A Christian is an impregnable person.  He is a person that never can be conquered.  Emmanuel became man to make the church and every Christian to be one with him.  Christ’s nature is out of danger of all that is hurtful.  The sun shall not shine, the wind shall not blow, to the church’s hurt.  For the church’s Head ruleth over all things and hath all things in subjection.  Therefore let all the enemies consult together, this king and that power, there is a counsel in heaven which will disturb and dash all their counsels.  Emmanuel in heaven laugheth them to scorn.  As Luther said, ‘Shall we weep and cry when God laugheth?’

Richard Sibbes, preface, Bruised Reed, p.6

Another great clip from another great sermon:

The whole pith and marrow of the religion of Christianity lies in the doctrine of substitution, and I hesitate not to affirm my conviction that a very large proportion of Christians are not Christians at all, for they do not understand the fundamental doctrine of the Christian creed; and alas! there are preachers who do not preach, or even believe this cardinal truth. They speak of the blood of Jesus in an indistinct kind of way, and descant upon the death of Christ in a hazy style of poetry, but they do not strike this nail on the head, and lay it down that the way of salvation is by Christ’s becoming a substitute for guilty man.

This shall make me the more plain and definite. Sin is an accursed thing. God, from the necessity of his holiness, must curse it; he must punish men for committing it; but the Lord’s Christ, the glorious Son of the everlasting Father, became a man, and suffered in his own proper person the curse which was due to the sons of men, that so, by a vicarious offering, God having been just in punishing sin, could extend his bounteous mercy towards those who believe in the Substitute.

Ran across this preparing for last Sunday’s sermon:

By Christ’s death the Father’s good pleasure was effected and prospered. God’s good pleasure is, that that this world shall one day be totally redeemed from sin; God’s good pleasure is, that this poor planet, so long swathed in darkness, shall soon shine out in brightness, like a new-born sun. Christ’s death hath done it. The stream that flowed from his side on Calvary shall cleanse the world from all its blackness. That hour of mid-day darkness was the rising of a new sun of righteousness, which shall never cease to shine upon the earth. Yes, the hour is coming when swords and spears shall be forgotten things—when the harness of war and the pageantry of pomp shall all be laid aside for the food of the worm or the contemplation of the curious. The hour approacheth when old Rome shall shake upon her seven hills, when Mohammed’s crescent shall wane to wax no more, when all the gods of the heathens shall lose their thrones and be cast out to the moles and the bats; and then, when from the equator to the poles Christ shall be honored, the Lord paramount of earth, when from land to land, from the river even to the ends of the earth, one King shall reign, one shout shall be raised, “Hallelujah, hallelujah, the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.” Then, my brethren, shall it be seen what Christ’s death has accomplished, for “the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.”

Read the sermon.

Bunyan relates a story of an encounter he had with the Spirit as he walked across a field.  The Spirit said to him:

“Thy righteousness is in heaven.” And me thought withal I saw with the eye of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand.  I saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, today and forever.  Now did my chains fall from my legs indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons.  Oh me thought, Christ, Christ, there was nothing but Christ that was before my eyes!  I could look from myself to Him and should reckon that all those graces of God that now were green to me, were yet like those fourpence coins rich men carry in their purses, while their gold is in their trunks at home. Oh, I saw my gold was in my trunk at home.  I saw my gold was in my trunk at home.  In Christ my Lord and Saviour.  Now Christ was all; all my wisdom, all my righteousness, all my sanctification, all my redemption.

(The Works of John Bunyan, Volume 1, pp. 35-36)

An impersonal God?  Well and good.

A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness inside our own head?  Better still.

A formless life force surging through everyone – a vast power we can all tap? Best of all.

But a living God – pulling at the other end of the cord approaching at infinite speed, the hunter, the covenant Lord, the husband?  That is quite another matter.

There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion suddenly draw back – supposing you really found Him?  Or, worse still, suppose He found you.  If there is a God you are in a sense alone with Him.  You cannot put him off with speculations about your neighbor’s hypocrisy, or memories of what you have read in books.  What will all that chatter and hearsay count when the anesthetic fog we call the real world fades away and the divine presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate and unavoidable?

- C.S. Lewis (quoted by Tim Keller)

This fall we will be preaching our way through 1 & 2 Peter.  We begin a 7-week Lenten series on the person and work of the Holy Spirit this Sunday (yes, we’re a few days early).  That series will give way to a 22-week series on the 39 Articles (some will be combined) and then the fall is given over to Peter.

As preparation, I’m working my way through Robert Leighton’s (1611-1684) wonderful commentary on 1 Peter.  Ever experienced love at first sight?  I was hooked on his opening line, “The grace of God in the heart of man is a tender plant in a strange, unkindly soil.”  He develops the thought with this: “Therefore, it cannot grow unless great care is taken by a skillful hand that cherishes it.  To this end, God has given the constant ministry of the Word to his church, not only for the first work of conversion, but also for increasing his grace in the hearts of his children.”

The beauty of a well-spoken word.

Commenting on 1 Peter 1.7, Leighton has this to say:

The furnace shows faith to be what it is, it also improves it and makes it more valuable and purer than it had been previously.  The graces of the Spirit, as they come from God’s hand, are nothing but pureness.  But as they are placed in a heart where sin lives (which while the body remains cannot be totally purged away), faith is combined with corruption and dross.  In particular faith mixes with unbelief, the love for earthly things, a reliance on the creature – if not more than God, then together with God.  The furnace is necessary to deal with this, so that the soul may be purified from its dross and made more spiritual in believing.  It is a hard task to  teach the heart to grasp loosely the things of the world (Psalm 62.10; 1 Timothy 6.17).

So God is pleased to choose the more effective way to teach his people the right and pure exercise of faith, whether by withholding or withdrawing those things from them.  He makes them relish the sweetness of spiritual comfort by depriving them of those outward comforts in which they were in most danger as they relied on them and so forgot God.

Looking forward to September.

“Religious people read thin, superficial books of religious sentiment, but do not meet face to face the strong, exacting, masculine pages of their Bibles.”

How true.

What books would you place on this list of “thin, superficial books of religious sentiment?”  I’d begin with these three recent books: The Shack, The Secret and Heaven is for Real

“The doctrines of original sin, election, effectual calling, final perseverance, and all those great truths which are called Calvinism — though Calvin was not the author of them, but simply an able writer and preacher upon the subject — are, I believe, the essential doctrines of the Gospel that is in Jesus Christ. Now, I do not ask you whether you believe all this — it is possible you may not; but I believe you will before you enter heaven. I am persuaded, that as God may have washed your hearts, he will wash your brains before you enter heaven.”

“They are all Calvinists there [in heaven], every soul of them. They may have been Arminians on earth; thousands and millions of them were; but they are not after they get there.”

“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert – himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason . . . . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”
(G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908)

“Being entirely at the mercy of such doubtful and vacillating friends, I, though perplexed, felt it best to obey. I climbed into the tree and was left there alone in the bush. The hours I spent there live all before me as if it were but of yesterday. I heard the frequent discharging of muskets, and the yells of the Savages. Yet I sat there among the branches, as safe in the arms of Jesus. Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among these chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy His consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back upon your own soul, alone, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then?”

John G. Patton: Missionary to the New Hebredies, An Autobiography Edited by His Brother [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965, orig. 1889, 1891], p. 200