Attempts at Honesty

Reflections on the interplay of the Bible and Culture

Home Archives for Christ

Living in the not yet: dealing with a stony heart

Posted on Written by Leave a Comment

Stony HeartIn the absence of a good idea for a title and the fact that the idea is similar, I borrowed the title of an earlier post as the name for this one.

In the earlier post, I focused on the places in Scripture where the lament “how long oh Lord” expresses the longing for things to be other than they currently are.

In reading through the early chapters of Hebrews this morning, I read a verse that describes this situation. The writer of Hebrews writes this about Christ:

 “Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.” (Hebrews 2:8, ESV)

This verse tells me that God remains in control and he has given all the world in subjection to Jesus Christ, but we do not see everything operating in subjection to Christ at this time.

It is easy to point the finger at all the trouble in the world as evidence that this verse is true. We have terrorists raining death and destruction on innocent people. We have governments with an anti-religious bias actively persecuting believers. We have disasters both natural and man-made. There is a lot we can look at as evidence that the world is not yet subjected to Christ.

But we must also look inside. If we are honest, we see the seeds of rebellion against Christ in our own hearts. We still struggle against emulating our first parents in their usurping of God’s authority. James tells us:

“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (James 4:1, ESV)

So living in the not yet, we struggle with the pieces of the world (including ourselves) that are not in submission to Christ. That is the bad news.

The good news is that one day Jesus will return and set everything right, including my stony heart.

Thoughts on the Incarnation of Christ

Posted on Written by 3 Comments

IncarnationOn the way to church this morning, I heard a woman on the radio say, “isn’t it amazing that Jesus came to die for us?” After hearing this, it occurred to me that you could shorten the question to “isn’t it amazing that Jesus came?”

If Christian tradition is correct and Jesus is God incarnate, then the fact that Almighty God would subject himself to the limitations of human existence is truly amazing.

My point is not to detract from the importance of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection. These events are the culmination and the purpose of Jesus’ incarnation. It just hit me that even before these important events took place, the incarnation itself is an amazing thing.

As a baby, Jesus willingly allowed his physical existence to depend on the care of Mary and Joseph. The creator of the universe had to limit his ability to communicate to crying and the other means of communication available to a newborn baby.

Did Jesus ever get frustrated with his limitations? It seems sacrilegious to think so, but I wonder. I do not know if Jesus was aware of his divine nature from infancy. Perhaps he had to grow into the knowledge. But if he had any consciousness at all about his divinity, he would have been aware of what he “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7) of when he set aside his divinity to fully experience humanity. That he did this willingly can only be as a result of his great love for us.

That Jesus loved us enough to “tabernacle among us” (John 1:14) should blow our minds. That his did so for the purpose of dying to redeem us adds to the “amazingness” of the whole plan.

The incarnation itself is something so wonderful that the only proper response is to worship.

John Stott on Jesus’ Hour

Posted on Written by Leave a Comment

“Despite the great importance of his teaching, his example and his works of compassion and power, none of these was central to his mission. What dominated his mind was not the living but the giving of his life. This final self-sacrifice was his ‘hour,’ for which he had come into the world. And the four evangelists, who bear witness to him in the Gospels, show that they understand this by the disproportionate amount of space which they give to the story of his last few days on earth, his death and resurrection. It occupies between a third and a quarter of the three Synoptic Gospels, while John’s Gospel has justly been described as having two parts, ‘the Book of the Signs’, and ‘the Book of the Passion’, since John spends an almost equal amount of time on each.”

John Stott in The Cross of Christ

 

Crowds and compassion

Posted on Written by Leave a Comment

The Crowd

Jesus, seeing a crowd of people had compassion on them. Mark sets the scene in the opening verses of Chapter 8:

“In those days, when there was again a large crowd and they had nothing to eat, Jesus called His disciples and said to them, “I feel compassion for the people because they have remained with Me now three days and have nothing to eat. “If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way; and some of them have come from a great distance.”” (Mark 8:1–3, NASB)

The Physical Need

Crowd
Photo credit: brixton

There are two needs of which Jesus is aware concerning the crowd. The first one is that the crowd had nothing to eat and had been following Jesus for three days.

It is likely that many of the people were hungry when they began following Jesus and they were hungrier still after three days. There was a very real and very urgent need for food.

The danger we have as the church in North America is that we can assume that the government will take care of the needs of the people around us. After all, we might argue, isn’t that why we pay taxes?

While programs for the needy may be a staple of 21st Century politics, there are still great needs that we can meet if we only open our eyes to see them. Like the disciples, we sometimes need someone to point out the opportunities because we are often conditioned to look past them.

When we see a crowd, too often we see an inconvenience. Jesus saw the crowd as an opportunity. In this particular case, it was an opportunity that he did not miss and the result was the physical need of the crowd was met. They were fed.

The Spiritual Need

One of the constant sources of embarrassment to the theologically conservative churches is that sometimes those liberals on whom we look with theological disdain do a much better job of meeting the physical needs of the people around them.

Yet, to only meet the physical need is to miss an opportunity for greater good. If we are right in our belief that our choices in this life have eternal consequences, then we need to be sure to use every opportunity to address the spiritual need of the people around us.

To be smug in our theological correctness without reaching out into the community is contrary to the example of Jesus. Jesus met the physical need as a means of building a bridge to address the spiritual one.

At the very least, we can be praying for the crowds of people we see. Jesus’ words in Matthew 9 are good encouragement:

“Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. “Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.”” (Matthew 9:36–38, NASB)

The Provision

In John 6:45, following the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus informs his hearers that He is the bread of life. It is easy to see the need for physical bread, perhaps less so for our spiritual needs.

We, as the church, need to offer physical bread in the form of meeting the community’s physical needs. We also need to offer Jesus as the spiritual bread that will satisfy the inner longing for relationship with God.

We can do neither if we do not engage the crowd.

Categories

Archives

Blogger Grid
Follow me on Blogarama