Living as we Pray.
By NC Stewart | May 21, 2010
“The attitude of the soul in prayer is that of entire dependence for itself, and of complete confidence in God’s all-embracing government. We ask him graciously to regulate our own spirit, to control the acts of our fellowmen, and to direct the course of the whole world in accordance with his holy and beneficent will. And we do right. Only, we should see to it that we preserve this conception of God in his relation to his world, when we rise from our knees and make it the operative force of our whole life.”
Benjamin B. Warfield
Topics: Interesting Quote, Prayer | No Comments »
How do you see the world?
By NC Stewart | May 21, 2010
A glass window stands before us. we raise our eyes and see the glass; we note its quality, and observe its defects; we speculate on its composition. Or we look straight through it on the great prospect of land and sea and sky beyond. So there are two ways of looking at the world. We may see the world and absorb ourselves in the wonders of nature. That is the scientific way. Or we may look right through the world and see God behind it. That is the religious way. The scientific way of looking at the world is not wrong any more than the glass-manufacturer’s way of looking at the window. This way of looking at things has its very imortant uses. Nevertheless the window was placed there not to be looked at but to be looked through; and the world has failed of its purpose unless it too is looked through and the eye rests not on it but on its God. (Benjamin B. Warfield)
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The Tornado Calls us All to Repentance!
By NC Stewart | April 27, 2010
Here is a picture of the EF4 Tornado that swept through Yazoo City, Mississippi on Saturday. On the Enhanced Fujita scale there is only one level higher, the EF5. Meterologists call the EF5 ‘the finger of God’: it wreaks ‘Bibical’ devastation, leaving nothing in its wake but matchsticks, sucking even the asphalt off the road surface.
As the prophet Jeremiah says, speaking of the aftermath of God’s judgment,
23 I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void;
and to the heavens, and they had no light.
24 I looked on the mountains, and behold, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.
25 I looked, and behold, there was no man,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
26 I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Lord, before his fierce anger. (Jeremiah 4:23-26)
“Without form and void” refers back to the primordial waste at the beginning of God’s creation (Genesis 1:2). Jeremiah’s point is clear - God’s judgment undoes creation, reducing it to the chaos that existed before His goodness molded into that which was “Very Good.”
What are we to make of such tornadic events today? Are these outpourings of God’s judgment? The answer to this question is both “Yes” and “No.” Yes, in the sense that we live in a fallen world under God’s curse. The created order is not as it ought to be. Man’s sin (Human rebellion against God that refused to give God His rightful place in our lives) has perverted God’s universe. The Almighty’s displeasure is writ large across the earthquake and the storm cloud. We have all sinned; we are all destined to die.
Having said that, we are not to think that those affected by such disasters are in any way more sinful than those of us who are spared. Many Christian’s, freely forgiven for all their sins by the death of Christ in their place, die in natural disasters. As such their death is not judgment, but mercy, carrying them from this world of sin and misery into the immediate presence of the Almighty. In His presence there is fullness of joy, at His right hand there are pleasures for evermore. When Christians die, they become more alive than they have ever been before. In fact, Jesus says, the one who believes in Him will never see death; they merely fall asleep.
For those outside of Christ, however, death marks the end of the day of salvation, the end of the free offer of the gospel, and the beginning of judgment. It is appointed once for men to die and after that comes the judgment. Their death stands as a sober warning, calling the rest of the world to repentance. Jesus was very clear about this:
There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? 3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. 4 Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:1-5)
If you are reading this blog and have not yet repented from your sins and flown to God for a just mercy in Christ, know this: God has yet spared you in His kind mercy. This kindness is designed to lead you to repentance. Just like the rest of us, you deserve only His wrath and curse. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).
God offers to you the death of His Son in your place for your sins. On the cross Jesus became sin for His people and suffered the wrath of God’s infinite inflexible judgment in our place (2Cor 5:21). There is no refuge from the judgment of God, there is only refuge in the judgment of God - the judgment Jesus received in the place of sinners in Golgotha’s darkness. The prophet Isaiah spoke of this substitutionary atonement in the 53rd chapter of His prophecy:
4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
nsmitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
on him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
pand with his stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
rand the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Come to Jesus, call upon Him to have mercy upon you. Ask God to take Christ’s death as your death, payment in full for all of your defiant neglect of God’s glory. Do not delay, the clock is ticking. Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish…
6 “Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
7 let the wicked forsake his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” (Isaiah 55:6-7)
Topics: Interesting Quote | 3 Comments »
For the Love of God
By NC Stewart | April 21, 2010
God’s love is stern, for it expresses holiness in the lover and seeks holiness for the beloved. Scripture does not allow us to suppose that because God is love we may look to Him to confer happiness on people who will not seek holiness… J.I. Packer Knowing God.
One of the commonest errors in our day is to view God only as love, as if He were a God made up all of love and nothing else. Thus all of his attributes are subsumed under and abrogated by His goodness. This is a grave, soul destroying mistake.
The first step towards this error is to theologize by human imagination - to begin with how we like to think of God, when, in reality, the real question to ask in our quest for divine knowledge is to begin by asking, “How does God like to think of Himself!” As such, the Scriptures speak unequivocally both of God’s goodness and of His severity. In speaking to define the greatness of God’s love, we must take great care that any definition we develop does not undermine the equally great reality of His wrath - His infinite and inflexible justice in perfect and constant action against sin. Until this wrath is removed by Christ, there is no way a sinner can or will experience His love.
In a nutshell the gospel is Christ died in my place for my sin. God loved the world at the cost of His Son to make this offer. If Christ was not spared to offer salvation to the world (John 3:16), God surely will not spare those who reject this offer of a costly, but just mercy (John 3:16). There is no love from God except in Christ and through Christ. In Christ we have a just mercy. Outside of Christ there is only a just condemnation.
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Secret Sins
By NC Stewart | March 19, 2010
A Godly man dares not sin secretly. He knows that God sees in secret. As God cannot be deceived by our subtlety, so he cannot be excluded by our secrecy (Thomas Watson).
Topics: Devotional, Interesting Quote | 2 Comments »
He always lives to make Intercession for us!
By NC Stewart | March 19, 2010
The Lord Jesus Christ prays for His people as if we really were members of His own body. Just like a child tells its father about the cut on the knee. The knee hurts and the mouth speaks. He does not say, “Daddy, the knee is sore.” He says, “Father, my knee is sore!” So it is with the Lord Jesus Christ and our Father in heaven. He never prays at a distance; always in union with His people.
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Federal Funding for Abortions
By NC Stewart | March 16, 2010
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When men are neither men nor women!
By NC Stewart | March 15, 2010
You can have your own opinions but you cannot have your own facts - at least in an age that values sanity. Apparently, however, in case you hadn’t already noticed, our world is beginning to lose its marbles. Exhibit A: this morning’s Daily Telegraph (UK), Heidi Blake writes of a “neuter” individual, what shall we call him, it? God forbid…
“Norrie May-Welby, 48, was born a man but had a sex change operation in 1990, at the age of 28.”
“After becoming unhappy as a woman, May-Welby decided to become a “neuter”. The 48-year-old is now officially recognised as a person of no specific gender.”
“May-Welby said: “The concepts of man or woman don’t fit me. The simplest solution is not to have any sex identification.”
“The UK’s Gender Trust welcomed the case. A spokesman said: “Many people like the idea of being genderless.””
What shall we say in response to this? First, this man is evidently a tortured soul in search of one of the most basic of human desires, identity. Having jettisoned the imago dei as his reference point, he has cast himself adrift on the unforgivingly frigid and stormy waters of relativism. Here, in the blackness of darkness, his personality is disintegrating. As such, he deserves our pity and our prayers, not our contempt. Without in anyway undermining his own personal responsibility for this perversion of natures, I can only imagine what miseries in his upbringing drove him to such lunacy.
Second, on a more objective plane of thought, we must surely make a basic scientific observation. May-Welby may like to escape the idea of gender, but he will find it a good deal more difficult to escape the facts of the matter. Genetically, it is either male or female. While a person’s phenotype (the outward manifestation of our genetic information) can, because of some “freak” of fallen nature, be indeterminate. Our genes never lie. Our genetic gender is not a choice we have the liberty to take, anymore than a person can decide to be non-human - say a dog, for example. We might prefer the idea of being a dog, we might like others to refer to us as “un chien,” and they may even oblige, but it will always be with a hidden derisory smile playing at the corner of the lip.
Third, as Christian’s we must call this act what it is: an act of defiance against God, the Creator. One of God’s first acts in creation was to make distinctions, separating the heavens from the earth, the light from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, good from evil, male from female, ordinary days from the Sabbath day. These distinctions flow from the ultimate distinction of all: the Creator/Creature distinction. As such, it is God’s divine right to set the boundaries of His created order. May-Welby’s decision usurps this divine prerogative and flows from the “carnal mind that is enmity against God (Romans 8:7).”
This hostility refuses to live in the world as God defines it, preferring to view the world through its own eyes, on its own terms, and always for its own glory. I am reminded of the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If the eye is good, the whole body will be full of light, but if the eye is bad, the whole body will be full of darkness. And if the light that is in you is darkness, how great will that darkness be!”
When we refuse God’s take on created reality, we loose touch with it only to plunge ourselves in a surreal wasteland where nothing seems as it is. In searching for another (godless) reality, man engages in a hopeless search, “Like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t really there.”
That individuals attempt such folly is hardly surprising, but that our culture “baptizes” it with legal sanction is quite another. What is this but the last gasp of a culture sinking in suffocating depths of relativism. In such a culture, apparently, nothing is true anymore, not even the language our genes speak from the earliest moments of our creation. What next? Before long, people will be jumping out of windows, choosing not to be believe in gravity. In their world the sky may be a different color, but in God’s world: nouns may be neuter, men can’t!
Topics: Pick of the Web, Reading Reflections | 1 Comment »
In a Nutshell, the Gospel…
By NC Stewart | March 14, 2010
This is an excellent summary from Dr. Ligon Duncan detailing the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Very helpful. Semper brevitas et claritas.
Topics: Interesting Quote | No Comments »
The New Atheists
By NC Stewart | March 13, 2010
This is a helpful entree into the essential elements of the New Atheism espoused by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchins, et al.
Topics: Interesting Quote | No Comments »
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