Stamina Last week, I reflected on the frantic pace of our modern lives. Living in the fast lane also means that everyday requires enormous amounts of energy. But it is not enough just to have intermittent bursts of dynamic output. We must continue to put out energy day after day. This reminds me of the Energizer battery commercials. The mascot electric bunny just keeps going and going and going because he has the right power source. The secret to having stamina over the long term is really about finding that pace that we talked about last week. But, over time that pace can and should increase as we get into shape. Stamina is not a weekend project, but rather, the result of incremental changes over the long term. This is not only true in regard to our bodies and our schedules but also our spiritual walk. Power I’m sure that most of us can point to mountain top spiritual experiences in our lives when God caused us to grow in dramatic ways almost overnight. However, the testimony of Scripture and the path of experience have taught me that spiritual growth and vitality come through daily discipline in the means of grace that God has given to us. Even the Lord Jesus told us to take up our cross daily (Luke 9:23). There is no path to experiencing and knowing the truly all powerful God apart from His prescribed means. So what are these means? First of course is that we need to avail ourselves of His communication to us. God has revealed Himself to us in the person of the Lord Jesus and we find this revelation in the Scriptures. That’s a long way of saying read and study your Bible. Second, we must be people of prayer. I know the busier and less energetic we feel makes us think that we do not have the time or strength to pray. But when we are busy and tired is when we most need to turn to God and cast our burdens on Him (1 Peter 5:7). Third, we need to go to church. In this one many means are bundled together. We need to hear the word of God explained and exposited for us. We also need to be exhorted and spurred on toward obedience. We also need to be encouraged and comforted by the loving relationships we have with our local church family. We also need to be nourished spiritually when eating the Lord’s Supper as well as physically breaking bread in fellowship with our brethren in the church. We need to hear testimonies and witness baptisms and experience the fullness of church life with God’s covenant people. Only when we are using God’s provide means can we expect God’s promised provision. Scripture, supplication, and saints are at the heart of God’s good gifts given to us to participate in the grace that we have in Jesus Christ. Rest God ultimately gives us rest! Rest is what God promised His people. This is not lounging around on the beach but rather the rest of the need to earn God’s favor. In the days of the Old Covenant what was proved conclusively is that fallen man cannot and will not achieve righteousness according to the law. But God has promised rest for everyone who will cease their pitiful working and trust solely in Jesus Christ as our only righteousness (Hebrews 4:1-13).
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The Fast Lane These days it is not uncommon for most of us to feel like our lives are moving at a frantic pace. This seems almost ironic coming from the pastor of a rural church in a small county in Arkansas, but gone are the days of slow country life. Please don’t misunderstand. I'm sure that the hustle and bustle of the big city is far worse than it is around these parts. However, the interconnectivity of our lives whether we are in downtown Manhattan or way out in Wyoming has meant that most of us are dealing with more information, decisions, and demands than ever before. Maybe this is just the inevitable march of progress that brings a quickening of our steps as we proceed through the adventurous future. It is rather ironic that most of the time saving and productivity improving technology have actually led us to have busier lives than our hard working and hard living ancestors. The Sprint The problem with going all out is that no one can sustain maximum effort forever. Sprinters clearly run faster than endurance runners but they could not keep that up for the duration of a marathon. Our modern age seems to have drawn us onto a hectic schedule that is difficult if not impossible to maintain over a lifetime. It is also possible that our insatiable appetite for youth has caused us to miss the natural and God ordained rhythms of life that come with different stages. For example, parents with young children and still growing families are in a different segment of life than parents of teenagers or even empty nesters. So often we seem to be trying to form all of society into a common mold where not everyone fits. This is particularly dangerous because many well intentioned believers, especially pastors, will burn out trying to keep up the pace. Or…. even more tragically, many Christians even pastors, may blow up their relationships, ministries, or local churches trying to prod more complacent believers into their olympic pace. The Long Way The reality is that often the better way is the longer way. I mean that it maybe to the advantage of both our current race (our earthly life) and the Kingdom of God for us to keep after the hard slow work of cultivating fallow ground, sowing good seed, and watering in faith knowing that in His season God will bring the growth (1 Corinthians 3:5-9). My point is that we need to find a pace that we can run at that matches our stamina so that we can stay in the race as we press on toward the goal of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Philippians 3:12-16). In this text Paul explains that this kind of forward progress is a mark of spiritual maturity among the servants of God. I do not mean that we are not supposed to be persuasive in evangelism or fervent in prayer or compassionate in our fellowship or passionate in our preaching or diligent in our studies. But I do mean that as we endeavor in all these important areas we must be mature and walking in the fruit of the Spirit in our lives (Galatians 5:22-24). Our lives must reflect love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self control. Nothing that we do apart from the working of the Holy Spirit will ever be of any spiritual benefit to us or to Christ’s church. Keep Going So what now? We all need to find our pace and keep going. It’s not ok to sit it out and just wait for heaven. We must be actively seeking to draw near to the Lord. We must be about the work of seeking to bring the needed restoration, reformation, and revival that our local churches desperately need. But we must be ready because this usually won't happen because of one single passionate appeal or a single loving gesture or a single tactical change. Rather God does this work through us as we engage in clear consistent teaching over the course of years, faithful compassionate care over those same years and diligent devoted fellowship over those same years to bring about the fruit in its season. Sheer Grace Last week we discussed the limitations of our knowledge and the sheer grace of God who listens to us and answers our prayers. It really is amazing to fathom the kind of love and compassion which motivates the LORD to condescend to us for our good. We know that He has glorious eternal purposes in all the things that He is accomplishing in the universe but He chose to bless us in the course of those pursuits. Certainly we could imagine that God could have done things differently but the gifts and blessings as well as the trials and hardships that we are experiencing are for His glory but also our good. Got Questions? Because we are naturally inclined to want to learn, it causes us to be curious creatures. We therefore begin to formulate questions that need to be answered. In fact the whole discipline of scientific enquiry is really just about asking questions and seeking redundant answers. The biggest questions are those that pertain to the purpose and point of our lives and existence. These questions are about the metaphysical realities of ontology. Questions like “Who am I?”, “Where did we come from?”, and “‘where are we going?”. The point of these questions is greater than the relative answer for the individual because these philosophical realities extend out to everyone else. One of the problems that we have living in a time period infected with so much postmodern thinking is that many are accepting the premise that many different and even contradictory truth claims can be valid at the same time and in the same way. Got Truth? However, for most of us we want to know about the things that are affecting our lives. As we move away from the theoretical and back to the practical our concerns about politics, economics, and even religion are about what we need to think, believe, and do. It is at this point that we need to realize the centrality of having an epistemological standard. Epistemology is simply the study of how we know things. What I mean is that we need a source from which to get the truth and from which we can measure all other truth claims. Many people want to make this epistemological standard one’s own reasoning capabilities or one’s own experience or one’s own preferences. However these are all subjective standards, and as such, they cannot provide a sure and steady point for real knowledge. If we are going to have the ability to actually know anything then there must of necessity exist an external objective source of truth. The Source The necessary source is of course God and the epistemological standard is His revelation found in the 66 books comprising the canon of the Old and New Testaments. Just to be clear I am arguing that all true knowledge is dependent on the existence of God and His own revelation. Without Him no knowledge is even possible. The things that we call scientific facts belong to God who made the universe where those things are true. The things that we identify as inalienable rights belong to God who is the one with authority to grant those rights. The things that we know by nature to be universal moral truths belong to God who establishes justice as the display of His own righteousness. God has given us a standard for truth, knowledge, and wisdom in His Word. The Bible is the standard for what we can know to be true, because it has been given to us by God to reveal truth to us (Deuteronomy 29:29). God gave us the Bible to bless us, direct us, correct us, instruct us, warn us, and even as the means to save us, through the preaching of the biblical gospel about Jesus Christ and the application of this truth to our hearts by the Holy Spirit (2 Timothy 3:14-17). In The Know Welcome back to the blog! I hope you have enjoyed the series of posts by my friend Cary Cox. The sovereignty of God is a deep subject, but also one of great importance for the practical way we live our lives. One of the things that probably makes understanding God’s sovereignty over all things is our own finite knowledge. We just don’t know everything. Of course, we have probably all met many people who think they know everything, but in reality even the most intelligent and educated among us are more ignorant than knowledgeable. What I mean is that we all know less than what we do know. It could be the inner sense of ignorance that causes us to have such an insatiable appetite for information. Most of us are compelled to learn new things and find out about the lastest news. This is easily provable by simply looking at how much news media and social media that most of us consume. In our day we even have terms for this phenomenon such as “fomo” meaning the fear of missing out. We want to be in the know. The Unknown At least a part of this is because we are often afraid of the unknown. One of the most common fears that human children have is a fear of the dark, why? Because we don’t know what could be lurking in that darkness. We struggle to know how we can face the future because of the uncertainty of what could happen tomorrow. Sometimes the questions are not just about the future but about right decisions in the present. We struggle to contemplate what we should do next about the important decisions in life. Oftentimes this traps us in a fog of expectations, possibilities, and assumptions. However, no amount of education or experience is going to equip us to anticipate every possible contingency. We cannot base our contentment, joy, or hope on our own knowledge but rather on the fact that we know the one who does know the future and has power over it. Who Knows In Psalm 116, the Psalmist confesses his love for God and states that this is because God has heard his prayers and his pleas for mercy. So often we are seeking peace through information when what we really need is confession. God hears us. That is an amazing sentence. The God who created the vast expanse of the universe hears you when you pray. That should be humbling to realize that God listens and takes note of what we bring to Him in our prayers. More than that God wants to hear His people pray. He even commands us to pray. When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray He assumed that they would pray simply because they were God’s people (Matt 6:5-14). The point I am making is simply that we can and should draw near to God in prayer. This should serve to elevate our love for God who listens to us. We should be amazed at the grace of God toward us even to hear and heed our prayer. Thankfully, our amazing God listens and answers our prayers. Let us not forget to praise God for His kindness in meeting our needs and answering our prayers. Active Control The Lord in Scripture credits himself with sovereign control over the heart of man, even a great king: the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, who turns it however he wills (Prov 21:1). The inspired book of wisdom goes on to teach us to acknowledge God’s control over every part of our lives: “The answer of the tongue is from the LORD” (16:1); “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps” (v9); “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (v33). Far from leaving life to our choices, God happily takes credit for even the roll of the dice! Far from leaving the world to natural laws of nature, “You cause the grass to grow” (Ps 104:14)! His control stretches over the minute details of everything that happens! “The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all” (Ps 103:19). “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Ps 115:3). After God humbled the great king Nebuchadnezzar, making him think and eat like an animal, God let his reason return to him, and he cried out in praise to God, “for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, ‘what have you done?’” (Dan 4:34-35). Full Control What about Satan? Though God allows him a measure of authority in the earth, Scripture demonstrates that God is sovereign over Satan and his demons. He is on the leash of God’s control, as Job demonstrates (Satan must ask permission, and is given limits over what he may do). In 1 Peter, the apostle writes that the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour; we are told to resist him (1 Pet 5:8-9). But earlier in the letter, Peter attributed this suffering of Christians, not to Satan, but to the will of God (“It is better to suffer for doing good, if that should be God’s will, than for doing evil” (1 Pet 3:17), and “Let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Pet 4:19)! God allows enemies against us, and calls us to fight them, according to his will, his plan, which will ultimately demonstrate God’s glory and serve for our eternal joy. What of Judas Iscariot? The Bible says that Satan entered into Judas as he carried out his plan (Luke 22:3-4), but all of Satan’s fury could only result in carrying out God’s will – “The Scripture had to be fulfilled…” (Acts 1:16). Satan demanded to have Peter, to sift him like wheat, but Jesus said “when” Peter turns again (not “if”), he must strengthen his brothers (Luke 22:31-32). Christ's Control As for Jesus, he shares the same essence, nature, and will of God the Father! Yes, he came healing sickness and disease, casting out demons, and doing mighty things, to demonstrate that the kingdom of God had broken into this world. But he did not bring the full consummation of his kingdom yet; that awaits his return, where every knee will bow, and all of his people will receive full healing in the glorification. In the meantime, the Lord disciplined his church in Corinth for their misuse of the Lord’s Supper by making them sick and killing some of them (1 Cor 11:30). And it is Jesus, the Lamb, in the Revelation – a NEW TESTAMENT book – who disciplines his church by throwing “that woman Jezebel,” a false prophetess leading the church astray by saying, “I will throw her onto a sickbed…and I will strike her children dead” (Rev 2:20, 22-23). It is Jesus who is breaking and opening the seals in heaven, unleashing death and destruction upon the earth! The people of earth understand this. They do not blame the devil, but call on the rocks to fall on them and hide them “from him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb” (Rev 6:16)! As for God’s will, Christian theologians have for centuries noticed that God’s will can be seen as a Revealed Will – what he makes known to us in Scripture (such as, “Do not murder”), and his Secret Will – which includes everything that happens (such as God’s desire for Jesus to be murdered for our salvation). Some have used different names for these wills, but Scripture clearly describes both. Our job is not to pry into God’s secret will, but to obey his revealed will. As we do that, we take encouragement that all that happens has been allowed to happen by our good and faithful God, who loves us in Christ, and has promised to make all things happen for our everlasting good and joy in him. |
AuthorEddie Ragsdale Archives
May 2024
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