Let’s sketch an image of ‘sub-Christian Bill.’  Bill has grown up in an understanding of Christianity that is (the kindest word for it) diminished.  He is truly joined to God through Christ, but has not heard the grandeur of God, the true freedom of Christ, the enabling power of the Holy Spirit.

He regularly reads the Bible, but has never related its parts to the grand narrative.  He has specific, unthoughtful ideas of what a believer does and doesn’t do.  His aesthetic is underdeveloped, falling squarely in that category of ‘evangelical kitsch.’  His theological conclusions, or better assumptions, are (irritatingly) reflections of the republican doctrine du jour.

Two more steps: First, round out Bill by noticing his simplistic ideas of who’s on the good team and who the evil others.  Second, multiply Bill by 20.

Now Ted.  Ted is glad to live in the church’s neighborhood, a nice guy, has to this point not taken God or His Word seriously.  Ted is your run-of-the-mill, unromanticized unbeliever.  Let’s multiply him by 20 too.

Enter young X. Cellant into Ted’s neighborhood as Bill’s new pastor.  Who will Pastor Cellant choose to save, Bill or Ted?

He’s tempted, for a few reasons, to save Bill.  For one, Ted is intimidating!  The other.  Secondly, Bill’s positions really are irritating.

But there’s more pulls to save Bill.  Pastor X is a Protestant, and the narrative of protest and reform he has inculcated for some time, especially in seminary.  If X isn’t traducing the establishment, isolating himself from the old ways, forging a new way forward, leading others to freedom, he just doesn’t feel right.  X vaguely holds the idea that disestablishment is tantamount to salvation.

Too X is new to the church, and eager to make a difference.  The quickest way to make a splash but w/o angering many is to subvert.  Hint at new, better readings of Scripture; caricature the Man of the old decaying Christianities; rally the disenchanted to…well, to you, X.  You in the name of the theologians en vogue.

“For so long churches have…but God’s word says…”  You could spend a lifetime forming these types of sentences, saving Bill and the multiplied Bills.  Settling into the wide groove of identifying your version of the Life vis-a-vis others.  Saving the unenlightened (Christians), the uptight, hedged-in (Christians), the thoughtlessly conservative (Christians).

This version of salvation is so wide-spread that a pastor will have to deliberately turn away from it.  But he should.  He should do the work of an evangelist, and go after Ted, and not aspire to the work of reformer.

Yes, Bill needs to be taught; and Pastor X Cellant should go about that.  But it is unhelpful for Bill to see his previous Christian experience debunked by his newly minted, intellectual, passionate pastor.  What does it profit him to be drawn into the paradigm: “All my Christian life I’ve been told ____________ but now I have the truth”?

Save the salvation rhetoric and mood – for the unsaved!  And reserve the Messianic posturing for the Messiah!

We are not sure of the exact problem.  One thing jumps out: He’s stuck with his own thoughts, and deeply regrets it.  He’s “listened to his heart” and seeks more trustworthy direction.

Notice that the psalmist isn’t just trying to get the verse of the day downloaded to him.  No, things are a little more desperate.  If he doesn’t get the divine counsel soon, he falls into the sleep of death.

There are enemies too.  And one of the incentives for God to consider and answer is to quiet these rowdies.  The assumption is that the psalmist’s enemies are God’s enemies too.  When they are on top, both God and the psalmist appear at a loss.

So “how long?”

I want to be careful here because I observe that we fall into the trap of heading right for the dramatic and secretly loving the tragic.  But if the Psalter is (among other things) a guidebook to the life of faith, we know that it’s very possible we’ll sometimes sense that God has forgotten us.

We can also allow that this sense of abandonment might settle down on us, over lengthy periods.  Then, as we study our situation, examine our life from every aspect, it will seem incredible that God has left us in such weakness and befuddlement.

We who have been chosen by God from before the foundation of the world?  We the commissioned with such important directives?  We who have listened in to God’s disclosures on the invisible world and the future and the ancient past?  We united to the Savior who has borne the judgment of sin, who has passed through the shades, and come up into resurrection life?  We His younger siblings?

All those claims taunt me now.  Who did I suppose I was?  Well I know now what I am: sorrowful, fading, beaten—shaken.

Full Disclosure: More than I like, I fall into these dark thoughts of abandonment; taking Winston Churchill’s lead I call them “the black dog.”  Then let me alone;  leave me and the dog to enter Dunkin Donuts: to eat Boston Cremes and repine!

Why can’t I get on track?  Where is the saving from sin?  “I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.”  I’m not asking for pity, God!  I simply want You to protect and improve what You said You’ve purchased…well, me!  I’m looking, but You’re hiding from me.

Hand me another donut!  How long?

If God would just turn the lights on for just a second—that I could get a little perspective!  Then I would know that something is happening in the background…that I’m being prepped or at least something is being staged…that there’s a point—even if it’s not me.  Just give me a clue as to what should I pray for?

Well, there’s the frustration.  But the prayer ends a little cheerfully.  Compared with the rest of the psalm, a lot cheerfully.  How does this happen?

Well, in prayer.  Prayer often clarifies things.  Dear People: Just.  Get.  To.  Praying.

Here after venting before God, the lights turn on, albeit dimly.  As he gets off his knees a thousand questions remain.  But the psalmist himself is able to put his distress in perspective by remembering a couple of things:

1. In the past he knew that God had rescued him on the way to some enduring, good plan for him.  If he experiences that deliverance, and that plan, one way before, and another way now—let it be.  The fact is, he is being saved.

2. God had in the past been generous to him; what makes this searing moment more real or defining than those moments?  And wouldn’t it make sense to believe that those generous moments, those moments of prosperity, betokened the big picture, since God is a loyal Savior?

I will sing to the LORD.

Our Lord contends that His followers will be at an advantage once He leaves because He will send “the Helper” to them.  At least in this lesson, the advantage of the Spirit is connected with the ministry of Jesus’ followers toward the world. Why exactly the Spirit is preferred over Jesus Himself is not explained, but is probably due to the fact that the Spirit will cover more ground (through Jesus’ disciples) than Jesus could in His flesh.

I’ll let Carson, whose interpretation of John 16 I am following here, provide us the right way to hear “the Helper”:

The Greek term parakletos, rendered ‘Counselor’ in the NIV, is the verbal adjective of parakaleo, lit. ‘to call alongside,’ and hence ‘to encourage,’ ‘to exhort.’  The verbal adjective has passive force, and is roughly equivalent to ho parakeklemenos, ‘one who is called alongside.’  In secular Greek, parakletos primarily means ‘legal assistant, advocate’…i.e. someone who helps another in court, whether as an advocate, a witness, or representative.  With this legal force it was transliterated into Hebrew and Aramaic.  In Greek, however, the term never had the restrictively technical force that Latin advocatus (‘a legal advocate’) had.  Moreover, the passive form does not rule out the possibility that the Paraclete may be an active speaker on behalf of someone before someone else.

In John’s usage, the legal overtones are sharpest in 16:7-11, but there the Paraclete serves rather more as a prosecuting attorney than as counsel for the defense.  NIV’s ‘Counselor’ is not wrong, so long as ‘legal counselor’ is understood, not ‘camp counselor’ or ‘marriage counselor’—and even so, the Paraclete’s ministry extends beyond the legal sphere.  The same limitation afflicts ‘Advocate.’  AV’s ‘Comforter’ was not bad in Elizabethan English, when the verb ‘to comfort’ meant ‘to strengthen, give succor to, to encourage, to aid’) from Latin confortare, ‘to strengthen’).  In today’s ears, ‘Comforter’ sounds either like a quilt or like a do-gooder at a wake, and for most speakers of English should be abandoned.  ‘Helper’ (GNB) is not bad, but has overtones of being subordinate or inferior, overtones clearly absent from John 14-16. – Carson, The Gospel According to John, p. 499

But what will the Spirit do through believers in the world?  He will convict the world of its sin, righteousness, and judgment.  That word ‘convict’ (elencho) means to expose wrongdoing, produce appropriate shame, and convince of guilt.  That, according to Jesus, is what we should expect of the Spirit after He is sent.

Specifically, the Spirit will expose the world’s sin, righteousness, and judgment.  The world’s sin is summed up in the fact that they have not believed Jesus, and thus haven’t accepted either God’s diagnosis of their problem or His way out of their ruined condition.

In the middle of their sinful unbelief, the Spirit is testifying the truth about Jesus.

Because the world, in John, designates the order that is in rebellion against its Creator, we should understand that the sin, righteousness, and judgment mentioned here are each expressions of that rebellion.  Of course the world’s sin is a problem; but so, says Jesus, is its righteousness and judgment.

Which means, there is a righteousness of the world but it’s a sham righteousness.  Read the Gospels and you’ll discover that the vocation of Jesus included His going behind the current religious posturing and pulling back the curtain of hypocrisy.  But He has gone to the Father.

The Spirit, though, will continue the assault against the laziness that excuses itself in pious terms, the vague spirituality that ignores the problem of the individual heart, the platitudes empty of good deeds, the adopting religious labels in lieu of worship—in short, the “righteousness” which the prophet Isaiah says is to God as so many menstrual cloths.

The world’s judgment is its deeply flawed evaluation of itself and its Creator.  It is the secular assessment that never takes into account the opinions of the invisible God.  It is the state of mind that trivializes sin, shrivels the concept of guilt to merely annoying feeling, has no patience for a textual faith.

Behind this mindset is the prince of this world who churns out lies—humongous systemic lies that underpin a false worldview and small lies that rationalize and minimize one’s failings before God.  But the Spirit, Jesus says, can expose the world’s defective evaluations because the prince of the world has been judged.

In the Messiah’s cross, sin and rebellion and all the works of the devil have been condemned in His body.  In the resurrection of the Messiah God began a new creation that leaves behind the ancient curse and the old devil and everything that fades away outside of the will of God.

God will use Jesus’ followers to convey all this to the world He loves.

Jesus says to the Samaritan woman that it is the time in history when true worshipers will be distinguished by one trait: there are those who worship in spirit and in truth and everyone else.  Is this how you worship God?

“God is seeking worshipers.”  Let that statement sink into you.  We can easily slip into careless frames of mind and assume that God is looking for Baptists or Catholics, Reformed Christians, evangelistically minded people, or fiscal/political conservatives.  Perhaps God is after a certain look, a certain demographic!  No, God is seeking worshipers.

To worship God means, at the least, to attend to Him.  The psalmist captures the opposite of worship as he describes the wicked: “God is in none of his thoughts.”  That denunciation could be true of Baptists, Catholics and fiscal/political conservatives.  In fact, sometimes the scandal of a God-less mind is made tolerable just by means of these religious or demographic identifiers.

The other day I invited someone to Christianity Explored, to investigate the Christ.  “I’m a ____________________ “ (insert tribal marker here), he snarled.  Behold! Here was someone letting his quasi religious, quasi-ethnic marker stand in for a God-attentiveness.

But not so the worshiper.  The worshiper has sanctified God in his thoughts; meaning that there is a well-worn trail between his thoughts on everything else and his thoughts on God.  He keeps going back to God.  The worshiper has taken some trouble, quite a lot of trouble, to understand Him. He moves when God tells him to move.  He admires God and, if that admiration just isn’t coming—he’ll work to get to the place where he admires again.  To put it in a pithy phrase, in the worshiper, God’s name is hallowed.

“God is seeking worshipers.”  We need to fear the lazy mood that imagines as long as we’re still using the right slogans and finding ourselves in the right group, we’ll be fine.  Not so!  Truth is not a vessel, where, once on board, we can settle in for the journey.  No, we walk in the truth.  Attentively.  God is seeking worshipers; not ‘those who once worshiped.’

But not just worshiping God.  Worshiping Him under certain qualifications, “in spirit and truth.”  Not in spirit and in truth, as if these qualities could be separated and owned one at a time (i.e., Spirit?  Check.  Truth?  Check).   But how does one worship “in spirit and truth”?

Well, the qualifiers here do not signify that in our worship we must have enthusiasm + orthodox doctrine.  Both of these are appropriate but not exactly what Jesus is after here.  In fact, Jesus is not giving instructions on how to worship properly, but rather stating how true worship will be rendered from this time forward.  Not prescription but description.

He says, God must be, by definition, worshiped this way—“in spirit and truth”—just because “God is spirit.”  The quality of God defines the worship; but what is this quality, ‘spirit?’

To say that “God is spirit” entails that He is invisible and omnipresent and thus cannot be tied to a place.  He moves freely and will not be administered or contained.  He is divine and heavenly and above—far above!—flesh.  He is not dependent on others to keep him alive but rather life giving!  He moves, but is Himself not able to be moved.  He is not out of reach, hidden, until He presents Himself.

So to worship the God Who is spirit means that we cannot worship God on our own, without heaven’s help.  To worship the God Who is spirit requires that our worship be spiritually derived: You can’t cart God around and call the scene a religious festival.  You can’t confine Him to one place and get by with calling the area ‘sacred.’  You can’t glue Him to a demographic or religious marker.

God is spirit: He is not wringing His hands hoping that the stuff-of-flesh, the earth-bound, will remember to keep Him alive.  He is not at our beck and won’t respond to incantation.

God is spirit: He initiates worship!

God is spirit: A statement not only telling us about Him, but also telling us what we need Him for.  “Spirit gives birth to spirit.”

Once more: God must present Himself if flesh is to know spirit.  And so He has, in the true account of the Word becoming flesh, the One and Only Son revealing the Father whom no one has seen.  God has appeared in Jesus.  You cannot worship the One God without the knowledge of Jesus.  Jesus is what is true about God.

To worship God properly, then, is possible only through a lively gift from heaven that always takes a certain look: a studied attentiveness to Jesus!

… And maybe you’ll be Baptist, too!

To summarize: The worshipers whom God seeks worship him out of the fullness of the supernatural life they enjoy (‘in spirit’), and on the basis of God’s incarnate Self-Expression, Christ Jesus himself, through whom God’s person and will are finally and ultimately disclosed (‘in truth’); and these two characteristics form one matrix, indivisible. – Carson, John 225

I said almost: we still have a few things to do.  1) place bookplates in the books, 2) place labels on the shelves that will help you navigate properly through the sections 3) alphabetize the topical books and 4) adjust some shelves and add some bookends (does anybody have such?).

Following are the sections of the library:

• New Testament Commentaries
• Old Testament Commentaries
• Systematic Theologies (both comprehensive volumes and individual treatments: i.e., soteriology, ecclesiology etc)
• Topical books (by author) – Really anything that doesn’t fall into any other category (e.g., Andrew Murray books)
• Church History
• Biography
• Christian Counseling (i.e., advice on marriage, child-rearing, life skills)
• Apologetics
• Books on Prayer
• Evangelism Helps

Books that are purportedly Christian should follow John the Baptizer’s lead.  In John 3 the Baptizer referred to himself as akin to the “friend of the bridegroom.”  In 1^st century Judean culture, this friend would do much to plan the wedding ceremony and to generally put forward the groom as the appropriate headliner of the ceremony.

In short, the Baptizer said, “[Christ] must increase; I must decrease.”  He says, If everything goes according to God’s plan, you’ll notice less of me and more of Christ.

The proper effect of Christian books, and especially commentaries, is also that they should decrease, and Christ increase.  Does this book prepare you to receive Christ’s words more clearly?  Does it move your thoughts to Him?  Does it encourage you in your obedience to Him?  Does it exhibit something of His majesty?

The author of the commentary should fade in the background and the text (which after all exegetes Christ who exegetes God!) must come into the light.  Must.

Sometimes the commentary author inadvertently cuts into the limelight and the effect is distressing.  We are burdened by his weighty erudition.  His cleverness leaves us thirsty.  Hey, leave off a few of those footnotes, won’t you?

Sometimes we see the author dancing, whirling… but always around our question and the point of the text!

Sometimes—and even though I love the old guys, this can be their fatal defect—we see the author tripping over himself with affectation and tremulous pietisms.

You don’t have to (I mean it’s not necessary), but I commend the use of a commentary in your daily Bible reading.  But use a commentary that puts Christ forward, instead of obfuscating, or dancing, or anything else that distracts.

Here are some guidelines for selecting commentaries to help you in your daily Bible reading:

• A painful truth: Generally new commentaries are better than old ones.
• Use a commentary that does not call itself devotional. Most of the time devotional commentaries tend toward the mawkish and don’t bring your understanding forward.  So convinced I am of this that I profit more from a commentary by a liberal author who deals seriously with the text (e.g., Robert Alter) than your typical devotional volume.

Of course the best of commentaries are sprinkled with insights that could be called devotional or inspirational.  But they’re not constantly straining for them, that’s the difference.

• Waltke, Carson, Fee, Longman, Moo, Hughes, Kidner – names to look for when selecting a commentary.  Read 1 Corinthians with Gordon Fee.  Read John’s Gospel with D.A. Carson.  Read Genesis with Bruce Waltke.  Read Song of Solomon with Tremper Longman (and your wife!)
• I highly recommend the Pillar New Testament Commentary series.  Also, the Tyndale OT and NT set.  One more: The New American Commentary series.
• Of course, some helpful commentaries are jewels among not-so-valuable sets.  Look at Philippians in the Anchor Bible.  Hey, Wright’s Commentary on Romans even in the New Interpreters set has been helpful.  If you’re looking for recommendations for commentaries on individual books, I’m glad to give you some.
• Read the text first, then read the commentary, then pray from your reading.  Day by day by day…

______________________________

Sovereign Lord, let us diligently seek you in your Word daily.  Give us thoughts that spur us on to find answers to questions from your Word, and so to pursue you.  Let your Word come to us in understanding.  Keep us from foolish men, cunning and deceitful doctrine; instead lead us into faith that is at once knowledgeable and obedient.  And we would see Jesus.

-Amen

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Crossroads: a step-by-step guide away from addiction, by Dr Ed Welch, lists ten steps to change.  The first one given is “Listen.”  Christian change can begin when one decides to humble himself and dedicate himself to listening to God in the Bible.  “Listening” includes hearing and accepting the diagnoses, accepting the extent of necessary change, and believing in the vehicle and process of change.

Here is where the Christian counselor has to hold his ground.  It is easy to get excited about the potential to see someone change and make concessions toward the addict’s worldview or apologies for the Bible’s straightforwardness.  We can’t!  It’s only Christian change if we allow the terms and standards to remain Christian.

Paul says that the Gospel—the account of what God has done in Jesus to rescue sinners (with no regard for their goodness) from judgment and to re-constitute them as righteous persons in His family and as inheritors of the new creation—this Gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

This statement about the Gospel should alert us to two things: 1) The Gospel changes people 2) The Gospel, though, is firstly and mainly concerned with salvation, a change of status before God.

So the second thing to say about Christian change is that it envisions a change far more radical than simply being delivered from a bad and/or illegal habit and even restoring one’s life to function and wholeness.  In fact, these good changes can even be ultimately harmful if they stand in for salvation!  Christian change begins with a gracious act of God to justify the sinner.

The third major distinctive of Christian change is in how we diagnose our addictions/ bad habits.  Here we need to include a word on sin.  Moderns today tend to refer to sin only in terms of structural or institutional sins such as racism, systemic greed, injustice.  On the other extreme are those who think of sin only in terms of individual acts—this time one sleeps with his girlfriend, this snort of cocaine, etc.

Both of these aspects of sin should be brought out, and neither should be omitted (see Acts 2; see Romans 1).  But some won’t listen as these charges are laid at their door: accuse someone of partaking of societal sins and the charge can seem too general; accuse someone of a series of particular sins and it comes as so much scold and only hardens their heart.

But there is another manifestation or symptom of sin that the Scriptures refer to, and I think it fits as we think about addictions.  Sin is idolatry, and addictions are worship disorders.  When we sin we are elevating ______________—be it tawdry or be it noble—above the Creator God.  We become idolaters when we forsake the Living Water and hew out for ourselves broken cisterns that can hold no water.

We choose to become idolaters.  We choose over and over again.  But at some point we become habituated to choosing the idol.  This can happen quickly if the idol is chemically addictive.  But even then there is not much difference between the chemical substance and other idols we choose—since everything we choose as a replacement for God we find desirable.

But here’s the point: we choose.  And soon we can’t help but choose.  We are voluntary slaves.  Both of those words have to be emphasized in our understanding of addiction.

Along with these preliminaries, the other steps are as follows:

•    Confess that you are double-minded
•    Know your story
•    Go Public
•    Know the God
•    Follow Jesus
•    Have a Plan
•    Love Others
•    Respond well when you go wrong
•    Have hope

Now, I want to take a step back and hopefully state things clearly.  One of the confusions during these past weeks arose because I didn’t identify my audience.  I was probably trying to accomplish too much:

1)    Teaching you how you can change

2)    Teaching you how an unbelieving addict could change

3)    Kinda offering a muddied idea of EBC reaching out to down-and-outers

Christian Change

So these steps are how Christians change.  (We don’t have to call them steps.):

1.    Change can begin only when Christians decide to believe the Bible above any other advice or societal drift or internal desire.

2.     Christians should own up to the fact that they waver in their will to change.

3.    Christians need to be able to think clearly on where they went wrong.

4.    They should confess their faults to one another.

5.    Christians can change only as they know God and specifically Christ and the Gospel.

6.    Christians should have a plan for change: They need to give no quarter to the sin in their life.  They need to value and strive for self-control.  They need to belong in a church where they can: 1) Remind themselves of what is true about God, what is true about themselves, what needs to change and 2) Do what needs to be done.  Church is not just where you change.  It is the change that needs to happen: You change so that you can love others.

7.    Christians need to know how to respond well when they go wrong.

8.    And Christians need to keep hope for the glorious appearing in front of them.

Christians should change, and Dr Welch has given us a pretty good summary of the structures and individual disciplines for change.  Leave one of these out and you’ll have problems.

Change for those outside the Church

Two particular problems, though, I think need to be concentrated on.  I’ve told you of our impression when we settled in Boston, that there are many people caught by substance abuse.  Every other person I spoke with had been treated, was being treated, should have been…

But it’s not only substance abuse, read statistics of pornography ingestion, and the number is staggering.  If we are to believe those reports, we could assume that a certain percentage of people that walk in the church doors every week are caught in the trap of degrading lust.

What’s a church to do in the face of these two problems, substance abuse and pornography?  I don’t think it should ignore these problems, and I think one of the ways that we could easily ignore them is by assuming that they will be solved in the regular schedule of the church.

These are problems that are tearing up homes, unraveling marriages, producing shoddy work, making people sad.  Which means, these situations are producing poverty of spirit, a condition that favors the Gospel.  In other words, not only should we look at these problems and shudder, but see the opportunity.  THE GOSPEL NOT ONLY SAVES FROM THE ULTIMATE PUNISHMENT FROM SIN BUT DELIVERS FROM THE POWER OF SIN.

Do you realize that the church that EBC’s building first housed began because it was concerned about the drunkenness in the area?  This has always been the best move of Christians—not wringing their hands but going to address real problems.

I want, and more importantly, our Lord wants, our church to be a hospital where we are pointing to the Great Physician.  An effective church helps people that are actually needy.  So what am I proposing?

1)    Offering a system of same-gender, voluntary, efficient accountability within the church that will pointedly ask questions of personal morality and spiritual disciplines

2)    Seek a week-night program that addresses substance abusers/addicts with the Gospel.  What this will require—

a.    A dedicated, capable, leader who believes the Gospel
b.    Two support people in the church
c.    Advertisement
d.    Prayerful, level-headed Church

For example, the death that Jesus died, he died to sin.  So (Paul says) we cannot live any longer in sin because, in baptism, we participate in that death.  To “live in sin” sounds intentionally general, as if any act or atmosphere that smacks of sin must be left behind.

But I want to say something of Jesus’ resurrection life that we have shared in.  The life that we now live, because of our baptism into Christ’s resurrection, we live toward God.  Who we are cannot be made sense of apart from this union.  So also what we do cannot be fathomed apart from this union in Christ.  And this is what we do—we live toward God.

People of EBC, I highlight this for you: there is a beautiful consistency in more and more abandoning yourself to the mission of God.  Your life is bound up with Christ, so in a sense there is no balance that needs be maintained.  You don’t have to think in terms of a little spirituality, a little sport, a little work, a little gardening—all towards a trendy idea of holistic living!  The broken body and spilt blood of Christ have set us free from fads and other lifestyles to an all-encompassing, focused service toward God.

You waste no time in growing in the grace and knowledge of Christ.  There is no energy mis-spent in serving Christ’s body.  For you, devotion isn’t superfluous, but in your make-up.  Your endeavor to win more people to him, to enjoin others in entering into the benefits of the Gospel, is more than noble, but even appropriate!

I could elaborate on what this life toward God doesn’t necessarily entail: 1) vocational service 2) no space or freedom to cultivate and create ‘on our own’ 3) the end of mirth and start of woodenness.

I could dwell on some sad and pedestrian facts: Some dance around an engrossed commitment to God.  Some pause in the shallows and only imagine what it is to navigate the deep.  In the life toward God, the players are few; the sidelines are full.

There are further elaborations to be explored; there are reasons to not settle for anything less; but here is one big, evangelical reason to plunge into the life toward God: THIS IS WHAT YOU DO.

HT: Doug Wilson

Dear Heathen:

The Lord Jesus Christ hath promised that the time shall come when all the ends of the earth shall be His kingdom. And God is not a man that He should lie nor the son of man that He should repent. And if this was promised by a Being who cannot lie, why do you not help it to come sooner by reading the Bible, and attending to the words of your teachers, and loving God, and, renouncing your idols, take Christianity into your temples? And soon there will not be a Nation, no, not a space of ground as large as a footstep, that will want a missionary. My sister and myself have, by small self-denials, procured two dollars which are enclosed in this letter to buy tracts and Bibles to teach you.

Archibald Alexander Hodge, and Mary Eliz. Hodge,
Friends of the Heathen.

(June 23, 1833. A letter to the “heathen” from ten-year-old A.A. Hodge and his sister Mary Elizabeth, given to J.R. Eckard, a Princeton Seminary graduate who was to go to Ceylon. Quoted in Princeton Seminary: Faith and learning 1812-1868, v. 1, p. 193)

Horatius Bonar, writing the preface to John Gillies’ Accounts of Revival, proposes that men useful to the Holy Spirit for revival have been marked in these nine ways:

1. They were in earnest about the great work on which they had entered: “They lived and labored and preached like men on whose lips the immortality of thousands hung.”

2. They were bent on success: “As warriors, they set their hearts on victory and fought with the believing anticipation of triumph, under the guidance of such a Captain as their head.”

3. They were men of faith: “They knew that in due season they should reap, if they fainted not.”

4. They were men of labor: “Their lives are the annals of incessant, unwearied toil of body and soul; time, strength, substance, health, all they were and possessed they freely offered to the Lord, keeping back nothing, grudging nothing.”

5. They were men of patience: “Day after day they pursued what, to the eye of the world, appeared a thankless and fruitless round of toil.”

6. They were men of boldness and determination: “Timidity shuts many a door of usefulness and loses many a precious opportunity; it wins no friends, while it strengthens every enemy. Nothing is lost by boldness, nor gained by fear.”

7. They were men of prayer: “They were much alone with God, replenishing their own souls out of the living fountain, that out of them might flow to their people rivers of living water.”

8. They were men whose doctrines were of the most decided kind: “Their preaching seems to have been of the most masculine and fearless kind, falling on the audience with tremendous power. It was not vehement, it was not fierce, it was not noisy; it was far too solemn to be such; it was massive, weighty, cutting, piercing, sharper than a two-edged sword.”

9. They were men of solemn deportment and deep spirituality of soul: “No frivolity, no flippancy . . . . The world could not point to them as being but slightly dissimilar from itself.”