God of Justice

I ran across this song a couple of months ago, and thought that it would be a perfect missions month song, but more than that it hits the themes that I think we need to be reminded of over and over again.  Justice.  Mercy.  Loving the unloved.  These themes go hand in hand with worship.

We’ve talked before about Amos 5:21-24.  God hates and despises our worship when it is not accompanied by justice and mercy.  Micah 6:8 follows along the same lines where it says, “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly before the Lord.”  Yet again we see that theme of the Lord requiring of us justice and mercy and kindness.

How does this happen?  I think Tim Hughes does a great job of reminding us of both the purpose and the method that we might show the world around us love.  That God of justice was a savior to us all.  He came to rescue the weak and the poor.  Most importantly, He came to serve and not to be served.  That is our example, to serve and not to be served!  This was just as countercultural then as it is now.  The disciples were shocked when Jesus washed their feet.  This was the same Jesus who John the Baptist was unfit to tie His sandals, yet He was serving the disciples at a base level.  This of course was a picture for how He came to serve all on the cross of Calvary.

I don’t know about you, but I have trouble with knowing how to answer this call.  This call to go live to feed the hungry and stand beside the broken.  I have been contemplating justice for months now since David Nasser’s talk about being the Bride of Christ in the world.  In a completely unrelated time, I was watching today a message John Piper gave this week about C.S. Lewis and how he is the second most important dead person in his life.  About 50 minutes into his message, he starts talking about what Lewis taught him about the perils of introspection.  He quotes C.S. Lewis, and I’ll repeat the quote here.

This is our dilemma . . . as thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humor while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things?

You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning around to look at the hope itself. . . . Introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look inside ourselves and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or track or by product for the activities themselves.

Then Piper ties it all together by saying this, “What this has meant for me is, first, that I see now that the pursuit of Joy must always be indirect—focusing not on the experience but the object to be enjoyed. And, second, I see that faith in Jesus, in its most authentic experience is suspended when it is being analyzed to see if its real. Which means this analysis always ends in discouragement. When we are trusting Christ most authentically, we are not thinking about trusting, but about Christ. When we step out of the moment to examine it, we cease what we were doing, and therefore cannot see it. My counsel for strugglers therefore is relentlessly: Look to Jesus. Look to Jesus in his word. And pray for eyes to see.”

How do we love justice and mercy?  How do we keep from just singing?  We focus on Christ, always on Christ.  How else will we know justice than to look to the perfect Judge Himself?  How else will we see mercy unless we see Him who showed such mercy and grace at the cross that we must be made speechless?  Our prayer should be, “fill us up and send us out.”  Just as Piper prayed for “eyes to see,” let us be praying for hands to love and eyes to see and feet to go.  I know that if that is truly the desire of our heart, He will open up opportunities, and before we know it, we will look back and say, “wow, look how God was glorified by serving those people!”

So, as we worship, let us remember that our worship is not just songs on Sunday, but rather our songs on Sunday are about our worship throughout our lives!

A Mighty Fortress

As I look through Christy Nockels’ song, “A Mighty Fortress,” I am fairly certain that we could go through the song line by line and find the corresponding Bible verses.  So, in the interests of time, let’s grab some of the major themes.

Let’s start with a concept that isn’t mentioned in the song directly.  This is the image of the separation of the wheat from the chaff that we see throughout the Bible.  I would encourage you to look up chaff and see the illustrations.  The chaff is the seed husks and stalk that get separated out from the wheat.  It is worthless for anything but being burned.  We see throughout the Bible that God separates the chaff from the wheat in our hearts and burns it up.  He separates that which is useless to our purpose of glorifying Him and burns it up.  What a promise!

This is the image that the Nockels paint for us first.  The image of God as a consuming fire.  They get this term from Deuteronomy 4:24, “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.”  and Hebrews 12:28-29, “Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”

Some people get the wrong idea from the term jealous God.  When God is jealous, he wants the best for us.  He knows that if we would only turn and keep our eyes on Him, we would be satisfied.  Our deepest need is to worship.  As a people, we all respond to that need by worshiping something.  That may be money, or power, or ourselves, or other unsatisfying things.  The Father knows that if we would turn and worship Him, we would be satisfied from the well that never ends.

Next to the idea of God as a Judge.  Do we not want justice?  When we are wronged, do we not want the offender judged fairly?  God is the only righteous Judge.  He alone sees to the core of our being and judges us.  That is why Christ was necessary, because when God looks at us to judge us, He must be fair, and getting judged fairly on our own is bad news for everyone.  When we identify with Christ though, when He looks at us, He doesn’t see our sin and brokenness, He sees Christ’s perfect atoning work on the cross!  What a wondrous love!  What about the murderer who accepts Christ though?  How can God not judge that man or woman for his/her crime?  I would say, have you not committed sins as great either in your heart or in deed.  Have you coveted?  Have you committed adultery by looking where you shouldn’t look?  Have you murdered someone with your words and actions or inactions?  I think if we start looking at ourselves, we start realizing just how great Christ’s sacrifice really was.  It all boils down to the greatest command, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind.”  We all fall short, and the only One that ever has completed this command was the One who has existed in perfect harmony with the Father as a part of the Godhead for all eternity.

The other part of the song that Christy talks about is the other half of Hebrews 12:28-29.  Here it talks about the Kingdom being unshakable.   We’ve seen that imagery before of course.  When I read the title of this song, my mind goes to Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress” which is based on Psalm 46.  It is the same thought.  We would rather build our Faith on a solid foundation.  The solid Rock that is our Savior Jesus Christ.  In His name we cannot be shaken.  Though storms may buffet, we can never be shaken in Him.  This is a truth to cling to.  This is a promise that He is faithful to keep.  So much more faithful than we ever have been or will be.

So, let’s make this our prayer, to set our eyes on Him and our hearts on Him.  Let us take refuge in the fortress that can never be defeated.  Let us not fear even when the earth gives way and the mountains are moved into the heart of the sea.  Even though its waters roar and foam, though its mountains tremble at its swelling.  Let us be still and know that He is God.  He will be exalted among the nations; He will be exalted in all of the earth!  The Lord of hosts is with us.  The God of Jacob is our fortress.

Amen

How He Loves (part 2)

If it seems like it’s been forever since we did the devotional on How He Loves (Part 1), it’s because it’s been forever!

We left off after verse 1.  The chorus is fairly self explanatory, so we kind of skipped over it.  What I wanted to do here was to go through the second verse.  Of course, by the second verse, I mean the original one with that oh so controversial line in it, “when heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss…”

Before we get there, let’s start at the beginning of verse 2.  “So we are His portion and He is our prize.”  This sounds wrong to me.  Isn’t He our portion?  Well, this line is not only Biblical; it’s straight from the Bible!  We find the thought in Deuteronomy 32:9.  Rather than me with woeful attempts to use the English language try to explain it, I’ll quote Matthew Henry’s explanation here.

“All the world is His.  He is owner and possessor of heaven and earth, but His Church is His in a peculiar manner.  It is His demesne, His vineyard, His garden enclosed.  He has a particular delight in it:  it is the beloved of His soul, in it He walks, He dwells, it is His rest forever.  He has a particular concern for it, keeps it as the apple of His eye.  He has particular expectations from it, as a man has from his portion, has a much greater rent of honour, glory, and worship, from that distinguished remnant, than from all the world besides.  That God should be His people’s portion is easy to be accounted for, for He is their joy and felicity; but how they should be His portion, Who neither needs them, nor can be benefitted by them, must be resolved into the wondrous condescensions of free grace.”

What a wondrous thought.  There are so many blessing that can only be resolved by the wondrous condescension of free grace!  So much so, that we’re drawn to redemption only by His grace.  On our own we wouldn’t desire redemption.  It is only by His grace that we come to Him.  There is so much grace that if it were an ocean we would all be sinking in it!  Even people that neither acknowledge nor worship Him are benefiters of His grace every day.

The most breathtaking display of His grace was when heaven met earth by God the Son taking earthly form, becoming despised and rejected, beaten and crucified, all so that rebels could become worshipers.  That’s where this line, “When heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss” comes in.  Unfortunately this line alone is why we will never sing the song on Sunday morning.  I would have to take 20 minutes and explain what is meant by these lines, and only those that would be there would understand.  John Mark McMillan has blogged about this, so I’ll let his explanation stand.

“The idea behind the lyric is that the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth converge in a way that is both beautiful and awkwardly messy.  Think about the birth of a child, or even the death of Jesus Himself.  These miracles are both incredibly beautiful and incredibly sloppy (‘gory’ may be more realistic, but ‘Heaven meets earth like a gory mess’ didn’t seem to have the same ring).  Why does the church have such a problem when things being sloppy?  Do we really think we’re fooling anyone on Sunday morning, especially God?  Are we going to offend Him?...”

A sloppy wet kiss… Both beautiful and messy at the same time.  What a perfect description of what happened at both the incarnation and the cross.  This is why when David Crowder (with John Mark’s permission and blessing) changed the line to “unforeseen kiss.”  It has meant that so many more people have heard and sung this song than would have if he hadn’t changed the line.  The unfortunate part is that unforeseen completely changes the meaning of this verse.   When we consider the shocking way that Christ redeemed His people to the father, we can’t help but be struck by the depth of His love.  When we consider this, we should have no time to consider our regrets because we should be so busy worshiping Him!

Many of you know my dislike for “7-11” songs (7 words repeated 11 times),but when you consider how He does love us, and in such an undeserved way, you just have to repeat to the world that He loves us so much, and the world needs to see that!  Oh, how He loves us!

Remembrance (Communion Hymn)

This week is the Sunday for our quarterly communion, and as a part of our worship, we will be singing a new song by Matt Maher and Matt Redman called Remembrance. They say that they set out to write a song for communion because there are few communion songs in the church repertoire. As I sing this song, and think through the lyrics, I love the depth of the lyrics, the poetic quality, and the theological foundation on which they’re based.

Before we get to the best lines, we have to wade through Verse 1, where there is much that could be debated, and much to be misunderstood. The first line, “Oh how could it be, that my God would welcome me into this mystery” isn’t ambiguous, but the next line, “Say take this bread, take this wine. Now the simple made divine, for any to receive” causes me pause and thought.

Let me give you some history.

In 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Paul tells us, “²³ For ^xI received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that ^ythe Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, ²⁴ and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for⁵ you. Do this in remembrance of me.”^{6 25} In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” ²⁶ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death ^zuntil he comes.”

The words that have caused much discussion are the words, “This is my body,” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The cause for division has been the extent to which the church takes the words Christ spoke here. There are three levels of interpretation. The Roman Catholic Church takes Christ quite literally, and they believe that when the elements have been consecrated by a priest, they actually become the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. To follow, they believe that when the bread is broken and the cup is poured, the Body and Blood present are sacrificed and imparting Christ’s grace on those gathered. (By the way, my source here is Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem, so Catholic friends, feel free to correct me).

This is why, in the history of the Catholic church, commoners weren’t allowed to drink from the cup. There we a concern that they might spill the literal Blood of Jesus Christ, thus desecrating the sacrifice. The Catholic view assumes that Christ was being literal when he spoke, yet Christ frequently uses symbols when speaking about Himself. For example, He says that He is the vine (John 10:9) and that He is the door through which we must enter the Kingdom (John 6:14). Jesus also frequently made his points using parables as symbols. Therefore, we can be confident in knowing that Christ might use symbols to highlight His point. Also, the disciples at the Last Supper certainly would not have misunderstood Christ’s symbols as He broke the bread and poured the cup. The cup is not itself the new covenant, but rather a picture of what the new covenant is, Christ’s blood poured out for our sins.

The biggest objection to the Catholic view centers on their belief that each Eucharist is a sacrifice for our sins. Hebrews 9:25-28 debunks the idea of this being a sacrifice offered each time for sin. “Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.” One sacrifice for all time!

The Lutherans meet somewhere in the middle with their belief in consubstantiation, or that Christ’s Body and Blood are present in the Bread and the Cup, much like water is present in a sponge, but the sponge is not water. The last view is that the Lord’s Supper is a symbol that helps us to remember the covenant that we have in His Body and Blood.

Why does all of this matter? Because Matt Maher, one of the two writers is Catholic. “Now the simple made divine” could easily mean, now the bread become the Body, etc. However, I don’t think that’s what they mean here. Matt Redman is not Catholic, and they both stated that as they wrote this song, they deliberately stayed away from doctrinal differences in interpretation. This line would never have made it if it was talking about Transubstantiation. Rather, I think the line is simply saying that the simple act of eating the bread and drinking the cup has a significance beyond simply eating and drinking. We certainly see this from Paul, who says in right after the usual communion passage, “^{27 a}Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord ^bin an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning ^cthe body and blood of the Lord. ^{28 d}Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. ²⁹ For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.”

Paul wanted to make sure that the Corinthians understood that remembering our Savior is not just eating and drinking. Paul isn’t saying we need to be sinless, rather, he’s saying we must examine ourselves. I don’t know about you, but serious self examination leads me to the cross. As we examine ourselves, we eat and drink together and are reminded that it was while we were yet sinners that Christ gave His life for us. Communion is a symbol by which we can proclaim to the world the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Let’s move on through the song. The last paragraph is summed up in the pre-chorus that says “By Your mercy we come to Your table, by Your grace You are making us faithful.” It is in recognition of His wonderful mercy that we come to celebrate His sacrifice. And it is only by the Grace of God that we are faithful at all!

That brings us to the chorus, which is my favorite part of this song. I love the progression here. Lord, we remember You, and as we remember Your sacrifice, we worship You, and as we worship You, we celebrate Your sacrifice at the Table. As we are responding at the Table, we remember You. What a wonderful cycle of worship! Are we not getting a glimpse of heaven? We see in Revelation that we’ll be before the throne singing Worthy is the Lamb who was slain! We’ll be remembering His sacrifice just as we do when we share the Table, yet in heaven, we’ll really get it. We’ll really understand His majesty! We’ll really understand what He did in becoming man, and we won’t need a symbol to see how He loved us at the cross!

Ouch, I’m into page three, and I’m not even halfway through the song, so I’ll try to hurry up. The next verse shows us both the Hope we have in Christ, and the Grace He shows us. On the cross, He overcame every trial we have faced and ever will face. And not just that, but there is no one who is outside of the range of God’s Grace if they would but come to the cross. All sins are forgiven at the cross. We must share this with the world around us!

Finally, let me touch on the bridge, where the lyric is, “Dying You destroyed our death, Rising You restored our life.” When I hear this line, I’m reminded of the way Pastor Mark baptized people, as they went under water, he would say, “United with Him in His death,” and as he lifted you up he would say, “Raised to new life in His resurrection.” Here is another symbol of how we connect with Christ through the cross. When He died on the cross and then rose from the grave, He won a victory over death itself, and when we follow Him, we too will see victory over death as we live eternally with Him! May He return soon so we might see His face!

 

How He Loves (part 1)

I’ve given it some thought, and I thought we’d take a break for a while from talking about Psalms and talk for a while about the songs we sing, are going to sing, or don’t sing. My intention is to take each song and work through it, talking about the biblical basis for it, or talking about why it isn’t based on sound theology. If you have some recommendations, send them my way!

I thought we’d start with the song How He Loves by John Mark McMillan. I’ve wrestled with this song for a while now. The chorus is great, and blatantly obvious in its meaning. Love the thought there, but the poetic nature of the lyrics made me step back and evaluate. My intention here is to talk about either how I interpret the lyrics, or when possible, talk about the writer’s original intent. The first thing that you learn in Biblical interpretation is that you’re attempting to understand the author’s original intent. Now for the Bible, we have to piece that together, luckily with song writers, we can ask them!

How He Loves starts off with a truth that is not necessarily a popular truth, or an understood truth for that matter. John (when I refer to John, I’m talking about the song writer) starts right off saying, “He is jealous for me.” This is an aspect of God that some people have trouble with, in large part because of the negative connotation that the word jealousy has in today’s society. Let’s break it apart a bit.

In Exodus 20:3, the very first commandment the Lord gives us is, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Throughout the Old Testament, there is talk of our jealous God. In the New Testament, we get glimpses of the same picture. In 1 Corinthians 10:14-22, Paul spends some time talking about idolatry, and at the end of the passage he says, “Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy, are we stronger than He?”

Here we come to a discussion of idolatry again. I think we’ve discussed that in God’s eyes, an idol is something that comes before Him. How devoted to God are we? Do our things come before Him? How about our family, does that come before Him? If it does, then it is an idol. Now, I’m not saying that things or family are bad things. I’m saying that they are idols to us if they are more important to us than God. Occasionally in the Bible we see God testing His people to see if they are really devoted to Him. Sometimes people show they are, sometimes not. Perhaps the starkest case is when God calls on Abraham to sacrifice the son that has been given to him after a lifetime of waiting. Abraham immediately obeyed, because he trusted His Lord to provide. His son was not more important to him than his God.

Now, we will certainly never be put in that exact situation, or will we? What if your son or daughter someday feels called to the mission field? Are you willing to give them up to do the Lord’s work? What about if the Lord lays it upon your heart to sell some of your things so that you can give? Are you willing, or are you more attached to your stuff than to your Lord. Let me ask this question, what is more important on a Sunday morning, that the worship sounds/looks the way it needs to so that you can worship the most comfortably, or that you are there with hearts poured out before the Lord regardless of the style? Bob Kauflin has posted a wonderful discussion of idols in worship at http://www.worshipmatters.com. I would encourage you to visit the site and read his discussion. My point here is that idolatry has a tendency to creep up in our hearts, and it’s usually good things that begin to supplant our Lord.

Hopefully, what you realize, as all of us should realize, is that we are hard hearted sheep. We wander aimlessly sometimes and He has to bring us back. The illustration of us being sheep, and the Lord being our good shepherd is one that the more you think about it, and the more you study it, the more apt it becomes. God is jealous for our affections. Why? Because He knows what is best for us, and He knows that the only place we will find satisfaction is in Him. So much like a shepherd sometimes has to aggressively care for his sheep, so sometimes the Lord has to wear our hearts down.

“[He] loves like a hurricane; I am a tree, bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.” A tree is an immovable object. Most trees don’t do a lot of bending on their own, but in the face of a hurricane, a constant pressure, the tree has two choices, it can bend or be uprooted. Our Lord knows our uprooting point though, unlike the hurricane and the tree, and so, He applies the pressures needed, until we finally bend and then….

“All of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory. I realize just how beautiful You are and how great Your affections are for me.” We get it; we see the Lord’s working in our lives. We are drawn near to Him, and all we can see is the beauty and majesty of our God. And most of all, when we are once again in right relationship with Him; we understand that all of the trials that brought us to the point of repentance were actually love. Yes, it hurt, but if He had not pushed, we would have remained unsatisfied. We would have remained lost. It hurt coming back, but God loves us so much, that He is willing to see us go through pain, to see us more satisfied. It’s much like as if we had a child that needed an operation. The child doesn’t understand why they must submit to pain. But the parent knows that the pain is but temporary, and will allow the child to live more freely and longer (I’m sure you can think of examples.)

So after we consider such things, we must sing, “Oh, how He loves us!” Next week, sloppy wet kisses and grace.