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It has been quite some time since I’ve posted anything. The time I’ve spent away from blogging has been very good for me. In general, the past several months have been very good for me. It has been a sort of wandering in the wilderness.

Wandering isn’t easy. When the Israelites left Egypt, they were leaving their enslavement behind, so they thought. I think they thought if they could just get out from under the “yolk” of the Egyptians, they would finally be free to live as a Godly people. The problem was that when they left enslavement, they retained their slave mentality. While God made it easy for them to shrug off their oppressors, they were still enslaved to a cultural upbringing that pointed them everywhere else but to God. All of the signs and wonders performed by God and through Moses didn’t make a dent in their fallen understanding of spiritual reality. Only after all of the generation that worshiped the calf at Sinai had wandered in the desert for 40 years and died were the Israelites free to pursue the land promised to Abraham. Even Moses only got to see the promised land from afar because he struck the rock instead speaking to it as God commanded.

I’ve spent the past several months wrestling in the wilderness. I moved to Rome, GA about 7 months ago now. And it might as well be the wilderness. I’ve spent most of my time here in the confines of my house and home office, rarely speaking to a soul other than my lovely wife. Don’t get me wrong, I have gotten out a good bit, hanging with some life-long friends of mine, and with my business partner. But, mostly it has been been a solitary existence. It has been a wandering time with little direction and much struggling.

We are all fallen, no doubt, but even when we’re freed from the oppression of our sinfulness through Christ, we still live with a sinful slave mentality that points us everywhere but to Christ as our daily, moment-to-moment salvation. I have had plenty of struggles over the past several months, but a slave mentality has been my foe.

But as Paul put it, we are no longer slaves to sin, we are slaves to righteousness (Romans 6:17-18 ESV). Although as Christians, we’ll always have the foe of our flesh with us as long as we live, we can cling to the daily truth and hope that we “have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.” (Rom. 6:22 ESV)

I also recently found a great devotional book that has been and continues to be a great help to me. It’s called Whiter Than Snow, by Paul David Tripp. I’m usually not a huge fan of devotionals, because they’re usually a bit too contrived and simplistic. But this book is amazing because it takes you through Psalm 51 (ESV) and David’s struggles for 52 days. Every day is a call to examine your life, see David’s story of sin, repentance, and grace as your own story, allowing you to let go of whatever righteousness you bring with you before God and instead cling to Christ’s righteousness. If you ever have trouble getting into the Word as I have, definitely check this book out. If you’re a super Christian and spend time in the word every day, check it out anyways. It’s meant to go through one devotional a week for a year (but you can probably just go through it how ever you want to like I have been doing).

Because I come from a Christian background where salvation is limited to the notion of a simple one-time prayer, or a decision made when you walk down front, or raise your hand to agree with the speaker’s summation of the Gospel, it can be quite easy for me to lose site of the real meaning of the Gospel. The Gospel is a person, not a moment, or a thing. It is the continual grace bestowed on me through the work done in and through the Person of Christ.

“Salvation is not a detached gift of God in some gracious and miraculous way bestowed upon man. Salvation is Christ, and to experience salvation is to experience Christ. It is not the experience of something, but of someone.

The Bible does not teach that Christ has salvation and dispenses it like a benevolent master giving gifts to his servants who obey him. Christ is our salvation and gives Himself to us as our salvation. He is our life; He is our strength; He is our peace; He is our joy; He is our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption.”

—George W. Peters, A Biblical Theology of Missions (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972), 65

A long while back I came across a great resource in the “First Importance Blog”, which I have subsribed to through RSS. So every day, I get a great quote (such as the one above) that helps point me to the Gospel right in my email. Make sure to check it out.

Do you go to a church that has designed itself with every thing that you could think of to tickle your imagination on Sunday mornings? What would happen if one day it was just all gone, all the big screens, video clips, cool music, pastor with his “talks” that market Jesus in the most fun and attention grabbing way . . . all vanished and gone? What would be left over? Would you still want to come? What would your faith look like? What do you think would happen to the people that go to the church? Would you read the Bible and have a relationship with God? Would you look at your faith with all the distractions gone and decide that maybe you’re not really a Christian? Would you feel confused about what it is that justifies you in the sight of God? Would you really even have a clue?

“What sort of foundation have we in Christ? Was he the beginning of our salvation in order that its fulfillment might follow from ourselves? Did he only open the way by which we might proceed under our own power? Certainly not.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III. XV.V.)

It seems very much like these sorts of churches make church culture into an essential part of faith, a way by which we in our own power might attain what only Christ has made way and attained for us. In the eyes of these churches, any church that is not innovating in similar ways as them is dead and should just give up, because people cannot and will not accept Christ without all of the “buzz marketing”. God in their eyes is powerless to redeem those who would know Him without us marketing the crap out of Jesus and candy-coating the gospel (if they’re even fortunate enough to understand it).

Piper says it best recently on his blog when described “not as an innovator”.

I heard Collin Hansen say in an interview that John Piper is not an innovator.

I hope I can live up to that tribute. I would like it to be true. I am very happy with the simple role of blowing the boredom out of people’s brains with long-forgotten, old-fashioned, faithful blasts of biblical truth.

So let me try to prove how uncreative I am theologically. Here is C. S. Lewis saying fifty years ago in his Reflections on the Psalms what I have spent most of my adult life trying to say:

The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”. But we shall know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him. (p. 97)

And I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. (p. 95)

If it were possible for a created soul fully (I mean, up to the full measure conceivable in a finite being) to “appreciate,” that is to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme beatitude. (p. 96)

I am a shameless conservative (=conserver) in repeating and embellishing such magnificent biblical insights from the past.

So, if it’s all gone, all taken away, what’s really left over? When you innovate the crap out the Gospel, there’s no Gospel left. The Cross + anything = nothing. What would you be left with?

Personally I’ll stick with having my boredom blown out of my brain “with long-forgotten, old-fashioned, faithful blasts of biblical truth” and leave all of those other pastors’ cool opinions, stories, creative takes on the gospel, and video clips to bore the masses.

A story that blows my mind and a situation that I can’t imagine being in for a few days . . . let alone 38 years. From Piper’s blog:

In his book, Passion, Karl Olsson tells a story of incredible patience among the early French Protestants called Huguenots.

In the late Seventeenth Century in… southern France, a girl named Marie Durant was brought before the authorities, charged with the Huguenot heresy. She was fourteen years old, bright, attractive, marriageable. She was asked to abjure the Huguenot faith. She was not asked to commit an immoral act, to become a criminal, or even to change the day-to-day quality of her behavior. She was only asked to say, “J’abjure.” No more, no less. She did not comply. Together with thirty other Huguenot women she was put into a tower by the sea…. For thirty-eight years she continued…. And instead of the hated word J’abjure she, together with her fellow martyrs, scratched on the wall of the prison tower the single word Resistez, resist!

The word is still seen and gaped at by tourists on the stone wall at Aigues-Mortes…. We do not understand the terrifying simplicity of a religious commitment which asks nothing of time and gets nothing from time. We can understand a religion which enhances time…. but we cannot understand a faith which is not nourished by the temporal hope that tomorrow things will be better. To sit in a prison room with thirty others and to see the day change into night and summer into autumn, to feel the slow systemic changes within one’s flesh: the drying and wrinkling of the skin, the loss of muscle tone, the stiffening of the joints, the slow stupefaction of the senses—to feel all this and still to persevere seems almost idiotic to a generation which has no capacity to wait and to endure. (116-117)