An Ebullient Christianity

What the Word says on slaves...

2010-12-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

I'll admit that this topic isn't very "Christmas-related", but I thought it might be encouraging all the same. It's a quite exhaustive list (I seem to like lists, don't I?) of the word 'slave' in the New Testament (δοῦλος in Greek). As I'm typing this, I'm reminded that Jesus took the form of a servant, and humbled Himself in obedience to His Father when He took what we deserved to the cross and paid for it once and for all there. Since we are to be slaves to righteousness, now under the Spirit, perhaps some of these verses will prove enlightening. It is also interesting to note that toward the end of the list, Christ's second coming becomes the subject of the verses. What an exciting future we have as Christians! Enjoy:

Slave, n. 1. A person who is wholly subject to the will of another; one who has no will of his own, but whose person and services are wholly under the control of another.

NIV

Matthew 20:27

and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—

Mark 10:44

and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.

John 8:33

They answered him, "We are Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?"

John 8:34

Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.

John 8:35

Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.

Acts 7:7

But I will punish the nation they serve as slaves,' God said, 'and afterward they will come out of that country and worship me in this place.'

Acts 7:9

"Because the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him

Acts 16:16

Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling.

Acts 16:19

When the owners of the slave girl realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities.

Romans 6:6

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—

Romans 6:15

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!

Romans 6:16

Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?

Romans 6:17

But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted.

Romans 6:18

You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

Romans 6:19

I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness.

Romans 6:20

When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.

Romans 6:22

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.

Romans 7:14

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.

Romans 7:25

Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

Romans 8:15

For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, "Abba, Father."

1 Corinthians 7:21

Were you a slave when you were called? Don't let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so.

1 Corinthians 7:22

For he who was a slave when he was called by the Lord is the Lord's freedman; similarly, he who was a free man when he was called is Christ's slave.

1 Corinthians 7:23

You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men.

1 Corinthians 9:19

Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.

1 Corinthians 9:27

No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.

1 Corinthians 12:13

For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

Galatians 2:4

This matter arose because some false brothers had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves.

Galatians 3:28

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 4:1

What I am saying is that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate.

Galatians 4:3

So also, when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world.

Galatians 4:7

So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

Galatians 4:8

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.

Galatians 4:22

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman.

Galatians 4:23

His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way; but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise.

Galatians 4:24

These things may be taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: This is Hagar.

Galatians 4:25

Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children.

Galatians 4:30

But what does the Scripture say? "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son."

Galatians 4:31

Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.

Galatians 5:1

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Ephesians 6:5

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.

Ephesians 6:6

Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.

Ephesians 6:8

because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free.

Ephesians 6:9

And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.

Colossians 3:11

Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

Colossians 3:22

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.

Colossians 4:1

Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven.

1 Timothy 1:10

for adulterers and perverts, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine

1 Timothy 5:1

Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers,

1 Timothy 6:1

All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God's name and our teaching may not be slandered.

Titus 2:9

Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them,

Philemon 1:16

no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a man and as a brother in the Lord.

Hebrews 2:15

and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

1 Peter 2:18

Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.

2 Peter 2:19

They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity—for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him.

Revelation 6:15

Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains.

Revelation 13:16

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead,

Revelation 19:18

so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and mighty men, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, small and great."

ESV

Matthew 20:27

and whoever would be first among you must be your slave,

Mark 10:44

and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.

John 8:34

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.

John 8:35

The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever.

Acts 16:16

As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling.

1 Corinthians 7:21

Were you a slave when called? Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.)

1 Corinthians 7:22

For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ.

Galatians 3:28

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 4:1

I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything,

Galatians 4:7

So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

Galatians 4:22

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman.

Galatians 4:23

But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise.

Galatians 4:30

But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.”

Galatians 4:31

So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman.

Ephesians 6:8

knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.

Colossians 3:11

Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.

Philemon 16

no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother—especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

Revelation 6:15

Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains,

Revelation 13:16

Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead,

Revelation 19:18

to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.”

Looking into Joy

2010-10-25T12:28:00.000-06:00

Here's another post, regarding the topic of joy, as it is described in the Word. I have used this list to remind myself what joy really is. Knowing God personally can and should result in a lasting joy that transcends circumstances and relationships. Now, living that out can sometimes be very difficult to be sure, but I really appreciate how John 15:10 addresses the experiencing of joy: "If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete." In our obedience to God will we find joy - not always in an immediate fashion, but over time; finding out what pleases God and doing those things with a thankful, grateful heart I think will change our hearts.

Read on!

JOY, n.

1. The passion or emotion excited by the acquisition or expectation of good; that excitement of pleasurable feelings which is caused by success, good fortune, the gratification of desire or some good possessed, or by a rational prospect of possessing what we love or desire; gladness; exultation; exhilaration of spirits.

Joy is a delight of the mind, from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a good.

Job 33:26 He prays to God and finds favor with him, he sees God's face and shouts for joy; he is restored by God to his righteous state.

Psalm 16:11 You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

Psalm 19:7-9 The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the LORD are sure and altogether righteous.

Psalm 51:12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

Psalm 86:3-5 Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I call to you all day long. Bring joy to your servant, for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. You are forgiving and good, O Lord, abounding in love to all who call to you.

Psalm 90:14 Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

Jeremiah 15:16 When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's delight, for I bear your name, O LORD God Almighty.

Habakkuk 3:17-19 Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights.

John 15:10 If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

Romans 15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

1 Peter 1:8-9 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

A look into Grace

2010-08-31T09:42:00.000-06:00

I have been discovering over the past year or so that I struggle with grace, its implications and application to my life. What has greatly helped me, is to get an idea of what the Word says about grace, how it defines it and how people in the Bible learned about and lived out grace. So, without further ado,

An exhaustive list of verses on grace, including a definition to get us started:

Grace

1. Favor; good will; kindness; disposition to oblige another; as a grant made as an act of grace.

Or each, or all, may win a lady''s grace.

2. Appropriately, the free unmerited love and favor of God, the spring and source of all the benefits men receive from him.

And if by grace,then it is no more of works. Rom.11.

3. Favorable influence of God; divine influence or the influence of the spirit, in renewing the heart and restraining from sin.

My grace is sufficient for thee. 2 Cor.12.

4. The application of Christ''s righteousness to the sinner.

Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. Rom.5.

5. A state of reconciliation to God. Rom.5.2.

6. Virtuous or religious affection or disposition, as a liberal disposition, faith, meekness, humility, patience, &c. proceeding from divine influence.

7. Spiritual instruction, improvement and edification. Eph.4.29.

8. Apostleship, or the qualifications of an apostle. Eph. 3.8.

9. Eternal life; final salvation. 1 Pet.1.13.

10. Favor; mercy; pardon.

Bow and sue for grace

With suppliant knee.

11. Favor conferred.

I should therefore esteem it a great favor and grace.

Job 41:12
"I will not fail to speak of his limbs, his strength and his graceful form.

Psalm 45:2
You are the most excellent of men and your lips have been anointed with grace, since God has blessed you forever.

Proverbs 1:9
They will be a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck.

Proverbs 3:22
they will be life for you, an ornament to grace your neck.

Proverbs 3:34
He mocks proud mockers but gives grace to the humble.

Proverbs 4:9
She will set a garland of grace on your head and present you with a crown of splendor."

Proverbs 5:19
A loving doe, a graceful deer— may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.

Song of Solomon 7:1
How beautiful your sandaled feet, O prince's daughter! Your graceful legs are like jewels, the work of a craftsman's hands.

Isaiah 26:10
Though grace is shown to the wicked, they do not learn righteousness; even in a land of uprightness they go on doing evil and regard not the majesty of the LORD.

Jonah 2:8
"Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.

Zechariah 12:10
[ Mourning for the One They Pierced ] "And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.

Luke 2:40
And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.

John 1:14
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:16
From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another.

John 1:17
For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Acts 4:33
With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all.

Acts 6:8
[ Stephen Seized ] Now Stephen, a man full of God's grace and power, did great wonders and miraculous signs among the people.

Acts 11:23
When he arrived and saw the evidence of the grace of God, he was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts.

Acts 13:43
When the congregation was dismissed, many of the Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who talked with them and urged them to continue in the grace of God.

Acts 14:3
So Paul and Barnabas spent considerable time there, speaking boldly for the Lord, who confirmed the message of hisgrace by enabling them to do miraculous signs and wonders.

Acts 14:26
From Attalia they sailed back to Antioch, where they had been committed to the grace of God for the work they had now completed.

Acts 15:11
No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are."

Acts 15:40
but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.

Acts 18:27
When Apollos wanted to go to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples there to welcome him. On arriving, he was a great help to those who by grace had believed.

Acts 20:24
However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the gospel of God's grace.

Acts 20:32
"Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.

Romans 1:5
Through him and for his name's sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith.

Romans 1:7
To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 3:24
and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Romans 4:16
Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham's offspring—not only to those who are of the law but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all.

Romans 5:2
through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.

Romans 5:15
But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God'sgrace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!

Romans 5:17
For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:20
The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more,

Romans 5:21
so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 6:1
[ Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ ] What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?

Romans 6:14
For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.

Romans 6:15
[ Slaves to Righteousness ] What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!

Romans 11:5
So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace.

Romans 11:6
And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.

Romans 12:3
For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.

Romans 12:6
We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man's gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his faith.

Romans 15:15
I have written you quite boldly on some points, as if to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me

Romans 16:20
The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you.

1 Corinthians 1:3
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 1:4
[ Thanksgiving ] I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.

1 Corinthians 3:10
By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds.

1 Corinthians 15:10
But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.

1 Corinthians 16:23
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you.

2 Corinthians 1:2
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

2 Corinthians 1:12
[ Paul's Change of Plans ] Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God. We have done so not according to worldly wisdom but according to God's grace.

2 Corinthians 4:15
All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.

2 Corinthians 6:1
As God's fellow workers we urge you not to receive God's grace in vain.

2 Corinthians 8:1
[ Generosity Encouraged ] And now, brothers, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches.

2 Corinthians 8:6
So we urged Titus, since he had earlier made a beginning, to bring also to completion this act of grace on your part.

2 Corinthians 8:7
But just as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness and in your love for us —see that you also excel in this grace of giving.

2 Corinthians 8:9
For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.

2 Corinthians 9:8
And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

2 Corinthians 9:14
And in their prayers for you their hearts will go out to you, because of the surpassing grace God has given you.

2 Corinthians 12:9
But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me.

2 Corinthians 13:14
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Galatians 1:3
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,

Galatians 1:6
[ No Other Gospel ] I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—

Galatians 1:15
But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased

Galatians 2:9
James, Peter and John, those reputed to be pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship when they recognized the grace given to me. They agreed that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the Jews.

Galatians 2:21
I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!"

Galatians 3:18
For if the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on a promise; but God in his grace gave it to Abraham through a promise.

Galatians 5:4
You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace.

Galatians 6:18
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers. Amen.

Ephesians 1:2
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 1:6
to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

Ephesians 1:7
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace

Ephesians 2:5
made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.

Ephesians 2:7
in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

Ephesians 2:8
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—

Ephesians 3:2
Surely you have heard about the administration of God's grace that was given to me for you,

Ephesians 3:7
I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God's grace given me through the working of his power.

Ephesians 3:8
Although I am less than the least of all God's people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,

Ephesians 4:7
But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.

Ephesians 6:24
Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.

Philippians 1:2
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Philippians 1:7
It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart; for whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God's grace with me.

Philippians 4:23
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.

Colossians 1:2
To the holy and faithful brothers in Christ at Colosse: Grace and peace to you from God our Father.

Colossians 1:6
that has come to you. All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God's grace in all its truth.

Colossians 4:6
Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.

Colossians 4:18
I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand. Remember my chains. Grace be with you.

1 Thessalonians 1:1
Paul, Silas and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace and peace to you.

1 Thessalonians 5:28
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

2 Thessalonians 1:2
Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

2 Thessalonians 1:12
We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

2 Thessalonians 2:16
May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope,

2 Thessalonians 3:18
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

1 Timothy 1:2
To Timothy my true son in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

1 Timothy 1:12
[ The Lord's Grace to Paul ] I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me faithful, appointing me to his service.

1 Timothy 1:14
The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

1 Timothy 6:21
which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. Grace be with you.

2 Timothy 1:2
To Timothy, my dear son: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

2 Timothy 1:9
who has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,

2 Timothy 2:1
You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.

2 Timothy 4:22
The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you.

Titus 1:4
To Titus, my true son in our common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.

Titus 2:11
For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.

Titus 3:7
so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.

Titus 3:15
Everyone with me sends you greetings. Greet those who love us in the faith. Grace be with you all.

Philemon 1:3
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Philemon 1:25
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Hebrews 2:9
But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

Hebrews 4:16
Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

Hebrews 10:29
How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit ofgrace?

Hebrews 12:15
See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.

Hebrews 13:9
Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, not by ceremonial foods, which are of no value to those who eat them.

Hebrews 13:25
Grace be with you all.

James 4:6
But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble."

1 Peter 1:2
who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood: Grace and peace be yours in abundance.

1 Peter 1:10
Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care,

1 Peter 1:13
[ Be Holy ] Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.

1 Peter 4:10
Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms.

1 Peter 5:5
Young men, in the same way be submissive to those who are older. All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble."

1 Peter 5:10
And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.

1 Peter 5:12
[ Final Greetings ] With the help of Silas, whom I regard as a faithful brother, I have written to you briefly, encouraging you and testifying that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it.

2 Peter 1:2
Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

2 Peter 3:18
But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen.

2 John 1:3
Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father's Son, will be with us in truth and love.

Jude 1:4
For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.

Revelation 1:5
Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from the seven spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

Revelation 22:21
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God's people. Amen.

The Yahoo! Word List

2010-06-30T09:08:00.001-06:00

Finally, a word list for all us techies and geeks out there.

A brief idea of what you'll encounter:

24/7

Note slash. Example: The phones are staffed 24/7.

No space. Not 3-D.

3G, 4G

Types of cell phone networks.

50-50

Note hyphen and use of numerals. Example: They figure their candidate has a 50-50 chance.

8x, 16x

Format for values that denote the speed of drives such as CD and DVD drives. Example: The DVD-RW drive boasts write, rewrite, and read speeds of 16x, 8x, and 16x, respectively.

9/11

Acceptable abbreviation for September 11, 2001, when space is tight; however, Sept. 11 is the preferred abbreviation.

°C

Acceptable abbreviation for degrees Celsius. (To create the degree symbol, see “Special characters.”) Example: The average summer temperature is 23°C in the valley. (No space between the numeral and °C, no period after °C.)

°F

Acceptable abbreviation for degree(s) Fahrenheit. (To create the degree symbol, see “Special characters.”) Example: The average summer temperature is 75°F in the valley. No space between the numeral and °F, no period after the abbreviation.

Hit the jump for the complete list.

Why Does the Universe Look So Old?

2010-06-29T15:49:00.002-06:00

Some inspiring thoughts from Tim Challies, here.

What do you think?

Ultrasound #2 - 6/11/2010

2010-06-13T15:35:00.000-06:00

Lisa's Ultrasound #2

Ultrasound #1 - 3/12/2010

2010-06-13T15:33:00.003-06:00

Lisa Ultrasound 3-12-2010

Lego Hello World

2010-06-03T08:37:00.002-06:00

This. Is. Awesome.

Kauai Photos

2010-05-12T11:31:00.004-06:00

Christ Conducts His Choir

2010-03-26T08:25:00.005-06:00

This is pretty amazing, I must admit:

From: Head Heart Hand

Waiting for Jesus

2010-02-22T09:07:00.002-07:00

by Henry Morris, Ph.D.

"Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation." (Isaiah 12:2)

It is fascinating to note all the occurrences of the word "salvation" in the Old Testament. Most are translations of the Hebrew yeshua, which corresponds to the name "Jesus" in English. For example, the verse above could just as well read "behold, God is my Jesus; . . . the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and song; he also is become my Jesus."

Hebrew parents usually gave their children names which had significance. Thus, when Gabriel instructed Joseph to name Mary’s son "Jesus," they would recognize immediately that they were, in effect, to name Him "Salvation," because "he shall save his people from their sins" (Matthew 1:21). We can easily imagine that Mary and Joseph spent many hours together poring over their Bibles and reading again all the great prophecies of the coming Savior—especially those in which His very name, yeshua, had been anticipated.

The first of these was in the dying words of their ancestor, Jacob, after whom Joseph’s own father had been named (Matthew 1:16). In almost his last words, the dying patriarch had exclaimed: "I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord" (Genesis 49:18). We can at least wonder whether they wondered if Jacob, in his prophetic vision, had actually seen Jesus, and cried out, enraptured, "I have waited for thy Jesus, O Lord!" Then, in Habakkuk 3:13, they could even have found both His name and His title ("anointed" = Messiah = Christ). Thus: "Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, even for salvation with thine anointed |i.e., Jesus thy Christ|; thou woundest the head out of the house of the wicked" (i.e., Satan—note Genesis 3:15). In any case, we can be sure that Joseph and Mary "marvelled at those things which were spoken of him" (Luke 2:33). HMM

From: http://www.icr.org/article/5096/

The Father of All

2010-01-26T08:37:00.002-07:00

by Henry Morris, Ph.D.

"Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us? why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?" (Malachi 2:10)

The message of Malachi, the last of the Old Testament prophets, was primarily directed to the Jews of the restoration, who already were backsliding after being restored from their Babylonian captivity, and God's rebuke of their sinful behavior focused on the key to its correction. They needed to remember, first of all, that they were all brothers, because they all had the same Father. This was not a reference to their becoming spiritual children of God by the new birth, but a reminder of the even more basic fact that they had all been specially created by God in the first place. They should therefore be united in God's great calling of the Jews as God's chosen people, bearing His message to the whole world.

Although Malachi's message was primarily for the Jews, it also has all men in view. "For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; . . . saith the LORD of hosts" (Malachi 1:11). There was an earlier covenant than the Mosaic and Levitical covenants—one which God made with all men after the great Flood, which has never been withdrawn.

This Noahic covenant, continuing for perpetual generations, does indeed remind us that all men everywhere are brothers, created by the selfsame Creator, and responsible to Him for their behavior toward one another, and for their stewardship of the earth under His ownership. Thus, Malachi's rhetorical questions remind us that the only way to resolve problems among the nations of the world is, first of all, to remind and try to convince them that they all were created by the one true "Lord of hosts," that they must someday answer to Him, and that He still loves them as a father loves his children. HMM

From: http://www.icr.org/article/5065/

Youthful Warriors

2010-01-15T06:06:00.002-07:00

by John D. Morris, Ph.D.
"Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity." (1 Timothy 4:12)
Many has been the time when a Christian soldier on foreign soil has considered himself a missionary, not only to his fellow soldiers, but also to the citizens of that country which might otherwise be closed to "professional" missionaries. These young men and women have led Bible studies, dispersed Christian literature, and served the surrounding people in many ways. "Whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water . . . he shall in no wise lose his reward" (Matthew 10:42).
Paul's admonition to young Timothy applies to anyone seeking to gain acceptance among hesitant observers, but especially to those with whom it is difficult to talk. Note the "exemplary" traits and habits necessary for such a one.
In word: "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt" (Colossians 4:6).
In conversation, or better, conduct: "Abstain from all appearance of evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22).
In charity, or true agape love, God's kind of love: "This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you" (John 15:12).
In spirit: "Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit" (1 John 4:13).
In faith: "Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone" (James 2:17).
In purity: "Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands . . . and purify your hearts" (James 4:8).
If we exhibit spiritual maturity in all these ways, we can be certain God will grant a fulfilling walk with and a fruitful ministry for Him. JDM

From http://www.icr.org/article/5056/

The Marks of Manhood

2009-10-30T10:37:00.001-06:00

By Dr. Albert Mohler

When does a boy become a man? The answer to this must go far beyond biology and chronological age. As defined in the Bible, manhood is a functional reality, demonstrated in a man's fulfillment of responsibility and leadership.

With this in mind, let me suggest thirteen marks of biblical manhood. The achievement of these vital qualities marks the emergence of a man who will demonstrate true biblical masculinity.

1. Spiritual maturity sufficient to lead a wife and children.

The Bible is clear about a man's responsibility to exercise spiritual maturity and spiritual leadership. Of course, this spiritual maturity takes time to develop, and it is a gift of the Holy Spirit working within the life of the believer. The disciplines of the Christian life, including prayer and serious Bible study, are among the means God uses to mold a boy into a man and to bring spiritual maturity into the life of one who is charged to lead a wife and family.

This spiritual leadership is central to the Christian vision of marriage and family life. A man's spiritual leadership is not a matter of dictatorial power, but of firm and credible spiritual leadership and influence. A man must be ready to lead his wife and his children in a way that will honor God, demonstrate godliness, inculcate Christian character and lead his family to desire Christ and to seek God's glory.

Spiritual maturity is a mark of true Christian manhood, and a spiritually immature man is, in at least this crucial sense, spiritually just a boy.

2. Personal maturity sufficient to be a responsible husband and father.

True masculinity is not a matter of exhibiting supposedly masculine characteristics devoid of the context of responsibility. In the Bible, a man is called to fulfill his role as husband and father. Unless granted the gift of celibacy for gospel service, the Christian boy is to aim for marriage and fatherhood. This is assuredly a counter-cultural assertion, but the role of husband and father is central to manhood.

Marriage is unparalleled in its effect on men, as it channels their energies and directs their responsibilities to the devoted covenant of marriage and the grace-filled civilization of the family. They must aspire to be the kind of man a Christian woman would gladly marry and children will trust, respect, and obey.

3. Economic maturity sufficient to hold an adult job and handle money.

Advertisers and marketers know where to aim their messages — directly at adolescent boys and young men. This particular segment of the population is inordinately attracted to material goods, popular entertainment, sporting events and other consumer options. The portrait of young manhood made popular in the media and presented as normal through entertainment is characterized by economic carelessness, self-centeredness and laziness.

A real man knows how to hold a job, handle money with responsibility and take care of the needs of his wife and family. A failure to develop economic maturity means that these young men often float from job to job, and take years to "find themselves" in terms of career and vocation.

Once again, an extended adolescence marks a huge segment of today's young male population. Slothfulness, laziness and economic carelessness are marks of immaturity. A real man knows how to earn, manage and respect money. A Christian man understands the danger that comes from the love of money, and fulfills his responsibility as a Christian steward.

4. Physical maturity sufficient to work and protect a family.

Unless afflicted by injury or illness, a boy should develop the physical maturity that, by stature and strength, marks recognizable manhood. Of course, men come in many sizes and demonstrate different levels of physical strength, but common to all men is a maturity, through which a man demonstrates his masculinity by movement, confidence and strength.

A man must be ready to put his physical strength on the line to protect his wife and children and to fulfill his God-assigned tasks. A boy must be taught to channel his developing strength and emerging size into a self-consciousness of responsibility, recognizing that adult strength is to be combined with adult responsibility and true maturity.

5. Sexual maturity sufficient to marry and fulfill God's purposes.

Even as the society celebrates sex in every form and at every age, the true Christian man practices sexual integrity, avoiding pornography, fornication, all forms of sexual promiscuity and corruption. He understands the danger of lust, but rejoices in the sexual capacity and reproductive power God has put within him, committing himself to find a wife, and to earn her love, trust and admiration — and eventually to win her hand in marriage.

It's critical that men respect this incredible gift, and to protect this gift until, within the context of holy marriage, they are able to fulfill this gift, love their wives, and look to God's gift of children. Male sexuality separated from the context and integrity of marriage is an explosive and dangerous reality. The boy must understand, even as he travels through the road of puberty and an awakened sexuality, that he is accountable to God for his stewardship of this great gift.

6. Moral maturity sufficient to lead as example of righteousness.

Stereotypical behavior on the part of young males is, in the main, marked by recklessness, irresponsibility and worse. As a boy grows into manhood, he must develop moral maturity as he aspires to righteousness, learning to think like a Christian, act like a Christian and show others how to do the same. The Christian man is to be an example to others, teaching by both precept and example.

Of course, this requires the exercise of responsible moral reasoning. True moral education begins with a clear understanding of moral standards, but must move to the higher level of moral reasoning by which a young man learns how biblical principles are translated into godly living and how the moral challenges of his day must be met with the truths revealed in God's inerrant and infallible word.

7. Ethical maturity sufficient to make responsible decisions.

To be a man is to make decisions. One of the most fundamental tasks of leadership is decision-making. The indecisiveness of so many contemporary males is evidence of a stunted manhood.

Of course, a man does not rush to a decision without thought, consideration or care, but a man does put himself on the line in making a decision — and making it stick. This requires an extension of moral responsibility into mature ethical decision-making that brings glory to God, is faithful to God's word and is open to moral scrutiny. A real man knows how to make a decision and live with its consequences — even if that means that he must later acknowledge that he has learned by making a bad decision, and then by making the appropriate correction.

8. Worldview maturity sufficient to understand what is really important.

An inversion of values marks our postmodern age, and the predicament of modern manhood is made all the more perplexing by the fact that many men lack the capacity of consistent worldview thinking. For the Christian, this is doubly tragic, for our Christian discipleship must be demonstrated in the development of a Christian mind.

The Christian man must understand how to interpret and evaluate issues across the spectrum of politics, economics, morality, entertainment, education and a seemingly endless list of other fields. The absence of consistent biblical worldview thinking is a key mark of spiritual immaturity.

A boy must learn how to translate Christian truth into genuine Christian thinking. He must learn how to defend biblical truth before his peers and in the public square, and he must acquire the ability to extend Christian thinking, based on biblical principles, to every arena of life.

9. Relational maturity sufficient to understand and respect others.

Psychologists now talk of "emotional intelligence," or EQ, as a major factor in personal development. While the world has given much attention to IQ, EQ is just as important. Individuals who lack the ability to relate to others are destined to fail at some of life's most significant challenges and will not fulfill some of their most important responsibilities and roles.

By nature, many boys are inwardly directed. While girls learn how to read emotional signals and connect, many boys lack the capacity to do so, and seemingly fail to understand the absence of these skills. While a man is to demonstrate emotional strength, constancy and steadfastness, he must be able to relate to his wife, his children, his peers, his colleagues and a host of others in a way that demonstrates respect, understanding and appropriate empathy. This will not be learned by playing video games and by entering into the privatized world experienced by many male adolescents.

10. Social maturity sufficient to make a contribution to society.

While the arena of the home is an essential and inescapable focus of a man's responsibility, he is also called out of the home into the workplace and the larger world as a witness, and as one who will make a contribution to the common good.

God has created human beings as social creatures, and even though our ultimate citizenship is in heaven, we must also fulfill our citizenship on earth. A boy must learn to fulfill a political responsibility as a citizen, and a moral responsibility as a member of a human community. The Christian man bears a civilizational responsibility, and boys must be taught to see themselves as shapers of the society even as the church is identified by our Lord as both salt and light.

Similarly, a Christian man must learn how to relate to unbelievers, both as witness and as fellow citizens of an earthly kingdom.

11. Verbal maturity sufficient to communicate and articulate as a man.

A man must be able to speak, to be understood and to communicate in a way that will honor God and convey God's truth to others. Beyond the context of conversation, a boy must learn how to speak before larger groups, overcoming the natural intimidation and fear that comes from looking at a crowd, opening one's mouth, and projecting words.

Though not all men will become public speakers, every man should have the ability to take his ground, frame his words, and make his case when truth is under fire and when belief and conviction must be translated into argument.

12. Character maturity sufficient to demonstrate courage under fire.

The literature of manhood is replete with stories of courage, bravery and audacity. At least, that's the way it used to be. Now, with manhood both minimalized and marginalized by cultural elites, ideological subversion and media confusion, we must recapture a commitment to courage that is translated into the real-life challenges faced by the Christian man.

At times, this quality of courage is demonstrated when a man risks his own life in defense of others, especially his wife and children, but also anyone who is in need of rescue. More often, this courage is demonstrated in taking a stand under hostile fire, refusing to succumb to the temptation of silence and standing as a model and example to others, who will then be encouraged to stand their own ground.

In these days, biblical manhood requires great courage. The prevailing ideologies and worldviews of this age are inherently hostile to Christian truth and are corrosive to Christian faithfulness.

It takes great courage for a boy to commit himself to sexual purity and for a man to devote himself unreservedly to his wife. It takes great courage to say no to what this culture insists are the rightful pleasures and delights of the flesh. It takes courage to serve as a godly husband and father, to raise children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. It takes courage to maintain personal integrity in a world that devalues the truth, disparages God's word, and promises self-fulfillment and happiness only through the assertion of undiluted personal autonomy.

A man's true confidence is rooted in the wells of courage, and courage is evidence of character. In the end, a man's character is revealed in the crucible of everyday challenges. For most men, life will also bring moments when extraordinary courage will be required, if he is to remain faithful and true.

13. Biblical maturity sufficient to lead at some level in the church.

A close look at many churches will reveal that a central problem is the lack of biblical maturity among the men of the congregation and a lack of biblical knowledge that leaves men ill equipped and completely unprepared to exercise spiritual leadership.

Boys must know their way around the biblical text, and feel at home in the study of God's Word. They must stand ready to take their place as leaders in the local church.

While God has appointed specific officers for his church — men who are specially gifted and publicly called — every man should fulfill some leadership responsibility within the life of the congregation. For some men, this may mean a less public role of leadership than is the case with others. In any event, a man should be able to teach someone, and to lead in some ministry, translating his personal discipleship into the fulfillment of a godly call.

There is a role of leadership for every man in every church, whether that role is public or private, large or small, official or unofficial. A man should know how to pray before others, to present the Gospel, and to stand in the gap where a leadership need is apparent.

From: Boundless Webzine

The Greatest Show on Earth

2009-10-13T14:18:00.001-06:00

By Tim Challies

From http://www.challies.com/archives/book-reviews/the-greatest-show-on-earth.php:

It has been a couple of years since Richard Dawkins’ last major work, The God Delusion (my review). That book was a long-time fixture on the bestseller lists and served to establish Dawkins as the foremost spokesman for the New Atheists. Dawkins has long had two related emphases in his writing and speaking: the non-existence of God and the evidence in nature that evolution is responsible for all that exists. Where The God Delusion emphasized the former, his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, emphasizes the latter. It is primarily a counter-attack to advocates of Intelligent Design, and represents Dawkins’ attempt to provide natural evidence for evolution. He says simply, “Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it.”

It will not surprise you to hear that I was not convinced by Dawkins’ evidences for evolution. I will not provide a rebuttal of those evidences here since I know that others who are more qualified than I am will do just that. Instead, in just a few paragraphs, let me share a few of my thoughts on this book and what I consider its more prominent flaws.

Overall, there is a thread of arrogance in many of Dawkins’ arguments. On the one hand Dawkins wants to show how science continues to make vast and important discoveries; he wants to show that science is living and always advancing, disproving old theses in favor of new ones. On the other hand he wants to act as if all we know about evolution we know for certain. So when we see that the retina in the human eye has the appearance of being installed backwards, we can therefore state with certainty that this is the case and that it is the result of a mutation that was overcome by fortuitous adaptations in the human brain. In other words, the human eye is a mistake. But how are we to know that an advance in science, two years from now, will not show that this is no accident but is just that way it has to be—or, to borrow from the world of software, that it is a feature instead of a bug. He relies on science to prove what is absolutely true or false, never pointing out how often science has been wrong in the past and how often a new advance overshadows or disproves an old one. The history of science gives me little confidence that, in the end, he will be proven correct even with an issue as simple as the human eye.

Dawkins holds up the invariability of DNA code across all living creatures as evidence of shared ancestry (since the genetic code is shared across all living things—it is what is written in the code, not the code itself, that distinguishes one creature from another). But when I look at the same thing, I see that it points in the opposite direction. I see it, quite obviously, as evidence of a common artist. If I look at two paintings and see that they bear a great degree of similarity to one another, that they feature similar scenes and a similar brand of realism or abstraction, I do not assume that one painting evolved from the other or that together they evolved from a common ancestor; instead, I assume that they have come from the hand, the brush, of the same artist. I can grant that there is a sense in which man is related to ape and aardvark—we share a common designer. The fact that my DNA resembles that of any other living creature simply reinforces this fact. Believing in Creation does not demand that we suppose God did not reuse any parts or that every creature has to be entirely different from every other creature. One who believes in God as Creator can affirm that he is the designer and that he based all living things on common elements.

One thing I noted often in the pages of The Greatest Show on Earth is that it is often difficult to know where fact ends and speculation begins. When Dawkins says that a kind of beetle has, over evolutionary time, evolved to resemble the ant it preys upon, do we know this is the case, or is Dawkins simply filling in what he considers a logical hole? Can he prove that this beetle began looking like something other than it is now using the same scientific rigor he demands of Creationists? Or is this just speculation? In this book he rarely distinguishes between the two. Needless to say, this leads to a fair bit of potential confusion.

There is a deep and obvious irony in Dawkins’ constant use of words of agency. In his worldview there is, at least in nature and in the universe, no planning, no design, no invention, no creation, no purpose. Everything has come to be through a long process of chance. Yet throughout the book he constantly softens this harsh reality by borrowing the words of agency and purpose. Why? Could it be that the world just too hard to contemplate without injecting some kind of higher purpose into it? But there is more. Very often he turns to examples or metaphors to explain what he is trying to communicate and, again, almost invariably these examples depend on some kind of agency. So, for example, he will discuss how there came to be so many varied breeds of dog, each descended from the wolf. This may be an evidence of evolution, but if so, it evidences a designer who made the decisions about which breed would have long legs and which would have short ones, which would have big ears and which would have small ones. It was human agency that shaped each of these breeds of dog! How can this then stand as an example of the agent-less, impersonal forces of nature? Again and again he falls into this trap.

All this caused me to reflect on how cold, how stark the world would be without some kind of agency. A scientist can conjure up in his mind ways of describing the world without God, but he has a lot more trouble explaining it. Design seems to scream for a designer, elegance for agency. Even Dawkins cannot deny that the world gives the appearance of design; so his task is to prove that the most obvious explanation is not the correct one. I would challenge Dawkins in his future books not to use this cop out, not to say photosynthesis was “invented” by bacteria more than a million years ago. This is an unfair condescension that perhaps just proves that he cannot maintain his line of reasoning with any kind of consistency. Always he denies a designer, yet so often he perhaps-inadvertently invokes one.

In this book I see the importance of what we can call worldview—the way each of us understands the world, the way each of us interprets all of life. Dawkins’ worldview demands that there is no God and that everything came to be without the assistance or oversight of a designer. Not surprisingly, then, everywhere he looks he sees evidence to support his presuppositions, just as a Creationist looks to Creation and sees evidence of God. If I go out hunting for bigfoot, convinced of his existence, I will inevitably find evidence to support my theory. I will find vague footprints and half-eaten meals, each of which will prove to me that I am hot on bigfoot’s trail. My presuppositions shape my conclusions. So this book shows me again that it is impossible, or near-impossible, to overcome our worldviews.

This book shows that Dawkins is still angry, still shocked that anyone could be so hopelessly confused as to believe in God and to doubt naturalistic evolution. In fact, he refers to such people as “history-deniers,” people who see the evidence, spit on it, and turn instead to their comfortable old deities. “No reputable scientist disputes it,” he says, but of course he would use circular logic to define a reputable scientist. He would never admit that a scientist could be reputable and deny evolution. Here we have the same old Dawkins. Sure he tries a new approach, but ultimately it is more of the same.

Is there value in reading The Greatest Show on Earth?. I am inclined to think that there is, at least for some people. I find it useful to read books written from an opposing viewpoint since they provide a very natural “check” for me. They help me wrestle with not only what I believe but how I express what I believe. This book gave me a lot to think about in that regard. And, though Dawkins insisted that the unbiased reader will close the book convinced of the validity of evolution, this was not the case for me. Then again, does the unbiased reader even exist? We’ve already shown that Dawkins is far from unbiased himself.

Plot and Plan Against Sexual Immorality

2009-10-07T14:38:00.000-06:00

by Motte Brown

I really appreciate this bit of wisdom from Jon Bloom from Desiring God blog about fighting for purity:

It's very important that we count the cost of sexual immorality before temptation hits. That's the time for clear thinking. Temptation clouds our judgment. That's why we pray "keep us from temptation." Avoiding the fog by steering around it is much better than trying to navigate through it.

Bloom goes on to reference a list Randy Alcorn made 25 years ago as a young pastor detailing for himself the consequences of adultery. It's his way of "steering around" sexual temptations before they happen. Alcorn writes that he reads the list when traveling or feeling vulnerable.

Here's a portion of the list with relevant consequences for singles:

Grieving my Lord; displeasing the One whose opinion most matters.
Loss of reward and commendation from God.
Having to one day look Jesus in the face at the judgment seat and give an account of why I did it. Forcing God to discipline me in various ways.
Suffering of innocent people around me who would get hit by my shrapnel (a la Achan).
Guilt awfully hard to shake—even though God would forgive me, would I forgive myself?
Plaguing memories and flashbacks that could taint future intimacy with my wife.
Bringing great pleasure to Satan, the Enemy of God.
Heaping judgment and endless problems on the person I would have committed [sexual immorality] with.
Possible diseases that could affect your health and the health of your spouse.
Possible pregnancy, with its personal and financial implications.
Loss of self-respect, discrediting my own name, and invoking shame and lifelong embarrassment upon myself.

It's also helpful to remember the positive practical effects from this list such as guiltless ministry impact and uninhibited intimacy with your wife (or future wife). Obeying God is better for you in real ways.

From: http://www.boundlessline.org/2009/10/plot-and-plan-against-sexual-immorality.html

O...M...Never Mind

2009-10-07T14:35:00.000-06:00

by Heather Koerner

"Okay," our devotion leader said. "Can anybody name any sins that they saw committed or discussed in that clip?"

He had just shown us a 5-minute clip of a popular sitcom. It took about a milli-second before the answers started coming. Fornication. Homosexual Behavior. Coveting. Cruelty. For just 5 minutes, the writers had certainly packed a punch.

"Any more?" he asked.

A few more answers popped out, though slower now.

"Anything else?" he asked. "I'm looking for something in particular."

There was silence for a good minute until someone offered, "They took the Lord's name in vain pretty often."

"That's it," he smiled. "Seven times to be exact."

I thought of that devotion while watching an ABC Nightline segment from last night's show. Nightline is currently doing a series on the Ten Commandments and last night's segment, titled "OMG! I Just Broke a Commandment!", focused on the third commandment. (Text story is here.)

Particularly, it focused on the increasing use of "OMG!" by Americans, both in text and verbal form. "They're just three letters of the alphabet ..." the voiceover guy says at the beginning of the segment, "... but they deliver an awfully big idea."

The segment then goes on to show a montage of "OMG" use from sitcoms, "reality" TV shows and even as a category on the game show Jeopardy. I've even seen it as a category on my Yahoo! homepage.

"I think when people use it," said one teenage girl being interviewed, "it's more to, convey, 'That's so exciting!' or 'How cool!' and instead of saying that, they said 'OMG!' instead."

"Most teens don't think about it," said another, "they just say it."

But that "not thinking" about the significance of those letters could be the problem. When asked whether "OMG!" represented a vain use of the Lord's name, Bob Miller, an Old Testament expert at Catholic University, said:

"I seriously do think it is a problem. I think that it shows a lack of belief that God is present or that there is any sort of reverence around what it is you're actually saying. I think the fact that it has become a casual thing that is thrown around in the language is just a symptom of that and that would never have happened in earlier centuries."

But isn't "OMG" just like all the other white-washed references to God's name that we've become accustomed to or that may even sound corny to us, Nightline asked? Golly, Gee, Jiminy Cricket (JC), Gadzooks, Jeepers, Oh Gosh. Are those taking the Lord's name in vain?

I've frequently said, "Oh, Criminy" and just now looked it up on Merriam-Webster. Great.

The teenagers in the Nightline piece seemed to try to make that case: That "OMG!" simply is an exclamation of surprise, or amazement, or delight. That it has no religious significance.

But is that true? Or do they just not realize the religious significance that it has?

To that point, something really interesting happened at the end of the segment. Referring to "OMG," the Nightline interviewer asked the panel of teenagers, "Will those letters be different to you now, because we've talked about it so much?"

Almost all the teenagers nodded their heads and agreed that, yes, it would be different. "I think I'll be more conscious of it now," one girl said.

For me, I'm not so much concerned about where exactly the "vain" line is drawn. I just want to make sure that I'm nowhere close to it and that my language and my heart both exemplify a reverence for the Lord.

Maybe I'll just stick with Winnie the Pooh. "Oh, bother" should work just fine.

From: http://www.boundlessline.org/2009/10/omnever-mind.html

Worn Down

2009-06-17T11:00:00.002-06:00

By David Barshinger

A week after I heard the first reports of swine flu in April, I came down with influenza type A myself. While the specialists never confirmed I had swine because they stopped testing non-hospitalized type A cases, my doctor was pretty certain I had contracted the H1N1 virus.

It came at a rather inopportune time, at the end of my semester. My school required everyone who had symptoms or tested positive to "isolate" themselves, so the illness forced me to miss my last week of classes.

The timing of the flu felt severely ironic because my previous semester had ended with pneumonia. The schedule I was keeping was wearing me down. It was obvious that I literally couldn't keep up with my calendar, that I was stretching myself beyond my limitations.

The Sky's the Limit?

"You can be anything you want if you just apply yourself." I grew up hearing that American slogan, and we relish it in part because, well, who doesn't love an underdog attaining great things through hard work?

And how can you criticize hard work anyway? God surely wants us to be diligent, working to please the Lord and not people (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:58 and Col 3:23). And it's clear he despises laziness (e.g., Prov. 19:15, Eccl. 10:18, Matt. 25:26).

But I've found that behind the maxim lurks a lie that we often miss: Limitations. The truth is, I can't be anything I want. God created me as a finite human being, which means I may have strengths, but I also have weaknesses, and limits.

Of course, God often uses our weaknesses to display his power (2 Cor. 12:9). We've heard the testimonies of people like Moses, the bumbler who became the great leader of Israel, confronting the mighty Pharaoh and guiding the Israelites out of bondage through the Sinai desert. But while God stretches us and empowers us to do things we thought we could never do, he has also created us with limitations.

The reality of my limitations is complicated by the pressures I face in a competitive marketplace. It's one thing to do my best and another to try to be better than everyone else.

Living in an economy where we can't take jobs for granted encourages such comparison and competition. A limited number of professorships awaits me and the many other doctoral students around the country when we graduate. Competition can sharpen us, but it can also stir up worry and workaholism.

What I forget is that this competitive world rests in the palm of its Creator who exists outside of time, our sovereign Father who knows my fears and my future and watches over me.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:25-27:

... do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?

Instead, Christ calls for orienting our lives around faithfulness to God, around right living, around the moral code Jesus lays out in the Sermon on the Mount. And when we do this, when we "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," we learn faith, to trust in the God who provides for our needs (Matt. 6:33).

Christ concludes, "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble" (Matt. 6:34). In other words, a life driven by worry about the future, consumed by competition and fears and driving myself into the ground ‹ that's not a life of faith.

The life of faith recognizes that I have limits and am ultimately not in control. The life of faith works diligently but rests in the sovereign, limitless God.

Anxious Toil vs. Sleep

When I was recovering from my bout of pneumonia, I found a passage of Scripture that convicted me about my strenuous schedule and challenged me to shift my perspective on work.

Psalm 127:1 says, "Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain." Those who labor out of fear without trusting in Yahweh will never find the satisfaction they desire. If they don't live their life with the solid foundation of God's presence, their house will crumble.

And Psalm 127:2 really hits it home. It begins saying, "It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil."

I had been burning the midnight oil and getting up early, to the point it was damaging my health. And what is anxious toil but the competitive lifestyle that works me ragged out of fear that it won't be enough, out of worry that someone else will get ahead? Yet such a haggard lifestyle ultimately amounts to naught.

Why is it in vain? Verse 2 explains, "for he gives to his beloved sleep." And here we discover the beauty of a life lived with God at the foundation. It's not vain to rise up early, but to both rise early and go late to bed. Why? Because it forsakes faith in God.

The one who works diligently and entrusts himself to the Lord is the one who receives sleep. He is the object of God's love, and God grants him that sweet rest that fortifies and heals his body and soul. He can sleep at night without life's worries consuming him because he trusts in the Lord's faithfulness.

The subversive, freeing message of the gospel itself says we can't do it ‹ we need God. That reality doesn't evaporate after salvation. As limited, finite beings, we will always need God's grace and provision.

We see this truth in how God built into creation the need for rest. God gave us this model when he labored six days in creation, but "rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done," making that day holy (Gen. 2:23). And thus the fourth commandment, based on the model of creation, says, "Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work ..." (Exo. 20:910a).

Here we see a model of faithful labor: six days of work with a full day set aside for rest. Constant work wears us down, it certainly wore me down at the end of my past two semesters. We are finite beings, and we need to remember that God calls us to be diligent, not divine.

Realizing That Sweet Rest

Though I had meditated on Psalm 127 after my pneumonia, my recent recurrence of an end-of-the-semester illness indicates I haven't learned the lesson very well. It shows how much we are creatures of habit and how important it is to implement healthy disciplines in our lives.

How do we do that? Here are a few ways I'm trying to employ these principles from Scripture.

Balance responsibility and health. My ability to perform well in my work depends largely on the health of my body. An attuned physique yields a sharp mind. It's pertinent to discipline myself both to get sufficient sleep and to exercise regularly. That means cutting out time from work to go for a run and forcing myself to go to bed at a decent hour.

Be more disciplined and diligent with the time I spend working. This may mean surfing the Web a bit less when I should concentrate on the tasks at hand, or setting a timer for an hour of focused efforts before letting myself check e-mail. And this makes my time away from work all the better because I'm satisfied with my hard labor and thus free to engage others.

Develop greater dependence on God. I need to remember my mortality and throw myself on God's incorruptibility. He is God, and I am not. A key way to nurture dependence is disciplining myself to rest. For example, setting Sundays apart as a day to put aside all work, even when everyone else I'm competing against is logging in time, teaches me to depend on God.

The Scriptures make it clear that God wants to free us from anxious toil and grant us rest. Anxious toil robs us of the peace that comes from depending on the Lord.

God instead commands us to work hard, but acknowledge our limits and ultimately trust him to bless our labor and provide for our needs. And out of that frame of mind comes the freedom from worry and competition that makes God's rest so satisfying, so sweet.

From Boundless Webzine

"Where Do All The Colors Go At Night?"

2009-06-15T14:38:00.005-06:00

By Albert Mohler

One of the most lamentable aspects of modern life is the disappearance of silence. Throughout most of human history, silence has been a part of life. Many individuals lived a significant portion of their lives in silence, working in solitude and untroubled by the intrusion of constant noise.

Historians often point to the Industrial Revolution as a great turning point in the human experience of environmental sound and constant noise. The arrival of the factory and the concentration of human populations in cities brought a transformation that was accompanied by increased noise and the displaced silence. Today, the problem of noise pollution is a matter of concern to many of us, who find our lives frequently interrupted by unwanted sounds and constant noise.

Our culture now assumes noise and the constant availability of music, electronic chatter, and entertainment. In many homes, there is virtually no silence -- at least during waking hours. In some homes, family members live in isolated environments of independent sound, with iPods, televisions, radios, and any number of other technologies providing a customized experience of noise.

All this takes a toll upon the soul. Psychologists argue that the development of individual identity requires extended periods of solitude, reflection, and silence. The Christian tradition has honored silence as a matter of spiritual discipline and an intentional effort to flee the noise of everyday life in order to hear what noise cannot supply.

If this is true for adults, it is perhaps even more true for children. But today's children are often subjected to a constant barrage of noise. Many are raised to the soundtrack of the television or other forms of entertainment. Some parents seem to fear silence and do their best to make certain that children are never without some form of sound.

Writing in the June issue of Standpoint, Susan Hill argues that our children are being impoverished by being deprived of silence. We have betrayed children, she asserts, by "confiscating their silence." As she explains:

But so difficult has it become to find such oases of silence, that many children never experience it. In adapting to constant noise, we seem to have become afraid of silence. Why? Are we afraid of what we will discover when we come face to face with ourselves there? Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let's drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.

Most of us will quickly realize the truth contained in her assessment. It seems that many of us are, to a greater or lesser degree, almost afraid of silence. Our children quickly inherit the same fear.

In "Silence, Please," Susan Hill describes the delights of silence in a way that beautifully captures what so many have lost:

In a quiet library, the turning of a page, the scratch of pencil on paper, are separate, distinctive, sounds. They identify themselves to us, they have a personality. They are beautiful. It is not only natural sounds that gain a richness set in the context of silence — all sounds do. To deprive ourselves and our children of the ability to distinguish such aural detail is to diminish our sensory life.

As Susan Hill acknowledges, complete silence is very difficult to achieve. Her goal is not to see children experience an artificial silence, but instead to see children experience the natural sounds that come as gifts -- sounds that require turning off the television to hear.

"Our children are too rarely given that opportunity or taught that the contrast between noise and quietness, like the parallel one between being in company and being alone, is vital to the growth and maturity of the individual," she explains. This growth and maturity, cultivated by silence, is essential to education -- both of the mind and the soul. Reading, writing, analysis, and reflection require some level of silence. Many children, particularly teenagers, are shortchanging their education by developing a dependence on noise, even when studying (or what they call studying).

The life of the mind and the shaping of the soul require the ability to hear, recognize, and understand what would be lost in a cacophony of sound. She expresses this beautifully:

If children do not learn to focus and concentrate in a pool of quietness, their minds become fragmented and their temperaments irritable, their ability to absorb knowledge and sift it, grade it and evaluate it do not develop fully. Reading a book quietly, watching a raindrop slide slowly down a windowpane or a ladybird crawl up a leaf, trying to hear the sound of a cat breathing when it is asleep, asking strange questions, such as, "Where do all the colors go at night?" and speculating about the possible answers — all of these are best done in silence where the imagination can flourish and the intricate minutiae of the world around us can be examined with the greatest concentration.

Where do all the colors go at night? All of us, what ever our age, need the gift of silence so that we can ponder such questions -- and hear what constant noise denies us.

From Al Mohler's Blog

How I Got Comfortable Shouting To God

2009-06-04T10:56:00.000-06:00

by Mark Altrogge on June 3rd, 2009

Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous!
Praise befits the upright. PS 33.1

I’m not a particularly emotional person. At football games I’ve never shouted and high-fived. I never danced or moshed or sang along or held up my lighter at concerts. And I was raised in a church in which the most expressive thing we did in worship was exchange the sign of peace with our neighbor - my brother and I would give each other a sideways glance and a smirk, then give each other the peace sign.

When Jesus saved me, I became convinced from preaching and the Word that God desires expressive worship. But for me to raise my hands or shout to God or sing with gusto was like telling me to do an Irish step dance at an opera.

But I wanted to become more expressive in my worship. I only had to overcome my fear of man.

I read about a man who conquered his self-consciousness by going out in the woods and shouting praises to the Lord. So I decided to try this. I lived on a farm at the time, so I tramped across a cow pasture to a stand of woods where I knew no one would hear me.

I looked around, raised my hands, and shouted, somewhat meekly, “Halleluiah!” I did it again, a little bit louder. I felt weird. What if someone heard me or saw me? Looking around, I shouted again, “Halleluiah!” I kept shouting over and over again, until I began to get used to it. I did this for about 15 or 20 minutes, then trudged back through the field to my apartment over the garage on the farm.

The next time I worshiped with the church, when the leader exhorted us to raise our hands and shout to the Lord, with the Lord’s help, I overcame my fear of what others thought of me and shouted my praises to Jesus.

30 years later, I still battle the fear of man at times during worship. But whenever it’s appropriate during our times of corporate worship, I love to shout my praise to the Lord. It feels good.

It feels good, because praise befits the upright.

From The Blazing Center

The Stone Chair

2009-05-04T09:13:00.002-06:00

The Stone Chair

by Tim Challies

In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien writes about a kingdom called Gondor which for many years has had no king. While waiting for the rightful heir to come and claim his throne, a series of stewards has been placed in charge of the land. The steward in charge at the time of the events described in the book is named Denethor and he has two sons, Boromir and Faramir, both of whom figure prominently in the story (and subsequently, in the movie). As steward of the land, Denethor had the power of the king but without the title and without the full measure of honor. He was able to make decisions and to pass judgment. He received the respect and admiration of the people of the land. His primary task was to do whatever was best for the land in the absence of its rightful ruler. In all he did he was to remember his position—to remember that he was not and never would be the king. As a constant reminder of his temporary position he was forbidden to rule from the king’s throne.

“…awe fell upon him as he looked down that avenue of kings long dead. At the far end upon a dais of many steps was set a throne under a canopy of marble shaped like a crowned helm; behind it was carved upon the wall and set with gems an image of a tree in flower. But the throne was empty. At the foot of the dais, upon the lowest step which was broad and deep, there was a stone chair, black and unadorned, and on it sat an old man gazing at his lap.”

That man, of course, was the steward. Where the king was allowed the full honor of sitting upon the throne, surrounded by splendor, the steward was consigned to rule from a plain, unadorned chair that sat at the foot of the throne.

Denethor was not a very good steward. He dreaded the day the king would return, for he knew that with the return of the king would come his own return to obscurity. He jealously guarded the power that had been given him and did not look forward to the day when he will have to relinquish the kingdom to its rightful owner. This attitude affected his every decision, and he often ruled based on his own desire for preservation rather than on the basis of what would be best for the kingdom he was sworn to protect. We find him saying:

“…the Lord of Gondor is not to be made the tool of other men’s purposes, however worthy. And to him there is no purpose higher in the world as it now stands than the good of Gondor; and the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again.” To this Gandalf replied “Unless the king should come again? Well, my lord Steward, it is your task to keep some kingdom against that even, which few now look to see.”

The steward was failing in his duty to properly care for what had been entrusted to him. We learn later that he had been going beyond the care of his office and had become corrupted by the enemy. His abuse of what had been entrusted to him led to his own corruption.

This concept of stewardship is one that has been largely lost to our time and our culture. We understand ownership, borrowing, leasing and mortgaging but have little knowledge of stewardship. Yet it is a crucial concept in the Bible. Scripture tells us that we are to regard all that God gives us as if we are stewards, not owners (See, for example, Luke 12). This is true of wealth; it is true of talents; it is true of opportunities and children and spouses and property and businesses and everything else. Where God has given richly, much is expected in return. At no time does God give us full and final ownership of what He has given us. He gives us but the opportunity to be stewards of his gifts.

Stewardship is more difficult than we may think. How tightly we like to cling to those things that we regard as ours. How tightly we cling to our money and how quick we are to set our hope in the uncertainty of riches (1 Timothy 6:17). How difficult it is to release our children to the care of God, knowing that we are but stewards of them for the short time God grants them to us. How prone we are to hold fast to all of the wrong things. How hard it is for us to understand that we do not occupy the throne. No, we are those who sit in the steward’s unadorned stone chair, far below, in the shadow of the throne.

Denethor held fast to the wrong things. Drunk with corruption and power and unwilling to hand over the kingdom, Denethor, steward of Gondor, eventually took his own life, ending his years of poor stewardship. He would rather die than give up the power that he thought was his. He would rather die than humble himself before the king.

Denethor’s son, Faramir, took his father’s place as the next in a long line of stewards. And no sooner did he do this than Aragorn, the heir to the throne, returned to Gondor. Faramir was faced with all that was so important to his father. Would Faramir be like his father? Or would he be a faithful steward?

“Faramir met Aragorn in the midst of those there assembled, and he knelt, and said: “The last steward of Gondor begs leave to surrender his office.”…Then Faramir stood up and spoke in a clear voice: “Men of Gondor, hear now the Steward of this realm! Behold! One has come to claim the kingship again at last. Here is Aragorn son of Arathorn…Shall he be king and enter into the city and dwell there?” And all the host and all the people cried yea with one voice.”

Moments later, when the new king has been crowned, it is Faramir who leads the cries of “Behold the king!”

Faramir was everything his father was not. He was a good and faithful steward who looked forward to the return of his king and who was willing and ready to hand what had been entrusted to him to its rightful owner. Faramir proved his character.

It is said that Queen Victoria, who reigned over England for over 63 years said, “I wish Jesus would come back in my lifetime. I would lay my crown at His feet.” Would you do the same? Will you lead the chorus of “Behold the King!”?

From Boundless.org.

The Crisis of Manliness

2009-04-28T10:00:00.000-06:00

The Crisis of Manliness

by Waller R. Newell

Fatherhood and manliness have always been closely connected, not only because fathering a child is a palpable proof of manhood, but also because fathers are supposed to provide their sons with a model of what to become. And yet, as a culture, we have never been more conflicted about what we mean by manhood.

In the Gen-X novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, a group of men in their 20s, stuck in jobs as office temps and couriers, relieve their boredom by meeting in the basement of a bar after hours and beating one another senseless. Sometimes they show up for work with black eyes and stitches as a warrior's badge of honor.

Aside from their jobs — white-collar, but holding out no clear career prospects — what these young men have in common is that they are under-fathered, the product of divorce and of fathers who had no time for them. "I'm a 30 year old boy," says the novel's protagonist. "I knew my dad for about six years, but I don't remember anything.... What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women."

In the absence of a clear idea from their distant, distracted fathers of what it means to be a man, these frustrated youths react against their antiseptic jobs by reverting to the crudest "macho" violence. The club's founder, Tyler, progresses from consenting violence among buddies to murder, a slacker Raskolnikov. The novel is chillingly insightful about the unmapped psyche of today's young males.

Given these signals from the culture, confirmed every day by real acts of mayhem, some hold that we should try to get rid of manliness altogether and make more rigorous efforts to create a genderless personality free of male violence. The horrific shooting in the Arkansas schoolyard, with little-boy killers waiting in their army fatigues to ambush their classmates and teachers, might suggest that they are right. Add to this the fact that the majority of violent crimes are committed by young men between the ages of 15 and 25, and there seems good reason for discouraging male children from embracing any notion of manly pride.

But it is not so simple. The last 40 years have witnessed a prolonged effort at social engineering throughout our public and educational institutions. Its purpose is to eradicate any psychological and emotional differences between men and women, and the grounds that any concept of manliness inevitably leads to arrogance and violence towards women and to rigid hierarchies that exclude the marginalized and powerless.

This experiment was meant to reduce violence and tensions between the sexes. And yet, during this same period, "macho" violence and stress between men and women may well have increased. Recent crime statistics suggest as much in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom — the countries where the feminist social experiment stigmatizing manliness has had the greatest latitude to prove itself.

As the book by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead confirmed, absent fathers are one of the strongest predictors of violence among young men in the United States, at least as important as poverty, lack of education, or minority status. The ease with which men of my baby-boomer generation have abdicated our roles as fathers is undoubtedly connected with feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Boomers were told that we shouldn't be hung up about providing masculine role models for children and should do whatever made us happiest, including escape an unsatisfying marriage. After all, to hold things together for the sake of the children would restrict both men and women to old-fashioned "patriarchal" responsibilities.

The results of this hard, bright credo of selfishness are today's under-fathered young men, many of them from broken homes, prone to identify their maleness with aggression because they have no better model to go by.

This generation's experience is summed up in a brilliant, pathetic scene from Atom Egoyan's film Family Viewing. The central character, a teenage boy, drifts in and out of his divorced father's house. The father is totally preoccupied with his relationship with a younger woman. The boy's only solid human contact is with his dying grandmother, shunted to a nursing home lest she spoil the father's swinging lifestyle.

One day the boy digs out some family videos. At first, he sees a backyard barbecue with happy children and his parents when they were still together. Suddenly, the film jumps to the father and his new girlfriend having sex. The father simply taped over the family movies, literally erasing his son's connection with the only secure part of his childhood.

It seems plain enough that we are missing the boat about manliness; for there are forms of pride and honor that would be good to impart to young males. Indeed, manly honor, and shame at failing to live up to it, are the surest means of promoting respect for women.

Equally, manly anger and combativeness can provide energy for a just cause. Horrified as we are by the cult of warrior violence in the Balkans or Rwanda or Darfur, we may have gone too far toward the opposite extreme in the Western democracies. As Michael Kelly recently observed, "There are fewer and fewer people, and they are older and older people, who accept what every 12-year-old in Bihac knows: that there are some things worth dying and killing for."

Abolitionism in the ante-bellum United States, the Allies' defeat of Nazi Germany, and the civil-rights movement of the '60s would never have succeeded without the legitimate expression of anger against injustice. The point is not to eradicate honor and pride from the male character, but to re-channel those energies from the nihilistic violence of Fight Club or the Arkansas schoolyard to some constructive moral purpose.

To do this, we must recover a sense of what it means to be manly — honorable, brave, self-restrained, zealous in behalf of a good cause, with feelings of delicacy and respect toward loved ones. For if young men are cut off from this positive tradition of manly pride, their manliness will reemerge in crude and retrograde forms.

Some 40 years ago, the Rolling Stones recorded a misogynist rant called "Under My Thumb." Today, it is one of the songs that fans most frequently request of these aging shamans of adolescent attitudinizing. In three decades, tension between men and women not only has not disappeared but may actually have intensified, and we must wonder whether the experiment in social engineering itself is one reason why.

For hostility towards women is an aberration of male behavior. If, as the prevailing orthodoxy contends, the male gender were intrinsically aggressive, hegemonic and intolerant, then by definition male behavior could never improve. The message young males receive from feminist reasoning is not, You should be ashamed of liking "Under My Thumb," but, That's the way your gender thinks about women.

So the first step toward a sensible debate about manly pride is to rescue the positive tradition of manliness from three decades of stereotyping that conflates masculinity with violence, hegemony, and aggression. We have to recognize that men and women are moral equals, that decent and worthy men have always known this, and that, while men and women share the most important human virtues, vices and aptitudes, they also have psychological traits that incline them toward some different activities.

According to the regnant orthodoxy, men and women should have exactly the same kinds of capacities and ambitions. They should be equally interested in becoming tycoons, winning battles, driving tractors and nurturing children.

But this is not reality. In general, men don't want to work in day-care centers or teach kindergarten, and women don't want to be truck drivers or join the military.

Moreover, women are far more likely than men to leave successful jobs to devote time to families, and women under 30 are more eager for lasting marriages and numerous children than women of their parents' generation (doubtless yearning for what their parents denied them).

We should recognize at last that, as long as women are guaranteed an equal opportunity to pursue whatever occupation they want, it does not matter that men and women on the whole still choose different vocations. Remaining injustices should be addressed by procedural liberalism, which has always brought the most solid progress. We should stop trying to reengineer the human soul to prevent boys from being boyish, while encouraging all forms of self-expression in girls.

All that 40 years of behavioral conditioning has done is drive maleness underground and distort it by severing it from traditional sources of masculine restraint and civility. The gurus of sensitivity have tried to convince men to become open, fluid, non-hegemonic and genderless beings who are unafraid to cry. But little boys still want to play war and shoot up the living room with plastic howitzers, and we can't give them all Ritalin. Psychologists have begun to express concern about our educational institutions' readiness to pathologize what once would have been regarded as boyish high spirits — rough-housing, "hating" girls, locker-room language — and to treat ordinary immaturity with powerful drugs.

Again, the point is to channel these energies into the development of character. Boys and young men still want to be heroes, and the way to educate them to treat girls and women with respect is to appeal to their heroism, not to try to blot it out.

Look at those kids performing daring flips on their skateboards, or sailing on their Rollerblades into the heaviest downtown traffic like warriors contemptuous of danger. They are almost always males. Look at that squeegee kid with his shaved head and horsehair plume, decked out like some road-warrior Achilles. Walk into one of those high-voltage computer emporiums, selling our century's most potent icon for the extension of human mastery over the cosmos. Who are the salesmen? Almost always cocky young men, celebrities-in-waiting in dark suits and moussed hair, hooked on the sheer power of it all.

Channel surf on your television late at night and sample the rock videos. Nearly all the bands in those rock videos are male, snarling or plaintive over the world's confusions and their erotic frustrations, oozing belligerence alternating with Byronic alienation and a puppyish longing for attention. Their names (e.g., Goo Goo Dolls) and attitudes (e.g., the lead singer of radiohead wheeled around a supermarket in a giant shopping cart curled up like an overgrown 5-year-old) combine an infantile longing to return to childhood with in-your-face suspicion and distrust.

And what else would one expect, since so many of the families into which they were born ended in divorce? By denying and repressing their natural inclination to manliness, we run the risk of abandoning them to such infantile posturing. When they pierce their bodies, it is because they want to experience moral and erotic constraint. Having failed to find an authority they can respect, someone to guide them from boyish impetuosity to a mature and manly vigor of judgment, they confuse authority with oppression.

Still, cast adrift in a world without any limitations, they want there to be a price to pay for their hedonism. Since no one will lead them back to the great ethical and religious traditions that set these limits on the highest intellectual and spiritual level, they pierce their bodies in a crude simulacrum of traditional restraint. And, in that, they reveal not only the wondrous capacity of spirited young people to see through the aridity of the governing orthodoxies but also the potential for an ennobling transformation.

It is precisely in a traditional understanding of manly pride and honor that we will find the only sure basis for respect between men and women. The best way of convincing young men to treat women with respect is to educate them in the traditional virtues, which make it a disgrace to treat anyone basely, dishonestly or exploitatively.

Moreover, the surest way of raising young men to treat young women as friends rather than as objects for sexual exploitation is to appeal to their natural longing to be honored and esteemed by the young women to whom they are attracted. When our erotic attraction to another is properly directed, it leads us to cultivate the virtues of moderation, honest, gratitude and compassion that make us worthy of love in the eyes of the beloved.

We try to be virtuous because we want to be worthy of being loved.

One thing is sure: Given our current confusion over the meaning of manliness, we have nothing to lose by re-opening the issue. If academic feminism is correct that violence toward women stems from traditional patriarchal attitudes, our grandparents' lives must have been a hell of aggression and fear. Yet, if anything impresses us about our forebears, judging from their lives, letters and diaries, it is the refinement of their affections for one another — and of men's esteem for women in particular. Perhaps we cannot return to that world. But boys and young men today need re-introducing to this tradition of manly civility.

Despite recent caricatures of the Western tradition as one long justification for the oppression of women, our greatest poets and thinkers from Homer to Rousseau have explored the delicate interplay of love and self-perfection.

In Homer's Odyssey, Telemachus, son of the great war hero Odysseus, embarks on a journey to find his missing father and thereby save his mother from the oppressive noblemen who want her to give up her husband for dead and marry one of them. As he searches for his father in an adventure parallel to Odysseus' own search for a way home to his long-lost wife and child, Telemachus is educated by his adventures and grows from a boy into a man, guided by the wise goddess Athena, who is also his father's best friend among the gods. Telemachus' search for his missing father, guided by the goddess, in effect provides him with the upbringing that Odysseus was not able to give him, although he still inspires it from afar because the boy learns during his travels of his father's exploits and wants to prove himself the hero's worthy son.

When I depict Telemachus as a boy from a broken home, forced at a too-early age to be his mother's protector from oppressive men, who has to bring himself up in a way that he hopes his absent father would be proud of, the young men in my undergraduate classes tend to become very quiet and reflective.

They are Telemachus.

From Boundless.org

The Quiet Time Performance

2009-04-20T13:39:00.000-06:00

by Tim Challies

Like all Christians, I love my quiet time. I am always thrilled at the prospect of sitting down for a few quiet moments before a busy day to spend some time alone with God—a few moments one-on-one with my Creator. I love to open the Bible and to carefully and systematically read the Word of God, allowing it to penetrate my heart. I love to sit and think deeply and meditatively about the Scriptures and to seek ways that I can apply God’s word to my heart. I love to pray to God, pouring out my heart in confession, praise, thanksgiving and petition. It is always the best and greatest part of my day. I couldn’t live without my quiet time.

But that’s not reality, is it?

I sometimes love my quiet time. I am sometimes thrilled at the prospect of sitting down to spend some time with God; too often, though, I dread it. I’d rather catch up on the news or spend some time writing or reading a good book or find out how badly the Blue Jays beat the A’s the day before. My quiet time is often invaded by little children, demanding my time and attention. Too often I hate to make my way through a difficult book of the Bible and dread spending another day reading through the prophecies of Isaiah. Thinking requires more time and effort than I am willing to give and it usually seems that a quick, cursory prayer is enough to make me feel that I’ve done my duty and asked God to bless my day and to forgive me for being a jerk with my kids the night before. I skim Scripture, breathe a prayer, and settle down to my breakfast.

That’s a little closer to reality, right?

In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges provides two scenarios and then a question. In the first, he describes a good day. “You get up promptly when your alarm goes off and have a refreshing and profitable quiet time as you read your Bible and pray. Your plans for the day generally fall into place, and you somehow sense that presence of God with you. To top it off, you unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is truly searching. As you talk with the person, you silently pray for the Holy Spirit to help you and to also work in your friend’s heart.” We’ve all had days like that. But we’ve also all had days like this: “You don’t arise at the first ring of your alarm. Instead, you shut it off and go back to sleep. When you awaken, it’s too late to have a quiet time. You hurriedly gulp down some breakfast and rush off to the day’s activities. You feel guilty about oversleeping and missing your quiet time, and things just generally go wrong all day. You become more and more irritable as the day wears on, and you certainly don’t sense God’s presence in your life. That evening, however, you unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is really interested in receiving Christ as Savior.” Bridges then asks if you would enter into those two witnessing opportunities with a different degree of confidence. Think about it for a moment. If you’re like most Christians, I suspect you would feel less confident about witnessing on a bad day then on a good day. You would feel less confidence that God would speak in and through you and that you would be able to share your faith forcefully and with conviction.

Why is it that we tend to think this way? According to Bridges, we’ve come to believe that God’s blessing on our lives is somehow conditional upon our spiritual performance. In other words, if we’ve performed well and done our quiet time as we ought to have done, we have put ourselves in a place where God can bless us. We may not consciously articulate this, but we prove that we believe it when we have a bad day and are certain that on this day we are absolutely unworthy of God’s blessings. This attitude “reveals an all-too-common misconception of the Christian life: the thinking that, although we are saved by grace, we earn or forfeit God’s blessings in our daily lives by our performance.”

Perhaps you, like me, have too often turned quiet time into a performance. If you perform well for God, you enter your day filled with confidence that God will bless you, and that He will have to bless you. You feel that your performance has earned you the right to have a day filled with His presence, filled with blessings, and filled with confidence. And, of course, when you turn in a poor performance, you feel that God is in heaven booing you and heaving proverbial rotten vegetables in the form of removing His presence and, in the words of a friend, “dishing out bummers.”

Quiet time becomes tyrannical when you understand it as a performance. Bridges provides a pearl of wisdom. “Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.” Whether you are having a good day or a bad day, the basis of your relationship with is not your performance, for even your best efforts are but filthy rags. Instead, your relationship is based on grace. Grace does not just save you and then leave you alone. No, grace saves you and then sustains you and equips you and motivates you. You are saved by grace and you then live by grace. Whether in the midst of a good day or bad, God does not base His relationship with you on performance, but on whether or not you are trusting in His Son.

Greg Johnson of St. Louis Center for Christian Study wrote an interesting tract entitled “Freedom from Quiet Time Guilt.” Johnson wrote about something I had only recently realized myself. “That half hour every morning of Scriptural study and prayer is not actually commanded in the Bible.” Imagine that. He goes on to say, “As a theologian, I can remind us that to bind the conscience where Scripture leaves freedom is a very, very serious crime. It’s legalism rearing its ugly little head again. We’ve become legalistic about a legalistic command. This is serious.” We have somehow allowed our quiet time, in its length, depth or consistency, to become the measure of our relationship with God. But “your relationship with God—or, as I prefer to say, God’s relationship with you—is your whole life: your job, your family, your sleep, your play, your relationships, your driving, your everything. The real irony here is that we’ve become accustomed to pigeonholing our entire relationship with God into a brief devotional exercise that is not even commanded in the Bible.” So what, then, does Scripture command? It commands that the Word of God be constantly upon your heart. You are to pray, to read the Scripture and to meditate upon it, but you are to do so from a joyful desire, and not mere performance-based duty. You are to do so throughout your whole life, and not merely for a few minutes each morning. Like Johnson, you will come to realize that the “goal isn’t that we pray and read the Bible less, but that we do so more—and with a free and needy heart.”

So do not allow quiet time to become performance. View it as a chance to grow in grace. Begin with an expression of your dependency upon God’s grace, and end with an affirmation of His grace. Acknowledge that you have no right to approach God directly, but can approach Him only through the work of His Son. Focus on the gospel as the message of grace that both saves and sustains. And allow quiet time to become a gift of worship you present to God, and a gift of grace you receive from Him.

From Challies.com

Giving Up on Atheism

2009-04-15T10:02:00.001-06:00

From Boundless Webzine:

Giving Up on Atheism

by Robert Velarde

While riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle on the way to the zoo, C.S. Lewis became a Christian. He later described the experience as not being particularly emotional: "It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake."¹

The great Christian thinker Augustine heard a child singing, "Pick it up and read." After picking up Paul's letter to the Romans and reading a passage, Augustine committed his life to Christ.

On the way to Damascus, Saul saw a bright light, heard the voice of Jesus and ultimately became a dedicated follower of Christ. Saul later became known as the Apostle Paul.

Conversion stories fascinate me. C.S. Lewis came to faith via a journey that led him through, among other beliefs, atheism, pantheism and theism.² Augustine grew up in a home with an alcoholic father and a devoted Christian mother. Like many young adults, Augustine rebelled. He eventually left home and joined a cult. Paul was a Jew and, therefore, a theist, but was anti-Christian, spearheading early persecution of the Christian church and its members. His conversion was so powerful and dramatic that this one man literally changed the spiritual face of every place he visited.

The Road to Atheism

My own journey to Christianity had a lot of twists and turns. Having been raised in a nominally theistic home, I had a basic but undeveloped sense of God. Since my family never regularly attended church, I had only some vague idea of "God." Eventually this turned into deism — the belief that God exists, but is distant from creation and has nothing to do with day to day events, much less an interest in people as a whole or individuals in particular. By its very nature, deism rejects the possibility of miracles, as well as the main theme of Christianity — the Incarnation.

During my second year of high school I seriously began questioning the reality of God. Any theistic leanings I had diminished and eventually faded — smothered, really, by my exposure to atheistic literature of an existentialist bent such as the writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. I also reveled in the nihilistic follies and despair of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Douglas Adams.

The end result was agnosticism on my part — that is, I claimed that the existence of God could neither be proven nor disproven. "We just don't know," was my attitude toward anything religious.

By the time I reached college, I considered myself a skeptic. On a good day I would see myself as an agnostic, while on a bad one I'd view myself as an atheist. In either case, I lived my life as though God did not exist. In that sense, I was what I'd call a functional atheist.

In retrospect I realize that my rejection of Christianity stemmed from what Josh McDowell considers the three most common excuses for rejecting Christ: pride, moral problems and ignorance. I did not want to yield to anything, preferring myself as the ultimate authority in my life. Morally, I didn't want any cosmic interferer telling me what was right and wrong. And, frankly, I was ignorant about Christianity on many fronts, especially when it came to the truth of its teachings and the evidence behind it.

The Arguments

Although many of my arguments against Christianity were of the "straw man" variety,³ several were legitimate arguments that have existed for ages past and will continue to exist. I will limit my comments to two of the most significant issues I had: First, I did not believe in the existence of God; second, I believed the problem of evil and suffering was one that theism could not overcome.

Positive arguments for the existence of God that influenced my conversion included the argument from the existence of the universe (cosmological), the argument from being (ontological), the argument from design (teleological), and the argument from morality (axiological). It wasn't until a while after my conversion that I learned there are not only many variations of each of these arguments, but that there are also a great number of additional arguments for the existence of God.⁴

In short, the cosmological argument claims that everything that has a beginning has a cause. Since the universe had a beginning, it must have had a cause. The best explanation of this cause is a powerful and personal being (i.e., God). The much-maligned ontological argument, first explored by Anselm, is actually quite clever. Unfortunately, I don't have the space to get into its nuances here. It essentially argues for God on the basis of the idea of God.

The argument from design influenced me more than the previous two arguments. This argument claims that anything exhibiting qualities of intelligent design must have been designed. Since the universe exhibits signs of intelligent design, there must be an Intelligent Designer.

Finally, the moral argument influenced me significantly. One of my main objections against Christianity was that I could not reconcile the idea of a loving, all-powerful God with the reality of evil and suffering.

It was while I was reading Mere Christianity that I encountered a real difficulty in my argument. How had I gotten this idea of evil? In order to claim something is evil, one must have a standard of good. As C.S. Lewis put it, "A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line."⁵

The problem of evil, then, requires an acknowledgment that good and evil exist. Atheists are left with what some philosophers call the problem of good. How can an atheist call anything good or evil on the basis of a worldview that excludes absolute standards?

Ultimately, I acknowledged that atheism was not a viable worldview. Although I turned away from atheism, I had yet to embrace theism, much less Christianity.⁶

The People

In addition to rational arguments and evidence, encounters with people also played an important role in my conversion. The New Testament writers introduced me to the person of Jesus Christ. I had made fun of Christianity and Christians — taunting them with insults generally directed at their presumably inferior intellects — but when I began to read the Gospels and encountered these powerful records of the life of Jesus, I found more than I bargained for. When I began reading Mere Christianity, as I mentioned earlier, my precarious worldview became even more endangered.

I first became acquainted with C.S. Lewis when a Christian friend of mine gave me a copy of Mere Christianity. As I read it, I encountered a paradox. Here was an obviously intelligent, witty and articulate person who was also a Christian. How could this be?

Of course, it wasn't only dead writers who influenced me. There were living, breathing Christians who, in various ways, nudged me closer to truth. Their patience and prayers most certainly played a part in my conversion to Christianity.

The Truth

In the end, every worldview I had either embraced or studied could not stand the test of coherency. They all broke down in significant areas — all, that is, except Christianity. I was cornered. I could either defy the reality of Christianity and remain, inexplicably, an agnostic or atheist, or I could acknowledge the truth of Christianity. I chose, grudgingly at first, the latter option.

It's been 17 years since my conversion to Christianity and the more I learn about worldviews, the more I am convinced that Christ is indeed "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6, NIV).

While Christian conversion varies from person to person — whether it occurs in the sidecar of a motorcycle or as the result of a powerful vision on the road to Damascus — one thing is certain: People do experience significant worldview shifts in the direction of Christianity.

As a Christian apologist and philosopher, I believe conversion to Christianity is grounded in truth — in the validity of an intellectually robust worldview that offers the best explanation of reality. And that, combined with a variety of factors, is why I gave up on atheism.

* * *

NOTES

Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, 1956), p. 237.
Atheism denies the existence of God, while pantheism sees everything as divine. Theists believe in a personal, transcendent God.
In logic, a straw man fallacy occurs when one argues against a position that does not truly represent the position one is arguing against. Instead, the position set forth is often caricatured and presented as easier to refute than it really is.
Two helpful resources providing overviews of arguments for the existence of God include Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli (InterVarsity) and 20 Compelling Evidences That God Exists by Kenneth Boa and Robert Bowman, Jr. (River Oak). For an excellent critique of atheism see I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek (Crossway).
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 45.
Still, I had a sense of longing for something more. After more spiritual and intellectual wanderings, I ended up embracing pantheism, resulting in my affinities for what was then known as the New Age movement. Here was something that promised spiritual fulfillment without the demands of the God of theism. But eventually I found pantheism as unlivable as atheism. Among other things, it too had the problem of the good, as well as evil.

Crisis Prep 101

2009-04-09T09:58:00.002-06:00

Crisis Prep 101

by Carolyn McCulley

It's not easy to follow our national news these days. There's a free-floating sense of dread in these reports: Will the various bailouts work? How can we afford them? Will the economy recover — or collapse entirely? How many jobs will be lost before we hit bottom? Whose will be among them?

Peppered among the higher-profile financial stories are reports of increased opposition to Christian activity or beliefs. A pastor is arrested for praying outside an abortion clinic. A military chaplain is not allowed to pray in the name of Jesus. A little girl is reprimanded for talking about her pro-life beliefs in class. A church service is interrupted by obscene protesters.

At first glance, these kinds of reports may not seem to be related. But both lead to some kind of loss — loss of fortune or loss of freedom. Faced with the possibility of loss in either category, believing Christians can panic ... or we can prepare.

Preparing for difficulties might seem odd, but it is a biblical concept (Luke 21:34-36). Throughout history and even in many nations today, Christians face loss and persecution for their beliefs. American Christianity's recent history of prosperity and comfort may be the exception, not the rule. In fact, the apostle Paul warned Timothy that "everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Tim. 3:12). As theologian Iain Duguid notes:

Believers around the world know this from experience, yet here in the prosperous and supposedly tolerant West we have come to expect our lives as Christians to run smoothly and successfully, at least if we are faithfully following the Lord. We think that the slogan "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" means that our lives should be protected by God from any form of unpleasantness. This is a false belief, however. Persecution comes to us in a variety of forms and from a variety of directions, yet it is something that we should expect constantly to mark out our lives in a fallen world. It may come in the form of mockery and isolation at school, or conflict or trouble at work, or simply being regarded as peculiar and strange people, but one way or another we should expect to suffer abuse for the sake of Christ.¹

I've heard many wise pastors say that the time to prepare for a crisis is before it happens. When faced with a sobering diagnosis, the loss of a job, the rejection of an unbelieving friend, the criticism of a non-Christian culture — these are not the times you want to dig deep into your faith only to discover shallow roots.

Crisis management is not the time to do an in-depth study on God's character, lovingkindness, and sovereignty over our lives. You have to have that kind of knowledge ready on tap for the day of crisis.

The Roots of Endurance

Many believers who have gone before us have done this kind of preparation by studying God's Word in depth before trouble comes. They rooted themselves and their families in the biblical essentials in order to stand fast and endure to the end. They steeped themselves in God's perspective and promises so that no one would say of them, "Oh, ye of little faith."

I particularly like how Reformation activist Martin Luther prepared his wife for widowhood. Not only did he make financial arrangements for her, he also tended to her soul. A friend of Luther's made this comment after Luther's death:

I often wondered why Doctor Martin Luther had his wife, Kate, memorize the 31st Psalm when she was still young, alert, and carefree and did not yet know how pleasing and comforting this Psalm could be. But her husband did not encourage her to do this without a reason. He knew that after his death she would be a sorrowful and pitiable woman, very much in need of the comfort that the 31st Psalm had to offer.²

One biographer of Luther's wife added:

Over the years the Luthers had received expressions of kindness, love, and sympathy from friends and neighbors. Luther also knew the ingratitude of people, the forgetfulness of rulers, the opportunism of bureaucrats, the jealousy of colleagues and wives, and the spitefulness of enemies, who from the moment of [her] arrival at Wittenberg had cruelly slandered her and gossiped about her. Luther also anticipated that after his death such thankless treatment of Kate would only increase. That is why he encouraged her with these powerful words in Psalm 31: "In Thee, O LORD, do I seek refuge; let me never be put to shame; in Thy righteousness deliver me! ... Yea, Thou art my rock and my fortress" (31:1, 3).³

The same gospel-centered perspective enabled William Wilberforce to persevere faithfully until his last days. Popular accounts paint Wilberforce as a man driven by the immorality of slavery, but that's an incomplete picture. Though the abolition of slavery and the slave trade may have been Wilberforce's crowning achievement, he was a man who championed many causes that today we would collect under the banner of "social justice."

One biographer noted that at one point he was involved in 69 different initiatives, including child labor conditions, prison reform, the prevention of cruelty to animals, and even the tyrannies of the caste system in India.

Yet, these were not general do-good efforts. According to John Piper's account of his life, Wilberforce's work was so effective because it was rooted in a gospel-centered perspective. By studying the doctrine of justification, Wilberforce had a tool, if you will, to withstand criticism and even self-doubt in the numerous years he dedicated to the cause of abolition.

It is a stunning thing that a politician and a man with no formal theological education should not only know the workings of God in justification and sanctification, but consider them so utterly essential for Christian living and public virtue. Many public people say that changing society requires changing people, but few show the depth of understanding Wilberforce did concerning how that comes about. For him, the right grasp of the central doctrine of justification and its relation to sanctification — an emerging Christlikeness in private and public — were essential to his own endurance and for the reformation of the morals of England.

This was why he wrote A Practical View of Christianity. The "bulk" of Christians in his day were "nominal," he observed, and what was the root difference between the nominal and the real? It was this: The nominal pursued morality (holiness, sanctification) without first relying utterly on the free gift of justification and reconciliation by faith alone based on Christ's blood and righteousness.⁴

After studying the life of Wilberforce, Piper analyzed our generation:

Is it not remarkable that one of the greatest politicians of Britain and one of the most persevering public warriors for social justice should elevate doctrine so highly? Perhaps this is why the impact of the church today is as weak as it is. Those who are most passionate about being practical for the public good are often the least doctrinally interested or informed. Wilberforce would say: You can't endure in bearing fruit if you sever the root.⁵

Security's Source

If we Americans have come to assume that prosperity and ease are our birthrights, the dawning years of the 21st century should sober us. From 9/11 to this deepening global recession, our assumptions of security have been shaken.

The question before us now is from where do we draw this security? If it is in our circumstances, we will crumble in the face of hardship — indulging self-pity and marshaling our coping strategies in such an all-consuming way that we will not have time or energy left to serve others or share the gospel. Let us not be those who hoard in national crises or personal emergencies. Let us not be those who forget to rejoice in our salvation if and when the waves of persecution reach our shores or bubble up from within.

I have to do the same crisis preparation. I've been tested already in a variety of ways and have found myself lacking. I like my material comfort, I enjoy respect for my faith and beliefs, and I suspect I am not ready for any true opposition. But I know that Luther and Wilberforce were in the same position at one time in their lives, too. I don't take comfort in their personal journeys, but in the fact we all love the same faithful Savior. My prayer is that I will not grow slack in my knowledge and worship of His character and promises, no matter what the future holds.

So for now, crisis preparation 101 means practicing generosity to those in need even when my own budget is tight, studying the character and promises of God, and storing up for myself riches in heaven rather than riches on earth. It means reminding myself that this earth is not my home and that I'm only a pilgrim passing through. But I'm a pilgrim following the One who assures a victorious conclusion.

Above all, crisis prep means being convinced of the source of true peace — something that transcends circumstances. Jesus assured us we have peace in Him: "These things I have spoken to you so that in Me you may have peace. In this world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). This precious truth is one to study over and over again as I prepare for whatever the Lord has ordained for my future.

NOTES

Duguid, Iain, Daniel: Reformed Expository Commentary (Philipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), p. 93.
Markwald, Rudolf K. and Markwald, Marilynn Morris, Katharina Von Bora: A Reformation Life (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002), p. 177.
Ibid., pp. 177-178.
Piper, John, The Roots of Endurance, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002), p. 158.
Ibid., pp. 159-160.

From Boundless Webzine

The Posture of Prayer

2009-04-08T09:13:00.005-06:00

From Tim Challies' blog:

The Posture of Prayer

In the past week or two I have been thinking a lot about my times of personal devotion, trying to see where I have allowed them to become just the “same old”—where I may have fallen into bad habits or lazy customs. I have been thinking about what I can do to make these times that will serve to help me grow in godliness while at the same ensuring that they are opportunities to bring worship to God. This is something I find that I need to do on a regular basis. My reflections on prayer coincided with reading 1 Timothy in my times of personal worship. In 1 Timothy we read Paul’s command that “in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling.” This set me to thinking about the posture of prayer. The chapter has quite a few things to say about the content of prayer (e.g. “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people…”) but it also includes these words about posture, the actions of a person’s body in prayer. I began to think about how I pray; not just the words, but also the posture.

Of course we need to affirm that God is far more concerned with the content of our prayers than the posture of our prayers. It is far more important to examine the heart than to examine the feet or the hands. At the same time, there is no doubt that our bodies can be an expression of our hearts (as you see when you shake your fist at the car that cut you off or when you clap your hands at the end of an inspired performance). And so it is useful, I think, to examine what the Bible says about our bodies during prayer.

I turned to Philip Ryken’s excellent commentary on 1 Timothy and found that he highlights several of the ways the Bible tells us to pray. I will summarize them just briefly, hoping that you find it useful, as I have.

Bowing
The Bible, and the Psalms especially, describe bowing during prayer. This is a posture we often use today and one we teach our children when we tell them to bow their heads (out of respect) and to fold their hands (probably out of respect and so they do not fidget!). Psalm 5 says “I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you” while Psalm 95:6 says “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” Bowing is a sign of respect and honor. Even today we may bow toward a king or dignitary, expressing in that action our respect for that person.

Kneeling
The Bible mentions several people who knelt during prayer, among them Daniel (Daniel 6:10) and Stephen (Acts 7:60). And of course Jesus himself knelt to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane. He “withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed” (Luke 22:41). Kneeling is a sign of humility and a sign of dependence. A person might kneel in the presence of a king or queen and he would do so as a sign of his deference to that person. It is difficult to be proud when kneeling before another. And so kneeling is a very natural posture for the Christian as he prays to the Lord. It seems a very natural position for bringing petitions to God, acknowledging God’s superiority and our utter dependence on him.

Standing
The Bible often mentions people standing to pray in public worship. When Solomon dedicated the temple, he knelt before God to pray while all the people stood (Chronicles 6:3, 13). In the same vein, Jehoshaphat “stood in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem, in the house of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 20:5). It became customary for Jewish people to stand for prayer while in their synagogues. Such posture has roots in the Christian faith as well. Ryken shows that Justin Martyr, Origen, Jerome and Augustine all wrote of standing for public prayer. Today we stand in the presence of a judge when he enters his court room. Until recently students would stand when their professor entered the room. And, until recent days, many churches encouraged people to stand during prayer. Standing is, of course, a sign of respect. We stand in the presence of those we respect (or at least as a sign of our respect for their position or their authority). And so standing for prayer is a natural position especially for times of corporate prayer as the people stand in God’s presence out of respect for his authority.

Lying Prostrate
Scripture also mentions people praying flat on the ground with their faces pressed to the earth. Moses fell in the presence of the Lord (Numbers 16:22, 20:6) as did Joshua (Joshua 5:14). Job fell to the ground and worshiped when he was in the depths of his despair. And, of course, the angels and elders who pray before God’s heavenly throne fall on their faces. “And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”” (Revelation 7:11). This is a sign of utter respect. A man may fall to the ground before another person when that other person has absolute power of life or death. To do so is to acknowledge one’s absolute unworthiness and to beg the grace of the other person. And so in prayer laying prostrate is a natural position for those who are overwhelmed either by trouble and woe or by a sense of the glory and majesty of God (or both!).

Hands Raised
And Scripture describes those who raise their hands in prayer. This was the way the priests worshiped in the temple (Psalm 134, 141, etc). And from extra-Scriptural sources we know that raising hands in prayer was customary in the early church. Ryken quotes Tertullian who said, “We Christians pray for all emperors, &c., looking up to heaven, with our hands stretched out, because guiltless; with our heads uncovered, because we are not ashamed.” Early Christian artwork often portrays those who prayed doing so with their hands raised. Such a posture signifies praise. Think today of a rock concert where people may raise their hands toward the stage in what looks almost like an act of praise and worship. And, of course, many Christians raise their hands when they sing, using this as a physical manifestation of their praise. Raising hands is appropriate in prayer especially during times of praising God. Ryken says “This posture is especially appropriate for the minister who leads in public prayer. When he stands in God’s presence to offer prayer on behalf of God’s people, he may raise his hands to show that the church’s prayers are offered to God as a sacrifice of praise.”

Nowhere does the Bible command us that we must set our bodies in one position or another during prayer. Yet it does describe a variety of positions that each have their own significance. You may find it useful to practice some of these postures in your times of private prayer, allowing that posture to be a reflection of your heart, whether it is a heart overwhelmed with the cares of life, a heart rejoicing in the majesty of God or a heart quieted in humble obedience to God.

Humbly Rejoicing in the Goodness of Others, by Tim Challies

2009-02-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

From http://www.challies.com/archives/articles/quotes/humbly-rejoicing-in-the-goodness-of-others.php:

As I read John Piper’s book Finally Alive I came across a lot of godly wisdom. But there was one quote that, more than the others, jumped out at me. I thought I’d share it with you today…

*****

This is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. (1 John 3:11-14)

Now this specific form of love in verse 12 may seem to you to be totally unneeded. “Don’t be like Cain who murdered his brother.” Am I really concerned that there will be a spate of murders among Christians? No. And I don’t think John feared that either, though it does happen. He doesn’t focus on the murder. He asks in verse 12, “And why did he murder him?” That’s John’s concern. There is something about Cain’s motive that he thinks will be relevant to the way believers love each other.

He answers at the end of verse 12: “Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.” What John is saying here is not merely that love doesn’t kill a brother, but that love doesn’t feel resentful when a brother is superior in some spiritual or moral way. Cain didn’t kill Abel simply because Cain was evil. He killed him because the contrast between Abel’s goodness and Cain’s evil made Cain angry. It made him feel guilty. Abel didn’t have to say anything; Abel’s goodness was a constant reminder to Cain that he was evil. And instead of dealing with his own evil by repentance and change, he got rid of Abel. If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, shoot the mirror.

So what would it be like for any of us to be like Cain? It would mean that anytime some weakness or bad habit in our lives is exposed by contrast to someone else’s goodness, instead of dealing with the weakness or the bad habit, we keep away from those whose lives make us feel defective. We don’t kill them. We avoid them. Or worse, we find ways to criticize them so as to neutralize the part of their lives that was making us feel convicted. We feel like the best way to nullify someone’s good point is to draw attention to their bad point. And so we protect ourselves from whatever good they might be or us.

But John’s point is: Love doesn’t act like that. Love is glad when our brothers and sisters are making progress in good habits or good attitudes or good behavior. Love rejoices in this growth. And if it happens to be faster than our own growth, then love is humble and rejoices with those who rejoice.

So the lesson for us is: Everywhere you see some growth, some virtue, some, spiritual discipline, some good habit, or good attitude, rejoice in it. Give thanks for it. Compliment it. Don’t resent it. Don’t be like Cain. Respond the opposite from Cain. Be inspired by other people’s goodness.

Love is humble. Love delights in other people’s good. Love doesn’t protect its own flaws. Love takes steps to change them. What a beautiful fellowship where everyone is rejoicing in each other’s strengths, not resenting them! This is what the love of God looks like when the new birth gives it life in the people of God.

Like Love, by Tim Challies

2009-02-23T15:39:00.001-07:00

From http://www.challies.com/archives/articles/personal-reflections/like-love.php:

I’ve been to my share of conferences in the past few years and quite a few of these have been geared toward pastors. There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed at the beginning of these events. In many cases these conferences are an opportunity for old friends to reconnect. Many times pastors have been attending the same conference year after year and have met new friends there or have reconnected with old friends from their college or seminary days. This is a once-per-year opportunity to spend a little bit of time together and to play catch-up.

I suppose there must have been a time when people carried printed photos in their wallets. Today, though, people carry photos on their cell phones or on their iPods. So often, when these men meet after the passing of yet another year, I see them embracing and then immediately digging out their phones or their iPods to show off the pictures of their children or grandchildren. And it is interesting to hear them talk; to hear them share proudly about the children they’ve already begun to miss even after only one day apart. As you listen to these pastors tell about their children, you notice that they dwell on the things that make them proud. “Brian’s nine. He loves basketball and leads his team in scoring. He’s getting so tall! His head comes up to my chest now and he eats like there’s no tomorrow. And here’s Rebecca. She’s fourteen. You can see she looks just like her mom. She loves cameras and says she wants to be a photographer…” Of course you know as you hear this that the last year has not been free of conflict. You know that mom and dad are probably working hard to maintain boundaries around Rebecca who is already acting out as a rebellious teen and that they are working hard to make Brian respect authority. It may well be that the night before he left, dad had to invoke some discipline and left the house only after making Rebecca promise that she would obey her mother. But when dad gets together with his friends, these things are not at the front of his mind. He loves his children, he is proud of his children, and he wants to tell others about them.

I thought about this a short time ago when I was considering how God feels about us, how he feels about me, how he feels about all of his children. I guess I often go through life thinking that God is generally displeased with me. I see my sin, I see my failings, I see my heart. At the same time I see from Scripture God’s majesty, his holiness, his perfection. And when I put these together I suppose that God must be looking at me with at least some level of disgust. He must regard me as I regard myself so much of the time; as a person who may try to do what’s right, but as a person who is just an abject failure when it comes to holiness. At the end of the day, I do love him, but I also love sin. At the end of it all, I pledge allegiance to him, but prove allegiance to myself seemingly just as often. So what could there be for him to love here?

But I’m starting to think that I’ve had this all wrong. I don’t know that there is a single Bible passage I would point to. But more and more, as I study God’s Word and as I learn about who he is, I see that he is a loving Father who is lavish with his love. Maybe it was my recent studies in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Maybe it was my reading through the prophets, seeing how God hates sin but loves his people. Maybe it was just talking to my mother who came to this realization, I think, long before I did. But somehow I am starting to see that God hates my sin but that he loves me. God despises the evil that lurks within me, but is extravagant in his grace. He actually, really loves me.

And maybe in that way God isn’t so different from the pastors I see at conferences. He loves us. He loves me. And more than that, he’s proud of me. He isn’t petty, filling his mind with all those things I’ve done wrong, but rather he is gracious, seeing all those evidences of his grace in my life. And, you know, I think this is one of the reasons that The Shack has done so well and has sold so many copies. It presents a God who not only loves people, but who also likes them and who is proud of them. Maybe we can be so careful in (rightly) understanding God’s hatred for sin and his desire for holiness that we forget about his great love for us despite the sin that still pollutes us. Maybe we forget that God truly does regard as children—children he not only loves but children he also genuinely likes. And there’s a difference between the two, isn’t there?

A Prayer for Year's End

2008-12-30T09:38:00.001-07:00

From The Valley of Vision Devotional:

O Love beyond Compare,
Thou art good when thou givest,
when thou takest away,
when the sun shines upon me,
when night gathers over me.
Thou hast loved me before the foundation of the world,
and in love didst redeem my soul;
Thou dost love me still,
in spite of my hard heart, ingratitude, distrust.
Thy goodness has been with me another year,
leading me through a twisting wilderness,
in retreat helping me to advance,
when beaten back making sure headway.
Thy goodness will be with me in the year ahead;
I hoist sail and draw up anchor,
With thee as the blessed pilot of my future as of my past.
I bless thee that thou hast veiled my eyes to the waters ahead.
If thou hast appointed storms of tribulation,
thou wilt be with me in them;
If I have to pass through tempests of persecution and temptation,
I shall not drown;
If I am to die,
I shall see thy face the sooner;
If a painful end is to be my lot,
grant me grace that my faith fail not;
If I am to be cast aside from the service I love,
I can make no stipulation;
Only glorify thyself in me whether in comfort or trial,
as a chosen vessel meet always for thy use.

Yawning With Purpose

2008-12-29T15:28:00.002-07:00

Ever wondered why we yawn, and why it seems so contagious? Read on!

From ICR.org:

Yawning With a Purpose

by Brian Thomas, M.S.*

All vertebrates yawn, but why they do it has long been a mystery. Recent research suggests that yawning may be a cooling mechanism for the brain.

In their study set for publication in the journal Animal Behaviour, Binghamton University biologists tested the hypothesis that “as ambient temperature increases and approaches (but does not exceed) body temperature, yawning should increase as a consequence.”¹ In other words, as the surrounding temperature rises closer to the body’s warmer temperature, yawning should result. The parakeets they tested yawned as predicted, thus confirming the researchers’ temperature-based hypothesis.

Oral and nasal passages are very close to the brain, as those who have experienced “brain freeze” when swallowing ice cream too quickly can attest, and it makes sense that the increased air movement through those passages would aid in cooling. Vertebrate brains, which contain billions of delicate, heat-generating biochemical reactions occurring every minute, operate best within a certain cool temperature range. Further, “the new findings also explain why tired individuals often yawn, since both exhaustion and sleep deprivation have been shown to increase deep brain temperatures.”²

Thus, the pre-programmed instinct to yawn may serve the purpose of cooling, but it only does so because of the location of specifically-shaped airways near the deep brain.³ Remarkably, both the physical equipment and the metaphysical instinct (information or programming) to use it are found fully integrated “in all classes of vertebrates.”¹ How did this come to be?

Lead author Andrew Gallup asserts that yawning “evolved to allow maximum cooling of the brain,”¹ though he offers no evidence to support the concept that a long series of adaptations in response to differing environments led to the development of yawning—nor does he explain how this feature was retained by all seven vertebrate classes throughout their hypothetically long history of development from a common ancestor. Much less faith is required to believe that a Creator specifically integrated this system to maintain brain temperature, and that “in his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”⁴

References

Gallup, A. , M. L. Miller and A. B. Clark. 2009. Yawning and thermoregulation in budgerigars, Melopsittacus undulatus. Animal Behaviour. 77 (1): 109-113.
Viegas, J. The Yawn Explained: It Cools Your Brain. Discovery Channel News. Posted on discovery.com December 15, 2008.
Thomas, B. 2008. The Amazing Design of the Human Nose. Acts & Facts. 37 (8): 14.
Job 12:10.

Musical Train-Wrecks for the Glory of God

2008-12-22T07:40:00.004-07:00

If you have ever been to church, you've probably seen or been involved with the musical worship portion at some point. This clip, from Bob Kauflin's Sovereign Grace Ministries church in Gaithersburg, Maryland shows what happens when worship goes wrong. Hilariously wrong.

Beloved Unlovely, by Brenna Kate Simonds

2008-12-17T09:12:00.002-07:00

From http://www.boundless.org:

It was the summer of 2000, if I remember correctly. Even though I'd only been serving God for a year and a half, I was zealous for God's Word and heartbroken for those who didn't know Him.

I had shared my desire to take my music to the streets with a friend, and as we prayed, she asked, "What's stopping you?" So I went. It was my first day of playing guitar out in the park. It was a very busy weekend in Boston, as there was a big tourist attraction in town, and there were literally thousands of people walking through the park.

I was ready to take on the world for Christ. Or so I thought.

I was unsure of whether or not God had really led me to sing in the park that day, and I wanted His confirmation. As I began to strum my guitar, I closed my eyes to sing some lines of a Delirious song:

Lead me to the cross
Where we first met
Draw me to my knees
So we can talk
Let me feel your breath
Let me know you're here with me

When I opened my eyes, there was a man standing in front of me. He was visibly intoxicated, and he reeked of mouth wash (I later found out sometimes alcoholics drink a certain brand of mouth wash when they can't get hold of alcohol). He was dirty, smelly and scary.

I was speechless.

And then he spoke. "I was headed in the other direction down the path when God told me to come over here and talk to you."

I didn't know whether I should be praising God for this confirmation or running for the hills.

I grew up with an alcoholic parent. I don't drink, and haven't for years. In fact, I can't stand the smell of alcohol. If I'm in the proximity of someone who has had a drink in the past 24 hours, I can probably tell just by standing 5 feet away. And I can't stand it.

Yet here was this man, standing in front of me, claiming that God had sent him to talk to me. I didn't know how to respond, so I asked him to sit on the bench next to me.

* * *

I was out of my comfort zone. God was having me share His love with the "unlovely." The thing is, Jesus was one of the original lovers of the "unlovely"; out of the many examples of this in the Gospels, a story in John 8 sticks out to me.

Jesus was teaching one morning, when the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees brought a woman to Jesus who had been caught committing adultery. They asked Jesus if she should be stoned, as Mosaic law required. After a lengthy pause, Jesus responded, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

Many people walk away from this passage and think that this statement from Jesus is the key moral of the story. And maybe it is. It just strikes me slightly differently. Personally, I rarely have to remind myself that I'm a sinner. I could have written the words from Psalm 51: "For I recognize my rebellion; it haunts me day and night." I was once the woman caught in adultery. I also was ungrateful, bitter, self-righteous and proud. I'm generally very aware that I'm still many of these things, but I have to wonder if the majority of the Church can see themselves this clearly. Indeed, as Scripture says, if we think we are without sin, we are lying to ourselves. Even as believers who are no longer bound by the laws of sin and death, we still sin.

I knew a homeless woman who went by the name of Friend. We attended the same church for a year or so. Since she didn't have a place to live, she had nowhere to store her things. Every Sunday, she carried two huge pieces of luggage full of her stuff, big duffel bags that she threw over her shoulders, down into the basement sanctuary of our church.

That year, the associate pastor got engaged and invited everyone in the church to attend the wedding ceremony, which would be held in another, more traditional church in town. Friend showed up to the wedding with all of her stuff in tow. She was dirty, and she probably smelled, but she wanted to attend her pastor's wedding. I was shocked when I saw the looks of disgust on people's faces as she walked down the aisle — people whom I knew were Christians.

I honestly wanted to punch a few of them, evidence of my own unlovely attitudes surfacing.

For me, John 8 is about how Jesus deals with sinners, sinners like me. It's not only about how He dealt with the unlovely people, but also the unlovely attitudes that live in all of our hearts. How would Jesus respond to the man who smells like body odor and mouth wash? The homeless woman who carries two bags of her stuff into a church wedding? Or whichever unlovely person He might come in contact with? How did He deal with this woman, caught knee-deep in her sinfulness?

To help me resolve these questions, I turned to German theologian Helmut Thielicke:

When Jesus loved a guilt-laden person and helped him, He saw in him an erring child of God. He saw in him a human being who His Father loved and grieved over because he was going wrong. He saw him as God originally designed and meant him to be, and therefore, He saw through the surface layer of grime and dirt to the real man underneath. Jesus did not identify the person with his sin, but rather saw in this sin something alien, something that did not really belong to him, something that merely chained and mastered him and from which he would free him and bring him back to his real self. Jesus was able to love men because He loved them right through the layer of mud.1

All of the accusers left. Jesus illuminated their unlovely attitudes. But the woman stayed. Was she waiting to see if Jesus would accept her? Was the hope in her heart that Jesus would be able to love her, that He would see right through her layer of mud?

Jesus did not condemn her, nor did He shy away from commanding her to "Go now and leave your life of sin." I see Jesus' admonition here as a general admonition, not a specific one. Even if she stopped the specific sin that got her into this situation in the first place, she would not be in any better position than she was in before. She would still be a sinner, in need of a savior.

I've noticed that Jesus often refused to point out people's specific sin struggles to them. Instead, He pointed out the overall sinful condition of people's hearts and their need for a savior. He loved this woman caught in adultery and extended His grace to her, just as He does to us, and just as He asks us to do for others.

* * *

I wish I could find a written account of my encounter with the man in the park. I can't even remember his name. But I do remember how God worked in my heart, and in his, that day. I talked with him, as scared as I was, and I shared God's love with him as best as I could in my own brokenness.

He eventually consented for me to pray for him. I put my hand on his shoulder as I talked to God on his behalf, and he wept so hard he was shaking and snot was unabashedly running out of his nose. I struggled in that moment with my own unloveliness as I looked around and wondered what people were thinking about me, if they were noticing me and the snot, and looking down on me.

When I finished praying, his face was genuinely different, his entire demeanor lighter. He asked me to play "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," which I faked my way through. He sang passionately, at the top of his lungs, for all to hear. By that point, I had gotten over myself and I sang out loud with him. Eventually, we parted and I said goodbye, letting him know I'd pray for him.

I don't know what happened to him after that. I never did see him again, though I would often look for him in that park, the same park where I would sometimes meet up with Friend for lunch. I know I was changed in that encounter, and I still pray that he was, too.

In the years that followed that day in the park, there have been many times that I've felt very unlovely, times when I was sure no one could handle seeing my brokenness or hearing about my unloveliness. I know that in the times when I've let my guard down and shared my struggles with someone, I've most often found compassion and acceptance, and rarely rejection. I find comfort in knowing that I have a high priest, Jesus, who sits at the right hand of God, interceding for me, a high priest who has been tempted in every way, who, when I confess my struggles, can honestly say to God the Father, "I know exactly what that feels like."

I sometimes wonder how we, as believers, might do a better job of loving the unlovely, people covered with the filth of sin. How we might love them right through "their layer of mud." How we can extend the message of grace and love to those who so clearly need it. And I sometimes wonder how willing I am to come face to face with my own unloveliness.

* * *

NOTES

1. Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?, p. 175.

From ICR Daily Devotional

2008-12-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

Occupied Territory

December 10, 2008

"But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light." (1 Peter 2:9)

In our ongoing struggle for both survival and victory in this world, we do well to recognize that we are in enemy territory. While it is true that our Captain created the world--indeed, "all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3)--sacrificed His life to redeem it, and will reign over it for eternity, it is also true that "the whole world lieth in wickedness" (1 John 5:19), occupied by "the prince of this world" (John 12:31), "the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience" (Ephesians 2:2).

The fact that we are surrounded by such darkness should come as no surprise, for before we were rescued by His grace, we too were part of the darkness--indeed, we had to be called out of it. John the Baptist came "to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace" (Luke 1:79). Furthermore, as Christ taught, "men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19).

This confrontation overshadows mere human conflict, however, "for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:12). But, praise God, we have been called "out of darkness into his marvellous light" as described in our text. Although we may be still in the world, our King has "delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son" (Colossians 1:13). "In him was life; and the life was the light of men" (John 1:4). JDM

10 Tips to Read More and Read Better

2008-11-25T13:20:00.001-07:00

From Tim Challies' Blog, www.challies.com:

When I turned to the readers of this site and asked for questions I could answer or topics I could address, I noted (without much surprise) that many people were interested in the subject of reading. One person sought a basic “Why, what and how of reading Christian books.” Others sought advice on how to read more and how to read better. This is a subject I have written about before but I thought it would be valuable to return to it today. Here is a list of ten tips to read more and to read better.

Read - We start with the obvious: you need to read. Find me someone who has changed the world and who spent his time watching television and I’ll find you a thousand who read books instead. Unless reading is your passion, you may need to be very deliberate about setting aside time to read. You may need to force yourself to do it. Set yourself a reasonable target (“I’m going to read three books this year” or “I’m going to finish this book before the end of the month”) and work towards it. Set aside time every day or every week and make sure you pick up the book during those times. Find a book dealing with a subject of particular interest to you. You may even find it beneficial to find a book that looks interesting—a nice hardback volume with a beautiful, embossed cover, easy-to-read fonts and beautiful typography. Reading is an experience and the experience begins with the look and feel of the book. So find a book that looks like one you’ll enjoy and commit to reading it. And when you’ve done that, find another one and do it again. And again.

Read Widely - I’m convinced that one reason people do not read more is that they do not vary their reading enough. Any subject, no matter how much you are interested in it, can begin to feel dry if you focus all of your attention upon it. So be sure to read widely. Read fiction and non-fiction, theology and biography, current affairs and history, Christian and non. You will no doubt want to focus the majority of your reading in one broad area, and that is well and good. But be sure to vary your diet.

Read Deliberately - Similar to reading widely, ensure that you read deliberately. Choose your books carefully. If you neglect to do this, you may find that you overlook a particular category for months or even years at a time. Al Mohler, a voracious reader, divides books into six categories: Theology, Biblical Studies, Church Life, History, Cultural Studies, and Literature and has some project going within each of these categories at all times. You can draw up categories of your own, but try to ensure you are reading from a variety of the categories on a regular basis. Choose books that fit into each of these categories and plan your reading ahead of time, so you know what book you will read next and you know what you’ll read after that. Anticipation for the next book is often a motivating force in completing the current book.

Read Interactively - Reading is best done, at least when enjoying serious books, when you work hard at understanding the book and when you interact with the author’s arguments. Read with a highlighter and pencil in hand. Ask questions of the author and expect him to answer them through the course of the text. Scrawl notes in the margins, write questions inside the front cover, and return to them often (and, if the questions remain unanswered, even seek to contact the author!). Highlight the most important portions of the book, or the ones you intend to return to later. As Al Mohler says, “Books are to be read and used, not collected and coddled.” I have found that writing reviews of the books I read is a valuable way of returning at least one more time to the book to make sure that I understand what the author was trying to say and how he said it. So interact with those books and make them your own.

Read with Discernment - Though books have incredible power to do good, to challenge and strengthen and edify, they also have the power to do evil. I have seen lives transformed by books but have also seen lives crushed. So do ensure that you read with discernment, always comparing the books you read to the standard of Scripture. If you encounter a book that is particularly controversial, it may be worth ensuring that you can reference a review that interacts critically with the arguments or that you can read it with a person who better understands the arguments and their implications. You do not need to fear any book as long as you read with a critical eye and with a discerning mind.

Read Heavy Books - It can be intimidating to stare at some of those massive volumes or series of volumes sitting on your bookshelf, but be sure to make time to read some of those serious works. A person can only grow so much while living on a diet of easy-reading Christian Living books. Make your way through some Jonathan Edwards or John Calvin. Read Grudem’s Systematic Theology or David Wells’ “No Place for Truth” series. You will find them slow-going, to be sure, but will also find them rewarding. Commit to reading some of these heavy volumes as a regular part of your reading diet. Consider joining in one of our Reading Classics Together efforts to add some interaction and accountability in reading one of the classics of the faith.

Read Light Books - While dense books should be a serious reader’s main diet, there is nothing wrong with pausing to enjoy the occasional novel or light read. After reading two or three good books, allow yourself to read a Clancy or Grisham or Peretti something else that never changed anyone’s life. Allow yourself to get lost in a good story every now and again and stay up way too late insisting that you’re going to read just one more chapter. You will find that they refresh you and prepare you to read the next heavy book.

Read New Books - Keep an eye on what is new and popular and consider reading what other people in your church or neighborhood are reading. If The Secret is selling millions of copies, consider reading it so you know what people are reading and so you can attempt to discern why people are reading it. Use your knowledge of these books as a bridge to talk to people about their books and what attracts them to the ones they read. Use your knowledge of these books to understand what other Christians are reading and why.

Read Old Books - Do not read only new books. I cannot say this any better than C.S. Lewis: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” So be sure to read old books, whether that means classics or whether that simply means books that come from a generation or two before your own. And be sure to read history as well, since there is no better way of understanding today than by understanding yesterday.

Read What Your Heroes Read - A few years ago, while at the Shepherds’ Conference, a young man who was in ministry but had not had opportunity to attend seminary asked John MacArthur what he would recommend to this man so he could continue learning and continue growing in his knowledge of theology. MacArthur’s answer was simple: He said that this pastor should find godly men he admires and read what they read. So do that! Find people you admire and read the books that have most shaped them. Visit the web sites of your heroes and you may just find that they have already compiled lists of their most formative books. Read these books and see for yourself how they shaped your heroes.

The Other Christian Faith

2008-11-19T16:53:00.002-07:00

The Other Christian Faith
by Rachel Starr Thomson

When I first fell in love with God, I thought the initial starry glow would never wear off. I cared so much about being His; about pleasing Him; about dwelling in His presence. I loved Him. Besides, this warmth, this new reality, was so much more than emotion. It was spirit. It was life.

But I lost it.

I'm not sure when or where, but the glow wore off. Then it did worse: It turned around. As the sun set one day, I paused in the middle of sweeping our driveway to acknowledge a devastating truth: I was afraid of God's voice. I felt like Eve, hiding in the bushes. I had loved Him, deeply and passionately, but now love had turned to fear.

If you drift away from God's presence, I had often been told, you must have sinned — so now you must make it right. Uncover your sin, acknowledge it, get your life back on track. That will close the distance between you and God.

I took the advice to heart, finding and repenting of sins in the darkest corners of my soul. I tried my hardest to repent properly, but I couldn't seem to straighten myself out enough to truly change. My depression only deepened.

I had heard that the key to God's presence was prayer. We can "practice the presence of God" by praying constantly, in every situation. So I did. But my prayers felt shallow and distant. At night I would lay on my face on my bed and try my hardest to pray, to pray passionately, to pray with greater faith.

Greater faith. Perhaps that was the key. Or greater outward holiness. Or inward sincerity. Or something I hadn't even thought of yet. My depression started to affect my outer life. Others noticed. I felt bad — like I was just trying to get attention. But I couldn't fake joy where I felt none. I loved God, and somehow I had destroyed our relationship. That hurt more than anything.

But rays of light started to reach me, mostly through the Book of Romans. As they did, they revealed the truth. Somewhere, somehow, I had confused my allegiance and become a devotee of The Other Christian Faith.

The Other Christian Faith has been around as long as Christianity itself. Paul railed against it when he wrote, "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you? Are you so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?" (Gal. 3:1, 3). Its backbone is a system of works. It shapes itself as we embrace many good and worthy things; it incarnates when we replace Christ with those things. Personal convictions, politics, homeschooling, ancient Christian disciplines, even right doctrine can become invested with the spirit of The Other Christian Faith — so long as we are capable of trusting in our own abilities, rules, practices, and traditions.

Slowly, I began to see the lie. God had never left me, but in all my strivings to find Him, I had left Him. All He asked of me was trust in His unearned grace, and that was the one thing I was unwilling to give.

In my case, The Other Christian Faith took the form of holy living — what we sometimes call sanctification. In trying to follow the reams of advice out there on living a true, vibrant, Spirit-filled Christian life, I forgot about grace. I did not trust God to make me righteous: I trusted the works I thought He had called me to do. When I hit a crisis point, not once did I simply throw myself on God's mercy and ask Him to help me because of His love. Instead, I tried to fix everything by fixing myself.

In the end, The Other Christian Faith is not even trust in works. Its lie is as old as Eden: We can do this by ourselves. The Other Christian Faith is faith in myself, couched in religion, bolstered by works, and totally dependent on my own righteousness.

There are several signs that The Other Christian Faith has set up camp in my life:

1. It can be spotted in how I treat other believers. If I am far more ready to judge and distance myself from others than I am to love and fellowship with them, chances are I have forgotten the nature of my salvation and theirs. If I see my fellow Christians as brands plucked from the fire, as lost sheep sought and saved by the Jesus who also found me, I will treat them with grace.

2. Likewise, The Other Christian Faith reveals itself in the way I treat myself. Like the Old Testament law, its demands are harsh and unflinching. Under its sway, I know what I want to become, and I strive in that direction. When I succeed, I rejoice in my own goodness. When I fail, I discover the law's age-old limits. The Other Christian Faith offers no hope and no comfort — just plenty of condemnation and pride.

3. The Other Christian Faith is revealed in the way I relate to God. Do I come to Him in gratitude and humility, or do I believe He owes me something? Is He my Father, loving me for no more reason than that His nature is to love, or do I see Him as smaller and less gracious than even myself?

Light came through my depression at last, reminding me of two important things. First, I began to see God again. His love, power, and infinite worth lifted my eyes. Psalm 5:3 became a theme verse: "My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up."

Second, I remembered that He loved me first.

And not only first, but more.

I had tried so hard to prove my love for God. He had already proven His by giving His only begotten, deeply beloved Son for my sake. He had sought and saved me. "What shall we then say to these things?" Paul asks in Romans 8:31-32. "If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? "

True Christian faith is trust in a person who loved us enough to die for us. It is a deep belief that we will never deserve what has been done for us, but God has done it anyway. Unlike The Other Christian Faith, faith in Jesus Christ sets us free from condemnation to dance in the great open pathways of His grace. It pours through us in love toward others, who are as helpless — and as rescued — as we are.

Incredibly enough, years after God broke through my darkness, I opened the doors to The Other Christian Faith again. Again, I hit a crisis; again, my misplaced faith condemned me. And again, graciously, lovingly, my Jesus found me. He lifted me, a pauper in spirit, and anointed me with the riches of His love.

Faith in ourselves traps us in a rule-based world of our own making, threatening us every moment with disgrace. True Christian faith begins as we beat our breasts and cry, "Have mercy on me, a sinner," and sweeps us up in a real mercy, a real grace, far beyond anything we could imagine. In small ways, I choose between them every day. And every day, the real Christian faith is more than enough to set me free.

From WORLD Magazine, 11/15 Issue:

2008-11-07T15:57:00.001-07:00

Marry. Cry. Rejoice. Buy.

And do politics as though you were not doing politics | John Piper

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

Politics is like marrying and crying and laughing and buying. We should do it, but only as though not doing it. Here is a strange text:

The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away (1 Corinthians 7:29-31).

This sounds bizarre. First it says: Don't flee the world. Marry. Cry. Rejoice. Buy. Deal. But then: Do it all as if you weren't doing it. So with politics. How does this work?

"Let those who have wives live as though they had none." If she is exquisitely desirable, beware of desiring her more than Christ. If she is deeply disappointing, beware of being hurt too much. This is temporary—only a brief lifetime. Then comes the never-disappointing life. Marriage—good or bad—is for making much of Christ.

So it is with politics. Its outcomes are not our greatest joy when they go our way, and not demoralizing when they don't. Political life is for making much of Christ whether the world falls apart or holds together.

Let those who mourn do so as though they were not mourning. Our losses do not incapacitate us. They do not blind us to the truth that for Christians the best is always yet to come. Always. The Lord gives and takes away. But He remains. And we remain hopeful in our mourning.

So it is with politics. We win or lose. Either way our expectations and frustrations are modest. The best this world can offer is short and small. In the long run Jesus wins.

Let those who rejoice do so as though they were not rejoicing. Christians rejoice in a thousand created things. But none of them satisfies the soul. Even the surest sights of glory now are in a mirror dimly. Such delights will soon be as though they were not. They will be replaced by a vastly better joy.

So it is with politics. There may be happy victories. But the best government we get is a foreshadowing. Peace and justice are approximated now. They will be perfect when Christ comes. So our joy is modest. Our triumphs are short-lived and shot through with imperfection.

Let those who buy do it as though they had no goods. Christians earn, give, spend, and buy. But our treasure is in heaven. Car, house, books, computers, heirlooms—we possess them with a loose grip. If they are taken away, we feel that in a sense we did not have them. We are not here to possess the world. We are here to show, by how we use the world, that Christ is more precious than the world.

So it is with politics. It does not have ultimate weight for us. It is one more stage for acting out the truth that Christ, and not politics, is supreme.

Let those who deal with the world do it as though they had no dealings with it. Yes, we deal with the world. But there are unseen things that are vastly more precious than the world. The full passions of our heart are attached to something greater—God and His purposes. We will inherit the world soon enough. For now we deal with it to show that Christ, not the world, is our treasure.

So it is with politics. We deal with the system, the news, the candidates, the issues, the outcomes. But they are not the great thing in our lives. Christ is. And Christ will be ruling over His people with perfect supremacy after every election and after the vanishing of every nation.

So we do not revel or retreat. Our reward is in heaven. Our comforts are great. Our task is clear. Make much of Christ, not Caesar.

From Al Mohler, 11/5/08:

2008-11-05T15:33:00.001-07:00

America Has Chosen a President

The election of Sen. Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States came as a bang, not a whimper. The tremors had been perceptible for days, maybe even weeks. On Tuesday, America experienced nothing less than a political and cultural earthquake.

The margin of victory for the Democratic ticket was clear. Americans voted in record numbers and with tangible enthusiasm. By the end of the day, it was clear that Barack Obama would be elected with a majority of the popular vote and a near landslide in the Electoral College. When President-Elect Obama greeted the throngs of his supporters in Chicago's Grant Park, he basked in the glory of electoral energy.

For many of us, the end of the night brought disappointment. In this case, the disappointment is compounded by the sense that the issues that did not allow us to support Sen. Obama are matters of life and death -- not just political issues of heated debate. Furthermore, the margin of victory and sense of a shift in the political landscape point to greater disappointments ahead. We all knew that so much was at stake.

For others, the night was magical and momentous. Young and old cried tears of amazement and victory as America elected its first African-American President -- and elected him overwhelmingly. Just forty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, an African-American stood to claim victory as President-Elect of the nation. As Sen. Obama assured the crowd in Chicago and the watching nation, "We will get there. We will get there." No one hearing those words could fail to hear the refrain of plaintive words spoken in Memphis four decades ago. President-Elect Obama would stand upon the mountaintop that Dr. King had foreseen.

That victory is a hallmark moment in history for all Americans -- not just for those who voted for Sen. Obama. As a nation, we will never think of ourselves the same way again. Americans rich and poor, black and white, old and young, will look to an African-American man and know him as President of the United States. The President. The only President. The elected President. Our President.

Every American should be moved by the sight of young African-Americans who -- for the first time -- now believe that they have a purchase in American democracy. Old men and old women, grandsons and granddaughters of slaves and slaveholders, will look to an African-American as President.

Regardless of politics, could anyone remain unmoved by the sight of Jesse Jackson crying alone amidst the crowd in Chicago? This dimension of Election Day transcends politics and touches the heart of the American people.

Yet, the issues and the politics remain. Given the scale of the Democratic victory, the political landscape will be completely reshaped. The fight for the dignity and sanctity of unborn human beings has been set back by a great loss, and by the election of a President who has announced his intention to sign the Freedom of Choice Act into law. The struggle to protect marriage against its destruction by redefinition is now complicated by the election of a President who has declared his aim to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. On issue after issue, we face a longer, harder, and more protracted struggle than ever before.

Still, we must press on as advocates for the unborn, for the elderly, for the infirm, and for the vulnerable. We must redouble our efforts to defend marriage and the integrity of the family. We must be vigilant to protect religious liberty and the freedom of the pulpit. We face awesome battles ahead.

At the same time, we must be honest and recognize that the political maps are being redrawn before our eyes. Will the Republican Party decide that conservative Christians are just too troublesome for the party and see the pro-life movement as a liability? There is the real danger that the Republicans, stung by this defeat, will adopt a libertarian approach to divisive moral issues and show conservative Christians the door.

Others will declare these struggles over, arguing that the election of Sen. Obama means that Americans in general -- and many younger Evangelicals in particular -- are ready to "move on" to other issues. This is no time for surrender or the abandonment of our core principles. We face a much harder struggle ahead, but we have no right to abandon the struggle.

We should look for opportunities to work with the new President and his administration where we can. We must hope that he will lead and govern as the bridge-builder he claimed to be in his campaign. We must confront and oppose the Obama administration where conscience demands, but work together where conscience allows.

Evangelical Christians face another challenge with the election of Sen. Obama, and a failure to rise to this challenge will bring disrepute upon the Gospel, as well as upon ourselves. There must be absolutely no denial of the legitimacy of President-Elect Obama's election and no failure to accord this new President the respect and honor due to anyone elected to that high office. Failure in this responsibility is disobedience to a clear biblical command.

Beyond this, we must commit ourselves to pray for this new President, for his wife and family, for his administration, and for the nation. We are commanded to pray for rulers, and this new President faces challenges that are not only daunting but potentially disastrous. May God grant him wisdom. He and his family will face new challenges and the pressures of this office. May God protect them, give them joy in their family life, and hold them close together.

We must pray that God will protect this nation even as the new President settles into his role as Commander in Chief, and that God will grant peace as he leads the nation through times of trial and international conflict and tension.

We must pray that God would change President-Elect Obama's mind and heart on issues of our crucial concern. May God change his heart and open his eyes to see abortion as the murder of the innocent unborn, to see marriage as an institution to be defended, and to see a host of issues in a new light. We must pray this from this day until the day he leaves office. God is sovereign, after all.

Without doubt, we face hard days ahead. Realistically, we must expect to be frustrated and disappointed. We may find ourselves to be defeated and discouraged. We must keep ever in mind that it is God who raises up nations and pulls them down, and who judges both nations and rulers. We must not act or think as unbelievers, or as those who do not trust God.

America has chosen a President. President-Elect Barack Obama is that choice, and he faces a breathtaking array of challenges and choices in days ahead. This is the time for Christians to begin praying in earnest for our new President. There is no time to lose.

Some thoughts from ICR

2008-11-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

The President's Heart

"The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will." (Proverbs 21:1)

A river may seem to meander aimlessly, but it eventually reaches its goal. The twists and turns along the way are constrained by a variety of hydraulic and geologic facts that determine its local speed and direction, but somehow it "just keeps rolling along" toward the sea.

So it is with a king--or with a president, or any leader of a state or nation. He may have a goal in mind (honorable or otherwise) for the nation he governs, but there are numerous people and circumstances along the way that will either impede or help his progress toward that goal. In fact, we ourselves--the Christian citizens of this nation--are an integral component of those circumstances.

But the president's heart is in the hands of God. In fact, "the powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13:1). Whether the ruler comes into power by election or inheritance or coup d'etat or some other way (depending upon the nation and type of government), God is in control and will accomplish His ultimate goal.

That is why it is vital that we frequently make "supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks . . . for all men," especially for "kings, and for all that are in authority" so that we will all be able to "lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" (1 Timothy 2:1-2).

Our American nation has had many great men as our presidents over the years, and many of our ancestors were indeed men and women of prayer. We do have a great heritage in our nation of both leaders and followers who believed in the Creator God of the Bible and who prayed diligently for their country and the great decisions of its history. We must--must--do the same today! HMM

ICR on Halloween, 10/31/08:

2008-10-31T09:00:00.000-06:00

Halloween

"Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils." (1 Timothy 4:1)

Halloween was a corruption of "Hallowed E'en," the evening before "All Saints Day" in which civil disobedience and sinful license were tolerated prior to the forgiveness and penance sought the next day.

Although the level of debauchery and wickedness has waxed and waned over the centuries, nothing "hallowed" has ever been associated with the practice--until more recent times among evangelical churches. Now we promote a "Harvest Festival" or a "Bible Character Dress-up Night"--much of which encourages the practice of costuming and treats as a harmless alternative.

The difficulty is not with the church activities, but with the timing and the association with that which is evil. That obvious connection with a pagan holiday will undermine resolve to "come out from among them, and be ye separate" (2 Corinthians 6:17).

Yes, no doubt that passage warns against an "unequal yoke" in marriage--but its primary focus is on church and individual purity! "What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? (2 Corinthians 6:14-15).

As a parent, I know the pain of restricting my children from participating in the "fun" of Halloween. And as a former pastor, I know the pressure to accommodate the majority of church members who see no "harm" in such things. However, our allegiance and our responsibility are to the Lord, not men (Colossians 3:23). HMM III

ICR Devotional Thoughts - 10/23/2008

2008-10-23T09:02:00.000-06:00

When the Lord Comes

"After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward." (Genesis 15:1)

This is the first of the great "I am's" of Scripture, and it was given to Father Abraham at a time of both great victory and great despondence. The Lord had enabled Abraham's little army to vanquish a much larger Amorite host, but then, still childless, he was suddenly overwhelmed by his loneliness and vulnerability in an alien land.

Then Jesus came! When Christ much later affirmed His eternal self-existence to the Pharisees ("I am," He had said), He claimed that Abraham had seen His day, and rejoiced (John 8:56). This experience, recorded early in Genesis, was, no doubt, that great occasion. As the living Word (John 1:1) by whom all things were made (v. 3), He assured Abram that He, Himself, would provide all needed protection ("thy shield") and all needed blessing ("exceeding great reward"). And then it was that "he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness" (Genesis 15:6). The Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal existing Creator and Redeemer of all things is no less able today than then to be our protection--and our provision, as well.

Note also that it was the Word of the Lord which came to Abram in a vision. This is the first use of the Hebrew word dabar in Scripture to mean "word," and here it is the Word of God personified. This still further identifies the vision with the pre-incarnate Christ, who would eventually become God's incarnate Word (John 1:1, 14).

Thus, as to Abram, God says: "Fear not!" Adam, indeed, was justifiably afraid when he heard the voice of the Lord (Genesis 3:10), for he had only a fig leaf for a covering. But, like Abram, we have a strong shield, which is none other than the Lord Himself. HMM

ICR Devotional Thoughts - 10/21/2008

2008-10-21T11:02:00.001-06:00

A Bag with Holes

"Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes." (Haggai 1:6)

This biting description of a frustrating life style, penned by one of the Jewish post-exilic prophets, is both preceded and followed by this appropriate admonition: "Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Consider your ways" (Haggai 1:5-7). When a professing believer somehow never seems to have enough and his money bag seems filled with holes, it is time for him to consider carefully his ways before the Lord.

After all, our God owns the cattle on a thousand hills and is well able to supply all our needs. In context, Haggai is rebuking the people of Judah for tending to their own welfare and neglecting the work of God. "Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your cieled |paneled| houses, and this house |that is, the unfinished temple in Jerusalem| lie waste?" (Haggai 1:4).

Herein is an eternal principle. Jesus said, "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things |that is, food and drink and clothing|. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you" (Matthew 6:32-33). If these necessities of life are not being provided, we urgently need to consider our ways. Are God’s kingdom and His righteousness really our first concerns?

We often quote the wonderful promise "my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:19). But we must remember that this promise was given to a group of Christians whose "deep poverty abounded unto the riches of their liberality," because they "first gave their own selves to the Lord" (2 Corinthians 8:2, 5). HMM

Today's ICR Devotional Thoughts

2008-10-14T08:22:00.000-06:00

The Importance of Reading

"Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine." (1 Timothy 4:13)

In this video age, Christians are in grave danger of forgetting the importance of reading. The word translated "reading" in this verse is the Greek anagnosis, a compound word meaning essentially "renewed knowledge." A sermon or lecture is knowledge heard; an educational film or video is knowledge seen; but reading is knowledge that can be read, rehearsed, reviewed, and renewed again and again, until fully and securely learned. In fact, it is necessary for students to take notes, even when hearing a sermon or seeing a film, if they expect to retain any knowledge received by such means.

The importance of reading is also pointed out by the verb used in the verse. "Give attendance" means, literally, "continue steadfastly." It is so translated in Acts 2:42: "And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine."

Reading and studying the Scriptures are especially necessary for a fruitful Christian ministry, but even this is not really enough. The Bible also commands us always to be ready to give an "answer" (Greek apologia, a systematic defense) to everyone who asks a "reason" (Greek logos, a logical explanation) for our Christian hope (1 Peter 3:15). To do this requires steadfast continuance in the study, not only of the Bible, but also of other sound literature as well. A truly effective and influential Christian is an informed Christian, armed with facts and sound counsel, prepared and capable both in his own professional field of practice and in his spiritual service as a Christian witness.

It is significant that Paul, just before his martyrdom and while imprisoned in a damp, cold, Roman dungeon, still desired his books to read (1 Timothy 4:13). The conscientious Christian must never cease to study and to grow in grace and knowledge (2 Peter 3:18). HMM

Encouragement and a Future Hope for you workers out there...

2008-10-08T13:55:00.002-06:00

Today's One Year reading helped me to look at potentially tedious, time-consuming or downright dead workdays as beneficial and eternally significant. Here's what Paul writes:
"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ." (Colossians 3:23-24) Be diligent in the work the Lord gives you, it is for a purpose and He does see it!

The Shack

2008-10-07T13:31:00.004-06:00

I've been reading through The Shack, by William Young. It's been over the past month or so, so the details aren't all that fresh. However, the storyline so far is intriguing. I will write more as I get into the meat and potatoes, so to speak, of the book and have some material to work with.

Our Engagement Picture!

2008-08-29T16:06:00.003-06:00

Hey! That's Lisa and I...we're getting married! January 17th, 2009 to be exact. Please pray for our marriage and our future and as the Lord leads you. Thanks very much!

Eternal Security, and the Hard Doctrine of Limited Atonement

2007-12-20T18:06:00.001-07:00

I have been reading through Ezekiel, albeit slowly - like I said in a previous post, to really ponder it and soak it in. This passage struck me: Ezekiel 18:30-32: "Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, declares the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions, lest iniquity be your ruin. Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD; so turn, and live." This makes me think of Hebrews 12:1: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us..." It is clear that each person 1) has sin 2) needs to recognize that fact and its consequences, and 3) must then repent (necessitating a change of direction) and finally 4) turn toward God. How gracious God is! And how strong is His desire that we all may see life!

I have also been working my way through The Sovereignty of God by AW Pink. I say "working my way through" because it really does require effort, focus and reflection for me to feel like I've given it my best effort! The chapter I'm reading currently is entitled "The Sovereignty of God in Salvation". It's been gnawing at me for quite a while, but this chapter hit on the head an issue I've been considering off and on for a while. I'm talking about the issue and theological doctrine of limited atonement. The basic idea is that Jesus' subsequent death and resurrection, thereby nullifying sin's penalty of death only applies to those whom God has already predestined to become saved. This would of course except all those who are not predestined by Him to be saved, and so it follows that Jesus' sacrifice was therefore limited in its scope. Not limited in power, for our Lord has infinite omnipotence, but limited only in the people it affects. For reasons only our Father knows, He has chosen, before time began, to save some through His great grace and mercy. This of course means that there are some who will not be saved. Without going into great detail, it would be hard to convince those who are solidly on the other side of the fence, i.e. those who believe that Jesus for all men's sins. However, one point I will make is that if Jesus did die for all mankind's sins, and all of mankind is not saved, then that would lead one to believe that Jesus' power of substituting Himself for our sake was limited and not all-encompassing, infinite. I will concede that there are a lot of holes in my arguments (I have left out the supporting Scripture references, obviously), but these are some of the main ideas and concepts that I picked up from Pink's book, which is quite compelling (and convincing, I might add). Grace to you as you consider these issues!

Some related links:
"Limited Atonement"
"For Whom Did Christ Die?"
Articles on Definite Atonement

My Prophetic Antecedent, Zeke

2007-12-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

I've been reading through Ezekiel the past week and a half. Trying to soak it in and be sensitive to the imagery and allusion, especially of the descriptions of the creatures he saw in his vision: "As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming metal. And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had a human likeness, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot. And they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus: their wings touched one another. Each one of them went straight forward, without turning as they went. As for the likeness of their faces, each had a human face. The four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. And their wings were spread out above. Each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies." Ezekiel 1:4-11. My good friend Paul Pavlik showed me a website that links to art relating to either Biblical themes or contents, Biblical Art. There was a link to an image that was pretty striking, as seen above, of the vision of Ezekiel. See what you think.

2007-11-18T15:54:00.001-07:00

A picture from one of the many trips to Emmaline Lake, this time with my good friend, Omar Herrera.

Verses of the past week

2007-11-18T15:39:00.000-07:00

This week's verses for me were Psalm 27:4 and Psalm 119:18. 119 was particularly striking and apropos for me, given the upcoming talk on Friday at 02. I desperately needed to hear from my Lord and His Word, as do all of us (fortunately!). It is so evident to me when I haven't prayed or submitted my heart to Him before I enter His Word. My mind simply does not comprehend the meaning, only "seeing" words and not the meaning.The necessity of taking my thoughts captive never had so much appropriateness as in those instances. Psalm 27:4. Ok, ok, so I stole this verse from Jerry Bridges and Helen Roseveare at the Desiring God conference, but the Bible doesn't mind, right? :) I love this verse. To dwell in the Lord's house, to bask in His presence, every single day is such a comfort to me. To yearn to just be near Him and that the closeness of God is my good spur me on to seek out and cherish those times away. "To inquire in His temple" makes me think of entering a library, earnestly seeking the answer to a question, or guidance in a sticky situation. Pointed to the right book, the answer is found, but only after hours of study and meditation. Incidentally, my footnote says that "to inquire" also means to "meditate". I hope these thoughts encourage you as they did me! Press on!

11.16.07 O2 Message: Perseverance

2007-11-18T15:26:00.001-07:00

Here's the transcript of my talk at O2 on 11.16.07:

Perseverance

Good evening! Tonight I’d like to pass on some wisdom I heard at a conference earlier this year in Minneapolis. It was a Desiring God conference in conjunction with John Piper’s ministry of the same name. The overall theme for the conference this year was “Stand: A Call for the Endurance of the Saints.” I thought it particularly appropriate for tonight, as we all head towards the end of this year and semester. Because of this, what I share here is as much for me and my benefit as yours, but my sincere hope is that each of you will be able to learn from this message. Specifically, I am going to address the issue of perseverance, and how critical it is to a maturing believer to not only grasp the concept and impact of it, but to embrace it as a lifestyle. Let’s pray.

Let me start by defining perseverance.

Def.: to persist, go on resolutely or stubbornly in spite of difficulties.

I had the opportunity to delve into Scripture this past summer, to find out what it said about this topic, which might give us something of a foundation to build on. In the Bible, I could only find “perseverance” in the New Testament, a total of 32 times. There are several Greek words for perseverance, but the one I used was hupomone. It was important for me to look at the Greek because it is the original language the New Testament was translated from, and so by knowing the Greek words, a closer approximation to what I was looking for could be found. What made me want to look up this word in the first place was that it is spoken of so much in the New Testament, and I had just never taken the time to look into it. It seemed like an aspect of our Christian walk that was important to the people of the first churches, and especially stressed by Paul, James, Peter, John and Luke. Why did these men, the leaders of the first churches, encourage perseverance so much? Because there was a need for it-it was a necessity for those just starting out in their faith, and also for those who were mature, to push on in the face of seemingly impossible and insurmountable challenges as Christianity grew, flourished and took root. The same goes for today-nothing has changed, except for the years on the calendar.

I once heard an analogy that goes like this: imagine three houses next to each other. The first is made out of straw. It holds up well enough, and provides some shelter. The second is made of wood, and is significantly stronger than the straw one before it. The third and last house is made of marble, and is easily the strongest of the three. Now imagine an intense heat coming upon these houses for a period of time. What do you suppose happened to each of them? The straw one was completely destroyed, and only traces left that showed anything ever existed there. The wooden house faired a bit better, however, only a few stray blackened logs were strewn about. The third? It was untouched, not even a small scorch visible on it. This analogy can describe our walk – essentially, what we do in our life after the point of justification, of salvation. Do we see our salvation as a “ticket to Heaven”, and stuff it in our back pocket and go on our way, indifferent to our Savior and what He has done for us? Or do we embrace our salvation and begin the journey to pursue our Lord and get to know and love Him? For a long time I was very much of the former mindset. I thought, well, Jesus died for me and my sins, what else is there? I was oblivious to the fact and reality that my father, my Lord, my Savior wanted an intimate relationship with me, and indeed, each one of us. It’s only really been over the past ten years that I have honestly pursued God, and every second has been worth it. Hebrews 10:32-39: “But recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For, "Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him." But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.” So, in light of this passage, what can we do? Jump in with both feet. And not hang on to the side, but to let go. To quote Paris Reidhead, a preacher and missionary from the 40s and 50s: “I have talked with people that have no assurance of sins forgiven. They wanna feel saved before they’re willing to commit themselves to Christ. But I believe that the only ones whom God actually witnesses by His Spirit are born of Him, are the people whether they say it or not, that come to Jesus Christ and say something like this: “Lord Jesus, I’m gonna obey You and love You and serve You and do what You want me to do as long as I live even if I go to hell at the end of the road simply because You are worthy to be loved, obeyed and served. And I’m not trying to make a deal with You.”

Before I move on to the teachings from the conference, let me tell you what Zondervan’s Exhaustive Concordance defines hupomone as: “the characteristic of a man (or woman) who is unswerved from his deliberate purpose and his loyalty to faith and piety by even the greatest trials and sufferings.” My earnest prayer for us is that-to cling to God through the thick and thin, the exciting and the mundane.

It is a great honor to be able to pass on what was taught at the conference three other men and myself were able to attend in September. The first message I’d like to cover is from Jerry Bridges, entitled, “Four essentials for standing firm, enduring to the end, and finishing well.”

#1 is to have a daily time of focused personal communion with God. If you consider a naval vessel, be it a small boat or a large aircraft carrier, they both need to regularly check their course heading, to make sure they haven’t been pushed from it. The same is true of our lives-we need to regularly evaluate them and make sure we are headed in the right direction. Psalm 63:1 “O God, You are my God; earnestly I seek You; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh faints for You; as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” Psalm 42:1-2 “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?” We need to have a thirst and a hunger for God that can only be quenched and satisfied by Him, and Him alone. Psalm 27:4 “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple.” “To inquire” also means to “meditate”. We need to have a plan that directs us to Him, whether it’s the One-Year Bible, a devotional, anything, but a time that is set aside each day to spend with Him, to get to know Him.

#2: a daily appropriation of the gospel. To approach God every day as a sinner, thanking Him for the sacrifice of His son. This is important, because it affects our view of our self-in that we have assurance of right standing with God. Romans 5 speaks of our salvation and justification as a past event , and we are still justified today, in present reality, as Galatians 2:20 puts it “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Also important to note is that our works, the good things we do, are not a means of justification, but an outflow. That we do them because we have His approval already, not to earn it in the first place.

#3 is to have a daily commitment to God as a living sacrifice. Romans 12:1 “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” If you think back to Old Testament times, the Levite priests had to offer sacrifices to God for sin penance. And that was pretty much the only way that God would interact with the Israelites. We don’t have that restriction any longer, but there are four unique characteristics about sacrifice applicable even today: first, the entire animal was consumed as a whole burnt offering; second, the animal was offered as a continual burnt offering; third, the animal was always presented as an offering; and fourth, the animal was not on loan to God in any way, it was given up completely. Accordingly, we should give God our whole life, continually, without asking for anything in return. The Levite priests didn’t keep what was left over after it was burnt and then eat it-that would have been unthinkable to them. Why then do we only give God a part of our lives, and not all of it? 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

#4 is to have a firm belief in the love and sovereignty of God. Lamentations 3:37-38: “Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come?” God is sovereign, meaning “one that exercises supreme, permanent authority.” Psalm 135:6 puts it similarly: “Whatever the Lord pleases, He does, in Heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.” Many of you will remember Steve’s message this past Sunday, on this topic. So this passage may sound familiar: “What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For He says to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my Name might be proclaimed in all the earth." So then He has mercy on whomever He wills, and He hardens whomever He wills.” Romans 9:14-18. We can also be infinitely thankful that God will always be on our side, if He is our Lord and Savior. Romans 8:38-39, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” God will never take away the Gospel, He will never take away His promises.

James 1:2-4 sums it up like this: “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

The second message I have the honor of passing on is from Helen Roseveare, a dear woman in her 80s, who was a missionary to the Congo. Out of all the speakers at the conference, she was my favorite. She spoke with confidence and with tenderness of her Lord and Savior and ours, Jesus. After 60-plus years on the mission field and working in Belfast, Ireland in the church, she still is as much in love with the Lord, if not more, than her first day of conversion, as she called it. Three points I’d like to touch on from her talk revolve around how we think chronologically of our lives, and our walk: one thing I know (the past), one thing I do (the present), and one thing I ask or seek (the future). We owe our whole lives to God. If He willed it, we could cease to exist here on Earth and instantly be with Him in Heaven. That clearly is not His will for the time being, we have a job to do, and there are people who do not know our Lord yet. And so it helps to have a mindset that is firmly grounded in the present, but reflects on our past and hopes for the future.

One thing I know (past tense): John 9:25 “The one thing I do know is that I used to be blind and now I can see!" He has saved us from a life of futility, of meaninglessness, and ultimately of condemnation! Thank God that He decided in His great mercy to save us from an eternity separated from Him!

One thing I do (present tense): Philippians 3:13-14: “this one thing I do: Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I keep pursuing the goal to win the prize of God's heavenly call in Christ Jesus.” Also Matthew 10:22, “you will be hated by all for my Name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” To endure, like that verse says, by telling people what we know and what He has done-no one can refute that: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."” Isaiah 52:7. She shared a hymn of hers that is not sung any more-I’ve never heard it, anyway. It is called, “My goal is God Himself.” The 1^st verse goes like this (I’m not sure how it sounds, so bear with me…) “My goal is God Himself, not joy, nor peace, Nor even blessing, but Himself, my God; ’Tis His to lead me there--not mine, but His-- At any cost, dear Lord, by any road.”

And one thing I ask or seek (looking to the future): Psalm 27:4, which I’ve shared before, but I love it, “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in His temple.” Four questions we need to ask ourselves are 1) Do I keep the Sabbath? We keep the other 9 commandments, but not this one, why? Do we love Him more than the things that keep us from fellowshipping with His people? Will we take time out of our schedule for a Sabbath, where we can worship Him, get into the Word without distraction, spend time with our brothers and sisters without anything else as the purpose or reason? 2) Do I love the Word? Love reading it, hearing it, meditating on it, sharing it? 3) Do I hunger and thirst for righteousness? By living a life that pleases my Lord, I can bring Him honor. And 4) Do I find Him, Jesus, my Savior, my Lord, lovely, and am I becoming more like that? 2 Corinthians 3:18, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” 1 John 3:1-2, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” I don’t know about you, but that is both exhilarating and terrifying-that we will someday see God as He really is!

The last message I will pass on is from John Piper, entitled, “Getting Old to the Glory of God.” Now, I know none of us are old, some barely in our 20s, some already there, but I thought this message appropriate for its challenge to our mindset; how we perceive this life and act accordingly toward our God. He said that the key to this mindset is to keep God as our highest treasure. That the fight to cling to Him is that it is not just the desire to do things for Him, but to delight in Him. He added that there are two deadly mistakes we can make as we consider our perseverance in our faith. The first one is that “perseverance is unnecessary”, in that perseverance in faith and love is not necessary for salvation. Mark 13:13 “And you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” Also Hebrews 12:14: “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” The second mistake is this: that “perseverance puts or keeps God on our side.” At the moment of Justification, when your life was given over to God through Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross, God became for you 100%, because Jesus did all the work of making a way between our fallen selves and God’s perfection. As I said at the beginning tonight, perseverance is not the way in which we garner God’s favor, but is the evidence of a life already bought and paid for by Him. As David neared the end of his life, he wrote this in Psalm 71:7-18: “I have been as a wonder to many, but you are my strong refuge. My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all the day. Do not cast me off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength is spent. For my enemies speak concerning me; those who watch for my life consult together and say, "God has forsaken him; pursue and seize him, for there is none to deliver him." O God, be not far from me; O my God, make haste to help me! May my accusers be put to shame and consumed; with scorn and disgrace may they be covered who seek my hurt. But I will hope continually and will praise you yet more and more. My mouth will tell of your righteous acts, of your deeds of salvation all the day, for their number is past my knowledge. With the mighty deeds of the Lord GOD I will come; I will remind them of your righteousness, yours alone. O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.” There is a man who lived his life for God, and even to old age his faith and trust in God and His promises burned brightly.

>Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

And so, tonight, my call to you and myself is this: that we would persevere. That our lives would be bound to God and that we would pursue Him, not because we’re told to or because we don’t want to look lazy, but because He deserves it. Because He loved us first and we want to show Him how much we love Him and are thankful for that sacrifice in return. Because we won’t see Him unless we do.

Would that we take our eyes off of the world and put them on Jesus, and as people in our teens and 20s pursue God and burn brightly for Him.

Let me end with this, as our charge: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:1-2.

Starting Out, or...I Just Began This Thing

2007-11-15T11:02:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my blog! There will hopefully be many things on this site, some of them helpful - musings on a God-filled and God-bought existence to be the majority.