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Covenantal Contentment

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Introduction

Christians are called to contentment not merely because this is a good thing, but because it is a central component of joining God’s mission, of establishing His Kingdom here in this world, and learning to fight like Christians.

The Text

Paul is writing in a context of intense struggle in Philippi. There are enemies outside and there are challenges inside the Church, and Paul urges the Philippians to rejoice in all of it (Phil. 4:4). A Christian should be known for being calm and stable because they know that the Lord is present and near to them (Phil. 4:5). And therefore, we fight all anxiety through prayer: casting our cares on Christ, with thanksgiving (Phil. 4:6). When we pray like that, God’s promise is that His peace which passes all understanding will guard our hearts and minds through Christ (Phil. 4:7). This joyful resting in Christ is marked by a disciplined thought life: keeping a common place book of all the good things, true things, just things, lovely things, etc. (Phil. 4:8). This attentiveness should include imitating mature Christians like Paul – this is the path of God’s peace (Phil. 4:9). Finally, Paul models this joyful contentment by expressing his delight in the gift he recently received from the Philippians (Phil. 4:10). He was truly thankful but certainly not desperate for the gift because he had learned to be content in every situation because Christ strengthens him (Phil. 4:11-13).

Knowing God

Contentment in God requires that you actually know the God you are content in. Christian contentment is not contentment in whatever you imagine God to be like. You can say the word “contentment” a whole bunch, but if you are not resting in who God actually is, you are not actually learning Christian contentment. So, who is this God? He is the God who is set on taking this world from glory to glory. We see this beginning in the very first chapter of the Bible. God creates something good, and then He comes back the next day and restructures it and improves it (Gen. 1). If you had been there watching, you might have been tempted to urge God to stop. If the Light was good, why make the firmament or the sun, moon, and stars? If the dry ground and seas were good, why add animals and fish? What we see in the creation week is the beginning of God’s pattern of taking good things and making them better. This is the God we rejoice in and remain calm in. This is God is not far off. He is near.

The same pattern follows through the rest of Scripture, particularly in God’s covenantal dealings with His people. The covenant with Noah grows into the glory of the covenant with Abraham, and that glory grows into the covenant with Moses, and that glory grows into the covenant with David. The glory of the covenant with David grows into the glory of the covenant under Ezra and Nehemiah, and Christ is the culmination of all the covenants in the New Covenant. Paul says that when we see the gospel unfolding and culminating in Christ, we are being “changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18). The whole Bible is the story of Christ: “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Lk. 24:26-27). The center of Christian contentment is the cross of Jesus, in which God broke the best thing in order to make an even better one.

How Does Covenantal Contentment Pray?

Paul says that Christian contentment is learned through prayer (Phil. 4:6). The pattern for Christian prayer is laid out in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father” means that we approach God as the One who made us and cares for us. He is not detached or distant. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” means that we entrust our stories to His story. He has a plan that He is carrying out in this world that is wonderful, glorious, and all together lovely. His Kingdom and Will are taking this world (and us) from glory to glory. It’s in that context that we are invited to ask God for our daily bread. It’s actually pretty audacious of us to think that we know what we need, but God is our Father and He wants us to ask for what we think we need. But we are to do so first of all “with thanksgiving” (Phil. 4:6). This recognizes that what we have today is already from God’s hand, and whatever God gives for our daily bread is good. Nevertheless, we do want to be learning to pray in the will of God, toward the will of God. We want to pray, as far as we can help it, for those things that we see that would work toward the coming of Christ’s Kingdom. And this is why it is important that all of our requests include a spirit of surrender: yet not my will by Thy will be done (Lk. 22:42, Js. 4:15).

Militant Christian Contentment

Christian contentment is not apathetic, not stoic. Christian contentment, grounded in the mission of God, is militant. “And the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you” (Rom. 16:20). It is not merely that it’s a nice thing to have God’s peace. It is the peace of God that crushes Satan under your feet. When we pray with contentment, the promise is that the peace of God, which passes all understanding will guard our hearts and minds (Phil. 4:7). The peace of God is our armor, our fortress. Paul says elsewhere that we need to wear the gospel of peace on our feet (Eph. 6:15). The peace of Christ is what takes us into battle. You cannot fully participate in the mission of God without the peace of God. This is because the conquest of the gospel is a mission of healing and restoration, not destruction. The gospel is very disruptive to the old world, the old man, the old systems of sin, death, and the devil. But it destroys that slavery, those strongholds in order to establish freedom, joy, and peace. And therefore, you cannot be a peacemaker if you are not already a fortress of peace and contentment. One of the greatest meditations on Christian contentment is The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by the puritan pastor Jeremiah Burroughs, who preached this series of sermons in the middle of the English Civil War.

Conclusions

At the center of our text, Paul says to meditate on the true, honest, just, pure, and virtuous things. In fact, the word means to reckon or impute. It can simply mean to think about, but this is how the word is frequently used: Abraham believed God, and He reckoned it to him as righteousness (Rom. 4:22). Paul goes on: “Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him, but also for us. It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead…” (Rom. 4:23-24). God imputes the righteousness of Christ to us who believe in Him, and if you understand that, you begin to imitate that, which is gospel war.

 

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Finding Your Identity in Christ

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The Text

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

Introduction

Who are you? From one vantage, the gospel is a great re-memory project. To be lost and dead in our sins is to have forgotten who we are and what we are for, and this makes us afraid. But the gospel of the cross of Jesus is God’s perfect mirror showing us our sin, showing us our Savior, showing us who we really are in Him so that we will not be afraid.

Overview of the Text

Paul is in the middle of an argument here seeking to call the Galatians back to the gospel of Christ (Gal. 1:6-7). And the central point of contention is between the freedom of finding your identity in Christ and the bondage of seeking the approval of man (Gal. 1:10). Paul told his own story of being saved in order to demonstrate that his gospel was not from man but directly from Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:11-16). Paul relates how he was received by the other apostles as a fellow apostle in his ministry to the gentiles, leading to a confrontation with Peter in Antioch who withdrew from eating with Gentiles when some Judaizers showed up (Gal. 2:1-13).

Our text is part of Paul’s confrontation of Peter or at least his continued meditation on that topic. He explains that Jews and Gentiles are alike justified by faith in Jesus Christ and not by works of the law, not the least because nobody can actually be justified by works of the law (Gal. 2:16). Paul’s next thought seems to be a sort of reductio on Peter’s conduct, pointing out that if a Jew eating with a Gentile is wrong, then wouldn’t that make Christ’s ministry through Peter sinful? Isn’t Peter contaminated? God forbid (Gal. 2:17). Besides, why would we try to rebuild exactly what we already broke with our sin (Gal. 2:18)? The law literally curses all lawbreakers and requires their cursed death, which the law specifies as crucifixion on a tree (Dt. 27:26, Gal. 3:10-13). Therefore, in terms of justification, the law’s job is to slay us so that being dead in our sins, we can live by being identified with the One who died for our sins (Gal. 2:19-20). This is where Jesus always meets us. Beginning with Mary Magdalene, Jesus has always met His people in graveyards. Or as Paul says here, Jesus meets us in the cross, at the cross. He saves sinners who are crucified with Him.

Crucified with Christ

Paul is here speaking of what it means to be a Christian. He doesn’t necessarily mean literally dying or being killed on a cross. He means being so identified with Christ by faith, that you reckon yourself, you think of yourself and your life as virtually crucified with Christ. Paul speaks this way with regard to baptism and sin: “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? … reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 6:3, 11). He also speaks this way in terms of repentance and mortification of sin: “For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God… Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection…” (Col. 3:3, 5). So on the one hand, reckoning yourself crucified with Christ, dead with Christ, means that you reckon all of your sin crucified in Christ. Part of this is in seeing what our sin deserves, and part of this is wanting to be truly free of it. But elsewhere Paul also speaks this way about his human achievements: “Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of Hebrews… But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ” (Phil. 3:4-5, 7-8). So on the other hand, reckoning yourself crucified with Christ means reckoning any good thing as nothing compared to Christ; you count it as essentially lost for the sake of Christ’s work. It is not lost as in good for nothing, but lost as in laid completely at the disposal of Christ who is reconciling all things to Himself (Col. 1:20). Finding your identity in Christ means reckoning all that you are, good and evil, as crucified with Christ. This drives away all fear.

The Life We Live

Paul considers this embracing of Christ’s death the way of Christian life and not just one time at the beginning of your Christian life. Christian life is an ongoing identification with Christ crucified. Paul says that he no longer lives, but Christ lives in him (Gal. 2:20). But this life he now lives is actually by the “faith of Jesus Christ.” This is a highly debated phrase since it can rightly be translated as “faith of Jesus Christ” or “faith in Jesus Christ.” The Bible does teach that salvation is by faith in Jesus Christ, and that faith is a gift of God (Eph. 2:8-9). But the Bible also teaches that our salvation rests on top of Christ’s finished work, His faithfulness. In other words, our imperfect faith in Jesus saves because His faith was perfect. Romans 1:17 says that the righteousness of God is revealed “from faith to faith.” Jesus is the Righteous One who lived by faith and so became our Righteousness by faith. Elsewhere, Paul seems to have both in view: “And being found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith” (Phil. 3:9). The Christian life in this sense is the faithful and perfect sacrifice of Jesus living inside you.

Who Loved Us

It is entirely possible to talk about all of this as though it were a possibility for some people out there somewhere in principle, in the abstract, as though it were something that just happens to befall some people. Maybe some people get identified with Christ like some people get the chicken pox. But Paul grounds this reality of identifying with the crucifixion of Christ with the love of Christ in personal terms: “who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Christ did not go to the cross with a vague or ambiguous or general goal in mind. He went to the cross with you in mind. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13). So this too is what it means to find your identity in Christ. It means knowing that Christ laid His life down for you in particular, by name. Those welcomed into heaven are those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life (Rev. 21:27).

Conclusion

Who are you? Learn to say, I am not my own but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. Learn to say, I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I live I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. You are not defined by your sin or by your successes, but by the perfect finished work of Jesus on the cross. This perfect love casts out all fear.

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Honest With God: Growth in Grace

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Introduction

We are considering the two components of growth in grace. The first is getting rid of impediments to that growth, which is a necessary thing—but preliminary. The second thing is actual growth in grace. This growth in grace is a form of life, and like all life it requires food. Our spiritual life in Christ must be nourished as much as our physical lives require nourishment.

The Text

“Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied” (1 Peter 1:2).

“And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all” (Acts 4:33).

Summary of the Text

We must always remember that the Christian life cannot be reduced to a series of techniques. It is not a thing you can tinker with. In all of the epistles, we receive the benediction of grace and peace. In most of the epistles we receive this grace and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit is usually not mentioned (although He is here in this passage). Why is that? I am following Jonathan Edwards in this, believing that this is because the grace and peace is the Holy Spirit. And so the pious wish that grace and peace be multiplied can be translated into personal terms. This too is related to honesty.

And as we see in the passage from Acts, when God visits a congregation in reformation and revival, He is poured out on everyone—and not just on the religious professionals. Sometimes it comes to the religious professionals last. One time in the nineteenth century, in Cornwall, a man named William Haslam was preaching a sermon entitled “What Think Ye of Christ.” During the sermon he was convicted of his own dry Pharisaism, and the Holy Spirit came on him. Another local minister who happened to be present stood up and shouted, “the Parson is converted!” And so we should yearn for the statement from Acts to be true of us as well—and great grace was upon them all.

Another Brief Word

As we strive for engagement with the means of grace, we want to make sure that we do not take what was said last week about the reality of remaining sin to discourage us. What is the point? As Christians we are called to the mortification of sin, and there are three kinds of mortification. The first is one that all true Christians have experienced—God has transformed our weed patch into a garden. “And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.” (Gal. 5:24). The second is what all backslidden Christians are called to. “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5). The tense of mortify here indicates that it is to be an “over and done” action. You are digging up big weeds from your garden. You are not permitted to “phase out” the big weeds. The third kind of mortification is daily and ongoing. “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Rom. 8:13). This is tending the garden also, but it is the gardener going out every morning at 5 am to pull weeds. And you always find something.

Worship

The last thing I would want to do is upbraid you over not worshiping the Lord when the only reason I could speak to you is that you are here. But I do want to remind you of the importance of weekly worship. “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching” (Heb. 10:25).

This is not a lecture, and you are not coming here for mere data. This is a covenant renewal service, and you are coming here to be strengthened, edified and built up. “For thou verily givest thanks well, but the other is not edified” (1 Cor. 14:17). Paul is constantly after edification. The worship service is a construction zone. There should be spiritual sawdust all over the place. The word for edified there is oikodomeo, a compound word meaning to put the roof on the house. Mark a difference between an emotional blessing, say where you get choked up, say, and edification, where you come out of the service with a wall knocked out and a load of two-by-fours on the lawn.

And remember that the service culminates in the Lord’s Supper, where all the blessings of the entire service (the music, the readings, the preaching) are sealed for us. The relationship between the sermon and the sacrament is not that of paired items that complement each other, like wine and cheese, or ham and eggs. Rather the relationship of preaching (and the whole service) is like cooking and the Lord’s Supper is like . . .  eating. Services with great preaching and no sacrament are like watching celebrity chefs on television. Services with little mini-sermons (for all the mini-Christians) and Big Eucharist are like some kind of raw foods thing. Here’s your bag of carrots.

Read the Word

We are Christians who worship God the Father through the Word. As people of the Word, we are people of the Word. We are to be steeped in the Scriptures. Our lives are to marinate in it.

Consider what the Word says about our relationship to the Word. “And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart” (Deut. 6:6). The king was required to copy out God’s law by hand for himself (Dt. 17:18-19). He was to have this Word so that he might learn to fear God. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Ps. 119:11). Indeed, for a robust understanding of the role of Scripture, meditate on all of Psalm 119. “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Pet. 2:2). When the Spirit was poured out on the day of Pentecost, one of the results was that the people dedicated themselves to the apostles teaching (Acts 2:42).

This is why, incidentally, the Bible Reading Challenge has been such a good thing. Read the Word.

And Pray

The prayers we offer up together on the Lord’s Day are the prayers of this congregation. They are not meant to replace your own prayers. Rather, they help to train and shape your prayers.

“Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). “Brethren, pray for us” (1 Thess. 5:25). “Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms” (Jas. 5:13).

For many Christians, private prayer is a great trouble spot. So let me conclude with two bits of counsel on learning how to pray. First, don’t be too proud to learn how to pray by learning to pray the Lord’s Prayer. Let Jesus teach you. That’s what that prayer is for. And second, start taking risks by asking for specific things. That way you will know if the prayer is answered, right?

And don’t forget to offer it all in the name of Jesus.

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Honest With God: Confession of Sin

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Introduction

I would like to spend this week and next addressing honesty with God, and what it means to grow in grace. In brief, there are two elements to growth in grace. The first is the removal of impediments to that growth, which we will address this week, and the second is the presence of that which feeds grace. The first is negative, dealing with sin, and the second is positive, which has to do with the reception of means of grace.

Think of a house plant that has been knocked over, and the pot has been shattered. If the plant is to grow and flourish, it is necessary to repot it . . . but repotting a plant is not the same thing as watching it grow. Repotting is what is happening when sins are confessed. Growth is what happens when the soil is rich, the sunlight plentiful, and water is abundant.

The Text

“He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: But whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy” (Proverbs 28:13).

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Summary of the Text

I have entitled this short series Honesty With God, and such honesty is essential to all true confession. Let us start with the passage from Proverbs. A man who covers his own sins will not prosper. It is striking that this action of covering is positive or negative depending on how it is happening. The word for cover here (ksh) also means to forgive. “Hatred stirreth up strifes: But love covereth [same word] all sins” (Prov. 10:12). Covering is what love does, and covering is what a self-absorbed sinner does on his hell-bent way to “not prospering.” A man does not have the authority to cover (forgive) his own sins. The offense was against God (Ps. 51:4), and so God must forgive. What is God’s way in this? The man who confesses (honesty), the man who forsakes (true repentance) is the man who finds mercy from God.

We find the same element of honesty in the passage from 1 John. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. The word for confess here is homo (meaning the same) and logeo (which means to speak). To confess is to “speak the same thing” that God is saying. We do not engage in any spin control. Note that God is the one who does the forgiving, and God is the one who does the cleansing. We do the acknowledging. So what do we contribute to this process of confession? We contribute the sin, which creates the need for forgiveness, and we contribute the honesty about the sin, which engages the promises of God—promises that ride on the fact that He is faithful, and that He is just.

What Shifts and Evasions Look Like

What are some of the shifts and evasions we employ to keep from doing what God summons us to do? Here are just a few. We justify what we did. What we did was really right, we say. We excuse what we did. It was wrong, but it all happened so fast, and besides, she started it. We hide what we did. Nobody knows about it and nobody is going to know about it. We confess what we did in vague terms. Lord, please forgive me for anything I might have done today. We rename what we did. Everybody makes mistakes. We shrug over what we did. Nobody’s perfect. We give up over what we did. I am going to do it again, so why bother? We barter over what we did. Restitution would be too costly. We pass the buck over what we did. The woman you gave me. We postpone dealing with what we did. I’ll confess it next Sunday. We are overwhelmed by what we did. Nobody could forgive that.

Honest on Our Behalf

Now the problem for us is that we live in a world that is simultaneously corrupt and, more importantly, dishonest about the depth of that corruption. All we have to do is be honest about our sin, the man says. But how? We can no more do that than we can achieve perfection in any other area. And here is the gospel of grace.

Jesus did not just die for you so that the penalty might be paid for the sins you committed. He did do that on the cross, but Scripture teaches us that all of the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us who believe. So you are afraid because you are such an imperfect repenter? Are you discouraged because it is so hard to be honest about things like this? Christ didn’t just die for you, He also repented for you (Rom. 5:10; 2 Cor. 5:21). From the very beginning of His ministry, He identified with sinners, and He—the sinless one—went through the humiliation of receiving a baptism of repentance. Why would He do that? The man who administered it to Him wondered the same thing.

“And John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I need to be baptized by You, and are You coming to me?” But Jesus answered and said to him, “Permit it to be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed Him” (Matt. 3:14–15, NKJV).

Now He did not repent so that you wouldn’t have to repent. Rather, He repented so that you could learn how to repent, following in His footsteps, freed from all condemnation (Rom. 8:1). Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. Let the one who repents, repent in the Lord. Let the one who is learning to walk honestly with God, walk honestly with Him in the honesty of Christ. This is what it means to walk in the light.

“But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

Walking in Christ means walking in the light. Walking in the light means walking honestly. And that means you will always be dealing with your sins in a well-lit area. Christ is that light.

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