The Masters

Be Killing Sin

I recently began reading John Owens’s work on the mortification of the flesh.  He deals in great detail with our role and God's role in the process of sanctification.  Our role can be summed up succinctly by this quote, "Be killing sin or it will be killing you".

 

Richard Baxter

I am in the midst of a sermon series from 1 Corinthians on issues of separation and liberty. I took as series title the well known phrase, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, love.” It is a great phrase. Of course, the tricky part is distinguishing between essentials and non-essentials. That is where careful exegesis of 1 Corinthians comes in.

The saying has been attributed to Augustine and Richard Baxter. For my series I am taking it as a Baxter quote. Baxter was an old puritan. I haven’t read him much but someday I hope to.

He has a homepage at this link. He hasn’t updated it since 2001 but I suppose we shouldn’t expect too much from a guy who has been dead since 1691.

At puritansermons.com you can find advice from Baxter on “How to Spend your Day with God.” At one point he says:

When alone in your occupations, improve the time in practical and beneficial meditations. Meditate upon the infinite goodness and perfections of God; Christ and redemption; Heaven and how unworthy you are of going there and how you deserve eternal misery in Hell.

The bluntness of the last phrase made me laugh out loud. Not in derision. More from pleasure at the political incorrectness. We have a lot of “How to…” sermons now days but something tells me Baxter might not think much of them.

Spurgeon on Faith

JoAnn lent me a little book on Spurgeon called On Spiritual Leadership by Steve Miller.  In a section on Spurgeon’s faith Miller writes,

Spurgeon’s childlike credulity and spiritual expectancy had their origin in the same trait:  his steadfast faith in God.  In every area of his ministry, Spurgeon exhibited and extraordinary confidence that God would equip, enable, and provide. And he believed this confidence could be applied to every matter in a Christian’s life – not just those issues related to the spiritual realm.  He taught that we ought to have a complete trust in God for all things, and that we ought to entrust all things to God.  In one sermon he said,

You believe in God for your soul.  Believe in him about your property.  Believe in God about your sick wife or dying child.  Believe in God about your losses and bad debts and declining business.

That pretty much covers it all.

Resurrection Power

I am off to get my tooth hacked out in a couple of hours but I wanted to put up a quick update.  We had a good weekend at church.  I have been preaching on the prayers in Ephesians.  I especially like the one in chapter 1 where Paul prays that the “eyes of our hearts” would be illuminated.  His desire is that we would understand that the power working in us is the same power that raised Jesus from the dead and seated Him on the throne of the universe. 

Later in the book he issues a call for us to walk in a way that is consistent with our calling.  But here he doesn’t really give us any action steps.  There are no buttons to push or twelve steps to follow.  He just prays that we would understand.

Hebrews 11

I am about five weeks into a series of messages on Hebrews chapter 11.  I wanted to do something on Old Testament characters, but couldn’t settle on anything.  Then it occurred to me that the famous chapter on faith provides a useful survey. 

I always find it interesting to see how things stick out at you when you teach a passage.  One of the things that has drawn my attention in Hebrews 11 is the number of times the author write “By faith…” and then follows it with an action verb.  Yesterday we did verses 23 to 29 which tell the story of Moses.  The phrase “By faith…” occurs five times in seven verses.  By faith his parents hid him.  By faith Moses refused to be called the son of the daughter of pharaoh.  And so on.

Apparently true faith is seldom passive.

Lewis on Pride

Here is a great paragraph on pride. It comes from a chapter in Mere Christianity titled The Great Sin. It has all the elements of that I love about Lewis.  Great insight for one: read it and see for yourself.  Relevance: his comment on self-respect could provide an antidote for the evangelical heresy of self-esteem.   Political incorrectness:  just schoolboys? – what about the girls?  And quaintness: what are chilblains?

It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very centre of our religious life.  But you can see why.  The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature.  But this does not come through our animal nature at all.  It comes direct from Hell.  It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly.  For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices.  Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper, by learning to think they are beneath his dignity – that is, by Pride.  The devil laughs.  He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting you up in the Dictatorship of Pride – just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer.  For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

C. S. Lewis and the Church

One of the difficulties of quoting C. S. Lewis is knowing when to stop.  Sentence after sentence contains illuminating insights.  You end up wanting to say, just read the whole book.  Here is a quote from Mere Christianity (book 4, chapter 8) on the purpose of the church.  If you like it, get the book.

…the church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.  If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.  God became man for no other purpose.  It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.

The Presence of God

I am back to studying and I will be reading a lot of C. S. Lewis over the next weeks.  He is very quotable.  Here is this on being in the presence of God from Mere Christianity:

The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or you see yourself as a small, dirty object.  It is better to forget yourself altogether.

James

As usual, I preached on Sunday. Hopefully, I did alright.  I am not sure since I wasn’t all there.  I have been on a strong antibiotic since last Tuesday.  On Sunday when it came time to preach I was feeling pretty light-headed. I think it came out alright.  I had the strange feeling of running my body by remote control from a distance.  I kept checking the congregation to gauge by peoples expressions whether I was making sense.  Apparently, it was no worse than usual.

Calvin and the Struggle with Sin

John Calvin is much maligned. For example, I have been reading Paul Johnson, the English historian. I like most of his opinions but he seems to have a grudge against Calvin whom he caricatures as intolerant. No doubt Servetus would have agreed with Johnson, but I expected a more nuanced evaluation even though Johnson is a Catholic (if I am not mistaken).

As a Baptist I disagree with some of Calvin’s ideas but I suspect that much of the negative reaction has to do with the fact that Calvin played a crucial role in the recovery of Biblical theology.