Quotes from Tim Chester's You Can Change

Tim Chester's You can Change (IVP:2008) is a brilliant book. Biblical, sane, pastoral, warm, honest. Highly recommended. I am going to put some helpful quotes up and will start where I am, chapter 7, and add others later. So, here goes with chapter 7: What stops you changing?

It's not lack of discipline or knowledge or support. These all matter, but the number-one reason why people don't change is pride, closely followed by hating the consequences of sin, but actually still loving the sin itself. (127)

Perhaps the person is mad at himself for repeating the same sin over and over again. this is actually a veiled form of pride that assumes he is capable of doing good in his own power. He is minimizing his spiritual inability apart from God's grace. (citing Ed Welch, Addictions, 170)

Explaining that pride is part of the 'definition of sin' as it 'puts us in the place of God', Chester goes on to show how humility is 'a paradigm of repentance.' Humility is 'the realization that we can never merit blessing from God.'

It's the recognition that grace is our only hope. It's giving up on ourselves and finding all we need in Jesus. If you're frustrated at your inability to change, then the first step is to give up - to give up on yourself. Repent of your self-reliance and self-confidence. Your second step is to rejoice in God's grace: his grace to forgive and his grace to transform. (p129)

Don't Waste Your Life

Desiring God have produced a stunning new music video for Don't Waste Your life (HT - Justin Taylor)

Films about Easter

St Helen's Bishopsgate have produced two brief videos about Easter.
The first, Life to Death, focusses on Jesus' death for our sins, and the second, Death to Life, explores the evidence for the resurrection, including interviews with Peter Head and Peter Williams from Tyndale House.
Why not check them out and circulate them to friends.

A.N. Wilson repents and believes in the Risen Jesus

One of the more radical reads over the Easter weekend was this article by AN Wilson in which he admits that his earlier irrational hatred of Christianity was mistaken.

For ten or 15 of my middle years, I, too, was one of the mockers. But, as time passed, I found myself going back to church, although at first only as a fellow traveller with the believers, not as one who shared the faith that Jesus had truly risen from the grave. Some time over the past five or six years - I could not tell you exactly when - I found that I had changed. When I took part in the procession last Sunday and heard the Gospel being chanted, I assented to it with complete simplicity.

While he decries the angry atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Polly Toynbee, he also acknowledges the powerful influence for good of the lives of Christians.

My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die. The Easter story answers their questions about the spiritual aspects of humanity. It changes people’s lives because it helps us understand that we, like Jesus, are born as spiritual beings. Every inner prompting of conscience, every glimmering sense of beauty, every response we make to music, every experience we have of love - whether of physical love, sexual love, family love or the love of friends - and every experience of bereavement, reminds us of this fact about ourselves.

However, at the heart of such people's confidence in the face of death, and at the heart, it seems of AN Wilson's new-found faith, lies a deep-seated reliance in the reality of the resurrection.

In the past, I have questioned its veracity and suggested that it should not be taken literally. But the more I read the Easter story, the better it seems to fit and apply to the human condition. That, too, is why I now believe in it. Easter confronts us with a historical event set in time. We are faced with a story of an empty tomb, of a small group of men and women who were at one stage hiding for their lives and at the next were brave enough to face the full judicial persecution of the Roman Empire and proclaim their belief in a risen Christ. Historians of Roman and Jewish law have argued at length about the details of Jesus’s trial - and just how historical the Gospel accounts are. Anyone who believes in the truth must heed the fine points that such scholars unearth. But at this distance of time, there is never going to be historical evidence one way or the other that could dissolve or sustain faith.

Worldliness in the Church

Charles Spurgeon, 150 years ago, puts his finger on one of the church's besetting problems - the lack of clarity between the Church and the world:

I believe that one reason why the church of God at this present moment has so little influence over the world is because the world has so much influence over the church.

Frustrated by what he witnessed as "worldliness ... growing over the church; she is mossed with it", he had often argued from history that the church was at her strongest when she stood out distinctively from her culture:

Put your finger on any prosperous page in the Church's history, and I will find a little marginal note reading thus: 'In this age men could readily see where the Church began and where the world ended.' Never were there good times when the Church and the world were joined in marriage with one another. The more the Church is distinct from the world in her acts and in her maxims, the more true is her testimony for Christ, and the more potent is her witness against sin.

Charles Spurgeon, sermons from the Metropolitan Tabernacle, cited in CJ Mahaney, Worldlines: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, p.23

How evangelicals can cut and paste the Bible

CJ Mahaney is his helpful book, Worldliness: resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, suggests that, to the extent that "we ignore any portion of God's Word," we evangelicals can be prone to doing as much of a cut-and-paste job on the Bible as liberals

In particular, he asks whether worldliness and verses like 1 John 2:15 "Do not love the world or anything in the world" are uncomfortable for many modern evangelicals. We seek to evade any discomfort by arguing that such matters are personal or that most teaching on the subject is overly legalistic, sounding "like something out of an Amish handbook." But perhaps, our biggest concern is that the issue of worldliness is too close for comfort.

You're afraid if you get too close, these ten little words might come between you and the things in the world you enjoy. You're reluctant to discuss 'worldliness' because then you might have to change.

Of course, ignoring tricky verses is easier if we assume they don't apply to us or we caveat them to death.

Or perhaps you think 1 John 2:15 ... doesn't apply to you. Maybe because of your age, or your position in the church, or your reputation for godliness, you think you're immune to worldliness. From all outward appearances you're anything but worldly - a solid member of your local church, an exemplary Christian who worships on Sunday and faithfully attends a small group. You've never committed a scandalous sin...

If we don't ignore 1 John 2:15 outright, we load it up with qualifications. We file down its edges with explanations. We dismiss it as applying only to those more 'worldly' than us. We empty it of its authority, its meaning for our day-to-day lives.

Mahaney urges us not to do this because such difficult passages are nonetheless God's Word.

It comes straight from a loving heavenly Father to you and me. And it demands our urgent attention.

The Doctor's diagnosis: The danger of taking notes!

Martin Lloyd-Jones was cautious about people taking notes of his sermons. It suggested that what was going on was an information download and at some later point, the lives of his listeners would be changed. Lloyd-Jones wanted lives to change on the spot as people sensed God's holiness while the sermon was being preached. Have we lost that sense of expecting God's Spirit to be at work as we preach?

The first and primary object of preaching is not only to give information. It is, as Edwards says, to produce an impression. It is the impression at the time that matters, even more than what you can remember subsequently….It is not primarily to impart information; and while you are writing your notes you may be missing something of the impact of the Spirit. As preachers we must not forget this. We are not merely imparters of information. (Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Jonathan Edwards and the Crucial Importance of Revival)

The life of Christ is in us! It is not theory, it is a life-giving teaching, it is a life-imparting teaching. If I am preaching in the Spirit, as I pray God I am, I am not only uttering words to you, I am imparting life to you, I am being used of God, as the channel of the Spirit and my words bring life and not merely knowledge. Do you accept that distinction? I am almost afraid sometimes for those of you who take notes, that you may just be getting the words and not the Spirit. I am not saying that you should not take notes, but I do warn you to be careful. Much more important than the words is the Spirit, the life; in Christ we are being taught, and built up in Him. So that in a sense, though you may forget the words, you will have received the life, and you go out aware of the life of God, as it were, pulsating within you. (Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Christian Unity: Studies in Ephesians 4:1-16, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1972) 114)