Tag: Travis Peterson

Empty-Handed Before God

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The following scene unfolds in the book, The Hiding Place, when Corrie’s aunt learns that she has only a short while to live. Her family tried to comfort her with thoughts of how much good she would bring with her to her Heavenly Father. Jans understood better, and her prayer is worth our attention.

***

But our well-meant words were useless. In front of us the proud face crumpled; Tante Jans put her hands over her eyes and began to cry. ”Empty, empty!” she choked at last through her tears. ”How can we bring anything to God? What does He care for our little tricks and trinkets?”

And then as we listened in disbelief she lowered her hands and with tears still coursing down her face whispered, ”Dear Jesus, I thank You that we must come with empty hands. I thank You that You have done all—all on the Cross, and that all we need in life or death is to be sure of this.”

Mama threw her arms around her and they clung together. But I stood rooted to the spot, knowing that I had seen a mystery.

[From: The Hiding Place, chapter 3 (sorry, no page numbers from audio recordings)]

***

Part of becoming a believer in Christ is grasping that you truly bring nothing, absolutely nothing, to the table. You do nothing to earn even a smidgen of God’s favor. His love, his mercy, his allowing of you into his family is 100% of grace.

Calvin on Trusting God.

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While reading Calvin on Psalm 62, I ran across the following:

“We may throw out a passing and occasional acknowledgement, that our only help is to be found in God, and yet shortly display our distrust in him by busying ourselves in all directions to supplement what we consider defective in his aid.”

Then, 6 pages later:

“Does danger, in short, spring up from any quarter, then just let us call to remembrance that divine power which can bid away all harms, and as this sentiment prevails in our minds, our troubles cannot fail to fall prostrate before it. Why should we fear — how can we be afraid, when the God who covers us with the shadow of
his wings, is the same who rules the universe with his nod, holds in secret chains the devil and all the wicked, and effectually overrules their designs and intrigues?”

Conviction of Self-Reliance (Jeremiah 2:26-28)

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Jeremiah 2:26-28

“As a thief is shamed when caught,
so the house of Israel shall be shamed:
they, their kings, their officials,
their priests, and their prophets,
who say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’
and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth.’
For they have turned their back to me,
and not their face.
But in the time of their trouble they say,
‘Arise and save us!’
But where are your gods
that you made for yourself?
Let them arise, if they can save you,
in your time of trouble;
for as many as your cities
are your gods, O Judah.

Today I find myself working through a difficult emotion. As I read the passage above, I find myself convicted, and it is simply unpleasant.

God speaks some very right and very hard words against the people of Israel. The priests, the leaders, all the people have turned their backs on God. Instead of trusting in God, they have trusted in other things. They have bowed down to statues and not to the living God. They have rejected God for the sake of their own desires.

Yet, when trouble comes their way, the people of God suddenly turn and find God again. They cry out to God, “Arise and save us!” However, these are the very same people who felt no need for God earlier. Thus, God responds to them by telling them to go back to crying out to their statues, since those are what they worship.

Now, here is where I was convicted. I need to cry out to God more. It is way too easy to let myself go through the day without really seeking God. Sure, I will pray at the prescribed times, but then I, if I am not careful, will walk through the remainder of the day as if I am the one who can handle it all myself. I act like the child who says, “No daddy, I can do it myself.” I rely on my strength, my wisdom, my education, my giftedness and somehow do not cry out to God.

How different is that from the guys who rely on the statues and their own wits to get them through the day? I don’t think it is as different as I would like it to be. One cries out to a block of wood. Another depends on his own abilities. Either way, both of us are relying on someone or something other than God for the good outcome that we desire.

I am grateful to God for conviction. I need it. It reminds me that I am not “all that.” Conviction makes me hurt, and it makes me realize that something is wrong that I need to change. So, here comes a new day. Here comes a new opportunity. Today, if I am going to please God, I need to look toward him, cry out to him, and depend on him. I am incapable of doing anything good on my own. I am fully in need of his grace to make it through even a moment of this life.

Gracious God, you know how weak I am and yet how proud I can be. You know how often I rely on my own skill instead of relying on you. Help me. Help me to serve you faithfully. I cry out to you. Please forgive me for self-reliance. Please forgive me for not being prayerful enough. Help me to seek you. I know that, apart from you, I can do nothing. I bring no ability to the table. Only through your power, through your Spirit, can anything good happen. So, I ask you to take my life this day and make it into something that pleases you. I ask that you will empower me to serve you faithfully and work through me to show the world how great you are. And lead me to prayer and dependence on you that will keep me close to you always.

Bibliography from Holiness Presentation

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Below are some books related to holiness and sanctification:


Adams, Jay E. Christ and Your Problems. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1971.

_________. How to Help People Change: The Biblical Four-Step Process. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986.

Bridges, Jerry. The Practice of Godliness. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1996.

_________. The Pursuit of Holiness. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006.

Lundgaard, Chris. The Enemy Within: Straight Talk About the Power and Defeat of Sin. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1998.

MacArthur, John. Our Sufficiency in Christ. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998.

Mahaney, C.J. Living the Cross Centered Life. Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 2006.

Miller, C. John. Repentance and Twentieth Century Man. Philadelphia, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 1980.

Owen, John, the Mortification of Sin in Believers. 1656 [book on-line]. Accessed 1 September 2009. Available from http://www.ccel.org/ccel/owen/mort.html; Internet.

Owen, John, Kelly M. Kapic, Justin Taylor, and John Piper. Overcoming Sin and Temptation. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006.

Piper, John. The Dangerous Duty of Delight. Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 2001.

_________. When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004.

Sproul, R.C. The Holiness of God. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1985.

Tripp, Paul David. Insturments in the Redeemer’s Hands. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2002.

The Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges – A Mini Review

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Jerry Bridges writes a piercing, challenging, and practical charge for Christians to give their lives to be holy as God commands. In The Pursuit of Holiness (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2006), readers will find practical helps, biblical conviction, and realistically high expectations.

What I Liked

Bridges clearly points Christians toward a higher level of following Christ. Far too many believers fail to live a holy life because they have compromised their understanding of what it means to be holy. The command of God is not for us to be more holy than our neighbors, it is to be holy like God. As Bridges writes, “This is where holiness begins—not with ourselves, but with God. It is only as we see His holiness, His absolute purity and moral hatred of sin, that we will be gripped by the awfulness of sin against the Holy God” (20). One major help for any believer to grow in holiness will be to see God in his true, awesome, terrifying, holiness.

Bridges rightly calls believers to seek to be holy by submitting themselves to the word of God. He writes, “We express our dependence on the Holy Spirit for a holy life in two ways. The first is through a humble and consistent intake of the Scripture. If we truly desire to live in the realm of the Spirit we must continually feed our minds with His truth. It is hypocritical to pray for victory over our sins yet be careless in our intake of the Word of God” (75). Bridges also claims, “Obedience is the pathway to holiness, but it is only as we have His commands that we can obey them. God’s Word must be so strongly fixed in our minds that it becomes the dominant influence in our thoughts, our attitudes, and our actions” (85). Again, Bridges says, “The Bible speaks to us primarily through our reason, and this is why it is so vitally important for our minds to be constantly brought under its influence. There is absolutely no shortcut to holiness that bypasses or gives little priority to a consistent intake of the Bible” (125). It is good, very good, for Christians to hear authors call them to sanctification through the Scriptures.

Though I could point out several other things, I’ll only list one more for right now. Bridges does an excellent job of calling Christians to accept the fact their sin is their responsibility. He argues, “We are to do something. We are not to “stop trying and start trusting”; we are to put to death the misdeeds of the body” (78). Bridges also writes, “So we see that God has made provision for our holiness. Through Christ He has delivered us from sin’s reign so that we now can resist sin. But the responsibility for resisting is ours. God does not do that for us” (57). Again, Bridges powerfully wraps up the book by asking, “Truly the choice is ours. What will we choose? Will we accept our responsibility and discipline ourselves to live in habitual obedience to the will of God? Will we persevere in
the face of frequent failure, resolving never to give up? Will we decide that personal holiness is worth the price of saying no to our body’s demands to indulge its appetites?” (152).

What I didn’t Like

There are a few shortcomings in this book, though not very many. Bridges would have made an even stronger case for personal holiness had he done more to truly identify what it means that God is holy. Bridges aimed at this goal, and brushed up against it on occasion, but he never truly gave the reader a deep sense of awe of God’s holiness. I write this fully aware that Bridges was not trying to write Sproul’s The Holiness of God, but was instead writing a book aimed at calling us to be holy. However, I would have liked another chapter or two on the importance of what it means that God is holy.

At the end of the book, Bridges points out the other shortcoming that I will mention. He (or his publisher) points out that this book focuses mainly on how to put off sin, but does not focus as much on putting on the godly alternatives that will help a believer to live in righteousness. In the final pages, readers find an encouragement to read The Practice of Godliness for this kind of advice. However, if more of how to put on righteousness had been in this book, it would have been stronger.

My Recommendation

The Pursuit of Holiness is a book that any believer could benefit from reading. The chapters are short, easy-to-read, and power-packed. This book would be ideal for small group studies between friends or for personal devotional reading. I highly recommend this book to anyone who desires to have more joy in his Christian life by living more of what God calls him to be.

For You Will Forget the Shame of Your Youth, (Isaiah 54:4-5)

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Isaiah 54:4-5

4 “Fear not, for you will not be ashamed;
be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced;
for you will forget the shame of your youth,
and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more.
5 For your Maker is your husband,
the Lord of hosts is his name;
and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer,
the God of the whole earth he is called.
.

It has been a little while since I have taken the time to write out some of my thoughts regarding a passage of Scripture from my daily reading. Busyness and excuses aside, I simply have not had the heart to take the time to write in this area lately. However., I need to do more here, to be more disciplined, to write even when I do not feel like it.

Then I read this passage for today: “for you will forget the shame of your youth.” How many of us live with regrets? How many of us still live with a feeling of being less than what God intends for us because of things we cannot go back and change? How many of us feel the sadness of wasted years, of foolish decisions, of sin?

To read God say to us that we will forget the shame of our youth, then, is something that is beyond amazing. Our sin was so great. We had earned for ourselves the wrath of God. We had earned for ourselves the fury of an infinitely perfect, infinitely holy, infinitely righteous judge. Our mistakes, our sin, our foolishness were inexcusable. In fact, God did not excuse them. Instead, if we know Christ, God punished those sins, pouring out his fury for our evil on Christ who willingly and intentionally took upon himself our guilt in order to satisfy God’s fury and allow us to experience God’s mercy for God’s glory.

The result of Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice is more than simply having us set back on neutral ground before God. In 2 Corinthians 5:21, God tells us that he made Christ, who knew no sin, to become sin on our behalf so that we might in turn become the righteousness of God. Thos who confess their sin and cling to Christ as their only hope of being right before God have more than forgiveness, they have God’s promise of perfection. Paul talked about this as the awaiting crown of righteousness for all who have loved Christ’s appearing in 2 Timothy 4:8.

This morning, I celebrate in my heart. I have been a fool more times than I could ever count. I have earned wrath and judgment. For God to then tell me, “for you will forget the shame of your youth,” is for me to hear God speak to me in promise of something totally joyous. I cannot look back on foolishness with any joy. However, I can look back and know that God has forgiven me, that he is changing me, and that he will perfect me in Christ. This motivates me to serve him more and more, to faithfully follow his word, to look forward to that future grace of being made truly righteous in Christ.

Calvin on the Sufficiency of Scripture

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John Calvin on 2 Timothy 3:16-17, which argues that the Scripture is inspired by God and useful to make us perfectly equipped to do God’s will:

“Perfect means here a blameless person, one in whom there is nothing defective; for he asserts absolutely, that the Scripture is sufficient for perfection. Accordingly, he who is not satisfied with Scripture desires to be wiser than is either proper or desirable.”

William Borden

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In 1904 William Borden graduated from a Chicago high school. As heir to the Borden family fortune, he was already a millionaire. For his high school graduation present, his parents gave 16-year-old Borden a trip around the world. As the young man traveled through Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, he felt a growing burden for the lost. Finally, Bill Borden wrote home about his desire to be a missionary. Eventually, Borden’s missionary call narrowed to the Muslim Kansu people in China. One friend expressed surprise that he was “throwing himself away as a missionary.” In response, Bill wrote two words in the back of his Bible: “No reserves.”

Borden spent the next few years of his young life at Yale University. There he was responsible for starting a very influential prayer and Bible study group among students. Borden’s small morning prayer group gave birth to a movement that spread across the campus. By the end of his first year, 150 freshman were meeting for weekly Bible study and prayer. By the time Bill Borden was a senior, one thousand of Yale’s 1,300 students were meeting in such groups.

Upon graduation from Yale, Borden turned down some high paying job offers. In his Bible, he wrote two more words: “No retreats.” He then went on to graduate work at Princeton Seminary in New Jersey.

When William Borden finished his studies at Princeton, he sailed for China. Because he was hoping to work with Muslims, he stopped first in Egypt to study Arabic. While there, he contracted spinal meningitis. Within a month, 25-year-old William Borden was dead.

When news of William Borden’s death was cabled back to the US., the story was carried by nearly every American newspaper. Mary Taylor wrote in her introduction to Borden’s biography, “A wave of sorrow went round the world . . . Borden not only gave (away) his wealth, but himself, in a way so joyous and natural that it (seemed) a privilege rather than a sacrifice.”

See

Howard Culbertson, “William Borden: No Reserves. No Retreats. No Regrets.” Bethany, OK: Southern Nazarene University, 2002. Accessed 2 September 2009. Available from http://home.snu.edu/~HCULBERT/regret.htm; Internet.

John MacArthur. 2 Timothy. Chicago: Moody Press, 1996, 197 (comments on 4:7).

God’s Top Priority and Why It’s Good (Psalm 138:1-2)

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Psalm 138:1-2

1 I give you thanks, O Lord, with my whole heart;
before the gods I sing your praise;
2 I bow down toward your holy temple
and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness,
for you have exalted above all things
your name and your word.
.

What is the most important thing in all the universe and beyond? What is most important to God? These questions are not asked often enough, and their answers are not generally given clearly enough. So, let me make it clear, even if it may confuse some. God’s top priority is not the good of mankind or my general happiness. God’s top priority is God’s own glory.

Look above at verse 2. God has exalted above all things his name and his word. There you have it. What has God lifted higher than anything else? It is not that God has lifted higher than all things that I be happy, that the lost be saved, or that the government allow prayer back in schools. God is not exalting that I be made wealthy, that I live my best life now, or that the needy be fed. God’s number one priority is himself.

Of course, to the uninitiated, this concepts seems utterly evil and selfish. Hold on a moment, though, as that is an incorrect assessment. That God is the number one priority in the universe is clear from the verses above; but this does not mean that God is somehow uncaring about other important things. God cares very much about the salvation of the lost, about the wellbeing of his children, and about whether or not the nations honor him. God cares greatly about the hungry being fed and the poor being cared for. Those things are simply not number one on his list.

Remember that the first of the Ten Commandments is that we must not have any gods before the one true God. God will not allow us to worship, to set as the highest priority and offer devotion to, something that is less than him. God is the highest, the greatest, the most glorious being in existence. If God were to allow us to worship something less would be for him to allow us to love something infinitely less worthy, infinitely less beautiful, infinitely less satisfying than he is. For God to allow us to worship something less than him or for him to set something less important than him as the number one priority of the universe would be for him not to love us but actually to hate us, as he would be allowing us to try to find our satisfaction in something that cannot satisfy. allowing us to waste our lives in futility instead of giving us the best would not be loving, and this is why God must make himself the number one thing in the universe and beyond.

So, is it offensive that God has exalted above all things his name and his word? It will offend those who think that they should be the center of the universe and that God should be displaced. But for the person who recognizes that God is the greatest, the highest, the most worthy, God’s centrality is a great gift from him. God allows us to find joy in his glory, and this joy is the joy that, unlike any other, can fully satisfy our souls.

So, would you like to be happy? If so, stop fighting against the fact that God is the number one priority of the universe. Instead, find out how marvelous it is to see God’s glory, his beauty, his majesty. God created you to display his glory (that’s part of what it means to be made in God’s image). You will never be truly happy until you are doing what you were created to do. So, as John Piper has argued in so many beautiful ways, make it the focus of your life to seek your own happiness in the one way that will truly satisfy your soul: find your joy in the glory of God. As Piper says, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”

Grudem on Prayer

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Grudem, Wayne A, Systematic Theology: Introduction to Bible Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 377.

James tells us, “You do not have, because you do not ask” (James 4:2). He implies that failure to ask deprives us of what God would otherwise have given to us

If we were really convinced that prayer changes the way God acts, and that God does bring about remarkable changes in the world in response to prayer, as Scripture repeatedly teaches that he does, then we would pray much more than we do. If we pray little, it is probably because we do not really believe that prayer accomplishes much at all.