Seth Godin on “YES”

On behalf of yes by Seth Godin

Yes, it’s okay to ship your work.

Yes, you’re capable of making a difference.

Yes, it’s important.

Yes, you can ignore that critic.

Yes, your bravery is worth it.

Yes, we believe in you.

Yes, you can do even better.

Yes.

Yes is an opportunity and yes is an obligation. The closer we get to people who are confronting the resistance on their way to making a ruckus, the more they let us in, the greater our obligation is to focus on the yes.

There will always be a surplus of people eager to criticize, nitpick or recommend caution. Your job, at least right now, is to reinforce the power of the yes.

The essence of the Christian salvation is to say that He is good enough and that I am in Him!

Last Sunday at Refuge Church I shared a powerful quote from Martin Lloyd-Jones.  I re-discovered it in Tim Keller’s Center Church, but have often benefited from Lloyd-Jones’ Spiritual Depression in other times.

The context of the quote is that The Doctor is asking someone if they are ready to become a Christian and is met with the response, “I’m not good enough.”

I’ve found that answer in my own heart, and in the hearts of believers and unbelievers … and I find The Doctor’s response helpful in every condition of heart:

At once I know that … they are still thinking in terms of themselves; their idea still is that they have to make themselves good enough to be a Christian … It sounds very modest but it is the lie of the devil, it is a denial of the faith … you will never be good enough; nobody has ever been good enough. The essence of the Christian salvation is to say that He is good enough and that I am in Him! (Spiritual Depression, p. 34)

Paradoxes

Prayer of Confession – Paradoxes

O Changeless God,
Under the conviction of the Spirit I learn that
The more I do, the worse I am,
The more I know, the less I know,
The more holiness I have, the mores sinful I am,
The more I love, the more there is to love.
O how wretched I am!

O Lord,
I have a wild heart
And cannot stand before you;
I am like a bird before a man.
How little I love your truth and ways!
I neglect prayer,
By thinking I have prayed enough and earnestly,
By knowing you have saved my soul.
Of all hypocrites, prevent me from being a Christian hypocrite,
Who sins more safely because grace is free and easy
Treating forgiveness like the morning after pill
Who thinks that God cannot throw me into hell, because I go to church

Who loves Biblical preaching, churches, Christians, but lives

Unholily.
My mind is a bucket without a bottom,
With no spiritual understanding,
No desire to submit to God and others
Ever learning but never reaching the truth,
Always at the gospel-well but never holding water.
My conscience is without shame or guilt,
With nothing to repent of.
I lack willpower and constantly settle for quick fixes and fad diets
My heart is without love, and full of leaks.
My memory has no retention,
So I forget so easily the lessons learned,
And your truths slip away.
Give me a broken heart that is constantly being filled with your Spirit,

Overflowing love to everyone.

Adapted from The Valley of Vision

 

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The Risk of Love

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.” -C.S. Lewis

The only One who loves without risk is God, because His love is strong enough and true enough to overcome any obstacle. He is the Ultimate Lover. Any theology of election and predestination that doesn’t flow from THAT ends up being wooden and fatalistic.

In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. …But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved-and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. – From Ephesians 1&2

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What is Christian Spirituality?

We live in a culture where it’s cool to be “spiritual” but uncool to push towards a definition of what spirituality means.  A few friends have pushed back on my fumbling attempts of sharing the Gospel with statements such as: “What works for you is good for you, what works for me is good for me … let’s not mix those up or worry about truth with a capital T.”

They are spiritual, but uninterested in Jesus.

Today I don’t want to write about helping “them” understand Christian spirituality, though that’s important.  Instead I want “us” to understand Christian spirituality so that we actually have something real and different to live and to share.

The always helpful Wikipedia defines “spirituality” as “…the concept of an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.”"

For a follower of Jesus (aka “Christian”) our deepest value is based on Jesus.  Our ultimates include His existence, ministry, death, resurrection, rule and return.  As C.S. Lewis points out in The Great Divorce the stuff of heaven is more real than our world today.

So the overall goal of Christian spirituality is becoming like Jesus. It is a process of training, shaping, and being shaped in every area of our lives by the Spirit into the image of Christ.

This happens in day-to-day life, not just during “religious” or “spiritual” experiences.  Dallas Willard writes:

Spirituality in human beings is not an extra or “superior” mode of existence. It’s not a hidden stream of separate reality, a separate life running parallel to our bodily existence. It does not consist of special “inward” acts even though it has an inner aspect. It is, rather, a relationship of our embodied selves to God that has the natural and irrepressible effect of making us alive to the Kingdom of God—here and now in the material world.

Robert Meye defines “spirituality” as:

…the grateful and heartfelt “Yes to God,” the response of the child of God to the call of God in the Spirit. Expressed both in act and attitude, the believer lives in obedience to and imitation of Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, and walks in the disciplined and maturing pattern of love’s obedience to God.

Yes to God when fighting with your spouse.  Yes to God when struggling with a temptation (whether those are little temptations like a second serving of ice cream, or big temptations like leaving the spouse you are fighting with).  Yes to God in all things, at all times, in all situations.  Yes to His Word.  Yes to His leadership.  Yes to the cross He asks you to bear.  Yes to the joys at His right hand.  Yes to God.

How do you do this?  It’s a life spent pushing God-ward in success and failure.  Here are a few “non-negotiables” that have helped me:

• Stay grounded in a personal, costly  relationship with Jesus
• Remember that you have a new identity in Jesus is guided by God’s Word
• Seek daily (or as often as you can remember) to be empowered by the Holy Spirit
• Don’t get caught up in the minor ups and downs of life … this is a whole-life  process
• Stay connected to a real community of faith … you can’t do this alone!
• Look for opportunities to show Gospel-sort-of-love in our everyday world, to everyday people.

How would you define spirituality?

What practices or habits help you?

Jesus is a Gift, not just an Example

I ran across this great line from Martin Luther's classic commentary on the book of Galatians. Commenting on Galatians 5:7-8 Luther talks about how Jesus can be seen both as an example and as a gift. The view of Jesus as gift must be the main definition. Though it can be helpful to look to Jesus as a guide for action, this will (should) mostly make us see our insufficiency and our increasing need for grace.

In times of doubt or times of temptation, Luther would encourage us to only look to Jesus as gift and grace. An example or lawgiver cannot make our hearts free, only grace can do that.

Luther goes on to imagine a tempted, frustrate Christian chasing away the Devil. He writes:

Every afflicted Christian, therefore, should learn to cast away the false idea of Christ and say,

“Cursed Satan, why do you now argue about doing and working? I am already frightened and afflicted because of my sins. But, since I am weary and burdened, I will not listen to you, the accuser and destroyer, but to Christ, the Saviour of the world, who says that he came to save sinners, to comfort those who are afraid and desperate, and to preach deliverance to the captives.

 This is the true Christ, and there is no other. I can seek examples of holy life in Abraham, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Paul, and other saints; but they cannot forgive my sins. They cannot deliver me from the power of the devil and from death. They cannot save me and give me everlasting life. 

Such things belong only to Christ, on whom God the Father has placed his seal of approval (John 6:27). 

So I will not listen to you, Satan. I will acknowledge as my teacher only Christ, of whom God the Father has said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!’ (Matthew 17:5).” 

If we do not learn to comfort ourselves like this in temptation and when we are persuaded by false doctrine, then the devil will either seduce us through his ministers or else kill us with his flaming arrows.

 

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‘Til Sin Be Bitter …

“Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.”

- Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance, p. 63

Christianity and the Sunrise

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” ― C.S. Lewis

Spurgeon: God will not Force Usefulness on Any Man

As soon as Zion was in labor
she brought forth her children.  Isaiah 66:8

“If any minister can be satisfied without conversions, he shall have no conversions.  God will not force usefulness on any man.  It is only when our heart breaks to see men saved, that we shall be likely to see sinners’ hearts broken.  The secret of success lies in all-consuming zeal, all-subduing travail for souls.  Read the sermons of Wesley and of Whitfield, and what is there in them?  It is no severe criticism to say that they are scarcely worthy to have survived.  And yet those sermons wrought marvels. . . .

In order to understand such preaching, you need to see and hear the man, you want his tearful eye, his glowing countenance, his pleading tone, his bursting heart.  I have heard of a great preacher who objected to having his sermons printed, ‘Because,’ said he, ‘you cannot print me.’  That observation is very much to the point.  A soul-winner throws himself into what he says.  As I have sometimes said, we must ram ourselves into our cannons, we must fire ourselves at our hearers, and when we do this, then, by God’s grace, their hearts are often carried by storm.”

C. H. Spurgeon, “Travailing for Souls,” 3 September 1871.  Italics original.

(HT Ray Ortlund)

Your passion, O loving Christ, is my Refuge

“You have offended the infinite God with your sins, but an infinite price has been paid. You ought to be judged for your sins, but the Son of God has already been judged for the sins of the whole world, which He received in Himself. Your sins ought to be punished, but God already punished them in His Son. The wounds from your sins are great, but more precious is the balm of the blood of Christ.

Moses pronounces a curse against you (Deu 27:26), because you have not kept everything that has been written in the book of the law, but Christ has been made a curse for you (Gal 3:13). The handwriting has been written against you in the court of heaven, but Christ’s blood has deleted that (Col 2:14).

Therefore, your passion, O loving Christ, is my ultimate refuge.”

—Johann Gerhard, Sacred Meditations VII