Substitutionary Love

Substitutionary Love

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by Tim Keller, and the Scripture is 1 Peter 3:18  For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.

 
Let's just say that you are one of the cool kids, and you are in middle or high school.  Here is a girl that nobody likes, and she's dorky.  She is isolated and alienated, so you try to love and reach out to her.  The next thing that you know the other cool girls are coming to you and saying, "What are you doing with her?"  What is happening is that some of that dorky-ness is rubbing off on you, and you aren't so cool anymore if you hang out with her.  There is no way for you to diminish her isolation and alienation without you entering into it and some of it falling down onto you. 

 

The only way that you love a broken person or messed up person and really love them to change them is that you have to do it substitutionarily. Jesus took our penalty upon himself and got what we deserved, and our sins and guilt and brokenness fell upon Him.  He took it himself so that we could be forgiven.  He loved us substitutionarily.

 

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining 

Friendship Facilitates An Encounter With God

Friendship Facilitates An Encounter With God

Dear Champions,

The short excerpt is by Tim Keller, and the Scripture is 1 John 4:7-8 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

 

If you love people in deep friendship regardless of what they believe, what you believe is going to look pretty credible.  If you love people only if they believe what you believe or only if it looks like they're on the way to believing what you believe, why should they believe what you believe?  How do you treat people who differ from you?   The most transforming thing that facilitates an encounter with God is unconditional love in a powerful friendship.  

 

We gravitate toward environments and relationships where we feel accepted, and we are repelled by environments where we fell rejected.   

 

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

God Shaped Hole

God Shaped Hole

 

Dear Champions,

 

The short excerpt is from Tim Keller, and the scripture is Romans 1:25  They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is for ever praised. 

 

Cynthia Hymal used to write for the Village Voice, and she lived in New York City for many years and got to know a lot of people when they were struggling artists, actors and actresses.  Afterwards some of these people would hit it big and become celebrities, so she knew a lot of people before and after.  Here's what she says about celebrities.  "I pity celebrities, I really do.  Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Barbara Striestand were once perfectly pleasant human beings.  But now their wrath is awful.  I think when God wants to play a really rotten little joke on you, He grants you your deepest wish and giggles merrily when you want to kill yourself.  You see, Sly, Bruce and Barbara wanted fame.  They worked, they pushed, and the morning after each of them became famous, they wanted to take an overdose.  That giant thing that they were striving for, that famed thing that was going to make everything okay and their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and happiness had happened, and they were still them.  The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable."

 

What Cynthia Hymal is saying is right-not about God playing a rotten, dirty trick on you.  Certainly she is right in saying that the worst thing that God can do to you is to give you the desires of your heart (Romans 1:24-32 addresses this).  Very few of us get the ultimate success, but the few who do are absolutely appalled.  There is an awful lot of dysfunction and unhappiness amongst the very elite, and there are all sorts of studies that prove it.  The few of us who do make it to the very top suddenly see something that it is appalling.  There is something so wrong with the human soul, there is a vacuum so big that you can put in 3 million dollars, 10 million dollars, you can become the biggest star and celebrity in the world, and you still aren't going to be happy.  It still won't fulfill you!  It won't be enough!  When you realize that, you begin to say, "What in the world will ever satisfy me?"  The Bible says that the hole is God shaped and only He can fill it.   

 

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining

Nothing Satisfies

Nothing Satisfies

Dear Champions,

 

The short excerpt is from Tim Keller, and the scripture is Matthew 6:33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

 

C.S. Lewis said the following: "Most people if they really learned how to look into their own hearts would know that they do want and they want acutely something that this world can never give them.  There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never keep their promise.  The longings that first arise in us when we first fall in love or first think of some foreign country or first pick up some subject that excites us.  These are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning will ever satisfy.  I'm not speaking about what would ordinarily be called unsuccessful marriages or trips and so on, I'm speaking of the very best possible ones.  There is always something that we have grasped at in that first moment of longing that just fades away into reality.  The spouse may be a good spouse, the scenery has been excellent, it has turned out to be a good job, but it, the thing that we thought was going to be in the center of it, always evades us."

 

When you finally see that nothing in this world will ever satisfy you (and you will eventually see this), there are only four ways to possibly respond.  You're going to have to choose one of them, and it will totally shape the rest of your life.  You'll either blame the things that you have and say that I've got to get better ones (better woman, better man, better job), or you will blame yourself and hate yourself, or you will blame life and harden yourself so that you will never hope for anything at all, or you can blame your theory of reality.  You can say, "If there is nothing in this world that ever satisfies me, then it must mean that I am made for something beyond this world."  One response makes you a fool, one makes you a self-hater, one makes you an utterly hard cynic, and one makes you a Christian.

 

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining