Those Who Sow in Tears Shall Reap with Shouts of Joy

Do you worry over your child's anger and behavioral failures, fearing he will be ruined by them, or that you are failing him as a parent?  What would it be like instead to rejoice in his failings as tools in God's hands to pave the way toward an infinitely brighter future?

Our 23-month-old son Ephraim has developed a recent fascination with blankets.  This evening he tried picking up the blanket my on which my wife was sitting.  When he was unable to do it, he protested vociferously.  Then he tried jumping off the coffee table onto the couch, but he couldn't bridge the gap, which sent him spiraling downward even further.  Exhausted and hungry, he proceeded into a bleary-eyed, wailing tantrum that would last about twenty minutes.

After I took him upstairs for "time out" in his crib, I prayed with him.  At first I asked God to be near to him and give him the ability to calm down because, as John Piper points out, anger "devours almost all other good emotions" and "numbs the heart to joy and gratitude and hope and tenderness and compassion and kindness."*

But then I thought, maybe I shouldn't pray for that.  So instead I began to pray, "God, in times like this when Ephraim can't control his own anger and emotions and tantrums, let him see his own desperate condition.  Let him see that he cannot restrain his feelings and the chaos that floods over him.  Let him see both your forgiveness for him in the cross and also how much he needs the power of the Holy Spirit inside him to give him peace and the ability to calm down."

This was really freeing.  As I thought about it over the evening, I gained a small bit of parenting freedom.  I've been reading through the book of Proverbs recently, which is mostly a book of how fathers should train their children in wise living in fear of the Lord.  Proverbs says that children who grow up to be unruly, disobedient, and unwise are "fools."  And of course I never want my son to be foolish or to be ruled by his desires (which is what anger reveals; see James 4:1-3).  But more than I want him to be "good," I want him to know and receive the goodness of Jesus Christ.  I want him to see how needy and sinful and evil his heart is, and that his outbursts reveal both how selfish his desires are and how he is mastered by his own desires--and that through this his only hope, and his sure hope, is the grace of God in Jesus.

I pray that God will keep this in my mind as the years go by.  Instead of fretting over every tantrum and display of self-will, I want them to become signposts confirming to him his need for Christ and the grace God offers to the humble.  I want to know that the more Ephraim sins--as atrocious as this is--the more cause there will be for him to crave the unfailing love of God.  "With weeping they shall come, and with pleas of mercy I will lead them back, ... for I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn" (Jeremiah 31:9).
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*John Piper, This Momentary Marriage (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2009) p. 150.

Nothing Can Hinder the Lord

This week I was talking with some other dads at our church about how difficult it is to rear our children to understand both grace and law.  We all recognized this is a tough tightrope to walk!  After all, nearly every New Testament letter was occasioned by either too much reliance on the law (human behaviors and efforts) or a perversion of grace into a license to sin or to live a lax life.  Both errors fail to do justice to the cross of Jesus.

Of course, this concern is even broader than understanding the gospel.  Any honest parent, I'm sure, would be led to some worries about whether they're doing a good job raising their kids rightly in all aspects of wise living.

But thank God I was reminded of this simple truth that evening: The God who gave us children in the first place, the God who has put authority and responsibility into parents' hands, who is himself a loving Father--it is this God who cares more about our children than we do!  He cares more about their faith and salvation than we ever will.  He is the one who designed his great saving plan and sent his Son to die for sinners, at great cost to himself.  He is the one who sends his Spirit to open the eyes of the blind to see the light of Christ's glory (2 Corinthians 4:4, 6).  He is the one who finds immense joy in recovering his lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7).  He is the one who delights in wisdom (Proverbs 8:30; 3 John 4).  As the Westminster Confession of Faith reminds us*, God uses our best efforts to rear our children in the way of the Lord Jesus without exasperating them (Ephesians 6:4), but he is not confined by how well we do.  After all, he is the one who, in his wisdom, has entrusted the passing of his covenant to the next generation into the hands of finite, weak sinners, and so he too will provide amazing grace to see that his purposes for our children are fulfilled.  Why are we sitting there looking at ourselves?  No wonder we have fears about parenting.

"Come, let us go ... .  It may be that the LORD will work for us, for nothing can hinder the LORD from saving by many or by few" (1 Samuel 14:6).
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* "God, in His ordinary providence, makes use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure." (5:3)

In the Flesh I Live by Faith

Ever since I became a follower of Jesus in college, Galatians 2:20-21 has been one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible.

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.  I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!  (NIV)

It's one thing to be excited about a Bible verse that captures the essence of the good news about Jesus when you're new in the faith.  But it's another thing to look back eleven years later and see more of this.  I guess that's one of the many things I love about the Word of God, too: it's so rich that it never ceases to be relevant.  As I learn more about life, it speaks deeper truths.

Paul wrote Galatians sometime between A.D. 48-52, at least 17 years after he met Jesus on the road to Damascus (see 1:18 and 2:1).  And what did he learn in those 17 years?  "It becomes evident that we ourselves are sinners" (2:17).  When I first began to love the gospel I think I had some idea I'd have grown a halo by now.  But instead I'm pretty sure the opposite has happened.

What I never saw before--and what I love now--is that Paul says that "the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith" (ESV).  For years I read "in the body" (NIV) and thought, Duh.  Of course he lives in the body.  He's a human.  He has a body.  I never understood why that was relevant for Paul.  But seeing "flesh" (Greek sarx) made sense of it: "flesh" is Paul's one-stop-shop for referring to the powers and postures of a fallen world and a sinful nature that tries to exercise every way of achieving hope and peace and life and joy except for submitting to God and trusting in him.  Our flesh represents our self-serving desires bent against God.

So why do I love this?  Because Paul just spent 17 years becoming an even bigger sinner, growing daily in his debt to God.  He knows he still lives "in the flesh."  He still has a "body of death" that perplexes him with his conflicting desires that rear their head without warning (see Romans 7).  And yet he can say that even in the midst of that--in fact, precisely because of that--he lives by faith in Jesus, God's Son.*  He sees he can't earn God's favor and love by his moral rectitude and just gives up, casting his worn-out soul on Jesus who loves him.

And if Paul can do that, so can I, because Jesus is not dead but alive.  In the middle of my perplexing, senseless sin that just grows every day, I can and must live by faith in Jesus.  I can know that Jesus "loved me and gave himself for me."  His death has not only fully paid for all my sins but also served as the culmination of a life of obedient sonship that became a fragrant offering to God (see Ephesians 5:2 and 1 Samuel 15:22).  And now, somehow, mysteriously, by faith his very life replaces mine before God--his obedience, his sonship, his place in the Father's love.

So I can go on living in the flesh, a stinkin' mess of sin and brokenness, knowing and trusting in Jesus.  The gospel is good news indeed.

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*Paul's argument in Galatians 2:17ff. goes something like this: Because Paul and his company are sinners, people are accusing them of using Jesus' grace as an excuse for sin: When people have Jesus, they don't need to be law-keepers to earn God's favor, so Jesus is a "servant of sin."  But Paul denies this, saying rather that they were "found to be sinners," people who by very nature cannot keep the law wholly and so cannot earn a right standing with God through it.  Rather, Paul sees how the law shows him his own sin and then how Jesus fufilled it for him, so that he can say "through the law I died to the law."  That is, the law itself showed him the law was useless but that Christ was faithful in every way Paul himself had failed.

Iain Campbell on Law and Gospel

Iain Campbell writes thus on a blog post at Reformation21:

One of the marks of grace in both Old and New Testaments is a love for God's law. The church needs that; and we need wisdom to highlight this without going down the road of legalism. I love the versification of Ralph Erskine (1685-1752) who says in one of his 'gospel sonnets':

Thus gospel-grace and law-commands

Both bind and loose each other's hands;

They can't agree on any terms,

Yet hug each other in their arms.

We need to divide the truth rightly in order to show the validity of this insight. Without law we cannot define sin or righteousness, and without the imputation of these objective realities there can be no atonement. Without an objective atonement, in which the sanctions of the law are met, there can be no Gospel.

The Gospel Is the Power of God for Sanctification

As Olivia and I have been deciding upon which church congregation to call our family and home here in Richmond, we've been met with a bit of a strange phenomenon as we've worshiped in the Presbyterian churches here (West End, Stony Point, and City Church): Every week's sermon dwells largely on a message of the complete sufficiency of Jesus' death and resurrection to atone for our sins and bring us new life, and the freedom of forgiveness and sonship we find in him. In like fashion we are also called to leave behind our vain idols and our self-made attempts at righteousness to embrace alone this Savior. It's not that in other churches the gospel was merely something that "got you saved," and then you got busy doing other stuff for God. The other churches were really good at helping wandering sheep learn what a sanctified life looks like and how to practically live a life transformed by the Holy Spirit.

At any rate, this apparent dichotomy--or, perhaps more accurately, this change in emphasis--has caused Olivia and me some consternation over how someone really grows as a disciple who learns from Christ and submits his whole life to the Lord's reign. But whatever steps and teaching might be necessary to guide us in putting off the old Adam and putting on the new, and knowledgeably walking in fear-of-the-Lord, the wind in our sails to move us down the path of discipleship is clear. "The gospel," says the apostle Paul, "is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16). Paul doesn't say this Good News is just the power of God for justification; it's the power for all of salvation--our freedom from God's wrath over sin (justification), our freedom from shame and for sonship (adoption), and our freedom from the reign of sin in our lives so that we become more truly human and alive to God (sanctification).

I mention this because Confessing Evangelical, a British Lutheran blogger, has put up a wonderful post about love for Christ, not the law's demands, being the power to change us. He quotes from a well-worn book among Lutheran pastors, Bo Giertz's The Hammer of God. Please take the time to read it; it's excellent.

Piper vs. Wright on Justification

Many of you who frequent my blog (if "many" can be said of such a small plurality!) or have ties to it are probably becoming aware of the differences emerging within Protestantism over the traditional view on justification and that of the so-called "New Perspective on Paul" espoused by James Dunn, E. P. Sanders, and, most notably, N. T. Wright. There has been much controversy over this, because it appears that Wright challenges traditional theology in two ways: (1) He sees references to the "law" in Romans and Galatians as exclusively referring to God's covenant with Israel at Sinai and not also a universal moral law given to all nations. (2) He denies the imputation of Christ's righteousness to the believer, instead saying that though present justification is by faith, there will be a future justification upon the basis of our Spirit-wrought works. Many evangelicals claim this is a slip back into Rome, but I'm not so sure that that's really at stake (or at least not the degree some people think it is). In fact, I think there are ways that both perspectives fit together.

Christianity Today magazine has put together a very helpful table comparing Wright's view and the traditional Reformed view of John Piper (although I think Michael Horton or Douglas Moo would have been a much better representative of the confessional Reformed position than John Piper). The accompanying essay about pastoral implications quotes Kevin DeYoung, my former pastor at University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan.

Whose orthodoxy is it?

A recent issue of Christianity Today magazine examined the rise of Calvinism in an article titled, "Young, Restless, and Reformed." Rallying around the likes of John Piper and John MacArthur (at least as much as they can be considered confessionally Reformed), the theology of "Calvinism" has been growing in evangelical circles. But not everyone is pleased by this. Scot McKnight says this about the so-called "Neo-Reformed" in a few recent posts at the BeliefNet blog (part 1; part 2):

They think the only legitimate and the only faithful evangelicals are Reformed. Really Reformed. In other words, they are "confessing" evangelicals. The only true evangelical is a Reformed evangelical. They are more than happy to call into question the legitimacy and fidelity of any evangelical who doesn't believein classic Reformed doctrines, like double predestination.

Whether or not Reformed Protestants actually believe about "double predestination" what everyone else thinks they do--a gross caricature in my estimate--I find McKnight's criticisms a sharp rebuke to folks like me. You see, I would consider my theological understandings most in conformity with the Reformed tradition. What I think McKnight labels as "Reformed theology" is really the mislabeled "five points of Calvinism," better known as the "doctrines of grace." Granted, this has little to do with the meat of real Reformed theology, which is that all of God's dealings with humanity are subsumed under one of two overarching covenants: a covenant of works and a covenant of grace.

In trying to defend the gospel, though, do we really need the "doctrines of grace"? Are they themselves essential to the gospel--so much so that if someone doesn't adhere to them he has bastardized the message of Christ and is not a true "evangelical"?

In short--yes and no. For starters, it was Lutherans during the 16th-century Reformation who were first called "evangelical," coming from the Latin evangel, or "gospel." Oops. (Granted, Reformed theology during the 16th and 17th centuries looked a whole lot more like Lutheranism than it does now.) Without being too minimalist or vague, here is what I consider essential to the gospel. (I hope you will see that, unlike some versions that are merely propositions or "points," the gospel is really a story in history.)

1. God created the world "very good" and man--Adam and Eve--in his image, for the goal of wholehearted fellowship with and enjoyment of God himself.


2. Through the deceptive agency of Satan, Adam exercised distrust and rebellion and brought God's curse of death--both physical and spiritual--upon all his progeny, that is, all of mankind. All of humanity is covenantally represented "in Adam" and are therefore under sin's guilt, shame, and power. Though God still requires all persons to fully obey God's moral law, they cannot do so and under just condemnation.


3. God graciously promised to provide a Redeemer in whom man would be rescued from sin, and through whom God would reign in righteousness to bring blessing and life to a world dead in sin. (*Addition: These blessings were originally pledged in Eden and then to Abraham and his offspring, later to be given to all persons who shared in Abraham's faith.)


4. Because of man's inability to effect his own restoration through works, God himself lovingly and mercifully took on human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ to achieve the obedience he required from man and to become an unblemished substitute to bear in his own death God's holy and just punishment for man's sin. This loving sacrifice reconciled sinful man to God.


5. Christ's was vindicated by God at his resurrection, and he now reigns from heaven to give his Spirit to all who would repent of their works, futility, and pride, and turn to him for salvation. Such persons are now, by the Spirit, given new birth "in" or "into Christ," are forgiven and declared righteous in him, and receive as a free gift the life Christ himself earned by his obedience.


6. Spiritual fellowship with Christ now transforms believers into a truer image of God.


7. Christ will return physically and visibly before the sight of all the world, and all persons will be raised bodily. Christ will condemn unbelievers to eternal torment and to welcome believers into eternal bliss in the kingdom of God--a new world which is again "very good" where we will honor and enjoy God unendingly.

The Reformed "doctrines of grace" do help to clarify these points and add depth and meaning. But this gospel goes a long way even without such beneficial clarifications. This message is our center. What I think the Heidelberg Catechism or Westminster Confession or Canons of Dordrecht do for us (and why they're ultimately necessary) is that they teach us to place saving agency--and thus all boasting and thanksgiving and honor and praise--squarely with God himself and God alone. They unpack more fully the message that "God saves sinners." We still have much the same gospel. It's just that without the Reformed lens on Scripture we wouldn't know how much praise and credit to really ascribe to God for the salvation we now have. We wouldn't know as well the security with which we lie in God's love and power.

In one sense, the Reformation's theology could be summed up as "Salvation belongs to the Lord; damnation belongs to man." It's a story of two cities, two mediators, two destinies, two ways to be human. So what the church really needs right now is not so much explicit, confessional Reformed orthodoxy, but finely tuned Law-Gospel sensors. We need pastors who are able to rightly able to expose how futile is our merit and how great and continual is our need for justification and life. And such pastors will also be able to lead us to the One in whom this justification and life is freely given.