Moses’ Prosperity Doctrine

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to share ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.

He considered abuse suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking ahead to the reward.

By faith he left Egypt, unafraid of the king’s anger; for he persevered as though he saw him who is invisible. (Hebrews 11:24-27)

learnenglish-central-stories-treasure-story-330x220 Talk about a radical reorientation to everything that we think in the natural!

  • Who wouldn’t want to be known–isn’t fame the greatest treasure?
  • Who wouldn’t want to have the place of son in the royal family–isn’t celebrity and having people look up to you a major rush in life?
  • Who wouldn’t want to be well thought of and treated well–isn’t good treatment our just desserts?

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Better is One Day…

home For the last 5 years, my family has lived in homes owned by someone else.

Since living in rental property, my heart has longed for what I do not have–a home. I have woven such a fantasy centered around having a Norman Rockwell type dwelling that it astounds me.

This morning as I read Psalm 84 God met me with the sweetest enticement to think new thoughts about this circumstance. He met me with the dearest compulsion to rethink the truth about “home.”

First, He questioned me about where I really thought I would feel most at home.  Then He pressed me to examine why I want a place of “my own.” With the motives of my heart dredged up and the most demanding functional god identified, my eyes began to savor the words of psalmist.

New thoughts flooded my mind when He had me consider the perspective of the writer of psalm.

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD Almighty.
I long, yes, I faint with longing
to enter the courts of the LORD.
With my whole being, body and soul,
I will shout joyfully to the living God.

This was one who wanted to be at home in God.  This was one whose thirst was not for an abode that would be a show place of what he could acquire on his own. This was not a person who thought security, satisfaction and comfort was found in an independent dwelling.  He desperately wanted to be where God’s glory was on display!  This writer felt deprived–exiled from the best home ever–the Presence of God.

A single day in your courts
is better than a thousand anywhere else!
I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of my God
than live the good life in the homes of the wicked.

Augustine said, “If you have a house of your own, you are poor; if you have the house of God you are rich.  In your own house you will fear thieves; in God’s house God himself is the wall.  Blessed, then, are those who dwell in your house.  They possess the heavenly Jerusalem, without distress, without pressure, without diverse and divided boundaries.  All possess it; and each singly possesses the whole.”

mth-glsPraise God–today I can say and believe, I am not homeless, I have a true home and it is my God!

Jack Miller wrote, “If you have made your home this world and whatever you can possess in it you are always in danger of being plunged into insecurities, fears, and losses.

But make God your dwelling place and you have unlosable treasure.”

Confident Approach

"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."  Hebrews 4:16

prayer Most of us confess that we find it difficult to draw near God in prayer –  much less in doing it confidently! 

I sometimes wonder if the words to the Santa Claus song "You better watch out.  You better not pout.  You better not cry I am telling you why"  haven’t spilled over and become our default thinking about God rather than the view expressed through this verse in Hebrews.

Though it has a jolly tune, the message is anything but inviting! 

Remember how it goes?

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Full of Leaks

22616740Under the conviction of your Spirit I learn that

the more I do, the worse I am,

the more I know, the less I know,

the more holiness I have, the more sinful I am,

the more I love, the more there is to love.

O wretched man that I am!

O Lord, I have a wild heart,

and I cannot stand before thee;

I am like a bird before a man.

How little I love thy truth and ways!

I neglect prayer, by thinking I have prayed enough and earnestly,

by knowing

that you have saved my soul.

 

Of all hypocrites, grant that I may not be an evangelical leakyBuckethypocrite,

who sins more safely because grace abounds,

who tells his lusts that Christ’s blood cleanses them,

who reasons that God cannot cast him into hell,

for he is saved,

who loves evangelical preaching, churches, Christians, but lives unholy.

My mind is a bucket without a bottom,

with no spiritual understanding,

no desire for the Lord’s Day,

ever learning but never reaching the truth,

always at the gospel-well but never holding water.

am_porteuse_d_eauMy conscience is without conviction or contrition, with nothing to repent of.

My will is without power of decision or resolution.

My heart is without affection, and full of leaks.

My memory has no retention,

so I forget easily the lessons learned,

and they truths seep away.

   Give me a broken heart that yet carries home the water of grace. ((Arthur Bennett, The Valley of Vision, A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions, Banner of Truth, p.128-9))

 

Joseph’s Coat

Meanwhile Jacob had settled down where his father had lived, the land of Canaan. 2 This is the story of Jacob. The story continues with Joseph, seventeen years old at the time, helping out his brothers in herding the flocks. These were his half brothers actually, the sons of his father’s wives Bilhah and Zilpah. And Joseph brought his father bad reports on them. 3-4 Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons because he was the child of his old age. And he made him an elaborately embroidered coat. When his brothers realized that their father loved him more than them, they grew to hate him—they wouldn’t even speak to him. Genesis 37, The Message

jacob_joseph_coat (Small) I have read the story of Joseph and his “technicolor dream coat” many times.  As I read it,  my mind has in view a snapshot of a fancy, multicolored striped tunic just like the ones I saw in the Sunday School pictures.

Recently while listening to a lecture by Dr. Doug Stuart, he pointed out that Genesis 37 is not telling the story of a little boy with a coat of many colors but is communicating that Jacob gave Joseph a long-sleeved coat. 

For the reader, that was to signal that an inheritance ceremony was going on in this family.  The long sleeved coat was normally given to the first born son symbolizing that he was the heir who would receive the double portion from the father. 

The Genesis story is highlighting how upside down Jacob’s affections were for Joseph.  As Jacob awards a younger son this great gift of inheritance, our hearts immediately resonate with the brothers who felt slighted and disowned by father Jacob.

Is there something else –something more hidden going on in this story?  Was the author’s intent not only to shock the hearer with the sense of unfairness but also with how undeserving was Joseph for such a generous gift.  

Running all through the Bible narrative, the Holy Spirit is weaving the tapestry of grace.  So too in this family history, the author is pulling a “grace thread’ through the fabric of jealousy, hatred, and undeserved favoritism.  The thread becomes clearer if we will stand in Joseph’s shoes rather than in the shoes of the offended brothers.  Tim Keller is masterful in getting at the “grace thread” of Genesis 37.  

“Suffering all by itself can ruin you, but suffering plus an absolute assurance of the love of God can turn you into something great, absolutely great.  Well some of us say, “That’s nice, except that’s not what happens is it?”  Because when bad things come in your life, you know what happens:

When suffering comes into your life, almost immediately you struggle with this, you say “Maybe I am not living right.  Maybe I am not doing right.” When suffering comes into your life, you have less assurance that God loves you. You feel like “God has abandoned me,” so how the heck is this going to work?  It doesn’t make sense.  

If George Herbert is right in saying, If I had joyous coat, if I had the coat of the Father on me, then suffering I can handle it.”  How do you get it? Here’s how you get it. The pattern of salvation in Joseph’s life was so weird to his brothers.  It’s so against the world’s thinking, but that is because it points to the ultimate pattern of salvation.  

You see, centuries later another one came to his brethren, “to his own and they received him not”.  Another one was sold for silver, and betrayed by the people closest to him.  It was another one who was stripped naked, and abandoned to die, and who cried out in the dark, “Why?” And nobody heard. Nobody came. That one was Jesus.

But here’s the difference: Joseph is being turned into a savior, the only way God’s salvation would have worked; Jesus was being turned into a savior through weakness in suffering and rejection. You see that?  Joseph can only save the community if he is first rejected by the community, he could never be their savior – though eventually he was – unless he was first lost, unless he was humbled, unless he was rejected, unless he was sold.

Joseph was being turned involuntarily into the savior for one human family.  But Jesus Christ came, and the pit he fell into was vastly deeper.  And the cry of his dereliction was vastly greater.  And his nakedness and his sense of abandonment was infinitely beyond anything that Joseph went through.  In other words, Jesus came voluntarily to be the savior of us all.

jesus_crucifixion_empty_cross Because when Jesus was on the cross, He wasn’t just physically naked.  He was stripped of His Father’s love.  Do you know why? He was being punished for our sin.  

When suffering hits you, you will always get back in touch with the subliminal deep profound sense – that every human being has – and that is “I really deserve some punishment for the way in which I’ve lived”.  No human being can get rid of that. I don’t care how much therapy you go to. It’s there. It’s cosmic. It is part of “the image of God”, part of who you are as human being.

And when suffering comes, you will lose any sense of God’s love unless you see: here is “The One” who lost the Father’s coat, so you can be assured that you have it.  Here is The One who lost the Father’s love, paying our penalty so we could know – in spite of our imperfect life – God loves us.

When I ask God to accept me because of what Jesus has done, I get the coat. I know He loves me.

And if you know that, that means if right now today you’re in the pit and you’re crying out in dereliction, you cry out “Why am I completely alone?” You’re not.  Because Christianity is the only religion that even claims that God has suffered, that God has gone into that pit.  That God is there. God has also gone in there in the dark besides you. He knows what it’s like! He’s suffered with you. God suffered for you! He did! So you’re not alone. You can know, even in the midst of your suffering, that He loves you. And that’s what you actually need.

Let’s pray. Father show us how we can have – in our life – this coat: The assurance of Gods love; the assurance of Your love, Father; the assurance of your adoration and delight of us. And we pray that if we have that, we’ll be able to turn even suffering into joy. We will turn even our troubles into wisdom and holiness. And we ask that you show us how to do that. Here, as we take the Lord’s Supper, make yourself real to us. In Jesus name, Amen.” ((Tim Keller, The Hiddenness of God, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, NYC, June 2003))

Do you Sense His Love?

image154 This morning I was revisiting a favorite book by A.W. Tozer The Pursuit of Man.

He used a wonderful illustration to make the important distinction between knowing about Christ and His love andknowing it experientially.

Tozer asked, “What good would it do a starving child to know about bread when his stomach rolled and growled begging for food to be satisfied?”

A person can die of starvation knowing all about the nutritional value of fruits and vegetables but knowing about them will not save him from starving!

“Knowledge by acquaintance is always better than mere knowledge by description.”

With that illustration in mind, I wondered about the love of God.  It is not uncommon to hear people proclaim that God is love, that He is by nature a loving and caring being.

loveofImage10b (Small) Wouldn’t life be more viscerally satisfying if we knew those truths by acquaintance rather than description? 

Maurice Roberts wrote on the subject of sensing the love of God and he suggested:

“The way to get God’s felt blessing on our hearts begins with an act of faith.  That is to say we must believe that there is such a thing to be had in this life. If we do not expect or even believe in such experiences, the probability is that we shall know but little of them.

There is, as we have sought to show, a true and scriptural enjoyment of Christ which is no fanaticism but the subjective fruit of the gospel.

Then, having become convinced that there is a genuine experience of a ‘felt Christ’ to be had on earth, we must go to God in prayer for it.  We come to the throne of grace as suppliants to receive this choice favor of ‘tasting’, or being made subjectively conscious of the love God has to us in Christ.

We do harm to our souls and hinder our own progress in the knowledge of God (remember how that differs from knowing about God) if we treat prayer as an exercise of the mind only and do not expect to emerge from the presence of God with a fresh token of His love born in us. ((Maurice Roberts, The Thought of God, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993, p.61))

What vitality would be breathed into our living if we stopped existing on the knowledge about God and sunk our teeth into subjective experience of tasting and seeing that God is good! Psalm 34:8

Let’s starve no more!

Facing Our Giants

TissSlng (Small) Out of my distress I called on the LORD;

the LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.

With the LORD on my side I do not fear.
What can mortals do to me?

The LORD is on my side to help me;
I shall look in triumph on those who hate me.

It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to put confidence in mortals.

It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to put confidence in princes.

Psalm 118

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