GraceTrax

THE Apostle John, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit wrote what has become one of the most well known and celebrated verses in the entire Bible, John 3:16. Take a look at that section, beginning in verse 16 and continuing through verse 21. 

"For God so loved the world that He gave His onlySon that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life, for God did not send Him Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned but whoever does not believe is condemned already because He has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.  And this is the judgment; the light has come into the world and people love the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.  For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light lest his deeds should be exposed.  But whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been carried out in God."  

In Scripture, we learn that the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—covenanted together in eternity past to design the exquisite plan of salvation. You see the beauty of that covenant in that passage. It’s one of the most beautiful texts in the Word of God and speaks of God’s wonderful deliverance of sinners—offered solely through the mercy and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.  

Three main points stand out in the first part of that text. 

First you see what we’ll call “The Father’s Plan” in verse 16. When you survey John 3:16, you cannot help but see the divine motive in the plan of redemption. The motive is this: the love of God. “For God so loved the world.” That is, by the way, the greatest motive of God.  The Bible says plainly that God is love. It also teaches that God at times manifests wrath against sin; but Scripture never says that God is wrath.  In his essential character, He is love personified.  That beautiful attribute—God’s love—motivates His redemptive plan. God loves sinners.   

God’s love does not mirror our own imperfect love. For example, we love our spouse, our children, and our parents.  But those loves are temporal. In contrast, the love of God is eternal. There was never a time in eternity past when God did not possess perfect love for His children, for He is a God of love.  

Intrinsically, love characterizes God, not only love within the Father, but the Son and Holy Spirit as well.  God’s love explains why we’re here today—why we’re assembled here in this place hearing the Word of God, singing the songs of the saints, and enjoying the privilege of being heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. Because of His love, we are kings and priests unto God. We enjoy that status because of His abundant love.

Secondly, you see in that passage not only God’s motive but also His action. Love moved God to give the greatest gift of all: His own Son. He didn’t withhold from us His greatest gift, but sent us His only Son. The greatness of God’s sacrifice is magnified by the fact that He is the only Son. God was motivated by love, pressed by love to send His only Son. His Son, Who did not have a place to lay His head; a son who was ridiculed, a Son who was murdered, a Son who suffered a cruel death on a cross—all because of His great love toward sinners. 

What rebels we are, and yet God did that for us—vile, wretched sinners, filled with wickedness and deceit. Because of that truth, when we adopt the attitude of Paul, who said “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death,” we are closer to God than at any other time. When we recognize the greatness of the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ, motivated by the Father’s love, and express that recognition with humble, heartfelt worship, God is glorified. 

Jesus spoke of that great, motivating love in John 17 when He said to His Father, “You have loved them, even as You have loved Me.” Isn’t it amazing that from all eternity, God set His love upon His own Son, and yet loves us in the same way? That’s a remarkable truth, Christian.  

Thirdly, you see in that passage a sublime, yet simple means of deliverance: faith. Note the simplicity of that truth: “Whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The one element we must possess in order to attain heaven is faith. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. Faith, trust, confidence; believing the Gospel; believing specifically in the object of the Gospel, which is Jesus Christ. That’s the means of deliverance. Faith—and faith in Christ alone.  

When we experience seasons of fear, doubt, trials, and tribulations, that truth will elevate our hearts.  When we give thought to the proper object, which is Christ, we’re lifted up and encouraged, because we’re looking toward the proper object. You see, you must not stop at just the concept of faith. You must go further. Faith must have the perfect object and that perfect object is Christ. 

That is the grace and the mercy of God. Again, sublime and yet so very simple. Think about the people in hell, suffering the intolerable wrath of God for this reason. They would not believe. Their judgment and condemnation is irreversibly fixed because they would not believe in the only acceptable object of faith, the Lord Jesus Christ.  

Many churches are moving away from the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our day. Therefore we must endeavor more than ever to lift high the Lord Christ Jesus Christ, Who said, “If I be lifted up I will draw all men to myself.” That’s our mission, to lift high the risen Savior.   

Many doctrines emerge from the pages of Scripture, but when we disconnect them from Jesus Christ in the pulpit, they are worthless; dead doctrines that serve only to build up egos instead of fueling love and devotion to Christ. God intended for doctrine and theology to bring us to a person: Christ. Christianity without a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is satanic.  It makes no difference how theologically minded a person perceives himself to be. Until he possesses a relationship with the person of Christ, he is simply a lost theologian. Many theologians who knew about Christ populate hell. You can read about them in Matthew 7. The knew about Christ, but they didn’t know Christ personally. Knowing Christ is eternal life (John 17:3).     

That’s the sublime, simplistic plan: believing in a person, the person of Christ, the One Who became the God-Man and bridged the great gulf of iniquity between God and man. That vital truth introduces the remainder of the passage—the intention of Christ’s Coming. We’ll take a look at that next time. Don’t miss it!   

IS IT RIGHT for a Christian wife and mother to work outside the home? If yes, when is it okay and when is it not?

We must look to God’s Word for the answers, and consider simply two errors to avoid in relation to this question:

First, do not fall into the error of being conformed to this world [Romans 12:1-2]. The world, largely through feminism (including within the church), has demeaned home-making as being of less or even of no importance and has then told women that they are being oppressed to be kept in the home. The truth from God’s Word is that the home is the earthly priority of a Christian wife and mother, and being in the home is a privilege and joy. Consider also these highlights from Proverbs 31, pointing to the excellent wife’s priority being her husband, children and home:

“She does [her husband] good, and not harm, all the days of her life” [v.12];

“She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household” [v.15];

“She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness” [v.27].

Titus 2:4-5 says, “and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

A Christian husband and wife should make determinations about the wife’s work and time based on the biblical priority of the home for her. In fact, if a Christian woman prioritizes pursuing a career over the biblical call to prioritize her husband, children and home, she is sinning.

Second, do not fall into the error of being self-righteous, legalistic or judgmental. “Working outside the home does not make you ungodly any more than being in the home makes you godly” [Pastor Kenny St. John]. Consider these highlights from Proverbs 31 pointing to the excellent wife working outside the home as part of her priority of her home:

“She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard” [v.16];

“She makes linen garments and sells them; she delivers sashes to the merchant” [v.24].

[See also Acts 16:14 and 18:3].

Each wife should look to her own heart (and each husband leading his wife look to his own heart and his wife’s). Do you have a heart and demeanor that is Christ-centered, submissive, home-focused, joyfully following God’s design for you as a redeemed woman in whatever situations you are including at home and at work? 

In fact, the secret to the wife’s excellence in Proverbs 31 was that she was “a woman who fears the Lord” [v. 30]. Such a woman, now as well as then, “is to be praised” [Proverbs 31:30].

READY for a tough question? Do you go to work to make money or to serve God? Your answer says a lot about how extensively you view the sphere of Christ’s Lordship. For the Christian, work should be viewed as worship—our personal service to the King of Kings.  

This world, created by God and redeemed by Christ is the Christian’s workshop. The words of the song, This is my Father’s World, should ring true for us whether we’re at church, school, home, or at work. As a Christian, you should never view a vocational task as mundane or inferior to others. In God’s eyes, no such distinction exists. 

But we don’t always view work through the lens of Scripture, do we? For centuries, the church suffered from the pervasive influence of Greek philosophy, particularly the Platonic way of thinking about physical matter. Plato taught that the physical realm was inferior to the spiritual. He won the hearts of some influential theologians in the early church and the result was devastating for the Christian view of work. Think about it. If your pastor declared that all matter was evil, you’d probably dismiss your secular job and head to seminary. 

That’s what happened during the Middle Ages. Thanks to Plato’s perverted spin on work, Christian men began abandoning their families and forsaking “secular” jobs. Instead, they withdrew into monasteries, seeking to pursue “spiritual” work for the Lord as monks. After all, several years of quiet contemplation, fasting, and prayer while wearing a brown potato sack can really put you in good stead with God, right? Not exactly. It’s hard to be that city on a hill when you’re hiding from the world in a dark castle in the forest. Thankfully, the church has come a long way since then.

The Reformation and ensuing Puritan era changed everything, erasing the false distinction between the sacred and the secular (as it came to be called). Martin Luther and John Calvin led the way in that movement, insisting that if God’s glory stood at the center of our endeavors—whether in the church, the home, or the shop—then our work was dignified, redeemed, sacred. Although that battle was fought centuries ago, the struggle for Christians to view work properly continues today.     

We must never forget: God evaluates and rewards our work on the basis of our faithfulness, not the perceived importance of the work itself. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker all can do their work to the glory of God. To put it another way, the humble, diligent Christian gentleman who collects your garbage may very well shame both you and your pastor when it comes to faithfulness.

So, let’s not kid ourselves with the sacred/secular myth. No such distinction exists. There are no secular jobs. The job is not the problem. The attitude of the Christian is the issue. Now let’s revisit that tough question, Christian. Do you go to work to make money or serve God? 

Utopia! Shangri-La! Just the sound of those words stir up emotions of happiness, harmony and unending tranquility. Yet while most people, I assume, long for peace that leads to lasting happiness, the kind of peace that is often sought after is not to be found in the world in its present corrupted state.  Multiplied attempts to produce such a serene society have not only failed miserably but have more often than not produced greater unrest and chaos.  Consider our immediate past alone with such “forward thinkers” as Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot whose promises of a cleansed utopian future produced some of the greatest atrocities ever known to man.

It is impossible to suppose that such futile attempts at peace will come to an end until Christ returns in clouds of glory, but these efforts will most certainly and ultimately fail, and will do so without remedy. Such an end, of course, will most likely leave the same wake of destruction that other feeble attempts at peace have left in the past.                 

The Bible is not silent about this matter of peace on earth. For instance, Jeremiah who wept his way through his salient prophesies, warned Judah before its fall in 586 B.C. of their forthcoming judgment, disaster, defeat and impending death for the nation. Granted, Jeremiah’s message during his first five years of ministry may have been the primary instrument in the great revival of 622 B.C., but, such spiritual awakening was short-lived. Wicked rulers followed such godly men as King Josiah and others who were friendly with Jeremiah’s message such as Ahikam, Shaphan, Gedaliah, and Achbor. And it must be noted that the prophets Nahum and Zephaniah certainly influenced the reformed movement that brought about a revival that created openness to Jeremiah’s early messages. However, as we move into the latter part of Jeremiah’s prophecy of warnings concerning the impending doom of Judah, persecution plagued his ministry.

One of Jeremiah’s most stern warnings came in chapter eight, where he informed Judah specifically about the scattering of the bones of the kings of Judah and its officials, priests, prophets and inhabitants. Perhaps, his most terrifying prophecy declares God’s pronouncement that “death would be preferred to life by all the remains of this evil family in all the places where I have driven them” (vs. 3).  He goes on to speak of their “perpetual backsliding,” failure to “relent,” turning to their “own course,” instead of God’s way. The fruit of which will be the lack of knowledge in the things of God (vs.7), shamed, dismayed and taken (vs. 9), wives given to others and their fields to others (vs. 10).

 This all culminates in chapter eight, vss. 10b-11. Because their prophets and priests are “greedy for unjust gain, they have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”  The key here is that the message was not true. “Peace, peace, when there is NO peace.” This is a prime example of the present and most prevalent approach to the preaching of the Word of God, that is, if you can call it the Word of God. These prophets of Judah were apparently giving a message that “healed the wound” of the troubled sinful people of Judah, but only because it met their perceived needs. The remedy these false professors prescribed was only skin-deep and failed to get to the spiritual cancer eating away at their souls. Of course, as it is in our day, the carnal lot of them readily received this damnable falsehood. These are the precursors of the “itching ears” of the Apostle Paul’s warning in 2 Timothy 4:3, when he states a forthcoming apostasy, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.”

Therefore, the same people that accepted the false prophets’ lies rejected the true prophecy of Jeremiah. While the message of the naysayers was to ignore divine retribution and the prescribed remedy against it, Jeremiah warned them of impending ruination and eternal judgment if they failed to relent from their wayward rebellion against God. It is in that context that we have before us such contrasting proclamations, with such devastating consequences, for not only did they discard the truth of God outright, they received the falsehoods of the godless purveyors without a hint of reservation.

To understand their plight we must understand both their depravity as well as their residual cravings for peace. It is a vestige of the image of God that causes a sinful being to long for something they cannot fully understand. In this case it is peace, but such cravings are corrupted by the presence and power of the sinful nature. The sinner thinks he knows what he longs for, but he really has no idea. So, when a man seeks after what he longs for he willingly follows his nose to the flesh’s route of least resistance. In other words, until the flesh is dismantled and rendered powerless (though believers fight against the remnants of flesh) by a spiritual new birth, it contrives and deceives its way to its easiest perceived avenue of happiness. Furthermore, since this happiness, due to the wickedness of the depraved heart (Jer. 17:9), cannot abide its own dethroning or its own subservience to another’s allegiance, it rejects the notion of self-denial and death to self by way of the cross. Therefore the puny pontifications of self-appointed preachers which gives the flesh what the flesh desires is readily accepted by the sinful heart and justifies itself by way of religious deception.

The pursuit of peace is thusly explained when we see what the heart desires more than what God demands. Apart from the effectual calling of God in overcoming the stubbornness and deadness of the heart there is no sure remedy. But when God, who created man in His own image, restores our first Adam image (fallen Adam) with the last Adam image (Christ) our desires are sanctified in that we will not ultimately stand for the false shadowy promises of a fallen world. No, we will not abide such things, for now we truly desire the real substance of Truth, which alone can meet the deepest needs of a man’s heart. The temporal peace of man’s frail dreams of utopia no longer appeals to the regenerated heart. We are not into counterfeit visions that are in fact, nightmares. Our world is now another world, a world that by faith we now see though it is not yet fully in sight. The peace and only peace we are now ready to embrace is the peace that only the Prince of Peace can bring to us. It is not yet manifest on earth for all to see, though in the hearts of the redeemed it presently reigns. Of course, believers have not fully experienced it in all of its glory, yet there is coming a new heaven and a new earth where all that is good and godly shall rule and reign. Our joy and peace will be unalterable and everlasting where no man or nation can ruin its reality. Bombs and hatred, lies and godlessness have no place in that eternal realm. Only eternal bliss without end shall be the lot of the redeemed.

To conclude, I implore you to consider carefully your future and the road you take into eternity. Though promises of earthly peace abound in the world of politics, religions and philosophies, their pledge is not a reality. Consider the history of fallen humanity, traverse its course and look carefully at her boundaries and you will not be able to make out even a shadow of peace that lasted for more than a very short time. The heart longs for it, but the world and all that it offers has no storehouse that holds even a hint of lasting peace for the inhabitants of the earth. But dear friend, if you will but look upwards to Christ, you will find a universe of abounding grace and consequent peace, which comforts the heart, clears the conscience and makes a way through this troubled world. And finally, that inward peace within the context of the flourishing chaos of the present age will one day issue into a full society made up of a universe of joy beyond measure attended by the holy angels, redeemed humanity and the blessed Triune God. Furthermore, no evil thing, nor fear, nor death shall haunt you, for Christ will gather you under His wings and comfort you forevermore. This, and this alone is the only PEACE that last forever, all other attempts at peace are mere facsimiles that are fading away before our very eyes. Christ alone is the Prince of Peace and true peace abides only in His Kingdom.