Monthly Archives: December 2007

Talking and doing

Posted by on December 20, 2007 2 comments

I've long held that there are many unbelievers in the church, and that this is an ongoing problem that needs to be faced without fear by church leaders in every congregation (1 Cor 5:9-13).

As believers we also have to share some of this responsibility.  However, the church today seems ill equipped to identify these individuals, never mind remove them.

So – in Matthew 7:21 we read:

Not everyone who says to me "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven

This is a classic passage that distinguishes those who are saved from those who are not.  Yet it is very easy for us to miss the implications of this passage in our dealings with other church goers on a Sunday morning – or even at bible studies and similar such things.

So – here is the question – what does it mean to do the will of the Lord?  We seem to be able to spiritualise almost everything, and in many cases this leads to gray areas in our thinking.  Knowing the will of God is an area that has been written about ad nauseam.  I remember when I was a young Christian trying to grapple what the will of God was for my life.  Should I do this or that? Make a decision to one thing or another.  I am now convinced that this sort of thinking actually does very little for us at all.  It is complicated and subject to every whim and subtlety we are prepared to read out of our circumstances.

So what does it mean to do the will of the Father and what bearing can this have on our standing before the Lord?

Lets start simple.  In 1 Thess 4:3-6 we read:

For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality; 4 that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, 5 not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; 6 that no one transgress and wrong his brother in this matter, because the Lord is an avenger in all these things, as we told you beforehand and solemnly warned you.

According to this passage the will of God for us is our sanctification.  What is sanctification?  In this particular passage it refers to a transformation from impurity to purity – from a life divorced from the righteousness of God to a life that reflects the righteousness of God.

Part of this transformation is the renewal of the mind (Rom 12:2) that comes when we present ourselves as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1).  The result of this sanctification is holiness (1 Thess 4:7).

However, this is the will of God – that we be transformed and made holy. 

There are other things involved in sanctification (as you'll see from the passage above), however, for the purpose of the point I'd like to make this "will" do for the moment.

With regards to our passage in Matt 7, this means that it is not those who talk about the Lord that will be saved, but those who are transformed will be saved.

There are many in church today who claim to be saved, but when you ask them how their Bible reading is going, they'll tell you that they don't have time or some similar reason.  These same people will often exhibit some of the traits of worldliness, and will be more inclined to discuss work, sports or gossip than they will their (or your) walk with the Lord, their Bible readings or anything spiritual.

Don't be deceived by people who try, but never succeed in putting the Lord first in their life.  For sure, there will be those in the church who are weak, but if they are unchanging in their walk, not growing and yet talk a good talk and never do anything – they may in fact be unsaved.

We should be willing to ask hard questions (such as "are you saved?", "how do you know?") and dig deeper than the surface, then hold each other accountable for change and if it doesn't appear, deal with it accordingly.

We should be able to defend the way we live from scripture, not explain the way we live by the standards the world sets.  It is not those who talk a good talk who enter the kingdom of God, but those who do the will of God.

Podcasts

Posted by on December 19, 2007 Comments Off

After a discussion yesterday, I thought I'd publish a list of the podcasts I subscribe to.

I actually use a Zune rather than an iPod, and the new Zune software does a great job of managing content on the device.

So – here is the list :-) .  Click the orange feed icon to get to the feed (the Grace To You feed requires a free account).

  • Christ Fellowship Baptist Church (Steve Lawson)
  • Mars Hill Church Sermons (Mark Driscoll)
  • Grace to You (John MacArthur)
  • Desiring God (John Piper)

There are not many there. But I do mostly listen to them.  I use my time traveling in the day to and from work to listen to sermons.  I also like to try and run on occasion, and I also use this time to listen to sermons.  This way, I've always got something going into my head and it is generally of value.

If anyone has other quality speakers who have a podcast, I'd be interested in hearing about them.

Christmas Story in MP3 for download

Posted by on December 17, 2007 Comments Off

John Wilke wrote in to tell us about the free dramatized audio Bible presentations available for free download in MP3 and WAV formats.

The site publishing these is www.faithcomesbyhearing.com which is publishing these in a series of podcasts that are around 12 minutes each.

Subscribe to the series here.

They also have the entire Bible in audio format in several translations available free of charge as a download, or on CD from here. 

Looks like a great resource!

Holiday Reading

Posted by on December 16, 2007 Comments Off

Over the break (I have two weeks off) I was hoping to unwind and so some reading.

Here is what I have on my reading list:

  • John Piper – Let the nations be glad (I’m part way through this – its a great book!)
  • John MacArthur – Because the time is near (again part way through – also very good)
  • J Mortimer Adler  – How to read a book (I’ve had this for years, and have never read it – and when I saw a second referral of this book here, I thought I should read it)
  • Howard and William Hendricks – Living by the book (brilliant for a simple bible study how-to or easy to read refresher)

If I finish those (not likely), I’ve also got  the following:

Realistically, I *might* finish the first three.  I’d really like to do Living by the books as a refresher too. 

As is easy for me to do – I always set up more than I can do.  I’m also hoping to stain the deck, fences and retaining walls, do some thinking for next years study group, reset my priorities and goals for the year, invest time with my three girls not to mention with my lovely wife.

A holiday is just a different kind of work.  But I’m looking forward to it!

Recently Read

Posted by on December 16, 2007 Comments Off

One of the features of Newsgator that I use is the news bins.  I have several, and recently I started one that I can share with you.

So, in this new fangled blogging engine I'm using allows me to have several entries from each of the blogs that I link to. 

So on the left near the bottom you'll see the blog roll, and the first one in the list is "Recently Read".

This is a list of items that I've read on my RSS feeds that I've thought was interested and worth sharing.  I'll update it pretty regularly, so you'll need to either subscribe to the RSS feed or check back here daily if you want to read them all, but if I put it in there, that means its something that has provoked thought in me, and I think is worth sharing.

Enjoy :-)

Excuses, fear and apathy

Posted by on December 15, 2007 2 comments

One of the things which I often find in people from "evangelical" churches (I put that "evangelical" in quotes for a reason which should be clear by the end of this post) is a strange concept of evangelism which staggers me and I believe points to a bigger problem.

I was discussing our home groups recent study of James 5:19-20 [part 1, part 2] and was surprised when this believer responded by indicating that they felt that this method would become a process that is simply manned.

Even when I explained what we’d discussed around the attitude the person doing this needs to have and the deep concern that we need to have for one another, this person was not convinced.

Then they said something interesting.  They said that we should simply live our lives to honor the Lord and our lives will be a witness to unbelievers. 

Typically the thinking behind this idea is that our lives will lead people to ask us what is different about us so we can talk about God to them.  I’ll deal with this in a moment.  In this particular case the idea was that if there are unbelievers in the church that our [moral] lives will cause them to ask us what is different and change.

This thinking illustrates a broader problem with the western church.  There are two issues here:

1) Fear of conflict

Just as the west is becoming so politically correct that it will not oppose anything, so the church is too.  Many churches now are paralyzed by the fear of conflict.  Sin creeps into the church and grows – without any opposition in the church – from leaders or elders – it spreads throughout the church and destroys it.

If sin is dealt with – it means conflict – but we must be willing to let conflict happen for the purity of the church and the glory of Christ.

Likewise, if we are going to preach the gospel, we must be prepared for conflict with unbelievers.  If we shrink from this we will be ineffective witnesses of the grace we’ve been given.

2) Unwilling to preach

While it is indeed necessary that our lives should be devoted to the Lord and this should mean that we are examples of the righteousness of Christ, this alone is not enough to save people.  Romans 10:14 makes this clear:

"But how are they to call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? ANd how are they to hear without someone preaching?"

It is through the folly of what we preach that God saves those who believe (1 Cor 1:21).  We must maintain our walk in righteousness, lest when we preach to others we be disqualified (1 Cor 9:27). We preach Christ crucified (1 Cor 1:23).

Today’s believers are generally more interested in padding their lives in a vacuum of comfort than be challenged or suffer hardship.  We are more interested in pleasure and joy in worldly things than seeing the glory of God through hardship and the bold proclamation of truth.

Jesus said to the church at Sardis

"I know your works.  You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.  Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God."

The church today – even many good churches have a reputation for doing good, however, the reality is that many churches are dead – or dying. 

It is up to the believers left to stand up to the challenge and be counted for Christ and suffer for it.  I believe the time is here when we must steel ourselves to do this – not to win some war, not to save the world – but to demonstrate our love for Christ.

Broken links

Posted by on December 15, 2007 Comments Off

Yeah, I know.  I've broken a bunch of links to this site. It is a consequence of changing blog engines.  I've switched to something that was built from the ground up in .Net 2.0 rather than bringing .Net 1.x architecture into the .Net 2.0 paradigm.

The benefit is that it will be much quicker and easier for me to make changes to the engine itself.

There are a heap of other benefits too though – which come in particularly handy with regards to my broken links.  One is search – we now have much better search capability – including the ability to search comments.  We also have comment RSS feeds, post ratings and a nice ajax based calendar for viewing posts.

The site also looks a lot more appealing.

The engine is being maintained a little more than the other one which means that it should keep pace with technology better.  I also have the ability to add more authors, so I might do this in the future to try and build up more content.

If you want some advice – for what it's worth – if you are looking at selecting a blog engine – select one that supports import and export of BlogML – this greatly simplifies migrating engines.

Another FWIW – I also looked at wordpress, but not being able to use feedburner broke that deal – even though I had a really good looking blog and no hosting requirements.  I was going to look at typepad too, but they required a credit card before being able to trial it – so I dumped them early – regardless of features.  I was looking at VineType and dasblog, but the architecture is based on .Net 1.x so no benefits to migrating.  In the end I selected BlogEngine.Net – which has better features than the old engine (subtext).

Oh – And yes, I know about blogger, but given my day job – this made it kind of hard to go there…

Mostly trivia – but sorry about the broken links :-)

Two tips for Logos software users

Posted by on December 11, 2007 Comments Off

I stumbled upon this tonight – very handy.

If you use logos (and if you don’t, you really should consider using it – it is brilliant), you can scroll up and down a chapter at a time with your mouse if you hold down the right mouse button and move the mouse up and let the button go. 

It sounds complex, but it is really very simple and useful.  It works in any book and skips to the next section if the book you are in is not a bible.

Also, if you are interested in a heap of books, there are a heap available here for free.  There are heaps of fantastic authors here, such as C H Spurgeon, Jonathon Edwards and heaps more.

There is also a free application you can download and install to automatically download these books to your library – again free.

Very cool stuff.

God, evil and free will

Posted by on December 3, 2007 Comments Off

This is a big subject.  I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but even so, I don’t have all the answers, so comments and discussion is welcome :-) .

Why is evil in the world?

In last weekend’s sermon, I said that evil serves a purpose.  Specifically I said that this purpose was more important than the problems that evil caused which means that removal of evil would prevent a greater good from coming about.

The way I exemplified this was by looking at Adam and Eve before the fall and asking “what did they know about God before the fall?”.  Which is an interesting question.

Before the fall they probably knew about Gods non-moral attributes – His power, knowledge, wisdom and such. They may also have knew something of the love of God and a few other things.  The question is similar to asking what can be known of God from natural revelation – that is – from the created order.  Lots can certainly be known of God from natural order – certainly enough to leave men without excuse (Rom 1:20).  However, sin throws many of the attributes of God into sharp relief and makes these less obvious attributes of God more apparent.  Without sin, we would know very little (if anything) about the justice of God, the mercy of God, the grace of God or the holiness of God.  However, with sin, these things become much clearer.

Thus, sin serves a greater purpose – that is to illuminate the character of God.

Now – this is where things get interesting.  One person after my sermon said that I almost made evil sound like a good thing.  I hope it is clear that we should never suggest that sin or evil is ever good.  It is in fact opposite to all that God is, and so it is to be hated to the utmost.  My point is not to justify evil – but to demonstrate that evil serves a greater purpose – which is why it has not been removed.

If we look at Romans 5, we find that the law came in “to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more”. The logic here is similar – if the law came to increase sin, then more sin means more grace, which results in the glory of God – thus perhaps if we sin, we can glorify God.  This is why Paul asked in Romans 6 “What shall we say then?  Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?”  Certainly not!  Are we to celebrate sin and evil so that the character of God may be shown more clearly? Again – No!

Does God “use” evil reactively?

Now if evil is in the world, and the Lord has allowed it to happen for his own glory, this seems to be all well and good and we can accept this.  However, this is only the beginning.  Scripture presents a picture that is considerably more complex than God just allowing sin to remain.

Take for instance Gen 45:8 and Gen 50:20.  These passages have Joseph talking to his brothers years after they sold him into slavery in Egypt.  The interesting thing about this is that they intended evil for him. They expected to never see him again, and yet God used their evil for his own purposes.  This is clear from Gen 50:20:

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.

In the same way that Joseph’s brothers intended evil, so God intended good.  The one action had two intentions – the intentions of man and the intentions of God.  Note the equivalence of mans purpose and Gods in the one action.  If God wanted Joseph in Egypt why did he use the evil of his brothers to bring it about?  Many would say that Joseph’s brothers intended evil and God reacted by piggybacking on that evil.  However, this text says that the intentions of God and the brothers were both played out – in other words God intended this evil act as part of His divine plan – not reactively, but at least just as proactively as Joseph’s brothers.

We see the same thing in Peters speech on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2:23:

this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

We should know that the death of the Christ was foretold by prophets hundreds of years before the Lord came to earth.  This verse tells us that Jesus was delivered up to death (which for someone not worthy of death is a great evil), and that not only was this foreknown by God, but it was Gods plan.  God appointed (or ordained) evil as a means of achieving good.  Evil was in the plan of God – not because of His foreknowledge, but because it was His sovereign plan to utilize evil for His ultimate end.

How does free will fit this?

This raises some questions, which frankly we cannot answer adequately.  How can God ordain or appoint evil actions on the part of men to fulfill His purpose without Himself being evil?  I don’t know.  God is holy, and righteous and just and completely separate from sin.  But what I can say is that it seems from scripture that this is indeed the case – God appoints evil to achieve his will. 

A mistake we can easily make when looking at this is to say that the relationship between Gods sovereignty and mans free will is the same as my sovereignty and your free will.  That is to say that I can only influence you to do things – I cannot directly have any autonomy over you.  Thus my sovereignty stops and your free will starts.  This is a very common error and I believe it undergirds fallacies such as Arminianism as well as Open Theism and others.

We must be careful not to relate to God on a creature to creature basis – He is creator and is not bound by the same restrictions his creatures have, and neither is He limited by His creatures or creation (miracles should be ample evidence of this).  To make this mistake is to make an error in category – that is to put God in a category with His creation.

This thinking is also at odds with scripture.  Proverbs 21:1 for instance clearly states the sovereignty of God over the will of man:

The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will

The Lord is not limited by our free will.  However, how does God move man, while not being responsible for the failure of man?  I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean we can just throw this out.  We don’t understand the trinity or how God can become man either, and neither do we throw them out. 

Why is this important?

The ramification of throwing this truth away is this: If we don’t believe that God is sovereign over the will of man and can determine the heart and will of man, then praying for people to be saved, or for the government or for any person’s will to be changed is pointless at best.  However, given the word of God sets an example and encourages us to pray for people generally as well as for their hearts and for their salvation (1 Chron 29:19, 1 Tim 2:1-2, Eph 6:19-20, Rom 10:1, Col 4:12) this indicates that this is in fact true.

The great truth of all this is that God will be glorified through the presence of evil in creation.  His character is demonstrated to His creation through the contrast that evil introduces and we can clearly see great breadth and perfect balance in the Lord, which should lead us to worship Him – not only for what he has done for us (although this should be part of it) but more importantly because of His greatness.

Not only will God be glorified by evil, but we can rejoice in God.  When we are suffering, we suffer because of sin and evil, but we suffer so that we may be changed to be more like Him in His perfection (James 1:2-4).  Even if we suffer due to some human conspiracy or the evil desires of another human, God is sovereign over this and we can seek the Lords help.  Finally, if we are telling people about Jesus Christ, we can ask Him to open their hearts to the truth (Acts 16:14) – and know that we are not asking the impossible – as all things are possible with God (Mark 10:27) and that we can entreat Him on this basis (Mark 14:35).

Our God is not trivial, nor academic, but is powerful, sovereign, majestic, worthy of worship and able to answer our prayers!