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This bonus special edition of the Jesus Changes Everything Podcast features a conversation between RC and Lisa as they celebrate their third wedding anniversary. Give a listen and join us in giving thanks.
Though there is nothing I am sufficiently thankful for, the list of things I am thankful for is endless. The pious answer, Jesus, is true. But not much of a surprise. All of us in Christ have the same infinite dependence on His grace and thus ought to have the same gratitude.
Today, however, is a special day, a day in which I give even greater attention to thankfulness than I do every day. Every day I thank God for Lisa, my precious wife, my most trusted counselor, my joy. Today, on the occasion of our third wedding anniversary, my gratitude overflows into the boundless ocean of cyberspace. Many of you have been blessed by Lisa’s wisdom, her pouring out the Word of God that she keeps in her heart, through her Facebook posts, through her pieces at thepurposedrivenwife.com. Some of you have listened in when she has been a guest on the Jesus Changes Everything podcast. Some of you are blessed to actually know her and to be loved by her.
What is true of none of you but is true of me is that I know her as my wife, my fitting help, as bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, my soul mate. I know how she blesses me with her soothing voice, speaking to me words of affirmation. I know how she blesses me when her deep hazel eyes look at me with love. I know how she inspires me to do things I never thought possible. I know how she blesses me when her wit makes me literally laugh out loud. I know how she sees into me and sees in me what no one else sees. I know how she stands by me, with me, behind me, even when I come up short, fall down, fail. I know when I am sick or in pain how she nurses me back to health. I know in moments of victory how she cheers me on. I know how she feeds me on both home baked bread and every word that comes from the mouth of God.
She speaks wisdom. She serves sacrificially. She risks. She storms the throne of God on behalf of so many. She is, in short, a font of life and blessing. When I was in the deepest pit she beseeched the living God for hours on end, for days on end- “Let him live Lord. Let him breathe.” And God heard her. What a deep and profound blessing it is for me to live with her and to witness our Father’s delight in her. His love for her, His joy in her, feeds my own love and joy and deepens still more my gratitude.
Three years ago on this day we rejoiced that God had led our steps to marriage. Today we rejoice that He continues to guide our steps in our marriage. Tomorrow we will get up and do it again. We will praise Him, together. We will thank Him, together. We will beseech Him, together. We will hear Him, together. We will follow Him, together. He will bless us, together.
Maslow was wrong. Well, he was right before he was wrong. It is true enough that we all have a hierarchy of needs. Some things are more important than others. Trouble is, he didn’t know what the most important things were. Foundational in his system are those things necessary for survival, things like food and water. King David had a different, a better perspective. He said that the Lord was His Shepherd, and he shall not want (Psalm 23:1). David, at this point, has no green grass, and no still water. To be sure God does provide these things, but before He does, David already has everything he needs, the Lord for His Shepherd. Survival is still up in the air, but David has already finished with his worrying. He has what he needs.
One of the most foundational principles in the modern marketing of the church is the notion that we need to tap into not Maslow’s needs, but “felt needs.” This language leaves open the question of what is truly needful, and calls us instead to make our pitch for what our target audience believes their needs to be. Is our target market afflicted with fear? Offer them peace. Is our market suffering from ennui? Offer them excitement, adrenaline.
We serve a big God. He does indeed give us not just peace, but the peace that passes understanding. We serve also a thrilling God. He is no tame lion. So why wouldn’t we meet the lost at their point of need with all the riches our God has to offer in Christ Jesus? Because our greatest need is to stop worshipping ourselves. When we market Jesus, telling people that He will provide for them this or that, when we list the bullet point benefits awaiting those who will walk the aisle we do not meet people where they are, but leave them where they are. Their problem, which is my problem, is self-worship. If the glory of God is that He allows me to better serve myself, I am still worshipping myself. When He becomes a means, I remain the end. Jesus didn’t tell us to count His benefits. He told us to consider the cost, and to take up the cross.
I don’t need to survive. I need to die. I need to do the will of my Father in heaven. That must be my meat and my drink. I need His life, His death, His Spirit, His Word, His fruit, His resurrection, His promise, His obedience. I need Him. And I need to come to understand that every other desire, no matter how pious, is the pathway to death.
The glory of God isn’t that He so potently serves me. The glory of God is that in His grace He teaches me to serve Him, working in me to do and to will His good pleasure. Every good gift, every drop of still water, every blade of green grass, is designed to show us Him. They are just the shimmering reflection of the one true gift, the one needful thing, the Pearl of Great Price.
God’s law serves at least three purposes, which Calvin wisely expressed. He affirmed that the law first serves as a mirror for us. It reveals the perfect character of God, and in so doing, it exposes our sin. This might be called the schoolmaster function. The law instructs us in our need for God’s grace. It reveals His perfection, and our failure to measure up. It reveals our need for Christ.
The second use is often called the civil use of the law. Here Calvin argued that those outside the kingdom are restrained by the revelation of the law. It doesn’t change the heart of the unregenerate, but it can create a sense of fear. As the civil law reflects God’s revealed law, and with it, civil sanctions, it restrains the wicked.
The third use of the law is likely the most controversial. Calvin argued that the law reveals to us that which is pleasing to God. That is, it tells us what to do. As we obey it we please Him. Some fear that in embracing this third use we muddy up the first use. If we argue with respect to the law, “This you must do” are we not at least obscuring the truth that “This you cannot do”?
My fear, however, operates in the other direction. If we obscure the third use of the law we obscure the first use of the law. That is, if we are not called and required to follow the commands of God, our failure to do so doesn’t mean we are at enmity with God. The schoolmaster cannot tell us of our need for atonement if we have not failed to do what we are called to do. Secondly, however, without the third use of the law we end up worse off than the heathen. We don’t know what to do. We are left without direction. If we are not called to do what the law of God says, how will we decide what to do?
Some will say, “Let love decide.” Great answer. Trouble is, the Great Commandment, which calls us to love God and our neighbor, is that which binds up all the law and the prophets (Matthew 22:40). Which means that “love” is not a new, indistinct, culturally conditioned law, but is instead the law of God. We are not left with what we think love means, by abandoning the law, but are left with what love actually means by keeping the law.
The third use of the law, however, has this other benefit. We could see it as the other side of the second use coin, or as an extension of the third use. The law tells us how to have a good life. It tells us how to be blessed. It tells us how to do what we were made to do. To put it more poetically, the law is the gateway to joy. This is less because, especially for believers, God sends thunderbolts down on us when we disobey Him, or rose petals on us when we obey. It is more because the law is good in itself. Obedience is blessing long before obedience brings blessing. We were made for this.
David certainly needed the law to convict him, to point him to his need for Christ. But he sang, “Oh how I love your law” (Psalm 119:97) for the joy that it brings. God’s law is not a list of pleasures we are not allowed to have, a list of delights we are not allowed to touch. It is instead pleasure and delight. Having been, while yet unbelievers, restrained, having been at our conversion convicted, having been in our walk instructed, may we be in our hearts, as we will be in eternity, ever joyful.
Today, if I’d like, I can have a take on what people think about what an NBA owner thinks about what Chinese basketball fans think about what another NBA owner thinks about what the people of Hong Kong think about their communist overlords. Or I can tend to the log in my own eye.
Jesus’ message about the one with the log in his eye trying to help the one with the speck in his eye isn’t just about measuring different sized irritants in our eyes or different sized sins in our hearts. It’s message isn’t simply, “Be sure to rebuke only those who are less godly than you are.” Rather it reminds us of the importance of giving our attention to our own weaknesses before we worry about the supposed weaknesses we see in others.
CS Lewis made a similar point in his Screwtape Letters. Therein he had Wormwood, the senior demon encourage Screwtape, the junior demon to encourage his “patient” to cultivate an amorphous and powerless love for distant abstractions while disdaining a love for his annoying neighbor in the pew beside him. We do the same with sin. We find it so much easier to raise up our moral outrage against people and sins that are far from us. It’s a rather handy distraction from ourselves and the sins that are in us. Angry Greta can hate with the heat of a thousand suns those nameless capitalists that are fiddling while Gaia burns, and in so doing pay no attention to the large sinner footprint she is laying down on her way to eternal warming.
We should not be surprised when unbelievers do this. But aiming close, we find we have much the same problem. I too find it easy to rage against the sins of people I’ve never met, and in so doing construct a delusion that they are worse than I am. The good news, on the other hand, is that there is so much more I can do about my own sins and failures than I can do about geo-politics in the NBA and Hong Kong, however brutal things may be there. Whether it is a log or a splinter, by looking into that mirror which is the Word of God, I can, with the help of the Holy Spirit, take it out. Not so I can then give my attention to the sins of others, but that I can turn my attention to the other sins of mine.
When you and I determine to debate over the relative merits of him, whomever he may be, whichever side I may take, we have both taken ourselves out of the one arena where we can do the most good- worrying about our own sins. Yes, of course there’s a time and a place to warn of wolves, to mark the divisive man. That time, however, isn’t in the midst of our battle with our own wolves, nor when we are being the divisive man. Let us pick up the prophet’s mantle, and prophesy against our own failures. And God will have mercy.
It is surely possible for different people to share the same goals, but to employ different strategies. What I am increasingly seeing, however, is how easy it is for strategies and goals to meld together. We all want, I trust, to grow in grace and wisdom, to bear the fruit of the Spirit. We can all agree also, I trust, that careful study of theology can be used as a means to that end, a strategy if you will. What if, however, the strategy and the goal get so entwined that we end up measuring our spiritual maturity not by the standard of godliness, but by the standard of our libraries?
I first noticed this shift in the pro-life movement. Everyone, presumably, wants the babies to be protected. Along the way some have adopted what might be called an incrementalist strategy- we work on stopping the most heinous abortions, and eventually move on to the “exceptions.” For a time that meant pro-lifers were encouraged to support both legislation and candidates that allowed for these exceptions. What totally flummoxed me, however, was in 2000, when the National Right to Life Committee not only encouraged us to vote for George W. Bush, but bestowed on him the title “Pro-Life.” This for a man who expressly, straightforwardly affirmed his conviction that the federal government ought to protect the “right” of doctors and mothers to murder babies conceived in the process of rape or incest. This is the “pro-life” candidate that evangelicals and pro-lifers voted for in droves.
More recently we have seen whole swaths of the “pro-life” movement embracing and laboring for informed consent laws, waiting periods, and clinic regulations- all bits of legislation that conclude, after every hurdle has been jumped- “and then you can kill the baby.” After nearly forty years of this “strategy” we have sunk to crafting, lobbying for and electing officials in support of legislation on how, when and where babies can be murdered. We have confused our strategy and our goal.
All of which tells us how important goals are, and how dangerous strategies can be. My goal with respect to me is that I would become a more godly man, that I would more faithfully obey the law and more joyfully embrace the grace of God. On the life issue the goal isn’t to limit the availability of abortions, nor reduce the number of circumstances in which they might take place. The goal isn’t even that the sanctity of life would be more widely recognized, nor that more babies would be saved. The goal is that God would be honored, in the faithfulness of His people, and in the protecting of His image bearers. Life is not sacred. God is sacred.
We need to learn what Joshua learned outside the walls of Jericho- we don’t seek to enlist God on our side. Instead we seek to serve Him, the Captain of the Lord’s Hosts. Our calling is to fidelity. He will bring the victory. May we go forth into this battle, as with every battle, not following our strategies, but following the Ark of the Covenant- His law, His grace, His presence. And the walls will come tumbling down.
