Happy Father's Day

This day is a day in which all the sons and daughters strive to honor their fathers or, at the very least, to acknowledge them.  To be sure, not every child has a positive evaluation of their fathers.  Some fathers have been bad fathers.  It is thus important that today marks a day not only for honoring our earthly fathers, if applicable, but even more so that we would exalt our Heavenly Father.

So, when you think of this Father's Day, my prayer is that you would think about God and what He has done.  Consider your Heavenly Father today and give Him praise too!

John 14:9–Know The Father Through Christ

John 14:9–"Whoever has seen me has seen the Father."

Even Jesus' disciples struggled with some of what He was trying to teach them.  Most of them did not understand the real gravity and depth of who Christ was until after His ascension when the Holy Spirit finally came upon them.  This, I believe, is one of those instances in which the block-headed disciples had trouble grasping the reality of who Jesus was.

But don't some of us still struggle with the same things?  Sure, we may recognize Jesus' distinctiveness as the Son of God but do we truly recognize Him in His oneness with the Father?

This is precisely the point that Jesus is trying to make with this statement.  He wants us to know without ambiguity that to know Him is to know God, to see the Son is to see the Father, and to love Christ is to love God.  This is the essence of Jesus: God.  This is the essence of the Son: the Father.  It is for this reason that Jesus can say that whoever has seen Him as seen the Father.

1 John 2:15–Do Not Love the World

1 John 2:15–"Do not love the world or the things in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him."

For John, and by extension the Holy Spirit, there is a sharp distinction, a distinct dichotomy between that which is of God and that which is not.  In fact, it could be said that throughout the scope of Scripture this is a major theme that continues to develop as the contrast becomes both more clear while also being more subtle and nuanced.  Because of this, it is of vital importance that we as Christians keep our focus fixed on Christ and not be swayed to the left or the right.

There is a story of Secret Service Agents who are trained in recognizing counterfeit bills.  Instead of spending their time learning the intricacies of the false bills.  No, they become so well acquainted with the real thing that they can instantly tell whether a bill is true or counterfeit.  Similarly, Christians need to become so well familiar with the things of God that there would never be a question about whether something was of God or not; we would just know.

This is our call as Christians: that we would know God so intimately in the depth of our beings so that we could always choose Him over any counterfeit impostor the world could offer!

A Few Thanks

Not a whole lot to say today other than thank You, Lord.

Thank You for air to fill my lungs with breath.  Thank You for food to fill my belly and fuel my body.  Thank You for health to live and to serve You.  Thank You for my amazing and gorgeous wife whose beauty and countenance astounds me daily.  Thank You for my beloved family whom I am blessed to love as well as like.  Thank You for my friends, who love me in spite of my innumerable faults.  Thank You for resources like car, books, glasses, and the like, so that I may worship and serve You with mobility anywhere.  Thank You, Lord, for my education.  Thank You for my body and may it be used only to bring You glory.  Thank You for my mind and may it be renewed everyday so as to discern Your will and think Your thoughts after You.

And thank You, Lord, for Your Son, whose precious blood was spilt upon that wretched but glorious cross for my sin and the sin of the whole world that all mankind may enter into a restored  relationship with You through faith in Christ Jesus.

Thank You.

Praying to the Father

Matthew 7:9-14
"Pray then like this:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name.
Your Kingdom come, Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you,
but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."

This sequence comes to us in the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew 5-7.  It is Jesus' direct teaching on prayer.  As we start another week, I have a simple request for devotional homework.  Every day this week, as we wake up in the morning, let us commit to praying this prayer as the start to our day.  In this way we will be, in the most literal sense, devoting ourselves to God as He has commanded.

Happy Father's Day

Father's Day is upon us.  The day of the year when children honor their fathers.  We spend this day giving thanks to our fathers for fathering.  While this is, without question, a good and important part of being a child, I submit that this Father's Day be spent, at least in part, in self-examination and personal assessment, asking ourselves: am I a good child?

Throughout the Holy Scripture, the value of a wise child is heralded as the joy of the father.  Therefore, the greatest gift a son or daughter could give would be the gift of devotion.  Devotion not only to our temporal fathers but also, and more so, to our heavenly Father. 

I can speak from personal experience here: the greatest gift that I have ever given my dad was when I gave myself to Christ.  Not only that, but in giving myself fully to Christ, my father and I have become closer than we ever have been.  And I praise God for that distinct joy.  It is as if in giving myself to Christ, God was giving my father to me and me to him.

While there is so much more to say, I would leave it at this: love your father today by loving God.  It is, after all, the only eternal gift we can give.  Everything else perishes as ash, but joining with your father in worshiping the Father is, well, it is everything.  Thank you, dad, for teaching me this.

Exodus 20:12: Honor Your Father & Mother

Exodus 20:12: "Honor your father and mother, so that you may live long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you."

It is said that this is "the first commandment with a promise." (Ephesians 6:2-3).  And it is a good and right commandment for us to follow.  But to honor your parents, I mean, what if your parents are, shall we say, unhonorable?  Perhaps this is when this commandment is truly put to the test.  For it is one thing to give honor to those who by their virtue and goodness warrant honor, while it is an altogether other thing to give honor to those who are despicable or disgraceful.

But is this not the very value and depth of this commandment? To honor your father and mother inspite of their status or stature.  Then we will truly be honoring others as God has honored us, that inspite of how despicable we are He has so shown us honor as to die on our behalf as a propitiation for our sins.  Thus when we honor our father and mother, we are imaging God as He has made us in His image.  Let us then take heed to commit to honor our fathers and mothers not just because it is right to do so but also in order that we may bear witness of God and His glory.

Asking Our Father to Help

Peter, a spry four-year-old boy was fooling around in his back yard.  His best friend lived next door and was in his backyard too, they were playing through the fence that separated the two yards.  In both of the little boys' yards, there was a huge rock.  Perhaps a boulder would be a better distinction to do the stone its justice.

Both boys were trying with all their might to move their respective boulders.  Peter could not make his budge.  His friend was equally unsuccessful with his stone, and frustrations were growing by the moment for each of the young boys.  Peter tried pushing, pulling, and prying to no avail.  He could hear his best friend struggling equally through the fence.

Peter could hear as his friend threw up his hands and exclaimed, "I give up!  I'm getting my dad to help me!"  His friend ran inside his house.  The next thing Peter heard was his friend, with dad in tow, coming out to the rock.  Peter peered through the gaps in the fence to see his friend's father walk over to the stone and, with no effort, lifted the stone over his shoulder and brought it to the outskirts of the yard and tossed it out of the yard and into the woods.

His friend was so excited and relieved, Peter could hear him shouting with glee.  This only strengthened Peter's resolve to move the stone himself.  He tried even harder than before to move the stone, still making no impact.  He could hear his friend go back inside as the sun began to set, but he was still no closer to moving the boulder.  He began to get very angry and started to cry out of his dejection.  Peter could easily have asked his able and willing father to help too, but he was determined to do it himself, without any help.  As a result, the boulder remained unmoved as Peter cried himself to sleep.

Aren't we just like Peter trying to move the immovable boulder without any help?  Life is full of stones for us to attempt to push around.  And, though we could easily ask our Heavenly Father for help, we turn back to the boulders like prideful and compulsive toddlers, just beating our heads against the rocks.

The boulders are there, they will always be there in our way.  How we handle them is the important thing.  We can either trudge against them like Peter, or handle them like his friend and call on the power and willingness of our Father in Heaven.  These are the two choices for dealing with trouble and challenges in life.  Let us then choose to rely on God at all times for all things because in doing so we are doing what He asks as well as what He wants!

The Good News of the Gospel

An emotionally-spent struggles to sleep.  For the past two years her son, a marine, has been deployed overseas.  Everyday the mother watches the reports, praying that she will not hear her son's name listed among those soldiers who had lost their lives in battle.  She is strained and worn from worry, having been for several months since her son's last correspondence.

Early one morning, before the sun dawns its brightness over the horizon, the mother hears rustling in the kitchen.  She gets herself dressed and walks down the stairs with reservation.   When she gets to the doorway of the kitchen, tears begin to wrench from her eyes as she is startled to see her son making her breakfast.  He had returned stateside days earlier and wanted to surprise her with good news.

Good News, that news which is a salve to our hearts and an encouragement to our lives.  The Word of God speaks of the greatest news to ever be received, which is the Gospel of Jesus, the story of sweet salvation.  The Gospel, the good news of Jesus, is the story of God's grace, the redemption from sin, death being conquered, and the reception of life eternal through the torn flesh and shed blood of God's Son, Christ Jesus.

Although the whole of Scripture speaks to the Good News of Christ Jesus, perhaps the most concise verse is the oft-quoted John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but shall have eternal life." The richness of this well-known passage is its theological density and literary precision.  John, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is indicating that at the heart of the Gospel of Christ is nothing less than God's very love for us!

Moreover, the Gospel, the Good News of salvation brought about by God through Jesus, is story that took centuries to write.  The Law and the Prophets (the Old Testament) prophesy of it (Rom 1:2-3; Heb. 1:1-4).  Profoundly, the Gospel was a centuries-long preparation of God for the redemption of humanity by the work of His Son, Christ Jesus.  This is certainly Good News.  Let us not eschew our passion for this news but let us, like the mother in the above story, weep tears of joy at the joyfulness of the Good News of Christ Jesus!

Christ Forsaken

Consider the scene: a son, having been ever-obedient to his father and in the most intimate of relationships with him, is asked by his father to give up his very life.  Moreover, the father tells his son that in giving up his life for a specific taks of his father's he will be scorned by man, be beaten, and murdered in a horrific and painful death.  Add to this, then, that in the moment of sacrifice the father tells his son that the son will become totally separated from his father for that moment in time as a result of the task the father has set for him.

This is the radical nature of Christ.  Having been in perfect divine-community with the Father for all eternity passed, He was disavowed from His Father at the moment of His greatest passion on the cross.  Jesus' physical suffering paled in comparison to His spiritual agony at being separated from His Holy Father for the first and only time in all of eternity.  As Jesus cried out in utter anguish, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?"

The moment cannot be overstated for the profound tragedy of what happened: Jesus, the very radiance of the glory of God the Father, was sacrificed upon the cross as the sin of mankind was concentrated in His body and atoned for in His death.  And, as He breathed His last breath, He was separated from the Father.

In truth, because the Holy Lord God cannot be in the presence of sin, when Jesus took on the whole weight on mankind's sin focused in His flesh, God had to turn away from His own Son in judgment.  This is the apex of love, which God has lavished upon us.  Having punished Jesus for the sin that was so rightfully due each of us, God made a way for our sin to be paid for and for us to enter into His divine presence.  The truest love of all was then God denying Himself in punishing His Son so as to glorify Himself at Christ's exaltation (resurrection).

Now, upon confession and belief in the work of Christ Jesus, we can take part in the wonderful love of God through His Son because Jesus took the sin of all mankind in our stay.  Let us then praise God for the perfect sacrifice He has made in destroying His Son!

Praise God Who is Near

During the so-called Age of Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, a great many thinkers and philosophers began to exalt the limits and capacities of human, especially reason and empiricism.  As reason and the perfectibility of man were heralded, a new stream of pseudo-Christianity arose that had a huge affect on how the world, particularly the leaders of a certain fledgling North American nation, thought about God.  This ideal has been called Deism and while their are very few who would still call themselves Deists, the philosophies of this heresy are still in play today.

Deism, very simply, is the idea that God the Father created creation and then left it alone.  A common word-picture used to describe Deism is to think that God wound the clock of creation and then closed it within a glass case ne'er to be touched or interrupted or tinkered with.  In its essence, Deism would say that God is transcendent over creation in that He is the creator but He is not imminent in that He has never and will never become involved with creation.  It can quickly be seen that this type of spiritual philosophy is still widespread today in the vast numbers of people who think of God as some far away being who is either too busy or too disinterested to become involved in our petty human affairs.

To be sure, this is blatantly false and grossly heretical.  For starters, Christ, the Son of God sent by the Father God to atone for the sin of mankind, is clear evidence of God's intimate involvement with and in the world.  Moreover, God is immensely near.  In fact, the Bible is direct and unified in expressing how ever-present God always is, particularly to those who call on Him and the brokenhearted (Deut. 31:6; Psa. 16:8, 34:18, 46:1, 145:18).  This should always be on our minds and be the reliable source of our constant comfort, security, and hope.  For God is always near.  His omnipresence deems that He is always everywhere.  Wherever we are, there He is.  This should be more than comforting, it should be overwhelming.  To consider that the Holy Lord, who is infinite and without need, is here with us for us should rock us with love to our very cores.  Let us praise the Lord for who He is and for being near us to love us!  Praise God!

The Judgement of Christ

Nobody ever wants to talk about judgement.  The whole concept makes people uncomfortable and fearful, rightly so.  But it cannot be simply ignored because of our fraught for judgement, to come at the end of the age, is a real future that will come for all of creation.  Judgement, plainly, is that moment at the end of history when God will finally and conclusively mete out His divine justice, holding every person accountable for choices made.

The common evangelical misconception is that believers will not face judgement.  To be frank, this is dangerous thinking and blatantly un-Scriptural (Matt. 13:39, 49, 25:32; Rom. 14:10; 2 Cor. 5:10).  The harsh truth is that in the end at Jesus' second coming, the Parousia,  everyone will be held accountable for his/her deeds.  This holds true for Christians as much as it does for non-Christians.  There are two points to be made in this regard:

First off, Christians need not fear judgement for we have an advocate who is seated at the right hand of the throne of God and intercedes on our behalf (Rom. 8:27; Heb. 7:25; 1 John 2:1).  This is a comforting reality.  It is true that Christ Jesus, because of His propitiative work on the cross, has become our true intercessor, having taken in His flesh the judgement due all mankind because of sin.

Thus the judgement every sinner deserves has been paid in full, that at the end of the age when the Father looks upon us in His holiness, Christ will He see standing in our place.  In this sense, judgement for Christians depend on Christ's salvific work and we will be judged righteous not because of any righteousness we have within ourselves, but because of Christ's imputed righteousness by faith.

The secondary sense of judgement is solely a Christian ordeal, and will not befall non-Christians.  Christians will be held accountable for how we live, for whether we persevere in faithfulness and to the measure with which we remain steadfast and secure in our faith through suffering and trial will we be judged (2 Cor. 5:10).  This should not be overlooked: we will be judged for how well and how thoroughly we've received and transferred the gift(s) that God has given us through His Son.

We should take this charge with the sobriety and seriousness that it deserves, acknowledging that how we live our post-conversion lives matter and will be weighed for its worth.  In this sense of judgement, Christians depend on Christ's sanctifying work to compel us to remain steadfast to will and to do for His glory.  Ultimately, God is good and worthy to be praised.  This holds true especially in His final and conclusive hour, when all creation will be brought to their knees before His glory.  Therefore, let us praise Him for His awesome and perfect judgement, and that we will be judged perfectly.  Let us also take heart that we will either be judged as ourselves or as Christ living within us.  Let us pursue the latter!