Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Primacy of Faith

Another fine post at the Gospel Coalition web site. Anyone who can quote Kierkegaard is worth reading!

From Ray Ortlund today at his blog “Christ is Deeper Still“:
The Christian life is not most profoundly a matter of ethics; most profoundly, it is a matter of faith. Abraham trusted God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. As Kierkegaard points out in The Sickness Unto Death, “The opposite of sin is not virtue but faith. Whatever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23).”
Ethics we can manage on our own. We can even observe biblical ethics to keep God at a safe distance. But if our hearts are believing the promises of God, we cannot say no to him. We yield to him. We suffer dislocation in this world for his sake. We feel the ground shifting under our feet and we don’t panic. Nothing seems stable, but we accept that. We surrender to God. Drawn on toward his promises, we start changing.
The most urgent question in our lives today is not moral versus immoral but true versus false, heavenly versus earthly, divine promise versus human control, trust versus possession.
Good news for sinners.
How true this is. The human sin tends to be self-reliance, rather than God-reliance. There is much "do-it-yourself" religion, even among those of us who know better. We know the absolute futility of ultimate success in the self-help movement. We know we can change our behaviors, but can we change our hearts? [SDG-JS]

Why Can’t We Just Read the Bible?

This is a great post over at the Gospel Coalition web site.This has some good suggestions, and some wise counsel. I especially like the Lloyd-Jones remarks to medical students. Enjoy!

The latest issue of Modern Reformation transcribes Michael Horton’s 2003 interview of Don Carson about hermeneutics and theological method: “Why Can’t We Just Read the Bible? An Interview with D. A. Carson.” Modern Reformation 19:4 (July–August 2010): 32–35, 43.

Horton’s questions include these:
  • Doesn’t sola Scriptura—Scripture alone—imply that all I really need to do is read my Bible?
  • Do you think there has been a lot of polarization where systematicians aren’t always very good exegetes and exegetes aren’t very good systematicians?
  • I think of the person sitting at home thinking about the benefits of doing what you’re talking about here but doesn’t have the foggiest idea of where to begin, and so just reading the one-minute Bible devotional every day is about as much as can be handled at this point. How do you stretch that person to go the next step and what resources would you recommend?
The beginning of Carson’s answer to that last question above may serve some young mothers well:
Martyn Lloyd-Jones once spoke with a group of medical students who complained that in the midst of their training and the ferocious work hours they really didn’t even have time to read the Bible and have their devotions and so on. He bristled and said, “I am a doctor. I have been where you are. You have time for what you want to do.” After a long pause he said, “I make only one exception: the mother of preschool-aged children does not have time and emotional resources.”
It is important to recognize, too, that there are stages of life where you really don’t have time to do much, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Children will sap you. If you have three children under the age of six, forget serious reading unless you have the money for a nanny. When our youngest finally went off to kindergarten, we celebrated that day—I took my wife out for lunch. Only then could she get back into reading again. It’s the way life is. You have to be realistic.
As the article says, Read the whole thing. [SDG-JS]