In The Word

3. Resolved, if ever I shall fall and grow dull, so as to neglect to keep any part of these Resolutions, to repent of all I can remember, when I come to myself again.

2. Resolved, to be continually endeavoring to find out some new invention and contrivance to promote the aforementioned things.

As you may or may not have noticed I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from posting to my blog. I’m trying to focus in on my family life and personal devotion time and have a hard time justifying time spent blogging. This isn’t to say I’m giving up, just working on getting my life balance into check. In the mean time, I’m going to post a “resolution a day” from The Resolutions Jonathan Edwards.  

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Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God’s help, I do humbly entreat him by his grace to enable me to keep these Resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to his will, for Christ’s sake.

Remember to read over these Resolutions once a week.

1. Resolved, that I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God’s glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, in the whole of my duration, without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriad’s of ages hence. Resolved to do whatever I think to be my duty and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general. Resolved to do this, whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.

Justification without sanctification would not be salvation at all. It would call the leper clean, and leave him to die of his disease; if would forgive the rebellion and allow the rebel to remain an enemy to his king. It would remove the consequences but overlook the cause, and this would leave an endless and hopeless task before us

C.H. Spurgeon - All of Grace

(HT:Reformed Geek)

The heart is so hard, the will is so obstinate, the passions are so furious, the thoughts are so volatile, the imagination is so ungovernable, the desires are so wild, that the man feels that he has a den of wild beasts within him, which will eat him up sooner than be ruled by him.

-C.H. Spurgeon - All of Grace

Ben Witherington, an author I know best from his books New Testament History: A Narrative Account and The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci has a wonderful post entitled Hermeneutics— A Guide for Perplexed Bible Readers

1) ‘What it meant is what it means’. Meaning comes contextually not from just having words in isolation but words in conjunction with one another in a specific sentence or larger context.

. . .

2) ‘Context is king’. One of the great, great dangers in modern interpretation of the Bible is proof-texting. What this amounts to is the strip-mining of certain key terms and ideas, linking them together with similar or the same words in other texts and contexts, and coming up with a meaning which none of the original texts had.

. . .

3) Genre matters. Before we can interpret a particular type of literature we need to understand what literary type or kind of literature it is. Prose should be interpreted according to the kinds of information prose is meant to give, poetry should be interpreted as poetry, historical narrative as narrative, parables as the literary fictions that they are, and apocalyptic prophecy must be interpreted as the highly metaphorical literature it is, and so on.

Good stuff! Be sure to check out the whole article. It’s short, to the point and informative.

(HT:Participatory Bible Study Blog )

I got this update from biblicaltraining.org a few days ago:

We have just added a new leadership level course on Buddhism from Dr. Timothy Tennent. There are a few lectures we are missing, but we will recorded them the next time he lectures.

We also posted our financial number for the year 2006 and our numbers for January through July, 2007. We trust you will see we are using your giving wisely.

As far as the future is concerned, we are on track to finish the core curriculum for the Foundations courses by December. These ten to eleven classes will also be used in our mp3sforJesus program. We have joined forces with New Directions, a missions organization that has been serving in the two-thirds world for 35 years, to distribute the classes. Their goal is 1,000 units in 2008. It is exciting to think that BT materials will eventually train thousands of lay church leaders in the bush areas of the two-thirds world. We solicit your prayers and ongoing support so we can finish this project.

Michael Patton over at the Parchment & Pen responds to this Atheism poster:

With His Own:

Nice work Michael!

Incedently, if you haven’t been through the materials Michael and Rome have put together at www.reclaimingthemind.org  . It would be well worth your time to check it out.

I haven’t been posting much lately as I’ve been quite busy with work and preparing for my first preaching opportunity, which I delivered today!  What a gracious God we have! Last night and early this morning I was at the end of my rope and quite sure that I was going to forget everything I had studied as I was standing before the congregation.  But all went well my I was able to read scripture clearly and deliver the message without too much trouble.  Thank you for all of you who were praying for me!

I shared the pulpit with my very good friend Mark Seitz. He spoke on Galatians and I spoke on Colossians.  After church I spent some The Pilgrims Progress and just happened to be in the section on legalism:

Therefore Mr. Worldly Wiseman is an alien, and Mr. Legality is a cheat; and for his son Civility, notwithstanding his  simpering looks, he is but a hypocrite, and cannot help thee. Believe me, there is nothing in all this noise that thou hast heard of these sottish men, but a design to beguile thee of thy salvation, by turning thee from the way in which I had set thee.

What a wonderful book, you can read it online or pick up the cheater’s version (in modern English) … which I must confess I’m reading and enjoying very much.