Is it really?

Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? (Matthew 5:25)

Reading these words, I found myself coming to the realization that based on how I manage my life, my answer would have to be, “Umm…no.”  No, more often than not, I am much more content to trifle with food, clothing, the new Mac laptops, my GPA, and on and on, rather than realizing the reality of the kingdom and seeking after it.

No my friends, life is much more than the food we digest and the clothes we adorn.  When we get dressed, there is the kingdom.  When we eat, there is the kingdom.  When we work, when we study, when we talk with our wives and fellowship with our friends, there is the kingdom.  So let us be first mindful of the kingdom and God’s righteousness, knowing that it is within the context of the kingdom that we live.

“Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”  I ask you, is it really?

Confessions of a Southern Baptist Seminarian - Part 1

I want my professor’s approval.

Thats the short and easy of it. When I walk into a classroom for the first time, one of my primary hopes is that the professor will approve of my work, that I’ll receive that proverbial pat on the back. As class began for the fall semester this past Friday, my hermeneutics professor began with a call to examine our own motives for engaging in the seminary experience. With that said, it didn’t take long for the tide of conviction to overwhlem me, exposing my motivations as anything but godly. I was brought back to Paul’s words to Timothy in his second letter:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

What should drive my sitting in lecture, my time in study, my time writing the many research papers and book reviews to come isn’t the approval of my professor, but the approval of my God, to whom I am ultimately to give an account, and before whom I live out my days. But thanks be to God that when I am “faithless, he remains faithful.” Thus it is to the grace and mercy of God that I turn to this semester, it is to the cross of my Savior that I cling, as I strive to show myself “as one approved” before the Lord of all.

Quotes Along the Way…

John Stott, commenting on Galatians 3:2-5:

This is the difference between them: the law says ‘Do this’; the gospel says ‘Christ has done it all’. The law requires works of human achievement; the gospel requires faith in Christ’s achievement. The law makes demands and bids us obey; the gospel brings promises and bids us believe.

Sunday Reflections

At church this morning, our pastor preached a sermon entitled God’s Household Rules:Love Your Wife based on the text of Ephesians 5:25-29. While there was much I took away from this sermon, perhaps the most crucial point made was the call to see marriage with an eternal perspective. The pastor spoke specifically of four areas in which we should view our wives in light of, those being:

1.Loving your wife in light of Christ’s special love for the Church
2.Loving your wife in light of Christ’s work on the Cross
3.Loving your wife with a view to her growth in grace
4.Loving your wife with a view to glorification

As was shown, Paul’s aim within this text is to exhort husbands to love their wives in light of these realities. How easy it is to come to marriage with only temporal concerns in mind, rather than viewing it in the eternal reality Paul calls us to.

During the service, we sang William Cooper’s There is a Fountain, a hymn I’ve become quite fond of this past year. The final stanza reads:

Redeeming love has been my theme/And shall be till I die

My prayer is that the redeeming love of Christ would manifest itself in all of my life…especially in my marriage.

Biblical Motivations to Ministry…

Concerning Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, C.K. Barrett writes:

Writing 2 Corinthians must have come near to breaking Paul, and…a church that is prepared to read it with him, and understand it, may find itself broken too.

After preparing and then preaching on a sermon from 2 Corinthians 5:11-15, I can wholeheartedly attest to the truth in Barrett’s words. Preparing for that sermon utterly broke me, as it revealed my motives for ministry were anything but what they were for the Apostle Paul. For the sake of clarity, let me go ahead and quote the text so you know what I’m talking about:

11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience. 12 We are not commending ourselves to you again but giving you cause to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. 13 For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 14 For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

As Paul defends his ministry to the Corinthians against the criticisms of the “super-apostles” (2 Corinth. 5:11) that had invaded the community, Paul makes known the realities and motivations that under gird his own apostolic ministry. Thus, in order to prevent this post from turning into a long bore, I’ll quickly comment on the two motivations of Paul’s ministry as noted within this text.

The first is found in verse 11, that being the “fear of the Lord.” Above all, I think its imperative to maintain the integrity of this verse. Paul isn’t talking about mere reverence or respect, as it is frequently translated to be, but rather a very real fear, as Paul has just previously noted the impending reality of having to stand before the judgment seat of Christ, something we must all do, in order that “each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinth 5:11). Thus, to take this phrase to mean anything other than fear (which, oddly enough, is what the text calls it!) would be to neuter the verse of its meaning. For Paul, the judgment seat of Christ was a governing reality in his life, not some vague, abstract concept only to be noted every now and then. On the contrary, “the fear of the Lord” moved Paul to persuade others of the truths of the gospel, to be “reconciled to God.” (2 Corinth 5:20) Living out his life and performing his ministry which God had entrusted to him was actually something Paul took quite seriously, as he knew that he lived his life before the very face of God, as he says “But what we are is known to God” (2 Corinth 5:11). Paul was absolutely cognisant of the reality that his ministry was performed before the very eyes of God, and as such, it affected and motivated his ministry, as he feared the one who takes sin quite seriously.

The second motivation to note comes in verse 14, as Paul writes, “For the love of Christ controls us…” Why does it control him?

…because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

The love Christ has for Paul, which was clearly displayed on the cross, controls his ministry. Whats even more fascinating about this verse is that the Greek word for controls might be more literally rendered as “to hem in,” or “encircle,” or even “surround,” thus revealing that what Paul is saying is that he can go no where other than whether the love of Christ leads him. He is “hemmed in,” by it….”surrounded by it”….controlled by it. The substitutionary death of Christ for his sin absolutely captivated Paul, it captured him, transformed him, and as such, it drove his ministry to proclaim such a magnificent love to others. Paul’s ministry, Paul’s life displays the ever-needed truth that the center of the gospel, the cross, isn’t important only at one point in time (i.e. - when someone comes to Christ), but is to be the guiding principle and the driving force of one’s life and ministry.

When coming to grips with the driving forces of Paul’s ministry, those being the “fear of the Lord” and the “love of Christ,” I can’t help but ask myself as to what drives me and my ministry? And it is that very question that broke me, as I came to realize the feeble and selfish motives that all too often push me. Yet, I pray that it wouldn’t be so, that I would come to grips with the reality of what it means to “fear the Lord,” and to be “controlled” by his love. After if all, if one has a proper understanding of who God is as he has revealed himself in Scripture, how can one not be fearful of his Holiness, and yet be controlled by his marvelous love? As Scott Hafemann (whose commentary I am gratefully indebted to) has so well put it:

What we need is not to squeeze more fleeting, religious experiences into our fast-paced lives. Rather, we need a more profound understanding of the gravity of life lived in the “fear of the Lord” (cf. 5:11), laced with a deeper joy in knowing “God’s favor” (cf. 6:2) . Concretely, this means taking time to focus on Christ (italics his) as the means and model of our new life in Christ (italics his)…That Paul had such a focus can be seen in the fact that he interprets both of his motives for ministry Christologically: Paul is moved by Christ as Judge in 5:11 and by Christ as Savior in 5:14.

May it be so for us my friends…that we would interpret not only our ministries but our lives “Christologically” knowing that our Judge is also our Savior…that we are moved by “knowing the fear of the Lord”….and “controlled by His Love”…I pray it be so…

Paul’s theology of the Cross

As I noted before, we were recently given the task of writing a 10-12 page paper on a theme within Paul’s epistles. Of the variety we had to choose from the list given to us (justification, eschatology, pneumatology, etc.) I chose to research Paul’s theology of the cross.

When I first began and started reading through all of Paul’s letters, marking when and how he spoke of the cross, I was quickly overwhelmed by how frequently he spoke of the cross and how he did so in a variety of manners. It doesn’t take long for one to discover that the center of Paul’s message was most certainly the cross of Christ.

So in studying the cross within Paul, I began to see the different accomplishments of the cross, whether it be the cross as the basis of our justification (Rom. 3:21-26), the cross as that which appeases or “propitiates” the wrath of God against sin (Rom. 3:25), the cross as the means through which we are reconciled back to God (2 Corinth. 5:18-21), as well as the cross as that through which we are redeemed from the curse of the law (Gal. 3:13), all the while clearly seeing in each the substitutionary nature of the atonement displayed. And while I’m leaving MUCH unsaid (I plan to post my paper in a bit), it becomes quite clear in studying what the cross accomplished how Paul came to the conclusion in 1 Corinthians that

…the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

In studying the cross within Paul’s epistles, I encountered the power of God through which we are saved. At the end of the day, when one truly sees that the exclusive ground for our salvation is the cross of Christ, in which the Son of God “became a curse for us ” (Gal. 3:13), how could anyone dare boast in anything other than the cross, and in anyone other than our Lord and Saviour. To boast in any other than the Lord…now that would foolishness…To boast in anything other than the cross…now that would be utter folly…

And so it begins…

Last Thursday, January 18th, wasn’t simply my birthday (in which I turned the big 23), but was also the first day of the 2007 Spring Semester here at good ol’ Southwestern. And as I’ve already been inundated with a tremendous amout of Greek over the weekend, I was forced to pause and reflect over the lessons learned from last semester…my first semester as a seminarian.

I begin with saying that one’s first semester of seminary is like opening your mouth right under a massive waterfall and trying to drink it all in…I think that describes it quite nicely, at least in my case. However, I wouldn’t see this statement as one with a negative connotation, but rather, one which shows the wealth of learning the seminary experience provides. While the semester was most certainly a rigourous one and the hours of sleep few and far between, it was a semester that truly grew me as a Christian.

If I learned anything last semester, it would be that I know absolutely nothing…that’s right…nothing. It was as if I was brought to the threshold of understanding what Paul meant when he exclaimed near the end of his letter to the Romans;

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways! (11:33)

As the scriptures were unfolded before me in each class, whether it be Greek, Church History, or in New Testament Survey, I continually saw the greatness of God, of how truly unfathomable his ways are.

Through this, I also so the pitfall of turning the study of theology into a mere “academic pursuit,” where one can be concerned with knowning the names, the positions, the arguments, the books, and so on and so forth…knowing all the “stuff” in a manner of speaking. Its an easy and dangerous slope to slip upon. Don’t get me wrong…such information is important to know and learn. However, it should never supercede ones desire to know God more through the study of the Scriptures, to obey the words of 2 Timothy 2:16;

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

Thus its my prayer this semester that God would continue to grow me in godliness through the study of His Word. I leave with a quote from David Wells, found within his introduction to the book, No Place for Truth, a quote that has given me a proper perspective for the upcoming semester…

…theology is a knowledge that belongs first and foremost to the people of God and that the proper and primary audience for theology is therefore the Church, not the learned guild…I say this because theology is not simply a philosophical reflection about the nature of things but is rather the cogent articulation of the knowledge of God. Its substance is not drawn from mere human reflection, no matter how brilliant, but from the biblical Word by which it is nurtured and disciplined. And its purpose is not primarily to participate in the conversation of the learned but to nurture the people of God. That is its nature and that is its purpose. It is here in the Church that the circle of knowing-the kind of knowing that has Christ as its object and his service as its end-is to be found. It is here, then, that the audience for theology is to be found. And so it is the community of faith that the theologian addresses fundamentally, because it is only by faith that the knowledge of God is first arrived at and only by faith that it is sustained.

Firsts…

While I have no desire to join the myriad of others who have composed “The Year 2006 in Review,” or something of the like, I feel avoiding such an article to be inevitable due to the garganteous amount of “firsts” or “beginnings” (which is probably the more appropiate term for my marriage, as its the only wedding/marriage I’m going to have) the year 2006 brought into my life.

To begin, 2006 will forever been known as the year when Zach Bowden was taken off the market (yeah…i’m embellishing a bit) as God graciously gave me the wonderful gift of Emily, my godly, gorgeous bride. (By the way, this list, if you want to call it that, isn’t in chronological order…I just saw it fit to put the wedding at the top…I’m sure you’d agree with that decision) While I’ve only been married for 3 months now, rest assured that God has taught me much through this covenant Emily and I entered into in October. As I plan to further chronicle the lessons I’ve learned from marriage thus far in blog entries yet to come, I’ll simply say that in these past months, while my pride and selfishness have become quite evident, God’s grace and mercy have only appeared all the more magnificent, as in my never-ending insufficiency, I have come to closer grips with the truth that God is eternally sufficient. It is my fervent prayer that God would mold me into the husband he would have me be, that Ephesians 5:25 would be seared upon my mind and heart:

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctfiy her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be whole and without blemish.”

Marriage is a wonderfully serious covenant, and, as my friends have told me, has been a wonderful agent in my sanctification.

Another “first” of note is that August of 2006 marked my first semester at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. While the semester was a rigourous one, as it rightly should be, I couldn’t be more thankful for the time God has granted us here. I look forward with great excitement to what is yet to be learned and the friendships that have yet to be made.

And finally, I’ll end with a “first” that I simply can’t fail to mention, that being that it was in the year 2006 that I was first introduced to the show to end all shows…24 (You know what I’m talking about Ched). I got hooked midway through season 5 and fortunately for me, my younger brother was employed at a video store thus enabling me to watch seasons 1-4 for free! Unfortunately, my addiction began during finals of my senior year of college so needless to say, sleep rarely ever came, as either had studying to do or more often than thought, was curious as to whether or not CTU would finally listen to Jack Bauer. Its been well said that “If everyone on 24 actually listened to Jack Bauer, the show would be called 12.”

Firsts….2006 was “chalk-full” of them, and I look forward to further meditating on the lessons learned, but also look forward to that which lies ahead.

Praying for progress…

My record as a member of the blogosphere is bleak at best, so I pray that as I once again attempt to pick up the proverbial pen, I’ll follow through with some semblance of consistency. In any matter, I hope to use this blog as a means to convey or articulate, as my friend Ched might say, that which God is teaching me, whether it be in marriage, seminary, daily happenings, or in the upcoming season of 24 (kidding…well…kind of).

This past year has brought many lessons to bear on my life, and I most certainly look forward to the road ahead…(especially since this year, I have a godly, gorgeous wife by my side!)