Do You See This Face?
This is the face of a man making good music. This face will be on stage at Suckau Chapel on March 9, 2008. You want to be there.
Coram Deo Blog
Archive for February 2008
Suffering
A significant theme in Lent is suffering. We remember the suffering of Jesus on our behalf and we, like Paul, “want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10).I’ll begin with a question for your contemplation: “What is suffering?”
What does it mean to suffer? // Is suffering the mark of New Testament Christianity? // Are we supposed to want or avoid suffering? // Is all suffering godly? If not, how do you know the difference? // How do you reconcile what feels like suffering to us with the plight of so many in our world whose suffering is more constant and severe? Do you minimize your own context, or do you suppose that suffering is relative to context? // Did Jesus have to suffer … was there any other way?
Pending your comments, I’ll plan on writing about some of these questions in the next few days.
A LENTEN PRAYER: (taken from ELCA.org)
Jesus, who knew temptation and hunger for our sake: Free us from all covetousness, and wake us from indifference to evil. For the life of the world, we pray; Amen.
Eternal God, whose image we bear: You have created us to live by more than bread alone. Nourish us through your Word and release us from the selfishness born of fear. In Jesus’ name we pray; Amen.
Christ, who wept over Jerusalem: Look with compassion upon the cities of our time; that our children might live to adulthood and enjoy a future filled with hope. In Jesus’ name we pray; Amen.
God, who searches for the lost: our season brings the lengthening of days and longer light reveals what had been hidden. Cleanse our hearts as we spring-clean our dwellings, that we give away what we no longer need and justice and kindness have ample room. In the name of Jesus we pray; Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING: Luke 4
Humility and Fellowship
In humility we are becoming less concerned with our prestige. Our wills are breaking and we are not demanding our rights anymore. Fear is losing its grip as we cling to our identity in Christ. Pride is being starved because we are letting go of or need to be right and our desires to be recognized. Humility is freedom to see who we are and become like Jesus.But to see who we are, we must be seen by others. To use Dan Allender’s phrase, “You can’t see your own face.” That is, when God shines light on our lives, we become visible to others. And if they are honest they will tell us what they see – the good, the bad, and the incidental.
It’s not that other people’s opinions are absolute truth, but neither are our isolated opinions of ourselves. Humility in this sense is being willing to be seen as we are, by at least a few people, over time. Our pride resists this kind of exposure, but it takes humility to become humble. A final thought from The Way of The Cross on this topic:
Anything which shows us what we really are is light. But when we in any way try to hide what we are or what we have done, that is darkness. The first thing which sin in our lives will make us do is to hide what we are. When our first parents knew that they had sinned, they hid behind the trees of the garden. Sin has had the same effect on all of us ever since. When we have sinned, we try to hide it in some way.
We cannot show our real self, so we pretend to be different from what we are. We say one thing to someone and a different thing to someone else. We like to make things look better than they are. We excuse ourselves and put the blame on others. We can all do this by being silent as well as by saying or doing something. This is what John calls “living in the darkness.”
Perhaps the sin is only being self-conscious: but, remember, everything that comes from self is sin. Perhaps we hide it by pretending to be what we are not. Even this is living in darkness.
We cannot be in the light with God, and in the darkness with our brother. We must be as willing to know the truth about ourselves from our brother as to know if from God. We must be ready to let him hold the light to us, and we must be ready in the same way to hold the light to him. We must be willing to know ourselves for what we really are, and we must be willing for our brother to know this as well.
We will not hide ourselves from those with whom we should be in fellowship. We will not cover our faults. We will speak the truth about ourselves with them. We will be ready to give up our spiritual privacy. We will not keep bad feelings in our hearts about another person.
If we aspire to love one another, then we aspire to be humble enough to give and receive whatever the light reveals.
SCRIPTURE READING: 1 John 1 and 1 John 4:7-21
BROKENNESS, part 2
I want to offer another excerpt from The Way of the Cross:
How can we be broken? This is both God’s work and ours. God shows us that we need to be broken, but we must choose. We must be willing for God to show us the truth about ourselves. Unless we do this, we cannot have fellowship with him. We must be ready to listen to what God says to us. If we are ready to do this, he will show us the things which come from our proud, hard self.
When he does this we can do one of two things. We can become proud and refuse to repent, or we can humbly bow our heads and say, ‘Yes, Lord.’ The man who knows, day by day, the meaning of brokenness is the man who humbly agrees to what God shows him about himself.
We must be daily broken before God. This may cost us a great deal. We shall have to give up all our rights. We shall no longer live to please self. Sometimes we may have to give back something we have wrongly taken from others.
There is only one place we can be broken. That place is the cross of the Lord Jesus. He was willing to be broken for us. When we realize this we must be willing to be broken for him.
This is not something which happens only once in our lives. There will be the first time when God shows us these things and we die to self. But from then on we must always be dying to self. Only in this way can the Lord Jesus always be showing his life through us. The choice will be made hundreds of times a day.
SCRIPTURE READING: 1 Peter 2 (with particular focus on vs. 11-25)
BROKENNESS
The Old Testament connects humility with the experience of Israel’s slavery in Egypt – a poor, afflicted, suffering people. The New Testament idea is not far from this. The Greek that is translated “humility” or “humble” means “lowly” or “to make low.”
For example, Jesus said, “Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4).
The picture of humility, then, is to empty ourselves of prestige. We demote ourselves in status and become like kids (who were not worshiped in Jesus’ day as they are in ours). We become last among men.
Humility sounds good in writing. It even has a cool, subversive vibe. But to step into the reality of your world is to remember how contrary this is to your thinking. In so many ways we are accustomed to building ourselves up – proving our worth, impressing people, wanting to be noticed and honored. Ironically, we even hope to be recognized for our humility.
If you thought giving up TV or chocolate for Lent was hard, give up trying to get recognition or attention for a day. You will find that our desire to be lifted up is subtle and pervasive.
In a little book called The Way of the Cross, Roy Hession says, “Revival is just the life of the Lord Jesus poured into human hearts.” The imagery depicts us as those who must be low enough to receive what is poured out. To be made low, our will must be broken. We must know what it means to say, “not my will but yours be done,” and “not I, but Christ.” This is truly what is at the center of denying self.
How do we humble ourselves in this way? Hession goes on to write penetrating words about the self:
First of all, our proud self must be broken. Our own self must give up its rights. Our self is hard. It does not want to obey God. It likes to show that it is right. It wants to go its own way. It wants to claim all its rights. It always seeks glory for itself. The self must bow to God’s will. It must confess that it is wrong. It must give up it’s own way. It must obey the Lord Jesus. It must give up all its glory. Only in this way can the Lord Jesus have all and be all in our lives. We must die to self.
Lent is not a morbid denial of self, but rather a joyful discovery of Christ, who shows Himself in so many ways and places when we at last can see past ourselves.
SCRIPTURE READING: Luke 18
THE HUMILITY OF JESUS
Lent exposes my lack of humility, as any effort toward repentance does. I don’t want to admit my dependencies. I don’t want to hold my tongue. I don’t want to contemplate my selfish habits. Yet in the quietness of Lent, all these things come to the surface.The 40 days of Lent parallels the 40 days that Jesus went without food in the wilderness. So one of the ways we identify with Jesus’ suffering is by giving up things. Whether its food or TV or gossip, we deny ourselves particular comforts and pleasures as a way of remembering what he endured.
Of course, our little sacrifices are symbolic at best of what Jesus surrender on our behalf. He gave up far more than food. He gave up his life. And still more than that, he gave up his seat at the right hand of God and condescended to become a man.
This is Jesus’ humility: He had nothing to gain; yet he gave up all he had.
I don’t know about you, but when I compare my life to this kind of humility, I see how self-protecting and self-promoting I can be. And this is why repentance begins with humility: Because even my repentance can be motivated by self-protecting fear and self-promoting pride.
Regarding fear, I turn from my ways because I dread consequence or loss of approval from others. Regarding pride, I tell myself that I need to turn from my ways because “I’m a good Christian, you know, a pastor even. I gotta’ stop lying or being lazy because I don’t want to be like the liars and slackers. I’m not like that.”
Natural repentance begins and ends in self. Spiritual repentance begins and ends in God.
This is why we give things up and devote more time to reflection during the Lenten season, because we are trying to make room in our lives for God to shed some light. And God will shed light into the dark corners, but that kind of light can only be received with humility.
So we look to Christ, who did not fear even in the face of death, and who did not act out of pride even though he was always right. His was a life of perfect humility.
SCRIPTURE READING: Philippians 2:1-8
CONTINUAL REPENTANCE
Are we still talking about repentance? Yep. Lent forces us to contemplate and wrestle with these things so we may identify with the depths of Christ’s humanity (soon we will celebrate the heights of His glory). What we must embrace this season, and always, is that repentance is not merely a concept. It is a lifestyle.
Bob had some good thoughts on this last year, and what do you know, they’re still pretty good:
The prophet Joel warned Israel to “rend your heart, not your garments” (Joel 2:13). The Apostle Paul differentiated between godly sorrow and worldly sorrow: “the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death” (2 Cor 7:11).The key to true repentance is that it always terminates on Jesus. True repentance does not wallow in self-loathing or delight in self-flagellation. Rather, it allows an honest sense of my sinfulness to drive me toward the depth of Christ’s mercy in the gospel. “For every one look at sin,” said R. Murray McCheyne, “take ten looks at Christ.”
Our community is often quick to embrace the “I’m a sinner” part of the gospel without quickly affirming the other part: “and Jesus is my only hope.” The side-effect of this half-hearted gospel is that we end up simply excusing sin, not turning from it. Worldly sorrow leads to death/despair. Godly sorrow leads to salvation, because it points me toward Christ.
No one understood this more fully than the Puritans. And so I offer today this prayer from the collection of Puritan prayers called The Valley of Vision. May God use it to help us “repent of our repentance.“
A LENTEN PRAYER:
O God of Grace,
Thou hast imputed my sin to my substitute,
and hast imputed his righteousness to my soul,
clothing me with a bridegroom’s robe, decking me with jewels of holiness.
But in my Christian walk I am still in rags;
my best prayers are stained with sin;
my penitential tears are so much impurity;
my confessions of wrong are so many aggravations of sin;
my receiving the Spirit is tinctured with selfishness.
I need to repent of my repentance;
I need my tears to be washed;
I have no robe to bring to cover my sins,
no loom to weave my own righteousness.
I am always standing clothed in filthy garments,
and by grace am always receiving change of raiment,
for thou dost always justify the ungodly…
Grant me never to lose sight of
the exceeding sinfulness of sin,
the exceeding righteousness of salvation,
the exceeding glory of Christ,
the exceeding beauty of holiness,
the exceeding wonder of grace.
SCRIPTURE READING: Deuteronomy 10:12-22
SEARCHLIGHT
Questions from the last post:
- Where is the mysterious work of God in repentance?
- What is the dynamic of spiritual repentance that differentiates it from natural penitence?
Last year, Evan had this to say about repentance:
“My struggle with repentance starts at knowing myself well enough to see what I should repent of … I wonder if the work of God in one’s repentance is illumination, the light on the path, the writing in the sand.”
If you are observing Lent – denying usual comforts, reorienting your life in some way around the things of God – then isn’t this your prayer? “God, illuminate my path! Search my heart and test my anxious thoughts. Shed light on my dark ways. I want a clear picture of what my life is about, and where it is headed. How will I turn from my ways if I cannot see them?”
When we feel the pains of hunger, the habitual desire to watch TV, the consuming desire to buy something, our thoughts turn here: “Search me, O God.”
That God is the one who beckons and arouses the repentance is what makes it spiritual and not natural. Natural repentance is aroused by fear or pride. Regarding fear, I turn from my ways because I dread consequence or loss of approval from others. Regarding pride, I tell myself that I need to turn from my ways because “I’m a good Christian (a pastor, even). I must stop doing this because I don’t want to be like the kind of person who does this. I’m not like that.”
Self-protection and self-worship ride in the Trojan horse of repentance all the time. And you simply will not see it unless God shows it to you. Oh God, search me! Every dark corner and every hidden place.
How does God search and test and illuminate? God has many instruments, I suppose, but we must begin with the sharpest one, “sharper than any double-edged sword … dividing soul and spirit … judging the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). The Word of God is “a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.”
This is why a greater devotion to the Bible is a good idea during the Lenten season. When we give up something, we make a clearing in our lives, but unless the clearing is illuminated, we walk around in the dark.
A LENTEN PRAYER
Creator of heavens and earth,
Speak light into our immeasurable darkness.
Expose the chaos of our steps
And bring order to our lives.
Light of the World, full of grace and truth,
Open the kingdom of heaven to us.
Tell us what you hear and see
And give us ears and eyes.
SCRIPTURE READING: Psalm 119
Get Some People Baptized!
A few weeks ago we gathered at Montclair Community Center to celebrate some folks in our community getting baptized. Baptism is a sign and seal of: union with Christ, initiation into God’s family, and cleansing from the guilt and defilement of sin. Here are some pictures from the night…
