Blog
Naperville Presbyterian Church
Along with a few others from our body, Stacey and I mention a few reasons we bless God for our church. As the boys wander around. As usual.
And great to see some outstanding teaching taking place among the women at around the 3:00 mark.
And great to see some outstanding teaching taking place among the women at around the 3:00 mark.
Resurrection = The Dawn of the New Creation
Jeremias:
There is nothing comparable to the resurrection of Jesus anywhere in Jewish literature. Certainly there are mentions of raisings from the dead, but these are always resuscitations, a return to earthly life. Nowhere in Jewish literature do we have a resurrection to doxa as an event of history. Rather, resurrection to doxa always and without exception means the dawn of God's new creation. Therefore the disciples must have experienced the appearances of the Risen Lord as an eschatological event, as a dawning of the turning point of the worlds.--Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus (trans. John Bowden; New York: Scribner's, 1971), 309
The Peace of God, Dying to the World, and Suffering
Lewis, writing to Warfield Firor, December 1949, on "the peace of God" as referenced in Phil. 4:7--
Our idea of peace expresses only the negative results of it: the exclusion of care, haste, fear etc. but not the positive thing that excludes them. So someone who has never bathed might think of a swim only as absence of clothes, absence of solidity in touch with one, etc.: but not what really counts, the cool, yielding embrace of the water. But (here comes the rub) does it not come exactly in proportion as we have, in some sense, died?--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (HarperCollins, 2004), 1007-8
I am concerned about that at present, chiefly as a result of reading William Law. It's all there in the New Testament, though. 'Dying to the world'--'the world is crucified to me and I to the world.' And I find I haven't begun: at least not if it means (and can it mean less) a steady and progressive disentangling of all one's motives from the merely natural or this-worldly objects: like training a creeper to grow up one wall instead of another. I don't mean disentangling from things wrong in themselves, but, say, from the very pleasant evening which we hope to have over a ham tomorrow night, or from gratification at my literary success. It is not the things, nor even the pleasure in them, but the fact that in such pleasures my heart, or so much of my heart, lies.
Or to put it in a fantastic form--if a voice said to me (and one I couldn't disbelieve) 'you shall never see the face of God, never help to save a neighbor's soul, never be free from sin, but you shall live in perfect health till you are 100, very rich, and die the most famous man in the world, and pass into a twilight consciousness of a vaguely pleasant sort forever'--how much would it worry me? How much compared with another war? Or even with an announcement that I should have to have all my teeth out? You see? And what right have I to expect the Peace of God while I thus put my whole heart, at least all my strongest wishes, in the world which he has warned me against?
Well, thank God, we shall not be left to the world. All His terrible resources (but it is we who force Him to use them) will be brought against us to detach us from it--insecurity, war, poverty, pain, unpopularity, loneliness. We must be taught that this tent is not home. And, by jove, how terrible it would be if all suffering, including death itself, were optional, so that only a very few voluntary ascetics ever even attempted to achieve the end for which we are created. Dare we gloss the text 'Strait is the way and few there be that find it' by adding 'And that's why most of you have to be bustled and badgered into it like sheep--and the sheep-dogs have to have pretty sharp teeth too'!
Ministerial Confession of 1651
In the 1640s our forefathers drew up the Westminster Standards, those
marvelous statements of Christian doctrine that have stood the test of
time and continue to guide the church today. Rich, careful,
reverent, true.
A few years later, in 1651, a group of pastors in Scotland who had accepted these documents doctrinally realized that they had another need, not in their creeds but in their hearts. They determined that they needed not only to confess publicly these doctrines but also to confess publicly their sins as leaders of the church.
Here is part of what they confessed, reproduced in Horatius Bonar's Words to Winners of Souls.
A few years later, in 1651, a group of pastors in Scotland who had accepted these documents doctrinally realized that they had another need, not in their creeds but in their hearts. They determined that they needed not only to confess publicly these doctrines but also to confess publicly their sins as leaders of the church.
Here is part of what they confessed, reproduced in Horatius Bonar's Words to Winners of Souls.
Exceeding great selfishness in all that we do; acting from ourselves, for ourselves and to ourselves.--Horatius Bonar, Words to Winners of Souls (American Tract Society, 1950), 24-28; language slightly updated
Not caring how faithful and negligent others were, if it might testify to our faithfulness and diligence, but being rather content, if not rejoicing, at their faults.
Seldom in secret prayer with God, except to fit for public performance; and that much neglected, or gone about very superficially.
Glad to find excuses for the neglect of our duties. Neglecting the reading of Scripture in secret, for edifying ourselves as Christians. . . . Not given to reflect upon our own ways, nor allowing conviction to have a thorough work upon us; deceiving ourselves by resting upon absence from and abhorrence of evils from the light of a natural conscience, and looking upon the same as an evidence of a real change of state and nature.
Not esteeming the cross of Christ and sufferings for his name honorable, but rather shifting sufferings from self-love.
Not laying to heart the sad and heavy sufferings of the people of God abroad, and the not-thriving of the kingdom of Jesus Christ and the power of godliness among them.
Refined hypocrisy; desiring to appear what, indeed, we are not. Artificial confessing of sin, without repentance. . . . Confession in secret much slighted, even of those things whereof we are convicted.
Readier to search out and censure faults in others than to see or deal with them in ourselves. Accounting of our estate and way according to the estimate that others have of us. . . .
Not praying for men of a contrary judgment, but using reservedness and distance from them; being more ready to speak of them than to them, or to God for them.
Not preaching Christ in the simplicity of the gospel, nor ourselves the people's servants, for Christ's sake. Preaching of Christ, not that the people may know him, but that they may think we know much of him. . . .
Too much eyeing our own credit and applause; and being pleased with it when we get it, and unsatisfied when it is lacking. Cowardice in delivering God's message; letting people die in reigning sins without warning.