Friday, November 30, 2012
If There Is A Story There Is A Story Teller
"I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will.From G.K. Chesterton's classic work of apologetics, Orthodoxy
In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a Person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a Story-teller."
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Broken in Death One Way or Another
"Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him." --Jesus, Luke 20:17
Anglican OT scholar Gabriel Hebert, 1941:
Dane Ortlund
Anglican OT scholar Gabriel Hebert, 1941:
This means that, one way or another, man must be broken and die: either in salvation or in judgment. To fall on that Stone, to die in union with Jesus, for His sake and the gospel's, is salvation; it is to drink of His cup and be baptizes with His baptism. But he who refuses to lose his selfhood will have it taken away from him. If he will not have the Coming of the Son of Man for salvation, he will have it for judgment.
Indeed, this way of salvation through the losing of life is the royal road which the Messiah Himself takes.--A. G. Hebert, The Throne of David: A Study of the Fulfillment of the Old testament in Jesus Christ and His Church (London: Faber & Faber, 1941), 179; language slightly updated
Dane Ortlund
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Sin's Deception
A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful; and there great lords had dwelt, the wardens of Gondor upon the West, and wise men that watched the stars. But slowly Saruman had shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived--for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dur, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (Houghton Mifflin), 542
Dane Ortlund
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Worried About Worries (When You’re Not Supposed to Be)
A beautiful, honest, and incredibly sympathetic reflection on the
relationship between anxiety, control, and circumstance appeared in The
NY Times last week, as part of their (and now our!) ongoing series about Anxiety, the appropriately titled “The Snake in the Garden”.
It’s hard to write a hopeful piece about what are essentially
self-defeating internal processes, but that’s exactly what Pico Iyer has
pulled off here. The final paragraph is one for the ages in fact, and
he even uses Garden of Eden imagery to frame his dilemma (which, one
might add, is highly reminiscent of the first chapter of Dorothy
Martyn’s wonderful Beyond Deserving).
More commentary from me would probably cheapen the piece, so here’s a
sizable chunk to mull over, which begins with Iyer describing a retreat
center that had proven to be particularly therapeutic for him, ht MS:
The retreat house was the rare place where it seemed impossible to be fraught. All my worries of the previous day seemed about as real and urgent as the taillights of cars disappearing around headlands 12 miles to the south. I started to go to this place of silence more and more often, and one spring day, on my way to two weeks of carefree quiet, I told my old friend Steve about it. Much to my delight, he booked himself in for a three-day stay that would coincide with my final weekend in the sanctuary.
I stepped into my cabin on the slope above the sea, 12 days before our meeting — golden poppies and lupines everywhere — and instantly began to wonder how Steve would see it. What if the sky clouded over before his arrival, I thought, and he was greeted by rain and mist? Maybe the vegetarian food set out in the kitchen would fail to meet his exacting standards? What about the crosses on the walls? Might they trigger some unsuspected trauma from his Roman Catholic boyhood? Every day for the next 10 days I worried that the place might not live up to his expectations — or my billing.
On gorgeous days, I scanned the horizon for clouds; sometimes I walked into the bookshop to ask the monk on duty if he’d heard the weather forecast for next Friday. When, the day before Steve’s anticipated arrival, he (almost inevitably) called to cancel, I realized that the only thing I’d done was to exile myself from Paradise, anguishing over what never came to pass.
Even if it had come to pass, my worries would have been pointless. The very place that was teaching me surrender — the beauty of its spaciousness was that I didn’t have to control a thing — had been undone by my recidivist mind. A trifling example, of course — usually worries are over something more substantial and not entirely self-induced — and yet it seemed to be smiling at me in my foolishness. The books on my desk in the cabin, as it happened, that spring were by Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. It’s not circumstances that define us, the Stoics wrote again and again; it’s our response to circumstances. And insofar as anxiety is to a large extent in the eye of the beholder, it’s also in the power of the beholder to control.
I couldn’t register that, however, because I was worried through the days before Steve’s projected arrival that a noisy neighbor might disturb his stay. The problem with anxiety — as Marcus Aurelius would acknowledge — is that, by definition, it’s irrational; in that regard, it’s not so different from the almost irresistible impulse to jump that seizes me every time I find myself on a 50th-floor balcony, or the senseless revulsion I feel on seeing a rope that I take to be a snake. Its power comes in those moments when reason has no sway over it.
Besides, many kinds of anxiety are natural, almost healthy, especially if they’re concerned with others; a parent who didn’t worry about her child might seem almost inhuman. Yet still it’s uncanny how often we let ourselves out of the Garden by worrying about something that, if it did happen, would quicken us into a response much more practical than worry. All the real challenges of my, or any, life — the forest fire that did indeed destroy my home and everything in it; the car crash that suddenly robbed dozens of us of a cherished friend; my 13-year-old daughter’s diagnosis of cancer in its third stage — came out of the blue; they’re just what I had never thought to worry about (even as I was anguishing over whether they’d serve spinach when my friend visited the retreat house). And every time some kind of calamity has come into my life, I and everyone around me have responded with activity, unexpected strength, even an all but unnatural calm.
t’s only when we’re living in the future, the realm of “what if,” that we brilliantly incapacitate ourselves. And it’s mostly when someone abruptly cries, “Watch out!” that we lose control of the car we’re driving. Yet all the Stoic arguments are hard to absorb in that part of ourselves that matters.
We try to distinguish between those things we can control and those we can’t — fruitless to worry about “status anxiety,” since that lies in the hands (the minds) of others, and senseless to worry about finances, since one can usually spend a little less or try to earn a little more — and then we start to worry about how much in fact that new relationship is within our control or not. I go up to my sunlit retreat house and read, in Milton, how the mind can “make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n,” and then decide that’s barely relevant if you’re stuck in limbo.
Nowadays my one, obviously flimsy, response to all this is to try to bypass the mind if I can’t control it and at least not take my anxiety so seriously…
I’ve slowly learned, the hard way, that my best writing comes when I’m not thinking about writing and am far from desk or conscious intention. But then the clouds gather above the sea, and my idle mind conjures up bad possibilities the way one might dream of chocolate cake. We worry only about exactly those things we can never do anything about. And then that very fact becomes something else we worry about. The cycle goes on and on until we let the mind give over to something larger — wiser — than itself.
One tiny note: if you’re picking up a note of “prescription” in that final line, it’s worth noting that the example of the “something larger” to which Iyer refers takes the form of an intervention from a loving teacher, rather than a carefully-calibrated, self-engineered distraction.
Mockingbird
Don't Worry Baby - The Beach Boys
The retreat house was the rare place where it seemed impossible to be fraught. All my worries of the previous day seemed about as real and urgent as the taillights of cars disappearing around headlands 12 miles to the south. I started to go to this place of silence more and more often, and one spring day, on my way to two weeks of carefree quiet, I told my old friend Steve about it. Much to my delight, he booked himself in for a three-day stay that would coincide with my final weekend in the sanctuary.
I stepped into my cabin on the slope above the sea, 12 days before our meeting — golden poppies and lupines everywhere — and instantly began to wonder how Steve would see it. What if the sky clouded over before his arrival, I thought, and he was greeted by rain and mist? Maybe the vegetarian food set out in the kitchen would fail to meet his exacting standards? What about the crosses on the walls? Might they trigger some unsuspected trauma from his Roman Catholic boyhood? Every day for the next 10 days I worried that the place might not live up to his expectations — or my billing.
On gorgeous days, I scanned the horizon for clouds; sometimes I walked into the bookshop to ask the monk on duty if he’d heard the weather forecast for next Friday. When, the day before Steve’s anticipated arrival, he (almost inevitably) called to cancel, I realized that the only thing I’d done was to exile myself from Paradise, anguishing over what never came to pass.
Even if it had come to pass, my worries would have been pointless. The very place that was teaching me surrender — the beauty of its spaciousness was that I didn’t have to control a thing — had been undone by my recidivist mind. A trifling example, of course — usually worries are over something more substantial and not entirely self-induced — and yet it seemed to be smiling at me in my foolishness. The books on my desk in the cabin, as it happened, that spring were by Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. It’s not circumstances that define us, the Stoics wrote again and again; it’s our response to circumstances. And insofar as anxiety is to a large extent in the eye of the beholder, it’s also in the power of the beholder to control.
I couldn’t register that, however, because I was worried through the days before Steve’s projected arrival that a noisy neighbor might disturb his stay. The problem with anxiety — as Marcus Aurelius would acknowledge — is that, by definition, it’s irrational; in that regard, it’s not so different from the almost irresistible impulse to jump that seizes me every time I find myself on a 50th-floor balcony, or the senseless revulsion I feel on seeing a rope that I take to be a snake. Its power comes in those moments when reason has no sway over it.
Besides, many kinds of anxiety are natural, almost healthy, especially if they’re concerned with others; a parent who didn’t worry about her child might seem almost inhuman. Yet still it’s uncanny how often we let ourselves out of the Garden by worrying about something that, if it did happen, would quicken us into a response much more practical than worry. All the real challenges of my, or any, life — the forest fire that did indeed destroy my home and everything in it; the car crash that suddenly robbed dozens of us of a cherished friend; my 13-year-old daughter’s diagnosis of cancer in its third stage — came out of the blue; they’re just what I had never thought to worry about (even as I was anguishing over whether they’d serve spinach when my friend visited the retreat house). And every time some kind of calamity has come into my life, I and everyone around me have responded with activity, unexpected strength, even an all but unnatural calm.
t’s only when we’re living in the future, the realm of “what if,” that we brilliantly incapacitate ourselves. And it’s mostly when someone abruptly cries, “Watch out!” that we lose control of the car we’re driving. Yet all the Stoic arguments are hard to absorb in that part of ourselves that matters.
We try to distinguish between those things we can control and those we can’t — fruitless to worry about “status anxiety,” since that lies in the hands (the minds) of others, and senseless to worry about finances, since one can usually spend a little less or try to earn a little more — and then we start to worry about how much in fact that new relationship is within our control or not. I go up to my sunlit retreat house and read, in Milton, how the mind can “make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n,” and then decide that’s barely relevant if you’re stuck in limbo.
Nowadays my one, obviously flimsy, response to all this is to try to bypass the mind if I can’t control it and at least not take my anxiety so seriously…
I’ve slowly learned, the hard way, that my best writing comes when I’m not thinking about writing and am far from desk or conscious intention. But then the clouds gather above the sea, and my idle mind conjures up bad possibilities the way one might dream of chocolate cake. We worry only about exactly those things we can never do anything about. And then that very fact becomes something else we worry about. The cycle goes on and on until we let the mind give over to something larger — wiser — than itself.
One tiny note: if you’re picking up a note of “prescription” in that final line, it’s worth noting that the example of the “something larger” to which Iyer refers takes the form of an intervention from a loving teacher, rather than a carefully-calibrated, self-engineered distraction.
Mockingbird
Don't Worry Baby - The Beach Boys
Mark Knopfler - Brothers in arms [Berlin 2007]
I just saw Mark Knopfler November 13th at the Fox Theater in Detroit. Mark opened for Bob Dylan and did an hour and a half set. Mark and his band were incredible. Mark also joined Dylan for the first part of his set. A great night of music, he did this song.
Monday, November 26, 2012
The Life You Save
"What
God says, is 'The life you save is the life you lose.' In other words,
the life you clutch, hoard, guard, and play safe with is in the end a
life worth little to anybody, including yourself, and only a life given
away for love's sake is a life worth living. To bring his point home,
God shows us a man who gave his life away to the extent of dying a
national disgrace without a penny in the bank or a friend to his name.
In terms of human wisdom, he was a Perfect Fool. And if you think you
can follow him without making something like the same kind of a fool of
yourself, you are laboring under not a cross but a delusion." -
Frederick Buechner
Frederick Buechner
Oscar Peterson - Boogie Blues Etude - AMAZING!
Ronnie Scott's Club in 1974 -
Oscar Peterson-piano,
Niels Pedersen-bass,
Barney Kessel-guitar.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Friday, November 23, 2012
The Magician's Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism
“More than a half century ago, famed writer C.S. Lewis warned about how
science (a good thing) could be twisted in order to attack religion,
undermine ethics, and limit human freedom. In this [half-hour]
documentary “The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against
Scientism,” leading scholars explore Lewis’s prophetic warnings about
the abuse of science and how Lewis’s concerns are increasingly relevant
for us today.”
Junior Wells' Chicago Blues Band -- Help Me (A Tribute to Sonny Boy Williamson)
From the album: Chicago/The Blues/Today! Vol. 1. Buddy Guy on guitar, Jack Meyers bass, Fred Below drums.
Junior Wells (December 9, 1934 -- January 15, 1998[1]), born Amos Wells Blakemore Jr. was a blues vocalist and harmonica player and recording artist based in Chicago, who was also famous for playing with Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Bonnie Raitt, The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
An Atheist Philosopher Predicts Scientific Naturalism Will One Day Be Laughable
Alvin Plantinga reviews Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012) in The New Republic. Here’s how it begins:
For those interested, Nagel reviewed Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011) in The New York Review of Books.
Justin Taylor
According to a semi-established consensus among the intellectual elite in the West, there is no such person as God or any other supernatural being. Life on our planet arose by way of ill-understood but completely naturalistic processes involving only the working of natural law. Given life, natural selection has taken over, and produced all the enormous variety that we find in the living world. Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At bottom, what there is in our world are the elementary particles described in physics, together with things composed of these particles.Plantinga goes on to summarize and interact with Nagel’s arguments and alternatives. Along the way he excerpts a quote from one of Nagel’s books written in 1997 which offers some insights into Nagel’s rejection of theism:
I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there are some people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also agnostics, who hold no opinion one way or the other on one or another of the above theses. And there are variations on the above themes, and also halfway houses of one sort or another. Still, by and large those are the views of academics and intellectuals in America now. Call this constellation of views scientific naturalism—or don’t call it that, since there is nothing particularly scientific about it, except that those who champion it tend to wrap themselves in science like a politician in the flag. By any name, however, we could call it the orthodoxy of the academy—or if not the orthodoxy, certainly the majority opinion.
The eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel would call it something else: an idol of the academic tribe, perhaps, or a sacred cow: “I find this view antecedently unbelievable—a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. . . . I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Nagel is an atheist; even so, however, he does not accept the above consensus, which he calls materialist naturalism; far from it. His important new book is a brief but powerful assault on materialist naturalism.
I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. . . . It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.You can read the whole thing here.
For those interested, Nagel reviewed Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011) in The New York Review of Books.
Justin Taylor
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Baby Face Leroy Trio - Boll Weevil - 1950 unissued alternate take
Unissued 1950 Parkway recording by the Baby Face Leroy Trio - Leroy Foster (vocals/guitar/bass drum), Little Walter Jacobs (harmonica) and Muddy Waters (guitar). Only recently discovered
Monday, November 19, 2012
A Good Wound
Spiritual pride is the main door by which the devil comes into the hearts of those who are zealous for the advancement of Christianity. It is the chief inlet of smoke from the bottomless pit, to darken the mind and mislead the judgment. It is the main source of all the mischief the devil introduces, to clog and hinder a work of God.Jonathan Edwards, Thoughts on the Revival (1742)
Spiritual pride tends to speak of other persons’ sins with bitterness or with laughter and levity and an air of contempt. But pure Christian humility tends either to be silent about these problems or to speak of them with grief and pity. Spiritual pride is very apt to suspect others, but a humble Christian is most guarded about himself. He is as suspicious of nothing in the world as he is of his own heart. The proud person is apt to find fault with other believers, that they are low in grace, and to be much in observing how cold and dead they are and to be quick to note their deficiencies. But the humble Christian has so much to do at home and sees so much evil in his own heart and is so concerned about it that he is not apt to be very busy with other hearts. He is apt to esteem others better than himself.
Some who have pride mixed in with a heightened awareness of God’s glory and intense experiences of spiritual joy are apt to rebuke other Christians around them for being so cold and lifeless. But the humble, in their joys, are also wounded with a sense of their own vileness. When they have high visions of God’s glory, they also see their own sinfulness. And though they speak to others earnestly, it is in confession of their own sins. And if they exhort other Christians, they do so in a charitable manner. Pure Christian humility disposes a person to take notice of everything that is good in others and to make the best of it and to diminish their failings.
Baby Face Leroy Trio - Rollin' And Tumblin' Part 1 & 2 - unissued COMPLETE performance
Unissued complete performance of the legendary 1950 Parkway recording "Rollin' And Tumblin;" by the Baby Face Leroy Trio - Leroy Foster (vocals/drums), Little Walter Jacobs (harmonica/vocals) and Muddy Waters (guitar/vocals). Only recently discovered.
Little Walter Trio - Just Keep Lovin' Her - 1950 unissued alternate take
Unissued 1950 Parkway recording by the king of blues harmonica Little Walter Jacobs, with Muddy Waters (guitar) and Baby Face Leroy Foster (guitar/drums).
Friday, November 16, 2012
John Owen’s Final Words
On August 22, 1683, at his home in Ealing (a suburb west of London),
the great theologian John Owen dictated his last surviving letter to his
longtime friend, Charles Fleetwood:
Owen responded:
Justin Taylor
I am going to him whom my soul hath loved, or rather hath love me with an everlasting love; which is the whole ground of all my consolation.Two days later William Payne, a friend who was overseeing the printing of his latest book, The Glory of Christ, paid him a visit. Payne assured Owen that plans were proceeding well for the publication.
The passage is very irksome and wearisome through strong pain of various sorts which are all issued in an intermitting fever.
All things were provided to carry me to London today attending to the advice of my physician, but we were all disappointed by my utter disability to understand the journey.
I am leaving the ship of the church in a storm, but while the great Pilot is in it the loss of a poore under-rower will be inconsiderable.
Live and pray and hope and waite patiently and doe not despair; the promise stands invincible that he will never leave thee nor forsake thee.
Owen responded:
I am glad to hear it; but O brother Payne! The long wished-for day is come at last, in which I shall see the glory in another manner than I have ever done, or was capable of doing in the world.These were Owen’s last recorded words. He died that day, August 24, 1683—St. Bartholomew’s Day—exactly twenty years after the Great Ejection of the Puritans. He was 67 years old.
Justin Taylor
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Tommy Emmanuel: Guitar Boogie & Amazing Grace.
Both of these songs are amazing. This is great guitar playing!
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Bob Dylan - Most Of The Time - A Great Informal Commentary on Romans 7
Keep listening for the context of the refrain, "most of the time."
Jeff Beck Group - Going Down
From the 1972 album JEFF BECK GROUP. Written by Don Nix.
Jeff Beck - Guitars
Bob Tench - Vocals
Cozy Powell - Drums
Clive Chaman - Bass
Max Middleton - Piano
My Favorite version of this song
"Going Down" - Freddie King
From his 1971 record, "Getting Ready," which was largely written and produced by Leon Russell and features Duck Dunn on bass. Russell wrote "Going Down," as part of an attempt to introduce Freddie to more of a "rock audience" through this record.
I have personally played this song many times and always loved rocking out to this tune.
Monday, November 12, 2012
The Central Passage in The Lord of the Rings
For me, the central passage in Tolkien’s long epic comes as Frodo and Sam are about to pass into Mordor, the dark and desolate land where Sauron and Mount Doom dwell. As they pause there on the threshold, Sam shares with Frodo a profound meditation on the nature of the Road and on the nature of stories. It is a speech to which we who live in an age that has lost both its sense of purpose and its sense of history—that knows neither where it came from nor where it is going—must carefully attend.--Louis Markos, On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis (Moody, 2012), 34-36
Sam and Frodo are living at the end of the Third Age. Behind them stretch ten millennia of mighty warriors, heroic battles, and timeless tales of adventure and self-sacrifice. But they are, of course, more than tales. They are the stage, the backdrop against which these two seemingly insignificant Hobbits act out their roles in the sacred narrative of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. Sam begins by reflecting back on those tales and those who lived through them:
“The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on—and not all to a good end, mind you, at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same—like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” (IV.viii.696)As I hinted in the previous chapter, there is good reason to believe that Tolkien’s vision of the Road and of the call matured during the seventeen years that separate The Hobbit from The Lord of the Rings: a period that includes those dark and desperate years during which England faced annihilation by the Nazis. Though Bilbo’s journey had allowed Tolkien to recover for his age much of the old magic and many of the old virtues, it lacked the proper scope to encompass the full dimensions of choice and destiny that define Frodo’s journey. To accomplish that would take a greater tale, one that could live up to Sam’s high description.
In the greater tales, the ones that matter—the ones that change both us and our world—the heroes do not so much choose the Road, as the Road chooses them. For our part, we must be ready, prepared in season and out, to answer the call, whenever and however it comes. And we must be prepared to press on, trusting to an end that we often do not, perhaps cannot, see. It is easy to claim that we would have done what Abraham did, but that is only because we stand outside the story. We see the good end, the fulfillment that Abraham could not see from within the story.
Sam muses on these things, and then, in one of those flashes of pure clarification that come to all those who endure in a cause, he realizes that the tale he and Frodo have been landed in is not a thing isolated from the past, but marks the continuation and perhaps even culmination of a tale that began long ago in the First Age:
“Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”“No, they never end as tales,” said Frodo. “But the people in them come and go when their part’s ended. Our part will end later—or sooner.” (IV.viii.697)I believe it was Pascal who said that only God can see the whole picture and every detail within the picture at the same time. In his moment of clarification, Sam sees that his individual call (and that of Frodo) is part of a larger tapestry in which each individual call works together to bring about the destined and hoped for end, what Tolkien liked to call the eucatastrophe: the good end that rises up, miraculously, out of what seemed, at first, to be defeat and death.
If we would be a part of that eucatastrophe, then we must be willing to trust the call, to enter the tale, to set our weary feet to the Road.
Dane Ortlund
Friday, November 9, 2012
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
When Christians Sin
Let us say that I have been living in the light of what God has been giving us for the present life. As a born-again child of God, I have been practicing the reality of true spirituality, as Christ has purchased it for us.
And then sin reenters.
For some reason my moment-by-moment belief in God falters--a fondness for some specific sin has caused me at that point not to draw in faith upon the fact of a restored relationship with the Trinity. The reality of the practice of true spirituality suddenly slips from me. I look up some morning, some afternoon, some night--and something is gone, something I have known: my quietness and my peace are gone. It is not that I am lost again, because justification is once for all. But . . . there is no exhibition of the victory of Christ upon the cross. Looking at me at this point, men would see no demonstration that God's creation of moral rational creatures is not a complete failure, or even that God exists. . . .--Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality (Tyndale House, 2011), 86-87; italics original
At this point a question must arise: Is there a way back? Or is it like a fine Bavarian porcelain cup, dropped to a tile floor so that it is smashed beyond repair?
Thank God, the gospel includes this. The Bible is always realistic; it is not romantic, but deals with realism--with what I am. There is a way back, and the basis of the way back is nothing new to us. The basis is again the blood of Christ, the finished work of the Lamb of God: the once-for-all completed work of Christ upon the cross, in space, time, and history.
Dane Ortlund
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
George Whitefield on Election
We should not have so much disputing against the doctrine of election, or hear it condemned (even by good men) as a doctrine of devils. For my own part, I cannot see how true humbleness of mind can be attained without a knowledge of it.
And though I will not say, that everyone who denies election is a bad man, yet I will say . . . it is a very bad sign. Such a one, whoever he be, I think cannot truly know himself. For if we deny election we must, partly at least, glory in ourselves. But our redemption is so ordered that no flesh should glory in the Divine presence. And hence it is, that the pride of man opposes this doctrine because according to this doctrine and no other, 'he that glories, must glory only in the Lord.'
But what shall I say? Election is a mystery that shines with such resplendent brightness that, to make use of the words of one who has drunk deeply of his electing love, it dazzles the weak eyes even of some of God's dear children.--George Whitefield, 'Christ the Believer's Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, and Redemption,' in The Sermons of George Whitefield (Crossway, 2012), 2:214-25
Dane Ortlund
Monday, November 5, 2012
What God Is Always Aiming for in Our Adversity
2 Corinthians 1:9
Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.John Piper:
Adversity by its very nature is the removal of things on which our comfort and hope have rested and so it will either result in anger toward God or greater reliance on him alone for our peace.Justin Taylor
And his purpose for us in adversity is not that we get angry or discouraged, but that our hope shift off earthly things onto God.
God’s main purpose in all adversity is to make us stop trusting in ourselves or any man.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Friday, November 2, 2012
The Whole Purpose of the Christian's Life
Whatever is not an exhibition that God exists misses the whole purpose of the Christian's life now on the earth.
According to the Bible, we are to be living a supernatural life now, in this present existence, in a way we shall never be able to do again through all eternity. We are called upon to live a supernatural life now, by faith. Eternity will be wonderful, but there is one thing heaven will not contain, and that is the call, the possibility, and the privilege of living a supernatural life here and how by faith before we see Jesus face-to-face.--Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality (Tyndale House, 2011), 64
Dane Ortlund
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