Meditations

Rebranding Sin

by Ben Zornes · Jan 24, 2022

There is a clever game we play when it comes to identifying sin. Instead of calling the sin by its biblical name, we slap a nickname on it that allows everyone to nod along with understanding camaraderie. We don’t call it an outburst of wrath, as Paul does, we say that we were simply expressing frustration. This is a sneaky way of avoiding taking responsibility for our sin, and thus confessing it, repenting of it, and then mortifying it.

An angry man might bark out his disappointment that his child didn’t obey him, berating the child for the bad behavior. Internally, he might feel a twinge of guilt that he unloaded that wrath on the kid, but then soothes his conscience by renaming the sin as pent up frustration. But when a father forms the habit of uncorking his rage at his wife and children, and covers it with clever rebranding, he’s sinning in two ways. The outburst of wrath is obvious, but he’s abdicating the responsibility of his office as head of the home.

He has become like the captain of an infantry who turns his weapon on his own troops. When a father rebrands these outbursts of wrath and fosters a culture of berating and demeaning his wife and children, he’s a traitor to his own cause.

Regardless of whether his wife and children are at fault for some dishonor or disobedience in their own way, it’s his calling to take responsibility for the tone and tenor of his home. If things are raggedy, if everyone is barking at each other, if all the voices have gotten increasingly screechy, it’s the father’s duty to lead in pulling off the worldly label on the sin, and calling it what God calls it. Then, he must lead in mortifying it.

Our homes are called to reflect the nature and character of the triune God we worship. We see that God is a Father who beams with joy over His beloved Son. We see that the Son lays down His life to redeem and win His bride. We see the Spirit at work to order and array the saints with the beautiful garments of holiness. However, the homes of many Christians don’t display the character of the Trinity, because we’ve rebranded many of our sins. The remedy is to stop lying about your sin. Stop calling it things that get you understanding empathy from your colleagues, and dulls the sting of conviction. Call your sin what it is, then cast it out, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit.

Leave Your Sin There

by Ben Zornes · Jan 18, 2022

The Gospel humbles the proud, and exalts the humble. Nowhere is that more evident than when we come to the Lord’s Supper. The pride of man thinks that the more you earn, the greater your fame, the more talented you are, the better your spot at the table and the better portions you should receive.

The table of the haughty insists that you must earn a spot at the table. The fellowship of the self-righteous is tenuous, however. They must continually adjust for popular opinions about what constitutes moral behavior. They fence the table by conforming to the fads of the time. The haughty heart wants its sins overlooked, while others, whose sins just recently became detestable according to public opinion, must be left out.

But this table, where the signs of our Lord’s humilition are brought to view, rebukes everyone’s sins. Petty and trite sins to criminal and deranged sins. Murder and envy, lust and sodomy, lying and defrauding, laziness and bank heists. Christ died not so that we could smuggle our sins into His banqueting hall and hide them under the table. He died so that we need carry our sin and our guilt no more.

The humble have had their eyes opened by grace to see the horrendous grotesqueness of their sin and the holy glory of Christ’s sacrifice for that sin. The humble say, “Amen,” to the evil of their sin, and say another “Amen,” twice as loud, to the forgiveness and eternal life offered them in the Gospel.

So, to all the world, to sinners of all stripes, to the child who tells habitual lies, to the businessman who rages at his employees, to the cross-dresser, the stripper, and the self-righteous Pharisees, the Word of the Gospel is this: come. Come here, and leave your sin there.

So come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ…

Out of the Pond-Scum

by Ben Zornes · Jan 17, 2022

To fight the darkness, we must begin where the darkness does. The Humanist Manifesto once declared, “No deity will save us, we must save ourselves.” Their salvation, however, is a farce. It’s founded on the belief of the perfectibility of man. Man isn’t fallen, they say, he’s simply rising out of the pond scum biologically, and now is also progressing from the pond scum of out-dated religious views on morality.

To help speed this devilish salvation along, the secular State has volunteered to nurture us from cradle to grave with the saccharine message that the greatest good is found by each person defining the world according to their own libido.

That salvation is about as expansive as a prison cell. But hey, at least you’re free to explore your sexuality in the meta-verse. The modern narrative being spun is that by embracing an ethic of sexual permissiveness overseen by nanny-state shenanigans we might progress towards a perfect utopia, overthrowing all bigoted oppression along the way.

But as Chesterton pointed out: “If we wish to pull down the prosperous oppressor we cannot do it with the new doctrine of human perfectibility; we can do it with the old doctrine of Original Sin.” A recovery of a thoroughgoing doctrine of Original Sin is, indeed, of utmost necessity in this hour.

From this doctrine God reveals to us that we aren’t rising out of the pond scum and into perfection. Rather, we have fallen from the glorious heights of the good way in which God first made us. Only by Christ, the Perfect Man, can we rise and be restored to goodness. Always remember that the Good News of the gospel is prefaced with the bad news of our fallen condition. Any other starting point is trying to imprison you forever in hell.

God made us in His own image, male and female He created us, and called it all good. But as the prophet Hosea said, “we like men have transgressed the covenant.” We’ve rebelled by denying our fallen state, and we’ve rebelled by indulging all the lusts of our fallen state. By denying Original Sin, we have coddled the culture, preaching a gospel of self-gratification. Instead of the straight lines of the Law, by which the Lord graciously convicts us of sins and reveal our need for the Savior, we have used the scribbled lines of corrupted desires to guide our morality. As such, we now face such laws as are being passed in Canada, and are on their way to the US, laws which enshrine evil as good and good as evil. May God deliver us from our own folly, and grant that we in the church might not hide secret sins in our own hearts and lives.

What Baptism Confesses

by Ben Zornes · Dec 21, 2021

The Christian life can be summed up by the word confession. The word for confession in the Greek literally means to say the same thing. The Christian is one who says the same thing that God says. Thus, our life should be summed up in confessing two things. We confess our sinfulness, and we confess our righteousness. These two confessions seem at odds, but baptism into Christ enables us to say both things truly.

Apart from Christ we are dirty and stained by sin, and thus we rest under the just wrath of God. But in your baptism, God says that you are clean and you are righteous. The Christian life is confessing these two things: I’m a sinner made righteous by my union with Jesus. You must learn to say what God says about you. As we learn to confess that, we can’t help but declare, “How great our debt, but greater far is the price He paid.”

Breadhouse

by Ben Zornes · Dec 17, 2021

It isn’t just a happy accident that Christ was born in a town named Bethlehem, which means house of bread. If a movie studio got this script they’d likely pass on it for being to “on the nose”. They might offer constructive criticism to the aspiring screenwriter, “You’ve got talent kid, just learn to be more subtle.”

But this story, told by the supreme Storyteller, simultaneously confounds the wise while being gloriously clear for even the most simple amongst us. Our father Adam’s sin was eating from the tree he was forbidden to eat from. As a result, God cut us off from the tree of life. From then on, mankind hungered for life, but no matter where he looked or how hard he labored this bread of life eluded him.

The high-points of the OT all resemble each other, in that God comes down to some undeserving but chosen servant to renew a covenant of grace. These moments are always punctuated by some covenant meal. Noah offers up a sacrifice after the flood; Abraham witnesses the glory of God pass through the parted meat of the covenantal sacrifice, Moses leads Israel to partake of a passover meal on the eve of their exodus, and during their wilderness wanderings God sent down bread from heaven. Indeed, this thread of God calling out to mankind through these covenant renewals with His chosen saints and then feeding them in a covenantal meal is one of the main threads.

It shouldn’t shock us that God, in bringing about the salvation for all the world, selects the little town of Bethlehem, the bread-house, in which to place the bread of life. He even went so far as to ensure that the virgin placed Him in a feeding trough. The point is unmistakeable. You are empty. He came to fill you up. You are hungry. He came to feed you. The bread of life has come down…

So come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ…

Not a Hallmark Holiday

by Ben Zornes · Dec 17, 2021

The angels which appeared to the shepherds made that now famous line which is plastered across all our Christmas swag, from pillows to pet sweaters. They declared glad tidings of great joy. Now, if we let Hallmark guide our understanding of this declaration we’ll receive a spiritually impoverished understanding of what they declared.

The tidings of “great joy” weren’t just that a cute baby had been born. Of course, while the birth of a child is a wonderful joy, and all the Grandmas’ hearts are warmed, that wasn’t the angels’ point.

These were glad tidings regarding the fulfillment of promise. The joy declared is the joy of a promise fulfilled, it is the joy of covenant mercies being remembered, it is the joy of God making good on His oath to Abraham to bless all the nations through the promised Seed.

Our Christmas joy is founded on the bedrock of two immutable things, as Hebrews 6:18 tells us, those two things are God and His promise. He swore to Abraham by Himself, and confirmed it with an oath. The glad tidings of great joy is that our God who cannot lie, in the fullness of time, made good on His oath and our Savior was born in Bethlehem.

Your joy doesn’t spring from the fleeting word of man. The world tells you to find your happiness, and then points you to all the petty trinkets and shadow glories of earth. Empty promises by finite men aren’t the ground for your eternal joy. Instead, true joy springs from God and His promise. He is and He has vowed. This joy Christ ushered in by His coming is not measured out to us in small doses, but is an ocean in which to swim. These indeed are glad tidings.

Narrow or Broad

by Ben Zornes · Nov 30, 2021

There’s a way of restricting the Supper so as to drain it of its meaning; similarly there’s a way of broadening it that renders it so thin that it might as well not be there. Some restrict the Supper just to members of the local body who’ve passed a strict gauntlet of catechism questions without stammering once. Some, aiming for inclusivity, distribute the “Supper” to all manner of unrepentant heathens, and “why stop there,” the recently ordained non-binary, lesbian Episcopalian reasons, her 13 feral cats deserve means of grace as well.

We welcome all baptized believers to join us at the Lord’s table. This isn’t because we have a low view of the sacredness of the Supper, but because we have a high view. While we believe that formal membership with a local body is necessary for the care of souls, the roster of our membership is neither the limit of or identical with the roster of all of God’s elect saints.

The boundary line of a church’s membership rolls tells us which souls God will call the elders of that local body to give an account for on the Last Day (Heb. 13:17). The boundary for who might partake of the Supper stretches from sea to sea, from continent to continent, and from generation to generation. The doorway for partaking of the Supper is that of holy baptism, and all who’ve passed through that door are most welcome here.

The question isn’t, “Are you a member of this local body?” Rather, the question is, “Are you baptized into Christ?” If you are baptized, then come. If you are Christ’s, then come. If you’re born of God, then come. If you have looked to Him in evangelical faith, yet you are just a visitor with us this morning, then come. Here is the communion of the saints.

So come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ…

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