Go On Up To The Mountain Every Day! (Part 1)
Allison and I spent our honeymoon in Banff, Alberta, Canada. We primarily stayed in Canmore, Alberta which is in the middle of the Canadian Rockies. Mountains!
On the first night of our honeymoon, we landed in Calgary International Airport and picked up our rental car to drive the hour to our resort reservation. The entire drive was under the guise of darkness. Even as we neared Canmore, Allison could make out mountains in the shadows. It was so dark we could barely see the silhouettes of the mountains pressed against the blackness of the night sky.
"It's mountains," she said. Being unable to see them fully I was somewhat skeptical because it would mean that we were surrounded by so many mountains!
We pulled into our resort, which we had purchased as through HomeAway.com. It was about midnight and after a wedding and a day of travel, we were ready to hit the pillow.
"I cannot give you the code, because I do not have it." As the receptionist said this, our hearts sank.
The receptionist informed us that since we were using someone else's condo and had purchased through a 3rd party website, she could not let us into the resort.
Gleaning the spotty WiFi from the hotel, Allison frantically searched through emails for the codes we needed. Interestingly enough, the only code we had was for the WiFi. We could use the resort's spotty internet, but we couldn't get in the building. Just great!
Allison repeatedly called the man who had rented us the condo for the week, but to no avail as it was almost 1 in the morning.. More and more it appeared that the first night of our romantic getaway honeymoon was going to be spent the back seat of our Toyota Rav-4 rental car.
We drove by street light into the township of Canmore and found our way to a rest stop where we spent the night. The front seats of the rental car were not comfortable enough for slumber, so we ended up in the back seat. If you've ever been to Canada, even in the summer nights, it gets cold! Allison was sleeping with two pairs of pants on, and I was wearing her jacket - the only jacket we brought for the trip because it was summer - as a blanket on my arms. Every 30 minutes I would wake up and turn the heat on full blast in the car, so that we didn't freeze.
Eventually we slept and woke and slept and woke our way to 7 a.m. By this time the sun had begun to fill the sky with light. I could see all around me and it left me awestruck and floored. We were surrounded by mountains! There were huge, gorgeous mountains everywhere!
I was like a kid in a candy store, everywhere we drove, more mountains, more insanely beautiful mountains and trees and lakes! And right inside these mammoth and gorgeous rocks was tiny little Canmore, Alberta. I couldn't believe it, they just put this town right inside this incredible mountain range! It was absolutely amazing to me. I remember I purposely had Allison take a picture of me pushing a shopping cart with the mountains in the background. Can you imagine? Grocery shopping and you walk out of Cub foods and you are surrounded by a stunning mountain range! I was blown away by the beauty of it.
However, I'm sure for the permanent residents of Canmore, the immaculate beauty and vastness of the mountain ranges around them starts to lose some of its luster. Those things that once seemed beautiful and magnificent suddenly just fade into the background. It isn't that the mountains became less beautiful, but they are there everyday and aren't going anywhere, so it becomes less and less exciting to see them. Even by the last day of our vacation I wasn't as amazed as I was that dew-filled August morning when I got out of the RAV-4 that had been our bedchamber and gazed in speechless amazement at the mountains around me.
Why does that happen? Why do we become less and less amazed at beautiful things when we spend more time around them? Why does the luster wear off?
This happens in our spiritual lives as well. We fall into a rut. God fades into the background. The worship songs at church suddenly don't seem to stir us, if we even feel like going at all. Bible reading becomes a chore as opposed to a joy, and we are less and less encouraged by Scripture. Our service to others falls into self-righteousness or even laziness, because our motivation is gone. Our prayer life becomes less and less important to us What saps our motivation?
It isn't that God has become less beautiful, but we begin to take Christ, the cross, and our salvation for granted. Why do these spiritual ruts and lulls happen? How can we combat them?
Beloved evangelical statesman and author Jerry Bridges, who has recently passed into glory, has a famous quote:
"Preach the gospel to yourself every day."
Throughout the two posts, I would like to put forth three ways that the gospel helps to see the beauty of Christ causing us to desire relationship with Him on and daily, even hourly basis.
1) The gospel humbles us to see our sin and our need for a Savior.
There is a disease called congenital analgesia, where sufferers feel no pain and sensations such as burning don't register as dangerous. People with this genetic disorder can have severe burns or even broken bones without even knowing it. Being able to not feel pain is dangerous!
In the same way, not having a relationship with God's word and the gospel can cause us spiritual danger. We can't see the damage and pain that our sin causes because we are oblivious to it. When we are in relationship with the gospel, we can see that we fall short of God's glory and perfection. The gospel reminds us that we are by nature, children of wrath.
What does it mean to be 'children of wrath?' Is that unfair on God's part?
The Bible teaches that we enter this world under the curse of the Fall. That is, when Adam sinned in the garden, the nature of his spiritual death spreads to us. We enter the world as spiritually dead, following the ways of the world, living for ourselves and our passions. Our nature is to be children of wrath and we are under condemnation. We are rebels by our very nature who do not desire the things of God.
J.I. Packer puts it this way, "We all stand by nature under God's judgment; his law condemns us; guilt gnaws at us, making us restless, miserable, and in our lucid moments afraid; we have no peace within ourselves because we have no peace with our Maker." (Knowing God, p. 206)
How can we think of this?
They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good,
not even one. (Psalm 14:3 ESV)
Is God unfair?
By no means! We all uphold moral justice. We want to see serial killers locked up, and we get mad when people cut us off in traffic. We desire to see justice for wrongdoing because we know it is right. In the same way, God is right to uphold his perfect moral justice.
Again, Packer helps us understand God's wrath, "This is righteous anger - the right reaction of moral perfection in the Creator toward moral perversity in the creature. So far from the manifestation of God's wrath in sin being morally doubtful, the thing that would be morally doubtful would be for him to not show his wrath in this way." (Knowing God, p. 184)
Our sin incurs God's wrath and puts us under just condemnation. It would be out of line with God's perfect moral character - it would be unjust and impossible for the holy God to not punish sin.
The gospel does not let us forget that we are sinners by our very nature and deserving of God's wrath. How humbling it is to know that we are sinners and have transgressed against the perfectly just ways of a holy God. Yet the gospel humbles us further.
Can we fix ourselves?
You might say, "If God were to tell us the ways to live out His will so that we might be morally upright before Him, we could do it!"
God gave us the law, and we failed to uphold it.
For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (Romans 3:20 ESV)
The law requires perfect obedience to God's will, and because we are not perfect, we all sin and miss the mark. Our ability to be self-justified falls short. We can't save ourselves. We are unable to purify ourselves through obeying God's law. There has to be a sacrifice for sin to quench the wrath of God.
The gospel teaches us that we need Jesus as our Savior.
Tim Keller says, "You don't know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have."
We have to remember that without Jesus, we are hopeless sinners, unable to know God and helpless to save ourselves. Preaching ourselves the gospel every day helps us to see our need for Christ because we see that our sin has separated us from the life of God.
If we don't feel hunger in our stomachs, we won't know that we need to eat. If we don't feel pain we find ourselves in danger. When we preach ourselves the gospel we remember how our sin separated us from God and how hopeless we were before God entered our lives.
If we don't remember our time in the desert, we won't call upon the name of the Lord!
If we don't remember our exile from God, we won't treasure our relationship with Him in Christ!
If we don't remember that once we didn't have God, we won't feel the joy of our salvation!
The gospel is the good news that God, in Christ, is reconciling sinners to Himself.
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
(2 Corinthians 5:18-19 ESV)
The gospel is the good news that Jesus has made the way for us!
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6 ESV)
We have to preach the gospel to ourselves so that we remember our great need for Christ!
When we feel our need for Christ, we will run to him!
Do you sense your need for Jesus? How can you run to him?
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