There is little that can be said about how far we fall short as made clear by these videos:
Archive for August, 2009
14 AugA Journey to Unindebtedness: A Journal, Entry 4
After much going back and forth with our potential lender–submitting documents and submitting more documents–it finally seems as though everything is going to go through on the land loan. And I thank you all for your thoughts and prayers.
We have signed pre-disclosure statements with the lender on the loan, and we are simply waiting for an appraisal to be done on the property and for a title search to be done by the attorney. If all that goes well, we are well on schedule to close on the land before month’s end.
13 AugYour Salvation is Near, II. Put on Christ, the Righteous One
After the apostle Paul encourages the church at Rome to love their neighbors and thereby fulfill the second table of the Law, he draws a glorious picture of the life of Christian by depicting it as a single day on this earth.
He begins by writing, “Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (v. 13:11). The picture that the apostle is giving is that of person who is lying in bed at dawn, and the light of the day is breaking over the horizon. The person, prior to the dawn, was ever asleep and his life was characterized by the darkness of night. But now, he has seen his salvation and has believed, and for him, “the night is far gone; the day is at hand” (v. 13:12a).
For those to whom the apostle is speaking, the darkness of their former existence is far gone, and the light of day is now their only existence. For this reason, the apostle exhorts them to throw off the works of darkness that formerly characterized their lives, and encourages them instead to put on the armor of light. And when the Christian wakes to God in this life, he wakes into enemy territory, and he therefore must do two things: one, cast off works of darkness, and, two, put on the armor of light.
12 AugYour Salvation is Near, I. Owe No One Nothing
Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law (Rm. 13:8).
While the interpretations of the apostle’s command to the church at Rome, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” are many, his purpose can be surmised in the verses that follow his exhortation. And though it is wise not to owe any man anything at all, e.g. lent money, etc., and to pursue such lack of indebtedness is a godly pursuit, that particular debt is not what the apostle is speaking about chiefly, though it cannot be discounted totally.
The debt about which the apostle is speaking particularly is the debt of sin or transgression. For the apostle’s command, “Owe no one anything,” is fulfilled by the command, “Love one another.” This is the same debt that Christ speaks about in his model prayer where he says, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Mt. 6:12). The idea is the same as that which the apostle presented in the previous section of his discourse, namely that we as Christians have an obligation to our fellow men to obey the law, be it God’s law or a government’s law, and we are to pay our debts according to the law, be it taxes or honor (cf. Rm. 13:7). Therefore, the Christian is a debtor in this life to the laws under which he finds himself.
10 AugThe Righteous Requirement of the Gospel
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do, by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit (Rm. 8:1-4).
In some ways, the Roman Road basis of evangelism has been both a blessing and curse to American Christianity. For on the one hand, the Romans Road has taken verses that are fundamental to the Faith and has made them well known to many, and yet, on the other hand, it has taken those same verses and ripped them from their contexts and has in the process watered down the Gospel.
For while it is indeed true that, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus” (v. 6:23), the verse taken from its context removes the very foundation of eternal life, namely regeneration and sanctification. For v. 6:23 is the apex of the apostle’s chain of salvific events that begins with identification with Christ in his crucifixion by baptism (v. 6:2), the freedom afforded by Christ’s death from the body of sin (v. 6:6; cf. v. 7:23) and thus from slavery to sin (v. 6:6; cf. v. 7:14, 25), and ends with the Christian’s being brought into slavery to obedience, to righteousness, and to sanctification, and sanctification’s end–eternal life (v. 6:16, 18, 19, 22). For the gift of God indeed is eternal life in Christ Jesus, however eternal life never comes apart from obedience, righteousness, and sanctification.
10 AugJust a Thought, xii. It’s Not the Music, Stupid
Many times (if not most times) when I speak to someone who is shopping around for a church, when I ask him his opinion of a particular church, his first impressions revolve around the type of music of the church. Seldom do I hear about the Christ-centeredness of the service or the disposition of the members or their desire to reach their community and the Nations with the Gospel. And if that person shows any inclination to visiting a church a second time, it is oftentimes contingent on whether or not he was entertained by that church the first time around.
While it is of little surprise that American Christians are more concerned about worshipping themselves than God by the churches they attend, it is saddening nonetheless. For it is clear that we have been deceived into thinking that true joy rests in self-satisfaction, and we rob ourselves of our Joy by seeking it in entertainment rather than in Christ and him glorified.
08 AugA Journey to Unindebtedness: A Journal, Entry 3
I had not planned on adding another entry into the journal until something a bit more significant had happened, but not to include the struggles that we have had thus far would not be a truthful representation of our so-called journey to unindebtedness.
Because of our past decisions–most of them foolish, some of them not as much–we have incurred a great amount of debt when compared to our present income. Because of this, we have been denied a loan twice with just mine and my wife’s name on the loan, and to get approved for the loan we are going to have to add a more financially stable co-signer to the loan, namely my father-in-law.
07 AugHow to Determine the Will of God
There is much that is said about knowing the will of God and doing the will of God in the church today, yet oftentimes there is little counsel that is given that is concrete, either Scripturally or in practice. Typically, if you express that you are searching the will of God in a particular matter, you are given counsel that revolves around the notion of “closed doors and open doors” or “listening to the small, still voice of God during prayer.” While these cannot be discounted (being that God can use whatever means he sees fit), biblically, these are not the ways by which we are called to determine God’s will.
For though the two aforementioned methods have their origins from the text of the Scriptures, they are from misapplication rather from than clear mandate. First, for though the notion of “closed and open doors” is used by the apostle Paul in his writings, it is always used in respect to the Gospel being proclaimed and received and not in respect to determining the will of God (cf. 1Cor. 16:9; 2Cor. 2:12; Col. 4:3). For when Paul uses such language, it is in commentary upon what God has done through what Paul has already done concerning the clear will of the Lord, namely, preaching the Gospel. For Paul already knew from the Scriptures and from revelation that the will of God was to preach the Word of God to the Gentiles, and the open door of which he speaks was God providing the way by which Paul would accomplish the will of God.
04 AugWhy There is Such Disdain for Calvinists
Having held a Reformed stance on God’s salvation of men for many years, I have witnessed time and time again (having stayed in traditional, Southern Baptist churches), how Calvinism and Calvinists cause quite a bit of stir within many churches. This stirring up of discord within churches concerning what is commonly called the Doctrines of Grace is generally multifaceted, and it is usually caused by two things–the hard doctrines of Calvinism itself placed against the doctrines of men that have crept into the church, and the Calvinist himself. While there can be little done, save by Spirit of God, with regard one’s hard heart toward the Doctrines of Grace, what is often the cause of one’s hard heart is not the doctrines themselves, but the person who bears the doctrines.
For, unfortunately, is commonplace that those who are most vocally Calvinists are those who would esteem themselves to be scholars of some grade and great exegetes of the Word of God. These, at times, act as though they bear some special knowledge that others in church have missed and therefore have about them a certain air of arrogance with regard to their particular understanding of the Scriptures.
03 AugJust a Thought, xi. A Life Lived Marching Around Jericho
For those who follow the Lord, the commands of the Lord may seem counter-intuitive. For those who marched around Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, the command by the Lord to march around Jericho and to shout on the last day to overcome the city likely did not happen without a few raised eyebrows. Nevertheless, the Israelites, in one of their rare moments of complete obedience, did not grumble but trusted the Lord without hesitance. For this reason, the Israelites prevailed over Jericho and moved onward to obtain the Promised Land which the Lord had already given into their hands.
Though today, the people of God will not be called to march around a city to accomplish its ruin, they are called to live a life that is as counter-intuitive as was the battle plan against Jericho. For many of the great commands of our Lord: “Lose your life that you might gain it” (Lk. 17:33), “Sell your possessions so that you might have treasure in heaven” (Mt. 19:21; cf. Mt. 13:44), “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Lk. 20:25), and “Seek to live peaceably with all men” (Rm. 12:18), etc.–all these go against what is preached by the world and what is ingrained in our natural minds and instincts. For the world tells us to seek for our life in this age, to hoard up for ourselves treasures in this world, to fight against paying taxes to the governing authorities, and to stir up discord for the sake of our rights. And if we are found living as Christ commanded rather than as the world commands, many eyebrows will be raised in the process.