Tony Reinke: “Audio and PDFs from the 2009 Sovereign Grace Ministries Pastors Conference (April 6-8) are now available for download.”
This includes the following seminar by Mike Bullmore: “The Pastor and Preaching: How to Start a Sermon, End a Sermon, and Prepare the Middle of a Sermon” (MP3 | PDF).
Kevin DeYoung, senior pastor of University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan, reflects on “worldliness in entertainment” as a “high place.”
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” –Jesus (Matt 5:3)
Poverty of spirit is the personal acknowledgment of spiritual bankruptcy. It is the conscious confession of unworth before God. As such, it is the deepest form of repentance. . . .
Poverty of spirit cannot be artificially induced by self-hatred. Still less does it have in common with showy humility. It cannot be aped successfully by the spiritually haughty who covet its qualities. Such efforts may achieve token success before peers; they never deceive God. Indeed, most of us are repulsed by sham humility, whether our own or that of others.
I suspect that there is no pride more deadly than that which finds its roots in great learning, great external piety, or a showy defense of orthodoxy. My suspicion does not call into question the value of learning, piety, or orthodoxy; rather, it exposes professing believers to the full glare of this beatitude. Pride based on genuine virtues has the greatest potential for self-deception; but our Lord will allow none of it. Poverty of spirit he insists on—a full, honest, factual, conscious, and conscientious recognition before God of personal moral unworth. It is, as I have said, the deepest form of repentance.
–D. A. Carson, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and His Confrontation with the World: An Exposition of Matthew 5–10 (Grand Rapids: Global Christian Publishers, 1999), 18 (emphasis added; originally preached in 1975 and published in 1978).
Related: Doug Moo on Theological Humility
This week my wife and I listened to the audio book of Randy Alcorn‘s novel Safely Home (Tyndale House, 2001). We finished the six audio CDs last night after our church’s cross-centered Good Friday service. The novel is excellent, and it was a means of grace for both of us. It helped broaden our horizons on multiple levels (e.g., re persecution of Christians in China in particular and a heavenly perspective on persecution in general). Highly recommended.
It’s available in the following formats: paperback, hardcover, Kindle, audio download, and audio CD.
Related resources:
That’s what Jesus said on the cross some 1,980 years ago.
That’s why “Holy Week” pictures like these are so sad.
Comment 66 is mine:
Thanks for the quality photos. As usual, they are first-class. I profit immensely from looking at the photos posted here each week.
The actions captured in these photos, however, simultaneously sadden and infuriate me. This is not pure Christianity as found in the Old and New Testaments. These are warped traditions that have turned the good news about Jesus Christ on its head.
For an explanation of why Jesus died (and why acts like self-inflicted wounds are not only unnecessary but actually offensive to God), see John Piper’s book The Passion of Jesus Christ: Fifty Reasons Why He Came to Die. Free PDF here.
This is convicting. Maintaining the kind of theological humility that Moo describes below is no easy task. It’s like walking on an extremely narrow path with steep drop-offs on both sides.
What follows is from the “contemporary significance” section of Doug Moo’s comments on Romans 11:33–36 in Romans (NIVAC; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), pp. 391–92:
Theological humility. To my mortification and my family’s delight, I received in the mail just this week an invitation to join the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). [Moo was born in 1950.] I have reached a point of life in which I find myself prefacing many things I say with “at my age.” Undoubtedly, as my children insist, some of the sentences that follow reflect hardening of the arteries or irrational fear of anything new. But a few of these statements, I trust, reflect some wisdom that the perspective of age has inculcated. [Read more…] about Doug Moo on Theological Humility
Here’s how D. A. Carson introduces Peter Adam‘s Hearing God’s Words: Exploring Biblical Spirituality (ed. D. A. Carson; New Studies in Biblical Theology 16; Downers Grove: IVP, 2004) in the series preface (pp. 9–10):
In recent decades the notion of ‘spirituality’ has become astonishingly plastic. People judge themselves to be ‘spiritual’ if they have some aesthetic sense, or if they are not philosophical materialists, or if they have adopted a pantheistic view of reality, or if they feel helped or reinvigorated by the ‘vibrations’ of crystals. Even within a broadly Christian heritage, many writers appeal to ‘spiritual disciplines’ that are utterly divorced from the gospel and detached from the teaching of Scripture. Against the backdrop of these cultural developments, Dr Peter Adam encourages clear thinking: he traces the notion of spirituality through some of the turning points of Scripture, and finally grounds it in the gospel of Jesus Christ and its full-blown application to our lives. By appealing both to the Bible and to influential voices in the history of the church (notably John Calvin), Dr Adam manages to combine biblical theology and historical theology in an admirable synthesis. His academic training, years of pastoral ministry, and now principalship of a theological college, ensure that this book simultaneously informs the mind, warms the heart, and strengthens the will. And from the vantage of three decades of personal friendship, I gratefully attest that what Dr Adam writes, he also lives.
Adam asks, “What devices do we use to hear God’s Word today and yet avoid its intended impact?” He answers, “We can best answer this in terms of different types of personality” (p. 171). (In the following quotation, I’ve replaced bullet points with numbers [pp. 171–72]). [Read more…] about Six Personalities That Deflect God’s Word
