While we rejoice that when we embrace the work of Christ by faith we are forever forgiven, loved and adopted, faith itself isn’t a one-off, but a calling. We are to grow in our faith, to move from faith to faith, to believe God more fully each day. When He promises He is with us always, we rejoice. When He promises He will never forsake us, we rejoice. Faith, however, is not just something we cultivate, but for me, something I’ve had the blessing of witnessing. What attracted me to beloved wife was first her faith. I watched her walk through hardship and challenge with her eyes on the Lord, resting in His faithfulness. I watched her proclaim His grace fearlessly. I watched her take genuine and deep risks, forgoing the faithless counsel of friends, and sometimes even my counsel, because she believed God.
My love not only walked in faith, but that faith spilled out to others, especially me. When we met I was a man without hope, counting down the days until my body joined my spirit in the grave. I believed I was good for nothing. Her belief in me instilled in me the blessings of hope. I always lived in hope of the eschaton, confident that the “not yet” would be beyond my imagination. She reminds me that Jesus reigns now and that the “already” is His world, that He is at work in the here and now, that He is not only high and exalted, but is likewise always near. Listening to her prayers I feel Him fill the room, because such is just where He is. Since she became my wife I wake each morning in gratitude and in hope, praising God for all His blessings, for the blessing of my bride and looking forward to seeing Him at work, at walking in those mercies that begin afresh each day.
The greatest of these is love. It is an immeasurably deep blessing to be able to love my wife. It is life giving to give love, to pour into her my delight in her. It is, however, not just blessed to give but also to receive. That is, it is an immeasurably deep blessing to be loved by my wife. This woman who walks by faith, who spills out hope, showers me with her love. Better still, she loves her Redeemer. To walk with my beloved is to follow after our Lord. He is the third strand that binds the two strands so closely together. He is our reason for being, our end and purpose, together.
Never has He blessed me more fully than He has in giving me Lisa as my wife and my Valentine. She will Be Mine, forever.
Tonight we continue our look at the monumental, towering book of Romans. All are welcome to our home at 7 est, or you may join us for dinner at 6:15. We will also stream the study at Facebook, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
No. Can one sin eating unhealthy food? Yes. It is a bit simplistic the syllogism commonly used to condemn those who enjoy an occasional bacon cheeseburger. It goes like this, “We are commanded to be good stewards of our bodies, the temple of the Holy Spirit. Eating a bacon cheeseburger is a failure to be a good steward. Therefore eating a bacon cheeseburger is sinful.” One way we can know there is a flaw in this syllogism is that Jesus tells us that all foods are clean (Mark 7:19) and because Paul tells us we must not let anyone condemn us for what we eat or we drink (Col. 2:16). No syllogism is needed to get to these conclusions.
Stewardship is vital. All that we “have” is, in the end our Lord’s. We are to care for all that He has placed under us. This doesn’t mean, however, that we slavishly reject everything that doesn’t fully maximize a return on investment. If I’ve been given charge over $100 and earn return of 4.7% that doesn’t mean I’ve failed if I could have earned 4.8%. On the other hand, if I’ve simply buried the money in the ground, I would have failed as a steward. In like manner, if all I ever ate was bacon cheeseburgers, I would not be stewarding well the body God has given me.
Some years ago a friend expressed a principle she had learned from a purportedly Christian weight loss guru, that any time we eat beyond satisfying our hunger we are in sin. It sounds pious enough. It just doesn’t sound like the Bible. The Bible doesn’t present food as merely fuel for the body. It presents food as a gift from God. Indeed, after life and each other, the first gift God gave man was food. It presents food as a sign and surety of friendship and peace. We are called to delight in it, to not merely eat, but to feast.
Like every good gift from God, abuse is possible. It may, in fact, be common in many of our lives. I’m not arguing that most of us might not do a better job of stewarding our bodies, that a few more salads and a few fewer bacon cheeseburgers wouldn’t be a good idea. Instead I’m arguing that we should not let anyone, including our friends, the devil, or even ourselves, add to God’s law and put Pharisaical burdens where the Lord has left us free.
The true issue, as Jesus and Paul both pointed out, is in our hearts. There is where the sin lies. And there is where gratitude flows from. Whatever we eat or drink, let us eat or drink as unto the Lord (Romans 14:6). Let us not build towering syllogisms on a foundation of sand, but rest secure in the unchanging Word of God.
“Last things last,” that’s what I used to say. It seemed to me that there were plenty of difficult theological issues for us to wade through without having to worry about the end times. We all agree, after all, that in the end our side wins. Whether Jesus comes to find His world a horrible cesspool that needs to be cleaned up, or to find a glorious reflection of His successful bride, or somewhere in the middle, He does come back and make all things right. I was indifferent about how He would return.
But two things kept nagging at me. The Bible talks about the return of Christ. It talks about the full consummation of history. And one thing I didn’t want to happen when Jesus comes back was this — to have Him be displeased with me because I tossed aside a portion of His Word cavalierly, indeed, if I tossed a part aside at all.
The second problem was this, a fundamental principle of progress. One cannot know which way to go unless one knows where one is supposed to go. If you’re going nowhere, any direction will do. But if you want to get somewhere, you have to know where.
A good friend once explained that years ago he had joined an association of local evangelical pastors that had as its goal educating their congregations about various political candidates. He explained that in the providence of God, this little group of pastors came to be rather influential in local politics. Candidates would actually seek them out to curry their favor. As a result, the elections began to swing strongly in favor of more conservative candidates. Everything was going well. And that, according to the organization’s founder, was a problem. He announced that he was shutting the organization down immediately, as an act of repentance. What was he repenting of? Seeking to delay the return of Jesus. To labor for justice was, in the mind of this pastor, to go in the wrong direction. His understanding of the end times taught him that the quicker things got worse, the sooner Jesus would return.
What are we to be doing? How are we to prepare for the return of Jesus? Is our calling to sit and wait, to drag as many lost souls as we can onto the lifeboat? Are we supposed to merely occupy until He returns, or are we called to be more than conquerors? Or should we be like I was, utterly indifferent?
Paul writes to Titus that believers are to be “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works” (2:13–14). That’s not nothing. That’s not indifference. We are called here to look for the blessed hope, to be not only at peace but looking joyfully forward in the midst of our own cultural collapse, knowing He will return. Yet we are also to purify ourselves, to be a people zealous for good works.
As we look with hope, our first task, it would seem, is to tend our own garden. We should be spending more time preparing for the return of the Groom than peeking down the hallway to see if He is coming. We know that when He appears we will be dressed in His righteousness. But this doesn’t mean we don’t labor to purify ourselves. Even as we face frustration in our sanctification, we still have peace because He is the one working in us, not just as individuals, but as a people. He is purifying for Himself a people. And our common purity is shown forth in zeal for good works. In this context we go forth as conquerors. We tend our own garden, then our common plot with the body, the church, and then go out into the jungle — the world — doing good deeds.
It’s all about Jesus. Our understanding of the last things is dependent upon our understanding of the Firstborn of the new creation. As we understand that this Jesus who went up in the shekinah glory cloud, and will return again in it, went to heaven not to wait, but to rule, we will labor here as His faithful servants, as His mighty warriors. When we understand that He is the only once and future king, we will serve Him not by straining our eyes toward Avalon, not looking for a sign but by putting our back into our labor. When we understand that He will wipe away every tear, our tears would begin to dry themselves (if we only would believe it). If we would but believe that He has already overcome the world, we would be of good cheer now.
We need not invest all our energy trying to chart the day and the hour. We need not live as if this were our last day, eschewing the godly investments in a sure tomorrow — like marriage and the bearing of covenant children. Such is a sure sign of a faithless steward. Instead, we need to seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness. That is first, and that is last — because it begins in Christ, the firstfruits of the new creation, the true Alpha male, and ends in Christ, to whom and for whom and through whom are all things, the true Omega man.
He was a theological rock star to me, a legendary scholar and bibliophile, as well as a kind and gentle man. It was my first semester of seminary and he offered an evening seminar on the doctrine of election. I met my life-long friend Mike Renihan there. And I heard something that deeply disturbed me. My professor, a strong proponent of the sovereignty of God, said, “God’s sovereignty and man’s free will are like two parallel lines that intersect in infinity.” I’m sure that disturbs you as well, but I’m asking you to soldier on.
Out of respect I didn’t ask my professor, “So God’s sovereignty and man’s free will are like two lines that never intersect that intersect.” His was a pious sounding response to what is admittedly a deep mystery. It’s also gobbledy-gook, word salad. It is true that God is absolutely sovereign over all things. It is true that man always chooses according to his strongest inclination at the moment, given his choices. It is true that man is accountable for all that he does wrong. It is true that seeking to reconcile all of this isn’t easy. The solution, however, isn’t to affirm contradictions, like lines that never cross that cross.
The solution, instead, is to understand that once there was God, and nothing else. Everything else is created, dependent, contingent, derived. Every bit of power, of any sort, including the power to choose, ultimately can be traced back to the God who alone has the power of being within Himself, to the uncaused Cause, the unmoved Mover. The solution is to understand that God is not only ultimate being but ultimate power. Just as all other being is dependent on Him so all other power is dependent on Him.
Human choices are real. We are not puppets on strings. Human choices, on the other hand, are not ultimate. And we are not God. As my father liked to put it, “I am free. God is free. God is more free than I am.” This ought to settle the matter in principle.
There are, of course, other questions not yet answered. How can we be held responsible? See Romans 9. How is God not guilty? See James 1:13. Can God set aside His sovereignty? (See Jeremiah 13:23.) Does this cast a shadow on the character of God? (See Isaiah 45). Does this make the love of the believer for Him inauthentic, or make God less than a gentleman? (See Ephesians 2). We should not be afraid to wrestle over these questions, or dive deeply into these texts. We ought to do so, however, from a position of certainty that God is God and we are not. (See Lamentations 3:37). Nor ought we ever come from anything other than a position of certainty that God is good, and we are not. (See Habakkuk 1:12).
For those of us already well persuaded that God is sovereign over all things, let us walk in peace with those who still struggle, knowing that even those struggles are part of His holy and sovereign plan.
