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This Man Deserves It

Originally posted at: https://promisedhopechurch.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/this-man-deserves-it/

For all his fornications, he is guilty.  For his selfish manipulations and lusts, every teenage violation of his future wife, he is unquestionably guilty.

For all of his anger, his petty hatreds and grudges (which he so often carries deep under his skin, where he thinks no one can see), he is guilty.  The thoughts he sometimes has about people, the nastiness he wages against his fellow humans right there inside his skull, is appalling.

For the thousands and thousands of lies he has told, too.  Big ones as a child and a young man, lies so ridiculous they’d be laughable if lying weren’t a sin against the God who always tells the truth.  And, as he’s gotten older, subtler ones.  Exaggerations, and little expressions on the face which were calculated to get a response but made to look like genuine emotion.

And, oh, the pride.  Deep, poisonous, nearly constant pride.  Always believing he is more worthy of his needs being met than another.  Always making allowances for himself that he would never make for someone else.  The quiet belief he nurses in his heart that the reason the fallen brother or sister has tumbled is that he or she wasn’t quite enough like him.  The self-centered, self-focused, self-righteous clamoring for his own reputation, his own pleasure, his own validation without half as much, a tenth as much regard for the well-being of others.  Oh, believe me, this one is proud.  

For the cowardice, the meanness, the vengefulness, this man is irrefutably guilty. No one, not even God Himself can deny that, on his own standing, this Wade Thomas Jr, born at Good Samaritan Hospital in the Year of Our Lord 1985 (and having sinned every year since) is guilty as (and of) sin.

There is no excuse.  No justification.  He had no valid reason for lust and brazen manipulation and gossip and deceit, he has no just cause for his anger and bitterness and idolatry of heart.  His head is in his hands because he knows this.  There is no defense he can mount.  There is no mitigating factor that will justify his willful, ignorant, faithless, rebellious wickedness.

None.  He is guilty.

Ahem.

And now let this one speak.

For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are of sound mind, it is for you.  For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.  Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer.  Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.  Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.  Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.  He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

2 Corinthians 5:13-21

Death is the sentence.  The serpent knew it in the Garden, though of course he lied (he always does).  Sin brings death, the only thing it can bring.  And so death is the sentence for Wade.  Shameful, inglorious, painful and God-forsaken death.  God gave life, sin brings death.  So Wade is owed it.  He merits it.  In at least one sense, he has asked for it.

The executioner is ready.  The crowd is assembled.

But the guilty man is not the one to die.

When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

Colossians 2:13-14

Every guilt the serpent lays on this man is valid.  He sinned.  He did.  He did rage at his brethren and sin sexually and deceive people and play out his proud hypocrisy in the most sinister of ways.  If he isn’t the chief of sinners, he is certainly a lieutenant.  But here is where the serpent plays into his own undoing:  Since he is the father of lies, he rarely expects the full, undiluted, 80-proof truth.  When God says He loved this man, He really meant it.  And when He pledged from love, right there in that sin-stained Garden, that a son of man would crush this ancient liar’s head, He wasn’t just talking to talk.

This love from God didn’t hinge on Wade’s faithfulness.  It preceded his faithfulness.  Beyond that, it superceded his unfaithfulness.  This God slew the dragon by being slain, and He gave pardon by taking on punishment.  He undid the sin and death Wade wrought by becoming sin and then dying.

This God made Wade, gave Him a Law, watched him break it, and then bore the punishment Himself.  He is exactly who He has always claimed to be:  Good, holy, loving, and just.  And the truth will always undo a liar.  And, as the saying goes, it is also quite likely to set free.

And so while Wade is, in at least one sense, guilty, the charge will not stand.  You cannot punish two men for his crimes.  The debt is real, but it is no longer his.  

The criminal’s cross has already been stained with man’s blood.  And the tomb has already had the body laid in it.  Sin brings death, and death it has brought.  Wade deserves to die, but in this great exchange called the Gospel, he gets to live.  By the grace of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, he has been given unshakeable, eternal life.

And the guarantee of that gift is that his Jesus Himself did not stay dead.  Look over there, on that hill.

Like the charges against this guilty man, both cross and tomb are by now quite empty.

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Adultery: Will You Cleave and Leave Your Man?

SOURCE:  Noël Piper/Desiring God

Dear Wife,

Cleave is a strange word. It’s a contranym — a word that can have opposite meanings.

In an upper story of a concrete apartment block in a small Chinese city, I watched Rene wield her cleaver like a top chef, preparing vegetables for her family’s dinner. I was impressed how she positioned her fingers so they didn’t get chopped with the carrots. “Wow! I want some of those knives to take home as gifts,” I said. Rene pointed out the window toward a shop across the busy street. “You should be able to find them there.”

The name of one brand was Family Cleaver. It was easy to see how the difficulty of grasping a double meaning in English must have tripped up a Chinese translator. I was glad to discover a different brand with a happier name (that wouldn’t have implications of splitting a family apart).

On the opposite side of the word, there’s the other meaning of cleave, as it’s used in a time-honored wedding text: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2:24 KJV). Or as the ESV translates the same word, the husband shall “hold fast” to his wife.

Johnny Picked Me

At a small country church in middle Georgia, on a mild Saturday afternoon in December almost 49 years ago, we were married. We had waited two and a half years for this day. I still could hardly believe that Johnny Piper had chosen me, and that he wanted to spend his life with me just as much as I wanted to be with him.

I understood — as well as a person can at the beginning of the rest of her life — the happy, solemn weight of promising to be faithful to him until death parted us, no matter what challenges God might bring into our lives. It didn’t seem possible I would ever want anything else.

“Noël, do you take John to be your wedded husband to live together in holy matrimony? Do you promise to love him . . . and forsaking all others, be faithful only to him so long as you both shall live?” There was not a doubt in my mind or heart when I declared, “I do!”

How could I have known that the worse of “better or worse” would lead to a season of sleepless nights when I wondered how I could keep on? I felt desperate for something different. That’s the time in our marriage when I would have been most likely to turn to someone else. But thank God, it didn’t happen. He held us together. There were a few habits that helped.

Faithfulness to Johnny, through the years, from boyfriend to husband, meant:

  • Not flirting with other men.
  • Avoiding men who seemed too interested.
  • Not meeting alone with any other man.
  • Having regular devotions together with Johnny.

Faithfulness required more than four habits, but these four have been central and essential.

Hardest Habit

The last is the hardest, but most important. My appreciation for it began, as with many things, with my parents. It is amazing my parents stayed together. About twenty years into their marriage, their rampaging differences seemed about to rip them apart.

Through even the most difficult months — years, really — Daddy and Mother took us all to church every Sunday. And every evening of the week, one of us kids was sent to the front porch to holler down toward the pasture and out toward the woods, “Sto-o-ory and pra-a-yers ti-i-ime!”

After all nine of us kids (later we were ten) had tumbled into the living room from the barn and creek and kitchen, Daddy read the next passage in our years-long path through the whole Bible. Then we kneeled at our chairs and took turns praying.

I realize now how difficult that must have been for my parents. Often they must have felt like hypocrites, going through motions when they didn’t feel like worshiping or praying together.

Of course, it would have been ideal if they had come before God with whole and happy hearts. But it was better to come somehow than not at all. And God held them together until he brought their marriage through the tempest into peace, using his glue of faithfulness — his faithfulness to them, and their faithfulness to each other and to those family devotional traditions.

What Kind of Cleaver?

What did it boil down to during my darkest nights? I was saved from wandering by some form of this question: What kind of a cleaver am I? Am I the deadly implement who will split my family — with a husband and five children — into shreds? Because, with or without divorce, that is what unfaithfulness will do to us.

Or will I cleave to the husband God has given me? Will I cling to my marriage and pray desperately for something different? I chose to cling, and God is still proving his faithfulness. He will do the same for you.

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10 Things You Should Know about Suffering

Originally posted at: https://www.crossway.org/articles/10-things-you-should-know-about-suffering

1. Suffering is a result of the fall.

God warned Adam that eating the forbidden fruit would result in death (Gen 2). Romans 5:12 confirms that this happened after Adam’s fall, “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” Death (and the accompanying pain and suffering) came as a result of that first sin and our continued sin. Pain, suffering, and death—in and of themselves—are not good.

2. God uses suffering for good.

Thankfully, Romans 8 tells us “That for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” God never tells us our pain is good, but he uses pain to work for our good in his miraculous and mysterious way.

One of the ways God uses pain is to wake us up and bring up to himself. Our tendency in times of trial may be to run away from God, become angry with God, or idolize worldly comfort. Charles Spurgeon said it well when he encouraged us to look to God in our pain. He is attributed with saying, “I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages.” We need to realize that God is in control over all our circumstances . . . and he is good. We need to open our eyes in our pain and see that our circumstances are taking us right to God.

3. We can’t always see what God is doing in our pain.

Augustine wrote of God and our circumstances, “If you understand, it is not God you understand.” We can hardly scratch the surface of the intentionality, creativity, and wisdom of God’s handiwork. Who can give him counsel or criticize his work? Proverbs 16:4 says, “The Lord has made everything for its purpose.” We can trust that God is always doing more than we can fathom.

We need to realize that God is in control over all our circumstances . . . and he is good.

4. God uses suffering to mature us in Christ.

James 1 says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” Trials can be counted as joy because God is persevering our faith. He is making us more like Christ, and that is always gain.

5. Persevering through suffering allows us to comfort others who suffer.

God brings us through suffering so we can comfort others who are suffering. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” The best burden-bearers are the ones who’ve needed someone to carry their burdens in the past.

6. Suffering opens up ministry opportunities you’ve never dreamed of.

Growing up with a healthy body I never knew one day my life and ministry would include encouraging the hurting and helping those who care for the hurting. I am in constant pain—each day I feel burning sensations and sharp pains in both of my arms. I can’t put on my seatbelt, open a bottle of water, button my shirt, or shake hands with my friends. In the past couple of years I have begun to feel similar symptoms starting in my legs. Some days the pain is agonizing. Most nights I struggle to sleep. Depression has engulfed me on more than one occasion.

And yet! God’s grace is seen in the bright rays of light that shine through opportunities he has given me to encourage others. He has granted me grace to pastor out of weakness and witness to others about his unrelenting love. I never would have chosen or dreamed of a ministry like this—the Lord has done marvelous things.

7. God moves through weakness and suffering and not in spite of it.

Christianity teaches that the goal is not to eliminate pain and weakness (in this life), but for God to work in and through you in your pain. Paul had a thorn in his flesh and asked God multiple times but it remained. One could wonder how amazing Paul’s ministry would be if Paul didn’t have his thorn. But God didn’t use Paul despite his thorn, but through his thorn. God moves not in spite of our suffering, but through our suffering. Weakness is God’s way of moving in this world.

8. Our earthly perspective on the duration of suffering is very different from God’s.

Noah worked on an ark and waited for a flood. Abraham waited for a child with Sarah for years. Joseph was in prison for years. Moses wandered in the desert wilderness for 40 years. Hannah wept continually for a child. David fled from a wicked king for 13 years in the desert. Jeremiah “the weeping prophet” preached and saw no fruit for several decades. Paul faced imprisonment one after another. 2 Corinthians 4:17 gives us a healthy perspective on persevering in trials, “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”

9. Suffering can propel us into community.

My suffering has caused me to depend on the believing community for help, service, encouragement, and prayer. Though seeking help is humbling, it has an added bonus of friendship. I think of all the rides my friends Chris and Scott have given me over the years; I think of Glen’s encouragement; I think of John’s phone calls from halfway around the world and Darren and Kieron’s text messages. When we resist the urge to isolate ourselves God blesses us with sweet fellowship.

10. Christianity has the only solution to suffering.

All other religions have insufficient means of coping with and resolving pain and suffering. Some present plans of escape from the reality of pain. Some teach ways to placate the gods. Some tout karmic philosophies. Some focus on working for paradise—a place with no pain and unbounded pleasure.

But only Christianity provides true hope for the hurting. Suffering and death is inevitable for all of us but we can have hope because one has gone before us in death. Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man, lived a sinless life in our place. He faced various temptations and trials—betrayal by those closest to him, mockery, emotional anguish, physical agony, and most of all, judgment by God the Father.

When Jesus hung on the cross bearing the weight of his people’s sins, he not only faced the worst earthly death imaginable (reserved for only the worst criminals), he faced the overflowing cup of God’s wrath. But the story doesn’t end there with the death of Jesus.

Three days later he walked out of his tomb; Jesus had risen from the dead. Christ’s resurrection means that our pain and our trials and even our death are not the end of the story.

Dave Furman

Dave Furman (ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary) serves as the senior pastor of Redeemer Church of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which he planted in 2010. Dave and his wife, Gloria, have four children.

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3 Unrealistic and Detrimental Expectations About Marriage

SOURCE:  Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S. /PsychCentral

There’s no shortage of unrealistic expectations about marriage. Which we can pick up from our families, from friends, from fairy tales, from television and movies, from magazine articles. And these supposedly true beliefs can sabotage our relationships, creating a whole lot of misunderstanding and chipping away at our connection.

Unrealistic expectations “set up couples to fail,” said Clinton Power, a clinical relationship counsellor. “When you expect that your relationship is meant to be a certain way, and that expectation doesn’t happen, this can create feelings of anxiety, sadness, and despair.” It can spark resentment, which can ruin relationships.

Below are three unrealistic expectations—and the truths behind each one.

Unrealistic expectation: Happy couples continue to feel the same intense feelings of love. “Falling in love is often called a ‘temporary psychosis’ for the very reason that when you are ‘head over heels’ in love with another person, you are often blinded to some of their differences and quirks,” said Power, founder of Clinton Power + Associates in Sydney, Australia. You love everything about your partner, and want to be with them. All. The. Time.

There are physiological reasons for this. According to psychotherapist and relationship expert Melissa Ferrari, “Oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin dance with the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone, fueling our desire and keeping us on a ‘happy high’ of love and lust.”

But eventually, these electric effects dissipate. And what’s left are two people dealing with the reality of day-to-day life, Ferrari said. “And this is where the hard work starts.”

After the honeymoon period is over, it’s totally normal to enter a period of conflict, Power said. For instance, the quirks you once found adorable, like your partner regularly running late and losing things, are now like nails on a chalkboard. Now it’s a significant source of tension. After all, you take pride in your punctuality, and you have a penchant for organization. Which your partner keeps messing with.

The good news is that conflict isn’t inherently a problem. In fact, it’s actually an opportunity, Power said. When you’re experiencing conflict, you “learn to negotiate and manage your differences” and “how to successfully soothe one another when one or both of you are upset.”

Unrealistic expectation: Happy relationships remain the same. We assume that the person we married will remain exactly as they are, and thereby so will our relationship. This expectation might even be subconscious, but it rises to the surface in the form of surprise: Your spouse starts exploring a new career path or passion or moving away from something they used to love (and you still do), and you’re taken aback.

Maybe you even think, this isn’t the person I married. And maybe they’re not.

“[P]eople grow and change over time, and this means that the relationship changes,” Power said. He shared this example: A couple starts dating when one partner is only 19 years old. This younger partner receives a big promotion—and begins traveling more and more and spending more time at the office, building their dream career. The other partner, who’s at home, misses them and becomes increasingly bored. So they start going out more. Both partners are upset at their new reality because they feel disconnected from each other, drifting further and further apart.

“The issue is they haven’t accounted for some of the individual changes they are each going through. The relationship can’t be like it used to be, because they are different people now than they were when they first met.”

Unrealistic expectation: Partners are responsible for each other’s happiness. We tend to have expectations about what we’ll “get” from our partners, Ferrari said. And when our partner doesn’t give us what we think we should be getting, resentment emerges, and starts settling in. (“Over time, resentment can evolve into contempt, which is coined ‘the sulfuric acid of love’ because it will erode a marriage.”)

Ferrari works with many, many couples who expect their partner to meet their happiness quota. For instance, they expect their partner to earn enough money to give them anything they want. “That places pressure on your partner to make you happy about something that you could be aspiring to yourself.”

Plus, it’s very different from trying to understand your spouse in a profound, meaningful, vulnerable way, and fulfill their unmet needs. This might look like giving your partner a big, long hug every time you come home because you know that physical touch helps them to feel loved. This might look like making it a point to thank them for their kind gestures, because you know that as a child, they regularly felt unappreciated. This might look like talking calmly through conflict because they grew up in a volatile home.

The above is about being considerate and getting to know your partner. It isn’t about doing something for them that they can do themselves. It isn’t about taking responsibility for satisfying their needs. It is about supporting them.

It is about helping them to heal past hurts, Ferrari said. Which can “help them greatly psychologically, particularly in terms of confidence, feeling loved, safe and secure…” And that is incredibly powerful.

Explore the expectations you have about relationships—about what healthy, connected marriages look like, about how you and your partner should behave, about what you should “get.” Then explore where these beliefs stem from—and whether they’re genuinely true. Because many of our expectations are not, and many of them can interfere with our relationship.

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Spurgeon Can Help Your Depression

SOURCE:   Brian Albert/The Spurgeon Center

The fact that you are reading this article indicates with a high degree of certainty that you have been depressed. If this is the case, you should be encouraged to know that you are not alone. The one we dub the “Prince of Preachers” was just that because he was also the “Prince of Pain.” When articulating his own depression, Charles Spurgeon spoke with brazen clarity:

“The worst cloud of all is deep depression of spirit.”

“The worst ill in the world is a depressed spirit.”

“Of all things in the world to be, dreaded despair is the chief.”

“Depression is . . . the shadow of death.”

“Depression is . . . my horror of great darkness.”

These were not mere pithy, little sayings doled out to be quotable. Rather, they were forged in a lifetime of brute experience. From the age of fifteen to his death in 1892, Spurgeon was never fully liberated from “Giant Despair.”

Overcoming Extreme Heaviness

In his sermon “Our Leader Through the Darkness,” Spurgeon provided his understanding of depression, which is crucial in grasping his spirituality and our own despondencies. He asked his congregation, “Do you know what exceeding heaviness means?” (“Exceeding heaviness” was a Victorian label for depression). Spurgeon took his grasp of despondency one step further by linking the malady with spirituality. Spurgeon said, “depression of spirit” is “deep” when “accompanied with the loss of the light of God’s countenance.”

Depression was not merely “dullness, inertia, pessimism, and deep unhappiness,” as many of his Victorian counterparts believed. To be depressed, according to Spurgeon, was to feel God’s presence removed from life, which led to “extreme heaviness.”

For Spurgeon, Jesus was the “nearest, dearest, closest, most intense and most enduring relationship that can be imagined.” He consistently proclaimed that the “essence of spirituality is found in Jesus.” Little wonder, then, that Spurgeon declared, “To be forsaken of God is the worst ill that the most melancholy saint ever dreams of.” He chose the same superlative to describe depression. The worst ill is “to be depressed of spirit” and “to be forsaken of God.”

The “Whys” of Life and the “Prince of Peace”

In the heat of history’s darkest day, Jesus also understood what it felt like to be forsaken by God. On the cross, the “Prince of Peace” took our sin (2 Corinthians 5:21) and became the “Prince of Pain.” Jesus broke the afternoon silence with a scream that Spurgeon called “the bottomless cry.” Jesus asked, “Why . . . me?”

The “whys” of life stump us. They are often the core question in our depression.

“Why did my baby die?”

“Why did a maniac fire into a crowd of people?”

“Why does Planned Parenthood prosper?”

“Why did I get cancer?”

“Why does my ministry languish?”

Jesus and Spurgeon take the “whys” one step further and recall Christ’s dying words, “God, why have You forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

When depression intrudes into our lives, we want to know why. We want to know why a particular circumstance has caused our malady. Spurgeon and Jesus both experienced depression because they believed God had forsaken them. And this, above all, was a “prelude to hell,” one that was completely “unendurable.”

Yet Jesus, our Prince, took hell for us. Spurgeon’s struggle with depression is more closely linked to Jesus’s depression than we initially conceived. Perhaps that’s why Spurgeon was called the “Prince of Preachers,” because he knew the “Prince of Pain.”