Archive for March, 2007
Our sins are never purely external. Early on in our marriage, I remember confessing anger to Nicole. She happily forgave and then looked at me expectantly. “What?”, I asked, smugly confident that I had done my duty. “Why were you angry?” Nicole was getting at the heart of my anger: the hidden motives and cravings that led to the outward manifestations of my sin.
Luke 6:43-45 (the basis for The Three Trees) is very clear that there is a connection between our behavior and our hearts:
“For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
Getting at the roots of our sin explains the behavior. What do you want and believe? What do you fear? What lies are you believing about God, yourself, and others? What does Scripture say about these desires, fears, and beliefs? Write ‘em down. Stuck? Try filling in the blank: “I want…” “I need…” “I wish…” “Things would be better if…”
I have to warn you that looking at your heart on this level can be hard. Sometimes you can’t think of a single thing, something it seems like a single sinful action is connected to a half-dozen sinful motives. Getting help from others on this will often move you much further, much faster than you can ever get on your own.
Another thought about involving others: plan on walking through this with someone else, preferably your parents. Working it all out on your own and showing someone else the finished product isn’t necessarily humble if you aren’t willing to listen to their input and allow them to ask you the difficult questions about patterns of sin.
Spend as much time as you need here, but not more than that. We’re not analyzing our hearts for the sake of analysis. No one has ever changed from just considering the connection between behavior and cravings. We’re doing this to arrive at a single step of simple obedience. That’s repentance. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Stay tuned. In the mean time, here are some “X-Ray Questions” to help you better understand your heart (from Lane & Tripp, How People Change, pp. 163ff):
- What do you love? Is there something you love more than God or your neighbor?
- What do you want? What do you deisre? What do you crave, long for, wish?
- What do you seek? What are your personal expectations and goals? What are your intentions?
- What do you fear? Fear is the flip side of desire.
- What do you feel like doing? This is a synonym for desire.
- What do you think you need?
- What makes you tick? What really matters to you? What are you living for?
- Whose performance matters to you?
- Who are your role models? Who are the people you respect?
- What would bring you the greatest pleasure? The greatest misery?
- What do you see as your rights? What do you feel entitled to?
- What do you think about most often?
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Are y’all watching the Final Four today? Who are you rooting for?
I’m not (normally) one to boast, but check out my 3/13 Final Four predictions.
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Now that we’ve recognized the situation in which we sin (the heat), we can talk about how we sin in a given situation. That’s the bad fruit: the external manifestations of sin that are usually visible, audible, or perceptible in some way.
The heat is our circumstances. The bad fruit is how we react to those circumstances. We can’t control our circumstances, but we can control how we respond. So this part of the diagram tries to answer questions like these: How did you respond? What did you think, feel, say, and do? What does Scripture say about these responses?
This will work if you’re willing to do the hard work of being honest and specific. That’s never easy or fun to actually acknowledge the unkind words, the rude expressions, the harsh actions. But change is in the details. Specific sight of sin leads to specific conviction which leads to an experience of specific forgivenss and specific change. Some questions to help you get specific (from Lane & Tripp, How People Change, 140):
- What is your typical bad fruit? (Complaining, laziness, anger, envy, lust, bitterness, avoidance, pride, blame, greed, etc.)
- Where have you slacked off?
- When have you given in to anger or envy?
- Where have you quit doing what God says is good?
- To whom have you spoken unkindly?
- Where have you blamed others?
- When have you accused God?
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 I love the seasons. I love the seasons in Virginia.
I can smell spring wafting through my bedroom window. I can see spring budding all over my front yard. I can hear spring in the chatter of birds that tell me my alarm clock is about to go off. It never ceases to amaze me that the seasons change right when they are supposed to, as dormant winter yields to vital spring. Faithfulness surrounds us. Job understands:
“Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways,
and how small a whisper do we hear of him!
But the thunder of his power who can understand?” (Job 26:14)
If these are the outskirts of his ways, what majesty must there be in Him whom we worship!
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Using the Three Trees begins by answering the question, “What is your situation?” None of us sin in a vacuum. Every time we sin, there is a situation in which our sinful cravings were revealed: real people said and did real things at real moments in time. Or we ourselves did what we shouldn’t do or failed to do what we should. Some of the situation my be self-inflicted, or it may be completely outside our control.
But we can’t fully understand our sin and the path of repentance unless we carefully consider the circumstances in which our sin was revealed. So we start by describing the situation or trial we are facing. What happened? Who was involved? In answering these questions, it is helpful to be as specific as possible. But stick to the facts.
Here are some questions you can review with your parents to make this more concrete and clear (from How People Change by Tim Lane and Paul Tripp, pp. 119-120):
- What pressures do you regularly face?
- Where are you facing difficult circumstances?
- What temptations are you facing?
- Who are the difficult people in your life?
- When do you feel alone or misunderstood?
- What (or who) do you try to hide from or avoid?
- When are you tempted to say you are “fine” when you are not?
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 Have I ever mentioned that I love maps? I do. I think I’ve said it here. And here. And here. And here. Let me say it again.
I recently learned that there is a new version of Google Earth that has added images to the 3-D buildings feature. So now our Nation’s Capitol (or the Manhattan skyline) is not a gray mass of nondescript buildings, but includes real details of some buildings. Pretty cool.
(Why didn’t anyone tell me about this earlier?)
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Parents,
The annual spring thaw is a good time to review with your kids the importance of purity and modesty. As the weather heats up, so does the temptation. Spring fashions are annually less modest than the previous year, and our culture is agressively putting forward immodesty and impurity as desirous.
For your sons in particular (and perhaps for your daughter), you should be aware that our dear friends at Covenant Life Church have created a Purity Resources page, compiling into one place many sermons and articles on the topic. I particularly recommend Josh’s 11/03 message on Media, and the recent Purity series. Don’t miss Josh’s You and the Flesh cartoons.
For your daughters, Sovereign Grace Ministries is making CJ’s message, “The Soul of Modesty” available for free until April 6. This message is described like this: “With humility and wisdom, C.J. brings the gospel to bear on this potentially sensitive topic, addressing externals only after addressing the heart.” I recommend reviewing this message at least annually with your daughter, perhaps before any shopping trip. Our culture has so completely jettisoned any semblance of modesty that as parents, we need to constantly fight the tide with biblical truth.
To download this message as an MP3 file, “visit the Sovereign Grace Store and add the message to your shopping cart. During the checkout process, enter the promotional code FREEDOWNLOAD to bypass credit-card payment. (Note: At the Order Preview page, please verify that you are being charged $0.00 for this message before you click on “Place Order.”) After the checkout process completes, you will see instructions for downloading the MP3 file. This code is good for this item only and expires April 6.”
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Saturday night, Vince asked us what happens when we don’t get what we want. We came up with an ugly list: grumbling, anger, yelling, impatience, screaming, pouting, tears, judging, accusations, bitterness, resentment, slamming doors. We could go on. This happens a lot, doesn’t it? It seems like every time we turn around, something is standing between us and the things we want.
So what do we do? To answer that question, Vince introduced us to the Three Trees. Our friends at the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation developed the Three Trees as a way to explain how the human heart works: it is extremely valuable in helping us understand our behavior, diagnose our heart, and chart a path of repentance.
To understand the diagram, you have to begin with Luke 6:43-45:
“For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
Vince helped us understand that these verses show us that we are made of two parts: the inner and the outer, spiritual and physical, soul (or heart) and body. What happens outside (our words and actions) is related to what happens inside (our desires and cravings). Furthermore, what happens inside will eventually become obvious on the outside.
In other words, circumstances don’t make you sin. People don’t make you sin. Rather, circumstances reveal the sin that is already in our hearts. Do you want to change? Do you want to grow in the Christian life? It’s going to be really hard to bring about genuine, lasting change without understanding this central truth. See James 4:1-2 to learn more.
Check back over the next few days to learn more about the eight individual parts of this diagram…
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Seniors! Just a reminder: your ballots for the five15 Award are due into the church office by Friday. I know that you are as eager as I am to recognize and honor godliness among your peers! I look forward to announcing the five15 Award winners at our BIG MEETING on Saturday, May 12.
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 We understand how secrets work, and to what lengths people will go to keep some things secret. Before and during World War II, the German Military relied on the Enigma Machine—a system for protecting military communication that was very difficult to decipher.
Yesterday, Mark preached to us from Mark 4:1-34, explaining that these verses contain a secret to the kingdom of God. But it’s a different kind of secret: God is not trying to keep outsiders from discovering this secret. He wants the secret to be made known.
In this chapter, Jesus tells stories called parables. Parables are simple comparisons between two unlike things, usually between something that is familiar to us (like seeds) and something that isn’t (like the kingdom of God). Mark explained that there are four important things to keep in mind when you are reading parables:
- Look for surprises or contrasts, especially at the end of the story. For instance, the parable of the sower would have been surprising to the original hearers because they didn’t expect that the kingdom of God can be rejected.
- Look for a main point. Jesus is saying someting; what is it?
- Don’t press the details, avoid allegorizing every details. Every analogy breaks down at some point, so don’t try to create an airtight one-to-one correspondence or every point of the parable.
- Having heard, then respond with faith-filled obedience. The most important step. We must act on what we hear.
Keeping these lessons in mind, it’s not hard to see what these parables are about. The parable of the sower tells us that the kingdom of God advances slowly and meets with varied responses. We need to know how to measure success in the kingdom: not by first appearances, but by final fruitfulness. The parable of the growing seed tells us that Jesus will finish what he starts. While the kingdom of God is truly present now, there is much more to come. The parable of the mustard seed tells us that you can’t measure the kingdom based on what you see right now. We don’t be able to determine its true magnitude until the end.
So what is the secret of the kingdom. These parables taken together teach us that “In Jesus, the kingdom has come truly but not yet fully.” The kingdom of God is here (remember Mark 1:15), but it is not here the power and significance that it will one day have. There is more to come! Theologian George E. Ladd explains:
“This is the mystery of the Kingdom: Before the day of harvest, before the end of the age, God has entered into history in the person of Christ to work among men, to bring to them the life and blessings of His Kingdom. It comes humbly, unobtrustively. It comes to men as a Galilean carpenter went throughout the cities of Palestine preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, delivering men from their bondage to the Devil. It comes to men as his disciples went throughout Galilean villages with the same message. It comes to men today as disciples of Jesus still take the Gospel of the Kingdom into all the world. It comes quietly, humbly, without fire from heaven, without a blaze of glory, without a rending of the mountains or a cleaving of the skies. It comes like seed sown in the earth. It can be rejected by hard hearts, it can be choked out, its life may sometimes seem to wither and die. But it is the Kingdom of God. It brings the miracle of the divine life among men. It introduces them into the blessings of the divine rule. It is to them the supernatural work of God’s grace. And this same Kingdom, this same supernatural power of God will yet manifest itself at the end of the age, this time not quietly within the lives of those who receive it, but in power and great glory purging all sin and evil from the earth. Such is the Gospel of the Kingdom.” George Ladd, The Gospel of the Kingdom, p. 64.
So what do we do with this? How should it affect your week?
First, believe in Jesus and his kingdom! Even though it doesn’t always seem close at hand, it is closer than you think. For teens, I think could look like a lot of different things. Living like we are part of the kingdom means living like Jesus is the King. Ask your parents if your life is reflecting the kingdom of God. How can it better reflect the kingdom of God? What changes can you make this week to bring that about?
Second, join Jesus in sowing the word of the kingdom. Preach the gospel to unbelieving friends, relatives, neighbors, classmates. If you sow enough seed, sooner or later, there will be fruit.
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