An Evening of Eschatology

It's rare for me to interact with other Christians and not occasionally hear the phrase "End Times" used in conversation. My frustration is that I don't think a lot of people really know what the Book of Revelation really says, and even if they have read it, they don't understand the context or genre of the writing. By the way, I don't claim to be an expert myself. People's "end times" theology is often times based more on things like the Left Behind series than on what Revelation actually says. So in light of my frustration on this matter, I wanted to share this video of "An Evening of Eschatology." John Piper is the moderator between three men representing the three common views of the "millennium" referenced in Revelation 20. It's two hours long so you may not have time to watch it all, but I found it very helpful for understanding the different biblical views of the "End Times." Not mention, how great is it to see believers with differing opinions come together and dialogue? I hope to see more of these kinds of events happen.

I appreciated a couple of opening and closing points made in this. One was that Christians often think that after we die, heaven is our final resting place; the resurrection and the new earth isn't a part of their hope or understanding. Is that true for you at all? Then in closing, the bottom line that all three speakers come to is that Christ's Kingdom will not fully manifest itself on earth by any amount of force or protest. Unfortunately throughout history we have often forgotten this and tried to Christianize the world in our own strength, primarily with military and political methods. Our job as the church is to live by the power of the Holy Spirit, embodying the gospel and bringing it to the ends of the earth. God's power and perfect timing in Christ's return will take care of the rest.

Desiring God and Suffering for It - Part 3

The apostle Paul made it clear that no amount of suffering, not even death could sway him from following after Christ. "To live is Christ and to die is gain" (Phillipians 1:21). Piper says that ,"Paul wanted what would bring the deepest and most lasting satisfaction to his life, namely, being with Christ in glory. But not alone with Christ...The pleasures at Christ's right hand are public pleasures, shared pleasures, communal pleasures." We need to recognize that Paul's choice to suffer was not just about his personal gain of Christ, but it was that he might gain the faith of the nations because "...in their joy in Christ, his joy in Christ was greater..." No wonder Paul was so driven to bring the gospel everywhere that he did. He knew that "his own personal enjoyment of fellowship with Christ would be eternally greater because of the great assembly of the redeemed enjoying Christ with him."

Along the evangelism line, Piper makes an interesting point about how our suffering (fueled by the hope of shared pleasure mentioned above) can actually be what brings unbelievers to faith. In Colossians 1:24, Paul talks about filling up what was lacking in Christ's afflictions with his own experiences of suffering. Piper is quick to assure us that this passage is not denying the completed work of atonement that Christ accomplished through his incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. Rather, Piper suggests that Paul meant that he saw his own sufferings as exhibiting the sufferings of Christ to those he was trying to bring to faith in Christ. We make the "afflictions of Christ real for people by the afflictions we experience in bringing them the message of salvation." That's a new concept for me, but I definitely agree with this conclusion. "The startling implication of this" Piper says, is that "the saving purposes of Christ among the nations and in our neighborhoods will not be accomplished unless Christians choose to suffer."

Piper supports this idea by sharing a passage from a book written by a former Russian secret police officer. This man would raid prayer gatherings and inflict extreme brutality on believers. There was a woman named Natasha who was present at many of the meetings that he would raid. No matter how bad she was beaten, she would not renounce her faith or stop attending worship gatherings. This man later became a Christian and credits his memory of Natasha's willingness to suffer as part of what made him recognize the preciousness of Christ, that she counted her own life worth losing for Christ's sake. What a testimony!

So, Piper says that "No one who knows and loves Christ can be content to come to Him alone." Based on the ideas I just shared, I take him to mean, at least in part, that someone who knows and loves Christ "loves the brotherhood of believers" (1 Peter 2:17), finding greater joy in being an active part of His church rather than neglecting thing like fellowship, corporate worship, service, etc. It is also their desire to be a part of adding to the number of the redeemed by sharing the gospel with unbelievers. Those believers out there who have been hurt by "the church," or have experienced rejection and persecution for sharing their faith might have a hard time with these points. All I can do is remind them that Jesus never abandoned His disciples (the beginnings of the church), even though he knew they would fail him multiple times and would abandon Him and even deny they knew Him. He preached the good news of the kingdom of God even though He knew he'd be rejected by many, even His home town, and would eventually be crucified for the truth He proclaimed. He did this "for the joy set before Him" (Heb. 12:2). May we be motivated by that same joy to love the church and add to it's number, even when, no, especially when it hurts.

Desiring God and Suffering for It - Part 2

I ended my last post from the chapter entitled "Suffering" focusing on Piper's assertion that "Christianity is not a life that one would embrace as abundant and satisfying without the hope of fellowship with Christ in the resurrection."  I spent some more time looking through the scriptures for passages where Jesus spoke of suffering for following Him.  Jesus himself said that "You can enter God's kingdom only through the narrow gate.  The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose the easy way (Matt. 7:13-14 NLT)."  If our lives are set on taking the easy way, something incompatible with the Christian life described in the bible, Jesus is saying that we are not on the Kingdom path.    

Why do we try to dumb things down in many of our churches today, watering down the gospel and the call of Jesus on His people so that our sales pitch to unbelievers (or wavering Christians) sounds more enticing and not so costly and demanding of our lives? Jesus didn't hide the fact that following Him would cost us, He promised that we would have to stop relying on ourselves, stop pursuing wealth and status, that we needed to obey his commands (repenting of sins that we like to indulge in), that we would face rejection, persecution and sometimes even death for proclaiming that He alone is the Savior.  Look at Luke 14:25-34, Jesus made it clear that our lives are no longer our own if we are to be His disciples, so we most count the cost and give those we share the gospel with the same opportunity.  You can't come away from reading the New Testament and not get the sense that as followers of Christ we will have to choose a difficult path, one that involves suffering and sacrifice in this lifetime.  

Why would we choose to follow Him then?  According to Paul, the reason we should choose this path is because we have the hope of eternal life in God's Kingdom, with a particular desire for God Himself.  How could we truly follow Christ if He is not what we long for?  Why would we follow Him no matter what, at great cost, unless he was more desirable to us than any of the things we might lose in following Him?  As we walk with Christ in this fallen world, we see and know only in part (1 Cor. 13:12), but that gives us a taste of the riches of Christ. The thing that makes Christianity "worth it"  is the reward that is yet to come, the one we get a picture of in Revelation 22.  If that is not our ultimate longing, the motivation that keeps us going on this journey as part of God's church, then we will end up choosing the easy way and never truly follow Jesus.  We'll settle for less.

Does Revelation 22 excite you?  Is the hope of eternity with God directing your life?  Or are you settling for less?  

I haven't been able to stop thinking thinking about this idea of the easy way vs. choosing a life where we will suffer and sacrifice that we might gain Christ.  I think it's fair to say that without a love and desire for God that shapes our lives we will inevitably settle for less and choose the world over Jesus.  It occurs to me that worship can help stir up our affections for God, especially when it is balanced with an equal amount of truth and heart.  And it would seem imperative that our worship must consistently anticipate the hope of eternal life, the world to come, the return of Jesus and the establishment of His kingdom, that we might cultivate a hope that can withstand any amount of suffering or sacrifice.

   

God, would you help me, help us, to stop pursuing goals and lifestyles that have no eternal value, or even mixing them with some elements of being a Christian, and instead help us to be willing to "give up everything we have" to follow after You (Luke 14:33), knowing that the cost is worth it because of the promise of the "joy in Your presence and eternal pleasures at Your right hand (Psalm 16:11)." 

I've still got more from this chapter, so look for part 3 soon.

Desiring God and Suffering for It - Part 1

Persecution is the kind of suffering that is directly linked to a believer's faith in Christ. However, in Desiring God Piper points out that "All experiences of suffering in the path of Christian obedience, whether from persecution or sickness or accident, have this in common: They all threaten our faith in the goodness of God and tempt us to leave the path of obedience..."  They are all "intended by Satan for the destruction of our faith and governed by God for the purifying of our faith." Though Piper does not see eye to eye with Gregory Boyd (see my post on the book God at War) I think these quotes reinforce the reality of a demonic realm that is actively waging war against mankind, and is certainly bent on destroying the faith of those trying to follow Jesus.  So regardless of the kind of suffering, we need to be on our guard against the enemy's plan to wreck our faith.

After comparing various ways we might suffer, Piper moves on to Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 15:32, "If the dead are not raised, 'Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'"  The hope of the resurrection (being raised from the dead and being united with Christ in glory) is the only reason worth the suffering that we choose to face as believers.  If the dead are not raised, if there is no hope of enjoying God forever in eternal life, then we should just seek to live a "normal, simple, comfortable ordinary life of human delights that may enjoy with no troubling thoughts of heaven of hell or sin or holiness or God."  Then the all too convicting remark.  "...many... professing Christians seem to aim at just this - and call it Christianity."

If we're honest, Piper is dead on with that comment, and if we're even more honest, a lot of us are in that boat, more concerned with living comfortably than choosing a path where we will suffer some kind of loss in order that we may gain Christ (Phillipians 3).  I would add that this is not just referring to those "health and wealth gospel" people, but is very inclusive of your average professing Christian in America.  

Piper continues, "Am I overstating this?  Judge for yourself.  How many Christians do you know who could say, "The lifestyle I have chosen as a Christian would be utterly foolish and pitiable if there is no resurrection?"  I'm convicted, are you?  I'm asking God to help me to not just walk the path of least resistance and most comfort, but instead help me to seek first His Kingdom and take up my cross, whatever suffering or sacrifice that might entail.

There's still more to share and consider from this chapter, so I guess there's a Part 2 coming...     

Are we supposed to enjoy worship?

A good friend of mine recently wrote a short e-mail to me after playing music together in a worship service.  He said that he had fun being a part of the service and asked if it was okay to enjoy times of worship or if those kinds of feelings should be kept separate in the context of worshiping.  

Since that e-mail, I've started reading Desiring God by John Piper.  There is a chapter on worship that speaks to this question about the heart, feelings, pleasures, thoughts that we should have in regards to worship, which is relevant to what my friend asked, and surely something most of us have wondered about before.

Piper starts this chapter on worship looking at John 4, where Jesus' conversation with a Samaritan women starts with asking for water, moves to her issue with sexual immorality, and then ends up talking about worship.  This is the chapter where we find the well-known phrase, "worship in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24).  Piper focuses on the "spirit" and heart element of worship, because he is concerned about the influence of Immanuel Kant on Christianity over the last few centuries.  His philosophy says that an action is moral only if one has no desire to perform it.  Piper particularly disagrees with this idea in regards to Christian worship.

In defining what "spirit" means in this context, Piper says he has taken it to primarily mean our spirits, our hearts engaged in worship, but also recognizes that the Holy Spirit has to be taken into account here.  So, his conclusion is that Jesus saying "that true worship comes only from our spirits made alive and sensitive by the quickening of the Spirit of God" (p.82).  Without the Holy Spirit, he says, our spirits will be dead and unresponsive to God and can't truly worship. Here are a few spirit/heart quotes from this chapter that stood out to me.

"An act of worship is vain and futile when it does not come from the heart"

"Where feelings for God are dead, worship is dead"

"Worshiping in the spirit is the opposite of worshiping in merely external ways"

The "truth" element in worship is essential to balance out our spirits, otherwise we will be like the Samaritans in John 4, who according to Jesus worshiped who/what they did not know.  If who God is and what he has done and all the other truth He has revealed to mankind didn't matter in worship, it wouldn't be wrong to think that God accepted the worship of all religions (sort of a unitarian view).  But Jesus Himself affirmed that truth was imperative to worship, which is why our songs and prayers and creeds and sermons must be weighed against God's truth as revealed in scripture.  A few more quotes to share, putting Piper's perspective on spirit and truth together.

"Worship must engage emotions and thought."

"How and whom are crucial, not where (referencing Jesus conversation with the Samaritan).  Worship must be vital and real in the heart... and rest on a true perception of God."

 

"Strong affections for God rooted in truth are the bone and marrow of biblical worship." 

I felt like God used this chapter to remind of the importance of our hearts and even emotions in worship because I've been focused mostly on the truth factor lately in my thinking and implementation.  The truth has to lead us to a place of not just knowing it, but being satisfied with the excellency of God and overflowing with the joy of His fellowship.  I'll sum up this post with Piper's analogy of how worship, in spirit and truth, works like a furnace.  

Our fuel is a true vision of God's greatness, our fire is the quickening of the Holy Spirit, the furnace is our spirit made alive and warm by the flame of truth, the heat that comes out is the resulting affections from us that result in powerful worship via confessions, longings, acclamations, tears, songs, shouts, bowed heads, lifted hands and obedient lives.  I don't think any of us could find fault in worship that works like that.

Covetousness - Desiring Something More Than God

How would you define the sin of coveting?  I've typically understood it to mean desiring things that you don't have.  The dictionary definition says to covet is to "desire something eagerly, especially something belonging to another person."  Exploring the origins of this sin of coveting brings us to the issue of contentment.  Back when I was reading through the study book on the Westminster Shorter Catechism it spent some time talking through the implications of coveting, saying that coveting begins with a dissatisfied heart.  The biblical requirement they say is to have full contentment with what God has given us.  The passage used to support that statement (which I agree with) is in Philippians 4 where Paul says, "I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am... In any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need..."

The study book continues to elaborate on how coveting can lead to all other sins.  If you want some material thing bad enough, but can't buy your own, you steal it.  If you want your neighbors wife more than your own, it can lead to adultery.  If you really want your country to be governed in a radically different way, you start a revolution and harm and kill everyone who gets in the way of that to get things how you want them to be.  

This morning while reading Future Grace, John Piper went even farther on the issue of coveting and how it relates to unbelief in everything that God is for us in Christ.  Piper says that "Covetousness is desiring something so much that you lose your contentment in God."  I think putting it that way carries even more weight than simply being discontent with our circumstances as we usually think of them.  And if you think about it, Adam and Eve's original sin caused them to forsake the contentment that they had in God as they experienced it in the Garden of Eden.

In America, contentment means that we have everything we want (which is never enough).  We think that our wants and often times our lusts are things that we are entitled to.  Our concept or picture of what it looks like to be taken care of and have everything we need to be content is totally flawed.  This problem in our perspective taints how we interpret God's promises.  Take a passage like 1 Corinthians 10:13 for example.  "My God shall supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus."  If we're looking through American lens, contentment to most people probably means having at least a decent paying job with an average benefits package, a dwelling with enough room for everyone to have their own space, we get to eat pretty much whatever we're hungry for, and if we're Christians we also have a freedom to worship how and where we choose and our faith doesn't conflict with our desires.  Piper does a great job of clarifying what "all your needs" really means in that context in Philippians.  It means "all that you need for God-glorifying contentment."  

I wonder what "God-glorifying contentment" looks like, and how we can pursue and maintain that (which would include letting God help us with that) in our lives?  Certainly it starts with a change of heart and perspective (contentment in God could look very different than my list in the last paragraph).  If we take Jesus and Paul's warnings seriously we will be sure to flee coveting or anything that leads to it and stay content in God, or we could find ourselves wandering away from the faith and impaling ourselves with many pains (1 Tim 6:10).  I'll try to think and study a bit more on what we need to do to keep from coveting and more importantly what it looks like in a practical way to be content in God.  Feel free to share what you think this might look like.

Looking Back for the Sake of the Future

Last year I spent some time writing about the book Ancient-Future Worship by Robert Webber and made the case for why our worship needs to intentionally remember God's story and help us find our place in it.  It has been interesting that since I started down that path of thinking, God has continued to bring different books and articles, passages in scripture and real life examples to me in a way that solidifies this conviction of needing to bring God's story to the center of worship, and also grows me in what that can look like.

The latest example of this is in John Piper's book Future Grace.  Early in the the book he states that "you will search the bible in vain for explicit connections between gratitude and obedience."  In other words, the bible doesn't call us to me motivated to live in obedience to Christ because of the good things God has done for you.  Piper suggests that, "... gratitude was never designed as the primary motivation for radical Christian obedience, perhaps that is one reason so many efforts at holiness abort."  Notice he doesn't say gratitude for what God has done doesn't play any part, but that it can't be the primary driving force for continued surrender to Christ.  You might think that so far what I'm quoting seems to work against the idea of how critical it is to remember God's story, but several chapters later a connection is made.

In the chapter entitled "Looking Back for the Sake of the Future," Piper makes a case for the significance of looking at the history of God's faithfulness in order to trust in His future reliability.  Jesus is the Yes and Amen to all of God's promises.  Everything that He promised He would do was fulfilled in Jesus' work here on earth, or will be fulfilled in Him since God's grace is now poured out through Jesus to the world, forever.  To bank on God's grace though, you've got to know what the promises were, or are, so that you can see that God's grace has always been faithful, and thus live in faith that He will continue to be.  If we never knew about God's past grace, or forget about it, then we will not have a foundation of what God has to rest our future on.

The issue of forgetting God's past grace is what often plagued Israel and led them into a  life of disobedience and no faith in the one true God.  Here's an example in Judges 8:33-34.  "The sons of Israel again played harlot with the baals."  They turned to follow after idols instead of the living God.  Why did this happen?  Simple,  "... the sons of Israel did not remember the Lord their God, who had delivered them from the hands of all their enemies on every side."  As Piper puts it, "They forsook their faith in God's future grace because they stopped remembering his past grace."  

I like how he says they stopped remembering (instead of forgot).  I may have mentioned this before, but the hebrews and the ancient church understood their act of remembering in worship to be more than just bringing something to mind, but it was to make it real, to remember in a way that would solidify it in as reality (which it is, but this world tries to give us a different reality).  So if we, like Israel, stop remembering God's saving deeds and His fulfilled promises, and especially how that is all culminated in Christ, it will eventually cease to be the reality we live in.  We might still have the head knowledge, but that will not guide our lives into holiness and enable us to overcome unbelief when the arrows of evil are shooting at us, trying to shake us from relying on God's future grace.

The need to remember what God has done historically as well as recalling His personal work in our lives (all through Christ) is critical in worship.  The point I think God is making to me right now through Future Grace is that it is also critical that worship proclaims His promises for the future that He has made to those who love Him.  It is the hope of the future promises that justifies through faith and causes God's people to stay the course.  May this passage be true of us.  

"Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised."  

Romans 4:2o-21