Author: Bryan Jay

My name is Bryan Jay and I have been teaching the Bible full-time for almost 30 years now. In 1992, I began pastoring a new church in Asheville, North Carolina, and in 1997, I moved with my family to Brazil where we lived and served for many years. Since that time, we have moved on to other places, continuing to teach the Word of God.

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Passion week meditation, part 1

Over the next three days, I want to post some thoughts on the death of Christ.

Because my access to the internet is limited, I will probably not be able to post anything on Resurrection Day, but I pray that anyone who may run across these thoughts will be better prepared to appreciate the joy of Resurrection Day by meditating on the tremendous grace displayed in the death of Christ as our substitute.

As God’s people, I believe we all desire to truly love one another.  We want to be a community of selfless, giving, servant-hearted brothers and sisters in Christ.  As God’s people we also long to love lost people with God’s love.  We want to be compassionate and caring and earnest in our love for those who do not know Jesus the way we know him–as Savior and Lord.

As God’s people, we know that these desires are within us because of what God did for us through the cross of Christ.  And we know that these desires can only be fulfilled in us because of what God did for us through the cross of Christ.  

We understand that love for one another flows from the love that God has shown us at the cross.  But isn’t there often a disconnect between knowing this in our heads and experiencing it in our daily lives?  What exactly is the connection between God’s loving act in sending Jesus to be our Savior, and the loving acts that we desire to see manifested in our relationships with one another as believers and with the lost people around us?

As we celebrate passion week, I want us to meditate together on the Scripture and ask the Holy Spirit to help us “connect the dots” between God’s love for us shown at Calvary, and our love for each other shown in our life together as a community of believers and in our evangelism of unbelievers.

Basically the dots can be connected with this truth:  We can only love with the love that we have received.  We must be experiencing the love of God in our lives if we hope to love those around us.  And the Scriptures are clear that the way we experience the love of God in our lives is through considering the supreme manifestation of that love at Calvary.

Here are two important Scriptures that point to this truth: 1 John 4:9 and Rom. 5:8. 

1 John 4:9  In this was the love of God manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world…10 In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 

God’s love was “manifested” among us when he sent Jesus to die as our substitute.  Therefore, when we meditate on what Jesus did for us at the cross, it is a means of experiencing personally the love of God that was manifested at the cross of Christ

And Romans 5:8

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  

Here Paul says that God “shows” us his love in THIS:  “Christ died for us.”  It is Christ’s death on the cross that shows us God’s love.  This is why the Lord Jesus left us the sacrament of Communion.    If we want a present experience of the love of God for us, we should consider the cross of Christ, because it is in the sacrifice of His Son that God DEMONSTRATES (present tense) his love for us.

However, even understanding this and doing our best to apply it, there are still two barriers that often keep us from experiencing the love of God when we take Communion or whenever we think about what Jesus did for us at the cross.  

1.  We fail to understand the magnitude of our debt.

2.  We fail to understand the magnitude of Jesus’ payment.

Obviously, since Jesus paid our debt these two barriers are related, and therefore, the more we see the magnitude of our debt, the more we will understand what Jesus did for us.  Likewise, the more we see the magnitude of what Jesus experienced as our substitute, the more we will understand what we owed.

Imagine that you are a small business owner whose accountant comes to you and informs you that you owe a huge amount in fines, taxes and penalties.  But out of his generosity, he pays everything you owe and then comes to you and says, “You know, you had a huge debt, but don’t worry about it, I paid it for you.”  

If that is all he says, you may think that he paid just a few dollars, and you may very well appreciate his generosity.   But there are two ways that you can begin to appreciate better what he has done for you.  First of all, he could show you all the paperwork in which the fines and penalties and taxes are listed.  You could look at each one individually and after awhile begin to get a sense of the magnitude of the financial problem you were faced with.  Secondly, he could show you his bank account and as you begin to add up the payments of everything that he had paid for you and see that it cost him everything he had, you would understand the magnitude of what he had done for you.

Applying this to our spiritual debt, we can do the same thing.  First of all, we need to consider our debt, and then we need to consider the payment that Jesus made for us.  Over the next two days, I want to post some thoughts on these two things.

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Bible Study Theology

James 1:12-15 The Nature of Temptation

Here’s a difficult question that’s worth thinking about:   What is the difference between the temptation that Jesus experienced and the temptation that we experience?  A good answer to this question will help us deal with the temptation that we experience.  Here are some of the biblical texts that we must consider in order to think this through:

Hebrews 4:14-16

14 Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. 16 Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Matthew 4:1-11

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” 4 But he answered, “It is written,

“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple 6 and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written,

“‘He will command his angels concerning you,’

and

“‘On their hands they will bear you up,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”

7 Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” 8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,

“‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”

11 Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.

James 1:12-15

12 Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. 13 Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. 14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.  15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

Here are some of the questions that make this issue difficult.  

1) Jesus was clearly tempted by Satan, and it was a real temptation.  The Hebrews passage makes this crystal clear.   But Jesus is God and the James passage says that God cannot be tempted by evil.  How can those two passages be reconciled?

2) The James passage says that each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Some versions, like the NIV and KJV translate “desire” with “evil desire” or “lust” (respectively).  The word in Greek is epithymia and almost always refers to evil desires, so these translations are accurate.  But Jesus, being sinless, would have had no evil, lustful desires luring him and enticing him.  Does James then point at a kind of temptation that affects us, but that did not affect Christ.  If so, how can this be reconciled with the Hebrews passage that says that Jesus was tempted in every respect… as we are?

Please note that I am not trying to pit any one scripture against the other.   I am trying to look at what God is telling us in these diverse passages to get at a more complete understanding of what temptation is and how Jesus, our great high priest, is able to help us with it.

I have some thoughts on this that I want to share in a future post, but I thought it would be interesting to pose the question first to see if anyone who may come across this blog would have some thoughts.  Feel free to leave comments.  Note that I must approve the comments before they will appear.  Our family is currently in the middle of a big move, so I may not get back to this right away.

Categories
Ministry

The folly of repressing religious freedom

What follows is a line of logic that may come in useful some day if you are challenged as to why it is not wrong to “proselytize.”  

What is behind the prohibition of sharing one’s religious beliefs with another?  If you were to ask someone who holds this position that “proselytism” should be prohibited, I can only think of two different ways that they could logically respond.  1) “Your religious belief is invalid, wrong, misguided, inaccurate (use whatever word you want) therefore it is unethical for you to share it with others since you are leading them astray.  They must be protected from your wrong belief.”  The other possibility would be, 2)  “All religious beliefs are valid and therefore it is unethical of you to try to destroy another person’s valid belief system through the imposition of your belief system.

The answer to the first objection is as follows:  If you see my religious beliefs as wrong and yours as right, then you have an ethical obligation to convince me and others of your beliefs.  Ethically, you MUST try to proselytize me.  If you are going to hold to a position that not all religious beliefs are valid, but some are, or maybe even only one is, then you must admit the ethical necessity of each religious system being allowed to present its claims.  Freedom to “proselytize” is demanded by the position that there is only one or even a few belief systems that are valid.

Unrelated to this line of logic, but also a valid response to the first objection is the idea that what is true will ultimately prevail.  This is Gamaliel’s argument in the book of Acts.  “If this teaching is not of God, it will fail anyway, so let them “proselytize”.  If it IS of God, then you will only find yourselves resisting God.”

In my thinking, the reponse to the second objection is even easier and much more obvious.  If all religious beliefs are valid, then there should be absolutely no ethical objection to allowing each individual to choose whatever valid religious belief he so chooses.  Obviously this would not include a coerced change of beliefs, but although often accused of coercion, no truly Christian evangelism even comes close to this.

I realize that pure logic will never lead to religious freedom to share one’s religious beliefs because there is an active spiritual resistance to God’s rule behind all prohibitions of religious freedom, but the above arguments might be useful at some point.