Category: Cross-Centered Life

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Cross-Centered Life Theology

Importance of the Lord’s Supper

To identify the central event in all of human history is not difficult.  Indeed, the same event is not only at the center of human history, but is central in the universe and even in eternity.  this event is, of course, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  

It is impossible to over-emphasize the importance of Jesus’ death on the cross.  It is impossible to do too much to keep Jesus’ death central in our thinking, in our daily living, in our conversation and relationship with others, in our service to and worship of God.  

And if it is impossible to make too much of Jesus’ death in our individual living, how much more so is it impossible to make too much of his death in our corporate life together as the people of God.  Without Jesus’ death, there would be no church.  There would be no worship.  There would be no sermons on family life, or money management, or dealing with conflicts, or any of the manifold things we talk about in church.  

I believe we have a sinful tendency to marginalize the death of Christ.  Because of the sin that still indwells us, we tend to drift away from the gospel.  When we first come to Christ, the gospel is right in the forefront of our minds.  We see Jesus crucified in our place, as our substitute, taking upon himself the punishment that we deserve.  We see him as our wonderful Savior and we overflow with love to him.

But as time goes on, our tendency is to treat Jesus and what he did for us at the cross like a movie ticket stub.  When you go to the movies, you pay to get in and they give you a paper ticket stub.  Without that stub, you can’t get past the usher into the theatre to see the movie you want to see.  That stub is your ticket in.  But once you show it to the usher and go into the movie theatre, what do you do with it?  You put it in your pocket and you forget about it.  

That can be a picture of how we think about the death of Christ.  It is our “ticket in”.  We understand that without what Jesus did for us on the cross, we will not be admitted into heaven.  We understand that without his death, we can not be adopted as God’s children and enjoy the privileges of belonging to his family, but the more distant we get from that date when we first entered the family of God, the easier it is to forget the centrality of Jesus’ death on the cross to everything that we do.

Our Lord, knowing our tendency to drift from what should be at the center, gave us, his people, two sacraments to help us keep Jesus’ death constantly before us.  The first sacrament, baptism, is meant to be performed only once.  It pictures for us our entry into the family of God.  Through our identification with Christ through faith, we are united with him in his death and resurrection.  But the second sacrament, the Lord’s Supper, Jesus told us to repeat.  He said, “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Cor. 11:26).  

The reason for two sacraments is that the cross of Jesus is not just our “ticket in”.  It IS that, but it is so much more.  Jesus’ death on the cross that atoned for our sins and propitiated the wrath of God is the source of every single good thing that God has ever given us or the world.  It is the foundation upon which a sinful world and sinful people have any basis for relating to God at all.  As I said before, it is at the center of everything.

For this reason, we gather together often to remember Jesus’ death on the cross.  We come together to pause and think about what he did.  If we only think of Jesus’ death as our “ticket in” we will very soon drift back to a dependence on our own righteousness to earn us a right standing with God.  But when we look often to the cross and what Jesus did there, we will mature in our faith and grow in our relationship to God.  There is a powerful, sanctifying effect that comes from meditating on the cross of Jesus Christ.  That is what we come together at the Lord’s table for.  

I believe that every time we come to the Lord’s table, we should focus on some aspect of what Jesus did for us there.  We can never exhaust the tremendous store of meaning that there is in Jesus’ cross.  Every time we come together to eat the Lord’s Supper together, it should be looking at another facet of the beautiful diamond that is the work of Jesus on our behalf at the cross.  Here are just a few of those facets that come to mind.  

When we meditate on the cross, we can consider the SERVANT-NATURE of our Savior.  Jesus himself said, “the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matt. 20:28).  Isn’t it amazing that the God whom we had rebelled against and scorned would stoop to serve us, his enemies?  

When we meditate on the cross, we can consider the OBEDIENCE of our Savior.  Jesus saved us by obeying in our place.  When we were disobedient to the Creator’s commands, Jesus came in our place and said, “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God…” and the author of Hebrews goes on to say that “…by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”   

When we meditate on the cross, we can consider the FORGIVENESS that Jesus provides through his death.  We can put ourselves in the place of the repentant thief and know that we will be in Paradise because we have repented and looked to the Savior.  We can hear him say to US:  “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”

When we meditate on the cross, we can consider the REDEMPTION that Jesus purchased with his death.  We were enslaved to sin, but we were ransomed, not with perishable things like silver and gold, “…but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” (1 Pet. 2:19).

When we meditate on the cross, we can see the SERIOUSNESS OF OUR SIN.  Nowhere do we more fully grasp what we are guilty of than when we look at the cross of Jesus.  It is there that we see our sin, because “God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor. 5:21) We see our sin at the cross because as Isaiah 53:6 says, “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” 

When we meditate on the cross, we can see the JUSTICE of God.  As God himself declared to Moses when he revealed to him his holy name:  “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty…”  

But God, who does not clear the guilty, is able to say in 1 John 1:9 that “he is faithful and JUST to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  He is JUST to forgive us our sins–because he has already judged our sins in Christ, and therefore it is right and just for him to forgive us.

And finally, when we meditate on the cross of Christ, we can see the LOVE OF GOD for us.  This facet is worth quoting several scriptures…

John 15:12-13  “…love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.”

John 3:16  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

And 1 John 3:16, and 4:9-10 show us HOW God, in his love, gave his only Son… not just in the incarnation, but at the cross:  “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us…”  “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  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.”

For those of us who are married, our unions are meant to display the love that Jesus showed us when he died for us.  Ephesians 5:25 “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

Unless we meditate on the cross and Jesus’ death there as our substitute, we will not be able to comprehend the depths of his love for us, his children.  We were, Ephesians 2 says, “dead in our transgressions and sins… following the course of this world…following the prince of the power of the air… we were by nature children of wrath….         BUT GOD, being rich in mercy, because of the GREAT LOVE with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.   TOGETHER with Christ, he says, pointing to the fact that Jesus shared our death, so that we might together with him, be made alive.

And perhaps the most incredible passage displaying the love that Christ showed us at the cross is Romans 5: 6-8:  “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will scarcely die for a righteous person–though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die–but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

These are just a few of the many facets of this beautiful diamond which is the death of Christ on our behalf.  So every time you eat the bread, which represents his body given for us, and every time you drink the cup, which represents his life-blood which flowed out of his body for us, remember that the cross of Jesus isn’t just your “ticket in” to the Family of God, to be shoved into your pocket and forgotten.  It is the spring from which flows your entire relationship with God.  Meditate on it often, and not just on Communion Sunday!

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Bible Study Cross-Centered Life Sermons Theology

Luke 7:36-50 Forgiveness and worship (part 2)

In an earlier post, I made some observations on Luke 7:36-50, which tells the story of a sinful woman who worshiped Jesus by anointing his feet while he was eating at the home of Simon the pharisee.  In that post, I focused on the fact that an experience of forgiveness is key to having a right heart in worship.  

Now you may be thinking, If I need to have an experience of forgiveness in order to worship with a right heart, how does that happen?  Do I need to go out and do something wrong so that I can come to Jesus for forgiveness in order to be a true worshiper?  Or do I just keep looking back to that day when I became a Christian and received the forgiveness of my sins?  

Well, lets examine the case of this sinful woman.  How did she experience the forgiveness of Jesus that filled her with such love and enabled her to be a true worshiper.

I think the answer is in v. 48.  After speaking to Simon, Jesus turns to the woman and simply says, “Your sins are forgiven.” The woman experienced forgiveness as she came into Jesus’ presence and worshiped him.  If she had not been there at his feet worshiping, she would not have heard him turn to her and say:  Your sins are forgiven.

Now think about this:  Jesus has just explained to Simon that the reason this woman has honored him so beautifully is because she has had a deep experience of his forgiveness.  And then he turns to her and says, “your sins are forgiven.”  

Doesn’t that seem strange and out of place to you?  Aren’t we caught in some circular reasoning here?  If she had already been forgiven and this was the source of her worshipful heart, why does Jesus say, “Your sins are forgiven.”

It may sound convoluted, but not only is an experience of forgiveness the  SOURCE of a right heart in worship, it is also the RESULT of a right heart in worship.  We can only worship the Lord with a right heart as we experience his forgiveness, causing us to overflow with gratitude and worship.  And it is when we worship the Lord and focus on the forgiveness that he has objectively given us that we experience subjectively that forgiveness.

Here is what I believe is happening:  The woman had come to Jesus to worship him, to honor him and to show her love to him.  She came because she knew who he was.  She knew he was the friend of sinners.  We don’t have any details of how she knew who Jesus was, but she knew that she was forgiven.

Her actions go beyond just repentance and seeking forgiveness.  They are the actions (as Jesus himself pointed out) of someone who had been forgiven much.  And yet it is as she worships him that she experiences that forgiveness. 

You and I as Christians have been forgiven by the Lord Jesus.  We know what it is to be forgiven.  I’m sure that if I were to ask any solid christian he or she would say, “I know that my sins are forgiven”  We know that Jesus died as our substitute.  He was punished for our sins.  He paid the price for our sins out of his great love for us.  

But what a difference between having your sins forgiven, and being in Jesus’ presence, worshiping him, and hearing him say (and say often), “I paid for your sins because I love you.  Your sins are forgiven, Bryan!” If we are never in his presence in worship, we’ll never hear those words.  If this woman had not come to Jesus in worship, her heart filled with love because of his forgiveness, she would have never heard, “Your sins are forgiven!” 

When we experience Jesus and his forgiveness for the first time, that should cause us to want to get back in his presence again.  And when we are back in his presence again, we will be in the presence of the Holy Son of God.  As we meditate on him and who he is and his holiness, we will experience all over again that forgiveness that he is constantly pouring out on us because of his cross.

It is when you are in his presence in true worship that you experience his forgiveness.  You are already forgiven, but to be a true worshiper, you must experience that forgiveness in his presence.

Why do we struggle with being true worshipers?  It isn’t because we haven’t been forgiven. And it isn’t because we haven’t been forgiven a great enough debt.  Our sin debt is every bit as great as this woman’s.

I believe we struggle with being true worshipers of Jesus because unlike this woman, we do not come often enough into the presence of the friend of sinners.  We are so busy with other things, we have no time for worship.  Or we come as Simon did, trying to impress him with who we are or what we’ve done.  We try to come across as such great worshipers.  Instead of just waiting in his presence, meditating on the tremendous privilege that is ours to even be there at all.

Categories
Bible Study Cross-Centered Life Sermons

Luke 7:36-50 Forgiveness and worship (part 1)

Luke 7:36-50 tells the story of a sinful woman who worshiped Jesus by anointing his feet while he was eating at the home of Simon the pharisee.   The woman is an example of one who truly worships the Lord Jesus, as she wipes her tears from his feet with her hair.  Simon is an example of failure to worship.  What does this scripture passage teach us about how we can worship the Lord with a right heart?

The main thrust of Luke’s account of this incident is that experiencing God’s forgiveness is an important key to having a right heart in worship.

 

The contrast between the sinful woman and Simon

Both Simon and the woman were offering something to Jesus.  Simon was offering the meal.  The woman, on the other hand, was there to offer Jesus the alabaster flask of ointment.  But as the story plays out, the contrast in Simon’s heart and the woman’s heart is striking, and what reveals this difference is what happened that night that neither one of them intended.

When the woman brought her alabaster flask, I don’t believe that she intended to break down in Jesus’ presence, weeping.  This wasn’t some orchestrated performance.  But there she was–a “sinner”–in the presence of the man who had come to be called “the friend of sinners”, and she couldn’t contain herself!  And the love in her heart was laid bare as she worshiped the Lord Jesus.

Simon as well never intended to have to deal with the presence of a sinful woman at his dinner party doing something that he considered scandalous.  And even though his heart isn’t publicly displayed like the woman’s, his thoughts reveal what is in him.  Verse 39.  He’s thinking:  If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.

The difference between these two hearts is in their FOCUS.  The woman is focused on Jesus.  She is in his presence.  She loves him–“the friend of sinners.”  She isn’t thinking… “is he going to like my offering?”  “Am I doing this right?”  “Will he be impressed with me?”  No, she is broken.  She is overwhelmed by the mercy and kindness that characterizes the person of Jesus in his relationships with people like her.

Simon, on the other hand, is focused on himself.  “Jesus should know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him.”  He is unconsciously making a comparison between himself and the woman:  “I am not the sort of person that this woman is.”  “Jesus should know that she is a “sinner”.  In other words, “I am not a sinner,” at least not in the sense that this woman is!”  

Both Simon and the woman brought an offering, but one had a heart focused on Jesus, the other was focused on himself.

I think we all know how easy it is to perform an act of worship, whether it is in a worship service at church, in our personal devotional time, or some other religious activity, and our focus is not on Jesus, but on ourselves; and even when we are analyzing and criticizing others, our focus is still on us.


The source of a right heart in worship:  An experience of forgiveness

Jesus reveals what is in Simon’s heart by telling a three-sentence parable in verses 41-42.

A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?

 Simon, apparently oblivious to what Jesus is doing, answers correctly, “The one who was forgiven more debt.”

Jesus with this parable is showing Simon the source of a right heart in worship.  And the meaning of the parable is clear: 

The greater the experience of forgiveness,

the greater the love that will be shown to the forgiver. 

We know from other Scripture that Jesus is not comparing here the SIN DEBT of Simon with the sin debt of the woman.  Rom. 3 says it over and over:  “No one understands…no one seeks for God.  ALL have turned aside; together they have become worthless…for ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  Simon is not less a sinner than the woman is.  If that were the case, Jesus wouldn’t confront him at all about his heart problem, Simon would simply be worshiping in proportion to what he had been forgiven.  

What Jesus is comparing here is the EXPERIENCE of forgiveness.  Both Simon and the woman owe an infinite sin debt to God.  The difference is that the woman has seen her sin and received Jesus’ forgiveness, and Simon hasn’t seen it!

Look also at what Jesus says in v. 47

Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven–for she loved much.  But he who is forgiven little, loves little.

Jesus isn’t saying here that the woman earned forgiveness through her great display of love to Jesus.  That’s what it sounds like in most English versions.  But Jesus said the exact opposite in his parable.  The love that the debtor showed to the moneylender was because he had been forgiven the debt, not something that he did to earn the forgiveness.

One author paraphrased Jesus’ words this way:  She was forgiven many, many sins, and so she is very, very grateful.  The greater the experience of forgiveness, the greater the love that will be shown to the forgiver.

Both Simon and the woman have brought something to Jesus.  Simon offers a dinner party, the woman offers the alabaster jar of perfume, but because her heart is right, and because of her greater experience of forgiveness, the woman HONORS Jesus because she truly loves him, whereas Simon DISHONORS him.

Jesus points this out in vs. 44-46.  He mentions three specific ways that Simon dishonored him and the woman honored him.  All three of the things that Jesus mentions were common practices in that day.  They were simple ways of showing hospitality to a guest:  washing his feet, greeting him with a kiss, and anointing the head with oil.  

When Jesus points out that Simon did not offer these things, he isn’t complaining about Simon’s lack of manners.  He is trying to show Simon his heart problem.  Simon failed to honor Jesus because his heart was wrong.  The woman on the other hand, without even consciously trying, honored Jesus because her heart was filled with love.  She washed his feet…. with her tears.   She anointed him… with the perfume that she brought.  And her kisses, far from being a mere formality, were the humble kisses of a forgiven sinner.

What Jesus is showing us is that when our heart is filled with love for him, worship is not about “getting it right”–raising your hands and dancing, or not raising your hands and not dancing–It is about a genuine honoring of our Savior, Jesus, the friend of sinners.  And when our heart is right and filled with love for him, he will be honored.  Our focus will be on him, and not on ourselves.   We will do the right things in his sight, even if they aren’t right in the sight of others.

I’ll have more to say on this passage in future posts.