He to rescue me from danger, interposed His precious blood

Happy Easter!

I, for one, walked out of Gordon Hugenburger's sermon at Park Street this morning a bit disappointed. I suppose it's because what I wanted was a sermon scratching through the layers of dragon scales and reaching my heart. He preached a solid sermon on the apologetic bases for why Christ actually physically died and I know the man next to me loved it. But I think (my spiritual man crush) CJ Mahaney puts it best when he says...

"It's possible for us to study the resurrection technically, to affirm the resurrection theologically, and to argue for the resurrection historically and yet fail to apply the resurrection to our hearts, particularly in relation to death."

I encourage you to watch/listen to this sermon, even if you just put it on in the background.

Before leaving you, two other CJ quotes that resonated with me:

"Death is God's determination to limit our arrogance."

"The resurrection prepares us for death by assuring us that what awaits us on the other side of death is not eternal judgment and condemnation, but instead eternal life. Because the Savior went before us into death, we have no reason to fear death. And because He died as a substitute for sinners like you and me, satisfying the wrath of God, we have been forgiven of our many sins. And because He was raised from the dead, we will be raised as well."

Amen.

Good Friday; Pet Peeve

"Seen your face in every child that smiles,
but I can't help but rejoice.
And I've heard the song called thunder,
but I knew it was your voice.
Touched the holes in your calloused hands,
stuck my fingers in your side.
oh I was six-feet-deep in doubt but
now I'm sure that you're alive."
-Dustin Kensrue, I Believe

Lately I've been worn out, tired out, and exasperated. Slightly with the church not living like the church, but mainly with myself not living like Jesus paid the ultimate cost to save me. This is a loaded statement and if you want me to unpack the facets of it (or try to), let's grab coffee sometime. Here, suffice it to say much of it has come from being kicked in the pants lately through Mark Driscoll sermons.

In one of them, he was talking about how parents must be careful to punish their children for sins, and not simply for mistakes. On Good Friday, we remember how sin renders us all wrecked, destroyed, dead...without a pulse....dead. Enter God: "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" (Ephesians 2:4-6, ESV, emphasis mine).

Needless to say, we rarely feel this dependence on Christ's atoning work; we rarely see how wretched we are and how urgently we need to adopt attitudes of repentance. Trigger my pet peeve: apologizing to others for mistakes, instead of sins. In lab today, a German visitor apologized profusely to me for mistaking me for someone else. I completely understood what she was getting at, but my stomach was knotting up. I often internally cringe when people apologize for simple mistakes (or for nothing at all such as stepping on the back of your shoe), though I understand their intentions. I think it's because I used to do it all the time...apologizing for trivial things. I did it so much I had a friend tell me I had to stop using the word 'sorry' and we made a bet to see how long I could go. I think, in this way (by apologizing for mistakes) we can 1) cheapen the act of repentance and forgiveness and can 2) avoid apologizing for the significant sins we have done to others. So I urge us, as a Christian community, let's bring 'sorry' back into 'sorry.' Let's not cheapen what it means to be repentant or we will fail to build real relationships with others and fail to understand how much we truly depend on Christ.

Intimacy with God

"If you want to be a Christian, of course you'll repent of your sins. But after you've repented of your sins you'll have to repent of how you have used the good things in your life to fill the place where God should be. If you want intimacy with God, if you want to get over this sense that something is missing, it will have to become God that you love with all your heart and strength."
-Tim Keller, King's Cross

Your heart is still young: how Jesus emptied Himself

"Allow me to give you an illustration of what subtraction by addition might look like and how it might take place. Imagine for a moment that someone, say, an older brother of yours, was shopping for a new car. He went to a BMW car dealership and asked to test-drive a beautiful, shiny, brand-new sports car. The dealer handed him the keys, and off he drove. Now, you need to know that for the past several days it had rained buckets in your area, and your brother decided to drive this shiny new car on the dirt roads out in the country. Well, as you can imagine, the roads were muddy as could be, and your brother drove this car wildly, turning and sliding every which way in the mud before he brought it back to the showroom floor. When he drove it in, absolutely covered in mud, the car dealer exclaimed, "What have you done to my car!" But to this, your brother calmly said, "Oh, you needn't worry. I've not taken anything away from the car, I've only added to it." And, of course, your brother was right. Every quality of that car was still there. It still had its beautiful coat of paint and its luster; nothing had been removed from what was there before. Rather, something had been added to it--a thick coat of mud! But notice what this mud did. It covered over that beautiful shine so that, even though it was still there, you couldn't see it. You might even say that the mud worked to hide the glory and brilliance of the car even though those qualities were still there, just hidden.
In a similar way, the fullness of the Son with every quality of his deity was poured out. Nothing from his deity was lost, but rather his full life was poured out as he took on the form of a servant. As that human nature enveloped, as it were, his divine nature, something of the glory and splendor of who he is as God was covered over--not lost or given up, mind you, but covered over. Since he chose now to live fully as a man, this required that certain aspects of his deity would have to stay hidden. To be a man, for example, he would have to accept the limitations of being at one place at one time, of learning new things as he grew from infancy to manhood, of experiencing hunger, thirst, tiredness, and weakness as all human beings do, and so on. Given this, are we required to say that Jesus gave up these qualities of his deity? No, and again I say, no! Rather, we say that Christ willingly gave up the rightful use of some of the abilities of his divine nature in order to experience fully his life now as a man. So, while he was in nature fully God, yet in order to live in nature fully as a man, he gave up the expression or exercise of some of his divine abilities. He did not give up those divine abilities themselves. In this way, Christ emptied himself by adding; there was a subtraction of the use of certain aspects of his deity by taking on the full experience of his humanity. And why? All for the purpose of humbling himself to become our servant, a full human being who would obey his Father to the point of death, even death on the cross. What a humbling he underwent. What a Savior he is!"
-Bruce Ware, Big Truths for Young Hearts, pg. 111-113