“Keep your low view of God to youself.”

This in-your-face quote (my paraphrase) comes from Heinz Schrader, pastor of Capital City Church International here in Pretoria.

Right now we have a few people who are in conversation with us about our view of suffering and God’s sovereignty.  They totally disagree with what we teach.  I want to tell you, that when someone has problems with the way a family is doing things, they are supposed to go to the head of the household.  So let me try to say this nicely: if you have a problem with what we believe and teach about suffering in this church, then come talk to me.  And you can talk to any one of our elders.  But you had better not ridicule one of these sheep down here who are in the midst of suffering, hardship, pain, and loss by telling them they’ve sinned or they need to read their Bible more.

Listen to me: if you don’t believe that God is sovereign in suffering, if you believe that all suffering comes from personal sin and lack of holiness, if you believe that man dictates the circumstances of life and not God, then you do not have a theology — you have an anthropology.  You exalt man higher than God.  So please, do us a favor and keep your low view of God to yourself.

Oh to be a Giver Like This

If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.  There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them…Sometimes our pride also hinders our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we ought on the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and less than we ought on those who really need our help.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

What if Jesus Was an Academic?

From psychiatrist James T. Fisher, in A Few Buttons Missing, defending the mental stability and power of Jesus:

If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene — if you were to combine them and refine them, and cleave out the excess verbiage — if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount.

Why is Salvation of Grace?

Salvation must be of grace, because the Lord is the author of it: and what motive but grace could move Him to save the guilty?  Salvation must be of grace, because the Lord works in such a manner that our righteousness is for ever excluded.

- Charles Spurgeon

And She Proves His Point

Mark Driscoll wrote a short piece for Fox News about the state of “Christian America.”

Below the article were a series of comments that readers had emailed in.  Here is one from a lady named Debbie in Ohio:

I think you can be a good Christian and not belong to a church. You need to be “Christ” like. Who is to say that this church or that church is somewhere you have to belong to be a Christian. I take offense to being classified as Christendom. Who made Mark Driscoll the authority on who is a Christian and who just thinks they are? Almost everyday in some town you can read a story about a church taking advantage of its congregation. I give charity but to people of my choice, and I give where I know it is being used to really help people in need.

Four thoughts:

1. Driscoll never said you had to go to or belong to a church to be a Christian.
2. Driscoll is not “the authority” on who is a Christian and who is not, but he is a faithful Bible teacher who stands as a shepherd (among many) over God’s flock, only insofar as he submits to the Good Shepherd.  Further, faithful Bible teachers only receive their authority from the Scriptures.
   
3. This lady, saying that you can always find a church “taking advantage of its congregation,” proves Driscoll’s point.  His argument, citing George Barna, was that just because someone (or a church) says they are “Christian” doesn’t mean they really are.
   
4. If she thinks the church is so messed up (which it is because it’s made up of sinners), then she should join us because I’m willing to be she’s not so perfect herself.  There are plenty of true Christian churches where she can “give charity” so that people who really have need will be helped.
   

What Does the Gospel Tell Us?

[The gospel] tells us that we are more wicked than we ever dared believe, but more loved and accepted than you ever dared hope–at the same time.  In fact, if the gospel is true, the more you see your sin, the more certain you are that you were saved by sheer grace and more precious and electrifying that grace is to you.

- Tim Keller

I Might Be Giving Up on Christianity Today

Christianity Today (CT) recently interviewed Rob Bell about his book Jesus Wants to Save Christians.  And at the end of the interview, Galli asked Bell how he would present the gospel on Twitter.  Bell said:

I would say that history is headed somewhere. The thousands of little ways in which you are tempted to believe that hope might actually be a legitimate response to the insanity of the world actually can be trusted. And the Christian story is that a tomb is empty, and a movement has actually begun that has been present in a sense all along in creation. And all those times when your cynicism was at odds with an impulse within you that said that this little thing might be about something bigger—those tiny little slivers may in fact be connected to something really, really big.

That’s the gospel?  Really?  That is not anywhere close to the gospel.  What Bell said had nothing to do about Jesus Christ’s person and work.  His gospel is not saving.  It is not God-centered or biblical.  If you had to Twitter the gospel, keep it short and sweet, how about this:

I would remind you of the gospel I preached to you…For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:1, 3-4).

Mark Galli, the interviewer, wrote at the beginning of the article that his book is “nothing less than a holistic, biblical theology of salvation — written, paradoxically, in Bell’s typical sentence-fragment style.”

That might even be more concerning to me given that CT calls themselves a magazine of “evangelical distinction.”  If Bell’s gospel is “evangelical,” then please, don’t call me that.

John Calvin on Abortion

From his Commentary on the Last Four Books of Moses:

For the fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man’s house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.

Speaking of Calvin, I’m going to post a bit on his life sometime next week (hopefully).  Most people know a lot about what Calvin taught, but few actually know about his life.  I’m one of those people so I’m excited to learn a bit more with you.  A lot of people mistakenly have called Calvin a cold, mean-spirited man who hated non-Christians.  The exact opposite is actually true.  He intensely loved the world and wanted everyone to know about the saving grace Jesus offers.  Hopefully the coming post will dispel some of those false stories.

Work Hard, Sleep Well, and Know that God’s Got it Under Control

Let us fight as if it all depended upon us, but let us look up and know that all depends on Him.

- Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening (April 20, evening)

Nothing New

It is wonderfully comforting to me that there is nothing new to learn or teach in Scripture.  You could read the Bible a thousand times and there will not be one word, phrase, or segment that you find that wasn’t there the first time you read it.  And everything you read has it’s own meaning, and no new meaning can be attributed to it.  It has always meant what it means and that’s how it will always be.

When teachers or pastors or whomever come out with a new interpretation or teaching, be skeptical.  If you notice, what I write on this blog is nothing new.  Everything I say is just a reiteration of ancient biblical truths that are precious and good, that have already been taught by men and women before me.   That’s what I want to be, however: a reminder of old truths so that God might open up the eyes of people’s hearts.

The reason we don’t understand Scripture is that we are blind.  And there are levels of blindness.  The non-believer is completely blind.  And for the believer, even we fail to understand some things in the Bible.  C.S. Lewis said, “There is always more to see than what you see.”

Jonathan Edwards reminds us of this fact that there is no new interpretation to any Scripture, and that in order for us to understand, our blinders need to be removed:

Spiritually to understand the Scripture is rightly to understand what is in the Scripture, and what was in it before it was understood: it is to understand rightly what used to be contained in the meaning of it, and not the making of a new meaning.  When the mind is enlightened spiritually and rightly to understand the Scripture, it is enabled to see that in the Scripture which was before not seen by reason of blindness…Spiritually to understand the Scripture is to have the eyes of the mind opened, to behold the wonderful spiritual excellency of the glorious things contained the true meaning of it, and that always were contained in it (Religious Affections, p. 109).