He Was Invaded with the Gospel & Changed Only by the Gospel

In today's world - who would be the most vile person to you personally?  The one who just gets your stomach aching and heart rate jumping? The person who, in your deepest hiding places of your heart - wishes they were even dead. For many it's the person of the opposite political party. The person with an "R" or "D" next to their name is the villain!  Or could it be someone like Jerry Sandusky, who for over a period of years if not decades raped young boys and even created such a sinister plot where he made a home for at risk boys...only to collect his next victim in this "safe place".  Or maybe it's the leader of a country that allows and even participates in slave-trade of young girls.  Innocent young girls who become sex objects for rich and depraved men.  For each of us this list would be different yet the thoughts we have about those people are the same...we're repulsed by them.

I don't know about you, but some of these folks would give me the creeps just being near them.  Imagine that one of your neighbors or even family members as involved in such a "career".  Would you go over to their home at Thanksgiving?  Send them an invitation to your child's birthday party?  Ask them out to a casual dinner with your spouse?

Well in Jesus' day there was such a man....his name was Zacchaeus.  He was a tax collector.  A tax collector was the worst kind of human scum known to man in those days.  He would be thought of like anyone of the folks described above.  But it gets worse.

A tax collector worked for Rome and Rome wanted their tax money at any costs. They didn't care how it was collected just so it was collected.  Think "New Jersey mob" and "The Goodfellaws".  So the tax collector and his "goons" (Roman soldiers) went around and found the money.  The tax collector was a local so he knew all the hiding spots. And the Romans didn't care about the "extra" Zacchaeus collected for himself...just bring the tax to Rome and no questions were asked.  Thus Zacchaeus was a rich man, a very rich man.

Zacchaeus was so hated that according to Jewish law, he wasn't even a human being.  Zacchaeus was a very very rich "non-person" who sold out his countrymen and his family for money.  He was hated and he was never invited to the family reunions...never.

Tax collectors helped raise the taxes so as to finance the brutal repression of God's people by the Romans...the pagan ugly godless Romans!  Obviously, these dogs were beyond the pale, repugnant to all decent, God-fearing religious people.

Oh - there is one more thing we know about Zacchaeus - he was a short man who wasn't even allowed in the front row of the crowds who were there to see Jesus.  They kicked him to the back of the crowd where he was unable to see anything but the backsides of men.  But this scum of humanity wanted to see this Jesus...

Many thanks to JD Greear for his insights into Zacchaeus' life

Luke 19:1-10: He entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. 3 And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. 4 So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. 5 And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. 7 And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” 8 And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” 9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Re-read the text above.  Read it again.  Are you moved to joy? Awe?  Repentance? All of these emotions and more?  Let's break this apart quickly (but keep in mind today's "Zacchaeus'").

• This great sinner was a "seeker" of Jesus (v3).  He heard about Him and wanted more information.  Nothing was going to get in his way either.  Not the fear of the religious crowds or a lack of a view.
• As he sat on the tree, Jesus came to him and called him and Zacchaeus didn't hesitate.  He was called by Jesus (5)!
• Jesus was not repulsed by this man's sins...He embraced Zacchaeus in spite of his sins.  He was NOT cleaned up. 
• They ate together and it ticked off the "religious" folk (v8). Jesus does it again...eats, invites, heals, picks food in the fields...just to demonstrate His grace to the "outsiders".
• Now the next thing is very interesting.  We next read that Zacchaeus was not only going to make good on his debts and payback those from whom he stole but he was giving extra.  But where did that come from?  There is no recording of rules from Jesus or laws or "what you now must do..."
• Finally we see the mission of Jesus and the mission of the church: seek and save the lost.

Zacchaeus was transformed by the grace of Jesus that came to him and not what he went and did. This transformed heart naturally made good on his debts.  He is now giddy and so excited about repaying his debts.  What happened?

All those Jewish laws and rules that he avoided and ran from and hid from were unable to do a thing to his conscience.  They were just more barriers to overcome like many of us do when we see a posted speed-limit sign..."I can go 7 MPH over the limit...".  Luther says this about the pharisee in all of us: "Our Lord God must be a pious man to be able to love rascals. I can't do it & yet I am a rascal myself."

The law made Zacchaeus a man of lawlessness and made others legalists and Pharisees.  Both had no need for Jesus until Jesus called Zacchaeus and gave him something the law couldn't do...grace and love.  And this man full of grace and love named Jesus change him from a tax collector to a man of integrity.  This same grace changed our lives and can change those in our lives whom we despise like the Jews did Zacchaeus.  Lets go seek em out!

Baby Steps, Baby Steps...is the Gospel?

In the hilarious movie, "What About Bob?", the lead character, Bob is a neurotic, crazy man who is afraid of everything...dirt, elevators, boats, and the list goes on and on.  Bob, played by Bill Murray meets an internationally acclaimed psychologist, Dr. Leo Marvin.  Dr. Marvin's advice on confronting his fears is to deal with them one "baby step" at a time.  Fear of elevators...go just to the second floor and then to the third until you're able to go all the way up to the top without falling apart. One of the key lines throughout the movie is "baby steps, baby steps, baby steps" as Bob comes face to face with his many fears.  Bob walks down the streets of the city restating those words, "baby steps" over and over.  Shear will power will get over those fears, try harder and do more is the call of Dr. Leo Marvin! And if that doesn't work we'll tie you to the boat and make you go sailing until you're no longer in fear.  You may be afraid and scared out of your wits but you're "sailing"!  You're performing on the outside but on the inside you're shaking like jello fresh out of the fridge.

So what does this have to do with the Gospel?  Well Bob was told by Dr. Marvin that the way conquer his issues was by "trying harder" and to do one step at a time until those fears are gone.  It sounds like good advice...until we realize the reason for those fears haven't gone away.  Bob will still get those germs on his hands even though he thinks he won't.  The only thing Bob was able to do was to cover those fears with outside performance but inside those fears raged inside him.

And this is what the law does to believers.  We don't believe the Gospel and it's full implications for our lives so we "try hard" to get better and become perfect - we must perform to the demands of  the law at all costs.  On the outside we're masking a wonderful performance of "godliness" but on the inside we know we're not measuring up.  Yet unlike Bob, who exposes his shortcomings, we hide ours so no one can see them.  We can't be seen as falling short.

Also, as Bob fails to perform and can't do what is demanded to take his baby steps he returns to his "law giving" analyst and cries out, "I need I need I need".  In the midst of his failures he returns to his law giver and asks from more rules and more laws.  Sadly Dr. Melvin complies and gives him another "to do list".

The law does demand perfection but can't do a thing to bring us the perfection it demands.  Just like Bob's baby steps we take a step trying to be better and get all excited when we conquer something in our own strength or will power or we become defeated when we fail.  We are either so full of ourselves for our "successes" and then so distraught by "failures".  So like Bob, we call, run to or beg our "Dr. Marvin's" to cure us.  Dr. Marvin then gives Bob another to do list and out goes Bob trying to meet the demands of that list all over again.  The cycle doesn't end until there is an invasion of unconditional love.

JD Greear writes in his book, Gospel - Returning to the Power That Made Christianity Revolutionary, "What religion is unable to do, God does for us in the Gospel" (pg39).  What he is saying is that the law (God's laws and the laws we put on ourselves or others) has no power to do anything but demand.  Whereas the Gospel has all the power because in Christ, those demands were all met in His life, death and resurrection.  Anything outside of Christ falls hopelessly short.

In the end of this movie Bob overcame his fears and Dr. Marvin went crazy.  How? Why?  Dr. Marvin lived by his rule keeping life and fell short.  He wound up not being able to be the person he portrayed himself to be so he lost it. He tried to perfect his TV appearance and show his perfect little family.  Dr. Marvin demanded obedience which if possible, would give freedom.  It never came.

Bob on the other hand overcame his fears by love and the unconditional acceptance by Dr. Marvin's family (his wife and kids)!  He knew who he was and was loved anyway which allowed him to be himself.  He believed in the love he received from the family which changed his behavior!

And this is the Gospel! Because we are accepted and loved unconditionally by God because of Jesus' performance for us, our fears will disappear until that time we forget the Gospel again (Rom 8:14-16) and then we preach it to ourselves again...everyday.

Learning from Linus - take a load off...

This is says it all.  If we don't have the right view or the correct view of the theology of the cross, we will never have peace of mind.  We will never have real peace and never have the questions of "I am good enough?" or "Will I measure up?" answered.  We will compare ourselves against others and see their shortcomings and feel proud and in the next moment we will see someone else "further along" and feel defeated, unworthy and unaccepted. Yet as Linus says. "sound theology has a way of doing that" - giving us peace and rest.

Because I forget the essence of the Gospel like everyone else, I keep hounding and writing and preaching and teaching and counseling from only one perspective: The Gospel!  The Theology of the Gospel can be summed up like this: "It is finished" .  And what we need to get a grip on is this is not a new idea.  Read the words of Peter:

10 Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, 11 inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. 12  It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. (I Peter 1:10-12 ESV)

 
Read those words above again!  The prophets preached about grace for you and for me!  And Peter doesn't end there...the angels "long to look" into the Gospel!  The Gospel is so deep, so rich, so empowering that the angels never stop looking into it's richness and beauty and so I too am longing for it's power.

But I forget and become addicted to "me" and my religion of personal obedience for God's favor.  I am addicted to religion and not to Jesus so I look to me and my works not to Jesus and His performance on my behalf.  It's funny because I know the Gospel but I have trouble living and believing the Gospel. As Tim Keller says: "It is one thing to understand the Gospel but it quite another to experience the Gospel in such a way that it fundamentally change us and becomes the source of our identity and security." - Now that will take a load off our minds and souls!

I am reading a book I highly recommend called "Gospel - Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary" by JD Greear (you can find it here) and he has some wonderful insights into the power of the Gospel and how it is only the Gospel that can take our burdens away and give us true peace.

We need to start by being very honest with ourselves...and we may not like this kind of honesty because it means confessing deep from our hearts desire to be a Pharisee and be a self-savior based on our own performance.  We live by the law pronouncing "God is happy with me because of my performance".

The problem with this is there is always someone else who is performing better and doing more...so it's never enough. "Give more, do more, get a bigger church, preach like him, love like she loves" and the list never ends, the demands never end.  We never get the right theology of the Gospel so we never have true peace, we never believe "It is finished".

Greear puts it this way in his book: "No matter how many rules I kept and how disciplined my life was, I walked around with an ever-present sense of guilt.  In the deepest part of my heart, I knew - knew God was not really pleased with me, because there was always something I could be doing better.  The really good Christians were always doing something that I wasn't."  He then says this very revealing truth in all "God pleasers": "My service for God was fervent, but my passions for Him were cold. I was tired and while I would never admit it, I was starting to hate God."

But God is NOT a taskmaster always standing over you and me!  He is not demanding more for us - how can He? He gave us Jesus...isn't He enough?  Greear writes: "The Gospel is the announcement that God has reconciled us to Himself by sending His Son Jesus..." (p5).  The Gospel is not just fire insurance but power to live every moment of our lives.  Jesus put it this way as the people asked: "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him who He as sent" (John 6:28-29). We ask, "what do I do" and Jesus says "believe" - the work is the WORK OF GOD!  He has set us free!  He then tells us that He is the bread of life...our nourishment is Jesus.  Our source of life is Jesus.  Our daily living depends on Jesus not our works.  Martin Luther says it this way: "Grace involves remission of sins, peace, & happy conscience. Sin is not canceled by lawful living, no person is able to live up to the Law."

We must get this from our heads to our hearts, from our intellect to our life, from our minds to our daily walk and in doing so we will live lives that we never knew we could live.  We will actually love God and love our neighbors like never before! Our identity - who we see in the mirror - will change from "I am a good/bad person due to my efforts" to "I am a child of God because of His efforts for me." Halleluiah!

A Gospel Response to Abraham and Hagar

I was talking with someone in our church the other day and we got to the subject of Abraham and Hagar.  She asked me how to teach this so it wouldn’t be a “moralistic lesson on how to behave”.  It was a great question!  So many times we teach or preach like this: "Now don't be like Abraham and disobey or God will punish you.  Obey and He will be pleased with you."  What we're saying is "your position and relationship with God is dependent on your behavior...be good for goodness sake." We have been taught so much that our behavior dictates God's response to us that we can't help but go there.  Tullian Tchividjian puts it this way in his blog on "One Way Love":

We love the “if/then” proposition: “If” you do this, “then” I will do that; we are inveterate slaves (at worst) or grumpy employees (at best). We militate against the freedom of inheritance and the dependency of sonship. We love living as though “what goes around comes around” conditionality were true. That kind of conditionality makes us feel safe. It’s easy to comprehend. It’s appropriately formulaic. And best of all, it keeps us in control. We get to keep our ledgers and scorecards. The equation: “If I do this, then you are obligated to do that” makes perfect sense to our grace-shy hearts.

Unconditionally, on the other hand, is incomprehensible. We are deeply conditioned against unconditionally because we’ve been told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment always precedes acceptance, that achievement always precedes approval. When we hear, “Of course you don’t deserve it, but I’m giving it to you anyway,” we wonder, “What is this really about? What’s the catch?” Internal bells and alarms start to go off, and we begin saying “wait a minute…this sounds too good to be true.”

You see, everything in our world demands two-way love. Everything is conditional. If I achieve, we reason, only then will I receive everything I long for: love, approval, significance, respect, and so on. Be good. Bring home the bacon. Keep your act together…Then (and only then) will you have what you want. That’s how our world works. But grace isn’t from our world. It’s otherworldly. It’s unconditional. Grace is upside-down, to-do-list wrecking, scandalous and way-too free. It’s one-way love.

So as we talked I reminded her that the story should focus on Jesus first and not our behavior.  The story is not a story of “good behavior = blessings” and “bad behavior = punishment” otherwise we would just provide behavior modification models.  We would teach that God is nothing more than a candy machine…put the right amount in and you get good stuff coming out.

The lesson from Abe and Hagar is that we are all just like Abraham, not trusting or believing God to keep His word and do what He says He will do!  We trust ourselves or others more than God.  We serve or bow down to idols so as to “help God along”.  Now we may not have a "Hagar" in our lives but we have other things in her place:

• How about not believing we are righteous in Christ so we walk around with guilt and condemnation.

• How about not believing He is our joy so we try and manufacture joy with non-stop video games, another vacation, more money and the list goes on and on.

• How about not believing that we are a child of God by faith and so we live as orphans trying to gain more and more of His love when in reality we have all His love…demonstrated on the cross.

You see, we are all just like Abraham, not fully trusting the promises of God and in the finished work of Christ…so we create our “Hagar” idols to “help God along”.  Isn’t this what Abe did…help God along with His declared promise of giving him a family?

Yet in the end despite Abraham’s disobedience and sin he was declared righteous!  Not because Abraham finally obeyed and earned it…but because he put is faith in God and by trusting God, Abraham was “declared righteous”.  

Read Paul’s words in Romans 4 –

3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” 4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. 5 And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness,

Obedience is so important but only the right kind of obedience.  Obedience from faith and from our declared position of being in Christ and of being forgiven.

Knowing His grace = natural reproduction

While I was on vacation last week I spent time reading the Psalms.  In doing so I came to Psalm 51 and just couldn't stop reading it and dwelling on David's words.  He says some amazing things that tells us about God's amazing grace and our natural reaction or response to His grace. I believe that if we miss or diminish any parts of what is in this Psalm we will either do nothing or we will "do" out of guilt or obligation.  Yet when we see the amazing grace of God, like David did, we will respond spontaneously!

So what does David say?  First let's look at the context: Nathan the prophet confronted David with his sin of adultery and murder. David thought he could get away with his sin and he couldn't.  God used Nathan to humble David.  It was now a meeting between David and God...

He knows his sin is so great and his inability to bring anything to the table of redemption, he pleads for God to:

• Give him mercy (v1)
• According to His (God's) steadfast love.  This steadfast love is hesed in the Hebrew.  This is His persistent and unconditional tenderness, kindness, and mercy, a relationship in which He seeks after man with love and mercy.  David knows his only hope is God's pursuit of him.  David was hiding and justifying his sin and David failed...as we have (v1).  God chases His people!
• His only hope for redemption is not his own self-righteous actions but God "Wash[ing] me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!"(v2).  David needed to be washed, cleaned, sin removed from his inner being and the only way as for God to do it. David can't do a thing but confess and ask for a new heart (v10).
• He knows he sinned and his sin is against the One and Only Lord of Lords and Kings of Kings.  His sin is great because he sinned greatly but even more so he sinned against God alone.  And he sinned against Him since his conception!!  He knew he was an utterly depraved human being.  David...David...the man after God's own heart...this David! He acknowledges his sin.  Not just a petty little "I sinned" or "I messed up" trivial confession but a deep heartfelt confession digging deep into his soul (vv3 - 10).
• Note a very important verse here: "Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice" (v8).  David wants/needs/desires/craves/ the joy of God and it was God who "broke his bones" which brought David to this point!  God, in His hesed love, chases us, loves us with a one-sided love and redeems us!  God does it all!

Then with redemption, forgiveness, the joy of the Lord being restored to David and you and me, note what happens next:

    Then I will teach transgressors your ways,

        and sinners will return to you.

    Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God,

        O God of my salvation,

        and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.

    O Lord, open my lips,

        and my mouth will declare your praise.

(Psalm 51:13-15 ESV)

Two amazing, natural things happen when we fully understand our sin and His mercy...

1.     We will share this amazing love with others...naturally.  We won't hesitate or be afraid.  Why? Because we now know it's all God's doing and not ours!

2.     We will worship!  This is NOT just a Sunday "thing" but a 24/7 reality because of His great salvation.
 

What I learned in reading this over and over is the reason churches don't grow and friends don't come to Christ is not because of anything other than our lack of understanding our great sin and His greater amazing grace.  When we really really get this the church will explode and multiply.  Until then we will sit and live for self rather than for something bigger and better and greater than ourselves...the purpose of God - to make disciples.