Why Should a Living Man Complain?

It was a day in late September, over twenty-four centuries ago, and the trumpets blared in Jerusalem, which was beginning to finally look like a city again, now that Governor Nehemiah had finished overseeing the rebuilding of the city walls. Those trumpets set in motion a signal, from town to town to town, that called the people of the surrounding countryside into the city, gathering into the square at the Water Gate in the new city wall. Under the comforting warmth of the September sun, the governor invited an aging priest named Ezra to unfurl the scroll of God's sacred Law and read it out to the people (Nehemiah 8:1-2).

During the hours they listened, I'm sure that the stories and promises and warnings they heard couldn't help but remind them where they'd been in the last century. For a century and a half before this moment, their ancestors had been in this land, violating God's Law with utter abandon. In pursuing their great human journey, they'd been headed in precisely the wrong direction, fleeing God with gusto. Time and again, the Lord had sent them grave difficulties, bombing the wrongful path before them, all in attempts to provoke a course correction, a reversal back toward light and life and peace. And as things got more painful, one might have hoped that a wayward nation would reconsider its ways. But, by and large, it didn't. It hightailed it faster toward doomsday.

To them, God had sent a great prophet, Jeremiah, full of tears and woe. And even though Jeremiah kept his hands clean of the sin he saw relentlessly around him, he suffered intensely alongside his sinful brethren. Reflecting during the catastrophe, Jeremiah recounted his pains but considered that “it is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.... Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes, and let him be filled with insults” (Lamentations 3:27, 30). After all, “who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it?” (Lamentations 3:37). All the things that were happening to them had been sent by God – even the wicked cruelties of Babylon had been steered their way by him, albeit for their own eventual benefit, as a discipline. “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come?” (Lamentations 3:38). As Job said, “the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away: blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). So, asked Jeremiah, “why should a living man complain – a man! – about the punishment of his sins?” (Lamentations 3:39).

Well, those people in his day did receive the punishment for their sins, and had no right to complain when taken captive to Babylon. Now they were back and had finally rebuilt, despite opposition from Samaritans, Arabs, and Ammonites – and even the injustice within Jerusalem itself. And so, on the east side of the city, the people streamed in through the new Water Gate to hear the Scriptures read to them. For hours, Ezra read out the commandments of God (Nehemiah 8:2-3), as the Levites translated and expounded (Nehemiah 8:7). The people heard condemnations of idolatry and immorality, of injustice and oppression. They heard the feasts and the fasts, the sacrifices and the sabbath. They heard the aggrieved love of a faithful God for his faithless nation. And they heard how important it was for “a man or a woman” who “commits any of the sins that people commit by breaking faith with the LORD” to “realize his guilt” (Numbers 5:6).

Which is exactly what happened in the square by the Water Gate that day. Confronted with the Law of God as a standard, the people listened for hours, not as if it were an abstraction unrelated to them, but they compared their history, their biography, with what they heard. They applied it to their conduct. Their applied it to their conscience. It pierced through their hearts, because they opened their hearts enough to let it in. And the word of God did its work in them. They examined their hearts and lives in its light. So “all the people wept as they heard the words of the Law” (Nehemiah 8:9). And throughout the holidays that followed – first the Day of Atonement, then the Feast of Booths – they came back again and again to hear more, examining their own hearts day by day (Nehemiah 8:13-18).

So far this year, we've talked about how, as human beings made in God's image and likeness, we're on a journey. It's the great human journey, and it's meant to lead us to the face of God. Seeing him as he is, we'll become like him in ways we can't even begin to imagine. The beatific vision will be the fullness of eternal life, as we share God's own life as completely as a creature can – and that is heaven. But we can't get there under our natural powers, much less as those powers are handicapped by sin. We must be born again. Grace not only cleanses and regenerates us, but it installs supernatural powers like faith, hope, and love into us; and putting these into practice moves us toward our goal, under the Holy Spirit's directing guidance. And since that journey is one of relationship with God, we talked about the conversation we have with God – our side, in prayer, and his side, in his word, such as in the words of Scripture that Ezra read to the people.

A few Sundays back, we heard a bit about how righteousness and holiness are necessary if we're ever going to reach the face of God, and how that means that it isn't enough that God's grace has installed these supernatural powers into our lives. Rather, we have to cooperate with his continued grace in the use of those powers. But sin is the opposite of cooperating with God. In sin, we act against these supernatural impulses, loosening them or even casting them out of our hearts – both of which require remedies of varying strength. It's like dumping trash in your car's fuel tank, bashing the engine with a hammer, typing directions into your GPS with your eyes closed. It'll make you unsafe on the road, send you off the path you're meant to take, or risk something worse.

Jeremiah asked, “Why should a living man complain about the punishment of his sins?” (Lamentations 3:39). Why indeed should a driver complain that his suspension's getting wrecked when he goes offroading in a pockmarked minefield? The ride's very bumpiness is a warning to get back on the road, not to whine as you speed further into peril. But if not by complaining, how then should we react to God's course corrections while we're still alive and able? Hear these next words: “Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the LORD!” (Lamentations 3:40). In other words, assess the ground around you, recheck the map, compare it to the turns you've made, and shift into reverse to back out the way you came. For what does it mean to “test and examine our ways,” if not to reflect on our behavior and motives, as to whether they're on course, whether our lives and hearts are on course? Nine centuries ago, one commentator paraphrased this passage like this: “Examining our past and present life with great attention..., sitting in severe judgment on our action, let us return to the Lord...”¹

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul saw himself as something of a latter-day Jeremiah (2 Corinthians 13:10; cf. Jeremiah 1:10). And when he writes his later letter to Corinth, the church there was in chaos, led astray after visits from pompous false teachers. For these puffed-up 'super-apostles' seemed so suave and assertive, and it made Paul's cross-shaped gentleness look like pathetic weakness in their proud eyes. So now, reports of their behavior have made Paul intensely anxious over the sins they've fallen into. Not only have Corinth's scandalous sinners still refused to repent of their licentious lifestyles (2 Corinthians 12:21), but Paul fears “that perhaps there may be quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder” (2 Corinthians 12:20).

So the gloves are coming off. Paul's giving his third and final warning, and “if I come again, I will not spare” the sinners in the church there (2 Corinthians 13:2). Rather, “in dealing with you, we will live with [Christ] by the power of God” (2 Corinthians 13:4). So before Paul reaches their doorstep with the unsheathed sword of church discipline, he urges them: “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are [even] in the faith” – that is, test whether there's any of Christ's presence left in them that can provide a seed of restoration (2 Corinthians 13:5). What Paul's asking of them is to sit down and reflect while he's on his way – to make a careful assessment of their acts, their lives, their relationship to the Christ they claim, so as to identify in themselves the sin that Paul has seen, and to reach a place of them seeing it as God sees it. They should react to Paul's letter as the Jews did to the Law Ezra read: they should assess themselves in its light, weep where they find them mismatched, and repent.

But this isn't the first time Paul's told the Corinthians to examine themselves, either. In his earlier letter, we read how notoriously badly they behaved when it came to Communion, to the point that their hypocrisy was literally poisoning them (1 Corinthians 11:17, 30). Bringing all this unrepented sin and vice to the altar, cramming holiness into their filthy, venomous mouths, offending the body of Jesus under the twin guises of bread and brother, they “eat and drink judgment on themselves,” to the point some of them had gotten sick or died (1 Corinthians 11:29). Paul tells them that, even before they make it to church, they ought to scrutinize their lives, their attitudes, their hearts: “If we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged” (1 Corinthians 11:31). So “let a person examine himself, then,” and only after finding a clear conscience, Paul tells us, “eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Corinthians 11:28). Self-examination is a prerequisite to safe communion.

Now, at this point, we might wonder if self-examination is just for extraordinary situations – Israel confronted with generations of sin, Corinthians dropping like flies. But it's not just for the extraordinary. If we want to grow in our relationship with God, if we want to advance in the great human journey, living out this advice is a powerful tool for transformation. And Christians down through the ages have agreed. In the fourth century, St. John Chrysostom pointed out to his congregation that Lent – this season we're in right now – is an awesome time for making real spiritual progress. But that progress can be lost, in Lent as throughout the year, if we don't set aside time for a regular examination of our heart and life. After all, don't sailors take stock of the ship's cargo? Don't captains keep a ship's log to chart their travels day by day, and ensure that the navigation makes sense in light of their destination, so they can correct course while there's time? But if they do that, said St. John, “much more is it proper for us to follow that procedure... by examining our conscience, scrutinizing our thinking, and considering what we have done right” – (or not right!) – “on this day, and what on that day...”²

Over thirteen centuries later, there was another John – John Wesley. Barely into his twenties, his mom wrote to him: “Dear Jacky, I heartily wish you would now enter upon a serious examination of yourself...”³ He took her words to heart and carried out a regular self-examination, day after day. And after his personal revival over a decade later, he organized the small groups that would be the cornerstone of the Methodist movement, and he had these penitent bands do self-examination out loud in groups every week, answering questions like “What known sins have you committed since our last meeting?”⁴ And in his classes, the class leader was to visit each class member once a week to help them examine “how their souls prosper.”⁵ The founder of our denomination was a member of just such a Methodist class near Ephrata. Our churches began, in many cases, in the form of class meetings.

So what does it look like to listen to Ezra, listen to Paul, listen to these great churchmen of generations past, and carry out a examination of our hearts and lives? A good place to begin is by thanking God, because everything we do ought to begin with thanking God for his goodness. Then, we can pray for God to help us call to mind our actions, good and bad, in the time period we aim to review. We can pray he'll give us insight into the motives by which we acted, and not just the excuses we've convinced ourselves of. We can pray God will let us really see ourselves as we actually are – the good, the bad, the ugly. And we can take a deep breath and keep calm and clear-headed, not letting ourselves get worked up or defensive, but taking a step back for a moment.⁶

Next, we can decide on a rubric to use. It doesn't usually help to just try to catch whatever comes to mind. We need to ask ourselves specific questions. Now, we could make up our own list of questions – a personalized standard, like John Wesley's 'scheme of self-examination,'⁷ or the relentless barrage that Francis de Sales put together.⁸ But classically, one popular rubric has been to use the Ten Commandments.⁹ Sit down and review your behaviors and heart attitudes with the Law of God, and you'll see why Ezra had the crowd crying!

Of course, if you keep to the letter, you can let yourself off the hook pretty easily – “Well, I never killed anybody, I haven't been stealing and committing adultery, I guess I pass.” Not so fast: Jesus digs deeper in his Sermon on the Mount, getting to the root. Another rubric that's been recommended throughout the ages is what we today like to call the 'seven deadly sins.' You know the ones – pride, anger, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth, and greed. Those are vices that beget all sorts of sins in our lives. Any one of us could examine our hearts and lives under those headings, investigating the ways we've allowed those vices to boss us around and control our attitudes and actions, or (hopefully) finding ways we've cultivated their opposite virtues.¹⁰

But, whichever rubric you pick out, use it. Hold it up next to you as you take a good, hard look in the mirror. Try to recall what you've done, what you've said, what you've nursed in your heart.¹¹ Look at everything, but if it helps, identify one main area you struggle in – maybe impatience, maybe anger, maybe defensiveness – and prioritize that first. Francis de Sales drew an analogy with maintaining an old pocket-watch: “He who is careful of his soul ought to wind it up morning and evening... and at least once a year take it apart to examine all its dispositions, in order to repair all its defects.”¹² Ignatius of Loyola suggested doing some level of examination of conscience a couple times each day, and keeping a record of your progress hour to hour, week to week.¹³

So how do we begin repairing defects? Well, the Law Israel heard Ezra read said: “When a man or a woman commits any of the sins that people commit by breaking faith with the LORD, and that person realizes his guilt, he shall confess his sin that he has committed” (Numbers 5:6-7). So that's just what they did. A little over three weeks after hearing Ezra read the Law, the Israelites got together again – and although it was October, it sure looked a lot like Lent. They all started fasting. They put dirt on their heads, just like the ashes we get on Ash Wednesday. They even dressed in sackcloth, rough and dark and depressing (Nehemiah 9:1). These are things Daniel did in Babylon, when reading Jeremiah made him realize Israel was still in the doghouse (Daniel 9:3). But what Daniel did as one man on behalf of a nation, Ezra led that nation's grandkids in doing as a generation of Daniels. Separating themselves from sin, they then confessed the sins they'd fallen into: “The offspring of Israel... stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers, and they stood up in their place and read from the Book of the Law of the LORD their God for a quarter of the day; for another quarter of it, they made confession and worshipped the LORD their God” (Nehemiah 9:2-3). That is, they admitted out loud, not just being sinners in a generic way, but they named names – they verbalized to God the findings of their self-examination, submitting a real raw report on the sorry state of their souls.

Just like Nehemiah's Judah, we can, if we wish, confess our sins in a group setting. After all, James writes that in certain contexts you should “confess your sins to one another” (James 5:16), and John Wesley said the bands he formed were designed to “obey that command of God” in all its intensity.¹⁴ Sometimes the early Christians practiced just such public confessions of sin. In time, it often became a more private affair between a person and his or her pastor, since Jesus told the apostles, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them” (John 20:23). But regardless, confessing in public or in total privacy, these believers were confessing to God, making their own the psalm: “I confess my iniquity, I am sorry for my sin” (Psalm 38:18). With real contrition, they regretted the sins they confessed, and hoped on God's forgiveness and help. We're told to “make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue” (2 Peter 1:5), and self-examination and confession are part of that effort.

And when we carry out our self-examination, when we read our lives and hearts in light of God's commands and the virtue we need if we want to be like him, we're going to find things to confess – maybe smaller things, maybe bigger things. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 1:8). So just confess it, lay it all out to God. Then ask his pardon, and commit to doing better, with the help of his grace.¹⁵ And here's the good news: he'll give it – the pardon and the grace. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). With self-examination leading to confession as a regular practice, not only can we understand ourselves better, but we can grow in righteousness, grow in virtue, “grow up into salvation” (1 Peter 2:2), “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18), “grow up in every way into... Christ” (Ephesians 4:15), and so chart our way to the very face of God. May these logbooks, this maintenance, aid us there, in Jesus' name and by his grace! Amen.

Prayer
Almighty and gracious God and Father, you who forgive sin even more readily than our foolish hearts so readily commit it, we turn to you and beg for your mercy.  We plead for your light to fall on our darkened minds, calling back to our remembrance all that has led us astray.  We ask you to help us see ourselves in your truth.  We confess before you that we are sinners.  Show us exactly where we are weak and where we are strong.  Show us where we falter where we tell ourselves we fly.  Unbury the broken bones in us that yet chafe with pain.  Guide us in searching ourselves, testing and examining our conscience and heart and life, and naming before you the sins we find.  Give us hearts that hate these sins as dirty ashes, that hunger and thirst for your righteousness in us instead.  This Lent, let our fasting hunger awaken that spiritual hunger, and lead us to true repentance, true amendment of life, from what our self-examination reveals.  Confessing our sins and our vices, we know, is our one great hope to find the forgiveness and help you offer, not because you have any obligation to, but because you love us even when our love for you (or even our love for ourselves) dies out.  Teach us where we must grow next, the place we must now be stretched as, part by part, we are stretched into the pattern of the image of Christ, in whose name we plead for your mercy and your grace.  Amen.

Open Eyes, Open Hearts

So far this year, we've been exploring this great human journey that's supposed to lead us to the face of God – to see him as he is, and so become like him as participants in his eternal life of blessedness. That beatific vision is what we're made for. But we found that this great human journey can't take off until our sin is dealt with and until we're operating under supernatural power, all of which requires us to be born again. But once we've been born again, grace installs in us supernatural dispositions called faith and hope and love. And as we put these into practice, we move toward our goal. And since our goal is union with God, our movement is all about deepening our relationship with God. So last week we talked about prayer. In Christian prayer, we make ourselves attentive to God's presence both as God and as Father, we make prayer a religious act of offering our honest inner self to him like a sacrifice, and in that context, we can process our emotions with God, thank God, make requests to God, interact with God, and just become comfortable in our Father's presence.

In all that up until now, though, we've only painted half the picture. All of that is good and important, but it can turn prayer into a bit of a monologue. Last week we said that “prayer is first and foremost about cultivating that relationship, about developing conversational familiarity with God in which it becomes easier and more natural to talk with him.” But a conversation, a relationship, takes a dialogue. Have you ever tried talking to someone who monopolizes the conversation, who won't let you get a word in edgewise?  Too often, we are that person toward God as we pray:  going on and on without leaving space for God's replies. So how do we do better?  How do we listen in prayer with an open heart?

The first thing that helps, as we become attentive to God's presence, is to become aware of God as a lovingly active listener – the fact that, whenever we're paying attention to him, he's already paying attention to us. What we say already has his ear, as children have their Father's ear. But does he have ours, even when he seems slow to speak? It takes vulnerability to open ourselves to God and then just... wait. It's uncomfortable, maintaining a stretch position of listening. It takes patience that we often don't muster. But then, in our silence, we begin to hear. I always struggled a lot with this, but one book on prayer I've been reading explains it so much better than I could ever hope to, so bear with me as I just quote them:

The response may come in different ways. … His response may come in the form of some insight which we may or may not be able to put into words. Sometimes it is simply a peace that rises up in our hearts, or we find that an image comes to us and possibly an interpretation of how that image applies to us. Other times we start to see a situation or a person differently, from God's perspective. … When it comes to our personal calling, words of love meant for us alone, direction for specific situations, or guiding us in the choice of two goods, his voice can be so quiet that we cannot hear it. That is to say, we will hear his voice only when we are ready to hear it, when we have already aligned our freedom with his will.¹

Now, with God's voice being so quiet, there comes a danger. And the danger is that, willingly or unwillingly, we can fabricate the other side of the conversation. We can imagine God too differently from how he really is, we can mistake other voices for his, we can distort what he's saying to us by filtering it through the wrong ideas. If we're to invest in a relationship with God, then we've got to match his very quiet voice to what he's already shouted to the world – we've got to have an ear formed by God's word.² So what's God shouted to the world?

God has shouted to the world his Word, and his Word is none other than Jesus Christ, the divine person. For we know that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). As the Word of God, he made everything that is and holds it all together (John 1:3). Because he holds it together, the Word is “the true light which gives light to everyone” (John 1:9), so that to an extent, even the unbeliever in deepest darkness has “the work of the law written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness” (Romans 2:15), so that at times they “by nature do what the law requires” (Romans 2:14). That's because God has written his Word all over the underside of creation, leaving a natural law to reveal himself.

But more important than even that, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). For “in these last days, God has spoken to us by his Son..., through whom also he created the world” (Hebrews 1:3), “and the name by which he is called is: The Word of God” (Revelation 19:13). And so this Word of God “was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels..., taken up in glory” (1 Timothy 3:16). Unless our first reaction when we hear the phrase 'word of God' is to think of Jesus himself as the Word of God – capital W and all – then we have missed the point. Because the Word of God is, first and foremost, this divine person, this Jesus Christ. Jesus is himself the shout of God that makes the world, holds the world, saves the world. He, and nothing else, is God's perfect self-revelation.

But after he was taken up in glory, we're told that the apostles he appointed “were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31). The 'word of God' there is the content of what they preached. And through their preaching, first “Samaria had received the word of God” (Acts 8:14), and then “the Gentiles also had received the word of God” (Acts 11:1). Over and over again, “the word of God increased and multiplied” (Acts 12:24). So, when the proconsul Sergius Paulus “sought to hear the word of God” (Acts 13:7), was he out of luck? No. Did he reach for a book? Also no. He called on apostles and listened to them, because what they preached to him was the word of God. Through them and those who worked with them, the word of God was “proclaimed among the nations” and “believed on in the world” (1 Timothy 3:16). It was this “living and abiding word of God” whereby “you have been born again,” says Peter (1 Peter 1:23). And because this preaching passed from mouth to ear to mouth to ear, Paul rejoiced that, even when he was chained up like a criminal, “the word of God is not bound!” (2 Timothy 2:9).

So the personal Word of God had come to the prophets and spoken to them, and therefore – as Peter explains – “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). Then, when the Word of God took on flesh, he appointed these apostles and poured out on them the same Holy Spirit, and they too spoke as the Spirit carried them along. So far, so good. But some of those prophets, and some of these apostles, took the word of God they were speaking, and they wrote it down. And what they left behind them, people called 'scriptures' – which, from the Latin scriptura, just means 'writings.' Later on, through a process we won't get into this morning, these scriptures got conveniently collected into a single set of books, sometimes even between a single set of covers. The Greek word for 'books,' in the plural, is biblia – so, in English, “the holy books” becomes “the Holy Bible.”

And this Holy Bible is God truly shouting his love to our world – or, as Paul puts it, “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Timothy 3:16). For the Bible to be God's speech implies that the message God wants to teach us is inerrant. “The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:6). “The word of the LORD is upright” (Psalm 33:4). “Every word of God proves true” (Proverbs 30:5). For just such a reason, Jesus announced that “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). One follower of the apostles summed this up by saying: “The Holy Scriptures... are true and inspired by the Holy Spirit. You know that nothing contrary to justice or truth has been written in them.”³

All that is totally true. At the same time, it's also true that the Bible didn't descend on a sunbeam, a message in one heavenly language that transcends all time and all space. The Holy Scriptures arose from the Holy Spirit carrying along real people. God chose to harness the gifts of a whole bunch of writers in all their specific contexts, and he let them bring their personalities and strengths and even weaknesses to the effort.⁴ So they write in their own languages, Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek. Sometimes they use a rhyme scheme or a pun that's hard to pick up on in our English translations. Some of them wrote in high-flying words of impressive eloquence; others of them ain't using no perfect grammar – and that's okay. Some wrote by their own hand, others dictated to a scribe, some had co-authors, and some might've even outsourced the wording to a secretary and then approved the final result. They assume background information they expect their first hearers to remember. They use customs and conventions familiar to them, without worrying about us people two thousand years later. The Bible is the word of God as written down, and the flesh it's incarnated in is all these particularities – but just as with Jesus, it's these enfleshed particularities that let it be seen and touched by us.

When we want to understand the Bible, then, first we have to read it literally. But that's not the same as reading it literalistically. Reading everything in it like a newspaper report would be literalistic, and often, that's what we do. But to read it literally is just to read it 'according to the letter' – i.e., what the words actually say and mean, according to their genre and their context and their grammar and their syntax and their figures of speech. If it uses metaphors or idioms, read those for what they are. If you come across a sentence like “It's raining cats and dogs,” literalistic reading makes you call the vet; literal reading makes you grab an umbrella.

First, there's the literary context. When you read a line or a verse, what's right around it? What kind of passage is it in? If it's a proverb, read it like a proverb. If it's a parable, read it like a parable. If it's a scene or episode, read it like that, as a story. Then, there's not just the immediate passage, but the whole book. What genre is it? If it's a biography like the Gospel of Matthew, read it as a biography. If it's a letter like Romans, read it like you read a letter. If it's an apocalypse like Revelation, we'd better figure out how we're supposed to read apocalypses. And how's the book put together? For instance, Matthew is arranged around five big teaching sessions (just like there are five books of Moses, from Genesis to Deuteronomy), and one teaching session, the Sermon on the Mount, has Jesus preaching from a mountain, just like Moses on Mt. Sinai. Once you see how it's put together, you can read each part in light of the rest. Just like it's hard to figure out a movie if you enter the theater an hour after it starts, so it's hard to figure out a book starting from the middle. Then, not only is there the whole book, but there's the whole Bible. The Scriptures are meant to hang together as one immense story that describes the truth of the universe.⁵ And so the whole Bible makes sense together. You'll get the most out of watching a movie these days if you've seen its prequels. The same's true of a Bible book's prequels.  (And then also its sequels, after which you can 're-watch' the earlier book with added perspective – again, just like the best movies.)

That brings us to the historical context. If it wasn't written this morning right here in the USA, don't read it like it was. As you look at a line or a verse, which are part of a passage and a book, when does it fit in that immense story? Which covenant does it belong to? Was it written before, during, or after the exile? Where was it written – Israel, Judah, Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome? Is the author a king or a priest or a prophet or a sage or a fisherman or a doctor or a tentmaker? Where'd the Holy Spirit find this person? And who was in the human author's mind as their first audience? Were they Jews or Gentiles, rich or poor, rural or urban, well-behaved or badly behaved?

That's an awful lot of questions, I know. That's why we've got a little church library. But while all this may sound complicated, it doesn't mean that you're left clueless when you sit down with your Bible in the morning. After all, Timothy was “from childhood... acquainted with the sacred writings” (2 Timothy 3:15). And while Timothy had to keep reading, keep learning, keep clarifying what he maybe didn't understand at first, even a child can feel the breath of God on the sacred page, and get some part of its message, whether a little or a lot.

So this literal sense of Scripture – metaphors and figures and all – is foundational. But as Paul looked to the Law, he contrasted its 'letter' and its 'spirit' (Romans 2:29). What the words say about things is the literal sense, but the spiritual sense shows us what the things mean, in all God's cleverness. Eventually, Christians divided the spiritual sense into three senses, for a total of four.⁶ I want so badly to get into that right now, but we don't have time, so we'll circle back to the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses of Scripture in a couple months.

Alright, but as we read Scripture or hear it taught, how do we guard against making stuff up? How can we be sure we're reading rightly? Because Scripture itself tells us that people will read it badly and teach it badly. “There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). There will “arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:30). And many of those twisted speakers would defend their bad ideas by twisting Scripture. Less than two centuries after Jesus' ministry, we hear Christians complaining how false teachers were sneakily twisting Scripture's meaning “by inventing different interpretations from ours. … They rely on passages which they've put together in a false context, or fastened on because of their ambiguity.”⁷

Up until recently, the average Christian didn't carry a Bible around, or have one at home. They heard it read at church, but some Christians barely had even that – and yet they could still believe rightly. We're told how “many barbarian peoples who believe in Christ... possess salvation, written without paper or ink by the Spirit in their hearts, diligently observing the ancient tradition. … Those who've believed this faith without letters are barbarians in regard to our language, but are most wise (because of the faith) as to thinking, customs, and way of life; and they please God as they live in complete justice, chastity, and wisdom.”⁸ So without having Bibles, they lived by God's word, even knowing it enough to reject false teachers out of hand. But how can that be?

It's because the apostles didn't only leave behind written words – which, by their own admission, could never be the full picture, since “the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). They also left behind people with living memories and living voices.⁹ Think about it: if you time-traveled back to the year the temple fell, most of the apostles are dead, much of the New Testament has been written, but you can shake hands with Christians who've spent hours listening to Paul's sermons, they've watched him go about his work, they've asked him questions face-to-face. And some of these people are the people to whom Paul handed over the keys to this or that church before he died; and they, in turn, will help the next generation understand the other Scriptures rightly, and so on down the line.¹⁰ Got questions about 1 Corinthians? Go to Corinth and ask the leaders and teachers there. Nobody was ever left to read the Bible all on his or her lonesome.

Nor were we ever supposed to. The Bible isn't just anybody's book; it's the Church's Book.¹¹ The word of God is for the people of God, as we proclaim after reading from it every Sunday. The Bible was written by people who belong to the Church, written for the sake of the Church, finds its most proper usage within the Church's worship, and is meant to be read with the Church as its fullest context – so there's not just the literary context and the historical context, but also the ecclesial context. And the Church herself is a Bible-reader who, as a single living body, is filled with the same Holy Spirit who inspired Scripture. Gifted by that Spirit, the Church strives to think always with the mind of Christ as she reads; and as she does, she continues to speak the word of God, the same as ever, uttering it in every generation as her sacred tradition. And that is how, as Paul writes, “the church of the living God” was, is, and shall be “a pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). 

We're out of time to explore how the Church speaks the word of God over two thousand years to today. But suffice it to say that trying to unlock the Bible for yourself in a vacuum is a recipe for reading it wrong. “How can I understand, unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:31). Reading any of the Bible as God's isolated word, forgetting all its contexts, has never been the hallmark of true disciples.

Okay, last question: what role should God's word, in all its forms, play in our lives? To that, King Jehoshaphat answers: “Inquire first for the word of the LORD” (1 Kings 22:5). True disciples prioritize God's word, and in practice, for us that means sitting down with an open Bible and exploring with guidance. King David declared that God's word was “more to be desired... than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10). True disciples not only prioritize God's word, they prize it: they want to gobble it up and savor it slowly, pile it high and haul it to the bank. They want as much of it as they can get, to explore it and enjoy it to the full. David goes on: “Moreover, by them” – God's words, that is – “is your servant warned, and in keeping them there is great reward” (Psalm 19:11). Paul echoes him by saying that God's word is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). How, then, do true disciples approach God's word?  They prioritize it, they prize it, and they put it to work. For they find it incredibly versatile, packed with all they need to know for salvation, all they need to steer clear of spiritual dangers, all they need to grow in wisdom, so that every kind of triumph comes within their reach. That's what true disciples do.

And, yes, to get at God's word, to get all of God's word, to get all we can out of all of God's word, is going to take plenty of effort – it's a deep dive, this backbreaking mental labor of unearthing pearls of such great price. But that shouldn't surprise us, since the same is true of prayer. So let us read with open eyes, hear with open ears, ponder with an open heart. It may be challenging... but it's a challenge with more than enough 'great reward' for us all. Amen.

Open Lips, Open Ears

They'd hurried a long way to find Jesus, walking in tears all the way from Perea to Galilee. What they had to say, they believed Jesus needed to hear, and from them. They'd visited him before, relaying questions from their imprisoned master. They were disciples of John, the prophet – more than a prophet – who'd rewritten history with his baptisms in the River Jordan. Several years before, John had been imprisoned by Antipas, son of the infamous Herod. Antipas had divorced his wife Phasaelis to steal his half-brother's wife Herodias – who was also a niece to both of them – and John had denounced the divorce as unlawful and impossible. Had Antipas not read the Book of Leviticus? “You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife; it is your brother's nakedness” (Leviticus 18:16). “It is not lawful for you to have her,” John had insisted in his fiery preaching, unencumbered by social niceties (Matthew 14:4). And while Antipas found John's preaching compelling, he found his love even more so. John had been imprisoned at Antipas' palace-fortress Machaerus during Jesus' desert duel with the devil, before Jesus launched his public ministry (Matthew 4:1-12).

But now, John's disciples told him, something had gone terribly wrong. These last couple years, Herodias herself had been stewing with hatred for John, and through her daughter Salome – named for Herodias' grandmother, a conniving woman who'd divorced multiple husbands and convinced her brother Herod to then execute each of them for treason – Herodias had at last found an opening for vengeance. Putting birthday-boy Antipas on the spot after lithe young Salome was offered a lavish prize from her lecherous uncle/great-uncle/stepfather for her dance, she'd insisted on the severed head of John as her reward. Terrified of public backlash but more terrified of losing face in front of his party guests, Antipas gave the order. To satisfy the vendetta of these incestuous Herodian fiends, the prince of prophets was killed. No sooner had his disciples entombed his headless body than grief propelled them to Galilee, to relay the dark news (Matthew 14:6-12).

In his humanity, where this news came to him really as news, the news hit Jesus hard. His forerunner, cousin, and friend was dead. Not only was he filled with a sense of loss and grief over someone so dear and important to him, not only did he grieve for his people at the loss of what John represented, but it wouldn't be long until the Passover, and that meant in just over a year's time, the wrath meted out to John would be unleashed on Jesus as well – and Jesus knew it. The countdown to Calvary had started ticking when John's head rolled from his shoulders. Feeling a foretaste of Gethsemane surge through his heart, Jesus felt the need to get away. Taking a boat, he rowed his way across the lake to find some peace and quiet in the vicinity of Bethsaida, where there were some wonderful open spaces really only used for grazing sheep (Matthew 14:13).

When he docked his boat, though, crowds were already waiting for him on the shoreline by the thousands. Hearing Jesus was on the move, they'd run around the sea to intercept him, desperate for his attention. And although Jesus' heart was so heavy, although he needed time alone, nevertheless as he looked into their eyes and saw their hurt, their sickness, their thirst to learn and grow, his compassion was mightier than his grief. Expending energy past human limits, he spent the day with them, healing their sick and teaching them about God's kingdom, a message all the more urgent now that the forces of death were in motion (Matthew 14:13-14).

By late afternoon, Jesus' own disciples were getting concerned. The crowds had come by foot, had stayed all day, and there were no food sources nearby. If they didn't leave now to go to the nearest villages, if they instead stayed with Jesus into the night, some of them would pass out before making it to a food vendor. The crowds, though, clearly wouldn't act even in their own best interest without Jesus' telling them to (Matthew 14:15). But Jesus had a different suggestion: the disciples should feed the crowd themselves (Matthew 14:16). With what? All they could find on hand was a single boy's lunch (Matthew 14:17)! But it was enough. Looking up to his Father in heaven, Jesus broke and blessed the barley bread, and as his disciples distributed it, it replenished itself hand to hand, in all its beautiful brokenness – much as Jesus' beautiful heart was broken. So five thousand men, and all the women and children there that afternoon, were fed an early supper (Matthew 14:18-21).

No sooner had they finished eating than he sent his disciples to his boat, telling them to sail across the sea while evening was coming on. The sun was already setting toward the horizon. He would deal with the crowds. And as his disciples rowed away, he gave them his final words and told them to go home. They obeyed. Thus, with the disciples on the lake and the crowds dispersing to the villages of northern Galilee, at last Jesus was alone – alone on the land as a quiet darkness filled the air. Walking to the top of a nearby hill overlooking the area, Jesus had his privacy. And so Jesus had his prayer. How long after sunset it took to start – how long the crowds took in their going away – it isn't clear. But his disciples were struggling with wind on the lake that blew them off course, and yet Jesus didn't walk out to them on the waters until after 3:00am. Jesus spent hours up on the mountain – just him and his Father, a practice run for Gethsemane. “He offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7). Jesus prayed what he preached.

Knowing he'd be swarmed by the needy crowds yet again after sunrise when he and his exhausted disciples hit land – not a one of them having slept a wink – Jesus could have curled up and slept on the mountaintop, I guess, but instead he devoted himself to an all-night prayer vigil. More than a night's rest – if he could even sleep – he needed to talk things out with his Father, to commune with his Father. And that meant prayer, prayer in private, prayer in the absolute vulnerability possible in the intimacy of God the Father and his Son on earth. For maybe seven hours – perhaps even more – Jesus prayed. In that prayer, Jesus processed his thoughts, feelings, griefs, and fears. And in that night of prayer, Jesus set us an example.

Jesus has been called “the model and master of Christian prayer,” and rightly so.¹ Over the past few weeks, you and I have talked about this great human journey we're all on, and how it's meant to reach its climax with us becoming somehow like God through seeing him as he is – a seeing we call the beatific vision. Of course, then we talked about how the journey can't be achieved under our own natural powers; we need supernatural powers to get there, we need supernatural faith and hope and love, all implemented in supernatural ways, in order to be able to see God as he is. God gives us these from the very start, when we're born again. But, as we heard last week, we have to actually act on these dispositions, use these powers and these gifts, practice this righteousness, build this relationship. I've been calling it “the great human journey,” but we could just as accurately call it “the great human courtship.” The goal is to see God unveiled, to know intimately as he is, to be united to him in divine love. And this heavenly union with God, which will be more intimate and powerful and delightful than anything in the world, is the perfect template of all marriage and all family in our experience. Where we're headed is to perfect union with God, and that means the journey there is like the journey of our most near and dear relationships. The growth we need is relational growth, relational investment, more deeply rooting God's presence in us by love. And prayer is simply the stuff of that relational investment on our end. So with the time we have this morning, let's follow Jesus up that lonely mountain, to learn what complete relational investment in God looks and sounds like. In your silence, eavesdrop on Jesus; in your words, join in with Jesus as he leads.

Since prayer is about relational investment, since prayer is talking to and with God, it can begin with cultivating a consciousness of God. And that calls for an attentiveness to and focus on God. “Prayer is focusing on God..., refocusing each time we relate actively within the relationship.”² To begin a time of prayer, turn your attention to God. If possible, dispose your body in whatever ways help you mentally, emotionally, psychologically get into 'prayer mode,' whatever that looks like for you. (For me, it's usually pacing back and forth.) Take a deep breath or two. Then open the conversation with a greeting, imagine God greeting you back, and picture him in front of or above or beside you, and begin. “The more concretely we envision our relationship with God,” it's been said, “the better our prayer will be.”³

Attentiveness to God will mean attentiveness to him as God. Cultivating a consciousness of him will call for an attitude of humble appreciation, of recognizing God as God and ourselves as not.⁴ God doesn't need anything from you. You need everything from him. But he wants you more than you want him. God cannot have a bad day. He cannot get sick of you. He cannot be too busy for you, because he transcends all we know as time. So you can trust that the psalmist's words hold good for you, too: “Truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer” (Psalm 66:19). Humbling yourself before God, confessing him as the God you aren't, you can trust that he's listening, even when all around is earthly silence. You don't have to try to manipulate your emotions to gin up whatever feelings you associate with God. He's just there, listening, attentive to you.

And when we approach him in and with Jesus, God is no longer merely the King who relates to us by his power, or even the Redeemer who relates to us by his mercy. Once we're born again to be participants in the life of Jesus Christ, God is to you and me the Father who relates to us by a love that cherishes. God's love is a love that does not know how to be anything less than infinite.⁵ It just doesn't! And so Jesus invites us with him to approach the Father as a person who, by the grace of adoption, belongs in the Father's arms. He invites you to approach God with a confidence that God, as your Father, isn't looking for pretexts to berate you or denounce you; God is simply happy when we put up no obstacles to his welcoming embrace. In many ways, then, prayer entails adopting the position and outlook of small children, resting in a parent's arms. “Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). The innocence, dependency, trust, un-selfconsciousness – in things like that, little kids offer us a model to emulate.⁶

Now, one caveat here: It seems to me that in today's culture, we tend to identify familiarity with informality and irreverence, thinking that being like a little child is about being like a bratty child. In modern America, we tend to make the model of the child-parent relationship about a cheeky child full of audacity. In first-century Galilee or elsewhere in the Roman Empire, not so much! A Roman father, especially, had legal power of life and death over his children. And in Jewish culture as much as Roman, life-long respect for fathers was a central value, one into which children were disciplined from the earliest age. So when Jesus advises us to approach God as our Father, he's not counseling us to approach with an abandonment of reverence and respect. He's not calling us to a flippant or casual approach, barging in on God and pretending God is just our peer and buddy. God being our Father does not occlude or exclude God's kingship and holiness and all his other great majesties. We are invited to approach God familiarly and freely as our Father, but that's not the same thing as flippantly and irreverently. In fact, the author of Hebrews says that the reason why the Father heard Jesus' prayers with all those loud cries and tears was precisely “because of his reverence” (Hebrews 5:7).

And so when we pray, we should have some consciousness that prayer is a religious act of value, at least insofar as it really presents your inner self to God as a gift of self.⁷ Prayers are a religious act of self-giving, and that's another reason they should definitely not be flippant. And we make them good religious acts by filling them with plenty of adoration, plenty of thanksgiving, plenty of praise. As a religious act, a good prayer is potentially the equivalent of a sacrifice. One psalmist hoped so, at least, when he said to God: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice” (Psalm 141:2). Praise, especially for God's comfort, is compared in Isaiah to “the fruit of the lips” (Isaiah 57:19). So “let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name” (Hebrews 13:15). This is one reason why we're encouraged to pray out loud, even though God hears us just as clearly when we pray silently on the inside. Praying out loud lets us serve God with everything we've got, inside and outside, by having our bodies make sounds that express our inner devotion.⁸

So our specific prayers are religious acts, and meant to be reverent like a sacrifice. But this reverence doesn't mean bombastic. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus pointed out that for at least some pagan Gentiles, they were so fixated on prayer as a religious act, but in the absence of a confidence that their religious act would be acceptable, they'd try all sorts of verbal tricks to ensure they were heard favorably (Matthew 6:7). Those pagan prayers would heap up lots of divine epithets and titles, and so could become very formalized and flowery. A flowery prayer need not be a bad thing, but it's bad when it becomes bombastic by being more focused on the words themselves than on the sentiments they convey or the character of the hearer. Jesus reminds us that God doesn't actually need the words to know your need; he was paying attention before you started (Matthew 6:8). So our words aren't a fishing expedition to butter God up; they're a blend of incense meant to smell good to both deity and offerer, meant to make it easier and not harder to communicate with God.⁹

And since it's about communicating with God, that calls for sincerity. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talked about “hypocrites” – play-actors, some Pharisees being guilty of this – who were fond of using prayer for what were fundamentally un-religious ends. They made sure that the call to prayer caught them in a place of maximal visibility, because they wanted to impress others with their piety so as to boost their social standing. So as to pervert their prayer to those ends, they turned it into a public performance (Matthew 6:5). Jesus' advice to seek privacy for prayer, even to the point of hiding in a closet, is primarily about reducing the risk of it becoming a performance aimed at enhancing your reputation. There remains, of course, a risk of it still being a performance aimed at enhancing your self-image! But to follow Jesus' counsel, at least, would make someone conspicuously absent during the set prayer hours, allowing others to assume from that whatever they wished. Of course, in today's culture, where religiosity in public is sometimes looked down on as unseemly, people's incentives might be different – not praying in public might be a more effective reputation enhancer! In which case, the relevant advice might be more along the don't-hide-it-under-a-bushel track (Matthew 5:15-16). But Jesus' point stands: arrange your prayer life so as to guard against temptations to manipulate it for social advantage.

To follow Jesus in prayer, then, cultivate a consciousness of God both as God and as Father, let prayer be a religious act but without bombast and without performance, but above and beyond being a religious act, let it be a truly honest gift of an honest self. And, as Jesus showed on the mountain, that means honest emotional and logistical processing with God in prayer. Just as you appreciate it when friends and family serve as a sounding board for what you're experiencing when you need to vent, why not “just tell God where you are and what's on your mind”?¹⁰ That's what Jesus did. In all those night hours, he was utterly honest and vulnerable with God.

Of course, there's a danger here, too. These days, when we say we're finally being “honest” with someone, we use the word 'honest' as a euphemism for being verbally abusive – letting fly all the harsh, unreasonable, and intemperate criticisms we've been storing up in our minds and which we've at last grown too passionately angry to suppress any longer. That's not at all what I'm recommending we do to be honest with God! You're supposed to be processing with God, not against God; growing more tender, not more defensive or more self-justifying. By all means, ask the hard questions, even lay out some challenges – Job can testify how surprisingly indulgent God can be with that. But in any relationship, there are lines of contempt not to cross under pretexts of 'honesty' – our honesty should stay reverent, as Jesus' did. But this reverent honesty can be very passionate, and should be, when that's what we're really feeling. By opening yourself to God in vulnerability, you create space for him to work and draw you closer. And if Jesus processed honestly all night on a mountain, so can we.¹¹

Within that, we can bring God our specific personal needs: “In everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God” (Philippians 4:6). And we can bring God the needs of others and of the world: “We always pray for you” (2 Thessalonians 1:11), “making supplication for all the saints” (Ephesians 6:19). But in all this, remember that priority isn't given to any particular topic, and ultimately not even to prayer's value as a religious act. Prayer is first and foremost about cultivating that relationship, about developing conversational familiarity with God in which it becomes easier and more natural to talk with him. Prayer is a venue for opening yourself to the strengthening of those theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, to becoming holier through a real encounter with God's grace, and so to growing fitter for the beatific vision. It doesn't need to be a constant barrage of words, still less of new words or new thoughts. But even as you run out of new things to say, or even as you incorporate silent resting in God, “continue steadfastly in prayer” with open lips and open ears (Colossians 4:2). For prayer is our spiritual breath, the regular maintenance and pursuit of our relationship with a God whose unveiled union with us is the supernatural bliss we're made for. And much more could be said of it, but time grows short. Let us merely meditate on that mountain... and listen. Amen.

Roadmap to Heaven

A couple weeks ago, we talked about where we're supposed to go, where this great human journey is supposed to lead every human to ever live. And, to waste no time, every human is created with the purpose of reaching the Beatific Vision – that is, the final destination on our great human journey is seeing God as he is, and therefore being transformed to be like him (as much as a creature can be), and so to know and love and enjoy God forever as only someone made like him can. Or, as John puts it: “What we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). But last Sunday, we wondered how this great human journey could even get started. First of all, our natural powers and their works are by definition incapable of reaching God, no more than it's possible for you to run to the moon. And to make it worse, we're sinners, which puts us in debt (and so under arrest), deformed in will (and so unable to run), and dead in our sins (and so unable to achieve anything). For all those reasons, we can't start.

But, as we said, our mercifully rich God sent his Son into the world, so that by his cross and resurrection, he could overcome all these obstacles. “The reason the Son of God appeared,” says John, “was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). “You know that he appeared in order to take away sins” (1 John 3:5). Jesus makes alive, pays the debt, renews our will, even bestows us with supernatural powers capable of reaching God. From the moment we're born again, we share in his death and resurrection. The grace God gives us in that instant both justifies us and sanctifies us. Now his grace is our new operating system. With it, God promptly installs the key system features we can call the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. They're dispositions to know God, look to God, and unite to God. These are supernatural powers, basic principles that remain when we're spiritually alive, abiding in Christ. God also installs other supernatural programs, infusing us with virtues that can actually implement faith, hope, and love in exciting ways. And, since we'd be naturally clueless at running any of these supernatural programs on our lives, God gives the Holy Spirit as tutorial, guide, and helper by his gifts. God installs all this from the very beginning so as to make us fit for our supernatural destiny.

But it's one thing to set up a computer and have everything installed, and another thing entirely to actually use it for something, isn't it? It's one thing to be equipped as an astronaut to fly to the moon, and another thing to take off or get there. God gives us startling grace the moment we're born again – so much so that, if you got fried by lightning coming up from that water, there's not a shred of doubt you'd wake up to the Beatific Vision the very next instant. But actually having to live out of that grace, out of those virtues, out of those gifts – well, that can be a messier prospect. “No one who abides in him keeps on sinning,” John tells us (1 John 3:6). “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning” (1 John 3:9). “Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil” (1 John 3:8). John does not mince words. If we choose not to cooperate with God in the use of his grace, virtues, and gifts, if we choose to live in ways that steer us off course, then Houston, we have a problem! Some sins deviate from the course just a bit and call for constant course correction, lest they add up and make us miss our goal. Other sins mess with the machinery, placing us in mortal peril, calling for even more radical intervention. The point is, the sins we carry out, the vices we allow to form, are obstacles that must be overcome in order to see God as he is. Otherwise, it's possible to still lose out (2 John 1:8), to fall short of the destination (Hebrews 4:11). We are saved by the faith God gives us, but it must be a living faith working by love, it must be kept alive in us – and sin has the power of death. Don't “be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).

What are we called to instead? Listen to John: “Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). This is the key, this is the hinge between what he said before and what he says after. Before those words, John dazzled us with the hope of the Beatific Vision. Afterward comes his discourse on the devastating nature of sin. What he's saying is that someone who persists in sin, someone who embraces sin, someone who refuses by sin to live out of what God has given, is canceling out their hope of the Beatific Vision. As we live in the world, as we take those steps from the water where we rose to new life, we must stay spiritually alive, rather than give in to death's alluring call by sin. And as even small sins inevitably stain us and take us just a little bit off course, we must course-correct, we must purify ourselves, we must cooperate with God's grace. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us,” but “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8-9).

Faith, hope, and love – and the other supernatural virtues that implement them – must be put into actual practice by the gifts the Holy Spirit gives for turning them into real acts, in much the same way that astronauts on a space shuttle have to cooperate with NASA and use the programming in the shuttle's systems. If they refused to train, they wouldn't make it. If they refused to course-correct when they got off course, they wouldn't make it. If they refused to carry out maintenance when something goes wrong, they wouldn't make it. But if they really live out of what they've been given, then they'll make it. “Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous” (1 John 3:7). By cooperating with God's grace, we allow it to shape us and fuel us. By acting out of the virtues we're given – and that's what John means by “practicing righteousness” – we not only make it easier for us to do so, but we allow God to increase those virtues in us, making us righteous by conforming us more and more to the image of Jesus who is our goal.

And Jesus is our goal. So let us decide this year to “lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us [fly] with endurance” on our supernatural voyage to him. Spurning the sin that kills, let us abide in Christ who is our life. Course-correcting daily from the sin that deviates, let us by repentance stay on target. Let us put righteousness into practice by acting out of the supernatural virtues God gives us, most supremely faith and hope and love. By acting from God's grace, we live purely, and so purify ourselves as he is pure. Cooperating with God, we have a humble but confident hope of a successful voyage, until at last we see his face. And this is what we're living for. So let's actually live it, by the help of God, because by grace we can. Amen.

Prayer
God and Father of every grace, you poured into us your Holy Spirit, justifying us from our sinful deeds and wills, sanctifying us from our whole past life, infusing us with faith and hope and love so that we could be supernaturally empowered to reach you and know, love, and enjoy you forever. You've blessed us with more gifts than we can count. Now you ask us to live by them, cooperating with your work in us. Strengthen us to abide in Christ, that ours may be a faith and a hope that live by love, a faith and hope and love that reveal themselves in acts as your Holy Spirit leads and guides and gifts. Conquer every contrary disposition in us. Heal us of our sin, and forgive us where we've fallen short. Purify us of everything that hinders faith or hope or love, and root them more deeply in us as you help us practice them. Make us true practitioners of righteousness, as people genuinely born of God. Let us bear a family resemblance to you even now, as your children, and bring us daily closer to the full image of what we will be when we see you as you really are, if only we endure in the practice of righteousness that implements faith, hope, and love to the end. Make us worthy and fit for that blessed vision! For you move us to it. In Jesus' name: Amen.

Matchless Grace

Where we left off last Sunday was with a vision – a glimpse of what life is all about, why God made us, what he made us for. We asked three related questions: “Where is the human journey meant to end? What will bring us true fulfillment and happiness? And what is any of this all about, anyway?” And we found that this journey of being human is supposed to lead us to seeing God as he is. In seeing God as he is, we'll know and have God in a way that satisfies us completely and comprehensively. We'll love him with his own love and be happy with his own happiness. That's why God made us, wanting to share his blessedness with creatures who are fit for it, and in sharing his blessedness, to somehow be made like him by seeing him as he is. That goal, seeing him as he is, is what later theologians called “the beatific vision” – it's the greatest delight there is in heaven.

So last Sunday, we spent our time together considering and getting excited about the destination we're supposed to get to. But, of course, the Bible is full of warnings that, just because we're meant to all reach this destination, just because it's God's desire that we all reach this destination, that doesn't guarantee that every person who ever lived is going to find himself or herself someday in heaven, someday seeing God as he is, someday becoming as much like God as it's possible for a creature to ever be. People on any trip can get lost – you can misread a map or miss a turn, you can get one place confused with another. People on a trip can even get waylaid by failing to follow the rules of their modes of transportation, like trying to get on a plane while you've got fireworks in your carry-on bag. And not only that, it's very possible to not even get started – to forget you've got some place to be, or to be clueless what mode of transportation you need to take at the first step.

And when it comes to the human journey, there are a couple big problems to face when getting started, reasons why so many people are ambling around unsure of what to do. And the first problem is this: The beatific vision is a supernatural good. Heaven is a supernatural place. And from birth, all our powers are natural. We can eat, drink, sleep, eventually walk and talk, run and think, and so on. But no amount of natural effort can add up to even one supernatural action. Natural means can't get you to a supernatural end – otherwise, they would be supernatural means! The beatific vision is all about God sharing himself. Getting the beatific vision isn't like surprising God when he's coming out of the shower. He has to reveal himself to you supernaturally, and before that can happen, he has to make you fit to see him as he is – and that, too, is supernatural.

It doesn't matter how many miles you walk, or which direction you start moving, but as long as it's just your own two feet taking you, you won't set foot in Australia from here. And when it comes to reaching the beatific vision, maybe a better analogy would be trying to run to the moon. That's one reason why Paul has to be very emphatic that it's “not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:9). A person can go around town being nice to everybody, donating to every worthy cause, rescuing cats from trees, and carrying out every other form of moral heroism under the sun – but as long as he's working from natural moral virtues that he got and refined himself, they just aren't proportionate to the goal we're aiming for. It's impossible to earn heaven by all the works, all the natural moral actions, a person can dream up. It just can't be done, by definition.

So that's one problem, and it's kind of a big one already. Put Adam and Eve in the garden, with no sin but also with no grace added atop their human nature, and they can't earn heaven, no matter how long they steer clear of forbidden fruit. But there's another spot of trouble here, which is that we're not in the garden. Sin has entered the picture. Sinners are, in Paul's memorable phrase, “by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). Sin does some very nasty things that get in the way of starting out on this journey. First of all, we have a debt that needs to get paid before we even leave our darkened caves – because until it is, we're fugitives from God's justice, and so long as we're on the wrong side of the law, we definitely aren't free to move. But as if that weren't enough, our will gets bent out of harmony with God's will, so it's stained and deformed, making it even more unfit for God.¹ Not only that, but “you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” (Ephesians 2:1). If you thought it was impossible to run to the moon before, try doing so a week after your own funeral!

Alright, so we're meant to be on this great human journey that's supposed to lead us to see God as he is, the kind of vision that's the highest delight of heaven. It's a supernatural goal that can only be reached by supernatural means, which means our natural powers can't even begin to make the first move – not because we're sinners, but because we're creatures. We'd need supernatural means to get there, just like we'd need a spaceship to achieve a moon landing – 'cause all the walking, running, and driving you can do won't get you there. And again, that's because we're creatures. But we also happen to be sinners, which means we've got a whole host of other issues blocking the first move. We're in debt (so we're under arrest and trapped), we're deformed (so we can't even run to begin with), and to top it all off, we're dead (which kind of makes the other obstacles look small, somehow!).

But God, says Scripture, was “rich in mercy. Because of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses” (Ephesians 2:4-5), he did something about our problems – all of them. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, into the world. And so much could be said about that, I could preach it every Sunday of the year and not even scratch the surface of all there is to be said. But “God shows his love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). He offered his infinite divine life sacrificially with infinite affection and devotion to his Father on the cross, and so created a mystery capable of resolving every problem.² We won't do too much today to trouble ourselves with the mechanics, which surpass all understanding anyway. But the truly important thing is that the death and resurrection of Jesus has power to unstop our journey in its tracks.

We were “dead in our trespasses,” and so in this death and resurrection, God can “make us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:5). We're deformed in will, and so in this death and resurrection, God can renew us and transform us, to “conform [us] to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29). We're deep in debt, so Jesus emptied himself and “became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). And he canceled out “the record of debt that stood against us” by “nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:14). We're insufficient in only our natural powers, so a supernatural power has to take over our life – and that, too, is provided for in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Okay, so in what Jesus did on the cross and did in his resurrection, there's power to get over all these hurdles to starting our journey. But how do we get at that? Where does our life cross paths with the cross? How begins a human life the human journey? And to that, Jesus himself gives answer: “You must be born again” (John 3:7). “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven” (John 3:3). Rebirth is the key! Rebirth is the new start! And Jesus explains in more detail what he means: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5). For “do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4). There, did you hear that? Our question was where a human life today might cross paths with the cross. And there's a biblical answer for you. Baptism is a baptism into the death and resurrection of Jesus. It unites us with the mystery of Christ, and gives us rebirth just as Jesus underwent resurrection. Paul later calls baptism “the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5). And Peter preached: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Acts 2:38-39).

And so when we enter that mystery, our life – whether in infancy or adulthood – crosses paths with the cross. It finds new birth, forgiveness, and gifts and graces beyond telling. Paul says that we “receive the abundance of grace” (Romans 5:17). And there's so much going on here that it could be sliced up and explained in so many different ways – and it has been! I want this morning to offer just a small sampling from one angle.

Paul writes: “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Those are three things all going on at once. “You were washed” – that's baptism, that's that “washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5). But to be washed is at the same time to be “justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Paul elsewhere writes that “we have been justified by his blood” (Romans 5:9). Justification takes its power only and entirely from the cross where Jesus died for us. It is his blood, his sacrifice, his surrender of his whole life, that can set us right. But it's not just the death of Jesus that's involved: he “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). It's his dying and rising, which we join him in through baptism where we're washed, that justifies us. Paul adds that we are “justified by his grace as a gift” (Romans 3:24). Justification isn't earned. It's a gift from God – a free gift, for “the free gift following many trespasses brought justification” (Romans 5:16). And “we have been justified by faith” (Romans 5:1) – more on that in a bit.

So from this beginning, from this new birth, God's grace steps in to give us justification. He raises us from our inner spiritual deadness, and he washes us free from the stains of our former life. He sets us on the right path for pursuing this great human journey that's meant to lead to his face. And it only happens when we're baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But Paul says one more thing is going on. “You were washed,” yes; “you were justified,” yes; but also, “you were sanctified” (1 Corinthians 6:11). Jesus suffered on the cross “in order to sanctify the people with his own blood” (Hebrews 13:12). And so God “saved us... by the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit, so that, being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:5-7). It's a gift that Christ gives the Church, “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word” (Ephesians 5:26).

It's not enough for God to raise us to new life, if that new life is just a natural human life, a normal kind of life, the kind of life that Adam and Eve could've had before the fall. Because while everything we've said up until now might deal with the problems of being in debt and being deformed and being dead, there's still that problem of being naturally insufficient to reach a supernatural destination. We need a kind of life in us that goes beyond the powers of human nature. And that's what God means to give us by this sanctifying grace. It's got to be true, as Paul says, that “where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more” – not merely compensating for sin on a one-to-one basis, but taking us even higher than the point from which we fell (Romans 5:20). Being justified by grace gets us back; becoming heirs of eternal life is higher still. Peter talks about it in the daring terms of being “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). This grace makes us “participants in the divine life.”³ It elevates our human nature beyond itself, able to receive the gifts God wants to give.⁴

So with grace rebooting our system in justification, and grace rebuilding us with a new operating system in sanctification, now grace can start installing all the key system features. Because even when justified and even when sanctified, if we keep living out of the same old natural resources we used to be limited to, we still won't reach our destination. We need God to pour into us, infuse into us, new basic principles to govern our lives, a whole new way of living – principles that come from God, are motivated by God, and aim to get us to God. Old theologians took up the habit of calling those new basic principles “the theological virtues,” saying that they're installed by God alone.⁵ And the theological virtues are the things Paul says abide. “So now faith, hope, and love abide – these three!” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Remember that verse? Those are the key system features, the new principles that govern our new way of living – the supernatural living that can get us to God.

I mean, just take faith, for starters. “Through [Jesus], we have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand” (Romans 5:2), and “the righteous shall live by faith” (Romans 1:17). “The life I now live in the flesh,” says Paul, “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). That kind of faith isn't something that anybody on the street can just choose to have one day. The capacity for it, the disposition for it, is a gift of God. Paul says so outright: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). It's a supernatural principle that will direct your mind, your intellect, to God.⁶ It yields a disposition towards believing everything God says and does – because it recognizes God's truth and authority. Submitting in reverence to God as to the primary truth, it leads toward assent to God as he reveals himself. And thanks to the inner light of faith, we're able and even inclined to believe things that our natural minds could never grasp. “The natural man” – literally, soul-driven man – “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Faith is the operating principle that lets us do that, that takes the blinders off. And faith, as a disposition, is something given by God right from the start. Faith itself is a gift of grace, and “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6).

Already from the new birth, we begin – however vaguely still, however incompletely – to be able to know God, and this is the beginning of our spiritual fulfillment.⁷ But separated from the other theological virtues, we're told that “faith... is dead” (James 2:26). A dead faith can't help you be alive in Christ. So God has to install some more. “By faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness” (Galatians 5:5), and there's the second virtue. Just like supernatural faith, supernatural hope is something God has to give us. And Paul says he did! God “gave us... good hope through grace” (2 Thessalonians 2:16). This hope fills us with desire to reach what grace has promised and what faith has believed, especially the mysteries of the kingdom. “Hope enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf” (Hebrews 6:19-20). “We rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2), and in the meantime, “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25), knowing that “hope does not disappoint” (Romans 5:5). This hope is a supernatural principle aiming our will toward God as being actually reachable. Hope is the anchor that latches on to the promise and, by a supernatural strength, won't let go, even when every natural power in us would. And hope, as a disposition, is given by God right from the start, in that baptismal package.

But “hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). And there's the third theological virtue, the greatest and most perfect of them all: love. Not just any kind of love – God-style love, the love that Greeks called agape and Latins called caritas or 'charity.' This kind of God-style love “believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). Just like faith and hope, it's not something we're naturally capable of. It has to be given by God. It's a supernatural principle that directs our wills toward God, not just as reachable, but as united with him already, because this is the kind of love that God is. God gives us a gift we couldn't muster on our own, and that's to love him for who he is, and to love everybody and everything else through God's love for them – to be made capable of seeing them as he sees them, loving them as he loves them, because in love we're becoming united to God who is Love. Acting out of this virtue unites us with God in incredible ways.

So when we're born again, not only does God justify us by his grace, not only does God sanctify us by his grace, but God equips us with these three new basic principles of supernatural living: faith, hope, and love. And from the moment we're born again, we are disposed toward supernatural living. Of course, to actually apply them as first principles of our lives, we're going to need other supernatural virtues installed in us, programs that can implement faith, hope, and love as their language in different kinds of ways.⁸ And, what do you know, God pours them into our heart too, infuses them too, so that we have a supernatural ability to no longer be “slaves to various passions and pleasures” the way we would be if we were merely natural (Titus 3:3). And like the theological virtues, these other ones also remain alive in us whenever we abide in Christ and his grace. Not only that, but from the very start, God gives us gifts that make us responsive to the Holy Spirit when it comes to finding ways to translate these virtues into supernaturally empowered practice, so that “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God,” like Paul says (Romans 8:14). But we're out of time to explore all that today.

What we need to see is that, in the instant we're born again, the moment we're baptized into Christ, we are given vastly more than we ever imagined. Supernatural life becomes liveable! An entire amazing set of graces and virtues and gifts gets installed into our hearts, into our souls. All the basic programs we need to be fit for our supernatural destiny are already there, waiting for us to begin our journey. Thank God for his matchless grace, which brings us all these gifts for beginning our great pursuit of a blessedness that outstrips everything we've seen or heard or imagined!

Prayer
Gracious Father, you are the Giver of “every good and every perfect gift” (James 1:17).  Graciously and lovingly, you showed your rich mercy by sending your Son to a world of sinners, to suffer and die for us who were dead in our sins, and to rise from the dead for us.  In him alone is faith well-placed, in him alone our hope is found, in him alone is love's true meaning revealed and set free.  By his death and life, you, Father, are infinitely pleased.  And you are indeed, as Scripture says of you, “the God of all grace” (1 Peter 5:10).  Your grace is marvelous, your grace is wondrous, your grace is surpassing, your grace is matchless indeed, for even from the moment of our baptism into your Son, we are washed, we are justified, we are sanctified, we are graced with the theological virtues of faith and hope and love, we are infused with supernatural moral virtues, we are granted the gifts of the Holy Spirit, so that, following his leading, we will be able to put into practice all these virtues and so live a supernatural life fit for heaven, the life of faith and hope and love.  None of this would be possible to us on our own two feet.  None of this is achievable by our natural powers.  But you have made us able to receive the supernatural.  Now, as your servant Paul has written, let us “not receive the grace of God in vain” (2 Corinthians 6:1).  As we glory in the immensity of your grace already given, help us to fly in this very grace toward your blessed face, that this supernatural life may soar to its fulfillment in our seeing you, knowing you, loving you, and being blessed with all your blessedness, in Jesus, through whom we pray for such purity of heart.  Amen.