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It isn’t what the enemies of Christ out in the secular world are doing that is the biggest part of the discouragement in these times. The greatest disillusionment, the greatest shock and devastation comes with watching those who professed Christ give up, walk away, and then repudiate all they once believed.
Just in a matter of a few weeks’ time, there has been another rash of this among people and ministries we have known. It’s a deeply depressing time.
In Matthew, Chapter 24, Jesus Christ foretold of a time that directly describes the days in which we live. A significant verse is this one, “And because sin will grow worse and worse, the love of many will grow cold.”
In the middle of moral and spiritual anarchy, and I’m talking about the church now, the profaning of holy things, and the rejecting of the eternal verities, it is not difficult to understand why many bewildered Christians are wondering what it is all about. So much senseless, gratuitous ugliness and brokenness among Christians, in spite of so many claims of Christ’s great power. So little power is seen. At least the kind that comes from above. It can be embittering.
I read this quote today from one of my favorite teachers of the last century, T. Austin Sparks. He describes the right response to darkness around us and in our own lives which is sometimes so inexplicable and so difficult to deal with, day after day.
The glory of God is manifested by every victory won, by every standing steadfast, by every refusing to give up; the Name is saved from dishonor, and the Lord Himself, the Christ of God who bears that Name is vindicated before angels and before demons. There are elements of mystery about it, why it should be necessary, but there it is.” T. Austin Sparks, from his sermon, “The House, the Name and the Glory”
Even in these very difficult days, we can continue to bring glory to God by not moving, not giving in to depression and discouragement, and by setting our eyes on the Savior. This life is brief. Eternity is forever. We can bring glory to God here and then rejoice in His presence for all eternity. This is our Christian calling. Each day, we can make the decision to either give in to our discouragement or to stand steadfast and glorify God before other people, before angels and those spirits below. Will we glorify God today with our lives?
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.~ I Corinthians 15:58
This is one of my favorite hymns of all. This is a wonderful rendition with the brass and timpani adding the appropriate regal sound. Love the congregational singing. Some day all believers will stand around the throne of the Lamb and sing together! What a day that will be.
1.All hail the power of Jesus’ name!
Let angels prostrate fall;
bring forth the royal diadem,
and crown him Lord of all.
Bring forth the royal diadem,
and crown him Lord of all.
2. Ye chosen seed of Israel’s race,
ye ransomed from the fall,
hail him who saves you by his grace,
and crown him Lord of all.
Hail him who saves you by his grace,
and crown him Lord of all.
3. Let every kindred, every tribe
on this terrestrial ball,
to him all majesty ascribe,
and crown him Lord of all.
To him all majesty ascribe,
and crown him Lord of all.
4. O that with yonder sacred throng
we at his feet may fall!
We’ll join the everlasting song,
and crown him Lord of all.
We’ll join the everlasting song,
and crown him Lord of all!
Now let the vault of Heav’n resound
In praise of love that doth abound,
“Christ hath triumphed, alleluia!”
Sing, choirs of angels, loud and clear,
Repeat their song of glory here,
“Christ hath triumphed, Christ hath triumphed!”
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Eternal is the gift He brings,
Wherefore our heart with rapture sings,
“Christ hath triumphed, Jesus liveth!”
Now doth He come and give us life,
Now doth His presence still all strife
Through His triumph; Jesus reigneth!
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
O fill us, Lord, with dauntless love;
Set heart and will on things above
That we conquer through Thy triumph,
Grant grace sufficient for life’s day
That by our life we ever say,
“Christ hath triumphed, and He liveth!”
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
Adoring praises now we bring
And with the heavenly blessèd sing,
“Christ hath triumphed, Alleluia!”
Be to the Father, and our Lord,
To Spirit blest, most holy God,
Thine the glory, never ending!
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he? They say unto him, the son of David. — Matthew 22:42
__________________________
By J. C. Ryle
(1816-1900)
First published by Drummond’s Tract Depot, Stirling, Scotland
Christmas is a season which almost all Christians observe in one way or another. Some keep it as a religious season. Some keep it as a holiday. But all over the world, wherever there are Christians, in one way or another Christmas is kept.
Perhaps there is no country in which Christmas is so much observed as it is in England. Christmas holidays, Christmas parties, Christmas family-gatherings, Christmas services in churches, Christmas hymns and carols, Christmas holly and mistletoe,—who has not heard of these things? They are as familiar to English people as anything in their lives. They are among the first things we remember when we were children. Our grandfathers and grandmothers were used to them long before we were born. They have been going on in England for many hundred years. They seem likely to go on as long as the world stands.
But, reader, how many of those who keep Christmas ever consider why Christmas is kept? How many, in their Christmas plans and arrangements, give a thought to Him, without whom there would have been no Christmas at all? How many ever remember that the Lord Jesus Christ is the cause of Christmas ? How many ever reflect that the first intention of Christmas was to remind Christians of Christ’s birth and coming into the world? Reader, how is it with you? What do you think of at Christmas?
Bear with me a few minutes, while I try to press upon you the question which heads this tract. I do not want to make your Christmas merriment less. I do not wish to spoil your Christmas cheer. I only wish to put things in their right places. I want Christ Himself to be remembered at Christmas! Give me your attention while I unfold the question—”What think ye of Christ?”
I. Let us consider, firstly, why all men ought to think of Christ. Read the rest of this entry »
Awake, mankind! For your sake God has become man. Awake, you who sleep, rise up from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you. I tell you again: for your sake, God became man.
You would have suffered eternal death, had he not been born in time. Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh, had he not taken on himself the likeness of sinful flesh. You would have suffered everlasting unhappiness, had it not been for this mercy. You would never have returned to life, had he not shared your death. You would have been lost if he had not hastened ‘to your aid. You would have perished, had he not come.
Let us then joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. Let us celebrate the festive day on which he who is the great and eternal day came from the great and endless day of eternity into our own short day of time.
He has become our justice, our sanctification, our redemption, so that, as it is written: Let him who glories glory in the Lord.
Truth, then, has arisen from the earth: Christ who said, I am the Truth, was born of the Virgin. And justice looked down from heaven: because believing in this new-born child, man is justified not by himself but by God.
Truth has arisen from the earth: because the Word was made flesh. And justice looked down from heaven: because every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.
Truth has arisen from the earth: flesh from Mary. And justice looked down from heaven: for man can receive nothing unless it has been given him from heaven.
Justified by faith, let us be at peace with God: for justice and peace have embraced one another. Through our Lord Jesus Christ: for Truth has arisen from the earth. Through whom we have access to that grace in which we stand, and our boast is in our hope of God’s glory. He does not say: “of our glory”, but of God’s glory: for justice has not come out of us but has looked down from heaven. Therefore he who glories, let him glory, not in himself, but in the Lord.
For this reason, when our Lord was born of the Virgin, the message of the angelic voices was: Glory to God in the highest, and peace to men of good will.
For how could there be peace on earth unless Truth has arisen from the earth, that is, unless Christ were born of our flesh? And he is our peace who made the two into one: that we might be men of good will, sweetly linked by the bond of unity.
Let us then rejoice in this grace, so that our glorying may bear witness to our good conscience by which we glory, not in ourselves, but in the Lord. That is why Scripture says: He is my glory, the one who lifts up my head. For what greater grace could God have made to dawn on us than to make his only Son become the son of man, so that a son of man might in his turn become son of God?
Ask if this were merited; ask for its reason, for its justification, and see whether you will find any other answer but sheer grace.
–Excerpt from a sermon by Augustine on the mystery of the Incarnation.
Many years ago when I was expecting my first baby, Charlie, I was asked to accompany a group of school children to an inner city nursing home and play the piano for their caroling. It was a nursing home for the blind in a very down at the heels part of town.
The stale smell of institutional food and disinfectant greeted me as I entered the building. A feeling of depression fell on me as I passed room after room where patients in wheelchairs sat, TV’s blaring, some elderly and blind, others not old, but also blind and disabled in some other way.
We were taken to a multi-purpose room with a long table and an upright piano against the wall. The school kids were told to stand around the walls of the room to sing. The patients were then wheeled in around the long table. There were about 20 people there in wheelchairs that day.
One man’s face was so horribly mangled, clearly something terrible had happened to him. I wondered if he had been in an accident. He did not look old.
The kids sang out, and I played my best on the old piano. A few requests were called out by those in the audience, and we did our best to accommodate those.
A few heads nodded along with the familiar old carols. Silent night. Away in the Manger. Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O Little Town of Bethlehem, The First Noel, all the usual ones.
Mr. Griffey, the very kind man who led the singing, then opened his Bible and shared the simple story of God’s astounding love in sending His dear Son to a dark world. He told of a Savior who did not come in regal splendor as He could have, He came in the lowliest fashion, for a world of lost sinners. He told how God’s marvelous plan of redemption was begun in that stable in the little village in Bethlehem.
He told of our Lord who came in humility to this world as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. He came to pay a debt we owed that could be paid no other way but through his death on the cross and his glorious resurrection.
He told how Jesus touched those in need. He reached out to the lepers and the lame and the woman caught in adultery. In an age when women were second class citizens, He gave women dignity as He sat with Mary, the sister of Martha and answered her questions. He memorialized a woman who poured out her perfume on his feet. He spoke to and gave hope to the Samaritan woman at the well who was living in immorality and should have been an outcast to him. He heard the cry of the blind Bartimaeus, the lame and the sick. He ministered to all, rich and poor, who welcomed him and would hear His message. Mr Griffey shared the truth of the Gospel that day with the souls that were there.
As we left the home for the blind that day, Mr. Griffey told me about the man without much of a face left. As a young man, he had tried to kill himself with a gunshot to the head, but instead of dying, the man had only horribly disfigured his face, blinded himself and rendered his legs paralyzed. He would live out the rest of his days in that wheelchair.
That is just one who heard the message of hope that late afternoon, 26 years ago. The love of Jesus was there in the room that day for those people as that message went out. That is the message we need to share this season and every season. There is a hurting world out there, filled with people who are suffering in so many ways. We can be light and help and love in this dark place when we place ourselves at God’s disposal.
Just because I love it, I want to share the lovely Candlelight Carol by John Rutter with you.
My grandmother told me once that a relative of hers would go to prayer when there was an insurmountable obstacle in her life—something important that was lost, some need that emerged, a situation that could not be humanly resolved. Then, after praying, she would look up and say, “Now we’ll see what God can do!”
In Scripture we are told that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are his ways our ways. He sees the big picture, but we only see what is directly in front of us. We ask for something to be fixed, and he does something altogether unexpected and different. Not what we ask for always, but something that takes us further on the journey God has intended for us.
Relinquishing our own vision of what needs to happen is key. Otherwise you can completely miss the hand of God, or even shun it. I am seeing this so clearly in my life these days. We can rattle door handles at times, yearning for an answer to our pleas, looking around for that open door or the next step, maybe even take off in a direction, only to learn that God had something else entirely.
More than anything else, I have found freedom in relinquishing human goals in exchange for what God has for that moment, however humble. Chafing and casting around constantly is not peaceful, and it isn’t productive. That’s because it’s too much of us, and not enough of Christ. As we take on whatever tasks God brings before us, however different from our human ideas, we can stop wasting energy, time and emotion. It’s called contentment.
The work we often vest with so much importance in our thinking can not only be the least important for our souls, but can serve as an obstacle to the deeper heart work God has for us. There’s a time to charge ahead with something, and there’s a time to step back. Failure to do this results in a great poverty of the soul that manifests in bad fruit in our lives. We can become brittle, impatient, prideful and defensive.
I am convinced that when we embrace contentedness and quiet, even in the face of what appears to be insurmountable difficulties, God will act. What He does in our lives may surprise us. I’ve learned that some of God’s richest gifts often come in strange-looking packages (tied up with string, as the song goes), but if He is truly sovereign, as His Word unmistakably declares, we can accept and even embrace those packages delivered to our door.
Today I am faced with a couple of exciting new packages in life! As my forebear said it so well years ago, “Now we’ll see what God can do!“
For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
- Isaiah 55:8-9
Now to him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.
- Ephesians 3:20-21
Hope itself is sort of like this blog over the last year and a half. It is sometimes strong, sometimes flickering and sputtering, sometimes going out completely, sort of like those trick birthday candles that blow out and then come back.
It’s been a very complex time in our lives. Everything in this world has become very strange and confusing. Christians are not exempt from experiencing those things. Old landmarks, old trusted institutions, churches, people we admired or followed, all of the old is rocking and shaking and changing.
News last week of a big name pastor among far-right fundamental Baptists who got caught after sexual involvement with a 16-year-old girl he had been counseling really wasn’t much of a surprise. What would once have been shocking is almost not shocking anymore as the sad news that yet another big name has crashed and burned in the middle of a double life made headlines.
Christian rhetoric and high external “standards” can be the ultimate smokescreen for the reality of our lives. It is very easy to appear to have our spiritual lives together if we spout the right phrases, quote a few verses, stay clean cut in appearance and windex our “windows” that people see. But internal rot cannot be hidden forever. It will be revealed in time.
There is a passage of Scripture (Jesus’s words in Matthew 24:12) that talks about how in the last days of history, the love of many Christians will grow cold because sin is so rampant. It is happening before our eyes. These evil times have even the most devout Christians looking around, trying to make sense of the senseless ruin in so many lives of professing believers. I say senseless, because it is difficult to understand how we could hold the cure for it in our own hands or promote the cure to others while ignoring it in our own lives.
This is the time when hope can flicker in our own hearts and lives. The primary problem is that a relationship with a doctrinal position is not the same as a relationship with Jesus. Rectitude in your theological position is not the same thing as having the Spirit of God within, convicting of sin, creating new life in the old person.
We are told what the fruit of the Holy Spirit looks like. There is no mystery here. And there are no special exemptions for those who have done enough spiritual work to get a free pass on a fruit check.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…(Galatians 5:22-23)
The hallmark of believers is love for others. We are told in plain terms what that love looks like.
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
~ I Corinthians 13
There is no way in ourselves that we can have that kind of love. Hurt creates resentment and bitterness. Hurt left unresolved for years can created a veritable tsunami of rage and un-forgiveness. It can wash away your very view of God. Only the work of the Holy Spirit within our hearts can change this, but if we are children of the Light, this is what must happen.
The world around us is only going to worsen as the natural consequences of our culture’s and much of the visible church’s anarchy against God grows worse. Only God at work in our hearts, through His Son, can keep us in times like this. Our prayer has to be, “Lord, heal us, and we shall be healed. Rescue us from the tidal wave of sin and wrong reactions to the filth and destruction around us. We can’t handle it on our own.”
There is another part to this, however. My favorite music is sacred music. The opening lines of Elijah by Felix Mendelssohn is the great chorus singing, “Help, Lord!” The idolatry of God’s people had brought them drought and ruin. God showed himself at Mt. Carmel in a powerful way, the prophets of Baal were destroyed, and God was returned to His rightful place in their hearts. This is the area God, I believe, wants his people to address. We have to tear down these high places of idolatry, and then our prayers for healing spiritually will be answered. The healing rains of God’s deliverance will come. Only each of us individually knows if or where we have these places, but I know this: If we ask, God will answer us and point them out.
No, the Hope Blog has not completely sputtered out. The hope in my heart that has flickered and sputtered at times over the last 18 months is still here, and for that I give the Lord Jesus Christ all of the credit. He alone is the answer to our broken state, no matter how much we may want to find the cure elsewhere, no matter how much we want to write off spiritual answers, or walk away from the faith in the face of so much treachery and ruin.
Men and women will fail us. We will fail completely in ourselves. But Jesus never fails. He shines as our ultimate hope. Brighter than the sun at noon. Take the scales from our eyes, God, so we can see Jesus in all His glory and fall at His feet and worship.
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