Category: Thoughts

Wealth with Wings

The recent financial news in this country brings to mind these Proverbs, “Do not weary yourself to gain wealth, cease from your consideration of it.  When you set your eyes on it, it is gone.  For wealth certainly makes itself wings, like an eagle that flies toward the heavens” (Pr 23:4-5).  Have you ever had a financial planner tell you that your wealth may sprout wings and fly away?

OK, maybe that is covered in the disclaimer about risk.  But seriously, putting our trust in our money not only places an idol in God’s rightful place in our hearts, but it also is labeled as foolish throughout the Proverbs.  While it may not be our conscious motive, many of us plan our finances such that if God goes out of business, we still have some financial security to fall back on.  Our goal should be just the opposite.  We need to plan wisely as demonstrated by the ant example in the Proverbs, but our security should be such that if God goes out of business, we’re through.

One of my favorite games as a kid, especially on long summer days, was the Parker Brothers game of Monopoly.  Do you remember the game?  The goal was to pile up cash through rent from the properties and houses that one accumulated during the game.  It created a real feeling of power while I was winning.  In fact, the feeling was so good that I didn’t want the game to end.  Once the game was clearly in hand, I would give my brother and sister IOUs just to prolong the game.  Why?  Because when the game ended, the cash was place back in the box, the board was folded up, and the feeling of power was gone.

One day God is going to fold up the Monopoly board.  Life in the material world will end.  The cash we’ve piled up will be placed in the box.  It’s useless where we are going.  Did we spend our lives accumulating Monopoly money?  Or did we invest in an eternal bank account that will come with us into the next life?

What do I mean by “come with us into the next life?”  After all, isn’t the idea we can’t take it with us a common fact about death and money.  Yes, we can’t take it with us, but did you know we can send it on ahead?  Jesus said, “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings” (Lk 16:9).  We will talk about how to “send it on ahead” next time.

Theological Systems

I am a big fan of systematic theology.  God’s story of redemption is epic in its sweep and fitting His words and works into that epic is both intellectually satisfying as well as pertinent to how we live.  Proper theology casts a long shadow in our lives, especially as we understand all that came to us through Christ in the new covenant.  But I am not a fan of theological systems.

Our work, as theologians, is to prayerfully investigate the mysteries of God and explain such in an accessible format to our readers.  Accessible does not mean diminishing the grandeur.  It is more like being a bridge.  Just as many pastors are a bridge on Sunday morning taking the Word of God, recorded primarily in Greek, and making it accessible to an English-speaking audience while preserving its original meaning, intent, and nuance.

My concern is that in our zeal for understanding and accessibility, it is easy to cross the line and remove the mystery altogether.  At the risk of alienating half the audience, take the biblical concepts of election, grace, depravity, and atonement, for example.  These concepts are clearly contained in Scripture and referred to and explained in many passages.  But is it possible that the adjectives we add to these terms are not contained in Scripture but only exist to help us fit it all into a neat system that we can get our human minds around?  This isn’t an answer, just a question.

I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer summed up the mystery well in this advent reading.  “No priest, no theologian stood at the manger of Bethlehem.  And yet all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of wonders:  that God became human.  Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable.”

“Without the holy night, there is no theology.  ‘God is revealed in flesh,’ the God-human Jesus Christ – that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve.  How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason!  Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God’s mystery precisely as mystery.”

Celebrate the mystery!

Spiritual Amnesia

Peter concludes his introduction to his second letter by commending the qualities of faith, virtue, knowledge, self control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love as of great value in leading a fruitful Christian life.  He then makes an interesting observation in verse 9 regarding those who lack these qualities.  What does Peter conclude?  Are they not working hard enough?  Do the slackers need more teaching, more education, more knowledge in regard to what God expects in the fruit department?

Peter attributes their lack to spiritual amnesia.  Look with me at II Peter 1:9, “For he who lacks these qualities is blind or shortsighted, having forgotten his purification from his former sins.”  Our number one problem with sin is not the power of the flesh, not the still resident but mortally wounded sin nature, and not our lack of effort.  Our number one problem, the sin that underlies all others, is forgetting the precious and magnificent promises of God regarding all that became new at our new birth, especially our new found freedom from the power of sin in our life.

Forgetfulness in daily life has been an increasing challenge for me, usually attributed to my current stage of life (think theater discounts, junk mail from AARP, and a closer parking space at church).  I don’t like it and have not been adapting well to it.  My young wife has already increased her penchant for lists.  She is the queen of lists.  She has lists of lists.  As for me, I just keep it all in my head, a stubborn attempt to live in the past.  Whenever I forget something, Rhonda gently asks, “Where is your list?”  I tap my temple and reply, “Right in here, Baby, with all the other lists.  Right here in this steel trap brain.”  She sighs, “That’s what I was afraid of.”

I know what she is thinking but is too nice to say it.  “That steel trap has been left out in the rain a few times too often and is starting to rust.  It might also have a loose spring.”  We can laugh about our forgetfulness after failed trips to the grocery or hardware store.  But in the spiritual life, forgetfulness drains us of our spiritual power and energy.

Remembering is so important that Peter returns to this theme further down the page in verse 12.  “Therefore, I shall always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been established in the truth which is present in you.  And I consider it right, as long as I am in this earthly dwelling, to stir you up by way of reminder.” (II Pet 1:12-13)

We cannot be reminded too often that “God’s divine power has granted us everything pertaining to life and godliness.”  May we never forget the promises of God regarding our new birth.  May we always find our spiritual energy in the resurrection power God has bestowed upon us.  May we embrace and live into all that God has promised when He literally “created us anew.”

Faith, Love, and the Watching World

In II Peter chapter 1, the apostle highlights some of the qualities of the fruitful life with the bookends of faith and love.  We wrote about faith last time.  Today, we want to concentrate on love.  Some writers see the list of II Peter 1:5-7 as a progression, starting with faith and continuing step-by-step through virtue, knowledge, self control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love.  In this view, love is the ultimate goal.  Whether this list represents increasing maturity in the Christian life or not, we do know from the rest of the New Testament that love indeed is our highest goal.

Jesus taught it in the two great commandments.  Paul taught it throughout his letters.  In the book of I Corinthians, Paul elevates love as the final answer to division in the church.  He drove home the point in I Corinthians chapter 13 with his eloquent defense of love trumps knowledge, love trumps giftedness, love trumps good works.  John taught it in the great book on love, I John, as the natural outflow of our becoming the literal children of God.

Francis Schaeffer, in his book The Mark of the Christian, calls love, not only the tie that binds but the final apologetic for the church before the watching world.  He built the book around two verses and their context.  “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Jn 13:35) and, “…that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that you sent Me.” (Jn 17:21).  Dr. Schaeffer goes on to conclude, “Love – and the unity it attests to – is the mark Christ gave Christians to wear before the world.  Only with this mark may the world know that Christians are indeed Christians and that Jesus was sent by the Father.”

Finally, coming back to faith and love together, Pastor Dwight Edwards writes, “This combination [of faith and love] is what puts God on display most noticeably before the world – our radical dependency in an unseen God plus our extraordinary concern for other people (especially fellow believers).  Paul calls it ‘faith working through love.’ ” (Revolution Within).

Lacking Nothing

The apostle Peter introduces his second letter in the New Testament with these words of encouragement, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.  For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, in order that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature.” (II Pet 1:2-4).

What does life look like for a “partaker (i.e. sharer) of the divine nature?”  Peter goes on in verses 5 through 7 to list the evident qualities of our spiritual life – faith, virtue, knowledge, self control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love – in a pattern similar to the fruits of the Spirit of Galatians 5:22-23.  Peter’s catalog begins with faith.  Faith is the foundation of our fruitful life.

Faith is believing that “God’s divine power has granted us everything pertaining to life and godliness.”  Faith is believing we are “sharers of the divine nature.”  Faith is believing the “precious and magnificent promises of God.”  Faith is believing that everything God promised to make new at our salvation did in fact happen.  The promise of a new nature, a new identity, a new heart, a new disposition, a new relationship with sin, a new power, a new Spirit inside, a new freedom, and much more has been the theme of this blog for several months.

By faith, we believe that one outcome of the new birth is a fruitful life.  Fruit is the natural result of a healthy tree.  It is not the result of a tree working hard to produce something that does not come naturally.  It is the same in the Christian life.  Spiritual fruit should come naturally to us because we are infused with divine, resurrection power.  We often picture spiritual growth working in opposition to our deepest desires – characterized as dark and evil, but this is not the case.  Our deepest desires now have a God-bent and the “working out” of our Christian life – the “practice” of our Christian life – is watering our God-bent desires, feeding these desires, and allowing them to come to full bloom.

It all starts with faith.  Growth in the Christian life is the result of believing “the precious and magnificent promises of God” (vs 4), not the result of working harder to keep this list or any other.  Do you see the difference?  We will continue to explore the difference as we move forward.