Balance...More thoughts on Romans 5!

The proper balance between the “feeling ugly” and the truth of “being righteous” is at times extremely elusive for me. I tend toward submersion within the ugliness, when in God’s sight I am found to be the very righteousness of Christ! The part of me that was once deserving of wrath is not a pretty sight at all, but then the flip-side is the beauty that is found through our identity IN CHRIST!

My desire is not to be fatalistic, self-pitying, or morbid, but to recognize my wretchedness apart from Christ for what it is. It is absolutely imperative that I see who I truly am apart from Him because the moment I start thinking I have got it "going on" or that I have one ounce of “self worth”, then I better look out. I have been through enough counseling and “recovery” meetings over the years to be inundated with “self worth” talk. The worth of Philip B. Fidler is far from “self” and only in Jesus! He is and must be the one and only source of worth!

So, when I mentioned before that I wanted to discuss ugliness, that I really do “feel” that way often (more often than I should), I do not want to throw it out there as something to be acceptable for the Christian as a way of life or mindset. My heart is to express that I struggle with living my life as one who has been adopted by the very Creator of the universe. I was adopted into my earthly family and very blessed in that regard, but what about my adoption to “son-ship” by the Father because Jesus satisfied the wrath that I deserve? That is what Romans 5 ends up being all about.

God’s wrath that my stench and ugliness deserved, is satisfied through the justification that ONLY comes through the substitution of Jesus by death on the cross. Christ died for us while we were still sinners (v. 8), we are now justified because of His blood that was shed (v. 9), we were enemies of God, but have been reconciled to God and saved (v. 10) and as verse 11 states, because of this we rejoice! I hope that you do a better job than I do at "lookin' saved". My redeemed spirit and new heart does not always tell my face, my actions or my attitude the good news!

How about we all make a much more concerted effort to conduct ourselves like we are who God says that we are! He are ugliness overcome by beauty! We are sin overcome by righteousness! If we have truly been converted, then we were once enemies that have now been completely reconciled!

Rick Burgess...Now He "Gets it"!

A friend of mine emailed me the link to watch Rick Burgess basically preaching at his own son's funeral. Rick is an award winning radio show host who was at a youth event for 7,000 kids. He gets the call that his baby son has drowned in a pool accident, and preaches an amazing message at his own son's funeral.

In my last blog I made the statement that we have to "get it". Meaning that I have to grasp the gospel in a way that my life is so changed that people around me know that Jesus is involved in the situation! Rick made the statement that he knew people were going to be watching him and thinking "ok man, where is this God of yours now?" But already, in a matter of days, hundreds and thousands of people have not only heard the gospel of Jesus Christ, but they are seeing the power of it lived out in a man and his family!

One of my favorite verses in the New Testament is Romans 1:16, where the Apostle Paul writes, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes..." Rick Burgess is perhaps the greatest earthly example of that power that I have ever seen! He "gets it". He stands on the platform, looks at his other four kids and tells them not to waste their lives living by what the world may say or do, but that the only things that will ever truly matter are those things they do for the Kingdom of God and then he challenges them to be soldiers in the battle! Amazing!

So, what have you done for the advancing of God's Kingdom today? Rick states that 90% of "Christians" (and I put that in quotes because so many in this country claim to be something they are not), do not or have not shared the gospel with a lost and dieing world. God can allow a tragedy like this to reach hundreds of thousands of people, but He can also use us to reach a family member, friend or co-worker. What are you going to do?

Like I said in the last post, we need to get over the "well I am saved and going to heaven" mindset, we need to realize that God poured out His wrath on Jesus so that He would not have to pour it out on us. So that the Creator and Sustainer of all things could have a relationship with us, He became flesh and took on the sins of the world literally in His body, endured the most heinous punishment known to man and died, just to give us life! He was raised from the dead and sent His Spirit to empower us to do things like Rick Burgess is doing in the face of the death of his very own son.

Please, lets stop playing around with this and make a radical difference in the places that we live! Man, lets cut the @#&% and get fired up about Jesus! Rick says that the one thing we can do to honor his family in this tragedy is join him in exposing this as the dumbest thing Satan ever did and make him pay! Lets just do it!

"For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son..." (Romans 5:10). Can we all start living like people who were once enemies of God but are now made right with Him through the death of Jesus, can we just do that?

If you have not seen the Rick Burgess videos at YouTube, here is the link. Please watch it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PUHUZWyFeg - this is just the first one, there are three and they are all about 9 minutes long. Please watch them!!

But I just feel ugly!

Paul makes a couple of awesome statements in Roman 5:6-8 that just refreshes the soul and breathes life into the spirit! I have been talking about the wrath of God and how Jesus satisfied wrath ON OUR BEHALF while on the cross, but Paul expands on that now and says that it was "while we were still weak" and "while we were still sinners." Then sums it up in verse 10 by saying that we were in fact enemies of God! How awesome is that!

Paul tells us all about what it means to be "counted" as the righteousness of Christ in chapter 4, then launches into faith, grace, hope, etc. in the beginning of 5 and then makes the big exclamation point by reminding us that it is ALL God! Verse 5 tells us that God has poured His very love into our hearts by His Holy Spirit and that He did it while we were at our weakest and most sinful! I did not have to clean my heart up before God would pour out His love into it, as a matter of fact, I am totally incapable of cleaning myself up at all!

There is so much here that I will camp out on Romans 5:6-10 for a while. I am seeing the incredible truth once again in verse 9 that we have been "saved by him from the wrath of God." I mean, I have to "get it". I have to let it sink into my hard head and heart that Jesus did not die on the cross for me just so I could go to heaven, so much more! He died on the cross for me to satisfy God's wrath and He did it when I was most wretched! I can take zero credit for that!

So that I don't get all crazy redundant here in this one blog, I am gonna camp on these verses until I feel like I have scratched the surface of doing them justice. I am going talk about how ugly I feel, how ugly I once was and how righteous Jesus is! Think about the word "wrath", that is what we deserve, and ONLY because of Jesus Christ are we not consummed by it! While we were the ugliest, the most beautiful of all beauties became ugliness on behalf of those "uglies" who believe! Amazing! Awesome! To be continued!

One Word!

As I have been looking at Romans 4 in a relatively new light, I have also been digging into this doctrine of "penal substitution." In a more common way, I have to sum those two words up as "Jesus was literally, in His Body and during His death, the absolute and perfect substitution for sin, so that I do not have to receive or endure the wrath of God that is due me." We live in a culture that says "I deserve to have....", "i deserve....", quite frankly, the ONLY thing any of us deserve is to be consumed by the very wrath of God!

When we say "I am going to heaven because I believe Jesus died for my sins", what an awesome and beautiful statement that is! However, in my mind it changes things a bit when I see that the reason I can go to heaven and have a relationship with God right now, is because Jesus (when He died on the cross) satisfied the wrath of God on my behalf!

Now the reason that I titled today's blog "one word" is because I am now in Romans 5 and the word that stood out to me this morning was "with" in verse 1. From the ESV, it reads "Therefore, since we have been justified (made free, innocent or righteous) by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (added parenthesis). Yes there are verses that speak of the peace of God, or peace from God, but ever so significant is this peace with God. The peace is the result of (Romans 4) being "counted as" righteous!

We enjoy the peace with God because we are free from the very wrath that we deserve! The greatest beauty of it all is that this freedom is offered to us not through works, not through donations or church attendance, but "by faith." We cannot earn it nor do we deserve it! It is all God! He not only made a way through the perfect sacrifice of Christ and His substitutionary death, but He gives us the faith to accept the offer of being free from His wrath!

Think about it a bit deeper than "Christ died for my sins so I can go to heaven", yes this is true, but really meditate on the fact that 1 Peter 2:24 says that Jesus Christ himself, sinless perfection, God in flesh, bore my sins and your sins IN HIS BODY as He was hanging on a cross. Take it one step deeper and savor that truth!

Good Morning! Since I have started a new job and have not quite established the new routine, my time management is a bit off! So I do apologize! However, I did want to come quickly and share a devotion that I read yesterday that spoke so clearly to my situation and perhaps yours. This is from "Morning and Evening" by C.H. Spurgeon and really touched me yesterday...gosh do I underestimate just who God is and more so, who He desires to be in my life! My pastor was teaching last night and one of the passages he used was from Eph. 1 and he made the statement "live like a son!" A father helps his son! Please read and enjoy, I sure did!

January 16
Morning
"I will help thee, saith the Lord."
- Isa_41:14
This morning let us hear the Lord Jesus speak to each one of us: "I will help thee." "It is but a small thing for me, thy God, to help thee. Consider what I have done already. What! not help thee? Why, I bought thee with my blood. What! not help thee? I have died for thee; and if I have done the greater, will I not do the less? Help thee! It is the least thing I will ever do for thee; I have done more, and will do more. Before the world began I chose thee. I made the covenant for thee. I laid aside my glory and became a man for thee; I gave up my life for thee; and if I did all this, I will surely help thee now. In helping thee, I am giving thee what I have bought for thee already. If thou hadst need of a thousand times as much help, I would give it thee; thou requirest little compared with what I am ready to give. ‘Tis much for thee to need, but it is nothing for me to bestow. ‘Help thee?’ Fear not! If there were an ant at the door of thy granary asking for help, it would not ruin thee to give him a handful of thy wheat; and thou art nothing but a tiny insect at the door of my all-sufficiency. ‘I will help thee.’"

O my soul, is not this enough? Dost thou need more strength than the omnipotence of the United Trinity? Dost thou want more wisdom than exists in the Father, more love than displays itself in the Son, or more power than is manifest in the influences of the Spirit? Bring hither thine empty pitcher! Surely this well will fill it. Haste, gather up thy wants, and bring them here-thine emptiness, thy woes, thy needs. Behold, this river of God is full for thy supply; what canst thou desire beside? Go forth, my soul, in this thy might. The Eternal God is thine helper!

"Fear not, I am with thee, oh, be not dismay’d!
I, I am thy God, and will still give thee aid."

Recommendation of a Book

I want to recommend a great book! I am going to try and make time to come back and write a brief summary tomorrow of what I have read so far, but this book deserves the energy it takes to read it. It is called "Pierced for Our Trangressions, Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution" by Steve Jeffrey, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach. It is written in the great tradition of Reformed Theology and has truly blown me away. I really needed to re-examine and get a fresh grasp on what Jesus did at the cross and how He literally bore my sins in His body while also very literally satisfying the wrath of God that I deserve! It is a deep book, but so worth the read!! Please invest in the study!

This book is important not only because it deals so competently with what lies at the heart of Christ's cross work, but because it responds effectively to a new generation of people who are not listening very carefully to what either Scripture or history says. One of the delightful features of this book is reflected in the subtitle: the authors make no apology for their thesis, but underscore the glory of penal substitution. This book deserves the widespread circulation achieved by corresponding contributions a generation ago - the contributions of Leon Morris, Jim Packer, and John Stott.
D. A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois

"That is why his faith...."

In closing out my time in chapter 4, there is a phrase that really caught my eye this morning. That phrase is found in verse 22 and states "That is why his faith was 'counted to him as righteousness.'" Then once again I had to go back and really look once more at what is the reason "why"? The reasons are the same that have been mentioned previously:

1. "He did not weaken in his faith" (v. 19)
2. "No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God" (v. 20)
3. "He grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God" (v. 20)
4. "Fully convinced that God was able to do what He had promised" (v. 21)

"THAT IS WHY HIS FAITH WAS 'COUNTED TO HIM AS RIGHTEOUSNESS.'"

There is one other verse that I must mention in closing this summary. In verse 17 (and 18 actually), God is referred to by Paul as "the God in whom [Abraham] believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." And concerning Abraham, "In hope he believed against hope..."

That gives me great hope! This is the only type of God I could possibly believe in. I was certainly one who was spiritually dead and even now, at times, I feel much less than fully alive. I want to focus far too much on what I think may be impossible to happen in my life. For Abraham it was a basically a "dead" body at 100 years of age, his wife Sarah had a barren or dead womb, yet God was calling them to be the parents of "many nations." My response probably would have been "yeah right!" But not Abraham! He believed in this God who gives life even to "dead" bodies or barren wombs. This God who calls into existence things that do not exist!

Right now is a time in my life where I have trials and tests immediately in front of me and I must not weaken, have distrust, but grow strong, give glory to God, be fully convinced that this God of the living is able to do all that He has promised for me as His kid. Now is the time for me to see that this righteousness that has been counted or credited to me is real and able to be exhibited through radical belief, just like Abraham!

substitute!

So what is the big deal behind all the talk of "belief" and why the need to be "counted...as righteousness"? I guess I am finally coming upon that stage where I know the desperation of my human condition and just how much I NEED atonement for my sin, a substitute, someone or something to satisfy the wrath of God that I deserve upon my life. Not in the aspect of salvation, but hopefully in the realm of growth.

I can only speak for me, but I am a very unrighteous person in my own strength. Left up to my own devices, I will self destruct in a heartbeat and I am fully aware of how I deserve the wrath of God UPON my life. I am fully aware of how wretched I can be, and how that ugliness can never approach the absolute holiness of God!

Paul ends chapter 3 of Romans making sure that we all understand that there is sin in all of our lives that separates us from God, that we all fall short of His glory, and that we all need justification that comes from a source other than ourselves. It is so awesome that Jesus was fully man and remains to be fully God. Sins were committed by man, sins had to be paid for by man. However, we all know that this man had to be holy and spotless, a sacrificial lamb that it without blemish. There is no other option when dealing with the atonement of sin.

So Paul makes the statement in Romans 4:2, again using Abraham as the example, that Abraham's good works cannot do it, because that would allow him (or us) to boast. We would want to take credit for something so far beyond our human, sinful capabilities. In the Old Testament book of Leviticus God laid out some very strict requirements that allow for potential fellowship with Him, that just cannot be kept! I will not get into all of that, but wanted to set the tone for how much we need, and have to have a sacrifice, our sin must be atoned for and we have to be "counted...as righteousness." It has to be done by Him, through Him, and for His glory!

In closing, I will dispel the post-modern myth that this was a "back then" scenario, and that it really doesn't apply to us today. If the post-modern thought is that truth is relative and that these type of passages don't apply to us today in an absolute manner, Paul tells us "But the words 'it was counted to him' were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord" (verses 23-24).

Like Abraham, we must believe God!

2008 - A YEAR OF PURPOSE!

If there is any one thing that the Lord has shown me as I have almost closed out what I labeled six months of "lessons in depravity", it is the need for 2008 to be a year that I can look back and say "I lived my life ON PURPOSE!" Part of what He used to seal that deal in my heart was my study of Romans 4. I have been attempting to be disciplined enough to study verse-by-verse through Romans. Months ago I started in Matthew 1:1 and have been going through the NT, after being in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations for most of last year. Great to close and begin the year in Romans!!

Anyway, there are some verses there that really solidified "purpose" for me, the absolute necessity of it, and how it all starts with an understanding of what "belief" is. We have this idea in our Western evangelical church that "believing" in Jesus is the same thing as "thinking" about or "pondering" Jesus, or even just thinking about believing. It is so much more than that and true purpose for me cannot begin until I fully understand the biblical definition of "belief".

So, since this is the first day of blogs for me, I will keep this short and attempt to post daily on this topic. For now I will say that many of us, myself included have it all wrong about believing in Jesus, what that is all about, what it means and what it produces! Paul says in Romans 4:24 that the righteousness of Christ "will be counted to us who believe", but spends verses 16-23 defining the word "belief". When he takes Abraham as the example and makes statements like "he did not weaken in faith", "no distrust made him waver", "he grew strong in faith as he gave glory to God", etc. All of these appear to define belief and faith!

My heart will be to study these passages and communicate that here, hoping for your posts and comments as I do! This has been a major eye opener for me. I have read this portion of Scripture, studied it in school and now desire to see it take up residence in my life! Will be back tomorrow I hope to actually begin the study! philip

First Post!

My heart is to have an avenue to express myself from a practically theological perspective. I am a thinker type and I really enjoy the deeper aspects of theology and theological study. However, I do not have the greatest track record for life application. For me, I feel like I need to express myself through writing in order to put some things on "paper" to look at my thoughts, my desires, my feelings, knowledge, etc. and how I can better live out a life sold-out to being a follower of Christ!

In these blogs I want to share verses, quotes, writings,.... stuff from my mind and heart, but mostly what I am seeing in the Word, how that applies for me on a daily basis, and in the process perhaps help someone else. I know those Christians out there who tend to look at those of us who have struggled in a way that is not pleasing to God. I readily admit that my sin, especially willful disobedience, is not pleasing to God. But I also avidly express that neither is the sin of those who look upon us with disdain and not care and compassion!

So here goes to launch of www.pbfidler.blogspot.com. I am excited about it. I just hope that I can make a difference in someone else's life by publicly working through my own stink! Please respond to me! Please help me make this an interactive forum. I have never done this before, so I don't even know how it works. Together we can explore and hopefully grow close to Jesus in the process! Thanks, and may the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ bring you grace and peace!!