind. Or the tradition tying this psalm to Moses could have developed long after the psalm was written. In any case, this prayer fits well with what we know about Moses.

He grew up as an adopted member of a royal family, then had to flee into the wilderness after he killed an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite. For the next 40 years, he lived in the desert as a shepherd, this man who had grown up in Pharaoh’s court. Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action,” (Acts 7:22), but as year after year went by in the desert, he must have wondered about the meaning of it all. He then served faithfully, leading God’s people out of Egypt, but he wasn’t allowed to enter the promised land because he lost his temper and dishonored God in front of the nation. In Deuteronomy 34, we see him at the very end of his life: “Then Moses went to Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab and climbed Pisgah Peak, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord showed him the whole land.... Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I told them I would give it to their descendants. I have now allowed you to see it, but you will not enter the land” (34:1-4). The people of Israel had been in captivity in Egypt for over 400 years, and Moses, at God’s direction, had led them out with the intention of bringing them into their own land. But now he himself was not permitted to enter. And immediately after seeing the land from the top of Mt. Pisgah, Moses died. God allowed him to be part of an amazing work of deliverance, but then he died before the work was finished. He spent 40 years as a member of the royal family in Egypt, 40 years as a shepherd in the desert, and 40 years leading God’s people around in the wilderness, dying just before they reached the promised land. He didn’t live to see the real fruit of his life work.

We were created in God’s image, with the ability to worship Him and have fellowship with Him, and part of what this means is that we are created with a desire for permanence and stability. I often speak positively about my experience with OM India. It was one of the real formative times in my Christian life. But it wasn’t always easy. When we first arrived in north India, in the fall of 1977, I was overwhelmed by the culture. I felt like I’d been dropped into a completely different world. Everything looked different; the food was different; I didn’t speak the local language; people thought and acted differently than I did. My main job was to drive a truck, transporting an evangelistic team, but I found driving there incredibly stressful. There were people, bicycles, and animals all over the road, and I’d heard stories about mobs killing truck drivers who hit someone–even when it wasn’t the driver’s fault. For the first few months, I was afraid every time I got behind the wheel. And on top of all that, everyone could tell, just by looking at me, that I didn’t belong in India. I was a foreigner, and people in the villages stared at me wherever I went. After a few months, it all got to me and I went off by myself to spend some time in prayer. And as I was singing a hymn I was gripped with a new realization that in the midst of all the changes I was experiencing, God was still the same. Every area of my life was in upheaval because of the sheer amount of cultural change I had experienced, but God was still there and I could find refuge and rest in Him. That realization was a turning point for me. That’s what the author of this psalm has found. In this world of constant change–where so much of our effort seems futile, where we don’t live to experience the fruit of our labor, where those we love are taken from us in death, where our bodies decline no matter how hard we work at physical fitness, and where we face the certainty of death in the end–we can find hope by taking refuge in our eternal, unchanging God.

The psalmist begins, in verses 1&2, with a description of God. God is eternal. He is a constant, secure dwelling place for His people. The letter to the Hebrews was written to Christians who had suffered for their faith and were now ready to give up. The author of the letter urges them: “Remember those earlier days after you had received the light, when you stood your ground in a great contest in the face of suffering. Sometimes you were publicly exposed to insult and persecution; at other times you stood side by side with those who were so treated” (10:32-33). They had joyfully endured suffering for Christ, but now they were on the verge of turning away from the gospel. They’d become worn down by the pressure, so the author reminds them of the truth. In chapter 13, near the end of the letter, he says this: “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:7-8). These may have been leaders who died during a time of persecution. In any case, they were leaders who taught them at the beginning of their Christian lives, and whose lives had ended well. They hadn’t turned away. They had persevered faithfully to the end, and the author wants his readers to imitate their example: “Consider the outcome of their way of life.” So he reminds them: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” In the midst of all the turmoil and pressure of enduring persecution, they can find rest and refuge in their unchanging God.

The psalmist isn’t just saying that he finds temporary refuge in God. He says God is the permanent dwelling place of His people. This implies two things: 1) We’re not homeless. We’re not adrift, on our own in this lost world. We may feel disconnected and alienated at times. But the reality is that God is our dwelling place. T.S. Eliot, before his conversion to Christianity, wrote a very pessimistic poem entitled “The Waste Land.” He says this, early in the poem (he’s looking at the world around him): “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,/ And the dry stone no sound of water.” His experience, looking at the world, is alienation. He can’t make sense of it, because there’s nothing solid to hold onto. He sees only “a heap of broken images,” fragments that make no sense by themselves. There’s no relief, no resting place in this dry, broken world. He’s experiencing the ultimate homelessness. He longs for permanence and wholeness, but he lives in a broken, fragmented world. But Eliot discovered, a few years later, that the eternal, unchanging God is the dwelling place of His people. 2) Our true home is not a place, but a person. Moses wasn’t allowed to enter the land. But his true dwelling place wasn’t the land anyway. The longing for a place where we belong is fulfilled in communion with the eternal God. “The thirst for place is resolved in the gift of communion” (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, pp. 111-112). The answer to our sense of alienation is not to build our dream house. Have you noticed the strong drive, in our society, to own a house? Why is owning a home so important to people? I believe part of the answer is that people hope to find some sense of permanence in owning a home. They hope to find some sense of relief from the alienation of living in this lost, fallen world. They hope to find some sense of belonging somewhere. But the answer is not to look for an ideal home, where we can live for the rest of our lives. The answer is to take refuge in God: “Lord, through all the generations you have been our home! Before the mountains were created, before you made the earth and the world, you are God, without beginning or end” (NLT).

That’s the first thing we need to know. We need to know who God is. But we also need a more accurate view of ourselves, so the psalmist gives us that in verses 3-11: “So don’t return us to mud, saying, ‘Back to where you came from!’ Patience! You’ve got all the time in the world–whether a thousand years or a day, it’s all the same to you. Are we no more to you than a wispy dream, no more than a blade of grass that springs up gloriously with the rising sun and is cut down without a second thought? Your anger is far and away too much for us; we’re at the end of our rope. You keep track of all our sins; every misdeed since we were children is entered in your books. All we can remember is that frown on your face. Is that all we’re ever going to get? We live for seventy years or so (with luck we might make it to eighty), and what do we have to show for it? Trouble. Toil and trouble and a marker in the graveyard” (The Message).

Life in this world is full of difficulty and sorrow and loss. And each sorrow, each loss, is a reminder of our mortality. Paul says, in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “outwardly we are wasting away.” That’s our condition in this fallen world; we are steadily wasting away. We tend to forget that. We have an innate longing for eternity. When things are going well, we can sometimes almost forget the uncertainty and instability of this life. Much of the frenzy of our society is an attempt to evade the truth about who we are. But no matter what we do, things happen to shatter our sense of comfort, and we are again reminded that we are mortal, and that we live in a fallen world, a world that can never provide the sense of permanence we long for. The author of Hebrews says it in this way: “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).

We too easily seek relief in the wrong things. In one of Francis Schaeffer’s printed sermons, he describes the excitement he felt at buying a new car, the first new car he had ever owned. He says he couldn’t keep his eyes off it, and he wanted to keep it looking shiny and new. He was obsessed with it, initially. Have you ever had that experience? There’s a sense of exhilaration that goes with buying something new, but that exhilaration quickly fades. So we find ourselves wanting to buy something else. And the process goes on and on. The poet Kathleen Norris says “Consumerism is fed by a desire to forget our mortality” (Dakota, p. 120). Schaeffer’s main point, in his sermon, is this: “We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives’; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” He was thrilled with his new car, but after a couple of days someone bumped into it and made a fairly large scratch on the side. He said that scratch completely changed his attitude about the car. He suddenly realized how fragile and unstable it was; it wasn’t going to last. Someday it was going to end up in the junk yard, as scrap metal. This fallen world has been “subjected to frustration, and decay” as Paul says in Romans 8.

Our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. We’re experiencing the effects of the Fall. We feel lost and alienated in this world because things are not what they were meant to be. We’re living in a world that is under God’s wrath, a world that is alienated from its Creator. The psalmist doesn’t want to bury his sense of alienation and despair by trying a new hobby or buying a new toy. So he begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence. That’s what he’s been doing for the first 11 verses of this psalm. He begins with the truth about God, in verses 1&2, and then with the truth about us, as people living in this world, in verses 3-11. And then, having begun in this way, he cries out to God and asks for grace to live wisely in the light of the truth.

A large part of our problem is that we so easily live in unreality. We forget who we are and try to live as if we were immortal. But the truth is that our lives in this world are uncertain and unstable. Our earthly possessions may very well outlast us, and we’ll leave behind these things that have gripped our hearts, the things we’ve accumulated in our attempt to drown out the realization of our mortality. “A voice says ‘Cry out.’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ ‘All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass” (Isa. 40:6-7).

Life in this world is uncertain. If we listen regularly to the news, we hear every day stories of unbearable grief and sorrow. And every one of these stories reminds us, if we’re paying attention, that we live in a fallen world, a world that is alienated from the life of God. We live in a world where sorrow and death are always there, waiting right around the corner. Reminders of our mortality are all around us, if we’re paying attention. We need to pay attention and face the truth about ourselves. It’s wise to be intentional in cultivating this awareness. That’s what the psalmist is doing when he cries out, in verse 12: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Here’s the same idea, in Psalm 39:4: “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” The order for night prayer that I use closes every night with these words: “May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” Because we’re so prone to illusions of immortality, and because our culture is so absorbed with living for the present moment, we need to be intentional in cultivating an awareness that we will not be here forever. Someday each of us is going to die, and part of our calling in life is to prepare ourselves for that day when we will stand before God. The psalmist begins by speaking the truth in God’s presence, and then he cries out for grace to live in the light of that truth.

We tend to gravitate toward one extreme or the other. Either we hide our heads in the sand and refuse to face the fact that we’re going to die one day, or we become morbid and obsessed with the certainty of death. Some monks, in the past, have slept in their casket, to remind themselves each night that their business in life is to prepare for death. I think that’s going too far. I had a friend in his late 30's who bought a newspaper every day, and the first thing he read each day was the obituary page. He was morbid, obsessed with the idea of dying. The psalmist isn’t morbid, nor is he living in unreality. He’s faced the truth, but he’s facing it in the light of his relationship with God.

In verse 1, he addresses God as “Lord,” Adonai, the Sovereign Lord. The sovereign, eternal God is the focus in the early part of the psalm, when he’s drawing a contrast between God’s eternity and our frailty. But in verse 13, when he begins crying for help, he uses the covenant name, Yahweh. The One he’s praying to is not only the eternal, unchanging God; He’s a God who has entered into a covenant relationship with His people. God is exalted beyond our comprehension, but He is not detached from us. He’s not indifferent to our situation. He is not only God the Creator. He is our God. In relationship with Him, our brief lives in this world have meaning and purpose.

Our lives here are uncertain, but our God is eternal. Living wisely means walking with Him in the light of our own mortality. In July of 2001, my 38-year-old niece got up in the morning, like she might have done any other day of her life. She was in good health. There was every reason to expect that she’d live a long, full life. But that afternoon she was killed in a boating accident. She woke up in the morning, not knowing that it would be the last day of her life. Living wisely means ordering our lives in the light of the fact that we don’t know when our lives are going to end. And, above all, it means living in a growing relationship with the eternal God. “ Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).

If this is the last week of your life, will you be ashamed when you’re standing in the Lord’s presence? What about 10 years from now? Will you be ordering your life differently then? Are you living for yourself, straining for something to relieve the tedium and futility of life in this fallen world? Are you seeking relief in all the wrong things? If you’re living for yourself now, if you’re not seeking God’s will in every area of your life, what makes you think things will be any different in 10 or 20 years?

“We all tend to live ‘ash heap lives; we spend most of our time and money on things that will end up in the city dump.” Does that describe your life? In the light of eternity, are you throwing your life away? Meditate on the shortness and uncertainty of your life. Find ways to remind yourself, to bring yourself back to reality. Try this: before bed each night, pray the Lord’s Prayer. Pray it meditatively, paying attention to what you’re saying. In this prayer, you’re involving God in every area of your life. And then close with these words, from the order for Night Prayer that I use: “May the All-Powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” By doing this, you’re inviting God into every area of your life, and you’re also looking forward, in His presence, to the certainty of your own death, and you’re asking Him to be with you until the end. It doesn’t demand much time, and you can do it after the lights are out, before you fall asleep.

This psalm reminds us of who God is, who we are, and then it guides us in responding to God. Knowing that our lives are quickly passing by, and that God is eternal, how do we pray? What should we pray for? Listen to verses 12-17 in The Message: “Oh! Teach us to live well! Teach us to live wisely and well! Come back, Yahweh–how long do we have to wait?–and treat your servants with kindness for a change. Surprise us with love at daybreak; then we’ll skip and dance all the day long. Make up for the bad times with some good times; we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime. Let your servants see what you’re best at–the ways you rule and bless your children. And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us, confirming the work that we do. Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!” A good way to pray this psalm is by using Isaac Watts’ paraphrase, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”

Praying to the One Who Knows All, Psalm 139 (Knowing God Series)

I’ve often heard this question from people who struggle with prayer: “If God knows everything about me, if He knows all my needs, what is the point of prayer? If God loves me and knows what I need, why doesn’t He take care of me whether I ask or not?” What is the point of telling God our needs, when He already knows them? Certainly we aren’t giving Him any new information. We aren’t telling Him something He doesn’t know already.

In Evangelicalism, to a large extent, prayer has been reduced to intercession and supplication. Prayer consists in asking God to do things for us (supplication) and for others (intercession). I’ve been in prayer meetings where the leader is in a hurry to finish with worship and praise, saying “we need to get moving, because we have a lot to pray about.” The really important part of prayer is intercession; worship is just a prelude to put us into the right mood. But in this prayer, in Psalm 139, the psalmist doesn’t seem concerned with making requests. He doesn’t seem to be troubled by the fact that God already knows everything about him. His experience is just the opposite: the realization that God knows all things encourages him to pray. It leads him to worship. In prayer, he has fellowship with the One who knows him better than he knows himself.

We’d do well to begin with this question: What is prayer? What kinds of things can properly be defined as prayer? E.M. Bounds wrote a number of books on the importance of prayer. And he himself was a very prayerful man. If I hear that Bounds prayed two hours each day (I think it was actually much more than that), what was he doing all that time? Was he speaking, making requests, the whole time? If I decide to imitate him in spending large amounts of time in prayer, what will I do with the time I’ve set aside?

This is, for me, an important question. When I was in Nepal, as a relatively new Christian, I had read much about these people who spent two hours each day in prayer, so I decided to do it. I started getting up at 4 in the morning, so that I could spend two hours in prayer before breakfast. But I got tired of praying through lists of names, so I’d break up the time by spending a lot of time singing hymns and choruses. But then I felt guilty. I wasn’t sure that this really qualified as prayer. Somehow I had it in my mind that singing to the Lord didn’t count as prayer, that if I was really praying–like the people I’d read about–I’d be filling the whole time with requests.

Since that time I’ve come to the conclusion that prayer includes more than intercession and supplication. Prayer is more than asking God for things. Some people seem to be particularly gifted in intercession. We should all intercede for one another, and some people clearly have a special gift and call from God in this area. But prayer is more than intercession.

Eugene Peterson has a good description of prayer in his book, Answering God, a book about praying the Psalms: “Prayers are tools, but with this clarification: prayers are not tools for doing or getting, but for being and becoming. In our largely externalized culture, we are urgently presented with tools that enable us to do things (a machine, for instance, to clean the carpet), and to get things (a computer, for instance, to get information). We are also well trained in their use. We are not so readily offered tools that enable our being and becoming human.... At the center of the whole enterprise of being human, prayers are the primary technology. Prayers are tools that God uses to work his will in our bodies and souls. Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in his work with us” (p. 2).

Prayers are tools that we use to collaborate in God’s work with us. Peterson goes on to point out that prayer is, by its very nature, responsive speech. God has spoken first, and in prayer we respond. The most important thing in prayer is not our speech, but the fact that God, in mercy and grace, has reached out to us. Prayer is answering speech. We’re in a relationship with God. He has spoken to us in His Word, and prayer continues the conversation. Peterson says this a few pages later: “What is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves, but that we learn to answer God. The Psalms show us how to answer” (p. 6). Prayer is not primarily about expressing ourselves in God’s presence–even expressing our needs–but about responding to Him. That’s why it’s so important to make use of these models of prayer in the Psalms. That’s why the Psalms are so often called a “school of prayer.” They train us in responding to God out of a wide variety of situations and emotional states.

In prayer, we are carrying on a conversation with God. We’re spending time in His presence, interacting with Him. But in a relationship we don’t have to fill all of the time with talk. I try to include several elements in my prayer life: I pray the Psalms every day. I also meditate on Scripture, seeking to be attentive to the fact that it is God’s Word. I spend some time in silence, simply sitting in God’s presence. I sing hymns and choruses. I pray the Lord’s Prayer, morning and evening. I also spend some time in intercession. But I don’t try to fill the whole time with requests, because the point is not to ask God for as many things as is humanly possible during the time I’ve set aside for prayer. The point is to spend time with God, worshiping Him and getting to know Him better; from within that context, I also lift up my own needs and the needs of others. Prayer is not just asking God for things. In prayer, we have fellowship and communion with God, the One who knows us better than we know ourselves.

The psalmist begins, in verses 1-6, by meditating on God’s complete knowledge of him. Here’s how it reads in The Message: “Yahweh, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand. I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back; I’m never out of your sight. You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence. I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too–your reassuring presence, coming and going. This is too much, too wonderful–I can’t take it all in!” Notice that he doesn’t just say, “Oh Lord, you know everything about me,” and then move on to something else. He stays with the idea, looking at it from different angles, to let it sink into his mind.

There are two things going on here. The psalmist is offering worship to God in response to the realization of God’s complete knowledge of him. But he’s also using prayer here as a tool, in the way Peterson describes, so he stays with the idea to let it sink in more deeply. “He wants the conviction to sink deeply into his soul that God knows him through and through, so he comes at the idea from a variety of angles and aspects” (Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, p. 277). Both aspects of prayer are important. We’re offering something to God, and, at the same time, we’re being transformed.

We often pass by things too quickly in our spiritual lives. We’ve heard the same truths over and over, all our lives, and when we hear and read them they just skim over the surface of our minds. We live at such a fast pace, going from one thing to another, that often we’re not even fully engaged in what we’re doing. It takes unhurried time for the truth of God’s Word to sink into our minds. Several years ago I read a book about praying Scripture, and the author had this helpful advice: “First, we must create within our hearts a flexible space of resonance, so that the Word can penetrate its deepest parts and touch its innermost fibers. This demands the kind of recollection we feel the need for when something great and beautiful appears in our life. A poem demands that we pause at the end for silence. A musical theme that has moved us continues to echo, sweetly and insistently, within our soul. We feel the need to keep listening to this inner echo until it has permeated every fiber of our heart. The Word of God is much more demanding than a musical theme and much more profound.... meditation is compared to the assimilation of food.... We ponder each word in order to grasp its full meaning, imprint it on our memory and taste its sweetness, find joy and nourishment for our soul” (Mariano Magrassi, Praying the Bible, p. 109). That’s what the psalmist is doing here. He’s not anxious to get on to the next thing. He keeps looking at the truth from different angles, to let it sink into his mind and heart. He’s giving himself time to assimilate it.

But then, this realization that God knows him completely doesn’t lead immediately to warm, secure feelings. He doesn’t immediately feel uplifted. From time to time I receive mailings from churches promoting their services, promising that those who attend will hear an “uplifting message.” But the truth doesn’t always affect us in this way. The psalmist’s instinctive reaction, when he realizes God’s complete knowledge of him, is to run and hide. He wants to respond the way Adam and Eve did in the Garden, immediately after the Fall: “The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8). When we come face to face with God’s absolute holiness and purity, and realize at the same time that this God knows the secrets of our hearts, we’re overwhelmed with a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re undone. We fall at His feet, like Peter when he realized who Jesus was, crying out “depart from me, Lord; I am a sinner” (Luke 5:8). We instinctively want to hide from Him.

But the Psalmist realizes that this is impossible, that there is nowhere in the universe where he can escape God’s presence. Listen, again, to these verses in The Message: “Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit? To be out of your sight? If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there! If I flew on the morning’s wings to the far western horizon, You’d find me in a minute–you’re already there waiting! Then I said to myself, ‘Oh, he even sees me in the dark! At night I’m immersed in the light!’ It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.” Jonah sought to escape God’s presence, because he didn’t want to do what God was commanding him to do. The psalmist realizes that there’s no point in trying to escape from God. Everywhere he turns, everywhere he could possibly go, God is there. God knows everything about him, and it is impossible to escape His presence. We have a plaque in our living room with these words: “Bidden or not bidden God is present.” God’s presence is inescapable.

The psalmist knows that he is a sinner. That’s why he instinctively wants to run from God. He knows that the words of his mouth and the thoughts of his heart have often been displeasing to God. He knows that he has often rebelled and gone his own way. So why is God so interested in him? Why is God so attentive to him? The answer is in verses 13-18: God is his Creator. God formed him in his mother’s womb and has cared for him since his birth: “Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb. I thank you, High God–you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration–what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; you know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day. Your thoughts–how rare, how beautiful! God, I’ll never comprehend them! I couldn’t even begin to count them–any more than I could count the sand of the sea” (The Message).

Notice what is happening at this point. As he continues meditating on this truth, he begins to overflow with praise. He doesn’t just say, “Oh Lord, I praise you,” over and over, until he feels emotionally stirred. He’s been gripped by the truth. This God, who knows everything, who is present everywhere, created him and has sustained him since his birth. This God is intimately aware of him and cares about him. The magnitude of this truth leads him to burst into praise. Remember what we saw in Isaiah 40. We begin with the truth. We begin with theology, the truth that God has revealed about Himself. We don’t begin by trying to work up our emotions. But when we grasp the truth, when it begins to sink into the depth of our hearts, we burst into praise, gratitude and wonder.

And then, in the middle of this wonderful meditation on God’s constant presence and care, the psalmist abruptly cries out: “If only you would slay the wicked, O God!” What is the point of verses 19-22? Why does the psalmist bring this into his peaceful meditations on God’s presence? Why can’t he maintain a more inspirational tone? His prayer life isn’t isolated from the reality of life in a fallen world. He’s not writing an uplifting inspirational book. He’s praying, crying out to God in the midst of a sinful, unjust, violent world. He’s surrounded by wicked people. This may be the thing that drove him into God’s presence in the first place. Some commentators think the psalmist has been unfairly accused of something and is taking refuge in God’s presence, meditating on the fact that even if everyone around him believes the lie, God knows the truth.

God is a God of justice, who will exercise vengeance on those who persist in oppressing others, and He has created us in His own image, with an innate desire for justice. The problem for us is what do we do with this sense of outrage that wells up within us? Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to pray for those who wrong us. If we’re not permitted to take vengeance, but are at the same time created with a desire for justice, how do we deal with the emotional turmoil that results from injustice, either committed against ourselves or those we care about? What do we do with our God-given emotional response to the evil things people do to one another? How do we get from where we are to where God is calling us to be? How do we let go of the rage that wells up within us? When everything within us is crying out for vengeance, how do we get ourselves to the point where we are able to love our enemies?

Praying these cries of vengeance in the Psalms–like these verses in Psalm 139–is a good first step. They help us give voice to things we probably wouldn’t express otherwise, things we may not even want to face in ourselves. Rage is similar to grief. If we try to suppress it, it will reappear in some other form and will do much damage. It needs to be expressed and articulated. We need to recognize and take ownership for our rage, and then we need to yield it to God’s wisdom and providential care, saying to God “but you know best how to deal with this.” Praying these Psalms gives us a way to express these powerful feelings, feelings which can turn into bitterness, or something worse, if we don’t deal with them.

We often move too lightly and superficially to the point of forgiveness and grace, without facing fully what is really in our hearts. When we do that, the result is less than what God is calling us to do. Eugene Peterson says some wise things about dealing with hatred: “Hate is our emotional link with the spirituality of evil. It is the volcanic eruption of outrage when the holiness of being, ours or another’s, has been violated. It is also the ugliest and most dangerous of our emotions, the hair trigger on a loaded gun. Embarrassed by the ugliness and fearful of the murderous, we commonly neither admit or pray our hate; we deny it and suppress it. But if it is not admitted it can quickly and easily metamorphose into the evil that provokes it; and if it is not prayed we have lost an essential insight and energy in doing battle with evil” (Answering God, p. 98). We need to admit our rage and hatred, and then bring them before God in prayer. Praying these Psalms helps us give expression to these things in God’s presence, where they can be transformed. But until we’ve faced the truth, we’re not able to move ahead. We can’t forgive until we’ve faced the depth of our anger and hatred. God commands us to forgive, but to get there we first need to express, in His presence, our desire for vengeance.

As far as we know, the Psalmists never take action to avenge themselves. Even in the most violent of these Psalms, the situation is committed to God and left in His hands. We know that David refused to take vengeance on Saul, even when he twice had the chance to kill him. He said: “May the Lord judge between you and me. And may the Lord avenge the wrongs you have done to me, but my hand will not touch you” (1 Samuel 24:12). David trusted God to take vengeance, but he refused to do it himself. Many of the people who criticize these Psalms think they are primitive and brutal. We’re more civilized now. We know better. But given the escalation of violence in our society, do we really think we’re better off than these ancient people? Far better to cry out to God in this way and then leave the whole thing in His hands than to take vengeance ourselves, as so many are doing in the world today.

So, what is the point of praying to One who already knows our needs? He already knows the worst about us. He knew all the worst before He called us to Himself. Our sinfulness never comes as a surprise to Him. He’s not going to be shocked and become disillusioned with us. He knows the worst, and He loves us and is committed to bringing us into His eternal kingdom. We can tell Him all that’s really in our hearts; He knows it all already anyway. It’s safe to bring into His presence our anger and desire for vengeance. We can be at our worst in His presence. And when we’re in His presence, He’s able to transform us and enable us to love our enemies even as He loved us when we were still His enemies.

Because He knows all, rather than fleeing from Him, we invite Him into every area of our lives, saying with the psalmist: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Since He knows everything already, there’s no reason to pretend with Him. We come into His presence and talk to Him about everything that concerns us, not because we think He doesn’t know, but because we know He loves us and because we want to know Him better. We begin by meditating on the truth: His presence is inescapable; He knows everything there is to know about us; He created us and has been caring for us since before we were born. And then, having seen the truth, we pray: “Investigate my life, O God, find out everything about me; Cross-examine and test me, get a clear picture of what I’m about; See for yourself whether I’ve done anything wrong–then guide me on the road to eternal life” (The Message). Rather than hiding, as we were inclined to do at first, we invite Him into every area of our lives, because we want to know this One who knows us perfectly.

Knowing the One Who Rules the Universe, Isaiah 40:6-61 (Knowing God Series)

A few years ago I watched the movie “The Apostle.” It’s about a Southern Pentecostal/holiness preacher who seems to be sincere–he’s definitely not a con artist–but who is plagued by gross inconsistencies. Both he and his wife are guilty of long-term adulterous relationships. In a fit of anger, he kills his wife’s lover with a baseball bat. He then leaves the area and begins preaching somewhere else as The Apostle. His new church grows very quickly, but his life continues in the same pattern. He tries to seduce a woman who is separated from her husband, and he beats up a man who tries to disrupt one of his church services. In the end, the police catch up with him and he is arrested for murder. The movie closes with him on a chain gang, preaching to the other prisoners.

What is wrong with this man? He sincerely believes in Jesus Christ. He prays all the time and believes he is called by God to preach the gospel. But none of this has any effect on the way he orders his life. The same is true of others in the story. They have great, exhilarating times of worship and prayer together, but their lives remain unchanged. They talk about God’s power. They think they feel His power among them when they worship and pray, but there’s no evidence of it in their daily lives. This is a common problem, although the inconsistencies usually aren’t as blatant as those in the movie. But this problem raises a question: how does the reality of God’s sovereign power connect with our weakness? We worship the Lord of the Universe, the One who possesses all power in heaven and on earth. How does this make a difference in our daily lives?

The first thing we need to realize is that God’s sovereign power doesn’t necessarily make us feel stronger. The people in “The Apostle” wanted to feel God’s power surging through them, lifting them up and carrying them along. So they worked themselves up by repeating the same words over and over, producing an emotional state where they felt like God was among them. But He wasn’t. It was nothing but a counterfeit, produced by their own efforts. God’s presence transforms us, and these people were not transformed.

In the fall of 1977, I was part of a group traveling overland to India from Belgium. We had been working with Operation Mobilization in Europe since the early summer, and were now committed to working with OM India for the next two years. Because we had several drivers, we were able to travel through the night much of the time, but that wasn’t safe in Afghanistan (because of the danger of bandits). In Afghanistan, we had to travel all day to get to a large town, where we would spend the night in a walled compound. On one of our nights there we were entertained by two sufis. Sufis are Islamic mystics. One of them played the harmonium, which is an instrument with a small keyboard and bellows on the back (like an accordion). A harmonium player uses one hand for the bellows and the other for playing notes on the keyboard. The other man was playing the tablas, a set of two bongo-like drums. Their music was highly repetitive, and it slowly built in intensity and speed. It was very powerful, and I quickly realized that if I allowed myself to get pulled in I would end up in a trance-like state. This is what sufis do. They have spiritual experiences by using the right techniques to achieve the kind of mental state they want.

About a year later I was in Kathmandu, Nepal, and a friend and I visited a Buddhist temple. There were monks sitting on the floor all around us as we walked in; someone was playing a gong and another person was playing a drum. I don’t think any of the monks even saw us walk in, as they were completely caught up in a trance. And I felt the same thing I had felt in Afghanistan. As the music built in speed and intensity, I realized that I had to consciously resist to avoid getting pulled in myself. My friend and I left after a very short time.

The thing that is clear in both these cases is that it’s possible to have spiritual experiences that are not brought about by the work of the Holy Spirit. That’s what the people in “The Apostle” were doing. They were using techniques very similar to those used by Sufis and other mystics. They thought the power of God was among them, and they had great experiences. But their lives were unaffected. The problem with counterfeit experiences like this is that they satisfy us with something less than the real thing. They’re addictive. They become idols, which keep us from seeking God. And they deceive us into thinking we have something which we don’t have.

When God is at work among us, or within us, we don’t necessarily feel stronger. We may be intensely aware of our own weakness and frailty; we may even be unaware of what God is doing at the time. In Isaiah 40, we find the people of Israel complaining: “My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God.” In many ways, this whole chapter is an answer to that complaint. Their complaint has two parts: 1) there’s a theological dimension to their problem: “My way is hidden from the Lord;” God doesn’t know what is going on; He’s lost sight of me; 2) there’s also an experiential dimension: “my cause is disregarded by my God;” I’ve been crying out to Him for help and nothing has happened; He’s not answering my prayers.

The people are intensely aware of their weakness at this point. This chapter is full of the majesty of God. It’s one of the most exalted passages in the whole Bible. But the people feel nothing but their own weakness. Paul has a similar experience in 2 Corinthians 12. He’s an apostle, with a high calling and lots of responsibility. But he is plagued and hindered by a thorn in the flesh. So he cries out to God to remove it. Surely this problem has to be removed, so that he can carry on his work as an apostle. He cries out to God repeatedly about this, and after the third time he receives this answer: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Do you think Paul, at this point, begins to feel God’s power in a different way? What he feels is his own weakness, but he’s received this assurance that as he labors in faith, God will be at work in ways that Paul can’t understand or explain. His weakness is a condition for God’s work, not a hindrance. But God’s work doesn’t make him feel any less weak. We have a picture of this working in 2 Corinthians 4: “For we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you” (vv. 7-12). What Paul experiences, what he feels, is his own weakness. And, at the same time, he sees God working in ways that he can’t explain, doing things that Paul could never accomplish himself.

Part of the problem with the people in the movie is that they were on the wrong track. They were looking for the wrong thing. They wanted God to give power to them, so that it would be theirs to use. The reality is that God uses us in our weakness. We still feel weak, because the power remains His. “We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

God often gives us a strong sense of His presence at the beginning of our Christian life, to help us get started in following Him, and to help us make a strong break with our past. But I’ve known many Christians who go to great lengths trying to reproduce these feelings, who become dependent on them. Much contemporary worship, with its emphasis on creating the right kind of mood, is doing this very thing. During Lent one year I read The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, a Spanish Christian who lived in the 1500's. One of his major points is that God doesn’t want us seeking a certain way of feeling; He wants us to seek Him. So, after awhile, He begins to lead us through times of dryness, when we feel nothing of His presence, to teach us to walk with Him obediently by faith. The demand for exhilarating worship experiences is not a mark of spirituality; it’s a sign of immaturity. In its worst forms, it leads to the kind of excess and inconsistency that are portrayed in “The Apostle.”

Notice how Isaiah answers their questions, in verse 28: “Do you not know?” He begins with theology, reminding them of the truth. The people in “The Apostle” began with experience, with trying to arrive at a certain way of feeling. That’s the wrong place to start. Our problem is very often that we’ve forgotten the truth. Our eyes have become clouded. Satan has sidetracked us and deceived us, and we’re no longer thinking clearly. So our first need, in this situation, is to be reminded of the truth.

What is the truth? “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.” He’s been telling them this all through the chapter. “Who has scooped up the ocean in his two hands, or measured the sky between his thumb and little finger, Who has put all the earth’s dirt in one of his baskets, weighed each mountain and hill? Who could ever have told God what to do or taught him his business?” (vv. 12-13, The Message). God knows all about their situation, and He has the power and wisdom to come to their help. They’ve lost sight of who God is. He goes on later in the chapter: “Have you not been paying attention? Have you not been listening? Haven’t you heard these stories all your life? Don’t you understand the foundation of all things? God sits high above the round ball of earth. The people look like mere ants. He stretches out the skies like a canvas–yes, like a tent canvas to live under. He ignores what all the princes say and do. The rulers of the earth count for nothing. Princes and rulers don’t amount to much. Like seeds barely rooted, just sprouted, They shrivel when God blows on them. Like flecks of chaff, they’re gone with the wind” (vv. 21-24, The Message).

God knows everything that is going on, and He has enough power and wisdom to deal with the situation. The problem is not with their feelings, but with their understanding. They need to begin by remembering who God is. Jesus reassures His disciples in the same way: “Don’t be afraid of those who want to kill you. They can only kill your body; they cannot touch your soul. Fear only God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Not even a sparrow, worth only half a penny, can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to him than a whole flock of sparrows” (Matthew 10:28-31, NLT). He reminds them of the truth about God, their Father.

Having reminded the people of the truth, Isaiah now urges them, in verses 29-31, to wait on God, to hope in Him and look to Him for help. It doesn’t help to know that God is all-powerful, unless we know that He is also inclined to help His people. So Isaiah tells them, in verse 29, “He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.” Those who are weary don’t have the strength to work themselves into a frenzy that makes them feel like they’ve received God’s power. In my early Christian life, I learned to pray with lots of energy and fervor, and I believe I was often guilty of the kind of counterfeit experiences I’ve been describing. But in 1978, while I was in Nepal, I came down with hepatitis, and for a long time I just didn’t have the physical strength to pray in that way. For awhile, it destroyed my spiritual life, but eventually I had to rethink my assumptions about prayer.

Often we aren’t aware of our own weakness, so Isaiah reminds us, in verse 30: “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall.” Even at the height of our strength, we are weak and needy. It’s not those who feel strong, but those who hope in the Lord who experience His power. The word translated “hope,” in verse 31, includes three things: 1) a sense of expectation and certainty; 2) a willingness to wait patiently; 3) a sense of rest and trust (Alec Motyer, The Prophecy of Isaiah, p. 308). Knowing the truth enables us to hope in Him. Knowing who God is, knowing that He is all-powerful, and that He possesses all wisdom, and that He is faithful in coming to the rescue of His people, enables us to wait on His time. It’s His work, not ours. We may not feel very triumphant. But He is faithful, and He is more than able to fulfill His promises: “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever” (v. 8). We can rest in Him and wait expectantly, because it doesn’t depend on our arriving at a triumphant state of mind. It depends on the sovereign God, the ruler of the Universe, acting on behalf of His people in faithfulness to His promises. We don’t need to work ourselves into a frenzy, like the people in “The Apostle.” Doing that will get us nowhere. We need to know and believe the truth, and then knowing and believing the truth, we wait expectantly on God.

In the end, the people in the movie were more absorbed with themselves than with God. They were more concerned with arriving at the kind of feeling they wanted than they were with God Himself. What God is calling us to, in this chapter, is to become less absorbed with ourselves and more absorbed with Him. How do we do that? First of all, by following the order Isaiah follows here: we begin with theology, with the truth about who God is. Very often our spiritual problems are the result of an inadequate view of God. J.B. Phillips, who wrote a paraphrase of the New Testament, also wrote a book entitled, Your God is Too Small. This is often the root of our spiritual problems: our God is too small. We’ve lost sight of the God of the Bible and have reduced Him to more manageable proportions. So we need to begin by reminding ourselves of who God is.

I’ve, in the past, suggested several ways to do this, but these things won’t help unless you put them into practice. Our false ideas are usually deep-seated, and they won’t die easily. We need to be willing to expend some effort in this area. Don’t be satisfied with the absolute minimum in your devotional life. If you have devotions in the morning, try getting up 15 minutes earlier, to give yourself a little more time. Sing hymns that worship God for His majesty and glory. Read slowly through Knowing God, by J.I. Packer, or The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer. Just read a page or so each day, as part of your devotional time. Make use of written prayers, like those of John Baillie in A Diary of Private Prayer. Pray regularly through the Psalms. Read prayerfully and meditatively through this passage in Isaiah for the next week or two, asking God to make Himself known to you. Expend some effort, invest some time, in filling your mind with a bigger view of who God is.

Expend some effort, and be diligent, but don’t be in a hurry. God doesn’t work on our timetable. Remember that the word “hope,” in verse 31, includes the idea of patiently waiting on God’s time. Psalm 27 has this same idea. The Psalm begins with great confidence: “The Lord is my light and my salvation–so why should I be afraid? The Lord protects me from danger–so why should I tremble?” The psalmist is confident, but he’s also conscious of danger. He is surrounded by enemies who want to kill him. Here’s how the Psalm ends: “Yet I am confident that I will see the Lord’s goodness while I am here in the land of the living. Wait patiently for the Lord. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the Lord” (vv. 13-14, NLT). The foundation of his confidence and security is God. But God acts according to His own sovereign wisdom, so the psalmist exhorts us to wait patiently on Him. The people in “The Apostle” were in a hurry. They wanted God to act right away; they expected Him to submit to their desires at the moment. They rushed ahead and produced their own counterfeits, because they weren’t willing to wait for the real thing.

God’s sovereignty means that He is in charge. The God described in Isaiah 40 is not one who will submit to our foolish whims. We can’t command Him to do what we want, and He can’t be manipulated by our clever techniques. He calls us to bow before His Lordship, to fall on our faces in worship and awe. He calls us to exalt Him, and to conform our lives to His will. And then, He calls us to trust in His faithfulness and wisdom to come to our help in His own way and His own time. A.W. Tozer said this: “If we are true Christians this we can know, that the boundless power of our infinite God is all around us, enfolding us, preserving us in being and keeping us unto salvation ready to be revealed. Let us look trustfully to God and expect ‘the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places’” (“The Power of God to Usward, in Born After Midnight, p. 27).

Our feelings of weakness are not a problem. They’re not a hindrance in our spiritual lives. Our feelings of weakness are a necessary condition for learning to trust in God’s power. Acknowledge your own weakness and poverty, and cultivate the fellowship of the One who rules all things by the word of His grace, who is exalted beyond our comprehension, the One before whom every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth will one day bow. “[His] gracious favor is all you need. [His] power works best in your weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9, NLT).

Fellowship With the Holy God, 1 John 1:1-2:2 (Knowing God Series)

At the beginning of this series we talked about the fact that we were created to know God and worship Him, to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The abundant life that Jesus came to give His followers is not a life of prosperity, luxury and ease, but a life of fellowship with God. This is eternal life: knowing God, as Jesus says in John 17:3. This is what we were created for, and it’s what our hearts long for. St. Augustine said “You awake us to delight in Your praise; for You made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You” (The Confessions of St. Augustine, a modern English version by Hal M. Helms, p. 7). Our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. This is the way we were made, and we can’t escape it, no matter how hard we try. The constant restlessness of our society in always grasping for something new and novel, something to relieve the meaninglessness of life in this fallen world, grows out of this. We’re restless, because we were created for something better. God gives us good things in this life, but there’s always a sense of incompleteness about them. I’ve often recommended John Baillie’s book, A Diary of Private Prayer. One of his prayers, which I’ve adapted somewhat, expresses this idea: “We thank you, O Lord, that you have so put eternity in our hearts that no earthly thing can ever satisfy us completely. We thank you that every present joy is mixed with sadness and unrest, to remind us that we are not yet home. And above all, we thank you for the sure hope and promise of an endless life which you have given us in the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen” (see A Diary of Private Prayer, p. 91).

Our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. God gives us good things, but He won’t permit us to find fulfillment in them alone. In doing that, He’s not being miserly. He’s not depriving us. He’s protecting us from idolatry. He’s calling us to Himself, the source of all good things. And when we’re walking with Him, gratefully enjoying the things He gives us, these things don’t have the sense of bitterness and emptiness that they do apart from Him. C.S. Lewis has a good description of how this works: “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a [swim] or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home” (C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, p. 18). Our Father refreshes us on the journey; but we must remember that we are still on a journey. These pleasant inns which our Father gives to refresh us are only a foretaste of what’s ahead. He is the source of all good, and our hearts will only find rest in fellowship with Him. “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

In the last sermon, we looked at the goodness of God, that this God who created us to know Him is a God who delights in showing kindness, compassion and mercy. Many Christians have been stern and rigid because they think that’s what God is like. They think of God as a humorless, harsh, demanding taskmaster who makes excessive demands and is never pleased with anything we do. A.W. Tozer, in an attempt to correct this perception, wrote this: “The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.... The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 15).

The passage we’re looking at today is about fellowship with God. John begins by testifying to his personal acquaintance with Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of life: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched–this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.” He’s not writing to them about his own theories. He’s an eyewitness. He’s speaking of things he knows for certain. And his purpose in writing is this: “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.”

John wants them to know God. That’s why he’s writing. But he’s concerned with a different problem than the one we confronted in the last sermon. One of Satan’s strategies is to deceive us about who God is, and if he doesn’t succeed in one direction he’ll try something else. He persuaded Eve that God wasn’t good, that He was depriving them of something really beneficial by forbidding them to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “God knows that your eyes will be opened when you eat it. You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NLT). But if we resist this temptation, he’ll try the opposite error. He’ll try to persuade us that God’s goodness means He doesn’t really care that much about our sins. I’ve often heard this sort of thing, that because God is good, He won’t punish us for our sins. I’ve talked to many people who see God as a benevolent, grandfatherly figure who is up in heaven wringing His hands, wishing we’d behave better, but who will forgive us in the end anyway, no matter what.

John wants to correct this misconception, so he tells us, in verse 5: “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” This contrast between light and darkness is common in Scripture. It’s often used to describe the conflict between truth and error. For example, Psalm 119:105: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.” Or, in John’s gospel, Jesus says: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). Light, when it’s used in this way, symbolizes truth, and darkness symbolizes error.

But light and darkness are also used in a moral sense. For example, in Isaiah 5: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (v. 20). Here, the contrast is between good and evil. Paul uses this same image in Ephesians 5: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth). Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for it is light that makes everything visible” (vv. 8-14). In this passage, light symbolizes holiness and righteousness, but also the truth that makes things visible, that exposes the works of darkness. Both of these images are important in the way John uses light and darkness in his letter.

Here’s one more example, from John’s gospel: “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God” (John 3:19-21). Light symbolizes truth and holiness, and darkness symbolizes sin and error. Evil hates to be exposed for what it is, so it is opposed to both holiness and truth. That’s the point of what Jesus said to His brothers: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil (John 7:7).” He speaks the truth about sin and unrighteousness. He exposes wickedness to the light of the truth, contrasting it with the holiness of God.

So, with all that in mind, what does John mean when he says “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”? The primary stress here is on His holiness. The following verses deal with the problem of sin in relation to a holy God. So, the most important idea in this verse is God’s absolute holiness and purity (although the emphasis on truth is also here, especially in verses 7-2:2). He wants to be sure his readers understand, so he states it both positively and negatively, in the strongest possible terms: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. Eugene Peterson does a good job of bringing this across in The Message: “God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.”

God’s holiness points primarily to two things. The most basic idea is His separateness, “His uniqueness, His distinction as the Wholly Other, the One who cannot be confused with the gods devised by men..., the One who stands apart from and above the creation” (ISBE Revised, vol. 2, p. 755). God stands apart from, and infinitely exalted above, His creation. But holiness also points to His moral perfection, “His absolute freedom from blemish of any kind” (Ibid.). One of the best pictures of God’s holiness is in Isaiah 6: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty’” (Isaiah 6:1-5). God’s holiness isn’t something we discuss over coffee and then go on with our business. When we come face to face with God’s absolute holiness and purity, we’re overwhelmed with a sense of our own sinfulness. We’re undone. We fall at His feet, like Peter, when he realized who Jesus was, crying out “depart from me, Lord; I am a sinner” (Luke 5:8).

In 1977, while I was at Operation Mobilization’s September conference preparing to go to India, I bought a hymnal. I didn’t grow up in the church, so I really didn’t know many hymn tunes at this point, and the hymnal I bought only had words. But I read through it as part of my devotions. Because I knew so few tunes, I often ended up using the same tunes for many different hymns. I learned a lot about God, and about worship, from reading through that hymnal. Some of my best memories from my time in India are the times I was able to get away from the team and away from other people to sing to the Lord. (It’s not always easy to get away from people in India. Sometimes I’d climb a tree in the early morning, before the rest of the team was up, or I’d walk out into the fog on a foggy morning.) This is one of the hymns I discovered in that hymnal. It’s not only about God’s holiness, but everything the author says about God in worship is pervaded with an understanding that he is worshiping One who is absolutely holy and pure.

My God, how wonderful thou art,
Thy majesty how bright;
How beautiful thy mercy seat,
In depths of burning light!

How dread are thine eternal years,
O everlasting Lord,
By prostrate spirits day and night
Incessantly adored!

How wonderful, how beautiful
The sight of thee must be,
Thine endless wisdom, boundless power,
And aweful purity!

O how I fear thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!

Yet I may love thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as thou art,
For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.

No earthly father loves like thee;
No mother, e’er so mild,
Bears and forbears as thou hast done
With me, thy sinful child.

Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture will it be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on thee!

(Frederick William Faber, 1814-63)

In worshiping the holy God, Faber is filled with adoration, awe, holy fear, hope, tears of repentance, and love. He’s aware of worshiping the One before whom angels cry out continuously “holy, holy, holy.” God is holy. In Him there is no darkness at all. “God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him.” In 1978 I read a book by a Christian psychologist who was disturbed by the idea of God’s holiness. It seemed clear to him that an emphasis on God’s holiness would lead to psychological disturbances, and that the New Testament only teaches about a God of love. But the book was foolish and shallow, and the author clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. There’s more of God in the third stanza of Faber’s poem–“How wonderful, how beautiful The sight of thee must be, Thine endless wisdom, boundless power, And aweful purity!” than there was in 100 or so pages of that other man’s book. He didn’t know God very well, because he presumed to dictate what God should be like. We need to know God as He is, and as He has revealed Himself. And knowing Him, we will find that He is worthy of worship, that our greatest privilege is to fall on our faces before Him in adoration, wonder and praise.

But this still leaves us with a problem, the same problem that both Isaiah and Peter recognized. How do we, as sinful people in a fallen world, live in fellowship with a holy God? This is the problem John addresses in verses 7 through the beginning of chapter 2. He answers the question in three different ways, responding to three different problems, but his basic answer is this: we confess our sins to God, bringing them into the light of His truth, and He both forgives us and purifies us, so that we don’t continue in captivity to sin.

In verses 7-8, he deals with the problem of those who claim to have fellowship with God, but who continue living in habitual sin: “If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” In John’s time, there were some teachers who associated evil with the material world and good with the spirit. This was an early form of a teaching known as Gnosticism. Some of them became extreme ascetics, punishing their bodies in an attempt to be free from the evil of the flesh, but others decided it didn’t really matter what they did in their bodies, since God is pure spirit anyway and matter is inherently evil. They believed sinning with their bodies wouldn’t harm their relationship with God. John is countering this teaching by asserting that we can’t have fellowship with God, who is light, and be living in darkness at the same time. The answer, in verse 8, is to walk in the light as He is in the light. This means bringing our sins before Him in confession, and also turning away from our sins and seeking to become more like Him (remember that John is using light here to signify both moral purity and truth). He’s saying that we need to confess our sins and turn away from them.

The next problem, in verses 8-9, is the claim to be perfect and without sin. Here’s how it reads in the New English Bible: “If we claim to be sinless, we are self-deceived and strangers to the truth.” Perfectionism gives us a false vision of ourselves; it leads us to self-deception and unreality. It puts us out of step with the truth. If we think we’re perfect, our self-perception is distorted. The solution is to confess our sins to God; and when we do that He forgives and cleanses us. The final problem, in verse 10, is similar. Verse 8 deals with those who claim to be perfect right now, while verse 10 talks about those who claim not to be guilty of sin at all: “If we claim that we’ve never sinned,” as it reads in The Message. All three problems put us in the darkness of sin and falsehood, out of fellowship with the God who is light, in whom there is no darkness at all. If we try to continue living in sin, and claim to have fellowship with Him at the same time, we’re denying His nature. We’re trying to pretend that He’s someone other than who He is. If we claim to be without sin, either that we’re not guilty at all or that we’ve been made perfect already, we’re rejecting God’s verdict against us, which then keeps us from bringing our sins into the light of His truth for cleansing.

The first two verses of chapter two give a summary of what John has been saying: “My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense–Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” God’s desire is that we live increasingly in freedom from sin. He’s freed us from the kingdom of darkness and made us part of the kingdom of His only Son. We’re new creatures. We’re no longer in bondage to sin. That’s the argument Paul develops at some length in Romans 6. We’re to be growing in holiness.

But we still find that all we do falls short of God’s glory, that everything we do is tainted with pride and self-seeking. And, as much as we might wish it were otherwise, Christians still fall into sin. So provision has been made for this as well. Jesus is our advocate. He speaks to the Father in our defense. He intercedes for us. He is our lawyer, representing us. He is the One who paid the debt for our sins and provided for our forgiveness. God is holy. In Him is no darkness at all. He won’t overlook sin and rebellion. But He’s provided a way, which doesn’t violate His holiness or undermine His justice. Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. When we’re accused by Satan, when he comes to us and reminds us of all the horrible things we’ve done, we don’t need to worry. Jesus speaks in our defense. Everything our accuser says may be true, but it doesn’t matter. The price has been paid in full. We can have fellowship with the God of light, in whom there is no darkness at all.

Our holy God is a loving and merciful Father. After Isaiah cried out in despair, this is what happened: “Then one of the seraphim flew over to the altar, and he picked up a burning coal with a pair of tongs. He touched my lips with it and said, ‘See, this coal has touched your lips. Now your guilt is removed, and your sins are forgiven” (Isaiah 6:6-7, NLT). This God, “the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see,” (1 Timothy 6:15-16) has loved us with a holy love and has given us free access into His presence. Let’s not be afraid to face the truth about ourselves and to bring our sins into the light of His presence, where we receive forgiveness and cleansing. “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.... If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

O how I fear thee, living God,
With deepest, tenderest fears,
And worship thee with trembling hope
And penitential tears!

Yet I may love thee too, O Lord,
Almighty as thou art,
For thou hast stooped to ask of me
The love of my poor heart.

Father of Jesus, love’s reward,
What rapture will it be
Prostrate before thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on thee!

The Name of the Lord, Exodus 34:1-7 (Knowing God Series)

One of the things we hear often in our popular culture is that all religions are pretty-much the same. They all worship the same God, but do it in different ways. “What’s the big deal anyway? Worship is worship, whether the object of worship is God, Allah, or Brahman. Prayer is prayer, no matter what name we give to the listening force” (Terry Muck, Those Other Religions in Your Neighborhood, p. 51). The differences between different religions, in this view, are really just differences of style and taste. Some people prefer one style, and others prefer another, but ultimately these differences are not significant.

The problem with this view is that different religions teach very different things about who God is, and these differences affect the way we live our lives. The men who high jacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center did it because of what they believed about God. When the apostle Paul, before his conversion, participated in the killing of Stephen, he thought he was acting in obedience to God. The same is true of those who’ve taken part in human sacrifice throughout the centuries, thinking that what they were doing would put them in God’s good graces. What we believe about God affects the way we live our lives.

Even if we believe in the God of the Bible and have trusted in Jesus Christ alone for our salvation, misconceptions about God can continue to plague us. I read this quote by A.W. Tozer in the first sermon: “Nothing twists and deforms the soul more than a low or unworthy conception of God.” He was speaking about Christians, and he was especially concerned about our tendency to lose sight of God’s goodness. He says this a little later in the same chapter: “Much Christianity since the days of Christ’s flesh has... been grim and severe. And the cause has always been the same–an unworthy or an inadequate view of God. Instinctively we try to be like our God, and if He is conceived to be stern and exacting, so will we ourselves be” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 14). He wants to reassure Christians that God is good, kind and gracious, not a stern, exacting task-master. He’s concerned that Christians often have an inadequate view of God.

If there’s any place in Scripture where we’d expect to find a grim, stern view of God it’s at Mt. Sinai, where the Law was given. Think of what has just taken place. Moses had gone up into the mountain to receive the law, and had been gone for over a month. As the days passed by, the people got tired of waiting, so they asked Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make them an idol. They said “Come, make us gods who will go before us” (32:1).

Aaron asked for their gold earrings, which he made into a calf. And when he showed it to them, the Israelites cried out: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt” (32:4). Aaron then built an altar in front of the calf, and the people proceeded to worship it. At that point, Moses returned. (It’s interesting to notice how often we give in just before a trial or temptation is over.) In his anger, Moses had smashed the original tablets into pieces, and God had judged the people for their rebellion, killing several thousand of them. Things were not going well in the spiritual life of the nation. They had received so much from God in their deliverance from Egypt, but they had very quickly rebelled and turned to idolatry.

All this immediately precedes the passage we’re looking at today. That’s the background to verse 1: “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.” What we’d expect, at this point, is a revelation of God’s severity and wrath against the sin of idolatry. And yet, in the context of everything that has just happened, here at Sinai where He is giving the Law to Israel, when God reveals Himself to Moses the primary focus is not on His wrath, but on His goodness. Here’s a definition of God’s goodness: “The goodness of God is that which disposes Him to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of good will toward men. He is tenderhearted and of quick sympathy, and His unfailing attitude toward all moral beings is open, frank, and friendly. By His nature He is inclined to bestow blessedness and He takes holy pleasure in the happiness of His people.... The goodness of God is the drive behind all the blessings He daily bestows upon us” (A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, p. 88). When we say “God is good,” we’re saying that He delights in showing kindness, compassion and mercy. God reveals Himself, in this passage, as good, kind and generous, but at the same time He doesn’t undermine, or cancel out, His holiness or His severity in dealing with sin and rebellion.

In chapter 33, immediately after the incident with the golden calf, God had said: “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way” (33:3). This is the point He’s making: “I’m still sending you into the promised land, and I’m sending an angel with you, but I’m not going to manifest my presence among you. I’m going to give you outward success, but I’m not going to be with you.” Moses finds this intolerable, so he begins crying out to God. He’s not interested in outward success unless God is among them. He wants to know God, and he wants the people to know Him. Near the end of chapter 33, we see him hungering and reaching for more of God, both for himself and for the people. In verse 13, he says: “If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people.” Verse 15: “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.” And verse 18: “Now show me your glory.” No matter how much of God he has, Moses wants more. And God responds with this promise: “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence” (v. 19). The passage we’re studying in chapter 34 is the fulfillment of this promise.

When God proclaims His name to Moses, He’s doing more than identifying Himself. Names in our culture are primarily used to identify us, to give us a label. They’re used in that way in the Bible also, but names are also intended to reveal a person’s true nature. Abram and Sarai, after they receive God’s promise, become Abraham and Sarah. Abraham means “father of many,” and Sarah means “princess.” After he wrestles with God, Jacob receives the name Israel, which means “one who struggles with God.” So names in the Bible are more than just labels to distinguish one person from another. They are meant to tell us something about the person. When God proclaims His name to Moses, He’s telling Moses what He is like. He’s proclaiming His true nature.

The name He proclaims is “the LORD.” In the NIV (and in many other English translations), LORD, in capital letters, is used to translate God’s name. We don’t know exactly how this name was pronounced. The Hebrew alphabet is made up entirely of consonants, and vowel points were added many centuries after the Old Testament was written. God’s name is written, in Hebrew, YHWH. The ancient Jews were afraid of taking God’s name in vain, so instead of speaking God’s name when they read Scripture, they substituted the Hebrew word adonai, which means “lord.” When Jewish Scribes, between the 6th and 10th centuries, added vowel points to the text, they put the vowels for adonai with the divine name YHWH, as a visual reminder to those reading the text aloud. This resulted in the name “Jehovah,” which is found in some translations; Jehovah is the result of combining the original consonants with the vowels for adonai. Yahweh is the best guess scholars have arrived at. It’s good to know that any time you encounter the word LORD (in capital letters) it’s a translation of this name, Yahweh.

But what does the name mean? It’s used primarily in the context of God’s covenant relationship with Israel, and it especially points to His self-existence, the fact that He is not dependent on anyone or anything else for His existence. One writer says this name “gives expression to the self-determination, the independence of God.... The name... signifies primarily that in all God does for His people, He is from-within-determined, not moved upon by outside influences” (Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology, pp. 118-19). Something of this meaning comes across in Exodus 3:14, where God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush: “God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.” Our lives are dependent on all sorts of things: air, water, food, protection from harm. All we need to do is watch the news to be reminded how fragile our lives are. Psalm 104 celebrates God’s creation: “O Lord, what a variety of things you have made! In wisdom you have made them all. The earth is full of your creatures.... Every one of these depends on you to give them their food as they need it. When you supply it, they gather it. You open your hand to feed them, and they are satisfied. But if you turn away from them, they panic. When you take away their breath, they die and turn again to dust” (vv. 24, 27-29, NLT). God is not like that. He is not dependent on anyone or anything else for His existence. He is complete in Himself. He is. He always has been and always will be. So, when He blesses His people, He is not being coerced by external forces.

This name proclaims His absolute lordship in the universe. It proclaims that He is God, that there is no one else like Him. But look how He elaborates: “I am the Lord, I am the Lord, the merciful and gracious god. I am slow to anger and rich in unfailing love and faithfulness. I show this unfailing love to many thousands by forgiving every kind of sin and rebellion” (New Living Translation). This God–who exists eternally in Himself, who is not dependent on anyone or anything for His existence, who is the rightful lord of all, and before whom every knee will one day bow–this God is good, and gracious and merciful. Tozer has a great description of fellowship with this God: “The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.... The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling. He communes with His redeemed ones in an easy, uninhibited fellowship that is restful and healing to the soul. He is not sensitive nor selfish nor temperamental. What He is today we shall find Him tomorrow and the next day and the next year. He is not hard to please, though He may be hard to satisfy. He expects of us only what He has Himself first supplied. He is quick to mark every simple effort to please Him, and just as quick to overlook imperfections when He knows we meant to do His will. He loves us for ourselves and values our love more than galaxies of new created worlds” (“God is Easy to Live With,” in The Root of the Righteous, p. 15). God is good, and He will never be otherwise. Knowing Him fulfills the deepest desire of our hearts.

But, having said all that, notice that, in verses 1-3, God gives Moses very clear, definite instructions which he needs to carry out in order to receive this revelation. God’s goodness doesn’t mean that He’s easy-going and indifferent, that we can approach Him casually and flippantly, any old way we like. Moses needs to follow God’s instructions in preparing the stone tablets and presenting himself on the mountain the next morning, and he needs to be sure that no one else comes near. God is revealing His goodness to Moses, but anyone else who draws near will die. God is good, and He is holy. There’s no contradiction between these things.

There’s a tendency, in contemporary American churches, to forget God’s holiness, to approach Him casually, to speak to Him as if He were one of us. Remember that John the apostle, who had an especially close relationship with Jesus during His earthly ministry, fell down in fear at the feet of the risen Christ on the island of Patmos: “I saw a gold menorah with seven branches, and in the center, the Son of Man, in a robe and gold breastplate, hair a blizzard of white, eyes pouring fire-blaze, both feet furnace-fired bronze, his voice a cataract, right hand holding the Seven Stars, his mouth a sharp-biting sword, his face [blazing like the] sun” (Revelation 1:12-16, The Message). He’s straining the limits of his language to describe the risen Lord in all His glory. Then he says: “I saw this and fainted dead at his feet.” We need to keep these things together. We approach God freely as our heavenly Father, knowing that He cares for us and delights in our fellowship. But at the same time we approach Him reverently, knowing that He is holy, that He is exalted beyond our comprehension. If we were to see Him revealed as He is, our first response would be fear. If we let go of either of these things, our relationship with God will be distorted. God is good, and He is holy.

The last thing to notice is at the end of verse 7: “Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” God’s goodness and compassion don’t cancel out His severity in dealing with sin. God’s goodness presents us with an invitation to repent of our sins and to bow before His lordship. The temptation then is to use God’s goodness as an excuse to keep on sinning, to assume that because God is good and merciful He will overlook our persistent rebellion. When people in our culture think of God’s goodness, this is usually what they’re thinking. They think of God as an indulgent, Santa Clause-like figure. He wishes we’d behave better, but He’ll forgive all of us in the end anyway.

Paul confronts this problem in Romans 11. He’s writing primarily to Gentile Christians about what has happened to Israel because of their rebellion and refusal to believe the gospel. But he doesn’t want these Gentile Christians to become presumptuous, so he says this: “Don’t think highly of yourself, but fear what could happen. For if God did not spare the branches he put there in the first place, he won’t spare you either. Notice how God is both kind and severe. He is severe to those who disobeyed, but kind to you as you continue to trust in his kindness. But if you stop trusting, you also will be cut off” (vv. 20b-22, NLT). God is good, but His goodness is not a license to sin. Paul calls us to hold both of these things together, the goodness and the severity of God. We’ve experienced His goodness, but we need to beware of presumption.

The way we get into trouble is by isolating God’s goodness from all the other things He’s revealed about Himself. And yet, the primary stress, in God’s relationship with His people, is on His goodness. That’s the emphasis even at Sinai, despite Israel’s rebellion and idolatry. If we become so worried about His holiness and severity that we can no longer rejoice in His goodness, we’ll do harm to our souls and our relationship with Him will be impoverished. Remember Tozer’s words: “The truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings and His service is one of unspeakable pleasure. He is all love, and those who trust Him need never know anything but that love.”

Here’s a suggestion, if you start to lose sight of God’s goodness. Read through the gospels, being attentive to the ways Jesus deals with people. Notice how patient and gracious He is with His disciples. Most of His severity is reserved for the hard-hearted religious leaders and for those who persist in unbelief. Jesus “reflects God’s own glory, and everything about him represents God exactly” (Hebrews 1:3, NLT). If you start losing sight of God’s goodness, the place to begin is with Jesus, who reveals God perfectly in human form. Read through the gospel accounts prayerfully, asking God to make Himself known to you as you read. He is kind and gracious to sinners, but He doesn’t say, “Oh, it’s not such a big deal. God the Father is good and forgiving.” He says, “your sins are forgiven. Now go, and stop sinning.” And then He demonstrates the full extent of His goodness by going to the cross to pay the penalty for our sins. In the cross, both the goodness and severity of God are revealed. His severity is poured out on His only Son, who took our sins upon Himself. And, because of this, we experience His goodness.

Meditate on God’s infinite goodness displayed in the sacrifice of His only Son. He “does not leave the guilty unpunished.” But the punishment for our guilt was more than we could bear, so God the Son took the punishment upon Himself. The guilt has been punished, and we have been pardoned. The debt is paid in full. If you begin to grasp the meaning of God’s goodness, you won’t want to use it as an excuse for sin. You’ll cry out, like Isaac Watts, “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” May God enable us to see Him more truly as He is and to give Him worship that is worthy of His great name.