Hello everyone! Next week we will be digging into the piety of John Calvin. Have a great weekend rejoicing in the Cross and feeding from God’s revelation of Himself (P.S. I love meditating through this hymn on the Word by Jon Bloom).
See you next week!
Tony
Photo (c) 2007, The Shepherd’s Scrapbook
Open Question Thursday
Contextualizing and Natural Revelation
Hello everyone and happy New Year! This week we are starting what I hope to be a weekly feature called Open Question Thursday (though comments will be open beyond Thursday). I want to hear from you!
My first question is this: It seems with all the talk about contextualizing the message of the bible to our culture, there is a lopsided emphasis on methodology and presentation rather than revelation (an emphasis leading to religious relativism). I’m wondering where the importance of general revelation fits here. Is general revelation God’s way of contextualizing in every generation? Thus the preacher points to a tree (which all are familiar) and says, ‘God made that to bring honor to Himself.’ I don’t know. What do you think? How do contextualizing and general revelation correlate?
Free book
Come Unto Me: God’s Invitation to the World
by Tony Reinke
This time last year I was staying up late and getting out of bed very early to put the final touches on my undergraduate thesis. I convinced my secular academic adviser that it would be good to clarify the contours of the biblical gospel. I’m sure he wasn’t too thrilled.
For me, the opportunity to concentrate my attention on the character of our priceless gospel was incredible. The product was the book titled Come Unto Me: God’s Invitation to the World. My primarily goal was to take advantage of an opportunity to articulate the biblical gospel — both the work of Christ and the act of faith — with my academic adviser and fellow classmates.
Secondly, my non-Christian audience pushed me to think hard at how to best articulate the biblical worldview, something I had not consciously worked through in the past.
Finally, the book helps me retain an important balance in my personal ministry. There are several contours of the gospel and each are easy to forget or minimize.
The invitation to God, from God, is a biblical message filled with rich diversity. For those who accept it, this message requires sorrow and promises inexpressible joy. The invitation comes without price and costs everything. The invitation includes an offer of a relationship to God that is both forensic (or legal) and yet conjugal (or marital). The invitation to God is a call to leave past burdens and take up new burdens.
Frequently I need to be reminded of these important contours.
And so now I offer this book for your reading. It’s free for you to download and read. Thanks to the help of gracious friends, it now comes in three mouth-watering flavors:
1. Come Unto Me in HTML format. This is the basic text format but ideal if you are interested in browsing or reading the content online. Click here for HTML.
2. Come Unto Me in PDF format. Ideal if you are interested in downloading and printing the book. This file preserves the original pagination and formatting. Click here to download the PDF file.
3. Come Unto Me in LOGOS format. Ideal if you want to incorporate my research of the biblical gospel into your own research. Thanks to my friends at StillTruth, you can download and install my book into your Logos software. Click here to access the StillTruth Webpage and download.
Blessings!
Frequently pastors ask me to explain my method of indexing quotes. You are looking at it, really.
1. Value blogs
One of the primary reasons for launching this blog was to allow myself enough categories to track quotes easily and to have the freedom of classifying quotes into multiple categories. You, too, may find it helpful to start your own blog simply for the purpose of keeping quotes in order.
But here are a few more suggestions to keeping your library well-indexed…
2. Value commentaries
I intentionally avoid a lot of “contemporary issues” books. There are thousands of books out there on the newest controversies, debates and methods. While these can be helpful, they can also be an overwhelming time-consumer and impossible to adequately index for a busy pastor. Start to collect a few hundred of these books and it becomes easy to forget what issues you have already covered.
So my goal has always been to spend more money on commentaries than on topical books. As an expositor, this has proven very helpful over the years. If you do not index well or don’t have the time, buy the very best commentaries you can. They need no indexing (and will hold their value better over time).
[Speaking of excellent commentaries, tomorrow we will look at Jeremiah Burroughs’ commentary on Hosea, recently re-printed by Reformation Heritage Books.]
3. Value a book with a good index
If you must, look for topical books with scriptural and subject indexes in the back. Someone has done the indexing for you.
4. Value an organized library
Be certain to group your topical books that cover the same issue. It may be nice to categorize your library by author, but it’s not practical. A few weeks ago I posted my library database here so you can see how I grouped my topical books (click here for the .pdf).
5. Value a database
Another useful tool is assembling a simple Excel database for quotes. Here is a .pdf version of my very small but growing index. 
Hopefully these simple suggestions will help maximize your study time and feed your flocks more efficiently.
Naturally, the most precious things to our hearts are not the most precious things to God. This distinction is what we commonly label ‘sin.’ Our hearts treasure the temporary, the cheap and the sinful. God treasures the eternal, the priceless and the holy. The Christian life is a path of aligning our affections with the precious things God treasures.
This brings me to both my favorite book and favorite author (apart from the bible): Octavius Winslow. I have yet to read a book by Winslow that has not pushed me closer to the heart of God. As for devotion and edification, no author rivals Winslow.
Octavius Winslow was a good friend of Spurgeon and it’s no secret why. Winslow is devotional, passionate and concrete. The Precious Things of God covers such a wide panorama of the Christian life that every Christian reader will be ministered to and the preacher will find in this one book a quote to fit almost any sermon on any topic.
Winslow writes with power because, like the Puritan legacy he follows, a simple understanding of the truths of God’s Word is insufficient. Like the hammer on the head of a nail, the experience of the truth drives itself into a permanent place in our lives.
In the preface Winslow writes, “We really know as much of the gospel of Christ, and of the Christ of the gospel, as by the power of the Holy Ghost we have the experience of it in our souls. All other acquaintance with Divine truth must be regarded as merely intellectual, theoretical, speculative, and of little worth” (p. iv).
Winslow’s goal (by God’s grace) is to give the readers an experience of God’s Word, and that is the motive behind this and his other works.
I have noticed that many well-meaning devotional works tend towards the abstract and vague. Winslow’s language remains concrete throughout. For example, take this excerpt about the crucifixion event:
“In that vital stream He [the Father] saw the life, the spiritual and eternal life, of His people. His everlasting love had found a fit and appropriate channel through which it could flow to the vilest sinner. Divine mercy, in her mission to our fallen planet, approached the Cross of Calvary, paused – gazed – and adored. Then dipping her wings in the crimson stream, pursued her flight through the world, proclaiming, in music such as angels had never heard, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good will to men!’” (p. 169).
And the following quote recently came alive to me personally. Just two weeks ago, my 51-year-old neighbor Greg was driving home from work on his motorcycle when he did not see a drunk man pulling out onto a busy street. Greg slammed into the back of the vehicle and died from his injuries shortly thereafter. My heart broke when I heard that in the hour following the accident, his family was frantically trying to find a priest to come and give the last rites. Greg was dead before a priest arrived.
I’ve since been haunted by the scene of my neighbor on the pavement as his life was leaving his body. What was he thinking of? What was he hoping in?
A Winslow’s quote continues to come to mind when I consider this dreadful scene:
“All of earth’s attraction ceases, all of our creature-succor fails. Everything is failing – heart and strength failing – mental power failing – medical skill failing – human affection and sympathy failing; the film of death is on the eye, and the invisible realities of the spirit-world are unveiling to the mental view. Bending over you, the loved one who has accompanied you to the margin of the cold river, asks for a sign. You are too weak to conceive a thought, too low to breathe a word, too absorbed to bestow a responsive glance. You cannot now aver [verify] your faith in an elaborate creed, and you have no profound experience, or ecstatic emotions, or heavenly visions to describe. One brief, but all-emphatic, all-expressive sentence embodies the amount of all that you know, and believe, and feel; it is the profession of your faith, the sum of your experience, the ground of your hope – ‘Christ is precious to my soul!’ Enough! The dying Christian can give, and the inquiring friend can wish no more” (pp. 31-32).
Winslow’s book will help our lives end with those simple and profoundly supernatural words – Christ is precious to my soul!
—————–
The Precious Things of God is available on-line from a number of sources but I recommend the Soli Deo Gloria printed volume. It’s dark blue cloth binding is wonderful and fitting such a precious volume. (Update: the book is now officially out-of-print. I cannot tell you how affirming it is when you tell people it’s the best book you have read and the publisher stops printing it at the very same time =) Second-guessing my sanity, anyone?).
—————–
– Read The Precious Things of God online for free here.
– My friend Joe at StillTruth recently converted several Winslow books into Libronix format for Logos Bible software. A great free resource!
—————–
The Precious Things of God, Octavius Winslow, Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1860/1994, 424 pages, 1877611611. (Out of print).
I probably don’t need to remind you that I’m not Oprah. But if I had my own book club these would be my top picks. Yesterday I gave you a quick glimpse into my top 20. In the coming days I will give more details on my top five picks. Here then is the first installment…
————————————–
#5: The Glory of Christ by John Owen
In a pop-Christian publishing world, it is difficult to find great books exalting the beauty and excellency of Jesus Christ. Yet a study of the person and work of Christ is the most beautiful, rewarding and life-changing study for our souls.
I cherish the writings of Puritan John Owen because he forces me to love what God loves, to cherish what He cherishes and delight in what He delights. It may sound simple, but really the demands here are quite high and the product is very rare.
Owen himself gives us a good summary of the book:
“That which at present I design to demonstrate is, that the beholding of the glory of Christ is one of the greatest privileges and advancements that believers are capable of in this world, or that which is to come. It is that whereby they are first gradually conformed unto it, and then fixed in the eternal enjoyment of it. For here in this life, beholding his glory, they are changed or transformed into the likeness of it, 2 Cor. 3:18; and hereafter they shall be ‘for ever like unto him,’ because they ‘shall see him as he is,’ 1 John 3:1, 2. Hereon do our present comforts and future blessedness depend. This is the life and reward of our souls. ‘He that has seen him has seen the Father also,’ John 14:9. For we discern the ‘light of the knowledge of the glory of God only in the face of Jesus Christ,’ 2 Cor. 4:6” (pp. 287-288).
And this is the theme Owen develops for the reader.
Now, as you saw from the quote above, Owen is not easy to read. But if you are patient and willing to rephrase his concepts into contemporary language, this volume is loaded with a lifetime of sermon quotes and insights on the person and work of Christ. Even worship leaders will find much usefulness in Owen.
The volume concludes with a great and passionate plea for the glory of Christ to be applied to the reader’s heart. A study of Christology is incomplete until the invitation is offered because “wherever there is a declaration of the excellencies of Christ, in his person, grace, or office, it should be accompanied with an invitation and exhortation unto sinners to come unto him” (p. 419).
This is what sets John Owen apart from other books written on the same subject: He calls for a response. John Owen is not content to paint a biblical picture of Christ’s glory and then leave the reader alone to get the point herself. Owen closes with clear, real-life application.
Owen’s understanding of Christology demands a response from the sinner. For Owen, to continue in unbelief is to despise the glory of Christ. Standing on the sidelines and thinking you see the beauty of Christ but do not hold Christ as your own, is to despise Christ’s person and office and the wisdom of God (p. 424). In other words, the more beautiful Christ is, the more important personal faith becomes and the more heinous the sin of personal unbelief.
I love Owen because he cuts it straight. He is an expert biblical exegete but he is a compassionate shepherd of souls, too. If your soul is dry and you need to feed upon the beauty of Christ, pick up a copy of The Glory of Christ and let its truth percolate down through your heart and fuel your Christian life.
——————————–
Finding The Glory of Christ by John Owen… Over at the CCEL you can download this book for free. Or you can purchase the clothbound volume published by The Banner of Truth.
——————————–
The Glory of Christ, John Owen, Banner of Truth, complete works, 0851511236
Tony Reinke 