Tim Chester's Blog, page 38

I’ve just realised (in time for Christmas) that there are two or three books which I’ve had published this year that I’ve not mentioned on this blog.

1 Samuel for You

1 Samuel for You is my latest contribution to The Good Book Company’s God’s Word for You series (famous for Tim Keller‘s contributions on Galatians, Judges and Romans). My wife thinks it’s my best book ever. (But then she has only read two of my books.)

Hosea (Focus on the Bible)

Hosea is a popular-level commentary in the Focus on the Bible series (famous for the various contributions on the Old Testament historical books by Dale Ralph Davis). I’m not sure how I missed mentioning this – it was a fairly major undertaking!

You Can Pray

I have mentioned You Can Pray before. But it’s now out in the US from P&R.

All of these books (and more) are available in the US from my US Amazon store store and in the UK from ThinkIVP (with the exception of Hosea which is available  – along with the others – from my UK Amazon store).

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Below are some self-reflection questions for pastors based on this extract from Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor (which we recently circulated among our leaders). The reflection questions were compiled by Rob Spink, one of our pastors here in The Crowded House.

The Reformed Pastor was first published in 1656. In the book Baxter explores the implications of Paul’s words of Acts 20:28: ‘Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.’ Having considered the pastor’s oversight of himself in the earlier part of the book, Baxter moves onto the oversight of the flock. In this extract he considers the ‘manner of the oversight’. While the language is fairly dense and at times old-fashioned, it’s worth noting J.I. Packer’s contemporary commendation of the usefulness of the book to modern pastors. He comments on three threads which mark the book out:

Its energy. As Spurgeon wrote, ‘If you want to know the art of pleading, read The Reformed Pastor.’
Its reality. Packer says: ‘Here we meet a passionate love and terribly honest, earnest, straightforward Christian, thinking and talking about the lost with perfect realism, insisting that we must be content to accept any degree of discomfort, poverty, overwork and loss of material good, if only souls might be saved, and setting us a marvellously vivid example in his own person of what this may involve.’
Its rationality. This led to Baxter’s particular emphasis on personal teaching and counselling. He was unusually clear on the need to visit people, to know the flock, to pursue them. As Packer notes, ‘personal catechising and counselling … is every minister’s duty: for this is the most rational course, the best means to the desired end’.

Here are Rob’s summary and reflection questions. The aim is:

To provide a short summary of Baxter’s exhortations to ministers for you to refer to quickly.
To stimulate you to reflect on the reading and how it challenges you in your ministry.

You shouldn’t expect Baxter to give you an easy ride! But neither should you feel condemned for the sin and shortcomings which will be all too evident.

The ministerial work must be done purely for God and the salvation of souls, not for any private ends of our own. ‘Self denial is…doubly necessary in a minister, as without it he cannot do God an hour’s faithful service’.

Reflection: What motivates my work as City Group Pastor? Is there evidence through self-denial that I am working for God, rather than my own ends?

The ministerial work must be done diligently and laboriously, as being of such unspeakable consequence to ourselves and others. ‘Study hard, for the well is deep and our brains are shallow….No man was ever a loser by God’.

Reflection: Do I work diligently? Am I studying and learning more of God?

The ministerial work must be carried on prudently and orderly. ’The work of conversion, and repentance from dead works, and faith in Christ, must be first and frequently and thoroughly taught.’

Reflection: Am I laying a solid foundation of the most fundamental truths through my teaching? Do I ever make much of things of little consequence?

Throughout the whole course of our ministry, we must insist chiefly upon the greatest, most certain, and most necessary truths, and be more seldom and sparing up on the rest. If we can but teach Christ to our people, we shall teach them all.’ Seneca: ‘We are attracted to novelties rather than to great things’.

Reflection: Do I have a clear sense of what is necessary for my people? How might understanding what is necessary challenge my current practices? Does my ministry draw attention to necessary ‘great things’ of repentance and faith in Christ, or novelties?

All our teaching must be as plain and simple as possible. ‘It is, at best, a sign that a man hath not well digested the matter himself, if he is not able to deliver it plainly to others’.

Reflection: When I speak of the gospel, am I able to be understood by my people? What could I do that might make me better understood?

Our work must be carried on with great humility. ‘We must carry ourselves meekly…to all; and so teach others, as to be ready to learn of any that can teach us, and so both teach and learn at once.’

Reflection: Am I growing in pride or in humility? Are there those in my life group/city group who I don’t think I can learn from? Am I too proud to learn?

There must be a prudent mixture of severity and mildness both in our preaching and discipline. ‘If there be no severity, our reproofs will be despised. If all severity, we shall be taken as usurpers of dominion, rather than persuaders of the minds of men to the truth.’

Reflection: Is my tendency to be too severe or too mild? How can I make progress in this area?

We must be serious, earnest, and zealous in every part of our work. Our work requires greater life and zeal than any of us bring to it. ‘If our words be not sharpened, and pierce not as nails, they will hardly be felt by stony hearts. To speak slightly and coldly of heavenly things is nearly as bad as to say nothing of them at all.’

Reflection: Am I zealous for the truth? Is my conversation of ‘heavenly things’ marked by coldness or zeal?

The whole of our ministry must be carried out in tender love to our people. We must let them see that nothing pleases us but what profits them. ‘When the people see that you unfeignedly love them, they will hear any thing and bear any thing from you..if you be their best friends, help them against their worst enemies’.

Reflection: Are you willing to lay down your life for your people? How can you grow in ‘tender love’ for them? How do you help your people as a best friend, against their worst enemies?

We must carry on our work with patience. We must bear with many abuses and injuries from those to whom we seek to do good.

Reflection: How do you respond when your work for your people is thrown back in your face? Do you endure patiently, or with the ‘meekness and patience of the new man’ or the ‘pride and passion’ of old Adam’?

All our work must be managed reverently, as is fitting for them that believe the presence of God. ‘Reverence is that affection of the soul which proceedeth from deep apprehensions of God and indicateth a mind that is much conversant with him’.

Reflection: Are you seeking to know God better? Are you growing in the knowledge of him? How might you encourage your people to have a ‘holy reverence’ for God?

All the work must be done spiritually, as by men possessed of the Holy Ghost. Gregory: ‘…not of orators does he (God) make fishermen, but of fisher men he produces orators’.

Reflection: How does this idea encourage you? Do you seek spiritual wisdom, or rely on the ‘wisdom of the world’?

If you would prosper in your work, be sure to keep up earnest desires and expectations of success….’it is a sign of a false, self-seeking heart, that can be content to be still doing and yet see no fruit of his labour….It is not merely our reward that we labour for, but for other men’s salvation’.

Reflection: What are your expectations? What would success be for your ministry? Are you too pessimistic? Are you appropriately directed toward outcomes?

Our whole work must be carried on under a deep sense of our own insufficiency, and of our entire dependence on Christ. ‘Prayer must carry on the work as well as preaching: he preaches not heartily to his people, that prayeth not earnestly for them’. When our faith is weak or hearts are dull, pray:’Must I daily plead with sinners about everlasting life and everlasting death, and have no more belief or feeling of these weighty things myself? O, send me not naked and unprovided to the work; but as thou commandest me to do it, furnish me with a spirit suitable thereto’.

Reflection: Does your prayer life suggest that you work depending on yourself or Christ? Do you need to make any changes?

We must be very studious of union and communication among ourselves, and of the unity and peace of the churches that we oversee. ‘They must do as much of the work of God, in unity and concord, as they can, which is the use of synods; not to rule over one another and make laws, but to avoid misunderstandings, and consult for mutual edification, and maintain love and communion, and go on unanimously in the work that God hath already commanded us’.

Reflection: How do you engage beyond your city group? Do you have opportunities to encourage and edify other churches? How can you grow in this area, and encourage your people to do likewise?

The Reformed Pastor is available from amazon.com. An abridged version is available from ThinkIVP.

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In this post we look at the centrality of the affections in the Reformation. In future posts we’ll explore the importance of the affections in Puritan spirituality.

In a helpful article Ronald Frost argues that the heart of Luther’s Reformation was a return to Augustine’s view of humanity and a rejection of Aquinas’ view (which was shaped by the Greek philosopher Aristotle).

In the view of Aristotle and Aquinas the will is self-moved. Indeed the will is at its most virtuous when it’s not corrupted or distorted by our affections. Aquinas recognised the will is damaged by sin, but he believed God’s grace restores it so that we have the freedom to choose God. In this way we co-operate with God in our salvation. In this view love for God is an act of the will and therefore one which deserves merit.

In the view of Augustine (and Luther) the affections are primary. Where love leads, the will follows. In other words, we always choose what we love or we find most desirable. So we are saved when we choose God, and we choose God because we love him. But we only love him because he first loved us, and because he reveals himself to us as the desirable one. In this view love for God is a response and so carries no intrinsic merit.

Augustine believed that we act through our wills. But he believed the will is entirely held captive by sin. Luther says: ‘Man is by nature unable to want God to be God. Indeed he himself wants to be God, and does not want God to be God.’ In Augustine the will is free in the sense that the mechanism works. We still make decisions. But the will is biased by sin. The will is like a balance which operates correctly, but which has a large weight on one side so it only ever tips in one direction. The will functions effectively in that it tends to that which it deems to be good. The problem is that sin has corrupted our sense of what ‘the good’ is.

But God recaptures our affections and therefore our wills. Augustine says: ‘It is certain that it is we that act when we act; but it is He who makes us act, by applying efficacious powers to our will.’ Or again: ‘When the martyrs did the great commandments which they obeyed, they acted by a great will,—that is, with great love.’ Frost comments: ‘Augustine’s point … is that love—seen as will and affections—is the motive centre of the soul. Thus, it is through the illumination of the soul by God’s love that the soul moves, by response, out of its imprisonment of self‐love.’

Augustine argued that the Holy Spirit is the source of the love that shapes the believer’s response. In other words, God reveals his glory and grace to us through the Holy Spirit and this revelation of God captures our hearts and therefore reshapes our wills. Frost summarises: ‘The will is enslaved by self‐love that defies God. The enslavement is only overcome in the elect by the regenerating disclosure of God’s love and goodness.’

This is a radical view of sin. In Aristotle both the outward act and the inward motivation were meritorious. Indeed the outward act came to be the more important since in Aristotle it could create a habit which in time would affect the inward motivation. The direction was outward to inward. In contrast in Augustine and Luther an outwardly pious act can be sin if the motive is self-love (which it always is without the regenerating work of God). ‘A person may think their own ways are right, but the LORD weighs the heart.’ (Proverbs 21:2)

Luther says: ‘We do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.’ The direction in Augustine and Luther is inside-out. The outward act is only really changed when the inner man is renewed by the Spirit’s revelation of God’s love.

Ashley Null summarises the theology of Thomas Cranmer (and Augustine and Luther): ‘What the heart loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies.’ (Ashley Null, ‘Foreword,’ Our Common Prayer: A Field Guide to the Book of Common Prayer, Winfield Bevins, Simeon Press, 2013, 13.)

And ‘we love because he first loved us.’ (1 John 4:19)

Ronald N. Frost, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics: The Real Reason for Luther’s Reformation?’, TrinJ 18:2 (Fall 1997) is available online here.

 

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We currently preaching through the book of Exodus. For the sermon on Exodus 20 we wrote the following public confession based on the Ten Commandments as they are fulfilled in Christ together with an affirmation of forgiveness based on Romans 3.

Let confess together that we have broken God’s law

as it is fulfilled and embodied by God’s Son.

God said: You shall have no other gods before me.

Father, we confess that have made ourselves and other things more important than you.

You shall not make for yourself an image.

Father, we confess that we have tried to reduce you to a god we can control or manipulate.

You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God.

Father, we confess that we have not cherished your name as we should.

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

Father, we confess that we have not found rest in Christ.

Honour your father and your mother.

Father, we confess that we have resented the authority you have given over us.

You shall not murder.

Father, we confess that we have entertained violent thoughts.

You shall not commit adultery.

Father, we confess that we have harboured lustful thoughts.

You shall not steal.

Father, we confess that we have nurtured grasping thoughts.

You shall not give false testimony against your neighbour.

Father, we confess that we have deceived other people.

You shall not covet.

Father, we confess that we have not always been content with the life you have given us.

Therefore no-one will be declared righteous in God’s sight

by the works of the law.

But now a righteousness from God has been made known.

This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

We have all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

But we are justified freely by his grace

through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Based on Exodus 20, Matthew 5 and Romans 3.

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Plant North Yorkshire is a new initiative to highlight the need for church-planting in North Yorkshire and help new churches start. It’s being launched with a consultation day on Wednesday 26 November. Please come if you can (click here for more details) or please pray for this needy area of the UK.

More information is available on the Facebook page and the website.

Here’s the vision:

We are a group of churches and church-leaders in North Yorkshire who long to see our county filled with gospel-loving and serving congregations. We love the Lord, and this part of the world, and long for others here to discover him. This is our job. God has put us here at this time, in this place, to do this job. We’re all individually wrestling with the busyness and problems as well as the opportunities of our own churches. If we stay like that, nothing will be done for the needs of unreached places. If we come together to think, share knowledge, pray, start to plan, identify areas, personnel, partnerships, avenues of support, and so on, then who knows what the Lord will achieve in the coming years? Our dream is to see Jesus glorified, loved and delighted in all across our county, and every town in North Yorkshire being reached by a gospel-centred, Jesus-loving, Jesus-preaching community of believers. We’d love you to join with us in praying, plotting and working together until by God’s grace we see that happen.

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Total Church, the book I co-wrote with Steve Timmis, is now available in Spanish under the title Iglesia Radical.

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The BBC recently re-broadcast a fascinating documentary on the latest developments in cosmology (originally broadcast in 2010). British readers can watch the programme here on iPlayer until mid-November.

What struck me was this. Those who find a biblical cosmology fanciful in the light of modern science have no idea of the cosmology proposed by modern science!

Christians believe in a heavenly realm, populated by spiritual beings, separate from our realm, but significantly affecting it.

We can assume such ideas are fanciful and alien to modern science.

But it may not be as strange as we may think. According to the current standard cosmological model, cosmologists believe our universe started with a big bang and then expanded for a quadrillionth of a second after which everything slowed. This was followed by a period of inflation in which the universe expanded in a fraction of a second to a quadrillion, quadrillion times it former size (though we do not how this happened).

But there are some problems with this model. Galaxies do not work in the way they should. In our solar system the further a planet is from the sun, the slower it moves. That is what we would expect to happen given our knowledge of the laws of physics. The same should be true of galaxies, but it is not. Stars at the centre should move faster than stars at the edge. But in fact they move at just as fast as those at the centre. According to the laws of physics, this should lead to galaxies flying apart.

So to make galaxies work as they should according to the laws of physics there needs to be more gravity and that means there needs to be more matter that there appears to be. But cosmologists could not find this extra matter. So they invented it. They theorised the presence of ‘dark matter’. It is called dark matter because it cannot be seen. Unlike ordinary matter it neither emits light or reflects it. Indeed we have no idea what it is.

The calculations suggest that for every kilogramme of normal matter there are another five kilogrammes of dark matter. And this dark matter is everywhere, all around us. Five-sixths of the universe appears to be made of something different from the matter from which we are made, something unknown to us. It is a kind of particle of which we have no experience. It is able to pass through ordinary matter without us noticing. Millions of dark matter particles are streaming through us all the time.

This is starting to sound similar to a biblical cosmology – another form of existence, unseen by us, existing alongside our experienced universe, acting upon it in unknown, but discernible ways.

This is not the only problem with the standard model. The expansion of the universe should be slowing according to the standard model as gravity starts to pull the universe back towards itself. But its expansion is actually increasing. So cosmologists postulate ‘dark energy’ – an tremendous source of unknown energy in ‘nothing’ that creates ‘nothing’.

I am not suggesting dark matter is the heavenly realms (although who knows!). Nor am I wanting to mock modern cosmologists. Quite the opposite. I am full of admiration for their work. Rather I want to highlight how a biblical cosmology is not as ridiculous in the light of modern science as people may assume.

In a similar vein, the BBC have also broadcast an awe-inspiring film-length documentary on the hunt for the Higgs Boson particle in their Storyville series which British viewers can watch here on iPlayer. I did shed a tear at one point as a marvelled at the fulfilment of the cultural mandate in this amazing collaboration to explore God’s creation. On the other hand, there is an extraordinary moment when one of the world’s leading cosmologists says the chances of the cosmos being anything other that chaotic are so remote that it is as if there is a benign hand on the dial, finely tuning our universe. But rather than accepting this, he says there therefore must be multiple universes, most of which are chaotic, and ours just happens to be one of the few that works. Notice two things about this argument. First, what drives this thinking is not what can be observed (the scientific process), but a prior commitment to rule out a benign hand on the dial (a God). Second, for this worldview to work, there must be a reality outside our universe. Once again materialists who find a biblical cosmology fanciful in the light of modern science have no idea of the cosmology proposed by modern science!

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It’s a pleasure to let you know that WorshipGod, the Sovereign Grace Music conference, is returning to the UK in May 2015. The website has just gone live. Speakers include Kevin DeYoung, Mike Reeves, Jeff Purswell, Rick Gamache and Bob Kauflin. Plus there will be a range of seminars for pastors, musicians and worship leaders which, if last year is anything to go by, will be really useful.  I’ll be doing a seminar on ‘Cultivating A Fruitful Life in the Word’.

For more information go to worshipgod.org.uk.

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A review of Jeremy R. Treat, The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology, Zondervan, 2014.

Available here from amazon.com and thinkivp.

The Crucified King is a great book. It explores the relationship between the atonement and the kingdom of God. In evangelicalism today these themes are often kept asunder, creating contrasting approaches to mission, or they notionally held together without much sense of genuine integration. As it happens I am thinking of writing something on this topic, albeit at a more popular level.

Treat argues that the Old Testament background to the ministry of Christ presents a pattern of “victory through sacrifice”. This is mirrored in the New Testament emphasis on the kingdom established by the cross. Turning from biblical to systematic theology, Treat shows how the theme of Christus Victor (Christ defeating Satan through the cross) makes sense through penal substitution (Christ bearing the penalty of his people’s sin). Christ disarms Satan’s power to accuse.

Tom Wright addresses this divide in his book, How God Became King. Wright blames the early creeds. But Treat provides ample evidence from the Fathers to show that they held kingdom and cross together. Instead he argues it is modern problem. It is not always helped, he suggests, by the emphasis in Reformed theology on the two states of Christ (his humiliation and exaltation) and the three offices of Christ (Prophet, Priest and King). In Calvin these categories were overlapping, But, where they are kept apart, it becomes hard to integrate cross and kingdom. I think Treat’s perspective is a helpful corrective (though I’m not persuaded it accounts for the separation of kingdom and cross in popular evangelical missiology).

The Crucified King is a remarkable tour de force of biblical and historical scholarship, all presented in an accessible form. Quite apart from its content, it is a model of good theology. But its content does matter. This is an important contribution to an important issue. I would have liked to see Treat spelling out the implications because this issue does shape contrasting approaches to mission and discipleship. I would also have liked a greater emphasis on how the atonement enables God’s people to experience the coming of his kingdom as good news. But perhaps this leaves something for me to say!

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A review of Michael F. Bird, Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction, Zondervan, 2013.

Available here from amazon.com and thinkivp.

Michael Bird is best known as a biblical scholar. His book A Bird’s Eye View of Paul is our introductory text on Paul in Porterbrook Seminary. (Apparently the US Publishers didn’t appreciate the punning title and published it under the more prosaic, Introducing Paul.)

Now Bird has produced a lively systematic theology. Bird is evangelical, Reformed, Calvinistic and Anglican (with a Baptist background). What makes Evangelical Theology distinctive, he claims, it its focus on the gospel. This is gospel-centred systematics. He says, ‘I intend to undertake this theological exercise of constructing an evangelical theology by putting the “evangel” at the helm.’ (21) Here’s how this evangel-ical theology is to be undertaken: ‘1. Define the gospel … 2. Identify the relationship of the various loci to the gospel … 3. Embark on a creative dialogue between the sources of theology … 4. Describe what the loci look like when appropriated and applied in the light of the gospel … 5 … What array of behaviours, activities, applications, and consequences follow on from [these] findings.’ (81-82)

This gospel-centred approach means, for example, that the order of topics is different from most other systematic theologies, especially the place of eschatology (the kingdom of God). Bird’s order is: revelation, Trinity, eschatology, christology, soteriology, pneumatology, anthropology and ecclesiology. This reflects Bird’s definition of the gospel: ‘The gospel is the announcement that God’s kingdom has come in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord and Messiah, in fulfilment of Israel’s Scriptures. The gospel evokes faith, repentance, and discipleship; its accompanying effects include salvation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.’ (52) Bird is not the first person to put eschatology nearer the front end of systematics (see, for example, Peter Jensen’s shorter At the Heart of the Universe). But it is good a move. This is systematics shaped more by the narrative of the Bible than logical structures.

The book is over 800 pages long with another 100 pages of bibliography and indices. But any sense that this might be an intimidating read is soon dispelled by the lively, engaging and occasional jocular style. This might irritate some, myself included. That said, people like me have plenty of more sombre alternative systematic theologies to turn to and I suspect it will lighten the process for a younger audience. Here’s a sample: ‘When I explain Calvinism to people, I usually say this: “People suck, they suck in sin, they are suckness unto death. And the God who is rich in mercy takes the initiative to save people from the penalty, the power, and even the presence of this sin. This is Calvinism, the rest is commentary.’ (24) Or on page 451 we are given ‘some comic belief’: ‘Why does God always have to use his left hand? Because Jesus is sitting on his right hand!’ At this point I’m getting pretty fed up with the jokes There are also some anomalies in terms of the level at which it is pitched. The first item we meet the word ‘epistemology’, for example, it is defined, but not the rarer and more complex word, ‘nominalism’.

As with any such undertaking there are points where I disagree with Bird. Stephen Williams highlights some specific deficiencies in his review in Themelios. The idea of creating gospel-centred systematics is welcome. But I’m not persuaded the ‘gospel-at-the-helm’ approach has created something which is very different from other evangelical systematic theologies. There is regular engagement with contemporary theological debates which is welcome and many readers will find this helpful and engaging. But I’m not sure that the missional implications come through as much as they could in a systematics with the gospel at the helm. Nevertheless I would happily use it with people.

We seem to have a growing number of good contemporary, thorough introductions to systematic theology at the moment. For example:

Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology (amazon.com and thinkivp).
Michael Horton, The Christian Faith (amazon.com and thinkivp).
Gregg Allison, Historical Theology (amazon.com and thinkivp).
Alister McGrath, Christian Theology (amazon.com and thinkivp).
Tony Lane, Exploring Christian Doctrine (amazon.com and thinkivp).
John Frame, Salvation Belong to The Lord (amazon.com and thinkivp).
John Frame, Systematic Theology (amazon.com and thinkivp).

All of them are have their distinctive emphases and styles. My problem is I can’t decide which I like best.

Evangelical Theological is available here from amazon.com and thinkivp.

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