Saturday Evening, February 25, 2023

 

 

I’ve got at least two more reflections on “Sounds Good But Is It The Truth?”, hopefully next week I’ll be able to write them. Context, context, context…both immediate and greater Biblical context.

 

One of our neighbors went to visit relatives who live out of state and came down with a severe case of covid. He was confined to bed for 4 or 5 weeks at his sister’s home. Thankfully neither his wife or sister caught it. We’ve been talking on the phone and praying throughout this ordeal, and I’ve asked other neighbors to pray for him. He has lost 20 pounds. They are hoping to drive home a week from tomorrow, please keep him (Pat) and his wife (Sharon) in your prayers.

 

Today I had a sweet prayer time with Bertha in the Food Lion parking lot. We had a conversation and I asked her how I could pray for her…well…she shared with me about things going on in her family and then we held hands and prayed…it was one of those “Do it now Bob” moments…and it was sweet in the Holy Spirit.

 

This evening I was reading Dante and the following came to me (much love and blessings! – Bob)

 

"...for so transparent grows the veil, to pass within will surely not be hard."

 

Purgatory VIII.20 - 21   Sayers translation

 

That which was once dark becomes translucent...as the numinous penetrates what is, on our side, seemingly impenetrable.

 

A surprise party awaits us like no other...O the angelic anticipation, O the excitement of creation (Romans 8:18 – 25)...knowing that an unveiling of unveilings is drawing us into the Blessed Trinity...O how glorious is our destiny in our Elder Brother.

 

"...to pass within will surely not be hard"!!!!

Sounds Good, But Is It The Truth? (4)

 

 

In the previous post I wrote: “…the idea that all we must do is to “confess our sins” and that we are then “saved” and can go our merry way is simply not true – confession of sins is not the same as repentance; in fact, 1 John 1:9 is often misunderstood and misquoted.”

 

Let’s please consider 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

 

What does this mean? To whom was John writing? Does the audience it was written to make any difference to its meaning? Was the Apostle John writing to people who were in a relationship with Jesus Christ or to a people who were not in a relationship with Jesus Christ? Was he writing to both? Does it matter?

 

More than once I have heard someone say, “I told my friend Frank that if he would confess his sins to God that God would forgive him and he would be saved.” But is this true? And if it isn’t true, how much damage are we doing to others when we tell them this?

 

On the face of it, First John was written to Biblical Christians, to those already in a relationship with Jesus Christ (see 3:1 as an example). Therefore, the context of 1:9 is that of living in a relationship with God. When we sin, and when we confess our sins, our intimacy with God is maintained and we live in His light (1 John 1:5 – 2:2). This is all thanks to our Advocate and propitiation – our Lord Jesus Christ; we cannot help ourselves in any way, shape, or form.

 

Those of us who are not living in a relationship with God in Christ, with Jesus Christ as our Lord, with the new life of God living within us, need more than having our sins forgiven – we need God’s gift of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, we need God’s very life in Christ within us – we need a new birth. We can’t really separate the elements that comprise Biblical salvation – they are all found holistically in Jesus Christ. That is, we can’t separate forgiveness of sins from repentance from new birth from the reception of the Holy Spirit from our “baptism” into the Body of Christ…and so forth and so on. We can’t separate them, but we can ponder them as they relate to one another in Christ and our life in Him.

 

Many confuse confession of sins with repentance – they are not the same. To “repent” is to change direction, to turnaround, to stop going in one direction and to go in the opposite direction – it is a change of life. In a Biblical context it is to stop going in the direction of sin and self and to follow Jesus Christ. Jesus says, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the Gospel’s will save it.” (Mark 8:34 – 35).

 

Can we see that what Jesus is saying entails more than someone simply “confessing” his sins in the sense of acknowledging his wrongs and being sorry for them? Repentance will include confession of sins, but confession of sins does not, in and of itself, include repentance. The difference is between life and death – it is no small matter.

 

Peter tells the people in Acts 2:38, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” How is this different than simply saying, “Confess your sins and you will be forgiven”?

 

Consider the life-changing images of the following:

 

“Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God….Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God.’” (John 3:3 & 5).

 

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are passed away; behold, new things have come.” (2 Cor. 5:17).

 

“He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” (Titus 3:5 – 7).

 

“…for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” (1 Peter 1:23).

 

“By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.” (1 John 4:13).

 

Living in a relationship with Jesus Christ is a vibrant experience, it is knowing God as our Father so that we cry out, “Abba! Father!” The Holy Spirit testifying with our spirit that we are truly the children of God (Romans 8:15 – 16). Can we see how much more this is than simply “confessing our sins” and going about our merry way, our own way, of life?

 

When we read in John 3:16 that, “…whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life,” the idea of believing means more than giving mental assent or recognition to Jesus Christ, it means that we throw our entire lives onto Him, it means that we exchange the breath of this world for the breath of God (by God’s grace and enabling – God is really the One doing the exchanging). It means that we pass from darkness to Light, from death to Life (Col. 1:13; Eph. 2:1 – 10).

 

The reason that, in the context of repentance, our forgiveness of sins is so glorious is that it carries with it our justification, and our justification brings with it an open door into an intimate relationship with God through Jesus Christ – for in Christ, God sees us as having never ever sinned and as having always kept His Holy Law. No wonder Paul writes:

 

“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…and we exult in hope of the glory of God.” (Romans 5:1 – 2).

 

O dear friends, we are called to understand and transmit the Bible as it is written; holistically and not piecemeal…and Jesus Christ is the Message of the Bible…He is always and forever the Message.

 

 

Sounds Good, But Is It The Truth? (3)

 

 

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” John 3:16.

 

Is there a difference between John 3:16 and the radio spot I previously referenced?

 

“Nothing can separate you from the love of God. God loves you more than your parents, your spouse, your friends. No matter where you are in life, no matter what you are going through – God loves you and nothing can separate you from His love.” (Radio spot).

 

If there is a difference, does it matter?

 

Here are some elements of John 3:16 to consider:

 

God “so loved” the world that He gave His only begotten Son. While the giving of His Son is an expression of God’s love, it is a particular and unique expression – because the “giving” was a giving of His Son on the Cross, bearing our sins, bearing our sinful natures – and becoming “sin for us,” (2 Cor. 5:21), becoming the object of God’s righteous judgment so that we might have eternal life and not perish if we believe in Him.

 

God “so loved” us because we were, and are, in trouble; as a world we are perishing. The “so loved” points to His giving His Son, and the giving of His Son points to our condition of spiritual death and condition of perishing. When the radio spot tells the people of the world that nothing can separate them from the love of God, that just isn’t true – our sins and our spiritual death are separating us from His love – they are a barrier to us receiving His love in Jesus Christ.

 

Those who believe in Jesus Christ, who repent of (turn from) their sins and way of life and commit their lives to following Jesus Christ as Lord shall not perish, but have eternal life – they receive the love of God into their lives (Romans 5:1 – 11).The radio spot does not call on the listener to respond to God, but the Gospel demands a response to God – the Gospel is not ambiguous, it is not uncertain – that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

 

(Let me interject, that the idea that all we must do is to “confess our sins” and that we are then “saved” and can go our merry way is simply not true – confession of sins is not the same as repentance; in fact, 1 John 1:9 is often misunderstood and misquoted. I will, the Lord willing, touch on this in the next post.)

 

The radio spot is true in that God loves the listener more than anyone else, and that God loves the listener in what he or she may be going through. However, the radio spot does not tell the listener that God “so loved” him or her that He gave His only begotten Son. It does not tell the listener that he or she is perishing – for to be sure, “whatever you are going through” includes sin and spiritual death, it includes the fact that the listener is perishing. Nor does the radio spot call on the listener to believe in Jesus Christ so that she or he might not perish but have eternal life.

 

The radio spot carries with it the real danger that people will have a false sense of security and that they will ignore the true Gospel as encapsulated in John 3:16.

 

The context of John 3:16 is that we must “be born again,” that is, we must have the life of God within us through faith in Jesus Christ. The context is also, “He who believes in Him [the Son] is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:18).

 

In the midst of our perishing, God loved us so much that He gave His only begotten Son – we cannot, and we must not erase the image of perishing from our message – that my friends, is simply evil – for it erases the Cross of Christ and the Christ of the Cross and it gives perishing people the opium of deceit rather than the wake-up call of the Gospel.

 

Does “evil” seem too strong a word? What might we call it should a physician give terribly ill patients sugar pills and tell them it is medicine…when medicine would cure them? Is that not evil? Is it not evil to see husbands and wives and mothers and fathers and children perish at the hands of a doctor dispensing the false for the true? Is not our opioid crisis evil? Is it not evil when doctors dispense opioids like candy with the support of pharmaceutical companies and others? If these things are evil, then certainly telling those who are perishing into eternity that “all is well” is evil.

 

Have we not created our own addiction? An addiction to avoiding the Word of God as it is written, and substituting it with self-oriented and self-pleasing messages to make us all feel good…at the expense of true and loving relationships with God in Christ, at the expense of eternal life? At the expense of the Cross?

 

“For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” (1 Cor. 2:2).

Sounds Good, But Is It The Truth? (2a)

  

This is a postscript to yesterday’s post, in which I raised the hypothetical situation in which a doctor does not tell a patient with cancer that he has cancer, but rather tells him that he is in great health. Today I want to draw on my observations in the workplace, which are not hypothetical. My point in this is to demonstrate that when we fail to tell others the full Gospel message, which includes the news that we have something far worse than cancer (sin and spiritual death), that we are not actually loving and caring for others, but rather putting ourselves first; we are not thinking about their feelings, but rather our own.

 

One of the most difficult things I encountered in business was teaching my managers the importance of constructively telling their underperforming employees the truth about their performance and in showing them what improvements were needed and how to implement those improvements. A conversation might go like this:

 

“Susan, I see that Frank once again failed to get his reports in on time this week, I’ve gotten another email from the corporate office about it. Our client contract stipulates that these reports are due every Monday by 3:00 P.M.”

 

“I know Bob. I’ll talk to him again.”

 

“How long have you been talking to him about it?”

 

“I guess it’s been about two months now.”

 

“Have you given him a timeframe in which he has to meet the standards of our contract? Does he know his job is in jeopardy? Does he realize how serious this is?”

 

“But Bob, I don’t want to hurt his feelings, and I want him to like me.”

 

“Susan, do you care about him enough to tell him the truth? Would you rather he has a job or have hurt feelings?”

 

While these conversations were more complex and while they each had a history, this barebones discussion illustrates what I often heard, “I don’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings. I want the other person to like me.”

 

In other words, the manager, while often telling me that she or he cared about the employee, often cared more about her or his own feelings than the employee – that is, the manager wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of telling employee the truth. This also meant that the manager avoided investing herself in the employee’s hopeful improvement and avoided having to make the decision of whether to, at some point, release the employee.

 

Over the years I’ve seen men and women respond positively to the bad news of their performance when presented in the context of care and concern and the offer of help for improvement. Naturally, I’ve also seen folks vehemently deny that anything was wrong and reject all help. We can’t control how others respond, but we can control whether we tell the truth or not, and we can control the spirit in which we tell it.

 

One of the saddest situations I found myself in from time-to-time, was to inherit a manager who had previously worked for others who never gave that manager constructive feedback, who did not invest themselves in that manager – with the consequence that the manager not only never grew professionally or personally but thought that he or she was doing a great job. Then, when the manager’s department encountered difficult times, the manager was not only ill-equipped to handle the situation, but he or she tended to be resentful of any coaching since coaching had never been part of the person’s experience.

 

O dear friends, if we truly love others we will tell them the truth. The Cross is a stumbling block, and it is foolish, and it appears to be weak (1 Cor. 1:18 – 31; Gal. 5:55), but it is also “the power of God.” Paul writes:

 

“For I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes…” (Romans 1:16).

 

Do we believe this? Or do we insist on not telling people the truth by not warning them of the cancer of sin, of spiritual and eternal death, of separation from the incredible love of God in Jesus Christ? Are we offering others the opportunity of repenting of their sins and way of life, and of following our Lord Jesus Christ? Are we offering others God’s gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ in place of the wages of sin?

 

Sounds Good, But Is It The Truth? (2)

 

The last post began with the following:

 

I recently heard a radio spot that said, “Nothing can separate you from the love of God. God loves you more than your parents, your spouse, your friends. No matter where you are in life, no matter what you are going through – God loves you and nothing can separate you from His love.”

 

Now let me ask you, is this true? Is the entire statement true? And if it isn’t true, does it really matter? If most of it is true, does the fact that some of it isn’t true matter?

 

I then asked us to think a bit about context, for while Paul writes in Romans 8:35 – 39 that, in essence, nothing can “separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” who was he writing to? Who was Paul’s audience? Does Paul’s audience matter? Does our audience matter?

 

Consider Paul’s words, “in Jesus Christ our Lord.” Does everyone on the planet acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord with both their words and their actions? Do they have a relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord of their lives?  

 

Note that the “love of God” which Paul is writing about “is in Jesus Christ our Lord.” There is a specific location for the love of God which Paul is writing about, and that location, the place where it can be found, is in Jesus Christ our Lord – it isn’t anywhere else.

 

Let’s consider the context of Paul’s statement about nothing separating us from the love of God in his letter to the Romans, what precedes the statement, what leads up to it?

 

In the early section of Romans, Paul surveys the human condition and concludes that we are all “under sin” (2:9) and that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” (3:23). He then points his audience to Christ Jesus (3:21 – 4:25) and faith in Him as our salvation from sin and spiritual death. He concludes this first section with a glorious passage (5:1 – 11) in which he extols our new relationship with God in our Lord Jesus Christ, which is a result of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ.

 

“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…and we exult in hope of the glory of God…the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us…But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him…And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.” (Excerpted from Romans 5:1 – 11).

 

Let me also point out Paul’s sobering reminder in Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

After this first section, represented by the above passages, Paul moves into a new section in his letter which explores what it is to live as the sons and daughters of the living God. Here we have the following:

 

“For you have not received a spirit of bondage again to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God.” (Romans 8:15 – 16).

 

Shortly after 8:15 – 16 we have Paul’s question in 8:35, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” followed by his glorious affirmation that, in essence, nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

But again, who is the “you” and the “we” and the “us” of Romans 8:15 – 16 and 8:35 – 39? It is, of course, those who have, in Christ, been made new people in Him (2 Cor. 5:17 – 21); those who have repented of their sins, their way of life, and who have acknowledged Jesus Christ as their Lord and Redeemer – those who have had their sins forgiven in Jesus Christ and have entered (by the enabling grace of God) into a relationship with Christ Jesus and the Father in the Holy Spirit.

 

Paul is not making his statement about nothing being able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord to the world, to mankind in general, for such a statement would not be true. Let’s recall that the “wages of sin is death,” and consider God’s words to ancient Judah, “But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear,” (Isaiah 59:2).

 

Suppose a doctor, not wanting to make a patient “feel bad,” does not tell him that he has cancer and needs immediate treatment? Is this doctor being faithful to his patient? Is he being faithful to the oath he took to care for his patients?

 

I once had a doctor who cared enough about me to ask, “Do you want to die early? Because if you don’t want to die early, you need to lose weight and change what you eat and get active.” His words and his concern motivated me to make changes in my life, I needed to hear what seemed like bad news at the time so that I could experience the good news of the benefits of changing my lifestyle. I will always be grateful to him; I had seen other doctors since I’d been overweight and had elevated blood readings, but he was the only one who cared enough to tell me the truth about my situation.

 

Certainly a doctor who tells a patient with cancer that “everything looks great” is engaging in malpractice. Most assuredly sin and separation from God is far worse than cancer.

 

Does it matter whether the radio spot is true? Does it matter if some of it is true and some of it isn’t? What is the central message of the radio spot? Is it true? If it isn’t true, does it matter?

 

Here is another question, suppose the radio message was anchored in John 3:16 instead of Romans 8:35 – 39, would it make a difference in its message to a general audience? What elements are there in John 3:16 that might make a difference?

 

Does context matter when seeking to understand and teach the Bible’s message?