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The Forgotten Planet
Here’s a short story I told the students for the ECS year-end assembly.
On the day before the very first summer break, the planets talked about their plans for the next three months. There were eight planets in the class, and their names were: Sol, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Luna, Mercury, and Venus. (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto weren’t old enough for school yet, though they had finished Kinder Prep and were enrolled for the Fall.
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The Age of Pick and Choose
Here’s another guest post by my oldest daughter, Maggie.
In the age of Pick and Choose personality, gender, race, and status, Tommy had no idea which head to wear….
so he chose all of them.
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Spoonfuls of Judgment
Even as a woman who survived exclusively on mail-order cookie dough and who never got dressed before dinner, she still managed to aggressively judge others.
—N.D. Wilson, The Outlaws of Time: The Legend of Sam Miracle, 24-25
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No Undiscovered Lurking-places
On God’s call to Abram (Genesis 12:1) to leave and seek what he could not see:
[I]t is not to be supposed, that God takes a cruel pleasure in the trouble of his servants; but he thus tries all their affections, that he may not leave any lurking-places undiscovered in their hearts.
—John Calvin, Commentary on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis
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Breaking the Divide
When Jesus instituted the Supper He was in the middle of the Passover Feast. Jesus was a Jew, His disciples were all Hebrews, and so they were observing a national event in Israel. Some twenty-five years later Paul wrote 1 Corinthians which included an extensive section about observing communion. By that time the Supper had clearly crossed national boundaries. Perhaps there were some Jewish members of the church in Corinth but many were Gentiles.
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No Stand Ins
The first of the Ten Commandments prohibits the worship of false gods. The second prohibits false worship of the true God.
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
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Why My Night Was Like a Storybook
I spent some time in the hospital last week and my oldest daughter wrote the following story putting together some details from her visit and additional info from her mom. We thought it was funny and, since she doesn’t have her own blog (yet), worth sharing here.
Why My Night Was Like a Storybook By Maggie Higgins It all started when my dad got sick. It wasn’t a normal sickness.
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A Fight to the Death
Abortion does not make sense. It is, and always has been, “fatal violence–against the most helpless members of our human community.” But many in our generation are frantic to deny this reality, so a testimony like that in When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense is potent.
[Abortion] gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the death.
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Communion Against Abortion
Here is an outrageous claim that I believe is true:
We must rejoice more when we remember Christ in communion if we want to stop abortion in our nation.
The decision of Roe v. Wade came 43 years ago last Friday. Since 1973 over 59 million unborn babies have been killed that we know about in the United States. God knows how many have not been counted.
The Supreme Court’s decision and its consequences have worked alongside a swelling cultural desire to stifle faith.
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Busts along the Wall
We started a string of exhortations on the Ten Commandments and last week we considered how Jesus summarized the first four commands by calling men to love God with all that they are (Matthew 22:37-38). It is also true that all men must love God, and all of man’s love must be for God, not split among gods.
In Exodus 20 we read that God spoke the following words (verse 1), starting with a reminder to the Israelites that He delivered them out of Egypt (verse 2).
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Chosen Symbols
Why do we observe communion? We do it because Jesus gave the ordinance to His disciples and commanded them to keep it until He returns. We eat the bread and drink the cup because He gave His Word.
Without His Word the Lord’s Supper would be a superstitious snack, a ritual resulting from man’s imagination and upheld by man’s tradition. It might make a man feel good or even think about good things but it would have no authority.
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Two Tables for Ten
We know, according to Paul, that the law was given to point men to Christ (Galatians 3:24). The law tutored sinners toward the Savior because the law required perfection and none of us are. Only Christ fulfilled every jot and tittle (Matthew 5:17-18), the rest of us, failing at even one point have become accountable for all of it (James 2:10). The law teaches us that we have not obeyed the law and that we must believe in Christ for our righteousness.
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Not in Remembrance of You
Of all the good gifts of God that have been abused, perhaps nothing has been more abused than the gospel. Salvation is not by works. No man can do anything, give any amount, or feel any emotion enough to earn favor with God. “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). That’s it. We are declared righteous by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
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Flotsam and Jetsam
The Bible contains some hard truths, truths that cut against the grain of our sin. Scripture is profitable, Paul wrote, for teaching and reproof and rebuke. Through the God’s law sin is revealed. The mirror of the Word reveals our imperfections. The living and active Sword divides in order to rearrange us and make us more pleasing sacrifices to Him.
Spiritual leaders sometimes say hard things to confront or challenge. Paul wrote that way to the Corinthians but he wanted to make sure that they understood his motivation.
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Harassing the Devil
In 1530 Martin Luther wrote the following to his friend Jerome Weller for his fight of faith against the evil one.
Whenever this temptation of melancholy comes to you, beware not to dispute with the devil nor allow yourself to dwell on these lethal thoughts, for so doing is nothing less than giving place to the devil and so falling. Try as hard as you can to despise these thoughts sent by Satan.
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Overactive Victimhood
One of our cultural contagions is overactive victimhood. Everyone is a victim of something and, once a victim, always a victim. This isn’t to deny longstanding results of being sinned against, or even the existence of permanent scars. It is to say that a person’s identity does not need to be in victimness.
Christians should be able to show how this is done and to provide a way to talk about identity according to the gospel.
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Convicting Clarity
According to the Bible some practices are more profitable than others during the assembled worship of a church. Paul emphasized the value of prophetic utterance over tongue-talking in 1 Corinthians 14. He esteemed speaking “to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation” (verse 3). Such profit requires intelligibility, using language with discernible meaning communicated to minds outside of the speaker’s. Such manifestations build up the church (verse 12).
What is edifying clarity for the church is also a convicting clarity to unbelieving visitors.
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Delighting in the Saints
Peter preached on the day of Pentecost about the resurrection of Jesus. He said, “God raised him [His Son] up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to held by it” (Acts 2:24). Then Peter proved his point by quoting Psalm 16:8-11 and made the following application.
Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.
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Birds of a Feather
Where the old [way of education] initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry–keeper deals with young birds–making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation–men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
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As the Year Turns
We’ve arrived at the turn of the calendar when people typically consider their food intake and the health of their hearts. God’s people ought to do the same, not only in terms of physical well-being, but also evaluating and planning Bible intake as the year turns.
If you’re a Christian, whether you’re seven or eighty, you should be craving to eat more Bible. There are many reading plans and more than one type of media, but God’s Word must be gotten in.