Category: 843 Acres

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Spiritual Warfare :: Throwback Thursday

By Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813-1843)
For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind. — Romans 7.22-23
A believer is to be known, not only by his peace and joy, but by his warfare and distress. His peace is peculiar: it flows from Christ; it is heavenly, it is holy peace. His warfare is as peculiar; it is deep-seated, agonizing, and ceases not till death.

Before a man comes to Christ, he hates the law of God, his whole soul rises up against it. The law is the breathing of God’s pure and holy mind. It is infinitely opposed to all impurity and sin. But natural men love sin, and therefore they hate the law, because it opposes them in all they love.

Unconverted men quarrel with the law of God because of its strictness. If it extended only to my outward actions, then I could bear with it; but it condemns my most secret thoughts and desires, which I cannot prevent.

When a man comes to Christ, this is all changed. He can say, “I delight in the law of God after the inward man.” He can say with David, “O how I love thy law: it is my meditation all the day.” The law is no longer an enemy. In Christ you will find rest.

Yet, in the heart of the believer there remains the whole members and body of an old man, or old nature: there remains the fountain of every sin that has ever polluted the world. So in the heart the lusts often lie quiet till the hour of temptation, and they war against the soul.

There are two great combatants in the believer’s soul. There is Satan on the one side, with the flesh and all its lusts at his command; then, on the other side, there is the Holy Spirit, with the new creature all at his command.

Have you experienced this warfare? It is a clear mark of God’s children. Learn to be humbled by it, but not discouraged. You need the blood of Jesus as much as at the first. You never can stand before God in yourself. You must go again and again to be washed; even on your dying bed you must hide under Jehovah, our righteousness.

Take up the resolution of Edwards, “Never to give over, nor in the least to slacken, my fight with my corruptions, however unsuccessful I may be.”

*Abridged from Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s sermon, A Believer Delights in the Law of God.

Today’s Reading
Job 3 (Listen – 2:32)
Romans 7 (Listen – 4:09)

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Real Freedom

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. — Romans 6.17–18
The proposition of Christianity is not, live free or submit yourself to Christ. Instead, the gospel challenges its hearers to recognize the way things of this world enslave and disappoint—and to abandon those things for Christ.

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism,” David Foster Wallace said in his famous talk This is Water. “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

The influential author went on to explore that in comparison to the divine, “pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” Paul’s suggestion that we become slaves to Christ isn’t a surrendering of freedom, it’s the beginning of freedom from the masters that destroy human flourishing. Foster Wallace continues:
If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you… Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
Paul calls the faithful to submit to Christ: “Just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.” In other words, the more you double down on your commitment to things which cannot fulfill, the more you get hurt—give yourself now to Christ, only he is sufficient to meet the deepest longings of your soul.

Foster Wallace concludes, “Freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.”

Today’s Reading
Job 2 (Listen – 2:11)
Romans 6 (Listen – 3:28)

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Suffering is Not for Nothing

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. — Romans 5.3-5
Malcolm Muggeridge said, “Supposing you eliminated suffering. What a dreadful place the world would be because everything that corrects dependency of man to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He’s bad enough now. But he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered.” Muggeridge gets at the heart of what I want to say. It’s not for nothing. Now how do I know that?

The deepest things that I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. Out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things that I know about God. The greatest gifts of my life have also entailed the greatest suffering. The greatest gifts of my life for example have been marriage and motherhood. And let’s never forget that if we don’t ever want to suffer, we must be very careful never to love anything or anybody. The gifts of love have been the gifts of suffering. Those two things are inseparable.

When I stood by my short-wave radio in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956 and heard that my husband was missing, God brought to my mind the words of the prophet Isaiah, “When thou passeth through the waters, I will be with thee.” You can imagine that my response was not terribly spiritual. I was saying, “But Lord, You’re with me all the time. What I want is Jim. I want my husband.”

We had been married twenty-seven months after waiting five-and-a-half years. Five days later I knew that Jim was dead, and God’s presence with me was not Jim’s presence. That was a terrible fact. God’s presence did not change the terrible fact that I was a widow. Jim’s absence thrust me, forced me, hurried me to God—my hope and my only refuge. And I learned in that experience who God is—who He is in a way that I could never have known otherwise.

Where does this idea of a loving God come from? It is not man so desperately wanting a god that he manufactures him in his mind. It’s He, who was the Word before the foundation of the world, suffering as a lamb slain—and He has a lot up His sleeve that you and I haven’t the slightest idea about now. He’s told us enough so that we know that suffering is not for nothing.

*Excerpted from an interview with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. For more see Elizabeth Elliot’s 7-part video series, Suffering is Not for Nothing.

Today’s Reading
Job 1 (Listen – 3:38)
Romans 5 (Listen – 3:53)

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The Freedom of God’s Forgiveness

Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.” — David, Romans 4.7-8
There are two ways in which a Christian can become trapped in sin. The first is readily recognizable—perpetuation of pride and brokenness despite awareness of their darkness. The other way a Christian can become trapped in sin is to go on living as if he has not been forgiven.

It’s the equivalent of Lazarus shouting back at Jesus from his grave—refusing to come out because he knows he has died and ought not be able to walk normally again among the living. The weight of sin, not the act itself, has become the trap.

Oftentimes people will say things like, “if I could just go back.” This sentiment (it is clearly not a viable solution) is our confession that we would rather solve our greatest problems on our own than have to humble ourselves and accept God’s unmerited grace.
Forgiveness of sins cannot be such that God by a single stroke, as it were, erases all guilt, abrogates all its consequences. Such a craving is only a worldly desire that has no idea of what guilt is. — Kierkegaard
We are truly shocked when we become aware of our sin. Prior to recognizing our failure we would never have confessed such darkness was in us. Yet, if we really believe God foresaw us and sees throughout all time, our sins did not surprise him. We overestimated our intrinsic goodness—feeling as if we had earned God’s approval through our devotion and discipline. God loved us first—even knowing the specific ways in which we were yet sinners.

Once we’ve seen our own unrighteousness, the only way forward is to find the glory of grace greater than the destruction of sin. The Church, at its best, is the spiritual community that surrounds each individual and echoes this truth through word and deed.
You rest in the forgiveness of sins when the thought of God does not remind you of the sin, but that it is forgiven; when the past is not a memory of how much you trespassed, but of how much you have been forgiven. — Kierkegaard
Until we see Christ’s forgiveness of our sins as a blessing, and feel the natural rejoicing of the soul that comes from such a miracle, we have not experienced the full force of forgiveness. Either grace is a mere fantasy—something which would be lovely if it were true—or it is as mighty and wonderful as the Scriptures proclaim it to be.

Today’s Reading
Esther 9-10 (Listen – 6:15)
Romans 4 (Listen – 4:08)

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The Theology of Food :: Weekend Reading List

Scripture’s focus on every facet of the tabernacle and temple is remarkable—God’s dwelling place, and the materials used to create it, were selected and prepared with the fastidious care. The New Testament confesses that the bodies of the faithful are the new temple of God’s Spirit.

To build this theology the authors of Scripture first caution against vanity. The care given to the temple was not to make it beautiful for its own sake, but to display the glory of God. At the same time, they challenge the early Christians to see how their decisions in the physical world affect their bodies.

In a recent article Bethany Jenkins, our founder at The Park Forum, asked, Do You Know Where Your Food Comes From? It’s a wonderful question that expands the discussion of faith and food beyond healthy eating to exploring how Christians can cultivate human flourishing through the food we consume.
Where did we get the idea that our food should be as cheap as possible? Do we not know that, when food is cheap to us, it is costly to someone else? Regular baking cocoa is cheaper than its fair trade equivalent, at least in part, because only a tiny portion of its profits goes to its growers.
It was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration that, following the Great Depression, worked aggressively to lower the percentage of the average American salary that went to food and rent. In our world today, the loss of this easy-to-access and inexpensive food creates what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls a “food desert.”

Journalists Phillip Lucas And Mike Schneider explain the ripple effects of a food desert created by the closure of a neighborhood’s Wal-Mart:
In Wichita (Kansas), the Wal-Mart that opened four years ago became a community hub in a shopping plaza that previously had been a haven for prostitution and gang shootings, said Pastor Kevass Harding, whose Dellrose United Methodist Church is right by the store.

“We had a place that used to be an eyesore, but then we had a first-class shopping center in this urban neighborhood,” Harding said. “So last week we get the news, my heart just broke. I was disgusted that it’s about money. It’s not about the people.”
The reality that cheap food has become about profit cannot be understated—just ten companies now manufacture almost everything Americans eat. The public’s awareness of the modern industrial food complex has opened up an opportunity for a host of local, organic, and hand-crafted food start-ups. Yet the price mark up on these foods causes pause. This is where Jenkins asks, “If we commit ourselves to ethical food sourcing, will the higher prices we pay be worth it?”

The answer, at least in part, is found in knowing where our food comes from—and maintaining a healthy skepticism toward the narrative crafted around it. Last year the Mast Brothers, who sell “artisanal chocolate” for $10 a bar, were accused of remelting high-cacao-butter chocolate from the French chocolate manufacturer Valrhona to create what they claimed were their own “bean to bar” chocolates. This unleashed what can only be described as chocolate kerfuffle.

In The Way Forward for Hipster Food Dana Goodyear explains the lesson for those trying to make informed purchasing decisions around food:
Old-fashioned food: let’s examine its appeal for a moment. So much of the artisanal movement is about a return to pre-industrial aesthetics and flavors, a celebration of the home- and handmade… But the Victorian era the movement makes loving reference to was not a wonderful time to be a consumer.

In the moment that the Masts’ aesthetic conjures, food was an anxious proposition, unregulated and rife with chicanery—lead in the red candy, chalk in the milk. Deep in our memories, along with the nostalgia for mustache wax, lies the awareness that stories about food are not always true, and that buying into them can be dangerous.
The main question for people of faith is not about recovering a lost aesthetic, but about the value of spending more money on food that is ethically sourced, humanely raised, and environmentally conscious. “UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children are working in the cocoa fields of the Ivory Coast,” Jenkins writes, “and up to 12,000 of them may be victims of trafficking or slavery.”

It’s up to us as consumers to raise our awareness of laborers in the food industry. As stewards of this world we cannot turn our eyes away from the effects of industrial food production on the environment or the horrific treatment of animals by the poultry, beef, and dairy industries. Our decisions in the physical world affect God’s dwelling place and, through that, our world.

Thoughtfulness around this matters for Christians because, as the leaders of the Lausanne Movement write,
The earth is created, sustained and redeemed by Christ. We cannot claim to love God while abusing what belongs to Christ by right of creation, redemption and inheritance. We care for the earth and responsibly use its abundant resources, not according to the rationale of the secular world, but for the Lord’s sake.

If Jesus is Lord of all the earth, we cannot separate our relationship to Christ from how we act in relation to the earth. For to proclaim the gospel that says ‘Jesus is Lord’ is to proclaim the gospel that includes the earth, since Christ’s Lordship is over all creation. Creation care is thus a gospel issue within the Lordship of Christ.

Today’s Reading
Esther 6 (Listen – 2:40)
Romans 1 (Listen – 5:02)

This Weekend’s Readings
Esther 7 (Listen – 2:08)  Romans 2 (Listen – 4:13)
Esther 8 (Listen – 3:41)  Romans 3 (Listen – 4:30)

Weekend Reading List