Whole and Holy

I've been spending some time this past week reflecting on Holy Week. What God keeps bringing back to my mind is the Lord's Supper, the wine and bread, His body and blood.

The human race didn't get very far before we crashed and crashed bad. We were intended for glory. Instead we exchanged the glory God had given us for a life of shame and evil. We were meant to live full and complete lives. Instead we willing let ourselves, our hearts, be literally shattered.

We hear a lot of different theories in today's world about why Christ came. Some say He came to be a good teacher or give us a new way to go about our day to day lives. These reasons, and others like them, are true but incomplete. The main reason Christ came, His central mission, was to put us back together again. He came to rescue us from our fall and the eternal consequences that would follow, He came to release us from the sin we turned to in our brokenness and He came to restore us to the glory we were always meant to have. To put it another way, He came so we could be whole and holy.

That's what the Lord's Supper is all about. With His blood He covers our sins. But it doesn't end with forgiveness. His blood might start as a covering but it is meant to go onto complete transformation. The goal of the atonement is not only to set us right with God, though without that we could not go any further, but to make it so that one day, though not one in this world, we can look back on sin as a half forgotten nightmare.

In the second part of the Lord's Supper, Christ's body is broken so that our hearts can be made whole. After the fall, our hearts became evil and wicked (Jer. 17:9). Christ's being broken turns all that around. Our heart of stone is removed and we are given a heart of flesh (Ezk. 36:26). But like with the atonement this is only the beginning. Our basic nature has been changed but the work of Christ isn't done. He wants to put us back together again so that we can be restored to glory. So that we can be whole.

If you spend some time this weekend reflecting on Christ's death and resurrection, remember that it's about more than just forgiveness. Christ wants to restore you to who you were always meant to be. That's why He came, so that we could be whole and holy before Him. No wonder we've spent 2,000 years calling this good news!

The Heart of God

I was revisiting today the parable of the talents that Jesus tells in Matthew 25. As you know if you've read the passage, the basic idea of the story is a master, representing God, gives money to three of his servants. Two of his servants spend it wisely and use it to make more money, earning them praise. The third does nothing earning him his master's anger.

The typical interpretation of this passage is that it is instructing us to use wisely what God has given us. But what struck me today was what the third servant, the unfaithful one, says when questioned by the master. Starting in verse 24:

Then the servant with the one bag of silver came and said, "Master, I knew you were a harsh man, harvesting crops you didn’t plant and gathering crops you didn’t cultivate. I was afraid I would lose your money, so I hid it in the earth. Look, here is your money back."

"I knew you were a harsh man." This line more than anything else shows what went wrong with the third servant. If the master in the story truly represents God then what the third servant says about him is completely untrue. God is not cruel and unkind, but loving and generous. Yes, He certainly is fierce and has every capacity to act harsh when He needs to but those are not the truest things about Him, especially not to those, like the servant, who He calls His own.

The servant in the parable no doubt has reasons for why he believes what he believes but he's missed the larger truth. More importantly, he's missed his master's heart for him. The master wants to make him more than a servant. He wants to give him more responsibility so that he can one day be a partner and a friend, just as does for the two faithful servants. But the servant cannot or will not see this. He's been sold on a lie and has missed the heart of his master.

I believe that more than anything the enemy is trying every day to sell us on the same lie. He may not be trying to convince you that God is harsh and angry. Maybe he's trying to tell you God is indifferent and never becomes angry. Maybe he's convincing you that God's love is entirely conditional. Whatever the lie is, the goal is the same: to get us to miss the heart of God.

God's heart is for us. As David reminds us in the Psalms, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. As Paul says in Ephesians, God had us in mind before the creation of the world. Our sin has caused to fall far from that wonderful creation, from who God had in mind since before time began. God's heart is all about getting us back to who we were always meant to be. Anytime He is harsh or disciplines us, it is towards this goal. Every blessing, every showing of love, is to bring us back to a deeper intimacy with Him. God's heart is about restoring us to be His children, His friends, the Bride of Christ.

Keep that central in your heart and the enemy's lies won't have a chance.