All Scripture Is Profitable

2Tim 3:16 All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable
for teaching [what the way is]
for reproof [how we've left the way]
for correction [how to get back on the way]
for training in righteousness [how to stay on the way]

The Prophet's Whip of Cords

He made the whip himself (John 2:15). Therefore his act of enraged violence was premeditated, not an impulsive outburst. He made a plan and he carried it out. Seizing tables piled with coins he tossed them on their sides. An uproar of protesting and excited voices was heard amid crashes of heavy furniture on stone, tinkling of rolling coins, and the swish and crack of his whip. Sheep bleating, oxen lowing drowned out the muted sounds of the frightened pigeons.

Whether or not the whip bit deep into the flesh of human shoulders we do not know, though I suspect it lashed down on people as well as on animals. Some translations read that he turned over the stools of the pigeon sellers, and as likely as not he unseated some by doing so. They would lie sprawling as the panicked animals stumbled over them.

The miracle is that protests were as feeble as they were vain. He would be sweating and panting with exertion, and there would be a calm purposefulness in his eyes that people could not face. Sheep, oxen, pigeons and people (who would snatch up whatever they had time to) were forced amin the hubbub through the gates.

Nor having done so much did he stop short. Each unsuspecting merchant arriving with more animals would be startled to find his way barred and a whip gripped in the menacing fist of the man with
the unflinching gaze (Mark 11:16).

His controls of the crowd was by a moral force, forged by his total lack of ambivalence and the money changers' uneasy consciences. He was expressing what the common people deep within their hearts had known for years.

What was it about the traffic in coins and animals that offended him so deeply? "A house of prayer" he had called it, not a place of teaching nor yet a place of sacrifice. (He himself was to be the sacrifice.) What was in his mind?

[John White, The Golden Cow]

Our Beloved Sin

Question: How shall we know what our beloved sin is?

Answer 1: The sin which a man does not love to have reproved is the darling sin. Herod could not endure having his incest spoken against. If the prophet meddles with that sin—it shall cost him his head! "Do not touch my Herodias!" Men can be content to have other sins reproved—but if the minister puts his finger on the sore, and touches this sin—their hearts begin to burn in malice against him!

Answer 2: The sin on which the thoughts run most, is the darling sin. Whichever way the thoughts go, the heart goes. He who is in love with a person cannot keep his thoughts off that person. Examine what sin runs most in your mind, what sin is first in your thoughts and greets you in the morning—that is your predominant sin.

Answer 3: The sin which has most power over us, and most easily leads us captive, is the one beloved by the soul. There are some sins which a man can better resist. If they come for entertainment, he can more easily put them off. But the bosom sin comes as a suitor, and he cannot deny it—but is overcome by it. The young man in the Gospel had repulsed many sins—but there was one sin which soiled him, and that was covetousness. Christians, mark what sin you are most readily led captive by—that is the harlot in your bosom! It is a sad thing that a man should be so bewitched by lust, that if it asks him to part with not only half the kingdom (Esther 7:2) but the whole kingdom of heaven, he must part with it, to gratify that lust!

Answer 4: The sin which men use arguments to defend, is the beloved sin. He who has a jewel in his bosom, will defend it to his death. So when there is any sin in the bosom, men will defend it. The sin we advocate and dispute for, is the besetting sin. If the sin is anger, we plead for it: "I do well to be angry" (Jonah 4:9). If the sin is covetousness and we vindicate it and perhaps wrest Scripture to justify it—that is the sin which lies nearest the heart.

Answer 5: The sin which most troubles us, and flies most in the face in an hour of sickness and distress, that is the Delilah sin! When Joseph's brethren were distressed, their sin in selling their brother came to remembrance: "We are truly guilty concerning our brother . . . therefore is this distress come upon us" (Gen. 42:21). So, when a man is on a sickbed and conscience says, "You have been guilty of such a sin; you went on in it, and rolled it like honey under your tongue!" Conscience is reading him a sad lecture. That was the beloved sin for sure.

Answer 6: The sin which a man finds most difficulty in giving up, is the endeared sin. Of all his sons, Jacob found most difficulty in parting with Benjamin. So the sinner says, "This and that sin I have parted with—but must Benjamin go, must I part with this delightful sin? That pierces my heart!" As with a castle that has several forts about it, the first and second fort are taken—but when it comes to the castle, the governor will rather fight and die than yield that. So a man may allow some of his sins to be demolished—but when it comes to one sin, that is the taking of the castle; he will never agree to part with that! That is the master sin for sure.

[Thomas Watson, The Godly Man's Picture]

To please Him in all respects

Col 1:10 NASB - so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please {Him} in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God;

I have committed this verse to memory. Here is some help from the original Greek:
 
walk: peripateo. to order one's behavior, to conduct one's self.
 
worthy: axios. weighing as much as another thing. "The saints are to see to it that their manner of life, their conduct, weighs as much as the character of their Lord. That is, He is to be their example in life, and the copy must be like the example." [Wuest]
 
work: ergon. that which one undertakes to do. an act, deed, thing done.
 
knowledge: epignosis. a thorough knowlege, a penetrating and gripping knowledge. Here it is not speaking of information, but rather a knowledge of His will for our conduct.

Endure Chastening

Hbr 12:5 KJV - And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him:
Hbr 12:6 KJV - For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
Hbr 12:7 KJV - If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?

When God chastens His people for sin, His chastisements are not the fruits of wrath or parts of the curse, for there is no wrath in them; the are not satisfactions for sin; they are not sent in vindictive justice; they are not merely penal, but medicinal; their reason is displeased love, and their purpose is fuller embraces.

[Samuel Bolton, The True Bounds of Christian Freedom]

Unbelief

"Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you, an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God." Hebrews 3:12

Unbelief is the prince of sins. As faith is the radical grace, so is unbelief a radical sin,—a sinning sin. As, of all sinners, those are most infamous, who are ring-leaders and make others sin, which is the brand which God has set upon Jeroboam's name, "Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who, sinned, and made Israel to, sin" (1 Kings 14:16), so among sins they are most horrid that are most productive of others, such is unbelief above any other: it is a ring-leading sin, a sin-making sin. The first poisonous breath which Eve sucked in from the tempter, was sent in these words, "Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" (Gen 3:1). As if he had said, Consider well on the matter; do you believe God meant so? Can you think so ill of God, as to believe he would keep the best fruit of the whole garden from you? This was the traitor's gate at which all other sins entered into her heart; and it continues to this day of the same use to Satan, for the hurrying souls into other sins, called therefore "an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God." The devil sets up this sin of unbelief, as a blind between the sinner and God; that the shot which come from the threatening, levelled at the sinner's breast, may not be dreaded by him; and then the wretch can be as bold with his lust as the pioneer is at his work, when he has got his basket of earth between him and the enemies' bullets: nay, this unbelief does not only choke the bullets of wrath which are sent out of the law's fiery mouth, but it damps the motions of grace which come from the gospel; all the offers of love which God makes to an unbelieving heart, they fall like seed into dead earth, or like sparks into a river, they pare out as soon as they fall in.

[William Gurnall, Departing from the Living God]

Christ Known Only by Revelation

(1) God has shut up everything of Himself in His Son.

(2) No one can know anything of that save as it is revealed. "No one knoweth the Son, save the Father, neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him" (Matt 11:27). Revelation can only come by choice of the Son.

The third thing is this. God always keeps the revelation of Himself in Christ bound up with practical situations. I want you to get that. God always keeps the revelation of Himself in Christ bound up with practical situations. You and I can never get revelation other than in connection with some necessity. We cannot get it simply as a matter of information. That is information, that is not revelation. We cannot get it by studying. When the Lord gave the manna in the wilderness (type of Christ as the bread from heaven) He stipulated very strongly that not one fragment more than the day's need was to be gathered, and that if they went beyond the measure of immediate need, disease and death would break out and overtake them. The principle, the law, of the manna, is that God keeps revelation of Himself in Christ bound up with practical situations of necessity, and we are not going to have revelation as mere teaching, doctrine, interpretation, theory, or anything as a thing, which means that God is going to put you and me into situations where only the revelation of Christ can help us and save us.

You notice that the Apostles got their revelation for the Church in practical situations. They never met around a table to have a Round-Table Conference, to draw up a scheme of doctrine and practice for the churches. They went out into the business and came right up against the desperate situation, and in the situation which pressed them, oft-times to desperation, they had to get before God and get revelation. The New Testament is the most practical book, because it was born out of pressing situations. The Lord gave light for a situation. The revelation of Christ, we might say, in emergencies is the way to keep Christ alive, and the only way in which Christ really does live to His own. You understand what I mean.


Now then, that is why the Lord would keep us in situations which are acute, real. The Lord is against our getting out on theoretical lines with truth, out on technical lines. Oh, let us shun technique as a thing in itself and recognize this, that, although the New Testament has in it a technique, we cannot merely extract the technique and apply it. We have to come into New Testament situations to get a revelation of Christ to meet that situation. So that the Holy Spirit's way with us is to bring us into living, actual conditions and situations, and needs, in which only some fresh knowledge of the Lord Jesus can be our deliverance, our salvation, our life, and then to give us, not a revelation of truth, but a revelation of the Person, new knowledge of the Person, that we come to see Christ in some way that just meets our need. We are not drawing upon an 'it', but upon a 'Him'.
 
[T. Austin Sparks, The School of Christ]

The Throne and the Altar

It is ever a serious matter for a sinner to find himself standing before the throne of God with the unanswered claims of that throne bearing down upon his conscience. There are no excuses there — no palliating circumstances there — no qualifying clauses there — no blaming of men or things there. There is but one object seen there — seen in its guilt, its wretchedness and its ruin, and that object is self, and as to that object the tale is easily told. It is all summed up in that most solemn, weighty, suggestive word, "undone." Yes; self is undone. That is all that can be said about it. Do what you will with it, and you cannot make it out to be aught but a hopeless, undone thing; and the more speedily and thoroughly this is understood the better.

All who have ever stood before that throne have given utterance to the same confession, and it will ever be found that just in proportion to our experience of the light of the throne will be our experience of the grace of the altar. The two things invariably go together. In this day of grace the throne and the altar are connected. In the day of judgement "the great white throne" will be seen without any altar. There will be no grace then. The ruin will then be seen without the remedy, and as for the result, it will be eternal perdition. Awful reality! O beware of having to meet the light of the throne without the provision of the altar!

Now in the scene before us we not only see a marvellous favour conferred, but conferred after such a fashion as to let us into the very secrets of the bosom of God. The divine remedy was not only applied to Isaiah's felt ruin, but applied in such a way as to let him know assuredly that the whole heart of God was in the application. "Then flew one of the seraphim unto me." The rapidity of the movement speaks volumes. It tells us distinctly of Heaven's intense desire to tranquillise the convicted conscience, bind up the broken heart and heal the wounded spirit. The energy of divine love gave swiftness to the seraphic messenger as he winged his way down from Jehovah's throne to where a convicted sinner stood confessing himself "undone."

What a scene! One of those very seraphim that with veiled face stood above Jehovah's throne crying, "Holy, holy, holy," passes from that throne to the altar, and from the altar away down to the deep depths of a convicted sinner's heart, there to apply the balmy virtues of a divine sacrifice. No sooner had the arrow from the throne wounded the heart than the seraph from the altar "flew" to heal the wound. No sooner had the throne poured forth its flood of living light to reveal to the prophet the blackness of his guilt than a tide of love rolled down upon him from the altar and bore away upon its bosom every trace of that guilt. Such is the style — such the manner of the love of God to sinners! Who would not trust Him?

Beloved reader, whosoever you are, in earnest desire for the welfare of your immortal soul, permit me to ask you if you have experienced the action of the throne and the altar? Have you ever retired from all that false light which the enemy of your precious soul would fling around you in order to prevent your getting a true insight into your total ruin? Have you ever stood where Isaiah found himself when he cried out, "Woe is me! for I am undone"? Have you ever been brought to own from your heart, "I have sinned"? (Job 33) If so, it is your privilege to enter this moment into the rich enjoyment of all that Christ has done for you on the cross.

You do not need to see any vision. You do not require to see a throne, an altar, a flying seraph. You have the Word of God to assure you "Christ suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3: 18). That same Word also assures you that "all that believe are justified from all things" (Acts 13: 39).

[C. H. Mackintosh, The Throne and the Altar]

In whom I am [already] well pleased

Behold, My beloved Son, in whom I am [already] well pleased. That is the tense it is given to us in. Now Jesus had not done a miracle, hadn't preached a sermon. Had no public ministry. In fact He spent 30 years at home, the majority of those [years] in a carpenter's shop. Somewhere along the way Joseph [his father] died. Jesus grew up under a single mom, not bitter. Walked with God. He hung every door jam straight. He never made out a phony bill when He fixed somebody's window. He never jipped somebody on material. God was saying "What I could not find in the first Adam (because he sinned and turned away) I have found for 30 years in the second Adam. Every day His labor was sacred. Every day and what He did, His heart was on me and on My Word and We communed with one another. This is My beloved Son, in whom I am [already] well pleased." Very important for us because by and large most of you here in this room will not have a public ministry. You will have a ministiry of one sort or another, but by and large not one as Christ did; preaching, healing, but you will have the kind of ministry He had for most of His life. We can find our lives where the majority of His life was spent [without a public ministry yet in fellowship with God.]

[Joe Focht, Pastor, Calvary Chapel Philadelphia]