Last night I attended my last deacons’ meeting in order to take part in the debriefing of an incident that occurred about a month ago in which we assisted a couple from Michigan who were passing through town on their way to Florida. At first blush it sounds like a scam, but believe me when I say that truth is stranger than fiction. It was the kind of mercy situation in which it seemed like God was teaching us more about ourselves than He was teaching the couple about Himself.
We talked about how our call to mercy is not dependent on the level of culpability that a person has for the situation they are in. God does not meet out His grace upon us based on our merit, so why should we get hung up on the fact that someone in trouble had a hand in their own financial demise? It is not the circumstances leading up to the need that define the response, but the need itself that determines our level of responsibility to help.
It got me to thinking about how self-righteous we are when things are going well. We often like to say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Truth be told, we fear that people might actually find out how close we sometimes are to the edge, or worse, that we have already fallen off. Based on a show of hands last night, even some of our church officers are a paycheck away from difficulty. Until such times come we operate as if we are in God’s good graces, but as soon as things start falling apart we begin to doubt and question His grace.
As these thoughts were running through my head last night, I was reminded of something that Sinclair Ferguson said during his sermon on Romans 8:32 at General Assembly last week. Below is an excerpted portion, picking up after an illustration about the trials of life.
There is much opposition and we would be liars to deny it. We would be false to the Gospel to hide it. But there is no opposition that is able to withstand the irresistible advance of the grace of God in the life of the believer, because God is for us.
But the million dollar question practically for all of us is the question, “How do we know that God is for us?” And to that question there are many false answers — one of the most obvious being, “That God has so obviously blessed me in His providences. And I can read from the present enjoyments I have of good things in this world that God is surely for me.”
I am always personally a little cautious when I hear Christians say to others, for example who have made major decisions in their lives and things seem to go very smoothly when they say, “Isn’t it like God to do that?” Because it is also like God to take our best plans, our highest expectations, and in His sovereign gracious purposes to turn our rocks into sand and our plans into dust so that we may learn to say, “Shall we not receive good from the hand of the Lord and shall we not also receive evil from the hand of the Lord?”
And our ultimate confidence that God is for us cannot be found in our ability to interpret the context, the providences, the situations of our lives or the lives of others. But the apostle Paul says, there is one convincing, irrefutable reason for the Christian believer being utterly convinced that God is for him or her, and that is this. He is the God, verse thirty-two, who did not spare his own son, but gave Him up for us all. How will He not also with him graciously give us all things?
The Cross — the Christ — the Gospel — is the reason the Christian believer knows that God is finally and irreversibly for him or for her. And in these glorious words Paul opens this out in three rather obvious statements that flow so eloquently from him: first of all by describing the action of the heavenly father; secondly, by designating the experience of the incarnate son; and thirdly, by expounding the logic of the Christian gospel.
Ferguson then spends the remainder of the sermon unpacking these three things. To relate this to my earlier thoughts I must follow with a personal example. Right now I am sitting on four extra unsold U2 tickets. It sounded like such a good plan three months ago, but instead it has been a burden and frankly, a hardship. Through a series of events (that I do wish to describe in detail) these tickets have affected my finances, my friendships, my family and even my job. Nothing has gone as planned and I find myself regetting, worrying and even suffering.
I begin to fall prey to the lie, as Ferguson describes it at the end of his sermon, that says, “He doesn’t really want to do you good. Look what’s happening in your life. He doesn’t really love you.” The truth that smashes that lie is the simple and practical point that Paul makes in Romans 8:32, that if he has done this for me, then I know that he will give me all things. So whether I go here or there, to the top of the mountains or to the depths, it is by the grace of God that I go; by the grace of a God who loves me — a God who did not spare his own Son for me.