Thursday, August 22, 2013

Are You Being Exposed To Good Enough Sin?


Living For The Glorious Possibility

“Possibly one of the most devastating things that can happen to us as Christians is that we cease to expect anything to happen. I am not sure but that this is not one of our greatest troubles today. We come to our services and they are orderly, they are nice ‒ we come, we go ‒ and sometimes they are timed almost to the minute, and there it is. But that is not Christianity, my friend. Where is the Lord of glory? Where is the one sitting by the well? Are we expecting him? Do we anticipate this? Are we open to it? Are we aware that we are ever facing this glorious possibility of having the greatest surprise of our life?
Or let me put it like this. You may feel and say ‒ as many do ‒ ‘I was converted and became a Christian. I've grown ‒ yes, I’ve grown in knowledge, I've been reading books, I've been listening to sermons, but I’ve arrived now at a sort of peak and all I do is maintain that. For the rest of my life I will just go on like this.’
Now, my friend, you must get rid of that attitude; you must get rid of it once and for ever. That is ‘religion’, it is not Christianity. This is Christianity: the Lord appears! Suddenly, in the midst of the drudgery and the routine and the sameness and the dullness and the drabness, unexpectedly, surprisingly, he meets with you and he says something to you that changes the whole of your life and your outlook and lifts you to a level that you had never conceived could be possible for you. Oh, if we get nothing else from this story, I hope we will get this. Do not let the devil persuade you that you have got all you are going to get, still less that you received all you were ever going to receive when you were converted. That has been a popular teaching, even among evangelicals. You get everything at your conversion, it is said, including baptism with the Spirit, and nothing further, ever. Oh, do not believe it; it is not true. It is not true to the teaching of the Scriptures, it is not true in the experience of the saints running down the centuries. There is always this glorious possibility of meeting with him in a new and a dynamic way.”

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, on John chapter 4

Givin It Up For Your Love - Delbert McClinton - Austin City Limits

Delbert McClinton ~ Won't Be Me

Peter Green - Born Under A Bad Sign

John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers - Dust My Blues - 1966

John Mayall Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton - "Little Girl" (1966)

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Doyle Bramhall II ~Meet Me In The Bottom~ LIVE IN AUSTIN TEXAS at Antone's 37th Anniversary

The Needle and the Damage Done - Gregg Allman, Warren Haynes and Derek Trucks

Jeff Beck-Stratus (Crossroads Festival 2007)

God's Sovereignty Encompasses Everything

How can we really say God is sovereign over all when there is so much chaos and pain in the world?

Nothing shall hinder his great design. God's great ends will be obtained: all his ends will be obtained, and by his own means.

After all this seeming confusion and vast succession of strange and wonderful revolutions, everything shall come out right at last. There is no confusion in God's scheme; he understands his own works and every wheel moves right in its place.

Not one mote of dust errs from the path that God has appointed it; he will bring order at last out of confusion. God don't lose himself in the intricate endless moves of events that come to pass. Though men can't see the whole scheme, God sees. The course and series of events in divine providence is like the course of a great and long river with many branches and innumerable windings and turnings which often seems to go backwards. 
--Jonathan Edwards, 1744 sermon entitled "Approaching the End of God's Grand Design," in Works, 25:121

Monday, August 5, 2013

'People Get Ready' - Jeff Beck with Joss Stone (live 2007)

Bob Dylan - Sweetheart Like You

Little Walter - It's Too Late Brother

Understanding God's Love

C. S. Lewis in the “The Problem With Pain” says, “God has no needs. Human love as Plato teaches us is the child of Poverty— of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God’s love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, caused all the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, love-ability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive. Hence if God sometimes speaks as though the impassible could suffer passion and eternal fullness could be in want, and in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare existence upwards, this can mean only, if it means anything intelligible by us, that the God of mere miracle has made Himself able so to hunger and created in himself that which we can satisfy. If he requires us, the requirement is of his own choosing. If the immutable heart can be grieved by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other, that has so subjected it, freely and in a humility that passes understanding” (pg. 50).

This is profound, let it challenge your mind as to your understanding of God's love.

An American Coach in London: NBC Sports Premier League Film featuring Jason Sudeikis - This Is Funny