Living Hope

"You must indeed, O believer, grapple with death, and shall get the first fall – but you shall rise..."

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 21:59:00 -0800

“

You must indeed, O believer, grapple with death, and shall get the first fall – but you shall rise again, and come off victorious at last. You must go down to the grave; but, though it be your long home, it will not be your everlasting home.

You will not hear the voice of your friends there; but you shall hear the voice of Christ there. You may be carried there with mourning, but you shall come up from it rejoicing. Your friends, indeed, will leave you there, but your God will not. What God said to Jacob, concerning his going down to Egypt (Gen. 46:3, 4), he says to you, on your going down to the grave, ‘Fear not to go down – I will go down with you – and I will also surely bring you up again.’

O solid comfort! O glorious hopes! ‘Therefore comfort’ yourselves, and ‘one another with these words’ (1 Thess. 4:18).

”

- Thomas Boston

The Bible Speaks

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 23:46:00 -0800

20 applications from Ephesians 1:3-4

1. “Blessed”

You have reasons for worshiping God no matter what is happening in your life.

2. “Be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”

There is a complexity to God that is important you work on understanding and appreciating if you are going to worship Him enthusiastically and biblically.

3. “Who has blessed”

It is sinful for you as a believer to think or act like you have not been given anything by God.

4. “Who has blessed”

As a believer you do not come to God first hoping for God to give you something, but instead as someone who has already been given something – beyond your wildest expectations.

5. “Us”

While God has been very good to you as an individual, it is important you do not lose sight of the fact that God’s great plan is bigger than just you. He is seeking the long term good of the church.

6. “With every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”

It is not only wrong for you to think you have not been given anything. It is wrong for you to think or act like you have not been given much by God. To have every spiritual blessing is to be rich. When you act as if you were poor, you are forgetting who you are.

7. “In Christ”

Because every single good thing in your life comes from God as a result of Jesus, while you should be confident as a believer, you should also be extremely humble and thankful.

8. When you are in difficult circumstances you should follow Paul’s example and take time to meditate and enjoy what you know to be true about who God is and what God is doing and what you know about the plan He is accomplishing in this world.

9. When you are in difficult circumstances it is tempting when you talk to others to try to find a way to focus their attention on you, but Paul does not do that. Instead he seeks to encourage others to focus their attention on God.

10. “Just as He chose us in Him”

God’s choosing of believers is an example of God’s goodness and a reason to worship and if I think of it as something other than that I am not thinking of it correctly.

11. “Just as He chose us in Him”

You should always feel a deep sense of dependency on Jesus because there has never been a time in the history of the entire universe where any of your blessings came apart from Him.

12. “Before the foundation of the world”

If you ever wonder if the church is an important part of God’s plan you need to see that it goes before the universe. In other words, God did not create the universe and say how should I fill it, but chose the church and then went about designing the universe.

13. “Before the foundation of the world”

When you begin to become worried about the success of the church, you should remember that God’s work in the church is not a passing whim but instead part of a decision He made before the foundation of the world.

14. Because God’s choice of you happened before the foundation of the world and it happened only in Christ, it is obviously very foolish for you to think of your salvation as being based on what you deserve for living your life a certain way.

15. When you begin to feel insecure about God’s plan for your life, you need to remember this is not something he just started working on but instead something He has been deliberately moving towards for a long time.

16. “So that you might be holy and blameless before Him…”

While the world around you minimizes the importance of holiness, God does not. Your holiness is an important issue to God. He chose you for it.

17. “So that…”

When you look at your life and wonder if you are ever going to be holy before God, here you see that it is not just wanting to be holy but God choosing you for the purpose of being holy and if God wants that to happen, you can be sure it is going to happen.

18. “So that…”

When you look at the church and you begin to become discouraged because you think how can this work, how can I help these people become holy, you need to step back and enjoy the fact that God is much more interested in the church’s victory than you could ever be.

19. “We might be holy and blameless…”

When Paul thought about God’s eternal plan for the church, one of the things that excited him most was the fact that we as a church will be holy and blameless before God some day. While there were many other things he could have mentioned, like He chose us to be rich, or He chose us to be pain free, holiness and blamelessness were especially precious to Paul and they should be to you as well. If you were to make a list of life’s absolute greatest blessings, would being pure and holy come to your mind? This is something you should long for, for yourself and others as well.

20. “Before God”

Knowing that you will stand before the Creator of the Universe and He will look at you and your life and consider you clean, right, and without blame should make what other people think about you matter much, much less. Why spend your life trying to gain the approval of other people when you already know you have and will continue to have the approval of God.

Believer: I look at myself and wonder how can God have good in store for me in my future?

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 01:01:06 -0700

Believer: I look at myself and wonder how can God have good in store for me in my future?
Paul: In Him we have obtained an inheritance.
Believer: I look all that is going on in the world and wonder can God really bring this great plan He has to pass?
Paul: In Him we have obtained an inheritance having been predestined by Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will.
Believer: I look at the difficulties I am experiencing and wondering is God really working all this for my good?
Paul: When you believe in Christ, God identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit whom He promised long ago. The Spirit is God's guarantee that He will give us the inheritance He promised.
Believer: But I look at the church and wonder why would God be so committed to our eternal good?
Paul: God's did all this to the praise of His glory.

"Christian worship is the response of God’s redeemed people to His self-revelation that exalts God’s..."

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:55:26 -0700

“

Christian worship is the response of God’s redeemed people to His self-revelation that exalts God’s glory in Christ in our minds, affections, and wills, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Christian worship…is different from every kind of worship because it has been made possible through Jesus Christ. (Rev. 5:9-10)

Is the response…God has already done something outside of us and inside of us that enables us to worship Him. We are not the initiators of worship; God is. (Acts 17:24-31)

Of God’s redeemed people…Just as God delivered the nation of Israel from Egypt to worship Him (Ex. 8:1), so He has redeemed us as a holy nation to declare His praises. (1 Pet. 2:9) Worship of God is intended to be corporate, not simply personal.

To his self-revelation…we can’t know God apart from Him revealing Himself to us. He has shown Himself to us in creation, His Word, and ultimately His Son. (Rom. 1:20; Heb. 1:1-4)

That exalts…the essence of worship is exalting - raising up, lifting high, submitting to, magnifying, making much of, honoring, reverencing, celebrating – the triune God. (Ps. 71:19)

God’s glory in Christ…Moses asked God to show him his glory and God passed before him and proclaimed his nature. (Ex. 34:6-7) God has enabled us to see His glory in the face of Christ. (2 Cor. 4:6)

In our minds…worship involves thinking, meditating, reflecting, processing, evaluating, understanding what God has revealed to us of Himself. (Rom. 12:1-2; Ps. 111:2)

Affections…true worship involves the heart as well as the head. We worship what we love and value the most. (Mt. 22:37-38)

And wills…If we are truly worshipping God, we will truly be transformed. (2 Cor. 3:17-18) Our choices will reflect our profession that God is supreme in our lives. (Rom. 12:1-2)

In the power of the Holy Spirit…We are those who worship by the Spirit of God, (Phil. 3:3) and depend on His leading and enabling.

”

- Bob Kauflin

Atonement

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 23:47:52 -0700

Atonement

"In every age, the man who has seen the risen Christ is the man with a mission; his true home is a..."

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:18:25 -0700

“In every age, the man who has seen the risen Christ is the man with a mission; his true home is a missionary community; and God wills that through him others may be drawn into the fellowship.”

- James S. Stewart

Paul: I have an ambition.

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:41:52 -0700

Paul: I have an ambition.
Believer: What do you mean by that?
Paul: I mean that I am driven.
Believer: To do what?
Paul: To please God in every single area of my life every single day of my life.
Believer: Why are you so serious about doing that?
Paul: Because we all are going to appear before Jesus as judge one day and He is going to evaluate the way in we used the life He gave us.

Thinking Hard about God

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:35:39 -0700

“To be spiritually minded … is to have our minds really exercised with delight about heavenly things … especially Christ himself as at the right hand of God.

Spiritual mindedness is developed, exercised and reinforced by meditation. By … . meditation, I intend the thought of some subject spiritual and divine, with the fixing, forcing, and ordering of our thoughts about it, with a design to affect our own hearts and souls with the matter of it… . In meditation our principal aim is the affecting of our own hearts and minds with love, delight, and humiliation… .

Because persons are generally at a great loss in this duty of meditation … I shall … give briefly two or three rules for the directing of believers to a right performance of this great duty, and they are these:

Meditate on God with God, that is, when we would undertake thoughts and meditations of God, his excellencies, his properties, his glory, his majesty, his love, his goodness, let it be done in a way of speaking to God, in a deep humiliation and abasement of our souls.

Meditate on the word in the word; that is, in the reading of it, consider the sense in the particular passages, … looking to God for help, guidance, and direction, in the discovery of his mind and will therein, and then labour to have our hearts affected with it.

What we come short of in evenness and constancy in our thoughts … let it be made up … by frequent returns of the mind to the subject proposed to be meditated upon.”

John Owen

Small Groups

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:27:00 -0700

We will be meeting in small groups this Sunday morning before our service in the afternoon. These small groups are scattered throughout Pretoria. As our church grows, we hope these small groups will become more and more an important part of each church member’s lives. Here are some reasons why:

1. Small groups provide an opportunity to get to know other believers in your local church in a more in depth way.

2. Small groups provide an opportunity to think specifically about the truths you are learning from the Scripture and to talk with other believers about how to apply these truths to your everyday lives.

3. Small groups provide an opportunity for you to show the love of Christ to others and enjoy the love of Christ as it is shown to you.

4. Small groups provide an opportunity for you to use your spiritual gifts in service to others.

5. Small groups provide an opportunity for you to work at becoming a biblical friend to others within the local church.

6. Small groups provide an opportunity to receive godly leadership from leaders within the church.

7. Small groups provide an opportunity to invite unbelievers to an informal setting where they can learn more about the gospel.

8. Small groups provide an opportunity to think with other believers how to make Jesus look great in your local community.

"One of the sweetest statements from the lips of Jesus … is this: ‘Come, you blessed of My..."

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:54:23 -0700

“One of the sweetest statements from the lips of Jesus … is this: ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world’ (Matt. 25:34b). There is a plan of God designed for your salvation. It is not an afterthought or an attempt to correct a mistake. Rather, from all eternity, God determined that He would redeem for Himself a people, and that which He determined to do was, in fact, accomplished in the work of Jesus Christ, His atonement on the cross. Your salvation has been accomplished by a Savior, One who did for you what the Father determined He should do. He is your Surety, your Mediator, your Substitute, your Redeemer. He atoned for your sins on the cross.”

- R. C. Sproul, The Truth of the Cross (Orlando, FL; Reformation Trust Pub., 2007), 152-153.

HT: Of First Importance

“Death in His Grave” by John Mark McMillan

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:22:26 -0700

“Death in His Grave” by John Mark McMillan

Jesus is coming back

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:47:56 -0700

We don’t know when Jesus is coming back, but we know for sure He is.

1. The trustworthiness of the Bible demands it.

In the Scripture God promises hundreds of times that Jesus will return and God always tells the truth.

2. The justice of God requires it.

God hates sin and will not leave it unpunished. He is sending His Son to judge it.

3. The love Jesus has for His people necessitates it.

Shortly before His crucifixion, Jesus comforted His disciples by promising to come for them. His love for His people has not diminished. He will return.

4. The hopes of all God’s people depend on it.

Everything we long for as believers is based on Jesus’ future return. If He doesn’t come back, all of our hopes are dashed.

5. The purpose of the universe calls for it.

The church, the world and the entire universe is about the exaltation of Jesus Christ. The last time the unbelieving world saw Jesus He was hanging on the cross. God the Father is not going to leave it like that. Everyone in the entire world will see that Jesus Christ is King.

What is the heart of the gospel?

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:58:56 -0700

What is the heart of the gospel?

Psalm 37

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:56:00 -0700

Believer: I am overwhelmed by the amount of evil there is in this world and am beginning to fear because of the evil men that surround me, in fact, sometimes I find myself wishing I had what they had. It all seems to come so easy for them.
Psalmist: Do not fret because of evil men, or be envious of those who do wrong.
Believer: But why?
Psalmist: For like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will die away.
Believer: What should I do then? How should I respond?
Psalmist: Trust in the Lord and do good. Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust in Him and He will do this.
Believer: Do what? What will God do?
Psalmist: He will make your righteousness shine like the dawn, the justice of your cause like the noonday sun.
Believer: Can you give me an idea of what that kind of attitude will look like and how I can develop that attitude in the midst of the craziness of my everyday life?
Psalmist: Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him. Do not fret when evil men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. Refrain from anger and turn from wrath, do not fret - it only leads to evil.
Believer: Tell me why again?
Psalmist: For evil men will be cut off, but those who hope in the Lord will inherit the land. A litte while, and the wicked will be no more; though you look for them, they will not be found. But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy great peace.

"To be a disciple is to be a disciple-maker."

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 02:51:32 -0700

“To be a disciple is to be a disciple-maker.”

- Colin Marshall and Tony Payne

Clean

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:04:41 -0700

I want you to imagine something.

We sometimes have difficulty looking ourselves in the mirror because of the shame we feel because of the bad things we have done.

Imagine being brought before someone who knows everything about you. And when I say knows everything about you, He knows absolutely every thought and desire you have ever had. Not in some sort of faded memory kind of way. He has the kind of mind where everything you have ever wanted, everything you have ever thought, it is right there in front of Him perfectly.

And what is more He is absolutely pure. This is someone you look at and besides the fact that He is awesome, huge, powerful, massive, you see Him and you know He is perfection. You know the feeling you get when you see something that just seems so right, take that feeling and multiply it by infinity. This person knows everything about you, and this person is absolutely glorious and right.

Now take this one step further, imagine being able to stand before a person like that. And not just stand but to be confident before a person like that. And not just that, but to be fully assured before a person like that. Not quivering because you think He might see something.

That is a clean conscience.

This is not just having a group of friends who approve of you and what you have done. This is having someone who actually matters and someone who knows everything that you have done, approve and not just having Him approve but being fully assured of that approval and the writer of Hebrews says that those who are believers in Jesus Christ have just that because of the work of Christ on the cross on their behalf!

“When Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled, sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh , how much more will the blood of Christ who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”

John Piper explains what is going on like this,

“All throughout the Old Testament conscience was an issue. But the animal sacrifices themselves could not cleanse the conscience. Hebrews 9:9 and 10 explains, ‘Gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with food and drink and various washing, regulations for the body imposed until the time of reformation.’ As a foreshadowing of Christ God counted the blood of animals as sufficient for cleansing the flesh – the ceremonial uncleanness, but not for the conscience. No animal blood could cleanse the conscience. They knew it and we know it. So a new high priest comes – Jesus the Son of God – with a better sacrifice: himself. Hebrews 9:14, ‘How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.’”

That’s a reason for confidence!

Or as the writer of Hebrews puts it,

“Since therefore brethren we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, His flesh, and since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”

An excerpt from David Platt’s sermon: The Gospel Demands...

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:52:00 -0700

An excerpt from David Platt’s sermon: The Gospel Demands Radical Compassion

"What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics,..."

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:04:00 -0700

“What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything else of that sort. Christians come together … because … they have all been loved by Jesus himself …. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake.”

- D.A. Carson

Faith is not ignoring reality

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 23:29:34 -0700

Faith is not ignoring reality:

The Stand to Reason blog has an fascinating insight into the prosperity gospel…

The post begins:

In his 2009 book The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, Ben Sherwood describes an intriguing phenomenon known as the Stockdale Paradox (after Admiral James Stockdale, the highest-ranking P.O.W. of the Vietnam War), which suggests a counterintuitive link between optimism and survival:

When [interviewer Jim Collins] asked Stockdale to explain which American prisoners did not survive captivity in Vietnam, the admiral replied, “Oh, that’s easy. The optimists.” Collins was perplexed, but Stockdale explained that the optimists “were the ones who said ‘we’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go; and then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Stockdale went on: “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” (emphasis mine)

Note that according to Stockdale it isn’t optimism per se that leads to heartbreak and despair, but an optimism of baseless expectations for specific and immediate improvement. Although such optimism is always energizing at first, the excitement invariably sours to disillusionment as the optimist is faced with a stark incongruity between the world as it actually is and the world as he imagined it to be. This lesson, of course, applies as much to spiritual survival as it does to the physical. The prosperity “gospel,” with its promises of material wealth and temporal bliss, leaves its believers vulnerable to the same kind of heartbreak described above…

HT: VitaminZ

Believer: How's ministry going Paul?

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:42:00 -0700

Believer: How's ministry going Paul?
Paul: We are constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus sake.
Believer: Wow. That sounds dangerous. A little risky. How you handling that?
Paul: We are keeping on, keeping on. We are not becoming discouraged.
Believer: You are not? How can that be? It sounds pretty tough. Look at the difficulties you are experiencing.
Paul: It is true, our bodies are having a rough time of it. You look at us from the outside and it's going to look like things are getting worse and worse, actually. But if you could see us from the inside out, you would see our inner man is getting stronger day by day.
Believer: That's great Paul. I am glad that you are growing, but I am just wondering how you are able to handle the amount of suffering you are experiencing without giving up?
Paul: Well, really the suffering I am experience is a small thing.
Believer: Small thing. No, no, no, Paul. How can you say that? Beaten, shipwrecked, stoned, thrown in prison, doesn't sound small to me.
Paul: You have to look at in perspective. For one thing, look at what it is producing for us. The suffering I am experiencing right now is doing something. It is producing an eternal weight of glory that is far beyond all comparison. But let me try to compare it for a second. My suffering is momentary the glory I will receive eternal. The suffering I am enduring is light when you try to compare it to the glory I am going to experience. Looking at my suffering in comparison to my future glory, it is momentary and light and not a reason for losing heart.
Believer: Wow. I wish I could be like that. How do you live that out though? I know about that glory but it doesn't always give me the kind of courage it is giving you.
Paul: You need to take some action. Look, we are making a practice of not looking at the things which are seen, but we are taking our eyes and focusing them on the things that are not seen because the things that we see are just for a little while and the thing that are not seen are forever.