In Affliction, Consider Christ
ReceiveTheWORD focuses on the absolute sufficiency of that Word; proclaiming and proceeding, as it does, from an all-sufficient Godhead. Pastor Joel Beeke's article at the Reformation21 blogpost addresses the perennial issue of affliction in order to show that the Bible is enough. This will serve to move the believer toward godly understanding of and response to such trials. Read prayerfully. Willingly. Thankfully.For extended reading on this general theme read the following by Philip Ryken - especially Part 3:
Two Dangers That Lead To Destruction - The Crook In the Lot Part 2
Why God Allows Suffering - The Crook In the Lot Part 3
What Can We Gain From Calvin Today?
One answer comes from Doug Wilson, Pastor of Christ Church, Idaho:
We gain, he says, "His rock solid, absolute confidence in the Bible."
He goes on to say that Calvin is not like "a modern day inerrantist who says the Bible is technically true but is still somehow apologetic over the fact. He doesn't have his hat in his hand, trying to persuade someone to please accept him even though he believes the Bible."
"The Bible is not something that takes a test from the world. The Bible is, in Calvin, that which administers the test to the world."
From Cornelius Van Til
"The Bible is authoritative in everything it addresses, and it addresses everything."
One Hymn's Testimony To the Sufficiency of God and His Word
If Thou But Suffer God To Guide Thee
If thou but suffer God to guide thee
and hope in him through all thy ways,
he'll give thee strength, whate'er betide thee,
and bear thee through the evil days.
who trusts in God's unchanging love
builds on the rock that naught can move.
and hope in him through all thy ways,
he'll give thee strength, whate'er betide thee,
and bear thee through the evil days.
who trusts in God's unchanging love
builds on the rock that naught can move.
What can these anxious cares avail thee,
these never-ceasing moans and sighs?
What can it help if thou bewail thee
o'er each dark moment as it flies?
Our cross and trials do but press
the heavier for our bitterness.
Be patient and await his leisure
in cheerful hope, with heart content
To take whate'er thy Father's pleasure
and his discerning love hath sent,
Nor doubt our inmost wants are known
to him who chose us for his own.
God knows full well when times of gladness
shall be the needful thing for thee.
When he has tried thy soul with sadness
and from all guile has found thee free,
he comes to thee all unaware
and makes thee own his loving care.
Nor think amid the fiery trial
that God hath cast thee off unheard,
that he whose hopes meet no denial
must surely be of God preferred.
Time passes and much change doth bring
and sets a bound to everything.
All are alike before the highest;
'tis easy to our God, we know,
to raise thee up, though low thou liest,
to make the rich man poor and low.
True wonders still by him are wrought
who setteth up and brings to naught.
Sing, pray, and keep his ways unswerving,
perform thy duties faithfully,
and trust his word, though undeserving,
thou yet shalt find it true for thee.
God never yet forsook in need
the soul that trusted him indeed
Words: Georg Neumark; Catherine Winkworth translation
Music and Meter: Georg Neumark, Wer nur den lieben Gott - 98 98 98
This hymn tune has been used for more than 400 hymns.
Alfred B. Smith's is a later tune.
This hymn tune has been used for more than 400 hymns.
Alfred B. Smith's is a later tune.
Why I Don't Have A Television and Rarely Go to Movies
I suspect that [others] would not agree on the degree to which the average pastor needs to be movie-savvy in order to be relevant, and the degree to which we should expose ourselves to the world’s entertainment.
I think relevance in preaching hangs very little on watching movies, and I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. Sources of spiritual power—which are what we desperately need—are not in the cinema. You will not want your biographer to write: Prick him and he bleeds movies.
If you want to be relevant, say, for prostitutes, don’t watch a movie with a lot of tumbles in a brothel. Immerse yourself in the gospel, which is tailor-made for prostitutes; then watch Jesus deal with them in the Bible; then go find a prostitute and talk to her. Listen to her, not the movie. Being entertained by sin does not increase compassion for sinners.
There are, perhaps, a few extraordinary men who can watch action-packed, suspenseful, sexually explicit films and come away more godly. But there are not many. And I am certainly not one of them.
I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.
I’ll put it bluntly. The only nude female body a guy should ever lay his eyes on is his wife’s. The few exceptions include doctors, morticians, and fathers changing diapers. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). What the eyes see really matters. “Everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Better to gouge your eye than go to hell (verse 29).
Brothers, that is serious. Really serious. Jesus is violent about this. What we do with our eyes can damn us. One reason is that it is virtually impossible to transition from being entertained by nudity to an act of “beholding the glory of the Lord.” But this means the entire Christian life is threatened by the deadening effects of sexual titillation.
All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. There is not one man in a thousand whose spiritual eyes are more readily moved by the beauty of Christ because he has just seen a bare breast with his buddies.
But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.
One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.
TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television. So we have never had a TV in 40 years of marriage (except in Germany, to help learn the language). I don’t regret it
- John Piper, June 2009
Should We Still Be Sending and Going?
As our family prepares to move overseas, we sometimes encounter this question in one form or another: Is the Western missionary model still legitimate?”
The question stems from a variety of concerns and perspectives, but our basic answer must be “yes.” Even with the high cost of sending and recent shifts in the global Church, it is still strategic and fitting for Western missionaries to cross geographical and linguistic boundaries in the pursuit of new worshipers of Jesus. Here is why I think so:
1. God wants his name to be great in every place as well as among every people.
Though missiologists in the past couple of decades have rightly emphasized the importance of unreached people groups ("nations") as the focus of the Great Commission, there are a number of texts which seem to require a geographic and not exclusively an ethnic focus (e.g. Malachi 1:11).
The Great Commission cannot be fulfilled by only reaching the unreached who migrate to America, or Christ doesn’t receive the glory he deserves.
2. There are still hundreds of remote peoples who haven’t heard the gospel.
Many Unreached peoples are unrepresented in reached cities. In these cases, someone is going to have to cross cultural and geographic boundaries to deliver the message in the flesh.
3. Too little money is given to missions, not too much.
God has blessed this nation with an abundance of resources, yet a staggeringly low percentage of Christian spending is channeled toward missions, especially missions to the unreached.
When God’s people here in America are biblically calibrated, there are plenty of resources both to continue sending workers from the West, and to support indigenous pastors and church planters.
4. In many cases, the Church in the West has something to offer.
With a long history of Christian thought, abundant resources, and relative lack of persecution, the Western Church can often make a contribution in places where the Church is younger and less grounded.
Just as it would be arrogant to think that we know it all and have no need of the global Church, it would be arrogant to sit on our wealth of resources, history, and doctrinal development rather than make it accessible to the world.
5. Crossing cultures is a fitting means for the message.
When Christians from more privileged and dominant-language cultures (such as America), set aside their comforts, rights, and security in order to identify with and minister to people of lesser-privileged cultures and more obscure languages, something powerful and gospel-adorning is communicated.
It is the purpose of God that the incarnational activities of going and identifying illustrate and glorify the gospel (1 Thessalonians 2:1-8).
- by Bill Walsh, International Ministries Director, Desiring God
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)