Audience of One

Joy and sin

Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. (Psalm 37:4)

Why do Christians sin? The answer is, because we desire to. We want to. I mean, obviously there’s a sense in which we don’t want to do it – as Paul says in Romans 7:15, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”. For Christians, there’s always a reluctance to sin, as Paul says earlier in Romans: “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”. But when we sin, we’ve been fooled by sin within us (what Paul calls our flesh) into thinking it’s good for us – that it’s the best thing to do. Our flesh “convinces the mind that the sinful act is somehow ‘good’ for the soul, so that our affections hunger for it, and our will chooses it” (my paraphrase of Kris Lundgaard). We sin because our flesh desires it.

The psalmist above instructs us to delight ourselves in the Lord, so that he gives us the desires of our heart. That’s the prosperity gospel, surely? We delight ourselves in God, and so he gives me that large mansion with the state-of-the-art recording studio in the basement. Well, not exactly. God doesn’t give us the object of our desires; he gives us the desires themselves.

Try and separate the two in your mind. In the above example, I desire to live in a large, technologically equipped mansion. The mansion is the object of my desire. If I were to obtain such a mansion, I would obtain what I desired, and so the desire itself would cease to exist. So the mansion, and the desire for the mansion are two different things.

We are told to delight ourselves in the Lord, and the result is that he will give us the desires themselves, not the object of our current desires. So if I delight myself in the Lord, he won’t necessarily give me the mansion, but he will give me new desires – a desire to serve him, a desire to follow him in all that I do.

If I want to fight sin, I have to look to God for my joy. I have to delight myself in him, or put it another way, to find my delight and joy in him, rather than looking elsewhere. The more we look to God for our joy, the more sin’s attractions dim and fade. And the more we stop sinning and live God’s way, the more we experience life the way it should be – life depending on our awesome creator God, lived to his glory. It’s there we find our eternal joy.

Matthew @ 13:51, January 30, 2008 to Discussions | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thinking about joy

Recently I’ve been reading quite a lot about the concept of joy in the Christian life. I guess it started back in October at the CU houseparty, with Mike Cain (not Michael Caine) speaking on Philippians 3-4. Unfortunately the talks weren’t recorded (successfully), so I can’t offer you a link to download them – however he gave similar talks which can be downloaded from his former church (free registration required). I was blown away by his first talk especially. In it, Mike challenged all of us to be confident in Christ, and not our own works. Standard Protestant theology then – but so easy to reel off and then forget.

Paul reels off a list of religious credentials second to none: a circumcised Benjamite Jew; a blameless Pharisee who persecuted Christians. He was part of the in crowd, the religious elite. Paul used to look to all of these things for his security. These were the things he thought made him one of God’s people – but now, verse 3 says that we “put no confidence in the flesh”, and that it is those “who glory in Christ Jesus” who are God’s people. Confidence in the flesh is looking to our own efforts to get us into a relationship with God: our assurance of his acceptance is based on our flesh – what we do.

Right at the start of the passage, Paul says we are to “rejoice in the Lord”. So why does he then go on to talk about “those dogs, those men who do evil”? He’s just told us to rejoice and suddenly gets angry, using really strong terms to describe these men. The answer is that putting confidence in the flesh, like these guys were, robs us of our joy. We rejoice in that which saves us, and if we put our confidence in what we’ve done, we won’t rejoice in God.

The truth is that God saves us despite what we’ve done. This is one of the most basic Christian truths – that it is by grace we have been saved. It’s unmerited favour on the part of God. We can’t do anything to deserve it, and so can have utter confidence that whatever we’ve done, whatever we do, if we’re trusting in Christ then we’re saved.

So when we start putting our trust in things other than Christ, our security goes out of the window. People in Paul’s day thought circumcision might help, or obeying the law (especially going above and beyond the law and making even more rules that God hadn’t given), or being born into the right family (a Jewish one). What do we put our trust in? Is it having the “right” view of baptism, or our Christian heritage? Is it our regular Bible reading, or our extensive Bible knowledge? Have we been to the right summer camp, or conference, or heard the “right” speakers? Is our Christian library extensive and all endorsed (or written) by the “right” authors? Are we involved in leadership in the CU, or actively serving our church?

A friend came up to me after Mike’s talk, and said, “If he’d put my name at the beginning of the list, it couldn’t be any more true of me”. I felt the same. I knew that many of these things described me. The Christian life starts with grace, but it also continues with grace. Just living an unexamined Christian life can lead to a drift into this kind of thinking – that we’re saved by grace, but as we progress in the Christian life, we start contributing a bit ourselves. We drift into thinking that helping with the CU, or not getting drunk, or reading the right books, makes us more acceptable in God’s eyes. We look down on others who aren’t as good as us. And all the time, we’re becoming more like the people whom Jesus criticised the most in his earthly ministry – the legalistic Pharisees. They thought, like the men in this passage, that what they did made them right with God, and better than others. The Bible tells us that it’s all down to Jesus, and never up to us. Christians are all equal in God’s sight.

As Mike said, “Jesus isn’t just the way into the Christian life; he’s the way on”. We’re not saved by grace, and then keep ourselves in God’s favour by doing the right thing. We’re saved by grace from first to last.

How does this relate to joy? Well, as soon as we start putting any kind of confidence in our own abilities and actions, we will start to lose the joy in God’s grace that we had. Being saved by grace from first to last means that we don’t worry about sinning, about not having a job on the CU committee, about not having been to the right conference. Our joy must be unrelated to what we have done; our joy must be in God and what he’s done. Only God is constant; our obedience goes up and down.

Interestingly, Paul’s comment about his list of religious credentials is that they are rubbish, that he counts them as loss – in other words, they’re a bad thing! The reason for this is in verses 8 and 9. Paul sees that all these things actually distract him from finding his confidence in Jesus. Applied to us, all our “Christian credentials” can be good in themselves, but if they distract us from Jesus and finding our joy and confidence in him, then they’re no better than rubbish.

Trusting our own righteousness leads to an up-and-down Christian life, where we relate to God on the basis of what we’ve done, and lose our joy as a result. So we must rejoice in the Lord! We must look to him for our security and our joy, because only in him can true joy be found.

Hopefully I’ll be continuing to blog through some of these issues in the coming weeks.

Matthew @ 19:13, January 29, 2008 to Discussions | Permalink | Comments (0)

Phew!

Well, that was a long break from blogging. I get hit by comment spam, my web host disables my blog software, I take quite a few months to realise I can actually do something about this, and, of course, no intricate technical process would be complete without it being a procrastination from revision. (With exams coming up, I always seem to end up fixing this blog/fixing my computer/breaking my computer etc. etc.)

The plan is to redo this site to make it more interesting for you and less of a waste of time for me. That said, I still want to get tags sorted, and maybe a redesign, and maybe some form of Flickr/Twitter integration. Maybe once exams are out of the way. For now, add me once more to your RSS readers – I know the website’s called Audience of One, but that’s a theological point about worship, rather than a request to limit my human readership…

Matthew @ 14:13, January 19, 2008 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (8)

2007 in review

In keeping with tradition (2006 and 2005’s entries), I thought I’d go for a round-up of the year, as well as a quick update on the status of this website.

This year began with me agreeing to lead a Christian Union small group in my hall of residence, which entailed staying on in hall for another year. I went through ups and downs with regards to staying in hall, sometimes looking forward to it because of friends staying on as well, sometimes dreading another year of institutional food and no kitchen. (So far it’s been great!) My degree continued, not really interfering much with everything else until the start of my second year, so I was quite involved with different CU activities outside the hall. I took over the hall small group at the end of March, and quickly realised that I didn’t really know how to lead Bible studies after all. (Still not got the hang of it, but I’ve got better.)

Easter brought a fund-raising concert tour for my dad’s work, for which I was employed as a roadie. I ended up going to Word Alive via London and Newcastle. Word Alive with the CU meant talks on the Trinity, Hebrews, and late night telling of surreal fairy tales involving time travel, bad puns and violent deaths.

I went to Uganda in the summer, the experience of which is very hard to describe. A group from the hall CU went to help in a school and a church run by the same guy; my friend Will and I tried to be an African Rico Tice between us (in other words, we were the speakers for a Christianity Explored course), and we also ended up speaking on Ugandan radio and going white water rafting on the Nile!

October brought a very difficult term for various reasons: a co-leader of the hall small group dropped out due to illness; my degree more than doubled its intensity meaning I got behind very quickly, having expected it to be easier; on top of everything, I was having quite an unsettling time spiritually with God teaching me a lot. On the plus side (not that God teaching me stuff isn’t) I joined a new church, one than my old church planted back in April. It’s small, meets just round the corner from my hall, is full of wonderful people and has much more scope for getting involved.

So, 2008. Well, first off I’ve got a blog to get sorted again. My web host disabled my blog software months ago (part of the reason for no updates) and I need to sort that out. I’ve got a lot of reading and thinking to do which I want to be digesting properly, and blogging about it is a good way of doing that. So that’s the plan. My CU responsibilities continue, and my degree will continue to be difficult. I now know more what to expect, but no doubt God’ll bring all sorts alongside that I don’t expect. It’s good to be kept on my toes.

Matthew @ 14:08, January 1, 2008 to Diary | Permalink | Comments (0)