Category Archives: Mercy and Grace

Eight Traits of a Responsible Ministry – A Tweak of Pope Piper’s “Masculine Ministry” by Chaplain Mike

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Shel Boese / Shelby Boese – the Neo-Reformed-Fundamentalists NeRFs (aka Latter Day Border-Line Gnostics: LDGs) [This is my terminology in process] get it sort-of, kind-of right.  Caplain Mike has a great tweak of John Piper’s “Masculine Ministry”.

 

[ I mean it in love, ya know like super-masculine Han’s Solo, being called a nerf-herder…Neo-Reformed-Fundes: NeRFs! Or the LDGs for the really extreme ones that cannot admit the Christian tent includes Arminians &Wesleyans (as Evangelicals), Catholics, Eastern Orthodox – because they have not seen the great reformed light or special revelation of the knowledge of the true “Gospel” like Smith and Moroni – Hence LDGs for the even more holy and hardcore NeRFs. 

Why I LOVE the Christian & MIssionary Alliance – at least on paper – we let the debate rip between these camps and still welcome you – as long as you are willing to center on the work of sharing Jesus as Savior (fully human and divine) for all people.  That means the NeRFs who become LDGs are problematic for the unity of the church around Jesus Only/The Trinity and God’s Mission.

 

 

Theological comedy OK back to work, back to work.

Eight Traits of a Responsible Ministry by Chaplain Mike

1. A masculine ministry believes that it is more fitting that men take the lash of criticism that must come in a public ministry, than to unnecessarily expose women to this assault.

2. A masculine ministry seizes on full-orbed, biblical doctrine with a view to teaching it to the church and pressing it with courage into the lives of the people.

3. A masculine ministry brings out the more rugged aspects of the Christian life and presses them on the conscience of the church with a demeanor that accords with their proportion in Scripture.

4. A masculine ministry takes up heavy and painful realities in the Bible, and puts them forward to those who may not want to hear them.

5. A masculine ministry heralds the truth of Scripture, with urgency and forcefulness and penetrating conviction, to the world and in the regular worship services of the church.

6. A masculine ministry welcomes the challenges and costs of strong, courageous leadership without complaint or self-pity with a view to putting in place principles and structures and plans and people to carry a whole church into joyful fruitfulness.

7. A masculine ministry publicly and privately advocates for the vital and manifold ministries of women in the life and mission of the church.

8. A masculine ministry models for the church the protection, nourishing, and cherishing of a wife and children as part of the high calling of leadership.

• • •

Change a word here and there, and what Piper says makes sense to me.

 

Eight Traits of a Responsible Ministry (Chaplain Mike)

1. A RESPONSIBLE ministry believes that it is more fitting that LEADERS take the lash of criticism that must come in a public ministry, than to unnecessarily expose CHURCH MEMBERS to this assault.

2. A RESPONSIBLE ministry seizes on full-orbed, biblical doctrine with a view to teaching it to the church and pressing it with courage into the lives of the people.

3. A RESPONSIBLE ministry brings out the more rugged aspects of the Christian life and presses them on the conscience of the church with a demeanor that accords with their proportion in Scripture.

4. A RESPONSIBLE ministry takes up heavy and painful realities in the Bible, and puts them forward to those who may not want to hear them.

5. A RESPONSIBLE ministry heralds the truth of Scripture, with urgency and forcefulness and penetrating conviction, to the world and in the regular worship services of the church.

6. A RESPONSIBLE ministry welcomes the challenges and costs of strong, courageous leadership without complaint or self-pity with a view to putting in place principles and structures and plans and people to carry a whole church into joyful fruitfulness.

7. A RESPONSIBLE ministry publicly and privately advocates for the vital and manifold ministries of ALL BELIEVERS in the life and mission of the church.

8. A RESPONSIBLE ministry models for the church the protection, nourishing, and cherishing of ONE ANOTHER as part of the high calling of leadership.

• • •

Folks, in spite of what Dr. Piper and his folks assert, all of this has nothing to do withmale and female distinctions. It has everything to do with responsible love. It has to do with moving toward maturity and living our lives as faithful adults in Christ. Men and women alike.

I know many are concerned about the demographic of young men today that seem to be having a hard time growing up. But if young men are failing to move past adolescence and embrace responsibility, we do not need to challenge them to be more “masculine” or “manly.” We should be admonishing them to grow up, to become adults, to move toward maturity, dutiful living, and the kind of love that lays itself down for others. All believers, male and female, are called to seek this maturity and encourage others in its pursuit. Hierarchy should not enter into the discussion when examining the principles Piper sets forth. And as far as church leadership goes, I don’t see that any of the principles he is advancing involve the special domain of man and “masculinity.” Women church leaders are equally responsible to promote the eight traits he names.

Piper and others who are elevating male/female distinctions in our day not only have an insufficient view of gender but, perhaps even more importantly, an inadequate ecclesiology. They should be encouraging young men (and all of us) to become mature adults and like Christ within a healthy Spirit-filled community in which all are called to submit to one another and honor one another. Instead, in the name of “masculinity,” they single out men and assign qualities to them exclusively that belong to the entire church. This leads to all kinds of adventures in missing the point.

No sir, God did not give Christianity “a masculine feel.”

He gave it the quality of responsible love. For everybody.

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Finding Hope After a Miscarriage

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Shel Boese / Shelby Boese – This was on RELEVANT Magazines FB update today – an article on the pain of miscarriage.  I hope this speaks to anyone who needs to hear this.  Being  a church of a lot of young people (and the other end of the age spectrum too – we have lots of people in 20-30s, starting to grow in the 40-60s (our smallest age group so far), and a large 60-90s group) this is a real issue and not an easy one to talk about. ..

Finding Hope After a Miscarriage

Jesse Harden

I came home to my wife writhing in pain as her body rejected the life that was God’s gift to us for only 8 short weeks. We were not prepared for this. No one in our family has had a miscarriage. Everyone that got pregnant stayed pregnant. Why was this happening?

 

 

The miscarriage was the most violent and painful thing I’ve watched anyone go through. Labor pains are supposed to give way to life, but this pain served no such purpose. There was no “but for the joy set before her” in my wife’s eyes as she went through these contractions. This pain gave birth to death and we knew it. I felt helpless as I held Joanna’s hand and dabbed her forehead with a washcloth and held the bucket for her to puke in when the pain got to be too much.

In the weeks that followed the real pain commenced. The physical pain was brutal, but I was not prepared for the deep spiritual and emotional pain that was to follow. There is an incredibly deep bond that God allows to develop between a woman and her baby in utero. Even in these short weeks, Joanna loved this child and had become attached to this person growing inside of her. Add on top of this our Christian conviction that God had “knit this baby together in his mother’s womb.” How does God knit a life only to allow it to be torn apart? This was a painful question that led to confusion and doubt.

Honestly, the pain was not as sharp for me. To me, the child was abstract – an idea, not a reality. Since it was so early in the pregnancy, Joanna was not showing. She had felt the change, but I had observed nothing. It was not as palpable for me.

This affected our marriage significantly. I tried to be sensitive, understanding and empathetic, but could not summon the emotions that validated my sense of loss like Joanna needed. She wondered why I didn’t cry – if I even cared. She needed someone to cry with her and share her pain and I couldn’t do it. Instead, I tried to give her the answers to her grief. I tried to be her pastor rather than her husband, partner, and friend. I tried to “fix” her, but she needed someone to hold her.

Unfortunately, the church held her no better than her husband. It’s funny how people in the church fear pain in others. We find it awkward and uncomfortable. We don’t know what to say so we either avoid interaction beyond the superficial or we speak without grace, sensitivity or attentiveness to the Spirit. We needed people to tell us that they knew we were hurting without telling us how to heal. We needed people to remind us that we weren’t alone without handing out religious clichés or greeting card anecdotes.

Healing is slow. We could not get pregnant in the months and years following and began pursuing adoption sooner than we had intended. We went to specialists and they couldn’t find anything “wrong.” It’s as if Joanna’s body simply refuses to entertain the prospect of such pain again. This prolongs the intensity of the pain that Joanna is experiencing. As a young couple in the “prime of life” you are surrounded by babies. Babies and pregnant women are everywhere! You can’t escape them! Our siblings have had six healthy babies since our miscarriage. Cousins, friends, teenage girls in our youth group and even Clay Aiken and Elton John are having babies!

Each announcement of a new life is bittersweet. We never begrudge someone the joy of their pregnancy, but the sorrow is in the reminder of our loss and the unfulfilled desire we have to be called “mom” and “dad” and to raise a person to love God, others, soccer and art. There are times when people unthinkingly ask, “When are you guys going to have kids?” as if we have any control over it. Others say, “Aren’t you glad you don’t have to put up with all of this?” Or, “Are you sure you want kids?” referring to their screaming, pooping child. The answer is “Yes! We want to change diapers, clean-up puke and get embarrassed in the grocery store! We have an aching hole in our hearts!”

To be fair, some questions came from people unaware of our struggle. This has led me to be much more sensitive in the questions I ask people concerning family planning or flippant comments regarding the inconvenience of child rearing in front of others.

It’s been about four years since our miscarriage and ensuing struggle with infertility and the adoption process. We’ve learned many lessons through these painful trials. Chances are you know someone struggling with infertility or loss from a miscarriage.  Here are some suggestions to lovingly navigate the waters of their pain:

 

  • Be quick in compassion. Write a note or speak with them in church communicating your thoughts and prayers are with them, avoiding advice or Christian clichés.
  • Persevere in your concern. So often we are good at triage care. We are there for people in the hours, days and weeks following a painful experience, but then forget to persevere, remembering their pain may last months or years afterward. Try to remember significant dates associated with the loss and keep them in mind when others announce new life.
  • Watch your words. Be careful how you talk about children or parenting around childless couples. Be aware of how certain statements or questions may ”hit” someone struggling with infertility.

 
God is not wasting our pain. We continue to experience healing and He is graciously giving us the joy of anticipating the arrival of a son from South Korea whom we have not yet met. Together, Joanna and I will embark on the journey of parenthood carrying always the memory of our loss with the hope of comforting others with the same comfort by which we have been comforted (2 Corinthians 1:3).

Jesse Harden is an associate pastor in Albuquerque, NM. He’s married to Joanna and they have one son, Jaxon, who will hopefully be in their home by the end of the year.

 

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Best review on the Key issues in Rob Bell’s view of hell so far…

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A Hell-Believing Universalist, March 21, 2011
[Shel: Bolding is mine - sorry had the wrong George referenced before 8:59a - great review none-the-less!]

This review is from: Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (Hardcover)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love questions and those who love answers.

Question-lovers focus on the ambiguity and uncertainty of belief. Reality is bigger and more complex than our theories about it. Consequently, we must be humble in the face of mystery, knowing how much we do not know.

Answer-lovers focus on the clarity and certainty of belief. Reality may slip the grasp of theory at the margins, but theory has a firm grip on reality at the center. So, we must act courageously in the world on the basis of what we do know.

Rob Bell loves questions. His critics love answers. This difference between them–a difference that is both temperamental and methodological–illuminates the controversy surrounding Bell’s new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

Bell asks, “Does God get what God wants?”–namely, “all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 2:4). He further asks, “Do we get what we want?” A “yes” answer to the first question makes you a universalist, that is, a person who believes that God both desires the salvation of all people and realizes that desire. A “yes” answer to the second question makes you a proponent of hell, that is, a person who believes that we can be separated from God for eternity.

A “yes” answer to both questions makes you Rob Bell, a hell-believing universalist.

If that description of Bell strikes you as an oxymoron, you are probably an answer-lover who longs for clarity and certainty. To you, belief in universalism and belief in hell form an incoherent set. Either/or but not both/and.

But Bell is a question-lover comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. God will get what God wants. And we will get what we want. Either way, love wins. “If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That’s how love works. It can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.”

Read that quote again. If we want heaven, love wins. If we want hell…love wins there too?

In my opinion, Bell can make that statement only by redefining hell. The Christian tradition–Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant–defines hell as the sentence of eternal punishment rendered by God against the unrighteous. One of the source passages for this definition is Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats. In that passage, Jesus teaches that he himself will separate the righteous and the unrighteous and render judgment. “Then they [the unrighteous] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Bell thinks the tradition has misinterpreted Jesus’ words in verse 46. There, Jesus contrasts two fates: kolasin ai’nion and z”n ai’nion. The standard English translation of these two phrases is “eternal punishment” and “eternal life,” respectively, although the words everlasting and forever occasionally appear instead of eternal. According to Bell, the “word kolazo is a term from horticulture. It refers to the pruning and trimming of the branches of a plant so it can flourish.” And ai’nion describes either “a period of time with a beginning and an end” or “a particular intensity of experience that transcends time” (emphasis in original). According to Bell, then “the phrase [kolasin ai'nion] can mean `a period of pruning’ or `a time of trimming,’ or an intense experience of correction.”

If the tradition defines hell as eternal punishment, then Bell redefines it as temporal or particularly intense pruning. The former is ultimate and retributive. The latter is penultimate and remedial. What Bell says about the interplay of human sin and divine judgment in the Old Testament captures the gist of what he’s saying about hell: “Failure, we see again and again, isn’t final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction.”

There are several problems with reasoning about hell in this way:

First, Bell commits “the root fallacy” when he thinks the root-meaning of kolaz’/kolasin determines its meaning. In the New Testament, kolaz’ and kolasin are translated as “punish” and “punishment” in the four instances where they are used (Acts 4:21, 2 Pet. 2:9; and Matt. 25:46, 1 John 4:18, respectively). The root-meaning in and of itself cannot determine whether that punishment is remedial (which is what Bell intends by “pruning” or “trimming”) or retributive.

Second, the word ai’nion must be translated the same way in both of its instances in Matthew 25:46. If hell is temporal, so is heaven. If hell is an intense experience that transcends time, so is heaven. Obviously, Bell desires to limit the duration of hell, but in doing so, he ends up limiting the duration of heaven at the same time.

Third, the problem of citing the Old Testament interplay between human sin and divine judgment is that this interplay is corporate and historical. In other words, it applies to the nation (Israel) or city (Jerusalem), not every citizen or resident. And it applies to that corporate body’s experience in this age, not necessarily in the age to come.

[SHEL: FYI Neo-refored-fundes do this this ALL THE TIME with election...]
Bell doesn’t draw a sharp distinction between this age and the age to come. He argues–correctly, forcefully, and with great insight–that they overlap in the present age. (He also argues–again, correctly, forcefully, and with great insight–that our eschatology should shape our ethics.) Theologians describe the overlap as inaugurated eschatology. In other words, through his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ inaugurates “the age to come” in the midst of “this age.” In terms of heaven, this means that we can begin to experience “eternal life” right here and right now. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come,” Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “The old has gone, the new is here!” But inaugurated eschatology also applies in terms of hell. Romans 1:18 says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people.” And 2:5 adds, “because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.” According to these verses, right now, we begin to experience either “eternal life” and “new creation” or “wrath” and “judgment.”

The New Testament teaches inaugurated eschatology, but it also teaches consummated eschatology. If the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ inaugurates, his second coming consummates. Consider, again, Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats, which begins this way: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him…” (Matt. 25:31). Or 1 Corinthians 15:51-52: “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed–in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”
Or Revelation 19:11: “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war.” In these passages, and in many others, Christ’s return marks a definitive turning point in the relationship between God and his creatures. In the words of the Nicene Creed, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

For Bell, there does not seem to be a definitive turning point, a crisis moment where destinies are finalized. Hell, especially, is temporal and remedial. How long one spends there depends on how long one resists God’s love. “Hell is our refusal to trust God’s retelling of our story.” Bell draws attention to Revelation 21:25, which says of the New Jerusalem: “On no day will its gates ever be shut.” Then he writes: “That’s a small detail, and its’ important we don’t get too hung up on details and specific images because it’s possible to treat something so literally that it becomes less true in the process. But gates, gates are for keeping people in and keeping people out. If the gates are never shut, then people are free to come and go.” Bell sees this as an image of hope. Those who have chosen hell can choose heaven. Logically, though, the image contains a note of despair, for what stops a person who has chosen heaven from choosing hell? Absent the precipitating event of Christ’s second coming and the final judgment, it seems to me that life as Rob Bell portrays it will always be an ongoing struggle between heaven and hell, with no guarantee of a final resolution.

And if that’s the case, in what sense does love actually win?

 

Shel boese: Amen brother – right on the money!


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Things That Have Been Bothering Me 1.2

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So Im in my  morning groove.  Drop kids off, check the church mail, make sure the building isn’t on fire, do the post-office box runs, mail packages, land at a coffee shop to practice daily office (devos, prayers, devo reading – Radical by David Platt right now)  study (papers, sermons, language), write, and distract myself with RSS and divine appointment conversations (and anyone else who drops in).

MMI blog had this out, given my #1 things that bother me, God just spoke His word again into my spirit.  I believe in a God who is there in the warp and woof of life:

Do you have a limp?

by Dane Gressett

Screen shot 2011-02-24 at 11.01.54 AM

Do you have a limp…from God?  God must often break us deeply to truly use us greatly.

Jacob got his name changed at the climax of the pressures he had been living with.  God forced him to face his character issues.  He carried a limp after that, as a reminder of the Lord’s severe mercies.  But he also carried more of the favor of God.

God was not only birthing a nation through the man, He was making the man a demonstration of the process He uses to make His servants fruitful.  Fruitfulness usually must take place inwardly before God risks doing much with us outwardly.  And fruitfulness, among other things, is a product of brokenness.

I don’t really trust a man who doesn’t have a limp somewhere.  If you haven’t been through some storms, failures, and persecutions, I wonder if anyone really knows what you’re made of?  If there’s not brokenness, there’s very little room for God’s pure power to be understood and demonstrated.

I think this is why Paul said, “For this reason I delight in persecutions, trials, afflictions….For when I am weak then I am strong…” 2 Cor 12.  He understood what I call “the law of acknowledged weakness”.

Paul definitely walked with a limp!

Somebody once said, “Before God can use a man greatly, He must first break him deeply…”  I think it’s true.  Only I would say that we must let God define what being used “greatly” looks like!  If we’re broken by our Lord, we begin to look at things differently and don’t necessarily concur with the world’s definitions of significance and success anymore.

Actually, anything God is in is great! The old hymn says, “little is much if God is in it…”  I don’t say this so that we will put limits on God, but so we can be freed from worldly preconceptions that often hinder us really hearing what God is saying.  Let God be God and everyman a liar.  His opinion alone matters.

Some of the greatest servants of God in the Bible were overlooked or rejected in their own settings.  For every Elijah who is a public figure (unpopular, nonetheless), there are 7,000 humble servants of God who have not bowed the knee to Baal (Rom 11:1-6).

God is pleased to keep most of us in obscurity.  After all, though God went public in His Son, the Father hath no man seen.  He’s happy to be hidden.

But obscurity will one day be reversed.

God in his wisdom keeps many of His choicest servants hidden…until the last day.  That’s when the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

 

 

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Well About the Time I Start To Be Ok With John Piper

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[Shel: I'm reposting this article from patrol.  I disagree with the author on the Biblical debate about hell...orthodox Christians affirm it - but disagree about it's essence.   But most of this is pretty spot on of the critique of the neo-reformed-fundamentalist/neo-calvinist movement's spirit.  FYI bolding or non-link underlining is my way of highlighting what jumps out at me in someone else's writing.]

what do you think?

 

David Sessions 12:37 PM ON FEBRUARY 28, 2011

What the Rob Bell Controversy Says About John Piper

By now you’ve no doubt heard that the Christian corner of the internet blew up over the weekend over Rob Bell’s upcoming book, Love Wins, a galley of which has been resting untouched on my desk for several weeks. If you’re just now tuning in, my friend Sarah Bailey at Christianity Today has the best roundup of what went down in what order. Basically, a post by Justin Taylor, who we’ve criticized before in these pages, announced that Bell is a universalist and started a chain-reaction of high-profile “new Calvinist” pastors (John Piper, Josh Harris) denouncing Bell on Twitter before they’d read the book.

But as much as I find Taylor’s tendency to instantly punish theological diversity obnoxious, I don’t think he’s the most important part of this story. The theology behind him, much of it written by John Piper, is the real story.

I realize Piper would be the first to tell you he’s a sinner and that he’s not perfect. But I can’t help noticing that his reaction to these bubbling web controversies often seems to be arrogance—a rather unfortunate pattern considering how voluminously the man has written and preached on humility, and how dogmatically the people in his denomination believe in self-effacement. (He even went on sabbatical from public ministry last year to examine “pride” in his life, among other things.) Still, the rigid certainty in Piper’s theological interpretations, and the interpretations of his close followers, seems to given him license for bizarre overstatement and snarky dismissal of those who disagree. His first reaction to a rumor on the internet that Rob Bell is a universalist is, “Farewell, Rob Bell.” “Public nudity is a form of God’s judgment,” he wrote in January. “Encouraging it or enjoying it is a form of hate.” Two weeks later, he praised Kevin DeYoung, a younger New Calvinist writer, for denouncing the “inclusivity” in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.“Kevin DeYoung is more reliable than C.S. Lewis,” Piper tweeted. Back in 2009, Piper baldly stated that a tornado that hit a Lutheran church during a vote on admitting gay clergy was a sign from God of his displeasure.

 

If you’ve ever been in a Sovereign Grace church, the denomination Piper leads, you may have seen the manifestation of this absolutism couched in humility. You would likely have noticed humility is mentioned from the pulpit virtually every Sunday, and an palpable air of self-examination hangs over the congregation inside and outside the sanctuary.

I believe this attempt to nourish humility is genuine, but it’s also a farce. Because if you believe in the “authority of Scripture” the way these people do, and the rightness of their own leaders and teachers the way these people do, how can you really be very humble toward people who believe differently? And when this rightness trickles down into a rigid system of how people should live and relate to one another, as I’ve seen it do, how can you even be humble toward your own friends in your own church? Thus the Sovereign Grace obsession with humility often feels empty and absurd, as if people are trying to convince themselves they have something to be humble about when they don’t really believe they do. In the real world, their theology drives the displays we see regularly on the internet: quick denouncement of any thought that diverges from the Way God Interprets the Bible As Revealed to John Piper Et Al. If that’s not fundamentalism, I don’t know what is.

I really have heard it all from these people when it comes to their assurance of the authority of scripture, but they can’t escape the reality that there are many things, including hell, on which the Bible is thoroughly inconclusive. As Jason Boyett explained today, you can’t draw any clear idea about hell from scripture without exegetical gymnastics. And on issues like this, you’d think people as deeply committed to self-examination and humility as Piper and Company ostensibly are would give other Christians some room for error. Especially, especially when those Christians are—like, God help us, all Christians should be—hoping people don’t have to burn in an eternal fire.

 

 

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Losing Books and Grace…She Has A Father

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Some days I blow it as a father.  I lecture when I need to love.  The loss of library books tends to put me into lecture mode.

(FYI these are heated lectures)

My daughter – who is still very sweet of heart and has not totally succumbed to the “mean girl” attitudes that pervades our secular culture – has inherited her father’s penchant for losing things.  We are now on library book 2 that has been lost at the church building.

I don’t understand this.

It makes me upset.  I like libraries – the whole idea of not needing to buy every book one reads.

So it’s an opportunity to love and show the forgiveness of Christ.  AND demonstrate that the loss of book is a loss – but she is more important.

God does this again and again for me.  That in spite of my sin, it’s consequences, He is a God who loves and is ready to absorb that loss on the Cross – BECAUSE the relationship is more important.

Nothing we can do can replace the cross – we are unable to overcome our loss – but the cross lets us live with consequences and also the ever-restored relationship because of His mercy.

I need the cross.

I need to model it in small ways for my daughter.  Yes there are consequences for losing the book: learning better boundaries, broken relationship with the library until the fee is paid…

but she has a father…

and THE FATHER…

who is forming me her father…

Her father will pay the price, which is more money than she is able to understand at this point in life

That’s what the cross is like.

(FYI God could just blow the world into non-existence and start over – He is not BOUND to the creation or the way of the cross – but in His great love he seeks to redeem the misuse of freewill.

I could ignore the library (a sort of non-existence).  But that would not accomplish all that is intended for the relationship between my daughter, myself, and others.  It would undo part of the whole point of books, knowledge, sharing, learning, etc.

hear this again…

She has a father…

She HAS a Father…

Both enter to protect, teach and redeem for the sake of holy love – the sake of relationship.

Do you have The Father?

Are you letting His grace form you in your relationship to others?

+++++++++

Perry Noble tells a similar story:

Do You Love Me More Than 18 Dollars? January 27, 2011

The other night I was putting Charisse (my three year old little girl to bed) and I told her that I love her.  She looked me right in the eyes and told me, “I love you too daddy.”

I then told her, “Charisse…I love you more than you could ever imagine!”

She said, “what does imagine mean?”

So I told her, “basically I love you bigger than you could ever think about or dream.”

Her eyes got really wide and she looked at me with the most serious look I’ve ever seen on her face and then asked me, “do you love me more than 18 dollars?”

STOP–18 dollars, that is HUGE in her world.  Seriously, 18 dollars is about as big as she could imagine…and when I told her that I loved her so much more than 18 dollars she had the biggest smile on her face…it absolutely amazed her that my love for her was greater than something that she thought was of so much value.

While I was walking down the stairs after leaving her room I was laughing at how “cute” that moment was until I felt the Lord move in my heart and show me that me trying to comprehend His love for me is like Charisse trying to comprehend my love for her…my mind literally could never even conceive it!  (See Ephesians 3:17-19)

God loves His children…NOT based on their PERFORMANCE but rather as their POSITION as His child.

And…if you belong to Jesus then God’s love for you is more powerful that the sin that seems to haunt you…

  • God loves you even though you are wrestling through an addiction!
  • God loves you despite the abortion.
  • God loves you even though the divorce was finalized.
  • God loves you even though you can’t get that particular season from your past out of your mind.
  • God loves you even though you rejected His love and sought to be religious to gain His approval.
  • God loves you even though you turned your back on Him and ran as hard as you could.

He loves you because YOU are HIS CHILD (Romans 8:38-39)…and that love He has for us is greater than anything we could imagine or fathom.  When we try to describe His love we wind up saying really silly things like, “God, do you love me more than 18 dollars?”  To which He replies to us that we have NO IDEA!

He gave His SON to pay for our sins…that’s UNBELIEVABLE love!  Because, honestly, if someone told me it would take the life of my daughter to pay for your sins, well, sorry, you would be in hell!  BUT God, IN HIS mercy sent Jesus to absorb His wrath in our place…NOT because we deserved it, but because of His unbelievable love.  (See Romans 5:6-8)

His love causes me to be in awe of Him…how HE could love me not BECAUSE of who I am, but in spite of who I am…and love me more than my greatest sin!

I’m in awe of a God who loves like that!

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