Our era has twisted the meaning of love. The culture acts as though real love is accepting whatever someone wants to do. No matter if it’s sinful. No matter if it’s harmful. We call that love. I call it apathy. Love is a righteous God who would forgive people and give them heaven, and spare them hell, even though they are unrighteous and unholy.
John 3:16 is perhaps the greatest verses in the Bible. It’s the most well-known to our culture. But with a Bible verse that’s so well-known, I think we can sometimes become tone deaf to it.
It’s a great verse because it tells the gospel as succinctly as any verse in the entire Bible.
God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
It points us to the love of God. But because of passages like this one, I think it’s easy for us as Christians to take the love of God for granted. The idea of a loving God is not universal to world religions.
In many religious systems, their gods are not loving, they’re not personal, they’re not perfect, and humanity basically has to do what it can to appease them. In most religions, the pressure is put on man to live up to a certain standard.
I’ve heard people argue that “all religions are basically the same.”
I think that’s something that Americans say who have generally never studied other religions and who are basically making an arrogant assumption that all other religions have a similar worldview to Christianity. Not the case.
Because here in America, no matter if someone is a Christian or the most ardent atheist, we are influenced by Christian teachings and beliefs. It’s at the core of our nation’s founding. It influences our ethics, laws, literature. It influences our understanding of a seven day week, it influences how we see the world. Because it’s so fundamental to America, it’s easy take certain Biblical teachings as self-evident assumptions.
It’s kind of like how when you grow up, there’s often a certain assumption in the normality of how you’re raised. It’s what you know. But you get older, and sometimes you realize that things that were always part of your life and which you always took for granted were actually not what everyone else experienced.
And in America, that happens with Christianity. And it happens with the idea of a loving God. We hear a phrase like “God so loved the world” and are tempted to think “well…yeah.”
Because we think we’re pretty good. Pretty loveable. Why wouldn’t God love us?
Why would God love you?
A perfect and holy God. He can have whatever he wants. He is totally self-sufficient, self-sustained. He doesn’t need any favors. He isn’t bored or lonely. Why would he love you?
Who’s your dream person to meet? That’s a frequent ice breaker question to ask. If you could meet any person and I’ll say it can’t be a relative. And it can’t be someone from the Bible. Who’s your dream person to meet? Maybe it’s a famous pastor, or an athlete, a movie star, a writer, a musician, a president. Whoever it is. Imagine you actually got to meet that person. That would be a pretty big deal. Right? Just to meet them. Because it’s someone famous, someone influential, someone people know, someone the world loves.
You wouldn’t expect them to know you. You certainly wouldn’t expect them to love you. And those are just people. We have such a habit of putting our celebrities up on a pedestal. Finite, fallible, fallen people. But then you compare that to the infinite and almighty God. A God who spoke the universe into being by the power of his word. The God who sustains all of creation. And he knows you.
Little ole you.
He’s righteous. Meanwhile, you don’t even live up to your own standards. You don’t even live as good a life as you know you could. And you certainly don’t live up to God’s standards.
We sin so much that become numb to it and often don’t realize it. The times where we act selfishly or manipulate someone. We have a justification for it. The times we lie. The bad things we think about others. The times we disregard God. The times where we know what we should do, and actively decide not to.
But that God knows you. And he loves you. God created humanity and he knew would sin. He made us anyway.
God made a covenant with Abraham and made a promise that he knew we would not deserve. He gave it anyway. God sent his son into the world. Jesus was perfect, without sin, came to spread light in a dark world, and God knew the world would kill him. He sent him anyway. God knew that you would be a sinner. But God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. He forgave you anyway.
Through Jesus and what he did on the cross. Nothing about this passage lifts up the goodness of man. This is entirely the goodness and love of God.
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22 “Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. 23 And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. 24 I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
Prayer
Almighty and eternal God,
You are the beginning and the end. You take our sins away as far as the east is from the west. A thousand years to you is like a day.
We once again come to you in a time of worship. And may we rejoice in the freedom that we have to praise you and to celebrate the good news of the gospel is that though we were dead in sin, you show your love in the gift of everlasting life through your Son who has taken on the weight of our sin.
Lord, it’s grieving this week to learn of the suffering and persecution which people are facing in many parts of the world: Christians suffering in Nigeria. Churches being cracked down on in China.
Lord, may we remember those people in our prayers. May they be light in spite of the terrible darkness which surrounds them. May your gospel go forward and overcome the best efforts of men to quell your truth.
Lord, we pray for our community and nation as well. There is one hope and that is the gospel. It’s not economics, or politics, or laws, or courts, where our ultimate hope lies but in Christ crucified. The Son of God, the Word made flesh, the firstborn of all creation who came into our world.
Lord, we pray for our virtual Vacation Bible School this week. We pray both for kids who do the activities and watch the videos, but we also pray for parents or babysitters or grandparents who might watch along and we pray that gospel and Biblical truths can impact them as well. Lord, we pray that you would use this.
Lord, we continue to pray for this church. We thank you for the people that we have. We thank you that in spite of this virus, you have preserved us. And we continue to ask for your protection. We also pray for your wisdom and guidance – not just with this situation – but with everything that we do as a church, O Lord.
We pray for our time in your world. May we be enlightened, encouraged, and edified. To the glory of God. In Jesus’ name, amen.
We’re continuing this morning in our summer series The Forensics of Faith.
Last week, we talked about justification. And just as a reminder, justification is right legal standing before God.
Today, we talk about the Doctrine of Regeneration. Regeneration refers to new spiritual life which God gives a person. The new regenerative life is what brings a person from spiritual death to spiritual life.
While justification is a matter of faith in what Christ has done.
Regeneration is a work of the Spirit.
And if you recall from earlier in our time in John’s Gospel, another term for regeneration is found in John 3. Born again.
In much of Christendom, it’s easy to overlook the Holy Spirit.
J.I. Packer, who was one of the great theologians of the last 50 years. Packer passed into glory at the age of 93 last week and so I’ve been going through his classic book Knowing God. One of the things that he says in that book that’s sadly all too true in much of modern Christianity is that we overlook the Holy Spirit.
We consider God and we focus on the relationship with Jesus. But as Packer says, the Holy Spirit is the Cinderella of Christian doctrines. Just off in the corner, forgotten about.
But the Holy Spirit is immensely important in the work of the salvation of souls and in the work of God’s church. In Ezekiel 36, the prophet points to a future time of washing and renewal.
So in our passage from Ezekiel, we’re going to look at three stages of Spiritual regeneration which the Lord brings.
First, the Spirit brings renewal
Ezekiel 36:25: I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.
Ezekiel is in the Old Testament and he’s looking forward to a future time of cleansing that God would bring by means of the Holy Spirit.
We live in that time now. When we are regenerated, it is a Spiritual cleansing which the Lord brings.
With the water, it’s easy to draw parallels to baptism. And in fact, the filling of the Holy Spirit is referred to as a baptism.
John 1:33. John the Baptist is speaking about Jesus and says: He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.
It is a privilege which all Christians share, as we see in 1 Corinthians 12:13: For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body
All believers in the gospel of Christ are filled with the Spirit. There’s no such thing as a Christian who does not have the Spirit.
Romans 8:9-10 is a great passage which communicates this idea: 9 You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
So we are baptized into the Holy Spirit.
Water baptism then is a symbol of the regeneration and cleansing which comes through the Holy Spirit.
Baptism does not bring salvation in itself. It’s an important and powerful outward symbol of an inward work which the Lord has done.
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.
What a powerful picture of God’s grace and renewal.
In Shakespear’s great play, MacBeth, there’s a scene where Lady MacBeth is overcome with grief and guilt for her murderous greed and ambition and she desperately tries to wash a blood stain off of her hands.
There’s no actual blood stain. It’s in her mind.
But that’s the brilliance of the scene.
Because we all have a stain of sin upon our hearts and lives that we cannot wash away on our own. It is God who brings the cleansing and renewal.
In Psalm 51, David too is ravaged by guilt and grief over a terrible sin he’s committed. His affair with Bathsheeba and him sending her husband Uriah to the frontlines in battle where he was killed.
David pleads with God: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!
And I return to John 3. A passage we preached from last fall.
After Jesus has said in John 3:3: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God
He will then talk of the cleansing which accompanies regeneration.
John 3:5-6: 5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
Water and Spirit.
To have faith is to have the Spirit and to have the Spirit is to be cleansed.
You have all sorts of rituals in the Old Testament. Washing is a powerful symbol of purity throughout various cultures and religions.
The washing that God gives through the Spirit is a cleansing of the human soul.
We see the language of this renewal again in Titus 3:
Titus 3:4-5: when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit
It is because of the mercy of God that we are made morally clean through the work of the Holy Spirit.
So through regeneration, God cleanses us.
Through being born again, God cleanses us.
When Jesus says, “you must be born again,” that’s another fantastic metaphor for regeneration.
Because it is a new birth. You’re a new person in Christ.
Also, the metaphors matters because we are regenerated as a one time event.
Jesus said that we must be born again. He did not say that we must be born again…and again and again.
It’s not that we are saved today, then we lose that, then we do better and we’re saved tomorrow. Many Christians believe that. It’s not a Biblical idea.
And this is why systematic theology is important in considering the connection between various Bible teachings and how they work together.
I’ll again call to mind justification which was our topic last week. Justification, simply put, is right legal standing before God. You cannot be justified without being regenerated. And to be regenerated is to be justified.
So when we’re regenerated and given the Holy Spirit, and we’re justified in Christ and forgiven our sins, it’s something that only needs to happen once. You can only be born again once and the good news is that true salvation cannot be lost.
We’re sealed with the Holy Spirit as a guarantor of our salvation.
Ephesians 1:13-14: In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
Second, the Spirit gives us a new heart
Returning to our passage in Ezekiel: I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Once again, what an incredible metaphor that the Bible uses. I assume it’s because of the Bible that the heart has become such a powerful symbol in our culture. Think about it for just a moment.
Someone who’s very kind if referred to as tender-hearted.
Someone who’s unkind and unfeeling is called cold-hearted. When we’re really sincere, we say something is from the bottom of our heart. When we see an impressive athletic display, we say they played their heart out. Really difficult situations are seen as heartbreaking.
And there are lots more little phrases like that. It’s a powerful symbol in our culture that we see as being the seat of our emotions. Because of regeneration, God gives us a new heart. Thousands of Americans wait on donor lists in need of heart transplants.
Heart disease is annually the leading cause of death in America with more than 1 in 5 deaths coming from heart disease.
Our hearts don’t last forever. And certainly, the heart is important in the Bible. Love the Lord your God with all your…What comes first? Heart.
Quoting again from David in Psalm 51:10, he asks God: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me
Jeremiah 17:9-10 says: 9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? 10 “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind,
We cannot make our hearts pure. But the good news is that through regeneration, God does a heart transplant in us.
He gives us a new heart and a new Spirit. So the Spirit brings renewal through cleansing, it is through the Spirit that we are given a new heart.
Third, the Spirit enables us to follow God’s law
The gospel changes lives.
When we’re born again, that doesn’t mean that we never struggle, it doesn’t mean we’ll never sin. But we are forgiven.
We aren’t perfect but we’re declared righteous because of the righteousness of Christ. But true recognition of sin, true faith in Christ, that changes a person. And it’s often especially noticed when an adult comes to faith.
If you have a child who’s grown up in the church and always had faith as part of their life, that’s an incredible blessing. And there certainly is a moment when faith becomes more real to a person, where their trust truly is in the gospel.
But when you have someone who’s an adult and gone years of living their own way, pursuing their own interests and desires, and Jesus comes into their life, there should be fruit of that.
Not all at once. It’s not saying a person suddenly never has any areas where they struggle. It’s a process. We’ll talk more about that next week. But when the light of the gospel truly takes root in a person’s heart, it causes a change.
It’s like you suddenly see the world through a different set of eyes. It’s like in the Wizard of Oz where the story goes from sepia to color. And the reason why there are changes and sudden changes is again due to the Holy Spirit and the process of conversion.
The Spirit enables us to follow God.
We certainly see that idea in our primary passage today. Consider Ezekiel 36:27: And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules
It is theSpirit of God working in us which enables us to follow the will of God.
When God works in a person’s life, and transforms a person to love him and love him and enables a person to follow his commands, that is miraculous.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)
That same Spirit who was in the beginning, part of creation, and who hovered over the waters dwells every single person who is a Christian and who believes in the Good News of Jesus Christ.
How amazing is that!
And it’s not because of us. It’s because our God is a good God.
Consider Ezekiel 36:22: Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came.
God’s works of grace are not because we were deserving. God ultimately makes grace available because of his character, because of his goodness, because of his faithfulness to the promises he had made, and for the sake of displaying his own divine glory and greatness.
Yes, God loves us.
But it’s not because we’re lovable but because God is loving.
And so through the gospel, through the work of Christ on the cross, we are forgiven and justified.
But what separates real faith, what separates the believers from the pretenders is regeneration.
In his systematic theology, Louis Berkhoff says:
Regeneration consists in the implanting of the principle of the new spiritual life in man, in a radical change of the governing disposition of the soul, which, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, gives birth to a life that moves in a Godward direction.
Numerous passages in the New Testament talk about the work that God does in the life of a believer.
1 Corinthians 2:14-16: The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
Consider Ezekiel again: I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules
God works through us. We don’t regenerate ourselves. We don’t cause our own Spiritual growth. We participate in the work which God is doing in us but we don’t cause it. I hope that makes sense.
I realize that’s a somewhat complicated idea.
Think of the metaphor of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. I know some of us are farmers, some of us garden.
You’re working to help provide the conditions for the crops or for the fruit to grow. You have a role in that. But you’re not the one who’s actually causing the growth.
Yes, it’s important to walk with God, to pursue God, to pray to God, to spend time in his word, to serve his people, to serve his church.
And God can and does use that for our Spiritual growth and enrichment and sanctification. But it is God who produces the fruit through the mediation of the Holy Spirit.
We don’t produce our own fruit.
We don’t make ourselves joyful. God does through the Spirit. We don’t make ourselves peaceful and at peace, we can’t just will that in our own lives. God does that through the Spirit.
But the Spirit transforms.
The Spirit causes Spiritual growth and because of that true faith results in a life that is changed by the gospel.
In Philippians 2:13, Paul puts says: it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
God works in us. New birth, being born again changes a person.
While it is through Christ that we are forgiven, justified, and given eternal life; we see that the Spirit is involved in bringing new life – specifically through cleansing us, through indwelling us, through causing a change in our heart, and by enabling us to live for God.
We have a good God who has made a way for sinful people to be forgiven. We must believe in his Son, Jesus Christ as Lord and savior.
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. -John 6:35
Jesus tells a group who’s following him that he is the bread of life. What the perfect food to pick. Something so universal, something that’s such a staple of life. Most foods, you can find someone who doesn’t like them.
Cheese is amazing. There are people who don’t like cheese. There are people who don’t like fish, or beef. There are even weirdos who don’t like chocolate. But everyone likes bread. It’s a universal staple.
Think about bread for a moment. A lot of restaurants you go to, they just give you a bowl of bread. You go to an Italian restaurant, maybe it’ll be breadsticks, maybe it’ll be bread with some olive oil. You go to a Mexican restaurant, they bring you chips and salsa. The tortilla chip is just bread that they then fried.
They don’t even charge you for it. Just “here, have some bread.”
Go to a Mediterranean restaurant, the meal will come with a pita. An Indian restaurant, it’ll be naan.
And that only works with bread.
Can you imagine going to a restaurant and they bring the table a bowl of broccoli? No! You can’t even imagine that.
Really, a lot of popular chain restaurants are known more for their bread than their actual entrees. No one is really going to Red Lobster for their week old fish and ocean roaches. It’s all about the cheddar bay biscuits. Olive Garden? The breadsticks are the real star of the show.
We love bread.
It plays a major role in so many of our favorite foods. Pizza. Cheeseburgers. Fried chicken.
Meatballs. Already a brilliant idea unto itself. A ball of meat, but we say “needs bread crumbs.”
We add bread to things that have nothing to do with bread. A salad. Mostly vegetables, let’s add bread crumbs. Soup. Mostly liquid, let’s add crackers and put it in a bread bowl. A bowl of ice cream. We look and say “the soup people were onto something. Let’s get rid of the bowl and replace that with a piece of bread.”
Most of our favorite desserts are just sweeter versions of bread. Cake. Donuts. All the best breakfast foods. Bread. Pancakes, waffles, french toast, bagels. We LOVE bread.
Rich people love bread, poor people love bread. Old people love bread, young people love bread. We love it so much that many years ago, people said “I wonder if we can find a way to drink this stuff.” And that’s how beer was invented!
Bread and language
Bread even impacts our language and sayings.
We judge the greatness of achievements and innovation by how it stacks up with sliced bread. We have indoor plumbing, we have cures to horrible disease, we’ve been to the moon, we have the internet. But no, when something great comes along, we compare that to the invention of sliced bread. When we eat together, we call that breaking bread. In many cultures, bread is a symbol of peace. We call money dough and the person who makes more money in a relationship is called the “bread winner.” If someone wants too much out of a situation, we say “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
Bread in the Bible
And then we consider it in the Bible. God feeds the Israelites with manna (which was bread) from heaven. Jesus references that in the Lord’s Prayer when he teaches us to pray “Give us each day our daily bread.” It is bread to which Jesus refers when the devil tempts him. He’s quoting from Deuteronomy but he says “Man does not live by bread alone but by every Word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).
Even the place where Jesus was born. Bethlehem in Hebrew means “house of bread.”
And it is bread at the Last Supper when Jesus institutes communion which he takes and breaks and says “this is my body, which is broken for you.”
Bread matters in our lives and the Bible.
Jesus is the bread of life
So in John 6, a great crowd has seen miraculous signs done by Jesus. He’s just fed multitudes. But the crowd wanted to be dazzled with greater signs and wonders but Jesus instead explains the significance of the sign when he felt the multitudes.
The manna from heaven was the bread which God gave to the Isrealites to sustain them on their desert wanderings. Jesus is the bread of life which God has given to sustain the human soul.
The people had followed Jesus because he filled their stomachs, but Jesus came to save our souls.
The people wanted to see a physical display of glory and power but Jesus came to fulfill the longings of the human soul.
And it’s for that reason that Jesus is the greater bread. The manna had to be collected everyday. Jesus is the bread which gives eternal life at the moment you believe in him.
But as the manna was collected daily, there is still a daily element to the bread which Jesus provides as he himself is the bread we need everyday for our spiritual sustenance. Without the bread which Jesus provides, we grow spiritually hungry and malnourished. We need to feed upon him everyday.
We need to commune with Christ everyday. Anytime you’re struggling spiritually, you feel like you’re just going through the motions, the first thing you should ask yourself is what your daily time with Jesus is looking like.
Going to him, praying, meditating on his word, serving his people, loving his people, orienting our lives around him.
Jesus is the eternal nourishment and the daily bread without which we will Spiritually starve.
The world wants to just satisfy your body.
If you can just have enough money, you’ll be secure and have what you need. Some people are drawn to intimacy and feel like that will sustain their soul. It’s looking to a physical desire. Some look to prestige and power. Those are still ultimately fleeting accolades that you can’t take with you. Dying people in a dying world honoring one another. Some people look to politics. The right party being in office. Men who are fallen and sinful, flesh and bones are our hope.
The world makes idols of what is fleeting and feeds the body. Jesus feeds the soul.
Jesus is the bread of life.
Where is your hope though? Is it in the material? Is it in today? Is it in what you have or who you are? Is it in what’s in front of you? Or is it in the eternal Lord of creation?
The crowd had said to Jesus: What must we do, to be doing the works of God?
Jesus says: I am the bread of life. whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst
We’re called to come to him. Coming to him in humility, coming to him realizing our needs, realizing our hunger.
And we are to believe in him. To trust in his gospel and his grace. We must recognize that we’re sinners in need of a savior.
That is what we do to receive the bread of life. We believe in Jesus. And he invites us to never hunger or thirst because he fulfills the longings of the human soul.
We face trials in life that our beyond our control. But we do have control over how we respond. In the Bible, in the book of James, he says, “count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds” (James 1:2).
We face trials, we face difficulties. It’s not that we find joy in the trials themselves. The point isn’t when a person breaks their arm, they should celebrate! But to find joy through what God is doing. What God is doing when things don’t go to plan.
Count it joy. It’s getting more at our thoughts than our feelings. The call here isn’t to put on a happy face when we’re struggling. It’s not to live a lie if we’re in a tough season. But through trials, through difficulties, that we should still find joy in God.
There are purposes as to why. James 1:3-4 says, “For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness and let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
To be steadfast is to be resolute and unwavering, to persevere. Testing of your faith produces steadfastness. When we are tested, we have an opportunity to grow in faith. We have an opportunity to trust God, to trust his purposes, to trust his goodness.
And there we have part of the reason why we should count tests and trials as occasions for joy. Not because of the difficulties in themselves, but because they produce steadfastness. We grow in strength.
A person might ask, “Well if God is so good, why does he make us go through the trials at all?”
Several reasons. The most obvious, based on this text is that God uses trials to make us perfect, and complete, lacking nothing.
But this also gets at the purpose of life on earth. And that purpose is not to have a total life of ease without any difficulties ever. We live in a fallen world. And even as children of God, we are not insulated from the effects of the fall: from health problems, from broken relationships, from lost jobs, and disappointments.
We live to know God, and facing trials doesn’t hinder knowing God and experiencing him. In fact, trials are meant to enhance that relationship.
If following God meant that you didn’t face any trials, and everything was totally smooth sailing and the way we thought it should be, then God wouldn’t be God, you would be. If everything went the way we thought it should go.
We grow through tests and trials. Or at least, we have the opportunity to grow in trials. We can keep our focus on God, we can turn to him for joy. Without knowing the answers, we can place our trust in him when we’re struggling. Or we can sit down and feel sorry for ourselves.
We can grow in faith through being tested. We never grow if everything is always smooth sailing and status quo. It is in the struggles, when we are forced to rely on God and God alone and to trust him that we grow.
Some of us won’t. And I don’t say this to mock, but some people who either don’t really have a relationship with God or who don’t really have a strong faith, in the struggle, will be like plants that aren’t strongly rooted in the soil, and in a challenge, totally become uprooted.
God doesn’t test us so that we can fail. He tests us so we can be perfect and complete lacking nothing. So that through having a greater reliance and trust on him, we can grow in holiness.
God is trustworthy in our trials.
Trials are not the time to distance yourself from God and His Church. That’s the last thing you should do! It is in the trials that you should more and more be living for God, trusting God, growing with God.
In facing trials, it’s important to have Godly people in your life. People to talk to, to pray with, to share your struggles with, to be encouraged by.
Again, it’s not if but when we face trials. It’s inevitable and just actively being aware of that is valuable. We can rejoice in the good times. But we can also rejoice in the struggles because God is working in us. It is in the trials that we are most enabled to grow. Muscle fibers have to be torn before they can grow back together and form stronger muscles.
If things are going really great right now, rejoice in that. There are trials in life, trials in families, there are trials in churches. God is trustworthy in our trials.
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James Innell (J.I.) Packer passed on into glory last Friday, less than a week shy of his 94th birthday. Packer was a workhorse who wrote over 300 books, articles, and reviews in his lifetime. Packer was a British born Anglican and an expert in the theology of the Puritans.
He attended Oxford and heard lectures from C.S. Lewis. While at Oxford, Packer attended the church of one of the 20th centuries greatest preachers, Martyn Lloyd-Jones. He was in league with some of the great Christian thinkers of the last century and himself became one of the giants of Evangelical theology for over half a century.
I appreciate theologians and Biblical scholars who can present their ideas with humility and gentleness. While he was a seminary professor and imminent theologian, Packer also wrote books for popular audiences, most famously, his 1973 classic “Knowing God,” which sold over 1 million copies. It’s intellectual but approachable. It’s theologically deep but personally applicable. Knowing God is a great introduction to the Christian faith.
Writing in straightforward language is a quality that alludes many of our great theologians but Packer had that gift. His work was not just about great intellectual knowledge of God, but about pointing us to greater relationship with the Lord.
As Justin Taylor of the Gospel Coalition remembers Packer, he says: He called for the church to take holiness and repentance seriously by walking in the Spirit and fighting against indwelling sin. He defended biblical authority and championed the cause of disciple-making catechesis.
In seminary, I remember reading another of (what I consider) his classics “Evangelism and the sovereignty of God” which explored the complexities of God’s sovereignty over creation and his call on the world to share the gospel.
Writing for Christianity Today, scholar and Packer biographer Leyland Ryken calls to mind Packer’s words to the church: “Glorify Christ every way.”
Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ -Matthew 25:23
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