New Location

New posts to The Weight of Glory have begun here.

My Blog Blew Up

I was pretending to be computer saavy - something I should never ever do.

As I was messing around with my blog template yesterday and pretending that I knew HTML, my blog suddenly became corrupted beyond all repair. Despite Vince's most valiant efforts, it is still pretty screwy looking, so I am using this as an excuse to try out Wordpress.

So, in the meantime, bookmark or subscribe to The Weight of Glory here. Please let me know what you think! Should I go back to Blogspot or stick with Wordpress?

Recent Reads, Part 2

It's not going to come as any surprise to readers of this blog that I think a John Piper book is a good read. Still, I was especially impressed by this book when I read it for the second time two weekends ago.

As a pastor for young adults I have increasingly been interested in finding books of substance and of simple clarity that I can give to novice readers of theological literature. Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ is a book that combines both of these qualities beautifully and compellingly.

The book examines the person of Jesus Christ from 13 different perspectives (e.g. "The Gladness of Jesus Christ"; "The Wisdom of Jesus Christ"; "The Anguish of Jesus Christ"; "The Severity of Jesus Christ") in short, easily digestible chapter. It crackles with crisp, memorable sentences and, at only 127 pages, can easily be read in a long Sunday afternoon and evening. It is a beautiful meditation on Jesus Christ and is highly recommended for readers at any level. In fact, if you have some spare change and are thinking about doing some outreach around Christmas, Desiring God is currently making boxes of 48 copies of Seeing and Savoring available for $48 a box!

Some excerpts:

"Jesus will not be domesticated. But people still try. There seems to be something about this man for everyone. So we pick and choose in a way that shows he is on our side. All over the world, having Jesus on your side is a good thing. But not the original, undomesticated, unadjusted Jesus. Just the Jesus that fits our religion or political platform or lifestyle. ...It is a strange thing that, among folks who do not follow Jesus as their Lord and God, almost no one wants to say bad things about him. The same thing is true of crosses: They are nice to wear for jewelry, but nobody wants to die on one. The only crosses people want are domesticated ones. It makes sense, then, that a man who calculated his whole life to die on one would be dangerous to believe in" (11-12).

"Christ does not exist in order to make much of us. We exist in order to enjoy making much of him. The assumption of this book is that to know the glories of Christ is an end, not a means. Christ is not glorious so that we get wealthy or healthy. Christ is glorious so that so that rich or poor, sick or sound, we might be satisfied in him" (27).

"Salvation is not mainly the forgiveness of sins, but mainly the fellowship of Jesus.... Forgiveness gets everything out of the way so this can happen" (41).

Saturday Morning Calvinistic Musings

This is what I do now instead of watching Saturday morning cartoons. I dig Calvin, but I definitely miss Duke, Airborne, Beachhead, and the rest of the G.I. Joe gang. He never gives up, you know. He's always there. Fighting for freedom over land and air.

Journal Entry for October 13, 2007

There is a powerful statement in Matthew 11:27 concerning unconditional election and irresistible grace: "All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."

In other words, all people either know the Father or do not know the Father. Those who know the Father know him only because the Son has chosen to reveal Him to them. So, the crucial difference in knowing or not knowing the Father is bound up with something the Son does, not with something we do. Namely, it is bound up with the Son's gracious self-disclosure of the Father, not with any human effort to come to know God. Therefore, the elect are essentially those to whom the Son has chosen to make the Father known, while the non-elect are those to whom he has not made Him known.

In addition, while it certainly isn't explicit, it seems clear that all to whom the Son reveals the Father know the Father. In other words, it is impossible for the Son to reveal the Father, as he truly is in all his beauty and glory, to a person and them not to "know" Him. On the face of it, the text seems to imply that those to whom the Son chooses to reveal the Father assuredly know Him. There is no such thing as a person to whom the Son has revealed the Father who then rejects what they see and remains lost.

I am led to worship, then, the God whom I could not possibly know apart from his gracious self-revelation, whose beauty and glory overwhelmed my hard-hearted rebellion the moment that the Son chose to reveal the Father to me.

Pagitt Unplugged

I never meant to make Doug Pagitt a regular subject on this blog.

But I just couldn't pass this up. For those of you who saw this exchange between Doug Pagitt and John MacArthur on Christianity and yoga on CNN:



...you might be interested to know that recently Pagitt released a podcast that included some comments he and the CNN reporter made after the interview ended. I am absolutely incredulous at one of the comments Pagitt makes concerning stress and the Bible.

In the spirit of charitableness, I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe reactions against him by Reformed evangelicals have been prejudiced at times, and maybe his comments are sometimes taken out of context, but this audio clip is pretty hard to look past. Unfortunately, while Pagitt and Solomon's Porch are often assumed to represent the far left wing of the emerging church movement, I can't help but think that the kind of thinking typified by Pagitt is simply the logical conclusion and inevitable destination of the uncritical embrace of postmoderism reflected in the emerging church movement as a whole.

Listen to the podcast clip here and leave your comments below.

Happiness is...

...being married to a woman who knows football.

My wife even knows fantasy football. Tonight I mentioned to her that I had just negotiated what may be a blockbuster trade. Her response was, "Has the commissioner approved it yet?"

Geez, that's sexy.

Un-shut-up-able

I have been listening to an excellent set of messages on evangelism lately, given recently by my friend Vince. You can (and should) listen to them here (scroll down to "And the Lord Added to Their Number," Parts 1 and 2 [Part 3 is this week]).

One of the things Vince does very effectively in these messages is to remove any and every excuse we might have, spoken or unspoken, for neglecting evangelism as the calling of each and every true disciple of Christ. Here's my favorite quote from the first part:

"We don't treasure God enough to share the good news with others. If we did - if we did see him as our supreme treasure in life - we would not shut up."

I really want to be an evangelist that does not shut up. Vince and I talked a little about his messages while he was writing them, and so for the last week he's had me thinking about why I, personally, do shut up. Why am I not un-shut-up-able for Christ? I have no doubt, as Vince says, that I do not treasure God enough. I have no doubt that I hold too tightly to certain worldly comforts and riches that are constantly asking Christ to "Scoot over, please," and share the throne of my heart. Still, having recognized that, I'm not sure that I even engage in evangelism to an extent commensurate with the degree to which I do treasure Christ. What accounts for this disparity in my life?

Recently, I've come to think that it may be because I do not have an appropriate realization of the authority of Jesus over all things, including my life, my home, my livelihood, my family, my reputation, my income, my personal well-being and health, my family relationships, etc. I do not trust deeply enough that whatever happens in my life, good or bad, as a result of my proclamation of Christ is under the authority of Christ, who is working all things together for my good (Rom. 8:28). I came to this realization while reading Matthew 8-10 yesterday and recognizing the crucial connection between 8:1-10:4 and what follows.

Matthew 8:1-10:4 is all about the authority of Jesus. Matthew makes it plain by his language and by the way he arranges the passage that Jesus has authority over all things, all of which leads up to the conclusion of his gospel, when Jesus declares that all authority over heaven and earth belongs to him (28:18). Jesus has authority over infectious diseases (8:1-4). He has authority over our physical bodies (vv. 5-13). He has authority over sickness (8:14-17). He has authority over his followers (vv. 18-22). He has authority over weather and the atmosphere (vv. 23-27). He has authority over demons (vv. 28-34). He has authority to forgive sins (9:1-8), and he delegates authority to his followers (10:1).

But notice what immediately follows this passage that so powerfully declares the authority of Jesus: Jesus sends his disciples out to proclaim the Kingdom of heaven. The preceding portraits of Jesus' authority are meant to fill this statement with power and hope and confidence: "So have no fear of them...do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (10:26, 28).

Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth. All that can be done to us by persecutors is that they can kill us, and most of us will face far less than that when we proclaim Christ. So may I, and may we, proclaim him boldly, in all times and in all places, flowing out of a deep delight in Christ, emboldened by a confident realization of Christ's authority over absolutely everything.

John Stott Makes Me Worship Jesus

Enjoy some Tuesday afternoon worship on me.

Read the following from Stott's The Cross of Christ slowly and carefully, and then listen to the track that follows:

"What, then, was it that God did or accomplished in and through Christ? Paul answers this question in two complementary ways, negative and positive. Negatively, God declined to reckon our transgressions against us (2 Cor 5:19). Of course we deserved to have them counted against us. But if he were to bring us into judgment, we would die.

'If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, who could stand?' (Ps 130:3)

So God in his mercy refused to reckon our sins against us or require us to bear their penalty. What then has he done with them? For he cannot condone them. No, the positive counterpart is given in 2 Corinthians 5:21: 'God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.' It is surely one of the most startling statements in the Bible.... For our sake God actually made the sinless Christ to be sin with our sins. The God who refused to reckon our sins to us reckoned them to Christ instead.

...Luther, writing to a monk in distress about his sins [said], 'Learn to know Christ and him crucified. Learn to sing to him and say, "Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, I am your sin! You took on you what was mine; yet set on me what was yours! You became what you were not, that I might become what I was not!"'" (196-7).

What Kind of a Name Is Vanhoozer?

Seriously.

In my now 5 years as a student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I've always wanted to ask Kevin Vanhoozer that question. Where in the world does that name come from and what does it mean? Vanhoozer. If he wasn't such an incredible genius, I think he would've done well in the vacuum cleaner business. Can't you just see that stamped on the side of a vacuum? "Vanhoozer. Nothing sucks like this."

I was only able to take one course from Vanhoozer at Trinity (although I sat in on as many random lectures and seminars as I could), but in the span of that brief 3-month course, he succeeded in changing the way I think about just about everything. He is always interesting and insightful and never disappoints. His book The Drama of Doctrine, which won a bunch of awards a year ago, and which may be his magnum opus, is worth its weight in... well, you know how that cliche goes.

Vanhoozer has written a foreword for the recent Kapic and Taylor edited volume of Communion with the Triune God, by John Owen (my son's namesake). I haven't read the book yet - I am waiting to read it whilst enjoying the mountains of Montana at the end of the month - but I did read the forward this morning. I doubt I will be able to persuade many readers of this blog to pick up a book by John Owen, since it certainly is some of the most difficult (though brilliant and marvelous) theological reading available, but maybe I can sneak him in through the back door by convincing some of you to purchase the book simply for Vanhoozer's brief comments. They're the worth the price of the book, in my opinion. Then, if you get around to it, you might give Owen a read as well.

Two quotes by way of tempting you:

"...Owen's approach to the doctrine of the Trinity is impressive indeed. Owen walks a fine line that balances the oneness and the threeness, emphasizing our communion 'with each person distinctly' while at the same time insisting that to commune with each person is to commune with the one God. Perhaps one advantage of Owen's approach over more than a few contemporary approaches is that he is able to preserve the distinctness of the Father's love while simultaneously focusing on Christ as the one alone who makes it known" (CWTG, 11).

"Christianity, it has been said, is not a religion but a personal relation. Owen agrees that theology is relational, but his account of our relation with God bears little resemblance either to the casual way in which it sometimes gets played out in dumbed-down theology and worship [see my 9/24 post] or to the reductionistic way it gets worked out in wised-up theology...which views the God-humanity relation in terms of flattened-out mutuality" (12).

Sickness and Praise

Some of my most worshipful times are when I'm sick.

I'm not sick at the moment, but cold and flu season is on the way and I thought I might do what I can, on the front end, to make the time you spend ill (in the health sense, not in the Beastie Boys sense) a little more pleasurable.

When I am sick, one of the things I inevitably spend time doing is contemplating how incredible it is that our bodies have been designed with a built-in response mechanism that detects and then reacts to potentially harmful microorganisms. And it is astounding to me that the body is built to do all of this involuntarily. Odd as it may sound, when I contemplate all the thousands of things that have to happen in my body; how many things have to work together just right to accomplish thousands and thousands of small but diverse tasks; how many micro-processes have to work to perfection again and again just in order to rid me of the common cold, I am moved to worship the God who put together such an incredibly intricate and effective machine. It is awe-inspiring to me that even with all the advances of the biological, biochemical and medical sciences, there are still millions of things about the human body that are unknown and poorly understood to the most proficient and celebrated scientists - things that are the simplest matters for God.

I am reminded of these passages from The Institutes:

"To investigate the motions of the heavenly bodies, to determine their positions, measure their distances, and ascertain their properties, demand skill...and where these are so employed, as the providence of God is thereby more fully unfolded, so it is reasonable to suppose that the mind takes a loftier flight, and obtains brighter views of His glory. Still, none who have the use of their eyes can be ignorant of the divine skill manifested so conspicuously in the endless variety, yet distinct and well-ordered array, of the heavenly host; and therefore, it is plain that the Lord has furnished every man with abundant proofs of his wisdom. The same is true in regard to the structure of the human frame. ...The human body bears on its face such proofs of ingenious contrivance as are sufficient to proclaim the admirable wisdom of its Maker.

But herein appears the shameful ingratitude of men. Though they have in their own persons a factory where innumerable operations of God are carried on, instead of bursting forth in his praise, as they are bound to do, they, on the contrary, are the more inflated and swelled with pride. ...Can anything be more detestable than this madness in man, who, finding God a hundred times both in his body and his soul, makes his excellence in this respect a pretext for denying that there is a God?

...Let each of us, therefore, in contemplating his own nature, remember that these is one God who governs all natures, and, in governing, wishes us to have respect to himself, to make him the object of our faith, worship, and adoration. Nothing, indeed, can be more preposterous than to enjoy those noble endowments which bespeak the divine presence within us, and to neglect him who, of his own good pleasure, bestows them upon us" (52-5).