On Sunday we heard Jesus refer to his followers’ relationship with him as a participation in him, specifically a participation in his death.  When we become followers of Christ, we truly receive him, and our identity is altered.  The events that formed Jesus’ destiny—his death, resurrection, and ascension—must now inform the calculations and priorities for our own lives.

For example, the death that Jesus died, he died to sin.  So (Paul says) we cannot live any longer in sin because, in baptism, we participate in that death.  To “live in sin” sounds intentionally general, as if any act or atmosphere that smacks of sin must be left behind.

But I want to say something of Jesus’ resurrection life that we have shared in.  The life that we now live, because of our baptism into Christ’s resurrection, we live toward God.  Who we are cannot be made sense of apart from this union.  So also what we do cannot be fathomed apart from this union in Christ.  And this is what we do—we live toward God.

People of EBC, I highlight this for you: there is a beautiful consistency in more and more abandoning yourself to the mission of God.  Your life is bound up with Christ, so in a sense there is no balance that needs be maintained.  You don’t have to think in terms of a little spirituality, a little sport, a little work, a little gardening—all towards a trendy idea of holistic living!  The broken body and spilt blood of Christ have set us free from fads and other lifestyles to an all-encompassing, focused service toward God.

You waste no time in growing in the grace and knowledge of Christ.  There is no energy mis-spent in serving Christ’s body.  For you, devotion isn’t superfluous, but in your make-up.  Your endeavor to win more people to him, to enjoin others in entering into the benefits of the Gospel, is more than noble, but even appropriate!

I could elaborate on what this life toward God doesn’t necessarily entail: 1) vocational service 2) no space or freedom to cultivate and create ‘on our own’ 3) the end of mirth and start of woodenness.

I could dwell on some sad and pedestrian facts: Some dance around an engrossed commitment to God.  Some pause in the shallows and only imagine what it is to navigate the deep.  In the life toward God, the players are few; the sidelines are full.

There are further elaborations to be explored; there are reasons to not settle for anything less; but here is one big, evangelical reason to plunge into the life toward God: THIS IS WHAT YOU DO.

You’ll enjoy this: Following is a letter written in the early 1800s by a ten-year-old boy and his sister.  The letter was sent to the natives of modern-day Sri Lanka through a missionary who was going to the island.

HT: Doug Wilson

Dear Heathen:

The Lord Jesus Christ hath promised that the time shall come when all the ends of the earth shall be His kingdom. And God is not a man that He should lie nor the son of man that He should repent. And if this was promised by a Being who cannot lie, why do you not help it to come sooner by reading the Bible, and attending to the words of your teachers, and loving God, and, renouncing your idols, take Christianity into your temples? And soon there will not be a Nation, no, not a space of ground as large as a footstep, that will want a missionary. My sister and myself have, by small self-denials, procured two dollars which are enclosed in this letter to buy tracts and Bibles to teach you.

Archibald Alexander Hodge, and Mary Eliz. Hodge,
Friends of the Heathen.

(June 23, 1833. A letter to the “heathen” from ten-year-old A.A. Hodge and his sister Mary Elizabeth, given to J.R. Eckard, a Princeton Seminary graduate who was to go to Ceylon. Quoted in Princeton Seminary: Faith and learning 1812-1868, v. 1, p. 193)

HT: Ray Ortlund

Horatius Bonar, writing the preface to John Gillies’ Accounts of Revival, proposes that men useful to the Holy Spirit for revival have been marked in these nine ways:

1. They were in earnest about the great work on which they had entered: “They lived and labored and preached like men on whose lips the immortality of thousands hung.”

2. They were bent on success: “As warriors, they set their hearts on victory and fought with the believing anticipation of triumph, under the guidance of such a Captain as their head.”

3. They were men of faith: “They knew that in due season they should reap, if they fainted not.”

4. They were men of labor: “Their lives are the annals of incessant, unwearied toil of body and soul; time, strength, substance, health, all they were and possessed they freely offered to the Lord, keeping back nothing, grudging nothing.”

5. They were men of patience: “Day after day they pursued what, to the eye of the world, appeared a thankless and fruitless round of toil.”

6. They were men of boldness and determination: “Timidity shuts many a door of usefulness and loses many a precious opportunity; it wins no friends, while it strengthens every enemy. Nothing is lost by boldness, nor gained by fear.”

7. They were men of prayer: “They were much alone with God, replenishing their own souls out of the living fountain, that out of them might flow to their people rivers of living water.”

8. They were men whose doctrines were of the most decided kind: “Their preaching seems to have been of the most masculine and fearless kind, falling on the audience with tremendous power. It was not vehement, it was not fierce, it was not noisy; it was far too solemn to be such; it was massive, weighty, cutting, piercing, sharper than a two-edged sword.”

9. They were men of solemn deportment and deep spirituality of soul: “No frivolity, no flippancy . . . . The world could not point to them as being but slightly dissimilar from itself.”

More from the dead guys!  (though this one here is propped up by one of the living).  Jonathan Edwards wrote Religious Affections to argue that affections—‘the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul’—were not only permissible, but actually vital in responding well to God.

Sam Storms recently offered a modern vernacular paraphrase of RA (Signs of the Spirit), where he closely follows Edwards’s argument, and, when possible, quotes him at length.  So, how goes your private prayers?  Let Edwards help you:

The sort of religion or spirituality that pleases God is one that consists largely in ‘vigorous and lively actings of the inclination and will of the soul, or the fervent exercises of the heart.’  God is displeased with weak, dull, and lifeless inclinations.  Scripture speaks often and with divine approval of earnest and fervent affections of the soul (see Rom. 12:11; Deut. 10:12; 6:4-5; 30:6).

Spirituality is actually of little benefit to anyone if not characterized by lively and powerful affections.  Nothing is so antithetical to true religion as lukewarmness.  Consider those many biblical texts in which our relationship to God is compared to ‘running, wrestling or agonizing for a great prize or crown, and fighting with strong enemies that seek our lives, and warring as those that by violence take a city or kingdom.’

And an application for Sundays at 10:30:

Therefore, when we think of how public worship should be constructed and what methods should be employed in the praise of God and the edification of his people, ‘such means are to be desired, as have much of a tendency to move the affections.  Such books, and such a way of preaching the Word, and administration of ordinances, and such a way of worshiping God in prayer, and singing praises, is much to be desired, as has a tendency deeply to affect the hearts of those who attend those means.’

When people object that certain styles of public worship seem especially chosen for their capacity to awaken and intensify and express the affections of the heart, they should be told that such is precisely the God-ordained purpose of worship.  What they fear—namely, the heightening and deepening of the heart’s desire and love for God, and the expansion and increase of the soul’s delight and joy in God, what they typically call “emotionalism” or even “manipulation”—is the very goal of worship itself.  For God is most glorified in his people when their hearts are most satisfied (i.e., when they are most “affected with joy) in him.