Where do I stand?

Why do we know so little of God?

1. We know so little of him because he is God.

"He often describes himself by telling us what we can't know if him. We can't see him, we can't comprehend him, because he isn't like a man. In fact, there's no one like him. And what we do know of him, we can't comprehend. We can only believe and admire. We say and believe that he is infinite and eternal, that he is everywhere and never changes."

2. We know so little of God because we only know him by faith.

Faith is all the evidence we have of this invisible God. It is the only way we can come to him. Our whole relationship with him in this life is summed up as walking by faith. We simply trust what he says about himself, and thats how we know him. We know him little, but we know him truly, enough to love him more than we do, delight in him and serve him more than we do, obey and trust him more than we do.


Here are some questions out of the book that have helped me look at different areas in my life, that I have definitely grown in, things that I haven't really changed in, and then just things that I have been really slacking in and need to pray about.

• Is your zeal for God as warm. living, vigorous, effective, and eager as it was when you first gave yourself to God?

• Do rivers of tears still flow from your eyes when God is dishonored?

• Do you contend as violently as you once did for the faith?

• Do you concern yourself as much as you once did with the glory of God in the world?

• Does your life judge the world by its holiness and separateness as it used to?

• Is your faith growing stronger?

• Do you delight in public worship as you did when you first came to Christ?

• Do you find the same relish and sweetness you once found in worship?

• Is the preaching of the Word as precious to you as it was?

• Do you listen to the Word eagerly and respond in faith and repentance?

• Do you anticipate the Sabbath as a time of joyous fellowship, as a foretaste of heaven?

• Do you hunger for holy conversation with others?

• Are you as careful about obedience as you were in the past?

• Is your conscience as tender toward sin as it was?

• Are you as faithful in private prayer and meditation?

• Do you love your brothers and sisters more than before?

• Are you as ready for crosses and burdens and persecution?

• Are you as humble?

• Are you as willing to deny yourself for the sake of the Kingdom?

Revelation 2:4-5

You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

7 Cold Splashes on First Love Fire

1. The flesh knows how to eat an elephant

The flesh knows that it wouldn't succeed against us if it stormed in to crush our love in one blow. It is subtle, working carefully and deliberately to pick our love apart. The felsh eats away love the way you eat an elephant - one bite at a time.

Indwelling sin takes advantage of our natural laziness and negligence in spiritual things, enticing us to lay aside spiritual duties one by one. It won't at first get God completely our of our minds. But it will talk us into thinking of him less and less making us think we can get by with a little less prayer, shorter or fewer private devotions, until he at last convinces us that we can get along without talking to God at all. Which we can't.

2. The flesh dresses us up in tuxedos and evening gowns

Hebrews 12:28-29 - Le us worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

God won't accept mere outward worship from us. When we deal with him, he demands our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, not just our bodies, but our thoughts, our longings and dreams, our everything.

To approach him without fear is to approach him without thinking about who he is: the God of the universe, who holds the nations in his hands, who can create and destroy.

3. The flesh sends us down rabbit trails.

In 2 Corinthians 11:2-3 Paul worried that the Corinthians had been deceived and lost their pure devotion to Christ. The flesh wants to sidetrack us from the simplicity of the gospel, so that Jesus is not our all in all. It steers us toward a religious or political or moral cause as a substitute for passion for him.

4. The flesh turns sin into a cuddly pet.

Cuddly pets are sins that we domesticate and harbor in our hearts. We think of them as either too small or too great to take to God, or in some cases we just get too attached to them to let them go.

5. The flesh pumps up our heads and shrivels our hearts.

I think what Lundgaard is trying to say here is that a person with a big head and a small heart can learn the doctrines of sin, yet never be convicted of sin. He can learn the teachings of grace and pardon and the great atonement for sin, yet never feel the peace of God that passes understanding.

6. The flesh gets us to do our own thing

The flesh tries to put out the fire of our love by gradually persuading us to live according to its wisdom, rather than God's. The wisdom of the flesh is to trust in self. God condemns such "wisdom". Isaiah 47:10 - Your wisdom and knowledge mislead you when you say to yourself, 'I am, and there is none besides me.' Independence is the opposite of faith and love. Faith and love trust another.

7. The flesh is a cat that gets our tongue.

Lundgaard tells us that the greatest destroyer of first-love fire is the neglect of private communion with God.

The person who calls himself a Christian, who says he loves God, yet does not seek his company and delight in it, can't be a true lover of God. His own flesh has deceived him. If he doesn't daily give his heart to God and receive God's heart in return, if he doesn't daily renew his hatred of his own sin and his delight in God's mercy, he has no relationship to God.

What you are
when you are alone with God,
that you are
and nothing more

Consent to Sin

Lundgaard describes consent of the will as a tricky thing. Sometimes we give our consent to something freely, fully, absolutely, after careful deliberation. Sometimes we consent reluctantly to "the lesser of two evils." Sometimes we do something on impulse that we immediately regret and can't explain.

Lundgaard categorizes consent to sin in two forms:

1. Sins of the high hand

In Ephesians 4:19 Paul speaks of those who have "given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more." With this consent the soul plunges into sin like a ship at full sail with the wind at its back.

2. Sins of the willy-nilly

When believers consent to sin, there is always a secret reluctance. The Spirit in us is grieved by our sin and can't delight in it. The believer's consent is like a ship sailing against the wind. In every individual sinful thought, word, action, or feeling, God's grace fights against the will's consent. The wisdom of the believer is to learn to listen to the voice of the Spirit's resistance, no matter how faintly it may echo in the conscience. The folly of the believer is to ignore that voice repeatedly, until he becomes nearly deaf to it. That is only 'greasing the tracks for sin," as Lundgaard calls it.

Lundgaard tells a story which illustrates what we must do in order to defeat sin:

"Suppose my friend Stanley is getting ready to spend a few months in the Central African Republic. Dr. Livingston tells him he must take a series of inoculations, or he will certainly get malaria. Stan looks into it and finds the pills will cost him $200, so he balks. Four months later Stan is on his deathbed, looking up at Dr. Livingston's I-told-you-so face. Who is responsible for Stan's sickness and possible death?

Stan was warned. He knew what he had to do in order to prevent malaria. But he chose, because of the cost, not to take the pills. He has no one to blame but himself.

For if you live according to the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. (Romans 8:13)

For the glory of God

1. Guarding your mind is essential to obedience.

Hebrews 2:1 - We must pay more careful attention, therefore, so what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.

The sense of the warning is that we need to give attention to the things we have heard (in the Scripture), because if we don't, we'll lose the life, power, sense, and impression of them in our minds. There is no way to keep the impression of the Word in our minds except by constant care.

2. The mind includes the conscience

Hebrews 5:14 - Solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

The solid food in the verse I believe is talking about the meat of the Scriptures.

If the conscience isn't stirred up at the sight of sin, it can't help us, and if the mind is dull and led astray, the conscience will be sluggish, or even corrupted.

Lundgaard writes that to please God with obedience, it isn't enough to merely do what he says. The way we do it has to square with God's rule. The great duty of the mind is to attend to the rule of duties.

Words mean nothing unless they are arranged according to the rules of language. In the same sense duties piled up mean nothing to God unless they are done according to his rule. The work of your mind is to know his rule and apply it to all you do before God, to be very careful, then, how you live.

God wants us to think deeply about what pleases him. Lundgaard gives us a list of some of the duties of the mind for everything that pleases God:

1. Obey fully

Under the Old Testament ceremonial law no animal could be a sacrifice unless it was completely free of spot and defect. Similarly, duties must be complete in all of their parts, nothing lacking. The mind must study to know everything that pleases God.

2. Obey by faith

Every duty must be done in faith, in the strength from Christ. Apart from him we can do nothing. We must remind ourselves that it isn't enough for us to be a believer, thought that's the beginning of every good work, but we must also act in faith in every duty.

3. Obey from the heart

A duty offered to God as an act of mind and will without the affections is abominable to God. God loves a cheerful giver, not merely someone who grudgingly drops money in the plate.

4. Obey God's way

Your mind has to make sure you do everything the way and by the means God has commanded. An example of this would be how God has commanded us to worship him. However we are not free to make up ways to worship him. According to his directions for worship we must worship him in spirit and in truth.

5. Obey God for God's goals

Your mind must search out the purpose of every duty, the main goal always being the glory of God in Christ.

"Whatever you do , do it all to the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31)

God's Hammer

Romans 8:13 - For if you live according to the [flesh], you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.
2 Peter 3:17 - Be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of lawless men and fall from your secure position.
1 Corinthians 15:58 - My dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.






"... the believer, to protect himself against deceit, has to fix in his mind the sinfulness of sin and the grace of God. The tools God has given you enable you to do that - when you swing God's hammer, the law of sin is flattened before you. On the other hand, precisely because these tools are so destructive, the flesh opposes them with all its wily strength. So we have to know not only how to use them, but how to keep from being tricked out of using them."

These great tools of the mind are meditation and private prayer. The meditation and prayer that Lundgaard is mentioning are designed specifically to ruin the flesh. In this meditation and prayer we compare our hearts to the Scriptures, comparing our lives to what we find there. We ponder the truth as it is in Jesus, to see his life formed in us.

Lundgaard mentions that, "... we never approach meditation and prayer like this until we keep three things in mind."

1. Meditate on God with God.

We must fill our minds with thoughts of God's character, glory, majesty, love, beauty, and goodness, but not abstractly and impersonally. We must also speak to God as we contemplate him, humbling our souls before him, adoring and admiring him, delighting in him and giving him glory. We must make our meditation into the worship of the psalmist:

O Lord, my Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8:1)

2. Meditate on the Word in the Word

We should study the written Word to know the living Word. We should never study and pray without God's help. He is the one who revealed his truth, and only he can enlighten our minds to know it. We should ask him to open his mind and will to us, so that we may know him and love him more.

3. Meditate on your self in the Word and with God.

The power of this meditation and prayer lies in its ability to expose the secret workings of sin, what advantages the flesh has gotten over you, what temptations it has used with success, what harm it has already caused, and what harm it still plans. This prayer and meditation calls on the Spirit to use his Word to shine light into the cracks and crevices of our soul, to show us every real need and danger there.

God has given us a hammer that crushes the flesh.

Temptation

This Chapter starts out with a story about a man having dinner with his boss's wife, in which she tries to seduce him. It is very similar in a sense to that of Josephs story so I will just share Joseph's instead.

Genesis 39:6-10

So he left all that he had in Joseph's charge, and because of him he had no concern about anything but the food he ate. ow Joseph was handsome in form and appearance. And after a time his master's wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, "Lie with me." But he refused and said to his master's wife, "Behold, because of me my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my charge. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? And as she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not listen to her, to lie beside her or to be with her.

We must know and hold on to the evil of sin and the love of God. That is how Joseph stood up against overwhelming temptation.

Titus 2:11

For the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in "the present age"

The Cross-Eyed Watchman

"Your mind can only protect against the deceit of the flesh if you are 'cross-eyed.' That is, you can only keep teh rottenness of sin and the kindness of God in mind if you fix your eyes on the cross. What shows God's hatred of sin more than the cross? What shows God's love to you more than the cross? If you want to know exactly what sin deserves, you have to understand the cross. If you want to know how infinitely deep the rot of sin reaches, you have to think through all the implications of the cross. If you want to know how far God was willing to go to recue you from sin, you have to see his precious Son hanging on the cross for you."

Deception

(James 1:13-14) But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

James is writing to people trying to excuse their sin much the way Adam and Eve did in the Garden, pinning the blame on God. But James says that the whole guilt of sin lies in the sinner, as he is hoodwinked by the desires of his own flesh.

First, the goal the flesh aims at is death. Whatever sin pretends, it will end in death. The flesh wants us to believe that the consequences for dallying with sin will only be slight.

Second, the way the flesh works for your death is by temptation. The essence of temptation is deceit, to be tempted and to be deceived are the same thing. Here is a lists that James gives us that he calls the five degrees of temptation:

1. dragging away
2. enticing
3. conceiving sin
4. the birth of sin
5. death by sin

"The first degree relates to the mind, it is dragged away from its duties by the deceit of sin. The second aims at the affections, they are enticed and entangled. The third overcomes the will, the consent of the will is the conception of actual sin. The fourth degree disrupts our way of life as sin is born into it. The fifth is the flesh's goal, a hardened life of sin, which leads to eternal death."

"Each of the faculties of your soul has duties before God. The mind is the sentinel, commanded to watch carefully over the soul by questioning, assessing, and making judgments: "Will this please God?" "Is this according to God's Word?" If the mind determines that an action is right, the affections should then fall in line and desire, long for, and cling to that which the mind said was good. Last, the will puts the soul into action, carrying out what the mind said was good and the affections hungered for."