Tag: God

Why Be Thankful

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Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:6-7 (NIV)

We are a very pragmatic and result-oriented generation. Nearly everywhere we turn, we are being told what to do in order to achieve the desired results in life: eat this food and you will lose weight; do this exercise and you will have amazing abs. Adopt this discipline and you will succeed. Practice this meditation technique and you will have peace. Everything we do is to an end. It is easy for us, therefore, to approach the Christian life that way.

But I do not think God is into us doing things to achieve results. He is rather the answer to all the results we seek, and therefore the end to all our efforts to achieve them.

I have spent the past couple of weeks going through the book of Romans with my wife, and the thing that strikes me is how little our personal effort plays in salvation. That it is truly by faith alone, and faith – as defined by the book of Romans – is our recognition the gift of salvation is not by works. We do not achieve salvation by human effort; it is a gift freely given.

And salvation is not just a future eternal state. It includes all that God desires to do in our lives. It is the abundant life Jesus promises, the victorious life over sin and death God always intended for us. It is the successful life. The successful life, then, is not achieved by human effort. We do not do in order to achieve the results we desire. We rest and believe.

This does not me we sit idle, of course. But it does mean our activity in life is confined to doing only what the Spirit of God in us is doing. The word picture here is like a home improvement expert coming into your home to remodel after several failed attempts by you to remodel it yourself. At that point, you no longer are trying to remodel your home. You are learning to get out of the way and let the expert do his best work, assisting when called upon. This is the Christian life. We are not trying to rebuild our own life. We are learning to allow God to rebuild it for us.

And this is why we really can be thankful in all circumstances. We are not trying to be thankful in order to make things happen. We are thankful because God has sent the best Home Improvement Expert in all creation into our lives, and He is already at work. He may be kept from doing all he wishes from time to time If we are getting in his way or preventing him from remodeling some of the rooms, but even here he is at work, teaching us to yield to him, teaching us how to make more space that he might be the one to do it.

Thankfulness stems not from a frantic impulse to make things happen; it stems from the recognition he has come and he has things under control. This is why we can be thankful. And the remodeling work he is doing is beautiful. In every moment, whether there is a lost of dust on the floor or not, he is doing a beautiful work.

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The Rest of God

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In repentance and rest you will be saved,
In quietness and trust is your strength.
But you were not willing,
And you said, “No, for we will flee on horses!”
Therefore you shall flee!

Isaiah 30:15-16 (NASB)

Speaking of death being the path to greatness, God will often lead us into situations where the only fruitful way forward is to die to our familiar ways of keeping ourselves safe and to trust in him instead. God will do this on purpose. One day, we will be happily following God’s leading; the next, we fill find ourselves in the midst of danger and difficulty, wondering whether we have really heard God. But (if the Bible is our guide) the presence of danger and difficulty in our lives is not an indication we are not in God’s perfect will (especially if we have “obeyed” our way into it). It is often an indication God is setting us up for the thing he likes to do most: delivering us from our troubles.

No doubt, such a place is a bit uncomfortable. The apostle Paul recounts on one ministry trip being “burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life.” But he explains God ordained this so that “we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead,” and declares God is “he on whom we have set our hope.1 This is really the heart of the Christian life: the process of us learning to no longer trust in ourselves but setting our hope entirely on God instead.

This is where the Christian life demands courage. Speaking from personal experience, it is much easier for us to flee from uncomfortable circumstances and trust in our own “horses,” just as the children of Israel did. Horses represent our own strength. The interesting thing is that the children of Israel were fleeing on their horses, not entering into battle with them. This is such a good picture of our human condition: as we trust in our own strength, we often find ourselves fleeing from life, not engaging with it. We find ourselves creating systems of survival around our fears or pain instead of facing these things head on that we may live a full life. This is because we were not created to live life on our own. We were created to live life in partnership with Him.

For this reason, it is so important to have a big opinion about God. Believing God is a God who desires to heal and deliver and extravagantly bless you has little to do with being selfish. It has everything to do with the confidence to remain in a place of rest in the middle of danger and difficulty so that you do not take matters into your own hands, giving God the opportunity to do his best work.

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  1. 2 Corinthians 1:8-10 ↩︎

The Science of Grace

Published on by dpatrickcollins1 Comment

No matter who you are, before you judge the wickedness of others, you had better remember this: you are also without excuse, for you too are guilty of the same kind of things! [and so] you condemn yourself.

Romans 2:1-2 (TPT)

It has been a long time since I realized the gospel is beautiful. It is like a Christmas present from a friend I am sure I have deeply offended. Except that the friend is God Himself, and the offense is not imagined but real. But he has sent me a Christmas gift anyway, the most extravagant gift I could imagine.

There is however a science to all of this, and my lack of understanding of the precision involved in the science of grace is what has prevented me from seeing how beautiful it is.

God is the author of all we see in nature, and one of the things we see in nature is a God whose way of dealing with the world is precise and, if I may use the term, unforgiving. Gravity, for example, does not care if you have good reason to step off a cliff. Neither does a hot stove if you touch it. The consequence of these things are unyielding, and the same is true when we violate the principles of God’s moral law.

The apostle Paul declares in the very passage I have quoted, “We know God’s judgment falls upon those who practice [any form of wickedness].” So we cannot escape the consequence of sin any more than we can escape the consequence of stepping off a cliff or touching a hot stove. It is science. We may not like it and think it is unkind of God to have created the world this way if we wish, but in the end it does not matter. It is how the world is. (And between us and God, God probably gets to decide how his world should be.)

Now because of the Cross, we are no longer under the law. But I mention the precise and unforgiving nature of God’s law because God’s grace is equally precise and, in a way, equally unforgiving. Not unforgiving in the sense God is withholding forgiveness, of course, but in the sense that there are precise rules that govern his grace. For example, God’s grace must be received as a gift. If you attempt to earn it, you will fail to open it. And if you prevent others from opening it, you will prevent yourself from opening it, also. Religious performance and judgment will deny you the grace God has otherwise freely made available to you.

We may think Jesus going to the Cross was God’s way of saying he no longer cares about sin – or anything for that matter. That God is not really a rule-follower after all. But this idea is really a reflection of our modern age, not God. We think nothing really matters and God feels the same way. But the Cross demonstrates the very opposite of this. It is evidence God cares so much about sin that he sent his only Son to die in our place. It was an exchange in conformance with his precise and unforgiving nature – unforgiving in the sense sin had to be punished. As Romans puts it, “There was only one possible way for God to give away his righteousness and still be true to both his justice and his mercy—to offer up his own Son.”

I mention this because if we think the Cross is about God not caring about stuff, we will think he does not really care about religious striving or judgment either. In fact, we will think God really does not care about much of anything that we do, that the main take-away of the Cross is that he loves us and is not too concerned with what we with our lives. And so we spend our days stepping off cliffs of judgment or touching hot stoves of religious striving, wondering why our lives are filled with so much pain, not reflecting the fullness of all he has promised. Of course he still loves us, but by our actions and attitude, we are alienating ourselves from his grace.1

But once we understand the precise nature of God’s grace, we are able to see his gift for the beautiful thing it is. It is, after all, a gift. But more than that, it is an invitation to leave the heaviness and destruction of a life of stepping off cliffs and touching stoves, and instead to step into a life of Christmas presents every day, not only for us but for everyone. It opens up all sorts of possibilities, for we are truly blameless before him. And if he has not spared his own Son, will he not now give us all things?2

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  1. Galatians 5 ↩︎
  2. Romans 8:32 ↩︎

God’s Cause and Our Choices

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And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. . . .
You do not have because you do not ask God.

Romans 8:28, James 4:2-3

God causes all things to work together for our good. But this does not necessarily mean what we experience in this life is the very best God intended for us, for the simple reason our choices have consequences.

For example, we know from God’s Word that we do not have because we do not ask. What God intends for us is all that we might have, but us choosing not to ask will result in us having far less than he intended. Likewise, God intends for us to bear much fruit and have the fullness of joy by remaining in Jesus by obeying his commands. But if we choose not to remain in Jesus by obeying his commands, we will experience little or no fruit and even less joy. God also intends to experience his peace the transcends all understanding by not being anxious for anything and presenting our request to him instead. But if we choose to present our requests to him and be anxious instead, his peace will not guard our hearts and minds. Our choices have the ability to thwart God’s perfect will for our lives.

In what sense, then, does God cause all things to work together for our good? The answer is that God causes all things in our lives to maximize our opportunity to choose the very best he has for us. He is actively orchestrating every circumstance in life to bring us to the point of choosing the good. In this sense, God is causing all things to work together for our good.

The fact God’s very best is not guaranteed and requires our participation may be sobering, but it is also comforting. For we can know even in our poor choices, he is actively working for our good, seeking to turn our lives around to align with his objectives and design as he conforms us to the image of his own Son. Whatever our situation, he is always for us, wasting nothing.

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Making Sense of Suffering

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In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire —may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

1 Peter 1:6-7 (NIV)

Our church has begun a series on suffering and it has gotten me thinking about the tension that lies at the heart of the Christian faith. On one hand, God is profoundly good, a goodness we see in Scripture and experience every day. On the other, we are called to suffer. By “called” I mean that suffering, for a variety of reasons, is expected. But how exactly does God’s profound goodness factor into suffering?

The difficulty many have with God is the presence of suffering in the world. That if there were a God, he certainly would not allow this to happen. But this assumes God is the way we think he should be. It also assumes his goodness is the way we think it is. Sure, if God is all-powerful, then he must be the type of God who allows us to suffer. But whether we conclude he is good or not because of this depends on whether we define his goodness based on his willingness or unwillingness to allow us to suffer. Scripture makes clear God’s goodness is not defined in this way.

Our difficulty with God when it comes to suffering, rather, is our own conception of him. If we have been raised on a strict diet of being told God is good and he does not want us to suffer, we are understandably going to have difficulty when we do. We are going to think something strange is happening to us. We are going to think it should not be happening, and that God is not who he says he is. We are going to be inclined to a crisis of faith.

But there is really no cause for a crisis of faith if we turn to scripture, because in scripture we see from cover to cover a God, though profoundly good, willing to allow suffering. It isn’t as if the Word of God portrays God as a God unwilling to allow any form of suffering, and we now find ourselves coming to terms with a world full of it. The opposite is actually true: the Word of God shows God to be very willing to allow suffering, something that reflects the world we find ourselves in. Our difficulty with suffering then is our own ideas about God that neither agree with scripture or the world around us.

But how can God be both good and allow suffering? Again, the answer is that God’s goodness is not defined by his willingness or unwillingness to allow us to suffer. It is defined by something far more profound. To put it simply, God’s goodness is defined equally by his holiness. And it is God’s holiness that makes God willing to allow suffering. God did not create the world and then, looking down one day, say, “Something is missing. I know: suffering!” No, the Word of God is clear that all the suffering we see today came through sin. So suffering is clearly not something God desires, but it is something he allows on the basis of his holiness.

It is really important we understand this. When we object to God’s goodness on the basis of suffering, we are imagining a God willing to go to any length to prevent it. We are imagining a God willing to restrict our free will in order to prevent the consequence of sin, which is suffering, or a God willing to allow us to exercise our free will without consequence. In short, we are imagining a God who is either controlling or not holy. But God’s way of dealing with sin was to allow humanity to exercise the full range of free will and also experience the full consequence of sin. God was willing to allow sin to come through Adam and death through sin, resulting in the world we now see today.

And God is now in the process of delivering us not only from suffering but its root cause, which is sin, through Jesus Christ and his work on the Cross. Yes, even now, God could snap his finger and deliver us all from it instantly. But for a variety of reasons, he has chosen to deliver us progressively. He has chosen to keep us in the world, though we are no longer of it, experiencing his goodness in a variety of ways as we are transformed by him, being conformed to the image of His Son. And his reasons for doing so – though I have no space to go into it now – are all good.

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