Last Sunday we started our new series on the book of Hebrews. By most
all accounts, Hebrews is a beautiful and well-crafted book that handles a powerful argument from beginning to end. The problem is, we are just barely in a position to understand it when we read it!
You should make a point of joining us on Sunday nights for our study through this incredible book!
Our LHC Book Club is discussing The Life and Diary of David Brainerd by Jonathan Edwards tonight. It is the edited journals and diary of an early colonial missionary to the American Indians (1741-1745). David lived the life of a frontier missionary – he made his home among various Indian tribes, spent the majority of his days among them preaching, teaching, and getting to know them. David also worked himself to death – he died at the age of 29 of TB in Jonathan Edward’s home. All told, his truly is an amazing and inspiring story. (The book by Edwards has not been out of print since its first printing in the 1700s.)
Brainerd was racked by depression. His diary entries become almost oppressive with his personal melancholy and sense of his own sinfulness. If nothing else, he was clear about how deep human sinfulness went, how it separates us from God, and how each human soul needs God’s gracious salvation.
Brainerd was driven to preach the gospel both to the church and the unreached world. Early in his writings he is burdened with the lukewarm nature of the church and how most Christians misappropriate their time in worthless and idle things. He clearly lived what he taught and wrote about, and it is very convicting indeed. Later in his career he became more and more burdened for the lost specifically the American Indian tribes on the frontiers of Western settlements. His journal records powerful moves of God in which entire families and villages were convicted of sin and came to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.
There is much to commend in the work – much more than can be handled quickly here. Maybe you have something to add about the lessons of his life?
I have been thinking lately about the combination of church and culture in the hearts of American Christians. Actually, as a pastor, you might say this issue is ingrained in what I do on a weekly basis, but nonetheless, it has been on the surface in recent days. Where does church fit into our priorities and schedules? How are we acculturated to view our spiritual selves? How much of that do we bring into our weekly church habits? Is church (as we know it) really all that important in the long run? So, as any decent blogger, I thought I would think out loud about a few things.
There are no major, publicly accepted institutions that enforce the importance of the spiritual.
The biblical view, which I believe is the accurate anthropological view, is that everything is spiritual (with apologies to Rob Bell). Though we are accustomed to a view in which our normal, day-to-day lives are lived in a non-spiritual and wholly “secular” world, it is more accurate to say that there is nothing that is not God-soaked.
Last night in our Tuesday Night Discipleship Study we continued through Richard Foster’s book, Prayer, and came to the topic of “The Prayer of Suffering.” I honestly didn’t know what to expect when I started the chapter, but it wasn’t long before I found what Foster had to say to be compelling and entirely in accord with Scripture and life with Christ.
The “Prayer of Suffering” is not a prayer to have more suffering in life (Christians are not masochists) and it is not even the prayer to eliminate suffering from our lives. It is a prayer – or even more appropriately, a way of living life with others under Christ – of redemptive suffering. Foster says, “Here we give to God the various difficulties and trials that we face, asking him to use them redemptively. We also voluntarily take into ourselves the griefs and sorrows of others in order to set them free.” (pg. 217)
Our ultimate example of redemptive suffering is Christ on the cross. There, he took the pinnacle of unjust punishment, bore our sins, and died in our place. Through the suffering of the cross, Christ redeemed not just our eternal souls, but all the pain and suffering we endure in this life. I think it can be said that without the cross and the empty tomb, suffering is nothing but the nihilistic struggle it feels like, but with Christ it can be a vehicle for our redemption.
And it isn’t just Christ. The apostle Paul wrote that he endured all kinds of things in order to proclaim the Gospel, and that he rejoiced in that the Gospel was proclaimed in spite of his own pain (Col. 1:24-29; Phil 3:8-11). Then he encouraged us to do the same as we go through life with those we love (Galatians 6:2, Romans 12:15).
There is so much more to be said, but I encourage you if you are a disciple of Christ to learn what it means to live through your suffering and the suffering of those you love in a redemptive way. We keep our eyes and lives on Christ the author and perfector of our faith who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross and despised its shame (Heb 12:1-2).
Funerals are a pain. And I don’t mean that in the sense that they are an annoying inconvenience – they are pain. They mark the passing of family or friend, and they stand as that public moment when we all grieve, love on each other, and make steps toward a new normal without the one we loved. As a pastor I sometimes get to watch as families deal with their loss while the pain is very fresh and sometimes the members of families are all at very different places at all the same time. One thing I have never appreciated about some is their immediate tendency to try and brush aside the grief with something like, “at least they are in a better place.” Though that is true for those who die with Christ, and though that truth is part of the healing process, we ought not to short-circuit the process of death and grief so quickly.
A recent article in CT deals with the new book, The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come, by Rob Moll. In the article we are encouraged to think more about funerals as an act of spiritual formation and even community formation under Christ. We are, after all, people of a crucified and risen savior living in inevitable physical decay. We ought to therefore embody a community of resurrection – and remember that resurrection implies death. Rob Moll notes:
We live in a culture that has forgotten how to help people measure their days. Through medicine and science, we know more about death and how to forestall it than ever before. Yet we know little about how to prepare people for the inevitable. The church is a community that teaches people how to live well by teaching them how to measure their days. Put another way, when the church incarnates a culture of resurrection—one that recognizes the inevitability of death but not its triumph—it teaches people how to die well.
Have we become so obsessed with living well or living comfortably that we have lost sight of dying well as part of the spiritual act of the believer? If we have neglected this, does it betray a lack of confidence in the providential guidance of God in all seasons of life?
I have mentioned that our LHC book club recently read Anselm’s Cur Deus
Homo. After reading the book a second time (and being thoroughly impressed a second time), I read up on Anselm and the book, and discovered it was quite the theological and philosophical revolution at the time. One of the passages that stuck out to me was the first chapter of the second book titled, “How man was made holy by God, so as to be happy in the enjoyment of God.” The first few sentences are provocative.
It ought not to be disputed that rational nature was made holy by God, in order to be happy in enjoying Him. For to this end is it rational, in order to discern justice and injustice, good and evil, and between the greater and the lesser good. Otherwise it was made rational in vain. But God made it not rational in vain. Wherefore, doubtless, it was made rational for this end. In like manner is it proved that the intelligent creature received the power of discernment for this purpose, that he might hate and shun evil, and love and choose good, and especially the greater good. For else in vain would God have given him that power of discernment, since man’s discretion would be useless unless he loved and avoided according to it. But it does not befit God to give such power in vain. It is, therefore, established that rational nature was created for this end, viz., to love and choose the highest good supremely, for its own sake and nothing else;…
What strikes me is the capacity that is made holy by God in order for us to be happy in him: our rationality. We were given this capacity for a purpose. It is intended to judge rightly between right and wrong, good and evil, and even make distinctions between lesser and greater goods. The exercise of my mental capacities is an act of sanctification, or redemption, of holiness to the end that I may be happy in God.
Put the other way around, I am happiest in God when this capacity is used to its utmost. The highest use my reason can attain is to supremely love the supreme good – God. And I learn to love him for his own sake and not for what he does or does not do.
Do I love God with all my mind?
Much has been made of a recent technological breakthrough in which the researcher, Craig Venter, assembled a fully synthetic strand of DNA. Such announcements tend to come with some rather grand claims, as evidenced by the article’s headline in The Economist, “And Man Made Life” and this opening paragraph:
TO CREATE life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark, a vital essence. It may come as a shock, then, that mere mortals have now made artificial life.
A good collection of reactions and analysis by biologist Jonathan Wells of the science can be found on the blog, Evolution News & Views. As it turns out, nothing too spectacular has happened, despite some of the implications of some of the reporting. All Venter and his colleagues have done is take some life apart, and recreate just DNA (which is not a living organism).
But what is going on in the desire to report this as “life-creating” or even the desire to recreate life in our own image? Two vast questions indeed, but here are a couple of thoughts.
Has anyone ever promised you that following Jesus would be easy? Maybe Jesus would fulfill your wildest dreams and make everything in your life go smoothly if you simply asked him into your heart. Though I believe it is true that life with God is the only “life abundantly,” I am also convinced that it can be life’s greatest challenge. Jesus doesn’t promise us ease in life, but he does promise us life. After all, what do we expect becoming disciples of an innocent and executed man?
The early disciples of Christ learned this in dramatic fashion during an extended conversation about the bread of life. Jesus turns the conversation from the topic of eating the bread of life, Him, and receiving eternal life, to eating his flesh and drinking his blood; a shocking and even odd metaphor in any culture. And it isn’t an option.
Jesus is a controversial figure. Divisive, even. And I speak of the Jesus of Scripture, of course. The “nice guy” Jesus of our culture is not only uncontroversial, he isn’t even interesting. He wants everyone to get alone, he is OK with other gods, and he loves you just the way you are. But when we come into contact with the Jesus of Scripture he immediately divides the room. And such is the case with the story of John 7. Jesus reenters Jerusalem for another feast of the Jews and even before the people know he is there, they are divided about who he is.
If we put ourselves in the places of the people in Jerusalem trying to figure out who Jesus is, we are presented with a real problem. There are those who say he is a great teacher, those who claim he is a rotten teacher. There are those who go so far as to say he is the Messiah, and those who want to kill him for blasphemy. One way or another, Jesus was not – and is not – a boring figure.
So how are we to decide who Jesus is? Are there better or worse ways to understand who he is? If we put it another way, if our spiritual formation depends on getting Jesus right, how do we get him right? In the course of the conversations in chapter 7, Jesus gives us at least two answers to this question. The first is all about our desires.
We had our annual District Council last week and our General Secretary, Dr. Jim Bradford, was the main speaker. There are several links to great talks on this page, but his ordination service sermon is especially worth listening to. (Under the “General Sessions” link.)
