Yup...its good to laugh

Calvin on the Proper View of This World

On Matthew 5:11-12:

“This is the sense of Jesus’ teaching in this passage. To be rich, to be glad, to be satisfied is to be drunk on prosperity and to live the life of senseless beasts. If we are comfortably off, it is not so that we may cover ourselves with gold and silver, or boast of owning fields and meadows, alike those whose goal in life is to have everything they want. Those kinds of people are as good as dead: they bury themselves in their perishable possessions and are incapable of seeing heaven above. As for us, we must take heed to ourselves lest the Son of God condemn us with his own lips: only by looking to him for continual blessing can we escape the misfortune promised here. We are taught, then, to pass through this world as strangers, convinced, as St Paul says, that those who have should be as those who have not. No one would deny that those who have plenty to live on meet many more temptations and run more risk of falling. They need, therefore, to turn constantly to God, and to learn that his gifts are meant to draw them closer t him, to quicked their love and to encourage their obedience. The good things they receive must never bewitch them to point that they become captives of this world.” –John Calvin, Sermons On The Beatitudes p. 79, 80.

A few things like light to a newborn babe strike us:

1)That this world is constantly trying to lay hold upon us much like an octopus. Its tentacles are many, they come from the job, the friends, and even from inside the marketed church as people covet everything from books to fiancé’s. The subtly with which octopi stalk their enemies is no less encompassing then the night drawn up by the dusk. It is coming unless we with wide eyed sober defense resist and run to the city upon a hill, the cross of Christ.
2) We must be as strangers and aliens. As those who immigrate to this country know enough of the language to get by, but none of the slang so let us be so unfamiliar with this world and its ways that the slang of sin is never upon our lips, ‘innocent as doves’ and yet the beauties of heaven always sweetly sweeping silently into our conversations as snakes through the grass. This then will spark the joy of heaven, the sincerity of evil and sin, and the hope of the cross in others lives and God works through the preaching of his word. Marvelously wrapped up in light he will fold this world unto himself in the blissful cosmic redemption. Hope is real.
3)Obedience is paramount upon our being. That with our conversion we would obey our Lord. The duty given by grace induced imperatives shines light upon the path to the joy in times of midnight desperation. And in times of abundance the joy guides us along to the path of consistent, prayerful, duty. Let us do this and live, ‘those who live by the spirit fulfill the law’ (Romans 8:3,4).

“But not only are my sins forgiven, I know that I am in this new relationship. I am not only forgiven, I have become a child of god, even as I am; He has adopted me into His family. And if you do not feel that you are happy because of that, then you do not know anything about Christianity. When some great honour comes to you you are full of rejoicing , and you tell everybody, do you not? So then, if you have really believed that in Christ you are in the family of God, you must tell the whole world about it and you must be filled with rejoicing. You are a child of God, you have His Spirit in you- ‘joy in the Holy Ghost.’” -Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Kingdom of God p. 84

“ ‘Peace’---‘righteousness and peace’. It follows inevitably, does it not? How can people be at peace when they are worried about their souls? How can they have peace when they know they are damned? Or when they are afraid of death because they know that it is followed by judgment? How can men and women have peace when they are striving, only to find how unworthy they are? It is impossible. But the moment they believe this blessed truth of the kingdom of God and in Christ as God’s way of righteousness, then everything is changed immediately. ‘being justified by faith, we have peace with God.’ It is an end of all my futile struggles.” -Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Kingdom of God p.81

Know Before Whom You Stand

“Indeed, there are so many people who call themselves Christians, but who have never really faced the question of how do they stand before God. they have assumed, like the Pharisees, that if you do this, that and the other, you are all right. They have never though about God; they have never considered their own relationship to Him. But this is what righteousness makes us do. It does not start wit hus and our behaviour and our ideas and our worships and our rituals and all the paraphernalia. It says, ‘There is God and there are you; and you have got to meet Him. You will have to stand before Him, face Him, and give an account of your life lived in the body.’ So we know nothing about righteousness until we have faced that old quesiotn of Job’s: ‘How should a man be just with God?’ (Job 9:2). You see, we can go though life and never stop to think of that. We live from day to day; we live on our own activities, on our own goodness and we are nice and self-contained and we have never faced this question. ‘it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment’ (Heb 9:27), and God will judge us in a holy , righteous manner, because ‘it is He that hast made us and not we ourselves’ (Ps 100:3); and He has put certain powers into us and He expects certain things from us.” -Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Kingdom of God p.76.

Luther on Depression

"Once Luther gave gave three rules for dispelling despondency: the first is faith in Christ; the second is to get downright angry; the third is the love of a woman. Music was especially commended."-Roland Bainton, Here I Stand p.363.

I do realized that most of us have #3 as unavailable at current. However; let with all our might us trust Christ and enjoy music. The third will come, have some faith, God wants it to come.

"Divine judgment may be by the principle of works or of grace but in either case the standard by which man is measured in the great assize is covenant law. In a judgment according to works, blessing rewards meritorious obedience and curse punishes the transgressor. In a judgment by the principle of grace, blessing is bestowed in the face of violation of stipulated moral-religious duty, in spite of the presence of demerit. (Divine justice will, of course, be satisfied whether it be a judgment of works or of grace.)"
-Meredith Kline, Kingdom Prologue p.112.

Luther on Our Lives and Gods Sundays

"...we profit by nothing so much as by the Word. For the whole Scripture shows that the Word should have free course amoung Chistians. And in Luke 10[:42], Christ himself says, "One thing is needful," i.e., that Mary sit at the feet of Christ and hear his word daily. This is the best part to choose and it shall not be taken away forever. It is an eternal Word. everything else must pass away, no matter how much care and trouble it may give Martha. God help us achieve this. Amen." -Martin Luther

The Word people, first and foremost. Get into it. Let it get into you. See the lynch like necessity of letting it get into you. Its a covenant of Grace, "Do this and live".

"Its the only book that when you investigate it, it investigates you." -Alistair Begg

Purpose of the Scriptures.

"The Bible as Old and New Testaments, was designed to provide constitutions for theses old and new covenants, and in these covenants, the conferral of the kingdom-grant promised in God's covenant with Christ takes place, in typological symbol under the old and in consummate reality under the new." -Meredith Kline, Kingdom Prologue, p.142.

If you understand this, tell me what it means in a comment.

Death of the Church

Machen again brings us up front in Christianity and Culture:

"Instead of making our theological seminaries merely centres of religious emotion, we shall make them battle-grounds of the faith, where, helped a little by the experience of Christian teachers, men are taught to fight their own battle, where they come to appreciate the real strength of the adversary and in the hard school of intellectual struggle learn to substitute for the unthinking faith of childhood the profound convictions of full-grown men. Let us not fear in this a loss of spiritual power. The Church is perishing today through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it. She is winning victories in this sphere of material betterment. Such victories are glorious. God save us from the heartless crime of disparaging them. They are relieving the misery of men. But if they stand alone, I fear they are but temporary. The things which are seen are temporal; the things which are not seen are eternal. What will become of philanthropy if God be lost? Beneath the surface of life lies a world of spirit. Philosophers have attempted to explore it. Christianity has revealed its wonders to the simple soul. There lie the springs of the Church's power. But that spiritual realm cannot be entered without controversy. And now the Church is shrinking from the conflict. Driven from the spiritual realm by the current of modern thought, she is consoling herself with things about which there is no dispute."

Sounds hopeless huh? Keep reading:

"The great questions may easily be avoided. Many preachers are avoiding them. And many preachers are preaching to the air. The Church is waiting for men of another type. Men to fight her battles and solve her problems. The hope of finding them is the one great inspiration of a Seminary's life. They need not all be men of conspicuous attainments. But they must all be men of thought. They must fight hard against spiritual and intellectual indolence. Their thinking may be confined to narrow limits. But it must be their own. To them theology must be something more than a task. It must be a matter of inquiry. It must lead not to successful memorizing, but to genuine convictions."

The Church needs men. "Be strong, act like men" the apsotle Paul to the Corinthian Church.

So....sex, what to do with it?

I just read this book by Peter Jones who is our resident scholar* at my school Westminster Seminary California about Sex, Paganism, and the God of the Bible. Which is rad. Definitely a rad book, worth reading because many of the things that we do are pagan in origin regarding the massive influx of the oversexed culture that we live in. We are dunked daily before we are saved in pagan views of sex. And when we get saved we are getting dried out, squeezed by the reality of the cross, applied with roadrunner anvil accuracy to shatter our stony hearts. We NEED to recover the biblical view of sex, or die trying. Which probably wont work because sex is about procreation, but that is a topic well beyond my area of expertise. Perhaps we can learn much from this man who has 7 kids, which is a holy number. Watch his interview at the Resurgence, its great!



*By the way a scholar in residence as far as I can gather is a retired teacher at our school who just reads books and writes all day. Sounds great huh?