If you’ve sinned against someone, do everything in your power to make things right. But know this: your sin is no match for God’s grace. And if you’re facing the consequences of another’s sin, take heart. Stay faithful. God knows, and he knows what he’s doing. In time, you will see God turn what man means for evil into the slave of God’s mercy.
Jacob began the night believing his greatest need was to escape from Esau. He ended the night believing his greatest need was to trust in the blessing of God’s promise. What changed him from fearing man to trusting God’s word was prolonged and painful wrestling with God. Sometimes, in your
Simon had been a zealot with a lethal hatred of the Romans. He had once sworn
Matthew had collected taxes for Rome—and himself.
Moses’s experience reminds us that spiritual leadership is often hard and sometimes heartbreaking. It is accompanied with adversity and opposition. The Bible illustrates this over and over, culminating in the life of Jesus.
Here’s what it means to be a Christlike servant-leader: Like Jesus, we don’t hope in people’s approval, we hope in God (John 2:24–25; Ps. 43:5). We are not defensive, but leave our vindication to God (Isa. 54:17). We, like Moses, faithfully teach and live by God’s Word (Deut. 32:47). We don’t hope in our own giftedness, but “in God who raises the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9). We believe that we are God’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Eph. 2:10). We believe that God is always at work in our work (Phil. 2:13). We believe that humble, faithful planting and watering in reliance upon Jesus will yield fruit, even in the midst of painful controversy and resistance (Matt. 25:21; 1 Cor. 3:6). We believe that the cross of Jesus—the worst rejection, adversity, and opposition ever faced—and his triumph over death guarantee us that no labor in the Lord will ever be in vain (1 Cor. 15:58).
AT THE ROOT OF insecurity—the anxiety over how others think of us—is pride. This pride is an excessive desire for others to see us as impressive and admirable. Insecurity is the fear that instead they will see us as deficient. As King Saul shows us, insecure pride is a dangerous fear because insecurity can lead to great disobedience.
But when we feel compelled to “serve” out of a self-conscious anxiety over what others think, we are serving our own glory and not Jesus’s glory. Jesus frees us from this slavery by inviting us to stop working, rest at his feet, and listen to him. So
Objection 1: I’m a Nobody, God. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (Ex. 3:11). Any fame or social credibility I may have
Objection 2: They Aren’t Going to Believe Me, God.
Objection 3: I Am Not Gifted to Do This, God.
Objection 4: Don’t Make Me Do This, God.
But if we turn from our sinful failures to Christ, there is no failure that can’t be redeemed by the cross. And if we will wait for the Lord, there is no failure that Christ can’t restore to useful service. Jesus chooses and uses failures. Paul knew this from personal experience: I
No, not every promised grace will be received in this age (Heb. 11:39). In fact, most are being saved for your best life in the age to come (11:35). But if you believe in him, you will receive sufficient grace (2 Cor. 12:9) to help you in your time of need (Heb. 4:16). So trust him and take heart! Jesus will turn your place of shame into a showcase of his grace.
When we find God’s promises unbelievable, as did Abraham (Gen. 17:17–18) and Sarah (Gen. 18:11–14), God has exposed the boundaries of our faith—boundaries he means to expand.
Learning to rest in the promises of God occurs in the crucible of wrestling with unbelief—seasons, sometimes long seasons, when everything hangs on believing that God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17).
As Abraham walked toward Mount Moriah with Isaac, he must have felt deeply conflicted and heartbroken beyond words. He didn’t understand all that God was doing. He didn’t know he was providing an illustration of justification by faith for God’s people for all time (James 2:21–23). He didn’t know this act would foreshadow the sacrifice of God’s only Son—a Son who would not be spared because he was the provided Lamb (John 1:29). Abraham
THE LOVE OF OUR own glory is the closest competitor with God in our hearts. And sometimes we cloak our self-worship in a pious disguise. In Matthew 21, Jesus exposed this idol in the hearts of a few men with just a single question. It
me. Oh,
We must remember this perspective in our times of desolation, grief, and loss. How things appear to us, and how they actually are, are rarely the same. Sometimes it looks and feels like the Almighty is dealing “very bitterly” with us, when all the while he is doing us and many others more good than we can imagine. God’s purposes in the lives of his children are always gracious. Always. If they don’t look like it, don’t trust your perceptions. Trust God’s promises. He is always fulfilling his promises. 1
When the sword pierces, all we feel is terrible pain. But later we discover that our deepest wounds can become the channels through which profound grace flows.
“God may be slow to anger [Ex. 34:6], but it’s a dangerous thing to mistake God’s patience with sin as a license to sin.”
“If by blessing you mean Samson’s strength, it was because God was being faithful to his word. He promised he would use Samson to deliver Israel from the Philistines (Judg. 13:5), and he faithfully kept that promise, even when Samson disobeyed him. And God was
“It was the Lord who promised that he would give Sisera into your hand. My role as a prophet was just to speak the Lord’s word to you. The power lay in the promise, not the prophet. When you refused to go unless I accompanied you, it revealed that your confidence was in me, not in God’s word. By trusting my presence for victory more than God’s promise, you gave the messenger more glory than the message. It made me an idol. That was the evil. God kept his promise to you because he is always faithful. But because you took glory away from him and gave it to another, he took glory away from you and gave it to another.” The writer of
But looking to Jesus (Heb. 12:2) reminds us that we have nothing that we haven’t received through him (1 Cor. 4:7). Past and future, world without end, all is God’s grace toward us in Christ. Looking to
Jesus leads all his disciples to watershed moments when the choices we make, not the words we say, reveal the treasure we want.
So now Jesus was preparing them for the cross—his first and foremost, then theirs—and the multimillennial mission to call out true Israel from all peoples into his kingdom. Jesus was teaching them to intentionally move toward death. All present that day would die physically, some as martyrs. But all his followers would also have to die spiritually, to themselves. They would have to die to the desire for self-glory, die to the desire for worldly respect, die to the fear of man, die to the desire for an easy life, die to the desire for earthly wealth, and die a thousand other deaths. Finally, they would have to die to their desire to save their earthly lives.
But Jesus wasn’t calling his followers to some stoic life of self-sacrifice. He was inviting them to joy beyond their imagination.
GOD HAD YOU SPECIFICALLY in mind when he created you and called you to follow him. You are custom-designed for your calling. But when you face the difficulty of your calling, you may look at others and be tempted to wonder why they don’t seem to bear the same burdens you do. The apostle Peter faced the same temptation.
The fallen part of our nature doesn’t look at others and glory in how each of them uniquely bears the imago dei (Gen. 1:27). It doesn’t revel in others’ distinctive refraction of God’s multifaceted glory. It doesn’t rejoice in the sweet providences God grants to them. It is not grateful for the blessings of their God-given strengths. It does not want to deal gently with their weaknesses (Heb. 5:2). Full of pride and selfish ambition, our fallen nature uses others to gauge our own significance, how successful and impressive we perceive ourselves to be. But there is gospel in Jesus’s words: “What is that to you? You follow me!” Do you hear it? It’s a declaration of liberation. Jesus died to make you “free indeed” (John 8:36), and this includes freedom from the tyranny of sinful comparison and coveting another’s calling. God had you in mind when he created you (Ps. 139:13–16). He knew just what he was doing. You, your body, your mind, and your circumstances are not an accident. Yes, he’s aware of your deficiencies, and, yes, he’s calling you to grow in grace (2 Pet. 3:18). But God does not expect or intend you to be someone else. Nor does he want you to follow someone else’s path. Jesus
eternal life is more about a Person than a place. What will make the kingdom of heaven so heavenly to us will not be the glorious phenomena of the new creation or the rich rewards we will receive, as inexpressibly wonderful as they will be. The heaven of the age to come will be knowing God himself, from whom all blessings flow.
