Don't Lose Sight of This!

It’s the economy stupid.” It was an obnoxious, laser focus line that controlled everything that was said in the 1992 presidential campaign by Bill Clinton. “It’s the economy stupid.” Why did they have such a laser-like focus? Because they knew, that this was the issue that controlled their destiny. If they talked about foreign policy, they were sunk. President Bush had just overseen an awesome victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and there was no way they were going to win on that topic, and so in a brilliant strategy move, they decided to keep the discussion to the thing that mattered most to them for them. The economy. Which is why they drove it into their teams head, keep your eyes fixed on what is most important, don't lose sight of this!  

I’ve often thought that there is a lesson for churches. In the final words of Matthew, Jesus declares that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”, and in light of that he says “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." In John 20 we read, “As the father sent me, so send I you”, and in Acts 1 we read, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."  

With these words, Jesus says , I have a task for you. Make disciples. Nurture disciples. Teach disciples. Build up disciples, knowing that I have authority and I am with you because I lived the life you should have lived and died the death you should have died, and now have risen. Keep your eyes on this. My commission to you is to make disciples, just as I made disciples. Don’t forget that.  

The final instructions are very important. They tell us what is most important to that person. Before He ascends, in His last times with His disciples Jesus says this is it. Disciple-making. And just as the Clinton campaign had a laser-like focus, so too must we.  It’s so easy to lose focus. We all live busy, packed lives with lots of demands. And yet if we are not careful, we can lose sight of this command and think that it’s someone else’s job. We must be on guard to not let this happen. In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus talks about how some people are “like seed sown among thorns”. Who “hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word”. The result is that they are made “unfruitful” (Mark 4:18-19). We must not allow that to happen in our lives. We must keep Jesus commands firmly in view. When we are called to faith in Christ, we are given a mission and commission. We are to be actively and intentionally seeking to lead people to faith in Christ so that they too become disciples of Christ who make disciples who make disciples. We do this through love, through service, through living holy before the Lord, through obedience to everything that He has taught us, but most importantly we do it through words. By opening our mouth and inviting people to faith in Christ. This is the mission Christ has commanded us to fulfill. 

Be disciples who make disciples who make disciples. Don’t lose sight of this command. It’s so easy to lose sight of it, which is why we need to remind ourselves of it daily. Just as we need to remind our-selves of the gospel daily, in a very real way, we need to remind ourselves of this daily. We all do. Myself included. If you come behind my desk, you’ll see a whiteboard with the words, “it’s disciple-making stupid!” on it. I keep it there for one reason. I can get so bogged down with the running of the church, and the this and the that, that I too need to be reminded. I too drift. I too get trapped by the thorns. And so I need to say to myself it’s disciple-making stupid. Don’t lose sight of this command. The call to me, and to you, and to all Christians, is that we are to be disciples who make disciples. Remember that this is our final instruction. Don’t lose sight of this command. We are called to make disciples, and if we are not, we’re not obeying our Saviors final instructions and we are showing ourselves to be false disciples. May we be disciples, who are obediently making disciples, who make disciples.

Morality: Paul Tripp

I’ve really come to appreciate Paul Trip’s work over the years. Recently I came across something that I’ve found incredibly worthwhile from a series he was doing on Psalm 15, looking at the standard of holiness that God calls his people to. In the previous article on Psalm 15, he wrote about how the Psalmist considered a God-honoring way to live with our friends and neighbors. Then he moved on to looking at how the Psalmist continues to list the Lord's standard of righteousness, looking at Psalm 15:4, "Who shall dwell on your holy hill ... [the person] in whose eyes a vile person is despised, but who honors those who fear the Lord."  Please read this, and be challenged. 

Trip writes: 

 

This verse reveals an unshakable moral commitment to what is right. The person described has such a deep allegiance to God that he or she is revolted by sin as much as the Lord is. 

I don't know about you, but there are times when my heart is seduced by evil. It may only be for a moment, but I catch myself chasing after - not despising - vile things.  

I don't want to come across as legalistic, but I think it's my job to draw an uncomfortable line: what do you need to give up that has the potential to make evil look beautiful? 

There are television shows that you might need to turn off. There are books and magazines that you may need to put down. There are movies and websites that you may need to stay away from. I'm concerned that the body of Christ is losing its edge. I've found that we're too willing to expose ourselves - in a fairly consistent manner - to things that are dangerous and polluted, that dull our moral sensitivity, and that present evil in a seductive manner.  

You see, here's what you need to admit: as long as you're still breathing, you have the capacity to find vile things beautiful. Even as a child of God, you're not free from corrupted desires. Are you willing to admit the depth of your spiritual need? And are you willing to sacrifice some of your entertainment and leisure preferences for the health of your soul? Maybe it's time we fight a little harder for our morality. 

I would encourage you to reconsider your lifestyle, but know that your hope for change won't be found there. Your hope is in the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. He gives you the power to say "No!" to vile things and gives you the ability to see beauty where God sees beauty. 

God bless, 

Paul David Tripp

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What are some forms of entertainment - TV, books, magazines, websites, social media - that are consistently promoting vile things?
2. How does entertainment mask those vile things in "beautiful" ways?
3. Why does your heart buy into those masking lies?
4. Why won't turning off the TV and disconnecting from Internet solve your ultimate problem?
5. How can you commune with the Holy Spirit and find the power to say "No!" to vile things?

I Asked The Lord that I Might Grow: By John Newton

I asked the Lord that I might grow, In faith, and love, and every grace; Might more of His salvation know, And seek, more earnestly, His face.

’Twas He who taught me thus to pray, And He, I trust, has answered prayer! But it has been in such a way, As almost drove me to despair.

I hoped that in some favored hour, At once He’d an­swer my request; And by His love’s constraining pow’r, Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this, He made me feel, The hidden evils of my heart; And let the angry pow’rs of hell, Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more, with His own hand He seemed, Intent to aggravate my woe; Crossed all the fair designs I schemed, Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried, Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death? “’Tis in this way, the Lord replied, I answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I employ, From self, and pride, to set thee free; And break thy schemes of earthly joy, That thou may’st find thy all in Me.”

Beat it into their heads continually by Martin Luther

Something to chew on from Martin Luther, the great reformer, speaking of our tendency to default to works righteousness. His words are genius.

“The law is divine and holy. Let the law have his glory, but yet no law, be it never so divine and holy, ought to teach me that I am justified, and shall live through it. I grant it may teach me that I ought to love God and my neighbor; also to live in chastity, soberness, patience, etc., but it ought not to show me, how I should be delivered from sin, the devil, death, and hell.

Here I must take counsel of the gospel. I must hearken to the gospel, which teacheth me, not what I ought to do, (for that is the proper office of the law,) but what Jesus Christ the Son of God hath done for me : to wit, that He suffered and died to deliver me from sin and death. The gospel willeth me to receive this, and to believe it. And this is the truth of the gospel. It is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consisteth.

Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.”

Martin Luther, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (Philadelphia: Smith, English & Co., 1860), 206.

From the Newsletter: Sovereign

God is on the throne. We need to remind ourselves of this often. I need to remind myself of this often. At times, we can look around and feel frustrated, and say “do you remember when?” Do you remember when work was going better. Do you remember when the family was doing better, do you remember when the community was more together, when we didn’t feel like we where harried and frustrated, and living a life marked by struggle and tension. Do you remember when the church was full? When it didn’t seem like culture was against Christianity. Do you remember when it seemed like God was on the move? Its easy to feel discouraged during certain seasons of life. It feels like the bottom is dropping out, things are going nowhere God, and yet, the fact is, God is on the throne and at work no matter what.

A few weeks back, I was reminded of this in a wonderful way. Teen challenge came and lead us in worship, and shared about their ministry, and the church was rather empty that Sun-day. And all through the worship service I was feeling particularly discouraged. I try not to look at numbers. I try not to count faces. I try to remember that there is hope at all times, and that counting faces shows that in the back of our minds we equate size and health, big with blessedness, and that this is not the case. I try to remind myself of the fact that far true signs of health are found in the depth of disciples, and their love of the gospel, and in their desire to live on mission for the glory of God.

But I was forgetting all that, and counting faces, and feeling down. I all but apologized to the leader of the Teen Challenge team for such a low attendance Sunday. And then I went down to lunch. We had an all church lunch so that we could spend more time with the men and learn more about what God is doing in their lives, and that’s when Lucy Mbugua came and sat down next to me, and introduced me to her friend Joyce. Joyce serves at a church of 700 back home in Kenya. And she told me that she is interested in bringing Teen Challenge back to Kenya. IN that moment, I was reminded once again the God is sovereign. That God is working even in what seems like a moment of failure, and de-feat. I was reminded that He is doing His will even when we have no idea what's going on.

Even when we're think we think were blowing and He’s not there, and just feeling totally crushed. The reminder for me, and I believe for all of us, is that God is on the throne. God is in control, and we need to find our life in him I need to find my life in him, and only/ in him.

He's at work in the great and glorious, and he is at work in the mundane things like an invitation to Teen Challenge and invitation by a friend to visit the church. He’s working in the time you leave the office, and the interactions you have on the way out the door. We never know what He is doing, but we do know that we can trust Him, and hope in Him, and find our life and our rest in Him. So often we run around trying to control the details of our lives. We are constantly stresses and worried that if we don’t do something it won’t get done, and if we don’t act and speak in a certain way, we’ll ruin everything.

And yet, what we are reminded is that we don’t have to live with this sword of Damocles over our heads. He is in control, and we rest in His finished work, and then live out of it with hope and joy. In Psalm 42, the writer frets speaks about how frustrated and distressed he is. And he talks about how he frets and worries in the midst of tense times. He says his tears have been his food day and night, while men say to him all day long, "Where is your God?" And he remembers how he used to hope, and how he lost his hope, and he lays out his frustrations. But in the midst of that he says something profound. He says it twice. He says “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God”, and he rejoices, saying, “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me. By day the LORD directs his love, at night his song is with me-- a prayer to the God of my life.”

Even when we are frustrated. Individually, or corporately, even when we feel like the bottom us dropping out on us, He Is Sovereign! We can find our hope, our rest, our life in him. Trust Him. Find your life in Him. Seek to glorify Him, and then trust that He will indeed work for the glory of His name no matter what it seems like at first glance.

From the Newsletter: Thoughts: Four resources Christianity gives us for suffering

Over the last few months we’ve had 2 funerals, and many other maladies at our church. From accidents to illness to death, the church family has encountered suffering and hardship. Something I wanted to say in my recent sermon on suffering from Romans 8, but needed to cut, is that Christianity offers us rich resources to lean into when sufferings come. Often Christians don’t lean into them, but they are there inviting us to lean into them.

There are four key doctrines that make up the foundation of these resources for dealing with pain, suffering and evil. Together, these four key doctrines stand over and against the secular or deistic view that sees suffering as an interruption to be pushed away or drowned out, and show you how you can move through it with hope.

The first is the belief in a personal, wise, infinite, and therefore inscrutable God who controls the affairs of the world–and that is far more comforting than the belief that our lives are in the hands of fickle fate or random chance.

The second is that, in Jesus Christ, God came to earth and suffered with and for us sacrificially–and that is far more comforting than the idea that God is remote and uninvolved. The cross also proves that, despite all the inscrutability, God is for us, and more than that, it shows us that "Suffering is actually at the heart of the Christian story.

The third doctrine is that through faith in Christ’s work on the cross, we can have assurance of our salvation–that is far more comforting than karmic systems of thought. We are assured that the difficulties of life are not payment for our past sins, since Jesus has paid them. As Luther taught, suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you. Secularity cannot give you that, and religions like Buddhism and Hinduism that teach variations of karma and provide salvation through virtue and good works cannot give it either.

The fourth is the doctrines of the bodily resurrection from the dead for all who believe. This completes the spectrum of our joys and consolations. One of the deepest desires of the human heart is for love without parting. Needless to say, the prospect of resurrection is far more comforting than the beliefs that death just takes into nothingness or into an impersonal spiritual substance. The resurrection goes beyond the promise of an ethereal disembodied afterlife. We get our bodies back, in a state of beauty and power that we cannot today imagine. Jesus’ resurrection was corporeal –it could be touched and embraced, and he ate food. And yet He passed through closed doors and could disappear. This is a material existence, but one beyond the bounds of our imagination. The idea of heaven can be a consolation for suffering, a compensation for the life we have lost. But resurrection is not just consolation–it is restoration. We get it all back–the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life–but to  new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength. It is a reversal of the seeming irreversibility of loss" I mentioned this thought during the meditation at Al’s funeral. When JJ was told that Mr. Blood had died, he said that he didn’t want him to be in heaven, and when Veronique told him that now Al’s not sick, he asked "does that mean he has two arms now that he’s in heaven?" The resounding answer is yes. That’s the promise of the resurrection.

 

In this life, we will all face hardship, and the question we will face is, "How can you be to-tally sure when you look at all the horrible stuff that has happened in your life and out in the world that someday God is going to make it all right? How can you not just hope so, but be absolutely sure that in spite of your own failures, God loves you and will never let you go? How can you know that when you face death it is not the end? Only if you know that Jesus rose from the dead and there-fore so will you. You know what else this means? You can have incredible hope in suffering. Tim Keller, whose incredible book Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering supplied most of these thoughts, points out that what this knowledge means for us is that "While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy". Suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you, but the more you dive into your resources, the more you are able to face it.

Use Your Time Well

Since Bonnie called me to tell me that her husband Bruce had passed away, I’ve found myself thinking about how finite and fleeting life is, and that you never know what a day or a week may bring. One day, he’s home and looks like he’s headed back towards healthy, and just five days later, he’s gone.

And it’s made me think about how fragile this life really is. We live in a comfortable western world where we are usually insulated from swift and tragic deaths, and for those that know him, this was a stark reminder that we are much less insulate than we think, and we have far less time than we think we do. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; says Psalm 90, yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you? So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom (90:10-12). Those of low estate are but a breath; those of high estate are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath, says Psalm 62 (62:9).

This all leaves me with a question for those who know Christ: How are we using our time? All too often, we waste it. We live in a celebrity, entertainment culture, which sucks us in without us even knowing it, unless we actively fight it. I don’t know if there has ever been a culture more given over to seeking to be entertained than this one. The Romans famously had their bread and circus, but that wasn’t every day. The average American watches 5 hours a day of TV, which works out to around 35 hours a week, or 9 years of your life. And as you get older, apparently TV viewing increases. We all bemoan the fact that the average American youth watches 1200 hours of TV in a year, while they only go to school for about 900 hours, but what we don’t says is that apparently, as you get older, apparently TV viewing goes up. The average youth watches 24 hours of TV, but after that it rises steadily until people over 65 average 48 hours a week, or nearly seven hours a day. 

 

But it’s not just TV, at any time; we have a constant stream of entertainment running by us. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, this update on my phone calling for my attention. And I haven’t even gotten to video games and the internet. We live in a culture that says, in the words of Nirvana “here I am now, entertain me”.

And it’s so corrosive. Pastor and Theologian John Piper once said that “The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night.” He’s right. It deadens our mind and softens our heart for God, giving us a love for the world, and a desire for comfort.

The result is that we sit around and spend our time on the trivial and unimportant, and then moan that we don’t have time to read our Bible and pray, and pursue the things of God. Piper commented that “One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time”, ouch.

Beyond that, there is our general pursuit of leisure. Moments of leisure are not bad in of and of themselves. But, our culture has made leisure one of the great goals of life. Work, so then you can then do nothing. It’s the great end of life. But the bible says that we where created to work. Work is good. We were created to work for the glory of God, leisure and rest is never the end, the glory of God is. 

And then there’s our pursuit of stuff. The great ability of advertisers is to create an ever in-creasing hole of desire that can never be filled, and so we chase this trinket and that thing, because we’ve been told that if we have that, everything will be complete. And so we run and run on the treadmill chasing things that do not matter. Bubbles and status symbols, things that we think we have to have to fit in, but will one day populate a landfill, because they have been replaced by a newer version. 

We have 168 hours in a week. That's it. What are you doing with them? If we truly believe the gospel, we should reprioritize how we spend our time. Is prayer and scripture near the top of our agenda? Do we prioritize sharing the gospel? Are we prioritizing reading things that build our mind and give us a distinctively Christian worldview and approach to life, or are we taking in drivel? Are we actively dreaming and scheming about how to spread the gospel, or dreaming and scheming about the next movie we’re going to watch? Are you building relationships that you allow for the spread of the gospel, or building your Candy Crush score (if you don’t know what Candy Crush is, that’s a good thing). Don’t waste your life. Desire that your life count for something great! Long for your life to have eternal significance. Don’t coast through life without a passion, being entertained along the way. 

Someday you will stand be-fore God, and give an account of how you used your time, and so I say again, don’t waste it. It is better to lose your life than to waste it. Young, old, especially those of you that are retired, may you use your time well, because life is too short, precarious, and painful to waste it on entertainment or chasing baubles that will fill landfills. Heaven is to great, in the words of piper, hell is too horrible; eternity is too long that we should putter around on the porch of eternity. It is better to lose your life than to waste it. May you use your time wisely, may it count for eternity, and may you be able to say with great joy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith (2Tim. 4:7)”, rather than, I have no idea where the time went.

TV Stats came from: Staticbrain, and the NY daily News.