Chronological Snobbery

The title "Chronological Snobbery" comes from C. S. Lewis. But others have certainly weighed in on such a truth-constricting point of view, relegating older writings to the dinosaur age, rendering them nothing more than insignificant wonders in the scheme of things. On the other hand, we would not affirm that all older writings are to be preferred to newer ones, for that would be to subjugate ourselves to the same malady only in the opposite direction. Rather, all writings should be accepted on their own terms without the interference of dated bias. As Lewis also affirmed, we do not prefer to mix older with newer writers because they did not also make mistakes. They did. It's just that they didn't make the same ones that we do. So, we read older writers to "hear" speech unencumbered by today's culture. In so doing, we hope to gain a heart of understanding.

The following comes from Peter Berger:

There is a hidden double standard. The past can be relativized simply by explaining the misconceptions of the ancient worldview. "The present, however, remains strangely immune from relativization. . . . In other words, the New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the contemporary analyst take the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing. The electricity- and radio-users are placed intellectually above the Apostle Paul.

And therein lies the danger.

The Night AFTER the Fiery Furnace

Shadrach, Meshach, & Abednego (Dan. 3) must’ve been awestruck by the LORD’s power in bringing them unharmed through the fiery furnace! I imagine being one of them and going home that night, knowing:

1) That they had put full trust in God. But that in itself was no guarantee that they would escape the flame, was it? So, what's more important, escaping certain death or being so sure of God's grace & power, that you're absolutely resigned to whatever he decides? There's a peace in such trust as we would do well to emulate. Amen?

2) They went also knowing that they were willing to die rather than submit to a false god. They could've justified bowing down for the sake of the kingdom, right? After all, they were witnesses in Babylon! They needed to remain alive. If they just bowed, but didn't really mean it, then they could stay alive another day to continue being a witness for Jehovah! But what kind of witness would they have been? To what kind of God would they be testifying, one that needed their voice MORE than he desired their obedience? "To obey is BETTER than (even) sacrifice" (1 Sam. 15:22), as vital & necessary as was sacrifice!

After it was over, Nebuchadnezzar glowingly praised, "Blessed be the God of Sharach, Meshace, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants, who trusted in him, and set aside the king's command, and yielded up their bodies rather than serve and worship any god except their own God" (Dan. 3:28). Amazing commendation, especially from the king who had just furiously attempted destroying them!

3) And they also went home knowing that they had experienced a bone fide miracle, releasing them from the power of the flame! Did they sleep for elation? Could they have done anything but sit around rehearsing God's great deliverance? It was not just that they believed God COULD do it. God in fact DID do it! That’s what’s so amazing.

We talk about God’s power; they did too. But to have experienced it, well, that’s another story! How long might it have been before they were back to normal? Did they not also appreciate the miracle more since they were in a powerful state of faith? To have so trusted God that they were willing to be thrown into the fire, in essence to die right on the spot, they were therefore more prepped to respond glowingly to this unbelievable manifestation of power.

Marks of the Spiritual Man - A. W. Tozer

True spirituality manifests itself in certain dominant desires. These are ever-present, deep-settled wants sufficiently powerful to motivate and control the life. For convenience let me number them, though I make no effort to decide the order of their importance. 

1.      First is the desire to be holy rather than happy. The yearning after happiness found so widely among Christians professing a superior degree of sanctity is sufficient proof that such sanctity is not indeed present. The truly spiritual man knows that God will give abundance of joy after we have become able to receive it without injury to our souls, but he does not demand it at once. John Wesley said of the members of one of the earliest Methodist societies that he doubted that they had been made perfect in love because they came to church to enjoy religion instead of to learn how they could become holy.

2.     A man may be considered spiritual when he wants to see the honor of God advanced through his life even if it means that he himself must suffer temporary dishonor or loss. Such a man prays Hallowed be Thy name, and silently adds, at any cost to me, Lord. He lives for God’s honor by a kind of spiritual reflex. Every choice involving the glory of God is for him already made before it presents itself. He does not need to debate the matter with his own heart; there is nothing to debate. The glory of God is necessary to him; he gasps for it as a suffocating man gasps for air. 

3.     The spiritual man wants to carry his cross. Many Christians accept adversity or tribulation with a sigh and call it their cross, forgetting that such things come alike to saint and sinner. The cross is that extra adversity that comes to us as a result of our obedience to Christ. This cross is not forced upon us; we voluntarily take it up with full knowledge of the consequences. We choose to obey Christ and by so doing choose to carry the cross. Carrying a cross means to be attached to the Person of Christ, committed to the Lordship of Christ and obedient to the commandments of Christ. The man who is so attached, so committed, so obedient is a spiritual man.  

4.     Again, a Christian is spiritual when he sees everything from God’s viewpoint. The ability to weigh all things in the divine scale and place the same value upon them as God does is the mark of a Spirit-filled life. God looks at and through at the same time. His gaze does not rest on the surface but penetrates to the true meaning of things. The carnal Christian looks at an object or a situation, but because he does not see through it he is elated or cast down by what he sees. The spiritual man is able to look through things as God looks and think of them as God thinks. He insists on seeing all things as God sees them even if it humbles him and exposes his ignorance to the point of real pain.

5.     Another desire of the spiritual man is to die right rather than to live wrong. A sure mark of the mature man of God is his nonchalance about living. The earth-loving, body-conscious Christian looks upon death with numb terror in his heart; but as he goes on to live in the Spirit he becomes increasingly indifferent to the number of his years here below, and at the same time increasingly careful of the kind of life he lives while he is here. He will not purchase a few extra days of life at the cost of compromise or failure. He wants most of all to be right, and he is happy to let God decide how long he shall live. He knows that he can afford to die now that he is in Christ, but he knows that he cannot afford to do wrong, and this knowledge becomes a gyroscope to stabilize his thinking and his acting.

6.    The desire to see others advance at his expense is another mark of the spiritual man. He wants to see other Christians above him and is happy when they are promoted and he is overlooked. There is no envy in his heart; when his brethren are honored he is pleased because such is the will of God and that will is his earthly heaven. If God is pleased, he is pleased for that reason, and if it pleases God to exalt another above him he is content to have it so. 

7.     The spiritual man habitually makes eternity-judgments instead of time-judgments. By faith he rises above the tug of earth and the flow of time and learns to think and feel as one who has already left the world and gone to join the innumerable company of angels and the general assembly and Church of the First-born which are written in heaven. Such a man would rather be useful than famous and would rather serve than be served. And all this must be by the operation of the Holy Spirit within him. No man can become spiritual by himself. Only the free Spirit can make a man spiritual.

 From: That Incredible Christian, by A. W. Tozer. Chapter 34

"Only Eternity Will Reveal . . ."

When I was in the "Preacher Boys" class (a moniker affectionately given by the founder, Bob Jones, Sr.) at Bob Jones University in the early '70s, the head of our department, Dr. Gilbert Stenholm, used to say to us "boys" that the results of our efforts in witnessing would not always be known on this side of eternity. I can still hear him saying, "Only eternity will reveal what God has done through the ministry of his servants." The following illustrates beautifully that very truth. It is taken from a book published by my colleague at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Kerry Skinner, entitled The Joy of Repentance.

Stephen Grellat

A most amazing testimony is found in a book titled, Measure Your Life by Wesley Duewel. Duewel tells the story of a man named Stephen Grellat who walked very closely with God and obeyed the Lord even when he did not understand all of the details or circumstances surrounding God's direction.

One day God's Spirit urged Grellat to go preach in a heavily forested area of America. When he arrived at the location where God had instructed him to go, all the little shanties were empty for all of the loggers had left. Can you imagine what must have been going through this man's mind? What would you have done?

Duewel shares that, "He was so sure that he was sent by God that he went into an empty shanty and preached to the bare walls the sermon that God had placed upon his heart. He then returned to his home. He could never understand why God would send him to preach to an empty shanty."

Years later, in England, as Mr. Grellat was walking across London Bridge, God gave him a glimpse of how He had used him so many years ago. A man grasped Mr. Grellat's arm and said,

"I found you at last!"

"I think you are mistaken," said Mr. Grellat.

"No. Didn't you preach in an empty shanty in the woods of America years ago?"

"Yes," Mr. Grellat admitted, "but no one was there."

"I was the foreman in charge of the loggers," the stranger explained. "We had moved to a new location before I realized I'd left one of my tools behind. I returned to get it and heard a voice in one of the shanties; I peered through a crack between the logs and saw you. You never saw me, but I listened to the rest of your sermon. God touched my heart, and I became so convicted of my sin that after some time I purchased a Bible, repented of my sins, and became a Christian. Then I began to win my men to Christ. Your sermon has led at least a thousand people to Christ and three of them have already become missionaries!"

I would have to put this man of God, Stephen Grellat, under the category of God's unnoticed. Had the man crossing London Bridge that day not identified Mr. Grellat, we would never have had a glimpse on this earth of what God did through his life. He would have remained totally unnoticed by man but certainly greatly noticed by God.

For more, see KerrySkinner.com

God Overpowers Satan & Evil To Do Us Good!

The devil and sinful men can make you sick, can steal your car, can sow seeds of strife in your marriage, can take away your job, and rob you of your child. But verse 28 says, God works all those things together for your good if you love him. And if they finally work for your good, the designs of the adversary are thwarted and his aim to be against you is turned into a Christ-exalting, soul-sanctifying, faith-deepening, painful benefit. If God is for you, he does not spare you these things. But he designs good where the adversary designs evil (Genesis 50:20; 45:7). The things that are against you he designs to be for you. No one can be successfully against you.

John Piper, "God Did Not Spare His Own Son," Romans 8:28-32, August 18, 2002

Eleven Practical Steps to Stay Alive to the Beauty of God's World

By Clyde Kilby

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above me and about me.

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death, when he said: "There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing."

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am d oing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their "divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic" existence.

7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I chad in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the "child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder."

8. I shall follow Darwin's advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, "fulfill the moment as the moment." I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is just now.

10. If for nothing more than the sake of a change of view, I shall assume my ancestry to be from the heavens rather than from the caves.

11. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life in the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls Himself Alpha and Omega.

 

Despair At Our Imperfections Is a Greater Obstacle Than the Imperfection Itself

In a small book entitled, Let Go, François Fénelon (French priest & theologian, 1651-1715), wrote some sage advice to an unknown woman. The following comes from chapter 13:

Do not be overly concerned about your defects. Instead concentrate on having an unceasing love for Jesus, and you shall be much forgiven, because you have loved much (Luke 7:47). However, we need to beware of the tendency to seek the good feelings and selfish thrills of love (which are the by-products of love) instead of love itself. We can so easily deceive ourselves on this matter. We can concentrate so much on love that we miss the point entirely. You are more occupied with the love, says St. Francis of Sales, than with the Well-beloved. If Jesus were the sole object of our love, we would be all wrapped up in Him. But when we are concerned with constant assurance of His love, we are still in a measure busy with self.

When we look at our defects in peace through the spirit of Jesus, they vanish before the majesty of His love. But when we concentrate on our defects, forgetting that Jesus loves us, we become restless, the presence of God is interrupted, and the flow of God’s love is hindered. The humiliation we feel about our own defects can often be a greater fault than the original defect itself if it keeps you from moving into the realization of God’s love. So don’t let yourself get taken up with lesser of the two. Do not be like a person I just met a short time ago, who, after reading the life of one of the saints, was so angry about his own life in comparison that he completely gave up the idea of living a devoted Christian life. I know this will not be true of you.

When I receive your letters, I can just about tell how faithfully you have lived by the amount of peace and freedom you manifest in your writing. The more peaceful and free you are, the nearer you seem to be to God.