HAPPY 490TH CELEBRATION OF THE REFORMATION!

This is my pastor’s letter of encouragement today. It was just what I needed today…everyday! I am so grateful for Pastor Biggs’ faithful teaching and shepherding of his flock, of which I am privileged to be a part! For more of Pastor Biggs’ excellent teaching, visit A Place For Truth.

Are you despairing of your own righteousness today, realizing that you are more sinful before God than you had thought before? Are you realizing that when all is said and done you just are not righteous before God? Or perhaps you are thinking more highly of yourself and your good works before God?

If you are doing either of these things, you are looking to yourself and your own righteousness to affirm and assure yourself before God. When you look to yourself you make null and void the work of Jesus Christ (Galatians 2:21).

If you have sought your salvation and righteousness in yourself, and you have realized the depth of your sins before God in words, thoughts, and deeds, then you know how Martin Luther felt when he cried out to his friend John Staupitz, saying: “Who can abide the Day of the Lord’s coming? And who shall stand when he appears?!” (Mal. 3:2).

Luther knew that if he were to be judged before God based on his own merits, then he would be damned and condemned and so his soul was not able to find peace.

Even when we find our righteousness and hope in Christ through faith, we need to daily be constantly reminded of Christ’s righteousness and merits for us- -not our own righteousness as the motivation for all we do. Our best works and good deeds before God are as filthy rags the Bible says.

When Luther was in despair, his friend Staupitz loved him enough to say these words:

“Why do you torment yourself with all these speculations and these high thoughts of your works before God? Look at the wounds of Jesus Christ, to the blood that he has shed for you: it is there that the grace of God will appear to you.

Instead of torturing yourself on account of your sins, throw yourself in your Redeemer’s arms. Trust in him- - in the righteousness and merits of his life- -in the atonement of his death. Do not shrink back; God is not angry with you, it is you who are angry with God.

Listen to the Son of God not your own thoughts; meditate on His Word to you. Jesus became man to give you the assurance of divine favor. He says to you: You are my sheep; you hear my voice; no man shall pluck you out of my strong hand.” ~John Staupitz to Martin Luther, ca.1509.

Be reminded of the truth of God’s grace and righteousness for you found in Christ alone today! This is the simple gospel that God restored in the Reformation and why it must be continued to be preached in the Church today! Do you believe the gospel?

HAPPY 490^TH CELEBRATION OF THE REFORMATION!

^ESV Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

In Christ,

Pastor Biggs

Stop Tinkering

“Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God, we do not see ourselves--blessed riddance. The man who has struggled to purify himself and has had nothing but repeated failures will experience real relief when he stops tinkering with his soul and looks away to the perfect One.”
... A. W. Tozer (1897-1963), The Pursuit of God [1948]

I need this relief. Badly.

O For a Closer Walk With God

In today's bible reading, this lovely and haunting hymn by William Cowper was juxtaposed in the Book of Life with Jesus' high priestly prayer for his disciples (and all believers!). I thought it was interesting that the authors would make this connection...which seems so appropriate to me, as it is so often my own experience. I especially like the verse that begins with "The dearest idol I have known"...

O for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame,
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb!

Where is the blessedness I knew,
When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul refreshing view
Of Jesus and His Word?

What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void
The world can never fill.

Return, O holy Dove, return,
Sweet messenger of rest!
I hate the sins that made Thee mourn
And drove Thee from my breast.

The dearest idol I have known,
Whate’er that idol be
Help me to tear it from Thy throne,
And worship only Thee.

So shall my walk be close with God,
Calm and serene my frame;
So purer light shall mark the road
That leads me to the Lamb.

Jane Austen on the "mega-church"

In Mansfield Park, chapter 9, Fanny and Edmund are discussing the importance of the clergyman with the disdainful Miss Crawford. Miss Crawford has just observed that don’t have much influence over their congregations, even if they preach “two sermons a week, even supposing them worth hearing, supposing the preacher to have the sense to prefer Blair’s to his own (my footnote says that many preachers of that day would read the well-known and eloquent Rev. Hugh Blair’s sermons rather than preach their own...nothing new under the sun, hmmm?)

Edmund supposes she is speaking of large congregations in London, while he is referring to the rest of the nation.

“We do not look in great cities for our best morality. It is not there that respectable people of any denomination can do most good; and it certainly is not there that the influence of the clergy can be most felt. A fine preacher is followed and admired; but it is not in fine preaching only that a good clergyman will be useful in his parish and his neighbourhood, where the parish and neighbourhood are of a size capable of knowing his private character, and observing his general conduct, which in London can rarely be the case. The clergy are lost there in the crowds of their parishioners. They are known to the largest part only as preachers…”

Twenty Years Ago...

Last month...



My prayer my sweet sons today:

As he pursues his heavenly journey by Thy grace
let him be known as a man with no aim
but that of a burning desire for Thee,
and the good and salvation of His fellow man.
~Divine Support, The Valley of Vision

Give him a desire to show forth Thy praise,
testify Thy love,
advance Thy kingdom.
~New Year, The Valley of Vision

Solemn Vows

Josh and Abby asked Jack to use the Book of Common Prayer wedding service, and I was struck by how few references there were to feelings (love, joy, etc), and how many there were to "solemn vows". Truly, for all the joy and smiles and laughter, it also was a solemn occasion, as Josh and Abby vowed lifelong commitment, and all in attendance vowed to support them in that commitment.

A related item… Wes Callihan had this article in his Scholegium newsletter today.

COGITEM -- Liturgy as a Language

Our pastor recently remarked that there is a liturgical reformation occurring (he's thinking primarily of reformed protestant churches) and it set me thinking about why that should be so. One reason surely is that liturgy is a language that allows us to express ourselves. If you have never learned to play the piano, you cannot simply sit down to one and express the innermost depths of your soul with great overhand swings at the keyboard, Rachmaninoff-style, no matter how passionately you feel like the desire. But if you've studied and practiced and learned the language of piano-playing from those who have gone before, you can express yourself with great freedom. That freedom came from submission to a tradition, the tradition of How To Play The Piano. If you have never learned to speak Spanish, you cannot suddenly start communicating freely with the person next to you on the bus in Guadalajara; but if you've studied and practiced, then you can express yourself. You are freed from the bonds of ignorance and enabled to do something that you never could before, because of your submission to How Spanish Is Supposed to Be Spoken.

In the same way, the liturgies of the Christian Church are a language which, if learned and submitted to, allow us to express ourselves in worship to God in the great communion of the saints. Where did we get the idea that "worship" can be whatever we want it to be? We can't just say anything we want and expect our seatmate on the Guadalajara bus to understand us, and we can't just bang on the piano a la John Cage and expect the audience to understand what we feel, and so we can't expect to do just any old thing in church and expect it to be meaningful. Liturgy is a language that has developed (in many dialects, certainly, but one language) in the Church over centuries and if we learn it, submit to What Worship Is, we participate in a language others have for centuries and still do speak and so we join with them in worship, and we can express ourselves with much more freedom than if we just bang on the keyboard.

Dearly beloved...

Sorry this is the best pic I have of the two of them...seems appropriate that it's with their youngest siblings! Karen and others have much better pics, but I didn't have my camera so handy at the wedding. So, more later.

It was a lovely and spectacular day. It was one of the most picturesque spots I can imagine for a wedding, overlooking a vineyard, and with the Sierras in the distance...topped off by a full moonrise over the vineyard later in the evening. Bride and groom were lovely, happy, and beaming. We are so happy and blessed to have such a sweet new daughter, the perfect wife for our son! It was amazing to watch our son take his solemn vows with this godly and lovely young woman...the baby girl/toddler/child/teen/woman that we have been praying for the last 20 years. God has answered exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we could have asked or desired.

A few more of my pictures:

Groom and Best Man with cigars..

all groomsmen with cigars

handsome group...but they made me cry...where did those little boys with guns go??

Josh and Dad

the rest of us

a big treat...our dear friends (and one set of Joshua's godparents) Kevin and Laura Nary (from our early married days) came from So. CA for the wedding...we had a great time visiting and catching up...haven't seen them in 7 years!! Their grown up kiddos Megan and David (our godson) came too!

Two Kinds of Reading by C.S. Lewis

"There are two ways of enjoying the past, as there are two ways of enjoying a foreign country. One man carries his Englishry abroad with him and brings it home unchanged. Wherever he goes he consorts with the other English tourists. By a good hotel he means one that is like an English hotel. He complains of the bad tea where he might have had excellent coffee. He finds the natives quaint and enjoys their quaintness…In the same way there is a man who carries his modernity with him through all his reading of past literatures and preserves it intact. The highlights in all the ancient and medieval poetry are for him the bits that resemble – the poetry of his own age.

"…But there is another sort of travelling and another sort of reading. You can eat the local food and drink the local wines, you can share the foreign life, you can begin to see the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants. You can come home modified, thinking and feeling as you did not think and feel before. So with the old literature. You can go beyond the first impression that a poem makes on your modern sensibility. By study of things outside the poem, by comparing it with other poems, by steeping yourself in the vanished period, you can then re-enter the poem with eyes more like those of the natives; now perhaps seeing that the associations you gave to the old words were false, that the real implications were different than you supposed, that what you thought strange was then ordinary and that what seemed to you ordinary was then strange.

"...I am writing to help, if I can, the second sort of reading. Partly, of course, because I have a historical motive. I am a man as well as a lover of poetry: being human, I am inquisitive, I want to know as well as to enjoy. But even if enjoyment alone were my aim I should still choose this way, for I should hope to be led by it to newer and fresher enjoyments, things I could never have met in my own period, modes of feeling, flavours, atmospheres, nowhere accessible but by a mental journey into the real past. I have lived nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamoured of either as to desire no glimpse of a world beyond them. As the mere tourist’s kind of holiday abroad seems to me rather a waste of Europe – there is more to be got out of it than he gets – so it would seem to me a waste of the past if we were content to see in the literature of every bygone age only the reflexion of our own faces."

~C.S. Lewis, "De Audiendis Poetis", Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Owen and Tennyson

well...long time, no post. I bet you've all been waiting with bated breath...

I'm reading Tennyson's Idylls of the King this summer for Book Tea. It's wonderful, although I might find it pretty hard going if I hadn't read James Knight's version for children of Morte d'Artur and Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain first.

I'm also reading John Owen's Mortification of Sin. These two, surprisingly, complement each other nicely.

When the fair Elaine falls in love with the dashing Sir Lancelot,

"The shackles of an old love straiten'd him,
His honour rooted in dishonour stood
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."

He was faithful to his unfaithful love for Queen Guinevere. Consequently, Elaine pined away unto death and then dramatically (to say the least) made a point of letting Lancelot know. It's worth reading if you don't know the story...and you must read it to understand Anne's perilous river journey which ended with Gilbert's rescue in Anne of Green Gables.

Here's Owen on sin's effect on our judgement:

"Sin's loud voice darkens the mind so that it cannot make a right judgement of things...so that it does not rightly judge the guilt of sin."

Homeschooling Encouragement

Go here for an encouraging article as a dad reflects on what he's learned by homeschooling.

ht Drew Campbell

Humbled By the War I Cannot Win

Paul Tripp has an excellent personal paraphrase of Romans 7 and Psalm 51 on his website today. Just what I needed today as I have been beset and given in all day to impatience and frustration. Thanks be to God!

Here's an excerpt, go here for the entire thing.

I am thankful for God’s grace, but there is daily evidence that I'm still in need of help.
That battle inside me cannot be solved by
Theology
Strategies
Principles
Techniques
Plans
Preparation
Helpful hints
Outlines
I have been humbled by the war I cannot win.
I have been grieved by desires I cannot conquer.
I have been confronted by actions I cannot excuse.
And I have come to confess that what I really need is rescue.
So, have mercy on me, O God,
According to your unfailing love
According to your great compassion
Blot out my transgressions.
Wash away all my iniquity
And cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions
And my sin is always before me.
I embrace the rescue that could only be found in you.
Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Scots Wha Hae

To go along with our reading of The Scottish Chiefs, we're memorizing Robert Burn's "Battle of Bannockburn". Robert Bruce's speech in that poem is the Scottish National Anthem. You can listen to it here, bagpipes and all. You should see E & D recite and act this out on the tramp!

Mark Twain on the Sovereignty of God

...although I seriously doubt he would have meant to honor God with this, yet his Presbyterian upbringing and bedrock presupposition is there.

This is from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, describing the death of Injun Joe and the tiny drip of water in the cave which provided some small comfort to him as he was slowly starving to death.

That drop was falling when the Pyramids were new; when Troy fell; when the foundations of Rome were laid when Christ was crucified; when the Conqueror created the British empire; when Columbus sailed; when the massacre at Lexington was "news." It is falling now; it will still be falling when all these things shall have sunk down the afternoon of history, and the twilight of tradition, and been swallowed up in the thick night of oblivion. Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect's need? and has it another important object to accomplish ten thousand years to come?

Homeschool or Classical School?

Cindy at Dominion Family has some interesting thoughts on this issue.

I posted this comment on her blog the day before in response to a related post:

It’s my 2 graduated scholars, both godly and intelligent young men whom I respect and enjoy, that keep me going…wouldn’t trade my relationship with them for anything…and I find it hard to believe it could have been built any other way…

And…how would I ever find the time to read aloud for 2 hours a day to my younger crew if they were in school?

Nope…not worth it. Too much I’m not willing to sacrifice for the “potential” academic benefits…which I’m not even sure exist.

This is on my heart b/c I’ve had several conversations about this from younger moms fearing their lack of ability to do high school with their boys.

Should I Be Worried?

My 6 year old son’s response to the very sparse description of Laura & Almanzo’s wedding in These Happy Golden Years:

“Awwww, they didn’t even kiss!”