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One of the great driving forces behind many of the musical choices made in contemporary churches is the desire to draw people in, to be good fishers of men, as it were, with music as the ‘hook’.
I am increasingly persuaded, however, that for the most part such thinking makes a serious category mistake that prejudices the whole discussion from the outset. Read the rest of this entry »
When diagnosing the spiritual health of a struggling believer what are your primary diagnostic questions? In assessing your own soul’s welfare where do you start?
“How is your quiet time?” “Do you have an accountability partner?” “Do you have a daily Bible reading plan?”
Those questions demonstrate that the individualism of our age has shaped our piety and warped it to such a degree that we are often asking the wrong questions. I want to suggest that while those are not at all unimportant, they ought not to be our primary targets in diagnosing spiritual need.
Let me offer a few- less individualistic- alternatives.
1. How often do you miss corporate worship on the Lord’s Day?
2. When you do attend corporate worship how do you prepare before going?
3. Do you find yourself impatient for the worship service to be finished?
4. Do you attend worship on the Lord’s Day evening?
5. Why do you attend worship?
6. Does the idea of keeping the Sabbath seem restrictive and harsh, and those who advocate its careful observance legalistic and narrow?
7. Do you evaluate the sermon by how moved you were during it?
8. How do you ensure you benefit from the Lord’s Supper?
9. Do you expect to benefit most from your small group or corporate worship?
10. What do you understand by the term ‘fellowship’?
11. Do you believe that a church’s weekday program is a good indicator of that church’s health?
12. When was the last time your prayed aloud with any of the members of your church?
13. If the church had no youth program/women’s ministry/small group structure would you consider your spiritual needs inadequately served?
14. Do you believe that the Holy Spirit is to be known and ‘felt’ as readily in private devotions, or in nature, on a mountain-top say, as He is in public worship?
15. Do you find yourself participating in corporate worship as a spectator, evaluating the minister’s performance, as a consumer of the product on offer, as though you were part of the audience at a theatre?
16. Do you feel dis-enfranchised when your particular strata of the congregational demographic is not represented ‘up front’ during the service?
17. Do you think the accessibility of the liturgy and preaching to non-Christian people a good measure of a healthy worship style?
This is a damning critique of contemporary worship songs.
I recall hearing John Piper, in an address on preaching as ‘expository exultation’, begin by welcoming what he considered to be a recent explosion of Godward lyrics in contemporary worship songs, and then going on to ask why there had not been a corresponding explosion of God-centeredness in preaching.
In my view Lester Ruth’s masterful treatment casts serious doubt on the adequacy of Piper’s assessment of those songs.
HT- Nic Batzig
Darryl Hart has a stimulating and useful piece here on Calvin as a model of ‘conversion’ that would serve Presbyterians better than the Edwardsian crisis-experience model that currently dominates.
The word ‘Christian’ and the word ‘comedy’, when found together, always read ‘laughing stock’, as this hilarious and tragic piece proves. Conclusive evidence that when Christians try to “redeem the arts” they simply foul them up. I feel vindicated!
13. In keeping with 12, the practise of infant baptism is the uniform position of the Reformed Confessions (3 Forms of Unity, Westminster Standards).
The earliest distinctively Reformed Confession, the Tetrapolitan Confession of 1530, written largely by Bucer says Read the rest of this entry »
12. The history of the church affirms that the baptism of the infants of believers is the normal pattern, and the ancient practice of the church catholic
This is of course disputed by credo-baptists, and paedobaptists readilly admit that some of the evidence is ambiguous, and while the antiquity of infant baptism is hard to dispute, we do not rest our practice of infant baptism on the age of the rite, but on the teaching of scripture.
Nevertheless, as Joachim Jeremias has pointed out, there is strong evidence of prevalent infant baptisms at a very early date in the church’s history Read the rest of this entry »
The guys over at Reformed Forum interview Dr. John V Fesko on his new book The Rule of Love. This excellent interview gets at a number of issues including Christ and the three uses of the law, the law in redemptive history, Kline v. Murray on the Law, and the nature typology and abiding relevance of the Fourth Commandment.
The Times Online chart the rise of the young, restless, and reformed in the light of Calvin’s 500th birthday.
It is common these days to assert that the Confessional tradition locating the Kingdom of God in the visible church is wrong. I beg to differ.
The Kingdom, we are told is bigger than the church. It is the rule of God, focused in the Lordship of Christ, at work ‘out there’ in the world. Kuyperian tranformationalists argue that this leads to an holistic vision of ministry and mission for the church, since ‘the Kingdom’ in their view is a virtual synonym for a kind of optimistic type of providence that permeates human culture, working to destroy the effects of the fall, in spiritual and societal categories ’till by incremental change we arrive at the eschaton.
‘The Kingdom’ here means God’s dynamic action taking back every sphere of human society and culture, ‘redeeming’ it and restoring it to its rightful function and dignity under the Lordship of King Jesus. It is apparently the church’s work to proclaim and enact the idea that Christ lays claim to “every square inch” of human cultural endeavor.
But not so fast! Read the rest of this entry »
This is beautiful.
Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl trailer from Gorilla Poet Productions on Vimeo.
11. None of the biblical examples of baptism require immersion and several make immersion impossible.
The only place I can think of where an immersion is sometimes said to be required by the language of the text relates to John’s baptism of Jesus in Mat.3:13ff (cf. Mark 1:9ff; Luke 3:21ff) or Philip’s baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8:38. Matthew mentions that the Spirit descended on Jesus as he was “coming up out of the water”. Luke says that they “both went down into the water… and he baptized him.”
Matthew’s language is often said by Baptists to indicate that Jesus was immersed. The difficulty here is that the text does not require this interpretation. It is predicated entirely on the meaning of the (disputed) meaning of the verb ‘to baptize’ which then finds ’support’ in the language of going down into and coming up out of the water. Read the rest of this entry »
According to Thomas Watson,
“repentance is a spiritual medicine made up of six special ingredients: sight of sin, sorrow for sin, confession of sin, shame for sin, hared for sin, turning from sin.” (Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance, Banner of Truth, p18)
Another way of putting it might be that repentance involves
1. Recognition of sin
2. Remorse for sin
3. Responsibility for sin
4. Renewal from sin.
The guys over at Reformed Forum have a great interivew with Dr Richard Gamble on issues related to his exciting new volume, “God’s Mighty Acts in the Old Testament” which seeks to be an integrated approach to Biblical and Systematic Theology.
Here’s the next installment.
Previous posts in the series:
8. The symbolism of infant baptism is most consistent with the sovereignty of God in salvation
It is, I know, a matter of personal opinion and bald assertion rather than scriptural evidence, but when I came to understand the sovereignty of God in my salvation, my own utter inability to come to him, and my complete dependence on the quickening agency of his Spirit for cleansing and new birth, the oft repeated baptistic objection that as a baby I did not understand what was happening to me melted away, to be replaced with wonder at the wisdom and mercy of God, who saw fit, in his vast covenant love, to have the sign of saving grace placed upon me while I was as yet ignorant and unable to do anything but cry out for a mother’s milk. For that was exactly my state when he saved me: unable, helpless, dependant, crying out like a baby for the mercy of another. That picture moved me, and moves me still, to adoration and praise.
9. The meaning of the baptizo word-group cannot be narrowed to mean ‘dip or immerse’ only.
The battle has raged, and continues to rage among Greek scholars over this. Suffice it to say that the evidence is sufficiently clear that baptizo and synonyms cannot be pressed to mean “dipping” exclusively.
10. The spiritual reality (the work of the Spirit in new birth, cleansing, and filling) is always poured out or sprinkled. We are not dipped into the Spirit.
There are no instances of the spiritual reality signified in baptism being spoken of as an immersion. There are the ‘baptism in, with, or by the Spirit’ passages (Matt 3:11; Mark 1:8; Luke 3:16; John 1:33; Cor. 12:13), but they rely on a disputed interpretation of baptizo. When we turn to those texts that actually tell us about how Spirit-baptism took place in the New Testament (Acts 1:8; 2:4; 2:17,18; 2:33; 9:17; 10:44,45; 19:6;) we find that the Spirit is poured out upon, or falls on, or fills, or is received by believers. People are not plunged into Him. He comes upon them. They are never immersed in Him. Where does this leave the view of baptizo as ‘to dip’ one wonders?
