"Souls in Transition"

Here is a review of an important book, "Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults." This looks like insightful analysis for parents and pastors alike (and for young adults!).

Finding Your Place in God's Story

Justin Taylor posts about a good deal on what looks to be a great new book by D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There: Finding Your Place in God’s Story.

"No Awful Beyond..."

“In Christ all things are ours. There is now for us no awful Beyond of mystery and fear. We cannot, indeed, explain the world, but we rejoice now that we cannot explain it. To us it is all unknown, but it contains no mysteries for our Saviour; He is on the throne; He is at the centre; He is ground and explanation of all things; He pervades the remotest bounds; by Him all things consist. The world is full of dread, mysterious powers; they touch us already in a thousand woes. But from all them we are safe.”

—J. Gresham Machen, What Is Faith? (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 116-17

HT: Of First Importance

Too cool?

“It has happened to me again. A friend of mine has become a Christian. I have known him for many years and have always been concerned about his relationship with God. In the past couple of years, he made some very bad decisions about his life, and I wondered if he would ever be open to the gospel. But I didn’t want to rush into talking to him about Jesus. I wanted to take it slow — to win his confidence. I didn’t want to take any chances of offending him.

While I was waiting for the right moment, someone he worked with came up to him one day at work and asked, ‘Are you going to heaven or hell?’ Can you believe that? How tacky. How insensitive and uncool. It must have been a tract-wielding fundamentalist. But . . . uh . . . my friend had never been asked that question. It bothered him. He decided he didn’t want to go to a place called ‘hell.’ To make a long story short, my friend continued talking to the ‘fanatic’ and became a Christian. Now he is preparing to go to Bible school so he can be a minister.

Uh . . . you don’t suppose this strategy of trying not to offend people is flawed, do you? You don’t suppose that the gospel is offensive by definition? You don’t suppose that anytime you talk to people about Jesus, you risk offending them? Or that being offended just might be part of the process of conversion?”

-- Mike Yaconelli, The Wittenburg Door, sometime in the late 80s.

HT: Ray Ortlund

Authentic Expectation

"To make a pretense of coming to God, not expecting to receive good and great things from him, is to despise God." -- John Owen

Our Addiction to Distraction

Justin Taylor, quoting from Pascal and Peter Kreeft, has a fascinating post on our modern culture's addiction to distraction. Here's an excerpt from Kreeft's Christianity for Modern Pagans, Pascal’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained,...

First Kreeft quotes Pascal: "I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

And then he writes,

We ought to have much more time, more leisure, than our ancestors did, because technology, which is the most obvious and radical difference between their lives and ours, is essentially a series of time-saving devices.

In ancient societies, if you were rich you had slaves to do the menial work so that you could be freed to enjoy your leisure time. Life was like a vacation for the rich because the poor slaves were their machines. . . .

[But] now that everyone has slave-substitutes (machines), why doesn’t everyone enjoy the leisurely, vacationy lifestyle of the ancient rich? Why have we killed time instead of saving it? . . .

We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .

If you are typically modern, your life is like a mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiple diversions. (pp.167-169)

Why Inerrancy Still Matters

Kevin DeYoung has an excellent post summarizing the continuing importance of a commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture, as explained in the words of J.I. Packer in his important, accessible, remarkable book, Truth and Power: The Place of Scripture in the Christian Life.

Here is just an excerpt from the book:

"Any degree of skepticism about the portrait of Christ, the promises of God, the principles of godliness, and the power of the Holy Spirit, as biblically presented, has the effect of enslaving us to our own alternative ideas about these things, and thus we miss something of the freedom, joy, and vitality that the real Christ bestows. God is very patient and merciful, and I do not suggest that those who fall short here thereby forfeit all knowledge of Christ, though I recognize that when one sits loose to Scripture this may indeed happen. But I do maintain most emphatically that one cannot doubt the Bible without far-reaching loss, both of fullness of truth and of fullness of life. If therefor we have at heart spiritual renewal for society, for churches and for our own lives, we shall make much of the entire trustworthiness–that is, the inerrancy–of Holy Scripture as the inspired and liberating Word of God." (p. 55)

"Faith comes by hearing...the word of God"

" Faith wakes at the voice of truth but responds to no other sound. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of GOD. Theological knowledge is the medium through which the Spirit flows into the human heart." -- A.W. Tozer

Billy Graham on 'Repentance'

“If repentance could be described in one word, I would use the word renounce. 'Renounce what?' you ask. The answer can also be given in one word - 'sin.'…

“Not only are we told that we must renounce the principle of sin but we are also to renounce sins - plural. We are to renounce the world, the flesh and the Devil. There can be no bargaining, compromise or hesitation. Christ demands absolute renunciation…..

“…repentance and faith go hand in hand. You cannot have genuine repentance without saving faith and you cannot have saving faith without repentance….

“…[To repent] means a great deal more than just regretting and feeling sorry about sin. The Biblical word repent means 'to change, to turn.' It is a word of power and action. It is a word that signifies a complete revolution in the individual.

“When the Bible calls upon us to repent of sin, it means that we should turn away from sin, that we should do an about-face and walk in the opposite direction from sin and all that it implies….

“….True repentance means 'to change, to turn away from, to go in a new direction.' To be sorry is not enough in repentance….

“….repentance cannot take place unless first there is a movement of the Holy Spirit in the heart and mind….”

“….There must be a determination to forsake sin - to change one's attitudes toward self, toward sin, and God; to change one's feelings; to change one's will, disposition and purpose.

“Only the Spirit of God can give you the determination necessary for true repentance….

“There is not one verse of Scripture that indicates you can be a Christian and live any kind of a life you want to. When Christ enters into the human heart, He demands that He be Lord and Master. He demands complete surrender….

“…He must have first place in everything you do or think or say, for when you truly repent you turn toward God in everything.

“We have the warning of Christ that He will not receive us into His kingdom until we are ready to give up all, until we are ready to turn from all sin in our lives. Don't try to do it part way. Don't say, 'I'll give up some of my sins and hang on to some others. I'll live part of my life for Jesus and part for my own desires.'”

“God demands a total change, a total surrender.”

--“Peace with God, pp. 100-107

The Apostle Paul as a Friend

“Paul had rich and original conceptions of love, which he had learned from Christ. Christ had loved him in his unloveliness. He had been patient with him in his blindness. His love had been the love of which Matheson sings, ‘O love that will not let me go.’ It had been the love of which Paul himself sang (1 Corinthians 13:4-8). The man who had this ideal of love realized what it was to be a friend.

It was to love unselfishly. ‘The third time,’ he wrote to the Corinthians who had been such a source of care and grief to him, ‘I am ready to come to you, and I will not be a burden to you, for I seek not yours but you. I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls.’ ‘Though,’ as the King James Version reads, ‘the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved’ (2 Corinthians 12:14-15). He loved men for their own sakes, not for what they could be to him selfishly, though he rejoiced when they poured back such friendship love as his in return. But that was their friendship, not his. His friendship love gave and bargained for no return. It coveted good for its objects and was ready to purchase this with pain.”

-- Robert E. Speer, Paul The All-Round Man (New York, 1909), pages 68-69.

HT: Ray Ortlund, Jr.

"...He gives us all things richly to enjoy."

"There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice."

-- John Calvin

Eph. 4:29 in the Age of Facebook

Here is a post I did as a guest blogger for Kevin DeYoung, on the good and the bad of Facebook for Christians.

"O Great God" (a new hymn)

Here is 'contemporary Christian music' at its best.

It’s a newer hymn based on The Valley of Vision prayer “Regeneration.” The words and music are by Bob Kauflin. You can hear the song sung by seven-thousand people here.

O great God of highest heaven
Occupy my lowly heart
Own it all and reign supreme
Conquer every rebel power
Let no vice or sin remain
That resists Your holy war
You have loved and purchased me
Make me Yours forevermore

I was blinded by my sin
Had no ears to hear Your voice
Did not know Your love within
Had no taste for heaven’s joys
Then Your Spirit gave me life
Opened up Your Word to me
Through the gospel of Your Son
Gave me endless hope and peace

Help me now to live a life
That’s dependent on Your grace
Keep my heart and guard my soul
From the evils that I face
You are worthy to be praised
With my every thought and deed
O great God of highest heaven
Glorify Your Name through me.

HT: Tullian Tchividjian

"Let God Be God"

Here's the link to the entire devotional from D.A. Carson that I quoted from in the previous post.

The Right Kind of "Possibility Thinking"

"...God may normally work through ordinary means. But he is not limited by them. That is why all the military muscle in the world cannot itself guarantee victory, and all the secularization, postmodernism, naturalism, and paganism in the world cannot by themselves prevent revival. Let God be God."

-- D.A. Carson in "For the Love of God" (vol. 1, entry for June 30; Crossway Books)