Month: October 2007

Categories
Enjoying the Process

Polka, Pirates, and Pontification

I know I have not posted anything substantial for over two weeks. This post won’t change that. But a number of things around the internet stood out to me here on Reformation Day/Halloween that are worth posting to the Void if for no other reason than so I can find them later myself.

Paul Lamey shares the must-see Reformation Polka as well providing some links and ideas to get your Reformation day party started.

Albert Mohler explains the deal with Halloween.

Tim Challies made a good case last year for leaving the light on. This year he’s collected a passel of Reformation Day posts.

A couple years ago I wrote a few Reasons for Remembering the Reformation and then preached through the five Solas and five Reformers. The notes for those messages are not available but the audio is. And here is my list of Recommended Reformation Resources.

Changing tunes, my wife pointed this out as well, but if you happen to have a knitted turtle in need of a costume, look no further than Captain Knack Sparrow. Quite an elaborate creation and entertaining story by my sister.

Finally, though it is significantly less important than Luther’s 95 Thesis, if I were to nail something on a door today it would be the following rant: How can my local “Christian” radio justify playing Christmas songs already? On my drive home this afternoon I was almost asphyxiated when I heard “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.” Are you kidding me? I thought Christmas music on Thanksgiving was early, but this is senseless. I don’t even think Johann Tetzel would approve.

Categories
Enjoying the Process

Sage Advice on Book Buying Priorities

Paul Lamey shares some sage, 500 year old advice on when to buy books.

Categories
Enjoying the Process

Rejoice in Your Youth

Thanks to Justin Taylor I’ve enjoyed the ads for the 2008 T4G conference. These three are my favorites by far.

Categories
Enjoying the Process

Miracle Mug

In July I made one purchase at our student ministry’s World’s for Sale. I affectionately call it my miracle mug.

The glory:

The guts:

In case you’re uncertain, the caption reads: “Enjoy the miracle of each new day” to which I would add an exclamation point! Consider how many Bible stories this 10¢ cup communicates:

  • the rainbow references the flood
  • the through-way illustrates crossing of the Red Sea on dry ground
  • the clean outside and dirty inside pictures the Pharisees
  • the “each new day” line reminds one of the morning mercies of coffee

If you think about it, it’s like a wordless cup…with words. I still pinch myself each time I use it. Perhaps one of the times I’ll pinch myself so hard that the cup will fall and shatter. And be assured, that future joy is preceded by the current joy of being able to delete these pointless photos off my iPhone.

Categories
Enjoying the Process

Praying Your Way Into the Pulpit

Colin Adams at Unashamed Workman collected some apropos quotes concerning pastors praying their way into the pulpit.

Categories
A Shot of Encouragement

Aspiring to Seek His Help at All Times

A cold “blog booger” on a paper plate collected some sentences from Calvin about God’s being due our adoration, trust, invocation, thanksgiving. I was laid low especially by my need for invocation, “the habit of the mind, whenever necessity presses us, of resorting to His faithfulness and help as our only support.”

Categories
He Will Build His Church

Puritanic Rigidity Is not the Problem

Charles Spurgeon once wrote,

Ah, sirs! there may have been a time when Christians were too precise, but it has not been in my day. There may have been such a dreadful thing as Puritanic rigidity, but I have never seen it. We are quite free from that evil now, if it ever existed. We have gone from liberty to libertinism. We have passed beyond the dubious into the dangerous, and none can prophesy where we shall stop. (quoted by MacArthur, Ashamed of the Gospel, p.87)

Even though Spurgeon was specifically confronting the church’s general lack of holiness in the Down-Grade, I think the quote applies equally well to our modern day disregard for the Lord’s day.

Perhaps we don’t value the Lord’s day because for all our talk, we’re not that desperate for God after all. We treat the Lord as if He were dispensable and we take delight in other things. Maybe if we hadn’t been busy all week trying to drink from broken cisterns we would thirst for the fountain of living waters and come for a corporate drink on His day.

Still the discipline of celebrating the Lord’s day every first day reminds us how much we need Him and how important His Body is. I think that’s why John Calvin said about Sunday corporate meeting,

we adopt it as a necessary remedy for preserving order in the Church. (Institutes, 2.VIII.33)

This is especially so for those of us in student ministry. I am convinced that the first mark of a healthy student ministry is that we are part of the local church. We will always be sickly and weak if we do not participate and praise the Lord on His day with His Body in “big church.”

As we lay to rest this series on the Lord’s day, let me conclude with one final thought. My son Calvin is almost two. He doesn’t know a lot of words but he’s at least learned (his own version of) the names of all the people living at our house. Since he can’t call things by what they are, he identifies an item by the person who owns it. He’ll circle the room and point out everything he recognizes by who uses it: books, chairs, ladders, coffee cups, cars, whatever. The question is, if someone looked at how you spend your Sunday, who would they say owned it? You? Or the Lord?

Categories
He Will Build His Church

A Week on the Merry-Go-Round

Obviously our whole lives are to be worship; worship is more than just a Sunday activity even though I’ve tried to make the case that there is something special about the Lord’s day. Not only that, there may be times when the best way for us to worship on a given Sunday means we might miss the meeting of the church. Yet I do believe our customary course toward the corporate meeting of the church on the first day of the week should be like water in a steep, downhill pipe.

Here’s the linchpin to the previous paragraph: The Lord’s day is a part of whole-life worship. Worship is not a one day a week activity, nor is there only one way to worship on that day.

Of course, that teeters the totter to the other side. In everything I’ve said so far about the Lord’s day, maybe it seems like we’re supposed to pause from life on Sunday for worship. In that case Sunday is like a big fat guy at the bottom of a seesaw, laughing at six little school girls of the rest of the week, suspended high above the ground. And to be sure, Sunday corporate worship is weighty. The neglect of the Lord’s day is a serious threat. That is, after all, why I parked here so long to preach and press and plead.

But the above paragraph is not my attempt at being “balanced,” it’s my appeal for being passionate. Sunday and the other six days are on not on opposite sides of a seesaw. Instead, Sunday is like that same big fat guy propelling those little school girls on the merry-go-round faster and faster till they squeal with delight. First day gathering isn’t an interruption of life for worship, it incites and impels whole-life worship.

That’s precisely why the Lord’s day is not a list of “can nots” and why occasionally our best worship may not be with the Body on Sunday and also why I still think the first day is the best day. So as we talk with each other/students/parents, let’s not be balanced about Sunday, let’s be passionate about worship.