Be Careful

As I read through Numbers 28, the laws for offerings laid down by the Lord for the nation of Israel, I am most struck by a warning He gives at the very beginning of that chapter. 

You shall be careful to present my offering...

Through Jesus we now can approach the throne of grace in gladness, and boldly, for we are His children, redeemed by the sacrifice of our Savior. We have access any time, for any matter.

But I know that I, like many, probably take that for granted much of the time.

Yes, we have unlimited access. Yes, He is concerned about all that concerns us. Yes. He loves us and wants us to approach Him.

But do we always do it with the reverence and awe, with the praise and thankfulness that we should?

I cannot say that I do, after all I am a sinful being in a fallen world; it took the death of His Son for me to be able to come before Him, acceptable in His sight.

Yes, I want to come before my Father continuously, for both praise and worship, to ask for wisdom and mercy.

But let me never take it for granted.

For where would I be if He took me for granted?

Going Out

By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going.
Hebrews 11:8 (NASB)

Have you ever "gone out" in this way? ... Continually examine your attitude toward God to see if you are willing to "go out" in every area of your life, trusting in God entirely...Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell you. God does not tell you what He is going to do— He reveals to you who He is. Do you believe in a miracle-working God, and will you "go out" in complete surrender to Him until you are not surprised one iota by anything He does? Believe God is always the God you know Him to be when you are nearest to Him. Then think how unnecessary and disrespectful worry is! Let the attitude of your life be a continual willingness to "go out" in dependence upon God, and your life will have a sacred and inexpressible charm about it that is very satisfying to Jesus. You must learn to "go out" through your convictions, creeds, or experiences until you come to the point in your faith where there is nothing between yourself and God.

Oswald Chambers - My Utmost For His Highest: January 2 Devotional

Heading out into God's will without knowing your destination, do you have that kind of faith? I am not sure I always do. No, I am sure I do not, because I know I am a work in progress, and will be as long as I walk this earth. Taking a step being unsure of the next is one thing, taking a step unsure where your foot will land is even another. That is the kind of faith God calls us to, the kind of faith and trust that Jesus demonstrated with the Father when He walked the earth as a man.

God will not tell you His destination for you, but He will reveal it. And you will never start coming to the destination until you start going out on the journey. Start the journey today.

Technorati Tags: Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, God, Father, Jesus, journey, faith, trust, Abraham

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part VII: Love and Forgiveness; Time and Space

The last part of my worldview review deals with areas that can tie you up in knots because of what can appear to be contradictions. But as we have stated before, can we really expect as finite beings to fully fathom the infinitely divine?

Can a perfectly just and holy God forgive? Yet we know Him as a merciful and gracious God. How can He maintain His holiness and yet extend us such grace? If He is holy and just He cannot forgive, but if He is merciful does He lose His moral absolute?

for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Romans 3:26 (NASB)

He is God and He is both the just and the justifier of those who believe in Him. He can do it because He has chosen to do so. Rather than question, I would have us be thankful. For quite frankly, the alternative is none too encouraging to entertain.

God is both within and outside of time and space. He was before time and space (that is, he was before the creation that He Himself created). He created all, but His participation and sustaining of creation means that in the end, it has no end, because He has deemed eternity for us.He has entered into history of His own choosing and as such, can give us the everlastingness we need for eternal existence. There can be none without Him.

Can you think of other points you and I need to ponder about the glorious God we serve?

He is the biggest of ideas and well beyond even that. In the scope of all history, He is the metanarrative that makes a short story out of all else.

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part VI: The Imago Dei in Relationships

How does the Trinity impact our worldview of relationships? How are we to take the attributes of the Godhead and candle our actions within our spheres of activity?

Looking at three areas: family, church and society you see some commonalities that enable you to develop a trinitarian worldview in a way that can be used consistently across your relationships.

Starting with family, you need to start with marriage. The marriage relationship most closely models the Trinity of all human relationships. You seek to make the other partner known within the context of the marital bond, which should be the strongest of all human bonds. You look to communicate with each other in the most intimate, honest and vulnerable of fashions. You enjoy each other in companionship, fellowship and friendship. You make audible expressions of love, expressions of pleasure and make known your desires to please each other. You give honor to your mate, you give gifts.You work with and for each other, you seek to submit yourself to your partner knowing the same is being done for you. You become part of each other, learning to trust and abide in each other during good times and bad, pleasure and pain, success or suffering.

You see in the marriage relationship all these coming through when one honors a partner the way the Three within the One give honor to each other. As you step into familial relationships, these become writ large on a family unit, you may lose the marital intimacy between a man and wife, but these actions are still there in a God honoring family situation.

As you move to the church setting you continue to stress the honor of others, less intimate perhaps, but with a continued mutuality. In providing glory to God and a witness to a Christian walk, these continue into societal relationships in general.

In all of these you look to avoid headship abuse, a leader must have a servant's heart, an attitude to servitude in order to effectively model biblical leadership. There should be willing submission to leadership not hostility in having to submit. If the honor and trust inherent in the Trinity are showing forth in human relationships, that should not be a burdensome ask. There should be an honoring of biblically based law and orderliness. Anarchy is not God glorifying.

As you look at your relationships, are you modelling these behaviors. Are you willing to take the first step towards a trinitarian view of how you can be a part of a bigger whole in joy and peace with God?

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part V: Being Relational

Our personaity, or who we are, is grounded in who God is. We are persons, we are relational because God is a personal, relational God. You have heard it said that you are what you eat. It is more appropriate to say we are who He is:

²⁶Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."

²⁷God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

²⁸God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Genesis 1:26-28 (NASB)

What does that mean for us? We hold certain characteristics as a result of being mad ein His image to rule over the creation He made. As a result of this we are:

• Creative: we enjoy the visual and performing arts, we enjoy making things
  
• Communication: we dialogue in community, speaking and listening to each other
  
• Objective: we engage in the study of science and history
• Emotive: expressing joy, sadness and anger
• Mortal: Unlike an eternal God, we live through cycles of birth and death. But I feel we must in order to look up to the divine form our positions as fragile and mortal and in need of His protection
  
• Friendly: we seek out and engage in community
• Intimate: we look for and cherish romantic and sexual relationships. However, they can only reach the full potential designed by God if fulfilled in the man and woman marraige bond. This comes closer to the intimacy felt within the Trinity than any other human relationship can.
  
• Just: we seek to exercise justice, but hopefully tempered with mercy
• Discerning: we can distinguish between fantasy and reality (well, most of us can most of the time)

As we engage in these characteristics we are more or less like God in how we carry them out, depending on our individual characters and the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Are there one or more of these that really click with you as bringing closer in relationship with God because you feel you model them more as He would have you rather than less?

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part IV: As Long As You End Up at God

One of the things I have been thinking about a bit is the differences in trinitarian views looking at it from the western church or the eastern church perspective:

• The western perspective is to view the Trinity with emphasis on the Oneness of God. Essentially looking at the Godhead from the unified essence that is God, looking out from the One into the Three.
• The eastern perspective is to view the Trinity with emphasis on the three Persons of the Godhead and their relatedness to each other. Essentially looking at the Godhead more from the roles each of the three persons of the trinity take on in constituting the One, looking in from the Three into the One.

That has ramifications on what might get stressed in a worldview one would take. A western perspective would focus more on God's sovereignty and the predestination that is inherent in His sovereignty. An eastern perspective would focus more on human freewill and how it relates to God.

I have to admit there are parts of each view that I like. I like having a totally sovereign God that predetermines the course of events. it allows me to place the utmost value that affords me: my fate and future in the hands of a sovereign God who is merciful, wise, just and gracious. But I also like the focus to be on how I relate to God because it puts some burden on me to explore my feelings to and my obedience with the will of God.

However you approach it, you should wind up in the center with a Triune God, the God of the Bible, our God in all His divine glory. if you do not, I feel you are doing something off kilter.

As you view how you approach your view of God, do you feel more the western or eastern influences of the picture of the Trinity?

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part III: God Before Us or Without Us

One concept I have been pondering is the fact that God as a divine, eternal being, existed before Creation. Even before He created everything ex nihilo, out of nothing, He was.

Tertullian: “…before all things God was alone, being his own universe,
location, everything. He was alone, however, in the sense that there was nothing external to himself.” Adversus Praxeas 5

Tied into the fact of God's self existence is His self-sufficiency. He did not need us, yet He created us. I think it is testament to His love and grace that He would choose to share Himself with us. I wonder if given the chance to create out of nothing, we would do the same? I hardly think so.

It occurred to me that in His eternal existence prior to creation, the proper view would have been one of pantheism. God is everything and everything is God; because God is the only thing. Maybe unitheism? But I digress.

The point I wanted to make was that thinking about the fact that accepting that God always was, and was before creation, is a call to faith in the divine:

• We really do not know how much we do not know about God
• We must believe that, as a gracious and loving God, He has revealed all we need to know of Him as we live our lives on this earth
• Whatever our conceptions about God, we probably color them with our human conceptions, and the divinely infinite can never be totally understood nor explained by the finite.

If you were to describe the reason(s) God created us, what would you say they are?

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part II: Some Groundrules

I'd like to lay out some of the basics of what it means to hold to a trinitarian worldview. At least, what it means to me. Here are a few of my thoughts:

• You have to hold to the Triune God of the Bible. You need to believe in the Imago Dei (see yesterday's post) and that our basic personalities and the dignity of the individual are grounded upon the bedrock of the fact that we are made in the image of God. You have to approach the world believing in Christian monotheism.
  
• You have to hold that God is the center of everything. I am not talking pantheism where God is everything and everything is God. But you have to believe in His sovereignty, His total control of Creation. If He is not your reason for living, you are missing something.
• You have to hold that God is bigger than everything. He is outside of creation in His transcendence, He is within creation in His immanence, but He is not everything and everything is not Him.
• You can never completely emulate Him, but you must not stop trying. We are to run the good race, we are to finish strong. God knows we cannot get there without Him, but He wants us to try anyway.
• While God is the center of it all, our focus is on His Son. He saved us, we are to be like Him to the extent we can.

I'd like to hear what you have for some of the ground rules you may hold on a Trinitarian worldview; a view which I believe is the appropriate Christian worldview that one should hold to.

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part I: Imago Dei

I have decided to rerun a series of posts that I wrote for another blog I was writing for a bit but have since stopped. It is on my thoughts around a worldview revolving around the concept of the Trinity. I think it is would be worthwhile to re-engage some dialogue around this so over the next 7 days I will rerun the series, with some minor modifications. For those of you who read and commented on the series in the other blog, my profuse apologies, but this has been on my mind and I wanted to air it again. I beg your patience and pardon.

The series begins with the concept of the Imago Dei, the Image of God. Simply put, Imago Dei asserts than we are made in the image of God.

²⁶Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule
over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the
cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that
creeps on the earth." ²⁷God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Genesis 1:26-27 (NASB)

I believe it is important to start with this fact because if we are created in His image, we should share some of His attributes, even if we are imperfect in our sinful nature. Our worldview should be shaped by who we are in relationship to God.

Who are we? In the broadest of senses we are:

• Capable of thought, reasoning, voluntary activity. We are emotional, we can love, hate, grow angry, happy or sad. We are relational, we seek out others in community, we seek out our Creator in praise and worship.
• Capable of creative activity. We look to learn, to build, to make new things out of old things. We fall short of being able to create out of nothing, but we are driven to create nonetheless.
• Capable of dominion. We seek to control our environment, others and often at our peril, our God.
• Capable of thought beyond this life, Unlike animals who are in the moment at all times, we can look beyond today and even tomorrow. We can plan and anticipate, and even ponder eternity.

These are attributes that mirror, although dimly, our divine Creator. But it is the very things He bestowed on us to make up be in His image that can be the root of our destruction. In our sin, we often think and act against God, taking the gifts He has given us and try to come out from under His sovereign will.

Are there other aspects/characteristics/attributes you see in us under the Imago Dei?

Our Own Worst Enemy

That we are, in our unbelief. The foothold we allow the enemy when we doubt our Lord in the least. A brief excerpt from yesterday's The Daily Spurgeon highlights this:

"Faith is the Christian’s strength; he who doubts not staggers not. Unbelief is the source of our chief weakness. As soon as we begin to distrust our feet begin to slide."

Here Spurgeon is talking of the attack of Satan on Jesus, but it has such implications for us. If the enemy chose to attack our Lord first by trying to get Him to doubt His relationship with the Father, why would we expect differently? It didn't work with Jesus but often does with us because of the doubt and guilt our sin brings into our minds.

Doubt, I see the need to fight it off each and every day. Doubt, because I know in my heart I am not worthy of the Father's love, our Lord's sacrifice. Doubt, because it seems unbeleivable at times what He was willing to do, how He was willing to live, and die, for me, for us.

To give Him glory by erasing the doubt about His love for me is the goal I need to strive for. Doubt, which makes me my own worst enemy needs to be overcome each day.

But oh, that I have His love and help to see me through each and every battle.

No Sin, No Shame

²⁵And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.
Genesis 2:25 (NASB)

Adam and Eve could stand before their God is this state because they were both pure and without sin. Can we stand before God without shame today? No, not given the sin that entered the world, and the sin that is in our nature as a result.

So, we must be clothed by Jesus to be justified before God, to be declared righteous in His eyes. Is is only with Jesus in front of me, shielding me from my own sin, that I can stand before the Father, that I can come before Him in prayer, in praise, and ultimately in worship.

¹⁰as it is written, "THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE;
Romans 3:10 (NASB)

There will be a day when I will be brought before the Lord in my resurrected state, and I like to think that is the state Adam and Eve were once in, without sin and unashamed.

²³for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Romans 3:23 (NASB)

That will happen one day. Right now I have to get through this sinful world, of which I am part, as best I can, trying to face my God, having Him look at me through the eyes of My Savior.

What Is Your Focus?

A lesson from earlier in the term keeps popping into my mind. I guess if this class had a test instead of just papers, this is one question I might get right.

Jesus' purpose was to focus attention on His Father, not to focus attention on Himself:

• We will never know more of the Father than we know of the Son
• We will never know more of the Son than we know of the Word
• Study the Word to know the Son to know the Father

So what is your focus. If Jesus did not focus on Himself, how can you make yourself the center of your life? We cannot be perfect as He was, but can we model this behavior on a daily basis?

Imagine how much better off the world would be if we could, all of us, even if just for one instance every day.

Prayer Time

Some thoughts on a verse I put in my journal two years ago:

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Mark 1:35 (NASB)

Solitary prayer alone with God. Jesus got up early, obviously before anyone else was up to do this. If it was important to Him, to His spiritual life to have the type of time alone praying, His "Table for Two" with the Father, how important is it for us?

A snippet from the 1/28 The Daily Spurgeon ties in nicely with this for me:

The true Christian has a peace which is totally unknown to any
other man; yea, he hath “the peace of God which passeth all
understanding.” There are indeed two kinds of peace into the secret
satisfaction of which no unconverted person can enter — peace with God, and peace in the heart...

From a sermon entitled "The Great Privation: Or, The Great Salvation."

I pray to get nearer to God. I pray to get the peace that is not otherwise available to me. I pray when I struggle with my life (like yesterday) to get the calm, if not all the answers, to go on with things in a way that glorifies my God.

I pray because Jesus did, and how can I go wrong with His behavior to aspire to? If only I could do it more faithfully and consistently (or a little less stubbornly), for when I do I enter His rest and feel His peace.

Revel In the Holy Spirit

J I Packer, in Knowing God, makes reference to the fact that the Holy Spirit is often the ignored member of the triune Godhead. His point is that we spend a lot of time writing, reading and speaking about Christ, but relatively little about the Holy Spirit. I have to confess, I am guilty of that as well. Just look at my tag cloud on the right side of my blog.

Packer makes many great points about this line of thinking. (He makes a lot of great points in all his writings) How the Son is subject to the will of the Father; how the Spirit is subject to the will of the Father and the Son. The Godhead works in perfect harmony and concert. Packer also mentions that it is not possible to truly know the Son without the work of the Spirit and quotes Scripture that clearly lays that out for us:

But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you.
John 14:26 (NASB)

"I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

"But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come.

"He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you.

John 16:12-14 (NASB)

We cannot bear to hear what we need without the Spirit. We cannot fully understand what we need to know about Chrust without the Spirit. The Spirit is the Helper (NASB) sent to be with us, the Comforter (KJV), the Advocate (NLT), the Counselor (NIV). You can see the scope and breadth of the Holy Spirit's role and love for us in the various translations of the Bible.

I do not think you need to be particularly charismatic in belief, nature or disposition to focus on the Holy Spirit. It is not about that. You just need to acknowledge the third member of the Trinity and be as comfortable reflecting on the work of the Spirit as you are on the work of the Father or the Son.

Revel in the Holy Spirit, be joyful of the presence of the Helper in your life.