Julie Lowe discusses the dynamics involved in trusting the Lord in a season of waiting (2 minute 23 seconds video).
Julie Lowe – Waiting On the Lord from CCEF on Vimeo.
HT: Dane Ortlund
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Monthly Archives: October 2012
Resentment
The Psychology of Resentment by seemingly unstoppable pull toward resentment. All you need to do is live a little in this fallen world. Before long you’re given a good solid reason to resent someone. Often someone quite close to you. Family member, spouse, parent, long-time friend, etc. It feels impossible to love that person.
What causes such bitterness? Why are our hearts so immovably deadened toward that person?
Well, they wronged you, so you resent them. They hurt you. They did what they should never have done. Or didn’t do what they should have done. And you bear the wounds.
Yes—but what’s the reason beneath the reason?
The fundamental reason is your God-given sense of justice—itself a good thing. You have been wronged, and you, created in God’s image and therefore with a rightly functioning sense of justice, of fairness, cry out that justice be done. The playing field must be leveled. Fairness demands it.
The trouble is that as a law-abiding citizen you know you can’t do something physically to them, as you may wish to (let’s just be honest here shall we?). And as a Christian you know you can’t verbally or publicly do something to them (perhaps simply because you would rather keep your reputation and leave them alone than exact revenge and lose your reputation; the greater idol outweighs the lesser).
So what happens? Where does a gospel-vacuous heart go in such a case? Here is what happens: instead of doing something externally to harm them you do something internally to harm them. You harbor bitterness. This is the psychology of resentment. You exercise emotional punishment toward them internally when actual punishment can’t be exercised externally. You set up a law-court in your heart since an actual law-court is unfeasible.
But here’s what happens. The bitterness you harbor, the emotional punishment you exact in your heart, has precisely the opposite effect, over time, than you think. Bitterness does nothing to the offender, while it quietly destroys the offended. Resentment kills, hollows out, the resenter, not the resented.
How then do we conquer bitterness?
By soaking in two realities.
One, God is the judge. He has a law court. A real law-court. And one day every person on the face of the earth who is not in Christ will be the defendant. The Bible even says that Christians one day will themselves assist God in judging the world, even judging the angels (1 Cor 6:2–3). Eventual fairness, justice, righting of wrongs, is gloriously inevitable. Your day of judging your offender is coming. But it is not today. You will take up the gavel. Just not today. If you seek to exact premature judgment, you destroy yourself.
Two, and most crucially, you yourself have offended God. And continue to offend him, in a hundred ways you are conscious of and a thousand you are not, every day. But he didn’t harbor bitterness against you. He didn’t resent you. He sent his Son for you. God decided to lay down every reason to resent you. Having been forgiven this, how in the world could we resent another?
Here’s C. S. Lewis, ‘On Forgiveness’–
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single person great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life–to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son–how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say our prayers each night ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.’ We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves.
Miscellaneous Quotes (53)
“Since Eden, there hasn’t been a single election that is NOT a choice of the lesser of two (or more) evils.” – Dan Phillips
“It is our firm belief, that what is commonly called Calvinism, is neither more nor less than the good old gospel of the Puritans, the Martyrs, the Apostles, and of our Lord Jesus Christ.” – C. H. Spurgeon
“What would have become of me, if the Lord had not stuffed that pillow with thorns on which I was disposed to rest?” – John Newton
‘Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ (Matt. 11:28)…. “You who please yourselves with being good enough now, who are not weary and heavy laden with a sense of your sins here, will be weary and heavy laden with a sense of your punishment hereafter.” – George Whitefield, ‘Christ the Only Rest for the Weary and Heavy Laden,’ in The Sermons of George Whitefield (ed. Lee Gatiss; 2 vols; Crossway, 2012), 1:360
“The Bible teaches that man’s will is enslaved to sin, incapable of submitting to God’s law, and dependent upon God’s regenerating grace.” – Dr. James White
In 1521 Martin Luther wrote a letter to his scrupulous friend, Philip Melanchthon. At one point Luther wrote: God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong; but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin… the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day. Do you think such an exalted Lamb paid merely a small price with a meager sacrifice for our sins?
“The resurrection did not turn a tragic defeat into a happy ending. No, the resurrection demonstrated the cross was a victory.” – Terry Virgo
“Justice is what we deserve. Grace is always and ever undeserved. If we deserved it, it would not be grace.” – R. C. Sproul
“Doctrine is but the drawing of the bow, application is the hitting of the mark.” – Thomas Manton
“If Christ could make a complaint, it would be, ‘My bride never talks to me.'” – R.C. Sproul
“The fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being (homo), and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.” – John Calvin, commenting on Exodus 21:22-25
“I’ve never read in the Old Testament where God shows up and the people are bored, or that anybody walks away saying, ‘this was irrelevant.'” – R.C. Sproul
“By entertaining of strange persons, men sometimes entertain angels unawares: but by entertaining of strange doctrines, many have entertained devils unaware.” – John Flavel
“Do not merely speak the truth, but live truthfully, openly and honestly with one another.” – Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson
“If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.” – Oswald Chambers
“Any gospel which says only what you must do and never announces what Christ has done is no gospel at all.” – Kevin DeYoung
“As soon as you think God owes us mercy, you’re not thinking about mercy any more.” – R.C. Sproul
?”There is no more monstrous idea than the idea that you can fall away from grace, that you can ever be born again and then be damned. The character of God is involved! It is impossible. His object is not merely to save me, it is to vindicate His own being and nature, and I am being used to that end. The end is absolutely certain because God’s character is involved in it.” – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin
“Christ is much more powerful to save, than Adam was to destroy.” – John Calvin
“There is no refuge from God, but there is refuge in God.” – Alistair Begg
“Christianity is greatest when it is hated by the world.” – Ignatius of Antioch
“Next to the wonder of seeing my Savior will be, I think, the wonder that I made so little use of the power of prayer.” – D.L. Moody
“People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking.” – Charles Malik, “The Other Side of Evangelism,” Christianity Today, 7 November 1980, page 40.
“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Henry Martyn (1781-1812), Anglican missionary, was told by a Muslim friend about a painting of Christ bowing down to Muhammad, begging for mercy. Martyn tells what happened next:
“I was cut to the soul at this blasphemy. Mirza Seid Ali perceived that I was considerably disordered and asked what it was that was so offensive? I told him that ‘I could not endure existence if Jesus was not glorified; it would be hell to me if he were to be always thus dishonored.’ He was astonished and again asked ‘Why?’ ‘If anyone pluck out your eyes,’ I replied, ‘there is no saying why you feel pain; it is feeling. It is because I am one with Christ that I am thus dreadfully wounded.’” – Constance E. Padwick, Henry Martyn (London, 1925), page 265
Martyn did not lash out at his Muslim friend. He did not complain. He did not even judge the man. Martyn only felt within himself a personal wound that struck at his own heart, his deepest love. Union with Christ, to Martyn, was more than a doctrinal abstraction. It was his lifeblood, his very identity. He winced with pain, not disgust. He turned away with sorrow, not a burning sense of wrong. It was his Muslim friend that pressed the matter further, seeing that Martyn was “considerably disordered.” Then Martyn spoke, not to correct his friend but only to explain himself.
The gospel goes out in greatest power and purity through love for Christ.