O Worship the King

O worship the King, all glorious above,
O gratefully sing His wonderful love;
Our Shield and Defender, the Ancient of Days,
pavilioned in splendor and girded with praise.

O tell of His might, O sing of His grace,
whose robe is the light, whose canopy space.
His chariot of wrath the deep thunder-clouds form,
and dark is His path on the wings of the storm.

Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
in You do we trust, nor find You to fail;
Your mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend.

The Object of Liberty is Life

"The only object of liberty is life." G.K. Chesterton

Justice and Mercy

"On the cross neither justice nor mercy loses out--both are fulfilled at once. Jesus' death was necessary if God was going to take justice seriously and still love us. The same concern for both love and justice should mark all our relationships. We should never acquiesce in injustice. Jesus identified with the oppressed. Yet we should not try to overcome evil with evil. Jesus forgave his enemies and died for them."

Tim Keller, The Reason for God

Immovable Faith

Don't just ask God for a miracle,
ask Him for an immovable faith.

A New Thought...

What makes life satisfying?
- a full and vibrant relationship with Jesus Christ
- honest, deep relationships with family and friends
- unselfishness/self sacrifice
- simple devotion to meaningful pursuits (music/reading/exercise/leisure, etc...)
- self-discipline

7 Traits of a Loving Person
1. kindness
2. patience
3. forgiveness
4. courtesy
5. honesty
6. generosity
7. humility

Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus

Come, thou long-expected Jesus,
born to set thy people free;
from our fears and sins release us,
let us find our rest in thee.

Israel's strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art:
dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart.

Born thy people to deliver,
born a child, and yet a king,
born to reign in us for ever,
now thy gracious kingdom bring.

By thine own eternal Spirit
rule in all our hearts alone;
by thine all-sufficient merit
raise us to thy glorious throne.

Words: Charles Wesley (1707-1788), 1744

"Homemaking -– being a full-time wife and mother –- is not a destructive drought of uselessness but an overflowing oasis of opportunity; it is not a dreary cell to contain your talents and skills but a brilliant catalyst to channel creativity and energies into meaningful work; it is not a rope for binding your productivity in the marketplace, but reins for guiding your posterity in the home; it is not an oppressive restrain of intellectual prowess for the community, but a release of wise instruction to your own household; it is not the bitter assignment of inferiority to your person, but the bright assurance of the ingenuity of God's plan for complementarity of the sexes, especially as worked out in God's plan for marriage; it is neither limitation of gifts available nor stinginess in distributing the benefits of those gifts, but rather the multiplication of a mother's legacy to the generations to come and the generous bestowal of all God meant a mother to give to those He entrusted to her care."

-Dorothy Kelley Patterson, Where's Mom? The High Calling of Wives and Mothers, pg. 47

Words

"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
George Eliot

Their religion is a great, soft cushion.

Rev John Stott of London, wrote, “Thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so-called 'nominal Christianity.' In countries to which Christian civilisation has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved; enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism.”

John R.W. Stott “BASIC CHRISTIANITY.” IVF 1958 p108.

Especially Preaching - not my own writing and very insightful

The shorter catechism (#89) says that the Spirit of God makes "the reading, but especially the preaching of the Word an effectual means of convincing and converting sinners, and of building them up in holiness and comfort, through faith, unto salvation."

Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:11 that Jesus gave pastors and teachers (or, more literally, pastor-teachers) to His people. Why? V. 14 - so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. In other words, Jesus gave pastor-teachers because we need them. Because on our own, we would be blown every which way and would not reach maturity in Christ. The fact that Jesus gives preachers - and that we didn't come up with this idea on our own - means that our responsibility to the preaching we receive on Sunday mornings is a responsibility we have to Jesus, the giver of the gift. Contrary to popular thought, it was Jesus' opinion that we do need preachers to understand the Word of God. Not as mediators, but as teachers. And not that we are ignorant on our own, but that we won't normally achieve the maturity and protection Jesus has planned for us apart from the church's preaching and teaching.

I just read Acts 15 this morning...

"Acts 15, where the council of the church decided what the Scriptures taught regarding circumcision and handed their decision down as authoritative. Again, the Scriptures lead us to seek balance. Real authority, the primacy of preaching yet maintaining the practice of submissive discernment."

More here by a man of good and Godly counsel:
http://measureofmydays.blogspot.com/2008/02/especially-preaching.html
http://measureofmydays.blogspot.com/2008/02/more-on-primacy-of-preaching.html
http://measureofmydays.blogspot.com/2008/02/just-once-more.html

Heard and Noted:

"We do not merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it."
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

"God made the earth by His power." Jeremiah 10:12-13

I sing the mighty power of God, that made the mountains rise,
That spread the flowing seas abroad, and built the lofty skies.
I sing the wisdom that ordained the sun to rule the day;
The moon shines full at God’s command, and all the stars obey.

I sing the goodness of the Lord, who filled the earth with food,
Who formed the creatures through the Word, and then pronounced them good.
Lord, how Thy wonders are displayed, where’er I turn my eye,
If I survey the ground I tread, or gaze upon the sky.

There’s not a plant or flower below, but makes Thy glories known,
And clouds arise, and tempests blow, by order from Thy throne;
While all that borrows life from Thee is ever in Thy care;
And everywhere that we can be, Thou, God art present there.

Isaac Watts, Di­vine and Mor­al Songs for Child­ren, 1715.

Hell

"If sinners will be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. And if they will perish, let them perish with our arms around their knees, imploring them to stay. If hell must be filled, at least let it be filled in the teeth of our exertions, and let not one go there unwarned and unprayed for. - C.H. Spurgeon.



"Let us arose ourselves to the sternest fidelity, labouring to win souls as much as if it all depended wholly upon ourselves, while we fall back, in faith, upon the glorious fact that everything rests with the eternal God." - C.H. SPURGEON

Read and Noted:

"...The Word of God, read or preached, has the power to enter the innermost crevices of a person's being, to shine light in unwanted places, to explode the myths and deceits by which fallen life sustains itself, and to bring that person face to face with the eternal God." -David Wells

Read and Noted:

"The more we need to pray the less we want to. Not to pray is to lose the desire to pray, for prayerlessness is its own punishment. But pray we must. We cannot sit and wait for the desire to pray to suddenly come upon us like the tongues of fire at Pentecost. Just do it. The choices we make when we are not motivated are the most critical of our Christian walk."
Ben Patterson

Excerpt from Jim Elliot's Journal

"Oct 28 - One of the great blessings of Heaven is the
appreciation of heaven on earth - Ephesian truth.
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain
that which he cannot lose. Lu 16:9 '...that whom it shall fail, they
may receive you into everlasting habitations.'
Scripture leaves so many stories untold. Think of the
calloused heart of the priest who stooped over, squinting in the
dimness of the sanctuary, looking for the 30 pcs. of silver Judas cast
there - pausing to see if he had found all 30. Too legal to put the
money in the treasury since it was blood-money, they wax very philanthropic
and buy with it a field to bury strangers in. How cold the heart of man!
How feelingless and obdurate!”

This can be found in the October 28, 1949 entry on page 174 (Chapter 4) of the 1978 hardback edition of the Journal and on page 108 (Chapter 11) of the 1958 hardback edition of Shadow of the Almighty. The quote is also used in the prologue of Shadow on page 15.
http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/faq/20.htm

"Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces."
George MacDonald

"Thy name is as ointment poured forth." Song of Solomon 1:3

How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds
In a believer’s ear!
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.

It makes the wounded spirit whole,
And calms the troubled breast;
’Tis manna to the hungry soul,
And to the weary, rest.

Dear Name, the Rock on which I build, My Shield and Hiding Place,
My never failing treasury, filled
With boundless stores of grace!

By Thee my prayers acceptance gain,
Although with sin defiled;
Satan accuses me in vain,
And I am owned a child.

Jesus! my Shepherd, Husband, Friend,
O Prophet, Priest and King,
My Lord, my Life, my Way, my End,
Accept the praise I bring.

Weak is the effort of my heart,
And cold my warmest thought;
But when I see Thee as Thou art,
I’ll praise Thee as I ought.

Till then I would Thy love proclaim
With every fleeting breath,
And may the music of Thy Name
Refresh my soul in death!

John Newton

Isaiah 40:6-8

The Word of God Stands Forever

A voice says, "Cry!"
And I said, "What shall I cry?"
All flesh is grass,
and all its beauty is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers,
the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it;
surely the people are grass.

The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.


I Peter 1:22-25

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.

For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable,
through the living and enduring word of God.

For, "All men are like grass,
and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
the grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of the Lord stands forever."
And this is the word that was preached to you.

Isaiah 40:11

He will tend his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms;
he will carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead those that are with young.

Psalm 7:17

I will give thanks to the LORD because of his righteousness
and will sing praise to the name of the LORD Most High.


Proverbs 7:2-4

Keep my commands and you will live;
guard my teachings as the apple of your eye.

Bind them on your fingers;
write them on the tablet of your heart.

Say to wisdom, "You are my sister,"
and call understanding your kinsman;

Read and Noted:

"...At times, my invisibility feels like an affliction. But it is not a disease that is erasing my life. It is the cure for the disease of my own self-centeredness. It is the antidote to my strong, stubborn pride. I keep the right perspective when I see myself as a great builder. As one of the people who show up at a job that they will never see finished, to work on something that their name will never be on."

It's 14 F° and sunny here...

But, I'd rather be on a warm porch - anywhere!

this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord

"Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega." - Clyde Kilby

We are beggars.

Wir sind Bettler. Das ist Wahr.
We are beggars. That's the truth.

"These are the last written words of Martin Luther. Mark Noll has a great section in his chapter on Luther and the reformation on Luther's theology of the cross. It is, by far, the most expressive and deeply felt part of Turning Points. Although justification by faith through grace is certainly at the heart of Luther's theology, it's the cross that was, for Luther, the only full picture of such justification, the only place where God came into the world in a real, humbling, miraculous, and touchable way."
Jared Olivetti

William Morris said it.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”