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He Was Able to Bear It

– A Communion Meditation from BCC Elder, Bill Pritchett
 

Coming to the communion table is not a time to stop and reflect on how great you are, but instead to reflect on how merciful God is. We are not to spend this time considering the great work we have done to clean ourselves up, but to recognize that despite our efforts, apart from Christ we can do nothing. When we assume that whatever God requires of us, that we have the power in ourselves to do it, is to make the cross and grace of Jesus Christ of no effect.

As John Owen wrote:

The purpose of our holy and righteous God was to save His church, but their sin could not go unpunished. It was, therefore, necessary that the punishment for that sin be transferred from those who deserved it but could not bear it, to one who did not deserve it but was able to bear it.

The wages of sin is death, the Bible says, and someone has to pay; there is a penalty, which accompanies our transgression. Man has trespassed and therefore is the only one who should pay and yet he cannot, being himself sinful. God has demanded payment and yet is the only One who could pay. However, He certainly should not, being Himself holy. What was to be done?

God alone could pay and so pay He did, with the blood of His Son. The Son of God became sin and bore the wrath of His Father, being a curse on our behalf. He became our substitution, dying for our sins, in our place. He did not deserve to die, we did, but He willingly became obedient to the payment required that we might be reconciled to Him. We deserved to die and owed a payment, but He purchased our freedom. God has been declared both just and the justifier of the justified.

We could not clean ourselves up to the point that our debt has been paid, we cannot do enough good to no longer need Jesus and the cross. So when we come to the communion table our minds go to the fact that we are sinners…but our minds don’t have to stay there because with Jesus it doesn’t end there…We are sinners, in need of a savior and we have that savior in Jesus Christ, so our minds can then go to the fact that we have a wonderful, merciful savior. That God is so patient and gracious with us over and over and over again. That though we still struggle with sin; that our victory is in Jesus.

The gospel is that Christ died for our sins and He rose and through faith in Him we can be reconciled to the Father.

So as we consider this quote from John Owen, let’s go before God in prayer and be thankful that though He did not deserve it, he was able to bear it….on our behalf.

Lord, we pray now and say thank you! Thank You for bearing what we are unable to bear. Thank You for grace and forgiveness, that we go through this life not solely dependent on our own strength but that You give us what we need each day to face temptation as well as whatever situations come before us during each day. Help us to stop looking to ourselves or to other people or other things to be our satisfaction but help us to look only to You. Let us see You as what is fully satisfying, to see You as what is lasting, to see You as what is fulfilling and to repent of our own idolatry. We ask, God, that you would forgive us of trying to tilt the scales in our favor, but rather, God, that You would enable us, by Your Holy Spirit, to just rest in Your arms today, to just trust that You’ve done what You’ve said You’ve done, to really let go knowing that we can trust in You accomplishing what You said You accomplished in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Help us now, Lord. It is in Jesus’ name, AMEN



How to Pray for the Sick and Disabled

-By  RACHEL LUNDY

When we know someone who is suffering from an illness or disability, our response is often to pray for healing. 

It is compassionate to desire relief for one who is suffering, and it is certainly appropriate to ask the Lord for healing.

 Our God is loving and compassionate, and He is grieved by the suffering of His children (Psalm 86:15, John 11:32-35). He is also a powerful God who is able to heal (Mark 1:29-34).

However, healing is not always God’s plan for those who are sick and disabled.

 Sometimes God chooses to heal, but sometimes instead He chooses to use a long-term illness or disability for the good of His people.
For this reason, it is good to pray for more than just physical healing. 

Let’s look to Scripture for examples of ways to pray for those who are suffering from an illness or disability.

  • Pray that God would comfort them (2 Corinthians 1:4).
  • Pray that they would “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18, NIV).
  • Pray that they would trust in the Lord and not lean on their own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).
  • Pray that they would grow in the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23).
  • Pray that they would suffer well. Pray that they would “commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good” (1 Peter 4:19, NIV).
  • Pray that God would grant them endurance and encouragement (Romans 15:4-6).
  • Pray that they would throw off sin and run with endurance. Pray that they would look to Jesus so that they do not grow weary and lose heart (Hebrews 12:1-3).
  • Pray that the Lord would provide for all of their needs “according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19, NIV).
  • Pray that they would thirst for God and that they would place their hope in Him (Psalm 42:1-5).
  • Pray that God would keep them in perfect peace (Isaiah 26:3).
  • Pray that they would “be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer” (Romans 12:12, NIV).
  • Pray that God would enable them to be content in whatever circumstances He places them in (Philippians 4:11-13).
  • Pray that they would hold unswervingly to the hope they have professed (Hebrews 10:23).
  • Pray that they would not lose heart, but that they would persevere and fix their eyes on what is eternal (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).

It is a great privilege to bring our requests to the Lord and be a part of the work He is doing. God chooses to work through the prayers of His people. Therefore, let us lift up our brothers and sisters who are suffering from disabilities, praying not just for their physical bodies, but for their spiritual growth and strength as well.

In what other ways should we intercede for those who are suffering from an illness or disability? If you are suffering, in what ways do you appreciate people to praying for you?

 

Rachel Lundy is a wife and mother of two children. She lives with dysautonomia, a condition that leaves her mostly homebound. She writes at Cranberry Tea Time about life with a chronic illness and the hope and joy she has in Christ.

 

 



What the Transgender Debate Means for the Church

 
– by Russell Moore

[Recently], news broke that the White House officially rescinded President Obama’s executive order regarding transgenderism in public schools. This is a good decision that corrects outrageous and coercive directives. Children should not be turned into pawns of culture war experimentation. As a conservative evangelical, I’m glad to see this action.

At the same time, the cultural conversation on gender identity issues requires more than good policy. It demands a gospel-centered response from the church.

Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It’s about what it means to be human. Poet Wendell Berry responded to techno-utopian scientism with the observation that civilization must decide whether we see persons as creatures or as machines. If we are creatures, he argued, then we have purpose and meaning, but also limits. If we see ourselves, and the world around us, as a machine, then we believe the Faustian myth of our own limitless power to recreate ourselves.

This is, it seems to me, the question at the heart of the transgender controversy. Are we created, as both the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus put it, “male and female,” from the beginning or are these categories arbitrary and self-willed? Do our bodies, and our sexes, represent something of who we were designed to be, and thus impose limits on our ability to recreate ourselves?

The Sexual Revolution has always whispered promises of this kind of godlike self-autonomy. After a generation of no-fault divorce, cohabitation, ubiquitous pornography, and the cultural unhinging of sex from marriage and marriage from childbearing, it only seems inevitable that Western culture is now decoupling sexuality from even its most basic reality: gender. If human sexuality exists solely for our self-actualization and satisfaction, then it makes no sense to impose restrictions based on something as seemingly arbitrary as gender.

This, ultimately, won’t work. There are good reasons to put boys and girls in different bathrooms and locker rooms and sometimes sports teams, reasons that don’t impugn the dignity of people but uphold it. Sex-differentiated bathrooms and sports teams and dormitories for men and women aren’t the equivalent of, say, a terrorist Jim Crow state unnaturally forcing people apart based on a fiction, useful to the powerful, that skin color is about superiority and inferiority. Every human being knows that there are important, and necessary, differences between men and women. Without such recognition, women are harmed and men are coarsened.

Moreover, the move here toward severing self-identity from biological reality will hardly stop at “gender.” If anything, there’s much more of a case to be made that one can feel to be a different age than one’s doctor’s exam or birth certificate would show. That’s relatively indifferent if all that this means is “You’re only as old as you feel” or “I’m a Millennial trapped in a Gen-X body.” It’s something else entirely if chronological self-identity is mandated for military service or the drinking age or the age of consent. People and neighborhoods and nations and cultures cannot live this way.

So how should we as Christians respond?

First of all, we should never mock or belittle those suffering gender identity disorders. These are our neighbors to be respected and served, not freaks to be despised. They feel alienated from their identities as men or women and are seeking a solution to that in self-display or in surgery or in pumping their bodies with the other sex’s hormones. In a fallen universe, all of us are alienated, in some way, from who we were designed to be. That alienation manifests itself in different ways in different people.

Christian congregations that seek to be faithful to the gospel must teach what’s been handed down to us, that our maleness and femaleness points us to an even deeper reality, to the unity and complementarity of Christ and the church. A rejection of the goodness of those creational realities then is a revolt against God’s lordship, and against the picture of the gospel that God had embedded in the creation.

But this also means that we will love and be patient with those who feel alienated from their created identities. We must recognize that some in our churches will face a long road of learning what it means to live as God created them to be, as male or female. That sort of long, slow, plodding and sometimes painful obedience is part of what Jesus said would be true of every believer: the bearing of a cross. That cross-bearing reminds us that God doesn’t receive us because of our own effort but because God reconciled us to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Second, we must bear witness to the goodness of what it means to live as creatures, not as self-defining gods and goddesses. God created us as human, and within humanity as male and female (Gen. 1:27). We are all sinners, so we chafe against having ourselves defined by a Creator, and not by ourselves or our ideologies. Our nakedness shames us, because our physical difference reminds us that we are not self-contained. Man needs woman, and woman needs man.

We must also resist the temptation to buy into the Sexual Revolution’s narrative. I don’t just mean that we accommodate ourselves to the sins and heresies of the movement, although that’s always a danger too. I mean the danger is that we assume that the Sexual Revolution will always be triumphant, progressing upward and onward. To assume such is to assume that the Sexual Revolution will be able to keep its promises. It can’t. It never has. If Christians see ourselves as people who are “losing” a culture rather than people who have been sent on a mission to a culture, we will be outraged and hopeless instead of compassionate and convictional. If we do not love our mission field, we will have nothing to say to it.

We should stand against any bullying of kids who different from other children, for whatever reason. Children with gender identity issues are often harassed and marginalized. They should be loved and protected. Schools can do this without upending all gender categories. More importantly, churches and Christians can do this. We should hate the bullying of our neighbors, especially children, even more than the outside world hates it.

We Christians believe that all of us are sinners, and that none of us are freaks. We conclude that all of us are called to repentance, and part of what repentance means is to receive the gender with which God created us, even when that’s difficult. We must affirm that God loves all persons, and that the gospel is good news for repentant prodigal sons and daughters, including for those who have trouble figuring out which is which.

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Portions of this article were published previously.