One of my favorite preachers was a man named Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the long-time pastor of Westminster Chapel in London.  Last week (1 March) marked the 29th anniversary of his death.  Below is a nice 10-minute  introduction to his life:

Iain Murray, his official biographer and former assistant, has written wonderful biographies:

• D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years 1899-1939
• D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Fight of Faith 1939-1981
• Lloyd-Jones: Messenger of Grace

If you wish to read a collection of his personal correspondence here’s a nice link: D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Letters 1919-1981.

If you’d like to hear him preach you may do so online (for free) at Martyn Lloyd-Jones Recording Trust.

Crossway Books continues to publish new volumes by Dr. Lloyd-Jones.  These volumes were edited from transcribed sermons by his daughter, Lady Elizabeth Catherwood. You can find these works here.

Lastly, a few years ago Mark Dever interviewed Lady Elizabeth and her husband, Sir Fred Catherwood, about her father: D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Reflections on His Ministry with His Family.

Jacqui and I had a nice walk on this crisp clear evening – stars above and a star beside me.  I was reminded of one of my favorite poems.  Can you guess the poet?

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

Watch it all – pretty creative:

As you may have observered, every Thursday in “Around the Horn” I list a collection of links to the week’s most interesting articles, well, to me anyway.  They range from religon, to the arts, to sports, or simply to something that caught my eye.  Some I liked because I agreed with the writer.  Some I liked because I disagreed and needed to work through why I disagreed.  All made me think.  I find critical thinking to be a fading quality and so I offer these articles to serve as thoughtful grit that just may produce an oyster of an idea.

Where is Katie Spotz?
22 year-old Katie Spotz (Mentor, Ohio native) is trying to become the youngest person to row a boat across the ocean.  Learn more about her cause and track her location at her site.

Years Beyond the Rabbit Hole, Alice Looks Back
From NPR: Charles Dodgson, a shy and awkward mathematics teacher in Oxford, England, spent a good deal of his free time with the Liddells: a family with three sisters who lived just across the street. At the age of 10, Alice, the youngest of the Liddell girls, requested that Professor Dodgson write down one of many the stories he told her. A few years later, he sent over “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” a manuscript dedicated to the real little girl he spent so much time with . . . . Dodgson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published shortly thereafter, under the pen name Lewis Carroll. In the back of the book was a photograph Dodgson had taken of Alice Liddell.

Uncle Jay Explains the News
Not heard of Uncle Jay?  Watch this clip of his weekly explanation of all things news.

McKnight on McLaren
Writing about McLaren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity, friend and professor Scot McKnight writes: Unfortunately, this book lacks the “generosity” of genuine orthodoxy and, frankly, I find little space in it for orthodoxy itself. Orthodoxy for too many today means little more than the absence of denying what’s in the creeds. But a robust orthodoxy means that orthodoxy itself is the lens through which we see theology. One thing about this book is clear: Orthodoxy is not central.

What’s an Anacoluthon?
From Monday with Mounce: Whatever the historical reason, the biblical writers are human and God in his sovereignty worked through them, and that included not always finishing their sentences.  Statements of the doctrine of Inspiration should not be based on how we think God should have done it, but on what we can see of how he did.

Gore, the Greens and a Pimped-out Panic
From Sp!ked: Former US vice-president and Nobel laureate Al Gore, writing yesterday in the New York Times, is just the latest high-profile climate alarmist to have a bash at damage limitation in the wake of a series of gaffes and revelations that have undermined the credibility of the official view of global warming. In particular, a claim made in 2007’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – that half of humanity will be starved of water in 25 years time – was more than just a typo. It was a huge blunder that reveals much about the scaremongering and belligerent tactics of the environmentalist movement.

Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe
From Mark Driscoll at TheResurgence: To answer any significant question about where we come from, why we are here, what is right and wrong, who God is, and where we are going when we die requires doctrine. Subsequently, everyone has doctrine. The only question is whether it is truthful, biblical, and helpful.

Explanation, Implication and Application?
What is the role of the preacher?  What makes good preaching?  One of the best, John MacArthur, offers this response to the critique that he’s short on application: It’s not for me to do that.  Application belongs to the Spirit of God. All I’m interested in is explanation and its implications. And the power comes in the implication and the Spirit of God takes the implications of what I’ve said tonight, all these things I’ve said, I don’t need to say all kinds of little scenarios to you and paint all kinds of little individual circumstances. All I need you to know is this is what the Word of God says and the implications are powerfully brought to bear with authority on your life and I exhort you to respond to those implications, it is the Spirit’s work to drive those implications into direct and personal application.

Steve’s February 2010 Congregational Letter

Encountering God – Ashley Early (video clip)

What is Anglicanism?

A Word About Augustine (video clip)

Around the Horn – 2.04.10

Mark Galli, in the article below, takes on the preacher as entertainer mentality so prevalent in so many churches.  I have to look no further than St. Andrew’s to see the rootedness of this wishfulness.  I was talking to one of our members, one of our long time leaders, recently and she was commenting about how she missed the preaching style of a former staff member.  ”What did you like?” I asked.  ”He made me laugh and his illustrations were so memorable.”  She then proceeded to name a few of the more memorable illustrations.  When I asked what point the illustrations were illustrating she had no answer.  What became memorable, then, was not Jesus – or His Gospel – rather, the preacher.  When I pressed her a bit she candidly commented, “I’d rather have a humorous presentation and remember that I liked going to church that day even if I can’t remember what the preacher spoke about.”  Tragic.

Here’s a clip from Galli’s article.  Make sure you read it all – especially if you are a preacher:

My friend says he’s slowly become aware that the medium has become the message—the sermon has inadvertently become a showcase of the pastor’s life and faith—and this by a pastor who my friend describes as humble and desperate to win people to Christ . . . Phillips Brooks once described preaching as “Truth through personality.” Indeed. But with the flowering of the personal illustration, preaching often morphs into “the truth of my personality” . . . It was just a generation ago that the personal illustration was suspect. Homiletics professors frowned on the preacher bringing himself or his family into the sermon. It was unseemly, not serious exposition. But the 1960s introduced the therapeutic age. Today, the personal illustration is de rigueur. If you don’t use personal illustrations, people wonder whether you are authentic.

Read the rest.

St. Augustine once wrote that each of us is created with a God-shaped vacuum. Only God can fill this void within us. God said through Jeremiah that He wants to fill our emptiness with His spring of living water. That means that He is like that spring of living water: constantly bubbling up, flowing forth, giving life. He alone is able to fill us completely and satisfy us completely as He pours His life into us. But all too often we’re like the people of Israel to whom Jeremiah spoke: We forsake Him – the spring of living water, and we dig our own cisterns – we try to come up with substitutes to fill the emptiness. The tragedy is that like the Israelites, our cisterns, our substitutes are cracked. They can’t provide life and they can’t hold life.

But Jesus meets us, just like He met the woman at the well. Remember her? She came to draw water, and Jesus saw her thirst for living water and offered it to her. Remember the substitute of her life? She tried to find a husband who could fill the void in her life. What a recipe for disappointment – and when one husband couldn’t fill the void, she moved to another. By the time Jesus met her she was working on husband number 6 in a sexual relationship outside of marriage. Only Jesus, the Living Water, could fill her deepest need. Only Jesus, the Living Water, can fill your deepest needs.

The Bible is full of stories of people who substituted something, or someone, for God. It’s called idolatry. An idol is anything we set up as a substitute for God. It doesn’t have to be a statue that you set up in your house – those are easier to see. The tougher ones are idols of the heart. They can be power, position, reputation, relationships, comfort, work, “the way we’ve always done it” … anything. These idols, these shifts of the heart, not only alienate us from God, but they also bring us into bondage to ourselves.

Sin not only estranges, it enslaves. It separates us from God and brings us into captivity. This is what Paul was talking about in Romans 7.15-24:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do– this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

Only Jesus.

Next on the list is that we not only experience alienation from God, and bondage to ourselves, our sin also moves us into conflict with others. Sin lies at the root of our personality. It controls our ego. All the sins we commit are assertions of our self against either God or other people. It’s not easy to adjust to other people, is it? We tend to either look down on them or look up to them. Most of our quarrels stem from our misunderstanding of the other person’s point of view. It’s more natural for us to talk than to listen, to argue than to submit. Our conflict with others, our sin against others often boils down to an assertion of our self. We think, “I’ve been sinned against and wounded, I’ll be aggressive and tough so it won’t happen again. I’ve been sinned against and wounded, I’ll withdraw and defer so it won’t happen again.”

How does all this apply to us?

Francis MacNutt said “The first and deepest kind of healing that Christ brings is the forgiveness of our sins.” If Jesus is the way to the Father, the road we travel on is called forgiveness. The steps along the road to forgiveness begin with confession, repentance, and culminates with restoration.”

Confession
Confession admits the specific ways in which we’ve failed to stand in Christ. In confession we name the deed – we name the idol to which our heart has turned. Perhaps a fantasy life, a wrong relationship, maybe the holding onto of other’s sins against you. Maybe it’s been doing nothing – not responding to the needs around you, not sharing Jesus with those who are closest to you. Whatever. In naming the sin – in speaking it out loud – we break the power this sin has in our life. In naming the sin we own the action. Now, as you come to confession be ready for your flesh to rebel. “It’s too shameful” “You’ll be embarrassed.” Your mind may become distracted. But remember we come to Love personified. I think one of the titles He bore with most pleasure was “friend of sinners.” Jesus is the one who meets us, through His Spirit, in the act of confession. His grace allows us to make the confession. His presence brings clarity and peace. Through Jesus the Father calls us back. But we resist.

Andy Comisky wrote:

The immature, shadowy self resists the truth. It invests much in its own self-defense. It prattles ad nauseam about its needs, its wounds, and about those who have failed to love it aright. Instead of practicing the presence of Christ, the defended self prattles in the presence. He becomes grace resistant, choosing instead the broad path of self-righteousness.

Repentance
The word “repent” means “to turn back, away from, or toward.” It indicates an inward change of mind, heart, conviction and commitment. Repentance is rooted in the fear of God and a sorrow for offenses committed against Him. When repentance is accompanied by faith in Jesus it results in an outward turning from sin. Repentance is more than saying, “I’m sorry.” It’s an about face, a turning to Jesus.

Restoration
When we turn to the cross, when we behold the Lamb of God, when we see His body broken and bleeding because of our sin, when we give to Him the idols of our heart, when we own our sins by naming them and turning from them, He assumes them into Himself. In exchange He releases forgiveness and cleansing. We’re told that “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

There’s a strange verse in the Bible, James 5.16:

Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.

Why would God want us to confess our sins to one another? It’s difficult enough to confess them to Him! The key is that we don’t live individual Christian lives. We were saved from sin and saved into the body of Christ. One of the terrible consequences of our sin is that it isolates us. God redeems us and restores us through His body. Christ ministers to us through His body. As we confess our sins to Christ, He ministers to us through the prayers and words of other Christians. As they speak words of forgiveness and blessing, Christ, through them, speaks words of forgiveness and blessing. As they receive us back into a restored relationship with the body, Christ Himself is present receiving us back into a restored relationship with Himself.

Finally, our forgiveness necessitates the forgiveness of others. For many this is the most difficult step. “You don’t understand what they did to me.” “They don’t deserve forgiveness.” Objections flood our mind. The reality is we hold ourselves in bondage – to the person and the sin – as long as we remain unforgiving. Forgiveness is often a process. It begins with our will, with saying, “I choose to forgive,” and then moves to action – acting in a forgiving manner.

Just saw this book at Barnes & Noble and now today I run across a CNN story/interview with the author.  The book?  “Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. In the CNN interview Gottlieb says:

There’s a survey in the book where men and women are asked, “If you got 80 percent of everything you wanted — of your ideal traits in a mate or partner — would you be happy?” The majority of women said, “No, that’s settling,” and the majority of men said, “Eighty percent? I’d be thrilled; that’s a catch.” So the question is: Is getting less than everything we want truly settling?

Read the rest.