Jonathan Evans

Jesus didn't die so that you could obey him...

God is committed to changing you. And changing you means something more than living an obedient, good, moral life. In fact, Jesus didn’t die so you could obey God (though it includes that). He died for something greater. 

  

To claim to be a Christian is to believe your old self has been crucified with Christ and your new self has been raised with Christ. This new self, though, is an image not made or molded in your own reflection or to your own liking. It is one (re)made in the reflection of Christ Jesus, the perfect image of God. When we “turn to the Lord,” we behold him and in him see and experience God’s glory and joy. An odd kind of joy, to be sure, if we don’t share or understand it. 

  

In a covenant of marriage there are three directions to be maintained. First, the covenant between a husband and his wife and a wife and her husband. Second, the covenant between the husband and God and the wife and God. But third, and most importantly, the covenant between God and the husband and wife—his promise, his commitment, his faithfulness to lead them, guide them, provide for them, and change them. 

  

God has made a covenant with you in Christ and Christ has kept that covenant for you with God. Both sides have committed themselves to loving you, to leading you, to providing for you, to protecting you, and most of all, to transforming you. Your side is walking in and walking out that transformation by the power of God's Spirit. 

  

No, Jesus didn’t die so that you could obey him. He died so that he could make you new—so that you might know and experience the new and abundant life of God in/as your obedience, not because of it. 

 

Time doesn't change you

There are some of us who having been Christians for a long time look on a person who has been a Christian for a much shorter time and are surprised, critical, jealous over the spiritual growth in that person. By comparison we feel we haven’t grown as much as we could have, and that may be true. 

 

What has happened in us? What is the root of growth in them? Clearly, it’s not time. Time may measure change or reveal change, but of itself it cannot produce change. 

 

Still, if the difference of growth as Christians did correspond merely to the passing of time, every Christian in their decades would be automatically more mature in their faith.  

 

No, the difference is not time. Time doesn’t change you. Repentance changes you.  

 

The younger Christian may be zealous for God, passionate, full of love and obedience. The thought of, the act of, deliberately sinning, going against or drifting away from their Savior, startles them, provokes them, convicts them. They are quick to repent, to “turn to the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:16) and are, therefore, changed. "The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17) 

 

But the older Christian may have grown stagnant, complacent and passive, nominal in their faith and cold in their love, disinterested in their growth and distracted from their obedience. If they are aware of sin or disobedience, rather than repent from it, they “turn away from the Lord” and set a distance between themselves and that sin.  

 

God’s kindness is not meant to lead us away from sin, but rather towards repentance from sin  (Romans 2:4). But in our repentance what do we turn to? With firmness of truth and warmth of love, with divine authority and humility, God stoops down to serve us—to wash us, show us, teach us, and lead us, if we will follow, to the realization and acceptance that we need to change and that our need is Christ.  

 

It is God's goal not that we might grow out of our need for Christ, but that we might grow into our recognition of our never-ending need of him. Perhaps his greatest grace/gift is to give this recognition of our need, exceeded only by the giving/gracing of himself to meet it. God’s kindness, our repentance, aligns both our wants and needs: I want what I need and I need what I want. Both are reconciled in Christ.  

 

Repentance redeems the time, makes the most of it. By repentance we grow both younger, more childlike in our dependance on God’s grace in Christ, and older, more mature in our likeness to God’s image in Christ. Repentance may or may not restore to us the things we’ve lost to sin and its consequences in our lives, but it can restore us to the One who makes us new and makes us whole.

"Show me"

At times we can be found as Christians living before God as young children playing hide and seek with their parents: if we can’t see them, they can’t see us. 

 

How often we are aware of something in our heart that we know we need to bring to light, to reveal, to confess and repent of, but we cover our eyes and believe that if we’re not looking at it, God isn’t either. “If it were a big deal,” we reason, “God would bring it up.”

 

So we choose to turn away, to ignore, to minimize, to push what we don't want seen behind whatever it is we do. At times God mercifully comes anyway and, like a good father, brings up and brings out those things that we didn’t want to look at or hear about.

 

But, also like a good father, sometimes he mercifully doesn't. Instead, he’ll wait for us to bring up what he’s known is there all along. In fact, as we grow and mature, this expectation becomes one of our primary responsibilities.

 

It’s one thing to be shown your heart. It's another to ask to be shown your heart. “Search me, oh God, and know my heart!…And see if there be any grievous way in me…” (Psalm 139). See, show me, if there is any wicked way in me.

 

It’s one thing for us to come to God and see what he will do. It’s another for us to come and seek what God will do—to seek to know his will, to seek to do his will, to seek for his will to be done. 

 

“Ask and it will be given to you” (Matthew 7:7) includes the things we ask and want to be left unseen; “You have not, because you ask not” (James 4:2) includes the things God is wanting and waiting for you to see.

Lord, teach us to pray always

“Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). This is an ongoing request. "Lord, teach us to pray always," we might add. We are continually learning, not only about prayer, but to pray.

(1) We must learn to pray, not to feel like praying. Prayer is our duty even when it isn’t our delight. Those who make prayer out to be always full of emotion and excitement are perhaps training a generation to expect not more out of prayer but less.

(2) Habits are formed through the body, not just the mind. One group of people suffer concussions and the effects often linger for weeks or even months. A second group, like athletes, suffer concussions and often bounce right back. The difference? Often the first didn't “see it coming”. The hit on the head was unexpected and blindsided them. While the second did see it coming and their body prepared them for the hit.

Similarly, our bodies prepare us for prayer. We don’t simply think prayer into being. We form it into being. Your body is as involved as your mind in that daily preparation/formation.

(3) Prayer is an expression of our faith and trust in God, not in prayer itself. We must be careful not to become devoted to prayer—to any spiritual discipline—rather than to God.

(4) Prayer is both an act of war against our enemy and an act of surrender to our King.

Richard Lovelace says, “If the devil can tempt us to do evil, he can also tempt us not to do good. He can glamorize sin, but he can also paint an ugly picture in our minds of any work which is the will of God, including prayer.”

G.K. Chesterton said, “We become taller when we bow”.

(5) We pray to know God. Prayer is often our answer to God’s knock on our heart, to God making himself known to us.

And we know God to pray. Prayer doesn’t prove holiness, yet holiness is proven in prayer. Holiness is our capacity for knowing and enjoying God. So we pray both out of relationship with God and out of the kind of relationship we have with him: whether as children, friends, servants, or disciples.

(6) Prayer takes time. How much? Somewhere I read: "pray as long as it takes to lift up your major responsibilities and any wider burdens the Holy Spirit has placed upon your heart.” A Puritan preacher said, “It is best to pray briefly, but often”.

(7) Prayer is entering a new age. The day of grace and salvation has come, the sun of mercy has risen upon us. Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death. He is our Risen King, and through him the Kingdom of God, a new age and life, has come. We have been invited and welcomed in.

For such a times as this you were born and born again

 

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10)  

 

In the Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln poses a simple question, “Do you think we choose the times into which we are born? Or do we fit the times we are born into?” Certainly the answer to the first must be, No. I believe the answer to the second is undoubtedly, Yes.

 

“For such a time as this” you were born (Esther 4:14). God who knows, sees, creates, and sustains all things, times, seasons, and cultures fitted you for this time and place you find yourself in. Time and place precede you.  

 

If God for mankind has “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling” (Acts 17:26), then no one can ever truly say that they were born at the wrong time or in the wrong place. God saw “fit” that the boundaries of your dwelling would be here and now. God did not say, “I must fit this time and place to him/her,” but “I will fit him/her to this time and place.

 

And it’s not as if God is suddenly presented with more human lives than he was anticipating or “planning” on.  He sees and knows all lives past, present, and future at once. Time is God's “unbounded now”.

 

But let us go further. For such a time as this you were born and born again (John 3:3, 7). Salvation and the Kingdom of God precede you, are bigger than you. To be born again is to be born into a new world and time. Incarnation means Christ came into the world he created to save humanity. Resurrection means a whole new world and humanity are coming into being in and through him. 

 

You find your place, then, and therefore your value, in Christ—in his kingdom as “fellow citizens” (Ephesians 2:19), in his body as “individual members” (Romans 12:5; 1 Corinthians 12:27), in his temple as “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5). You are fitted for and fitted into the kingdom, the body, the temple of Christ. 

 

Winston Churchill once said, “We live in an age of great events and little men.” What we are called to as Christians and disciples of Jesus, as his church, is to be men and women who are fitted in Christ by the Holy Spirit for the times and for the events of our present day and culture. We are a part of something bigger and greater than ourselves. We are always already participating in the saving and renewing activity of God here and now on this earth. 

 

3 Things You Cannot Do Alone

1-Be yourself

Our culture says to save yourself you must be yourself. But the gospel says to be yourself you must be saved from yourself.  You must lose yourself, deny yourself, die to yourself. In short, you must be crucified and resurrected in Jesus Christ.

Jesus not only saves you from your sin, but he also saves you to a new life found in him. And in saving you to himself, he saves you to his people.

Jesus’s mission is to form not solely individuals but a people (1 Peter 2:9). We won’t find in the Bible statements like, "Be yourself. Love yourself. Forgive yourself. Free yourself.” What we do find are statements like, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ. Love your neighbor as yourself. Forgive others. Submit to one another.” The many “one another” passages¹ we find in the Bible are, in fact, at the center of what it means to be a Christian and become like Christ. In other words, you can’t be your true self all by yourself.

 

2-Be a disciple 

Implicit in the command to go and make disciples is be made a disciple. You can't reproduce disciples if you aren't a disciple first. And discipleship can’t happen apart from “one another” and life together with God’s people. Our character—behaviors, values, beliefs, loves—is formed in the presence of others.

If the world will know we are disciples of Jesus by our love for one another (John 13:35), then this love is most visibly seen and most clearly overheard in our relationships. We cannot be shaped or formed by Christ, and into Christ, apart from love, and we cannot love or know love apart from mutual serving and personal sacrifice in relationship with others.

Christ has won you on the cross. Yes! But he has also won for you a new life together with the people of God.

 

3-Be the church

The church long existed before any one of us did. It was not only God’s plan, but it is also his accomplishment through the cross. Jesus purchased the church, his bride, with his own precious blood. But the church is not a single color or race or demographic or political party. 

The church is the manifestation and joy of God’s wisdom in the creation of humanity. The church in its manifold, rich diversity/unity, that is. It’s only as you come to connect with others different from yourself that you come to know and to share in what God has actually and fully realized in Christ: that of every nation, tribe, and tongue he has made one new man, a new humanity, in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:13-22).

As the church, then, we must see and love humanity differently than the world does. God so loved the world, not only those in the world who love us, who are easy to love, or who love what we love. We love not instrumentally, for the gain of, but for the sake of. We value people because they reflect the image of God. We’re not bent on labeling people out of arrogance, ignorance or fear, but are instead set on knowing people, and on serving them, putting ourselves last and putting them first.

 

¹ We are to honor (Romans 12:10), accept (Romans 15:7, bear with (Ephesians 4:2; Colossians 3:13), forgive (Ephesians 4:32; Col. 3:13), pray for, and confess sins to one another (James 5:16). We are to cheer and challenge (Hebrews 3:13), admonish and confront (Colossians 3:16; Galatians 6:1-6), warn (1 Thessalonians 5:14), and teach one another (Romans 15:14; Colossians 3:16). We are to stop gossiping and slandering (Galatians 5:15) or being fake (Romans 12:9) with one another. We are to bear burdens (Galatians 6:2), share possessions (Acts 4:32), and submit to one another (Ephesians 5:21).

Listening is an act of faith

 

Listening is an act of faith. It is being awake to God and his speaking personally to us. It is being aware of God and that he is personally present with us. Wakefulness, watchfulness are conditions for listening. Too often, though, we are disciples asleep, unaware, unconvinced that God is in this place.

 

"Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me?” (John 14:9)  

 

It is much easier to think of faith as an act of speaking on our part, of God waiting on us. And so it often is. Just as often, though, it is an act of not speaking on our part, of our waiting on God. The faith to wait is as vibrant as the faith to move.

 

In fact, our faith both moves and is moved. By the time my faith moves to listen to God, I realize God has already made the first move and drawn me to himself.

 

In many ways, listening by faith is like surrendering by faith. By the time God asks you to surrender all, you realize that you’ve already given him all. This last act of surrender is simply the culmination of an ongoing series of acts, of surrendering a little bit of yourself at a time.

 

So listening is ongoing. Little by little knowing more and more. Those who wait until they come to a sermon to listen for God will find it difficult to hear him. But those whose listening is ongoing daily will come and find it easy to hear him.  

 

For all of us who come to the preaching of God’s Word, we can either sit and wait for something to grab our attention or we can come already attentive to “God with us". We can come fully awake, aware, and ready to listen in on the ongoing conversation of God with us, to receive the living and active word of God deep into our hearts. 

 

“Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.” (Luke 8:18)

If our commitment is to obedience, we will fail. But if...

 

To forgive my wife, to love her, when I don’t feel forgiving or loving will at some point prove impossible if my highest commitment and obedience is to forgiveness or to love or even to my wife. 

 

My power to forgive doesn’t come from forgiveness. My power to love doesn’t come from love. While the highest virtue or the deepest devotion may inspire us to live a certain kind of life, virtue and devotion in and of themselves are not “the breath of life”. They themselves cannot create and give life. They are, rather, the life breathed in. 

 

My power to love and to forgive comes from God who is himself love, and who, because he is love, forgives. Beginning with me. Before I love and forgive, he has loved and forgiven me in Jesus. My love has its beginning in The Beginning. And my forgiveness has its end (completion and fulfillment) in The End. I work out what he works in (Phil. 2:12-13).

 

So, again, to forgive my wife, to love her (or anyone), when I don’t feel forgiving or loving is impossible if my highest commitment and obedience is to forgiveness or to love or to my wife. But if my highest commitment and obedience is to Christ—Jesus, the Son of God, the Word made flesh, the Living God now living in me—then all things are possible when I don’t feel like doing any of them. 

 

In those moments of dying to self, one breathes in and breathes out prayer: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. I am submitted to him.” 

 

Power, then—our willingness and ability and effort to obey Christ and his commands—comes from him and by his Spirit, not from ourselves or anyone we love, not from any virtue, passion or excellence we aspire to. The circuit begins, is complete, and begins again in my heart when I submit to Christ and, by his Spirit, receive his grace to walk and live in obedience to him.

 

If our commitment is to obedience, we will fail; if our commitment is to Christ, he will succeed.

For every sin and for every righteousness

 

Some gifts are a short time coming. We go looking for a gift we have yet to decide upon and are spontaneous at the last minute. Some gifts are a long time coming. We have thought it through and know precisely what it is we are looking for. But none of our gifts are an eternal time coming. 

 

“You could have saved us in a second, but instead you sent a child” (Seasons, Hillsong Worship). Jesus was neither a spontaneous gift, hurriedly announced by angels to shepherds in Bethlehem, nor a plan designed long, long ago when Adam and Eve exited Eden. God’s eternal plans were realized “in the fulness of time” in Christ (Galatians 4:4). 

 

But how can that which has always been come into being? In a world God creates. And, still, God went further. He wrote himself into his story, your story, in Christ. Jesus appeared (1 John 3:5), not out of nowhere, but from eternity; he took on flesh, a body like ours. If God knows all things, creates all things, and sustains all things from beginning to end, then why “must” he give his Son, sending him as he did, to be born, to live, to die, to be buried, to be raised, and to ascend to the right hand of God?

 

Because humanity isn’t God’s mistake. We are his creation, plan, delight. Yet, as such, we are fallen, broken, lost, condemned because of our sin. But, as such, God is recreating us, a sinful humanity and world, by restoring all things in and through Jesus Christ (Ephesians 1:10). 

 

Towards this end/beginning, Jesus came to know, to share in, and to experience each and all of our suffering and brokenness (Heb 2:17-18; 4:14-15; 5:8) To save us, he didn’t come to sin like us. Rather, although he was unlike us and righteous before God, he came to willingly suffer and to endure, and to freely accept, the entirety and eternality of the consequences and punishment of our sins, dying on a cross, to be forsaken in our place.  

 

As Christians, when we speak of our salvation, of being justified in and united to Christ by faith, we say something like, “It is as if I'd never sinned". But that is only one side of the coin. The other, and as equally precious, side of the coin is to say, “It is as if I’d always obeyed”. 

 

When your sins are forgiven and removed in Christ, it doesn’t leave a stain or a vacuum or an abandoned space where something used to be. Rather, it cleanses and fills and transforms. Your sin is covered. With what? Christ’s righteousness. Jesus came for every sin and for every righteousness.

 

If, for example, you lie this afternoon and ask God for forgiveness tonight, he will forgive you in Christ your sin of lying. But that’s not all that happens. It also means that in place of your lying you have been given the righteousness of Jesus— his truthfulness, his truth telling, his faithfulness to the truth. The all-important and essential thing to remember, to rejoice in, about the gospel of Jesus Christ, is that we are righteous before God, not only forgiven. 

 

On the cross, Jesus gave himself for us in our sin and to us in his righteousness. "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)  

Leaders who bow

 

What are reasons we mistrust some of our leaders today? They are domineering, uncaring, self-seeking, dishonest, and manipulative. But Christians are not to lead this way. We are to be the opposite kind of “image”. 

 

Leadership is a calling given to everyone by God at creation and from birth. Every human being is given some level of influence over something and someone. Everyone, everywhere, is a leader, called and gifted to “subdue the earth,” to make something useful or beneficial for others, in that “garden” portion on the earth where God has put him or her. (Genesis 1:26-28; 2:15) 

 

Furthermore, God created and called us as leaders to lead in his “image”. But sin has broken that image, distorted that calling. Though much good is and can still be done, in Christ, by his grace in salvation, a true and godly image of leadership can be restored. That image is the image of Christ, into which we are recreated as Christians and are being made new, conformed. We can be, then, the best leaders. Not best because of us, in and of ourselves, but best because of “Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). 

 

“Best” means not necessarily more skilled or better qualified, as much as it means the necessary character—mind, heart, and will—of Christ. When we are character-formed and character-driven, we come to reflect his glory in who we are as leaders, in how we lead as leaders, and in what we lead as leaders. 

 

We are to be servant leaders of others, caring and compassionate leaders towards others, but, above all, obedient and faithful leaders to Christ.  

 

The best leaders are true servants. The best servants are true leaders. They inspire those around them! But, in the Bible, another word for servant could be worshipper. So the best leaders are also true worshippers. 

 

One of the things I look for in both my own leadership and in the leadership of those who serve with me is, Do we worship? Are we free both to worship and in our worship? I look for the character of a worshipper, not just an act of worship. Why? Because worship means surrender. 

 

A picture of worship is that of a servant kneeling to kiss his master’s hand. It’s a picture not usually associated with leadership. And, yet, as G.K Chesteron said, “We become taller when we bow.”  

 

We are to be leaders who bow. 

 

Like Jacob born holding onto his brother Esau’s heel, we are born wanting to take control of our lives. But we are "born again" learning to give up control of our lives to Jesus.  

 

True leaders are those servants who have bowed their will and surrendered their heart to be conquered by and to serve their Savior and Master Jesus Christ. His life in them becomes an ability and authority to direct others towards a particular desired outcome. Or, His life in them becomes an ability and authority to attract others towards his particular desired outcome. It's “the power of attraction” versus "the attraction of power”. It’s an influence and persuasion that results, not from a position or platform or title, but from a man or a woman who's whole life is embracing and being embraced by Christ.  

 

We are to be leaders who lead the way, who take the lead, like that. We are leaders who have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us. And the life we lead by we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us. (Galatians 2:20)