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Hebrews 12:3-17 & A Prayer

Father,

            Holy and loving,

 

Grant us in our consideration of your courageous Son,

            Sustaining grace to realize that the hostile hand of sinners,

            Is also Your helpful hand of discipline.

 

May we not seek the false remedy of alleviating our suffering by attenuating Your sovereignty.

            May we agonize, struggle, and bleed to keep this faith.

            May Your words come to our minds and hearts as light in dark times.

                        Grant us a sanctified memory, so that we may not forget Your words.

 

Teach us to esteem, value, even treasure Your discipline as it cries out to us that we are:

            Loved,

            Received,

            Delighted in,

            Not a bastard.

 

May we know that Your discipline does not come to us as a penalty, but for our purity.

            We are corrected,

            We are prevented,

            And we are educated,

            But the wrath and penalty due for our sins has been born, for hell hung on the cross in our stead.

 

May we be infected with a childlike awe to look just like our Daddy,

            And may that desire make the bitter medicine of discipline sweet to our souls,

            The unpleasant bud of pain, tolerated in hopes of the beautiful bloom of:

                        Your holiness,

                        And the peaceful fruit of righteousness

 

May the truth of Your loving, fatherly, perfect discipline propel us to run, strive, and encourage one another.

            We move in hope, only because we know You are moving.

 

Father,

            Holy and loving,

 

We plead this with earnest tears, for:

            The consequences are so severe if we respond with bitterness to your loving discipline.

            Our ecstasy is the vision of You, in all Your glory.

            Without holiness we will not see this, it is the stamp of our sonship.

            God put this stamp on our souls.

 

May we not like Esau count corn flakes more than the Christ of the Cross and all He purchased for us.

 

In the name of Your perfect Son, Jesus, 

            I, Your lesser son, adopted and unworthy, pray, amen.

In the Spirit of Hebrews 10:34

 

I received the following  email this morning from Voice of the Martyrs:

DAY 50: Gao Zhisheng Held Hostage

Christian human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng, has now been missing 50 days, and there is increasing concern for his life. He was last seen being hauled away from his home by more than a dozen police officers on February 4. Reports from inside China indicate he is undergoing brutal torture.

The situation is critical, and with each day that passes, Gao Zhisheng’s life hangs in the balance.

Because of Gao’s work defending house church Christians and others persecuted in China, the Chinese government wants to silence his voice. ChinaAid president, Bob Fu calls Gao’s torture “the most severe persecution in China’s modern history.” Gao’s wife and two children, who have also been abused and tormented by the police, escaped to the U.S. less than two weeks ago. His family is afraid that authorities, furious at their escape, are taking revenge on Gao.

ChinaAid and The Voice of the Martyrs, together with Gao Zhisheng’s wife and children, call on all Christians and those who value human dignity and justice to speak out on Gao Zhisheng’s behalf by signing a petition to free Gao.

» Sign the petition at www.FreeGao.com

Indelible Grace on iTunes

Many of the the readers of this blog are familiar with Indelible Grace Music.  They do a great job of putting old theologically rich hymns to new music.  I have wished that they would put their albums on iTunes for some time so that I can buy just the songs I want off of each album.  I guess I’m way behind because it seems they started putting them on iTunes last summer.  If you have iTunes this link will open the Indelible Grace Music Store.

As a recommendation I think the songs done by Derek Webb, Sandra McCracken, and Mathew West are the best ones – no surprise huh?

The Doctor: Divorcing Faith

[W]e must never think of faith as something in and of itself.  Faith is never something isolated or alone.  You must never divorce faith from its object.  Faith is always linked to an object.  The object is the Lord Jesus Christ and His perfect work and His perfect righteousness; and as long as you always remember that, you can never go wrong.  So we must not boast of our faith; it is not faith as such that saves us.  Faith is merely that channel, that instrument, that link that connects us with the righteousness of Christ which saves us.  His is the righteousness that saves, and faith simply brings it to us.  It is His righteousness that saves us by faith, through faith.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 3, Pg. 120

Hebrews 12:1-3 & From Moons to The Eternal-Supernova

We orbit the illuminated moons of Hebrews 11:4-40 (for five weeks we have orbited!) only to be thrust toward The Eternal-Supernova Son.

[B:] The Atonement

How does the Bible speak of the atonement?  What words and images does it use?  Leon Morris does an excellent service to us in this work.  Although primarily a word study Morris is always sure that his theology is Biblical as well, that is, he always lets the context and Biblical storyline determine the ultimate meaning of the word.  Many word studies are attempts to violate the clear meaning of the storyline, this is not one.  Although The Atonement is the laymen’s version of his previous work, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, it is still a very scholarly work.  While it is readable, understand what it is, it is not simply reflections, sermons, or exhortations concerning the cross, but a deep study of the meaning of the cross.  Morris deals with images such as covenant, sacrifice, redemption, and reconciliation among others.  If ever we need push ourselves to read deep hard books, it is concerning books of this ilk, books on God’s masterpiece of atonement.

When God gave them commandments in the wilderness, the writer says, the Israelites complained.  But God replied that they were his slaves: ‘For this reason have I redeemed you, that you might give decrees and you should keep them.’  Here the thought is plainly expressed that Israel was not redeemed for the people’s own personal convenience but in order that they might be the servants of God.  The redemption from Egypt was the redemption of a community which was to be in a unique sense bound to God as the people of God.

That peace has a very different content in the Bible from that which we normally give the term is clear from some words towards the end of Romans.  The writer assured his readers that ‘The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (Rom. 16:20).  God is characterized as ‘the God of peace’ by the very fact that he performs a warlike action!  This is strange language to us, but the overthrow of Satan was a necessary ingredient in peace as the men of the New Testament understood it.  So it is quite natural for one of them to speak in this way of God as the God of peace as he crushes the evil one.  What could more vividly show what ‘peace’ means?

Peace means the defeat of evil.  Peace means the breaking down the barrier between man and God.  Peace means the presence of God’s rich and abundant blessing.  Peace means positiveness; it is not the absence of anything – the barrier that separated us from God or anything else.  Peace is presence, the presence of God.  Christ ‘is our peace’.

The Necessity of Gospel Glory

I was skimming back through Jeremiah Burroughs Gospel Reconciliation the other day looking at places that I marked with a red asterisk (* = very important / powerful / good) and came across this gem.

God expects that we should have mighty high thoughts of this work [the wisdom and goodness of God in reconciling the world to Himself in Christ]; and if our thoughts are not high of this work, and are not lifted up above all creatures, we do but take the name of God in vain.  God does not care for any other glory we give Him unless we give Him the glory of this work.  It is true, when we see the works of God in the earth and on the seas, we should glorify God’s power and wisdom.  But unless your heart is taken with this masterpiece (as I may so term it), with this great work of God of reconciling Himself to the world in Christ, God will reject all your other glorifying of Him.  I mean He will so reject them as He will not accept them in comparison.

There is no other name by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12) because no other name glorifies how only God can give us God.  God gives His Son, and the Son He gives, gives us His Father.  Thus God is glorified as both the means and end of the gospel.  This is the marvelous masterpiece of reconciliation.  Revel in it, and know your heavenly Father smiles.

[B:] Knowing Scripture

R.C.  Sproul’s little book is a great, clear, and simple explanation as to both why and how you should study the Bible.  What I always love about Dr. Sproul’s teaching is that by simple I do not mean watered down.  Although concise and easily readable, Sproul tackles big ideas and communicates them as a master teacher.  This is one of those books every child of God ought to have read because I think they will profit by reading it.  Never ignore a book that is rightly used to generate a love for the Book of books.

The preponderance of boredom that people experience with the Bible came home to me several years ago when I was hired to teach the Scriptures in required Bible courses at a Christian college.  The president of the institution phoned me and said, ‘We need someone young and exciting, someone with a dynamic method who will be able to make the Bible come alive.’  I had to force myself to swallow my words.  I wanted to say, ‘You want me to make the Bible come alive?  I didn’t know that it had died.  In fact, I never even heard that it was ill.  Who was the attending physician at the Bible’s demise?’  No, I can’t make the Bible come alive for anyone.  The Bible is already alive.  It makes me come alive.

No Christian can avoid theology.  Every Christian is a theologian.  Perhaps not a theologian in the technical sense, but a theologian nevertheless.  The issue for Christians is not whether we are going to be theologians but whether we are going to be good theologians of bad ones.  A good theologian is one who is instructed by God.

The Doctor: Is There a “But Now”?

On Romans 3:21 – [C]an there be two words which are more blessed and more wonderful to us than just these two words, ‘But now’?  To me they provide a very subtle and thorough-going test of our whole position as Christians.  Would you like to know for certain at this moment whether you are a Christian or not?  I suggest that this is one of the best tests.  As I repeat these words, ‘But now,” is there something within you that makes you say, ‘Thank God!’  Is there a ‘But now’ in your experience?  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 3, Pg. 26