Fix Your Gaze

“Great things stir up faith, and keep it above, and faith keeps the soul that nothing else can take place of abode in it. When the ‘great things of God,’ Hos. viii. 12, are brought into the heart by faith, what is there in the whole world that can out-bid them? Assurance of these things, upon spiritual grounds, overrules both sense and reason, or whatever else prevails with carnal hearts” (The Soul’s Conflict with Itself, Richard Sibbes, pp. 217-18). 

Sibbes makes the point a couple hundred years ago that John Piper has made in the last 20 years, namely, that what crushes sin is our superior pleasure in God. I am reminded once again that my desire for the precious things of God, revealed in the Scriptures, is what conquers worldly pleasures. 

As a simple application, that means that when I become overwhelmed with the daily struggles of life so much that the things of God seem distant, unimportant, or unsavory, the first order of business (as with every other day) is to focus my mind and heart (and thus my faith) on truth. Dwindling affections for God mean a distraction from heart-impassioning truth. 

And as a broader application for the church, it means that the lukewarmness we all experience is due in large part to our distracted gaze from divine truth—we’re focused on things that don’t spark godly affection. The first order of business for reviving the church is the same as with the individual: we need to see God in truth so that our hearts, by His Spirit, will be ignited. 

Pigmy Christians are cultivated in a truthless soil of worldliness, and redwood Christians come from the soils of rich, deep, biblical truth, which is the revealed character of God.

Don’t Be a Mercenary

At a time and place when worship of the Living God should have consumed the people of Israel, what actually held more sway was a commitment to make worship profitable. The Passover was a time for the people to delight in the gracious salvation of their God—with heart, mind, and soul—and to remember how He saved them. Instead, it became a rebellious spectacle of how a place of worship could be lost for pragmatism and profitability. 

What happens—then, and now—when God’s people become more consumed with making worship practical, profitable, and efficient, rather than basing worship on the God they love, adore, and find their joy in? They become mercenaries. And mercenaries Christ drives from the church. 

“And he poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father’s house a house of trade” (John 2:15-16).

On the other hand, we’re not mercenaries when what motivates us is our desire to be satisfied in God. A mercenary fights because he gets paid, but a patriot and a true soldier fights because his joy is in the country or cause he fights for. So a Christian’s joy is in worshiping and adoring God, not in turning the church into a profitable business.    

The only way not to be a mercenary Christian is to be motivated by our pleasure in God. The church needs more worshipers—people consumed with the beauty and worth of God—not more entrepreneurial types who have another end motivating them. The church needs godly men, not businessmen.

The Greatest News in the World

For those who consider themselves as nothing, renouncing every form of selfishness and pride, who mourn for their sin, who consider others of more importance, and for those who feel the hunger pains of yearning to be made into the image of the holy God and unlike the character of our indwelling sin (Matt. 5:3-6), this is the best news in the world. It is, as Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes, the heart of the gospel:

“To hunger and thirst really means to be desperate, to be starving, to feel life is ebbing out, to realize my urgent need of help… Let us look briefly at what is promised to those who are like that… ‘They shall be filled’, they shall be given what they desire. The whole gospel is there. That is where the gospel of grace comes in; it is entirely the gift of God. You will never fill yourself with righteousness, you will never find blessedness apart from Him. To obtain this, ‘all the fitness He requireth, is to see your need of Him’, nothing more” (Sermon on the Mount, p. 68).

ML-J goes on about the reality of justification in the life of one such believer:

“If you believe on that cross He was dying for you and for your sin, you have been forgiven; you have no need to ask for forgiveness, you have been forgiven… the righteousness of Christ is imputed to you. God looks at you in the righteousness of Christ and He no longer sees the sin. He sees you as a sinner whom He has forgiven… The Christian, therefore, should always be a man who knows that his sins are forgiven. He should not be seeking it, he should know that he has it, that he is justified in Christ freely by the grace of God, that he stands righteous at this moment in the presence of the Father” (Sermon on the Mount, p. 69). 

This blessed truth—that we are justified in Christ apart from anything we do—is the freedom of the Christian to pursue holiness, knowing that it is freely given to him. He pursues it not as a wage, but as a gift. 

“The Christian is one who at one and the same time is hungering and thirsting, and yet he is filled. And the more he is filled the more he hungers and thirsts. That is the blessedness of this Christian life” (Ibid, p. 70).