📖 You are meant to be a burden

I’ve started a separate email list for my longer writing about the Bible and following Jesus. Bible Made Simple will continue as usual on Tuesdays. If you’d like to read these deeper pieces too, subscribe to Thinking Biblically here.

I. You cannot follow Jesus while simultaneously thinking you can and should pursue all your personal wants and desires.

Jesus famously tells us in Luke 9:23:

“If anyone wants to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it.”

This means that just because you or I may have a want, desire, or bent toward something, that does not automatically make it good or worth pursuing.

There are things about your “authentic self” (an ambiguous term our culture uses to justify any desire someone may have) that should be denied and resisted. Anything that is sinful, wrong, or leads us away from Christ, though we may want it, is to be denied daily.

The good news of the gospel is that anyone can be redeemed by Jesus! But it comes at a cost. And that cost includes turning away from the things that are sinful and pursuing the things that are good.

The invitation of Jesus is open to all, but if you want Jesus, you must deny the things that lead you away from him.

———————-

II. It is worth considering whether what we put our hope in is worth it.

There are many things we may want and desire in this life, and some of them objectively are good things, but we must be careful not to place our ultimate hope in things that cannot ultimately satisfy or save us.

Proverbs 11:7 states:

“When the wicked person dies, his expectation comes to nothing, and hope placed in wealth vanishes.”

Death exposes the emptiness of putting your hope in things that cannot survive death (even good things!).

If your hope is rooted only in what you can get out of this life, death will eventually take away everything you hoped in. What a shame that is!

Yet for those who hope in Jesus, one day every sad thing will become untrue.

This proverb is not saying that it is wicked to have money. It’s teaching us that wealth, and anything confined to this life, is a hopeless place to put your ultimate confidence.

John Stott on why it’s not wrong to be a burden:

”I sometimes hear old people, including Christian people who should know better, say, 'I don’t want to be a burden on anyone else. I’m happy to carry on living so long as I can look after myself, but as soon as I become a burden I would rather die.’

But this is wrong. We are all designed to be a burden to others. You are designed to be a burden to me and I am designed to be a burden to you. And the life of the family, including the life of the local church family, should be one of ‘mutual burdensomeness.’”

It is a profoundly strange (and sad) thing to be a Christian and not be intentionally generous financially toward the work of the Lord.

Not giving consistently to your local church as an act of worship is strange, considering that everything belongs to the Lord, God gave his one and only Son for you, and you are ignoring the repeated teaching of Scripture to support the most important work in the world.

The question is not, “How much should I give?” but, “How much should I keep?” To answer that question with “All of it” will not lead to you becoming a spiritually mature disciple of Jesus.

An ungenerous Christian is an oxymoron, given the example of our Lord and his worthiness to be trusted with our resources.

Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther by Roland Bainton

A biography of the 16th-century church reformer, Martin Luther.

I learned much not just about Luther, but about the many severe problems perpetuated and tolerated by the Roman Catholic Church during this time, and the absolute dire need for reform.

I am grateful for a deeper understanding of the issues at play, and why the Reformation came to be (and how desperately it was needed). Yet, there were a few issues that made this book not the most enjoyable read.

For one, it would have helped if the author had explained some of the mechanisms of the Catholic Church. He wrote about events, but if the reader is not well-versed in the customs of Catholicism and its workings, they'll find themselves confused about what exactly is being explained and the significance of it (this happened to me multiple times).

Also, while the book was about Luther, it often felt less like a biography and more like an overview of his life. Granted, I can't imagine how hard it is to write a sequential biography of someone who lived in the 1500s, but I would have much preferred the typical approach of writing the sequence of events in a person's life rather than a general overview.

Finally, even the end fell flat. Not much time was spent on the last 15-ish years of his life, and not much was written about his final days other than that he died. I did learn a lot, but it was a dry read at times and a bit of a drag in parts.

6/10

How would you define love?

It's common to see people accuse Christians of being "unloving" whenever we don't go along with the modern secular idea of affirming all individual desires, or if we dare to call something a sin.

But doesn't it matter how love is defined? If not, how do we know if someone is actually being unloving? Some thoughts. 👇

Click here to read some biblical thoughts on love.

P.S. You can literally hear this photo…