Category: God and Church

More Grace Than You Can Handle

From C. John Miller’s The Heart of a Servant Leader as seen on Jared’s blog, The Gospel Driven Church (emphasis mine):

Let me urge upon you the importance of cultivating faith if you are to be able to walk in love and spiritual power. Without faith it is impossible to please God, but those who believe are given more grace than they can handle. Believing is to expect God to be with you and change you and to change others…When the work is dull and routine or people are slipping away, go forth with new boldness and preach Christ until you are filled with faith yourselves and God works faith in others.
Think of it this way. All the powers of hell and earth are ranged against the gospel and your ministry. They will not compromise. Therefore don’t expect it from them. Don’t expect the enemy to coddle you. He will continue to attack from every quarter. At night. On the streets. In your meetings. Wherever. This is a take-no-prisoners kind of war, and we must not compromise with the uglies and with evil in any form.
Therefore resist, fight with all your heart against evil in yourself and others, seek holiness through faith in the blood of Christ, and live boldly out of your union with Christ. You are in Him and He is in you. Don’t doubt it. On that basis keep at it.

When things are going badly, or the simply the routines of life are dragging you down, preach Jesus until you are again filled with faith. It seems to be addressed to ministers, but I think it applies to all of us. If life sucks, focus intently on Jesus until your faith is revived.
Then again, if life is good, focus on Jesus too. It can’t hurt. 😀

Grace That Changes

In the middle of a post on the future of conservative and progressive Churches of Christ, Jay Guin said this:

Escaping a works-based salvation is not about finding freedom to be selfish. We flee works to find grace — but we’ve not really found grace until grace changes us to become gracious people, that is, people who serve others, especially those others who least deserve it — you know, like us.

It underscores his point – that the future for both groups, and other churches for that matter, lies not in maintaining the traditional path or moving to new ways. It lies in preaching and living the gospel of grace.

The Insult of the Gospel

“The gospel, by telling us Jesus died for us, is also really insulting. It tells us that we are so wicked that only the death of the Son of God could save us. This offends the modern cult of self-expression and the popular belief in the innate goodness of humanity.”

Timothy Keller, The Message of Romans(Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2003), 2.

From Of First Importance
So, if what you preach doesn’t offend someone every now and then, what Gospel are you preaching?

Why Does Christ Come?

Does Christ come merely to improve our existence in Adam or to end it, sweeping us into his new creation? Is Christianity all about spiritual and moral makeovers or about death and resurrection — radical judgment and radical grace? Is the Word of God a resource for what we have already decided we want and need, or is it God’s living and active criticism of our religion, morality, and pious experience? In other words, is the Bible God’s story, centering on Christ’s redeeming work, that rewrites our stories, or is it something we use to make our stories a little more exciting and interesting?

Michael Horton from his book Christless Christianity

From It’s Not About Improvement at Jared’s relentlessly gospel centered blog, The Gospel Driven Church. Go. Read. Be challenged.

Doctor Looses License Over Successful Procedure

This story is not for the faint of heart.
The patient was instructed to arrive early, which she did. The staff got things underway in anticipation of the doctor’s arrival. But he was called to another patient for an emergency and arrived hours late. The procedure was already begun and the staff carried it to it’s completion:

The Department of Health said [Dr.] Renelique was scheduled to perform an abortion on a teenager who was 23 weeks pregnant in 2006. Sycloria Williams had been given drugs in advance to dilate her cervix.
According to the complaint, she gave birth at a Hialeah clinic after waiting hours for Renelique to arrive. The complaint said one of the clinic owners put the baby in a bag that was thrown away.

Because of the tardiness of the doctor, the baby was born alive, but quick thinking staff members finished the procedure by simply throwing the baby away.
But the doctor was disciplined, and now lost his license over it.
Why?
Had the doctor been on time, everything would have ended the same.
Wasn’t the desired result a non-pregnant girl and a dead baby? Isn’t that what was achieved? Why does it matter that this baby was actually alive for a few moments outside the mother? What changed about it?
Every day hundreds, probably thousands, of babies get thrown in the trash, only they are killed before we get to see that they are babies. Why is it barbaric to throw a baby in the trash only if it’s actually breathed air? *
The inconsistency in this issue is amazing to me. Cause a pregnant woman to miscarry in an accident and you’re a murderer. If she comes to you and asks you to do it in a nice clean office, then you’re a doctor. But mess it up, and let the baby be born alive, but correct your mistake, well, now you’re a murderer again.
I can only hope that this will show some how barbaric the pro-abortion position is. If even a few stop and think “What in the world are we doing?”, then maybe this little one won’t have died in vain.
HT: Daniel & Thinklings
* I’ll grant what one commenter at the Thinklings said. It’s a cold person who can look at a live baby, holding it in your arms, and then throw it away.

Good News for Parents of Teens

You may have heard of a study last month on the effectiveness of abstinence pledges. it was widely reported on, this article in the Washington Post covers the gist of the reporting:

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

That’s what was heard over and over. Abstinence programs don’t work, we were told, why are we doing them?

As a Christian parent of one teen age girl and two others approaching puberty at light speed, I had two reactions.

First was a sigh of resignation of the state of the world we live in. Teen sex is a fact of life, almost celebrated in TV & movies. It stinks, but you’ve gotta live somewhere and Mars isn’t open for business yet.

Second was to carry on with what I had already been doing, namely a full on assault against the world’s full court press on my girls’ values. I have taught them that waiting is God’s way, it’s the best way and that all around them their friends and the media will be acting otherwise. The odds may be stacked against me, but there’s absolutely no way that I’m going to sit by and let it happen. It’s inevitable, the studies say, but I follow a God who says otherwise.

Imagine my (lack of) surprise when yesterday I read a Wall Street Journal opinion piece debunking the reporting on this study:

[T]he only way the study’s author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers

In other words, the study compared conservative, religious teens inclined toward waiting until marriage with conservative, religious teens inclined toward waiting until marriage who had actually taken a pledge to do so and found no difference between the groups.

Well, duh.

Dr. Bernadine Healy, health editor for U.S. News & World Report, examined the results and found “virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general — a fact that many media reports have missed cold.” And there’s more:

What Dr. Healy was getting at is that the pledge itself is not what distinguishes these kids from most other teenagers. The real difference is their more conservative and religious home and social environment. As she notes, when you compare both groups in this study with teens at large, the behavioral differences are striking. Here are just a few:

– These teens generally have less risky sex, i.e., fewer sexual partners.

– These teens are less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, or to have friends who use drugs.

– These teens have less premarital vaginal sex.

– When these teens lose their virginity they tend to do so at age 21 — compared to 17 for the typical American teen.

– And very much overlooked, one out of four of these teens do in fact keep the pledge to remain chaste — amid much cheap ridicule and just about zero support outside their homes or churches.

So teen parents rejoice, it turns out that God knows what He’s talking about after all.

HT: Brant Hansen

Ecclesiastes 7 – Laughter, Sadness and Fearing God

Ecclesiastes 7:1 – OK, I get that ‘a good name’ is better, but ‘the day of death’?
Ecclesiastes 7:3 – “Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.” That’s contrary to what we believe. We chase the laughter and gladness. I have to admit, I don’t quite get what Solomon is advising in these verses. Are we to seek out sadness and sorrow?
Ecclesiastes 7:9 – “Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.” Yep, been there. It’s not good.
Ecclesiastes 7:10 – “Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” I love this. It’s one of my pet peeves that folks lament the ‘good old days’. Human nature has not changed in all of human history, in my view. The old days are no more good than the ‘new days’, at least as far as how evil people are. When folks try to say that people were better back then, I say no, they were only perhaps better at hiding it.
Ecclesiastes 7:18 – It always comes back to Fearing God. Don’t be too righteous, don’t be too foolish – fear God.

Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others.

Ecclesiastes 7:21-22

How true and wise. We often say things that we regret and many times don’t have the opportunity to apologize. We want folks to be forgiving of us in those circumstances, yet when we are hurt by careless words that are later regretted, we tend to hold onto it, taking to heart that which was said in haste and in error. If we would have taken it back if we could, why should we assume they wouldn’t?
I have to say, this chapter really confused me in spots. I read it over and over and didn’t quite get it. Anyone know what Ecclesiastes 7:25-29 is about?

A Tale of Two Christmas Trees

Milly will tell me I should have known better.

Our 4-5 year old pre-lit Christmas tree has lost some light strings each year. I love the idea of a pre-lit tree, but the quality of the average mini light string means that the strings can start to go dark after only a year or two’s use. This year, I put the tree together and only about half the tree lit up. After weighing my options and looking online, I decided on a new GE tree with ‘ConstantOn’ lights from Lowes for $150.

I picked up the last one from our local store last night. Turns out all the decorations are half off. I guess December 5th is the end of the Christmas season. When it starts well before Halloween, I guess that’s about right. Gotta make room for the Valentines stuff I guess. Anyway, I got the tree home and put it together and plugged it in. Wouldn’t you know, 4-5 branches of the ironically named ConstantOn lights were unlit and no amount of plug wiggling or branch shaking or fuse changing would get them on.

So I called GE’s customer service line. Their trees are made by a company called Santa’s Best Craft, ‘Best Craft’ also being rather ironic in this case. One of the reasons I bought the GE was the non-existent customer service I had with the last one made by a Chinese company named Puleo, now gone I guess. The friendly sounding lady on the phone decided I had a bad string and offered to send me a new one. “New branches, you mean, right?” I asked. Nope, just the lights, that’s all they’ll send. So now I have to re-string my pre-strung tree before I even use it? Have you seen how they are cable tied in place and interwoven into the branches? No way, not going to do it. I didn’t spend $150 (mind you, this is normally a $300 tree) so I could string the lights again. So I took it down and returned it.

The whole setting-up-the-Christmas-tree experience has the potential of sending me over the edge every year (long time readers may remember my battle with the icicle lights) so I’m fighting a serious bad attitude here. So I pray on the way to Lowes.

I pray that God will help me make the right choice in trees when I get there so I don’t get angry. OK, that’s silly, I really don’t think God has a ‘right lazy-man’s-pre-lit-Christmas-tree in mind. What I really need is for help in being Godly and acting like His child in this. And then I began to think about the $150 I was prepared to spend. I had a perfectly presentable tree at home that just needed new lights. New lights would be about $10.

So by the time I reach Lowes, I’ve decided. If I have $150 of disposable income, I’m going to dispose of it to someone who needs it more than I. I’m going to add it to our charity fund to be dispersed in our family meeting later. So I head toward the light isle, stopping to pick up a grille cover on the way. The cover they had will be too big, but it’ll work.

Arriving at the light isle, they are out of lights, of course. So (and this is the part that Milly will tell me I should have known all along) I put the cover back and head across the street to Home Depot. They’ve got the lights I need and a grille cover that’s just the perfect size.

Lessons learned?

  1. Praying about it is always a good idea.
  2. When you pray about something with a a clear choice between A and B, the spirit will frequently reveal that the answer is, in fact, seven.
  3. Go to Home Depot first. 😀

No Place For Capitulation

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. …

Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

Albert Einstein, Jew by birth and Atheist by choice as quoted in this Time article from 68 years ago (Monday, Dec. 23, 1940).

It’s long-ish, but well worth your time. You’ll hear of pastors arrested for not changing their message to fit the will of the Führer. They refused to submit to the Führer over Christ. The courts freed them, but the Nazi’s just threw them in the concentration camps. Then, when offered release with the sole condition being that they not preach, not that they change their preaching, just that they stop preaching, they refused. To be imprisoned and forced into silence was preferable to voluntarily not preaching.

Said one daughter of writing to her imprisoned minister father, “When I write the address, ‘Concentration Camp, Sachsenhausen,’ then I am always very proud.”

HT: Jessie Gardner via. Twitter

It Desecrates the Holy

We must begin marriage with a covenantal oath, and then never break our oath. Marriage portrays Christ and the church. As the husband and wife are physically united as one, Christ and the church are spiritually one. The way we live reflects on Christ and the church. We do not have the luxury of being able to say nothing about the church. Our lives always speak. Mental and physical infidelity lies to the world about the spiritual faithfulness of Jesus and his people. Immorality trashes the mystery of Christ and his church. It desecrates the holy.

R. Kent Hughes on sexual conduct in Set Apart, p. 83

On This Day

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Categories

Archives

Meta