When grace doesn’t seem like enough

“The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith, and has been in every generation.”
~ JOHN STOTT, The Cross of Christ

I met Glorhy in El Salvador this summer, a gift, a radiant teenager who spoke a little English. We connected. I can’t explain exactly why or how.

We became friends. Even on Facebook. (I asked her, “Cómo se dice “facebook” en español? How do you say “facebook” in Spanish? Her reply, “Facebook.” Go figure.)

But there’s more I can’t explain.

Glorhy is sick. It’s cancer. And because superior healthcare isn’t exactly convenient or cheap for her in El Salvador, Glorhy isn’t getting better.

I cry out to God, “Help her, Father. Please?”

I tell Glorhy that it will be okay. I send messages that say things like, “God is strong” and “God will give you courage.”

But I feel like the man sending away the needy with “Go in peace, be warm and filled” (James 2:15-16).

Because I want to promise, “God will heal your body.”
But I can’t say that. At least not in this realm.

To console me in my helplessness, I remind myself of what I know.
• I know our afflictions here are light and momentary compared to eternity (2 Corinthians 4:17).
• I know the needy we will always have with us (Matthew 26:11).  
• I know Jesus didn’t heal everybody in the flesh even when he was here.

But he did heal this one (Luke 4:39) and that one (Matthew 8:3) and this one (Mark 2:11-12).

So why not this one, Lord?
I can’t explain it.

If there’s one thing that gets us, believers and non-believers alike, it’s unexplained suffering.

Who hasn’t asked, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

I don’t doubt that God is powerful enough to prevent bad things from happening.
I don’t doubt that God is loving enough to want the best for us.

But what I can’t know is how God will choose to use his power to do ultimate good.

And while I also know his grace is enough for me,
what about Glorhy?

Is it enough for her?
She lacks financial resources I have; she lacks spiritual support I have; she lacks a million other things I have.

Her needs appear to outstrip her supplies.

But she doesn’t lack grace.
She doesn’t lack grace.
She doesn’t lack grace.
I must remember.

And I must pray.
• I pray for a healthy soul enclosed in a sick body.
• I pray for the Spirit to engulf her spirit.
• I pray lavish grace floods out her fears.

If his grace is enough for me—for you—I must trust:
it’s enough for her too.

* * *

Glorhy has asked me to ask the church to pray for her.

Will you word a request to the Father today on Glorhy’s behalf?
Thank you, church.
Thank you, Lord.

This ends my reading of The Cross of Christ with Challies.
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The cross and enemies

The cross should affect every relationship in our lives. Including the hardest ones—the people we don’t like. (I’m assuming you have a few of these people in your life, too?)

Here are a few thoughts from John Stott:

The peace that God secures if never cheap peace, but always costly.

To forgive and to ask for forgiveness are both costly exercises.

Justice without mercy is too strict, and mercy without justice too lenient.

What should our attitude be toward evil?

• Evil is to be hated.
• Evil is not to be repaid.
• Evil is to be overcome.
• Evil is to be punished.

Vengeance and retaliation are first forbidden us, and then attributed to God. Is that not intolerable? No. The reason these things are forbidden us is not because evil does not deserve to be punished (it does, and should be), but because it is God’s prerogative to punish it, not ours.

On the cross, by both demanding and bearing the penalty of sin and so simultaneously punishing and overcoming evil, God displayed and demonstrated his holy love; the holy love of the cross should characterize our response to evil-doers today.

* * *
More on Chapter 12, “Loving Our Enemies” at Challies.

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Next week:
Last chapter (whew! it’s been a good but tough read) “Suffering and Glory”

"Self-Understanding and Self-Giving"

Becoming a Christian is a transforming experience. By changing us, it also changes our self-image. We now have much more to affirm, not boastfully but gratefully.
~ John Stott, The Cross of Christ

When we understand the cross, it changes how we see God. His love, his honor, his suffering, his wisdom...the cross experience alone is enough to reveal God to us so we are drawn to him (John 12:32).

But the cross also changes how we see ourselves. 

The two extremes of self we can pick up from the world are:
(1) Be totally self-absorbed. The world revolves around me and my needs and my pleasures.
(2) We're just another animal in the kingdom, with no more intrinsic value than the neighborhood mutt.

But the cross of Christ provides the true view, "for it calls us both to self-denial and to self-affirmation."

Self-Affirmation
When Christ died, paying the penalty for sin, he lifted the burden of guilt and condemnation off his believers. By participating in his death and rising with him in new life when we put him on, we are given a new kind of life--forgiven, redeemed, holy, free, eternal.

In God's eyes, we are counted worthy, much more valuable than any of his other created things (Matthew 6:26; Matthew 12:12).

Christians can no longer think of themselves only as "created and fallen," but rather as "created, fallen and redeemed." And the injection of the new element gives us both more to affirm and more to deny. For we have not only been created in God's image, but re-created in it.

Self-Denial
But the cross is also "the symbol of death to the self." We're called to turn away from the sin of self-centeredness (Galatians 5:24), replacing it with God-centeredness.

What we are (our self or personal identity) is partly the result of the creation (the image of God) and partly the result of the Fall (the image defaced). The self we are to deny, disown and crucify is our fallen self, everything within us that is incompatible with Jesus Christ. ...True self-denial (the denial of our false, fallen self) is not the road to self-destruction but the road to self-discovery.

Self-Sacrificial Love
Once we understand who we are as a result of Christ's work on the cross--both through self-affirmation (an appreciation of God's gifts) and self-denial (discarding our sinful nature), we're led to self-giving.

The community of the cross is essentially a community of self-giving love, expressed in the worship of God and in the serve of others. It is to this that the cross consistently and insistently calls us.

Now, when faced with the choice between selfish ambition or sacrifice, we're to choose sacrifice.
Between power or service, choose service.
Between comfort or suffering, choose suffering.

Because of Christ's radical obedience to the Father's will on the cross and his extravagant outpouring of love to us, we are empowered and en-couraged to reflect the cross in our homes, our churches, our communities, and our world.

* * *

For more on Chapter 11, "Self-Understanding and Self-Giving," visit the reading group at Challies.

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Next week: Chapter 12, "Loving our Enemies," how the cross shapes our relationships with the difficult ones.

The Community of Celebration

~ From Chapter 10 of The Cross of Christ

All quotes by John R. W. Stott

[Christ’s] self-giving on the cross was not just to save isolated individuals, and so perpetuate their loneliness, but to create a new community whose members would belong to him, love one another, and eagerly serve the world.

~  +  ~  +  ~  +  ~

The community of Christ is the community of the cross.

Having been brought into being by the cross, it continues to live by and under the cross. Our perspective and our behavior are now governed by the cross. All our relationships have been radically transformed by it.

The cross is not just a badge to identify us and the banner under which we march; it is also the compass that gives us our bearings in a disorientated world.

~ + ~ + ~ + ~

Boldness, love and joy [marks of those who have been redeemed by the cross] are not to be thought of as purely private and interior experiences, however; they are to distinguish our public worship.

~ + ~ + ~ + ~

So the community of the cross is a community of celebration, a eucharistic community, ceaselessly offering to God through Christ the sacrifice of our praise and thanksgiving.

The Christian life is an unending festival.

And the festival we keep, now that our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for us, is a joyful celebration of his sacrifice, together with a spiritual feasting upon it.

In this celebratory feast we are all participants.

* * *

And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying,
   “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
Revelation 5:13

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Read more on Chapter 10 at Challie’s site

The Conquest of Evil

~ Thoughts from Chapter 9 of The Cross of Christ

Author John Stott opens with this:

It is impossible to read the New Testament without being impressed by the atmosphere of joyful confidence which pervades it.

...There was no defeatism about the early Christians; they spoke rather of victory.

Yet, they also suffered and all eventually died. Is that a victory?

Yes.

At the cross, Jesus canceled their record of debt (Colossians 2:13-14). And swallowed up death in life (1 Corinthians 15:56-57).

Because of Christ’s death, we, too

• Are no longer under the tyranny of the law
• Are free from our fallen sin nature
• Have overcome the world
• Cannot be harmed by death

The four tyrannies characterize the old “aeon” (age) that was inaugurated by Adam. In it the law enslaves, the flesh dominates, the world beguiles and death reigns.

The new “aeon,” however, which was inaugurated by Christ, is characterized by grace not law, the Spirit not the flesh, the will of God not the fashions of the world, and abundant life not death.

I count that as a victory in full.

When Satan tempts me to despair
And tells me of the guilt within
Upward I look and see Him there
Who made an end of all my sin.

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Praise the One, risen Son of God!
~ BEFORE THE THRONE OF GOD OF ABOVE
Shane and Shane

* * *

More on Chapter 9 at Challies

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The cross reveals who God is

The cross was a word as well as a work...listen attentively to it.
~ JOHN STOTT, The Cross of Christ

The cross doesn’t just save us. It also shows us who God is.

In Chapter 8—The Revelation of God—Stott expounds on this as the second achievement of the cross (the first is our salvation; the third is the defeat of evil.)

Here are five aspects of God revealed in the cross.

The Glory of God

According to John’s Gospel Jesus referred to his death as a “glorification,” the event through which he and his Father would be supremely “glorified” or manifested.

As Jesus emptied himself, he was lifted up. We see the glory of both Son and Father in their “self-humbling and self-giving.”

The Justice of God

We also see God’s justice through the cross. This was where God dealt with the cost of sin, taking its burden away from us and placing it onto His Son.

The Love of God

If we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in a dictionary but at Calvary.

Stott places emphasis like this:

• God gave his Son to die for us.
• God gave his Son to die for us.
• God gave his Son to die for us.

It would still have been wonderful if God had given his Son, and so himself, only to become flesh for us, to live and give and serve for us on earth.

But the incarnation was but the beginning of his self-giving.

Having “emptied himself” of his glory and taken the nature of a servant, he then “humbled himself” and became “obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Phil. 2:7-8).

The Wisdom and Power of God

God wisely combines his satisfaction for justice and our need for a Savior in the cross. He also demonstrates his power there by saving all those who believe.

Seeing God’s glory, justice, love, wisdom, and power exemplified through the cross, we have a fuller image of the God so worthy of our worship!

* * *

More on Chapter 8 at Challies

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Why we need the cross

John Stott begins Part III—The Achievement of the Cross—with this question:

What did God accomplish by his self-sacrifice, his self-substitution [on the cross]?

He offers three results from the New Testament:
     1. We are rescued
     2. God is revealed
     3. Evil is defeated

This week, Chapter 7, “The Salvation of Sinners,” deals with the first result—the rescue.

Stott sits us in four places to show our rescue by the cross more clearly.

1. In the temple court
    - To appease God’s wrath (Propitiation)

God took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it in his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us.

…we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.
1 John 2:1-2

2. In the slave market
    - To free us through blood (Redemption)

Bought by Christ, we have no business to become the slaves of anybody or anything else. Once we were the slaves of sin; now we are the slaves of Christ, and his service is the true freedom.

For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
Mark 10:45

3. In the court of law
    - To make us righteous (Justification)

When God justifies sinners, he is not declaring bad people to be good, or saying that they are not sinners after all; he is pronouncing them legally righteous, free from any liability to the broken law, because he himself in his Son has borne the penalty of their law-breaking.

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21

4. At home
    - To restore the relationship (Reconciliation)

Reconciliation means peace with God, namely adoption and access. …it was Jesus himself who always addressed God intimately as “Abba, Father,” who gave us permission to do the same, approaching him as “our Father in heaven.”

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
Romans 5:10-11

Our need
Each setting, each theme, highlights how much we need the cross. As Stott so bluntly states, “These metaphors do not flatter us. They expose the magnitude of our need.”

But they do flatter our Savior.
To him be all glory and praise for saving our souls!

* * *

For further reading, I recommend:
Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray

More on Chapter 7 at Challies

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Who is your substitute?

For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
Romans 5:10

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?
Romans 8:32

Selected quotes from Chapter 6,
“The Self-Substitution of God” in
The Cross of Christ by John Stott
(EMPHASES MY OWN)

The substitute bears the penalty, that we sinners may receive the pardon.

Who, then, is the substitute?

What we see in the drama of the cross is not three actors but two, ourselves on the one hand and God on the other. ...For in giving his Son he was giving himself. This being so, it is the Judge himself who in holy love assumed the role of the innocent victim, for in and through the person of his Son he himself bore the penalty that he himself inflicted.

Divine love triumphed over divine wrath by divine self-sacrifice.

The biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us.

The essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.

Neither Christ alone as man nor the Father alone as God could be our substitute. Only God in Christ, God the Father’s own and only Son made man, could take our place.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16

* * *

More from Chapter 6 at Challies

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Who was the cross satisfying?

Please forgive my most elementary synopsis below of the much more intelligently written Chapter 5 in The Cross of Christ, “Satisfaction for Sin”.

Who or what was God having to “satisfy” by having Jesus die for our sins?

John Stott suggests these four possibilities:

1. Satisfying Satan
Possibility:
Because of sin, man now belonged to Satan. If God wanted to reconcile with his people, he had to swap blood for blood in a deal with the devil to get his people back.

No.

God doesn’t have to arm wrestle with the devil over anything. Stott writes, “We deny that the devil has any rights over us which God is obliged to satisfy.”

2. Satisfying the Law
Possibility:
Because God put the Law in motion, he had to keep it himself, like King Darius’s obligation to put Daniel in the lions’ den because of an edict he signed (Daniel 6).

Not exactly. I reason: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. “We cannot think of God as caught in a technical legal muddle of this kind. …The real reason why disobedience of God’s moral laws brings condemnation is not that God is their prisoner, but that he is their creator.”

3. Satisfying God’s justice
Possibility:
Because man couldn’t pay the debt he owed, somebody had to. So God paid it. Justice was served.

Well, in one sense, yes, but like the second possibility, this view also subjects God to be a prisoner of his own making, in the former to the Law, and here to his sense of justice. Such denies the full character of God.

4. Satisfying himself  
Possibility:
All of God, including his love (not just his justice), was satisfied through Jesus’ death. God is divinely self-consistent. All his character traits live in unison.

Yes.

The cross of Christ “is the event in which God makes known his holiness and his love simultaneously, in one event, in an absolute manner” (Emil Brunner).

Thus love and justice meet. While it may be hard for us to imagine God “as the Judge who must punish evil-doers and of the Lover who must find a way to forgive them,” God is both, not in contradiction to each other, but in harmony.

And so he sacrificed for us, satisfying not only himself, but us too.
Such holiness. Such love. Such grace.

* * *

More from Chapter 5 at Challies

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“The Problem of Forgiveness”—Chapter 4

“Forgiveness is the very opposite of anything which can be taken for granted. Nothing is less obvious than forgiveness.”
~ EMIL BRUNNER

The question isn’t so much why it would be difficult for God to forgive us, but how it’s possible for him to forgive us at all.

So John Stott writes chapter 4—“The Problem of Forgiveness”—in The Cross of Christ.

To understand the cross, we first need to understand ourselves as we are (sinful, responsible, guilty, lost) and God as he is (holy).

Quotes below from John Stott:

1. The Gravity of Sin

Every sin is a breach of what Jesus called “the first and great commandment,” not just by failing to love God with all our being but by actively refusing to acknowledge and obey him as our Creator and Lord.

We have rejected the position of dependence that our createdness inevitably involves and made a bid for independence.

2. Human Moral Responsibility

Are we responsible for our actions any longer? Yes, we are.  “Man never sins purely out of weakness, but always also in the fact that he ‘lets himself go’ in weakness. Even in the dullest sinner there is still a spark of decisions,” indeed of defiant rebellion against God.

3. True and False Guilt

How could anyone imagine that Christianity is about sin rather than about the forgiveness of sin? How could anyone look at the cross and see only the shame of what we did to Christ, rather than the glory of what he did for us?

...Decision making belongs to the essence of our humanness. Sin is not only the attempt to be God; it is also the refusal to be human by shuffling off responsibility for our actions.

4. God’s Holiness and Wrath

God’s holiness exposes sin; his wrath opposes it. So sin cannot approach God, and God cannot tolerate sin.

When we have glimpsed the blinding glory of the holiness of God and have been so convicted of our sin by the Holy Spirit that we tremble before God and acknowledge what we are, namely “hell-deserving sinners,” then and only then does the necessity of the cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it before.

Grasping both the gravity of our sin as well as the majesty of God is how we begin to understand the beauty of the cross.

May we never lose sight of it.

* * *

More from Chapter 4 at Challies

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Centered on the Cross

~ thoughts from The Cross of Christ, Chapter 3, “Looking Below the Surface”

Jesus’s death was necessary. Voluntary. Altruistic.
And beneficial—to get rid of the obstacle of sin that prevented us from getting close to God.

John Stott takes a closer look in chapter 3 at the importance of the cross in three main scenes within Jesus’s last 24 hours prior to his death.

1. The Upper Room

Jesus visibly symbolized his death with the bread and the wine (Matthew 26:27-28)—explaining it to the apostles, who subsequently explained it to us.

It was a memorial of his death. It is the cross that he doesn’t want us to forget.

2. The Garden of Gethsemane

What was in the cup that Jesus didn’t want to drink (Matthew 26:39)? Physical suffering? Surely not just that. Martyrs ever since have shown great courage in the face of brutal sufferings. Surely Jesus would show no less courage than they.

The dread was alienation from his Father. He knew that on the cross, he would be covered in darkness, in our sins.

3. On Golgotha

Why this cry from the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)?

Some say from anger or despair. Others say it was a cry of loneliness. Or perhaps a cry of victory.

But perhaps we should take his words at face value: he cried out because he was God-forsaken. Could there be anything worse?

Truths from the Cross

Stott concludes chapter 3 with three truths we learn from the cross:

1. Our sin must be really bad.

It is impossible for us to face Christ’s cross with integrity and not to feel ashamed of ourselves. Apathy, selfishness and complacency blossom everywhere in the world except at the cross.

2. God’s love is exceptionally incredible.

God pursued us even to the desolate anguish of the cross. …Its proper name is “grace,” which is love to the undeserving.

3. Christ’s gift of salvation is free to us.

So what is there left for us to pay? Nothing! Since he claimed that all was now “finished,” there is nothing for us to contribute.

* * *

More from Chapter 3 at Challies

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Why did Christ die? Because we killed him?

~ thoughts from The Cross of Christ by John Stott—Chapter 2

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
Tennessee Ernie Ford used to ask us that on Sunday mornings on my dad’s LP playing on our stereo. I still hear it like it was yesterday.

But was I there? Am I there?
Why did Christ die? Did I kill him?

“…and they crucified him”
Interestingly, none of the four Gospel writers go into detail about the actual crucifixion itself.  (See Matthew 27:35; Mark 15:25; Luke 23:33; John 19:18)

But who was really responsible? Who killed Christ?

Pilate
So [Pilate] delivered him over to them to be crucified….
John 19:16

Even though Pilate believed Jesus was innocent, and even though Pilate tried four times to evade a crucifixion for Jesus, in the end he gave in to the Jews’ plea for His death.

• Do we ever sacrifice what we think is right because of peer pressure? By our passivity do we crucify Jesus anew?

Jewish Leaders
This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.
Acts 2:23

Jesus told Pilate that his sin was less than the Jewish leaders who turned Him over to him (John 19:11). And why did the Jewish leaders’ hate Jesus? Scripture says even Pilate knew it was envy (Matthew 27:18)

Jesus was a threat to their authority. They had been in charge for so long and weren’t ready to relinquish their power without a fight.

• How do we feel about Jesus messing with the lifestyle we’re comfortable with? Do we welcome change, or do we also fight against someone else telling us what to do?

Judas the traitor
For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.
Mark 14:21

Can Judas really be held responsible if he was just fulfilling a prophecy (John 17:12)?

Yes. He had planned out the betrayal. Luke accused him of wickedness (Acts 1:18). And Jesus said it would have been better had Judas not been born (Mark 14:21). Judas’ greed was his demise.

• What do we value more than Jesus? Do we trade in our loyalty when other pleasures are more appealing?

You and me
...since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.
Hebrews 6:6

So we crucify Christ too?

“We may try to wash our hands of responsibility like Pilate. But our attempt will be as futile as his. For there is blood on our hands.”
~ JOHN STOTT

Before we can celebrate in the victory brought by Christ’s death and resurrection, we need to own up to our guilt in causing it.

God
He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?
Romans 8:32

But when all is said and done, why did Christ die?
Was he a passive victim of murder?

No.

“Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy;--but the Father, for love!”
~ OCTAVIUS WINSLOW

He died in obedience to his Father’s will and out of love for us.

• Now what?

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2:20

And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Ephesians 5:2

* * *

More from Chapter 2 at Challies

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The Centrality of the Cross (Chapter 1)

“From Jesus’ youth, indeed even from his birth, the cross cast its shadow ahead of him. His death was central to his mission.”
     ~ JOHN STOTT, The Cross of Christ

And so from page one onward, John Stott writes of the cross in The Cross of Christ.

Most religions have a symbol. The symbol of Christianity settled into the crucifix, the cruel object upon which Jesus died.

But was the cross the center of Jesus’ perspective? Stott answers yes.

We read in the gospels how Jesus often alluded to his own death.

• He obviously knew the prophecies written about the Messiah included his death.
• He saw the hostility towards him from the Jewish leaders. 
• He knew the Father had willed his sacrifice, and he also knew he would be obedient to that will.

Jesus came to give his life away. His death was the hour for which he was purposed (John 12:23-28).

The writers of the Gospels all bear witness to it.

[They] show that they understand this by the disproportionate amount of space which they give to the story of his last few days on earth, his death and resurrection.

It occupies between a third and a quarter of the three Synoptic Gospels, while John’s Gospel has justly been described as having two parts, “the book of the signs” and “the book of the Passion,” since John spends an almost equal amount of time on each.

The book of Acts also recounts the story of the death and resurrection. And the three major writers of the epistles (Paul, Peter, John), write prolifically of it.

In the last book, Revelation, John introduces Jesus as “the first-born from the dead” (Rev 1:5). He writes most consistently of Jesus as “the Lamb,” the sacrifice by whose blood we are set free. 

Do we do it justice? Do we keep the cross as central to our faith as it deserves?

I look forward to reading more of The Cross of Christ in light of Scripture as I examine my own priorities.

The four sections of Stott’s book are:

• Approaching the Cross
• The Heart of the Cross
• The Achievement of the Cross
• Living under the Cross

If you’d like to read along, please do so! I’m reading with the group at Challies, one chapter a week, starting now. It promises to be quite insightful.

* * *

How central do you keep the cross in your faith?

More about Chapter 1 at Challies

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