The Beatitudes

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Christians are those who recognize their spiritual bankruptcy before God, their utter lack of goodness, not simply their inability to do good, but that they are completely sinful before him. In recognizing and declaring their lack of true life, their complete lack of good, God gives them the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Christians don’t simply recognize their spiritual bankruptcy before God, it overwhelms them. Their sinfulness and the knowledge of God goodness yet their persistent rebellion against him agonizes them, their inability to submit to God, the complete failure of their lives causes them to deeply mourn for their condition, mourn because of God’s own sorrow, and mourn because of the horrid condition of mankind. But God himself comforts them. Despite the fact that created this mess for themselves, a perfect God intervenes and involves himself in the mess. He comforts them by letting them know he cares, he loves them, and offers Christ to comfort them.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

God’s compassion in Christ and in his willing involvement into man’s mess, floors the Christian. That God would die for man reveals to the Christian that he was far more sinful than he’d ever dared believe, yet at the same time magnifies the great mercy and love of the Father. Both mercy and grace humbles the Christian to the ground. This humility and awe of God’s prepares him to inherit the earth. What Adam and Eve lacked God gives to the Christian, and puts the earth once again under their care.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

The humbled and meek recognize their lack before God but find that they need something positive before him, that in their brokenness, they need to be made right before God. They hunger and thirst to be right before God, to be righteous or holy as God is holy. They cannot rest until they find their righteousness, and God gives them his rest in Christ. Their lack is completely fulfilled in the righteousness of Christ. They are here justified. Even when they recognize further sin in their own lives, that they yet lack righteousness, they know to return back to Christ, who overflows with righteousness, thus being sanctified.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

The Christian’s righteousness was given to them freely. It was an act of mercy that gave them their righteousness, it was not earned. Not merely was the Christian saved from utter spiritual poverty, he’s given the abundant wealth of Christ’s righteousness. Mercy and grace to its fullest. He knows that the mercy he’s received is far greater than any offense against him, and by response forgives any wrong against him. In reciprocating to others the mercy he’s received, God in turn blesses him with even more mercy, which causes the Christian to be all the more merciful.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

The Christian when merciful is single-minded, is pure in heart. God’s mercy, the gospel of Christ overwhelms all of his actions and his thoughts. His standard of love is no longer based off of his own sense of justice, but by the radical justice of God that is overflowing with grace towards even his enemies. The undivided heart is the same as God’s undivided heart, which is a passion for his own glory. The pure in heart see God eye to eye, face to face, because the pure in heart are those who have God’s heart. He reveals to them his plans, his purposes, his joy, because the Christian is in one heart with God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

When the Christian sees God, he sees and knows that God is most glorified by the gospel, by Christ’s work on the cross. The gospel is the good news of God making peace with man, creating a harmonious, bountiful, amazing relationship with him. Christ was the ultimate peacemaker because his life’s work was to reconcile man to God. The Christian who knows God’s heart, and sees him face to face, is also a peacemaker, actively looking to reconcile man to God by proclaiming the God’s reconciling work on the cross. In so doing the Christian exemplifies the life of Christ, and follows in his obedience, and in so doing is living in this world as Christ did, and called a child of God, a co-heir with Christ.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

As the Christian proclaims the reconciling work of Christ, it condemns the world, causing people to persecute them. They are no longer citizens of this world, their value system is completely different, they have become anomalies in the world. The world is no longer worthy of them. To the Christian persecution is joy. 1) It reveals that they are living out their Christian life is God had intended for them to. 2) They get to live in the footsteps of Christ, and share in his sufferings. 3) Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 

beyond me.

I want to drive away somewhere. But I have no idea where I’d end up. I’d most likely end up where I am right now and wondering what it all meant.

Messed up nails. Burnt pots. Trim them off. Rub/scrub them over with half cut limes.

I want to go back and change everything. I can’t understand why I want to do it so badly. I’d gladly give up everything else I’m doing if I can get a chance to go back to fix things to the way they were supposed to be. It’s like… or I often thought of it like a relationship that was going so well but ended up being broken apart against our will and then seeing how poorly everything worked out, and just wanted to go back and make everything better again.

I sincerely believe I can. It would be fairly simple. A lot of hard work for sure but pretty straight forward. It would be good.

But I figure if I’m being too naive. There’s too many things against it. Too many unknown obstacles. Things haven’t really changed, have they? Have they?

So what can I do but pray? To lay down my own wants and desires, give them up, and trust. Listen intently, follow intently, let my wish dream die, and let God’s will be done. His good and perfect will.

As for me. I need to seek. Obey, and take care of the task that I know is before me. Take heart. Take courage. Do not be discouraged. The joy of the Lord is your strength.

 

Having a place for those who’ve repented to return to the church.

 

 

lloyd-jones on j. edwards

Indeed I am tempted, perhaps foolishly, to compare the Puritans to the Alps, Luther and Calvin to the Himalayas, and Jonathan Edwards to Mount Everest! He has always seemed to me to be the man most like the apostle Paul. Of course, Whitefield was a great and might preacher as was Daniel Rowland but so was Edwards. Neither of them had the mind, neither of them had the intellect, neither of them had the grasp of theology that Edwards had; neither of them was the philosopher he was. He stands out, it seems to me, quite on his own amongst men.

‘Jonathan Edwards and the Crucial Importance of Revival’, The Puritans, Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

 

Had a dream that some people had gone through my stuff to find dirt on me, and I caught them in my room. I bascially house arrested them and wouldn’t let them go out. At first it was just like 2-3 people, but then it expanded into like a dozen and I forgot what got me up, but I woke up.

It was difficult wrestling down this one guy who somehow had three arms, trying to get him to not leave with this info against me. And I tried so hard.

As I lay in sofa just trying to make sense of it. It was fairly obvious. That there were issues in my life that I wanted to badly to hide and was scared that people would find out about. But how it’s just becoming too big of an issue for me to really deal with.

And I would usually pray. Reminding myself despite my financial issues, or personal issues, that God is bigger than all of that. I needed to be trained to be weened off of those concerns, or that my God is far greater than those problems, and if he wanted to could immediately resolve them from his vast treasury.

But I’ve been missing something crucial, and it dawned on me, that God loves me. I just had this perception of God, that he loves me but he’d rather discipline me and train me rather than care for me, that’s what real love is. But that’s a part of real love, another part of it is that God wants to help us in our troubles, will go to great lengths to help us, and will help out those who trust in him and come before him as they are, not trusting in themselves, but trusting in a perfectly just and merciful and deeply compassionate God.

So when I think about the problems that I face, I’ll be overwhelmed. I look at my own spiritual life and see how lacking it is. I look at my physical life and see how lacking it is. And recognize that my life is full of lack, full of sin, full of selfishness, and that is simply who I am. But God’s life is full of fullness, full of righteousness, full of love, and that is simply who he is.

And it captivates me that this is my Father, who did not spare himself any cost to save me. With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible. All things are possible through him who gives me strength.

And seriously, the work of Christ is amazing beyond all comprehension of amazement. Glory Glory Glory. Our lives are full of his glory.

 

Personal experience defining spirituality. That I have to experience it in order for it to be true. Subjective reality. Truth outside of ourselves. Outside of our individual selves and outside of our collective selves. Extra nos. Righteousness outside of ourselves. You don’t have to experience your sinfulness for it to be real. As a Christian, you don’t have to experience your righteousness for it to be real. But if we persist in sin, our experience of sinfulness would be excruciatingly real. If we are genuinely righteous by a righteousness apart from ourselves, then experiencing righteousness would be joyfully real. Experience isn’t a precursor to reality, or truth. Truth precedes its experience. Our sinfulness precedes our experience of sinfulness. Even our declared righteousness precedes our experience of righteousness.

 

life vs. life

I sometimes wonder if my best writing is left far behind me. There was a time when my thoughts and feelings were so raw that I just had to let them take shape in words or form.

But these days I don’t write much anymore. My thoughts are still there, but, I don’t think I get the chance to delve deeply in the crevices of my own heart.

So this is an attempt to do that again…

I’m starting to see the value of eternal life and the death that is natural life.

But the life I find myself grappling most is this natural life. I feel like I use so much of my energy trying to resuscitate it over and over again. I’ll put a DNR sign on it and then after second thought, let’s just take it off and hope that there’s till some value left in it. Like a pack rat, I can’t discard it. Like text books from years ago and lecture notes, I just gotta throw that out because even though I spent hours on it, really, I’m not gonna be interested in learning about geography much anymore, and if I do, wikipedia!!

So. Letting life die as I know it. It was good to know you, but you did me no good. Somehow I hoped it would change. But being 30 now makes me realize my life has settled down. I’m on a downward slope and really, things aren’t going to get better. I don’t see change in the horizon.

Scraping old plans, and cutting off old ties. Giving up your life, your dying life wasting life, and taking up the cross. Taking up the life of Christ himself. An eternal life that has overcome death. A life that is already made perfect. A life already complete.

How could this be a real offer? How could one put hope in this? Maybe because beside it, there really is no hope. And the means in which hope is offered through Christ, through the Spirit by the will of God, is, simply spectacular. Simply amazing.

The transformation from complete hopelessness to complete hopefulness is radical and assured and revealed.

To earnestly seek. To earnestly hope.

 

Quote

It is right to feel we should like to know we are forgiven; it is right to feel we should like to be delivered from that sin – all that is perfectly legitimate – but if those things come before desiring to know God, then our whole attitude is very wrong and faulty. Could it be that most of our particular problems arise from the fact that we do not start with this desire to know God and put this before everything else? – MLJ

 

Quotes of the Day

“I plead, in other words, for a revival of the study of theology…Nothing to me is of such significance as the increasing realization that without a body of doctrine, without a fresh study of Christian theology, there can be no true revival in the church. It is not enough to cultivate the devotional life. It is not sufficient to read certain selected portions of Scripture daily, accompanied by the reading of a devotional commentary, though that is good and excellent and we can never do too much of it. But in addition let us return to a systematic study of theology. Let us view the whole landscape. Let us go back to the great profound biblical expositions of the cardinal tenets of faith.”

“The Holy Spirit will honour nothing but the truth that is in Christ Jesus.”

“The man whose doctrine is shaky will be shaky in his whole life.”

“Christianity never puts courage and manliness first. Or, to put it a better way, courage and manliness and strength in the Chrsitian are always to be the outcome of his faith, of his belief…To be ‘in Christ’ is the important thing. It is only if we are ‘in Christ’ that we are called to ‘be strong’, to ‘quit you like men’. Christianity is only interested in courage in the context of setting of the faith.”

“If you ’stand fast in the faith’ you will soon be persecuted. You will be told that you are behind the times, that you are a back number, that your theology is the theology of Adam. You will have men hurling their criticisms at you. You will become a joke in the office; people will laugh at you. You cannot be a Christian in an army barrack-room, or camp, or shop, or office, but that men will cause you to suffer. They will attack you with the arrow of ridicule and sarcasm and scorn. It is not always an easy thing to stand firm. It is a much easier thing to give in and to compromise, to do what others do. ‘Be strong,’ says Paul.”

“The enemy is powerful and strong and mighty. He commands his big battalions. The church is samall and weak; it is not a popular thing to be a Christian. The crowds do not come in our direction and for that very reason every man amongst us counts, and counts tremendously. Therefore, let us be strong. Let us quit ourselves like men.”

“It is a waste of energy to start evangelizing the world before the church herself is right…It is only when we who are Christians, and who claim to be members of the mystical body of Christ, are in a right relationship with one another that we can truly function in relation to the world.”

“The apostle tells us in the thriteenth chapter [of 1 Corinthians] that ‘love thinketh no evil, that it hopeth all things’. Yet how often are good orthodox Christian people, in their desire to be watchful, guilty of becoming critical of the fellow Christians.”

“The biblical message starts on the assumption and supposition that everything else has failed. Then is pronounces the message.”

“Things are not well with the Christian church…For the last hundred years, and especially in this present century, in our folly we have been trying to build and to run the Christian church without God. We have forgotten the prayer meeting, we have forgotton the experience and the fellowship meeting, we have given up discussing the problems of the spiritual life.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Christian in an Age of Terror