February 2012
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The Gospel Is For Christians
There is nothing exceptional about Mitch Chase’s book The Gospel Is For Christians, except for the fact that the book itself is exceptional. I have rarely read a book that is so simple yet so comprehensive.
There is nothing unique in Chase’s book. Everything he writes can be found in a number of other books written by great evangelical authors. However, this very fact makes The Gospel...
January 2012
3 posts
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Greece 2012: Summary
[Romanian Class Group Shot]
Thank you once again for your prayers and financial support. I wanted to encourage your faithfulness to God’s mission by sharing with you what God did in Athens this January.
Unfortunately, many mission trips are short-sighted. My two years in Moldova taught me that missions is hard, slow work. I was excited to work with Training Leaders International (TLI) in Athens...
Greece 2012: Confidence and Trust
Our team is slowly waking up and getting ready to head to the airport for the long trip to Europe. Before leaving I wanted to share one item of prayer with you so that you can join me in presenting this before God.
Please pray that we can quickly gain the confidence and trust of those leaders who will be studying. This is critical to good teaching.
There are at least three crucial things we...
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Greece Trip Journal →
Tomorrow morning I leave for Minneapolis and then for Athens on Friday. One way you can keep up with the happenings of this trip and pray for our team is by reading our trip journal on the Training Leaders International website. I will do my best to also keep my website, Facebook, and Twitter up to date, but, even if I am not able, you can keep track from this site.
December 2011
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Thank You: Goal Met for Greece Trip 2012
Thank you to everyone who contributed to my upcoming trip to Greece. My goal has been met, and now I am working to pack everything for when that plane takes off on Wednesday, January 5th.
I also want to say a special thank you to everyone from Hardin Baptist Church for you generous gift.
Whether now or while in Moldova, it has always been amazing to witness God providing for his mission through...
“Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe,...”
– John Donne (1572-1631)
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Christmas Means Theological Training Is Important
At Christmas, we take the time to remember the amazing truth about the person of Jesus. “Remaining what he was, he became what he was not.” When he was born in Bethlehem, Jesus remained fully God, but he also, in a mysterious way, became fully man.
By becoming fully man, the eternal Son of God gained the ability to experience every temptation and trial that we face while also...
November 2011
9 posts
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A Quest for Godliness
Many lovers of the Puritans posses the cultural irrelevance and kookiness of hardcore Trekies or Renaissance faire nuts. Going to a church led by a Puritan-obsessed pastor can be a bizarre experience as twenty-first century persons try their best to pretend they are in fact living in the seventeenth century with the exceptions of their clothing, sound system, and electric lights. To many more...
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Failing and Re-Learning Family Worship
Consistent, meaningful times of family worship have long been a goal of mine. When Stacy was pregnant with Jude, she obsessed over cloth diapers and baby slings while I spent my time perusing Amazon and bookstores for resources for family worship. I imagined reading and re-reading the Bible storybooks until we all had them practically memorized. I imagined catechizing Jude and hearing him say with...
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Was Judas Iscariot Unique?
When introducing ourselves in Moldova, people often had difficulty with our foreign-sounding names. To alleviate this difficulty, we would give the Romanian equivalents of our names: Joshua is Iosua, Stacy is a version of Anastasia, and Jude is Iuda. We were surprised, however, when a friend said to us one day, “Don’t tell people that Jude’s name is Iuda.” In English, we have two names, Jude and...
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The Pilgrim's Influence
Our tears to joy, our fears to faith Are turned, as we see.
Twice I have read the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, but only now have I completed the entire book including the second part.
The first part is the classic story. Christian escapes the City of Destruction by going through the narrow, wicket gate. While taking the King’s Highway, he faces many trials and...
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Teaching the Perfections of God's Beauty
In the midst of a psalm that emphasizes God’s judgment and his desire for genuine worship, Asaph sings this beautiful line—“Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth” (Ps 50:2). He imagines the glory of God shining forth into the world from Zion, the holy hill where God is worshiped. I am unsure whether Asaph intended the phrase “the perfection of beauty” to...
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Why Read Books? For People.
Mega-bookstores are overwhelming. On a date last week, Stacy and I went to Barnes & Noble to drink coffee and browse around, and as we were there, I came away with two conflicting impressions. First, so many books exist that should never have been written and should never be read. I saw so many titles that seemed absolutely worthless—books destined to be in the penny bin of a local...
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Missions and Preserving the Faith
Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus...
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WatchA couple of weeks ago, Stacy attended a meeting at the seminary hosted by Chosen Families, a ministry which focuses on hidden disabilities. At the meeting, someone recommended a sermon by John Piper on John 9:1-4 entitled “Why Was This Child Born Blind?”
When God has something to teach us, he often confronts us with the same truth in a number of different ways. The truth of this passage as...
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Teaching Romanian-Speakers in Greece
For the past two years, our family lived and served in the Republic of Moldova because we believe that God wants all peoples to worship him in Christ. There, I taught and trained young people whom I am convinced will be used mightily by God to reach that country for years to come. They have humble hearts enflamed by a passion for the gospel and have received a firm foundation of biblical truth....
October 2011
5 posts
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The Bitter Blessing of Autism Spectrum Disorder
No one plans to have a child on the autism spectrum. We review the worlds that we create in our prenatal imaginations and declare, “It is good.” Sure, there are scraped knees and runny noses in those worlds, but we imagine our children to be unhindered by diseases, disorders, or disabilities. In our minds, we create our children in our own image, only better than ourselves. Of course, to some...
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Holy Helplessness
I’ve never felt as helpless as I do right now. This morning I was praying through Psalm 141, and I clung to verse 8: “But my eyes are toward you, O God, my Lord; in you I seek refuge; leave me not defenseless!” Persons with a simplistic view of faith cannot account for David’s paradoxical words. On the one hand, David proclaims a confident faith in God. He looks toward God because only God can...
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Another Müller?
For several years now, I’ve desired to read a biography of George Müller. I had heard many stories about this man of prayer, but I did not know the whole story of his life. Finally, through Roger Steer’s George Müller: Delighted in God I’ve fulfilled that desire.
I found that the typical stories which I had heard about George Müller’s extraordinary faith were true. At the time of his...
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Food for the Mud-Hole
Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! Oh, fear the LORD, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing (Ps 34:8-10).
We can often be too bland and unfeeling in our descriptions of spiritual experience, but the Word of God is not so. Biblical Hebrew does...
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Chosen Families: What's in a Name? →
I love the transparency and hope of this dad, and I especially love this line:
Christ is taking the challenges associated with Fletcher’s disability and gently blowing the tiny flame of grace in my heart until it becomes a raging fire of His love and mercy.
Read the rest of this article about being the dad of a child with a hidden disability here.
September 2011
10 posts
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Humbling Encouragement of a Death Well-Died
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve completed two biographies: Andrew Fuller: Model Pastor-Theologian and George Müller: Delighted in God. I love biographies. My other favorites include John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, which I read last winter, and the classics: Augustine’s Confessions, Patrick of Ireland’s Confession, and Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot.
...
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“Children need nature for the healthy development of their senses, and,...”
– Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, p. 54
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God's Refreshing Revelation
This weekend I made it a deliberate point to get Jude and myself outside (Stacy Leigh was sick so she didn’t join us much). I wanted to do this because interaction with God’s Creation inevitably results in refreshment for God’s image-bearing creatures. Unfortunately for seminarians, the outdoors are often merely a portal we pass through between home and school and work, and for Jude, I had begun...
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Daily He Bears Us Up
Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation. Selah (Psa 68:19).
In Psalm 68, King David celebrates God’s perfect protection and provision for his people, the nation of Israel. God causes the righteous to rejoice by destroying Israel’s enemies, by bringing justice to the oppressed, and punishing the wicked. God has already demonstrated such deeds by liberating Israel. He...
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“The goal of the home is not riches or comfort but the praise of God in all...”
– Diane and Tom Schreiner, “Marriage, Family and Seminary” in Towers (September 2011)
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General Letters & Writings of John Notes Available
This summer, I completed the final installment of my 3-year New Testament curriculum, which I wrote for the EurAsian Baptist Bible Institute. After completing the most involved project of my academic and ministerial life thus far, I collapsed in exhaustion and have just now gotten around to posting it online.
So, without further ado, you can find the General Letters & Writings of John notes...
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Moth, Rust, and Thieves
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroy and thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matt 6:19-21).
Jesus gives his disciples in these verses two opposite commands—one negative, one...
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Escalating Impossibility
I keep deluding myself into thinking that one day life will be easy. Isn’t that the American Dream—or rather the American Expectation? You may—even should—struggle early on in your adult life, but with enough hard work and determination you will eventually come to a point of financial stability and even prosperity. Isn’t this our expectation, our entitlement? A life of ease and...
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August 2011
8 posts
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"...His Disciples Came to Him"
“Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him” (Matt 5:1).
This verse begins the greatest sermon ever preached—the Sermon on the Mount, and it has become a habit—almost an oral tradition—among evangelical scholars to focus on the context that this verse gives to the sermon itself. Students of the Bible observe that Jesus’...
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“No, the Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book of heroes. The Bible is...”
– Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible, p. 17
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The Cure for Self-Pity
When Jude was six months-old, my wife and I were disappointed that he did not imitate us or do “tricks” like our friends’ children. When he was a year-old, we began to be frustrated, but by the time he was two years-old, we had grown increasingly concerned about his delayed language development. Now with a two and a half year-old, we have come to understand that Jude’s developmental delays...
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“Purity is right. Impurity is wrong.
True? Absolutely. But it’s equally...”
– Randy Alcorn, The Purity Principle: God’s Safeguards for Life’s Dangerous Trails, p. 16
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"Keep" in Jude
Stacy Leigh and I named our firstborn after the Letter of Jude, and therefore the Letter of Jude was the first book of the Bible—so far the only book—we’ve ever memorized. By memorizing a book or long passage of Scripture (we’ve also done Ephesians 1:1-14) you are able to meditate and study the Scripture with greater precision than by merely reading it or studying it on...
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“[Concerning the depression or “fainting fits” experienced by...”
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 155 (in the 1954 edition)
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Income Concerns in Seminary and Ministry →
Great encouragement. Ministry is not a career in which you work toward financial stability. Ministry is following Jesus no matter the cost.
Here’s a taste of Dr. Coppenger’s article:
“So to those who are anxious over how they will make it, let me offer a word of encouragement. God will give you what you need, but not necessarily when you want it. As one preacher I heard in...
July 2011
2 posts
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July 2011 Update
While in Moldova, we got used to writing monthly updates for supporters. Since returning, we have not kept up the practice. However, we know that many people are still praying for us, so I thought I would give you an update so that you can know what God has done and what we still need him to do.
We moved to Louisville last week. We are now unpacked and settled into our apartment. We enjoy where...
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“How can God be absolutely sovereign at the same time as man is absolutely...”
– Graeme Goldsworthy, The Gospel in Revelation in The Goldsworthy Trilogy, p. 235
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Half-Amish
Last week a truck driver tragically struck a horse-drawn buggy in western Kentucky killing a three-year-old Amish girl (Read the story here.) Even though the driver was under the influence and clearly exhibiting reckless behavior, in the minds of many in rural Kentucky, the tragedy serves as further evidence of the need for Amish communities to accept certain regulations for their own safety.
...
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“Because we can do life without God, praying seems nice but unnecessary. Money...”
– Paul Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World, 324 [Kindle]
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Unemployment
[My dad and I find ourselves in the same boat. His factory—Goodyear in Union City, Tennessee—is closing this year.]
The difficulties in life expose our hearts. When living comfortably, we can hide our sins and our idols from others and even from ourselves, but adversity brings all to light.
I first discovered this as a newlywed. As a single college-guy who lived alone, I had begun...
He Leadeth Me: Saved by Grace →
Great post from my sister, jessihutchens:
3 years ago I was planning to go on a mission trip to Nicaragua with my church. 3 years later I am planning to do the same. But, 3 years ago my plans were different, my motives were different, my heart was different, and my eternity was different. When I finally arrived in Nicaragua, little did I…
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The Beauty and the Geek →
This link is to Eric Chapman’s blog where he recently posted a reflection on our time in Moldova. Eric was too kind with his words in this post.
I would only add that we too wondered what we were getting ourselves into. Stacy Leigh had only met Eric and Stephanie once, and I had only spoken to them over the phone. However, we quickly found friends and mentors in them. They made Moldova easy...
May 2011
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March 2011
1 post
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September 2010
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Moldova on the Radio
In July, Bro. Bob Burney visited Moldova to preach at our central camp. While here, he continued to broadcast his live radio show on WRFD 880AM in Columbus, Ohio.
We are thankful for the programs he did because he was able to capture the stories of what God is doing here in Moldova. With his permission, I’ve posted the programs below so that you may hear these God-stories from Moldova.
Bob...