"We mediocrities struggle at a different level, hoping that our own petty contributions, irrelevant and ephemeral as they are, will be puffed and acknowledged by others; and, in a sense, there is nothing we can do about that. I am a man divided against myself; I want to be the centre of attention because I am a fallen human being; I want others to know that I am the special one; and as long as the new me and the old me are bound together in a single, somatic unity, I will forever be at war with myself. What I can do, however, is have the decency to be ashamed of my drive to self-promotion and my craving for attention and for flattery and not indulge it as if it were actually a virtue or a true guide to my real merit. I am not humble, so I should not pretend to be so but rather confess it in private, seeking forgiveness and sanctification. And, negatively, I must avoid doing certain things. I must not proudly announce my humility on the internet so that all can gasp in wonder at my self-effacement. I must make sure I never refer to myself as a scholar. I must not tell people how wonderful I am. I must resist the temptation to laugh at my own jokes. I must not applaud my own speeches. I must deny myself the pleasure of posting other people's overblown flattery of me on my own website, let alone writing such about myself. I must never make myself big by clinging to the coat-tails of another. In short, I must never take myself too seriously.
Not even chimpanzees do that."
- Carl Trueman, Fools Rush In Where Monkeys Fear To Tread
An enlargement of the heart, that peculiar muscle that pumps life-giving, oxygen-rich blood throughout the body, is a symptom of its disease. Precipitating factors have caused it to over-exert itself, and just like any muscle found in the body, it has compensated for the load by increasing in size. Eventually, it will just give out due to fatigue and the host body will die.
Interestingly, this is not the case for the soul of man, his heart—the seat of his emotions, motivations, inclinations, and intellect. Its enlargement is, conversely, an indication of health—spiritual vigor and life—borne out of the nature of Christ that the Spirit has wrought in him. He is a new man, with a heart pumping the eternal life-giving blood of the Lamb, by which immortality is his as he is forever connected to the Vine.
Abraham was such a man, one with an enlarged heart. Can you picture him bartering with God for the souls of a few men, who in his mind could perhaps be entangled in the web of wickedness and debauchery that is Sodom and Gomorrah, with themselves abhorring their current predicament and desiring the righteousness of God? Why would Abraham feel so strongly about this so as to engage the God of Unapproachable Light, knowing himself to be but a worm? Perhaps it is because the light of life that is his heritage as one who has been counted righteous in the sight of God has opened up his eyes to the extent of his own radical depravity, his own unworthiness, and therefore as a justified sinner he feels an affinity with those that are as yet unjustified. "What separates me from them?", he may have asked himself. "What is it in me that I should have been treated so well, and these little ones, forsaken?" He came face to face with grace and his heart was enlarged.
"The next place to be cited is Heb iv. 9. This verse (with its context, which must be carefully read) teaches that, as there remains to believers under the Christian dispensation a hope of an eternal rest, so there remains to us an earthly Sabbath to foreshadow it. The points to be noticed in the explanation of the chapter are: That God has an eternal spiritual rest; that He invited Old Testament believers to share it; that it is something higher than Israel's home in Canaan, because after Joshua had fully installed Israel in that rest, God's rest is still held up as something future. The seventh day (verse 4) was the memorial of God's rest, and was thus connected with it. It was under the old dispensation, as under the new, a spiritual faith which introduced into God's rest, and it was unbelief which excluded from it. But as God's rest was something higher than a home in Canaan, and was still offered in the ninety-fifth Psalm long after Joshua settled Israel in that rest, it follows (verse 9) that there still remains a sabbatism, or Sabbath-keeping, for God's people under the new dispensation; and hence (verse 11) we ought to seek to enter into that spiritual rest of God, which is by faith. Now, let it be noted that the word for God's 'rest' throughout the passage is different one from 'Sabbath'. But the apostle's inference is that because God still offers us His 'rest' under the new dispensation, there remaineth to us a Sabbath-keeping under this dispensation. What does this mean? Is the sabbatism identically our 'rest' in faith? But the seventh day was not identically that rest; it was the memorial and emblem of it. So now sabbatism is the memorial and emblem of the rest. Because the rest is ours, therefore the Sabbath-keeping is still ours; heaven and its earthly type belong equally to both dispensations."
- Robert L. Dabney, Discussions, 535 (as cited in Joseph A. Pipa, The Lord's Day, pp. 128—129).
Beauty in creation is reflective of the incomprehensible beauty of God. It is precisely because of His transcendence that only faint shadows of His comeliness are evident in nature—O, but what food for the soul are these glimpses in the dark!
I am of the conviction that man needs his regular doses of the beauty of God reflected in the created order as a barrier against the erosion of his well-being. Having been at a valley surrounded by an undulating series of tree-green mountains yesterday, with the landscape blanketed in a clear sheet of warm, soothing sunlight, and having my heart moved to worship at the sight thereof, my conviction was reinforced. The place was Heaven's Gate cemetery; and though the context was that of mourning, the joy and love of God permeated every inch of grass. Indeed, a peek at a crack on the door of heaven was what it was, and I thought to myself, "papa is enjoying the full reality of all this now"—well, perhaps not the full reality as that is still in the age to come—but being in the presence of the One from whom all this beauty that surrounded me derives its being, he is happy and he is home.
With that said, I advocate pets as stress-relievers, too. I am enjoying "Ranger", my Sulcata Tortoise very much!
"We need sound doctrine, not because we are intellectualists but because we need the surprising good news that we have been saved not by our discipleship but by Christ and his work. We need this doctrine not simply to know how to be saved from God's wrath but for the knowledge of how we have been liberated from the tyranny of sin. Anyone can rise to the occasion and help to make the world a better place, but only through faith in Christ can a sinner be united to Christ and bear the fruit of the Spirit, whose fragrance penetrates this passing age with the scent of the age to come. We need the doctrine in order to know what God is doing in this time between Christ's two comings, as he gathers us to receive his good gifts through preaching and Sacrament, as we respond to him in prayer and praise, contribute to the up-building of the saints through the gifts he has given us, and reach out to the world through witness and service."- Michael S. Horton (What Is Discipleship Anyway?, Modern Reformation)
I am writing this as one who has just recently lost a dearly beloved father-in-law. Well, to be more precise, what I lost was the ability to interact with him through the agency of our physical bodies. Human relationships this side of glory are founded on laws of physics that must not be transgressed in order for life to ensue, for communication to take place, and hence for relationships to flourish. Death is the stake driven through the heart of the physicality of humanity, the distortion that mars God's ultimate design for man to be embodied, and the fruition of sin. For where there is sin, there then must be the tears of years of shared humanity abruptly torn asunder, bringing with it the grief and convulsion of soul that marked even the Lord Jesus Christ (cf. John 11:33—35).Me and my family are allowed to mourn for papa, for he was God's gift to us—being instrumental in the bringing forth of my wife into the world and raising her up in a manner that has benefited me as her husband and our kids as their mother—with his felicities transcending kinfolk, spilling over to the many people he has touched through the preaching of the Word, his social advocacies, and his long, drawn-out story-telling (he was a voracious reader and had an opinion on almost everything under the sun), which have all now been temporarily suspended.But then our lament must be short-lived. As children of God, redeemed by the invaluable covenant blood of Christ, death is now but the doorway into an eternity of seeing the Lord face to face—but it is not to be romanticized for it is the curse of God upon sin, and the curse which He Himself bore in behalf of those whom He has chosen from among the lot of mankind even before the dawn of time. The nature of death is a dichotomy: it is the harbinger of doom for those who have shunned the Lamb that was slain even before the foundation of the world, and the herald of delights for those who through the Spirit have put their faith, through grace, in Christ—and it is in the latter consideration that we find the consolation that cuts short our sadness.I may not have often appreciated papa's penchant for verbosity, but I know that in the future age of glory, I shall again converse with papa, with a perfection of dialogue that must necessarily mark the absence of sin, in the flesh. We love you, papa!"When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:'Death is swallowed up in victory.'
'O death, where is your victory?O death, where is your sting?'" (1 Cor. 15:54—55)
"We need to work at ensuring that our commitment to holiness is a commitment to God, not to our own self-esteem. Frederick W. Faber, a nineteenth-century British writer, showed me great insight into this tendency (I've paraphrased his words for clarity): 'When we sin we are more vexed at the lowering of our self-esteem than we are grieved at God's dishonor. We are surprised and irritated at our own lack of self-control in subjecting ourselves to unworthy habits....The first cause of this is self-love, which is unable to stand the disappointment of not seeing ourselves in time of trial come out beautiful, erect, and admirable.'"- Jerry Bridges, Holiness, 'Sin and Self-Esteem', p. 119
"Reformed worship is beautiful, but it does not have the beauty of sensual things. Rather, it has the beauty mentioned in several of the psalms. 'Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness' (Ps. 29:2).It is for this reason that Reformed worship has always been marked by what some have called 'a stark simplicity.' The beauty is found in the faithful preaching of the Word of God, in the simple, unadorned, but faithful administration of the sacraments, and in the maintenance of faithful discipline. Reformed people find their delight in truth and in the spiritual things that Christ spoke of when he said that we must worship God in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). Abraham Kuyper spoke of 'the serious danger with which symbolism menaces the future of our Calvinistic Church life.' When 'symbolism replaces revelation,' he said, it 'makes us fall back from conscious to unconscious religion. The Reformed faith always places revelation in the foreground, and tolerates no other performances than such as are able to echo it and remain carefully under its sway.' This simplicity is a hallmark of the worship conducted in Reformed churches."- Thomas E. Tyson and G.I. Williamson, What is the Reformed Faith?, Part IV, p. 34
"The Reformed faith insists upon God's supreme authority. 'The duty which God requireth of man, is obedience to his revealed will' (WSC, Q.39). That revealed will (the moral law) is 'summarily comprehended in the Ten Commandments' (WSC, Q.41), which are found in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. It is not difficult to relate all of the commands in the Bible to one or more of the Ten Commandments (cf. Matt 5:17—48). That moral law is binding upon all men for all time. Prior to our conversion, it 'was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith' (Gal. 3:24). That is, it revealed our sin and need of a Savior. After conversion, it is a rule of gratitude for the covenant people of God in their thankful service to their Deliverer."
- Thomas E. Tyson and G.I. Williamson, What is the Reformed Faith?, Part II, p. 22
The brief snippet below blessed me in that it showcases what it means to live radically outside of our comfort zones in order to render pure, undefiled obedience to Christ, as exemplified in Calvin's life."Calvin knew whereof he spoke. There was a period of murkiness as he became an evangelical. There must have been a period of transition in Paris, an inward wrestling with whether or when to stop attending Mass. Whether and when to identify with the evangelicals. How? Where? At what cost? His public identification with the evangelical church in Geneva, his virtual imprisonment by Farel, being pressed into service in Geneva against his will, having been unceremoniously dismissed by the City Council and then recalled from a much more pleasant place–Calvin only wanted to study and write–these were all crosses he bore. He considered that living in Geneva was like being crucified 1000 times a day. He did it at the expense of his own health, his own happiness, his own peace of mind, against his better judgment and personal inclinations, because his Savior did it for him." (emphasis mine)
"What would things look like if Satan actually took over a city? The first frames in our imaginative slide show probably depict mayhem on a massive scale: Widespread violence, deviant sexualities, pornography in every vending machine, churches closed down and worshipers dragged off to City Hall. Over a half-century ago, Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church, gave his CBS radio audience a different picture of what it would look like if Satan took control of a town in America. He said that all of the bars and pool halls would be closed, pornography banished, pristine streets and sidewalks would be occupied by tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The kids would answer 'Yes, sir,' 'No, ma'am,' and the churches would be full on Sunday ... where Christ is not preached.
Not to be alarmist, but it looks a lot like Satan is in charge right now."
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Michael S. Horton,
Christless Christianity, Getting in Christ's Way
"Our Father, we are sinful and You are holy. We recognize that we have heard in Your Law difficult words knowing how often we have offended You in thought, word, and deed, not only by obvious violations, but by failing to conform to its perfect commands, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. There is nothing in us that gives us reason for hope, for where we thought we were well, we are sick in soul. Where we thought we were holy, we are in truth unholy and ungrateful. Our hearts are filled with the love of the world; our minds are dark and are assailed by doubts; our wills are too often given to selfishness and our bodies to laziness and unrighteousness. By sinning against our neighbors, we have also sinned against You, in Whose image they were created. Lord have mercy on us; Christ have mercy on us; Lord have mercy on us."- Dr. Michael Horton, J. Gresham Machen professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California), host of The White Horse Inn national radio broadcast, and editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation magazine. He is author of several books, including Power Religion, A Better Way, Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, God of Promise: Introducing Covenant Theology (Baker, 2006), and Too Good to be True: Finding Hope in a World of Hype (Zondervan, 2006).
