Worth Getting Choked Up Over

I'm not a very emotional guy.  Maybe that's redundant, but I don't cry easily.  I can only think of one thing that has brought me to tears, or at least getting choked up, repeatedly in the past and which continues to do so from time to time.  And that thing is the Gospel.  Listening to a sermon or a song or a hymn full of the truth of God's grace does it often.  Or studying or teaching a passage that hits me just so.  So it was that on Sunday I found myself getting choked up along with Rocky, and I didn't even know what he was planning on reading.  So I asked Rocky if he could send it to me so we could still share it with all of you.  It's from a sermon preached by John Piper a week before Christmas in 1983:

The reason God's covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David ought to increase the joy of our faith is that in all of them the main point is that God exerts all his omnipotence and all his omniscience to do good to his people, and we are that people if we follow Christ in the obedience of faith. The most practical truths any Christian can know are that God is all-powerful, all-wise, and all for you. Nothing will have a more important practical impact on the way you use your money, spend your leisure, pursue your vocation, rear children, deal with conflict, or handle anxiety. Heartfelt confidence that the sovereign God is working everything together for your good out of sheer grace affects every area of your life.


The deep emotional assurance that, even though you are a sinner, God's attention is focused on you with omnipotent mercy is the day-to-day power to give you deep peace even though you can't go home for Christmas, genuine joy even though you can't afford to buy her that special gift, and loving warmth even though you don't hear from the friend you counted on. When you rest in the fact that God's job description includes the responsibility of seeing that everything in your life turns out for your good, then your heart will not yield to covetousness or stealing or returning ridicule for ridicule; and you won't hold back from telling your colleagues this week what Christmas really means to you.


The reason we study the covenants is because in them we see the biblical proof that God's job description does indeed include the responsibility to withhold no good thing from those who walk uprightly, and to work for those who wait for him, and to turn every strep throat and stripped clutch and stinging put-down for our eternal good. That's what I would offer as the definition of God's covenants: when God makes a covenant he reveals his own job description and signs it. In almost every case he comes to the covenant partner, lays his job description out and says, "This is how I will work for you with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my strength if you will love me as I am, cleave to me, and trust me to keep my word."

You can read or listen to the full sermon here.

Also during his lesson, Rocky briefly touched on something that reminded me of something I had once heard from Piper.  Rocky said something about how a truly benevolent dictatorship would be the best form of government, as long as we could find the right king.  Well, by God's grace, we have just that king - King Jesus.  Which reminded me of the following, which comes from another Christmas sermon from John Piper, this one on Christmas Day, 2005:

Let’s start with the controversial fact that the person who came of this in-breaking of God is a king. Luke 1:32b-33 says, “The Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Three words tell us that this person will be a king: “Throne”—“The Lord will give to him the throne of his father David; “Reign”—“And he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever;” “Kingdom”—“And of his kingdom there will be no end.”




What makes this controversial is that we believe in democracy, not kingdoms. Saudi Arabia is not an attractive system to us. Democracy is what the world is moving toward. It’s what we are fighting for in Iraq. Rule by a king was a more primitive form of government, wasn’t it? Democracies are more advanced, more developed, more suitable for the modern world. This is where history is going—democracy, not kingdom.




Let me respond to this very soberly and very simply: the only legitimate reason that kingship is not attractive to us is because in this age and this world the only kings available are finite and sinful. Listen to C. S. Lewis describe why he believes in democracy:

A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. . . . The real reason for democracy is . . . Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters. [from C. S. Lewis, “Equality,” in Present Concerns: Essays by C. S. Lewis, qtd. in Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root, eds., The Quotable C. S. Lewis (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1989), pp. 152-153.]

If there could be a king who is not limited in his wisdom and power and goodness and love for his subjects, then monarchy would be the best of all governments. If such a ruler could ever rise in the world—with no weakness, no folly, no sin—then no wise and humble person would ever want democracy again.




The question is not whether God broke into the universe as a king. He did. The question is: What kind of king is he? What difference would his kingship make for you?

Read, listen to, or watch the full sermon here.

Ecclesiastes

I really enjoy doing a full series on a single book of the Bible.  It's good to see passages in the broader context of the book, and then to see how they fit into the even broader context of the Bible.  As Mike pointed out on Sunday, the Bible is really one big story - God's story.

As we do studies like this, one thing I find helpful is to look at resources that help summarize or outline the main points and flow of the book.  One way of doing this is by looking at the introductory notes in a study Bible.  Another way that I've come across in the past couple of years is a series of overview sermons preached by Mark Dever at Capitol Hill Baptist Church.  I was able to listen to his message on Ecclesiastes, Wisdom for the Successful, before we started studying Ecclesiastes, and I listened to it again today, after finishing our study.

I found his concluding comments to be quite helpful when left with the mire of meaninglessness that the Teacher points out throughout Ecclesiastes.  He begins by looking back at the phrase we've seen so often in the book - "under the sun":

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It occurs twenty-eight times in this short book, and it refers to life as viewed entirely from the perspective of this earth, a life considered apart from God.  Such a truncated and circumscribed life, of course, is meaningless. "All come from dust, and to dust all return" (3:20). 

Friend, can you see how the Teacher's honesty about sin, the Fall, and its consequences helps us understand why the world is like it is, and how we should respond to it?  Hear him!  This world is a bad place for your final investment!  It was not made for that!  As long as you keep trying to cobble together meaning from the scraps of this world, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes will pursue you and point out the paltry and passing, flimsy and fleeting nature of your materials.  There is more to life than what we find under the sun, and God has not made us to be satisfied with this world alone.  As the Teacher says, God has "set eternity" in our hearts (3:11).  Yes, our lives are lived out under the sun, but our hearts' desires stretch infinitely beyond the horizon.  Eternity goes beyond the sphere of what is under the sun. 

Throughout the book we read of him who dwells in the heavens, above and beyond the sun.  The book is not as faithless as it is sometimes made out to be.  In the last few verses, we read, "Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear god and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.  For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil" (12:13-14). 

Some people feel that these last verses of the book spoil it.  The real message is stark, but it's honest, brave, and commendable, perhaps even necessary to survive in the world.  Maybe these last verses were just tacked on, they've thought. 

But I don't think so.  These verses bring us to the ultimate message of this book: only with God do we have a clear and true perspective that gives meaning to life.  That is the perspective we must have. 

For life to have meaning, we need what lies beyond it.  We need judgment (cf. 8:10-13; 12:14); and we need hope.  It is because God the Author will finally evaluate what we do that life has meaning.  In the same way that a book cannot read itself, you and I cannot give meaning to our own lives.  We were created by someone bigger than us, for his purposes and for his ends.  Only from him can we learn meaning and truth. 

When we view our lives from his perspective, what do we see?  What do we see when we turn away from our self-centered, beneath-the-sun perspectives and adopt the Teacher's own God-centered perspective?  We see, first, our rebellion against God.  This becomes evident as soon as we stop measuring "success," "fair," "good," and "valuable" from our own vantage point and begin using God's standards.  Second, we see the promise of judgment that our rebellion requires.  But third, we learn in the Scriptures, marvelously, that God is not only holy, he's loving; and he has given his Son to die on the cross and take upon himself God's judgment for the rebellion of all those who will ever repent of their sins and believe in him! 

CONCLUSION 

So is futility final?  No.  Ecclesiastes was never meant to be a substitute for the whole Bible.  As we have seen, some of these cynical sayings, taken by themselves, can be confusing and even appear false.  To know the truth of God, we need the full revelation of God himself that he gives us in the whole Bible.
So, I ask again, is futility final?  Outside of the answer that is found in Christ, there is no final answer to the futility of life.  Only God's revelation of himself in Jesus Christ assures us that there is something beyond the sun and beyond the grave.  In that sense, the good news that we as Christians have to share is the key to getting "beyond the sun."  Christ came to live, die, and rise again in order to bring us forgiveness of sins and a restored relationship with God.  This good news is the key to getting beyond and over the sun and to gaining the life full of the meaning and purpose that God intended for us.  The afterlife is not an old Christian dogma that we can simply push aside.  The afterlife, says the book of Ecclesiastes, is essential to this life and to understanding the truth of who God made us to be.  And only through Jesus Christ do we see the death of death and the birth of a new life that will endure forever. 

"Therefore is anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Cor. 5:17). 

"Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain" (1 Cor. 15:58b). 

We will find meaning only when meaning extends beyond this life and world.  Only eternity with God makes a life "successful" and "worth living."  And we will find such meaning only in Christ!

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You can download the sermon here or read it as a part of Dever's book The Message of the Old Testament: Promises Made.

National Adoption Month

I was blessed this morning to be able to share a bit of my heart for adoption and spend some time as a class praying.  While listening to some Christmas music this afternoon as we were putting up our Christmas tree, I was reminded of the following song and wanted to share it on the heels of our time thinking about adoption this morning: