Well, here we are, hosted on WordPress on my very own web server. This looks a little rough, but I will have complete control now (not Google), and this will also serve as a test bed for learning WordPress for use at my church.
Note that the way I have set it up, the first comment from each email address must be approved manually. Afterwards, your comments should post without manual approval.
I have been praying for the family of an old Texas Tech school mate, Kelly James, who was identified today as being found at the top of Mt Hood. I admire the way Frank James, his brother, has handled this tragedy in public for the families. How different it has been from some of the antics of other families in trouble! God is a life-changing God, and he changes everything about our lives, even how we handle tragedy and death. I would like to have as much maturity as this family has shown.
A blog for the three families is at this site.
As Ricky Skaggs once sang, “It’s the newest craze in town … there’s an old kind of love goin’ round.” I’m so happy for Eric and Jenny. You can also read a poem about it here…
My day was bracketed with depressing news about Islam. It began during my drive to work, where NPR was featuring a story about Turkey and how its “secular” state was putting two men on trial for converting to Christianity. Hmm. Turkey is supposed to be a model for how you can have an Islamic state that is also secular and free. The charge against these two brothers is that they “insulted Turkishness.”
My work day ended (late) while I was putting the finishing touches on a software fix, while listening to two episodes of the White Horse Inn on Islam. I knew Islam was a challenge, but these two radio shows brought its hideous untruth and aggression into much clearer focus. I highly recommend you download the MP3’s and listen to them without delay.
When I was a kid, the fear was that worldwide Communism would take over and erase all our freedoms forever. I believe worldwide Islam is a much greater danger than Communism ever turned out to be.
Our trust is not in the United States military, but in the King of Kings who will appear personally from the clouds. Until then, the brethren must be willing to die, if necessary, preaching the gospel to Muslims and others who will want to kill us, and who will “think they offer service to God” (John 16:2).
It is always dangerous to quote or read Tozer. At some point we actually might believe what he says. It is much easier to applaud what he says while keeping a safe distance.
This is from The Shepherd??s Scrapbook:
“Pseudo faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails. Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of any second way or makeshift substitutes. For true faith, it is either God or total collapse. And not since Adam first stood up on earth has God failed a single man or woman who trusted Him.
The man of pseudo faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get into a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself with secondary ways of escape so he will have a way out if the roof caves in.
The faith of Paul or Luther was a revolutionizing thing. It upset the whole life of the individual and made him into another person altogether. It laid hold on the life and brought it under obedience to Christ. It took up its cross and followed along after Jesus with no intention of going back. It said goodbye to its old friends as certainly as Elijah when he stepped into the fiery chariot and went away in the whirlwind. It had a finality about it ? It realigned all life??s actions and brought them into accord with the will of God.
What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who are prepared to trust God as completely now, as they must do at the last day. For each of us the time is surely coming when we shall have nothing but God! Health and wealth and friends and hiding places will all be swept away and we shall have only God. To the man of pseudo faith that is a terrifying thought, but to real faith it is one of the most comforting thoughts the heart can entertain.
It would be a tragedy indeed to come to the place where we have no other but God and find that we had not really been trusting God during the days or our earthly sojourn. It would be better to invite God now to remove every false trust, to disengage our hearts from all secret hiding places and to bring us out into the open where we can discover for ourselves whether we actually trust Him. This is a harsh cure for our troubles, it is a sure one! Gentler cures may be too weak to do the work. And time is running out on us.
- A.W. Tozer (source unknown)”
I’ll never get tired of John Newton. I’ve been listening to the Desiring God Conference mp3’s from two weekends ago, and I was greatly blessed by the address by Tim Keller. One thing that he continually did during his lecture was quote John Newton — a sure way to gain MY favor. Here’s one that he quoted in full:
Prayer answered by crosses.
I asked the LORD that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;
Might more of his salvation know,
And seek, more earnestly, his face.
‘Twas he who taught me thus to pray,
And he, I trust, has answered prayer!
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.
I hoped that in some favored hour,
At once he’d answer my request;
And by his love’s constraining pow’r,
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.
Instead of this, he made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry pow’rs of hell
Assault my soul in every part.
Yea more, with his own hand he seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe;
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.
LORD, why is this, I trembling cried,
Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
“‘Tis in this way, the LORD replied,
I answer prayer for grace and faith.
These inward trials I employ,
From self, and pride, to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou may’st find thy all in me.”
You have to check out Kim’s 15 minutes of fame over at the Dallas Morning News State Fair blog. They even have a picture of her.
Sometimes I feel postmillennial and I just want to “redeem the culture” and I suspect that this world IS my home. And the weird thing is that there is a way in which it is true! God never meant for us to exist without a world to take care of. There will be a new heaven and a NEW EARTH. We will always be taking care of the earth, the earth the way it should have been all along. But THIS world… is not my home.
Once again I have been challenged by John Piper’s sermon on Romans 12:1-2. I hope that every single one who reads this will download the audio from June 27, 2004, and listen carefully to it.
Piper quotes a guy named Andrew Walls as saying that there are two equally true principles which must be held in tension; he called them “the pilgrim principle” and “the indigenous principle.” The pilgrim principle holds the world, and this life, loosely: I’m ready to go, and you can come with me if you will. The indigenous principle says that the Gospel has something to say to every culture, and we better get ready to contextualize and speak to our culture.
In other words, the gospel can and must become indigenous in every (fallen!) culture in the world. It can and must find a home in the culture. It must fit in. That??s the indigenous impulse. But at the same time, and just as powerful, the gospel produces a pilgrim mindset. It loosens people from their culture. It criticizes and corrects culture. It turns people into pilgrims and aliens and exiles in their own culture. When Paul says, ??Do not conformed to this world,? and ??I became all things to all people,? he is not confused; he is calling for a critical balance of two crucial biblical impulses.
I find that this disctinction helps explain a lot of the contradictions in the Christian life, and it is very dangerous to adopt just one of the two principles. Alone, the pilgrim principle produces wonderful, death-defying missionaries, but with no appreciation for the idea of “common grace” or the link we have with fallen humanity. Alone, the indigenous principle could produce something like mainstream liberal theology, with concern for “the poor” but no concern for their eternal souls. We must have both, somehow.
Andrew Fuller’s classic book of the above title was published in the late 1700’s. Depending on your perspective, it either killed Calvinism or revived it. My perspective is that it revived Calvinism and that it was a legitimate development of the Puritans and the Great Awakening evangelists. Fuller’s friend William Carey was the first Protestant English missionary to foreign lands, and is usually credited with kicking off the modern missions movement.
Fuller’s accomplishment was to provide the theological underpinnings for the new foreign missions, by combating the deadening hypercalvinism/antinomianism that had gripped English Baptist life. Drawing heavily upon the thought of Owen and Edwards, Fuller showed that because it was moral inability, not natural inability, that prevented men and women from receiving the gospel, the gospel was to be preached to all, indiscriminately. This seems so obvious to us now, but there are dear brothers even today who believe that Fuller was the source of all heresy and apostasy and that he perverted the doctrines of salvation.
I believe that Fuller is important and that the doctrines contained in The Gospel Worthy Of All Acceptation are mostly the pure doctrine of Scripture. (Whether Fuller in later life can be charged with any other errors is not in my area of knowledge, and it doesn’t affect my opinion of this book.)
I used to access this book at a site called thebaptistpage.com, now known as baptistpage.org, but it seems to be out of date and broken. So I’ve republished the files on my site here. As far as I know, they are available nowhere else on the web.
A group based near Ft Worth (actually Glen Rose), called the Fellowship of Reformed Churches, has not only a website, but an annual conference. The information is located here. It looks great! The date is Oct 14 (during the State Fair, yikes) and the location is Southwestern Baptist Seminary. The title of the conference is “Humble Orthodoxy.”