Notes from Day #2
What a blessing the conference was to be reminded of and taught about God's true love for me, love that doesn't exist to make much of me. Any expression of God's love toward me that made me satisfied in secondary gifts and pleasures while witholding the greatest Good would be cruel. And so God in His love died for me so that I could be with Him forever and enjoy Him, see Him, know Him, and savor Him and all of His excellencies here and now. I pray that the lessons learned toay will spill out in trials and spill out in blessing.
After a week with little sleep and an on-going battle with an ear infection, I spent much of the day today asleep. I needed it, but it did not afford me the opportunity to comment more on the conference. And to tell you the truth, I'm not quite sure how to do it. Basically in 3 sessions, Piper summarized (in 22 very rushed bullet points) the essence of what God has taught Him during His life. For many bullet points, I thought, "you wrote a whole book about that."
For each bullet point, my mind was overwhelmed with information. For each bullet point my heart was overwhelmed with sorrow over my own wickedness or awe for God and His glorious love and mercy. Over the next days and weeks I will post summaries of points as well as what meditating on those points has done in my heart. In the meantime, here are the notes from day #2. I will copy my handwritten notes from day #1 and post them soon.
The highest best, final, decisive good that comes to us in the "good news" and which all the other elements of the good news are intended to lead to and in which all the other elements of the good news would not be good news is the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus without which all of the other gifts of the "good news" would not be good news. The other gifts are just the means to the greatest good.
11 (cont): God is Most Glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him
Where does that come from? It's an inference from many texts, but here's a single text you can put under that couplet. Phil 1:20
20 as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.
Paul's passion is that his life and death would make Jesus look good. How do you die in a way that makes Jesus look magnificent? Answer in 21
21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
Let's look only at the death pair. "It is my desire that Christ will be honored in my body...by death...to die is gain." How can I say that? At that moment everything on earth is lost, all you have worked for. How can that be?
23 I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.
The reason it is gain to die is that I get Jesus clearly. Though I lose everything I thought was pleasurable. No more sex, no more eating, no more body. Just amazing closeness and clarity with the most amazing being in the universe. And he calls it gain. If I put all of the possibilities and hopes on earth and weigh them against satisfaction with Jesus, I call it gain if I lose all on earth and get Jesus.
12. Drawing out how we talk about the greatness of the love of God and the salvation of God.
Let those who love your salvation say evermore, "God is Great!" not "great is your salvation" Ps 70.4
That either means that a saving God saves us so that we can see his greatness or that he is saving us from our inability to see him as great. Either way God is the Gospel.
3 Because your steadfast love is better than life,
my lips will praise you.
You might think it would say "because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise your steadfast love." But instead it says, I will praise you. Either, "In your steadfast love I see the kind of person whom I love." or "Your steadfast love is the means by which he liberates me from not being able to see how worthy he is in his love."
13. A textual foundation for definition of being loved.
I argue that in all that He does God exalts Himself for our enjoyment. Some people feel like God is a megalomaniac. That doesn't seem like love.
What the culture means by being loved at the surface level is opposite of what the Bible means:
World: (Unbelievers, those without God at the center, dead spiritually) To be loved is to be made much of. I feel loved if you thank me, build me up, make much of me, help me with my self-esteem.
Biblical love: Biblical love from God to us keeps God at the center, not us. God loves us by doing everything He has to do, at great cost to Himself, to remove every obstacle from inside of us and inside of Him to bring us to the place where we enjoy Him which makes much of Him.
God's way to love us is to strip us of every substitute, vain satisfaction so that we can be satisfied to the soul only with God. God would be so cruel to love us the way that the world makes us want to be loved. He would be keeping us from seeing God in His greatness, His beauty, and HIs everlasting perfections. God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the only way to love. If I exalted myself, it would not be love. But Jesus would have no other way to love than that.
Lazarus, Mary, Martha were loved and God did this for the Glory of God (John 11:1-5).
5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
How do you make sense of the therefore in verse 6? I'm going to stay two days longer so I make sure that he's dead when we get there. The answer is in verse 4.
4 But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
Paraphrase: To love is to do whatever you have to do, even if it costs your brothers life, to reveal the glory of God. To spare a brother temporarily is not what love is about. To love you is to make you see my glory.
Being loved is not mainly being healed, pain taken away, marriage being fixed. It is doing whatever he has to do (Lazarus' death or His death) so that I can see, savor, and be satisfied by the glory of God. Any other act besides that may feel like love to billions of unregenerate people. But it isn't. Love gets you to God.
14. 250 years back: Jonathan Edwards
"Most of my influential mentors are dead." (Religious affections, end for which God created the earth, freedom of the will particularly).
Spark of Great Awakening. Saw many great movements of grace and many abuses of that. So he spent a lot time sorting out what was from God and what was not. He didn't throw out the baby of the "enthusiasm" with the bath water.
Religious Affections was an absolutely devastating
God is the Gospel p. 137 "It's amazing that this same idolatry....[through Edwards quote] Joy in themselves and not in God." - That I fear is in many churches today.
p. 150 "Jonathan Edwards learned this to his own heartache...[Edwards quote: Difference between joy of hypocrite and joy of true saint. Hypocrite rejoices in self. Self is founation of joy. True saint rejoices in God....God seems in a sort to be lovely to them"
Some churches try to make God and the cross means to affirm what they already believe that we are satisfied in ourselves and things that please us. Kill that in our own hearts. Point people to
15. Clearly there are texts in the Bible that say that God makes much of us. But you keep saying that God saves us to make much of Him. How do these go together?
Zephaniah 3:17 17 The Lord your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.
Psalm 147.11: 11 but the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.
1 Peter 1:6-7: 6 In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, 7 so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
1 Cor 4:5 Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.
Romans 2:29: 29 But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God.
Here we have a sampling of verses where God makes much of us. What does that mean?
1st (wrong): God takes pleasure in our physical body, in the intricacy of the eyeball, the circulatory system, and says "Magnificent." But it can't mean that cause the verses talk about us doing certain things. (Except in the sense that they tell of the glory of God).
2nd (right): Talking about person with personalities. So when God looks at me He sees a person thinking, doing, saying things. So the question comes up, "Does He love me?"
Two kinds of love:
1. Agape, unconditional pursuing your good kind of love. Answer: yes. he elected you unconditionally. He regenerated you unconditionally. He crucified Christ for you unconditionally. He will overcome every backsliding you do and keep you for himself unconditionally. But that's not what most people mean when they ask, "Does He love me?"
2. Does He like me? "I understand #1, but does he like me?" Yes, God does that. That's what these texts are talking about. Sometimes he likes us more, sometimes he likes us less. That's why Paul can say that he does that he does to please God. So what pleases God? The answer has to come down to, "God is delighted when I delight in Him" which is the root of all good things that I do that the Bible talks about being pleasing to God. But is there anything else about us that he likes? A: Everything you do with your mind in thinking, heart in feeling, hands in making God may delight in, providing that its expressing and flowing from a satisfaction in Him. God can look at a perfect grout line if its coming from a heart that is expressing a heart that's satisfied in Him. He loves me in that he does everything he does to remove obstacles to my enjoyment in Him. We commends me, says "well done" to me, if my heart has broken free from being the bottom of my own joy to myself and delight in God and hten out of that fountain do all the things that I can do.
16. His fear: That my joy may be not in God, but I enjoy God having joy in me as greatest good.
Don't turn God's liking us into an idol. The reason I need to like being liked Biblically is because my be liked affirms my liking and being satisfied in God.
What we've just said in defining love as God's doing whatever he has to do to maximize our satisfaction in Him answer the object raised by Michael Prous: "Worship is an aspect of religion that I always found difficult to understand..." His only way to understand God seeking worship is that God has character defects and needs our worship to fix his low self-esteem. This reveals a mis-definition of love that won't work with God. We can't be maximally happy if we are at the bottom of our happiness, only if God is at the bottom of our happiness. We can't relate to God the way that we relate to everybody else.
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17. The Central Issue of the Gospel
"God is the Gospel" needs to be said to preserve the meaning of what the Bible does say about the Gospel.
Five Ways to Describe the Gospel
18. Christ suffered once for sinners that He might bring us to God. (1 Peter 3:18)
19. 2 Cor 4:4-6
To be lost is to be blinded to, "The light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God." Lostness=blindness to glory. To be saved=to experience v. 6
6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Solution to v. 4 (blindness), God says, "let there be light."
1 Cor 1:18 Folly or Power. What's the difference: God shining the light.
2 Cor 4:5. The Holy Spirit does not do v. 6 without v. 5. You can't make it happen without proclaiming the good news.
20. Connecting with Unbelievers: Clues that unbelievers have something written on their heart witnessing this.
This God-centered Gospel is not so otherworldly so as to make an unbeliever not want it.
Why do unbelievers go to the Grand Canyon, go to the Rockies, or the Alps. Why do we go to feel small and vulnerable? Why do we buy glossy picture books to remind us of our insignificance when we get home? It is a witness that they were made not for the salvation of self-esteem but for something magnificent outside themselves. They know this. The deepest highest pleasures have not come when they have stood in front of a mirror and liked what they saw. But at the edge of the grand canyon when the soul is drawn out and for a fleeting god-given moment they are non self-conscious and only feel wonder. They have tasted a parallel of what they were created for: God.
Help them feel how small that is to desire a heaven that's a hall of mirrors where we like what we see. No mirrors in heaven.
Why do you go to football games where you watch people play better than you, symphonies with better musicians, movies where they act better than you. Yet we go to all of these things documenting our inferiority. Yet we don't walk away feeling inferiority. Nope, we are made to admire greatness. We're not made to feel great about ourselves mainly. We're made to feel great about God mainly.
21. How do I become more like this? (30 minutes of stuff not going to give).
22. If you delight in God, you will become more like him.
23. Edwards: God glorified in the Work of Redemption by the Greatness of Mans Dependence on It in the Whole of it (1731): "The redeemed have all their objective good in God. God himself is the great good which they are brought into possession and enjoyment of by redemption. he is the highest and sum of all that good which Christ Purchase. God is inheritance of saints, portion of their soles, their treasure, their ornament, everlasting treasure. They have none other in heaven but Him...The Lord God, He is the light of the heavenly Jerusalem....The glorious excellencies and the beauty of God will be what will forever entertain the minds of the saints...The redeemed will enjoy indeed other things (angels, one another), but that which they shall enjoy in the angels or in each other or anything else whatsoever that will yield them life or happiness will be what will be seen of God in them."
