What mature Christian do...

From Tim Keller's Counterfeit gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters

Speaking about the characteristics of a mature Christian:

Our hearts are like that. We think we've learned about grace, set our idols aside, and reached a place where we're serving God not for what we're going to get from Him but for who He is. There's a certain sense in which we spend our entire lives thinking we've reached the bottom of our hearts and finding it is a false bottom. Mature Christians are not people who completely hit the bedrock. I do not believe that is possible in this live. Rather, they are people who know how to keep drilling and are getting closer and closer.

The great pastor and hymn-writer John Newton once wrote about this struggle:

"If I may speak my own experience, I find that to keep my eye simply on Christ, as my peace and my life, is by far the hardest part of my calling...It seems easier to deny self in a thousand instances of outward conduct, than in its ceaseless endeavors to act as a principle of righteousness and power."

Page 176-177

I was sharing last night to a brother that I notice how much idols (money, sex, comfort, approval from others etc...) are popping up in my life. I can feel them crawling right underneath my skin. The hardest is that as much as I want to put them away, there is a part of me that CRAVES these idols. Dirty idols. Like a cheap fix. Psalm 14 hits the spot!

Today, at dinner, I thought about the Grace that I bestow upon. I was quick to realize that there is no way I can tear these idols down myself. Tim Keller hit it right on. The second we tear them down ourslves, they will come back. Our heart is idols generating machine.

This is why we need Jesus. This makes a lot of sense. I mean, if I can tear down my own idols and worship God, I pretty much fulfill the Law by myself. Then why do I need Jesus? This leads to salvation by works..not by grace. If I am honest about myself and based all my thoughts, motivations, attitudes and actions from the Law, I will fail every single one of them.

Wow. Why in the world would God be so gracious in saving me? Calling me His children? Indeed, amazing Grace! What can I do but rejoice and repent!!

Not just doing good things...

Why should Christians share? Why should we give? Why should I give?

Just want to post up a few pointers before I head to bed.

There are two points:

i) For myself

A while ago I was doing a paper on Christian Ethics. I was studying on the Rich man and Lazarus. It is the commentaries of many great theologians that struck me that the Lazarus is outside of the door of rich man. Yet the rich man did not show concern about Lazarus. Even Jesus plays with the names of the character. As Lazarus, poor, would often in our world be nameless. Any one with wealth and status will have a title. Jesus, in his story, reverse this. (Upside down Kingdom, indeed!).

Jesus once said, you either love God or love money. Either love one master or despise the other. You cannot serve both. (Matthew 6:19-24)

When I give, it is for my soul. It is a way for me to focus on the Lord. I will not choose to serve money by following it, hungering it and have it choke my life and bring temporary satisfaction that leave me starving for more.

ii) For my Lord

In Luke 3 John the Baptist came out of the wilderness and told people to repent and to produce fruits, people started to ask John what to do.

This is John's response (Luke 3:11-13)

To the crowd - "The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same."

To the tax collectors -"Don't collect any more than you are required to"

To the solders - "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely—be content with your pay."

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Shouldn't John be telling the people to tithe more or make an offering to God in the temple? Rather John's response is to share to those who need it, to be fair and just.

Looking at Isaiah 1:13-17, we see that God does not just want offerings. Rather He wants the people to do right, to act just, to plead for the case of the widow. This is the character of God. To share, to act just and to do right is not an add on. Rather it is coherent in WHO He is.

Also in Micah 6:8, He already showed me what's good. Christ already shown that in His life. He came down and humbly died on the cross. By His Mercy, I, a sinner far away from God, was saved.

....

The last point I like to make which I have been thinking more about is how much do I believe in salvation. Sure we know Christians we will be with Christ when we died. My career and all my achievements in the end will fade away? That this life is nothing more than foreshadow of another life. That I am an exile and my real resident is not on this world?

In August when I went to Australia and backpack, I was travelling light. Afterall, why do I need to worry about anything. I won't be there for long. Three weeks here and there. I just get what I needed and move on.

If I am a merely a passerby of this world, should I be hunkering down like this is my permanent home?

So should Christian give? Yes. Because Christ give freely of His life so we can be reconcile to God and men.

What if we don't give? Perhaps our hearts are hardened and the grip of Satan's lie that this world and all its extravagance is still holding us from seeing the truth?

The devil led him (Jesus) up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours."

Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.'

Luke 4:5-8

Beatitudes (Part 2): Which virtues?

The first Beatitude

Matthew 5:3 says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

The focus of the one who is poor in spirit (economically and spiritually poor) is not on his or her own humility and virtue, but on God's grace and compassion....

But for those who are really poor in spirit know much better than others just how unvirtuous they really are. Jesus' focus is not on how perfect the poor in spirit are, but on how God is love, how God is present to redeem and how God will redeem.

We see how God feels deep compassion for the poor and the outcast when we see how Jesus cared....God is actively delivering the humble and the poor, Jesus' followers can rejoice...

Followers of Jesus participate in God's reign by humbling themselves before God, giving themselves over to God, depending on God's deliverance and following God in caring for the poor and the oppressed.

The Second Beatitude

Matthew 5:4 says, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

Mourning...has a double meaning. Grief, the sadness, of those who have lost someone or something they care about deeply: the oppressed and the grieving mourn because they experience real loss and are sad. But it also means repentance: sinners mourn for their own sins, and the sins of their community and truly want to end their sinning and serve God.

When Jesus called for mourning, he meant the mourning of repentance that is sincere enough to cause us to change our way of living.

The Third Beatitude

Matthew 5:5 says, "Blessed are the humble, for they shall inherit the earth."

..."humble" in the sense of surrendered to God, and socially and economically poor or powerless. If we are poor and surrendered to God, we are blessed, because in Christ God is delivering us and we shall inherit the earth.

The word has another connotation as well. Wherever the Greek word here translated "meek" or better, humble, occurs in the Bible, it always points to peacefulness or peacemaking.....

It is no accident that Christ in Matthew twice is designated as meek. Therein rightly lies the heart of his differentiation from the Zealots, from the violence-using battlers for the reign of God.

...God is the God who gives rain and sunshine to enemy as well as friend, and calls us to love our enemies (Mt 5:43-48).

Blessed are those who are surrendered to God, who is the God of peace.

The Fourth Beatitude

Matthew 5:6 says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied."

The question they usually ask is whether righteousness is sometihng God gives us or something we do. Their widely agreed answer is both. "God brings righteounsess as our deliverance, and we participate in it by doing righteousness"

Because our culture is individualistic, we think of righteousness as the virtue of an individual person. And because our culture is possessive, we think of it as something an individual possesses. But righteousness that an individual possesses is self-righteousness. And that is not exactly what the gospel says we cannot have (Rom 3).

...it (righteousness in Hebrew tsedaqah) means delivering justic (a justic that rescues and releases the oppressed) and community-restoring justic (a justice that restores the powerless and the outcasts to their rightful place in covenant community)....And that is why the hungry and the thirsty hunger and thirst for righteousness; they yearn bodily for the kind of justice that delivers them from their hunger and thirst and restores them to community where they can eat and drink.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for a justice that delivers and restores to covenant community, for God is a God who brings such justice.

The fifth Beatitude

Matthew 5:7 says, "Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy."

Mercy is about an action; specifcially, a generous action that delivers someone from need or bondage.

When Jesus walked down the road and a blind or crippled person called out, "Have mercy on me," he did not mean "Let me off easy" or "Forgive me," but "Heal me, deliver me from my afflicatoin."

"'Justice and mercy and faith' - these were the 'weightier matters of the law' neglected by Jesus' opponents,"...

Blessed are those who, like God, offer compassion in action, forgiveness, healing, aid and covenant steadfastness to those in need.

The sixth Beatitude

Matthew 5:8 says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God."

The way to purity is in giving myself over to an "all-encompassing orientation toward God, Who creates all and therefore also purity...

The heart is a relational organ. When God speaks to me, I receive it in my heart. When I act angrily toward someone, I do it with my heart. The real split is not between inner and outer, but between God-serving and idol-serving. It is between giving aid to the poor in order to be noticed and respected by others, and giving as service to God.

Blessed are those who give their whole self over to God, who is the only One worthy of the heart's full devotion.

The Seventh Beatitude

Matthew 5:9 says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God"

Blessed are those who make peace with their enemies, as God shows love to God's enemies.

The Eight and Ninth Beatitudes

Matthew 5:10-12 says, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for rigtheousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

The Beatitudes should be interpreted as in the context of the prophets with their emphasis on God's reign and God's call for righteousness and justice, and the suffering that they bore for calling Israel to covenant fidelity in their own day.

Blessed are those who suffer because their practices of loyalty to Jesus and to justice.

The Beatitudes: Idealistic vs Grace-Based Porphetic Interpretation

Taken this straight from the book, Following Jesus in Contemporary Context: Kingdom Ethics by Glen H. Stassen & David P. Gushee:

Many have interpreted the Beatitudes idealistically, saying they are high ideals that Jesus is urging us to live up to: if only we would mourn, be pure in heart, be peacemakers and so on, then we would be rewarded. This is the ethics of idealism: "if only people would act according to these ideals, then good things will happen.".....

If we think we do live up to these ideals, we fall into self-righteousness....

We undersatnd them as a set of ideals floating above our heads, imposing an ethic on us from above us that does not fit our real struggles. They are foreign to our nature, like a suit of armor that does not fit our body, or a job that does not fit our gifts and interests. We try to make our reality fit the ideals, but it simply does not fit... (page 33)

A Grace-Based Prophetic Interpretation

Guelich argued that Beatitudes should be interpreted not as wisdom teachings but as prophetic teachings. Wisdom teachings emphasize human action that is wise because it fits God's way of ordering the world and therefore gets us good results. Prophetic (or eschatological) teachings emphasize God's action that delivers (rescues, frees, releases) us from mourning into rejoicing.

Is Jesus saying, "happy are those who mourn, because mourning makes htem virtuous and so they will get the reward that virtuous people deserve"? Or is he saying, "Congratulations to those who mourn, because God is gracious and God is acting to deliver us from our sorrows"?

....

Some have erroneously taken grace to imply passivity, disempowerment of those who receive God's grace: if God is giving grace, it means that we are doing nothing. And if we are doing something, if we are acting in conformity with God's will, it must not be grace. This sets God's grace and our disciplesihp in opposition, as rivals. Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this "cheap grace"....It is grace without repentance, grace without concrete change in our way of relating to others, grace without cost to us. It is "easy believism"...

A central theme in Bonhoeffer's writing is participation in what God is doing in Christ. Through God's grace in Christ, we become active participants in Gods grace, and Christ taks shape in us...It is like the cripple by the pool of Bethesda or Bethzatha (John 5:2-9): he could not walk until Jesus delivered them; then he was empowered to move, to participate in the deliverance that Jesus brought.

The shape of grace is Christ taking form in us. We participate by answering Jesus' gracious call: come follow me. This is not cheap grace, nor is it works-righteousness. (page 34 -36).