Tag Paul

No Confidence in the Flesh

Todd R Leave a comment

Today is the last post in a 5-part series on the first Beatitude from Matthew 5:3 – “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  Today’s thought begins with how the Apostle Paul, who met Jesus on the road to Damascus[1], emphasized how being “poor in spirit” is universal across all demographic characteristics:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3:28
“Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.” – Colossians 3:11

Paul wrote two different lists, meaning they are not comprehensive.  He simply couldn’t include every possible example of the ways Christ eliminates barriers, but provided examples of the main point, which is “all.”  Prior to these verses, he writes that “in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” (Galatians 3:27) and that we “have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.” (Colossians 3:10) This “new self” is the new identity, which is the only one that matters, that we are “sons of God”.

What does this have to do with “Blessed are the poor in spirit”?

Paul knows that Jesus provides – in full – the only way for salvation, on the cross and through His resurrection.  What we think are accomplishments “in the flesh” do not make us “rich” in spirit, and in fact may make us worse off.  Paul expands on this in Philippians 3:4-7, discarding any confidence he has in the flesh as “loss”:

“Though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.”

In other words, Paul is saying that his obedience to the ceremonial law of the Old Testament, his genealogy, his denomination, his nationality, and his recognition as a religious expert provided no value, in fact negative value (“loss”), toward his salvation in Christ.  From the earlier verses we can add gender and economic status to the list.  His identity in earthly terms is a negative whenever it gets in the way of his identity in Christ.  When he counted on these things for salvation, they only clouded his view of what was really needed and were in the way of accepting it.  They were a distraction, a waste of time.  This applies not just to Paul, but to anyone: religious pedigree, ethnicity, nationality, or any other accomplishment is a negative contribution if it causes us to refuse His free offer of His righteousness.

It also affects how we present Christ to others.  If our own definition of “poor in spirit” includes a complete lack of faith in our “flesh”, it becomes easier to offer the gospel to “all” others, to approach them in love, and therefore to reflect the kingdom of heaven.  To love our neighbor includes not limiting who our neighbor is.  In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the person beaten and abandoned on the side of the road is only identified as “a man.”[2]  If we know that our identity also did not matter in our salvation, that it may have made us even poorer in spirit, the identity of our neighbor will not matter either.  The unity and outreach of the church depend on the idea that all are equally “poor in spirit.”

Pray for Christ to enable you to embrace your new identity, your new spirit, and provide new motivation to be a more faithful subject in His kingdom.

“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” – Matthew 6:14-15
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” – Matthew 5:3

[1] Acts 9:3-9
[2] Luke 10:30

The Difference Between Grace and Mercy

Todd R 1 Comment

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!

We Don’t Understand God

Todd R 2 Comments

Several chapters at the end of the book of Acts in the Bible detail how Paul was destined to share the Gospel in Rome and how God preserved his life in order for him to get there.  One such story happened when Paul was shipwrecked on the island of Malta.  The people on the ship carrying Paul were welcomed by the people of Malta, but when Paul had gathered sticks to add to their fire, “a viper came out because of the heat and fastened on his hand.” (Acts 28:3). The next verse is where things get interesting:

“When the native people saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, “No doubt this man is a murderer. Though he has escaped from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live.””

Notice that “Justice” is capitalized.  Why?  The people weren’t thinking of justice in an abstract, impersonal sense, but this “Justice” in the original Greek was “Δικη”, or “Dike.”  Dike, in Greek mythology, was “the goddess of justice and the spirit of moral order and fair judgement as a transcendent universal ideal”[1]  This “Justice” was personal.  In Greek mythology there were many gods and each of them oversaw or represented some aspect of the world.  In the case of Acts 28:4, the “native people,” instead of seeing Paul’s snake bite as a random event, saw as its cause an intervention by one of their gods against someone who must have deserved justice.

Paul, “however, shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm.” (verse 5). Seeing this, the people “changed their minds and said that he was a god.” (verse 6).  Because they thought a god was trying to punish Paul, they had to further conclude that Paul was powerful enough to overcome Dike and therefore must be a god himself.  Modern readers know this is all just superstition, but what’s interesting is how superstition builds on superstition.  The belief in one false god led to the belief in another.  This story is an example of lies building on lies.

The tragedy is that this happens far more often than we think.  What we see as a superstitious instinct – bad things happen to people who deserve justice because there is a god of justice – also was (and is) believed by people who claim to believe in the true God.  In John chapter 9, disciples of Jesus asked Him regarding a man blind from birth, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”[2]  These disciples believed in a God of justice, and so when they saw something bad happen, they attributed it to a direct intervention by God against someone who surely deserved it.

Christians believe that God is a God of justice, and yet Jesus corrected His disciples and said, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”[3]  Jesus then healed this blind man, and God was glorified in a way that couldn’t have happened if the man had not been blind.  Likewise, when Paul shook off the snake in Acts 28, God was glorified in a way that couldn’t have happened unless Paul was bitten by a snake.  The lesson is that if something bad happens to someone, it doesn’t mean there is some specific sin in that person that deserves a specific act of justice in the form of punishment.

God’s ways aren’t that easy for us to understand, “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?”[4]  If we believe God acts in easy-to-understand cause-and-effect relationships that we can see and understand (or even predict) we are just as superstitious as the people who believed in Dike.  And if we believe this, we are more likely to add to this belief just as the people did who thought Paul was a god.  We draw more conclusions from our own false conclusions, thinking it’s “logical,” although our starting point was off.  As Mark Twain wrote: “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”

When Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25 said “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” an important point was being made that needed to be repeated: our own logic can lead us down the wrong way, even to death.  Our logic sometimes begins with a misunderstanding of how God works, and often with us thinking we can understand God completely.  We can believe God is just (and it is true that He is), but that doesn’t mean we know everything about how He accomplishes justice in the daily events of our lives and of the world.

So, what do we do about this?  We will never be perfect in this world, but I find that the way to move in the right direction is constant fellowship with God.  Constant prayer, daily Bible study, regular meditation on the Word.  Cultivation of a humble heart that knows it is flawed and can always be made better.  Repeated questioning of why we believe what we believe and do what we do.  Can we trace everything back to His Word?  All of our thoughts and actions?  Do we ask Him to show us where we’re wrong?

Pray that we may know God truly, even though we can’t know Him completely.  That God will better reveal Himself and His will to us, today and every day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dike_(mythology)
[2] John 9:2
[3] John 9:3
[4] Paul in Romans 11:34, quoting Isaiah 40:13

The Part of Us That Matters

Todd R Leave a comment

The Apostle Paul wrote an amazing contrast in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, which says:

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On the one hand, there are things that are transient, described as: outer, wasting away, light, momentary, affliction, and seen.

On the other hand, what is eternal is: inner, being renewed, weighty, glorious, beyond all comparison, and unseen.

These things are part of each of us, but what is eternal matters infinitely more than the other. Don’t confuse the two, or you may lose heart because Paul earlier assured us in verse 14 that “he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence.”  At that time, only what is eternal will remain.

Amen.

Allow Me to Demonstrate

Todd R 1 Comment

Life as a Christian in the 1st century must have been extraordinarily difficult.  Like Jesus these early disciples faced resistance both from religious leaders as well as the Roman government. Most of these early Christians had not met Jesus personally and also did not have the Bible we have today.  What did they base their faith on?  Largely on the witness of others and on the teachings and examples of the apostles. Paul, who brought many to Christ and founded many churches during his missionary journeys, knew that all of his actions would be scrutinized as to whether they reflected what he was teaching.

Paul told new Christians to keep a close watch on his life, because if Christ had not made a difference in Paul’s life, why should others believe it would make a difference in theirs?  If Paul didn’t personally have love, joy and peace[1] in his life, why should those hearing him preach expect Christ to provide them with love, joy and peace.  He knew actions speak louder than words.

To the church in Corinth Paul wrote: “my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men butin the power of God.”[2]  Paul saw his life as a “demonstration” of God’s power and knew that this demonstration would be more powerful than the competence of his “speech” and the complexity of his “message.”  It’s as if Paul had given a presentation describing God and His power, and then told his audience, “Allow me to demonstrate…”. Paul often gave thanks that the churches he wrote to were living examples of Christian faith lived out.

So, the question comes to us: what do our lives demonstrate?  Do we show love to others?  Do we have joy in all circumstances? Are we at peace with God and can we offer peace to others?  What do people notice about us?  The fruit of the Spirit, or the patterns of this world?

Pray for all of God’s people, including you and I, that we would walk with Christ, abiding in Him, so that we may bear the fruit of love, joy and peace that the world will notice.  When we proclaim Christ, with Paul we should be able to say “allow me to demonstrate…”

“People may not agree with our theology but they shouldn’t be able to argue with our lives.” – John McGowan

“Out of a hundred people, one will read the Bible, and the other ninety-nine will read the Christian.” – Dwight L. Moody

[1] Galatians 5:22
[2] 1 Corinthians 2:4-5