The Danger of Drifting

Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. (Hebrews 2:1)

We all know people that this has happened to. There is no urgency. No vigilance. No focused listening or considering or fixing of their eyes on Jesus. And the result has not been a standing still, but a drifting away.

That is the point here: there is no standing still. The life of this world is not a lake. It is a river. And it is flowing downward to destruction. If you do not listen earnestly to Jesus and consider him daily and fix your eyes on him hourly, then you will not stand still, you will go backward. You will float by.

Drifting is a deadly thing in the Christian life. And the remedy to it, according to Hebrews 2:1, is, “Pay close attention to what you have heard.” That is, consider what God is saying in his Son Jesus. Fix your eyes on what God is saying and doing in the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

This is not a hard stroke to learn so that we can swim against the stream of sin and indifference. The only thing that keeps us from swimming like this is our sinful desire to float with other interests.

But let us not complain that God has given us a hard job. Listen, consider, fix the eyes — this is not what you would call a hard job description. It is not a job description. It is a solemn invitation to be satisfied in Jesus so that we do not get lured downstream by deceitful desires.

If you are drifting today, one of the signs of hope that you are born again is that you feel pricked for this, and there is a rising desire in your heart to turn your eyes on Jesus and consider him and listen to him in the days and months and years to come.

Daily Devotional: The Mystery of Marriage

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)

When God engaged to create man and woman and to ordain the union of marriage, he didn’t roll the dice or draw straws or flip a coin as to how they might be related to each other. He patterned marriage very purposefully after the relationship between his Son and the church, which he had planned from all eternity.

Therefore, marriage is a mystery — it contains and conceals a meaning far greater than what we see on the outside. God created man male and female and ordained marriage so that the eternal covenant relationship between Christ and his church would be imaged forth in the marriage union.

The inference Paul draws from this mystery is that the roles of husband and wife in marriage are not arbitrarily assigned, but are rooted in the distinctive roles of Christ and his church.

Those of us who are married need to ponder again and again how mysterious and wonderful it is that God grants us in marriage the privilege to image forth stupendous divine realities infinitely bigger and greater than ourselves.

This is the foundation of the pattern of love that Paul describes for marriage. It is not enough to say that each spouse should pursue his or her own joy in the joy of the other. It is also important to say that husbands and wives should consciously copy the relationship God intended for Christ and the church.

I hope you will take this seriously whether you are single or married, old or young. The revelation of the covenant-keeping Christ and his covenant-keeping church hangs on it.

Desiring God by John Piper, page 213

Daily Devotional: Love’s Greatest Happiness

No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. (Ephesians 5:29–30)

The union between Christ and his bride is so close (“one flesh”) that any good done to her is a good done to himself. The blatant assertion of this text is that this fact motivates the Lord to nourish, cherish, sanctify, and cleanse his bride.

By some definitions, this cannot be love. Love, they say, must be free of self-interest — especially Christlike love, especially Calvary love. I have never seen such a view of love made to square with this passage of Scripture.

Yet what Christ does for his bride, this text plainly calls love: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church . . . ” (5:25). Why not let the text define love for us, instead of bringing our definition from ethics or philosophy? According to this text, love is the pursuit of our joy in the holy joy of the beloved.

There is no way to exclude self-interest from love, for self-interest is not the same as selfishness. Selfishness seeks its own private happiness at the expense of others.

Love seeks its happiness in the happiness of the beloved. It will even suffer and die for the beloved in order that its joy might be full in the life and purity of the beloved.

This is how Christ loved us, and this is how he calls us to love one another.

Desiring God by John Piper, pages 206–207

Confessing Sin - Jay Sanders

Are you frustrated with your sin?
When we recognize that we have a thought, attitude, or action that dies not line up with the word of God, we must confess it!
1 John 1: 9

When it comes to MY sin, am I willing to open my mouth and confess it??
Here's the thing, God already knows what you did. No one can run from the presence of God! He knows everything.
Until you confess your sin, you will be frustrated because God is omnipresent.
Pray that God will humble your heart, so that you're able to speak to those who have been offended and ask for forgiveness. God did not create us to live a life full of deceit and disobedience. Sin separates us from the fellowship we have with God by faith through Jesus.

Unconfessed sin creates
1) A loss of fellowship
2) A loss of joy (John 15:11)
3) A tear in your witness as a believer of Jesus Christ

But the awesome thing is this: God IS faithful! When we say the same thing about our sin that God says about our sin, the Bible says God will forgive you. God will forgive me. There is no sin that's so deep that God's grace can't reach. God sent his son down as a sinless man to die a sinful death and we ought to be grateful. What Christ did on the cross us big enough to cover your sin if you would just put your faith in him.

The church, as the body of Christ, has an obligation to uphold the standards of our holy God by living righteously. We don't get the privilege of living in sin like the rest of the world. God has called his children to be set apart, holy, to represent him and proclaim the gospel to the ends of the Earth.

How can God use a church who is unwilling to confess their sin? Can he use a church that refuses to humble themselves and repent? More personally, Are YOU useable?? Is God able to use you as a vessel to glorify him and win souls for the Kingdom? I pray that God will prick our hearts and cause unrest in our spirits until we confess all sins to him. We can't grow in Christ if we are holding on to sin. Let go.

Notes on John 2-3:15

John 2:13-18
1 Corinthians 6:9-
Don't put yourself in situations where you are tempted to indulge in sexual immorality
Parallel between 2 John and 1 Corinthians 6 - your body is the temple. Jesus is cleaning the temple in John.YOU are in the temple. What is in YOUR temple that Jesus needs to be cleaned?

God's grace is bigger than your sin
You don't have enough will power to keep yourself from sinning
If you feel like you can lose your salvation, that means you're currently trying to keep it now on your own strength and think you're doing a good job
John 2:23-24 Parallel to
Genesis 22 - jahova jira my provider,  believing God for a sacrificial lamb for atonement, not to give people materialistic gain.
Jesus in these verses was talking about the kinds of people we see today. People who can quote scripture back and forth  and very religious, but couldn't tell you if there is a Trinity, who's in the Trinity, what's the gospel, etc. Jesus says he has turned himself from these people because these people only trusted in God and did good things for miracles
Nicodemus is NOT dumb. This (john 3) is a new saying that jews have not heard before. He was genuinely baffled for a man can't be physically born again.