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.

Book of the Week – Suffering and the Sovereignty of God edited by John Piper and Justin Taylor.  It seemed like we were privy to a lot of suffering recently, both globally (earthquake in Haiti) and personally (close friends facing life and death situations).  It seemed like a good time to reflect on the theology of suffering.  This book takes essays from different authors and theologians and compiles them together to develop a Biblical basis for trusting in the sovereignty of God in light of suffering.  Read it online here: http://bit.ly/1an00j

Sermon of the Week – Repentance for the Righteous by Matt Chandler.  Matt Chandler is one of our favorite speakers because of his expository style and honest approach.  I always walk away feeling convicted and in need of repentance.  This sermon is no exception.  He deals with the fact that we all need repentance, and not just for the things we label as terrible sins.  The good, law-abiding, Sunday School-teaching person who thinks his works impress God needs repentance as much as the drunken, rebellious criminal.  Listen here:  http://bit.ly/6CmvBu.

Song of the Week – God has really impressed on me the importance of prayer in the past few weeks, so it was a delight to listen to the song Marcus picked for this week which deals with waiting for God in prayer.  Listen to it here:

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.