The duty of the Christian is to bear witness to the truth. That is our role in God’s economy, in God’s plan for history in this age. The world is coming under judgment, and we as Christians must proclaim the truth of that fact.

We’re not here to build big churches. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves. We’re not here to be loved by the world. We’re not here to self-actualize. We’re here to tell the world the truth about the reality of impending judgment. The world will hate us for that and try to destroy our witness. One of the most effective ways they can accomplish that is to convince us to compromise the truth of our witness by giving in to some degree to the lies of the world. So we need to remain true, keep our witness pure and endure to the end. This is what we’re here for.

See Revelation 11.

Why a Baby?

The Old Testament prophets spoke frequently of the coming of the Messiah. Here’s one such promise, from Isaiah 61:
1 The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God…

Like many of the passages that speak of the coming of the Messiah, this one associates God’s vengeance with the coming of the Messiah. The one who is sent by God will bring vengeance on God’s enemies.

God makes these kinds of promises very often in the Old Testament, promising that He will save His people from their enemies, and keep them safe when the Messiah comes. He promises that He will vindicate His good name and destroy God’s enemies, who are also the enemies of the people of God. And it was for this reason that Christ came into the world, according to Mary’s song of thankfulness to God recorded in Luke 1:46-55.

Now at the time that Jesus was born, the Roman Empire held sway over the Mediterranean world. The Roman Empire was probably the most powerful empire that had existed up to that point. And considering the technology that they had to work with, you might make a case that they were the most powerful empire that has ever existed. They were proud and cruel. They had destroyed many nations, and put many other nations under tribute. They were the uncontested masters of the Mediterranean world for over four centuries.

And besides the Romans, there were many other groups that hated God and His people. There were the Syrian kings who ruled Palestine in the name of the Romans, of whom Herod is the best known. There were also the Jewish religious rulers of the day, the Pharisees and the Saduccees, who would so often come into conflict with Jesus during His ministry.

The nations of the world were under the sway of Satan, and many of Israel’s own people were under Satan’s sway as well.

But God is God, and of course He will vindicate His good name. He has the power to flood the earth, send fire from heaven, strike men dead of disease or send His mighty angels to earth. One angel was sent against the Assyrian king Sennacherib, and in one night killed 185,000 of his men (2 Kings 19). He could send whole battalions of angels with shoulder-fired rocket launchers against His enemies if He so chose. But what did He do?

He sent a baby.

You are perhaps familiar with the expression, “I’ll beat you with one hand tied behind my back.” Competitive people sometimes seek to prove their superiority by winning even while handicapped in some way. When God seeks to demonstrate His awesome power, He decided to destroy the nations of the world with only a baby.

There’s nothing more helpless than a baby. The infants of the animal world are very often able to fend for themselves from the moment of birth. But a human baby will die in just a few hours without constant attention. It takes years before a baby is able to do the simplest things for itself.

And this particular baby was born to a poor couple away from home, in the territory of a king who so desperately wanted to hold onto his own power that he ordered all the babies from that region killed.

At Christmas time, we often focus on the nostalgia of childhood, the cute images of baby Jesus, the trappings of a sentimental religiosity. But God did not send Christ into the world to give us an appealing target for our nostalgia. He sent Christ into the world to save His people and destroy His enemies. And to demonstrate God’s awesome power, He did all of this with the weakest of things, an infant.

Even when Christ grew, with all of His incredible power, He never used it for His own benefit. He never used it to strike down His enemies, as I very often want Him to do when I read the gospels. When conspired against by numerous powerful enemies, when betrayed and abandoned by His friends, He did nothing to defend Himself, but went as a lamb to the slaughter, looking to all the world as the weakest and most despised of men. And it was in this moment, of His greatest apparent weakness, that He struck the shattering death blow against the powers of all the world and Satan together.

People so often boast against God, if not in words then by our actions. We so often believe we can escape judgment, that we can defy God’s laws and create our own kingdoms on earth free of His rule. When God moved to demonstrate the utter foolishness of trusting anyone or anything other than Him, He showed His immense power by laying in the dust all of the glories of earth. And He did it with the weakest of all things. No chariots, no horses, no armies. No lightning bolts, or fire and brimstone. No huge marketing campaigns, grand taxpayer-funded schemes, or well-funded lobbyists.

Just a baby.

From Charles Dickens, _A Tale of Two Cities_, remarking on the unreality of French upper-class society:

Such homes had these various notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur- forming a goodly half of the polite company- would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world- which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother- there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.

A lot of similarities to our own upper-class society, I feel. Women have few babies, if any, and are obsessed with looking as if they never had any. Career women too often relegate their children to the care of others, and feel it more important to pursue the fashions of the day than to raise their own children. “Breeder” is a term of contempt in large swaths of our society. Women of sixty are desperate to look and act like women of twenty.

But God told us that women will be saved by childbirth. There is no justification to be found in the act of childbearing, but there is justification in faith. Part of faith is embracing, not rebelling against, what God has made us, whether men or women, whether young or old. It is Biblically defensible to not have children. But it is not Biblically defensible to not have children, or to have very few children, in order to be able the more freely to pursue our own lusts.

How are you doing today?

I’m not asking to be polite. I really want to know. How are you doing?

Are you fulfilled in your life? Are you happy in your relationships? Are you content with the significance of your existence? Are you at peace with your past and confident in the future?

If you have no feeling at all that there is a problem in your life, a great problem, then there’s not much point in reading this pamphlet. I’m not going to try to convince you that you have a problem. I believe that you do have one, and I’m going to identify it for you and provide a solution. But a doctor doesn’t come to treat healthy people. So if you think you’re healthy, then I’ll bid you adieu. But I’ll leave you with this thought- the time will come when the reality of this problem becomes undeniable to you. At that time, I hope you will remember what I said. Perhaps you should keep this pamphlet with you and read it again when that happens.

The problem you are experiencing at its heart is guilt. People are supposed to be a certain kind of thing, and it is all too apparent that we are not the kind of thing we are supposed to be. Why is that? A bird never fails to be a bird. A tree is always a tree. Sometimes some force from the outside like a bolt of lightning or a hunter’s rifle prevents the tree or the bird from being what it is. But with people, it’s different. It’s not what is on the outside that causes us to fail to be what we are supposed to be. It’s what is on the inside. We know we should not steal, yet we steal. We know we should be kind to other people, yet most of the time we care far more about ourselves than we do anyone else. We don’t live up to even the moral principles we hold ourselves, and it’s not because something else has forced us to. It’s because there’s something wrong inside of us. And we try to suppress the awareness of this very basic truth or to convince ourselves that it’s other people’s fault that we feel this way. But it’s not anyone else’s fault. It’s our fault. People are special- different than birds or trees. We have souls. We are spiritual entities unlike birds or trees and were created in order to voluntarily give our love and praise to the God that made us. But a long time ago the first man decided that he would decide right and wrong for himself, live for himself and rebel against God’s rule. And as a result, that man, Adam, and all of the human race after him, were separated from God and we all continue to live in Adam’s rebellion.

At heart, guilt is an awareness of separation. When you were a kid and did something naughty and your parents were angry at you, you had this terrible feeling that your parents were now alienated from you, didn’t love you anymore. The pain of a spanking didn’t bother me all that much. I would routinely cause myself more pain than that just in the course of playing. When my parents would spank me, it was the feeling of disapproval, or worse- the idea that my parents simply didn’t love me anymore- that was far more devastating than physical pain. That feeling would always pass soon, because I had loving parents who would reassure me of their love even when disciplining me. But the persistent feeling of guilt in our lives is the knowledge that we are alienated from God, that God is actually hostile to us. The desire to overcome this alienation is the reason people do most of what they do. Work, entertainment, religion and politics- all of it is so often pursued as different ways of either earning God’s favor or distracting ourselves from the pain of His displeasure. But it will not go away. It cannot be ignored. And if we don’t do something about it, it will kill us. God is the source of our life, and separation from Him will eventually destroy us.

The good news is, there is hope. God has provided a solution to the problem. Two thousand years ago, God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, who is God Himself, to earth to become a human being in order to bridge this gap. He came and pronounced the hopelessness of ever earning favor with God by our works, the need we all therefore have for a savior who can rescue us, and the fact that Jesus Himself is that savior. The self-righteous religious authorities of the day, in envy and hatred of Jesus for His exposure of their hypocrisy, murdered Him by falsely accusing Him to the political authorities of the day, leading to His crucifixion. But Jesus had predicted that He would die, and that He would rise from the dead on the third day after He was crucified, and this is what happened. When He rose from the dead He told His disciples that His death was necessary for the salvation of sinners and that they were to go out into all the world and spread the good news of Jesus so that the whole world would know of this salvation. And thus the Christian church was born.

Jesus had to die because God is just. He will not simply ignore sin. Wickedness must be punished. But God’s great mercy is seen in that He sent His beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to voluntarily pay the price for our sins so that we could be reunited to God. When Jesus died on the cross He became a substitute for us and all the wrath of God against sin was poured out on Him. He said on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus, who was perfect and never sinned, felt the separation and guilt that we feel because of our sin. And the death that we deserve, He took in our place. When we believe what God has said, put our trust in the salvation of Jesus Christ, then we become part of the body of God’s people on earth, the church, under the umbrella of Jesus’ own perfect righteousness. And now God regards us not as individual wicked sinners, but as members of Jesus’ people, and therefore beloved of God because Jesus is beloved of God.

So the Christian is freed from guilt. And when he is freed from guilt, he is also freed of all the self-destructive and evil thoughts and deeds that come from guilt, from the pain and despair of separation from God. With the love of God, we learn to love our fellow man, to love the creation that God has made, and to live our lives as God has intended.

This is all a process. Faith in Christ is just the beginning of the journey. Christians are still sinners, and hurt others and fail in many different ways. The journey can be quite painful at times. But it is the most rewarding thing any of us can do.

If you’ve stayed with me this long, and still think you’d rather stick with your old way of thinking, then the question I have for you is, “How’s that worked out for you so far?” Is your life such a bang-up success that you can be confident rejecting this offer of rescue and salvation? Are you so secure in the meaning and purpose of your life that you feel content going back to your old way? Do you truly believe in your own ability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps? What in your own experience or in the history of the world gives you such confidence in man’s ability to save himself?

But if it sounds like giving your life to Jesus is the way to go, then do it. And don’t be half-hearted about it. It’s all or nothing. Faith in Jesus means making a whole-hearted decision to believe what God has said. You don’t have to understand everything right now. But you have to be committed to believing.

If you do believe what God has told you, then there are some important steps you need to take right now.

1. Pray to God, and tell Him what you have decided. He hears, and He has promised to answer every prayer prayed to Him in sincerity. He answers in lots of different ways, so be patient. But tell Him that you recognize your hopelessness, your guilt, and your need for a savior. Confess your sins, and ask for forgiveness. Tell Him that you accept His Son Jesus Christ as your savior, and pledge to make Jesus the Lord of your life.
2. Get into church. You need the support of like-minded people. A lone ranger is a dead ranger, and you need people in your life who will encourage and teach you to live your life for God. Find a church that believes and preaches the word of God, the Bible (unfortunately, not all churches do).
3. Get a Bible, and start reading it. It is God’s message to mankind and contains everything you need to know. As a suggestion, start by getting acquainted with Jesus, in the book of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Then read 1 Peter or Ephesians to gain a great deal of instruction about Christian doctrine and life. Then just start reading from the beginning and go all the way through.

It is my great desire and prayer that more are added to the number of Christ’s people. But don’t wait forever. The guilt that I mentioned earlier is in fact God’s warning to people that judgment is coming, and it could come at any time. Christ is coming again, and if you die or if Christ comes again before you have made this decision, then it is too late. Judgment has come, you have refused and rejected God’s offer of salvation, and you will then receive the just penalty for your rebellion against the God that made you. I pray that you will instead receive the offered mercy, believe in Jesus Christ and live forever with Christ, and with all of Christ’s people.

One of the most important lessons I ever learned in my life was taught to me by Paul Sondrol, a political science professor at the University of Colorado. I was rather notoriously tardy to things in those days, especially class, and I had Dr. Sondrol as a professor for some upper level political science classes that were small classes, where my tardiness would be noticeable. At the beginning of one such class, during the normal beginning of the semester lecture about class expectations, Dr. Sondrol told us that he hated it when students were late to class. He viewed it as a sign of disrespect. Even after telling us this, I was late almost every day to class by five or ten minutes.

Dr. Sondrol was the sponsoring professor for the Model OAS program at UCCS. Without going into all the details, it was a great program, a lot of fun, a great learning experience and a pretty desirable opportunity with limited slots. I applied for it. The summer before the fall semester, I met with Dr. Sondrol to discuss it. He told me that he thought I was a good fit for the program, but one thing concerned him, my tardiness even after he had told the class that he expected us to be on time. I assured him I wouldn’t continue that pattern. I got into the program.

That fall, the first day of class for the Model OAS program, I misread the location of the class, thinking it was on the other side of campus. I was five minutes late. I apologized to Dr. Sondrol, and he graciously accepted. The second class period, I couldn’t find a parking spot and was again five minutes late. Mortified, I again apologized to Dr. Sondrol. This time, he told me, “There’s always an excuse.”

And that’s when it hit me. I realized a truth that I heard well expressed recently in the quote- “the maximum effective range of an excuse is zero.” An excuse affects me and me only. It might make me feel better about why I didn’t do what I should have done. But for everybody else, it has no real effect.

Everybody has challenges in their life. Everybody faces obstacles, has unexpected things happen. Everybody misreads a schedule sometimes or has trouble finding a parking spot. But the difference is, some people live their lives in such a way that any unexpected event, however trivial, throws them off their plans and prevents them from succeeding. Other people live in such a way that they can absorb such unexpected events without difficulty. When Dr. Sondrol said that to me, I resolved to become the second person. I realized I had been the first. And so, every day for the rest of that semester I showed up to class twenty minutes early, and then on the days when something unexpected happened, I’d only be ten minutes early instead of twenty.

Proverbs 26:16 The lazy man is wiser in his own eyes Than seven men who can answer sensibly.

To paraphrase- the lazy man has more answers than a committee of seven.

I’m still not the most organized guy in the world. But I try not to make excuses any more. If I forget something, or fail to get something done, the only acceptable response is to simply accept the blame, try to make it right and do better next time. An excuse serves the purpose of making me feel better. It serves no other real purpose. The other guy, who depends on me doing what I said I was going to do in order for him to accomplish what he wants to do, isn’t interested in reasons for failure. He’s interested in succeeding. And every successful man knows, there are people who succeed at what they say they’re going to do and then there are people who are always making excuses. Guess which one he’s going to do business with?

And to take a step back and look at the big spiritual picture- when I come up with excuses for why I can’t do what I am supposed to do, it’s ultimately God that I’m blaming. I’m saying, God has not given me the resources that I need in order to obey Him. King Saul was an excuse maker. He said, “the people made me do it” when he failed to obey God in the matter of the Amalekite war in 1 Samuel 15. But it didn’t matter; God rejected him as king anyway. God always gives us the resources we need to obey Him. God gave me Christ, the most precious gift He had to give. The idea that He would withhold some other thing that I need to succeed is laughable.

And this subject is of course far more important than professional or academic success- spiritual success; though of course, faithfulness in my job or at school is just a subset of faithfulness in my spiritual life. All things are matters of faith. And my prayer to God is that He would grant me the faith and the strength to succeed in my spiritual life, rather than making excuses for failure.

Independence Day

Men will be ruled. There is no alternative; there never has been. The question has always been, by whom? The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the great founding principles of this nation were a statement that men of this nation would be ruled, must be ruled, by themselves.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

This was truly a revolutionary concept for the ages. Its principle was and is that liberty is not a right that governments give to men, that liberty is a right which God gives to men, and which governments can then either acknowledge and defend, or attempt to deny and withhold. Therefore, any government which denies life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness is an illegitimate government, according to the principles of our founding fathers.

The theory is based on theism, at the least. It is based on the idea that God made men. Without the concept of creation, this statement makes no sense. If we are the products of chance or unthinking nature, then it is inevitable, natural, good, that some races, classes, kinds of men should be better than others and should oppress and rule over others. There is no consistent way of expressing the inherent equality of men except under the principle of a God who created them.

But there is no reason of itself why theism should lead to the belief in fundamental equality either. For if God made men, He may have made them unequal, making some races and classes better than others. Certainly many religions believe this. So it is not sufficient to have religion, but one must have a certain kind of religion, one that teaches equality, in order to make the statement made at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence.

Christianity is just such a religion. The Apostle Paul said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) The distinctions between mankind, the inherent inferiorities and superiorities are all there erased at the drop of a hat. With those distinctions and rankings goes the idea that one group of people should inherently rule over another. It took the church hundreds of years to work that out and put it into practice, and it has come in fits and starts, but the very concept is fundamentally Christian, fundamentally a part of the gospel and is inconceivable without it.

Certainly through most of its history Christendom has known the rule of kings, many of them tyrants, many more just incompetent. But God sharply criticized the people of Israel for desiring a king. The desire for a king, God said, was a desire to be like the nations around them, to share in their glory and to gain the sense of security that would come from a king with a standing army to go out and fight their battles for them. The desire for a king was fundamentally a repudiation of God’s rule. (1 Samuel 8) For four hundred years before then, Israel was ruled politically by judges. There was no perpetual national government; government was handled locally and tribally, and figures known as judges would arise when the need existed for them. They would serve to unite Israel against their common foes and they would also serve to adjudicate disputes brought to them. As long as the people would follow God and not worship the false gods and idols around them, this was the only government they needed.

Think of the freedom they possessed! No palaces to pay for, no imperial guards, no bureaucrats consuming their wealth. No pyramids, no royal tombs, no huge projects erected to the vanity of the rulers. No officials telling them how to live their lives. They were free.

They threw it away, and subjected themselves to kings. First they had Saul who was terrible. Then they had David, who was a very good man, but who as a king was still not very good for the nation. His own sins inflicted war and plague on the nation. And he was the best; it was mostly downhill from there. Ultimately the kings of Israel were a disaster; their oppression split the nation, involved the nation in ruinous alliances and wars, were the avenue for a great deal of wickedness and idolatry entering the nation, and ultimately bringing on the destruction of both the northern and southern kingdoms at the hands of foreigners. The people of Israel threw away their freedom, and ultimately their security and prosperity as well. When they did it, this is what God said to Samuel, the last of the judges:

“.. they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them.”

Our founding fathers recognized that a free people could only be a people who would be ruled by God. Only when people voluntarily chose to be ruled by the principles of God’s word would a representative government work. One could debate the philosophical underpinnings of this belief, but it really isn’t necessary. We see around us in our nation today a people being brought into slavery. But we are not being brought into slavery by a political party, by a president, by foreign enemies or internal conspirators. We are being brought into slavery by ourselves.

You can, for example, trace a great deal of our present economic woes to the subprime mortgage crisis, where banks made loans to people who could not afford to repay them. When they defaulted on those loans in huge numbers, starting especially in 2007 and 2008, the whole credit industry was shaken by it. Some blame the banks for making irresponsible loans. That’s true, to a degree. Some blame the government for coercing those banks into making bad loans. Also true, to a degree. But none of it would have been possible except for people who took those loans. People refused to be ruled by the principles of God’s word, principles of hard work and savings as the source of wealth, and as a result those people, and the nation as a whole, are being brought into slavery.

Whether the subject is health care, education, abortion, homosexuality, war, civil rights, unemployment or anything else, the principles of right behavior are clearly contained in God’s word. If people would follow them, there would be no need for government action to solve problems that don’t need to exist. But we don’t trust God to take care of us, and so we resort to government schemes. People say we need the government to handle our health insurance for us. But Jesus told us that God would always take care of us, if only we trust Him. If we follow the Scriptures in our behavior, if we lived godly lifestyles, if we were moderate and sensible in our eating, drinking and everything we do, if we worked hard and saved our money, if we were generous with the poor around us, then there would be no need to look to Washington and cry, “Save us from ourselves!” And there would be no need to turn a quarter of our wealth over to power-hungry bureaucrats just to give ourselves the false assurance that they can save us.

Because here’s the dirty secret- they can’t save us. If we rebel against God, nobody can save us. If we follow His word and submit to His law, then we have no need to worry about any threat, whether economic, foreign, or natural. But if we throw off His rule and resort to our own ways, then no government program in the world will rescue us from His judgment. Israel’s kings did not bring them security or prosperity; on the contrary, they sucked up the wealth of the land to glorify themselves and made the nation even more exposed to invasions and oppression than they were before.

We must be ruled by God, or by God we’ll be ruled. I bow to no one in my disdain for the current administration and congress. But they aren’t the problem. The Democrats aren’t the problem; the Republicans aren’t the problem either, just as they obviously are not the solution. The problem is us. The problem is a citizenry that will not be ruled by the truth of God’s word. The problem is a people who believe that it is their right to indulge in every lust, every desire, every evil dream they have, and that it is their right to have science or government or religion rescue them from the consequences of their bad behavior. The problem is a nation full of people who hear “you deserve to own your home” and believe it, and believe that a law should be passed guaranteeing them home ownership, and that someone else should pay for it. The problem is a nation full of people who do not trust God to protect us, God to give us health, God to give us prosperity, and instead look to false gods, who look to the Beast and Babylon to fulfill our every lust and protect us from every danger, trying very hard not to notice that Babylon is built on dead mens’ bones. Whether we look to the monolithic state, or the promises of economic prosperity, or the pleasures of entertainment, it makes no difference. We are pledging ourselves to the empires of the world, the false gods of this age. The empires of the world, including the one we live in now, are built on lies and theft and murder. If we will not bow to the God who made us, then we will bow to tyrants.

The truth will set you free, Jesus said. The key to being free in our political and economic lives is to first be free in our spiritual lives. If we repent of our sins, throw ourselves on God’s mercy and pledge ourselves to be ruled by Him in every aspect of our lives, then we will be free as individuals. We will be free of the lies and oppression of evil men in our minds and hearts. We will be able to live lives that are governed by God’s gentle and just rule and can trust God completely to meet our needs.

This was the dream of America, a nation of free citizens, self-ruled and looking to the truth of God’s word, working out in each of our lives individually, to meet our needs. A nation which recognized the God-given right of every individual to rule themselves by God’s principles, and which exercised its governmental function only on those who refused to rule themselves. The pursuit of happiness never meant the untrammeled exercise of every lust, but rather the right to decide for oneself, according to God’s truth, how to live one’s life, and not have the course of one’s life dictated by the state. The constitution isn’t inspired by God, and it isn’t the only way of living out these principles. But the government of this country was an expression of the Biblical truths of the equality and dignity of man created in the image of God. It certainly wasn’t perfect. America’s principles failed too often with regard to the American Indians, and completely with regard to the black slaves, at least for many years. But even this was not a failure of the founding principles but a failure to consistently apply those principles. But as we fell away from our Christian roots, as we failed to trust God, as we refused to be ruled by God’s truth and came to see our right to indulge all our desires, we have gradually lost our freedom. We are no longer independent.

I fully support the separation of the institutions of church and state. But there can never be any separation between religion and state. We will be ruled by God in every aspect of our lives, public or private. Or we will come under the rule of tyrants, thieves and liars. This is the judgment of God who will not be ignored, and it is inevitable. We see it all around us right now.

If you are a patriot, if you love your country, the greatest service you can do for your country is to recommit yourself to be ruled by the truth of God’s word, and to encourage those around you to do it as well. It can’t be forced; it must be voluntary. Passing laws, choosing judges, electing officials and the like is all secondary; not unimportant, but secondary. What must be primary is that every one of us becomes citizens first of all of God’s kingdom, repenting of our rebellion and submitting to the rule of Jesus Christ. Only then can we be free, and only when this nations returns to a belief in a God who made us and reclaims the rights with which God endowed us, the right to rule ourselves according to God’s holy truth, only then will this nation again be independent of the rule of the tyrants of this world.

To separate faith from confidence would be an attempt to take away heat and light from the sun. I acknowledge, indeed, that, in proportion to the measure of faith, confidence is small in some and greater in others; but faith will never be found unaccompanied by these effects or fruits. A trembling, hesitating, doubting conscience, will always be a sure evidence of unbelief; but a firm, steady faith, will prove to be invincible against the gates of hell. To trust in Christ as Mediator, and to entertain a firm conviction of our heavenly Father’s love, — to venture boldly to promise to ourselves eternal life, and not to tremble at death or hell, — is, to use a common phrase, a holy presumption. -Calvin’s commentary on Ephesians 3:12

A great quote from Calvin, here. Real faith is going to produce confidence and ultimately boldness in my life. As he makes clear, that confidence will be weak at times, especially as my faith is immature and unformed. But he who trusts in God will know that no power on earth, in heaven or in hell can stand against God’s will for our lives, and God’s will for our lives is that we triumph; not in some carnal sense of fame or money or earthly security, but in God’s completion of the work within us which He started.

This goes to the point I was making earlier about overcoming sin, as well. Overcoming sin is not a matter of working up the willpower to change, or changing my environment. The man who does not believe he can change, who fears to hear the exhortations of God’s law, who sees only condemnation in God’s standards of righteousness, is a man who lacks faith. Overcoming sin is a matter of faith, of believing in God’s promise of forgiveness in Christ and empowering by the Holy Spirit. As I believe those promises, I will gain more confidence to tackle what previously seemed insurmountable, the sin in my life. And as that confidence grows, I will even gain boldness to believe and to do what I never before dared believe or do. I will come to believe that I can indeed be perfect, to be sin-free. Not in this life; not in the strength of the flesh, but by God’s power and enabling, I am even now aiming toward that goal which is promised me in eternity, that I would be truly holy and a worthy image bearer of my perfectly holy savior.

That is, as Calvin says, a holy presumption.

For Memorial Day

Tommy, by Rudyard Kipling

I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:

O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins,” when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you, Mr. Atkins,” when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but ‘adn’t none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-‘alls,
But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls!

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, wait outside”;
But it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide,
The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide,
O it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.

Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy how’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.

We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints:
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;

While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, fall be’ind,”
But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir,” when there’s trouble in the wind,
There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,
O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir,” when there’s trouble in the wind.

You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires an’ all:
We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country,” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
But Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!

One thing I deal with frequently and one question I hear often is how we overcome sin. This is nothing unique for a pastor; every Christian must struggle with this issue. I have some thoughts on the issue and I’m going to write them down purely for my own benefit. As irregular as I’ve been with this blog, I know I don’t have a whole lot of regular readers left. And I also know I don’t have any new insight into this question. But it helps me think through things to write them down.

This issue is fundamentally the same whatever the sin is. There are differences in the circumstance, and how particular temptations arise and therefore how they must be avoided. But the heart issues, at root, are the same. This should be broadly applicable, therefore, to all kinds of sin issues. Promiscuity, laziness, drunkenness or other kinds of substance abuse, anger, envy, lying- all of it arises out of the same kind of heart, and that is where we must start with our analysis.

There is an essential trinitarian aspect to overcoming sin in our life. Knowing God is of course foundational; the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, the Proverb tells us. The Father declares His law, which diagnoses us, tells us what’s wrong with our lives. Further, the Father predestines us to receive the salvation of Jesus Christ from eternity. The Son, Jesus Christ, came to earth to live the perfect life of obedience and to die on the cross, freeing us from guilt and reconciling us to God by the removal of the curse of sin, the punishment of death and hell. The Son’s death and resurrection also paves the way for the Holy Spirit, who implements the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection in our lives. He comes into our hearts and transforms us, giving us a new heart, one with the power and capability of hearing God’s word and doing it. He teaches us through the Holy Scriptures, which are, according to Jesus, “Spirit and life” (John 6:63). All three Persons of the Holy Trinity therefore work together to accomplish this goal of overcoming the sin and corruption in our lives.

I want to focus especially on that second aspect, the death of Christ and the removal of guilt. I cannot stress enough that we must learn to put away guilt if we are ever to overcome sin in our lives. Our natural inclination is to think that we can beat ourselves up with guilt in order to produce changed behavior. But this is to fail to understand guilt. Guilt is the awareness and knowledge of condemnation before God. And it is hopeless; it only works despair. It drives me away from God. This is the whole reason for the necessity of Jesus’ death; I cannot overcome the penalty of my sin. As long as I am holding up the penalty of sin in front of myself or others as a motivator to change, all I will accomplish is hopelessness and more sin, since that penalty is an inevitable, insurmountable obstacle, unless it is removed by the death of Christ. And in fact, the sinful behavior itself is part of the penalty of rebellion against God.

Paul says in Romans 8 that there is “no condemnation” for those who are in Christ Jesus. And he establishes that point thoroughly before he goes on to the subject of changing behavior in Romans 12, just as he does in Ephesians. And the reason for putting off sinful behavior and replacing it with righteous behavior is presented by Paul as thankfulness for the reality of our salvation, the reality of the removal of guilt, not to accomplish that removal.

Therefore there is no condemnation by God for your failure to overcome sin. There will be discipline as God lovingly brings pain and consequences into your life in order to help you learn and grow, just as a loving father spanks his child to help the child avoid destructive behaviors. But if you are in Christ, nothing you do will ever cause God to hate or condemn you, since you are now seen in the merit of Christ, and not your own merit.

So once you have it firmly in your mind that a)there is no penalty for failure, since guilt is removed and b) you are guaranteed success by the power of the Holy Spirit in your life, you are ready to start thinking about overcoming sin.

Overcoming sin and changing behavior is described in the Scriptures in a lot of different ways. Paul talks about “renewing our minds” (Romans 12:2) and setting our minds on heavenly things and not on earthly things (Col. 3:1-2). John the Baptist calls his audience to repent (all 4 Gospels, first chapter or two). In 1 Peter 2, the apostle tells us to lay aside evil conduct and to practice righteous conduct. The similarity in all of these kinds of statements is that in each of them, changed behavior is the result of reprogramming our minds. It is necessary to change our values.

If a drunk wants to stop drinking, it’s often because the earthly consequences are starting to cause problems for him. Maybe he’s in legal trouble; maybe his marriage is failing; maybe his health is being ruined. So he tries to tell himself that all of these consequences are so terrible that he has to stop drinking. This rarely produces any long-term change, though. If the man’s motivations are earthly, then the immediate pleasure of the bottle are probably greater to him than the long-term pain of poor health or relationship problems. Even in the gutter, having lost everything he has, the man can still escape into the bottle and feel just as good for a while as he would feel if he were drunk in a nice house with a loving wife. My brother Jim pointed out to me recently that the idea that you have to hit rock-bottom to change is wrong, because there is no rock-bottom. Things can always get worse. The only real rock-bottom is hell, and that comes too late for change. Earthly consequences, even the fear of hell itself, will never produce any real change.

Only when the man reprograms his values, when he starts to believe that the purpose of his life is not to please himself, not to experience pleasure in the things of this world, is real change possible. He must have some purpose that transcends himself, that transcends the world. Most addiction treatment programs recognize this, and it’s why the AA program, for example, includes belief in a higher being as one of the necessary steps. But of course true change can only be based on truth; therefore to avoid simply changing from one destructive lie to another, it is necessary that this transcendent purpose be the true transcendent purpose, the God of the Bible. He calls us to glorify and serve Him with our lives. This is a call to a completely different set of values and priorities than those which come naturally to us.

I remember once talking to my dad about time management problems a few years back and I said something along the lines of, “I just feel like I waste a lot of time and then when I get done the things I need to get done, I don’t have time left for God.” And he responded, “Matthew, it all belongs to God.” And then I saw the root of my problem. It wasn’t that I was taking too much time for myself and not enough for God. It was that I had a wrong view of the purpose of my life. I was viewing my life as about essentially pleasing myself, while carving out enough time to placate God. Instead, I should view it as all of my time belonging to God and being for the purpose of serving Him; I just do it in different ways. I serve Him by reading my Bible, going to church, talking about Christianity to my friends when I have the chance. But I also serve Him by doing my job, by reading a book for relaxation, by talking to my friends about the weather. Everything I do must be for the purpose of serving God. I do not belong to myself. And this is what Paul means when he calls us to offer ourselves as living sacrifices and set our minds on things above. It means a reprogramming of our minds, of our values.

All sin at its root comes from this source, the belief that I am the god of my own life. My life exists to serve myself, and even my religious activities are seen in that light- to serve my ego, my self-righteousness, to assuage my guilt or to keep God off my back. When I am saved by Jesus Christ, instead I recognize that I am bought with a price and called to serve Him with my life. That is now my transcendent purpose. Putting away sin is only possible when the evil thought patterns that produce sin can be replaced by the truth, by the transcendent purpose of serving God with every aspect of my life.

A stirring article. Having just recently been through a discipline case involving slander, this really resonates with me.

Does the Lord really mean that it is not only OK but a positive good to get angry with those who destroy other’s reputations by backbiting? Surely not. We must be patient, forgiving, kind, charitable, while our neighbor’s reputations go up in flames–or so the message is in many churches. How long has it been since anyone in your church was disciplined by the elders for this unspeakable crime against God, the very sin of the devil himself against the church?

The problem with these kinds of sins, the sins of the tongue, first, is that they’re difficult to prove. The other problem is that if you face them, then you have very public and painful conflict. But if you don’t face them, then people in the church who are being victimized just quietly become disillusioned and drift away. So churches often choose not to face them at all, since the consequences of facing them are so much more visible and obviously painful than the quiet and subtle consequences of not facing them. But God rewards obedience. We should never be afraid to have a fight when we need to.