Union with Christ

The following is a passage taken from The Valley of Vision by Arthur Bennett:

O Father.

Thou hast made man for the glory of thyself, and when not an instrument of that glory, he is a thing of nought;

No sin is greater than the sin of unbelief, for if union with Christ is the greatest good, unbelief is the greatest sin, as being cross to thy command;

I see that whatever my sin is, yet no sin is like disunion from Christ by unbelief.

Lord, keep me from committing the greatest sin in departing from him, for I can never in this life perfectly obey and cleave to Christ.

When thou takest away my outward blessings, it is for sin, in no acknowledging that all that I have is of thee, in not serving thee through what I have, in making myself secure and hardened.

Lawful blessings are the secret idols, and do most hurt; the greatest injury is in the heaving, the greatest good isn the taking away.

In love divest me of blessings that I may glorify thee the more; remove the fuel of my sin, and may I prize the gain of a little holiness as overbalancing all my losses.

The more I love thee with a truly gracious love the more I desire to love thee, and the more miserable I am at my want of love;

The more I hunger and thirst after thee, the more I faint and fail in finding thee,

The more my heart is broken for sin, the more I pray it may be far more broken.

My great evil is that I do not remember the sins of my youth, nay, the sins of one day I forget the next. Keep me from all things that turn to unbelief or lack of felt union with Christ.

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The Great Extermination – And How it Affects YOU

You may or may not remember the 2005 movie War of the Worlds, which happens to be one of my favorite disaster movies. There’s a scene in that movie that could be  true if placed in the correct context.

Ogilvy, the madman in the cellar, says, “Think about it. They [the aliens] defeated the greatest power in the world in a couple of days. Walked right over us. And these were only the first. They’ll keep coming. This is not a war anymore than there’s a war between men and maggots… This is an extermination.”

An extermination. There’s an extermination going on right now all around us as we speak. And I guarantee you’ve been a casualty of this great attack. You don’t have to watch the news for too long or flip through many channels to see that Satan and his minions are wreaking havoc on our world. But don’t think you’re too safe in your comfy little abode traveling on your safe little commute, working at your cozy little job. Satan has polluted all of that with his venomous stench as well – you’re just immune to it.

To often we think, “Oh, well Satan’s busy corrupting the guys over in Washington, or he’s just torturing inmates, or he’s a routine visitor of the Red Light district.” But he’s released his millions, maybe trillions of demons on the entire planet, and they live right here among us, breathing down our necks, wrapping their filthy claws around our wrists, pulling us in directions we either never thought we’d go or settling us in some predictable little lifestyle where we don’t give them a second thought.

“Why would they not want us to think of them?” you may ask. Because if we don’t think of the evil spirits swarming the very grounds we walk on, then we don’t think of God. If we don’t think of the Heaven’s ghouls we don’t think to stand on guard against them. If we don’t remember that our atmosphere is rank with Hell’s pollution, then we’re more prone to developing  immunity to it quicker than anyone, and we fall astray, or get waylaid from the helping hand of God.

Let’s go back to this idea of an extermination for a minute. Satan’s isn’t like some villain out of a Disney movie (though he can be compared to some of them) -he isn’t restrained, though his goal is singular: to stop the advancement of the Gospel of Christ. Think about it. Look around you and see how far Satan is willing to go to stop the Gospel from spreading.

Satan inspires men to rape women. He lures children to scream at their parents. He entices world leaders to spread genocide, and train up child soldiers. He caresses the cheek of the doctor who mauls babies with tubes and needles. The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on. All of this for what?

To prohibit the Gospel from spreading.

That is his one, singular, primary, ultimate goal. And you have been and will be time and time again a casualty of his great Gospel extermination. Not one person is untouched by the war he has waged against Christ. No one person, ever, in the history of the world.

Now let’s flip the coin over. If Satan, who saw the dawn of Creation, who has entered the throne room of God most high, spoken directly to the Creator of the Universe and Giver of Life, was there during the crucifixion of Christ, and likely witnessed His great resurrection is willing to take on the entire world to obliterate God’s testimony, then just how great is the Gospel that we take advantage of and pass off as no big deal?

If God Himself is willing to have casualties – mind you, the one Being who really truly knows just how precious life is – in this great war over His testimony, then how much more ought we to think of this Gospel He has entrusted us with? We should be guarding it with our lives, preserving it for every person we come in contact with and shamelessly exploiting it to every person we talk with. Because while the fumes of the demons are like the pollution of Hell, the fragrance of the Gospel of Christ we carry with us ought to be like a rich balm, or sweet lotion of Heaven to help wipe away the stench of sin.

Most people would say, at this point, “I’m not trying to scare you…” But I’m not going to say that. This stuff ought to scare the lights out of us. But we don’t have to remain fearful, because we know that Satan’s extermination of all those who carry Christ’s Word with them, and who has the potential to hear it, will fail. It will fail hard and miserably. And though he may have the ground now, and is today victorious in more ways than we can imagine, D-Day is coming and God and His angels will annihilate the evil spirits that have been choking us all our lives and the smog of sin will clear and we will see clearer than we’d ever thought possible, and then we will understand the power and the significance and sanctity of the Gospel our Lord has fought so hard to preserve.

So I ask you, will you be used by God to spread His Good Word or will you just continue to be effected by the deadly, spirit-numbing fumes of sin and Hell, and stay silent in your comfy little life?

[Image Credit]

For Whom the “Bell” Tolls: My Thoughts on Velvet Elvis – Part 2

For the first part of this review, click here.

“Is the Bible the best God can do?” asks Bell. Apparently not, because he doesn’t seem to be sure God even wrote the Bible to begin with. He wonders if Corinthians, for example, is written by Paul or God or God through Paul or Paul through God. I wonder, as he’s standing at the pulpit on Sunday mornings preaching through 1 Timothy what he does with chapter 3 verse 16 (“All Scripture is inspired by God…”), but there’s really no reason for him to preach out of the Bible anyway, according to him. 

“The Bible is open-ended,” he says. “We cannot simply do what it says,” because it first must be interpreted. Meaning, “Someone has to decide what it means.” Yes, he’s saying that the Bible can be interpreted in any way we’d like. “When someone tells you what the Bible means, it’s not true.” It’s just their interpretation. Yes, this man is the pastor of a mega church. If you’re not yet wondering about the devastating effects of the gut-wrenching statements here, take the time to read some reviews on this book online. People really think this is deep, sound, theological teaching and many say it has changed their lives. I have no doubt their lives have been changed because Rob Bell the “superpastor” is releasing people from the obligation of obeying the Words of God. No one ever said a changed life is a holy life. 

To take this hellish theology further, he gives the example of a leader in his church who had a question about a section found in the Bible and after asking many learned people and consulting many references to no avail, she in the end, decided to just go right back to the Bible to see what it had to say about this topic. Bell’s response? That’s “toxic.” And if that’s not far enough, he says that Jesus Himself gives His followers permission to make new interpretations of the Bible (somehow he gets this idea from Matthew 16:9 and 18:18).

Earlier in his book he admitted that Jesus came to fulfill the Word of God by giving it flesh and bones. Now he’s telling his readers to do what they think Jesus is saying, not what He is saying. After all, it wasn’t until the 300’s the sixty-six books were agreed upon, according to Bell. “This is part of the problem with continually insisting that one of the absolutes of the Christian faith must be a belief that ‘Scripture alone’ is our guide. It sounds nice, but it is not true.” 

If you want to irk Bell, tell him that you attend a church that teaches the Bible. According to him a church that’s growing has an easy yoke. Do you want to know why that church has “easy yoke”? Because it’s not holding its congregation to the standards of the Bible. The church may present an easier yoke on Sunday, but what are the attendee’s lives like the rest of the week, being starved for the Word of God, and having it withheld time after time?

Many yokes seem easy, which is what people will likely flock to. People want the easiest dieting books, the simplest instructions, the lighter load, the church that has very few standards and does not convict with the two-edged sword of the Holy Word of God. Many churches like this will grow. And why shouldn’t they? They’re giving out milk and honey! But over time that trampoline will get overcrowded and the few springs holding everyone up will give way and the party will end when the whole thing comes crashing down. Did I mention that not once, if my memory serves correctly, does Bell make any reference to Satan and the unseen world? 

To be concluded…

 

For Whom the “Bell” Tolls: My Thoughts on Velvet Elvis – Part 1

I wrote this a while back after reading Velvet Elvis by Robb Bell. I knew the book had stirred up a whirlwind of controversy in Christian circles, and before arguing one way or the other I decided to give the guy a chance (I liked his Nooma videos) and see what he had to say before choosing a “side.”

I wrote this back in 2009. Because of the length, I have broken it up into a few different posts. I’d love to hear from you all your thoughts:

It should go without saying that when you see the subtitle of a Christian book labeled, “Repainting the Christian Faith,” you should proceed with caution, should you decide to proceed at all. 
In this disjointed book, Rob Bell seems to want the theme to be about rethinking Christianity and the Bible as, according to him, Jesus did (that’s right, you’re going to hear a lot about a second-guessing Savior). One of his main points is that we are to reform Christianity. Or, as he puts it, we are to be “reforming theology.” He uses the example of Martin Luther who exposed the sins of the church leaders to make the church about God and the people and not about business and stale religion. That’s a fine example to use, if Bell is speaking to an audience of money changers. But he’s speaking to you and me, Christians striving to live according to the Word of God because we love Him. 

And that’s just the introduction. He then begins his first chapter by explaining how everything, at some point had to be named. At some point God’s Spirit had to be named by us, and even the Trinity was once nameless until we came along. And then he subtly suggests that the Spirit of God is not eternal. That at some point, “God became the Spirit so He could be everywhere.” This also implies God was not (and cannot be on His own) omnipresent. 

Concerning the doctrine found in the Bible, [Bell] points his readers to the example of a trampoline. He seems to be unclear as to whether the net itself is God or if it’s Christianity or what, but the springs are what he focuses on. They are the doctrine that holds everything together. You can remove the springs (doctrine), stretch them, pull them, examine them. If you take one or two springs off of the trampoline, it will not fail, it won’t collapse. This is where the famous controversy comes in: that the virgin birth was not necessary to fulfill Scripture.

In his defense he claims to believe in the virgin birth. But what I find to be more startling than his example of the virgin birth is that he claims that ultimately you can take any prophecy or truth out of the Bible and Christianity still remains unfaltering, somehow leaving you with a sturdy foundation to stand upon. He contrasts this analogy of a trampoline to that of a brick wall where it’s assumed if you take out one unchanging, solid brick, the whole wall will crumble. Plus, Bell says that a wall is meant to be guarded by keeping people out as opposed to enjoying the amusement of a trampoline and inviting others to join you. It’s because you love jumping on the trampoline that you’re going to invite people to join you, he continues, just like if you really love God, you’ll invite people to experience Him. “You rarely defend things you love,” he says. I’d sure hate to have him as the leader of my family [when a burglar breaks in].

He then goes on to describe a leader that is much desired and sought after. One who has more questions than answers. He uses Jesus as an example in that He answered a lot of questions with questions. So in response to the questions people have, Bell boasts in a “Doubt Night” he holds at a church where people are invited to write their questions down on a slip of paper and have them read publicly. (“Why do babies die?”, “Why do bad guys have all the fun?” etc.) In my mind, this can only accomplish one purpose: create more doubt in already [wavering] minds, and without these questions being backed up by answers, I can only imagine how hazardous this kind of thinking is to a young Christian who is already plagued with uncertainties.

Bell says people don’t want a leader with all the answers [I'm assuming political jokes would not be welcome here], but someone who has questions themselves. So while Rob and his pals are doing somersaults and throwing pity parties on his springless trampoline, I think I’ll choose to invest my faith and efforts in those who are laying their lives and reputations on the line by defending the wall as if it’s their very home. They take the Word of God very seriously because they recognize that there are eternal consequences in regard to what we choose to put our faith in. 

To be Continued…

Fall Movie Lineup

As I’ve mentioned in my Summer Movie List, I like to watch my movies by season. Somehow I just can’t get into White Fang when it’s 104 degrees outside. So as the world parts its curtains on Fall, I’d like to share with you a few movies I like to watch during this golden season. (Since this is a family blog, I have put the themes and/or advisory discretions in parenthesis at the end of each segment. I do not recommend any films that involve sexuality.)

Remember the Titans

Let me just come right out and make a confession. I absolutely hate football (yes, I realize that comment just made me lose half my subscribers). I have no reason to hate it other than it’s not baseball, and it’s not a very tough sport if you have to wear all that padding. Now, rugby… give me rugby any day - those guys are serious! Be that as it may, Remember the Titans does stand as one of the all-time greats as far as movies go. It’s the first film I remember Disney doing  that was actually a real movie after years of set-backs and miserable flops. (I haven’t looked into it, but I’m pretty sure this was made during Eisner’s ousting, which would explain the fine quality of this nearly-perfect film.) And if anyone happens to run into Boaz Yakin, tell him to get back in the director’s chair and make more movies. (Deals with racism.)

Rudy

Speaking of football, Rudy would have to be the next best football movie, even if just for the heavenly music score alone. I often play the soundtrack when I’ve got a writer’s block covering my keypad, and it helps me to press on. And by the way, I haven’t read it yet, but Rudy Ruettiger just came out with his autobiography. Sounds like it would be a good read. (Lots of cursing even for a PG film.)

Dead Poets Society 

Who hasn’t seen this movie yet? I’m not quite sure why I consider it a fall movie. Maybe it’s all the talk about life and death, or the solemnity of the poet’s voices as the autumn leaves drip off the trees outside the glass that separates me from the bitter wind… sorry, it’s contagious. This movie helps bring out the author in me, and there’s really no better time to write than when raindrops seep down your window pane and you’ve just been inspired by a truly honest movie where the characters are charming and realistic, the lines are memorable, and the emotion is thick and raw. Action/adventure fans beware: This may put you in a coma. (It deals with suicide.)

Dan in Real Life

Steve Carell. I don’t know many people that hate him (in fact, I can’t think of any). In our house, he’s adored, mostly because of his character as Michael Scott in The Office. Like Jim Carrey and Will Farrell, Steve Carell pulls off dramatic roles very well, especially in this fun little film about a widowed father who can’t quite seem to fit in with his family. Filled with beautiful fall scenery on the New Jersey coastline, also accompanied by a great soundtrack with original songs! (There’s a scene where he’s stuck in the shower with a woman, but nothing is shown, and it’s innocent enough to not be awkward. Deals also with remarriage.)

I hope you enjoyed this list of fall movie recommendations, and I’m sure most of you have already seen all of these anyway, but in my experience, they’ve been fun to revisit over the years. Be watching for another list for Halloween “alternatives” later next month (can anyone say Luther?)

What are your favorite movies to watch this time of year?

The Strength of Mercy

For those of you familiar with All God’s Children International, here is a book that documents its humble origins, written by Jan Beazely, one of the main instruments in getting this mission off the ground.

It’s hard to step out in faith sometimes, but we’re left with no excuse after watching the Beazely family make one faith-filled decision after another, following God’s guidance like stepping stones. The Strength of Mercy is the story of how a girl named Heather took a curious path for her life which lead to the adoption of her sister, and ultimately hundreds of children throughout the world. Here is an excerpt from the book:

“As I look back on what has unfolded during the past several years, I am awed by what god has accomplished. I’ve rediscovered – on an almost daily basis – that when we yield in trusting surrender, we are ushered into the very center of His will, further than we dreamed possible.

God’s divine direction and the strength of His mercy were first experienced intimately in our home. Our greatest hopes and fondest desires as parents culminated in this amazing journey that our daughter – and our entire family – was called to take. Not only did we hope for the fulfillment of the promise God had given me so many years earlier, but it was also an incredible privilege to watch our oldest daughter walk and talk with the Lord on such intimate terms. To watch her strain to hear His voice and then obediently move forward, even when He didn’t explain Himself, was pure delight. It was the most precious gift a parent could ever hope for. Our once-rebellious teenager was transformed into a woman of courage and grace before our very eyes. In the transition, God used her to rescue a needy child – her sister, our new daughter. 

Then God invited us as a family to share this same mercy with the world. When I first received God’s promise back in October 1985, I could never have dreamed that we would bring more than 300 children out of Eastern Europe to new homes and a new life … Neither could I have foreseen working in the countries of Bulgaria, China, Russia, Hungary, Macedonia, and Honduras…

For a truly redemptive story on the power of grace and the beauty and divine possibility of adoption, I recommend this book wholeheartedly. It would do some of us a lot of good to be reminded that even today, outside the pages of the Bible, it is still possible to follow God in faith even if the world is hostile against our decisions. Does anyone else have a good adoption-themed book to recommend to us?

Theo: Adopted into God’s Family

For those of you with little kids looking for quality entertainment less intense than Disney but deeper than Veggietales, look no further than this new Christian children’s series, Theo. Created by Mike Joens, the storyboard artist and animation producer/director for McGee and Me! and Adventures in Odyssey, this traditionally animated (2-d) cartoon series is centered around a friendly English gentleman who is a student of God’s Word and lives in a large house with two witty British mice. The series is faithful to guide viewers into the basics of systematic theology.

I want to point out an episode I had the opportunity to preview recently. It’s about adoption. The ten minute video does a very good job teaching on adoption’s basic foundational truths and the idea that people very different from us can indeed be adopted into our families and called brother or sister or son or daughter.

For families with kids looking into adoption, you might want to take special care to watch this video with your young ones. It can serve as a very good tool to help aid a discussion about what your family is preparing to do. It will help your kids not see adoption as just taking some outsider into the family, but how that is so significant of a move to the adopted one, and it ties in how we also, if given our lives to Christ, have been adopted into God’s family and how that is significant to us.

Check out the website here. You’ll find other videos you can order that deal with a few other doctrines of faith. McGee and Me! and Adventures in Odyssey lovers especially will find this series endearing and even a bit nostalgic.