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Meh-wedge – A Good, Good Thing!

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You might know this past weekend, my wife and I had the privilege, along with our 5 month old, to go to Florida for a beach wedding.  In this case it was for my brother.  While I was in the midst of celebrating Saturday night, I read the following tweet online:

mrmeddersJun 08, 6:23pm via Tweetbot for iOS

If you’re a Christian and you don’t *love* weddings, you don’t have a romance problem—it’s a theological problem.
I don’t know how this thought strikes you, but it made me pause a second and get my bearings.  After all, I was the “trained professional” involved in helping pull off the ceremony and, like most every wedding I was involved in, there are things that make weddings somewhat unlovable.  I’m thinking of the personalities of people involved, all the details coming together at precise moments, in our case, the heat of a summer’s day on the beach dressed in nice clothes, time barriers, a crying child.  

But what is marriage about?  A few years ago, our church was rewriting bylaws and we were adjusting some language on the article on marriage.  We said, we believe marriage is a good thing.  Some people thought it was a little too chatty and didn’t have the “sacred institution” language that had always been there.  But, do you know why we opted for the “good thing” language?  Because the Bible (and, as a result, God) does.

Proverbs 18:22
He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.
or 
Genesis 2:18-24
God says “It’s not good for man to be alone” and remedies this by creating a wife for Adam. 
God made marriage to be a sacred institution and a “good thing”.  Hebrews 13:4 gives us 2 directions in regard to marriage: to let it be held in honor among all and to keep it pure.  So, marriages, weddings and the uniting of a man and woman together is a great work of God and, thus, Christians should “love” when people gather to celebrate what God has done in bringing a man and woman together.  
That tweet was right on and exactly what I needed in our celebration Saturday to look to the One who gave us this good thing and praise Him.  Hope you can do the same today reflecting on these things.  

Eschatological Timelines

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Head Heart Hand is a website devoted to leading servants by David Murray, a prof at RTS. These eschatological views come from an E-Book he wrote entitled EndTimes Q & A. Here are the 4 main views:

Dispensational Premillenialism

Dispensational Premillennial Timeline from Puritan Reformed on Vimeo.

Historical Premillenialism

Premillennial Timeline from Puritan Reformed on Vimeo.

Amillenialism

Amillennial Timeline from Puritan Reformed on Vimeo.

Postmillenialism

Postmillennial Timeline from Puritan Reformed on Vimeo.

Our Basement…

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Our basement at the church has flooded, which leaves me with some theological musings…

1) Is this depth of water level what liberal scholars really think Pharaoh and his army perished in when chasing the children of Israel out of Egypt. (They say that the children of Israel actually crossed the Sea of Reeds, which was just a few inches deep.) The only problem is the drowning of those chasing. Just a thought.

2) Our insurance company says that this isn’t covered because it isn’t an “act of God.” (I jokingly told our treasurer we should sue on theological grounds. You see, we believe in God’s providence, which means that He is sovereignly in control and governing ALL THINGS. Not an act of God. Ha! I can read the headline now, “Local Church in KS Sues Insurance Company Over Doctrine”. Oh, well. NO need for mean-spiritedness.)

3) There has to be some sort of ramifications for Baptists and Presbyterians with all this water.

Oh, well. God is gracious and we are trusting Him to provide the means and take care of us. When you pray, ask God to endow us with wisdom.

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A confession of deeply felt reality…

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Reading through Herman Bavinck’s Reasonable Faith, I came across the following quote, which helped me realize something about doctrine. Here’s the quote:

This declaration of faith on the part of the church is not a scientific doctrine, nor a form of unity that is being repeated, but is rather a confession of a deeply felt reality, and of a conviction of reality that has come up out of the experiences of life. The prophets and the apostles, and the saints generally who appear before us in the Old and New Testament and later in the church of Christ, did not sit and philosophize about God in abstract concepts, but rather confessed what God meant to them and what they owed to Him in all circumstances of life. God was for them not at all a cold concept, which they then proceeded rationally to analyze, but He was a living, personal force, a reality infinitely more real that the world around them. Indeed, he was to them the one, eternal, worshipful Being. They reckoned with their lives, they lived in His tent, walked as if always before His face, served Him in His courts, and worshipped Him in His sanctuary. (p.25)

Too many theological discussions today forget that we are dealing with a real Being. We must reckon ourselves accordingly to God Himself. It is easy to treat God, as Bavinck says, as a cold concept to analyze rather than a living personal force, a reality more real that the world around us. Amazing! Hope you are encouraged today to draw near to this real One.

Weekend Preview – Judgment & Following

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This weekend, Lord willing, I will be back in the pulpit and looking forward to a full Lord’s Day.

In the morning service, we will be exploring Mark 14:43-52. For a while, we’ve been looking at the theme of spiritual weakness and how the disciples got on a path of that when they argued that they would stay devoted with Jesus to death and, then, how in the Garden, Jesus urged them to watch and pray and, thus, escape temptation, for the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. In this passage, we see these followers wrestling with courageous following. The problem: they pursue it with misguided actions, forget that Jesus sees the ultimate purpose of all events and ultimately fail to be devoted to Jesus.

In the evening service, we will be looking at Hosea 5:1-15. I alluded to this in my last post. Hosea 5 really unfolds how God is righteous in His judgment. He will punish His people because they fail to look to Him. If they will only repent of their adultery and turn to Him, God would give them grace, but until they do, God will be content to keep them under His righteous judgment.

Hope to see you this weekend and I’m praying that God works in amazing ways through His Word.

TCT – Theology, A Church Project

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Continuing my series on Total Church, today we turn to the subject of Theology. The authors do a great job of showing the importance of theology and how that emerges in a Word and Community centered body. They also tie its importance to Mission. The most helpful part of this chapter, though, was when they made a distinction between what they called “The Theology of the Academy and the Theology of the Church.” There is a huge distinction between what is fleshed out in the rigors of academia and what the church actually deals with. This section…

…is a critique of professional theology removed from the furnace of life and not hammered into shape on the anvil of the local church. (p.162)

This is so well-said. I remember well my seminary days when my professors who shaped me in such profound ways were waxing eloquent on problems. What I’ve found being in one local church, though, for nearly 8 1/2 years is that some of their critiques would have been better served by being forged in the anvil of a committed body. This is so helpful for me to remember. We are “doing theology” every time we gather together. This is a huge responsibility for our leadership, but also a huge responsibility for those who make up the church. You can divorce one from the other. Church and theology go together.