Neither Left Nor Right

The ideology of the Left believes big government and social reform will solve social ills, while the Right believes big business and economic growth will do it. The Left expects a citizen to be held legally accountable for the use of his wealth, but totally autonomous in other areas, such as sexual morality. The Right expects a citizen to be held legally accountable in areas of personal morality, but totally autonomous in the use of wealth. The North American "idol"--radical individualism--lies beneath both ideologies. A Christian sees either "solution" as fundamentally humanistic and simplistic

-Timothy Keller, Ministries of Mercy

Praising Themselves, Obscuring His Glory

"God cannot bear with seeing his glory appropriated by the creature in even the smallest degree, so intolerable to him is the sacrilegious arrogance of those who, by praising themselves, obscure his glory as far as they can."

-John Calvin, as quoted in Humilty: True Greatness, 33.

Listening to Theology

In the old days, when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones--bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 3.1

Restless

You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

-From St. Augustine's Confessions, 1.1

No Need for Proof

Our children know that Amy and I are their mom and dad. We have been with them (almost) every day of their lives. Therefore, it would be quite strange if one of them said something like, "Could you give me some proof that you're really my dad?" This would be strange because they have every reason to believe that I am their father. For example, I live with them, I play with them, I look like them, etc.

In his book, Apologetics to the Glory of God, John Frame makes a similar point regarding those who grow up in a Christian home. He writes:

...many people grow up with God and receive him gladly. They hear about God in church, in Sunday School, around the family dinner table, and in Christian school. They see their parents making decisions based on the Word of God. They learn Scripture verses and catechism from memory. God is literally the head of their home. They could no easier doubt God's existence than they could doubt the existence of their own father or mother...God's norm for us is that we live and raise our children in such a way that proof will be unnecessary (65-66).

So, for those of us who are Christian parents, let us ask ourselves these questions: Are we raising our children so that they know that God's existence is as certain as our existence as their father or mother? Are we raising children in a way that proof will be unnecessary?

Those Who Help Themselves

So, where do you think that the phrase--"Heaven helps those who help themselves"--comes from?

While quite a few people would guess that it comes from the Bible, such a guess would be incorrect. The phrase is actually derived from the fable "Hercules and the Wagoner," one of Aesop's Fables. In the fable, a man's wagon gets stuck in the mud. So, the man begins to cry out for Hercules to help him. Eventually Hercules shows up and says, "Put your shoulder to the wheel, man, and goad on your horses, and then you may call Hercules to assist you. If you won't lift a finger to help yourself, you can't expect Hercules or anyone else to come to your aid." (Aesop's Fables, #102)

"Help!"

God, in his grace, has used addiction to shatter my moralistic understanding of the Christian faith and force me to accept the gospel. I am not a faithful man. That's why I need a Savior. I cannot live victoriously on my own. That's why I need a Helper and brothers. I cannot keep my promises to God--the very act of making them is delusional--but God will keep his promises to me.

As a Christian, I am perpetually reduced to the role of a supplicant. No more can I offer God a bargain, his favor in exchange for my faithfulness, or go toe-to-toe with him, demanding payment for years of service. But when I approach him humbly, as a restored prodigal son, he responds with overwhelming generosity to my requests for aid.

No fancy prayers are required. In fact, God finds fancy prayers repugnant. He loves it, however, when I acknowledge my need and my belief in his benevolence with a simple one-word prayer:

"Help!"

-Nate Larkin, Samson and the Pirate Monks, p. 132

History and Doctrine

"Christ Died"—that is history; "Christ died for our sins"—that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.

--J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 27.

Reliance

In Bruce Waltke's An Old Testament Theology, he writes the following:

If Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, do not keep the single command in a paradise, how can the Israelites, marred by original sin, expect to keep a host of commandments in the moral cesspool of Canaan? The answer should be obvious: "Apart from reliance upon a trustworthy God, they cannot!" (p.151)

And neither can we! We must cast ourselves into the arms of our Savior who has died and rose again. Praise God for His marvelous grace!

Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor

I recently put D. A. Carson's new book about his father, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor, on my wish list. And now after reading Challies review and the lengthly quote he included, I believe I will try to get a hold of the book a lot sooner. Here is the way Carson describes his father's ministry:

Tom Carson never rose very far in denominational structures, but hundreds of people … testify how much he loved them. He never wrote a book, but he loved the Book. He was never wealthy or powerful, but he kept growing as a Christian: yesterday’s grace was never enough. He was not a far-sighted visionary, but he looked forward to eternity. He was not a gifted administrator, but there is no text that says “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you are good administrators.” His journals have many, many entries bathed in tears of contrition, but his children and grandchildren remember his laughter. Only rarely did he break through his pattern of reserve and speak deeply and intimately with his children, but he modeled Christian virtues to them. He much preferred to avoid controversy than to stir things up, but his own commitments to historic confessionalism were unyielding, and in ethics he was a man of principle. His own ecclesiastical circles were rather small and narrow, but his reading was correspondingly large and expansive. He was not very good at putting people down, except on his prayer lists.

When he died, there were no crowds outside the hospital, no editorial comments in the papers, no announcements on the television, no mention in Parliament, no attention paid by the nation. In his hospital room there was no one by his bedside. There was only the quiet hiss of oxygen, vainly venting because he had stopped breathing and would never need it again.

But on the other side, all the trumpets sounded. Dad won entrance to the only throne-room that matters, not because he was a good man or a great man—he was, after all, a most ordinary pastor—but because he was a forgiven man. And he heard the voice of him whom he longed to hear saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your Lord.”

Ad Fontes

“Without humanism, there would have been no Reformation."

Certainly, most Christians would find the previous statement to be quite strange. And indeed, this would be a strange statement if 14th century humanism was equivilant to present-day secular humanism (which is at odds with the Christian faith or any worldview that involves belief in the divine.) Yet, at the time of the Renaissance, humanism was a return to the arts and letters of the past. Humanists sought cultural renewel by returning to the thoughts and forms of antiquity. As Alister McGrath explains in his book Christianity's Dangerous Idea,

Its basic method can be summed up in the Latin slogan ad fontes, which can be paraphrased as "back to the sources!" A stream is at its purest at its source (30).

For humanists, primary texts were of vital importance. McGrath continues:

Most humanists of the era--such as the great Erasmus of Rotterdam--were Christians who were concerned for the renewal and reform of the church. So why not apply the same method of regeneration to Christianity? Why not return ad fontes, to the original sources of faith, and allow them to reinvigorate a burned-out and run-down church? Could the vitality and simplicity of the apostolic age be recaptured?....But how was this to be done? What was the religious analogue of the culture of the classical world? What was the fountainhead of Christianity? Christian humanists had little doubt: the Bible, especially the New Testament. This was the ultimate source of faith (31).

Church history is messy. And the more we delve into study of the history of the church, the more we will see the ways in God has worked through innumberable people, events, and movements.

With Closed Eyes

"It is the proof of our obedience when we are not wise in our own eyes but commit ourselves entirely to the Lord. Whenever, therefore, he requires anything of us, we must not be so concerned about success as to allow fear and anxiety to hinder our course. For it is better, with closed eyes, to follow God as our guide than, by relying on our own prudence, to wander through those circuitous paths." -John Calvin, Genesis

The Incarnation and the Sanctity of Human Life

In his chapter on "Abortion" in Evangelical Ethics, John Jefferson Davis writes the following:

In the New Testament, the incarnation of Jesus Christ is a profound testimony to God's affirmation of the sanctity of prenatal life. In theory it might have been possible in the eternal plan of God for the Savior to come to earth as a grown man, but in the wisdom of God, Jesus Christ recapitulated the full span of human existence--from conception through death--in order to fulfill the purposes of God. The personal history of the Son of God on earth begins not when he was "born of the Virgin Mary," but when he was "conceived by the Holy Spirit." His human history, like ours, began at conception. His conception was, of course, a supernatural one, but the significant point is that God chose to begin the process of incarnation there, rather than at some other point, thus affirming the significance of that starting point for human life. As the writer of Hebrews says, he had to be "made like his brothers in every respect" (2:17), in order to be a merciful and sympathetic high priest on their behalf (p.136).

Augustine on Seeing and Knowing God

If, as Augustine believes, God is the only Thing to be enjoyed, then it is imperative that we cling to Him since He is the true source of all blessedness. After quoting 1 Corinthians 13:12 ("For now we se in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.") Augusine writes,

But unless we now love Him, we shall never see Him. Yet how can one love what one does not know? A reality may be known and not loved; but whether that which is not known can be loved is questionable. If that is impossible, no one can love God before knowing Him. (On the Trinity 8.4.6)

Augustine on Enjoying God

At the beginning of his work On Christian Doctrine, Augustine states that there are three categories of things: 1) things to be enjoyed, 2) things to be used, and 3) things that are to be enjoyed and used. To enjoy something, according to Augustine, is to "cling to it with love for its own sake." Therefore, the only thing that belongs to the first category is God himself. Augustine writes,

The things which are to be enjoyed are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, a single Trinity, a certain supreme thing common to all who enjoy it, if indeed, it is a thing and not rather the cause of all things, or both a thing and a cause" (On Christian Doctrine 1.4.4)

The Paradoxes of Self-Love and True Love

"[A Christian] lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor...He lives in Christ through faith, and in his neighbor through love." --Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian

"The self will lose itself if it simply lives in and for itself. It will seek its own benefits, and the more it seeks it own benefits, the less satisfied it will become. That's the paradox of self-love: The more you fill the self, the more it echoes with the emptiness of unfulfillment. Living in itself and for itself, the self remains mysteriously unsatisfied and insatiable. Since God creates the self to be indwelled by Christ, the self will be fulfilled only if it draws the living water from the wellspring of love's infinity and passes it on to its neighbors. The paradox of true love is exactly the opposite of the paradox of self-love: When loving truly, the self moves outside of itself to dwell with God and neighbor, and only then is it truly at home. When this happens, we have crossed over from self-centeredness to genuine and fulfilling generosity." --Miroslav Volf, commenting on Luther's quote in Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace.

Ecclesiola in Ecclesia

"That Christians are not to conform to the world is a familiar concept of the New Testament. It is not so well known that Jesus also saw (and foresaw) the worldliness of the church itself and called his followers not to conform to the nominal church either, but rather to be a truly Christian community distinct in its life and practice from the religious establishment, an ecclesiola (little church) in ecclesia." -John R.W. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount

From Infancy Onward

"Yet you are he who took me from the womb; you made me trust at my mother's breasts. On you I was cast from my birth, and from my mother's womby you have been my God."-Psalm 22:9,10

"For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my youth. Upon you I have leaned from before my birth; you are he who took me from my mother's womb. My praise is continually of you." -Psalm 71:5,6

In his book, Paedofaith, Rich Lusk writes:

The Psalter treats infant trust not as a sporadic, occasional, or unpredictable reality, but as the norm in covenant children. God gives us believing children to work with and nurture. In this way, covenant children are a blessing and reward from the Lord. As we help them grow to mature faith, we fulfill the purpose of the cross-generational covenant promises. The psalmist has many remarkably deep, vivid, datable, and narratable experiences of God's grace, but he still maintains he was a believer from infancy; he trusted in God and knew Him from the very beginning of life. In this way, the Psalter norms Christian experience for the child growing up in a Christian environment. The experience of the psalmist should be the experience of our offspring. Our children belong to Christian homes and, like David, should learn to regard themselves as believers from infancy onward, not necessarily on the basis of experience, but as a corollary of the covenant promises.

Waiting

"Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long...May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you." -Psalm 25:5,21



Waiting...





can...







be...







painstaking.



I like immediate results, quick answers and speedy resolutions. I want to pray, then see God answer without delay. I wanted God to work according to my timetable. So, when I come to a text like the one quoted above, my impatience is tested and my need for repentence is made clear. I am not the sovereign God of the universe!

In his book When I Don't Desire God, John Piper writes,

We are like farmers. They plow the field and plant the seed and cut away weeds and scare away crows, but they do not make the crop grow. God does. He sends rain and sunshine and brings to maturity the hidden life of the seed. We have our part. But it is not coercive or controlling. And there will be times when the crops fail. Even then God has his ways of feeding the farmer and bringing him through a lean season.

We must learn to wait for the Lord. King David gave us an example of this in Psalm 40...Here is a man after God's own heart (1 Sam.13:14), who spent time in the 'pit of destruction and in the 'miry bog'--where there was no song in his mouth. How long was he there? We are not told. What matters is what he did there. He waited for the Lord. He could not make the Lord come. He could wait and hope and trust that he would come. And he did come. He put David's feet on a rock and put a new song in his mouth.

David waited on the Lord because he knew that "all the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies" (v.10). David waited. And I will wait, hope and trust too.

There Was a Day When I Died...

"There was a day when I died, utterly died to George Muller and his opinions, preferences, tastes and will; died to the world, its approval or censure; died to the approval or blame of even my brethren and family and friends; and since then I have studied only to show myself approved unto God"

- George Muller as quoted by D. Martn Llyod-Jones in Studies in the Sermon on the Mount