"Love Lustres at Calvary"

I was reading in The Valley of Vision this morning and encountered the following passage. I love the imagery and the reality to which it points.

My Father, enlarge my heart, warm my affections, open my lips,
   supply words that proclaim 'Love lustres at Calvary.'
There grace removes my burdens and heaps them on thy Son,
   made a transgressor, a curse, and sin for me;
There the sword of thy justice smote the man, thy fellow;
There thy infinite attributes were magnified,
   an infinite atonement was made;
There infinite punishment was due,
   and infinite punishment was endured. 

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Arthur Bennett, ed., Valley of Vision (Carlilse, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975), 42.

Praying with Confidence when We Are Anything but Confident

I have been praying for wisdom lately on a number of issues. James 1:5 says, 

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.

The following verses state that such a request must be made in faith without doubting. This often makes so much sense to my mind, but seems like the farthest thing from possible to my heart. After all, life is pressing in! I need direction! What should I do?! How does one pray with confidence when he or she is in the throes of the waves of doubt?

J. A. Motyer's comments on this verse bear repeating:

In conformity with his practical approach to things, there is a beautiful directness and simplicity about the teaching of James: whoever lacks wisdom can ask for it, and God will give it. Just like that! Such simplicity is either totally unrealistic, or else finds is justification in what is known about God. For James, it is the latter. His doctrine of God is such that he can afford to make large promises in his name, and to affirm that those promises will be honoured. He teaches us, first, that God’s nature it to give. He writes (literally) ‘… let him ask from the giving God …’. The requirements of English make it impossible for us to leave the words just like that, because we have to accommodate the remainder of what James writes within the framework of English grammar. But this is, in fact, how he sees God in himself: he is ‘the giving God’. No one attribute expresses all that is true about God, but each expresses something about him that is true all the time. If we speak of him as ‘gracious’ there are very many other things to say before the divine nature is fully described. Yet there is never a time when we could come to him and find that he was no longer gracious. So it is, also, when he is described as ‘the giving God’. His attributes are as infinite as he himself is, but there is no war among them: they are as perfectly one as he himself is. When we come with our prayers, he never replies, ‘Come back tomorrow. Perhaps I will then be able to be “the giving God” again, but today I must occupy myself with being something else.’ ‘Giving’ is not the whole truth, but it is ceaselessly true. He is more than ‘giving’, but he is always ‘giving.’[1]

How does one pray with confidence when he or she is in the throes of the waves of doubt? The secret, I believe, is found in looking outside ourselves. Confidence in the character of God leads to confidence in our praying. 

"I believe [Lord]; help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24).

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[1] J. A. Motyer, The Message of James (The Bible Speaks Today; ed. John R. W. Stott; Accordance electronic ed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 38.

It Is Neither Your Graces Nor Feelings on Which Your Are to Live

As an addition to reading Scripture, I've been reading Spurgeon's Morning & Evening intermittently the last month. This morning, I read the following and wanted to share it.

First John 3:1-2 reads,

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now, and 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 3:1-2)

Commenting on the phrase "Beloved, we are God's children now," Spurgeon writes,

How is it with your heart his morning? Are you in the lowest depths of sorrow? Does corruption rise within your spirit, and grace seem like a poor spark trampled under foot? Does your faith almost fail you? Fear not, it is neither your graces nor feelings on which you are to live: you must live simply by faith on Christ. (Morning & Evening, 2/13m)

What a great reminder of the true means by which we are to live the Christian life!

P.S.--I only recently discovered this resource, but I highly recommend it. Spurgeon's writing is very poetic and falls somewhere between modern English and King James English. A modernized revision with ESV Scripture quotations of this classic has been published by Allistair Begg.

Eyes to See and Ears to Hear

Karen and I are reading (slowly) through the book of John. The slowness is more a result of our sporadic reading than of careful study. Nonetheless, we recently read chapter 5. In this chapter Jesus heals a paralytic on the Sabbath. Upon healing the man Jesus commands him to take up his bed and walk. The Pharisees observe the man carrying his bed on the Sabbath (i.e., "working") and question him about it. When they found out it was Jesus who had healed him and told him to carry his bed on the Sabbath it became an occasion for the Pharisees to oppose Jesus. To make matters worse in their eyes, Jesus refers to God as His Father, thus, as John notes, "making himself equal with God" (5:18). Though they saw that work (i.e., healing by Jesus and bed carrying by the ex-paralytic) was being done on the Sabbath, the Pharisees failed to recognize that Jesus was doing the works of the Father. The remainder of the chapter is Jesus' response/explanation of the works that He is doing and how He is doing them, namely, the Father is doing them through Jesus.

An important observation in Jesus' response is His emphasis upon hearing (i.e., listening to Him and believing). Jesus states, "Truly, truly I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. . . . An hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live" (Jn 5:24-25). NOTE: Jesus here has the spiritually dead in view. Those who receive eternal life by believing Jesus' testimony will also be raised when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead at the end of the age (1Th 4:13-17; 2 Tim 4:1).

A significant part of Jesus' reply deals with the witnesses that testify of who Jesus is (cf. Jn 5:30-47). Though the Pharisees were looking for the Messiah in the Scriptures (v.39) they were failing to see that Jesus was the fulfillment of those Scriptures. Jesus concludes, "If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?" (Jn 5:46-47). It seems evident that Jesus here has the following prophecy in mind:

“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me [i.e., Moses] from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen— just as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the LORD said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him” (Deuteronomy 18:15-19 ESV).

Moses' message is simple: "God will raise up a prophet greater than me. Listen to Him." Jesus, as the only begotten Son of God, knows God like no other prophet (Jn 1:18) and has delivered to us the words of life (Jn 6:68). The Pharisees failed both to recognize the works of God and to hear the testimonies of Scripture. It is ironic that on the Sabbath, a day set aside for the remembrance of God's mighty acts of salvation (Deut 5:12-15), their focus on their own legalistic rules to preserve the Sabbath led them to overlook the work that God was doing before their very eyes. In these works God was showing Jesus to be the prophet who was greater than Moses. Nonetheless, they failed to heed Moses' command and did not listen.

I pray that God will give us eyes to see and recognize Christ for who He is and ears to hear His words of life and embrace them in faith. May we accept the demands of these words and joyfully live them out in eager anticipation of our great Savior's return!

Grace and Peace,

J