This past Sunday was dedicated as the International Day of Prayer. Take four minutes to watch Shafia’s story. Please. And then take four minutes to replay the story of your life. Does being a Christian mean anything different here than in the land of our slain brethren?
One of the most sobering and soul-stirring quotes from the pen of Jonathan Edwards:
If true religion lies much in the affections, hence we may learn what great cause we have to be ashamed and confounded before God, that we are no more affected with the great things of religion.
God has given to mankind affections . . . that they might be subservient to man’s chief end, and the great business for which God has created him, that is, the business of religion. And yet how common is it among mankind, that their affections are much more exercised and engaged in other matters than in religion! In things which concern men’s worldly interest, their outward delights, their honour and reputation, and their natural relations, they have their desires eager, their appetites vehement, their love warm and affectionate, their zeal ardent; in these things their hearts are tender and sensible, easily moved, deeply impressed, much concerned, very sensibly affected, and greatly engaged; much depressed with grief at losses, and highly raised with joy at worldly successes and prosperity.
But how insensible and unmoved are most men about the great things of another world! How dull are their affections! How heavy and hard their hearts in these matters! Here their love is cold, their desires languid, their zeal low, and their gratitude small.
How they can sit and hear of the infinite height, and depth, and length, and breadth of the love of God in Christ Jesus, of His giving His infinitely dear Son, to be offered up a sacrifice for the sins of men, and of the unparalleled love of the innocent, and holy, and tender Lamb of God, manifested in His dying agonies, His bloody sweat, His loud and bitter cries, and bleeding heart, and all this for enemies, to redeem them from deserved, eternal burnings, and to bring to unspeakable and everlasting joy and glory–and yet be so cold and heavy, insensible and regardless!
Where are the exercises of our affections proper, if not here?. . . Is there anything which Christians can find in heaven or earth so worthy to be the objects of our admiration and love, their earnest and longing desires, their hope, and their rejoicing, and their fervent zeal, as those things that are held forth to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ?
[ . . .] God has so disposed things in the affair of our redemption, and in His glorious dispensations, revealed to us in the gospel, as though every thing were purposely contrived in such a manner as to have the greatest possible tendency to reach our hearts in the most tender part, and move our affections most sensibly and strongly. How great cause have we therefore to be humbled to the dust that we are no more affected!
- Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, 51-53.
Some excellent words by Michael Spencer:
Live each day as the day that all of the Gospel is true. Live this day and be glad in it. Live this day as the day of laying down sin and taking up the glad and good forgiveness of Jesus. Live this day determined to be useful and joyful in Jesus. Live this day in a way that, should all things change tomorrow, you will know that the Lord is your God and this is the day to be satisfied in him.
Charles Spurgeon spoke of a message “which weighed on him” that should weight heavily on us. Hear his impassioned plea:
“I plead this day for those who cannot plead for themselves, namely, the great outlying masses of the heathen world. Our existing pulpits are tolerably well supplied, but we need men who will build on new foundations. Who will do this?
Are we, as a company of faithful men, clear in our consciences about the heathen? Millions have never heard the Name of Jesus. Hundreds of millions have seen a missionary only once in their lives, and know nothing of our King. Shall we let them perish?
Can we go to our beds and sleep, while China, India, Japan, and other nations are being damned? Are we clear of their blood? Have they no claim on us? We ought to put it on this footing–not, ‘Can I prove that I ought to go?’ but, ‘Can I prove that I ought not to go?’
When a man can honestly prove that he ought not to go, then he is clear, but not else. What answer do you give, my brethren? I put it to you man by man. I am not raising a question among you which I have not honestly put to myself. I have felt that, if some of our leading ministers would go forth, it would have a grand effect in stimulating the churches, and I have honestly asked myself whether I ought to go. After balancing the whole thing, I feel bound to keep my place, and I think the judgment of most Christians would confirm my decision; but I hope that I would readily, and willingly, and cheerfully go abroad if I did not feel that I ought to remain at home.
Brethren, put yourselves through the same process. We must have the heathen converted; God has myriads of His elect among them, we must go and search for them somehow or other. Many difficulties are now removed, all lands are open to us, and distance is almost annihilated. True, we have not the Pentecostal tongues; but languages are now readily acquired, while the art of printing is a full equivalent for the lost gift.
The dangers incident to missions ought not to keep any true man back, even if they were very great, but they are now reduced to a minimum. There are hundreds of places where the cross of Christ is unknown, to which we can go without risk. Who will go?
[ . . .] Surely there is some self-sacrifice among us yet, and some among us who are willing to be exiled for Jesus. The Mission languishes for want of men. If the men were forthcoming, the liberality of the Church has provided the supply, and yet there are not men to go. I shall never feel, brethren, that we, as a band of men, have done our duty until we see our comrades fighting for Jesus in every land in the van of the conflict. I believe that, if God moves you to go, you will be among the best of missionaries, because you will make the preaching of the gospel the great feature of your work, and that is God’s sure way of power.”
- Charles H. Spurgeon, “Forward!” in An All-Around Ministry (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2000), 55-57.
God, give us such hearts that bleed for the peoples who do not know you and tears that plead for your glory to be seen and souls satisfied forever in Jesus.
A couple of weeks ago, our friends over at Together for Adoption (T4A) published their first e-book called Our Adoption in Christ: What It Means for Us and for Orphans. They write:
This book was written to equip churches theologically in the areas of orphan care and earthly adoption. We believe that robust theology produces robust action. So, our writing objective was to put the gospel at the center of the global orphan crisis. If the church is to be mobilized to care for 143 million orphaned and vulnerable children, then the gospel must be the main thing. Our prayer is that God will use this brief book to equip and empower churches to serve orphans.
Below is the table of contents, and I encourage you to not only download this e-book but also check out their many resources, including the audio from the recent T4A Conference.
1. The Prodigal’s Suspicion and the Global Orphan Crisis (Dan Cruver)
2. Adoption in God’s Story of Redemption (Dan Cruver)
3. Glorifying the Father of the Fatherless (Jason Kovacs)
4. The Cosmic Significance of Adoption (Dan Cruver)
5. Creating A Culture of Adoption in Your Church (Jason Kovacs)
One of the undercurrent movements of evangelical renewal in local churches has been the rise of missional communities. These small communities are distinct from your typical home groups or small-groups because what unites them and defines them is a common mission. I resonate with this kind of missiologically-informed structuring of the ekklesia scattered as those who have been sent.
Here at Grace, we have been transitioning to similar communities to have a broader and deeper impact in Southwest Florida. Part of the developmental process has been to listen and learn from other churches who have embraced some form of small groups to foster community, whether it was life-on-life discipleship or a more incarnational lifestyle in engaging the community at large.
One of the things that has confused me about some of the philosophy behind leading models is how they are formed or constituted. There are various filters that one can use to encourage members to participate in these groups. What seems to be the leading filter has been for members to choose the groups according to what they have most in common (e.g, affinity-based). So there would be the young married groups, elderly groups, ladies groups, mens groups, college groups, and so on. These groups are shaped to bring the most homogeneity and thereby promise to be more effective and fruitful.
What I find troubling about this filter/model is twofold:
Lord Jesus, give me a deeper repentance,
a horror of sin, a dread of its approach.
Help me chastely to flee it
and jealously to resolve that my heart shall be Yours alone.
Give me a deeper trust,
that I may lose myself to find myself in You,
the ground of my rest,
the spring of my being.
Give me a deeper knowledge of Yourself
as Savior, Master, Lord, and King.
Give me deeper power in private prayer,
more sweetness in Your Word,
more steadfast grip on its truth.
Give me deeper holiness in speech, thought, action,
and let me not seek moral virtue apart from You.
Plough deep in me, great Lord,
heavenly Husbandman,
that my being may be a tilled field,
the roots of grace spreading far and wide,
until You alone are seen in me,
Your beauty golden like summer harvest,
Your fruitfulness as autumn plenty.
I have no master but You,
no law but Your will,
no delight but in You,
no wealth but that which You give,
no good but of that which You bless,
no peace but that which You bestow.
I am nothing but what You make of me.
I have nothing but what I receive from You.
I can be nothing but what grace adorns me.
Quarry me deep, dear Lord,
and then fill me to overflowing with living water.
- a prayer from The Valley of Vision
Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people. Because heaven is a prepared place, our Christian lives should be characterized by rejoicing and anticipating being with the Lord. Because heaven is for a prepared people our Christian lives should be characterized by repentance and turning away from ourselves. Therefore, the Christian life is both one of rejoicing and repentance, at the same time. In fact, it could be said that, though we mourn over and hate our sin, our repentance should be joyful knowing that God has promised bring to fulfillment that which he began in us, namely the glorification of His Son in us. There is no genuine joy without thorough repentance, and genuine repentance ought to bring about increasing joy as sin is displaced and we draw nearer to Jesus.
We often call Christians “believers”. “We are a gathering of believers . . .” but Christians are also “repenters,” so why don’t refer to a gathering of repenters? Our response to the gospel at conversion is both – a repenting faith or believing repentance, and our response to the gospel from that moment on is the same. The more we behold Jesus by faith as seen in the gospel, the more we are transformed into His image from one degree of glory to another. If there are no degrees of glory being experienced on earth, then what, pray tell, would such a professing Christian claim to experience in heaven? The very degrees of glory we experience in the daily transformation of our lives through repentance and faith are meant to be a foretaste of the fullness of glory to be seen when we are “taken up into glory.” To miss it here is to forfeit it there.
From Passion 2010:
“With every increase of mercy you receive from God there will be an accompanying increase of responsibility. . . . As you grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and receive more and more of His mercies with each passing day, your repentance must keep pace. Any failure here is an open demonstration of a lack of love and appreciation for the boundless mercies of our Lord Jesus Christ. Tragic is the case of any individual whose repentance does not increase with the gifts and graces of God he daily receives.”
- Richard Owen Roberts, Repentance: The First Word of the Gospel, 297.
“[Repentance] is perpetual. . . . The Christian is a new person in Christ, but he is imperfectly renewed. He has died to sin and has been raised to new life. But this mortification and vivification continue throughout the whole course of his life on earth. We are no longer what we once were, but we are not yet what God calls us to become; and as long as that is the case we are called to an ongoing battle for holiness.
[ . . .] Repentance does not merely begin the Christian life. According to Scripture, the Christian life is repentance from beginning to end! So long as the believer is simul justus et peccator (at the same time righteous and yet a sinner), it can be no other way.
[ . . .] True repentance can never be reduced to a single act only found at the beginning of the Christian life. It arises in the context of our union with Jesus Christ; and since its goal is our restoration into the image of Christ, it involves the ongoing practical outworking of our union with Christ in his death and resurrection–what Calvin calls mortification and vivification–that is, being conformed to Christ crucified and risen.”
- Sinclair Ferguson, The Grace of Repentance, 20, 28, 30.
Here is a great testimony and picture of incarnational ministry–having a presence among the people who are seeking to reach through dwelling in their context and telling them the good news of the kingdom. Contrasted to the evangelical ghetto fostered by the fundamentalism of separatists, the missional mindset sends us to the ghettos of the world fostered by the compassion of Christ.
“Repentance is necessary for God’s own people, who have a real work of grace. They must offer up a daily sacrifice of tears. The Antinomians hold that when any come to be believers, they have a writ of ease, and there remains nothing for them now to do but to rejoice. Yes, they have something else to do, and that is to repent. Repentance is a continuous act. The issue of godly sorrow must not be quite stopped till death. Jerome, writing in an epistle to Laeta, tells her that her life must be a life of repentance. Repentance is called crucifying the flesh (Gal. 5:24), which is not done on a sudden, but leisurely; it will be doing all our life.
Search with the candle of the word into your hearts and see if you can find no matter for repentance there:
1. Repent of your rash censuring.
2. Repent of your vain thoughts.
3. Repent of your vain fashions.
4. Repent of your decays of grace.
5. Repent of your non-improvements of talents.
6. Repent of your forgetfulness of sacred vows.
7. Repent of your unanswerableness to blessings received.
8. Repent of your worldliness.
9. Repent of your divisions.
10. Repent for the iniquity of your holy things.
Behold here repenting work cut out for the best. And that which may make the tide of grief swell higher is to think that the sins of God’s people do more provoke God than do the sins of others. The sins of the wicked pierce Christ’s side. The sins of the godly go to his heart.”
- Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance, 69-72.
Romans 3:23 is a verse that man Christians should be familiar with–”For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Typically, this verse is spoken to emphasize the universal nature of sin and man’s need for rescue, and rightly so. But rarely if ever does the last phrase receive much attention.
Sin is described in various ways throughout the Bible, whether iniquity, transgression, lawlessness, or here as “missing the mark.” The mark is the glory of God. We were created for it, rather for Him. God put us on this earth that we might be to the praise of His glory, and yet because of the devastating impact of the Fall and our sinful nature, we exchange the glory of God for the glory of ourselves. We have each went astray and turned to our own way (Isa. 53:6)–a way manifesting the hidden idolatry of our hearts and vain pursuits of meaningful existence without God.
Sin is what caused us from glorying God outside of Christ and what keeps us from glorifying God when we “in Christ.” Turning from sin and to the living God in a lifestyle of repentance addresses the very thing that prevents us from glorying God (negatively) and is the means by which pursue God in holiness (positively). Gospel-centered repentance is inherently glorious, because it is in the gospel we see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and are changed into His image. That change is brought about by joyful repentance of having seen and been satisfied by the God you’re called to glorify through genuine transformation of the heart (turning from idols to serve the living God – 1 Thess. 1:9).
When we are given over to sin, we are saying at that moment, “I am more satisfied in ________ than Jesus Christ. I find my purpose, significance, identity in __________ than Jesus Christ.” How can our affections which have become weights to pull us down into depths of depravity be transformed into wings which lift us heavenward? We who have been in “the domain of darkness” need the “light of the gospel” to shine in our hearts to see sin for what it is and to embrace Christ as a great Savior of great sinners. Meditating on the gospel and preaching it to ourselves are important means of grace to cause our hearts to rejoice in Jesus, being satisfied in all that He is for us, all that He has done in us, and all that He promises to do through us. Only when we are satisfied more in Jesus than anything in this world will our repentance from sin produce the deep, transforming work that we so desperately need.
All those who love the glory of God must necessarily love the gospel, and all those who passionately embrace the gospel must necessarily respond regularly in a repenting faith in Jesus who died to redeem us from the “futile ways handed down from our forefathers,” not the least of whom is Adam. When our repentance is gospel-induced, our repentance is driven by a delight in God and the mercies in Christ Jesus rather than mere determination to make behavioral improvements. Our repentance should be mercy-inspired and fueled by grace, lest our very attempts of repentance prove to be vainglory and yet another expression of just much we indeed fall short.
May the God who grants us repentance be pleased to be glorified in those who, in light of the gospel, are satisfied with His Son and regularly abandon broken cisterns for the well of living water.
“[Repentance] is not a transient action, as Papists and some ignorant creatures imagine, as if a sigh for sin, an act of sorrow for it, a confession of it with a ‘God be merciful to me a sinner,’ were repentance. No, no; these may be acts of repentance while they proceed from a truly penitent heart. But repentance itself is not a passing act, but an abiding grace (Zech. 12:10); a continuing frame and disposition of the soul; a principle lying deep in the heart, disposing a man to mourn for and turn from sin on all occasions.
It is not the passing work of the first days of one’s religion, as some professors take it to be; but a grace in the heart, setting one to an answerable working all the days of his life. It is a spring of waters of sorrow in the heart for sin, which will spring up there while sin is here, though sometimes through hardness of heart it may be stopped for a while.
They that look on repentance as the first stage in the way to heaven, and looking back to the sorrowful hours which they had when the Lord first began to deal with them, reckon that they have passed the first stage, are in a dangerous condition. And whoever endeavours not to carry on their repentance, I doubt if they ever at all repented yet. As when Moses had smote the rock in the wilderness, and the waters began to gush out, those waters ran and followed them in the wilderness: so the heart first smitten with repentance for sin at the soul’s first conversion to god, the wound still bleeds, and is never bound up to bleed no more, until the band of glory be put about it in heaven (Rev. 21:4).
Hence initial and progressive repentance, though the former be the repentance of a sinner, the latter of a saint, are no more different kinds of repentance, than the soul’s virgin love to Christ, and their love to him through the course of their spiritual marriage with him; or than faith in the first, and after actings. But as the midday and evening sun are the same with the morning sun, so are these; though the rising morning sun may be most noticed by the traveler, who having traveled in the night, was thereby brought from darkness to light.”
- Thomas Boston, Repentance: Turning from Sin to God – What It Means and Why It’s Necessary, 31-32 (emphasis mine).
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