Thanksgiving Thoughts

Happy Thanksgiving!

1 You will say in that day: "I will give thanks to you, O LORD, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, that you might comfort me. 2 "Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid; for the LORD GOD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation." 3 With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.4 And you will say in that day: "Give thanks to the LORD, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the peoples, proclaim that his name is exalted. 5 "Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously; let this be made known in all the earth.  - Isaiah 12:1-5

Here we are reminded that God’s WRATH was upon us and has been turned away from Jesus’ followers by His death on our behalf and this has been confirmed by His resurrection from the dead. He SAVED us by FAITH alone. We are FREED FROM FEAR, have endless JOY, GIVE THANKS continually, and CALL ON HIM because of this. We want to TELL ALL THE WORLD what HE HAS DONE, and it is FOR HIS GLORY ALONE! 

For all of this and so many blessings and gifts of His grace, we give thanks today.

Resurrection Day is Coming . . .

Time to celebrate.

Marveling at the Gospel (Re-Post)

The incomprehensible God united Himself incomprehensibly with humanity, 

to die under the incomprehensible suffering 

generated by His just and incomprehensible wrath, 

paying an incomprehensible price to redeem incomprehensibly sinful sinners

through His incomprehensible grace, 

rising again by His incomprehensible power, 

showing His incomprehensible love, 

displaying His incomprehensible wisdom, 

revealing His incomprehensible glory.

I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.

Ephesians 1:16-21

An Outline of Biblical Christology

The Lord has graciously allowed me the opportunity to teach a class on the Incarnation. What a grand topic!  The outline below was developed to help view the Incarnation in its wider theological context. You may find it useful for your own edification and Gospel meditation, and perhaps also for study and teaching. 

This type of systematic Biblical study highlights the fact that the doctrine of the Incarnation is dependent upon the doctrine of the Trinity; the doctrine of the Cross is dependent upon both the Trinity and the Incarnation; the doctrine of Christ's Final Victory is dependent upon the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Cross. And the doctrines of Salvation, Sanctification, and Glorification are inextricably tied to all of the foregoing. In other words, if Christ was not God and Man, and Suffering and Victorious, we would have no hope. Thank God He IS, and therefore we DO!

AN OUTLINE OF BIBLICAL CHRISTOLOGY

      I.        I. Pre-Incarnate Glory

And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. (Jn 17:5)

a.     Divinity

… the Word was with God, and the Word was God (Jn. 1:1); He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature (Heb. 1:3)

b.    Sonship

… He gave His only Son … (Jn. 3:16)

c.     Work as Creator

For by Him all things were created … all things were created through Him and for Him (Col.1:16)

d.    Revelation as Messiah

Immanuel (Isa. 7:14); A Prophet like Moses (Deut. 18:15-19); The seed of the woman who will crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15)

See also Isa. 9:6; Mic. 5:2; Ps. 45:6-7

    II.        II. Earthly Life (Humiliation)

            He was manifested in the flesh … (I Tim. 3:16); But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman … (Gal. 4:4)

a.     Virgin Birth

Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son … (Isa. 7:14, Mt. 1:23); … for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit (Mt. 1:20); … the angel answered her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God (Lk 1:35)

b.    Humanity

Since … the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things (Heb. 2:14); And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us … (Jn. 1:14); … the man Christ Jesus (I Tim. 2:5)

                                                    i.    Suffering

Despised and rejected … a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (Isa. 53:3); … He learned obedience through what He suffered (Heb. 5:8)

                                                  ii.    Temptation

… One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin (Heb. 4:15)

c.     Holiness & Sinlessness

 We… have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. (Heb. 7:26)

                                                    i.    Innocence from Evil

… who knew no sin (II Cor. 5:21); He had done no violence … there was no deceit in His mouth (Isa. 53:9); … in Him there is no sin (I Jn. 3:5)

                                                  ii.    Practice of Good Works

… how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. (Acts 10:38)

                                                 iii.    Faith & Devotion to the Will of God

In the days of His flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to Him who was able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverence. (Heb.5:7); … continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly (I Pet. 2:23)

d.    Sacrificial Death

He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself (Heb. 9:26); Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God (Eph. 5:2)

                                                    i.    Shedding of Blood

… the church of God, which He obtained with His own blood (Acts 20:28)

                                                  ii.    Bearing of Sin, Guilt & Wrath

He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree (I Pet. 2:24); … the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (Isa.53:6)

                                                 iii.    Vicarious, Substitutionary Atonement Accomplished by His death

… who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness (Titus 2:14); It is finished (Jn. 19:30)

   III.        III. Ultimate Glorification (Exaltation)

Therefore God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name (Php. 2:9); … that in everything He might be preeminent (Col. 1:18)

a.     Resurrection from the Dead

God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it (Acts 2:24)

b.    Ascension into Heaven

He … was carried up into heaven (Lk. 24:51); … He was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight (Acts 1:9)

c.     Enthronement at the Right Hand of the Father

We have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven (Heb. 8:1)

When Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God (Heb. 10:12)

d.    Intercession & Mediation for Believers

… He is the mediator of a new covenant (Heb. 9:15); … there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (I Tim. 2:5); He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them (Heb. 7:25)

e.     Second Coming & Final Victory

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to Himself.  (Php. 3:20-21)

Isaiah 53:4 - Stricken of God

Surely our griefs He Himself bore,
And our sorrows He carried;
Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten of God, and afflicted.

In verse 3, we found the Savior acquainted with grief.

Here we find that it is our grief He bears.

In verse 3, we found the Savior a man of sorrows.

Here we find that it is our sorrows He carries.

In verse 3, we found that we did not take account of the Savior.

Here, we find that our account of Him was misguided.

• "Surely" is the Hebrew word AKEN, אָכֵן, meaning "truly," or, "in reality," or, "but in truth," denoting a strong contrast between this verse and the one before it.
• "He Himself" is the emphatic Hebrew demontrative pronoun, HUW', הוּא, showing that He personally and voluntarily lifted our burdens when we were not even aware.
• "We ourselves" is the emphatic Hebrew personal pronoun, 'ANACHNUW, אֲנַחְנוּ, indicating that our own judgment was far from the reality, and when we finally took notice of Him we drew the wrong conclusions. The cross forces us to take account of Jesus Christ - yet we must not only notice Him, but also discover what His work means.

Why Does He Suffer So?

The common belief in Jesus' day was that a person suffered as a result of his own sin or that of his parents. Suffering was not voluntary, it was not in behalf of others, and it was considered to be a well deserved punishment meted out by God against evildoers. Apparently the book of Job had little effect on the thinking of first century Israel.

While He suffered, the people looked at Jesus and concluded He was being punished by God. This far along they were correct. But they failed to apprehend the reasons: that He suffered voluntarily, bearing only the wrath that we deserved for our sins. Christ's motivation and the motivation of the Father were both misinterpreted because the underlying cause of His suffering was not seen for what it was: a substitution for us, due to His representation of us, resulting in an imputation of sin from us . . . with the attending wrath of God pressing down heavily upon Him.

The sorrow and grief of sin are infinitely heavy. Can you feel them in your soul? Have guilt, condemnation and the wounding of conscience trampled you down into the miry mud bog of despair? Are you drowning in the turmoil of a heart that is deeply aware of its sinfulness? It may seem that way at times, but you and I barely know the measure of the weight of our guiltiness. Only Jesus truly knows it. Our finite emotions can hardly sense the true depth of our trouble. Yes, it's worse than you think. Our sin-warped minds are hard pressed to formulate the real implications of our revolt against Almighty Goodness. We have only a slight perception of these things . . . and even what we have is nearly unbearable to our fragile spirits.


Moreover, our perception of our own sin is stretched out over a lifetime and revealed progressively. Jesus carried it all - yours, mine, the whole world's - concentrated together in one small bit of time and space, a mere 3 hours! Imagine the weight He felt in His soul. No wonder His sweat was like great drops of blood in the hours leading to this event, and He uttered the most grave self-assessment: "I am deeply sorrowful to the point of death."

The regenerated righteous are peculiarly aware of their own unworthiness and misery. They feel most pressed down by their corruptions. However, far from leading to hopelessness, this terrible reality causes more dependence on Christ, more humility, more grace, more fleeing to the Word of God for refuge, more pleadings and prayers for deliverance, more sensitivity to the needs of others, more intercession for those who are not blessed with such vast spiritual resources - and all of this builds a sturdiness of character in which hope solidifies us and leads us to an inexplicable joy, peace, and rest! Just as sin is worse than you think, grace is stronger than you realize.

When it comes to our sorrows and griefs, Jesus is the great Carrier. We can - we must - cast our burdens upon Him. We must always remember that those discomfiting revelations of our depravity are but the residual shadows of a condemnation which has already passed. It has been borne by another in our place.


Psalm 55:22 Cast your burden upon the LORD and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken.

For those who will not cast their burden of sin upon the Lord Christ, the crushing guilt that is felt now is only a shadow of what is to come. But for those who turn to God in faith, trusting Him to bear away their sin, the feeling of condemnation is temporary and ultimately inconsistent with the truth of full redemption in Christ. 


So, in the objective sense, our sin and guilt have already been carried away to judgment. We find nothing but mercy from our self-propitiating Father. But in the subjective sense, we wrestle with sin and guilt and must daily apply the truth of the Gospel against its powerful advances. We also receive God's loving, fatherly discipline, His temporary judgments that are redemptive and spur us on to growth in Christ. While we await the final perfecting of our minds and the redemption of our mortal bodies at the coming of the Lord, we struggle through the process of sanctification. We're on the way to our promised glorification in Christ, but we haven't reached it yet. However, it is so sure and certain that the apostle writes of it as if it is finished: "... whom He justified, He also glorified." (Romans 8:30). He also says we are presently seated with Christ in the heavenlies, though this does not yet appear in our experience. We live between the cross, with its "finished" judgment against our sin, and the ultimate fulfillment of the redemption purchased there. In such a state, we are both wretched justified sinners needing further sanctification, and redeemed saints in the process of being glorified, being made holy, and being changed into His image. This situation itself is only temporary, as we move onward to the culmination in our own experience of God's eternally finished work. It is so finished, and so guaranteed, that we are even now called "holy" and "perfect" and "glorified" in Christ.

He Willingly Bore the Injustice of Bearing our Just Condemnation

"Stricken," "Smitten," and "Afflicted" are each passive participles in the Hebrew, perhaps showing our misapprehension in thinking that Christ was the unwilling recipient of divine justice.

In reality, He was bearing our sins freely and without coercion. He was not merely being acted upon, but was actively and purposefully submitting to the will of the Father. He certainly did not crucify Himself, but He allowed Himself to be crucified. He did not act to stop it, though His agony would have ended with a mere word from His lips or an unuttered prayer for deliverance. And while we stood looking on and misjudged the reasons for His death, He did what we should have been doing: He asked the Father, "My God, My God, WHY . . ." The simple, child-like faith we should have expressed was instead expressed by Him in fulfillment of Job's prophecy: "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him!" The answer to His question is this: He was forsaken because we are desperate, depraved sinners - and God loves us too much to give us the justice we deserve but cannot bear - so He absorbed His own wrath. And the cross shows us that even for God, this is (to use the human expression) "more easily said than done." There was a price to pay for our lawlessness - a price so costly that God's spoken Word alone was not enough to remedy it - though a Word would have been sufficient to seal our deserved condemnation. For mercy to appear, there needed to be a divine act of bearing sin, and an obedience that answered our disobedience, for the sake of His pure justice. Christ acted, Christ obeyed, and Christ guaranteed the purchase.


The justice He received was the just wrath we were due. There was no sin in Him to elicit any divine judgment or wrath against Him. The inherent virtue in Him merited only praise. He was falsely condemned by the same humanity whose crimes He bore, while at the same time He was rightly condemned by the Father because He stood as our representative receiving the penalty for our crimes. His sufferings were vicarious and substitutionary - in our place.

When you face the darkness of your heart, do you remember His sufferings on behalf of that heart? When you fall into sin, do you believe He suffered to redeem you from that very sin? When you are victorious over temptation, do you thank Him for purchasing that victory? Do you recognize that your obedience in faith is impossible apart from His sacrifice? The cross (including the resurrection) is the flaming core of our faith and the center point of our sanctification. As we live before the cross, bear the cross, gaze upon the cross, meditate upon the cross, sing of the cross, embrace the cross, and love the cross, we grow in newness of life by the same power that raised Him from the dead.


Dear friend, let us pray thus: may the cross of Christ - and the Christ of the cross - ever captivate our hearts!

The First and Last Entries

Below is an excerpt from the first entry in Jim Elliot's Journal, followed by the final entry, which was written about one week before his martyrdom by the Auca Indians in South America:

January 17, 1948

What is written in these pages I suppose will someday be read by others than myself. For this reason I cannot hope to be absolutely honest in what is herein recorded, for the hypocrisy of this shamming heart will ever be putting on a front and dares not to have written what is actually found in its abysmal depths. Yet, I pray, Lord, that You will make these notations to be as nearly true to fact as is possible so that I may know my own heart and be able to definitely pray regarding my gross, though often unviewed, inconsistencies. . . .

Help me, Lord, not to "mourn and weep" only for those things, once precious, which You teach me are but dead (whether desires, pleasures, or whatever may be precious to my soul now), but give me a willingness to put them away out of my sight (Gen. 23:4). Burying places are costly, but I would own a Machpelah where corpses (dead things in my life) can be put away.

December 31, 1955

A month of temptation. Satan and the flesh have been on me hard. How God holds my soul in His life and permits one with such wretchedness to continue in His service I cannot tell. Oh, it has been hard . . . I have been very low inside me struggling and casting myself hourly on Christ for help. Marriage is divorce from the privacy a man loves, but there is some privacy nothing can share. It is the knowledge of a sinful heart.

These are the days of the New Year's Believers' conference on the Sermon on the Mount. Yesterday I preached and was helped on "whoever looks upon a woman . . ."!

"Let spirit conquer though flesh conspire."

Out of such humility came fierce preaching and a willingness to die for the cause of Christ.

Below are the three parts of a sermon preached by Elliot in 1951.

The Resurrection - Jim Elliot (Part 1)



The Resurrection - Jim Elliot (Part 2)



The Resurrection - Jim Elliot (Part 3)


Certainly a passionate, Scripture-saturated preacher! Some thought-provoking things here. And some real challenges, too.