Saturday Booksnip

From Greg Ogden's Discipleship Essentials (p. 60):

The vitality and depth of our worship are directly related to our view of God. If we truly know him as he is, three things will characterize our worship: awe before the Wholly Other, shame before the Absolutely Pure, gratitude before the Merciful One. When we know that he alone is God, we fall before him in awe. When we know that he alone is perfect, we fall before him in shame. But when we know that he, the holy One, so desires our fellowship that he gave his only son to make it possible, we fall before him in gratitude and praise and sing the wonder of his holiness and the glory of his amazing grace.

"Discover your true selves in the death of Jesus."

I'm still working my way through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. The latter part of the book had been a bit of a struggle for me, but on p. 276, in his chapter called, "The Saints," in the midst of a discussion of Romans 3 (and how the righteousness of God Himself is ours through faith), Bonhoeffer says this:

Discover your true selves in the death of Jesus, in the righteousness of God which is granted there to us.

I facilitate a small-group and in that setting especially I see again and again that we need to make this great discovery anew each day. It is at the cross that burdens are lifted, fear and worry washed away, and the majestic mercy of God is on full display.

Come, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price. Isaiah 55:1

J. I. Packer said:

Knowing God is crucially important for the living of our lives...We are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. disregard the study of God, and you sentenced yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and loseyour soul.

This quotation is from Knowing God (p.14). Found at Theocentric Preaching.[HT: Milton Stanley]

On Saturday (Sometimes) I'm a Litblogger

I've been reading The Children of Men, by P. D. James, a dystopian fantasy about a world in which no children have been born for 25 years, due to an inexplicable plague of infertility that has infected the entire human race. James imagines a civilization in decline, a world without a future. This is my first book by James, and I've got to say she's an author you learn very quickly to respect. Like a modern-day Orwell, her writing seems to be underpinned by a great but unobtrusive intelligence.

The book is full of fine perceptions. Here's a brief passage describing an officer of the SSP (the State Security Police):

Rawlings didn't permit himself the indulgence of personal antipathy any more than he would have allowed himself to feel sympathy, liking, or the stirrings of pity for the victims he visited and interrogated. I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part in the action. It isn't sufficient for them, as it is for most of us, to stand a little way off to watch the crosses on the hill.

An Overmastering Gratitude

Here's a quote from an old book by the Scottish preacher James S. Stewart, called A Man in Christ. Stewart is writing about Paul here, and he is making the point that Paul's letters cannot be boiled down to a doctrinal system. To attempt to do do is to sacrifice much of their essence. Stewart says that had Paul written only as a theologian (building a systematic theology), he simply would not have been God's "mighty instrument" that he proved himself to be for the converting of the world.

With utter clearness, the great day of Damascus had revealed to him Christ as the sole meaning of his own life and of all life, and the very centre of the universe of God: and all the days since then had verified and confirmed the revelation. Possessed, from that first hour of discovery, with an overmastering gratitude to the Lord to whom he owed it,with an utter conviction that what had happened to himself could happen to everyone, and with a consuming passion to see it happening all over the earth and to share his Christ with all mankind, he threw everything he had, everything he was, into his response to the gospel challenge. (pp. 30-31)

The good news of a slaughtered Lamb

I've been quoting Graeme Goldsworthy a lot lately. The Goldsworthy Trilogy is a collection of three seminal works by this author, they being The Gospel and the Kingdom, The Gospel in Revelation, and The Gospel and Wisdom. I've just begun the third of these, and no doubt will be sharing some of Goldsworthy's own wisdom concerning "wisdom." But for now, I want to quote for you the penultimate paragraph of The Gospel in Revelation, a book that has impacted my own thinking in a significant way:

The world looks on the slaughtered Lamb with pity, disdain and even abhorrence. Through the tinted glass of self-importance it views his sacrifice as a joke, or as the natural end of an outmoded ethic based on superstition. But the world itself gives the lie to its own interpretation. For had the Lamb provided such a senseless life and death, the remedy would be to leave it alone to fester and wither away. Instead of a few bleached bones and the smell of putrefaction he left an empty tomb and his Spirit who so seared the truth of the gospel into the hearts and minds of his little band of followers that they began to turn the world upside down. For this the world will not forgive him. It rises up and lashes out at the Lamb while pretending that he isn't real. It does this because the one whose spirit pervades the world knows full well that the slain Lamb is his downfall.

On Saturday I'm a Litblogger

One of the nice things about working in a library is that you regularly run into old neglected books, perhaps long forgotten books, that you would never have discovered unless you are the type to peruse the dusty shelves of used-book stores and library stacks. But having discovered one, you have opened your life to a world of words and images, lives and stories. It comes to you as a gift, as from a friend you'd not heard from in some time, and you feel, above all, profoundly grateful.

Well, anyway, I think I've just made such a discovery. It's a little book called Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, an autobiographical account of growing up in rural England around the time of the Great War. This is one of those nostalgic backward glances to an era now nearly forgotten, before life was completely technologized. The roof was of thatch, the bread was baked fresh each day, and water came from a pump in the scullery. Here's an example of Lee's magical way with words:

The scullery was a mine of all the minerals of living. Here I discovered water--a very different element from the green crawling scum that stank in the garden tub. You could pump it in pure gulps from the ground, you could swing on the pump handle and it came out sparkling like liquid sky. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighed your clothes with cold. You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air. You could put your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the sides of the bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and work your mouth like a fish, and smell the lime from the ground. Substance of magic--which you could tear or wear, confine or scatter, or send down holes, but never burn or break or destroy.

The meaning, motive and power for Christian life

Graeme Goldsworthy's The Gospel in Revelation is one of those books that is so packed with Biblical wisdom, one feels the need to read certain passages aloud to whomever happens to be sitting near. The book was originally published back in 1984. At that time Goldsworthy had looked around the world of Evangelical religion and found a striking decline in the preaching and teaching of the Gospel. For example, he writes:

It is regrettably true that much Christian literature and preaching has lost the essential ingredient of a sound method of interpretation. It has allowed the Gospel to be demoted into something less than the preeminent and central characteristic which interprets the whole meaning of the Bible.

Or how about this one:

All problems, heresies and deviations from the true course of Christian living which occupy the writers of the New Testament Epistles derive from the same basic problem: a failure to bring the gospel to bear on this or that aspect of life. Consequently there is only one remedy that can ever be prescribed and that is the gospel. This assertion may surprise many, for Christian living or the general subject of sanctification (holiness) is so frequently dealt with in Christian teaching and preaching as if the gospel were only the means of beginning the Christian life, and not also the means of continuing it. The New Testament, however, teaches that it is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which constitute the meaning, motive and power for Christian life.

Booksnip (7)

In Packer's Knowing God, the chapter on propitiation is called "The Heart of the Gospel." Hmmm. If that's the case, if propitiation really is "the heart of the gospel," then it seems we're missing the heart quite often and sometimes quite spectaularly in the contemporary church.

My program for myself of late has been to re-connect with this old school evangelicalism. I'm looking for the gold, the real value, the deep things beneath the chaff of the contemporary. In my experience, preachers tend to talk a lot about God's ability to take care of us, to see to our circumstances. Ah, yes, "circumstances." God will help you through them. God is greater than them. Are you dealing with money issues, relationship issues, these issues, those issues? Give 'em to God. He's good, strong, and loving. He'll take care of you. That's the adumbrated contemporary gospel. And you know what? It's not the gospel of the New Testament. Here's what Packer had to say about it way back in 1971. His words are even more relevant now than then:

We have all heard the gospel presented as God's triumphant answer to human problems--problems of man's relations with himself and his fellows and his environment. Well, there is no doubt that the gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving a deeper problem--the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man's relations with his Maker; and unless we make it plain that the solution to these former problems depend on the settling of this latter one, we are misrepresenting the message and becoming false witnesses to God--for a half-truth presented as if it were the whole truth becomes something of a falsehood by that very fact. No reading of the New Testament can miss the fact that it knows all about our human problems--fear, moral cowardice, illness of body and mind, loneliness, insecurity, hopelessness, , despair, cruelty, abuse of power, and the rest--but equally no reader of the New Testament can miss the fact that it resolves all these problems, one way or another, into the fundamental problem of sin againt God. By sin the New Testament means, not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, definace of, retreat from, and consequent guilt before, God the Creator; and sin, says the New Testament, is the basic evil from which we need deliverance, and from which Christ died to save us. All that has gone wrong in human life between man and man is ultimately due to sin, and our present state of being in the wrong with our selves and our fellows cannot be cured as long as we remain in the wrong with God.

Booksnip (6)

I've been re-reading J. I. Packer's Knowing God, because it seems to me to embody an older and truer wisdom than we are likely to find in the contemporary Christian scene. On page 102 I came upon this incredible nugget of pure gold:

We are familiar with the thought that our bodies are like machines, needing the right routine of food, rest, and exercise if they are to run efficiently, and liable, if filled up with the wrong fuel--alcohol, drugs, poison--to lose their power of healthy functioning and ultimately to 'sieze up' entirely in physical death. What we are, perhaps, slower to grasp is that God wishes us to think of our souls in a similar way. As rational persons, we were made to bear God's moral image--that is, we were made to 'run' on the practice of worship, law-keeping, truthfulness, honesty, discipline, self-control, and service to God and our fellows. If we abandon these practices, not only do we incur guilt before God; we also progressively destroy our own souls. Conscience atrophies, the sense of shame dries up, one's capacity for truthfulness, loyalty, and honesty is eaten away, one's character disintegrates. One not only becomes desperately miserable; one is steadily being de-humanized. This is one aspect of spiritual death. Richard Baxter was right to formulate the alternatives as 'Saint--or Brute': that, ultimately, is the only choice, and everyone, sooner or later, consciously or unconsciously opts for one or the other.

B. F. Westcott wrote:

It cannot have been for nothing that God was pleased to disclose his counsels, fragment by fragment, through long intervals of silence and disappointment and disaster. In that slow preparation for the perfect revelation of himself to men which was most inadequately apprehended until it was finally given, we discern the pattern of his ways. As it was in the case of the first advent, even so now his guiding the course of the world to the second advent. We can see enough in the past, to find a vantage ground for faith; and when the night is deepest and all sight fails, shall we not still endure, like the men of old time, in seeing the invisible?

[quoted in James Boice's The Gospel of John (V. 1): The Coming of the Light, p. 305]

Booksnip (5)

It's taken me months, but I'm wending my way through Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. I think it's a wonderful and quite unique book. Infused with the passion of a lifetime, it seems to be poured out rather than written.

Although it would be difficult to summarize this book, one thing that can be said without doubt is that it is Christocentric. Here's a "snip" concerning the taking of communion:

The Eucharist is the definitive action practiced in the Christian community that keeps Jesus Christ before us as the Savior of the world and our Savior, and ourselves as sinners in need of being saved.... Without the Eucharist as focal practice, it is very easy to drift off into imagining Jeus as our Great Example whom we will imitate, as our Great Teacher from whom we will learn, or our Great Hero by whom we will be inspired. And without the Eucharist it is very easy to drift into a spirituality that is dominated by ideas abut Jesus instead of receiving life from Jesus. The Eucharist says a plain "no" to all that. The Eucharist puts Jesus in his place: dying on the cross and giving us that sacrificial life. And it puts us in our place: opening our hands and receiving the remission of our sins, which is our salvation.

The Christian community is never going to give up teaching moral behavior, giving instruction and the commandments of Moses and the imperatives of Jesus and the exhortations of Paul, dealing with the idea and truths given in the Scriptures, and training Christians to follow and obey Jesus in the many and varied conditions of history in which we find ourselves. But however important all these things are, they cannot serve as the center. We cultivate our participation in the play of Christ in history by following him to the cross and receiving his life as he gives it to us under the forms of the Eucharist.

Booksnip (4)

From Brennan Manning's The Importance of Being Foolish:

The French poet Paul Claudel said that the greatest sin is to lose the sense of sin. The man without a lively sense of the horrow of sin does not know Jesus Christ crucified. The knowledge that sin exists and that we are sinners comes only from the Cross. We can delude ourselves into thinking that sin is only an abberation or a lack of maturity; that preoccupation with security, pleasure, and power is caused by oppresive social structures and personality quirks; that we are sinful but not sinners, since we are mere victims of circumstances, compulsions, environment, addictions, upbringing, and so forth. The Passion nails these lies and rationalizations to the Cross of Truth.

Booksnip (3)

Here's another passage from James Montgomery Boice's expositional commentary on the Gospel of John:

It is true that no man can see God and live, as God said to Moses; but it is also true that in Christ God came to men in a way that enabled men to know him. In Jesus Christ the character of God may be known. There is no true knowledge of God apart from him. Do you want to believe that God is loving? Good! But do not base your belief on some fantasy of your imagination. What could be less reliable than that? Instead, base it on the revelation of God's love in Christ at Calvary. Do you want to believe that God is powerful, able to bring a transformation in your life? If so, do not depend on your own wishful thinking. Look to Jesus Christ. He will reveal it; because the same one who died for your sin also rose again in power and now lives to apply that same death-conquering power to the lives of those who follow him. Are you searching for wisdom? Look to the One who has become for us wisdom from God--that is, "our righteousness, holiness, and redemption." (1 Cor 1.30)

From The Gospel of John, Volume 1, by James Montgomery Boice, p. 101.

Booksnip (2)

James Boice, in his discussion of John 1:13, says this:

The Biblical doctrine of rebirth takes everything away from man and gives everything to God. It is the principle of the "seesaw" in theology. It is the principle that you cannot have both ends of the seesaw--God and man--up at the same time.... If you exalt man in your thinking so that he is able to take care of himself spiritually and eventually inch his way into heaven, then God will be down and there will not be much need for him. But if man is down where he should be and where the Bible places him, dead in trespasses and sin, with a depraved will and utterly without any genuine spiritual potential, the God will be up where he belongs. He will be great and mighty and altogether lovely, as he is. And the Christian, when he comes to see these things, will look up from the dung heap of this world, still covered with much of the world's refuse, and say, "Oh, my God, how could you love me?" And when he gets to that point the love of Christ will begin to constrain him, and he will begin to learn that God has set things up this way so that it will be with the bonds of love and not the whip of the law that we are drawn to holiness through the Lord Jesus Christ.

From The Gospel of John, Volume 1, by James Montgomery Boice, p. 83.

Booksnip (1)

I've been reading Gordon Fee's commentary on 1 Corinthians and enjoying it a great deal. On page 87 Fee is commenting on 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, wherein Paul is writing about God calling the foolish, weak, and worthless things (in the the world's estimation) to shame the wise, powerful and affluent of the world, for the purpose of bringing everyone to the point of "boastlessness" (my word . . . sorry).

Fee writes:

The conclusion of the paragraph, "no human boasting" but rather "boasting in Christ" through whom God has effected salvation for us, continues (rightly) to play a signifcant role in the church. All of this is quite in keeping with the great cadences of Romans and Galatians, with which the Protestant tradition is so familiar. Unfortunately the means (the cross as the divine scandal) and the evidence for this conlcusion do not always get the same hearing. It is not that god cannot, or will not, save the affluent. But for Paul the glory of the Gospel does not lie there; rather, it lies in his mercy toward the very people whom most of the affluent tend to write off--the foolish, the weak, the despised. Such people do not fit well into the "suburban captivity of the church." This paragraph must serve as a continual warning against our remaking into our own more comfortable images God's distinctly revealed priorities of mercy for the helpless--as part of the evidence that his ways are not ours.