Why Was Jesus Unintimidated by Pilate?

Great meditation here by John Piper, for those, like me, who wrestle with fear.

Fear

Paul Tripp:

Fear can overwhelm your senses. It can distort your thinking. It can kidnap your desires. It can capture your meditation so that you spend more time worrying about what could be than considering the God who is. Fear can cause you to make bad decisions in the short term and fail to make good decisions in the long run. Fear can cause you to forget what you know and to lose sight of who you are. Fear can make you wish for control you will never have. It can cause you to distrust people you have reason to trust. It can cause you to be demanding rather than serving. It can cause you to run when you should stay and to stay when you really should run. Fear can make God look small and your circumstance loom large. Fear can make you seek from people what you will only get from the Lord. Fear can be the soil of your deepest questions and your biggest doubts. Your heart was wired to fear, because you were designed for life shaped by fear of God. But horizontal fear cannot be allowed to rule your heart, because if it does, it will destroy you and your ministry.

Read the rest.

Love More Than Need

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be loved or wanting a good reputation.  We should want both.  It would be inhuman not to.  As citizens of the kingdom, our good reputation honors the King and, having been loved by the King, we certainly delight in being loved.  The problem comes when we want these things too much, when we want them for our own glory rather than God's.

Notice how human desires go topsy-turvy when we stray outside God's kingdom.  As kingdom residents, we have been loved with an everlasting love and we have the privilege of loving other as we have been loved.  We stand in the shadow of Jesus, who revealed what human life was intended to be.  He loved others even when he wasn't loved.  Jesus shows us that to be truly human means that our desire to love others outdistances our desire to be loved ourselves.  True humanness is found more in a sacrificial love for our enemies than in being the object of another person' affections.  Yet we often live as though the opposite were true.  Without adequate human love, we feel paralyzed to love.  We want to be filled with the love of others before we move out in love towards others.  This is normal for us, but normal does not mean that it is either right or true.  At root, our yearing for love and acceptance from other people (when it is more important than loving and accepting others) is evidence of allegiances to ourselves.  We prefer to be king rather than serve the King.

But if we serve the King, our desire to be loved could not outdistance our commitment to love others in his name.  Our own approbation would seem almost meaningless, irrelevant.  Rejection would hurt, but it wouldn't sidetrack us from our mission of love.

- Ed Welch,  Running Scared, p. 178, 179

Whose Approval?

D.A. Carson:

Would it be unduly cynical of me to suggest that most of us are more likely to feel troubled by something we have said or done that has upset a colleague or parishioner than by something that has dishonored God? Some do not want to be too closely associated with anything the scholarly guild judges old-fashioned or fundamentalist: that, surely, would be shameful. On the other hand, Jesus says some blunt things about those who are ashamed of him and his words (Mark 8:38). The question resolves into something pretty straightforward: Whose approval do we most earnestly desire? Whose approval do we want when we prepare for a lecture (whether to deliver it or to learn from it)? Whose approval do we seek when we preach a sermon? Whose approval matters most when we write a paper or slog away at a dissertation? Whose approval do we hunger for when we choose a vocation, decide how to use our time, take pains to build links of affection and accountability in the local church, exercise, bring up our children, nurture our families, read, lead a Bible study, help a neighbor?

(Editorial, Themelios, Nov. 2009)

Read the rest.

(HT: Mike Pohlman)

Let Creation Help You Increase Your Fear of the Lord

In our home group, we are working our way through Ed Welch's book, When People Are Big and God is Small. I have found it to personally be very beneficial and I would highly recommend you picking up this book. It's a challenging read, not in the sense of the style, but rather it will crawl up into your lap and show you your sin. Not comfortable, but very needed.

One of the remedies that he gives for helping people decrease their fear of man is to increase their fear of the Lord. How do we do that? Two main ways: 1) read your Bible, 2) and get out and experience creation. I'll let you read the book to see how he fleshes these two points out, but this video from Francis Chan will probably contribute to the 2nd point.