The Greatest Good

Every human being, while alive on this earth, is in pursuit of what he or she deems is the universe's "greatest good". The worldly man esteems power, riches, fame, and pleasure as the rationale of existence, while the man beholden to God has this as the chief of his or her desires: "To be conformed to the likeness of Christ and to share in God's holiness...That is the highest good to which the believer can aspire." (Jerry Bridges, The Discipline of Grace, ch. 13, p. 238).

This is a black-and-white proposition. There is no fence-straddling and no demilitarized zone. A person is either worldly or godly; he or she is either a child of the devil or a child of God. In both cases, one's desires determine one's ultimate end.

What occupies the "meat" of your daily thoughts?

Live by Grace, Not Performance

"I write these words at the age of fifty-five. During the past ten or twelve years, I have often—and with greater seriousness than ever before—reflected upon the course of my life. Certain patterns of thought and attitude and conduct have come to light, some of them quite disturbing. I look back upon repeated failures in my efforts to subdue inner conflicts and fears, to combat immaturity and self-centeredness, to build genuine and enriching relationships with other people, to conquer besetting sins, and to grow in holiness and communion with God. I now see that every period in my life has been marked by...struggle. But the persistence of the failures, together with a growing understanding of the past, has made the struggles of recent years exceptionally intense and painful."

- J. Knox Chamblin, Paul and the Self, pp. 11-12, as quoted by Jerry Bridges in The Discipline of Grace, ch. 2, p. 42.

"I am this day seventy years old, a monument of Divine mercy and goodness, though on a review of my life I find much, very much, for which I ought to be humbled in the dust; my direct and positive sins are innumerable, my negligence in the Lord's work has been great. I have not promoted his cause, nor sought his glory and honour as I ought, notwithstanding all this, I am spared till now, and am still retained in his Work, and I trust I am received into the divine favour through him."

- William Carey, in a letter to one of his sons

These words describe the voice of the one for whom conformity to Christ is the sweetest, most desirable thing in the universe. However, human experience in this fallen world will ever fall short of the mark of complete Christlikeness, and the Christian may often be left heartbroken and in despair over sins that daily mar his walk and testimony. The danger of relating to God on the basis of performance then becomes quite apparent.

We must constantly be taking to mind and heart the precious truth that God deals with His children always on the foundation of His unmerited grace. He can justifiably do this for us—for those who have trusted in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ—by virtue of the fact that Christ has fully satisfied His requirements of having both the penalty of sin paid for and perfect obedience to His law carried out in a sinless righteous life—and these are applied to us as real benefits. Because of our union with Christ, God's grace is assured and we have now, and will have all the days of our earthly lives, all that we need and will ever need to live a life that is pleasing to God, growing in maturity to the attainment of ever-increasing Christlikeness.

But we must desire Christ and continue to desire Him, and the new nature wrought in us by the Holy Spirit does so in a way that is as inevitable as breathing is to the sustenance of physical life.

The Pipermeister on Calvo

"I think this would be a fitting banner over all of John Calvin’s life and work—zeal to illustrate the glory of God. The essential meaning of John Calvin’s life and preaching is that he recovered and embodied a passion for the absolute reality and majesty of God. That is what I want us to see most clearly. Benjamin Warfield said of Calvin, 'No man ever had a profounder sense of God than he.' There’s the key to Calvin’s life and theology.

Geerhardus Vos, the Princeton New Testament scholar, asked this question in 1891: Why has Reformed theology been able to grasp the fullness of Scripture unlike any other branch of Christendom? He answered, 'Because Reformed theology took hold of the Scriptures in their deepest root idea. . . . This root idea which served as the key to unlock the rich treasuries of the Scriptures was the preeminence of God’s glory in the consideration of all that has been created.' It is this relentless orientation toward the glory of God that gives coherence to John Calvin’s life and to the Reformed tradition that followed. Vos said that the 'all-embracing slogan of the Reformed faith is this: the work of grace in the sinner is a mirror for the glory of God.' Mirroring the glory of God is the meaning of John Calvin’s life and ministry."

- John Piper, John Calvin and His Passion for the Majesty of God, ch. 2, pp. 16-17 (emphases are in italics in the original)

The Humble Tenacity of Looking to Christ

Indeed, if gameness and heart are character traits that are valued highly in the prizefighter, so are they in the Christian.

"Jonathan Edwards just laid me bare in 1971 and '72 when I was reading his book Religious Affections. I can remember several nights where, in his chapter on evangelical humiliation, he began to peel back the onion layers of my soul. He would say, 'So you think you're humble? What if you're boasting in your humility?' And you admit, 'Yes, I probably am boasting in my humility.' And he would ask, 'Well, what if your confession that you are boasting in your humility is really a pose, and you're still boasting in your humility?'

He gave question after question that made you realize, 'There's no center to this onion.' You peel and peel and peel, and the last peel just disappears, because you can always ask yourself, 'How do you know?' You can always doubt yourself. There's no way, by mere self-analysis, to come to a point where you're looking at something that you can say, 'Definitely authentic!' Because the capacity of the human brain to doubt is always there.

So where in the world does assurance come from? The answer is that, even though introspection is commended and wise up to a point, the bottom line of assurance comes when you stop analyzing and you look to Christ and you look and you look and you look until Christ himself in his glory and his sufficiency by reflex, as it were, awakens a self-forgetful 'Yes!' to him.

Your best moments of assurance are not the moments when you're thinking about your assurance. Because the very moment that you're thinking about your assurance, you have the capacity at that moment to doubt your assurance. This little voice, whether it's your conscience or the devil, is saying, 'You think you have assurance, but...'

And so the answer comes, 'Look to the cross! Look to Christ!' And if you're able to look to the cross, if you're able to see him as sufficient and satisfying and powerfully able to carry all your sins, and you find yourself drawn out of yourself to say 'Yes' to him, that's what you want. You are assured. He is your assurance at that moment."

- John Piper, How can I know if my repentance is genuine?

The Loneliness of Holiness

What a breath of fresh air it is when one's life experience is validated in the lives and words of the saints of old, who themselves know the different nuances of what it means to walk upon the narrow path of devotion and obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ.

"The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not to be honored but to see his Savior glorified in the eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglcted. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over serious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces (see Psalm 45:8), and finding few or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.

It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. 'Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me' (Psalm 27:10). His inability to find human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He learns in inner solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd—that Christ is All in all, that He is made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, that in Him we have and possess life's summum bonum."

- A.W. Tozer, The Radical Cross, ch. 6, p. 37

Schaeffer on Brotherly Love

"All men are our neighbors, and we are to love them as ourselves. We are to do this on the basis of creation, even if they are not redeemed, for all men have value because they are made in the image of God. Therefore they are to be loved even at great cost.

This is, of course, the whole point of Jesus' story of the good Samaritan: Because a man is a man, he is to be loved at all cost.

So, when Jesus gives the special command to love our Christian brothers, it does not negate the other command. The two are not antithetical. We are not to choose between loving all men as ourselves and loving the Christian in a special way. The two commands reinforce each other.

If Jesus has commanded so strongly that we love all men as our neighbors, then how important it is especially to love our fellow Christians. If we are told to love all men as our neighbors—as ourselves—then surely, when it comes to those with whom we have the special bonds as fellow Christians—having one Father through one Jesus Christ and being indwelt by one Spirit—we can understand how overwhelmingly important it is that all men be able to see an observable love for those with whom we have these special ties. Paul makes the double obligation clear in Galatians 6:10: 'As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.' He does not negate the command to do good to all men. But it is still not meaningless to add, 'especially unto them who are of the household of faith.' This dual goal should be our Christian mentality, the set of our minds; we should be consciously thinking about it and what it means in our one-moment-at-a-time lives. It should be the attitude that governs our outward observable actions."

- Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster, 157-58

Wretchedness

I have a mental picture of the kind of man I want to be. A stable man, walking in integrity, and in constant obedience to the Lord. But then there's the real me.

Hope does not exist in anything, anywhere, at any time except in the prospect of conformity to the character of the Lord Jesus Christ, secured for me by His life and death and applied by the Holy Spirit, and in His promise to really carry this out and not leave me as I am. "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Rom 7:24,25)

Whenever despair over my self grips me, to You I cling, O, Lord. Leave me not as I am.

D.A. Carson's Dad

"Dad had a view of work that sprang in part from the Great Depression: anything less than working all the time was letting down the people and the Lord. There is no hint in his journals or letters of the proper place of rest, of pacing himself, of Jesus’ words, “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest” (Mark 6:31, niv). In Dad this was married to a bit of a perfectionist streak. That, I suspect, played a big part in his failure to finish his thesis: the work was never good enough, so it was never complete. And the sense of failure from not completing it added to the pattern of failure, which in turn engendered more defeat.

I do not wish to make excuses for Dad. Certainly I am not in a position to judge him. But there are gospel ways of tackling this problem more hopefully. So many aspects of ministry demand excellence, and there are not enough hours in the day to be excellent in all of them. When I was a young man, I heard D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones comment that he would not go across the street to hear himself preach. Now that I am close to the age he was when I heard him, I am beginning to understand. It is rare for me to finish a sermon without feeling somewhere between slightly discouraged and moderately depressed that I have not preached with more unction, that I have not articulated these glorious truths more powerfully and with greater insight, and so forth. But I cannot allow that to drive me to despair; rather, it must drive me to a greater grasp of the simple and profound truth that we preach and visit and serve under the gospel of grace, and God accepts us because of his Son. I must learn to accept myself not because of my putative successes but because of the merits of God’s Son. The ministry is so open-ended that one never feels that all possible work has been done, or done as well as one might like. There are always more people to visit, more studying to be done, more preparation to do. What Christians must do, what Christian leaders must do, is constantly remember that we serve our God and Maker and Redeemer under the gospel of grace. Dad’s diaries show he understood this truth in theory, and sometimes he exulted in it (as when he was reading Machen’s What Is Faith?), but quite frankly, his sense of failure sometimes blinded him to the glory of gospel freedom." (emphasis mine)

The foregoing is a snippet from D.A. Carson's "Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor (The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson)", a book about Don's father. I have never come across a piece by Don from which I was not blessed in soul. This book is no exception. The humility of Don and his father come leaping forth forcefully from the pages and one cannot help but be encouraged by the grace that permeated the Carson family.

This book will aid you in the furtherance of your sanctification. Get it here: Download

Psalm 51 - Repentance

What is the Nature of Your Treasure?

Living in a world besmirched by the aftermath of sin, it must then be that pain, suffering, and disappointment are inevitable. To be human is to have trouble as a constant companion (Job 5:7). However, one's soul is adversely intruded upon by trouble only when the object of one's affection, or one's treasure, is assailed or threatened. Therefore, the key to soul stability in times of suffering rests solely not on desiring that which is affected by the fallenness of the current order of creation, thus changeable, but on desiring that which transcends the world, thus unchangeable. To be at peace in whatever circumstance is to have the Unchanging One as one's Chief Desire and Only Treasure.

The nature of what one pursues as the "apple of one's eye" determines the state of one's joy. Anxiety, fear and worry must necessarily rest upon those who have purposed to find joy in the volatile; but these soul torments have no intelligent and logical basis for those whose soul-satisfaction owes itself to the One who does not change (Malachi 3:6).

John 16:33
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.

Adrian Warnock and the Pipermeister

This interview once more underscores the fact that the humble are the ones upon whom God lavishes His grace in order for them to glorify Him by finding their satisfaction and enjoyment solely and ultimately in Him.

"He mentioned to me that he regularly walks away from his events feeling like he's blown it." - referring to D.A. Carson.

"I just know that what I want is the gift of self-forgetfulness..."

Where a Man Belongs

"A famous cigarette billboard pictures a curly-headed, bronze-faced, muscular macho with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The sign says, 'Where a man belongs'. That is a lie. Where a man belongs is at the bedside of his children, leading in devotion and prayer. Where a man belongs is leading his family to the house of God. Where a man belongs is up early and alone with God seeking vision and direction for his family."

- John Piper, Desiring God, ch. 8, p. 218

The Entailments of Everlasting Life

"We must believe in Jesus and receive Him and turn from our sin and obey Him and humble ourselves like little children and love Him more than we love our family, our possessions, or our own life. This is what it means to be converted to Christ. This alone is the way of everlasting life."

- John Piper, Desiring God, ch. 2, pp. 69 - 70