No 18: To Heal us from Moral and Physical Sickness

I am 58, and so far, excepting our annual diet of colds and coughs, I have suffered no disease except jaundice at 18 - and that wasn't painful.  On the other hand Susan has suffered an auto-immune onslaught and now has no pancreatic or thyroid function.  Her daily life is circumscribed by this disease, and St Paul's phrase about being "subject to frustration" (Romans 8:20 NIV) seems very apt.  In other areas between us, you might say things go the other way.  All her brothers and sister are with her to this day; my beloved big sister, Catherine, died at 20 from lupus when I was 14.  Periodically, I need to weep and mourn my loss afresh.  Neither of us grew up in godly or safe families.  We really feel rescued and redeemed by God.  He continues to heal the damage to our hearts.  But Susan is not healed of her physical disease - yet miraculous healings break out around us, now in this person, now in that.

Piper's observations take an eternal perspective, and that's what we have to hold on to.  Disease will 'one day be utterly destoyed'. But not yet. 

A mystery is that every one of us can testify to how God has used suffering to change us and bring us closer to Him, repeating in our lives the principle of the Cross - life out of death, victory out of failure, healing out of suffering.  I believe that if I had not been wounded by losing my sister, I may not have gone searching for God.

Last October, God gave me this personal word, which I was allowed to share on Sunday morning at church:

“I am sovereign, I am King over My whole creation, and I will bring My creation to a glorious fulfillment.  Man, and you too, Johnny, are glorious amidst My creation and destined to sit beside Me in the world to come, holy and sanctified.  In that time My victory will be completed when even Satan and every evil power at his disposal bend the knee and acknowledge that I am just and true and everything I have done is just and true:  My righteousness will be glorious across My whole creation and every mouth will be stopped.  It will not be possible for you to possess My understanding while undergoing your span of life and serving out your part in My unfolding Kingdom.  But I have revealed a mystery of My working which will guide you through many dark places like a pole star: I train My children in the Kingdom by letting them suffer from evil – to stop the mouth of Satan.  The victory can be won in no other way, although My heart breaks to see how you suffer.  As each of you make your way into My courts when your life’s race is run, the noblest angels step aside before you, bowing in your honour, wondering and rejoicing to welcome such a hero home – for you have been tested in a fire which is outside their experience.

“Go back and read again the sacred writings of My people, which you call the Bible, and see how this word is true; and how eternal and unchanging the Gospel is.  You have always been made perfect in suffering.  Only in this way can I save you from reproducing the very evil which you oppose.”

No 17: To Obtain for Us All Things that are Good for Us

This verse is an example of distinctively Jewish thinking by St Paul: a mode of reasoning known in Hebrew as 'qal va-chomer' ('simple and difficult' or 'trivial and important').  Jesus used it again and again.  Here are a couple of His:  "If that is how God clothes the grass of the field ... how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith?" (Luke 12:28).  "If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:13).  You could say that several of His parables make the same point in story form: the unjust judge grudgingly hears the widow, so how much more likely is it that God will "... bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?  Will he keep putting them off?" (Luke 18:7).  That's an amusing one.  I wish preachers would laugh a bit more at Jesus' words, like His original hearers did.  In fact lots of the Bible is funny.

I'm still thinking about what I wrote yesterday, about God's readiness to give everything, but our unwillingness and unreadiness to accept His grace.  How clearly this comes across in St Paul's passionate plea we've just read in this chapter: "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" (Romans 8:32).  How could we fear otherwise?  How could we fear not being provided for by God, if He pays so much attention to a small flower or a sparrow?  How could we doubt God's lavish generosity, when even we are like that towards our own children?  Do we have lesser expectations of God than of a corrupt judge?

God utterly humbled Himself before His children, He pulled no rank, and He  loved us unwaveringly through the worst things our sick hearts made us do to Him.  Nothing less than that, it seems, could overcome our doubts and fears and finally "purify our conscience" (Hebrews 9:14), so we and He could henceforward live together in perfect trust, love and peace.

No 16: To Give us a Clear Conscience

'If you were allowed to take just one reason for Christ's death away to your desert island, which would it be?'*

Without question for me, this would be the one.  Why? 

Without a clear conscience, I remain fundamentally unsure about God's good intentions towards me - however many truths I hear and believe about them.  As Piper describes, none of us can shake off a sense of personal guilt.  Even if I can convince myself I am 'doing everything right' now, I can't change my past and undo the effect of things I may bitterly regret saying or doing.  When I have talked about this with Muslim friends, they stress God's mercy, compassion and readiness to forgive; and their words greatly honour God and encourage any sinner.  But they don't reach the very wounded heart of my being.

As I meditate across the whole testimony of the scriptures, it seems to me that this purification of our conscience is the one thing that had never been experienced by mankind until Christ rose from the dead.  Our Hebrew forefathers experienced God's unconditional love and choice: "The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples.  But it was because the Lord loved you and kept his oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharoah king of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 7:7-8).  They experienced God's forgiveness and restoration:  "Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits - who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion, who satisfies your desires with good things so that my youth is renewed like the eagle's" (Psalm 103:2-5).  God was offering everything to them, with only one condition - their love, attachment and obedience in response.  And so He always has and always will.  Nothing prevents reconciliation and complete shalom and salvation from God's side.

All the difficulty lies on our side.  These amazing, kind, utterly true words from God best express, for me, what is our problem and what He would do about it:  "I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 11:19).  A 'divided heart' is a perfect description of an uneasy conscience.  St Paul accurately describes what it feels like: "[Gentiles] ... show that the requirements of the Law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them" (Romans 2:15).  This struggle leaves us in that state of uncertainty and doubt about God's good intentions towards us:  "... he who doubts is like the wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.  He is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.  That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord" (James 1:6-8).  So God offers everything - but we cannot receive it because our consciences will not allow us to.

I don't think we can ever explain how this purification of our conscience happens, once we "eat and drink" the death and resurrection of God in Christ for us.  Yet every believer knows it has happened.  Never mind what we've done.  What a scandal! God breaking all His 'rules'!  Now He and I can truly delight in each other without a shadow falling between us.


* My foreign readers will need to ask a British friend about our radio programme 'Desert Island Discs'

No 15: To Make us Holy, Blameless, and Perfect

This is an inspiring chapter.  Among Piper's own comments, I like these two particularly: 'The good news is that being on the way is proof that we have arrived.'   'In other words, we should become what we are.'  St Paul and the writer to the Hebrews, and Piper, all find themselves having to use the same word to describe different things.  For instance, 'perfected' means something already done by Christ for us (Hebrews 10:14), but also something yet to be completed in us (Philippians 3:12).  We are already 'unleavened' but apparently there is leaven still to be cleared out (1 Corinthians 5:7).  Another example is how Jesus spoke of the Kingdom as here and now, but also yet to come.  These illustrate the limitations of language.  The Bible is full of such paradoxes because all we can do, and all each writer and editor of the Bible could ever do, is "... see but a poor reflection as in a mirror", as St Paul beautifully wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:12.

I have to try and keep the balance of both meanings in a sort of tension, and this is a powerful instrument the Holy Spirit uses to wean me off my addiction to rational systems and push me towards a new way of seeing.  I do believe that this is what is meant in Isaiah 55:9:  "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

A major thread in my personal testimony over the past 5 years has been a deep engagement in the process of "cleansing out the old leaven", and becoming the man God saw before He created anything.  This has involved letting the Spirit examine my heart and examine my past and show me where anything ungodly has taken root (cf Hebrews 12:15).  I can then confess it and bring it to the Cross where Jesus takes it away together with all other sin.  I teach children to visualise the Cross surrounded by a sort of rubbish heap, to which we can add what we've just admitted; or to write it secretly on a piece of paper and drop that in a bin beneath a crucifix.  I find it helps to do the same - to become "like little children" (Matthew 18:3) in these things.

We discover many things have taken root and provide a stronghold for Satan, and this explains our repeated failures or fears in certain areas.  It is usually a mixture of things I have personally done wrong and wrongs done to me - and God wants to take both kinds away.  I might remember harsh, unfair words spoken over me as a child; but then the Spirit also reveals the resentment and judgments I formed as a result.  These are vital to confess and get free from, because I shall be reaping evil consequences until I do.  When ready, we are taken a step further by God to consider what may lie in previous family generations.  In 2010, my wife and I had the great privilege of hosting a day in our church when Mike Preece confronted us with the fearsome Masonic vows which our forefathers had made, and we very thoroughly spoke them off ourselves with the authority we now possess in Christ.

I was surprised to find that this process of inner healing is thought controversial by some evangelicals, and I have been challenged even within my fellowship here.  Their reasoning is that "... if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17).  This brings me back to where I started.  Yes, in the Spirit St Paul sees our perfected creation and wrote these amazing truths.  On another occasion, taking a different perspective, he also wrote: "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works" (Ephesians 2:10).  God's work in us is both finished and in progress.  I still think the wisest name to give our faith was the first one: the Way (Acts 9:2, 24:14).

No 14: To Bring us to Faith and Keep us Faithful

Before I get into this beautiful chapter, I need to say a few words, as I did on my post No 2.  I have received private comments that some of my posts seem to imply something which theologians call 'universalism'.  I haven't received any theological training myself, and so I shall have to find out what this is all about; but my critic defined it as believing that all will be saved irrespective of their faith in the work of Christ. 

Some men have the cast of mind to get very interested in abstract debates like this: but I don't.  I am intuitive, I think.  I do apply my rational mind to the revelations God has given, and is giving, us; but it is a secondary activity.  What has been given to me by God, whether it is written in the Bible or spoken to me now or expressed as a sign in daily life or is a glimpse of His mystery in His creation,  I try to keep my heart and mind spaces open to the raw reality of it; and I consciously control the desire to select only the bits which fit into what I already understand.  A wise retired pastor, emailing encouragement to me a few days ago, wrote: "It's a given that you can't adequately describe God in human terms."

So, when God speaks to me about His unconditional love, which I can see has emerged as my major theme this past fortnight, I give that my rapt attention.  I examine my heart's response and I listen to more that the Spirit is waiting to say to me about it - a meditation and a conversation.  Then, when I meditate on other truths He speaks of, I try to do so with His unconditional love always lodged in my heart and mind; because St John has revealed to us that "God is love" (1 John 4:16).  The astonishing simplicity of those words is one of those 'high level' truths which we see Jesus organising His teaching around on at least two occasions (Matthew 7:12 and 22:40).  This is why in my first post I wrote: 'Whatever His wrath means, we know that love is His abiding and defining attribute - they aren't opposites.  God doesn't stop loving, to be wrathful.  Clearly, like God's love itself, his wrath lies outside all categories of human experience.'

I couldn't possibly be a 'universalist' because Jesus repeatedly warned us that a terrible and unalterable fate waits for those who reject the goodness, the love, the compassion for others, the wholesomeness, the peace of heart, the humility, the justice, the mercy, which is God.  Jesus would not have issued these warnings if, in fact, noone would ever suffer this fate.  But what I can't do, is to let this fact qualify or lessen the truth of God's unconditional love for us all.  If our rational, 'either / or', ways of thinking balk at this, well, there's nothing I can do about that.  Ultimate Reality, the Kingdom of God, lies beyond all human categories of thought and perception.  It is possible for us to contemplate it; but only mystically.

This leaves me with little space and time to add anything to what Piper has written!  I'll just share one thing which has been precious to me for some years, and it fits today's theme well.  Galatians 2:20 is one of St Paul's most important insights, written in my NIV like this:  "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."  I took a look at the Greek, and saw that the second part can be translated differently:  "The life I live in the body, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."  This way of putting it accords better with my experience and other related scriptures.  The faith I have is His gift, and it's His faithfulness which keeps me safe in Him.  If it was only my faith, I doubt I could keep that up.

No 13: To Abolish all Rituals as the Basis of Salvation

Since 1981, I have belonged to two church fellowships and both have taken a very negative line about rituals and traditions.  This is a hallmark of reformed churches, to a greater or lesser degree.  These are great truths which Piper quotes from St Paul, which were hard-won in fierce argument in the Church's first days.  But as I looked around me, I began to see things were not as I first thought.  My first fellowship prided itself (I fear it did) on not being enslaved to tradition, and contrasted itself with 'traditional churches' like Catholic, Orthodox and high Anglican, which used many rituals and set great store by their traditions.  However, we still retained two rituals: communion and baptism; and we followed all kinds of perhaps unacknowledged traditions in the pattern of our meetings, our church government, and our preferred doctrines.  There was no denying that we too 'did things a certain way'.  We belonged to an evolving pentecostal / charismatic / evangelical tradition, call it what you will.  Of course, knowing our St Paul well, we wouldn't dream of saying this was a 'basis of salvation', although in our enthusiasm at times we probably thought it nearly was! 

So, seeing that we never get away from rituals and traditions to some extent, I began to question the sharp dividing lines I heard being drawn between one church and another, and to examine my own heart and motivations.  Was I really just joining the church whose style I preferred, and whose main thrust of teaching made most sense to me at the time?  Was I misunderstanding what I saw happening at a Catholic Mass, and jumping to the conclusion that those rituals meant Catholics were "enslaved" to them?  Was I, in fact, enslaved to some church practices and doctrines without realising I was because I hadn't recognised that they, too, were rituals and traditions?

In recent years, God has shown me how much He loves every diverse expression of His Body here on earth, His Church; and how much more spacious the Kingdom of Heaven is.  He is constantly enlarging the 'box' of my awareness and letting me glimpse new regions in His Kingdom which He invites me to explore.  One of our sons, certainly already a sincere believer with a good grasp of the Bible and of evangelical doctrines, found his heart deeply touched and converted by God when he was amongst Catholic believers; and last Easter he was formally received into the Catholic Church - an amazing spiritual journey which you can read about in his blog.  Anthony has his testimony of encounter with God in that way, and everyone around him can see how God's hand is upon him and he is alive and fruitful in ways he wasn't before.  His testimony is irrefutable, even if it doesn't fit our different experience: so I am humbled afresh to realise how small my thoughts are, compared to God's whole truth, and how limited are my understanding and spiritual experiences, thus far along the Way.

All this has been the means God has used to bring me into a new freedom which exactly resonates with this chapter in Piper's book.  With the 'eyes of my heart' (Ephesians 1:18) I can now see Jesus in almost any tradition of Christian gathering.  I have found myself barely able to stay on my feet, so strongly have I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit, amongst Catholic monks at Douai Abbey (joining their morning prayers whilst doing my quinquennial inspection) as well as charismatic evangelicals in our Wallingford church.  Like He did for St Paul and St Peter, God has taken me into the simplicity of His salvation for us.  And a surprise was waiting for me: a new-born delight in the Church's amazingly rich heritage of tradition, ritual, wisdom and disciplines to help us become complete in Him.

No 12: To Take away our Condemnation

I think it must be one of the most difficult but most important tasks for a teacher, to make St Paul's ideas understandable!  His thinking is so fertile and quick, darting up trains of thought, sometimes losing the thread of his main point and even forgetting to finish a sentence, if you know some Greek.  I think it's worth pondering the fact that God wanted his writings to go in as letters, and to ponder what a letter is - and is not.  And to ponder the wisdom behind Jesus' decision to leave no writing at all behind!

Alerted by the 'therefore' in Romans 8:1, I've been looking again at what St Paul has just written before (I have to remind myself to ignore chapter divisions when I meditate upon scripture).  As I briefly mentioned in posting No 1, in chapter 7 St Paul sees a bigger picture than our preoccupations with sins and laws, and daringly states that '... apart from law, sin is dead.  Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.' (Romans 7:8-9).  In other words, if we are innocent about a law, we aren't sinning if we break it.  It sounds so much better to live that way! and I naturally wonder whether law is such a good thing.  St Paul delves into the psychology of all this in chapter 7, and it's a fascinating voyage he takes us.  In answer to my question, he points out that 'I would not have known what sin was, except through law' (7:7).  Reading on, we witness how St Paul realises what's going on inside him.  He has a part to him which longs to do the right thing, which he calls his "inner being", and another part which never manages to do so, which he calls the "flesh":  'So I find this rule at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members' (Romans 7:21-24).

This is what chapter 8 explains we are rescued from, this "law of sin and death" (8:2).  St Paul is talking about how we become free of what imprisons us.  This affects both unbelievers and believers alike - St Paul certainly trusted in Christ, but these two parts of him were still in conflict.  It's fundamentally this huge conflict within us which brings us our worst misery and self-condemnation.  That's what God wants to heal us of, and restore to us His peace, His wholeness, His shalom.  We are prisoners, even while believing, until He does so. 

As St Paul recognises, it's an imprisonment that is part and parcel of our psychological make-up, our human condition, and to that extent not our fault.  The wonderful Good News St Paul brings us is that God "knows how we are formed" (Psalm 103:14) and doesn't blame us for it.  And never has.