because i like lists

This week, I have taken several things from the time back at TMC, particularly from SLS retreat. Rather than go into elaborate detail, here is a short list:

insights:

1. God is a vinedresser, and the church is His vineyard. He acts on behalf of the fruit and the life of the whole vineyard over and above the fruit and life of any one individual part.

2. God prunes us to make us more fruitful, not more acceptable.

3. Kettlebell windmillls are an excellent exercise

4. Coffee filters can double as toilet paper, should the need arise… necessity is the mother of invention.

5. The end of everything is to glorify the Father.

6. God truly is longsuffering

dangers:

1. having confidence in the position as RA, my status as student at TMC, knowledge of Scripture, or anything other than Christ alone

2. forgetting that life is about more than excelling at school

3. The black widow(s) that live outside my door, whom I have named “Ursula,” because I really hate that name and because I really hate spiders

4. sin

excitements:

1. Christ has bought me with His blood.

2. I am marrying the most wonderful woman that the world has ever known in June.

3. I can have bacon for breakfast every day.

4. I have three kettlebells.

5. I’m not in hell right now.

6. The lord has given me an amazingly lovely woman to cherish for the rest of my life.

 

i love this woman, and i’m gonna marry her

Sunday, July 26, 2009 will be a day that always holds great significance for me. On that day, I asked Diana Humphreys to marry me, and for reasons that I cannot wrap my mind around, she said ‘yes.’ Diana has been my best friend and the greatest girl I have known, and I love her with all me heart. I am the most blessed man alive, and I am so thankful that the Lord has given me this woman, whom I do not in the least deserve. I consider it a privilege to be able to love her for the rest of my life.

For those of you who do not know Diana, she is loving, compassionate, joyful, fun, gentle, a servant, slow to anger, wise, and beautiful. She is adorned with an inward beauty that radiates through her countenance, and she is also drop-dead beautiful. For those of you who do know Diana, you will know that no two sentences, no matter how extolling, can truly express the lovely woman that she is.

Diana, I love you, and will never tire of showing you my affection. You have my heart and will always be the most important human relationship in my life. You are my first love, my lilly among the thorns.

 

culture is not evil…

…People are.

Recently, the Lord has been teaching me that the culture that we live in is not — in and of itself — sinful. Clarification is needed: The culture is not a living, breathing being with a soul and personality. It is the name we give to the network of the exchange of goods, services, information, and relationship. Culture is the way that we interact with one another. It includes language, art, medicine, architecture, clothing, music, the way we form friendships, the way we end friendships, the way we talk. It is everything that governs our day-to-day interaction with ourselves and eneryone else in our society.

Like most things, culture can be used for good or for evil:
For instance, medicine is not evil. Those who murder children (yes, I am talking about abortion) are.
Food is not evil. Those who are gluttonous are.
Alcohol is not evil. Those who indulge in drunkenness are.
Rap music is not evil. Those who use it to express anger, sadistic desires, or perverse sexual fantasies are.
Smoking is not evil. Those who are mastered by it are.
Clothing is not evil. Those who use it — or a lack of it — to attract attention to their bodies are.
The list goes on. Culture never sent anyone to hell; but people who use aspects of culture in sinful ways condemn themselves. We can live in our society in such a way that uses the culture for either redemption or condemnation.  There is one way to use the culture for redemption: When we see it as a tool to reach the lost for the sake of the Kingdom, we are free to engage the culture. This is what it means to be in the world but not of it, and the end of this mindset is a life lived within society to the glory of Christ. On the other hand, there are two ways to use the culture for condemnation: First, we can dismiss sinful practices as “merely cultural” and use that as an excuse for license to do evil. Second, we can see the culture itself as evil and so fail to meet the people who live within it on terms that they understand and can relate to. Both of these mindsets fail to maintain the integrity of the Gospel while evangelizing the lost.

The basic principle that we must understand is that our mission in life is not to isolate ourselves from the culture, but to see sinners come to repentance and faith in the One True God. It is the  people in our society that need saving, not the music industry, the clothing industry, the Internet, or the English language. The Gospel is unchanging, but the way in which we communicate that timeless message and the way we validate it by our actions changes from era to era, from nation to nation, from generation to generation, from region to region. We must keep in mind that God is not impressed if we don’t frequent the coffeeshops where gay couples hang out, if we don’t play cards, or if we only listen to classical music and hymns written before 1880. The brutal fact of the matter is that everyone is entirely ugly and evil before a holy God, and the only thing that makes us at all worthy is His love for us!

The church, in an effort to keep itself unstained from the world, has failed to engage the culture, and it has instead created its own subculture — or, more accurately, subcultures. From within these subcultures, it has become ingrown and isolated. The seeker-sensitive church may be very relevant to the suburban upper middle-class married boomers, but it has absolutely no point of connection to a younger, more community-oriented generation. Furthermore, in an effort to “market” the Gospel to a certain demographic, some of these churches have lost the content of the Gospel. The Gospel is always relevant, but churches are not. The church must realize that there is a way to maintain the content of the Gospel within the context of the culture — and this is just what Jesus and the Apostles did in the First Century. They understood that sinners had to come to salvation, and that salvation was by grace alone through faith alone, and it was found in Christ alone. They took that core message and preached it boldly within the context of their cultures. Jesus spoke in a very Hebrew way to the Jewish people; Paul, likeways, spoke in a very Greek way to the philosophers on Mars Hill. However, both of them preached the exact same Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The mission of every Christian individually and of the church collectively is to draw sinners to faith and repentance. We must engage the culture to reach sinners who condemn themselves by using the culture sinfully. We must be in the world but not of it to save those who are of the world and not in the church’s culture. May we live our lives to the glory of God alone!

 

addicted to conviction

Many men are troubled with the guilt of sin. At times, the arrows of sin are piercing to the natural man. He may be brought to a state of concern from preaching or some great affliction. He may set himself against a particular lust that greatly disturbs his peace of heart. But the poor creature! He labours in the fire, and his efforts are destroyed.
–John Owen

In one of the chapels of last semester at The Master’s College, the speaker was talking about sin and conviction. I can’t say I remember who the speaker was — or even the rest of the message, but I do remember one comment that he made: Conviction of sin and life transformation are two radically different experiences, and one can be addicted to conviction without desiring transformation. Conviction is the feeling that one has done wrong, that one’s conscience is not at ease, that one has done a thing that violates his conscience (regardless of whether that thing violates the law of God). Transformation, on the other hand is the actual working of the Holy Spirit on a Scripture-informed conscience, accompanied by feelings of penetence, that lead to repentence and an eventual change of action.

I cannot tell you the number of times I have listened to a good sermon and walked away feeling very convicted. However, more often than not, the conviction has eventually flowed away — like most emotions do — and it left no change behind, only the same old residue of sin that was there before. Thinking that conviction will remedy sin is like thinking that looking at how dirty we are will make us clean. It does not matter how acutely aware we are of the dirt and sweat clinging to our bodies. If we do not shower, we will not be clean. Likewise, we can be painfully convicted of our sin but without experiencing an ounce of transformation. The most dangerous thing about conviction is that it feels very spiritual. You or I can easily experience the guilt of a sin and mistake that guilt for transformation. However, without the working of the Holy Spirit, repentance, or a consequent change of action, conviction is nothing less than a product of hell! It can fool us into thinking that we are spiritual while we still wallow in sin.

Let us not be addicted to conviction! Conviction, in and of itself, is no good thing, but insofar as it leads us to repentence it is useful. Conviction may either be a “godly grief” that leads to repentance or a “worldly grief” that leads to death (2 Cor 7.9-10). The difference between the two is that the former is God-centred, but the latter is man-centred. We can either hate our sin because it offends a holy God or because it makes us feel guilty. When we come to the point where we can say, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps 51.4), we can know that our conviction is a godly grief that will lead to repentence and transformation. Let us hate our sin and desire transformation in ever greater degrees into the image of Christ!