Holly D. Dye is the founding contributor and General Editor of Refocusing Our Eyes.
O Sovereign Lord ~ Thou which hast made the changing of the seasons, will also direct and watch over mine.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. (Ecc 3:1)
The great English commentator and Presbyterian minister, Matthew Henry said, “Those things which to us seem most casual and contingent are, in the counsel and foreknowledge of God, punctually determined, and the very hour of them is fixed, and can neither be anticipated nor adjourned a moment.”
Finding myself in such a troubling and agonizing season of my life, I resigned to spend several hours seeking God’s wisdom on this Lord’s Day. His answer came in quite an unexpected way, as my attention was drawn to His creation.
A few weeks ago there was an event here at Dodgers Stadium with Joel Osteen – 35,000 people at Dodgers Stadium – something like that. He is now the largest “church”, and I’m using the word loosely, in America, down in Houston.
You need to understand that he is a pagan religionist, in every sense. He’s a quasi-Pantheist. Jesus is a footnote that satisfies his critics and deceives his followers.
I once assumed the gospel was simply what non-Christians must believe in order to be saved, while afterward we advance to deeper theological waters. But I’ve come to realize that ” the gospel isn’t the first step in a stairway of truths, but more like the hub in a wheel of truth.” In other words, once God rescues sinners, his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the gospel, but to move them more deeply into it. All good theology, in fact, is an exposition of the gospel.
In his letter to the Christians of Colossae, the apostle Paul portrays the gospel as the instrument of all continued growth and spiritual progress, even after a believer’s conversion.
“All over the world,” he writes, “this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth” (Col. 1:6). He means that the gospel is not only growing wider in the world but it’s also growing deeper in Christians.
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1Jn 1:8)
Notwithstanding believers are cleansed from their sins by the blood of Christ, yet they are not without sin; no man is without sin.
This is not only true of all men, as they come into the world, being conceived in sin, and shapen in iniquity, and of all that are in a state of unregeneracy, and of God’s elect, while in such a state, but even of all regenerated and sanctified persons in this life; as appears by the ingenuous confessions of sin made by the saints in all ages;
by their complaints concerning it,
and groans under it;
by the continual war in them between flesh and spirit;
and by their prayers for the discoveries of pardoning grace,
and for the fresh application of Christ’s blood for cleansing;
by their remissness in the discharge of duty,
and by their frequent slips and falls, and often backslidings:
What is there about the cross of Christ which angers the world and stirs them up to persecute those who preach it?
Just this: Christ died on the cross for us sinners, becoming a curse for us (Gal. 3:13).
So the cross tells us some very unpalatable truths about ourselves, namely that we are sinners under the righteous curse of God’s law and we cannot save ourselves. Christ bore our sin and curse precisely because we could gain release from them in no other way. If we could have been forgiven by our own good works, by being circumcised and keeping the law, we may be quite sure that there would have been no cross.
Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, ‘I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.’
O Sovereign Lord ~ Thou which hast made the changing of the seasons, will also direct and watch over mine.
