Fully to Enjoy God...

"To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives or children or the company of any, or all, earthly friends. These are but shadows, but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams but God is the sun. These are but drops but God is the ocean." - Jonathan Edwards

His Blood Speaks a Better Word

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:22-24, ESV)

"Herein, the blood of Christ 'speaketh better things than that of Abel,' for Abel's blood said, 'Revenge!' and made the sword of God start from its scabbard; but Christ's blood cried 'Mercy!' and sent the sword back again, and bade it sleep for ever." - Spurgeon

Who is God?

I have been reading Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves. I will be reviewing it soon - it has been a wonderful help to me in so many ways. But I wanted to share one quote:

At bottom this God is different, for at bottom, He is not Creator, Ruler or even "God" in some abstract sense: He is the Father, loving and giving life to His Son in the fellowship of the Spirit....Having such a God happily changes everything.

For the first, I feel as if I am beginning to see how a trinitarian God changes everything, and how so much of what we see in the world around is simply the overflow of this wonderful truth about the Lord.

He Crushed Its Head

I am finishing the book of Numbers in my regular Bible reading, and I just came to the passage where the Lord sent fiery snakes to punish the Israelites for their disobedience. It reminded me of one of my favorite passages from Russell Moore's book Tempted and Tried.

In my nightly Bible readings with my family, I read a selected narrative in the canon, but every night my children beg me to read "the one about the snake." For some reason they love to hear about Moses combating the fiery serpents in the wilderness with the bronze serpent on the pole and about the afflicted finding healing when they look on the emblem of the very curse that's killing them. My little boys don't simply have a morbid fascination with venomous snakes among the wandering Israelites. In fact, they are never satisfied to end the story there. 

They wait in silence until we turn to what they call "the other pole," the picture of the cross of Christ. That's when I tell them how mysteriously this seemingly helpless, executed man confronted the snake of Eden right there on "the other pole" and finally did what God had promised since the beginning of history. He crushed its head. 

Praise God that He did.

Psalm 8 is Our Destiny

I was reading through this sermon from John Piper as I was preparing for Bible study on Sunday. His conclusion was so full of hope of the gospel in the midst of all of life's trials that I had to share it.

What then shall we do? Put your faith in the promise of this great future grace—that what you see in Christ today will someday be your portion. 

Fix your eyes on Christ, not on the pain and futility and frustration and sickness and death of this age. They will not have the last word. Christ has conquered death and all the sin and pain that leads to death. 

Think on him. Consider him. Look to him. 

And say to cancer and paralysis and sightless children and airplane-eating Everglades and child-shooting fathers—say to every unsubjected enemy— 

"Psalm 8 is my destiny! In Christ Jesus all things will one day be put under my feet, and I will rule with him in glory forever and ever." 

Believe that and say that—in the face of every calamity and every frustration in life. 

Because it is true.  

Jesus has made it true.

Real and Practical Doctrine

I was reading through an old journal of mine and came across this quote from Jim Elliot about his father:

"My father's religion is of a sort which I have seen nowhere else. His theology is wholly undeveloped, but so real and practical a thing that it shatters every 'system' of doctrine I have seen. He cannot define theism, but he knows God."

High praise indeed. May we have hearts that are caught up in knowing God, and not in labeling what we know about Him. It reminds me of another quote about Bill Wallace, missionary to China. The author of his biography writes:

"The Chinese had heard sermons before, but in Bill Wallace they began to see one, and that made the difference."

Doctrine is good; don't get me wrong. But unless it is born out of a true knowledge of God for the purpose of displaying His glory, then it truly is empty and meaningless, a vanity.

Holiness for Gospel Adornment

I try to spend some time reading before I go to bed, and lately I have been reading some short biographies by John Piper. In his own about the Puritan John Owen, he shared this quote that summed up Owen's life and ministry.

I hope I may own in sincerity that my heart's desire unto God, and the chief design of my life...are, that mortification and universal holiness may be promoted in my own and in the hearts and ways of others, to the glory of God, that so the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ may be adorned in all things. 

It seems to me that this really should be a summary of the life of every Christian. May we be serious about pursuing holiness so that we might better display the glories of our God and His gospel.

Open My Hands

January 8 was the anniversary of the deaths of five missionaries in Ecuador: Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, Pete Fleming, Nate Saint and Jim Elliot. After I returned from Thailand last year, I devoured several different biographies, one of which was The Shadow of the Almighty, Elisabeth Elliot's account of Jim Elliot's life leading up to his death. I was (and am) convicted and encouraged by his love for the Lord and faithful pursuit of eternal things rather than earthly. One quote in particular stood out to me:

Father, let me be weak that I might lose my clutch on everything temporal. My life, my reputation, my possessions, Lord, let me loose the tension of the grasping hand...Rather open my hand to receive the nail of Calvary, as Christ's was opened - that I , releasing all, might be released, unleashed from all that binds me now. He though Heaven...not a thing to be clutched at. So let me release my grasp. 

Oh, that this would be my heart - open my hands, Lord!

The Sum and Substance of the Covenant

"Jesus Christ is Himself the sum and substance of the covenant, and as one of its gifts He is the property of every believer...

Has He power? That power is yours to support and strengthen you, to overcome your enemies, and to preserve you even to the end.

Has He love? Well, there is not a drop of love in His heart that is not yous; you may dive into the immense ocean of His love, and you may say of it all, 'It is mine.'

Has He justice? It may seem a stern attribute, but even that is yours, for He will by His justice see to it that all that is promised to you in the covenant of grace shall be most certainly secured to you...

O believer, God's acceptance of Christ is your acceptance; for the love that the Father set on a perfect Christ, He sets on you now...

That perfect righteousness which Jesus worked out, when through His stainless life He kept the law and made it honorable, is yours and is imputed to you. Christ is in the covenant." - Charles Spurgeon, Morning by Morning

The Death of Death

"Do you dread sin? He has nailed it to His cross. Do you fear death? He has been the death of death...Whatever foes there may be before the Christian, they are all overcome. There are lions, but their teeth are broken; There are serpents, but their fangs are extracted...God has taken away in the person of Christ all the power that anything can have to hurt us...They are beaten, they are vanquished; all you have to do is share the plunder." - Charles Spurgeon

Great Purpose

There is comfort found in knowing this truth. 

"There is no circumstance, no trouble, no testing, that can ever touch me until, first of all, it has gone past God and past Christ, right through to me. If it has come that far, it has come with great purpose." - Alan Redpath

He Grips Our Soul

Another gem from Samuel Rutherford.

"And withal, consider how, in all these trials (and truly they have been many), your Lord hath been loosing you at the root from perishing things, and hunting after you to grip your soul. Madam, for the Son of God's sake, let Him not miss His grip, but stay and abide in the love of God." 

Kiss the Wave

“I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages.” – C. H. Spurgeon

Sanctification

J. C. Ryle's descriptions of what sanctification is and is not have convicted me greatly many times. What I often consider progress is really no progress at all. Praise God that the victory is certain!

Sanctification Is Not:

1. Talk about religion. “People hear so much of Gospel truth that they contract an unholy familiarity with its words and phrases, and sometimes talk so fluently about its doctrines that you might think them true Christians. … [But] the tongue is not the only member that Christ bids us give to his service.”

2. Temporary religious feelings. “Reaction, after false religious excitement, is a most deadly disease of soul. When the devil is only temporarily cast out of a man in the heat of a revival, and by and by returns to his house, the last state becomes worse than the first.”

3. Outward formalism and external devoutness. “In many cases, this external religiousness is made a substitute for inward holiness; and I am quite certain that it falls utterly short of sanctification of heart!”

4. Retirement from our place in life or renunciation of social duties. “It is not the man who hides himself in a cave, but the man who glorifies God as master or servant, parent or child, in the family and in the street, in business and in trade, who is the Scriptural type of a sanctified man.”

5. Occasional performance of right actions. “[Sanctification] is not like a pump, which only sends forth water when worked upon from without, but like a perpetual fountain, from which a stream is ever flowing spontaneously and naturally.”

Sanctification Is:
1. Habitual respect to God’s law and habitual effort to live in obedience to it as the rule of life. “The same Holy Spirit who convinces the believer of sin by the law, and leads him to Christ for justification, will always lead him to a spiritual use of the law, as a friendly guide, in the pursuit of sanctification.”

2. Habitual endeavour to do Christ’s will and to live by his practical precepts. “He who supposes [that Christ’s precepts as recorded in the Gospels] were spoken without the intention of promoting holiness, and that a Christian need not attend to them in his daily life, is really little better than a lunatic, and at any rate is a grossly ignorant person.”

3. Habitual desire to live up to the standard with St. Paul sets before the churches in his writings. “I defy anyone to read Paul’s writings carefully, without finding in them a large quantity of plain, practical directions about the Christian’s duty in every relation of life, and about our daily habits, temper and behavior to one another.”

4. Habitual attention to the active graces which our Lord so beautifully exemplified, and especially to the grace of charity (love). “A sanctified man will try to do good in the world, and to lessen the sorrow and increase the happiness of all around him. He will aim to be like his Master, full of kindness and love to everyone … by deeds and actions and self-denying work, according as he has opportunity.”

5. Habitual attention to the passive graces of Christianity (those graces which are especially shown in submission to the will of God, and in bearing and forbearing towards one another). “Of one thing I feel very sure—it is nonsense to pretend to sanctification unless we follow after the meekness, gentleness, patience and forgiveness of which the Bible makes so much. People who are habitually giving way to peevish and cross tempers in daily life, and are constantly sharp with their tongues, and disagreeable to all around them—spiteful people, vindictive people, revengeful people, malicious people—of whom, alas, the world is only too full!—all such know little, as they should know, about sanctification.

Long for the Giver

From David Powlison: "We are meant to long supremely for the Lord himself, for the Giver, not his gifts. The absence of blessings - rejection, vanity, reviling, illness, poverty - often is the crucible in which we learn to love God for who he is. In our idolatry we make gifts out to be supreme goods, and make the Giver into the errand boy of our desires."

May the good things we receive always point us to the Hands from which they come. 

Final Verdict

Sometimes it's really hard to imagine that the Lord would love me when I see all my sin. And sometimes, I really struggle and wonder whether I could really be saved. But then I come to Scripture and I am reminded that, praise God, my salvation does not rest in my works or lack thereof, but in the completed work of Christ. And nothing can change that because of Him, and only because of Him, I stand justified before God. This quote from J.I. Packer sums it up perfectly:

"[N]obody can produce new evidence of your depravity that will make God change his mind. For God justified you with (so to speak) his eyes open. He knew the worst about you at the time when he accepted you for Jesus' sake; and the verdict which he passed then was, and is, final." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God

The Sum of a Million Little Things

"Holiness is the sum of a million little things — the avoidance of little evils and little foibles, the setting aside of little bits of worldliness and little acts of compromise, the putting to death of little inconsistencies and little indiscretions, the attention to little duties and little dealings, the hard work of little self-denials and little self-restraints, the cultivation of little benevolences and little forbearances. Are you trustworthy? Are you kind? Are you patient? Are you joyful? Do you love? These qualities, worked out in all the little things of life, determine whether you are blight or blessing to everyone around you, whether you are an ugly spiritual eyesore or growing up into a good-looking Christian." - Kevin DeYoung

Worship: The Goal of the Church

I love this quote from John Piper in his book "Let the Nations Be Glad". 

"Missions is not the ultimate goal of the Church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever." 

If worship is the ultimate goal of the church, it ought also to be the greatest goal of my life. Does the way I live and love and work lead display worship and cause others to glory in Christ? Not as I would like. Praying always for more...

David McIntyre on Sanctification

So encouraging. 

"While we abide in Christ, we ought not to allow ourselves to be discouraged by the apparent slowness of our advancement in grace. In nature, growth proceeds with varying speed. Sibbes compares the progressive sanctification of believers to the increase in herbs and trees, which 'grow at the root in winter, in the leaf in summer, and in the seed in autumn.' The first of these forms of increase seems very slow; the second is more rapid; the third rushes on to full maturity. In a few days of early autumn a field of grain will seem to ripen more than in weeks of midsummer."

- David McIntyre, The Hidden Life of Prayer

Look to the cross!

I love this quote from John Newton...Free pardon to all who come, no exceptions, and no reserves. Praise God. 

"When the brazen serpent was erected in the wilderness, to cure those who must otherwise have died, the benefit was not restrained to those who had been bitten by the fiery serpent but once or a few times. The worst case amongst the people was relieved as soon and as certainly as the very slightest. The remedy was universally proposed to every person. The application was easy; it was only, look and live. But if a man had spent all his time in measuring or counting his wounds, instead of looking to the ordinance of God, he might have died, though the means of life were within his view. The sense of the evil of sin is given to quicken application to Christ, and not to discourage our approach. The Scripture has concluded all under sin, and as such we are all condemned already. But the Gospel proclaims a free pardon to everyone who, with the eye of his mind, looks for life to him who hung upon the cross." - John Newton