Victory from Trials

As I'm preparing for Compass Night this Thursday evening @ 6:15 (please pray for me about this!!!), I have been reading a number of books and wanted to share this line from Bill Thrasher's A Journey to Victorious Praying--a book I can so far recommend though I haven't finished it yet. He wrote:

"Many times great difficulties precede special works of God. You can even say that God wins His greatest victories in the midst of apparent defeat. This can be clearly demonstrated in the life of our Lord on earth. When Jesus was crucified and placed in the tomb, it looked like the forces of unrighteousness had triumphed. However, it was in this time of apparent defeat that our victory for our salvation was won."

Think about how this is true over and over again in the Scriptures and then bring that truth into your own life. I don't know what you're going through, but take heart. God has not and will never abandoned you (see Matt 28:20, Phil 4:5 & Heb 13:5) and will bring victory from the what looks like defeat (Rom 8:28).

The First Church of...Oprah???

You've got to watch this video about Oprah and the new book she's pushing and her denials of Christianity, especially for all those Christians who believe watching her is innocent.

Groothuis on Expelled

Read an excellent review of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed by Dr. Doug Groothuis here, a man I don't always agree with but who I highly respect after reading his excellent book Truth Decay. I will write my own review after I see it this week.

Get to Know David Brainerd

You will never regret taking an hour to listen to John Piper's biography of the unstoppably passionate missionary to American Indians in the 1700s David Brainerd (click here to read or listen or download it). It is amazing to read how many pioneering, paradigm shifting missionaries his life deeply impacted.

Let me leave you with this insights from Brainerd's journal, which Jonathan Edwards published, and Piper's message...

"He was gripped with by the apostolic admonition: "Redeem the time for the days are evil." (Ephesians 5:16) He embodied the counsel: "Let us not grow weary in well doing, for in due time we shall reap if we do not faint." (Gal. 6:9) He strove to be, as Paul says, "abounding in the work of the Lord (1 Cor. 15:58)."

April 17, 1747. "O I longed to fill the remaining moments all for God! Though my body was so feeble, and wearied with preaching and much private conversation, yet I wanted to sit up all night to do something for God. To God the giver of these refreshments, be glory forever and ever; Amen." (p. 246) February 21, 1746. "My soul was refreshed and comforted, and I could not but bless God, who had enabled me in some good measure to be faithful in the day past. Oh, how sweet it is to be spent and worn out for God!" (p. 366)

Among all the means that Brainerd used for pursuing greater and greater holiness and usefulness prayer and fasting stand out above all. We read of him spending whole days in prayer (p. 172), and sometimes setting aside six times in the day to pray, (p. 280), and sometimes seeking out a family or friend to pray with. He prayed for his own sanctification. He prayed for the conversion and purity of his Indians. He prayed for the advancement of the kingdom of Christ around the world and especially in America. Sometimes the spirit of prayer would hold him so deeply that he could scarcely stop.

Once, visiting in a home with friends, he got alone to pray: "I continued wrestling with God in prayer for my dear little flock here; and more especially for the Indians elsewhere; as well as for dear friends in one place and another; till it was bed time and I feared I should hinder the family, etc. But oh, with what reluctancy did I find myself obliged to consume time in sleep!" (p. 402)

Expelled: The Movie

I am really excited to see the new documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which opens today!

It's about the scientific establishment's censorship of intelligent design. Watch the trailer here and search youTube for many clips. You can watch an older trailer below. Enjoy!

Christian Homosexual???

Azariah Southworth, host of the popular Christian youth show The Remix (can be seen in more than 128 million homes worldwide and averages more than 200,000 viewers weekly on TBN's JC TV channel) announced yesterday that he's gay, saying:

"This has been a long time coming. I’m in a place where I’m at peace with my faith, friends, family and more importantly myself. I know this will end my career in Christian television, but I must now live my life openly and honestly with everyone. This is my reason for doing this. ... I know I will be cut off from many within the Christian community, and if so, then they didn’t get the point of the life of Christ. I believe by me living my life honestly and authentically now, I am able to be a better person and a better Christian. We all know there are so many other gay people in the Christian industry; they’re just all scared. I was scared, but now I’m no longer afraid."

Rather than deconstructing each phrase, I want to point out something I've been noticing for a while among Christians that happens to be prominent in his statement above, specifically, that in the name of honesty & authenticity we excuse our sin.

While I'm sure this has been very difficult for Mr. Southworth both in his own soul and now in public, the goal in life is NOT authenticity--especially when being authentic or honest means being sinful. Sadly, he will not be "a better person and a better Christian" because the goal of life is to please God (1 Corinthians 10:31; 2 Corinthians 5:9)--something his new lifestyle cannot do no matter how authentic he is.

For the Christian, no matter what temptation you're struggling against (lying, stealing, greed, anxiety, homosexuality, cussing, laziness) it's just that, a struggle! A struggle to do what God wants and not what you want (Romans 7:14-25). He folded in his struggle, and because it's a fold that marks his entire life in rebellion against God this likely proves he was never a Christian to begin with (I John 2:19). I just pray more won't follow his example, but rather keep on advancing in their fight against their own sin (Romans 8:12-14; Galatians 5:24-25; 2 Timothy 2:22).

Which leads me to something else. I wonder, is it as easy in churches to say you're struggling with anxiety as it is that you're struggling with homosexuality? Could this guy have been honest with someone before he "came out," or did he have no where to turn? I don't know. I just know we consider it OK to talk about struggling with some sins, but not others--a phenomena in Christianity that doesn't serve people like Mr. Southworth.

Read more about this here, and if you do, make sure you read some of the comments. You get the obligatory "God loves you just how He made you," which is so deceiving, but what do you think of the "God hates you sodomite" stuff, or the obligatory quoting of Romans 1?

Specifically, I'm asking if it's a godly way to approach a sinner and if it's effective in light of passages like, say, "love your neighbor," Colossians 4:5-6, the end of 1 Peter 3:15, 2 Timothy 2:24-26, Proverbs 12:18, 15:1, 16:21 and 16:24.

Together for the Gospel 2008

If you're looking for some solid preaching to download and listen to, make sure to check out the free downloads here from the Together for the Gospel Conference, which just wrapped up yesterday.

The audio on the page above includes:

Sound Doctrine: Essential to Faithful Pastoral Ministry
(Ligon Duncan)

Bearing the Image: Identity, the Work of Christ, and the Church
(Thabiti Anyabwile)

The Sinner Neither Able nor Willing: The Doctrine of Absolute Inability
(John MacArthur)

Improving the Gospel: Exercises in Unbiblical Theology
(Mark Dever)

The Curse Motif of the Atonement
(R.C. Sproul)

Why Do They Hate It So? The Doctrine of Substitution
(Albert Mohler)

How the Supremacy of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice
(John Piper)

Sustaining a Pastor’s Soul
(C.J. Mahaney)

Also, if you like these and would like to listen to the conference audio from 2006 you can download it here. Enjoy!

Radical Islam's Next Target: Rome

While you were going to church this weekend, one TV preacher from Hamas told his listeners:

"Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad. Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs [the Jews] in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam."

This part was especially encouraging...

"I believe that our children or our grandchildren will inherit our Jihad and our sacrifices, and Allah willing, the commanders of the conquest will come from among them. Today, we instill these good tidings in their souls, and by means of the mosques and the Koran books..."

Read more about it here, and even watch the "sermon" here.

Praying for Your Pastor

People often ask me how they can help me, and just so you know, the most important and most downplayed way anyone can help their pastor is to pray for him.

To help you do that, I came across this blog post. If you're going to do for me what this blog says--and I PRAY that you would--just know that I don't preach on Sunday's, but on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Also, for my own preaching and the preaching of the pastors at Compass that I serve with, I use the acrostic CAPPPP to pray for them. It stands for...

• Clear -- no confusion from what I say, a structure that flows and makes sense
• Accurate -- explains what the text says, which comes from prayer and good study time
• Passionate -- not a lecture, but a sermon for changing the heart
• Pursuasive -- that the audience would be convinced intellectually by the text
• Practical -- that it will be easy to see how to live the text
• Powerful -- that God's Spirit would save the lost and sanctify the believers present
  

So, please add these words to #4 from the blog post above. Thank you so so much!!!

Father & Daughter Have Kid...TOGETHER!!!

This world is getting weirder, more confused morally and farther from God's standards (click here and here to read more about this incestuous couple).

Listen to that internal shock of disgust as you read the articles. That is your in-born moral "compass," God's law written on the heart of every human being, Christian or not (Romans 2:14-15), telling you something is wrong though you may not be able to formulate an argument against it just yet. For more on the importance of moral intuitions, click here.

Pregnant Man? Not Really!

Welcome to the brave new world! (read about him here). Regardless of how a person looks, talks, identifies oneself, the hormonal injections, sexual orientation, relationship status, etc. this does not help the cause of gender neutrality or equality (that there is no difference between genders, that all gender is is a social construction).

In fact, it proves the exact opposite of what he was hoping for and has been fighting for in his personal life--namely, identification as a man. What it does is give incontrovertible evidence that though he thinks he's a man, he really isn't!