http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16105648/hope-awakens-faith-and-faith-awakens-love
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More Thrilling to Be Saved Than to Succeed
Jesus sent out seventy-two disciples into the towns where he was about to go. He said to them, “Heal the sick in it and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’” (Luke 10:9). When they came back from their ministry, Luke tells us,
The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!” And [Jesus] said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:17–20)
Do not rejoice at your stunning power over evil (even in my name!), but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.
Written for Redemption
What does it mean to have your name written in heaven? The apostle John tells us that names were written in heaven before the foundation of the world. We also know that the book where these names are written is called “the book of life of the Lamb who was slain” (Revelation 13:8). In other words, it is the book of salvation, the book of the redeemed.
If your name is in the book, these things are true of you (or most assuredly will be):
You are chosen by God in eternity.
You are predestined for sonship in his family.
You are ransomed from every evil bondage.
You are purchased for God’s precious possession.
Christ has taken your place under the punishment of divine wrath.
God has caused you to be born again; he has taken out the heart of stone and put in its place the heart of flesh.
He has made you alive in Christ Jesus and given you the gift of repentance and faith.
He has forgiven you all your sins, and declared you innocent before God.
You are irrevocably rescued from the terrors of hell.
You stand righteous in the court of heaven and have peace with God.
He has adopted you as his own child, and made you an heir of eternal life with the inheritance of all things.
He has made his Holy Spirit to dwell in you, and brought you into the fellowship of his beloved Son.
He is omnipotently committed to holding on to you so that nothing can separate you from the love of God.
He will make every pleasure and pain work for your eternal good.
He will lead you in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
He will bring you safely to his eternal kingdom and present you blameless before the throne of his glory.
He will grant you to see the glory of Christ and be changed into his likeness.
He will give you a new glorious body for the enjoyment of all the endless delights of the age to come.
He will grant you to sit with him on his throne, and share in his universal rule.
He will give you access to the very presence of God, where there will be fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.That is what it means to have your name written in heaven.
Joy of All Joys
Now, when the seventy-two returned rejoicing that powers of darkness, evil, and destruction had fallen before them in Jesus’s name, why would he say, “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20)? Why would he say that?
“Be more irrepressibly thrilled that you are saved than that you are gifted — even in the name of Jesus.”
I don’t assume that Jesus was giving an absolute prohibition of rejoicing over the rescue of people from satanic evil. Because in Luke 15, in the parable of the prodigal son, he tells us to rejoice when we rescue a lost sheep (v. 6), a lost coin (v. 9), or a lost son (v. 32). So, when Jesus says, “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but [do] rejoice that your names are written in heaven,” I take him to mean that rejoicing in our salvation — in the God of our salvation — is something more essential.
It is to be your most essential joy — that is, the joy with the deepest roots, the joy that is most durable, the joy with the greatest satisfaction, the joy that sustains and shapes all joys, the joy that is unmistakable to those around us, the joy that can’t be suppressed, but marks your ministry and your life. Let that joy be this: that your name is written in heaven. Let that joy be this: that you are saved.
Be more deeply, more durably, more gladly, more pervasively, more unmistakably, more irrepressibly thrilled that you are saved than that you are gifted, or competent, or productive, or successful, or famous, or powerful, or fruitful — even in the name of Jesus.
Do not rejoice that, with degree in hand, you are equipped to make a difference, but that your names are written in heaven. To be precise, when you take your diploma, and rejoice to enter the world for the good of others and the glory of God, do it in such a way that people say, “His truest joy, her truest joy, is to be saved. Those Bethlehem graduates are thrilled that their names are written in heaven. Everything flows from that.”
Seven Reasons to Rejoice
Now, back to our original question. Why did Jesus say not to rejoice in ministry success but to rejoice that your names are written in heaven? Why does this matter? It matters for seven reasons: legalism, authenticity, zeal, glory, love, death, and shame.
1. Legalism
To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, we will move toward legalism. If ministry is not the overflow of joy in Christ, it will become the achievement of joy — and it won’t be in Christ. If our work is not coming out of joy, it will become the desperate striving after joy.
2. Authenticity
To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, we will not be able to commend Christ with authenticity as the all-satisfying Savior. There will always be a niggling sense of inauthenticity in our ministry and our witness: “If he does not satisfy me, why am I trying to show him to others?”
3. Zeal
To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, our zeal for any worthy cause will be distorted, out of tune. The cause may be totally righteous, but it will be missing the melody of God’s all-satisfying presence. People may admire your stature as a warrior, but the music of your life will not sound like the pleasures of knowing Christ.
4. Glory
To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, God will not be glorified in our vocation the way he ought to be. Why? Because the fullness of his worth and beauty and greatness is known and shown only where he is manifestly felt as the deepest, sweetest, most durable joy in life.
5. Love
To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, our love for other people will be compromised. Because what is love but to labor, at any cost to ourselves, to give people what is best for them, what is fully and eternally satisfying? That labor of love is weakened by every degree of joy we do not find in our own salvation.
6. Death
To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, we will approach our own death without peace. We will be tormented late at night with the nagging fear that we loved service more than the Savior. (A precious parenthesis here: In my last interchange with Tim Keller, Luke 10:20 was the verse we reveled in. He wrote, “That book in heaven is the one that Lloyd-Jones was comforted by. You probably know the story of him quoting it near the end of his life.”) Dear young graduates, I promise you that sixty years from now, if you have spent your life reveling in the Savior more than in his service, you will be so glad.
7. Shame
To the degree that we are not thrilled to be saved, we will be afraid to face the Lord on the last day. When he asks, “What did you enjoy most in the life I gave you on earth?” how will we face him? How will we face him if we must confess, “You were not my most essential joy”?
Joy Now, Joy Forever
I say with Jesus to all the graduates (and to the rest of us), “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). Make that joy your most essential joy. Let that joy be known to all.
Then you will be delivered from legalism, and you will minister with authenticity, and your zeal will have the melody of heaven, and God will be glorified in your life, and you will taste the sweetness of loving people, and you will face death without fear — and you will face the Lord without shame.
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The Happiest Family of All: How Father and Son Glorify Each Other
The happiest families can be surprisingly competitive. And not just in moments of play and recreation when we compete against each other, in love and good humor. But all the more in the everyday “contest” to honor and bless one another.
“Outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10), Paul writes for the whole church, and such a vision begins at home. And yet the glory and joy of such a “competition” is far, far larger, and more fundamental, than even our homes and churches. We might view all of history as the divine Father and his Son seeking to “outdo one another in showing honor.”
“Service is greatness,” writes Donald Macleod, “and one may even ask . . . whether the persons of the godhead do not seem to vie with one another for the privilege of serving” (Person of Christ, 88). It is an astounding and holy contest to trace through the pages of Scripture, and the story of the world — a story of their glory that delights all those who have been welcomed into the greatest of families.
One Great Design — and Medium
To marvel at the pronounced other-orientation of the Father and the Son is not to minimize the God-centeredness of God but, rather, to go deeper into it. God made the world to glorify himself. This, in short, is God’s “one great design,” as Jonathan Edwards preached in December 1744, in a sermon called “Approaching the End of God’s Grand Design.” And yet how much more can we say than simply this? Edwards says more.
He also speaks of God’s “one grand medium,” saying, “The one grand medium by which he glorifies himself in all is Jesus Christ, God-man.” Another way, then, in fuller detail, to capture God’s one great design, says Edwards, is this:
[God made the world] to present to his Son a spouse in perfect glory from amongst sinful, miserable mankind, blessing all that comply with his will in this matter and destroying all his enemies that oppose it, and so to communicate and glorify himself through Jesus Christ, God-man.
God’s God-centeredness is not at odds with the centrality of Christ. In fact, we cannot have one without the other. One is the great design; the other, the grand medium. God glorifies himself through his Son.
Prompted by Edwards, then, it is amazing to return to God’s own word, see if the dynamic is there, and watch with delight as our Father and our Lord Jesus “vie with one another,” as it were, seeking to “outdo one another in showing honor.”
Father to Glorify Son
Consider first that unexpected attribute of the Son’s glory in the magnificent opening lines of Hebrews. In these last days, God has spoken to us in his Son, “whom he appointed the heir of all things” (Hebrews 1:2). Only after noting this appointment does Hebrews add “through whom also he created the world.” Before creation, the Father appointed his Son to be heir of it all; then the Father made all through him and for him. Paul backs it up in Colossians 1:16: “All things were created through [the Son] and for him.”
“The Father made the universe, and ordained all of history to unfold as it has, to glorify his Son.”
In other words, the Father made the world to give it to his Son. The Father loves his Son (John 3:35; 5:20) — with a love so full, so thick, so deep, so abounding that he overflowed to make a world to make much of his Son. The Father made the universe, and ordained all of history to unfold as it has, to glorify his Son, and demonstrate his infinite delight in and love for his Son. And that does not subtract, so to speak, from the Father’s glory, but only increases it in the increase of his Son. As the Father rightly pursues his glory in creation, he does so in and through the honor and praise of his Son.
So, in the fullness of time, the Father sent his Son, in human soul and body, visibly and audibly — as fully man, without ceasing to be God — to come, in stages, into this great appointed inheritance.
Son Glorified Father
Jesus, the God-man, lived his human life in utter dedication to his Father. Rightly did the angels proclaim “Glory to God!” at Jesus’s birth (Luke 2:14), as the glory of the Father came to the fore in the life and ministry of the Son. In his “state of humiliation,” from manger to cross, the man Christ Jesus did not “glorify himself” (John 8:54; Hebrews 5:5), but his words and deeds, and the effect and intent of his human life, were in full and glad submission to the will, and glory, of his Father. As he says without slant in John 8:49, “I honor my Father.”
“Jesus, the God-man, lived his human life in utter dedication to his Father.”
The Son loves his Father (John 14:31). And he lived as man, and strode toward the cross, propelled by his great delight in and love for his Father. He instructed his disciples to so live, and bear fruit, that his Father would be glorified (Matthew 5:16; John 15:8), and he taught them to pray for the hallowing of his Father’s name (Matthew 6:9; Luke 11:2). The night before he died, Jesus summarized, in prayer, his life’s work as “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4). When he sees that at last his “hour” has come, Jesus prays, “Father, glorify your name” (John 12:28).
As the Son draws near to the cross, we marvel to see both glories — of Father and of Son — coming to the fore, not in competition, yet vying to accent the other. And strikingly, the Son’s lifting up, his coming into his glory as God-man, begins not only with his resurrection, but even in the shame and horror of being “lifted up” to the cross (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32). Seeing that his hour has come, and that he will now move beyond his “state of humiliation,” and enter into glory (Luke 24:26) with his great final act of self-humbling (Philippians 2:8), Jesus says,
Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. (John 13:31)
Not only will the incarnate Son continue to glorify his Father, as he has since Bethlehem, but now he will do so in some new measure — and the Father too will glorify his Son. “So intertwined are the operations of the Father and the Son,” comments D.A. Carson, “that the entire mission can be looked at another way. . . . One may reverse the order” (John, 482). They glorify each other.
Father Glorified Son
In history’s greatest twist, the cross, in all its unspeakable odium and shame, begins the incarnate Son’s uplifting. Here, at Golgotha, the Father’s anticipated glorifying of the Son, as the Son spoke of, and prayed for, begins to be realized. The Father had glorified his Son, in measure, in his anointed life and ministry (John 8:54; 11:4), but now his glory comes decisively and fully at the cross, and in his rising again (John 7:39; 12:16, 23). Peter’s Pentecost sermon will recognize that God “glorified his servant Jesus . . . whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 3:13, 15). Or, as Peter later wrote, tying together the Son’s resurrection and glorification, “God . . . raised him from the dead and gave him glory” (1 Peter 1:21).
Christ’s resurrection, then — and with it, his ascension and enthronement in heaven — ushers in a new era, the age in which we live, of the church and the Spirit. If the Father seemed to outdo the Son in showing honor before creation, and the Son tried to outdo the Father in his earthly life, and the Father thrust the glory of his Son to the fore, in history, in the terrible cross and triumphant resurrection, we now — as happy sons of God and brothers of Christ — thrill as our Father and his Son strive all the more for the privilege of exalting each other.
Glories Together Now
The New Testament teems with the glory of God, and the glory of Christ, as the saints see what Edwards called “the great design” and “the great medium” play out before our eyes. The glory we see in Christ, the eternal Word made flesh, does not exclude the Father, but is “glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14). All God’s centuries of promises, says 2 Corinthians 1:20, find their “Yes” in Jesus — “that is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.” The fruit of righteousness we bear in life “comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:11). To the Father, through the Son.
We serve, says 1 Peter 4:11, “by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.” In our sufferings in the present time, we look to the God of all grace, who called us to “his eternal glory in Christ” (1 Peter 5:10). And in the great doxology of Hebrews, we look to the Father, “who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus” to work in us what is pleasing in his sight “through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen” (Hebrews 13:10–21).
Perhaps best of all is Philippians 2:9–11. God the Father has “highly exalted” his Son and given him, without envy or reservation, “the name that is above every name.” This is a stunning grant — one of the great realities the Father must have dreamed up when appointing his Son “heir of all things,” and is now delighted to fulfill. And lest we worry that the holy contest has gone too far when we learn that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,” Paul has one last phrase to enchant us all in this happy family: “to the glory of God the Father.”
Glories at the End
Even now, as Christ sits enthroned in heaven, the Father is putting all things under his feet, and when that great work of redemption is done (Revelation 21:6), then “the Son himself will also be subjected to him” (1 Corinthians 15:27–28). Does the Father then, in the end, become the last recipient of glory, while the Son finally outdoes him in showing honor? Macleod encourages us “not to overlook the complexities of the situation” (88).
It is here, precisely with the end in view, that he observes how Father and Son seem to “vie with one another for the privilege of serving.” As we strain to look into the future, we find depths and dimensions to the divine glory we should be careful not to reduce. On the one hand, Jude 24–25 tells us the Father will present us before himself, while in Ephesians 5:27, Christ presents the church to himself in splendor. So too, not only will the Son present the kingdom to the Father (1 Corinthians 15), but the Father will present the bride to his Son (Revelation 21:2, 9). Macleod observes, “The idea of the Father handing over the bride to Christ is as definitive as that of the Son handing over the kingdom to the Father” (88).
Such twin emphases have for two millennia led the church to confess with Christ, and with awe, the blessed mystery, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
Glory Enough to Go Around
What a thrill it is to see that our Father, and our elder Brother, are not miserly with divine glory. There is no scarcity of glory in the Godhead to be hoarded and rationed. Divine persons do not compete for glory, even as they vie to show each other honor. As Dane Ortlund observes, “The New Testament oscillates so frequently between the Son and the Father as the more immediate object of glorification that it becomes unthinkable to envision one person of the Trinity being glorified and not the other persons.”
Our God does indeed, as God, righteously and lovingly seek his own glory, but we should not think of his glory as scarce, or his fingers as tight. He does not give his glory to another, even as “the Father of glory” (Ephesians 1:17) and Jesus “the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8; James 2:1) — and so too “the Spirit of glory” (1 Peter 4:14) — vie with each other, outdoing one another in showing honor.
Such “competition” makes for the happiest family of all.
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God Destined Your Afflictions — Don’t Be Shaken! 1 Thessalonians 3:1–5, Part 3
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15591797/god-destined-your-afflictions-dont-be-shaken
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