GOSPEL DELTA

Licking the Earth

// February 27th, 2010 // No Comments » // Affection, Life

When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised, ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, exploring and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called “licking the earth.” They are diversions designed to distract our attention from the true purpose of our existence in this world, which is, quite simply, to look for God, and, in looking, to find Him, and, having found Him, to love Him, thereby establishing a harmonious relationship with His purposes for His creation.

–Malcom Muggeridge, “A Twentieth Century Christian Testimony”

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

– C. S. Lewis

J.I. Packer on Calvinism

// February 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Doctrine

“Now the real nature of Calvinistic soteriology becomes plain. It is no artificial oddity, nor a product of overbold logic. Its central confession, that God saves sinners, that Christ redeemed us by his blood is the witness both of the Bible and of the believing heart.

The Calvinist is the Christian who confesses before men in his theology just what he believes in his heart before God when he prays. He thinks and speaks at all times of the sovereign grace of God in the way that every Christian does when he pleads for the souls of others, or when he obeys the impulse of worship which rises unbidden within him, prompting him to deny himself all praise and to give all the glory of his salvation to his Savior.

Calvinism is the natural theology written on the heart of the new man in Christ, whereas Arminianism is an intellectual sin of infirmity, natural only in the sense in which all such sins are natural, even to the regenerate. Calvinistic thinking is the Christian being himself on the intellectual level; Arminian thinking is the Christian failing to be himself through the weakness of the flesh.

Calvinism is what the Christian church has always held and taught when its mind has not been distracted by controversy and false traditions from attending to what Scripture actually says; that is the significance of the patristic testimonies to the teaching of the ‘five points’, which can be quoted in abundance. (Owen appends a few on redemption; a much larger collection may be seen in John Gill’s The Cause of God and Truth.)

So that really it is most misleading to call this soteriology ‘Calvinism’ at all, for it is not a peculiarity of John Calvin and the divines of Dort, but a part of the revealed truth of God and the catholic Christian faith. ‘Calvinism’ is one of the ‘odious names’ by which down the centuries prejudice has been raised against it. But the thing itself is just the biblical gospel.”

The very act of setting out Calvinistic soteriology in the form of five distinct points (a number due, as we saw, merely to the fact that there were five Arminian points for the Synod of Dort to answer) tends to obscure the organic character of Calvinistic thought on this subject. For the five points, though separately stated, are really inseparable. They hang together; you cannot reject one without rejecting them all, at least in the sense in which the Synod meant them. For of Calvinism there is really only one point to be made in the field of soteriology:

the point that GOD SAVES SINNERS.

God:

the Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of Father and Son by renewing.

Saves:

does everything, first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory: plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies.

Sinners:

men as God finds them, guilty, vile, helpless, powerless, blind, unable to lift a finger to do God’s will or better their spiritual lot.

God saves sinners:

and the force of this confession may not be weakened by disrupting the unity of the work of the Trinity, or by dividing the achievement of salvation between God and man and making the decisive part man’s own, or by soft-pedaling the sinner’s inability as to allow him to share the praise of his salvation with his Savior. This is the one point of Calvinistic soteriology which the ‘five points’ are concerned to establish and Arminianism in all its forms to deny: namely, that sinners do not save themselves in any sense at all, but that salvation, first and last, whole and entire, past, present and future, is of the Lord, to whom be glory for ever; amen!

To read the whole article, click here:

http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/packer_intro.html

The Spark and the Fuel

// February 20th, 2010 // No Comments » // Doctrine, Life

HT: Timmy Brister

Listen as Tullian Tchividjian describes how the gospel is not just what ignites us as believers but fuels everything we do in the Christian life.

Key to Change: Affections

// February 19th, 2010 // No Comments » // Affection

Reading this quote today from David Powlison got me thinking about how the Gospel transforms our character and behavior:

“What one thing about God in Christ speaks directly into today’s trouble? … Just as we don’t change all at once, so we don’t swallow all of truth in one gulp. We are simple people. You can’t remember ten things at once. Invariably, if you could remember just ONE true thing in the moment of trial, you’d be different. Bible “verses” aren’t magic. But God’s words are revelations of God from God for our redemption. When you actually remember God, you do not sin. The only way we ever sin is by suppressing God, by forgetting, by tuning out his voice, switching channels, and listening to other voices. When you actually remember, you actually change. In fact, remembering is the first change.”  – David Powlison

It all starts with truth, right? Doctrine. Then there are our responses to truth:

• Romans 1 talks about those who SUPPRESS or vandalize the truth because they’re glorying in something else other than God.
• Romans 6 talks about those who OBEY the truth as those who have been united to God through faith, and glory in Christ alone.

So we can either suppress or obey. But why is it that in the moment of decision, when we know the truth and the opportunity for obedience presents itself, we just go ahead and switch the channel? We all do it, all the time. But why?
 
I think Paul gives us the key to connect doctrine and obedience here in this chapter, and it’s the heart – what Jonathan Edwards called “the affections”. Look at verse 17:

“you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed”

The heart is the seat and source of our whole identity, the essence of our total inner selves that expresses itself outwardly in word and deed. The word “heart” appears over 900 times in its derivatives and forms in your Bible. Out of the heart comes ruling desires, “epitumia”. Look at verse 12: Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. (Epitumia, some translate this “lusts of the flesh”).
 
See, the old self has affections (lusts of the Flesh) and the new self has competing affections (lusts of the Spirit). When we die, are buried and are resurrected with Christ, the Holy Spirit gives us new passions, new desires, new sources of joy. And over time, those new passions begin to conquer, to overcome the old ones. In a time where stoic rationalism characterized much of the Christian landscape, Jonathan Edwards wrote this:

“As in worldly things, worldly AFFECTIONS are very much the spring of men’s motion and action; so in religious matters, the spring of their actions is very much religious AFFECTION: he that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without AFFECTION, never is engaged in the business of religion….I am bold to assert, that there never was any considerable change wrought in the mind or conversation of any person, by anything of a religious nature, that ever he read, heard or saw, that had not his AFFECTIONS moved. Never was a natural man engaged earnestly to seek his salvation; never were any such brought to cry after wisdom, and lift up their voice for understanding, and to wrestle with God in prayer for mercy; and never was one humbled, and brought to the foot of God, from anything that ever he heard or imagined of his own unworthiness and deserving of God’s displeasure; nor was ever one induced to fly for refuge unto Christ, while his HEART remained UNAFFECTED. Nor was there ever a saint awakened out of a cold, lifeless flame, or recovered from a declining state in religion, and brought back from a lamentable departure from God, without having his HEART AFFECTED. And in a word, there never was anything considerable brought to pass in the HEART or life of any man living, by the things of religion, that had not his HEART deeply AFFECTED by those things…The religion of heaven consists very much in AFFECTION.” – Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections

I love this about Jonathan Edwards. He said that the true sign of a genuine believer wasn’t simply correct doctrine, or personal piety, but beneath those things a true and deepening joy, forged through the sufferings of life, that can never be suppressed. These new affections that the Spirit creates in us, begin to conquer our souls the way an invasive plant would conquer and take over a field of crops overtime as it gradually expanded and snuffed the life out of the other plants. CS Lewis would call this “the good infection”, spreading like a virus in us, killing the old man, vivifying the new. Thomas Chalmers, the great Scottish Presbyterian preacher, in his sermon “The Explusive Power of a New Affection” wrote this:

“The love of God, and the love of the world, are two AFFECTIONS, not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity, and that so irreconcilable that they can not dwell together in the same bosom. [It is impossible] for the HEART, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it… It is seldom that any of our bad habits or flaws disappear by a mere process of natural extinction. At least, it is very seldom, that this is done through the instrumentality of reasoning, or by force of mental determination. What cannot be destroyed, however, may be dispossessed. One taste may be made to give way to another, and to lose its power entirely as the reigning AFFECTION of the mind. It is thus, that a youth may cease to idolize central pleasure, but it is because the idol of wealth has gotten the ascendancy (so, he becomes disciplined). But the love of money might actually cease to have mastery over his HEART if it is drawn more to ideology and politics, now he is lorded over by a love of power, and of moral superiority, instead of wealth. But here is not one of these personal transformations in which the HEART is left without an object of ultimate beauty and joy. The HEART’s desire for one particular object can be conquered, but it’s desire to have some object is unconquerable. The only way to dispossess the HEART of an old AFFECTION is by the expulsive power of a new one.” – Thomas Chalmers

One of the great keys to discipleship is to identify the things in your life that stir up your affections for Christ, things that inspire you and bring you joy, versus the things that rob you of your affections for Christ. Prayer, scripture reading, time out in the wilderness, fellowship with other believers, robust dialogue on theology, sermons by Tim Keller and John Piper…these things stimulate my soul toward higher levels of feeling, thinking, and doing. Watching too much TV, following soccer too closely, being physically lazy, over-working…these things take my joy in Christ away, and I’m constantly needing to flee from them. What stirs your affections for Christ? Inspires you to holiness? What robs you?

Confessions – Book 2

// February 19th, 2010 // No Comments » // Affection

Reading through the first chapter of Book 2 in Confessions, I couldn’t help but notice Augustine’s use of words when describing those dark times in his adolescence when his sin and distance from God was at its peak. The closing line “”I became to myself a wasteland” pretty much sums it up. Descriptions like ” mists of passion steaming up”, “puddly desires of the flesh”, “hot imagination”, “boiling over in my fornications”, “barren fields of sorrow”, “tides of my youth”, and “foaming in my wickedness” paint a picture of a wasteland. As I reflected on this, three things from my own life jumped to mind:

1)   TS Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland”

I read this poem back in high school. Eliot’s descriptions of despair have a similar flavor to those of Augustine.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

In addition, there are even thoughts in “The Wasteland” that were directly inspired by Augustine’s “Confessions”.

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

This poem rang true to me when I read it 10 years ago. Even then, in some sense I had realized that we live in a wasted world. In “The Wasteland” we see Eliot as a tormented man, not unlike Augustine, who sees and experiences the spiritual emptiness, paralysis, and disease of this world. But Eliot’s despair turned to hope when he became a Christian in the middle of his life. Much like Augustine, God saved him “from fire by fire”. Post-conversion, Eliot became a profound Christian writer. From his pen came this stunning quote:

“The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-

To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

2)    ”The Dead Marshes” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Two Towers:

In The Lord of the Rings, the Dead Marshes were an ancient battlefield of the where many of the fallen were laid to rest. Over time, the battlefield became marshes, which swallowed up the dead, though their bodies could still be seen floating in the water. In Two Towers, Gollum leads Frodo and Samwise through a passage through the marshes, which was marked by lights that danced about, and Candles which Gollum called “candles of corpses”. The Marshes were also known as ‘The Mere of Dead Faces’; and are described in Two Towers as:

“dreary and wearisome. Cold, clammy winter still held sway in this forsaken country. The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark greasy surfaces of the sullen waters. Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed up in the mists like ragged shadows of long forgotten summers.”

In The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien speculated that the description of the Dead Marshes may have been based on his personal experience in World War I, specifically, the Battle of the Somme, fought on the banks of the Somme River in France. One of the largest battles of the First World War, by the time fighting had petered out in late autumn 1916 more than 1.5 million casualties had been suffered by the forces involved. It is understood to have been one of the bloodiest military operations ever recorded.

I think both Augustine and Tolkien are alluding to an all too easily-forgotten truth: that life is truly a battlefield that has, in many places (especially our hearts), turned into a swamp of despair, and there are casualties all around us. We feel that. But on this side of the Cross we have the solid assurance that God has not left us alone.

3)   ”The Pond”

This is a video I recently saw at Ray Ortlund’s blog. It so aptly illustrates the deceptiveness of sin and temptation, and the rescue we experience from the sewage that Augustine is describing through this part of his life. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” – Romans 7:15.

Missional Leadership Diagnostics

// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Life

HT: Timmy Brister

1. If our church would cease to exist in our city, would it be noticed and missed?

2. If all the pastors were tragically killed in a car accident, would the church’s ministry cease or fall apart?

3. If the only possible means of connecting with unbelievers were through the missionary living of our church members, how much would we grow? (I ask this because the early church did not have signs, websites, ads, marketing, etc.)

4. What are the subcultures within the church?  Do they attract or detract from the centrality of the gospel and mission of the church?

5. Is our church known more for what we are not/against than what we we/for?

6. What are we allowing to be our measuring stick of church health? (attendance vs. discipleship; seating capacity vs. sending capacity; gospel growth, training on mission, etc.)

7. Are the priorities of our church in line with the priorities of Christ’s kingdom?

8. If our members had 60 seconds to explain to an unbeliever what our church is like, what would you want them to say?  How many do you think are saying that?

9. If the invisible kingdom of God became visible in our city, what would that look like?

10. In what ways have we acted or planned in unbelief instead of faith?

11. As a pastor, is my time spent more in fixing people’s problems or helping people progress in faith through training/equipping them for ministry?

12. Are the people we are reaching more religious or pagan?

13. What can we learn about our evangelism practices by the kind of people are being reached with the gospel?

14. What will it take to reach those in our city who are far from God and have no access to the gospel?

15. What percentage of our growth is conversion growth (vs. transfer growth)?

16. How many people know and are discharging their spiritual gifts in active service and building up of the body of Christ?

17. How many people do I know (and more importantly know me) on a first name basis in my community and city who do not attend our church?

18. Am I using people to get ministry done, or am I using ministry to get people “done”?

19. Is the vision we are casting forth honoring both God’s heart for the lost (builder) and God’s passion for a pure church (perfecter)?

20. If money and space were not an issue, what is one thing we ought to dream for God to do in our midst where it is impossible for anyone to get the credit except for the omnipotent hand of God?

21. If being a church planting church is comprised of disciple-making disciples, then how are we doing?

Getting Your Lent On

// February 18th, 2010 // No Comments » // Doctrine

Confession (c) 2006 Kyle Ragsdale

The guys at Christ the King Presbyterian in Raleigh, NC (Elliot Grudem, Bruce Benedict) have put together some solid Lenten resources.

Lenten Resources:

• A Brief Guide to Lent (Christ the King Pres)
• On Keeping a Holy Lent (Craig R. Higgins)
• 40 Days of Readings for Lent (Missio Dei Church)