"If God's grace is absolutely free and we cannot earn it or merit it in any way, what motivation is there to live an obedient life?"There were quite a few answers: because we want to please Him, because we want Him to be proud of us, etc., but none of them really satisfied me. The pastor's wife briefly touched on something that I wish we would have had more time to explore - that it reminded her of John Piper's book Desiring God.
What motivates me to want to obey when I don't particularly feel like obeying, or when I don't particularly care if I please God or make Him proud? (And just forget about saying you've never felt that way.)
It is what the pastor's wife said: that I desire God more than that thing which I would disobey God to do. It is because of Colossians 1:19:
“For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell.”
Even if at the moment my fleshly appetites are stronger than my desire for God, by the grace of God I still know and am absolutely confident that what I am truly desiring is God in His fullness. I know by faith and experience that Jesus holds infinitely more. As Spurgeon explained so perfectly insofar as flimsy words will allow:
All the rivers flow into this sea, for from this sea they came. As the atmosphere surrounds all the earth, and all things live in that sea of air, so all good things are contained in the blessed Person of our dear Redeemer....There is no necessity in our spirit but what is abundantly provided for in all fullness of Jesus Christ.
This is what marked a turning point in my walk with Jesus a couple of years ago. It was what kindled my hope and ignited my desire and my passion to seek the beautiful face of Jesus - and He has proved Himself faithful to His promise that those who seek shall find.
All good things - feelings, pleasures, thrills, whatever - have all had their source in One Being, Jesus Christ. They are given to us so that we might have an inkling of Something unimaginable, Something inexpressible: the incomparable goodness that we have at our disposal, and that is abundantly lavished on us in all the fullness of Jesus Christ.
What sense does that make?
In his book Things Unseen, Mark Buchanan explains:
In some ways the creation itself struggles...to render a true picture of heaven....Earthly things are broken copies. The things below are less real, less alive, less solid than the things above: a two-dimensional portrait, static and piecemeal, of an Original that is living and dynamic, four- (or five- or six-) dimensional. Here we only see through a glass darkly.
One Sunday I wanted to demonstrate this for y church. I put an acetate on the overhead projector and then drew a face, a woman's face, shoulders, soft and slightly dropping, and a line stretching at shoulder height on either side of her, depicting a landscape horizon. I sketched in her facial features. For her mouth, I drew a thin line slightly curving up, a crimp.
"What is this?" I asked.
"A cat," someone said.
"A woman,:" someone else said.
"Yes! Good!" I said. "But not just any woman. A famous woman. Who?"
"Your mother," someone said.
"Queen Elizabeth," someone else said,
"Madonna."
"You're all wrong," I said. "Dead wrong. What's the matter with you people? Can't you see that this is the Mona Lisa?"
Laughter.
"Why is not one of you in awe, burning with covetousness, plotting how you might, the moment my back is turned, smuggle this out and sell it to an art dealer?"
"Because you're a lousy artist." someone said.
True. Ruefully true....I had drawn only a shabby copy, a broken shadow, of Mona Lisa.
If I am so fiercely craving these temporal things that came from Jesus, and are merely distorted reflections of something about Him, how much more goodness and delight and pleasure I would be engulfed in if only I craved Him Himself rather than just these measly little symbols and shadows of Him? In Christ we have the very image of those temporal shadows; the very the substance of those temporal symbols!
I don't merely want symbols and shadows. If something is going to keep me on, it has to Substance. It has to be the hope and desire for Things Unseen.
No amount of the temporal - though you drown me in it - will have the capacity to wholly satisfy this endless pit I call my soul. Nothing but the infinite Jesus Christ can ever be big enough or substantive enough to reach down, touch, and quench the very depths of my ravished soul. The Lord Jesus Himself will satisfy me completely and wholly with good things in His Person because He loves me so. That is a promise!
"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
— C.S. Lewis (Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)
All that we shall want between this place and heaven, all that we could need between the gates of hell where we lay in our blood to the gates of heaven where we shall find a welcome admission, is treasured up for us in Jesus Christ. ~ Charles Spurgeon
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