Marissa Henley

Encouraging weary women to hope in Christ alone

A Biblical Gospel – Radical, chapter 2

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Click here and scroll down to read my other posts on David Platt’s book, Radical.

Are you believing the gospel as it is described in God’s Word, or are you believing an Americanized version?  This is the poignant question posed to readers in chapter two of Radical. Many of us have bought into a watered-down, Americanized false gospel, and therefore, we have a watered-down, Americanized response to Christ’s call to discipleship.

When my grandpa was in seminary, he was asked to write a paper on the chief attribute of God.  He wrote a wonderful essay on God’s love.  And he received a big fat F.  Grandpa wouldn’t mind my sharing this story–he loved to tell it–to illustrate the trap that so many Christians fall into.  Is God loving?  Absolutely.  There are countless verses in Scripture where God tells us how much He loves His people.  The problem comes when we stop at God’s love without looking at the whole of what Scripture says about God.  God’s Word tells us that He is the sovereign Creator, the Holy Judge who must deal justly with sin.  My grandpa’s seminary professor said that God’s chief attribute is His holiness–His purity and righteousness that makes Him God and us not God.  Are we willing to give as much weight to John 3:36 as we do to John 3:16?

As Platt writes, “The gospel reveals eternal realities about God that we would sometimes rather not face.  We prefer to sit back, enjoy our cliches, and picture God as a Father who might help us, all the while ignoring God as Judge who might damn us . . . We are afraid that if we stop and really look at God in his Word, we might discover that he evokes greater awe and demands deeper worship than we are ready to give him” (p. 29).

Platt asserts that we must also face what the biblical gospel says about who we are in relation to God.  Here’s a pop quiz:

True or false?

1.  “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.  Therefore, follow these steps, and you can be saved.” (Radical, p. 32)

2.  “You are an enemy of God, dead in your sin, and in your present state of rebellion, you are not even able to see that you need life, much less to cause yourself to come to life.  Therefore, you are radically dependent on God to do something in your life that you could never do.”  (Radical, p. 32)

The first is what is being proclaimed in many churches all over this country.  It leads to complacency, entitlement, and the expectation that God will fix all my problems and make me happy.

The second is what God’s Word says about our human condition.  It leads to wholehearted devotion of our entire life to a God who came to us, to redeem us from the pit of our sin and make us righteous in His sight.  It causes overflowing gratitude and commitment to our Creator who poured out the wrath we deserve on His sinless Son.  In Platt’s words, “Surely this gospel evokes unconditional surrender of all that we are and all that we have to all that he is” (p. 37).

Which gospel are you believing?  And how will you respond?

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Broken Cisterns

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Have you ever noticed a period of time when every Bible study, every sermon, every life experience seems to revolve around the same theme?  It’s as if God tosses subtlety aside and very clearly says, “I want you to learn this!”  This has been happening to me lately.  And the message I’m getting loud and clear is:  Only God can satisfy me and provide the joy and peace that I need.  When I put my trust in other things, they will fail.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a very bad week.  I was sick, the kids were sick, we had a death in the family, and much, much more that I won’t go into now.  Trust me, it was a bad week.  The week was supposed to end with an overnight getaway for my hubby and me for my birthday.  We hadn’t been away overnight in a really long time, which means I hadn’t slept past 7:30 a.m. in a very long time.  So for about two months, I had my eye on October 25 as Sleeping In Day.  (Have I mentioned that I love, love, love sleeping in?)

Well, thanks to a 3-year-old with a high fever, we managed to get away for a few hours but decided to come home before the overnight (and sleeping in) part of the trip.  Rather than sleeping in and enjoying a day of outlet shopping with my hubby, I spent the day sitting at a doc-in-the-box clinic with a kid who had a fever of 104.  Good times .

In the midst of my bad day at the end of a bad week, I sat down to do my BSF lesson.  The lesson was on Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1-26).  In John 4:13-14, Jesus tells her:  “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Then I read Jeremiah 2:13:  “For my people have committed two evils:  they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

So the obvious lesson here is:  Marissa is hewing out broken cisterns of sleep that can hold no water.  If Marissa were satisfied in Christ, drinking in His living water, she wouldn’t be devastated by not getting to sleep in.  And you want to know how well I learned this lesson?  So well that 5 days later, when the same child started running a fever a few hours before Getaway Attempt #2, I threw a very impressive adult temper tantrum about it.  (We went anyway, but the sleeping in eluded me as I worried about my sick kid and the poor grandparents who were stuck taking care of him.)

The whole experience (and my awful reaction to it) has me thinking about broken cisterns in my life.  Those things–some good (sleep), some bad (complaining)–that I turn to for comfort when I’m stressed, worried, tired or sad.  Those things seem to make it better for awhile, but then after a few days (or hours, or minutes), I’m right back where I was before.

Here are some questions I’ve been asked by Bible study leaders and pastors in recent month–remember, God has to make a big deal of something these days to get me to notice it:

Do the people around you see that you are completely satisfied in Christ?  If not, then why? (Please, please do not ask Noel or my good friends this question.  Maybe you could ask someone who sees me about once a month with a happy smile on my face and well-behaved children?)

Where do you turn when things get difficult? Food, tv, complaining, gossip, shopping, time to yourself? (Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. and double Yes.)

Where are you placing your trust other than the Lord? (Sleep, money, and myself, just to name a few.)

When I put the answers to these last two questions together, my behavior really shows itself to be ridiculously silly, not to mention sinful.  When things get tough, I want to grab a piece of chocolate cake and take my mind off things with some brainless television.  So basically, I’m saying to the Sovereign, All-knowing, All-powerful Creator of the universe, “Thanks, God, but I think I’ll let this cake and this tv show solve my problem.”  And then I wonder why I struggle with the same thing again the next day.  Because it should be obvious . . . God is bigger than my problems.  Chocolate cake is not. Only God can make me more and more holy, conforming me to the image of Christ so that I can love others and glorify Him.

How I’d love to leave those broken cisterns behind and drink only of the living water, finding my deepest satisfaction in my Savior.  I know it will be a continuing struggle for me, but I’m thankful that God has knocked me over the head with this lesson.  🙂

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Unthankfulness

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Do you know how many times my children have opened their dresser drawers and exclaimed, “Clean clothes!  Washed, dried, folded and put in my drawer!  Way to go, Mom!  Thank you!”

Zero.  Usually, all I hear is, “When are you going to wash my Transformer pj’s?”  Sound familiar?

When I read Jerry Bridge’s chapter on Unthankfulness (see previous post on his book Respectable Sins), I realized that I must look the same way to God as my kids do to me.  God has done so much for me and continues to sustain me every day, and I seldom stop to thank Him.  God has rescued me from guilt, sin and death by delivering me from the domain of darkness and transferring me to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom I have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Colossians 1:13-14).  He has blessed me in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places (Ephesians 1:3).  In addition to spiritual blessings, He has given me every ability or skill I have, a loving husband, three healthy children, friends, a home, possessions, food . . . everything I have comes from Him.

How often do I thank God for my mini-van?  For the ability to go to the store when we run low on food?  For the privelege of gathering with other Christians openly every Sunday to hear the Word of God preached?  It is not often that I exhibit a sincere attitude of thankfulness.

I read an article on happiness recently in Good Housekeeping magazine.  It said that when we buy something we want, we have a high level of satisfaction, but only for a very short time.  We quickly become used to having that item around and take it for granted, and our sights turn to the next item we want.  This is so true in my life.  I remember last year, when I desperately wanted to replace the ceiling fan over our dining room table with a beautiful chandelier.  Finally, I got my chandelier, and I loved it.  For about a week, I looked at it all the time and felt happy and thankful.  Now, how often do you think I still notice my beautiful chandelier?  Pretty much never.  Rather than being thankful for what I have, I turn my attention to that sofa I’d like to replace.

Jerry Bridges reminded me in this chapter that my unthankfulness is a sin.  Sound harsh?  It’s true.  In Ephesians 5:20, we see the command to give “thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Bridges writes, “Failure to give Him the thanks due to Him is sin.  It might seem like a benign sin to us because it doesn’t harm anyone else.  But it is an affront and insult to the One who created us and sustains us every second of our lives.”

Bridges also writes about giving thanks in ALL circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18).  This is a personal challenge for me right now, as someone I love very much is facing a battle with cancer.  I found comfort in Bridges’ discussion of this topic, encouraging us that giving thanks in difficult circumstances can only be done by faith in the promises of God.  We can only obey I Thessalonians 5:18 because we know Romans 8:28 is true:  For we know for those who love God all things work together for good.  In the midst of heartache, we can thank God for the good we know He can accomplish through any circumstance.

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Being Mindful of God

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Our Sunday school class is studying Respectable Sins by Jerry Bridges.  I highly recommend it.  His basic premise is that, as Christians, we condemn “big sins” such as adultery or abortion, but we tolerate certain “respectable sins” in our own lives, such as worry, gossip, discontentment, pride, worldliness, etc.

The first so-called respectable sin Bridges discusses is ungodliness, which he defines as “living one’s every day life with little or no thought of God, or of God’s will, or of God’s glory, or of one’s dependence on God” (p. 54).  He writes, “Let us then seek to be as mindful of [God] as He is of us.”  This was very convicting for me, as I fear all of these chapters will be.  Psalm 139 tells us that God is extremely mindful of us.  He knows our every action, our every thought.  He created every cell in our bodies.  It makes sense that the creature should be just as mindful of the Creator as the Creator is of her.  But looking at my life, I see that I fall short in so many ways.

It is easy to be mindful of God on Sunday or even during the 15 minutes that I may or may not carve out of my day in order to not look stupid this Thursday at Bible study.  It isn’t hard to be mindful of God when life’s crises bring you to your knees and you know you have no answer but Him.  But it is oh so difficult to be mindful of God when my child has disobeyed me for the 300th time and it isn’t even 9:30 a.m.  Or when my three-year-old still won’t use the potty.  Or when the baby is screaming, the boys are fighting, and dinner still needs to be made.  And then hubby calls and says he will be late . . . almost never does mindfulness of God enter into my reaction at that moment!  And what a difference it would make if I were living in those moments with more awareness of God’s presence, His glory, and my dependence on Him.

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