1 Peter 4:12-13 - Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.

The apostle Peter probably would not have made a good pastor. One could just imagine him sitting in his office, feet up on his desk, when distraught parishioners keep coming in. "Peter! My husband is leaving me!" "My kid won't return my phone calls!" "My mother is in the hospital!" "I got laid off!" Peter probably wouldn't even take his feet off the desk. "Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place. Nothing strange is happening to you. Rejoice! You are sharing Christ's sufferings!"

Now this seems to be the worst kind of response to someone in pain. "Suffering? Relax! It's no surprise ... actually, you should be happy!" As insensitive as this sounds, don't let yourself think that Peter isn't following the example of God Himself.

Consider the crucifixion. When Jesus told the disciples that He was going to be arrested, tried, convicted, and executed. Peter said, "Never!" And Jesus' response was, "Get behind me, Satan." Remember, God works sub contrario - "under the opposite" - of where we think He will be. He worked in the crucifixion to save us. He worked in Peter's abandonment and deniel to restore him, and He works in our struggles and in our hurt to give us joy.

Jesus told His followers that in this life they will have struggles. "But," He said "take heart! I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). He didn't say that things would get better, although we wish He would (and sometimes things do). He simply said that He has overcome the world.

We suffer, but we never suffer alone. Jesus said that He came for the sick. The healthy have no need of Him. We never suffer alone. And our suffering, stinging though it may be, not only has an end, its end has already been assured. "The God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ assured. "The God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ ... will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast" (1 Peter 5:10).

You never suffer alone!

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

 

Philippians 3:8 - What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ

A man was standing at the gate of heaven waiting to be admitted. To the man's utter shock, Peter said, "You have to have earned a thousand points to be admitted to heaven. What have you done to earn your points?"

"I've never heard that before," said the man, "but I think I'll do all right. I was raised in a Christian home and have always been a part of the church. I have Sunday school attendance pins that go down to the floor. I went to a Christian college and graduate school and have probably led hundreds of people to Christ. I'm now an elder in my church and am quite supportive of what the people of God do. I have three children, two boys and a girl. My older boy is a pastor and the younger is a staff person with a ministry to the poor. My daughter and her husband are missionaries. I have always tithed and am now giving well over 30 percent of my income to God's work. I'm a bank executive and work with the poor in our city trying to get low-income mortgages."

"How am I doing so far?" he asked Peter.

"That's one point," Peter said. "What else have you done?"

Good Lord," the man said in frustration. "Have mercy!"

"That's it!" Peter said. "Welcome home."

If heaven came down to earning points, we'd all be excluded. In fact, the place where this illustration really breaks down is that Peter gives the man any points at all. If points can be earned, then grace has no value at all. But if points are impossible to earn 0 and anyone who has ever tried knows that they are - then grace is imbued with surpassing value.

The law shows are failure to earn points, and grace - in the gospel of Christ - gives us all the points in the world, for free.

Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

1 John 5:3-4 - In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.

In 1 John 5:3-4 John makes what seems, on the face of it, to be a ridiculous claim: the commands of God are not burdensome. What? Has John not read the Old Testament with its 613 commandments? Was he not there for the Sermon on the Mount, complete with Jesus' proclamation that His followers are required to be perfect, just as their Father in heaven is perfect?

And as if those laws weren't burdensome enough, we could add all of the self-imposed Christian commandments. 

The idea that God's commandments are not burdensome seems diametrically opposed to our experience: they certainly feel burdensome.

And yet we do have Jesus' offer of an easy yoke and a lightened burden. He does promise rest. But how does that work? How is it that Jesus' yoke is easy when He is the One asking us to be perfect?

The answer is as simple as it is profound. Though the commandments are indeed burdensome, the burden has been laid on the shoulders of another. Jesus Christ achieves perfection in our place. Jesus Christ, the culmination of the Old Testament expectation, fulfill the Old Testament laws. That same weight that threatens to break our backs actually did crush our Savior. The weights that we bear every day are simply aftershocks of our human attempts to save ourselves. The weights we feel are a phantom. They;ve already been taken to the cross, carried up the Via Dolorosa on Christ's back. We are free. We are, in Christ, unburdened.

-Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Acts 1:8 - But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

When Peter Pan tells the Darling children they can go with him to Neverland, they ask how to get there. He tells them that they'll fly. When they try and fail, Peter is puzzled. "This won't do," Peter murmurs. "What's the matter with you? All it takes is faith and trust." I could almost hear the frustrated preacher behind those words. "What's the matter with you, congregation of mine? Why aren't you doing good Christian thing A or good Christian thing B? All it takes is faith and trust!"

Most pastors, and for that matter, Christians in general, have too high a view of Human ability. We are left wondering what's wrong when we try to do something and fail. We wonder why our minds drift to the same selfish or impure places day after day, despite our efforts to control them. We wonder why our relationships seem to falter when we've tried so hard to make them work.

But Peter Pan is forgetting something: "Oh! And something I forgot ... dust! A little bit of pixie dust." And so, with the magic ingredient introduced into the situation, flight is possible. Sure it helps to set your mind on "the happiest things," but the pixie dust is the key. It's the fuel that makes the flight go.

In the same way, it is the Holy Spirit that makes our Christian lives possible. But unlike Tinkerbells's dust, we can't grab the Holy Spirit and shake a little out. No, it's better than that. The Holy Spirit is promised as power to us, but He is not fairy dust or a magic potion. He is God! He is the third person of the all-powerful triune God indwelling us, instructing us, and empowering us.

It's the Spirit that allows for flight, not the quality of our "faith and trust." Someone once said that as our opinion of human ability goes up, our reliance on Jesus goes down. Let's always remember that. A high view of ourselves gives us a low view of Jesus. But it's a low view of ourselves and what we can actually do that promotes a high view of Jesus and what He has done for us. Only the eye-opening power of the Holy Spirit can grant us this kind of gospel sanity and cause us to fly into the freedom that Jesus paid so dearly to secure for wingless people like us.
Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,
 

2 Peter 3:18 - But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.

Are you doing well as a Christian? It seems that often Christians are less concerned with the fact that they're a Christian than their proficiency at being one. Because of this, we envision our Christian lives as being like a ladder we have to climb. Sure, we think, Christ's great sacrifice for us was enough to get us on the ladder, but now it's up to us to move higher. We imagine the pope and Mother Teresa as being very high on the ladder and those people who don't read their Bibles every day as being very low. This concept makes sense to us, and it allows us to do one of our favorite things in the world - compare ourselves and our progress to that of others.

So what, then, are we to make of the Great Christian Tumble? You know what I mean: when someone considered "a great Christian" is revealed to have been engaging in reprehensible behavior. It's confusing. We don't know how to classify the event. Was this person not as high on the ladder as had imagined? Perhaps they'd never really gotten on the ladder at all. The truth, though, is more profound: there is no ladder.

Each of us, as Martin Luther said, at the same time justified and sinner, or in other words, we are both right before God and wrong in ourselves. We live our lives in the glory of the Holy Spirit even while we are getting in accidents, getting called names, and getting abandoned by our loved ones. Even while we are still dealing with sin. Our desperate need never goes away.

In ourselves, we are left in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the Christian ladder. In Christ, we are carried directly to heaven, no work necessary on our part.

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Mark 9:7

Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets, are shown in the story of the transfiguration to be less than equal to Jesus. The law and the prophets are overshadowed by the gospel. All three of them are standing there and the cloud comes, and the voice says, "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" (Mark 9:7). And in case the disciples were confused about which man they were supposed to be listening to, when they looked around the other two were gone. Only Jesus remained. Peter's mistake is that he fails to distinguish the law from the gospel. He thinks that Moses and Jesus will make good equal teammates.

If we fail to understand how the law and the gospel work together, our struggle to obey the law will make us forget about the gospel completely. If you start to worry about how well you're doing in God's eyes, you will forget that He saved you as a sinner. Remember what Paul said: "Once I was alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death" (Romans 7:9-10). The commandment that we think will bring us life, like "be a good Christian," will actually bring us death. The way in which it brings us death is by making us forget the truth, blinding us to the good news that we once knew, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Peter, by suggesting that Moses and Elijah be on equal footing with Jesus, is actually eclipsing the radical goodness of the good news that Jesus embodies. Both God's law and God's gospel are good. But only one of them is eternal. There will not be any sin to restrain in heaven, giving the law an expiration date. But the gospel's life is eternal, which is why Paul says in 2 Corinthians that the gospel's glory is far greater than the law's.

The cloud comes and the voice from heaven singles out Jesus. The gospel always has the last word. For the pardoned children of God, forgiveness always trumps condemnation.

Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Romans 2:4 - Or do you show contempt for the riches of his 

kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?

The ironic thing about legalism is that it not only doesn't make people work harder, it makes them give up. So we make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to licentiousness. In fact, the law tends to stir up lawlessness. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law.

To be sure, the Spirit does use the whole Word in our sanctification - the law as well as the gospel. But the law and the gospel do very different things. The law reveals sin but is powerless to remove sin. It shows us what godliness is, but it cannot make us godly. As Martin Luther said, "Sin is not concealed by lawful living, for no person is able to live up to the Law. Nothing can take away sin except the grace of God."

The law apart from the gospel can only crush; it can't cure. Scottish churchman Ralph Erskine wrote:

     The law could promise life to me,

          If my obedience perfect be;

      But grace does promise life upon

          My Lord's obedience alone.

       The law says, Do, and life you'll win;

           But grace says, Live, for all is done;

       The former cannot ease my grief,

          The latter yields me full relief.

So the law serves us by showing us how to love God and others. But we fail to do this every day. And when we fail, it is the gospel that brings comfort by reminding us that God's infinite approval of us doesn't depend on our keeping the law but on Christ's keeping of the law for us. And guess what? This makes us want to obey Him more, not less!

Indeed, it is the kindness of the Lord that leads to repentance.

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,