Suffering for the Gospel

by Jason E. Robertson

Pattern of the Typical Christian Life:

1. Wow, trusting God is great.
2. Whoa, this is difficult.
3. Why, this is impossible.
4. Well, I’m just trusting God.
5. Wow, trusting God is great.

Read the entire article.

Suffering is Not a Sin

By Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller:

Suffering is not a sin. The devil would try to tempt us otherwise. Remember how it was with Job. His three friends (then four), all poor theologians, tried to connect the dots between Job’s suffering and his sin. The same temptation comes to us when we thing that a Christian must always be happy and cheerful, or when we imagine that there is some sort of shame in suffering and trouble.

There is a type of “Billboard Christianity” where everyone is smiling and successful, healthy and happy. This plastic faith understands Jesus as spiritual “Botox”, and then if you are sad or depressed it is because your faith is not strong enough. In fact, we hear this type of thing from the television preachers. “God wants you,” they say, “to be healthy, wealthy and wise.” And if you are not, you must be under God’s curse or the control of the devil and so forth and so on. As if we are Christian robots with these two facial expressions: happy and ecstatic. I know that this false teaching hasn’t made its way among us, but perhaps there is even in our midst a shame in our suffering, a thought (even if we haven’t thought about it in these words) that our suffering is a sin.

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Resolution-Driven vs. Gospel-Driven Living

When the New Year rolls around, people are inevitably looking to make a new start. Since January 1, I have run into all sorts of people looking to make a new start. The gyms are packed full of people looking to shed the fat and get into shape (until the lactic acid build up gets so painful, they quit).

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The fact is, when it comes to sanctification resolutions really have no place. Only one man has lived a perfectly resolute life, Christ!

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Resolutions, if not carefully kept in check, subtly take the place of Christ and His Gospel and begin dictate our thinking and decision-making, they shape our outlook on the Christian life, and begin to distort our understanding of our Heavenly Father, they corrupt our affections and ultimately destroy the peace our souls.

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Prayer Can Be Easy

Robert L. Dabney, from his Systematic Theology, p. 716:

Prayer is the vital breath of religion in the soul. It cultivates our sense of dependence and of God’s sovereignty.

By confessing our sins, the sense of sin is deepened.

By rendering thanks, gratitude is enlivened.

By adoring the divine perfections, we are changed into the same image, from glory to glory.

From all this it is apparent that prayer is the Christian’s vital breath. If God had not required it, the Christian would be compelled to offer it by his own irrepressible promptings. If he were taught to believe that it was not only useless, but wrong, he would doubtless offer it in his heart in spite of himself, even though he were obliged to accompany it with a petition that God would forgive the offering. To have no prayer is, for man, to have no religion.

Lee Irons comments:

The great danger is to turn the duty of prayer into a law that leaves you feeling guilty for your lack of prayer. The paradox of law-based motivations to godliness is that the more guilty you feel, the less you will do what you know you ought to do. And the more you fail, the more guilty you feel. It is the never-ending spiral of law-sin-guilt from which one cannot be extricated apart from the gospel.

So try something new. Follow Dabney’s encouragement and think of prayer as something that you already do without realizing it. Or, perhaps more accurately, as something that your regenerate heart wants to do, if only you would capitalize on those irrepressible promptings from the Spirit and turn them into conscious prayers. Instead of thinking of prayer as something arduous and requiring tremendous amounts of discipline and effort, see it as something easy. As soon as the thought, “I should pray about this,” pops into your heard, do it right then and there. Just talk to the Lord, even if for the briefest moment, even for a second or two (what I call “arrow prayers”).

Even when you have sunk into a pit of spiritual emptiness, where even the thought of trying to crawl out makes you feel exhausted and hopeless, the irrepressible promptings of the Spirit are there, perhaps nothing more than the simple, abject cry, “Lord, help me!” It is not really the case that we are prayerless. It is just that we have such an exalted conception of prayer that we have overlooked the many prayers that we have despised as unworthy of the name of prayer.

From Between Two Worlds.

What About “Me” Songs?

Matt wrote in to ask:

What do you think about singing songs that have a lot of me/we/I content. Is it wrong to sing a lot of songs that talk about us? A couple come to mind right now: “We stand and lift up our hands…” “I love you Lord…” etc…I think there’s value in having some songs with personal language as we sing/speak to God, but is there a balance that we should seek in using songs that speak of we, me, or us?

Great question.

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Dan Phillips’ “Twenty-Five Things I’ve Learned”

1. Experience may be the best teacher — but the tuition is mighty high.
2. Until they’re tested, they’re just opinions — not convictions.
3. No matter how hard you try, you’ll mess up. So try a little harder, and don’t wait for the mess-up to embrace and acknowledge the fact that the results are ultimately in God’s hands.
4. Sin only makes sense to itself, and to other apostates.
5. Sin makes you irrational, insane, crazy, nuts.
6. People locked into a sin are impervious to logic, facts and Scripture.
7. People locked into a sin always say it’s someone else’s fault.
8. People locked into a sin hate anyone who tries to tell them the truth, no matter how humbly nor lovingly.
9. People in love with a sin will always find dire and horrendous fault with anyone who tries to part them from it.
10. Sin destroys, ruins, kills. Its sales-line is a lie: it has nothing we really want.
11. Sin doesn’t care who it hurts, nor how much, nor how devastatingly, as long as it gets its way.
12. There is no sin — no sin — that can’t make an excuse for itself that makes sense to itself.
13. Every unrepentant sinner sees himself as noble.
14. Every unrepentant sinner sees his sin as different.
15. Everything an sinner does to “fix” his situation apart from repentance only serves to make it much, much worse.
16. You can’t talk anyone out of sin.
17. The only and sovereign cure for sin, still, is the blood of Christ, applied through humbled repentance . There is no “therapy” for sin.
18. When Roman Catholics charge that Sola Scriptura makes everyone into a little pope, they’re fundamentally wrong — yet they do point to a real and dire danger.
19. If only perfect, “arrived” men and women can hold out the Word to other men and women, nobody will ever be able to do so. That is because….
20. What makes the Word of God the Word of God is that it is the Word of God, and not that it is perfectly handled by perfect people.
21. That fact excuses nobody for striving to be perfect, as his Heavenly Father is perfect. It just puts first things first.
22. No matter how much you’ve learned, you’re still pretty dim. So get the heck over yourself, and stay (or get) humble. Don’t be a sucker, but keep your ears and mind open.
23. Complicating that last, everyone who disagrees with you will accuse you of arrogance. Assume they may be right, and do something about it.
24. You think you’ve experienced all the pain a human being can take? Wrong.
25. You’ll never out-smart the Devil, you’ll never wear him down, you’ll never overpower him by your own strength, endurance, or smarts. Never. Only God can. Sticking to His Word and looking to Him is not only the best thing you can do, it’s the only thing you can do. Any suspicion to the contrary is stupid beyond the ability of mere words to express.

Read the entire article, include Scripture references and commentary.

Actual Call to a University

Me: “[University name], how may I transfer your call?”

Lady: “Yes, my son missed his first day of class and for some reason the class room has changed and he can’t find it.”

Me: “He can come into the computer lab and look up his schedule to verify which room the class is located.”

Lady: “He is on campus right now wandering around and no one is helping him. He is already late for class, and it is your fault. Can you go find him and take him to his class?”

Me: “…we don’t provide those services. He can come look up his schedule and then go to class.”

Lady: “Urgh!” *click*

From Not Always Right.