Ryken Loving Jesus More

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3411-9
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Do you love Jesus more than your spouse? Your reputation? Your kids? Your health? Your job? Your money? As Christians, we're called to love Jesus more than anyone or anything else. But do we really do this? Emphasizing that God's love for us is the source of our love for him, Phil Ryken challenges us to take Jesus's words seriously and think carefully about where our affections truly lie.

Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than fifty books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition and the Lausanne Movement.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ryken, Philip Graham

Leseproben

2

This I Know

Some people enjoy a spiritual love life like the one that Elizabeth Payson Prentiss wrote about. As she considered her joyful experience with Jesus, Prentiss wrote: “To love Christ more is the deepest need, the constant cry of my soul. . . . Out in the woods and on my bed and out driving, when I am happy and busy, and when I am sad and idle, the whisper keeps going up for more love, more love, more love!”1

Then again, some people have a relationship with Christ that is not like that at all. They find it hard to love Jesus even a little bit, let alone love him more and more. In fact, they are not entirely sure what it looks like or feels like to love Jesus. And they are not entirely convinced that Jesus loves them, either. As one college student wrestled with heavy doubts about the Christian faith, his mother asked him whether he believed that Jesus loved him. The student’s answer came after a long pause. “Minimally,” he said.

What about you? Do you ever have your doubts about the love of God? Do you ever feel as if God loves you only minimally, if he loves you at all?

The Bible says that we love God because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). As we have seen, it also tells us that the Holy Spirit is the source of God’s love in the life of the believer. But if we are not entirely sure that Jesus does love us, then how can we possibly love him? There is a deep and direct connection between loving and being loved. So in order for us to have more love for Jesus, we need to know more of his love for us. And when we have our doubts, it is desperately important for us to fight for the assurance of God’s affection.

Doubting Your Doubts

Some of my favorite comments about the relationship between faith and doubt use insects as a basis for comparison, drawing connections between theology and entomology. Frederick Buechner takes a positive perspective when he writes, “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”2 But the poet Roger White finds his spiritual doubts to be more of a nuisance: “A mosquito buzzes round my faith,” he says—the mosquito of spiritual doubt.3

Many of us can identify with the poet’s description. In our solitary moments the nagging questions whine away at our souls like so many mosquitoes. Is the Bible really true? Does God actually hear my prayers? Can I genuinely be forgiven? Will I definitely go to heaven when I die? Is there truly a God at all?

The novelist John Updike describes a Presbyterian minister who answers the last question in the negative. Under the influence of liberal scholarship, the man has serious questions about central doctrines of the Christian faith, until one day he gives in to his doubts and abandons his Christianity. As Updike tells it,

The Reverend Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct—a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. . . . His thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition, which he had long withstood, that . . . there is no . . . God, nor should there be.

Clarence’s mind was like a many-legged, wingless insect [!] that had long and tediously been struggling to climb up the walls of a slick-walled porcelain basin; and now a sudden impatient wash of water swept it down into the drain. There is no God.4

Doubt can be a stimulus to faith, or an ongoing annoyance in the Christian life, or a fatal blow to someone’s loose commitment to Jesus. It all depends on what we do with our doubts. So we should choose our insect wisely!

One thing we should always do with our doubts is to be honest about the fact that we have them. Doubt is a struggle to be acknowledged. Indeed, having doubts is a normal part of Christian experience. We see this repeatedly in the Scriptures. We see it in the story of Job, whose afflictions tempted him to doubt the goodness of the sovereignty of God. We see it in the life of Asaph, who looked around at the atheists he knew, saw what a good time they seemed to be having, and suddenly doubted whether God was worth it (Ps. 73:1–15). We see it in David, whose psalms testify to all the struggles of a doubting soul. We also see it in the desperate father who hoped that Jesus would heal his son from an evil spirit. “I do believe,” he said to Jesus, but “help me overcome my unbelief” (Mark 9:24 NIV).

All of these believers were also doubters, sometimes. In a way, we even see this in Jesus himself, in his words from the cross, when he gathered up all of our darkest doubts and expressed them in the interrogative mood: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34; cf. Ps. 22:1). Doubt is a struggle to be acknowledged—an ordinary dimension of spiritual experience for God’s faithful people in a fallen world.

But doubt is also a temptation to be resisted. The main person who wants us to disbelieve is the Devil, which is why dealing with doubt can be such a dark struggle. The contested ground between faith and unbelief is a spiritual battlefield, and like any form of warfare, it calls for armed resistance.

Some believers spend too much time doubting their faith, and not enough time doubting their doubts. Yes, there are some reasonable questions that thoughtful people have always raised about the Christian faith. But there are also some very good questions that faithful people should raise about their spiritual doubts:

Have I studied what God has to say on this question, or have I been listening mainly to his detractors?

Am I well aware of how this doubt has been addressed in the history of Christian theology, or has my thinking been relatively superficial?

Have I been compromising with sin in ways that make it harder for me to hear God’s voice and diminish my desire for the purity of his truth?

Is this a doubt that I have offered sincerely to God in prayer, or am I waiting to see if God measures up to my standards before I ask for his help?

All of the doubting believers that I mentioned earlier knew how to fight for the assurance of their faith. When Asaph had his doubts, he went to the temple and worshiped God anyway. Once he was there, he perceived, correctly, that turning away from God would only end in destruction (Ps. 73:16–28). When David had his doubts, he talked them over with God in prayer. And when the half-believing, half-doubting father in the Gospel of Mark wondered if his son would ever be delivered, he went to Jesus and prayed for the gift of triumphant faith.

These are all God-honoring ways to deal with spiritual doubts. Even doubting is something we can do to the glory of God, as long as we do it with God, and not against him. So as you seek the assurance of God’s love, be sure to doubt your doubts!

Going Back to the Gospel of Love

Most of all, the assurance of God’s love will come by going back to the gospel and listening again to the good news about Jesus Christ. If the gospel is what we are having trouble believing, then it may be tempting to ignore it. Instead, we ought to go back to the lowly manger and not stop until we have gone on to the bloody cross, the empty tomb, and the glorious throne of God, where Jesus reigns as the King of all kings.

When we go back to the story of Jesus like this and see him again in his gospel, we know that we are loved. We know this because everything Jesus has ever done for our salvation is a demonstration of his affection. The apostle Paul said it like this, in his letter to Titus: “When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us” (Titus 3:4–5). As soon as Jesus is introduced into the situation, love is there, and because love is there, we are saved.

In offering this assurance, the apostle Paul knows that there is a darker side to life. The language he uses to describe what life is like without Christ, or before Christ, is dark and depressing. We were “foolish,” he says, “led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another” (Titus 3:3).

This is what life is like without Christ, which explains why times of spiritual doubt can be so discouraging. The more trouble we have seeing Jesus, the more we wander into foolish thinking. The consequences are devastating: sinful patterns of self indulgence, angry conflicts with other people, and bitter thoughts about ourselves as well as others. If these are some of the struggles that we have—habitual sin, broken relationships, self-loathing—then we must not be seeing the love of Jesus the way that God wants us to see it.

Everything is different when we really do see Jesus. Titus 3:4 marks a turn in thought and a change in our destiny: “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy” (Titus 3:4–5).

What makes the transition from “before” to “after” is nothing that we can do for ourselves, but only what God can do for us. So the apostle proceeds to describe the loving way that God saves us: “by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that...