God’s promises are shocking. Our sin, in turn, is shocking. These two intersect when we in our sin refuse to believe the promises of God. He, because He is abounding in grace, makes some kind of stunning promise. We, because we are cynics, skeptics, sophisticates, refuse to believe Him. We may try to masquerade our unbelief as something praise worthy, arguing perhaps that contextual understanding of the Bible diminishes what at first blush looks like an extravagant promise. Truth be told, our faith is just too anemic.
Consider this straightforward promise from God, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him” (James 1:5). Now if we take a too light look at this text it seems to be saying that if anyone will ask God for wisdom that God will give it to him. If, however, we take a more deep look at the text, if we consider the vagueries of the original Greek, if we consider the context of James’ original audience, we find that the text actually says that if anyone will ask God for wisdom that God will give it to him. The scholars who gave us our English Bibles are not stupid men. They did well here. And James himself was no fool. He spoke not just wisdom here, but God’s own wisdom. This is God’s promise.
Our calling isn’t to seek to mitigate its extravagance. Were we to try, we would find only this. “But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind” (verse 6). It’s true enough that James says that doubt will undo this promise. Which ought not to cause us to doubt the promise, but to believe it. This caveat is designed to encourage us to believe the promise. Indeed, failure to believe the promise makes one like a wave that is driven and tossed by the wind.
So how do we get this wisdom? The answer is still right there in the text- we ask for it. We don’t do anything else. We just ask. And He will give it to us. He will give us wisdom if we will but ask Him for it. Wisdom, you’ll remember, He said, is more to be valued than silver and gold, yes than much fine gold (Psalm 19). How often do we ask Him for a better (higher paying) job, or a raise? How many ways do we find to ask God for silver and gold? But we are told that if we will ask for that which is better than silver and gold, He will give it to us.
Wisdom begins with fearing God. It moves on to fearing God. It ends with fearing God. If we fear Him, we will heed Him. As we heed Him we will value what He values, and we will believe His promises. Ask Him first for the wisdom to ask Him for wisdom. And then do not stop until Wisdom welcomes you into His eternal kingdom.
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.
Of course. The same is true of those with severe mental handicaps, those who are yet within their mothers’ wombs, and the very young. Each of these people will have the same struggle everyone else does- they’re sinners. By nature they are at enmity with God. They are all dead in their trespasses and sins, just like those with dementia. They are inclined away from Christ, as we all once were. A person’s ability to remember things, or their level of native intelligence has precious little to do with it for one simple reason- what is lacking is rebirth.
It is true enough that there is content to our faith. Saving faith isn’t an amorphous affirmation of some blob of non-information. We are saved by a faith in a person, Jesus Christ, and all that He accomplished for us two thousand years ago. Those of us who believe in election also need to beware embracing the heresy of justification by election. All the elect, and only the elect will be given the gift of faith (John 6:44). But the ground of our salvation is the work of Christ which is appropriated by faith in Christ. We are not justified by election.
I don’t pretend to know all the various kinds and levels of mental impairment. I did raise a daughter who was never able to speak a word. Recently I had the privilege of serving beside a brother as he preached Christ to his mother whose dementia was sufficiently advanced that she frequently thought her son was her long dead husband. She is a bright-eyed and chatty woman. She wasn’t, however, strong in following a line of reasoning. She did, I’m happy to report, acknowledge her sins, her need for God’s grace in Christ, and her conviction that He suffered for Her sins, redeeming her and making her a daughter of the Father.
She may not remember that event. But, He does. He knows what He wrought in her heart, and knows what He has promised in Jesus. The God who brought the entire universe from nothing, who commanded, “Let there be light” and there was light, is more than able to bring life from death. He is more than able to overcome our darkened hearts. Our feeble minds are not an obstacle to Him.
My friend, a faithful son of both his mother and His heavenly Father, didn’t hesitate to bring the gospel to bear. He gently pressed upon his mother the reality of her sin, and the fulness of the sacrifice of Christ. And she responded. Be skeptical all you like. But beware thinking you were smart enough to come to Jesus. Do not lose sight of the fact that if we do not come as children we can not enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 18:3). If you have a loved one with diminished capacity, do not lose hope in the grace of God. And all of us must never believe that anyone still alive is beyond the power of His grace. No living human will enter the kingdom apart from faith in the work of Christ alone. No living human, however, is beyond being blessed with that faith.
The world, Paul tells us, knows what’s coming. Romans 1 not only highlights the universal guilt of all men, but, ironically, defines that guilt as the denial of what we know. We know that there is a God and that we fail to meet His standard. We know, in short, that we are in trouble. But, we seek to suppress that truth in unrighteousness. The lexical background of the Greek word translated as suppress suggests something like a heavy metal spring that we try to hold down as long as we can. I believe, however, that we get closer to the spirit of our sin if we see ourselves, as God is speaking to us, while we run about with our fingers in our ears shouting, “La, la, la, la, la; I can’t hear you!”
Consider how unbelievers in the West tend to live their lives. They may not have their fingers in their ears, but they likely have their ear-buds in their ears. They surround themselves constantly with noise. At work, they have talk radio on. In the car, they play music. When they get home, they turn on the television and become distracted with their eyes as well as their ears. They hyper-schedule their days, moving from one thing that demands their attention to another, their smart-phones buzzing and beeping their daily orders.
We who have been redeemed by His grace, however, live much differently, don’t we? We don’t need the constant noise of pop culture to drown out our own thoughts. We are busy speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. We are meditating day and night on the glory, the richness, and the beauty of the Word of God. We, who have already received the pearl of great price, who have been promised eternal blessing and the drying of every tear, want nothing more than an opportunity for silence so that we can enter into the fullness of the gospel of our Lord. We want quiet that we might contemplate the peace. We seek out our prayer closets that we might give thanks.
Wait. Is that what we do? Is that how we live? Or are we instead mirror images of our neighbors? We might, if we are pious, order our pop culture from the PG side of the menu. We might carve out twenty minutes of quiet for prayer and contemplation. But we are still consumed with consuming pop culture, with surrounding ourselves with noise, and for much the same reason. We don’t, in the West, take the time to think because we don’t want to face not just the hard lesson of life under the sun— life is short and then we die— but also the much harder lesson of life lived under the Son— life is short, then we die, and hell lasts forever.
Now, to be sure, we know that we will not suffer for all eternity. That is our neighbor’s fear, not our own. The fears that plague us are much more tame. We worry about our retirement accounts. We worry about our job security. We worry about the economy and the election. We worry about our reputations, what people say and think about us. We worry so much that we worry about what we’ll worry about when we get to heaven.
The heathen know from creation itself that their Creator will bring judgment down on them. We, on the other hand, have been given a book. This book tells us about His grace. It tells us about all that is ours in Christ, that everything that He brings into our lives is for our good and His glory. It tells us on every page that He loves us with an everlasting love and that nothing can thwart His will. This means we should be at peace. We should set aside our worries. We should remove our fingers from our ears that we might hear the music of the rolling spheres magnifying His name. We should no longer cry out, “La, la, la, la; I can’t hear you!” but, “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.”
What we need, as we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, is to be still and know that He is God. We don’t need to turn up the volume of His revelation but turn off the noise. We don’t need Him to make bigger promises. We need eyes to see what He has already promised. We don’t need better, cleaner noise than the heathen. We need silence.
When we stop; when we take a deep breath; when we rest; when we put to death our vain desires, vain imaginings, and vain distractions; when, in fact, we not only quit the rat race but finish the race He has set before us; and when we draw our last breaths we will hear with perfect clarity what He has been saying to us from the moment we were reborn: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” And then we’ll hear heavenly choirs of angels promising, “And He shall reign forever and ever.” Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.
We’re fools, we meaning we humans. We see the destruction that flows from our foolish choices, and seek out any solution besides stopping with the foolish choices. The Bible says that sexual behavior is only for a married husband and wife. While the Bible says it, it isn’t a rule made strictly for those who believe in the Bible. It goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, which means marriage is a gift for everyone and its rules apply to everyone.
What happens when we don’t obey God on this issue? In the United States, the failure to keep our pants on has led to 50 million babies being slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs. It lead to at least 350,000 gay men dying of AIDS from 1987 to 1998. It has led to three out of every ten children in the country living without both a mother and a father. It has led to the destructive fruit of those fatherless homes as every social evil, drug use, low academic scores, criminal conduct, alcoholism, promiscuity, truancy, homelessness, depression, suicide correlates to homes without a father present.
It’s all too easy to lose sight of the actual destruction while we look at statistics. Almost every one of these children began their lives wherein both parents took off their pants when they should not have. So we construct after school programs, welfare programs, free contraceptive programs, provide counseling, build prisons, hire police, everything except agree that we need to keep our pants on. In fact, we purposefully exclude the message of “keep your pants on” from students in the government’s schools. Drag queens and illustrated sex guides are fine. Abstinence is out of bounds.
Worse still, we’re fools in the church. Given the widespread practice of both adultery and fornication, the marketing gurus have persuaded the church to steer clear of the issue. Paul said of the church and fornication, “Let it not be named once among you” (Ephesians 5:3). The church in our day says, “Let the sin not be named among you as a sin, because such drives people away.”
Thirty years ago I learned of an evangelical church, one of the biggest in my city, that had members in good standing who were living together. I’m confident that many other churches had members guilty of fornication, but not that openly flaunted it. Today I’d be surprised to find any evangelical church of any size in any city that didn’t have members in good standing that were shacking up. This isn’t the fault of gay marriage or Disney or drag shows for kids. This is the fault of timid hirelings and either straying sheep or goats being goats.
My wish is that every one of us that’s ever been guilty of sexual sin of any kind would be in church, but in a church that upholds God’s law, calls His people to repentance and celebrates the grace that forgives. Better still, I wish that such sins would not be named once among us.
There is no pathway to peace and well-being in our spirits, our churches, our communities that leaves room for sin without repentance, that leaves room for taking our pants off with anyone other than our true spouse.
The heart of magic is misdirection. Sure, there are specially made tools of the trade. There is well-trained prestidigitation. There are moments of art and flourish. The magic, however, is to get the audience to look one direction while you do something decidedly ordinary in plain sight. That’s how we start with an empty hat, and end up with a fluffy bunny.
It is much the same in all manner of intellectual magic. If we can get our intellectual opponents to overlook the fact that we are bringing something out of nothing, we can wow them all the way to the bank.
Consider first naturalistic science. Here we begin with one of two hats, both of them black. Some will say that all of reality was compressed into a point of singularity that existed from all eternity. Did you see what they did there? They explain the creation of the universe by presupposing the existence of the universe. We ask, “If you deny that God made everything, where did everything come from?” and they reply, “Well, everything was really squished together…” We let them get away with a universe, and a profound change (the explosion of the point of singularity) from and by nothing. The second option is more brazen. On the one hand these scientists are more honest, affirming that there was nothing. And then they get more dishonest, when they tell us “it” exploded into everything. Wait. There was no “it.” There was nothing, not even a hat surrounding the emptiness. And now it’s everything?
They don’t, of course stop there. Evolution takes center stage for act two. We’ve got everything, but how are we going to make it better? How do we go from chaos to cosmos? The magicians flourish again and tell us, “Everything gets better.” We ask, , “But how? Where’s the oomph?” They tell us, “Everything gets better. It’s science.” More order, more information jump out of the hat as fish take a walk on the dry side. All by themselves.
Consider second economics. An honorable politician promises to defend our wealth. A truthful politician promises to take some of this one’s wealth for the benefit of another. A common politician promises he can make us all richer by taking from all of us. Once again the common politician is the magician. He wants us to forget that the state has nothing it can give that it did not first take from another. He may take it via taxes. He may take it by inflating the money supply. But he will leave it out of the equation, pulling bunnies out of hats. And worse, getting us to pull levers behind the curtain at our voting booths.
Consider third man’s will. Those who believe in the doctrines of grace are quite content to confess that men are free to do what they want, to act according to their nature. Indeed we affirm we must do what we want, and can do no other. Those who don’t believe in the doctrines of grace, on the other hand, define freedom of the will as the ability to do what you don’t want to do. You choose without the desire for what you choose. This too is something out of nothing. Two men are presented with the gospel message. One embraces it, the other does not. How’s come? If we confess the difference in the man, it is the man God made, the man for which God is the ultimate cause. (And of course the wiser man would have something of which to boast (Ephesians 2:9)). If we confess the difference is in God, well, welcome to the doctrines of grace.
All three, like magic, claim to give us effects without causes, something from nothing. All three depend on our willingness to be distracted, to be misdirected. All three are rabbits out of hats, and hats out of thin air.
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.
