Books on Godliness (pt. 1)

A few books that have made a huge impact on my spiritual life and growth are When I Don't Desire God, The Enemy Within, Living the Cross Centered Life, The Pursuit of Holiness, and Overcoming the World. Each one of these books takes a strong stance on the Holiness of God and his great mercy and grace. Each author, Piper, Lundgaard, Bridges, and Beeke, all admire the Puritans and adopt their teaching and methods in personal godliness. Piper states as much in his plethora of writings, Lundgaard's work essentially is a modern rewrite of Owen's Mortification of Sin, Bridges accomplishes the same but in regards to Ryle's Holiness, and finally Beeke, but his work is steeped in Calvin's theology of Union with Christ. A gem... just read Romans 8.

Piper noted that,

God defines evil this way when he says, "My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2:13) God pictures himself as a mountain spring of clean, cool, life-giving water. They way to glorify a fountain like this is to enjoy the water, and praise the water, and keep coming back to the water, and point other people to the water, and get strength for love from the water, and never, never, never prefer any drink in the world over this water. That makes the spring look valuable. That is how we glorify God, the fountain of loving water.... So preferring the pleasures of money or power or fame or sex over the "pleasures.... at God's right hand" is not like preferring caramel to hot fudge. It is a great evil. Indeed it is the ultimate meaning of evil. Esteeming God less than anything is the essence of evil."

Lundgaard wrote on the tactics of sin,

You know the flesh has made a breach in your defenses when your heart is hardened by its deceitfulness (Heb 3:13) so that you are careless about sin. You will look at your life and think about how often you need God's forgiveness, and so think of it as something common, nothing to worry over or take pains about. You'll know you are hardened when you begin to extend the boundaries of Christian freedom to include indulgences that in the past would have shocked you. Your flesh will whisper to you that strictness and anxious care about obedience are legalism -the gospel came to deliver you form such things! And besides, if you really do commit a sin, you cna be forgiven later.

For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21

(I'll come back to Overcoming the World, Living the Cross Centered Life, and the Pursuit of Holiness.)

Stats on the state of the church in America and Poverty in the global economy

Church Planting. (see here)
1.) 195,000,000 unchurched people in American today. Making it one of the top four unchurched nations in the world.
2.) No county in America has a greater church population than it did 10 years ago
3.) combined communicant membership declined 10%
4.) each year up to 4,000 churches close their doors, with 1500 being planted
5.) of 350,000 churches, 4 out of 5 are plateaued or declining
6.) one denomination found that 80% of her membership came from these churches
7.) the single most effective evangelistic method is planting new churches

World Poverty
1.) 1.5 billion people live on less than a $1 a day
2.) same don't have access to clean water
3.) 6 million children die due to malnutrition before their 5th birthday
4.) 8 million people go to bed hungry everyday, 3 million are children
5.) only 10% of this number hunger due due to famines
6.) food production has decreased due to soil quality

Sex is the sign of the marriage covenant itself. And to engage in sex is to call God as witness to hold us accountable for our covenantal commitment. So regardless of whether it makes sense to our culture or to our bodies to reserve sex for marriage, and regardless of whatever lesser commitments we have made to a women, as Christians we must realize that having sex outside of marriage makes a mockery of the covenant God instituted and to which he is a witness.”

Michael Lawrence from Sex and the Single Man in Sex and the Supremacy of Christ, ed. by John Piper and Justin Taylor

T4G Road Trip (Youtube Wednesday)

www.t4g.org
April 15th-17th, 2008
Louisville, Kentucky
Speakers: John Piper, Albert Mohler, Ligon Duncan, Mark Dever, John MacArthur, RC Sproul, CJ Mahaney, Thabiti Anyabwile

with some really sweet guys and a hip prof from Grove City College


yes i am drooling

Weekend prayers and happenings

John Piper's granddaughter died as she came into this world this weekend. He writes about Felicity here. I love this man as he continually offers hope no matter in what situation. To quote one of my friends, "he is a pastor who truly lives up to his calling."

Had a good weekend with Jen, spent some time at Light of Life taping for my project this summer. Lord Willing it will be done in a few weeks. (yay)

There is a book coming out in about a month and a half that I have been anticipating for the past year. John Piper's conference last year, the Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern world is coming to a bookstore near you (or amazon.) I have all the promotional interviews on my computer and refer to Driscoll's and Keller's often.

here are two quotes.

I know this heading [“Gospel Humiliation”] sounds pretty strong, but I want to get your attention. In Jonah 3:1–2 we read, “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.’” In Sinclair Ferguson’s little book on Jonah [Man Overboard] he comments on the broken, humbled prophet who hears the second call to Nineveh and answers it. He says:

God intends to bring life out of death. We may well think of this as the principle behind all evangelism. Indeed we may even call it the Jonah principle, as Jesus seems to have done. . . . [I]t is out of Christ’s weakness that the sufficiency of his saving power will be born. . . . [So] fruitful evangelism is a result of this death-producing principle. It is when we come to share spiritually—and on occasions physically—in Christ’s death (cf. Phil. 3:10) that his power is demonstrated in our weakness and others are drawn to him. This is exactly what was happening to Jonah.

What does this mean? A man recently shared with me how he was trying to talk about his faith with his neighbors, to little avail. But then some major difficulties came into his life, and he began to let his neighbors know how Christ was helping him face them. They were quite interested and moved by this. It was the Jonah principle! As we experience weakness, as we are brought low, Christ’s power is more evident in us.

Lloyd-Jones once gave a sermon on Jacob’s wrestling with God. In the talk he told a story of a time when he was living in Wales. He was in a gathering of older ministers who were discussing a young minister with remarkable preaching gifts. This man was being acclaimed, and there was real hope that God could use him to renew and revive his church. The ministers were hopeful. But then one of them said to the others: “Well, all well and good, but you know, I don’t think he’s been humbled yet.” And the other ministers looked very grave. And it hit Lloyd-Jones hard (and it hit me hard) that unless something comes into your life that breaks you of your self-righteousness and pride, you may say you believe the gospel of grace but, as we said above, the penny hasn’t dropped. You aren’t a sign of the gospel yourself. You don’t have the Jonah principle working in you. You aren’t a strength-out-of-weakness person. God will have to bring you low if he is going to use you in evangelism.

(Tim Keller - Desiring God Blog)

To create a contemporary analogy: If I’m called to preach the gospel among a lot of people who are cultural teetotallers, I’ll give up alcohol for the sake of the gospel. But if they start saying, “You cannot be a Christian and drink alcohol,” I’ll reply, “Pass the port” or “I’ll think I’ll have a glass of Beaujolais with my meal.” Paul is flexible and therefore prepared to circumcise Timothy when the exclusive sufficiency of Christ is not at stake and when a little cultural accommodation will advance the gospel; he is rigidly inflexible and therefore refuses to circumcise Titus when people are saying that Gentiles must be circumcised and become Jews to accept the Jewish Messiah.

(DA Carson to Mark Driscoll - Between Two Worlds)

more than gratitude

“Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility….I have tried…to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I meant something different…Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun….If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labour.” (as quoted in, When I Don’t Desire God, by John Piper)

[HT] The Mahaney Girls

Frogs are better then men

I have heard it said, "God did not die for frogs. So He was responding to our value as humans." This turns grace on its head. We are worse off than frogs, they have not sinned. They have not rebelled and treated God with the contempt of being inconsequential in our lives. God did not have to die for frogs. They are not bad enough. We are. Our debt is so great only divine sacrifice can pay it.

-John Piper from For Your Joy

An Urgent Call to Stand

Together for the Gospel and the Gospel Coalition

I love a few trends in the church today. One focus is on the missional duty and calling of the church. (Simply being missionaries to the local community your congregation is in.) The other trend that I certainly love is how churches, denominations are finally focusing on the gospel. Congregations of the SBC, OPC, PCA, and Sovereign Grace Ministries are saying, "Hey we are one church." Denominations are losing their distinctives to come together for the gospel. Most people who read my blog, you are quite familiar with the Together for the Gospel Conference, but a few months ago there was another groundbreaking conference entitled The Gospel Coalition. One is much more organized than the other but the focus is the same, the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the coming days I hope to watch the videos on the Coalition's site (they are making all their media freely available!!!) That includes workshops led by men like Mark Driscoll and Phil Ryken, plenary talks by Carson, Piper, and Keller, including several speaker interviews and panels.

From the Gospel Coalition's website:

The evangelical church must stay true to its Biblical foundations, and it must maintain and enhance the effectiveness of its expository preaching, the holiness of its members, the ‘thickness’ of its counter-cultural community, the fervor of its evangelism. But if it doesn’t learn how to do this in our biggest cities then we don’t have much hope for our culture.

If our cities are largely pagan while our countryside is largely Christian, then our society and culture will continue to slide into paganism. And that is exactly what is happening. Christians strengthen somewhat away from the cities and they have made some political gains, but that is not effecting cultural products much. It is because in the center cities (NYC, Boston, LA, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC) the percentages of people living and working there who are Christians are minuscule.

Jim Boice proposed that evangelical Christians need to live in the major cities at a higher percentage than the population at large (See Two Cities, p.163ff.) Currently 50% of the U.S. population live in urban areas (and 25% lives in just the 10 largest urban areas.) Boice proposes that evangelicals should be living in cities in at least the same percentages or more. As confirmation of Boice’s belief consider how much impact both the Jewish and the gay communities have had on our culture. Why? Though neither is more than 3-4% of the total population, they each comprise over 20% of the population of Manhattan (and in other center cities. )

So we have two problems. First, evangelicals (especially Anglos) in general are quite negative about U.S. cities and city living. Second, you can’t ‘do church’ in exactly the same way in a city as you do it elsewhere, not if you want to actually convert hard-core secular people to Christianity. There are churches that set up in cities without adapting to their environment. Ironically, they can grow rather well anyway in cities by just gathering in the young already-evangelicals who are temporarily living in the city after college. But that is not the way to make the cities heavily Christian—which is the crying need today. (Tim Keller)

In the meantime I picked a book from a friend, Sam DeSocio. It is entitled Confessions of a Reformission Rev: Hard lesions from an Emerging Missional Church. I will certainly review it when I finish it.

We become what we take pleasure in- John Piper

If you delight in the glory of Christ. You will become like Him. If you delight in dirty jokes, humor of this world, lusts of the eyes, flesh, and material things, you become a material person.

Is this not true? While this fact may go unnoticed by many day in and day out, is this not the story of their lives? Everyone becomes what they crave most. If it is food, they become a glutton, if it is drugs, they become an addict. If it is Christ, then that person becomes like Christ.

How are we to take delight in God? God wants us to take great pleasure in Him. Think of God and all that He has done for you and His creation. Think of the Exodus, Preservation of the Remnant, but most importantly think about the Cross. Ruminate the person and work of Christ. His sinless nature, justification, love for the Father, love for His people.

While this may seem easy to do, it is hard. Our hardened hearts need to be softened by the fire of the Holy Spirit; the callous needs peeled back.

Ponder a prayer that Tim Keller offers,

"Lord Jesus Christ, I admit that I am weaker and more sinful than I ever before believed, but, through you, I am more loved and accepted than I ever dared hope. I thank you for paying my debt, bearing my punishment and offering forgiveness. I turn from my sin and receive you as Savior. Amen."

A Single Mindedness

Owen once remarked that it is the duty of every believer to kill their sin. Piper also adds that it is the duty of Christians to delight fully in God and this can only be done by killing sin. It is easy to slip into a daily routine where I go with the flow. I am passive and not active, not challenging what lies ahead. Consequently that can and does lead to sin. It is so easy to forget that Christians, little-Christs, are called to have a single mindedness - Where minds are focused on Christ. Everything we say or do is to complement our God's Glory saturated lifestyle. Is it not easy to forget this? You know it is true.

The Holy Spirit convicted me, as if I was hit by a Spiritual 2x4. You and I forget what it means to bear the name of Jesus. It is easy to wallow in our sins, to cry out to God yet later turning to our sins. Which only hardens our hearts more. But bearing the marks of Christ within us there is hope. God gives us power to say no to sin, this power is life. We are renewed from our old selves. And now the tables are turned. Old Robbie is dead and Christ lives. Do not despair if you wallow in your sin. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is for the weary and heavy laden - it is for all men who want to cast off their struggle with sin.

If you do currently struggle with sin, look to Christ. Forget the methodology that Contemporary Evangelicalism offers you. Take one moment at a time and allow yourself to focus on the Cross, praying that your hardened heart, God will peel away like layers of an onion. Focus on Christ's Glory. (This is the only way to overcome temptation.)

John Piper

[HT] The Irish Calvinist