Faith and Deeds

Mike Leake 1 Comment

This one is from my good friend Terry Buster:

In his study in Hebrews (Experiencing the Presence of God) A. W. Tozer references the hymn, “Trust and Obey.”

“Trust and obey, for there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”

Tozer uses the two wings of a bird to illustrate the symbiotic relationship of faith and deeds. With two wings the bird flies freely to the glory of God by doing what God created him to do. One wing will not do. It takes two to fly.

So it is with faith & deeds. It is not enough merely to trust God. Having a a self-satisfied ‘faith’ which leads to serving self while setting aside uncomfortable labor in the Kingdom of God is not the faith of Scripture. It is the foolhardy wish that in the end, God will ignore one who cherry picks nice sounding words from the Bible while refusing to bow the knee before the omnipotent God.

The same is true regarding good deeds. The desire to find salvation by adhering to the Law of God or well intentioned, altruistic attempts to make this world a better place (which is anchored in the philosophy that all people are basically good) is fundamentally rooted in the idea that we can do it on our own. The best image I can give of mere obedience is that of a man attempting to bow down at his own feet.

Trust and Obey. As the writer of Hebrews puts it, “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). We begin with faith and continue in faith. But our continuance in faith only comes about as we grow in humble obedience to the call and command of our Lord. “Faith by itself, if it does not have works is dead” (James 2:17).

True life is found through trust and obedience. God did not send His Son to bear our sins on Calvary to recreate us in Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) so that we would find satisfaction in believing what we want to believe. Jesus did not die so that we could invent new ways to serve Him. Christians are made anew in Christ to fly.

“Trust and obey, for there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey.”

Newton’s Song to Cowper

Mike Leake 1 Comment

One of the pieces I’d like you to read this month in our Year with Newton is on the Mystery of “God Moves in Mysterious Ways”. In my research for this I read through John Piper’s biography of William Cowper again. There was a statement that Piper used that came alive to me. One of his section headings reads:Never Cease to Sing the Gospel to the Deaf.

Piper writes,

Let us rehearse the mercies of Jesus often in the presence of discouraged people. Let us point them again and again to the blood of Jesus…Don’t make your mercy to the downcast contingent on quick results. You cannot persuade a person that he is not reprobate if he is utterly persuaded that he is. He will tell you he is deaf. No matter. Keep soaking him in the “benevolence, mercy, goodness, and sympathy” of Jesus and “the sufficiency of the atonement” and “the fullness and completeness of [Christ’s] justification”…Pray that in God’s time these truths may yet be given the power to awaken hope and beget a spirit of adoption. (Piper, The Hidden Smile of God, 117-19)

This is what John Newton did in the life of William Cowper. Newton was very discouraged and perplexed at Cowper’s ailment. Yet he remained by his side, even at times foregoing vacation so as not to leave his dear friend alone. Newton never ceased to sing the gospel to the deaf. It took a toll in Newton too.

On one occasion Newton wrote to John Thornton of the toll it was taking on him:

Mr. Cowper’s long stay at the vicarage in his present uncomfortable state, has been upon many account inconvenient and trying. His choice of being here was quite unexpected; and his continuance is unavoidable, unless he was to be removed by force…I make myself easy by reflecting that the Lord’s hand is concerned; and I am hoping weekly for his deliverance…The Lord evidently sent him to Olney, where he has been a blessing to many, a great blessing to myself. The Lord has numbered the days in which I am appointed to wait upon him in this dark valley, and He has given us such a love to him both as a believer and as a friend, that I am not weary; but to be sure, his deliverance would be to me one of the greatest blessings my thoughts can conceive.

Why it was so taxing on Newton?

Sometimes when I read through tattered pages from days long ago I slip into a type of fairy tale thinking. People stop becoming real. John Newton becomes a hero without warts. I rejoice in the fruit of his ministry but I do not accurately reckon the toil that such fruit entails. I say things like—and will say again in a moment—that we need more pastors like John Newton. But I forget the travail that Newton must have experienced as he bled with William Cowper.

Consider this letter from Cowper and how it must have pained Newton. Keep in mind this is written in 1784. That is eleven years after Cowper’s second bout with madness (first under the watch of Newton). Now it is happening again after a brief respite. Listen as if you had received this letter from a dear friend that you had been counseling and bleeding with for years:

Loaded as my life is with despair, I have no such comfort as would result from a supposed probability of better things to come, were it once ended … You will tell me that this cold gloom will be succeeded by a cheerful spring, and endeavour to encourage me to hope for a spiritual change resembling it—but it will be lost labour. Nature revives again; but a soul once slain lives no more … My friends, I now expect that I shall see yet again. They think it necessary to the existence of divine truth, that he who once had possession of it should never finally lose it. I admit the solidity of this reasoning in every case but my own. And why not in my own? … I forestall the answer:—God’s ways are mysterious, and He giveth no account of His matters:—an answer that would serve my purpose as well as theirs that use it. There is a mystery in my destruction, and in time it shall be explained.

Do you hear what has happened in the mind of Cowper? His mind has become so set upon destroying him that his precious hymn written in 1773 is now darkened. “There is a mystery in my destruction, and in time it shall be explained”. He has somehow believed that the mystery of God’s ways is that he will be damned even though he is one of the elect. He theologically agrees with everything that Newton is saying but he is, as on biographer said, “utterly deaf” to “every consolatory suggest” because he had “concluded that God had rejected him”.

Yet Newton never abandoned his friend.

We Need More John Newton’s

Some would probably consider Newton’s soul care of Cowper a failure. After all he never really found healing. We like magic words that somehow fix everything. But Cowper wouldn’t be “fixed”; not on this side of Eden.

Newton couldn’t be Cowper’s savior. But he could be his friend. Though it’s a mystery and not something I would really want to write a theological dissertation on, it seems that at times the Lord calls people like John Newton to hold the hand of his friend while simultaneously holding the hand of Jesus. His dear friend was in such despair that he could no longer cry out for mercy. It seems that Newton interceded for Cowper when he was too weak to even plead for help.

Newton’s ministry to Cowper was a ministry where he continued to “sing the gospel to the deaf”. He did it as his friend not as his fixer. He loved William Cowper, madness and all. He was never a project but always a brother in Christ. To this end Newton never gave up on his friend. He pleaded for Cowper’s stake in Christ even when Cowper was confident that he had been forsaken.

Ministry success isn’t defined by the number of hands we heal but the hands we hold. Healing belongs to the Lord. Holding on is our sacred duty as fellow sojourners. We need more pastors like John Newton. Pastors that aren’t discouraged because their “projects” fail. But pastors that ache because their friends hurt. Pastors that stay and preach, and plod, and proclaim the excellencies of Christ even when it seems that we are only holding a symphony for the deaf.

Jesus is pleased with such faithful husbands, daddies, friends, and pastors. I pray that I am one.

—

This is republished from 2012. I don’t have any reading for you to do this week. This week has been a bit crazy for me and I didn’t get to the August schedule until late on Thursday. Therefore, you get the week off and we are going to be back at it this next week. Thanks for reading.

Today in Blogworld 08.07.15

Mike Leake

The Anatomy of Sexual Sin

We don’t just fall into sexual sin, it comes from somewhere.

Wilberforce Didn’t Quit

I think this really is our Wilberforce moment, this is a great reminder from Aaron that Wilberforce didn’t give up.

9 Marks of a Healthy Worship Leader

As we are looking for a worship leader at our church, I found this extremely helpful.

Planned Parenthood: 4 Ways to Respond

It’s one thing to watch the videos and be appalled, it’s another to take action. Here are four simple ways you can respond today.

I’m not sure it’s enough for me to vote for him, but the more Ted Cruz works with bacon the more I like him:

Five Words Which Could Change Your Bible Study

Mike Leake 2 Comments

I’m not sure what toy it was now. Or maybe it was a set of baseball cards. I bet it was something epic like Castle Grayskull. Either way, it was a toy that I had to have.

So, I put together a terrific case for why my parents should buy this toy. They informed me that at this particular time we did not have quite enough money to spend on a new toy. Of course, I knew this was nonsense. I had just recently looked in my mother’s purse and noted one of those magic slips of paper—known to us pre-debit card children as a “check”. I had watched many times before as my parents filled their grocery cart and then simply written a check to pay for it. In my childish brain I simply assumed that all one had to do was be a possessor of one of these checks and the sky was the limit.

I politely informed my mother that all she needed to do to buy this Castle Grayskull (or whatever) was to simply write a check. I knew she had one. I knew she hadn’t lost function in her arm. And I’d even supply the pen. So just go get my toy. Even throw in something nice for your self. Write the check. Done deal.

The solution to me seemed so simple. I didn’t understand how my parents couldn’t see this. And then they explained to me how checks work. I was devastated.

I was reminded about this bit from my childhood the other day when I had a similar conversation with one of my own children. And I realized that I haven’t really grown much. And I’m confident I’m not alone. We have a tendency to assume that if we know about something, then we must know that thing completely. How many passages in the Scriptures do you assume that you have mostly exhausted?

Five New Words

About ten years ago I typed out four words which changed my life: I COULD BE WRONG. I put those four words in bold face about 72 font and stuck them on a sheet of paper next to my desk. It was a reminder to be passionate about truth but also to be humble because as a finite sinful human being I can be absolutely confident about something and still be wrong. I think I need to write four new words. I COULD BE MISSING SOMETHING.

I’m convinced that these five words could really assist us in our study of the Scriptures. As a seminary student, a pastor, and one on a fifteen year love affair with the Bible, I can walk into a text pretty confident that I know what it is saying. I interact often with people who are struggling through a passage. If I’m not careful I’ll take their consternation as ignorance on their part. But really it is ignorance on my part (“just write a check, mom!”). They are seeing something that I’m not and working through it. But I cannot see what they are seeing because I’m too confident that I fully grasp the passage.

I’m not saying that we study the Scriptures as if they are simply a wax nose and we can shape how we want. Neither am I saying our study of the Scriptures is always filled with mystery and at the end of the day we will all just be scratching our heads clueless to its meaning. Not at all. What I am saying is that the God revealed in Scripture is inexhaustible and as finite human beings we’ll never plumb the depths. As such it would do us well to remember: I COULD BE MISSING SOMETHING.

You might not be missing something. You might really have mastered a text. So this isn’t some quest to constantly try to find some hidden meaning. It is simply a call to say come into the text without humility and you’ll likely leave as one who not only is mastering the Scriptures but one who is being mastered by the God of the Scriptures.

—

Photo source: here