High Purpose of Perplexing Trial - To Know God

J.I. Packer in chapter 21 of Knowing God:

What is the purpose of grace? Primarily, to restore our relationship with God. When God lays the foundation of this restored relationship, by forgiving our sins as we trust his Son, he does so in order that henceforth we and he may live in fellowship. And what he does in renewing our nature is intended to make us capable of, and actually to lead us into, the exercise of love, trust, delight, hope and obedience Godward - those acts which, from our side, make up the reality of fellowship with God, who is constantly making himself known
to us. This is what all the work of grace aims at - an ever deeper knowledge of God, and an ever closer fellowship with him. Grace is God drawing us sinners closer and closer to himself.
 How does God in grace prosecute this purpose? Not by shielding us from assault by the world, the flesh and the devil, nor by protecting us from burdensome and frustrating circumstances, nor yet by shielding us from troubles created by our own temperament and psychology; but rather by exposing us to all these things, so as to overwhelm us with a sense of our own inadequacy, and to drive us to cling to him more closely. This is the ultimate reason, from our standpoint, why God fills our lives with troubles and perplexities of one sort and another: it is to ensure that we shall learn to hold him fast. The reason why the Bible spends so much of its time reiterating that God is a strong rock, a firm defense, and a sure refuge and help for the weak, is that God spends so much of his time bringing home to us that we are weak, both mentally and morally, and dare not trust ourselves to find, or to follow, the right road.
When we walk along a clear road feeling fine, and someone takes our arm to help us, as likely as not we shall impatiently shake him off; but when we are caught in rough country in the dark, with a storm getting up and our strength spent, and someone takes our arm to help us, we shall thankfully lean on him. And God wants us to feel that our way through life is rough and perplexing, so that we may learn thankfully to lean on him. Therefore he takes steps to drive us out of self-confidence to trust in himself - in the classical scriptural phrase for the secret of the godly life, to "wait on the Lord."...We need God to make us realists about both ourselves and him.

Perplexities and confusions fade when put in this perspective. Through these the Lord's simple call is to "be still and know that I am God." (Psalm 46)

Outside of Christ there is nothing worth knowing, and all who by faith perceive what he is like have grasped all the immensity of heavenly benefits. - John Calvin (Institutes of the Christian Religion)

photo: Hamburg, Germany 2007 

Guidance: More About His Glory Than Our Security

While dejunking/organizing on Monday night, I listened to a couple audio chapters of Knowing God by J.I. Packer. It's a great book to re-read (or listen). I'm doing the exact same thing tonight - it's great! This is from the end of chapter 20:

Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us his way, that we may tread it; he wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensuring that, whatever happens, whatever mistakes we may make, we shall come safely home. Slippings and strayings there will be, no doubt, but the everlasting arms are beneath us; we shall be caught, rescued, restored. This is God's promise; this is how good he is. 
Thus it appears that the right context for discussing guidance is one of confidence in the God who will not let us ruin our souls. Our concern, therefore, in this discussion should be more for his glory than for our security - for that is already taken care of. And our self-distrust, while keeping us humble, must not cloud the joy with which we lean on "the Lord Protector" - our faithful covenant God. - J.I. Packer

Knowing God Personally

J.I. Packer on page 39 of Knowing God:

Knowing God is a matter of personal dealing, as is all direct acquaintance with personal beings. Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him as he takes knowledge of you. Knowing about him is a necessary precondition of trusting in him ("how could they have faith in one they had never heard of?" [Rom 10:14 NEB]), but the width of our knowledge about him is no gauge of the depth of our knowledge of him.
...If the decisive factor was notional correctness, then obviously the most learned biblical scholars would know God better than anyone else. But it is not; you can have all the right notions in your head without ever tasting in your heart the realities to which they refer; and a simple Bible reader and sermon hearer who is full of the Holy Spirit will develop a far deeper acquaintance with his God and Savior than a more learned scholar who is content with being theologically correct. The reason is that the former will deal with God regarding the practical application of truth to his life, whereas the latter will not.

May God give us much grace to be men and women who "deal with God regarding the practical application of truth" to our lives and not simply have all "the right notions" in our heads without it taking control of our hearts. What joy and peace there is in knowing God in this way! 

Father, please send your Spirit to open our hearts up to your word in our lives each day.

"Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous thing out of your law." - Psalm 119:18 ESV

photo: July 15, 2007; Tuscany, Italy

Thou Our Guide

I had some open time this evening and picked up my copy of Knowing God, which I have still yet to finish. My marker, where I last left off, was in the chapter called "Thou Our Guide." Pages 239-240 contain the following:

No Simple Answers

But it does not follow that right guidance will be vindicated as such by a trouble-free course thereafter. Here is another cause of deep perplexity for Christian people. They have sought guidance and believe it has been given. They have set off along the road which God seemed to indicate. And now, as a direct result, they have run into a crop of new problems which otherwise would not have arisen - isolation, criticism, abandonment by friends, practical frustrations of all sorts. At once they grow anxious. They recall the prophet Jonah who, when told to go east and preach at Ninevah, took a ship going north to Tarshish instead, "away from the Lord" (Jon 1:3), and was caught in a storm, humiliated before unbelievers, thrown overboard and swallowed by a great fish - in order to bring Jonah to his senses. Is their own present experience of the rough side of life (they ask themselves) a sign from God that they are themselves like Jonah, off track, following a path of self-will rather than the way of God?

It may be so, and the wise person will take occasion from his new troubles to check his original guidance very carefully. Trouble should always be treated as a call to consider one's ways. But trouble is not necessarily a sign of being off track at all; for as the Bible declares in general that "many are the afflictions of the righteous" (Ps 34:19 KJV), so it teaches in particular that following God's guidance regularly leads to upsets and distresses which one would otherwise have escaped. Examples abound. God guided Israel by means of a fiery and cloudy pillar that went before them (Ex. 13:21-22); yet the way by which he led them involved the nerve-shredding cliffhanger of the Red Sea crossing, long days without water and meat in "that vast and dreadful desert" (Deut 1:19), and bloody battles with Amalek, Sihon and Og (Ex 17:8; Num 21:21-23) - and we can understand, if not excuse, Israel's constant grumbling (see Ex 14:10-12, 16:3, Num 11:4-6, 14:2-3, 20:2-5, 21:4-5).

Again, Jesus' disciples were twice caught by night in bad weather on the Sea of Galilee (Mk 4:37; 6:48), and both times the reason why they were there was the command of Jesus himself (see Mk 4:35; 6:45).

Again, the apostle Paul crossed to Greece "concluding" from his dream of the man of Macedonia "that God had called us to preach the gospel to them" (Acts 16:10), and before long he was in jail at Philippi. Later he "resolved in the Spirit to . . . go to Jerusalem" (19:21 RSV), and told the Ephesian elders whom he met on his way, "I am going to Jerusalem, bound in the Spirit, not knowing what shall befall me there; except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me" (20:22-23 RSV). So it proved to be: Paul found trouble on the grand scale through following divine guidance.

Nor is this all. For a final example and proof of the truth that following God's guidance brings trouble, look at the life of the Lord Jesus himself. No human life has ever been so completely guided by God, and no human being has ever qualified so comprehensively for the description "a man of sorrows." Divine guidance set Jesus at a distance from his family and fellow townsmen, brought him into conflict with all the nation's leaders, religious and civil, and led finally to betrayal, arrest and the cross. What more can Christians expect, while they abide in the will of God? "A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master . . . If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household!" (Mt 10:24-25).

By every human standard of reckoning, the cross was a waste - the waste of a young life, a prophet's influence, a leader's potential. We know the secret of its meaning and achievement only from God's own statements. Similarly, the Christian's guided life may appear as a waste - as with Paul, spending years in prison because he followed God's guidance to Jerusalem, when he might otherwise have been evangelizing Europe the whole time. Nor does God always tell us the why and wherefore of the frustrations and losses which are part and parcel of the guided life.

But I am glad for what he does tell us. He will never leave us nor forsake us. He is working all things for our good. He only gives good gifts to his children. If he is for us, who can be against us? In him is perfect peace, and at his right hand are pleasures forevermore. We can hope in him and rejoice! Strength rises for those who wait on the Lord.

I praise and marvel at a God of grace and peace who extends the same to his children.

photo: Chicago; 6/11/11 

Daily in Debt to Grace

Today I listened to a message given at the Worship God 06 conference by Mark Mitchell called Sanctification through Serving. It was a helpful message, and I wanted to type out two of the quotes he used in his conclusion.

J.C. Ryle (from Holiness):

The holiest actions of the holiest saints that ever lived are all more or less full of defects and imperfections. They are either wrong in their motives or defective in their performance, and in themselves are nothing better than splendid sins deserving God's wrath and condemnation. The only righteousness in which we can appear before God is the righteousness of another, even the perfect righteousness of our substitute and representative Jesus Christ the Lord. For all this, however, the Bible distinctly teaches that the holy actions of a sanctified man, though imperfect, are pleasing in the sight of God. . . . He regards them as members of his own dear Son, and for his sake wherever there is a single eye he is well pleased.

J.I. Packer (from Knowing God):

There is unspeakable comfort - the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates - in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.

There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that he sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow humans do not see (and I am glad!), and that he sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought of that, for some unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to realize that purpose.

I want to grow to understand the gospel more and more in my days and moments. I want to see my justification more clearly, so that I see the reality of grace in my sanctification as well. I see so much of my failures, limitations, and sins. But God sees even more; he sees it all. And knowing all, he still purchased me and loves me and is committed to doing his work in me. It is comforting to know that when I am tired out from the hard work of sanctification and growing in Christ, God is not. I work only because he works. While my hold on him fails, his hold on me never fails. He is the one who came to seek and save me, and he is still the one who initiates towards me.

Oh to grace how great a debtor, daily I'm constrained to be.

photo: Agape Farm - Mt. Union, PA 2010