The Eternal Survivers

Greater Intimacy

HT: Tim Challies

Feelings

Do not misuse Christ by asking Him to baptize your feelings; instead, ask Christ to fill up your heart and soul and thereby create your feelings...

                     - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Pray for Rosaria Butterfield

A while back I wrote about and quoted from the book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, by Rosaria Butterfield, and posted videos of her testimony. The following update comes from Denny Burk

I cannot overstate how much I appreciate and love Rosaria Butterfield’s book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert. It’s the story of her conversion from lesbian feminist scholar to Christianity. It’s easily the best book I’ve read all year.

Since her book came out, she has been asked to speak in a number of different venues. As you can imagine, her message is hated in certain contexts, not least of which is the average university campus. Recently, she spoke on the campus of the University of South Florida, and her reception was less than warm. The campus newspaper reports:

As Rosaria Butterfield began her lecture about her journey and “train wreck conversion” from a lesbian professor to a Christian, a pastor’s wife and mother of four, nine students in the front row of the audience stood up silently, took off their jackets, turned their backs to Butterfield and linked arms in front of a packed Oval Theater guarded by two University Police officers and two security officers.

“Rosario Butterfield does not speak for us.”
“LOVE.”
“USF is 4 hate speech.”
Their white T-shirts revealed hand-written messages:

The nine remained standing silently throughout the two-hour lecture, in which Butterfield shared her story and love for the Bible. 

Butterfield appears to be very busy these days. Her website says that she is booked-up for speaking into 2015. She is uniquely suited to bring the message that she brings. It also makes her a target. The activists view her story as a threat–as the above story makes clear. Pray for this dear sister. She’s fighting the good fight.

Please join me in praying for this sister in Christ as she proclaims Him over the next two years in the face of much antagonism and intolerance from her former comrades.

(HT: Carl Trueman)

Healing Is Death

"What good Christians don’t realize is that sexual sin is not recreational sex gone overboard. Sexual sin is predatory. It won’t be “healed” by redeeming the context or the genders. Sexual sin must simply be killed. What is left of your sexuality after this annihilation is up to God. But healing, to the sexual sinner, is death: nothing more and nothing less. I told my audience that I think that too many young Christian fornicators plan that marriage will redeem their sin. Too many young Christian masturbators plan that marriage will redeem their patterns. Too many young Christian internet pornographers think that having legitimate sex will take away the desire to have illicit sex. They’re wrong. And the marriages that result from this line of thinking are dangerous places. I know, I told my audience, why over 50% of Christian marriages end in divorce: because Christians act as though marriage redeems sin. Marriage does not redeem sin. Only Jesus himself can do that. The audience seemed a little shocked to hear this."

       - From Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Controlling Metaphor

[I read a] "little book by F. B. Meyer called The Shepherd’s Psalm (1889). In it, I found what we in English studies call a controlling metaphor (a powerful albeit understated idea that holds all the other parts of a paradigm together). This, I believe, is the controlling metaphor of the Christian life, and one that I first found in Meyer’s book and first seized in that little cozy apartment during my first day in Beaver Falls. Meyer says, “Unbelief puts circumstances between itself and Christ, so as not to see Him…Faith puts Christ between itself and circumstances, so that it cannot see them” (p. 17)."

     - From Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

A Soul Overhauled

"Making a life commitment to Christ was not merely a philosophical shift. It was not a one-step process. It did not involve rearranging the surface prejudices and fickle loyalties of my life. Conversion didn’t “fit” my life. Conversion overhauled my soul and personality. It was arduous and intense. I experienced with great depth the power and authority of God in my life. In it I learned—and am still learning—how to love God with all my heart, soul, strength and mind. When you die to yourself, you have nothing from your past to use as clay out of which to shape your future."

      - From Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Bigger

"How did the Lord heal me? The way that he always heals: the word of God got to be bigger inside me than I."

- From Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

See also My Train Wreck Conversion

Repentance is An Intimate Affair

"In this crucible of confusion, I learned something important. I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin. How much greater? About the size of a mustard seed. Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what. And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees. Repentance is an intimate affair. And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect."

 - From Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

(Italics added by me for emphasis)
  

More Rosaria

Following up from this post from July 17 (last Wednesday), Here's another interview with Rosaria Champagne Butterfield: It's over an hour, but well worth investing the time.

Amazing Story of Total Transformation

Please watch this very interesting, provocative, and, in fact, wonderful, testimony of Dr. Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. She was once a feminist, a lesbian, very anti-Christian, and a post-modernist college English professor. Now, she is a Christian wife and mother, married to a Presbyterian pastor. Amazing story! It will take some time to listen and watch, but it will be so worth it.





And in this second video, she takes audience questions.





For more of her story, read her book, Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor