Pastor Tim's Blog

+ Jonathan Edwards

July 5, 2010

Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703 - March 22, 1758) has been called America's greatest theologian and most influential thinker. During his life time he worked as a parish pastor, missionary, and college teacher. He published many books and works which have never gone out of print and are widely read today.

One of my goals this summer is to both read about Jonathan Edwards and read him. A couple of months ago I read Jonathan Edwards And The Ministry Of The Word: A Model of Faith and Thought by Douglas A. Sweeney who has published a number of works on Edwards and knows his subject well.

This morning I started reading Jonathan Edwards on Beauty edited by Owen Strachan and Douglas Sweeney from The Essential Edwards Collection published by Moody Publishers. The book has five chapters on the beauty of God, Creation, Christ, the Church, and the Trinitarian Afterlife.

Edwards identified seven attributes that demonstrate God's beauty - eternality and self-existence, greatness, loveliness, power, wisdom, holiness, and goodness.

I was struck by something Edwards wrote about God's goodness, "God delights in the welfare and prosperity of his creatures; he delights in the making of them exceeding happy and blessed, if they will but accept of the happiness which he offers." Edwards asserted of God's goodness, "this is goodness that never was, never will, never can be paralleled by any other beings." When kings give good things to their subjects, "they do but give that which the Almighty before gave to them."

According to Edwards God's greatest gift of goodness is seen in the giving and self-sacrifice of his Son for the sin of the world. "There never was such an instance of goodness, mercy, pity, and compassion since the world began; all the mercy and goodness amongst creatures fall infinitely short of this."

It is plain to see that I am going to feast on Edwards over the next several days. He is God-centered in a manner in which few of us are today.

+ The Pursuit of God

June 21, 2010

In 1948 A. W. Tozer wrote The Pursuit of God. I was given the book shortly after I became a Christ-follower in 1974. I read it soon after. And I have read it many, many times since. Next to the Bible, I have read The Pursuit of God more than any other book in my library. Right now I am on another Pursuit reading binge. I read the book in May and I continue to pick it up in June to re-read highlighted passages. Unlike any other book, Pursuit draws me in every time I pick it up. Though I am familiar with its content it always seems new when I go back to it.

One chapter that has grabbed my attention of late is "The Universal Presence." Here are a few favorite quotes:

"What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience? It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. There is no place, there can be no place, where he is not. No one is in mere distance any further from or any nearer to God than any other person is. (p. 62)

"The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same. There can be one without the other. God is here when we are wholly unaware of His Presence. His manifest

only when and as we are aware of His Presence. (p. 64)

"The approach of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought of in spatial terms

at all. There is no idea of physical distance involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles but of experience. (p. 65)

"I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which they (those in history who knew God

intimately) had in common was spiritual receptivity. Something in them was open to heaven, something urged them Godward. They had spiritual awareness and they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response." (p. 67)

Lord Christ, I pray for spiritual receptivity. I want to be open to heaven. I desire to live with a Godward look. Increase my spiritual awareness. Show me how to cultivate this. Grant me the lifelong habit of spiritual response. In Jesus name, Amen.

+ Admiration of the Godhead

June 1, 2010

"Some of the most rapturous moments we know will be those we spend in reverent admiration of the Godhead. So let us begin with God. Back of all, above all, before all is God: first in sequential order, above in rank and station, exalted in dignity and honor. As the self-existent One He gave being to all things, and all things exist out of Him and for Him.

'Thou are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou has created all

things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.'

Every soul belongs to God and exists by His pleasure. God being Who and What He is, and we being who and what we are, the only thinkable relation between us is one of full lordship on His part and complete submission on ours. We owe Him every honor that it is in our power to give Him. Our everlasting grief lies in giving Him anything less."

(A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, p. 101-02)

+ The words of others

May 5, 2010

Rather than write something myself I want to share some favorite words of others with you in this post. These are quotes I have come across in my reading over the past several weeks. I will let them stand on their own:

C. S. Lewis
“For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”

C. H. Spurgeon

The minister who does not earnestly pray over his work must surely be a vain and conceited man. He acts as if he thought himself sufficient of himself and therefore needed not to appeal to God.

E. H. Peterson

I realized that this was my place and work in the church, to be a witness to the truth that dazzles gradually. I would be a witness to the Holy Spirit's formation of congregation out of this mixed bag of humanity that is my congregation - broken, hobbled, crippled, sexually abused and spiritually abused, emotionally unstable, passive and passive-aggressive, neurotic men and women. Men at fifty who have failed a dozen times and know that they will never amount to anything. Women who have been ignored and scorned and abused in a marriage in which they have been faithful. People living with children and spouses deep in addiction. Also fresh converts excited to be in on this new life. Spirited young people, energetic and eager to be guided into a life of love, compassion, mission and evangelism. A few seasoned saints who know how to pray and listen and endure. And a considerable number of people who pretty much just show up. I wonder why they bother. There they are. The hot, the cold, the lukewarm, Christians, half-Christians, almost Christians. New-agers, angry ex-Catholics, sweet new converts. I didn't choose them. I don't get to choose them.

John Stott

When I enter the pulpit with the Bible in my hands and in my heart, my blood begins to flow and my eyes sparkle for the sheer glory of having God's Word to expound. We need to emphasize the glory, the privilege, of sharing God's truth with people.

Jonathan Edwards

Oftentimes in reading it (the Bible), every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt a harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words. I seemed often to see so much light, exhibited by every sentence, and such a refreshing ravishing food communicated, that I could not get along in reading. Used oftentimes to dwell long on one sentence, to see the wonders contained in it; and yet almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders.

Ernest Hemingway

You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another (Jake Barnes to Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises).

George Herbert

He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.

Frederick Buechner

For the first time in my life that year in New York I started going to church regularly. My reason for going was simply that on the same block when I lived there happened to be a church with a preacher I had heard of and that I had nothing all that much better to do with my lonely Sundays. And then there came one particular sermon with on particular phrase in it that does not even appear in a transcript of his words that somebody sent me more than twenty-five years later so I can only assume that he must have dreamed it up a the last minute and ad-libbed it - and on just such foolish, tenuous, holy threads as that, I suppose, hang the destinies of us all. Jesus Christ refused the crown that Satan offered him in the wilderness, Buttrick said, but he is king nonetheless because again and again he is crowned in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place, Buttrick said, 'among confession, and tears, and great laughter.' It was the phrase 'great laugher' that did it, did whatever it was that I believe must have been hiddenly in the doing all the years of my journey up till then. It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.

Patti Griffin

When you're lost and you're found

And you're found and you're lost

And you're dancing with no one around

You're coming home to me, just remember

You're coming home to me.

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