Register for the Mid-Michigan Reformation Conference

We're about half-way through summer and before we know it, fall will be upon us. That means it's time to register for the 10th annual Mid-Michigan Reformation Conference to be held on Saturday, October 26th from 10:00 am to 4:30 at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Flint.

Keep your eyes open for more detailed information that will be released soon, but as I have mentioned here before, the theme of this year's conference is "The Glory of Christ" and our speakers will be:

• David Crabb of First Baptist Church in Lapeer
• Jason Helopoulos of University Reformed Church in East Lansing
• Chuck Jacob of Knox Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor
• Don Galardi of Community EPC in Owosso

The entire event (including a hot lunch) is free of charge, but we do need to have an idea of how many will be attending, so we ask that you click here and fill out the quick and easy online registration form.

Feel free to shoot me an email with any questions.

Registration Open for Mid-Michigan Reformation Conference

Even though it's not yet June, you can already register for the 10th annual Mid-Michigan Reformation Conference to be held on Saturday, October 26th from 10:00 am to 4:30.

As I have mentioned here before, the theme of this year's conference is "The Glory of Christ" and our speakers will be:

• David Crabb of First Baptist Church in Lapeer
• Jason Helopoulos of University Reformed Church in East Lansing
• Chuck Jacob of Knox Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor
• Don Galardi of Community EPC in Owosso

The entire event (including a hot lunch) is free of charge, but we do need to have an idea of how many will be attending, so we ask that you click here and fill out the quick and easy online registration form.

Feel free to shoot me an email with any questions.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Lewis on Pleasures

"Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility…But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in calling them 'bad pleasures' I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean 'pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.' It is the stealing of the bad apples that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory…I have tried since…to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it.  One must of course give thanks, but I meant something different…Gratitude exclaims, very properly, 'How good of God to give me this.' Adoration says, 'What must be the quality of that Being whose far off and momentary coruscations are like this!' One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun…If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labor."

C.S. Lewis
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
(as quoted by John Piper in When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy)

A Word for Preachers...Ferguson on Preaching to the Heart

"In the last analysis, this is what preaching to the heart is preaching to the heart is intended to produce: inner prostration of the hearts of our listeners through a consciousness of the presence and the glory of God. The result distinguishes authentic biblical preaching from any cheap substitute; it marks the difference between preaching about the Word of God and preaching the Word of God.

"The presence of this threefold openness, then, is most desirable in preaching. When there is the exposition of the Scriptures, an enlarging and opening of the preacher's heart, and the exposing of the hearts of the hearers, then the majesty of the Word of God written will be self-evident and the presence of the Word of God Incarnate will stand forth in all His glory."

Sinclair Ferguson
Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching

Meditating on the Glory and Love of Christ

Today I came across this helpful reminder from John Owen in The Glory of Christ:

I would urge you to prepare your minds continually for heavenly things by meditating seriously on the glory of the love of Christ.  This cannot be done if the mind is always full of earthly thoughts.  Do not be satisfied with general thoughts of the love of Christ but think of it in a more detailed way.

1. Consider whose love it is: the love of the Son of God who is also the Son of Man. As he is unique, so his love must be unique. 
2. Think of the wisdom, goodness and grace shown in the eternal acts of his divine nature and of the pity an love of his human nature in all that he did and suffered for us (see Ephesians 3:19; Hebrews 2:14, 15; Revelation 1:5). 
3. We deserved hatred, but, "in this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (John 4:10). 
4. What power this love has in its effect on our lives, enabling us to bear fruit to his glory.

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Owen on Beholding Christ's Glory

"Some say they have a desire to behold the glory of Christ by faith, but when they begin to view this glory they find it too high and difficult. They are overcome, like the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration. I admit that the weakness of out minds and our inability to understand much of the eternal glory Christ prevents us from keeping our thoughts in a steady and unbroken meditation for any length of time. Those who are not practised in the skill of holy meditation in general will not be able to meditate on this mystery in particular. But even so, when faith can no longer hold open the eyes of our understanding to think about the Sun of righteousness shining in his beauty, at least we can still, by faith, rest in holy admiration and love."

John Owen
The Glory of Christ

A Word for Preachers...Piper on Our Aim in Preaching

"Our aim in preaching is not to help our people feel treasured, but to help them treasure God. We must aim to preach in such a way that we breed a kind of people who feel loved not when they are made much of, but when they are patiently helped to enjoy making much of God, even when they themselves are slandered, ridiculed, persecuted, and killed. This is impossible with man, but with God all things are possible. When the Holy Spirit comes in power on our preaching, people see that Christ is treasure and they are loved, and that those two things are one. God has ordained that one way they see Christ treasured in us is how we are sustained by Him in suffering."

John Piper
Feed My Sheep: A Passionate Plea for Preaching

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...The Glory of Christ

"His glory is far too great for our small minds to understand so we can never give him the praise due to him. But by faith we can have some knowledge of Christ and his glory, and that knowledge is better than any other form of wisdom or understanding. The apostle Paul said, 'I count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord' (Philippians 3:8). If our future happiness means being where Christ is and seeing his glory, there is no better preparation for it than to fill our thoughts with that glory now. So we shall gradually be changed into that glory."

John Owen
The Glory of Christ

For Our Good and For His Glory

I'm thinking about preaching a series of sermons on the Exodus and an interesting thing caught my eye today. In Exodus 7:3 God tells Moses that he is going to "multiply signs and wonders in the land of Egypt" so that Pharaoh will be made aware that he should let the nation of Israel go. Pharaoh will not listen, Moses is told, so god declares that he will instead bring his people out of Egypt "by great acts of judgment."

What caught my attention is what comes as a result of this judgment. In 7:5 we read, "The Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them."

Did you catch that? God's intention is not just that Israel would be delivered out of bondage, but also that Egypt would know that he is God. I find two things interesting about this.

First of all, God is not just some tribal deity, content to receive the homage from some small group of people. He is the God of all creation, and is rightly jealous for acclaim as such from all peoples. He wants the Egyptians to know his name.

Secondly (and I can never be reminded of this enough), while the Bible is an unfolding drama, I am not the center of the story, God is. God is indeed acting for the benefit of his people (both in Exodus and today), but his ultimate goal is far greater than them. He is concerned that his glory be made manifest in all the earth.

We would never consciously admit that we think God exists to serve us. But functionally, this is the way we often approach him. We often ask questions as to why WE are victims of injustice or how good could possibly come from the bad things that happen TO US. Our finite minds can't conceive how certain circumstances could possibly work our for our good, much less for God's glory.

In the midst of such thoughts and feelings, let us rejoice that this was not the mindset of Jesus. For however much we might feel that we have been treated unfairly, that we have been wronged, no man has ever been treated more unjustly than the man Jesus Christ. And no person has ever experienced bad things quite like the Son of God.

As he died on the cross it made no sense to his followers. And if we had been there, it would have made no sense to us either. But in the midst of God's righteous judgment of OUR sin being levied against HIM, God was indeed working out things in a way that was better than we could possibly have imagined. It was for our good and for his glory.

So let us always be "looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:2)

Wednesdays Words of Wisdom...Edwards on the Glorious Perfections of God

"It seems to be a thing in itself fit and desirable, that the glorious perfections of God should be known, and the operations and expressions of them seen by other beings besides himself...(and) 'tis a thing infinitely good in itself that God's glory should be known by a glorious society of created beings."

Jonathan Edwards
The End for Which God Created the World

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom...Lewis on Glory

"And this brings me to the other sense of glory--glory as brightness, splendour, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means. In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more--something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words--to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves--that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects."

C.S. Lewis
The Weight of Glory, pp. 42-43

Wednesday's Words of Wisdom

“For what is more consonant with faith than to recognize that we are naked of all virtue, in order to be clothed by God? That we are empty of all good, to be filled by him? That we are slaves of sin, to be freed by him? Blind, to be illumined by him? Lame to be made straight by him? Weak to be sustained by him? To take away from us all occasion for glorying, that he alone may stand forth glorious and we glory in him?”

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Faith Like a Child

One of my greatest joys in all of life is when my children ask me good, biblically-informed questions. My daughter just turned six about a month ago. Today, while giving her a ride to school, we had the following conversation out of the blue:

C: Dad, Where does God live?

Me: In Heaven.

C: Where’s that?

Me: We don’t know for sure.

C: Doesn’t the Bible say that when He comes back, He’ll come on the clouds?

Me: Yes, it does!

C: Then heaven must be in the sky.

For a second, I actually thought about explaining to her that while it’s certainly possible that she was right, it's also possible that “on the clouds” could just be a metaphor referring to “in great glory.” Instead, I think I did the wise thing: I commended her for being very bright and I silently gave thanks to God for the fact that He is already working in my six-year-old child’s heart to pique her interest of spiritual things.