Mark Lauterbach at GospelDrivenLife recently posted the following reflection on our self-focused pride and Christ’s self-sacrificial humility. His thoughts lead to conviction, humility, and joy as we behold our Savior. Here are some highlights.

Jesus was humble — he took no thought of himself that he might serve us unto our everlasting redemption from wrath and giving us joy in the face of God. I was first struck with how much I am unlike Jesus.

Who can measure the depths of self focus that is part of the human heart. I have meditated often in recent years on the classic formula that sin “turned us in on ourselves.” How vivid. I am always thinking about myself. I wake in the morning with one question — did I sleep well? Do I feel rested? I walk to the coffee with one question — will this be a good cup of coffee? I sit down to meet with the Lord and my thoughts are not first about Him. I am self- aware. When I look in the mirror later it is with self-consciousness about my weight, my receding hairline, my appearance. I can spend hours on end hardly noticing the people around me except to ask, “I wonder what they think of me?” In essence I simply want to be worshiped — to be considered the brightest, the smartest, the most gifted, the most godly.

It is grievous. And my Savior did not live at all this way. He resisted the temptation to self-absorption every day and thought first of His Father’s will and second of serving the people around him. He desired the good of others’ souls and their esteem and worship of God.

How desperately I need a Savior! I have no power to turn my self-focused heart outward apart from God’s saving grace.

And my culture, as ALL cultures, is self-focused. We hate the possible loss of self in anything, which is why motherhood is particularly abhorrent. I think all our self focus is actually why we are so deeply unhappy — for there is no joy to be found by studying my self.

And here I am amazed — my Savior was humble to save me. He became a lowly God to rescue arrogant man. He is not my example of humility. He is my Savior by his humility. He is what I cannot and will not be — so that now God clothes me in his perfect humility. I am saved from wrath by his death. I am clothed with humility by his life.

And all this compels me to flee all self-regard; to cease patting myself on the back and commending myself. I am free to live in his complete and perfect commendation.

And Jesus’ perfect humility is my destiny. One day, when redemption includes body-soul-spirit, I will be made sinless and will be free from all pride. Then I will be fully human as God intended me to be. And I will be lost in wonder at His glory.

The following are quotes from The Heart of Evangelism by Jerram Barrs that are referring to or relate to the passage we are studying this week- Acts 17:16-34.

. . .Where did Paul begin? Did he begin by attacking their idolatry or their endless speculation that never arrived at the truth or their love of argument for its own sake or their devotion to rhetorical skills regardless of the truth or falsehood of the subject? No! Paul began by commending them for their religious longings, for their desire to worship.

Paul was not flattering them or being sarcastic about their religion but was identifying a point of contact he could use for communicating the gospel. Their religious nature and the altar to the unknown god became bridges for declaring who God truly is. Paul’s commitment was to ask: ‘What is right with their thinking? What can I commend about their way of life?’ So often we think of dealing with the ideas of non-Christians as a matter of attack: ‘What is wrong with their thinking? Where can I attack their ideas and way of life?’ Paul seems to have taken just the opposite approach.

It is true that believers and unbelievers are in different kingdoms. . . But they never escape the real world. . . In addition to this people never escape their own humanity. They are made in the image of God because that is the way God made them. Consequently there will always be contact points for the believer to find. There will always be elements of the truth in any unbeliever’s thinking because they have to live in God’s world.

Just as Paul built bridges to Israelites and to pagans, so we are to learn from his example and build bridges to our contemporaries. If we are to apply this principle to our own attempts at outreach, we need to reflect on the state of religious belief and church commitment in our society today.

As we consider these examples of Paul’s efforts to show his acquaintance with the ideas of the men and women who were listening to his words, we have to concluded that Paul had done his homework. He respected his hearers sufficiently and had a deep enough care for them that he had worked at understanding their ideas and their religion. In fact, as we have seen already, Paul tells us that this commitment governed all his communication and the way he lived every day. ‘I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.’ -1 Corinthians 9:22. Paul was able to enter the culture of others in order to reach them. His motivation was love for Christ and love for those he met.

Sometimes our evangelism does not make the effort to understand what people believe or why they believe it. Consequently it fails to communicate. Either this need for understanding is considered unnecessary. . . Or it is assumed that everyone in our society is in the place of the Jew or the God-fearer of the New Testament. . . A third reason for the failure to do the hard work that is necessary to understand people is that sometimes we are plain lazy and cannot be troubled to rouse ourselves to make the effort to find out what other people think and believe.

Paul clarified the Gospel by telling the Athenians that their deepest longings were met in the truth of who God is. He declared that their wisest thinking was fulfilled and surpassed in the revelation God had given about Himself and that their most cherished ideas were transcended and completed in the message of Jesus, the man whom God appointed as His ambassador.

Because of this reality of disobedience and rebellion, the Gospel will always be experienced as a challenge. It will challenge the mind, for it always confronts false belief with the truth. It will challenge the will, for it cuts to the core of our insistence on turning away from God and going our own way. It will challenge the heart for our hearts are devoted to many masters in place of the one true Lord. Any faithful communication of the Gospel must come with this challenge. In fact, it is appropriate to assert that if there is no challenge, there is no genuine presentation of the Gospel.

Just as with the Jews, Paul’s challenges were spoken to the beliefs and convictions that were at the heart of what it meant to be Greek, and above all Athenian. These cherished notions were their glory and their pride. Paul’s purpose was to bring them to a point where they would begin to question their most precious assumptions about themselves and to doubt what they had believed. Onely when this happened would they be humbled before God, turn away from what had captured their devotion and turn instead to Jesus as their sole hope and confidence before God. Christ must be their wisdom, the source of boasting, the One who gives them a sense of identity, their secure anchor for eternity.

Reflecting on the challenges Paul made in these two different settings, we should notice that it was the most precious things in each culture that Paul confronted. Why was this? At the heart of all sin, unbelief and rebellion against God is pride.

Author Paul David Tripp posted an article this last week on his blog regarding the nature of sin as a relationship. I have posted the majority of the article below.

Sin is much, much more than the violation of a set of rules. Sin is more profound then rebellion against a moral code. Sin is about something deeper than behaving inappropriately. It’s deeper than bad actions and wrong words.

When you witness the body of an infant who’s not yet able to communicate with words, stiffen up in anger, you know you’re dealing with something bigger, deeper, more fundamentally disturbing than a failure to observe a code of conduct. The infant is angry because you’re asking him to do what he doesn’t want to do. He’s outraged that you’d presume to give him directions. He wants to be the king and lawgiver in his own little universe of one. He doesn’t want to live under the authority of another. He wants to make up his own rules; rules that would, of course, follow the shape of what he wants, what he feels, and what he determines he needs. The only thing that would actually satisfy him is the one thing that he’ll never have, God’s position. He was created to live under authority, not to be that authority. So he fights his subjugation in a vain quest for self-sovereignty.

It’s the desire to be God rather than to serve God that’s at the bottom of every sin that anyone has ever committed. Sin isn’t first rooted in a philosophical debate of the appropriateness or healthiness of a certain ethic. No, sin is rooted in my unwillingness to find joy in living my life under the authority of, and for the glory of, Another. Sin is rooted in my desire to live for me. It’s driven by my propensity to indulge my every feeling, satisfy my every desire, and meet my every need.

Because sin is about the breaking of relationship, restoration of relationship is the only hope for us in our struggle with sin. It’s only because God is willing to love us in a way that we refuse to love him, that we have any hope of defeating sin. It’s through the gift of adoption into relationship with him, that we find what we need to gain power over sin. And what do we need? A greater love for him than we have for ourselves. His love for us is the only thing that has the power to produce in us that kind of love for him.

Sin is a relationship and it takes relationship to deliver us from sin. Christ was willing to experience the rejection that our rebellion deserves so that we could have the relationship with God that’s our only hope as we grapple with the selfishness of sin.

A couple of weeks ago Erik Raymond over at Irish Calvinist posted a series on understanding and fighting lust. Here are some highlights.

From Part 1-

The word translated lust in the New Testament is epithumia. The word simply means ‘desire’. This desire can be good or bad; whether it is good or bad depends upon how it aligns
with God’s revealed will.

Simply put sinful lust is to desire something that we believe to be ‘good’ outside of what God has called good. It is to put our own will and pleasure above God’s.

This is seen quite clearly through the example of sexual lust. God has said that sex is to occur within the framework of marriage (between a male and a female). Therefore, any lustful craving to experience the intimate pleasures reserved for the marriage apart from this sacred institution is to pursue enjoyment apart from God’s clearly revealed will. When a man sits and quietly fixes his eyes and heart upon a woman (whether it be on a computer, television, photo, in person or in his imagination) and then begins to desire her sexually, this is sinful lust. The man has lustfully craved sexual satisfaction apart from divine sanction.

From Part 2-

So why do we lust?

Everyone yells in unison “Sin!” or “Pride!” or “Greed!” or some other answer that we know to be true but to often do not understand how it works.

My contention here is that if you do not know why and how your heart works you will not effectively wage war against its fleshly passions.

Why do we sit and meditate about how successful we will be? Or how people will like us? Why do we strain our necks to covet and long for what we do not have? Why do women envy other women’s beauty, style, wardrobe, sense of humor, mothering skills, or professional skills? Why does a man find himself sinfully staring at a woman who is not his wife? Why do we find ourselves daydreaming and fantasizing about how we would orchestrate our lives if we were sovereign?

There is an appraisal that takes place. Each one of us, whether a Christian or not, are governed by our hearts .

Our hearts then confront us with stuff and the natural fallen tendency is to appraise stuff through the lenses of self-exaltation rather than divine exaltation. We naturally fasten our lust upon that which exalts self through the demotion and insult of God.

When we are confronted by our hearts we are forced to make a choice between that which God calls beautiful and what the sinful heart calls beautiful.

For an example, and I am going to pick on men, specifically in the area of sexual lust (fill in the blank: from pornographic images to that which men execute upon modestly clothed women).

Here is the scenario, men, you are looking at your computer and you desire to look at porn. So you open up a web browser and go to a filthy site in attempt to satisfy your lust. You have just declared that these images are chiefly beautiful and worthy of your desire. You have elevated your selfish lust to a position of supremacy above what God has called beautiful. You have exchanged the beauty of God for the beauty of a fleeting image.

From Part 3-

So how do we fight these desires? We do it with desires. Your chief defense against sinful lust is an all out offensive of sanctified lust, if you will. It is to set our hearts upon the supremacy, sufficiency and beauty of the Lord Jesus Christ; and it is in this posture of continual satisfied delight in Jesus that the lusts of our flesh and this world evaporate into vapors like the steam on our morning coffee.

Friends can we not find ourselves in agreement with God as to his beauty? We must come to the word of God to have our minds shaped and conformed by God. He says he is infinitely beautiful and worthy to be the unceasing object of our satisfaction and delight. Do you agree?

If you do then your cravings and lust for things of this world and of your flesh will be starved out by your relentless enjoyment and pursuit of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

You can throw your computer out the window, but that won’t kill your lust. You can never go to the mall (the vanity fair :/), but that won’t kill your lust. You can cut out your eyes, but that won’t kill your lust. You can move to a cave in Montana, but that won’t kill your lust. You can employ legalism, but that won’t kill your lust. All of these things fall short because they are external amputations when we need a heart transformation.

To see Jesus as supreme and sufficient is to see everything else as lacking. To see stuff as worthy of your lust (coveting, craving, etc..) is to see Jesus as lacking. To seek goodness outside of what God has called good is to appraise Jesus and find him lacking. We need to think like this. Our lust for selfish pleasure does have consequences. Whether we are talking sexual lust, material lust, professional lust, or whatever, we are talking about the removal of attributes of God and the imputation of the attributes of supremacy and sufficiency to stuff, and this is the height of idolatry (Col. 3.5).

This is why it is so critical to be in the word of God daily. To find ourselves in subjection to the divine word, that we might have our minds transformed and renewed according to the will of God, that we would think his thoughts after him, appraising that which is excellent and rejecting that which is sinful (Rom. 12.1-2; Eph. 5.1-2).

The following was posted by Abraham over at the Desiring God blog.  It seems that it would be helpful both in building relationships for the gospel and in getting to know our body.  See if you can apply it this weekend.

Here’s a tip from Chris Brogan on how to make the public events you attend more useful on a personal level:

If you’re at a conference and you’re really digging the speaker, look around the audience for other vigorously nodding heads. Everyone else is going to try and talk with the speaker. You should go seek out the other audience member who seemed to get it. See if there’s a connection there.

He’s writing about how to market yourself, but it’s good advice for just making friends and being personable, too.

And it doesn’t only apply to conferences. I’d say try this at your church. Events where a bunch of people get together for a common cause are the easiest places to start conversations from scratch.

Here’s a challenge (maybe more of a challenge if you’re part of a small fellowship): Don’t leave church on a Sunday morning without introducing yourself to at least one new person.

Isn’t it unfortunate that so many people come and go on Sundays without having face-to-face interaction with anyone other than who they came with? It’s especially hard on visitors or people who come by themselves. The best way for me, as just one guy, to combat this problem is to make sure I never leave without talking to someone new. Then I know for sure that at least one other person that morning talked to someone new, too.

Seize your commute, your free time, your workout time this week and soak yourself in the truth. The following three sermons would be a great supplement to this week’s Grace Group study. Originally given at a men’s retreat in the Northwest, Dr. Azurdia is an excellent, articulate, and challenging speaker. I would encourage you to download, thoughtfully listen and seek to apply.

To Download File, Right-Click and SaveTarget As…

Session #1 - John 17:17-19 (MP3)
Sermon on engaging the culture

Session #2 - John 17:17-19 (MP3)
Sermon on sanctification and its relation to engaging the culture. Note: There was a technical problem recording sermon #2. Only 30 minutes of the sermon available

Session #3 - John 17:17-19 (MP3)
One of the best exegetical defenses of particular atonement we have heard. The basis for our sanctification and for engaging the culture.

I am currently reading a book entitled “The Heart of Evangelism” by Jerram Barrs and would highly recommend it. In a chapter entitled “Barriers Between the Church and the World II” he gives several reasons why believers often struggle in interacting with the world.

He notes barriers of. . .

• Intimidation- we are afraid of the hostility of the world and are failing to rest in the promises of God.
• Condemnation- criticizing and condemning the culture and the world in a self-righteous way.
• Retreat- a corporate pursuit by the church of getting out of the world in every way possible. Setting up our own sub-culture with as little contact as possible with the world.
• Separation- the avoidance of any kind of personal interaction and relationships with unbelievers.

Here is a quotation from the section on retreat that references our passage for this week- John 17.

The third response of many of us as believers to the surrounding culture is to retreat from it. Distressed by the world because it is so ‘worldly,’ we try to create our own distinct culture so we can avoid sinful society as much as possible. We have our own separate Christian or even Reformed institutions, so we will be able to avoid the pollution of the world. We retreat in to our churches and all the relationships and institutions associated with them, so that the world will influence us in a minimal way. Then, we think, we will be secure and safe from contamination.

I am not suggestion that all Christian insitutions are wrong– for example, schools and colleges or mission agencies and organizations devoted to social actions. Clearly such institutions are necessary and good. However, we need to ask ourselves what our motivation is for starting a particular Christian institution. Is our purpose to retreat from the world, or is our purpose to prepare believers to serve in the world?

Jesus prayed that we might be in the world as He was in the world, not that we might retreat from it (John 17:15-18). He described us as salt in the world (Matthew 5:13-14). He said that if we fail to influence our society because we have kept ourselves within the saltshaker of the church, on the shelf of our retreating institutions, then we will be worth nothing at all except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. If we sometimes wonder why we Christians do so little in evangelism, and why the little we do is often ineffective, we need to recognize that this mentality of retreat is one of the reasons.

We all need to ask ourselves some challenging questions: ‘Who are our unbelieving friends? Who are the ’sinners’ whom we give ourselves to love? Who are the ungodly who welcome us gladly and enjoy being with us?” There is no other way to be like Jesus and to be obedient to His command.

Yet the reality all too often is that along with fear and condemnation, separation and retreat characterize too many of us as believers. We retire into the haven of the church for our own protection and for the protection of our children. This makes genuine outreach almost impossible. How can we have true communication with people about a gopsel of love, self-giving, and the Word made flesh if we distance ourselves from those who need to hear the message? A friend who is not yet a believer put it this way: ‘The trouble with you Christians is that you wrap yourselves in a cocoon. All your close friends are other Christians. What about pagans like me? Who is going to reach me?’