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Calling Latin Peeps

February 25, 2013 — 6 Comments

A friend of mine has an old (1663) KJV Bible with the following Latin quote (ascribed to Luther) hand inscribed in one of the front pages:

“Pactum feci Domino Deo meo, ne mihi mittat vel visiones, vel somnia, vel etiam angelos. Contentus enim sum Hoc Dono, quod habeo Scripturam sanctum, qua abunde docet, ac suppeditat omnia qua necessaria, tum ad hanc vitam tum ad futuram.”

My rough translation on the fly:

“I have made a covenant with the Lord my God, that He give me neither visions nor dreams nor even angels. For I am content with This Gift which I have: Holy Scripture which teaches abundantly, and supplies everything necessary, both for this life and for the future.”

So how’d I do? Any suggestions or corrections?

Thanks and cheers in advance.

In Bible, History - Reformation, Misc, Sola Scriptura

Looking for Jesus: Part 7

January 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

[Note: the first part of this sermon was The Gospel According to Water.]

How This Fits with Epiphany
Epiphany means “manifestation,” it means a sudden bolt of inspiration, understanding: “Aha!” One of the supreme places the Bible and the church fathers have pointed for one of these great manifestations is the baptism of Jesus. There the God who made the waters came down into the waters. The one who led Israel through the sea came down to be led through the sea. The One who cleansed and purified Israel, the One who was always clean and holy came to be washed clean for the forgiveness of Israel, to fulfill all righteousness. Then, right on schedule, as Jesus was coming up out of the water, the Spirit descended upon him and the Father spoke from heaven identifying for the whole world, His beloved Son. This beloved Son, filled with Spirit, became the Rock that was struck so that living water might flow out to the ends of the earth (Jn. 19:34). And when we read and hear this story of the rivers, the story of the waters, and we see Jesus standing in the midst of the waters, how can we not glorify Him? How can that not hit us? How can that not open our eyes? Jesus is our living water, our Spirit-filled water.

What Should Studying the Bible Be Like?
This why when you read the Bible rightly, when you are studying it prayerfully, it should be like drinking water, like cool fresh water on your face on a hot day, like a happy, gurgling stream in a mountain meadow, like riding in a fierce, raucous squall. It should be at turns refreshing, sweet, comforting, peaceful, unnerving, terrifying, and overwhelming. Because Jesus meets us in His Word. Continue Reading…

In Bible, Culture, Epiphany, Evangelism, Grace, Justice & Mercy, Politics, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, TRC, Wisdom

The Gospel According to Water

January 15, 2013 — 2 Comments

The story of the Bible is the story of a river. It’s the story of the Spirit hovering over the waters, causing it to flow, making it surge, making it splash, making it live.

Adam and Eve were supposed to build boats and ride the river down the mountain. They would have had great adventures. Which river would they have gone down first? The Pishon? Looking for the gold in Havilah? Or try the Gihon going down to Ethiopia, or the Euphrates perhaps? Four rivers going out to the ends of the earth, the ends of the compass. The whole world was theirs because the whole world was their Father’s and they were safe in His love. But instead they plodded down that eastern hill in sadness, dust clouds licking their feet.

Grace was when they walked in the garden, when springs of water came up from the face of the ground to water the flowers and plants. Grace was the river that ran out of the garden, out of the presence of God, and down the mountain to the ends of the earth. Grace was drinking that living water, splashing in those streams, riding them, walking in them with the God of the Universe. Continue Reading…

In Bible, Creation, Culture, Epiphany, Grace, Misc, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, TRC, Wisdom

Looking for Jesus: Part 6

January 7, 2013 — 1 Comment

[Note the first part of this sermon was The Gospel According to the Rocks.]

What does the Bible say about the world?

1. When we consider all these themes (trees, lights, rocks, etc.), the Bible is telling us that there is a deep goodness embedded in the world (Gen. 1:31). All of creation has experienced the curse of sin and death and now groans, waiting for the redemption of the sons of men (Gen. 3:17-19, Rom. 8:19-22), but the world is also constantly talking about the glory of God (Ps. 19:1-4, 97:6). The world makes it manifestly clear that it was created, that we were created by an all-powerful, glorious, orderly, good God (Acts 17:24-29, Rom. 1:19-21). But even more explicitly, after we have read and studied the Bible, the World is constantly talking about Jesus, about God’s love for His people, His mission to share that glory with the world. The world proclaims the majesty of the Triune God and all men are without excuse, but the astounding claim of the New Testament is that it was created by and has the fingerprints of Jesus all over it (Jn. 1:3, Col. 1:16, Heb. 1:2-3). Creation, flood, Exodus, miracles, resurrection, trees, rocks, stars – all proclaim the obedience of creation to its Good Lord. In other words, the world proclaims that Jesus is Lord.

2. The Bible tells us that because of sin, the world has a certain kind of gravity to folly, a logic to evil, and therefore there are clearly established patterns to sin and evil. Sin tends to grow up in a particular direction (Rom. 6:19). Paul says that ingratitude gives way to hollowness that descends to folly that finally becomes darkness (Rom. 1:21). In layman’s terms, a little bitterness gives birth to a biting sarcasm that grows into full blown lies that grows up into men trying to have sex with other men. In Ps. 19, David confesses that sin is mysterious and therefore prays that God would cleanse him from secret faults (Ps. 19:12), followed by a prayer against presumptuous sins – that they would not have dominion over him (Ps. 19:13). Then David says he will be “upright” and “innocent from the great transgressions.” Psalm 1 describes a similar logical progression: walking, standing, sitting with ungodly, sinners, and scornful (Ps. 1:1). He who walks with the wise will become wise, but he who is a companion of fools will be destroyed – whether actual flesh and blood people, books, music, movies, heroes we look up to (Pr. 13:20). Apart from the miraculous and gracious intervention of God’s grace (e.g. Lk. 15:17), this progression always happens (Ps. 6:16, Pr. 26:27, Gal. 6:7) and fools never learn (Pr. 26:11, 2 Pet. 2:22). Molehills of sin always tend to grow up into mountains of evil. Continue Reading…

In Bible, Church Calendar, Creation, Epiphany, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, TRC

Looking for Jesus: Part 5 & the Gospel According to the Child

December 31, 2012 — 1 Comment

This week in our series, Looking for Jesus: Learning to Read the Bible and the World Through New Eyes, we’re answering the question: What does the Bible do? And our theme is children. These two things actually go together so well, that I’m just going to combine them for today’s sermon rather than taking them sequentially.

The Bible is a Fairy Tale that Creates Children
The Bible opens like a fairy tale, and it closes like a fairy tale. It opens in a perfect, beautiful garden, and it closes in a glorious, towering garden city coming down out of the clouds of heaven. And it’s filled with childish stories. There are talking snakes and talking donkeys. There are old women giving birth to babies. There are old men with sticks that command the forces of nature in the name of the God. Sometimes people walk on water, and sometimes the waters part making a path through the water. Bread comes down out of heaven, water gushes out of rocks, cities fall down when the people march around them shouting and blowing trumpets, men walk in a fiery furnace unharmed. There are giants and dragons and (depending on your translation) unicorns and satyrs. Burning bushes, rainbows, evil spirits, miraculous battles, sometimes the sun stands still, sometimes men pray and it stops raining for three years, and they pray again and the rain comes. One man apparently vanished into thin air because he walked with God, another man was taken up in a fiery chariot, and another man appeared and disappeared and reappeared in various places by the power of the Spirit. Many talked with heavenly beings whose appearance made you want to die with fear. Many people have spoken with angels, seen glimpses of God, and visions of the glories of heaven and the angelic armies. Bread and fish multiply, the dead are raised, men speak in unknown tongues, the lame walk, the blind see, arrogant kings judged, slain, eaten by worms, and the hero is a child born of a virgin, betrayed, rejected, and murdered like a worthless criminal.

This is no reasonable book. This is no book for serious, color inside the lines, paper-clip counters. This is the kind of book to make serious scholars mad. This is the kind of book to make certain kinds of scientists throw it down in disgust. This book is a fairy tale, and it is full of fairy tales. It’s a book of childish stories, beginning in a garden with two innocent, perfect children who break the rules and bring a spell of darkness on the earth. And the story climaxes after many twists and turns with the birth of another child who obeys the rules and breaks the spell that was cast over the earth, and brings light back into the world. The hero-child goes down into the cave of death, slays the dragon, rescues the harlot, making her his virgin bride, and finds the way out again alive. And the story closes imagining the whole world as a cosmic fairy tale, a Marvel Comics meets Beowulf, an apocalyptic vision of the reign of the Child King who is also a Lamb who is also a Lion who goes into battle, slaying the dragon and all his accomplices with the sword that comes out of His mouth while rescuing His Bride through the flames, through the sword, through great peril and bringing her at last to the great Wedding Day, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. Continue Reading…

In Advent, Bible, Child Kingdom, Christmas, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, Theology - Christology, TRC

The Gospel According to Gifts

December 29, 2012 — Leave a comment

Once upon a time, in the beginning, God gave. God spoke the universe into existence, and God gave reality, God gave existence, God gave all things. Creation itself was the first birthday party, the first festival, the first baby shower, the first graduation party, first wedding reception. The world was created, the world was born, the world graduated from nothing into everything. God spoke His bride into being and decorated everything for the marriage feast. God gave in His love.

In other words, in the beginning it was Christmas. It was Christmas all day, every day with presents stacked to the moon because God made everything perfect for His people, because God is love. God is the original extravagant Giver. He spoke radiant light. He spoke tossing, foaming oceans. He gave tangy oranges and crisp watermelons and sweet corn on the cob. He gave Great White Sharks with mouthfuls of razor teeth and grey armored rhinoceroses, and bald eagles sweeping and diving. They were just a few of the party favors, dinner entertainment to keep the guests busy before the wedding party could be introduced. He hung lights for the party, flinging handfuls of sparkling dust into the night sky. He stretched clouds, puffy and streaked around the horizon, and He heaped up snow-capped peaks all around the room. He touched the tops of some of the mountains and made them smoke and blow fire; He gave some of the angels missions streaking lightening and rumble thunder to pop and crack and boom for the festival. He made everything ready for His wedding day, and He spread a great lavish feast with fruits and vegetables, juices and fresh water, bread and wine: all of it in love, all of it with joyful expectation.

And all of it for us, His Bride. It was all an enormous wedding gift. It was a festival, a party, a celebration of His love for us. And when everything was ready, He made man in His own image, male and female, the guests of honor. It was our birthday and our wedding day, and even the love we shared was meant to point to Him, our Maker, our Husband, to His love embedded in the universe. The whole world was a proposal, God on bended knee, smiling proudly, “I love you. Will you marry me?” Continue Reading…

In Advent, Bible, Christmas, Grace, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, TRC

Looking for Jesus: Part 4

December 29, 2012 — Leave a comment

[Note: I've broken my sermon from last Sunday into two parts for navigating convenience. This is the first part: What Should We Expect to Find in the Bible?, and I've linked to the second post which was the second half of the sermon: The Gospel According to Gifts.]

This Fourth Sunday in Advent we continue our series Looking for Jesus: Learning to Read the Bible and the World Through New Eyes. This week we consider the question: What should we expect to find in the Bible? And our theme for our case study this week is Gifts.

How does this fit with Advent?
There’s usually a lot of talk around this time of year about finding the true meaning of Christmas. From Charlie Brown to the evening news, this phrase gets batted around and frequently buried beneath a pile of vague, sappy feelings. But you can tell a lot about what’s really going on in the face of tragedy. And we’ve had an up close example in the recent shooting in Connecticut. Some reported that following the shooting people were taking decorations down, others understandably felt the tension of try to celebrate in the face of such heartache. Still others have sought to weave their suffering into the celebration. One report said 20 trees were decorated in one place remembering the 20 children who lost their lives.

In the face of loneliness, in the face of pain, in the face of uncertainty, in the face of failure, in the face of regret, the shallow meaning of Christmas – some kind of warm fuzzy sentiment of goodwill and brotherhood strikes hollow. And if that’s all it is, then by all means, we should take the decorations down. Continue Reading…

In Advent, Bible, Christmas, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, TRC

Looking for Jesus: Part 3

December 17, 2012 — Leave a comment

[Note: I've broken my sermon into two parts for navigating convenience. This is the first part: How Should We Read the Bible?, and I've linked to the second post which was the second half of the sermon: The Gospel According to the Lights.]

This week we continue our series Looking for Jesus: Learning to Read the Bible & the World Through New Eyes. This week we ask the question: How Should We Read the Bible? And for our case study, we will look at the theme of Lights.

How does this fit with Advent?
As we celebrate Christ’s first Advent, we are praying that God would come open our eyes to see Jesus in His Word and in the World around us. So my goals are:

1. That you would love the Bible more and read it and study it more because you love Jesus more and you can’t stop finding Him (and His stories of grace) there.

2. That finding Jesus in the Bible would be the beginning of even greater wisdom in seeing Him in the story of your life and in the story of the world around you.

Jesus said that you can tell a tree by its fruit (Lk. 6:44), but we need wisdom for this. We need our senses exercised to discern both good and evil, and this comes through growing skillful in the word of righteousness (Heb. 5:12-14).

One of the great lies of evolutionary thought is that everything is random. But Jesus says that fig trees make figs, and bramble bushes always make thorns and never the other way around (Lk. 6:44). But paganism always wants random mutation. It wants bad trees to be able to make good fruit. And if evolution is true, then that is the way the world works because we all accidentally crawled up out of the primordial slime. But if God created the world from nothing, and has spoken it into existence, then His definitions matter. Plants must produce fruit and seeds according to their kinds. This is because this is how God has spoken the world, and this is how God has spoken in His Word. And God’s Word brings light and clarity and freedom. But the culture around us is busy trying to ignore God’s Word which is to invite darkness, necessarily blurring distinctions. That’s not a human being it’s a blob of tissue. That’s not a man or a woman, it’s a bisexual, transsexual, lesbian, gay, transgender, whatever. But the fruit of this redefining is rotten, ugly, violent, and dark. The fruit of this is a young man walking into an elementary school and massacring a classroom full of kindergartners. Continue Reading…

In Advent, Bible, Christmas, Culture, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, TRC, Wisdom

The Gospel According to the Lights

December 17, 2012 — 1 Comment

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Once upon a time, God created light. God spoke light. His first word was literally light. And it shone in the darkness. You could see because God had spoken. The Triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, eternally, forever bound in an indescribable glory, an unapproachable light, created a visible glory, a visible light, a robe for His glory. And there was evening and morning.

And God created rulers for this dance: the sun, moon, and stars to divide the day from night, to be for days, seasons, and years, to rule the day and the night. First God made day and night, a 24 hour span, and then came the sun, moon, and stars, to orchestrate the dance, to divide between the day and the night. First came the tick, tick, ticking of the clock and then came the hands and the face, the signs for seasons, days, and years.

And then God created more rulers. God created man in His own image: He caused His face to shine upon them. And He told them to rule, to have dominion over the whole earth, like the stars. So God brought the animals unto Adam to see what he would call them. Adam’s eyes were full of light, God’s created light, and so Adam’s words named like God’s words.

But there was no helper found suitable for Adam, so God caused a deep sleep to come upon Adam, and Adam’s Day became Night. And during that Night, God built another light to shine next to Adam. So there at the top of the world on a mountain in Eden, God shared His glory robe with His children, clothing them in His light and love and grace, two stars created to grow up into greater glory, Kings and Queens of all creation, signs and rulers and time keepers.

In Advent, Bible, Christmas, Creation, Evangelism, Grace, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, TRC, Wisdom

The Gospel According to the Wasteland

December 10, 2012 — 1 Comment

Once upon a time, God created life in excelsis and fruitfulness gushing, overflowing: plants and flowers exploding in aromas, colors, fruit; land animals scuffling, snorting, bellowing; sea creatures diving and spouting and swarming; birds singing, darting, perching, preening; and people laughing, dancing, running, leaping, building, painting, inventing, discovering (at least for a little while). In the beginning, the world teemed with life: energy, color, shape, beauty, goodness, and it was all spring loaded by the sheer Word of God’s blessing to multiply and grow and expand.

But Adam and Eve listened to another word, to the word of the serpent. They turned from the voice of God their Father. They listened to other voices. Though they, themselves, were made by that Word, in the image of God, they desired to be their own gods, to please themselves, to judge for themselves, to know for themselves. And as they chose to be their own gods, as they chose to turn away from the word of the God who had made them, they were choosing to leave His care, leave His world, leave His blessing and grace.

And so God spoke a different kind of word: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life…” (Gen. 3:16-17) And so came death, darkness, separation, sorrow, pain, struggle, conflict, emptiness: there would be pain in child bearing; there would be thorns and weeds; and the weight of sin would begin pulling their bodies back down into the ground they were taken from. God sent them out of the garden clothed in the skins of animals, but they were sent out into the wasteland, to the east, into exile, into the wilderness, away from the tree of life, away from the presence of their Father. Continue Reading…

In Advent, Bible, Bible - Genesis, Christmas, Sermon Outlines, Sola Scriptura, TRC