One thing that is exciting for me is that the biweekly publication of Park Cities Presbyterian Church published a 500 word article I wrote in October 14 edition of their This Week newsletter. This Week is read nationwide by approximately 2,200 people. For me the thing that differentiates this from just publishing it on my blog is that someone else had to read it and decide if it was worth publishing. Blogging of course has no such strictures. At any rate, here is the article for you and as you will notice it duplicates some of the materials you will have seen else where here. Thanks to Stephanie Barker and Terri Speicher for the privilege to write for PCPC.
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Christian the Yoke’s on You

When I was a boy, I received a coin inscribed with the words one dollar. While the words described something that was true about the coin, they didn’t tell the whole story. The coin was an 1883 silver dollar that is now worth about $50.

Scripture can be like this. In 2 Corinthians 6:14 we are told not be otherly yoked to unbelieving things. The word yoke is like the one dollar inscription on the coin I received. The word certainly tells us something, but the concept at hand is far weightier. This idea of being yoked runs throughout scripture.

Just as the value of my silver dollar grows over time, so the weightiness of the metaphor of being yoked increases through the course of God’s redemptive work in history. Where do you suppose we might find the metaphor of yoke first minted? Conceptually, we witness it in the Garden of Eden, where the serpent seduced Adam and Eve to throw off the blessed yoke of God from their necks, only to find that in its place the devil subtly slipped a silky noose. On the cross, Jesus broke the bars of this satanic yoke and restored us to union with God in Christ.

The Christian life is walking in Christ’s yoke, to “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians 7:1) We walk in this yoke only by the steps of faith and repentance with the purpose of seeing the likeness of Christ formed in us. In this way we experience an exodus of sorts, walking from the land of slavery and sin to the purposed destination of promised rest in Christ. Just as God broke the bars of Israel’s slavish yoke, so God has liberated us by binding Himself to us.

We walk neither aimlessly nor alone; rather, God Almighty has­—in loving kindness—bound himself to us. Walking with us, He leads the way to everlasting rest. Is this not the language of Jesus’ imploring words in Matthew 11:29–30, “Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light”? The Christian life is walking with Christ in His unbreakable yoke of love.

By the time Paul gets his hands on the conceptual coinage of yoke, it has sharply increased in value and meaning from the mere idea of joining two animals. In His divinity, Christ has united us to God in His glory. In His humanity, Jesus has bound each member of His Church together in love and thanksgiving. Loving God and our neighbor is rarely easy. The wonder of our union with Christ is that He works in us now to grow us up, leading us that we might truly love in His likeness.

May the Lord bless you and keep you,
That faithfulness will mark all your ways,
That in the small and slim design
You will obey the Lord sublime.

May the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
That loveliness might be redefined in Him:
Beauty that is without measure -
An all surpassing treasure.

And may He be gracious unto you,
Who apart from Him can do nothing,
Who even in your rebellion against Him
Require His lifegiving Spirit to sin.

May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you
as a child of His covenant, forever true,
as one adopted out of the blackest dark
In love, on a journey of liberty, embark!

And may He give you peace -
Not appeasement that is a vapor mist
Nor blind hope that there’s something better still
But eternal peace who is Christ that never fails.

In The Supremacy of God in Preaching, John Piper has a chapter on the marriage of gravity and gladness in God glorifying preaching.� Often there is an imbalance, according to Piper, in pulpits today.� “Gladness and gravity,” Piper writes, “should be woven together in the life and preaching of a pastor in sch a way as to sober the careless soul and sweeten the burdens of the saints” (p. 52).� Later in the chapter he suggests seven practical suggestions for cultivating this warp and woof in our preaching.

1. Strive for gladhearted-holiness.� “You can’t be blood-earnest in the pulpit and habitually flippant at deacons’ [= elders' in the Presbyterian world] meetings and church dinners.”
2. Make your life and especially your study one of constant communion with Christ.� May we spend ten hours on our knees over our books as B. B. Warfield urges.
3. Read inspiring edifying books.� Read works written by authors who bleed bibline and are blood-earnest about the truths they discuss.
4. Contemplation of death.� Directing our minds to the contemplation of death, reminds us of the gravitas of our depravitas as Dr. Sinclair Ferguson used to tell us in classes at Westminster Seminary.
5. Higher standards.� Scripture teaches us that teachers of Christ’s people will be judged with greater strictness (James 3:1).
6. The Example of Jesus.� Jesus was evidently the most profound and prolific preacher that ever lived.� He wept often, was approachable even by children, was humble and yet boldly preached on things like hell in even horrible terms.
7. Humble yourself.� “Don’t be content to guide people amont the foothills of God’s glory.”� Lead them to the heights of his majestic transcendence (c.f., 1 Pet 5:6).

I would encourage those of us who have the privilege of preaching to cultivate in our own minds a healthy fear of God.� My own thoughts are that we do not fear God as we should.� We do not sense the dangerous business it is to be an instrument in the hands of a holy God when we preach.� We are not the physicians, we are the surgical instruments in the hands of the Great Physician.� O God have mercy that when you come to find this scalpel, that I will not be dull and tarnished but sharp and holy, for Christ’s sake.� Amen.

Kevin Johnson has a post over at Reformed Catholicism, Regarding Preaching, that sparked my mind to something that is increasingly a burden for me and my family.

My own confessional standards (i.e., the Westminster Confession and Catechisms) ask this question:

What doth God require of us, that we may escape his wrath and curse due to us for sin?

In some of the evangelical churches I have been in the answer to Question 85 of the Shorter Catechism would be something like this:

To escape the wrath and curse of God due to us for sin, God requires of us that we sit through as many sermons as possible, order many sermons on tape, present the gospel as if it were merely a series of propositions to believe, and really hope that you do not have too many doctrinal errors in your thinking.

What I am trying to get at in this little parody is that I see many churches who claim the Westminster Standards as their own who at least in practice seem to proclaim the above spoof as their answer to question 85. What we actually find in the Shorter Catechism is much different:

To escape the wrath and curse of God due to us for sin, God requireth of us faith in Jesus Christ, repentance unto life, (Acts 20:21) with the diligent use of all the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption. (Prov. 2:1–5, Prov. 8:33–36, Isa. 55:3)

In the answer to Question 85, I have emphasized that in addition to the things we would expect in evangelical churches (i.e., faith in Jesus and repentance), we are charged with a third, sadly neglected item, being the diligent use of ALL the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption.

Question 88 explains that these outward means are the word of God, sacraments and prayer, all of which are made effectual to salvation. The word is said to be made effectual by the reading and especially the preaching of it. Then the catechism turns to the way that the two sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist are made effectual.

I will leave you to explore the catechism questions 85-94 or so to ponder how the sacraments are made effectual. What I want to explore here is, how is that in confessing that they are effectual we seem to be largely living in a time where the Supper is approached as a burden, something we do because we have to as Christians (to get God off our backs?). If we really believed that the Gospel was something more than rational propositions about good people, bad people, the One, platonic heaven and hell, then might we not run the visible proclamations of Christ’s life-giving death from our churches?

As I have said in another post, the paradigm today regarding the Supper is largely, “How often must we have it to not be in error?” Christ gives himself in the Supper and that would seem to lend itself to a better paradigmatic question, “How often can we have the Supper?” The Westminster Standards lends itself to a three faceted worship of Christ proclaimed in the preaching of the word, in the administration of the sacraments and in the prayers of his people. May a balanced liturgical diet be returned to the Reformed churches of Christ.

In the last episode we focused on the idea of blessing and tried to understand it in its Biblical context. We said that it was essentially the promised result of covenant obedience and its corollary was and is cursing as the promised result of disobedience.

Psalm 1 begins by introducing to us the Man of Blessing, the Blessed One. We must note here that there is but one man in view who is blessed. In other words, the idea here is singular and is contrasted later with the multiplicity of the wicked, who are a countless mass. In the first three verses of Psalm 1 we find a description of what the Blessed One is not, what he is and what he is like.

What he is not

The Man of Blessing is not one who walks in the counsel of the wicked (that countless mass). Nor does he stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers (verse 1). This is a description by way of remotion, a via negativa of sorts. In the context of this remotion is a definitive motion or inertia that the Man of Blessing avoids. Here we find a descent downward into the vileness of sin. Notice the way the psalmist uses verbs here to show the wicked as those who are brought to a place of rigormortis: walking … standing … sitting.

These verbs illustrate for us the devolution we experience in sin. We being merely listening to wicked counsel and soon we find ourselves walking in the way or path of sinners, doing what they do. Still more, as we dull our consciences on the paved stones of the way of the wicked we find that we are cozy with our sin. We become content and just sit down in it, scoffing at those who think we should do otherwise. We become alcoholics drowning in denial. Porn addicts caged by our perversions. We gorge ourselves on food and mock those who seek fitness. We all existentially get the picture here, if we are honest.

Paul describes this divestiture of our humanity in Romans 1:18-32 in which we willfully lust after sin, our mistress. To our dismay we find that sin is playing for keeps. We walked out on God, and in a sobering set of verses, the Apostle Paul paints a bleak picture for us. God in his covenant faithfulness gives us over to sin so that by verse 32 we find ourselves sitting in the seat of scoffers knowing that, “those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”

This is what the Man of Blessing is precisely not like. He knows his destination and is bent towards it. He loves keeping covenant. Nothing will separate him from the goal perfect obedience at the end of his journey. He perseveres through all the scoffing and ridicule that comes from walking on his most demanding path. In other words, the Man of Blessing is not immune to or removed from the inertia of the wicked. He is exposed to the wicked, to sinners and to those who scoff and yet he does not participate in this wretchedness.

What he is

In a way antithetical to that of the wicked, the Man of Blessing finds his consuming pleasure in the Law of the Lord. There is much to say about the manifold nature of the delight that the Man of Blessing finds in the Law. We will focus on two aspects here.

First, there is an understanding of the Law that the Man of Blessing has that the wicked, sinners and scoffers do not. The Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches us that the moral Law of God is summarily comprehended in the Decalogue (Ten Commandments, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). In other words, the Decalogue describes for us what righteousness (i.e., true and actual morality) looks like. In this way, the Decalogue is a description of who God is and not a prescription of what he must do in order to demonstrate himself as righteous. This point cannot be emphasized enough. God is righteous in his essence, simply by being God. He then describes for us by way of legal imperatives our purpose on this earth as human beings, which is to visibly demonstrate his likeness.

We know that humanity was created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27) and because of sin we find a humanity now that is in fact image but reflects something very much unlike God. Redemption then is a restoration of humanity’s destiny in the person and work of Jesus Christ, who alone fulfilled the Law, being perfect as his heavenly Father is perfect (Matt 5:48). Therefore, the Man of Blessing delights in the Law because it describes to him the love of his life, the God whom he cannot get enough of.

Second, we turn our attention now to the nature of obedience. There are essentially two expressions of obedience in which we engage on a regular basis. They both may have the same outward appearance; but only one is authentic obedience.

One expression of obedience can be seen in the way I obey the police officer I see when I am driving down the highway. Whether I am speeding or not, I have an instinctive reaction to brake – just to make sure that I am under the speed limit. How obedient of me! What we see here is that I am obedient precisely because I do not want to have a relationship with the police officer.

In contrast to this, the Man of Blessing delights in the Law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night. He obeys explicitly because the Lawgiver, whom the law describes to him, is his delight. His obedience is motivated by a desire to cultivate and affirm his relationship with the Lord. It is the delight of his life, or we might say such obedient connection is the life of the Man of Blessing. The former expression of obedience is outward and superficial, seeking to avoid the lawgiver; the latter is an inward eruption of delight that works its way out into all kinds of visible manifestations of obedience and is the only expression of obedience that is authentic.

What he is like

The psalmist then employs an extended simile to further explain the relationship of obedience to life. The Man of Blessing is like a tree planted by canals of water. There is a purpose seen here and a passivity. The Man of Blessing is planted. Where something is planted tells us much about the one who planted it.

In the ancient near eastern context, where something was planted was critical, the difference between life and death. The canal of water is something that was purposely dug out. In the ancient near east these were intricate labyrinths of waterways that brought water miles away from the tributary, like great fingers that extended out perpendicularly from a river or other fresh water source. This tree was planted purposefully in a place in which it would be nourished and cared for and consequently it would bear fruit. The tree participates in its situation and acts according to its purpose and destiny. It produces fruit in its season. This is contrasted later with the wicked who are like chaff, or just the shells of fruit that once was.

The tree in this simile is in a situation such that it cannot help but bear fruit. However, this does not mean that the tree has a silver spoon in its mouth as it were. While its leaf does not whither, all that it does is victorious. Many translations render יַצְלִֽיחַ as prosper; however, prosper does not seem to provide for the English reader the force of the hiphil verb form that we find here. The tree that is planted by canals of water is made victorious or made prosperous. There is a sense in which the tree overcomes adversity.

There is a conceptual parallel in the Sermon on the Mount. Here in Psalm 1 we find two ways, that of the Man of Blessing and that of the wicked. In Matthew 7:24-27 we find two builders, one wise and the other foolish. The former builds his house on the rock, a solid foundation. The latter builds his house on the sand, a foundation that lacks stability. Soberly, we find that for both the wise and foolish builders storms come. It is precisely in the context of oppression and difficulty that the wisdom of the wise is seen.

The Man of Blessing, being like the tree planted by canals of water, bearing its fruit at the right time, is very much like the wise builder. He looks to the Law of the Lord, and much like the rock foundation of the wise builder we find that his faith is wisely placed. The storms do come; however, we find that the Man of Blessing is one who overcomes on account of what supports and nourishes him.