Long Hollow White House Campus Blog

Every Monday around noon, I drive down to the LifeWay building downtown to go to seminary classes.  We park the car, get out our security tags and I lug in my over sized laptop and power cord.  We file into the Crowe room and a little guy named Micah Carter, that’s Dr. Carter to you, settles in behind the pupit-esk podium and makes us pull out the hymnals.  That’s right, hymnals.  35-50 men and women pick up the old Baptist Hymnal and sing one song or another loudly, poorly, and very achapello.  Every time we do it, I remember the old days at LHBC.  There was a time when everything we sang came from those dusty tomes.  Always singing the first two verses and then the last, never the third.  Always trying to figure out the notes, never even close to successfully.  Always completely confused and over matched by the lyrics. 

As these things often do, the second time around, after years of steady study and learning, I start to see the depth and reality of the words in these songs.  What strikes the soul more forcefully than Amazing Grace?  Where can I hide from the glaring light of Before the Throne of God Above or Rock of Ages?  When rehearsing these songs in my mind, my heart sings louder than my voice.  My soul rejoices.  My eyelids fall and my eyes of faith gaze out on majesty. 

One verse in particular, one of the verse threes that we usually skip for time, was quoted recently by a preacher named R.C. Sproul.  It’s the third verse of Joy to the World it says, “No more let sins and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found.” 

Sproul was talking about the joy, the electric, nuclear bomb, cosmic joy that comes from our wedding to Christ, how His righteousness, His clean record, His effort and perfect obedience are now ours.  We who were once cursed, the curse that was found on me, can take all the perfect identity and blessing of Jesus.  

Sproul says, “Gentleman I beg you, in this day and age, don’t ever negotiate the concept of the imputed righteousness of Christ.”  He’s speaking to pastors and warning them never to lose this foundation for joy.  He continues, “The Father looks at me and beyond the impurities and everything he sees the cloak of the righteousness of Jesus.  And now I am justified, not for today, not for this week, not till I commit another sin, but for eternity.”  “I despair of my righteousness.  I acknowledge my sin.  I put my trust in Christ and in Christ alone.  And the good news is the very instant I do that, all that He is, and all that He has…is mine.”

Rehearse in your mind these truths.  Again, go through and search them out in your mind.  Relive and worship our risen King, the curse breaker.  Far as the curse is found, we can have the obedience of Christ wrapped around and draped over us, hiding all our iniquity and allowing our sin to be forgiven.  Let your life be a hymn of praise as you let yourself gaze upon this truth.  Christ is now yours and you are now His. 

Peace and grace to you,

Ben

Paul had to encourage Timothy not to get too down when folks would push him around because he was so young.  I take comfort in that.  Just because some one’s older, it doesn’t mean scripture doesn’t still apply.  As long as I rightly divide the word of truth, everybody can feel at ease with a young guy on stage.

What’s more, the fact that I missed the 70’s might not be too bad a thing.  For evidence I present this ridiculous video from one of the era’s greats…James Brown.  If you take a fresh look at this icon, you might wish you could have grown up when I did.  I mean seriously, check out his back up dancers.  Hilarious.

watch?v=0ROzGihgCj8&feature=related

Have you ever seen Groundhog Day with Bill Murray?  It’s in my top maybe 5 movies of all time.  I was thinking about Easter and what it really means and I was thinking of that part where Bill’s character is living the perfect day and he comes up and gives the Heimlich to the mayor of the town.  He saves the day, smirks, turns to leave and lights a woman’s cigarette on the way out.  Smooth.

I was thinking about it  because the Bible describes Death as consuming.  Literally, we are being eaten by death, consumed by the shadow, falling down into Death.  You could think of us as falling into this giant mouth, down into Hell.  When Christ died though, something crazy happened.  Death choked. 

See when we die, it makes sense.  We deserve it.  It’s not natural, but it happens to all because we are all alike, under the curse.  When Christ came though, He lived perfectly.  He didn’t deserve death, and yet He died.  God allowed something to happen that had never happened before.  A sacrifice was made.  God himself died.  He allowed Himself to die in our place.  It was here that Death got a morsel too big.  Here Death was stymied.  We celebrate at Easter because in the death of Christ, Death died.

Praise be to God, that’s not the end of the story.  It’s not like Armageddon where Bruce Willis goes down with the asteroid or Vader kills Ben Kenobi.  (are all my illustrations movies?)  Three days later, with the apostles alone and scared, the world shaken by the death of the ruler and our the creator, two women find an empty tomb.  HE IS RISEN!!!  Death died and He did not.  Our great God found a way to take away our punishment and live.  Though He died, He also rose.  Does that not make you want to yell?  We have a way of salvation and He isn’t dead!!

Let nothing stand in the way of your celebration this weekend.  Let it charge you up and make you strong.  Let your mouth stay smiling and goose-bumps run up and down your arms like every 15 minutes.  Our Great God has made a way.  Let His people rejoice!!

Literally jumping up and down right now,

Ben

There is a terribly important truth that we have to spend time gazing on with eyes of faith.  We are now sons and daughters of the king.  We are no longer enemies.  God has found a way to transfer our standing from dead rebels, sinners who follow the temptations the Devil leaves for us willingly even excitedly, to live Princes and Princesses.  We now wear rings and robes.  We now eat at large tables prepared by God himself.  We now can walk boldly before the ultimate holy one and call Him, “Dad.”

There is a theologian at Southern Seminary named Russell Moore who went through a process of adopting two orphans from Russia.  He has written extensively on this topic and I’m going to put a portion of his article which can be found at Touchstone Archives, on the blog here as it shares vividly this most excellent example of such a blessed doctrine.

No Longer Orphans

When Maria and I first walked into the orphanage, where we were led to the boys the Russian courts had picked out for us to adopt, we almost vomited, in reaction to the stench and the squalor of the place. The boys were in cribs in the dark, lying in their own waste.

Leaving them at the end of each day was painful, but leaving them the final day, before going home to wait for the paperwork to go through, was the hardest thing either of us had ever done. Walking out of the room to prepare for the plane ride home, Maria and I could hear Maxim calling out for us, and falling down in his crib, convulsing in tears. Maria shook with tears, and I turned around to walk back into their room, just for a minute.

I placed my hand on both of their heads and said, knowing they couldn’t understand a word of my English, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” I don’t think I consciously intended to cite Jesus’ words to his disciples in John 14:18; it just seemed like the only thing worth saying at the time.

When Maria and I at long last received the call that the legal process was over, and we returned to Russia to pick up our new sons, we found that their transition from orphanage to family was more difficult than we had supposed. We dressed the boys in outfits our parents had bought for them. My mother-in-law gathered some wildflowers growing between cracks in the pavement outside the orphanage.

We nodded our thanks to the orphanage personnel and walked out into the sunlight, to the terror of the two boys. They’d never seen the sun, and they’d never felt the wind. They had never heard the sound of a car door slamming or had the sensation of being carried along at 100 miles an hour down a Russian road. I noticed that they were shaking, and reaching back to the orphanage in the distance.

I whispered to Sergei, now Timothy, “That place is a pit! If only you knew what’s waiting for you: a home with a Mommy and a Daddy who love you, grandparents, and great-grandparents and cousins and playmates . . . and McDonald’s Happy Meals!” But all they knew was the orphanage. It was squalid, but they had no other reference point, and it was home.

We knew the boys had acclimated to our home, that they trusted us, when they stopped hiding food in their high-chairs. They knew there would be another meal coming, and they wouldn’t have to fight for the scraps. This was the new normal.

They are now thoroughly Americanized, perhaps too much so, able to recognize the sound of a microwave ding from forty yards away. I still remember, though, those little hands reaching for the orphanage, and I see myself there.

The Sons’ Glory

The New Testament teaching on the adoption of believers in Christ isn’t a reassuring metaphor for the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Adoption does not simply tell us we belong to God. It is a legal entitlement, one we are prone to forget.

Paul warns the congregation at Rome that sharing the spirit of Christ means that we will suffer with him (Rom. 8:17). It means that we will groan right along with the rest of the creation for the “sons of God to be revealed,” for our “adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23).

But he fits this within the context of a legal inheritance. If we are adopted by God, if we are his children, then we are “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17). If we live through the “sufferings of this present time,” it is only so that we can be conformed to the image of our Christ, “in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29).

Paul identifies Jesus as the One who inherits the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. He is the One of whom it is said, “You are my Son” (Psalm 2:7), who is given “the nations as your heritage, and the ends of the earth as your possession” (Psalm 2:8).

That’s us gang!  Enjoy this magnificent grace.

Ben