Isaiah 53:1-12 (NKJV)
1 Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant,
And as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
3 He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him;
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
4 Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.

6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted,
Yet He opened not His mouth;
He was led as a lamb to the slaughter,
And as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
So He opened not His mouth.
8 He was taken from prison and from judgment,
And who will declare His generation?
For He was cut off from the land of the living;
For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.
9 And they made His grave with the wicked—
But with the rich at His death,
Because He had done no violence,
Nor was any deceit in His mouth.
10 Yet it pleased [was the will of] the LORD to bruise Him;
He has put Him to grief.
When You make His soul an offering for sin,
He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days,
And the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand.
11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied.
By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many,
For He shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great,
And He shall divide the spoil with the strong,
Because He poured out His soul unto death,
And He was numbered with the transgressors,
And He bore the sin of many,
And made intercession for the transgressors.

… subscribe, and you’ll be entered into a contest to win a free iPod Shuffle!  See here for details.  But don’t just do that – Danny has a lot of thought-provoking and challenging things to say over on his blog, so do some reading while you’re over there!

OFI has a great quote from Spurgeon here.   It’s about finding your joy in Christ, the only source of all lasting joy.  Note that I’m not saying that you can’t find joy in things here on earth… Far from it.  You can find a short-lived joy in the things of the world, which do not satisfy (see Ecclesiastes, or any believer whom God has chastened because of their love for the things of this world).  You can also find real joy in things received from Christ while on this earth – such as your spouse – things received from and blessed by Him. 

If you haven’t already, may you begin to find lasting joy in Christ this year!  It is worth all that you have and are in exchange.

I finished reading through the  Bible this morning, completing my RttBiaY program.  I know I haven’t been posting a lot about my reading lately – not that I’ve been posting a lot lately, period!  (Perhaps I’ll have some time to finish a few of the 10 or so unfinished posts which I started and never got around to finishing over the past 6 months… Some of those are about verses or passages which I had come across during my RttBiaY reading.)

But I’m excited to have finally done what I’ve set out to do many times over the years – read straight through from Genesis to Revelation!  It was a very rewarding exercise – one I hope to do many more times in the future.  I’m not sure if I’ll start again right away, or spend some more in-depth time in a few books which I decided I wanted to study some more – or perhaps both.  We’ll see.

It was great to see for myself the arc of the Biblical narrative from beginning to end.   Of course, growing up in the church, going to Christian jr/sr high schools, attending or leading dozens of Bible studies, and doing all sorts of personal study (other than reading the Bible from cover to cover), I have always “known” that the Bible is consistent in its presentation of man’s condition and his need for a solution to the problem of sin which is external to himself – in other words, the focus of the Bible is Jesus Christ.  The Old Testament looks forward to Jesus Christ, and the New Testament reveals His life, death, resurrection, and the resulting freedom from sin and eternal death, sin’s penalty, which we can have in Jesus Christ.  Reading the Bible from beginning to end, however, gives one a better grasp on exactly how consistent the Bible is in this respect. It also shows all the more clearly how patient God is with His people (both Israel and the Church) — and how fickle His people can be.  And it shows all the more, with painful clarity, how much God hates sin.

But thanks be to God, for He has provided us with a perfect, spotless substitute!  A beautiful Savior, whose birth we are about to celebrate.  The older I get, and the more that I see how attached my heart can still be to the things of this world, or just to my own selfish desires – the more I appreciate the free gift of salvation which God had in mind before the foundation of the world, the gift long pointed to in the Old Testament which began life in a lowly manger some 2000 years ago – and which God also planned to send to the cross for your sins and for mine.

Do you know this Savior?  He alone can truly and permanently satisfy the deepest desire of your heart.

I haven’t read all of the articles here (there are quite a few!), but the ones I’ve read are excellent: Gospel-Driven Sanctification by Jerry Bridges, The Difference Between Legal and Gospel Mortification by Ralph Erskine, and The Anatomy of Backsliding, which is one of John Piper’s sermons (see the link to “Sanctification and Growth”).

Here’s the quote from Sinclair Ferguson that introduces these articles:

This first thing to remember, of course, is that we must never separate the benefits (regeneration, justification, sanctification) from the Benefactor (Jesus Christ). The Christians who are most focused on their own spirituality may give the impression of being the most spiritual … but from the New Testament’s point of view, those who have almost forgotten about their own spirituality because their focus is so exclusively on their union with Jesus Christ and what He has accomplished are those who are growing and exhibiting fruitfulness. Historically speaking, whenever the piety of a particular group is focused on OUR spirituality that piety will eventually exhaust itself on its own resources. Only where our piety forgets about ourself and focuses on Jesus Christ will our piety nourished by the ongoing resources the Spirit brings to us from the source of all true piety, our Lord Jesus Christ.
- Sinclair Ferguson

Hat tip to Bob Anderson at WHCC for the pointer to Gospel-Driven Sanctification by Jerry Bridges, which resulted in my finding the collection of articles!

While looking for another of A.W. Tozer’s works online, I came across this essay called “Does God Always Answer Prayer?” from Man: The Dwelling Place of God. Tozer didn’t belong to the “God answers: yes, no, or here’s something else” school of thought with regard to prayer.

What do you think?

I finally started reading Tozer recently. I’ve wanted to read some of his books for a long time – so when I found an old copy of The Best of A.W. Tozer earlier this year, I figured that would be a great place to start. Let me tell you – it is! It’s a compilation of 52 chapters (drawn from a dozen of Tozer’s books) which Warren Wiersbe put together. If I can find some more time, I’ll post some more quotes sometime soon; for now, here’s some of Nearness Is Likeness:

One serious and often distressing problem for many Christians is their feeling that God is far from them, or that they are far from God, which is the same thing.

It is hard to rejoice in the Lord when we are suffering from this sense of remoteness. It is like tying to have a warm, bright summer without the sun. The chief trouble here is of course not intellectual and cannot be cured by intellectual means; yet truth must enter the mind before it can enter the heart, so let us reason together about this. In spiritual matters we think correctly only when we boldly rule out the concept of space. God is spirit and spirit dwells not in space. Space has to do with matter and spirit is independent of it. By the concept of space we account for the relation of material bodies to each other.

We should never think of God as being spatially near or remote, for He is not here or there but carries here and there in His heart…

That God is equally near to all parts of His universe is plainly taught in the Scriptures (Psa. 139:1-18), yet some beings experience His nearness and others do not, depending upon their moral likeness to Him. It is dissimilarity that creates the sense of remoteness between creatures and between men and God….

But how can the conscious sinner bridge the mighty gulf that separates him from God in living experience? The answer is that he cannot, but the glory of the Christian message is that Christ did. Through the blood of His cross He made peace that He might reconcile all things unto Himself. “And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight” (Col. 1: 21,22).

The new birth makes us partakers of the divine nature. There the work of undoing the dissimilarity between us and God begins. From there it progresses by the sanctifying operation of the Holy Spirit till God is satisfied.

That is the theology of it, but as I said, even the regenerated soul may sometimes suffer from the feeling that God is far from Him. What then should he do?

First, the trouble may be no more than a temporary break in God-conscious communion due to any one of half a hundred causes. The cure is faith. Trust God in the dark till the light returns.

Second, should the sense of remoteness persist in spite of prayer and what you believe is faith, look to your inner life for evidences of wrong attitudes, evil thoughts or dispositional flaws. These are unlike God and create a psychological gulf between you and Him. Put away the evil from you, believe, and the sense of nearness will be restored. God was never away in the first place.

- Nearness Is Likeness (emphasis added) – from Born After Midnight. You can find the whole chapter online here (it’s not very long).

I love the part about truth entering the mind first – probably partly because I’m so analytical But it’s true, isn’t it? All the more so when we feel at a distance from God. Praise God for His provision in Christ Jesus of the solution to bridge the “mighty gap” which we cannot bridge by any means on our own!

[Side note: I find it fascinating that the Psalm which most extols the beauty of the law (Ps. 119) is, in Hebrew, an incredibly structured poem that appeals to the intellect as well as the heart: every stanza is labeled with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in alphabetical order, with all 22 letters represented. Furthermore, every verse of every stanza starts with the letter the stanza represents. How cool is that!]

Sticky posts stay at the top of your blog, and newer posts appear below them…

Given that, I’m going to use this space to ask you to please pray for Connor!

For my regular readers (all two of you), who by now have become quite irregular through no fault of your own, I apologize… I’ve been spending most of my blogging time over on ConnorWatch.org (if you haven’t been there, please visit – and pray for Connor!)

I came across Abraham Piper’s testimony yesterday, and had to put up a pointer to it. Actually, only a small part of it is officially his testimony – the rest of it consists of his suggestions for parents who are struggling with a wayward child (though I suspect that he is also largely telling his own story, from the perspective of his parents, when he outlines his suggestions).  His suggestions are wise and loving counsel to any who might be going through similarly wrenching times with their own children.

Since I’m posting about Piper progeny, I should also point to this powerful poem by another of the Pipers’ sons, Karsten: Sometimes He Kills Us to Save Us.

[I started this post over a week ago, but haven't had time finish it off until now...]

Recently I read and then listened to this sermon by John Piper. If you have the time, listen to the message as well – things come across in the audio that aren’t there in the written sermon. (And only the audio mentions Calvinism, Ben )

Here’s the text:

Therefore, putting aside all malice and all guile and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation, if you have tasted the kindness of the Lord. 1 Peter 2:1-3

The sermon is a great encouragement to combat what he calls “spiritual fatalism”:

[T]he belief or feeling that you are stuck with the way you are—”this is all I will ever experience of God—the level of spiritual intensity that I now have is all I can have; others may have strong desires after God and may have deep experiences of personal pleasure in God, but I will never have those because . . . well, just because . . . I am not like that. That’s not me.”

Continuing with a fantastic simile:

Spiritual fatalism is tragic in the church. It leaves people stuck. It takes away hopes and dreams of change and growth. It squashes the excitement of living—which is growth. It’s like saying to a gawky little girl who feels like her body is all out of proportion: well that’s the way you are, and you will always be that way, when in fact she is meant to grow and change. That would be tragic to convince her of a kind of physical fatalism—that her growth is stopped right there at 13. So it is with the spirit. Only spiritual fatalism is much worse. Because greater things are at stake, and because we never do get to a point where we’ve arrived at the final stature like we do in our physical bodies.

He quotes this wonderful poem by John Bunyan:

Run, John, run, the law commands
But gives us neither feet nor hands,
Far better news the gospel brings:
It bids us fly and gives us wings.

About which he says:

What this says is that just as essential as having the desires for the Word that we are supposed to have is having the trust in God that he gives what he commands. If God says to desire, when we don’t desire, then we trust him that he must know something we don’t know. He must have some power we don’t have. There must be a way. That’s the opposite of spiritual fatalism. God commands it. So there must be a way. I will not settle for less than what God commands, even if it is a command to fly.

Piper goes on to open up the scope of his examination to the context of the text and that it is the *same power* behind the new birth of the believer which is the basis for the creation of desire in the heart of a believer who doesn’t feel that desire. He also covers the “destructive side” of the Word of God, as described in verse 1 of the text – for we must get fight also on the negative side to rid ourselves of malice, guile, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. We must pursue both in order to “experience all of God”.

I hope you get as much out of the message as I did!