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Archive for August, 2011

“Oh, what a blessed privilege it is to be able to ‘think,’ and not be afraid!”

Posted in Quotes, Sermons on August 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I love J.C. Ryle.  And I am deeply grateful to those who preserved his sermons!

The true Christian is the only happy man, because he can “sit down quietly and think about his soul.”

He can look behind him and ahead of him, he can look within him and around him, and feel, “All is well.”

He can think calmly on his past life, and however many and great his sins, take comfort in the thought that they are all forgiven. The righteousness of Christ covers all, as Noah’s flood covered the highest mountain.

He can think calmly about things to come, and yet not be afraid. Sickness is painful; death is solemn; the judgment day is an awful thing: but having Christ for him, he has nothing to fear.

He can think calmly about the Holy God, whose eyes are on all his ways, and feel, “He is my Father, my reconciled Father in Christ Jesus. I am weak; I am unprofitable: yet in Christ He regards me as His dear child, and is well-pleased.”

Oh, what a blessed privilege it is to be able to “think,” and not be afraid!

J.C. Ryle, “Happiness” – a sermon on Psalm 144:15.

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There are no small gifts from God

Posted in commentary on August 20, 2011| 3 Comments »

I noticed three gifts that God provided on Friday.

  • Little did I know as I wrote Friday’s post that I would need my own advice to serve my own soul.  Friday morning I was late getting up and ready for the day but with my own words still lingering in my head I made time for God’s word.
  • Brian Eaton introduced the Desiring God staff on Friday morning to the new Children Desiring God curriculum, Rejoicing in God’s Good Design: A Study for Youth on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, by taking us through a lesson.  It was good to be reminded, again, that God is intentional in all that he does.
  • Paul’s primary doctor was available at the moment we needed her.

There were a thousand additional ‘small’ things that God did for me and for you on Friday that went unnoticed.  But we only get to live in that ignorance because Jesus is so powerful:

He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. Hebrews 1:3a

Amazing.

We needed to admit our boy to the hospital on Friday so I’m going to skip a few days blogging.  Or maybe not; there’s an awful lot of ‘hurry up and wait’ from previous experiences and I might have the time.

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“We are all leaky buckets.”

Posted in Helpful things on August 19, 2011| 3 Comments »

One of the great blessings of my work is morning devotions lead by our president, Jon Bloom.

Yesterday he was making the point to remember who God is and who we are as we deal with the anxieties of the day using Luke 12:28-34.  But he began by saying:

We are all leaky buckets.

That image was so good and so helpful.

There are days when I feel ‘full’ of the grace of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Those are good days!  Not unexpectedly, they are more likely to come when I am filling myself up with God through prayer, time in God’s word and time with God’s people.  My desire for my own joy encourages it!

And when I neglect those same disciplines, the leaky bucket starts to empty.  Ironically, the more I neglect getting close to God, the less I want to pursue my own joy in him.  That’s a terrible cycle.

And, of course, there are those days when we must fight for joy.  Pastor John provided some helps for us in his sermon, The Fruit of Hope: Joy, that he delivered back in 1986:

How then do we obey the commandment to rejoice? How do we fight for joy in the ups and downs of everyday life?

First, let us acknowledge that by nature we are sinners and helpless to become the kind of people who rejoice in the glory of God rather than our own glory.

Second, let us cry out to the God of hope that he would send his Holy Spirit and pour the love of God into our hearts.

Third, let us set our minds on the biblical expressions and evidences of God’s love for repentant sinners. For example:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,

“For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)

And so, finally, when the love of God has filled us with hope in the glory of God, we rejoice in that hope, and again I say to you, REJOICE!

I was a pretty good legalist for the first 2/3rds of my life, believing if I did the ‘good’ things (prayer and Bible reading) then God owed me (like a non-disabled child).  When he revealed himself as greatest treasure, the legalist in me still exists, but he gets quieted (most days – that’s still a battle!) by remembering who God is and pursuing him and getting closer to him.

So, a simple plea today – remember and fill your leaky bucket.  Seek your own joy in the only place where there is real, everlasting, infinite measures of it:  Jesus Christ.

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There is nothing sweeter to a forlorn and broken spirit than the fact that Jesus has compassion – Spurgeon

Posted in Quotes on August 18, 2011| Leave a Comment »

From a sermon by Charles H. Spurgeon on Matthew 9:36 “He was moved with compassion.”

There is nothing sweeter to a forlorn and broken spirit than the fact that Jesus has compassion.

Are any of you sad and lonely? Have any of you been cruelly wronged? Have you lost the goodwill of some you esteemed? Do you seem as if you had the cold shoulder even from good people? Do not say, in the anguish of your spirit, “I am lost,” and give up. He hath compassion on you. . .

And thou, broken down in health and broken down in fortune, scarcely with shoe to thy feet, thou art welcome in the house of God, welcome as the most honoured guest in the assembly of the saints. Let not the weighty grief that overhangs thy soul tempt thee to think that hopeless darkness has settled thy fate and foreclosed thy doom. . .

He is never happier than when he is relieving and retrieving the forlorn, the abject, and the outcast. He despises not any that confess their sins and seek his mercy. No pride nestles in his dear heart, no sarcastic word rolls off his gracious tongue, no bitter expression falls from his blessed lips. He still receives the guilty.

Pray to him now. Now let the silent prayer go up, “My Saviour, have pity upon me; be moved with compassion towards me, for if misery be any qualification for mercy, I am a fit object for thy compassion. Oh! save me for thy mercy’s sake!” Amen.

Charle Spurgeon, The Compassion of Jesus, published December 24, 1914.

 

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“God didn’t make a mistake”

Posted in commentary on August 17, 2011| 1 Comment »

Justin Taylor persistently and consistently provides content worth reading, watching and thinking over.  He gets it with regards to disability – I love that God has provided us such a thoughtful advocate!  And he taught me years ago when he was still at Bethlehem how to think clearly about abortion.

His blog is worth following if you don’t currently do so.

Here’s one reason – the video clip he offered yesterday of Dave Busby, who lived with a disability, speaking the truth about God and suffering as clearly as it can be said.  If you follow that link you will see about 90 seconds of the most relevant part of of his talk.

Thank you, Lord, for men gripped by a big, Biblical, happy view of your sovereignty like Dave Busby!

And thank you for Justin Taylor who continuously points to how glorious you are!

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“The endurance of faith is one of the Spirit’s finest fruits” – Powlison

Posted in Quotes on August 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Profound good in our lives often emerges in a crucible of significant suffering. Jesus himself “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). Often faith and love shine most clearly, simply, and courageously in a dark place. And what marked you for bad? Often our typical sins emerge in reaction to betrayal, loss, or pain. Hammered by some evil, we discover the evils in our own hearts (Rom. 12:17). And perhaps most often, in the hands of our kind and purposeful Father, the bad and the good both come out. A trial brings out what is most wrong in you, and God brings about what is most right as he meets you and works with you (Ps. 119:67). The endurance of faith is one of the Spirit’s finest fruits—and you only learn to endure when you must live through something hard.

David Powlison, “God’s Grace and Your Suffering,” in Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, ed. by John Piper and Justin Taylor, p. 147.

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Christianity is not therapy

Posted in commentary, Sermons on August 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

There is too much in our culture that is left to subjective feelings of the moment.  Yet, as we all know and have experienced, feelings change.

Some of the decisions made in the moment have lifelong, even eternal, consequences.

More news on abortion over the weekend left me shaken and angry.

Yet, in the end, no matter what our culture or our churches do or don’t ultimately do to protect the lives of our unborn babies with disabilities, God reigns over all things.

And there is the hope – Jesus is the king, perfect and just and good in everything he does.  All things will be made right by our king; every injustice will be accounted for.

We are not Christians because it makes us feel better; we are Christians because the very source of all joy has called us to himself and personally accounted for every evil we have committed against our Holy God and declared us righteous.

We can experience joy in the midst of great sorrow because he is God and he is glorious.  And that objective reality will help us do what we need to do today as we deal with disability in a culture that would prefer that we or our loved ones would just cease to exist.

Christianity begins with the conviction that God is an objective reality outside ourselves. We do not make him what he is by thinking a certain way about him. As Francis Schaefer said, he is the God who is there.

We don’t make him. He makes us. We don’t decide what he is going to be like. He decides what we are going to be like. He created the universe, and it has the meaning he gives it, not the meaning we give it.

If we give it a meaning different from his, we are fools. And our lives will be tragic in the end. Christianity is not a game; it’s not a therapy. All of its doctrines flow from what God is and what he has done in history.

They correspond to hard facts. Christianity is more than facts. There is faith and hope and love. But these don’t float in the air. They grow like great cedar trees in the rock of God’s truth. . .

Rootless emotionalism that treats Christianity like a therapeutic option will be swept away in the Last Days. Those who will be left standing will be those who have built their house on the rock of great, objective truth with Jesus Christ as the origin, center, and goal of it all.

John Piper, The Fatal Disobedience of Adam and the Triumphant Obedience of Christ, August 26, 2007.

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The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings – Malachi 4:2

Posted in Scripture, Sermons on August 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Back in December of 1987, Pastor John was preaching on Malachi 4:1-3:

“1 For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.” Malachi 4:1-3

And he offered this helpful word on Jesus and the hope before us:

This sun of righteousness rises with healing in its wings.

I can remember the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean nineteen years ago this week. Noël and I were on our honeymoon. We were up early one morning and saw how it happens on the rim of the ocean.

A thin line of orange and red appears along the water. Then it intensifies, brighter and brighter, and you see the brightness focusing more and more on the center of the line, until the flaming ball surges up out of the water. And then you watch it rise up, and in a sense it brings that whole red line on the rim of the water up into the air as though the sun had wings.

When Malachi saw that, God told him: the coming of the Messiah will be like that and the effect of his beauty will be healing. And Jesus was a great healer. All I have time to say now is that though Jesus does not heal every disease in this life, he will heal every disease in the resurrection. In other words Jesus meets the tremendous need we all feel for hope beyond the grave—that all sickness and pain and sorrow and crying will be gone forever.

Amen, Pastor John!

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Pray for our Christian doctors

Posted in commentary, Scripture on August 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’ve been reading accounts of what happened to the medical profession in Nazi Germany and the capitulation of so many doctors to the Nazi regime’s murderous policies against children and adults with disabilities.

It is a stark reminder to pray for our Christian doctors who not only provide care to us and to our families but must battle darker forces within their own profession.

And it is also a reminder that the Great Physician handles the the most important issue 0f all – the darkness within our own sinful hearts:

But when he heard it, (Jesus) said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” Matthew 9:12-13

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This clash is not about ‘preventing disability.’ – Denny Burk

Posted in commentary, Quotes on August 12, 2011| 1 Comment »

I deeply appreciate when those who don’t live with disability speak out on it.

In this blog post from several years ago, Denny Burk, succinctly unpacks a significant cultural problem as evidenced in a New York Times article on abortion and Down syndrome:

There is a real problem with how this piece frames the issue and what’s at stake in our culture. The article suggests that it is a “cultural skirmish over where to draw the line between preventing disability and accepting human diversity.” But what thinking person could possibly describe the conflict in this way. This clash is not about “preventing disability.” That’s a euphemism that every rational person should reject. It’s about whether or not we should execute disabled persons before they can become a “burden” to their parents and society.

On this issue Christians must offer a prophetic word to the culture. All people are created in God’s image (including people with Down Syndrome) and are thereby to be treated with the dignity that God commands towards those who bear His image. To kill innocent humans because they are inconvenient or unwanted is an assault on the image of God.

Amen.

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