Following Christ Means Standing Apart

“If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”  JOHN 15:18-19

 

PONDER THIS

People are known by the enemies they have. Every now and then someone will say something like: “Oh Pastor Rogers, we love you so much. Everybody loves you.” When I hear this, I laugh because everybody doesn’t love me. And that doesn’t break my heart. I don’t expect to be loved by everybody, nor should you. We cannot be popular with a world that crucified our Lord. If His friends are our friends, His enemies are our enemies. That doesn’t mean we’re not to love our enemies. Jesus loved His enemies. He prayed for those who crucified Him. I don’t mean we are to be filled with hate and spite. But the reality is that some people are enemies of the cross of Jesus Christ. Paul said, “I tell you weeping that there are enemies” (Philippians 3:18, author paraphrase).

Who would you classify as your enemies?

What does it look like to practically love our enemies?

PRACTICE THIS

Take an inventory of your life. Where are you hating the things Christ hates? Where are you loving the things that He hates? What needs to change?

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

How Love Changes Your Home

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her.” EPHESIANS 5:25

 

PONDER THIS

The Bible says a husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, and that is an unconditional love. It is not performance-based love: “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). When you have unconditional love as Christ has for the Church, let me tell you what it’s going to do for your home: It’s going to give security in the place of fear. It’s going to give peace in the place of guilt. And it’s going to give joy that will replace anger. This kind of love is an act of the will. How does God love us? Do you think God loves us romantically? Do you think God loves us because we’re lovely? No, God loves us as an act of His will.

Would you say you regularly love as an act of the will? Why or why not?

What makes this difficult?

PRACTICE THIS

How might you practically show love to someone as an act of will this week? Take steps to actually do this.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

A Churchy World and a Worldly Church

“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” 1 JOHN 2:15

 

PONDER THIS

A worldly Christian really is a contradiction in terms. The world has become so churchy, and the church has become so worldly, that people don't really understand the principle of biblical separation. When the Bible speaks of the world, it's not speaking of the people who live on planet Earth. There's nothing wrong with loving people. If you don't love people, there's something wrong with you. The Bible says God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son (John 3:16). You should love everybody, and God set the example for you.

The word that is translated world is the Greek word cosmos. It means an order of things or philosophy. We speak of the world of sports, the world of business, or the world of fashion. You cannot love this world's system and love God Almighty at the same time. Don’t get caught into the way of the world saying, “That’s just how things work.” Dare to believe God and trust the better way He has given you through Jesus. It is the way of extraordinary love and sacrificial service.

What is the difference between loving the world and loving the people in the world?

What are some ways you are influenced and shaped by the world for good and for bad? What are some ways you are shaped by God?

PRACTICE THIS

Pray, asking God to help you take on His life and love of others without following the way of the world.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

The Ultimate Love Note

“There is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one.” ROMANS 3:11-12

 

PONDER THIS

Your salvation did not start with you; it started with God. This passage says clearly there's no one who seeks after God—not one person. You may object that you know plenty of people seeking after God. But the only reason they seek after God is because He first sought them.

When I was in the sixth grade, I looked over at a girl sitting about four desks and two rows over from me. Her name was Joyce Louise Gentry. Shelo's now Joyce Louise Rogers, but I saw her there in the sixth grade. I wrote a love note, and I walked by and dropped it by her desk. She first looked at me and wondered, “Who is this fellow?” But do you know why she loves me? Because I first loved her. The Bible is God's love note. It is God saying, “I love you, I desire to be your Lord, I desire to be your Savior.” You may thirst for God, but He made you thirsty for Him. God put that thirst in you, and the reason we thirst after God is because He is seeking us.

What was the first way you learned about the hope of Jesus? How have you grown since that time?

How have you recognized God’s pursuit of you over your life?

PRACTICE THIS

Extend love to those who are far from God; remind them of God’s love for them.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Love’s Greatest Happiness

No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. (Ephesians 5:29–30)

Don’t miss that last phrase: “because we are members of his body.” And don’t forget what Paul said two verses earlier, namely, that Christ gave himself for us “so that he might present the church to himself in splendor.” So in two different ways, Paul makes plain that Christ pursued his joy in pursuing the holiness and beauty and happiness of his people.

The union between Christ and his bride is so close (“one flesh”) that any good done to her is a good done to himself. Which means that the clear assertion of this text is that the Lord is moved to nourish, cherish, sanctify, and cleanse his bride because in this he finds his joy.

By some definitions, this cannot be love. Love, they say, must be free of self-interest — especially Christlike love, especially Calvary love. I have never seen such a view of love made to square with this passage of Scripture.

Yet what Christ does for his bride, this text plainly calls love: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church . . . ” (Ephesians 5:25). Why not let the text define love for us, instead of bringing our definition from ethics or philosophy? According to this text, love is the pursuit of Christ’s joy in the holy joy of the beloved.

There is no way to exclude self-interest from love, for self-interest is not the same as selfishness. Selfishness seeks its own private happiness at the expense of others.

Christlike love seeks its happiness in the happiness of others — not at their expense. It will even suffer and die for the beloved in order that its joy might be made full in the life and purity of the beloved.

This is how Christ loved us, and this is how he calls us to love one another.

John Piper 

No More Lukewarm Love

“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth. REVELATION 3:15-16

 

PONDER THIS

One couple was before a marriage counselor, who asked the man, “What do you think is wrong with your marriage?” The man responded, “She says I don’t love her anymore.” Have you gotten that way about your love for the Lord? There is a way to keep the wonder in your worship, just like there is a way to stay in love even when years have passed. There is a way to keep the fire in your faith, not to simply come and sit.

How can you keep the wonder in your worship? You need to recognize the nature of God. Do you take God seriously? Are you serious about your worship? Jesus would rather have you cold than lukewarm. He’d rather have you out-and-out against Him than lukewarm. Why? At least a person who’s against Christ has enough respect to be against Him. But a lukewarm person says, “I believe. I’m just not excited about it. Lord, you don’t move me.” We come to church sometimes and yawn in the face of God. God asks, “Where is my honor?” That’s the reason Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

How would you assess your affection for the Lord?

What are some ways you have lost the wonder of God? What are some ways you can seek renewed wonder?

PRACTICE THIS

Thank God for who He is. Ask Him to help you see Him rightly so that you wonder and marvel over Him.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Not Nearly Hedonistic Enough

 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.” (Matthew 6:19–20)

The message that needs to be shouted from the houses of high finance is this: Secular man, you are not nearly hedonistic enough!

Quit being satisfied with the little 2% yields of pleasure that get eaten up by the moths of inflation and the rust of death. Invest in the blue-chip, high-yield, divinely insured securities of heaven.

Devoting a life to material comforts and security and thrills is like throwing money down a rat hole. But investing a life in the labor of love yields dividends of joy unsurpassed and unending:

“Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. [And thus] provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail” (Luke 12:33).

This message is very good news: Come to Christ, in whose presence are fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Join us in the labor of Christian Hedonism. For the Lord has spoken: It is more blessed to love than to live in luxury! More blessed now, and forever.

John Piper 

Love Fills the Space

“But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection.”

COLOSSIANS 3:14

 

PONDER THIS

God is putting us together as living stones, and He’s putting us in place. What keeps us from falling apart? We’re bound together. What is the mortar that holds us together as believers? It is love. We sing, “We are one in the bond of love.” It’s the love of Christ that holds us together. Without the love of Jesus Christ, the Church would fall apart. People look at the Church, and they can’t understand it. They say, “Who are those people? What brings them all together? What is the commonality they have?” We come from different backgrounds, different educational achievements, different tastes, different proclivities, and even root for different ball teams.

Christ is the foundation of the Church, and it is His love that holds these stones together. Not only does His love hold us together, but His love also holds us where we are apart. Stone is not perfect. Some stones have bulges and bumps, and other stones have cavities and chips. He has crafted each of us uniquely and knows how to put our strengths and weaknesses alongside each other. Love fills in the space. Where there’s a cavity, the mortar of love is bringing us together and keeping us each as unique and distinct testimonies to God’s Church.

How have you experienced the way God’s love binds you to other Christians?

What does it look like to pursue love and unity even in differences?

PRACTICE THIS

Reach out to some of those in your church you do not know well to get to know them better.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

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 

Tending Gardens

““Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

DEUTERONOMY 6:4-7

 

PONDER THIS

Do you have a garden? I don’t have a garden. I don’t like gardens. There’s too much weeding, too much fertilizing, too much watering, and too much care. It’s tough to have a garden. Regardless of your interest in gardening, you’ve got another kind of garden. You’ve got some olive plants. And caring for those plants takes weeding, it takes watering, it takes fertilizing, it takes cultivating, it takes discipline, it takes instruction, and it takes demonstration. Most of all, it takes time.

I read the other day that if a father does not spend quality time with his daughter, he greatly hinders her journey in life. She can become distant or look for attention from someone else. She’s looking for a father figure. She might become vulnerable or may have a negative view of men in general. Investing in the next generation takes time, but it is worth it. Be intentional about the moments you have with the next generation. Children and young people need to know your love and that you have taken the time to care.

How have you been shown love from someone spending time with you?

What is hard about taking time to love others? What is beneficial about it?

PRACTICE THIS

Think about who you need to pour into in the next generation and reach out to set up dedicated time with them.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

An Explosion of Love

By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.” 1 JOHN 3:16-18

 

PONDER THIS

The Church believes in the permanence of marriage. But there are many whose homes have been broken by divorce. What do we do with that? Do we turn them away? No! In the name of Jesus, we open our arms and say, “You’re welcome here,” and share Christ’s love and hope.

We’re against pornography. It’s terrible. It is antithetical to true love, but so many today struggle with it. How do we interact with these people? Do we step on them? Or do we offer help to them and extend to them the grace of Christ? We believe same-sex relationships are contrary to the Word of God, but what do we do to those who believe differently? Do we criticize them, put them down? Or do we reach out a loving hand to lift up and give help?

The Church needs to demonstrate the love of Jesus Christ. If we would be bright lights in a dark world, we need to be known not merely for what we’re against, but for what we’re for. What we need is an explosion of random acts of love that display the love of Jesus Christ.

Who are the people most difficult for you to love? What are some ways you can show Christ’s love to these people?

When has someone’s love and care made a difference in your life? How did it point you to Christ’s love?

PRACTICE THIS

Show love to someone it is difficult to love and commit to pray for him or her regularly.

 

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

The Key to Radical Love

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11–12)

One of the questions I posed while preaching on loving our enemies from Matthew 5:44 was, How do you love the people who kidnap you and then kill you?

How can we do this? Where does the power to love like this come from? Just think how astonishing this is when it appears in the real world! Could anything show the truth and power and reality of Christ more than this?

I believe Jesus gives us the key to this radical, self-sacrificing love, described in Matthew 5:44, earlier in the very same chapter.

In Matthew 5:11–12, he is again talking about being persecuted, just like he was when he said in Matthew 5:44, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” What is remarkable about these verses is that Jesus says that you are able not only to endure the mistreatment of the enemy, but rejoice in it. “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you. . . . Rejoice and be glad.”

This seems even more beyond our reach than praying for our enemies or doing good to them. If I could do this humanly impossible thing — namely, rejoice in being persecuted — then it would be possible to love my persecutors. If the miracle of joy in the midst of the horror of injustice and pain and loss could happen, then the miracle of love for the perpetrators could happen too.

Jesus gives the key to joy in these verses. He says, “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” The key to joy is faith in God’s future grace — that is, being satisfied in all that God promises to be for you. He says, “Rejoice, for your reward is great in heaven.” Our joy in persecution is the joy of heaven streaming back into this moment of horror and setting us free to love. So, this joy is the freeing power to love our enemies when they persecute us.

If that is true, then the command to love is implicitly also a command to set our minds on things that are above — all that God promises to be for us — not on things that are on the earth (Colossians 3:2).

The command to love our enemy is a command to find our hope and our deepest soul-satisfaction in God and his great reward — his future grace. The key to radical love is faith in future grace. We must be persuaded in the midst of our agony that the love of God is “better than life” (Psalm 63:3). Loving your enemy doesn’t earn you the reward of heaven. Treasuring the reward of heaven empowers you to love your enemy.

John Piper 

Walk the Love Mile

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I tell you not to resist an evil person. But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.’” MATTHEW 5:38-41

 

PONDER THIS

As a Christian, you are to go the second mile when your dignity is degraded. That’s what people did to the Lord Jesus Christ. They spat in the face of Jesus, and they slapped Him with open hands. But Jesus did not slap back. He simply turned the other cheek. When your dignity is degraded, when somebody insults you with an open hand, a vile word, or whatever else, turn the other cheek. Go the second mile. We can do this because we have everything we need in Him.

Don’t just do the minimum. Do more than is required. We show God’s mercy by turning the other cheek or by going beyond that which is required of us in a court of law. We live as ambassadors of His grace by helping those to whom we owe nothing. There’s the law mile and the legal mile, and there’s the love mile and the extra mile. This is what Jesus has called us to pursue.

When have you seen someone turn the other cheek for the sake of Christ?

Where do you need to turn the other cheek in a conflict you are facing right now?

PRACTICE THIS

Ask God for the grace to go the second mile with those you are in conflict with this week.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Change Is Possible

Put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:24)

Christianity means change is possible. Deep, fundamental change. It is possible to become tenderhearted when once you were callous and insensitive. It is possible to stop being dominated by bitterness and anger. It is possible to become a loving person, no matter what your background has been.

The Bible assumes that God is the decisive factor in making us what we should be. With wonderful bluntness, the Bible says, “Put away . . . all malice” and be “tenderhearted” (Ephesians 4:31–32). It does not say, “If you can . . . ” Or, “If your parents were tenderhearted . . . ” Or, “If you have not been terribly abused . . . ” It says, “Be . . . tenderhearted.”

This is wonderfully freeing. It frees us from the terrible fatalism that says change is impossible for me. It frees me from mechanistic views that make my background my destiny.

And God’s commands always come with freeing, life-changing truth to believe. For example,

God adopted us as his children. We have a new Father and a new family. This breaks the fatalistic forces of our “family-of-origin.” “Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Matthew 23:9).

God loves us as his children. We are “loved children” (Ephesians 5:1). The command to imitate the love of God does not hang in the air, it comes with power: “Be imitators of God, as loved children.” “Love!” is the command and being loved by God is the power.

God has forgiven us in Christ. Be tenderhearted and forgiving just as God in Christ forgave you (Ephesians 4:32). What God did in Christ is powerful. It makes change possible. The command to be tenderhearted has more to do with what God did for you than what your mother or your father did to you. This kind of command means you can change.

Christ loved you and gave himself up for you. “Walk in love, as Christ loved [you]” (Ephesians 5:2). The command comes with life-changing truth. “Christ loved you.” At the moment when there is a chance to love, and some voice says, “You are not a loving person,” you can say, “Christ’s love for me makes me a new kind of person. His command to love is just as surely possible for me as his promise of love is true for me.”

Don’t be a fatalist. Be a Christian. Change is possible. God is alive. Christ is risen. The promises are true.

John Piper 

Love’s Greatest Happiness

No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. (Ephesians 5:29–30)

Don’t miss that last phrase: “because we are members of his body.” And don’t forget what Paul said two verses earlier, namely, that Christ gave himself for us “so that he might present the church to himself in splendor.” So in two different ways, Paul makes plain that Christ pursued his joy in pursuing the holiness and beauty and happiness of his people.

The union between Christ and his bride is so close (“one flesh”) that any good done to her is a good done to himself. Which means that the clear assertion of this text is that the Lord is moved to nourish, cherish, sanctify, and cleanse his bride because in this he finds his joy.

By some definitions, this cannot be love. Love, they say, must be free of self-interest — especially Christlike love, especially Calvary love. I have never seen such a view of love made to square with this passage of Scripture.

Yet what Christ does for his bride, this text plainly calls love: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church . . . ” (Ephesians 5:25). Why not let the text define love for us, instead of bringing our definition from ethics or philosophy? According to this text, love is the pursuit of Christ’s joy in the holy joy of the beloved.

There is no way to exclude self-interest from love, for self-interest is not the same as selfishness. Selfishness seeks its own private happiness at the expense of others.

Christlike love seeks its happiness in the happiness of others — not at their expense. It will even suffer and die for the beloved in order that its joy might be made full in the life and purity of the beloved.

This is how Christ loved us, and this is how he calls us to love one another.

John Piper 

Logic Will Only Take You So Far

“Finally, all of you be of one mind, having compassion for one another; love as brothers, be tenderhearted, be courteous; not returning evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary blessing, knowing that you were called to this, that you may inherit a blessing.” 1 PETER 3:8-9

 

PONDER THIS

Suppose you want to go to Europe. You get in your car and drive to New York City. Then you drive to the ocean there. There’s no bridge that crosses the great Atlantic. So, you park your car and get on an airplane to travel the rest of the way. The car is good, but it can only take you so far. Logic is like that. Logic is good, but it will only take you so far. And when you come to a chasm that is so wide logic can’t leap, then faith must fly.

If somebody says to me, “Prove there’s a God,” I just simply say, “I can’t.” And then I just turn back to them, and I say, “Prove there is no God.” And if he’s honest, he’ll say he can’t. And he says, “Well, you’re just naive because you believe there’s a God.” I say, “That’s right. I’m a believer. And you’re a believer, too. I believe there is a God; you believe there is no God. I have faith that there is; you have faith that there isn’t.” What I believe is reasonable, but it goes beyond reason...to faith...that God is.

How have you responded to him or skeptics in the past?

Have you ever tried to use logic to explain your faith? What happened?

PRACTICE THIS

Pray for a skeptic you know, asking God to open his or her eyes to believe and trust in Him.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

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 

Ideas Have Consequences

The aim of our charge is love. (1 Timothy 1:5)

Victor Frankl was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau during the Second World War. As a Jewish professor of neurology and psychiatry he became world renowned for his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which sold over eight million copies.

In it he unfolds the essence of his philosophy that came to be called Logotherapy — namely, that the most fundamental human motive is to find meaning in life. He observed in the horrors of the concentration camps that man can endure almost any “how” of life, if he has a “why.” But the quote that stirred me recently was this:

I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. (“Victor Frankl at Ninety: An Interview,” in First Things, April 1995, p. 41.)

In other words, ideas have consequences — consequences that bless or destroy. People’s behavior — good and bad — does not come out of nowhere. It comes from prevailing views of reality that take root in the mind and bring forth good or evil.

One of the ways that the Bible makes plain the truth that ideas have practical consequences is by saying things like, “Whatever was written in former days was written . . . [that] we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). The ideas presented in the Scriptures produce the practical consequence of hope.

Again, Paul says, “The aim of our charge is love” (1 Timothy 1:5). The imparting of ideas through a “charge” or through “instruction” produces love.

Hope and love do not come from nowhere. They grow out of ideas — views of reality — revealed in the Scriptures.

Another way the Scriptures show us that ideas have consequences is by using the word “therefore” (1,039 times in the NASB). “Therefore” means that what follows comes from somewhere. For example, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). Or: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Or: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow” (Matthew 6:34).

If we want to live in the power of these great practical “therefores,” we must be gripped by the ideas — the views of reality — that go before them and stand under them. Ideas have consequences. So, let’s bring all our ideas under the authority of God’s word.

John Piper 

Honk If You Love Jesus

PRAY OVER THIS

[34] A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. [35] By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

(John 13:34-35)

 

PONDER THIS

You don’t have to have a lapel pin or bumper sticker to prove you are a Christian—love is the greatest testimony.

A man out in California was one of these guys who was always on time. One morning he woke up, went out, and tried to start his car, and the battery was dead. He asked his wife, “Can I take your car?” She said, “Yes.” By this time, he was stuck driving in heavy traffic. He was inching along and then came to a dead stop and the man behind him honked the horn. He was frustrated but he let it go. After a while, the man behind him blew the horn again. Then the man tapped the horn the third time.

The man threw open the car door, went back to the driver behind him, and tapped on the window. He yelled at the driver, “Listen, you, I don't want you to blow your horn at me one more time. I can’t move my car!” The driver behind him said, “Doesn’t that bumper sticker mean what it says? Honk if you love Jesus?” He said, “Oh, I do love Jesus. I am so sorry.” This is a funny example, but we all need to take the saint off the dashboard and put him behind the steering wheel. We need to stop showboating our Christian title and begin living it out in our love.

When are you most likely to be guided by your emotions instead of by love?

When have you seen an example of someone loving others well?

PRACTICE THIS

Extend an act of love or service to another person today.

LWF Dr. Adrian Rogers 

Absolute, Sovereign, Almighty Love

“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” (Exodus 34:6)

God abounds in steadfast love and faithfulness.

Two images come to my mind:

The heart of God is like an inexhaustible spring of water that bubbles up love and faithfulness at the top of the mountain. Century after century the spring keeps on flowing.

Or the heart of God is like a volcano that burns so hot with love that it blasts the top off the mountain and flows year after year with the lava of love and faithfulness.

When God uses the word “abounding” — “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” — he wants us to understand and feel that the resources of his love are not limited. You can drink at this mountain spring all day, year after year, generation after generation, and it never runs dry.

You might even risk saying that God is like a government that simply prints more money when there’s a need. Inexhaustible, right? Well, there’s a difference. God has an infinite treasury of golden love to cover all the currency he prints. The government is in a dream world. God banks very realistically on the infinite resources of his deity.

The absolute existence, the sovereign freedom, and the omnipotence of God are the volcanic fullness that explodes in an overflow of love. The sheer magnificence of God means that he does not need us to fill up any deficiency in himself. Instead his infinite self-sufficiency spills over in love to us — to sinners — who need him, and the gift of himself in Jesus.

We can bank on his love precisely because we believe in the absoluteness of his existence, the sovereignty of his freedom, and the limitlessness of his power.

John Piper