Life and Doctrine - No Separation

This article by Time Keller is over a week old, but I just got around to reading it and it is GOOD!  I'm referring to "There’s No Escaping Doctrine, but Handle it With Care" at The Gospel Coalition Blog:

Keller is commenting on a sermon by David Martyn Lloyd-Jones in the book Walking with God: Studies in 1 John (Crossway, 1993). The message deals with the tension between emphasizing doctrine over life experience or vice versa.

On the Danger of promoting experience over doctrine, Keller says:

"So when you say, “I don’t care about doctrine, it’s how you live that matters,” you are ironically promoting the doctrine of justification by works. You are proposing that what God really wants is a good life. The response can be similar when someone claims that it doesn’t matter which religion you belong to, because all religions are alike and no one should be held to a particular doctrine of God. Yet that assumes that God is not holy, and that he does not hold people responsible for how they live. In other words, to say, “No one should be held to a particular view of God” is to assume and promote a particular view of God. To say, “Doctrine about God doesn’t matter” is itself a statement of doctrine about God — and therefore it does matter! So Lloyd-Jones concludes: “It is no use your saying, ‘We are not interested in doctrine; we are concerned about life’; if your doctrine is wrong, your life will be wrong” (p. 23; italics added).

On the danger of promoting doctrine over experience, he says:

However, whenever Lloyd-Jones takes up the importance of doctrine, he always points out that there is a danger on the other extreme. He speaks of some Christians and says, “There is nothing they delight in more than arguing about theology” and they do this in “a party spirit” (p. 24). One of the signs of this group is that they are either dry and theoretical in their preaching, or they can be caustic and angry. They have “lost their tempers, forgetting that by so doing they were denying the very doctrine which they claimed to believe” (p. 24). In short, ministers who go to this extreme destroy the effectiveness of their preaching. What is the cause of this? Lloyd-Jones answers that they have made accurate doctrine an end in itself, instead of a means to honor God and grow in Christ-likeness. “Doctrine must never be considered in and of itself. Scripture must never be divorced from life” (p. 25).

That is some good and wise commentary.

Update:  There is a Tim Keller Wiki resource page!

Diagramming Levels of Giftedness

This diagram goes with the Vern Poythress article on spiritual gifts mentioned in the previous post.   I'll comment on it later.

The Best Essay Ever Written on Spiritual Gifts Today?

I'm always interested in good teaching on spiritual gifts, especially when it combines good scholarship with openess to the Spirit. Therefore I was certainly intriged and interested when I saw this title at Justin Taylor's blog - The Best Essay Ever Written on Spiritual Gifts Today:

He is referring to an article by Vern Poythress in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society published in 1996 called “Modern Spiritual Gifts as Analogous to Apostolic Gifts: Affirming Extraordinary Works of the Spirit Within Cessationist Theology.” The thesis of the article is:

"I maintain that modern spiritual gifts are analogous to but not identical with the divinely authoritative gifts exercised by the apostles. Since there is no strict identity, apostolic teaching and the biblical canon have exclusive divine authority. On the other hand, since there is analogy, modern spiritual gifts are still genuine and useful to the church. Hence, there is a middle way between blanket approval and blanket rejection of modern charismatic gifts."

The link above will take you to the article  It is 27 pages long as I printed it out, so it is not something that can be easily sumarized in a brief blog post.  I will read it and share my comments after I have time to think about the content.

If Only It Was All Success

Here's another quote from Plan B that I REALLY wish was not true, but painful experience confirms:

"The process of becoming the person God wants us to become usually doesn't come from success, success, success.  It's loss, success, failure, success, heartbreak, success, disappointment, success."

- Pete Wilson, Plan B, page 80 (Quoting Edwin McManus)

Love That Strips All Hindrances

"I think this is a difficult truth to grasp, but God loves you enough to strip you of anything that keeps you from him.  And often these things that separate are not bad in and of themselves.  Often, in fact, they're good things - relationships, missions, jobs.  But if for some reason they are keeping us from knowing God as we should, he may take them out of our lives."

              - Pete Wilson, Plan B, Page 107

"...I must relinquish what I cling to for identity!  I must let go of that which holds me back from intimacy with and worship of God.  This could be work or religion or certain god given gifts.  It could be expectations or dreams, or it could be addictions.  Maybe it's control or the desperate need for approval."

              - Page 108

Facing Plan B

Just started reading Plan B: What Do You Do When God Doesn't Show Up The Way You Thought He Would, by Pete Wilson, lead pastor of Cross Point Church in Nashville, TN.  Some Quotes:

"Your dreams may not be happening, and things aren't turning out the way you expected, but that doesn't mean your life is spinning out of control.  It just means you're not in control."   Page 22

"The greatest of all illusions is the illusion of control."   Page 31

"I've noticed that those of us who have trusted our heavenly Father with our eternities often have a tough time trusting him with our tomorrow."  Page 61

"...When you respond in your current circumstances as if you were confident that God is there, you will see God in the circumstances... Because the simple truth is that God is there.  God is always there.  The problems come when we allow our circumstances to distort our perspective and we miss God."   Page 68

The Person I See in the Mirror

Love this poem!

The Looking
In the mirror one day,
I saw a self.
Body.
Mind.
Emotion.
I took a closer look and peered into my soul.
The things I saw?
Brokenness.
Fear.
Envy.
Lust.
Insecurity.
One more time I looked into the mirror.
This time I saw a redeemed self
This time I saw a beautiful self.
This time I saw, in the background, Jesus.
By his grace he redeemed me.
Now he is making me into
the self I want to be,
the self that I really am.

Poem by Jim Martin at A Place For The God-Hungry

Crux Sola Est Nostria Theologica

"Now it is not sufficient for anyone,and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty,unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross."

- Martin Luther

(Title is Latin for "The Cross Alone is Our Theology")

It Has Come This Far: Murderous Feminism:

This is disgusting and revolting beyond all words.

A feminist author named Antonia Senior has written a piece for The Times of London in favor of killing human beings in order to further the Feminist cause

“What seems increasingly clear to me is that, in the absence of an objective definition, a foetus is a life by any subjective measure. My daughter was formed at conception, and all the barely understood alchemy that turned the happy accident of that particular sperm meeting that particular egg into my darling, personality-packed toddler took place at that moment. She is so unmistakably herself, her own person — forged in my womb, not by my mothering.


“Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life. That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful womb it is not a life, but a foetus — and thus killable.”... 

“The answer lies in choosing the lesser evil. The nearly 200,000 aborted babies in the UK each year are the lesser evil, no matter how you define life, or death, for that matter. If you are willing to die for a cause, you must be prepared to kill for it, too.”

Let us be perfectly clear: this writer acknowledges that unborn children are human lives, but she believes that it is still okay to kill them for the mother's convenience and happiness. Through the use of ultrasound and other such medical techniques, the pro-life movement is winning the intellectual battle over person hood. Yet, our culture has become so depraved that "feminists" still want to kill children that they acknowledge as human beings.

May God be merciful to Western Civilization, because we are not even merciful to ourselves.


Hat Tip:  Denny Burk and Albert Mohler

Judge Grants Political Asylum to Son of Hamas

I am rejoicing today that Mosab Yousef finally got political asylum in the U.S. yesterday after the government dropped its opposition

For details see | Liveblog | Christianity Today or Jerusalem Post

I have written about Yousef and his book here and here. He is a true Christian convert from Islam and should be treated as a hero by both Israel and the U.S for the terror attacks he helped prevent and lives he saved. It was stupid for the Dept. of Homeland Security to oppose his asylum request in the first place.

This is truly good news.