Baptism Exhortation - Melody

Doolittles, the Lord has blessed you with another daughter – and thank you for using social media to introduce her to us this last week.  She is as beautiful as the pictures posted.  What a picture of grace and glory, the creative work of the Lord in the womb of faithful and beautiful women.

Baptism of infants is certainly a sweet time.  But it is not to be a sentimentally sweet time.  It is to be a time rooted in the unfailing promises of God that drive us as parents to revive our faith in God and our call to what it means to bring our children up in the fear and nurture of the Lord.

This baptism promises that God will be faithful to His Word.  But it demands your renewed obedience to His Word as well – both to this new little one as well as to all the children He has blessed you with.  And along with that is your covenant relationship as husband and wife.  You cannot give Melody a better gift than parents who love and laugh and forgive and strive after God together day after day in the home she grows up in. 

Don’t strive after perfectionism – strive after God.  Don’t be gnat stranglers – be as fat as this little girl with faith, hope, and love – gifts He has given to you – to enjoy and pass on to her and all your children.  This moment is not for your presumption – it is out of and to strengthen your faith – a faith that brings forth good works – and all to the praise of God’s gracious glory.

The Unbiblical Position Against Application in Preaching

There are those who believe it is selfish to look for or demand personal application to be given, sought for, or received in preaching.  Really.  On a number of occasions I was charged with watering down the message of the Scripture simply because I applied the text to the lives of my congregation.  I was told that I must "preach Christ" and that meant no applications.

Those who attacked my preaching were students of man, who, on one occasion, stated these points in a sermon of his own - 
"But where is your application, you ask?  Did you miss it?  Did you not sense the invitation of the Holy Spirit to feel the power of the Pauline theology?  Have you been so conditioned by modern preaching that you cannot find your life in the text of the Word of God?  Have you been so conditioned by the demand to extract something from the Scriptures for yourself (how selfish that is!  how completely self-centered and man-centered that is!) that you cannot find your life in the text of the Word of God?  Have you been so conditioned by contemporary self centered, man-centered preaching that it is not Christ in whom you find your life, but in the program, in the agenda, in the activity - or whatever else is placed as a barrier to a Christocentric realization of the Word of God."

Carrick attacks this, and does so quite well - "The antithesis that is posited in the above extracts between God-centredness and morality or behavior is, we believe, unquestionably a false antithesis.  It is a false antithesis that sets up a false dichotomy.  It is abundantly evident from 'the Pauline theology' itself that theocentricity and Christocentricity do not exclude the addressing of issues of morality or behavior." - IP, p133.

Passover Memorial

The Lord’s Supper is a covenant meal and a memorial that involves both God and His people.  All who are baptized are qualified to come to this Table because they have been identified as God’s people.

This memorial points back in some ways to the memorial of the Passover meal in the Old Testament.  It virtually goes without saying that this meal fulfills, or that Jesus fulfills, all that the Passover meal promised.

John the Baptist called Jesus the Passover Lamb.  John’s gospel tells us that Jesus was being slaughtered at the same time that the Jews were busy preparing their Passover lambs, and Paul tells us that “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” in 1 Corinthians.

By shedding His blood on the cross, Jesus turned away the angel of death and rescued us from the wrath of God.   That blood was displayed on the cross and, as Hebrews teaches us, the blood on the heavenly tabernacle was the blood of Jesus.  And you, like the participants at Passover, and yet so much more, are summoned to come and partake of the Passover Lamb – by faith and by means of the Holy Spirit.

When Elijah Prayed, James Preached

"At the end of his epistle James adduces the example of Elijah in order to illustrate and exemplify the duty of earnest prayer" Carrick, IP, p126.

Here is an inspired example where a minor point in a particular text (a narrative in this case) may legitimately be a major emphasis of a sermon.

"One of the major problems with the charge made by some within the redemptive-historical school to the effect that an exemplary use of an Old Testament or New Testament passage will inevitably be atomistic, subjectivist, anthropocentric, and moralistic is that this charge actually recoils upon James himself - it recoils upon the Holy Scriptures of God." - p128.

Always a bad thing when we think we are smarter than the Bible.

The Jews as Representative of the World

In his introduction to his commentary on Isaiah (published around 1846), Joseph Alexander writes, 

"If the Jews could have been made to understand or to remember that their national pre-eminence was representative, not original; symbolical, not real; provisional, not perpetual; it could never have betrayed them into hatred or contempt of other nations, but would rather have cherished an enlarged and catholic spirit, as it did in the most enlightened; an effect which may be clearly traced in the writings of Moses, David, and Isaiah....(The Mosaic dispensation) was scrupulously faithful even to the temporary institutions of the ancient Church; but while it looked upon them as obligatory, it did not look upon them as perpetual.  It obeyed the present requisitions of Jehovah, but still looked forward to something better.  Hence the failure to account, on any other supposition, for the seeming contradictions of the Old Testament, in reference to the ceremonies of the Law.  If worthless, why were they so conscientiously observed by the best and wisest men?  If intrinsically valuable, why are they disparaged and almost repudiated by the same men?  Simply because they were neither worthless nor intrinsically valuable, but appointed temporary signs of something to be otherwise revealed thereafter; so that it was equally impious and foolish to reject them altogether with the skeptic, and to rest in them for ever with the formalist." - Alexander, Commentary on Isaiah, p52.

America Needs to Be Born Again

The strongest, richest, seemingly most blessed nation of the last couple centuries, seems to be spinning out of control in its refusal to give thanks to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in outrageous ways blaspheming His name and His law.

There is now an executive order signed that will make it illegal for any organization which receives any federal funds from following hiring practices that exemplify their fear of God and their love of the Gospel and its Author, Jesus Christ.  If a non-profit charity, a Christian one for instance, says it won’t hire a man who is pretending to be a woman, they can kiss their federal contract goodbye.

Now there is the argument about why the federal government is even involved in funding any of these things –and by what right they have to take our money to do so – but that is for another time.  There is also the argument about why such charities are yoking themselves with a government that continues to strangle our rights to free speech and freedom of religion – but that is for another time as well.  The clear message from our President and his administration is that he intends to push the Lordship of Jesus as far into the dark corners of individual piety as possible – and none of it in the public marketplace.

Our idolatry as a nation is coming of age.  Secular humanism will destroy this country if God is not merciful.  And that is why we have gathered in the name of Jesus Christ for the public and political worship of God, beseeching Him again for the power of the Holy Spirit to pour out upon this nation.  We need national repentance. We need a national revival. America needs to be born again.

Masculine Imagery and God

Frame makes an important (to our contemporary time) case for the theological importance of masculine imagery for the God of Scripture (Frame, ST, pp111-114).  Summing up some of his main points - 

1 - The Scriptures overwhelmingly use male imagery in the revelation of God and we do not have the right to change the biblical concept as revealed.
2 - It is false to say that the ancients were trapped in their cultural view of patriarchy.  They were fully aware of female deities and divine coupling that occurred in the religions of the pagans surrounding them.  They distinctly rejected such a view or practice, but not out of ignorance of the possibility of its existence.
3 - The pagan religions with fertility goddesses and female deities produced a view of creation that was either pantheistic or made creation something divine, something that came forth from god.  The idea of "Mother Earth" or "Mother Nature" comes forth from this and is to be rejected outright.
4 - God's relationship to His people is regularly described in marriage terms where He is the husband and we (corporately) are His bride.  The implications of this require a right understanding of submission and authority, headship and responsibility.  To reverse such relationships or metaphorical thinking would terribly confuse an understanding of God's relationship to us as well as the standard, biblical teaching on the relationship of husband and wife.