This passage stands as one section in the midst of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In it, Jesus has laid out what the Christian life looks like, how a citizen of the Kingdom is to be. It began with a laying out of the Beatitudes, a portrait of Christian character. We then move seamlessly into an explanation of what taking the commandments to heart looks like. It isn’t about externals only, but obedience that goes down to the level of one’s thoughts and desires.
In chapter 6, we saw that we are called to be generous to others, laying our treasure in heaven and to be prayerful rather than anxious about our needs. In seven, Jesus closes with a warning to those who don’t put their trust in Christ but instead build their house on the sandy foundation of their own wisdom. In the middle of all of that, we find this prohibition, so often repeated in our culture: “Don’t judge.” What does it mean to judge? In a legal sense, it means to compare someone’s behavior against a standard to see how it should be reacted to. If, for example, the standard punishment for theft is prison time, when someone steals, we judge them deserving of jail time. Saying that there is a standard that we all stand or fall on is becoming increasingly out of favor. It has now gotten to the point that there are hardly any standards at all. In fact, the only thing you can do wrong in our world is to tell someone that they are wrong. The only thing that you can be judged for is judging. When we live with that mindset around us everywhere, we can easily think the same way. We can believe that it is wrong, unloving, to call people to a standard. Besides, who among us has ever really felt comfortable doing that? Doesn’t it feel wrong to tell people they are wrong? After all, is it really our business, and even if it is, we’re not worthy to do it! We’re not without sin, so we can’t throw stones. When we bring all of these thoughts to this text, we can read this first line as “Don’t be judging, because, if you do, you will be judged for judging!” In fact, there are other places in Scripture that would seem to support this line of thinking! Look at James 4:12, “There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?” Paul, in 1 Corinthians 4:3-5 says, “But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.” It would seem pretty clear from a surface reading of these passages that we are simply told to mind our own beeswax, and let God sort ‘em out in the end. But is that what Jesus, and by extension the rest of the Bible, has in mind? Indeed, James says later in chapter 5:19-20 that we are supposed to turn people away from their sin. That sounds like we need to 1) recognize the standard and 2) hold people to it. Sounds like judging! Paul also doesn’t hold back against the Corinthians in their sin in 1 Cor 5 just a few paragraphs away from chapter 4. He tells them to remove someone who was sinning sexually. That sounds rather judgy. Well, what about Jesus in Matthew 7? Is He condemning judgment? Well, if He is, then there are some other passages that will be hard to square with this line of reasoning. For instance, what would we do with passages about training children? Telling our children what to do and punishing wrongdoing (Ephesians 6:4) sounds like the essence of judging. And it isn’t just children subject to this! In Matthew 18, as we already covered at the beginning of this series, we find the process for church discipline. That whole procedure requires judgment at a lot of levels. In order to confront a believer for their sin, then you need to be able to judge that what they are doing is in fact sinful! Especially at the end of the process for the unrepentant, there is the call to put them out of the church! I don’t know of something that would sound more like judging than that! Further, back in Matthew 7, in this same chapter, we are told that we will know false teachers by their fruits (requires judging), and in fact, just a few sentences after “judge not” we find in verse 6 that we aren’t supposed to give what is holy to dogs or pigs! How on earth are we to be able to make such determinations without judging? Obviously, Jesus must not be giving a blanket ban on judging, at least the way we typically define it, but we still have a command not to judge lest we be judged. What are we supposed to do? In our two points today, we are going to see we are called to live a holy life and we are called to lovingly help others live a holy life. Let’s take a close look at Matthew 7. When we see this command “judge not lest you be judged,” Jesus doesn’t then switch to a new topic as if He has said all He has to say on this topic. The next sentence explains why. Jesus tells us that what we judge others for, we better make sure that it doesn’t come back on us! We see an illustration of that from King David’s life, don’t we? He was all mad about a story of a rich man with lots of sheep stealing from a man who had only one lamb. He said that that man deserved to die, only to find out that the story was about himself. He judged harshly for stealing, forgetting that he had actually done a worse thing by taking another man’s wife. So Jesus is being very practical with us. If we are going to say, “This person is in sin!” We best make sure that we aren’t in that same boat. He uses a striking image to illustrate this. He imagines a guy with a bit of dust in his eye that does need to come out. The guy who has taken it upon himself to remove it, has a house beam sitting in his eye! The obvious point we are supposed to draw from this is, goodness! if you have a house beam in your eye, you need to be thinking about getting that out, not worrying about other people! One Scholar put it this way, “Therefore, Jesus does not forbid all moral judgment or accountability. Rather, he forbids harsh, prideful, and hypocritical judgment that condemns others outright without first evaluating one's own spiritual condition and commitment to forsake sin.” (Eric J. Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 30). It turns out the word “judge” has a range of meanings. If we judge based in love from the standard of God’s Word, that is appropriate! If we are just roasting people for the same stuff we do, all of what we have discussed above applies. Don’t do it! Now, unfortunately, this is where many people stop reading. People will understand that Jesus isn’t telling us that we don’t judge sin, but they don’t want to be the ones to do it. They will say, “Well, I’m no better than that guy, so there is nothing I can do. See this log?” But that isn’t where Jesus finishes. Jesus doesn’t say, “Well, if you got the log in your eye, there’s really nothing that you can do.” No! Jesus says, “You got a log in your eye? Well, then get that thing out of there, SO THAT YOU CAN HELP YOUR BROTHER.” Jesus is not actually against speck removal. In fact, because Jesus wants that speck out of your brother’s eye, He calls you to live a holy life to make that possible. One commentator put it this way, “How can someone whose vision is totally obscured render a just assessment of another person's minor vision problems (7:3), let alone attempt the delicate task of correcting the problem (7:4)?” David Turner, Matthew, 206). Jesus calls you to log-free living. It isn’t just so your eyes are out of pain, but so that you can help others. That brings an entirely different motivation for holiness, doesn’t it? Have you been motivated to stop a sin so that you can help others stop that sin? You can absolutely help someone out of an addiction without having had that addiction, but boy there can be something helpful about having been there. This isn’t about not judging, this is about being in a place to help. If you are doing the same thing, there is nothing helpful about pointing out others sin. I’m going to have a hard time quitting cigarettes if my doctor smokes. We need to recognize the position that we have calling ourselves followers of Christ. We are called to lovingly help others live a holy life. This position is not used to stand above and condemn, but to come alongside and encourage. As we talked about in Matthew 18, the heart of God is one who pursues after the sinner to cause them to return, and the same is true of our fellow church members. As one writer put it, “Since we have been commissioned to proclaim a message of repentance and faith to those outside the church who need to hear the good news, certainly we need to proclaim the same message of repentance and faith to those inside the church” (Eric J. Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 30). So how are we to do this? One, we need to have a firm grasp on our own need for the gospel. That’s one of the reasons why we have a confession of sin in our worship service. I need to read that confession just as much as you do. I need that time of personal confession just as much as you do. We all need the gospel, and none of us stand as inherently holier than another. We all need Jesus. Second, we need to have experience with repentance. People who are good at confronting are good at confessing. Good rebukers are good repenters. This is the case because they live what they are telling you to do. A life well-lived has weight. Three, you need to love those you confront. People can tell. Even if you can’t love them for their own sake, love them for Jesus’ sake. They’re in your life, so reach them. Christian criticism is always constructive, not demeaning and condemnatory (David Turner, Matthew, 205). But what about when people simply won’t receive constructive criticism? What if by correcting someone, you are exposing yourself to violence? Here is where verse 6 comes in. As one commentator put it, “Jesus's disciples must not be censorious (7: 1 – 5), but neither must they be oblivious to genuinely evil people” (David Turner, Matthew, 206). There will be times in which having warned people, there is nothing more you can do with them. I think Titus 3:10-11 is an example of this “As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.” However, we need remember a critical point that I think Craig Keener, one of my commentators, put best, “[Matthew 7:6] does not allow one to pre-judge who may receive one's message (13:3-23), but does forbid one to try to force it on those who show no inclination to accept it…” (Craig Keener, Matthew, 244). What he’s saying is, we don’t get to look at someone and go, “Nah, I don’t think that guy is going to believe the gospel. Just look at him!” I mean, who would have thought that Paul would become a believer? The guy was basically fresh from killing Stephen, the Church’s first deacon, when he was converted. But if after giving the gospel, the person goes, “No, don’t ever bring this up again” you are free not to force the issue. Tremendous wisdom is always required in these sorts of situations, and the decision to say, “I can’t help this person anymore,” is one that should be very slowly and prayerfully come to. And just because you aren’t able to help that person, doesn’t mean someone else can’t. In summary, what Jesus is condemning here is harsh, hypocritical condemnation of other people’s sin that you also take part in. The world is often harsh and wrong in its criticism of churches, but more often than we would like to think, we condemn the world for sin while allowing it to exist unchecked in our midst. We rightly criticize the sexual revolution taking place in our country, but we wrongly participate in it through pornography (Eric J. Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 28). A life of holiness will give us a life of freedom, a life that can point people to a better way. We are never going to be perfect; we don’t claim to be! But we do point to a Savior who has not only forgiven our sin, but is making us new. He is not only saving us from the log in our eye, but He is removing it from us that we may see clearly.
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Do you want a promise from God that you will be able to do anything that you set your mind to? Wouldn’t it be a great thing, even a humbling thing, to hear that Christ will promise to be the one to give you strength to parent, preach, fix that leaky faucet, or win that championship football game? This would take the focus off of ourselves and onto Jesus as He gets the credit for every good thing accomplished and every victory won! Enter Philippians 4:13. Many have claimed this verse as they set out to do something, and I have particularly seen this in the athletic community. One NBA star would write this verse on his shoes, and in my youth ministry, would see things like that all the time.
Like most of the verses that we have studied so far, the popular interpretation isn’t too far off the truth. Indeed, the only way that we are able to do anything is because God preserves us. I am not the one keeping my heart beating. I’m not the one who keeps my body going. Anything that I do is because God preserves me. David recognizes this in Psalm 139. In another Psalm, specifically 104:14, we see that God’s control of the Earth extends even to the growing of grass. I’m currently reading through a 700 page book going through all the Bible verses that talk about God’s sovereignty over all things. It is true that draining the game winning basket, catching that touchdown pass, preaching a good sermon, or training up good kids is all credit due to God. But that is not typically how we use the verse. Because it is also true that when we miss that critical basket, the sermon doesn’t land, or the kids don’t turn out the way we expect, God is overseeing that, too. If we use this verse simply to say, “God is going to empower me to win here based on this verse,” when we don’t win, we can end up disappointed, or at worst, disillusioned with God (Eric J. Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 109-110). What if I told you that the promise God is actually making here is better than victory? What if the promise that is made here will still empower you, even, in fact especially, in defeat? It turns out that Paul has a secret about how to do that, and a lot of us, me included, often miss what that is. It turns out that the secret that Paul has is contentment. True contentment is probably, from the world’s perspective, the weirdest of Christian virtues. The ability to be satisfied with whatever you have whenever you have it and even when you don’t have it, strikes against the core of everything that our culture preaches. We are a culture of more is more. Newer is better. Whole industries are built on discontentment. I have been recently introduced to the phenomenon of fast fashion. We will produce clothes that are designed to only last a season! That shirt you bought in the spring is totally out of date in just a few months. The tech world (where I live a lot of the time) is no different. Honestly, I think Apple does this better than anyone. We need to crank out a new iPhone every year that is only incrementally better than last year’s. We didn’t even know that we wanted a phone to do this, that, or the other thing. Tool manufacturers do the same things. The Pyramids were built with hand tools, yet Milwaukee finds a way to make us need the new stuff. The list can go on with nearly every hobby, and if we are honest, we have all fallen into this trap even over good things. Hopefully today, we are going to be looking at a verse that will give us the power to stay out of that trap, or at the very least, show us how to get out of it when we do. Today, we are looking at our two points: Everything that we have is a gift from God and Contentment is possible. Everything that we have is a gift from God Let’s begin by reminding ourselves, as always, of context. Paul is writing this letter to the Philippian church from prison. He has a lot to say to them, which I found summed up in these words by one writer: “Paul desires to see them grow spiritually and serve God faithfully without any attachment to the world. He wants them to be unified, experiencing the joy that is found in Christ. In fact, the words joy and rejoice are used no less than 16 times in the book's four chapters” (Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 111). That is a pretty wild letter to write from prison! Talking about joy and rejoicing when there is suffering going on seems confusing. I have a hard time writing about having joy when things aren’t joyful for me! But it turns out that if we think that way, then we just don’t understand how joy and contentment work. Thankfully, Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, does. When we look at the context of the passage, in this case, just a few verses up, we find that Paul has found the secret to being content in all situations in life. This isn’t a case of Paul just led a more rugged life than we do and just doesn’t know what he is missing. Apparently Paul has abounded before. He’s been full and hungry. Needy and satisfied. One scholar put it like this: “Such contentment springs from complete readiness to accept whatever God gives. The apostle makes no distinction between the necessary and the superfluous, but simply gives thanks for everything. He can accept both abundance and want as a part of his life, and he gives thanks that he has received both as a gift, together with God's gracious forgiveness and quickening power. (Dictionary of New Testament Theology, 72).” Did you catch that? He was saying that Paul accepts everything from God as a gift whether we view that thing in and of itself as a win or a loss. You air-balling the final basket in your highschool championship game, losing the match to the boos of the crowd is just as much a gift from God as is scoring the game winning shot to wild cheers. Now, there is no denying that certainly one feels like a gift and the other doesn’t, but both are from the same gracious God. Missing the shot can be a test from God to grow you in satisfaction with Him alone, but if we choose to turn that into an occasion for bitterness against God, then we make it a temptation to sin. Look at Job. He was a successful man in every single sense of the word, and in a couple of days lost literally everything: business, family, and personal health. What does he say in response? “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” He worships God—praises Him—in the midst of life’s deepest sorrows. That’s what contentment looks like. This doesn’t mean that Job didn’t grieve. He did. Tearing your clothes indicates intense grief, and in all of that the Bible says he didn’t sin, but he praised God in the midst of his grief because, in that moment, at least, he trusted that God was good and just. Trust in God is the key concept here. Contentment is possible. Let’s return to Paul. Many sources that I read pointed to the passage in 2 Corinthians 12. Paul is in the midst of a discussion about how much God has given to him in terms of spiritual insight and heavenly visions. When we get to verses 7-9, we find that Paul was given some sort of heavy hardship that even Paul found difficult to bear. He asked God three times that it would be taken away, and God’s answer was, “I have given you enough. My grace is sufficient.” We can apply this lesson directly to what Paul is saying here in Philippians. One scholar put it this way: “This verse is about having the strength to be content when we are facing those moments in life when physical resources are minimal. This is about having faith in the God who provides – the God who is sovereignly in control over every circumstance in life, the God who sees and knows our needs and has promised to meet them in Christ!” (Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 114). Do you see what he is saying there? Paul is telling us how to have contentment even when there is nothing, and the key to that is trust in God. Trust God? That’s it? That’s the big secret? It sounds so familiar, that it is almost disappointing to hear that the key to contentment is trusting in God. We trust that God will work things out, and we look to Christ to give us the power to be content even when things aren’t going our way. So why are we so discontent so much of the time? If it truly is that easy and understandable that we trust that God is good and rely on His power as the key to being content, then why aren’t we? I think the reason why is because we live in a world that tempts us with the possibility that contentment is just one more purchase away. One writer put it this way: “It's tempting to think, When I get a raise, I will be settled and secure, or As soon as I get married I'll find contentment at last. But these sorts of things are smoke screens for the believer in Christ.” (Bargerhuff, 115-6). Have you ever had those thoughts? What happened once you got them? We got discontent again! It’s like we have amnesia! I’ve done this while preparing this sermon! I’ve been trying to get some things fixed up around the house, and I’ve thought to myself, “Ok, as soon as I get this thing fixed, I can finally relax.” No sooner do I say this that I will see something else that needs attention. I think that the reason we aren’t content is not so much that we don’t trust God but because we think that we can eventually trust something else, and then we don’t have to trust God anymore! We are like the lottery players, buying just one more ticket, because this one has got to be the one! We’ve seen others win (even though if we follow their story through, everyone ends up worse, and more dissatisfied than before they played), so our turn is just around the corner. Yes, we will “trust” God until then, but really we are just biding our time until the real security comes along. And it’s a lie. It’s a false god. It will always leave you disappointed. It will give you just enough satisfaction for a little moment to hook you in and then leave right when you need it. I’ve talked to wealthy people, and it doesn’t provide lasting satisfaction. Does it make some aspects of life easier? Of course, but it doesn’t give you contentment. Contentment can only happen in the present. There is no such thing on Earth as contentment in the future. If you find contentment feelings while thinking about something in the future, that’s worship. And unless that object is God, your sinful heart will never be satisfied. But here is where we get the good news. To borrow one last time from Bargerhuff, “What a joy it would be to come to the place in our lives where we know that we could trust in Christ to provide and rest in his strength for any and ‘all things.’ To have that kind of spiritual strength would be amazing. Monumental. And according to what Paul says, absolutely possible” (114). Philippians 4:13 promises that by relying on Christ’s power to strengthen you, you can be content regardless of the situation in front of you. So practically, how do we do that? When you find yourself dreaming of a future in which ______ difficulty is removed or _______ joy is achieved, bring your hopes, dreams, and fears to Christ. Tell Him what you are going through, ask His help on it, then rest in the promise that His grace is sufficient for you. Contentment isn’t sitting motionless, cross legged on a mountain with no desires. It’s actually more profound than that. It means that whatever you are going through, despite your desires, you find your satisfaction in God. It doesn’t come from your circumstances. Now, if you are in a bad situation, you don’t have to stay in it in the name of contentment if you can remove yourself from it. If you are able to improve your circumstances, do it, but do so with the goal of God’s glory in mind. Paul was about to be unjustly whipped in Acts 22, and he used his status as a Roman citizen to avoid that. This wasn’t a sin. He didn’t, in the name of contentment, go through trouble he didn’t have to, and neither do you. If you are facing abuse in your marriage, that isn’t something that you have to take. In fact, to do so is allowing your spouse to sin. You can seek help. That’s ok. Even if by changing jobs you can provide better for your family, then do so, as long as there is no sin involved. If you want to be married, and you have the opportunity to marry as God would have you do, then do so! Nevertheless, in all of this, do so with the realization that your ultimate hope doesn’t lie in achieving something in your life. Do so recognizing that you can be content in Christ even if God tells you, “No.” You will need to lean on Christ for this. You may need to tell yourself hourly that true contentment is found in God. Focus on the gospel that one day, like we discussed last week, all things will be made right. Rest in that future promise, and rely on Christ’s present strength. Ask Him. His grace is sufficient. One last quote: “The New Testament version of manna is grace. God will give you all the grace that you need today. But He’s not going to give you all the grace you need for tomorrow, because if you had manna for the next week, you would trust in your storehouse and forget about God.” (David Powlison). Keep close to God, have Him always in your mind, and you will discover that you already have all that you need.
Different people want different things in a disaster. There is one type of person who wants a plan. No matter how bad things are around me, nothing makes them feel better than a solid step 1, step 2 plan to get them where they want to go whether that is budgets or home repair. Some things, of course, are beyond one’s personal ability to fix, like, say the state of a nation. I know many have felt that way about America, particularly so in the last ten years. It gets really hard to watch the news because there is very little that any particular individual can do about the culture of a country. We all know that if there is going to be any sort of real, lasting change, God is going to have to be the one to make it happen. That’s where we find this verse in 2 Chronicles 7:14 that seems to give us the ultimate step 1, step 2 scenario! The planning people are satisfied!
But there is another group of people who would rather have a powerful promise that someone will take care of their problem. These types of folks see the road in front of them, and honestly, a plan is a little overwhelming! They’re not so much into step 1, step 2, because they know that they are not powerful enough or confident enough to implement those things. They would rather have someone that they can lean against to do it for them, thus ensuring that it is going to be done correctly. For folks like this, Jeremiah 29:11 seems like the perfect place to land on, and indeed, many have made this verse a theme for their lives, claiming it on everything from business to highschool graduation cards. Both of these passages are absolutely perfect for an “Oh, so close” kind of interpretation. People are tantalizingly close to correct in what these passages mean, but those promises were made to different people, and the way we tend to claim them puts our focus in the wrong place. It is true that God will work things out for our ultimate good, and in the end, the glory that awaits us will make all of our problems seem small (Romans 8), but if we think that Jeremiah 29:11 means that we will never go through any long-term struggle, we are simply wrong. And while it is true that prayers and repentance do bring blessing even to a whole nation, 2 Chronicles 7 isn’t a blueprint or formula to course correct a nation. There is actually a greater Kingdom coming that should be our greatest focus (Bargerhuff, Eric The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 76). Today we are going to look at two points today: God makes promises to specific people and God’s best is yet to come. Here is where the context of the people is important to keep in mind. God is in the midst of relaying the covenant that He has made with Israel, in particular the covenant with David. The promise is still sure that the throne will last forever, BUT that doesn’t mean that they are able to do whatever they want to. When they stray from God’s commands they will experience hardship, but if they repent, the skies open back up, enemies are defeated, and the land is healed. If we are going to understand the specific promises in these verses, we are going to have to remember some covenants, aka, the context of the people. Let’s go ALLLLLL the way back to Genesis 12:1-3. In these verses, what we have here is a covenant with God (later ratified in chapters 15 and 17) between Himself and the nation of Israel. All of the descendants of Abraham, by virtue of being his descendants, are given the incredible promise of experiencing divine blessing, and having the opportunity of passing on that divine blessing. That promise was not made with other nations. The Egyptians couldn’t claim those promises. The Canaanites didn’t have this covenant. And by extension, nether do Americans. This promise of blessing and passing on a blessing was the exclusive gift and responsibility of the Israelites. This position of blessing had some expectations on behavior, something that we see spelled out for us in what we know as the Torah, the Law, the first five books of the Old Testament. Here the expectations were laid out clearly and exhaustively, governing how one dressed, ate, washed, lived, worshiped and, well, governed! Such was the life of the Israelites, and anyone who wanted to enjoy the benefits of this covenant left all other gods behind, and worshiped the true God the same way that they did. Obviously, no one was ever perfect then, so it was by grace then just as much as it is now, but the Israelites were to be the shining example pointing the rest of the world to come and get to know their God who had done so much for them. When they would sin, God would send hardships into their lands in the form of pestilence (2 Samuel 24:10-15), war (2 Samuel 12:10), and ultimately, exile to both Assyria and Babylon. The promise always was, even in exile, that if the people would repent, God would bring them back to the land of Israel, which He did. This is because God had a covenant with Israel that promised exactly that (Deuteronomy 30:11-20; Isaiah 44:28; Jeremiah 29:11). So now the question remains: can we use these verses as a promise to us, American Christians? Both of these verses would have been verses to cling to for Israelites in exile, and would be consistent with other verses promising these things, but can we Americans use them? Well, that depends on what you mean by that. There is an ultimate sense in what God was promising Israel. He wasn’t just saying that they would be redeemed from physical slavery to live in the geopolitical location of Israel, but that they would be redeemed to be citizens of the Kingdom that is not of this World. That they would be redeemed from spiritual slavery! This is the component of the promise that we can claim as well! The covenants that God made were ultimately pointing to Jesus, so if you look at Jeremiah 29:11 and think that “plans for good” means redemption by Jesus Christ, then you claim that promise, people! That promise is for you! However, if you are using this promise to mean that God is going to bless your new cookie business that you are starting on the side with record profits, then no you are not using that promise correctly. We need to look at the context. For this particular verse, we only have to go back literally one sentence to realize who God is making this promise to: captives in Babylon. When the 70 years are over, THEN God is going to bring them back as He promised He would thereby showing that God is not just out to smash Israel but actually has a future and hope for them that will ultimately be fulfilled in Christ and in His second coming. You can’t rip the promise out from its situation. As one pastor pointed out, even the original audience of that promise (the Isrealites heading into captivity), wouldn’t live long enough to see that promise fulfilled, as it would be 70 years from then! Most of them would have to declare this promise to their children and grandchildren who would actually see it fulfilled (Bargerhuff, Eric The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 38). The same goes with the Chronicles passage. The context is the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem. This is a huge event, one that has been in the works since 2 Samuel 7. At the completion of the Temple, God reiterates the covenant terms that have been in place since Moses: obey and receive blessing, disobey and receive cursing, repent and receive blessing again. So, is this something that we can claim here? Well, just like the Jer. 29:11 passage, it depends. If you are praying this believing that if we get enough people praying, eventually God has to return and heal the land, then, no, that’s not for us. The promise was made to Israel, not America. HOWEVER, this doesn’t mean that God won’t be merciful if Americans pray to Him. God is a merciful God, so absolutely we should pray for our country. Nevertheless, I think our focus should be in a different place than it usually is when we pray this prayer. The thing I think we can take away from both of these passages as correctly understood that can still be deeply comforting to us. Both of these passages highlight the mercy, grace, and forgiving nature of God. Do we realize how deeply God owes us nothing? We lose our patience with people after a handful of unpleasant interactions. But God’s grace endures sin after sin after sin after sin after sin. We repent, and God forgives over and over again. This isn’t something that we treat lightly or abuse, but it is something that we should be in awe over. In Israel’s case, God kept forgiving. In the disciples’ case, Jesus kept being patient, and in my case, God keeps showing mercy and grace. We see over and over again God’s mercy being shown, and in that we can have comfort. The best thing is that we can have that comfort whether times are good or bad. I think this is the main thing that I want to drive home to us today. The way that I see these verses often employed is the idea that once we have the thing we are claiming these promises for, then, and only then, we will be really happy. When it seems like God’s plan for you is to suffer (you know, like how basically every Christian in the New Testament experienced it), it feels like Jeremiah 29:11 is a tease. The same goes for 2 Chronicles 7:14. We don’t want to think that we cannot praise the Lord, or can’t have real hope when a culture’s politics are wrong. No matter what happens to this country, God’s plans are still going to move forward. God doesn’t need any nation. Now, as it has been properly pointed out, this doesn’t mean that we don’t pray for our government or our culture. Indeed, quite the opposite, because 1 Timothy 2:1-4 tells us to pray for those who are in power in our governments (Bargerhuff, Eric The Most Misused Verses in the Bible, 76). It is true that when Christians are living like Christians it does affect a nation. And it is certainly a great thing for the gospel when governments allow it to spread easily. I very much enjoy getting to do this job legally, and I pray that I would be able to continue to do so for many years to come. But I do not have the promise of God that if I do that He is obligated to rescue my country from its own destruction. The promise that I do have, however, is the country that I am going to is one of total peace, security, and rest before the King, Jesus. That is the place that I am going to regardless of what happens here. This doesn’t mean that I don’t care about what happens here, but it does mean that my experience of hope doesn’t rise or fall based on who is in office. I need to pray just as hard for my own repentance from sin no matter who is in office, or what sort of policies are being promulgated. Indeed, as the context of Jeremiah 29:11 shows, God’s people shouldn’t expect to never suffer. The Israelites spent a good portion of their nation’s history in some sort of trouble. We are not owed any sort of easy way out of anything. But we have been granted something even better. Israel was thrilled with the idea that they would be given a land, and who could blame them? But as I hinted at earlier, all of these promises have their eyes set a little further beyond the horizon. Beyond settled borders or a healthy crop yield and a righteous government stands a risen Messiah. We have prayed for healing of our land and healing of ourselves, and God sent His only Son. Jesus is able to reach so deeply into our hearts and heal so much more than we ever thought we could. One day, He promises to return and not just set up just laws or put the right people in office. He is actually going to be in office! More than that, death, disease, and decay will one day be no more! One day the Lord will return and establish a renewed creation better than Eden! There will be no need of court systems or even law enforcement. I mean, there is not going to be the need for the sun anymore because God Himself is going to provide the light for the world! We will get to dwell directly in God’s presence as we were always meant to be doing. Is that enough of a good plan for you? That is a far bigger dream than any highschooler would dare to dream. Even if you got everything you think you would want by claiming those verses, it wouldn’t compare to what God is actually bringing you. Again, I am not saying that it is wrong to pray for a country that honors God. I am not saying that you can’t pray to God to prosper the plans that you have. It is good to pray. It is necessary to pray. But as you do so, never forget what God is already doing for you. It will actually give you a stouter heart to pray for the world as it stands now. Your heart won’t fail when you watch the anger stokers on TV or doomscroll through the Twitterverse. God isn’t failing because America is. God isn’t failing because you are. Indeed, God can triumph directly through those failures, and even when things seem to be going the absolute worst, God can bring it out to the best. Of course, all of what I just said here is only true if you are in Christ. If you have not surrendered to Christ, been united to Him, then this is as good as it is ever going to get. This is as sure as life will ever be for you. Things will get much, much worse, so I plead with you to get right with God today if you haven’t already. Only then will you find the comfort that these verses can actually bring you. Image by Lorenzo Cafaro
Have you ever noticed how many guarantees there are offered to you? People promise guaranteed satisfaction on so many sorts of products and services because people want to know that the money they spend or the effort they expend will be worth it. No one wants to pay a bunch of money only to have buyer’s remorse or work super hard on something that turns out to be a waste of time. Now if there is anything that parents want is a guarantee on, it is that their children are going to do all right in life. Parents put more effort, more of themselves, into their children than anything else in their lives (if they are doing it properly!), so they, of all people, want to know that what they are doing is the right thing. We’ve all heard the horror stories of parents who seemingly did everything right and yet the kids did not turn out the way their parents hoped. This puts us on the hunt for some sort of technique, some sort of verse, some sort of something that will help us sleep at night knowing that no matter how anything else turns out in life, at least the kids are going to be ok.
Many believe that they have found their answer in this verse. All you have to do is train up your kid! This means that any kid that wasn’t trained, or at least wasn’t trained properly, will turn out poorly. Now, I think we all know that life isn’t that simple, but we still have this verse here. We can’t just say, “Well, that is not how my life has turned out, so the Bible must be wrong.” That is a very dangerous way to do Bible interpretation. We can’t interpret the Bible through our own life experience, so what are we supposed to do with it? What is this verse really promising us, if anything? Well in order to understand this verse, we need to understand a little bit about how the Bible works, and specifically how Proverbs work. In this sermon, we need to cover two important things: God Never Contradicts Himself and God calls us to train our children for His glory. As always, whenever there is an important theological topic, theologians need to put a fancy name on it. Obviously, the idea that the Bible doesn’t contradict itself is really a foundational concept, so we’ve got a name for it! The term theologians use is called the analogy of faith. Let’s examine what is meant by the analogy of faith. All we are saying is that the Bible doesn’t contradict itself, so the Bible is the best guide and interpreter of the Bible. Is there one verse that could be interpreted a few different ways? Well, find another verse that addresses that topic clearly. Whatever is meant there in the clear passage is what it means in the unclear passage (R.C. Sproul, Truths We Confess, 27-29). To put it in a very simple way, keep the context of the whole Bible when you are interpreting any individual verse. Do you remember last week when we talked about the importance of context in a chapter of the Bible? We saw last week how the context of the whole chapter of Matthew 18 helped us interpret it correctly. This week, we are going to see how the entire Bible (more or less) helps us understand Proverbs 22:6. Why is keeping the whole Bible in mind helpful? Well, we know that the Bible was written in its entirety by God Himself. This means that though there were several human writers, there was one Divine Author. What this means is God isn’t going to contradict Himself. We can contradict ourselves because we either don’t remember what we have said before, or we are simply inconsistent about what we believe. God doesn’t have any of those limitations. This is an important thing to grasp in our minds because this is foundational to the rest of our interpretation of the Bible. This means that the best interpreter of the Bible is the Bible. We can best understand what the Bible is saying over here by what the Bible says in other places. By comparing different passages of Scripture together, we can determine what any one passage is referring to. Let’s look at an example of this. We can see Ephesians telling us that God forgives us purely by His grace. We might walk away from that thinking, “Ok, then, it doesn’t matter what I do. I’m saved by grace, not my works, therefore, I will do no works.” But then James comes along and reminds us that there are still commands that we will obey if our faith is a living one. We are still saved by grace, but that salvation is made evident by the works that faith produces. The one doesn’t cancel the other but they complement one another. Now, we know that James isn’t preaching salvation by works because the entire rest of the Bible very clearly affirms salvation by grace alone. And indeed, once you read James closely, you will see that James isn’t saying that salvation is obtained by works but it is displayed by works. This is why something like keeping the whole context of the whole Bible is so important. Yes, we need to know the immediate context, but to keep ourselves from getting into the exegetical weeds and becoming unbalanced on something, we need to see what the rest of Scripture has to say on the topic. If we try to “find balance” using our own intuition rather than the Bible itself, we always run the very high risk of going too far the other way. So how does keeping the whole Bible in mind help us with Proverbs 22:6? When we start to look at the rest of the Bible, we can see that what is seemingly promised here, simply hasn’t worked out in the rest of the Bible. Ironically, we actually have the example of Solomon himself not following the right path when he is old. In fact, precisely when he got old, he married a bunch of other women and turned his heart away from God to false gods! He even attempted to kill the next guy in line to the throne as a result of that sin (1 Kings 11:40)! What happened? Was David just not a good dad? You could make that argument based on Absolom’s case, but the 1 Kings 11 passage makes explicit that David followed God wholeheartedly, so he has a decent chance as any to fulfill this verse of training his child appropriately. We also see examples of terrible parents who produce good kids. Let’s look at 2 Kings 21:19-26. Amon was a miserable dad. The guy did basically nothing right, and yet Josiah comes from him and goes on to be one of the best kings since David, according to God Himself (2 Kings 22:25). We’ve seen parents produce two kids of completely opposite dispositions. Adam and Eve had both Cain and Abel. One was a worshiper and the other was a murderer. Jacob had his twelve sons where both Reuben and Joseph came from him (different mothers, though). By seeing these other passages in the Bible, because we know that the Bible does not contradict itself, we are able to arrive at a proper understanding of the Scriptures. Obviously, based on the data that we have, we can conclude that Proverbs 22:6 isn’t an iron-clad promise, because it has obviously not been that for these other parents, in the Bible. Remember, we are not drawing on the data of our own lives but drawing on Biblical data to figure this out. Even if we look into the Proverbs themselves, we will see that Proverbs has never promised fool-proof parenting. One scholar put it this way: “...yes, Proverbs has an optimistic air about parents and tradition, But that should not lead readers to regard the book as naive or idealistic. A closer reading of the book reveals its unapologetic realism” (O’Dowd, 709). In another place, he said, “The book does not solve the problem of contradictions in life. Instead it leaves this problem to the limits of human understanding, calling us away from pragmatism and despair to an ethics grounded in faith, providence, and hope” (707). This last sentence I think needs some unpacking for us. Proverbs is showing us what our approach to life should be even in the face of hardships and a culture that says we are doing this wrongly. Proverbs isn’t trying to reveal every mystery or lay out what to do in every single situation we will encounter in life. If it even tried to, the book would be endless! It simply lays out what a wise approach to life would be in a variety of situations leaving it to a mind transformed by the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit to reason our way through it. Proverbs 26:4-5 is a great example of this where we are told to not answer the fool and to answer the fool. Different situations require different responses, and Proverbs is able to sustain that reality. What Proverbs is calling us to is an ethic that is “grounded in faith, providence, and hope” (707). I love this because I think it captures so well what we are trying to do here. When we live out this wisdom that God has left for us here, we do so in faith, in trust that God is leading us the right way. We do so trusting in God’s providence, His total care of all things. There is nothing in your life that is left to chance. I have spent so much of my life trying to make it regret-proof, overthinking so many decisions in my life because I just want it to be perfect. It is fine to plan and be careful, but where the arrogance comes is when I think that by doing so, I can fundamentally control my life so it is lived in the way I want. It isn’t my life, it is God’s. I think about a decision long enough to take God’s Word into account, the wisdom of other people, and go for it. If it turns out badly, well, God’s providence is going to work through it. In the end, I still have hope of what God is going to do in the future. Keeping these three things in mind I think is going to transform how we approach the Proverbs. We see this powerfully illustrated in the book of Job. Job actually never gets the answer to why despite faithful living, he experienced all this trouble. The “only” answer he gets is the only answer we need: “God is God, and we are not.” We are living in His world, and no matter what our experience of it is, it is going to be worked out for His ultimate glory. So after all of that, let’s dive into our verse (finally!) At first, it would seem that we have an iron-clad promise that as long as you raise your children correctly, they will turn out ok even when they are old, but as we have seen, the rest of the Bible would seem to indicate to us that this simply isn’t the case. This doesn’t mean we throw our hands up in despair saying, “Well, then, nothing works! Might as well give up!” We don’t have to do that. So what is this verse saying to us, then? In one sense, in general, if you teach your children the things of God, they are likely to continue in those teachings. God’s wisdom is that we teach our children because they need it. This isn’t meant to be a promise so much as it is a prodding to teach your children. This isn’t the only place in Scripture where this is taught. In Deuteronomy 6:7, we are told to teach our children diligently. Psalm 78:6-7 tells us to teach our coming generation about the works of the Lord with the implication that they will follow the teachings presented to them. Included also is Psalm 102:18, Deu 4:9, 11;19, Ex. 12:26-27, and Josh. 4:6, and that is just the Old Testament. Obviously, teaching one’s children is an important task for the people of God. This was a priority that God continues into the New Testament in Eph. 6:4, Col. 3, and Jesus’ own interaction with children, Matthew 19:14. Children are very important to God, so He has commands all the way through the Bible to train them up, and He has laid that responsibility squarely on the parent’s shoulders. In short, children look to you to learn about God and His Word. Yes, things like church attendance is important. Sunday School is so helpful, which is why we are so grateful to those who serve in that capacity week after week. Bible videos, children’s books, and VBS are all helpful to you, but none of those things can replace you. There is no more of a powerful witness of Jesus’ ability to impact a life than a life lived in front of others. Parents, there is no one that your kids are watching more closely than you. So train them. Show them how it is done. But this doesn’t mean that God owes us children doing what we want them to. We don’t train them for our own glory or their own glory. This is such a hard part about being a parent! It is so easy to train our children with the idea that if we do so properly they will make us look good. What makes that so easy to think is that it is kinda true! We look at well-behaved kids and assume that this is the parent’s good work. God will sometimes reward in that way, but He doesn’t have to. Other times I am motivated for my kids to be obedient because I want their lives to be easier and have the approval of strangers. Sometimes I am selfless enough to not care about what this means for me, but I am not sufficiently focused on God to get past what it means for my children. Sometimes God allows kids to take themselves through quite the convoluted path to ultimately them where He wants them to go. In those situations, we trust them to His care, continue to pray for them, and rest that God is indeed a good God who will work all things for our glory and His good. So what is our takeaway? We recognize that while God gives us clear directions for what to do with our children, we must not think that this will be a magic formula to ensure our children turn out a certain way. This doesn’t mean we don’t train them (to do that is to be disobedient), but it does mean that we don’t train them with the idea that if we’ve done that, God owes us good kids. We train them for God’s glory, not ours, not theirs, and not anyone except God’s. I don’t know of a single parent who doesn’t look back on their child-rearing without some level of regret. None of us have done this perfectly. Some of us actually did it very poorly. But Jesus can forgive bad parents. The gospel is for parental failure, too. If that is the case for you today, then you, to borrow a phrase from John Piper, you are going to have to rely on the same grace of God as the parent who did it perfectly. Repent of that sin, apologize to your children, if necessary, and go after Christ (recognizing that just because you have apologized, doesn’t mean that potentially decades of hurt magically go away). Maybe your wayward children turn back immediately because of that, maybe they don’t, but the point is to be reconciled to God. Live out the gospel in front of them as an adult, and maybe, just maybe, when they, too, are old, they will not depart from The Way as well. This is a life-long process, and commitment to God’s Word is the only path forward. One Scholar put it this way: “Like children, parents are prone to error. And so God puts children, parents, and others on notice that true wisdom is found only in the tradition of those who "fear the Lord" (Prov. 1:7). One cannot have wisdom (or society) without tradition, but not every tradition counts, and thus heating wisdom's call is a task that never ceases” (O’Dowd, 709). We all need to be walking along this path, and we will, only by God’s grace, be able to lead our children down it as well.
We are going to be starting a new sermon series for the month of July that I’m calling “Oh, So Close!” There are a lot of verses that are misquoted, misapplied, and misunderstood today in our wider culture, so I thought that we would take a few weeks between Bible books to look at a few of them. The point of this series is not to condemn people who have misunderstood or misapplied the verses we will cover. This is part of the reason why I have titled the series the way that I have. Sometimes, these misapplications are very close, but not close enough. Some mistakes are worse than others. If you have misapplied the verse in Matthew 18 that says, “where two or three are gathered together, there I am in the midst of them” to a prayer meeting of a few people, you can still be saved. You are not applying that verse correctly, but you can still go to heaven. Other times, the misapplication of verses can set you up for a real problem in the Christian life. People can take Jeremiah 29:11 and think that based on that verse God only intends to bring good things into their lives as defined by them. When troubles come into their lives, they can think that God has abandoned them.
The real point of this series is I want to give you a helpful set of tools in your own interpretation of the Scriptures. If you can apply the things that we will see in the next few weeks, you will have a greater chance of interpreting the Bible for yourself with precision. It is not enough to be correct that a certain topic is taught in the Bible; you need to be precise as to what that verse specifically is saying about a given topic. To use the Matthew 18 passage again, it is true that God is with us, even when our numbers are small, but that is not the precise meaning of that passage. As we will explore when we get to that one, the truth that God gives to us in that verse is more profound and comforting than just a general blanket statement of God’s presence with us. Whenever we are interpreting a verse of the Bible, we must keep at least three things in mind. We must keep the context of the passage in mind. What do I mean by that? I mean to say that you need to read, at the absolute bare minimum, the entire chapter that the verse is in if you actually want to understand it. If you just read a single verse without accounting for the rest of the chapter, you are almost certainly not going to get the correct idea to say nothing of the precise idea of the passage. I remember one humorous example of this was a flip calendar of “Inspiring Bible Verses for Your Day.” The person had flipped to a page that took its verse of the day from Matthew 4:9 which reads, “’And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’” Can you see the problem here? Verse 9 is not Jesus talking to the disciples, it was Satan trying to tempt Jesus to disobey God! The caption under the photo said, “Less inspiring when you know who said it.” You can see how if you just read a verse in isolation and don’t read the whole chapter, you are bound to misinterpret the verse. Most of the verses that we are going to cover would be understood properly by reading the entire chapter that contains them (even better if you read the chapter before and the chapter afterward). You will hear in real estate that the three most important things are location, location, location. In Biblical interpretation, as I believe RC Sproul said, it is context, context, context. As you grow in your knowledge of the Bible, you will actually see how the more context you have the better the deeper the knowledge you have of a verse. If you read the verses before and after, you might have something. The chapter will give you more. The chapters before and after give you even more. Soon, you’ll see that the entire book, its purpose, structure, audience, and cultural background all have something to say about that individual verse. Then the Testament it is in and how the whole rest of the Bible interact with that gives you the sense of how deep these verses can be. This isn’t to say you have to read the entire Bible every day in order to understand the verse from your Daily Bread devotional, but you do need to keep in mind the fact that the whole of God’s revelation has something to say about how we understand any verse. We must keep the context of the people in mind This is the second thing that we must keep in mind while studying the Scriptures. What do I mean by the context of the people? I mean to say that you have to understand the passage the way the original audience would have correctly understood it. In other words, the truth of a Bible verse can’t mean something different today than it did then. Let’s take a classic example of this from Romans 1:16 which reads, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Tell me if you have heard this explanation before. People will preach this passage saying, “The Greek Word for power here is ‘dunamis,’ from which we get the word ‘dynamite.’ So when Paul is talking about the power of the gospel, we should think of the kind of power we would get from a stick of dynamite!” First of all, what does that really mean? Jesus is going to blow up my sin? Blast me to heaven? That’s very unclear. And it certainly isn’t what Paul had in mind. Paul didn’t know about dynamite, neither did anyone in his audience. The Holy Spirit is going to write in such a way that everyone, including the people sitting there, would understand. That word is talking about the power of dynamite to save someone. No it is talking about the power of God. Dynamite destroys things into chaotic pieces, God steps out into the chaos and speaks it into order. God doesn’t blow up your sin into pieces so small you can’t see them, He completely removes them because He has the dunamis, the ability, the power to do it because He is God. You see the difference? See how much clearer the Holy Spirit is than we are when we try to get clever? We have to remember that the Bible was written in a certain time, with a certain language, with cultural expectations, assumptions, and metaphors. That doesn’t mean that the Bible doesn’t speak with authority in a world with Google and cell phones, but it does mean that we need to lose our cultural assumptions and learn theirs. Learning about inheritances, birthrights, and father-son relations gives the story of the Prodigal Son a massive impact. There are a number of places where Jesus said something that would have gotten a shocked gasp out of the people listening to Him that we miss. That’s not the Bible’s fault, that’s ours! That’s mine. We need to learn and explain what God is saying by learning how He said it. We must keep the context of the prose (genre) in mind. If you have heard of the other two, you might not have heard of this one, but it is equally important to remember. If I were to tell you that I am going to read you some history, you are going to assume that I am going to read you true facts about the past. If I tell you that I am going to read a novel to you, then you know that I am not reading you something that really happened. I am telling a story. If I tell you that I am reading history, when I am really reading Lord of the Rings, you are going to be very confused! That is the importance of genre. Knowing what kind of work I am reading is going inform you on what to expect. The Bible works in the same way. The Bible has a ton of different genre’s in it, each with their own rules and ways of communicating. For example, Jesus often uses the story-telling teaching format of parables. Parables have been defined as an earthly story with one heavenly meaning. When Jesus told the Parable of the Prodigal Son, He wasn’t reciting history that literally happened, he was telling a memorable story so that we would get the one point of the God’s love for sinners. If you don’t know what the rules of a parable are (that these are fictional stories only meant to communicate a single point) then you can go in wild directions trying to interpret every last detail of the parable (do the pigs symbolize the Gentiles?) and miss the main meaning. One big place where we see genre as chief importance is in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, particularly the first 3. Are these chapters history, or are they poetry or parable? How you answer that question will determine how you interpret Genesis. I’ve only mentioned a couple different genres, but there are so many more! In the Bible you have, history, poetry, epistle, wisdom literature, law, gospel, genealogy, and more! To sum it all up If all of this is a little overwhelming to you, just ask yourself the question, “What does the author intend here?” That will force you to intuitively ask those other questions above. You will read the whole of the author’s writings to get a sense of his style and purpose (context of the passage), you will ask whom he is writing to and why (context of the people), and, finally, you’ll ask how he is doing that (context of the prose). Really, just knowing that this is a question you need to ask will help keep you from some of those assumptions that lead to misinterpretation. These things were not written by Americans last week. This is literature from thousands of years ago with something still to say today. And I think that is quite amazing. Let’s try it out So, let’s try out these means of interpreting Scripture into probably the most misapplied sections of Scripture that I have personally seen, Matthew 18:20 “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” If you have been a Christian who has gone to prayer meetings, you have almost certainly heard this verse quoted, especially if the prayer meeting is only attended by a few people (which, sadly, they usually are). Now, I’ll begin by saying that it is correct to say that God is with you at that prayer meeting. That is true. There are lots of Bible passages that assure us that God is with us. Matthew 28:20 “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Hebrews 13:5 says, “I will never leave nor forsake you” itself a quote from Deuteronomy 31:6. The Bible cleary teaches us that God doesn’t abandon us and is always with us, but just because it says it in those places does not mean that this is the precise meaning of this passage here in Matthew 18. If we keep the context of the passage in mind, we will see that this is a passage reporting the teachings of Jesus with the genre of a sermon, authoritative prescriptions for how we are supposed to live. In the immediate few verses of 15-20, we will see the context of the people is outlining how the Church is supposed to confront sin in its midst. First, it needs to be dealt with one on one, and if that is unsuccessful, then you bring in a couple of other people in on this process. Anyone who has had to do that knows just how scary that is. It gets even harder when you look at the rest of the context of the passage, the earlier part of the chapter. We find out at the beginning of chapter 18, verses 5-9 that sin is the worst thing in the world. In fact, it is said that you would be better off having been drowned in the sea with a 200 pound rock wrapped around your neck than cause other people to sin. Jesus goes even further and says that you would be better off cutting off your hands and plucking out your eyes than sinning. But then, Jesus tells the parable of the lost sheep in verses 10-14, showing that God shows mercy on the sinner and pursues them to bring them back. Far from just kicking the sinner out of the church like a disease to never interact with them again, we are called to pursue the sinner and call them to righteousness. But! We still have to deal with their sin, and if they won’t repent, we do in fact tell them that we think they are acting like non-believers and take away their invitation to the Lord’s Supper until they repent of their heinous sin. But until they repent, we don’t shun them, but we don’t pretend like there is nothing going on. We are concerned about their soul and will put in every effort we can to bring them to Jesus because that is the heart of our Lord as indicated in verses 10-14. That all sounds really complicated, doesn’t it? Don’t you wish there was a promise from God that He would be with you in that specific process, guiding you? Well, that’s exactly what we find in verse 20. God promises to be with you in exactly that type of scenario that requires immense wisdom and balance. This is just like what a father does when he is with children who are scared of a storm. He reminds them, “I’m right here.” Now, did the kids really forget that he was there? No! He’s holding their hand! But to hear it from him again in that moment is a reminder not only that he is there, but it is a reminder of all the other times that he has been there. If he has been a good dad, that is a comfort to the kids. Dad is here, just like he was before. I was safe then, so I’m safe now. God has been the perfect dad. He has always been there. It may not always have been easy or pleasant, but He has always brought you through everything and will do so again in this hard season. Yes, Church discipline is scary, trust me, but God is always holding your hand, and here He is pointing that out to you so you remember. So yes, God is there when you are in a lightly-attended prayer meeting, but oh, isn’t that promise precisely interpreted so much more comforting? There are other places to go to make us feel better about the small prayer meeting. But this passage is a precious promise to those who have to be faithful in very hard times. It’s not one we want to overuse or water down in our application of it. If you want a great passage on prayer, look at Luke 11:1-13. There Jesus promises to give good things to those who ask. The context is about prayer, and the promises are about prayer, and those are just as comforting. God will be more than with you in that prayer meeting. He will also hear and grant those requests that are good for your soul. What is our takehome point today? God has given you precisely what He wants to give you in His word. Not a word is wasted or unnecessary. Find out exactly what God means, and I promise you, that you will find the comfort, instruction, and joy that God means for you to have from it. Image by Abby Jessup
We live in a fast-paced world where unless you are constantly moving, it feels like you are falling behind. This world has trained us to think this way even about our Christian lives. “Fast-paced” isn’t typically what should come to our mind when we think about prayer. Prayer feels slow, dare we say it, unproductive. But it is prayer that Paul emphasizes so much here at the end of this letter.
As Paul makes the final turn in his letter to the Epehesians, he suddenly drops the military imagery and instead exhorts the Ephesians church (and us) on the importance of prayer. He spends quite a bit of time on this here, highlighting its importance to the spiritual fight. He also breaks out the word “all” four times in this brief section before finally requesting that this gift of prayer be applied to him and his calling. Prayer should be a continual, Bible directed, others-focused way of life Let’s begin by talking about Paul’s exhortation to be praying “at all times.” This is our first “all” that Paul applies to our prayer life. It should be done at all times. Now obviously, Paul isn’t calling us to have heads bowed, eyes closed, knees bent, deep in prayer 24 hours a day. But what he is calling us to is a heart that is always on a hair-trigger to pray. I came across one guy who put it this way, “I’ve never prayed for more than twenty minutes, but I have never gone twenty minutes without praying.” I think that is what Paul is getting at here. Prayer is just the natural part of your day where you are constantly interacting with God. It should be something that we are familiar with, it is how we treat our phones, isn’t it? We do this with our phones all the time. Whenever we see something interesting, what do we do? We whip out our phones to capture it. Whenever we see nothing interesting, what do we do? We whip out our phones to distract us from being bored. When we are sad and need a numbing, we take it out, when we are celebrating the end of a day, we whip it out, when we wake up, it is often the first thing we see and often the last thing we put it down before we go to sleep. This isn’t an anti-phone statement, but it does illustrate our capacity to do this. We can be connected to something every twenty minutes, even if it isn’t for a very long time. All those pick-ups add up. Even if you change your background on your phone to “Pray” that could help! If we were to pray every twenty minutes (3 times an hour) for just two minutes at a time, over the course of a day (assuming 15 hours of consciousness), that would be over an hour and a half of prayer every day! Spending just one minute in prayer over that length of time, would be 45 minutes of prayer a day. Now, imagine how many different life situations you would bring into prayer? How might your prayer improve in terms of variety? If you were to talk to God about the things that have happened over the last 20 minutes, you would have a much greater variety of things that you would bring to God in your life. So it is pretty clear when we are supposed to pray, but how are we supposed to pray? Specifically, what does Paul mean when he talks about prayer “in the Spirit”? Some have thought that praying in the Spirit has meant praying in some sort of unknown, spiritual language that even the prayer doesn’t really know. That isn’t what Paul is talking about here, I don’t think. Contrary to popular conceptions of Him, the Holy Spirit isn’t actually known for being unclear. He is quite clear; He’s the One who wrote the Bible. He has no trouble getting His message across; just look at the book of Acts. What I think Paul is referring to here is something that he wrote back in Romans 8:26-27. If you don’t know what to pray for or how to pray for something, pray that. The Holy Spirit will fix the prayers to what they should have been. But there is another way that the Holy Spirit guides your prayers: through the Bible. If you want to know what your prayers should be, become familiar with the Book the Holy Spirit wrote. Study the Psalms as the example of prayers for nearly any situation in life. It’s not just the Psalms either. By studying Paul’s letters you can learn what the Christian life should be like and fit everything through that grid. For example, it is perfectly fine to pray for someone’s health (James 5:14), but there is so much more that we could be praying for them. Have you prayed through the fruit of the Spirit and asked the Lord to cultivate those in yourself and in others as well? Do we pray for people’s spiritual health as much as or at least as well as their physical health? That’s what the Holy Spirit prays for us as it says in Romans 8:27 “And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” What is the will of God? 1 Thess 4:3 “your sanctification.” Again, do we pray that people would be healed? Yes, but there is much more that we can also pray for, and that is what praying in the Spirit will bring us. He guides us in His Word how to pray, and then fixes our broken prayers when we get them wrong. Paul encourages us to pray this way in all of our prayers and petitions to God (two ways of saying the same thing, basically). All of our prayers should be directed by the Holy Spirit, especially those that we offer up for others. As we get to the latter half of verse 18, we are told to keep alert. The word Paul uses for “alert” means “lie awake, pass sleepless nights.” (Thielman, 434). This is such a powerful image. For those of you who have had to deal with insomnia, when are you ever more alert than that? For whatever reason you are awake, you are intensely aware of yourself and your situation. That’s part of what is so maddening about it! But when it comes to prayer, it is this level of alertness, readiness to pray, especially for others, is what Paul wants us to develop. What does that look like? I think this is getting at a first instinct to an issue is to pray about it. John Piper has an illustration I’ve thought about a lot over the years. He mentions that we often think about prayer as being more like a domestic intercom trying to reach the front desk for more pillows rather than a war radio asking for supplies. When we treat prayer more like the domestic intercom, when a real situation hits us, we don’t reach for it. If we thought about it more like it actually is, a line of communication for a battle, our first instinct is to reach out to the Commander when something shows up on the battlefield. Paul mentions more about prayer, specifically that we are to persevere in our prayers. This may actually be the hardest part of Paul’s instruction on prayer. We are to keep praying, calling into Command, even when we don’t get the answer right away. Anyone who has been in the Christian life for any length of time has experienced this. You find yourself smacking the side of the radio, as it were, asking God, “Is this thing on?” Maybe you have been praying for a good thing like a spouse or a child, or the growth of the church, or a revival of the gospel and it just continues to be radio silence, or so it seems. It is hard enough when you are praying for something for weeks and months, but it is an entirely different thing when you have been praying for something for decades. One of the commentaries that I read in preparation for this talked about how he prayed for his brother’s salvation for thirty years. Thankfully, that had a happy ending, but I can only imagine what that was like. Perhaps he was encouraged by these words by George Muller: “When asked if he really believed that two men for whose salvation he had prayed for over fifty years would be converted, George Müller of Bristol replied, “Do you think God would have kept me praying all these years if He did not intend to save them?” Both men were converted, one shortly before, the other after Müller’s death. (Kent Hughes).” Obviously, it isn’t a promise from God that whatever you pray for (even good things) will be granted (otherwise there would be a lot more lottery winners), but I think that there is something to Muller’s words that I have seen a number of times even in my own life. I remember when I was a teenager, there was an adult video store featured prominently on the road on the way to our church at the time. Every time we passed it for three or so years, we prayed that such a place would go out of business. Of all the things to pray for, that was something that the Lord laid on our hearts. After three years, a hurricane came through and damaged it so badly it had to be torn down and never was rebuilt. Now things haven’t always worked that way for me, either. Right out of seminary, I was praying for a specific job that I was pretty deep into the interview process with that didn’t work out. But that put me on a different path that has led right to this moment right here. Someday I’ll have to tell the whole story, but suffice it to say that God brought us through a lot of unexpected things that were perfect for the time (even if we didn’t see it that way). All this to say, we must never divorce persistence in prayer from the goodness of God. If He is going to, from my perspective, deny me a good thing, it is because ultimately it is for my good and that if I had all the information He had, I would agree 100%. I can’t remember where I saw this, but someone gave the illustration of a parent and child. The parent has found out that there is a recall on their child’s favorite toy due to a dangerous chemical within it. The parent has to, out of love, take away the toy. The child doesn’t understand, and there is really no way to make a young child understand that. It is the same with God and us. We can ask for something that God doesn’t give to us. We don’t understand why, and perhaps in our humanity on this side of heaven, we couldn’t understand it if it were explained to us. But we must be reminded that while we continue to pray for that thing, we worship God by saying, “I know you are good. I know that you have placed this desire in my heart. I’ve searched your Word and know this is something you want me to pray for, so I am going to keep going.” That is a testimony that glorifies God. That is prayer that remembers that Christ has died for them. Jesus isn’t being a meanie, withholding something you want as a power trip like we might do. Jesus has already given you Himself. When you were a sinner, Jesus died for you anyway and rose again from the dead. He invites you to follow Him, yes down a narrow, hard road into the shadow of valley of death, but also promises to lead you to His house to dwell forever. That’s where that shield of faith and helmet of salvation come in. You aren’t praying for a losing battle. You are marching to Zion. Prayer should be offered for the gospel to go forward. As we come to the end of the letter Paul shares a prayer request. It is worth noting here that Paul, the Apostle, needs and asks for prayer. We should not feel that we are above the Apostle Paul in that way. So when Paul, writing from prison, asks for prayer, what does pray for? That he would boldly preach the gospel. He has done this already, which is why he is in chains right now! Paul’s main focus in life is that the gospel would go forward boldly as he knows that he has been called to speak it. That should be our focus as well. Do you pray for yourself as you begin the day, “Let me speak the gospel boldly today?” Are you perhaps a little afraid to? Well, then, all the more reason to pray it! We pray for revival, yes, but we need to pray that we will be a part of that! So what is our takeaway from this passage? Prayer is so important to Paul that we break from our military metaphor emphasize. This is something that we offer up constantly because we are in a battle for the souls of people. Paul needed prayer, Jesus Himself needed prayer, you need prayer. It can be something as simple as a minute every twenty minutes or a scheduled time to pray. Now you may say, “You have no idea how hectic my life is!” You’re right I don’t, but I can quote from my wife, whom I have on very good authority is a very busy person. One morning, I offered for myself to watch the kids who were unusually demanding that morning, so that Abby could go into her room and do her devotions in the peace and quiet. She looked at me and said, “If I don’t learn how to spend time with Jesus in the midst of chaos, then I’ll never spend time with God.” She’s right! Your life is hectic! But you must figure out how to make it work. “We close with these fitting words from Dr. John Piper’s book Desiring God: Unless I’m badly mistaken, one of the main reasons so many of God’s children don’t have a significant life of prayer is not so much that we don’t want to, but that we don’t plan to. If you want to take a four-week vacation, you don’t just get up one summer morning and say, “Hey, let’s go today!” You won’t have anything ready. You won’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned. But that is how many of us treat prayer. We get up day after day and realize that significant times of prayer should be part of our life, but nothing’s ever ready. We don’t know where to go. Nothing has been planned. No time. No place. No procedure. And we all know that the opposite of planning is not a wonderful flow of deep, spontaneous experiences in prayer. The opposite of planning is the rut. If you don’t plan a vacation you will probably stay home and watch TV! The natural unplanned flow of spiritual life sinks to the lowest ebb of vitality. There is a race to be run and a fight to be fought. If you want renewal in your life of prayer you must plan to see it. Therefore, my simple exhortation is this: Let us take time this very day to rethink our priorities and how prayer fits in. Make some new resolve. Try some new venture with God. Set a time. Set a place. Choose a portion of Scripture to guide you. Don’t be tyrannized by the press of busy days. We all need mid-course corrections. Make this a day of turning to prayer — for the glory of God and for the fullness of your joy.” (Hughes). Image by Himsan
Ah, Father’s Day, the holiday that only exists because Mother’s Day was established first. It only took about 58 years before it was recognized as a national holiday, but who’s counting? A dad was put in charge of getting it to holiday status, and he said he’d get to it. Now, I’m nor are any of the other dads here complaining. It is our joy to be the ones to provide for our families. That is what we have signed up to do. However, if that is all that we end up doing for our families than we have missed a big portion of our job. Yes, we want to fix things around the house, yes, we want to be able to pay the utility bills, and, yes, it would be nice to leave an inheritance to our children, but the most valuable thing that fathers can pass down to their families is wisdom.
When we look into the book of Proverbs, we see a father (Solomon wrote a lot of this book) who is obsessed with passing down wisdom to his son. What is fascinating is what we don’t see in a book written by a wise king to a future heir to the throne. We don’t see Solomon giving his son investment advice (other than to say riches fly away). We don’t even really see Solomon giving a whole lot of ruling or political advice. Instead, what Solomon emphasizes is finding wisdom. If you were to do a search for wisdom on the internet, you would come up with a lot of different answers. I asked Google, and I got a mix of things like, “work smarter and not harder,” “put effort into whatever you are doing” “don’t care so much about what other people think of you.” I even asked ChatGPT, and it told me that the best piece of advice I could give to my son would be for him “to be true to himself and his values.” Those can sound profound, I guess, but there is no authority behind those statements. Most of those answers are different ways of saying the same thing: you have to figure out life on your own. We have something far better here, as one scholar put it: “The father's teachings in Proverbs constantly echo Deuteronomy, whose message flows from Yahweh in the heavens, through Moses on Mount Sinai, to parents at the city gates, and into the lives of children in the home. The allusions to Yahweh and Moses here in Proverbs endow the father’s sayings with a sense of tradition and authority” (O’Dowd, 735). The Proverbs offer a real foundation for wisdom because it is wisdom given by our Father in heaven. There are so many places we could go, but for this sermon, I was led to Proverbs 3:1-12, with three pieces of advice from a father to a son. Dads, these are a few things that we can pass down to our families that will be the most valuable things for them (and of course we ourselves) to know and do: Remember what God says, Replace your wisdom with God’s, and Return when God Corrects. Remember what God says Forgetting what God says is easier to do than you think because it happens so very slowly, and it happens very naturally. Kevin DeYoung once described our lives as being on a slope towards disobedience. In order to keep God’s commands, you are going to have to put forward actual effort to make it happen. You are going to need to remember, act on, and have it as a conviction of your heart. Far from this being a burden to remember, it is the path of blessing, as we see in verses 2 and 4. Following these commands will add years to your life (see commandment number 5), and it will bring wholeness to you, as it says in verse 2. The word translated “peace” is a Hebrew word that you have probably all heard before: Shalom. This word means more than just the absence of war. One source describes shalom as “wholeness” or “fulfillment” and went on to say, “Implicit in shalom is the idea of unimpaired relationships with others and fulfillment in one’s undertakings” (Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, Vol 2, 931). Verse 4 continues this thought by promising success with God and man. One scholar explained it this way: “The reward for a life set on wisdom is “favor and good success in the sight of God and man” (Prov. 3:4). This phrase is a hendiadys, a figure of speech that uses two extreme ends to represent a larger hole (e.g., "head to toe").” He went on to point out that this is how Jesus is described in Luke 2:52 (O’Dowd, 737). In order for this to be true, though, we must submit at the heart level, which we see at verse 3. These commandments have to be our everyday carry. They have to become a part of who we are, down to the very heart. The heart, in the Bible, is the center of who you are. One scholar put it this way, “What is true for the heart is true for man as a whole” (O’Dowd, 737). Your whole person must be united to God’s wisdom. As we get to verse 5, we see what it will look like to put God’s commands on our hearts. We tend to have a limited view of knowledge to be just data download. O’Dowd has a more beautiful way to looking at it, ““To "acknowledge" God is to "know" — we are not simply to tip our hat to God throughout our lives but to connect each and every moment to our sense both of God’s immediate presence and of his moral designs for the world” (737). Making those connections with our life to God is what shows us that God is ceaselessly relevant to our lives. Thinking about God this way leads to a deep knowledge which O’Dowd beautifully phrases it: “Rather, knowledge in the OT is a matter of participation, like knowing good food, a favorite clearing in the forest, or a close friend…Such knowledge is also multidimensional, without borders or limits. It might be most helpful to picture knowing God in all our ways as a poetic, artistic, and open–ended endeavor. It is a work of continuous imagination disciplined into our experience of God and his world” (O’Dowd, 739). It is that constant time spent with it, that day and night meditation on it is what writes in on the tablets of your hearts and binds it to your neck. There is no substitute for time in God’s Word. Replace your wisdom with God’s As we get on to verses 7 and 8, we are warned not to trust in our own wisdom but stay with God’s. “Let your conscience be your guide” is actually terrible advice. Your eyes can deceive you, and so much more your instincts and even your conscience. Your only guide is the Word of God. That is the only thing that won’t lead you astray. Your own wisdom will always lead you astray. Always. This doesn’t mean that every unwise decision will have the same level of impact on your life, but rest assured that anytime you go off of God’s reservation, there will be bad consequences. What’s more, those consequences may be years later. I’m sure many of you, if you can’t draw from your own life experiences can think of public figures who have gotten what they have by underhanded means and have it suddenly stripped away when those means came to light. There is a reason why the names Enron or Bernie Madoff are so well known. So if this is true, then why do we still fall prey to it? Well, some of that is because we are sinners who will do things that we know are wrong simply because we are sinners. We know it is wrong, but we just want to do it. Other times we can fall to our own wisdom because we haven’t spent enough time in God’s Word to know that we have gone astray! Have you heard the line “God helps those who help themselves”? According to the internet, about half of America thinks that is in the Bible (link)! I remember once in Sunday School, our teacher did an exercise where he quoted from various sources, and we the class had to answer whether it was from the Bible or not. The one I thought was in the Bible was “cleanliness is next to godliness.” I know, it’s so embarrassing! People grow! Following our own wisdom never leads anywhere good. Sometimes we fall prey to this because living a wise life can be complicated. Sometimes there are multiple good and Biblical ways to deal with a situation. One commentator put it this way, “If it were only a matter of choosing to follow clear rules or what seems most clear to our conscience, life would be easy. True wisdom turns out to be a complex skill learned over the course of one's life that allows man to discern the Lord's will in the foggiest times of life (CF. Proverbs 30; Job 28)” (O’Dowd, 737). Again, this takes time and practice. Become as familiar as you can with God’s wisdom. Don’t deny yourself the blessing of familiarity with God’s Word. As we get into verses 9-10, we see something that seems to come out of nowhere! Honestly, I wasn’t totally sure what to do with these verses, but I think O’Dowd is onto something: These verses are a specific application of what is called for in general terms in verses 1–8. How can one be wise and trust, know, and fear the Lord? With the fruit of one's labor – and not only the fruit but the first income from a season of work (or the first part of the paycheck, before other bills or hunger have been served). Wealth and income may be the prime example for actions and thought patterns that must be submitted to the knowledge and fear of the Lord.” (O’Dowd, 738). That’s how we show what we really believe, don’t we? The way we spend our time and especially the way we spend our money. Those things show us where our hearts are. For a lot of us, I think how we spend our money is the best gauge of our values because many don’t value time. Parting with resources as God leads is the test of how much you trust and know God. This isn’t to say that we all live in cardboard boxes on the side of the road having given away all our possessions. It isn’t a one time act of radical action, but a lifelong offering back to God what He has given. It is a regular, deliberate, unpanicked evaluation of our lives simply asking, “How could I honor God with this gift that He has given to me?” Did you just get a raise? How can you honor God with that? It might be by helping a family member or a ministry. It could be getting out of debt you got into because of greedy spending choices and learning how to manage God’s money better. The habit to get into is a relentless asking, “How can I use this for God?” Return when God Corrects Finally, don’t despair when God corrects you. It is inevitable that you will follow your own wisdom. And sometimes God will bring suffering into your life for reasons known only to Him, but still for your good (O’Dowd, 738). This is the way God chastens, corrects, and crafts His children. We aren’t perfect, so we need correction. God doesn’t hate those whom He corrects, far from it. He wants you on the correct path, so He will do whatever it takes to put you on the right path. Any parent who has had to do this with a child understands how hard that is. I am a father, but I am the faintest shadow of what the Fatherhood of God is like. I know how much I love to bless my children and how hard it is to correct them or take something away from them that is bad for them but they want. How much more so must it be for God? Even if you have never raised children, you can get a glimpse of that when you have to force yourself to do that which you don’t want to because you know you need to do it or if you have ever had to confront a friend over something that they were doing to hurt themselves or others. It isn’t easy. Now, you may say, “Well, God knows the outcome of those things. He knows that it is for that person’s good. He has infinite wisdom, so it is easy for Him to do!” Well, look at Jesus’ reaction to Lazarus at the tomb. Jesus knew that He was about to give the family the greatest news they wouldn’t have even dared to hope for, and yet He still wept. God has infinite wisdom, yes, but He also has infinite love, too. But you have something far more than just someone correcting you. You have Christ who is crafting you. To borrow one last time from O’Dowd, “Just as God first spoke light into the creation, so he has spoken again in Jesus to make his glory fully apparent to us. For Paul, to know Jesus means to be transformed into his very likeness (2 Cor. 3:18). And in this likeness we come to walk in the ways of wisdom and righteousness. We could say that what proverbial wisdom imagined by knowing God in the ways of wise living, Jesus has multiplied 1000 times. What Lady Wisdom could not do with our fallen state, Jesus has done for us and in us and through us” (O’Dowd, 740). We have a hope that the writer of Proverbs looked forward to that we have seen with crystal clear vision. We aren’t able to be wise like we want to be. To perfectly obey these Proverbs is impossible, but we have a Savior who did live those perfectly and offers you His record by grace through faith in Him. Once you’ve put your trust in Him, He promises to indwell you and change you bit by bit. Soon, you’ll start to act like Him. People say that I am a lot like my dad, and that’s not much of a surprise because my father regularly spent time with me. Yes, those quality times of fishing, going to a ball game, teaching me about God, taking me to conferences, those were and are all important. But what has made me like him is the quantity time I spent with him. I notice the cadence of speech that I have when I am explaining something is his. The way I rub my face when I’m tired is his. The way I hold my head, the way I think about the world is largely shaped by him. There are other things that are shaped by my mother that again quantity time was necessary to put in to get out those habits. The same thing is true of Jesus. The more time you spend with Him, getting to know Him like we talked about earlier, the more you will be like Him. Wisdom is found in likeness to Jesus, and if you are like Jesus, that is the most valuable thing you can give to your family. I get it, I like being the dad that can repair things, is ready for things, and provides for things, but having a deep relationship with Jesus is the most important thing that I can have for my family. Work Cited: O’Dowd, Ryan Patrick, Proverbs, ESV Expository Commentary, Vol. 5, Crossway, 2022. Image by Manfred Antranias Zimmer
Have you ever gotten a letter from someone you loved? It was a great gift wasn’t it? With each sentence that goes by, they are sharing more of themselves with you. It tells you how they think, what they value, and all of that reveals how you can love them better. Wouldn’t it be great if God did something like that for you? Well, it turns out that He has! Not only has He revealed Himself in this letter called the Bible, He has also revealed how your life is supposed to work. In here, He will teach you where real truth is found, how to fight sin, how to detect error, and so much more. Our two points today are: The Bible is a precious gift from God and Training is required to use the Bible rightly
The Bible is a precious gift from God The Bible is a precious gift from God. God didn’t have to give us this. He could have written down His words on some rock way up in the mountains that only the dedicated would have been able to even see. He could have written it as a series of mysterious riddles that people would need to think about for ages only to come to the wrong answer. These are the ways that almost all other religions work. It’s how we would set up a religion if we could. Instead God is gracious to write us this book. If you have been in Christian circles for any length of time, you have probably heard the Bible described as a love letter. I think this is actually a good way of thinking about the Bible because it helps us keep the context of who this is from and why God has written it. It is because He loves you. I think keeping this in mind helps us approach this book rightly. When we have a love letter in front of us we investigate every little word that is sent to us. We try hard to discover every nuance, try to notice every connection, and if there is anything that doesn’t make sense on first reading, we look at it closer and closer, not satisfied to leave any part of the letter not understood. Heaven help you if there is a typo! If there is a missing “not,” the whole relationship can change! Imagine reading, “I can wait to see you again.” Thankfully the Word of God as originally given doesn’t have mistakes! The Bible is a letter given in love that tells us what is absolutely true because it comes from God. It is inspired by God and is thus without error or contradiction (2 Timothy 3:16; Psalm 19). An infallible source is something that should be more precious to us than ever. Our world has grown so complicated and information so unreliable finding anything that is authoritative is more needed than ever. The only way that this is possible is because God Himself has written it. But this does more for us than an assurance that we are believing the right things. This is the only tool that we can use to fight error. Fighting evil with anything less than the Word of God is only going to end in failure. Trying to fight the advance of sexual perversity in homosexuality and transgenderism isn’t through citing scientific literature. It isn’t through appealing to the latest book that has been written. This applies to our own personal sins as well. Ian Duguid points out that when Jesus was tempted, He quoted from God’s Word. But what typically happens with us when we are tempted? We tend to give reasons why we shouldn’t sin like, “I’ll get caught” or “I’ll feel bad about it.” He points out that Satan is really good at debate, and he’ll eventually talk you out of your reasons and into what you really want to do. Instead, by going straight to God’s Word, the argument is over. There is nothing else to say (The Whole Armor of God, 91-93). Scientific literature or our own personal reasons can feel helpful in the moment. Those sources may even be correct, but only God’s word is the truth. The Bible tells you why something is correct. It brings not only sanity into the world but brings significance into the world. This attitude of awe is something that we should bring to the Bible. When we approach any text we do it with expectations. When you approach an instruction manual you expect to learn how to do something. When you approach a novel you expect to be entertained. What expectations are you bringing to the Bible? Do you approach this like an inconsistent exercise habit? It’s something you know you should do; it’s something you know you have failed to do over and over, but you know you are supposed to do it, so you try yet again. Sometimes you will discover something wonderful despite that attitude, but oftentimes you won’t. If you come to the Bible knowing that this book is without mistakes, the only guiding truth for life written by someone who loves you deeply, coming at it like you would a love letter, you will find what you need for spiritual warfare. Beyond just the revelation of knowledge, this letter is a gift because it gives us what we need to oppose evil and reveal error. As many commentators noted, this sword is our only weapon that is used for attack in this suit of armor that we have been given. It is one thing to say that the Bible contains truth. It is another thing to say that this truth has power. This is where we often stop short of giving the Bible the credit it deserves. As one commentator put it: “The Word of God draws the blood of Satan himself!” (Preaching the Word Commentary) This is what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 10:3-6. Arguments and lofty opinions are no match for the Word of God, but we get so scared of those things, don’t we? Someone comes along with a plausible sounding argument, and we suddenly start questioning God, don’t we? Or someone or some group decides which beliefs are fashionable, and we don’t want to be left out. That’s what happens with Eve. Satan presents a plausible sounding argument, namely, God isn’t good to you because He withholds things from you. The verse that Eve probably should have quoted was, “‘All of these trees I give to you for food’ how could a God be mean who does all of that for us?” The same thing can be said of Israel when they wanted a king. Why do they want a king? Because everyone else had a king! We need to be quicker to bring the gospel to bear on the situations that we encounter in our lives. We are too quick to believe the lies and doubt God’s goodness and put down the sword of the gospel message. When you have a firm grasp of the gospel any lies that question the goodness of God are answered by that weapon. That’s what we clung to when we saw shootings and unexpected deaths. We clung to the sword and said, “I hear what the world around me is saying, but this I know, that Jesus will make it right.” I’m quick to pick up the feather duster of distraction. That does nothing against Satan’s lies. But when I grab the razor sharp blade of the Word of God, evil goes running. So before we jump into point two, let’s remember what we have covered. We have been given the ultimate weapon against Satan, and it is a Divine love letter. It is absolutely true in everything that it says and is our only weapon that will actually defeat evil because it has Divine power in it. It is not working like some sort of magic words (Hoehner,853), but God is using it in such a way that it will always have an effect. Training is required to use the Bible rightly We need training to understand what we have been given (2 Timothy 2:15 “rightly dividing” implies “wrongly dividing.”). To properly use this gift that we have been given, we need instruction and training, but why? Isn’t the Bible intuitive? Some things (but certainly not all or even most) in the Bible are hard to understand. Even Peter himself admits this (2 Peter 3:16)! He was talking about the letters of Paul! He doesn’t say in particular what it was that confused him, but there are a number of things that can go in that category! Some things are difficult to understand. A big part of this is our sinful tendencies pull us away from a proper understanding of God’s Word and the gospel. We have to make a very careful study of the book in front of us, knowing this limitation, if we are going arrive at the right meaning. This doesn’t mean that we give up on our personal study to let the professionals take care of it. The Word of God will sink deepest into the person who is working on it. Having knowledge of a diverse number of subjects can be very helpful. If you know about car engines, you can save yourself a fortune in repairs. If you know computers, you can save yourself hours of work both on the computer or with tech support. The problem with those things is for the most part, knowing how to work on an engine doesn’t carry over very much to computer knowledge. Knowing how to knit doesn’t help you very much with cooking dinner. Knowing about the Bible, however, changes how you know everything else. If you remember a few weeks ago, I mentioned a concept I had heard from somewhere that knowledge and facts always need to be interpreted. The Bible is the only accurate foundation for interpreting the world around you. The Bible doesn’t have recipes in it, but it will give you a foundation to understand why you are cooking or how gracious God is to give you food in the first place. The Bible doesn’t explain how to change your oil, but it does give us a grid to be amazed that everything in that car came from some element of God’s creation and how good God is to allow us to know these things (idea from Tony Reinke’s book on Technology). This is of course to say nothing of the immensely practical information that the Bible gives you on marriage, children, and you know, how to get to heaven forever after you die! I hope at this point it is very obvious that this book is worth studying, but I can understand it being intimidating. The Bible is a big book after all. I want to encourage you that just because you are studying yourself, doesn’t mean that you are studying alone. I’ve been preaching and studying the Bible for years, but I never give a sermon unless I’ve looked at other people’s comments on the passage. I know that I have biases and blindspots that other men don’t, so it is a very important step to consult with those who have studied and walked with Jesus longer and deeper than I have. We are in an age where there are so many good resources out there, it’s a shame we don’t know our Bibles better than any previous generation. Just about every pastor puts their sermons out for free (we used to have to pay for a cassette to be produced and shipped!). Ministries like Ligonier put out stellar teaching for extremely low cost in multiple formats of magazines, books, videos, and podcasts. There are study Bibles in multiple versions from Ligonier and Crossway that take practically every verse and provide a short commentary on it. If you REALLY want to go deep, there are commentaries from some of the brightest minds that ever lived, and they sit right on my shelves in my office (you are always welcome to borrow!). A quick glance at our screen time statistics tell us we have time (with the possible exception of young, new moms. Even Dr. Martin Loyd Jones gave y’all a pass). You need to be ready because if you don’t know it, there will be those who will sow false teaching to their own advantage (1 Timothy 4:1-16). Any area of knowledge that requires a lot of time and effort will be used by the immoral to their advantage. We see many of them on the TV taking advantage of people by proclaiming a false gospel of prosperity to enrich themselves. The counter is learning true teaching, of course, but you can’t learn true teaching if you just don’t put in the time. I remember being told of Grandpa’s training to be a policeman. One of the exercises was to put him in a room for hours with only a pile of money to familiarize himself with. He would sort, count, feel, smell, get to know every aspect of what a real dollar is made of. The next day, they would slip in a counterfeit bill for him to find. After spending several hours with the real deal, the fake was found out immediately. Knowledge of the Bible is not automatically granted. You simply have to put in the time to become familiar with it. There is no shortcut to this. Because of false teaching, our own sin, and the difficulty of (some) of the Scriptures, we are called to be workman to rightly divide the word of truth, so as we draw to a close, let me encourage you to take up this book for the sake of your joy. Yes, this book will keep you from error, sin, and futile living, but this is a book for your joy. Take up and read to discover the source of all comfort and peace. Be familiar with it, memorize it, meditate on it. When I say “meditate” I don’t mean sitting in a room with an empty mind. That’s Eastern meditation of emptying your mind to hear your own internal truth. Biblical meditation is to fill your mind with God’s Word to drown out your internal lies! Any encounter with God’s Word will bring a blessing, but if you want to really get the most benefit out of your Bible reading, don’t just read it and put it down. Instead, take some time, sit back and turn it over in your mind. Think about how the verse that just struck you applies to your life. Try not to let it go before you can write down something that this verse will make different about your life. It doesn’t have to transform every aspect of your life. Even if it just gives you a reason to keep doing what you are doing, that will benefit you. Above all, dive into this word to know the one who loves your soul so much. Jesus knows every hair on your head. Why not get to know Him a little better? Image by Vasily Sukovatitsyn
Have you ever heard the term “beginner's luck?” It refers to this uncanny ability people often have when they are attempting something new for the first time. Whether that is baking a macaroon or building a wooden bench, there seems to be some strange phenomenon where people can nail it the first time they try it. If I had to guess where something like that comes from it is that beginners know that they are beginners. They understand that they are weak in this and need to listen carefully to instruction. They assume that everything that they are told is important and needs to be followed to the letter. And what do you know, when you follow expert guidance to the letter, you often find that you complete the task with surprising skill. However, as you go for additional attempts, beginner's luck begins to wear off. You stop paying as close attention as you used to, or as you have started to refine your craft with those little extra techniques, you’ve begun to ignore the basics.
What we have here today is a very easily forgotten basic in the Christian life: Faith. After we have been walking with Jesus for a while, there can be (not always) a tendency to forget how dependant we are on Him. This is particularly true if you have spent a lot of time reading and studying without prayer . When you do that you can quickly turn Jesus into a philosophical interest rather than your Savior. Perhaps this is why Paul talks about the shield of faith in such prominent terms. We will also be looking at the helmet of salvation today, but as you will see, these two pieces of armor function in very similar ways. We are going to be answering two questions today: What is faith and How does it work? Paul notably begins by saying that “in all circumstances” we should take up the shield of faith. This is explicitly defined as a defensive weapon with which we will extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one. The helmet of salvation also is a defensive part of the armor. With the helmet, you protect the most vital (and vulnerable) part of your body, and with the shield, you protect everything else. The shield that is in Paul’s mind here would have been a roughly body-length shield. It would have been made of wood or metal and often wrapped in a water-soaked piece of leather. With this shield, you would be able to place yourself behind it and any flaming arrows flung at you would simply stick into the soaked shield and extinguish. This would allow you to either hold your ground or advance on the enemy without fear of their arrows. This would mean the enemy could basically do nothing to you until you got much closer. This means it is important to keep your shield up! Every part of your body is going to have to be stuffed behind that shield at all times! Even the smallest part of the exposed body can lower your effectiveness in the field. An arrow to the foot is not going to kill you, but it is going to hobble you. So how does faith really work? In our culture, faith is often seen as a power in and of itself. People talk about the power of faith or the power of believing as if the power to get through your life comes from the fact that you believe you can. It makes for a great coffee mug but a terrible way to live life. That’s just whistling in the dark, pretending. The power of belief doesn’t work on your credit card bill (trust me, I’ve tried). You can believe all you want that it’ll just go away, but that doesn’t change anything. Faith doesn’t get its power from believing but whom you are believing in. Look at Luke 7:1-10. The Centurion wasn’t putting faith in faith. He was putting faith in Jesus. The same is said for the woman in Matthew 9:21. She knew that even the smallest faith in Jesus’ hands is a faith with the firmest foundation. It is not trust in trust. It is trust in Jesus. Putting your faith in yourself is going to fail, but putting your faith in Christ never will ultimately. Will you still suffer? Yes, but trusting in Jesus will keep you going in the battle. This is the picture that Paul has of faith. It is a supreme trust in God Who keeps the flaming arrows from landing. That’s an important distinction. It isn’t your faith that keeps these arrows from landing, but rather it is faith that connects you to the One who keeps the arrows from landing (Duguid, 66-7). So what does this look like, practically? This is something that the Bible answers for us: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." - Hebrews 11:1. Let’s break these things down. “Assurance of things hoped for.” How do you know that something is going to happen? Well, the future is always uncertain in our lives, isn’t it? I had originally planned to deliver this sermon last week, only to get the stomach bug the night before! The only way that we can be sure that something will happen is if we can look back on it. You will be sure that you will make the team only after you make the team. You will be sure you will ace the test only after you get your grade back. You will only know that you will work at the same job until you retire if you retire from that job. That is how everything in our lives work! That’s why we have the saying “hindsight is 20/20” meaning that we only see things clearly once they are past. We who are now post 2020 know this more personally than ever. However, faith operates completely differently. Faith, Biblically defined, is the exact opposite of “hindsight is 20/20.” Faith looks forward to the future with hope and is absolutely assured that it is going to be good. It sounds counter-intuitive, but faith allows a person to look forward to the future and see the whole picture, the entire context of the universe and one’s place in it. Faith views the future with God’s perspective—a much clearer vision. With God’s perspective on things, the saying becomes, “foresight is 20/20.” Faith looks forward and sees what Paul says in Romans 8:18, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” That is faith that looks at things in context, an eternal context. I am able to endure a surgery if I know that on the other side of it, I will be healthier. Even if it means weeks of recovery, I am willing to endure the suffering because I know (or at least think that I know) I will feel better in the end. Faith is able to do that with the rest of our lives! Instead of a statistical likelihood that I will be healed after a surgery, I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I will be healed of all maladies in heaven because I am trusting God, not what has typically happened to people. And I know that that suffering is preparing me for more: 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 The conviction of things not seen. This is another way of talking about faith but in slightly different terms. If you are going to pull out of your driveway to head to a week-long vacation, and someone says, “Are you sure you locked the back door?” What are you going to do? If you’re like me, you’re going to think about it for a second, huff, get out of the car and go—what?--look at it! I need to see that the lock is engaged for me to know that it is locked and not have to think about it the entire time I am on vacation! Once again, faith doesn’t work like that. Faith works without seeing. Going back to the door lock example, let’s imagine that Jesus is going with us on vacation, and I say, “Did I lock the back door?” and Jesus responds, “Don’t worry about it; I’ve got it all under control.” My functional response is often, “Lord, that wasn’t the question I asked. I asked if I locked the door.” I want to see the lock. I can understand a lock. But what I don’t see is Jesus has secured the door with something way more powerful. That’s how it often works in our lives, isn’t it? We know that Jesus provides for us. But we feel better when we can see the bank account numbers reflecting that. We know that Jesus is watching over our children. But we feel better when we can see that they are behaving themselves. We know that God works all things together for our good, but we would sure like to see exactly how that is going to shake out. When Granger was even younger, he, for whatever reason, never trusted us to feed him. We fed him constantly, but he would not stop squalling until the food was in front of him on a plate! He could see us preparing the food, getting the bowl out, grabbing the spoon, but no matter what, he would not be assured until he was holding the food in his hands. I’m like that. That is not the response of faith. Faith looks to a future we can’t see and is completely comfortable. Satan’s whole goal in this is to get you to doubt God. Either God hasn’t been good to you, or God could have been better to you. Those are his two messages. It is only when we put our faith in Christ, our trust, down do those arrows land. You aren’t going to fight very well for a general whom you think doesn’t have your best in mind. If you trust in Christ’s love for you and His power to accomplish the purposes of His love, then you are pretty well impervious to Satan’s arrows. Now, this works as long as you keep that shield up over every area of your body, your life. Sometimes we try to apply our faith just to Sunday morning or only what we think in our heads without it changing how we live. This we must not do. This is why we have to take up the shield of faith in “all circumstances.” There is not a moment in your life in which you do not need to take up your shield. In fact, it is precisely when you think you don’t need to take it is when you need to take it up the most. Maybe you’ve heard the story of the Union Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick from the Civil War. He was warned not to go near the road as Confederate sharpshooters had been racking up Union casualties all morning. However, he soon forgot about the warning, and went out into the road to do something. When his soldiers shouted their warnings about the sharpshooters, he responded, “They couldn’t shoot an elephant at this distance,” at which point he was immediately shot in the face and killed instantly by those sharpshooters, forever cementing his reputation as speaking the most ironic words ever uttered in battle (link).We always need to be ready, and with God’s armor on, we are. As we come to a close, let’s look at the helmet of salvation. This one is a distinct piece of armor, but it serves a similar purpose. In 1 Thessalonians 5:8, Paul calls this piece of armor the hope of salvation, and this would work similarly here. Ian Duguid gives us an illustration of how this would work. Let’s suppose that you receive two pieces of mail one day. The first envelope contains the true news that an uncle you didn’t know you had has passed away and left you ten million dollars as an inheritance. It is official, correct, and assured that this money is yours.Then, after a deep breath, and once your hands stop shaking, you open the next envelope which is a parking ticket—costing you the grand sum of fifty dollars. Now, in light of the first letter informing you of your new multi-millionaire status, how much is that second letter going to impact your day? Probably not all that much. It would seem very silly to be bent out of shape over something so little in comparison to so much. The same is true of our salvation (The Whole Armor of God, 83). As we said earlier, Paul points out in Romans that our present trials are not worth comparing to the glory that awaits us, and it is that knowledge, that certainty of heaven is what gives us protection from discouragement. This is one effect of this piece of armor similar to the shield of faith. But there is something else that the helmet of salvation does: gives us motivation for obedience. Ian Duguid again points out that the helmet of salvation, the knowledge that we get to heaven by Jesus’ work and not our own, also gives us the boldness to do risky (or repetitive) things for the Lord (84-85). It is hard to be a bold witness to your coworkers when you think you have a lot to lose. But when you know that you have the smile of God even as Man frowns, you can be bold. The same is true for the mundane grinding faithfulness. Both take great courage! There is one amount of courage that it takes to pack a backpack and walk into the jungles looking for a tribe who has never heard the gospel before! But there is another kind of courage that gives up a career, gives up everything that one has worked for to raise children, battling for their obedience, raising them to love Jesus, working for decades with no clear indication for how it is going to turn out. The helmet of salvation allows both of those Christians in their respective callings to stick it out. So how do we apply this to our lives? How do we strengthen the effects of the shield and helmet? To borrow one last time from Duguid, he illustrates a young lady dreaming of her wedding day. She surrounds herself with all of the beautiful things, flowers, table settings, dresses, and just loses herself in the beauty of that day imagining what it will be like. It is fun to prepare a wedding in your mind you don’t have to budget for. You can just let the joy of the possible wash over you. That’s what we need to do with our salvation (87). Spend time thinking about what your life is going to be like in heaven, and then strive to live that kind of life now (86)! You can enjoy heaven today! You can start imagining that wedding of the lamb! Think about this, dream about this, surround yourself with things that remind you and educate you about heaven, and you will enjoy those benefits (87). And when all else fails, when it seems impossible to lift up your shield or take comfort from your helmet, remember the Old Testament words from Psalm 28:7. Ultimately, God is your shield (67). He will not let you fall away completely. Yes, you can make life harder on yourself with that shield down. Yes, you can make yourself less effective on the battlefield, but God is not going to let you fall away completely, just like Jesus did for Peter (75). You are His, and He will never let you go.
It has been said that the greatest lie Satan ever pulled off was making the world believe he doesn’t exist. We as Christians, of course, believe that there is a devil and that there are evil spiritual forces in the world. The problem is we often don’t live out what we believe. If there is anything that stands out today with all of the violence we have seen is it is causing us to be more aware of the potential dangers to our person in this world. That being said, your chances of being in a place of violence like that are pretty small. Your chances of being in a place of spiritual attack are 100%. You WILL be attacked spiritually, but there is something that you can do about it as God will provide you with all that you need to fight it well. Our two points today are: Stand with righteousness in an evil world and Stand with peace in the midst of war
The passage begins with a call to “Stand.” As one scholar puts it, “The command to stand is Paul's chief admonition of the entire paragraph, which is seen by its repetition… The following pieces of armor describe the means by which a believer is able to stand firm.” (Merkele, 113) In other words, everything we are about to put on in these verses is tied back to this command. We are in a spiritual war, after all, and “[t]he proper response in light of this largely unseen reality is to be prepared. Paul's first imperative to believers is to ‘be strong in the Lord’ (v. 10). Satan and his minions are well armed and can easily defeat or discourage weary soldiers of the cross." (Merkele, 116) Interestingly, we get the order Paul presents the armor is in order of how a soldier at the time would put them on (Floukes). Stand with righteousness in an evil world Paul begins with the belt of truth, because the belt would have been key to enable you to fight the rest of the battle. Your clothes would have gotten in the way without being tucked behind your belt. Of course, the key question is, is this belt referring to capital “T” truth, the gospel, or is this lower case “t” for truth in terms of honesty? I tend to lean towards the latter, as Paul talks about the gospel of peace for your shoes, and it doesn’t make sense to me to have the same concept applied to two different pieces of armor. Other scholars come to the same conclusion: “We may conclude that it is not the truth of the gospel that is alluded to, but the undergirding of truth in the sense of ‘integrity’, ‘truth in the inward being’ of which Psalm 51:6 speaks. As ‘the girdle … gives ease and freedom of movement’, so ‘it is the truth which gives this freedom with ourselves, with our neighbours [sic] and with God. Lack of perfect sincerity hampers us at every turn.’” (H. L. Goudge quoted in Foulkes) Why is truth so important? The fact that we even ask this question shows how far we as a society have gone in this concept. There is so much information in world now that truth seems to be very hard to come across if discoverable at all. Truth seems less like a precise statement and more of a misty range of approaches each one as valid as the next as long as you don’t get too crazy. It is easy to assume because precisely stated truth is so hard to find that it isn’t important, and we simply make assumptions knowing that the world is flexible enough to tolerate a mistake or two. We as Christians should have a greater love for truth than that. For us, truth isn’t just something we want to seek out so we don’t get slammed online for spreading “misinformation.” Truth and honesty is an essential foundation of being a Christian. There are precise statements of truth in this world, and it is our job to find them and defend them. The devil lies, and the world lies, but we speak the truth. We’ve already seen this In Ephesians 4:25: "Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another." Other verses point to the importance of truth, as well. Proverbs 12:22: "Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight." Psalm 25:5: "Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long." Psalm 119:160: "The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever." Indeed, our Savior is described as “the truth.” So if truth is such an important concept, then why is it such a rare thing to find in this world, particularly today? I think the answer lies in the fact that our sinful flesh naturally resists the truth and the effort it takes to find it. When you think about it, there are so many other sins that have to be overcome to find and proclaim truth! We first need our pride eliminated so we don’t assume we already know everything. Pride doesn’t seek answers; it already knows them! Next, we need our laziness to be eliminated. It is one thing to be aware of our ignorance, but it is something else to correct that! Then, we need our impatience to be eliminated, as we’ve discussed already. Then we need our pride eliminated again if we find an answer we don’t like or something that we have to submit to. It takes humility to change course. It takes a humble heart to admit we were wrong about something. However, truth is always worth finding, and it is found only in the word of God. Now, it is true that you can’t find out what happened yesterday in Sylacauga from the Bible, but I guarantee you that you need the Bible to know how to think about what happened in Sylacauga yesterday. All information is interpreted, and the Bible gives the only sure source of proper interpretation. You need the truth. If you do not have truth or honesty in what you say is true, you will not be equipped for spiritual warfare. As yourself this question, whenever you come across of piece of information or say something, “How do I know this is true?” Just about every media source has had some sort of scandal of lying. Who do you rely on and why? This isn’t to make us all paranoid, just thoughtful in whom we trust. Just because it is mainstream (or not), doesn’t make it true. Just because a source says something different than the main narrative doesn’t mean it is right. I remember in seminary, a professor told us how to approach sermon preparation. He warned us against the tendency to prefer a particular interpretation over another simply because “we like it.” That’s a bad method of Bible study! There can be things that sound profound, but are still wrong (in fact, we will be looking at a few of those in our summer series coming up!). We move on to the breastplate of righteousness. The breastplate was an essential piece of armor, as it protects all of your vital organs except your head (itself protected by a helmet). Now, the question we have to ask first is, whose righteousness are we talking about? Are we talking about Jesus’ righteousness, or our own? There is a sense in which the answer is “both” with the majority emphasis on Jesus’ provided righteousness. I say it this way because I think that Jesus’ righteousness placed on you will also produce a righteousness in you as well. As one scholar put it: “By putting on God's righteousness believers are committed to being imitators of him (5:1) and acting righteously in all their dealings.” (O’Brien, 475) You need Jesus’ righteousness to survive the conflict. You will never make it on your own righteousness. When the battle is over, no one is going to look at themselves and say, “Wow, I really protected myself there!” It is always going to be, “Without Jesus, I would have never made it.” However, without a personal commitment to holiness, you risk being less effective on the battlefield. Think about King David. Was He covered by the grace of God despite what he did with Bathsheba? Yes, he was, and praise God for that. That means God can cover me. Did God work through even a series of sins as heinous as those to ultimately advance His redemptive purposes? Yes. And praise God again that this means I can’t derail God’s plans due to my sin as well. Did David’s sin cause devastation to his family and ultimately the nation of Israel itself? Also yes. And praise God that He allows consequences for sin to help motivate me not to commit it as often. David’s sin cause him to be a less effective king than he otherwise could have been. It is hard to rule when you are running away from your own son. If we want to be effective parents in our homes, fathers and mothers, we need to put away those sins that so easily surface in parenting. We need to put away impatience, pride, and selfishness and instead cultivate patience, humility, and love. Can you go to heaven being an impatient parent? Yes, but think about how much better of a parent you could be by cultivating patience? None of us will ever be perfectly patient or perfectly anything (that’s why we need Christ’s righteousness), but we will be more effective warriors in this spiritual battle by being conformed to the image of Christ. Developing this personal righteousness by the Holy Spirit’s power will help keep you from sins that can devastate your witness or ability to minister. There are qualifications for ministry, and if I fall into certain sins, I can disqualify myself for ministry. If I become a quarrelsome person, always picking a fight with someone, or using my position to steamroll people who get in my way, or fall prey to the love of money or the praise of people, I could very easily do whatever it takes to keep those things and thus disqualify myself for ministry. Could I still go to heaven? Sure. But that doesn’t mean that I could get right back in the saddle to preach again. Sin really does have severe consequences, and the forces of evil would love for us to fall to those things. No, they can’t force you out of heaven, but they can put you on the sidelines. This can even happen without disqualifying sins. I’ve seen guy’s ministries brought to a standstill because they couldn’t get out of their own pride. Fight for holiness. Stand with peace in the midst of war Finally, the shoes. We don’t tend to think of these as armor, as the Roman shoe would have looked like a sandal. That doesn’t seem very protective to us, but the real technology was under the shoe! There would have been small spikes underneath the shoe to help grip the ground underneath them which would have given them a solid footing in any terrain. It would have also, obviously, kept their feet from injury and pain, so you wouldn’t have to watch where you were going lest you step on something sharp. Your feet were protected. Paul likens this piece of the armor to the gospel itself. My seminary professor once put it this way, “Since Paul will shortly explain the soldiers footwear as ‘the readiness of the gospel of peace’ (6:15), he probably has in mind here also the truth of the good news that is centered on Jesus and his reconciling death on the cross (2:14-18).” (Thielman, 424) Put simply, understanding that you are at peace with God gives you a sure stance when you fight. IF you are unsure where you stand with God, any effort you put towards the Christian life is doubly hard. If you have ever experienced dizziness, you know how important a sense of firm footing is. The same can be said spiritually. But with your feet properly prepared and on solid footing with the knowledge that you are at peace with God because of Jesus’ obedient life and death on the cross, His rising from the dead, and ascension into heaven, you will be able to fight knowing that you will be victorious. There is also the sense in which we are proclaiming the gospel as well. There is likely an allusion to Isaiah 52:6-7: “Therefore my people shall know my name. Therefore in that day they shall know that it is I who speak; here I am.” How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Thielman, 426) As another scholar sees it: “Although some believe that Paul's imagery and explanation of the armor indicates that Christians are to take only a defensive stand, this perspective is probably too narrow. The shoes signifying ‘the readiness given by the gospel of peace’ (v.15) suggest that we should be prepared to advance the gospel message wherever God calls us.” (Merkele, 116) What is our takeaway from all of this? Well, while the tools come from God alone, we are called to put them on (Hoehner, 842). Preparation for spiritual war doesn’t happen on cruise control. You will need to take steps every day to intentionally live, as John Piper once put it, in a “wartime lifestyle.” Everything should be dedicated to the spiritual war effort. This isn’t meant to drive us to panic because the war is won. Rather, we represent the glorious victor and are honored to fight by His side. We do this by remembering that our standing with Him is only by the gospel, by walking closely with Him to conform our lives to His character, which will spill out as an honesty and commitment to truth. Image by LUM3N |
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April 2024
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