That’s a command for us to have a certain emotion, delight. But aren’t emotions involuntary and uncontrollable? How are we supposed to summon up an emotion that we don’t already feel? Sam Storms offers four ways to delight in the Lord:

1. Intellectual fascination. We must make use of the mind to set ourselves to know him. I have in view intellectual enthrallment with God in which our understanding of him is expanded and intensified. Know him. Learn of him. Study him. Explore his ways. Investigate his will. Become a student of the personality and character of God and he will most surely captivate your mind.
2. Aesthetic adoration. We are fundamentally, and by God’s design, aesthetic creatures. Being fashioned in the image of God means, at least in part, that we are instinctively drawn to beauty and repelled by ugliness. We have an innate capacity to recognize and rejoice in beauty (unless, of course, we pervert and diminish that capacity by hardening our souls in unrepentant sin). God is ultimate Beauty. To delight in him is to behold his beauty in all its vast array: the symmetry of his attributes, the intricacies of his handiwork, the splendor of his power, the majesty of his mercy, and the list could go, quite literally, infinitely. We must therefore labor to cultivate our aesthetic sensibility and refine our taste for the sweetness of his glory.
3. Emotional exhilaration. Our affections are also designed to find their focus and fulfillment in God. He is worthy of our zeal, love, devotion, delight, fear, joy, passion, gratitude, and hope. Although we do not see him now, we “love him,” and “believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:8). With the Spirit’s help we must learn to cultivate and re-direct all affections so that they are rooted in him and riveted on him.
4. Volitional dedication. Delighting in the Lord also entails the engagement of our wills and the choices we make. We must do two things. First, we must choose to obey his commands, and second, we must choose to avoid all that he has prohibited. Obedience nourishes delight and joy. God’s commands are his prescription for happiness and spiritual health. We must therefore trust God when he says that sin will corrupt and destroy. We must trust God when he says obedience will bless and enrich. Disobedience dulls and anesthetizes our spirits to God’s presence and activity. It’s like injecting Novocain into our spiritual nerves. Disobedience diminishes our capacity to delight in him; it drains our spiritual energy; it lays waste to our ability to focus on God and trust him confidently. It unleashes in our spiritual system a toxin that will progressively cause our spiritual eyes to go blind and our spiritual ears to go deaf. To the extent that we insist on eating the appealing, but ultimately toxic, delicacies of this world, our spiritual taste buds will lose their sensitivity to enjoy the sweet savor of Jesus.

Whenever God wants to describe what life is like in his family, the word-picture he keeps coming back to is the idea of a feast:

• “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples, a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.” (Isaiah 25)
• “Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 8)
• “He said to his servants, “Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate.” (Luke 15)
• “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son.” (Matthew 22)

Why does God keep describing life in his kingdom as a banquet?

The Banquet Shows God’s Majesty and Generosity.

A banquet is different from a regular meal. A meal could be a protein bar that you shove down your face on your way to work. A meal could be a spam musubi that you swallow in two bites while you’re walking from one class to another. But a banquet is so much more. We’re talking ten-course meals, and ice-sculptures, and chocolate fondue fountains!

When I was in Southeast Asia this year, I had the chance to attend a banquet. Tthere was table after table, piled three feet high with food. One table piled with roast duck, another roast beef, another with five different kinds of fish, another with shrimp, and another with crab. But guess what table my local friends all went for first? The snails! There was a huge table with 10 different kinds of snails, and all their eyes were all wide open. They were in snail heaven!

A banquet isn’t just a meal, it’s an experience! It displays the generosity and graciousness of the host. He’s spending all this money and going to all this effort, just to give you joy and contentment.

When God invites us into his kingdom, he wants us to experience his majesty and his generosity. That way, when we’re worried about something, and we’re tempted to lie a little bit, or cheat a little bit, or manipulate things a little bit… it’s much easier to resist that temptation if we’ve experienced God’s majesty and generosity in life. We know he’s got everything under control, and he’ll provide everything we need.

The Banquet Gives Us Strength.

When you’re at a banquet, and there’s all this gorgeous food that looks like it could be on the cover of a magazine, you don’t just look at it and admire it and then go home. You get to eat it! It’s nourishment. It gives you strength.

That’s why we take communion every week at Harbor. It’s a banquet Jesus hosts for us each week to remind us of the way he’s given us strength through his death on the cross, and through the power of the Holy Spirit living inside of us.

Isaiah 40 says, “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”

I know a lot of weary people right now. But God wants to give us strength that’s far beyond our own. The banquet reminds us of that.

The Banquet Connects Us to Each Other.

There’s something about food that brings people together. One of our sons is playing baseball, and after every game there’s a big feast with the whole team. We hang out for hours together, just talking story. Then we go to our other son’s flag football game. After the game, maybe somebody brought a Costco pizza and juice boxes for the team, but there’s nothing else. So we stand around and talk politely for 10 minutes, then everyone’s gone.

Food brings people together! And the banquet is a symbol of the way God has brought his people together as a family. And there’s a reason for that. Look at what Paul says in Colossians 3:

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

God wants to build compassionate hearts, and kindness, and humility, and patience in us. And the only way to do that is to bring us into deep relationships with other people. The only way we can show compassion is if we’re around other people who need compassion. The only way we can show patience is if we’re around other people who try our patience.

God loves parties because he wants to bring glory to himself, strength to his people, and unity to his family.

Deuteronomy 6 gives a strong challenge to parents:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. (Deut. 6:5-7)

At our recent men’s conference, Dr. Don Carson encouraged men to take this responsibility seriously. Maybe you’d like to get more proactive about shepherding your family toward Jesus, but you don’t know where to start. Let me recommend a foolproof way to get your family worship off the ground:

1. Read one verse every morning together as a family.
2. Briefly discuss its meaning and implication for life.
3. Pray together that God would help your family apply it.

Here’s how our family does it. On our smartphones, we’ve put a link on our home screen to the ESV verse-of-the-day here (also available through Twitter). When we load up the kids for school each morning, we budget an extra five minutes. After everyone’s buckled in, we read the verse, discuss, and pray together.

Once your family is in the habit of learning, growing, and praying together, you can add a weekly family worship time that allows for more in-depth times of study, discussion, and prayer. If you’re a Harborite, you can use the parent sheets from each week’s Sunday lesson (available on the Children’s Ministry page on HarborConnect).

During our extended family worship times, our kids love to be characters in the story as we read passages from Scripture. We’ll read a line, then the kid who’s been assigned to the character will repeat it. We’ve discovered some Oscar-worthy actors in our crew.

Here are a few books that have been very helpful resources for our family worship times:

• Long Story Short by Marty Machowski – a creative guide for leading kids through important Old Testament passages.
• Big Truths for Young Hearts by Bruce Ware – a theology book for 6-to-14-year-olds
• Training Hearts, Teaching Minds by Starr Meade – a systematic way to teach your kids the fundamentals of the Christian faith, using the shorter catechism.
• The Action Bible by Doug Mauss – The Bible in graphic-novel form. I can’t tell you how many deep discussions have been launched with my boys by this book (just this morning, it was “Why would God allow someone as evil as Jezebel to be queen of his people?”)

Jen Smidt offers ten suggestions. Here are the first four:

1. LAVISH HER WITH LOVE

That deep longing for love was designed for God to fill. Lavish your daughter with love while continually pointing out that her heavenly Father is the one where love originated. You love because he loves; she is loved because he loves her more than you ever could (1 John 4:10).

2. HELP HER TO LEARN SUBMISSION

Submission isn’t just for wives. We are all called to submit our hearts and lives to God (James 4:7) and the earlier your daughter sees that in you, the sooner she will rest in the sweet protection of God’s will for her life.

3. TEACH HER TO TAME HER EMOTIONS

Big feelings are hard to manage. The devastation over losing something, anything from a favorite earring to a dear friend, can be all-consuming. Daughters need to be instructed and discipled in expressing emotion without being owned and identified by those emotions.

4. DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN TRUTH AND LIES

In my own heart and my daughters, I have watched the battle play out time and time again. We are easily lured into the snare of unbelief. Urging your daughter to verbalize the thoughts in her head will allow you the opportunity to separate what is true and what is untrue with her. Apply the truth of Scripture to the distortions that your daughter may be believing about God, you, or herself.

Read the whole article.

Isaiah 5 is a beautiful picture of God’s provision…

My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it;

…and a stark look at how many people fail to take advantage of his grace:

And he looked for it to yield grapes,
But it yielded wild grapes.

God reminds us that he’s given us everything we need…

And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?

… and that he will not allow ingratitude and unfruitfulness to go on forever:

And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.

Because he cannot allow injustice to stand:

And he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness, but behold, an outcry!

But what motivates our missional living? Are we pitching tents just for the sake of pitching tents? That’s the question Jonathan Dodson asks:

God’s glory is expanded when the gospel is translated into the many cultures of the world, entering new ethnicities, idioms, and habits. It will take the breadth of history to display the diversity of God’s glory through the advance of the church.

However, the church also retreats. Our passion for mission wanes. Even with the resurgence of missional ecclesiology, we fail in sharing and showing the gospel in our own cultures. Clearly, the missional church is not enough, not only in its scope of mission, but also in its motivation for mission. When the motivation of the church is mission, we are destined to retreat, tire out, and fail. What, then, should we do? Throw up our arms in surrender and blend fully into our cultures with the hope of missional memory loss?

We need a greater, more captivating motivation than “missional church.” When the motivation for mission is mission, people will revert to consumerism. However, if our missional endeavors are motivated by something greater, more certain, than our oscillating passion for the advance of the gospel, then there is hope. If the history of redemption will not come to a close until God’s glory has been completed, then the assurance of mission starts and ends, not with the church, but with God! God’s commitment to his own glorious expansion throughout space and time is the hope of the world. The hope of mission is not the church; it is Jesus committed to ushering his full, redemptive reign over all space and time, including every people.

As we bring missional failure and success to the feet of Jesus, we will be increasingly motivated for mission by his mercy and his might. We need to be increasingly captivated by the expanding glory and beauty of Christ among the nations. Missional church is not enough. We need Jesus’ insistence on the spread of his redemption throughout history for his glory. We need his commitment to his complete glory breaking into history to complete the display of the riches of his grace.

 

Most of us have heard the Easter story many times before. It’s familiar. Predictable. Maybe even boring.

But we can’t allow the beauty and horror of this passage to get lost just because it’s so familiar to us.The king of the universe … was killed! This humble, compassionate servant was executed.

When the gospel writers tell the story of Good Friday and Easter, they don’t just want to convey historical facts. They want us to feel the weight of these facts. They want us to see the eternal significance of these facts.

A Day of Darkness

In Mark’s account of the crucifixion of Jesus, it says, “When the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.” (Mark 15:33)

All the most important events of the death of Jesus take place in the dark. Jesus was betrayed by Judas in the dark. He was put on trial in the dark. Now Jesus is being crucified, and it’s dark again … in the middle of the day! Just when the sun should be shining the brightest.

Darkness has always been associated with the judgment of God. In the time of Noah, the sky grew dark with clouds when God brought the flood that destroyed the earth. In the time of Moses, darkness fell over Egypt for three days – that was the ninth plague on Egypt.

And the prophets foretold a day of darkness that was coming. Joel said, “The earth will quake, the heavens will tremble, the sun and the moon grow dark. Zephaniah said, “The day of wrath is a day of trouble and distress, a day of destruction and desolation, a day of darkness and gloom.”

When the sky gets dark, it’s because God is judging someone. But who is God judging in this story?

Mark continues: ”At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

Jesus bore the wrath of God for our sin

The heartbreaking revelation is that God is judging his own son! His love and his tenderness toward his son are gone. They’ve been replaced by wrath and judgment… toward his own son. For three hours Jesus took the full wrath of God. The pain he had felt from the whips and the nails were nothing compared to the pain of his father’s judgment.

Jesus has been completely forsaken by his father. We can’t even imagine the horror he feels at this moment. He’s been intimately connected to the father for eternity, and now that relationship is gone. That’s why he was sweating drops of blood the night before: he knew how horrible this would be. He asked the Father to remove this cup, to change the plan, because he didn’t want to be forsaken by his dad!

Plenty of people forsake us in life. Friends move away, and relationships drift apart. That hurts, but the pain gets infinitely worse when a spouse decides to leave. The relationship was deeper, and the love was stronger.

Now imagine a perfect, loving relationship that lasted forever. Imagine that person turning his back on you. Imagine how horrifying that would be. What we’re seeing on the cross is a preview of hell. Being abandoned by God. Losing God’s comfort. Losing his compassion. Losing his grace. That’s what Jesus is experiencing right now.

And this was foretold by the prophets. Isaiah 53 says, “It was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; his soul makes an offering for guilt.” Jesus was crushed for our sin. He bore the wrath of God for me!

Jesus died to reconcile us to God

Mark continues the story, “And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down. And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” (Mark 15:36-38)

The curtain in the temple was not light and thin, like the one you might have on your window. It was very heavy and very thick, more like a wall. It was there to separate the room called the holy of holies, where God resided, from the rest of the temple. This curtain separated the people from his presence.

There was only one man on earth who could enter the holy of holies, the Jewish high priest. He could enter this room once a year, and he had to bring a blood sacrifice, to pay for sins. The curtain was there to show that no sinful person could enter God’s presence.

But now, that curtain has been ripped open! It hasn’t been torn from bottom to top, the way a person would do it. It’s torn from top to bottom, to show that God did it. The death of Jesus has broken down the barrier between God and man. Anyone can come to God, and anyone can connect to God.

This couldn’t be accomplished by the death of a regular person. If I died on a cross for you, it wouldn’t do anything for you. You might be inspired, but you wouldn’t be saved. You wouldn’t be reconciled to God. Only the death of God himself could accomplish this.

Jesus is the Son of God

The story concludes, “When the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39).

Roman centurions were the most brutal soldiers in the Roman army. They were officers who had risen up through the ranks in the army because they were cold-hearted and bloodthirsty. They had seen many deaths. They had caused many deaths!

This centurion has probably witnessed hundreds of deaths in his career, but he sees something different about this death. He sees something different about this man. The humility of Jesus is something new. The compassion of Jesus is something new.

Jesus was punched, and slapped. He was spit on. He was mocked, He was whipped. He was crucified. … But he never retaliated. He said, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And this bloodthirsty soldier was astonished.

In Mark’s gospel, he is the first person to proclaim the full identity of Jesus Christ. He’s the first human to call him the Son of God. Which is meant to show us that you can only understand the identity of Jesus by understanding the death of Jesus. When you see how he died, you realize who he really is.

And you realize that he has the power to forgive your sins and the authority to rule your life.

Don’t let the familiarity of the story steal away the mind-blowing, universe-shattering power of the truth behind it.

What an incredible feast we had in God’s word with Dr. Don this weekend. Hopefully you’re hungry for more. John Bell has read every one of his 60-plus books. Here are his recommendations for the five Carson books every Christian should read:

1. The God Who is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story - Carson plots out the salvation historical unity of the bible’s storyline, always with Jesus as its center. This is the first book I recommend new Christians read (or I send them the video link to the lectures).
2. For the Love of God (Free PDFs: Volumes I and II) – A daily devotional covering every book of the bible, but providing a “big picture” view of salvation history. Carson places each reading into the larger framework of God’s eternal plan. A good companion piece to The God Who is There.
3. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and His Confrontation with the World – An exposition of first 10 chapters of the book of Matthew. A first rate resource for understanding the nature of the Kingdom, the requirements of that Kingdom’s citizens, and how Jesus fulfills OT scripture.
4. How Long, O Lord? - The best book on suffering and evil you’ll ever read.
5. The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God/Love in Hard Places (free PDF’s: Difficult Doctrine/Love in Hard Places) – These two books should be read together. The first looks at the nature of God and why he loves what he does, and how human beings distort those truths. The second book looks at God’s command to love our enemies. Very convicting!

As most Harborites know, you can also access Dr. Don’s daily devotional For the Love of God as a daily blog. It can even be emailed to you!

(via Tim Challies)

But sometimes dumb little things in life get in the way of prayer. Here’s a list of seven extremely practical suggestions, taken from A Praying Life by Paul Miller:

1. Get to bed. What you do in the evening will shape your morning. The Hebrew notion of a day as the evening and morning (see Genesis 1) helps you plan for prayer. If you want to pray in the morning, then plan your evening so you don’t stay up too late. The evening and the morning are connected.
2. Get up. Praying in bed is wonderful. In fact, the more you pray out of bed, the more you’ll pray in bed. But you’ll never develop a morning prayer time in bed. Some of my richest prayer times are at night. I’ll wake up praying. But those prayer times only began to emerge because I got out of bed to pray.
3. Get awake. Maybe you need to make a pot of coffee first or take a shower.
4. Get a quiet place. Maybe a room, a chair, or a place with a view. Or maybe you do better going for a walk. Make sure that no one can interrupt you.
5. Get comfortable. Don’t feel like you have to pray on your knees. For years I was hindered from praying because I found it so uncomfortable to pray on my knees.
6. Get going. Start with just five minutes. Start with a small goal that you can attain rather than something heroic. You’ll quickly find that the time will fly.
7. Keep going. Consistency is more important than length. If you pray five minutes every day, then the length of time will slowly grow. You’ll look up and discover that twenty minutes have gone by. You’ll enjoy being with God. Jesus is so concerned about hanging in there with prayer that he tells “his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up” (Luke 18:1, NIV).