Graham A. Cole’s Engaging with the Holy Spirit

Following up his larger book on the Holy Spirit, Graham Cole has given us a handy book on Engaging with the Holy Spirit: Real Questions, Practical Answers. In this short book (just over 100 pages) he looks at six questions:

1. What Is Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?

2. How May We Resist the Holy Spirit?

3. Ought We to Pray to the Holy Spirit?

4. How Do We Quench the Holy Spirit?

5. How Do We Grieve the Holy Spirit?

6. How Does the Holy Spirit Fill Us?

These are pressing and important questions, and we can thank Prof. Cole for his work on them. Tolle lege!

Arise, O Star

[I wrote this some time back, and we have sung it a number of times at Redeemer. I'm only posting it now because I've only now figured out how to make things single spaced on the blog--press shift then enter.]

Arise, O Star

Verse 1
Seed of the woman
Promised long ago
Sworn to crush the serpent’s head
That to Eden we might go

All nations will be blessed
In the seed of Abraham
And the scepter is to Judah
The land belongs to him

Chorus

Arise, O Star
Jacob longs for you
Keep your word, Lord
Your promises all true

Your people wait
For that Day when you will come
Take your power and reign
Heaven’s highest Son

Verse 2
The branch will come from Jesse
Great David’s greater Son
As a Son to God comes He
To the throne in Zion

The prophet like Moses
Priest like Melchizedek
Anointed with the Spirit
Messiah, he shall reign

to chorus

Verse 3
So the Man of Sorrows came
Acquainted with his grief
Smitten for our sins
Raised to set us free

And he shall come again
With all his holy ones
For that day we watch
Come soon, Lord Jesus

to chorus

James Merrill Hamilton Jr.
March 31, 2006

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Here are the biblical texts that give rise to these lyrics:

A Prophetic Word from Dr. Russell Moore

Anyone concerned with the state of evangelical believers in this culture should read Dr. Moore’s thoughts in “Southern Baptists, the Family, and the Rule of the Appetites.”

On your way there, check out these two pictures of a statue of a lion conquering a snake. This statue resides in the Tuileries, the garden right outside the Louvre in Paris.

The Lion of the Tribe of Judah has conquered the snake!

May we heed this prophetic word (yes, I am a cessationist) from Dr. Moore and learn from our King how to crush the serpent’s head.

Soon Comes the King

Soon comes the King, in splendor laden light;
Awed, we shall sing, and praise his glorious might.
Together we wait for the coming Lord,
In green pastures grazing, fed by his Word

Redeemed by the Lamb, who stands as though slain,
Known by the Father, and bearing his name,
Alive by the Spirit, who quickens our hearts.
Faith is our shield against all Satan’s darts

That fly against us on this pilgrim way,
And if our paths part until that great day,
Hold fast the Word, which is able to save,
And he’ll gather us home beyond the grave,

When together again our Lord we’ll praise,
When we stand before him and see his face.

June 22, 2008
On the occasion of our farewell to the saints at
Baptist Church of the Redeemer in Houston, TX.

Canadian Courts and Legislature Usurp Parental Authority

Americans should sit up and take notice of what’s going on in Canada. Not long ago, Canada legalized gay “marriage,” and since that battle has moved south, others probably will as well.

There is legislation being considered in Canada that would make spanking illegal, and Dr. Mohler reports on an instance where a 12 year old girl took her father to court and won. As the Globe and Mail [Toronto] reports::

First, the father banned his 12-year-old daughter from going online after she posted photos of herself on a dating site. Then she allegedly had a row with her stepmother, so the father said his girl couldn’t go on a school trip.

The girl took the matter to the court - and won what lawyers say was an unprecedented judgment.

Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday that the father couldn’t discipline his daughter by barring her from the school trip.

So if you want the government and the judges to tell you how you can and cannot parent your children, vote for the liberals who believe that government has all the answers this fall. These liberals seem to cluster in a certain political party here in the States. As Dr. Mohler notes:

The logic of this ruling is not limited to Canada. In 1970, Hillary Rodham, then a young lawyer (and later Sen. Hillary Clinton), wrote a law review article, “Children Under the Law,” in which she argued that minors should be treated as “child citizens” who should, under at least some conditions, be able to challenge their parents in court over parental decisions.

These are times when those who know their God need to stand firm and take action (Dan 11:32). We should pray and do everything we can to protect religious liberty–which includes the right to raise children according to the mandates of Holy Scripture–but if these liberties are taken away, we need the backbone to obey God rather than men and the wisdom to know what sacrifices are worth making.

I am reminded of John Bunyan, who was incarcerated for 14 years, away from wife and children, because he would not consent to stop preaching the gospel.

Let us pray, and let us raise an outcry against governmental intrusion into family business. Let the message to the government be clear: Get out of my house!

The government needs to limit itself to the aims stated in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

May the Lord give us wisdom.

Dostoevsky on the Love of God

From The Brothers Karamazov, Book 2 “An Unfortunate Gathering,” Chapter 3 “Peasant Women Who Have Faith”:

Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don’t fret. If only your penitence fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not.

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For more on this love of God, click the “Two Ways to Live” tab in the right margin under the word “Gospel.”

Jesse James and Church Discipline

Ken Keathley has one of the best introductory paragraphs to a post I’ve seen:

A while back I had the privilege of preaching at 1^st Baptist Church of Kearney, Missouri, which so happens to have been the home church of Jesse James. Jesse was a member in good standing when he led the first daylight bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri, a town about ten miles away. The church minutes record that deliberations to discipline Jesse were complicated by the concern that he might burn down the building. Everyone in the community knew Jesse was staying at his mother’s farm (she was a Sunday school teacher at the time), so two deacons were selected to go to confront him according to the guidelines of Matthew 18. The minutes of the next business meeting report that, for one reason or another, the deacons never could find the time to visit the notorious bandit. Then the minutes report that Jesse himself arrived at the meeting, and wishing to cause no embarrassment to the congregation, requested his name be removed from the roll. The church obliged.

From there he goes on to make an important point about church discipline. Read the whole thing.

Russell Moore on the Kingdom of the Crushed Skull

Dr. Moore writes:

The Atlantic Monthly notes a recent study in the journal Psychological Science that suggests that “humans may have a built-in aversion to snakes and their hissing, slithering, menacing ways.” Researchers at the University of Virginia studied 120 preschool-age children and their parents to pick up reactions to images of various things, including snakes.  The researchers were surprised to find that the children, even those who had had no exposure to snakes, immediately picked out the snakes as threatening.

The preschoolers had no such “threat-relevant” reaction to pictures of frogs or caterpillars. This suggests, says the Atlantic, “an innate predisposition to see a snake as a threat.” The authors of the article contend that humans and “other primates” could “have an evolved tendency to rapidly detect” a snake.

What, though, if this loathing isn’t at all evolutionary? What if it is the result of a cataclysmic events somewhere in the primeval past, something still embedded in the human heart?

Read the whole thing.

Dostoevsky on Lying to Oneself

From The Brothers Karamazov, Book 2 “An Unfortunate Gathering,” Chapter 2 “The Old Buffoon”:

Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill — he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.

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ChristianAudio.com is having a $9.49 sale, and I’ve been enjoying listening to The Brothers Karamazov, which I read the summer before my first semester at DTS.

Sing and Learn New Testament Greek

Anyone facing first semester Greek in the fall, or perhaps this summer, or maybe planning to teach it to their children will want to check out Kenneth Berding’s Sing and Learn New Testament Greek from Zondervan.

There are eleven songs on one cd that are accompanied by a 28 page guide.

I remember realizing that if I couldn’t say the English alphabet without at least using the rhythm of the alphabet song, I should probably put the Greek and Hebrew alphabets to some sort of rhythm or music if I wanted to learn them, too!

I commend this mneumonic device, but don’t think for a minute that this cd will enable you to learn Greek without hard work. There’s no substitute for disciplined, assiduous study. This cd can be a useful tool, but you’ll have to put the tool to work!