From Adrian Warnock:
Terry Virgo – being a Reformed Charismatic apostle
Reply
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Strength Depending on Weakness
From Burk Parsons:
We have heard people say, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Both believers and unbelievers alike cling to this proverbial life principle that gives us a sense of comfort and hope in the midst of our daily anxieties, miseries, and afflictions. This is a universally understood truth that Scripture itself teaches (Rom. 5:3-5; Jam. 1:2-4, 12; 1 Pet. 4:12-19). Trials do indeed make us stronger and more steadfast in our faith. Trials mature us. They help us to grow up. However, this is only one part of the biblical equation.
When we as a human race fell into sin, our affections changed, and we who once had the ability not to sin became a people who could not help but sin and even found pleasure in sin, albeit fleeting pleasure. Sin ravaged our hearts and minds, and, like Tolkien’s Gollum, we began to wallow in the mire of sin-dependent idolatry all the while maintaining our autonomy from God and our supreme, though perceived control over any and all our precious little idols, each of which possessed an uncanny resemblance to ourselves.
Before the fall we were dependent creatures depending on God alone, and after the fall we remain dependent creatures in our sustained existence. However, after the Fall, the object of our affections became manifold, and, in turn, the object of our dependence changed from depending on God alone–worshiping and serving the Creator alone–to worshiping and serving the creature and his comforts.
Without hesitation we happily turned to worship the supreme creature and all the idols we could conjure up as self-proclaimed, autonomous, self-made creators. We became dependent on our own self-made objects of affection, and our dependence was divided between the creature and the Creator.
When trials and temptations come (and if we’re not spiritually calloused or overly cynical, we’ll notice their hourly arrival) we are faced with the decision as to whether we will depend on self or depend on God–whether we’ll depend on our own means of sustenance and satisfaction that leads to daily death independent of God or whether we’ll depend on God’s means of sustenance and ever-present satisfaction that leads to daily life abundant that is dependent on God.
We understand that all of life’s trials and temptations are a direct result of the Fall–our fall from Creator-dependent true worship to self-dependent false worship. And even when we consider the first sins of Satan’s rebellion in the heavens and Adam’s rebellion in the Garden, we can see how they strove to be independent from God when tempted by the titillating notion of such independence.
Our daily temptations, daily anxieties, daily miseries, and daily afflictions are part and parcel of life’s daily trials. These fiery trials sometimes come blazing and sometimes come like a sudden spark out of nowhere, coming both from without and from within–darts from the world and the devil, which we’ve come to expect, and darts from our own hearts that we still surprisingly shoot at ourselves. Both the enemy within us and the enemies outside us exist as a natural result of the Fall, and in their natural course of existence they fight daily to gain our affection, allegiance, and dependence. Like Gollum’s precious little idol that seemed to want to be found, our self-swindling hearts seem to want us to find our immediate and ultimate fulfillment in anything that lures our dependence away from God. Meanwhile, our Enemy is content simply to draw our affections to anything but the one true God, and thus to make us less dependent on God and increasingly dependent on ourselves and on our hearts’ precious idols, which will come alive and do our bidding.
While we do indeed become stronger and more mature as a result of life’s daily trials, ultimately, as the adopted children of God our Father, the trials he sovereignly sends our way are not intended to make us stronger but to make us weaker–less dependent on our own strength and more dependent on God and the power of his strength in which we can delightfully and eternally boast as does our brother Paul:
Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 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 of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12:8–10).
Whatever doesn’t kill us, by God’s grace, makes us weaker in our self-dependence and more dependent on the strength of God. And this is all through the One who endured the trial of the Cross so that we might regain life dependent. By His grace we remain utterly dependent as we live justified from faith to faith at the foot of the Cross taking up our own crosses daily and dependently. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith in God, not faith in self.
Do we in our own strength confide? Our striving would indeed be losing.
The Gospel Of God
Darryl Dash nails it with these thoughts on the Gospel:
The Gospel is about what God has accomplished through the person and work of Jesus Christ. This is big news. It involves rescue from judgment for sin and a restored relationship with God, and his restoration of creation.
The Gospel is good news about what God has done, never about what we must do or have done. It’s good news, not good advice.
The Gospel is:
- Good news for the poor and victims of injustice because God (not us) has acted
- About individual salvation and the restoration of the cosmos
- About individual salvation and the kingdom (reign) of God
The Gospel is not:
- What we do to promote justice
- About loving God or loving our neighbors, because this is both Law and a right response to the Gospel (what we do), but it is not the Gospel (what God has done)
Our efforts to promote justice, obey God, and love others are necessary implications of the Gospel, but they are not the Gospel itself. It is wrong to ignore the implications; it is also wrong to confuse our efforts with the Gospel.
God is uniting all that’s been torn apart in Christ (Ephesians 1:10). That is Gospel. We work to unite what’s broken around us. That’s not Gospel; that is our response to the Gospel.
The Gospel is all about what God has done, not what we are doing.
(HT: Tullian Tchividjian)
Practical counsel for growing theologically
From Joe Thorn’s interview with Ray Ortlund:
What advice would you give to the average Christian who loves Jesus and the church, but needs to grow theologically?
Here’s one way to jump in. Pull some friends together, everybody buy a copy of Driscoll and Breshears’ Doctrine, and work through it together. Check out the small group suggestions on pages 437-450. Read it slowly. Embrace the difficulty. Look up every word you don’t understand. Mark up your copy with questions and highlights. Get mad if you have to. But pray to God for clarity, and he’ll give it. As you read, keep checking it against the Bible, examine what your friends say too, and don’t let go until you really know what you believe. You will never be the same again.
(HT: Justin Taylor)
An alien sanctity: being and acting in another
From Jonathan Parnell:
“Personal holiness”—what thoughts does this phrase engender?
If I had to guess, I would say your mind went to thinking about spiritual disciplines or moral performance. Or at least that’s what mine did. The word “personal” has a way of making our brains forget God’s self-attested holiness and focus only on our own, which we typically equate to nothing more than our conceived progress in fulfilling certain do’s and don’ts.
Moral code can easily become our attempt to live up to God’s holiness. Ontology gives way to function. Being is replaced by doing (and not doing). Welcome to planet frustration. This is the world of many followers of Christ—the disappointing drudgery of the religious treadmill.
But there is good news. The gospel doesn’t stop where sanctification begins. Our holiness is not isolated from God’s holiness—it is dependent upon it.
John Webster explains in his book Holiness that sanctification is not an “acquired sufficiency” and that a Christian’s holiness must always be in reference to the “triune work of grace.” He writes,
The Christian’s sanctity is in Christ, in the Spirit, not in se [in itself]; it is always and only an alien sanctity. Sanctification does not signal birth of self-sufficiency, rather it indicates a ‘perpetual and inherent lack of self-sufficiency’.
Sanctification ‘in’ the Spirit is not the Spirit’s immanence in the saint. Quite the opposite: it is a matter of the externality of sanctitas christiana [Christian holiness], the saint being and acting in another.
‘Sanctification in the Spirit’ means: it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And ‘Christ lives in me’ means: by the Spirit’s power I am separated from my self-caused self destruction, and given a new holy self, enclosed by, and wholly referred to, the new Adam in whom I am and in whom I act (84).
Amen.
The Scriptures Testify To Him
While the temptation in preaching will be strong to proceed directly from, say, the godly Israelite to the contemporary believer, this method will inevitably produce distortions in the way we understand the text. There is no direct application apart from the mediation of Christ. That is the theological principle that I have wanted to emphasize in this study. While, no doubt, the direct approach will produce nice thoughts and, to a limited extent, even edifying ones, we simply cannot afford to ignore the words of Jesus that the Scriptures testify to him. I say again, if this be the case, then the Scriptures only testify to us insofar as we are in him.
- Graeme Goldsworthy, Preaching the Whole Bible As Christian Scripture, 
(HT: Vitamin Z)
Bill Kynes – What does it mean to abide in Christ?
When Justification Is Marginalized
“The ultimate concern of most church members is not the worship and service of Christ in evangelistic mission and social compassion, but rather survival and success in their secular vocation. The church is a spoke on the wheel of life connected to a secular hub. It is a departmental subconcern, not the organizing center of all other concerns. Church members who have been conditioned all their lives to devote themselves to building their own kingdom and whose flesh naturally gravitates in that direction anyway find it hard to invest much energy in the kingdom of God. They go to church once or twice a week and punch the clock, so to speak, fulfilling their ‘church obligation’ by sitting passively and listening critically or approvingly to the pastor’s teaching.
[ . . .] Since their understanding of justification is marginal or unreal–anchored not to Christ, but to some conversion experience in the past or to an imagined present state of goodness in their lives–they know little of the dynamic of justification. Their understanding of sin focuses on behavioral externals which they can eliminate from their lives by a little will power and ignores the great submerged continents of pride, covetousness and hostility beneath the surface. Thus their pharisaism defends them both against full involvement in the church’s mission and against full subjection of their inner lives to the authority of Christ.”
- Richard F. Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal, 204-05
(HT: Timmy Brister)
Preaching as Expository Exultation
Our hearts will not be drawn out to worship if someone just dissects and analyzes the worth and glory of God but does not exult in it before us. Our hearts long for true preaching. Some of us don’t even know that is what we are missing.
Like children who grew up in homes where mom and dad never exulted in anything. They never rejoiced or praised or verbally admired and treasured anything. They were always flat and unenthused (except when they got angry). You couldn’t tell if anything really moved them deeply and positively. So the kids grow up not knowing what they are missing. That is what many people in the church are like who have never tasted true preaching.
God exists to be worshiped—to be admired and treasured and desired and praised. Therefore, the Word of God is written primarily to produce worship. This means that if that Word is handled like a hot-dish recipe or a repair manual, it is mishandled. And the people will suffer.
The Truth of God begs to be handled with exultation. And our hearts yearn for this and need it. Something in us starts to die when precious and infinitely valuable realities are handled without feelings and words of wonder and exultation. That is, a church starts to die, without preaching.
Resolved 2010 Panel Discussion
Keynote Panel Q&A featuring John MacArthur, Rick Holland, Steve Lawson, Al Mohler, and CJ Mahaney, at the recent Resolved 2010 Conference.
(HT: Gospel Coalition]
Tom Nettles on the importance of building life-giving doctrine into the ethos of church
From Justin Taylor:
Joe Thorn has a helpful interview with Professor Tom Nettles (Southern Seminary) on “experiential theology.” Here is one exchange that pastors especially will find interesting and stimulating:
What advice would you give to pastors and church planters to develop themselves and their churches theologically?
The conviction that doctrine is a transformative power must be present from the beginning. It cannot be a subsequent development.
If piety and doctrine are developed separately, it becomes extremely difficult to put them back together from a pastoral standpoint. The effort will seem artificial, contrived, and as optional for the Christian life. The “practical” will always seem more manageable for the supposedly ordinary Christian, while doctrinal issues and discussion will be seen as the province of a few heady folks. The fostering of this perception is fatal to the health of the body and to the robust faith of each individual Christian. Pastoral counseling suffers in difficult situations from shallow doctrinal development.
A worshiping body, convinced to the person of the divine insistence on his own glory as a right, good, and glorious thing, and the consequent joyful approval of divine sovereignty in creation, providence, and redemption can be a strong and mighty outpost of kingdom labor and worship. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” will receive the sound and hearty “Amen” in the souls of the saints. Whining and perplexity over the difficulties of life will be minimized, courageous consistency in the face of sorrow and tragedy will grow as a witness that confounds the expectations of the world, and oneness develops in the entire congregation in genuine sympathy for each other as they experience together the multi-faceted grace of God. They will not think it strange at any fiery trial that comes to them but will consent that “this is the will of God concerning you.” Pastoral counseling builds naturally off the instruction, admonitions, exhortations of a proclamation ministry. A clear and forceful integration of the biblical doctrines of the Trinitarian existence of God, the intrinsic glory of the Godhead, Christ’s infinite condescension, humanity’s fall and consequent just condemnation and punitive corruption, divine sovereignty in election, reconciliation and redemption, calling, resurrection, and eternal occupation—all of these and others constitute the pastoral task from the very beginning of establishing a worshiping congregation.
You can read the whole thing here.
Some thoughts on the mortification of sin: Dynamics
John Owen, 1616-1683, author of On the Mortification of Sin
My thanks to Guy Davies for this:
Those who are still dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1-3) have no hope of mortifying sin. False teaching cannot help us either Col 2:20-23. But those who have been united to Christ crucified and risen are empowered to put sin to death and bring holiness to life. In the concluding post in this series, we take a look at some of the dynamics of mortification according to the New Testament:
i. Remember who you are
Paul makes this point in Romans 6:11-14. Never forget that sin is no longer your lord and master. Christ has set you free, John 8:32. Live as a free man or woman in Christ.
ii. Expect a life-long struggle
It is no easy thing to put sin to death. Sins that we once thought were mortified may return. New situations or stages in life may find new sins raising their ugly heads. Don’t believe anyone who tells you of quick and easy way to mortify sin. Sins are like a persistent weeds. And gardeners never finish weeding. There is growth in grace and progress in the fight against sin, but it is hard work, Galatians 5:17.
iii. Look to Christ
He is able to help you in the struggle to put sin to death, Hebrews 12:1-3. His blood cleanses us from all sin, 1 John 1:7-9. John Owen makes this point in his classic, On the Mortification of Sin,
“Set faith at work on Christ for the killing of thy sin. His blood is the great sovereign remedy for sin-sick souls. Live in this, and thou wilt die a conqueror; yea, thou wilt, through the good providence of God, live to see thy lust dead at thy feet.” (Works of John Owen, Volume 6. p. 79).
iii. Kill sin by the Spirit’s power
If you are in Christ, then the Holy Spirit is in you, Romans 8:9, 12-13. Walk in the Spirit,Galatians 5:16 and see his fruit being produced in you, Galatians 5:22-23. Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit or quench his work. He will empower you to mortify sinful desires and crucify covetousness. The mortification of sin is not something you can do on your own. But you are not on your own. God has united you to his Son by his Spirit.
iv. The future hope
The mortification of sin is a work for believers who live between the already of being raised with Christ to a new life of holiness and the not yet of full resurrection glory. Our “members” will only be completely mortified when we are raised from the dead by the power of Christ. Then our life which is now “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3) will be revealed, Colossians 3:4. This hope motivates us to “purify ourselves even as he is pure”, 1 John 3:1-3.
The gospel-driven life is a constant battle against sin. You have died with Christ to the old life of sin. You have been raised with him to a new life of holiness. Therefore obey the gospel imperative and put sin to death that you may be holy as the Lord your God is holy.
A mysterious exchange
“When we are united to Christ a mysterious exchange takes place: he took our curse, so that we may receive his blessing; he became sin with our sin, so that we may become righteous with his righteousness. . . . On the one hand, God declined to ‘impute’ our sins to us, or ‘count’ them against us, with the implication that he imputed them to Christ instead. On the other, God has imputed Christ’s righteousness to us. . . . We ourselves have done nothing of what is imputed to us, nor Christ anything of what is imputed to him. . . . He voluntarily accepted liability for our sins.”
John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove, 1986), pages 148-149.
(HT: Ray Ortlund)
A word of caution
From Reformation Theology:
Most Christians do not think enough, or study enough in order to pursue God with their minds as well as their hearts, but as Dr. John Piper reminds us, there is a ditch on the other side of the road – an intellectualism that pursues the study of God without relationship with God. In the short video below, he encourages Christians to value theology as a means for knowing God, without making theology God.
Your church might not be a church if . . .
From Jared Wilson:
You never hear the word “sin” there.
You hear the word “sin,” but only briefly or redefined as “mistakes.”
You can’t remember when you last heard the name of Jesus in a message.
The Easter message isn’t about the resurrection but “new opportunities” in your life or turning over a new leaf.
On patriotic holiday weekends, the message is about how great America is.
On the other weekends, the message is about how great you are.
There are more videos than prayers.
People don’t sing during “worship,” but watch.
The pastors’ chief responsibilities are things foreign to Scripture.
There is more money budgeted for advertising than for mission.
The majority of the small groups are oriented around sports or leisure, not study or service.
You always feel comfortable there.
Church membership just appears to be a recruiting system for volunteers.
You only see other church people on Sunday mornings at church.
—
If your church meets one or more of these, it might be a spiritual pep rally, a religious performance center, a Christian social club, or something else entirely, but it is probably not, biblically speaking, a gathering of the biblical church.
Previously: You May Not Be a Church If . . .
Worship in Spirit and Truth
From Juan Sanchez:
But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” (John 4:23, ESV)
The following are some of the basic principles by which we seek to plan and practice corporate worship at High Pointe Baptist Church. (As best as I can remember, these principles were influenced by a sermon series I listened to by John Piper on worship titled, Worship God.)
1. True worship is God-centered. We were created to worship, and we are commanded to worship God alone (Exodus 20:3-5; Revelation 22:9) in the ways that He has outlined in Scripture (Ecclesiates 5:1-7). Therefore, as we prepare our hearts for worship let’s remember that worship is about God, not us.
2. True worship is Christ-focused. Jesus Christ is the image of God, the creator, sustainer, and reconciler of creation, and the head of the church (Colossians 1:15-20). It pleased God to reveal Himself through the Son and to reconcile us to Himself through Jesus’ death. So with the disciples, we worship Jesus (John 20:28); Jesus is the focus of worship because He’s the focus of the Father’s work.
3. True worship is Spirit-empowered. The Bible makes it clear that we are born into this world as children of wrath and dead to God. However, by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:1-10), we are made alive to God and dead to sin (Romans 6:1-14). Only those who have been made alive by the power of the Holy Spirit can truly worship God; these are the true worshipers God seeks (John 4:21-24).
4. True worship is Word-based. God’s Word (the Bible) is the basis of everything we do in worship (announcements, welcome, singing, praying, preaching, etc.). Why? Because God works by His Word. He created by His Word (Genesis 1); He sustains His creation by the Word of His power (Hebrews 1:3); He came into this world as the Word (John 1:1); He saves us by the power of His Word (Romans 1:16). Preaching is the primary form of the Word in our worship because this is the model Jesus and His disciples left us (Luke 4:43; Romans 10:14-15) and because we are commanded to preach the Word until Christ returns (2 Timothy 4:1-2).
5. True worship engages both mind and heart. True worship requires that we engage God with our minds as we study His Word and seek to grow in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. At the same time, it requires that we engage God with our hearts as the fullness of the Holy Spirit in our lives overflows and causes us to praise God in complete delight. This means that our worship will be passionate and Spirit-filled because it is based on the truth of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is what it means to worship God in spirit and truth (John 4:24).
6. True worship is edifying. Though worship is about God and not us, true worship will build up believers in both mind and heart “until we all attain the unity of the faith, and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man” (Ephesians 4:11-13). In other words, though worship is all about God, it will benefit us and cause us to grow in our love for Him and one another, for worship has both a vertical (Godward) and a horizontal (corporate) direction.
7. True worship is more than Sunday. As believers in Christ, we are not to neglect gathering together (Hebrews 10:24-25). However, true worship is an everyday matter. We are to give our entire lives over to God as living and holy sacrifices (Romans 12:1-2). That means we worship God in how we live, work and play every single day of our lives.
The Essence of Holiness
“You will cleanse no sin from your life that you have not first recognized as being pardoned through the cross. This is because holiness starts in the heart. The essence of holiness is not new behaviour, activity, or disciplines. Holiness is new affections, new desires, and new motives that then lead to new behaviour. If you don’t see your sin as completely pardoned, then your affections, desires, and motives will be wrong. You will aim to prove yourself. Your focus will be the consequences of your sin rather than hating the sin and desiring God in its place.”
- Tim Chester, You Can Change (Wheaton, Ill.; Crossway, 2010), 28.
(HT: Of First Importance)
How is Your Worship Life?
An excerpt from Marcus Honeysett’s EMA address:
The question I most want to ask any Christian, but especially any group of Christian leaders is “how would you describe the state of your worship life at the moment?” Do you currently have the space, capacity and leisure to enjoy God?
If not, something will have to go. The reason I say this is that biblical leadership and preaching are by-products of joy in God. They don’t work properly unless they spring from this source. You can’t say “I honour God in my preaching” if you heart is not bursting for him in your affections and adoration. You really can’t.
The tasks of leadership and preaching centre around working with people for their progress in the Lord and their joy in the Lord (Phil 1, 2 Cor 4). And the strength to carry out the task, that ability to labour and struggle with God’s energy powerfully working in us, comes from the joy of the Lord. How easily we forget that it is the joy of the Lord that is our strength and start to look for strength from other sources.
Therefore I conclude that the leadership task emerges out of joy in God, is empowered by Spirit-fuelled joy in God and is done in order that others have joy in God. Leadership and preaching are shot all the way through with dependence on joy in God. No joy, no good preaching and leading.
Worship (having adoring affections for God in every area of life) is the giving of expression to that joy. Worship reflects our joy back to God in exultation and to everyone around us in discipling them and evangelising. Discipleship and evangelism, just like biblical preaching are by-products of Holy Spirit-produced joy in God.
Broken or Triumphant?
This is excellent from Dane Ortlund:
“He has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.” –Hosea 6:1
Are Christians to be broken or triumphant?
Both. But—let’s be clear what we mean.
Are Christians to be broken? If by broken we mean downcast, long-faced, perpetually discouraged, hand-wringing, abject, ever grieving over sins—no. If by broken we mean contrite, low before the Lord, poignantly aware of personal weakness, self-divesting, able to laugh at ourselves, of sober judgment, sensitive to the depths of sin within us—yes.
Are Christians to be triumphant? If by triumphant we mean self-assured, superficial, obtuse to personal weakness, beyond correction, self-confident, quick to diagnose others’ weaknesses and our strengths, showy, triumphalistic—no. If by triumphant we mean confident of God’s unconquerable purposes in the world through faltering disciples, bold with a boldness that accords with the outrageous promises of the Bible, quietly abandoning ourselves to God in light of Christ’s irrepressible victory, relentless in reminding the enemy of Christ’s emptying of the power of Satan’s accusations, risk-taking fueled not by reputation-seeking but God-fixated faith—yes.
Brokenness without triumph is Eeyore-ish gloom that emphasizes the fall to the neglect of redemption, crucifixion to the neglect of resurrection. It is personally under-realized eschatology.
Triumph without brokenness is Buzz Lightyear-ish naïveté that emphasizes redemption to the neglect of the fall, resurrection to the neglect of crucifixion. It is personally over-realized eschatology.
The gospel gives us the only resource to look our brokenness squarely in the face, downplaying nothing, overlaid with—not in competition with—unspeakable victory. Both together.
Jonathan Edwards understood this deeply. “All gracious affections, that are a sweet odor to Christ,” he wrote in Religious Affections, “are brokenhearted affections.” Yet Edwards had earlier written in the same book of the supreme value of “delight and joy in God, a sweet and melting gratitude to God for his great goodness, a holy exultation and triumphof soul in the favor, sufficiency and faithfulness of God.”
In the gospel are we liberated to experience simultaneously fall and redemption, crucifixion and resurrection, brokenness and triumph. Jesus tells us to take up our cross daily (Matt. 16:24) while Paul tells us we have been raised and are seated in heaven (Eph. 2:6; Col. 3:1). How can both be true? Because the only person who was ever in himself triumphant-without-brokenness switched places with those who are only in themselves broken-without-triumph so that now the greatest triumph—restored sonship to God—is freely ours, even as brokenness remains. As any seasoned saint will attest, the strange way God brings us to treasure this triumph is through, not by circumventing, present brokenness. But brokenness is never an end, only a means. There is no brokenness in the first two chapters of the Bible and none in the final two chapters.
Piper – what is essential for the next generation
From Desiring God:
If at the end of your life you could say one thing to the next generation of church leaders, what might it be?
This is risky, because I know how it could be misused by people who don’t like me anyway. But I think I’m going to say to them on my death bed, “Make the Bible the supreme intellectual and emotional authority in your life, for the sake of magnifying Christ in the fullness of his person and his work, so that generation after generation preserves the foundation and the capstone of the glory of God in Christ, and the grace that is the apex of that glory.”
I’m a Calvinist, and I’m not going to go there, because I believe I got my Calvinism from the Bible. If I didn’t get it from the Bible, then I don’t want people to be Calvinists. So it seems better to say, “Hold fast to the Bible. Base everything on the Bible. If you are going to criticize somebody, criticize them from the Bible. If you are going to affirm somebody, affirm them from the Bible. If you are going to do a strategy, do it from the Bible. Be a Bible saturated people.” That’s what will make for long term staying power for the gospel.
I know this is going to be called bibliolatry, and people will say, “You worship the Bible, not God.” Bologna on that. People who reject the Bible for God become idolaters. The only God worthy of knowing and loving is the one we meet in and discover through the Bible. I do want him to be everything, and the Bible is secondary compared to him; but if we try to say him or something about him without stressing the foundation of the Bible, then we will lose what we are trying to preserve after a generation.
