Rock Gardens & Weed Beds

Many folks think that there is something to recommend in being middle-of-the-road in perspective and attitude, and something bad about being extreme in the same. I can understand why in many situations that may be a wise course, but it's anything but wise when it comes to Christianity. In following Christ, the milquetoast middle is nothing but a muddle. And dangerous at that!

Offered for your consideration: the parable of the sower. The extremes were clear in their result whether for good or bad. The mucky middle, on the other hand, had the look, even the promise of fruitfulness, but not the reality. Why did the middle fail? Because only by selling out, getting extreme in focus, can we see achieved what was intended to be achieved by the scattering of the gospel seed in our lives. Only a single-minded vision of submitting to what Christ in us is attempting to grow can make our lives truly fruitful in God.

And as God sees life, fruitfulness is what counts. For the seed which is the Word to get anything done in us that He came to do, there has to be singularity in the soil of our hearts. Our soil must be set apart, exclusively, for the growth and fruitfulness of that one seed. It must yield no room, nor nutrient, nor anything else that anything else would need to grow. It must not yield to anything that would retard the growth of that one seed.

If our soil is a mixed bag, chunky with rocks, or infested with other kinds of seed, our appearance may seem fine for a time, but over time, our fruitlessness will reveal the unfortunate truth about our hearts. Like any farmer planting his fields with a crop, when God plants seed in us, he expects that kind of fruit out of us. God farms by the Christ-in-Christ-out method (CICO). When rocks and weeds compete for the soil with that seed, the seed's growth is stunted and it never comes to fruit.

God wants a harvest for what he's sown into our lives. How is it that we think we can we offer him rock gardens and weed beds instead? Jesus cursed a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season. When God looks for fruit, fruit better be there, or there's going to be a reckoning. One fig would have done it for Jesus... at least some fruit will do it for us.

Our Message Must Include the Wrath of God

Considering the fame and evangelistic effect of "Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God," it is surprising that we don't hear much about the wrath of God anymore. I wonder if we're missing something important in ignoring or undercutting its relevance. Perhaps God's wrath has something important, even necessary, to say to this generation. There certainly is no absence of the subject in the Bible, Old or New Testaments.

Do we need to be proclaiming the wrath of God more in our day?

Romans 1 tells us the wrath of God is in the process of being revealed from heaven. The subject is important enough to God to include it in his self-revelation in his word and in his creation as well. This has to be something we should know about him, he wants us to understand this about him. Life, if we'll hear its witness, screams at us through death, decay and disease that something isn't right, that God is upset and he wants us to get the message.

The thunder of his wrath echos incessantly, rattling everything in time and space, shaking everything until it ultimately dies.

Prophets, one after the other, tried to establish God's wrath as a stimulant to reasonable thinking on the part of their hearers. Though far removed from them we still need to hear that today. Not that we should live shivering in fear of punishment (that's the Devil's ploy), but we should live in sober judgment discerning the nature of how things work and what that tells us about the wrath of God. When sky-walking upon a steel girder stories above the security of earth, that sinking feeling that discerns gravity is a boon to clear thinking and careful stepping.

The witness of that wrath and the deadness of our souls invoke a certain trembling in us when contemplating the Almighty. At even a too clear conception of God we hide, trembling in the bushes, knowing we are sinners and children of wrath by nature. We fear the face of him who sits on the throne. Any wrath from one eternal, perfect in action and almighty in power is enough to seal our fates for eternity. What could coax us out of our hiding places but the sure knowledge that our sins were fully expiated and we were thereby reconciled to God.

The outrageousness and brutality of Christ's passion impeccably scribes the fearful breadth of God's wrath against sin on the stone tablet that is the sinful heart. 

Do we even have a real purpose in ministry and evangelism without paying due deference to the wrath of God? Ours is a ministry of reconciliation. The offended cannot be reconciled to the offender until wrath has been placated. The quality and depth of God' grace and forgiveness cannot be seen in proper relief apart from the backdrop of his animus against sin. He who is perfect in grace is also perfect in wrath, so we can't casually slip into the former without giving proper notice of the latter.

Is a message which focuses on grace without so much as mentioning wrath really good news? Our message, to be the gospel message, must include the wrath of God.

Confession Is Good for the Soul

"If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness."     1 John 1 :8-9 NIV

Confession, as used in the text above, means agreement. Literally, it's saying the same thing, so confession in this context, which is about our sin, is seeing some thought, or intent, or action, or word of ours as being wrong before God, and consciously agreeing with God concerning its wrongness. In other words, confession is saying, “I agree with you, God, that this thing from me was sinful.” If a confession is limited in scope to just an admission of the facts, i.e. "I did this," without agreeing with God about its wrongness, then a necessary ingredient of confession which makes purification "take" will be missed.

There are biblical descriptions of confession that are helpful: 

• Lev 5:5 makes confession part of the sacrificial system. Each sin had to be confessed as part of offering sacrifice. In Christ the believer has but one sacrifice over a lifetime and does not have to offer Christ again and again with every failing and confession of sin (Hebrews 10:12-14). The Christian recognizes Jesus' singular sacrifice as applying to whatever sin might occur in the believer's life whenever it is confessed.

• Prov 28:13 makes confession essential for prospering in life. If one wants their life to be blessed as much as possible, confession rather than suppression that sin was committed is necessary.

• James 5:16 associates confession (to each other as well as God) with healing. This applies only in those cases where the sickness was a corrective measure applied in response to sin (as in 1 Corinthians 11:30). If your theology can't handle the thought of God taking punitive action against a believer, you need to change your theology so as to agree with the Word, or risk missing out on this potential remedy.

• The verse at the head of this post binds confession of sin to God's faithfulness in responding to such with forgiveness and cleansing from unrighteousness. One might wonder why confession would be necessary in light of the once-for-all-time provisions of the cross and resurrection, since they are one-time events sufficient in effect for our entire lives. Suffice it to say that the cross is what's effective, the confession is merely a means of applying the fact of what was already supplied to the momentary guilt of failure--the blood of Jesus cleanses us from sin, confession clears our consciences.

So, believers in Christ confess sin so that they may continue to grow in spirit and in grace, particularly so in the case where the sin is against another person, especially a brother or sister in Christ. Harbored sin, that is unconfessed sin, puts static between the believer and God. The heart is not in phase with God, or agreement, and so there's noise in between. That noise is Holy Spirit convicting the believer of sin. (John 16:8-11) Conviction in this sense is just the Holy Spirit saying to the believer, “That ain’t right.”

This does not imply or direct believers to adopt a formal, ritualistic approach to confession as some expressions of Christianity, like Catholicism, have done. That wouldn’t be necessarily erroneous if not for the formal pronouncement of penance and absolution afterwards. Like all things Christian, our only mediator is Christ, never another person. When one's sin was overtly against another person, then confession needs to be to God, then to the person wronged, not to an uninvolved party. Certainly, any resulting restitution is to the wronged party, not to the uninvolved through some abstract exercise of penance.

When we confess our sin we must not only say that something is sin, we must actually see it that way, as God does, in our own minds and hearts. If we are in agreement of heart as well as mouth with God on the matter, there is no sense of imposition or burden in our confession. We don't see it as God making us do something we don't really want to. We confess willingly to God, even though with embarassment, because we desire our communication with the Holy Spirit to be static-free.

The blood that atones for all our sin has already been shed, once and for all. That singular effusion was sufficient to wash away all our sin before God-- past, present and future. Therefore, confession doesn’t obtain something we don’t already have without it, it just makes the most, in the here and now, of what was already provided in full. When it arises from that light, and expresses heartfelt agreement with God on the nature of what we have done, confession is truly good for the soul!

The Essence of True Repentance

Repent! 

It's the first word of the gospel message. It is simultaneously commanded by God and granted by him. John baptized unto it, and commanded fruit in keeping with it, but what is it? The simple definition is a change of mind or heart, but often we have a change of mind or heart (or at least we think we have), only to find ourselves back in the same place far sooner than we ever thought possible.

Is repentance meant to be a yo-yo experience, the penitent returning to the same place of regret over and over? Not ultimately, but I think we sometimes get stuck there. We need more than godly sorrow, guilt has its place, but I think it's more stagnating than instigating. If such is to be any more than wasted emotion, we need to get up and climb over that hill to see a new horizon. Repentance is about transit-- it moves us from where we were to someplace new.

Truth is: regret is not the same as repentance, even though it is a stop on the way. It is possible for one to reach the conclusion that God considers a thing wrong, and even to regret that it’s been done, but still not see the thing the same way that God does. That point of agreement is where the journey toward repentance crests the final hill to see the quest's goal. For the one who sees what God says, but does not see as God sees, only Romans 7 can be his or her lot-- overcoming certainly will not be!

Regret can never be the source of victorious, overcoming behavior in the future. Even if determined action is taken against regretted behavior, that will only end up attaching a collar and leash to a wild leopard. It does not and cannot change the nature of the beast. The imposition of an alien viewpoint cleanses the soul no better than sweeping rubbish under a carpet cleans the house. For repentance to produce fruit, a sincere realization that God was right and we were wrong needs to arise in the soul and overwhelm heart and mind.

We can beat ourselves up endlessly for the stupid things we do, say and think, but that won't translate into victory unless that "aha moment" distills in our souls and we see it God's way. Not just see it, though, we have to actually agree with God. That's not something you can do by checking a box at the end of a user agreement and move on, it's something birthed in the soul and wakened in brokenness. Only then can we truly relinquish our will to his, come into agreement with him and achieve change.

Only then can we walk together with God. The prophet asked, "Can two walk together except they be agreed?" The answer to rhetorical questions is always obvious, but sometimes the applications are anything but. The answer to effective repentance is out there waiting for us to connect the dots. From the intersection of Godly Sorrow and the Need of Change the sign post points toward the next stop called Agreement. On the other side of that ash heap we're trying to climb over is the junction where we and God meet and travel on together. 

It's the essence of true repentance.