Reformation Polka

If you like church history, you’ll love this:

(HT: Reformation Theology)

Spurgeon on Evangelism

(HT: Erik Kowalker)

“One anothers” I can’t find in the New Testament

From Ray Ortlund:

Humble one another, scrutinize one another, pressure one another, embarrass one another, corner one another, interrupt one another, defeat one another, disapprove of one another, run one another’s lives, confess one another’s sins, intensify one another’s sufferings, point out one another’s failings . . . .

In a soft environment, where we settle for a false peace with present evils, we turn on one another.  In a realistic environment, where we are suffering to advance the gospel, our thoughts turn to how we can stick up for one another.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.”  John 15:12-13

Lloyd-Jones on Thinking and Faith

From Scott Anderson at Desiring God:

Although he may overstate the case a little—thinking is not the essence of faith—he is right that thinking is essential to faith.

Faith, according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph [Matthew 6:25-34], is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him.

That is the real difficulty in life. Life comes to us with a club in its hand and strikes us upon the head, and we become incapable of thought, helpless and defeated. The way to avoid that, according to our Lord, is to think. We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction.

The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them.

The trouble with most people, however, is that they will not think. Instead of doing this, they sit down and ask, What is going to happen to me? What can I do? That is the absence of thought; it is surrender, it is defeat. Our Lord, here, is urging us to think, and to think in a Christian manner.

That is the every essence of faith. Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense.

—Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, p. 399. Paragraphing added.

Football’s coming home!

Matt is my favourite broadsheet cartoonist, and by far the most accurate football pundit!

God’s Great Grace

I’m preaching through Romans midweek, and Ephesians on Sundays for my friends at King’s Church, Southend.

I like this from Justin Taylor:

One of the beautiful things about the book of Ephesians is the way in which Paul celebrates God’s grace, power, might, wisdom, love, and glory.

Follow the adjectives and superlatives to see an example of worshipful pastoral theology in action.

We are saved “to the praise of God’s glorious grace” (Eph. 1:6)

Our redemption and forgiveness through the cross is “according to theriches of his grace, which he lavished upon us” (Eph. 1:6-7).

We are called to know “the riches of [God's] glorious inheritance in the saints” and “the immeasurable greatness of his power . . . and his greatmight” (Eph. 1:18-19).

Because God is “rich in mercy” and because of his “great love” toward us, we were saved” (Eph. 2:4).

In the coming ages God will show us “the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:7).

Paul preached to the Gentiles “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Eph. 3:8).

Though the church “the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10).

Paul prays that “according to the riches of [God's] glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being” (Eph. 3:16).

One application for us is that we should notice how we speak of God’s love, wisdom, grace, etc. Do we feel, with Paul, how truly great God’s grace is?

How to read the bible

In order to understand the Bible, one must read it. One must read it like any other book. That is not to say that the Bible is only another book, but that the Bible is a book and should be read the way all books are read. The biblical authors expected their books to be read and understood in that way. They used the language and literary forms common in their day. Their books make sense and reward the patient reader with genuine understanding and insight. The meaning of the Bible is straightforward and unmysterious. Many miracles are recorded in the Bible, but what is most remarkable about the Bible is the Bible itself. In it God speaks through the miracle of human language. Through language, modern readers can understand the thoughts of biblical authors who lived thousands of years ago in a culture very different from our own.

- John Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch

(HT: Justin Buzzard)

Resolved 2010

The lifeless lyrics of theological liberalism

Dave Garner has written a helpful article entitled Rescuing the Church from the Arms of Digital Deity – Returning to the Authority of Scripture.

Like Todd Pruitt, I love this paragraph:

In the twentieth century, liberal Protestants put the Bible on trial and found it guilty of error, abandoned their dependence upon God’s Word, and replaced it with the lifeless lyrics of their own wisdom. What social Gospel theorist Walter Rauschenbusch preached, Charles Sheldon popularized; “What did Jesus do?” became “What would Jesus do?” Morality and social justice supplanted redemption, and the living Christ died again, this time buried beneath unbelieving, yet captivating rhetoric. He was not to rise again in the liberal Protestant Church.

Created to share joy

Historian George Marsden makes a summary of what Jonathan Edwards thinks of why God created: “Why would such an infinitely good, perfect and eternal Being create?… Here Edwards drew on the Christian Trinitarian conception of God as essentially interpersonal… The ultimate reason that God creates, said Edwards, is not to remedy some lack in God, but to extend that perfect internal communication of the triune God’s goodness and love… God’s joy and happiness and delight in divine perfections is expressed externally by communicating that happiness and delight to created beings… The universe is an explosion of God’s glory. Perfect goodness, beauty, and love radiate from God and draw creatures to ever increasingly share in the Godhead’s joy and delight… The ultimate of creation, then, is union in love between God and loving creatures.”

~ The Reason for God, Belief in an age of Skepticism. Timothy Keller (Dutton, New York, 2008) P218

(HT: Rick Ianniello)

Sinning as a Christian

From Reformation Theology:

In one of the Q&A sessions this week at the Ligonier National Conference, R.C. Sproul asked questions submitted by attendees. On the panel were Michael Horton, Alistair Begg, Albert Mohler and Steven Lawson. An effort was made to capture in brief form the questions and answers but you may wish to track down the audio or video to hear lengthier responses. Here is one such question:

Why don’t Christians care, or care enough, that they are sinning?

Begg: Because we don’t truly understand the nature of the atonement and what has happened in Christ bearing our sins. A low view of the atonement goes in line with an easy-going view of sin in the same way that when people take sin seriously they have a solid and clear grasp of what has happened in Christ dying for us. This was not a moot question for Paul in writing Romans where the same question applied to the people he was writing to. The answer lies in the gospel. We need to preach the gospel to ourselves all day every day and one way we will fail is a fast fall into antinomianism (lawlessness). The ultimate reason is that the believer does not understand what it means to be united to Christ. If we don’t, we’ll have legalism on one hand or lawlessness on the other. People simply don’t know who they are in Christ.

Sproul offered one correction to the question saying that there is no such thing as a true Christian who does not care about his sin. The question should be “why don’t we care to the degree that we ought to care?” And it’s because our hearts are still less than fully sanctified and God has not fully revealed to us the sinfulness of our sin (and thank God for that). If God revealed to me right now the full measure of the continuing sin in my life, it would destroy me. God is gracious and gentle in correcting us gradually.

Lawson added that some Christians are not as sensitive to their sin because they have a lack of exposure to the Word of God. It is the light of God’s Word that shines the light into our hearts. If we are distant from the Word of God there are sins that are not being exposed by the light of the Word. On the other spectrum there can be exposure to the Word of God but it’s mere intellectualism and not something that stirs the heart or the affections. It is all cognitive, touching the head but not the heart. If a person is not regularly coming to the Lord’s table where you’re coming face-to-face with the death of Christ for us and confessing sin to God, you are ignoring a great means of grace. It is here that you are asking God to bring into the light sin that has not been confessed, acknowledged, repented of. Also, Christians who are out of community with other believers are leaving themselves exposed and weak before Satan’s attacks.

Pray for Joni Eareckson Tada

Joni Eareckson Tada will be undergoing surgery for breast cancer, according to this press release:

“Joni is to undergo several more tests, followed by surgery within the week,” said Mazza. “The extent of the cancer will not be determined until the procedure.”

Ken Tada, Joni’s husband of nearly 28 years, is very hopeful. “The doctors have assured us that more advancements have been made in the last five years in treating breast cancer then in the last 150 years,” he said. “We are confident Joni is in very good hands.”

Joni echoed Ken’s sentiments. “I’ve often said that our afflictions come from the hand of our all-wise and sovereign God, who loves us and wants what is best for us. So, although cancer is something new, I am content to receive from God whatever He deems fit for me,” she said. “Yes, it’s alarming, but rest assured that Ken and I are utterly convinced that God is going to use this to stretch our faith, brighten our hope and strengthen our witness to others.”

(HT: Justin Taylor)

England needs heroes!

When England won the World Cup in 1966 I was eight, and these were my heroes.

I hope some heroes turn up today!

The Sin of Sodom

From Tyler Kenney at Desiring God:

As Bible-believing Christians, we are known for our convictions against sexual immorality. But are we known equally as well for our contempt for religious arrogance?

Scripture clearly states that sexual immorality is sin (Matthew 15:19; Romans 13:13; 1 Corinthians 6:18; Galatians 5:19, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, etc.). We must also remember, however, that this is only one bad fruit of our rebellion against God, one among a list of many others, including idolatry, theft, greed, drunkenness, reviling and swindling (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). And all of these, God says, are just spin-offs of a more deep-seated trouble.

Speaking to a disobedient Israel, the prophet Ezekiel declares,

Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me. So I removed them, when I saw it. (Ezekiel 16:49-50)

In the context surrounding this passage, Ezekiel is charging Israel for having done worse than Sodom. And what does he say was Sodom’s sin? The prophet doesn’t focus on any single outward behavior. Sexual immorality was an issue, as we know from Genesis, and so was her lack of concern for the poor and needy, as we see mentioned here. But Ezekiel doesn’t target either of those primarily. Rather, he says that the real issue with Sodom was her haughty heart—she was proud.

There’s a warning in this for us: We must beware in our opposition to sexual immorality that we do not merely take on a different expression of the same sin. We must beware lest we think that the issue is simply an external one and that we are “good with God” just because we maintain a high moral code.

Any outcry among Christians against sexual immorality should be outdone by our protests against pride. We should be most aggressively opposed to arrogance—especially as we find it in ourselves and in our churches. Only then will we be in a right position to speak humbly, wisely and brokenheartedly about the evils of sexual immorality and the greater love of Jesus Christ.

God’s Word is Not Negotiable

“However hard some things are to understand, it is never helpful to start picking and choosing biblical truths we find congenial, as if the Bible is an open-shelved supermarket where we are at perfect liberty to choose only the chocolate bars.

“For the Christian, it is God’s Word, and it is not negotiable. What answers we find may not be exhaustive, but they give us the God who is there, and who gives us some measure of comfort and assurance.

“The alternative is a god we manufacture, and who provides no comfort at all. Whatever comfort we feel is self-delusion, and it will be stripped away at the end when we give an account to the God who has spoken to us, not only in Scripture, but supremely in his Son Jesus Christ.”

- D.A. Carson, How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil

(HT: Trevin Wax)

Criticism

From Marcus Honeysett:

Recently a church leader friend reflected with me that he is on the receiving end of criticism that he feels is not only unmerited but also comes from people who don’t know what they are talking about. Most church leaders will relate to that. I certainly do at this moment in time.

This previous post on worship being the antidote to criticism helped me as I reflected on it this morning. Criticism dries up our spirits unless we take it to the Lord, throw ourselves on his mercy and ask for his help. If you are currently being criticised then receiving grace today is even more vital for you than it normally is (and it is normally overwhelmingly vital!).

Worship is the refuge that allows us to respond to criticism well rather than defensively. Worship is the means by which God is allowed to be bigger in our perspective than our critics. Worship allows us to not be precious about us and our reputations because we are absorbed not with ourselves but with him. Criticism isn’t nice, but criticism that gets out of perspective is debilitating. Worship puts our perspective right, bastions our hearts, makes us rejoice in God and find our happiness (that criticism would wish to destroy) in him.

Trailer for “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”

Coming this Christmas:

(HT: Justin Taylor)

The only forgiveness that matters

“There may be some foul spot in our lives; the kind of thing that the world never forgives, the kind of thing, at any rate, for which we who know all can never forgive ourselves. But what care we whether the world forgives, or even whether we can forgive ourselves, if God forgives, if God has received us by the death of His Son?

If we could appeal to God’s approval as ours by right, how bravely we should boast—boast in the presence of a world of enemies! If God knows that we are right, what care we for the blame of men? Such boasting, indeed, can never be ours. But we can boast in what God has done. Little care we whether our sin be thought unpardonable or no, little interested are we in the exact calculation of our guilt. Heap it up mountain high, yet God has removed it all.

‘I know not,’ the Christian says, ‘what my guilt may be; one thing I know: Christ loved me and gave Himself for me.’

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 82

(HT: Of First Importance)

Hillsong – At the Cross

For Mel and James.

The gospel in four words

“‘Come unto me,’ he says, ‘and I will give you.’  You say, ‘Lord, I cannot give you anything.’  He does not want anything.  Come to Jesus, and he says, ‘I will give you.’  Not what you give to God, but what he gives to you, will be your salvation.  ‘I will give you‘ — that is the gospel in four words.

Will you come and have it?  It lies open before you.”

C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, 1950), I:175.  Italics original.

(HT: Ray Ortlund)