Something to Remember, Something to Forget

Something to Remember, Something to Forget

by | Feb 12, 2017 | Giving

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                        “Give without remembering and receive without forgetting.”
 
The old saying that we should give without remembering and receive without forgetting contains a world of wisdom in its few short words.  While it is not actually a biblical proverb, the principles represented in this old maxim are certainly found in the Scriptures.  

We may not be able to find a specific biblical verse saying “forget your acts of giving,” but the apostle Paul covered the principle when he wrote: “But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead” (Philippians 3:13).  What Paul says here can be applied in many ways – such as forgetting our past sins and failures – but it applies equally to forgetting or not dwelling on any good we may have done and concentrating on what good we may still do.  

The Scriptures are even more explicit about the need for us to remember the things we ourselves receive.  Paul shows exactly this continuing thankfulness when he wrote to the Church at Ephesus: “I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers” (Ephesians 1:16).  Paul clearly remembered to give ongoing thanks not only for things he himself received, but also for others, too.

So we can certainly find a worthwhile reminder of biblical principles in the old saying regarding forgetting what we give and remembering what we have been given.  The way to which we are called is one of gratefully remembering the gifts we receive and actively looking not at things we have given, but looking for new ways to give. 

As We Serve, We Grow

As We Serve, We Grow

by | Feb 5, 2017 | Service

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“I thank my God every time I remember you.  In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy  because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now,  being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus”  (Philippians 1:5-6).

The Church at Philippi in Asia Minor is often said to have been Paul’s favorite congregation. It is not that he did not love all those with whom he worked, of course, but his letter to the Philippians shows a special affection for them and their dedication to the work of God.

As he begins his epistle Paul states how he gives continual thanks for the Philippians because of their “partnership in the gospel” (vs. 5), but then he continues the thought by saying that their work in the gospel gave him great confidence that God would complete his work of transformation in them.
 
This is a vital thought in Paul’s theology.  He is not saying, of course, that because of the Philippians’ good deeds God will complete his work in them  – we have all of Paul’s letters to show that this could not be what he meant.   So what exactly did Paul mean?
 
When we read the epistle to Philippi in its entirety, it is clear that Paul was stressing his certainty that because of their dedication to the work of God and the love that showed, the Philippians would naturally be living in such a way that God would be able to fulfill his purpose in them as individuals.  Look at what Paul tells us a few verses later in the first chapter:

“And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:9-11).

Here, if we need to see it, we find clear expression of the fact that Paul is not talking about the Philippians’ own works of righteousness.  He specifically states that what they are doing is a result of their being “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ” (vs. 10b).  But Paul makes it equally clear that they will be filled with this fruit of righteousness as they continue to grow in love (vss. 9, 11).

Putting all these verses together, we see that Paul  equates the Philippians’ love with their partnership in the Gospel – their selfless dedication to the salvation of others.  He shows  (in  verses 6 and 10) that that the expression of that love through God’s work will lead to their own growth.
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If this seems in any way like complex theology, its principle is profoundly simple:  the more we concentrate on the welfare and development of others, the more God can and will develop us personally. It is a simple truth that the way to maximum spiritual transformation and growth is often not through self-focused spiritual exercise, but through the other-focused work of love that we are called to do. ​​

Four Tests of Forgiveness

Four Tests of Forgiveness

by | Jan 29, 2017 | Forgiveness

By R. Herbert
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“… forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses” (Mark 11:25).

We all know that as Christians we must forgive if we are to receive forgiveness ourselves, but the path to forgiveness is often not an easy one.  Long after we have been hurt, cheated or abused by others – and long after we have tried to forgive and forget the injury – we may still have vivid memories of the hurtful situation, or ongoing reminders of what happened to us.

But if the hurt still feels real when memories do surface of ways we have been hurt in the past, we may need to ask if we have truly forgiven the individual or people who hurt us. Given what Christ said regarding the forgiveness of our own sins, it is imperative not only that we forgive, but also that we know we have done so.

How Can We Know if We Have Forgiven?

How can we know we have truly forgiven someone?  The apostle Paul’s writings touch on four principles that we can use in our own lives in making sure we have indeed forgiven someone who has offended us.  We can access those principles by simply asking ourselves the following questions.

Whenever you think of what the other person did to you …

1) … Do you think of how much you need forgiveness yourself?  This may seem backwards at first, but it is a baseline principle.  Paul wrote: “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Colossians 3:13).  Ultimately, we may never really forgive someone unless we come to see that the person’s betrayal of us is no worse than our own betrayal of God in every sin we have committed.  We can never presume that someone else’s sins are worse than ours, because only God knows the heart and mind – just as Jesus said that even persecutors who kill  the people of God “will think they do God a service” (John 16:2).  Remember this was exactly Paul’s own situation before his conversion.  Paul reminds us that: “… God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Romans 11:32).

2) … Do you think about the fact that despite their faults, God loves the person who has hurt you just as he loves you?  (Matthew 5:45, Romans 5:8).  If you cannot see the offender’s good points and do not see him or her as someone loved by God, you may well not have forgiven them.  Forgiveness involves reaffirming in our own minds the spiritual potential of the wrongdoer. When we forgive we stop defining the wrongdoer by the wrong he or she did. Only when we can really think of the other person as having sinned against us through weakness, a failure of empathy, or a lack of understanding can we begin to see them with the kind of compassion that is necessary for forgiveness to happen.

3) … Do you think of ways you might be able to help them?  Jesus commanded his followers to   “… love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).  Paul specified a way we might do that when he wrote: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse” (Romans 12:14).  Of course, in keeping these commands in mind, we can substitute “hurt,” “injure,” “mistreat,” “abuse,” or anything else someone might do against us. The end result is the same:  we must bless such people.  To love and bless someone means taking the opposite approach from resenting them and refusing to get over a wrong that they have done to us.  This aspect of forgiveness often involves thinking of ways we might initiate or increase reconciliation with the other person, when this is possible. Regarding a person who had sinned against the members of the church at Corinth, Paul wrote: “Now … you ought to forgive and comfort him” (2 Corinthians 2:7). It is not coincidence that Paul says we should forgive and comfort in the same breath – this is just one example of truly loving those we forgive.  In this case the person had repented of what they had done, but in every case we must come to the point where we love the person who harmed us and we are willing to pray for them and bless them in any ways that we can.

4) …Do you think that the offense – whatever it was – is ultimately not important?  This is a shocking concept for many people and perhaps the hardest stage of forgiveness to reach. But when we truly and deeply forgive, we begin to feel that the ways in which others have injured us really do pale into insignificance by comparison to what our sins did to Christ.  With this level of forgiveness we come to the point where we can honestly downplay the other person’s offense against us almost as though it did not happen.  Notice something Paul said in this regard to the Corinthians:  “… And what I have forgiven –if there was anything to forgive –I have forgiven in the sight of Christ for your sake” (2 Corinthians 2:10, emphasis added). Did you notice the significance of Paul’s words when he says “… if there was anything to forgive…”? Paul knew there was indeed something for the Corinthians and for him personally to forgive and  specifically discussed this sin in his first letter to the Corinthians, yet after forgiving the sinner he shows us the attitude of downplaying the offense as though it was not ultimately important.

Choosing Forgiveness

We may never be able to forget memories we have of ways in which others have hurt us – in the same way that we may still have scar tissue from an old physical wound. But forgetting is not necessary for forgiving, and we must never feel that because we cannot forget, we cannot forgive.   People sometimes say “I have tried to forgive the person who hurt me, and I just cannot.”  But God does not give us this option – not forgiving others is choosing that God will not forgive us.  Some people also think that they cannot forgive because the pain they feel is  “too great,” but ironically the pain will always be there until we forgive.

When the first thought we have about a person who hurt us is not the pain they caused in our life, we are certainly beginning to forgive. But the process must be completed.  We must ask God’s help to reach the point where we always think more about how we need forgiveness than we do regarding the sins of another against us. We must reach the point where we firmly accept that God loves the offending person just as fully as he loves us – whatever our opinion of their failures.  We must come to the point where thoughts about the person include thinking of ways we might pray for them and bless them, and where we come to realize that in the larger picture of God’s plan for all humanity, what others have done to us is ultimately not important compared to his plan being fulfilled in our – and their – lives.

A Lesson About Knowledge

A Lesson About Knowledge

by | Jan 22, 2017 | Knowledge & Wisdom

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​The second epistle of Peter has sometimes been called the “knowledge” epistle of the New Testament.  The apostle’s short letter speaks of “knowing” and “knowledge” eleven times – five times in the first chapter alone – and focusses on the importance of what we know more than any other section of the Christian Scriptures.
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Notice how Peter begins his epistle directly after addressing his readers: 

“Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness” (2 Peter 1:2-3, emphases added).

In contrast with the false teachers of that era who taught that true knowledge was hidden and only attainable by a few, Peter stresses that ultimately, true knowledge is knowledge of God and his Son, and that we all have access to everything we need through the knowledge that God openly gives us.

After his introduction, Peter describes what we might call a “spectrum” of spiritual qualities:

“For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love” (2 Peter 1:5-7, emphases added).

This “spiritual spectrum” ranges from faith through love with the “hope”-related quality of “perseverance” or “endurance” at the center (1 Thessalonians 1:3).  As such, we can see that Peter’s list is an expansion of the three qualities of faith, hope and love we know so well from Paul’s writings (1 Corinthians 13:13). 
 
But notice something else about this “spectrum.” If we look carefully, we see that Peter sets the individual qualities in groups of two:  faith/goodness, knowledge/self-control, perseverance/ godliness, mutual affection/love.   When we consider these pairs closely, we see that the first quality of each pair represents a mental attitude and the second quality involves a practical application.  So faith, knowledge, perseverance (or hope), and mutual affection are all things within our own minds, whereas goodness, self-control, godliness, and love are all things relating to what we do – that we apply in life. 

So the “spiritual spectrum” that Peter gives helps teach us that we must have action as well as knowledge. Peter summarizes this fact when he tells his readers later in his letter that we must “… grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).  We must have positive change in our lives along with the growth of knowledge or we will fail to grow spiritually as we should.
 
The pairs of qualities that Peter gives us deserve some thought.  How do the qualities relate? What is the connection between each of them?  Perhaps above all, Peter’s list shows us that a feeling of affection is not love – that we may have good feelings toward others without really loving them. Mutual affection, Peter’s list shows, is an attitude; love is an action – something we actively do for others.

It is only as we grasp and apply this fact that we will be using the knowledge God gives us as he intended. Peter himself tells us, directly after listing the qualities of his “spiritual spectrum”: “For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:8). 

Becoming One and Being Many

Becoming One and Being Many

by | Jan 15, 2017 | Fellowship

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“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many” (1 Corinthians 12:12-14).

In his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul uses a double analogy that is worth meditating upon.  First, the apostle reminds us that by the means of the one Spirit that is given to us, we are made part of the one body of Jesus Christ (vs. 13a). 
 
But Paul then extends the analogy of being baptized in the Spirit just as we are baptized in water to say that we are “all given the one Spirit to drink” (vs. 13b),  just as we drink water.   Paul frequently talks about baptism in his letters and uses other analogies such as that of the Israelites being completely baptized in the Red Sea by means of the water around them and the cloud (water vapor) above them (1 Corinthians 10:2).   In 1 Corinthians 12, however, Paul extends the analogy in a unique manner by saying that after baptism, we are all given the Spirit to “drink.” 

Paul’s words here are reminiscent of those of Jesus, of course, when he said “…Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink” (John 7:37).  Notice also Paul’s statement earlier in 1 Corinthians regarding the Israelites in the wilderness, that they “… drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4).

So the overall analogy that Paul makes is that we are first baptized in the Spirit and then we drink the Spirit.  To be baptized means that we enter into the water, and to drink means that we let the water enter us.   We are surrounded by water on the outside in baptism, then filled on the inside as we “drink” the Spirit.

In saying this, Paul first stresses that we must never be content to stay at the point where we were baptized and received the initial deposit of the Spirit of God –  we are then called to drink more and more of that Spirit till we are filled with it (Ephesians 5:18).

We drink the Spirit in a number of ways.  Jesus said:  “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63), and we drink as we study those words and make them part of us. We drink as we pray for the Spirit: “… If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13).  We drink to the degree that we set our minds on the things of God as opposed to the things of this world:  “Those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit” (Romans 8:5).

But there is a final aspect to what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:12-14 that we should not overlook – it is what Paul says regarding the one body and many.  Paul makes it clear that if we repent and are baptized, we receive a portion or deposit of the Spirit of God and in so doing we become part of the one body of Christ (vs. 13a) – we are the same as all other believers in this.  But he then stresses that although we are all given the one Spirit to drink, “Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many” (vs. 14).    We are one with and like all other believers in baptism, but to the different degrees we drink the Spirit, we are separate and unique. 

Paul’s message is a powerful one – through baptism we receive the Spirit and are granted inclusion in the one body of Christ. Our identity is lost in his.  But it is to the degree that we then continue to seek and drink the Spirit that we become different – different parts within the same body, with different gifts and responsibilities.  Paul’s simple analogy teaches us that while we can rejoice in becoming part of the one body through baptism, we must never rest there.  We must then continue to drink the Spirit.  To the degree we do, we are a unique part of the body, having in that sense a unique relationship with God – and God may uniquely use us.