Hebrews
2:1-3a
For this reason we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it. For if the word spoken through angels proved unalterable, and every transgression and disobedience received a just penalty, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?
3:6-11
but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house–whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end. Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says, “Today if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as when they provoked me, as in the day of trial in the wilderness, where your fathers tried me by testing me, and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was angry with this generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart, and they did not know my ways, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest.'”
3:12-14
Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbeleiving heart that falls away from the living God. But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end…
4:1, 9, 11
Therefore, let us fear if, while a promise remains of entering His rest, any one of you may seem to have come short of it…. So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God…. Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest, so that no one will fall, through following the same example of disobedience.
6:3-8
And this we will do, if God permits. For in the case of those who hae once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and make partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance, since they again crucify to themselves the Son of God and put Him to open shame. For ground that drinks the rain which often falls on it and brings forth vegetation useful to those for whose sake it is also tilled, receives a blessing from God; but if it yields thorns and thistles, it is worthless and close to being cursed, and it ends up being burned.
6:9-12
But, beloved, we are convinced of better things concerning you, and things that accompany salvation, though we are speaking in this way. For God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints. And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you will not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
10:19-24
Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful, and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds…
10:26-27, 29
For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries…. How much severer punishment do you think he will deserve who has trampled under foot the Son of God, and has regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?
12:1-3
Therefore…let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith….For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.
12:12-13
Therefore strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed.
12:15
See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.
13:21
[Now the God of peace…] equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
Category: Contemplations
The only true obedience is abandon
The Rich Young Ruler: “I want to make my life live forever. How do I do it, teacher?”
God: “Put your life here in my hand.”
“I will do whatever you want me to do with it, Lord. I will give it care and treat it just the way you want me to. Just let me hang on to it.”
“I want it to be perfectly safe.”
“Okay, I will feed it five times a day and put it in a very safe place in the middle of my fortress, and never take my eyes off of it, and you can call every day to check on it, and I will…”
“No, you can’t keep it perfectly healthy. You can’t make it prosper like I can. Put it here in my hand.”
“But God, I’ll be so careful, trust me, just let me keep it…”
“Put it here.”
And he couldn’t bring himself to do it, so he clutched it to his chest and went away. God wants your life. He wants your lifeblood, and nothing less. The only true obedience is abandon.
He who fashions the hearts of them all
The Lord looks from heaven; he sees all the sons of men; from his dwelling place he looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, he who fashions the hearts of them all, he who understands all their works. (Psalm 33:13-15)
God watches all men and completely understands why we do what we do, because he made us. He knows the most hidden motivations and impulses of our hearts; he knows us better than we know ourselves. Even our souls, our own heart and mind and will, which may be called our property more than anything else, are in debt to God. Yet we do not acknowledge they derive from God and bear his mark, but demand our right to them, as if we had given birth to our own consciousness. How naked we are before the gaze of God! And yet what is to the resistant soul an invasion of privacy is to the willing soul a rush of intimacy. How peaceful to know that the worries and confusions of my heart, and the fog that sets in over my mind, confined as they are within their own dismal solitude, are pierced by his light of knowledge. Indeed, my inmost parts exult when God looks down from heaven, and incline toward him as plants reach for sunlight.
The Sacrifice that goes before us
Considering Genesis 33
Jacob, being afraid of his brother Esau because of the wrongs he had done to him, knowing the vow of Esau’s wrath, wanting to make peace, sent ahead of him offerings of livestock. He sent them ahead of himself so that Esau would come upon them and ask whose they were. He would hear, “They belong to Jacob, who is coming behind.” That way the offering would precede the confrontation, and appease Esau before he had a chance to see Jacob and react according to his wrath.
It is the same way with us and God. (And Jacob later says he saw Esau’s face as a face of God to him.) We know we have sinned against God, so on our way to the inevitable confrontation we send ahead the offering of Jesus Christ by faith, the Firstborn who preceded us to the throne, who is now interceding for us. He is the lamb of offering. He is our preemptive sacrifice, by which, in hope, we satisfy the wrath of God.
Mere Christianity excerpts
Reading it, finally, and loving it.
I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we believe it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature (18).
Now this thing which judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them (19).
The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: out instincts are merely the keys (20).
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd (43).
That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed (43).
Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. (46).
Potato chips
“You are the salt of the earth,” said our Divine King. “I am the bread of life,” He also said. Who enjoys saltless, raw potato chips? Who enjoys pure salt? Neither is good, but if the salt complements the chip, then you’ve got mouth-watering bet-you-can’t-eat-just-one food. So, my dear salt particles, throw yourselves at the Chip of Heaven, trying with all your might to adhere to him, to become stuck on him, embedded within him. Then others will marvel at your godly flavor, and thirst after living water.
Born again: a simultaneous cause-effect
John Piper gave this analogy: Our role and God’s in the new birth are like light and fire. There is a cause-effect relationship between the two. Fire causes light; God’s “begetting” (Piper) causes our belief, which is our role in our spiritual birth–what we necessarily must perform for it to occur. No one would say the light caused the fire; no, the fire caused the light. Fire, ergo light. A–>B
However, the two are simultaneous (Piper). Fire does not preceed light. When there is fire, there is light. When there is not fire, there is not light. We can see the light from a flame and say, “Look, there is fire.” In the same way, we can see belief and say, “Look, there is new birth.”
The light is…
- The inseparable counterpart to the chemical reaction.
- The empirical component of the fire, that which can be experienced (and experience is essential)
- The “going forth” into our observable reality, just as the Word was the going forth of God.
- The manifestation, the certainty
- The realization which makes the fire reality
- The evidence which makes it evident
- The symbol which takes on the meaning of the signified so strongly that it well-nigh partakes of the essence, like the sacramental bread and wine
The light is mysteriously, intimately, intricately, immediately related to the fire, like two lovers intertwined. What God has joined together, let no man separate. Woe to the man who attempts to say, “There is new birth, though belief has not yet come” or “Belief is a byproduct of the new birth.” Belief is no mere byproduct any more than a child is the “byproduct” of the union between man and woman. Although God begets salvation, he begets it into the bosom of a believing heart, so let none forget the value of our human response in the work of salvation.
Metal in the leaves
The child scuttled ahead along the path, gravel crunching under his tiny shoes. Suddenly something shiny glimmered in the woods to the left. He turned and froze for an instant, watching. There it was, behind a log. It flashed again—metal caught sunlight. What was it? The child plunged off the path into the knee-high brown leaves, rustling towards the strange object.
“Ben! Stop right there! That’s gonna hurt you!”
The child looked over his shoulder. His father stood behind him on the path, their picnic lunch slung over his shoulder in a green satchel. His father’s face was wrinkled in fear. His hand stretched toward the child, frozen in anxiety, as if the child was a vase about to fall from a shelf.
“Ben, stay out of the leaves. Don’t go near that thing. Come back over here on the path,” his father pleaded. His voice was heavy with danger.
Why should he? the child thought. I want to see what it is. How does he know it’s bad? I want to see. A burst of defiant passion ignited the child’s blood, and he began to turn back toward the sunken metal.
But then, at the last instant, he made eye contact with his father. In the dark eyes he felt a deep affection, a true concern—so true that it made the trees around him seem like a doubtful dream. Then he knew that his father loved him. He could sense that his father knew something beyond his comprehension, distant yet certain. There must be real danger in that piece of metal. The depth of the dark eyes overcame him and quenched the fire of his rebellious exhilaration.
The child sighed and trudged out of the leaves. The gravel crunched under his feet again, and his father stood over him. He dropped the green satchel and scooped him up in his arms. Oh, the warm tight squeeze felt good! The child pressed his face against his father’s shoulder. He was glad now he had not kept going in the leaves.
His father picked up the green bag and started walking down the path. As his head rose and fell with his father’s steps, the child glanced back over the shoulder. Now, from this height, he saw the metal more clearly. The jagged teeth of a bear trap glimmered in the sun.
By the word of your lips I have kept myself from the ways of the violent.
—Psalm 17:4
Faith and works as envelope and message
I was about to write “Faith vs. Works” but realized that that is totally wrong. It is a both/and, not an either or. That’s the whole point James screams at us.
Anyways, he says that “Faith without works is dead, just as the body without the spirit is dead.”
There seems a very good comparison to body and spirit here, but I would think that faith would be the inside, the spirit, and works the outside, the body. After all, aren’t works the visible manifestation of the internal faith motivation? But the ratio does not go like this –> faith : works :: spirit : body.
Rather, it is–> faith : works :: body : spirit. So in a sense works are inner/motivational and faith is outer/manifestational. Fascinating and counter-intuitive. I think the following image helps.
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Consider a woman sending a Christmas card to her mother. Suppose she wrote a fine letter, with lovely and kind words, but sent it to her friend, instead. Her mother would not even receive the gift, although it was a genuinely good and heartfelt letter. That is like works without faith.
Suppose, however, that she properly addressed the envelope and mailed the card, but the card was blank, and she wrote not a single word on it. That is like faith without works. It is directed at God, alright, but there is no real substance.
Only a properly written message on a properly addressed card will get to her mother, and successfully communicate her message of love. So, too, the packaging of your attitude of belief and the content of the actual deed you perform become together a pleasing gift to God.
Sun and rain
For the three days following Christmas I built a sheep fence with my friend Kent on his farm. We worked basically sunup to sundown. The first day was dreary, rainy, freezing cold, with biting wind. My brief meals inside were sweet but meager respites from an environment I imagine must closely resemble hell. The second day was clear and beautiful. The sun made the field glow happily as it set in a golden sky; instead of razor-sharp wind, there was a soft breeze.
Some people say that evil exists for the purpose of contrasting good, so that we can really know what good is. I don’t believe there is such a simple answer to the problem of evil–that solution is lodged somewhere in the mysterious thoughts and intentions of God Himself. But now my work at Kent’s farm has turned from two days of reality into countless days of memory. In the eternal substance of memory, that day of suffering is purified and sweetened by the following day of good, until they together form a memory that is good. An experience. An adventure worth telling. A story for me to tell while friends drink it up.
But what happened there? That day of bad and that day of good seem to cancel each other out during their present reality, producing no net goodness. Yet as they pass from reality to memory, a sweet memory results from the two, which has a net value of good. The essential events that life is really made of. The mysterious moments we want and even need to live. (When we are not partaking in such a clash of sun and rain, we usually supplement this by watching movies, sports teams, and other artificial sources.)
Perhaps this in some way reflects the way in which God becomes “more than a conqueror” of evil, mysteriously overcoming it in eternity.
Ben Taylor 