Must I be carried to the skies

On flowery beds of ease?

While others fought to win the prize,

And sailed through bloody seas?

The Together for the Gospel conference was last week, and Challies has been keeping up with it. Here’s a list of audio downloads.

In 2001 at a CBMC conference (Christian Businessmen’s Connection), Dr. Howard Hendricks delivered these words in a three-part message on prayer.

Build teams committed to prayer. Now, I want to share with you because I find that very few Christians know this. Study this for yourself. Don’t go by my word. If you study prayer in both the Old and New Testament, what the Bible says about prayer mostly is addressed not to individuals, but to groups. That’s a revolutionary truth. Does that mean you don’t pray individually? Of course not. It means that you understand that God honors the collective ministry of a group of believers. The four guys who carried the man into the present of Jesus Christ, and the text says, “When He [Jesus] saw their faith, He said to the sick, ‘Rise, take up your bed, and walk.'” See, He takes very seriously the fact that you get a group of people who covenant before God to unite their hearts in prayer.

By the way, the greatest untapped reservoir in the United States and I’m sure many other countries as well is senior citizens. It’s the fastest growing segment of people in America and the fastest growing segment of that group is over 80. The tragedy is that many of these people are sliding from home, reaching for the bench, throwing in the towel, or can only look forward to retirement. May I remind you of the fact that the average American dies two years after retirement. The reason is they lose their purpose, and we are finding that the greatest group of prayer warriors we are seeing raised up all across our country is senior citizens, many of whom not only have time, but interest, money, and everything else so that they can invest in praying for others.

Another untapped reservoir is youth. There’s a church in our area that has a fantastic group of young people. I love them like crazy. They went to the elders of their church and asked, “Can we open the church on Wednesday mornings to pray?”

“Well, we’ll have to take that under consideration.”

So, after four or five meetings (typical elders), they finally decided, “No, we can’t do that. Continue reading Gathering to Pray →

Mart De Haan asks, “If God is good, but good isn’t God, how do we avoid making our worst mistakes with some of the best things in life?”

Chattanooga Matters (formerly the Chattanooga Resource Foundation) has a seminar from earlier this year with John Stonestreet of Bryan College on YouTube. It’s a nine part video series, and in this part, John makes a great statement. “In my view the worst thing about contemporary entertainment . . . [is that] it makes us think about things that aren’t important and keeps us from thinking about things that are. It distracts us from the real world. We are a distracted generation.”

Tonight, another insight from the bottomless, fetid pit of my wisdom.

I think of this insight as my own, but that’s probably just the result of ignorance. Likely thousands of real theologians said it before I did.

But I never read it in their books. I worked it out with my own tiny, smooth-surfaced brain.

So I think of it as my own.

Is there any saying that’s brought more comfort to sinners than this: “If you had been the only sinner in the world, Jesus would have died to save you”?

I suppose it’s a cliché, but I like it. It speaks to me.

And yet it always bothered me. Because it didn’t seem to actually rise from any biblical text. And I don’t take anything as absolute truth that isn’t either found in Scripture or plainly derived from a clear reading of Scripture.

And then I figured it out. Luke 15:3-7: “Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?”

And just down the page, Luke 15:8-10: “Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?”

The point of these parables is not (I believe), as some will think, that everyone will be saved. The point is the concern of the Searcher for each individual who is lost.

In other words, if I had been the only sinner in the world, Jesus would have died to save me.

My apologies to everybody who came up with this first (probably in preaching on Luke 15).

But it’s a comfort to me.

Have a good weekend.

So Senator Harry Reid thinks the Federal Income Tax is a voluntary contribution.

This isn’t really surprising, when you think about it. The Left has its own definition of voluntarism. The Left’s vision of society has always looked a lot like a Soviet propaganda movie. The call goes out for the proletariat to make some sacrifice for the common good, and the people happily drop their individual concerns and march off to do whatever job the Politburo says they should do. And if the authorities have to use guns to get some of them to fall in line, well, it’s for their own good, and therefore voluntary in the deepest, truest sense.

Even prisoners in the gulag were officially described as volunteers.

I got a new computer at work recently, and I just updated the screen saver.

I opted to use that “3D Text” saver that displays some words specified by you, in shiny metallic 3-D form, rotating in the dark. I typed in Norwegian words—“Ordet Blev Kjød,” which comes from John 1:14: “The Word became flesh.” I can understand that it might seem questionable to some if I say that this verse is the center of my theology (happily, it’s also the motto of the school I work for), but I think this doctrine—the Incarnation—is kind of the foundation on which all the rest of Christian theology rests. If you don’t get this one right, you’ll probably wander into all kinds of heresies.

I was looking at that phrase, spinning on my screen yesterday, and it just struck me how wonderful it is.

Every human being (as far as I can tell) experiences (at least at some point) transcendent longings. We yearn for a greater meaning, a higher beauty, a purer love than this world can offer.

And yet we generally find ourselves mired in lower things. Our aspiration for meaning turns into just making a living. Our dream of beauty becomes fashion and affluence. Our hope of love becomes either mere sex or one or more disappointing, unsatisfying relationships.

Humans have traditionally dealt with this problem by either denying the spiritual (materialism) or denying the physical (eastern spirituality).

Christianity deals with it by boldly proclaiming that in Christ, the two things become one. In Christ, because of His incarnation and the things He did in His incarnation, we can have our cake and eat it too, so to speak. We can have spiritual meaning in the physical world, and physical satisfaction in spiritual things.

I think that’s really good news.