What a Day May Bring

I had a first hand lesson today in the principle of Proverbs 27:1,

“Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.”

I was going about my day and setting out what I wanted to accomplish, when early into the day, the secretary at our church tells me my dad is on the phone. I assumed he must have forgotten to tell me something, because I had just seen him the night before. However, what he had to tell me was to change my day completely.

Behold the Lamb

As our church celebrates the Lord’s Supper today, I thought it would be fitting to post this song, another by the Getty’s and Stuart Townend, that is also known as the Communion Hymn. Read through and remember the significance of the cross. Have a blessed Lord’s day.

Behold the Lamb who bears our sins away,

Slain for us – and we remember

The promise made that all who come in faith

Find forgiveness at the cross.

So we share in this bread of life,

And we drink of His sacrifice

As a sign of our bonds of peace

Around the table of the King.

Too Funny

Sorry, that there has not been much for posting this week, but we are heading to the Bolton Conference this weekend and I am sure that we will have plenty to blog about when we get back. In the meantime, you can thank Kevin DeYoung for this video, a very funny spoof on the song Jesus take the wheel, which I saw first at his blog a few months ago. Enjoy!

Bookstores

You may have noticed the bookstore icons on our site. Let me encourage you to click away. Any time you click on the Westminster site icon, we get a credit for someone viewing their site. Currently, all of the book covers are also links to the Westminster store, so fell free to click on those as well. Recently, I added the Monergism icon and if you go to their site and purchase something it can benefit our blog. We greatly appreciate your help in this area and encourage to stop by and click as much as you like.

I Will Glory in My Redeemer

Here is another hymn by the folks at Sovereign Grace, however, this one is by the husband and wife team of Steve and Vicki Cook. Spend some time thinking about the One in whom we only can glory and boast. Have a blessed Lord’s Day.

I will glory in my Redeemer
Whose priceless blood has ransomed me
Mine was the sin that drove the bitter nails
And hung Him on that judgment tree
I will glory in my Redeemer
Who crushed the power of sin and death
My only Savior before the Holy Judge
The Lamb Who is my righteousness
The Lamb Who is my righteousness

Trusting the Truth of Genesis

My husband downloaded some lectures for me by R.C. Sproul about “Knowing Scripture.”   It’s been good.  Sproul talks a lot about the Bible and literature, a subject which fascinates me, as anyone who knows me realizes.  I’ve already quoted Sproul a few times to my high school literature class.  But to be honest, some of the things he said about trusting the truth of Genesis threw me off for a moment.   Let me explain, and perhaps I should begin by saying that I totally agree with Sproul’s assertion that Genesis should be taken as a historical account.  It was just that some of the arguments that he used to explain this unsettled me for a bit, because I didn’t feel as if they necessarily supported that assertion.  And so,  I felt the need to  work through why I believe what I believe for the sake of my confidence in the Word of God.    The literary structure of Genesis has been controversial for years, but I had always brushed any opinions differing from what I had been taught from childhood aside.  Well my love and understanding of literature doesn’t allow me to ignore issues like that so easily anymore.   I have to wrestle through them.

When it comes to interpreting Genesis, Sproul pointed out quite fairly that it isn’t that simple.  He said that there are many orthodox Christians, who although they believe in a historical Christ and don’t flinch at miracles or the supernatural, nevertheless interpret the first several chapters of Genesis as myth because they believe that is the dominant literary form. 

Missing the Point

I am preparing to preach in our school’s chapel tomorrow and I am studying the passage of Jesus feeding the 5,000 from the gospel of John and just absolutely astounded by how much people miss the point. Obviously, the disciples missed the point at the time, but I am referring to the countless times that this story was related to me as a child. I, of course, knew no better back then, and, in fact, it is only by God’s great grace that I can now read such passages and see these things. However, I remember countless times hearing this story and the great truth that was always drawn out was about the boy who “shared” his lunch.

Clarifying My Post – Resurrecting the Imagination

I just want to clarify what I was saying in my last post.  I wasn’t saying that reading for information is wrong.  We are told “to grow in grace and knowledge.” Right now I am reading a church history book, a topic I don’t know enough about, but need to.  My main point was that this is not all we should read, and this is not the only way we should read Scripture.  It is very clear to me that our affections should be engaged and that the Bible is not just something we read to gain more information or hear  some interesting stories, but that we are supposed to feel a certain way also. 

Mercies Anew

Here is one by Sovereign Grace based on the the verse in Lamentations 3

Lamentations 3:22-23  It is of the LORD’S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.  (23)  They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.

Reflect on God’s new mercies for you today and everyday and have a blessed Lord’s day.

Every morning that breaks
There are mercies anew
Every breath that I take
Is your faithfulness proved
And at the end of each day
When my labors are through
I will sing of Your mercies anew

Resurrecting the Imagination

Elizabeth Sewall wrote a book entitled, The Death of the Imagination. As a literature teacher, it isn’t too hard for me to believe that her premise is the correct one: the imagination, one of God’s special gifts to his human creatures, lies dead or dormant in most of us and needs to be awakened.  We must start thinking, as C.S. Lewis so astutely states in The Abolition of Man, that the goal of education “is to irrigate deserts.”   I require my students to read good books in my literature class.  They don’t have a choice, but I certainly pray that they might acquire even the tiniest glimpse of beauty along the way.  I have a large group of non-readers, typical American teens obsessed with sports or pop culture, and so it is a huge challenge to interest them in something beyond all of that.  I do have a minority of students that read for pleasure, when it is not required of them for an assignment, and yet I have found that they too need their imaginations pushed in the right direction. In my class,  it seems to me that the non-readers  have dead imaginations, while the imaginations of the readers are only “mostly dead,” as Max the miracle worker in the movie The Princess Bride said.  But whether their imaginations are “dead,” or “mostly dead,” both groups are in need of resurrection.  Certainly, resurrection is the greatest of all miracles, and I am convinced I will need a great miracle.  Fortunately, I have Someone greater than Miracle Max working through me as I teach.