Trusting God by Jerry Bridges

I'm going through this book with some of the girls in our youth group. It's a great book, but hard to read some times. Here's a quote from the chapter called "The Sovereignty of God."

Our first priority in times of adversity is to honor and glorify God by trusting Him. We tend to make our first priority the gaining of relief from our feelings of heartache or disappointment or frustration... We honor God by choosing to trust Him when we don't understand what He is doing or why He has allowed some adverse circumstance to occur. As we seek God's glory, we may be sure that He has purposed our good and that He will not be frustrated in fulfilling that purpose.

God is Love, Right?

I enjoyed reading through D. A. Carson's little book The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. Originally a lecture series at Dallas Theological Seminary 13 years ago, the book has been tightly focused and provocative in thinking about the love of God in the Bible. Carson did a great job in translating his mostly serious, sometimes witty style of speaking into the text of the book.

I especially appreciated Carson’s refusal to capitulate to easy, casual explanations of God’s love. It is right that Carson ends the book by encouraging the reader to engage the abstract thought world of God’s love, but not without connecting it to the living, breathing world around us where so many are unloved.

I found the following quotes very helpful:

"Strange to tell, not once is Jesus or God ever described in the Bible as our friend. Abraham is God's friend; the reverse is never stated." p. 41

". . . the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized." p. 11

“God in his perfections must be wrathful against his rebel image-bearers, for they have offended him; God in his perfections must be loving toward his rebel image-bearers, for he is that kind of God.” p. 69

Knowing God

I'm finally reading a book I've always wanted to read. That book is J.I. Packer's Knowing God. I'm reading for my Theology I class and it has already proven in the first several pages why it is a modern classic. Today, I found this warning especially helpful:

If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited. The very greatness of the subject matter will intoxicate us, and we shall come to think of our interest in it and grasp of it; and we shall look down on those whose theological ideas seem to us crude and inadequate and dismiss them as very poor specimens.

May we all take heed.

Just a Thought

Sometimes when not a lot of youth show up for our Tuesday night service (we call it Reality Check), I begin to feel discouraged. I have to fight that feeling with the knowledge that God is sovereign and then investigate how I'm doing as the teacher and "overseer" of Reality Check. This quote by 19th century pastor John Brown from Mark Dever's What is a Healthy Church? was really helpful:

I know the vanity of your heart, and that you will feel mortified that your congregation is very small, in comparison with those of your brethren around you; but assure yourself on the word of an old man, that when you come to give an account of them to the Lord Christ, at his judgment-seat, you will think you have had enough.

Quote of the Day

I'm reading Unfinished Business: Return the Ministry to the People of God by Greg Ogden. It's required reading in my Theology IV class (Church and Last Things). Here's the quote:

The analogy has often been drawn between the way we play church and a football game. Bud Wilkinson, legendary former head coach at the University of Oklahoma, was asked, when he became head of the President's Council on Physical Fitness, "What contribution does professional football make to the fitness of Americans?" He answered, "A professional football game is a happening when 50,000 people desperately needing exercise sit in the stands watching 22 people desperately needing rest."

How true that is, especially in America. What can we do to change this?

Two Quotes

Two quotes from two men who were not Christians. I thought these would be good to help us stop and think for a moment in our busy, busy lives.

"I tremble for my country when I think that God is just."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand."

-Mark Twain

The Point of Life

I have less than an hour left of work before I leave to pick up Happy from school (that sounds funny) and then we're heading to Santa Maria for the weekend. So, I'm taking a break from coding invoices to post my last blog of the work week.

Even though Happy already provided a link to another blog, I'm going to do the same. This blog has challenged my thinking nearly every time I read it and today's post was a sobering one. Even if you don't want to read the whole thing, I'd like to quote the last couple lines:

...the ultimate goal in life should not be to get well, to get a raise, to get married, or to get whatever. The point of life is to die. It is not he who dies with the most toys, that wins, but he who dies most to himself.

Since graduating from college and starting a job that is slightly less glamorous than I had imagined, I've frequently questioned my purpose here. But why would I question it? There is nothing in Scripture that says I am to die to self only if I have a job that seems worthy--only if I'm a missionary in a third world country--only if I'm serving faithfully in the church. It seems my focus has shifted. Who am I to question God's plan for me at this point in my life? And who am I to serve Him less heartily if I'm doing something monotonous or even boring?

May the Lord teach me to "Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you" (1 Thes. 5:16-18).

New link

By the way, I added a link to the side to a blog that is on Todd Bolen's blog. I read it for two or three hours yesterday and was hugely impacted by it--so much so that I decided I had to share it with anyone else who wanted to read it. To summarize, this woman has been experiencing severe pain on a daily basis for quite a while now. The doctors have yet to figure out what it is, although they have ruled out many possibilities. The main reason I added her blog to our links was because of our tendency to compare ourselves with others. As I read, I realized that I was doing the same thing and then was challenged by something she quoted on August 1st - "Parable of the Paraplegic." So, read it, it's good. What a great reminder of our Sovereign and GOOD God!

Errors in the Bible

This was a challenging reminder to me as I approach God's Word. I thought others might want to read it as well :-)