another puritan guest blogger

This post is brought to you by Thomas Brooks, a puritan preacher who lived in the 17th century. I found these twenty "short" sayings from Brooks on the web.

They may not all be short by our standards, but they're certainly worth the read.

1. Let those be thy choicest companions who have made Christ their chief companion.
   
2. The lives of ministers oftentimes convince more strongly than their words; their tongues may persuade, but their lives command.
   
3. Christ choosing solitude for private prayer, doth not only hint to us the danger of distraction and deviation of thoughts in prayer, but how necessary it is for us to choose the most convenient places we can for private prayer. Our own fickleness and Satan's restlessness call upon us to get into such places where we may freely pour out our soul into the bosom of God [Mark 1.35].
   
4. Suffering times are sealing times. The primitive Christians found them so, and the suffering saints in Mary's days found them so. When the furnace is seven times hotter than ordinary, the Spirit of the Lord comes and seals up a man's pardon in his bosom, his peace with God, and his title to heaven. Blessed Bradford looked upon his sufferings as an evidence to him that he was on the right way to heaven.
   
5. It is better to have a sore than a seared conscience.
   
6. God sees us in secret, therefore, let, us seek his face in secret. Though heaven be God's palace, yet it is not his prison.
   
7. God's hearing of our prayers doth not depend upon sanctification, but upon Christ's intercession; not upon what we are in ourselves, but what we are in the Lord Jesus; both our persons and our prayers are acceptable in the beloved [Eph 1.6].
   
8. Christ is the sun, and all the watches of our lives should be set by the dial of his motion.
   
9. An idle life and a holy heart is a contradiction.
   
10. Repentance is a grace, and must have its daily operation, as well as other graces. A true penitent must go on from faith to faith, from strength to strength; he must never stand still or turn back. True repentance is a continued spring, where the waters of godly sorrow are always flowing. 'My sin is ever before me'.
    
11. It was a choice saying of Augustine, 'Every saint is God's temple, and he who carries his temple about him, may go to prayer when he pleaseth'.
    
12. Prayer is nothing but the breathing that out before the Lord, that was first breathed into us by the Spirit of the Lord.
    
13. Those years, months, weeks, days, and hours, that are not filled up with God, with Christ, with grace, and with duty, will certainly be filled up with vanity and folly. The neglect of one day, of one duty, of one hour, would undo us, if we had not an Advocate with the Father.
    
14. You had better be a poor man and a rich Christian, than a rich man and a poor Christian. You had better do anything, bear anything, and be anything rather than be a dwarf in grace.
    
15. Much faith will yield unto us here our heaven, but any faith, if true, will yield us heaven hereafter.
    
16. A man's most glorious actions will at last be found to be but glorious sins, if he hath made himself, and not the glory of God, the end of those actions.
    
17. The two poles could sooner meet, than the love of Christ and the love of the world.
    
18. My sin is ever before me' [Psalm 51.3]. A humble soul sees that he can stay no more from sin, than the heart can from panting, and the pulse from beating. He sees his heart and life to be fuller of sin, than the firmament is of stars; and this keeps him low. He sees that sin is so bred in the bone, that till his bones, as Joseph's, be carried out of the Egypt of this world, it will not out. Though sin and grace were never born together, and though they shall not die together, yet while the believer lives, these two must live together; and this keeps him humble.
    
19. The only way to avoid cannon-shot is to fall down. No such way to be freed from temptation as to keep low.
    
20. The best and sweetest flowers of Paradise God gives to his people when they are upon their knees. Prayer is the gate of heaven, a key to let us in to Paradise.

C/C Camping Trip

Anyone putting those last minute items in their bags for Bass Lake might want to check out this weather forecast. Looks like we might get a chance to meditate on Psalm 29 together.

If you have any questions, call me at the church or on my cell. See you all at the ministry fair tonight, and then again at 4:00am.

-nate

Proverbs 18 and the healthy body

Do we NEED friends?

Has God built us in a way where, if we are not in fellowship with others, we miss out not only on the blessings of human companionship, but somehow shortchange our potential for growth in Him?

When I spend time with my brothers and sisters in the family of Christ, am I looking for a good time? For something for myself? Or am I looking, in some way, to grow together towards Him?

Are my Christian friendships the kind of places where I practice kindness, gentleness, self-control, longsuffering, and forgiveness? Or do I cling to my pride and a false picture of my self-sufficiency and [fool myself into thinking I can] hide my imperfections from others?

Am I more worried about keeping my human "relationships" in tact than about obeying God's direction in His Word?

In the middle of mulling all of these questions, I remembered Proverbs 18:1, "A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; he rages against all wise judgment." That seemed to answer my "do we need friends?" question. But when I looked up this chapter, I saw that it is all -- from start to finish -- a primer on getting along with others.

As always, it's best to read the entire chapter in context, but here are some examples of its wisdom:

v. 2 - A fool has no delight in understanding,
But in expressing his own heart.

v. 8 - The words of a talebearer are like tasty trifles,
And they go down into the inmost body.

v. 19 - A brother offended is harder to win than a strong city,
And contentions are like the bars of a castle.

v. 20 - A man’s stomach shall be satisfied from the fruit of his mouth;
From the produce of his lips he shall be filled.

v. 21 - Death and life are in the power of the tongue,
And those who love it will eat its fruit.

v. 24 - A man who has friends must himself be friendly,
But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Fruitful friendships don't happen by accident. They take work, humility, patience, and love. But how worth it will it be if we can help each other to know Christ more fully and spur each other to accomplish His kingdom work on this earth!

joy: the real thing

This morning I was thinking about part of Psalm 30:5, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning."

I have always associated this verse with weeping over someone's sickness, and associated the joy that comes in the morning with a restoration of health. So in my mind a paraphrase would've been something like "you may cry over God's seeming silence for a season, but in the next season He will surely bring you what you ask and make sure you have everything you want to be happy."

But this morning my little paraphrase just wasn't ringing true.

Maybe it had something to do with James 1:2-4:

My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

Or with Romans 5:1-5:

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

We are not guaranteed the fulfillment of our requests in prayer.

We are guaranteed suffering.

But we are also guaranteed joy.

This means that the fulfillment of our requests and joy must be two separate things. Joy must be something that can exist side-by-side with suffering. Joy WILL come in the morning. But what will it look like?

The first answer that cropped up in my mind was from Psalm 16:11, "in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore."

He alone is our guarantee of joy. I can watch my loved one's sickness go from bad to worse, and still see joy in the morning -- if I am in His presence.

What a weighty miracle this is.

John Piper describes it one way in Desiring God:

In conversion we find the hidden Treasure of the kingdom of God. We venture all on it. And year after year in the struggles of life, we prove the value of the treasure again and again, and we discover depths of riches we had never known. And so the joy of faith grows. When Christ calls us to a new act of obedience that will cost us some temporal pleasure, we call to mind the surpassing value of following Him, and by faith in His proven worth, we forsake the worldly pleasure. The result? More joy! More faith! Deeper than before. And so we go on from joy to joy and faith to faith.

(Multnomah: 2003, p. 74)

hey Jude

[warning: this post was written by someone who draws applications from unusual sources]

The other day I was listening to Beatles: One and got "Hey Jude" stuck in my head. (The internet is replete with theories on what that song means, but really I guess it doesn't matter right now since this post is about something else.)

Thinking over the line "well you know that it's a fool / who plays it cool / by making his world a little colder," I started to think about the importance of being passionate about things that are passion-worthy and not "playing it cool" with things that matter.

Maybe that's ambiguous.

Here are some ingredients in my mental marinade:

• The stories of the early Christians in Acts, giving their alls for Christ seemingly without a second thought (the consequences of acting on second thoughts it pretty dramatically illustrated by the story of Ananias and Sapphira). It was all or nothing in the Acts church. Is it that they didn't have the luxury (maybe more of curse?) we have of so easily blending into our surrounding culture? Or that, even though they could've, they were so passionate they chose not to?
• This challenge from John Piper. How do I act when I am really excited about something? How do people who are "in love" act and talk? Is my "passion for Christ" something that I write about on paper, or something that is apparent in my actions and in the words I speak?
• The powerful devotion of adherents to radical Islam (and the incredible growth of Islam all over the world). Wrong? Yeah. Devoted? Yeah, that too. Christ isn't calling us to the death of a suicide bomber when he says "come and die," but that somehow doesn't keep us from coming up with excuses to follow.
• The total inanity of the church as perceived by Western culture. Some of us were having a conversation recently about the meaning and usage of the word "lame." Well, the church is perceived as lame in the literal sense that it's a cripple, and lame in the vernacular sense that it's dumb and boring. And that's because cultural Christianity isn't about passion for Christ at all.

I'm convinced that our generation has a dramatic choice to make between all-out crazy boundless uninhibited devotion to Christ or living in active rebellion to His call. I don't think that, given the cultural threats to the Western church, we'll have the option of having "regular" American-dream-9-5-job-lives where we can go to church on Sundays and try to be a good witness in the workplace and go to Bible study on Wednesday nights and call it good. We need to GO to carry the Gospel to new places, or to have such an attitude of GO in our lives at home that we are committed to make no compromises, to lose all respect in the eyes of others, and to stand unabashedly for the truth of His Word in words and deeds.

That's what it will take to show those around us that the God we serve really is worth living -- and dying -- for.

A lesser god wouldn't be worthy of our worship, devotion, or service in the first place.

perspective on the Scrolls

I was just poking around technorati.com to check out the blogosphere's response to San Diego's Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit and stumbled upon this very helpful review from Pastor Walter Price in Beaumont.

If you were there a few months back for the Thursday night study on the preservation and reliability of Scripture, you will probably recognize some of Dr. Archer's examples.

stars and stripes [aren't] forever

Studying colonial American history, I was always intrigued by the names given to some of the pilgrims' children. One name that stood out especially was "Peregrine," which literally means "foreign, alien; wandering, traveling." It's not an accident that the same people who left everything they had known and established for a chance at freedom would christen a child this way.

Looking back on our nation's history, with all the benefits of that 20/20 hindsight thing, we forget the uncertainty and doubt that must've loomed heavy on the minds of all who led the way at each critical juncture. Happily as it may have turned out for us, the decisions made by pilgrim families was not easy. They made the choice to be strangers in search of a better country. And they were painfully aware of the difficulties and risks that their choice brought.

Not too long after elementary school and all of those lessons about the Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, and Squanto and the corn-growing, I began to cultivate a new interest in pilgrims and wanderers, based on a passage from Hebrews 11. After relating the faith of some of the earliest followers of Yahweh, the author says,

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.

This is not an isolated recounting of this theme in Scripture. One exciting thing about studying the Old Testament in Sunday School has been watching this pilgrim theme unfold again. God's people are frequently wanderers in a foreign land, living in a way that declares that they seek a homeland. From Genesis to Revelation, His people are strangers and pilgrims, ambassadors for the King of that heavenly country.

So as we celebrate patriotism today on the Fourth of July, let's take a bit to reflect on how our experience here is just a faint reflection of our love for the better country we so desire.

Would my life be worthy of a name like "Peregrine"? Do I declare plainly that I am not at home here? Do I sing the Lord's song in this foreign land?

Do I think of heaven the same way that the psalmist remembered his home country in Psalm 137?

By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

How shall we sing the LORD's song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its skill!
Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy!

Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, "Lay it bare, lay it bare,
down to its foundations!"
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!