GOD NEVER COMMANDS YOU TO DO SOMETHING THAT HE CANNOT DO! The Humbling Impossibility and the Liberating Possibility of Obedience

 What if I told you that you can become tenderhearted when once you were callous and insensitive. What if I told you that you can stop being dominated by bitterness and anger. What if I told you that it is possible to become a loving person no matter what your background has been.

This statement could be most liberating and encouraging for the hopeless or this could be a really depressing for the self reliant. It may be depressing because you could say that you have tried but it did not work.  God is requiring you to do something that you cannot do .You tried to muster up all the willpower you could find and all the energy you could exert and you have failed. You desire to be these ways but cannot seem to change. The ongoing sin in you stands in the way of your ability to be the way you want to be and do what you want to do.

Fundamentally most of us know that it's because of our sin nature. But others of us believe it's because of our personality, temperament, upbringing, genetics, disposition, environment, and all sorts of determining factors that mitigate our ability to truly live the kind of life that God would have us to live. Our This radically affects our perspective on God and his commandments. Some think that the only virtues God can require of me are the ones that I am good enough to perform. Many people will look at the Commandments of God and because they cannot live up to it will say things like, "nobody's perfect". "God knows I can't do this", "I'm doing the best I can", or deep inside you feel deep guilt and shame at your failure to live the Christian life.

But it can also be most liberating and encouraging as well. This is why, because God never requires us to do something that HE cannot do !!!!!

The Bible assumes that God is the decisive factor in making us what we should be. Only God can make us want what we ought to want and do what we ought to do. With wonderful bluntness the Bible says, “Put away malice and be tenderhearted” (Ephesians 4:31–32). It does not say, “If you can…” Or: “If your parents were tenderhearted to you…” Or: “If you weren’t terribly wronged…” It says, “Be tenderhearted.”

This is wonderfully freeing. It frees us from the terrible fatalism that says change is impossible for me. It frees me from mechanistic views that make my background my destiny.

Imagine if you were in prison and Jesus walked into your cell and said, “Leave this place tonight,” You might be stunned, but if you trusted his goodness and power, you would feel a rush of hope that freedom is possible and you'd walk out the door.

If it is night and the storm is raging and the waves are breaking high over the pier, and the Lord comes to me and says, “Set sail tomorrow morning,” there is a burst of hope in the dark. He is God. He knows what he is doing. His commands are not throw-away words.

His commands always come with freeing, life-changing truth to believe. For example,
And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.

1. God adopted us as his children. We have a new Father and a new family. This breaks the fatalistic forces of our “family-of-origin.” “Do not call anyone on earth your father; for one is your Father, He who is in heaven” (Matthew 23:9)
2. God loves us as his children. We are “loved children.” The command to imitate the love of God does not hang in the air, it comes with power: “Be imitators of God as loved children.” “Love!” is the command and being loved is the power.
3. God has forgiven us in Christ. Be tenderhearted and forgiving just as God in Christ forgave you. What God did is power to change. The command to be tenderhearted has more to do with what God did for you than what your mother did to you. This kind of command means you can change.
4. Christ loved you and gave himself up for you. “Walk in love just as Christ loved you.” The command comes with life-changing truth. “Christ loved you.” At the moment when there is a chance to love and some voice says, “You are not a loving person,” you can say, “Christ’s love for me makes me a new kind of person. His command to love is just as surely possible for me as his promise of love is true for me.”

IIt is not foolishness, it is the gospel, to tell a sinner to do what Christ alone can enable him to do! This is the central mystery of living the Christian life. Christ has died for our sins and risen from the dead. Because of his blood and righteousness we are forgiven and counted righteous by God in Christ (2 Cor. 5:21; Phil. 3:9; Rom. 5:19). Therefore, Christ has become the Yes to all God’s promises (2 Cor. 1:20). Everything promised by the prophets for the new covenant has been purchased for us infallibly by Christ. These new-covenant promises include, “The LORD your God will circumcise your heart . . . so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart” (Deut. 30:6); and, “I will put my law within them . . . on their hearts” (Jer. 31:33); and, “I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezek.11:19); and, “I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezek. 36:27). All of these new-covenant promises have been secured for us by Christ who said at the Last Supper, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). The blood of Christ obtained for us all the promises of the new covenant. But look again at these promises. What distinguishes them from the old covenant is that they are promises for enablement. They are promises that God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We need a new heart to delight in God. We need the Spirit of God whose fruit is joy in God. We need to have the law written on our heart, not just written on stone, so that when it says, “Love the Lord with all your heart,” the Word itself produces the reality within us.
* What Christ bought for us when he died was not the freedom from having to obey but the enabling power to obey.
* What he bought was not the nullification of our wills as though we didn’t have to obey, but the empowering of our wills because we want to obey.
* What he bought was not the canceling of the commandments but the fulfillment of the commandments.

In other words, we need the gift of love in God to want it and to live it. Left to ourselves, we will not want it and we will not produce it. That’s what Christ bought for us when he died and shed the blood of the new covenant. He bought for us the gift of love in God.

That is half the mystery of the Christian life—the most crucial half. The other half is that we are commanded to do what we cannot; andwe must do it or perish. Our inability does not remove our guilt—it deepens it. We are so bad that we cannot love God. We cannot delight in God above all things. We cannot treasure Christ above money. Our entrenched badness does not make it wrong for God to command us to be good. We ought to delight in God above all things. Therefore it is right for God to command us to delight in God above all things. And if we ever do delight in God, it will be because we have obeyed this command. That is the mystery: We must obey the command to rejoice in the Lord, and we cannot, because of our willful and culpable corruption. Therefore obedience, when it happens, is a gift.

The heretic Pelagius in the fourth century rejected this truth and was shocked and angered when he saw the way St. Augustine prayed in his Confessions. Augustine prayed, “Give me the grace [O Lord] to do as you command, and command me to do what you will! . . . O holy God . . . when your commands are obeyed, it is from you that we receive the power to obey them."

That is a biblical prayer. It corresponds to the mysteries of the Christian life. God gives his commands. Yet, only God can change our hearts so that we delight in them and desire to do them and are able to obey them. In short, we are thrown back on God utterly. The Christian life is all of grace.

Be encourage your reader,
God Will Never Command Us To Do Something That He Can't Do, in you and through you.
"From him and through him and to him are all things.To him be glory forever."
(Romans 11:36)

Praying with you (and St. Augustine), “Lord command what you will and grant what you command!”
Pastor Bill

THE LONGINGS OF OUR SOUL

Many days a voice inside my mind cries out, "there just has to be more than this". Do any of you hear that same voice inside? As far back as my childhood I have always felt the sense of inconsolable longing. I would look up into the heavens and its vastness and feel there is something so far beyond wrhat I see and I would long. I would be out in nature and look at the mountains and think that there's something so much bigger than me and I would long. I would look out over the ocean and watch the sun set over the vast horizon and I would long. I would sit inside an Anglican Church and hear the songs, observe the liturgy being participated in, and the taking of communion and I would feel, even though I did not understand what was going on, a sense of longing.

Have you unfulfilled longings that are unsatisfied? Deep inside I think we all feel there is something more, something bigger, better, and grander than what meets the eye.We all long for many things: beauty, happiness, joy, love, good health, harmonious relationships, meaningful lives, safety, security, peace, and prosperity. Sadly, most of us have found that we cannot even find fulfillment in these in a fallen world and when we do, we find both that we can lose them in an instant or we find that they in themselves do not satisfy us.

This is because deep inside we know that there is something more. We join all of creation with this insatiable longing for something more.The apostle Paul says that all of creation is groaning for this "something more",

"For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."
Romans 8;22-25 ESV

We know what we see and experience is neither ultimate nor is it final. We know there is more. CS Lewis, who has helped me to understand the nature of my desires and longings like no one else wrote,
"It was when I was happiest that I longed most… The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing… To find a place where all the beauty came from."

God is so gracious to give us these sweet longings in our soul. I believe that all of our longings point to what is our true, deepest, and ultimate longing, which is for heaven. We long for heaven because it is there that Jesus lives, rules, and reigns. Heaven is a world of perfect, ineffable, infinite, and eternal love. Here on earth we see but black and white, but there there is color. Here we live in shadow, but we know that there it is substance and light. Heaven is our ultimate destination toward which we are all moving.

When we see and experience for ourselves,heaven for what it truly is, we will become aware of how big, grand, and glorious it is in comparison to anything that this world has to offer us. Whatever there was in this old life will be swallowed up by the beauty and grandeur of the real thing. All this will happen because of who is there; we will see God in the face of Jesus Christ.

We only see glimpses of heaven here, as if looking through a portal; but they are only that, glimpses.
For example, miracles and supernatural events and experiences provide such glimpses to be sure. We 
all long for miracles. I have seen several extraordinary ones in my life. The apostle John referred to miracles as "signs" (Ex. John 2:11,23). Signs are pointers that point beyond themselves to something else.  The feeding of the 5000 was a "sign", for the people who ate that day became hungry again. It is Jesus who is the true bread, Jesus who is the true life. The true miracle of every miracle is Jesus. He is more than a sign, He is ultimate reality and the source of all light and all life.

Heaven is our true home and the home we really long for. Jesus is the way to it (John 14:6) and Jesus is the destination. So the longing for home iis really a longing for heaven and our longing for heaven is really a longing for Jesus,

We want more than healing of our illnesses, more than bread that will satisfy our appetites, more than an exotic trip that will satisfy our craving for beauty and peace. We want more than marriage, family, and friendships which satisfy our deep need to love and be loved. Our longings run deeper than
temporary satisfactions.Our deepest desires are not for miracles/signs but for what the miracles/signs point to. We want heaven, we want Jesus. C.S. Lewis understood this and wrote, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world."
Another time he said,
There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. . . . It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. . . . All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered
just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it. C. S. Lewis

May we never make signs and this world substitutes for our deepest longings no matter what good or bad this life and this world bring us. Jonathan Edwards exhorts us to stay focused on the reality of heaven, God, and Jesus:

"The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives. or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but God is the substance. They are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams, but God is the ocean. Therefore it becomes us to spend this life only as a journey toward heaven, as it becomes us to make the seeking of our highest end and proper good, the whole work of our lives; to which we should subordinate all other concerns of life. Why should we labour for, or set our hearts on anything
else, but that which is our proper end, and true happiness?"

Augustine said, “Oh Lord thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts can find no rest except we find it in Thee.” The heart of man is full of restlessness and longing. C.S. Lewis says that "our best havings are our wantings." We are both afflicted and blessed with a chronic restlessness, an insatiable soul-thirst to both "have" and to " want" C.S. describes joy as both in "wanting" and "having".
"The very nature of joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want to want is to have. Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again with joy was itself again such a stabbing." God has given us as a gift this sense of "having" and "wanting" for this reason: that we might keep looking until we find Christ, and that having found him we might be turned back to want Him again and again when we leave His spring to taste of other springs and find them lacking. The more we have a God the more we want him which means, we will always want more of God and we presently experience even in eternity. There will always be more of God to enjoy. Which means there will always be holy longings-forever
"We taste Thee, O Thou living Bread,
And long to feast upon Thee still;
We drink of Thee, the Fountain-head,
And thirst our souls from Thee to fill!"










Bernard of Clairvaix

Longing to know the one in the only one, who is in himself all I have ever longed for in all my desires and longings.
Pastor Bill