Why a Mediator?

1 Timothy 2:5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
John 14:6 I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

What does it mean to say that Christ Jesus is our mediator?

We frequently think of Jesus’ mediation as being necessary for our salvation; He died on the cross to pay the penalty for all the sins of all who repent and believe in Him. So, in last Sunday’s sermon, we considered the biblical image of the courtroom, with each of us standing accused of crimes for which we are guilty. Satan, the Accuser, lists them one by one – but for those in Him, Jesus, the Mediator, the Substitute, responds to each accusation by declaring, “Forgiven, by my blood!” Christ, our Mediator, covers those sins and keeps’ God’s justice from requiring of us the fair punishment of an eternity in hell.

But Jesus’ mediation accomplishes much more than keeping us out of hell. Through His work, we who once were God’s enemies are now in His family. We are loved by Him; we are His little children, His joy, His delight. As Jesus welcomes the little children to come to Him, God the Father rejoices to have us approach Him, confident in His love.

Yet ponder this thought: This loving relationship is for those who are in Christ. In Christ, we can come into God’s presence – for God then looks at us and sees Jesus’ perfect life, not our sins. In Christ we can (and must!) speak to God, presenting any and all requests to Him – for we ask in Jesus’ Name, that is by His mediation and intercession. In Christ we offer all we are and do to God, presenting ourselves as living sacrifices – and, though even our best efforts are stained by sin, we are accepted by God as holy and acceptable because of Christ’s perfect life.

Ambrose, the fourth-century Bishop of Milan, put it this way:

Christ is our mouth by which we speak to the Father; our eye by which we see the Father; our right hand by which we offer ourselves to the Father. Save by his intercession neither we nor any saints have any intercourse with God.

Turn this over in your mind. Meditate on it. Apart from Christ, your relationship to God is solely that of condemned prisoner to Judge. You cannot speak to Him. You cannot see Him. You can do nothing for Him.

We speak to God, boldly approaching His throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16), because we have “a great high priest who has passed through the heavens” (Hebrews 4:14). We see God for Who He is because of Christ, “the exact imprint of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3); when we have seen Him, we have seen the Father (John 14:9). We can be the light and salt of the world, doing good deeds that glorify the Father (Matthew 5:13-16) only because Jesus has sent to us the Holy Spirit (John 14:12-18) – and He Himself intercedes to cover the remaining sinful aspects of even our best deeds.

Thus, the author of the letter to the Hebrews rejoices that Jesus “is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). He must always live, if we are to have a relationship with the Father – for we always need His intercession. We always need His mediation.

So dwell on this precious truth. Before God the Father, Jesus is your mouth. He is your eye. He is your right hand. In Him – and only in Him – God the Father is for you. He loves you. You are His precious little child. You are His delight.

Because of Christ Jesus.

What a Savior!

A Great Commission Resurgence?

For the last several months, Danny Akin, President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has been advocating a “Great Commission Resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention. In his chapel address on April 16th (audio), Dr Akin laid out twelve axioms required for such a resurgence. Since then, SBC President Johnny Hunt has embraced this message, and modified the axioms somewhat, reducing them to ten, as available here.

In many ways, I am impressed with the Great Commission Resurgence document, and believe the SBC should move in the direction it lays out. Here are some of the axioms that clearly resonate with our theology, vision, and values:

1: We call upon all Southern Baptists to submit to the absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ in all things at the personal, local church, and denominational levels.

2: We call upon all Southern Baptists to make the gospel of Jesus Christ central in our lives, our churches, and our convention ministries.

(more…)

A Life Lived to God’s Glory Among the Nations: Ralph Winter, 1925-2009

(For a version of this devotion that is easier to print, see this link).

Ralph Winter died on Wednesday night, at the age of 84. I am confident that the Lord Jesus welcomed Dr Winter into His presence, saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master!” In the new heavens and the new earth, when we recount the history of the greatest accomplishment of all time – God bringing all the nations to Himself – Dr Winter will be among the most prominent figures who by God’s power worked to fill the earth with His glory as the waters cover the sea.

I only met Dr Winter once. When he was about 80, after being diagnosed with an incurable cancer, during a period of remission, he came to Columbia to teach. He flew into Charlotte, and met with several of us that evening. Our conversation showed him to be what I already knew – an academic in the best sense of the word. Dr Winter was a man of ideas – and he was always looking for people to challenge those ideas, to engage him in debate over those ideas, to sharpen his thinking and to stretch him further. So when I thanked him for his profound impact on me and on the worldwide church, he brushed it off, and immediately began asking me questions. In short order, he discovered an area of disagreement: He believed each local church should be focused on one small slice of the demographic pie, in order to most effectively reach unbelievers like them; I believe God is most glorified when the local church transcends the cultural boundaries that so often separate believers. He wanted to debate the issue, and I gave him that pleasure, uncomfortable as I was – despite being a former academic myself, I was there that evening to honor him!

But that interaction displays the character of Dr Ralph D Winter: He was an incredibly creative man of ideas. He was always searching, always thinking. In my view, he propagated a few wrong ideas. But in God’s providence, he was the man most responsible for pushing the worldwide church to embrace a whole series of right ideas – biblical truths that had been overlooked, or not widely known. Here is a list of some of Dr Winter’s key ideas. See more of my favorite Ralph Winter quotes at this link.

God’s missionary mandate to the church is a cross-cultural mandate. Dr Winter’s address to the 1974 Lausanne International Congress on World Evangelization was perhaps the most important paper presented at any conference in the last century. At that time, almost every mission agency thought of the biblical missionary mandate as a command to reach every nation – that is, country – with the Gospel. Dr Winter argued persuasively that the biblical mandate was to reach every culture with the Gospel, every people group, every ethno-linguistic entity; that’s the biblical definition of “nation.” God’s design is for His church to plant a thriving, evangelizing church in every people group of the world. Thirty-five years later, almost every missions agency agrees with this analysis. This insight led to the founding of the US Center for World Mission and the development of the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement course.

God’s cross-cultural mandate to His people permeates Scripture. Dr Winter emphasized that our God is a missionary God, calling all the nations to Himself, and that this has been His purpose from the beginning. The calling of Abraham in Genesis 12 is itself part of the cross-cultural mandate. Missions is thus not a mandate resting on a few, isolated verses here and there; it is the central part of the biblical storyline.

God has been working throughout history to fulfill this cross-cultural mandate. In telling the story of missions, many have written as if nothing happened prior to 1792, when William Carey sailed for India. Dr Winter emphasized that God has been at work in fulfilling the missionary mandate throughout time, using different methods in different periods of time. For pedagogical purposes, he broke history down into 400-year eras, and argued that one way of advancing the Gospel was prevalent in each era. I am not alone in rejecting some of those generalizations as too broad and thus unhelpful. But his emphasis was right: God has indeed been at work over the centuries, well prior to 1792.

God’s church needs bands of people focused on missions to assist in the fulfilling of the cross-cultural mandate. Building on the functioning of Paul’s missionary band, Dr Winter argued that such groups of missionaries are a vital part of the church. Indeed, he argued that each missionary band was fully a church in its own right – just a different type of church than the normal within-one-culture church. Here again, in my view Dr Winter took a valuable insight and went too far with it. By all means, mission agencies have a vital role to play in fulfilling the task. But each missionary should be part of a local, home church, living as one extended arm of that local church, as the local church plays its role in obeying the cross-cultural mandate.

Use all that you have, throughout all of your life, for God’s glory among the nations. Dr Winter exhorted others time and again to live this out, and then set a sterling example of what this means. He worked for God’s glory among the nations until the day before he died. He left a safe and secure job to start the US Center. He called all of us to a war-time lifestyle, and then he lived such a lifestyle, never accumulating possessions, always giving away much of what he received. Furthermore, he called the church to prayer for cross-cultural missions, and then prayed diligently himself.

For those of you who have been part of Desiring God Church for some time, these points may seem almost passé. You have heard me say them – as well as variations on these themes – time and again. That’s the impact of a man mightily used by God – His profound insights and ideas become so widely taught that we begin to take them for granted.

So let us thank God for this man:

I praise you, Lord God, for the gift of Ralph Winter to your church, and to me in particular. May you raise up many more like him because of his faithfulness to Your calling. And may we fulfill your cross-cultural mandate to the church in this generation – in part because of the faithfulness of Ralph D Winter. All glory and praise is Yours, O Lord.

(For more on Ralph Winter, see key quotes; John Piper’s tribute; another online tribute; and his autobiography. Best of all, take the Perspectives course!)

Responding to Conflict – When You are at Fault

How do you react when your wrong decisions cause pain and trouble for yourself and others? What do you do when others then bitterly blame you and accuse you?

We all make mistakes in judgment. And we all sin. There are consequences to these mistakes and sins. Surely we must take responsibility for those consequences.

But every mistake, every sin, and every conflict is an opportunity for God to display His sovereign goodness. And thus every error and sin of ours provides us with the opportunity to trust in Him, and thus to glorify Him.

Consider present conflict in your family, among your friends, or in your workplace. Limit your thoughts to those conflicts for which you are in large measure responsible: Your sin, or your error of judgment, has led to this dispute. How should you respond biblically? How can these problems lead to God’s glory?

This is the situation David finds himself in at the beginning of 1 Samuel 30. (more…)

Economic Recession and the House Built on the Rock

(For a version of this devotion that is easier to print, see this link.)

In a speech on the economy this week, President Obama quoted from Matthew 7, Jesus’ closing words in the Sermon on the Mount. A house built on sand falls when the storms come, but the house built on the rock stands. He used this picture to contend that we must build our economic house on a solid foundation. While those from different political ideologies will disagree about whether or not the president’s economic policies provide a solid or shaky foundation for future economic growth, all will agree that our economy needs to be built on rock, not on shifting sands.

But Jesus is talking about something much more important than the US economy. He’s talking about whether or not you enter the kingdom of heaven – that is, whether you rejoice with Him or you suffer apart from Him for all eternity.

Consider the verses immediately prior to Jesus’ story about the two houses: (more…)

Why Did Jesus Have to Die?

(For a version of this devotion that is easier to print, see this link.)

Why did Jesus have to die?

Tomorrow we remember the death of Jesus on the cross. There are many possible perspectives on this event: It was a tragedy, as an innocent man suffered horribly at the hand of His enemies; it is an example to us, as Jesus focused not on Himself but on others; it is a major event in world history, as Christianity was born at the cross.

But there have been millions and millions of innocent people put to death. There are other ways for God to give us good examples, and other important events in history. These perspectives don’t answer the question: Why did Jesus have to die?

The third chapter of Romans provides us with the threefold answer:

  • Jesus had to die because man is thoroughly sinful;
  • Jesus had to die because God desires to display His perfect justice;
  • Jesus had to die because God desires to display His perfect love and mercy. (more…)

Making Decisions to the Glory of God

(For a version of this devotion that is easier to print, follow this link.)

Many people today want guidance. They want a word from God to know:

  • Whom to marry,
  • what job to take,
  • whether or not to buy a house,
  • whether to take money out of the stock market or leave it in.

There are also many decisions considered more “spiritual” in which we want God to lead us:

  • To attend one church or another;
  • to go into long-term missionary work or not;
  • to go into full time ministry or not;
  • to focus on one unreached people group or another;
  • to go on one short term mission trip or another.

Can you count on God’s guidance in making such decisions?

The Bible clearly teaches that God sovereignly calls and guides His people to carry out His plans. We saw a wonderful example of this last Sunday in Acts 15:36-16:15. Paul makes decision after decision about his second missionary journey, fulfilling God’s missionary mandate as best as he can determine; most of his decisions – to take Silas with him, to travel by land to Galatia, to circumcise Timothy, to stop in Philippi, to seek those worshiping God by the river, to stay with Lydia – are made without any noted supernatural direction. But then at times the Holy Spirit supernaturally guides Paul, redirecting him away from Asia and Bithynia (Acts 16:6-7) and towards Macedonia (Acts 16:9).

God does call and guide His people to carry out His plans.

Will He guide you? (more…)

Can You Know God?

Do you know all about God?

Even the question sounds presumptuous, doesn’t it? How can any man fully comprehend the God of the universe?

David makes this point in Psalm 139. He first contemplates God’s comprehensive knowledge of all the intimate details of his life:

You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. . . . Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether. (Psalm 139:2, 4)

He then responds:

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it. (Psalm 139:6)

Charles Spurgeon elaborates on what David says here:

I cannot grasp it. I can hardly endure to think of it. The theme overwhelms me. I am amazed and astounded at it. Such knowledge not only surpasses my comprehension, but even my imagination. It is high, I cannot attain unto it. Mount as I may, this truth is too lofty for my mind. It seems to be always above me, even when I soar into the loftiest regions of spiritual thought. Is it not so with every attribute of God? Can we attain to any idea of his power, his wisdom, his holiness? Our mind has no line with which to measure the Infinite (The Treasury of David).

He is infinite; we are finite. We cannot even begin to figure God out. We have nothing in our experience to compare Him to – indeed, He is incomparable. We can never know all about God.

Some, rightly seeing that we can have no hope of fully understanding such a being, wrongly conclude that we cannot know Him at all. While that may initially sound humble and God-honoring, actually the statement is arrogant and demeaning to God. For an infinitely wise, all-knowing God must be able to communicate aspects of Who He is to those of His creatures who have the capacity to reflect on His character.

This, indeed, is the claim of Scripture: That God reveals Himself to us to some extent in creation itself (Romans 1:19-20; Psalm 19:1-4); He reveals Himself yet more fully through His working with the people of Israel, through prophets, through laws, through ceremonies, and through acts in history (Hebrews 1:1); and He reveals Himself most fully in the person of His Son, God Himself (John 1:1), the “exact imprint of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3). As John Calvin writes (echoing the second century church father Irenaeus),

The Father, who is infinite in himself, becomes finite in the Son because he has accommodated himself to our capacity, that he may not overwhelm our minds with the infinity of his glory (Institutes 2.6.4).

Or as Charles Wesley writes, “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see! Hail the incarnate Deity!”

In trying to understand God, we are similar to a two-year-old trying to understand his parents. The two-year-old cannot possibly comprehend their character and abilities through his reasoning and investigations. Indeed, there is much about his parents that he is completely incapable of grasping. But through the parents’ loving and caring acts, and through their simple, carefully chosen words, they can communicate to him much about themselves – all, in fact, that he needs to know at this point in his life.

Just so with God and us. We surely cannot know all about God; throughout eternity we will rejoice to learn more and more of His infinite goodness. But He acted in history to teach us about Himself (1 Corinthians 10:11); He breathed out the Scriptures so that we might know Him and love Him (2 Timothy 3:16; Matthew 22:36-40); He became incarnate in Jesus, fully God and fully man, so that we might see God’s attributes in the flesh; He died on the cross so that we might be reconciled to Him by grace through faith.

Remember this image: You are the two-year-old. God is above you. You can’t comprehend Him. But you can trust what He tells you. You can see Jesus, revealed in Scripture. You can love Him.

So humble yourself. Adore Him. Bow before Him. Submit to His perfect Word. And rejoice that He has invited you to come into His presence as His adopted two-year-old.

Which Culture is Most Christian?

Which culture is the most Christian?

There is a definite Islamic culture; there are elements of life on the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century that continue to serve as ideals for many Muslims today. There is also a definite Hindu culture. Is there a Christian culture?

Biblically, the answer is no. There is no Christian culture; no culture is the most Christian. Christianity is inherently cross-cultural.

In Acts 15 – the text for our sermons the next two Sunday mornings – the young church must deal with this very question. Paul and Barnabas have been teaching that Gentiles, non-Jews, can come to faith and be united to Christ; they need not be circumcised or follow all the requirements of the Mosaic Law, such as the dietary code. Some had come from the predominantly Jewish church in Jerusalem to Antioch – Paul and Barnabas’ sending church! – and declared their teaching wrong; Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, they argued, and in order to be united to Christ, Gentiles must become Jewish.

Though, as we shall see, more than culture underlies this dispute, culture is one important element. If Christ is the fulfillment of all that Judaism points to – isn’t Christian culture Jewish culture?

Guided by the Holy Spirit, the apostles and elders – and, indeed, the entire church in Jerusalem (Acts 15:22) – declare that this is not the case. We will examine their arguments and explanations in the weeks ahead. But for now, consider some of the implications of this outcome:

1) No one must give up his culture to become a follower of Jesus. Every culture has sinful, clearly unbiblical elements, and these, of course, the new believer must avoid. For example, in the Roman Empire, abortion and infanticide (through abandonment) were common. The early Christians practiced neither and rescued many abandoned infants. Nor would they bow down to worship Caesar or any other so-called god; many were martyred in consequence. In that sense, Christians must be counter cultural. But from these early days, there were many different cultures in the church. In Antioch there were Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, slave and free, African and Asian. They came together united in Christ, not united in culture. As they preached the Gospel, they called all to come to Christ, not to come to Christ and to take on one specific culture.

2) Genuine Christian worship will look, sound, and feel very different across cultures. There are key biblical guidelines for corporate worship. Such worship includes the preaching of the Word (2 Timothy 4:2), the public reading of the Scriptures (1 Timothy 4:13), singing songs, hymns, and spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:19), praying together (1 Timothy 2:1, Colossians 4:2), practicing baptism (Matthew 28:19) and the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:26). But within these guidelines, churches in different cultures will be profoundly different.

3) These cultural differences are for the glory of God. Revelation 7 pictures those from every tribe and tongue and people and language praising God around His throne. These are the saints made perfect, worshiping God eternally – and they are culturally distinct! They retain their cultural differences. They are made one in Christ; they praise God in song; but that song is a glorious, thousand-part harmony, rather than one melody sung in unison. So God works all things together to create for His glory for all eternity one people with thousands of remaining cultural distinctions.

4) The true church welcomes and delights in this diversity of cultures. Our natural tendency is to look down on those who differ from us. We tend to question the motives or sincerity of people who praise God in ways that seem strange to us. But if our chief end is to glorify God, and if God rejoices in the diversity of cultures praising Him, we too will rejoice to see the Gospel lived out and proclaimed in different cultural forms.

5) The church that unites various cultures in one local body glorifies God. Such an assembly shows today, in microcosm, the Revelation 7 unity that we will experience in eternity.

So praise God for the guidance the Holy Spirit gave to the Jerusalem church in Acts 15. Praise God that we are not limited to worshiping Him in Jewish cultural forms. Praise God that He has made us one from many cultures. And praise Him that even at DGCC, we can reflect His glory through uniting people from different cultures in one body. Join us these next two Sundays as we rejoice together in these great truths.

Don’t Be Cowards; Fear!

Should Christians fear? Or should they not fear?

In our passage for last Sunday’s sermon, Paul and Barnabas show great boldness in the face of fearful circumstances. Paul tells the young believers “It is necessary for us to enter the kingdom of God through many tribulations” (Acts 14:22). That is, don’t fear such tribulations; they are the passageway to an eternity with our loving God. Similarly, Jesus says that we will always have such tribulations in the world. “But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Because He is sovereign over all that happens, we can have peace in Him even now, even when we face frightening circumstances. For we know that God is working all things together for good for those who love Him, for those whom He has called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). When nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God, then we need not fear even those who are putting us to death (Romans 8:35-39).

Consider the story of the storm on the Sea of Galilee, told in Mark 4:35-41. While out on the lake, a great windstorm arises – so great that the waves are breaking over the sides of the boat. Though the disciples bail and bail, the water in the boat rises higher and higher. It looks certain to sink in a few minutes. And the wind continues to howl; the waves continue to pound. (more…)