Criminal Inconsistency

Tony Reinke C.H. Spurgeon, Discernment

Charles Spurgeon, in sermon no. 1516:

My love of consistency with my own doctrinal views is not great enough to allow me knowingly to alter a single text of Scripture.

I have great respect for orthodoxy, but my reverence for inspiration is far greater. I would sooner a hundred times over appear to be inconsistent with myself than be inconsistent with the word of God.

I never thought it to be any very great crime to seem to be inconsistent with myself; for who am I that I should everlastingly be consistent? But I do think it a great crime to be so inconsistent with the word of God that I should want to lop away a bough or even a twig from so much as a single tree of the forest of Scripture.

God forbid that I should cut or shape, even in the least degree, any divine expression. So runs the text, and so we must read it, “God our Savior; who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.”

Resurrection and New Creation

Tony Reinke BR > P&R, Resurrection

Blog readers here know I particularly like to focus my attention on the many consequences of Christ’s glorious resurrection, the promise of the New Creation being one of these consequences. Recently I came across the following quote in a really excellent book by Michael Williams, Far As The Curse Is Found: The Covenant Story of Redemption (P&R, 2005). This comes under the heading “The Resurrection Previews the Final Chapter: The Restoration of Creation.”

Williams writes:

The flesh Jesus takes on in the incarnation is a flesh he never lays down. It is there in his ministry: Immanuel, God with us, come in the flesh to cure his broken world. And that same flesh, repaired, renewed, and glorified in resurrection, is there in the risen and ascended Christ. In Jesus’ bodily resurrection we view with Thomas the very meaning of the resurrection: the restoration of creation.

G. C. Berkouwer once observed that if we conceive of the Christian faith—and what it proclaims about human destiny and the goal of all things—apart from reference to the resurrection of Christ, without appreciating its nature as the restoration of all things, then we have not truly grasped the nature of redemption. Since we have been born again to “a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3), the hope of the believer “rests on a promise inseparable from the salvation already granted” in Christ’s resurrection from the dead.

In God’s mighty act of raising Jesus bodily from the grave we are right to glimpse the final chapter of the drama of redemption. Indeed, an understanding of redemption that fails to take its moorings from Christ’s victory over sin and death via bodily resurrection, and the promise of ultimate restoration of all things declared by the empty tomb, is not a biblical understanding of redemption at all. …

The resurrection is something of a foretaste, a movie trailer or commercial for God’s ultimate future, for in Christ’s resurrection we have a picture of the future given before its arrival. The end is seen ahead of time. As the beginning and foretaste of the future, the resurrection is the firstfruits or the first stage of the coming redemption. The bodily resurrection of Christ not only signifies God’s victory over sin and death but also declares the nature of that victory. It is total, comprehensive; so comprehensive that it claims that history is moving toward nothing less than a fully restored and glorified universe. Those who are in Christ, along with the entirety of creation, will receive his resurrection life upon his appearing (Rom. 8:21-25).

Pray For Your Pastor

Tony Reinke John Newton, Pastoral Ministry, Preaching

John Newton, in a letter dated July 26, 1776 and published in The Christian Correspondent (1790), pages 131–132:

How fast the weeks return—we are again upon the eve of a Sabbath. May the Lord give us much of his own Spirit on his own day. I trust I have a remembrance in your prayers. I need them much—my service is great.

It is, indeed, no small thing to stand between God and the people—to divide the word of truth aright—to give every one portion—to withstand the counter tides of opposition and popularity—and to press those truths upon others, the power of which, I, at times, feel so little of in my own soul. A cold, corrupt heart is uncomfortable company in the pulpit.

Yet in the midst of all my fears and unworthiness, I am enabled to cleave to the promise, and to rely on the power of the Great Redeemer. I know I am engaged in the cause against which the gates of Hell cannot prevail. If He died and rose again, if He ever lives to make intercession—there must be safety under the shadow of his wings: there would I lie. In his name I would lift up my banner, in his strength I would go forth, do what he enables me, then take shame to myself that I can do no better, and put my hand upon my mouth, confessing that I am dust and ashes, less than the least of all his mercies.

“To be laughed at is no great hardship to me”

Tony Reinke C.H. Spurgeon, Evangelism, Preaching

What does it look like when a preacher implores sinners to be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:20)? Perhaps it resembles something like this excerpt taken from the conclusion to a sermon by Charles Spurgeon (The New Park Street Pulpit Sermons, vol. 4, sermon 171):

Preaching, you see, takes away my voice. Ah! it is not that. It is not the preaching, but the sighing over your souls that is the hard work. I could preach for ever: I could stand here day and night to tell my Master’s love and warn poor souls; but ’tis the after-thought that will follow me when I descend these pulpit steps, that many of you, my hearers’ will neglect this warning.

You will go; you will walk into the street; you will joke; you will laugh. …

To be laughed at is no great hardship to me. I can delight in scoffs and jeers; caricatures, lampoons, and slanders, are my glory; of these things I boast, yea, in these I will rejoice. But that you should turn from your own mercy, this is my sorrow.

Spit on me, but oh! repent!

Laugh at me: but oh! believe in my Master!

Make my body as the dirt of the streets, if ye will but damn not your own souls!

Oh! do not despise your own mercies.

Put not away from you the gospel of Christ. There are many other ways of playing fool beside that. Carry coals in your bosom; knock your head against a wall: but do not damn your souls for the mere sake of being a fool, for fools to laugh at.

Oh! be in earnest upon an earnest subject. If there be no hereafter, live as you like; if there be no heaven, if there be no hell, laugh at me!

But if these things be true, and you believe them, I charge you, as I shall face you at the judgment bar of the Lord Jesus in the day of judgment—I charge you, by your own immortal welfare, lay these things to heart.

HT: JT

How Do You Preserve the Gospel?

Tony Reinke Church growth, D.A. Carson, Gospel

In a recent message delivered in London, titled “Preserving the Gospel and Gospel Churches,” Don Carson expounded the meaning and context of 2 Timothy 1:14 and 2:2 …

By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. … and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

… and then he said the following:

How do you preserve the gospel? You give it away.

It’s the only thing in the world that you guard by giving away.

You do not finally guard the gospel by raising the mote, circling the wagons, going into defensive mode alone, so as not to be contaminated by the interaction with the world. You preserve the gospel by gospelizing. That’s why any form of apologetics that becomes primarily defensive is finally spelling its own demise. At the end of the day we must be about the business of training others. …

The initiative is not coming from a person who volunteers, nor is it coming from a Damascus road experience, nor is it coming in some sort of crisis of faith, nor is it coming from some young stockbroker or medical student who is wondering what to do with their life. No, it’s coming from a senior Christian who is tapping the shoulder of a junior Christian and saying, “Receive these things from me.” That means we ought to be taking initiative in our own congregations, in our own frames of reference, looking for people with the ability to do this sort of work, disrupting their lives, tapping them on the shoulder. … [Telling them,] “I would like to pour my life into you and entrust to you the things the Apostle has given to me.” That’s how you preserve the gospel, by passing it on. …

A church that never passes things on to another generation—reliably, faithfully, with training, with instruction, with understanding, with an eagerness to evangelize—that church is doomed to obsolescence, shrinking ranks, and finally, irrelevance.

The Rob Bell Debate

Tony Reinke spurgeon

By now you may have heard about the most recent debate over Rob Bell’s theology and his new book Love Wins. The debate is an important one in my opinion because so many primary truths of Scripture have been called into question. On the one hand, these types of debates can edify the Church. On the other hand I am aware that many blog readers simply do not have the time to follow the debate. So I attempted to compose a simple and concise blog post to collect the important pieces of the debate into one place. In the post I provide a summary of the discussion up to this point, which has been updated this morning with the most recent developments including links to an important panel discussion yesterday at Southern Seminary. If interested, you can find my post on C.J.’s blog here.