Zack Eswine on Significance in the Ordinary

Zack Eswine on Significance in the Ordinary from Crossway on Vimeo.

Defiant Repentance

The scene is Exodus 32.

Here's the command:

"You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God."

Exodus 20:3-5a 

Here's the transgression:

"So Aaron said to them, 'Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.' So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf."

Exodus 32:2-4  

Notice how deliberate Aaron is. Aaron is leading the charge! He orders the gold. He collects the gold. He carefully fashions the gold with a graving tool!

Here's the confession:

"And Moses said to Aaron, 'What did this people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them?' And Aaron said, 'Let not the anger of my lord burn hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, 'Make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.' So I said to them, 'Let any who have gold take it off.' So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf."

Exodus 32:21-24 

You're kidding, right? "and out came this calf"!?! It is clear throughout Exodus that although Aaron doesn't play the role to the people that Moses does, he is still an identified and established leader. In the absence of Moses, it is understood that Aaron is the default leader. That's why Moses approaches Aaron and Aaron alone when he comes down off of Mount Sinai. Aaron does a couple things:

1) In his confession, Aaron shifts the blame. He attempts to slide out from the weight of condemnation by pointing his finger at the people. They made me do it! he says. You know how stiff necked they are! You can't blame me!

 2) Aaron uses passive voice in describing active transgression. "He received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf." Aaron fashioned. Aaron made. With a tool. "And out came this calf." Now, according to Aaron, the calf fashioned itself, made itself, and emerged from the fire itself.

How often is this true of us? Even if we recognize our sin, we pad our confessions to God and to others with language that makes us feel better about it. We get just about as close as we can to our true discomfort zone--the zone that makes us squirm when we realize God's holiness and our sinfulness--and then press the eject button and float down to "safety" as we rationalize our failure through circumstance and comparison.

That's not what David did.

"Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my other conceive me."

Psalm 51:1-5 

No hedging. No pretending. No pointing fingers at anyone but himself. No comparing. David Unabashedly recognizes God's holiness and his inadequacy. This is defiant repentance. David defies every impulse in the human heart to slide out from the weight of condemnation. Its almost as if he's digging through the garbage can of his soul and flinging all of it at God. I think if we could watch David read James 5:16 he would explode in joy and affirmation.

"Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed."

YES! EXACTLY! David would say. The upside-down world of defiant repentance tells us that if we try to slip out from the inescapable anvil of condemnation like Aaron, we will feel its weight for eternity. Rather, if we call out to God like David and say, "hey, this is really heavy. Can you help me out here?" We will never feel so much as a feather of its weight because Christ bore it for us. Eternal condemnation for eternal joy. Because of Christ.

Romans 5:8. Romans 8:1.

Genuine repentance. God-granted growth. Effective sanctification. Effervescent Joy.





 

Calvary's Anthem

Heavenly Father,
Though hast led me singing to the cross
Where I fling down all my burdens and see them vanish,
Where my mountains of guilt are leveled to a plain,
Where my sins disappear, though they are the greatest that exist,
and are more in number than the grains of fine sand;

For there is power in the blood of Calvary to destroy sins more than can be counted, even by one from the choir of heaven.
Thou hast given me a hill-side spring that washes clear and white, and I go as a sinner to its waters, bathing without hindrance in its crystal streams.
At the cross there is free forgiveness for poor and meek ones,
And ample blessings that last forever;
The blood of the Lamb is like a great river of infinite grace with never any diminishing of its fullness as thirsty ones without number drink of it.

-an excerpt from The Valley of Vision

Will Not Let Us Go

George Whitefield:

"Nothing could possibly support my soul under the many agonies which oppressed me when on board, except a consideration of the freeness, eternity, and unchangeableness of God's love to me.

I need not fear the sight of sin when I have a perfect, everlasting righteousness wrought out for me by Jesus Christ....

May he enlighten me more and more to know and feel the mystery of his electing, soul-transforming love. There is nothing like it, to support us under present and all the various future trials. But the Lord has apprehended us and will not let us go. Men and devils may do their worst; our Jesus will allow nothing to pluck us out of His Almighty hands."

HT: Dane Ortlund

Rest

"If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Rather, seize the corner of His garment."

Paul Miller

'You Are The Very Person'

Spurgeon:

I have no gospel to preach to the self-righteous, no, not a word, Jesus Christ Himself came not to call the righteous, and i am not going to do what he did not do, No, I ask you rather to look at that righteousness of yours till you see what a delusion it is. It is not half so substantial as a cobweb. Be finished with it! Flee it!

"They that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick" (Mark 2:17). Is it not equally clear that the great remedies of grace and redemption are for the sick in soul? They cannot be for the whole, for they cannot be of use to such. If you feel that you are spiritually sick, the Physician has come into the world for you. If you are altogether undone by reason of your sin, you are the very person aimed at in the plan of salvation. I say that the Lord of love had precisely such as you in his eye when he arranged the system of grace.

He that is a dirty sinner is the kind of man that Jesus Christ came to make clean, Come in your disorder. Come to your heavenly Father in all your sin and sinfulness. come to Jesus just as you are: leprous, filthy, naked. Come, though despair is brooding over you, pressing upon your chest like a horrible nightmare.

-All of Grace

.....

That is a shot of joyful hope for sleepy souls such as mine.

Joy

"My sin in the past: forgiven. My current struggles: covered. My future failures: paid in full all by the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace found in the atoning work of the cross of Jesus Christ."


Chandler, Explicit Gospel. p.15

The Father's Cup (Good Friday)

The Father's Cup (Good Friday)

If anything scroll to the bottom starting at "The Father speaks..."

Praise Jesus.

24 Minute Gospel IV

Here

No Other Joy Compares!

"I think, again, that is is essential to the preacher's success that he should thoroughly enjoy his work.    I mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its idea. No man to whom the details of his task are repulsive can do his task well constantly, however full he may be of its spirit. he may make one bold dash at it and carry it over all his disgusts, but he cannot work on at it year after year, day after day. Therefore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate pleasure, count it an essential element of your power, if you can feel a simple delight in what you have to do as a minister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow of speaking, in standing before men and moving them, in contact with the young. the more thoroughly you enjoy it, the better you will do it all.

This is all true of preaching. Its highest joy is in the great ambition that is set before it, the glorifying of the Lord and saving of the souls of men. No other joy on earth compares with that. the ministry that does not feel that joy is dead. But in behind that highest joy, beating in humble unison with it, as the healthy body thrills in sympathy with the deep thoughts and pure desires of the mind and soul, the best ministers have always been conscious of another pleasure which belonged to the very doing of the work itself. As we read the lives of all the most effective preachers of the past, or as we meet the men who are powerful preachers of the Word today, we feel how certainly and how deeply the very exercise of their ministry delights them."

-Phillips Brooks, Lectures on Preaching, p. 53-54

Praise--The Completion of Delight

Piper:

 "We praise what we enjoy because the delight is incomplete until it is expressed in praise. If we were not allowed to speak of what we value and celebrate what we love and praise what we admire, our joy would not be full. So if God loves us enough to make our joy full, He must not only give us Himself; he must also win from us the praise of our hearts--not because He needs to shore up some weakness in Himself or compensate for some deficiency, but because He loves us and seeks the fullness of our joy that can be found only in knowing and praising Him, the most magnificent of all Beings. If He is truly for us, He must be for Himself!"

Desiring God p.49

...But a Delightful Conviction...

Edwards on the doctrine of God's sovereignty...

"From my childhood up, my mind had been full of objections against the doctrine of God's sovereignty.... It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me. But I remember the time very well, when I seemed to be convinced, and fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty of God....

But never could I give an account, how or by what means, I was thus convinced, not in the least imagining at the time, nor a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God's Spirit in it; but only that now I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it. However, my mind rested in it; and it put an end to all those cavils and objections.

And there has been a wonderful alteration in my mind, in respect to the doctrine of God's sovereignty, from that day to this; so that I scarce ever have found so much as the rising of an objection against it, in the most absolute sense....I have often since had not only a conviction but a delightful conviction. The doctrine has very often appeared exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not so."

-quoted in Desiring God p.38-39

Forever Forgiven

From Sam Storms' meditations on Colossians, The Hope of Glory...#20, p.72...

"God has taken your sin and placed it out of sight behind his back. All he sees now when he sees you is the blessed righteousness of his own dear Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Such is the love of forgiveness.

Still not good enough? Still not convinced? Still afraid that your sins will do you in? Then pay close attention to the word of the prophet Micah...He has something important to say about the kind of God we have:

 "Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea" (Mic. 7:18-19).

How much more graphic do you demand God to be before you enter into the joy of his forgiving love? All vestige of condemning guilt is gone. Again, "just as God said he put our sins behind his back, so here he says he will hurl them into the depths of the sea. They will not 'fall overboard' ; God will hurl them into the depths. he wants them to be lost forever, because he has fully dealt with them in his Son, Jesus Christ."

Piper's 5 Convictions of Christian Hedonism

1) The longing to be happy is a universal human experience, and it is good, not sinful.

2) We should never try to deny or resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead, we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction.

3) The deepest and most enduring happiness is found only in God. Not from God, but in God.

4) The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love.

5) To the extent that we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: The pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is...

The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

-Desiring God, p.28

Galatians 2:11-16

"For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I id not receive it from any man, nor was I thought it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me..."


No explanation needed.

Hymn

Well may the accuser roar, of sins that I have done;

I know them all and thousands more, Jehovah knoweth none!

Gospel Community

In moving my books back from school to home, I began flipping through some of them, remembering which ones were gifts from friends. It brought me so much joy to read the personal notes jotted on the inside covers. Here are a few I came across...

"Always remember that the gospel is the beautiful news that 'It is finished!' It is not primarily about doing (morality); Rather, it is about what has been done by Jesus for a helpless sinner like you and me. We love you brother."

"I hope you enjoy this book and it blesses your life like it has mine. How sweet it is to be received and kept by Jesus. Can't wait to see how God continues to display his wondrous grace. Keep walking pilgrim."

"Remember that NOTHING can stop God's furious love and delight of you because of Christ's work on your behalf. In Him you have all things you could want and need."

Who cares what the actual books are about!

Edwards on the Loveliness of Heaven

Per Kevin Deyoung

The Apostle tells us that God is love, 1 John 4:8. And therefore seeing he is an infinite Being, it follows that he is an infinite fountain of love, Seeing he is an all-sufficient Being, it follows that he is a full and overflowing and an inexhaustible fountain of love. Seeing he is an unchangeable and eternal Being, he is an unchangeable and eternal source of love. There even in heaven dwells that God from whom every stream of holy love, yea, every drop that is or ever was proceeds.

There dwells Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, the Prince of peace and love, who so loved the world that he shed his blood, and poured out his soul unto death for it. There dwells the Mediator, by whom all God’s love is expressed to the saints, by whom the fruits of it have been purchased, and through whom they are communicated, and through whom love is imparted to the hearts of all the church. There Christ dwells in both his natures, his human and divine, sitting with the Father in the same throne.

There in heaven this fountain of love, this eternal three in one, is set open without any obstacle to hinder access to it. There this glorious God is manifested and shines forth in full glory, in beams of love; there the fountain overflows in streams and rivers of love and delight, enough for all to drink at, and to swim in, yea, so as to overflow the world as it were with a deluge of love. (The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards, 245)

A Strange Melancholy

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who lived in the 1800s. He was known as a political thinker, and his most famous work was Democracy in America. During his investigations of America and its political structure, he noted the following, as quoted in Tim Keller's Counterfeit Gods.

"A strange melancholy that haunts the inhabitants...in the midst of abundance..."

About one hundred years later C.S. Lewis stumbled upon the same conclusion:

"There is something we have grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality..." 

de Tocqueville concludes:

"the incomplete joys of this world will never satisfy the human heart."

And Lewis, simply and famously:

"something has evaded us."

Colossians 3:1-5 - Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.

Incomplete joys. idolatry. Anything can be an idol, and just about everything has been. Its usually the best things that are.

Keller on rooting out our idols:

Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God.   This cannot be remedied only by repenting that you have an idol, or using willpower to try to live differently. Turning from idols is not less than those two things, but it is also far more. 'setting the mind and heart on things above' where 'your life is hid with Christ in God' means appreciation, rejoicing, and resting in what Jesus has done for you. It entails joyful worship, a sense of God's reality in prayer. Jesus must become more beautiful to your imagination, more attractive to your heart, than your idol.

Keller on Jonah and Jesus

Keller on Jonah and Jesus

Everyone should read this post, and this upcoming book. And the Bible.