30 Days of Transforming Grace: Days 10-14

30 Days of Transforming Grace

By Jay Wegter

Days 10-14

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TRANSFORMING GRACE

D A Y 10

DELIGHTING IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD (PART

ONE)

INTRODUCTION: This lesson is an introduction to a mini-series on delighting it the knowledge of God. This series of chapters is a call to believers to sit for a moment and consider how central the affections are to true religion. Delighting in the Lord is intended to be an incentive to handle the Scriptures as God’s living Word addressed to the affections of sinners.

As servants of Christ committed to the faithful preaching of God’s Word, we’re grateful for the example set by today’s expositors; they have taught us by example to preach to the mind, and to the conscience, and to the will. But a question arises; are we preaching to the affections? Are we exalting the excellence of our God and His glorious perfections in the truths we declare? Are we setting forth the desirability and beauty of Christ, the Lord of the truth? Would it trouble us if we found that we are content to leave souls informed and challenged but not ravished by the God of all grace?

This author finds his own conscience pricked at this juncture. Welling up inside is a growing compulsion to be ever more effective in carrying out the privilege of displaying Christ first to my own heart as a precursor to displaying Him to my hearers and readers. As those who are called to handle the Word of God with precision, our job is not complete if we stop at crisp exegesis alone—we must strive to move our hearers from accuracy to awe, from appreciation to apt obedience, and from duty to delight.

I. To know God, identify the obstacles which block delight in God

A. It is all too common for professing believers to content themselves with a ‘concept of God that is vague and void of passion. Our purpose in this chapter is to recover our passion to know the Lord and in so doing pursue a biblical strategy for knowing God and delighting in Him.

God’s missionary heart may be expressed in the following phrase, “God wills to be known through Jesus Christ.” Jesus shares the identity of Yahweh, and Jesus performs the functions of Yahweh—He is Creator, Ruler, Judge, and Savior. The most quoted Christological text in the New Testament captures the wonder that Jesus of Nazareth is sovereign Lord of all: “The Lord said to my Lord ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’” (Ps 110:1) (Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God, pp. 104-118).

The Apostle Paul’s all-consuming goal was to grow in his knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. He saw knowing Christ as his whole life direction, and as the answer to ‘God’s upward call’ (Phil 3:7-16). The Apostle’s daily habit was to ‘weigh’ the infinite privilege of knowing Christ against every temporal thing this world could offer—from earthly security to personal honor and prestige. The apostle’s assessment: compared to knowing Christ, all earthly gain was but rubbish. Paul is a wonderful example of focused passion to know the Lord. He was discontent to know Christ at a distance; he refused to know Christ theoretically; he never would have settled for secondhand convictions—Paul could certainly be described as ‘panting after God’ (Ps 42:1).

Part of our problem in living out our biblical faith is that we have too often allowed the culture to define what is ‘normal’ in terms of life pursuits. We live in a society which imagines it is healthy to live for the present without being controlled by eternal hope. As a consequence, we find it all too easy to be ruled by the tyranny of the urgent. When searching for knowledge of a particular topic, we don’t have to take a trip to the library—we ‘Google’ the subject—simply hit a few keys and we find our answer in seconds. By contrast, knowing God is a lifetime endeavor which is worthy of the best of our time, focus, sacrifice, and affection.

B. In a society of instant information it is becoming far too easy to lose our grip on the practice of the spiritual disciplines. Spiritual disciplines are the very opposite of immediacy. They take time—the exercise of spiritual disciplines requires that we come to a full stop. Spiritual disciplines cannot be ‘done on the fly’ or while engaged in some diversion. Waiting upon the Lord means that we are subject to His timetable not ours (Ps 25:3).

Successfully meditating upon Scripture means we will have to be silent, with patient concentration, until our thought processes and affections are captive to the Word of God (Ps 145:5). Modern culture has us swimming in options (consider how many areas in our lives where this is true: social, recreational, self-improvement, travel, amusement, etc.). In our over-scheduled, over-stimulated lives, we tend to be obsessed with the temporal, allowing ourselves to be pulled away from ‘kingdom consciousness’ as if the core meaning of life revolved solely around the plaudits of men and the achievement of our earthly goals.

Our flesh is attracted to society’s ‘scorecards’—as if our accomplishments in the area of vocation represent a true measure of personal success. We face the temptation to affirm our worth by means of our performance in the world, as if we truly are the architects of our own identity and value (1 Jn 2:15-17). But, if material wealth were the true standard of worth and success, then Jesus would have been a failure. For He told His disciples that, “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (Matt 8:20).

II. To know God, recover the spiritual discipline of Scripture meditation

A. The path to know God better centers especially upon the activity of contemplating God’s saving work toward us in Christ. This is the Apostle Paul’s great emphasis in Ephesians chapters 1-3. Paul wants the believer to live out his shared life in Christ. But how are we to live upon Christ unless we know who we are in Him in the first place? Living our shared life in Christ depends upon studying and meditating upon our new identity in Christ.

The central focus in our contemplation of redemption ought to be upon our relatedness to the Godhead as it is settled in Christ. As opposed to philosophy,

Christianity is about relationship with God who came to us in Christ Jesus, thus we are to more principally consider Him (Heb 12:2). We are to frequently dwell upon our relatedness to the Godhead as it is settled in Christ. This is the most crucial point in our relationship with God.

The Divine Being we are called upon to delight in is not remote. Our Christian God was among us. He took on our nature. He entered our experience on our behalf. Therefore delight in Him is as natural as saying ‘hello.’

What is it about God’s nature that generates delight? If we compare the intimate acquaintance of a fellow human to intimacy with God; God’s communications are more intimate, constant, powerful, efficacious, delightful, and satisfying than any earthly friendship (The Works of the Reverend John Howe, “A Treatise on Delighting in God” (Soli Deo Gloria) 1:474-664. The Devoted Life, Kelly M. Kapic and Randall C. Gleason, eds. (Intervarsity Press), “A Treatise on Delighting in God,” summary of Howe’s treatise by Martin Sutherland, pp. 225-237).

Corresponding to this crying need is the inspired grace-driven ‘logic’ of the New Testament authors. They repeatedly focus upon the following ‘grace cord of four strands’: Who Christ is, What He has done for believing sinners, Who we are in Him, and How we are to live upon Him. Thus it is Christ’s supremacy; Christ’s atonement; our union with Christ; and our abiding in Christ. This four-strand cord has everything to do with our progress in the knowledge of the Lord; for God’s grace is relational—we grow in our knowledge of Christ by caring for our relationship with Him.

We come to a working, experimental knowledge of Christ best by meditating upon Him from the perspective of union with Him. In other words, we do not study Christ as passive spectators walking through a ‘theological or historical museum’, but as those who have abundant life in Him by virtue of living organic union with Him (Col 3:3-4). As one pastor quipped about the epistle to the Ephesians, “It is Christ and the believer— compacted ‘chock o’ block’ together in nearly every verse in the letter.”

B. Ephesians is the great epistle of the believer growing in his knowledge of the Lord by means of meditating upon the ‘mystery of union with Christ,’ the ‘mystery of Christ Himself,’ and the ‘mystery of the gospel’ (Eph 3:8-12; Rom 16:25-27). Christ, as the last Adam, came to restore what the first Adam had lost. God, in His infinite wisdom and goodness in Christ is restoring members of the ruined race of Adam to the perfect image of God. Through the Last Adam, God is forming a new humanity of men and women who are ‘complete in Him’ (Col 2:10). Through Christ the redeemed have perfect sonship, status, favor, acceptance, righteousness, and right-standing. In Christ they have right-relatedness to the Holy Trinity. In Christ they bear the perfectly restored image of God. In Christ they have the Spirit of God making His permanent abode in them.

Those who belong to Christ are His spiritual ‘seed’. They make up His progeny—they have life in Him (Col 3:3-4). Their lives are bound up in His life. They live upon Him (Gal 2:20).

This all-encompassing spiritual reality of our existence and identity in Christ can easily appear remote, distant, and unreal. As a consequence, the question many believers have is, “What will bring these glorious truths of life in Christ into the present for me; what will transport them from lofty concepts into real Christian experience?” The answer involves living upon Christ now.

III. To know God, fix your eyes upon Jesus (Heb 12:2)

A. The world’s promises of security and significance are addressed to sense, sight, and feeling. Christ’s promises are addressed to our enduring faith. John Calvin offers a very practical reason for continually ‘looking unto Jesus’,

We can be fully and firmly joined with God only when Christ joins us with Him. If then we would be assured that God is pleased with and kindly disposed toward us, we must fix our eyes and minds on Christ alone, for actually, through Him alone we escape the imputation of our sins to us—an imputation bringing with it the wrath of God (Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, John T. McNeill, editor, vol. xx, book II, p. 506).

“Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of faith” (Heb 12:2). “Looking,” or fixing our eyes on Jesus means looking away from one thing to concentrate on another. The word is a present active participle, thus looking is to be a habitual action. We look to Christ in faith, hope, expectation and trust. It is not merely an intellectual exercise—it is an act of the whole soul in faith, trust, and reliance. “Look unto Him and be saved all the ends of the earth” (Is 45:22).

In looking unto Jesus, we are to look away from all the things that divert our minds and discourage us: oppositions, discouragements, mockings, persecutions, afflictions, personal injustice, setbacks, failures. It is so easy to become fixated upon negative circumstances; but the believer is to be characterized by “looking unto Jesus” (Heb 12:2). The Greek word here for ‘looking’ (afahrao) means to look away from one thing and to concentrate on another. In order to make progress in our knowledge of God, we must fix our eyes of faith on Jesus. This consists of not only contemplating His Person, but also His saving work toward us, His sufficiency, and His will for His people. Christ Jesus makes God known to us—for Christ is communicating the Father to us, “He is the radiance of His glory and exact representation of His nature” (Heb 1:3).

The ongoing act of looking unto Jesus reveals the secret of perseverance in this long distance contest. Our gaze must be continually fixed upon the great object of our faith— the Lord Jesus Christ; for from Him alone we derive our renewed energy, refreshment, and encouragement (John Owen). The ground of our stability in the Christian life is a constant looking unto Christ.

He is the Author, or Beginner of our faith. Jesus is the pioneer and forerunner of our salvation (Heb 2:10). He is the High Priest of our confession (Heb 3:1). He effectively worked by His Spirit to plant faith in us at our conversion. He is also the Perfecter and Finisher of our faith. He grants faith by His sovereign grace and mercy; He upholds our faith; and He perfects and finishes our faith—it is His work in us.

The Word promises, “For I am confident of this very thing that He that began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil 1:6). The Christian is “protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet 1:5). The One we love and in whom we trust birthed faith in us. Christ is our ‘Sanctifier’(Heb 2:11)—He is our Mediatorial King who rules us and who subdues us to Himself.

As our Lord and Master, He chooses the trials through which our pride and self-will are broken. He disciplines us to bless us—to do good to us in the end. Our response must be, “Lord, you know best; I trust you and put you first above my own carnal reasoning.”

We must not neglect the duty of fixing our eyes on Jesus; our comfort and holiness depend upon this blessed duty. Christ is our life and covenant, but He is also our example of endurance. He exercised faith; looking at the unseen, not the temporal. He endured for our sake amidst incredible opposition; He finished the work His Father gave Him to do. His whole earthly life was the embodiment of trust in God (Heb 5:8).

“For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps, who committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in His mouth; and while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously” (1 Pet 2:21-25).

Now He calls us to exercise a habit of faith in Him. We live between the cross and the resurrection. You are to live upon what Christ has done for us at the cross and what He will do for us at the resurrection to come. The finished work of the cross disconnects us from the world and the hope of the resurrection fixes our sights on the glory to come. We will come to know God better only as we strengthen our focus on Christ and deepen our habit of reliance upon Him.

B. Looking to Christ’s excellence is the feast for the believer’s mind and the heart—we will come to know the Father’s love who brought Him into the world for us. His redeeming love is held out to us amidst our great difficulties and discouragements. We must note the comfort here and the inducement to perseverance in believing—Jesus is not merely our example; He is the Author and Finisher of our faith—He begins faith in us and He carries it on to perfection.

Jesus is our example unto encouragement; what He suffered was “for the joy set before Him.” “Joy” pertains to the things in which He rejoiced—the joy set before Him was the salvation of the Church and the glory of God. He had joy at the prospect of accomplishing all of the counsels of divine wisdom and grace unto the eternal glory of God. His love for the elect and His desire for their eternal salvation was inexpressible. These things were all a matter of joy. “As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see it and be satisfied; by His knowledge the Righteous One My Servant will justify the many as He will bear their iniquities” (Is 53:11).

Before time in eternity past, these things regarding our salvation were assured in a covenant within the Triune Godhead. This was the covenant that planned the birth of Messiah in Bethlehem. Thus as Jesus contemplated the fulfillment of this covenant, He had joy that supported Him amidst the trials of His soul. He knew that His sufferings would make peace between God and man; seal the covenant of grace and make Him the Mediator of it; open up the way of salvation to sinners through Christ; effectually save all those given to Him by the Father; and that He Himself would become the Firstborn among many brethren. He paid the price of the cross to gain the joy set before Him. His faith looked past the cross to the eternal joy (Heb 10:1-14).

“He endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” He patiently endured the most horrific suffering and ignominy and insults. But by faith He saw past these hideous agonizing circumstances to the joy that His suffering was accomplishing. He despised the shame—that is He did not succumb under it or faint because of it. He counted it as nothing in comparison to the blessed and glorious effects His sufferings would bring.

He was assured of the outcome which is eternal glory and joy. Likewise we are called to suffer. “If we suffer with Him we shall also reign with Him” (see 2 Tim 2:12; Rom 8:17). Our duty is to fix our eyes on Jesus in all of our difficulties, hardships, and failures—and know that our suffering is an essential part of our race to the glory and joy set before us. If we trust in God’s purposes in our suffering, we will be safe. As we saw in our last lesson on Romans eight, the attainment of the beauty of glory is tied to sharing in His sufferings—the fellowship of His sufferings is always tied to the power of His resurrection. His cross is the gateway to His joy and ours!

IV. To know God, seek the Lord as He is revealed ‘in the covenant’

A. In the new covenant it is God’s own glory and excellence that have granted to us His magnificent promises (2 Pet 1:4). These new covenant ‘promises’ are gospel promises. God has literally ‘harnessed’ His own infinite power and perfections and put them to work in our redemption and adoption. We are to live upon gospel promises that are ‘backed up’ by the exertion of God’s glory and excellence. God’s attributes, perfection, and character have been put on display in our reception of His grace.

We must seek to grasp the truth that God has willed to make Himself known to us by way of the covenant of redemption (Matt 26:28; Heb 9:13-15; 1 Cor 11:25; Heb 10:5-25). How paramount this is in our apprehension of life and completeness in Christ. The fact that God’s own glory and excellence have formed and fashioned every gospel promise in Christ is significant beyond words. It means that God’s glory, excellence, and perfections have been moved out of the realm of abstraction and into the category of covenant. Consider the wisdom of God’s plan—in order to bring us all the way to God and glory, the Lord exercises His perfections on our behalf—placing these perfections on display in the process of our redemption.

Beholding God’s perfections is inseparably joined to the saints’ true happiness. Beholding God’s perfections is so appealing to the saved man that he places his highest delight in those things; then he will desire them as he desires his own happiness because they are inseparably joined. The saints’ love to God is the fruit of God’s love to them. The ability to love God is God’s grace gift to believing sinners. God’s love to particular elect persons is discovered by conversion (Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections, p. 166).

God’s precious and magnificent promises are not bare propositions (such as, ‘if you do this, such and such will happen’), no, these magnificent promises are God’s covenant faithfulness in action—for the promises are God’s commitment to keep exerting His own attributes on our behalf. By His own glory and excellence, He caused us to escape the corruption in the world by lust. He made us partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). By His own power and excellence He transferred us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son (Col 1:12-14ff.).

By the exercise of His infinite attributes He removed us from being children of wrath in order to make us heirs with Christ. In Christ, the Father is taking us from defiled dust to grace and glory. HOW He is taking us to glory is the source of endless wonder and meditation for the holy angels. He is taking us to glory in such a way that His excellence and perfections are being put on display—being exhibited to the watching angelic hosts who marvel at God’s wisdom in perfecting the church through Christ (Eph 3:8-12).

At conversion the believing sinner comes to know the wonder of God’s perfections exercised towards him. In his book, The Religious Affections Edwards captures the transforming truth that the gospel gives us God (the glorious saving knowledge of God). States Edwards, in conversion, the redeemed man experiences a great manifestation of God’s moral perfection and glory exercised toward him. The fruit of this discovery is the excitation of love to God born of holy gratitude. Thus the spiritual occasion of gracious love in the saints arises primarily from the excellence of divine things as they are in themselves, and not from any conceived relation they bear to the sinner’s immediate self-interest (Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections, p. 175).

God’s love is the foundation for all of our gracious affections. God’s love lays the foundation for these grateful affections. Gracious gratitude arises when saved men are affected with the attribute of God’s goodness and free grace, not only as they are concerned with it as it affects their own interests, but as a part of the glory and beauty of God’s nature. In the Gospel of grace, God’s goodness as part of the beauty of His nature is set before our eyes – His exercises of it for us is the special occasion of our mind’s attention to that beauty. It fixes our attention and heightens our affections (pp. 176-177).

Joy, spiritual delight, and pleasure in God are not primarily born of immediate self interest as its foundation. Instead, it primarily consists in the ‘sweet entertainment’ the believer’s mind has in the view and contemplation of the holiness, glory, and beauty of divine things in themselves. By contrast, the hypocrite rejoices in himself—self is the foundation of his joy (ibid.).

B. In opening up the storehouses of divine wealth to bestow it upon sinners, God is making His majesty known. God’s great self-revelation is through His plan to glorify His grace (Eph 1:3-6ff.). From the standpoint of finite humans and angels, it would seem impossible for God to bridge the ontological (uncreated versus created being) and moral barrier (holiness versus defilement) that separates Him from His rebellious creatures. For, the meeting of God’s burning holiness and man’s sinfulness results in an eternal conflagration of divine wrath. Thus the question is, “How is it possible for our holy self-existent God to export His wealth of blessedness; life; light; community; and love into the lives of rebellious creatures? How can God shower the guilty with eternal kindness without violating His own immutable character?” (1 Tim 6:15-16.)

How can God bestow His infinite divine wealth on those with infinite demerit? Believe me, no one wants to know this more than angels (1 Pet 1:12)! And angels are glorying in the answer (Eph 3:8-11). This is the most marvelous thing about God’s grace—it has a goal even higher than bringing us to heaven. That goal is to magnify God. This is the great and lofty goal of grace—that God might be glorified and made known through the means by which He bestows His infinite wealth upon guilty, polluted, undeserving rebels. God is putting His excellence and perfection on display in the plan of redemption. God’s wisdom and power have been exerted in His ‘bridging’ the apparently hopelessly formidable barrier between Himself and sinners (1 Cor 1:23-25).

The divine wisdom and power by which God redeems escapes the understanding of those who have a reputation for wisdom (1 Cor 1:21). In fact, all of the world’s false religions, with their ‘conventional wisdom’, have something in common—they trust their own standard for wisdom. And they all attempt to obligate God through moral and religious striving. News flash! It is impossible to obligate God. It is impossible to mollify or soften up God and make Him propitious or kindly disposed toward you. Why? Because even what you think you have is not yours; it is on divine loan to you. Thus, it is impossible to trade or barter with God—He rejects out of hand any and all attempts to transact with Him, “For from Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things” (Rom 11:36).

The message of grace in Christ cannot coexist with the ‘fig leaves’ we use in an attempt to cover our moral nakedness. The gospel comes at us like a 10.0 earthquake—it sends seismic waves throughout our natural intuitions about religion. It trashes our religious instincts. It comes claiming that God has taken our salvation out of our hands and placed it into His own hands. It humbles us, devastates us; then it thrills us with the prospect that God wishes to love us, cleanse us, and pour out His kindness upon us for Christ’s sake.

The gospel is God making Himself knowable and accessible by way of the promises of blood bought grace. The gospel is the great revealer of God. Through the Spirit of God the gospel floods our heart with light (2 Cor 4:6). By faith in the gospel we come to know God for the very first time—for the gospel reveals three invaluable truths at once that are a requisite to knowing God: 1.) The gospel reveals God’s attributes; His unbending holiness, and just character. 2.) The gospel reveals the heart of God to be that of love, compassion, and mercy in His plan to send Christ to be Savior. 3.) The gospel reveals man’s darkened, lost, guilty, condemned, helpless condition.

All three of these elements are indispensable to the biblical gospel. If any one of the three are removed—the biblical gospel is compromised and is made void. Central to the gospel is God’s plan to bring sinners to Himself through Christ. But what must be ‘displayed’ to the sinner is the fact that God’s plan of redemption is based upon substitution. The gospel is about exchange—Christ’s life for the life of His people— Christ’s righteousness for the sins of His people. Christ’s blood for the guilt of His people. All fellowship and communion with God, from the moment of salvation to timeless eternity is based upon this glorious exchange of Christ in our nature and stead assuming our liabilities (Eph 2:16-18; 2 Cor 5:21).

This is absolutely foreign to natural reason that God should satisfy His own offended justice by inflicting agony of the soul and body upon His only begotten Son. It is the gospel of penal substitution alone that reconciles sinners and preserves the Name of God in so doing. Whoever truly has faith in Jesus—has faith in Jesus as suffering Substitute (1 Pet 2:24; 3:18). No one can come to God BUT by the provision of forgiveness in Christ as Substitute—thus to bow before God is to bow before Him as He is revealed in the gospel—as the One who has not withheld His only Son (Rom 8:32). As the One who can only be known through His provision of the slain Lamb (Jn 1:29). The stumbling sinner’s failed quest to be accepted by his Creator through works ends at Christ crucified for sinners—for “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom 10:4).

V. To know God, recognize that the exchange of Christ’s life for the life of His people is not only our entrance into the Christian life; it is the definer and the direction of our Christian life.

A. The gospel promises ‘map out’ our Christianity, we ‘navigate’ by these promises— gospel promises constitute a mould which is designed to ‘shape’ our Christian life. These promises are joined to our new identity and purpose, for they reveal: the source of divine enablement for obedience; the Father’s will for us; who we were before Christ; who we are in Christ; who we are to others; and who we will be in glory.

The gospel promises in Christ are efficacious; they give us access to God—they bring us ‘near’ to God (Eph 2:13-18). In our walk with the Lord, we are to grow in our knowledge of Him by testifying (or ‘preaching’) to our own hearts the truth, content, and preciousness of the gospel promises. As we ‘feed’ upon the gospel promises, the net effect is that Christ is displayed to our understanding and affections. We begin to see Him as ‘Source Person’—in other words, we begin to really understand that everything we need for life and godliness is found in Him (2 Peter 1:2-4).

To recline upon Christ as source Person, so as to live upon Him is the exchanged life in action. This is what Paul meant in Galatians 2:20 when he said, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me [through me].” This concept of the exchanged life is not merely the ‘secret’ to effective Christian living—it is the very means of growing in our knowledge of the Lord—for we are commanded in Scripture to reckon; consider; count; calculate who we are in Christ (Rom 6:11; Col 3:3-5; Gal 2:20).

B. We are to reflect upon our Savior from the perspective of our radical identification with Him. In His condescension; His incarnation; His humiliation; and His passion—He became radically identified with us (in our helplessness; hopelessness; guilt; shame; separation; condemnation; pain and dereliction). How we need to understand that He became radically identified with us and our dilemma that we might become radically identified with Him as our life (Rom 6:3-9). How vital it is to understand that this brings the value of Christ’s cross into the believer’s present experience.

God requires that we believe something outside of anything in our earthly experience—namely that the sin natures of believers were legally judged in the body and soul of our Lord Jesus Christ in His death—all that we might be legally set free from the dominion of sin (Rom 6:5-11). Thus to live by faith in Christ is to live out the ramifications of radical identification with Him every day. Ongoing communion with the Lord is fueled by ongoing reckoning of the great exchange Christ accomplished (2 Cor 5:21). As Puritan John Owen exhorts, we are communing with God when we keep taking Christ for all the reasons God gave Him to us.

What a glorious thought. The gospel is not designed to ‘jump-start’ and then abandon us to the impotence of flesh power. No, the promises in the gospel are designed to equip us to ‘live upon Christ’ as He is offered in the gospel. Oh how perfectly this answers the quiet desperation of the average Christian who is often mired in self-recrimination— bemoaning his lukewarm-ness, carnality, and unfruitfulness.

C. Christ is waiting for our acts of faith to ‘seek Him out’ in His sufficiency. He is a merciful High Priest who waits to hear our cry that He might bestow fresh provisions of grace and mercy (Heb 2:18; 4:15-16). Christ is a divine Person—He is sensitive and responsive to our faith. He waits for us to reach out to Him in our faith. Our faith toward Him is a measure of our longing to know Him better.

And since our hearts as believers are already His home, our faith toward Him is a measure of our hospitality towards Him. Our heart hunger for His love and presence will be manifested by our faith. In other words, our faith will seek Him out through the gospel promises in His Word. We will want to ‘meet’ Him at the gospel promises to learn more of His heart toward us. This is the believer feeding upon Christ—for Christ is the bread of heaven, the food of the regenerated soul.

Christ’s responsiveness to our faith means that He waits for us to answer His gospel love out of a desire to ‘sup’ with Him in fellowship (Rev 3:19-21). Our faith demonstrates the level of our heart’s hospitality. Have we been aloof from Him—too busy to seek Him out? Have we given up panting after Him because the disclosures of His love have been few and far between? Christ is there none the less—waiting for our faith to reach out to Him; to desire Him; to adore Him and take delight in Him.

How passive we often are in this area—we easily forget that His Spirit is there ready to assist us to ‘press on to know the Lord’ (Hosea 6:1-3). This vital topic of Christ responding to the believer’s faith is highlighted in the following expanded translations which seek to capture the emphasis in the Greek, “And that Christ in His love, through your faith, may make His permanent home in your hearts” (Eph 3:17) (Williams Translation). “That the Christ might finally settle down and feel completely at home in your hearts through your faith” (Kenneth Wuest Expanded Translation).

Do you see the impact of this verse? Our trust and dependency and longing to live upon Christ as our ‘Source Person’ is our message of hospitality to the Christ, “I desire that my heart be your hospitable home.”

Our growing knowledge of the Lord is not merely an academic exercise, nor can it be reduced to an experience. It is actually intensely practical. To grow in the knowledge of the Lord is a rectifying, sanctifying process. It weans us from the world. It gives us a growing desire to mortify indwelling sin and smash all of our heart idols. It shakes us out of our stagnancy and spiritual apathy. It perfects our ability to live as true reflexive, spontaneous worshippers. It convinces us that we are carried by Christ—thus freeing us up to be burdened on behalf of others.

Therefore, in light of the fact that the Christian life is ‘mapped out’ by the gospel promises, how can we content ourselves with a bare ‘God concept’? Obviously we cannot. We must break out of our lethargy which has been too willing to live with a passionless, vague concept of God. We must rouse ourselves to meet the Lord in the gospel promises—to meet Him who first met us by His sovereign grace. We must humble ourselves, learning to meditate in such a way that we are always ‘matching’ our spiritual weakness and poverty with His infinite sufficiency and grace. We must keep presenting ourselves to Him as our Master who employs us in service as stewards of divine grace (1 Pet 4:10). Then we will be growing in the knowledge of the Lord and taking delight in Him.

TRANSFORMING GRACE

D A Y 11

DELIGHTING IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD (PART

TWO)

‘Access Points’ to delighting in the Knowledge of God (Eph 1:15-23)

INTRODUCTION: It has been said that a swine has never seen a star. That is no doubt true, but it is not because their vision is vastly inferior to ours. In fact their vision is roughly equivalent to ours. The reason they don’t see stars is because they have no interest in stars. They simply were not created to seek out the majesty of the night heavens because they were not created to be worshippers. Mankind is created to worship. Therefore man is endlessly curious— he maps, explores, adores, investigates, composes, sings, lauds, wonders, and interprets. Humans were created to be enthusiastic spectators of God’s excellence. You might say that inside of us is a little ‘radar’ turning—always looking for beauty, excellence, virtue, pleasure, and nobility—something outside of us greater than us which deserves our admiration, adoration, and reverence.

God has created us to find happiness in Himself—by pursuing God as our object of desire. But that God-given yearning was perverted by mankind’s fall into sin. Romans chapter one tells us that since the entrance of sin we continue to worship, but that the object of our worship has changed from God to the creature and the creation. Every unregenerate person is subservient to created things because of the inescapable fact that we serve what we worship (Rom 1:25). Only by the gracious miracle of regeneration is a person delivered and restored to become a true worshipper of God.

Our text (Eph 1:15-23) is about finding our source of excellence in God. When Paul wrote Ephesians one, he was opening up the topic of ‘transformed seeing’. Paul was not a pragmatic moralist; he didn’t commend morality solely for its practical advantages. No, he always anchored Christian duty and ethics in heavenly realities. In his epistle to the Ephesians he sends us to the heavenlies—which is where we find our matchless position in Christ—Paul does so in order to instill in us transformed seeing. Paul knows that transformed seeing produces transformed living.

In both of Paul’s prayers in the book of Ephesians (1:15-23; 3:13-21) he is praying for supernatural sight and comprehension on behalf of believers. Transformed living (born of transformed seeing) includes a lifestyle of worship in which we function increasingly as a living sacrifice. That means that our faculties of thought, speech, and affection are devoted to Christ and focused on things above as our highest source of satisfaction (Col 3:1-3).

Now as to this topic of delight in God, it ought to be self-evident that we cannot have love and fond affection for what we do not know personally. And we cannot know personally what we have not beheld or perceived. Therefore our exhortation throughout this lesson will be “stir yourselves to improve your spiritual sight. You were created to be a worshipper—therefore you cannot, NOT worship. Your heart refuses to live as a dry desert with no object of desire. This helps us understand why idolatry is a perversion of true worship. You are always on the lookout

Transforming Grace Thirty days of

for excellence. You are always pursuing your object of desire because happiness is the byproduct of that pursuit.”

Our hearts know well our object of desire. Christ refers to one’s object of desire as a man’s ‘treasure’. Every man is always reviewing his treasure, adding to his treasure, speaking of his treasure, guarding his treasure, and is ultimately ruled by his treasure. No wonder Puritan John Howe referred to delight in God as “the top, middle, and foundation of true religion.” Jonathan Edwards offers a similar observation—namely that true religion consists primarily in the affections. And John Piper makes his entry on the topic, “Delight in God will take you from duty to desire – it will make you holy and it will enable you to love others supernaturally.”

I recall a story about the Scottish divine, Thomas Chalmers. He was a faithful expositor of the Word of God, but after five years of ministry he was distraught that his congregation was so cold and passion-less for spiritual things. Chalmers took a summer sabbatical. During times of extended prayer he asked the Lord to give the answer as to why the church members were stagnant.

The Scottish pastor was hit with a life-changing impression: “Thomas, you are preaching to the mind, the will, and the conscience, but not to the affections!” Well he returned to his parish and penned his most famous sermon, “The Expulsive Power of a new Affection.” In that sermon Chalmers unfolded the biblical truth that idols of lust won’t budge unless they are displaced by a higher affection. His message was not lost on his hearers or upon his fellow pastors. His emphasis on the role of the affections in true religion began a new chapter of lasting fruitful ministry.

What Chalmers and other divines have discovered was that the clearer your view of God (specifically who God is toward you in Christ), the more strength you will have against sin and the greater motive to release and smash your idols. Nothing is a more powerful influence in your life than to know you are beloved of God and to feel that in your whole soul.

Chalmers explains that the practical moralist attempts to displace the love of the world from the heart by showing its unworthiness. But because of the constitution of our nature, the moralist way is altogether incompetent and ineffectual. Only setting forth a more worthy object will avail to expel an inferior one. Chalmers observes that when affection or love sees its object at a distance, it is desire. While under the control of desire, the soul pursues a path of activity toward gratification. If the object is not gained, it results in pain, abandonment, and fatigue for the ineffectual efforts.

The ascendant power of a second affection will do what no forcible exposition (or display of unworthiness) of the first object can do. A naked demonstration of folly won’t kill the charm of the first object. One must address to the eye of the mind another object with an attraction powerful enough to dispossess the influence of the first object. Only this will engage him in the prosecution in interest and hope, as exhibited toward the former object (The Protestant Pulpit, Andrew Blackwood, compiler, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” by Thomas Chalmers, Baker Books, pp. 50-62).

This stamps the word, “impotence” upon all moral and pathetic declamation about the insignificance of the world. Railing against the dissipation associated with the world does not change the heart. A man will not consent to the misery of being without an object of affection merely because it has been displayed as frivolous and fugitive. He would rather voluntarily submit himself to torture. To be without desire and exertion toward an object of affection is to be in a state of discomfort and violence to our nature. We were designed to worship; therefore we cannot live with the heart as a dry salt waste with no object of affinity (Ibid.).

Only a superior object can displace the power of a previous reigning affection. You cannot rid a man of desire for an inferior object by destruction; it must be by SUBSTITUTING another superior object of desire. None of our tastes disappear by the process of natural extinction. What is to be destroyed must be dispossessed—one taste gives way to another (a superior taste) in order to lose power as a reigning affection.

By example, boys’ appetites are replaced by manlier tastes. I think of the five year old boy who pleaded with his parents that no girls should be allowed to attend his birthday party because “they are so boring.” At five girls were a bore; at sixteen the young man cannot stop thinking about girls. Youthful pleasures are supplanted by the idol of wealth. Love of wealth can be supplanted by the love of influence, recognition and political power.

Desire for an object which exerts a more powerful preference must be there in order to tear the soul away from its first adhesion. Grasping and desire is the tendency of the human heart; the heart must hold an object. Heart and soul without any object of affinity is desolate, void, and vacant; it is an intolerable misery if left just with the burden of its own consciousness (this will be part of hell’s desolation to be totally without diversions and objects of desire that may be pursued).

Because we are made for God, Chalmers cautions that over indulged fleshly hedonism leaves the heart an arid desert. The heart revolts against its own emptiness, usually pursuing its idols with even more slavish resolve. The soul refuses to live with an inner wasteland—it refuses to live empty, having no object of desire (Ibid.).

I am reminded of Jesus’ kingdom parables in Matthew chapter thirteen. Spiritual sight allows those who believe the gospel to ‘see’ the incomparable wealth of the kingdom which Jesus describes as ‘treasure hidden in a field,’ and as ‘the pearl of great price’.

Moralistic preaching is powerless to evict the idols of the heart. The moralist seems to be oblivious to man’s created nature. He tries to dispossess without cooperating with the heart’s created mechanism; for the heart is created to love and hold with affinity that which it regards to be excellent. Nature abhors a vacuum in the affections. The natural man loves nothing above the horizon of this world. Therefore it is absurd for the moralist to pass sentence on every ‘inmate’ of the natural man’s bosom without substituting another love in its place.

It is totally unnatural to leave nothing in the room of the heart. Moralistic preaching is not strong enough to pull down strongholds. “BE GOOD!” “TRY HARDER!” “MAKE MORE SACRIFICES FOR THE KINGDOM!” “HAVE PASSION FOR SPIRITUAL THINGS!”—to utter these exhortations for their own sake cannot do it. To think that moral admonishments can dislodge heart idols is to imagine that moral absolutes contain their own incentives for obedience—this kind of preaching shows a great naiveté about man’s nature.

What can subdue the moral nature of man? We must address to the mental eye (the ‘eyes of the heart’) the worth and excellence of the latter so that the old is done away with (all things new). This is the Apostle Paul’s great purpose in Ephesians—it is transformed seeing; for Paul not only prays for increased spiritual sight in his readers, but also presents to their eyes of faith the desirability of heavenly things (Ibid.). Lewis Sperry Chafer (founder of Dallas Theological Seminary) was wont to say, “If men preach less against the world and more about who believers are in Christ and they will voluntarily release their compromises with the world.”

Only the love of Christ in the gospel makes a man “revolt” against his former love of the world. How does one obliterate present affections? A moral revolt must take place in the affections that causes a man to rebel against his love of the world. There is charm in effectually preaching the gospel. The love of God and the love of the world are rival affections. They are irreconcilable; they cannot dwell in the same bosom.

The heart with only the world yet in front of it cannot reduce itself to an empty wilderness. Transformed seeing is required in order to release old affections. The heart is constituted so that an old affection is only expelled by a new one. A radical change must take place in man’s character for him to love God more than the world (1 Jn 2:15-17).

The “crucifixion” of the old man is a most fitting description of this radical change. Only the cross can produce a change this deep. Paul attributes to the power of the cross the fact that the world is crucified to him and he to the world (Gal 6:14). In the gospel God is displayed so that we may love God, have confidence in Him, and approach Him through our Mediator. He shines His glory on us in the face of Christ and freely grants full pardon and gracious acceptance. The Spirit of adoption is poured in; we are delivered from the tyranny of our former desires. As sons of God we reciprocate God’s love to us (1 Jn 4:19).

Justification by faith produces the sinner’s change—and the greatest moral and spiritual achievement conceivable. It is simply not enough to display the destructive consequences of sin and the folly of temporal and illicit pleasures—displaying the deceitfulness of the heart, the follies of society, and the stench of corruption will not eradicate these inmates from the heart.

Only a faithful expounding of the gospel testimony can avail. The good news of the gospel is the only instrument that can cast out the love of the world. The recesses of our nature can only be conquered by being made new creatures in Jesus Christ. The display of God’s wondrous economy is the only way to reclaim a sinful world to Himself. By feeding their affection for God believers keep their hearts in love with God, they shut out the love of the world, they place no confidence in the flesh, and they renounce earthly things (Jude 21). Only a new affection can expel the impulsive power of the old affection (that old affection being the love of the world—1 John 2:15-17).

Why do people keep old affections? The answer is as follows: because new ones are out of view and beyond sight because of unbelief. God’s truth in the gospel raises new affections though Spirit-enable spiritual seeing. Transformed seeing raises our spiritual eyes above the horizon of this world to behold eternal things (2 Cor 4:17-18).

In Psalm 49, the spiritual dullness and blindness of unregenerate men is compared to ‘the beasts that perish’. Unsaved individuals are caught up in temporal things—that is where their hope is invested (Phil 3:18-19). By contrast, God’s sovereign mercy in regeneration opens up loveliness, glory, delight, and joy in the things of eternity. Unbelief cannot see (so as to feel) the love of God in sending His Son into the world. But one Spirit-enabled, amazing look at God’s love in sparing not, His tenderness, and the sufficiency of the atonement causes the sinner to pass from a state of nature to godliness. This Spirit-enabled transformed seeing makes us rock builders and no longer sand builders (Matt 7:24-29).

True discipleship is driven by delight in the Lord. Doctrine and demand (the demand of true discipleship) are brought together by desire and delight; that is how a true disciple is made! Without desire and delight, the religious professor will never rise to devotion to Christ; he will remain in a state of legal working, legalism, antinomianism, or dead orthodoxy.

The Christian’s battle to live as an overcomer is the successful effect produced by the greatness of the cause—the cause of our success is a moral resurrection (by means of the new birth) to the truths and precepts of Christianity. The glorious and wonderful object displayed in the gospel pacifies the sinner’s conscience and purifies his heart. It is the love of the world that continues to mar the heart and the conscience of the unregenerate. The reason why is due to the fact that every lust of the flesh is filled with enmity toward God’s moral majesty (Rom 8:5-8). Only a pure affection can cast out the impure affection. The love of evil is expelled by the love of God.

The matchless grace of God in the gospel makes us new creatures with new desires; thus we must preserve the freeness of the gospel offer. The freer the gospel, the more satisfying the gospel is. Grace is according to godliness. By contrast, if you hold God to be a pensioner to be paid back, “do this and live,” (as under law); it will issue forth in fearfulness.

The “debtor’s ethic” (a term coined by John Piper to describe the pensioner view) says in effect, “God has done this much for you, you ought to do your all for Him.” The “debtor’s ethic” is inadequate to elicit a selfless motive of overflowing gratitude. The redeemed sinner is already battling a flesh which is attracted to legal working (evidenced by the Galatian heresy of perfection of the flesh through law-keeping). The Christian life must never be presented as a legal bargain in which the believer is seeking to square things with his Maker.

Repentance is sometimes falsely described in this way as a legal bargain, as if when the sinner’s level of willingness to release his idols reaches ‘critical mass’ then the Lord is willing to save him. Piper notes that the “debtor’s ethic” mentality is actually driven by self-centeredness, not the desire for God’s glory.

The “command to eternal life” is to come and buy without money and without cost (Is 55:1ff.). Pure divine grace delivers the afflicted conscience from the hand of justice, and delivers the heart from its ungodly tenants. Once awakened by grace, the heart sees its new moral existence and it overflows with gratitude as a result.

Don’t add conditions to the gospel; don’t raise a shred of legality in presenting the gospel or you will raise distrust between God and man. When you place legal conditions upon the gospel, you take away its power to melt and conciliate. The redeemed sinner is under a mighty moral transformation when he is under the belief that he is saved solely by sovereign grace; he is thereby constrained to offer his heart a devoted thing and to deny ungodliness.

Man either operates by the channel of the senses or the channel of faith; only the latter leads to delight in God. We keep the love of the world out of the heart by the love of God. We keep our hearts in the love of God by building ourselves up in our most holy faith (Jude 20). Faith works love, and faith works by love (Gal 5:6; 1 Tim 1:5). It is by gospel faith that love, love which fulfills the law, is admitted to the heart (Rom 13:8, 10). The ability to love supernaturally is the result of being born of God—a work of regeneration which causes us to apprehend God’s love for us (1Jn 4:7-8, 19).

The sinful creature operates either by the channel of senses, or the channel of faith. Only by the latter will he release temporal objects to behold superior objects. This the spiritual seeing Paul sets forth in Ephesians. By the love of God in the gospel, we die to the present world and live to a lovelier world (although at a distance for the present). Says Chalmers, by the love of God in the gospel, a new affection expels the old; all without doing violence to the constitution of man’s moral nature (Ibid.).

Our theme from Ephesians centers upon the truth that God is known by means of the way in which He saves us—by His sovereign grace and mercy. The chief object of our meditation is our relationship with God as it is settled in Christ. “Our theology is that of a crucified God who is “Lamb” and “Husband” to us forever—who in His infinite purity said to us in our filthiness, “Live! Live!” He saw the mystery of iniquity in my heart and still betrothed me and adopted me” (Edward Morgan, The Life and Times of Howell Harris, p. 194).

Salvation imparts a relationship which is to control our lives—our purpose is to press on to know the Lord in worship and devotion by means of considering His saving work towards us. In these next two lessons we are going to gaze upon the Lord through three “portholes,” or access points found in Paul’s first prayer in Ephesians. The three access points are: the hope of His calling, His inheritance in the saints, and His power toward us who believe.

Ephesians 1:15, 16 -- Paul is thanking God for His intervening grace in the life of the Ephesians. The content of Paul’s prayer is an extension of the praise he has offered for God’s sovereign grace in vv. 3-14.

Paul is expressing his gratitude to God for divine intervening grace in the life of his readers, the Ephesians. The Apostle’s prayer of thanksgiving is the recognition that God’s sovereign grace is exemplified in their faith, love and spiritual progress.

Key to our message is WHAT Paul is going to ask for; AND, that he is asking on behalf of folks who are already believers. He wants them to go on in their knowledge of the Lord. The knowledge of God transforms us by degrees—thus growing in your knowledge of Christ is indispensable to your progress toward maturity.

Vs. 17 – Paul’s prayer of intercession concerns the accomplishment of God’s purpose in the lives of these believers; namely that they would grow in the knowledge of the Lord (2 Pet 3:18).That is God’s will for us as well.

What can we learn from this prayer regarding how we can grow in our knowledge of the Lord?

Paul’s prayer is a model for us in our apprehension of the knowledge of God. Begin by approaching God in prayer and asking Him to give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in order to know Him better. This is a prayer request to have our capacity for spiritual seeing heightened. Our posture in this prayer is one of worship characterized by overflowing thanksgiving for God’s gracious self-disclosure; He sovereignly initiated the relationship with us. We remember His grace as we pray, that God grants your request solely on the basis of the merits of Christ.

What is the means necessary to achieve the end of knowing God better? Answer: The granting of a spirit of wisdom and revelation (1:17). When Paul refers to the knowledge of the Lord; he uses the strengthened form of the Greek word for know, epiginosko. This intensified word for know means to be personally familiar with and conversant with the object of knowledge.

The Christian is dependent upon the Spirit of God to reveal more of the Lord and His ways to us. The Holy Spirit searches the deep things of God. It is His blessed task, His ministry to unfold them through the Word to us (see 1 Cor 2:9-16). He continually gives light—His ministry is to illuminate spiritual truth, giving us understanding and captivating our affections. It is only by His work that we can we know God better.

A spirit of wisdom and revelation is vital because there is nothing more important than knowing God. Your experimental knowledge of God is the one thing you will bring to glory. Your delight in the knowledge of God is your strength (Neh 8:10). Growing in the knowledge of the Lord is to be our consuming passion: “Let us press on to know the Lord” (Hos 6:3).

V. 18 – “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened.” The prayer is for the insight needed to grasp certain truths that are revealed by the Spirit. The “EYES OF THE HEART” is a fitting metaphor. The Spirit reveals, but we must have certain faculties enlightened in order to receive and grasp what He reveals. The heart of the saved man ‘sees’ what the five senses cannot see. Our physical eyes need light in order to work and the eyes of our heart need spiritual light in order to function.

The Apostle uses a perfect participle to describe the Spirit’s work of enlightening the eyes of the heart. The use of the perfect tense suggests that the enlightenment of our heart’s ‘eyes’ continues to produce a life-transforming result.

Paul frames the object of their knowledge (which the Spirit will enable them to recognize) as three questions. The FIRST truth to be revealed in order to know God better comes from the question, “what is the hope of His calling?”(v. 18).

‘Calling’ is a salvation term describing God’s sovereign power in bringing us to Himself—to be called is to be saved (1 Cor 1:26). The HOPE of one’s calling is that aspect of salvation for which we are waiting—what we are looking forward to in the future. That hope refers to life in the new heavens and the new earth in the presence of God (Rom 5:2; Eph 5:27; Col 3:4).

PROBLEM: In our generation we reflect too little on the future and almost never upon eternity. This is why you need urgent help from God in order to be able to know the hope to which you have been called. Only then will you be able to navigate with eternity’s values before your spiritual eyes. It is very common today for professing believers to have vague and general thoughts of God, of grace, and of Christ. In our pursuit of the knowledge of God through spiritual seeing we move from vague thoughts to specifics.

When God answers our prayer for a spirit of wisdom and revelation and enlightened ‘eyes of the heart’—He is providing specific heart-thrilling content to our hope. But again, we are not passive in receiving this answer to prayer. The Spirit reveals by means of diligent study and meditation upon the Word of God (Ps 145:5).

Regarding the specific content of our hope—redemption has a result; a consummation. Your right-relatedness to the Trinity through Christ has a very clearly defined goal; it is ultimate conformity to Christ at the moment of glorification. Our election before the foundation of the world is aimed at this goal—“chosen that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love” (1:4).

You’ve been called out of darkness into His marvelous light for this very purpose—that you may gain the glory of Christ (2 Thess 2:14). The more fixed your hope is on the final goal and outcome of redemption, the more straight and resolute will be your walk towards that goal. Perfect conformity to Christ in glory is our necessary ‘fitness’ to please, worship, and enjoy God perfectly.

All history is moving towards this event in which the sons of God are presented publicly to the rational universe (that is before the holy angels). The entire creation is poised for this event (Rom 8:18-25). It is a soul-ravishing thought that God has synchronized our public presentation as the sons of God with the remaking of the universe (into the new heavens and the new earth—see Romans 8:18-25).

The goal of redemption is not adequately described as simply the absence of sin, death, and sorrow and a new immortal body. The consummation of redemption will be the enjoyment of God in Christ communicating Himself to us forever. Regarding the bliss of the eternal state, Howell Harris notes, “It is eternal love attending you: it is Christ given to be your life, light, and blessedness without cessation. And it is the redeemed enjoying God and pleasing God perfectly.”

In glory the Church will be a spotless reflection of the character of the Godhead—God’s communicable attributes will have reached maturity in her—she will be as much like God as creatures can possibly be. Through Christ the new humanity will perfectly reflect the moral majesty of God. Relations within the society of the redeemed will reflect the excellence of relations within the Trinity (perfect love, honor, deference, goodness, humility, wisdom, and truthfulness).

Now all of this is to fulfill God’s vision (dream if you will)—for He has never desisted from the goal He announced originally in Genesis to make man in His image and likeness. What is His dream? It is to have an eternal temple to dwell in. Not a temple made of inanimate things, but a temple of living stones. That is how God describes in Christ, the redeemed, the saints—as living stones that are growing together, being fitted together, being built up into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit; a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ (Eph 2:21-22; 1 Pet 2:5).

Heaven is not an eternal vacation—it is an eternal vocation for beholding God’s glory will be the source of our bliss. Randy Alcorn observes in his book, The Treasure Principle, “Heaven will be a place of rest and relief from the burdens of sin and suffering; but it will also be a place of great learning, activity, artistic expression, exploration, discovery, camaraderie, and service,” (Randy Alcorn, The Treasure Principle, p. 36.)

At the consummation the ages, the aim of redemptive history shall be realized (as announced by an angel who is filled with wonder and joy)—“Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He shall dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be among them” (Rev 21:3).

There’s an old Chinese proverb, “fish and guests smell after three days.” If we are careful about who stays in our home for an extended period of time, how much more do you think God cares about who His eternal human companions will be? This should give us some insight into our tests and trials, for they keep surfacing where our affections lie. God is wise to test us. Testing exposes our loyalties. Affliction shows us what we really love—it makes us choose, declaring our loyalties—it detaches us from the love of the world and anchors our hope more securely to God as our true ‘home.’

When Puritan pastor Richard Baxter went house to house visiting church members, he always asked his parishioners this question, “Do you see all of life as preparation for the next life?” Only if one can say ‘yes’ is that person truly in touch with the hope of his calling. Thought of heaven is a ‘litmus test.’ It has been said of the Apostle Paul, ‘His religion was supremely the religion of heaven.’

CONCLUSION: To respond to Paul’s prayer in Ephesians chapter one means that we will take action. We will not content ourselves to walk spiritually with eyes half closed. We will stir ourselves to focus on things above. We will meditate upon the Word of God in order to think on another level. We will confess that we have allowed the cares of life to obscure our view of heavenly things. And we will repent of walking by sight and not by faith.

Spiritual seeing produces true knowledge—a growing knowledge of the Lord. We believe in order to better understand. We focus the eyes of our heart so as to take increasing delight in the Lord. As Chalmers has stated so well—only when we are resolved to dwell upon our spiritual blessings in Christ will we cease to be mesmerized by old affections.

TRANSFORMING GRACE

D A Y 12

DELIGHTING IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD (PART

THREE)

‘Access Points’ to delighting in the Knowledge of God (Eph 1:15-23)

Desire for God is founded upon assurance that we are His children—that we are securely held in His heart of love. Knowing and delighting in God requires that we stir ourselves to seek Him (Deut 4:29). It is our privilege and responsibility to cultivate that desire. God promises that in our search for Him through the scriptural means; He will let us find Him. But our seeking after God must be characterized by a passion which will not give up or settle for distance and remoteness (Jim Berg, Changed into His Likeness, pp. 119-124).

Our panting after God will incorporate the scriptural path of meditation on the Word of God. When we feed on Scripture, we are thinking upon and applying to ourselves what we know of His works, ways, and wonders (J. I. Packer). This involves displaying to the eye of faith the beauty and desirability of God. Without this step we cannot expect to find our ultimate satisfaction in unseen things (2 Cor 4:16-18).

Lest we forget, delighting in God is commanded in Scripture (Ps 37:4). I don’t believe I’m going out on a limb to say that delighting in God is a felt experience. For the Scriptures utilize such terms as taste, pant after, thirst, pleasure and enjoyment. Romans chapter five describes the love of God being shed abroad, or poured out, in the heart of the believer (v. 5).

But this experience of delight in God is not the result of passivity on our part. Maurice Roberts says that if we do not stir ourselves to have fresh encounters with God, a chill will come over the soul and our hearts will go in search of other lovers (The Thought of God, by Maurice Roberts, “Christ Lover of our Souls,” Banner of Truth, 57-66).

Your Christianity is not safe in a compartment partitioned off from the rest of your life. The saving faith granted to every true believer produces a ‘whole-souled’ response to God. In other words, every part of our soul, every faculty of our being is engaged in trusting, enjoying, obeying, and worshipping God. Our affections play a central role in our devotion to the Lord. Delight in God is therefore not an option—we were created for it; it unites the heart and keeps us from dead formalism (protecting us from a divided heart characterized by outward religion only). Our active response to gospel love drives every proper motive in our Christian life. This is the Pauline model of sanctification.

Ecstasy and delight in God are essential to the believer’s soul—they promote sanctification. We are not meant to live without spiritual exhilaration. When the heart goes for long periods of time without warmth from God’s presence, there will be the temptation to find the emotions satisfied from earthly things, not the Spirit of God (Ibid.).

The soul of man was made to worship, to adore, and to pursue happiness. Our daily duty and privilege is to seek this experience from Him until we are joyful partakers of it. To taste this once is to not be satisfied nor rest content, but to seek to have it again and again.

Consider the example of George Muller who ran a large Christian orphanage in early 19ᵗʰ Century England. Busy as he was with the needs of the orphans, George Muller believed that his number one responsibility each day was to begin by finding his highest happiness in the Lord. Muller tended to remain in his quiet time until the joy of God had swept over his soul.

The experience of biblical enjoyment of God is not abnormal or extraordinary, but part of our inheritance—“the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge our inheritance” (Eph 1:14). “Pledge,” “earnest” or initial payment is not confined to the doctrinal, or theoretical, the “down payment” of our inheritance strongly implies that the enjoyment of God is to be expected, looked for (Ibid.).

When we delight ourselves in the Lord, He makes His wonderful love real to us. This gracious communication to us in this life by the Spirit generates felt joy and exhilaration in connection with the consciousness that one is a child of God. This experience is not confined to the N.T. God is my exceeding joy (Ps 43:4). Taste the goodness of the Lord (Ps 43:4). “Tasting” is experiential; it is the ecstasy of the Spirit poured out in the heart—that we might pant after Him, thirst for Him, desire to appear before Him, and long to enjoy His loving-kindness forever.

The godly expect this ongoing “tasting;” it is not just mental understanding, but heart-warming experiences. It is felt enjoyment of the love of God (Ps 63:2-7). How different is the heartless formalized religion that so often passes for genuine holiness. Without heart affection, our religious knowledge is offensive to God. True worship is not a function of rote learning. It is through true worship that believers find this felt blessing.

Delighting in God, as any other aspect of faith, is a spiritual art learned from the Word of God. But how do we go to God for the sense of His love? It begins with an act of faith. We must believe that such a thing as a sense of His love is to be had in this life. We must expect such an experience.

Stoic professors of Christianity may scoff in their imagined wisdom at such a religious experience (and condescendingly smile at our reports). But the scriptural enjoyment of Christ is not fanaticism; it is the subjective fruit of the gospel in the heart-experience of the believer (Ibid.).

Are you convinced that the experience of Christ’s love can be felt? Then go to God in prayer for it. Go to the throne of grace for the choice favor of tasting, so as to be made aware (subjectively conscious of) the love God has for you in Christ. We often stray at this point—our tendency may be to come to God in prayer to tell Him how much we love Him. But, to experience God’s love it is necessary to put one self as far down as possible. Start in prayer by admitting how piteously low our love to God is. Assume a lowly place in praying, “For thus says the high and exalted One who lives forever, whose name is Holy, I dwell on a high and holy place, and also with the contrite and lowly of spirit in order to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite” (Is 57:15) (See also Is 66:1-2).

Don’t make it a habit to pray without God’s power in your heart—it is folly, and it is harmful to treat prayer merely as an exercise of mind without expecting to emerge from the presence of God without a fresh token of His love. In true prayer there is a concurrence of man’s spirit WITH God’s Spirit. The Spirit assists with groaning too deep for words (Rom 8:26).

We are to treat God with the awe His majesty deserves—lowness, contrition, self-abasement; yet not with detached politeness. He expects us to wrestle with Him as Jacob did, casting ourselves at His feet and making mighty demands—deadly earnest to get His blessing, expiring at His feet if we do not succeed. Such concentration in prayer demands undistracted focus and an unhurried, settled mind before His felt presence. The believer rises from his knees at times with joy inexpressible at the prospect of having received the unforgettable impression of Christ’s love upon his spirit (Ibid.).

Spiritual decline sets in when we lack the commitment to take hold of God and when we fail to pursue delight in Him. Without a commitment to take hold of God in the above way, there is a danger of learning to tolerate living away from the experience of the love of Christ. Our corruptions work against daring to draw near. We tend to retreat into the shadows away from Christ for months on end until we become strangers to the inward enjoyment of the love of Christ in the heart.

A spiritual chill comes over the soul—callousness insulates the spirit from intimacy with God. Worldliness, like cracked layers of paint, coats the soul and makes the believer accustomed to feeling nothing. Busy-ness for God may continue. But it is dangerous to live without the heart-warmings that are all important to spiritual well-being.

The next step of spiritual declension involves slipping into dead formalism (outward religion void of spiritual passion). Prayer becomes mere duty and routine. Bible reading is kept up for appearance, or to salve the conscience. There is an accompanying loss of joy in things spiritual—without relish for the things of God. In this condition we tend to choose companions that are cool regarding devotion to Christ, who do not challenge us spiritually. It is surprising that this condition is not more readily diagnosed—but like the church of Ephesus of Revelation 2, works, labor, patience, zeal, and orthodoxy may conceal a heart that has left its first love of Christ.

A heart that is spiritually lukewarm is often concealed in Christian workers who may be actively fighting against ecumenism, liberalism, and secularism. Countless folks are convinced that they are serving God even though they are engaged in spiritual decline.

When we stir ourselves to experience the love of God, we will have strength against temptation and we will have effectiveness in service. Without fresh encounters with Christ, the soul becomes restless for pleasure. It is unfortified against an ambush by Satan. The love of God experienced puts iron into the backbone—the believer relishing God’s love can easily say no to the world’s solicitations. But without these heart warmings of God’s love in Christ, the soul is far too ready to compromise when temporal things compete for its affection.

The Lord requires we walk close to Him. Without conscientious fellowship we will lose the opportunity for genuine service. Spiritual effectiveness comes out of the secret place with God.

Guarding time with the Lord in which we seek Him passionately births new vision and new triumphs. To pray well is to have studied well (Martin Luther). Nothing must be permitted to weaken our cultivation of fellowship with Christ. All of our outward duties need to be remolded to be a means of fellowship with God. Fruit-bearing is a byproduct of abiding in Christ (Jn 15:4-5).

Abiding in Christ is our number one priority—we are to live unto God, upon God, and for God. For me to live is Christ and to die is gain (Phil 1:21). To be effective we must excel at fellowship with Christ. The power to influence others spiritually is a function of emerging from our prayer closets as those melted by gospel love (Maurice Roberts).

The SECOND truth on delighting in the knowledge of God to be revealed from our passage is, “what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints?” (v. 18b). This truth continues the “glory” theme. At the consummation of the age our sonship will become instantly visible to the watching universe (see 1:14; Rom 8:19, 23; 1 Jn 3:1). Now concerning God’s glory in the Church, the Bride of Christ, the Apostle John tells us in his gospel that the saints are a gift from the Father to the Son (see Jn 6 and 17). In essence the Father selected out a “Bride” for His Son—the redeemed make up this celestial Bride. God’s valuation of us His people is established by His valuation of the Son (Jn 17:22-23).

It is precisely at this point where we need the Spirit’s help. Our slumbering spiritual eyes must be opened to take in this glorious spiritual light. We need to know who we are and what our destiny is as God sees it. We must move from doubt to certainty in the matter of these spiritual realities if we are to grow to maturity. When we are preoccupied with basing our intrinsic worth on temporal things it inhibits our ability to reason spiritually—the issue is not net worth in the world, but our identity in Christ! Paul prays that his readers would grasp the riches of God’s inheritance in the saints.

God’s inheritance is not the holy angels, nor is it the nearly infinite rainbow of beautiful galaxies, it is a company of redeemed sinners who are conformed to their Savior and Head; the society of the redeemed that make up God’s eternal companions. This is precisely why Paul prays for a spirit of wisdom and revelation, and for enlightened eyes of the heart—this will not grip you so as to captivate and ravish your heart unless the Holy Spirit reveals it to you. When He does reveal it to you, it will prove to be an incentive to live in light of the glory of God and in view of heaven and the riches of glory to be lavished upon you (see Eph 1:8; 2:7). Is it any wonder Paul that wants us to grasp who we are in Christ, for God has made us to be His inheritance in Christ.

We who make up the company of the redeemed are Christ’s inheritance, His Bride— that the Lord Jesus Christ might be the First-born among many brethren (Rom 8:29). Wonder of wonders—He inherits us and we inherit Him!

Not only do we form Christ’s inheritance, the riches of God in Christ comprise our inheritance (including the physical creation)! Abraham, a type of every believer lived in tents his whole life even though he was heir of the world—Rom 4:13. Yes, the meek shall inherit the earth. Abraham is the prototypical heir of the world. He was willing to live in a tent, owning no land except for his wife’s grave plot. He could hold things loosely in his mortal life because he knew that in the age to come he would inherit it all as ‘God’s country, God’s city’ (Heb 11:14-16). It’s reminiscent of ‘Pilgrim’ leaving the city of destruction in order to enter the celestial city (in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress).

The subject of the saints as Christ’s inheritance opens up for us the mutual love typified in the marriage covenant. Heaven is about mutuality—I am my Beloved’s and He is mine (Song of Songs 6:3). In heaven mutual ownership will take our joy over the top. This is to be a source of delight to us—the marriage metaphor is a figure of speech filled with incredible promises of mutuality and intimate love. “And I have made Thy Name known to them and will make it known; that the love where with Thou didst love Me may be in them, and I in them” (Jn 17:26). Concerning this ‘other worldly love,’ C. S. Lewis offered the following contrast: compared to the Lord dwelling with the redeemed in glory, the most ideal romance among mortals is like a glass of milk mixed with water—it’s insipid by comparison.

Mutuality means that we give ourselves to God and He to us in a covenant of coownership. As Spurgeon said, “I’ll be able to say on that day, God on yonder throne is mine!” This is where God is taking us—glory is moving closer and closer to us. In glory our fellowship with the Lord will be one of perfect intimacy. “Our communion with God lies in his giving himself to us and our giving ourselves and all that he requires to him” (John Owen, Communion with God, abridged version, Banner of Truth, p. 3). Heaven will be the consummation of the great mystery, Christ in you and you in Christ (Col 1:27.)

To be in God’s presence is to behold God. The pure pleasure involved in beholding God has begun in the saints (2 Cor 3:18). But for the present in our beholding we see in a mirror dimly—then it will be face to face. “And it will be said on that day, ‘Behold, this is our God for whom we have waited that He might save us” (Is 25:9).

Mutuality is alluded to in a number of Scripture passages on heaven. “And there shall no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His bondservants shall serve Him; and they shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads” (Rev 22:3-4).

Regarding the bliss of seeing the glory of Christ, the Reformers referred to “The beatific vision.” To beatify is to bring a person to a state of exalted joy above anything possible on earth. It means the vision that makes us blessed, or happy. ‘Beatific’ is from two Latin words, “beatus”, blessed, and “facere,” to make. To look at God will change us and make us like Him, “We shall be with Him and see Him as He is (1 Jn 3:2).

The beatific vision which will bring us endless exalted joy will be our beholding of Christ in His glory (this is what our Lord prayed for in John 17:24—that the saints would behold His glory.) The sight of Christ glorified will ravish our souls (2 Thess 1:10). We will never cease to marvel at the sight of God looking out at us through eyes of flesh—our amazement will never cease as we behold our glorified Savior with the marks of our atonement on His glorified body. The slain Lamb is the center of heaven; the Light of heaven. The invalid Puritan Isaac Ambrose, who from his convalescent bed meditated on the glory of Christ for thirty years, said, God’s desire is to converse with us after our [human] form (Isaac Ambrose, Looking Unto Jesus, p. 210). In other words, our communion with the Godhead is through Christ—God in our human nature.

This vision of God in Christ will be the consummation of our knowing God and will give us full delight and joy for all eternity. “In your presence is fullness of joy, in your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps 16:11) (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, pp. 189-190).

Your present ability to behold the Lord, albeit in a mirror dimly, is what differentiates you from the unsaved around you. Scripture describes the redeemed in 2 Corinthians 3:14-18 as the unveiled ones. Beholding the glory of the Lord is a gift of sovereign grace that has begun for the redeemed (2 Cor 4:4-6). Our present beholding is preparing us for eternal beholding.

Though you behold in a mirror dimly now, you are being fitted to behold face to face. In order to behold face to face, you must be a partaker of God’s holiness so that you can look upon Him without fear, shame, and covering your face. This will happen the moment the true believer sees Christ—when we see Him we will be like Him for we shall see Him as He is (1 Jn 3:2; Phil 3:20-21).

Your eternal vocation will involve beholding—it will be your source of ravishment and bliss. We would ask by way of application: is beholding so as to delight in the Lord a part of your vocation now? If so, then you are experiencing the answer to the prayer in our text—the petition for a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of the Lord with the eyes of the heart being enlightened.

Our blessed privilege of beholding the glory of the Lord now by faith in His Word requires a brief clarification: this beholding does not mean attempting to picture Christ’s glorified appearance. What it does mean is thinking upon Christ’s humiliation; character; majesty; vastness; and sufficiency. Christ’s glory is revealed in His character and in His work of redemption. His redemptive work purchased the grace for us described in the gospel promises— dwelling upon Christ as He is offered in the gospel promises is inseparable from beholding.

I find myself agreeing with Maurice Roberts and other divines who caution us about studying God’s attributes in a cold, sterile, philosophic manner. Our study of God ought to be in a doxological mindset (or worshipful mindset) – that is for the purpose of delight and enjoyment and adoration and relational knowledge of Him. This exhortation is a logical bridge to our third access point in Paul’s prayer.

Vv. 19-20 – Now referring back to our passage in Paul’s prayer, the THIRD truth to be revealed in order to increase our knowledge of God is, “what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe?” (v. 19, 20 ff.) What comes to mind when you think of a demonstration of God’s power? Perhaps the parting of the Red Sea? Or the very act of creation when by the Word of the Lord trillions of plants and animals sprang to life from dust. Or maybe the explosion of a supernova creating a glowing cloud scores of light years in diameter.

Well, Paul’s choice for our knowledge of God’s power is in keeping with the acts of God that concern you directly—that is His sovereign grace revealed in the gospel. Paul highlights the power of God exerted when Christ was raised from the dead. The resurrection of Christ is the vindication of Christ. It is the destruction of sin; it is the conquest of death. It is the guarantee of our justification. It is the proof positive and pledge of your eternal glory. No wonder Paul regarded God’s power in the resurrection to be an avenue for a growing knowledge of the Lord. Paul wanted to know Christ and the power of His resurrection (Phil 3:10).

Beloved, the death and resurrection of Christ is the cause of your new birth. God can make a sinner a new creature by means of the new birth because Christ has dealt decisively with sin and spiritual deadness by means of the cross and the empty tomb. To be made alive spiritually at the moment of regeneration is described in Ephesians 2 and Colossians 2 as “being raised with Christ.”

But in these verses (19, 20 ff.) the Apostle tells us something amazing about our new birth. “The same superhuman power was needed to make us believe, as was needed and exerted to raise Christ from the dead (vs. 20)” (JFB Commentary, 1 vol. p. 1282). Paul is stating concerning the greatness of God’s power toward us who believe—that these acts of God are “in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places” (1:19-20).

Think of it, the magnitude of power necessary to raise Christ from the dead was also exerted by God when He reached down and saved you! This is tied to your knowledge of the Lord; it must sink in deeply; it must be perceived by the “eyes of your heart” that a miracle of Almighty God was necessary to produce spiritual life and saving faith in you (prior to your new birth, spiritually you were as dead as stinking Lazarus in his tomb).

Not only is the resurrection of Christ the cause for the new birth, resurrection is an analogy for the new birth (see Eph 2 and Col 2 a continuation of the same line or argument. Salvation analogies include: creation, resurrection, and birth). In each case there is not cooperation, but divine (unilateral) action upon dead matter, a dead creature, or an utterly dependent fetus.

The new birth is a spiritual resurrection which joins us to Christ and seats us in the heavenlies (Eph 2:6). That is our destination—because of union with Christ heaven is the proper place we belong. But our right to be there, our qualification to be there, our fitness to be there is all due to our union with a Perfect Savior who is able to save to the uttermost (Heb 7:25).

What a deep mystery, for our sakes, the only begotten Son of God lay in a dark stone tomb as a human corpse—the Creator of the universe a cadaver. Then He was raised with power (Rom 1:4) and seated above all authority. God, by means of the wounds of Christ, was conquering His enemies and ours. And our enemies were: sin, death, hell, the world, the flesh, the devil, and the condemnation of God’s law.

After His death on the cross, He went from a corpse to Ruler of the universe. He did all this to resurrect His eternal Bride, the Church. He had to span the chasm that lay between dust and glory by taking on a body of dust; He had to span the chasm that lay between death and the throne of heaven so that we could go from dying to glorified. He had to span the gap between depravity and burning holiness so that we could go from rebels to worshippers.

This is why it says He is the Alpha and Omega: because He has first place in everything— as He says of Himself in Revelation 1:18, “I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.” He has first place in everything; that is the Father’s purpose (Col 1:18). Christ completely spans the infinite gap between self-existent holy God and the defiled creature of dust. By the sacrifice of Himself, Christ has dealt decisively with everything that separates us from God, and He has dealt decisively with everything that disqualifies us from eternal life and blessedness. How we need to ‘feed’ upon Christ as our qualification for divine favor and acceptance.

God’s attributes were not put on display all at once until the work of Christ. Understanding this fact is an important access point to your growth in the knowledge of God. Here’s why, consider that God has literally harnessed His attributes and put them to work in your salvation.

Think of it—He is exercising His infinite love, wisdom, and power (which are all resident in Christ) in order to bring you to glory. God is exerting His attributes for His own glory; but also for your eternal welfare and glory. This is so important to our topic—God wants you to grow in the knowledge of Him by seeing His attributes at work, harnessed in order to save you.

God can only be known in covenant because He dwells in burning holiness—the cherubim cover their faces as they call out holy, holy, holy. God says who would dare to risk his life by approaching me—I dwell in unapproachable light (Jer 30:21; 1 Tim 6:16).

God cannot be known and enjoyed apart from a place of safety—creating a place of safety is what He has done in placing us in Christ, our ‘City of Refuge” (Heb 6:13-20). By His wisdom, power, and love, God has carved out a place of protection for us in the wounds, blood, and body of Christ. Christ is given to us as our covenant with God (Is 42:6; 49:8).

Let’s go even deeper—the unsearchable riches of the Godhead are put on display in Christ— which means that HOW God is taking the Church from dust to glory has become the primary revealer of the Godhead to the holy angels (Eph 3:8-10).

It says in 2 Peter 1:3-4 that the precious and magnificent promises of the Gospel are given to us out of (or by means of) God’s own glory and excellence. Thus the Gospel promises to forgive you and to adopt you in Christ are promises cast in the foundry of God’s attributes. God took His own attributes and poured them into the mould of the Gospel promises. God wants you to know Him better and better as you take delight in all that He is toward you in Christ. We are to dwell upon Him as the God of all grace who is exercising His mighty attributes on our behalf. This makes us an owner, not merely a spectator or observer.

God exports His life, love, blessedness, and righteousness across time and eternity and gives Himself to us in Christ. This is why at the moment of salvation (2 Cor 4:4-6) the believing sinner beholds God Almighty’s glory in the face of Christ. The sinner sees for the very first time WHO God is—that God plucks out His own heart (so to speak) in the giving of His Son in order to reconcile hostile sinners to Himself. It’s God’s attributes harnessed in the Person and work of Christ in order to bring us to God.

When the sinner sees by faith that his own eternal welfare and God’s glory are forever joined and bound up together in the Person of Christ—hostility toward God is purged from the sinner’s heart; it’s impossible for the former enmity to remain there. When by faith the believing sinner beholds this display of divine love; it casts enmity out of his heart—it makes a friend of a former enemy (it reconciles – Col 1:21-22). The exercise of God’s immutable and glorious attributes (in the redemptive work of Christ) accomplishes not only our highest good (eternal salvation)—but it also is the highest form of God’s self-revelation; this revelation of God in our behalf will redound to the eternal glory to God.

We will experience delight when we meditate upon who God is (it is always who God is toward you in Christ. It is always Christ’s perfect suitability for our every need. It is always Christ who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor 1:30). Christ is the wisdom and power of God; He holds His offices of Prophet, Priest, and King in order to bring you all the way to God.

This is the truth of the Gospel which dispels lies about God; lies that kept the soul in its dark dungeon. Now that we are sons of light; we find that we have communion with God when we take Christ for the reasons God gave Him (acceptance, forgiveness, righteousness, access). God is exalted when you keep taking Christ for the reasons the Father gave Him.

Consider what Owen says in his book, Communion with God, “We must assure ourselves that there is nothing more acceptable to God than to keep our hearts filled with him as the eternal source of all that rich grace which flows out to sinners in the blood of Jesus. Our resistance to walking close with God stems from the fact that we do not behold and receive his love. The more we see God’s love by faith, the more will we delight in him” (Owen, p. 32).

God’s giving of himself as an all-sufficient God, to be enjoyed by his creatures, to provide for all their needs out of himself, is only revealed in Christ. In Christ, God is in covenant with his people to be a Father to them. In this covenant he has promised to lay out himself as the one who alone can meet the needs of his creatures. In Christ, God has promised to give himself to them for their eternal good and to be their exceedingly great reward (Ibid, p. 87).

We must be convinced that God will use all his glorious attributes for our good. He has set forth Christ to be the Lord our Righteousness (Isaiah 45:24,25; 1 Cor. 1:30; 2 Cor. 5:18). We must be convinced that His attributes are powerful and able to bring us into eternal glory. To assure us of this, God wraps up the whole covenant of grace in one promise: “I will be your God.” Now we know that this Gospel covenant is confirmed in the blood of Christ. To be in Christ by faith is to know the wonder, excellence, wisdom and knowledge of God exercised in the salvation of sinners (Ibid, pp. 88-89).

Going to Christ as one’s sin bearer is the believer’s daily work. Christ calls the believer to daily lay the burden of their sins upon him. By faith the saints are to see God laying their sins upon Christ. This is what it means to know Christ crucified. Believers draw near and take from Him that righteousness which he has wrought for them, so fulfilling what Paul taught (2 Cor. 5:21). Christ is delighted that his saints should always hold communion with him by giving him their sins and receiving his righteousness. We commune with Christ when we keep taking Him to be our righteousness (Ibid, p. 144).

Vv. 21-23 – In these verses Paul declares the power of Christ over everything for the sake of the church. The living, ruling Christ pervaded the consciousness of the early church. The saints who made up the early church exhibited a fearless trust that nothing could stand in the way of their inheriting of the promises; for Christ, our Mediator and Priest is our Mediatorial King— He orders all things from His sovereign throne. This enabled them to witness with boldness and to face a martyr’s death.

CONCLUSION: When we come to the place where we attempt to comprehend God and worship Him, our meditation must focus upon HOW God has revealed Himself—we must return to our passage—that God has revealed Himself in guaranteed hope, in promised inheritance, and in matchless saving power—these three are access points to delight in God.

God wants you to learn to pray personally for spiritual understanding; for it is God’s way of furthering disclosures of Himself. It is God’s way of moving us from beholding to delight to worship. The benefits are so great; to have a proper estimate of your riches in Christ; to have a well-founded hope of salvation is the support and stability for the soul. A full Christ-centered assurance that the promises will be realized by you is a living sanctifying force! This is the joy for which we were created anew. Christ has purchased this for us; it is our birthright in Him. The more we believe this to be true; the more we will find happiness in the Lord accessible to us.

TRANSFORMING GRACE

D A Y 13

THE MORTIFICATION OF SIN AND THE BELIEVER’S

TRIUMPH OVER TEMPTATION

(adapted from The Enemy Within by Chris Lundgaard)

INTRODUCTION: In this lesson we will discover together that success in resisting temptation begins far in advance before the temptation strikes. The action which must precede resistance of temptation is known as mortification of sin. To mortify sin means to put it to death. Believers are commanded in God’s Word to put sin to death by reckoning that the members of their body are dead to sin by reason of union with Christ (Col 3:5ff). Ongoing mortification of sin is absolutely essential if we are to resist temptation consistently. The believer who is experiencing victory over the solicitations of sin is an individual who is constantly engaged in the mortification of sin—or the putting of sin to death. Obedient believers are always cutting off the occasion to sin by refusing to make a provision for the flesh (Rom 13:14).

The true believer knows that of the three enemies of his soul: the world; the flesh; and the devil—one of those three, the flesh, resides in his own person. Therefore he keeps a constant watch upon his own soul knowing that the temptation to be ruled by his own desires is ever present. When David king of Israel committed adultery with Bathsheba, he had become vulnerable to sexual immorality because he had drifted away from the constant habit of mortification.

Christians who study their Bibles are aware of the human condition—namely that the entrance of sin has not only brought guilt, wrath, pollution, and rebellion; it has also decimated our sense of security, significance, purpose, and meaning. Sin has driven a wedge into our human unity, fragmenting our souls. By contrast, when man was in a state of innocence, God was at the center of man’s being—our Creator provided unity, purpose, identity, and meaning. But since the fall, self and sin have rushed into the void. As a consequence, depraved man has been charmed by the world’s overtures. The world promises to integrate the soul and to supply man’s deepest needs—offering a pseudo security and significance. As a result, nothing is easier than to worship created things (Rom 1:25). Thus the child of God is to fortify his heart against the deceptions of sin by loving God’s truth and by pursuing satisfaction in Him.

“All sin comes from not putting supreme value on the glory of God—this is the very essence of sin” (John Piper). “Oh how horrible our sins look when they are committed by someone else” (Chuck Smith). “The pleasure of sin is soon gone, but the sting remains.” “Sin has the devil for its father, shame for its companion, and death for its wages” (Thomas Watson). “Christian, you are never out of danger of sinning” (Spurgeon). “Sin goes in disguise, and thence is welcome; like Judas, it kisses and kills; like Joab, it salutes and slays” (George Swinnock).

Transforming Grace Thirty days of

I. The Purpose of Mortification of Sin

The purpose of mortification (putting sin to death) is to arrive at the goal for which God in His grace laid hold of us—namely, conformity to Christ (2 Thess 2:14; Rom 8:29ff.). God always accomplishes His purposes with a precise goal in view. God declares the end from the beginning (Is 46:10). God decrees, He predestines, He foreordains—He works with the end in mind. Discussion: what specific end or goal is described in the following verses Eph 1:4; Rom 8:28-30?

We must learn to cultivate the habit of mortification of sin with the END in mind. Mortification of sin is not an end in itself. We are not putting sin to death merely for the purpose being practical moralists, or because a virtuous life is superior to an unethical life. Why is having the right end in mind in our mortification of sin so important? In part, the answer is that it is possible to engage in mortification for the wrong reasons. Some ‘knuckle under’ to a coercive moral structure for the purpose of gaining respectability from their peers or superiors. Others pride themselves on their ability to adhere to a moral code. In the case of the Colossian believers, their efforts at mortification were often linked to asceticism—the severe treatment of the human body for spiritual purposes. Paul refutes asceticism in Colossians 2:20-23—asceticism had the wrong end in view, for it suggested that those who engage in such practices were able to attain the highest levels of spirituality. The focus was on self; not on Christ.

In our struggle with the flesh; we must begin with the right end in mind. The goal of mortification is life with God in glory. All we do in our efforts at sanctification by way of mortification should serve an ultimate end—the end for which we were created anew in Christ Jesus (2 Cor 5:17; 1 Jn 3:1-3; Eph 5:27). Sin has twisted the image of God. The Lord recreates and restores His people to the perfect image of God. Since we are new creatures created anew in Christ, we are to abandon the old sinful behaviors and attitudes and adopt the new. Our efforts at mortification are not merely focused on abstinence; but upon replacement behaviors. Therefore in mortification we are to put on the new man and put off the old man (Eph 4:22-32; Col 3:8-17ff.).

II. The Place of Mortification

Mortification is absolutely necessary if you want to have spiritual life. It is not optional like a vacation home or elective surgery. Mortification is not easy. We are not to weigh the benefits against the cost. Mortification of sin is mandatory for every true believer (Rom 8:12-13). No one who hopes to live in God and with God can decline his or her obligation to mortify sin. The nature of our flesh demands constant mortification.

Romans 7:7-25 depicts indwelling sin as an operative principle:

• Sin dwells in us as an operative principle
• Sin offers the incentives of power, pleasure, and freedom
• Sin is parasitic; it depends upon our consent
• Sin seeks to press us into its mould in order to bring us into subjection
• Sin wants sole (unshared) rule over an individual
• Sin wants to catapult the individual toward death

You can’t do anything pleasing to God unless you are putting the flesh to death. Because the struggle is constant, you’ll have to keep overcoming the flesh. In order to have victory, you’ll have to think self-consciously about the battle: “This is for all the marbles.” “How I use the members of my body is a declaration about the identity of the one I serve.” “Those who are deceived go with the flow instead of mortifying sin.” Discussion: see Gal 5:17ff. Why does Paul speak of the prospect of being deceived in Ephesians 5:6? Does the deceived person in this text imagine that he may tolerate some sins and still be spiritually safe and secure? Do you think it is common in our society for people to be living a divided life—an outward form of religion with an inward rebellion against God?

III. The Practice of Mortification

The believer must know his divine resources for mortification (see 1 Cor 10:13; Jn 3:34; Rom 8:32ff.). We are not teaching a ‘bootstrap’ approach to sanctification—even the spiritual discipline of mortification is a function of grace-enablement. The cross, the Word, the gospel, and the Spirit comprise our divine resources for resisting temptation. We must know the present value of the cross for present change. A new record in heaven and a new power over sin go together (Timothy Lane, Paul David Tripp, How People Change, New Growth Press, 2006, p. 32). Discussion: See Romans 6—describe again the divine provision for victory over sin as a result of the present value of the cross.

The believer must not receive divine resources passively. Instead there must be diligent application and appropriation of the divine enablement provided for us. If you receive your resources passively; there will be very very slow spiritual growth. In order to actively appropriate our divine resources for mortification, the following features will characterize our efforts:

1. FIRST: Dedicate yourself to mastery of the means of grace (the disciplines of grace) in order to defeat sin and the flesh. In other words, know your spiritual resources and appropriate them. To do so you will have to exert constant resistance against the flesh by the Spirit’s enablement.
2. SECOND: There is an immense difference between reading the Bible and meditating on the Bible. Reading is only ‘brushing against’ the truth. Meditating on the Word is what is required in order to have your life ordered and transformed. “Meditation is the best beginning of prayer, and prayer is the best conclusion of meditation” (George Swinnock). “If I have observed anything by experience, it is this: a man may take the measure of his growth and decay in grace according to his thoughts and meditations upon the Person of Christ, and the glory of Christ’s kingdom, and of His love” (John Owen).

Discussion: See Hebrews 5:12-14, then describe the role of the Word in the thought life of the mature.

3. THIRD: Meditation requires interpretive skills; time for reflection; and penetrating application to one’s own life. Those who meditate are deadly serious about what the Word says as it intersects with their lives—it is the work of a lifetime. It is continual biblical self-confrontation—this is absolutely essential to the ‘Transformation Mandate.” That mandate, found in Romans 12:1-2, indicates that we are either being transformed by the action of God’s truth renewing our minds, OR, we are being conformed to the world and its desires and values. The category of ‘static’ or stationary does not exist; here is no neutrality, no ‘demilitarized zone’, and no pacifism in the battle.

IV. The Tactics of Temptation

God has given us the knowledge in his Word that the primary way temptation works is by deceit (Eph 4:22). To yield to sin is to be hoodwinked by our own desires (James 1:14ff.). The sinful flesh has one goal—death. You are trying to mortify the flesh; the flesh is trying to kill you (1 Pet 2:11; James 1:15; Rom 8:6). In order to avoid being deceived, we must know that the flesh pretends to be your friend—offering to make you happy if you sow to its desires. But, the flesh has an agenda of slavery to sin and spiritual death. The solicitations by sin offer the false promise of fulfillment while hiding the price tag of guilt; shame; bondage; hopelessness; loss; and alienation.

It is vitally important to know that the flesh is armed to deceive you, enslave you, and slay you. If a burglar invaded your home, you would immediately call the police to prevent your possessions from being ransacked. We need to know why we behave so differently when sin threatens to break in and wreak destruction upon our souls. Why do we let our guard down; unlock the door; and put out the welcome mat?

Discussion: Describe how the flesh is a covert enemy that has a secret truce with Satan and the world.

The degrees of temptation are spelled out in James 1:12-15:

1. The mind is dragged away from being a watchman of the soul
2. The affections become entangled and interested in sin’s offers
3. The will is overcome and consents to sin’s offers
4. The will and actions give birth to acts of sin
5. Sin as master enslaves and results in death (not a description of believers)

The faculties of our soul must operate in unison in order to resist temptation.

1. The MIND is renewed by God in order to discern what pleases God. The mind is a watchman of the soul—it makes discerning judgments about what is proposed (Prov 4:23).
2. The AFFECTIONS respond to the mind. “Yes, this is a good thing.” Or, “No, this may look attractive; but I hate this—there is revulsion in it.” The affections respond to what the mind says whether good or bad. “Do, or don’t, develop an appetite for this.”
3. The WILL seeks to consent to, and carry out, the ruling desire of the affections (whether holy or unholy). Notice the number of times the phrase, “I will,” or “I shall” appears in Psalms 57, 101, and 145.

The flesh tempts the mind; seeking to convince the mind of the legitimacy of its overtures to sin. The battle is for the mind. The mind is the sentry posted to keep the thief of sin out of the soul. What happens in mind renewal? In scriptural mind renewal, we feed on the truths of Scripture. In so doing, there is a renewed commitment to love the Lord and the truth of God; to see its preciousness; and to build our lives upon God’s truth as upon rock. In mind renewal, there is strong emphasis on the contrast or antithesis between the two paths; the two ways; and the two destinies (Matt 7:13-14).

The flesh has countless tactics to persuade us that a temptation is no real danger. The flesh seeks to weaken the perception that there is real danger in sin. The flesh wants to weaken our understanding of the purposes of God’s grace (Titus 2:11-14). The antinomian (lawless) thrust of the flesh is to separate the remedy of grace from the design of grace. To only focus on forgiveness is a ‘half gospel.’ The ‘half gospel’ neglects the gospel mandate of conformity to Christ and deliverance from the power of sin.

The flesh uses a ‘half gospel’ to view grace as pardon only. A half gospel will make you far more vulnerable to sin—for the flesh uses the half gospel concept as a strategy to convince us that the present danger of sin has been carried away by Christ. One of the symptoms of holding to the half gospel is imagining that the grace of God has neutralized or removed the dire danger of sin. The immense danger of the ‘half gospel’, also called the ‘gospel gap’ is addressed 2 Peter 1:4-11.

Discussion: We ought to be sobered by the severity of the warnings in Scripture about turning the grace of God into a license for sinning (Jude 3-4; Heb 12:10, 14-17).

The temptations of the flesh also seek to incorporate the imagination. We are drawn into how delightful things might be. We allow our minds to drift into scenarios in which we picture certain possibilities. These possibilities are then used to justify our actions—though they are contrary to God’s clear commands.

Steps of sin through imagination are often as follows:

• A degree of discontent followed by coveting (low thoughts of God’s goodness)
• Fixing the mind on something or someone you think will bring happiness
• Feeding the desire until it becomes a ruling desire
• Plotting on how to bring the fantasy into reality
• Sell the soul for it—willing to die for it (sin’s ‘madness’)

In order to obey God in anything, there must be an ongoing mortification of the flesh. God produced the new birth in us in order that our wills might have the power to choose only what is good for the soul. Nevertheless we are in a battle between flesh and Spirit (Gal 5:17).

1. To obey God in anything we must mortify the flesh. The refusal to mortify is sin.
2. Our battle is life versus death. It is resist sin or die (Rom 8:12-13).
3. We must listen to the Spirit’s resistance of the flesh. Walk in step with the Spirit and you will not carry out the sinful desires of the flesh (Gal 5:16, 18).
4. The obedient believer yields to the Spirit and cooperates with the Spirit (Phil 2:12-13).

Discussion: Is there a consciousness of the Spirit’s power, presence, and help as the believer seeks to say no to the flesh? Do you by faith in the Word experience the Spirit’s work of warning, reminding, assisting, and enabling? Consider how closely the Spirit works with the believer’s conscience.

V. What are the steps of ‘rebounding’ after sinning?

1. ‘Debriefing’ is an important part of meditation. Meditate on your failures in the presence of Christ and His Word. Confess your sin to the Lord in a specific manner (1 Jn 1:9). Identify, and confront your part in being willing to be deceived (Hos 14:1-3; Jer 3:12-14, 22; 4:1). Acknowledge that you were willing to put something in the creation in place of God (which amounts to idolatry—Colossians 3:5).
2. Practice ‘search and destroy’—how did the evil intruder get past your defenses? How can you strengthen the protective perimeter around your heart? Why did you let him in willingly? How will you hunt him down and eliminate him? Why did you call him a friend when he was a cruel enemy? How will you determine to avoid being seduced by this same deceiver in the future? How will you exercise faith in God’s Word in the future—the next time you are tempted. Every moral failure involves unbelief.

3. Fortify your “wall” where it is weak—how did temptation have such an easy entrance? Learn to build a case for obedience, and a case against disobedience. As you meditate on the Word, “collect” the benefits of obedience and stockpile consequences of disobedience. Learn to ‘preach’ these to yourself. Read the Word and “mix” faith with it (Heb 4:1-2). Compose mental ‘sermons’ which you preach to yourself which exalt God and His truth and which abominate sin as high-handed treason against His holy character and majesty.

4. Resolve to care more deeply for your relationship with the Lord. Sanctification is the ‘byproduct’ of maintaining our relationship with the Lord—guarding our communion and intimacy with Him by opposing anything which jeopardizes that fellowship. Our loyalty to the Lord is to be characterized by purity and simplicity (2 Cor 11:3). Faithless Israel was condemned for having a loyalty to the Lord which was easily distracted and temporary only (Hos 6:4).

VI. Tips for gaining Mastery of Mortification

Remember that we become like what we worship (2 Cor 3:18). The human heart is always worshipping—the heart is the place where worship takes place. Therefore, we must watch over our hearts with all diligence (Prov 4:23; Matt 6:19-21; Col 3:1-3). We are becoming today what we will be tomorrow. I frequently tell the men whom I disciple that they have a spiritual biography that is under construction; it is being written each day and it will be read publicly at the judgment seat of Christ.

Consider that another weapon against sin which helps to drive mortification is joy. There is joy in consolidating our affections on the Person of Christ. “Lord give me a united heart to revere Thy Name!” (Ps 86:11). We are most happy when we are most holy. Simple and pure devotion to Christ is a powerful weapon against the temptations of sin (2 Cor 11:3). As we exercise ongoing faith in Christ as He is offered in the gospel, the Spirit produces peace, hope and joy in our lives (Rom 15:13; 14:17).

Avoid reducing mortification to a task. See mortification as an expression of your love and submission to Christ—as a part of maintaining intimacy and loyalty to Him. True mortification is affection-driven says Paul as he contrasts it to the self-focused efforts of asceticism (severe treatment of the body) (Col 3:1-4ff.). Mortification must touch the depths of our hearts. We must see the relational in mortification. It is not an abstraction—it is looking unto Jesus Himself (Heb 12:1-3ff.). The flesh wants tasks not relationship with the glorified Christ. The flesh resists grace and divine love—because both grace and love conquer us and reclaim wayward hearts for God (2 Cor 5:14-15ff.).

Remember that the flesh obscures God’s nature by seeking a conditional love based on law and performance. All false religion is driven by a ‘do-able’ morality. The flesh always brings our focus back to self—the flesh pulls toward the pendulum swing of self-love and then self-hate. Many are vulnerable to self-destructive self-recrimination and depression. More sin bolsters self-loathing. Hearts heavy with crushing self-hate are invisible to preachers. Pastors should stick to the gospel in all their preaching. They should preach repentance with the sinner hearing with full confidence that God receives prodigals.

Mortification is grace-driven!

Consciously go to God for love in your quiet time. When the believer labors to have a deeply sensed love of God in his heart; it will make a barrier to the insinuations of temptation, so lay a rich storehouse of provisions by means of the gospel (John Owen, Triumph over Temptation, James M. Houston, Ed., Victor Books, 2005, p. 173).

VII. The Curative Role of Confession

Sin and shame seek cover. When we yield to strong temptation to sin, we move to secrecy, hiding, and concealment (Ps 32:2; Prov 28:13). The flesh loves darkness and secrecy. The flesh is a ‘con-man’ to break the strength of close fellowship with other believers. Solitude and darkness gives home field advantage to the flesh (Jn 3:19-21). “He who separates himself seeks his own desire, he quarrels against all sound wisdom” (Prov 18:1). “Conscience-wasting sin” is exacerbated by solitude. Cutting oneself off from fellow believers makes the situation more disastrous (John Owen).

The corporate aspect of confession is vital to spiritual health (James 5:16). A gospel-centered body of believers will welcome the role of confessing sin to one another. Churches which drift from being gospel-centered tend to indirectly promote respectability rather than authenticity. Mutual confession breaks sin’s grasp by breaking pride, shame, and fear. There is promise and glory in the abasement.

The work of sin is deceit. Part of the deceit is the veil of concealment. When the veil is removed the power of sin is weakened. When a brother pronounces forgiveness of sins to another—he speaks as an ambassador of God in Christ—speaking the gospel.

Pray that God will make you the kind of person who can hear the confession of a brother. When you bring sin out of darkness into light it just shrivels and dies. God holds out real forgiveness for even the most wicked of sins. God specializes in cleansing spiritual lepers.

If you remain ignorant of your enemy (sin), you will justify yourself and behave impatiently toward those who reprove you and admonish you (2 Chron 16:7-10; Prov 9:8)

(Owen, Triumph over Temptation, p. 198). When the psalmist confessed his sins, the heavy hand of God upon him was lifted and changed to liberty and joy (Ps 32:3-7).

TRANSFORMING GRACE

D A Y 14

TEMPTATION AND SPIRITUAL WARFARE

Adapted in part from the sermon, The Blood of the Lamb the Conquering Weapon,

by Charles H. Spurgeon

I. Know the wiles of your foe; he is the accuser of the brethren

When Satan sought permission to torment Job, the evil one implied that those who worship God do so only for the benefits and blessings God provides. Satan’s inference was that God is not worthy of worship for who He is. Thus, Satan accuses Job of obeying God for mercenary reasons alone—for what Job can get from God (Job 1:8-12). Then the devil does something astounding; he makes a bet with God. The devil’s ‘wager’ is that if Job’s prosperity is removed he will curse God.

Well, we know how the book of Job ends—the devil loses his bet, Job retains his integrity and has his blessings restored by God. Nevertheless, the evil one has not ceased making his wager; he continues to accuse the saints in every age of human history. Satan’s accusations before the throne of God suggest that true worshippers (those who worship God for who He is in His infinite worth) are not to be found. By his accusations, the devil implies that God cannot hold the loyalty of even one person without bribing them with forms of health, wealth, and prosperity.

This certainly gives us insights into the evil one’s motives. For, the devil’s own deception (which fueled his rebellion) was based upon his arrogant premise that the creature can gain autonomy by choosing not to worship his creator. This lie which Satan first told himself is also the lie he told our first parents in the Garden of Eden.

The accusations of Satan aimed at the saints are designed to discount the efficaciousness of Christ’s work in their lives. There is a time to take sides against ourselves; it is when we identify sin in our lives that must be confessed and repented of. When the Spirit of God works upon our conscience, He does so to renew our obedience and restore our communion with the Lord through repentance. But when the devil accuses us, he does in a different way for a different purpose.

The evil one’s accusations and insinuations have the intent of discrediting our right to the promises of God, and thus creating distance from the Lord. When the enemy accuses; he is hoping that believer will take sides against himself in such a way that personal sin is viewed as larger than the work of Christ.

It is incredibly common for believers to be living with accusations piled up inside of them like a logjam. When we live with accusations in our soul, and do not deal with them the gospel way; it weakens our confidence before God and our boldness for God. Here are just some examples of the kind of accusations that the evil one casts against us: “God has forsaken His tender care of you because of your misdeeds.” “Your failures as a Christian have worn out God’s patience; He is disgusted with you.” “Because of your disobedience, all you can expect from God is His disfavor.” “All your attempts to serve God are those of a double-minded person.” “The ugliness of your past deeds cling to you like corruption.” “If

Transforming Grace Thirty days of

you are this disillusioned with your obedience as a Christian; think how a holy God must feel about you.”

Late Puritan Thomas Hooker gives the following insights about the targets of Satan’s accusations:

The best Christians are the most suspicious of themselves, and none fuller of doubts and fears, than those who have the least cause of fear or doubt that their estates are broken and bad. Therefore Satan makes it his chief work to grieve and terrify such. Besides, their own distrustful hearts are always ready to join issue with his false reports against them, raising false surmises against themselves, and putting mercy away from them; as if they were hired by the devil to take his part in pleading against their sure salvation (Thomas Hooker, The Poor Doubting Christian drawn to Christ, Maranatha Publications, p. 75).

Holiness in the life of the believer is a vexation to the devil. But we need to know why that is so. The holy lives of believers constantly put to the lie the satanic premise that no true worshippers exist. Each time Satan beholds the holiness of God’s true worshippers, he is galled and blistered by the fact that they have rejected his rebellion against God. Our holy lives speak volumes. By our actions of loyalty to God, we are stating by our lives that Satan is terribly wrong—God is worthy of our worship—God has a countless throng of true worshippers.

The holy lives of the saints are a vexation to the devil because he is reminded that he is living a lie, and that he will soon be condemned forever and resigned to the pit. By his refusal to obey, honor, love and worship God, the evil one has forever alienated himself from God. Having chosen estrangement, Satan is on the outside—careening toward oblivion, darkness, and torment. His rebellion ruined him forever; it did not create a new reality, nor did it make him a god.

This gives us understanding as to why Satan entertains such jealousy and spite toward God’s eternal covenant of love with elect sinners. Sinful humans, former subjects in Satan’s kingdom, have been redeemed and now belong to God. Now they possess the sure promise that they will forever enjoy the light, love, life, glory, presence, and blessedness of God almighty. They will be raised above angels in the eternal state—they will be co-heirs and co-regents with Christ.

In acting out his hatred of God’s glory and redemptive purposes, Lucifer works as a tireless accuser of the brethren. Satan cannot touch God; but he seeks to slander what God loves, His redeemed children. The evil one is not done with his wager. When he sees sin in a saint, he argues that the iniquity he sees in the believer is a character trait of Satan not of God. Every sin the devil sees in God’s people cries to him, “My father, my father.” The enemy is saying by his accusations before the throne of God, “this person looks more like my child than Your child!”

In his jealousy and hatred he tries to break the love bond between God and His children— he slanders the saints in the ears of God and slanders God in the ears of the saints. How grateful we are for the promise of God: the accuser’s cruel voice is silenced by the blood of the Lamb!

How ironic that mighty Beelzebub is also a coward. Since Satan’s entire kingdom is built upon lies and upon human and demonic crime; it is a fragile kingdom, like a house of cards. Therefore, strong as the devil is, he is a coward when faced with God’s truth. In speaking about Satan’s ways, Jesus told His hearers, “Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature; for he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44b ).

When Christians believe God’s truth, stand upon God’s truth, and live out God’s truth, it sends shudders through the evil one. Truth is eternal; lies are temporary. Satan will flee when he is resisted by the truth (James 4:7). Because Satan is of the lie, he is a coward. The devil flees when even a 12 year old girl stands upon the Word of God by faith and rejects the evil one’s lies.

Our battle is not with flesh and blood. It is with principalities and powers in the heavenly places (‘heavenly places’ refers to the entire realm of spirit beings—Eph 6:12). Satan’s power, energy, swiftness, and wisdom all combine to make him a most formidable foe. He deludes, deceives, blinds, buffets, accuses, and beguiles—he has thousands of years to perfect his craft. He is the father of lies (Jn 8:44). He is always in a posture of one in waiting to ambush the unwary. Satan has a well-tried method of operation—he preys upon those who have let their guard down. He is an incurable opportunist—always looking for someone to devour. He hides in the shadows; he waits for those who are not on watch. He actively looks for those who are not on the alert—who have left off the means of grace (the Word, fellowship, and prayer) (1 Pet 5:8).

The saint cannot be passive in this battle (1 Pet 5:8-9). The saint is to conduct himself with a sober spirit (guarding against both neglect and moods of passion in which our flesh can carry us away). The believer is commanded by God to resist the devil (1 Pet 5:9). To not fight, or cease to fight, is to be overcome. We must be on watch—girding up the loins of the mind always being ready for action (1 Pet 1:13). We are to be strong in someone else’s strength—be strong in the Lord and the strength of His might (Eph 6:10), not in our own strength. As we will see in a moment, we must understand the nature of Christ’s victory over Satan—what Christ has done to the devil—if we are to be strong in the Lord instead of attempting to be strong in ourselves.

The evil one is like a chess master—he thinks many moves ahead. He plans his temptations to coincide with our successes and failures, our moods, and the company we keep. He sails with the wind and the tide. If you are experiencing a time of success; he will tempt you to pride and to presumption. He saves his solicitations to discouragement and despondency for other occasions. He has particular temptations that accompany times of prosperity; and a host of other temptations to launch in times of suffering. Paul told the Thessalonian believers that he feared for their spiritual welfare knowing that Satan would tempt them to despondency amidst the persecutions they were enduring (1 Thess 3:1-9).

The blood of Christ our conquering weapon—the most powerful weapon in our arsenal is the blood of Christ. Our strategy for victory is taken from Revelation 12:10-11. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb. The saints are allied in this fight of the ages; they utilize the same mighty weapon—the blood of the Lamb. We preach Christ crucified. The death of the Son of God is our conquering weapon. If Jesus had not died; we would have no conquering weapon by which to overcome the devil.

They overcame by the blood of the Lamb—that is, Christ’s blood was shed in a substitutionary manner—the blood of God’s Lamb sacrificed for us. The chastening of our peace was upon Him—this is substitution; the just for the unjust (Is 53:5). His vicarious death was the satisfaction of God’s justice. Under God’s moral government sin must be punished. It was punished in the death of Christ.

Every speck of Christ’s suffering was vicarious. Therefore the propitiation Christ accomplished is the hope of men. His death is effective to take away sin; to take away the tremendous load of transgression off of the elect; to cancel out the dreadful debt of the law; and to secure forgiveness. By His resurrection—all He did in His death was accepted by the Father—Christ’s resurrection secured our justification (Rom 4:25; 1 Tim 3:16).

We cannot hear these truths too often; we have an amazing capacity to forget the gospel. The tribulation saints of Revelation 12:10-11 overcame the devil and the beast by the blood of the Lamb. In the heat of battle, when their own lives were on the line, they overcame by the blood of the Lamb. Do you see how clear this is—the blood of the Lamb is not just for our admiration—it is for holy warfare. It was given with the divine intent of being our weapon (Charles Spurgeon, The Blood of the Lamb the Conquering Weapon, Metropolitan Tabernacle Vol. 34, No. 2043). Nothing can bring lasting pervasive peace to your conscience but the blood of Christ (Heb 12:24; 10:22; 9:14). But, it is not the kind of peace that takes its ease in a posture of spiritual slumber. No, this peace is designed to produce backbone; holy boldness; militancy for the gospel.

This blood was shed to arm the saints for warfare. It is our conquering weapon to overcome sin and Satan. It is a mighty weapon able to subdue sin; to withstand temptation; to produce holiness; to strengthen purity. Since your battle is in the heavenlies and your weapon is the blood of Christ and your foe is Satan; there are applications and strategies for battle that every saint and minister of the gospel must practice in order to overcome.

II. Know the strategies for overcoming in warfare; we overcome by the blood of the lamb

A. You must regard Satan as truly overcome and vanquished by Christ.

By faith you are to grasp your Lord’s victory as your own. Christ expects you to participate in His victory—regarding His victory as your own victory—because it was in your human nature that He triumphed over the enemies of your soul (the world; the flesh; the devil; sin; death; and hell).

By Christ’s finished work on Calvary, He has rendered a death blow to the head of Satan. He has made His people overcomers by His own overcoming (Gen 3:15). The imagery in Genesis 3:15 depicts the serpent wounding the heel of the Savior in the crucifixion (the spike which held the victim’s feet to the cross was driven through the heel bone). But, the Savior will crush his head—a death blow. The serpent’s fangs and venom are in his head which will be crushed by the Savior during His atoning work— which will secure the serpent’s defeat.

Christ in our nature overcame the evil one. We are saved because the Father has radically identified us with Christ—placing us in union with Him so that the infinite value of Christ’s work becomes ours. We are crucified by His cross. We are buried with Him and risen with Him in His resurrection. He is our Head—as members of His body, we did in Him what He did. By union with Him, we participate in His life (Jn 1:16). By union with Him we are on the receiving end of all of the benefits He earned for His people. In his divinity and perfect humanity He is our perfect complement. For all we need to be—He is (Heb 7:25-27). We are complete in Him (Col 2:10). He has poured out pardoning grace upon believing sinners. That He might gain His loving dominion over us (the whole man) and our willing obedience to Him.

The perfect triumph of Christ is described in Colossians 2:14-15.

V. 14 – Paul proclaims to us that believers are cleared of all debt to God. That mountain of indebtedness we owed God—we were helpless to discharge. That signed acknowledgement of our moral debt to God was a perpetual witness against us—but Christ cancelled that debt by His death.

By Christ’s death for us He effectively rubs out—blots out—effaces the remembrance of our debt and obligation. We all know that our consciences were aware of that debt to God. But Christ has cancelled that debt so that our consciences might have peace and tranquility before God.

Thus, it is for our comfort; our protection; our joy; our thanksgiving; our peace that we study how Christ interceded for us and removed our indebtedness. The Scripture says that the bond against us was taken out of the way and cancelled by being nailed to the cross! Oh what news that is. The charges against me have been torn up; cast aside; destroyed by Christ’s death. That document with its ordinances that were hostile to us was destroyed.

It was cancelled out because my Substitute took my just penalty and punishment. He was willing to have the charges against me fastened to Himself. That debt was tied to Him so that it might not have any more power over us.

V. 15 – But we must come to an understanding of how the work of Christ has liberated us from Satan’s dominion. Our text reveals that at Calvary God is doing something in the spirit realm (in the cosmic realm) by removing this debt against us. He is stripping principalities and powers. The whole kingdom of darkness is losing their primary tool. For men and women are kept in bondage, slavery, fear, and servitude by this damning indictment being held over their heads. The fear for those who are not believers has a concrete basis; for all men by their perpetual law-breaking are guilty of capital crimes against God which are worthy of death.

Think about it—Satan makes men slaves by the fear of death—fear of that the dark alarming portent of judgment to come (Heb 2:14-15). The devil is the invisible coroner at every lost man’s death bed. He keeps unsaved men in his grip through fear, guilt, and superstition. Hebrews chapter two tells us that this is the very reason Christ became incarnate—that He might set us free from the dominion of Satan.

The evil one thought the keys of death and hell were on his key ring; but no more (Rev 1:17-18). Christ’s victory on Calvary’s tree proved to be a triumphant defiance of demonic power over mankind. The weapons of those blackmailing powers have been snatched away. When Jesus broke the power of cancelled sin and blotted out our indebtedness—He was subjugating demonic powers who had the power of indictment. The very instrument of their demonic hostility was turned against them—Christ defeated, defanged, and disabled them.

God through Christ exposes to the watching universe of angels the utter helplessness of evil powers. He makes a public display that exposes these spirit beings to ridicule. He makes an example out of them—He shows their true character. The language in this verse would be immediately recognizable to a first century reader. It pictures a conquered army with its officers—trudging along impotently in chains being led through the streets in a victory parade (Col 2:15).

Oh the magnitude of Christ’s conquest—His victory is yours. The Savior who loves you has subjected hostile demonic powers to Himself—they are now impotent to harm you. (He who originally created them upright has defeated these fallen beings.) The devils who deal in accusations against us can no longer come up with a charge that sticks because the document that attested to our guilt has been destroyed (Rom 8:32). Let the eyes of your heart look upon your conquering Savior and be encouraged by the sight of the victory wrought in your nature. We are more than conquerors through Him who loved us (Rom 8:37). You must see Satan as vanquished by Christ if you are to overcome your foe.

B. We overcome Satan in the heavenly realm by overcoming him as the accuser. How often he plants accusations in the sensitive hearts of the saints. Haven’t you heard their accusing memories that shock and startle the conscience? Haven’t you heard charges and accusations which bid you to visit the memory of former sins and retry the case all over again?

The evil one knows that by his blaming and shaming and pointing, he can conjure up black memories of the sins of our youth. “How can you be a child of God?” he reasons. “Your life as a professed Christian is nothing but a sham, a heap of hypocrisy.”

As the accuser, he plants thoughts which can be crippling reminders of past sins and failures; remorse about our barrenness; coldness; defeat; and compromise. He lets us come to pessimistic conclusions about ourselves. “My failures define me.”

As Thomas Hooker said, “Satan begins the accusations, then lets us take over beating ourselves up—we take it from there; doing his work for free.” We’ll look at the mountain of evidence and be tempted to take sides against our own soul and the gracious work God has done there.

These assaults can be overwhelming like a flood when the evil piles up evidence and accusations against us. The saint can be staggered by these accusations. “How can I face God with the foul remembrance of these iniquities filling my mind and conscience?”

Countless believers have their spiritual arms hanging slack at their sides when the accusations strike. The onslaught of accusations can be like waves breaking over us in succession. These recriminations tend to immobilize us spiritually. Like a magnet drawing up iron filings, the conscience brings the accusations to itself as the believer listens (almost dutifully) to the inner voice of condemnation. Wouldn’t it be convenient if the accusations posed by the powers of darkness had an identifiable alien accent— perhaps like Count Dracula? Unfortunately the devil’s suggestions come into our minds disguised as our own independent thoughts. Success at spiritual warfare involves identifying lying thought and rejecting them. We are commanded to resist the accuser’s prevarications (James 4:7). In fact, when accusations hit us, it is the signal to engage in spiritual warfare by employing our chief weapon—the blood of the Lamb.

Now is your opportunity to overcome by the blood of the Lamb. An onslaught of accusations is your signal to engage in spiritual warfare—to overcome. The Scottish divine, Robert Murray M’Cheyne gets to the point quickly, “If anyone shall insinuate that it is not for my present and eternal happiness, and for God’s glory and my usefulness, to maintain a blood-washed conscience, . . . that is the voice of the devil, God’s enemy, the enemy of my soul and of all good. . .” (Andrew A. Bonar, Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne, Banner of Truth, 1966). You were born for battle—remember you have an Advocate as well as an accuser. Your advocate is also in the heavenlies (1 Jn 2:2). He pleads the merits of His own blood on your behalf. He lives to make intercession for you—for He shed His blood in order to discharge you of your debt. By His cross—He assumed our liabilities.

In order to get the victory—you must know that the accuser’s cruel voice is silenced by the blood of the Lamb. The blood tells of the infinite God who accepts the sacrifice that He Himself has provided. The Spirit never tires of showing us the blood, and you must never tire of showing your conscience the blood.

The conscience is like a courtroom; it was created to come up with verdicts; verdicts of guilty or not guilty. But unlike an earthly courtroom with fallible judges; your courtroom of conscience is connected to the courtroom of God. In other words, the justice achieved in your conscience is not justice at all unless it agrees with the justice of God. This puts the work of our Savior into bold relief. Because in the final analysis, nothing can satisfy your conscience except that which ultimately satisfied the absolute holy justice of God. As one theologian said, “If we could get the blood of Christ into their consciences, we could empty out our nation’s mental institutions.”

Dear people—nothing can bring tranquility, peace, and silence to the conscience but the death of the God-man in your place. You must preach this truth to yourself, because in our carnal reasoning and instincts—we will seek cures for conscience outside of Calvary.

Learn to say it, “Nothing will satisfy my conscience; but that which satisfies my God—the death of His Son in my place.” Make certain you do not run anywhere but to the atonement. There is no conquering weapon but the blood of the Lamb.

Draw all comfort from the atonement, not from inward feelings and inward disputations. Hide only in the wounds of Christ. Augustine remarked that the conscience of the redeemed is intended by God to be the palace of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit. Keep the gospel on the throne of conscience counsels Martin Luther. Take confidence that your Advocate and Defender will repel the charges brought against you. We are assured from Romans 8:31-34 that no charges brought against us will stick. “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son , but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the One who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.”

It requires fresh acts of faith and fresh views of the Savior and the Gospel in order to bring the court of conscience in line with the court of heaven (our already justified state). Our sense of judgment is like a pursuing pack of hounds; but God is greater than our hearts and knows all things (1 Jn 3:18-22).

Consider how many “verdicts” are in competition in our hearts: the verdict of others who are disappointed in us; the verdict of our own legal-prone hearts; the verdict of the evil one who accuses us.

The charges of all enemies are only worthy of contempt (whether personal adversaries, demons or Satan). God is for us in our justification, God is for us in Christ dying, Christ is for us in Christ interceding. Our heavenly Advocate continually pleads the merits of His blood on our behalf. Let us never forget: the accuser’s cruel voice is silenced by the blood of the Lamb!

C. We must overcome the enemy in regard to access to God.

The accuser of the brethren seeks to hinder us from bold and free access to God. The evil one harasses; he assaults with thoughts of care, guilt, heaviness—all to make us hesitant to readily draw near to God.

The accuser insinuates that your soul’s dwelling place has been in the world and the flesh more than in God—therefore, there is nothing left for you to do but mourn your miserable distance from God. All accusations are insinuations which suggest that we are not eligible for God’s love, blessing, and favor. The accusations of the evil one are intended to make you disqualify yourself for communion with God.

It is at this moment that you must reckon the fact that you are brought near by the blood of Christ (Eph 2:13). Take hold of the promise that you have boldness to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus (Heb 10:19; Eph 3:12). When your eligibility to for God’s love, presence, and favor is under attack—that is your ‘signal’ to reckon the infinite value of Christ’s blood spilled on your behalf. Practice preaching to yourself crystal clear gospel logic—that is where the victory lies. Let your heart take courage— allow your heart to consent to God’s love because of Christ who is your ‘eligibility’ for endless divine favor. See God’s desire to display His Son as the propitiation for your sins (Rom 3:23-26).

The cross of your Savior has removed your sin which was the obstacle to favor with God—but that obstacle has been taken away. The cross has forever set aside the issue of eligibility for God’s love and favor. The cross has cleared away every barrier to a love relationship with God in Christ (1 Jn 4:9-10, 19). Your Father in heaven does not want you in a state of spiritual paralysis and estrangement from Him. Look to Christ again to see that your full favor was procured when your transgressions were removed at Calvary (1 Jn 4:18).

D. We overcome by laying hold of the sufficiency of God from the throne of grace. When we overcome in heavenly places before the throne of God it is our preparation to go forth to serve the Lord. You are surrounded by people who desperately need your ministry. The Word of the cross in your mouth is mighty to defeat evil among your fellow men. In your ministry you must pass on the practice of making the blood of Christ your conquering weapon. You must know experimentally the benefits of Christ’s blood in your own conscience. You must become accustomed to having the Great Physician apply His healing blood to your conscience.

Your spiritual power is tied to this—if you preach His blood—you must know the benefits of His blood if your message and testimony are to have power. This is why the battle must be fought above first. You must overcome in order to serve. Get the verdict of the gospel in your own conscience first (1 Jn 2:13). You must prevail at the Mercy Seat in secret—then in your ministry to others. Christ must be appropriated as the Physician of your soul before you can commend Him to others as their Physician.

Our main business is to bear witness with the blood of Christ in the power of the Spirit. We have life—we owe our life to the crucified One—who in His sovereign mercy has enabled us to look to Him that we might live (Jn 3:14-16; 5:21, 24; 12:50). The cross is the wisdom of God and the power of God for our salvation and our sanctification. The blood of the cross drives out error; it softens hearts; it overcomes despair; it reveals the bitterness and noxiousness of sin; it overcomes every form of sin and vice; it cleanses from all filth; it stirs to love and obedience (this is the use of the blood of the Lamb in the lower sphere—in our preaching of the gospel).

We must exhibit greater courage in order to win victories. Some who profess Christianity are too timid to speak of Christ’s blood even in godly company! They love themselves too much to get into trouble by speaking boldly about their Savior and their faith. How, therefore, can they be of the noble band spoken of in Revelation who loved not their lives unto the death. God will not do anything by us unless we are true friends of the cross of Christ.

If we are untrue to the cross out of fear of man; our ministry will be neutralized. It is folly to live for the respect of men. We need backbone, fixedness, and self-denial. We must be willing to be made nothing for Christ’s sake. Be a faithful witness of His blood—your hope is there. The gospel of Jesus Christ is God’s irreversible verdict concerning the sins of the elect. No wonder Thomas Brooks urges sincere believers to repent of being downcast and discouraged about their sins:

[Such discouragement] springs from their ignorance of the richness, freeness, fullness, and everlastingness of God’s love; and from their ignorance of the power, glory, sufficiency, and efficacy of the death and sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ; and from their ignorance of the worth, glory, fullness, largeness, and completeness of the righteousness of Jesus Christ; and from the ignorance of that real, close, spiritual, glorious, and inseparable union that is between Christ and their precious souls. Ah! did the precious souls know and believe the truth of these things as they should, they would not sit down dejected and overwhelmed under the sense and operation of sin (Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices, Banner of Truth, 1968, p. 147).

The issue of gaining victory over Satan’s accusations by the blood of the Lamb is not a peripheral issue; for the way a man deals with his conscience reveals how he deals with God. “A good conscience is the palace of Christ; the temple of the Holy Ghost; the paradise of delight, the standing Sabbath of the saints.” St. Augustine. “Conscience is well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.” Samuel Butler. “No flattery can heal a bad conscience, so no slander can hurt a good one.” Thomas Watson. The accuser’s cruel voice is silenced by the blood of the

Lamb!