Listening to advice

Proverbs 19:20-21 (NIV)

20 Listen to advice and accept discipline,

    and at the end you will be counted among the wise.

21 Many are the plans in a person’s heart,

    but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.

We all may think we know what is best. We may even argue with friends or spouse, the there is always the change we could be wrong. We are to listen to advice and when we know it to be trues we are to accept it as discipline. Then our own words will become wisdom for others. Remember it never hurts to listen to advice for the person giving it may always have seen the wisdom in their words.

Some years ago, Tim Keller had a relative who never would wear a seat belt. Every time he talked to him, he would get in the car, but wouldn't wear his seat belt. We all nagged him to no avail. Then one day he got in the car and put his seat belt on right away. We said, "What happened to you?" He said, "A couple weeks ago, I went to see a friend of mine in the hospital. He was in a car crash, and he went through the windshield. He had like 200 stitches in his face. For some strange reason, ever since then, I've been having no problem buckling up."

I asked him, "Well, did you get new information? What changed you? Did you not know that people go through the windshield?" Of course I knew the answer to those questions: What happened was that an abstract proposition became connected to an actual sensory experience that is something he saw. As Jonathan Edwards used to basically say over and over again, it's only when you attach to some truth—that's when real life change occurs. Something has to become real to your heart. Then you will be changed.

God the Father

1 Peter 1:3 (NIV)

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

Peter reminds us that we have been adopted into the family of God and that we have been given a new birth of resurrection. It is being a part of this family that God is our father, just as God is the father of Christ.

In his book Delighting in the Trinity, Michael Reeves compares two ways to look at God. First, there is the common view that God is the Supreme Ruler of the Universe. Reeves contends that if God is The Ruler and the problem is that I have broken the rules, the only salvation he can offer is to forgive me and treat me as if I had kept the rules. Then he gives the following analogy:

But if that is how God is (if he is primarily the Ruler), my relationship with him can be little better than my relationship with any traffic cop. Let me put it like this: if, as never happens, some fine cop were to catch me speeding and so breaking the rules, I would be punished; if, as never happens, he failed to spot me or I managed to shake him off after an exciting car chase, I would be relieved. But in neither case would I love him. And even if, like God, he chose to let me off the hook for my law-breaking, I still would not love him. I might feel grateful, and that gratitude might be deep, but that is not at all the same thing as love. And so it is with the divine policeman: if salvation simply means him letting me off and counting me as a law-abiding citizen, then gratitude (not love) is all I have. In other words, I can never really love the God who is essentially just The Ruler. And that, ironically, means I can never keep the greatest command: to love the Lord my God.

But then Reeves offers another way, the biblical way, to think about God—consider Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the beauty of the Triune God. Reeves write again:

It is a lane that ends happily in a very different place, with a very different sort of God. How? Well, just the fact that Jesus is "the Son" really says it all. Being a Son means he has a Father. The God he reveals is, first and foremost, a Father. "I am the way and the truth and the life," he says. "No one comes to the Father except through me" (Jn 14:6). That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.

[Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity (IVP Academic, 2012), pages 20-21]