CCC Gainesville | Blog
Jesus is glorious.
He simply is. The beauty, simplicity, and mystery of THIS MAN amazes me. I want to know Him. I want us as a church to adore and follow Him. When we gather for worship Sunday, may He lead us by His Holy Spirit to know our Father and to know ourselves. And to know that He has reconciled us–forever. Inseparably. That you may marvel:
Someday, the Scriptures tell us, all of God’s people will appear before this one whose body is forever scarred by the whipping, the nails, and the spear they thrust into his side. His humanity is real and never sentimentalized. He will be enthroned as King of kings, and in consummating his kingdom righteousness will cover the earth like water covers the sea. He will be worshiped by all of creation, but always knows his people by name (John 10:3, Revelation 3:5).
“What matters supremely,” J. I. Packer says, “is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me… I am never out of his mind… He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters… There is unspeakable comfort… in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love, and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself… There is… great cause for humility in the thought that he sees all the twisted things about me that my [friends] do not see… and that he sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself… There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose.”
If you struggle with faith because you have unanswered questions, knowledge you desire in the hope it will make things certain, remember that what you know and don’t know is important, but not supremely so. There is a greater knowledge that does not depend on us, that embraces us within a greater love, and for which no doubt arises. That is the knowledge that truly matters.
In today’s weekly email there was a quote that I submitted:
“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven…The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”
― Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
This was an example of poor history and scholarship that is out there and was popularized by Dan Brown. It wasn’t earmarked as such in the weekly email and it should have been.
If you want to know a more biblical view, here’s one from JI Packer, writing of those who believe that a revelation delivered by sinful and ignorant human beings must itself be imperfect he states:
But this is to deny the biblical doctrine of providence, according to which God ‘worketh all things after the counsel of his own will’. The Bible excludes the idea of a frustrated Deity. ‘Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth’. He was well able to prepare, equip and overrule human writers so that they wrote nothing but what He intended; and the Scripture tells us that this is what in fact he did. We are to think of the Spirit’s inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term) concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers’ own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God’s work.
Girls and leaders sharing a meal. They (grades 8-12) are in Daytona for a retreat on r’ships and dating.
Habakkuk 2:4 is a classic place where we’re taught the idea that God mercifully works to make us His own. Here’s more:
1.) Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.
–From the Westminster Shorter Catechism
2.) We believe that Christ, by his obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified. By his sacrifice, he bore in our stead the punishment due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice on our behalf. By his perfect obedience he satisfied the just demands of God on our behalf, since by faith alone that perfect obedience is credited to all who trust in Christ alone for their acceptance with God. Inasmuch as Christ was given by the Father for us, and his obedience and punishment were accepted in place of our own, freely and not for anything in us, this justification is solely of free grace, in order that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners. We believe that a zeal for personal and public obedience flows from this free justification.
–Point 8, The Justification of Sinners in the Gospel Coalition Confessional Statement
3.) The doctrine of justification, the storm center of the Reformation, was a major concern of the apostle Paul. For him it was the heart of the gospel (Rom. 1:17; 3:21-5:21; Gal. 2:15-5:1) shaping both his message (Acts 13:38-39) and his devotion and spiritual life (2 Cor. 5:13-21; Phil. 3:4-14). Though other New Testament writers affirm the same doctrine in substance, the terms in which Protestants have affirmed and defended it for almost five centuries are drawn primarily from Paul.
Justification is a judicial act of God pardoning sinners (wicked and ungodly persons, Rom. 4:5; 3:9-24), accepting them as just, and so putting permanently right their previously estranged relationship with himself. This justifying sentence is God’s gift of righteousness (Rom. 5:15-17), his bestowal of a status of acceptance for Jesus’ sake (2 Cor. 5:21). –JI Packer, article on justification
God moves powerfully through our feeble imperfect prayers. He just does. As Tim Keller has written, “Throughout the Old and New Testaments and church history, every spiritual awakening was founded on corporate, prevailing, intensive, kingdom-centered prayer. We cannot create spiritual renewal by ourselves, but we can “prepare the altar” and ask God to send his Holy Spirit to change our hearts, our churches, and our communities.”
Come to Room 122 anytime between 5-6pm Sunday to join in Kingdom Centered Prayer. Please note this will be happening simultaneously with the Summer Fellowship Event that runs from 5-8pm.
You can read Kingdom Centered Prayer online.
