Here are some of my disorganized musings on my short time in college thus far. To be honest, I wasn’t too excited to come to college. In fact after orientation I was convinced that I had made a mistake. It felt like God was placing me somewhere tailor-fit to be wrong in every way. In the weeks leading up to college, I was entrenched in a mixture of worries, and regrets. What if I had gone here? How will things change at home? What will the future be like? etc.

In an attempt to combat my selfishness and restore a right perspective, I came up with an analogy of sorts. It made a lot of sense to me then, and it still does now. My analogy comes from a Paul Washer sermon on marriage. Washer exposes a common misconception that marriage is perfectly intertwined with compatibility. He argues instead that oftentimes God gives you a spouse who is weak in the very areas you need her to be strong; a spouse who is incompatible, who fails to meet the conditions you hold most dearly. Why would God do that? Because God’s goal is not to make us happy, it is to make us more like Christ. Did Christ only love those who met all of His conditions? By no means! He loved us, wretched sinners, though we met none of the conditions. He loved us though we rejected, and hated him. He loved us all the way to the Cross, where he bled and died for our sins. How can we learn to love like Christ, that is to love unconditionally, if our spouse meets all the conditions? We cannot. By giving a wife who fails to meet our conditions, God, in his wisdom, makes us more like Christ, by teaching us to love sacrificially, and to selflessly lay down our lives. In my analogy this principle can be applied broadly to college, and life in general. God’s goal in allowing me to go to college is not to provide me a perfect fellowship, a perfect roommate, and perfect friendships; rather, it is to conform me to the image of Christ. Furthermore, his purpose in orchestrating my life is not to provide me with perfect circumstances but to make me more like His Son.

I think the analogy works; where I went wrong in my pre-college thinking, however, is assuming by my prideful human wisdom, and lack of faith that God would place me in a dark dungeon, and I would have to miserably trudge along for a few years. There is a difference between trusting God’s plan wherever it may lead, and just assuming the worst. I did the latter. I had a preconceived notion of how I thought God would work, without at all conceiving that his way was the better way. I resigned myself for the worst, instead of trusting God for the best.

Well I’m here now. The big mystery of going away to college is a mystery no longer. And what of all my fears, worries, and anxieties? Irvine is not perfect. It is weak in certain areas where I would like it to be strong; but any complaint I might muster has been completely overshadowed by the overwhelming faithfulness of God. With each blessing granted, prayer answered, and trial lovingly placed, I’ve seen that God’s plan truly is perfect, and far better than my own. I am thankful for the privilege of being here, and I am looking forward to the long journey to becoming more like Jesus in his humility, in his selflessness, and in his unconditional love.

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²I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” (Psalm 16:2)

Filling the Void

This post is loosely inspired by Ecclesiastes 3:11: ^“11He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

There is a giant gaping eternal-sized hole right smack in the middle of my heart. It is ravenous, and insatiable; it hurts, and aches, and groans. My whole life I’ve tried to fill this void with all sorts of things with the hope that I might plug, and clot the loneliness, and the emptiness. But of course,  temporal things were and will never be enough. My soul cries for something more. It longs for eternity. An eternal hole takes an Eternal God to fill. It takes Jesus Christ, beaten, bloody, and alone, nailed to a Cross for all my sins, so that I might know Him, and be whole in Him.

With that massive truth in mind, let me try and outline my idea for yet another series. By the grace of God, I am now continually striving to find my identity, and my satisfaction in Christ with the goal that He alone would fill the voids in my heart. Here an important question arises: what of the other things, which I formerly used to fill the voids? As I stated earlier, I have sought satisfaction in a variety of pursuits, the foremost of those being relationships and achievement. These things are by no means bad. Quite the opposite! They are gifts from God. We fall into sinful idolatry by letting the gifts usurp the Giver.

When we find the entirety of our worth in Christ, it is not as if we lose all the gifts of God; rather, they are restored to their proper purpose. They become what God intended for them to be. The gifts can be fully enjoyed. Things like relationships and achievement are no longer ultimate things, but means to glorify and magnify Christ. C.S. Lewis puts it like this:

“To sacrifice the greater good for the less and then not to get the lesser good after all–that is the surprising folly. . . Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made… You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

I want to write a few posts on the restoration of secondary things to their proper place in light of the reality of Christ.With the start of college especially, it is quite easy to let good things become gods in my heart. Hopefully this will be beneficial to myself, and you all as well as I seek to keep first things first!

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“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt. 6:33)

Recently I was talking with a few brothers when one of them raised some interesting questions. His (paraphrased) questions went something like this: What is the proper place for emotion in the Christian Life? More specifically, how can we be continually affected by the Gospel in everyday life? And what of the Christian who has grown up in the Church, and who’s love for the Gospel has grown slowly with understanding? (I don’t really answer any of these questions; this post is an introduction of sorts. Hopefully I can answer and connect these questions in subsequent ones. I just wanted to get all my thoughts out on this before I forget.)

Let me start off by saying that the fight to feel, and to be affected by the things of God, is the chief struggle in my life. Honestly it scares the heck out of me. Why? Because to have the right emotions and affections for God is entirely out of our control. If you lack knowledge of God you can solve the problem by studying the Bible. If you’re always gossiping, you can solve the problem by disciplining yourself and seeking to be an encouragement instead. Of course, God is needed to work in us, but we still retain a certain amount of “control”. It is not so with emotions and affections. You cannot make yourself feel harder; you cannot make yourself truly affected by something you are not already. The fight to love God in our hearts simply cannot be forced by sheer will-power or discipline. It is God alone, who can transform the heart to be affected by His glorious Gospel.

And what’s more scary? This is not a secondary or peripheral battle in the Christian life, it is the most important one. The Westminister Catechism ask the question: “What is the chief end of man?” It’s answer? To glorify God, and enjoy him forever. And so we find that to enjoy God forever — to be rightly affected by the Gospel, and to feel proper emotions towards it, is the very purpose for our existence! If we lose this battle of loving, and marveling at the Gospel, we fail in the very thing we were created for!

I lose this battle more often that I would like to admit. There are days, and even extended seasons when I wake up, and I simply do not care about the Gospel, I am unaffected by the Word of God, and prayer feels ineffective. Oh, how I want to radically love the Gospel in my heart! How I long to feel what I ought to feel when I hear of my Savior on the cross for my sin! But too often my heart is hard as rock. In this state the doubts start to creep in: What if these emotions and affections you long for never come? What if they don’t even truly exist? And perhaps this will shed some light on my struggles addressed in my last post: What if Jesus isn’t worth it? What if this is all a sham?

There is so much I can say on this. and this will undoubtedly be a frequently occurring topic in my blog. However in the interest of keeping this at a reasonable length, I’ll end with three observations: one an exhortation for myself, one an important reminder, and the other a truth that I take comfort in.

1. Fighting to marvel at the Gospel cannot be passive:

Jeremiah 29:13 famously says this: “¹³ You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” We do not wait around lazily for joy to arrive. No, we fight hard for joy. As I established earlier, enjoying God through the Gospel is the purpose for which we were made. Christ did not die to rescue us into a life of dreary intellectual knowledge. He saved us so that we might look upon Him, and be overwhelmed at His glory. He saved us so that our affections would burn for him alone, and our emotions would be passionately joyful and thankful in his presence. We cannot lose this battle. A Christian that is emotionless, and unaffected by the Gospel is not a Christian at all. If I find that I struggle to marvel at the Gospel, I must not take it lightly. I must be active, passionate, and focused on fighting to marvel in the Gospel. I must diligently seek joy in His Word, and earnestly plead for eyes to see his beauty in my prayers. I must fight with every ounce of my being, while still knowing that what I’m seeking comes from God alone.

2. It is the Gospel that allows us to see:

A few weeks ago I spoke on “The Marvelous Gospel” from Psalms 118:21-24. In that message, I spoke on what makes the Gospel so amazing: Jesus’ unfathomable humility, our total depravity, God’s unexplainable love at the Cross, His power in the resurrection, and His glorious plan all wrapped in this thing we call the Gospel. Intellectually, we must understand why the Gospel is marvelous, but that is only half the battle. One can understand everything mentioned above and still be cold to it. Our hearts and heads must work in unison.

So where does the heart marveling, and the deep emotional response come from? Ironically, the way we marvel at the Gospel is through the Gospel itself! We were dead in our trespasses, with no ears to hear, eyes to see, or tongue to taste the goodness of God. Dead. Dead people don’t feel anything, nor are they affected by anything. But God being rich in mercy, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ — by grace you have been saved! (Ephesians 2:5) It is Christ who fulfills what is foretold in Ezekiel 11:19: “And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.” This is as true now, as it was at the moment of salvation. Christ brings joy. He does what no amount of intellectual knowledge could ever do: he transforms hearts of stone into hearts that feel, and hearts that are affected by the Gospel. In this fight to feel, and to be affected,  may I never stray far from the Cross.

3. God is all about His Glory:

This is important to remember as we seek to respond afresh to the Gospel everyday. God is infinitely beautiful, and the origin of all joy and He is not interested in keeping it to himself. The saint who honestly seeks to love the Gospel in his heart asks for a noble thing, and it is a request that God will be faithful to fulfill. God loves for his glory to be seen, and rejoiced in by his people. And as Piper famously says, “God is most glorified, when we are most satisfied in Him.” If God is all about his Glory, we can be confident that when we seek His beauty He will be faithful to show it to us.

To those of you along with myself who are entrenched in this daily battle, let me end with a quote by Spurgeon. He says:

If you long for him, he much more longs for you.  No sinner was ever half as eager for Christ as Christ is eager for the sinner; no saint was ever one-tenth as anxious to behold his Lord as his Lord is to behold him.  If you are running to Christ, he is already near you.  If you sigh for his presence, that sigh is the evidence that he is with you.  He is with you even now; therefore, be glad!

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quick note: I realize emotions and affections may not be the best choice of words to encapsulate what I’m trying to talk about. We cannot rely solely upon emotions; they come and go, and are no substitute for faithful commitment. However, I feel too often we downplay, and thus neglect this aspect of the Christian Life. Why? We fear the disconnect between what we intellectually profess, and what we actually feel. The battle to be emotionally affected is at it’s core a battle to find joy and marvel in the Gospel. If we proclaim the Gospel is the most beautiful thing, the greatest news, and our only hope; should not our emotions and affections be in tune with that?

Part 2’s coming soon!

Our lives are full of pursuits. Be it marriage, a prestigious job, or the appreciation of our peers we all have things we seek after. We desire, and hope for these things. We expend our resources, and sacrifice to attain them. Ultimately our lives are characterized and defined by what we pursue. But why do we pursue things? and what makes something worth pursuing? Behind every search, every chase, and every dream is the hope of lasting satisfaction. When we try hard in school, or buy a new toy, we do so because we hope it will somehow amount to something worthwhile. So the logic follows that what makes something worth pursuing or not is how much lasting satisfaction we expect it will bring.

Not every pursuit is the same; each one carries differing levels of expectations of the payoff. The bigger the hope of reward, the higher we’ll place the pursuit in our lives; the more we’ll sacrifice, and work to get it. The ambitious student will place the pursuit of education, and career at the forefront of his life, because he believes it will make him happy; he’ll put in the effort, sacrifice, and energy required is in order to attain his goal because he trusts that in the end it will be worth it. At the same time, his pursuit for something like recreation, and immediate fun will be less, because it does not seem as worthwhile as his long term goals. You get the point.The same process goes for every person, just with different goals, and different ways of going about it.

But the thing about all pursuits apart from Christ is that they never live up to their expectations; and the greater the expectations the greater the loss when the pursuit fails to fulfill its promise. What seemed so enamoring while we were chasing it,  turns out to be disappointing once we get it; our pursuits don’t bring us the satisfaction we long for. Toys grow old quickly, the praise of man is fleeting, people disappoint, and careers don’t satisfy.

As Christians, we are called to pursue Christ. Not only that, we are called to pursue Christ above all things.  God calls us to commit the entirety of ourselves to love him with all our heart, mind, strength, and soul, and to abandon everything to know him more. And so, the important inescapable question arises: is it worth it? Following Christ is the riskiest decision anyone could ever make because one must forsake all things, in order to gain him. Jesus himself, in Matthew 13:44 describes the pursuit of the kingdom of heaven in this way. saying, ⁴⁴“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. (emphasis mine) The greater the pursuit, the greater the possibility of loss; and so the possibility for disappointment is enormous. Paul speaks of the crushing implications for the Christian if the pursuit of Christ proves useless: “¹⁴And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain… ¹⁹If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Yikes. As was said earlier, what makes something worth pursuing is the hope of lasting satisfaction. In the same way, we follow Christ because we believe he is worth it; we know that all other pursuits fail to live up to their billing, but we are confident that in Jesus Christ alone is everlasting satisfaction, and fullness of joy. And with that settled in our hearts, we can follow him full-tilt with passion. We can boldly say with Paul: “⁸Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

Ah! This is so hard for me! In fact, my whole thought process on this topic (aka. this post) stems from a lingering doubt that haunts me with each pursuit counted as loss for the sake of gaining Christ. My unbelief tells me what if you count all things as loss in order to gain Christ, and find that he’s not worth it; that he does not bring lasting satisfaction, or fullness of joy? This lack of faith is not doubt in the happiness of heaven, but rather it is doubt in living my life full-on for Christ here on earth.  I often struggle to believe the all-sustaining,  power of God in everyday life. I think the dilemma is best captured in this question: if I were to lose everything: possessions, friends, and status, and had only Christ would that be enough? Or in other words, would Christ be enough to satisfy us if we lost the pleasures from all other pursuits?

It is a difficult question to answer, and ultimately one that is all hypothesis until I experience it for myself. Tim Keller captures it well when he says, “You don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.” I draw encouragement from something Paul says in Philippians 1: 20-22: “²⁰as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. ²¹For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Here was Paul, a man who had truly given up everything to follow Jesus. Heck, he writing Philippians from prison! And yet he could say with confidence that he would not be ashamed for living all-out for Christ.

Is it worth it to follow Christ? Is it worth it to count all things as loss, so that I might gain Him? These are not hard questions to answer. Of course it’s worth it! Not only in the eternal life too come, but also in earthly life now.  The problem isn’t knowing the right answer in my head, but settling it in my heart. It’s having full courage in this glorious fact, trusting in it, finding comfort in it, dropping all rival pursuits for it, and having it seep into everything I do; that when I read my bible it would be with full courage that Christ is worth it, when I pray, and serve, and strive to be more like Him it would be with the eager expectation and hope that I will not at all be ashamed. Why? Because Christ is worth it, and it is a glorious thing to live for him! He is the one worthy pursuit, the one pursuit that brings lasting satisfaction.

I’ve decided to start blogging. Why? Certainly not because I’m particularly insightful, spiritual, wise, or anything like that; I’m none of these things. I can think of four reasons off the top of my head. First, I want to encourage you all! I know from personal experience that I’ve been thoroughly blessed by the blogs/writings of fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and I want to do the same! Second, it will help keep me accountable, especially as I jet off to college. I’d imagine that the things I write here will contain goals, struggles, and ways I need to grow; I would love it if you all would challenge me, and check up on how I’m doing in those regards. Third, I’ve recently realized the benefits of being able to articulate my thoughts to myself. Too often I let ideas float around in my head, half-formed and hazy. Writing them out helps me to crystallize my thoughts, and to make them more real and clear to myself! And finally…well, I’m crossing my fingers that this’ll make me a better writer! Hopefully this blog will help kill four birds with one stone (it started off as two) and serve quadruple purposes as an encouragement to those reading, accountability for me, a helpful tool for my own growth, and a jump-start for my iffy writing skills. whew!

So why the title ‘Joy Inexpressible’? The truth is I’m  miserable at thinking up names for things (which is why this post is entitled what it’s entitled, and why my tumblr is still called “:)”). I’ve always been scared that if your site didn’t have a cool name, and a witty description that people would scoff and dismiss it; so I jumped the first moment I thought of a respectable title!

But in all seriousness, these words, ‘joy inexpressible” hold a lot of meaning for me. Everything I long for, and hope for are wrapped up in these words. The phrase comes from 1 Peter  1:8: ‘⁸ Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, ⁹obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” Though I have not seen him and even now do not see him, I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe that in him is joy inexpressible, filled with glory, and that in him there is salvation for my soul! And that’s what I want this blog to be about! About Christ, the pursuit of his likeness, and the joy found in his love 🙂 (There is a lot more that could, and should be said about this passage, but I’ll save it for another time!)

In closing, I’m still not quite sure how this will turn out. To be honest, I don’t really know anything about blogging at all other than you post stuff up, and people read it. So that’s what I’m going to do. And we’ll see how it goes.