I Have a Friend - Jesus

One time I was at a homeschooling conference and went to a vendor group. The guy was selling books that introduced small children to Jesus by taking them through the "steps of salvation." We had his book and I was interested in meeting him and seeing how he used it. At the meeting was a young father who had a little girl who wasn't reading yet. He said, " I try to read your book to my little girl, but she is not interested. She only wants to hear the story of the good Samaritan over and over." The teacher explained that it was good to read the story, but how important it was that the little girl get saved by going through the steps in his book.

I was taken back a number of years when I had questions about how to raise and train my children in the Lord. I remember trying to read a chapter of Romans to kids who were 6, 4, and 2. The most troublesome was my son, the 4-year old. He said what the girls were thinking, "I'm bored. Are we done yet?" I went to God with my problem. I knew I was not there to entertain my children, but the glassy eyes and the fidgeting hands and the plain admission of boredom worried me. "Do I really want them to learn that the Bible is boring?"

God was good to me. He used the form of scripture to teach me an important lesson about teaching my children. A number of years before, I visited with a missionary couple who were home on furlough. Jim and Beverly explained that they were following the Bible format for explaining and teaching God to a people group who had not had any Bible to read. They began with Genesis and the Creator God and moved to the covenant God and the God of Israel. They honored the flow of history in teaching about Jesus more than a particular theology. They did not despise theology, but they found it hard to start with it. I remembered that conversation and tried to be a missionary to my family.

I discovered that both testaments of the Bible begin with a lot of stories. Then there was wisdom and law. Then there was prophecy. It was a really rough understanding, but it got me started right: stories. I found that what my children needed first was to come to know Jesus and all his friends. The Bible characters and their stories were the foundation of our family's Bible education. Suddenly, there were questions instead of boredom. At times they would remind me of our times together when I forgot. They were asking to read the familiar books with pictures and words they could understand.

I once read an article about educational television. They were doing some tests with children and their TV program, monitoring when the kids got up and when they would remain and watch. The main thing that got children bored as they watched was not a lack of special effects or color or excited voices, but simply understanding. When children stopped understanding the show, they got bored. It made me realize that my kid's boredom was not so much about excitement, but about sharing God in an understandable way.

So, stories and appropriate leveled language helped. My interest in learning helped them to learn as well. Theology came naturally through questions. We became students of Jesus and of God by wondering about them and their ways. I realized that the stories kept speaking to me as I learned how to see it as freshly as my children did. The stories laid out the framework where law, wisdom, prophecy, and salvation made sense. Most importantly, Jesus was their Friend before he became their Savior.

This is not strange. Watchman Nee expressed this as the gospel truth. Jesus is a friend to sinners before he is their savior. I have found this truth so helpful and have been able to expand on it as I have been involved with the spiritual formation of my family. We do not come to know Jesus as Savior and Lord apart from knowing him as Teacher and Friend.

I could not resist going and talking to the father of that little girl after that meeting. I told him a little of my story with my children and said, "Keep reading that story over and over and over to your daughter. She will become friends with the people in it and learn to know the story-teller through it. There will be time to see her saved from the corruption in this world, but first she needs to have a friend - Jesus."

Forget Sin, Forget God

For I know my transgressions,

and my sin is always before me.

-Psalm 51:3

Before sin can be behind you, it must come before you. You must see the eyes of those you have hurt. You must come to know that the faces you see full of hurt and anger are really reflections of your own. Sin must come before you so that you know your transgressions. Such intimate knowledge is not something you forget.

Forgetting your sin is forgetting God, because at the heart of all sin is a God who has been hurt. He is not hurt by self-pity, but by deep concern for us and those we have hurt. Forgetting our sin means accepting it. It remains too close for us to see and fear. Without fear of sin, there can be no fear of God.

The cross of the suffering Christ is a deep, still pool in which we see our sin. We swear friendship, loyalty, and love to Jesus, but cannot stay awake with him. We curse ourselves and swear we do not know him with our actions if not our very words. We strike out with swords and anger instead of standing firm beside him. We run off naked into the night, exposed as foolish, frightened children.

The One who would not save himself hangs before us. He is the mirror of each of us, caught in sin, nailed to that which kills us, unable to save ourselves. Empty religion builds the cross and leaves us there to die. It points out the futility of our lives and cries out to God, "Why have you forsaken me?" but waits for no reply and anticipates no rescue. Empty religion is the cross with no crown, Adam in futility working the soil for thorns, Eve in pain bearing only a still-born child. It puts us on the cross and makes us self-pitying martyrs instead of the New Creation.

The One who is innocent and yet condemned stands before us. Mocked and beaten with a crown of thorns he is hated for no reason, for being with the wrong people, being guilty of telling the truth about himself and our sin. Brutal government finds it necessary that the innocent should die rather than a whole nation perish. Unsubstantiated claims drown out true confession. The howling crowds dictate justice, wanting to see punishment rather than seek vindication and reconciliation. Whether we are unwilling to help or a party to his condemnation, our brutality is shown in the flogged, spat-upon Savior who stands before us.

We remember our sin so we can remember God. Nothing else. Our personal sins will make us run and hide. Our empty religion will crucify us. Our brutal politics will bring us to hate and blame. 

"I know my transgressions" so that I might know you, Jesus. You bore the cross, but you did not stay there, but you did not stay there, and neither must I. Amen.

Festooning Psalm 103

My dear soul,

    praise the Lord, this God!
May we always remember
    what a blessing he is!

You forgive!
You heal!
You redeem!
You crown me!
You satisfy!
I am so satisfied, so full, so energized,
    I could fly!

You see me among the oppressed,
    those wandering like sheep with no shepherd.
I need you to work for my good
    and to make me good.
That is what you showed Moses so long ago
    and what you always show your people.
Yes, that goodness comes from your heart,
    so gentle and kind,
    so hard to get angry
      because you love me do dearly.

Lord, I do not deserve it,

    but you don't accuse or hold a grudge,
    or treat me like I treat others,
      how I treat you.
It's just who you are,
    completely accepting and embracing
    whoever seeks you out,
    throwing out my sins
      never to be seen again,
    treating me like a long-lost son
      so passionate because I am yours,
      so gentle because you could easily blow me away.

I don't  have long here, Lord,
    and I won't really be remembered.
    I'm just like stubble blown from a field.
So I will have to trust your love -
    your never-ending love -
    to keep me around,
    to make things right for my children
      and their children, and on and on,
    to make good your good promises to me,
    to remind me of the joy of doing it your way,
      the right way.

Your good ways are firmly set so near me
    and as far as I'll ever go.
They will always be over and above
    every other plan or rule I can see.

Bless you, my good Lord!
King of angels!
Commander of all forces!
Creator and Owner of the universe!
Bless you!

Oh, bless him, my dear soul,
    who sees even you.

How Jesus and Paul Loved the Law

What has been the effect of antinomian Christianity on spiritual formation?

Antinomian Christianity is Christianity which is lived “against the law.” In this view we are not only made right (justified) with God apart from the law, we are made right by avoiding disciplined action according to the law. “It amounts to rejecting [the law] entirely except in so far as it may be done to you by God, passively.”1

With such a relationship to the law, antinomian Christianity has a spiritual formation without any form. Such Christianity must rely on “grace as formless spurts of permissiveness that thrust the law aside.”2 Without the form of the law to guide and structure our spirituality, we are left with a grace that merely allows disobedience and empty living. The formation of our spirit is not based on the revelation of God’s guidance for all of life, but on emaciated superstitions that reduce life with God to mere service to humanity, a “get-out-of-hell-free” card, or a really good worship service show.

Why did Paul “love” the law? (Note Romans 7:22)

Paul loved the law because it made him “conscious of sin” (Ro. 3:22), his great enemy which sought to enslave him to “impurity and ever-increasing wickedness.” (6:19-20) He loved the law which was so “holy, righteous, and good” (7:12) that sin wanted to deceive him and make “the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually [bring] death.” (7:1-0-11) The law helped Paul to see and know sin as his great enemy bent on deceiving and killing him. The law also explained, taught, and illustrated a life of willing “slavery” to God in “true righteousness and holiness” (Ep. 2:24), the very essence of eternal living of a life like God’s. (Ro. 6:23)

Why is the law so important even today?

Sin is still our greatest enemy and we are in need of guidance and teaching more than ever. With the loss of the knowledge of morality in favor of a vague sympathy for morality, we find ourselves cut adrift, “infants [in knowledge], tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.” (Ep. 4:14) We are more afraid of law than of sin, more afraid of guilt than of wrongdoing. So, we find ourselves unable to grow in grace and have called such stagnancy the inevitable cost of being fallen human beings. Our world and our lives look quite pagan, without hope and without God (Ep.2:12). The law supports us and can bring hope and God’s presence through a grace that actually brings knowledge and overcomes sin.

How do law and grace go together?

The law is direction and guidance, which is a grace in itself, but it is not complete. The law points to the fullness of grace found only in Jesus. As Dallas Willard said, “The law is the course of rightness, not the source of rightness.” When law is taken as ultimate in our life with God (“The Bible says it, so I will do it!”), we find our willpower is insufficient to keep the law, so “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Ro. 7:15) This is because our will is no match for sin coming at us in obsessive desires. (vv. 18-20) When the law is not ultimate, but subordinate to the grace through Jesus in his abiding Spirit, it becomes a powerful ally, able to not only identify sin, but able to bring new desires that overcome sin from a new nature operating in and around us.

Why is the law so important to the soul and its restoration?

More and more we are finding that recovery of physical function after injury must include the right kind of activity and effort of the affected areas. Apathy makes injuries much harder to heal or even permanent. Similarly, our souls cannot heal without the right kind of effort in their injured and fragmented areas. “The law was given as an essential meeting place between God and human beings in covenant relationship with him, where the sincere heart would be received, instructed, and enabled by God to walk in his ways.”3 This “meeting place” is one where delighting in the law will bring integration and healing to the soul by God’s grace supplied by Jesus, our Teacher. The efforts to delight in the law may seem small and indirect, but will help the soul as nothing else can. Where there is healing and help for the soul, God’s kind of life flows through our life and our being making what is impossible for any person possible with God.

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1Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ (p. 213). The Navigators. Kindle Edition.

2Ibid, 215.

3Ibid, 212.