Category: Christian Living

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Christian Living

The Benefits of Deprivation

Here in America, we have been taught that we should never be deprived of anything. We’ve been led to believe that deprivation is a “bad word.” But God might be trying to teach us something different. Perhaps deprivation can actually lead to God’s Glory. As J. I. Packer tells us:

You know what kind of life it is that Christ calls you, as his disciple, to live. His own example and teaching in the Gospels make it abundantly clear. You are called to go through this world as a pilgrim, a mere temporary resident, traveling light, and willing, as Christ directs, to do what the rich young ruler refused to do: give up material wealth and the security it provides and live in a way that involves you in poverty and loss of possessions. Having your treasure in heaven, you are not to budget for treasure on earth, nor for a high standard of living—you may well be required to forego both.

You are called to follow Christ, carrying your cross.

What does that mean? Well, the only persons in the ancient world who carried a cross were condemned criminals going out to execution; each, like our Lord himself, was made to carry the cross on which he was to be crucified. So, what Christ means is that you must accept for yourself the position of such a person, in the sense that you renounce all future expectations from society and learn to take it as a matter of course if the people around you give you the cold shoulder and view you with contempt and disgust, as an alien sort of being. You may often find yourself treated in this fashion if you are loyal to the Lord Jesus Christ.

None of this, of course, is strange to any of us. We know what kind of life Christ calls us to; we often preach and talk to each other about it. But do we live it? Well, look at the churches. Observe the shortage of ministers and missionaries, especially men; the luxury goods in Christian homes; the fund-raising problems of Christian societies; the readiness of Christians in all walks of life to grumble about their salaries; the lack of concern for the old and lonely and for anyone outside the circle of “sound believers.” We are unlike the Christians of New Testament times.

Paul tells us that there is no ultimate loss or irreparable impoverishment to be feared; if God denies us something, it is only in order to make room for one or other of the things He has in mind. Are we perhaps, still assuming that a person’s life consists, partly at any rate in the things he possesses? When it comes to cheerful self-abandonment in Christ’s service we dither. Why? Out of unbelief, pure and simple.

May we learn to say with Habakkuk in face of economic ruin or any other deprivation: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign LORD is my strength” (Hab 3:17-19). Happy the person who can say these things and mean them!

I hope that I can learn cheerful self-abandonment in order to exalt Jesus Christ. I hope I can learn to be joyful in Jesus even when I do not find myself “rich” in the ways of the world.


        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)


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Christian Living

I Became a Christian and All My Problems Vanished!

“I Became a Christian and All My Problems Vanished!”
…ummm, I Don’t Believe You.

In fact, “I don’t believe you” is too mild a statement, but I didn’t want to offend you by writing what I really think about this statement. “I became a Christian, and now I don’t have anymore problems,” let’s just say that a person who says this or believes that it will come true is someone who is either a deceiver or deceived. Some who say it are lying because they think that is what they are supposed to say. Others believe it will come true because they have bought into the lie.

Does the Bible give us assurances that Jesus will walk with us through difficult times? Yes.
Does the Bible promise us that once we become Christians we will no longer have difficult times? Absolutely not.

In fact, Jesus says just the opposite – that trials and difficulties and persecutions will come, and that some of these will come directly as a result of following Him. So to say that becoming a Christian will make life easy is to attack the truthfulness of God’s own words.

Taking up one’s cross daily is difficult.
Engaging in spiritual warfare with the enemy is difficult.
Dealing with real persecution because of faith is difficult.

      …great assurances are scriptural and true—praise God, they are!
      But it is possible so to stress them, and so to play down the rougher side of the Christian life—the daily chastening, the endless war with sin and Satan, the periodic walk in darkness—as to give the impression that normal Christian living is a perfect bed of roses, a state of affairs in which everything in the garden is lovely all the time, and problems no longer exist—or, if they come, they have only to be taken to the throne of grace, and they will melt away at once.
      This is to suggest that the world, the flesh, and the devil will give us no serious trouble once we are Christians; nor will our circumstances and personal relationships ever be a problem to us; nor will we ever be a problem to ourselves. Such suggestions are mischievous, however, because they are false.
      Of course, an equally lopsided impression can be given the other way. You can so stress the rough side of the Christian life, and so play down the bright side, as to give the impression that Christian living is for the most part grievous and gloomy—hell on earth, in hope of heaven here-after! No doubt this impression has from time to time been given; no doubt the ministry we are examining here is partly a reaction against it. But it must be said that of these two extremes of error, the first is the worse, just to the extent that false hopes are a greater evil than false fears.
      The second error will, in the mercy of God, lead only to the pleasant surprise of finding that Christians have joy as well as sorrow. But the first, which pictures the normal Christian life as trouble-free, is bound to lead sooner or later to bitter disillusionment.

Life is difficult for everyone.
Life with Jesus makes for the best possible situation in this difficult life.
Life with Jesus, even though it brings in new difficulties, allows us to find His strength in the midst of the dark spots.
That is why Paul can say… Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

The Christian life is full of joy because of Jesus. But let us never deceive others by telling them the Christian life is trouble-free, because we never want someone to become disillusioned about Jesus because of us.


        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)


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Christian Living

Oops, I Took A Wrong Turn! Now What?

We’ve all done it…
Taken that wrong turn…
And some people have found that wrong turn to be a costly mistake…

a car that took a wrong turn into a lake
photo credit: www.komu.com/news/car-slides-off-roadway-into-lake/

Sometimes we feel as if we taken the wrong turn not just with our car, but with our entire life. We look back on the past and and we think, “Boy, did I choose the wrong way.” And we might even wonder if life has been permanently damaged because of that choice. If you feel that way, I have great news for you…

      If I found I had driven into a bog, I should know I had missed the road. But this knowledge would not be of much comfort if I then had to stand helpless watching the car sink and vanish; the damage would be done, and that would be that. Is it the same when a Christian wakes up to the fact that he has missed God’s guidance and taken the wrong way? Is the damage irrevocable? Must he now be put off course for life?
      Thank God, no. Our God is a God who not merely restores, but takes up our mistakes and follies into His plan for us and brings good out of them.
      This is part of the wonder of His gracious sovereignty…. The Jesus who restored Peter after his denial and corrected his course more than once after that, is our Savior today and He has not changed….
      Guidance, like all God’s acts of blessing under the covenant of grace, is a sovereign act. Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us His way, that we may tread it; He wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensuring that, whatever happens, whatever mistakes we may make, we shall come safely home. Slippings and strayings there will be, no doubt, but the everlasting arms are beneath us; we shall be caught, rescued, restored. This is God’s promise; this is how good He is.
      Thus it appears that the right context for discussing guidance is one of confidence in the God who will not let us ruin our souls.
      Our concern, therefore, in this discussion should be more for His glory than for our security — for that is already taken care of.

Isn’t that a beautiful description of how good God is to us. That if we have chosen Jesus as Savior and Lord, then no matter if we slip, we know that His arms are beneath us and that we will not ruin our souls. Our security in Him has been established already, so let us live for His glory!

        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)


Categories
Christian Living

I Am Following God, But Life Is Still Tough. What Gives?

a dark tunnel symbolizing the tough passages that God might lead us through
I wish there were simple answers to all of life’s tough questions, but we often find that many of our questions cannot be packaged into a box that is easily and neatly tied up. This is a question that is difficult. What we discover in our lives is that as we strive to follow God we have this sense that life should get easier, but our experience is that many times life gets even harder. This leads to us questioning if God is mad at us or if we have misunderstood God’s leading:

      Here is another cause of deep perplexity for Christian people…. They have set off along the road which God seemed to indicate. And now, as a direct result, they have run into a crop of new problems which otherwise would not have arisen—isolation, criticism, abandonment by their friends, practical frustrations of all sorts. At once they grow anxious. …Is their own present experience of the rough side of life (they ask themselves) a sign from God that they are themselves like Jonah, off track, following the path of self-will rather than the way of God?
      It may be so, and the wise person will take occasion from his new troubles to check his original guidance very carefully. Trouble should always be treated as a call to consider one’s ways. But trouble is not necessarily a sign of being off track at all…[as the Bible] teaches in particular that following God’s guidance regularly leads to upsets and distresses which one would otherwise have escaped. Examples abound.
God guided Israel by means of a fiery and cloudy pillar that went before them; yet the way by which he led them involved the nerve-shredding cliffhanger of the Red Sea crossing….
      Jesus’ disciples were twice caught by night in bad weather on the Sea of Galilee, and both times the reason why they were there was the command of Jesus himself.
      [Paul] told the Ephesian elders whom he met on his way, “I am going to Jerusalem, bound in the Spirit, not knowing what shall befall me there; except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me.” So it proved to be: Paul found trouble on the grand scale through following divine guidance.
      …For a final example and proof of the truth that following God’s guidance brings trouble, look at the life of the Lord Jesus himself. No human life has ever been so completely guided by God, and no human being has ever qualified so comprehensively for the description “a man of sorrows.” Divine guidance set Jesus at a distance from his family and fellow townsmen, brought him into conflict with all the nation’s leaders, religious and civil, and led finally to betrayal, arrest and the cross.
      …By every human standard of reckoning, the cross was a waste—the waste of a young life, a prophet’s influence, a leader’s potential. We know the secret of its meaning and achievement only from God’s own statements. Similarly, the Christian’s guided life may appear as a waste—as with Paul, spending years in prison because he followed God’s guidance to Jerusalem, when he might otherwise have been evangelizing Europe the whole time. Nor does God always tell us the why and wherefore of the frustrations and losses which are part and parcel of the guided life.
      Sooner or later, God’s guidance, which brings us out of darkness into light, will also bring us out of light into darkness. It is part of the way of the cross.

But thankfully, what I have found in my own experience is that even though I might be taken to difficult places by the guiding hand of God, the great news is that He not only holds my hand taken me to there, but he also never lets go as He leads me through them.

And there is a purpose for me going through it, even if I don’t understand it right now. I just have to trust Him even when I can’t see the end result.

I also need to remember that the purpose may not be about me, but rather about building up His kingdom. Since I have pledged my life to be His servant and to build His kingdom, then even if my life is crushed in the process, I am to be willing to be crushed for His sake.

I agree with the words of a song: “I’d rather walk in the dark with Jesus, than to walk in the light of my own. I’d rather go through the valley of the shadow with Him, than to dance on the mountains alone.” The Christian life is tough. It is not for the weak… it is for the courageous. It is for those with the courage to follow God even when the path isn’t clear and even when the road is rough.


        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer, and from Wayne Watson’s song: Walk in the Dark)


Categories
Christian Living

Getting Into A Muddle

“Getting Into A Muddle”
  by brian rushing

confusing road sign symbolizing the concept of a muddle
photo source: whoisbillbailey.info/picture-good-luck/

Many of us often wonder: “How in the world has this world gotten in such a mess?”
We might also ask: “How in the world has my family gotten into such a mess?”
And even more personally, at some point we will probably all ask: “How has my personal life gotten into such a mess?” I like the way J. I. Packer asks it: “How on earth have people got into such a muddle?”
His answer?

One is that people have gotten into the practice of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from his own Word; we have to try to help them unlearn the pride and, in some cases, the misconceptions about Scripture which gave rise to this attitude and to base their convictions henceforth not on what they feel but on what the Bible says.

A second answer is that modern people think of all religions as equal and equivalent—they draw their ideas about God from pagan as well as Christian sources; we have to try to show people the uniqueness and finality of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s last word to man.

A third answer is that people have ceased to recognize the reality of their own sinfulness, which imparts a degree of perversity and enmity against God to all that they think and do; it is our task to try to introduce people to this fact about themselves and so make them self-distrustful and open to correction by the word of Christ.

Do you see yourself holding to any of these misconceptions? Have you ever found yourself in a muddle?

Too often we want to “feel” that God should be a certain way, when the Bible presents Him in another light. Too often we want to think that there are many ways to God, when the Bible is clear that Jesus is the only Way. And too often we want to think that we are good enough on our own, when the Bible tells us that our righteousness is worthless in God’s eyes and that we must take the righteousness of Jesus to be made holy.

To get out of our mess… our muddle… we have to decide to “grow up” and look at things from God’s perspective, instead of demanding that things always be our way.


        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)