Happy Birthday Landon!

Our son, Landon just turned three. To us that is a big gift from God. Landon was born at 23 weeks, which is only about 5-1/2 months into the pregnancy. He only weighed 1 lb and 7 oz and we were not given much hope that he would come home, or have any sort of a normal life. To God's credit he did come home and he has has done far greater than the doctors ever would have dreamed. Because his lungs are still a little behind he is on oxygen and he has had to have a few surgeries from complications from being born so early, but God has told an amazing story both to us and to all the doctors who have scratched their heads in unbelief at the the miracles God has and is performing through Landon. We take every day, sometimes every minute with Landon as a gift, and take lots of pictures! God is without a doubt the author of life, and we know its because Christ died on the Cross to purchase both ours and Landon's life from the power of sin and death. To God be the glory!

The Blessing of Sight

This is a post from one of my favorite blogs that is no longer on the web. It is a post that deals with the subject of how God sometimes opens our eyes to the awefulness of our sins when we are shutting them on purpose. But it is also about God's rich mercy that is there to comfort and forgive us when we repent.

The Blessing of Sight

You’ve just truly seen yourself for the first time and now you’re scared. For years you have lived in the bubble of your own religious pretense, presumption and play acting, but now the mask has been taken from you and you tremble at what you’ve been shown.

For there lying conspicuously in front of you, what you had ignored so many times before, is a passage of God’s truth that now turns your heart to melted wax. Like a melted, snuffed candle you feel as if the life and flame has gone out from within you and now you think yourself as a grotesque blob of useless smoldering wax. What once was brushed aside by a mental wave of the hand, now has you terrified. You are desperate, anxious and near total despair. Perhaps it was the infamous Hebrews 6:4-6 or Hebrews 10:26-28 that struck your pride down. Maybe an Old Testament passage kindled your guilt and gave you glimmers of how past sins that had gone unnoticed and untended for so many years. It doesn't matter. Now you've been brought low. Now you realize your own sin, and you feel the weight of the deep offenses you’ve piled upon yourself and before the Lord.

Regardless of which dagger of the Living God’s truth struck and pierced your heart, you still think: "What need is there for me to stand before God to face his judgment? His wrath is already on me. His angry eyes are fixed on my unrepentant, bold, unabashed sin."

But even in his anger there is hope, much hope. In fact, for quite possibly the very first time in your life, there is true hope for you. Or is it that you have forgotten what the Word of God says? Have you not remembered that the God of All Creation is a God is One that brings forth the greatest good from the greatest sorrow for all who call upon him? Remember the story of Esther and how near the Jews were to annihilation at the hands of wicked Haman? Remember how the Israelites were pinned between the sea and a charging, well-armed Egyptian army? Remember the more than 185,000 Assyrians that were at Jerusalem’s gates? What about Jonah defying God, yet having a great work performed through his preaching after he was spared? What about the utterly depraved Ninevehites who heard Jonah’s preaching and repented? How about a murderous Paul being turned from his madness - when he didn’t even ask for it?

Now maybe you think: “That’s all well and good for a child of God, but I no longer think that God will accept me. I am as Esau. I am as Judas, once he saw his sin. I am like the Israelite put out of the camp or to be stoned to death for his offense and blasphemy. I don’t believe that I can repent and I don't believe that God will allow me to repent.”

Ah, but you see the truth. You see that to continue unrepentant is to sign your own spiritual death warrant. You see that your offenses before God is the thing to be sorrowful over. You now understand that you’ve offended God and that you continue to offend God. The question is not whether you see your guilt as a legitimate problem, the question now is what you are going to do about it?

Will you go the way of Judas, take matters into your own hands, and kill yourself in unbelief? Will go back to sinning, resolved to your presumed 'fate', and continue to live unrepentant like Cain and Esau? Or will your sorrow and guilt drive you to seek to Christ and trust in his promises for salvation. Remember Jesus said that those who seek find. Those who ask, receive. Those who knock are let in the door. So do these things and plead for God’s mercy, ask for repentance from him, and if you can’t find it in your heart now, pray for it and expect to find his grace.

Sight is a rare gift. To see God’s truth is a great blessing that far too often is not cherished and is taken for granted. To have sight of the truth is to have a measure of God's grace in your heart.

And the Spirit of God will work a heart to fear its separation from the truth in order to bring it back to conformity to God’s will. He will use the sight of your sin to turn you from your ways.

To that end, do not look upon anxiety or fear as a great curse, but as a blessing that God has not given up on you. He is prompting you to return to him to find the grace and peace in the Lord Jesus Christ and to show you that the melted wax of your heart does not mean that the light of Christ’s love has extinguished. It just means that he is preparing the ground for your return and for your receipt of his love and truth.

"If we are faithless,
he will remain faithful,
for he cannot disown himself" - 2 Timothy 2:13

(Some may recognize this post as it was linked to a lot, but I am leaving the author's name out because I can't contact him to see if it's ok to put on here.)

A Failure to Move Forward

"Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity..."(Hebrews 6:1, ESV)

One thing that stands out about this warning passage and others in Hebrews the more I read them are the similarities between what the writer is saying and the experience of Israel in the wilderness at Kadesh-Barnea (see here). The writer here in Hebrews 6 is scolding his congregation for their lack of forward progress in the faith. He then abrubptly stops and gives this solemn warning about the consequences of continuing in this state. If we look back to Numbers 14 we can see that the Israelites suffered from this exact same thing:

"Then all the congregation raised a loud cry, and the people wept that night. And all the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron...'Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?' And they said to one another,'Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt.'" (Numbers 14:1,3b-4)

God had promised to give them the land in his covenant with Abraham. They had also experienced countless miracles, eschatological wonders, and caring provision from the hand of God which parallels the gifts experienced by the New Covenant believer in Hebrews 6:4-5. In spite of all this they still refused to go forward, thus completely setting aside the covenant promises God had made to them. They not only rejected God, they also rejected his servant Moses and conspired to put him to the open shame of the death of a covenant breaker (parallelling putting Christ to open shame in the New Covenant). When God finally thunders from heaven in judgment on his people in Numbers 14:22-23 he says that it was for thier habitual rebellion, not for any isolated act, which helps us shed light on the statement about "falling away" in Hebrews 6:6. This falling away is not an isolated act of disobedience, or even an ongoing struggle with a certain sin, but a habitual and ongoing condition of a hard heart that despises God and his commandments and covenant promises. In fact it is a heart so hard that there is no shame, and when offered the chance of repentance it is rejected (Numbers 14:9-10). This is a dangerous condition indeed.

What the writer of Hebrews is showing here is the dangerous place that apathy, or refusing to go forward in the faith can result in. Calvin says in his commentaries that apathy can lead to indifference, and indifference to alienation, and alienation if not repented of can lead to this falling away and full rejection of Christ and his teachings in the New Covenant.

In summary, this passage is not for those who struggle with sin, which every single Christian does daily. So who is it for? I'm not sure I know the exact answer to that except to say that it's to those who are deliberately refusing to move forward in the faith for whatever reason.

So what is the author of Hebrews saying to us? "...we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises." (Heb 6:11-12). We move forward with the full assurance of hope in God's promises, especially the promise of the forgiveness of sins!

Sanctity of Life Sunday – An Abortion Story

Sunday before last was Sanctity of Life Sunday and we had a young woman who works with the Women’s Care Center speak to the congregation. There was no way the congregation could have been prepared for the story she began to tell. She told about a young girl who was a friend of hers who recently had an abortion…her second one.

She began the story with her friend nervously walking into the clinic and sitting down with seven or eight other girls. The price for the “procedure” was $450 and they all had paid and were waiting for their name to be called. The girl mentioned there was some awkward conversation between the women, whose age ranged from 18 to mid-thirties. The nurse came out and asked her to come back to one of the rooms and to change clothes. After the girl changed clothes she sat for a while waiting on the nurse to come in. During these few minutes the girl understandably became very emotional and wondered if she was doing the right thing. When the nurse came in she noticed that the girl was troubled, but she proceeded to ask her the routine questions: “Do you know who the father is?” and “Does he feel the same way about the child?” and so on. The last question was “Are you sure you want to do this?” The young girl spoke through the tears a troubled “no”. So, the nurse directed her to a room where she could take some time to think about it. The girl sat in there for three hours…alone, torn with the decision to keep her baby, or to “have it taken care of”. The most support the nurse would offer was “have you made up your mind yet?” There wasn’t anything like “why don’t you go home and think about it if you need to, there’s no hurry”. After the three emotional hours the young girl decided to go through with the abortion. When she finally went in to see the doctor he looked at her and smiled and said “You’re my favorite patient today”. When the girl asked him why he replied, “Because you’re my last one. I can go home after this.” So the girl went through with the abortion.

As I mentioned earlier, the girl in the story is the friend of a really good Christian lady in our Church who is helping her work through this and trying to lead her to repentance and faith in Christ. Please pray for both of them. Also please pray for the Women’s Care Center in our town that tries to educate women on the alternatives to these horrible procedures by using Ultrasounds and solid Christian counsel. Finally, pray that the hard hearts of the clinics and doctors performing these procedures would be softened by the Holy Spirit and the prayers of people interceding for these helpless victims.

Brief Hiatus

My family and I have been on a brief hiatus with our son, Landon, the past few days as he has been in the hospital, so I haven't been able to post. Thanks be to God he is back home and doing well. God has been telling an amazing story of his mercy with our son, and some day I hope to put it on here.

I have a lot of posts on the backburner and I will try to get them out this week.

Thanks and God Bless.

Hebrews 6, the corporate translation

"For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt." (Hebrews 6:4-6, ESV)

A lot of the time people will read this verse and wonder "is this me?". Especially those who have been caught up in some certain sin or another. But one thing that has struck me about these verses after reading this is the corporate nature of the language in these verses. If you look you will see words like those and them. If you follow the more Redemptive Historical explanation offered in the paper listed above (or here) its hard not to conclude that at least part of the authors intentions were to address them in a corporate manner. In other words, if we (church/corporate body) fall away from God in the same way that Israel fell away from God, then that we will not be able to be restored again. But this falling away is not just any falling away. In the events at Kadesh-Barnea the Israelites were ready to stone Moses, God's mediator, and expose him to the shame of being cast outside the camp and killed. But here if there is not forward progression, then the author says that the consequences are much worse now that we are in the New Covenant, for it's not Moses now, but Jesus that we will put to an open shame if we fall in this way!

Now the big question is to what extent did they fall away at Kadesh-Barnea? In other words, what did it look like to those looking on? I hope to deal with that in the next post.

Go back and look at the story of Israel in the wilderness and the events leading up to Numbers 14 through the lenses of Hebrews 5 and 6. To me this corporate approach makes more sense than the individualistic interpretations that we've all heard.

Quote from Internet Monk

One of the wonderful things about God's grace is that sometimes he uses our sin somehow to ultimately draw us to Himself. Here is a great quote from Imonk that stresses this point:

"God is not harsh to reject us, but faithful to love us, through these seasons. He often lets our own persistence in sin become the means of working his grace into us. If we have acquired a taste for sin, we may drink it to the dregs and suffer the consequences before we see the superiority of our Savior and the pleasures of obedience. Persistent sin is rarely- thankfully- cured instantly, but over time, and in God’s time. His goal in our lives is not a plant that grows quickly without root, but a tree that bears fruit. There are seasons when trees that will be fruitful look, even to the eyes of the mature, to be dead and hopeless. But this is a God who brings life from the dead."

More on McKnight's Blog

Ok, I've read a lot more of McKnight's Blog (Jesus Creed) and he has a lot of thought provoking material on there, especially about how he has moved from a Calvinist view of Scripture to, well, something he calls "Post-Calvinism" (read here). This was all thanks to a series of events, the most important being when he was asked to teach through the book of Hebrews at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I think he asks a lot of questions that need to be thought about and discussed. Maybe his post should be called "Calvinism Isn't Enough"! I don't think I agree with everything he's written, but I definitely enjoy reading and working through it.

Great Explanation of warning passages in Heberews

I've found a new blog by Scot Mcknight that I've really been enjoying. He has a really good exegesis of the warning passages in Hebrews. It's broken down into four sections which really helps. They are:

Exhortation
Sin
Believers or Not?
So What?

I'm not sure I agree totally with his "phenominological-true believer" category, and he doesn't subscribe to the Calvinistic view of Hebrews completely, but I appreciate the way he honestly writes about struggling with it. The comments are great, too.

Sin comes with guilt

Unfortunately when we sin it often comes with a lot of guilt when we realize how bad we've messed up. This is especially true when there is sexual failure in a Christian's life. Pastor Wilson has a great post here on repentance, forgiveness and how to deal with the guilt in light of Christ's sacrifice.

A different look at John 3:16..

This is how my family and I see John 3:16 now that we are Presbyterian!

For God so loved the world (covenant of redemption) that he gave his one and only Son (propitiatory covenant sacrifice), that whoever believes in Him (puts faith in covenant promises) will not perish (suffer covenant curses) but have eternal life (enjoy covenant blessings).

Amen.

John Piper - What does it mean to get saved?

Piper video on what it means to get saved.

Redemptive Historical look at Hebrews 6

Some of the passages in Hebrews are very hard to take in if not read in the right context and with the authors intentions and audience in mind. Here is a paper that looks at the warning passage in Hebrews 6:4-6 in its RH context, which is very helpful.

Free John Owen Stuff

Here is a link to some free high quality PDF's of some of John Owen's works. Free stuff is always the best!

Calvin on voluntary sin vs. sins of ignorance

Here is another quote from Calvin on the subject of voluntary sins vs. sins of ignorance:

“Certain men, somewhat more prudent, when they see the teachings of Novatus refuted by the great clarity of Scripture, do not deem every sin unpardonable, but only voluntary transgression of the law, into which one knowingly and willingly falls. Now those who speak thus allow pardon for no sin, except on that is an error or ignorance. But in the law the Lord commanded one sort of sacrifice to be offered to atone for the voluntary sins of believers (Lev. 6:1ff), another sort to redeem their acts of ignorance (Lev 4). Consequently, what depravity it is not to grant any expiation for voluntary sin. I say that nothing is more apparent than that Christ’s sacrifice is alone sufficient to forgive the voluntary sins of the saints inasmuch as the Lord has attested this by carnal sacrifices as seals.” (Calvin, Institutes).

Novatus was a contemporary of Calvin that taught that if someone sinned one of the "bad sins" voluntarily after being baptized that they had to be excommunicated from the Church and no forgiveness remained for them. If that was the case then there probably weren't a whole lot of people left in his church! As Calvin points out in several places this is a grave error and it does not see sin the way Scripture does, and worse than that it attempts to limit the extent of forgiveness that Christ's sacrifice accomplished. Thankfully Christ's death on the cross makes an allowance for the worst of sins, as long as there is repentance involved (I John 1:9).

Note: If it seems like I'm spending a lot of time and effort on this subject, well its for a couple of reasons. #1, it's the reasons I created this blog, to struggle through some of these verses. #2, it's because I have struggled with these verses. In the past I have struggled with God's forgiveness for certain sins in my own life in light of a lot of these passages. But to my surprise I keep finding one thing...grace! And I hope that's what these blog entries convey to whoever reads them.

(Go here for rest of this series)