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Faith in Christ’s Love is the ‘Heartbeat’ of our Daily Walk with God
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 Jay's Blog |
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Friday, March 10, 2006 |
Faith in Christ’s Love is the ‘Heartbeat’ of our Daily Walk with God. We have fellowship with God when we believe that Christ is perfectly suitable for our desperate situation as ruined transgressors. In the Garden of Gethsemane Christ took a ‘virtual tour’ of the agonies of Calvary when He looked into that cup of wrath; yet He still voluntarily gave Himself for us (John H. Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, pp. 443-445).
Therefore when Paul contemplated Christ’s sacrificial love; he could say of himself in Galatians 2:20, “I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Paul’s life was daily supported by Christ’s ‘Gethsemane love’—a love by which the Son of God was willing to be betrayed for him. Can you say you are living by that ‘Gethsemane love’? Only by ongoing faith in Gospel promises will the believer experience the reality of that Gethsemane love.
Our development of Christian character is a faith-driven, ‘reflex’—a believing, obedient response to the conscious reception of the controlling; animating; other-worldly love of Christ (2 Cor 5:14, 15; 1 Jn 3:1; 4:19). All progress in Christian character must have this Gospel motive. Our efforts at righteous living flow from the grace of God in the Gospel. Our striving after holiness is NOT to measure up so God will accept us.
Because the believer is in union with Christ; all of the benefits of Christ’s Person and work belong to the Christian. Therefore, our striving after holiness is a function of our new life; it is an expression of our ‘justified’ status in Christ (Rom 6).
The Scriptures say that the Father was pleased to crush His only Begotten Son; to bruise Him for our sake (Is 53:10). Christ paid and paid on that cruel tree until the Father said, “Enough, I am satisfied! I am forever placated, I am propitiated. There is no more payment to be made! My wrath is eternally satisfied for all those who will ever believe.” This is the verdict of the Father; the Judge of all the earth; this is the verdict of heaven for all those who believe (Rom 3:25, 26). But this is precisely where so many professing believers are ‘stuck’. The verdict of heaven is NOT the verdict of their conscience.
The only way out of this dilemma is the exercise of vigorous faith in the Gospel promises given to us in Christ. Without faith it is impossible to please God (Heb 11:6). Faith takes the eyes off of self—so fully in fact that faith delivers from morbid self-consciousness; and from introspection, and self-recrimination. Why? Because faith causes us to be caught up with the object of our faith—the Lord Jesus Christ.
True faith is inherently self-renouncing BECAUE true faith despairs of self as the source of acceptance with God! How we need to get it into our heads that God is only glorified when we keep taking Christ for all the reasons God gave Him.
Scripture commands us to not lean on our own understanding (Prov 3:5). In a very powerful way; the truths of the Gospel are ‘counter-intuitive’. In other words they are one hundred and eighty degrees opposite the natural ‘religion’ we were born with—in a word; the truths of the Gospel are contrary to our natural understanding.
Consider how opposed natural carnal reason is to the following truths: penal substitution, the eternal wrath of God against sin, the necessity of regeneration, the Holy Son of God in place of the ungodly, the impossibility of salvation by works, the utter dependence upon sovereign grace.
We need to be honest about the flesh’s opposition to living by faith. We could accurately say that our natural instincts of self-preservation are opposed to faith. Our craving for self-protection, security, self-qualification, and self-improvement, are all naturally opposed to God-honoring faith.
Instinctively we want to be the source of our acceptance; we loath the fact that divine pity alone can save us. It takes a work of divine grace in order for us to rest the whole soul upon the Person and work of Another.
The Gospel is about Christ; Who is our sole qualification for divine acceptance, right-standing, and favor. We are to rest in Him; we are to ‘labor’ to enter into Gospel rest (Heb 4). The Scriptures are utterly realistic; there is a ‘fight’ involved in learning Gospel ‘rest’ (1 Tim 6:12).
The natural orientation of the flesh will resist our trust and abandonment to Christ. The battle becomes intense when we insist upon ‘managing’ our own brokenness and defectiveness. At times it seems that the flesh would rather suffer the torture of a martyr than rely upon Christ alone.
Our fears are so convincing; we shudder at the thought that some aspect of our depravity will disqualify us for God’s love; so we insist upon managing our own case. But the consequence is joylessness; unrest; depression; agitation; and anxiety.
God is not stingy with assurance. He says in Hebrews 6:17-20 that it is His desire to show us His saving purpose and thereby to give us ‘strong encouragement and hope’.
Unbelief obscures the character of God from our sight. When we slip into unbelief, we are controlled by impressions, fears, moods, emotions, and carnal conclusions; rather than by the constraining love of God (2 Cor 5:14, 15). Satan seeks to establish a ‘beach head’ in our lives through our fears and emotions. If he can gain a toehold there; he will seek to erect a stronghold against the knowledge of God; the next step the evil one takes is to ‘install’ an internal ‘publishing house’ in our souls to print lies about God’s goodness.
When we begin to believe those lies ‘published’ by our unbelieving imaginings; it generally produces ‘an evil heart of unbelief’ (Heb 3:12). We must keep looking upon the goodness of God THROUGH the Gospel lens of all that God is toward us in Jesus Christ. Our fears; our circumstances; our guilt; and our anxiety are all unreliable vantage points to view our God.
Our number one duty in the Christian life is to keep tearing down every fortress raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:3-6). Our vocation is to make our minds the ‘servant’ of God’s revelation; so that our thoughts are continually corrected by the Word. As author Os Guinness says, we are either going to distort the truth of Scripture, OR, continually be conformed to it by ongoing repentance. Ongoing repentance not only conforms us to the Word; but also increases our love of the truth. Only when we are living by faith we are in touch with God’s character and promises—and only then are we are in a position to behold the glory of God; and be changed into Christ’s likeness by beholding His glory (2 Cor 3:18). |
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