A Selection of Short Thoughts

Greetings All!

     Sometimes you can say a lot in very few words!  Therefore,  today, instead of one longer thought, I offer you many short thoughts -- all which struck me as worthy of sharing.  I trust one or more may hit home for you as well!   Enjoy!

     “Prosperity cannot be a proof of God’s favor, since it is what the devil promises to those who worship him.”

John Piper

     “When we deal seriously with our sins, God will deal gently with us.”

Charles Spurgeon

     “Evangelism must start with the holiness of God, the sinfulness of man, the demands of the law, and the eternal consequences of evil.”

Martin Lloyd-Jones

     “I frequently hear persons exhorted to give their hearts to Christ, which is a very proper exhortation. But that is not the Gospel. Salvation comes from something that Christ gives you, not something you give to Christ.  The giving of your heart to Christ follows after receiving from Christ the gift of eternal life by faith.”

Charles Spurgeon

“I’m just a nobody telling everybody about somebody who can save anybody.”

Anonymous

“Your personal testimony, however meaningful to you, is not the Gospel.”

R. C. Sproul

     “In our day it is considered worse to judge evil than to do evil.”

Os Guiness

     “Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible.  Faith begins where man’s power ends.” 

George Muller

     “Worry is believing God will not get it right, and bitterness is believing God got it wrong.”

 Tim Keller

     “You will derive far more benefit from a single verse of Scripture read slowly and prayerfully and duly meditated on than you will from ten chapters read through quickly.”

A. W. Pink

     “I must listen to the gospel. It tells me not what I must do, but what Christ the Son of God has done for me.”

Martin Luther

     “If you are really saved, brethren, not a hair of your heads belongs to yourselves. Christ’s blood has either bought you or it has not. And if it has, then you are altogether Christ’s – every bit of you – and you are neither to eat nor drink, nor sleep, but for Christ.”

Charles Spurgeon

     “The doctrine of grace and redemption keeps us from seeing any person or situation as hopeless.”

Tim Keller

     “God has given me everything, forgiven me everything, promised me everything, and I lack nothing except the faith to believe it.” 

Martin Luther

     “The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”

Elisabeth Elliot

     “You have become blind when you see nothing wrong with something God has called sin.”

Anonymous

Many blessings in Christ, Pastor Jeff

The Reason For God - Belief in an Age of Skepticism

Greetings All!

     Today I bring you a selection from Tim Keller's best-selling book "The Reason For God - Belief in an Age of Skepticism."  If you have not read it, you have missed out on some very wise and convincing arguments for the Christian faith.  Many people have what we could call their "pat objections" for why they reject the Christian faith.  "There can't be just one true religion."  "How could a good God allow suffering."  "Science has disproved Christianity."   "How could a loving God send people to hell?"

     Keller takes on such objections and offers many well-reasoned responses to them.  In an age where people often tend to do little more choose a view that fits with their personal preferences (whether they've thought it through or not), Keller offers us some very logical and well-thought-through alternative perspectives, which challenge such pat objections to the core.  If you really want to be challenged to reconsider many issues from a fresh perspective, you will want to pick up a copy. For to miss out on this book is to miss out on an apologetic treat similar to that of reading C. S. Lewis, Os Guinness, Ravi Zacharias, and others.

       Our particular "thought" for today addresses the objection voiced by people who say, "I can't believe in Christianity because I believe in a God of love."  Enjoy.

I believe in a God of Love

       "During my college years and my early twenties, I, like so many others, questioned the Christian faith I was raised in. There were subjective reasons for my doubts. Christianity just didn't seem real to me experientially. I had not developed a prayer life and had never experienced God personally.  There were also intellectual problems I was having with Christianity, all of which I address elsewhere in this book. There was one, however, I will talk about here.  I was troubled by those Christians who stressed hellfire and damnation. Like so many of my generation I believed that if there was a core to all religions, it was a loving God. I wanted to believe in a God of love who accepted people regardless of their beliefs and practices.  So I began to take courses in the other major religions of the world -- Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, and Judaism.  I have profited to this day from those studies. However, my explorations in other faiths proved me wrong on this particular point about the centrality of a loving God.

       I found no other religious text outside the Bible that said God created the world out of love and delight. Most ancient pagan religions believed the world was created through struggles and violent battles between opposing gods and supernatural forces. I turned to look more closely at Buddhism, the religion I liked the best at the time. However, despite its great emphasis on selflessness and detached service to others, Buddhism did not believe in a personal God at all, and love is the action of a person.

         Later on, after I become a minister, I was a speaker and panelist for several years in a monthly discussion program in Philadelphia between a Christian church and a mosque. Each month a speaker from the church and a speaker from the mosque would give a Biblical and Qu'ranic perspective on the topic. When we covered the topic of God's love, it was striking how different our conceptions were. I was told repeatedly by Muslim speakers that God was indeed loving in the sense of being merciful and kind to us. But when Christians spoke of the Lord as our Spouse, of knowing God intimately and personally, and of having powerful effusions of his love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, our Muslim friends balked. They told us that it was disrespectful, in their view, to speak of anyone knowing God personally.

       Today many of the skeptics I talk to say, as I once did, they can't believe in the God of the Bible who punishes and judges people, because they "believe in a God of Love."  I now ask, what makes them think God is love?  Can they look at life in the world today and say, "This proves that the God of the world is a God of love?"  Can they look at history and say, "This all shows that the God of history is a God of love?"  Can they look at the religious texts of the world and conclude that God is a God of love?  By no means is that the dominant, ruling attribute of God as understood in any of the major faiths. I must conclude that the source of the idea that God is Love is the Bible itself. And the Bible tells us that the God of love is also a God of judgment who will put all things in the world right in the end.

       The belief in a God of pure love -- who accepts and judges no one -- is a powerful act of faith.  Not only is there no evidence for it in the natural order, but there is almost no historical, religious textual support for it outside of Christianity.  The more one looks at it, the less justified [this objection] appears."

       Though many today will say, "all religions basically teach the same thing," all it takes is actually reading their religious texts to see that this is not so, as Keller, who has read them testifies.  In fact, when it comes to the issue of love, the Bible separates itself even further from the others by not only speaking of the love of God frequently, but even going as far as to declare that "God IS love" (I John 4:16).  God is not just loving, He is love.  In this regard as well, no other religion comes close.

       What many in western society today fail to see (disconnected as we are becoming from our past) is that our culture was influenced for two millennia by Christian thought and practice.  And, therefore, scores of the virtues that have come to be the rallying cry of our secular society, are not virtues our secular culture developed on it's own, but virtues our culture borrowed (or stole) from Christianity, washed of their rooting in Christianity, and tried to claim as their own.

       It's what could (or should) be called, cultural plagiarism -- with no credit given to the original author of those virtues.  Or as one friend put it, our culture has borrowed "lumber" it removed from the structural framework of the house called Christianity, but washed of all it's Christian moorings and meaning, and then made to fit a secularized ideal.  Other cultures stress honor and shame, compliance and conformity, obedience and punishment.  But in a culture influenced for many centuries by the teachings of Jesus Christ, and the redemption that came to us through the sacrifice of Himself for those who didn't deserve it; a culture influenced by the truth that love is the greatest of all gifts (I Corinthians 13), and that God himself is love (as His disciples alone declared), it is quite impossible for love not to be seen the queen of virtues.

In the Bonds of Christian Affection, Pastor Jeff

Desiring God Daily Devotional

Greetings All,

     This week's 'thought' comes to you from a familiar source -- John Piper.  It's from his "Desiring God Daily Devotional" selection for June 16, 2013.
     As I have mentioned before, his book "Desiring God" is already (in my opinion) a spiritual classic, and a read that helped me immensely in my own walk with the Lord.
     I highly recommend it to anyone who would like to read a deep, well-reasoned, spiritually informative, personally formative and biblically-based summary of the Christian faith and life. Should one have adopted the erroneous notion that one cannot be intellectual, academic or highly intelligent and Christian at the same time, this book (along with any by C. S. Lewis, Ravi Zacharias, Os Guinness and others) will quickly disabuse you of that false notion.
     This selection has to do with correct and incorrect notions of God, and our responses to God in relation to them.  To heed Piper's words in this selection could save many a well-meaning Christian much fruitless effort and lead to far more praise and glory being given to God.  Enjoy.

"So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him."

(2 Corinthians 5:9)

     "What if you discovered (like the Pharisees did), that you had devoted your whole life to trying to please God, but all the while had been doing things that in God’s sight were abominations (Luke 16:14–15)?

     Someone may say, “I don’t think that’s possible; God wouldn't reject a person who has been trying to please him.” But do you see what this questioner has done? He has based his conviction about what would please God on his idea of what God is like. That is precisely why we must begin with the character of God.

     God is a mountain spring, not a watering trough. A mountain spring is self-replenishing. It constantly overflows and supplies others. But a watering trough needs to be filled with a pump or bucket brigade.

     If you want to glorify the worth of a watering trough you work hard to keep it full and useful. But if you want to glorify the worth of a spring you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart’s satisfaction, until you have the refreshment and strength to go back down in the valley and tell people what you've found.

     My hope as a desperate sinner hangs on this biblical truth: that God is the kind of God who will be pleased with the one thing I have to offer — my thirst. That is why the sovereign freedom and self-sufficiency of God are so precious to me: they are the foundation of my hope that God is delighted not by the resourcefulness of bucket brigades, but by the bending down of broken sinners to drink at the fountain of grace."

     Piper's words mimic in an identical fashion the idea conveyed to us by the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 46:1-4.  Read that passage, and contemplate what he's saying, and you will find yourself thanking God that you don't worship an idol (or a god) that needs you to serve it, but a God who is so infinitely adequate and self-complete that He offers to serve you instead of needing you (as with the idol's Bel and Nebo in Isaiah 46) to habitually serve them.

     Bel and Nebo were huge carved stone statues that had to be carried on carts (sometimes hundreds of miles) into battle by the soldiers. Picture it.  Their need to be "carried" made it exhausting to "serve" them, while the God of the Bible, out of the inexhaustible riches of who He is, offers instead to "carry" us.

Grateful we serve a God who is like a self-replenishing spring!  In Him, Pastor Jeff 

Called

Greetings All,

 

      This week's 'thought' comes to you from "The Call -- Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life," by Os Guiness.  It's a book that is profoundly insightful, intellectually and spiritually stimulating, and personally encouraging, while also being challenging. If you want to understand postmodern culture -- and especially want to help your older children or other young people find direction and a way through the maddening maze of contemporary life-alternatives -- this book is extremely helpful.  Guiness has an uncanny grasp of human need, sees the big picture, and relates it to the smaller details of modern life very well. 

      I know this quote is long, but ask you not to ignore it for that reason!  It was difficult to condense into a short selection, since the whole chapter is so good.  It comes from the chapter entitled: "A Focused Life."   If you are one who often feels like life is confusing, superficial, too fast-paced and overloaded with too many alternatives, options and choices, you may gain helpful insight and guidance for your dilemma from his words -- words you can share with others.  Enjoy.  

    "Pluralization is the process by which the proliferation of choice and change rapidly multiplies the number of options. This affects modern society at all levels, from consumer goods to relationships to worldviews and faiths... The modern world offers an endless range of choice and change, overwhelming traditional simplicities and cohesion.... Life has become a smorgasbord with an endless array of dishes.  And more important still, choice is no longer just a state of mind. Choice has become a value, a priority, a right.  To be modern is to be addicted to choice and change.  These are the unquestioned essence of modern life.  

    Some of the effects of pluralization are desvastating... For example, the increase in choice and change leads to decrease in commitment and continuity -- to everyone and everything. Thus, obligation melts into option and choice.  Other effects are also terribly obvious -- above all the way in which choice and change lead quickly to a sense of fragmentation, saturation, and overload.  In the modern world there are simply too many choices, too many people to relate to, too much to do, too much to see, too much to read, too much to catch up with and follow, too much to buy.  

     Each choice sprouts with its own questions.  Might we? Could we? Should we? Will we? Won't we? What if we had? What if we hadn't? The forest of questions leads deeper and deeper into the dark freedom, then to the ever darker anxiety of seemingly infinite possibility. At some point different to us all, a cut-off switch kicks in.  We are overloaded, saturated. There is too much to do and too little time to do it.  But life goes on.  Neither planning nor juggling can span the gap.  But life goes on.  At the level of our relationships alone, their sheer number, variety, and intensity become impossible. But life goes on. One minute we feel the vertigo of unlimited possibility and the next the frustration of superficiality. But life goes on. 

     The result is not only overload but also a profound loss of unity, solidity, and coherence in life. Experience comes to us shredded into fragments and episodes.  Each moment stands on its own, with neither roots in any yesterday, not consequences for any tomorrow.  Like a sound-bite or a headline, each experience bursts into our attention and quickly fades from our memory. So today's rage is ridiculous tomorrow; today's celebrity is tomorrows bore.  Not surprisingly, attention-deficit is a contemporary disorder and genuine tradition is a scarce commodity. 

      Stone, it is said, was the medium for the ancients and steel for the early moderns; ours is plastic and the name of the game is recycling.  'One-and-only' and 'forever' are obsolete, and 'needing more space' is our most readily given excuse.  In our fragmented lives the one thing necessary is to "keep our options open." The art of "identity building" is more a matter of fluidity than fixture.  And since the rules of the game change as fast as the games themselves, we are taught to avoid above all else, being 'stuck' with commitments that might 'mortgage' the freedom of tomorrow...

   Yet the very character of [our God-given] calling counters the fragmentation and overload at key points and opens up the secret of a focused life in a saturated world: First, calling subverts the deadly modern idolatry of choice... Choice for modern people is a right that overwhelms both responsibility and rationality... But, ultimately, only one thing can conquer choice -- being chosen.  

    Thus, for followers of Christ, calling neutralizes the fundamental poison of choice in modern life. 'I have chosen you,' Jesus said, 'you have not chosen me.' (John 15:16) 'We are not our own, we were bought with a price.' (I Cor. 6:19-20)  We have no rights, only responsibilities.  Following Christ is not our initiative, it is merely our response, in obedience. Nothing works better to debunk the pretensions of choice than a conviction of calling.  Once we have been called, we literally 'have no choice.'

    Second, calling provides the story line for our lives and thus a sense of continuity and coherence in the midst of a fragmented and confusing world.  The saturation and overload produced by pluralization, and reinforced by mobility, are a leading cause of modern alienation.  If we have lived too many places, had too many jobs, known too many people, and watched too much TV, how do we make sense of it all?  Is there a story line to our lives or are they just a jumble of experiences that are, 'sound and fury, signifying nothing'?... 

     Whenever we feel this dilemma, calling reminds us that there were nomads before modern mobility -- and calling gave them meaning.  Thus Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees and followed the call of God without knowing where he was going. The people of Israel crossed a trackless desert following a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  In both cases their sense of direction and meaning came soley from God's call, not from their foresight, their wisdom, or their ability to read their circumstances. They were on their way to a land of promise.  They did not always know the way God was leading them, but they always knew why they trusted God: His word was the promise and his call was the way...  Follow the call of Christ despite the uncertainty and chaos of modern circumstances, and you have the story line of your life.

    Third, calling helps us to be single-minded without being fanatics. Modern choice and change, reinforced by the pace and pressure of modern life, constantly threaten to diffuse our concentration and dissipate our energy... The dangerous notion that 'the need is the call,' is a sure recipe for overload and confusion... The remedy, needless to say, lies in setting wise goals and setting aside everything else.  But how? Long ago the writer of Proverbs observed, 'Folly may amuse the empty-headed, but a man of understanding makes straight for his goal.'  More recently, Harvard philosopher George Santayana wrote, "in accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else' ....

     A sense of calling helps because it provides the bull's-eye at the center of the widening concentric circles that are life's possibilities.  Modern life assaults us with an infinite range of things we could do, we would love to do, or some people tell us we should do.  But we are not God and we are neither infinite nor eternal.  We are quite simply finite. We have only so many years, so much energy, and so many bank notes in our wallets... Let God's calling be the ultimate compass in your life... [For] calling is a 'yes' to God that carries with it a 'no' to the chaos of modern demands, and helps us trace and unriddle the meaning of our lives in a chaotic world."    

       We live in a challenging era, where living out our faith in Christ is difficult (maybe more difficult than ever before), and thus empathy and compassion for struggling and lost souls, and not anger, or an escapist desire for a "return to simpler days," needs to drive us to offer advice such as which Mr. Guiness gives. Advice which is intelligent, coherent, wise, and finds its source in the high calling of God, and not your typical superficial remedies.

                             That we may all reorient ourselves to the compass point of His call, 

Pastor Jeff

Driven to Despair

Greetings All,

This week's 'thought' comes from Os Guinness, and is found in his book "The Call." Guinness was born to British missionary parents in China during World War II. His family remained there until 1951 when the communists forced most foreigners to leave. He was educated at Oxford, is a devout Christian, and a scholar with few rivals. He is an expert on social trends, and has published 24 books.

His purpose in writing "The Call" was to help "all who long to find and fulfill the purpose of their lives."

This selection speaks of "seekers" (both true and false) and the two main ways people seek happiness and fulfillment -- the way of eros and the way of agape. The path of the one leads to a dead end, the other to the ultimate goal of their search. Thus, if you are in the midst of seeking, or know someone who is, his words can save you (or your friend) a lot of heartache and needless travel time spent on the path that leads to nowhere but despair. Enjoy.

"'We all want to be happy,' as Cicero said in Hortensius, and reasonable thought would indicate that the greatest happiness comes in possessing the greatest good... True seekers [as opposed to the uncommitted, restless, drifter who merely seeks different experiences ad nauseam -- without ever settling anywhere] are different... They become seekers because something has spurred their quest for meaning, and they must find an answer... They are people for whom life, or a part of life, has suddenly become a point of wonder, a question, a problem or a crisis... They do not come to believe in the answers they seek because of a need. That would be irrational and make the believer vulnerable to the accusation that faith is a crutch. Rather, [true] seekers disbelieve in what they believed in before, because of new questions which their previous beliefs could not answer...

All human beings are alike in seeking happiness. Where they differ is in the objects from which they seek it and the strength they have to reach the objects they desire. Jesus way (the way of agape) says, 'By all means love, by all means desire, but think carefully about what you love and what you desire.' Those who follow the way of eros are not wrong to desire happiness, but wrong to think that happiness is to be found where they seek it [in the desire or appetite aroused by the attractive qualities found in the object of its passion and pursuit]. The very fact that we humans experience desire is proof that we are creatures. Incomplete in ourselves, we desire whatever we think is beckoning to complete us.

God alone needs nothing outside himself, because he himself is the highest and the only lasting good. So all objects we desire short of God are as finite and incomplete as we ourselves are, and, therefore, disappointing if we make them the objects of ultimate desire... Because true satisfaction and real rest can only be found in the highest and most lasting good, all seeking short of the pursuit of God brings only restlessness. This is what Augustine meant in his famous saying in Book One of his 'Confessions': 'You made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.'

Considering the distance between creature and Creator, can any seeker... hope to bridge the chasm? The answer, realistically, is no. We cannot find God without God. We cannot reach God without God. We cannot satisfy God without God -- which is another way of saying that our seeking will always fall short unless God's grace initiates the search, and unless God's call draws us to him and completes the search. If the chasm is to be bridged, God must bridge it. If we are to desire the highest good, the highest good must come down and draw us so that it may become a reality we desire. From this perspective there is no merit in either seeking or finding. All is grace.

The secret of seeking is not our human ascent to God, but in God's descent to us. We start out searching, but we end up being discovered. We think we are looking for something; we realize we are found by Someone. As in Francis Thompson's famous picture, 'the hound of heaven' has tracked us down. What brings us home is not our discovery of the way home, but the call of the Father who has been waiting there for us all along, whose presence there makes home home...

But for those drawn [to the search] by lives like Leonardo da Vinci's, yet sobered by the tragic impossibilities of finite unaided human searching, the truth of 'calling' holds out comfort and promise. We not only have Jesus' explicit promise that seekers will find ('seek and you will find'), but we also have his direct example to show that seekers themselves are sought. Indeed, from the seeking wise men onward, Jesus is the greatest magnet for seekers in all history. The words given in Mark's Gospel to Bartimaeus, the blind beggar who desperately sought healing from Jesus, are God's encouragement to all who truly seek: 'Take Heart. He is calling you.'"

Around the time that Os Guinness was born, A. W. Tozer had written a similar statement in his classic work, "The Pursuit of God," where he started off his entire book by stating: "Christian theology teaches the doctrine of prevenient grace, which, briefly stated, means that before a man can seek God, God must first have sought the man... We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit. 'No man can come to me,' said our Lord, 'except the Father which has sent us draw him.' (John 6:44)... The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after God."

Can such statements lead to despair? In one sense, yes they can. They were intended to do so. For only when one is driven to despair in their own attempts to control their own destiny and salvation, will they discover the One who really controls their destiny and salvation -- and in finding Him they will find their purpose, calling, fulfillment and true happiness.

In His Service, Pastor Jeff