Video – According to the Bible, Your Feelings About Your Enemies are Irrelevant

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Pastor Foley

What kind of feelings and thoughts do you have when an enemy attacks you?  Pastor Foley says that the Bible points to the fact that your feelings about your enemies are actually irrelevant.  Instead, when our enemies attack us, we must understand it to be either one of two things.  First, God could be giving you an opportunity to grow in him.  Second, God could be allowing you to suffer for His name’s sake.

Taking the example of King David in 2 Samuel 16:5-14, we see David responding to an enemy’s attack by recognizing God’s presence and sovereignty in a less than desirable situation.

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How do we actually “Do Good?”

Posted on February 13, 2013 by tdillmuth

WLO_doinggood

Post by Pastor Tim – You may say, “Do good . . . of course I know how to do good!”  But the good that we are familiar with is often completely different from the good that God asks us to do.  Pastor Foley made this point in his last blog post when he said, there is “a world of difference between doing good things . . . and doing the good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

The world of difference in our good works, is that we are not called to simply do nice things for other people.  Instead, we are called to mirror the goodness of God that was given to the world through Jesus.  Interestingly enough, we can see a specific pattern emerge when we look at Christ’s life and his teachings.

What we see is that God’s pattern of doing good almost always originates with his enemies and it often is done at the giver’s expense.  This is why my family has prayed for our enemies each and every day for the past two weeks.  For me personally, this has meant that I have prayed for a former mentor and friend.  He has alienated himself from so many who cared about him through his careless and criminal actions.  There have been people that have tried to help him, but they have been hurt emotionally and financially by what he has done.

Now prayer in and of itself is a good work, but it also has opened up my heart to more opportunities to mirror Christ to him.  One such opportunity that I’m praying about is to go through our discipleship materials with him.  If I was simply trying to be helpful, I would just send him some money.  But instead of being helpful, I want to point him back to Christ.

We currently offer the Whole Life Offering Discipleship Training Materials to groups serious about growing in discipleship.  For a monthly fee, we provide training materials, videos, resources and coaching on how to use those materials.  This is what I am going to offer to my enemy, the opportunity to re-establish his relationship with the Lord and re-orient his life towards growing in Christ.

I’m under no illusion that he is going to suddenly jump at the chance to change his life and become a disciple of Christ.  He may decide that he wants nothing to do with me or the Whole Life Offering.  Practically speaking, trying to help him in this way is probably a “long shot.”

But this is the very essence of Luke 6:35 when Jesus speaks about how we are to do good and lend to our enemies, without expecting anything in return.  Robertson’s Word Pictures points out that this phrase “without expecting anything in return” was also used by medical writers to identify the desperate or hopeless cases.  In other words, when Jesus tells us to do good to our enemies, he is specifically speaking of lost causes and desperate situations.

So as you seek to understand how to do good, remember that it almost always starts with prayer and it will inevitably end up with an investment of yourself with possibly no foreseeable advantage or benefit.

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Why “Giving The Glory To God” For Your Good Deeds Is A Whole Lot Less Holy Than It Sounds

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Pastor Foley

WLO_doinggood“In Jesus’ name” is among the most used but least understood phrases in Christendom. The Rev. Ken Collins has a helpful post on what it means–and what it doesn’t mean–for us  to do things in Jesus’ name:

If you appoint someone to act in your name, it means that they can act as your agent within the restrictions you impose. Jesus has empowered His followers to act in His name to do certain specified deeds: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, preach the gospel, and so on.

If you do something in Jesus’ name it means that you do it with the authority He gave you and not on your own authority, and that you act within the limits of your authorization, whatever those limits may be. You act as His agent, in His stead, to His credit and for His benefit. You have no benefit from your deeds except His thanks and whatever reward He chooses to give you.

“Certain specified deeds” is the phrase I love in what Rev. Collins writes. There is, in other words, a world of difference between doing good things and giving Christ the credit and doing the Works of Mercy (or, as they are called in Ephesians 2:10, NIV), “good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” The latter is commended (and commanded) in Scripture; the former is a gross misunderstanding of the Christian life and actually quite the slippery slope to works righteousness.

Think about it: If you are constantly having to deflect credit to Christ–e.g., “Christ’s the one who deserves the glory for what I just did”…”I just want to give all the credit and the honor to my Lord Jesus for what you just saw me do”–then implied in that statement is that there is credit to be had here, credit which by all appearances is most reasonably attributable to you.

But as Rev. Collins points out,

If you do something in Jesus’ name it means that you do it with the authority He gave you and not on your own authority, and that you act within the limits of your authorization, whatever those limits may be. You act as His agent, in His stead, to His credit and for His benefit. You have no benefit from your deeds except His thanks and whatever reward He chooses to give you.

The issue of “giving all the honor and glory to Jesus” is, in other words, almost always the wrong issue. The right issue is: What works are we to be working in the first place–or, to be more theologically accurate, whose works are we working?

This is the field of meaning behind Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:16 (NIV, emphasis mine):

In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

If you are doing your own deeds and people are spoiling to give you credit, you haven’t done your job when you say, “Hey, the glory goes to God.” If, on the other hand, you work the works that God prepared in advance for you to do (you’ll know them; they’re specified in Scripture), it will not occur to people to give you credit. That is because the works that God prepared in advance for you to work, done the way God prepared for you to do them, will always draw attention to God, not to you.

Take a few minutes to read and reflect on Acts 14:8-18, where Paul’s healing a man leads to he and Barnabas being mistaken for Zeus and Hermes. It’s not as if the crowd credited the healing to Paul the human being and then Paul humbly pointed his finger up to the heavens to deflect the glory to God. What happened was that the crowd assumed that Paul and Barnabas must be gods, because only gods could do the kinds of things Paul and Barnabas were doing.

In other words, the crowd was correct that a god was at work. Their  mistake was in misidentifying which God.

“Giving God all the glory” sounds holy. But it’s a whole lot closer to works righteousness than it sounds. When you do the Works of Mercy God has prepared, in the way he has prepared for you to do them, those to whom you do them will, according to no less an authority than Jesus Christ, give glory to God.

Then it’s your job to make sure they know which one.

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