Category Archives: John

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Receiving Revelation

Being With Jesus:
14:22-24

Judas (not Judas Iscariot, but his other disciple with that name) said to him, “Sir, why are you going to reveal yourself only to us disciples and not to the world at large?” Jesus replied, “Because I will only reveal myself to those who love me and obey me. The Father will love them too, and we will come to them and live with them. Anyone who doesn’t obey me doesn’t love me. And remember, I am not making up this answer to your question! It is the answer given by the Father who sent me.

Why do some people seem to get more insider information about God than others? I’m not talking about those who claim to have special revelation but within seconds of being with them you realize they only have half of that equation—for sure, they are “special” but they have zero revelation! No, the kind of people I am speaking of have greater insight into Scripture, get more profound insights out of their daily devotions, display a special connection to the Holy Spirit and day by day seem to grow more profoundly, deeply connected with God than the average believer.

Does God love them more than others? No, but for a select few of these types, it may be that God has sovereignly selected them to reveal himself more clearly for the purpose of ministering to others the deeper things of the Lord. Is it because they are spiritually smarter than the rest of us? Probably not. Do they have more faith than you and me? I doubt it.

It Takes FatihSo what is it? My sense is that except in special cases where God has uniquely marked certain individuals for a greater download of divine information, those with deeper revelation have simply and consistently exercised their faith more than the rest of us. The exercise of their faith has been met with greater revelation. It is as St. Augustine said: “Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.” The surest way to a greater faith—which, remember, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, according to Hebrews 11:1—which leads to a closer relationship with God and greater revelation of who God is, is to exercise the faith that we have.

That seems to be Jesus’s answer to Judas, who asked the Lord, “why don’t you just go ahead and prove yourself to the whole world? Wouldn’t that make things a lot easier for you?” It almost seems as if Jesus sidesteps that question when he begins to talk about love and obedience: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 14:23). But what Jesus is getting at is that deeper revelation comes by way of our receptivity, and receptivity is conditioned by our love, and our love is displayed by our obedience to Jesus’ commands, and our obedience comes from the exercise of our faith. If we don’t exercise faith, revelation would be wasted. Thomas Aquinas, a brilliant church leader in the thirteenth century, made this profound observation: “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” So why would God waste revelation on someone who has been unwilling to exercise faith?

But when we exercise faith, our faith grows. As our faith grows, greater love flows from us toward God. And as love flourishes, obedience becomes our willing offering of response to God. It is our growing faith, flowing love and willing obedience that acts as our invitation for God to make his home in us. And when God talks up residence in our lives, deeper insight, special revelation and spiritual familiarity will come to characterize our relationship with God.

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“Faith fills a man with love for the beauty of its truth, with faith in the truth of its beauty.” (Frances, de Sales)

Getting To Know Jesus: Do you desire greater revelation of God? Are you willing to exercise your faith? Are you ready to love God more and obey him with greater willingness? Think about the following challenge from Martin Luther: “What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God. We should accustom ourselves to think of our position and work as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on account of the position and work, but on account of the word and faith from which the obedience and the work flow.”

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The Blessed Distress

Being With Jesus:
John 13:21

Now Jesus was in great anguish of spirit and exclaimed, “Yes, it is true—one of you will betray me.”

I have always had an easier time accepting Jesus’ divinity than his humanity. I suppose that’s because I tend to think of human emotions—anxiety, disappointment, temptation, fear—as flaws and weaknesses. How could the Son of God be flawed or weak? No way; not my Messiah! Jesus in “great anguish”! How could this be?

Jesus was God, so he knew all things in advance. He knew what he would face, but he also knew the outcome was pre-set, so there would be nothing but victory and glory for him at the end of the day. Even though he would allow hurtful and harmful things to happen to him in his assignment as the world’s redeemer, he had power over those things; he would turn them toward his Father’s ultimate purpose. How then, would he ever be upset, feel overwhelmed, and weep over things that didn’t go his way.

Yet over and again in the Gospels we see Jesus expressing a variety of emotions that we mistakenly attribute to humans only: tiredness, hunger, anger, grief, disappointment, distress. The truth is, those emotions are resident in the Creator, and we, made in his image, simply are able to feel and experience what he felt and experienced, too. We feel because God feels. In fact, the writer of Hebrews tells us that not only does he feel what we feel, we ought to be supremely grateful for that since that makes him our empathetic High Priest:

Jesus' Anguish“But Jesus the Son of God is our great High Priest who has gone to heaven itself to help us; therefore let us never stop trusting him. This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses since he had the same temptations we do, though he never once gave way to them and sinned. So let us come boldly to the very throne of God and stay there to receive his mercy and to find grace to help us in our times of need.” (Hebrews 4:14-16)

In the case of his betrayal, knowing in advance that Judas would hand him over, for a price, to the Jews, having deliberately selected him with that knowledge in advance, Jesus was still distraught as he announced to his disciples that one of them would stab him in the back. And his distress was not hidden behind a stiff upper lip. The disciples were very aware that Jesus was terribly upset, so much so that Peter tried to counteract these messianic emotions with some bravado of his own: “Don’t worry Lord, I’ll be with you through thick and thin!”

Many times during my two daughters’ growing up years, they would come to me for comfort when they had experienced fear, frustration, disappointment and/or hurt in their lives. And being a little thick-headed father (I know, that’s a bit redundant), it took me a while to realize that they didn’t always want me to fix their problems, they simply wanted me to listen to their upset and offer an emotional response that assured them I identified with their hurt. They wanted me to “feel their pain.” They wanted, and needed, an empathetic father. To be sure, they sometimes needed me to fix things; but most of the time they just needed to know that I cared. Here’s the thing: They didn’t care how much I knew, they needed to know how much I cared.

The fact that Jesus cared so much about Judas’ betrayal—even though he knew in advance it would happen and that God would leverage it for his eternal plan—proved to his disciples that he cared for them, too. They knew how much he cared, and that made him a perfect, empathetic High Priest they could come to for anything they were facing.

What a drag it would be to serve an uncaring, unfeeling Messiah. Thankfully, that is not the Messiah you serve. Jesus was distressed—but what a blessed distress! It proves that even as one who is fully God, he is still perfectly capable of feeling emotions for you, too.

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“When all is said and done, people may admire how much you know, how well versed you are in your field (doctor, mechanic, lawyer, engineer, community leader, etc.), but they will remember you for the ages for how much you cared for them… When [they] know how much you care, you have begun building the foundations of trust-based relationships.” (John Maxwell)

 

Getting To Know Jesus: Where are you hurting today? Boldly—with unmitigated fear, anger or hurt, if necessary—go to Jesus and pour out your heart to him. He cares! And he knows what to do for you too!

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The Divine Leverage of Willful Unbelief

Being With Jesus:
John 12:40

“God has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts so that they can neither see nor understand nor turn to me to heal them.”

John 12 is a pivot point in this Gospel that marks Jesus’ last public movements before his arrest, crucifixion and post-resurrection appearances. It is one of the most stunning accounts you will find in Scripture because of the unbelief of the characters in this chapter.

Jesus has just performed the greatest miracle you could ever hope for: the raising of Lazarus from the tomb four days after he had died. Yet the reaction of Judas, the priests and the Pharisees, respectively, to this outstanding miracle is flat-out rejection of Jesus’ deity, if not blind hatred. This unbelief is stunning, given the fact that the now-resurrected Lazarus is standing before their very eyes.

Fortunately, this story is more than the sad history of the Jewish establishment’s reject of Jesus. As is always the case with Scripture, there are some valuable lessons we can learn from this about the willful unbelief of man and the unstoppable purposes of God.

The first lesson we learn is that miracles alone will never lead people to the full surrender of their lives to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. People often demand a miracle before they will place faith in Christ, but the record of the Gospels indicates that miracles alone won’t wash away willful unbelief. They should—but they don’t. Time and again, Jesus performed a miracle, only to have people turn around and in the very next moment demand not another sign, but a sign—as if the one he had just given hadn’t been given at all. Such is the utter blindness of illogical unbelief. Beware, the next time you find yourself insisting that God grant you your miracle.

The second lesson we learn is that the motives of sinful man will always irreconcilably conflict with the purposes of a holy God. When man’s agenda collides with God’s agenda—and it always does, sooner or later—something’s gotta give. The Jewish leaders were more interested in protecting their religious and political way of life than in discovering the life of abundance that the Messiah had come to reveal, and in this case, unbelievably, man killed his Creator! Keep in mind that early and often in your voyage of faith you will be called to untether from the shores of comfort.

But the third lesson we learn here is that even the inflexible unbelief of man always gets leveraged for the irrepressible glory of God. That is why Jesus quotes Isaiah in John 12:40, “God has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts—so they can’t see, can’t understand, can’t turn to me and have me heal them.”

Now this is one of the Bible’s hard sayings that seems to say God destines some people to unbelief. But understand that Isaiah’s complaint springs from the broken heart of a prophet who is bewildered that his message, his calls to repentance, made men worse, not better. Yet in their painful and willful rejection of the word of the Lord, Isaiah knew that even this could not take place outside God’s purpose nor thwart his unstoppable plan. Nothing can—which means we best get on board with God’s agenda. So in that sense, even when men rejected Isaiah’s message, their unbelief was still contained within God’s purpose.

That is not to say that man’s unbelief is God’s purpose; rather, it is to say that God sovereignly uses even man’s unbelief for his sovereign purpose. For instance, in Romans 11 the Apostle Paul said that God used the unbelief of the Jews for the conversion of the Gentiles. God didn’t predestine certain people to unbelief, but he used their unbelief to further his agenda. In John 12, the Jews’ unbelief isn’t God’s fault; it’s the Jews’ fault. Yet even then, God is so great that not even this sin of stunning unbelief is outside his power, so he leverages it to bring about the cross and the redemption of all who believe.

Now if all this is theologically true, what does it mean for you practically? Simply this: God will leverage man’s unbelief for his ultimate glory—even yours. But you have a choice. You can either stubbornly hold on to your unbelief—that is, where your agenda conflicts with God’s—or you can surrender it to Jesus so that you can get on board with God’s glorious plan.

What is your area of unbelief; the place where you are holding on to your agenda? Have you ever withheld money from missional work because it was dedicated to something that you “needed” to do?

Have you ever held back from an appeal to serve in your spiritual community because you felt unqualified or too busy or frankly just didn’t want to make the commitment? Have you ever criticized change in the church the pastor felt necessary to reach more outsiders because it conflicted with your comfort and your preferred style of worship. There are a hundred ways we hold on to our unbelief—with spiritual justification—but here’s what Jesus said in John 12:24-25 about letting go of your agenda for God’s:

“Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it’s never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it’s buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is, destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”

unbeliefIf you hold on to what you want, you’ll kill any chance of what God wants for you! To experience the resurrected life—not just in eternity, but now—you have to die to your unbelief.

Before you finish this post, I would implore you to determine that your agenda, your unbelief, will no longer control you.

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“Disobedience is the root of unbelief. Unbelief is the mother of further disobedience. Faith is voluntary submission within a person’s own power. If faith is not exercised, the true cause lies deeper than all intellectual reasons. It lies in the moral aversion of human will and in the pride of independence, which says, ‘who is Lord over us? Why should we have to depend on Jesus Christ?’ As faith is obedience and submission, so faith breeds obedience, but unbelief leads on to higher-handed rebellion. With dreadful reciprocity of influence, the less one trusts, the more he disobeys; the more he disobeys, the less he trusts.” (Alexander Maclaren)

 

Getting To Know Jesus: Where are you stubbornly holding on to your own spiritual agenda—and thus, expressing willful unbelief? Ask God to reveal to you where you need to surrender your preferences to his ways. Then be ready to ruthlessly obey him.

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I Surrender All—Really?

Being With Jesus:
John 11:4

But when Jesus heard about [Lazarus’ deathly illness] he said, “The purpose of his illness is not death, but for the glory of God. I, the Son of God, will recleive glory from this situation.”

When I was a kid, there was a Gospel chorus that my little country church regularly sang. In fact, to my recollection, we sang that song most every time we gathered for a service—Sunday morning, Sunday night and for Wednesday evening Bible study. It was called, “I Surrender All.” I can still hear the melody and feel the emotions that went with it as we belted out our commitment to the Lord.

Though it is currently not used too much, once in a while it gets dusted off and sung in churches today when attenders are being urged to some sort of higher commitment. The words go like this:

All to Jesus I surrender,
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.

I surrender all,
I surrender all.
All to Thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.

I surrender all! Really? Here’s the question I have for you: How committed are you that God’s glory would be displayed in your life through by whatever means, even unpleasant events? How surrendered are you—not willing to be surrendered, but actually are surrendered—to God’s purpose being worked out through all of your circumstances, especially the painfull ones? I’m not sure how you will answer that, but I know that when I honestly consider the implications of total surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in my life—not in theory, but right now, in the gritty reality of my current world—I have to nervously gulp a little bit.

You see, to be truthful, although I say I am surrendered to God’s glory and totally committed to his divine plan for me, I have some expectations about how I want him to work that out. I have some investments I’ve made, some relationships I cherish, some possessions I like, and some plans that I want him to protect and prosper. I want unchallenged, guaranteed wins in my life. No bumps in the road, please!

Of course, you and I realize that God doesn’t operate that way. Sometimes he allows challenges, losses and bumps; sometimes even the death of an investment, a dream or even a loved one. Don’t like my theology on that? Just talk to Mary and Martha; they’ll set you straight. They discovered here in John 11 when their brother was on his deathbed that Jesus doesn’t always operate according to our timeline. He can’t be rushed, coerced, manipulated or diverted down our preferred path when he knows there is a better road leading to the glory of God that we must trod.

The truth of the matter is, Jesus is committed to the glory of God—period. And he knows that the greatest glory comes to God when people place total trust in him through unconditional belief. Furthermore, he knows that the greatest and strongest trust is developed in the toughest trials of life. That is why he told his disciples that he was going to let Lazarus’ illness end in death so that he could raise him up so that they could believe in him so that God would be glorified:

“Our friend Lazarus has gone to sleep, but now I will go and waken him!” The disciples, thinking Jesus meant Lazarus was having a good night’s rest, said, “That means he is getting better!” But Jesus meant Lazarus had died. Then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. And for your sake, I am glad I wasn’t there, for this will give you another opportunity to believe in me.” (John 11:11-15)

In his book, Place of Immunity, Francis Frangipane wrote that God made the Old Testament Joseph fruitful in the very things that afflicted him. He goes on to say that “in the land of your affliction, in your battle, is the place where God will make you fruitful. Consider, even now, the area of greatest affliction in your life. In that area, God will make you fruitful in such a way that your heart will be fully satisfied, and God’s heart fully glorified. God has not promised to keep us from valleys and sufferings, but to make us fruitful in them.”

SurrenderThat is a great truth, my friend. In the place of your affliction, not only will God make you fruitful—and I would add, he can’t make you fruitful apart from the painful pruning that takes place there—and not only will he fully satisfy your heart, but he will fully glorify God’s heart. And for our sake, I am glad that is what he does!

That is why you and I should willingly and joyfully say, “I surrender all—really!”

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“Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” (Elton Trueblood)

 

Getting To Know Jesus: As an affirmation of your complete trust in Jesus’ Lordship over you, sing the chorus, “I Surrender All.” If you don’t know it, find it on the Internet and listen to it. Then ask the Lord to give you the grace, courage and resolve to live like you believe it.

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Making Jesus Famous

Being With Jesus:
John 10:16

“I lay down my life for the sheep. But I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them [in] also, and they will listen to my voice. Then there will one flock and one shepherd.”

The more I learn about Jesus, the more intensely missionary I become. That’s because Jesus was intensely missionary. He was a missionary Messiah!

You cannot read too far into the Gospels without discovering that Jesus fervently cared for the things his Father cared for—his sheep, especially sheep that were not yet eternally secure in the Father’s fold. In John 10:1-15, using very tender pastoral language, Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd who cares for the sheep of his flock—leading, protecting, feeding and loving them. Really, what Jesus is describing is the ministry of the local church.

But in verse 16, he speaks of sheep not in this fold: “I lay down my life for the sheep. But I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them [in] also, and they will listen to my voice. Then there will one flock and one shepherd.”

Clearly, Jesus is speaking of those yet to come into the flock of God. He is referring to what we have come to call the ministry of global missions—reaching those who have not yet heard of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.  Throughout the Gospels, there is a constant sense of Jesus’ intensely missionary heart for these “pre-believing” sheep. And if for no other reason, because of the Good Shepherd’s passionate love for his sheep and his relentless pursuit to bring them into the safety of the fold—especially those yet reached, we, too, must become intensely missionary.

Theologian John Stott reminds us that, “Missions is the central feature of God’s historical purpose.” It’s true. That’s why Jesus was born…that’s why he died…that’s why he’s coming again! That’s why missions must be our central focus too! If you and I are to truly follow Christ as a devoted disciple, become like him, thinking as he thought, acting as he acted, then we must embrace this foundational conviction: Lost people must matter to us because they matter to God. Matthew 18:12-14 reminds us that this conviction is at the very core of God’s being:

“If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one wanders off, won’t he leave the ninety-nine and go look for the one that’s lost? And if he finds it, he’s happier over the one than the ninety-nine that didn’t wander off. So also your Heavenly Father is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost.”

If lost people matter that deeply to God, shouldn’t they matter that deeply to us too? You can never look into the eyes of a lost person without seeing an eternal soul so loved by God that he gave his only Son for their redemption. It doesn’t matter who they are, where they live, what they have done; they matter to God!

In light of that, here is another inescapable conviction that we must embrace if we are to be fully devoted disciples of Jesus: reaching unreached people, both near but especially far—not just geographically, but theologically—must be a driving passion. Why do I say that? Because you can’t read the Bible without sensing “stay and share” must quickly morph into “go and tell.”

What I mean by that is that it is simply counter to God’s heart that there remain those who have never even heard the Gospel once when we pour so much into those who hear it over and over yet continue to reject it. Do you realize there is a disproportionate amount of resources, financial and human, that is poured into reaching those who have already heard the Gospel while there are still thousands of people groups—Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, animists—without access to a gospel-preaching witness in their culture. That must sadden the Father’s heart.

Jesus commanded us in Mark 16:15, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” In Acts 1:8 he promised the Holy Spirit would enable our witnesses, “to the uttermost parts of earth.” In Matthew 24:14, he said, “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

Why I Exist“I have but one passion: It is He, it is He alone. The world is the field and the field is the world; and henceforth that country shall be my home where I can be most used in winning souls for Christ.” (Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf)

It’s clear that God puts the highest premium on taking the Gospel to people who’ve never heard. In Isaiah 66:19, God promised to send messengers to “…lands beyond the sea that have not heard of my fame or seen my glory.” That’s why the church exists; that is the purpose of every believer. Romans 9:17 says, “I raised you up for this very purpose: to display my power in you so that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” David prayed in Psalm 67:2, “Send us around the world with the news of your saving power and your eternal plan for all mankind.”(LB)

Are you seeing what I am seeing? God’s chief concern is that his name be known and praised by all the peoples of the earth. That’s why Isaiah 12:4 says we’re to, “make known his deeds among the peoples and proclaim that his name is exalted.” When we proclaim his fame, we delight the heart of God. And when we do, God delights to satisfy our hearts.

Proclaiming his fame, especially to those who have never heard—that is our assignment. You might say that the greatest use of your redeemed life is making Jesus famous. Are you?

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“The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.” (Henry Martyn)

 

Getting To Know Jesus: God is most glorified in us when we’re most satisfied in him—and we’re most satisfied in him when we’re proclaiming his glory and his fame. Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he’ll give you the desires of your heart.” We can have it all—success, significance, and most of all, satisfaction—if we will get addicted to making Jesus famous among the unreached. What can you do today to make Jesus famous?

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Making Hay While The Sun Shines

Being With Jesus:
John 9:4

Jesus said, “All of us must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent me, for there is little time left before the night falls and all work comes to an end.”

Do you live with a sense of urgency as it relates to God’s timetable? Our grandparents and generations before them seemed to understand that life came with an expiration date. We don’t! Probably because life was hard, opportunities weren’t dished out on silver platters, life expectancy was significantly less than it is today, they approached life with a great deal more seriousness than we do today.

Our generation seems to fit the profile of the people Jesus described who will be living in the last days:

“The world will be at ease—banquets and parties and weddings—just as it was in Noah’s time before the sudden coming of the Flood; people wouldn’t believe what was going to happen until the Flood actually arrived and took them all away. So shall my coming be.”

In this John 9 story, Jesus heals a man born blind on the Sabbath—a real no-no in first century Jewish religious culture. As Jesus performs this miracle, serious questions are thrown his way from both the crowd of astounded onlookers as well as the angry Jewish spiritual leaders. The crowd peppers Jesus with a “stump the messiah” question: Why was this man born blind; was it his parents’ sin or his? The religious leaders’ interrogative was more dastardly: How could you do this on our holy day, the Sabbath? Never mind that a flesh and blood miracle was standing in living color before their very eyes, they wanted to know who he thought he was to “work” on a day no work was to take place.

Work, For The Night ComethThen in the midst of all these questions, Jesus makes this statement about carrying out the task assigned by God before time expires. It seems a bit out of the blue and disconnected until you consider the context. On the one hand, since the man had been born blind, it would have been perfectly acceptable to allow things to remain as they were. The fates had determined this man’s condition; no need to rock his boat. On the other hand, Jesus knew that performing this miracle on this day—the Sabbath—would invoke the ire of the religious rule keepers and even seal their blind hatred for him. So it would have been easier for Jesus not to do this, or to delay doing it.

But Jesus was not one to avoid conflict or to take an easy path. And in this statement, he was sending both a message and a warning. The message was that the work of God must take priority over everything else in life—religious rules, man’s time, cultural mores, people’s feelings. And the warning was that there was a limited amount of time and opportunity to carry out the work of God. Tomorrow may not come; night is falling; if we are to do the work of God, we must act as if this is our window of opportunity, because that divine window is closing.

Now that truth applied to not only Jesus, but it applies to you and me as well. Notice that Jesus said “‘we’ must do the work of the One who sent me.” As God-followers, we have been given the same two things Jesus had been given: a divine assignment and a limited amount of time. So stop underestimating the brevity of your life and the time you have to make your days count; look up and see that eternity is in view.

James 4:14-16 tells us, “You don’t even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil.”

James says that it is foolish and downright sinful to assume that we’ve got tomorrow. Why? Because life is unpredictable: “you don’t even know”. None of us know what is going to happen tonight much less next year: a war could start, the economy could collapse, your friends could leave you. That is not meant to frighten you, but to cause you to be more dependent on God and more serious about doing his will while you keep an eye on eternity.

Not only is life unpredictable, but James is also saying that life is brief. “You are a mist”, he says. Mist comes from the Greek word, “atmos”, which is where we get our word “atmosphere”. Your life is like fog; it rolls in at night but it burns off by noon. Who knows how long you are going to live? None of us do. I’m only one heartbeat away from eternity. Life is short; you go from highchair to wheelchair, from diapers to decay in a millisecond. As Chris Matakas said, “We rise to meet each day because there will come a time when the day will rise without us”

The point is, there are no guarantees, so don’t presume on tomorrow. For sure, plan for the future, but live like today is the last. Moses prayed, “Lord teach us to number our days aright, so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12) Wisdom would teach you to live today as if you knew tomorrow you would stand before God. And that is a great way to live.

The early Christians lived that way. They were pretty urgent about the time. They learned to order their lives by seriously seeking and then immediately living out the Lord’s. They came up with a Latin watchword to remind each other of the importance of actively keeping the Lord’s will in mind. It was Deo Volente: “If God wills.” In fact, in some periods of history, the believers would end their letters with “D.V.”, Deo Volente. Then they would respond to, “If God wills” with another phrase, “Carpe Diem: Seize the day!” What a great philosophy for living to live like Jesus lived: “If the Lord wills, I will seize the day!”

Our time is shorter than we think, so as they say, let’s “make hay while the sun shines!”

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“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
(Leonardo da Vinci)

 

Getting To Know Jesus: What is it that God is calling you to do that you have been putting off? Telling someone that you love them or asking for their forgiveness? Volunteering to lead a ministry? Going on a missions trip? Getting counseling for an addiction? Having a difficult conversation with a loved one? Witnessing to someone you care about? Carl F.H. Henry said, “The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time.” Jesus says to you, “now is the time, night is at hand, so do the work my Father has assigned to you.” Today is the day!

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Grace!

Being With Jesus:
John 8:2-5

At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

In one of my favorite books, What’s So Amazing About Grace, Philip Yancey writes,

“Grace means there’s nothing we can do to make God love us more—no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there’s nothing we can do to make God love us less—no amount of racism, pride, pornography, adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.”

That’s why I love this story of the adulterous woman’s life-transforming encounter with Jesus; it just exudes grace! And it reminds me of how God looks right into what Lewis Smedes called this, “glob of unworthiness that is me and offers to accept me, own me, hold me, affirm me, and never let go of me even if he’s not too impressed with what he has on his hands.”

A glob of unworthiness—that’s me…you, too! And that’s God—loving us, without limit—because of his incredibly great grace! King David, who knew a lot about personal failure and unworthiness, wrote in Psalm 103:8-14,

Grace Greater Than My Sin“The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love…he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we’re formed, he remembers that we’re dust.”

That theology of unconditional love, undeserved mercy and unlimited grace is what’s fleshed out here in this story in John 8. And it’s not only the message Jesus wrote with his finger as he stooped to scribble in the dirt, he wrote it with his blood as it dripped to the dirt from the cross. Grace is his life-message! Amazing grace, how sweet the sound! It’s the one thing that’ll touch your core need today; it’s the only thing that’ll transform our lost world.

In 1988, a concert was held in London’s Wembley Stadium, and throughout the day, bands blasted the crowd high on booze and drugs with their ear-splitting music. But for some reason, the promoters scheduled an opera singer as the closing act, Jessye Norman. At the finale, she walked out with no band or singers —unknown to the crowd, which was shouting for more Guns ‘n Roses. Jessye began to sing, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. That saved a wretch like me!” And remark-ably, 70,000 fans got quiet.

By the second verse, “Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved”, they were putty; by the third verse they were digging into their memories to sing along, “and grace will lead me home”. As she sang, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun; We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we first begun” a transcendent reverence had enveloped the stadium.

What on earth wields that kind of power over a beleaguered psalmist, or an adulterous woman, or a stadium full of drug-addled rock-n-rollers? Grace!

Now don’t miss the point of this story: The adulterous woman reminds us that every sinner has a future, but every saint has a past. We’re all born broken, and we become whole only by the mending of grace, God’s glue. And no matter how bad, how unworthy, how disqualified you think you are, you are not beyond the renewing reach of God’s grace. That’s why prostitutes, publicans, and other sinners responded to Jesus so readily—still do. They knew their sin; that’s why forgiveness was so appealing.

And no matter how good, worthy and qualified you think you are, apart from grace, there’s no good in you. In fact, on your best day, apart from grace, Isaiah said your righteousness is as filthy rags. (Isaiah 64:6) That’s why, as C.S. Lewis said, “[Adulterous women] are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God; [it’s] the proud …the self-righteous [that] are in that danger.”

So wherever you fall on the continuum—from super-saint to seedy sinner—just remember: every saint has a past, but every sinner has a future. And grace is there waiting for you! Grace! It’s only by grace that the brokenness we’re born with, and live with, is mended.

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“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
(C.S. Lewis)

 

Getting To Know Jesus: Take a moment today to simply and gratefully reflect on God’s grace.