Heaven’s Relief in the Coming Wrath

God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted . . . when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. (2 Thessalonians 1:6–8)

There will come a time when the patience of God is over. When God has seen his people suffer for the allotted time, and the appointed number of martyrs is complete (Revelation 6:11), then a just and holy vengeance will come from heaven.

Notice that God’s vengeance on those who have afflicted his people is experienced by us as “relief.” “God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted.” In other words, the judgment on “those who afflict” us is a form of grace toward us.

Perhaps the most remarkable picture of judgment as grace is the picture of Babylon’s destruction in Revelation 18. At her destruction, a great voice from heaven cries, “Rejoice over her, O heaven, and you saints and apostles and prophets, for God has given judgment for you against her!” (Revelation 18:20). Then a great multitude is heard saying, “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just; for he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality, and has avenged on her the blood of his servants” (Revelation 19:1–2).

When God’s patience has run its long-suffering course, and this age is over, and judgment comes on the enemies of God’s people, the saints will not disapprove of God’s justice.

This means that the final destruction of the unrepentant will not be experienced as a misery for God’s people.

The unwillingness of others to repent will not hold the affections of the saints hostage. Hell will not be able to blackmail heaven into misery. God’s judgment will be approved, and the saints will experience the vindication of truth as a great grace.

John Piper 

God Wants Your Heart

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” MATTHEW 6:21

 

PONDER THIS

If you want financial freedom and the windows of Heaven to open, you must return to God. It is not your money that God wants. It is you that God wants. God needs nothing. In Psalm 50:12, God says, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world is Mine, and all its fullness.” God loves you. It is not what you have that God wants. God wants you. God says, “Return to Me…and I will return to you” (Zechariah 1:3). If you give your money without giving yourself, remember the adage, “The gift without the giver is bare.” If you think God is trying to somehow get more money out of you, you are so wrong. In today’s verse, Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” God calls you to give your money because it reveals the truth about your heart.

What connection have you noticed between your own heart and how you spend your money?

Is there anything God is calling you to change regarding how you spend and/or give your money?

PRACTICE THIS

Make steps today toward any financial changes God is calling you to make.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Bible Study

Isaiah 66:15-16

    [15] “For behold, the LORD will come in fire,

        and his chariots like the whirlwind,

    to render his anger in fury,

        and his rebuke with flames of fire. 

    [16] For by fire will the LORD enter into judgment,

        and by his sword, with all flesh;

        and those slain by the LORD shall be many.

Matthew 25:41

[41] “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

1 Corinthians 3:13-17

[13] each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. [14] If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. [15] If anyone’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.

[16] Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? [17] If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.

Hebrews 10:26-27

[26] For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, [27] but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.

The Powerful Root of Practical Love

We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. (1 John 3:14)

So, love is the evidence that we are born again — that we are Christians, that we are saved.

Sometimes the Bible makes our holiness and our love for people the condition of our final salvation. In other words, if we are not holy and not loving, we will not be saved at the judgment day (e.g., Hebrews 12:14; Galatians 5:21; 1 Corinthians 6:10). This doesn’t mean that acts of love are how we get right with God. No, the Bible is clear again and again as Ephesians 2:8–9 says, “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast.” No, when the Bible says that we are saved by faith but that we must love people in order to finally be saved, it means that faith in God’s promises must be so real that the love it produces proves the reality of the faith.

So, love for others is a condition of future grace in the sense that it confirms that the primary condition, faith, is genuine. We could call love for others a secondary condition, which confirms the authenticity of the primary and essential condition of faith which alone unites us to Christ, and receives his power.

Faith perceives the glory of God in the promises of future grace and embraces all that the promises reveal of what God is for us in Jesus. That spiritual sight of God’s glory, and our delight in it, is the self-authenticating evidence that God has called us to be a beneficiary of his grace. This evidence frees us to bank on God’s promise as our own. And this banking on the promise empowers us to love. Which in turn confirms that our faith is real.

The world is desperate for a faith that combines two things: awestruck sight of unshakable divine Truth, and utterly practical, round-the-clock power to make a liberating difference in life. That’s what I want too. Which is why I am a Christian.

There is a great God of grace who magnifies his own infinite beauty and self-sufficiency by fulfilling promises to helpless people who trust him. And there is a power that comes from prizing this God that leaves no nook or cranny of life untouched. It empowers us to love in the most practical ways.

John Piper 

Truth Holds Your Life Together

“Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness.” EPHESIANS 6:14

 

PONDER THIS

It is integrity that holds everything else together. Truth and integrity are synonymous. You’re to believe the truth, know the truth, love the truth, tell the truth, live the truth, and preach the truth. If you don’t, your life is going to come apart. You cannot get into the battle against Satan unless you have the belt of truth. Satan is a liar, and he will come against you with lies. Jesus is the truth. Satan’s attack is an untruth. His attack on you is to bring a lack of integrity into your life.

Are you wearing the belt of truth at this moment? Or are you living a lie? If you are not wearing truth, if you do not have integrity in your life—in the big things and in the small things—you are going to lose the battle. It is truth that holds everything together; without truth, everything falls apart.

How have you seen the reality that everything in your life is held together by truth?

What is the connection between today’s verse and Jesus saying He is the truth in John 14:6?

PRACTICE THIS

Identify anywhere you may be living falsely and take steps toward the truth today.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Bible Study

John 5:24

[24] Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.

John 20:31

[31] but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John 3:15

[15] that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

John 5:27-29

[27] And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. [28] Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice [29] and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.

Enduring When Obeying Hurts

Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross. (Hebrews 12:2)

What faith performs is sometimes unspeakably hard.

In his book Miracle on the River Kwai, Ernest Gordon tells the true story of a group of POWs working on the Burma Railway during World War II.

At the end of each day the tools were collected from the work party. On one occasion a Japanese guard shouted that a shovel was missing and demanded to know which man had taken it. He began to rant and rave, working himself up into a paranoid fury and ordered whoever was guilty to step forward. No one moved. “All die! All die!” he shrieked, cocking and aiming his rifle at the prisoners. At that moment one man stepped forward and the guard clubbed him to death with his rifle while he stood silently to attention. When they returned to the camp, the tools were counted again and no shovel was missing.

What can sustain the will to die for others, when you are innocent? Jesus was carried and sustained in his love for us by “the joy that was set before him.” He banked on a glorious future blessing and joy, and that carried and sustained him in love through his suffering.

Woe to us if we think we should or can be motivated and strengthened for radical, costly obedience by some higher motive than the joy that is set before us. When Jesus called for costly obedience that would require sacrifice in this life, he said in Luke 14:14, “You will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” In other words, be strengthened now in all your losses for Christ’s sake, because of the joy set before you.

Peter said that, when Jesus suffered without retaliating, he was leaving us an example to follow — and that includes Jesus’s confidence in the joy set before him. He handed his cause over to God (1 Peter 2:21) and did not try to settle accounts with retaliation. He banked his hope on the resurrection and all the joys of reunion with his Father and the redemption of his people. So should we.

John Piper