Grace Come in the Flesh: Come Again, Lord Jesus

The following is the corporate prayer prayed at New Covenant Church this morning. It is shaped by Tit. 2:11–14.

The Prayers at NCC (11/30/14)

O God our Savior, your word tells us—“the grace of God has appeared.” Your grace has appeared. It has appeared “bringing salvation to all people.”

We marvel at this. We bless you for this. And we pray this would land on us with full force and great effect this Advent season. We ask for Christmas to lay hold on us as it ought. For your grace has appeared, appearing in person, coming in the flesh, bringing salvation.

O God our Savior, your word also tells that this grace that has appeared, that it instructs us, it trains us, trains “us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age.” By your grace incarnate, O God, help us to live holy and heavenly lives.

And as we seek to live well-trained in this grace that has come in your Son, we pray for you to help us to wait for and look for “the blessed hope”—hope outstripping every other hope—“the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

We love your appearing, O Lord of glory, and we long for you to appear again in glory. We wait for you to come again, King Jesus, Desire of the nations, Lover of our soul, our Exceeding Joy. By your grace incarnate, help us to wait for you above every other kind of waiting.

How could we do otherwise, Lord? How could we wait for anything else? Wait for the next vacation? Wait for the new home? Wait for retirement? Wait for promotion? Wait for recognition? How could we do that? How could we wait like that? We would wait for you all our dying days, “our great God and Savior,” our Lord Jesus. Help us to wait with this sanctified waiting.

We want to wait this way, because you gave yourself “for us to redeem us from all lawlessness,” delivering us from defying God, doing it our way, not loving you heart, soul, mind, and strength; you gave yourself for us, Lord Jesus, delivering us from disregarding neighbor, making much of ourselves, not loving neighbor even as we love ourselves. Continue to deliver us, we ask, from all lawlessness, deliver us through your dying incarnate grace.

And, help us to wait, O Lord, for your coming again in glory, because you also gave yourself for us in grace “to purify for yourself a people for [your] own possession, [a people] zealous for good deeds.” And so as your purified people, as your purchased and cherished possession, beautify us for yourself with the adornment of good deeds. Make us zealous, our God and Savior, for good deeds that adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in everything, everywhere, at all times. 

For it is to you we pray, O Lord, and it is for you we wait. Come again, we pray, and turn faith into sight. Turn longing into seeing and savoring. Come again, Lord Jesus. Come.

Amen.

Our Besetting Sin

Doug Wilson:

Evangelicals are nice, there is no getting around it. It is our besetting sin. That means about the worst thing you can tell us is that we are being mean to somebody. Maybe that meanness is turning someone away from Jesus. Our niceness is the steering wheel that we always want to put our critics behind.

—A Hailstorm of Cotton Balls

Unintelligible to Man Magnifying Man

"The kingdom is a conception which must of necessity remain unintelligible and unacceptable to every view of the world and of religion which magnifies man at the expense of God."

—Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church (New York: American Tract Society, 1903), 83–84.

Jesus Teaching about the Kingdom of God

Geerhardus Vos answers why Jesus uses the language "kingdom of God" (when it was not used in the OT) and why we might be prone to misunderstand him:

The main reason for the use of the name by Jesus lies undoubtedly in this, that in the new order of things God is in some such sense the supreme and controlling factor as the ruler in a human kingdom. The conception is a God-centered conception to the very core. In order to appreciate its significance, we must endeavor to do what Jesus did, look at the whole of the world and of life form the point of view of their subserviency to the glory of God. The difficulty for us in achieving this lies not merely in that we are apt to take a lower man-centered view of religion, but equally much in that by our modern idea of the state we are not naturally led to associate such an order of thing with the name of a kingdom.

—Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church (New York: American Tract Society, 1903), 83–84.

The Future of World Evangelism

Hafemann:

S. Douglas Birdsall, the executive director of the Lausanne Movement, has said in public presentations and private conversation that part of his motivation as he works to bring about the third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town, 2010, is that "the worst thing that could happen to the future of world evangelization is to bring in 100 million new 'converts' like the last 100 million, since their superficiality obscures rather than reveals the glory of God."

 —Scott J. Hafemann, "The Kingdom of God as the Mission of God," in For the Fame of God's Name: Essays in Honor of John Piper (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 251, f.n. 19.

Is the Kingdom of God within You?

How shall we render ἐντὸς ὑμῶν in Lk. 17:21? The Holman Christian Standard Bible translates the phrase: “The kingdom of God is among you.” Some translations (though not generally modern ones) have rendered the phrase “within you” (e.g., KJV, NKJV). “The kingdom of God is within you.”

Initially you might not think the question important enough to ask. But the question is important because how one answers this question shapes, to one degree or another, how one understands the nature of the kingdom of God. In the past taking the passage as “the kingdom of God is within you” was sometimes all-determining for how the kingdom of God was understood. It was sometimes thought of as an entirely or dominantly internal reality. 

But is this correct? Is the kingdom of God in Lk. 17:21 an internal reality experienced by those who embrace the Lord Jesus in saving faith? Or is it an external reality in some sense? “The kingdom of God is in your midst” (ESV).

Writing in 1903, Geerhardus Vos says this about rendering Lk. 17:21:

“In your midst” deserves the preference for two reasons: first, because it suits best the purpose of the question of the Pharisees, which was as to the time of the coming of the kingdom, not as to its sphere, and because of the unbelieving Pharisees it could scarcely be said that the kingdom was “within” them. Our Lord means to teach the enquirers that, instead of a future thing to be fixed by apocalyptic speculation, the coming of the kingdom is a present thing, present in the very midst of those who are curious about the day and the hour of its sometime appearance.[1]

I think Vos got it right over a hundred years ago, mainly by doing contextual exegesis. For reasons similar to those adduced by Vos, no doubt, modern translations almost invariably go with a translation such as "in your midst" or "among you." And so, at least in this passage, the kingdom of God is an external reality, not internal. How was this so? Well, the King was among them. The promised Davidic king, the Lord Jesus, King of God's everlasting promised kingdom, had come. And his presence inaugurated the coming of the kingdom of God.

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[1] Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church (New York: American Tract Society, 1903), 52–53.

Why God Allows Corruption in Us

"The end why God suffers any corruption to be such a snare and temptation, such a thorn and brier, is to awaken the souls of men out of their security, and to humble them for their pride and negligence."

—John Owen, The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded (vol. 7 in The Works of John Owen; ed. William H. Gould; Carlisle: Banner of Truth, 1994), 359.