Tag Grace

Weeds are Good for You

Todd R 2 Comments

Are there people in the church, either in your own church, another local church, or somewhere in the global church, that seem a bit un-Christian?  Perhaps their doctrine is different than yours, or perhaps they behave differently.  Maybe they dress differently or have different standards in music.  They could have different political beliefs.  It could be anything.

Within a parable Jesus told in Matthew 13:24-30 is some wisdom about “those people.”  The parable is:

“He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also.  And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’  He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’  But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.  Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”’”

For this post, the key phrase in the parable is “No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.”  The wheat in the parable represents God’s people, and the weeds represent unbelievers in the midst of them.  The servants ask the master whether they should pull up all the weeds immediately, which seems like a sensible thing to do.  Weeds are bad for crops, right?

The surprising response is that the servants should “Let both grow together until the harvest.”  Why?  Because in the master’s judgment it is better for the wheat if the weeds are allowed to grow.  In other words, removing the weeds before the harvest – when God will separate the wheat from the weeds – would be bad for the wheat harvest.  Until the harvest, the master warns that we could “root up the wheat along with them.”

In Matthew 25 where Jesus tells of the final judgment in verses 31-46, it’s strongly implied that some of the “wheat” will be surprised about being wheat and some “weeds” will be surprised about being weeds.  In verses 37-39 Christians say: “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?  And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?”  In verse 44, unbelievers say: “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?”

Therefore, if the wheat and the weeds themselves can be unsure which they are, how can anyone else definitively decide who doesn’t belong, especially to risk damaging those who do belong.  There will always be true and false believers in churches until Christ returns, so remember: According to the Master, the wheat is better off with the weeds than without.  Especially if sometimes what we think are weeds actually aren’t.

Confession: The Blessing Nobody Expects

Todd R 2 Comments

What comes to mind when you think of confession?  Think about it for a moment.

For some, the thought might be a simple private prayer, or for some a confessional booth.  For others, no specific images might come to mind, but just a feeling of someone “out to get you.”  I expect some of you thought of the Spanish Inquisition, or at least the Monty Python skit making fun of it[1].  Where do these ideas come from?

The blame belongs in many places: secular culture, bad experiences with church, an emphasis on external over internal religion, and even Monty Python comedy skits.  My fantasy baseball league even has a team named “Spanish Inquisition” because the manager of that team thinks no one expects him to win – not even himself.

The mocking of secular culture aside, confession is an uncomfortable topic even for sincere Christians.  In Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, he shares the tension over confession between Tolkien and his then-fiancée Edith.  Tolkien was a practicing Catholic, while Edith was a member of the Church of England.  They had agreed as a couple to be Catholic, but Edith “began to dislike making her confession.  It was therefore all too easy when she was worried about her health (which was often) to postpone going to mass. She reported to Ronald [Tolkien] that getting up to go to church early in the morning and fasting until she had made her communion did not agree with her.”  She insisted “my health won’t stand it.”[2]  In my own Protestant church, we have a weekly prayer of confession, which the pastor regularly defends the importance of.  Few of us probably look forward to confession, whatever form we practice it in.

Photo by Shalone Cason on Unsplash

This discomfort with confession seems to be a shared part of mankind’s fallen nature, but if we look at well-known Bible verses on confession, we find that it is really about restoration, a rebirth of man’s relationship with God and a renewal of man to his ideal nature.  It is as different from God being “out to get you” as it could be.  1 John 1:9 encourages confession, because: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  God wants to give us forgiveness and cleansing, not condemnation and guilt.  Isaiah 1:18 explains this cleansing more poetically:

“Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD:
though your sins are like scarlet,
            they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red like crimson,
            they shall become like wool.”

Confession doesn’t need to be a dirty word.  The word “confess” means loosely to say the same thing about something, so confession means we agree with God (say the same thing he does) about sin – that it is bad.  But confession also applies to the rest of 1 John 1:9, that God “is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  Full confession includes agreeing about the steadfast and dependable character of God, His faithfulness and justice, as well as His desire to forgive and cleanse.  If we doubt this desire, consider what He voluntarily suffered on the cross to provide for this forgiveness, and to demonstrate His enduring love.

By adding confession about the good things of God to our confession of our sin, our confession does not make us miserable about our own condition but shows us how different we are from what God wants for us, how deeply our sin needs to be corrected, and how wonderfully God has provided for the removal of sin.

But this does not come easily.  Referencing Hebrews 4:16, which says, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need,” Puritan preacher Thomas Watson wrote that “Christ went more willingly to the cross than we do to the throne of grace.”

Why is this?  Could it be that we have trouble whole-heartedly confessing that “he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”?  Monty Python joke that “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” but do we fully expect God’s throne to be one of grace when we come to confess?

[1] If you’re not familiar with the skit, here’s a 4-minute example: https://youtu.be/Cj8n4MfhjUc
[2] Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography.  (1977).  P. 68-69.

The Difference Between Grace and Mercy

Todd R 4 Comments

The words “grace” and “mercy” are often used interchangeably, as if they mean the exact same thing.  But what if they’re both used in the same sentence?  For example, the apostle Paul almost always opens his letters to the churches with some version of the phrase “grace and peace,” but in 1 Timothy 1:2 he added “mercy”, writing:

“To Timothy, my true child in the faith:
Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.”

If grace and mercy were the same thing, it would be redundant for Paul to use both words, so they must have different meanings.  Paul uses these two words again later in the chapter, in 1 Timothy 1:13b-14, verses that give a clue to the different meanings:

“But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”

Paul had been writing about how before Christ found him, he was a zealous persecutor of Christians, dragging them to prison and also supervising the stoning of Stephen, one of the church’s first deacons, then “But I received mercy…”.  Paul deserved to be punished for his hate of and actions against Christ’s people, but instead received mercy.

Then he writes that “the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”  Here, Paul is receiving something from God – faith and love.  Did Paul deserve these things?  No, but he got them anyway.

Perhaps mercy is when you don’t get a bad thing that you do deserve, and grace is when you do get a good thing that you don’t deserve.  In Christ, we get both grace and mercy.  Paul’s words in 1 Timothy match this description.  By mercy, Paul didn’t get the punishment he deserved for his sins, and by grace Paul did get the faith and love he didn’t deserve.

Therefore, Paul, along with all of us, have 3 things to be thankful for: God’s mercy, and the faith and love that we get by God’s grace.  None of us deserve the “faith and love” God gives us (or it would not be grace), but when we are saved, we all receive these same gifts.  And we get them in place of what we actually deserve.

So, consider what we have received by grace.  Even our faith is a gracious gift – “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).  This faith we receive is enough to save us and reconnect us to God but is not yet a perfect faith that enables us to fully trust God with all of our life decisions.  We receive a love that is part of God’s character and is what we are to give to all people, but not enough for us to love perfectly.  However, when we are reborn in the new heaven and new earth, we will have perfect faith and love.  What a world that will be!

Knowing the difference between grace and mercy gives us more to be thankful to God for, so thank God for both His grace and mercy, and the faith and love that come with them!

Church is Not a Shopping Mall

Todd R 1 Comment

I recently had a very strange dream, which occurred (kind of) in the church I went to as a kid.  This church, in Washington, D.C., has been around for over 130 years and meets in a stone building and has an amazing pipe organ in the main sanctuary.  The appearance and structure of the church communicates permanence and tradition.

In this dream, I was roughly a teenager on one end of the church building but had to meet up with my family at the other end of the building.  I started out in a place that seemed like the church I knew, but as I travelled to the other end, things got really bizarre.  First, the size of the building seemed to keep expanding and the number of people in it kept multiplying.  Soon I noticed that there was a gift shop selling all sorts of kitsch that had nothing to do with religion.  I kept going in the same direction, trying to find my family, but the building just kept growing as I went, eventually having many levels, with huge moving walkways and escalators.  The dream ended with me still in the church, but this end of it had become a very upscale, very massive, shopping mall.  I remember wondering “how did the church turn into this?”

What to make of this?  Consider what a shopping mall is.  Yes, it’s a large collection of stores in one place, but not a random collection.  Those stores were chosen to be as diverse as possible.  The more of our desires and wants the mall can meet by having different types of stores, the more economically successful the mall will be, and that’s what matters to the mall operator.  People want fancy clothes, jewelry, entertainment, snacks and candy, toys, and many other things.  So, a mall can represent our “do whatever you want” culture.

I wonder if the seed of the dream was something I saw on Twitter a few days before: “There are infinite ways to be non-binary.”  What they were saying is that not only are there not just two genders, but that we can endlessly create new ones with no limit at all.  It’s like a sexual version of the shopping mall, and also a denial that there’s any real right or wrong or that there’s any such thing as an inappropriate desire.  But can we really make ourselves into anything we want to be without consequences?

Consider this: no competent computer engineer would tell us that we can just arrange a diverse group of components any way we want and end up with a working computer.  The engineer isn’t being intolerant or mean, they just know what it takes to make a computer do what it’s supposed to.

Likewise, when Jesus says “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few,”[1] He is not being intolerant or mean by saying we can’t do whatever we want to, He just knows that we were designed, what we were designed to do, and also what will ultimately satisfy us.

Christian churches are supposed to teach us how to follow Christ, not tell us to do whatever we want to, but now many churches, just like in my dream, have turned into proverbial shopping malls.  In many cases, we’ve forgotten that people are not accidents of random circumstances in nature, and we’ve forgotten that our Creator knows what’s best for us.  We’ve decided to pursue “the way that is easy” forgetting that it “leads to destruction.”  Too many churches, now including the one I went to in DC, say that Jesus will meet whatever needs we think we have, rather than saying that Jesus knows what we need better than we do; that it’s our idea of need that must be changed.

It’s our idea of need
that must be changed

When Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” the “world” He loves is the one where we’ve come up with infinite ways to reject Him.  Where we’ve come up with infinite ways to deny that He made us and knows better than us what’s right and wrong, what “leads to life” and what “leads to destruction.”

When God gave His Son, His sacrifice was sufficient for all sin and can cover all the infinite ways we decide to ignore what’s good for us.  Because God loved this world, it’s also true that His people should communicate His love and grace at all times to all people, by word and action.  Yet it’s also true that church is not a shopping mall regardless of what people can imagine in their dreams that it should be.  The church is called to a higher standard of living, a holy standard informed by our Creator’s knowledge of what works.

So, in these troubling times, pray that people will continue to find Jesus, both within and outside the church and what much of it has become.  That God’s people will love holiness, but also love sinners.  Pray that we find the way that is hard but leads to life and that God’s church is a beacon calling people to it.

Amen.

[1] Matthew 7:13-14

Pictures of Holiness and Grace

Todd R 2 Comments

A picture can be, as they say, worth a thousand words.  To make an impression, sometimes God uses pictures or images, and one example is how He lets us know just how holy He is.

When calling Isaiah to be a prophet, God gave him an image in Isaiah 6:1 “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple.”  In this vision of a throne room, why bother to mention that “the train of his robe filled the temple”?  Because in this image of God’s presence, there is no room for anything that isn’t holy.  If anyone tries to walk into the temple, they will tread on the Lord’s robe with their dirty feet, and any lord would be immensely offended at that.  James Boice commented on the verse, that: “This suggests that there is room for no one else at the highest pinnacle of the universe.  It is not just that Jehovah reigns, therefore, but also that no one else reigns beside Him or in opposition to Him”[1]

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

A similar picture of holiness comes from Revelation 15:8, which says: “and the sanctuary was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from his power, and no one could enter the sanctuary until the seven plagues of the seven angels were finished.”  Until God’s judgment was complete – both on the unrepentant and on the cross for His people – there would continue to be no room in the sanctuary for anyone but the Lord.

A third picture, which was not just a vision, but built in actual, physical form, is the “Holy of Holies.”  During most of the Old Testament period, priests implemented an elaborate sacrificial system to illustrate God’s requirements for meeting with sinners: an innocent creature had to die.  These animals symbolized the later sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  But the “Holy of Holies” was the ultimate statement of how serious approaching God is.

This innermost room of the temple was only entered once per year (on the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur), and only by the high priest, who only can enter after hours of preparation.  Once there, the high priest would sprinkle the blood of a sacrificed bull on and in front of God’s “mercy seat”, the cover of the ark of the covenant and a sign of His presence.  Later Jewish tradition (not found in the Bible) indicates that others would stand outside the room holding a rope that was tied to the high priest, who also had bells tied around his waist.  If those outside heard the bells jingling, followed by silence, they would assume the high priest did not atone properly for the sins of the people, died in God’s presence, and needed to be dragged out by the rope.  God’s holy presence was to be taken seriously.

So Isaiah, presented with God’s holiness, cried out “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”  Isaiah’s “Woe” comes down to current times in the expression “Oy!”  Isaiah knew instinctually that being in God’s temple was a bad idea.  However, God provides redemption for His people, which He pictured for Isaiah like this: “Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar.  And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”[2]

Isaiah was not saved by a burning coal, but by what it represented: the future sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  In God’s steadfast love for His people, He offered Jesus once for all, and the only sacrifice necessary and sufficient for us to know God.  Therefore, there is no longer a barrier to His holy presence for God’s people, so the writer of Hebrews says, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”[3]

Yes, God is holy and must be honored as holy, but when we feel insufficient or feel like yelling “oy!” when things go wrong, we can come “with confidence” to Jesus in His temple and ask Him to reassure us of His provision for our sin.  That we may know, like Isaiah, that “your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

Amen

[1] From “May 9.” James Montgomery Boice and Marion Clark. Come to the Waters: Daily Bible Devotions for Spiritual Refreshment.  (2017).
[2] Isaiah 6:6-7
[3] Hebrews 4:16