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A Favorite Verse That is So Much More

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By Dan Amos

Have you ever run across a verse that acts as the proverbial two-by-four upside the head? I can definitely point to Romans 1:20 as an example. I read it. Then I re-read it over and over. I pondered it and printed it out and posted it on my monitor at work. It was such a foundational verse, one that underpins my worldview and helps to explain our current situation.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse (Romans 1:20).

This is a verse of incredible hope to me. God created. He’s in control, always has been and always will be. While He has chosen to limit His revelation to us, enough is there that we can know, whether we are a scientist or not. There’s enough evidence to acknowledge His majesty, that we have to actively deny Him to not see it. I see how we are fearfully and wonderfully made and I know that I don’t have the kind of faith to believe inorganic matter spontaneously came alive on its own and overcame entropy to organize into the complex, interdependent organisms that are people.

The rest of the chapter is less hopeful, more instructive as it describes the consequences of our denial:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ( Romans 1: 21-22)

We know the consequences of our sin and that of our ancestors. What was made very good was spoiled. Life became difficult and finite as a result. What we are experiencing today was not part of His plan, but it is redeemable even in the tragedy and loss.

I count myself fortunate and blessed in this time. I am thankful more than ever and for more than before. I have often given thanks for those who serve in our military, law enforcement and medical service. Now, I recognize my gratitude for the truckers, the clerks, the stockers. I am thankful for all those people who make everyday living possible and who continue on today under difficult conditions and often with smiles under their masks. I hope as we return to a new normal, whatever that may be, that we don’t forget how we were served so well by so many.

There are many who are making an extraordinary effort on our behalf. We have Sunday service because of many sacrificially serving. Every week because of people like Lars P. and Gregg Z., we are getting closer and closer connected while physically apart. How wonderful that they are harnessing technology to serve.

And of course the Good News is we are not doomed to condemnation without hope:

But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus (Romans 3:21-24)

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The Heart of Sin

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By Kendrick & Janna Gilli

“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.” Proverbs 14:34 (NIV)

 Pastor Steve was right when he said that Americans hate the word sin. We are fiercely independent and do not like being told what to do or what we are, and so when it comes to being called sinful, Americans bristle at it. Americans also like to believe that people are basically good—maybe a few bad mistakes in life, maybe a few bad apples in the bunch. This, of course, starts as a baby and a toddler, because they are so cute and angelic.

And we wonder why so many people feel hurt by Christians! We tell people that they are sinful from birth. Often the familiar response is, “What! My cute little angelic baby is sinful?” We tell people that only the Holy Spirit can help us realize our sin and work on it and we get, “I don’t need no stinkin’ help; you can’t tell me what to do!” We tell people that only Jesus can wash away our sin so that we can be with Him in heaven. The response is often, “What do you mean? What are talking about? I am a good person and those anger issues are because it is overcast here so much. It is not really my fault.”Job said it best: “I have concealed my sin as people do, by hiding my guilt in my heart” (Job 31:33).

People equate the idea of sin as gigantic and associated with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. No, that baby is not Hitler. No, just because you get mad doesn’t mean that you are Stalin. Why can’t people realize that we don’t have to be Stalin to be sinful? People tell others all the time that they do not have to be perfect. If this is true, then they must recognize on some level that everybody has faults (i.e., sins).

 A favorite story in my family goes back to when I was a few months old and my sister was one year older. She liked to pick up a doll and hit me with it. What was in her heart that made her want to hit her baby brother? What about when my daughter would throw temper tantrums when she was two to four years old? Sin is in our hearts even as children, and we need help from our parents to recognize it and deal with it. Even the world agrees that parents need to teach their children right from wrong. However, the world also believes that once we have grown up, we magically stop doing things wrong. In fact, the “wrong things” as an adult are just considered “choices,” that we are just being whom we choose to be. Sin has become a bad word or politically incorrect.

It is also interesting how, as Americans, we persist in thinking we do not need any help. We love to help others but are too proud to ask for any help ourselves. What would you do if your car broke down in the middle of the intersection and four guys came to help you push it out of the way? Would you refuse? Of course not! Then why do we refuse help with correcting mistakes we make? Why are we not willing to accept help from God? He just wants to help us be better and when we do things wrong, He wants to forgive us. Yet, we believe that we can solve our problems ourselves or we are too proud to ask God to help us change.

 As a nation, we seem to have gone to the extreme with our pride and denial. In fact, Satan is doing a darn good job pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. So as Christians, how do we deal with this? The first part of this answer is recognizing the truth and asking God to convict us and to show us our sin; then, we must be willing to ask Him to change us from the inside out. The second part of this answer is LOVE. Being Christ to the world and living with love will open up doorways to conversations about sin and God’s solution for it. And finally, the last part of the answer is prayer; we need to be prayer warriors and to ask God for grace and opportunities to share the gospel with unbelievers. We need to fight against the lies that Satan is spreading, lies that make us complacent and okay with our sin. An unseen war is raging all around us, and we need to put on our armor daily and pray that God opens our eyes to it.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:10–12)

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The Riches of His Grace

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……By Jeff Foerster

In this week’s sermon on the book of Ephesians, Brian Sharpe laid out for us three precepts for living as a redeemed people. They are as follows:

These are good; these are great. But there is a problem: me. I want to make these powerful guidelines simply checklist items to perform and then put away. I might even take out the list daily, but only to make sure I’ve “accomplished” each item. These three points are spot on; the problem is the depth of sin’s corruption in me. I am not as bad as I could be, but every area of my being has been tainted by sin.

Wow, how depressing, right? Stay with me for just a little longer—the solution is lovely.

The other day, while watching a Seahawks game on the tele, I heard a rapping at my door. What should appear before my eyes, but two messengers of slavery. I engaged them in conversation, during which one suggested as a precept that “We are all God’s children, right?” Uh, no—sorry dude. If all people begin as God’s children and then I am promised the right to become a child of God, the foundation of Scripture becomes a wee bit uninspiring, and Jesus’s sacrifice becomes merely symbolic nicety. In truth, we have a default position, judged guilty, and a default destination, everlasting separation from God in Hell.

Okay, I promised “lovely,” but I gave you “Hell”—not without purpose, however. Only the propitiation and expiation of the cross and the resurrection can establish right relationship with God, rescuing us from the penalty of sin. We receive this not by being born in the flesh, but by being born of the Spirit. Only in understanding the depth of our depravity, our foundation in darkness, can we truly appreciate what Christ has done for us in redeeming us from the grave, from death itself! From this perspective, we begin to desire to know of God and to know God, to spend time with this God who becomes our Father, not the One we deserve, but the One we need. We needed saving, and in His abundant generosity, He also gave us a home and a future.

From this position building into desire, longing, we can recognize that sin and Satan have no hold on us, the Bible teaching us that we are born again, into life, and not into the ways of death. When we “walk” by spending time with our God in silence and in speaking, in prayer and petition, while working and while planning, while driving and while shopping, we will have neither time nor inclination to go down the “path of the prostitute.” When in close relationship with our Father, the Lord of all glory, we will clearly see our sin for what it is, our hearts will be broken for it, and we will, in repentance, fall on His mercy and purpose to walk, nay, RUN in the other direction. Simply, success is found in an ongoing relationship with the living God.

I end with Brian’s question: How should knowing we have an inheritance affect the way we live? His answer: take your eyes off the present and place them on the future. Our future is Christ—FOREVER!

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Why I’m So Messed Up!

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By Nate Champneys

I can’t remember a time in my life where I wasn’t in church. I remember being three years old and being in the toddler nursery. I remember my Sunday school teacher, “Teacher Lynn,” a sweet retired woman who taught my preschool Sunday school class. I had a really great family life. Loving Christian parents, a family that loved me, great friends, great school, great church. Pretty much cookie cutter in almost every way. I couldn’t ask for a better childhood. And yet, I am piece of work. I really am as broken and messed up as they come. I used to think, “I may not be perfect, because nobody really is, but I’ve got it mostly together.” I would look at other people who had different problems than me and think, “Wow, they need counseling.” I would never come out and say, “I am better than you,” but subconsciously that is exactly what I believed.

A few months ago I started meeting with a retired friend for mentoring, and God has really been using him in my life to show me just how broken and messed up I really am. Honestly, it’s shocking. How can I have been so blind for so long to the depths of my own depravity? And how can I have judged so many people for all their problems? I’ve got anger issues, daddy issues, pride, guilt, shame, and immaturity, just to name a few. There are times in my life when I behave a certain way and I just don’t understand why. I am just so broken.

As human beings our depravity is kind of like the Pacific Ocean. Every one of us is really messed up. This is why the Bible says, “Our righteousness’s are like filthy rags.” Anything good we bring to the table is truly laughable when compared to the ocean of our sin. Many of us will blame our childhood or our parents for our brokenness. The reality is our parents were broken, and their parents were broken, and right now I am passing on my brokenness to my children, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. Everything is broken. Don’t get me wrong, God is in the middle of all this, slowly but steadily bringing healing. But it’s kind of like using a teaspoon to empty the Pacific Ocean. It’s ludicrous to think that this side of eternity we will ever come close to emptying the ocean of our depravity. But that has never been the point. I used to think that when I reached my 80s that I would be almost perfect. But the more I look around, the more I realize I have never found a human being who is almost perfect. This is a fantasy. Everyone, no matter the age, is still broken. Again, perfection is really not the point. It’s never been the point.

So what is the point then? The Scriptures say that, “While we were YET sinners, Christ died for us.” God did everything He did for you (including dying for you), not to make you a better person, but so that He could be with you. Granted, by being with Him, we can’t help but start to become more like He is. His love is so deep for you that He says, “I will love you in the midst of your ocean of sin. As you spend time with Me, I will heal you teaspoon by teaspoon, and some day, when this life is over, I will make you completely new.”

So when I condemn other people for their brokenness, I am basically saying, “I am better than you because God has removed 2,457 teaspoons out of my ocean of depravity and He has only taken 2,456 out of yours.” Ridiculous, right? God is calling us to a different way of thinking. He is calling us to be broken and messed up together. To be okay with being works in progress. Not to condemn each other, but to “spur each other on to love and good deeds.”

Hebrews 10:21-24

“And since we have a great High Priest who rules over God’s house, let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts fully trusting Him. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep His promise. Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works.”

 

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Starting Point to the Kingdom

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By Beau Leaman

Jesus starts the Sermon on the Mount by saying, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit” (Matthew 5:3). I believe all Scripture to be intentional, persuasive, and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and for training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16). It is for this reason that Jesus intentionally started the Sermon on the Mount with this key phrase, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit.” What exactly does this phrase mean? Does it mean the Spirit of God inside us must be poor? Is it talking about our own spirit? Does it refer to our personal happy barometer in how we’re feeling? Does it refer to our hope and endurance? Does it mean that those feeling thankful in the moment are blessed? I believe in order for us to ask the question we have to understand two points. These points are both fundamental and foundational if we’re to ask the question, “What exactly does this phrase mean?” Let’s begin discussion.

The first of two points we must ask ourselves in answering this question has to do with the awareness of our depravity. As fallen creatures, we often stumble around keeping clear of the “major sins” of today’s evangelical Christianity. For some of us (depending on where you’re at), I think it’s easy to get caught in the feel-good bubble because we have not committed adultery, engaged in drunkenness, or are in a homosexual lifestyle. We often replace these “major sins” with “respectable sins.” Examples would include: gossip, gluttony, outbursts of anger, lust, slander, etc. Later, in Matthew 5:8, He continues with saying, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” God calls us to purity and holiness and the more we are pure and holy, the more we shall see God. Our depravity fits perfectly with this analogy. The more we realize what separates us from God, the greater the realization of our depravity. Oswald Chambers says, “The underlying foundation of Jesus Christ’s kingdom is poverty, not possessions; not making decisions for Jesus, but having a sense of absolute futility that we finally admit, ‘Lord, I cannot even begin to do it.’ … The knowledge of our own poverty is what brings us to the proper place where Jesus Chris accomplishes His work.” This leads to the second point.

In Matthew 4:17 it says, “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Jesus starts his initial preaching with a call to repentance and starts the Sermon on the Mount with a call to realize our need for God’s help. What a point to be made! Repentance is the natural follow-up once we realize the proper place He holds in our life. This repentance cries from a genuine heart of poverty and genuine trust that He will and has the power to forgive us. This forgiveness frees us to do His work without any footholds restraining us to doing His work.

May God grant us the wisdom to realize and acknowledge those areas of our life we’ve held back from having a genuine and heartfelt relationship with Him. May God grant us the power to talk with Him no matter how big or small the circumstance may be. May God open our eyes so our faith and trust in Him would increase all the more for His Kingdom’s sake.

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Suffering

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By Tomina Sharpe

As I have processed through the news this week of my dear friend Nancy’s worsening cancer, I have really been in turmoil. I know that in light of eternity it is not going to matter to me whether I lived on this earth 1 year or 100 years. The number of years that any of us has on this earth is completely up to God and His sovereign plan.  If God chooses now to take Nancy at the young age of 49, I can accept that as His plan, even though it is not what I or anyone else would choose.

What my mind has been in turmoil about and unable to accept has been seeing my friend’s pain and suffering and knowing the pain and suffering that her family is experiencing. Cancer is a horrendous disease that was never God’s intention for anyone to experience. Over the years I have seen this disease in action from afar. It has come closer to home for me recently as I have watched Nancy go through it and as I watched my grandfather die from it in February. Cancer is horrific and the pain goes on and on over long periods of time.

As I was thinking about this today, my mind went to the pain that Jesus suffered on the cross and I questioned for a while whether even Jesus suffered as much as I see those with cancer suffering. Jesus’ pain lasted a matter of days while those with cancer can suffer for years. I felt almost blasphemous even thinking the thought that someone else suffered more than Jesus. But then it hit me. The physical suffering that Jesus went through, while horrible, was nothing compared to the suffering that He went through when he took our sin upon Himself and the Father turned His back on Him.

We measure our life through the lens of time, but I don’t know that Jesus experienced this suffering within the framework of time. I cannot comprehend the suffering that my friend Nancy is going through and I pray I will never experience that suffering myself to understand it. But I know that nobody on this earth has ever experienced anything close to the suffering that Jesus felt on the cross when He took our sin upon Himself and the Father turned His back upon our Savior. This brings me to my knees before my Jesus and I can only weep at the love that He must have for me and for the whole world to willingly endure this.

As I see those around me that have suffering forced upon them through cancer or loss, I have to remember that Jesus didn’t have suffering forced upon Him. He chose it. He chose it out of love. Whatever suffering I may experience on this earth can only serve to remind me of the suffering that He experienced on my behalf. While I would never willingly choose to experience suffering such as my friend Nancy is experiencing, there is one joy that she is experiencing that I never may. She has a much more intimate knowledge of pain and suffering which gives her a deeper knowledge of the love that Jesus had in order to choose to suffer for us, a love so great that our minds will never be able to come close to wrapping around.

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride

See from His head, His hands, His feet
Sorrow and love flow mingled down
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet
Or thorns compose so rich a crown

Were the whole realm of nature mine
That were an offering far too small
LOVE SO AMAZING, SO DIVINE
DEMANDS MY SOUL, MY LIFE, MY ALL

O, the wonderful cross
O, the wonderful cross
Bids me come and die and find
That I may truly live
O, the wonderful cross
O, the wonderful cross
All who gather here by grace
Draw near and bless Your name

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