Bully's Blog

…out of this crucible of failure and pain, a new Thomas Kelly arose, one who genuinely floated in the grace of God with a simple and childlike obedience and trust. This renewed Thomas Kelly is the one whose teaching and example have gained wide attention. Yet all of Kelly’s works represent a reaching for the same simple and pure devotional understanding.

In the following selection, which is taken from his masterwork, A Testament of Devotion, notice that he suggests some will be swept into holy obedience and some will have to wrestle for it…

Do not mistake me. Our interest just now is in the life of complete obedience to God, not in amazing revelations of His glory graciously granted only to some. Yet the amazing experiences of the mystics leave a permanent residue, a God-subdued, a God-possessed will. States of consciousness are fluctuating. The vision fades. But holy and listening and alert obedience remains, as the core and kernel of a God-intoxicated life, as the abiding pattern of sober, workaday living. And some are led into the state of complete obedience by this well-nigh passive route, wherein God alone seems to be the actor and we seem to be wholly acted upon. And our wills are melted and dissolved and made pliant, being firmly fixed in Him, and He wills in us.

But in contrast to this passive route to complete obedience most people must follow what Jean-Nicholas Grou calls the active way, wherein we must struggle and, like Jacob of old, wrestle with the angel until the morning dawns, the active way wherein the will must be subjected bit by bit, piecemeal and progressively, to the divine Will.

Read more:
Testament of Devotion, Thomas R. Kelly
http://www.bullartistry.com.au/pdf_bestill/010BeStill.pdf

“Worship is not a cozy time with Jesus. Worship is a ritual act that involves bringing all creation into God’s presence and asking Him to change it.”

James B. Jordan, The Offertory, Rite Reasons No. 97. www.biblicalhorizons.com

How an Oscar Winning Film Provides an Unforgettable Picture of Sin
“The Diet” | Column by Richard Wagner | www.digitalwalk.net

Sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must master it. —Genesis 4:7

…If you’ve ever fought a bout of food poisoning, you know that there’s not much worse until your body has gotten the poison out of its system. Tainted food may look enticing, but once inside, it begins to invade, inhabit, and revolt against you. Sin enters your life much in the same way. It comes wrapped inside of an appealing package, but what lurks underneath is an enemy that aims to overpower every aspect of your life. And while most cases of food poisoning go away on their own in a day, sin never gives up – that is, unless you actively do something to get rid of it.

The nasty effects of sin and temptation can leave you searching for answers. In a most unexpected way, the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind offers a vivid picture for how to deal with sin in your life, reinforcing what the Bible teaches about the poisonous stuff.

A Beautiful Mind tells the true life story of John Nash, a math genius who could solve problems that baffled even the greatest thinkers of his day. While in graduate school at Princeton, he makes an amazing discovery that propels him to much fame in the late 1940s. However, behind the scenes, Nash is a desperate man, plagued by schizophrenia that leaves him unable to separate fantasy from reality. Unknown to him consciously, his troubled mind produces imaginary people that become an intimate part of his life. It is only through the selfless love shown by his wife, Alicia, that Nash is eventually able to overcome his battles and, late in life, receive the Nobel Prize.

While A Beautiful Mind is gripping and inspiring drama, the film, quite unintentionally, offers something more for Christians. Watch the film with an eye on his delusions and think of them as representing sin and temptation. If you do so, the story of John Nash paints an unforgettable picture of sin’s damaging effects and the way to successfully conquer temptation in your Christian walk.

Ground Zero

The Bible is says flat out that Satan is going to lose in the end. But, until the day that you can exclaim “hasta la vista”, the master tempter is going to identify and target your weak spots. In particular, he’s going to locate an area of your life in which you have an unmet desire and then offer a cheap imitation as a substitute to fill that hole.

A Beautiful Mind illustrates how this kind of bait-and-switch routine is pulled off inside of a person’s mind. In spite of his arrogance and brilliance, Nash is needy. Very needy. His schizophrenic mind dreams up three make-believe people to fill in these missing pieces of his life.

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“Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh” (Luke 6:21b).

The truth of the gospel leads inexorably to laughter. Those who want to glower as they cling to truth want something that can never be. Whatever it is they have in their hands, it must not be the truth, unless it is just a fragment of it. The dour Calvinist, the cranky sabbatarian, and the pious self-loather are all textbook head cases. We see them in Scripture, we see them in our literature, and sometimes we see them out on their front porch on sabbath afternoons, glaring at the bicyclists. Are they speaking the truth? Well … are they laughing for joy?

Whenever the truth is presented to us, we have to recognise the various devices we have for avoiding it. The libertine is not hard to understsand. Any given truth may be overtly rejected in the flesh. But we too often forget that it may also be accepted and praised in the flesh. Thus the pharisaical mind is innoculated to truth — he has received just enough of the truth to keep him from getting a case of the real thing.

- Douglas Jones, Douglas Wilson, Angels In The Architecture, p. 72-73.

“We so often lead lives forgetful of the fact that our God is very shocking. Amidst all our fragile piety and devouring busyness, we have a Lord who steps in and commands us such things as, “Thou shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever they soul desireth: and thou shalt eat there before the Lord thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou and thine household” (Deut. 14:26). Such unthriftiness. Such waste. Such gluttony. Such winebibbing. Such is a command of our holy God.

For some reason foreign to our modern ears, God tells us that celebration is central to pleasing Him; it is central to leading a good life. Modern American life has no time for serious celebrations as did life in centuries past. We’ve got work to do; projects and deadlines press us. And yet for all our industrial-strength pragmatism, few if any truly important things get accomplished. We have forgotten that celebration isn’t just an option; it’s a call to full Christian living.

Celebration is worshipping God with our bodies, with the material creation He has set up around us. Celebrating–whether in feasts, ceremonies, holidays, formal worship, or lovemaking–are all part of obeying God’s command to “love the Lord thy God with all thine heart”… God’s redemption and creation ought to keep us in a perpetual state of thanks which bursts out in celebration at every opportunity.”

- Douglas Jones, Douglas Wilson, Angels In The Architecture, p. 80.

The Eternal Son came to earth and lived the Christian life . . . visibly. But pause for a moment. The Eternal Son is the second member of the Godhead (the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit). Did it ever occur to you that your Lord . . . the Lord Jesus Christ . . . stated publicly that he could not live the Christian life? Of himself, he could not live the Christian life (John 5:30). Isn’t that amazing! (So, if you’re having a hard time, just consider John 5:30.) Now let us inquire of him, “How did you live the Christian life?”

Was the mainstay of his Christian life prayer and Bible study? He did pray, but was prayer the central pillar of his secret to living the Christian life? That just does not seem to fit, does it? The Son depending on prayer and Bible study to make it through the day?

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“Progress in holiness can best be measured not by the length of time we spend in prayer, not by the number of times we go to church, not by the amount of money we contribute to God’s work, not by the range and depth of our knowledge of the Bible, but rather by the quality of our personal relationships.”  

– Stephen F. Winward

“What’s gone wrong? How can the church be an attractive, relevant community of transforming grace and conversation?”

Excerpts from Reframing Paul, by Mark Strom

“Grace is subversive. It undermines the ideals and standards of those of us who cannot tolerate weakness in others (or in ourselves). It undermines the pride of those of us who search out every vestige of unbiblical belief and practice. It undermines the presumption of those of us who preach the pure gospel to cure all ills. It undermines the safety of those of us who throw off the shackles of abusive and codependent relationships only to refuse grace to those who have hurt us. It undermines our need to find the ideal, the answer, the method, the cure. We are left with the weakness of grace-full conversation.

Grace leaves us with Jesus. Jesus leaves us with his Spirit. His Spirit draws us into conversation. The conversation opens us to the wonder and fragility of life. The Father who gave us life bids us live and converse in grace.”

Read more…

http://bullartistry.com.au/pdf_bestill/058BeStill.pdf

Many people felt that New Buildings was scarcely the place for a man of Chapman’s type to live in. In fact a good part of the congregation at Grosvenor Street would have found it difficult to live there in those days, for drunkenness, filth and poverty were evident in the alleys around.

One day a wealthy gentleman approached him with a most attractive proposition. A fine house, standing in its own grounds in the country… But the offer was courteously declined. “No,” said Chapman, “I must live where the poorest saint can visit me.”

One day Mr. Chapman had the pleasure of an unexpected visit from a relative, who evidently desired to know how he lived…

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I get through more Bible in one scripture lesson with non-Christian high school kids than many church congregations get in 6 months. Why have we dumbed church down so much?

“A young man, who never really wanted to graduate from high school himself, gets hired as a youth minister. His task is to put together a wild and crazy time down at the church, with perhaps a little inspirational message attached. The driving assumption is that young people today will not tolerate serious instruction and discipleship, and so we must give them large amounts of what they do want, which is “fun, fun, fun, till her daddy takes the T-bird away.” The problem here is not that the kids in the high school group get together, but rather that we have assumed that their time together should consist largely of froth and vanity. As these children grow up, we find that they are unaccustomed to any kind of serious, sustained worship, and so the pressure mounts to make the worship service more and more like the youth group used to be. Because we have tolerated and encouraged the dumbing down of the faith amoung young people, we discover over time, as they grow up, that it stays dumbed down.”

Doug Wilson, Mother Kirk, p. 220. Available from www.canonpress.org