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December 27, 2013

Accepting the Unfinished

“It was not granted you to complete the task, and yet you may not give it up.” -Rabbi Tarfon

There are divine works that we are called to participate in but not finish. God often does great things over periods of time that exceed the human lifespan. Paul tells us that the great patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament could only look forward to the coming of the Messiah. Even though they played important roles in preparing His way none lived to see the Advent. Similarly, David made Jerusalem a great city in preparation for the construction of the Temple of the Lord but it was left to his son to see it built. We who today labor for the Kingdom may not be here on earth for its consummation at the return of Christ.

These examples all relate to major biblical events but this truth can just as accurately be applied to any Christian’s life ministry. Some of the goals God has called us to work towards will be accomplished during our earthly pilgrimage and some will not. The problem for contemporary believers is that we have a tendency to see all things as attainable not only in our lifetime but in a few months or years. This is because many of us have been beguiled by the “instant gratification” culture of the 21st Century. We forget that the Lord of time does not work according to our idea of time. Some trees, after all, do not reach maturity for hundreds of years. He is the God of the Tortoise as well as the Cheetah. It may even be accurate to say that the greatest things in our lives are the things that take the longest for us to attain. We should not be surprised that this is often equally true for ministry.

It is important for believers to be reconciled to the truth of this. If we are easily frustrated by what seems to us to be the glacial pace in the fulfilling of a mission we know we have been called to then we run the risk of losing heart. How many promising ministries have been abandoned in their infancy because results do not fulfill our expectations? It is sobering to ponder the possibility that God has left His human servants with the power not only to advance but also to hinder the gospel. The hindrance can occur in a number of ways for a number of reasons and one of them is impatience with the timing of results. The temptation to impatience typically begins with an unrealistic expectation. An example of such an expectation might be the idea that a new Bible study or small group should draw large numbers of people in a very short period. The fact is that such ministries do not always achieve “respectable” numbers for quite some time. If the organizers do not factor that possibility into their thinking, from the beginning, they will be sorely tempted to give up altogether where a willingness to wait might produce great fruit in season.

It is not for us to know the season when a ministry will produce an abundant crop for the King’s storehouse. What we can know from the Scripture is that “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Pe 3:8.) It is imperative that the implication of this verse be allowed to sink into our minds and hearts. Once we realize that God does not operate according to our schedule it will be much easier to do His work while leaving the timing of the harvest to Him. Even if we do not see that harvest here on Earth we will once we get to Heaven and become, ourselves, part of the completed work of our Lord.

December 20, 2013

Love Precedes Repentance

Some Christian teachers are frustrated by the apparent lack of success they experience in spurring their people to grow in holiness. They accurately use the words of the Bible in carefully exegeted sermons in which they preach the real need for repentance and change but then watch their people in vain for results. Nothing changes or their flock’s moral behavior becomes even worse. Why?

Perhaps it is because exhortation rarely changes the people it is directed at unless someone who they know loves them is the one doing the exhorting. Whether it is a pastor to his flock or one individual to another, love and acceptance must precede truth telling about personal sinfulness in order for real change to occur. Love is what leads us towards true repentance. Accusation and guilt-manipulation rarely produces the Godly sorrow that leads to new life, they usually only provoke the kind of sorrow that the scripture tells us will ultimately lead to death.

Exclusively employing the fear of punishment to try to make a human being stop indulging in some moral trespass is problematic. Sincere repudiation of sin most often happens when the person committing it comes to realize that the wrongdoing in question is hurting someone they know has their best interests at heart. The someone in question is always God ultimately, but this principle also holds true when the one hurt by the sin is a person who has loved the sinning party well. A child who has done something to offend a truly loving parent will often tearfully breakdown and sincerely ask for forgiveness when that parent gently confronts them in a loving way that shows their own hurt.

To understand the spiritual principle in operation here we might do well to compare the reaction to sin exhibited by the Pharisees with that of Jesus. The Pharisees of the Gospels never accepted a person unless the person was morally pure according to their rules. If you did not live up to those rules you were rejected and looked down upon. Pharisees were never friends with “sinners”. By contrast Jesus welcomed such people into his presence. The Bible tells us the religious elites of his time accused him of being a friend of drunkards and prostitutes. This is because he was. For Jesus acceptance came first because He knew that it was primarily the kindness of his Father, which led people towards repentance, not his wrath, as, justified as it might be. The love of Christ for a man or woman preceded that man or woman’s contrition and, in fact, it was this initiative of unconditional love, which made the contrition possible.

We do not earn the right to tell another human being that they need to turn from a sin until we have shown them we love them in both word and deed. Otherwise they will either ignore us or be spiritually and emotionally damaged by us, or both. Before we presume to exhort we must first embrace and accept the person in question even though we do not embrace and accept their wrongdoing. This is the way to turn someone from their sin and back into right relationship with God and others.

Love precedes repentance.

December 6, 2013 No Comments

A Justifiable Question

Many believers in the West today do not rest in the love of Christ. We pay lip service to the notion but we do not deeply receive the love He has for us. The evidence of this is the psychological pathology that afflicts such a large percentage of the body of Christ. The gift of God is, among other things, a sound mind. It is impossible to bask in the fullness of His love and remain chronically emotionally ill. Something is wrong when the children of God are popping Prozac like its going out of style.

Now I do not want to sound like some eternally sour fundamentalist. There are enough voices out there condemning psychology in an arrogant and undiscerning way without adding my own to the chorus. Also, as someone who regularly sees a Christian counselor it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to do so. I also need to make clear that I’m not saying that all those who struggle with feeling the love of Jesus do not truly know Him. That said the fact remains that something is wrong here.

As much as one tries to find it in the early church the first Christians apparently were not a depressed, anxious bunch of people. While Pentecost might not have ushered in perfect mental health for those who received the Spirit the event was not exactly an occasion for group therapy! The love of God in Christ brought delight and purpose to people who existed in a time and place where life was often brutal and short. Something happened that transformed them from individuals who seemingly had every right to be miserable into beacons of enduring joy.

The New Testament talks about trials and tribulations. In fact it promises adversity to those who walk in the footsteps of Jesus. What it does not promise is that the Christian life will cause or perpetuate everything from Obsessive-Compulsiveness to Bi-Polar Disorder. Again, the gift of God is a sound mind. When so many believers are without a sound mind it is, I think, justifiable to ask why.

The cure for what emotionally ails us is the acquisition of heart knowledge that, through Christ, the God of the Universe loves us personally and that we love Him. No one who truly lives in this realization on a daily basis can long be deeply troubled psychologically. Some will call this stance simplistic. Others may say that it is too black and white and that it punishes people for struggling with the reality of still being marooned in a fallen world. Perhaps both objections are valid but they still do not account for the lack of joy and the growing presence of pathology in the Western church today.

I submit that the problem is not so much psychological as theological. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” A cliché? Yes, but profound and life changing truth nonetheless. It is solely in the progressive acceptance of this love that our hearts and minds are put at rest. In the end Jesus Christ Himself is the only deliverance we can count on from emotional disorders and we do well to look to Him directly, even as we continue to take our medication and visit our therapists. Whatever legitimate relief we get from both of these resources ultimately comes from God anyway. The hope is that, some day, we will come to know Him and His love well enough to dispense with them.

November 28, 2013 No Comments

Born to Trouble…

“Our spiritual growth and emotional maturity occur in opposition to instinct-against the grain of our natural inclinations.” Barry Grosskopf

The author of this quote is not a Christian but he succinctly defines the essence of the sanctification process. The battle between the flesh and the spirit that every believer experiences is captured here using non-biblical language. Our sinful tendencies and Grosskopf’s “natural inclinations” are one and the same. He touches on an important point that many Christians have trouble truly accepting; that becoming more Christ-like is never easy and often comes through trial. Growing in maturity is a matter of daily overcoming the powerful fallen human instincts to take the path of least resistance and to avoid pain at all costs.

As long as we think that a life of continuing trial is somehow an atypical thing in the walk of faith we set ourselves up for bitterness and despair. The book of Job tells us “man is born to trouble” and this is a truism for all of us as long as we remain on Earth. All human beings suffer. It is universal. No one is exempt be they believers or non-believers. The difference is that for the faithful child of God suffering is ultimately redemptive and a part of the divine plan for our ongoing sanctification. It is almost a cliché in the Church for people who have gone through such redemptive pain to testify, usually after the fact, that they are thankful for that pain because it brought them closer to God…but this is exactly the case.

A few years ago a friend of mine went through the horrors of breast cancer. She endured chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She underwent a mastectomy and, in order to limit the disease’s spread, my friend had most of her reproductive system surgically removed. Her life was forever altered by the illness and there is no guarantee that it will not return and end her life. Shortly after the cancer went into remission I heard her say at a prayer meeting that she would have gone through the whole ordeal again rather than forfeit the spiritual growth that it resulted in. I was absolutely floored by her testimony and suddenly I did not feel as sorry for her anymore. This woman had been through the crucible of great trial and had apparently gained an intimacy with God which was profound. This was so precious to her that she accepted the suffering it took to attain it.

While it is true that my sister in Christ could not avoid the pain that befell her she might have looked at it as nothing but a curse and allowed it to destroy her faith. That this did not happen is mute testimony to her pre-existing faith in her Lord and to the resilience that the Holy Spirit can give us in even the worst-case scenario. I suspect she knew beforehand that trial is a part of this life and trusted God in the darkest moments because of that knowing. The natural inclination would be to “curse God and die” but she did neither because there was more in her heart than that inclination.

We cannot grow without adversity. Struggle is part of God’s will for the redemption of a fallen race. We can fight this reality or we can accept and profit by it.

November 22, 2013 1 Comment

Trusting God in Our Failures

Maybe accomplishing all our spiritual goals successfully isn’t as important as continuing to trust God when we fail to accomplish them. Performance based spirituality is rife among some in the American church. Many have taken the hard driving, Type-A perfectionism of the surrounding culture and baptized it. Exhortation to “excellence” is heard every Sunday from pulpits across the land and it has become all too easy for Christians to feel like they are never doing enough, well enough. Sometimes it appears as if we Evangelicals have decided to exalt Martha over Mary, rather than the other way around.

We will all fail…repeatedly. Every saint in the pages of scripture failed at something in their lives and usually more than once. What counted was the fact that they did not give up and walk away from God in the midst of that failure. When we fail our best option is to pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off and pray for the strength to do better next time. Perseverance is precious in God’s economy and far more important than an unbroken string of successes. Trusting the Lord in our failures is vital to spiritual growth and this is something that all of us need to grasp if we are to progress in our sanctification.

Some will say that such an acceptance of ongoing failure in the Christian life is a form of permissiveness, even a manifestation of the sin of sloth. This is only true for the person whose heart is far from God to begin with. The sincere lover of God is not looking for excuses to shirk the responsibility to do what God would have them do. It is akin to the parable of the talents. The problem with the wicked servant was not just that he did a lousy job with the gifts his master gave him; the problem was that he wrongly judged that master, calling him “a hard man”. In fearfully burying the talent in the ground rather than at least putting it in the bank so it might, at minimum, earn interest this man showed that he held contempt for his master’s character. This was his sin, not necessarily the failure to perfectly multiply his talent’s value.

We do others and ourselves a disservice when we mercilessly carp on failure. Failure is part and parcel of the fallen human condition. This is true both before and after conversion. If it weren’t there would be no provision in the New Testament for the confession and forgiveness of sins committed by believers, which there clearly is. Perfection will come only when we someday stand face to face with Jesus Christ and become fully like Him.

Because of this promise of eventual perfection we can continue to put our faith in God for ultimate victory when we fall short in any endeavor. With that in mind it is vital that modern American Christians who have bought into the relentless perfectionism of a large segment of our society (and hung a cross around it) cut themselves some slack. Constantly excoriating ourselves for failures God fully expects us to experience is a form of ungodly self-condemnation. It might even be perceived as pride, a “goddish” attempt to see ourselves as more than the fallible, finite human beings that we remain, even after we have come to faith.

Jesus never fails it is true but, for now, His followers’ will…and that is ok.

November 13, 2013 No Comments

The Danger of “Personal Empowerment”

“Personal Empowerment” is the mantra of this age. We in the West are constantly being told that the power to get what we want for ourselves is somehow our birthright. It is being taught through advertising, through popular entertainment and, perhaps more subtly, through our educational system. From childhood we are being sold the idea that the key to life is to put ourselves at the center of our own personal universes and cultivate a mindset that there is no limit to what we can ultimately make our own. This will all come about if we just empower ourselves. How we get that power is by believing, first, that we are “worth it” and than doing whatever it takes to acquire the means to fulfill our dreams. These dreams are most often of our own design.

The reality of inherent and intrinsic human limitation is not a part of this self-powered self-fulfillment ideal. Many times also missing is any idea of service to others being part of the true route to real life. Most importantly the concept of our dependence on, and moral obligation to, a Creator and Sustainer of life is not included in the human empowerment equation. This should not too surprising since the original fall of our race was about buying into the proposition of “becoming as God” instead of knowing, loving and serving the true God.

However the 21st Century West has enshrined this core aspect of original sin and raised it to a level of acceptance, and actual celebration, perhaps unknown in all of human history thus far.

The sad thing is that it isn’t just the secular West that has willingly been hoodwinked by an idea as old as the Serpent; too often it is the Western church as well. While blatant self-empowerment rhetoric may not be as evident in our Christian subculture it has been unconsciously adopted by many Christians. The reason for this is simple: we are reading the same ads, watching the same TV shows and often going to the same schools and colleges as our secular neighbors. Spend enough time immersed in the world and it becomes impossible not to be more influenced by the culture around us than by the Holy Spirit.

One of the hardest things for fallen human beings to embrace, even those who profess to follow Christ, is personal weakness. It does not feel good to deeply recognize our absolute powerlessness to attain to anything of truly eternal worth, starting with salvation itself. Power for its own sake or for the purpose of achieving self-centered goals can feel good for a time. All sin is pleasurable for a season, the Bible tells us, and the seeming possession of great personal power is certainly no exception. In the end, however, it destroys us. We may well “achieve our dreams” living in the First World, but if we do so apart from the will of the One who created us for his perfect and loving purposes we will eventually end up with nothing but ashes and despair…whether in this life or the next.

For we who call ourselves followers of Christ it is imperative to wake up to the societal deception we have allowed to influence our lives and the life of the Church. We must divest ourselves of any power that our Lord has not given us for His purpose. Otherwise we will progressively forget Him as we pursue our own path through the use of illegitimate power, and all use of power for selfish goals is illegitimate by Biblical definition. Personal weakness is not an easy thing to accept, no, but it is only in such accepted weakness that we may find the strength to truly live as on to God…and so truly live.

November 7, 2013 No Comments

Correction and Motive

It is easy to hate another’s sin just because it makes us feel uncomfortable by reminding us of our own moral failures. Often the result is that we either do not want to be around the person in question or we feel an almost compulsive need to criticize them. Both responses to other’s sin are selfish and unloving. The only legitimate reasons for hating another person’s sin are love for that person and love for the God they are sinning against. Only when these are the motives is it possible to approach the sinning person and rebuke them lovingly and with a sincere heart. Until we have such a heart perhaps we should never presume to open our mouths.

Sin is, of course, the universal experience of all mankind with the single exception of Christ. As believers we are each called not just to reckon with our own sins but to also appropriately reckon with the sins of others. Dealing with a sinning brother or sister is one of the most difficult challenges of the Christian life. The temptation in these situations is always to either accuse or excuse. Both these reactions come from the flesh and not the Spirit. When we angrily point the finger at someone we are acting out of a prideful arrogance that conveniently glosses over our own evils and when we, alternatively, give them the impression that sin is no big deal we act out of a permissive laxity that does the same thing. Either approach is equally wrong and sinful in and of itself.

It is vitally important to take the time to recognize our own impulses in reacting to transgression in others. Otherwise we may multiply their transgression by our own and lose a precious opportunity to be agents of reconciliation and healing. The key is found in not immediately reacting to whatever the person has done. On many occasions wisdom dictates thinking before we speak and certainly this is one of them. Our immediate passion for either accusing or excusing must not be allowed to possess us; rather we must control our initial urges and remain silent for the moment. This gives us the opportunity to determine whether we are ready to truly “speak the truth in love” or whether we need to be silent for the time being and check our own spirit.

It has been said that motive is everything and this is clearly the case in how we react to someone else’s moral lapses. We must search our motives before we presume to say one word of correction to another human being. We must also ask the Holy Spirit to help us enter into this self-examination, while at the same time granting us a spirit of sincere love. Then we can deal with the sinning person, as God would have us, not as we would have us. This is the only way to insure that we do not compound another’s sin with our own.

October 31, 2013 No Comments

The Balanced Life

The word “balance” is not usually associated with the Christian walk. It does not appear in Scripture. Jesus and the apostles never used the word itself. But balance is implied throughout the Bible whenever it speaks to living the life God desires us to live.

First, though, the word has to be defined. The most important part of this definition is to state what it is not and that is “moderation”. Moderation, as we normally use it, refers to never doing too much or too little of some activity. Moderation is implicitly amoral. For instance it is a good word for a Christian to use when speaking of doing too much or too little exercise because exercise, in and of itself, is not immoral. The problem comes when you try to apply the term to something like sex out of wedlock. We are not to indulge in a “moderate amount” of adultery; we are to avoid it altogether. In the context of living the life of a disciple the best understanding of balance is the avoidance of extremes in areas that are not innately sinful for the purpose of properly enjoying the gifts of God.

An example might be dealing with legalism or licentiousness in regards to our freedom in Christ. The Apostle Paul dealt with these extremes in many of his letters to the churches. Some persons in these churches were expecting “true” believers to hold to Jewish practices and restrictions like circumcision or not eating meat sacrificed to idols. In other churches the opposite extreme held sway. For instance all kinds of sexual sin were being permitted in the 1st Century Gentile churches. This happened because some of the early non-Jewish Christians believed they were free to let their physical bodies be engaged in such activities because their spirit was separate from those bodies and would remain unsullied (this belief was a forerunner to the later heresy of Gnosticism). It was also often the result of simple ignorance of the sexual standards the Torah upheld as normative for a holy people. Whether to one extreme or the other these wrong teachings and cases of ignorance in the churches were corrected by Paul and the other apostles.

The need for such correction is an old story and today we face similar extremes in living out our faith. Some Fundamentalists, for instance, tell us that anything that is not specifically allowed in the Bible should be anathema to the authentic believer. They would go so far as to say that all art, music and film without a specifically Christian message is forbidden. In fact more radical fundamentalists even take that a step further telling us that the mediums themselves are evil; usually using some Levitical verses taken out of context for justification. On the other extreme we see what might be called “Loose Evangelicals”, people who feel that they can watch or listen to almost anything without it negatively affecting their souls and their relationship with God. Here, too, is the need for Godly balance. Asceticism for the sake of asceticism is unprofitable. Undiscerning consumption of everything the World says is good is unprofitable as well.

Perhaps we should seek to be as balanced as our Lord who fasted in the wilderness but, shortly thereafter, turned the water into wine at a wedding party. His Holy Spirit can keep us from going to unhealthy extremes if we ask Him to help us lead balanced lives. In Jesus we see a life lived in perfect balance yet with great passion. With the Spirit’s help we can model ourselves after the One who truly knows the best way and come to experience the abundant life He has promised us.

October 23, 2013 No Comments

The Wrong Way to React to Evil

Deliver us, oh Lord, from bitter judgment of other human beings, but do not deliver us from right judgment of evil.

There is sometimes confusion in the church today about the difference between self-righteous hatred and righteous anger. These two states of being may superficially look the same but they are actually polar opposites of each other. The problem is that professed Christians caught up in the “Culture War’s”, both inside and outside the Church, are in danger of becoming more likely to conflate them. In doing so they eliminate a cardinal quality of the very theologically healthy orthodox Christianity they claim to want to see preserved, and that is the quality of humility.

Among those who rigorously contend for the unchanging counsel of Scripture it is getting more and more tempting to become bitter at the change seen in the West, both within and without church walls. In area’s ranging from homosexuality to divorce and re-marriage the metanarratives of our society are rapidly discarding any grounding in the Judeo-Christian underpinnings that gave birth to Western Civilization. Simultaneously Biblical illiteracy combined with “easy-believism” are influencing professed believers in Christ to become more captive to the world’s new ideas of right and wrong then they are to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Much of what was universally considered to be immoral in the church of 50 years ago is being tacitly or openly tolerated today.

In response to this shift the temptation for those who recognize and resist it is to lash out at those in our congregations and in the influencing culture who are on its vanguard. In doing so we risk the age-old problem of hating the sinner as well as the sin. This temptation is exacerbated by the reality that it is becoming more and more difficult to deal with “sin in the camp” in the Christian community today even when we are truly doing everything we can to be in the right spirit. No one wants to be labeled as judgmental in congregations that believe less in church discipline than in “live and let live”. In such congregation’s personal holiness and theological orthodoxy are becoming less preached and lived out by both leaders and laity. This is causing those who want to hold the line to feel an even greater urge towards anger, and even hatred of, individuals rather than the errors those individuals have fallen into.

We must constantly be on guard against the inroads the world is making in the Church, of this there is no doubt, but we must also be just as much on guard against self-righteousness. It is all too easy for one to be biblically right in a patently wrong spirit. Those who feel called to fight the moral decline in both society and the Church must constantly ask the Spirit of God to keep them humble and to give them forbearing love towards both those who do not know better and those who should. “There but for the grace of God go I” must be constantly kept in heart and mind by all who would presume to be conservative watchdogs and reformers at this juncture in the history of Christianity in this part of the world. Otherwise whatever good counsel they might have will be completely ignored by the people whom they claim to want to bring to repentance. In fact if those going astray see more bitterness than redeeming love they will not only continue in the wrong direction but accelerate down the road to spiritual ruin. God forbid that any true Christian should be responsible for such a terrible outcome.

Moral absolutes must be upheld, but this effort absolutely must not be attempted in a prideful, hateful manner. It might be better to do nothing then do anything in such a Christ-dishonoring and ultimately destructive way.

October 17, 2013 No Comments

Obedience and Trust

We are told that our friendship with Jesus Christ depends on our obedience to Him. It is difficult to be obedient to someone we do not trust. The distance many believers feel between themselves and God is often a function of their lack of trust in His goodness. Martin Luther once said that the darkest nights of his soul came during the times when he lost faith that “God is good and that He is good to me”. In this world obedience to men may be possible purely on the basis of the fear of consequences. We obey the speed limit because we know the state is ready and willing to revoke our driving privileges if we do not. But the obedience that Jesus had in mind was obedience that was freely given Him by the disciples because they had come to trust both in His goodness and His goodness to them. This trust was the fruit of knowing and receiving their Master’s love.

The term “obedience” is a dirty word in our culture today. Rebellion has never been more fashionable in Western society. Since the tumultuous cultural revolution of the 1960’s the idea of submission to legitimate authority has often been ridiculed. Even the idea that any authority is legitimate has been questioned. The concept of the total self-sovereignty of human beings has been a problem since the Garden but it arguably has never met so little resistance as it does today. It is not too much of an overstatement to describe ours as a “culture of rebellion”. Whether it is in regards to parents, the government, or our superiors in the working world, we tend to reject direction that runs counter to our own desires.

Of course there are some reasons for this increased spirit of mutiny against human authority. It is difficult, for instance, for children to obey abusive parents. Since Vietnam and Watergate our government has come to be seen as hypocritical, corrupt and overbearing and this has at times been at least partially true. As for our bosses on the job we cannot help but notice that some are motivated only by the opportunity to make the most money possible, often with the least ethical restrictions.

Unfortunately we have too often used the truth that flaws in human authority exist as an excuse for our own rebellious overreaction. The bottom line is that we could have relative moral paragons over us at home, in the government, and at work and we would still have trouble living lives marked by obedience. The hearts of the governed are no less corrupt than the hearts of those that govern them. Our problem in being obedient to those God Himself has put over us is, at its core, the problem of our sin.

True obedience can only become possible when we come to the place where we realize that we are lost if we continue following our own heart, our own will. It is then we become willing, in our desperation, to consider giving ourselves over to Someone who we come to believe is able to save us. But even after we make the decision to follow the Savior God has sent us actually becoming obedient to that Savior remains problematic, as Luther’s words made plain.

Perhaps we need to remember that we love because God first loved us. It is this divine initiative that makes it possible to love Him at all. We sometimes let our circumstances paint a picture for us of a “reality” that make us wonder if we are really in relationship with a good God. We lose the confidence that He is bigger than those circumstances. This is when it becomes difficult for us to be submissive; to be the friend the Scripture tells us we need to be to Him. What ultimately enables us to live in true, if not perfect, obedience to Jesus Christ is our remembrance of what He did for us on the cross and the renewed trust that remembrance engenders. A God who loved us so perfectly that He was willing to die for us is a God to which we can truly desire to be obedient. In the deepest sense it was His willing obedience to His Father, in seeking and saving us, that makes us willing to give Jesus that same kind of obedience (and, by extension, to give it to those he has put in legitimate authority over us.)