The Command to Rejoice

Recently I heard Francis Chan speak on Philippians 4:4-9 and really every study these past few weeks has miraculously centered on these verses—and I have been convicted to the practice of implementing these verses in my life! This is how they read:
“Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made know to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Italics, mine)

Now these are verses that we’ve heard since…forever! There are songs about that first verse, and the others are “good” memory verses. But how often do we take these as commands? How often do we take these verses as blessings that God allows us to partake in?!? Christ has given us the freedom in trusting God with our future to have a joy that no circumstance can take away. This really is what everything boils down to as the Spirit has been teaching me: trust. In Jeremiah 17:5-8, we even see curses and blessings from the Lord pronounced:
“This is what the Lord says: ‘Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.’” When we do not trust in God, we trust in man (ourselves or others) and know worry and fear well. Without trust, we do not let the Spirit guide our steps. Without trust, we worry about what life will bring. Without trust, we have no room for peace and no occasion for true, lasting joy.
Rejoicing in the Lord comes when we trust God enough with our earthly livelihood that we can focus on the Love of our life: Christ! No matter the circumstances I should be blown away that I am in love with my Creator and even better yet, my Creator loves me! He is my Bridegroom and the wedding banquet is coming soon…what better call for celebration! And as I meditate on the character of God—Father, Son, Spirit—I am filled more and more with awe for him and feel blessed to be his servant. This is what the rest of the world doesn’t have and so desperately desires: joy, satisfaction and peace. And yet so often, the church, the bride of Christ, feels like this state of peace, joy and stress-less-ness is impossible. Not only impossible, but even undesirable to the point that we don’t even think that anxiousness or stress is a sin. It has become so normal for everyone that we can look at these verses and think, “oh wouldn’t that be nice” and completely disregard the promises of God!
What wouldn’t draw non-believers to Christ faster than if the body of Christ would actually live out these verses? We do have something the whole world wants and needs—and yet it seems we don’t even believe it. Many are caught up in worry, in restlessness, anxiousness and what does this reveal in us but a disbelief in our Lord and Savior. Really, what does it gain? Jesus says—no commands—us in Matthew 6 to not be anxious! God knows what you need to serve him and bring him glory. He even says, “For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.” (Matt 6:32) Everyone else worries and strives after their day-to-day provisions. What can man do through worry? In fact, what can man even do through all his labors? For without the Lord, our lives are futile and fruitless. Solomon, the wisest of wise, states in Psalms 127:1-2, “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—for he grants sleep to those he loves.” Rest in the Father and the security that comes in trusting the Lord, he will take care of you—even if circumstances speak otherwise. Paul and Silas sang psalms in prison, for they trusted in the Lord and in his will. Stephen trusted in the Lord and still was stoned to death. In the eyes of the world, it may not always be flowing with milk and honey, but the Lord is ever drawing us to himself and will provide peace and joy throughout—for when we trust in the Lord and rejoice in him, his presence is all we need for contentment.
Instead of fixing our eyes on our life and its uncertainties, Jesus goes on to say in Matthew, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Matt 6:33) Look to God, grow your character, serve him and build up treasures in heaven and rest in the love of the Lord. Give everything up to God thankfully in prayer and supplication. Hallelujah, he has taken our worries! He knows of our tomorrow and will be with us still! Glory be to our Father. Now we can go on thinking of other things that are pure, honorable, praiseworthy.
Chan mentioned something that has stuck with me from his sermon on this passage. He said that whatever we think on, dwell on, meditate on or are consumed with, we consider it praiseworthy. We are praising those thoughts good or bad because they are worthy enough in our mind to think about. Otherwise we wouldn’t be thinking about them. So, are our worries praiseworthy? Not a chance…especially not compared to our God! So instead of worrying about today, tomorrow, a year from now let us set our eyes and hearts and minds on the kingdom of God, his righteousness, above on heavenly things (Col 3:1-4). He is worthy of our praise and our thoughts and meditations.

So, where are our thoughts? Are they leading us to anxiousness or to peace? Are they worrying about tomorrow or rejoicing in serving and loving our Lord? Are they keeping us stuck in pursuits of this earth or are they directing us toward our eternal dwelling in heaven?

Why not embrace the freedom God grants us and rejoice! Praise God for the promise of peace.

In View of God's Mercy

Romans 11:33-12:2
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out!  Who has known the mind of the Lord?  Or who has been his counselor?  Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him?  For from him and through him and to him are all things.  To him be the glory forever! Amen.  Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – which is your spiritual worship.  Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.  Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

My blog as a whole could very easily be understood as a bunch of things that we should or must do for God, and I will largely admit that the bulk of my writing here consists of the things God wants for us and from us, but that we don’t seem willing to give.  I think though in my writing I have missed what Paul gets in verse 1 of chapter 12.  He says, “in view of God’s mercy,” and then goes on to issue a command.  These few words are so critical to the Christian faith, and are essentially the heart of the matter.  There is much that I believe God wants from his faithful followers that we are not doing, but the problem at base is not there.  Foundationally, the problem is a lack of awe, love, and amazement before God and his mercies.  It is from an overflow of these things that the rest should gain life, and actually without the first, we cannot rightly have the second.  Without a proper view of God’s mercies, our actions to the Lord become as mere offerings and sacrifices, things Isaiah tells us are detestable to the Lord.  This is not to say that the Lord does not want us to live sacrificial lives, but to say that the Lord knows the heart, and it is a heart of Love for Him that he wishes to see.  We will surely give an account of our works before the Lord, but they will simply reaffirm those who God knows, and those he does not.  Perhaps the best word for what God wants to see in our hearts is gratitude.  God is so amazingly good, and his mercies so much better than any other gift that has ever been given that it is like comparing apple pies to cow pies.  That is why I get concerned when I see in myself and in others an absence of the character and lifestyle that God says we should have.  God’s commands have become burdens to us primarily because we lack gratitude, and we lack gratitude primarily because we do not see how great the gifts of God are, we do not know the extent of his generosity.  We honestly look at the apple pies he is baking for us and wonder if the cow pies of the world might not be more enjoyable.

I love the way Paul starts Philippians 2 saying, “If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.”  I can almost hear Paul screaming his question, “Are you guys really getting this?”  Paul wanted to see that they truly understood through their life, he wanted them to “prove their repentance.” Acts 26:20  Then in Philippians he follows up these instructions with perhaps the most beautiful depiction of the gift of Jesus that is found in the New Testament saying, “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross!  Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”  What Paul depicts here is the greatest sacrificial gift ever given, not only that this man willingly chose death on the cross, but that this man was not just a man, but was in “very nature God” and yet traded heaven to take on human-likeness and not as the highest of humans either, but as the humblest servant to ever live, and all this while knowing that his life was on a collision course with the cross.  No human gift has ever matched it, nor will one ever match it.  We simply do not have heaven to give up.  What is perhaps the greatest part of this gift, the big surprise after the initial shocker is that Christ was raised to glory and it is to a share of that glory that he calls us, that is, “if indeed we share in his sufferings.” Romans 8:17  This, if nothing else, is surely a gift, a mercy, worthy of gratitude, worthy of all love and adoration.  We must all ask ourselves if we are living a lives worthy of this kind of gift, if we truly have gratitude to the degree that this gift and this giver should receive.  Paul reminds us that one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.  The reality is that some of these knees will bow out of love, adoration, and gratitude, while others will bow out of fear.  We should not be too quick to assume which motivation will drive us.  In the Romans verse that this reflection began with, and which it will now come back around to, Paul gives us the description of a person who in gratitude has seen God’s mercies.  Such a one will live as a living sacrifice, humbly resisting the patterns of this world, and with a renewed mind knowing and obeying the will of God.  Basically the truth is that if your knee is constantly bending to the will of Jesus Christ here on Earth than to continue to do so on that final day will be natural.  However, if our knees are more in the habit of bending to the patterns of this world, than it may very well be fear, and not gratitude that strikes us when see Jesus in glory.  All will know that he is Lord, but not all will like what that really means!

Now I want to finish coming back around to the Romans 12 text and break down what it looks like to live a life in view of God’s mercies.  First of all, Paul instructs us to offer our bodies as living sacrifices.  What is perhaps most interesting about this is the holistic nature of it.  Many assume, or at least have convinced themselves that the sacrifices Jesus requires are in addition to, or somehow separated from our normal course of life.  We sacrifice to Jesus with time of prayer and study, by volunteering, by worship etc.  Paul’s instruction of offering our bodies is exactly what it sounds like.   Earlier, in Romans 6 he says, “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.  Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.  Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness.”  Literally, this is saying that we are to, assuming that sin has no control over us any longer because of the power of Christ, offer every part of our body as God’s tool.  Rather than a checklist of sacrifices to be made, it is rather the decision to live every moment, every breath in a way pleasing to God.  The only way this happens is by putting on Christ, by putting on the new self and clothing ourselves with “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”  Andrew Wiens does not bring pleasure to the Lord in and of himself.  However, I have a savior who always does what is pleasing to God the Father (John 8:29) and it is this savior, this God who has “poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 6:5)  This is our hope in Christ Jesus, that our entire lives, our entire beings might be made right in such a way that they would be pleasing and very good in the eyes of our God, just as they were before the redemption.  The basic instruction Paul is giving us then is to live as a redeemed Child of God, not as a slave to sin.  This is possible because God has given us his Spirit, “and if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who lives in you.”(Romans 8:11)  It is for this reason that Paul calls this our spiritual worship, for as he goes on to explain in Romans 8:12- we have an obligation as those who have been given the Spirit, and put simply it is to cry out, “Abba, Father.”!  When we rightly see God’s mercies, our Father’s gifts, we cannot help but cry out to him as our Daddy.  This is a life pleasing to God.

The second and third things Paul goes on to say in verse 2 of Romans 12 are instruction to achieve that which we have just discussed, and a promise of what will come when you do.  We will deal with the instruction first, and it is, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  I believe essentially this is an instruction to go back to the previous verse and make sure to get in view of God’s mercies.  We cannot simply move on trying to be living sacrifices if we haven’t put ourselves in the right vantage point to see God and his mercies, and to commune with him.  One of my favorite Bible stories is that of Zacchaeus.  As We all know Zacchaeus was a wee-little man, and as such when Jesus was coming by he was prevented from seeing by the craziness of the crowd around him.  Thus, what did Zacchaeus do?  He climbed a tree to get a better view.  We have to know what kind of man Zacchaeus was to fully appreciate this though.  He was a hated man, but a hated man because he had gotten rich by taxing his fellow Jews for the Roman government.  He was the Chief tax collector too, the head-honcho, and that position, along with a little embezzlement on the side had put his bank account in a pretty good spot.  He was a man who would have been used to power, used to nice things, and to comfort.  He would have worn the nicest clothes.  In other words, this would be like Donald Trump, in his fanciest suit, climbing a tree to get a view of somebody.  It was out of character, if for no other reason than the sheer childlike humility it would have taken.  He was probably a man who cared a lot about reputation, (even if he had a bad one) but somehow this day, he cared more about seeing Jesus than he did about his reputation.  This is the kind of spirit Paul is instructing us to have.  If we are struggling to feel the kind of love, gratitude and awe toward God that we know he is worthy of.  If we know we don’t quite fully understand or see his mercies, it is probably because of the junk in our way.  This world is fallen, and it is fallen primarily because of its forgetfulness.  Throughout the Bible the problem of sin is talked about as one of forgetting.  We have forgotten who God is, and subsequently we have forgotten who we are.  The pattern of the world is one that trusts in self, trusts in money, trusts in things, while neglecting to trust the one who is really worthy of it.  The pattern of the world is trying to find joy in people, in money, in things while not finding complete joy in the only one who can bring it.  It is thus that we must rise above the patterns of this world.  If we look at our lives, and then look around us and find ourselves in the crowd of the worldly, we must find a tree to climb.  It will surely look strange to those around us, the crowd will have a hard time understanding while a guy who is used to cashmere suits is climbing a tree, but if we want to feel the gratitude we know is lacking we have to see better.  Having a better view of God’s mercies is necessary and thus the decision to climb or stay on the ground with the crowd is a life or death decision. 

Interestingly, Paul phrases his instruction a second way, this time in the positive.  Before he tells us what not to do, “Do not conform”, but now he restates the same command as, “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  If you’ll remember, throughout the Bible, the problem of sin is talked about as forgetfulness.  Most of us have heard of Paradise Lost, but perhaps more accurately it is indeed Paradise Forgotten.  We have forgotten where to find Paradise.  We know that we want it, but we can’t seem to get the recipe right.  We don’t remember the proper ingredients.  It is thus that Paul says we must renew our minds.  We must remember!  It is remembering paradise, remembering Eden, and our Father God who resided with us there that will draw us into a place to be living sacrifices.  This remembering will take a decision and Paul realizes this.  If we continue to look in the world, and from within the confines of the world’s patterns we will continue to find no match for the vague memory that resides in the depths of our human nature.  It is for this reason that so many Christians are spiritually sick, that so many of us find ourselves wondering why our meager lives of sacrifice look so different from the lives of power that we see in the book of Acts.  We continue to look in the wrong places, and we refuse to let go of the patterns of this world so that our minds might be renewed.  The picture looks something like this for many American Christians:

Like all human-beings they found themselves explorers, looking for an unknown treasure for which their heart ached, in the midst of the dense forest which we call the world.  Then, one day they had the idea, the call if you will, to climb a tree, and see if there might be something above or beyond the forest they found themselves in.  As they reached the top, there it was, the thing they had looked for their entire lives.  There, beyond the forests, was home, the dazzling city of life and light.  Quickly they scampered down the tree, and set off in the direction of home, a new energy and hope burning within them as they went.  Home was dazzling and beautiful from a distance, how grand it would be from a closer vantage point, from within it!  However, not to much later, they once again found themselves captivated and enthralled by the temptations of the forest.  Before long, they had decided that the forest was home, or perhaps they remembered where home was, but had intentionally or just for conveniences sake had decided that that would have to wait for another day.  Either way, their hunger for home had died away, and the true grandeur of the place was never seen by their eyes, for they never persisted in drawing nearer.

The problem with America is that our forest is particularly nice, particularly comfortable and thus particularly dangerous and tempting.  It is easy to mistake it for home, and thus James says, “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you.  Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes.  Your gold and silver are corroded.  Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire.  You have hoarded wealth in the last days.”  James 5:1-3  Even Jesus himself says, “Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.”  Luke 6:24  It is thus that Paul tries to help us out by commanding us not to settle for the imitation, not to get comfortable in the world no matter how comfortable it is.  The reality is that no matter how much we make ourselves at home in it, this world can never be our home.

Finally, Paul’s words in Romans 12:2 come with a promise.  If, by refusing to conform to this world, and by renewing our minds we succeed in coming into view of God’s mercies, and if we in gratitude and love of God and his mercies we offer our bodies as living sacrifices by the power of the Holy Spirit within us, then, and only then, will we know the will of God.  After all, the decision to be a living sacrifice looks something like this:  “Jesus you gave your life for mine, and so here, you take my life and live how you would like.”  When we make such a decision than God starts directing our lives according to his will.  Paul asks the questions in 11:34, “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”  The implied answer to these questions is no one!  However, Paul goes on to say that when Christ gets us then he will make his will, his mind known to us.  The heart of what is being said is also said in James, where it reads, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.”  James 4:8  This verse in James is paired with, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” James 4:7  Resisting the devil is very much the same thing as resisting the Patterns of this world.  As we intentionally push away from those things, in order that we might view God more clearly, he promises that he will indeed make himself known, he will come near.  It is this intimacy that is the beautiful promise of the Gospel.  God has called us children, friends, and bride.  These terms are no coincidence.  The truth is that the more we reject the ways of sin so that we might more delight in and express our gratitude for his infinite love by becoming living sacrifices, the Lord of the Universe will bless us with his presence by making his thoughts our thoughts, and his ways our ways, and it is within that presence, under his thoughts and his ways that life is good, pleasing, and perfect, there and only there.  How do we not see the beauty of these mercies?!  May all our lives come ever more in view of the amazing love and gifts the father has lavished on us.  In so doing may we reject the ways of the world, relinquish control of our paths, and live in the way that is good, pleasing, and perfect, that each day we may see the newness of the mercies of the Lord.