Jesus

Cultivating An Appetite for Righteousness

/ davidsschrock / 1 Comment

hungerA few weeks ago, I preached on the fourth beatitude: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matt 5:6). Jesus words call attention to the fact that those who will be righteous will first hunger and thirst because of their lack of righteousness.

In my sermon, I spoke about three kinds of people:

  1. those who are self-righteous and boast of their good works;
  2. those who are unrighteous and boast in their unrighteousness;
  3. and those who are unrighteous but long to be righteous.

I argued that only the third kind of person will be justified. The self-righteous can be humbled and the unrighteous can be convicted, but only when the Spirit grieves us about the sin in our lives, will we call upon the Lord in faith and in turn be satisfied with God. (The Spirit, of course, does far more than convict us of sin—he also illumines our mind (2 Cor 2:14-16), regenerates our hearts (Titus 3:5), enables belief (Gal 5:22-23), etc.—but in work or redemption, genuine grief for sin is necessary).

With desiring righteousness in mind, I urged our congregation to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Theologically, I know that such hunger and thirst is a gift from God, but I also know that hunger and thirst can and should be cultivated in the hearts of those who have been born again. Therefore, here are six ways that you can grow in your hunger and thirst for righteousness. These six steps towards cultivating righteousness did not make it into the sermon itself; the rest of which you can listen below.

Cultivating Your Appetite for Righteousness

1. Read Scripture. If you don’t hunger for righteousness, read the Word. That’s why it’s there. The Spiritual man lives on God’s word, because the Word of God created that man’s spiritual life. Just the same, hunger for righteousness comes from the Word. If you don’t feel hungry, sit down with the Bible and watch how God renews your appetite.

2. Pray. Ask God for a greater appetite. If you read Paul’s prayers, it will not take long before you realize that he doesn’t pray the way we do. Though he’s in prison and afflicted with physical pain, his prayer requests are always centered on the Word. Likewise, when he prays, he prays that his spiritual children would have spiritual power to perceive the beauty and glory of the gospel of grace. We should pray for this too . . . pray that God gives you stronger affections for his righteousness. God will never reject the saint who prays for this.

3. Spend time around people who will make you hunger for God and his Word. This can be done through good books, through friendships with people who love God, know his word, and speak the truth to you in love. A couple weeks ago, my wife and I took day away to attend the THINK Conference at College Park Baptist Church. John Piper was the speaker, and he spent four hours teaching through the text of Philippians. It was glorious. But what caused hunger & thirst in my soul was not his Bible teaching . . . it was his Scripture memory. He opened his first session quoting the whole book, and it urged me again to keep working on Bible memorization.

4. Meditate on Christ’s return and the satisfaction you will have when he returns.  I cannot tell you how many times the thought of Christ’s return has given me strength to say ‘no’ to ungodliness.  By meditating on the glories of the new creation, and the beauty of Christ, I have found strength to say no to sin, by means of choosing the greater pleasure of knowing God. There is no greater way to crucify the flesh, than to ponder the satisfaction of knowing God. Meditating on Christ is one of, if not the, greatest tools for fighting sin. Feed yourself on him, and you will have little appetite for unrighteousness.

5. Fast. No, that’s not an imperative to run your life at breakneck speed. Just the opposite, it is the call to pull away from the world and your bodies demand for food. We fast in order to quicken our senses for spiritual need. Just as we eat food when we are hungry, we fast so as to be more aware of the appetites in our life. Fasting cultivates a hunger for God and fasting reveals those created things which are most idolatrous to us. If you are struggling to hunger and thirst for righteousness, God has a specific medicine—fasting! I don’t do this well; I need to do it better.

6. Feast on the Lord’s Supper.  Now this is a little bit curious, because when we come to the Lord’s supper most of us are hungry. In our church at least, the Lord’s Supper comes near the lunch hour or just before dinner (when we observe communion at night). In those moments, most people with normal sized appetites are looking for more than a wafer & shot glass of juice. Therefore, it may seem odd to “feast” on the Lord’s Supper. What does that mean?

Simply this: When you come to the table, you are not coming for the wafer and the shot glass. No, if you have eyes of faith, you see through these things to the Lord Jesus who satisfies your soul.  He is the Bread of Life; the Living Water. His blood is the wine that quickens our hearts. He is our portion and our prize. Believers don’t come to him because they “have to.” We come to the table because we love him, and we hunger and thirst for him, his kingdom, and his righteousness. For those who know the Lord, the Lord’s Supper is a feast for your faith, even as we await the Wedding Banquet, where Christ will satisfy us in soul and body.

Surely, there are more ways to cultivate a hunger and thirst for righteousness. What would you add?

May God be gracious to us to give us an appetite for righteousness, and may he increase our hunger and thirst for him, that he might satisfy us now and forever.

Soli Deo Gloria, dss

A Decade in the Making: Rightly Understanding Matthew 5:8

/ davidsschrock

pureNo verse of Scripture has been more effective in keeping me sexually pure than Matthew 5:8.

When I first became a believer, I went to a weekend retreat called Purity & Holiness. It was a two-day seminar designed to teach young people about dating, sex, and marriage.  I bless God for its impact on my life. And—not surprisingly—one of the key verses impressed upon us that weekend was Matthew 5:8.

The impact of this singular verse has been massive in my life. But not because I rightly understood its meaning at the time. In fact, I would say, that I misunderstood much of its true meaning because I took Jesus’ words as a command ordering me to purify myself . . . or else I wouldn’t see God.

Yet, that’s not exactly how the beatitudes work. Matthew 5:8, like all the beatitudes, has imperatival force, but the beatitudes are not commands. They are (speaking of their genre here) blessings that Jesus pronounces on his disciples. They are qualities that his followers must have to enter the kingdom, but they are also qualities that he gives to his followers.

When I first heard this verse, without understanding how Jesus used these words in his Sermon on the Mount, I took it as a command to stop being impure, and to begin pursuing purity. By reading it that way, Jesus’ words though emphasizing purity, did not give me any power to be pure.

Continue reading →

What Does Genuine Mercy Look Like?

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mercyWhat does mercy look like?

In Matthew 5:7, Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” The mercy that God will give refers in this passage to the divine favor that God will grant to his merciful children on the day of judgment. But what does it mean to be merciful now? 

In my Sunday sermon, I sought to answer that question and here is the answer I gave.

In response to the gospel and enabled by the Spirit, mercy gives to the needy, forgives the offender, in order that all might give thanks to God.

Thematically, mercy gives and forgives for the sake of thanksgiving. Let me unpack that definition. Continue reading →

More Than Baby Talk: A Primer on the Incarnation

/ davidsschrock / 1 Comment

gloryPutting our children to bed is always a precious time to read the Bible, sing hymns, and talk about the day. But precious as it is, it is not always simple.

A few days ago, as our five year old was minutes from dream land, he began asking questions about Jesus’ birth. I listened to my wife explain that Jesus had always existed. And I heard him respond, “Yes, but he was also born,” exposing the challenge that if Jesus was born than he must have had a beginning. Right?

Perhaps, we have the making of a little Arian in our home (as in Arius from the fourth century Africa, not the Third Reich in twentieth century), or perhaps he is simply experiencing the challenge that we all face when we begin to press into the incarnation of Jesus Christ. What does it mean that the eternal Son of God who was with God before the beginning of time (John 1:1) took on flesh and became a man in time?

The Incarnation

The subject of the incarnation is puzzling for adults let alone little boys with active imaginations. Continue reading →

Jesus Knew His Calling: A Missional Christology

/ davidsschrock

In the Gospels, Jesus frequently spoke of why he “came.” For instance, in Mark 1:38, when the crowds are pressing in on him, Jesus tells his disciples, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.”  While Jesus was attentive to the needs of man; he was perfectly obedient to his Father’s will. As John reiterates time and again in his gospel, the Son was ‘sent’ by the Father on a mission to redeem those whom the Father had given him before the ages began.

Thus, to understand who Jesus is one must look at his Christological mission—what missiologists might call the Missio Dei. As the image of the invisible God and the Son whose obedience pleased the Father, Jesus’ “I have come . . .” statements reveal the very heart of God and the work Christ came to accomplish. To know these statements is to know a great deal about our Lord. To overlook them is to miss a key insight into his self-identity and mission.  Continue reading →

Re-Imaging Our Personal Identity

/ davidsschrock / 1 Comment

A friend of mine once quipped that when we tell people we are ‘fine,’ we are really saying in code that we are Freaked Out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional (F. I. N. E.). I think he has a point, as ‘fine’ is so often used to cover up deep-seated insecurities and hurt.

Sad as it may be, this is the human condition. We are masters of making fig-leaf coverings. We have lost our original covering of righteousness, and deep down we all know that something is not quite right.

On biblical terms: We are made to bear the image of God’s glory, but in our sin we have fallen short. Therefore, we need restoration to be who God made us to be. In other words, we need to be remade in the image of God. Praise be to God that this is what the gospel of Jesus Christ accomplishes. Consider just a few verses. Continue reading →

Philippians 2:5-8: A Literary Structure

/ davidsschrock

In his commentary on Philippians, Moises Silva outlines the literary structure to Philippians 2:5-8 in two parallel stanzas. This passage, regularly assumed to be an early Christian hymn, has received much attention from scholars  and for good reason. It beautifully describes the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord, which entitled Jesus to receive the name of above all names (vv. 9-11).

Silva’s outline  discerns the structure of the hymn and helps the reader see the main points of the passage.

who in the FORM of God existing in likeness of men BECOMING
not an advantage considered his being equal with God and in appearance being found as man
but nothing he made himself he humbled himself
the FORM of a servant adopting BECOMING obedient to death

Here is his line-by-line explanation: Continue reading →

Christ, Our Willing Sacrifice

/ davidsschrock

Hebrews 10:4 states that the blood of bulls and goats cannot atone for sin. To those familiar with the argument of Hebrews or the typology of sacrifice in the Bible, it will come as no surprise that an animal cannot atone for the sins of a human. The Old Testament sacrifice can only purify the flesh, and only for a time. The value of an animal is insufficient for ransoming men made in the image of God. Only another man can do that, but then only if that man is unblemished in body and will.

Writing about the mind of Christ in Philippians 2, Alec Motyer makes this point extremely well (see his commentary, The Message of Philippians, 117). Continue reading →

UPDATED: Identifying the Son: A Chiasmus for Christ (Matthew 3:1-4:17)

/ davidsschrock / 6 Comments

UPDATE: On the basis of a few comments and further reflection, here is an updated outline of the chiasmus in Matthew 3-4.  What do you think?

In preparation for Sunday’s message, I came across some themes in Matthew 3:1-4:17 that seemed to present themselves as a conceptual chiasmus in Matthew’s gospel.  The issue revolves around the identity of Jesus, which the whole point of Matthew’s writing and the point he is trying to make early on in his gospel.

What I noticed is that in chapters 3-4 is that Matthew seems to pit John’s testimony about Jesus against Satan’s questions to Jesus. The former affirms the sonship of Christ and prepares the way (3:3) for the Father to declare his unconditional approval of the son (3:17).  By contrast, Satan takes the word of God and twists it back against Jesus so that, he questions Jesus identity with it (4:1-11).

In the end, John’s testimony proves true as Jesus abides in God’s word (4:4, 7, 10) and resists the temptation of the devil.  In the end, John’s proclamation of the kingdom’s nearness (3:2) is confirmed by Jesus’ devotion to the Father.  Therefore, Matthew records Jesus’ announcement of the kingdom, which nicely concludes this section of his gospel (4:17).

Here is my conceptual outline below.  Would love to hear your thoughts. Continue reading →

The Gospel Preached Beforehand

/ davidsschrock / 2 Comments

Yesterday I preached a pair of messages on the “gospel preached beforehand.”  In Galatians 3:8, Paul writes, “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.”

I have thought much about what the contents of that ‘gospel message’ would have been, and yesterday I sought to explain from Genesis 12, 15, 17, and 22, how the Lord proclaimed the good news to the patriarch Abraham.  In short order, I argued that the content of the gospel can be witnessed in God’s promise of grace (Gen 12), justification by faith that results in a covenant relationship (Gen 15), circumcised citizenship in the kingdom of God (Gen 17), and the necessity of the Lord’s sacrifice, substitution, and resurrection (Gen 22).

Only when all of these elements are included do you have the full gospel message. Maybe I saw too much Christ in the Old Testament, maybe not enough. Tell me what you think.

Here is the sermon audio. The first message begins in Luke 24 and turns to look at Genesis 12, 15, and 17; the second message covers Genesis 22 with an introductory excursus asking this question: ‘Since we have the full gospel (Heb 1:1-4), why should we spend much time on the gospel preached beforehand?”

Soli Deo Gloria, dss