Sermon of the Week

The sermon of the week is actually a series on election by Pastor Mike Abendroth.  Pastor Abendroth is a friend of mine from Massachusetts where he is an elder at Bethlehem Bible Church.  This sermon series was very helpful to me as I was starting to come to an understanding of what the Bible meant by election.  The series is formatted as answers to “frequently asked questions” about election.  He was kind enough to give me permission to post them here for you to listen to.

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 1

Ministry\’s Only Hope: Election Part 1

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 2

Ministry\’s Only Hope: Election Part 2

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 3

Election Part 3

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 4

Election Part 4

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 5

Election Part 5

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 6

Election Part 6

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 7

Election Part 7

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 8

Election Part 8

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 9

Election Part 9

Ministry’s Only Hope: Election Part 10

Election Part 10

Song of the Week

Marcus sent me this song to use as song of the week this week and its an awesome one to use to draw your attention to God and His glory.  Sing along and enjoy the God you serve.

Book of the Week

The book of the week is The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by D.A. Carson.  Here are some quotes from the first chapter to whet your interest:

To put this another way, we live in a culture in which
many other and complementary truths about God are widely
disbelieved. I do not think that what the Bible says about the love
of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is
abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the
wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of
God—to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic
Christianity.
The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has
been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The
love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized.
This process has been going on for some time. My
generation was taught to sing, “What the world needs now is
love, sweet love,” in which we robustly instruct the Almighty
that we do not need another mountain (we have enough of them),
but we could do with some more love. The hubris is staggering.

Precisely how does one integrate what the Bible says about the
love of God with what the Bible says about God’s sovereignty,
extending as it does even over the domain of evil? What does
love mean in a Being whom at least some texts treat as impassible?
How is God’s love tied to God’s justice?

Download it here.  Or order your own copy here.

Hope you enjoy some of these materials.  Take a look and bring your questions to our next meeting on February 13.

Our song of the week is “All I Really Need” (click for a free download) by Mark and Stephen Altrogge.  The song is part of the In A Little While album put out by Sovereign Grace Music.  The focus of the song is that our real need is peace with God through Christ and He has provided that for us.  We pondered a quote by K. Scott Oliphint and Rod Mays in the book Things that Cannot Be Shaken:

Our true need is not physical water or husbands or pleasure, or. . . .  Our true need is for a permanent solution, one that does not ebb or flow with the times, one not subject to the whims and wishes of our fickle hearts.  We need living water.  We need permanent change.  We need the Holy Spirit to unite us to Christ.  In Him we have the True Bread and Living Water, so that we will never be hungry or thirsty again.  All of our needs are met in Him, because in the end, our only real need is to be united to Christ by the Spirit.

Our sermon of the week is “The Holiness of God” by Paul Washer.  Washer discusses what it means for God to be holy and it establishes a high view of God that is foundational for us to understand some of the truths, and some of the hard truths, of the Gospel.

Our book of the week is God is the Gospel by John Piper, which can be downloaded for free from Desiring God ministries.  In God is the Gospel, Piper grounds the magnificence of the Gospel in the fact that we get God.  That God is the primary object of the Gospel.  And that God is the one who initiates and accomplishes the Gospel power in our lives.

Our next meeting will be Saturday, January 16 at 10:00am.  Feel free to join us for some breakfast foods and Bible study.

Buy it here.  Read the sermon here.

Here are some excerpts:

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple. The first question I ask about these promises is: “Why any of them except the first?” Can anything be added to the conception of being with Christ? For it must be true, as an old writer says, that he who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being “noticed” by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know Him, but that they will be known by Him (I Cor. viii. 3). It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully reechoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words: “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged.

Manny is a pastor and former addict who is counseling Baxter, an addict who has just left rehab and is in Manny’s halfway house.  Manny is the first speaker.

“. . . My life was all about myself, much like yours.  I loved the bad things, just like you.  Pleasure, selfishness, pride–that was my life, and it’s been yours, I suppose.”

“Oh, yes.”

“It’s all sin, and it all leads to the same end–misery, pain, destruction, ruin, then death.  That’s where you’re headed, son, and you’re in a hurry to get there.”

Baxter nodded slightly.  “So what happened?”

“I got lucky and lived, and not long afterward I met an inmate, a career criminal who would never be eligible for parole, and he was the gentlest, sweetest, happiest person I’d every talked to.  Had no worries, every day was beautiful, life was grand, and this from a man who’d spent fifteen years in max security.  Through a prison ministry, he’d been exposed to the gospel of Christ, and he became a believer.  He said he was praying for me, as he prayed for a lot of the bad guys in prison.  He invited me to a Bible study one night, and I listened to other inmates tell their stories and praise God for His forgiveness and love and strength and promise of eternal salvation.  Imagine, a bunch of hardened criminals locked away in a rotten prison singing songs of praise to the Lord.  Pretty powerful stuff, and I needed some of it.  I needed forgiveness, because there were lots of sins in my past.  I needed peace, because I’d been at war my entire life.  I needed love, because I hated everybody.  I needed strength, because deep inside I knew how weak I was.  I needed happiness, because I’d been miserable for so long.  So we prayed together, me and those bad boys who were like little lambs, and I confessed to God that I was a sinner, and that I wanted salvation through Jesus Christ.  My life changed in an instant, Baxter, a change so overwhelming I still can’t believe it.  The Holy Spirit entered my soul, and the old Manny Lucera died.  A new one was born, one whose past was forgiven and his eternity secured.”

Anyway, it just so happens that I am rarely the winner.  I enter contests as often as the next guy but I don’t think I’ve ever actually won much.  Well, every week I put my name and email address into the Free Stuff Fridays giveaway over at Tim Challies blog because every week he’s giving away great stuff.  Its a great blog that I visit every day.

On Saturday, after a very long day that had followed a very long night, I got home around 10pm and thought I’d check my email really quick (I’m a bit of a junkie).  There in my inbox was an email from Tim Challies with the subject line:  “Free Stuff Fridays (You Won)”.  You can see what I won here.  I’m pretty excited about getting some new reading material.

In no particular order:

1)  I don’t want them to associate the Christmas story with fairy tale.  Someday they’re going to realize Santa is not real (despite all attempts by Hollywood to convince them otherwise).  When that happens, I don’t want them to question all elements of the Christmas story.  Let’s be honest.  Many Bible tales sound fairy tale-ish.  I want them to be clear on what elements are real and what are fiction.

2)  The concept of a being who “sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake” is a bit disturbing when you think about it.  Since when does another being, fairy tale or not, deserve the non-communicable attributes of God.  Unless the character is a representation of God in the story, which if that’s the case here, then it leads to a malformed view of God.

3)  The whole idea of gifts as a result of good-behavior is a distortion of what the Christmas story was all about.  God didn’t send His Greatest Gift to us because we were on the nice list instead of the naughty list.  We were all on the naughty list.  None of us deserve anything.  I want my kids to understand that they don’t deserve the gifts that they get, but the gifts flow out of love and graciousness from their father and mother who enjoy showering blessings on them.  This will produce a proper view of gifts in relation to God’s gift of salvation.

4)  To me, the modern conception of Santa Claus encourages the materialistic culture surrounding Christmas as an American holiday.  It’s hard enough to encourage my kids to think about Christ at Christmastime.  I’m tempted to throw out the whole gift-giving all together (although I would have to give back my ESV Study Bible and Third Day Chronologies).  

5)  The modern view of Santa Claus does a disservice to the true story of Nicholas of Myra (see a summary here).  I plan to teach my kids about the real Nicholas who, as far as we can tell, was an orthodox believer who ministered to the poor and needy.  The story of Nicholas is a story that encourages giving sacrificially rather than receiving.  The modern Santa Claus is a poor representation of that brother in Christ.

6)  This may be selfish, but I worked hard to provide the gifts I give my children, and so did their grandparents and aunts and uncles.  I don’t want some jolly elf swooping in and taking credit for what I’ve provided for my children.

This is not intended to be a polemic to get everybody to abandon Santa Claus.  I wouldn’t mind if that happened, but it doesn’t bother me that friends and family still tell their kids he’s real.  This is just what we’ve decided as a family and how we got there. 

This is also not an argument against make-believe.  I believe in the power and importance of a good imagination.  My kids are constantly making up stories, reading fairy tales, and watching Pixar movies.  I just don’t want my kids to confuse make-believe with real-life, especially when it comes to the birth of Christ.

I get my kids a book every Christmas and we read it Christmas morning before opening presents (after reading Luke 2).  This year I found a book by Karen Kingsbury called We Believe In Christmas that said what I wanted to tell my kids about Christmas.  On the page with a picture of a kid on Santa’s lap she writes:

“And should they whisper ‘I believe. . .’
when sitting on his knee,
Whisper, ‘I believer this more,’ 
and there will Christmas be.”