Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
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 gaining the ability to suffer and die. If Jesus was not fully human then he could not have been the substitutionary sacrifice for our sins. By remaining fully God, Jesus was able to bear the penalty for the sins of the whole world and able to be the mediator between God and man.
To misunderstand who Jesus is is to misunderstand the Gospel of salvation. Jesus could not be our Savior if he was only half God and half man. He could not be our Savior if he was created, as some heretical groups teach. Our salvation depends on this important yet difficult Gospel truth.
Please lift me up to the throne of grace in preparation for my trip to Athens, Greece from January 5-14. I will be partnering with Training Leaders International to teach the leaders of the Romanian-speaking churches there. Although some of the older pastors have received training in Romania, many of the younger leaders are unable to receive training in their own language.
It is vitally important for these churches to have men who know how to study and proclaim the Bible. Without training, churches easily fall into errors that can keep them from reaching people for Jesus. As we are reminded every Christmas, what we believe that the Bible teaches has eternal significance!
Please partner with me in prayer as I prepare for this trip. I have raised about half of the $2500 that I need for my portion of the trip. Please pray that God will provide the remaining amount. Also, pray that God will provide a skillful translator for the teaching time. Pray that God will prepare all of our hearts as we study about God’s attributes, and pray that God will strengthen the Romanian-speaking churches in Athens and that many people will meet Jesus through their ministry.
If God impresses on your heart a desire to support my trip financially, then you can do so online by following this link.
I hope that all who read this have merry Christmas that draws you closer to your family, to your church, and most importantly to the God-man we worship! What a privilege it is to proclaim the same good news that angels sang about to those bewildered shepherds all those years ago!
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 normal people, such practices seem just as disconnected from real life as learning to speak Elvish.
Although I have long been an admirer of the Puritans from a distance, the bizarre practices of many who emulate Puritan forms as the means to the Puritans’s godliness have long caused me to keep the Puritans at arms length. J.I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life finally proved to me that both my approach and the approach of the Puritan-ophile are wrong.
Both in secular history and Christian history, there is a tendency to portray the Puritans as being “so heavenly minded that they were of no earthly good.” In my public school education, the Puritans were portrayed as the enemies of Shakespeare, the hysterical witch-hunters of Salem, or the hypocritical victimizers of Hester Prynne. The only primary Puritan source that I recall reading in high school was Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but even in my conservative school, it was derided as uncouth, judgmental, and, well, Puritanical.
Going to Boyce College was quite a different experience when it came to the study of the Puritans. I learned to better appreciate them and respect them, but even there I got the impression that, with a few exceptions, the Puritans were largely irrelevant. I know this was not the intention of my instructors, but this was the perception I received from the Puritans’s own book titles, which are about as long as the books themselves, and the reports that certain Puritan preachers spent decades preaching through books of the Bible. I thought of the Puritans as great men, great theologians, and great men of devotion, but largely irrelevant residents of an ivory tower.
Packer takes great pains to portray the Puritans as truly earthly saints—men of God who wanted to apply God’s truth to every area of their earthly life. Like Roman Catholic monks, Puritans sought a life wholly devoted to God, but, unlike Roman Catholic monasticism, the goal of Puritan “monasticism” was to live out piously in the context of normal human relationships. Rather than pursuing godliness by escaping the world, the Puritans pursued godliness in the world—in their countries, in their communities, in their churches, and in their families.
For the Puritans, no dichotomy between doctrine and godly living existed. The study of, writing about, and preaching of doctrine was important because right doctrine is the means to godly living. Due to this, the Puritans set a great example for us to follow. They were “physicians of the soul,” masters of application. They were not superficial but were penetrating in the way they applied the Word to life. They understood people—their motives, actions, and processes—much better than we do even with all our studies in psychology.
Because of this, the Puritans can aid us today as we attempt to apply the truth of Gospel to our own day and to the lives of people to whom we minister as Christians. Their wisdom should be valued by us today, and it is my hope to read many more Puritan works myself, not because I want to cloister myself away from the modern world but because I want to reach it. Let us imitate the Puritan heart and not merely their forms in a superficial way. Let us not sin against these brothers—these fathers rather—in the faith either by ignoring them or by making of them the Reformed pastor’s equivalent of nerdy, anti-social sci-fi obsession.
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 a little kid voice that our chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”
With this enthusiasm, I started family worship early with Jude. He was barely able to sit in his high chair when every morning after breakfast we began reading a chapter of The Big Picture Story Bible followed by prayer for our day and for an unreached people group. We did this faithfully for almost a year and a half, but over time we became increasingly frustrated with Jude’s lack of engagement. I would swing him in our backyard in Moldova repeatedly asking him the most basic catechetical question: “Jude, who created you? God. Jude, who created this tree? God. Jude, who created Peanut and Heidi (the dogs)? God.” Over and over and over again, I would ask and answer the creation question just hoping that he would attempt to say, “God,” even if it was only because he thought it an amusing sound to make.
Of course, at this same time, we were becoming aware of Jude’s developmental delays, which has only recently been diagnosed as Autism Spectrum Disorder. Feeling defeated by my inability to gain Jude’s interest, I put the story Bible on the bookshelf and left it there. “Some day in the future,” I told myself, “when we overcome these problems, I’ll start family worship again.” After this came our move back to America and the resultant hectic schedule. Any random attempts to revive family worship have been unsuccessful.
When I saw on my syllabus this semester that Dr. Whitney would be teaching on family worship, I thought cynically, “I’m sure he’s never tried to lead a child on the Autism Spectrum in family worship,” and when the day came for his lecture on the subject, I entered the hour with bitterness in my heart. However, my bitterness dissipated as Dr. Whitney made a point that I had never understood before. I had restricted the goal of family worship to engaging children, but Dr. Whitney emphasized that even newlyweds should be worshiping together through Scripture reading, prayer, and song.
Family worship isn’t for children alone. It is for any and every family member capable of being involved. Stacy Leigh and I both need to worship together. As we fight the spiritual battles of discouragement, depression, and despair, we need to strengthen one another through times of worship together, and, as a husband, it is my duty before God to provide such experiences. Previously, my misguided expectations resulted in an unsuccessful practice. With Advent beginning this Sunday, I want to recommit to the practice of leading my family—and more specifically my wife—in worship. I know that doing so will never be easy as Satan desires to keep us from the worship of God and to deprive our family of spiritual food. Yet, I am confident that a clearer, truer expectation for family worship will result in a more profitable experience, and I hope that one day when Jude is capable of joining us, we will have already established a consistent, meaningful family tradition.
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 Judas, that translate the one Greek name Ioudas. Our English-speaking forefathers decided to utilize two different names to avoid confusion between the author of the Letter of Jude and Judas Iscariot who betrayed our Lord. However, in Romanian, there is only one name, Iuda, and this name is most closely associated with Judas Iscariot. We were causing great confusion because people assumed that we had named Jude after Judas Iscariot. I suppose they were asking each other, “What sort of missionaries name their son after the betrayer of the Lord Jesus?”
Even though I did not name my son after him, I think it is important to understand Judas and his actions. If you watch the History Channel specials about Jesus that are always aired around Easter time, you will see liberal theologians trying to analyze Judas and understand his actions. I’ve heard these theologians say things like, “Judas wasn’t really a bad guy. He just became disillusioned with Jesus because Jesus was not taking the action he thought was necessary to establish his kingdom over against the Romans. Judas thought that by getting the Jewish leaders involved Jesus would be forced to act. Judas thought that one day he would be seen as a hero.” Unfortunately, these men treat the gospels like biased news accounts rather than the inspired Word of God.
The Bible affirms that Judas‘ actions were evil. Judas was evil. We should not and cannot justify him and his actions. We do not question the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. However, we must question the uniqueness of Judas‘ evil. Were Judas‘ actions unique? Was Judas Iscariot unique? The answer to this question is both yes and no. Yes, Judas‘ actions were unique because no one in all of history will be the tool Satan—and God, also, in an inexplicable way—uses to bring about the death of Jesus. However, the answer to the question is also no—Judas is not unique.
Judas received incredible blessing. He witnessed Jesus‘ teaching, miracles, and friendship firsthand. He beheld the glory of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. Yet, Judas spurned the blessing of God and sought to achieve his own, personal, monetary blessing by delivering the Son of God to be killed. Following these actions, Judas felt the weight of God’s judgment and sought his own way of atonement by returning the money and committing suicide.
These decisions were a particularly Adamic series of decisions. Where else do we see the same series of events? Genesis 1-3. Adam received incredible blessing from God. He beheld God firsthand. He experienced God’s grace and truth. Yet, Adam spurned the blessing of God and sought to achieve his own, personal blessing by rebelling against God in order to become “like God” himself. But immediately following this, he felt guilt and sought his own way of atonement by making clothes from fig leaves. Just like his son Judas, Adam’s decisions were suicidal in nature. He knew that eating the fruit meant certain death!
Yes, Judas‘ actions are evil, but they are not unique. As equal inheritors of Adam’s nature, apart from God’s grace, we all make this same series of decisions. We all act in this suicidal manner. We have all received incredible benefits from God by the very fact that we are alive. We all, at the very least, see God’s invisible attributes revealed in Creation, but we spurn God’s blessings. In our unrighteousness, we suppress the truth. We seek our own blessing by becoming our own God. We are enemies of God. Our sinful motives, thoughts, words, and deeds are attempts to destroy him. When we do feel guilt over our sin, we seek self-atonement through various methods of religion, psychology, and self-help. But no matter what we do these actions will finally lead to our death. Sin is self-destructive.
Jesus said, “It would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Mark 14:21), and if we do not escape our suicide by God’s grace, we likewise will one day say, “It would have been better for me if I had not been born.” O, But may we not forget that Judas was a disciple! If it was possible for him to fall to such depths, how can I be so prideful to think that I am beyond such self-destructive decisions? “Prone to wonder, Lord, I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love.” Is this not the song of my heart? We must make this our prayer: “Take my heart, Lord; Take and seal it; Seal it for Thy courts above!” One day I will see him, and when I am overcome by his unshielded glory all that I will be able to say is “Grace alone. Grace alone brought me here!”
