"Prayer and Providence"

“Coming events cast their shadows before them, and when God is about to bless his people his coming favour casts the shadow of prayer over the church. When he is about to favour an individual he casts the shadow of hopeful expectation over his soul. Our prayers, let men laugh at them as they will, and say there is no power in them, are the indicators of the movement of the wheels of Providence. Believing supplications are forecasts of the future, He who prayeth in faith is like the seer of old, he sees that which is to be: his holy expectancy, like a telescope, brings distant objects near to him.”

- Charles Spurgeon, The Holy Spirit’s Intercession
posted at Of First Importance

The Essence of Sin (Idolatry)

"Sin is not only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry."

-Tim Keller

Living in Laodicea (2): "Christless Christianity"

again via Justin Taylor (HT: James Grant):

Michael Horton interviews R.C. Sproul on 'Christless Christianity.'

Horton's latest book, due out in November, is on the theme of "Christless Christianity": Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church.

ESV Study Bible: The Bible and World Religions

From Justin Taylor:

The next sampling from the ESV Study Bible is now being made available: The Bible and World Religions (a 9-page PDF).

Living in Laodicea

Here are excerpts from Colin Hansen's Christianity Today Online review of the book, "Jesus Made in America"

"...if evangelicals today still regard Jesus Christ as true God from true God, fully God and fully man, they don't dwell on it. Their music, trinkets, DVDs, and movies market a Jesus who will hold you tight, model generosity, and tell you how to vote. So argues Stephen J. Nichols, research professor of Christianity and culture at Lancaster Bible College and author of Jesus Made in America: A Cultural History from the Puritans to the Passion of the Christ.

"'Today's American evangelicals may be quick to speak of their love for Jesus, even wearing their devotion on their sleeve, literally in the case of WWJD bracelets,' Nichols writes. 'But they may not be so quick to articulate an orthodox view of the object of their devotion. Their devotion is commendable, but the lack of a rigorous theology behind it means that a generation of contemporary evangelicals is living off of borrowed capital.'

"When Nichols reaches our current era, he explains how evangelicals have fallen captive to American culture. He admires the evident devotion to Jesus in much contemporary Christian music. But he shows how lyrics 'safe for the whole family' begin with sub-Christian notions of romantic love and neglect the biblical record, not to mention the rich descriptions in the Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds.

"'Like a good boyfriend, Jesus shows up at the right moment, says the right thing and knows how to hug,' Nichols writes after surveying popular Christian radio hits. Perhaps we should not be surprised, Nichols observes with some indignation. After all, entries for Sandi Patty and Stryper in an encyclopedia of evangelicalism run longer than entries for John Perkins and John Stott."

A Christian Perspective on Sports and Competition

Justin Taylor's post introduces the new book, "Game Day for the Glory of God: A Guide for Athletes, Fans, and Wannabes" by Stephen Altrogge.

"A Bow and A Kiss: Authentic Worship..."

A Bow and a Kiss: Authentic worship reveals both the friendship and fear of God
by Philip Yancey posted 04/28/2005 Christianitytoday.com

"Christianity claims a unique place among the world's religions. Our faith tells of a God before whom the strongest saints took off their shoes, bowed down, fell on their faces, repented in dust and ashes. At the same time it tells of a God who came to Earth as a baby, who showed tender mercies to children and the weak, who taught us to call him "Abba," who loved and was loved. God is both transcendent and immanent, the theologians say. God inspires at once awe and love, fear and friendship.

'To most moderns, however, a sense of awe comes with the greatest difficulty. We have domesticated angels into stuffed toys and Christmas ornaments, made cartoons of St. Peter at the gate of heaven, tamed the phenomenon of Easter with bunny rabbits, and substituted for the awe of shepherds and wise men cute elves and a jolly man dressed in red. Almighty God gets nicknames like "The Big Guy" and "The Man Upstairs."

'An article in the February 2005 issue of this magazine ["Christianity Today"] addressed one of my pet peeves. How did it happen that the word worship became synonymous with music? For several months my church went on a hunt for a "worship pastor," and a parade of candidates auditioned with their guitars and backup groups. Some of them prayed, yes: "Lord, just, you know, really be here tonight with us, just let us know you're here." None showed much knowledge of theology, and assuredly none led us toward anything like awe. Worship today means loudly filling every space of silence.

"I welcome the sense of celebration and joy apparent in much recent music. Yet I wonder what we are missing when we seek to reduce the distance between creature and Creator, a distance expressed so eloquently by Job, Isaiah, and the psalmists. John, the disciple Jesus loved, who had lain against Jesus' breast, records in Revelation that he fell at his feet as though dead when Jesus appeared in full glory.

"The style of worship swings back and forth like a pendulum, from Orthodox to Doukhobors, from Anglican to Quaker, from Lutheran to Moravian, from state-sanctioned churches to counter-cultural emergent churches, and perhaps we need a bit of both. Søren Kierkegaard once said that we treat worship as if the pastor and choir are the actors and the congregation the audience; instead, God should be the audience, the pastor and choir the prompters, and the congregation the true participants. Which brings up an interesting question: What kind of music does God prefer? We will have a long time to learn the answer to that question, it seems, as Revelation gives many scenes of creatures worshiping God through music and through prayer.

"Jewish ethicist and writer Abraham Heschel made the observation, 'Awe, unlike fear, does not make us shrink from the awe-inspiring object, but, on the contrary, draws us near to it.' And Martin Luther was said to pray with the reverence of addressing God and the boldness of addressing a friend….

"…An album [Matt] Redman released in 1998, 'The Friendship and the Fear,' takes its title from a verse in Psalm 25: "The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him." Redman continues exploring the borderland between friendship and fear, for authentic worship encompasses both. It is the proper response when a holy God extends to flawed human beings an invitation to intimacy. In the Hebrew Old Testament, the primary word for worship means 'to bow down in reverence and submission.' And in the New Testament, the most common Greek word for worship means 'to come forward to kiss.' Between those two—or combining both—lies our best approach to God."

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today. May 2005, Vol. 49, No. 5, Page 80

"God Is Now Weightless"

David F. Wells ... has labored to awaken the Western church from its neglect of the pre-eminence of God. The evangelical church, says Wells, ‘has lost its traditional understanding of the centrality and sufficiency of God.’

(No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?
[Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993], 296).

‘It is one of the defining marks of Our Time,’ he writes elsewhere, ‘that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life.

'Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness.’

(God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a
World of Fading Dreams [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994], 88).

cited by Dane Ortlund in his new book, "A New Inner Relish: Christian Motivation in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards" (Christian Focus Publishing)

"God's Fatherly Pity"

“Though he knows your trials will work for your good, yet he pities you. Though he knows that there is sin in you, which, perhaps, may require this rough discipline ere you be sanctified, yet he pities you. Though he can hear the music of heaven, the songs of glee that will ultimately come of your present sighs and griefs, yet still he pities those groans and wails of yours; for ‘He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.’ In all our distresses and present griefs he takes his share; he pities us as a father pities his children.”

- Charles Spurgeon, “God’s Fatherly Pity”
posted at "Of First Importance"

Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?

"...I have watched with growing disbelief as the evangelical Church has cheerfully plunged into astounding theological illiteracy. Many taking the plunge seem to imagine that they are simply following a path to success, but the effects of this great change in the evangelical soul are evident inevery incoming class in the seminaries, in most publications, in the great majority of churches, and in most of their pastors.

"It is a change so large and so encompassing that those who dissent from what is happening are easily dismissed as individuals who cannot get along, who want to scruple over what is inconsequential, who are not loyal, and who are, in any case, quite irrelevant.

"Despite this, the changes that are now afoot are so pregnant with consequences that it becomes, for me, a matter of conscience to address them. Conscience, I have learned, is a hard taskmaster, and I have not the slightest doubt that my attempt at doing this will appear quite ridiculous. I will look to some like the foolish dog that sits on the front lawn and, to everyone's displeasure, bays at the moon. But bay I must."

-- David Wells, "No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?" pp.4-5 (Eerdmans 1993)

Revive Us Again

"...although in the sixteenth century the Word of God had been taken captive by the Catholic Church, the meaning of sin had been lost, and the death of Christ had been diluted, the Reformation still happened.

"The Gospel was recovered, the Church was renewed, Christian life was invigorated, and Europe was changed in deep and profound ways.

"If the Church then, which had been all but lost despite its outward wealth and pomp, could be recovered, so can the Church today. And if Europe [during the time of the Reformation] could be changed as drastically as it was, so might out world today.

"Then as now, however, the prerequisite is a Christian life that is biblically faithful and a Church that is doctrinally shaped, morally tough, intellectually vibrant, and buoyant with a faith that can lay hold of the promises of God in the face of circumstantial disconfirmation and see God's great power at work.

"Is this the kind of Christian life we find in evangelical churches? The answer is that what I have described here is becoming rare and is being replaced by a kind of spirituality that, because it is walking lockstep with the culture so often, is better able to mimic that culture than to change it."

-- David Wells, "Losing Our Virtue" p.30 (Eerdmans 1998)

The Justice of God and the Destruction of the Canaanites

A helpful article from Justin Taylor on a difficult subject.

When the Heart Is Full with the Love of Jesus

“On the most basic levels, I desire fullness, and fleshly lusts seduce me by attaching themselves to this basic desire. They exploit the empty spaces in me, and they promise that fulness will be mine if I give in to their demands. When my soul sits empty and is aching for something to fill it, such deceptive promises are extremely difficult to resist.

"Consequently, the key to mortifying fleshly lusts is to eliminate the emptiness within me and replace it with fullness; and I accomplish this by feasting on the gospel. Indeed, it is in the gospel that I experience a God who glorifies Himself by filling me with His fullness. . . . This is the God of the gospel, a God who is satisfied with nothing less than my experience of fullness in Him! . . .

"Indeed, as I perpetually feast on Christ and all His blessings found in the gospel, I find that my hunger for sin diminishes and the lies of lust simply lose their appeal. Hence, to the degree that I am full, I am free. Eyes do not rove, nor do fleshly lusts rule, when the heart is fat with the love of Jesus!”

- Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer for Christians (2008), 45-46.
posted at Of First Importance

One Pastor's Perspective on Facebook

Josh Harris writes about his 'one and only week on Facebook.'

Mission-minded small groups

A good post from Paul Manuel of New City Church.