Aiming for the Center
March 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment
D.A. Carson, from his talk at the 2007 Gospel Coalition conference:
[There is a tendency today] to assume the Gospel, while devoting creative energy and passion to other issues: marriage, happiness, prosperity, evangelism, the poor, bioethics. The list is endless. But this overlooks the fact that our hearers inevitably are drawn toward that which we are most passionate. My students are unlikely to learn all that I teach them. They’re most likely to learn what I am excited about. If the Gospel is merely assumed, while relatively peripheral issues ignite our passion, we’ll train a new generation to downplay the Gospel and focus on the periphery. It is easy to sound prophetic from the margins; what is urgently needed is to be prophetic from the center.
You can download the whole talk here.
Why Bother with Stem-Cells?
March 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Why Bother with Stem-Cells?
So why should Christians bother themselves with a social issue like stem cells? Won’t this distract us from the Lord’s work of preaching the Gospel and saving souls?
I want to look at these questions in some detail tomorrow, but for now here is an insightful quote from Richard Mouw in his excellent book, When the Kings Come Marching In:
“Recently I heard a very pious man say, ‘I don’t mean to suggest that it is wrong to pay attention to some of these social issues — but I do wish we would spend more time talking about the things of the Lord!’
“Of course it is of the utmost importance that we talk about the things of the Lord. But the important question is this: what are the Lord’s things? Doesn’t Jesus agonize over attacks on the dignity of those persons for whom He spilled His blood? Doesn’t He grieve over men and women who have been imprisoned because they witnessed for justice and righteousness? Isn’t the Son of God angered by the oppression of widows and orphans [and unborn babies, I might add!], and by the schemes of those who plot destruction of all that the Creator has called good?
“If so, then many so-called ’social issues’ are ‘the things of the Lord’.”
Thoughts?
The Church in the World
March 16, 2009 | 1 Comment
The Church in the World
While Monday is a day of rest for me, it signals the beginning of the work week for most. This quote from Michael Horton, in his book Where in the World is the Church?, was a good one to get the week started:
“While the midieval and, to a large extent, pietistic tendency is to call the believer out of the world and into church-related activities, the Reformation approach is to view all church-related activities as ‘refueling’ stations for their real service in the world. We should not put people who work diligently at their calling on a guilt trip for failing to attend every church-related activity or volunteering for church-related tasks. It is the church that serves the Christian so that the Christian can serve God in the world…
“Even if a church is feeding the sheep with God’s promises, a further question must be asked: If the church itself is healthy internally, are individual Christians fulfilling their calling in the world with excellence? That is not the same question as, Are they winning souls? Rather, Do individual believers sense that it is their Christian duty to transcend mediocrity in their daily routines and link their service in the world to their service of an all-knowing God of glory?
“A Christian does not go to work on Monday morning in order to convert people to Christ, but to pursue his or her calling, for which he or she was designed by divine creation.”
I think that Horton’s comment at the end about not going to work to convert people to Christ could be misleading, since I know that Horton emphatically believes that Christians ought to be evangelizing unbelievers! Nevertheless, I thought this quote was interesting and worthy of more reflection. I am curious to know what those people who went to work at a ’secular’ job today think of this quote. Leave a comment and let me know!
What Cesspits and Perfume Have in Common
March 13, 2009 | 2 Comments
What Cesspits and Perfume Have in Common
Last week I decided to take the plunge…I am finally reading through Augustine’s City of God. At 1,085 pages, this is a bit of an endeavor, because Augustine is not the easiest person to read. But I’m hoping to be done by March of 2010.
Anyway, I was struck by this quote early on in the book, dealing with how both the righteous and the wicked suffer in this world:
When the good and the wicked suffer alike, the identity of their sufferings does not mean that there is no difference between them. Though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different…The fire which makes gold shine makes chaff smoke…In the same way, the violence which assails good men to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin and annihilation. Thus the wicked, under affliction, execrate God and blaspheme; the good, in the same affliction, offer up prayers and praises. This shows that what matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings. Stir a cesspit, and a foul stench arises; stir a perfume, and a delightful fragrance ascends. But the movement is identical.
See why it’s going to take a year to read through?
Re-Learning God’s Way
March 2, 2009 | 6 Comments
Re-Learning God’s Way
A few weeks ago I shared this quote from Neal Plantinga:
“Thoughtful Christians know that if we obey the Bible’s great commandment to love God with our whole mind, as well as with everything else, then we will study the splendor of God’s creation in the hope of grasping part of the ingenuity and grace that form it. One way to love God is to know and love God’s work.
Learning is therefore a spiritual calling: properly done, it attaches us to God. In addition, the learned person has, so to speak, more to be Christian with. The person who studies chemistry, for example, can enter into God’s enthusiasm for the dynamic possibilities of material reality.”
On the Seeking Him blog, this led to a prolonged discussion of the merits of different forms of educating our children (ie. home-school, public-school, private school.). But the quote is more focused on learning about all subjects (no matter where that learning is done) through a God-centered vision of all things.
So, readers, here is what I want to know from you: if you could go back to school and re-learn a subject given what you now know about God, what subject would it be? Leave a comment and let me know.
My answer is anthropology.
Where is Home: Heaven or Earth?
February 28, 2009 | 2 Comments
Where is Home: Heaven or Earth?
I had some reservations about reading Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright. Any book that announces in its subtitle that it is ‘Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church’ makes me a bit cautious. Rethinking things this essential often means saying something heretical about them. Not to mention the book has a glowing endorsement from Emergent superstar Rob Bell, and I was really thinking this book could be shady.
But when I read it at the end of last year, I found it to be a worthwhile and engaging read. I did not agree with everything in the book, but it seemed to me that there was a lot more wheat than chaff. So now I am re-reading the book again (since, if you read yesterday’s post, I don’t remember enough of what I read).
One of the points that Wright makes early in the book is that the hymns of the Church sometimes advance a view of the final hope of the Christian’s ultimate destiny that is contrary to the Scriptural account. Among others, he cites the great hymn How Great Thou Art as an example. The final verse reads:
When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Wright takes issue specifically with the phrase, ‘When Christ shall come….and take me home…’ This, he says, promotes a significant misunderstanding about what Christ will do at His second coming. As Wright puts it,
“Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden dimension of our ordinary life — God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21-22, we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven but rather the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.”
This idea does not seem to be captured by the words of How Great Thou Art, which describes Jesus coming and taking His people out of this world to our home, supposedly somewhere up in the sky with Him. It gives the impression that salvation is found in escape from this present world, not the healing and renewal of it. So Wright suggests that a more biblical way to state the last verse would be to say, ‘When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation/and heal this world, what joy shall fill my heart.’
It’s not as if I expect the words to this great hymn to be changed (although the original Swedish version does not talk about Christ coming to take me home), but I like Wright’s suggested change. I think the re-wording makes a statement about our final salvation and the scope of Christ’s redemptive power demonstrated in His death and resurrection that seems largely absent from our singing and our thinking about God’s final goal and purpose for the world.
Thoughts? Is Wright being over-dramatic here? Is this a matter of semantics and not a really big deal? How do these two different pictures affect your thinking of the final hope of Christianity?
Leave a comment and let me know what you’re thinking about this…
Enjoying God Everywhere
February 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Enjoying God Everywhere
In Mark Noll’s book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Noll calls attention to the regrettable absence of Christian scholars and thinkers in various fields of study like art and science. This is regrettable, according to Noll, because in failing to learn diligently about nature, society and humanity, among other areas of study, we fail to learn about the Creator of all. As Noll says, When we study something, we are of course learning about that thing. But even more, we are learning about the One who made that thing.
Noll draws attention to the famous American theologian Jonathan Edwards. Here is a man who had an insatiable thirst for learning about both God and God’s world. When he was still in his teens, Edwards wrote an extensive description of the shape, construction and purpose of a spider’s web.
There are many true things we can say about the spider’s web, but according to Edwards, the ultimate thing shown by the spider in its spinning is “the exuberant goodness of the Creator, who hath provided for all the necessities, but also for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects.” Edwards understood that the final reason for exercising our intelligence is to know more of God and his loving ways with the world.
Clearly Edwards was a man who did more than read his Bible and preach on heaven and hell (which he did extraordinarily well!). He was zealous to know all that he could about God, by studying carefully both His Word and His world.
May God raise up many such intellectuals who will zealously pursue a greater enjoyment of God through all that He has made.
The Redemption of Culture, #1
February 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment
The Redemption of Culture, #1
Last week in writing about Miles Davis’ classic jazz recording Kind of Blue, I hinted at something I want to explore in a couple of more posts. I said that a cultural artifact like Kind of Blue can and does bring delight to the heart of God and may well be enjoyed on the New Earth which will be our eternal home.
What is the basis of my saying such a thing? I’m going to take a few posts to try to explain what I mean. First up is a quote from Anthony Hoekema in his book, The Bible and the Future. I’m only a quarter of the way into this book, but I am enjoying it. In a chapter on the tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of the Kingdom of God (that is, that the Kingdom has already been inaugurated by Christ’s death and resurrection, but has not yet been consummated, which will happen at His second coming), Hoekema writes,
“What about the cultural products of non-Christians? Do we simply write off such products as valueless because they have not been produced by believers and have not been consciously dedicated to the glory of God? Christians who take this attitude fail to appreciate the working of God’s common grace in this present world, whereby even unregenerate men are enabled to make valuable contributions ot the world’s culture.”
Hoekema then quotes John Calvin, who recognized that through the working of the Holy Spirit, non-Christians can and do say things that are true. Hoekema then writes,
“With respect to non-Christian culture, therefore, we must remember that Christ’s sovereign power is so great that He can rule in the midst of His enemies, and cause those who do not know Him to make contributions in art and science which serve His cause. The powers awakened by the resurrection of Jesus Christ are active in the world today! The sovereign rule of Christ over history is so marvelous that He can make even His enemies praise Him, though they do so involuntarily. And when we read in the book of Revelation that the kings and nations of the earth shall bring their glory into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:24, 26), we conclude that there will be some continuity even between the culture of the present world and that of the world to come.”
What, specifically, does this mean for Kind of Blue? Well, I can’t say for certain, but I do think it points us in the direction that such cultural artifacts may be part of the redeemed culture that will fill the New Earth. The most compelling place in the Bible which leads me in that direction is Isaiah 60.
But this post is getting a little lengthy already. I’ll save that for another time soon!
Knowing God Through His Works
February 8, 2009 | 29 Comments
Knowing God Through His Works
Currently I am re-reading Engaging God’s World, a book by Cornelius Plantinga that I read last year. In the Preface, Plantinga writes:
“Thoughtful Christians know that if we obey the Bible’s great commandment to love God with our whole mind, as well as with everything else, then we will study the splendor of God’s creation in the hope of grasping part of the ingenuity and grace that form it. One way to love God is to know and love God’s work.
Learning is therefore a spiritual calling: properly done, it attaches us to God. In addition, the learned person has, so to speak, more to be Christian with. The person who studies chemistry, for example, can enter into God’s enthusiasm for the dynamic possibilities of material reality.”
Of all people, Christians ought to have the greatest thirst for learning about the world we live in. For as we study the creation, we are bound to learn more about the Creator.
Obama Speaks about his Faith
February 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Barack Obama, speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast:
“I didn’t become a Christian until many years later, when I moved to the South Side of Chicago after college. It happened not because of indoctrination or a sudden revelation, but because I spent month after month working with church folks who simply wanted to help neighbors who were down on their luck – no matter what they looked like, or where they came from, or who they prayed to. It was on those streets, in those neighborhoods, that I first heard God’s spirit beckon me. It was there that I felt called to a higher purpose – His purpose. “
I wish I knew a little more about how Obama would explain his becoming a Christian. He seems to be saying that what led him to Christianity was seeing ‘church folks’ living lives of compassion and justice around him over a period of time. This beckons a few questions:
What is a Christian?
How exactly does a life of good deeds and a commitment to social justice lead someone to the Christian faith?
Mahaney on Phelps and his Bong
February 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment
C.J. Mahaney has an insightful post on recent photo of super-swimmer Michael Phelps smoking from a bong. He writes:
This is what I find so striking: A man whose chest has been covered with gold medals, has achieved international fame, showered with awards, and blessed with an incomprehensible amount of money, still feels compelled to press his face to a bong.
And he concludes with these wise, humble words:
Study the unflattering picture of Michael Phelps to be reminded of the deceitfulness of sin and the superficiality of fame and money. But also study the picture to be reminded of the message of Christ and him crucified for restless sinners like you, and me, and Michael Phelps.
More from Watson
January 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Here is a great one…
“The twelfth argument to contentment is, Whatever change of trouble a child of God meets with, it is all the hell he shall have.
Whatever eclipse may be upon his name or estate, I may say of it, as Athanasius of his banishment, it is a little cloud that will soon be blown over, and then his gulf is shot his hell is past. Death begins a wicked man’s hell, but it puts an end to a godly man’s hell.
Think with thyself, what if I endure this? It is but a temporary hell: indeed if all our hell be here, it is but an easy hell. What is the cup of affliction to the cup of damnation? Lazarus could not get a crumb; he was so diseased that the dogs took pity on him, and as if they had been his physicians, licked his sores: but this was an easy hell, the angels quickly fetched him out of it.
If all our hell be in this life, in the midst of this hell we may have the love of God, and then it is no more hell but paradise. If our hell be here, we may see to the bottom of it; it is but skindeep, it cannot touch the soul, and we may see to the end of it; it is a hell that is short-lived; after a wet night of affliction, comes the bright morning of the resurrection; if our lives are short, our trials cannot be long; as our riches take wings and fly, so do our sufferings; then let us be contented.”
What clear thinking! May we learn from it and make it our own.
Be True to Your Word, President Obama
January 21, 2009 | 3 Comments
Yesterday in his inauguration speech, Barack Obama said:
The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
This statement almost brought me to tears, because it grieves me that a man can say this while supporting the choice of a woman to deny her unborn child a chance to pursue their happiness.
If all are equal, free and deserve to pursue their full measure of happiness, then abortion must be stopped.
I will certainly be praying for Barack Obama, that through a massive change of heart, he would really seek justice and the pursuit of happiness for all.
Cruel Kindness
January 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Joe,
In my recent studies on small group ministry I have been reading a book called Life Together, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In it he writes:
“Nothing can be more cruel than the kindness that consigns another person to his sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the rebuke that calls a brother back from the path of sin.”
How grateful I have been for those brothers and sister of mine who have loved me enough to point out my sin. It is not easy to hear such words, but it is always fruitful.
Readers: do you ever struggle with this cruel form of kindness? What prevents us from displaying the kind of compassion Bonhoeffer commends?
Larry
Contentment in Affliction Part 2
January 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Three more reasons why we should be content in the midst of afflictions.
5) Afflictions do bring more of God’s immediate presence into the soul.
When we are most assaulted, we shall be most assisted; ‘I will be with him in trouble.’ (Ps. 91:15) It cannot be ill with that man with who God is, by his powerful presence in supporting, and his gracious presence in sweetening the present trial. God will be with us in trouble not only to behold us, but to uphold us, as he was with Daniel in the lion’s den, and the three children in the fiery furnace. What if we have more trouble than others, if we have more of God with us than others have?…If God be with us, the furnace shall be turned into a festival, the prison into a paradise, the earthquake into a joyful dance. O why should I be discontented, when I have more of God’s company!
6) These evils of afflictions are for good, as they bring with them certificates of God’s love, and are evidences of his special favor.
Affliction is the saint’s livery; it is a badge and cognizance of honor: that the God of glory should look upon a worm, and take so much notice of him, as to afflict him rather than lose him, is a high act of favor. Some men’s prosperity hath been their shame, when others afflictions have been their crown.
7) These afflictions work for our good because they work for us a far exceeding weight of glory (2 Cor. 4:17)
That which works for my glory in heaven, works for my good. We do not read in Scripture that any man’s honor or riches do work for him a weight of glory, but afflictions do; and shall a man be discontented at that which works for his glory? The heavier the weight of affliction the heavier the weight of glory…
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