Push Back the Crowd

The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to the other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, strong, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the the right parts of us. – C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Not A Handbook for Life

We can open our Bibles for all sorts of odd reasons–as a religious duty, an attempt to earn God’s favor, or thinking that it serves as a moral self-help guide, a manual of handy tips for effective religious lives. That idea is actually one main reason so many feel discouraged in their Bible-reading. Hoping to find quick lessons for how they should spend today, people find instead a genealogy, or a list of various sacrifices. And how could page after page of histories, descriptions of the temple, instructions to priests, affect how I rest, work and pray today?

But when you see that Christ is the subject of all the Scriptures, that he is the Word, the Lord, the Son who reveals his Father, the promised Hope, the true Temple, the true Sacrifice, the great High Priest, the ultimate King, then you read, not so much asking, “What does this mean for me, right now?” but “What do I learn here of Christ?” Knowing that the Bible is about him and not me means that, instead of reading the Bible obsessing about me, I can gaze on him. And as through the pages you get caught up in the wonder of his story, you find your heart strangely pounding for him in a way you never would have if you treated the Bible as a book about you. – Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity, 82-83

Faith is Foundational

As [18th century Scottish philosopher Thomas] Reid pointed out, to know anything about the world we must accept what our senses tell us. We can “dare to know” only if we trust the “testimony of our senses” (as [David] Hume called it.) Similarly for reason, memory, and our other cognitive faculties. We simply have to take our faculties at their word.

And by taking reason and sense perception at their word, we trust their testimony. Testimony, therefore, is foundational to everything we believe. Without trusting our cognitive faculties, we could never believe anything.

Moreover, remember, believing something on the basis of testimony is faith. Therefore, faith is the starting point for all we know and believe. Anselm of Canterbury had a much more reasonable motto than the Enlightenment’s, one that hints at the importance of faith: “Credo ut intelligam,” that is, “I believe that I may understand.” Reid put it a bit differently, saying that the unjust must live by faith no less than the just.

So, when [Victor] Stenger complains that science and reason don’t rely on faith, he’s missed the Enlightenment’s important (and unintended) lesson about faith, reason, and evidence. “The theist argument that science and reason are also based on faith is specious,” he says. “Faith is belief in the absence of supportive evidence. Science is belief in the presence of supportive evidence. And reason is just the procedure by which humans ensure that their conclusions are consistent with the theory that produced them and with the data that test these conclusions.” Stenger is right about one thing: having faith is believing something without having an argument for it (“belief in the absence of supportive evidence”). But Stenger’s failure to realize that science, too, is based on faith (because everything we believe is, ultimately) is a massive mistake. Yet it’s as common as it is colossal. – Mitch Stokes, A Shot of Faith to the Head: Be a Confident Believer in an Age of Cranky Atheists

A Shot of Wittgenstein

[Twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went around the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well, obviously, because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.” To which Wittgenstein responded, “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” – William E. Carroll, “Galileo and the Inquisition I” as quoted in A Shot of Faith to the Head by Mitch Stokes.

Preaching Backed by Prayer

Praying grounded on these solemn and profound convictions is the only true praying. Preaching backed by such praying is the only preaching that sows the seeds of eternal life in human hearts and builds men up for heaven. -E. M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer

Just Be Born

Life is right at the center of God’s purposes for this dead world of ours. But the way into this new world He is fashioning is quite similar to the way we got into the old world — we have to be born into it. A new world, a new creation, requires, of necessity, a new birth. – Doug Wilson, An Evangelical Center, Blog and Mablog, 9/27/2012

Time and Again

The Lord comes a second time to all who are his true children. Have we never, like Abraham, stopped at our Harans? Of course we have. We are sent on errands, but some sin or preoccupation detains us. Have we never, like Moses, taken matters into our own hands and formulated our own plans? Of course, we have. Like Peter, we have even denied our Lord on occasions when we should have spoken for him. We have disobeyed him. We have run away from him. Some of us, like Jonah, have run very far indeed. Does God cast us off? Does he disown us? No! He disciplines us, it is true. But, having done that and having brought us to the place of repentance, he returns the second time to recommission us to service. Moreover, he comes a third, a fourth, a hundredth, a thousandth time, if necessary, as it often is. None of us would be where we are now in our Christian lives if God had not dealt thus with us. Oh, the greatness of the unmerited grace of God! We deserve nothing. Yet we receive everything, even when we foolishly turn from it. – James Montgomery Boice, The Minor Prophets, volume 1, 294

God is More Than You Think

Not being able to fully understand God is frustrating, but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable of comprehending. What a stunted, insignificant god that would be! If my mind is the size of a soda can and God is the size of all the oceans, it would be stupid for me to say He is only the small amount of water I can scoop into my little can. God is so much bigger, so far beyond our time-encased, air/food/sleep-dependant lives. – Francis Chan, Crazy Love

The Place of Politics

Keep politics in its place as the affairs of man which God rules over, not as the affairs of God which man rules over. Lewis has some wise words:

“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. The let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him onto the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the ’cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours — and the more ‘religious’ (on those terms) the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here.” — C.S. Lewis, from The Screwtape Letters

(From Sad Hill News)

Invisible Links

Nothing in the modern mind encourages us to see the invisible links binding together all of life. We have no sense that we live in the presence of a loving Father and are accountable for all we do… This is my Father’s world… Everything you do is connected to who you are as a person and, in turn, creates the person you are becoming. Everything you do affects those you love. All of life is covenant. – Paul Miller, A Praying Life

By Farther Steps

Reformed and Reforming, semper reformanda to Christ's glory.

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