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Twenty years ago, Hope Church occupied a spot of land next to an auto dealer, a spot the dealer was seeking to buy and the church to sell. The church’s residential neighbors opposed the deal and sought to get the sale blocked by persuading the county commission to deny the dealer’s request to change the use from ‘church’ to ‘car dealership’.

I attended the meeting of the county commission at which this issue was docketed in order to lend personal support the dealer, though I had nothing to say. The memory I brought away from that meeting had nothing to do with property and politics.

I was reading at the time John Stott’s wonderful book on preaching Between Two Worlds. The attorney for the neighborhood (in this context, the ‘enemy’) noticed what I was reading and in a brief conversation told me that he was reading Stott’s The Cross of Christ which had recently been published.

For some reason this stuck in my mind. Were the situation to be repeated today, I would have immediately asked this guy to meet me for lunch or coffee so that I could probe his interest in Stott. (Though twenty years late, I think I might still do that.) But I dropped the conversation, and left simply wondering why he was reading Stott.

Recently, I purchased Stott’s book and have begun to read it. The topic’s, and therefore the book’s, relevance has dimmed not the least over the past twenty years. It seems that the doctrine of the cross continues to be a stumbling block to many, and these days even to those who wish to call themselves evangelical. It is well known that recent thinkers have sought other ways to speak of our redemption, especially those in the emerging church movement. Some have even ridiculed the cross as divine child abuse. It is a doctrine that at worst is under attack, and at best is misunderstood.

If anyone can speak to the issue with clarity, intelligence, wisdom, and power, it is John Stott. I’m looking forward to reading this book. A great turning point in my ministry occurred about 8 years ago when the idea of ‘grace’ was introduced to me in a fresh and powerful way. And grace, as I understand it, is centered upon the cross.

Stott shares an account in the life of the great British preacher Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one with whom Dr. Stott had some severe ecclesiological disagreements over the years. Lloyd-Jones confessed to friends that “a fundamental change took place in his outlook and preaching in the year 1929.” That change had to do with his understanding of the cross. Here is how Stott relates this:

“After preaching one night in Bridgend, South Wales, the minister challenged him that ‘the cross and the work of Christ’ appeared to have little place in his preaching. He went ‘at once to his favourite secondhand bookshop and asked the proprietor for the two standard books on the Atonement. The bookseller…produced R.W.Dales’s The Atonement (1875) and James Denney’s The Death of Christ (1903). On his return home, he gave himself to study, declining both lunch and tea, and causing his wife such anxiety that she telephoned her brother to see whether a doctor should be called. But when he later emerged, he claimed to have found ‘the real heart of the gospel and the key to the inner meaning of the Christian faith.’ So the content of his preaching changed, and with this its impact. As he himself put it, the basic question was not Anserlm’s ‘why did God become man?’ but ‘why did Christ die?’

I’m anxious to see what he discovered.

BTW, for an assessment of Dr. Stott’s ministry from one who makes no public profession of the Christian faith, see this opinion piece by David Brooks.

This one will cost you. If you’d like to hear how the pastor of a large church with a diverse congregation of people both conservative and progressive, both believing and curious deals with the subject of abortion, you would do well to purchase ($2.50 for mp3 download) and listen to this sermon by Tim Keller.

Blew an hour and a half the other day watching Get Smart with Steve Carell. (Not a great film. As my daughter put it, they put all the funny parts in the trailer. There is not much more.) Some of you will appreciate that in the movie the good guys, the agents from CONTROL, used Dell laptops and the bad guys, the agents from KAOS, used MacBooks. Apparently Apple got behind in their product placement payments.

Apparently backing up to DVD is not such a great idea.

Magnolia is one of the most intriguing movies of the past ten years. Apparently Roger Ebert agrees. (Some may find the language and some of the content offensive – tread with care if you choose to watch it.)

Before watching this, be sure your PCQ (pop culture quotient) is up to speed with this link to Snowbot.

UPDATE: I accidentally got my links twisted around. So, if you visited the site earlier, the above link sent you here. I recommend this piece, but I just got my links misconnected. Thanks, Keith, for untangling me!

Rx for anxiety induced sleeplessness:

Psalm 147:5 Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.
6 The LORD lifts up the humble; he casts the wicked to the ground.
7 Sing to the LORD with thanksgiving; make melody to our God on the lyre!
8 He covers the heavens with clouds; he prepares rain for the earth; he makes grass grow on the hills.
9 He gives to the beasts their food, and to the young ravens that cry.
10 His delight is not in the strength of the horse, nor his pleasure in the legs of a man,
11 but the LORD takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.

Job 40:8 Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?
9 Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?
10 “Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor.
11 Pour out the overflowings of your anger, and look on everyone who is proud and abase him.
12 Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand.
13 Hide them all in the dust together; bind their faces in the world below.
14 Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can save you.

Taste deeply and call me in the morning.

This may help as well, but it’ll take longer! (You may need to follow the link to download, if you like. I’m not sure the embedded player below will work as planned.)

It is a little known fact* that the ‘e’ in ‘eHarmony’ stands for ‘Edwards’. Jonathan Edwards, to the surprise of many, is a great companion for young women seeking a worthy life partner. He should be, of course. He had a slew of daughters himself (one named Jerusha, just like a ‘famed’ 21st century Bradenton pastor I know).

I have told my daughters that all men are liars. I exempt none. My particular sample here is, of course, men who are seeking a girl. They will so present themselves so as to be acceptable to the women they seek. In so doing, they will present themselves in ways that may be wildly tangent to reality. We will, as guys, shade and construct the truth in order to make ourselves acceptable. Guys just cannot be trusted.

You can argue with my cynicism if you like, but that is not the main point here.

A Christian women will want, or at least will express her intention to want, a Christian guy. If she is particularly attractive, and her standards become known, there will be a veritable revival in Christian profession among men occurring like a wake around her. Suddenly guys who have not seen the inside of a church in a decade are professing a dear acquaintance with Christianity.

Revivals, we all know, can have spurious ‘converts’. So, when a young lady is faced with a most certainly Christian young man, according to his own profession, how will she, and her father with her, determine the genuine nature, or hypocrisy, of his faith?

Exactly the question Jonathan Edwards sought out to answer in his treatise on the Religious Affections. Okay, maybe not with dating in mind. But the application works nonetheless.

So, as a community service, and to assist all the searching and eligible, but vulnerable young women out there, (and as the last entry in my posts on this book) I direct all to whom this applies to my posts (summarized here). If you don’t have the time, or the patience, for all of that (though telling some guys that you can’t come with him to the movies because you are reading Jonathan Edwards could have quite an alluring impact), I give this one simple assessment of the whole.

The clearest evidence of whether a guy is telling you the truth regarding his ‘profession’ of Christianity will be in his practice, not his words. The genuine guy will seek as a rule to conform his practice to Scripture, and this conformity will be the rule of his life over time. He will not simply be a ‘good man’ who is ‘good to me’. he will be a man whose desire it will be obey Jesus.

Such men are, sadly, rare. (And those that there are are also remarkably blind, overlooking a slew of good, godly, beautiful, available Christian girls. That is the subject for another day.)

So, ladies, look through the veneer of a supposed ‘profession’ of faith, which may be no more than a profession of desire. Listen closely to Mr. Edwards, and you will be in the end a much happier woman.
———-
*because I just made it up.

Prepare to be underwhelmed.

I am generally adept at most things technical, but one skill I’ve never mastered is texting. So, on Monday, with my daughter at Starbucks, I was given a lesson in the finer points. I had taken a picture Sunday, which I knew that I could send to some folks from my phone, but tried with no success. So, in about 4.5 nanoseconds, J showed me how.

Amazing.

Technically, I don’t ‘have’ texting on my phone. That is, we pay for each text sent and received. So, don’t send me a text. But this one indulgence was enough to show me that it could be very addictive.

Now, get this: on my OWN I figured out how to send the picture to my own email inbox! Whoa.

Anyway, here is the picture. It is of our musicians rehearsing for our worship and prayer time Sunday night.

Since the monumental discovery of the Rock, Paper, Scissors Society last week, discovery has been pretty tepid.

That said, I was quite excited to find this free Christmas song from Sixpence None the Richer. It’s beautiful, and free, and as much as I like beautiful, I really like free. (Some thoughts on a recent concert appearance, and an explanation of their name here.) “…so kiss me…”

And thanks to one of the esteemed faculty members of Covenant Theological Seminary, I learned that my preppy name is “Rucker Garrison Vanleer the Fifth”, but that most people know me as “Topper”. I have NO idea what lies behind this.

“If God were unkind enough to answer some of our prayers at once, and in our way, we should be very impoverished Christians.” (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, From Fear to Faith: Studies in the Book of Habakkuk – and the Problem of History, page 24)

It is, it seems to me, a far greater test of the depth and legitimacy of faith, to believe this statement as true, than it is to believe that God answers every rightly prayed prayer.

December 12, the trailer says, is, ominously, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Actually, it is simply the date on which Scott Derrickson’s remake of the classic cold-war era sci fi feature will be released. I’m skeptical of remakes of classics, but Derrickson is a Christian whose The Exorcism of Emily Rose was very well done, so, I’m withholding judgment.

However, today I could use some earth standing still. I have a lot to do. My sermon needs more time to develop. I have some difficult tasks facing me this afternoon. There is just a lot on my plate.

So then, to my delight, I came into my study this morning to find that my wall clock is stopped at 12:39 AM. It has not moved since I came in. It shows that I got here VERY early, and that I’ve gotten quite a bit done since coming in and yet no time has yet elapsed.

My prayers are answered.

Sort of.

I finished Monday a project begun a long time ago (see here and here), the reading of Jonathan Edwards’ Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Edwards is nothing if not thorough. And he is zealous to buttress his assertions with ample reference to Scripture. So, the work is wordy. But that wordiness is no slam against its worth. I’ve reflected extensively on this before, so no need here to repeat my thoughts.

I did not wish to leave the book without emphasizing the 12th sign of the work of God’s grace in the life of a professor of Christianity. His point here is that the major evidence for the reality of the work of God’s grace in our lives and others is the fruit of Christ-likeness we display subsequent to our profession of faith. It is our practice, the fruit, that reveals us and others for who we are.

Edwards says this:

“From what has been said it is manifest, that Christian practice or a holy life is a great and distinguishing sign of true and saving grace. But I may go further, and assert, that it is the chief of all the signs of grace, both as an evidence of the sincerity of professors unto others, and also to their own consciences.”

and this:

“Christ nowhere says, ye shall know the tree by its leaves or flowers, or ye shall know men by their talk, or ye shall know them by the good story they tell of their experiences, or ye shall know them by the manner and air of their speaking, and emphasis and pathos of expression, or by their speaking feelingly, or by making a very great show by abundance of talk, or by many tears and affectionate expressions, or by the affections ye feel in your hearts towards them: but by their fruits shall ye know them; the tree is known by its fruit; every tree is known by its own fruit.”

It is for these reasons that when I first hear of someone’s ‘conversion’, my rejoicing is tentative. I only believe what I hear when the fruit of what is expressed is revealed, and that takes time.

But what fruit do we look for? Is it perfect compliance to the law of God?

Hardly.

I read also this morning on ParadoxUganda of a man who during his marriage had pursued two affairs. Can we say that this man is truly saved? Given what is said here about his testimony before his church, we can believe he is:

“A primary school head teacher, who looked familiar to me but whom I do not really know, stood up front with his Bible, and proceeded to give the most beautiful testimony of repentance I have ever seen in any church. He began by saying that though he had become a Christian in 1992, he felt he was truly being born again today. He read several Scriptures to show that he needed to repent to God, to the church, to his children, and to his wife. Then instead of the vague “If I have done you any wrong please forgive me” kind of weak semi-repentance, he boldly told his story, saying that he had pursued two extra-marital sexual relationships over the last few years, and describing the terrible impact on his wife, and on his life. He actually got down on his knees, and his wife came up front, and when he asked for her forgiveness she granted it. The elders came forward and prayed for both of them, and their young child. Bhiwa hugged the man so hard he lifted him off his feet, and the women in the congregation were cheering they were so amazed. When it was all over the wife stayed up and asked if she could sing. She was too overcome to speak, but she stood in front of the church and sang solo a song about Jesus on the cross while a tear rolled down her cheek. Then in the prayer request time three other men stood up, none with specific repentances like this but all three asking the church to pray that they would be convicted by the Spirit and change as this man had!”

I want to see in a person a pursuit after godly behavior. But that pursuit will never be perfect. It must be conjoined with a regular repentance and a continual re-apprehension of grace.

That is the fruit of true conversion.

Rare is the movie I will watch twice in one weekend. But when one finds a good story, one wants others to discover it as well. So, a week or two ago, we were encouraged to watch a 1990 film Awakenings. Friday night, Barb and I watched it, and Sunday night, we watched it again, this time with many of our family members around.

This is not an original story. More incredibly, it is based on real events from the summer of 1969 in the life of a reclusive neurologist at a hospital for the chronically ill. But it is, as a story, more than that. At the end, Robin Williams, playing the neurologist, sums up the lessons of the summer, and says this:

“Another awakening took place. The human spirit is more powerful than any drug, and that is what needs to be nourished. Work, play, friendship, family. These are things that matter. This is what we’ve forgotten. The simplest things.”