Keep Yourself in the Love of God

The weekly Bible study group I've been a part of has just spent four weeks in Jude's short epistle, and it has been wonderful. The verse from Jude that really floats my gunnysack is this:

But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.

That rocks. And that part where Jude says, "keep yourself in the love of God," that has been making me wonder, how do you do that? then I ran across this quote from Elyze Fitspatrick's book Because He Loves Me:

One reason we don’t grow in ordinary, grateful obedience as we should is that we’ve got amnesia; we’ve forgotten that we are cleansed from our sins. In other words, ongoing failure in our growth is the direct result of failing to remember God’s love for us in the gospel. If we fail to remember our justification, redemption, and reconciliation, we’ll struggle in our sanctification. In other words, remembering, revisiting, and rediscovering the reality of our justification every day is the hard work we’re called to do if we’re going to grow.

I don't think Elyze has exhausted the possibilities for how to "keep yourself in the love of God," but it's a pretty good start.

3 Things

I've been beating this drum for a long time (so much so that it's gotten old even for me), but this is well put: No More Get Better Sermons

....When you get to church to find out that the preacher is in the third of a 10-sermon series on “10 steps to cure depression” get up and run out of there as fast as your depressed legs can take you. It’s self-help, not the gospel. Chalk it up to a well meaning preacher who hasn’t yet realized that our real hope is in God, in the sufficiency of his work on the cross and in the salvation that is not found in get-better sermons.

I haven't read this book, but I know I'd recommend it to new parents. You hear all kinds of crap about child-raising, including strenuous Biblical justification for beating them, but I like the sound of Give Them Grace. Paul Tripp (whom I respect greatly) says if it:

So many Christian parents fall into the trap of asking the law to do in the hearts of their children what only grace can accomplish. Armed with threats, manipulation, and guilt, they attempt to create change that only the cross of Jesus Christ makes possible. It is so encouraging to read a parenting book that points parents to the grace of the cross and shows them how to be instruments of that grace in the lives of their children.

Two recent posts from Jared Wilson on friendship: here and here.

Relationships between needy "me-monsters" and need-to-feel-needed "fixers" are not friendships, but co-dependencies.

I've known many of the former, but it's the latter that really frustrate me. They're perhaps a little more rare (among men, anyway) but these people only really feel happy if they're solving your problem, patting you on the hand and telling you everything's going to be okay, etc. They often tell you about how they blessed someone yesterday, and hold themselves up as little blessing factories. They absolutely cannot stand to be alone.

3 Things

"Roomy Hearts" in a "More Spacious World" is about the Song of Songs. It's fashionable these days to say the Song is all about carnal love. And if you think otherwise, well you're probably some sort of sexually repressed type or something (so the thinking goes). It's seen as a great breakthrough to deny the allegorical aspect of the Song, but this author takes the more traditional stance -- the Song is about God's love for his people -- and makes a good case.

This looks interesting. Practicing the Way of Jesus: Life Together in the Kingdom of Love

And this: Alan Jacobs argues in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction that we need to cultivate the practice of reading for pleasure. I couldn't agree more. Scot McKnight seems to agree, too.

3 Things

There's a lot going on in this post, but the main point is that "union with Christ" is the hub of the wheel of the Christian life.

The hub on the wheel of a biblical soteriology is union with Christ. And therefore, the hub on the wheel of the gospel – the good news that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand in the person of Jesus Christ – the hub on the wheel of the gospel is our union with Christ. Not regeneration alone. Not justification alone. Not adoption alone. But union with Christ alone.

I've heard plenty of teaching that seems to boil the good news down to a few theological propositions one needs to accept, but what makes the good news "good" is that Jesus is available! Not dead. Not distant. Not merely an exemplar of the good, but alive and available, making possible what the Apostle John liked to call "life."

I also like Alan Knox's take on Hebrews 10:24-25. That verse is usually boiled down to an imperative about how you should keep going to church. Alan says it means a whole lot more.

And finally, wanted: notorious leader of an underground liberation movement

Saturday This and That

I really like Thomas Shreiner's Magnifying God in Christ. I'm only in the first chapter, but reading it through the second time. It's about the now and the not yet aspects of the Kingdom of God.

As it happens, I also picked up (downloaded) a free copy of Gene Edwards' The Prisoner in the Third Cell, a short novel about "John the Immerser." I'd never read Edwards, although I've heard him lauded from time to time by others. The book is both simple and intense, and also happens to be about the now and not yet aspects of the Kingdom of God.

I'm reading both of these books on my Nook. I'm liking ebooks well enough, in some ways better than print, and in some important ways not so much. I've heard a lot of people say, "I just love to feel a book in my hands and turn the pages...." I understand that and share (to an extent) that affection, but for me it's not essential. The words, after all, are the important thing. And as I enjoy book after book on my "electronic reading device," it seems to take on a certain friendliness and charm, so that when I see it sitting on the desk beside me I get a little thrill of excitement, knowing there's good reading in there.

I've been pretty active on Facebook for a while now, and as an experiment have begun "following" people on Twitter. "As an experiment," because I just don't get Twitter. Not yet, anyway. Of course I'm "following" mostly people I don't actually know, in the hopes of discovering why I should be interested in their "tweets." I haven't "tweeted" anything yet myself, because I can't find a reason to--but I do have seven followers! I'm thinking my first tweet should be a haiku.

I've been attending a Bible study with a church planter. The church planter is a really good teacher, keeps things very Gospel-centered, and with each passing week I'm a little more liking the idea of being a part of this process. By the way, if you want to hear from my church planter friend you can go here.

I'm running again. That means my strained quad is healed, or just about. Running gently now, and slower, but loving the challenge. Meanwhile, all these wild shrubs are in blossom along my route. Doing a little research, I think they might be white cinguefoil bushes. At first, for reasons I forget, I was calling them trifloras for some reason, but that's definitely wrong. Anyway, they're everywhere just now. They're hearty and wild and quite pickery too. Does cinquefoil have pickers? The flowers look right, anyway. In some places they climb up into the lower branches of the trees. So I wrote a haiku:

Cinquefoil blossoms
tangled high in the maples
a petal-tower

First tweet?

Two Poets

I've been reading poetry all my life. When I was a kid, when I wasn't collecting baseball cards or listening to the Phillies on my transistor radio tucked under my pillow, I was copying out Poe and Frost and Longfellow in a little spiral notebook. I made my own anthology of favorite poems that way.

I don't read nearly as much poetry nowadays, and have become rather a tyrannical reader. I'm very impatient and don't think much of most of the poetry I encounter in lit journals (so I don't read then any more). I still love Frost (above all others) and his younger "followers" Richard Wilbur and Robert Francis. Of contemporary poets I love the work of Mary Oliver most of all, and it's her kind of poetry I sometimes try to emulate.

In the mid-20th century there was a poet named James Wright, whose work appeared in a lot of anthologies (and I suppose still does). I love three or four of his poems, and that's a pretty good record. Perhaps his most often anthologized poem is "A Blessing."

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

That's lovely, isn't it? It's observant of both the outer and the inner realities, and careful of both.

So anyway, today I discovered a blog called Kingdom Poets, which features "poets of the Christian faith." That's where I found this remarkable poem by James Wright's son, Franz Wright. Together these two are the only father and son combination to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Here is "Cloudless Snowfall."

Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody's put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone—
Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.

This is fine stuff. Thanks to D. S. Martin at Kingdom Poets for making my day.

Thomas Shreiner's Magnifying God in Christ: The Introduction

i just purchased Thomas Shreiner's Magnifying God in Christ for my Nook. It's subtitle is, "A Summary of New Testament Theology," and it's the kind of book I've been hankering to read.

This is a thematic overview of the New Testament. In his introduction, Shreiner argues that this approach will lead to a better understanding of the message of the NT, helping us to see the forest as a whole and thereby to understand with more precision the individual trees. This seems right to me. I think our Bible reading suffers from too much scrutiny of tiny shards, and not enough "gazing upon" the whole object.

So what are the broad themes that Shreiner sees running through the whole of the NT? Shreiner says, first of all, that "God's purpose in all that he does is to bring honor to himself and to Jesus Christ. The NT is radically God-centered. We can say that the NT is about God magnifying himself in Christ through the Spirit." In fact, Shreiner suggests that this theme is pervasive, so woven into the language of the NT, that it is easily missed. It is "right before our eyes," but we fail to see it.

The second great theme of the NT, says Shreiner, is the history of salvation, or the unfolding in time of God's saving plan. Shreiner: "The centrality of God in Christ leads to abstraction if it is not closely related to the history of salvation." And the history of salvation, God's plan unfolding in time, bringing us up against the "already--not yet" conundrum. "God has inaugurated his kingdom, but has not consummated it. He has begun to fulfill his saving promises, but he has not yet completed what he has started." This is the key to understanding redemptive history, and "redemptive history is fundamental to grasping the message of the NT."

The book begins, in chapter 1, with an overview of the already--not yet theme. "Understanding the tension between the inauguration and consummation of God's promises is indispensable for grasping the message of the NT."

Chapter 2 focuses on God the Father, chapters 3 through 7 on Jesus Christ, and chapter 8 on the Holy Spirit.

Chapter 9 examines the question, why is this great saving work of God needed?

Chapter 10 looks at the closely intertwined themes of faith and obedience, which are pervasive throughout the NT. "Faith and obedience are distinguishable," writes Shreiner, "But they are inseparable. No one will enjoy final salvation without believing and obeying. A careful examination of the NT reveals that all obedience flows from faith, and that there is no salvation apart from a changed life."

Chapter 11 examines the place of the Law in the the believer's life, chapter 12 explores what the NT says about the church, and finally chapter 13 examines the consummation of God's promises in the fully-consummated Kingdom to come.

My plan is to blog the book. It helps me with books like these to take notes as I read and to write chapter summaries. What you have above is my summary of Shreiner's introduction. In future posts, I'll move through the book chapter by chapter. These posts will be heavy on the words of Shreiner, light on my own words. The goal is to engage the ideas in this book carefully and to let them percolate in my thinking.

Sons and Fathers

Best Father's Day post this year: S. D. Smith's My Father's Stunning Failure to Achieve.

And again, forgive me for promoting my brother's new book, Rattlesnake Daddy: A Son's Search for His Father.

Americana Monday 12

Jesus is on the mainline. Call it Americana Gospel, by a great respecter of old time music, Ry Cooder.

My big bro's new book!

Friday Songbook: Weary Blues

If you haven't yet discovered Madeleine Peyroux, you're really missing something. This song, written by the great Hank Williams, really could have been used on my Americana Monday post (missed that one this week, didn't I), but Peyroux does a nice "cafe jazz" version (with a lovely muted trumpet solo). It's really a Nashville song, but Madeleine turns it into something very different.



And if you want to hear how very much Madeleine Peyroux has completely redefined the song, listen to old Hank's original version. I love them both.

June Poem: When the Great Day Comes

The sense of something about to happen,
The sense of something looming, eminent, soon-coming.
You walk around with your brights full on;
you're waiting, expectant,
a little fearful.

"In the fullness of time," the old ones used to say,
and at last you think you know what they mean.
But perhaps they didn't understand
that the fullness is now, here,

and what is about to happen
is going to stop clocks, reverse spins,
and cause new stars to burst forth in the firmament.

Is it such foolishness to live this way?
Nothing as we know it will remain as we know it
when the Great Day comes.

"And what I say to you I say to all:
Stay awake."

Searching for God Knows What

A friend of mine slipped Don Miller's Searching for God Knows What into my hands and said, "this book really rocked my world. Read it."

So, I'm reading it. And liking it quite a lot, as matter of fact. The book has the feel and tone of a story, a first-person narrative full of remembered episodes and humorous side-trips, which I gather are Miller's stock and trade. But the book is about the Bible, in large part, and you get the feeling that Miller has tried hard to get out from under the "Biblical theology" approach to that book in order to read it as a story and to interact with it, to feel it, as a story.

This happens to be something like the approach I've been trying to take myself, so the book strikes a confirming note for me. Here's the insight from Miller that I appreciate a whole lot: the Bible is much more than a collection of life-lessons or sermon-opportunities. It will be very difficult for preachers to get their minds around this fact, methinks. Preachers are always trying to mine the Scriptures for life-lessons. "That'll preach!" they say when they hit upon such a passage.

Since this sort of preaching is often the only way people hear about Scripture, they are soon trained to mine the Word with the same purpose in mind. That is, to search for nuggets that will encourage or assure them, teach them a neat little life-lesson, etc. What they often miss is the broad sweep of the story, Genesis to Revelation, of God's plan and purpose for creation.

Now, mind you, I have heard that kind of preaching. It's not impossible to "preach the story," but it's rare. It's rare to let a parable stand on its own, as Jesus did, without parsing the life out of it with learned exegesis.

In my many years of listening to preachers, I often felt as if the preacher thought he needed to talk me back from the edge of a cliff or something. "Don't do it. Life is worth living. God loves you! Let me show you from the Scriptures!"

Well, the road to therapeutic deism is paved with good intentions . . . just like that other road! I'm sympathetic to Dan Edelen's suggestion (here) that for a time the church should replace preaching with the reading of whole books of the Bible. Imagine that!

Because, well, it's Pentecost Sunday

Listening to Driscoll on the Holy Spirit. Funny and right.

Fred Sanders lists some books on the Holy Spirit. I downloaded a couple of these to my Nook.

How Green Was My Valley

Yup, so I was wandering around the library this morning, just sort of looking for the old raggedy spines tucked in among the shiny "thrillers" and who-done-its. I happen to be in the L section, and there it was, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley.

I had mentioned it yesterday as one of my favorite old books, and thought I might go back to it, so thirsty was I for something truly stirring and wonderful. Yes, it still stirs. The opening pages are beautiful, and the story unwinds in the form of serial recollections of a young man at one of life's crossroads. After every page or so I want to put it down and walk around the house wondering why they don't write books like this anymore.

Interestingly, the film version, made in 1941 and directed by the great John Ford, had its world premier in my home town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

On Reading

I began this year with the determination to read some great books. The kind of books, that is, that you remember for the rest of your life, and look back on with great fondness. The kind of book you honor in memory. For example, one of my favorites is How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn. I read it back in early high school, I guess it was, and I don't remember all that much about it, except I do remember how it made me feel. I remember the tears I shed at the end, and there aren't many other books that have made me cry like that.

Another was Mutiny on the Bounty, by Nordhoff and Hall.

So I was hoping to be scrupulous about looking for that kind of book. Of course you never know for sure, but in truth I have kind of let down my guard and read a lot of merely okay books instead. I can hardly remember a single title, except for Carter Beats the Devil, which was great fun, and Out Stealing Horses, which was almost a great book, I think, but somehow falls just short by being awfully forlorn, in a Nordic way.

I have always loved books that made you aware of the passage of time, the brevity of life and our need to shake ourselves awake to this world during our short stay here. Both 'Valley' and 'Bounty' have that sense about them. Thornton Wilder's Our Town is another. I've seen the play produced numerous times, but I like best just to sit and read it every now and then. It always moves me.

The other development in my reading life this year has been my purchase of an ereader. I'm fine with these gadgets, I think, and will be using it more and more as time passes, I'm sure. But there's no doubt in my mind that something is truly and definitely lost in the setting aside of the book-as-object. Especially big books, which seem to continue in your peripheral vision even when you've put them down, whereas ebooks simply disappear. Even War and Peace is essentially insubstantial as an ebook (I loved War and Peace, by the way).

Most men I know have a rather puritanical attitude about reading. They only read something if they thing they should. If their pastor at church recommends it, for example, or if they think they can learn something important, a "life-lesson," as they say. Most of the guys I know (not the women, mind you) complain about not being able to focus for long, or about the author's unnecessarily large vocabulary. If you show them a book, they immediately note how many pages it is. In other words, most of the men I know, have some sort of deficiency when it comes to reading, but it shames them to admit it. Among Christian men, in my experience, there are few who simply read for pleasure. For them reading is work, not pleasure. Or it's education, or it's some form of personal betterment, but it is never simply joy.

Anyway, to get back to where I began, I'm yearning to read a really good book, a really special book. Perhaps The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs. Or perhaps I'll just re-read How Green Was My Valley, that is if it's available in e-format.

Wellsian Wisdom

Three excerpts from an interview with David Wells at Ligonier.com:

"Every study on the internal life of the churches shows that they are becoming increasingly less literate biblically. With that, our ability to judge where our culture is intruding upon our souls is diminished. A church that is merely mimicking the culture, rather than offering a biblical alternative to it, is on its way to oblivion."

And:

It is a temptation to think that by being nice and accommodating we can make the Christian gospel seem like a great little addition to everyone’s life. But the gospel is not a great little addition. It is a soul-shaking, costly, demanding reality. The church cannot hide this fact! The gospel is not about self-therapy. Despite our pressured, taut, nervejangling age, the Christian message is not there just to make us feel better about ourselves or more able to cope. It is about coming before our great God and Savior, confessing our sins, entrusting ourselves to Him, and surrendering our claim upon ourselves to Him. What is most needed, and what is most lacking in the church, is a little character in differentiating its message from self-help therapies and marketing strategies. Our deficiency is not that we lack the right technique. It is that we often don’t have a real alternative.

And:

We have brought into the church the rhythms of buying and selling, of making a product appealing so that a potential buyer can be lured into a sale, and to help out that process, we are changing the atmosphere of worship into one of pleasant entertainment. The product we think we are selling is the gospel and, within that, the God of the universe. Put that way, it sounds pretty absurd, doesn’t it? But as the visions of success, of sanctuaries packed with potential buyers, dance before our eyes, nothing seems to be absurd, inappropriate, or out of bounds to us. Apparently, we are willing to do whatever we think it takes, no matter how inappropriate.

Friday Songbook: Basin Street Blues

The Mills Brothers were one of the great singing groups of the songbook era. Here they are with the Boston Pops singing an old Dixieland classic, 'Basin Street Blues.' I just love the mouth-trumpet and mouth-trombone solos.

Two Books

I turned on Blogger's new "mobile template" for you Fandango readers on the go. Heh. I just think that's really funny for some reason. People "on the go" are probably not reading Fandango (at least not until they settle down). But anyway, I turned it on. Just in case.

Finished reading a couple of books in the last two days. First, Frank Viola's Revise Us Again: Living from a Renewed Christian Script. "Revise" is probably not as serious a term as "reform" or "revive," but this book features a series of suggestions for change in contemporary American Christianity. It is essentially a call for the church to take a good look at itself in the mirror.

Some of the chapters are about communication styles or semantics: Christian code language (when "I'll pray about it" actually means, "go away, don't bother me with your problems"), and Christianeze. These chapters were sometimes amusing and always on-target, and I know plenty of Christians that should definitely read them, but Viola really gets going in his chapters on the Gospel, the presence of God, spiritual expectations, and the Holy Spirit. In all these cases, says Viola, some serious revising is necessary. Viola is as usual serious, engaging, and pointedly challenging. From Eternity to Here and Reimagining Church were stronger books, but Viola's work is always worthwhile.

I also just finished Tim Keller's King's Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. Unfortunately, my reading of this one was broken up over a period of a couple of months, and I fear that I have not really done the book justice. Keller has a way of illustrating his points with striking metaphors, and his writing is beautifully lucidm refreshingly free of Christian jargon and pop-culture references. It is apt I think to call him a 21st century C. S. Lewis in that his work is essentially one of apologetics. In King's Cross he's looking at the world through the lens of the Gospel of Mark. It is divided into two main sections: "The King" and "The Cross." What he has done, I think, is write a book about the theology of atonement that is uniquely jargon-free and aimed at an audience that he presumes to be intelligent and perhaps skeptical. Very refreshing.

Americana Monday 10

A little Gospel Americana.

Garden > Wilderness > Garden

John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. (Mark 1:4 ESV)

I wonder, where was the wilderness? Was that a word for anywhere outside the city and out beyond the farms and vineyards, the rocky places where no one lives? Is that what wilderness means?

"John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness."

Wilderness, as opposed to what? Civilization? Is the desert more wild than the city?

Back in Genesis, God expels Adam and Eve from the garden (that is, from the place of His presence), and into the wild. The wild is a place apart from God. And there we find the proper juxtaposition: Garden/wilderness. This is the great tragedy behind all tragedies. Here is what God says about the world into which he was sending the young couple.

And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
(Genesis 3:17-19 ESV)

The world into which Adam and Eve were cast is the world in which we, their descendants, still live. The wilderness is the world. The world is a wilderness.

Note: it was sin, Adam and Eve's attempt to deceive God and to be like gods themselves (Gen. 3:22) that caused this curse on the earth's "ground." From garden to wilderness, by God's decree.

Note also: when John the Baptist arrives on the scene, saying "prepare the way of the Lord," the act that prepares the way is repentance. Here in the wilderness, surrounded by the consequences of sin, we rethink what we've done and what we've been. That's how the way of the Lord, a way through the wilderness, is "prepared."

Now the first story about Adam and Eve after their expulsion into the wilderness is the story of their two eldest children, Cain and Abel. It is, of course, the story of envy, jealousy, and murder. It is the story of wilderness.

Are you getting the feeling that the word "wilderness" may not primarily apply to the natural world of soil and crops, etc., but to the spiritual condition of men and women. We have built a civilization since Adam's day, but we have not built a garden. We are still in the wilderness.

Now flash forward to Isaiah, who prophesies a day when God will pour the Holy Spirit out upon the world, and the effect of that will be a restoration of the Garden:

Beat your breasts for the pleasant fields,
for the fruitful vine,
for the soil of my people
growing up in thorns and briers,
yes, for all the joyous houses
in the exultant city.
For the palace is forsaken,
the populous city deserted;
the hill and the watchtower
will become dens forever,
a joy of wild donkeys,
a pasture of flocks;
until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high,
and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field,
and the fruitful field is deemed a forest.
Then justice will dwell in the wilderness,
and righteousness abide in the fruitful field.
(Isaiah 32:12-16 ESV)

The fully-realized effect of the Holy Spirit's being "poured out" is the re-gardening of the earth, the reversal of the Genesis 3 curse. And in Isaiah is more evidence that God is not speaking here merely of soil and crops (though there is that, and it is not insignificant), but of spiritual things, when he says that "justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field."

Here it is in a nutshell. Fruitfulness of all kinds is closely associated with the place of the presence of God: the Garden. When the Holy Spirit is poured out, that is a restoration of the presence of God. The hallmark imagery of the restored creation in John's Revelation has to do with the overwhelming presence of God.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. (Revelation 22:1-5 ESV)

Now back to John the Baptist. He's preaching in the wilderness. In that wilderness he is announcing a major event in the story of God's redemptive purpose for the earth. A Mighty One is coming, long ago prophesied by Isaiah (see Is. 40:3-5), and he will baptize with the Holy Spirit!

And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (Mark 1:7-8 ESV)

That is a high promise indeed. He, this one so much mightier than John, will restore the presence of God to his people! And when that happens, as Isaiah says, fruitfulness, justice, and righteousness shall "abide" (continue in settled permanence).

We live in a wilderness that is destined to be a garden again. For now, we may at times harvest a crop, but it is mostly thorns and thistles, and the work is killing. That's civilization. But there is one thing more to be noted. Christ the son of God has come (John's "one who is mightier than I"), has fulfilled the prophesies, and the purpose of God for His creation is assured. The restored Garden is not yet, but by the power of the Holy Spirit fruitfulness, justice, and righteousness are possible realities even here in the wilderness.

Friday Songbook: Rockin' Chair

It's the music of the '30s I love best, and when I'm in doubt about what to post here on the Friday Songbook, my mind turns to Hoagy Carmichael. His songs, like Johnny Mercer's, have a down-home feel, nostalgic for the country, set to jazz rhythms. The wispy fantasy-of-wealth images of a Cole Porter are not for him. This song, 'Rockin' Chair,' pictures an old black man on his front porch, waiting for the end. The strummed rhythm has a lazy front-porch feel to it, and Mildred Bailey sings it like one completely at home in the lyric.



Few modern singers would even consider doing this song, but it doesn't surprise me that musical historian and guitar god Eric Clapton has tried it on for size.

10 Christian Biography Titles

John Piper's Ten Reading Recommendations for Christian Biography:

• Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography
• George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life
• Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther
• T. H. L. Parker, Portrait of Calvin
• Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography
• William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell
• Iain Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon
• Elisabeth Elliot, A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael
• Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson
• Mary Drewry, William Carey: A Biography

The Past is a Foreign Country

She's in the rockabilly hall of fame, she made 17 B westerns, and till this morning I'd never heard of Carolina Cotton. Someone ought to write about the place of yodeling in American pop culture.