Behold, how eager this out little boy
Is for a butterfly, as if all joy,
All profits, honours, yea, and lasting pleasures,
Were wrapped up in her, or the richest treasures
Found in her would be bundled up together,
When all her all is lighter than a feather.

He halloos, runs, and cris out, “Here, boys, here!”
Nor doth he brambles or the nettles fear:
He stumbles at the molehills, up he gets,
And runs again, as one bereft of wits;
And all his labour and his large outcry
Is only for a silly butterfly.

Comparison

This little boy an emblem is of those
Whose hearts are wholly at the world’s dispose.
The butterfly doth represent to me
The world’s best things at best but fading be.”
All are but painted nothings and false joys,
Like this poor butterfly to these our boys.

His running through nettles, thorns, and briers,
To gratify his boyish found desires,
His tumbling over molehills to attain
His end, namely, his butterfly to gain,
Doth plainly show what hazards some men run
To get what will be lost as soon as won.

John Bunyan

Excerpt from Spurgeon’s For the Sick and Afflicted:

“I bear whatever thou wilt put upon me; I have borne it, I still bear it, and I will bear it, whatever thou mayest ordain it to be. I submit myself entirely to thee, and accept the load with which thou art pleased to weight me.”

Now, we ought to do this, dear friends, and we shall do it if we are right at heart. We should cheerfully submit, because no affliction from which we suffer has come to us by chance. We are not left to the misery of believing that things happen of themselves, and are independent of a divinely controlling power. We know that not a drop of bitter ever falls into our cup unless the wisdom of our heavenly Father has placed it there. We are not even left in a world governed by angels, or ruled by cherubim; we dwell where everything is ordered by God himself. Shall we rebel against the Most High? Shall we not let him do as seemeth good in his sight? Shall we not cover our lip in silence when we know that the evil is of the Lord? Shame upon us, if we be his children, if this be not the prevalent spirit of our mind-”It is the Lord, let him do what seemeth him good.” Moreover, we should not only bear all things because the Lord ordains them, but because he orders all things for a wise, kind, beneficent purpose. He doth not afflict willingly. He takes no delight in the sufferings of his children. Whenever adversity must come it is always with a purpose; and, if a purpose of God is to be subserved by my suffering, would I wish to escape from it? If his glory will come of it, shall I not even crave the honor of being the agent of his glory, even though it be by lying passive and enduring in anguish. Yes, beloved, since we know that God can only grieve his regenerated creatures for some purpose of love, we should willingly accept whatever sorrow he pleases to put upon us. And we have his assurance, besides, that all things work together for our good. Our trials are not merely sent with a good object, but with an object good towards ourselves, a design which is being answered by every twig of our heavenly father’s rod. “The cup which our Father hath given us, shall we not drink it?” It is healing medicine and not deadly poison, therefore let us put it to our lips without a murmur, ay, quaff it to its very dregs, and say, “Not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

Need of Jesus (from the Valley of Vision collection of prayers)

Lord Jesus,
I am blind, be thou my light,
ignorant, be thou my wisdom,
self-willed, be thou my mind.

Open my ear to grasp quickly thy Spirit’s voice,
and delightfully run after his beckoning hand;
Melt my conscience that no hardness remain,
make it alive to evil’s slightest touch;
When Satan approaches may I flee to thy wounds,
and there cease to tremble at all alarms.

Be my good shepard to lead me into the green pastures of thy Word,
and cause me to lie down beside the rivers of its comforts.

Fill me with peace, that no disquieting worldly worldly gales
may ruffle the calm surfaces of my soul.

Thy cross was upraised to be my refuge,
Thy blood streamed forth to wash me clean,
Thy death occurred to give me a surety,
Thy name is my property to save me,
By thee all heaven is poured into my heart,
but it is too narrow to comprehend thy love.

I was a stranger, an outcast, a slave, a rebel,
but they cross has brought me near,
has softened my heart,
has made me thy Fathers’ child,
has admitted me to thy family,
has made me joint-heir with thyself.

O that I may love thee as thou lovest me,
that I may walk worthy of thee, my Lord,
that I may reflect the image of heaven’s first-born.

May I always see thy beauty with the clear eye of faith, and feel the power of thy Spirit in my heart,
for unless he move mightily in me
no inward fire will be kindled.

The Power of the Cross

Oh, to see the dawn
Of the darkest day:
Christ on the road to Calvary.
Tried by sinful men,
Torn and beaten, then
Nailed to a cross of wood.

CHORUS:
This, the pow’r of the cross:
Christ became sin for us;
Took the blame, bore the wrath-
We stand forgiven at the cross.

Oh, to see the pain
Written on Your face,
Bearing the awesome weight of sin.
Ev’ry bitter thought,
Ev’ry evil deed
Crowning Your bloodstained brow.

Now the daylight flees;
Now the ground beneath
Quakes as its Maker bows His head.
Curtain torn in two,
Dead are raised to life;
“Finished!” the vict’ry cry.

Oh, to see my name
Written in the wounds,
For through Your suffering I am free.
Death is crushed to death;
Life is mine to live,
Won through Your selfless love.

The Power of the Cross by Keith Getty & Stuart Townend

Some of us need to fire god.

Some of us believe in a pretend, small god who is mostly uninvolved with our lives.  Life gets hard and we don’t know what to do.  Where is my god?

We should fire this silly god.  In reality, the Bible tells us about the one, true God who is intimately and sovereignly involved with all things.  The Westminster Shorter Catechism wisely says, “The decrees of God are, his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.” As we learn to interact with this God, the difficulties of life make more sense.

God teaches us important lessons by bringing difficulties into our lives.

Is this surprising, that God would intentionally bring difficulties into your life?  Recall the Israelites who learned some very important lessons from God, and these lessons came in his classroom of desert hunger.

Deu 8:2-5 And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.  And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. Your clothing did not wear out on you and your foot did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the LORD your God disciplines you.

It’s important to see God’s “discipline” as loving discipline, “as a man disciplines his son.” His discipline graciously uncovers the true condition of our hearts so that we can confess sin and learn to trust Him more fully.  Like the ancient Israelites, I tend to get selfish, irritable and impatient when I’m hungry.  What does God’s classroom of hunger reveal in your heart?

Our hearts are sick with sin.  As J.I. Packer says, even our best deeds are “shot through with sin.”  We don’t like to see ourselves this way, we don’t like to kill the sin that infects everything we do, and so we need God’s gracious discipline to help us face reality.

Jer 17:9-10 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?  I the LORD search the heart and test the mind…

It is good and gracious of God to do this because when we face our sin, we can bring it to the cross and get washed white as snow.  As a good man disciplines his son, so God uses difficult life situations to show us what’s in our hearts and help us get clean.

When God provides things we don’t want (like manna, which was probably thrilling for a few days, but what about year 27?), what’s in our hearts?  God’s startling provision tends to uncover greed, lust and jealousy in my heart.  What does it reveal in yours?  What does your non-ideal life situation reveal in your heart?

When you don’t get a raise, but you get laid off instead…when your husband is rude to you…when your body fails…when your children rebel…when your beater car blows another tire…what do the difficulties of life uncover in your heart?

“…testing you to know what was in your heart…”

This is a surprise to many people, that God would design difficult scenarios for us.  But think about what it means to refine silver and gold.  You turn up the heat and all the impurities rise to the surface.  This is not a comfortable process.  But it’s a good process.  God works all things together for good so that even in the case of extreme trauma we can trust His wisdom and watch our hearts.

Pro 3:11-12 My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the LORD reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.

Heb 12:11-13 For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees,  and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.

God brings difficulties into our lives for the purpose of revealing our deceitful and sin-sick hearts.  When that sin comes to the surface, we can skim it off through repentance and faith.

Resentments, impatience, anger, discontentedness, overmuch sorrow, arrogance, lying, giving up on people – oh, those these are hard to give up!  I love imagining a different life, and I love blaming people for my sadness.  I love myself so much.  I’m addicted to myself, and my heart aches when things don’t go how I want.  The difficulties of life, even just this afternoon, reveal the sad realities of my entrenched sin nature.

I have hurt so many people with my cravings.  When I don’t get what I want, I do the opposite of loving God and others.  By God’s grace, I’m starting to identify these impurities when they rise to the surface in my life, and I’m learning how to get clean at the cross.

Charles Spurgeon wrote, “The pine is nearly always placed in disordered and desolate places, and it brings all possible elements of order and precision. Lowland trees may lean to this side and that with only a meadow breeze to bend them or a bank of cowslips to make their trunks lean sideways. But let storm and avalanche do their worst, and let the pine find only a ledge of vertical precipice to cling to, the tree will nevertheless grow straight. Thrust a rod from its last shoot down the stem, it shall point to the center of the earth as long as the tree lives.  The most upright Christians are usually reared amid the sternest trials. The divine life within them so triumphs over every difficulty as to render the men, above all others, true and exact. What a noble spectacle is a man whom nothing can warp, a firm decided servant of God, defying hurricanes of temptation!”

The big question: Do you want to be a true and strong servant of God?  Then do not despise His discipline.  And during those difficult times, watch your heart.  Ugly things will rise to the surface that need to be confessed and forgiven by the blood of Jesus.  Receive discipline.  Watch your heart.

1 Peter 4:12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.

In fact, when God turns up the heat in our lives, we can actually rejoice because we know that the outcome of our suffering will be a heavy metal holiness.

Romans 5:3-5 More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,  ⁴ and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Jam 1:2-4 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

When the Bible talks about leadership, it often uses the image of shepherding.  A shepherd with his flock implies all the things we normally associate with leadership (like management, authority, and so on), but it also implies aspects of relationship that are unique to the church (provision, protection, and intensely personal care).

One of the major problems in ancient Israel was bad leadership, bad “shepherding.”  (See Ezekiel 34 for the classic text against bad shepherds.)

The Heart of the Problem

God is the all-sufficient provider and protector of His people.  He is our shepherd (Ps. 23).  Jesus is the “great shepherd of the sheep” because of what He did on the cross, saving us from sin and death.  When leaders fail to point God’s people to God’s sufficiency, people “wander.”

Zechariah 10:1-2 Ask rain from the LORD in the season of the spring rain, from the LORD who makes the storm clouds, and he will give them showers of rain, to everyone the vegetation in the field. [In other words, Go to God for all your needs!] ² For the household gods utter nonsense, and the diviners see lies; they tell false dreams and give empty consolation. Therefore the people wander like sheep; they are afflicted for lack of a shepherd.

Idolatry happens when we love and depend on other things, people and experiences more than God.  Idolatry displaces God.  In Zechariah’s day, the country had an idolatry problem and none of the leaders corrected it.  They promoted the ancient Jewish rituals, but the people remained “afflicted” because their leaders were not helping them to trust in God.  Bad leaders might succeed at many things, but they fail at the most important thing, helping their flock to set their hearts fully on Christ and His Gospel.

Justice is one of the great themes of the Bible.  God’s concern for justice is especially clear in the Old Testament where the prophets railed against the shallow religious environment of the Divided Kingdom.  We should ask ourselves today: Is God glorified by how we take care of the downtrodden, or should we be disturbed by the words of Isaiah?

Isaiah 1:15-17 When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.

Isaiah 58 is one of my favorite sections of Isaiah, probably because I remember reading it when I was 19.  The chapter contains some of the best writing of the ancient world.  In this chapter Isaiah defines “true fasting” as a time to “let the oppressed go free…share your bread with the hungry.”

Isaiah’s logic is a little confusing.  Fasting is a formal religious practice of giving up food or other earthly appetites for a time of prayer.  In Isaiah 58, God redefines fasting as kindness, mercy and justice to others.  Zechariah adopts the same logic in Zechariah 7.

So by God’s definition, there is a link between formal religious behavior (like fasting) and mercy.  Here’s how I think they’re related.

The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbéd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat-and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet-
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”

In four posts we’re exploring four expressions of faith for killing sin.  Many Christians don’t know what to do about sin, never finding the freedom and victory in Jesus that the Bible talks about.  This series explains a biblical process for killing sin.  As John Owen said, “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.”

This post handles the third expression of faith, “Cry out to God for deliverance.”  This can include the practice of fasting, also described below.  The other three expressions are: 1) Know what the Bible says about sin, 2) Mourn over the ugliness of sin, and 4) Worship.

Expression of Faith #3: Cry out to God for deliverance

I like to fix problems by myself.  It says something about my manhood if I can’t dig myself out of a hole.  But when the problem is sin, I need to admit my impotence.  Dealing with sin is like getting into a cave with an angry bear.  I better have God with me, or I’m lunch.  Sin is an enemy, waging war and trying to kill me.  Seriously (Rom. 7:23).  That might sound extremist, but it’s the simple truth.  At some point we need to get down on our knees and ask God to protect us from the terrifying enemies of indwelling sin and the devil.

When denominations change their doctrinal statements, the changes usually move away from what previous generations would have recognized as true.  In contrast, the Evangelical Free Church of America recently revised its Statement of Faith to simply reaffirm what the 1950 framers believed, but in a modern context.

For example, the revision strengthens our statement about the Bible’s reliability by adding the lines, “The Bible is…the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged.”  Also, ”[The Bible] is to be believed in all that it teachers, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.”

The Bible “without error” has always been essential to evangelicalism.  But the hot philosophical questions today relate to epistemology (how do we know what we know?).  Many people question the Bible’s clarity in ways that the 1950 framers did not anticipate.

People today say, “Since God is incomprehensible and we are only human, we cannot claim to have any firm understanding of Him or His truth.” This attitude is characteristic of America’s growing relativism.  In the EFCA we’re concerned about the slippery slope of questioning God’s ability to communicate clearly.  Inevitably, having lost confidence in the Bible, people begin to disregard whatever they don’t like about the Bible, regardless of how clear it is.  This impacts sexuality, God’s attributes, and even the Gospel itself.

We believe that God is incomprehensible and glorious beyond our full comprehension.  In Isaiah 55:8 God says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.”  However, we also believe that God is our all-powerful Creator who can communicate very clearly about whatever He wants us to understand.  Therefore, I can have confidence in what God teaches in His Word, even though so much of it remains mysterious.

I know my friend Dan pretty well.  I’m confident he exists.  I’m confident about where he works, his favorite movies, what makes him laugh, and what it’s like to spend time with him.  But other people know Dan better.  I certainly don’t know Dan fully.  Something similar is at work in my relationship with God.

This approach to Bible interpretation gives a preacher something substantive to say.  Of course the very word “preach” sounds bizarre today, mainly because it implies the duty to listen and respond, as to an authority.  Modern American individualism bristles at this.

If the sermon is a dumb lecture about the preacher’s opinions and prejudices, then we should reject it.  But if the preacher works hard and humbly to bridge the gap between what the Bible says and what we currently understand, then the sermon has Authority beyond what can be rejected without harm.  It is God’s Word.

I’m looking forward to heaven.  So many questions!  But until then, I welcome God’s right to speak truth into my confusion.  True to form, the Bible nails my predicament with these hopeful words: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).

See this link for more re: the EFCA Statement of Faith revisions.