Homeward Bound, Godward Loosed

I feel new. Not new like a car off the lot. New more like a clean house after the clutter has been cleared away and the moldings scrubbed till they shine. New like a blade of grass awash in the coolness of the faithful morning dew. I feel refreshed, revived, repurposed.

When I think of what it means to repurpose something, I have to admit that my first thought is of something not very pleasant. I imagine a milk crate becoming a crude dorm-room coffee table, or composting. But when God is doing the repurposing, it's really very awesome and beautiful. (OK, well, so is composting. Kind of.)

These past nine months or so since I left the safety and comfort of (the young-adult nursery/New England resort we call) Amherst College have been shot through with the cries and expectation and pangs and power of transformation. I can't claim to know the ways of God, for his ways are so much higher than mine. But I do know that he makes use of certain seasons in our lives to jolt us out of the stupors we fall into, those dazes, those periods of falseness and futility and waste. And jolt me he has.

I began this year confused, maybe even despondent and depressed if I'm being honest with myself. I could feel the gentle rumble of a distant quake, but I couldn't know just what was coming. In December I was baptized, after many years of tarrying a little longer than I expected in a state of doubt and uncertainty about the reality of God in Christ. After my baptism I began to pray in new ways, and I can't be sure why.

I prayed, in short, the prayer it is said Martin Luther prayed in his weakest spiritual moment: "Here I am. Take me, Lord." I added, quite helplessly: "Make use of me, not as I wish, but as you will." Well, prayer makes things happen.

My mental furniture and the rhythms of my heart--pretty quickly--began to change as I prayed these things. In the span of a few weeks I could feel the Holy Spirit clothing me in my nakedness with the promises of the Almighty. I could sense his presence as I for the first time opened God's Word with delight rather than a sense of duty. This delight has only grown. The Lord has revealed himself to me in such majesty that I can really only respond with a constant stream of bleary-eyed praise. I was such an ingrate, a fool, an unregenerate hypocrite, far more reliant on the opinions of others and the fleeting pleasures of the world in all its materiality than on the mercy of the Cross. I was a legalist and didn't know it, seeking to placate a God I didn't understand with mechanical obedience. I was superstitious. My faith was a shipwreck, or maybe it had never set sail to begin with.

Through prayer, fasting, the sharpening iron of friends, the wisdom of faithful shepherds, and the grace of the One whose blood is sufficient, I am new. New in the Colossians 3 sense--"seeking the things above," "putting off my old self and its practices."

Along with the newness of spirit has come an abundance of unexpected gifts and morsels and revelations. Nine months ago I had no clue what to do after I graduate. Now it is one of the clearest things I've ever been made to see by God. Nine months ago, too, I wasn't sure of my identity and values and intentions and goals. All these things have been set straight as well. I am my master's.

I owe so much to the wisdom and passion of John Piper. After discovering his work on Biblical manhood and womanhood (which I highly recommend) in January, I have found myself a kind of kindred spirit in the man as I've explored his rich, deep collection of sermons, seminars, books, and articles. And by kindred I don't mean to compare myself to him in stature, but rather in the ways our minds and hearts seem to work. There is not one thing he has taught me that has not reverberated in the deep, innermost recesses of my soul as faithful clarification of Scriptural truth. Through his ministry, I have discovered what it means to treasure the Cross, to make much of Jesus (a la Jonathan Edwards), to wrestle with paradoxes and "do theology," to be a thinking Christian, to be missional and worshipful, to live out faith unabashedly and radically, to fight sin to the death (a la John Owen). The Lord placed him in my life at a crucial moment, and his teaching and preaching have provided much spiritual fuel over these months, and continue to. Proverbs 23:12 exhorts us to apply our hearts to instruction and our ears to words of knowledge. The Lord showed me to Piper so that I could be obedient to that exhortation in these months away from my "home" in Amherst.

And now I have the blessing of undertaking an honors thesis centered on Jonathan Edwards. I can't begin to express both how hilariously unaware I was of what I was doing when I chose him as my subject and how incredibly thankful I am to God for steering me in his direction nevertheless. I'm now beginning to glimpse the goodness and life-altering spirit of Edwards's meditations on finding one's deepest satisfaction in the Lord. I know that in this, too, my Father has arranged a fitting, faithful, fantastic spiritual mentor and tutor for me this year, someone to guide my thoughts Godward, to show me the delight of his "God-entranced vision of all things."

All in all, though I've written this hastily and recorded my praises and thoughts very imperfectly here (and I hope you'll forgive me), I want to conclude with the image I began with: repurposing. Indeed the Lord chooses whom he desires for his flock, no matter how reckless or frail or surprising a choice--and I am terrific evidence of that. The truth is, it took, and is taking, a huge amount of repurposing to make me the servant my master needs me to be. It has been, and is still, exceedingly humbling to witness how far I needed, and need, to come from who I was--just how much dross needed to be removed--in order to finally see and know God for who he is. The degree of numbness and blindness and deafness is astounding. And the perfect purity the Lord brings to bear on our lives when we finally invite Christ in to reign in us is also astonishing. All I can do is fall down and sing, "Holy, holy, holy!"

More to come. The fall semester is right around the corner. I'm turning it in just days now. I pray that these many months of being made new would stand even in the face of the challenges of work and study and a (small but energetic) social life.

My prayer as I go back is this: Keep me, Lord. Keep me grounded in the realities of grace, of your sovereignty, of my frailty, of the need for accountability, of the loveliness and incomparable beauty of Jesus, of heaven and hell, of eternity and the infinite measure of your love. In keeping me, Father, give me feet to go, hands to give and serve, a mind renewed by your truth, a spirit of freedom, and a profound desire to see you glorified everywhere I am and everywhere I'm not. Amen.

Loving Studying God More than Loving God

A few days ago I posted a video that explored what it means to love loving God more than to love God for who he is. Today I ran across an article, by Carl Trueman, that warns against a similar phenomenon--loving knowing and studying God more than loving him. 

The greatest temptation of a theology student is to assume that what they are studying is the most important thing in the world. Now, I need to be uncharacteristically nuanced at this point: there is a sense, a very deep and true sense, in which theology is the most important thing in the world. It is, after all, reflection upon what God has chosen to reveal to his creatures; and it thus involves the very meaning of existence. In this sense, there is nothing more important than doing theology.

But this is not the whole story. One of the great problems with the study of theology is how quickly it can become the study of theology, rather than the study of theology, that becomes the point. We are all no doubt familiar with the secular mindset which repudiates any notion of certainty in thought; and one of the reasons for this, I suspect, is that intellectual inquiry is rather like trying to get a date with the attractive girl across the road with whom you have secretly fallen in love: the thrill comes more from the chase and the sense of anticipation than it does from actually finding the answer or eliciting agreement to go to the movies.

Read the rest here.

Our פֶּסַח Lamb, Slain

Lately I've been reading through a small, neat, and eminently useful and wise volume titled The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World (Piper & Taylor, eds.). One of the contributors, pastor Voddie Baucham, Jr., has this to say about the stark, unchanging reality of Christ's sacrifice. It struck me.

In days gone by God had been passing over, or overlooking, sins. And some were thinking that this called into question the justice of God: God, how can you claim to be righteous and yet not crush Moses the murderer, or crush Abraham the liar, or crush David the adulterer? How, O God? But in the merciful providence of God there came a day when God the Father crushed and killed his one and only Son in our stead in order to satisfy his wrath, "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:26 ESV). Was that enough for the sins of Adam, Abraham, and Moses? Can you hear the rhetorical questions from Calvary? Was that enough for your sins? Was that enough for you to recognize the supremacy of Christ in truth as it relates to redemption? There was nothing else that could have been done that would have allowed God to be both just and justifier. But in the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus Christ we find a resolution to the question, "How can what is wrong be made right?" . . .

How can what is wrong be made right? The spotless, sinless Lamb of God was crushed, rejected, and killed to pay a debt that he did not owe on behalf of sinners who could never pay him back.

We don't talk about the blood of that Lamb nearly enough, it seems to me. Not once in my many years of childhood Sunday school do I recall ever hearing about Jesus as a slain sacrificial lamb. Maybe that's because children would inevitably squirm at that image. Yet it is so essential to the character of our salvation that passing over it (forgive the unavoidable pun) for the sake of some kind of decency, or because, for adults, it sounds too metaphorical, is to fail utterly to understand just what was at stake and involved in the crucifixion. 

The form of our substitute was in reality paramount. The Lord knew that no amount of pure, white-fleeced animal sacrifices could ever atone for the sins of all mankind, from the first man to the last. Only the Christ could fulfill the role. Only the Anointed One could bear such a massive burden. Only he could achieve the victory. Only his blood could make us "white as snow." In the end, the Lamb of God had to be slain in order to satisfy the perfect, just wrath of God. And that is the reason for our hallelujahs, the reason we gather to worship, the reason there is a church--the center of everything, what holds everything together. I needed a good reminder.