Sunday, April 23, 2017
Some notes that I took down while listening to John Piper's sermon on Marriage: Forgiveness and Forbearance. Its really just in note form, because its just for me to remember what I have learnt. I'm sure you will benefit more if you want to look up the full sermon.
vertical forgiveness, vertical grace, vertical justification is coming down from Jesus from the cross, and I am now so thrilled by it, so transformed by it, so revelling in it that i now bend it out to my wife. and thus marriage becomes a display of the covenant keeping love of Christ and the church.
Why are you stressing forgiveness and forbearance, instead of romance and enjoyment.
1) In marriage there will always be conflict, for the simple reason that there will always be sin. Idiosyncracies, peculiarities of this person that will get your goat. always to the end of time.
2) Hard, rugged work of forgiveness and forbearance makes possible the reawakening of affections that you thought were dead.
3) God gets glory when 2 very imperfect, very flawed, very different people forge a lifetime of faithfulness in the furnace of affliction, by relying on Jesus.
The main battle in life/ marriage is to believe in Christ. When I say believe, i mean to trust it, embrace it, cherish it, treasure it, bank on it, breathe it, let it shape you. Christ is my life, His cross is my joy. This is my life, this is my hope. From this i love my husband. Out of this I find forgiveness and forbearance possible.
Put on then:
1) as God's chosen ones
2) as God's holy ones
3) as God's loved ones
On that basis, it tells us what inner conditions and external behaviours are the right clothing, fitting clothing to the chosen, the holy & the loved.
Put on then compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another, and if anyone has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.
Sink your roots by grace into the gospel until there's more mercy here flowing out in kindness. Fight the fight at the level of the gospel.
Humility is lowliness, meekness is the demeanor that follows.
Forbearing/ Longsuffering/ Patience means inside if there a short fuse, there should be a long fuse, a really really long fuse. And if there is this long fuse, it burns so long, it rains on it before it gets to the dynamite. Leads to forbearance and forgiveness. Sink your roots into the gospel, until your fuse gets longer and you become a longsuffering Christian.
Where does anger come from? Anger is a marriage killer. Rage is the opposite of longsuffering. Longsuffering grows out of lowliness and bowels of mercy, which flow from knowing yourselves to be loved, holy and chosen. Anger is rooted in no believing the gospel. When I say believing i mean not embracing, not cherishing, not treasuing, not being stunned and blown away that my sins are forgiven and i am loved, and i am set apart for God, and I am chosen from eternity owing to nothing in myself. How could I ever hold anything against anybody?
Because for the degree that John Piper is not amazed at his salvation, Noel pays.
What does forbearance mean, it means enduring one another, doesn't sound hopeful or positive.
Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. The NT is not excessively romantic about relationships. It's just tough, stay in them! Because if you stay in them, glorious things can happen.
Forgive/ freely, graciously give without exacting a payment. In the context of a relationship, somebody has done something, and they've gotten into debt with you, they've hurt you/ neglected you/ made me. You can settle that by saying "That person, he/she should pay!" And we make people pay in various ways, we get the last word, say an ugly word, mope, don't show up in bed.
This says return good for evil without making her pay. That's the spirit of forgiveness. Do not return evil for evil, but bless.
Forgiveness says: I will not treat you badly, because of your sins against me, or your annoying habits.
Forbearance says usually to itself: Those sins against me, and those annoying habits really bother me, and I won't hold it against you.
If that weren't true, we wouldn't need this word endurance. This word is here because they don't go away!The habit that you wish were different doesn't go away.
The compost pile analogy:
Picture your marriage as a grassy field and you enter at the beginning full of hope & joy. You look out on the field and you see beautiful flowers and grass and rolling hills, trees and it is beautiful. You want to walk in this all your life. On your wedding day I want this woman and I want this man, and we want to be together and walk in beautiful fields of green grass, spring flowers. And before long you step into cow pie. And in some seasons in your marriage they seem to be everywhere. This is not grass, this is just manure! These are sins, flaws, idiosyncrasies, weaknesses, annoying habits in your spouse and you try to forgive them and you try to forbear. The problem is they can tend to dominate the relationship. Everywhere you step, it smells. It may not be true that they are everywhere, it just feels that way. I think the combination of forgiveness and forbearance leads to the creation of a compost pile. Here at the compost pile, you and your husband begin to shovel cow pies into this pile, and you put a fence around it and you shovel them in. And you look at each other and you simply admit that there are a lot of cow pies in this field. You and I bring a lot of cow pies to this relationship. And you say to each other that we got to do this because we are losing sight of the fact that we keep focusing on these cow pies, that's all we are thinking about! I mean we're looking for them to step in! So let's get them and throw them in one place, the compost pile. And when we have to, we'll go there and we'll smell it and we'll feel bad, and we'll deal with it as best as we can. Then we walk away from the pile. And we'll set our eyes on the rest of the field. Satan and our flesh can begin to take a few disappointments/ frustrations and multiply them so out of proportion that we think "there's no green grass anywhere, there are no flowers, there are no trees, there's no sunshine which is an absolute lie. Then we are going to pick some of our favorite paths, hills that we know are not strewn with cow pies, and we're going to be thankful that that part of the field is sweet. Our hands may be dirty, and our backs may ache from all the shoveling, but we know one thing, we will not pitch our tent in that compost pile. We will go there when we must, this is the gift of grace that we will give each other again and again and again, we will only go there when we must. We won't go live there, we won't retreat there, we won't go lick our wounds there, we won't pitch our tent there, we will only go there when we must. Why? because you and I are chosen, holy and loved.
avoid the aliens;
2:27 AM
