Clothed in Righteousness
I now have a whole new perspective on my “robe of righteousness” whenever someone dresses me! The Lord Jesus Christ is our garment of praise, our robe of righteousness, our garment of salvation. Put him on today and delight in all that he sacrificed to clothe you in something so precious, so priceless… his righteousness.
For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
Galatians 3:27
I often wish I could dress myself. I can’t pull on a sweater, button a jacket, or hike up a pair of slacks. This frustrating predicament has driven me at times to God for help. And isn’t it like the Lord to give not only grace, but insight. I was reading today’s verse and decided to hunt down other references to clothes.
Isaiah 61:10 says,
I delight greatly in the Lord…for he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.
There’s a similar reference in Revelation 19:8. Even back at the Garden of Eden, it was God who provided skins to clothe Adam and Eve after the Fall.
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The Ruling Elder & the Ministry of Prayer
When I was first saved, I loved talking to God and seeing Him work. I still do. Yet, I now see that there is a lot to be gained from a little structure, like actually having a regular quiet time where I pray the Bible.
I was almost 30 and had been in the Marine Corps for about a decade when God abruptly entered my life in a Damascus Road type of experience. The spiritual change was immediate, but my ignorance of spiritual things was entrenched. I knew nothing about God except that He was real, He was personal, and that I was His. These basic realizations made prayer the most natural thing in the world for me.
From the point of my conversion forward, I wanted to do everything in my life by reference to God, and so I needed to be constantly talking to Him. I was naïve and overwhelmed, but I had not yet thought that I could pray wrongly. It was clear to me that God was God and I was not; therefore, I had no problem with deferring to Him, no real desire to get my own way, and no inclination to ask merely for the benefits package. However, as I learned more and became increasingly exposed to private and public prayer, I realized that my way of doing it had some deficiencies.
How did this realization hit? First, I read about true prayer in the Bible. Second, I observed or experienced some issues with prayer, particularly with Session and in corporate prayer gatherings. Third, I recognized that the biblical condemnations of praying wrongly might apply in different ways to committed Christians.
Below are some of the errors in prayer that I have witnessed or fallen into over the course of Christian life. My hope is that this brief list highlights some things all of us – and especially us ruling elders – need to be careful about while trying to serve the church.
Hypocrisy
The first of these “prerrors” (if I can coin the term) is hypocrisy. In Matthew 6:5, Christ warns us not to pray like the hypocrites, who are people who like to be seen publicly as holy and righteous. Because they are looking for public approval, they do not gain God’s approval. I do not think I have seen an awful lot of hypocritical grand-standing in PCA churches, but I have experienced a different problem with hypocrisy as an elder. The problem on my mind is that the awareness of my own tendency toward hypocrisy can paralyze me.
My sin makes me want not to pray, especially publicly, because I am aware of the all-too-present danger of hypocrisy. I know intellectually that this paralysis can only happen if I am listening to the enemy and not to God, so I have found a couple of practices that help with addressing this. I have to first constantly remind myself that when the paralysis strikes, it is because I am adopting a works-oriented view of myself. Of course I am not good enough on my own to earn God’s approval. Christ alone is perfectly righteous, but I enjoy that perfect righteousness of Christ as my own through faith in Him. To allow remaining sin to cripple me in my walk and duties is concomitant to denying that my name is written on His hand. Then I think about 1 John 1:9, which says that “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Reminding myself that I am judged by Jesus’ performance and not my own, and confessing my sins without reservation, have helped me deal with my feeling of hypocrisy and to pray publicly without this paralyzing self-focus.
Vanity
The second prerror is vain repetition. God denounces this in Matthew 6:7, where Christ cautions His disciples against imitating the babbling of Gentiles and pagans, who say meaningless words and have meaningless practices. By contrast, the Christian is here called to pray with faith and trust, enjoying a freedom of expression like that which exists between a child and a loving father who already knows that child’s needs.
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Profane Sacrament
If you’ve gone to a clinic or hospital or pharmacy to try to erase what you thought was a mistake, if you’ve killed your child only to receive heartache, pain, remorse, and more suffering, that doesn’t need to be the end of the story. This universe was created by a God who chose to walk among His fallen creatures and wade through the demons and the pain to restore what has been lost. He’s a God who has made a way for restoration, and He offers that restoration through the means of faith and repentance. He offers us an alternative to the demons of the wild that we’ve been worshiping in our wandering. He gives us a way out of the darkness, and into marvelous light.
You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall not practice magic, you shall not practice witchcraft, you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born.
-The Didache
Deep Witchcraft
“Nobody likes abortion,” so says the bleeding heart. “It’s just a necessary evil, we need to have more sympathy for victims.” The victims in view, oddly enough, are always the perpetrators carrying out the massacre, never the children being slaughtered. So blow the winds of our time. If you’re a Christian who affirms what the historic Christian faith has to say about the killing of an unborn child, you’ve probably had an encounter like the one above. You’ve probably been told that you just need to try and empathize more with the suffering mothers, and then you would see that the issue isn’t as black and white as your bigotry has led you to believe. But what if the opposite is true? What if further reflection on the nature of abortion doesn’t lead you into lesser-defined gray areas and fluffy emotionalism, but into a deeper abhorrence for the practice of abortion?
Abortion is a far deeper action with greater consequences than many understand. It is more than an ethical issue, a political issue, or even a religious issue – it’s deeply spiritual and cosmic in its reverberations. Even many Christians, who are entirely against abortion on theological and moral grounds, can often misunderstand how very profane the act of abortion is, and the implications it holds for how we view human nature and our world. Abortion isn’t just a personal act of sin that heaps condemnation on an individual’s head – though it is certainly that. Abortion stains the very land itself, it spills blood onto the earth, into the very soil of a nation, and turns God’s face against it. Look to the book of Leviticus, to the Law of God.
Moreover, thou shalt say to the children of Israel: Whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth of his seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death; the people of the land shall stone him with stones. I also will set My face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people, because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile My sanctuary, and to profane My holy name. And if the people of the land do at all hide their eyes from that man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and put him not to death; then I will set My face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go astray after him, to go astray after Molech, from among their people.
— Leviticus 20:2–5
The God of Israel in Leviticus 20 condemns practices associated with Molech worship – Molech being one of the many pagan deities worshiped by the surrounding nations, specifically in this case, Assyria. The central distinguishing feature of Molech worship was the “giving of seed,” or put simply, the offering of a child. Child sacrifice played a central role in the worship of Molech, as it did in many ancient pagan systems. Most of us will be familiar with Molech, as his worship has often been used by Christians today as a parallel for the modern atrocity of child sacrifice we see in our own culture. It will be worthwhile to look closely at exactly what’s being condemned in Leviticus, and why the worship of Molech – and therefore, abortion – is so profane.
When God issues His prohibition regarding Molech worship and child sacrifice, He doesn’t just forbid it in the same way He forbids plenty of other unclean practices in the Old Testament. He specifically forbids it by penalty of death, along with the penalty of receiving God’s hatred, or God “setting His face against that man.” He gives a twofold explanation for the severity of this sin: it defiles His sanctuary and profanes His holy name. It makes sense to us on the face of things that a sacrifice to a false God would defile God’s sanctuary and profane His name – after all, the Israelites were God’s own people, and to commit any idolatrous act of worship would be inherently blasphemous. But the act in question is being condemned more forcefully and clearly than plenty of other lesser blasphemous acts. How is it that the act of sacrificing a child to Molech profanes God’s name specifically?
I believe there are at least two primary factors involved that make child sacrifice – whether to Molech directly or via abortion – a heinous profanity toward God’s name. For starters, we know that a sacrifice to Molech, like any pagan worship, isn’t simply a meaningless act for a god who doesn’t exist. It is a sacrifice to a demon – a real, dangerous, and evil supernatural being. Paul tells us explicitly that offerings to false idols are offered to demons (1 Corinthians 10:20), and so we shouldn’t forget that demons and evil powers are not only real, but can play a significant role in atrocities that are acted out by human beings. The demons behind the false gods of this world are active, living, malevolent agents that seek worship for themselves, and seek to lead people away from worship of the true God.
The second factor in play is that child sacrifice – and especially abortion – is an act of blasphemy aimed directly at the face of the Most High. It’s an attempt to destroy not just a person created in the image of God, but to destroy the very image of God itself. It’s the closest a mortal can come to striking at God’s very nature, outside of Calvary’s cross.
This is My Body
Sacrament – (in the Christian Church) a religious ceremony or ritual regarded as imparting divine grace, such as baptism, the Eucharist…
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You Just Need to Obey
Every step of heart-prompted obedience leads to experiencing abundant life in Christ. Conversely, every step of disobedience takes us away from the joy of divine goodness. Far from being optional, grace-fueled obedience is absolutely necessary for Christlikeness. Is there any need to pray about whether or not to obey God’s Word? You just need to obey.
Can you imagine a Christian couple actually praying about living together before marriage? Can you fathom a young woman who professes Christ even bothering to pray about whether she should marry an unbeliever? Can you grasp a Christian businessman having to pray about whether he should tell the truth in a transaction? When the Word of God is so clear, praying to discern God’s will becomes a convenient excuse—or even a prolonged filibuster—to avoid doing what Scripture commands.
Many who profess Christ today emphasize a wrong view of grace that makes it a free pass to do whatever they please. Tragically, they have convinced themselves that the Christian life can be lived without any binding obligation to the moral law of God. In this hyper-grace distortion, the need for obedience has been neutered. The commandments of God are no longer in the driver’s seat of Christian living, but have been relegated to the backseat, if not the trunk—like a spare tire—to be used only in case of an emergency. With such a spirit of antinomianism, what needs to be reinforced again is the necessity of obedience.
For all true followers of Christ, obedience is never peripheral. At the heart of what it means to be a disciple of our Lord is living in loving devotion to God. But if such love is real, the acid test is obedience. Jesus maintained, “If you love me,you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Genuine love for Christ will always manifest itself in obedience.
This does not mean that a Christian can ascend to sinless perfection. This will never be realized this side of glory. Neither does it imply that a believer will never disobey God again. Isolated acts of disobedience will still occur. But the new birth does give a new heart that desires to obey the Word. In regeneration, God says:
And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezek. 36:26–27)
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