|
| I love this song: "To Christ The Lord". I feel it captures the essence of why we should worship. The third and fourth verses particularly proclaim the gospel.
He saw me plunged in deep distress
He fled to my relief
For me He bore the shameful cross
And carried all my grief
His hand a thousand blessings pours
Upon my guilty head
His presence gilds my darkest hours
And guards my sleeping bed
To Him I owe my life and breath
And all the joys I have
He makes me triumph over death
And saves me from the grave
To Heaven the place of His abode
He brings my weary feet
Shows me the glories of my God
And makes my joy complete The key is that the focus of this song is not about us or how we worship; it is about what He has done for us. It is a song of thanksgiving and praise. I feel like so often in modern worship the gospel is neglected for the sake of providing a feel-good experience for those participating. In preparation for working with the RUF music team this fall, I have been reading some articles on worship that Marshall gave to us. I would like to share a couple of things Kevin Twit, the RUF minister at Belmont and the driving force behind Indelible Grace music, has written about worship.
"Emotion is not a bad thing! But it is not the goal of worship, it is not an end in itself. Worship is a formative experience (whether we like it or not!) and we need to be aware of this in our planning for worship. Do we communicate that only certain emotions are appropriate in our worship? (The Psalms bring the whole range of emotional experience before God.)
Do we communicate that the Christian life is always fun and exciting or that living as a disciple is a 'long obedience in the same direction'? Our worship should not communicate something false about what it feels like to be a Christian. Again, the Psalms are a helpful guide in this - they do not romanticize the Christian life. This does not mean that worship is always a somber and heavy, but it should not always be light and familiar either. I am arguing for a more full demonstration of the character of God reflected in our worship. What we often see is that each group reflects part of who God is, one group focuses on joy, one on majesty, one on awe, and one on "Abba" intimacy - yet all of these things need to be part of our worship!"
"Worship needs to be Christ-centered. This doesn't mean that every song needs to be a gospel presentation, but the service as a whole needs to strongly communicate that everything we do is made acceptable by Christ! There are many praise choruses that have no reference to Christ or His work. We can use these but they must be blended in a context in such a way that people don't think they can come into God's presence through their own desire or sincerity or willpower! It is appropriate to tell God what you want to do (as long as it's true and not a lie!) in worship, "I want to praise you Lord!" but beware of crafting a whole service around what we want to do. These songs are best as responses to God's revelation of His character and His promises. There are too many worship services that are really about us declaring what we are going to do. Taking vows (which is what you are doing when you sing a song like that) has a place in worship, but it should never be done lightly."
"Our hearts can be drawn from one affection to another, but they will never lose their longing to cling to something. This is why John Calvin said that our hearts are like idol factories. We will worship something. We will love something and until a new more beautiful, more believable, love comes along, we will inevitably cling to idols! But the Gospel comes to us and it brings an expulsive power - the expulsive power of a new affection. A new affection comes in, as we see Jesus as more beautiful and believable and it drives out these other affections! It is in worship, through the preaching, the singing, and the sacraments, that our hearts are drawn from other "beauties" as our eyes are opened to see Jesus for who He really is."
| | |
| Anyone who has seen Bruce Almighty is familiar with the scene where Bruce is trying to answer everyone's prayers at once, and he only finds himself getting further and further behind because the prayers are flooding in faster than he can answer them. His solution is to turn all the prayers into emails and reply "Yes" to all. This leads to disaster when everyone gets what they think they want and hilarious chaos ensues. But the scene does bring up a truly puzzling question that many Christians (including myself) have most likely pondered at one point or another: How is God able to hear all of the prayers throughout the world at the same time and respond appropriately to each of them? Surely this kind of multitasking is difficult even for a spiritual being as powerful as Him. And haven't we all heard that God forgets not even the sparrows, and that we are of more value to Him than these sparrows? How is it possible for Him to remember each of us within the limits of time? The part where we tend to get hung up is realizing that God is not bound by the constraints of time, but instead He is the Lord over Time. The concept that God is eternal, the fact that He always has been and always will be, is a difficult idea to wrap your mind around because even though I know it to be true, it does not make it any more conceivable to me within my three-dimensional mind.
It has always been beyond my knowledge to explain how God can respond to each of us outside of time, but it made a lot more sense when I read C.S. Lewis' analogy on how God's relationship with us outside of time is much like an author's control over the timeline in his novel. I'll let Lewis explain it to you himself:
"Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty--and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always the Present for Him. If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames
That is difficult, I know. Let me try to give something, not the same, but a bit like it. Suppose I am writing a novel. I write 'Mary laid down her work; next moment came a knock at the door!' For Mary who has to live in the imaginary time of my story there is no interval between putting down the work and hearing the knock. But I, who am Mary's maker, do not live in that imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half of that sentence and the second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary. I could think about Mary as if she were the only character in the book and for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent doing so would not appear in Mary's time (the time inside the story) at all.
This is not a perfect illustration, of course. But it may give just a glimpse of what I believe to be the truth. God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel. He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world...
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and we cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line and sees it all."
--From Mere Christianity
The illustration of God being our Author couldn't be anymore perfect, not only does He exist outside of time, but He is in complete control of what happens within time. God has a better concept of time than any of us could ever have because He is the Author, Creator, and Lord of Time. This is reassuring to me because I know that He will hear my every prayer and He will do more than reply "Yes" to all.
| | |
| We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
-
Paul
Laurence Dunbar
fabricated I'm
constructed of
opinions and lies
which only leads to failing
in my own eyes
sinking to the depths while
I'm masking what's inside
a bittersweet existence and
I cause my own demise
and I wonder what your
gonna do
when your disguise comes
crashing down
and yourself comes shining
through
are you gonna hide your face
or let it rest in the hands
of grace?
"Masquerade" – Reality Check
"Surely what a man does when he is taken off
his guard is the best sort of evidence for what sort of man he is? Surely what
pops out before the man has time to put on the disguise is the truth? If there
are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very
suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats: it only prevents them
from hiding. In the same way, the suddenness of provocation does not make me an
ill-tempered man; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am… Apparently
the rats of resentment and vindictiveness are always there in the cellar of my
soul."
-C.S. Lewis
I was reading this
passage by Lewis the other night, and I was struck by the truth of these words.
It is obvious to me that most people (if not everyone) tries to hides their
flaws behind a fake exterior, a mask that is intended to fool all observers
into thinking that we really aren't resentful and prideful and self-centered.
However, we can't keep up the facade forever; every once in awhile something
happens that causes our mask to come loose for a split second, and a split second
is more than enough time to expose us for who we really are. In my case, it's
either that guy that cuts me off on the interstate or a particularly difficult
homework problem that normally causes me to explode, or it's my extremely
competitive nature that gets frustrated when I get beat at anything. Those
moments provide a glimpse of my true self without the mask, and it’s extremely
disturbing because I can tell myself that it was a fluke and that it will never
happen again, but my sin keeps finding ways to expose itself.
"Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each
one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.
Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil."
~Ephesians 4:25-27
One of the major
frustrations we face in our relationships with others, especially in regards to
our brothers and sisters in Christ, is that we rarely feel comfortable opening
up and sharing our true selves with each other. We put up defenses to keep
others from seeing our vulnerabilities. One of the most common defenses is
clamming up and withholding our personal struggles and pretending instead that
everything is fine and dandy. How often do you answer the questions "How's it
going?" or "How you doing?" with a simple answer like "I'm doing well" when you're
really facing inner turmoil, but you’re too afraid to reveal it. It goes both
ways too; most people use the "what's up?" greeting with no intention of
actually listening to what’s going on in your life. We need to have our
barriers broken down if we're ever going to have true Christian fellowship.
Paul encourages us to speak the truth to one another "for we are members one of
another" in the body of Christ, and we should be willing to invest in others'
lives at the same time. Some other defenses we use to keep up our masquerade
are to deflect situations that would leave us vulnerable with humor or even by
surrounding ourselves with "friends" who won’t ask us the hard questions;
having the most Facebook friends or going to every social event known to man won’t
do anything to fill our need for true fellowship. The problem we run into when
we make life a masquerade is that all our feelings and passions get bottled up
until we reach a bursting point, where even the smallest frustration opens the
floodgates and we are revealed for who we really are.
"What causes quarrels and what causes fights
among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?... Submit
yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you."
~James 4:1,7
So how do we combat
our impulse to hide behind the mask that tells others that we are something
completely different from the sinful people that we really are? One thing is
for sure, it sure is a lot easier to say that I need to make that change than
actually taking the steps to open myself up to others. Another certain thing is
that the devil will take any opportunity to turn your face away from the cross,
and if that means helping us live a lie that fools everyone around us in order
that our sin can fester inside of us, than you can be sure that he will try his
hardest to make it happen. How does James say we can resist the devil so that
he will flee from us? By submitting ourselves to God, we can battle the
passions that are at war within us. Ask Him to help you to lay aside your mask,
because you can't do it on your own.
"And if what we are matters even more than what we do—if, indeed, what
we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are—then it follows that the
change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary
efforts cannot bring about… After the first few steps in the Christian life we realize
that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by
God."-C.S. Lewis
Lewis says it better
than I ever could. We are incapable of changing anything about our souls
without the help of His Holy Spirit. How can we pursue truthfulness in our
Christian fellowship and invest in others? Find an accountability partner with
whom you can share struggles and encouragements. Join a prayer group or
fellowship group where you can talk openly with others. Don't be afraid to open
up to others and tell them how they can pray for you, and ask how you can do
the same for them in return. You will find that it is truly a better
alternative than hiding behind the facade.
When someone or something pulls off your mask,
what is revealed before you have the chance to hide behind the mask again? | | |
| "There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.
The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virture opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.
______
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
______
The point is that each person's pride is in competition with every else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree.
______
Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of pride.
______
As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
______
Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good--above all, that we are better than someone else--I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
______
For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity--that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride--just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
______
The devil loves 'curing' a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure our vanity.
______
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."
-C.S. Lewis
From 'Mere Christianity'
| | |
| History teaches us that
hyper-Calvinism is as much a threat to true Calvinism as Arminianism is.
Virtually every revival of true Calvinism since the Puritan era has been
hijacked, crippled, or ultimately killed by hyper-Calvinist influences. Modern
Calvinists would do well to be on guard against the influence of these deadly
trends.
-Phil Johnson
When it comes to how much control we believe that God exerts over the
process of salvation, there are two extremist views: deism and hyper-Calvinism.
Both deism and hyper-Calvinism encompass a wide variety of views, whereas I
will only be examining one aspect of each, so these definitions can merely be
described as subcategories, mainly because I don't want to scare off all
potential readers only two sentences into this post. The deist view is
basically the belief that God created the world and left it to spin on its own
without any intervention on His part. This would mean that anything and everything
we do is apart from God, including our own salvation. It may seem crazy that
anyone who believes in the existence of God would believe any semblance of that
view, but I will come back to it because I think some modern "Christian"
beliefs have taken much from the deist view. On the other hand, you have
hyper-Calvinism, which has been used to describe everything from true Calvinism
to the belief that God has predestined the very color of the socks you will
wear each day and the calorie content of the Big Mac and fries you'll eat for
lunch tomorrow. However, the definition of hyper-Calvinism to which I refer is
that salvation is only dependent on being one of God's elect and that saving
faith is not necessary because He will bring them to Himself apart from any
means. If that were true then there would have been no need for the Christ.
Another common hyper-Calvinist view is the belief He has predestined every
action and every choice we make in life, including the choice of accepting or
rejecting Christ. This view eliminates our need for the Holy Spirit because we
don't need a changed heart if all of our natural and supernatural choices have
already been programmed into our robot selves beforehand. The problem is that
many Calvinists get carried away with the word predestination and begin
applying it to every facet of life and ultimately miss that the Gospel is about
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, creating a theology that revolves
solely around the Elect, a theology that doesn't even deserve to be related to
the principles of John Calvin.
When I mentioned that some modern "Christian" views reminded me of Deism, I
was speaking of the belief that it is solely up to us to find and choose Christ
without any intervention on the part of the Spirit, the belief that some might
refer to as free-will. I started to explore the difficulty of a reprobate
reaching a decision of total trust in Christ in my first post. There is no
reason for the reprobate to make a conscious decision to turn from his
self-centered ways and fall before one to whom he must offer his full obedience. It
is most probable that most who believe in free-will do believe that God uses
certain things such as nature and other humans to influence the mind of the
reprobate, but that at some point, the true decision hinges entirely on the
individual.
Before the work of salvation occurs, either the
Holy Spirit is at work in all individuals, only some individuals, or He is not
at work in any. For the sake of arguing for free-will, we must eliminate the option
of the Holy Spirit working in some, but not all individuals because this option
would suggest a special grace that is limited only to those whom God has chosen
to provide it. If the Holy Spirit is not at work in any one before the work of
salvation occurs, then that would imply that we are solely responsible for the
act of choosing a saving faith in Christ Jesus, which would be a very viable
option for the deist. However, the Bible tells us that "by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not of your own
doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast"
(Ephesians 2:8-9). What grace is this through which we have been saved if we
are responsible for that decision of faith? Is it not boastful to say that we
must find Him and choose to have faith in Him without His intervention? For
this reason, I do not believe that we can arrive at the conclusion that the
Spirit has no influence upon our decision to choose Christ. If the Holy Spirit
is at work in all as a part of common grace, at what point does He decide that
His work is finished and withdraw from His work in us that we may make a
salvation decision of our own free will? Even if He were to give us this
freedom, our decision to choose Christ would still be dependent upon His
previous work and grace that molded us into creatures capable of seeking God.
Remember that we were all once reprobates, and we didn't reach a point of being
more than a reprobate on our own. It is only by grace that we are even capable
of recognizing our sin; it's not because of our free will, because the free
will of a reprobate revels in the self-serving pleasures of his sin. We rebel
against the thought that God has everything to do with molding us into
creatures that either can or can't recognize their sin and their need for a
Saviour. Our remedy for this rebellion is to create this philosophy of
free-will that states that we have the freedom to make our own significant
decisions. However, having the freedom to make decisions is pretty much useless
when you're incapable of realizing the depth of your own sin on your own. I'm
not saying that we don't have free-will in any decisions, because I believe
that we are given freedom in making many decisions as long as they fall within
the fence of God's law, but I think the term has been misused (much like
predestination) to encompass a set of beliefs that are not founded upon
Scripture.
The main problem with the modern free-will approach is that so much emphasis
is put onto the action of "asking Jesus into your heart", that there is rarely
room for the gospel. One way or the other, whether we have free-will or not
when it comes to our salvation, we tend to miss the point of the gospel. It
doesn't matter how we come to saving faith, but what is important is that we
realize there is more to salvation than just praying a prayer. Christ not only
offers us forgiveness for our past sins, He offers us a whole new way of living.
The point of becoming a Christian is not that God will forgive all of your sins
so that you can do whatever you want to do from now on.
"What shall we say then? Are we to
continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin
still live in it? Do you know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ
Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by
baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by
the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life."
-Romans 6:1-4
"And I will give you a new heart, and
a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from
your flesh, and give you a heart of flesh."
-Ezekiel 36:26
"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 to righteousness."
-Romans 6:17-18
Salvation is not a once in a lifetime event; it is a continuous process that
defines our entire Christian walk. Many have fooled themselves into thinking
that salvation is nothing more than justification and adoption; i.e., that our
salvation is made complete by God's acceptance of Christ's perfect
righteousness in our place and his reception of us as his children, which
entitles us to the inheritance of all he has promised. We'd like to think
that’s all there is to it, so we can go on living our daily lives the same as
we always have without any responsibility. The hardest part of salvation to
stomach is naturally the part that requires something of us; the requirement
that we change the way we live and whom we serve. This is sanctification, the
act of God's free grace that is continuously remolding our whole person into
the image of Christ. We are no longer slaves to sin, but slaves to
righteousness, which means we are no longer ruled by a desire to sin, but by a
desire to obey the Father. This does not mean that we will cease from sin, for
we will not fully become like Christ until the Day of Atonement, but
sanctification is the process of turning more and more from our sin and
increasing in our desire to obey and serve God. He has given us a new heart of
flesh that we might walk in newness of life! Here again, we cannot become more
obedient or less sinful on account of our own righteousness, but we must rely
upon strength from the Holy Spirit. But since we have made heirs of the King of
Glory, we have inherited the Spirit of His Son, so we will never have to face
our weaknesses alone. Arise my soul, arise!
"But he said to me, 'My grace is
sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore, I
will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ
may rest upon me."
-2 Corinthians 12:9
Therefore our great
care should be to serve God, and please Him, who is not unrighteous, whatever
men are to forget our work and labour of love. If we work for men only, our
works, at furthest, will die with us; if for God, they will follow us.
-Matthew Henry
| | |
|
