Sunday School notes for August 1, 2010

Sunday School for Sunday, August 1 2010

Today's Myth: If God Gave Me a Sign, I Would Believe

You guys might have heard something like this before. Some folks like to claim that, if God would only give them some sign or proof of his existence, then they would believe.

Sometimes, it comes under the guise of scientific authority and great rationality: "If you can't prove to me that God exists, then why should I believe that he does?"

Sometimes, it takes the form of a hollow prayer: "God, if you would just help me get an A", or "God, if you would just make that handsome young man over there ask me out", or whatever, then I'll follow you.

Have you guys ever heard anything like this?

Both of these examples have their own problems, but they both spring from a deeper myth of which many people try to convince themselves: that their lack of faith is due to God's inability to prove his worthiness.

Read Romans chapter 1, v18-23.

- What do these verses say about man?

• by his unrighteousness, man suppresses the truth (about God) (v.18)
• God's divinity and power are made plain to man in created things (v.19-20)
• Man chooses the truth that he wants to choose: "[he] knew God [but] did not honor him as God or give thanks to him" (v.21)

According to Paul, people who claim there is no God are liars, not just because what they claim isn't true, but because deep down, they know that God is there, but have just made a conscious effort not to honor him.

Read Mark 3:1-6 and then read Mark 6:1-6.

- Do you think that, prior to Jesus, people just went around miraculously healing other people?

• Nope.

- Jesus says in Mark 2 that one of his reasons for healing is so that witnesses to his miracles "may know that [Jesus] has authority to forgive sins" 2:10, something that his opponents attribute to "God alone" (2:7). In the passage that Kathy read, why does it say that Jesus' opponents "watched him" (3:2)?

• "to see whether he would heal . . . so that they might accuse him" (3:2)

- How do they react to Jesus healing the man with the withered hand?

• They plot to "destroy him" (3:6)

And so even in the face of Jesus' authority as God, which is proven to his opponents by his miraculous healing, these opponents want nothing more than to destroy him.

When Jesus is back in his hometown, the people marvel at his "wisdom [and] mighty works" (6:2), but they're just like the Pharisees. Instead of honoring him as God, they "[take] offense at him" (6:3).


Read Luke 16:19-31. Pay special attention to verses 27-31.
- In v.27, what does the rich man ask of Abraham?
- That he would send Lazarus to warn his family (v.27-28)
- What is Abraham's ultimate reply in v.31?
- That a sign, like someone coming from the dead, would still not
convince the rich man's faithless brothers


The Point

God has revealed himself in creation, in his Word, and, most abundantly, in his son Jesus Christ. If you are a Christian already, he has probably revealed himself to you in other ways more and more. You may have felt his hand behind your circumstances, or his Spirit guiding you in prayer or in action. And yet we still find ourselves demanding more of him. We dangle our faith in front of him like it's something he needs or for which he is in desperation. This is the God of the universe, and we should not put the Lord our God to the test. We need to repent of our pride, and we especially need to repent for so quickly dismissing the present power of his grace in our lives.

If you are not a Christian already, you still need to repent. You need to repent for knowing God but not honoring him, for willfully exchanging the truth about him for a lie, and for worshiping anything created instead of he who created it all.

My encouragement to you, Christian or not, is that Jesus' arms are open wide to receive your humble repentance and give you a new heart--a broken and contrite heart, which his Father will never despise.

my brother is blogging again

danielcwarshaw.com

Check him out some time. He's been doing it for a long while, but has recently slowed after going back to school for an MBA. He just started putting stuff up again. If you're at least marginally interested in food reviews and/or camera equipment and/or left-left-field humor, you'll probably be at least marginally interested in his blog.

Writing again again

So I'll give this a shot once more. I feel the need to write, because there's a lot on my mind lately, particularly as I consider Scripture more and more. I may still throw up the occasional oddball about technology or family randomness, but I think I'd like to write about some of the things I'm thinking about. Maybe some folks will read it and we can start a dialogue, but even if not, I'll be preserving some thoughts "out in the cloud", and that seems to be where everybody is storing their thoughts nowadays.

love your wife

So Valorie and I watched "Fireproof" the other night, and while some of the acting was weak, and it was definitely chick-flick-esque, I must say it was worth watching. I was really convicted.

I'm really good for grumbling whenever Valorie asks me to do something. I'm either too tired, or I did it last time, or I don't feel like it, or whatever.

It wasn't like this when we were dating, though. When we were dating, I would follow her a half hour home every night to make sure she got there ok. I would do anything for her, because she was special and mysterious.

So what's changed? Is she less special or less mysterious? I would say no.

When people get divorced, it seems like the stock reason is that they are different people than they were when they got married. I actually think this is true, but I think that this is precisely why you should want to stay married--there's always something new to find out and know. We don't get married because we find someone boring or because we think we know everything about them. We get married because we find someone fascinating, and a lot of the fascination lies in that we don't know everything about that person.

I think I grumble and whine because I'm selfish, and because I've fallen victim to dwelling on the things about being married that never change--the responsibilities.

Thankfully, God used this movie to give me a little bit of a smack in the side of the head. I'm making it a point to actively love my wife, to "lead my heart" instead of following it (paraphrasing the movie here). It's amazing--when you do that, it becomes natural to love fully in the heart again. For some reason I can't explain, flight-of-fancy emotions follow closely behind a measured, deliberate love of the will. Beyond all comprehension, serving my wife with discipline quickly morphs into serving my wife with joy. I see her in a different light, and I want to learn about her, and keep learning about her.

So next time you're about to grumble at some request your wife has made, take that complaint captive, regardless of how the request was made or which instance of the same request it is. Wipe the frown off of your face (or better yet, stop it before it gets there), soften your hardened heart, and do it. Real love comes at a cost to the lover. Real love is the only love worth having. Don't be lukewarm. Love your wife.

what am I proud of?

Praise God for showing me the things that he shows me.

Over the past several days (excluding yesterday), I was being really Christian. We had a Bible conference at church, each session of which I attended. I had Christian discussions with my wife and encouraged her about our son and other issues. I wrote two blog posts analyzing some ideas and some scripture, and I would say that they turned out alright.

But I was being a lousy Christian.

Looking back over the weekend, I can see that my prayer life was nearly non-existent. I had my Bible with me at church, but I didn't really read it there or at home. I felt empowered, successful, enlightened, and altogether pretty flipping good about myself.

One of my favorite passages (as of today) is from 1 Corinthians 1. In verses 26-31, Paul says:

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

I had read these verses before today, but never really took them to heart. But God, in his wisdom, works in his time, and this section of Scripture was on my heart when I needed it today, even though I hadn't read it in quite some time.

Earlier in this chapter, Paul alludes to Isaiah: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart" (1 Corinthians 1:19). God breaks down our conventional human wisdom. He chooses weakness to conquer strength, foolishness to conquer wisdom.

The gospel is "a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23) because it goes against the way that we operate in everyday human life. If you want to carry more weight, you must become stronger. If you want to retire at 50, you must manage your affairs with wisdom. Simply put, the strong are strong and the wise are wise, and their lives typically bear fruit reflective of these truths.

But a world where we rely on our own strength to make our provision is a broken world. In Genesis, God tells Adam that it is "because [Adam has] . . . eaten of the tree of which [God] commanded . . . 'You shall not eat of it,' . . . by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread" (Genesis 3:17-19).

Christ came to heal the world. Romans 8:18-25 talks about our hope resting in the eventual restoration of the world (the entire creation!) to what it was before it was "subjected to futility" (Romans 8:20) by man ("him who subjected it" - Romans 8:20). Christ came so that we will one day no longer rely on our own human strengths to meet our needs. And while we must, at present, still toil in this broken world to provide for our families, maintain our finances, and whatever else, we are given a significant foretaste of the glory to come in the person of Christ (the Word) and in the person of the Holy Spirit. The ministry of Christ in the Bible, the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our hearts--there is our strength. By the grace of God himself, we have been given a sort of access to the mind of God, where perfect wisdom is found. And we are given perfect strength in the promise of the hope in which we were saved, to which the Spirit bears witness.

Over the past several days, I have lost sight of all of this. I have found sufficiency and satisfaction in my state of well-being instead of in Christ. The irony is that my state of well-being was because of Christ. How quickly does the devil seize even what is good and pure in our lives and try to pervert it into some counterfeit goodness? Praise Jesus, though, that even in my recent lapse into a Christless Christianity, he is sovereign. Not even my human stupidity can separate me from the love of God in Jesus Christ, and for that I am most grateful.

after

i carried my father

out of his house

in bags of clothing--

Brooks Brothers

Dockers

cashmere coats

i wore him

out of his clothes

Yves Saint Laurent

in socks

shirts and trousers--

a gradual shift

from his smell

to mine until

all that's left

is mine--

time absorbs

the moment

of transfer

and I've forgotten

when my father

left his skin

and moved into

his things

when he ceased to be

here

in all that's left

of all he was:

bone, voice

aftershave--

my father

a heap of broken images

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images . . .

T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland

I am told that a great deal of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland is Biblically allusory, and so it is entirely possible that there are Biblical references in the passage above (other than the "Son of man . . ." bit). This is not why I chose to quote the passage, though. I'm mainly interested in that last part.

I had the pleasure of attending our church's Winter Bible Conference these past two days. Our speaker was Dr. Vern Poythress, a man with a list of impressive academic credentials and an admirable (realistic) humility about them and their relation to his creator.

One of the things Dr. Poythress examined frequently over the weekend was the idea that we and all of our capabilities are images of God and his character. And so the constance of many of our natural processes (the rising and setting sun, for example) are echoes of the reliability of God and his unchanging nature. We, with our capacity for rational thought and our ability to communicate in sophisticated ways, are likewise reflections of the glorious God that created us.

Dr. Poythress was quick to point out that, whereas Christ, the son of God, is a perfect image of the Father, we and all of our God-derived attributes are imperfect reflections of the Father and his nature.

Why am I writing about this? I was sitting in church this morning, trying to get my son to listen to me. I found myself getting frustrated, because he was the model son yesterday, and it only took him a day to lose his respect for the authority of my wife and myself.

This got me thinking, though--the Bible tells us that Christians sin. 1 John 1:8 says: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." In Romans, Paul says that though we Christians ". . . delight in the law of God, in [our] inner being . . . [we] serve the law of sin [with our flesh]" (Romans 7:22,25).

Another image Dr. Poythress mentioned was the parallel between the God-Man relationship and the Man-Child relationship. We know from Scripture that the God-Man relationship is broken, and not what it was created to be (Romans 1), and that this is a result of man's sinfulness.

What makes me think, as a human father, that the Man-Child (human-to-human) relationship will be a more perfect imaging than the God-Man relationship? In other words, if I am bound to disobey the law of the perfect God in whose image I have been created, I should expect my son to disobey the law of his imperfect earthly father, at least from time to time (read: frequently).

We are rebellious creatures. We hate to yield authority to anyone or anything. This is why many nonbelievers are offended by the idea that they would be considered sinful because of the actions of one representative man. It is this faith in the self that keeps them from acknowledging Christ, as well--he, like Adam, is a representative whose actions are looked upon as the basis of judgment for a body of others. The difference between the two is in what we deserve. Adam was a rightful representative (or federal head) for the whole human race, because given the same circumstances, not one of us would have made the right choice--God over the self. I realize that would raise objections from a lot of folks, but I believe that, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that this is the case.

Christ, on the other hand, is our representative purely through the grace and love of our Father. Given his circumstances, we would have yielded to the Evil One in the wilderness. We would not have healed the sick--would not have bothered with them, even--and we most certainly would not have sought to bear the punishment for anyone's sins, least of all our own. And yet God in his mercy sent his Son for those very reasons--because we're not good enough to reflect his holiness on our own. Those who believe can hide themselves in Christ's righteousness, so that when God looks on us, all he sees is the perfect image of himself reflected back at him.

May he grant me the grace to look on my own son with such patience, grace, and humility. God the almighty humbled himself for our sake. May I seek to show my son that type of love as best I can reflect it.