Pentecost 2016 (2)

“For I tell you, unless your righteousness goes beyond that of the experts in the law and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:20, NET Bible here and following)

Last week, here in Ukraine, this church, along with Ukrainian society in general, celebrated what we call “Trinity Day”, otherwise known throughout the world as Pentecost. Because it’s a notable Orthodox holiday, the whole society “observes” it, one way or another, much like happens with Christmas and Easter.

And now, a week later, how many people out there, in the houses and streets around us, are reflecting further on the significance of last week’s holiday? Very few. Extremely few. And, I suppose, in most people even my commenting on this would summon up the objection: “There was a holiday last week. So? We celebrated it—what more do you want? Does God want us to go on endlessly thinking about a holiday that’s over?”And that is the difference between a “traditionally Christian culture” and a living, personal relationship with Jesus, the Son of God. That is the essence of what we preach in this church. You may forget everything else you ever heard in this church, but please don’t ever forget this: we proclaim, not some holy calendar, not some national religion, not a sanctifying, saving ritual—we proclaim Christ crucified, risen and returning, as the only Way, Truth and Life of God, saving all who receive Him in faith and repentance. Not by works, but freely, as the gift of God’s grace.

Yes, last week was the Day of Pentecost, but today and every day, every moment, the Holy Spirit of God abides in the hearts of God’s children, born spiritually by Christ’s saving power, and communes with them, speaks to them, guides and works through them.

For us, every day is the Day of Pentecost. Because the Holy Spirit abides and moves in our lives every day. In the same way, you could say that every day is Christmas, because Christ is always born in our hearts, in our spirits, by divine grace. Every day is Easter, too, because we live in, and experience, the power of His resurrection—the resurrection of the Redeeming Lamb, Jesus.

Along the way in our spiritual development, contingent upon the way we indeed walk with Him, we peer more and more into the miracle of salvation, ever more deeply desiring to know Him unobstructedly, without hindrance. To know Him Who, in the words of the apostle Paul, “…is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, for all things in heaven and on earth were created by him – all things, whether visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers – all things were created through him and for him. He himself is before all things and all things are held together in him. He is the head of the body, the church, as well as the beginning, the firstborn from among the dead, so that he himself may become first in all things. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in the Son and through him to reconcile all things to himself by making peace through the blood of his cross – through him, whether things on earth or things in heaven.” (Colossians 1:15-20)

This is He about Whom the apostle says that a believer’s entire aim in life is to know Him and even to know “the fellowship of His sufferings.”

Last week I emphasized that the presence and work of the Spirit in us asserts our genuine, authentic “self”, establishes our true worth in God, gives birth to a new interrelationship with God, so that we have no need of a façade or image dreamed up to impress people.

Today I want us to peer more closely into the significance and intrinsic role of the Spirit in our daily experience as children of God.Yes, it all starts on the inside, where God, at the price of His Only-Begotten Son, writes a new law on the believer’s heart:“‘But I will make a new covenant with the whole nation of Israel after I plant them back in the land,’ says the Lord. ‘I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds. I will be their God and they will be my people. People will no longer need to teach their neighbors and relatives to know me. For all of them, from the least important to the most important, will know me,’ says the Lord. ‘For I will forgive their sin and will no longer call to mind the wrong they have done.’” (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

To this new and transcendent dimension of spiritual life, in the knowledge of God, Christ summoned His hearers in the Sermon on the Mount, when He mentioned that ultimate righteousness, the kind that surpasses all the diligent, painstaking, fastidious, Law-parsing “righteousness” of the Pharisees. Yes, surpasses— precisely because it begins on the inside, in living relationship with God, and it expresses, not an attempt to earn God’s approval, but free, spontaneous, unconstrained love toward God, in bursting gratitude for the gift of life in Christ.

It would be a tremendous error to suppose that life in the Spirit is a predictable, stale, impassive state of being that is always consistent with religious custom and traditional expectations, that life in the Spirit must never upset, agitate or anger the world around you. We can’t forget that the Pharisees’ prime accusation against Jesus was that His behavior didn’t conform to their religious-cultural rules.

Yet Jesus was innocent before the Father.

In the works of C.S. Lewis there is a lion, and his name is Aslan. Aslan is an imaginative figure of Christ in Lewis’s stories. This lion Aslan is righteous, kind and loving, but don’t make the mistake of taking him for a house pet that will jump when you say “Jump!” or sit when you say “Sit!” In one of these books a certain character comments, “Aslan is not a tame lion.” And another character responds, “No, but he is good.”

And our God, however good and kind and holy and loving, is not “tame”, and He doesn’t jump to entertain us. He doesn’t bow to our whims; rather, He enjoins us to implement His holy intentions—in simple terms: to do what he says! He requires us to attend to His indwelling presence in the Holy Spirit, Who is the deposit of our everlasting inheritance in Christ.No, He is not tame. “Our God is indeed a devouring fire.” (Hebrews 12:29) In fact, He takes us by surprise, suddenly overturning our accustomed categories and concepts, views and habits, banishing everything that fails to accord with His Law of Love.

Acts 4:8-22: Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, replied, “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today for a good deed done to a sick man – by what means this man was healed – let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, this man stands before you healthy. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, that has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved.”When they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and discovered that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized these men had been with Jesus.  And because they saw the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say against this.  But when they had ordered them to go outside the council, they began to confer with one another, saying, “What should we do with these men? For it is plain to all who live in Jerusalem that a notable miraculous sign has come about through them, and we cannot deny it.  But to keep this matter from spreading any further among the people, let us warn them to speak no more to anyone in this name.” And they called them in and ordered them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John replied, “Whether it is right before God to obey you rather than God, you decide, for it is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.” After threatening them further, they released them, for they could not find how to punish them on account of the people, because they were all praising God for what had happened. For the man, on whom this miraculous sign of healing had been performed, was over forty years old.

To obey man or God? That’s the choice that lay before Peter and John that day, and, filled with the Spirit, they chose right.

I think we are sometimes fearful of admitting to ourselves, admitting into our consciousness, just how free we are in Christ, because such freedom actually represents the highest responsibility—and the strictest law, the law of the Spirit. It demands of us constant devotion and attention to the very Lawgiver Who lives in our hearts, in the Holy Spirit. That’s why the Scriptures call this life in Christ the highest calling.

I think we all know the following passage very well, maybe by heart: 
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also behave in accordance with the Spirit.” (Galatians 5:22-25)

In spite of our Sunday School room posters illustrating this passage as “The Fruits of the Spirit”, with apples and oranges and bananas serving to help the children memorize them, take note that in actuality Paul never says these are the fruits of the Spirit. The apostle isn’t trying to give us an exhaustive list of all the ways God’s Spirit manifests in our lives. No, he adduces these qualities as the Spirit’s “fruit”, in the singular. Paul is characterizing a life in which God’s Spirit enjoys range and scope to express Himself. In a life like that we may expect to perceive God’s Spirit coming through in a multifaceted demonstration of God’s perfect character.

And here’s the thing: against that sort of life, there is no law! Because a life like that is the realization of God’s law! A life like that has transcended all law, except for the living law of Love. That’s why Christ called such a life a “righteousness” that transcended even the righteousness of the Pharisees.

This is supreme Christian freedom and responsibility.

Elsewhere in his letter to the Galatian Christians, Paul writes: “Carry one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ,” (6:2) and “For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment,  namely, ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’” (5:14)

The Lord Jesus said, “In everything, treat others as you would want them to treat you, for this fulfills the law and the prophets.” (Matt. 7:12)

And the apostle James tells us, “But the one who peers into the perfect law of liberty and fixes his attention there, and does not become a forgetful listener but one who lives it out – he will be blessed in what he does,” (1:25) and “But if you fulfill the royal law as expressed in this scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well,” (2:8) and, “Speak and act as those who will be judged by a law that gives freedom” (2:12).

This is that new law, the new principle of the inwardly abiding Spirit of God Who gives birth to a new motive within us, one that reflects the very heart of the eternal Creator.

This is that law that surpasses the righteousness of the Pharisees, because it flows from vital union with the Spirit of the Lawgiver, from essential connection with His very heart.

This is the Spirit’s appointment and work in our experience as children of the Living God.

Pentecost 2016 (1)

When we talk about the Holy Spirit, and the work of the Spirit in our lives, we often mention that the Holy Spirit:

unites us

guides us

fellowships with us

guards us

sanctifies us

testifies of Christ through us

proclaims the Gospel through the Church

brings conviction and prompts repentance in people’s hearts,

and for everything listed here there is biblical ground.

But today I’m going to emphasize something else the Spirit of God does. He reveals to us just who we are. The Holy Spirit impresses upon us what our true “self” is, in the sphere of, and in connection with, the divine Life. God’s Spirit accords us our genuine spiritual “visage”, personhood, self-concept.

And in a world like our present, contemporary one, where people desperately scramble after the coolest “image”, finding out and coming to terms with your authentic Self in the light of Christ means freedom—it means room, expanse inwardly. It means independence from worldly pressures to please people by fabricating an external persona that conforms to a fallen world’s ephemeral errors and delusions.

The apostle Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20; NET Bible, here and following)

And he tells the Colossians: “God wanted to make known to them the glorious riches of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (1:27)

“Christ in you”—in this lies our authentic Self, the child of God, because of the abiding Spirit of God in Whom we have fellowship with the Father and Son.

Paul says the following as well concerning this Holy Spirit: “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery leading again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself bears witness to our spirit that we are God’s children.” (Romans 8:14-16).

By the inward witness of the Spirit we realize and affirm who we are—namely, the children of the living God and Redeemer. And established as such we seek no other “image” or “profile” in the world’s eyes. On the contrary, our hearts unfailingly return to the Father in the Spirit, by the grace of the Son, there to exult in unveiled encounter with the eternal Source of our life.

God’s child, at the very center of your existence you are not alone; the Spirit of Christ dwells there and, through you, with your own voice, He cries, “Abba! Father!”

In the world there’s no shortage of reasons to worry, agonize and fret, no shortage of things that drown out God’s own call. Not only that, but the very values and influence of the world constantly work on our minds, and all this, taken together, easily breeds a false self-concept in us, a counterfeit persona that we lean on like a crutch in order to cope with the world and all that it expects of us.

But the crutch, sooner or later, snaps.

The Holy Spirit in the heart of a believer in Christ, this is He Who delivers us from the temptation to fabricate a counterfeit  Self out of a misguided attempt to handle life in this world. He accords us the capacity to find out who we are and what we are appointed to, and why we even exist at all! And what the real significance of our existence is right here and now, today, as well as for all eternity. To the degree we apprehend His gaze upon us, and see ourselves reflected there, to that degree we know who we are. That is his gift, because He loves us.

And the more we find ourselves out in Him, the more we discard our masks, the outer “gloss” from behind which we used to declare, “This is me.”  

What does this all convey to us about the Holy Spirit? What does it mean? The apostle Paul writes: “Now we do speak wisdom among the mature, but not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are perishing.  Instead we speak the wisdom of God, hidden in a mystery, that God determined before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood it. If they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But just as it is written, ‘Things that no eye has seen, or ear heard, or mind imagined, are the things God has prepared for those who love him.’ God has revealed these to us by the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the things of a man except the man’s spirit within him? So too, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.” (1 Corinthians 2: 6-11)

To search the deep things of God, to know “the things of God,” to receive the revelation of the things God has prepared for those who love Him, this is all accessible to us, but only if we are willing to be spiritually naked before God, open, transparent, with no masks of any kind, and then only may we experience what the apostle depicts with the following words: “…[W]hen one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is present, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, which is from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:16-18)

This is what the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ granted to His beloved-in-the-Son nation, the Church, on that day when “suddenly a sound like a violent wind blowing came from heaven and filled the entire house” (Acts 2:2) where, with one accord, they were waiting for the promise of the Father. And they were filled with the Holy Spirit, thus coming into the rule and sway, the dominion and power of the Spirit of God, Who is the essential, central, living Principle of our present redeemed life in Christ. 

HOPE

When we think about hope, we generally think of it as a kind of wish or desire. For instance, “I sure hope Mom is making meat loaf for supper tonight”—because we love Mom’s meat loaf. Or, “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow, so we can have the picnic.” We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we have strong feelings about what we want!

Or “hope” can be something a bit more like “preference”. For instance, “I hope it will be Pavarotti singing the role and not Domingo, because I like Pavarotti more.”

But when Holy Scripture, the revelation of God, raises the concept of “hope”, what’s being expressed is something different yet. Biblical “hope” is a confident expectation.

In the Bible, “to hope” is to wait actively. Not passively, but actively! That is, to manifest expectation by faithful obedience.

This is why hope is tightly connected with faith. Because if you don’t believe the Lord’s promises, then why manifest faithful obedience? But faithful obedience is the essence of the hope God’s Word reveals. And hope is the fuel of our constancy towards God.

Up to the time of David, we run across “hope” as a distinct concept surprisingly rarely in Scripture. With one impressive exception: the book of Job, where hope is mentioned about 18 times. That’s not surprising, of course. Hope became life’s crucial, essential question for Job—was there any hope left for him at all?

The highest expression of Job’s hope is found in Job 19:25:

²⁵ As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that as the last
he will stand upon the earth.
²⁶ And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God,
²⁷ whom I will see for myself,
and whom my own eyes will behold,
and not another.
My heart grows faint within me. [NET Bible, here and following]

I think his heart is growing faint within him from longing, pining, hoping for that day, the day of universal righteousness, righteousness restored by the same One Who will restore Job’s own body from the dust of death. And therefore Job says further, to the “friends” who have come and done such a miserable job of “comforting” him:

²⁸ If you say, ‘How we will pursue him,
since the root of the trouble is found in him!’
²⁹ Fear the sword yourselves,
for wrath brings the punishment by the sword,
so that you may know
that there is judgment.

“There is judgment.” That, paradoxically, is precisely our hope—that there is judgment. Yes, that’s a frightful notion to most, but how can we expect—more than expect, press earnestly towards the ultimate restoration of righteousness without anticipating the righteous judgment of a holy God? It’s impossible! No judgment, no restoration.

We in Christ press towards the judgment, with no fear of condemnation. Because we unequivocally trust and categorically set our hope on the Redeemer prophesied so long ago by Job. That’s the great paradox of the faith of Christ: we press eagerly in hope towards the very thing that, to most of humanity, represents the extinguishment of hope. And there is spiritual sense in that. If our hope is not in God, then… it is not. So it has always been and so it always will be, and in every sphere of life, including the Last Judgment, the Judgment the Lord Himself has taken care of in love towards us, having taken human flesh upon Himself, having suffered, having atoned for the sins of a mutinous creation. That is the kind of love and grace we hope upon.

Such hope is no mere wish or desire, no mere preference. Rather, it is the concrete reception by faith of the fate God has appointed us in Christ. That is divine hope, and its source is the very heart of the Eternal, the Almighty.

Apart from the book of Job (which is a very ancient book, by the way), “hope”, as a distinct term, is rarely expressed in the history of Israel, until the time of King David, the “man after God’s own heart”.  And I find something ironic in that: Job, after all, lost everything, while David gained everything. But both trusted upon the Lord and entrusted all their hope to Him.

In the psalms of David we encounter a virtual explosion of hope! David’s whole life is defined by hope, by trust in God, and this hope is expressed over and over in the psalms.    

Psalm 25:1-5

¹ O Lord, I come before you in prayer.
² My God, I trust in you.
Please do not let me be humiliated;
do not let my enemies triumphantly rejoice over me!
³ Certainly none who rely [hope] on you will be humiliated.
Those who deal in treachery will be thwarted and humiliated.
⁴ Make me understand your ways, O Lord!
Teach me your paths!
⁵ Guide me into your truth and teach me.
For you are the God who delivers me;
on you I rely [hope] all day long.

And verse 21:

May integrity and godliness protect me,
for I rely [hope] on you!

Now, maybe will someone will object: “Well, it’s easy for David to rely on God. After all, he’s a king and has everything he could wish for!’

(Which,  oddly, is just what the devil protested to the Lord concerning Job: “Of course he reveres you! You give him everything. Just let him a suffer a bit and then let’s see how much he reveres you!”)

But--! But how many years did David, though already anointed king by the prophet Samuel, have to live as an alien, an outcast, rejected by his people. And even when he was finally recognized as king the schemes and intrigues against him didn’t stop—the worst of which was the uprising engineered against him by his own cherished son Absalom.

But, whether in battle or at peace, whether  in power or under persecution, the life of this “man after God’s own heart” was constantly characterized by hope.

The apostle Paul tells us that this kind of hope—divine hope—“doesn’t disappoint.” It doesn’t leave us in the lurch, doesn’t ditch us, doesn’t abandon us, doesn’t drop the ball or throw us under the bus!

But before we take a closer look at the place where Paul expounds on this hope, let’s take a look first at the very last mention of hope in the psalms.

We find it in Psalm 147:11. In the King James Version it reads “The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in those that hope in his mercy.” 

It is interesting to look at how this verse is translated in other versions:

(ASV) Jehovah taketh pleasure in them that fear him, In those that hope in his lovingkindness.

(CEV) The Lord is pleased only with those who worship him and trust his love.

(Contemporary Jewish Bible) Adonai takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who wait for his grace.

(NIV) …the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.

And in the NET it reads: "The Lord takes delight in his faithful followers, and in those who wait for his loyal love."

It’s surprising that the final word in this verse gets translated from Hebrew into English in so many different ways: grace, mercy, loyal love, unfailing love, lovingkindness. You would be justified in asking why: isn’t it just one word in Hebrew and doesn’t it mean just one thing? Why can’t the translators agree on a single translation?

Well, the answer is: the Hebrew word, khesed, conveys a concept to the Hebrew mind for which we do not have, in English, a single precise term. Khesed connotes something like ultimate, supreme, incomparable, sacrificial devotion and loyalty. You can see why many translators simply opt for the English word “love”—even though there is a different Hebrew word for “love”!

You could never have khesed without love, but you could have love, of one sort or another, with khesed. To put it another way, all khesed is love, but not all love is khesed.

In the New Testament, where the apostles tried to convey this Hebrew concept, they used Greek words that we translate as either “grace” or “love”.

But it is this khesed, precisely, that is in God, this divine motivation that constitutes the primordial, primal source and origin of all actual love. Because there is khesed in God, there is hope in us.

And so the apostle John tells us, in perhaps the best-known Bible verse of all, that God is love—to compel us to inextinguishable hope.

Those who hope on God have entirely entrusted their whole fate to His khesed, i.e., to His sacrificial faithfulness. They have entrusted their whole future to this incomparable, inextinguishable devotion of the Most High. That is the first and last lesson the Lord God desired to inculcate in the Israelite nation under the Old Testament. And many did indeed take the lesson in! They responded to God’s faithfulness with hope.

But—the lesson remained at best a glimmer of what was unveiled only in the face of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Redeemer foretold in antiquity by the God-faithful Job.

And it is about hope like this that the apostle Paul writes in the fifth chapter of the epistle to the Romans:

“Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,² through whom we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of God’s glory. ³ Not only this, but we also rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance, character, and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

With such assurance, because of such undergirded expectation, in such compelling trust, we can endure and keep going on life’s path, fortified by “the hope of God’s glory.”

It’s interesting, even a bit surprising, that in the four Gospels we never hear the Lord Jesus pronounce the phrase “I hope.” Or even the word “hope.” But, the kind of certainty and decisiveness that testify to surging hope, we see everywhere and always in His words and deeds.

It says in Romans 5:3-4: “³ Not only this, but we also rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance, character, and character, hope.”

It is this kind of hope, hope issuing from proven character, character forged in suffering, suffering endured for love—this kind of hope that “does not (cannot!) disappoint”—that streams from the Person of Christ when, for example (Luke 9:51, KJV), “the time was come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.”

Perfectly knowing what awaited Him there, Jesus nonetheless set His face toward Jerusalem, where the Father’s will—the will Jesus utterly set His hope upon—was summoning Him. It is that all-transcending hope, divine hope, that empowered Jesus Christ to walk on. Past all the approaching agonies joy awaited Christ. This is what the writer of Hebrew directs our attention to: “…keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. For the joy set out for him he endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2)

For the sake of that certain, fixed, promised joy, in the Father’s presence, Christ endured the cross, and likewise endured all worldly, passing trials, sorrows, pains and grief, right up to the Cross itself, knowing what HOPE was preserved for Him with the Father.

And the author of Hebrews exhorts us to fix our gaze on Him, so that we too, for the sake of that hope kept safe for us with our Risen Redeemer, might endure, not give up but press forward: “Think of him who endured such opposition against himself by sinners, so that you may not grow weary in your souls and give up.” (Hebrews 12:3)

How not to grow weary in our souls? Hope. Heavenly hope doesn’t say “Maybe…” but “Amen!” to all the promises verified and kept for us in Heaven, where our life itself “is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ (who is your life) appears, then you too will be revealed in glory with him.” (Colossians 3:3-4)

Again, the apostle Paul tells us in Romans 5:1-2: “Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,² through whom we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of God’s glory.”

The believing reaction to this promise isn’t “Maybe…” but “Amen!” The only worthy answer is consecration that exalts the all-surpassing love of our living Hope and Redeemer, here on earth and for all eternity.