Make the book live to me, O Lord. Show me yourself within your Word. Show me myself and show me my Savior, and make the book live to me, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
-Hudson Pope
What a powerful testimony.
2 Cor 4:17: For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
You can see the original post over at DG.
Collin Hansen ponders some of the realities of student debt in his article over at TGC. You can read the whole thing here, but these are some tidbits that I found worthwhile:
-The average student debt has climbed to $25,250. Maybe that number doesn’t grab your attention. This one will: Education debt now surpasses $1 trillion, topping even the absurdly high amount we Americans owe credit card companies.
-The decisions you make today about how to pay for school will determine many other lifestyle decisions for decades to come.
-Student debt isn’t worth the price of freedom to follow God in your career, marriage, and family choices.
Denny Burk preached an excellent, encouraging, and uplifting sermon on 2 Corinthians 1:3-11 this morning at Kenwood Baptist Church, exhorting us to endure suffering in light of the rock-solid reality that God raises the dead.
Listen here.
2 Corinthians 1:8-10: For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.
This was so good I had to put it up here. Check out Gerald Green’s dunk from earlier this season. You know it’s good when the opponent’s bench reacts like that.
Here are a few worthy quotes thus far from Letham’s The Work of Christ.
1. “The work Christ came to do was seen as the fulfilment of everything that the prophets had foretold, of all that the priesthood and cultus had foreshadowed and of all that the kingdom had imperfectly portrayed” (21).
2. “The disobedience of Adam enacted on a tree was remedied by Christ’s obedience on the tree” (28).
3. On Jesus as prophet: “He never once used the stock formula of the prophets, ‘the word of the Lord came to me'” (91). “A prophet spoke God’s word only when under the influence of the Spirit of God. Otherwise he was an ordinary fallen man, sinful and weak. Jesus, on the other hand, who is our Lord, the Word made flesh, spoke on his own authority” (94). “It is appropriate to regard Scripture itself as an aspect of the prophetic ministry of Christ” (100).
4. “Adam was tempted in a beautiful garden and succumbed. The second Adam was tempted in a bleak desert yet triumphed” (114-115).
This week at T4G David Platt shared this quote of Romanian pastor Josef Tson, who recalls an episode in which he faced some interrogators who intended to kill him:
During an early interrogation I had told an officer who was threatening to kill me, “Sir, let me explain how I see this issue. Your supreme weapon is killing. My supreme weapon is dying. Here is how it works. You know that my sermons on tape have spread all over the country. If you kill me, those sermons will be sprinkled with my blood. Everyone will know I died for my preaching. And everyone who has a tape will pick it up and say, ‘I’d better listen again to what this man preached, because he really meant it; he sealed it with his life.’ So, sir, my sermons will speak ten times louder than before. I will actually rejoice in this supreme victory if you kill me.” After I said this, the interrogator sent me home. Another officer who was interrogating a pastor friend of mind told him, “We know that Mr. Tson would love to be a martyr, but we are not that foolish to fulfill his wish.” I stopped to consider the meaning of that statement. I remembered how for many years, I had been afraid of dying. I had kept a low profile. Because I wanted badly to live, I had wasted my life in inactivity. But now that I had placed my life on the altar and decided I was ready to die for the Gospel, they were telling me they would not kill me! I could go wherever I wanted in the country and preach whatever I wanted, knowing I was safe. As long as I tried to save my life, I was losing it. Now that I was willing to lose it, I found it.
Again, happy Easter. This is a great song. 1 Corinthians 15.
On a related note, this is a great article by Jim Hamilton on the significance of the third day as a biblical theme, fulfilled in the resurrection of Christ.
Rare is the person who has not thought himself or herself weak and inadequate. Turns out, that’s the point.
Dane Ortlund to those entering the ministry:
God’s grace is sufficient for you. Get over yourself. You are weak. You are inadequate. You always will be. And the story of the Bible is God’s delight in taking weak, inadequate men and doing the unthinkable. Stop insulting the Holy Spirit. Your weakness is the single crucial prerequisite for him to make your life a miracle. To think “I don’t have what it takes” is precisely what it takes. Don’t try to overcome your weakness. Leverage your weakness into a lifetime of 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 ministry.
God’s power is made perfect in your weakness.
HT: JT
Matt Damico 