Holy Discontent

Holy discontent is a phrase that seems to come freighted with all sorts of associations. Let me skip right to what I mean when I say it. I am talking about a form of outrage which directs one into the path of holiness and trust, rather than into sin. If we have the mind of Christ, then our outrage likewise should be as the heart of Christ was outraged. In the perversion of the temple court, he was outraged, seeing it turned into a den of thieves. (See Matthew 21:12-17, Mark 11:15-19, and Luke 19:45-48) Regardless, when Jesus gets outraged, he goes ballistic. He overturns tables, drives the moneychangers and usurers out with a scourge, and cries out in vicious anger at the way His Father’s house is being treated.

Now, we face the same points of outrage in our society, in a number of different circumstances. I am outraged at the impoverished hearts and minds that see the perversion, the pissed-on rug of holy days and Sabbath days as normal, and even as acceptable. I am outraged at the depravity of society that would allow some very dark places of the heart and mind to exist, and I am outraged, too, at myself for seeking them out on occasion. But that, as I’ve already mentioned, must be lifted up in heart-sabbath, given up to the Lord that we might glorify Him more fully through praise, through prayer and through spiritual discussion. The very point, as I’ve said, of holy discontent is not a restlessness to do something contrary to the Lord’s will; it is rather to examine our lives daily through the knowledge of the power of Christ and His ability to do anything He wants. We are to look at our hearts, I believe, and see them as desperately sick, but saved by grace for the glory of Christ Jesus. That is to be our discontent. That we are far to easily enthralled with the world and its hollow and empty pursuits, and

that we are comfortable in them.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Heart-Sabbath

The phrase “heart-sabbath” keeps coming up in my mind, so I thought I’d look at it a tiny bit. Mostly, I’m just trying to figure out what it means. When it came up in prayer, I made a record of it, which I’ll return to now.

Hmm. Apparently not as clear as I’d like it to be. It came up in a discussion I was having, and the context was in the neighbourhood of letting the heart rest from depression. Spiritual depression, actually. I’m currently reading a book by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on spiritual depression, and it’s providing some unexpected insights into some of the things that have been coming up in my posts throughout this version 2.0. I’m going to be into version 2.7 with this post (pretty much a random number, by the way, but indicative of where on the scale of voice it fits.)

So. Heart-sabbath, as I’ve been thinking about it, is letting the heart rest in prayer and from the burdens it carries. It is also, in a sense, speaking to the discontent of the soul that seems to plague some who are in the church, or who call themselves Christian, but can’t find a crucial bit or an important piece of the faith. Holy and unholy discontent itself is a different topic, and I’ll look into that tomorrow, I think. In the meantime…

The problems that we cause for ourselves in opening our hearts to the wrong people are often avoidable ones, if we are discerning correctly (that is, by the Holy Spirit and through the Word). However, so often in life we are guided into error by those whose approval we seek, or those whose lives we want to try and emulate. We make small compromises here and there, which, taken apart, seem like nothing. But if put together, they become troubles that weight us down, and which can vex to no end. The Bible itself cautions, in Jeremiah, against the heart’s tendencies to error. Here’s Jeremiah 17:7-10:

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? ‘I the Lord search the heart, and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.’”

What really sticks out to me from these verses is the peace of a tree by quiet waters, the man whose trust is in the Lord. See, we often manufacture mistrust in our hearts because of poor discernment in offering up its contents, and then we are left with the consequences, which become burdens that we carry around. I say ‘we’, but certainly this is not the case in all. I (who I generally mean when I say ‘we’) have a habit of carrying around a great many burdens, and so I guess the real point of taking a heart-sabbath is to acknowledge that, and unburden myself.

Not really much on what it means to take a heart-sabbath, but therapeutic nonetheless. Perhaps I should simply rest beside the still waters, as in the oft-quoted Psalm 23.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Easter Sunday: The Resurrection Miracle – New Birth

It is tradition in many churches to observe a sunrise service on Easter Sunday, wherein those souls who really, really want to have a good cup of hot chocolate in the morning will get up at 5 or so to spend time with fellow silly people; or, if they’re particularly foolish, stay up all night, in preparation for the service. I fall in the latter category, because if I’m asleep, I like to be asleep. Regardless, the sunrise service is, hopefully, the first step in the redemptive resurrection of Jesus Christ. We walk in the steps of those women who, early in the morning, rose to go and prepare the body of their Lord, only to find that He had risen. We rise early because God’s mercies are new every morning, especially on this one. He is risen indeed.

This is the third and final Easter Weekend post, where I hope to put together the reflections of the past few days and come up with a tie-together to end part II of TRUTH. I’ll be turning to a new posting style come this week, as befits the new birth that I’m going to talk about briefly today.

Let me first say that A World Apart has given me some insight into a number of things, but that it’s reached its limit for now. There’s only so much you can say about rebirth, about resurrection and redemption – the three Christian R’s, intertwined but distinct. It’s a good idea to put them in the proper order. For our redemption, Christ was resurrected that we might be reborn. He is sole mediator. But what does that literally mean?

I find that I’m really not getting into the meat that I want to get into in these most recent posts. They’ve been completed out of a sense of obligation, but I don’t know to whom. They’ve been dealing with some of the truths of the Christian faith, but not in any way that you can really hear them. That, I can’t do. Most cuttingly, they’ve become too intellectual even for me. I find reading them is rather tiresome, and that’s not where I want to be with them. So onward and upward, as we’ll hear coming up in Prince Caspian, to be released very soon. I’m looking forward to it with a great deal of excitement and hope. It’s probably one of the most carefully thought-out allegories in Lewis’ Narnia, and I pray that Walden has remained faithful to it.

That’s slightly tangential, so I’ll move on. I was planning on looking at two major themes today: the legacy of Christ and His resurrection; and rebirth.

What is the problem most people seem to have with accepting the gospel? I’ve said that Christ is the gospel, and Him alone. If that is the case, then what do people find so repulsive or so worthy of conflict? If you look back at the passage from Isaiah in yesterday’s post, you’ll find that God knew what He was saying when he inspired Isaiah in prophecy. There is certainly nothing in the form of a whipped, crucified, bloody man that one would find appealing…at least not in any normal moral sense, so that is certainly true. Paintings, sculptures, classical understandings of Christ have beautified Him, making the suffering servant palatable and robbing the Isaiah passage of a great deal of its significance (Hmmm. Interesting thought for a later post). I read the passage in church on Good Friday and I could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in it, and I tried to convey some of that sensation to the congregation. It may have succeeded, and if so, to God be the glory. So on the one hand we have a stinging picture of our sinfulness punished in Chrsit, and on the other we have a feelgood, holiness-emphasizing canon of illustration regarding Christ. Where’s the joy in a holy (and wholly) unreachable God-Man, so pure in his appearance that we cover our eyes or avert them from his radiance? Well, I’d like to suggest that the joy comes from knowing that He’s alive, that He is as pure and good and holy as He looks, and that in Him, in the destruction and rebirth of something beautiful, sin is atoned for. With this in mind, let me return to the question of Christ’s appeal. I’d like to think that what people find repulsive is the knowledge of their own sin, their own shame and their own failure, all lifted up on the cross for all to see. That’s the core of repentance, by the way: Humility and maybe even humiliation, your darker places dragged out into the light for people to see. And that’s the core of what Christ did for us. He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might be spotless before the radiant and holy Father. He dragged our sins out into the open and put them to death with His own death, and was then resurrected after having completed the task. ‘It is finished’ echoes through our minds once again in this.

If we accept Christ’s sacrifice as genuine, then what we have now is the remnant, the carry-over once-for-all atonement. That, too is what people find so difficult about the gospel. That Christ has his eye on things and his intercessory cloak on right now, watching, weighing, judging. That we are part of the redemptive plan of the world, and that we can be forgiven. See, we like to live in our failures, not have them forgiven. We don’t think we can ever be worthy of what has been done for us. You’re right. We can’t. We like to wallow in failure because it proves our own points. With new birth, it’s all put away. The afterbirth is discarded, and the new child looks up into Daddy’s eyes and smiles.

Happy Easter, and Blessings;

Christ-bearer

Sabbath Sacrifice

Darkness covered the land from about the sixth hour until the ninth hour, it says. Voices were stilled, quiet descended only yesterday. Today, the Son of Man is dead. I’ve called this Sabbath Sacrifice because it was unlawful to touch or prepare a dead body on the day of Sabbath in the Jewish faith. Thus, Christ was laid in a tomb unwashed and unpreserved. A borrowed tomb, as he was unable even to afford a burial plot of his own. So perished the great Son of Man. A day of darkness indeed.

If any among you have seen the play or the movie “Amadeus”, you will recognize the analogy I’m about to draw. The final scene in the movie is the shrouded body of Mozart dumped unceremoniously into the grave of a pauper, shoveled over with a careless spill of lime and some dark earth. It helps to remember the life he lived in preparation for that scene, and on the Saturday of death in the Easter event it helps, too, to remember the life of Christ in the darkened tomb that haunts our inner vision. So as we meditate on Christ’s burial this day, focus on His life, focus on His accomplishment in both life and death. And in that meditation, bear one thing in mind, because that’s where I’m going to start: Christ, before he died, while praying in Gethsemane, spoke these words according to John:

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word. that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one”. (John 17:20-22)

Christ prayed not just for those whom he loved, his disciples, but also for those who would come to love Him through the words that they bore. One of the most transcendent prayers of glory in the Bible, prayed for all of those who have been redeemed in Him.

I wrote last time about the contemporaneous nature of Christ’s sacrifice, and tonight (still Saturday as I write this), I want to speak about that in greater detail, preparing you for part three, which is the resurrection miracle and the gift of re-presentation.

The sacrifice Christ made for us, that God made for His children, was and is in love. In Philippians 2, Paul writes these words:

“Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Philippians 2:4-11)

Which resonate in the pronouncement of Isaiah 52:13-53:12:

“Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted. As many were astonished at you- his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind- so shall he sprinkle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard, they understand.
Who has believed what he has heard from us?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows; and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes, we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned — every one — to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. by oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.”

That’s a lot of Bible, but the content boils down to this (in three separate books by three different authors at three different times, no less): Jesus is the man of sorrows, who bore all of our suffering, all of our guilt, all of our wounds, that God might be glorified in Him. So as we turn again to the death of sin in the death of Christ, turn to it again with these thoughts.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Good Friday: "It is finished", Complete Atonement and Forgiven Debts.

This is the first of the Easter Weekend posts. I’m excited, because last year I wasn’t maintaining this blog with enough regularity to warrant such mediations. This year I can call them breaks in a pattern! I”m hoping to look at a few things in some detail for this one.

You may have noticed, over the past few months, that I’ve been sticking around several themes in Christianity. Centrally, the gospel of Jesus Christ, and peripherally, what results when Christ is preached and when He is allowed to change lives. Good Friday is the beginning of the three days that are the core of the Christian faith, the assurance of salvation, the completion of Jesus’ earthly ministry and heavenly mission, and the reason for the celebration of the Christian life. This post is part one of a three-part reflection on what this Easter weekend means to me this year. It’ll all come together in the end.

The title of this post is composed of three things: the words “It is finished”, the statement “complete atonement” and the acknowledgment of one part of the Lord’s Prayer as a central point of the day. I’m going to look at each of those briefly, and try to pull in some of the thoughts that have been arising as the last little while has been happening.

The statement ‘it is finished’ is, interestingly enough, recorded only in the gospel of John, although all four gospels record Jesus uttering a loud cry just before he breathed his last. In all cases, there is a great gravitas in the final minutes of Jesus’ life, a sign of something pivotal happening in his crucifixion and death. John makes it clear what this is. With the great ‘it is finished’, Jesus is speaking to a number of things. It is firstly the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 21:22-23:

“And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance.”

which raises some interesting points. For example, what crime did Jesus commit that would cause him to be put to death? And how is the land defiled if a man remains hung all night on a tree? These are areas of interesting speculation, but draw one away from the intent of this first point: Jesus was cursed by God in being hung on a cross. So, too, were the thieves beside him, but even in that curse, Christ could look at one and say today, you will be with me in paradise. In his death lay the potential for redemption even outside of the condemnation of the law

Jesus is also speaking to the work of redemption that God set in motion for man. In the crucifixion of His Son Jesus, God has declared the complete work of fall and redemption, atonement and justification. Christ came into history at a specific point by our reckoning, but (when you think about it), instantaneously in His. God sees both sin and redemption contemporaneously, and that’s what makes Christ’s atonement so incredible. I’ll look at that in just a minute. Hard to wrap your head around, but worth thinking about. Christ is the fundamentally important point of the entire work of the Bible, because it is in Him that everything is fulfilled.

Additionally, Jesus is speaking to the work of his earthly ministry. All that needs to be told about Him, all that is necessary, has been said. He is the gospel. Not his actions, because not all are recorded. Not his teaching, because he has said “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” (Matt.7:12). Not ‘this is what the Law and the Prophets mean,’ although that is implied, but that is what the Law and the Prophets are. No, what ‘It is finished’ speaks to is the truth that He has done what was required. Everything else is going to be trying to understand that.

Which brings us ’round to complete atonement. If the message of Christ is complete, and if He is the gospel truth, then all that we need to believe is that what we are told about atonement through the precursors in the Old Testament and the fulfillment in the New is valid and that it applies to us. Amazingly, it takes the comprehensive insights of multiple authors to arrive at that conclusion in the Word. To return to the point I suggested not too long ago, the contemporaneous understanding of Christ’s atonement means that by its very nature it is complete and universal. It covers all of mans’ sin because all of mans’ sin is that which is in perspective. I’m going to look a bit more at this on Saturday.

Finally, to round off this post (much longer than I had thought it would be), I want to look at the phrase forgiven debts, related as it is to the Lord’s prayer and to what I’ve been saying prior to this. Atonement is one of those fancy theological words that can be said much more simply in ways like this: Debt forgiveness, prices paid, account credited. Financial terms for a spiritual transaction. The great debt that we have towards God — for not killing us in our sin, for example, and for sacrificing His own Son to overcome it — and its only repayment in Christ Jesus is what truly needs to be thought about in this time. Today is the day of Christ’s death, and it is a cause for jubilee, because in it all debts have been forgiven and all credit history erased. Praise the Lord for what He has done.

Blessings;.

Christ-bearer.

A World Apart – Faithful Representation

I’ve just looked at two levels of standing apart in the world, through community and through personal demonstration of our redemption for Christ’s glory, as otherworldly people. Not in any great detail, mind you, but enough, hopefully, to give you some background for the three Easter Weekend blogs that I’ll be doing. This is the central point of the faith, and so I’m going to try to be faithful in its presentation. I’ve titled this one Faithful Representation to remind you of some of the themes that have been cropping up here and there in what I’ve been writing over the past few months. We’ll see what happens.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

A World Apart – Byzantium

The phrase ‘Byzantine intrigues’ is a reference to the kingdom of Byzantium, but the details of that phrase would lead to a very, very large entry, which would break the mandate of brevity for the World Apart series. My thinking on Byzantium leans primarily towards the examination of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and the ‘otherworldliness’ that springs from the churches and arts of the culture. It’s really the otherworldliness that I want to talk about here, just because it’s the current theme of my entries.

The Orthodox church places a lot of emphasis on ikons. For example, this one:

called the Christ Pantokrator. The whole idea of the ikons is to emphasize the otherworldliness, the holiness of the depiction. for more information, see the Wikipedia entry on iconography.

In a sense, we too are meant to be images reflecting holiness; not our own, but Jesus’. We are otherworldly, in a sense, because we know of and have hope in the redemption of this world.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer

A World Apart – Monasticism

I’m a big fan of the monastic lifestyle for a number of reasons. It’s always been something of my nature to seclude myself, withdrawing from the world for a time and just doing my own thing, and I’m also a big fan of the discipline of retreat. Spiritual disciplines are an entire realm of entries themselves, which might spin off from this next week, but for now I’m just going to look a bit at what it means to be a literal world apart, sequestered unto the Lord.

Thinking about St. Patrick’s Day has got me thinking about the missions of the Celtic saints, and what it was that drew new members to them. What, in fact, all mission should be like, if you think about it at all. Short-term missions work is usually deeds-oriented, offering solutions to practical problems and doing the theology tourist thing. I’m not decrying that form of missions, not at all, but I do want to suggest that it’s not the only kind. Much of a missionary lifestyle is demonstrating the fact that the character is different. That there’s something better than sin, better than Satan. And the monastic communities that won Pictish converts were built as self sustaining, committed communities. Not to impose a belief on pagans, but rather to witness through one’s life and work. To show that there was something honourable, good and holy in the Lord. That’s where we keep slipping up, we frail and foolish creatures. We don’t do any better than the culture we find ourselves in unless we have within us the true knowledge that we have been set apart. That, itself, is something that may take a very long time for any of us to come to terms with.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

It’s in a sense both a true feast-day and also a perversion of one, this St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not Catholic, but the tradition of celebrating saints’ days is, and generally speaking, they are festive occasions. Green beer, lucky clovers, the appeasement of the little people. There’s no real focus to the day, just a hodgepodge of traditions both pagan and Christian, which emerges from the Celtic church in most of the tales associated with its inception and growth. St. Patrick,St. Columba – two big ones in the branches of Celtic Christianity. They both seem to have monastic origins, creating quite literal worlds apart and ennobling a tradition of service and study that most today would find distasteful. While it’s sort of a break from A World Apart, it’s not, really, because I’m going to spend some time this week on the theme of being held apart from the ordinary, the true life that a Christian should lead. So what better way to start off a week of meditations leading up to Good Friday and Easter than to wish everyone a happy St. Patty’s Day!

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

A World Apart – Letting Go

As people tend to do, we hold on to things. We try and manage everything, control everything around us and pretend to ourselves that we have the power to do so. That even includes what might traditionally be understood as missional work. We try and control what God does in the lives of the people we seek to save. Missionaries, of course, will laugh at this statement, because they know better. They know that God’s the only one who decides what God will do. Look, for example, at Matthew 8:1-4:

“When he came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him. and behold, a leper came to him and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.’ And Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying ‘I will; be clean.’ And immediately he leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a proof to them.’”

I understand this to say that it is entirely under the sovereignty of the Lord to heal or not heal as He sees fit, and I consequently extend this to point to the necessity of letting go of those things we want to hold up and say ‘look, I did this’ or ‘look, have I not been blessed to do this?’ The point I want to make is simply this: The job of a Christian is to live according to the new life in Christ that he has been given, and let God do the work of getting a hold of the heart. I have friends who say that the chances of fully converting them are slim, but present, and at that I smile inwardly and say, God, I’m just here to do the work I can. I can seek to become more Christlike, to share Him as he lives and works in me, but I can’t do the work in man’s heart to incline it towards Christ, or to remove it and give him a heart of flesh. That’s what the world doesn’t really understand with hope. That while many things are beyond our control, they are not beyond God’s.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.