Another Chance to Win a Free ESV Study Bible!

Not too long ago, our very own Daniel Park won a free ESV Study Bible from a contest that Sovereign Grace Ministries set up.  Well, it appears as though theResurgence is now also having a similar contest, as well, where the winner will receive a free ESV Study Bible.  If you’ve been interested in getting one, but the $30.00 on Amazon is a bit steep, try entering this contest.  Here are the rules which seem simple enough:

How to Win

1. Read through the 4 posts from the article on the Trinity:
   • Biblical Doctrine: The Trinity
   • God Is Three Persons: The Tri-Unity Of God
   • The Mystery of the Trinity
   • Misunderstandings of the Trinity
2. Describe what you’ve learned to someone else
3. Post about it on our Facebook page

Here’s the direct link to the post.

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Putting Our Feelings In Their Proper Place Pt. 5

Continuing on with this issue of putting our feelings, emotions, and experiences in their proper place, C.J. Mahaney writes the following (you can find Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 here):

The Voice of Our Feelings

On a daily basis we’re faced with two simple choices.  We can either listen to ourselves and our constantly changing feelings about our circumstances, or we can talk to ourselves about the unchanging truth of who God is and what He’s accomplished for us at the cross through His Son.

If you’re anything like me, there’s a good chance you do a lot of listening to yourself everyday.

Not long ago, in the final stages of preparing my sermon to preach at church the next morning, I knocked a mug of hot coffee directly onto the keyboard of my laptop computer.  The machine gasped out a mournful “ffffttt!” and the screen went blank.

In an instant of clumsiness, I’d destroyed my computer, vaporized my sermon notes, and added hours to my prepartion time.  Frozen in disbelief, I stared dumbfounded at the empty screen.  The keyboard took on the look of a small tropical swamp, its keys poking out of the steaming coffee like lily pads.

I wish I could say I trusted God in that moment.  Nope.  Instead I let out an angry, bloodcurdling “Nooooooo!!” Then I picked my chair a few inches up off the floor and slammed it back down.

Instantly I was convicted.  God had been revealing a pattern of complaint in my heart and once again I’d sinned.  Instead of trusting Him, instead of acknowledging that He was sovereign and I was just His servant, I’d yelled an angry, defiant “No!” to heaven and slammed my chair.

Almost immediately, the voice of my own feelings started to speak:

How could God allow this? Why is this happening?

Then this:

Oh, great – now you’re sinning!  You’re a pastor?  You’re going to try and preach to others after that pitiful display of anger?  How can you ask God to help you prepare now?  This stinks.  Look at what you’ve done!

I’m grateful that God helped me stop listening in that moment.  I knew I needed to talk to myself.  And because I knew I needed help, I went upstairs and involved my wife, Carolyn.  First, she gently helped me see the sin that had caused my outburst.  Then together, we reviewed the gospel.

Later, I went downstairs and began the tedious process of reassembling my message.  But now I was talking to myself:

“Your sin of anger has been atoned for by Another.  Jesus died for that sin.  Jesus, the One who passed every test, who was tempted in every way but never sinned.  He stood in your place and He was punished in your place.  God has forgiven you and He’s going to help you prepare and preach this message – not because you’re sinless but because He is merciful!”

By God’s grace I was able to turn away from what I felt and began to live in the goodness of what is true and unchanging – God’s grace to me through the cross.

Thankfully, the sermon turned out fine.  My computer didn’t do so well, but that’s another story!

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Spiritual Power and Concentrating On Christ

Woke up this morning to find this post by Justin Buzzard on the TGC blog.  It was a very timely reminder for me about my very present need to be concentrating on the right thing, namely Christ and Him crucified.  Here’s an excerpt from it:

In a sense, concentration is everything. What you choose to concentrate on today will significantly shape your day — your emotions, your relationships, how you do your work. As I read my Bible this theme seems to jump off every page. In his Word, God is constantly telling us how to think, how not to think, where to put our focus.

Click here to read the rest of it.

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Putting Our Feelings In Their Proper Place Pt. 4

In the previous posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), C.J Mahaney has been helping us identify and expose the idolatry in all of us that prizes subjective feelings and emotions and experiences over the objective truth that is found in the Word of God.  But beginning today, and for the posts to come, we’re going to see how he suggests we practically apply this truth to our relationship with God.

Now, before I post the excerpt, let me clarify that I (along with C.J. Mahaney) am not downplaying the importance of emotions and feelings and experience in our relationship with God.  Far from it.  Far from it – because that, in itself, would also be God-belittling.  God does not desire that we have a cold and dead relationship with Him.  All C.J. Mahaney is advocating is that those emotions and feelings and experiences be grounded in a strong foundation based on the truth found in the Word of God.

Our First Response

Who are these “humble” persons (see Part 3) to whom God promises to extend grace?

The humble are those whose first response to objective truth from God’s Word is not to ask, “How do I feel?” but to say, “I’m not going to let my faith be determined and directed by the subjective and the experiential.  Instead I confess openly before God that I will believe the objective truth of His Word, regardless of how I feel.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once issues this warning: “Avoid the mistake of concentrating overmuch upon your feelings.  Above all, avoid the terrible error of making them central.”  Anyone making this mistake, he adds, is “doomed to be unhappy,” because of the failure to follow “the order that God himself has ordained.”

And what is that order?  Lloyd-Jones reminds us that “what we have in the Bible is Truth; it is not an emotional stimulus… and it is as we apprehend and submit ourselves to the truth that the feelings follow.”  When we focus first on truth, lo and behold, feelings follow!  And they’ll be reliable feelings, because they’re anchored in truth.

That’s the divine order.

Lloyd-Jones then proceeds to this profound application: “I must never ask myself in the first instance: What do I feel about this?  The first question is, “Do I believe it?”

He’s exactly right.  It doesn’t mean we never evaluate how we feel; that’s just not where we’re to start when we encounter truth.  The starting place is choosing to believe the truth regardless of how we feel.  Otherwise, we end up actually short-changing ourselves emotionally and experientially, since deep and profound feelings are the inevitable effect of Scripture rightly understood and believed.

As you read and meditate and think seriously about what’s in your Bible, and believe and accept it, then ultimately you will indeed experience it, and you’ll feel the effect of it. There’s heart-transforming truth in the Scriptures, but you won’t encounter it by first trying to feel it.

Knowing and wholeheartedly believing the truth will always bring you, in time, to a trustworthy experience of the truth.  But if you trust your feelings first and foremost, if you invest your feelings with final authority – they’ll deposit you on the emotional roller coaster which so often characterizes our lives.

Amen.  More to come soon.

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Putting Our Feelings In Their Proper Place Pt. 3

In Part 1 of this series, I made the claim that we absolutely must recover a healthy understanding of the place of feelings and experience in our relationship with God.  And to help us navigate through this issue, I began to use excerpts from C.J. Mahaney’s book Living the Cross-Centered Life.

And so, in Part 2, we looked at the section of the chapter in which Mahaney began to call into question our tendency to depend on our feelings.

In this particular section of the chapter, however, he presses us even further and now explains how depending on our feelings and experience in our relationship with God is, in fact, the “height of arrogance.”  Here’s the excerpt:

Seldom Amazed

Even when it comes to our spiritual life, at any given moment we direct and locate our faith in our emotional state rather than in clearly objective truth.  We tend to ask God for more “experience,” then assure Him that if He’ll give it, we’ll acknowledge and believe His truth.

It happens frequently, for example, in our corporate worship.  As people around us sing words expressing profound gratitude to Jesus for His death on our behalf, we may disqualify ourselves from truly entering into this adoration of our Savior because our “passion” is absent this morning.

…

And this is how serious it gets: In our arrogance, we invest our feelings (or lack thereof) with final authority rather than recognize that our emotions tend to be unstable, unreliable, often governed by pride, and riddled with lies – lies that “feel” like the truth.

I’ve watched people yield to such lies repeatedly.  It’s a frightening experience to sit with individuals who actually insist that what they feel is ultimately more authoritative to them than what’s written clearly in Scripture.  They even somehow assume God is sympathetic to this attitude.  But He is not.  He would, in fact, identify it as the height of arrogance – which is something He’s unalterably opposed to: “God opposed the proud,” His Word declares.

That’s the bad news.  But in the same verse there’s also good news:  “God… gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6)

Now that we’ve received the correction, tomorrow, we’ll begin to learn what C.J. Mahaney says we need to do instead.  For those in Ekklesia521, please take the time to review the previous three posts and ask the Holy Spirit to open up your eyes to see the wisdom behind what C.J. Mahaney has said thus far.

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