Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Busy Christianity

Busyness is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. So I was greatly encouraged by these thoughts from Kevin DeYoung. Here is his conclusion.
A cross, yes. Jesus said we would have to carry one of those. But a cross that kills our sins, smashes our idols, and teaches us the folly of self-reliance. Not a burden to do the impossible. Not a burden to always do more for Jesus. Not a burden of bad news that never lets up and obedience that is always out reach.

No doubt some Christians need to be shaken out of their lethargy. I try to do that every Sunday morning and evening. But there are also a whole bunch of Christians who need to be set free from their performance-minded, law-keeping, world-changing, participate-with-God-in-recreating-the-cosmos shackles. I promise you, some of the best people in your churches are getting tired. They don’t need another rah-rah pep talk. They don’t need to hear more statistics and more stories Sunday after Sunday about how bad everything is in the world. They need to hear about Christ’s death and resurrection. They need to hear how we are justified by faith apart from works of the law. They need to hear the old, old story once more. Because the secret of the gospel is that we actually do more when we hear less about all we need to do for God and hear more about all that God has already done for us.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Romans 6:15-23

What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:15-23)
The Wrong Kind of Free. You’ve heard the expression, “Freedom isn’t free.” I have a good number of America’s “greatest generation” in my church, so I hear it a lot. And of course it’s true. The freedoms of press, speech, religion, self-government, etc. came to this country at the price of much blood shed. A sad fact of history is that it rarely comes in any other way. Yet freedom at the cost of blood shed is still freedom; however, freedom at the cost of slavery is not. Of course, a free slave is an oxymoron, but that is what we all are according Paul. If you are a slave of sin, then you are free to righteousness. If you are a slave to righteousness, then you are free to sin. Such language seriously challenges our assumptions about freedom. Can there be a freedom that is no freedom at all? Can there be a slavery that is really freedom?

Free to Righteousness. What exactly does it mean to be “free of righteousness.” Perhaps Paul means something like “contamination.” A “slave of sin,” which he says we all once were or currently are, is free from the contamination of righteousness. Righteousness does not creep into his life like a healing gangrene and spread its life-giving aroma. No, the natural man is absolutely free of such health, absolutely free from moral good. This might sound like an overstatement. Certainly, even apart from Christ, we are not entirely free of moral good. Even a rapist may send his mother a card on her birthday. But as I said in my last post, Paul is not concerned with good and evil merely at the level of the will. Evil is more than an action or a choice, and so is good. The fruits of righteousness are not the fulfilling of a moral obligation. They are love, joy, peace, patience, etc. That is, they are matters of the heart and soul. So for example, the natural man, the man apart from God’s grace, can perform an act of kindness, but he does so because of what sociologists call reciprocity. He gives because he knows that he will be given to, because he knows he needs to be given to. Others are really tools of the self. You give to receive. His motives are completely free from the contamination of righteousness.

The Wages of Sin. Romans 6:23 is oft quoted by Christians to non-Christians in hopes that they will see the dangers of living life their own way and the hope found in the gift of salvation. However, it is important to note that Paul is addressing believers, and Paul’s point is not primarily about the punitive effects of sin. His focus is on the fruit of sin. He is not thinking of the court room but of the garden. The problem of sin is not merely the problem of a guilty verdict (though that is his point in Romans 3:19-20); it is also the problem of a putrid fungus eating away at the life of a fruit-bearing tree. Sin produces death. God’s punishment is simply condemning it to face its own demise.

The Free Gift of God. But righteousness is not like sin. Self-destruction comes to us as the product of who we are as slaves of sin. Righteousness and the life that follows is not produced by us. It is given to us. Jesus, and Jesus alone, is the producer. Thus, Paul sets before us two roads. One is to walk in our efforts fighting for our own freedom from the authority of God. This is the road of shame with a destination of death. The second road, and God help us never to cease being amazed that there is a second road, is the road of Jesus’ efforts and the healing product of those efforts freely given to us. Is not the choice obvious? And if you do not wish to make the obvious choice, then at least admit that you are not free.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Romans 6:12-14

Finally back to Romans.
12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. 13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
“Let not sin reign.” That phrase should immediately signal to us that Paul’s notion of sin is quite different from ours. Sin is lying, hurting, gossiping, lusting, etc. Sin is about doing. Doing bad things. It’s a convenient theory. Reduce the amount of naughty things you do and the better you are. Then we read Paul, and Paul says, “Let not sin reign in your mortal bodies.” How exactly does an act “reign” over us? It doesn’t. But Paul isn’t talking about mere acts, for he says, “Let not sin reign . . . to make you obey their passions.” Sin is rather personal here. It is a power, a force with desires and passions. Sin isn’t just the results of our poor choices; sin is the cause of them. Sin is the desires that lie behind the choices we make.

Farewell Self-effort. This is literally a life-changing discovery. Becoming a better person can no longer be considered a battle of self-effort. Self-effort is about the strength of the will, but here we find that the will itself is corrupt. The will is not an independent force that we can muster against any and all that opposes the good. The will is subservient to the values and desires of the heart. The heart says, “I want something sweet,” so the will says “Let’s go to Starbucks.” The hearts declares, “But I’d rather not put on some extra weight,” and so the will says, “Make it a skinny.” It is not the reverse. The will does not say, “Heart, desire something sweet, so I can choose Starbucks.” The will doesn’t desire. The will chooses, and the will always chooses what the heart wants. You might think, “Not always. I really didn’t want a decaf, sugar-free, skinny latte, but I choose it.” True enough, but all you are saying is that you valued your appearance or your health (or both) more than you valued the enjoyment of fat and sugar. Therefore, gritting your teeth and marching forward in the determination to do better simply isn’t going to get the job done. You want to fight with the will, but the will is a slave to the heart. And if the heart is crooked, the will will be crooked also.

Under Grace. When you read Paul’s command, “Do not present your members to sin . . .”(8:13) you immediately conclude Paul is instructing you to toughen your will. And if sin were simply a bad choice, that would be sufficient. But as we have seen sin isn’t just a bad choice; it is distorted desires behind the choice. So although Paul gives a command, which seems like an appeal to self-effort, he looks elsewhere for the power to keep that command: “Sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace”(8:14). “Law,” I think, refers merely to self-effort. But we are not under the demands simply to perform; we are under grace. Grace says you don’t have to perform because Christ already did. It says you are accepted even when you fail. The law by itself keeps us under the delusion that we can do it if we just try hard enough. Grace frees us from the delusion and tells us we can’t. The law by itself enhances the dominion of sin by enslaving us to the soul-destroying cycle of effort, failure, condemnation, guilt, effort, failure, condemnation, guilt, ad nausea. Grace frees us, for Christ took our guilt, absorbed our condemnation, paid for our failure, and redeems our efforts. The pursuit of righteousness then is no longer an effort of futility. Rather, under grace it is a pursuit in which we have nothing to loose and everything to gain. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Fight Clubs


Jonathan Dodson just released his booklet on accountability partners entitled Fight Clubs . It is a very gospel-centered, well thought out guide to accountability relationships. These relationships are essential for everyone, but most accountability relationships I have been in focus primarily on law and not grace, on our effort (or failure) and not on Christ's work. To me, this is must reading. You can download it for free here.