Our Christmas Security

Listen to the implications of Christmas in this prophecy from Micah 5:2,4-

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,
who are too little to be among the clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
one who is to be ruler in Israel,
whose coming forth is from of old,
from ancient days...
He shall stand and shepherd His flock in the strength of the LORD,
in the majesty of the name of the LORD His God.
And they shall dwell secure, for now He shall be great to the ends of the earth.
And He shall be their peace.

The King born in Bethlehem will shelter His flock under the majestic refuge of the name of God.  And we will be forever secure, temporally and eternally safe in His hands, because He shall be great to the ends of the earth.  Think on that for a moment, and be staggered by the connections made right here in the verse.  Christ's global greatness is the day-to-day rock-solid foundation for our assurance, peace, comfort, and security.  Because He is ascended at the right hand of God, with "all authority in heaven and on earth" given to Him, we can be confident that we are secure.  The One who was born for us and lived for us and died for us and rose for us is now reigning for us and interceding for us and guaranteeing our security and entrance to glory by His own blood-bought peace with God.

Hear the apostle Paul's own inspired implications of this Christmas prophecy, echoing Micah's words: "But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For He Himself is our peace." (Eph. 2:13)

This Christmas, stand in awe once again at the mercy and majesty of our God.  And count yourselves secure, immovable on this glorious foundation: "now He shall be great to the ends of the earth."

Thinking Lightly

I've been slowly getting back into translating Romans from Greek to English, and recently my work in Romans 2 jumped out at me.  Here is my literal translation of Romans 2:4-

"Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, being ignorant that the kindness of God leads you into repentance?"

Do you "think lightly" of God's kindness and forbearance and patience?  Is it a small thing to you, something that rests lightly on your mind and heart?  The truth of God's new-every-morning mercies in Christ is the most massive, weighty reality in the universe, a reality which should be daily, hourly crushing the sin out of our souls, taking our breath away, and bowing our hearts down before the throne of grace.

Yet too often in the church and in my experience, God's grace has been a small, light thing.  Too often I reckon "the riches of His kindness" to be more like a $5 bill and less like the inexhaustible, precious treasure that it really is.  Too many mornings, the patience of God is a small thing to me.  I rise with my alarm clock and go about my day, not stopping to realize in wonder and awe that God again caused the sun to rise this morning on millions of people-- myself included-- who deserved to die in their sleep and yet have another day of divine forbearance and mercy in front of them.  Think of it!  The sun rose this morning-- a testament to God's love for His enemies.  "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may  be sons of your Father who is in heaven.  For He makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and He sends rain on the just and the unjust." (Matthew 5:44-45)  And the same love for His enemies that the sunrise proclaimed this morning was also demonstrated, in an even more magnificently glorious way, on the cross.  "While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son." (Romans 5:10).  Every morning, we should be staggered by the sunrise!

O, that the weight of God's kindness and forbearance and patience would fall with sin-shattering, joy-maximizing implications on His people!  By His massive mercy, may we today find His kindness to be wealth beyond compare, His forbearance to be an unending fountain of hope, and His patience to be a firm foundation of peace.

Past, Present, and Future

O the sweetness of these words: "To Him who loves us"-  loves us!  That He would ever look with even a mere moment of love upon a sinner such as I is earth-shattering.  But that He loves me with a present tense, ongoing, ever-present passion is unfathomably staggering.  Who am I, that the God who "inhabits eternity" (Is. 57:15) would break into time to pursue me with a present tense love?

And in order to make my experience of His present tense reality eternally sure, He has grounded it in the objective past tense: "and has freed us from our sins by His blood and made us a kingdom."  God demonstrates (present tense) His love in that while we were still sinners, Christ died (past tense) for us.  O, the marvelous assurance that this truth brings!  The foundation of His love is not my present-- my weak, wavering, sin-stained present; the immovable Rock of His affection is His own past-- His unchanging, faithful, eternally accomplished past!

Therefore my heart's deepest longing and desire is this: that every future tense of my life would be suffused with His praise, and an ever-increasing conformity to His precious likeness: "To Him be glory and dominion forever and ever.  Amen!"


"To Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by His blood and made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever.  Amen." ~Revelation 1:5-6

Elijah vs. Jesus

My wife and I are teaching children's Sunday School today, and in the course of planning, I got to thinking.  Elijah was one of the greatest Old Testament prophets and miracle workers.  At his word, the heavens withheld their rain for 3 1/2 years.  He provided a miraculous supply of bread and oil for a widow and raised her son to life, called down fire from heaven, and became one of only two people in history to never die when he was taken away by chariots of fire.

And yet this great prophet and miracle worker does not even hold a candle to Jesus Christ.  John the Baptist, whom Jesus said fulfilled the promise of the second coming of Elijah's spirit and power, said of Jesus, "He who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie."  Clearly someone greater than Elijah was here.

Here are five reasons why Jesus is greater than Elijah:

1) Elijah's faith wavered.  Jesus remained faithful.
Despite all that he had seen God do, when Elijah's life was threatened by Jezebel, "he was afraid and he arose and ran for his life." (1 Kings 19:3)  Jesus, on the other hand, never wavered in His commitment to Calvary and His Father's will, and thus the author of Hebrews writes, "Christ is faithful over God's house as a son." (Hebrews 3:6)

2) Elijah had to pray to God to affect the weather.  Jesus simply said, "Be still," and the storm stopped.
Most of Elijah's miracles actually involve him praying and asking God to act.  James says that "Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain." (James 5:17)  But Jesus didn't ask for anybody's permission; He simply said, "Be still," and the storm ceased.  Thus He proved that He is the God of Psalm 89:9-- "Who is mighty as You are, O Lord?  You rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, You still them."

3) Elijah raised a widow's son from the dead.  Jesus is the resurrection and the life.
Elijah is one of the few people in the Bible through whom God raised the dead.  But even though the miracle was spectacular, it is obvious from the account in 1 Kings that it was God who raised the dead, not Elijah.  Elijah pleaded with God, and God answered his prayer.  Jesus, on the other hand, declared about Himself saying, "I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live," (John 11:25), and then backed up this claim by commanding life into the decaying corpse of Lazarus with a simple, "Come forth."

4) Elijah was taken to heaven with fire.  Jesus will come from heaven with fire.
Elijah was taken up into heaven by "chariots of fire and horses of fire." (2 Kings 2:11)  Lest we be too enamored by this spectacle, though, 2 Thessalonians tells us of a greater heavenly fire: a coming day "when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God... when He comes on that day to be glorified in His saints and to be marveled at among all who have believed."  The glory of Jesus' heavenly fire will brilliantly outshine Elijah's, as much as the sun outshines a flickering match.

5) Elijah never died.  Jesus conquered death.
Elijah is one of only two people in the Bible, along with Enoch, to never taste death.  Yet the honor that Jesus has and will receive is infinitely greater, for Jesus is now "crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone." (Hebrews 2:9)  And Jesus did not just taste death for everyone; "He Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death."  Elijah the sinner never died, thanks to Jesus tasting death for Him, and now Jesus has definitively conquered Satan and eliminated the power of death for all time for all who trust in Him.

Elijah is surely worthy of much honor among the great saints of the faith.  But Jesus is surely worthy of much more.  He is a greater miracle worker, greater life-giver, greater sin-conquerer, greater grave-overcomer, greater Savior.

Twitter

Twitter is something I've been thinking about for a long time.  I swore up and down that I would never ever ever be on Twitter.  It seems to me to be one of the most self-serving, inane forms of communication in existence.  I've always been a believer in Neil Postman's idea of "the medium is the message."  Twitter is a communication medium that lends itself to triviality.  Therefore, I am wary of it.

But at the same time, I have seen people redeeming Twitter to be a tool of the Gospel.  I've marveled at how God can take even the most inane mediums and turn them into something that can glorify Himself.  And so, with some trepidation, I have opened a Twitter account.  This blog post is my justification of that.

Twitterers like John Piper and The Gospel Coalition have shown me that short does not have to equal trivial.  In fact, I believe that there is a potential for great profundity if glorious truth can be packaged into something as small as, say 140 characters.  One reason I am using Twitter is that I want to develop a skill in communicating the truth of God's word in an efficient, profound, poetic (read: short) way that honors God for the treasure He is and preserves the weightiness of His Word.  I believe that Twitter can help me grow as a preacher and expositor of God's Word.

Twitter is also going to become a tool of my daily devotional times.  My goal is, every day, to come away from God's Word with a statement of glorious, gospel truth that can fit in a Tweet.

Thirdly, I hope that by joining those who are seeking to redeem this medium, I can add my voice to the chorus of praise that even now is occurring on Twitter.  God desires to be glorified in all things, and I want to see His name and renown spread through this new medium that He, in His sovereignty, has granted to us.

My Twitter address is www.twitter.com/theophilus318.  Follow me as I follow Christ!

Back to Blogging

It's been almost 3 months since I've blogged on here, and in the meantime, a lot has happened.  I got married on July 25th (hurray!), I started a very challenging job at the end of August, and I have been struggling to keep all my commitments and priorities straight in the face of an entirely new season of life.

Marriage is, second to salvation, the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me.  My wife is a servant and a blessing, more than I deserve.  I thank God daily for her.  "He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD."  ~Proverbs 18:22

But I've also discovered that what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7 is true.  "The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord.  But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided."  How painfully true this is!  My most desperate prayer has become, "Give me an undivided heart, that I may fear Your name!"

The constraints of serving a wife, working a full-time job, teaching Sunday school, attending new members' class, and (soon) beginning to be a part of a leadership group at my church, all have left the Daily Verse Online in limbo.  I'm still not sure where God wants me to go with this.  He has blessed me with that ministry, and the opportunity to serve the Word of God to thousands each day, for nearly 7 years.  I don't know yet if He's calling me to other things, or if He's putting the DVO on hold for a season, or if it is my own selfishness that is keeping me from that ministry.  Until He shows me where to go, the site will remain up but no Daily Verses will be sent.  To those of you who miss receiving daily verses: I'm sorry.  I'm thinking of you, and when God lifts the curtain, you'll know.

But I want to come back to blogging.  I need an outlet for musings on the Word that doesn't have the same demands as the DVO.  I hope those of you who read this will be blessed by this blog as I strive to please God by honoring and cherishing His Word here.

Wedding

I'm getting married in 41 hours.  Oh my gosh.  I want to write a profound post on the topic, but right now I'm so frazzle-brained I can hardly think straight.  I'm getting married in 2 days.  2 days!

After that, a week in Hawaii.

Then it's back to work, back to the Daily Verse Online, back to blogging... but now I'll have a wife.  Sweet.

Pray for me!