The Purpose of the Sun
Photos from yesterday’s Ring of Fire Eclipse are pretty incredible.
J. Gresham Machen once wrote of the force of seeing this total solar eclipse:
When I viewed the spectacle of the total eclipse of the sun at New Haven on the twenty-fourth of January 1925, I was confirmed in my theism. Such phenomena make us conscious of the wonderful mechanism of the universe, as we ought to be conscious of it every day; at such moments anything like materialism seems to be but a very pitiful and very unreasonable thing. I am no astronomer, but of one thing I was certain: when the strange, slow-moving shadow was gone, and the world was bathed again in the wholesome light of day, I knew that the sun, despite its vastness, was made for us personal beings and not we for the sun, and that it was made for us personal beings by the living God.
The Putrid Chicago River and the Purifying Grace of Union with Christ
A. H. Strong, in his 1905 sermon in London:
How shall I, how shall society, find healing and Purification within? Let me answer by reminding you of what they did at Chicago.
In all the world there was no river more stagnant and fetid than was Chicago River. Its sluggish stream received the sweepings of the watercraft and the offal of the city, and there was no current to carry the detritus away. There it settled, and bred miasma and fever.
At last it was suggested that, by cutting through the low ridge between the city and the Des Plaines River, the current could be set running in the opposite direction, and drainage could be secured into the Illinois River and the great Mississippi. At a cost of fifteen millions of dollars the cut was made, and now all the water of Lake Michigan can be relied upon to cleanse that turbid stream.
What the Chicago River could never do for itself, the great lake now does for it. So no human soul can purge itself of its sin; and what the individual cannot do, humanity at large is powerless to accomplish.
Sin has dominion over us, and we are foul to the very depths of our being, until with the help of God we break through the barrier of our self-will, and let the floods of Christ’s purifying life flow into us. Then, in an hour, more is done to renew, than all our efforts for years had effected. Thus humanity is saved, individual by individual, not by philosophy, or philanthropy, or self-development, or self-reformation, but simply by joining itself to Jesus Christ, and by being filled in Him with all the fulness of God.
Training Children For Gospel-Centered Reading
Elyse Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus, page 120:
We want our kids to know the one good story so well that when they see Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Frodo, Anne of Green Gables, Ariel, or Sleeping Beauty, they can recognize the strands of truth and deception in them.
Crucified with Christ
“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” –Galatians 2:20
Making Much of God
“God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.” –John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life, page 37. [Art by Karalee Reinke, colorization by Alex Medina.]
Do Sports Have Spiritual Value?
Coming fresh off the completion of his book, Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity, Christian philosopher Timothy Dalrymple says yes. Here’s one reason why:
God does not care about sports in themselves. God cares about the people who play them.
God cares about the people who watch and enjoy sports and whose lives are affected by sports. And God works through sports, as God works through all things, for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.
Training the body is, or can be, a profound and necessary school for the spirit. And in today’s age, when so many Christians live lives of comfortable complacency, when the rigor and striving of faith have been so terribly deemphasized, sports can serve an important role in reminding us of the importance of discipline and collective sacrifice in the pursuit of a greater goal.
So if sports can help us grow closer to God and more mature in our faith — and they can — then yes, God cares about sports for what can be accomplished through them.
New Easter Post
This morning I posted a new Easter essay on the Desiring God blog: Our Tears Are Being Undone.
As many of you have probably already guessed, most of my blogging work will now be focused there. I am greatly honored to be a part of the incredible DG team here in Minneapolis, focusing my energy on helping to curate, resurface, and spread John Piper’s 30-years-and-running gospel preaching legacy.
[Hyperventilation.]
What that means is the Miscellanies blog (a little blog I started in 2006 to fill a ministry lag), will still be used but only for occasional posts, perhaps once a week or so. If you’d like to follow me, you can always do that more effectively via Twitter or Facebook. I’ll be using both of these channels concurrently to point to my work online, my travels, quotes and quips from mostly dead guys, and of course pictures of stuff I point my iPhone at.
Thank you for reading and following this blog. Because you come here, ministry opportunities have been opened for me (like book writing). So thank you!
Tony
Don’t Waste It
From the meditative doodles of my lovely wife this morning…
John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life, page 37:
God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.
Celebrity Pastors and Holy Heroes
A transcribed excerpt from Friday morning’s DG staff devotional with John Piper:
Philippians 3:17 shows us four generations of imitation: you ➔ those ➔ us ➔ Christ. So that clearly implies God wants us to find good examples, to watch them, and to be encouraged and inspired.
Yes, it can be sinful and dangerous. And it can be wonderful.
Anytime a preacher is a draw, two things are happening.
(1) There is a carnal attraction to Apollos-like eloquence, or logic, or turns of phrase, or personality that people like. And they don’t go through it. They don’t go through it to God. They don’t go through it to Jesus. They don’t through it to the Holy Spirit, to be broken by him and have their lives turned upside down, so if that pastor died they would have Jesus, and he would mean everything to them. No. They just stop with the preacher. That’s carnal.
(2) But there are other people. A word lands, for whatever reason, that person meets Jesus, and God condescends to make that sermon on that day a miracle. The sinner in the pulpit has miraculously been made the instrument of grace (1 Cor. 3:6-7).
And there is no way to weed that out ahead of time. You cannot put a sign on the church door: “All of you who are coming here for carnal reasons, stay away. All of you who are coming here because you meet God here, come.”
Therefore, it behooves elders watch that leader, rebuke, counsel, and correct, hedge in, and protect that leader from himself. And it behooves the pastor to be reminded that the Day will disclose his work (1 Cor. 3:13).
But don’t be afraid to have heroes. I think that’s why Hebrews 11 is in the Bible. …
Primitive Christian Worship
Although I disagree with a few strands of his overall theology, I appreciate what Ethelbert Stauffer writes about corporate Christian worship in his New Testament Theology [(Macmillan: 1955), 201]:
The worship of the primitive Church at every point took it back to the coming of Christ, the Christ-event. So it is the good news of the gospel that constitutes the real centre of her services of worship. The Word of Jesus Christ must have its course, said Luther, in the German Mass. It must dwell amongst us richly, declared Paul (Col. 3.16; cf. 1.27). So it came about that the prophecies and histories of the OT were read and expounded; the sermon set forth the mighty acts of God in the fulness of time (Acts 13.15 ff.); the correspondence of the apostles, new and old alike, the epistles, which are very much like sermons when read to the congregations, these were read and so, with their message, their thanksgivings and doxologies, helped to bring out the full meaning of Christian worship.
But Christian worship was ‘also’, most certainly, a service to the world. Yet the primitive Church did not serve mankind in solemn rites and cultic practices, in pious instructions and edifying spirituality. Christian worship rooted men out of their self-centred individualism into an extra nos — away from all that is subjective — up to that which is simply objective. This was its service to humanity. It summoned the nations to worship the crucified.
