Come! Join the mighty chorus!

I'm in a café (surprise, surprise). I should be working on a speech production research scholarship proposal (surprise, surprise). Instead, I'm hyped-up on caffeine (surprise, surprise) and distracted by the music I'm listening to (surprise, surprise), which is currently Charlie Hall's rendition of "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" (awesome, awesome). I'm listening to it on repeat, and I keep smiling every time the song comes to these two lines:

Mortals, join the mighty chorus
Which the morning stars began

It's beautiful to me to think about how the whole of creation is glorifying God even before I wake up, and that I get to have the blessing of joining that worship during the day. It's beautiful because it makes me realize that God doesn't need me to worship Him. All He has to do is be God and make cool stuff (like the entire universe), and everything that He has ever made explodes with worship just by being in existence! But God gives me the mind-blowing blessing of joining in that worship, an act which I wouldn't even be able to do if God hadn't first turned my heart of stone into a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26), and the result of which (i.e. giving God glory) is the source of the only true joy I can ever experience in this mortal world, and beyond.

So, when you wake up tomorrow, join the mighty chorus which the morning stars began! And be blessed by doing so.

How do you summarize the beauty of the Gospel in 15 lines?

Sing the 5 lines of the chorus of "I Come by the Blood" three times over, that's how!

I come by the blood, I come by the cross,
where your mercy flows from hands pierced for me.
For I dare not stand on my righteousness.
My every hope rests on what Christ has done,
and I come by the blood.

Unbelievably amazing...

Stop trying to be someone you're not!

I'm beginning to memorize a chunk of Ephesians with a friend from church, and here is the first part that I was working on today:

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ! - assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

-Ephesians 4:17-24 (my emphases)

Paul is writing here to Christians, encouraging them to not go on sinning like they use to do, and like the Gentiles continue to do. But notice how Paul doesn't say, "Stop sinning or else God will disown you!" or, "You'd better stop sinning or else you'll cease to be a Christian and then you'll go to hell!" No, Paul simply says, "Stop being controlled by sin... because that's not who you are anymore."

If you are a Christian, this doesn't mean that you're not still a sinner in a fallen world. What it does mean, however, is that you're no longer a slave to sin:

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

-Romans 6:17-18

This freedom from the reigning power of sin is the beginning of the release from sin that Christ's atoning sacrifice purchased for you 2000 years ago. It means that your sin no longer keeps you under God's judgment, because it has been paid for. It also means that God has given you the ability to turn away from sin, to resist temptation, and that He is strengthening that ability in you as He sanctifies you and grows you. One day, when you are finally in the presence of Jesus, the release from sin will be completed, and at that time you will no longer be under any effects of sin. But until that day, remember what the true Gospel is, remember what it has purchased for you, and remember what it has made you: a person free from the reigning power of sin.

If we are people who have been freed from the reigning power of sin, then let's stop letting sin reign over us. Let's stop trying to be people we're not.

Wanna share the Gospel? Then pray.

Very often, we spend so much time trying to figure out how to pray for God's will in certain situations, because we don't know what His will is concerning the matter. And yet we seek Him anyway, asking that His will be done.

However, there's at least one thing in which we can be absolutely certain of His will... but so seldom do we (or, at least, do I) actually pray for it: personal evangelism.

God has been teaching me in the last couple of years the importance of praying for very specific, providentially ordained situations which God would use to allow opportunity to point others to the cross. I started doing this, praying for specific people, that God would use me that month, that week, even that very day to speak to them about Christ.

And you know what? He has.

He's been answering those prayers... in a fury of humbling, awe-inspiring blessing to others and to me.

But the funny thing is that I've actually been kind of surprised by how readily He answers these prayers (literally within hours, in some cases)... yet, I shouldn't be. I know that God wants me to preach the Gospel, because it brings glory to His Son, His very Self. It's not as if He's going to have something better for me to do than to give Him glory, after all... because spreading the glory of God is the greatest activity that we could ever hope to be involved in.

Consider this as an encouragement. Are you feeling stuck? apathetic? discouraged? The atoning sacrifice of Christ at the Cross is the answer to these ails, and telling others of this glorious news will bless you as it blesses them.

So pray for opportunities to proclaim of Christ's work, remembering that it is not of your power to reap the growth, only to sow the seed. But remember as well that God wants to give you opportunities to sow the seed... so just ask Him to give you what He already wants to give, and be blessed, brothers and sisters. Be blessed.

Keep it on Christ, Chris... keep it on Christ.

God has certainly taught me much in the past year... it has been a difficult year, to be sure... but I've understood lately just how much this difficulty was necessary for God to grow me just a bit more.

As many who might read this may already know, my relationship with my ex-girlfriend was ended a little over a year ago. This has been incredibly difficult for me to deal with, because I was moving towards making the relationship a bit more... ehh... permanent, if you will. Yah. Almost bought the ring, yo. Almost bought it.

Having that kind of relationship taken from me rocked me to the core, I have to admit (mostly because she was yet another one of the idols of my idol-factory heart). I was shaken and beaten, and didn't know what to do with myself. I was so sure that marriage was where that relationship was supposed to go. But God has taught me a good thing lately, a thing which - among other things - I'm not sure I would have been able to learn without being shaken so thoroughly (coffee, anyone?).

I have been thinking about my pastor's view on evangelism, which is that the fruit of his ministry isn't really his concern, it's God's. He's always said that, as he preaches the Gospel, if God decides to fill the church with 1000 people, he will praise God. If God decides to fill the church with 10 people, he will praise God. Whatever fruit God decides to bear from his ministry should have no effect on his calling to preach the Gospel and nothing but the Gospel. He keeps it on Christ.

In meditating on this, I have realized that I was focusing so intently on the fruit that I thought would be reaped from being in a Christ-glorifying relationship with a godly woman (namely, marriage), that I completely lost sight of the fact that I had been in a Christ-glorifying relationship with a godly woman. I was part of something which brought glory to the name of the Son of God, and seemed to have forgotten how much of a blessing this was, and how both of us can now glorify Christ more fully and deeply in our separate lives, having been a part of that relationship for a time, than if it had never happened.

Praise God for His faithfulness and goodness, and for His glory! Lamentations 3:37-38, Job 1:21, 2:10.

So, my prayer is that God would continue to remind me of this as He grows me. No matter what the fruit may be that He decides to bring about in my life, that is His business to deal with, not mine. My business is to bring glory to the name of Jesus, by the power of God's Spirit, and to lead others to the foot of the Cross in any and all ways that God will choose to use me to do so. As I do that, I pray that I would remember that anything that comes about in my life as a result is simply God's will unfolding, and that His will is good.

Keep it on Christ, Chris... let God take care of the rest.

Blogging...

...I'd like to do it again.

Yeah.

I think I'll do that.

Not overthrown by scholarship

The conviction was growing in me that life is too short and the church is too precious for a minister of the Word to spend his life trying to recreate a conjectured Jesus. There was work to be done—very hard work—to see what is really there in the God-given portrayal of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels. [... T]he portrayal of Jesus in the four Gospels has not been overthrown by scholarship. The appearance of overthrow arises from the unwarranted creation of criteria of authenticity that by definition will rule out aspects of the New Testament portrayal. Thankfully, God has raised up several generations of careful, rigorous, and faithful scholars who are not cowed by the radical critics and who patiently go about their work establishing the historical credibility of the four Gospels. I thank God for them. I don’t mean that they provide proof of the Gospels. I mean they show that the attacks on the historical validity of the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels are not compelling.

-John Piper, "What Jesus Demands from the World" (pp. 32, 33)