Tuesday, 17 December 2024

Always on the tip of his tongue

The Apostle always has Christ on the tip of his tongue. He foresaw that nothing would be less known in the world some day than the Gospel of Christ. Therefore he talks of Christ continually. As often as he speaks of righteousness, grace, the promise, the adoption, and the inheritance of heaven, he adds the words, "In Christ," or "Through Christ," to show that these blessings are not to be had by the Law, or the deeds of the Law, much less by our own exertions, or by the observance of human traditions, but only by and through and in Christ.  - Martin Luther on Galatians 3:7

If you are a minister of the gospel, then are you one that Paul would recognise, because Christ is always on the tip of your tongue?

If you are a believer in Christ, then is your manner of life one that the Bible would recognise - your cry is always "more of Him!" ?

Friday, 29 November 2024

Measure your Christian life

One measure of Christian life and growth is: how real is eternity to you? And how important is it?

To a healthy Christian, eternity is present, and all-important. He/she lives, as seeing the things which are invisible. Christ is real and present; the evil one is real and dangerous; eternity is glorious and eagerly expected; life is lived hoping to hear "well done, good and faithful servant" and looking forward to the enjoyment of the New Creation. Prayer is precious and valued, and the struggle to establish and maintain it one that is felt and engaged each day.

For an unhealthy Christian, eternity is vague, far off and of little immediate concern. He/she lives as seeing the things that the world sees - money, advancement, pleasure. Christ is distant and of little relevance; evil is a theory that rarely intrudes into daily life; eternity is far off, does not need to be thought much about, and will probably sort itself out; life is lived to pursue and enjoy the good things of this life. Prayer is a few muttered words to satisfy conscience before getting down to the real business.

How is your Christian life doing?

Wednesday, 27 November 2024

"Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also"

"Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" - Matthew 6:21.

In context, this line is not saying "your attitude to wealth reveals where your heart is". That would be a true statement, and a Biblical one too. But it's not what this line is saying.

Here, Jesus was saying that where you put your treasure influences where your heart is directed towards. By investing your resources in the kingdom, you will enable and direct your heart to follow. Giving will improve the state of your heart.

Randy Alcorn explains this further in this article. "I’ve heard people say, “I want more of a heart for missions.” I always respond, “Jesus tells you exactly how to get it. Put your money in missions—and in your church and the poor—and your heart will follow.”"

Tuesday, 26 November 2024

Life in Christ (Charles Spurgeon)

These are a tonic for the soul; Charles Spurgeon preaches Christ to us from the parables, and reminds us that the blessing is obtained simply be believing. Here is the gospel in all its graciousness and freeness towards needy sinners.

These are Kindle links for the UK Kindle store. Volume 1 is free, the others are just pennies. If you follow them and change the ".co.uk" to ".com" you'll get the US store if you have a US-based Kindle.

Life in Christ volume 1

Life in Christ volume 2

Life in Christ volume 3

Volume 1 is also available on Nook, Google Play and Apple Books for free, here.

Two retractions

1) I am always eager to read about the 1950s Hebrides revival for various reasons, including 1) I once knew a man who visited the area at the time and talked engagingly about it and 2) I'm hungry for God - aren't you?

In the past I've recommended Duncan Campbell's autobiographical account of the Hebrides revival. At the start of this year, I mentioned that I was reading Island Aflame by Tom Lennie, a new and edifying historical account of those events. I recommend that you read both, and you will gain a lot from the experience. But if you do, you will be forced to conclude that whilst being used of God in an astonishing way, with the evidence indicating that true revival did go where he personally went, again and again (even to other countries) - and would that God would use any of us even just 1% of how he used him - yet Duncan Campbell did have an unmortified personal problem with fabricating events which simply never happened. A full account of the revival was needed to put the record straight on that.

2) I have also occasionally linked on this blog to edifying and/or incisive pieces written by Douglas Wilson, of Moscow, Idaho (as well as writing some criticisms). As is well known amongst those theologically interested, over the years he has produced a number of good writings on family, education and (with rather more reservations) culture particularly.

However, he also has, and for long has had various unmortified issues (but in more recent years they seem to have moved more to the fore and become significantly more dominant in his output), such as (a sample list, not intended to be comprehensive) 1) an unmortified zest for unnecessary controversy 2) deploying controversy as a recruitment and marketing tool 3) neglecting to engage responsibly and adequately with critics, preferring to brush them off with responses far beneath the level of someone of his education, ability and understanding (and this not just for unworthy challenges, but at all sorts of levels) 4) (related) frequent fundamental unseriousness in his writing style which is not (as his defenders claim) mere misunderstanding of his sense of humour and playfulness, but crosses the line into a regular ongoing refusal to switch out of his default mode and deal with serious issues in a way that respects their importance and which respects the readers 5) straying far outside of his areas of competence and embarrassing himself and the church (such as his recent attempts to argue that overall voter numbers constitute a statistical proof that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged - if you want to suppose it was, please distinguish this from his statistically hopeless arguments for it; I may or may not explain the specifics of this one day) 6) A line increasingly implied of "them and us", "only we are faithful, you have to be with us to be faithful", "unless you're talking about what we're talking about, and doing it in the same way, then you lack discernment" 7) a catalogue of serious and consequential doctrinal errors, of which his particular brand of Christian Reconstructionism is one which is particularly serious and influential, resulting in prodigious amounts of empty and prideful talk and time-wasting across the Internet, instead of the godly edification and challenge which leads to serving the needy and lost. His "objectivity of the covenant" doctrine is also both largely novel and has serious consequences. This list could be considerably expanded.

The sorts of controversies and issues that constantly arise around Douglas Wilson would lead most men to ask "how exactly did we get into the situation where we keep needing to talk about this, and refute this and that crazy thing?". Unfortunately Wilson does not seem to understand that if you regularly attract the wrong company and those who thought they were following you make predictable classes of ruinous errors, you can't always blame this on people failing to understand the full breadth of your vision or pay enough attention to another pile of your writings. At some point, a wise person has to ask why certain classes of problems keep happening and ask, is all the blame on the other side because those people have failed to understand my full vision?

I would very much regret pushing anyone towards the influence of Douglas Wilson and his brand of thinking and acting on the Internet. I condemn nobody who has benefited from any of his efforts or resources, as indeed have I (though even at the beginning of encountering them, 25 years ago, I found the undertone which I thought I detected that nobody else quite knew how to be faithful today in all the world as well as his circle did, hard to stomach).

In many things we offend all, and the number of my own failings and omissions (too many to enumerate) rises up to the heavens. We repent, and Jesus Christ will keep his promise and pardon us, and wash us through his blood. Douglas Wilson makes it clear that this is his faith too, and this is what he preaches when he sticks to the Bible. But, I think that for honesty and clarity it has to be said: of Douglas Wilson's writings the good parts, you can get elsewhere (despite the impression you might sometimes get from him and those around him); and the other parts, could lead you far astray from a productive life of service and into many lost years of useless and empty chatter. "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good".

Monday, 25 November 2024

Paedobaptism and a priori argumentation

This piece by Jared Longshore is an archetypal example of paedobaptist argumentation in important aspects.

What I mean by that is as follows. He begins by defining some theological abstractions, and their characteristics (N.B. by this I am not implying that theological abstractions are bad things, or to be avoided in general). Then, he moves from those abstractions to discuss the Biblical evidence in their light. And along the way, he asserts that the abstractions already require, before the New Testament begins, what conclusions can validly be drawn from the New Testament data.

This is the wrong way to approach the question he's addressing. Instead, you should begin with the New Testament's various direct and deliberate explanations of how the New Covenant works, and how it relates to other covenants. From there, you should then work back towards your higher-level/deep abstractions about how God's ultimate covenant of salvation works.

If you fail to do this the right way, then what's going to happen is that your a priori abstractions are going to control the interpretation of the data, instead of being built from the data.

The covenantal paedobaptist may assert that he if he were to do things the way I say, he'd still get the same result, but this raises the question: why doesn't he? Or if I chose to be ruder: actually I don't believe him. If paedobaptist conclusions could be built by starting with the Bible's clear and deliberate explanations of how the New Covenant works, and how it relates to what came before (and what comes "behind"), then paedobaptists wouldn't always choose to carry out their argumentation another way. (And note that the above link is the opening statement of a debate about baptism; it is a basic of debate that you should present your strongest case in relation to your opponent's argument, so this would have been exactly when to do so). Instead, by laying down arguments which then control, a priori, how the New Testement should be read, the Bible is muzzled, and the conclusion is pre-determined by the higher-level abstractions which come in prior to the detailed exegesis, and control its boundaries.

That's how you end up - even in a debate when presenting your strongest arguments - with statements from the paedobaptist side like this one from the above, "thus the burden is on those who would change God’s covenantal pattern in the new covenant". Baptists don't propose to "change" anything. That's a loaded statement. Since the New Covenant contains the full and final revelation of God's purposes, and illuminates, explains and clarifies what was previously in the shadows, it guides the interpretation of what came before and our doctrine of precisely how they relate. Understanding the New Covenant is required first in order to reveal to us how the covenants relate.

This loaded statement also assumes what needs to be proved in multiple ways. How do you know that "God's covenantal pattern" must mean that when the New Covenant comes, the category of "children of Abraham" is going to include the one-generational offspring of Gentile believers? There's a lot of issues of continuity and discontinuity of different kinds that have to be worked through before you can get there. Happily the New Testament has more than enough to get us to the correct conclusion. But you certainly can't conclude "one-generational offspring of Gentile believers are 'in the covenant', and also all receive any covenant sign" without detailed New Testament exegesis, so it can't be asserted a priori. Any argument which asserts it a priori must be, ironically, a priori wrong. And indeed, such an assertion proves too much: if there is indeed (as I believe there is) a final covenant involving the Triune Godhead and the elect, then such a strong assertion would have to result in the conclusion that these one-generational offspring are not only entitled to any covenant sign, but also actually and definitely and always finally saved. Otherwise, we're supposed to conclude that all the "administrations" of the covenant are critically different (at the point which the writer's whole argument is to insist is key, the point which the whole debate is about) from the final covenant itself. That is to say: his argument proves too much; he's ultimately obliged by it ultimately to argue (something which we know is false), that all one-generational offspring of believers are certainly finally saved; otherwise we have precisely the sort of change which he is arguing is already known to be impossible by the time that the Old Testament closes.

"Abraham's physical descendants through the lines of Isaac and then Jacob were all in covenant with God, and their male offspring were thereby required to be circumcised; therefore all the next-generational offspring of Christian believers are also members of the New Covenant and thus should be baptised" cannot be proved by a priori argumentation about God's "covenant of grace" and assertions about how "administrations" of that covenant "must" work. It has to be proved by demonstrating, by good and necessary inference, that this is how the apostles actually explained that the New Covenant operates upon the relevant points of detail. They didn't do this, and their actual explanations point in a different direction.

Stephen Dancer: with Christ, which is far better

Earlier today I heard that my brother in Christ, Stephen Dancer, has gone on ahead and is now in the presence of his Saviour.

I knew Stephen when we were apprentice church-planters and (distance) Bible college students together in Derbyshire. Alongside others (and not including me), Stephen played a notable role in the planting of Ashbourne Baptist Church. He also assisted amongst the saints at Derwent Free Church in Chaddesden (which no longer meets). Stephen subsequently moved to Solihull to help establish Solihull Presbyterian Church, amongst whom he has served ever since (bio here).

The chief characteristics for which I remember Stephen are his spiritual seriousness; his desire to do what he did for the Lord as well as he could, in all sincerity, as one seeking to please God and not men. He loved the Bible, believed in the importance of holiness and prayer, and in serving the people of God. This was reflected in his (very intermittent) blogging (here and here), but experienced by the believers in Solihull from week to week. Such things, you might think, are the common characteristics of true Christian ministers in general. Sadly, all experience shows that this is not so; and whilst there are many who start that way, and there are many who you believe deep down still hold to those things, the fight over the years doesn't go on as it should. With Stephen, I always came away persuaded that with him that he was still walking with Christ and serving him. And as such, I believe that Stephen has now heard his "well done, good and faithful servant", and passed into the presence of his Lord.

Stephen was not old - I don't recall his exact age, but I think he was past 55 and not yet 60. He used his life well and the abiding memory left with me will be his sincere love to his Master, and determination to serve him faithfully whilst here below. As such he "being dead, yet speaks".

How many more times will I have the opportunity to do something for Jesus Christ, and to speak to others about him? Reader, how many more times will you be allowed the privilege of speaking about Jesus Christ? If you intend, when you pass from here, to be known as someone who prayed, someone who served, someone who spoke up for the Saviour, what is it you're doing now and today that will lead to that result? One day we will have no further opportunity, and our eternal record will be cast and sealed. Much of our record is already set. What will we do with that which remains?