rock counting

Doug Wilson posts Not Counting Rocks:

I have said in other contexts that the Pauline requirements for ministry are character qualifications, and as such they are not analogous to the operation of counting rocks.

Though we are discussing the requirement of godly family management, let me illustrate the point with one of the other qualifications, also having to do with family. Paul says that an elder must be a one-woman-man. This sounds great, but what do we mean. Ever? It is obvious that we must draw a line at some point, and the first thing to do is admit this fact to ourselves. If we do not admit it, we will still draw that line, but the fact that we have done so will be invisible to us, and it will be entirely arbitrary.

For example, say that a man has been presented as a candidate for elder, and he has been married to the same woman, happily, for the last thirty years. But, when he was a young man, before he was a Christian, he was married to someone else who left him and divorced him after six months. This fact will be an item for discussion in his elder candidacy (as it should be). The question will be whether or not this man qualifies as a one-woman-man. Fine.

But suppose there is another candidate who slept with twenty-one women before his conversion, but was enough of a jerk not to marry any of them. He too is happily married now, and his past is treated in the elder election as a matter of irrelevance. But Paul doesn’t say “one-woman-man in marriage.” He says one-woman-man.

Now if you think you are counting rocks instead of evaluating character you will soon be at a point where you are not even able to count the rocks. You will think that the gold sanctifies the altar, and not the other way around. You will disqualify a man for being with two women in his life, and allow a man who has been with twenty-two women.

When we are looking at a man’s family, we are looking for what we want to see duplicated — for Paul tells us that it will be duplicated. So let me give a couple of examples that might test whether we think the altar sanctifies the gold or the gold the altar.

Let us say that a minister’s brother and sister-in-law are killed in a car accident. They were not believers, and their 15-year-old daughter was brought up in a thoroughly pagan environment. She comes to live with her believing uncle and aunt, and they of course have a number of challenges. Sexual activity is something she just assumes, along with liberal drug use, nothing too hard. They are doing what they can with a hard situation, and the minister’s own kids are all doing great. Now is this man qualified to be a minister unless and until he adopts his niece? As soon as he adopts her, someone might say, jabbing at Titus 1, he has an unbelieving daughter. Sure, the response comes, but why? The reason he has an unbelieving daughter is that he is the kind of man you want shepherding the flock.

Suppose you have a similar scenario, only this time the minister and his wife take in a foster daughter who is four-year-old. She was a crack cocaine baby, and her mom has been with seventeen different men during the course of her short life. She is taken in as an act of true mercy, and her foster parents are being Jesus to her. Would being Jesus disqualify them? Or would it disqualify them as soon as they decided to adopt her fully, instead of keeping her at the arm’s length distance of foster child? To think that such a thing would disqualify a man is to aspire to get one of those Fools-and-Blind awards that we see Jesus dispensing in the gospels.

At the same time, Paul did not give us these requirements in the Pastorals so that we could spend all our time thinking up ingenious exceptions to them. There is such a thing as mismanagement of a family, it is fairly common, and we can see it in the result of insolent and disobedient children. We can even see it in the complicated dynamics of the situations I described above. Suppose a minister adopts more scrambled kids than he can handle, and he loses both them, and his natural children drift away from the Lord in bitterness and jealousy. That’s not good either. A minister is not qualified in the broader church because he made of hash of things but meant well.

As I am fond of saying, there is a ditch on both sides of the road. In the circles I travel in, I see examples of both. In one ditch, wayward ministerial children are an unfortunate norm. It is already this way in the broader evangelical and Reformed world, and it is becoming increasingly acceptable in the conservative, family-oriented Reformed world. But it really shouldn’t be.

But in the other ditch, you have small churches that have such tight standards for the family of the elder that the church struggles along without any leadership at all. This kind of hyper-scrupulosity contrasts sharply with Paul’s actual practice. If you look at the time line carefully in one portion of Paul’s ministry, he appointed elders after about three weeks of ministry, right before he left town (Acts 14:23). Here is your Bible, these are the standards, seeya. I’ll write.

convenience store holiness

Doug Wilson posts a quote from his book For a Glory and a Covering:

There is such a thing as righteousness on the earth and righteousness within marriage. It is not the case that a backslidden Christian is under one hundred feet of water, and the godliest saint who ever lived is only under three feet of water, but both of them are equally wet. Rather, obedience and disobedience, or faithfulness and unfaithfulness, are two different states. True obedience is possible, and God expects it. The yoke of Christ is easy and His burden is light (Matt. 11:30). At the same time, we should not underestimate sin either — we do struggle with our remaining sinfulness, and we will do so, to some extent, until we are with the Lord. Do not look for convenience store holiness. The great Puritan John Owen said that a man will make no progress in godliness unless he walks daily over the bellies of his lusts.

nothing to lose

William Gurnall in The Christian in Complete Armour:

Why should you fear to be stripped of that which you have resigned already to Christ? It is the first lesson you learn, if a Christian: to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow your Master, so that the enemy comes too late. You have no life to lose because you have given it already to Christ, nor can man take away that without God’s leave. All you have is insured, and though God has not promised you immunity from suffering in this kind, yet he has undertaken to bear the loss, indeed, to pay you a hundredfold, and you will not stay for it till another world.

(via)

slaves of god

Douglas Phillips posts Christians ... Slaves of God:

“A person has been converted -- saved (has become a Christian) -- when the message of the Gospel has led him or her to be realigned away from their sin and toward God, turning to Christ in faith (belief/trust/confidence) and repentance (new allegiance), so that they, from then on, habitually respond to Jesus as Savior and Lord, manifesting the ‘obedience of faith’ (following, living, worshiping and working as his slave/doulos), and committing to live in obedience to everything Christ commands in every sphere of life, in accordance with the Scriptures.”

(Matt. 28:18-19; Romans 6:17-23; 1 Thess. 1:9; Acts 11:26; 26:20; Rom. 1:5; 16:26; Eph. 5:5; Col. 1:13-14; 1 John 2:3-6)

war with yourself

David Powlison in Speaking Truth In Love:

Honest war with yourself comes paired with incomprehensible gifts. The peace of God passes all understanding, at the cost of all your fears! The love of God surpasses knowing, at the cost of every false love!

Whatever you do, get this wisdom, this kingdom of God, this Christ! Nothing you could possibly desire compares. The cost is high: yourself. The reward is higher: no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.

(via)

deception

Great post by Doug Wilson on Deception and the Culture War:

The metaphor of war can be quite helpful in motivating people to action, but it can also cause a lot of problems. There are things that are permitted in an actual war (such as killing), which should not be tolerated in a metaphorical war, as when a school superintendent declares war on poor spelling.

So if we have accepted the notion of a culture war, as we should have, how much comes with it? The ancient Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu, said this: “All warfare is based on deception” (The Art of War, p. 66).

For those who accept the lawfulness of warfare, this is not controversial. Pacifists object to deception in warfare, but only because they object to everything else about warfare along with it. But if it is lawful to kill a man at a checkpoint, surely it is lawful to deceive him in order to spare his life. Few Christians believe that an undercover operative has an obligation to answer truthfully when asked a direct question. “Are you a spy?” “Yes, actually . . . Thank you for this opportunity to come clean.” Still fewer Christians believe that the questioner should be summarily shot in order that the spy might avoid the sin of deceiving somebody.

A man who paints his tank to look like a bush is telling enemy pilots that his tank is a bush when in fact — let us be frank — it is not a bush. God Himself gave the Israelites a strategy that depended upon deception at the second battle of Ai (Josh. 8:2). Sun Tzu was right—warfare is deception. A good general wants the enemy to believe the opposite of what is actually the case, in as many instances as possible. He wants him to believe he is far away when he is close, and to believe he is close when he is far away. He wants him to believe he is strong when he is weak, and weak when he is strong.

So in our culture war, what is permitted and what is not? This is something we have to work through carefully because we are under constraints that the progressives are not under at all. They do not answer to God, and so they behave accordingly. But we are people who serve the Lord, one whose very name is the truth (John 14:6).

ready to forgive

More clarity from Doug Wilson on forgiveness:

“But you can have a heart full of forgiveness, full to the brim, ready to overflow the moment repentance appears. Until that happens, there is no forgiveness. We need to distinguish forgiveness in principle and forgiveness accomplished” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 95).

crucified with christ

Elliot Ritzema quotes CH Spurgeon on Galatians 2.20, "I am crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me."

Crucified with Christ:

“When a man finds and knows himself to be linked with Christ, his life is altogether a new life. Crucified, then dead. Crucified, then the old life is put away. Whatever life a crucified man has must be new life. Whatever you have of life was not given you till you came into union with Christ. It is a new thing—as new as though you had been actually dead and rotted in the tomb and then had started up at the sound of the trumpet to live again.”

I no longer live:

“How many first-person pronouns are there in this verse? Are there not as many as eight? It swarms with ‘I’ and ‘me.’ The text deals not with the plural at all. It does not mention someone else nor a third party far away, but the apostle treats of himself, his own inner life, his own spiritual death, the love of Christ to him, and the great sacrifice that Christ made for him. This is instructive, for it is a distinguishing mark of the Christian religion that it brings out a man’s individuality. It does not make us selfish; on the contrary, it cures us of that evil. But still it does manifest in us a selfhood by which we become conscious of our personal individuality in an eminent degree.”

The Gospel is like a telescope:

“In the night skies there had long been observed bright masses of light. The astronomers supposed them to be stores of unfashioned chaotic matter—until William Herschel’s telescope resolved them into distinct stars. What the telescope did for stars, the religion of Christ, when received into the heart, does for men. Men think of themselves as mixed up with the race, or swamped in the community, or absorbed in universal manhood. They have a very indistinct idea of their separate obligations to God and their personal relations to His government. But the gospel, like a telescope, brings a man out to himself, makes him see himself as a separate existence, and compels him to meditate upon his own sin, his own salvation, and his own personal doom unless saved by grace. You know nothing about conversion if you merely believe in human depravity and human ruin, but have never felt that you are depraved, and that you yourself are ruined.”

Christ lives in me:

“I do not know a better epitome of Christian experience than this. This is the daily walk of a true child of God; if he lives after any other sort, then he does not live a Christian’s life at all. Christ living in us, ourselves living upon Christ, and our union to Christ being visibly maintained by an act of simple faith in Him—this is the true Christian’s life.”

forced forgiveness

Doug Wilson in For a Glory and a Covering:

We cannot forgive those who are defiant, however much we might like to. Because forgiveness is a transaction, if someone steals your car, you can’t run down the street after them, yelling out your forgiveness.

do not pamper

"If the professed convert distinctly and deliberately declares that he knows the Lord's will but does not mean to attend to it, you are not to pamper his presumption, but it is your duty to assure him that he is not saved. Do not suppose that the Gospel is magnified or God glorified by going to the worldlings and telling them that they may be saved at this moment by simply accepting Christ as their Savior, while they are wedded to their idols, and their hearts are still in love with sin. If I do so I tell them a lie, pervert the Gospel , insult Christ, and turn the grace of God into lasciviousness." - Charles Spurgeon

(via)

gospel freedom

From Jerry Bridges in The Discipline of Grace:

“The gospel, applied to our hearts every day, frees us to be brutally honest with ourselves and with God. The assurance of His total forgiveness of our sins through the blood of Christ means we don’t have to play defensive games anymore. We don’t have to rationalize and excuse our sins.

We can call sin exactly what it is, regardless of how ugly and shameful it may be, because we know that Jesus bore that sin in His body on the cross. With the assurance of total forgiveness through Christ, we have no reason to hide from our sins anymore.”

(via)

I'd add only "and we have no reason to sin anymore".

piper quotes

For those that enjoy Piper and quotes, here's 20 Tweetable John Piper Quotes by Jared Totten:

1. God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
2. All heroes are shadows of Christ.
3. Sin is what you feel and think and do when you are not taking God at His Word and resting in His promises.
4. Sin is what you do when you are not satisfied in God.
5. Prayer causes things to happen that wouldn't happen if the prayer doesn't happen.
6. Until you know that life is war, you cannot know what prayer is for.
7. Satan wants you, and God wants you. The one with sadistic hate. The other with sacrificial love.
8. God does not kill joy. He kills sin. That is, he kills what will finally kill all joy.
9. If you live gladly to make others glad in God, life will be hard, risks will be high, and your joy will be full.
10. A God-centered God created a God-centered cosmos that he saves by a God-centered cross.
11. The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature.
12. Boasting is the voice of pride in the heart of the strong. Self-pity is the voice of pride in the heart of the weak.
13. Grace is the enabling gift of God not to sin. Grace is power, not just pardon.
14. I measure Your love for me by the magnitude of the wrath I deserved and the wonder of Your mercy by putting Christ in my place.
15. The climax of God's happiness is the delight He takes in the echoes of His excellence in the praises of His people.
16. The goal of preaching is the glory of God reflected in the glad submission of his creation.
17. The cross is not a mere event in history; it's a way of life! "Take up your cross daily" Jesus said!
18. Relativism no longer means: your claim to truth is no more valid than mine; but now means: you may not claim to speak the truth.
19. Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't.
20. Strong affections for God, rooted in and shaped by the truth of Scripture - this is the bone and marrow of biblical worship.

planted

Michael Kelly posts The Tree of Life in a Barren Land:

Standing alone in the desolate savanna of Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, this acacia tree attracts animals from all around to its shade, as is seen by the hundreds of worn trails directed toward it…

This picture reminds me of the words of Jeremiah 17:

“The man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence indeed is the Lord, is blessed. He will be like a tree planted by water; it sends out its roots toward a stream, it doesn’t fear when heat comes, and its foliage remains green. It will not worry in a year of drought or cease producing fruit” (Jeremiah 17:7-8).

That’s what you see here. Green in a sea of brown. Growth in a land that’s dead. Signs of life in the midst of a desert. When everything else around gives way to the heat and the dirt and the wind, the tree remains. And that “remaining” calls out to everything around it, and everything around it comes.

They come curiously, wondering how such a thing could still remain in a land so hostile and dead. They come, skeptical at first but still asking where the source of life is. They come, and they find shade.

for his glory

John Piper in Finally Alive:

Everything good that God has made and that God sustains is ruined when it is not done in reliance on God’s grace and in pursuit of God’s glory.

(via)

holy love

John Stott brings out the glorious reality of the holy love of God when he says,

“The vision of God’s holy love will deliver us from caricatures of him. We must picture him neither as an indulgent God who compromises his holiness in order to spare and spoil us, nor as a harsh, vindictive God who suppresses his love in order to crush and destroy us. How then can God express his holiness without consuming us, and his love without condoning our sins? How can God satisfy his holy love? How can he save us and satisfy himself simultaneously? We reply at this point only that, in order to satisfy himself, he sacrificed — indeed substituted — himself for us.

‘Beneath the cross of Jesus
I fain would take my stand –
The shadow of a mighty rock
Within a weary land…

O safe and happy shelter!
O refuge tried and sweet!
O trysting-place, where heaven’s love
And heaven’s justice meet!’”

(via)

lewis quotes

20 tweetable CS Lewis quotes ...

1. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. 
2. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
3. If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
4. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
5. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.
6. The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
7. We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
8. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
9. God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.
10. Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.
11. There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
12. True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.
13. Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.
14. Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.
15. Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.
16. He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.
17. The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
18. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.
19. God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
20. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.

(via)

aristotle and baptism

I like how RC Sproul summarizes Aristotle's illustration on types of cause ... and the thinking relative to baptism:

Aristotle identified various types of causes. His favorite illustration of the various causes involved a statue. He said a statue has several causes, several things that must be present for the image to take shape. First, he said, there has to be a material cause, which he defined as the material from which the statue is made. It could be a block of stone, a chunk of wood, or some other substance. He then identified the efficient cause, a person who changes the shape of the material and refashions it. For a statue, the efficient cause is the sculptor. Next there is the formal cause, a plan, idea, or blueprint that directs the alteration of the material. There is also a final cause, which is the reason for the statue. Finally, Aristotle identified the instrumental cause, which is the tool or means by which the change in the material is wrought. In sculpting his Pieta, Michelangelo could not just command the marble to take the shape he desired. He needed a chisel and a hammer. Those were the instruments by which the change in the marble took place. 

As Protestants, we say that justification is by faith alone. That little word by is critical to our understanding of how justification takes place. It does not mean that faith is meritorious and obligates God to save us. Rather, the word by indicates grammatically what we call the instrumental dative, which describes the means by which a thing comes to pass. So, to use Aristotle's categories, faith is the instrumental cause of justification, according to the Protestant view.

laughter and joy

Martin Luther:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy. (Psalm 126:1,2)

They who feel their captivity shall have their mouths filled with laughter and joy: that is, redemption and deliverance from sin and death shall be preached unto them. This is the sense and meaning of the Holy Ghost, that the mouth of such shall be filled with laughter, that is, their mouth shall show forth nothing else but great gladness through the inestimable consolations of the gospel, with voices of triumph and victory by Christ, overcoming Satan, destroying death, and taking away sins… The gospel is nothing else but laughter and joy.

(via)

mortification

From the Resurgence blog ...

We’re usually not too eager to deal with our sin, but doing so is an essential part of the Christian life. The Puritans offer six pieces of advice for how to meet our sin head-on.

Mortification. It isn’t a word you hear much these days. But mortification of sin was what Paul was talking about when he said to the Colossians, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Col. 3:5). He urged the Romans to do the same: “If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom. 8:13).

Putting sin to death is an essential part of the Christian life. But how do we do it? One group we can turn to for guidance is the Puritans. The Puritanism was a 16th- and 17th-century movement that sought to purify worship and practice in the Church of England. As part of their emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing about lives of holiness, they wrote a lot about mortification; John Owen even wrote an entire book called On the Mortification of Sin. They offer sound advice for us today.

1. SEE SIN FOR WHAT IT IS

“If the thoughts of death, and the grave, and rottenness, are not pleasant to you, do not let the thoughts of sin be pleasant. Listen to every temptation to sin as you would listen to a temptation to self-murder, and as you would do if the devil brought you a knife and tempted you to cut your throat with it; so do when he offers you the bait of sin.”

—Richard Baxter

2. DON’T WAIT FOR SINFUL DESIRES TO CHANGE ON THEIR OWN

“We must not indulge our inclinations, as we do little children, till they grow weary of the thing they are unwilling to let go. We must not continue our sinful practices in hopes that the divine grace will one day overpower our spirits, and make us hate them for their own deformity.”

—Henry Scougal

3. EXAMINE YOURSELF REGULARLY

“The longer you delay, the more your sin gets strength and rooting. If you cannot bend a twig, how will you be able to bend it when it is a tree? If you cannot pluck up a tender plant, are you likely to pluck up a sturdy oak?”

—Richard Baxter

4. DON’T TRY TO DO IT WITHOUT THE SPIRIT

“It is the Spirit alone that can mortify sin; he is promised to do it, and all other means without him are empty and vain. How shall he, then, mortify sin that has not the Spirit? A man may easier see without eyes, speak without a tongue, than truly mortify one sin without the Spirit.”

—John Owen

5. DON’T TRY TO DO IT WITHOUT OTHER PEOPLE

“Woe to him that is alone! David was alone when Satan drew him to defile his neighbor’s wife. While the sheep flock together they are safe, as being under the shepherd’s eye. But if one straggle from the rest, it is quickly a prey to the ravenous wolf. It is no hard matter to rob that house that stands far from neighbors. The cruel pirate Satan watches for those vessels that sail without a convoy.”

—George Swinnock

6. EXPECT TO FIGHT SIN YOUR WHOLE LIFE

“Let no man think to kill sin with few, easy, or gentle strokes. He who has once smitten a serpent, if he does not follow on his blow until he be slain, may repent that ever he began the quarrel. And so will he who undertakes to deal with sin and pursues it not constantly to death. Sin will after a while revive, and the man must die. It is a great and fatal mistake if we suppose this work will admit of any remissness or intermission.”

—John Owen

the excellency of election

George Whitefield:

Oh the excellency of the doctrine of election, and of the saints’ final perseverance, to those who are truly sealed by the Spirit of promise!

I am persuaded, till a man comes to believe and feel these important truths, he cannot come out of himself; but when convinced of these, and assured of the application of them to his own heart, he then walks by faith indeed, not in himself but in the Son of God, who died and gave himself for him. Love, not fear, constrains him to obedience.

(via)