A Biblical Theology of Revival

Good stuff from Carl Trueman

Desert Springs Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico hosts an excellent annual conference called Clarus. I have never attended but I have listened to quite a bit of the audio. Carl Trueman has been a guest and has presented a number of helpful addresses.

I encourage you to take time to listen to the following:
The Pastoral Heart of the Reformation

Knowing God: The Importance of Grace

Knowing God: The Importance of Scripture

The Theology of the Cross: The Forgotten Heart of the Reformation

Apparently they really love Carl out at Desert Springs because they keep inviting him back to Clarus. As a result, he has a lot of messages recorded there, all of which are well worth the listen. But don't tell him I said that. I don't want his ego to get inflated.

Sunday's Sermon

On Sunday I preached part 4 of our series through Jonah. It is entitled, "Repentance, Anger, and the Mercy of God" and can be listened to HERE.

Bully Pulpit

A new feature at Mortification Of Spin is a shorter, high impact broadcast called "Bully Pulpit." It's our way of responding to calls for weekly rather than bi-weekly editions. Our goal is to hit one topic rather quickly but thoughtfully in a way that will be helpful for the listener. Given the title, it is not our goal to tread lightly. Today's Bully Pulpit is a response to some confusing and troubling remarks made about preaching by a few well known mega-church pastors.

Listen in as Carl Trueman and Todd Pruitt take to the Bully Pulpit.  On this week’s Pulpit they discuss the means and goals of preaching.  What role does evangelism play in preaching?  How do Jesus and the Apostles teach men to preach?  Today, many preachers give their congregations gobbledygook instead of solid, biblical meat each week.  The Bible confronts us in our sinful state before God, and preachers need to bring that confrontation in through their sermons by turning their own pulpits into Bully Pulpits.

The High Stakes of Ordination

On Saturday (Sept 21, 2013) I took vows to be a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). I was, at that time received into the Blue Ridge Presbytery and formally accepted the call to be Lead Pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church. As I stood before my brothers and took the vows that so many have taken before me I was struck both by the sobriety and privilege of that moment. It was the culmination of a months long process of study, the level of which I had not experienced since completing seminary in 1994.

The process of transferring my ordination as a Southern Baptist to the PCA consisted of six exams covering my knowledge of the Bible, theology, Presbyterian church polity, the sacraments, church history, and PCA history. There was also an exam addressing my conversion, call to ministry, and Christian maturity. The completed exams totaled over 100 pages.

In addition, a committee of the Presbytery administered an oral exam over the material covered in the written exams. At the recommendation of that committee I stood before the Blue Ridge Presbytery for yet another oral exam. For a man who tends toward anxiety, this was exhausting in every conceivable way. After one-and-a-half hours on the floor my back was killing me and my nerves were fried. But, by God's grace, I had good recall and my brothers in the Presbytery affirmed my call.

The high point of the entire process was the taking of vows. I was asked to make 8 promises before the Presbytery. Those promises are as follows:

1. Do you believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as originally given, to be the inerrant Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice?

 

2. Do you sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures: and do you further promise that if at any time you find yourself out of accord with any of the fundamentals of this system of doctrine, you will on your own initiative, make known to your Presbytery the change which has taken place in your views since the assumption of this ordination vow?

 

3. Do you approve of the form of government and discipline of the Presbyterian Church in America, in conformity with the general principles of Biblical polity?

4. Do you promise subjection to your brethren in the Lord?

5. Have you been induced, as far as you know your own heart, to seek the office of the holy ministry from love to God and a sincere desire to promote His glory in the Gospel of His Son?

6. Do you promise to be zealous and faithful in maintaining the truths of the Gospel and the purity and peace and unity of the Church, whatever persecution or opposition may arise unto you on that account?

7. Do you engage to be faithful and diligent in the exercise of all your duties as a Christian and a minister of the Gospel, whether personal or relational, private or public; and to endeavor by the grace of God to adorn the profession of the Gospel in your manner of life, and to walk with exemplary piety before the flock of which God shall make you overseer?

8. Are you now willing to take the charge of this church, agreeable to your declaration when accepting their call? And do you, relying upon God for strength, promise to discharge to it the duties of a pastor?

 

It was a moving experience to stand before my brothers in the Presbytery and take those vows. After months of study, stress, and exhaustion I was certainly relieved. But I was also grateful to have had the experience. I knew I was participating in something very important, the origins of which stretch back to the days of Moses.

 

In Exodus 32, Moses records the events surrounding the people's worship of the golden calf. It is at that time that the first ordination service is recorded. And it is, literally, a matter of life and death:

 And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose (for Aaron had let them break loose, to the derision of their enemies), then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Who is on the LORD's side? Come to me.” And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. And he said to them, “Thus says the LORD God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.’” And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And that day about three thousand men of the people fell. And Moses said, “Today you have been ordained for the service of the LORD, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, so that he might bestow a blessing upon you this day.”
(Exodus 32:25-29 ESV)

After responding affirmatively to Moses' question, "Who is on the Lord's side?" the Levites are instructed to take their swords and kill those involved in the gross act of rebellion. After killing some 3,000 fellow Israelites, the Levites are informed that they have just been ordained in the service of the Lord. Ordination is no small thing. And while I am thankful for living in this particular period of redemptive history, ordination, while practiced differently, is no less serious.

How grateful I am to be a part of a body that treats ordination as a matter of life and death. The stakes are that high.

The Constant Reader

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Dr. Tom Nettles new biography of Charles Spurgeon: Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

New Mortification of Spin

The latest Mortification of Spin is up and running.

If you get heartburn over the mention of the word "liturgy," you may find some proverbial antacid in the thoughtful conversation between our hosts on this episode of The Mortification of Spin. In fact, Carl and Todd remind us that our churches are all liturgical in one way or another - the question is whether we are basing the order and structure of our worship on Scripture or whether we're simply, shall we say, flying by the seat of our pants. Can the seat of our pants sufficiently guide us in corporate worship that is Christ-centered? If you've never opened The Book of Common Prayer, buckle up and listen in...you're bound to learn quite a bit from this helpful podcast.

Behold Your God

Behold Your God looks like a very helpful resource for churches to use in Sunday School, small groups, session meetings, etc.

What I'm learning about ordination in the PCA

As many of you know I am in the process of swimming across Lake Geneva. Actually, I have already made that trip theologically. Now I'm in the process of making it official with the proper authorities in the PCA. I am the newly elected Lead Pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in beautiful Harrisonburg, VA and I am in the process of completing my exams for ordination. It has been an exhausting few months. We had to sell a house in Pennsylvania, move, find lodgings in H'burg, get kids enrolled in school, and everything else that goes along with moving to another state. All during this time I have been trying to study, take seven (very thorough!) exams, preach, and try to be a pastor to a wonderful staff and congregation. I don't recommend doing it this way but there really was not other option for me. Fortunately, leadership in the Blue Ridge Presbytery has been quite gracious in helping me figure out what exactly the term "briefly describe" means on their exams.

Recently I took the English Bible exam which took me around nine hours to complete. The finished product was 35 pages long. I have felt the distance of having completed my M.Div. 19 years ago. During that time, believe it or not, some of the key dates and outlines of books have faded in my memory. So the preparation time has been significant. If all goes well I will complete, successfully, my final exams next week and then appear before the presbytery for questioning on Saturday the 21st. I must confess that the idea of being questioned by learned men about anything concerning the Bible, doctrine, the Book of Church Order, and church history leaves me a bit terrified.

However, the thought has occurred to me numerous times in these weeks that it is a good thing that the PCA sets the bar quite high for its ministers. And while no process is perfect, this particular one helps to keep the standard high for who may fill the pulpits of PCA churches. Yes, I know, there are exceptions.

Along the way I have learned a few things about preparing for the licensure and ordination exams. So, I would like to offer some advice to those who are considering ordination in the PCA. If you are in that boat, here are the most helpful resources I have found in preparing for the exams:

The Westminster Standards
Ryken's Bible Handbook
New Dictionary of Biblical Theology
ESV Study Bible
Book of Church Order

If you make heavy (and I mean HEAVY) use of these resources you should be able to pass the exams.

That odd moment when Carl Trueman is compared to Sarah Palin...

It really did happen. Check it out HERE.

Just because some of our brethren are humorless does not mean the rest of us have to be.

Sunday's Sermon

On Sunday I preached my first sermon as pastor elect of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Harrisonburg, VA. It was a blessing to open God's Word with these beloved saints. My text for the sermon was Psalm 96. You can listen to it HERE.

When the music does what the sermon doesn't

In his latest article over at Ref21 Carl Trueman recounts a recent visit he made to King's Chapel at Cambridge University. Trueman, a graduate of Cambridge, remembers the gospel-less preaching of King's Chapel during his student days. However, on this visit he wished his youngest son to experience a service of Evensong. If you are not familiar with Evensong, it is a ritualized service of sacred singing, prayers, and meditations from the Book of Common Prayer (Anglican). It is the essence of High Church Protestant liturgy. The irony, as Carl has told me, is that the old songs and liturgy from the BCP stand in profound distinction from the typically vapid sermons in that and many other Anglican churches.

Trueman writes of being seated next to a young Muslim woman wearing a hajib was also in attendance in the service at King's Chapel. Afterward he wondered along with his son what the young woman had seen and heard in that service.

Now, I confess to being something of an old Puritan when it comes to liturgy. Does it not lead to formalism and stifle the religion of the heart? Certainly I would have thought so fifteen or twenty years ago. Yet as I reflected on the service and what the girl in the hijab had witnessed, I could not help but ask myself if she could have experienced anything better had she walked into a church in the Protestant evangelical tradition. Two whole chapters of the Bible being read? To have one whole chapter from one Testament seems to test the patience of many today. Two whole psalms sung (and that as part of a calendar which proceeds through the whole Psalter)?  That is surely a tad too old fashioned, irrelevant, and often depressing for those who want to go to church for a bit of an emotional boost. A structure for worship which is determined by the interface between theological truth and biblically-defined existential need? That sounds as if it might be vulnerable to becoming dangerously formulaic formalism. A language used to praise God which is emphatically not that employed of myself or of anybody else in their daily lives when addressing the children, the mailman, or the dog? I think the trendy adjective would be something like 'inauthentic.'

Yet here is the irony: in this liberal Anglican chapel, the hijabi experienced an hour long service in which most of the time was spent occupied with words drawn directly from scripture. She heard more of the Bible read, said, sung and prayed than in any Protestant evangelical church of which I am aware - than any church, in other words, which actually claims to take the word of God seriously and place it at the centre of its life. Yes, it was probably a good thing that there was no sermon that day: I am confident that, as Carlyle once commented, what we might have witnessed then would have been a priest boring holes in the bottom of the Church of England.  But that aside, Cranmer's liturgy meant that this girl was exposed to biblical Christianity in a remarkably beautiful, scriptural and reverent fashion. I was utterly convicted as a Protestant minister that evangelical Protestantism must do better on this score: for all of my instinctive sneering at Anglicanism and formalism, I had just been shown in a powerful way how far short of taking God's word seriously in worship I fall. 

Of course, there were things other than a sermon which the hijabi did not witness: she did not witness any adults behaving childishly; she did not witness anybody saying anything stupid; she did not witness any stand-up comedy routine or any casual cocksureness in the presence of God; she did not see any forty-something pretending to be cool; in short, she did not witness anything that made me, as a Christian, cringe with embarrassment for my faith, or for what my faith has too often become at the hands of the modern evangelical gospellers.

Read the whole post HERE.  
 

Knowing Vs. Feeling in Worship

Good stuff from Alistair Begg:

An Interview with the Housewife Theologian

On the latest edition of the Mortification of Spin, Carl and I interview Aimee Byrd about everything from the threat of mountain dwelling cannibals in West Virginia to the importance of teaching doctrine in the church. Check it out HERE.



You can purchase Aimee's new book, Housewife Theologian, HERE.

Coming up on Mortification of Spin

As Carl has already pointed out over at Ref 21, we recently interviewed Aimee Byrd about theology, women, the church, and her new book Housewife Theologian. You can also check out Aimee's excellent blog HERE.

Never let it be said that two middle aged cranks like me and Carl cannot get in touch with our more feminine, nourishing side. Aimee was so impressed with our manners that she has agreed to join us as a recurring guest host on Mortification of Spin. It will be broadcast from Mrs. Byrd's mountain cannibal-proof bunker in West Virginia.

Gender Identity, The Fall, and God's Good Creation

Jerry Brown, the Governor of California wound up in the news recently for signing legislation that allows "equal access" in schools for students who believe themselves to be "transgendered." That is, students in California schools who believe that they are not the gender into which they were born, will have the option to use whichever restroom they choose. This same access will be accommodated by athletic teams as well. For instance, a boy who feels himself to be a girl will be allowed to try out for the girl's volleyball or soccer teams. The complexities and moral hazards for such an arrangement are legion.

Russell Moore, the newly appointed President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, has written a helpful piece for the Washington Post.

Dr. Moore writes:

Laws such as those in California will quickly test the boundaries of society’s tolerance for a psychological and individualistic definition of gender. There are reasons, after all, why societies put boys and girls in different bathrooms, men and women on different sports teams.  When gender identity is severed from biological sex, where does one’s self-designation end, and who will be harmed in the process?

As conservative Christians, we do not see transgendered persons as ”freaks” to be despised or ridiculed. We acknowledge that there are some persons who feel alienated from their identities as men or as women. Of course that would be the case in a fallen universe in which all of us are alienated, in some way, from how God created us to be.

But we don’t believe this alienation can be solved by pretending as though we have Pharaoh-like dominion over our maleness or femaleness. These categories we believe (along with every civilization before us) are about more than just self-construction, and they can’t be eradicated by a change of clothes or chemical tinkering or a surgeon’s knife, much less by an arbitrary announcement in the high school gym.

The transgender question means that conservative Christian congregations such as mine must teach what’s been handed down to us, that our maleness and femaleness points us to an even deeper reality, to the unity and complementarity of Christ and the church. A rejection of the goodness of those creational realities then is a revolt against God’s lordship, and against the picture of the gospel that God had embedded in the creation.

Read the entire article HERE.

Answers to tough questions

Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing (P & R) will soon be releasing what promises to be an excellent new series of short books entitled Christian Answers to Hard Questions.

Titles in the series include:
Christian Interpretations of Genesis One by Vern Poythress
Christianity and the Role of Philosophy by Scott Oliphint
Should You Believe in God? by Scott Oliphint
Was Jesus Really Born of a Virgin? by Brandon Crowe
Science and the Problem of Evil by William Edgar
Morality of God in the Old Testament by Greg Beale
Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design by Guillermo Gonzalez

A Song for the Suffering

I come, God, I come
I return to the Lord
The one who’s broken
The one who’s torn me apart
You strike down to bind me up
You say you do it all in love
That I might know you in your suffering

Though you slay me
Yet I will praise you
Though you take from me
I will bless your name
Though you ruin me
Still I will worship
Sing a song to the one who’s all I need

My heart and flesh may fail
The earth below give way
But with my eyes, with my eyes I’ll see the Lord
Lifted high on that day
Behold, the Lamb that was slain
And I’ll know every tear was worth it all

Though you slay me
Yet I will praise you
Though you take from me
I will bless your name
Though you ruin me
Still I will worship
Sing a song to the one who’s all I need

Though tonight I’m crying out
Let this cup pass from me now
You’re still more than I need
You’re enough for me
You’re enough for me

[Not only is all your affliction momentary, not only is all your affliction light in comparison to eternity and the glory there. But all of it is totally meaningful. Every millisecond of your pain, from the fallen nature or fallen man, every millisecond of your misery in the path of obedience is producing a peculiar glory you will get because of that.

I don’t care if it was cancer or criticism. I don’t care if it was slander or sickness. It wasn’t meaningless. It’s doing something! It’s not meaningless. Of course you can’t see what it’s doing. Don’t look to what is seen.

When your mom dies, when your kid dies, when you’ve got cancer at 40, when a car careens into the sidewalk and takes her out, don’t say, “That’s meaningless!” It’s not. It’s working for you an eternal weight of glory.

Therefore, therefore, do not lose heart. But take these truths and day by day focus on them. Preach them to yourself every morning. Get alone with God and preach his word into your mind until your heart sings with confidence that you are new and cared for.]

Though you slay me
Yet I will praise you
Though you take from me
I will bless your name
Though you ruin me
Still I will worship
Sing a song to the one who’s all I need
Sing a song to the one who’s all I need

HT: Desiring God

Reza Aslan - Giving History a Bad Name

John Dickson is an Australian pastor, historian, and evangelist. Denny Burk has called Dickson's review of Reza Aslan's book on Jesus "the most devastating" he has read. After reading it myself, I must agree. In fact, if you read only one review of Aslan's best-seller, Dickson is the one to read. Incidentally, Dr. Dickson is a fabulous preacher and apologist. His books are worth reading and the programs he has produced for Australian TV are outstanding.

Check out his review HERE.

"The most disappointing thing about the fanfare accorded to a book like Zealot is not that it will undermine the Christian faith (it will not); even less that it poses a challenge to the consensus of working scholars (it certainly does not). It is that it chips away at the public's confidence in history per se.

"For a brief moment, Reza Aslan will be heralded as a breakthrough author. In a month or so, some other theory, equally unsubstantiated and certainly contradictory, will get the same kind of airtime. Such works are generally ignored by working scholars, who tend to be suspicious of anything that bypasses the peer review process.

"The general public, however, over time experiences breakthrough fatigue - an increasing contempt coupled with a decreasing curiosity toward any new claim about the man from Nazareth. The net effect is a weary scepticism that we can know anything about the historical Jesus or about history at all.

"The Jesus depicted in Zealot is certainly a figment of the imagination of a professor of creative writing, but he is likely to do concrete damage to the public's appreciation of a vast and worthwhile academic discipline. Aslan's Jesus is giving history a bad name."
- John Dickson

Coming up on Mortification...

Later this week Carl and I will be recording some more installments of the Mortification of Spin. We received so much feedback from our recent edition on spousal abuse and divorce that we decided to record a follow-up. We will also be welcoming back the delightful Aimee Byrd. On the docket as well is a discussion about my recent move to Presbyterianism (PCA) - How did the Southern Baptist-raised pastor of a large non-denominational church make the leap across Lake Geneva?

We want to hear from you. Are there topics you would like us to discuss? Are there questions you would like us to explore? Are there people you would like us to interview? Let me know in the comment section.