Ken Boa Reflections Ministries

Dr. Ken Boa: Let's begin with a prayer, shall we? Lord, we thank you for this time. Give us wisdom, discernment, and understanding. In Christ's name, amen.

Just to give you a quick overview of where we left off, I was looking at various approaches to the spiritual life. In *Conformed to His Image*, I have 12 facets of this journey. One is relational spirituality. Loving God completely, ourselves correctly, and others compassionately. We talked about that last time. Paradigm spirituality was to cultivate an eternal perspective in this temporal arena and to move from a cultural view of the world to a biblical perspective on the world, which is radically different. You have to transfer your hope then in this new paradigm to what's going to endure and treasure things according to their true value.

Then, wisdom invites us to really amplify the precious present so that we understand that. Then we talked about discipline spirituality, the third facet we're going to be looking at. It's engaging in those disciplines. What are the benefits? The disciplines are not ends in themselves, as I argued, but rather they're means to the ends of intimacy with Jesus. That's their purpose. So you have to be dependent upon God, but you also have to show up and you have to do the parts that are responsive to his initiatives.

Exchanged life spirituality is an entirely different approach. It's coming at it from another angle. So remember, this is a big gem and this gem has multiple facets, and this angle shows something different than the discipline spirituality. This focuses on your identity in Christ and how God has renamed you and given you a new name and understanding. Your old life, which was in Adam, has been now exchanged for new life, which is in the second Adam, the second Adam which is Christ. So you really focus not on works, which is what religion is all about, but rather on grace. That is God's unmerited favor, and that he gives us beyond what we deserve.

Motivated spirituality is yet another angle on the spiritual life. What motivates you to get up out of bed in the morning? What are the things that you do and why do you do them? If we look rather to Christ as the one who meets our needs and we see fear, love, gratitude, rewards, identity, purpose, and hope, longing for God, all these are different motivators. They are earthly motivators as well. We have to train ourselves and to prepare ourselves to pursue those things that will, in fact, endure once again. What makes us choose to do what we do?

Devotional spirituality focuses on another side. It focuses on intimacy with him. What does it mean to grow in love with him, to have a growing intimacy, and to become conformed to that which you admire? Because what you admire most will define you in very real ways. It's been said by Henry Scougal that the worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love, so that the greater the object of your love, the greater your soul becomes.

Holistic spirituality involves every component of your life under the lordship of Christ so that you're moving into Christ as being the hub of the wheel, not a component. It overcomes this false sacred-secular dichotomy. He's the mundane, the routine, and the ordinary.

Process spirituality is where I speak about the idea of focusing on not just the product, the outcome, but enjoying the process along the way. It's being versus doing and the idea of becoming a human being, not a human doing, and being faithful to the process and not just living from one product to another, looking at the future hoping that your joy will be attained when you acquire this. No, choose contentment in the present tense and abide in Christ in that process and practice his presence, which is a hugely important theme.

Spirit-filled spirituality is walking in the power of the Spirit and recognizing the role of the Holy Spirit as a central dynamic in our journey. We're creating this new spiritual renewal card, by the way, and I'll be passing some of these around to you later on when we have them. One of them has to do with the 12 ministries of the Holy Spirit to make you more attuned to and sensitized to the role of the Holy Spirit, not as a force, but as a person. The Holy Spirit is not an "it", it's a "he." It's a person, and so we invite them in.

Then we go to warfare spirituality. This is where we left off last week. It's not an option. You're going to be in a warfare, and one part of the warfare is internal, which Paul calls the flesh. It's the warfare between the deepest you, the true you in Christ, and the false self that is the leftover remnants of the scripts that we falsely bought into as we were growing up. Understand that we are called to resist the devil because that's a powerful external source that appeals to the flesh and that you are to renew your mind against the world and you are to reckon yourself with the flesh as dead to sin.

Now we go into nurturing spirituality. We're going to be talking about a lifestyle of evangelism and discipleship. There's a whole spectrum that goes really from one to the other, and we're going to be exploring what that looks like. How does a person move and make one kind of a small micro-decision from one stage to another? And the realization that you and I are called not just to grow, but to reproduce. As we mature, then it becomes natural that we should reproduce. We reproduce according to our kind, and if you are in Christ, then you're reproducing spiritual fruit.

It's the philosophy of what I call E squared. E squared means evangelism and edification. The ministry, as I see it, has always been evangelism and edification. It's really the Great Commission: make disciples, not just converts. But there is the component of reaching people. That's why I created, for example, Jesus in His Own Words with two friends where we created that together as a resource that I sometimes use for personal evangelism. But the other is to grow and mature, and that's the whole idea of becoming a disciple, what that looks like.

The 12th and final facet kind of bookends the whole thing because, after all, we began with relational spirituality. Now we end with corporate. As I put it, you come to faith as an individual, but you grow in community. You need the both. That's why I bookended it, because the most important thing about life is relationships. At the end, if you really stop and look back, that's what mattered. Not how much wealth you had, not how much power you may have supposed you had, not your performance, not your accolades and achievements as the world would define, but your real eulogy should have to do with lives, with relationships, the impact that you had on eternal beings. That's what's going to endure forever.

The encouragement and accountability and the worship that's involved in the local church. We meet together to build one another up, to use our spiritual gifts to equip and encourage and empower one another, and that's what community provides. The nature and purpose of the church as well has a number of specific descriptions. There are seven purposes that we list for the church, and it's always helpful to kind of review that. But we need to grow in that context.

At any rate, I then conclude the book. Now I tell people, if you haven't read *Conformed to His Image*, start with this chapter. Start with the concluding chapter. That's always good advice, by the way. If you want to get the essence of a book, read the conclusion first. Really, it's a secret that most people don't know. You want to get the net of that book, read the conclusion, and then you'll know what to look for in the other book if you even choose to read the rest.

That's what I do when I get any kind of an article. I quickly look at the abstract, but then I look at the conclusion. Then if I want more, I'll get the more. But they're tying it together. That's my conclusion. So read if you wanted to just read this thing, and it's the essence of finishing well. There are seven keys to finishing well. Naturally all of you, I do believe, would like to finish well. Am I wrong? Am I mistaken? I don't think you'd be even here if that wasn't the case. So I'm not only appealing to your desire, but I'm seeking to give you tools to help you achieve just that. I write books in many ways as tools, like for example, *Recalibrate Your Life*, which some of you have got.

What's my purpose? I often talk about different levels: the question of meaning, the question of identity, the question of purpose, the question of hope. Meaning, identity, purpose, hope. Those four issues relate to the four questions: Where did I come from? (Meaning). Who am I? (Identity). Why am I here? (Purpose). Where am I going? (Hope). So it kind of captures the entirety.

The seven keys to finishing well begin with intimacy with the interior life. Because if you've got this, everything else will fall in its place. In fact, I think the other six keys are related to cultivating that intimacy with Christ. I put fidelity in the spiritual disciplines there as well, again, as I said, because they're not ends in themselves, but rather the spiritual disciplines are means to the end of becoming more like him by knowing him better. That I may know you more clearly, love you more dearly, follow you more nearly. So that's the idea there.

But there's also a need, I find, for people who finish well who are characterized by this third quality. These are people who have a biblical perspective on the circumstances of life. As I look at people in the scriptures and in the history of the church who finished well, they all seem to have these qualities in common. They were also teachable. As they grew older, they didn't become more rigid and inflexible, but they remained supple and fluid because they recognized that teachability is a key component to our lives. If you want to live well, you're going to learn well, and you'll always be in a learning mode.

Given that, then teachability, and then after that, having a personal purpose. Again, it's critical that we have a purpose understanding. Why am I here? Again, many people have businesses that have a purpose statement, but they don't have one for their lives. Then finally, healthy relationships. What begins with him, with the intimacy with Christ, will enhance relationships with others. The ministry impact we're supposed to have on the lives of others is expressed in that manner.

There is, indeed, a unity and diversity. I'm just focusing right now on just giving an overview of where we're going. But in this unity and diversity, the body of Christ is both diverse and composite, so that I love the fact that there is a unity and diversity. That's really a reflection in many ways of the Divine Trinity because there you have the unity and the diversity. Three co-equal, co-eternal persons who are not each other, yet they are fully each of is fully God. It's a deep and profound mystery because it provides the basis for relationship, it provides the basis for unity and diversity for an I-thou relationship, because there's got to be more than one person for there to be love. You have to have a thou as well as an I. That's mediated by the third person, the Holy Spirit, because the lover and the beloved and the love that flows between them.

The Holy Spirit is almost like the love that flows between the Father and the Son. In our lives, then, he's a third person. In a relationship, there is a kind of an "us" in any relationship, the "us", and that's meant to grow. That's part of it, and there is an interdependence, not independence on the one hand or codependence on the other, but rather interdependent so that there's a communion that we enjoy with one another.

God, we know, has always used dissimilar people. You don't want to be with a bunch of clones or automata or robots because that would be a very uninteresting world to marry yourself. Just think if you married a person who was absolutely identical to you. That would just be a gruesome idea. Just the other sex, but they're like you. That wouldn't work. You need to have this diversity in that unity, and he's used that and he uses it in the church.

For example, the difference between a John Calvin and his particular emphasis, which would later be particularly related to what was called Reformed theology, or a Thomas Aquinas, the *Summa Theologica*, which is an astonishing thing because he had a kind of a vision of God. He says, "You have written well of me, Thomas. What would be your reward?" And he says, "Only you, Lord." But he says after I had that vision of God, he said, everything I wrote seemed like straw to me. So he stopped writing. He didn't finish his work. That must have been pretty impressive. Martin Luther. Each brings a different thing to the table, and he's balanced by his associate Philip Melanchthon, and there's a different emphasis there.

If you look at the unity and diversity, you take the best of each and brush aside the weaknesses because we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses. We see as well Francis of Assisi, very, very different than John Chrysostom. You look at these, but they all have something to contribute that's different from the other. In fact, I have an appendix that talks precisely about this, about the whole idea of the history of the spiritual development in the church.

In this unity and diversity, we're free to be drawn to that diversity. Some of these approaches will be less appealing to you by nature. Some will be more appealing to you by nature. But it is wise to be aware that you should expose yourself a bit to all the facets just to be aware. That's why I look at the ones even that where you find them less attractive, they'll be a bit of a discipline going on there. That's the end of that part of that, but now we go on to another thing here.

I'm going to talk about the very first of those facets in a little bit more detail. You'll know that some of these are themes I recur that recur in my teaching. I am, I admit, quite repetitive. But that is pretty intentional because that is for pedagogical purposes. You learn by repetition, particularly when it's new insights. This is why people have to hear the gospel on more than one occasion. Multiple occasions that you hear the gospel and then somehow it just sinks in and suddenly a person gets it.

So it also you have to hear certain truths about, for example, what would be talking about the exchanged life and realizing my identity is not in myself or my performance, but in him. Hearing it again and again is counter-cultural and it's counter-intuitive. It goes against the grain of our time. So by hearing them again and again, after a while, oh, the Spirit can use this and one person gets it an "aha" moment.

I had that happen when I was away in Knoxville, Tennessee, this weekend. I lived in Knoxville from '72 to '75. Some of those people who were there I've known since '72. It's kind of wild. Many of them were. But again we're processing what it means to have an appetite for home. Living today in light of that day makes perfect sense. But it was an extraordinary experience to realize the diversity of those people and how we all shape each other's lives and journeys in so many meaningful ways. There was a few occasions there, I spoke on Friday night and then on Saturday morning, and I could see and I talked with a couple of them afterwards. I could see that they suddenly got something that they'd never gotten before.

I have a great pleasure when I see it. I sometimes can see it in their eyes, suddenly they got it. So I asked them, "What was it when I was talking about this? What was your experience?" You do not know when the Spirit is going to speak into a person's life, but you want to be open to and receptive, and then by virtue of hearing it from different angles and so forth. Sometimes you're not ready for a truth. Just like there's some people I've recently met that I wasn't ready to know. I would have loved them and I would have had a great relationship with them, but apparently I was not ready to know them yet. Very strange thought.

So it's not that it's thinning out, it's growing and developing. I was with two people, I should show you the photo of them, but I think I should resist. But when they were much, much younger than they are now and I saw one of them's pointing to the other one like this. He's got his hand covered up, and the other one he doesn't know has this little peace signal above the other guy's head. So they it's a funny photo that just show them and there they are. That was 40 years ago. Isn't that fascinating to see that?

But the point is that we get "aha" moments by repetition and so you have to hear it again and again. This is the essence of the spiritual life if I were to define it in this little visual. The essence of the spiritual life, if you want to really get it, but you never get it, even when you get it, you don't get it because there's new layers to see. So you'll get it on new levels, new depths as well. Even once you have an insight, you can enter it further up and further in.

Being, knowing, and doing. Being, I call loving God completely, and knowing, I call loving self correctly. Now, by loving God completely, I define that as you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your mind, your soul, your strength. You'll notice it goes from the inside to the outside. The strength has to do with your actions, your hands. So it goes from the heart to the head with the mind to the hand. It goes from being to knowing to doing.

Loving God is the key to loving yourself correctly because if you love him enough and believe what he calls you to believe and to do, do you believe this? Then what will happen is you'll allow him to define you and not the world. To love yourself correctly, as I like to define it and you've heard me say this probably many, many times, is to choose to believe that what God says about you is true in spite of your feelings and experiences to the contrary. When he says, for example, you're adopted into the household of God and you are holy and beloved and without reproach, that you are perfect in my sight. Do you feel that way? Didn't ask you to feel that way. It asked you to choose to believe it's true because you see that's you in your deepest self. It's not necessarily true in your soulish self. That's true of your spiritual self. But in your mind, your will, your emotion, you're being brought more and more into conformity with the image of his Son.

But you see that's the basis for security, significance, and satisfaction. Loving yourself correctly is to allow God to define you, not the world. My phrase that I find myself using a lot is the world will define you by default: do nothing. The world will define you, tell you what to live for and what the values are. The Word, however, will only define you by discipline. You're not going to suddenly become spiritual by watching TV. You're not going to get this message about who you truly are in the media, in the news, whatever. You're going to have to choose through discipline to show up and expose yourself to those truths and even there recursive, repetitive, because you don't get it the first time. As you sink into that truth, you keep practicing.

You're creating the greenhouse. You can't create the growth of a plant. We cannot grow, make a thing grow. Nothing. We can only create the conditions for growth. So a gardener doesn't make the plants grow, they have their own life. It's a deep mystery and nobody understands a flower let alone an insect or a bird. It's all mystery. But here's what you can do. You can create the conditions for growth, and that's where the metaphor of a greenhouse comes in. You have the right light and temperature, the moisture, the nurturing, cultivating, all those things. So by creating the conditions for growth, then we move from there.

Loving God completely, loving self correctly, and that's the key to loving others compassionately. Because the more secure you are, the more you approach relationships not out of deficiency but out of sufficiency. You approach relationships out of an overflow rather than looking to them as someone who could help you get your needs met. Instead of looking to people to meet your needs, you've already looked to him who's already met your needs. Then having said that, then you're secure enough and you know who you are. You're significant because God said so, and that you can be satisfied because he's empowered you to do something that's going to last forever.

Given that, you can approach relationships out of the overflow and in an other-centered way and even if they resist or reject, it doesn't destroy you because you're not defined by their opinion of you, but rather by his. Therefore, the interesting irony is that you can love and serve people far better than if you were looking to them for your needs. Because if you're looking to people to meet your needs, you're committed to manipulating them because you've got to get you have to use that. You're like a tick on a back of a dog. But rather, I've seen ticks on ticks. The idea of people just pulling and sucking.

No, here it may be painful if a person doesn't reciprocate. It's painful when there's a misunderstanding and there's a broken relationship, something happened. But it doesn't destroy you because you know who you are. It doesn't necessarily destroy you. That is to say you are secure in Christ, not in your understanding of yourself based on their opinion. That's a great liberty to be set free from the bondage of the opinions and expectations of other people. How many things have I done or taken on that I shouldn't have taken on because I didn't want to disappoint somebody? But maybe it wasn't the right thing to do. Maybe it was I want to be I should rather be seeking to be pleasing to Christ rather than impressive to people. The more I'm impressed with him, the less I'm impressed with people anyway. But actually, the interesting irony is the more I'm impressed with him, the more I'm able to serve people and love them even when there's no results.

So you see this pattern. Loving God completely is the key to loving ourselves correctly and that in turn empowers others to love others compassionately. What begins with the love of God ends with the love of neighbor. You see then it's a reciprocal relationship because as you love others, it'll enhance your love for him. You're loving the ones he loves. So it's a mutually reinforcing dynamic, and I hope that that means something to you because if I had to give you one shot, one image, this is the essence of the whole spiritual life in this one image.

So as I break that down and try to tease it out a little bit more, to love God completely, love ourselves correctly, what does it mean to do those? Just a more on those things. Let's start with the first one: loving God completely. The God of the Bible immediately we have to think of who is the one we're loving. That is why it's always good to start with prayers of adoration rather than petition. My handbook to prayer does that. I think we have church the church has copies if you want to get a copy. If we need more, we can get more for you. But when in any of the days that you use, so this is what the 15th, so this is the the first month day 15. But it always starts with adoration because you need to know who you're talking to and then adoration, bigger view of God, then you grasp the the lower view of sin and you see confession is necessary, then renewal.

Adoration. Who is the one you're pleased and you're privileged to serve? He's infinite and he's personal and he's triune and you'll find this nowhere else. There's no religion as I commonly call it, it's a relationship. In fact, it's a romance. You'll find this nowhere else. Not in Buddhism, not in Hinduism, not in Islam, not in Confucianism, not in Taoism. You're not going to find it elsewhere because all those are all variations of our attempt to bridge the gap between the ultimate and ourselves, however that's defined. And it's always works-based. Our efforts, our right meditation, right action, right concentration, whatever it happens to be.

Here is one who is infinite and personal. Therefore, ultimate reality is a relational being that we can get to know. This relational being displays his glory and his attributes through intelligent moral agents, as well he displays his glory through his created order. So the world is so much of a theater, as it were. His created order is a theater of grace and even though fallen, you begin to see that and leverage that and amplify your vision of who he is.

And he, and this is another critical, absolutely unique thought, religion is humans trying to achieve or do it themselves. It's their initiation, they're initiating it, they're doing the pursuit. Whereas this is totally different. You didn't pursue me, in fact you chose to avoid me. You wanted to escape. I'm pursuing you, and he's the one who initiates and our role is to respond to his relationship. It's always interesting what people have this idea that all roads lead to God eventually. It's like a mountain you go up this thing and as you even if Buddhism's over there and Hindu's over there and eventually we all just like the coexist sticker you've seen. The delusion there is that as we get closer to the top of the mountain we get closer to each other. They fail to grasp that even within Hinduism there are atheistic versions of Hinduism, there are polytheistic versions with about 300 million gods and goddesses, and then there are pantheistic or panentheistic versions of Hindu. They're not even on the same mountain! Forget the same God.

Even within their own religions, there's only one savior. There's no one else who's actually claimed to be a savior and who's proven it by pursuing us and wooing us. He's the initiator. So he's the sacred romancer who purchases his beloved. All the best fairy tales, the best stories, the best romances are true in so far as they are hints of this greater story. The greatest story ever told is a romance. In this romance, the king finds the beloved and he sets his heart on her, he pursues her and seeks to woo her, but he must purchase her and save her, deliver her. So he purchases his beloved, he pursues her, he provides for her and he protects her. She's the one who doesn't initiate, she receives. So there's this divine vision of all of us being actually part of the bride. Very interesting to think of myself in that term as being feminine in that, but compared to him, we are because he's the pursuer, protector, provider, purchaser. We are the ones who receive.

So we in fact didn't pursue him, we were trying to avoid him. We averted and avoided relationships with God because we wanted the autonomous self because in our own very nature we are hardwired for our own self. We don't want to bow the knee to another. So God has to be the Hound of Heaven that often uses severe mercies to get our attention. But he purchased our us and that the infinite Word became the Incarnate Word, which is an astonishing idea. Why did he do it? Not just to become one with us, but to die for us. That's the most astonishing thing. He purchased us, he came to purchase us and his solidarity with the human condition being fully God but now fully human with undiminished deity. He came to do that so that we could then be in him. He became the Incarnate Word, now he's the indwelling Word, and he removed the barrier to the relationship that we formerly had.

Alfred reminded me that Pope Francis says all religions are a path to reach God. No, they're not. Check them out, they don't agree with each other. Buddhism doesn't agree with itself, Islam. They are paths to avoid God but to recreate God in our own image. They're paths to actually make God manageable and to diminish his holiness so that we could have the illusion that we could attain a relationship with him. If anything, the scriptures reveal our utter depravity in the sense that we do not want that person there, we want ourselves, we want life on our terms.

Our purpose, though, is very different from the purposes that we see in this world. It's to grow in an intimate relationship with God. Our purpose is to do that and to know and love and enjoy and honor the triune God of creation. So once he's sought us out and we respond by that grace and that point of regeneration. It's a deep mystery that he could bear our sins and that he could give us his righteousness. It's a deep mystery that grace is actually able to underwrite the cost of our sin. It's a deep mystery that we're given the capacity to respond to it and that it changes us.

Another deep mystery is that he now indwells us and we indwell him. That's impossible. Infinity and eternity, infinitely boundless and far and yet intimate as well. All these are remarkable things. He's the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Triune, intensely relational because again he's a community of persons, he is a society of being. This is deep and mysterious and we have no other analogies for this. You'll find it nowhere.

Here the interesting idea is that there's a vertical and a horizontal component that comes out of this. First of all, by loving God the vertical relationship will empower us on the horizontal to love others. That makes sense, doesn't it? Once you have a right relationship, again Thomas Merton put it well when he said we're not at peace with one another because we're not at peace with ourselves, and we're not at peace with ourselves because we're not at peace with God. That summarizes it beautifully.

If you have peace with God, then you have an inner peace all of a sudden. You realize who and whose you are, and you now recognize your true identity in Christ. Then with that shalom that you have with him, it then empowers you to have peace with others. The relationship is born out of that. We see God and us and others. They are created in God's image for relationship. We are relational beings and at the end of the day, that's what relationships are about.

It's an interesting thing. Our sphere of relationship is always going to be very finite and bounded because you're going to go a couple generations one way and a couple generations in another way. It's always interesting, imagine trying to sell unframed pictures in a garage sale of your family or of your relatives. They'd be totally worthless. "Why? I don't know that person." There's no relationship. Why then I've actually collected these old photos, early photos. I wish I had more. There are so many things I'd like to see that I remember but I never recorded. In those days, I didn't take near as many photos. We none of us did as we do now. Now we get thousands of the things because it doesn't cost us anything because it's digital, don't have to have a set off in film.

But I have scanned a lot of things and treasure those images because of the associations. Why? It's the relationship that I treasure. The interesting thing is others have treasured others, but you don't know them "from Adam's housecat" is the phrase. But you will. The reason that you can't know beyond a couple generations either way is because it would be too painful in a fallen world. It was painful when I lost my grandparents, more when I lost my parents. It would be more with my wife or my daughter. So you could only endure so much bandwidth in a fallen world.

But in an unfallen world, in the new creation, when we are resurrected and we are in a resurrected world, my word, what'll happen then? You'll have open access from Adam to the last person. All people will be contemporaneous with you. Then the fellowship really begins. You'll know these people and you'll be more intimate with them in that context than any relationships you currently have. It's just going to go up further up and further in. You're going to pick up where you left off with other relationships but you're going to have new ones that are going to go on. So that's an incredible thought.

It was Augustine who said this wonderful prayer, "May we know thee, may we know ourselves." *Noverim te, noverim me.* May we know you, because in knowing you then we know ourselves. If you don't know him, you can't know yourself and you're going to be flip-flopping around trying desperately to find some identity to cling to as people are doing now. There's a desperate need for that.

What is man that you give thought to him? There's the human dilemma of our greatness and our smallness, our dignity and our depravity. Pascal beautifully summarizes this whole idea in his *Pensees.* We are the grandeur of the created order, but we also are the degradation of the created order. Stop and think about this, it's an amazing thought. We're not like any other animals. We're not animals, in fact there's a different First Corinthians 15 distinguishes us from animals. We are in this embodied being here as a caterpillar right now. I have to use my caterpillar imagination because I've never met a butterfly yet. But we got hints of what that'll look like.

In this degraded world order, we see depravity, that we bear the image of God and yet on the other hand we're ensnared in trespasses and sin. How can that be? What I love about it is the scriptures only the Bible gives us a realistic view of anthropology. A secularized, a humanist cannot embrace the depravity of man. They have to believe that we're basically good, and what naivety that produces in policies and so forth. We're not basically good. Yet at the same time, they don't have a basis, a secular philosophy doesn't have a basis for our true dignity. Dignity is given we are given worth by the one who made us, not just because of being impressive in other people's eyes.

We're capable of harnessing the forces of nature and more and more impressed with our technologies, but at the same time we can't rule our tongue. It's a supreme irony, isn't it? We have this greatness. I look at the animals and I look at insects. I see bees and they're constantly working. They work all day long. They're indefatigable. The butterflies and the dragonflies, they're working constantly, the birds, they're constantly working they're doing what God made them to do. We're the only ones who go against what he called us to do. We defy him in our fallness.

We are capable of doing that. We can't rule our tongue. We're the most wonderful and creative beings on earth, but we're also the most violent, cruel, and contemptible beings on earth. Now we see the scriptures give us we can look straight into the abyss of the human heart. Why? Because we have the gospel that can give us hope. Because if I looked into that I'd be total angst and despair, and I can see why existentialists who grasp the true condition of human nature would end up in despair unless they encounter the living God.

Only when they do that, when you get the gospel, then you can look hard in the eye at sin because we cannot out-sin the grace of God. Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. This combination of the two is absolutely remarkable. As Pascal put it, "Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." Stop and think about that. I mean, that's an incredible contrast. When I was speaking at a college a number of years ago, one of the students, it was a sophomore, died the night before. She died because she apparently had eaten a watermelon, one of the seeds got caught in her throat when she and she died in her sleep.

So this one seed, in one watermelon, with all the thousands of watermelons and all the fields of watermelon, but this particular one would be the death of a human being. We're just reeds just like that and you can be gone. But Pascal goes on to say the entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. He says, "A vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this."

That's an amazing thought, isn't it? You are given vast dignity and you are worthwhile because you are bearing the image of God and you are defined by him when you realize he is the one who will woo you and pursue you because you're worth that much. What is the measure of the worth of a thing? How much someone's willing to pay for it. Well, what was your purchase price? You were not purchased with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the blood of Christ. So that precious purchase defines your worth, which means that you are boundless worth and you've never met a mere mortal. We're talking to people and about people who will go on into eternity. We are privileged to see the joy of what that's going to produce.

We'll pick up next week. Let me close in a prayer. Father, we give you thanks and praise for who you are and for who you declared yourself to be and that you've declared us now in Christ to be new creatures, new creations. We pray by your grace that we would become more and more in our practice who we already are in our position in Christ's name. Amen.