When we are plagued by our failure, by our abominable imperfection which we hate, where do we turn? The salvation which God offers us in Christ Jesus is exactly what we want – and more. It is, more importantly, what He wants. It is in accordance with His nature. What Jesus Christ died to do is to give us His own righteousness. When He sends His Holy Spirit into our hearts, He makes us new creations. The reason that He became sin on our behalf was that we might become the very righteousness of God in Him. In Colossians, we read, that “you are perfect in Him.” When God says something, it is true, it is truer than we can understand. His word is truth. “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” “What shall I render to YHWH for all His benefits to me? I shall take up the cup of salvation and go into the House of YHWH.” “The blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.” “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” “If we confess our sin, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” “Rejoice in the Lord. I will say it again, rejoice.” “Your righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and the pharisees.” “I press forward to the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.” “All things are lawful, but not all things are edifying.” “For them I sanctify Myself, that they too may be sanctified in Truth.” As Christians, we are not content with anything less than spotless holiness. What we want is to be like Jesus Christ, our Master and Redeemer. The Holy Spirit lives in us, and we hate sin – we hate sin to the death, literally. We would crucify the flesh and its passions. Indeed, we want to be perfect for our God: anything less than absolute, pure perfection is abominable to us, as it is to Him. It is for this reason that I hate the term, Christian morals. There is no such thing. Christianity is not about morality. Even the strictest code of morality is minimalistic from our perspective; we do not want to be moral, but holy. We are not content with rules we can pass; it is our desire to be spotless, perfect and righteous throughout our entire being, in our thoughts, in our attitudes, in our words, in our actions, in all things. The absolute holiness of Jesus Christ Himself is our standard and our desire. Any imperfection, any falling short, seems to us a horror and sin of unfathomably abominable evil. We detest and hate it. Anything other than the glory of God is unsatisfactory and must be thrown away. We have begun to see God, and so we are beginning to see reality from God's perspective. When we fall short, we cannot live with it. We must be perfect and holy. In our inner being, we agree with God. It is His holiness, He Himself, that we want. Yet, we fall short constantly. The imperfection we hate with all our might lives in us, and we do not know the extant of this abomination that seeps into everything we try to do, and mars the inmost attitudes of our hearts. It is not a matter of 'Am I saved?' or 'Will God let me into Heaven?' (Such a thought may even appear nonsense to us.) It is a matter of, 'God is holy. I must be holy because my God is holy.' It is a matter of, 'I am in love with Jesus. I am enthralled by my Savior. I must be like Him.' (This is why I would never preach morality. The point is not repentance from sins, but turning to God and repentance from sin.) When we are plagued... In Christ Jesus – which means, in truth – we are the perfect, spotless, holy righteousness of God. We are the reward and the righteousness of the Savior who became sin in our place. We are more righteous and holy than we will ever be able to understand. Yet, we see sin everywhere in our lives. We hate it and struggle against it, and we know we would rather die than continue to sin, and yet we sin. Our love is imperfect. Sometimes, we are afraid to trust that we really are the righteousness of Christ, perfect in Him. We would not only cry for an hour about this horror of imperfection, but we feel like sitting in misery over our failure, our abominable inadequacy, the unspeakable evil of the sin which still infects us. We do not want to rejoice. We rebel against trusting and believing God, living in the freedom that He has bought for us, and rejoicing in what He has done because of pride. On the cross, the perfect Son of God took upon Himself all our sin. In some sense, remaining wholly innocent, pure, and righteous, He became our sin. When He was crushed, sin was crushed. When He died, sin died. When He was destroyed, sin was destroyed. He did away with our sin, so that it is no more. When He rose, He had filled death by His life – His blood – and sin by His righteousness – His blood. All our imperfections are simply gone in the sight of God – which means, in truth. He won the righteousness of God for us – this is absolutely amazing! We do not have the righteousness of a creature, but the righteousness of God Himself – of God as Man. This is more than we could have ever imagined, ever imagined that we longed for, and yet, honestly, anything less than this would be unsatisfying to us. God made us for Himself. In the light of this, we have no right not rejoicing. Jesus, by the price of His own blood, saved us from sin and hell. He suffered what no mere man can ever suffer. He did everything, He paid the greatest price. God Himself died. Think about that! God Himself – always righteous and holy – was made sin for us. This is the most horrible, the most terrible, the most glorious, and the most beautiful thing that ever was done! The righteous and ultimate Man was forsaken for us. He DIED. It would be the greatest insult to His sacrifice and His love not to rejoice in what He has done for us. It would be to say, 'No, what You did isn't enough. I am not content with this gift You give me.' Is that not a horrific insult to pay to Love Himself? It would be say, 'No; I am not content with You. Your righteousness is not good enough.' Could there be a more terrible insult to pay the Eternal King, the All in All, the Righteous One? It would be to say, 'No; I don't believe what You did is real.' Can there be a more abominable insult to pay Truth? Whatever we may feel, however we may fail, Jesus Christ is the Faithful and True. We really were crucified with Him. We really were buried with Him. We really were raised with Him. We really are seated in the heavenly places with Him. This is the truth. Let us rejoice in Him! Look to Him and what He has done. It is satisfactory. It is more than satisfactory. It is real! “Let God be true, and every man a liar.” We rejoice because He deserves that we rejoice. He is enough. Let us rejoice in everything – even our view and experience of our own abominable imperfection – because it helps us to see more truly the amazing wonder of what Christ has done for us and in us – that He makes sinners perfect saints – in every opportunity to trust Him. “Worship YHWH with trembling; rejoice before Him with fear.” Copyright 2018 Raina Nightingale
Author: Raina Nightingale
All Things Are Yours: Knowing and Praising God in Pleasure and Pain
One of the beautiful truths about the Christian life, is that God always gives us His absolute best – which, of course, points us to His Son, because it is for us in His Son that He gives us His absolute best, which is Jesus Christ Himself, in Jesus the Son. All things He makes, in our lives, to be very good. Not a single hair of our heads will perish. That is, nothing will be lost. Nothing will turn out to the worse. Nothing will be less than the absolute best and perfect. The statement that not a hair of our heads will perish was made in the context of being persecuted, hated, and killed, and it holds for all of life. “What, then, shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son for us, but freely gave Him over for us all, how will He not, with Him, graciously give us all things?” writes St. Paul, and in another place, “For all things are yours, whether Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, or the world, or the present, or the future, or life or death – all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.” Everything was made for us. Pleasure is made for us. Suffering is made for us. Life is for us. Death is for us. We are the heirs of all things, because we are in the risen and glorified Christ. He died for our transgressions and rose for our justification, and in Him all must be ours. The whole world belongs to us in Him – we may enjoy the stars and the flowers and the sunsets. When pleasures are given to us, we praise and thank God for them. We worship Christ. We see His glory and are turned to Him by the majesty of a mountain, the beauty of the sky, the pleasure of a drink of water, the clarity of a color. We see His love for us in the placement of every blade of grass, in the bark of a tree, in food when we are hungry, in the song of a bird. In the same way, when sufferings are given to us, we praise and thank God for them, and we worship the Son, drawn to Him by our suffering, seeing His glory in the midst of it, knowing His love for us in every pain, grief, and shudder. The truth is, for those who have open eyes, the whole world proclaims the glory of the Lord, and in every experience – whether pleasant, even ecstatically pleasant, or painfully, perhaps searingly so – you can know God more, and know more about Him, too. In both pleasure and pain, you can know God in ways you never knew Him before; you can see truths about Him you never realized before; you can know truths you already knew in such a way, with such knowledge, that it is as if you never knew them before. I have never been able to understand the inability of some to see enjoying enjoyable things and giving thanks for painful things as somehow incompatible; there is a huge difference, because pleasure is pleasant and pain is painful – there's a difference between pleasures and between pains, too – which I have no desire to go into here, and I am certain that I could not describe this to anyone who did not already know, but there's also a similarity, even, perhaps, a sameness: we accept both for God's sake and give thanks to Him. One of the things about suffering is this: because of the idolatry in our hearts, it is very easy for us to become distracted by pleasures and to want the pleasures themselves, more accurately, to mistake our desire for our Creator for desire for created pleasures, instead of worshiping God and desiring and delighting in Him and in the pleasure for His sake – which is not to say that the delight in the pleasure (there is a reason pleasure is the word both for our experience and for that which produces the experience in us) is artificial; in suffering this is impossible, or nearly so, since the nature of suffering is pain, not pleasure, so that one must delight in God without distraction, worshiping Him without any danger of worshiping that for which one gives thanks. In Heaven, we will know God so truly, see Him so well, delight in Him so fully, ever satisfied in Him and ever seeking more of Him, that there will be no danger at all of our hearts mistaking created pleasures for our desire, thus idolizing them and rendering our worship and joy impure. (I say one of the things about suffering, because there is glory in suffering that is particular to that suffering, for the suffering becomes itself glory and is itself drawn up into the glory; the glory or reward that rests over suffering is not artificial, but is in fact related to the suffering itself.) It's true, that all is ours and nothing is against us. I write this partially to clarify. Some people draw a line between the “Theology of the Cross” and the “Theology of Glory,” as if the two could ever be separated. There is no glory without the cross, and there is glory in the cross. This is proclaimed in the Gospels and the entire New Testament, and, indeed, the Old Testament also. The Cross and the Resurrection are inseparable. Some people seem to be obsessed with suffering and death, to the extent that they ignore life and resurrection. Redemption begins on earth. Copyright 2018 Raina Nightingale
Love’s Wounds in Beauty Glorified: The Christian’s Comfort in the Scars of Christ
“And in the midst of the throne, there stood a Lamb, standing as if slain.” “Put your fingers here in my hands and your hand in my side.” “Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, let us hold firm our confession of faith. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we ourselves, yet without sin.” “It was fitting for the Messiah to suffer these things, and so to enter His glory.” “He who descended to the depths is He who ascended to the heights, in order that He might fill all in all.” Enthroned in heaven, His humanity glorified with the glory of God, Jesus bears the scars of His crucifixion. God is everywhere, and all of God is everywhere. “All things were made through Him, and apart from Him was made nothing that was made.” Again, it is spoken of the Word, “Who upholds all things by the word of His power.” Again, it is written, “In Him all things hold together.” In a beautiful psalm, we read, “If I make my bed in Sheol, You are there, even there Your right hand will guide me. Behold, if I take the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will uphold me.” All of this, we may infer from the Name that God gave to Moses, YHWH, the One Who Is. There is no existence, there is nothing which is, which is not in Him, the One. Again, it is said, “For in Him we live and move and have our being.” His presence is the foundation and the sustenance of our existence – indeed, of all existence. Jesus prayed, “Glorify Me with the glory I had with You before the world was,” and so we know that His humanity is glorified with all the glory of God. In His humanity, He is present everywhere. It is with this omnipresent humanity that I am concerned, here. Jesus' humanity is really human, and we have ample evidence that His risen body still bears the scars of His crucifixion: His passion, His suffering and death, were not merely the passage to His glory, but are included in that glory, part of the glory itself. He Himself said, the night before He died, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him. Now, if God is glorified in Him, He will glorify Him, and will glorify Him immediately.” This is our great comfort, as we read, “Now, He had to be made like His brethren in every way, in order that He might become a fitting High Priest for us. In that He suffered when He was tempted, He is also able to help those who were being tempted.” In His glory, that temptation and suffering have their place, and in that we have comfort. When He rose from the dead, when He entered into glory, He did not forsake the humanity in which He grew, lived, was tempted, suffered, died, and triumphed in all this. No more did He forsake or remove the scars of His life, of His temptation and suffering, of His death, of His sorrow. He carries those wounds in heaven, and all He does is very Truth, for He is Truth. He is glorified and omnipresent in the humanity which suffered temptation no one but Himself as ever suffered (think about it: God suffering as no mere man has ever suffered! Yet, it was appropriate that the New and Better Adam should triumph in temptation far more complete, terrible, and comprehensive, than the temptation before which the first Adam fell; that His triumph should be more complete than the fall of His race). Because it is in the same flesh that was crucified that He is glorified and lives within us now, He is able to give us strength and comfort. In everything that comes our way – in sunshine and play, in the temptations that accompany these things, in heart-crushing loss, loneliness, and searing pain, in the temptations that accompany these things – He has been there before us. He has been tempted! He has suffered! More, He has borne our sins themselves – not guilty, perfectly innocent and more, perfectly righteous, He bore our sin and all the agony of our sins. In His glorified humanity, the scars are still present, for us to trace. This is our comfort. He can give us the comfort of His own experience, of His own suffering, of His own glorified wounds. We need fear nothing: in it all, He is with us. We can never be alone. It would be very great indeed, but far, perhaps, beyond us, to know that God is with us and for us, but to know that God-made-Man is with us and lives with in us – that is, indeed, comfort and strength, sustenance and joy. When He rose from the dead – o, impossible thought! – He did not leave behind the scars and wounds of His life, His temptation, His suffering, and His triumph, but He bore them into glory, to be glorified with the rest of Himself. We live on His broken humanity – we eat His body and drink His blood, and proclaim the death of the Lord until He comes. O glorious comfort, glorious life, far past my ability to describe or communicate, that we have in the Lamb standing as if slain in the midst of the throne. The Lamb, for He is the Sacrifice, standing as if slain, for He bears the wounds of our redemption, which is not simply redemption from sin but the redemption of our entire being, body and soul, in all its heights, and depths, and crannies. The midst of the throne, encircled by a rainbow like an emerald, with a sea of glass flashing with fire before it, is the midst of the glory, the center of all things, the very summit of heaven. Yea, He is with us. “For He has said, 'Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.' Therefore, we may say with confidence, 'What may I fear? The Lord is my Helper; what can man do to me?'” We read also, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” – and it is this that is our confidence, our confidence that He will never leave nor forsake us, our confidence that He is our Helper. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is risen from the dead, and can suffer and die no more, for He is glorified, and in His glory He bears His temptations and sufferings, and in this, by His life, temptations, and death, and by His resurrection, He helps us in our trials and all our sufferings, in all that we live and endure, and is our High Priest. It is by this, by the same life, temptations, death, and the same resurrection that we have confidence, peace, and joy. We will never be alone, for the Man who is God, the Man who suffered more alone than anyone has ever been or will be, is with us: He lives within us! Yes, the glorified Christ lives within us!
What’s Amazing is What God Does: The Place Where Courage Is Impossible
No matter what happens to you, however horrendous, you will not suffer even insignificant harm – you will not be harmed or damaged in something as minor and seemingly unimportant as a single hair of your head. This is staggering, and it rules out all possibility of what the world means by courage. The whole value system of the world is built on men trying to be gods unto themselves, to find strength, meaning, purpose, power in themselves; as Christians, all of this is done away with (and we must be willing to accept it; we must not fight it when the world scorns us, we must not try to convince the world that we are not really so weak and pitiful as all that, but we should accept its scorn and disregard with joy, rejoicing that we have been counted worthy to be counted among the scum of the world, the off-scouring of all things, with our Savior, going to Him outside the camp). We recognize how completely weak and helpless we are as creatures and we rely on God's strength and God's care. We are strong when we are weak not because there is some strength that works through the appearance of weakness... What is amazing is not the endurance or the joy of the martyrs. What is amazing is not the willingness of Christians to die for their Lord: what is amazing is that their Lord died for them, sinners. Knowing that God demonstrates His own love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us, it is obvious that we would gladly die for Him. The least we can do is to consider our lives not our own but His – He bought them with His blood. We are only slaves dying for our Master, creatures dying for our Creator, redeemed sinners dying for the Perfect Sacrifice and Savior, pardoned rebels for our King. That we should both live and die for Him is nothing. What means something – what staggers belief – is that the Master died for His slaves, the Creator died for His creatures, the Perfect One for defiled sinners, the King for rebels and traitors. “If we live we live to the Lord and if we die we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or we die we belong to the Lord, for to this end Christ both died and lives again, that He might be the Lord both of the dead and of the living.” “You will be betrayed even by friends and family, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all men because of Me, and not a hair of your heads will perish.”
The Glorified Humanity of Christ
In the same flesh that was pierced with a spear, every eye will see Him and He will judge the nations. In that same flesh, He is with us now. It is not only in His Deity, but in His perfected and glorified flesh, the very same flesh in which He was tempted and crucified, that Jesus Christ is everywhere and dwells within believers – and we in Him. In fact, it is through dwelling in His humanity that we dwell in His Deity, for the Deity and the humanity are of one person: the Son of God. It is in Him – in His humanity, in His resurrection – that we are perfected and glorified. His death is our justification, but His resurrection is our salvation.
Blessed are the Poor in Spirit and Our Daily Bread
To be poor in spirit means to recognize that we are creatures. This may well be a description of repentance, for sin began when Satan told Eve that if she ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil she would be like God and she and Adam ate the fruit. But, it is because we are creatures that we are poor in spirit, that we are beggars who have nothing to bring but need, and this is a most blessed state, for it is God's delight to fill our need – which can be satisfied by nothing less – with Himself, with love, with blessing. His desire is to continuously fill continual need with continual blessing. It is a very blessed thing to be a creature, to be poor in spirit.
Lessons from Jonah, the Whale, and Nineveh: Salvation is of the Lord
The most successful prophet in the Old Testament appears to be Jonah. God told him to go to Nineveh, and tell the people there that God would destroy their city in forty days because of their sin. Hating the Ninevites and fearing that they might repent and God would spare their city, Jonah ran away. ...Regardless, to hear Jesus say, “Well done, you good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your Master,” will be incomparably worth it all. I do not ask for more.
The Song of Mary Magdalene and the Empty Tomb
Then, blinded by our tears and our despair We saw only death, emptiness, the grave Though before our eyes He stood, risen and alive
Free to Live and Free to Die
“We who are free to worship and serve the Lord must never forget those who are not.” At first glance these words seem, at least to me, to be saying that Christians should remember, pray for, and preach the Gospel to those who do not know that God sent His Son to be the sacrifice …
Temples of the Holy Spirit and Living Sacrifices
It is like the parable of the talents. He loans us all we have, including our bodies and our minds. Spending your whole life trying to take care of your body and eat healthy because you say to yourself, “I belong to God; I should take care of myself,” is like the servant who buried his talent and then said to his master, “Master, I knew you were a hard man, taking what you did not sow and harvesting what you did not plant. So, for fear of losing it, I buried this, your talent. Here is what belongs to you.” We may just as easily be called upon to lose it all for His sake; and, this is no loss, for it was His to begin with. He has the right to demand it back whenever He pleases, in whatever way He pleases, and in whatever portions He pleases... Do not sin; do not live for yourself; do not live or act or choose for your own pleasure; “You are not your own; you were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your body.” All your functions, all your parts, are to be at His disposal. Everything you do should be an act of worship. You should use your body in a way that is worthy of your calling as saints; in a way that is worthy of the Lord Jesus... God Himself lives in us. How dare we unite the very temple of God, the members of the Lord, the Lord Himself, with sin and unholiness? Because we are temples of the Holy Spirit, all sin is sacrilege – sin committed against that which is holy.
Enthralled By Love 