Potentially to my shame, there are only a few Christian books which have ever had a profound effect on my faith: The Love of Christ by Richard Sibbes is one of them. If you are tired and weary of the fight of faith, downhearted and struggling, stagnating and cold, discontent and untrusting, spiritually miserable, longing in anyway to be so much more than you, feeling that you stuck in a rut and going nowhere; if you are going through hard times, tests of faith, trials and afflictions of any kind or if you are abounding in every way and knowing blessing upon blessing then this book is for you for the topic it covers is medicine to any soul and Sibbes is for good reason called the heavenly doctor.
He does not content himself with merely pointing the reader to Christ, no, he goes out of his way to win the reader to the lavish affection of Christ for his people. Mainly using chapters 4 and 5 of the Songs of Solomon he goes through the process of a Christian who is asleep to and his love Christ (“I slept but my heart was awake.” Songs 5v2) and how that Christian awakes and finds Christ again. For Sibbes Songs of Solomon was all about Christ and his Church and he applies it excellently in this regard. One of my favourite quotes was: “Sometimes she [the Church] is all compounded of joy, vehemently desiring kisses of her beloved. She holds her beloved fast, and will not let him go; and sometimes, again, she is gone, hath lost her beloved, is in a sea of troubles, seeks and cannot find him, becomes sluggish, negligent, overtaken with self love, after which she has smarted in her omissions, as here again, she is all fire for Christ,”
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Part of me wanted to write as the title: ‘want to know Christ more? Read the Puritans.’ It’s equally sound advice and this entire post is courtesy of the two Puritans: Richard Sibbes and John Owen and their respective books: The Love of Christ and Communion with God. If you want a love feast, if you want a rich meal of teaching on Christ’s love, if you in any way want to grasp the height, width, length and breath of Christ’s love then please, read their books.
What struck me as I read them was that when dealing with Christ and his love for believers then they both instinctively turned to The Songs of Solomon. Many of you will know this Bible book as the one about marriage, and it is, but to understand it as being about a human marriage is only a tiny, insignificant part of its full richness. Primarily, as with all Scripture, Songs of Solomon is about the marriage between Christ and his bride: the church. Using language overflowing with romantic imagery it conveys a glimpse into the deep depths of the love of Jesus Christ. As such it is medicine for any soul, soul food of the best type, and if you are troubled, weary and sorrowful then you can do no better than feasting yourselves on this book. _ Human Rights stem directly from Christian thought – it is easy to explain why every human being has certain rights if we hold that every human being is made in God’s image. Secular attempts to justify human rights have a much harder time. But this post isn’t about human rights in the normal way we understand it to mean: the rights of a man in relation to other men. Instead, this post is about the rights of men before God and the fact that we have none.
As facts go this one in particular we hate and the extent to which we hate it is reflected by the extent to which we fail to grasp the nature of God and the nature of man. At heart, we all like to think that God is pretty equal to us and that we can relate to him much as though it were a relationship of equals. To be told that we don’t have a single right before God, even to life, goes against our grain and usually diminishes our view of God. ‘Well,’ we huff ‘If God does not value my rights as a human being then he obviously isn’t a very good God and I’m not going to value him.’ Before I dig into this there’s probably a few qualifiers I should say: first, please do listen to the sermon I’ve uploaded below by Mr. Keller, particularly if you’re going through a dark time it’s a lot better than anything I can say. Secondly, my experience of sorrow is a blip on the scale of human suffering and in writing this I feel like I’m grasping concepts I don’t fully understand. Finally, the comfort of Christ is reserved only for his people, if you are not a Christian then his comfort grants you nothing.
When sorrow, hardship, trails, grief, persecution and suffering come our way then our first refuge should be the comfort that is to be found in Christ. It is not our first instinct to do this. It is easy to search for comfort in other things: family, friends, escapism through drink, computer games, drugs, fantasy, relationships, keeping busy, anything that distracts from the pain. Most of these are perfectly valid and good things in part but they can’t comfort us on our profoundest level, the spiritual level, for that we need the love and comfort of Christ. It is often not an easy comfort to grasp for it allows us no illusions or delusions about our situation, it confronts us with the reality of this sinful world we live in and our sinful selves, it tells us that we should not be surprised by our sorrow for as Jesus promised: “In the world you will have tribulation.” (John 16v33). I used to think that if I did a good job of walking with God I would be spared hardship and sorrow; not true, Job lived blamelessly before God and suffered much, Jesus lived perfectly before God and suffered to the point of death. The comfort of Christ is not in denying sorrow yet nor is it wallowing in self pity or giving way to despair. As I said, it can be a hard comfort to grasp but it is the only comfort that will provide peace and solace for the troubled heart. The comfort of Christ is rich and can comfort the most weary and grief stricken soul. As context for this blog post I was at work today and having to go through a pile of seventy receipts and check each one of them against a computer record. It is a boring task though in time terms it might only take five minutes, still they are a very dull five minutes, and so almost idly I prayed that I would come across the receipt that was wrong soon rather than it being the last one I checked. I processed a few more than saw that a receipt had fallen onto my lap, I stifled an irrational hope that this receipt would be ‘the one’ and checked it to find that amazingly enough it was. Coincidence, most would say but it wasn’t, there was a cause and effect: my prayer and then God’s answer.
But the question is: did my prayer dishonour God? Did praying about something so small, so insignificant and petty, something that was purely for my own sake and no one else’s, something that saved me a mere few minutes, did this dishonour God? Considering the power, majesty, strength, wisdom and infinite glory of our Creator God how can I pray petty little prayers? I would argue no for this idea is not found anywhere in the Bible, more we are actually commanded to bring everything before God in prayer: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Philippians 4 v 6 _ “But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,”
Romans 5 v 20 Firstly, this is not a divine license to sin, Paul says in the next chapter: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6v1-2). So if it is not an encouragement to sin what is it and why is it important? This verse is important because we all sin, we can fight against it all we like and we may even conquer some sins but there will always remain other ones we commit. This verse should not be read: I’ll sin so that grace might increase instead it should be read: I sin, thank God that even in my sin grace increases all the more. But what grace is to be found in the darkness of sin? _ One of the ideas I come across fairly regularly is the one that when it comes to salvation God purposely limits himself and gives human beings free reign to choose as they will on the matter. That is to say, God, who is sovereign in all things, limits his sovereignty so that it does not include salvation. He still works to save people, he presents people with a choice and they are free to accept or decline as they see fit. The advantages of this thought are clear: it makes the whole issue of divine sovereignty and human free will very easy to understand. God has his bit he’s in charge of and we have our bit and so we sidestep a lot of the complicated issues predestination brings up.
But its ease of understanding is not a measure of its truthfulness. The question we have to ask is simply whether this idea is biblical or not? “The LORD your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will rejoice over you with gladness; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”
Zephaniah 4 v 17 Every so often I come across a bible verse that is so wonderful I can’t help but smile and the above verse is one of them. It comes at the end of Zephaniah, in the previous chapters there has been pronouncements of judgement on Israel for their rebellion and sin but in the last chapter a new theme is taken up and this theme is the love of God for his people. The Arab Spring, the Euro-crisis, the US debt problem, the European debt problem, the terrorist attack in Norway, the riots in England, the world seems increasingly instable of late. All that was thought certain and secure is being rendered worthless. We built our lives on the ‘certainty’ of economic growth, on the ‘security’ of our house prices but the god of money now lies in ruin. Who would have expected a year ago that Norway would have been the victim of terror? But one of the countries with the highest Human Development Index rating is now no stranger to the evil of terrorism. Riots happen in Greece, Spain or France, in foreign places, not London, not in our own backyard, so we thought. The US was unassailable in its economic position; it would never lose its credit rating, this we knew for sure.
But no, in the last six months much or we thought or wanted to think is now revealed to be wrong. Greed, hatred, looting, corruption, lying, violence and sexual immorality have come to light in every circle of society. Those in power, those not in power, we see that all are guilty of evil. This should be a profoundly humbling experience for us as we watch the world around us. It has not been. What’s your god in your life? What is your driving ambition? What do you make sacrifices for? What do you define your happiness and security by? What are you fears and insecurities? What do you define your reality by? What do you bend your imagination towards? What do you spend your money on? What are your most uncontrollable emotions connected with? What, in short, have you made your god?
There are infinite possibilities for the gods you have set up in your life. And we all have them as God says: “For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” (Romans 1v25) It is not for me to say who or what this god or idol is in your life, it is not for me to the point for the finger in blame for I know all too well the lure of idols and other gods, but it is for me to feel pity for you because if there is one thing I know and one thing that I were to share with you about these idols of yours then it is this: they will never love you. |
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