Stupid Fan Thing

I don't know if I've ever written specifically about anything local before, but hey, there's a first time for everything. And this stupid thing just bugged me that much.

Ever since the middle of December 2002, we've had this so-called 'windmill' scarring our city's skyline for some dumb reason or another. Apparently a few tree-huggers got together and figured they could power up at least one house with this monstrosity... but I don't buy it.

I've been quite suspicious of the efficacy of this terrible turbine for some time now. I think that with the amount of wind we get and the size of the fan, we'd be lucky if the fan managed to power the little red blinking light on the top of it.

I can't think of how many times I've driven by this piece of awful architecture and thought, 'What's making it run... it's not even windy today!' I'm convinced that it's a scam. The government put up the money to fund the ugly thing thinking it would win the votes of a few 'enviro-friendlies' and only once it was up did someone realize, 'Hey, this thing won't be able to power anything!'

Not wanting to look like bad decision-makers or anything, the government-types figured they should cover their tracks so they reversed the power flow... they hooked the fan up to a power source. Now they can make the fan look all pretty as it spins and spins, easing the consciences of all our trash-producing, global-warming (paranoid) minds.

Anyway, today was the final straw. Today (a very windy day) I drove by it only to see it standing still. Someone forgot to flip the switch! That's the only explanation I can think of.

I say take the darn thing down. Stupid fan thing.

Ever wonder why we have this day?

Dr Michael AG Haykin has a wonderful and timely post on St Patrick here.

Whoever said history is irrelevant? Now next time you'll have an answer when someone says, "Why do we have St Patrick's day? Who is this Patrick guy anyway?"

Fantastic Stuff

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort from Way of the Master will be on ABC's "Nightline" tonight at 11.35pm ET.

A preview of the interview can be read here.

You can watch a preview on video here.

Pray for those who'll be seeing the show to be moved to look up the Way of the Master. Pray for God to use the testimony and witness of these two brothers to advance his kingdom for his glory. This is a wonderful opportunity for the Gospel to go forth on primetime US cable. Wow.

[HT: The Twins]

Too much time on my hands...

The other night my wonderful wife and I were lying in bed before going to sleep and my mind got to thinking (a dangerous pass-time, I've discovered)...

Why are kids born out of wedlock called "illegitimate children"? Why does the immorality of the parents call into question the legitmacy of the child?

Make no mistake, that son or daughter is a very real child. So why do they get the bad title, like they did something wrong? Maybe the guilty partners should be called "illegitimate parents" or something. That would definitely make more sense to me.

And then as if that wasn't bad enough, if the kid's a boy he's gotta go through life with everyone calling him a "bastard." Sheesh. It's not like it's his fault he was born...

Jerk

What kind of a guy launches a blog and then doesn't tell anyone?

What kind of a guy just emerges on the blogosphere with a fancy-schmancy design--one that even kerux couldn't complain about, nor could Nick copy!--like it's no big deal while the rest of us non-web-designers have to fuddle around with blogspot and crusty old html (non)skills?

A good guy, I suppose.

The God Who Dissatisfies

In a similar vein with this post, kerux has begun a new series of sermons on the book of Ecclesiastes. This past Sunday evening he preached a preview of the book, and one verse in particular stuck out to me. It left me with this thought:

God has made us to be dissatisfied.

This seems to be a summary of grand biblical theme; I'll just look at a few verses from the wisdom literature here.

1. Ecclesiastes 2.24. This was the verse that got me thinking along these lines. It is literally translated roughly this way: "There is not a good inherent in man that he can eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil." In other words, God creates us so that we know we desire something... as we try to fulfil that desire in anything and everything we find, we discover that nothing can give us lasting enjoyment. We're never satisfied.
2. Ecclesiastes 3.11b. "Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." We know there's purpose and order to all things; we know there's something eternal for which our hearts always cry. This creates endless and unsatiable restlessness because we are created as finite beings which God has created to long for infinity.
3. Psalm 107.25, 26, 28. "For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea. ... their courage melted away in their evil plight... . Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble...". The story here is that some people have decided to try to find their fortunes in business. They take off in ships to see if they can attain wealth. The Lord raises up the waves, lifts them "up to heaven" and crashes them "down to the depths." This is not random. The Lord blows apart their ships to show them something: Business, wealth, or pursuit of your desires will never lead to happiness. God shakes their whole world--everything they had rested their hopes for health and happiness on--to dissatisfy them.
4. Proverbs 10.3. "The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the craving of the wicked." Those who don't know the Lord long for many things: He thwarts all their cravings. They will never be able to obtain that for which they so desperately long.

But why? Why would God--who is love--dissatisfy people? The answer is simple: Because he loves us.

God created us for himself; he alone is eternal and eternally good. He created us to fit him. He created us with desires that perfectly match his character and beauty. The problem is that because of sin we think we know better. We think we want things that we don't. Like doctors of yesteryear who drained sick people of their blood because they thought that the blood contained the sickness, we are hopelessly blind (in our sin) to know what exactly is wrong with us and what we need.

God will dissatisfy you (stir you up to discomfort and restlessness) in every place that you seek to find your life aside from him, if you are his. If you trust in your riches, he bankrupt you. If you trust in your home, he'll flood your basement. Whatever it is that we allow to be our delight and our sufficiency instead of the person of Jesus Christ will not last. It's God's gracious way of showing us that we're relying on something that can never last and is not worthy of our hope.

When the things we have and do don't satisfy us, when we lose something in this life that we love dearly, we need not inquire if God is still good. Rather, we should praise him all the more for weaning our sinful hearts off of the temporal and on to the Eternal Good: Himself. He made us for himself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in him.

What if...

My good friend and cousin, James, wonders: "What if we abandoned the religion of Jesus for the religion of the Bible or the religion of Christianity?"

On the other hand, I can't help but wonder...

What if a group of people became disaffected with the Jesus-followers who came before them and decided that they knew better? What if youthful zeal combined with the afterglow of post-Nietzschean pop-culture and formed a new religion which claimed to be faithful to the old religion long-forgotten? What if the warm-fuzzies then created by discovering the "real Christianity" turned into historical snobbery and together with revisionist history, a disdain for doctrine, and a love for philosophizing about all things ethereal created a grass-roots movement from within "broader evangelicalism"?

I wonder what that would look like... I wonder if they'd be any closer to truth than the "cold", "doctrine-consumed" modern church that came before them, that they disdain so much?

The Church Militant

Kirk Wellum reminded us in class today that the living church is a church at war.

Ever wonder why church people are so lazy? In Kirk's words, they've got all the time and energy to "go, go, go" all week for all kinds of things, but when it comes time to pray or to read their Bibles or do any spiritual task, they're dead. Tired, too busy, etc., etc., etc.

Our battle is not against flesh and blood. I think too often I forget that we are at war with an enemy that hates us being involved in spiritual tasks. Too often I give in and think, "yeah... I am too tired to pray right now" and give no thought to why I wasn't tired five minutes ago.

We don't understand our enemy. The less seriously we take the battle and the enemy, the more we'll lose and the less we'll notice.

The Gospel and Postmodernity

Dr. Glendon G. Thompson preached a fabulous message in chapel today on dangers of living as a Christian in a postmodern context. Ironically enough, the temptations that he brought out are not really particular to our epistemological or cultural contexts so much as they are simply a plight of humanity in a fallen world. The wonderful thing about the message was it applied these universal temptations to contexts and tendencies particular to a postmodern world.

This all got me thinking some more about postmodernity.

My good friend Rielly loves to point out to me (and I think rightfully so) that modernity was no more friendly to Christianity or to biblical Christian thought than postmodernity is. Both are inherently secular philosophies with positives and negatives which must be sorted through and accordingly either accepted or rejected.

Even with Rielly's voice floating around in the back of my head, I started thinking... perhaps postmodernity is more inherently opposed to Christianity. Off the top of my head I came up with four reasons to think this is so:

1. Declaration of ethical absolutes. Scripture declares moral absolutes based on the character and revealed will of God. These are true regardless of time and / or culture. North American postmodernity, based on existentialism, rejects this notion out of hand.
   
2. The centrality of metanarrative. Central to Christianity is the God of Christianity. He is one who transcends time and all creation. He has providentially ordered all things according to his good and perfect will. All of history, then, is one story, centred on the revelation of his Son--the image of his glory--who redeems his people for himself. Metanarrative is what holds our whole worldview together.
3. The necessity of truth and intent contained in words and phrases. If there is no objective meaning contained within a text which can be determined through proper hermeneutical method, then again, our whole worldview crashes. Biblical Christianity cannot be sustained if it is impossible to derive meaning from a text apart from the biases of the reader.
4. The concept of truth and its 'knowability.' This is the element of postmodernity that most Christians love to write about and pick on, so I'll leave it with only one comment here. The person of Jesus Christ is Truth Incarnate. Truth is knowable, because Truth became man. If we cannot accept that proposition, the whole faith is meaningless.
   

Continuing on my love for the Church

As if I hadn't been thinking about reasons why I love the Church enough lately, Dr Haykin comes to our church and preaches on "THE Church"!

Fantastic stuff!

Check out the sermon for free, here.

He preached that in our evening service. In the morning, I preached on divorce in the kingdom of God.

A Tale of Two Churches -- Part 2

About five or so years ago now, I was involved in a church plant here in Toronto. We started with about five of us meeting together for a weekly Bible study and for prayer. Over time, we found another family or two interested in helping to establish the work and so we began to hold Sunday morning services in a home.

Now we meet in the gym of a school. We meet Sunday morning and Sunday night for worship. Wednesday evenings are ‘Grace Night’, where the adults meet for prayer and the kids have games time and classes. We’re up over a hundred people now, and we are a very close family of believers.

That’s it. No big purpose-drivel programs, no singles clubs, no Sunday school, and no youth pastors. Our kids (ages 2 and over) sit through the services, and the pastor preaches to them. Our sermons are typically 45 minutes to an hour on Sunday mornings and our pastor intentionally preaches through the Word of God book-by-book.

On Sunday nights the services are more interactive, but still centred on the Word. We encourage people to talk and ask questions and we all ‘improve the message’ by talking about it corporately. Kids too. We make sure they hear the gospel, because they are little sinners with eternal souls that need to be saved.

On Wednesday nights we begin by worshipping God through song and then break up into age appropriate groups. Kids have their classes and adults (everyone over grade 12) gather for prayer. That’s it. We pray. For a good 45 minutes to an hour. We never run out of things to pray about. We are intentional in making sure that prayer is always central to everything we do.

We’re not perfect, but we’re a group of sinners seeking earnestly to redeem church, and I love it. It’s authentic, gospel-centred, and soaked in prayer. I couldn’t ask for more. Who could?

Why do people make church so much more complicated than it needs to be? Focus on the gospel; be intentional in preaching to everyone and praying for everyone. If that is genuinely your focus, I truly believe the Lord will make the rest clear.

Venture much on God—if he is in it, he’ll bless your work. If not, then great! Rejoice! He’s made it clear to you that he has another plan for building his church.

If we truly believe that our Lord Jesus will build his church on his word, through the prayers of his saints, then why do we sell ourselves out to so many specialization fads and programs that promise to bring in a crowd or build ‘genuine community’ (as if any but the Holy Spirit could produce true unity)? Why not commit ourselves to prayer and the study of the Word and trust God to do the rest?

A Tale of Two Churches -- Part 1

Rielly’s comments to my last outbreak of praise of Christ’s church got me to thinking. Do I love the ‘C’hurch or the ‘c’hurch? Which is it that holds my affections? As I’ve reflected on the reasons why so many people seem so eager to ‘re-invent’ church these days, I’ve discovered that I have much in common with them.

My first exposure to church was through my childhood. Raised in a ‘Sunday school’ generation, I spent years hearing stories of Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Samson, Gideon, et al. Typically these stories were truncated, leaving out the real point of the story. To think… it wasn’t until I got to Bible College that I realized that David and Goliath really wasn’t about David and Goliath!

The church I grew up in was ineffective in reaching its surrounding area. It was made up of older people who had known each other a long time. They liked to sing the good old hymns, keep up with whose kids are getting married, and whose arthritis is kicking up this week. The preacher had to make sure the service was done by 12 noon, even if it started late, and there’d be trouble if he wasn’t.

I can remember, the only two times excitement I saw out of anyone there was when they made it legal for stores to open on Sunday (how could a 'Christian nation' turn its back on the 'Sabbath 'like that?) and when I played with the lights in the hallway one time (this wasted electricity, I quickly learned).

A dear old man I know spent years in the church serving in any number of roles of leadership and in various capacities on countless committees. He’s not even a believer. You think anyone ever took the time to ask him about his soul? Why would anyone expect any spiritual life out of a church that willingly and carelessly puts unregenerate people in roles of leadership?

Well, that same old man now has cancer and is facing death. He’s terribly afraid of it, and he’s in denial that it will ever even happen to him. He outright rejects the faith. But he still goes to that church and week after week people still say hi, ask how the chemo’s going, and what about his grandkids. Like that’s important.

That’s the ‘church’ I grew up with. If I had never left that church, I never would have heard the gospel. Funny how that works. I hold that pastor and that church responsible for the blood of countless souls who have come faithfully, week after week after week, never hearing the gospel, and never having anyone inquire into the state of their soul.

If anyone has reason to ‘go emergent’ and bash the church, it’s me. But I won’t. I love Christ’s church. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that church can be done so as to violently oppose the cause of Christ’s kingdom, or it can work to vigorously advance the cause of Christ’s kingdom. Simply put, ‘church’ has to be redeemed.

But that is for part two.

A 'Fulfillment' Devotion

By his power he stilled the sea; by his understanding he shattered Rahab.
By his wind the heavens were made fair; his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.
Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him!
But the thunder of his power who can understand?
-- Job 26:12-14

By incredible power, our Lord and our Christ stilled the sea with a word. All of creation bows in obedience to our Master and our God. While the disciples were afraid, Jesus was in control, and the seas in submission.

By Christ, the breath of God created the heavens and the earth. He was in the beginning; he was with God and was God from eternity past. By him were all things created, for his glory; in him all things live and move and have their being; in him all things are being held together, and are working together for our good, that we might be conformed to his own image. By his goodness, the creation is indeed made fair.

His hand was not only pierced, but inasmuch as he has our names engraved on his heart and hands, so also he was stricken, smitten and betrayed. He willingly took on our transgressions, in order that he might exercise his great power over Hades for us, whom he has loved. In so conquering he has sent death, our greatest enemy, and the serpent who wielded its power fleeing. That man has done what no man could do; he did not believe the lie, but in truth and power, sent the serpent fleeing.

Behold, Christian, these are but the outskirts of his ways. Imagine! How small a whisper do you hear of him! Behold him in creation! Behold his power over all things! Behold his victory over death! Behold… these are but the outskirts of his ways. And now, how small a whisper…

The thunder of his power, who can understand? His thoughts are not like our thoughts, nor are his ways like our ways; inasmuch as his thoughts are higher than our thoughts, so his ways are higher than our ways. In an infinite, qualitative manner, God stands over against humanity and all created things, in such a way as he could never, ever be compared with anything our eyes may see, our ears may hear, or our minds may conceive. Now we see but the outskirts of his ways, and hear but a whisper of his voice.

In much the same way as Job could not yet see the full revelation of Christ, but spoke of him better than he knew, so now, we too speak of God Almighty, Sovereign Creator of all the earth, and all things below, and all things above. How our minds should long for that day when we will see him! How our hearts should cry out in a desperate voice, “Lord, let me know you! Let me hear you!”

Yet we are here on earth, and my heart is sinful, I know. Behold, this life and this mind knows only of the outskirts of his ways. This sinful soul may only now hear but a small whisper of him. How my heart and flesh yearn and long, cry out and moan, “Even so, Lord Jesus, come!”

Oh, how I love church!

It may seem funny, but I've been thinking a lot about the church lately: what it is and what it's purpose is... or, what it should be and what's it's purpose should be. Kirk Wellum is my professor of systematics at school and he's been teaching us about the church as an "outpost of heaven" here on earth.

Now that got me to thinking...

How do I think about the church? In listening to many of my friends and in reading many of the books put out in the past little while, it seems that there is a very negative / cynical view of the church out there. We tend to view the church more as "Israel all over again" than we do as an "inbreaking" of the kingdom of heaven.

The church is the bride of Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Sure there are problems in the church as it exists, but the truth of the matter is that the church is a people foreknown and foreloved by God, redeemed and made alive by God, being sustained and purified by God, in order that she might one day be presented pure and spotless to God, to the great glory of God!

All that to say, think good things of the church! She is not lost. She is not yours. She is Christ's bride and he loves her. She is his great treasure! As one who hopes to be an undershepherd for my Lord one day, may it never be said of me that I underestimated the power and value of the Holy Spirit's ability to work in the Son's bride.

If someone had nothing but bad things to say about my bride, I'd have some serious issues to take up with them.

The Primacy of the Love of God

Recently I was convicted again of my prayerlessness. "How could a seminarian like me, who studies great things of God all day, go without praying, and be okay with that?" It seems I just grow dull to prayer... and I know I'm not alone on this one.

But then, it seems God brings me through great seasons of prayer and I realize again the importance of praying. Just today I was thinking, "Why do I need to learn these lessons so many times? Why can't I just learn it once?"

And then it hit me.

I don't have to learn lessons on prayer. I don't have to learn lessons about reading my Bible. I don't have to learn lessons on the benefits of the other spiritual disciplines. I just need to grow in my love for God. Period.

If I know God, then I will love God. If I love God then it will be the constant desire of my heart to be in his presence and seeking his favour; so I will pray. It will be the passion of my life to know him and be known by him; so I will read his word with desperation and longing.

I don't need to learn to pray. I need to love my God more.

And how can I love him more? Only by knowing him better. But how can I know him better? I can't open my eyes and see him... I can't reach out and touch him... I can't taste or smell him... I can't hear his voice...

To know God, I am entirely dependent on him. Like Jesus told Peter, only the Spirit of God can reveal the nature of God to men. And like Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, the natural man cannot understand things which are spiritually discerned.

Even if I tried to obey on my own strength, without the love of God, my works would count for nothing. I would be a hopeless pharisee.

So I am dependent on God to reveal himself to me, so that I will know him, which will lead to increased love of him, which will lead to prayer and obedience. So I must pray that God would reveal himself to me!

And in all this where is my pride? It is telling me that I can live on my own strength. Satan knows that if I am prayerless, I cannot know God. If I don't know God I won't love God. If I don't love God I won't pray and I won't obey.

How desperately dependent I am! And that is the one lesson I need to learn.