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For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3)
Since we are united to Christ, God regards us in the identical way he does Christ. The Father treats us exactly the same way as he does his own eternal and beloved Son.
-Robert Letham, Union with Christ: In Scripture, History, and Theology, p. 53.
That is what it means to be hidden in Christ! The Father sees Christ instead of me. Thus, He relates to me as He relates to Christ for He sees the beloved Son in my place.
Oh to have this truth capture my mind!
When I feel anxious about desires unmet. When I feel distant from the Lord. When I feel that I miss out because of my striving to please the Lord. When I fail to please the Lord. When I feel the pull to give into sin. When I have no desire to do the things God wants me to do. When I feel unloved. And in pretty much ever other circumstance and thought this truth needs to be the determiner of how I understand and live in this world.
Do I hate sin because of its offense to God, or the offense it does to me? The answer to that question is massive. In contemplating over that answer I was reminded of this quote,
We are transformed into Christ’s image—that’s what sanctification is—by steadfast seeing and savoring of the glory of Christ…The work of the Holy Spirit in changing us is not to work directly on our bad habits but to make us admire Jesus Christ so much that sinful habits feel foreign and distasteful.
-John Piper, God is the Gospel, p 91-92.
The needed focus of my eyes and heart is clear—Jesus Christ. Not my sins. Focusing on my sins puts me in the center where the central thing I worry about is sin consequences to me. Instead, my central focus should be the glory of Christ so that He is center. And with that focus comes the killing of sin.
By His death, Christ purchased all the grace and glory that the God of all grace had designed for us. That is clear in Scripture: “For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Heb. 9:14). Alas for us poor creatures! For a long time after we are sanctified, we remain imperfect, lacking all and everything in comparison. How, then, are we perfected? Because Jesus Christ, by that one offering, perfectly purchased all that ever shall make up our perfection. It is finished in that sense. He so abundantly procured all by His death that He needed to offer Himself but once. If there were anything necessary to perfect a saint that Christ did not purchase, His offering must have been imperfect.
-Thomas Goodwin, Ephesians; Works 1:170, 173 quoted in A Habitual Sight of Him by Joel R. Beeke and Mark Jones, 91.
Regrets can be hard on us. Whether they are about our lives before our salvation or what happened yesterday. We think back about what could have been only if we had not messed up or if we did what we were suppose to. How are we to interact with these regrets?
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones helpfully lays out how we are to respond:
1. Dwelling on regrets is a waste of time. “Let us then lay this down as a principle. We must never for a second worry about anything that cannot be affected or changed by us. It is a waste of energy…You can sit down and be miserable and you can go round and round in circles of regret for the rest of your life but it will make no difference to what you have done.” (p. 82)
2. Failures in the past are not to make us depressed, but to spur us on to action. “if you really believe what you say about the past, if you really do bemoan the fact that you have wasted so much time in the past, the thing to do is to make up for it in the present. Is not that common sense?” (p. 83)
3. Turn away regret by focusing on who you are right now, at this moment. “What matters first of all if you are a Christian is not what you once were, but what you are…’I am what I am’—whatever the past may have been. It is what I am that matters. What am I? I am forgiven. I am reconciled to God by the Blood of His Son upon the Cross. I am a child of God. I am adopted into God’s family, and I am an heir with Christ, a joint-heir with Him. I am going to glory. That is what matters, not what I was, not what I have been.” (p. 85-86)
4. We are not to judge ourselves. “As Christians we must leave our judgement to Him [1 Cor. 4:1-4]. He is our Judge and you have no right to waste His time or your own time and energy in condemning yourself. Forget yourself, leave the judgement to Him; get on with the work.” (p. 87)
5. Forget yourself, know Him. “part of the trouble with these people is that they are still morbidly preoccupied with themselves, that they have not learned as Christians that they are to deny self and take up the Cross and follow Him and to leave themselves, past present and future in His hands….stop looking at yourself and begin to enjoy Him…If you were to feel more interest in Christ you would be less interested in yourself. Begin to look at Him, gaze upon Him with this open, unveiled face. And then go on to learn that in His Kingdom what matters is not the length of service but your attitude towards Him, your desire to please Him.” (p. 87-88)
6. Live knowing you are in the Kingdom of Grace. “Nothing Matters in the Kingdom but the grace of God…God has a different way of looking at things. He does not see as men do; He does not compute as they do; it is all grace from beginning to end…stop looking at what what you have not done and the years you have missed and realize that in His kingdom it is His grace alone that matters.” (p. 89)
To sum up, “Praise God for the fact that you are what you are, and that you are in the Kingdom.” (p. 90)
Quotes taken from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, p. 82-90
“Jesus is God and man in one person: man that he may feel our woes, God that he may help us out of them.”
- Charles H. Spurgeon, “Immanuel – The Light of Life” (sermon on Isaiah 9:1,2)
A minister must be learned, on pain of being utterly incompetent for his work. But before and above being learned, a minister must be godly.
Nothing could be more fatal, however, than to set these two things over against one another. Recruiting officers do not dispute whether it is better for soldiers to have a right leg or a left leg: soldiers should have both legs. Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. “What!” is the appropriate response, “than ten hours over your books, on your knees?” Why should you turn from God when you turn to your books, or feel that you must turn from your books in order to turn to God?
You are students of theology; and, just because you are students of theology, it is understood that you are religious men—especially religious men,to whom the cultivation of your religious life is a matter of the profoundest concern—of such concern that you will wish above all things to be warned of the dangers that may assail your religious life, and be pointed to the means by which you may strengthen and enlarge it.
In your case there can be no “either—or” here—either a student or a man of God. You must be both.
-Benjamin B. Warfield, The Religious Life of Theological Students, 182-183
I came across this and thought it was an insightful point about the genealogies of scripture which we tended to pass over
A key purpose of genealogies in some contexts is to show a divine purpose that moves history to a specific goal. It is easier to see the big picture when a wide-angle lens is used to look at the canon. Genesis begins with Adam, and the storyline quickly progresses through history, using genealogies, until Abraham arrives on the historical scene. The storyline follows Abraham and his descendants, and Genesis closes with Abraham’s grandson predicting that an individual from the family of a great grandson (Judah) would wield a ruling sceptre over all the nations and preside over an astonishingly fertile land (Ge. 49:8-12).
Stephen G. Dempster, Dominion and Dynasty: A Theology of the Hebrew Bible, p. 47-48.
This is not to say every genealogy fits this model, they are different for different contexts. It does, instead, at least instruct us that there are purposes in the genealogies. The authors under the direction of The Author had reasons for putting them in. It is our task and joy to explore and discover what those reasons are.
For the same end, that your hearts may be rightly fitted and framed for the performance of these principal duties, the Holy Scripture directs you to walk in the persuasion of other principal endowments of your new state –
- as that you have fellowship with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ (1 John 1:3);
- that you are the temple of the living God (2Cor. 6:16);
- that you live by the Spirit (Gal. 5:25);
- that you are called to holiness, and created in Christ Jesus to good works; that God would sanctify you wholly, and make you perfect in holiness at the last (1 Thess. 5:23; Eph. 2:10);
- that your old man is crucified with Christ; and through Him you are dead to sin, and alive to God; and, being made free from sin, you are become the servants of righteousness, and have your fruit to holiness, and the end everlasting life (Rom.6:6, 22);
- ‘You are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, shall appear, then shall you also appear with Him in glory’ (Col. 3:3, 4).
Such persuasions as these, when they are deeply rooted, and constantly maintained in our hearts, do strongly arm and encourage us to practice universal obedience, in opposition to every sinful lust; because we look on it, not only as our duty, but our great privilege, to do all things through Christ strengthening us.
-Walter Marshal, Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, p. 86.
From the outset of my Christian walk I have treasured the Book that speaks of the God of ultimate beginnings and ends, and illumines all that falls between. . . . An evangelical Christian believes incomparable good news: that Christ died in the stead of sinners and arose the third day as living head of the church of the twice-born, the people of God, whose mission is mandated by the scripturally given Word of God. The term evangelical—whose core is the “evangel”—therefore embraces the best of all good tidings, that on the ground of the substitutionary death of Christ Jesus, God forgives penitent sinners and he shelters their eternal destiny by the Risen Lord who triumphed over death and over all that would have destroyed him and his cause. That good news as the Apostle Paul makes clear, is validated and verified by the sacred Scriptures. Those who contrast the authority of Christ with the authority of Scripture do so at high risk. Scripture gives us the authentic teaching of Jesus and Jesus exhorted his apostles to approach Scripture as divinely authoritative. There is no confident road into the future for any theological cause that provides a fragmented Scriptural authority and—in consequence—an unstable Christology. Founded by the true and living Lord, and armed with the truthfulness of Scripture, the church of God is invincible. Whatever I might want to change in this pilgrim life, it would surely not be any of these high and holy commitments.
-Carl F. H. Henry quoted in D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge, eds., God and Culture: Essays in Honor of Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 392–93
…you must believe steadfastly that all your sins are blotted out, and that you are reconciled to God, and have access to His favor by the blood of Christ; and that He is your God and Father, and altogether love to you, and your all sufficient everlasting portion and happiness through Christ. Such apprehensions as these do present God as a very lovely object to our hearts, and do thereby allure and win our affections, that cannot be forced by commands or threatenings, but must be sweetly won and drawn by allurements. We must not harbour any suspicions that God would prove a terrible everlasting enemy to us, if we would love Him; for ‘there is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear; because fear has torment; he that fears is not made perfect in love. We love Him, because He first loved us’ (1John 4:18, 19).
-Walter Marshall, Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, p.85-86
