12 Sunday Dec 2010
Posted in Theology
This is probably my favorite Advent hymn. I love the original two verses by Wesley, but I especially appreciate the first half of verse 3, penned by Mark Hunt.
I’m a bit of a hum-bug about Christmas, but hymns like this really do prepare my heart (through the truth of the Gospel presented therein) for the celebration of our Substitute’s birth.
13 Saturday Nov 2010
Posted in Theology
Tags
culture, Gospel, homosexuality, Jim Swilley, Law, repentance
Recently, Charisma magazine published an article by J. Lee Grady asking, Is It Ok to be Gay and Christian? You can read the article here. A friend of mine sent me the link and I have a response that I initially shared via email with the 2 or 3 of us to whom he’d sent the link.
08 Monday Nov 2010
Posted in Book Discussion, Personal, Theology
Tags
Gerhard Forde, Gospel, justification, Lutheranism, Reformed Theology, repentance, sanctification, Scripture, sexual sin, theology
For my Spiritual and Ministry Formation class, we’re assigned blog summaries in which we interact with material assigned the previous week. This week’s assignment was to read the Lutheran view of Sanctification as discussed in Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification, edited by Donald Alexander, published by IVP. The Lutheran view was articulated by Gerhard Forde. I figured I’d share my assignment on my blog.
Dr. Forde begins his discussion of sanctification as “the art of getting used to the unconditional justification wrought by the grace of God for Jesus’ sake. It is what happens when we are grasped by the fact that God alone justifies.” In other words, Dr. Forde asserts that sanctification is the natural byproduct of justification and thus, all of it is indeed brought about by none other than the Christ who bought us. Many people view sanctification as the “getting down to business” of the Christian life. It’s what we bring to the table after Christ saves us and is (so it is thought, anyway) the way we stay in God’s good graces. This is, Dr. Forde asserts, “entirely false. According to Scripture, God is always the acting subject, even in sanctification. ”
Repeatedly, Dr. Forde calls attention to the dangers of speaking of sanctification. All the discussion appeals to the old man, he says, becoming a verbal exercise which sounds very impressive, but lacking the necessary foundation of love which the old man is completely incapable of laying himself.
Sanctification, as well as justification, is rooted in the unconditional promise of God. This is something the old man does not know how to handle because “as old beings, we simply cannot understand or cope with the unconditional promise of justification pronounced in the name of Jesus. What we don’t see is that what the unconditional promose is calling forth is a new being. The justification of God promised in Jesus is not an ‘offer’ made to us as old beings; [instead,] it is our end, our death.”
Are you putting YOUR old man to death?
28 Thursday Oct 2010
Today’s Book of Common Prayer (BoCP) epistle reading is from Revelation 12:7-17. In it, we learn of the fact that Satan is the accuser of those who are children of God by faith and that those children have conquered Satan by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.
Growing up, I heard about this as being a reference to sharing my faith in addition to the fact that Christ saves. But what is the substance of the confession of these saints? Is their changed life the testimony by which they overcome Satan?
The three rules of biblical interpretation are, of course, CONTEXT, CONTEXT, and CONTEXT. So, what do you think? What is the substance of the martyrs’ testimony?
26 Tuesday Oct 2010
Tags
I’ve decided to switch up my email and have been converting it over to another GMail account (all my accounts are still used and checked; I’m simply running everything from an online ‘hub’ rather than from Outlook for the sake of my convenience). In the process, lots of random emails from the last 4 years have come across my screen. One of them contained a reflection I wrote in December of 2008. It reads,
It fascinates me that people are willing to talk about their feelings, but not deal with the actual Scriptural realities behind what they believe and are called to do in Christ.
Are you listening to anyone except yourself?
I don’t recall the context; it was a retort to something on a forum of which I used to be a part. But I can’t say much has changed. People would rather air their feelings about God instead of do the hard work of searching out what the Bible says about this concern or that situation. Call it a product of my ENTJness, but seriously…WWBD? (That’s “What Would the Bereans Do?”) 😉
19 Tuesday Oct 2010
Tags
insecurity, loneliness, prayer, preaching, psalms, relationships, Scripture, sexual sin, worship
Psalm 88
I Cry Out Day and Night Before You
A Song. A Psalm of the Sons of Korah. To the choirmaster: according to Mahalath Leannoth. A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.
1O LORD, God of my salvation;
I cry out day and night before you.
2Let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry!
3For my soul is full of troubles,
and my life draws near to Sheol.
4I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am a man who has no strength,
5like one set loose among the dead,
like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
for they are cut off from your hand.
Psalm 88 has long been one of my two favorite psalms of lament. The other, a close second, is Psalm 13.
Today’s lament really started in earnest yesterday afternoon. I was driving away from school and there was a runner with an amazing body standing at the intersection that I didn’t just lust over…I was full-on envious.
Then this morning, I saw two or three guys who I find myself being very intimidated by at chapel. They seem very articulate and talented and like they’ll be good pastors. And they’re all really attractive on top of all of that. And they wear that attractiveness like it doesn’t really matter to them…they could take or leave it.
Oh, to be that bold. To have the security to hold one’s looks loosely in one’s hand like they seem to…it’s a pretty impossible task. How many idols have I just rattled off? Probably five or six.
I just feel very alone; I couldn’t really concentrate in Sermon Preparation & Delivery today…I sort of phased in and out on what the sub would say (though he had excellent things to say, and the stuff I did hear seemed very insightful). If there’s one class I never check out of, it’s Prep and Del. But I just couldn’t focus.
I unfriended someone on Facebook this morning. The past few times I’ve gone to his page to see what he’s up to, he and his cute boyfriend are all over the place. The guy himself looks like a model. I get that life isn’t fair…but like Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame), I ask, “but why can’t it ever be unfair in my favor?”
18 Monday Oct 2010
Jay Sklar, a professor at Covenant Theological Seminary, has a little ritual in his classes. In his class greeting, he and the class say,
Sklar: Shalom, class.
Class: Shalom, Jay.
Start with the Text…
…not with the commentary.
Context…
…is king.
I once sat in a church where, at the beginning of the sermon, the pastor told his congregation that he’d consulted 20 different commentaries, 13 of which validated his interpretation of the text. Aside from that being only slightly extreme, I think this pastor missed the point entirely of using commentaries. He seemed to have started with his own presupposition first and then ran a tally count of people who agreed with him, going to the text last.
Bryan Chapell, former pres. of CTS
Bryan Chapell, in his book, Christ-Centered Preaching, pg. 74, makes the following assertion:
You must think through what Scripture says in order to be able to expound adequately and apply meaningfully what commentators say. No commentator has room to write down all the implications, insights and truths given in a text. no distant educator or long-dead scholar knows your situation or your congregation’s concerns. It is not wise habitually to run to commentaries as the first step of sermon preparation, lest your thoughts start running in a groove carved by one not in touch with what you need to address.
29 Wednesday Sep 2010
Posted in Theology
Tags
Calvinism, false teaching, fanatics, Gospel, Holy Spirit, preaching, rant, Reformed Theology, Scripture, theology
The Holy Spirit said *what* to him??
Lately, some folks have been totally taken over by frenzy. They put down their Bibles and want to reach out to God in another way. These guys criticize others who preach from the Bible, saying that we’re “just following the dead letter of the law.” Here’s what I want to ask them: where do they get this Spirit that shows so much contempt for biblical teaching as being so low and childish? If they want to tell me that it’s the Spirit of Christ, I’d tell them they’re being ridiculous!
None of the apostles or early church-goers were ever taught to hold the Bible in such contempt…not by the Holy Spirit. Instead, they had great respect for it…dare I even use the very old-fashioned word ‘reverence’? The Holy Spirit taught of His ruling over His people when he spoke through Isaiah, after all: “My Spirit is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your offspring…forevermore” (59:21). This is the way the Church is happy: by being ruled over by the Spirit of God in his Word!
27 Monday Sep 2010
Posted in Theology
Tags
John Broadus
Covenant Theological Seminary’s president Bryan Chapell based some of his book Christ-Centered Preaching on Broadus’ material as published in 1944 (and prior). Since that time, Broadus’ work has been so altered that most of his observations on expository preaching have been removed. So, I went on Amazon and bought a copy to read for myself.
A word of warning to preachers and teachers of the word, from the father of modern expository preaching, John Broadus:
…it is so common to think that whatever kindles the imagination and touches the heart must be good preaching, and so easy to insist that the doctrines of the sermon are in themselves true and Scriptural, though they be not actually taught in the the text, that preachers often lose sight of their fundamental and inexcusable error of saying that a passage of God’s Word means what it does not mean.
[Broadus, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, 41st edition, ed. Dr. E. C. Dargan; George H. Doran Co., pub. 1898. pg. 52. Emphasis his.]
A timely word indeed for all preachers. Lord help us.
16 Thursday Sep 2010
Posted in Book Discussion, Personal
Tags
First, I haven’t fallen off the radar completely. I’ve been swamped with reading for my Covenant Theology class, as well as learning Greek and doing my first outline for Sermon Preparation and Delivery. Pretty stoked.
I’m also a reader for another student (meaning, I read their assignments onto an mp3 file and then send it to them). It pays pretty well and it’s a class I’ll have to take in the future, so I’ll have read most of the materials for those classes when I get there. Pretty excited about that, actually. But what that means is I fell behind in reading a little bit this week and spent 8 hours reading, 2 for the other guy, 6 for me…just to get caught up. Then I came back from class today and read for over 2 hours for the other guy. Now I’m taking a break from Greek to write this.
Washed and Waiting, by Wes Hill
But another distraction has arrived. Amazon just sent me the copy of Washed and Waiting by Wes Hill. I couldn’t put it down and spent an hour this afternoon reading it. It warrants its own post, but allow me to quote from page 42 (which is, of course, the answer to life, the universe, everything):
A sexual orientation is such a complex and, in most cases, it seems, intractable thing; I for one cannot imagine what ‘healing’ from my orientation would look like, given that it seems to manifest itself not only in physical attraction to male bodies but also in a preference for male company, with all that it entails, such as conversation and emotional intimacy and quality time spent together.
Gay and Evangelical 