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Accounting for Participation
The Lord’s Table is a table of community accountability. By God’s grace, we have only removed a few persons from communion at our church due to church discipline. He has guarded our flock from gross, ongoing, unrepentant sinners. We have been able to enjoy the sweet fellowship here without too much bitterness.
This is fellowship worth preserving, worth protecting, and that means that not everyone is invited. In particular, when professing brothers refuse to repent from their sin after they have been personally, lovingly, and repeatedly pursued, they may be formally uninvited from participation.
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On Not Sponsoring Stupidity
The book of Proverbs is full of wisdom, wisdom for those who need to get wisdom, and wisdom for those who need to give it. Solomon helps the one who already understands obtain guidance and then also give guidance to others.
One of the proverbs most quoted in our house is Solomon’s lesson on the unteachable.
Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge,
but he who hates reproof is stupid.
(Proverbs 12:1, ESV)
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Totus Pravus
It is sort of funny to think about the high moral standards of the Egyptians who refused to eat with the Hebrews. In Genesis 43 it is described as a “abomination,” something that causes disgust or hatred, a thing to be avoided at all costs. Joseph and his attendants ate at a separate tables from his brothers in order to avoid the defilement and dishonor of sharing such an intimate act with the unworthy.
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On Not Being a YAC
I’ve heard it said that if you want to memorize another person’s name, try to say it three times the first time you meet them. That exercise certainly won’t hurt, since the more we work a muscle the stronger it gets, including the brain. I really like a phrase that one of our elders uses frequently, but I was having trouble remembering it. We talked about it again at a leaders meeting last Saturday, and I’m going to talk about it now to burn it in my brain.
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All Sorts of Quests
How do we know that we don’t have to live with tortured consciences? We couldn’t know it without the Bible. Men have attempted all sorts of quests to deal with their inconvenient guilt, whether trying to distract the conscience with entertainment, trying to drown the conscience with alcohol, trying to defeat the conscience with legalism, or trying to propitiate the conscience by punishing someone else. There will be a reckoning. There will be blood.
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A Longer Prayer
This will be the last exhortation to confession based on the Lord’s Prayer, and my goal is to wrap up this series with an extra-biblical bow.
I grew up in a King James Version only church. Because of that, the prayer of Jesus I memorized as a kid is a little longer than what’s found in the ESV and, for that matter, in the accepted Greek New Testament. There are some later, meaning less old so less likely to be original, manuscripts that include a final phrase after “deliver us from evil” in Matthew 6:13.
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Greatness Under Cover
However proud Joseph became when he dreamed that his family would bow down before him, he had no idea how truly great he would be and how completely chastened his brothers would be. God’s fixed purpose to raise Joseph to glory looks brilliant looking back. Looking forward as a seventeen year-old, Joseph’s vision of greatness was blurry. Looking around during his final teenage years and throughout his twenties, Joseph’s vision of greatness was only by faith; there was no fix in sight.
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Their Website Address
The final two petitions in the Lord’s prayer are closer in concern than any other two petitions. “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” are certainly related, but standards, as defined by His will, can be obeyed by individuals without defining a whole group. His kingdom is broader and includes much more than personal observance of His law, it includes corporate ceremony and festival of His lordship.
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Not in Me
Pharaoh paid a great compliment to Joseph before seeing any of Joseph’s work for himself. “I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream you can interpret it.” But Joseph answered, “It is not in me” (Genesis 41:16). He knew he had nothing that he had not received. For however audacious he’d been telling his own dreams to his brothers and father, he’d been humbled for the last thirteen years, sold as a slave and then serving as a prisoner.
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After the Final Amen
Of all the petitions that Jesus taught His disciples to pray, the only one He clarified after the final amen, so to speak, was the request for forgiveness. There’s certainly more that Jesus could have said about the coming of His kingdom; that could have been really helpful for our eschatology. He could have said more about what things are like in heaven and how that would translate here on earth.
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Exsultamus!
Perhaps one reason why some young people in the church grow up and walk away from the faith is because they have not celebrated communion enough or because they have not celebrated it at all. This Table is a central location where the church and parents need to disciple young believers.
There is a wrong way to do right things. Observing the Lord’s Table in a way that stirs up guilt more than hope, that triggers shame more than joy, that prompts uncertainty more than peace, is dissonant with the gospel and dangerous to souls.
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The "Oh, no!" Conjunction
In the middle of the next petition in the Lord’s Prayer is a small word labeled by some Greek grammarians as the “Oh no!” conjunction. Actually the lexicons and syntax books call it a comparative conjunction, and this comparison cuts the conscience. Other names for this conjunction could be the “Conviction” conjunction, the “Are you serious?” conjunction, or the “Hypocrite’s Log-puller” conjunction.
The prayer Jesus teaches His disciples includes: “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12).
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Familiarity Breeds
Since I’m a pastor and since I am responsible for much of the Lord’s Day liturgy at our assembly’s worship, I’m often asked what our Sunday morning service looks like. When I get to the part about having weekly communion, the follow-up question is typically, “Doesn’t that make it not special after a while?”
There are short answers, which is what I usually give (don’t be too surprised). I often say, “Not yet by God’s grace.
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Right Out of the Oven
Halfway into Matthew’s rendering of the Lord’s Prayer Jesus provides the most temporal of all the requests: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Bread stands for food, the kind of physical sustenance a man survives on, provided he doesn’t have celiac disease. You’d think that the Great Physician would have taken that into account. Probably He did. Bread is good, gluten and all, though some don’t have the guts to enjoy it.
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Last Number of Times
If you read my blog you probably already know through some other channel that my sister went to be with the Lord on February 17. The funeral home website posted her obituary and a video slideshow, and the following are the notes for the talk I gave at the funeral service.
My sister was a gifted crafter. As the many quilts displayed in the sanctuary demonstrate, she had a keen eye and deft touch to put her ideas into incarnated form.
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The Cup in Our Hands
There is no way that Pharaoh’s cupbearer was unable to remember what Joseph had done. Nothing could have been worse than losing his royal position as confidant to the king and nothing else other than his restoration to that position would have occupied his mind more while in prison. His dream, and Joseph’s foretelling of his deliverance, consumed him for three days until the prophecy was fulfilled. Even if the cupbearer did not want to advocate on behalf of the Hebrew who served him and gave him hope, there is no way that Joseph simply slipped his mind…for two years.
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A Lot of Calvinistic Sun in the Sky
The third request of Jesus’ prayer takes a lot of faith. He taught us to ask our divine Father to set apart His name from every other name. Next we ask Him to establish His promised empire among us. Then we’re to pray, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).
I want to ask, how is this possible? And, what would it look like?
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In Remembrance of Where Christ Is
We are in a constant spiritual war and our enemies—sin, the world, and the devil—are relentless. The Lord has not left us without weapons.
Paul told the Romans to reckon themselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus by remembering their baptism. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6:3) This is one reason we don’t sprinkle, we dunk under water as if buried under it.
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Current Visibility
When Jesus taught His disciples to pray He started the pattern with requests that calibrate our perspective. The first thing we ask our Father in heaven to do is hallow His own name. May He create reverence for His holy glory deep in our hearts and wide among the nations.
The second and third requests are related to the hallowing of His name as well as to each other: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
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The Nuts and Bolts of Education
These are my notes for a talk I gave last week at our school Information Night.
One of the best things about the daily nuts and bolts at our school is that we have separate bathrooms for boys and girls. I don’t start this way to get a laugh or to cause a shock. Gender specific facilities are important for modesty—though that’s not my primary reason for mentioning it. They are important for morality—though sin doesn’t depend on any given door being closed.
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More Suitable for Church People
How can Jesus stand to have Tamar (see Genesis 39) in His genealogy? From the standpoint of the eternal councils, did the Son ever want to suggest an alternative plan to the Father, maybe something a little less scandalous and gross, something more suitable for church people, and the kids?!
Tamar was a Canaanite, one of the strange women the Patriarchs were eager to avoid. She was not a one man woman; she had sex with two men so sinful that the LORD executed them, and then with another man, her father-in-law, that she deceived into it by playing a prostitute.
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Not to Make Us Stars
If we avoid pretentious hypocrisy and superstitious verbosity as Jesus warned His disciples, how should we pray? “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name’” (Matthew 6:9).
We have already considered the collective nature of the prayer with a first person plural pronoun (always “our” and “us” in the prayer, never “I” or “me”). We also see that it is a family affair. We are siblings addressing our spiritual Father whose dwelling place transcends the earth.
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A Way of Life
Our new President has been tweeting for a while, and a few years ago he posted something for the world that continues to be born out in his behavior.
When someone attacks me, I always attack back…except 100x more. This has nothing to do with a tirade but rather, a way of life! (November 11, 2012)
He didn’t say when someone attacks my people, or my family, or even my friends, but just “me” (even though he did post it on an anniversary of 9/11).
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Verbal Forklifts Not Required
Jesus instructed the disciples about two things regarding prayer before He provided the pattern in Matthew 6. He first told them not to parade their über-righteousness before others in verses 5-6. There’s an inferior reward for pretense. In verses 7-8 Jesus provides a second warning and contrast.
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.
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Won to His Side
The people of Israel often had outside enemies. The genealogy of Esau in Genesis 36 records the increasing numbers and strength of the non-elect line. Chiefs and kings just a land away caused grief to God’s people even when His people were minding their own business within their borders. King David, who eventually defeated and subdued the land of Edom during his reign (2 Samuel 8:13-14), knew many battle songs. He knew what threat felt like, not just triumph.