Forgiving and Reconciling, Part I: Why We Ought to Look Forward to the Judgment of God Like Kids Look Forward to Christmas

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Pastor Foley

THE JUDGMENT OF GOD.

It sounds like an ominous topic, doesn’t it? Something we should hope we never face. Something that we’re fortunate that Jesus saves us from.

But wait a minute—it’s not the judgment of God that Christians should fear. It’s the wrath of God. And it turns out that the wrath of God is what we face when we run from the judgment of God. 

The judgment of God is something that all flesh should welcome—and long for!

Remember in the Old Testament book of Judges: Judges are those raised up by God to free the Israelites from bondage—bondage that they blundered into of their own accord.

God’s righteousness works the same way. It’s first and foremost God’s way of setting the world—and all of us within it–right. So far from being something we run away from, it’s something we should run toward. And that’s what our new blog series this month on the Work of Mercy of forgiving and reconciling is all about. 

The judgment of God is joined at the hip to God’s forgiveness of us–and it’s the wellspring of our forgiveness of others. That’s why our foundational Scripture in this series is found in 1 Timothy 1:15-17, where Paul talks about the judgment of God and why we should welcome it and never run from it.

This is how Paul starts, in 1 Timothy 1:15:

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. That’s his judgment, his righteousness—his setting things right. The foundation of his forgiveness.

When we read 1 Timothy 1:15 it’s hard to overlook Paul’s comment in that verse about himself—the part where he says that he is the worst of sinners. It sounds like an exaggeration, doesn’t it? 

But it’s actually not–and it’s actually key to understanding everything we’re talking about here about why the judgment of God is a major league part of God’s good news for us.

Paul persecuted Christians—which is to say, he persecuted Christ’s own body—which is to say, he persecuted Christ. Remember, Christ says to him on the Damascus Road, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” 

Paul persecuted Christ himself. That makes him quite reasonably the worst of sinners. And yet one of the most important things for us to see about this passage of Scripture is how readily Paul accepts this truth—God’s judgment—about himself. Paul doesn’t deny this truth, justify it, downplay it, explain it, glorify it, or attempt to change the subject. He simply states it. He just accepts it. Totally.

And then Paul goes on to point out that because of Christ Jesus, Paul’s acceptance of the judgment of God has opened the door to God’s mercy to Paul—and God’s transformation of Paul—in Christ Jesus. Check out 1 Timothy 1:16-17:

But for that very reason [Christ coming into the world to save the worst of sinners] I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen (1 Timothy 1:16–17).

What you see here in Paul—our acceptance of God’s judgment leads to God’s mercy in Christ Jesus—is the very essence of what Christians call justification by faith. And this is why we welcome and plead for God’s judgment—because in Christ, God’s mercy follows God’s judgment for all who put their trust in Christ Jesus.

That’s God’s forgiveness in a nutshell, as we’ll see in the posts that follow. 

Where we’ll turn next is something that sounds weird but turns out to be great news, namely:

The God who remembers our sins no more never forgets our sins.

And he doesn’t want us or anyone else to forget them either.

We’ll explain why that’s great news in Part II of our series on forgiving and reconciling.

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Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Part VII: Remember That The Goal Is Kingdom, Not Heaven And Resurrection Of The Body, Not Immortality Of The Soul

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Pastor Foley

I really want to recommend Russell Moore’s book, The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective. Moore is the Dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he uses a scholarly hammer to drive home the key messages that we’ve been sharing this month about making sure we are proclaiming the kingdom of God, just as it is proclaimed in the Scriptures and by the early church fathers and by the Reformers and wherever and whenever the church has been faithful. He’s the guy who said that the goal is the kingdom and the bodily resurrection, not heaven and the immortality of the soul.

He’d be a great guy to explain why the best way to proclaim the gospel is not to say,  “If you died tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity?”

Moore explains that “personal salvation cannot be understood apart from the unique role of humanity in the Kingdom purposes of God” (Moore, 99). God created humans not simply to have a personal relationship with them. He created them to reign over creation by mirroring his life and goodness into it. So when Jesus achieves his victory, he does not cry out, “Now we can have a personal relationship!” There is that, of course. But he comes to reclaim humanity’s role and responsibility to reign over God’s creation as “viceregents” (Moore, 99). Here’s how Moore puts it:

Salvation is seen, holistically, in terms of a bodily resurrection, the reversal of the Edenic curse, and the restoration of humanity as viceregents of the created order. The work of the Spirit in regenerating the heart is not therefore seen as a purely “spiritual” matter. Instead, it is the uniting of the individual to the pioneer of salvation (Heb. 2:10), the One who is “justified” by God, has merited resurrection from the dead, and who therefore can claim the cosmos as His inheritance (Ps. 2:1-12; 45:6-17; Acts 2:22-36; 1 Cor. 15:21-28; Heb. 1:2; Rev. 1:4-6). Resurrection is seen as central to God’s redemptive purposes because it is central to God’s Kingdom purposes. Salvation is pictured, not in terms of escape from the world, but as restoring the human person’s right to rule over the world (Matt. 19:28; Rev. 3:21) (Moore, 111).

So when we are saved, we get to have a personal relationship with God…but not a private one. We are joint heirs being trained to reign with him over all creation. That’s big—bigger than going to heaven when you die—and we need to proclaim it as such.

When we do, it helps people to quickly see that they are going to need a lot of help in this process—something muuuuuuuch greater than “a free gift at the book table in the back to help you get started in your Christian life.” As Moore notes, “The New Testament never severs personal regeneration from membership in the church” (Moore, 148).

And just in case we missed it, Moore adds, “The New Testament does not present the sacrificial, substitutionary atonement as directed toward isolated individuals. Instead, the atonement is directed in the New Testament toward the gathering of a church” (Acts 20:28; Eph. 5:22-23) (Moore, 153).

If we proclaim the Gospel and say that the outcome is that we go to heaven when we die, wow, have we missed the mark of Scripture! The message of Scripture is that through faith—which brings along with it repentance and confession and, yep, even good works, none of which saves and all of which are means of grace by which we come to know God more deeply—God places us in a new family that points to a new creation that will be fully revealed soon.

Craig Blaising at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Darrell Bock at Dallas Theological Seminary describe the church as a “workshop of Kingdom righteousness” (Moore, 142). I like that. When we’re saved, we’re saved into the church and into the kingdom, not out of the world and on to heaven. And we live this life of daily confession and repentance and practicing the Works of Mercy and the Works of Piety—all grace, all gifts that he gives to those he loves to grow us into the fullness of Christ, the greatest gift of all.

Bock says that as we live this new creation life, if we’re faithful and we’re letting God pour his life and power and grace through us, we ought to be able to say to others, “If you want to see God and the promise of his powerful, transforming rule, look at what he is doing among us” (Moore, 142).

That may be the most natural—and supernatural–proclamation of all.

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Seven Ways We Can Improve Our Proclamation Of The Gospel, Part VI: Make Sure BOTH Confessions Are Very, Very Specific

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Paul says in Romans 10:9-11, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved” (Rom. 10:9-11).

Notice how specific that confession is. It’s not a confession when someone says, “I believe in God and stuff.” As Polycarp noted shortly before he was martyred, “To confess Christ with the heart is to acknowledge him as he is, as Lord… Confessing requires…articulating in words and sentences to fellow human beings penitent words fitting to the occasion” (Oden, 581).

And note how public that confession is. It’s not a one-time prayer at an evangelism rally. It’s a daily confession before the world. As Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:12, “If we deny him, he also will deny us.” So really, when it comes to confession, the whole sentence could properly be interpreted, “If you confess with your mouth and do not deny that confession…”

But there’s another part of the concept of confession we need to not miss that’s equally important. Confession is used in two ways in the Scripture:  in relation to confessing Christ as Lord, and in relation to confessing sin. And it turns out the two are joined at the hip. As Clement of Rome pointed out, “One who has not confessed sin is hardly prepared to confess Christ” (Oden, 579).

And what the Scripture has in mind is not a general confession like, “Sure, I’m a sinner. After all, we all sin, right? Nobody’s perfect.” That is not a confession of sin. It’s just a vague but true statement. As Oden notes, “To be genuine, confession must be sincere, personal, definite, and unconditional, not ambivalent or blurred or halting…” The Protestant Reformers put it this way in the Westminster Confession: “Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance” (Westminster Conf., 15) (Oden, 580).

As you evangelize, teach confession as a lifestyle, not an event. It’s not a rusty turnstile that you walk through one time and scratch yourself on the way to becoming a Christian. It’s a way of life—a constant, searching self-examination in the company of other brothers and sisters to make sure we are not deceived by Satan, who is so good at blinding us to our sin.

And did you catch that I said, “In the company of other brothers and sisters?” As we’ll note in our next and final post in this series, we desperately need to reform our proclamation in order to make clear that the outcome of our believing the gospel is not just a personal relationship with God but a whole new life in a whole new family in a whole new creation.

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