It's Not About Me!

As I’ve been studying the Scriptures lately, one of the themes I have seen cropping up time and again is the fact that life doesn’t revolve around me. Far too often, my first reaction to things is to ask, “How does this impact me?” And while it is a perfectly good (even necessary!) practice to look for ways to apply the Bible to our own lives, I would argue that we need to go much further than that in our application of God’s word.

Let me show you what I mean. Consider 1 Timothy 1:15-18…

15 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. 16 But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. 17 To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

In verse 15, we see Paul urging Timothy to maintain humility, realizing that he has received mercy instead of what he deserved. To remember this truth on its own would be good, but it is altogether insufficient to simply end there. Verse 16 goes on to explain that this mercy was not intended to terminate on him, but was to be an example to others so that they might trust in Christ as well, and similarly experience his mercy. At this point, it might be tempting for us to think that this is where Paul is going with what he is saying, but then verse 17 reminds us that it’s not even those other believers who are, in the end, the focus of God’s work. What is most important is that all honor and glory would forever be God’s alone.

Last Sunday I preached from Mark 6:45-52, which (falling right on the heals of Jesus feeding over 5000 from just five loaves and two fish) tells the story of Jesus walking on water. As Jesus climbs into the boat, Mark informs us that the disciples were utterly astounded, “for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened” (v. 52). The reason they were astounded was not ultimately that Jesus had walked across the water nor that he had silenced the wind and the waves. As amazing as these things were, Mark suggests that if they had “understood about the loaves,” they would not have been so astounded at what Jesus had done.

The problem is that they (like the crowds) thought that what Jesus was doing in feeding the 5000+ was merely filling empty stomachs. Yet again though, Jesus intended for the glory of God to be made manifest. What he had actually done was display that the laws of nature do not govern him, but rather he governs them; he was showing them that he is God!

God is constantly at work meeting our needs. He does so with such frequency that quite often we don’t even notice it. When we do notice it though, let us remember that this is not all that he is doing. He is yet again drawing our attention to the fact “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10-11).

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Sproul on Holiness and the Justice of God

"Was it unjust for God to say to Adam and Eve that they would die when they sinned? Think about it. Was it evil for God to impose the death penalty for all sin? If you say yes, be careful. If you say yes, you are saying it as an expression of the very fallen, sinful nature that exposes you to the death penalty in the first place. If you say yes, you slander the character of God. If you say yes,you do violence to His holiness. If you say yes, you assail the righteous Judge of all the earth. If you say yes, you have never come to grips with what sin is. We must not say yes. We must say no and say it with conviction.

R.C. Sproul
The Holiness of God

A Word for Preachers...John Broadus on Doctrinal Preaching

"To a certain extent it is proper that we should conform to the tastes of the age, for they frequently indicate its real wants, and always affect its reception of truth; but when those tastes are manifestly faulty, we should earnestly endeavor to correct them. The preacher who can make doctrinal truth interesting as well as intelligible to his congregation, and gradually bring them to a good acquaintance with the doctrines of the Bible, is rendering them an inestimable service. Doctrinal preaching is not necessarily dry. In fact properly presented doctrine, didactic instruction, may be the most interesting kind of preaching. Men wish to know, delight in knowing. All depends on the way in which it is done. The dry preacher will make all subjects dry; dull anecdotes, and tame exhortations have sometimes been heard of."

John Broadus
On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons

Friday Fun...Uncle Drew

(HT: Vitamin Z)

Don't Be Too Quick To Abandon Traditions

While it may be debatable as to whether or not it is a good thing, it is undeniable that we are in the midst of an age when many within the Church have deemed it either wise or expedient to abandon much of the Church's heritage and many of her traditions.  Trevin Wax has some good observations dealing with this fact in a great blog post originally posted in 2007, and re-posted at his blog this morning. Early on, he makes a concession:

Before we go on, we must admit – yes, our Christian traditions can become dry and lifeless. In many churches, they are ritualistic and cold. Most of the time, though, rigor mortis sets in when traditions are not understood or explained. When rituals become dry and empty of significance, the answer is not to throw them out, but to rediscover their purpose.

This extends not only to the shape of our liturgy and the parts that make up a worship service. It includes even the language we use. Wax points out the eschewing within the church of such theological terms as "justification," "redemption" and "propitiation," in an effort to be "seeker-friendly."

Christian leaders cop out by dismissing such terminology because “the lost don’t understand.” The greater danger is “the saved don’t understand.” If our preachers, teachers and writers would reconnect the church with the depth and majesty of the theological terms so many want to throw away, perhaps the cry against hard words would fall silent.

Words are more than just definitions in a lexicon. They remind us who we are – citizens of God’s Kingdom.

Click here to read the whole post.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Matt Chandler on Church as a Hobby

"(N)obody can really attend church as though it's a hobby; to do so does not reveal partial belief but hardness. The religious, moralistic, churchgoing evangelical who has no real intention of seeking God and following him has not found some sweet spot between radical devotion and wanton sin; he's found devastation. The moralism that passes for Christian faith today is a devastating hobby if you have no intention of submitting your life fully to God and chasing him in Christ."

Matt Chandler
The Explicit Gospel

A Word for Preachers...Baxter on Taking Heed to Ourselves

"We are the nurses of Christ’s little ones. If we forbear taking food ourselves, we shall famish them; it will soon be visible in their leanness, and dull discharge of their several duties. If we let our love decline, we are not like to raise up theirs. If we abate our holy care and fear, it will appear in our preaching: if the matter show it not, the manner will. If we feed on unwholesome food, either errors or fruitless controversies, our hearers are like to fare the worse for it. Whereas, if we abound in faith, and love, and zeal, how would it overflow to the refreshing of our congregations, and how would it appear in the increase of the same graces in them!...Above all, be much in secret prayer and meditation. Thence you must fetch the heavenly fire that must kindle your sacrifices: remember, you cannot decline and neglect your duty, to your own hurt alone; many will be losers by it as well as you. For your people’s sakes, therefore, look to your hearts. If a pang of spiritual pride should overtake you, and you should fall into any dangerous error, and vent your own inventions to draw away disciples after you, what a wound may this prove to the Church, of which you have the oversight; and you may become a plague to them instead of a blessing, and they may wish they had never seen your faces. Oh, therefore, take heed to your own judgments and affections. Vanity and error will slyly insinuate, and seldom come without fair pretences: great distempers and apostasies have usually small beginnings. The prince of darkness doth frequently personate an angel of light, to draw the children of light again into darkness. How easily also will distempers creep in upon our affections and our first love, and fear and care abate! Watch, therefore, for the sake of yourselves and others."

Richard Baxter
The Reformed Pastor

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Calvin on the Primacy of God

"For, quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves: indeed. our very being is nothing but subsistence in the one God. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself. Indeed, our very poverty better discloses the infinitude of benefits reposing in God. The miserable ruin, into which the rebellion of the first man cast us, especially compels us to look upward...Thus, from the feeling of our own ignorance, vanity, poverty, infirmity, and--what is more--depravity and corruption, we recognize that the true light of wisdom, sound virtue, fell abundance of every good, and purity of righteousness rest in the Lord alone."

John Calvin
Institutes of the Christian Religion

Reflections on Covenant Theological Seminary

Rev. Joe Novenson, lead teaching pastor at Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and seminary board member, shares some reflections on Covenant Theological Seminary.

A Word for Preachers...DeYoung on Preaching With Authority

"The only hope we preachers have for success in the ministry is the  power inherent in the word of God. We can have no other confidence. The  only things really worth happening in your church will only happen by  the power of the word. The word may seem slow or foolish or irrelevant,  but it will not disappoint. It cannot return empty.

"Critics like to say about evangelicals, “You worship the Bible, a  dead letter, words on a page, blah, blah, blah.” Don’t mind those  critics. Satan uses their critiques more than God does. The devil wants  you to think there’s no power in the word, that it’s not living and  active, that it’s not sharper than any two-edged sword, that it’s not  the imperishable seed by which men and women are born again. The devil  wants you to believe you are fruity and fruitless for wasting your time  in study and wasting your breath on Sunday. The devil wants you to voice  your cynicism, your skepticism, and your sophisticated reasons for  supposedly worshiping Jesus by revering the Scriptures less than he did.  Don’t buy it. Look at every preacher worthy of emulation from any  century and you will find a man preaching with authority.

"So preach with confidence and conviction this Lord’s Day. Preach as  if you were utterly and completely dependent on the word of God to do  the work of God. “Declare these things;  exhort and rebuke with all  authority. Let no one disregard you” (Titus  2:15). Preach like you mean  it."

Kevin DeYoung

"Her Children Rise Up and Call Her Blessed"

When it comes to going to bed, my eight-year-old daughter is a world class staller. I thought I was good at it as a kid with my routine of asking for a drink of water, etc., but she has made an art form of it. Asking for extra hugs is a good tactic, albeit a little elementary. In my case in particular, the well-timed (i.e., right as the lights go out) theological question is quite effective in gaining a few more minutes of awake time. Last night though, was an all-timer. As I'm turning away from her bed to walk out of her room, she drops this one on me: "Daddy, I liked your sermon today."

Well, I'm not sure if she is the most discerning homiletical critic in the world, but I'll take it. And I was of course happy to chat about it with my eight-year-old for a few minutes, even though bedtime had long passed.

Anyway, if you'd like to hear some preaching that comes with my daughter's recommendation, you can click here and listen to my Mother's Day sermon from Proverbs 31:10-31, "Her Children Rise Up and Call Her Blessed."

Friday Fun...Russian Taxi Cab

I never realized that in order to be a taxi cab driver in Russia you have to first pass a swimming test...



(HT: Trevin Wax)

A Quick Thought on Prayer

This morning I was considering the words of 1 John 5:14-15:

And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.

There are those who take such passages of Scripture and use them to develop a "prosperity gospel" that essentially preaches, "Trust God, and you will become healthy and wealthy." This is far from wise.

Rather, what we are promised here (and in many other similar passages) is that if our will is aligned with  God's, then we will receive those things for which we ask in prayer. If we really believe this to be true, then whenever we come before the Lord in prayer, our first and foundational petition can be none other than "Father, conform my will to that which is your own."

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Jared Wilson on a Resurrection Gospel

“A resurrection gospel is a full gospel. What we are accustomed to is a simplistic, stripped down gospel, a gospel that suggests, ‘You have issues, but Jesus died for you; now be a good person.’ The full gospel says, ‘The problem is a radical one no less serious than death and it requires a radical intervention no less powerful than resurrection’ The full gospel says that the level and quality of your messed-up-ness is complete, exhaustive, and irreconcilable by you, but the gift of God's grace extends infinitely, eternally, covering it all. It reconciles us fully to God in a way that can only be described as bringing a dead person back to life.”

Jared Wilson
Your Jesus Is Too Safe

A Word for Preachers...Lloyd-Jones on the Authority of Scripture

"While men believed in the Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God and spoke on the basis of that authority you had great preaching. But once that went, and men began to speculate, and to theorise, and to put up hypotheses and so on, the eloquence and the greatness of the spoken word inevitably declined and began to wane. You cannot really deal with speculations and conjectures in the same way as preaching had formerly dealt with the great themes of the Scriptures. But as belief in the great doctrines of the Bible began to go out, and sermons were replaced by ethical addresses and homilies, and moral uplift and socio-political talk, it is not surprising that preaching declined."

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Preachers & Preaching

Mike Horton on "Masculine Christianity"

Within the New Calvinist movement, and evangelicalism in general, there are many who would advocate for a more "masculine" Christianity. Mike Horton responds in this recent article from Modern Reformation magazine. In it he gives an interesting take on gender stereotyping within the church, and the need for our ideas to be more grounded in the Scriptures.

It is well worth reading the whole thing, and I recommend you do so. But if you want just a summation, here is where he ends up:

My point is that the larger goal here shouldn't be to trot out more gender stereotypes from our culture, whether feminist or neo-Victorian, but rather to rediscover the ministry that Christ has ordained for making disciples of all nations, all generations, and both genders. We need less niche marketing and more meat-and-potatoes service to the whole body of Christ. There, men and women, the young and the old and the middle aged, black, white, Latino, Asian, rich and poor hear God's Word together, pray and sing God's Word together, and are made one body by receiving Christ's body and blood together: "one Lord, one faith, one baptism." In that place, at least, there are no women's Bible studies and men's Bible studies, distracted youth groups and child-free golden oldies clubs, but brothers and sisters on pilgrimage to a better homeland than those that have been fashioned for us by this passing evil age.