Remember Yahweh: Memory and the Christian Faith

 This section of Os Guinness’ book, God in the Dark, came to mind when I was recently studying the repeated command of YHWH to his people: Remember the day you came out of Egypt…  Remember that the LORD your God redeemed you… Do not forget the LORD your God (Deut 5.15, 7.18, 9.7, etc).

“Clearly, memory for a Christian is not nostalgia or historical reverie.  It is far more profound than having a mental skill or a better-than-average ability to recall.  There is all the difference in the world, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, between tradition as the living faith of the dead and traditionalism as the dead faith of the living.”

“The redeemed memory, as it works under God’s Spirit, keeps the living awareness of the present in line with a living awareness of the past.  Thus our gratitude and thanksgiving, which are spurred by a knowledge of the past, are linked to our faith and hope, which engage the present and look toward the future.  This gives continuity and wholeness to the life of faith that are indispensible to its growth and maturity.” 

“Ideally the ministry of remembering should be a bright thread running through all our Christian living – individually, corporately, publicly, privately; in the quiet moment of the intimate prayer as well as in the open statements of public thanksgiving…”

These excellent quotes are taken from chapter 3 of Os Guinness’ God in the Dark.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

How To Hear a Sermon (Watson)

 Since I’ve read quite a few books on preaching, I’ve always wanted to write a book for Christians called, “How To Listen,” since listening well is an art.  I think the generalization is true: people just don’t listen well today.  Our attention spans are miserably… (now I forgot what I was going to say…).  Anyway, here are some good words from Thomas Watson on how to listen to a sermon for profit.

1) Give great attention to the word preached.  Let nothing pass without taking special notice of it. ‘All the people were very attentive to hear him’ (Luke 19.48).  Give attention to the word, as to a matter of life and death.

2) Come with a holy appetite to the word.  The thirsting soul is the thriving soul.  Come with hungerings of soul after the word, and desire it, that it may not only please you but profit you.

3) Come to it with tenderness upon your heart.  O come to the word preached with a melting frame of heart!  It is the melting wax that receives the stamp of the seal; so, when the heart is in a melting frame, it will better receive the stamp of the preached word.

4) Receive it with meekness (James 1.21).  Meekness is a submissive frame of heart to the word – a willingness to hear the counsels and reproofs of the word.

5) Mingle the word preached with faith (Heb 4.2).  Believe the word, and so believe it as to apply it.  When you hear Christ preached, apply him to yourselves.  This is to put on the Lord Jesus.  When you hear a promise spoken, apply it.

6) Be not only attentive in hearing, but retentive after hearing (Heb 2.1).  Satan labors to steal the word out of the mind (Mark 4.15).  Our memories should be like the chest of the ark, where the law was put.

7) Reduce your hearing to practice.  Live on the sermons you hear.  It is obedience that crowns hearing.

8) Beg of God that he will accompany his word with his presence and blessing.  The Spirit must make all effectual.  God’s Spirit can produce grace in the most obdurate heart.

9) Make it familiar to you.  Discourse of [speak about] what you have heard when you come home.  “My tongue shall speak of thy word’ (Ps 119.172).  One reason why some people get no more good by what they hear, is that they never speak to one another of what they have heard; as if sermons were such secrets that they must not be spoken of again; or as if it were a shame to speak of the matters of salvation.

Watson concludes this section with a few other words.

“The word will be effectual one way or other; if it does not make your hearts better, it will make your chains heavier.  Dreadful is their case who go loaded with sermons to hell.  But …’I am persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation’ (Heb. 6.9).”

Taken from Thomas Watson’s exposition of the 10 commandments (in part 4, “The Way of Salvation”).

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Kuyper on Sanctification and the Covenant of Works

 

“The demand of sanctification belongs to the covenant of works; sanctification itself to the covenant of grace.  This makes the difference very obvious.  Not as tho the covenant of works commanded man to sanctify himself; given to holy men, it excluded sanctification (pre-fall – my note).  But God gave the covenant of grace to unholy men (post-fall – my note).  And the only connection between the demand for sanctification and the covenant of works is, that the latter ever pursues fallen man with this demand, and with the terror of Horeb.  Unholiness destroys the foundation of the covenant of works and renders compliance with its condition impossible.  Hence the absolute contradiction between it and the sinner’s personal life.  The one must make room for the other; they cannot stand together.”

“In this painful conflict we are often tempted to ask whether God is not unjust in his law to demand of us the impossible, and to lay the blame on him; for did he not make us so?  And from this difficulty the Arminian in our own heart seeks to escape, either by denying that there ever was a covenant of works, or by substituting the fulfilment of the law for sanctification.”

“Wherefore it is our aim, especially regarding this doctrine, to escape from this harmful confusion of ideas, and to arrive at a correct understanding and purity of expression.  The preaching must not add to the chaos, but lead us to clear insight and understanding.”

“…In city and country church the word must be preached persistently, and with ever-increasing purity, until, convicted of personal unholiness, men begin to see that by absolute sanctification, not mere self-betterment, they must restore unto God his right; until, feeling their inability, with broken hearts they turn to God to receive the mystery of sanctification from the treasures of the covenant of grace.”

In other words, to have a biblical understanding of God’s holiness and our sanctification, we have to maintain the difference between 1) the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, 2) the law and the gospel, and 3) justification and sanctification (which Kuyper says in the chapters before and after this one [3.1]).

Above quotes taken from Abraham Kuyper’s The Work of the Holy Spirit, chapter 3.1.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

The Puritan Hard Drive

Anyone else hear of this: the Puritan Hard Drive (PHD) by Still Waters Revival Books?  I was just skimming through it, and it looks pretty amazing.  I do have to admit, though, I cannot stand reading from a screen for more than a few minutes at a time – and of course I love holding a book and writing in it for later studies.

Anyway, this does look awesome for those of you who do read off screens or for those of you who are missionaries or teachers that could use this type of thing.

Comments?

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Loving God With Our Minds

“Lazy minds breed lazy hearts and hands.  Presupposing the naturalistic worldview of their neighbors, liberalism assumed that religion inhabits the realm of inner mystical experience and universal morality.  Why would anyone feel compelled to consider Christian claims if their would be defenders either denied them or denied intellectual access to them?”

“The greatest threat to Christianity is never vigorous intellectual criticism but a creeping senility that transforms truths into feelings, public claims into private experiences, and facts into mere values.  Christianity is either true or false, but it is not irrational.  If its claims are not objectively true, then they are not subjectively useful.”

“If our only reason for believing that Jesus is alive is that ‘he lives within my heart,’ then, as Paul said, ‘our preaching is vain and your faith is in vain.’  ‘We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ…And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins…If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied’ (1 Cor. 15:14-19).”

“We must recover our distinctively biblical committment to rigorous, inquisitive, and persuasive thinking before there can be a genuine renewal of Christian conviction, faith, repentance, and discipleship.  It is time once again to love God with our minds.  …Take away theology and you take away any reason to bother with God.”

Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life, 262-263.

shane lems

sunnyside wa