Happy New…

January, a new month and a new year.  We are only six days into 2009 and already thousands of new lives have been brought into the world, including Natalia, the first baby of a good friend of mine.   This is one of the happier times of the year, as all the bad memories of 2008 are pushed aside and all the hopes and changes (or politically the hope for change) fill the mind with what might be.

But it’s only six days into 2009 and the headlines still prove that we live in a fallen, sin-filled world.  As Natalia grows up she will discover that she has a genetic birth defect, one that affects every single human being – a sin nature.    As we look around at the world we see sin, and the effects of sin everywhere and to dwell on these things for any significant amount of time tends to discourage and depress.

This brings about the question – How then do we as Christians view sin?

And how do “justify” a God who allows sin to have disastrous effects the world over?  Is the Christ that we teach and preach able to sustain the believer through times of severe disaster and tribulation?  Only the God of the Bible – only the Jesus of scripture – can adequately answer these questions.

Now our western Christianity is filled with many people who just “love Jesus”, but the question must be asked – “Which Jesus do you love?”  There are many “Jesus’” being proclaimed that look nothing like the Jesus of the gospels, and these “anti-Christ’s” (as it were) tend to focus on making the believer happy, healthy and wealthy.  The danger of these messages (apart from treading closely to false-gospels) is that they do not adequetely address the presence of sin.

All that is to introduce a new book that was given to me for Christmas.  The book, written by John Piper, is titled “Spectacular Sins and Their Global Purpose in the Glory of Christ”.  The introduction is worth buying the book, and includes these statements which precluded my thoughts for this post:

At the all-important pivot of human history, the worst sin ever committed served to show the greatest glory of Christ and obtain the sin-conquering gift of God’s grace.  God did not just overcome evil at the cross.  He made evil serve the overcoming of evil.  He made evil commit suicide in doing its worst evil.

And:

It seems to me that Christians in the West are being coddled.  We suffer little in the name of Christ.  Therefore, we read the Bible not with a desperate hunger for evidences of god’s triumph in pain, but with a view to improving our private pleasures.

A few paragraphs later:

Christians in the West are weakened by wimpy worldviews.  And wimpy worldviews make wimpy Christians.  God is weightless in our lives.  He is not terrifyingly magnificent.  His sovereignty is secondary (at best) to his sensitivity.

And on the importance of preaching both sovereignty and sensitivity now:

Coddled people will not be good listeners when their world collapses.  They will be numb with confusion and rage at the God who wasn’t supposed to allow this.  “If this is the way God is, why didn’t you tell us?”

I think that the beginning of 2009 is a perfect time to review your worldview, and to run it through the gauntlet of the entire Word of God…the hard passages as well as the ones that must neccesarily comfort and encourage us.