If your mind sees the Gospel only as a source of pardon from sin, and not also as the source of deliverance from the power of sin, you will be more easily attracted by the pleasures of sin…

Kris Lundgaard

Giving a birthday present to your best friend is like forcing down some double-fudge brownies. But giving up your extra bedroom to a homeless person in the name of Jesus is like eating the Rockies for breakfast.

–Kris Lundgaard

We may sing on Sunday morning, “Rescue the perishing, care for the dying, snath them in pity from sin and the grave,” but our actions during the week might be proclaiming, “I really couldn’t care less.”

– Timothy K. Beougher, Overcoming Walls to Witnessing

In his letter, 1 Peter, the Apostle addresses how they were, as “elect exiles,” ambassadors representing a foreign kingdom and sojourning on the earth, proclaiming the news that their King had given them and bringing others back with them to their true hom.

But Peter did not begin his letter with promises of immediate relief or with tips to lessen their suffering. In fact, with what we would consider poor bedside manner, Peter eventually promises that “after you suffer for a little while” God would comfort them (1 Peter 5:10).

What Peter decided that his hearers needed to know first, before addressing their trials, was who God was and who they were in God. In a soaring proclamation of the role that each person of the trinity plays, Peter reassured his readers with descriptions of the Godhead and how the trinity works together both to save and to secure, even through temporal circumstances (1 Peter 1:1-2).

Perhaps Peter was telling them that before they focused on what is happening, they should focus on what is. Before fosuing on what what happening to them, they should focus on what had been done for them. Before focusing on their suffering, they should focus on their Savior. Before focusing on their tribulation, they should focus on the trinity.

It is certainly true that we don’t understand earthly things rightly before we begin to comprehend heavenly things truly.

Really? Who welcomes open rebuke? Who welcomes hidden rebuke?

Who even welcomes rebuke that really looks like something else altogether?

All of us have had the experience in which we ask, perhaps only in our mind and to ourselves, “what does he or she really think of me?” He or she may, in fact, have great affection or love for you, but the unknown renders the reality ineffectual.

Charity toward another — “love” in the Proverb — is not meant to be hidden. Love is to be expressed. Or demonstrated. This is why we should be quick to understand love not merely as emotion, or feeling, but as the emotion or feeling expressed and demonstrated toward its object.

One might even say that love as emotion and feeling is not true love until it is expressed toward its object.

“Love consists in this…that God loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10, CSB).

So, as with many Proverbs, the truth is in the comparison. Hidden love is relatively worthless, both to the one holding it and the one (not) receiving it. Open rebuke, by comparison, at least has value, even if only to confirm where the rebuker stands.

We previously discussed Two Directives involved in a believer’s attempt to walk in the will of God: his moral will and mission instructions. Because the Bible does not direct us to find God’s personal, individual will for our lives other than these things, we start with these directives as a guide for making those choices which need it and for which there is no clear biblical answer.

In addition to the Two Directive of God’s moral will and his mission instruction, we also have God’s Five Demands (depending on how you count them…). In those few instances that the Bible describes the “will of God” and then actually defines it, we find further resources to make decisions. The Five Demands (“the will of God is…”) are:

1) that you be saved (2 Peter 3:9)

2) that you be wise (Ephesians 5:17-18)

3) that you be sanctified (1 Thessalonians 4:3-4)

4) that you be submitting (1 Peter 2:13-15)

5) that you be rejoicing (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

Some describe 2) as that you be Spirit-filled, and include another description of the will of God that we be suffering. Regardless of how they are counted, the point is that these clear expressions of God’s will — in addition to God’s moral demands — provide the believer with ample material with which to evaluate decisions, opportunities and choices facing us for which there is no clear biblical direction.

If we are saved, are being wise (being Spirit-filled), are being sanctified, are submitting, and are rejoicing (in suffering, perhaps), then we need not resort to putting out the fleece, casting lots, reading signs, walking through open doors or around closed ones, or any of the other myriad ways we sanctify pagan notions of receiving divine guidance.

While neither the two directive or five demands serve as a checklist for each decision we face, they do provide us an overall “trajectory” for a life directed toward God, powered by the Spirit, legitimized by Christ, and aimed at making disciples.

We have 100 U.S. Senators, 435 U.S. Representatives, and a President. With all that mental power being directed toward dealing appropriately with national issues within the confines of the U.S. Constitution, it would seem that we should not have so many important issues still falling in the laps of 9 unelected Supreme Court Justices.

It is a travesty that such crucial issues are decided by a bare majority of unelected officials. Yet that is precisely what is once again on the horizon regarding the constutionality of national healthcare, aka ObamaCare.

If Justices did not cast ballots along such clearly partisan lines, close votes would be much more palatable. Here’s hoping that the ObamaCare result will be an outlier.

One reporter asked Tebow whether his new position would provide him opportunity to evangelize the enormous NY venue, and whether he would attempt to proselytize his Jets teammates in the locker room.

Tebow responded that whatever the venue, he was interested in being himself, which included openness about his faith. He also stated that he doesn’t try to approach many individuals to talk about Christianity, because he believes that the way he lives his life provides a witness.

The concept expressed by Tebow raises again a couple of questions for followers of Christ. What is evangelism? What is “lifestyle” evangelism?

The problem comes when I seek to “know the will of God for my life” in terms as significant as who I should marry and those as mundane as what I should eat for breakfast.

Scripture is clear that God wills. Some of his willing he has revealed to us “ahead of time” in the demands for holiness and moral living that he places on his people. Some of his willing he does not tell us “ahead of time” and we never know until after the fact: as the old saying goes, if you want to know God’s will for next Tuesday, wait until next Wednesday.

But nowhere in God’s word do we find any instruction to find God’s will for our lives, other than his moral will. We are not promised to know God’s preference for each decision we make or for each choice we face before the deciding and choosing.

This does not mean, however, that God doesn’t have a revealed preference for how we choose. Broadly speaking, God’s preference for us is to live our lives and make our decisions following the way of wisdom. In so doing, we reflect the fact that despite the fall we still bear God’s image, which includes the mandate to have dominion over the earth. As we become conformed to the image of Christ, we conform our will to his, and can, as Augustine quipped, “Love God and do what we please.”

In the meantime, there are guideposts in the Scriptures to help us think through our daily decision-making. I suggest we think of these guideposts as the Two Directives and Five Demands.

The Two Directives: Moral Will and Mission Instruction

Informing and guiding the trajectory of our lives, including how we make daily choices, are the grand themes of God’s 1) moral will and his 2) mission instruction. God’s moral will is his demand that we be holy, for he is holy, including the Ten Commandments, the “be” commands, and all the other instructions for how we are to live while on the earth. God’s moral will is further delineated for us in the Five Demands, which I will discuss in a later article.

Mission Instruction

People are on earth for a purpose. God’s people are on earth and are his for a purpose. This “chief end of man”, as the Westminster Catechism describes it, is to love God and enjoy him forever. Specifically, while we are “between the times” of Christ’s first advent (the inauguration of the kingdom) and his second advent (the consummation of the kingdom), we are to carry the message of man’s chief end and the means to that end — the gospel of Jesus Christ — to all people on earth.

The primary statement of our mission instruction is the Great Commission, found in Matthew 28:18-20.

So, when we are faced with decisions regarding which school to attend, what course of study to pursue, who to marry, where to live, we should be thinking how the options we have either further the mission or impede the mission.

There are, of course, more details to consider, which we haven’t space to discuss here. But the point is that the believer should always be thinking of the mission — the Great Commission — and his responsibility in it before God when living life. We should be constantly resisting the common default decision-guiders, such as obtaining the dual-income-dual-garage-dual-kid life, pursuing the “American dream,” “finding oneself”, or even the rather wispy concept of “happiness”. (This pursuit of “happiness,” after all, is what frequently provides justification for the middle-aged man to leave his wife and children for another woman: hardly God’s will in any sense.)

Like soldiers on the field of battle, believers searching for guidance do well to consider the completion of the mission.

LifeWay’s The Gospel Project series of adult, young adult, and kids’ curricula does not incorporate video.

During a simulcast on the project held March 14, LifeWay’s Ed Stetzer responded to a question regarding their decision, and his answer is relevant to any church’s — and any member’s — evaluation of video-based curricula. Paraphrased, Stetzer said:

We not only want to encourage learning by members, but also teaching in the local church.

In other words, video-based lessons could certainly facilitate learning, but they do nothing to facilitate the raising up and training of teachers, and they do not contribute toward the healthy circumstance in which local mouths other than the preacher’s are speaking gospel truth to members.