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The Government…And Us. (Notes from last night)
Hope you’re shoveled out and warm… On Monday night we resumed our study of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome by looking at the first seven verses of chapter 13. This is the paragraph where Paul describes how the “renewed mind” (which e wrote about in the beginning of chapter 12) leads a Christian to relate to the government he or she is under. Here are the notes:
Intro: Let’s not forget that Paul begins his letter with 11 chapters giving us total truth about the world and how someone can be reconnected to God. Then in Chapters 12-16 he shows us how our lives will look if we’ve been reconnected to God. If you don’t know Christ, we’d like to commend a certain kind of life and thinking. The Christian life is part of the Christian message. (It’s a better way–for real!)
“The Renewed Mind”— A mind that’s being renewed produces people who…
13:1-7 …Submit to human governmental authority, because…
v.1-2 we see God behind all human authority. (v.1-2)
v.3-4 the purpose of government is to conform generally to God’s moral laws. (also: we see that corrupt government is no excuse for corrupt behavior on our part)
v.5 the conscience of a Christian should convict us of this truth (12:2)
v.6 this is all rooted in Christ’s teaching: see Matthew 22:17-21–Christ teaches that God has ordained for us to give to Caesar the things that he has given to Caesar. So if God gives the government (Caesar) authority, we acknowledge that fact by submitting to the authority. But, implicit in Christ’s teaching here is the idea that God will never give Caesar certain things, and we never have to either. The key is seeing that the renewed mind (Romans 12:1-2) knows the difference.
v.7 Once we see these things, it frees us up to also see that acknowledging humans in the proper way does not mean that we’re not acknowledging God. Instead, showing this “honor” Paul speaks of, is how we acknowledge God—by acknowledging what He’s put in place in the world.
Here’s another way to frame the issue. If we lived in a universe in which there was no God, and if we were not created, then there would be no such thing as legitimate authority. No human would have to acknowledge, against his or her will, the authority of another human, because we’d all just be animals made of matter. But since our God is the creator of the universe, then authority is present in the very nature of what our world is. And all of humanity is under Authority—the great King. One day he will rule the world directly, physically and personally in the Lord Jesus Christ, but until that time he has chosen to rule the world through human intermediaries.
Therefore, we can conclude that the default Christian posture towards government is that of submission.
To say it another way, the instinctive “first move” of the renewed mind is to obey the law, and then we should be watchful for laws and orders that would cause us to transgress God’s laws. In a basically functioning society, we should generally be positively contributing citizens. Our basic heart attitude becomes that of willing compliance…but…we are the first to refuse obedience, to the point of death, when we are sure the government is requiring something which would cause us to sin.
But this doesn’t only apply to government. If we zoom further out, we could say that the renewed mind, generally speaking, does not rebel against circumstances, and does not resent authority in general. Instead, it submits to God by submitting to circumstances.
Other verses: 1 Peter 2:9-17; Titus 3:1-2; Daniel 4:17; Jer 27:5-6
Now, Can we apply this all to non-believers as well, and see how this teaching of Paul relates to the good news of salvation? Yes. Part of the Christian message is found in Matthew 28:18-20. The true King has come. He’s the perfect, loving and righteous king. (He died for you.) He’s the king you want. He’s inviting you into his kingdom now. He’s coming back to rule. So, we don’t just preach, “Do what the government tells you!” We preach, “You don’t need to worry that the government can every really ruin anything for you or steal anything from you! They are under the authority of Christ, the authority to which we all must bow. Bow the knee to his authority and find love and acceptance. Then you’ll be able know how to coexist with (and when to resist) any earthly government, without fear or anxiety. Regardless of the human power you’re under, you’ll be free, liberated by the true king into his everlasting kingdom of life and light. Believe this message, enter his kingdom, and be made alive and free!”
Not that you need to pit the two against each other…
So I read this the other day (from The Hole in Our Holiness by Kevin DeYoung) and was a little shocked, just because it’s not the sort of thing you hear in a lot of Christian books these days. But of course, it’s true…
The fact of the matter is, if you read through the instructions to the New Testament churches you will find few explicit commands that tell us to take care of the needy in our communities and no explicit commands to do creation care, but there are dozens and dozens of verses that enjoin us, in one way or another, to be holy as God is holy (e.g., 1 Pet. 1:13-16).
Anyone care to weigh in with thoughts on this? What do you make of this “weighting” towards personal holiness in the New Testament letters?
And why do you think it’s in fashion now (in the church in the west) to reverse emphasis?
What kind of home do you want to live in?
Richard Baxter was a minister in England in the seventeenth century. I’m slowly reading through his book The Godly Home, which was reprinted in that last couple years and updated some for modern readers. Basically, it is a remarkably up-to-date and relevant manual for thinking about and building a Christian home. Only a few of us in the young adults group are married, but admit it–all of us are thinking about it. Which means, we should be thinking about the kind of home God wants us to build. So I recommend the book.
It’s full of wisdom like this section below, which helps us think through the benefits of a cultivating a godly home from (what I found to be) a slightly unexpected angle. Please don’t read this as harsh, but rather, being said bluntly with some old language, as a real appraisal of the different kinds of homes parents help build–and as a charge to build the first kind.
A holy, well-governed family tends not only to the safety of the members but also to the ease and pleasure of their lives. To live where God’s law is the principal rule and where you may be daily taught the mysteries of his kingdom and have the Scriptures opened to you and be led, as by the hand, in the paths of life, where the praises of God are daily celebrated and his name is called upon and where all speak the heavenly language and where God, Christ, and heaven are their daily work and recreation, where it is the greatest honor to be most holy and heavenly, and the greatest contention is who shall be most humble and godly and obedient to God and their superiors and where there is no reviling scorn at godliness, nor any profane and coarse language – what a sweet and happy life this is! It is the closest thing to heaven on earth.
But to live where worldliness, profaneness, wantonness, and sensuality bear all the sway and where God is unknown and holiness and all religious exercises are matters of contempt and scorn and where he who will not swear and live profanely makes himself the hatred and derision of the rest and where men are known by their shape and speaking faculty to be men – nay, where men take not themselves for men but for animals and live as if they had no rational souls or any expectations of another life or any higher employments or delights than the transitory concernments of the flesh – what a sordid, loathsome, filthy, miserable life is this! To live where there is no communion with God, where the marks of death and damnation are written, as it were, upon the doors, in the face of their impious, worldly lives, and where no man understands the holy language and where there is not the least foretaste of the heavenly, everlasting joys – what is this but to live as the serpent’s seed, to feed on dust, and to be excommunicated from the face and favor of God and to be chained up in the prison of sexual desire and malignity among his enemies until the judgment that is making haste comes and will render to all according to their works.
Help for Your Twenties
I handed a few of these out on Monday night, but here’s the update for any of you who weren’t there. Over at the Philadelphia Christian Student Initiative website, the newest booklet is now available.
Here’s the blurb I put on the site:
Though few people know it before they head into adulthood, the twenties are one of the most spiritually challenging times in life, especially because they present a whole host of new challenges we don’t face when we’re younger.
Written especially for Christian students nearing the end of their time in college, Surviving Your Twenties attempts to highlight those challenges in succinct points, and offer some guidance for the road ahead.
This booklet was written out of the past few years’ reflection on the decade I spent in my twenties, and real heart-searching as to why so many of my friends started their twenties believing and (as best I could tell) excited to know and serve Jesus, and then turned thirty in various states of spiritual ruin: with lives seriously impacted by sin, or no longer claiming to believe the gospel at all. It’s not the prettiest piece of literature you’ll ever read–it turned out to be a sort of shot-gun list of the challenges that seem most important to know about, and some ideas for getting yourself ready for the years ahead.
You can download ePub, pdf, or text files for free at the PCSI resources page.
You can pick up printed copied in the back of the room on Monday nights, and as always, if you’re away at school and you want any of this stuff to use on your campus, let me know. We’ll gladly send it to you for free.
Help for your praying: Pray out loud?
Here is an excerpt that brings before us a different way to think through how we pray. To pray out loud, when alone, may seem like a bit of a strange concept at first, but I would challenge you to give it a try. I have personally found this to be very beneficial in my own prayer life as it keeps me more focused and concentrated in my prayers.
Much of the discussion about [prayer] has taken place within the context of a Western culture in which the majority of people who, when praying privately, do so silently, without either speaking aloud or “mouthing words.” It remains doubtful whether this was often the case in the ancient world.
Praying was very much like reading, where even in private one read “aloud” – to oneself, to be sure, but by “mouthing words” nonetheless – just as children still do until they are “taught” otherwise. The casual evidence for this in the NT, of course, is Philip’s “hearing” the Ethiopian eunuch as he is “reading” from Isaiah (Acts 8:30). So also with praying. Not only does the narrative in Daniel 6 assume that Daniel prayed “aloud” when praying alone, but so does the parable of Jesus in Luke 18:9-14, as does Luke’s narrative about Jesus’ praying in 11:1 as well as the Synoptic narrative about his prayer in the Garden.
In all of these cases the narrator assumes a culture where people prayed “aloud,” that is, articulated for themselves as they prayed.
–from God’s Empowering Presence by Gordon Fee
You Should Have a Secret Life (Notes from last night’s study)
Last night we took one more week of break from our study through Romans to consider Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 6 and how it relates to our private (secret) life with God–and how social media impacts this necessary part of life. Here are the notes:
The scriptures we looked at were Matthew 6:1-7, 16-18. Some observations:
1. The issue: living our lives “to be seen” by people. (v. 1,5,16) Note: The issue is not being seen in general. See 5:13-16. It seems that this goes for our all aspects of our life, not just some part of life we’d label “spiritual.”
2. A Helpful Question: who do you want to see you? If it’s people, why? (If that’s the case, Jesus says “you have your reward”–applause, esteem, people’s admiration). But there’s another question we might ask here to help get at what he’s teaching: Who do you want people to see? …to notice? …to think about? …to admire? …to praise? …to want?
3. Another Question: Why do people feel this way?
Two reasons maybe: 1. Because they think that other people are the only ones there to notice. 2. Because they think that the only things that have value in their lives are the things others see (they want “their reward”).
4. The Antidote: Know that you have a father who sees in secret.
If there really was no one there in the universe except other humans, then this teaching of Jesus would make no sense. But if there is a God who sees all things, and to whom the hidden things are just as open as the things that we call “public”—that makes everything different. Now even the most secret moments in our lives are inhabited by Someone else, and in fact, by the most important Person in the universe…in fact , the only person whose opinion matters. And, if that Someone is the one who made us, and if he made us to relate to him, than our relational life with Him is the most important thing to us. It’s the thing we should think most about, invest the most in, and derive the most joy from.
A further observation: God has made all of life like this. We have lives made of concentric circles of relationships, and the more important they are, the closer they are to us, then—the more things happen in that relationship that don’t leave the circle of that relationship. God has designed shared information and experiences, kept in that relationship, and accumulated over time, to be in the very fabric of what relationships are. If this is true, it leads to this next question…
5. What secret life with God do you have?
What worship has passed between you and God that no one else knows about? If you think something, or write something, pray something, or do some act of service to God, do you feel the need to have other people hear it, read it, see it, or know about it? If you had to, so to speak, tally up and weigh out everything that just you and God know, what would be in that list?
6. How Social Media impacts this.
Social media is breaking down the barrier that has always stood between the public and the private. I think these scriptures show us that that barrier is part of God’s design in the world. To break it down is to injure ourselves, to lower ourselves and miss some essential part of what it means to be human. It may even lead us to sin, and to an emptying out of the private places of our lives so that we have food for the beast of our new, hungry public lives.
It affects our relationships with other people too. If I start to take the personal parts of my marriage public, I would be emptying that relationship out, and eventually, I would turn it into a husk…a shell of its former self, and make it meaningless. Can we say the same for our friendships? And what about how it impacts our relationship with God himself?
Encouragment for reading the word in 2014
It’s been a few days, but here are the notes from the study on Monday night. I spent the evening giving an exhortation to a fresh attention to reading the word for the new year.
First, here’s the list of scriptures we read: Genesis 1:1-3; Genesis 2:15-17; Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Deuteronomy 32:46-47; Psalm 1; Psalm 119:1-16; Isaiah 66:2; Jeremiah 15:16; John 6:63; John 15:7; Revelation 1:17-19; Revelation 21:1-5; Revelation 22:6, 18-19
And here’s the bullet list of observations about these texts I made:
- The God who exists speaks.
- The way God has designed for us to know him is that he has made us able to understand his speech.
- So we know him primarily by hearing him speak.
- He can speak so we can hear it audibly.
- He can speak so that it can be written down.
- He directed some people to write some of his words down.
- When his words are written down, the written words become the way for us to know what he said in those instances.
- So, what is true of God’s speaking in general is true of the written record of his speaking, the bible.
- So, the bible becomes the way for us to hear him speaking.
- We come to know him and relate to him by knowing what he says to us.
- God has designed us to draw our life from our personal, relational connection to him.
- So, literally, reading the bible to hear God’s personal word to us is the source of our life.
Exhortation? Pursue the reading, understanding, memorization and living out of the Bible in order to know God, draw close to him, and to live.
Also, here’s the parable/story I read for non-believers to think about as I closed…
Imagine you had been lost in the woods for a long time, and finally you stumbled on a house in a clearing. You assume it’s abandoned, and when you go through the unlocked front door you see that there’s no one inside. You settle down, and find that it actually makes a good home. It has what you need, and so you decide to stay. But one morning you wake up and realize that some things have moved from where you placed them. And there are new smells too. You follow your nose to fresh cooked eggs and toast. Fresh juice in a glass. Someone has been here, you think. And then you notice a note, under the edge of the glass. It says, “Eat up, I’ll be back soon.” And it’s signed, “The Owner of the House.” You’re hungry, so you eat, even though you’re a little freaked out. You’re just finishing the last bite when, under the plate, you discover another note. This one’s longer—pages and pages of hand written words. It’s this “Owner” again (only now he’s calling himself “the Builder”), and in the letter he describes how he chose the plot of ground you’ve been staying on and built the house. He actually says he built it for you, and others just like you (he calls the others “the family”). He says that he’d actually been nearby when you moved in, and watched the whole thing. Not wanting to scare you, he waited for the right time and way to let you know that he was there, and that you were living under his protection. And so on this morning he cooked breakfast for you, and left you this letter. At the bottom of the last page, it’s signed, “Love you—Your Father.” Now you’re totally thrown off. You sit there, with the morning wearing on, and try to figure this out. Can you trust this letter? How do you know who wrote it? What if it’s a joke or a trick? What if it’s for someone else? Clearly this house has been empty and abandoned all this time…right? Clearly you’ve been alone…even lonely! Is it really reasonable to change the way you’ve been seeing this house, just because of a letter? And right in the middle of those thoughts, as you’re deciding whether to read over the pages again or throw them out, there’s a knock at the door.
Meeting for College Students Tomorrow Night
If you are on college break, we’re getting together in the Calvary (CCA) library tomorrow night (1/8) to discuss the past semester. Bring any intellectual, spiritual or social issues you encountered this fall, and Brian will lead a discussion of them. Some sort of dinner will be served… 5:30-7:30 PM. Email me if you have questions…
The Bible: Helping you get up earlier in 2014
Have trouble getting up early to read the scriptures? What about just in general?
Here’s some scriptures which offer inspiration and instruction to help us in this area. I recommend looking up the bible verse after each thought to see what the actual word of God has to say in this area.
Get up early, regularly, and have a certain place you regularly go to, so that when something big goes down, you know how, when, and where to meet God to talk it over. (Genesis 19:27)
When you know God has given some clear direction about something in your life, get up early and waste no time getting on it—especially when it’s something hard for you to do. (Genesis 21:14 and 22:3)
When God has met you in a special way the night before, get up early to worship him and contemplate what happened. (Genesis 28:18)
Get up early when, at the leading of the Lord, you have to face some major opposition that day. Run to the problem rather than delaying the confrontation. (Exodus 8:20 and 9:13)
Get up early to do the work God has given you to do. (Exodus 24:4)
Get up early when God has called you to seek him on behalf of others. (Exodus 34:4)
Get up early to follow the new direction God has given you. (Joshua 3:1)
When your calling requires diligent faithfulness to a pattern God has given you, get up early to be able to fight the battle for the kingdom God’s way. (Joshua 6:12)
When sin has messed things up, get up early to deal with it. (Joshua 7:16)
After you’ve failed, get up early to pursue God’s right way again. (Joshua 8:10)
Get up early to worship after you’ve received assurance that God has heard your prayers. (1 Samuel 1:19)
If someone close to you needs to be confronted because of failure or sin, get up early. (1 Samuel 15:12)
Get up early to take care of the most mundane task that you’ve been given to do…you never know what the day may bring… (1 Samuel 17:20)
If you ever fall in with the wrong crowd, get up early to get out of there. (Even non-believers know it’s the right thing to do.) (1 Samuel 29:10-11)
When you’re scared, but know the Lord is with you, get up early to face what He is going to walk you through. (2 Chronicles 20:20)
Get up early to pray for your family, even when it seems like they’re doing fine. You never know what’s coming. (Job 1:5)
Know what not to get up early for. (Isaiah 5:11)
Even when you feel like all is lost, get up early, and show your love for the Lord. You might be surprised with what you find. (Mark 16:2)
The Lord is teaching. Get up early to get taught. (Luke 21:38, John 8:2)
When you’ve suffered opposition and persecution, and the Lord has delivered you, get up at dawn to get right back to the work. (Acts 5:21)
Going through these scriptures, I was struck just by how much “getting up early” there is in the Bible. It seems like a pattern.
Are we seeing an example of part of a consistent, godly life?
What do we mean when we say God is love? (Part 6)
This is the sixth and final post in a series of posts from the booklet How is God Love? To read the series introduction, click here. [To download the booklet in its entirety, go to this page.]
Last post we saw that, though God is love in Himself, He is also the kind of God who wanted to do everything that was necessary for us to share in and experience this love. Seriously awesome truth. We conclude with these thoughts…
This Eternal Good news about Love
The implications of this are such good news.
Instead of…
…a materialism that makes love a meaningless chemical reaction, or
…an aimless set of opinions about some spiritual version of love, or
…just assuming love matters, Disney style…
…we encounter the message of Christ: love is real, love matters, and we can have it, forever. The love we feel for others can take on its highest possible significance. The earth is not a cold, dead place.
Our love can be gathered up into the eternal Love—into God himself, and become a part of the love that he is working all through the world.
And we have seen and testify
that the Father has sent his Son
to be the Savior of the world.
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God,
God dwells in him,
and he in God.
So we have come to know and to believe
the love that God has for us.
God is love,
and whoever dwells in love
dwells in God,
and God dwells in him.
(1 John 4:14-16)