Saturday, October 22, 2022

 

Saturday, October 22, 2022


Psalm 118:1-18

Nehemiah 1:1-2:8

1 Peter 5


And the king granted me what I asked, for the gracious hand of my God was upon me.


In this, Peter’s concluding remarks, he instructs the elders of the church to exercise their oversight of the flock willingly, not under compulsion. Then he tells them that if they do so, they will get a reward. Extend this line of thinking beyond the elders to every believer: do we do what we ought because we should, or because Christ rewards each person according to what he or she has done (Rom 2:6; Rev 22:12)? Which one is it?


The Bible will often speak euphemistically of the heart as the control centre of desire. A heart of stone is turned against God; a heart of flesh feels emotions such as love. Pharaoh’s heart was “hardened” and he suffered the plagues; the Israelites at Manasseh in the wilderness also suffered in a similar way by similar means: a hardening of the heart.


John Calvin’s personal motto was “I offer my heart to thee, O Lord, promptly and sincerely.” Reformed spirituality relies very heavily on the work of God to turn our desires towards that which God would have us desire: Jesus Christ. The greatest composer of Reformed worship music, J. S. Bach wrote a piece of music on this theme, and the title sums it up: “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (BWV 147).


If we get out of our minds the broken, worldly mechanism of working and earning, and move up into the heavenly economy of free grace, of giving and receiving (the active expression of what we call God’s love), Peter’s worldview and therefore his instructions to the elders make sense. We do not work hard in order to get a reward: this would contradict Jesus’ offering on the cross and make His death pointless. Instead, we have been made properly human again, now existing in line with God’s thinking, a way of thinking where love is freely expressed to one another simply by virtue of the high value love has. When it comes to our reward from the Lord Jesus, this reward is God making the ultimate expression of this heavenly economy of free grace, towards us.


The free nature of this gift should and does humble us. There is nothing in our hands we have brought to the cross of Christ, yet we do not have enough room in the truck to pack in everything we have received in return. This humble heart, the result of God’s transformation of our spirit from hard stone to warm flesh, is more pleasing to God than anything else in creation (Ps 51:17). In this blessed state, the hand of God rests upon us, and we receive blessing upon blessing, an ever-increasing bounty of divine favour, culminating in that moment of ecstasy when we are finally and properly reunited with the object of our desire, the Lord Jesus.



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