Grace versus Self-love

Justin and Lindsey Holcomb:

There are many non-Christian books that are very good at describing the effects of sexual assault but offer weak suggestions regarding healing. By not believing the Gospel, they advocate self-love and self-affirmation and miss grace—God’s one way love, the unconditional love of God—which is the only thing that gets to the depth of the devastation of sexual assault. Eventually, self-love turns into nihilism. Our book places God’s radical grace and redemption of sin and its effects front and center and responds to the survivor’s experiences, pain, and needs from that perspective.

From an interview at Mockingbird here.

Mending the Soul

This looks like an admirable effort, and needed. Mending the Soul is run by Steven Tracy, who teaches at Phoenix Seminary after many years of pastoring, and his wife Celestia.

Going Home

What a specter, what a horrible thing death is to most of us. We regard it as a terrible monster that is going to grip us. Death, we say, is the most terrible thing of all, the thing to avoid. No, says Christ, death is nothing but the door of entry to my Father's house for his followers--'In my Father's house are many mansions.'

We tend to think of ourselves after death, do we not, as in some disembodied state in some great eternity where all is strange and terrible. But it is really to go home, if you are a child of God, if you are a brother or sister of the Lord Jesus Christ. God is not some terrible awful power, away in some distant eternity; he is your Father. He is one who loves you with a love you cannot imagine. Thank God for human love, but, my dear friends, our human love pales into insignificance and nothingness by the side of the love of God toward those who belong to him. 'My Father's house' is a glorious home.

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled (Crossway, 2009), 73

Is Christianity the Only 'Intolerant' Faith?

Randy Newman, in his excellent book on sharing the gospel with those close to us, records the fascinating exclusivism of Buddhism:

When asked about other religions' ability to provide refuge, the Dalai Lama replied, 'Liberation in which "a mind that understands the sphere of reality annihilates all defilements in the sphere of reality" is a state that only Buddhists can accomplish. This kind of moksha or nirvana is only explained in the Buddhist scriptures, and is achieved only through Buddhist practice.'

--'"Religious Harmony" and Extracts from The Bodhgaya Interviews,' in Christianity through non-Christian Eyes (ed. Paul Griffiths; Orbi, 1990); quoted in Randy Newman, Bringing the Gospel Home: Witnessing to Family Members, Close Friends, and Others Who Know You Well (Crossway, 2011), 87 n. 8

The Great Prerequisite to Revival

We are not aware of our impotence, we are not aware of our weakness, and of our need for power.

As long as we think we can organise [revival], there is no hope for us. The beginning of revival is to realise that without this manifestation of God's power we can do nothing. We have got to get back to that position, in which the apostle Paul so constantly found himself. I am never tired of quoting it. It is the text, more than any other, that needs to be held before every section of the Church today.

'And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.' (1 Cor. 2:3-5)

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Crossway, 1987), 182

Philippians 3:7-11

Unlike most 90s worship songs, this one, for me, just never gets old.

Not trendy. But true. Wonderfully true.

Done

HT: C.A. Stilwell

Good Friday

. . . when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. --John 13:1

To the end.

A Kind of Heavenly Elysium

Last night I read again Edwards' account of his wife's personal renewal in the Lord and, with my decaf in one hand and a big bowl of thin mint Edy's in the other, was deeply moved.

Edwards points out that the 'anonymous' person he is describing (1) was converted 27 years ago, so this is not the passing excitement of a recent convert; (2) experienced this personal renewal four years before Whitefield and Tennent came to town, and at a time when the rest of Northampton was spiritually sleepy, so this is not vicarious feeding on the experience of others; and (3) has suffered bouts of depression from youth, which have now strangely ceased, so this reviving is not explainable by a Myers-Briggs personality profile.

You know, at one point Edwards goes on for nine pages of his original manuscript of his account of Sarah's experience with a single paragraph; and in that paragraph he has one sentence that goes for three pages. Though the Yale editors break all this up, it is not difficult, in meditative reading, to see why Edwards wrote this way: in describing Sarah's experience of heaven, Jonathan himself was caught up in these glories.

And in reading what Jonathan wrote, I am myself caught up in it.

The soul remained in a kind of heavenly Elysium, and did as it were swim in the rays of Christ's love, like a little mote swimming in the beams of the sun, or streams of his light that come in at a window; and the heart was swallowed up in a kind of glow of Christ's love, coming down from Christ's heart in heaven, as a constant stream of sweet light, at the same time the soul all flowing out in love to him; so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing from heart to heart. The soul dwelt on high, and was lost in God, and seemed almost to leave the body; dwelling in a pure delight that fed and satisfied the soul; enjoying pleasure without the least sting, or any interruption, a sweetness that the soul was lost in; so that (so far as the judgment and word of a person of discretion may be taken, speaking upon the most deliberate consideration) what was enjoyed in each single minute of the whole space, which was many hours, was undoubtedly worth more than all the outward comfort and pleasure of the whole life put together. . . .

This great rejoicing has been a rejoicing with trembling, i.e. attended with a deep and lively sense of the greatness and majesty of God, and the person's own exceeding littleness and vileness: spiritual joys in this Person never were attended, either formerly or lately, with the least appearance of any laughter or lightness of countenance, or manner of speaking; but with a peculiar abhorrence of such appearances. . . . These high transports when they have been past, have had abiding effects in the increase of the sweetness, rest and humility that they have left upon the soul; and a new engagedness of heart to live to God's honor, and watch and fight against sin. . . .

And this steadfastness and constancy has remained through great outward changes and trials; such as times of the most extreme pain, and apparent hazard of immediate death. What has been felt in late great transports is known to be nothing new in kind, but to be of the same nature with what was felt formerly, when a little child of about five or six years of age; but only in a vastly higher degree. These transporting views and rapturous affections are not attended with any enthusiastic disposition to follow impulses, or any supposed prophetical revelations; nor have they been observed to be attended with any appearance of spiritual pride, but very much of a contrary disposition, an increase of a spirit of humility and meekness, and a disposition in honor to prefer others.

--Jonathan Edwards, Thoughts Concerning the Revival, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4: The Great Awakening, excerpts from pp. 332-35

'So subjectivistic!' you say. 'So annoyingly introspective!' Friends, if there was one level-headed, sober-minded thinker in the history of the church, it was the man writing this account. This is the man who warned countless times against the danger of feeling untethered to truth, and intemperate zeal, etc--in this same book that he records Sarah's experience he writes, 'There is nothing that belongs to Christian experience that is more liable to a corrupt mixture than zeal.'

I defy you to give me one good reason why you should die without longing for and praying for such renewal in your own soul.

Is this not, at heart, what Paul prayed over the Ephesians in the second half of Epheisans 1, and the end of Ephesians 3?

How long will you go on burdened and miserable?

This is not for the Sarah Edwards's of the world. It is for normal, everyday, faltering Christians like you and me.

Christ did not go to the cross, and walk out out of the tomb, and send the Spirit, so that you could (only) doctrinally assent to Ephesians 3:19.

Pester Him

In the course of one of his sermons on revival, Lloyd-Jones spoke of the great value of reading the biographies of men God has used in revival in the past. He said--

You will find this same holy boldness, this argumentation, this reasoning, this putting the case to God, pleading his own promises. Oh, that is the whole secret of prayer, I sometimes think. . . .

Do not leave him alone. Pester him, as it were, with his own promise. Tell him what he has said he is going to do. Quote the Scripture to him.

And, you know, God delights to hear us doing it, as a father likes to see this element in his own child who has obviously been listening to what his father has been saying. It pleases him. The child may be slightly impertinent, it does not matter, the father likes it in spite of that.

And God is our Father, and loves us, and he likes to hear us pleading his own promises, quoting his own words to him, and saying 'in light of this, can you refrain?' It delights the heart of God.

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Crossway, 1987), 197

'If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.' --John 14:14