Amazing What Human Beings Are Able to Create

A bit from the Batman musical score, by Hans Zimmer.

Where the Gospel Takes Us

Thank you, Tullian. I have affection for you, across the miles.

Theology for Life

Thrilling to see the new theological education web platform uniontheology.org, which has just launched and is being overseen by our brother Mike Reeves of WEST. Get to know Mike a bit through this 9Marks interview, back when he was head of theology at UCCF.

I had the privilege of contributing to the new platform a short piece on Jonathan Edwards' view of sanctification. Though I was invited to do it last year, in rereading it I was struck by how relevant the essay is for current confusion and discussions about how Christians grow. I hope it helps people. We have so, so much to learn from Edwards and the great saints who have gone before. How impoverishing to neglect church history. 

A fuller enjoyment of Edwards' theology of Christian living will be released in August by my favorite publisher (who also very kindly provides my paychecks). More on that later. I mention it now to say that if you find help in the essay you may want to consider ordering the book and thereby supporting said publisher!

Here is a compelling articulation from Mike on the need and vision for Union.

God's Global Purposes

John Piper recently visited Immanuel Nashville and spoke twice for the Immanuel Theology Group and did a brief Q&A.

John Piper Session 1 - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.

John Piper Session 2 - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.

John Piper Session QA - ITG January 2014 from Immanuel Nashville on Vimeo.

An Inexpensive Way to Deal with Your Rabbit Problem

Remember Your Leaders

Francis Schaeffer died thirty years ago today. If you are an evangelical Christian born after he died, you may know nothing about him, maybe never even heard of him. But you owe him far more than you know.

For me, I know of no other modern leader in whom was so beautifully manifest the blend of thinking faith and real-time dependence on the Holy Spirit.

Grumpiness

Maybe you don't vent--you just stew. A leaking, low-level irritability is a great temptation on a journey of love. You feel you have the right to be moody--you've earned it. It is a way of exacting emotional payment from a disappointing life. Grumpiness provides momentary relief, but it always involves a splitting of the self. I commit outwardly, with my hands, but not with my heart. I go through the motions of love, but anger smolders just below the surface like a simmering rant. . . . The result? I'm split. My will has slipped off the tracks of quiet surrender to the Master, and I'm just going through the motions. Life ceases to be fun. If left unchecked, my inner moodiness begins to distort my heart, and I can slip into cynicism, which begins a downward trajectory into bitterness.

Self-pity, compassion turned inward, drives this inward spiral. Instead of reflecting on the wounds of Christ, I nurse my own wounds. . . . But self-pity is just another form of self-righteousness, and like all self-righteousness it isolates and elevates. . . .

The cure for a cranky soul begins by repenting, by realizing that my moodiness is a demand that my life have a certain shape. Surrendering to the life that my Father has given me always puts me under the shelter of his wings. That leaves me whole again, and surprisingly cheerful. 

--Paul E. Miller, A Loving Life: In a World of Broken Relationships (Crossway, 2014), 109-10

Hierarchy is Edenic

Lewis:

I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don't think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. . . .

The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian. . . .

Under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive.

--C. S. Lewis, "Equality," in Present Concerns (London: Fount, 1986), 17-19

Clean Power

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

I remember a woman who was a spiritist, and even a medium, a paid medium employed by a spiritist society. She used to go every Sunday evening to a spiritist meeting and was paid three guineas for acting as a medium. This was during the thirties, and that was quite a large sum of money for a lower-middle-class woman.

She was ill one Sunday and could not go to keep her appointment. She was sitting in her house, and she saw people passing by on their way to the church where I happened to be ministering in South Wales. Something made her feel a desire to know what those people had, and so she decided to go to the service, and did so. She came ever afterward until she died and had become a very fine Christian.

One day I asked her what she had felt on that first visit, and this is what she said to me. She said, “The moment I entered your chapel and sat down on a seat among the people, I was conscious of a power. I was conscious of the same sort of power as I was accustomed to in our spiritist meetings, but there was one big difference. I had a feeling that the power in your chapel was a clean power.” 

--Elizabeth Catherwood and Christopher Catherwood, eds., The Christ-Centered Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Classic Sermons for the Church Today (Crossway, 2014), 34

'I Find You in the Seeking...'