I’m sure this could be said about other attributes of God too, but it occurred to me that every time Satan lies to God’s children, the lie is a direct attack on the faithfulness of God to us.  We are constantly being tempted to fear, steal, get revenge, have a lustful thought, look to ourselves and despair over our sin, or take shortcuts.  Every time Satan throws a fiery dart at us, he is tempting us to believe that God will not really be faithful to us as He said He would be - that He will not protect us, that He will not provide what we need, that He will not avenge wrongdoers, that He will not satisfy us infinitely more than any earthly relationship, that His grace is not good enough to save us in spite of ourselves, or that He that will not give us enough time in our day to do quality work.  And so, David says, you’ll need to cling to the faithfulness of God with every ounce of your strength if you’re going to have any measure of success in extinguishing the flaming darts of the evil one (Ephesians 6.16).

Here a beautiful passage from Scripture about the faithfulness of God.  But first, isn’t it interesting that that verse I just referenced from Ephesians 6 is written specifically about the shield of faith?  It’s talking about faith in God.  Having faith in someone is, by definition, believing that that person will be faithful to keep their promises.  This concept is at the heart of the spiritual battle that we fight.

Romans 4.19-25 says,

[Abraham] did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

If we all trusted God like Abraham did, we would have something to say to Satan when he attacks our souls.  We could tell him that our God is greater than any sinful trinket he waves in our face.  And we could tell him as if we really believed it.

That’s the fight of faith.

I’m transferring from BCS and pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree in Christian counseling, beginning on January 18th.

And for those who want more details, here’s the long story:

It was around the end of November this past semester when I really started pondering a change.  All of this ties back to last summer, when some of you will remember that I was pondering some big changes, as well.  I want to say clearly that I have nothing against Bethlehem College – nothing against the faculty, students, or the program itself.  But as the semester progressed, it became clearer in my mind that the major that I was pursuing (a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical and Theological Studies) was not for me.  And since I had been thinking about counseling for some time, I began to wonder if it would behoove me to start over on my Bachelor’s degree (which I’ve been working on for one semester), and pursue counseling for the rest of my academic career.

I have a lot of commitments and interests here in MN, so I knew that I wanted to stay local to pursue a Bachelor’s degree. I loved what I had heard about the FOCUS (adult degree completion) program at Northwestern, when I spoke with their department last summer.  So naturally, that was one of the first places I looked when I knew I would not be coming back to BCS.  I met with an academic advisor and visited a class, and I knew it was a fit for me.  I loved the small group atmosphere, and the discussion-based, writing-heavy structure.  I applied and was recently accepted.

FOCUS offers two options for Christian counseling: a twenty month Bachelor of Science program, and a sixteen week certification program.  The former is what I’m after eventually, but they don’t have enough people to begin the B.S. cohort until this summer at the earliest.  The cohorts meet once a week, on Wednesday nights, and you come out with a B.S. or certificate or whatever you’re after.  Right now, I’m planning to pursue a certificate in Christian counseling.  What’s the difference?  The certificate program is merely training, such as you might get at CCEF or NANC (although the philosophies between these institutions may differ some).  Churches recognize your certificate as proof that you’ve had training and are qualified to get involved in their counseling ministry.  Most churches don’t offer a paid counseling position, however; and if a person wants to be a paid counselor, they ultimately need to pursue higher education.  A B.S. in Christian counseling, then, primarily serves as the backbone to a masters or Ph.D., or whatever it is one wants to pursue.  After that begins the licensure process with the state in order to be recognized in a clinical setting.

So, my plan is to finish the certificate program at Northwestern by May of this year, jump into the B.S. program when it starts up, and then pursue a masters, followed by licensure in MN, so that I can be a paid counselor in a clinical setting.  I am still passionate about teaching the Bible to youth, and I will probably do that in a volunteer capacity.  All of that is not completely set in stone, but that’s what I’m thinking right now.  I’m not sure when I will graduate with my B.S.; that depends on when the cohort starts up.

What an adventure this past month has been… but I have seen the Lord’s hand in it all, and I can’t wait to see what He has for me down the road!  Hello, Northwestern College!  It’s gonna be a good time.

It means, at the very least, that Jesus loves me a lot.  You might ask, though, so what?  A lot of people love me, and I love a lot of people.  We know about love.

But this is not average love.  It can’t be.  Because while we were still sinners, Christ died for you and I.  We don’t have a category in our minds for that kind of love apart from the gospel of Jesus, because you and I don’t know anyone who would suffer what Jesus did for people who hate them as much as we have all hated Jesus in our sin.

Think about your life.  You’re running the race of faith in Christ, and you’re failing a lot.  Me too.  When you sin, do you doubt the love of God for you?  Sometimes I do.  It’s not so much that I think He hates me, but sometimes I feel like He must just be saving me from my own stupidity again because to do otherwise would contradict His nature.  I imagine that the faithfulness of God to me is simply how it must be.  I reason that God couldn’t have genuine affection for me… could He?

Think about God.  Think about who He really is for you.  If you’re in Christ, He is your Father.  So imagine yourself in the family of God.  He’s the head, and there you are with all of your rebellion and failure and immaturity.  He sees it all, just like your earthly family knows you inside and out.  But He’s your dad!  How does your dad react when you sin?  Yes, he is grieved.  But he doesn’t throw you out of the house.  He doesn’t treat you like a slave.  He doesn’t give you ultimatums like “if you want to be accepted here, you’ll never do that again.”  He doesn’t love you less until you behave better.

Those are the characteristics of a father.  Why do you think the picture of God as our father is used so frequently in the Bible?  It’s because that’s how God deals with people who have trusted Him.  Oftentimes, I don’t treasure the gospel because I forget what the gospel is all about.  The gospel is about the God of the universe loving us like a father loves his kids.  We are His kids, after all (1 John 3.1).

And that verse that I quoted from Psalm 23 is one of the most beautiful pictures of how God deals with His kids in their sin.  He follows them with goodness and mercy.  It’s like when we are running from Him in our rebellion, He is running after us with grace.  Like a father running after his two-year old to get him out of the street and save him from danger, God our father wants to guard us from the deceitfulness and harmfulness of our sin.  He’s on our side.  When you and I turn away from Him toward danger, He is grieved, but He doesn’t throw us out of His family.  He doesn’t treat us like slaves.  He doesn’t give us ultimatums like “if you want to be accepted here, you’ll never do that again.”  He doesn’t love us less until we behave better.

God, our father, is committed to preserving our safety, hope, and joy.  He has to punish us when we sin, but that’s what dads do.  It’s further proof of His love to us.  And He will keep us from destroying ourselves in our folly.  Our future in heaven with Him is secure.

Take hope today, friends!

You would probably say that Dan is not a very nice man.  You would probably be ashamed to call him your business partner.  And you would probably be ashamed to call him your brother.  A man who dishonors your reputation, hinders your forward progress in the business world, and blatantly neglects his responsibilities does not deserve your respect or your love.

And who am I to call myself better than Dan?  Jesus has put me on this earth for a purpose (Isaiah 43.6-7) which I have neglected to fulfill, out of my own rebellion (Jeremiah 2.13, Hosea 3.1).  I am constantly showing the world that I believe far lesser things are more valuable than He is.  In my idolatry, I call Him a liar for claiming to be the greatest treasure that I could pursue.  He follows me with goodness and mercy (Psalm 23.6), and I pretend He doesn’t exist.  I’m an awful salesperson of the gospel, as it were, and more often than not, the world would never run to Jesus because of my witness to Him.

And guess what?  Hebrews 2.11 says, in spite of all of this, that Jesus is not ashamed to call me “brother.”  WOW!  We’re talking about God in the flesh… and ME!?  If I were Jesus, I would not only be ashamed to say that I know Joe Eaton, but much more to say that I am his brother!  I think it’s worth looking at Hebrews 2 to see what led up to this.  For time’s sake, I will only discuss the verses immediately before and immediately after the phrase in question, but I will all but command you to read the entire chapter for yourself.  You will be blessed.  And you might want to open your Bible to Hebrews 2, because I’m not going to reproduce the whole thing here.

Chapter two verse ten says that “it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”  Three observations.  1) Everything we have is from, through, and to God the Father (Romans 11.36).  Why should a God with such incredible power concern Himself with us at all?  2) God not only concerns Himself with us, but He adopts us as His sons, at great cost to Himself.  3) Jesus Christ founded our salvation through suffering at the cross.  That was God’s plan.  If He had not died, we would not live.

So we proceed to verse eleven.  It begins, “For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source.”  This follows because everything is from God, and because God brings many sons to glory.  So Jesus-lovers are not only created by God, but they are also created for God – for adoption as sons (Romans 8.15) and for sanctification (to be conformed to His image) (Romans 8.29-30).  That implies that we share a commonality with Jesus; namely, if Jesus is the Son of God, and God has adopted us as sons, then we have the same Father that Jesus does.

And that is why Jesus is not ashamed to call us brothers, continues verse 11.  Consider our union with Him: so perfect, so complete, so all-encompassing, that the man by whom everything holds together (Hebrews 1.3) finds no shame in declaring that He is related to us because we share the same Father.  We have devalued Him, tainted His reputation, and shouted to His face that we love other things more than we love Him, and yet, He is unashamed in declaring that we are brothers.  And immediately after writing this incredible phrase, the writer of Hebrews goes on to prove his point by referencing the Old Testament.

He first quotes Psalm 22.22, where David declares how he will gladly praise the Lord with His people who “fear Him” and “stand in awe of Him.”  (Check out the context of this verse).  In Hebrews, the writer quotes this verse to show how Jesus makes Himself personal to us, His people, by identifying with us and affirming the greatness of our Father along with us.  He continues by referencing Psalm 18.2, Isaiah 8.17, and Isaiah 12.2 in which the writers declare varied expression of dependence upon God in trying times, and their confidence that He will in fact deliver them from their suffering.  The writer of Hebrews is making the point that in the gospel, Jesus becomes like us through living in dependence and trust of the same Father that we have.  Finally, the writer of Hebrews references Isaiah 8.18.  The point of that passage is that God has made each of us testifiers to His greatness and worth, not just among the congregation of the righteous (which we have already seen), but also in the midst of an unbelieving generation.  This passage was cited to make the point that Jesus was a witness to an unbelieving world of the awesome love of our Father, just as we have been commissioned as witnesses to the gospel today.

Believer, the point of this section of Scripture is to blow us away with the sheer love of Jesus Christ to us.  When we sin, He is not shaking His head in disbelief and rage, and He is not shrinking back in shame from us.  He is completely on our side (Romans 8.31-32), and He is our constant advocate before YHWH (1 John 1.1).  Further, the point of this section of Scripture is to kill the fear in our lives that we are not good enough for God.  Although we are absolutely ridiculous and fall so short in ourselves, Jesus has perfected us and has left us with no reason to fear anymore.

The writer of Hebrews said it best, naturally.  Chapter four verses fourteen to sixteen say this: “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

Have you ever wondered where God is or why He’s doing what He’s doing?  David did.

Have you ever wondered if life is even worth living?  Paul did.

Have you ever tried so hard to stay awake in fervent prayer to God, but you still succumbed to exhaustion?  Peter, James, and John did.

Have you ever thought that you knew better than God what is the best course of action for your life?  Moses did.

Have you ever felt anger towards God?  Jonah did.

And so have I.

…And consider the faithfulness of YHWH to these men who were faithless so often.  My hope, and yours, is rooted in who He is, not who we are.

I pray that the Lord would give me a greater zeal to rest in His faithfulness and seek His beauty in the face of my humanness than even the zeal to fight the sin in my life.  The one will follow the other, anyway (John 14.15-17).  My only hope is that He saves needy sinners.  Rejoice with me, believer!

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In verses 35 and 40 respectively, Jesus clearly detailed what’s at stake in the universal quest for satisfaction, when He said, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst” and “this is the will of My Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”  Here’s an analogy we can relate to; it’s about food.  But what does being hungry and thirsty have to do with being saved?  What does satisfaction have to do with being saved?  To answer those questions, let’s back up now to gather some context to the situation into which Jesus is speaking.

In the opening verses of John chapter 6, Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish.  Next, He walked on the sea of Galilee to meet the disciples in their boat in the middle of the night.  That’s some crazy, supernatural awesomeness, and time and space fail me to say much more about it.  Suffice it to say, however, that Jesus had caught a lot of people’s attention with these miracles.

So, we pick up the story in verse 21.  Jesus had gotten into the boat with the disciples on the sea of Galilee, and then they all traveled together to the other side.  The crowd sorta flipped out when they realized that this miracle-worker had gone away, so they ended up sailing to the other side of the sea as well, in search of Jesus.

“When they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, ”Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them, ”Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on Him God the Father has set His seal.”

In other words, Jesus was saying, the crowds didn’t really love or want Him.  They were only looking for Him so that they could He could do more stuff for them.  Notice that Jesus said explicitly that they weren’t seeking “signs.”  What does a sign do?  A sign is a pointer, right?  A sign is not the main point of any story.  We know that.  The object of a sign is the point of the story.  No one who sought Jesus that day on the shore of the sea saw Jesus’ miracle as a sign pointing to a greater reality.  They only wanted Jesus to fill their stomachs.  Really, it only takes a brief reading of verses 28-34 to see that the crowds actually thought Jesus’ main purpose in His ministry was to satisfy their hunger pangs.  So Jesus was like, “OK, you guys want to talk about food?  Let’s talk about food.”  Enter verse 35 and following.

Jesus said to them, ”I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in Me shall never thirst. But I said to you that you have seen Me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and whoever comes to Me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of Him who sent Me. And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that I should lose nothing of all that He has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

In other words, Jesus did come to feed these people.  But He didn’t come merely give to them baskets upon baskets of bread and fish.  That was just a pointer to a greater reality; namely, that He Himself would satisfy these people, if only they would stop obsessing over their hunger pangs and start pouring their lives into a relationship with Him that would perfectly fulfill every need of their parched and famished souls.  The man who would “look on the Son” for joy like that, Jesus said, would live eternally in fullness of joy (Psalm 16.11).

Jesus goes on to make even more explicit this idea that He came to be more deeply satisfying to humanity than any earthly food.  Here’s what He said in verses 55-56 (but please check out the wider context in verses 53-58): “For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.”

The point of the story is clear.  Jesus came to fill the void in every heart.  He came to be more precious to us than money, friends, popularity, relationships, reputation, or anything else.  Everyone who eats of those earthly “foods” will be hungry again.  Money gets spent, friends betray us, somebody becomes more popular than we are, romantic relationships lose their thrill, we sin terribly and destroy our name.  But everyone who seeks joy in Jesus Christ alone will have the deepest longings of their soul satisfied in the deepest sense of the word; namely, to see the glory of God (2 Corinthians 4:6-7).

How often do I come to the Word of God just to seek a remedy for my earthly cravings?  I’m scared, and I want to be at peace.  I’m selfish, so I want everyone to see me as super-spiritual in my reading of the Word.  I’m depressed, so I want to feel warm-fuzzies and forget all about the pain in my heart.  All of this is earthly bread.  It’ll fade away.  And when it does, I’ll just find myself hungry again.  How often do I read the words of Jesus without seeing that they’re a pointer to help us know Him more deeply (John 5.39)?

Believer, if you find yourself in the same boat as me and the crowd tonight, take heart.  Turn from your idolatry and run to Jesus.  There you will never hunger or thirst again.

“This is eternal life, that they know You the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” ~ Jesus Christ, John 17.3

Treasuring, despising.
Fearing, depending.
Resting, wanting.

The fight is to realize there is something beyond sinfulness.
The fight is to know that we are not who we were before.
The fight is to see that in Him, we’ve been made new.

To know that we are more than fear, hate, want.
To know ourselves the way He does instead.
To know His sufficiency in our failures.

The fight is to stop working and start resting.
The fight is to believe in His kindness to us.
The fight is to see that He is our definition.

Trusting, doubting.
Crying, rejoicing.
Aiming, failing.

This is what faith is:
To boast in Jesus,
Not ourselves.

This is what hope is:
Although we’ll fail,
He is ever faithful.

I wrote a guest post over on the Fighter Verse Blog.  Rather than reproducing it here, I’ll send you over there if you’d like to read the original post so you can check out the awesome content on that site!  Have a blessed Saturday!