Gospel Butterfingers

Think about when you totally blank on somebody’s name…you know that you know it, but the name is hiding somewhere in a dark corner of your brain. It can be embarrassing to say the least. But what about other much more important bits of truth? Sometimes is it really hard to hold on to Truth, especially in the dark when your hands are shaking, the time you need Truth the most. It’s not Truth that is changing, but our grip on it.

It is this gospel-butterfinger epidemic that spurs Isaiah (and all of Scripture) to perpetually give us hope-reminders. It’s not because we are dumb but because we are forgetful, prone to let situations eclipse the Sun of Righteousness.

Isaiah 40
28 Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
29 He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
30 Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
31 but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.

Isaiah is talking to a people that had been taken into Exile away from the Promised Land and seemingly away from God and His Promise. He is reminding his brothers and sisters that blinding circumstances don’t negate the Truth of God; that he has, is and will always carry his people to completion. We will absolutely grow weary, faint and fall exhausted. Our grip on Truth and Hope isn’t enough. We have to be the ones being held by the One that will not grow weary, whose grip does not grow weak and who is wholly unable to let us fall.

But I so easily forget.

So here are some memory-tools God has given us to remember. They are little “means of grace” that we can utilize in times of forgetfulness, like a cheat sheet on your 8th grade English test, but these aren’t cheating.

Look Backwards

1 Samuel 7:12
Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, “Till now the LORD has helped us.”

These “memory stones” would remind all who walked by that God had indeed miraculously showed up at that place in time, and he would do it again

Look Forwards

Psalm 30:5b
Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.

Whatever we are in, even the most frustrating and confusing times, are only part of our journey. In this life The Author that started us out and is still writing. But when the final page is turned, it turns out that we’ve just gotten through the introduction to our life’s book, the rest beginning in Revelation 21 where there is no weeping or pain.

Look Upwards

Psalm 13
1 How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?
5 But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. 6 I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

The most common genre in the Psalms is the Lament, and almost all of them end in worship. The pain and frustration is real, but turning from darkness to the light of worship helps train our hearts that Hope overcomes Evil.

Look Around

1 Thessalonians 5:11
Therefore encourage one another and build one another up…

We deeply need each other. As we’ll see in the next step, we get utterly blinded and confused. So I need brothers and sisters around me to speak Truth into me. When I can’t hold onto Truth myself I need others to hold onto it for me, sitting with me as the voice and presence of God.

Look Inside (1)

Psalm 42
Why are you cast down, O my soul,and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation.

We all constantly talk to ourselves, telling ourselves what is true, false, good, bad, satisfying etc. Like I said in the last block, we so often tell ourselves (and therefore believe) in the lie that things are hopeless and God doesn’t care (or isn’t real, or is powerless). The Psalmist would have internal arguments as he went along the path of life, speaking to his soul to stop believing a lie and hold on to Truth.

Look Inside (2)

Romans 8:26
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness.

More importantly than looking to an internal conversation, we can find assurance, hope and even peace that God himself in the Person of the Holy Spirit is literally inside of us, speaking not only to our own hearts but also praying to The Father on our behalf “with groanings too deep for words.”

Look Outward

2 Corinthians 1:3
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Maybe it seems impossible, but loving others when we are having a hard time holding onto love ourselves will actually lift us our souls. It helps knock us out of the dark whirlpool as we see that we are not alone; that pain is universal and God has rescued us in order to be His rescuing agents for others.

Look Christward

Romans 8:32
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?

Ultimately our greatest hope is looking to Jesus himself, and resting in the Truth that if God went to the absolute greatest extent imaginable in order to rescue us (the sacrifice of His own Son) then he will absolutely continue his rescue-operation.

Scripture is brutally honest about the pain of this world, not asking us to minimize or paint the pain with a facade of “just trust Jesus.” We are invited to come to him with out true pain (like Mary and Martha did when their brother Lazarus was sick and dying) while also having expectant and open hands for him to hold as he walks us through the dark.

Estranged Estranged

We are the most connected people that have ever lived. And are shockingly isolated.

  • We are convinced of our rightness.
  • We have enthroned ourselves.
  • We believe that others orbit around us.
  • We treat others as our subjects.

The real issue, the foundational problem, is that this is actually how I treat God. I believe that my way is better; my plans are wiser; my solutions more satisfying.

We have been meticulously designed by God to be knit together with him, under his loving and righteous rule, and to be knit to one another in humble love. Which is exactly how we are NOT living. And so, with a broken heart, the Lord sees our betrayal and calls it like it truly is:

Isaiah 1:4b
“they are utterly estranged”

Estranged. Disconnected. Alienated. Alone. Runaways.

But it’s actually even worse than that. The wording is one of handful of “Word Doubling.” God says that we are “Estranged Estranged” — when a word in Hebrew is repeated back to back, it is going exponential. For instance, 2Kings 25:15 talks about a super refined silver by calling it “silver silver”. We do the same sometime. For teenagers there is an enormous difference between saying “I like him” vs saying “I like like him.” The second involves a much higher degree of passion and heart. And this is exactly what we are being convicted of in Isaiah. We aren’t just estranged from God, we are estranged estranged. In our pursuit of self we have utterly and completely estranged ourselves from our Loving, Providing, Caring, Holy Father (compare this to the younger prodigal son from Luke 15). We want to white-wash it and convince ourselves that we aren’t that bad or that far away. We point to the ways we don’t act like that or reduce the holiness of God in order to not seem so unholy (more on that next week in Isaiah 6).

But God is very painfully clear in Isaiah 1:4. In this one verse He explains in 7 different ways how dislocated we have become from him.

Which makes His Grace and Love all the more!

The more I own the truth of my estrangement, the more amazing I realize that God is because of how far he has come to get me; how much his love must have; how powerful he must be. Jesus himself intentionally distanced himself from The Father to come to Creation, and even more so, he was estranged-estranged on the cross because that’s how far he had to come to get us, and that’s the payment that had to be made on our behalf. Isaiah, 700 years before Jesus, knew this was going to happen and said it like this:

Isaiah 53:4-5
Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

May we all truly hear the miraculous and (almost) unbelievable Good News. We have been brought home and the Father through the power and ministry of the Holy Spirit currently, as you read this, has perfectly and utterly “UnEstranged” you. If you are in Christ, he has perfectly paid for and wiped away (see Isaiah 1:16-18) all of our scarlet sins, making them and us pure in him…and this not from ourselves but by faith through Jesus. Your Father, right here and now, has given you “peace” and “healing” (Is 53:5). He sings over you; is satisfied with you; has brought you into him arms and his home. You are no longer estranged…and has set us free so that we can, starting right now, enjoy Him forever.

Prayer:
Holy Spirit, gently open my eyes to how far I have run from you, and then quickly and surely convince my heart that you have come to get me; that I am a new creation that has been brought home with my brothers and sisters to be satisfied in and by you. Convince my heart of your love and forgiveness, and point how how I am an empowered instrument of your Grace right now in the community around me.

Foundation

Isaiah 7:9b
“If you are not firm in faith,
you will not be firm at all.”

Have you ever walked on an icy path, trying with all your might, with arms flailing about, to simply keep upright? Each of your steps running the risk of landing your flat on your back (or worse). We all know what it’s like to have unsteady footing…on a sandy beach, mountain trail, crossing a stream. We all also know, but are usually unaware, of the unsteady footing we have in everyday life. We have an incalculable number of stepping stones on our life’s path that we use to get us from A to B.

  • I place my weight on the how happy, safe and satisfied my kids are
  • I place my weight on the happiness of my marriage
  • I place my weight on how well I do in my job
  • I place my weight on my financial safety net
  • I place my weight on my health report

This list is infinite. And shaky. And sinking. Inevitably sinking.

My kids (like me) are going to make bad decisions, have hard times, be unsatisfied, cry, yell and be in despair. If their satisfaction is carrying my weight, then I will fall.

My marriage will have great highs and terrible lows. My wife, though she is seriously strong, cannot hold my weight on her shoulders.

I may not be able to control my family, but at least I can control my job and how well I do. Right? Again, nope. I have some control, but one day I will work my last day; on many days my career will be overwhelming and life-depriving instead of life-giving.

Isaiah in the passage above tells us an eternal truth that we see all through scripture. If we put our weight on horses and men, kings and banks, health and approval, we will absolutely fall. They simply cannot bear the weight of our souls. And so Isaiah with great hope pleads with us to put our faith in the Lord as our sure foundation. But what does that mean and how can that hold the weight of my heart? Psalm 130 gives us a clue:

Psalm 130:7
“O Israel, hope in the LORD,
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is plentiful redemption.

God himself, the one who has given us our weight, is the only one who is able to carry it. We cannot even carry it ourselves. The Psalmist gives us hope by telling us Who God is and What God Does:

  1. Steadfast Love — This is the word “Hesed” (my favorite Hebrew word). He alone is and does Love. His love is sacrificial, eternal, unending and strong. His love is what we stand on; what carries our weight; what holds us up.
  2. Plentiful Redemption — It’s not just that God redeems. He has “plentiful” redemption (the same words used in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply). His redemption, his secure saving power is enough to carry all of me, all of us. “Redemption” means that God (alone) has purchased us from our other stepping stone. His redemption means that he 1) picked us up and out from the miry clay and 2) set our feet on The Rock. (Psalm 40:2).

In Isaiah and the Psalmist’s time, they were looking forward in faith to The Rock, The Redeemer. We now have the honor and blessing to look backwards in time to the coming and completion of the Messiah, The Rock. They looked forward to Jesus who was Plentiful Redemption; we look backwards to the same. Jesus himself is The Rock on which we have faith, on which we stand. He is the only unmovable, unchanging, strong and steadfast stepping stone.

Take a minute to listen to this promise through a remake of this classic hymn — remember the hope: “On Christ the Solid Rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.”

The Heart…

The Heart. What a conundrum. We have really gone weird with this word. Everybody has their classic two-handed heart sign on their social media (am I the only one super tired of this thing?) and a heart emoji signifying some shallow degree of “love” which is more akin to “that’s kinda cool.”

But biblically speaking The Heart is the core of our whole person; the root of our intellect, emotions, behavior and faith; our personal operating system made in the image of God and broken in the image of man, filled with more malware than we could ever detect, much less remove. This is why scripture constantly comes back to The Heart about 1000 times (literally).

God’s people are “after his own heart”, yet it is also “deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9-). Our hearts are the roots of our being, producing every other fruit. So to learn about your heart, look at what it is producing. Look at your roller coaster emotions, and divided intellect. Look at your actions, where you give selflessly while simultaneously speaking murderous gossip. Look at your faith that is a strong cornerstone, until the storm hits and you ask “Where are you God?”

You see, we perpetually get blinded by the fruit. We try to adjust our behavior; work at our emotional connection with Jesus; study more so we can be better theologians; pray harder so that our faith will be built. All of these are excellent, but they are fruit. Doing these things will certainly go backwards and grow the heart, but, taken by themselves, they are whitewashing tombs. Isaiah reminded us 29:13) And the Lord said: “…this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men…” We can easly fall into the religion of fruit-management rather than the Gospel of Heart-Transformation. But this Transformation is exactly the point and promise, and will end up leading to Spirit-Fruit. This Transformation is what Jesus purchased for us on the cross. Remember our heart-state before Christ: (Proverbs 19:3) “When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the LORD.” The hope and healing found in the Gospel is that God decided to not rage back against us as we raged toward him but instead focused his rage onto Jesus on the cross so that Ezekiel 36:26 could become true: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”

So today, where is your heart? Ask the Holy Spirit to remind you of Who and Whose you are. Ask the Father to reveal how valued and accepted you are because of His Son. Tell Jesus thank you for exchanging his heart of flesh with our heart of stone so that now we can have the adoption as children of God.

Gospel Financial Advisor

I just heard a story about a pastor in a very poor part of Africa that was asked about the biggest issue plaguing his village. He shockingly and simply said “materialism.” Not hunger, mortality rates, sexual sins, theft. Materialism. He said that a guy in the village got a cow, not all the other men were coveting the cow and trying to figure out how to get their own cow.

This issue of money and possessions has been (and always will be) a universal disease. In the very beginning God gave all of creation to mankind, for our benefit and his glory….with the one boundary of “the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Gen 2:17). But Adam and Eve were persuaded that they could (and should) use God’s gift for their own glory…exactly how we treat money and possessions.

The Book of Proverbs is saturated with financial wisdom, like these two:

13:11 Wealth gained hastily will dwindle,
but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.

23:4 Do not toil to acquire wealth;
be discerning enough to desist.

Solomon, the world’s wealthiest man, is being a Gospel Financial Advisor, trying to keep us from the traps that encircle him while leading us to a place of freedom where we are not slaves to wealth, whether it’s never having enough or obsessed with keeping what we have. The real issue under the issue is idolatry: we want money to give us what can only be received from God. We want value, security, acceptance and security, and it truly feels like money will give us those things. And, in a shallow and short-lived way, it does. Money can get us to a place where we can “buy our way out” of most any problem. We can buy enough things to make us comfortable and happy. We can convince ourselves that we are better than others that have less. But this is as fleeting as being popular in high school. It works for us, for a minute. Until it doesn’t.

The heart of what we are truly looking for can be found in Proverbs 22:

22:1- 2
A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches,
and favor is better than silver or gold.
2 The rich and the poor meet together;
the LORD is the maker of them all.

We want a GOOD NAME, but that can only be truly given by Jesus who was essentially disowned by the Father on the Cross so that we could be adopted into his royal family, given His Name forever. The “favor” of man is always conditional, while the FAVOR of God is permanent, based upon Jesus and what he’s already accomplished.

But, honestly, the problem is that we don’t really have a proper filter. Our definition of “need” is horribly skewed, our view of the purpose of money is misplaced and our view of God’s goodness and generosity is anemic. We think we “need” the comforts of life that our neighbors have. We think that we “deserve” all that we have and it’s ours. We think that we need to acquire and acquire because God is likely to let us down and leave us in the ditch. So in light of this, we need to keep coming back to the outrageous trustworthy generosity of the King. Jesus, at great cost, gave up heaven and his Royal Riches in order to share his inheritance with us. He has proven over and over that he immeasurably loves us and desires to give us all good things, even though sometimes his (correct) definition of “good” is different than ours. And so we have to keep coming back to Jesus , asking him to loosen our tight clamp on this world as he has tightens his grasp on us. And as this slowly happens, we can start to live open-handed generous lives as God graciously invites us to join him as he blesses others with and through the finances that he has loaned us in this life.