Archive for the ‘Growth’ Category
July 30, 2008
Other Ways to Refuse the Postmodern World
1. Attend local live concerts.
2. Go to a local museum.
3. Treat your checker at the supermarket like a real human being.
4. Don’t worry about fashion in clothes.
5. Drive your car into the ground before getting another one.
6. Give a significant amount of your money to Kingdom causes.
7. Read books that are over your head.
8. Listen to music you don’t understand until you do.
9. Memorize parts of the Bible.
10. Read about Christians from other counties, such as Brother Yun from China.
11. Object when your church wants to spend thousands on a food court (or the equivalent
), but won’t use that money for missions.
12. Do not interrupt others when they are speaking.
13. Turn off as many TVs as possible.
14. Don’t say, “I’ll pray for yo
u” unless you will.
15. Listen to what people from other countries have to say about America and about their own countries.
16. Care more about your soul than your lawn.
17. Speak in complete sentences.
The Constructive Curmudgeon: Other Ways to Refuse the Postmodern World
July 29, 2008
Kinds of Biblical Theology.
This is a very helpful article on the differences between systematic and biblical theology and how they should interact. If you’ve ever wondered, “ok, how does this all get put together?” This articlle will give you a brief overview of the ways this is done.
July 16, 2008
John Piper in 1995 wrote Future Grace. I’m finally getting around to reading it. His main premise is that faith in future grace is what drives our righteous behavior before God now. He says, “I pray that you will hear and follow the call to find your joy in all that God promises to be for you in Jesus. And I pray the the expulsive power of this new affection will go on freeing you for the fleeting pleasures of sin and empower you for a life o sacrifical love. If in this way, we prove that God is prized above all things, then living by faith in future grace will be to the praise of his glory.” To be clear, I agree with his premise. However, as he talks about gratitude in his first chapters, I think he is lacking in perspective on all that gratitude can give.
First, let’s notice what Piper says about gratitude and faith.
A definition: “We easily forget
that gratitude exists because sometimes things come to us
“gratis”—without price or payment. When that happens, we
should feel a pleasant sense of the worth of what we’ve received and the
goodwill behind it. This pleasant sense is what we call gratitude.” (Future Grace [FG], 31)
“God meant gratitude to be a spontaneous
expression of pleasure in the gift and the good will of another.” (FG, 32)
Piper’s main concern at first is to show that gratitude should not result in what he calls the debtor’s ethic.
The debtor’s ethic says, “Because you have done something good for me,
I feel indebted to do something good for you.” (FG, 32)
This is good because we can all easily slip into trying to pay God back for all the good He does us. This, however, violates a true picture of who God is. Paul explicitly asks in somewhat of an echo of Is. 40, ‘who can give to God that he should be repaid?’ We cannot repay God for any good we do is ultimately from His grace (Eph. 2:8-10).
Piper explains, “In the debtor’s ethic the Christian life is pictured as an effort to pay back
the debt we owe to God. Usually the concession is made that we can never
fully pay it off. But “gratitude” demands that we work at it. Good deeds and
religious acts are the installment payments we make on the unending debt
we owe God. This debtor’s ethic often lies, perhaps unintentionally, beneath
the words, ‘We should obey Christ out of gratitude.’” (FG, 33)
Is then gratitude a vital part of a sanctifying faith and growth in Christ?
Here’s how Piper explains it: “As I said before, this is not nit-picking or incidental; it is amazing. Gratitude is not set forth in the Bible as a primary motive for Christian living.
Gratitude is a beautiful thing. There is no Christianity without it. It is at the
heart of worship. It should fill the heart of every believer. But when it comes
to spelling out the spiritual dynamics of how practical Christian obedience
happens, the Bible does not say that it comes from the backward gaze of
gratitude, but that it comes from the forward gaze of faith.”
Here than we see a final part to Piper’s perspective on gratitude. It is oriented toward the past and not the future. Piper does not see gratitude as a primary motive for Christian living. Is he correct? I want to lookat that in part 2. But, before we analyze that, some practical questions: is gratitude a part of your worship? Are you daily grateful for the gift of eternal life? Do you regularly look at God’s blessings to you? These questions are vital because they reflect a heart of biblical worship.
However, we also should not slip into a debtor’s ethic. Trying to repay God for what He has done. It is very easy to conceive of our relationship to God based on things he gives us and things we owe to him in return. This ultimately is a perversion of grace because it conceives of grace as coming with strings attached. It also subtly conceives of God as not able to do what we think needs to be done without us doing something. How easy is it to slip into the debtor’s ethic? What do you think?
June 5, 2008
This is a good reminder of how important summer is.
May 7, 2008
Taken from Dr. Constable’s notes on Deuteronomy:
“The ceremonial custom of boiling a kid in its mother’s milk is known from the ancient Canaanite tablets found at Ugarit [i.e., the Ras Shamra Tablets]. Such a rite was superstitiously observed by the Canaanites, hoping that through magical acts they could increase fertility and productivity (14:21; Ex. 23:19; 34:26).”
161
“. . . various Canaanite cults regularly engaged in the practices of seething a kid in its mother’s milk as a fertility rite of sympathetic magic intended to coerce the deity into granting fertility to the wives, fields, and flocks of the cults’
adherents. Such rites of sympathetic magic ‘worked’ on the premise that the gods were in some way part of and subject to the same natural created order that human beings also inhabited. By finding the common natural connection points, human beings could ‘push the right buttons’ and thus manipulate the gods . . .
“Israelites do not, through an act of sympathetic magic, try to
coerce the deity into blessing them with fertility for the year to come; but instead, after the year’s crops have been harvested and whether that year’s harvest has been fruitful or not, Israelites bring a tithe to God as an act of gratitude [cf. vv. 22-29].” 162
Samuel J. Schultz, Deuteronomy, p. 55.
162
Michael L. Goldberg, “The Story of the Moral: Gifts or Bribes in Deuteronomy?” Interpretation 38:1 (January 1984):21-22.
