Finished reading: A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle 📚

@hobbsandbean told me that this would be my favorite of the series, but I also needed to read the first two before this, the third. I did like it, actually. I can look past the bent toward open theism with the “might-have-been”s. I mean, I’ve seen Back to the Future so I know that traveling back in time can change things in the present. :)

It also happened that I actually read this book unlike A Wrinkle in Time and Wind in the Door, which I listened to. I have nothing against peeps that benefit from, even prefer, audiobooks, but reading works better for me.

4 of 5 stars

I like guitar, I like Classical Gas, I liked this edition.

What He's Prepared

In Revelation 9:15 John writes about four angels who “had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year.” It’s not difficult to determine who had prepared them, but it is beneficial to meditate on it. God prepared them, to do what He wanted (which for these angels was to wipe out a third of mankind) at the exact moment He wanted (which I believe is still in front of us on history’s timeline).

Read More

Counting Waves

In our Omnibus class for adults we discussed On the Incarnation by Athanasius last Thursday night. It is a 1600 year-old book about God taking on flesh in Christ, and it is both accessible and encouraging. Near the end Athanasius wrote this: “For as one cannot take in all the waves with one’s eyes, since those coming on elude the perception of one who tries, so also one who would comprehend all the achievements of Christ in the body is unable to take in the whole, even by reckoning them up, for those that elude his thought are more than he thinks he has grasped.

Read More

The Blessing of Being Lied About

Let’s be honest (as we always should be anyway). As Christians good works are often hard, sometimes harder than others. What’s even harder than good works is a hot cup of zeal in your heart, the sort of first love affections that yield the fruit of the first kinds of good works (think Christ’s message to the Ephesians in Revelation 2:4-5). There are a number of Scriptural ways to examine our works, to make sure that they are spiritual and that they glorify our Father in heaven, not just our names on earth.

Read More

Here’s a good question for considering how to bless others: Is what I’m doing making it easier for them to give thanks to the Lord?

Not the Sanctimonious Sisterhood of Bossy Pants

Love, good works, fellowship, and eschatology go together. They are like ingredients in a pot, and each of us has a spoon. Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24-25) The command is to consider, to think, to strategize.

Read More

Walking among the Lampstands

In John’s vision of the Lord, he saw one like the son of man in the midst of the lampstands (Revelation 1:13). When John wrote the words of Jesus to the Ephesians, Jesus identified Himself as the “one who walks among the seven golden lampstands” (2:1). Jesus is with His body, He is among His church in her various locations. He is present. This also means that He knows what’s happening.

Read More

In A Centennial Reader, James Bratt introduces Abraham Kuyper’s inaugural address for the Free University of Amsterdam, and why opening this institution was so important for Kuyper:

❝Higher education and advanced research had enormous importance for him: religiously, for exploring and enhancing God’s creation; strategically, for (re)shaping society and culture; socially, for raising the self-respect and life-chances of common people.”

On reading doctrinal books rather than devotional books for sake of deepening devotion:

❝For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that their heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”

—C.S. Lewis, Preface to On the Incarnation

Keeping the Adjective

There are only two uses of the adjective form of “Lord” (κυριακῇ) in the New Testament. One is in Revelation 1:10 regarding the “Lord’s day.” The other is in 1 Corinthians 11:20 regarding the “Lord’s supper.” We use these descriptions many centuries later because they are inspired descriptions. This adjective is worth keeping. It is also worth noting that when John saw the vision of the resurrected Lord, he fell at Jesus’ feet as though dead.

Read More

Perhaps my favorite Preface of all time is that by C.S. Lewis for On the Incarnation by Athanasius. Here’s an example, on why we should read old books:

❝Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”

A Bellyaching Bucket

I’ve mentioned it a few times recently, but I keep thinking about it, I keep having opportunities to try it, and I keep thinking that it could really work. What I’m about to say connects with the image used in Revelation 1 for the churches. The image that Jesus uses for the churches is a lampstand, a light giver. Jesus told His disciples that they were the light of the world, and collectively our light should shine brighter.

Read More

The Evangelical Reconcilers

This is an interesting take on three approaches that Christians take to culture, in particular, to Western society. I haven’t spent much time among self-identified capitulators, nor for that matter among the warriors. I have spent most of my life among the reconcilers, as defined by this article, though those most of those guys would not identify themselves as such. I think the reason for that is because many of these orthodox Evangelicals are fighting, and their claim is not untrue. They are fighting the spiritual war, at least as they understand it and for which there is a kind of biblical defense (i.e., Ephesians 6:10-20; 2 Corinthians 10:3-5). They are fighting against capitulators in the church (those who “affirm with their generous overlords the unworthiness of conservative evangelicals to be tolerated”), and they are fighting against sin in souls by proclaiming the cross. Calling them reconcilers is not quite accurate, though I can see from Wolfe’s perspective how he tags them as such.

The whole article is worth your time to read, and it provides an opportunity to consider what sphere(s) a faithful disciple of Christ should seek (and expect?) to influence. It’s connected to our Kuyperian-sized blind spot. I do agree that our goal should not be to make ourselves “harmless to the regime.” Jesus is Lord.

The kind of preacher to aspire to be, as Augustine confessed to the Lord about Ambrose:

❝His gifted tongue never tired of dispensing the richness of your corn, the joy of your oil, and the sober intoxication of your wine.”

No Greater Harbor

If a harbor would be home to many ships, its shore must be broad. If a man would be host to many for a meal, he must not only have a large table, he must also have a large heart. As one of your shepherds, I love you, but the head of this communion table is Jesus Christ, the one who love us and freed us from our sins. His heart is great.

Read More

Because sin darkens the minds of unbelivers (Ephesians 4:18), does that mean that they can’t discover any true things in science?

❝No, the real darkening of sin is found in something completely different, in our having lost the gift to comprehend the true context, the proper coherence, the systematic unity of things. We now view things just outwardly, not in core and essence; hence also, each thing individually, not things together in their connection and origin in God.”

—Abraham Kuyper, “Common Grace in Science,” A Centennial Reader

Don't Forget That

In a recent sermon I made the case that the worst sin in the modern world is the sin of living as if God is irrelevant. Another name for this is unbelief. Yet another biblical way to describe it is forgetting God. God’s people were exhorted not to forget Him in the Law. Take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

Read More

Loving our kids and teaching them to respect life has consequences.

“If you pray for Roe to be overturned, and for the issue to be returned to the states, you are praying for the eventual crack-up of the 50 state union. It may happen with a whimper or a bang, but one thing is sure and certain. Respect for life and love of death are incompossibilities. We cannot vote them into a mutual respect and acceptance any more than we can vote to have water flow uphill.”

—Douglas Wilson, The UnRoeveling of America