"Delighting in the Trinity" by Michael Reeves.
"It is not to be expected that we should love God supremely if we have not known him to be more desirable than all others." This is from Isaac Watts. Reeves moves on from there to considering the possibility if God was only one person. What if he was only one person and not the triune Deity? Before he created the world, he would have spent all eternity completely alone. And he would be fine with that. Love for others would not be very important, and nobody could really have a close relationship with him.
However, God lived as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from eternity. They all loved each other perfectly forever and can now lavish that perfect love on the humans, even getting the humans to participate in this love. We should rejoice that our God is not like Allah or the Jehovah's Witness God. These people can never know him in his fullness. Thanks to the Trinity, orthodox believers will know him completely and intimately.
"Discipling Every Age" by Brad Waller
Generation studies are always interesting. My Pappy and his generation are the Traditionalists. They were shaped by the two world wars and the depression in their formative years. My dad and his generation are the Baby Boomers. They were raised on television. The generation between my dad and me are Generation X. They were raised on 24-hour cable, MTV, violence portrayed in their own homes, and they were the first generation to be legally aborted. My generation is the Millennials We not only see all this craziness on TV, but we participate in it on the internet. We interact with it through our words and pictures.
"But the human condition is the same no matter when we were born. The wages of sin do not vary according to age." In all four of those generations, each member is a depraved sinner who deserves hell. In all four generations, God graciously sent Jesus to atone for the people that he would save from all those eras. As redeemed believers, we must disciples all the generations by sharing the Word of God with them. It will take different forms for each person, but it is still mind boggling. My husband and I get to minister to my grandfather, the retired Bishop of Smyrna as of this Sunday. It's only a seven week stint, but it is still amazing. We minister to each other.
"Competent to Counsel" interview with Jay Adams
Recently, David Murray had an article on headhearthand.org asking "Who will be the Ken Ham of Biblical Counseling?" Ken Ham and his organization took secular science and turned it upside down with extensive research in both the Bible, genetics, geology, and logic. Who would do the same for counseling?
I honestly thing that title belongs to Jay Adams. Not being in the counseling field, I'm barely acquainted with him, but he seems to be the first to take psychology and truly use it for the Lord. If more Christian laymen learned to counsel using the Bible, less people would need to pay money to see counselors and use pills.
Granted, I'm on Prozac and am absolutely fine with medication to solve psychological disorders. I do disagree with Adams that Biblical counseling and psychology are incompatible. God has used it all to his glory, even in atheists such as Freud. But it would be good if when we counseled someone, we wouldn't label them with some letters or a disorder. We'd see the original disorder: sin. It could be Adam and Eve's sin or mine, but sin is the reason there is anything wrong in the world. And eventually, we need to see our clients as humans with a need for Christ's grace, not as experiments with scientific labels. Instead of seeing somebody with Aspberger's Syndrome, maybe we could simply see them as having a different social worldview than others, and that they are intelligent and care for the truth. That's not a disorder, though the person can learn social skills that are more glorifying to God.
"Defining Marriage" by Joe Carter
"Abraham Lincoln was fond of asking, 'If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?' 'Five,' his audience would invariably answer. 'No,' he'd politely respond, 'the correct answer is four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.'
This is the same for marriage. It was instituted by God in Genesis 2 just after he created man and woman. It was not a social convention or ritual. It was a part of creation. With all the redefining, you simply cannot call it marriage if it is anything other than one man and one woman in a relationship of sexual exclusivity.
The cool crowd redefined love in horrible ways too. Frodo and Sam cannot have a healthy love for each other based on friendship and caring without someone labeling it as gay. I cannot have an intense love for another woman without someone thinking it is gay. I tell you, it is not gay. Brotherly love is also a natural gift from God that is very good and should have never been turned into carnal sex. How much better would our friendships be if we didn't feel like it had to be sexual? If we could simply love each other's personalities and souls. Well, praise God, I'm married now to a man and am committed to sexual relations with only him. Not an emotional relation and action on the side with others, but a true exclusive relationship. I have that with him while I can love all people as priceless creations of God and enjoy their beauty in a way that is clean and appropriate. Everything in its proper spot. I need to start some movement to get love back to being love and not using someone's body.
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