Fatherlessness and Planned Parenthood

If we demand that congress defund Planned Parenthood (as we should), we cannot expect God to hear our prayers and give us success in this if we do not simultaneously with all of the same vigor and disgust defund fatherlessness in every form in our land. How can you demand that "Planned Parenthood be defunded while you search for porn on your computer? How can you demand that Planned Parenthood stop selling the body parts of human beings, while you are ogling the body parts of other human beings for sale. Don’t you see how it’s all connected? Don’t you see how it’s all related? How can you sleep with a woman who is not your wife? How can you move in with your girlfriend? How can you treat the possibility of bringing a fatherless child into the world casually and feel disgust about aborted baby livers and hearts and lungs? That disgust needs to spread into the American soul. We need to feel that disgust at the thought of a woman stripped bare on a screen. We need to feel that disgust at the thought of our children ignored and neglected. It makes you mad to think of a baby being crushed with forceps to harvest its brain for cash, but it should also make you mad to think of a child crushed by the absence of her dad. Because fundamentally, it’s the same thing." - Toby Sumpter - http://www.tobyjsumpter.com/planned-parenthood-fatherless-america/

Learning to Drink Wine Here

I alluded to this in the sermon:  It is here at the Table of the Lord that we learn about drinking wine.  Wine portrays many things in the scripture.  It is pictured as the cup of wrath to be poured out in places like Psalm 75.  It points to the blood of Christ which declares both the wrath of God and the life of Christ for us.  It is used to describe the enjoyment and rest at the end of hard work, the celebration of good things in feasting, and the act of giving thanks and partaking of thanks.

And so it is important to note that the Lord took wine, gave thanks for the thanksgiving cup, declared it to be His blood of the new covenant, and then told his disciples to drink it – all of you.  Grape juice is offered here not for those who do not have a preference for wine, but for those who still have questions about the use of alcohol based on temperance laws of the past.

Actually, I think the Lord instructs us to drink wine here so that we might learn to drink wine appropriately throughout the rest of our lives.  He brings us here, to a Table where the work is finished, where rest and celebration is offered and received, where fellowship is enjoyed and unity is treasured  - unity with God and with one another.

Beating the Flesh

The world, the flesh, and the devil.  Our three enemies.  Battles on three fronts.  How do we win?  How do we keep up our guard?

Remember that the old man has been crucified in Christ.  We have put off the old man, Paul tells us, and so therefore we are to put off the ornaments, the clothing of the old man.  And having put on Christ, we are to put on the garments of the new man.  We are to put off lying, for instance, and put on the truth.  We are not to get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but we are instead to be filled, overcome with the Spirit.  We are to put off all forms of fornication and put on lives sexual purity, either in celibacy or in the marriage bed as defined by the Lord.

The world and the devil are strong enemies.  But they are external.  They cannot make great gains against our sanctification unless we first yield to the flesh – our fleshly desires.  There is no reigning sin in a Christian – or else he really isn’t converted.  But there is the problem of remaining sin and that is where the internal battle rages.

And so we are instructed to mortify that flesh – and to do so daily.  We do so by faith and in the power of Christ in us, the hope of glory.  In other words, do not battle flesh with flesh.  Battle flesh with the Spirit.  Do not allow the flesh to lease a space in your heart for a time – that internal enemy will open the door to the other two external enemies when you aren’t watching.  Every time the works of the flesh start showing up in your heart, escort them out immediately in the name of Jesus.  We are to have no place for it to reside, to rest, to make itself comfortable or for us to be comfortable with.

Providence and Individual Human Life

"...God controls the course of our individual lives.  That control begins before we are conceived.  God says to Jeremiah:

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations - Jer 1:5

Is Jeremiah an exception to the general rule because he is God's prophet, or does God know us all before conception?  If God knew Jeremiah before his conception, then God must have arranged for one particular sperm to reach one particular egg to produce each of Jeremiah's ancestors back to Adam...God's foreknowledge of an individual implies comprehensive control over the human family." - Frame, ST, p153.

Prayer over the Message

"But, beyond this, there is something specially helpful with which to conclude our preparation for the pulpit, and that is to pray our way through the forthcoming sermon, taking each section and each sentence in turn.  To start with a prayer that the Lord will grip the attention of the listeners, a prayer for the opening, for help over the forseeably difficult places; praise too for the wonder of the truths that are shared; prayer that at each point of the sermon our demeanor may commend the message." - Motyer, Preaching?, pp139-40

Vulnerable Wisdom

And so we are to work with all our might, seeking and applying wisdom.  And applying wisdom takes wisdom because we live in the mist.  Even Jesus, Who is Wisdom Incarnate, came into this world of folly knowing that He must entrust Himself fully into the purposes and will of His good Father.  These words should come from our lips as well – “not my will, but Yours be done,” not in despairing submission, but rather with a fierce hope in God and not in this world “under the sun.”

Cremation and Hope

"Cremation, almost unknown in the Western world a hundred years ago, is now the preference, actual or assumed, of the great majority.  It both reflects and causes subtle but far-reaching shifts in attitudes to death and to whatever hope lies beyond." - N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, p4.

We have lost our hope in the resurrection of the body, of the resurrection of creation, and of the collapse of the gulf between heaven and earth.  And this affects how we live in the here and now.