CCC Gainesville | Blog
Today at 5:15pm at the Euliano home.
3914 SW 95th Drive in Haile Plantation
Kicking off the year!
In thy presence there is fullness of joy, in thy right hand are
pleasures for evermore (Psalm 16:11). I hold the heady doctrine
that no pleasures are so frequent or intense as those of the
grateful, devoted, single-minded, whole-hearted, self-denying
Christian. I maintain that the delights of work and leisure, of
friendship and family, of eating and mating, of arts and crafts, of
playing and watching games, of finding out and making things, of
helping other people, and all the other noble pleasures that life
affords, are doubled for the Christian; for, as the cheerful old
Puritans used to say (no, sir, that is not a misprint, nor a Freudian
lapse; I mean Puritans—the real historical Puritans, as distinct from
the smug sourpusses of last-century Anglo-American imagination),
the Christian tastes God in all his pleasures,and this increases
them, whereas for other men pleasure brings with it a sense of
hollowness which reduces it. Also, I maintain that every encounter
between the sincere Christian and God’s Word, the law of thy
mouth (Psalm 119:72), however harrowing or humbling its import,
brings joy as its spin-off… and the keener the Christian the greater
the joy. I know for myself what it is to enjoy the Bible—that is, to be
glad at finding God and being found by Him in and through the
Bible; I know by experience why the Psalmist called God’s message
of promise and command his delight (Psalm 119:14, 16, 24, 35,
47, 70, 77, 92, 143, 174—ten times!) and his joy (vs. 111, cf. 162;
Psalm 19:8), and why he said that he loved it (Psalm 119:47, 48,
97, 103, 113, 119, 127, 140, 159, 163, 167—eleven times!); I
have proved, as have others, that as good food yields pleasure as
well as nourishment, so does the good word of God. So I am all for
Christians digging into their Bibles with expectations of
enjoyment…What is enjoyment? Essentially, it is a by-product: a
contented, fulfilled state which comes from concentrating on
something other than enjoying yourself… Bible study will only give
enjoyment if conforming to our Creator in belief and behavior,
through trust and obedience, is its goal. Bible study for our own
pleasure rather than for God ends up giving pleasure neither to
Him nor to us… what brings joy is finding God’s way, God’s grace
and God’s fellowship through the Bible, even though again and
again what the Bible says—that is, what God in the Bible tells us—
knocks us flat. –JI Packer
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Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; he did not come to improve the improvable; he did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things work. –Robert Farrar Capon
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“There’s a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, “Why on our hearts, and not in them?” The rabbi answered, “Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.” –Anne Lamott
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“We present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is wisdom; this is the royal law; these are the lively oracles of God.”
With these words in the coronation service the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland handed to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth a copy of the Bible.
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.
