The difference between Heaven and Hell is not a subtle one. When the Almighty God separates the sheep and the goats, at the end of the day, that judgment day, there will be no nuance. Light and darkness are too entirely different sorts of things—and children of light and children of darkness have entirely different points of origin. Children of God and children of the devil have different fathers. This is not an obscure point.

So what is an evangelical? I am not speaking about cultural evangelicals, or nominal evangelicals. What is a true evangelical? In short, an evangelical is someone who knows, on the basis of the substitutionary death of Jesus, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that nobody has God in a box.

James tells us that men have tamed and domesticated all kinds of wild animals. A man can get into a cage with a whip and a chair, and make a lion do tricks. Swimmers can stand on the tip of a killer whale’s nose and amaze the crowds at Sea World. Man can tame all kinds of things. But James goes on to point out that for all his prowess, man cannot tame his own tongue. Because he cannot tame his own tongue, he finds himself proclaiming formulae and composing liturgies which make the implicit claim that mankind knows how to tame God.

But God is the living God, and can be tamed by no one. Jesus became one of us, and knows exactly how we feel—He tamed restless humanity. He can sympathize with us in our weakness. But we do not tame Him. And that is what makes an evangelical—someone who knows—experientially knows—that because Jesus died, and because the Spirit was given, we can be tamed. We come to this point by repenting of our sins, and by believing in Jesus. (Douglas Wilson, “God Tamers”)

by Stephen Rodgers

So I guess I’m working with a theme this week: a rather long quote for a rather long Weekly Links.  I’ll try to keep my descriptions short, and I’ll break them into helpful categories, but I hope that you’ll take the time to seriously consider and avail yourself to the resources below. They’re for your benefit after all.  Enjoy!

Holy Week

Over at his blog, Justin Taylor has been posting (re-posting?) a series on what happened on each day of Holy Week:

• Monday
• Tuesday
• Wednesday
• Thursday
• Friday

Easter Apologetic Resources

We did this last year as well, which included linking to Triablogue then, as well as some other resources.

• Triablogue has an updated list of apologetic resources on Easter issues.
• Resurrection scholar Mike Licona has a series of videos on myths about the Resurrection.

Free Monthly Resources for April

Some of these offers expire in April (the audiobook/Logos book), so move fast on them.

• New edition of the 9Marks eJournal: The Underestimated Doctrine of Conversion
• New issue of CredoMag: Make Disciples of All the Nations
• New issue of Themelios: 37.1
• New issue of Tabletalk: The God-Centered Life
• Free audiobook: Road to the Resurrection by Greg Laurie
• Free Logos book: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners by John Bunyan

New Resources

Let me highlight a few resources that might be helpful to you:

• Did you know that TGC has a journal published by Matthias Media (The Trellis and the Vine folks) that critiques the secular worldview.  It’s called Kategoria, and it looks very well done.
• RC Sproul has a daily broadcast/podcast called “Renewing Your Mind.” Add Mohler and MacArthur to that, and you’ve got a very good day.
• CMI actually makes a number of articles and back issues available for both Creation Magazine and The Journal of Creation.

Music

• So…Sovereign Grace Music has a new website…and it has a large section of free music. If you’re a music minister, it also has simplified licensing info…but did I mention the free music?
• CXVI put out a free Easter album.

Visual Theology

I’ve blogged before about Tim Challies’ “Visual Theology” series; he has a few new ones that I commend to you.

• The Trinity
• To the Glory of God
• The Tabernacle

For the Seminarians

DG just completed this very thought-provoking series:

• How to Stay Christian in Seminary

I’ll get the new resources added to the Recommended Resources page shortly.

See you at church tonight!

Pro Rege

by Stephen Rodgers

Welcome to another of our surprise Monday posts!

A couple weeks back I posted an article directing you to the Shepherd’s Conference resources. I just wanted to briefly, and I do mean briefly, follow up on that to let you know that the audio from the 2012 Conference is now up and online.

I’ve already included the necessary parameters in that link to filter it down to just the 2012 material, although the GCC web guy (or gal) isn’t quite on the ball, so the Spanish sermons are in there as well.  No biggie; it’s absolutely worth your time to give those recordings a listen!

Personally, I would recommend that you start with the ones labelled “General Session” (and listen to those in order), then branch out to the seminars that are of interest to you. If you don’t have time to take the comprehensive approach, or you just want a few recommendations, here are a few that I found extremely profitable:

• General Sessions III and IX – MacArthur on the Holy Spirit
• General Session IV – Voddie Bauchem on the responsibility of husbands
• I Can’t Find Dating in My Bible – Austin Duncan on the subject of dating (yes, we’ll add this to the DTR Hub Post)
• I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m told that Steve Lawson’s biographical sketch of Charles Spurgeon was fantastic

Enjoy!

Pro Rege

Jesus didn’t have to die despite God’s love; he had to die because of God’s love. And it had to be this way because all life-changing love is substitutionary sacrifice. Think about it. If you love a person whose life is all put together and has no major needs, it costs you nothing. It’s delightful. There are probably four or five people like that where you live. You ought to find them and become their friend. But if you ever try to love somebody who has needs, someone who is in trouble or who is persecuted or emotionally wounded, it’s going to cost you. You can’t love them without taking a hit yourself. A transfer of some kind is required, so that somehow their troubles, their problems, transfer to you. (Timothy Keller, King’s Cross)

by Richard Shin

Here we go:

• For those who may or may not be interested, here‘s a Bethlehem Baptist Church ministry update concerning John Piper’s transition.
• Justin Taylor writes on the fear of being wrong about not baptizing children.
• Jonathan Leeman encourages us to consider the church in our life planning.
• As a member of the labor force, I find this post on motivations for working by Matt Perman to be remarkably refreshing.
• Philip Jensen speaks about the mistakes he has made over the years in hist ministry. Pay close attention to the one about arguing too much.
• Paul Tautges has seven thoughts on the sin of anxiety. I think they’re worth reading.
• Ray Ortlund shares a short one (as his usually are) on putting Christ first.

The weather has been a bit funky recently. Stay warm and glorify God this weekend, folks!

Coram Deo

There is no safe investment.  To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.  The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves)

by Richard Shin

Without further ado, let’s do this:

• First off, we have an update from the last Weekly Links here. Glad to see him doing well.
• Tony Reinke quotes from John Piper’s Future Grace on Paul’s blessings of grace at the beginning and end of each epistle. Speaking of the book, some of you might be interested to know that John Piper is publishing a revised edition.
• Mike Riccardi explores the seemingly theological conundrum of Romans 9. He then concludes that in order for Romans 9:19 to make sense, the doctrines of grace–particularly that of total depravity, unconditional election, and irresistible grace–must be true.
• Andy Jones shares nine lessons he learned from the life of Charles Hodge, the 19th century theologian.
• Jared Wilson posts a letter from Wormwood to one of his subordinates on how to sabotage one who works for the “Enemy”. Brothers and sisters, we must pray for our pastors. (This Wormwood sounds an awful lot like the one from C. S. Lewis’ famous The Screwtape Letters)
• Many have asked themselves, “Why does God allow suffering?” Paul Tautges shares 36 biblical purposes of God in our suffering.

Th-th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks! Have a blessed weekend.

Coram Deo

by Stephen Rodgers

No quote this time, I’ll just get straight to the point.

This is just a brief update since there are a couple of links that have an expiration date on them (either in terms of relevancy, or an actual expiration date), and therefore can’t wait until next month. I suppose I could have emailed Richard and told him to include them, but then I’d have to write it, and then he has to write it again, and meanwhile we could have been done with this for days if I just pushed the big red (it’s really blue) button.

• Christianaudio.com’s free book for March is A Tale of Three Kings.
• California’s loss is Texas’ gain.

Happy Monday!

God – the Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of the Father and Son by renewing. Saves – does everything, first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory: plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies. Sinners — men as God finds them, guilty, vile, helpless, powerless, unable to life a finger to do God’s will or better their spiritual lot. (J. I. Packer, Teaching the Faith, Forming the Faithful)

by Richard Shin

We’re back with another great set. Here we go:

• Thabiti Anyabwile lists five reasons God the Father said “No” to God the Son in the Garden of Gethsemane.
• Affirming others is not optional. How are you with affirming others? Sam Crabtree has a 3-part series on it here, here, and here. He has a book called Practicing Affirmation: God-Centered Praise of Those Who Are Not God, for those who might be interested.
• I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but an old sermon of John Piper recently resurfaced on the Desiring God website. The sermon was given as a senior seminary student at Fuller Theological Seminary, and get this: he spoke on Christian Hedonism.
• Why do you pray? Maybe you want God to do something for you. Maybe you do it because you have to. Read what Paul Tautges draws from the Psalms about why the psalmists pray.
• Tim Challies pens an article on what it means to be a good churchman and what such a person does in the context of a local body of believers.
• Paul Tripp says that for our “ministry relationships to be healthy, [we] must have destructive and constructive zeal.” Does that make sense to you? If not, check out his article here. It’s addressed to pastors, but it applies to us all.

That’s all for now. Have a great weekend everyone. And singles, stay safe at the retreat this weekend!

Coram Deo

Spiritual pride takes great notice of opposition and injuries that are received and is apt to be often speaking of them and to be much in taking notice of their aggravations, either with an air of bitterness or contempt.  Whereas pure and unmixed Christian humility disposes a person rather to be like his blessed Lord, when reviled, dumb, not opening his mouth, but committing himself in silence to him that judges righteously. . . . It becomes the followers of the Lamb of God, when the world is in an uproar about them and full of clamor against them, not to raise another noise to answer it but to be still and quiet. . . . Meekness and quietness among God’s people, when opposed and reviled, would be the surest way to have God remarkably to appear for their defense. . . . Nothing is so effectual to bring God down from heaven in the defense of his people as their patience and meekness under sufferings. (Jonathan Edwards, Works)

by Richard Shin

I hope you are all having a great week. We have another great set for you all out there. Let’s get started:

• China is one big country. In the number of people, in land, in economy, and in influence, it is quite big. And because of that, we often hear about it. Yet, things aren’t often what it seems. Joann Pittman helps us understand a little better the truth about China.
• Ray Ortlund gets interviewed by Tony Reinke from Desiring God about how he uses social media, particularly his blog and Twitter.
• Speaking of Ray Ortlund, he has a list of ten things that he cares about more the longer he lives.
• Russell Moore speaks about why impostors love the church. I was particularly intrigued by the last reason: a perversion of the Christian doctrine of grace.
• Paul Tautges speaks about how we can live by faith, not by feelings. We must be careful not to “deny our emotions” but so often we are driven by them that faith. Instead, we should use emotions as “responders to truth, not judges of it.”
• Eric Davis has a list of eight ways we can encourage one to join a local church in this 2-parter. You can find them here and here.
• There are many ramifications of having a low view of Scripture. Off the top of my head, it can lead to inconsistency in our reading, higher view of ourselves, lack of commitment to the local body, lack of care for Christian unity, and many more. Lisa Robinson’s post from Parchment & Pen speaks about how we can overcome a low view of Scripture.
• I’m a firm believer of our being thinking Christians. Philippians 4:8 guides us on how to do that. Paul Tautges (yes, another one) flips each good thing around and gives us a list of things to not think about.

That’s quite a few. Hopefully you get to enjoy some of these over the weekend. See you on Sunday.

Coram Deo

by Stephen Rodgers

I have it on excellent authority that Stephen Rodgers (that lazy bum!) didn’t finish his BOB article on Psalms, because 1) Psalms is a really big and somewhat complicated book to summarize, 2) his wife’s family is camped out in his house, challenging his theology because apparently even unbelievers speak in tongues now, and 3) he’s drinking absurd amounts of caffeine and driving up to Shepherd’s Conference.

Always excuses with that guy.

I also have it on good authority that he’s going to try to distract you with some excellent resources that you may or may not already know about.  Let’s see if it works…

In talking with a number of folks about the Shepherd’s Conference, I was surprised to discover that not many people were aware of how accessible the messages are.  I wanted to take a moment to pass along a few links that might help you enjoy the conference, even if you aren’t going this year.

• Ok, first of all, things get a little exciting because right away you have a choice of where you try to download the messages from: there’s the GCC Media page (which can be filtered to only include Shepherd’s Conference), or you can hit up the Shepherd’s Conference Media page.  They have the same content, just organized slightly differently (which is why those last two links both show 595 available sermons, at least as of the day I’m writing this).
• I have a preference for the GCC Media page: it let’s me slice and dice the material so that it’s slightly more relevant.  For example, of those 595 sermons, here are the 562 in English.  Cesar/Marina, if you’re reading this, here’s the 13 in Spanish and the 20 in Russian.
• You can also slice and dice by year, media type, and media subtype.  I find this helpful, because I can just click on Audio then filter by year to make sure I don’t miss anything.  So for example, here are the 36 messages from last year(2011), filtered by audio download (mp3 file) and language (English).
• You still need to click through the link to see the download button, but that’s not hard. Toss those on your iThing/Droid/whatever of choice, and you’ve got a lot of good material in a very short amount of time.
• And if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can explore the GCC Media page to find tons more messages as well. I should loop back around and show you a few that I’m particularly fond of, but in the meantime, searching out guys like Nathan Busenitz, Phil Johnson, Jonathan Rourke, and Austin Duncan is time well spent.  Or you can search by topic…or keyword…or Scripture.

Long story short, it’s a great resource, and I hope you benefit from it as much as I have.

PS. If you’re looking for more John MacArthur material, you probably want to hit up GTY. For example, the sermon archive sorted by date can be found here.

No culture in history has ever embraced moral relativism and survived. Our own culture, therefore, will either (1) be the first, and disprove history’s clearest lesson, or (2) persist in its relativism and die, or (3) repent of its relativism and live. There is no other option. (Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Jesus)

by Stephen Rodgers

Let’s just jump straight into the links, shall we?

• Creation.com has a great new resource out called “Genesis Verse-by-Verse.” It works pretty much like you might expect it would, creating an index of the first 11 chapters of Genesis down to the verse level, and then linking back to more than 8,000 articles that are relevant to that particular passage. It’s a great resource for that section of Scripture.
• Since it’s now March, there’s a new edition of Tabletalk out entitled “The Self-Centered Life.” If you’re not reading Tabletalk, you should start.  If you don’t know where to start, how about our chronological index?
• The quote from Peter Kreeft was actually inspired by an article in The Journal of Medical Ethics that recently argued in favor of “after-birth abortions.”  Sadly, this is actually intended to be serious rather than some sort of reductio ad absurdem.  I’ve updated the Abortion Hub Post with some materials.
• Tim Challies is a rather prolific blogger, and recently started to explore the idea of visual representations of certain Biblical ideas or themes.  We’ve already benefited from this by shamelessly appropriating one of the visualizations for the BOB logo (not to worry, he allows that). However, I wanted to pass on some of his other visualizations for your benefit as well.

The Order of Salvation
The Attributes of God
The Books of the Bible
Philippians 4:8
Awaiting the Messiah

Alright, that’s all for this week.  See you Sunday!

Pro Rege

“Here’s the bottom line: forever not only promises us blessing in the future, but it guarantees us the grace that we need in the here and now. This grace is not a set of things; it’s a person, and his name is Jesus! Understanding that God’s greatest gift is himself changes the way you live. If Christ lives inside you, not only is it impossible for you to be alone, but it is impossible for you to be left to your own resources of character, wisdom, and strength.” (Paul David Tripp, Forever: Why You Can’t Live without It)

 by Richard Shin

There’s quite a bit of links this week. So, here we go:

• The season of Lent is upon us. As such, Tim Kimberley from Parchment and Pen gives a short history on Lent.
• Upon completing his personal study on Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, Tim Challies gives us six ways we can stand to fight against Satan.
• Phil Johnson from Pyromaniacs shares the right idea behind what it means to reprove, rebuke, and exhort (2 Tim. 4:2).
• With bits and pieces taken from the chapter called “Conformity to the World” from Charles Bridges’ book on The Christian Ministry, Mike Riccardi shares some wisdom on how we can follow Paul’s example from 1 Cor. 9:19-23 and not be conformed to this world.
• If you were with us a few months back, you might recall some videos I referred to John Piper and John Knight. Well, you need to know what happened there to understand what happened here.
• If we stay in the faith long enough, sooner or later we will lead others spiritually. Jon Bloom from Desiring God lists some ways Moses led his flock and how he was reminded that spiritual leadership is hard and sometimes heartbreaking. However, he reminds us that God is our reward (Heb. 11:26), and so we can be hopeful.
• Among other things, John Piper is famous for his helpful acronyms. Well, he has a new one A.I.M.S. Check it out here.
• Ray Ortlund Jr. breaks down Psalm 16:3 into its three phrases and shares with us some encouraging words that give a new perspective on the verse.

That’s it for now. For the collegians (and staff…yay!), have a great retreat. The rest of you, stay safe and glorify God.

Coram Deo