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New Testament

Biblical Imitation: Looking Into the Mirror and Not Forgetting What You Look Like (Troy)

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But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.  2 Corinthians 3:18

First, imitation serves as an example of God’s design in how he made the world.  He is the master craftsman, and his world is built to run on a certain mix of fuel.  Inputs drive outputs, and imitation links these together.  In this sense, imitation is inescapable.  It’s not if, but who?  Second, the principle of imitation is intricately linked to how we live our lives and how we raise our kids.  Finally, Scripture show us to how we can take this principle of God’s design and push it into the corners of our daily lives.  The fact that we are starting a new year, adds the spice of considering how we can work our understanding of imitation into real change in our lives versus vain resolutions.  

GOD’S DESIGN – IMITATION

Proverbs 22:24-25, “Make no friendship with an angry man, And with a furious man do not go, Lest you learn his ways and set a snare for your soul.”

IMITATION COMMANDS: DO’S AND DON’TS

3 John 1:11, “Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God.”

IMITATION – PUTTING THIS INTO PRACTICE

Hebrews 13:7, Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.

Test for what you are reading or watching  (social media)

Philippians 4:8, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.  

PRAYER IN LIGHT OF IMITATING CHRIST

With Christ — Mark 3:14

Like Christ — 2 Corinthian 3:18

For Christ — 2 Corinthians 5:14-15

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State of the Church 2024 – On Hard Work & Holy Ambition (King’s Cross)

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INTRODUCTION

In our day, it is commonplace to hear messages on the need for work/life balance, the need for “me time,” and the dangers of workaholics, ambition, and stress. And I am convinced that 99% of it is a siren song for laziness, apathy, selfishness, and cowardice. 

The Lord created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day, and our Lord Jesus remade the world in three days and rested on the first day, re-affirming the Sabbath principle and transforming the first day into the Christian Sabbath (cf. Heb. 4:9-10). But the Kingdom of God is taken by a kind of holy violence, that is, great struggle and ambition (Mt. 11:12). 

The Text: “Then came to him the mother of Zebedee’s children with her sons, worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him. And he said unto her, What wilt thou? She saith unto him, Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom…” (Mt. 20:20-28).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

One time Mrs. Zebedee and her two sons came to worship Christ, and she asked for her sons to be given places of honor at His right and left hand (Mt. 20:20-21). Jesus gently corrected her, insisting that she didn’t quite know what she was asking for (Mt. 20:22), but His question in return did not utterly reject the request. He asked whether James and John would be able to endure the suffering that would be required for that kind of glory and authority (Mt. 20:22). When they replied in the affirmative, Jesus granted at least that – they would drink His cup and endure His baptism, but those places of authority were prepared by His Father (Mt. 20:22-23). 

While the other ten were upset with James and John for even making the request (probably envious that they had not asked first), Jesus did not rebuke the brothers but exhorted them all to give up every semblance of Gentile power-grabbing (Mt. 20:24-25). Instead, His disciples must be committed to the greatness that comes through long service and suffering (Mt. 20:26-27). This greatness is principally illustrated and accomplished by the suffering service of Christ Himself, who gave His life as a ransom for many (Mt. 20:28). 

HOLY AMBITION

Jesus does not say that desiring greatness and authority is wrong or foolish. Instead, He simply insists on two things: first, the only path to greatness is faithful suffering, and second, the results are in God’s hands. But if Jesus is the prime example, this does not mean that Christians should hope for minimal earthly impact or influence. Rather, if Jesus has been given the name that is above all other names through His obedient suffering, all Christians should seek to emulate that obedience to gain greatness under His name. For example, Paul says that he outpaced all the other apostles in his zeal for the kingdom, but it was God’s grace that enabled him (1 Cor. 15:10). It’s true that we ought rather be janitors in the Kingdom of God than dwell in tents of wickedness (Ps. 84:10), but that doesn’t mean our goal should be mediocre. Our goal should be to work hard for the King, enduring all trouble and difficulty gladly for His sake, and let Him use us where He will.   

FAITHFUL WITH LITTLE

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the parable of the talents, praising the servants who invested what was given to them and doubled the master’s money: “well done, good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord” (Mt. 25:21, 23). But the servant who buried his talent in the ground and merely returned what was given is called wicked and slothful, his one talent is stripped from him, and he is cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Mt. 25:26-30). And his most heinous sin is his view of the master as a hard and greedy man, which is why he is cast into Hell. But God is not hard and greedy; He is generous and bountiful. 

APPLICATIONS

We need Christians who know that their Father is a generous God who will give abundantly more than we ask or think – because He has already given us His son – and therefore, they study, work, and build with a holy ambition and deep, joyful expectation. 

The way God made the world requires the necessity of study and service first. There is a caricature of some of the younger generations (e.g. “Gen Z”) of a sort of entitlement mentality, insisting on easy, high paying jobs without proving your wisdom or worth. These are people who quit jobs after a few days or weeks because they are “hard” and they don’t feel very “appreciated.” This should be a completely foreign notion for Christians. We need young men hungry for vocations of leadership in politics and the corporate world. This is call for Daniels and Josephs, which is to say, these are paths of suffering, persecution, hardship, often with real leadership and authority, though only rarely with much temporal glory. 

This is why we have put such a premium on Christian education. But it is not enough to merely remove our kids from the public schools. We really do want our sons and daughters to be full of knowledge and wisdom, and this requires wisdom to know how to raise the bar while remember their frame. Related, while our sons and daughters are called to different vocations, this does not mean that our daughters need be less educated. Let us have wives and daughters as ambitious as Mrs. Zebedee and sons like her sons. 

We need young men hungry for pastoral ministry and missionary work. Jesus said that the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few (Mt. 9:37-38). It has always been the case, since at least the time of Jesus, that unbelievers are more eager to come into the kingdom than believers are to welcome them in. But there is a particular glory in the sacrifices of those who give their lives to proclaim the gospel because it imitates the life of the One who has received all glory and honor.

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Have Yourself a Merry Little Postmill – Christmas Eve Service (Doug Wilson)

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The point this evening is not to load your Christmas down with any exegetical postmill work, which has been done elsewhere. This is just intended as a simple word of Christmas encouragement—I do not seek to persuade you in these few minutes, but rather to embolden you.

It may well be that you even call yourself postmill and are happy to say that it is your doctrinal stance. You certainly live in a community that is characterized by postmill teaching and expectations. Well and good, but it may still be possible that this goon show of a century has gotten you down a time or two.

Your eschatology may say that the name of the Lord will be great among the Gentiles, from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same (Mal. 1:11). Your doctrinal commitments may well affirm that the earth is going to be filled up with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Hab. 2:14). The books on your shelf may well argue that the root of Jesse will be raised up as a standard, and all the Gentiles shall seek Him (Is. 11:10). Yes, certainly.

But the last time you checked, dudes could marry dudes, teens were being legally mutilated in the name of pronoun madness, and half the population believes that if we raise our taxes and give more power to the EPA, the government promises to fix the weather.

It is easy, in other words, to come to feel like a thick fog can somehow erase the sun, moon and stars. This is a possible discouragement even in our postmill circles. And so this message of Christmas grace is that our sovereign God has stooped down to us in order to remind us how transient evil is, and how permanent His goodness is. Christmas is a stiff breeze that demonstrates that a fog is a lot easier to scrub than the sun, moon and stars are.

But when you look for God to move, remember that He doesn’t do things the way we would have predicted. Take, for example, how He established the first beachhead of His everlasting kingdom in an animal’s food trough. Who among us would have called that move beforehand?

“Of the increase of his government there will be no end.” But we should know by now that we do not define increase the same way that He does. John the Baptist said that he was going to decrease, while the Lord was going to increase. But then what did that increase look like? It looked like agony in the Garden, and a flogging, and spittle in the face, and a crown of thorns. He will increase, but you must read all the way through to the end.

After God had spoken all His raw materials into existence, speaking to a darkness that was nothing at all, that created matter was still shrouded in darkness. And so at that point, what was the first thing God ever said in this world? “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). He simply said light, and there it was. And so when the earth was an inchoate and shapeless mass of dark matter, when darkness was over the face of the deep (Gen. 1:2), all He did was simply speak.

This created darkness was His raw material, and it provided the apostle Paul with a marvelous illustration for God’s power over a different sort of darkness—the darkness of our rebellious iniquity.

“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”

2 Corinthians 4:6–7 (KJV)

The created darkness of the shapeless void and the rebellious darkness of mankind’s sin and rebellion have this one thing in common. Neither one can resist the voice of God’s authority when that authority says anything like, “Let there be light.”

Tiglath-pileser, Caesar Augustus, Herod, Pilate, Sanballat, Shalmaneser, Pharaoh, Bismarck, Napoleon, Attila the Hun, Woodrow Wilson, Genghis Khan, what are they? They are all of them principalities and powers who breath through the nose. Let there be light.

Pornography, propaganda, pandemics, police states, what are they? Let there be light.

Darwinism, socialism, feminism, egalitarianism, fascism, environmentalism, mysticism, what are they? Let there be light.

The God who spoke the cosmos out of nothing is certainly capable of speaking a new cosmos out of the old one. He can make sons of Abraham out of rocks, remember.

So when you look around at all the black rock of man’s iniquitous folly, you should certainly look straight at it without flinching. You should confess that it is in fact an enormous amount of iniquitous folly, all of it dark, bent, and twisted rock. But never forget that you are also looking at God’s own quarry, from which He is going to speak into existence a cathedral of light, built entirely out of living stones, and the pavers all made from transparent gold.

So the Christmas message is much more than the fact that God conquers and overcomes evil. He does do that, but there is a greater mystery involved. The Christmas message is that God is in the process of creating something marvelous, using evil as His raw material. All the laws, and conspiracies, and plans, and movements, and resolutions, and plots . . . all the things that have us so worried . . . are nothing but scraps on His workshop floor.

“Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Luke 12:32 (KJV)

And what a glorious kingdom that will be. That kingdom of light, inhabited by children of light (Eph. 5:8) . . . where did it start? That kingdom of light began in those pitch-black nights that enveloped Bethlehem, and the shepherds, and the sheep, and the wise men.

It was truly dark. But the star wasn’t.

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Have Yourself A Covenantal Christmas (Advent Grab Bag #4) (King’s Cross)

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INTRODUCTION

The birth of Christ is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Adam, renewed with Noah and Abraham and David. And the overarching promise is a promise of mercy and the remission of our sins, which is like the sun coming up after a long dark night. 

The Text: “And his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Ghost, and prophesied, saying, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people, and hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David…” (Lk. 1:67-79).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT

This song of Zacharias is traditionally called the “Benedictus,” after the first word of the song: “blessed” (Lk. 1:67), and this song of praise centers on God’s faithfulness to His covenant promises to Israel (Lk. 1:68). The salvation that is coming is a direct fulfillment of promises to David (Lk. 1:69), but really all of the prophets since the beginning of the world, that we should be saved from all our enemies (Lk. 1:70-71). This was His holy covenant of mercy promised to our fathers, going back to Abraham, that we would be delivered from all our enemies and serve God in holiness and righteousness (Lk. 1:72-75). This song of praise is particularly for the birth of Zacharias’s son, John, who will be the prophet of God, to prepare the way of the Lord (Lk. 1:76). What God is ushering in is a greater knowledge of salvation through the remission of their sins, which is like the sun coming up at day break, giving light to everyone everywhere (Lk. 1:77-79). 

ONE COVENANT OF GRACE

One of the central themes of this song is covenant continuity. The birth of John and the coming Messiah are the “fulfillment” of all the covenant promises of all the prophets since the world began (Lk. 1:70-73). This began in the Garden of Eden after Adam sinned: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel… And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all the living” (Gen. 3:15, 20). This was the first covenant promise and prophecy of God’s mercy. But it was reaffirmed to Noah when God mercifully promised to never destroy the earth again and reissued the Dominion Mandate (Gen. 9:7-12). Likewise, God promised to be Abraham’s God and the God of his children after him, to bless all the families of the earth through his seed, and Abraham was justified by faith alone in these promises of God (Gen. 12, 15, 17). It was on the basis of those covenant promises to Abraham that God called Moses in His mercy to deliver Israel from Egypt and gave them His law (Ex. 3). It was the same covenant of mercy that God renewed with David, promising that he would have a son who would reign over the house of Israel forever (2 Sam. 7:12-29). 

A NEW COVENANT NOT LIKE THE OLD ONE

However, Zacharias’s song also indicates that something new is happening with the birth of John: there are some significant differences between the Old Covenant with the fathers and the New Covenant in Jesus (Heb. 8:7-9). This is why we also rightly speak of two covenants (Old and New) under the Covenant of Grace. We can call them covenant administrations of the one Covenant of Grace because that is the basis of salvation for all saints in both covenants: all were/are saved by faith in God’s promise to take away our sins (Lk. 1:72-75). But there really are some striking differences. It was the same “sun,” but the Old Covenant was the “night” of the history of the world and all the sacrifices and prophecies were like the reflection of the moon (think of God’s promise to Abraham, pointing at the stars in the night sky), but when Jesus was born, the sun rose over the horizon: “the dayspring/the sunrise… to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Lk. 1:78-79).

Hebrews is all about the vast improvement of the New Covenant and the futility of returning to the Old. The New Covenant is better because Christ is the perfect High Priest (Heb. 7), Christ is the perfect and final sacrifice for sin (Heb. 9), and because the offer of forgiveness is clearer and more effective (Heb. 10). This means we do believe that the New Covenant is far more potent, efficacious, and expansive (Heb. 8:10-12, 10:16-17). However, even Hebrews indicates that there are some who come into “the knowledge of the truth… who trod underfoot the Son of God” (Heb. 10:26, 29), who like Esau sell their birthright (Heb. 12:15-17), and fall away (Heb. 6:4-6). And so the warning is to flee all lust, complaining, idolatry, and pride (1 Cor. 10:1-14). Flee to His mercy.

APPLICATIONS

The central question is this: does God’s covenant mercy still extend (in history) through families? The Song of Zacharias says, yes. But what if some do not believe? What if some fall away? The sun is still risen. It’s still getting lighter. And what exactly is getting more and more clear and obvious? The grace of God.   

The covenant mercy of God is extended primarily through households, and in particular, through men who take responsibility for communicating that mercy to their households. This begins with believing that this is true: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved; and thy house” (Acts 16:31). This also includes praying for your house, both confessing sin and asking for grace for them (Job 1:5, 1 Pet. 3:7). And then teaching, correcting, and leading in grace. But you can’t give what you don’t have. 

What came upon that midnight clear was the Daybreak of God’s covenant mercy, the Sunrise of His tender mercy to families; not dark clouds of covenant condemnation, not the bleakness of covenant fear and anxiety, not the harshness of covenant threatening. Yes, we are required to speak the truth, but the truth about sin is that Christ was born to take it away. Christ was born for this.

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