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The Lord's Chosen Servant

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:52:47 +0000

Why Jesus is My Hero #49 of 52

"Behold my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice,
or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break,
and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not grow faint or be discouraged
till he has established justice in the earth;
and the coastlands wait for his law.
Thus says God, the Lord,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people on it
and spirit to those who walk in it:
'I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness;
I will take you by the hand and keep you;
I will give you as a covenant for the people,
a light for the nations,
to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.
I am the Lord; that is my name;
my glory I give to no other,
nor my praise to carved idols.
Behold, the former things have come to pass,
and new things I now declare;
before they spring forth
I tell you of them.'"

I'm not really sure what I can add to this totally awesome passage about why Jesus is so fab.

The Puritan Richard Sibbes makes much of v3 in his book "the bruised reed": "a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench". It really brings out Jesus' tenderness and gentleness with his people - as Psalm 103:14 puts it "For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust." Being a Christian isn't all about being perfect all the time and never messing up - it's about trusting in a great saviour who paid a great price to forgive us a great debt so that we can live a grateful life. However bruised we feel, however much we feel like the flame is about to die out altogether, Jesus knows our need and he longs for us to run to his grace-filled arms for strength.

I rather like v4 as well: "He will not grow faint or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law." Here is someone who will not rest until his purposes have come to pass, and being God he will never run out of enthusiasm or patience before achieving his goal. "Justice" here is a picture of the created order being brought back in line with God's will - of all of the effects of the fall being reversed and things being set straight that formerly were crooked. What a great day that will be, and what a relief for bruised reeds and faintly burning wicks!

"I am the Lord; that is my name;
my glory I give to no other,
nor my praise to carved idols."

The Long Promised King

Sun, 06 May 2012 13:09:48 +0000

Why Jesus is My Hero #48 of 52

On Thursday voters across London were turning out to choose their candidate for Mayor, and there were also many local council elections across the country. Yet however enthusiastic we are about the concept of democracy, it can sometimes be hard to get especially excited about local elections - sometimes there's a sense that we're voting for people we've never heard of into positions of very limited authority (but as somebody who's about to do a Bible study on Romans 13 next week, let me encourage you that you should still vote!)

Yet there is one leader that we should be very enthusiastic about - God's anointed king, his Messiah. King David was one of Israel's greatest kings, ruling a united nation at a time of unprecedented political and economic power, and who most importantly had a healthy relationship with the Lord God. David has this bright idea that he'd like to build God a house - a temple for his name to dwell in - but it turns out that God has other ideas. God turns it around and says he's going to build David a house instead - an eternal dynasty that will know no end:

"Moreover, the Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men, but my steadfast love will not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me. Your throne shall be established for ever.'" (2 Samuel 7:11-16)

This passage is the foundation for all of the Messianic expectation that follows in the rest of the Old Testament - this sure and certain promise from God that he's going to raise up a ruler in the line of David to sit on the throne forever. Superficially it looks like it might be referring to David's son Solomon, and indeed there certainly is a partial fulfilment through him. But at the same time there is much about the ruler described here that seems to go beyond any merely human king.

When Jesus shows up on the scene in Mark 1 he announces "The kingdom of God is at hand" - because at last, after years of waiting, the king of that kingdom has arrived. Read the book of 1 and 2 Kings sometime and you find yourself being perpetually frustrated, as king after king fails to obey God as they ought, bringing ruin and disaster on themselves and the nation as a whole in the process. It's heartbreaking to see the prosperity that Israel had under Solomon, only to see him throw it all away as his heart turns away in idolatry and goes after the foreign gods of his many wives. As much as we like to complain about our leaders, it's God's grace and mercy to give them to us for our good. But our supreme good is found in our supremely good leader - Jesus Christ, the true son of David. He's the one king we can depend on - his heart remains eternally true to his Father in heaven, and through his resurrection from the dead we know he will never die again. Unlike the temporary prosperity enjoyed under Solomon's reign, the blessings of being part of Jesus' kingdom will never end, because his godly rule will never cease.

That's why Jesus is my hero - because he's exactly the kind of ruler I need: one who will remain wholly true to the Lord his God for all eternity, selflessly ruling over his kingdom for good forever.

The Downsides of Cohabitation

Fri, 04 May 2012 14:04:37 +0000

Interesting article on the potentially detrimental effects on a relationship of living together before you're married from the New York Times:

"I've had other clients who also wish they hadn't sunk years of their 20s into relationships that would have lasted only months had they not been living together. Others want to feel committed to their partners, yet they are confused about whether they have consciously chosen their mates. Founding relationships on convenience or ambiguity can interfere with the process of claiming the people we love. A life built on top of "maybe you'll do" simply may not feel as dedicated as a life built on top of the "we do" of commitment or marriage."

(-HT Tim Challies)

The Kindness and the Severity of God

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 14:32:54 +0000

Why Jesus is My Hero #47 of 52

Have you ever heard people make a distinction between the seemingly vengeful, angry God of the Old Testament and the kind, loving God of the New Testament? What is God actually like? Which picture of God are we to believe?

In reality it's an entirely false distinction - time and time again, both the Old and the New Testaments emphasise both of these aspects of God's character side by side: both the kindness and the severity of God, the mercy of God side by side with the holiness of God.

Numbers 16 is a good representative passage. The constant grumbling of the people of Israel as they wander through the wilderness has finally broken out into outright rebellion against Moses & Aaron, and ultimately against God himself.

"They assembled themselves together against Moses and against Aaron and said to them, 'You have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?'"

The passage stresses that this grumbling and rebellion is a very serious matter. Grumbling is highly addictive and can spread rapidly throughout a community - instead of responding to God in humble submission and thankfulness for what he had done, all they could see was the negatives and how they wanted things to be different.

As events unfold, it quickly becomes apparent just how offensive this kind of grumbling is to God:

"Moses said, 'Hereby you shall know that the Lord has sent me to do all these works, and that it has not been of my own accord. If these men die as all men die, or if they are visited by the fate of all mankind, then the Lord has not sent me. But if the Lord creates something new, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the Lord.
And as soon as he had finished speaking all these words, the ground under them split apart. And the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, with their households and all the people who belonged to Korah and all their goods. So they and all that belonged to them went down alive into Sheol, and the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly. And all Israel who were around them fled at their cry, for they said, "Lest the earth swallow us up!" And fire came out from the Lord and consumed the 250 men offering the incense.'"

It's a deeply sobering passage as we see God acting in judgement against the sin of the people. God clearly displays his severity.

And yet God also displays his kindness:

"Moses said to Aaron, 'Take your censer, and put fire on it from the altar and lay incense on it and carry it quickly to the congregation and make atonement for them, for wrath has gone out from the Lord; the plague has begun.' So Aaron took it as Moses said and ran into the midst of the assembly. And behold, the plague had already begun among the people. And he put on the incense and made atonement for the people. And he stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was stopped."

God provides Moses and Aaron to intercede on behalf of the people, and provides a way for the people's sin to be atoned for - that is, something to turn aside God's anger and allow restored relationship to take place.

The God of the New Testament is exactly the same God we see in this passage. Nowhere are these two aspects of God's character, his holiness and his mercy, more clearly demonstrated side by side than at the cross of Jesus Christ. At the cross God shows us more starkly than ever just how serious our sin is, that he can't simply sweep it under the carpet, that it must be judged according to the holy purity of God's character - in giving up his one and only Son to die, God shows that there is simply no other way. Yet God also proves his mercy beyond doubt, in punishing his Son in our place so that we can be forgiven, so that we can go free. He died the death that we deserved - his death atoned for us, if we'll trust in him. Like Aaron and his censer, Jesus' cross stands between the dead and the living and makes all the difference in the world.

The kindness of God, and the severity of God, side by side, shown at the cross. It's a thought that should deeply humble us, as we recognise the seriousness of our sin, and how deeply it grieves God. But it's also a thought that should make us profoundly grateful, as we rejoice in the free and full forgiveness shown to us in Jesus Christ - that we don't need to pay the penalty for our sin ourselves, because it's already been dealth with.

Fretting and Procrastination - What They Have In Common

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:33:10 +0000

I'm an accomplished procrastinator, and yesterday I did a fair bit of fretting as well, and I've come to an important realisation about what these two traits of mine have in common, with some big implications for how to deal with them: both procrastination and fretting ultimately involve wasting time being anxious about a problem rather than dealing with a problem.

Firstly, some definitions:

Procrastination is when you know you're supposed to be doing something, but it just seems too much like hard work, so you put it off and waste time doing something less important that you'd rather be doing instead.
Fretting is when you're anxiously thinking about a situation and all the ways in which it might go wrong and all the problems that might arise and what about this and what about that and... agh, make it stop!

I've written before that the root of so much of my procrastination is uncertainty - for example why I never seem to be able to bring myself to wash up my parents' teapot when I go to visit:

"The reason I always left the teapot is that I never quite knew what to do with it - it clearly needed some kind of cleaning action applied to it and yet it was so grimy and dirty inside and I didn't really want my future cups of tea to taste of washing up liquid and I don't really know what I'm supposed to do with it and - Agh! Uncertainty. My brain gets scared and shuts down and prefers to leave it rather than figure it out and deal with it."

For me, procrastination is a fear of what would actually be involved in solving the problem I'm avoiding. It's running scared instead of embracing the problem and getting on with it.

And I've realised that fretting is exactly the same. When facing a potentially stressful situation, there are two possibilities:

The situation is entirely outside of my control, and no amount of fretting is going to prevent the situation going wrong. In this situation I just need to pray and entrust it to God, knowing that he is good and that he loves me and that if things go wrong it's only because he permitted it.
Or maybe there is something I could do to address the situation, maybe being prepared for some of the ways it could go wrong, maybe asking some sensible questions of the people who know the situation better than I do, anything at all to actually get on with addressing the source of the anxiety. In this situation, I should probably just get on and deal with things.

But in neither situation is anything achieved by sitting there and fretting! Just like procrastination, fretting is running scared instead of embracing the problem and getting on with it.

Being anxious isn't just a personality quirk - I firmly believe that it is an expression of my sinfulness. It's a failure to trust God for the future, and to get on and do what I can to serve him in the present. Realising this fact has been a helpful step towards growing less anxious, by his grace - even if there is still an awful long way to go!

Book Review: Walking With Gay Friends

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:39:29 +0000

The following is a guest post by my friend Dave.

Has anyone ever asked you to change?
Not just your clothes - though that could be part of it. Has anyone ever asked you to change your behaviour?
Has anyone ever asked you to change not just your behaviour, but the way you think?
Has anyone ever asked you to change not just your behaviour and the way you think, but also the things you believe and the feelings you have?
To change your behaviour, the way you think, your beliefs, your feelings, the people you hang out with, the places you go, and the dreams you have for the future?
To dump your partner, to ditch the friends who love you the most, to turn away from the only people who seem to understand and support you, and to eradicate pretty much everything that makes you you - your entire identity?

If you can answer "no" then you are probably not a gay person investigating the Christian faith.

We all know that homosexuality and Christianity are not particularly amicable companions. While tempers are especially high at the moment, in the wake of the government's proposals to allow gay marriage, historically neither side has tended to come to the debate demonstrating a great deal of tact, respect or understanding. In a recent article on the Guardian website, one group's viewpoint was described as a rampant, sickening plague. In this particular case, that was the author talking about a church - but we've all seen the same sort of language wielded by self-professed Christians against the gay community. "Objections to equal marriage rights are, as ever, only bigotry hastily smeared with religious justification", claims the author of the article, and, sadly, that can often be the case. Even smart, well-educated, Biblically-knowledgeable Christians can be hopelessly bigoted, ignorant, or just painfully insensitive when it comes to issues of same sex attraction.

Which is why every evangelical Christian should read Alex Tylee's short book "Walking with Gay Friends".

It doesn't matter if you don't have any.

For one thing, you may. Same sex attraction issues are common, and most Christians who wrestle with them don't tend to shout about it. Would you?

For another thing, the storm brewing around the marriage proposals means that more and more people are going to be taking note of what the church has to say on the subject. It is vital that there are at least a few Christians out there who can navigate the turbulent course between the twin evils of Bible-denying liberalism and Bible-distorting homophobia.

Thirdly, even well-meaning Christians, who have thought through the issues, and know how to argue against homosexual practices from the Bible (which means not just crying "The Bible says it's wrong", but being able to show how the Bible says it's wrong), can still be guilty of gross insensitivity toward their struggling brothers and sisters. If you can't see how the questions at the start of this post relate to this topic, for instance, then you definitely need to read the book. Telling someone that they need to "stop being gay" if they want to become a Christian is not like telling someone they need to stop swearing, or wearing short skirts, or beating up pensioners. There are deep issues of identity involved that will require huge amounts of love, support, understanding and encouragement to work through.

(It's worth saying that even the top guys mess this stuff up. Around three thousand Christian men recently went to the London Men's Convention, for an excellent day of Bible teaching, praise and fellowship. Estimates vary hugely as to what proportion of the population experience homosexual urges, but in a group of three thousand there could have been anywhere from 30 to 300 (or more) men there for whom this is a painful battle. Inside the complimentary booklet, Evangelicals Now chose to run a full-page advert featuring a buff, topless man. One of my friends commented that it looked like the cover of a gay magazine.)

Walking with Gay Friends is subtitled "A journey of informed compassion", and it's the word informed which, I think, is this book's strongest recommendation. Written with an insider's perspective on same sex attraction issues, the book gives the heterosexual reader an eloquent and frank insight into the pains and sacrifices a homosexual person faces when called to be obedient to the Bible's teaching on sexual morality. Alex includes many quotes from Christian strugglers, highlighting some of the good and bad experiences they have had at the hands of their church families, and while there are some encouraging descriptions of things going well, the overall picture that emerges is of a church family that doesn't seem to know how to understand their struggle or how to support them in it. A church that is generally ill informed.

In all the debate, it's easy to lose sight of an important truth: the greatest problem that a gay person faces is the same problem that faces us all. We are all equally guilty in God's sight - all of us, straight or gay, need to turn to Christ for forgiveness. Gay people need the gospel as urgently as everyone else. And this is why the church desperately needs to be better informed. Because someone who is dealing with the burden of homosexuality naturally wants to find a group who will care for them, encourage them, understand them, and make them feel accepted and wanted. And at the moment it's the gay community who are fulfilling that role, not the church.

Please read this book.

Reconciled

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:43:29 +0000

Why Jesus Is My Hero #46 of 52

Do you ever take it for granted that God would be on your side? That if there is a God out there, and if you could ever find a way to meet him, that he'd be really thrilled to see you? Maybe you've spent your whole life trying to live for him, so of course he's a really big fan of yours!

Well the Bible says that by rights, in a world where people get what they deserve, God should be decidedly against us. By nature, there exists hostility and enmity between God and us. I phrased it that way deliberately: hostility from God towards us, as God rightly stands in judgement against our instinctive hostility towards him. As Romans 1 puts it: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth."

So we have a problem. It doesn't matter how much we try and seek God, how many good works we do or how much money we try and donate to worthy causes - if we're trying to get to God by our own efforts, then we can never overcome God's hostility towards people who have treated him with the contempt which we have all shown towards him. The hostility is on God's side, the wrath belongs to God, and so any solution has to come from and originate with God.

This is precisely why the message of Good Friday is such good news, as we discover that on the cross God was providing a way to remove the hostility that existed between us, and to allow for reconciliation to occur - for us to be restored into a loving relationship with him. The apostle Paul describes it like so in this wonderful passage, 2 Corinthians 5:14-21:

"For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

... All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

On the cross, God's wrath against our sin was poured out on the innocent, Jesus Christ. He absorbed that hostility that we deserve so that if we commit ourselves to him, God might now treat us as his friends - more than that, as his children! It means we can pray to him with confidence, trust him to act towards us in love for our good, enjoy spending time listening to him as he speaks to us in his word, delight in the gospel of peace full of the hope of eternal life. None of these are things that we can take for granted - none of these are privileges that we should be able to enjoy by rights. We were by nature children of wrath, and only by his grace are we now made children of light.

That's why Good Friday is such good news, and that's why Jesus is my hero.

Jesus Was Innocent

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 19:55:14 +0000

Why Jesus Is My Hero #45 of 52

We don't often think about it like this, but at the end of the day, Christians follow a condemned criminal. Jesus of Nazareth was executed on a Roman cross on charges of treason against the Emperor, amidst additional accusations of blasphemy. If there's any truth to these claims - if Jesus was rightly condemned as a criminal - then the whole Christian faith is a complete sham and holds out no hope of salvation whatsoever.

It's no wonder, then, that in his gospel - designed to bolster the confidence of doubting Christians - Luke should be at such pains to stress the complete innocence of Jesus. His account of the accusation states it again and again, designed to show us that Jesus is utterly above reproach in the matters under examination. Pilate's initial investigations prompt him to decree "I find no guilt in this man." After trying to abdicate responsibility to a thoroughly ambivalent Herod, he is forced to respond like so:

"After examining him before you, behold, I did not find this man guilty of any of your charges against him. Neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Look, nothing deserving death has been done by him." (Luke 23:15-16)

Even the criminal on the cross next to Jesus is presented as a witness by Luke, stating "this man has done nothing wrong", and then to wrap up the passage, we have the Roman centurion declaring "Certainly this man was innocent!"

It's hard to miss the point that Luke is making: yes Jesus was executed on a cross, but it wasn't because there was the least shred of evidence against Jesus. He was completely innocent of wrongdoing. If Jesus died on the cross, it's only because he allowed it to happen - only because he chose to die. That's clear from way back in chapter 9 of Luke, where after Jesus has predicted his death, we read that "When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. " (Luke 9:51). Jesus died for a purpose, freely of his own choosing.

What was that purpose? Simply put, innocent Jesus died so that the guilty might go free. What better visual aid could there be than that of Barabbus, who Luke twice describes as "a man who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the city and for murder". This clearly guilty man is released from prison as Jesus is put to death despite his obvious innocence. This is the glory of the cross - that Jesus died as a substitute in the place of guilty men and women so that they might live. The just punishment that our sins deserve was poured out on Jesus in our place instead of on us, so that God can accept us as though we were completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

That's why Jesus is my hero - because he's the only reason that I can stand before a holy God with any shred of confidence. He has paid the price for my sin, because he had no sin of his own.

Life Without Guidance

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 23:42:32 +0000

Me and my flatmate Dave watched the movie "Ghost World" tonight. It's really depressing. It's kind of a commentary on the angst associated with growing up, growing apart, dealing with the vacuum of life without guidance and any moral framework.

It relates to something Dave has blogged about recently about what a disaster it is to follow your heart, seeing as how it's deceitful above all else and all that:

"I think the Bible's teaching can be summarised like this: the heart is an unruly child - capable of good things, but if you leave it to its own devices, you will be in a pickle."

I really like this quote by John Newton which isn't entirely relevant but which is really great so just needs to be shared, and it kind of sums up the experience of one of the characters in the movie:

"Whatever we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands shrinks upon trial, and will not fully answer the expectations which the prospect raised. It quickly ceases to be new, and then we secretly say to ourselves, Is this all?"

How Photoshop Denies the Generosity of God

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:46:14 +0000

Came across this must-read article on The Satanic Ideology of Photoshop by Mike Cosper that ties in really well with a lot of stuff I've been thinking about recently about thankfulness and contentment. It talks about the lies that feed and are fed by the culture of photoshopped beauty that we see all around us in magazines and on billboards. He says that ultimately, it's all a Satanic assault on our contentment in God and what God has given us:

"When Satan came to Eve in the garden, his assault (amongst other things) was an attack on her contentment. "Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'?" (Genesis 3:1) To paraphrase: "Has God held out on you? Has he given you less than you need, less than you deserve?" The temptations of Jesus in Luke 4 are likewise assaults upon contentment. For Jesus to turn stones to bread would have been to deny the sufficiency of God's provision. To worship Satan in exchange for the kingdoms of the earth would have been to deny the sufficiency of Jesus' inheritance to come. In these cases, Satan's message was the same: God is holding out on you. You're lacking what you really need. You don't have what will really make you happy."

Our ideas about what is beautiful are so distorted that we become unable to accept aging with grace. But more than that, our self-centredness and pursuit of pleasure means that we elevate outer beauty to the point where it makes us miserable, unable to rejoice in the reality of how things actually are.

Yet the Bible reminds us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Exactly as we are, God knew what he was doing! We need to keep remembering what life is all about, that we're here for God's glory and not our own pleasure or our own egos, and that even as we wrinkle and sag we will continue to grow more and more beautiful if we persist in seeking first the kingdom of God. There's a glory to a person's godliness that cannot help but shine.

We might wish to be eternally youthful, but instead we need to keep trusting that our God is generous and good, and rejoice in how things actually are today.

(-HT Justin Taylor)

Busyness and Rest

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:51:15 +0000

I've been really enjoying the "Life of a Steward" blog recently - a stimulating resource for anybody thinking about productivity and wise stewardship of our time from a thoroughly Christian perspective. Yesterday's post was titled Jesus and Rest: The Mater's Way of Refocusing. Here's a little excerpt:

"Rest has a way of refocusing us... When we live at a busy pace, rest is the chance for us to rejuvenate and avoid burnout. But it goes beyond that. Rather than simply recharging us so we can tackle our work week, rest can change how we fundamentally view our lives. Rest gives us the ability to refocus."

For a few years now I've been a big fan of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" approach to time management. I've long thought that one of the most valuable and foundational components of his method is the regular review - taking time out to consider what you're working on and what you should be working on. I'm rubbish at being proactive enough to make it happen. But reading that post above made me think that it's invaluable in other areas of life as well to take a step back every now and again and ask ourselves what's going on.

When we're busy we tend to become more reactive and less pro-active: in mathematical terms, we look for a local maximum, becoming hyper-focussed on where we are at the moment and responding to the demands being placed on us, and so we fail to notice that if we just zoomed out a bit we'd realise that the real answer lies elsewhere in doing something else entirely.

Read the whole thing here.

Marriage is for Losers

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:11:21 +0000

Great post by Dr Kelly Flanagan on relating well within marriage:

"In marriage, losing is letting go of the need to fix everything for your partner, listening to their darkest parts with a heart ache rather than a solution. It's being even more present in the painful moments than in the good times. It's finding ways to be humble and open, even when everything in you says that you're right and they are wrong. It's doing what is right and good for your spouse, even when big things need to be sacrificed, like a job, or a relationship, or an ego. It is forgiveness, quickly and voluntarily. It is eliminating anything from your life, even the things you love, if they are keeping you from attending, caring, and serving. It is seeking peace by accepting the healthy but crazy-making things about your partner because, you remember, those were the things you fell in love with in the first place. It is knowing that your spouse will never fully understand you, will never truly love you unconditionally--because they are a broken creature, too--and loving them to the end anyway."

-(HT Tim Challies)

Fading Are the World's Best Pleasures

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:06:30 +0000

Why Jesus Is My Hero #44 of 52

How do we take seriously the battle with the world, the flesh and the devil?

Yesterday I went along to the London Men's Convention at Westminster Chapel. The theme was "The Fight" - encouraging us blokes to take that battle seriously. Al Stewart from Australia delivered the first talk, tackling the issue of our battle with The World - that is, the world in rebellion against God, the constant atmosphere of anti-God thinking and values that is so pervasive that we're hardly even aware that we're breathing it in all the time.

Al's address was based on these verses from 1 John 2:15-17:

"Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world-- the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions--is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides for ever."

This sinful world craves and chases after all manner of things - the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes. It doesn't matter whether it's unrestrained sexual desire or greedily lusting after the latest iPad or gluttonous eyes that are constantly bigger than your stomach, the world is constantly feeding us messages about what will make us happy - encouraging us to seek our happiness and contentment in the things that God has made rather than in God himself, and often in the process making us sick through overindulging in things we'd have been better off without. Add to that our pride in our possessions - the way we use the things that we have as a kind of status symbol, seeking our identity in the stuff that we own rather than in Christ.

But John gives us the antidote when he reminds us that "the world is passing away along with its desires". None of the stuff we crave and lust after will last. The new iPad soon becomes the old iPad, the food is soon gone and its taste quickly forgotten, the illicit pleasure of the affair gives way to the misery of guilt and broken relationships.

Putting our hope for happiness in the things of this world is a recipe for disappointment. Yet there is one source of lasting joy that will never let us down: as I have written previously, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. He never changes or passes away, and the joy of living with him as your king is the kind of pure, unadulterated pleasure that doesn't leave a rotten taste in your mouth.

As Psalm 37 puts it so beautifully:

"But [the wicked man] passed away, and behold, he was no more;
though I sought him, he could not be found.
Mark the blameless and behold the upright,
for there is a future for the man of peace."

An Object Lesson of How To Get Smart Developers To Apply For Your Job Opening

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:18:36 +0000

There are a few companies out there who are overwhelmed with applications from amazingly talented individuals, but more often than not that's not the case. Smart people get to choose where they work, and to recruit for the best talent companies need to sell themselves to the candidates just as much (or even more) than the candidates need to sell themselves to the company. My first employer learnt this the hard way when they had job openings sitting unfilled for months at a time because no decent candidates were ever applying.

Today I came across an awesome job advert for a position that I just couldn't resist applying for: the post of Web Developer at Hubbub. This job advert makes me smile on so many different levels:

These guys show that they're serious about only hiring smart people - by showing that the bar is high, it makes you as a candidate want to take on the challenge of proving you're good enough. Requiring a JSON hash is a really simple but effective way of immediately screening out the vast majority of potential applicants who really haven't the first clue about web technologies. Not to mention those pesky recruiters :)
Having a sense of humour - nobody who has a choice in where they work wants to work for a dull and boring corporate machine (well, maybe a few do - but certainly not me!) and this job advert oozes a sense of a company culture that is a lot of fun (and without simply faking it)
Reflecting the company's values - it's obvious just from reading the job advert that this is a company that is serious about food, and they're obviously going to want to hire somebody that's serious about food too.
Bacon - what more needs to be said?

The health of a company depends entirely upon the quality of the people that work for it, and in this day and age you can't expect to just post a bland notice about a job vacancy and expect to get anyone remotely exceptional applying for it. Big kudos to Hubbub for making something that really stands out from the crowds.

What Does Our Future Hold?

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:38:59 +0000

Why Jesus Is My Hero #43 of 52

What does the future hold for me? If you're anything like me, that's a question that is frequently on your mind, and one which often causes a certain amount of anxiety. Where will I be? What will I be doing? Who will I be there with? How will I be feeling about it all?

As Euston Church we've been away on a church weekend this weekend, and we began by looking at a passage that tells us the answers to all of those questions, if we're Christians, and gives us just the answers we need to battle with anxiety about the future:

"In Jesus we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." (Ephesians 1:7-10)

God has made known to us the mystery of his will. He's revealed his plan to us! There's no need for us to guess at it and wonder what he's going to do - he's told us. When's it going to happen? It's a plan for the fullness of time - in other words, when the world reaches its conclusion and everything arrives at the point towards where it's been heading all along. And what is his plan? To unite all things in Jesus, things in heaven and things on earth.

This is where your life is heading, if you're a Christian: as those who have been adopted as God's children through his undeserved grace and mercy, we're going to be with Jesus united with all the company of heaven under his rule. It's all sorted - God's going to make sure it happens, and nothing can stand in his way. Doesn't matter what exam results you get, whether you get offered that dream job or not, whether the purchase of your house goes through as planned or whether your parents get ill - if we're trusting in Jesus, then we can be totally sure what the future holds for us: God's going to take us to be with him.

Of course, there's still lots about the "in between" bit of our future that we don't know, which God doesn't reveal to us in advance. We kind of have to figure that bit out as we go along. But we don't do it alone - we know that God goes with us to make sure that we end up safely at our destination. Knowing the big picture plan with certain confidence really helps deal with anxiety about the little day-to-day stuff - because if God can save us from our sin and make us alive again when we were spiritually dead in rebellion against him, then he can certainly deal with the issues of today. It's like if you saw a tennis player win all of the Grand Slam championships in the world in a single season, and then started worrying about whether they'd be able to win against your 12 year old nephew. If they can do the hard thing, then of course they can do the easy thing!

What a great relief it is to know that my future is secure with Jesus - what it holds is not in doubt!