How Jesus Rescues Any of Us

This story is not an abnormality. The redemption and honesty is unusual, perhaps, but not the problems. 

I grew up knowing of Skip Ryan--esteemed PCA pastor of Park Cities Presbyterian Church, admired by all. Before the narcotics.

I admire him much more now. 



HT: Mike Berttucci

No Restraint

He whose arms were expanded to suffer, to be nailed to the cross, will doubtless be opened as wide to embrace those for whom he suffered. As God will have no manner of regard to the welfare of the damned, no pity, no merciful care, lest they should be too miserable; so on the contrary with respect to the saints, there will be no happiness too much for them; God will not begrudge any thing as too good for them; there will be no restraint to his love, no restraint to their enjoyment of himself; nothing will be too full, too inward and intimate for them to be admitted to.

--Jonathan Edwards, Miscellany #741, Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale ed., 18:370

Princeton, Orthodoxy, Calvinism

In the early 1900s theological schools in America were quietly stepping away from the historic reformed convictions on which many of them had been founded. Princeton Theological Seminary, founded in 1812, was in its last years of withstanding this pressure, and in 1912 Princeton's president, Francis Landey Patton, triumphantly declared,

The theological position of Princeton Seminary is exactly the same today that it was a hundred years ago.

The same cannot be said for the school's second century. But before he died, at age 82 in 1924, a year after Machen's Christianity and Liberalism was published and in the rising thick of controversy at the school, Landey was invited to deliver a series of lectures at Princeton. J. Ross Stevenson was now president, under whom the school would take a left-hand turn to become more broad as several faculty left to found Westminster. In a statement that those loyal to Old Princeton enjoyed retelling in later years, Landey remarked of historic Calvinism:

I rejoice that it is a system so coordinated, whose doctrines so concatenated, which has been so logically constructed, that if discovered in some future age by an excavating palaeontologist, he would be forced to remark, "Gentlemen, this belonged to the order of vertebrates."

--Iain H. Murray, The Life of John Murray (Banner of Truth, 1984), 18, 24

All That Matters

I walked in the sunshine with a scholar who had effectively forfeited his prospects of academic advancement by clashing with church dignitaries over the gospel of grace. 'But it doesn't matter,' he said at length, 'for I've known God and they haven't.'

--J. I. Packer, Knowing God, 20

The Goal on Which He Had Set His Heart

Scottish-born reformed theologian John Murray taught for many years at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. In the 1920s he was a seminary student at Princeton. For his final homiletics class he wrote a sermon on John 3:30--John the Baptist's words, 'He must increase, I must decrease.' Murray wrote:

We are not to think of these words as spoken in stoical, disappointed submission, but as the expression of a heart full of holy joy that the goal on which he had set his heart had now been actually achieved. His popularity, his increase at the expense of the honor of Christ, would have been his deepest sorrow. . . .

The desire for self-supremacy is an expression of the sin which above all others seeks to undermine the very purpose of the gospel and the gospel ministry, which is the restoration of the kingdom of God and the rule and supremacy of God alone in all spheres and departments of life. May God grant that we follow in the footsteps of John and imitate his self-effacement, self-abasement, self-renunciation, self-forgetfulness! 'God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I unto the world.'

--Iain H. Murray, The Life of John Murray (Banner of Truth, 1984), 2