You Can’t Start Over, but

You Can Start Today

God’s Heart for Men in Recovery

Bryan Fraser

Copyright 2012 by Bryan Fraser

All rights reserved solely by the author. The author guarantees all contents are original and do not infringe upon the legal rights of any other person or work. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the author.

Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Also by Bryan Fraser:

The Hidden Life: Living Inside-Out to Release God's Blessing

Winning a Generation Without the Law: How the Apostles Preached the Gospel to the Postmodern Mind

No Demons, Please... We're Evangelical: The Spiritual Roots of Addiction

To Pastors Michael and Blossom Christian,

who saved my life

Table of Contents

Preface

1.  When Your Sins Force You into the Desert

2.  Jesus: Friend of Sinners

3.  When You’ve Used Up All Your Chances

4.  When Your Struggle Against Sin Becomes a Truce

5.  Sin Hides No Surprises

6.  Recovery Is Not For Wimps

7.  Why David Was a Man after God’s Own Heart

8.  When You’ve Trashed Your Calling

9.  Plan A or Plan B—It’s Your Choice

10.  100% Sinner—100% Saint

11.  You’re a New Creation, Not a Rebuilt One

12.  Our Trials Are Not Our Cross

13.  The Seven Functions of the Word of God

14.  25 Ways to Receive the Gospel

15.  Don’t Admire Your Recovery in the Mirror

16.  Never Tell God You Deserve Better Than You Got

17.  Always Give Thanks for a Soft Heart

18.  Don't Climb God's Mountain If You Want Your Own Streams to Run to Their Confluence

19.  Repentance as a Change of Attitude

20.  The Essence of Faith

21.  Believing in Jesus is Simple, but It’s Not Easy

22.  The Most Fertile Soil for Recovery

23.  The Gospel Is Light, but It’s Not Heat

24.  The Secret of Staying on God’s Freeway

25.  God’s Judgment is Our Arrival at a Destination We’ve Already Chosen

26.  The Most Important Element in Your Recovery

27.  Resist Blending God’s Perfections into a Manageable Package

28.  What If I Had Obeyed?

29.  Your Trials Are Not Punishment

30.  Don’t Focus On Your Recovery 24/7

31.  The Six Kinds of Faith

32.  God’s Commitment to You

33.  The Sinner’s Heart Condition

34.  The Flesh—What, Why and How?

35.  Welcome to the Family

36.  You Can’t Undo Your Sin

37.  I Will Never Leave You Nor Forsake You (Even When You Want Me To)

38.  On the Necessity of Falling Hard

Preface

Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed. Matthew 25:24

Who am I? I’m one of you. I’m young enough to have a few good years of discipleship left, Lord willing; and old enough to have made lots of mistakes. By “mistakes,” of course, I mean sin.  Some of mine have been the unintentional sins of inexperience, others have arisen out of blind stubbornness, and not a few—have been cold, calculated, wilful iniquity; managed and deviously perpetrated for decades.  My compulsive addictions shipwrecked my pastoral ministry and nearly destroyed my marriage. I may write my story at a later time, but this is not that occasion.

Most of you are reading this because you know you’ve blown it and you don’t need me to tell you so. Your not-so-secret behavior is now exposed, either voluntarily or involuntarily, as the case may be. It’s time to start repairing the damage. Whatever our flavor of addiction has been—drugs, alcohol, pornography, gambling, gluttony, or something else—and whatever physical, biochemical, emotional, spiritual, or generational factors ushered us down that dark path, we all share one common factor: we concluded early on that God was a “hard man.” We decided our reality was populated with unconquerable appetites, desires, lusts, temptations, and pressures that God was simply unable or unwilling to address.  The man who feeds compulsive addictions for any length of time not only suffers delusion about his own identity and condition, but he turns God into an insensitive, unrealistic, brick-counting Pharaoh.  In addition to hiding from God, he also distorts God’s nature and character in his own heart. This new “God” he fashions cannot be trusted with his pain and failures any more than his wife, family, or friends can be: “They would all condemn me and just wouldn’t understand.”

A critical element of recovery, therefore, is to begin thinking rightly about God’s character. I’ve written this book with the specific intent of helping men in recovery replace the contorted “God” of our addicted imaginations with the Father of mercies.  I also address a common mistake of recovering men: focusing on isolated recoveries in the areas of behavior modification, self-image, daily disciplines, patterns of accountability, etc.; while at the same time trying to build a “new life” without first trading in their “old God.”

OK, so you’ve repented (still a word we haven’t been able to replace!) and committed to taking whatever restorative steps apply to your condition, whether counselling, a support group, medical treatment, deliverance, confession, apology, or restitution.  This book does not in any way attempt to add to the growing body of wisdom available today addressing how Christian men can best accomplish these processes. Rather, these meditations are built on the principle that a recovering addict must avoid making “Recovery Culture” his new religion. He must worship the living God who wants to restore him back into service.  Serving the God-who-is-only-there-to-get-Me-through-one-more-day-of-recovery will get stale real fast and will actually retard recovery. Even while the addict is in the early stages of healing it is important that he see himself as a restored disciple, not as a probationary applicant for reinstatement into the body of Christ. The man in recovery cannot rebuild a healthy spiritual life on a 24/7 diet of remorse, penitence, and exclusive association with his co-recoverers. I attend a recovery group once a week, but I don’t attend one five times a week.  It will not be beneficial to immerse himself completely in “recovering addict” spirituality.  Too much of this necessary discipline will not be good for him. The bulk of his spiritual activity needs to relate to general body life, for our goal is not to become recovered addicts, but whole disciples.

Reach out and embrace “whole” right now.  Get into the main current as soon as you’re strong enough to swim out there. Understand that our God is at war and he hasn’t discharged us from active duty. He has no interest in putting you through some scripted protocol of mourning appropriate to your crime. He has known our histories of lying, deceit, unfaithfulness, compromise, hypocrisy, and dishonesty from the beginning and he’s ready to resume the work we’ve already delayed too long. (After all, David confessed his sin with Bathsheba to the prophet Nathan, had a good cry, and then went home and wrote the Bible!) The sooner your primary view of yourself is that of a complete disciple (who happens to be a recovering addict), the faster you will become that person.

Hopefully these meditations will help you build on your mistakes without living under their shame. For God has provided us with the resources to get on with our discipleship from a place we never expected to land or, as Henry Fonda put it in The Longest Day, “We're starting the war from right here.”

1.  When Your Sins Force You into the Desert

There is an old man leaving Jerusalem and heading east. As he slowly makes his way up the Mount of Olives those near him can see tear-stained cheeks under the shawl covering his head. His feet are bare and caked with dirt. King David is going into forced exile, fleeing before the rebel army led by his own son Absalom. He senses this is the end.  David is approaching his 70th year: too old for fighting and political intrigue.  Besides, Absalom is young and handsome, full of bright, new promises. The people love him.

Memories of past victories and glory flash before the king’s eyes. “Can it really be over?” he wonders. Despite the shock of his expulsion from Jerusalem, David harbors no anger toward anyone. As he had left the city, David’s heart was warmed to meet Zadok and the other priests. Good old Zadok! Who could ask for a more faithful friend? David’s conversation with Zadok had been short and to the point: “Take the Ark of God back into the city. If the Lord sees fit he will bring me back to see the Ark and the Tabernacle again. But if he is through with me, well…let him do what seems best to him.”

The younger men with David are indignant. “Absalom will pay for this crime against the Lord’s anointed,” they swear.  “He will taste God’s justice.” But the king’s thoughts are elsewhere. David is not thinking about revenge against Absalom, but about his own sins. While everyone around him is concerned about the king’s honor, David knows in his heart that his sins have caught up with him. He has brought this disaster upon himself. The king fully realizes the poison he has poured into people’s hearts. He has committed murder and adultery. He has lied, cheated, and stolen. He has alienated his children. He has ruled the land by impulse and force for too long. This day was inevitable. It might have come next year or the year after, but he knew there was unrest in Israel. As David reaches the summit he gazes out over the wilderness of Judah.  The king wonders how long it will be his home. But he has no time for sightseeing today. He turns and walks out into the desert.

David went into the desert to wait. He could do nothing else. For the time being, Absalom held all the advantage. David could only sit tight and let God do what seemed good to him, as he put it. During this great trial David’s faith was unshaken. He trusted in God’s care absolutely, regardless of the present circumstances. It is out of this experience that Psalm 25 emerges. A tired, beaten man, weighed down with the consequences of his sins, throw’s himself on the Lord’s mercy. Then, having no other course of action, he waits.

In this psalm, we see the various attitudes of David while he was waiting to see what the Lord would do with him. David’s prayer is recorded for us so that we might know how to approach God in times like this.

To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.

O my God, I trust in You;

Let me not be ashamed;

Let not my enemies triumph over me.

Indeed, let no one who waits on You be ashamed;

Let those be ashamed who deal treacherously without cause.

Show me Your ways, O Lord;

Teach me Your paths.

Lead me in Your truth and teach me,

For You are the God of my salvation;

On You I wait all the day.

Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses,

For they are from of old.

Do not remember the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions;

According to Your mercy remember me,

For Your goodness’ sake, O Lord.

We will encounter times in our lives when our disobedience forces us into the desert. By this I mean simply that we become the victims of our own rebellion.  We persist in violating God’s law and eventually it comes back upon us. The consequences are real and they hurt. The place we are in is lonely and barren. We see others around us who are not suffering as we are and we long to get back to the green places.

In the depth of our sorrow we pray.  But the aim of any such prayer must be full restoration on God’s terms. We can’t presume anything more.  When tears run down our cheeks we should not try to bargain with God. It’s not the time or place. God will decide the circumstances of our recovery.

Let’s look at some of the attitudes in David’s prayer. First, we see that he fully surrendered himself to the Lord. “To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in You.” As simple as this sounds, many people fail on this first account. To lift up one’s soul to the Lord means to give him charge of my whole life: every detail, nothing withheld. What a temptation it is to reserve some precious little corner of rebellion for myself! That secret place we don’t think anyone knows about. The Lord requires the whole story. If you’ve ever tried to confess a sin to the Lord and hold some details back at the same time, you know what an awkward impossible prayer this is. It just doesn’t work. We must be completely surrendered.

Then we see that David admitted the seriousness of his problem.  “Let me not be ashamed; let not my enemies triumph over me.” David was facing total shame.  His enemies were already moving into his house: eating his food and enjoying his luxuries. As he walked across the Mount of Olives, Absalom’s troops were occupying Jerusalem. David was not fooling himself. His sins really were doing some serious damage.

It’s so easy for us to delude ourselves and think that we are strong enough to push through when our sins are crippling us. So when we find ourselves in the desert we need to admit the full extent of our disobedience and the damage it has caused so far.

Another attitude David displays is his belief that God is faithful. “Indeed, let no one who waits on You be ashamed.” What does it mean to wait on the Lord? It means allowing him to repair our lives according to his schedule. God has his own methods and timetable for exposing as well as for delivering those who go astray.  He forgives our sins immediately, but he will not resolve their consequences as quickly as we would like. This is a critical distinction we must understand. The Lord did not bring David back to Jerusalem immediately after David confessed his sins.  He was still in the desert.

Waiting on the Lord means believing that he knows exactly where we are. We will always be tempted to try to escape from the desert on our own. We think God has forgotten us. Or we fear that he showed us how to get out and we missed the sign. But the Scripture says none that wait on the Lord shall ashamed; not one. He does not forget us, nor does he send us tricky signs we can’t interpret. He knows where we are and is faithful in delivering us in his time.

Verses 4 and 5 describe God’s university: “Show me Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths.” Sometimes the Lord keeps us waiting in the desert because if he let us out early we would just go make the same mistakes. We need to be reprogrammed.  God needs to melt off some dross in the furnace. The reason God does so much of his teaching in the desert is that it’s much easier to hold our attention. There’s not much out there. We tend to stay in class because there’s nothing to distract us. He also wants to see what our attitude is to instruction while we’re in the desert. Will we close our ears to his teaching until we get out of the desert? Do we want deliverance first, then instruction? But God wants disciples who are teachable in the desert as well as in the pleasant places.

David is close to 70 and his whole life has collapsed around him.   Elijah and Jonah prayed that they might die when God sent them to his university, but David’s prayer is, “Lead me in Your truth and teach me.” “Lord, I need some fresh insights; I will wait all day for your instruction.” Moses was 80 when he saw the bush burning in God’s botany lab. He said, “I must turn aside and see why this bush is not consumed.” Both of these men allowed God to teach them in the desert. These are the kinds of students God uses to do his mighty tasks.

Perhaps the most important attitude in David’s prayer is his complete reliance on God’s grace. David appeals to three aspects of God’s grace: his tender mercies, his lovingkindness, and his goodness. Each of these refers to God’s eternal covenant with us. He will surely deliver us from the desert, but on the basis of Christ’s righteousness, not our own.

Waiting in the desert does not culminate in a parole hearing.  He is not looking for a record of good behavior that would justify our release. We wonder what we have to do.  There must be a formula! But there is none, for he knows when we have learned the lessons necessary to resume our callings.

In the desert there is only grace.  Grace is undeserved favor. It cannot be bought, traded manipulated, or coerced. Neither can it be extinguished by our faithlessness and rebellion.  It stands as a testimony to God’s unchanging goodness to us. If we have a low view of God’s grace, it is only because we have an elevated view of ourselves.  We forget that God keeps us alive in this immense universe with its infinite forces in such delicate balance.  We forget the thousand ways his unseen hand keeps our feet from disaster every day.  We forget the depths of our sin which would crush us beneath its weight if God did not withhold the inevitable judgment upon this world.  The desert is a place for reflecting on God’s grace. As we wait for God we should grow in thankfulness.

No one will deny that the desert is a forbidding environment. It is a hard place to live. It is a lonely place.  It drains our strength.  It is not a place we would ever choose to live. Yet in spite of its harshness, it is a place God uses to form and purify his servants. There are things he must show us there that we can learn nowhere else.

So if we find ourselves waiting in the desert, we have a choice to make. We must decide which aspects of the desert we will focus on.  If we choose, we can see nothing but the barren wasteland. We can close our eyes, stop our ears, and beg God to release us. But such a person’s God is only a little God who solves little problems. But the people God is looking for are those who see something more in the desert. They’re not in such a hurry to leave at all costs. For those who receive all things from God’s hand in thanksgiving, waiting in the desert is not punishment—it’s discipleship.

2. Jesus: Friend of Sinners

Everything about Abraham was large.  His victories were stunning and bold, marked by courage, daring, steadfast faith and disregard for personal safety.  His failures were momentous and staggering.  When he fell, Abraham plumbed the depths of compromise, rationalization, fear and doubt.  Abraham’s sojourn with God alternates between the highest sunlit peaks of faith and the darkest valleys of unbelief.  Whichever course he chooses, he seems to know no half-way measures.  He pursues either road with all of his energy and conviction.

Abraham’s troubles in life were as much of his own making as they were thrust upon him by others.  If we are looking for predictability, consistency in judgment, or steadfast patience, we will not find these qualities in Abraham.  If we are searching for an iron discipline that is never swayed by the passion of the moment, we must look elsewhere, for Abraham is none of these.  The Bible presents Abraham not as Superman, but as Everyman.  He stumbles, hesitates, manages his sin, and loses his way in all the ways common to our fallen condition.

The Bible also gives us many examples of people who excelled in the qualities Abraham lacked. We read concerning Noah that, according to all that God commanded him, so he did.  We detect no blemish or wavering of faith in any aspect of Daniel’s life.  Luke tells us that Zacharias and Elizabeth were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.  These people are quite properly called righteous, as are Abel, Jehoshaphat, Josiah and Job.  We could name more.

But the Bible declares Abraham to be the friend of God and not these others.  God maintains four primary relationships with man in the Bible: king, judge, prophet, and friend.  The first three are all designed to lead us on to the fourth.  God did not create us simply to rule over us, to judge us or to admonish us; even though he must continue in these roles to some degree during this current age.  He created us for friendship, and all of his other relationships have this end as their ultimate objective.  We need to note also that the roles of king, judge, and prophet all concern God’s administration of this present age of sin and lawlessness. They are temporary roles and will expire when they are no longer required.

Abraham became God’s friend because he understood why God really created us.  He was one of those rare people who understood that God’s ultimate desire toward us is that of personal friendship.  He understood that genuine friendship is a relationship that exists on a level above all of the frailties, faults, and inconsistencies of human weakness.  While many in the Bible are deemed righteous, very few are called friends of God.  From a theological perspective, righteousness describes a position of legal standing with regard to God’s law.  This is how the Lord described Job to Satan: “a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil.” But whereas righteousness is a position of legal standing toward God, friendship is an attitude of intimacy toward the person of God himself.

Friendship is the most difficult and usually the last relationship Christians achieve with God.  Most Christians, in fact, never do.  Most never move beyond a legal relationship with God, as if he were nothing but an accountant balancing a ledger.  Martha was diligent in her serving, but missed the better part chosen by Mary.  The older brother of the prodigal son was a loyal and faithful man, but he never developed any bond of friendship with his father.  The church at Ephesus was disciplined, faithful, and patient; but it had left its first love.   In each case, these people aspired to a legal standing of righteousness toward God.  I have known Christians I respected very much for their piety, discipline, and holiness.  But I wouldn’t call them fully mature because they hadn’t advanced very far toward friendship with God. Righteousness is defined through conformity with the law, but the law will pass away when all is fulfilled. Friendship with God will last for eternity.

God does not call us simply to manage the temporary condition of human sin.  He calls us into eternal friendship and that relationship is available to us today.  It is true that we are God’s servants, but that is only half the truth.  Sadly, most Christians prefer to remain servants of God only.  They find it is safer to remain merely a servant of the King rather than to accept his invitation to friendship.  They find friendship with God too intimate and terrifying.  But Jesus confessed to the twelve, “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends.” Jesus does not call people to be disciples so that he can make them servants.  He calls people to be his servants so that he can make them friends.

Such is our calling and our inheritance in Christ.  For the present time, we live in these frail bodies and God must occasionally correct and rebuke us.  But he has given us his eternal spirit of friendship and this is our true and permanent home.  We live in his house as friends and no longer as servants.  God has made a new covenant with us through Christ’s death. But there is something tragically incomplete in the Christian who only relates to God through the legal terms of that covenant and never accepts the offer of friendship inherent in the covenant. Abraham entered into the friendship with God that so many others missed for the very simple reason that he understood and accepted God’s offer of friendship.  The testimony of Abraham is a call to us to assess how well we have responded to God with Abraham’s heart and attitude.

Are you God’s friend, or only his servant?

3. When You’ve Used Up All Your Chances

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. Jeremiah 8:2

This is the cry of Israel under the impending collapse of the nation, both spiritually and politically. Israel at this time was a tiny nation tossed about by the competing empires of Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt.  Israel’s kings had warded off disaster one year at a time through compromising foreign alliances.  Israel had squandered better opportunities to seek after the things of God when disaster was not so imminently visible.  They had rejected the warnings of faithful prophets and refused to recognize that unbreakable link between their moral condition and their physical deterioration.  They could now see that disaster was upon them and they had precious little time to consider how they might turn the onrushing tide.  They are now convinced of their past folly and procrastination in having wasted the season when it would have been much easier to head off the disaster now before them.  And so they lament, in the anguish of despair, that “the harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

Jeremiah’s consistent message was the inevitability of destruction at the physical level as a result of moral and spiritual corruption.  Although this reference to salvation certainly foreshadows the precise New Testament redemption of the individual, Jeremiah’s prophecy here reflects the broader deliverance of Israel from national enemies by Yahweh.

More than any other prophet, Jeremiah bore the burden of proclaiming that Israel’s time to respond had run out.  While other prophets issued warnings with the possibility of reprieve, the message of Jeremiah was that the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation to Babylon was imminent. The call to repentance was past and Israel was too far down the road to turn around.  He is often called the weeping prophet.

In Jeremiah, we see the heart of God more clearly and intimately than in any other Old Testament prophet.  We see the picture of God as a distraught parent watching its beloved child slowly destroy himself; a parent who calls, who beckons and who pleads with undying patience for their wayward child to come home. Israel’s dismay represents the reality that the possibility of reform lessens dramatically as we progress through the stages of life.  Once our habits, convictions, and priorities become set, they are rarely reversed in our final years.

We largely misunderstand the concept of judgment in the Bible.  God’s judgment is essentially the recognition of that which must inevitably follow our present direction and momentum.  It is no different than our addiction to compulsive, destructive behaviors.  We know that if we persist in them past a certain point then our self-destruction is inevitable.  We recognize also, that there is a point where, even though life persists, the course toward destruction cannot be reversed.  In the instance of Israel, it is Jeremiah’s recognition that the nation’s corruption had reached a point from which it would not recover.

One of the best definitions of judgment is someone arriving at the destination he has persistently chosen.  Several years ago, my wife struck up a very unique friendship with a young teenage girl we will call Brenda.  Brenda lived with her single father and did not have the best home life, but did not have the worst one either.  Brenda had her rough edges, but she stuck to my wife like glue and pursued every opportunity to spend time with her.  The two of them talked about life and spiritual things.  Brenda frequently attended the youth group my kids attended.  But we soon learned that Brenda had a compulsion for bad decisions, substance abuse, and self-destructive behavior.  We moved away, but wherever we went, Brenda always kept in touch with my wife with a phone call every month or two.

Like many teens with a difficult home life, Brenda was in a tremendous hurry to grow up.  She married a sailor who was at sea six months at a time.  Neither of them was mature enough to manage a marriage, but they were mature enough to have four kids in short order.  Life got rockier for Brenda, the marriage failed and Brenda discovered heroin.  When last we heard from Brenda, her addiction had taken a pretty firm hold and she had signed over her children to the custody of her father.

As we look at Brenda and the tragedy of her life, we have seen her transition from a bright teenager who could have connected with some good opportunities to a burned out dope addict who has pretty much used up all of her options.  Brenda has reached a point in her self-destructive tailspin from which she will not recover.  As a recovering addict myself, I can take this mystery no further.  Why did God offer me as many chances as he did and I eventually responded? Why am I living in repentance and remission while Brenda, in all reality, is too far down the road?  I can only conclude what is evident: that she said “No” to God too many times and the die is cast.  Brenda’s story illustrates the nature and character of God’s judgment.  God’s judgment is essentially the recognition of Israel’s history for what it was, too many refusals and the inevitable consequences of those choices.

Jeremiah speaks to us of the regret of neglect; of the failure to use our time wisely when it seemed like unnumbered years stretched out before us.  It speaks of obligations, promises and commitments which were delayed and ignored as we poured our energies into more immediate demands, and which never received their due attention.  We go through the early stages of life thinking that we have endless time to entertain the pleasures of present sin.  “This temporary behavior isn’t who I really am.”  “I can change when I decide I’m ready.”

And yet we confess as Christians the mystery that our faith, in its very essence, is the repudiation of this world’s laws of death, scarcity, impossibility, cynicism, inevitability, and hopelessness.  God’s mercies are indeed new every morning.  The end of summer makes salvation difficult, but not beyond Christ’s reach.  For the power of Christ runs transverse, not parallel to the principle and laws of this world.  When Jesus descended from the Sermon on the Mount and touched the leper, it was not Jesus who was infected, but the leper who was cleansed.

There is a fatalistic determinism common to this world that the Christian must reject absolutely.  This is the belief that at a certain age, after a certain duration of failure, disappointment, and struggle, even outright rebellion; that the inevitable path of spiritual progress is downward. Cynicism replaces hope.  Unaware, the Christian comes to take pride, not in newness, but in his mastery of the inevitable.  Instead of growing more childlike, he becomes more cunning and shrewd.

I read of a 94-year-old Australian great-great-grandmother who quit school at 12 and is said to have become the world’s oldest person to earn a university master’s degree.  Here is a story that captures our imagination by its rarity, yet why should it be so?  Here is a woman who defied the momentum and probabilities of this world.  Should not our spiritual progress match this achievement?  Should we not be casting off more weights rather than collapsing under them?  Should we not be accelerating rather than slowing down?  Look at Noah, at Abraham, at Moses, at Caleb.  God called them to their greatest works not in the flower of their youth, but at the finish lines of their races.  Their years were running to the end of their course, but their spirits were ascending. This is my expectation and testimony in recovery: that no situation is beyond Christ’s reach; that God’s arm is never too short. I pray it is yours as well.

4. When Your Struggle Against Sin Becomes a Truce

Therefore, since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it. For we who have believed do enter that rest, as He has said:

“So I swore in My wrath,

‘They shall not enter My rest,’”

although the works were finished from the foundation of the world. For He has spoken in a certain place of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works”; and again in this place: “They shall not enter My rest.”

Since therefore it remains that some must enter it, and those to whom it was first preached did not enter because of disobedience, again He designates a certain day, saying in David, “Today,” after such a long time, as it has been said:

“Today, if you will hear His voice,

Do not harden your hearts.”

For if Joshua had given them rest, then He would not afterward have spoken of another day. There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His. Hebrews 4:1-10

One of the common replies I hear when I testify of my sin and ongoing recovery goes something like, “Oh, we all struggle with that,” or, “All Christian men have that struggle.” Yet as I hear evangelical men describe their temptations and their fallout, I have to conclude that most of them maintain a truce with sin rather than a struggle against it. The difference is quite significant because the definition of ‘struggle’ is, “to contend resolutely with a task, problem, etc.” and “to advance with violent effort.” It indicates a steady movement toward resolution and victory. Instead, evangelical men more typically adopt a strategy of accommodation and containment, rather than one of eradication toward sin. They see little or no movement from one year to the next. Quite simply, if you are not actively pursuing a strategy of the eradication of ‘man’ sins from your life and seeing steady progress, you are hardly involved in the struggle to which we are called.

The nature of this struggle and its objective is well illustrated by Israel’s campaigns in Canaan under Joshua. On the whole, Israel’s period under Joshua was a high point in their history. The generation before Joshua all died in the wilderness because of their rebellion against the Lord. The generation after Joshua saw the nation dissolve into the disarray of the judges, in which every man did what was right in his own eyes. But under Joshua, the nation pulled together and achieved much of what the Lord had for them to do. It was under Joshua that Israel really became a nation and developed a distinct identity.

Yet despite the positive aspects of this period, the Holy Spirit judges Israel to have failed to enter the rest God prepared for them. “The word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it.” And so even considering how superior Joshua’s generation was to the previous generation, the final verdict is the same: the word they heard did not profit them. The generation in the wilderness was stubborn and unbelieving. They simply refused to go along with God’s leadership. But the new generation under Joshua had a differently problem. It wasn’t stubbornness. It wasn’t rebellion. It was their failure to finish the course. Israel entered Canaan with clear instructions on how they were to possess their inheritance. They were able to occupy the land because they followed these instructions to the letter. But with the bulk of their work completed, they pulled back and did not finish the course. As a result, their labor is rejected, “Those to whom it was first preached did not enter because of disobedience.” In considering this harsh judgment on Israel, let’s consider three reasons why Israel’s failure to finish the course was so tragic: (1) because they made such a good start under Joshua, (2) because their rest had been prepared from the foundation of the world, and (3) because they suffered the wrath of God.

First, it was tragic because they made such a good start under Joshua. The vitality of Israel’s enthusiasm never fails to inspire us. The name of Joshua is synonymous with victory. The miraculous crossing of the Jordan, the destruction of Jericho, the victory over the Amorites while the sun stood still—these events are symbols of God’s power activated by faith. But unfortunately, these popular stories from the early chapters of Joshua do not paint the whole picture. All too often, we forget the disappointing finish that Israel made in claiming their inheritance. Because in the closing chapters of the book, we read these ominous accounts: "Ephraim did not dislodge the Canaanites living in Gezer...” Judah did not dislodge the Jebusites living in Jerusalem... Manasseh did not drive out the Canaanites who were living in their region." And I could go on.

Even though all the major battles had been won, the task wasn’t complete as long as long as a single Canaanite remained in the land. Because of Israel’s failure to follow through to the end, the book of Joshua ends as a tragedy. The history of Israel under Joshua teaches us that God grants his rest not to those who start strong, but to those who continue in obedience. During the military campaigns under Joshua, Israel did everything God asked. As a result, they took all the key cities, overthrew all the kings of Canaan, and saw God’s power overcome incredible odds against them. The war was won. God had broken the back of Canaanite power. All that remained was for Israel to dislodge the remaining Canaanite peoples: little by little, year by year. God was in no great hurry. But he said to Israel, “You must keep going.” In the end, it was not the imposing armies with their horses and chariots issuing out of Canaan’s walled cities that drove Israel to exile in Babylon. It was the friendly, harmless looking settlers that taught them the delights of Canaanite idolatry.

With the finish line in sight, Israel gave up the race. Instead of continuing on with their task, they called it quits and accepted the Canaanites as permanent residents of the land. Why was Israel’s failure at the end so critical? Why couldn’t God simply remember all the things Israel had done right and overlook their poor finish? Well, the reason is this: their partial acceptance of even a few Canaanites meant their total rejection of God’s desire for a holy people. No matter how far we have come with Jesus, he insists on continuing to cleanse us. As we mature in Christ, the sins he exposes are less spectacular, less obvious, and less dramatic. But they are just as deadly if we withdraw from the race and tolerate those sins in our lives.

Have you won your “large” battles against your visible giants, but allowed too many unobtrusive “settlers” to remain in your lives? For example, most of you men grant yourselves way too much “liberty” regarding the electronic visual input you can safely handle. Suggestive, alluring, and violent images—entirely apart from so-called “adult-rated” material—fill every form of programming and advertising, polluting your thoughts and imaginations. I once heard a preacher describe cable television as an anchor to hell—and that was over twenty years ago! Some of you exercise little or no discipline over what you eat and you carry around thirty or forty extra pounds. We surf around the internet on “innocent’ sites that soften us up for a major crash-and-burn later. We allow these and other “settlers” in our lives simply because we think it’s enough to fight the major battles.  But this is the disobedience that weakens our immunity and keeps us in a truce with sin rather than in a struggle against it. Evangelical men need to engage in far more eye plucking and hand cutting today than ever before.  It is no longer good enough to wait for a specific pronouncement from Christian culture telling you what’s acceptable and what’s not. (If you ask the Holy Spirit for direction in this regard, he will be much more severe than the general evangelical consensus.)

The secret to entering God’s rest is to keep moving. It’s not the speed that counts. You don’t have to compare yourself to anybody else. Just keep moving. Those who keep moving will enter God’s rest. Those who stop will come short. We should note that the warning is addressed specifically to those who have stopped moving. “Let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it.” ‘Have come short’ describes a completed action. This exhortation is directed to the man who is satisfied with where he is and has an attitude of tolerance toward the remaining sin in his life. This is the person who should fear. It is not a condemnation of the Christian who falls a hundred times and keeps getting up. Those are precisely the kind of people Jesus is looking for to do his work. And those are the people who enter God’s rest: the ones who keep getting up and keep moving. Don’t let a good start with Jesus Christ go to waste. Keep moving.

The second reason that Israel’s failure was so tragic is that its rest had been prepared from the foundation of the world. The rest we are called to is God’s own rest. It is the very rest that God enjoys; the sabbath rest God entered on the seventh day of creation. The significance here is that the rest Israel missed was ready, complete, and waiting for their arrival. And so God’s declaration has a tone of surprise. “So I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest,’ although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.” Everything was prepared. God was expecting them. And so it was all the more tragic that Israel fell short.

This same rest is prepared for us, for the people of God. In fact, the Greek literally says that this rest has been set aside. It’s been reserved. The most graphic illustration I can think of is the parable of the wedding banquet. God is pictured as a king who has invited all kinds of people to a fantastic wedding feast. And at the table is a chair reserved for everyone invited. The food is prepared and the place settings are reserved regardless of whether those invited come. God has prepared a place for each of us in his rest from the foundation of the world. Before the invitations ever went out, God envisioned each of us individually entering into his rest. That’s how God does it. God does not call people, and then, as an afterthought, decide where they will fit in. But behind each invitation is a total plan for that life conceived from the foundation the world. Now consider that rest set aside for you with your name on it. Are you pursuing it and claiming it as your inheritance? Are you determined to make just a little more progress each day? Don’t be satisfied with the present. Pursue Christ all the days of your life.

The final thought concerning God’s creation rest appears in verse 10, “For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His.” Here, the writer draws a direct comparison between our rest and the nature of rest God entered on the seventh day of creation. The significance of that rest is that God had brought order out of chaos. Genesis 1:2 reads: “the earth was without form and void.” The forces of the universe were in disarray, they were not subject to God’s desire for order and harmony. Therefore God brought the creation under his dominion and the forces of chaos were subdued. Then he entered into his rest on the seventh day.

We who enter into God’s rest enter into his dominion over chaos. The devil, who is the god of this present world, incites chaos and disorder.  He keeps the world in a state of disruption. Most people in the world expend a tremendous amount of energy trying to fence out chaos from the order they desire in their lives. But we enter God’s rest by struggling against our own sin (over which we have authority) rather than against the chaos of our world (over which we don’t have authority). We subdue our sin. God subdues our chaos.  The man who submits to this arrangement “ceases from his works” to subdue chaos and enters God’s rest.

The third reason that Israel’s failure was so tragic was that they suffered the wrath of God. We usually hesitate to speak too loudly of the wrath of God, but this is clearly God’s motivation in rejecting Israel, “So I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.” In the minds of many people, the fact that God is love cancels out the possibility of his getting really mad. We think this way because human wrath is usually a character flaw. Our wrath is most often a product of our sin rather than a product of our righteousness. But with God who is holy, this is not the case.

When our daughter was a little child, she and my wife were getting out of our car in the driveway when she started to walk toward the street. My wife sternly told her, “Stop!" Now, my daughter knew what her mother required, but instead of obeying, she ran into the street, forcing a car to slow down. You can believe she suffered the wrath of her mother. There followed discipline, pain, and misery. My wife’s love for her child did not soften her wrath, but revealed it as the pure motherly attribute it was. My wife could not have produced that emotion for another woman’s child, but it was her love for her own child that made her wrath so real and powerful. This is exactly the nature of God’s wrath against his people. When we “run into the street,” God gets mad. He has such wonderful plans for each one of us that he gets mad when we throw our lives away.

God’s wrath against his people always has restoration and healing as its objective, but that does not lessen its severity. When God gets mad he gets serious! When one of God’s people stops pursuing his rest, God will afflict that person until he turns around. Would you want to serve a God who did anything less?

Back in Deuteronomy, God told Israel specifically what he would do if they turned away from him: “Among these nations you shall have no rest, nor shall the sole of your foot have a resting place; but there the Lord will give an anxious heart, failing eyes and anguish of soul. Your life shall hang in doubt before you; you shall fear day and night, and have no assurance of life” (28:65, 66). I’ve seen rebellious Christians (especially the one I saw in the mirror) who are in this condition. They’re suffering from anxiety, doubt, fear, and lack of assurance. Their condition denies everything their faith is supposed to provide. Then they cry out, “Lord, deliver me from this misery!” when the Lord is the author of it!

There is a widespread error in popular Christian thought that God will endorse whatever plans my imagination conjures up. It’s the idea that Jesus will submit to my will and bless me in whatever course I choose. The technical term for this is antinomianism: the abolition of God’s law. And so as Christians, let us fix this doctrine God’s wrath in our minds. If we stop short of God’s rest, he will make our lives miserable. He promises to.  That’s how powerful and practical God’s love for his people is.

In spite of all Israel accomplished under Joshua, is it not amazing that the Holy Spirit points to that generation as an example of people lacking faith? Israel’s walk with God gradually lost momentum and, in the course of time, came to a halt. Genuine faith doesn’t do that. It finishes the course. Keep moving until you push out the last Canaanite. Claim that place God has prepared for you. Don’t stop short for anything because nothing else is worth it.

5. Sin Hides No Surprises

Cling tightly to your faith in Christ, and always keep your conscience clear. For some people have deliberately violated their consciences; as a result, their faith has been shipwrecked. 1Timothy 1:19

The apostle Paul here speaks of the man who has invested a good deal of his time and energy into following Jesus Christ.  This perfectly describes my Christian life prior to the exposure of my compulsive sins. I had set my course, made a commitment to God, and applied myself to Christian discipleship.  But at some point along the way, I intentionally diverted from the path.  I deliberately violated my conscience and, as a result, my investment was ruined.  The use of a shipwreck as an illustration of my condition emphasizes the role my own choices played in my descent to the bottom.

Now we recognize that natural forces play some role in a shipwreck, but natural forces are not in view here.  Rather, the emphasis is on human responsibility.  A shipwreck is always the focus of much attention.  Some of this attention comes from the authorities who have responsibility in such matters.  They look into the causes and all the factors associated with the accident.  But most of the attention comes from the public at large for whom it is simply a tragic, human spectacle.  How could such a thing happen, they ask?  With all of the technology, all of the engineered design of the ship, all of the charts and navigation instruments, all of the weather forecasting, all of the experience of the crew—how could such a thing happen?  What fateful combination of events, negligence, faulty assumptions, and miscalculations conspired to run this marvelous vessel onto the rocks?

And so it was when my faith was shipwrecked.  How could such a thing happen?  Just yesterday he stood among us as an upright, humble, and self-controlled servant of God.  We saw no clue.  Nothing seemed to be amiss or out of order.  But suddenly my ship is capsized and all that I built is tarnished and disgraced.  People hear of my calamity and pause to consider how incongruous and out of place it seems.  Is there something we should have seen?  Were there clues that we missed?

A shipwreck is not caused by ignorance.  The ship is not cast onto the rocks because the maps were wrong or the charts failed to show the shallow reefs.  It is not because the compass broke or the instruments failed.  But the ship is run aground despite this information.  I arrogantly assumed that, despite all of these hazards that I could see plainly on the charts, I could still pass through safely.  My voyage would be exception.  I would take the shortcut and survive the very course I would counsel others against.  I would enjoy the thrill of sailing closer to the rocks.  Do I not know my maps by heart?  Had I not memorized the tides, the currents and the locations of the hidden rocks? Would not my long experience allow me to break the rules that all others must follow?

So my thinking went before I shipwrecked my faith.  From my youth I heard the warnings of Scripture.  I knew full well the paths my feet should not tread, the views my eyes should not behold.  I knew the thoughts and longings my mind should reject without allowing them to settle.  How well I knew the danger of that first foothold, the first step down the wrong street, the failure to avert my eyes after the first glance.  All these truths were fixed in my mind, but I chose a different course.  Was not my extensive knowledge of biblical truth protection in itself, I said to myself?  Have I not built up many years of strength that will allow me more latitude than the inexperienced beginner?

My shipwreck was caused by hazards I knew but did not see.  How easily I deceived myself and sailed toward the folly and destruction I knew to be inevitable!  I could not see my doom before me at the moment of convenience, so I proceeded, closing off my mind to the disaster that awaited me.  Just beneath the surface lay the rocks and shoals poised to tear into my ship’s hull.  They were clearly marked on the charts.  I knew a slight miscalculation in my course or an unexpected gust of wind or shift of the tide would send me to the bottom.  Yet I saw only calm, unbroken sea, so I sailed on.   My wreck came suddenly without warning, when all within my view appeared calm. I hadn’t even used my anchor to slow my momentum, so peaceful had the sea appeared.

Sun Tzu observed, “Every battle is won or lost before it is fought.” I made every preparation to lose my battle, yet proceeded as if its outcome would somehow be different. My brothers, be assured that sin hides no surprises. One thing does indeed lead to another and we shall reap precisely what we sow.

6. Recovery Is Not For Wimps

It is God’s grace that he does not show us our futures as did the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in Dickens’ fantasy.  Were we allowed to peer into the “shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us” we would be greatly dismayed.  Not one of us would begin the painful steps of recovery if God allowed us to read ahead in the script.  No rational person would sign on to such a package if he knew in advance all the procedures he will face in our Lord’s operating room.  Even now, if we could see the difficulties ahead in our healing we would quail and hesitate.

But in his infinite wisdom, God gives us the hope, the strength, the vision, the strength, the grace, and the mercy for today and only for today.  The joy of walking with him today is always sufficient. His mercies are new every morning.  We have believed in him whom we have always found trustworthy to sustain us today.  We don’t have to endure the things yet to come.  And so we confess each day as did Peter, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Recovery is not for wimps, but God will give us the strength each day to endure the pain that is necessary for us to achieve wholeness.

7.  Why David Was a Man after God’s Own Heart

I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My own heart, who will do all My will. Acts 13:22

There is hardly any verdict more offensive and perplexing to our natural moral intuition than the Lord’s testimony of David: that he was a man after his own heart. David, as has been often noted, was an adulterer and a murderer.  With respect to our subject of long-standing compulsive addictions, we can also observe that David’s sin with Bathsheba was not a single, spontaneous carnal sin from which he quickly repented. It was ongoing, calculated iniquity and he had opportunities to end it at several points.  We can note at least nine separate sins in his tangled web.

1.        He ignored his responsibility to provide military and spiritual leadership to his troops and allowed himself idle, unproductive time. (2 Samuel 11:1).

2.       He rose from his bed and went up to the roof for no profitable purpose (11:2).

3.       Having seen Bathsheba bathing, he remained to “behold” her instead of immediately averting his eyes (11:2).

4.      He used his royal authority improperly to find out who she was (11:3)

5.       He committed the act of adultery (11:4).

6.       He recalled Uriah from the war in a strategy to conceal his own paternity of Bathsheba’s child (11:6).

7.       He made Uriah drunk in order that he would violate his conscience before the Lord (11:13)

8.      He used his royal authority to have Uriah murdered (11:14, 15).

9.       David rendered the judgment due to the man in Nathan’s parable without similarly judging himself (12:5, 6).

We see that several of David’s actions were separated by enough time to allow him to fully contemplate his evil course, devise the next step in his wicked strategy of concealment, and—consider his ways and repent.

The man who repents from his evil ways, regardless of their complexity or duration, can take comfort in the Scripture’s testimony of David.  In God’s unsearchable mercy, the man who receives an opportunity to repent, confesses his sin, and turns from his wicked ways is fully pardoned, as the Lord testified to Ezekiel:

But if a wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed, keeps all My statutes, and does what is lawful and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die. None of the transgressions which he has committed shall be remembered against him; because of the righteousness which he has done, he shall live (Ezekiel 18:21, 22).

The Lord’s mercy toward the penitent man must inscribe two lessons on our hearts. First, God’s “forgetting” of our sins is not restricted to those we committed impulsively without forethought, but includes our high-handed, concealed, devious iniquity as well.  “None of the transgressions which he has committed shall be remembered against him.” Second, we must not presume for a millisecond that the opportunity we have to repent today will be offered again.  Only the Lord knows the condition of each of our hearts and will decide in his secret counsels when our disobedience has made its hardening complete:

“Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God; but exhort one another daily, while it is called “Today,” lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:12, 13).

8. When You’ve Trashed Your Calling

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the back of the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.” So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then He said, “Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.” Exodus 3:1-5

A defeated, unimportant man is tending his father-in-law’s sheep in the middle of nowhere. Moses was a failure. God had given him a great opportunity once but he had blown it. Moses could have been a great success, but when the chips were down, he had made all the wrong choices. If only he had controlled his ambition and his temper. His mother had taught him patience and humility, but Moses thought he knew it all in those days. That was long ago. During forty years in the desert he must have daydreamed about what might have been a million times. He was just a two-bit shepherd now and lucky to have this job.

If only...

If only...

If only...

Moses was absolutely right in thinking that he had blown it. But he was absolutely wrong in supposing that he had almost made it. Back in the days when Moses was a big man in a big city, he had served a very small God. The young and high-minded Moses fancied himself a very great asset to God. Even forty decades later, Moses still clung to the false idea that some people have the right stuff to do great things for God and others just don’t.

You and I tend to be just like Moses. Living in a fallen and contaminated world, we are accustomed to the effects of sin. We measure things like goodness, righteousness, and holiness according to the best qualities that fallen man can produce. We hardly take notice of “incidental” sins which, in themselves, would have driven Christ to the cross. So it is not surprising that we should pick out the very best examples of human character and say, “There, he must be who God can use.”

This kind of thinking reveals a serious misunderstanding of the holiness of God. The essential meaning of the Hebrew “qodesh” is to be apart or to be separate. God’s holiness is a purity and goodness which is completely separate from our concepts of good and evil. The natural man is only dimly aware of goodness because he can contrast it from blatant evil. But God's holiness is an eternal attribute that was his nature before sin came into existence.

We can never appreciate the infinite chasm that separates man from God. Yet it is necessary for us to meditate on the holiness of God and to acknowledge his infinite purity as best we can. The Christian lives with God amidst the tension of intimacy and separation. Jesus made the remarkable confession in John 15 that “I have called you friends.” God maintains these two relationships with the Christian simultaneously: intimacy and separateness. He is both our intimate friend and the God who keeps distance. The human tendency is to try to blend the two into some synthesis we can understand. We desire both to make God less intimate with us and less holy than he is. One of the very frequent indicators of a cult is the absorption of these two attributes into each other. Both are lost and some human conception of God results.

And so it happened that, in his eightieth year, Moses was called into the service of the Holy. This man who had failed God in every way was now ready. Moses thought that he was tending sheep as a punishment, but it had actually been preparation. Just when Moses thought his life was spent, God called up and said, "I’ve got a job for you." Moses was not ready to work for the Lord until he had come to the end of himself. The God who keeps distance is looking for people like Moses who appreciate how great that distance is. Moses had the most intimate relationship with God of anyone in the Old Testament, and yet, along with that intimacy, Moses understood fully his own complete inadequacy.

Using the enlistment of Moses as our pattern, let’s consider how to enter into the service of the God who keeps distance. This is a pattern for everybody. It doesn't matter what your story is, how much time you have wasted, or how badly you have failed. The first step is to see your present circumstances as the doorway to God’s service. The Scripture tells us that, “Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian.” If you are presently in submission to God, regardless of what lies in your past, then he has you exactly where you need to be.              Moses was in about the least likely situation could ever lead to a restoration to service for the Lord. As a shepherd working for his father-in-law, Moses was part employee and part slave. Moses was under obligation to serve Jethro in return for the gift of his daughter in marriage. Even after God orders Moses to Egypt, he must ask Jethro's permission to leave.

Oftentimes, Christians who have made some bad choices in life think their present situation is completely out of God's reach. I've blown it, God has stuck me here, and the best I can ever do is watch from the sidelines as a second-class Christian. The man who humbles himself before the Lord stands at the doorway to God's service. God can send that man anywhere he wants to.

Second, believe that your present course is God’s course: “And he led the flock to the back of the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.” Do you ever feel that you're heading toward the back of the desert: that place where nothing ever happens, where no opportunities exist? Be careful! That's where the mountain of God is. Mt. Horeb did not become the mountain of God until God spoke to Moses there. You can't identify the mountain of God ahead of time. In order to get there a Christian only has to do two things: (1) see that none of your decisions conflict with the word of God and (2) keep moving according to the best light you have today. I don't know why Moses led the flock to the back of the desert, but I do know that God spoke to him while he was moving. Unless you consciously reject God’s specific guidance, then hour course is his course. And even if you end up in the back of the desert, you are exactly where you’re supposed to be.

Third, meditate on the grace of God. “And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed.” Realize that every one of us deserves to be consumed, yet we are not. The burning bush was God's first contact with Moses and it represented the grace of God's promise to Abraham. If we would serve the God who keeps distance, we must keep the symbolism of the burning bush forefront in our minds. The most holy God has spoken to us in our corruption, and yet we are not consumed. None of us is worthy to do God's work and yet he has chosen us anyway.

Fourth, respond to the unusual and the exceptional: “I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.” Expect to hear from God in unique or unexpected events in your life pursue them to their conclusion. Assume God is in it until you can determine that he’s not. God reveals himself to those who are willing to turn aside and investigate the unexpected. So when something unusual comes into your life, don’t simply stare at it for a few moments and then get on with your business. Follow it up and see if God has something new for you. We should note here that God called Moses when Moses turned aside. A Christian receives his calling when he is moving through life. He normally does not receive his calling by sitting still and waiting for that call to come to him.

Fifth, believe God has a calling with your name on it. “So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’” There are no generic Christians. When the Holy Spirit called you into salvation, there came with that calling a purposeful role for your life. Let's remember the classic call of the prophet Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; and I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” Again we find the Hebrew word “qodesh.” “I sanctified you. I made you holy. I set you apart for my own purpose.” When God calls each one of us into his service, he doesn't call us because we have impressed him or because we have made the grade. But he chose us in Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world that we should be holy (Ephesians 1:4), that we should be set apart for our specific callings.

“Then He said, ‘Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’” When I went to meet all my in-laws in Newfoundland, one of the first things I learned is to take my shoes off indoors. You would no more wear your shoes into a Newfie's house than you would dump your garbage on his lawn. And so removing one's shoes shows respect for the cleanliness of the property.

In the ancient world, however, the removal of one’s shoes was a much more important symbol of status. It indicated defilement, shame, poverty, even the bondage of slavery. When a king conquered a city, one of the first things he would do would be to order the inhabitants to remove their shoes as a symbol of their humiliation. They would march into captivity barefoot. The priests of Israel performed all of their temple service barefoot. Despite all of their fancy embroidery, jewels, and fine linens, they were defiled. They were not acceptable to enter into the presence of God.

Moses had to remove his sandals because the presence of God made that place holy ground and Moses was defiled. He was unclean. He was not fit to draw near to God. But in Jesus Christ, we are made fit to draw near to God. The blood of Christ has made you holy. In Jesus Christ, we are called the ‘hagioi,’ the holy ones, In Jesus Christ we are made acceptable to enter into God's presence. God will never say to us as he did to Moses, "Take your sandals off your feet." Do you remember what the father said when the prodigal son finally returned home? “‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet.” You see, this was not simply a kind gesture. It was a symbolic restoration of everything that son had thrown away. That son was now fully acceptable in his father's family.

Jesus Christ puts new sandals on the feet of all who humble themselves before him. He doesn’t tell you to clean all the dirt, scum and uncleanness off your old shoes. The Lord puts shoes of righteousness on your feet and calls you holy. And so when the Lord looks at you now, he doesn’t see all your past sins that would disqualify you from his holy service. He sees a new man in Jesus Christ. He sees that new creature he predestined for good works.

God is just as holy and separate and as he ever was. God did not become somebody different when Jesus Christ came. He is still the God who keeps distance. But in Jesus Christ our righteousness, we are invited to draw near and serve him.

If you have sinned and gone your own way in the face of God, do you know what you've done? You've stretched out your road. You’ve lengthened the course leading to your calling in Christ. You're still on it. You're still going to get there if you submit to God; you’ll just be a little (or a lot!) older. Moses committed murder, and so it took him forty years in the desert to arrive at his calling. Our sins don’t cancel God's holy calling because none of us qualifies for that calling in the first place. Today is the day to confess with all your heart that you believe in God’s holy calling on your life. And having done that, submit yourself to the will of God that he may reveal himself to you.

9.  Plan A or Plan B—It’s Your Choice

“Come now, and let us reason together,”

Says the Lord,

“Though your sins are like scarlet,

They shall be as white as snow;

Though they are red like crimson,

They shall be as wool.” Isaiah 1:18

When we speak of God’s covenant, we refer to God's unconditional election of Israel which goes all the way back to Abraham. This covenant was a high privilege which was to prompt the people to live holy lives. Instead, Judah and Jerusalem were using God’s election as a license to sin. There was a general belief that, because of his covenant, God must overlook their sins. They taught that God would judge them with a different standard than he judged the nations. But Isaiah argues that God’s judgment will fall upon all alike, regardless of nationality.

God judges sin absolutely regardless of who commits it. God promises to redeem those who repent, while those who forsake the Lord will be consumed. Isaiah had to remind the people that God judges sin on an individual basis wherever he finds it. God’s covenant is not a rabbit's foot or lucky horseshoe that the unrepentant can use to turn away his judgment.

We need to ask, then, what was the benefit of God's covenant? Would God’s judgment upon Judah nullify God's promise? The answer is “absolutely not!” God states his purpose with his covenant people: he is going to create a people of righteousness and faithfulness. These people will be not only positionally righteous in Christ, but righteous in every aspect of character and behavior as well. That is God’s program and he will accomplish it. God’s covenant means that he never forsakes those he calls to be his own.

But the crucial thing from our standpoint is that God offers two ways this can be accomplished. God offers a plan 'A' and a plan 'B'. The choice is ours. Plan 'A' is the easy way and is the reasonable approach. “Let's reason together. If you are willing and obedient, if you submit to me, then the process will be relatively painless. In fact, you will eat the good of the land while I do it. You will have a full and satisfying life. So let's reason together.”

But on the other hand, maybe you prefer plan ‘B.’ Plan ‘B’ is the all-expenses-paid Babylon vacation. For those who don't want to reason with God, he is perfectly willing to do it the hard way. Judah chose plan ‘B.’ They would not reason with God, so he ransacked Jerusalem and sent the people into seventy years of captivity in Babylon. Their vacation worked very effectively. When they finally returned to Jerusalem there was no more idolatry. God had purged away all their idol worship.

Titus 2:14 contains a wonderful promise of God's intention toward us. Paul refers to “our great God and savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people, zealous for good works.” This is the inheritance we have in Christ. It is guaranteed to all who believe in the Lord Jesus. God promises to redeem us from every kind of sin and purify us.

But the question still remains: Which way do you prefer: plan ‘A’ or plan ‘B?’ Some of you (along with me) have spent a long time running with plan ‘B’ and you’ve found it’s not much fun.  If you have, then I would say this one thing: start living like a plan ‘A’ disciple today.  You may not have to remain in Babylon as long as you think.

10.  100% Sinner—100% Saint

Having become a Canadian citizen in 2000, it recently occurred to me how distinct my separate US and Canadian identities have remained.  When I’m in Canada I’m fully Canadian.  Likewise, when I’m in the U.S. I’m as much an American as when I only held U.S. citizenship.  I never think of myself as a “Canadian” American when I’m in the US or as an “American” Canadian when I’m in Canada.  People who hold multiple citizenships will understand what I mean.

Similarly, after a Christian receives a new nature the spiritual man and the natural man remain distinct. The new nature does not sanctify the old nature, making him a more “spiritual” natural man.  (On the other side of the coin, the renewed man is fully a new spiritual creature.  He is not less spiritual because he temporarily resides in this physical body.)  This is a tremendously liberating concept.  Many Christians live in spiritual defeat because they expect their renewed spirit to somehow “make over” the natural man.  But this will never happen.  The natural man will always be just the natural man.

The Spirit and the flesh war against each other, but Spirit and the natural man do not. The flesh opposes God’s law, but the natural man is simply unable to keep it because of the spiritual death he suffered in the fall.  The Christian, upon having his spirit revived, does not lose any of his humanity.  Rather, he is restored to his previous capacity to enjoy all the blessings of God’s creation.  It is therefore perfectly acceptable for him to embrace all God gives to the natural man:

It is good and fitting for one to eat and drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labor in which he toils under the sun all the days of his life which God gives him; for it is his heritage. As for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, and given him power to eat of it, to receive his heritage and rejoice in his labor—this is the gift of God. (Ecclesiastes 5:18-19)

The Christian is not some sort of hybrid creature in which God confuses and dissolves the distinct attributes of the new and old natures.  It is most unfortunate when Christians try to suppress their innate humanity and attempt to live as contrived sanctimonious monsters.  But it is a Christian’s rightful inheritance to live out both his identities to the full: to walk in the Spirit and to rejoice in his humanity.

11.  You’re a New Creation, Not a Rebuilt One

Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah—not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them. Jeremiah 31:31, 32

A few years ago when the Province of British Columbia fashioned its Reconciliation Protocol to address past injustices against native peoples, one aboriginal pundit aptly observed that the process would be better termed a “Conciliation Protocol.”  He observed that the province was actually offering BC’s aboriginal communities a relationship they had never before enjoyed.   A new relationship was on the table, not the restoration of any old one.  This observation sheds light on Jeremiah’s declaration that God invites us into a new covenant.  It is not an offer to rebuild the broken one.

In contrast to this concept, Western Christianity is more accustomed to thinking of salvation as the restoration of a former covenant:  “God and man were in a covenant of creation before man’s fall => man voided the covenant of creation through sin => Christ paid the legal penalty for sin on the cross, thereby revalidating the original covenant fallen man breached.”

But in Romans 11, Paul speaks of the reconciliation of the world as the grafting of the Gentiles into a covenant community of which they have never been a part. Reconciliation is accomplished through God offering a new relationship, not rebuilding the old one.  This perspective radically influences how we see ourselves. You are new creation in Christ, not a rebuilt model. Begin every day this way. Did you foul up yesterday? Start over today! That’s your inheritance.

12.  Our Trials Are Not Our Cross

If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.  Matthew 16:24

Taking up our cross is different than enduring our trials.  As the Roman soldiers were going out to crucify Jesus, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry our Lord’s cross.  Jesus never does this.  He calls us to take up our cross, but does not force us to carry it.  We either take up our cross ourselves or walk away from it.  It is our choice.

In contrast, we get no choice with trials.  Whom the Lord loves he chastens and he doesn’t seek our permission for this discipline.  The Lord never calls us to take up our trials. Christians sometimes confuse taking up their cross with coming to terms with their trials.  A trial is suffering given for the purpose of our purification. For example, someone might say, “My family constantly ridicules my faith.  I guess that’s just the cross I have to bear.”  No, that’s a trial.  The patient endurance of trials trains us in righteousness which is certainly a good thing, but that is not taking up our cross.

We are to intentionally seek God and ask him about our cross.  And we who are in recovery are not given a reprieve from this calling.  We are full-status disciples and are to pick up just where we were before we took our “detour” into addiction. The proper question is not “do I have a cross,” but “what is my cross?”  However, too many Christians make no effort to discover their cross and take a very passive attitude toward taking it up.  They are like the unemployed man who sits at home waiting for someone to call him up and offer him a job.  He makes no effort to look for work.  He doesn’t leave his house to look for work.  He doesn’t fill out any applications.  But he imagines that someday an employer will just call him up and give him a job.  He is like the Christian who chases after his own ambitions and priorities year in and year out and says, “I wonder if the Lord has a cross for me to take up.  Maybe someday he will call me up and tell me.”  But he has no stomach or interest in finding his cross.  He secretly hopes the Lord calls the other guy to take up his cross, but not him.

Taking up our cross is always a choice to offer up something precious to be put to death.  It is an intentional sacrifice offered for the purpose of bearing spiritual fruit.  Spiritual fruit can only be brought forth through death.  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”  Obedient disciples willingly seek their cross and take it up because Jesus has given this example and our love for him constrains us to follow after him.

13.  The Seven Functions of the Word of God

We need to keep in view two aspects of the word of God: it is living (Hebrews 4:12) and it accomplishes God’s purposes (Isaiah 55:11).  We should contrast these spiritual dynamics of the word of God with the naturalistic view that it is simply a cognitive proposition having potential power activated only by the hearer’s positive response.  But Isaiah tells us that God’s word does not return to him void.  In fact, the word of God accomplishes many purposes in those who hear it, most of which, unfortunately, are not positive.

1. In some people, the word of God produces violent opposition. “So all those in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust Him out of the city; and they led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw Him down over the cliff. Then passing through the midst of them, He went His way” (Luke 4:28-30).

2. In others, the word of God produces a lackadaisical dullness. “For the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes they have closed” (Matthew 13:15).

3. Sometimes the word of God produces a twisted distortion of grace. “…as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16).

4. Another fruit of the word of God is naturalism: people stripping it of its efficacious saving power.  “…having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!” (2 Timothy 3:5).

5. In some people, the word of God identifies the hearers as thin, stony soil.  “But he who received the seed on stony places, this is he who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no root in himself, but endures only for a while. For when tribulation or persecution arises because of the word, immediately he stumbles” (Matthew 13:20-21).

6. In others, the word of God produces a rejection of that which disturbs their present earthly stability.  “Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. And those who saw it told them how it happened to him who had been demon-possessed, and about the swine. Then they began to plead with Him to depart from their region” (Mark 5:15-17).

7. Finally, the word of God reveals those who are good soil suited to bring forth a hundred-fold crop. “And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart” (Galatians 6:9).

In each of these seven kinds of people, the word of God accomplishes God’s purposes.  It reveals their essential identities that cannot be seen with the natural eye.  It “is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”  The Roman world knew two kinds of swords.  The romphaia was a large, heavy sword wielded by a soldier in battle.  But the sword identified here is a machira.  A machira is a much smaller instrument: very sharp and two-edged.  Its function was to cut deeply and penetrate.  So the word of God imagery here is more the “opening up” work of a butcher or surgeon rather than the destructive blow of a battle sword.  The word of God reveals the innermost reality of a person’s substance as nothing else can.  It is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Soak and meditate in the word of God as you progress through your recovery. It will heal and transform you in many ways beyond human comprehension.  Let God’s “scalpel” open you up and remake you.

14.  25 Ways to Receive the Gospel

The gospel is a message of deliverance speaking to every aspect of a person’s constitution and awareness.  Yes, Jesus saves the sinner from the legal penalty of sin.  But how many other ways can we receive the good news?

1.        You will be saved from your enemies. Numbers 10:9

2.       But you have today rejected your God, who himself saved you from all your adversities and your tribulations. 1 Samuel 10:19

3.       You save me from violence. 2 Samuel 22:3

4.      Deliver my life from the wicked with your sword. Psalm 17:13

5.       You have delivered me from the strivings of the people. Psalm 18:43

6.       I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears. Psalm 34:4

7.       Lord, who is like you, delivering the poor from him who is too strong for him?  Psalm 35:10

8.      Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed. Psalm 51:4

9.       And to God the Lord belong escapes from death. Psalm 68:20

10.    For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling. Psalm 116:8

11.     Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips and from a deceitful tongue. Psalm 120:2

12.    You have lovingly delivered my soul from the pit of corruption.  Isaiah 38:17

13.    I seek out my sheep and deliver them from all the places where they were scattered on a cloudy and dark day. Ezekiel 34:12

14.   I have broken the bands of their yoke and delivered them from the hand of those who enslaved them.  Ezekiel 34:27

15.    I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. Ezekiel 36:29

16.    And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save his people from their sins.”  Matthew 1:21

17.    Deliver us from the evil one.  Luke 11:4

18.   Be saved from this perverse generation. Acts 2:40

19.    We shall be saved from wrath through Him. Romans 5:9

20.   But now we have been delivered from the law.  Romans 7:6

21.    Who will deliver me from this body of death? Romans 7:24

22.   That he might deliver us from this present evil age.  Galatians 1:4

23.   He has delivered us from the power of darkness.  Colossians 1:13

24.  And the Lord will deliver me from every evil work.  2 Timothy 4:18

25.   Let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save a soul from death and cover a multitude of sins. James 5:20

The man in recovery will need salvation from a variety of afflictions he has brought upon himself and our Savior is sufficient for them all.

15.  Don’t Admire Your Recovery in the Mirror

Do not be overly righteous,

Nor be overly wise:

Why should you destroy yourself? Ecclesiastes 7:16

But you, O man of God, flee these things and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, gentleness. 1 Timothy 6:11

The Preacher’s counsel is not a cynical rejection of the consecrated life the apostle charges Timothy to pursue, but a warning against seeking righteousness simply to be seen as righteous.  The truly righteous man begins from the positional righteousness Christ has already conferred upon him.  He then pursues a righteousness that is strategic, discerning, effective, purposeful, and calculated to win through to the victory Jesus has already achieved.

The righteous man keeps himself unstained from the world because he knows it makes him a soldier fit for battle.  He understands that his Lord has called him to war, not to a beauty contest.  He casts off every weight because they constrain what he can contribute to the common bond of purpose he shares with his Master. His righteousness bears the mature discretion of a responsible steward looking after the affairs of “a man going to a far country, who left his house and gave authority to his servants, and to each his work.”

We are to avoid a self-centered righteousness based not on a love of the things Christ loves, but more on the pleasure of admiring oneself in the mirror.  Such a man submits to a capricious set of disciplines and vain sacrifices calculated to allow him to boast: “Lord, look at me!  Aren’t I doing well?”  His righteousness tends toward the awkward and eccentric, evidencing little practical wisdom toward his Master’s larger interests.  The birds may destroy the crops and the harvest fail, but he will brag, “Weren’t my furrows beautifully straight?”

But the righteous man is like a man who maintains his car in good working order because he has higher purposes requiring that it run efficiently.  He treats his car with respect because it provides the mobility essential to his work.  Contrast him with the man who buys a hot car because of the gratification it gives him entirely apart from its utility.  He thrills to its look, its feel, its technical performance, and the image it evokes.  He adds accessories and keeps it in gleaming condition far beyond what is necessary for providing comfortable, functional transportation.  For him, his car is an end in itself regardless of where he drives it or to what purpose.  It is this caricature of righteousness, this “trophy” righteousness against which the Preacher cautions us. In recovery, we must avoid staring at ourselves in the mirror to see how our recovery is doing.  Live a righteous life, not a righteous recovery.

16.  Never Tell God You Deserve Better Than You Got

You made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the heat of the day.  Matthew 20:12

The gospel is the ultimate leveller.  When the landowner gave all the vineyard workers the same wage at the end of the day, the ones who had gone out first complained, saying “You made them equal to us.”  This is exactly what grace does.  Everybody receives eternal life under the same terms: agreeing to go into the vineyard. The parable shows how easily the fickle human heart shifts from an attitude of gratitude to resentment.  The first workers who went out in the morning were very grateful for their election.  But by the end of the day, they were griping and complaining that the landowner wasn’t fair and they weren’t receiving their due.

There can be a disgruntlement in the evangelical spirit over this equation: that grace should be so magnanimous toward those who have wasted the day in idleness.  It is annoyed that those who hardly broke a sweat are granted the same benefits as those who have borne the burden and the heat of the day: the same joy, the same inheritance, the same status and the same intimacy.  “We’ve repented.  We’ve sacrificed.  We’ve followed.  We’ve served.  We’ve prayed.  Now you’ve made them equal to us.”  But those who obeyed the gospel long ago are to persevere in their duties in order to make their callings and elections sure, not to deserve what they already have. When the owner paid the workers, he didn’t give them what they deserved.  He never promised to give them what they deserved.  He promised to give them what is right.  What is right derives from God’s righteousness, not our perseverance.  When we go into the Lord’s vineyard he blesses us according to his righteousness, not according to what we deserve.

Any time you want to have it out with God and complain about your lot in life this is an important point to keep in mind.  Tearing into God once in a while is a good thing.  I recommend it for your mental health and your spiritual well-being.  God doesn’t mind.  He’s not going to hear anything he hasn’t heard before.  But remember one thing: when you pour out your complaints before God, you can say many things.  You can tell him you hurt.  You can tell him you’re tired.  You can tell him you’re scared.  You can tell him you’re confused.  You can tell him you’re frustrated.  You can tell him you’re angry.  But consider well, fellow recoverer: never tell God you deserve better than you got.  He never gives his own what we deserve, and we can all be thankful for that.

17.  Always Give Thanks for a Soft Heart

While the word of God is good news, its effect on those who reject it is never neutral, but very substantially detrimental.  This is not God’s desired outcome, nor that of our invitation to the world to “Come.”  “For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To the one we are the aroma of death leading to death, and to the other the aroma of life leading to life” (2 Corinthians 2:15).  As much as we desire that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9), the word of God hardens those who reject it.  This hardening is a very real fruit of his word.  Paul was used of God this way in Acts 19:8-9,

And he went into the synagogue and spoke boldly for three months, reasoning and persuading concerning the things of the kingdom of God. But when some were hardened and did not believe, but spoke evil of the Way before the multitude, he departed from them and withdrew the disciples, reasoning daily in the school of Tyrannus.

The word of God therefore brings its own authority of condemnation, for the Lord declares regarding it, “It shall not return to me void.”  The good news can potentially be very bad news for those who disobey it. One of the greatest blessings of my recovery was that God preserved my heart in a condition soft enough to respond to him in repentance when he exposed my sin.  I am grateful every day for his incredible patience and forbearing toward me.

18.  Don't Climb God's Mountain If You Want Your Own Streams to Run to Their Confluence

Now the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning.  Job 42:12

The reader learns the grand design of Job’s trial, but Job does not.  So it is with us. The man in recovery will not be given the larger logic of his serpentine course through life.  He will be guided not by a map, but by a pillar of fire and cloud.

It is a deceptive trap to seek consolation for life’s ambiguities through nursing the expectation that they will ultimately distil down to a concise, satisfying apology.   Only a fool believes that at any moment he will round that ‘Aha!’ corner that affords him a strategic view of all the strands and scraps of his life arranged into some conciliatory design of divine appeasement.

Those who desire to live where the smaller streams have converged into a single, well-defined channel must go downhill.  But the one who would follow Jesus from the dark valley to the sunlit heights must realize that the streams will not run to their confluence in that direction, but branch into innumerable, intermittent rivulets.  He will gain a wider view of the land, but will only discern his own trail on it a few steps ahead.  He will not be his journey’s master, but its servant.

The Book of Job began as a story about Job, but ended as a story about God. In the same way, as the man in recovery proceeds through his healing, he will see his story become more about Jesus and less about himself. This is inevitable because Jesus must be exalted in all things.

19.  Repentance as a Change of Attitude

Repentance is not changing my behavior, although that will be its result.  It is submitting to God’s transformation of my outlook from seeing him as my adversary to regarding him as my benefactor.  For the man in recovery, it means laying down all self-justification; it means ceasing from rebellion against a universe beyond his comprehension.  Ultimately, it means accepting the fact that God formed me from nothing and that this is his world, not mine.

20.  The Essence of Faith

The Lord your God, he is God in heaven above and on earth beneath. Now therefore, I beg you, swear to me by the Lord, since I have shown you kindness, that you also will show kindness to my father’s house, and give me a true token, and spare my father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters, and all that they have, and deliver our lives from death. Joshua 2:11, 13

We see in Rahab’s salvation two essential elements common to all confessions of faith—the assurance that the Lord is God in heaven above and on earth beneath, and that he will deliver me from death, despite my having no idea how he will do so.  Faith never requires any more than this.

Faith means confessing who God is.  It is not a confession of who I am, what I have done or left undone, or what I will do.  Nor is it a confession of the means, the rationale or the basis of God’s deliverance.  Rahab’s faith received the spies as emissaries of the gospel when she had every rational reason to expose them as agents of destruction.  Faith must always see as Rahab saw—perceiving with spiritual eyes that the Lord has brought deliverance to me this day and I must embrace it.

21.  Believing in Jesus is Simple, but It’s Not Easy

It is fashionable today to dismiss the alleged “easiness” of believing in Jesus and side exclusively with James who declares, “Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” Some evangelicals would go so far as to assert that a confession of faith is hardly more than an ethereal potentiality that may advance to saving efficacy if a solid demonstration of committed discipleship follows.

We must resist this kind of one-sidedness in our theology because God sets before us many opposing truths that will not be reconciled on this side of eternity.  God predetermines my path, but also calls me to choose my way.  Money is a blessing, yet the love of money is the root of all evil.  We are to judge wisely, but we are also warned to judge not.  A Christian is a saint as well as a sinner.  Our task is not to fuse these perplexing opposites, but to grapple with them and allow their tensions to stand.  It is in our wrestling with these difficult counterpoints that the Holy Spirit teaches us how to work out God’s wisdom in the real situations of our lives.  In the same way, we must endure the tension of the Bible teaching simultaneously that God gives eternal life to all who believe and also that perseverance in good works will prove that belief to be genuine.

Jesus condemned Capernaum not because it failed to follow an initial repentance with works, but for its refusal to believe in him.

And behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus. And when they saw Him, they begged Him to depart from their region.  (Matthew 8:34)

And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, will be brought down to Hades; for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I say to you that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you. (Matthew 11:23-24)

Our natural sense of justice is offended by this verdict.  For on the surface it seems clear that Sodom is guilty of far greater sins.  And yet Jesus renders exactly the opposite of the expected judgment: that it shall be more tolerable for Sodom in that final day.  This passage speaks of God's judgment on two classes of unregenerate people: Sodom which persisted in its carnality to the limit of God’s patience, and Capernaum which was guilty of the volitional sin of unbelief.

Sodom was a cesspool of depravity and sexual perversion. The Bible tells us that the men of Sodom were exceedingly wicked and sinful against the Lord.  In contrast, Capernaum was a fairly respectable city much like many communities we could imagine today.  They upheld God’s basic moral principles, held his name in respect and were, in most respects, a religious people. But what distinguishes Capernaum is the fact that the city had the privilege of seeing more miracles and works of Jesus than any other city.  It is in this sense that Capernaum was exalted up to heaven.  Capernaum became the central point of the ministry of Jesus and many of His miracles occurred in or near the city, including numerous healings: Peter's mother-in-law, the centurion's servant, a paralyzed man, and the casting out of demons. The feeding of the 4,000 occurred nearby, as did many other miracles. They witnessed these miracles of Jesus; they saw their friends, neighbors, and relatives healed of diseases, but they refused to believe. They grew offended and indifferent to their visitation and begged Jesus to depart from their region.

When we consider these two cities side by side, our sympathies lie with Capernaum as being the more righteous.  We are startled accordingly when we hear Jesus’ judgment: that Sodom will fare better than Capernaum; that Sodom was better soil than Capernaum; that, if Sodom had the measure of revelation given to Capernaum, the city would have repented and believed. The lesson here is God’s judgment upon unbelief.  There is nothing that brings God’s wrath so readily as unbelief, and unbelief in the face of great opportunity is all the more condemning.  It is fundamental to God’s principles of judgment that he holds the informed more liable than the ignorant.  Judgment is more severe for those who should have known better than for those who live in darkness.

So let us consider carefully how we toss around the terms “easy believism” and “cheap grace.”  There is nothing “easy” about the fallen man’s struggle to overcome his perverse and corrupt heart that works tirelessly to break down his faith.  Taking nothing away from the importance of the concrete steps a man must take in recovery, God takes very seriously the decision he makes in his heart to believe, for the proverb tells us, “as he thinks in his heart, so is he.”

22.  The Most Fertile Soil for Recovery

Nevertheless the gloom will not be upon her who is distressed,

As when at first He lightly esteemed

The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,

And afterward more heavily oppressed her,

By the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan,

In Galilee of the Gentiles.

The people who walked in darkness

Have seen a great light;

Those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,

Upon them a light has shined.  Isaiah 9:1-2

The Galileans were a throw-away people, a people Jerusalem’s upper classes deemed to have no value.  Isaiah calls them a people heavily oppressed, a people walking in darkness.  But God sent the light of his Son to the people who walked in darkness.  As the setting for the ministry of Jesus, Galilee would become the cradle of our Christian tradition.  Jerusalem could not have received the ministry of Jesus.  Jerusalem was the city that killed the prophets.  The comfortable, the complacent and the satisfied have little appetite for God’s light.  It is too penetrating, too disturbing, too revealing.  God’s light exposes the inflated and distorted impressions they have of themselves.

Those peoples who have walked in the deepest darkness are the most responsive to the light of Christ.  Most westerners would be surprised to hear that the church is growing faster today than at any time in its 2,000 year history.  But we don’t see it because this growth is occurring in the developing world.  Europe and North America are not experiencing this expansion because we have not walked in their darkness.

In his book, The Next Christendom, Penn State professor Philip Jenkins documents the explosion of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  He observes, "Christianity is flourishing wonderfully among the poor and persecuted, while it atrophies among the rich and secure.  The centers of the church [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, [and] New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa and Manila.”  The developing world is the Galilee of the 21st century, while the west appears more like Jerusalem: smug in its own superiority and religious heritage.

The cultures of the developing world were the throw-away peoples of Western civilization 100 years ago.  We used these peoples to build our cities, prepare our meals and carry our burdens.  They were the “inferior” races, fit only to be the servants of the dominant European culture.  We wrote our laws to exclude them from full participation in our society and keep them in the lower places we had allotted to them.  But God has now placed them in the ascendancy.  They will be teaching the West about the things of God.

The spiritual progress of the body of Christ always begins at the bottom and filters upward; never the other way around.  Those who are secure, confident and stable at the top of the pyramid do not have the desperation and hunger to perceive the movement of the Spirit.  It is the powerless who advance the church.  They cry out to God in their weakness and helplessness because no one else will hear their voices.

It is an uncomfortable reality that our spiritual formation comes not through our rest, but through our weariness; not through our relief, but through our pain; not through our comfort, but through our distress.  We spend our lives pursuing rest, relief and comfort.  God grants us these in their proper measures, but they will not form us: either in our characters or in our spirits. We seek shelter from those very forces that bring forth the wisdom, patience, and endurance that God desires to instil in us.  But without our descent into darkness, we would not be able to recognize God when he comes to us.  Like Jerusalem, we would look for someone else and miss the time of our visitation.

Darkness is sometimes the most fertile soil for recovery.

23.  The Gospel Is Light, but It’s Not Heat

Light has no residual effect.  It is not the same as heat.  If you stop adding firewood to a hot woodstove, it will still provide heat for some time afterward.  But when light is removed, it is dark immediately.  If someone walks into a room five seconds after you turn off the light, he will not know the light was ever on.  We see this principle in effect in Israel’s history.

Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of a hundred and ten…. After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. They forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them…. Unlike their fathers, they quickly turned from the way in which their fathers had walked, the way of obedience to the Lord's commands (Joshua 24, Judges 2).

Once the teaching of the law fell by the wayside, Israel quickly turned from the way in which their fathers had walked.  In the same way, this current generation born in the last twenty or thirty years is unaware of centuries of Christian heritage and Christian influence because Western society switched the light off before they arrived.

Christian morality has a shelf life of one generation. If the parents depart from the light, the children will continue in the form of religion out of habit.  But the grandchildren will not follow in the example of their parents because light has no residual effect.   This was precisely what our culture went through in the late 60’s.  If we go back to the early decades of the last century, the grandparents grew up in church-going, Bible-reading, homes, but they did not continue these practices in raising their own children. This next generation, the generation that fought through World War II, continued in the form and morality of their parents’ religion.  When their children, the baby boomers, came of age, they rejected the law of their parents and the counter-culture revolution turned our society upside down.  The light went out in one generation.  Their parents were dumbfounded.  “What happened?  Why are you treating us this way?”  The accusation from their children was predictable: “Hypocrites!  You demand that we keep the law even though you have rejected the substance and source of that law.”

This generational progression illustrates the principle that darkness is only the absence of light.  Darkness is not a thing in itself.  It is has no substance or definition of its own accord. People only know darkness where they can contrast it with light. It is far healthier to see your recovery as a journey into light, not a desperate escape from darkness.  You will not be able to strip away all the vestiges and tracks of your sins by trying to run from their darkness.  Run to the light. Return to the Lord and the darkness will not be able to endure his glory.

24.  The Secret of Staying on God’s Freeway

Good theology is like good nutrition.  The basic conclusion doesn’t change: eating mostly the right things and minimizing the wrong things will keep one reasonably healthy and lead to a long and profitable life.  Of course, some people take their diets much more seriously than this and scrutinize every gram of food that enters their mouths against the most current nutritional findings.  Certainly there is some incremental value in this, but the returns are diminishing.  One could argue that the time spent researching, buying, and preparing the nutritionally-perfect diet exceeds the time added to one’s lifespan by doing so.  Most people just can’t be bothered with such detail and their health does not visibly suffer.  We haven’t become a fat society through failing to keep up to date with the latest research, but through tossing the two-pound bag of Oreos into the cart.

In the same way, the essentials of the faith don’t change.  Some theological battles are necessary and must be re-fought every generation.  But the bulk of our theological exercises tend toward the obscure and controversial.  We’re attracted by the thrill of the chase rather than the meat that goes into the freezer.

Poor theological method is overrated as a source of spiritual error.  People don’t go astray in their hearts because they honestly interpret the odd Bible passage wrongly.  God has so designed the Bible that the most important things we need to know are stated over and over again in a variety of ways.  People go astray because they wilfully drive through the “WRONG WAY” signs on the freeway.  They go astray because of the faulty presuppositions they defiantly bring to the Bible before they ever open it:

         That God doesn’t interact with history

         That the moral content of the Bible only reflects the cultural biases of primitive peoples

         That miracles don’t happen

         That ancient editors and compilers have scrambled the original teachings of the Bible beyond recovery

         That modern readers can write off as myth that which is presented as fact

         That the reader is free to decide “what it means to me”

         That God is an unreasonable and hard taskmaster.

God hasn’t restricted access to his truth to the theologically astute, nor made it too difficult for the willing heart to find it.

For this commandment which I command you today is not too mysterious for you, nor is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend into heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it (Deuteronomy 30: 11-14).

Just don’t drive through the “WRONG WAY” signs anymore.

25.  God’s Judgment is Our Arrival at a Destination We’ve Already Chosen

Therefore once more I accuse you, says the Lord, and I accuse your children's children. Jeremiah 2:9

It occurs to me that popular religion sometimes holds God up to a very different standard than we do each other or to many general principles we recognize to be true.  We expect parents to correct their children and channel them into proper behavior.  We expect our elected leaders to rebuke corruption, injustice, and to enforce that which is right.   We expect our closest friends to speak to us honestly if we’re heading down the wrong path.  And yet we observe a common sentiment that a proper view of God can only speak of blind acceptance, unconditional approval, absence of judgment, silent assent, and the universal inclusion of every thought and behavior.  It is a belief that defies everything we know about society and ourselves.   If we heard a parent speak this way about raising children we would write that person off as a flake.

This raises the matter of the nature of God’s judgment.  Much of God’s judgment is built into the laws of creation.  If we eat at McDonalds three times a day (as a recent movie demonstrated) we will gain weight and get sick.  Is this judgment?  It is in the sense that God’s judgment is very often our arrival at a destination we have already chosen.

It is a good thing to be accused by God.  We are fortunate that he has not left us to our own devices and opinions.  For God accuses us that he might make right in us those things that are bent and broken, that he might strengthen that which is weak, that he might heal that which is injured, that he might see each of us reach the full potential for which he has created us.  The accusations of God are not mean or hurtful.  Their purpose is to show us truth and reality.  “Here is who you really are.  Here is where you hurt and here is where you are deficient.  I can make you well.”

When we examine the life and ministry of Jesus, we cannot find one encounter where he passed up an opportunity to accuse a sinner.  Now we would probably not think of these interactions as accusations because of the manner, the tone, the attitude, and the intent he brought to the encounter.

Indeed, what would we think of God if he did not accuse us?  What would we think of a father who silently allowed his children to run after misguided, dysfunctional behaviors to their own destruction and never uttered a word of correction or rebuke?  And yet the popular notion persists today that, for some strange reason, God should be a spineless milksop having no opinion on anything.

God’s Accusations are:

         Without preference to persons

         Righteous and true

         Objective and unchanging

         With a view to our restoration and healing

26.  The Most Important Element in Your Recovery

But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul;

All those who hate me love death.  Proverbs 8:36

A significant question in addressing compulsive addictions is learning whether the captive wants to live.  Jesus said “If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” This potentiality allows that there are those who will not eat of it, for starvation and hunger are not the same thing.  A starving man’s hunger will gradually dissipate and he will seek his relief in death, not food.  His most pressing need is an appetite, not a map giving him directions to the dining room.  The darkened, addicted brain is bent on self-destruction.  The proverb tells us it loves death.   Job well summarizes the solace it hopes to find in death:

There the wicked cease from troubling,

And there the weary are at rest.

There the prisoners rest together;

They do not hear the voice of the oppressor.

The small and great are there,

And the servant is free from his master.

Why is light given to him who is in misery,

And life to the bitter of soul,

Who long for death, but it does not come,

And search for it more than hidden treasures;

Who rejoice exceedingly,

And are glad when they can find the grave? Job 3:17-22

In this respect, the critical issue in the captive’s recovery is not whether he understands how his sin has killed him, but whether he wants to live.

We may contemplate the precise content our recovery strategy should contain, but such detached analysis must not ignore the suicidal perversity of the human heart.  If a man is unwilling to mitigate the curse of death he can see hovering over his soul, no further elaboration of his self-destructive habits will have any greater effect. The addict fails to embrace Christ not because of his ignorance of what steps his recovery requires, but for lack of a will to live.

If you can find someone who wants to live, releasing him from the bondage of death is a breeze.  Such a man recently became a Christian in the Haida village where we live.  Jack came to us in a state of absolute terror.  Over the previous two weeks, he had been assaulted by visions of demons chasing him and threatening him.  He saw his hands and feet changing into claws in the shower.  He didn’t know what was happening, but feared for his very life.  He told his neighbor who attends our Bible study and she said, “Oh, I think you better see the Frasers.”  After hearing his story and praying over him, I asked him if he saw anything while we prayed.  He said he saw demons trying to grab him and pull him into a pit.  I asked him if he knew who Jesus was and he said he didn’t.  I simply told him Jesus was the Son of God who came down to earth to offer eternal life to everyone who believed in him.  I added that Jesus had authority over all these demons and could command them to never come near him again.  I then asked Jack if he would like to believe in Jesus for eternal life and live with him forever.  “Leading” Jack to Christ was hardly the right word for what happened next.  We had to be careful not to get knocked over as Jack ran into the Kingdom.  Jack has lived victoriously with no further oppression ever since.

When the Father draws a man to him and gives him a will to live, he doesn’t need much more convincing to believe in Jesus.  A genuinely hungry man doesn’t care about the fine print on the menu. From the moment God exposed my sin, I knew I wanted to live—not just a dull shadow of the life I could have had forty years earlier, but the life abundant Jesus promised.  I believe today that the most important element in my recovery is still that fervent desire.

27.  Resist Blending God’s Perfections into a Manageable Package

Therefore consider the goodness and severity of God: on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise you also will be cut off. Romans 11:22

Reason always strives to synthesize God’s perfections into a manageable middle ground.  It pulls holiness down within practical reach and grades sin on a curve.  It would both temper his goodness and constrain his severity.  It qualifies God’s promises and pacifies his warnings.

So in this matter of repentance, reason is offended that God will absolutely forget ten thousand days of sins forsaken, but would rain destruction on a single sin retained one day too long. The man in recovery must fully accept both of God’s attitudes toward sin: unconditional forgiveness and absolute intolerance. He must live in daily thanksgiving that God has revived him from a living death, but also live in holy fear of the prospect of ever repeating his folly.

Keep both God’s goodness and his severity fully intact. Resist the temptation to appease one with the other.

28.  What If I Had Obeyed?

So he looked this way and that way, and when he saw no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. Exodus 2:12

Understand that God has seen your sins from before the foundation of the world.  He did not author them, or approve of them; yet he has accounted for them in his counsels and will coordinate the delays they bring with other plans he is unfolding

It is a mystery beyond comprehension that our sins fit into the tapestry of his designs. God did not condone the murder Moses committed, but it led directly to the forty years of preparation Moses required in the desert. Moses could not have led Israel until the desert brought him to terms with the failure of his flesh to deliver Israel.

God sometimes coordinates the delays our sins cause with his preparation of other servants. Peter’s hypocrisy (Galatians 2:11-13) delayed the integration of Jews with Gentiles until Paul was full prepared for that ministry.

God may use the delays our sins cause to address an approaching crisis we cannot foretell using our natural senses. The sins of Joseph’s brothers put his life on hold for several years, but coordinated his exaltation with Egypt’s seven years of famine (Genesis 41:29).

You can’t undo yesterday or control tomorrow. Don’t overanalyze the circumstances and timing of your past sins, but walk humbly in the repentance God has granted you today. In retrospect, you will be able to trace the roles of both your past rebellion and your present obedience.

29.  Your Trials Are Not Punishment

Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you; but rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ's sufferings, that when His glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy. 1 Peter 4:12-13

It is important for the man in recovery to realize that a number of spiritual processes—trials among them—will continue in the immediate aftermath of his repentance and restoration.  God does not suspend his sanctification of the whole disciple during that period when he is recovering from his own disobedient choices. Peter tells us not to be surprised by our trials, and this admonition applies especially to the recovering addict.  The man in recovery may think that God is “turning up the heat” to punish him, but this is most definitely not the case.

When trials come, we think something’s out of alignment with my particular situation.  It is much easier to speak of rejoicing in trials when we consider trials generally, but trials never come to us generally.  They come to each one of us and to our friends and families very personally and painfully.  Many of you suffer from broken hearts over family members who are in terrible distress.  Some of you are afflicted in your bodies and struggle with severe pain daily.  Some of you wonder why great questions in your lives go unanswered for so long.  “How long, O Lord must I cry out to you and receive only silence?

Does God not hear?  Does He not care?  Sometimes we think that God is just too busy with great and important issues to get around to my problems.  Or perhaps because of my long disobedience I don’t deserve the relief I cry out for.  But none of these ideas are correct.  God does hear and he does care.  When God called Moses at the burning bush, He immediately told Moses: "I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows.”  In fact, God had known and watched their trials for 400 years: from the time of Joseph to the time of Moses.  He knew exactly what they were enduring and he knew exactly how he was going to deliver them.

But God had a purpose for Israel that could not be accomplished any other way.  He was building a nation that would be a light to all nations.  And this nation could only be brought forth out of the furnace of Egypt.  Now 400 years seems like an awfully long time.  Yet if God had delivered His people after only a generation or two, there would have been no Israel.  In God’s perfect wisdom, Israel’s incubation period was 400 years.  During each of those 400 years God saw their pain and suffering.  Yet he had a greater purpose for the nation than answering its prayers for deliverance immediately.

Peter tells us that God brings our fiery trial upon us to try us.  His purpose is to melt us down, burn off the impurities and mold us into new creatures.  This new person can only be forged in the furnace of our fiery trial.  From our viewpoint, trials are horrible, annoying experiences.  They take the pleasure out of life, waste our valuable time, and certainly seem unfitting if God really loves us as he says he does.  It seems like I could be much more useful to God if he would lift these burdens that keep me down.  I don’t like this thing that’s happening to me, I’ve asked God to remove it from my life, and yet on and on it goes.  God, who created the entire the universe out of nothing, has not given me relief from my trial.

But God is doing a new thing in each of our lives that requires the fiery trial.  This is God’s purpose and this is his priority.  One of the most difficult things to learn as a Christian is that my personal comfort and security is not God’s priority.  In fact, just the opposite is true.  God works to provide just the right amount of discomfort and uncertainty in my life so that I will look to him each day for my needs.  For without trials we become independent, self-sufficient, immovable, and useless for God’s purposes.  Our goal in Christian discipleship is to develop this same mind as Christ:  where we come to understand that God’s purposes requires that we endure the pain, stress, and discomfort of trials.  Let’s review five things that help us to bear trials.

First, trials are easier to bear when they are expected. Peter tells us, “Do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you.”  He says do not think it strange because we do think it strange.  We think our trials are going to be fewer, shorter, and less painful than our sanctification requires them to be.  Then when trials come at us one after another and overstay their welcome we think something is wrong.  We think something is very much out of order.  The Christian who expects to have fewer trials than before he was saved is going to be upset when his trials increase.

Peter says in verse 17, “For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God.”  It is a peculiar arrangement of God’s schedule that he has chosen to begin the cleansing of his creation not with the world, but with his own house.  The day of God’s judgment on the world is coming, but that judgment has already begun with us to purge the corruption and worldliness from our lives.  When the day of the Lord comes, God is going to destroy the world with fire.  That fire is going to burn away everything that is corrupt, everything that is impure, everything that is in rebellion against his holy nature.  In his second letter Peter describes it this way: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up” (2 Peter 3:10).

But in this age, God has already begun this purification with his own people.   When the Holy Spirit descended on the church at Pentecost, he rested on each of the apostles as tongues of fire.  In this way God showed his intent to set aside a people unto himself through fire.  So in our trials, we are subjected to that very fire of judgment that will one day consume the heavens and the earth. We may sometimes become frustrated that God is not judging the world during this age.  They are enjoying life, heaping up riches for themselves, making themselves secure and comfortable.  God is not trying them.  But if you are in Christ, you are already in God’s furnace.  He is purifying His church to present it to himself spotless and blameless.

Second, trials are easier to bear when we understand their purpose. Peter says that the fiery trial is to try you.  Its purpose is to burn away all the impurities of the flesh in order that we become more like Jesus.  Jesus is the ultimate football coach.  He is the marine drill sergeant.  He is the most demanding teacher you ever had.  He is all these things rolled into one.  His purpose with trials is to turn us into submissive disciples fit for his use.  Without trials we can’t become who we need to become.  He does not say, “As many as I love I commend,” but, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten.”  If we are to grow into our full potential in Jesus, it is more important that we discover our weaknesses than our strengths.

Enduring trials is exactly like baking cookies.  Cookie dough doesn’t turn into cookies by sitting on the kitchen counter at room temperature.  It doesn’t become cookies until it is tried in the fire. We become mature disciples through God’s measured stress and discomfort.  God always measures our trials.  Sometimes it feels like we’ve been in the oven too long, but God never allows this to happen.  He removes the stress of our trial exactly when he intends to.  1 Corinthians 10:13 says, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.”

As I said above, trials are not God’s punishments for our sins.  Jesus absorbed the entire penalty for sin when he died on the cross and we can add nothing to the price he paid.  Sometimes we sin against God and a fiery trial follows right afterward.  It is easy to think that God is punishing me for that sin.  Men in recovery can easily surmise: “Well, I know that I really let God down.  I’ve just got to endure this trial until God is satisfied that I’ve suffered enough.”  God never punishes us for our sins, although our acts of rebellion certainly bring misery and trouble into our lives.

Beware of the error you will hear in some circles today that an obedient Christian never has to suffer trials.  There are deceivers in the body of Christ today who teach that a Christian can end any trial immediately simply by claiming victory over it. They falsely teach that a Christian who is unable to end his trial commits the sin of unbelief.  But James tells us, “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing” (James 1:2-4).  God has a perfect work he intends to complete in our trial and he will not end it before his own appointed time.

Neither is a trial a puzzle we are to solve and then God will end it. “I must be stupid.  God is trying to teach me something and if I would only learn the lesson then the trial would end.”  We think it strange that our trial goes on and on.  What is wrong with me that God does not bring relief?  We need to remember that many Christians in past ages and today have lived under severe oppression their whole lives.  They have suffered political violence, poverty, illness, homelessness and saw no relief in this life.  Yet they loved Jesus and rejoiced daily to partake in his sufferings.  Trials almost always last longer than we think is necessary.  But Peter tells us: do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial.  Our trial is not a riddle where God will bring relief when we find the answer.  It is his ongoing plan for us.  It is his holy furnace to try our souls and conform us to the radiance of his glory.

Third, trials are easier to bear when we bear them together. All Christians endure trials.  Realize that your brothers and sisters are enduring their trials as well.  Sometimes we think that everyone else is doing just fine and I am the only one who is suffering. My particular trial seems like the most agonizing experience that anyone could possibly endure.  Hebrews 10:24-25 exhorts us, “And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.”

Each of our trials is different.  God designs tailor-made trials for each one of us, exactly the ones we need to turn us into the people he wants us to be.  Sometimes when we see what our brother or sister is enduring we think that isn’t so bad.  I would rather have his trial than mine.  But that’s exactly why God gave you yours: to purify you the way he intends. Two reasons why we come together in fellowship: to learn how other people have endured my particular trial and to comfort people who are suffering in an area where I am strong.

Fourth, trials are easier to bear when we realize that Jesus has preceded us in each one.  Think of all the ways Christ suffered.  He was ridiculed by his own people for the things that he stood for.  He was betrayed by friends that he trusted.  He was falsely accused of wrong when he only did right.  He had no permanent home of his own, but wandered from place to place.  Finally, he was tortured and murdered because society could not bear the intense light of his righteousness.

If you can identify with some of these trials, then consider that Jesus has walked before you.  Hebrews 4:15 says, "For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin."  He is bringing you through this same furnace to make you more like himself, that more and more, you will have the mind of Christ.  Peter calls us to rejoice that we partake in Christ’s sufferings.  Rejoice that he is afflicting those things in you that must die in order that those things in you that will live forever can be purified.

Fifth, trials are easier to bear when we rejoice.  Peter tells us to rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ's sufferings. People rejoice when the cookies come out of the oven, not because of what the cookies endured in their trial, but because of what they have now become.  Every trial you endure makes you more like Jesus.  Every trial you endure makes the flesh weaker and the spirit stronger.  Resist the temptation to say, “I will get on with life when my trial passes.”  For trials and idleness do not mix well.  God best comforts us when we are going about his business in this world.

Finally, understand that the best medicine for the man in recovery will often be that outreach that gets his eyes off of his own difficulties. Comfort those who mourn.  Wipe away each other’s tears.  Ask God to deliver us from our trials because in his perfect timing he will surely do it.  And finally, do whatever thing God gives you to do today, even while your trial continues.

30.  Don’t Focus On Your Recovery 24/7

If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. John 13:14

Genesis 18 describes how three desert travelers visited Abraham at his tent.  It is the Lord himself accompanied by two angels.  But just as Jesus concealed his identity from the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Abraham perceives only these travel-weary sojourners.  Following the tradition of the ancient Near East, Abraham offers them the customary hospitality presented to visitors: a comfortable place to rest, water to wash the dust from their feet and a freshly-prepared meal.  Abraham is a man of great means with many flocks and herds and over 300 servants.  And so it is also customary that he makes a prominent display his status and wealth and put these at the disposal of his guests.

He directs a servant to bring water for their feet.  He selects a good and tender calf and orders another servant to prepare it immediately.  He dispatches Sarah to the kitchen to whip up some baking. (Abraham was not well versed on his gender equality theology, but he was 100 years old and lived 4,000 years ago so perhaps we can forgive him on this point.) Abraham is a magnificent host in every way.  We can find no fault in his generosity or in his attention to the needs of his guests.  But in all this, Abraham did only what was expected and what many men of means and influence would have done.

In John 13, we find the story of another foot washing. The differences found in these two accounts teach us a great deal about our call to service in Christ and the true source of our power for our healing. Both Abraham and Jesus rendered services of hospitality to their guests.  Abraham did that which was expected, but Jesus did that which was entirely unexpected and calls us to follow in his example.  It is this lesson that we are to apply to all our affairs as we go into this world in the name of Christ.

When we consider Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet, we must not overlook the fact that this is his last evening with them.  His disciples’ heads were filled with dreams of grandeur, all the lofty things they would accomplish, and puffed-up impressions of their own importance.  So what does Jesus teach them?  He doesn’t stress the importance of great and powerful preaching.  He doesn’t emphasize the great faith necessary to perform miracles or heal the sick.  He doesn’t call them to summon up the courage to offer themselves as martyrs for the faith.  But instead he washes their feet to teach them the importance of humble servanthood in accomplishing God’s work.  Jesus went to the trouble to act out this parable on the last night he would be with his disciples.  He saw this lesson as being of utmost importance.  Let’s see several points about this passage.

The first thing we should see is that Jesus poured the water after the meal.  The water should have been poured before the meal was served.  This was the obligation of the host in ancient Israel.  The host would pour water into the basin so that the guests could wash the dust of the streets off their feet before the meal started.  But the job had been neglected.  The disciples were certainly aware of this omission, but no one had volunteered to do it.  They were more concerned about what seats they got at the table than in taking the servant’s role of pouring the water.  In Luke’s account of this meal, he tells us that the disciples were busy arguing over who would be more important in the new government Jesus would set up.  So instead of reclining after the meal as he might have expected, Jesus attended to this duty that no one else had been willing to do.

Christian service will require that we interrupt our schedules.  It will interrupt what we plan to do in the next ten minutes and it will interrupt what we plan to do with the rest of our lives.  One of the patterns of Jesus' ministry is that it often appeared to have no pattern.  He went from place to place, changing direction without warning, somehow knowing when to stop at a certain place and minister to a certain person or town.  He did what he saw his Father doing, just as we are to do what we see our Father doing.

This is an especially difficult discipline for those of us, like me, who are primarily task oriented rather than people oriented.  It is very easy for me to become so focused on my plans and schedule that I ignore the opportunity the Lord puts before me right now.  Task-oriented people are concerned with schedules, planning, appointments, being on time and meeting stated objectives.  Task-oriented people are a real value to the church just as long as you don’t get too many of them in the room at the same time.  They’re very useful in keeping things moving along and keeping the church pointed in the right direction.  Jesus may have rebuked Martha, but I’m sure they all enjoyed the dinner she cooked.

Task-oriented people are contrasted with people-oriented people.  People-oriented people forget everything else they were doing when they encounter a human need.  For a people-oriented person, a deadline is a telephone with no dial tone. They have tremendous spiritual discernment about what’s going on with the people they meet.  They understand how people are hurting, what needs to be done, what needs to be said and they will quickly drop whatever they were doing to address that need.  Task-oriented people, like me, tend to get impatient with people-oriented people because they cannot stick to a single objective. They move from one task to another without finishing anything and they never have any idea what time it is.  But people-oriented people understand one critical truth that Jesus demonstrates in this lesson: that Christian service is all about our plans being interrupted.

We are familiar with the Great Commission in Matthew 28: “Go ye…”  But the grammatical construction here is actually the present participle, not the imperative tense and is better understood, “As you go.”  The meaning here is that Christian service is to be an attitude of life, not a formal program separated from my regular daily affairs.  An airplane ticket won’t give me a servant heart.  If I am not in Christian service in the normal, everyday context of my life, I won’t be transformed by traveling halfway around the world.

The second point I want us to see is that Jesus removed the outer garments that signified his respected office of rabbi.  He removed these robes and wrapped around his waist the towel that was worn by the lowest house servant.  Whereas Abraham exercised his authority to direct his servant to bring water, Jesus took the very form of a servant.  God will often call us to service that is beneath our station or rightful office.

We will sometimes have the greatest spiritual impact serving in a way that fails to recognize our strengths, our experience and our status.  Now God bestows on his servants specific callings and offices along with the abilities to carry out those callings.  And we are certainly to recognize those callings in the church.  But God will occasionally say to us, “Friend, I have a special job for you today.  It has nothing to do with your regular job description and I know you had important plans, but you’re the one I’ve chose to take care of this matter.”  The disciples were horrified when Jesus removed his robes to wash their feet, but this was a lesson they needed to learn.

The third point is that Jesus washed their feet personally instead of merely preparing the water.  While it was customary for a host to provide water for foot washing, it was not expected that he would actually wash the guests’ feet.  If Jesus had only risen and poured the water, he still would have made his point about servanthood.  But he continued on and washed their feet.  Our service brings the greatest glory to the Lord when we go beyond what would normally be expected.  (Why are you doing all this for me?)

The final thing I want to point out about the foot-washing lesson is the fact that Jesus knew that Judas was about to betray him.  Jesus makes a point of rendering humble service to his enemy who was about to betray him to death.  Proverbs 25:21 reads, “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; And if he is thirsty, give him water to drink; For so you will heap coals of fire on his head, And the Lord will reward you.” Abraham offered hospitality that was due to his visitors as esteemed emissaries of the Lord.  In our Christian service, we are to make a special point of ministering to our enemies, both our personal enemies and the enemies of Christ.  In doing so, we will break the curse and blindness that is on them.  Acts of humble service toward our enemies are essential in defeating the true enemy.

Jesus did not tell us to serve our enemies because it’s nice or proper or the spiritual thing to do.  But he tells us to live this way because there is healing power in it.  Jesus did not die on the cross because it was a beautiful picture of self-sacrifice and Christian virtue.  He did it because that was how he broke the power of sin holding us captive and won us back to himself.

This is the lesson of foot washing: that there is healing power in humble servant hood.  Jesus has shown us the way to transform the world:

         Pray for those who persecute you

         If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two

         Love your enemies

         Do good to those who hate you

         Bless those who curse you

         Give to everyone who asks you

         If your enemy is hungry, feed him.

These are hard things to which our Lord calls us: to allow our plans to be interrupted, to serve others below our abilities, to go the extra mile beyond what expected, and to minister to our enemies.  They are not hard because the individual acts of service are especially difficult.  They are hard because the run cross grain to our natural sense of justice and propriety.  We want to serve those who have earned that service and are deserving of it. But the breaking of sin, both the world’s and our own will be accomplished by walking as Jesus walked rather than focusing on our own recovery all day all the time.

31.  The Six Kinds of Faith

And there was a certain nobleman whose son was sick at Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had come out of Judea into Galilee, he went to Him and implored Him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Then Jesus said to him, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will by no means believe.” The nobleman said to Him, “Sir, come down before my child dies!” Jesus said to him, “Go your way; your son lives.” So the man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him, and he went his way. And as he was now going down, his servants met him and told him, saying, “Your son lives!” Then he inquired of them the hour when he got better. And they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” So the father knew that it was at the same hour in which Jesus said to him, “Your son lives.” And he himself believed, and his whole household. John 4:46-53

In our recovery from addiction, we will at times need to exercise different kinds of faith.

1: Seeking faith. Sometimes faith takes the form of searching without knowing what I’m looking for.  The nobleman was desperate, “Maybe the man who turned water into wine can help me.” His need led him to take a considerable journey to find out. In recovery, we often do not know what we need, what our next steps should be, or who can best help us. Seeking faith pursues God’s help in such uncertainty.  Other journeys of uncertainty are Abraham (Genesis 12:1), Jacob’s sons (Genesis 42:2), the Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10), and the Magi (Matthew 2:1).

2: Faith for my immediate perceived need. “Come and heal my son!” Recovery will often encounter specific hurdles that occupy our entire field of vision.  This faith does not take in the larger picture, but focuses on the problem I see before me right here, right now. It is an especially childlike faith.

3: Faith for what I have already seen. “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will by no means believe.” Sometimes all we can do is ask God to do what I have already seen in the way he has already done it.  Maybe you have a friend or mentor who has trail blazed a path of recovery ahead of you. You know where he started and can see his progress and victories.  It is a faithful request to ask God to bring you along that same path and give you what your friend has proved can be accomplished.

4: Faith based on need rather than merit. “Heal my son, for he is at the point of death!” The man in recovery will need to forget both his accomplishments and his failures, especially if his progress has been uneven. Sometimes he must simply appeal to God’s goodness for what he needs as did the leper in Matthew 8, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”

5: Faith that persists until it is answered. The nobleman persisted after the Lord initially put him off. Some stages of our recovery will plateau and we can’t find any way to move forward.  There is that faith that believes in God after an initial disappointment. Examples of persistent faith are the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mark 7:24), the woman before the unjust judge (Luke 18:2), and the friend at midnight (Luke 11:5).

6: Faith that believes according to the fullness of God’s promises. Some of us in recovery are trying to get to a place we’ve never been. We don’t know what God desires to ultimately do in us. The nobleman sought physical healing for his son and received spiritual healing for his entire family. This faith believes that God will complete the work of recovery in you even when you don’t know all he means to do (Philippians 1:6).

32.  God’s Commitment to You

He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6

We see here three basic facts about God: (1) he has begun a good work, (2) he will complete the work he has begun and (3) he will complete the work unconditionally.  He won’t just give it his best shot.  He won’t just complete it in those of us who make the grade.  But he will complete that which he has begun.

This verse speaks of God’s covenant with the Christian.  I could also use the word ‘contract’ which has a more contemporary ring to it.  A contract defines the terms of relationship between two parties, how each party will be affected by the conditions of the contract.  As we see in this verse, the distinctive nature of God’s covenant with man is that it is unilateral, or one sided.  It is a contract initiated by God, kept by God and completed by God.  It is a contract in which God provides the will, the perseverance and the power necessary to ensure that the contract is fulfilled.

Now someone is going to say, “Wait a minute.  My Bible speaks about man’s responsibility as well; that we are to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, that we are to obey God’s commandments in order to make our calling and election sure.”  Yes, this is certainly true. We are called to obedience and discipleship and the choices we make in life have very real consequences that are eternal.  We have here two foundational truths, divine providence and human responsibility, which run nearly parallel and appear not to intersect.  While it is difficult for our minds to reconcile them, it is not too hard for God, and in eternity these two lines shall meet in him who is the source of all truth.

The great temptation we must resist here is to dilute each doctrine in order to somehow fit them together artificially.  Western Christianity has seen many such innovations that shave a little bit off divine providence and shave a little bit off human responsibility and in so doing fashion a single doctrine that has two heads.  But any creature with two heads is a monster, a human rationalization where both doctrines are lost and the Christian disciple becomes mired in confusion and discouragement.  We are to embrace both teachings fully and to live each one out completely, because they both express the mind of God.  We receive his peace that comes from above when we conform our thinking to God’s thinking.

Exactly what work has God begun?  The work being described here is sanctification.  Another word for sanctification is separation.  It is the lifelong process of God separating the Christian from his fears, his lusts, his addictions, his pride and his self-centeredness.  God’s objective is to turn us into submissive vessels that can accomplish something useful in his purposes.  In response to God’s objective, our objective must be to learn to live in the certainty that God will complete this work.  And finally, Satan’s objective is to delude us into believing that the whole matter is constantly in doubt, that God’s ability to complete the work somehow hinges on our performance.

So it is essential that we understand the nature and terms of God’s covenant with us.  One of the realities of life that we all learn sooner or later is that we must understand the terms of any contract we enter into.  Every one of us can recall some point in our lives where we either misunderstood or ignored the terms of a contract.  And it cost us money, time, trouble or grief.  Even when there is no intent to violate a contract, the costs are real and painful.  And so it is with our most important contract: our covenant with God.

Many of our spiritual problems are caused by willful disobedience.  But many other problems come about simply because we fail to understand the nature of this contract.  A Christian who struggles to accomplish in his life those things that only God can accomplish will very quickly become a defeated, discouraged, and miserable religious person.  A typical ping pong game that Christians play goes like this: we spend half our time trying to live artificially above the present level of our sanctification and the other half beating ourselves up because we couldn’t maintain it.  That is not the Christian life and God doesn’t expect us to live that way.  So it is essential that we understand as specifically as we can the nature of our contract with God and the division of roles that it describes.

As the other party in this covenant, our role is primarily to be the beneficiary of God’s commitment.  Now this role is not as easy as it might sound because it goes against our grain to passively submit to God’s methods and God’s timetable.  It is the nature of fallen man to want to strive, to produce, to excel, to display our results at the end of the day.  The Bible is full of stories of men and women who thought they were ready when they were not; who thought they could stand, but they fell.  But we also see people who thought they were all washed up when they had not yet started. And when they thought they had failed their success was just around the corner.  So we want to explore this issue of God’s commitment to completion and how he goes about this work.

There are four common misconceptions we have about the sanctification process.  The Bible teaches that God has committed to completing the work he has begun in us.  However, there we have difficulty believing God's promise:

1.  We think we can sanctify ourselves. This belief arises from a wrong and puny view of sin. What is sin?  Typically, we think of sin in terms of those particular problems and habits that give me the greatest trouble.  Our view of sin, therefore, tends to be very limited and introspective.  The Bible presents us with a very different understanding of sin.  Sin is described as a corruptive force that holds the entire universe in bondage—not only personal creatures, but inanimate matter as well. Consider the energy that was involved in creation:  The worlds and suns and stars and galaxies, seemingly without end, that were brought into existence when God created the heavens.  And then secondly consider the fall of that creation when God's creatures rebelled against him.  “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.  For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now” (Romans 8:20-22).

If you look through the most powerful telescope we can build at the most remote star that it can detect, that star is groaning under the weight of the burden of sin in creation.  In fact, when Jesus died on the cross, the creation itself responded.  “And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit.  Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split” (Matthew 27:50-51).  Do you think that God just decided to throw in a little extra drama here?  No, this was creation itself reacting to a change in the cosmic equation.  Something new had happened; the first fruits of its promised release from the corruption of sin.

Think about this for a second.  The very same force that drives us to submit to the works of the flesh holds the entire universe captive, yearning for the new creation that has been promised.  Sin is such an incredibly powerful force that we can no more appreciate its scope than we can gauge the power of God himself.  This is the force that God has promised to deliver us from.  And yet when we consider the work of our sanctification, we so easily adopt an attitude where we think that I am the lead player and that God is just an assistant.

There was a remarkable interchange between Jesus and his disciples in Mark 10 in which Jesus totally rearranges their understanding of the sanctification process:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” And they were greatly astonished, saying among themselves, “Who then can be saved?” But Jesus looked at them and said, "With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible." (Mark 10:25-27)

What Jesus teaches here is that the weight of sin is so far beyond our comprehension that it is impossible for a man to resist and overcome that weight by his own force of will.

God gave Israel Canaan for its inheritance, yet we see again and again that Israel could only occupy that inheritance in God’s timing under God’s power.  On one occasion Israel decided to go out against the Amorites when it was not God’s time for that battle.  And the Lord said to Moses, “Tell them, ‘Do not go up nor fight, for I am not among you; lest you be defeated before your enemies.’”  But Israel defied God’s timing, went out to the battle, and it says that the Amorites chased Israel as bees do.

Every Christian, at some point, tries to occupy his inheritance using the wrong method at the wrong time when God is not with him.  God loves us when we go out to those battles, he loves us during the battle, and he loves us when we come back with our tail between our legs.  These failures are a part of God’s process to make us into the vessels he requires.  But we will not see victory if God is not in it.  The weight of sin is too great and we cannot sanctify ourselves.

2.  We think we are equal partners in God's covenant. As I said earlier, we are naturally prone to attempt to fashion a human doctrine that artificially gives equal weight to divine providence and human responsibility.  But the nature of God’s covenant does not allow for this possibility.  In the everyday Greek of the New Testament world, there were two words meaning ‘covenant. ‘The first word is ‘suntheke.’  The prefix ‘sun’ means ‘together with.’  A suntheke was any mutually binding contract.  A treaty between two nations was a suntheke.  An employment contract between an employee and employer was a suntheke.  A lease agreement between a landlord and tenant was a suntheke.  The distinctive aspect of a suntheke was that both parties had to remain faithful to the terms of the contract in order for it to remain valid.  If either party fell short of its obligation, the suntheke was null and void.  Interestingly enough, although this term was in common usage in the New Testament world, it does not appear in the Bible.

What we find instead is the word ‘diatheke. ‘Diatheke means ‘last will and testament’ and it also refers to any contract that depends only one party.  Even though two parties are involved in the contract, only the initiator has to remain faithful in order for it to remain valid.  The Bible uses ‘diatheke’ to describe God’s covenant with us and the word appears 33 times in the New Testament.

If someone has been named as a beneficiary in a will, he will get a letter from a lawyer telling him what he has received. There is no list of demands, no contractual obligations that the beneficiary must fulfill in order to receive the inheritance.  Now I can’t imagine a beneficiary calling up the lawyer’s office and saying there must be some mistake here.  Please double check the will and make sure there isn’t something I have to do to get this inheritance.  None of us would question a worldly inheritance that way, but we question our heavenly inheritance, don’t we?  We play with this idea that there has to be some critical obligation for me to fulfill; and that if I fail, God will opt out of the contract.

We see the principle of diatheke at work in Luke 22:31: “And the Lord said, “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren. There are three things to notice here: (1) Jesus did not ask Peter to pray for himself, (2) Jesus knew that Peter would fall and (3) Jesus knew that Peter would later recover and fulfill his calling.  What we need to see here is, that when Satan asked for Peter, Peter could not have stood.  He did not have the resources to keep himself in the covenant.  So the Lord himself interceded for him and kept him in his faith.  This is a perfect example of a diatheke, a unilateral covenant in which the Lord as the initiator keeps the contract intact.

Aren’t you glad God did it this way?  He didn’t say, “I’m going to complete the work I began in you if...“ or “I’m going to complete the work I began in you but...“  He said, "I’m going to do this."

3.  We think that God fails the way we fail. Many great plans of men fail.  Every one of us has begun some plan that we did not finish.  Some of us have had a marriage fail.  Some of us have failed in a business venture.  Some of us have started a program of study that we could not complete.  We know that failure is always a risk in any project we undertake. So it is only natural that we project this possibility of failure onto God.  We think that, even while God may have the best of intentions, there is always the possibility that he will fail.  After all, he has to work with me, doesn‘t he?—with my stubbornness, my flesh, my inconsistencies.

But God’s plans do not fail. Balaam spoke directly to the matter when he said Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?” In calling you and me to be his children, God understood very precisely and clearly the work he was undertaking.  When we fall or slow down or get lost, God is not dismayed or surprised or pulling his hair out at what jerks we are.  But he knows exactly who we are, where we are, and what work he has begun in us.

4.  We measure ourselves against man’s timetable. It has been said that when the British go to war, they have the unnerving habit of losing every battle but the last one.  In some sense, this can also be said of God.  He has a pattern of vindicating his plans at the very end when all hope appears to be lost.  Two examples that quickly come to mind are the Red Sea crossing and the crucifixion of Jesus.  In both cases, it appeared that God had simply overextended himself; he took on projects that he wasn’t quite up to. Now we often hold ourselves under the same judgment.  We keep a tally on ourselves against some artificial schedule of progress and decide that God is really not doing very well.  I should be godlier by now.  I shouldn’t be having trouble with this temptation anymore.  I should have gotten past this stage.

Do you know that we are unable to subdue our flesh at once? “And the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you” (Deuteronomy 7:22).  Israel was not capable of managing its entire inheritance at the beginning.  It was too small, too immature, untested in too many areas.  Not only were the pagan nations useful in controlling the wild beasts, but they had another purpose as well.  Israel had to confront each nation individually.  There was a pattern of warfare, settlement, and rest that was essential for Israel’s development as a nation.

In the same way, each one of us has an inheritance to occupy.  God has a place of holiness, service, and power for each of us.  But we cannot take the land according to our schedule.  If we try to put to death our flesh too fast, we will soon be overtaken by beasts we are unable to manage.  Our Father in heaven knows where we are, what we can bear, and when we are ready for the next stage.  If God had wanted to, he could have designed the sanctification process so that it took place in an instant.  But he didn’t do it that way.  He set it up so that it works out gradually through the course of our lives.

The Bible calls the Lord Jesus the author and finisher of our faith, so he understands perfectly the process of sanctification that we’re going through.  Sometimes we are wiser in human affairs than we give the Lord credit for in spiritual matters.  We don’t expect a toddler to have the coordination of an older child; we don’t expect a child to have the judgment of a teenager; we don’t expect a teenager to have the maturity of an adult; we don’t expect young parents to have the wisdom of grandparents.  We recognize that each stage comes in its own time.  No amount of effort can hurry it along.  And yet we chastise ourselves so severely if we can’t meet standards that God knows we haven’t attained yet.

There is a verse in 2 Corinthians 8:12 that refers directly to money management, but it also applies to our spiritual journey: “For if there is first a willing mind, it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have.”  Or to put it another way, God wants everything you have, but he doesn’t want anything that you don’t have.

We have to be very careful about what standards we measure ourselves against.  For none of us can see what end God has in view.  A college student always has his end in view.  He knows what program he is studying.  He knows what courses he must complete and what degree he will receive when he has completed them.  He gets grades along the way that show him what progress he is making toward that end. But in God’s university we have none of these things.  We don’t learn what courses we were enrolled in until graduation day.  So be careful about grading God’s progress in your life.  For he operates on a timetable that is very different from ours.

Back when I was a college student I used to lead some hiking trips that the university outdoor program sponsored.  Now the outdoor program's purpose was not to be a serious mountaineering society, but to provide a source of recreation to the full range of students.  So we had every range of students that signed up for these trips.  We had very experienced backpackers and absolute novices.  We had seasoned athletes and people who were out of shape.

Now the objective of these trips was quite simple: everybody finished the hike and everybody had a good time.  In order to accomplish these objectives, we had the basic rule that we traveled as a group. The strong hikers were not allowed to leave the slower folks behind.  The way we accomplished this was to put the weaker, inexperienced people in front on the trail.  If one person slowed down, the whole group slowed down.  If someone got a blister, we all stopped until it was treated.  If someone couldn't carry his pack, we spread the load around.  Now you can imagine how much more pleasant and satisfying this was for the beginners instead of falling behind, getting worn out and feeling that they could never measure up.

How do you believe God sees you?  Is your God patiently walking behind you, perfectly aware of the pace you are able to keep, stopping and sitting down beside you when you need to rest, picking you up when you fall?  Or do you see your God as an agitated perfectionist, miles ahead on the trail, impatiently tapping his foot, wondering if you are ever going to catch up?  This is a critical question because your view of God will determine your view of yourself.

Even in recovery we are to be busy in the Lord’s work, forgetting about our past failures and casting aside our artificial schedules of progress.  Paul expressed this attitude so clearly in Philippians 3:13, 14: “I do not count myself to have reached the goal; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

33.  The Sinner’s Heart Condition

It is not often these days that the church and society can agree on anything, but on one question they seem to reach the same conclusion: that we can get along just fine without the Ten Commandments.  From the point of view of the church, many Christians point to the words of Jesus just before he was delivered up to be crucified: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.”  The Apostle Paul says quite explicitly that love is the fulfillment of the law. And so many Christians conclude that any attention given to the Ten Commandments is legalism and declare, along with John Lennon, that all you need is love and love is all you need.

Outside the church, our postmodern society has declared its liberation from the Ten Commandments. “What has a 4,000-year-old moral code written by a primitive Eastern culture to do with the human race today with all of its complex problems,” it asks?  “We are sufficient to be a law unto ourselves, thank you very much.”  Actually, in saying this they sound very much like Paul himself when he writes in Romans that “when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts”  The Bible recognizes that all peoples, Christian or not, have God’s law written on their hearts; that, when God created human beings in his image, he engraved on each one’s heart an innate awareness of right and wrong.

These criticisms beg the question of whether we really require the Ten Commandments at all.  If God has written his law on our hearts, can we not conclude that every person is capable of charting his own ethical course apart from a written law?  I want to make two pleas in favor of the Ten Commandments this and explain how they fit into our lives.  My first appeal is that we need the Ten Commandments because the human heart is an unreliable guide.  Jeremiah declares that “The heart is deceitful above all things.” Even though God has written his law upon our hearts, our hearts distort and misrepresent that law to our consciences.  My heart will magnify those commandments where I have done well (or think that I have done well) and gloss over those commandments where I have stumbled.

When the rich young ruler asked Jesus, “What good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?,” Jesus first identified six commandments in which this man’s heart had great confidence: “‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  The young man answered rather boastfully, “All these things I have kept from my youth.”

But Jesus then added a requirement where this man’s heart had deceived him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” This man had made a god out of his great wealth and his heart had deceived him.  It had overlooked his failure to keep the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.”  It is because of this deceitfulness of our own hearts that they do not remain a reliable standard of God’s law.  Therefore, God has given us his law in a written form that our hearts cannot manipulate.

The second reason we need the Ten Commandments is that they serve to show us specific areas where we fall short of genuine love toward God and neighbor.  The theologians of the Reformation called this use of the law the usus elenchticus, from the Greek verb elencho, meaning to convict, literally, to ‘bring to light.” The law written on our hearts is the same law as the commandments given to Moses, but it is a more subdued and indirect light.  It draws us toward God and leads us to inquire after his law.

It is like the light of the sun just before dawn.  If I look at that point on the horizon where the sun will appear, I can maintain my focus only while the sun is still hidden. But once the sun is fully visible, I must avert my eyes or its brightness will blind me.  The written code of the Ten Commandments itself is like the risen sun.  If I focus on any one commandment and declare, “I have kept this law,” I cannot maintain my gaze very long before the commandment convicts me and I must lower my eyes.

The law says “You shall have no other gods before me,” but our hearts so easily make false gods of every form of pride, fear, greed and pleasure and then substitute these for the one true Creator.

The law says, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.”  The sabbath is God’s provision for both the creature and the creation to receive the rest they need to sustain and restore themselves.  Yet our hearts run unbridled after excessive exploitation, profit, production and consumption.  Our insatiable appetites have built a global economic system that must expand by leaps and bounds every year or collapse.  We have desecrated God’s Sabbath rest and the result is the economic crisis that we find upon us today.

The law says, “You shall not murder and you shall not commit adultery.”  Yet Jesus radicalized these commands and taught us that when we entertain hatred or lust in our hearts, we have already broken these commandments.

The law says, “You shall not steal,” but we rob God whenever the least of his children is sick, homeless, hungry or thirsty because our love has grown cold.

The law says, “You shall not covet,” but our hearts so easily grow dark when God blesses my neighbor with a bigger blessing than mine.

But as we lower our eyes away from the commandments we have not kept, they must come to rest on the one who did not avert his eyes.  Jesus fixed his eyes on God’s law and he did not blink.  He is the only one who can declare in truth, “All these things I have kept from my youth.”  And as a reward for his obedience, we consigned him to the cross.

The Bible tells us that the cross is both foolishness and a stumbling block.  It is foolishness because, while God has written his law in our hearts, he has not written the message of the cross there.  The message of the cross cannot be deduced from our general awareness of God’s law.  It is God revealing something that human wisdom could not otherwise have known—and for this reason human religion cannot endure it. The message of the cross has found no comfortable place in the public square of human religion: not in 1st-century Rome and not in our 21st-century society.

The cross is called a stumbling block because it is a fact of history.  The Christian religion is not founded on an idea or on a philosophy or on a system of thought.  It is founded on a fact: that at a certain time and place in real history, an actual man who walked among us lived a life of perfect love, and then died on a cross because we could not tolerate his perfection.  There is nothing more inconvenient than a fact.  I can reject an idea, I can rework a philosophy, but I cannot undo a fact.  A fact is no respecter of persons, of culture, of race, of gender, or of personal opinion.  A fact simply is.

The church is called to be a community both of the law and of the cross.  As a community of the law, the Ten Commandments teach us that love is not a warm, fuzzy, undefined feeling where we decides for ourselves what love means. The Ten Commandments declare that Homo sapiens is not a species of chameleons that can successfully adapt to whatever morality it defines for itself in the present moment.  Our specific applications of the Ten Commandments will change with each generation, but God has etched his law in stone with his own finger and this law reveals the unchanging divine nature.

Then the church is also a community of the cross.  The word ‘cross’ is derived from the Latin ‘crucis,’ from which we get the word ‘crucial.’   The cross is the crucial element of the Christian faith.  Every other religion or philosophy describes our journey to achieve peace with God, but Christianity describes God’s journey to achieved peace with us.  The Lord said to Moses at the burning bush: “I have surely seen the oppression of my people, so I have come down to deliver them.”  The essential journey of the Christian faith is the “coming down” of Jesus to deliver us. The cross is God’s declaration that Christ had to come down to deliver us because, in our rebellion, we cannot deliver ourselves.

That is what people do not like about the cross: it condemns human wisdom.  Our problem is not that we lack the intelligence, or the good intentions, or the commitment to keep God’s law.  Our problem is that we have deceitful hearts.  Our hearts distort, confuse and contaminate all our efforts keep God’s law.  And so, in the cross, God has provided a solution to the human heart problem that is outside of human wisdom.

The cross is in the form of an intersection and it is God’s great intersection.  It is that intersection where I decide either that I am sufficient unto myself to keep God’s law or that I must look to the cross to complete in me that which I cannot attain on my own.  And this is our testimony: Christ crucified, the power of God and the wisdom of God for a broken and needy people.

34.  The Flesh—What, Why and How?

I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. Galatians 5:16-21

The man in recovery does not need either the Bible or a preacher to tell him there is a force within him that opposes the sovereignty of God.  He knows that inside him there is an opposing will that wrestles with Jesus for lordship, that seeks to gratify itself outside of God's provision, and that strives for self-justification. The apostle Paul, who also referred to himself as the chief of sinners, sums up the Christian's situation pretty well: “For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice” (Romans 7:19). The Bible refers to this force within us as the flesh.

But the man who does not know anything more about the flesh than that will be at a great disadvantage. He will probably attribute more authority to the flesh than it deserves. He will take its lies to heart. And he will likely give up all hope of ever dealing with the flesh effectively. While we all talk about the flesh and realize that it is something we struggle with, I don't think I am far off the mark in saying that our understanding of it is somewhat foggy. Let’s consider what the flesh is and also what it’s not. We need to understand three fundamental things about the flesh: What is it, why I do I have it, and what can I do about it?

The flesh is that remnant nature of rebellion which we received from our parents and, ultimately, from Adam and Eve. It is that drive which places my preferences, my glorification, my gratification, my reputation, and my self-indulgence above the lordship of Jesus Christ. The works of the flesh in our lives appear in three primary expressions: through our physical appetites, prompting us to illicit sensual gratification, through our emotions, prompting us to fear and through our intellect, prompting us to pride.

Sins of sensual gratification are more outwardly visible, while sins of fear and pride are more subtle. But all are a rebellion against the lordship of Jesus in our lives. We can see these manifestations of the flesh in Genesis 3:6, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.”

We see first of all the sensual gratification which was outside of God’s revealed will. There was plenty of fruit in the garden that was both fully—satisfying and permissible to eat. But the flesh prompted the man and woman to exert their own wills over God’s will, and so they ate the forbidden fruit.

And then, secondly, we see the onset of the fear in the verses 7-10:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

After they committed the initial sin of sensual gratification, the flesh prompted them to fear of discovery.

And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?” Then the man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” And the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Then finally, we see the sin of pride, where the flesh prompts the man and woman to protect their reputations by rationalizing the sin and shifting the blame elsewhere.  This is the typical three-step pattern of the flesh's work in our lives: forbidden sensual gratification, followed by fear of discovery, followed by prideful self-justification.

This brief look at Adam and Eve’s adventure illustrates the fact that the flesh does its work through the whole man: body, soul and spirit—not just the body.  There is a common misconception about the flesh that it is centered in the physical man as opposed to our spiritual nature. This view is often wrongly attributed to Christianity.

To look at where this view came from, back in the third century there was a guy named Mani. Mani founded a philosophy called Manichaeanism. The basic teaching of Manichaeanism was that the universe was composed of two essences: the spiritual or immaterial realm which is good and pure, and the physical realm which is evil and corrupt. Manichaeanism taught that man was a mixture of these two essences: the spiritual part of his nature consists of the good element, the physical of the evil. Man’s task, according to Mani, is to free his “good” spiritual self from his “evil” physical self. This is accomplished primarily by abstinence from all the sensual enjoyments: riches, lust, wine, good foods, luxurious houses, worldly ambition, etc.

There are many different religions and philosophies that have picked up on Mani's view of man, but it is certainly not the biblical viewpoint. This question of the origin of the physical world is answered in the first chapter of the Bible:

         “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (verse 1)

         “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (verse 27)

         “And God said, "See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food.” (verse 29)

         “Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.” (verse 31)

We see here that God created man as a unified creature having both a physical and a spiritual nature. As well, God created man with desires and appetites and God also provided the means to satisfy these desires within the physical world he created.

In understanding the work of the flesh in our lives, it is critical that we understand that our physical appetites and desires are given to us by God and are good; even in a world contaminated by sin and corruption they remain good. This is why we can enjoy sexual relations within marriage. This is why we can enjoy relaxation or good food and drink or a comfortable home or the self-esteem that comes from personal achievement or hundreds of other sensual pleasures that satisfy our God-given desires. In contrast to this, Satan provides us with a caricature of God as a sadistic tyrant who created us with all kinds of desires and appetites and then forbids us from satisfying them.

But the problem comes when we trespass outside of God's provision to satisfy our desires. James 1:14 says “But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed.” ‘Own’ is the word we want to underline here. When we replace God's formula for satisfying our desires with our own formula, that is the point where sin enters the equation. Now to bring all this back to our understanding of the flesh, the flesh is that compulsion within us that wants to replace God's formula with my own formula.

If we consider all of the works of the flesh listed in Galatians chapter 5, this is precisely what they are: corrupt human solutions to satisfying our desires outside of God's will. These practices are not the flesh itself; they are the works of the flesh. These are the tools that the flesh uses to get us what we desire. Behind every one of these works of the flesh is a perfectly good desire that God wants to satisfy.  For example, we see that one of the works of the flesh is outbursts of wrath. This is defined as passionate anger boiling up and soon subsiding again. Now the desire involved here is the desire for control. This is a good and proper desire, in its proper context. The Spirit's strategy for gaining control is to humble ourselves and minister to those under our authority with a servant attitude. But the flesh's strategy to satisfy this desire is to create an atmosphere of fear by displaying unexpected outburst of wrath.

Another example is hatred. The motivation of hatred is the desire for justice. If someone has done us wrong, we have a God-given desire to see justice done and that person held to account. This desire springs from the very character of God himself. Again, the Spirit's formula is to deliver the situation to God and walk away from it. But the flesh's strategy is to nurture hatred toward that person and contemplate some form of vengeance on our own.

So to sum up this definition of the flesh, we see that it is a subtle, crafty enemy who masquerades as our friend.  Its objective is to convince us that God is not really capable of satisfying our desires; but that our own shortcuts and strategies are what really pay off for us.

We now need to look at the question of why we have the flesh. The Christian is the only creature in the universe that has to deal with two natures. The unbeliever has only the flesh. The resurrection body we will receive after this life has only the Spirit. But the Christian, during his temporary stay on this earth has both. Have you noticed that when you became a Christian, you had more internal struggle than you had before? Before your conversion, life went along fairly smoothly. But the minute you became a Christian you had two potential masters fighting for supremacy.

If I can refer to a brand new Christian as a house, there comes a day when the flesh hears a knock at the door.

Flesh: Yes, can I help you?

Holy Spirit: Good morning, I'm the Holy Spirit. I'm moving in today.

Flesh: Oh yeah, I heard something about the house being refinanced. How long do expect to stay?

Holy Spirit: Oh, I won't be leaving. This is my home now.

Flesh: Oh yeah. Well, there's a room down in the basement that's out of the way. You can stay there. Now don't think that you're going to reorganize everything around here. It's not like I started working on this place yesterday. I know where everything is and there's a system to it, OK? I've done the decorating, the remodelling and it doesn't look half bad. You should have seen it when I got here.

Holy Spirit: Well actually, everything you've done here will have to go eventually. But, I'm not sure what the schedule is. That will be up to the owner. It depends on how long it takes him to get around to each room.

Flesh: Well, listen here, Mr. Clean. We'll just see who ends up running the show around here. I know this guy pretty well and how he likes the house kept. This won't be the last you hear from me on this matter!

It is a curious fact that, when God gave us his Spirit as a new nature, he did not evict the old one. He could have eradicated the flesh if he had chosen. There was nothing in the equation of redemption or justification that required him to allow the flesh to stay. The flesh has no legal right to remain, but God allows him to stay. We can refuse to listen to the flesh, but we can never get rid of him or rehabilitate him. God in his wisdom has allowed this peculiar situation for a single reason: that we might show our love for him by daily choosing the Spirit over the flesh.

Life with two natures is not easy. Galatians 5:17 says, “For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.” The flesh and the Spirit compete for your attention and loyalty. Do you find yourself submitting to God one moment and rebelling the next? Do you ever wonder who you are really? Am I a disciple of Jesus with a renewed heart or am I just the same old person who loves sin as much as I ever did? Well, the answer is 'Yes' to both. Both of your natures are very real and very permanent.

One of the illusions that Christians sometimes entertain is that, as I advance in Christian maturity, the flesh will become less aggressive in its desire to dominate me. It will not. Sin will never become less attractive in this life. The devil loves to accuse us on this point. Did you ever notice that he's right at your ear when you sin: “This is who you really are, isn't it? All this Christian stuff that you play at is just a facade. You might fool everybody else, but you and I know the truth, don't we? You're just the same conniving sinner you always were.”

We always want to be suspicious when the devil brings up ‘truth.’ The thing we have to realize about the devil is that all his lies use truth as their starting point. This is because he cannot create anything himself, not even lies. He can only twist and pervert truth. And so he begins with the truth: that we have an old nature that can never be rehabilitated or eradicated. But he omits the other half of the story: that we also have God's Spirit in us and that the acts of service, obedience and worship that we commit in submission to the Spirit are real and eternal. He doesn't want us to focus on that part.

Another way that Christians can get confused about having two natures is what I call the conference syndrome. Many of us have suffered from the conference syndrome from time to time. We go to a three or four day conference and have a very intense experience in the Spirit. We get blessed, anointed, healed, restored, zapped, commissioned, reconciled, slain, and empowered.  And somehow we think that the flesh isn’t going to be such a problem anymore.  But then we come home and within a week the same old temptations reappear and we commit a blatant, high-handed rebellious sin just like we always did.

What happened? Wasn't all that ministry at the conference real? Wasn't I changed? Were all those words and prophecies over me just hot air? Yes, it was all real and genuine. That was really God and I was really changed. But nothing that the Spirit accomplishes in us will ever vaccinate us against the influence of the flesh. The flesh cannot be rehabilitated and it cannot be evicted. There is no escape from the fact that the Christian has two natures.

Well, what do we do about this situation?  How do we deal with the flesh?  I want to talk about two strategies for managing the flesh- one that works and one that doesn’t work.

The strategy that doesn’t work is described in Colossians 2:20-23:

Therefore if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations—“Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle,” which all concern things which perish with the using--according to the commandments and doctrines of men? These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.

What Paul is saying here is that we will not get anywhere by focusing on subduing the sins of the flesh.  There are two reasons for this.  First, the flesh is stronger and more devious than us and it will win every test of wills.  There is no surer path to failure than to exert all of your will and energy to overcoming an area of sin.  If we imagine that we gain some temporary control over certain areas of the flesh, it will simply reappear in a different way that we’re not looking for.  Only God can subdue the flesh.  Second, when we focus on subduing the sins of the flesh, we are in fact being led by the flesh into the sin of pride.  This is the pride that thinks I can accomplish in myself what Christ had to go to the cross to accomplish.  The flesh is not going to subdue itself.

The second strategy is the one that works and it works because it is God’s strategy.  We find it in our text from Gal. 5:16, “Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” If I can paraphrase this verse, God is saying, “Be about my work, walk in my ways and I will take care of the flesh.” God promises that this will happen, even though we don’t know how he does it.  God calls us to expend positive energy doing acts of obedience, not negative energy doing battle with the flesh.  This is the path of obedience and humility.

Now I want to look for a moment at walking in the Spirit.  When you think of walking in the Spirit, think of a four-legged animal.  Walking in the Spirit has four legs:

         Grounding in God's word

         Worship and prayer directed to God

         Service and outreach to the world

         Fellowship with the body.

These are the four elements that make up the Christian’s stride in walking in the Spirit.  God promises that when we walk this way, we will not fulfill the lust of the flesh.  So the question we need to ask if someone is getting beaten up by the flesh is, “How is your walk?”  Tell me about your Bible study habits.  What acts of mercy and service do you fill your time with?  When do you meet with God?  What Christians do you meet with during the week?

The big picture we want to see here is that God has left Christians here on this earth to bear fruit, not to fight against the flesh.  John 15:8 says “By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.”  Romans 7:4 says, “Christ...was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God.”  God can pull us up to glory any time he wants and solve the flesh problem.  But we can only bear fruit while we’re here.  That’s why he commands us to focus on those things that will bear fruit and not get diverted into trying to outwit the flesh.

There’s one final word that sums up how we’re to deal with the flesh: “Focus on being good; don't focus on not being bad.”

35.  Welcome to the Family

And if you call on the Father, who without partiality judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear; knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. 1 Peter 1:17-19

The apostle begins this section with a phrase which we are almost inclined to pass by: “if you call on the Father.” After nearly 2,000 years of Christian history, we are quite familiar with the title, ‘God the Father.’ But as we read Peter’s letter we need to be reminded of what a revolutionary idea the Christian faith introduced.

Only Christianity speaks of the fatherhood of God.  Although both the Jew and the Muslim trace their spiritual roots back to Abraham, neither presumes to address God as ‘Father.’  Yet when Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, he directed them to call out to their Father in heaven. Why is the Christian able to call God his Father when other moral and religious people cannot? Peter identifies redemption as the crucial element.  It is important for modern Christians to realize that redemption was primarily a business concept rather than a religious one in the New Testament era. Redemption referred to the price paid for a slave’s release into freedom in the Old Testament and in the Roman economy. A Roman slave’s hope was that he could eventually save enough money to purchase his own redemption.  When he finally raised the agreed upon amount, he and his master would go down to the marketplace, announce the transaction, and file an official document confirming the slave’s freedom.

A freed slave might still serve the same household, but he would have a new relationship with his former master. If a slave performs his duties faithfully, he has only done what was required of him and receives no reward. However, if he is disobedient he will certainly be punished. This was the relationship Judaism had with God. If I perform well I’m only holding up my end of the contract.  But if I mess up I will surely suffer God’s punishment in due measure. Judaism did not teach a family relationship between man and God. It had the mindset of a slave.

When the New Testament writers applied the concept of a slave’s redemption to the gospel of Jesus Christ, they packed a lot of meaning into the term we don’t fully appreciate. But the man on the street in Peter’s day knew exactly what redemption was. When a slave was redeemed, it meant his days of satisfying the obligations of forced service were over. This is the essence of how our redemption in Christ changes everything. Anyone outside of Christ can only approach God as a slave. He only feels approved on a day-to-day basis as he fulfills his assigned duties.  But those who have been redeemed are freed from this performance bond.

A very good indicator of whether a Christian knows God as his Father is a bad memory. Some Christians have a very good memory for their past obedience and disobedience. They keep God in their debt for sacrificial acts of service rendered and carry shame for sins they haven’t yet “paid off.” But a Christian who serves his Father is going to have a poor memory of these things. If he sins, he sets things right quickly and gets on with life.  If he renders some sacrificial service to God he forgets that as well. He is free from the slavery of keeping a mental scorecard of how he is measuring up. He is never in debt to God and God is never in debt to him. They are family.

Many Christians never did anything ‘all that bad’ before they were saved.  These kinds of Christians sometimes have difficulty understanding just what they were redeemed from.  Their lives were not characterized by gross immorality. But a sinner is not defined by the violation of specific commandments (although he does violate them). A sinner is the person who sees his relationship with God as a binding business contract. Where that relationship exists there is no love.  And the man who does not love God sins. When Jesus died on the cross he purchased for us the freedom to love God. He paid off our business obligations to God, nailed the contact to the cross (Colossians 2:14), and made it possible for us to live with him as family.

Now I want you to notice how Peter says that, if we know God as our Father, we should conduct ourselves throughout the time of our stay here in fear. “Wait a minute, Peter. You’ve just told us we’ve been redeemed from slavery into God’s family.  Now you’re telling us to live in fear of God as our judge?” Many Christians who focus on the fear of God find the fatherhood of God a difficult concept to accept. (This relationship becomes even more strained when we entangle ourselves in a persistent pattern of sin increasing our fear). But Peter is actually showing some remarkable wisdom in holding God’s fatherhood and judgeship side by side. The devil doesn’t care how he defeats us.  If one strategy fails he just turns to the next one. If he fails to lure the Christian into a legalistic relation with his Father, his next strategy is to delude the Christian into thinking he is a favored child who is judged by a lower standard.

Peter immediately anticipates this danger and stresses the fact that God is an impartial judge. He does not wink at his kids’ sins or overlook their sloppy work. Just because he has redeemed us into his family, it doesn’t mean we get a free pass to licentiousness. God does not turn his eyes away from our hypocrisy because we carry the label, “Christian.”  The devil has been very successful in luring Christian men into a false confidence that their heavenly Father overlooks their hidden sins.

I lived in this delusion for decades, but twenty-four hours before the Lord exposed my secret indulgence I felt the oppressive weight of the Holy Spirit on me like nothing I’ve ever felt before.  I couldn’t focus at work and it was like I was living in a different dimension.  I shared this oppression with my wife and she took it to the Lord.  She received a clear word that she couldn’t intercede for me, that “Bryan has to deal with this matter on his own.” Once my sin became known the next day, I knew then the fear of God as never before. I knew that if didn’t renounce my iniquity for good and forever he would kill me, just as he came to kill Moses for neglecting his son’s circumcision. Such is the ferocity of his fatherly love that he would have killed me in order to end my self-destruction.

Christians today are apologetic about the idea of fearing God. We are very quick to assert that the Bible doesn’t really mean what it says; that some primitive, aberrant superstition accidently found its way into the New Testament. But to live in the fear of God means a Christian is to keep in view the welcome he will receive when he arrives home to his Father’s arms.  He so desires to please his Father that he strives to do his will in all respects.

Peter calls men to give equal weight to both aspects of God’s person. On one hand, don’t fall into a contractual relationship with God that overrides the Father/son bond. On the other hand, don’t get so casually familiar with his fatherhood that you lose your fear of his righteous judgment. Both extremes are snares of the devil.

36.  You Can’t Undo Your Sin

And he said, “While the child was alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, ‘Who can tell whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?’ But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.” 2 Samuel 12:22-23

David is here contrasted with his servants who felt his child’s death required a prolonged period of ceremonial fasting and weeping. But David understood that the gravity of his sin was infinitely more grievous than any fleshly show of mourning could address. When we consider how much our sins have grieved the Lord, broken our families’ hearts, discouraged those who looked up to us, and caused unbelievers to blaspheme the name of God; we can understand David’s reality check.

If your grief over your sin is genuine, let it flow as long as it needs to. But don’t drum it up as an offering to appease yourself or anybody else. The best offering we can bring is to live a life worthy of repentance.

37.  I Will Never Leave You Nor Forsake You (Even When You Want Me To)

This promise is found in four places in the Bible. Each occurrence brings out a different emphasis of God’s promise.

         Be strong and of good courage, do not fear nor be afraid of them; for the Lord your God, He is the One who goes with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you.”  Deuteronomy 31:6

         Then Moses called Joshua and said to him in the sight of all Israel, “Be strong and of good courage, for you must go with this people to the land which the Lord has sworn to their fathers to give them, and you shall cause them to inherit it.  And the Lord, He is the One who goes before you. He will be with you, He will not leave you nor forsake you; do not fear nor be dismayed.” Deuteronomy 31:7-8

         No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you nor forsake you. Joshua 1:5

         For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Hebrews 13:5

The Bible presents us with two great absolutes regarding man’s ultimate destiny: that those who are in Christ will most certainly be kept secure until he welcomes them into his glorious presence, and that those outside of Christ will in no way find any escape from the everlasting destruction prepared for them.  These truths are equal and opposite realities, each one flowing out of God’s perfect attributes of omnipotence, holiness, justice, and righteousness.  And so whenever the church strays from the truth regarding matters of the final judgment, it always departs from both of these doctrines simultaneously.  In fact, wherever we find the teaching that a Christian may somehow fall away from the grace of salvation, we will also hear the teaching that some who reject Christ may somehow gain entrance into heaven.  We would expect to find these two errors seated together because they both have their origins in a departure from the revealed nature of God.

It is a primary mission of the teaching church to constantly hold up these two great doctrines of salvation with the greatest clarity and contrast: the perfect safety of the Christian and the certain doom of the unbeliever.  To the degree that the church loses its way in this obligation, Christians will live in anxiety and dullness, the lost will not stir from their slumber, and the work of the kingdom will languish.

Hebrews 13:5 is the only one of the four promise statements that uses the absolute: “never.  “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Whether we like it or not, God does not take breaks.  And sometimes we find this a real pain. We go places and make plans that we don’t want God to have any part of.  We fence of certain areas of our lives: attitudes, activities, possessions as God-free zones.  Now God doesn’t respect these boundaries, of course.  He is still there: waiting, protecting us, making sure we don’t go too far, keeping us out of too much trouble.  God is really quite a well-adjusted parent, much more than we usually give him credit for.  Let’s look at some situations in our lives when we don’t really want God around:

We don’t want God around when we have unconfessed sin.  Adam and Eve heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.  Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”  When we persist in unconfessed sin, our attitude toward God is that of fear and our inclination is to hide from him.

We don’t want God around when we wish to follow our own wills and know that God would not approve of our choice. “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.’ But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.”  Whenever we make a rebellious decision in order to realize our own priorities, the last thing we want is God’s input.  We love to make our decisions with our eyes, but God calls us to make our decisions with our ears.

We don’t want God around when he starts to shake up our comfortable lives. “Then they came to Jesus, and saw the one who had been demon-possessed and had the legion, sitting and clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid. And those who saw it told them how it happened to him who had been demon-possessed, and about the swine. Then they began to plead with Him to depart from their region.”  Capernaum loved its status-quo stability more than the visitation of the power of God and they asked Jesus to leave.

God’s promise never to leave us nor forsake us is given in a context of movement.  God’s people are to be going.  They are to be moving.  They are to be about his work, living as aliens and strangers in a foreign land.  When God’s people have an attitude to hear his call and go where he sends them, it goes well with them.  But when God’s people turn their attention to their own stability and security and prosperity, that’s when they don’t really want him around.

We don’t want God around when we feel we have failed God.  “And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” (Luke 5:7, 8).  Sometimes when we can see nothing but our own sins and failures, we are overwhelmed and consider ourselves unworthy to be in the presence of Jesus.  Well, we are unworthy, but he approaches us anyway and removes our filthy garments.

We don’t want God around when we love our traditions and God shows up to take that control back to himself. “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies.”  There are churches that don’t want God interfering with their own preferences and priorities.  Spiritual gifts are a messy and unpredictable business.  You never know what might happen.

Now what is God’s response when we don’t want him around?  Does God say, “That’s the third time this week that blankety-blank has told me to get lost?  In fact, it’s been a regular pattern with him over the years.  Just when I think I can count on him, he runs off on his own again, gets into a big mess and calls me up at three in the morning to come bail him out.  Well, that’s the end of Mr. Nice Guy.  I’m going to ditch this loser and find someone I can depend on.”   Is this God’s reaction? On the contrary, whenever we reject our Lord and run away, his word to us is, “when you have returned to me, we will get back to work.”  Because his promise to us is always: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

I am always curious whenever I hear someone claim that God has forsaken them.  Their complaint generally runs like this: “I’ve got nothing but trouble in my life.  I cry out to God for help and direction and I never hear a thing.  I can’t find God.  I have no sense of his presence.  All I do is survive from one day to the next.  I hear other people’s stories about what God does for them, but none of it rings true for me.”

My counsel to this person is an interview along these lines:  “Tell me of your daily Bible study and prayer routine.  Tell me of your sacrificial giving to the Lord’s work.  Tell of your works of service and mercy.  Tell of the time you devote to visiting the sick and orphans and those in prison.  Tell me about the major decisions you have made in your life where you put the work of the kingdom first and your own interests second.  Did God really not meet with you in any of these things?”  We want to see God with us first before we go, but that is not the promise.  God’s promise to Joshua was that, “No man shall be able to stand before you.”  It was Joshua going forth to take the land that activated the promise.  Israel had to step into the Jordan before the waters backed up to allow them to cross.

We all have hurts and problems and I don’t mean to minimize them because the analogy of the church as a hospital is a very valid one.  But, the church is always to be a hospital at war.  Our Lord knows our hurts, our disappointments, and our frustrated dreams.  He knows the knives that protrude from our backs and the traps others have set for us.  We are always tempted to stop.  “Lord, make me whole first.  Then I will start moving forward again.”  But that is not his way.  God heals us as we go forward into battle, not when we stay behind to gaze at our wounds.

Finally, God’s promise that “I will never leave you nor forsake you” is the promise of a friend. The story is told of a Muslim student who came to North America to study, heard the gospel, and believed in Jesus.  Upon his conversion to Christianity, two things immediately happened: first, the sentence of death was placed on his head and, second, his family back in his home country was permanently disgraced and regarded as outcasts.  He was asked, given the high cost of his decision, what caused him to put his life at such risk and become a Christian.  He said, “there is one verse that convinced me that I must come to Jesus Christ: John 15:15, ‘No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends.’  In my former religion, there is no concept of God as our friend.  I want to be God’s friend.”

38.  On the Necessity of Falling Hard

Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! Romans 11:33

It was God’s mercy to Peter that he denied the Lord three times before the cocked crowed.  This gave Peter a true and accurate assessment of the hopelessness of the flesh.  Had he only denied Jesus once, he could have dismissed it as a momentary blip in his devotion. He would have retained some vain hope of rehabilitating his carnal ambition to build perishable booths on the Mount of Transfiguration.  But Peter’s calling was to build an imperishable church.  In order to accomplish this, it was necessary that he first fall so completely on the night of his Lord’s betrayal.

Understand that the Lord will call us to works that would not have been possible without our thorough descent into addiction.  Had we simply “puffed, but not inhaled,” we would still trust our natural strength far too much.  Does this excuse our self-centered iniquity? Not in the least! But God’s ways are past finding out.

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Table of Contents

Preface

1. When Your Sins Force You into the Desert

2. Jesus: Friend of Sinners

3. When You’ve Used Up All Your Chances

4. When Your Struggle Against Sin Becomes a Truce

5. Sin Hides No Surprises

6. Recovery Is Not For Wimps

7. Why David Was a Man after God’s Own Heart

8. When You’ve Trashed Your Calling

9. Plan A or Plan B—It’s Your Choice

10. 100% Sinner—100% Saint

11. You’re a New Creation, Not a Rebuilt One

12. Our Trials Are Not Our Cross

13. The Seven Functions of the Word of God

14. 25 Ways to Receive the Gospel

15. Don’t Admire Your Recovery in the Mirror

16. Never Tell God You Deserve Better Than You Got

17. Always Give Thanks for a Soft Heart

18. Don't Climb God's Mountain If You Want Your Own Streams to Run to Their Confluence

19. Repentance as a Change of Attitude

20. The Essence of Faith

21. Believing in Jesus is Simple, but It’s Not Easy

22. The Most Fertile Soil for Recovery

23. The Gospel Is Light, but It’s Not Heat

24. The Secret of Staying on God’s Freeway

25. God’s Judgment is Our Arrival at a Destination We’ve Already Chosen

26. The Most Important Element in Your Recovery

27. Resist Blending God’s Perfections into a Manageable Package

28. What If I Had Obeyed?

29. Your Trials Are Not Punishment

30. Don’t Focus On Your Recovery 24/7

31. The Six Kinds of Faith

32. God’s Commitment to You

33. The Sinner’s Heart Condition

34. The Flesh—What, Why and How?

35. Welcome to the Family

36. You Can’t Undo Your Sin

37. I Will Never Leave You Nor Forsake You (Even When You Want Me To)

38. On the Necessity of Falling Hard