Following up on some of the thoughts in Tuesday's sarkicophobia post and meta, I find Spurgeon's meditation for this morning startlingly timely. To wit:

...The iniquities of our public worship, its hypocrisy, formality, lukewarmness, irreverence, wandering of heart and forgetfulness of God, what a full measure have we there! Our work for the Lord, its emulation, selfishness, carelessness, slackness, unbelief, what a mass of defilement is there! Our private devotions, their laxity, coldness, neglect, We get our muddy paw prints on EVERYTHING WE CONSCIOUSLY DO sleepiness, and vanity, what a mountain of dead earth is there! If we looked more carefully we should find this iniquity to be far greater than appears at first sight. Dr. Payson, writing to his brother, says, “My parish, as well as my heart, very much resembles the garden of the sluggard; and what is worse, I find that very many of my desires for the melioration of both, proceed either from pride or vanity or indolence. I look at the weeds which overspread my garden, and breathe out an earnest wish that they were eradicated. But why? What prompts the wish? It may be that I may walk out and say to myself, ‘In what fine order is my garden kept!’ This is pride. Or, it may be that my neighbours may look over the wall and say, ‘How finely your garden flourishes!’ This is vanity. Or I may wish for the destruction of the weeds, because I am weary of pulling them up. This is indolence.” So that even our desires after holiness may be polluted by ill motives. Under the greenest sods worms hide themselves; we need not look long to discover them. How cheering is the thought, that when the High Priest bore the iniquity of the holy things he wore upon his brow the words, “Holiness to the Lord:” and even so while Jesus bears our sin, he presents before his Father’s face not our unholiness, but his own holiness. O for grace to view our great High Priest by the eye of faith!

This is what I love so much about Spurgeon. He never writes as a Doctor of the Theory of Applied Christianity, much less as having flawlessly mastered that subject. Spurgeon ever writes as a redeemed sinner who has been in the trenches and knows them well. I can listen to him without feeling obliged to prefix each statement with "Theoretically...."

Spurgeon takes a clear-eyed and unromantic view of the complex mish-mash of motivations that plague every thought-process that pushes through our consciousness, including the holiest. The flesh really is a problem. We have not yet been delivered from the body of this death (Romans 7:14-25), there still is an internal battle (Galatians 5:17), We need a very single focus. Just... not on that guy. Or ourselves. and I very much doubt that we perform any conscious action without an admixture of motivations. ("Very much doubt that we do" is a humble-sounding way of saying "have no doubt whatsoever that we don't.")

So notice that Spurgeon's solution isn't to collapse into self-absorbed inaction until we achieve purity. It is — well, it's what Spurgeon's solution always is about everything, isn't it? It is to look to Jesus.

Every good and godly and holy thing we aren't, He is — and He is that on our behalf, before God. We'll never get to be like Him by looking to ourselves until we "arrive." Instead, we grow as "we all, with unveiled face, [behold] the glory of the Lord, [and] are ...transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

So get over yourself, get into Jesus, and get moving.

Secondly

This is a quick post, and I doubt I will do much at my own blog for the next couple of days, because... my dear and only daughter is to be wed this Sunday! (A bit more about that here, item two.) 'The ring is MINE!' - 'Not this time, dude'

We all are joyfully looking forward to this happy experience for the Phillips family, as Rachael honors the family who loved and raised her, and honors God in the launching of a new family created in the fear of God and respect for His name and word.

Until then, we'll be doing whatever we need to, to get things ready. After that, a rehearsal, a dinner, and ultimately I get to walk my dear Rachael down the aisle, as my dear wife beams on proudly and happily, and as my Josiah and Jonathan lead the usherings and bear the One Ring (er, Two Rings), respectively — and as I witness Rachael exchange vows with Kermit, honorably in the sight of God and the assembled witnesses.

I'll be armed with a tux... and an initially-dry handkerchief or two.

Join me in praying for Rachael and Kermit, and that the name of Jesus Christ be lifted up.

Dan Phillips's signature

Labels: Dan Phillips, discipleship, growth, mawwiage, TIWIARN

07 January 2009

New Post

The wrong miracles

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_zak6_irffj8/SWTOSV1sdwI/AAAAAAAAAeQ/pCa99RJ5EL4/s1600-h/oops_today.gif

by Frank Turk

Yeah -- wow. So I look down this morning and I see the image you see at the right there, and I realize I should have had a TeamPyro post today ready for you people because it's Wednesday.

How can it be Wednesday? What happened to Tuesday? Is this what it's like to get old -- to have days vanish?

As I deal with my existential crisis, Let me comment briefly (heh) on something that came up in the last couple of days which is bound to draw ire from a lot of people for a lot of reasons. I want to talk a minute about the apologetic value of defending OT miracles.

Now, read this closely so you don't say something you ought to apologize for after you read (or have someone tell you about) what I will have written here: without any reservation, I affirm creation in 7 days, every single miracle and supernatural event of both the OT and the NT, and I affirm that God can do as He pleases in and above Creation because He's the creator and sustainer. So as you read this, don't hear me say that I discount the miraculous.

But here's the thing: I believe that God can do all those things -- a global flood, preserving all the animals in a boat, parting the Red Sea, speak through dreams, etc. -- because I have faith in God. The Bible's authority speaks to me because my faith makes me ready to hear what the Bible says and receive it and believe it. When I didn't have faith in God, it all looked like gibberish to me.

That doesn't mean the Bible didn't have the authority to speak to me on these issues: its authority is above and before my willingness or ability to listen. And in the end, because the Bible has the authority is has, people are going to be judged by that standard in the end.

In that respect, the Way of the Master approach to evangelism is a wholly-valuable approach, presuppositionally, to telling people the truth about their real problem before God. It doesn't seek to get them to first, for example, accept a 6-day creation before showing them that the Law says they are sinful people under condemnation. They know in their hearts what the law says (Rom 1-2)(Rexella - thx van Impe groupies everywhere), and WOTM is an appeal to that -- which, I think, is a good thing.

But think about that in terms of the apologetic value of defending OT miracles -- or even NT miracles (excluding 2, which I will get to in a minute) -- to unbelievers. The other bread of life There's no sense in doing that at all -- because they could believe all the miracles and still miss the point of the Old Testament. Look at this from John 6:

So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum, seeking Jesus.

When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal."

Then they said to him, "What must we do, to be doing the works of God?"

Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."

So they said to him, "Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'"

Jesus then said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."

Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst."

You know: these are Jews who believe that Moses made miracles in the desert, and that they can trust the Torah to tell them the truth about the history of that time. But here they are, with Jesus standing in front of them, frankly missing the point. They believed the OT miracles -- and missed the Messiah!

So before you break out the apologetic argument to substantiate any or all of the miracles in the Old Testament, keep something in mind: those miracles, in the best case, are merely parables about Jesus -- however historically-accurate they may be. Believing in those miracles doesn't give you faith in the one who is just and also the justifier of the ungodly.

On the other hand, what if we were wiling to say something like this: "Listen [unbeliever's name goes here]: I'd be willing to stipulate your unbelief in the miracles God made in Israel if you'd be willing to talk to me about one of two non-negotiable miracle of the Christian faith. Paul, who was the first global evangelist for my faith, said that if the resurrection was not true, then he was himself a liar and all his followers were the most-pathetic of all men. Let's talk about the miracle of the ressurection."

In that miracle, we also get a front-door to the other non-negotiable miracle of our faith -- which is forgiveness of sin. You know something? If we spent as much energy on appealing to people to repent because God -- who ought to rightly judge them -- has provided a solution to the problem of His wrath -- a miraculous solution, because there's no logical or natural solution to His wrath except our punishment -- think of all the really-worthless arguing we'd have to give up.

Don't waste your time on the wrong miracles. The flood of Noah is not good news: finding out that the tomb is empty, and Jesus Christ is risen -- a sign of His power and His authority, and of the worthiness of His sacrifice -- is actually Good News.

Labels: apologetics, centuri0n, Gospel

New Post

TSK weighs in

een awhile since
we've said much about the Emergenting situation. Here Tall Skinny Kiwi has reviewed my review of Emerging diversity. He's very kind.

Phil's signature

Labels: 50 words or less, emerg*, Phil Johnson

06 January 2009

New Post

Stunned, stymied and sidelined by sarkicophobia

by Dan Phillips

New year — new word! Sarkicophobia.

Sar´-kĭ-kə-fō´-bē-ə

Derivation: In the NT, the term σαρκικός (sarkikos) is Whole buncha yummy sarx commonly translated "fleshly" or "carnal." It is an adjective derived from sarx, "flesh," and means belonging to the flesh, pertaining to the flesh. It occurs in Romans 15:27; 1 Corinthians 3:3 [twice]; 9:11; 2 Corinthians 1:12; 10:4; and 1 Peter 2:11. Sometimes it is used simply of material things (Romans 15:27; 1 Corinthians 9:11), and sometimes of attitudes or thinking that is dominated by the flesh (i.e. unredeemed, un-Christian thinking or attitudes; 1 Corinthians 3:3; 2 Corinthians 1:12).

Formation: Unlike nomicophobia, there actually is an existing (if little-used) English word to use: sarkic. The rest is easy.

Meaning: I would use this of folks who so fear obeying God "in the power of the flesh" that they'd rather do nothing, than do something carnal. Whatever their theory, their practice can be summed up in this motto: better to disobey God outright, than obey Him in the flesh! Or, Better do nothing for God's glory, than do something fleshly for God's glory!

The result is not only paralysis, but a particularly repulsively and repugnantly pious form of paralysis. You dursn't confront these folks for their sin in disobeying God. Do that, and you mark yourself as shallow and — well, carnal! Because clearly, you don't understand: when they disobey God, it's really because they love God so much! It's because they just want Jesus to be all, and God to be all, and themselves to be nothing, like little lead soldiers melted down into the big molten vat of Godness.

I'm mel-l-l-l-lting! It's the "thinking" that underlies the ever-popular (and never-Biblical) mantra for daily living: Let Go and Let God.

Illustration: reading Andrew Murray and the "higher life" sorts will freeze you up like this. Murray will so terrify you of the http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_P1I-Or2ze18/SWNwe7Zo5bI/AAAAAAAAB54/UpC0EUTqklk/s1600-h/blob.jpg thought of acting in the flesh, that you'll collapse into goo. You will want to be a glove on Jesus' hand, moving only when He moves, dissolving into nothing that He may be all in all.

Among these folks, it's all clothed with (masked in?) gloriously spiritual and mystical language, and sounds absolutely wonderful. I mean — who wouldn't want that? What Christian wouldn't like to quit striving and struggling and battling and sweating and groaning... and failing? What Christian wouldn't like to be so mastered by Jesus that he lives and breathes and emanates Jesus, so that Jesus lives through Him in the sense of replacing his will and responsibility?

Again, this is seen in the phrase: "Stop trying to live the Christian life, and let Jesus live it through you!" NOT the Biblical picture of sanctification and discipleship

Aside: do you see, though, that this only moves the goal, the marker? It doesn't remove it? The idea is that I stop getting my grubby hands all over everything, and let Jesus control everything. Stop trying to do things right — in fact, that's the problem: I keep trying to do things right. And that's wrong. I have to stop trying, and let Jesus do it.

Okay, so then... why isn't He? Who's stopping Him? Well, I am. Because I haven't let Him right. I haven't yielded right. I haven't adopted the right resting, yielding attitude.

So you see, it's still me, me, me. It's just that we've moved the focus from my obeying right, in faith and by grace (which is an explicitly Biblical focus), to my yielding right (which is not). And I still fail, because I have to strike the right mystical attitude to shift into "J" for Jesus-life. If I'm not there, there's something more for me to do.

So even apart from being un-Biblical, it's nonsensical. It collapses on itself.

Anecdote: I was infected with this very early in my Christian life. It seemed natural enough to me because of its similarity to the cultic teaching from which I'd been saved. Then we believed Also not the way that God was all and in all, and we just needed to "manifest" the God-life. This teaching is very similar, only it focuses more on Jesus rather than the mysticized redefinitions of Religious Science.

So, like J. I. Packer and many Americans as well, I tried and tried. That is, I tried not to try. I tried to melt... er, that is, to let myself be melted. (But wait, if I'm doing the not-doing... if it takes me to not take me to... whoa, like I said, this gets really confusing....) And, like J. I. Packer, it made me pretty miserable.

But my circle of Christian friends was also infected, and we all had the same fear: acting "in the flesh." We were afraid of going to church in the flesh, witnessing of Christ in the flesh, praying in the flesh, studying the Word in the flesh, obeying the Word in the flesh. So, for fear of doing any of those things in the flesh, we'd stop doing them altogether. Some of us could be pretty smug about it, too, and could look down on others who were very energetically involved in church, witnessing, and holy living — but we were pretty sure that it was, you know, in the flesh.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_P1I-Or2ze18/SWNyi7NV5GI/AAAAAAAAB6Q/z6VxVroRE5I/s1600-h/smug.jpg It came to a head for me in my first course of pastoral training. It's quite a long story in itself, but the bottom line is that I'd gone from being a lazy, undisciplined student before my conversion, to being very committed to immersing myself in Greek so as to master the New Testament.

But many of my fellow-students wouldn't. They wouldn't study too hard, get into it too deeply. Why? Whyever not?

You've already guessed: all that studying was in the flesh.
Another guy, afraid of doing anything 'in the flesh'
The effect of sarkicophobia on me was that I was ever taking my spiritual pulse, ever checking within, freezing up, paralyzed, spiraling down into deeper and deeper morbid introspection. In the name of "looking to Jesus" (revealed in His Word) I was constantly looking to myself, within myself.

And so what should I do? Should I leave off the hard, sweaty, grueling work of study and "let God," for fear of studying in the flesh?

In short: God set me free. Somewhere around that time I began to realize how comparatively simple, straightforward, and in-broad-daylight New Testament Christianity was. Never ever did you see an apostle or Christian on the side of the road, locked in a whirlpool of introspection over serving God by Spirit-enabled, faith-motivated, grace-empowered obedience to Gospel commands in the flesh. Nor did we ever read of an apostle issuing a series of commands in Christ's name, then immediately cautioning his readers against obeying them in the flesh.

Nor was the concept of flesh introduced by Paul to make Christian living more complicated. True, he depicted the fact that the flesh complicates Christian living (Romans 7:14-25); but he never compounds the issue by horror-stories of grace-saved, born-again, Spirit-baptized Christians living for God's glory in the flesh — as if it were some sort of indefinable mystical state of being, more powerful than the Holy Spirit and the new nature.

True, the apostles warned against pride, arrogance, lust, covetousness, divisiveness, bitterness and such things; and, true, these are works of the flesh (Galatians 5:19-21). But Paul says those works are "obvious, apparent, plainly evident" (Galatians 5:19). Never would Paul have interrupted an aglow, on-fire, Christ-loving Christian from telling the Gospel, and told him to go to his closet and stop witnessing until he was sure he wasn't doing it in the flesh.

And so I decided — about Greek and a great many other things. I'd give it everything God gave me to give, out of love for Christ, and to be of use to His church. And if it made me arrogant, I'd take the arrogance to the Cross, and deal with it. And get on with keeping His commands. Christian dude - those commands are all addressed to YOU. Now, deal with it!

Because that's what love for God is (1 John 5:3), and that's what people who love Jesus do (John 15:14)..

I wasn't going to use sarkicophobia as an excuse to avoid all-out living for God's glory, through grace, by the Spirit's power, in obedience to the commands of God.

In sum: sarkicophobia creates people locked in perpetual self-absorption in the name of Christ, ever taking their spiritual pulse, immune to direct appeals from Scripture to believing obedience. The last thing it produces is Christ-centered, God-glorifying, robust, hearty, daring, fruitful, pioneering, world-rejecting Devil-defying Christians.

And that's a bad thing.

Dan Phillips's signature

Labels: Dan Phillips, discernment, discipleship, Sanctification

05 January 2009

New Post

Apocalypse Then

Remembering the Y2K Hysteria
by Phil Johnson

xactly ten years ago this week I preached in our church's morning service. I can't remember if John MacArthur was ill or suddenly called out of town for some reason, but I remember being asked very late to fill in. I had about 24 hours to prepare.

It being the first Sunday of 1999, I decided to preach an appropriately forward-looking message on Matthew 6:34 and its context: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."

In those days, the evangelical world was at the peak of the Y2K insanity, so I made reference to that issue in my message. At the time, Gary North was operating a heavily-trafficked website that included this:

We've got a problem. It may be the biggest problem that the modern world has ever faced. I think it is. At 12 midnight on January 1, 2000 (a Saturday morning), most of the world's mainframe computers will either shut down or begin spewing out bad data. Most of the world's desktop computers will also start spewing out bad data. Tens of millions—possibly hundreds of millions—of pre-programmed computer chips will begin to shut down the systems they automatically control. This will create a nightmare for every area of life, in every region of the industrialized world.

'Spewing' bad data'

North's Web site had links to more than 3,000 places where you could read similar doom-and-gloom predictions about the Y2K crisis. He grimly told visitors to his Web site that they had better heed these doomsday warnings, or they would certainly regret it.

Today, he admits, "I did not understand the Y2K thing in any sort of detail. I took someone elses [sic] word for it. . . ."

At the time, he was saying:

It took me from early 1992 until late 1996 to come to grips emotionally with the Year 2000 Problem. You had better be a lot faster on the uptake than I was. We're running out of time.

I don't mean that society is running out of time to fix this problem. Society has already run out of time for that. There are not enough programmers to fix it. The technical problems cannot be fixed on a system-wide basis. The Millennium Bug will hit in 2000, no matter what those in authority decide to do now. As a system, the world economy is now beyond the point of no return. So, when I say "we," I mean you and I as individuals. We are running out of time as individuals to evade the falling dominoes . . .. We are facing a breakdown of civilization if the power grid goes down.

(It frankly amused me that a postmillennialist like North, who had frequently derided premillennialists by referring to them as "pessimillennialists" would himself make a career of fear-mongering. But that is just what he has done. So much for the vaunted "optimism" of theonomic postmillennialism.)

In my message that morning a decade ago, I pointed out that the spirit of that kind of panic-mongering was 180 degrees at odds with a whole string of Jesus' commands in Matthew 6:25-33. I mostly just explained the biblical text.

I admit I wasn't prepared for the reaction I got that morning. There was a smallish group of people in the church who were fully into the Y2K hysteria, and they approached me in a phalanx as soon as the service was over. The guy who would have been their spokesman (if his wife hadn't kept interrupting him) was so angry he was red in the face and spitting when he talked. He said he was going to meet with the elders and demand equal time to tell the people of Grace Church they needed to start stockpiling food and preparing for the looming crisis. He likened me to me a holocaust denier.

I stood there and listened to them for ten minutes or so until they began to calm down a bit. I let them talk and did not interrupt, except to ask how they thought Matthew 6:25-34 applied to our society in 1999.

As the spokesdude began to lose some of his steam, he said, "Look: all I know is that if you're wrong, you are guilty of placing the people of our church in mortal jeopardy by not encouraging them to stockpile food and prepare Y2K bunkers. But if I'm wrong, the worst that will happen is that I will have to come back and apologize to you for losing my temper."

"Will you do that?" I asked.

"Of course I would—if it turns out I am wrong," he avowed. "But I am not wrong."

"I will look for you on the first Sunday of the year 2000," I promised.

Apocalypse Now

He moved to a remote part of Idaho that fall because he wanted to be as far as possible from any urban area when all the computers started spewing bad data. One of the hard-core Y2K aficionados in the group actually left his wife when it came to light that she did not share his fear of the coming apocalypse. He likewise moved out of state.

Ten years after the fact, not one of that group of Y2K cadets has ever come back and formally acknowledged that they were wrong, much less apologized for the scene they made that morning.

Gary North is now selling doomsday advice for a monthly fee— "approximately the cost of one movie ticket, a large box of popcorn, and a large soft drink per month."

My advice: the popcorn is much healthier for you.

Even if you load it with butter.

Seriously.

Phil's signature

Labels: eschatology, Phil Johnson, worldview

04 January 2009

New Post

Human Philosophy and Scientific Hypotheses Cannot Deliver "Truth"

Your weekly dose of Spurgeon
posted by Phil Johnson

The PyroManiacs devote some space each weekend to highlights from The Spurgeon Archive. The following excerpt is from "The Greatest Fight in the World," Spurgeon's final manifesto.

he history of that human ignorance which calls itself "philosophy" is absolutely identical with the history of fools, except where it diverges into madness. If another Erasmus were to arise and write the history of folly, he would have to give several chapters to philosophy and science, and those chapters would be more telling than any others.

I should not myself dare to say that philosophers and scientists are generally fools; but I would give them liberty to speak of one another, and at the close I would say, "Gentlemen, you are less complimentary to each other than I should have been." I would let the wise of each generation speak of the generation that went before it, or nowadays each half of a generation might deal with the previous half generation; for there is little of theory in science to-day which will survive twenty years, and only a little more which will see the first day of the twentieth century.

We travel now at so rapid a rate that we rush by sets of scientific hypotheses as quickly as we pass telegraph posts when riding in an express train. All that we are certain of to-day is this, that what the learned were sure of a few years ago is now thrown into the limbo of discarded errors.

I believe in science, but not in what is called "science." No proven fact in nature is opposed to revelation. The pretty speculations of the pretentious we cannot reconcile with the Bible, and would not if we could. I feel like the man who said, "I can understand in some degree how these great men have found out the weight of the stars, and their distances from one another, and even how, by the spectroscope, they have discovered the materials of which they are composed; but", said he, "I cannot guess how they found out their names."

Just so. The fanciful part of science, so dear to many, is what we do not accept. That is the important part of science to many—that part which is a mere guess, for which the guessers fight tooth and nail. The mythology of science is as false as the mythology of the heathen; but this is the thing which is made a god of. I say again, as far as its facts are concerned, science is never in conflict with the truths of Holy Scripture, but the hurried deductions drawn from those facts, and the inventions classed as facts, are opposed to Scripture, and necessarily so, because falsehood agrees not with truth.

Two sorts of people have wrought great mischief, and yet they are neither of them worth being considered as judges in the matter: they are both of them disqualified. It is essential than an umpire should know both sides of a question, and neither of these is thus instructed. The first is the irreligious scientist. What does he know about religion? What can he know? He is out of court when the question is—Does science agree with religion? Obviously he who would answer this query must know both of the two things in the question.

The second is a better man, but capable of still more mischief. I mean the unscientific Christian, who will trouble his head about reconciling the Bible with science. He had better leave it alone, and not begin his tinkering trade. The mistake made by such men has been that in trying to solve a difficulty, they have either twisted the Bible, or contorted science. The solution has soon been seen to be erroneous, and then we hear the cry that Scripture has been defeated. Not at all; not at all. It is only a vain gloss upon it which has been removed.

C. H. Spurgeon

Labels: Dose of Spurgeon, truth, wisdom of God

02 January 2009

New Post

New Year 2009: a few scattered thoughts

by Dan Phillips

Howdy. Blessed New Year to you all.

Over at my place, I listed out some Highlights and reflections from 2008. Since some of it is about Phil, Frank, and you-all, I point you to-itward.
We also had a discussion previously about Bible-reading plans. After that, Justin listed out some terrific online resources.
Here's what I've decided to do as a plan: since I worked out that you can get through the whole Bible if you average just 3.2575342465753424657534246575342 chapters a day, I'm committing to reading at least three (- except for the day I hit Psalm 119; no promises for Hm... wonder what's in all those boxes.... that day!), plus a chapter of Proverbs. See, I've most frequently done the M'Cheyne plan, and I like it. I did it last year, with Carson's For the Love of God. But that has the disadvantage of not reading the books as the authors meant us to, and thus doesn't really follow the narrative. So thus far, I read creation and fall and the first stirring of civilization (Genesis 1-5); then the flood and the division of humanity into languages (Genesis 6-11). For devotion, I'll probably read Spurgeon; he doesn't reliably expound the text, per se; but he speaks cheer and comfort and Christ to my heart, and I need that.
Whatever you do, I do urge you to have a plan and follow it. Aim at nothing, and you're pretty sure to hit just that. Having no plan just doesn't work for me; I think a 3-chapter minimum commitment will. (I'll try to remember to let you know how that worked out at year's end, DV.)

God's let us all live to see the start of another year. Let's set ourselves to love Him and one another - the way He defines love - with greater intensity, reality, and focus.

Dan Phillips's signature

Labels: bumpable, Dan Phillips, discipleship, growth

01 January 2009

New Post

In With the New

Happy New Year
from all of us at TeamPyro

Happy New Year

Here's something to read if you get tired of football:

How I Got Drawn into the Lordship Debate
The Complete, Canonical List

Labels: lordship, TIWIARN

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08 January 2009

Two unrelateds: a sarkicophobia afterthought; and a TIWIARN

07 January 2009

The wrong miracles

TSK weighs in

06 January 2009

Stunned, stymied and sidelined by sarkicophobia

05 January 2009

Apocalypse Then

04 January 2009

Human Philosophy and Scientific Hypotheses Cannot Deliver "Truth"

02 January 2009

New Year 2009: a few scattered thoughts

01 January 2009

In With the New

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