Over the last few months I’ve spent a bit of time learning how to code apps for the iPhone and iPad. The fruit of my work reached the App store today: P2R for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Learn more at the P2R page or see it in the app store.

Speculation about John Piper’s tweet, pictured above, seems to be the thing to do, so here’s my 12 cents (up from 2 due to inflation).

There’s an old joke about an elderly couple driving down the road in a pickup truck. The man sat behind the wheel while the wife sat on the other side of the truck, next to the passenger door. At one point the wife turns to her husband and says, “You know, we used to sit a lot closer to each other when driving around.” The man, still driving, turned to his wife and replied, “Well, I haven’t moved.”

Piper’s farewell to Rob Bell was a wave toward the one who was moving. Bell’s trajectory has always been away from orthodoxy but this new book positions him well outside biblical Christianity. Piper’s tweet was a recognition that Bell has departed from any appearance of biblically faithful Christianity. Farewell, indeed.

Thank God that by God’s grace Piper has not moved. I pray he never will. Pray that I never well. Pray for other believers to remain faithful, held from wandering by God’s merciful hand. And pray for Bell that he would realize he is the one who moved, and moved into very dangerous territory. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

There are four things that stand out in this passage:

…that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment…

Paul does not pray for simple love. The modern notion of love says love is blind and free otherwise it is not love. But even as Paul prays for the love of believers to abound, he prays that it would abound with knowledge and all discernment. This does not mean believers can ever be stingy with love, but it does mean that as believers exercise their love, they are to practice discernment informed by knowledge. Our hearts must be connected to our heads as we seek to exercise love in a way that is pleasing to God. So true love does not engage in sin and true love does not give approval to sin.

…so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ…

Related to what was just said, the love believers are to have will ultimately give approval to that which is excellent. Excellence is determined by knowledge and all discernment which is grown through prayer and is given through the Word of God. But this means things are not determined to be excellent just because individuals approve of them, but Christians only approve of those things discerned to be excellent by the standard of Christ. And so the result for us of this love which abounds in knowledge and all discernment is that when we arrive at the day of Christ we will be found pure and blameless. This means the abounding in this kind of love and the right judgment of what is excellent and what is not is part of God’s sanctifying work in our lives. Through Christ God is purifying his bride, making us spotless so that one day Christ will present a spotless bride to his Father.

…filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ…

And here we see Christ’s work most clearly. A growing love that exercises knowledge and all discernment, giving approval to that which is excellent, will lead a person to be filled with the fruit of righteousness. This fruit can come only through Jesus Christ, so it must be Christ who works in us to abound in love so that we can then be filled with his fruit.

For the believer, there is a long-term goal of sanctification: that we might be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. But there is also a daily goal: that Christ’s sanctifying work in us might lead to fruitfulness. Being filled with the fruit of righteousness on the day of Christ requires bearing fruit each day. We normally think of fruitfulness as tangible results – how many people you led to the Lord, how many homeless people you helped, how much time you spent with your family, etc, but that isn’t really the point. Tangible results are a result of fruitfulness. The fruit of righteousness is the fruit of the Spirit – bearing in our lives the very character of Christ as found in passages like Galatians 5:22. So as we abound in the love of God we become more like Christ and will demonstrate his character when he returns. In the meantime, the daily outworking of our growth in Christ will be increased obedience to God’s commands such as love, justice, proclamation, service, etc.

…to the glory and praise of God.

The ongoing purpose of abounding in love is that we grow in our fruitfulness. The eventual purpose is that we be pure and blameless for the day of Christ. But the ultimate purpose is that God will be glorified and praised. We are not out of the spotlight of God’s work, but nor are we in the center. The spotlight is on God. We are mirrors that magnify the light shining on him and through Christ’s sanctifying work we are enabled to reflect him all the better. But God is the goal. We exist to give glory and praise to God. Our question each day cannot be whether the events of our lives give us personal fulfillment and the satisfaction we think we deserve but whether the events in our lives help us grow in Christ so that we might better bring glory and praise to God. And as we grow in Christ, we will find that our satisfaction is no longer in personal fulfillment on the world’s terms but personal fulfillment in the cause of bringing glory to God.

The greatest satisfaction in our lives should come as we, in all things, give glory and praise to God.

The heavens declare the glory of God:

The point of this passage is that when people do not receive God’s vision (prophetic vision comes from the Hebrew חָזוֹן which means revelation, divine communication) they go astray and are lost. We sometimes take this to mean that the pastor is to cast his vision for a church and without that vision a church will shrivel up and die. But Proverbs is telling us that unless the spiritual leader of the people (then it was the prophets who spoke for God, now it is pastors who deliver God’s word) give God’s revelation to them, they will perish.

Again and again the Bible seeks to root us in itself. We are to live by the Word of God, the revelation of God’s truth. It bothers me whenever I hear passages like Proverbs 29:18 used to call for subjective vision-casting. The role of the pastor is not to deliver his ideas of what a church should be and do. The role of the pastor is to cast God’s vision as given to us in the Bible. From beginning to end, pastoral ministry involves instructing people in the ways of God. In this way, the pastor helps his people live blessed lives, as the proverb says, blessed is he who keeps the law.

The pastor must be a vision-caster, but it had better not be his vision that he is trying to cast. Pastor, cast God’s vision, God’s Word, to the people God has entrusted to you.

Picked this up from Desiring God. Decided to take the challenge. Below is an argument for God’s existence from the Miscellanies of Jonathan Edwards. Following that is my attempt to explain what Edwards means, along with an illustration of his meaning.

‘Tis certain with me that the world exists anew every moment, that the existence of things every moment ceases and is every moment renewed. For instance, in the existence of bodies, for there to be resistance, or tendency to some place; ’tis not numerically the same resistance that exists the next moment, ’tis evident, because this existence may be in different places. But yet this existence is continued so far, that there is respect had to it in all the future existences; ’tis evident in all things continually. Now past existence can’t be continued so that respect should be had to it, otherwise than mentally. If the world this moment should be annihilated, so that nothing should really and actually exist any more; the existence of the world could not be continued so that, if another world after a time should be created, that world should exist after this or that manner from respect to the manner of the existence of this, or should be so only because this had been thus or thus. Indeed, we every moment see the same proof of a God as we should have seen, if we had seen [him] create the world at first. Revelation 4:11, “For thy pleasure they are and were created.”

‘Tis only this way that respect can be had to existence distant as to place as well as time, but as much respect is had to distant existence in one sense, as in another.

Explanation:

Edwards believes that creation, our existence, does not have within it sustaining power. Each moment exists then ceases to exist with no inherent connection to moments before or after it. The limited existence of moments is demonstrated by the fact that things change. The world of a moment ago no longer exists. In the words of Heraclitus, you cannot step twice into the same river. New moments of time come into existence through God’s creative power, similar to God’s initial creation of the world in Genesis 1. If new moments simply popped into existence without the hand of God, they would bear no resemblance to previous moments in time. Since our moments exist in a continuous sequence, there must be a God who creates those moments and connects them to each other.

Illustration:

The world is like a movie reel. A movie is a series of pictures printed on individual frames, similar to the individual moments of our existence. The frames are created by a studio, held together on a movie reel, and displayed in a consistent sequence by a projector. If not for the work of the studio to create and the reel to hold together, the frames would all be blank or would have no relation to each other. But because there is someone who creates each frame and holds them together in a continuous sequence, we have movies. So it is with God who creates each of our moments and holds them together.

What do you think he means?

One of the claims of Calvinism is that regeneration must precede faith. That is, no one can trust in Christ, no one will desire salvation and forgiveness, until God first removes the dead heart of stone and puts in a heart desiring God. Left to ourselves, we will always, always reject God. Only when God breathes life into us by the Spirit will we turn to him.

One image of this is found in Zechariah 13:8-9:

It starts with God speaking of a division among the people. Two-thirds are set aside for destruction while one-third will be saved from the coming invaders. This one-third, this remnant of the people, is not set aside because of their own merit but because of the mercy of God. In Romans 11:5 Paul compares us with the faithful few of Elijah’s day and describes us as a remnant chosen by grace.

So God designates a remnant of the people. And what does he do with this remnant? He refines them, he tries them, he purifies them in the fire that burns away every impurity. He takes that which is impure and makes it pure. Only after he has done this work will the people call on his name. They must call on him, they must pursue him by faith, but because of his work, they will call on him. And when they call on him, he will declare them to be his people.

Thanks be to God for his mercy to us, to take that which was foul with sin and completely in rebellion against God, to cleanse us, to purify us, to give us hearts of love for him, and to make us his children. Some people say this theology is heresy. I call it grace, mercy, and life.

Over the last few weeks, the internet has seen several discussions on infant salvation. Some of those discussions were started, oddly enough, as ways of launching assaults against Reformed Baptists. I’ve been reading from Loraine Boettner recently and came across the following and thought some might find it helpful. It addresses, among other things, charges that the Westminster Confession of Faith and/or Calvin himself taught that some children who die will not be saved, and whether or not there is room in Reformed theology to believe that infants who die will be saved. Boettner argues that not only is there room in Calvinism for this view, only Calvinism can consistently teach that children who die will be saved.

The following comes from Presbyterian theologian Loraine Boettner, from his book The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, and deals with the question of infant salvation: Read the rest of this entry »

It is amazing what children come up with, particularly children who have faced extraordinary struggle.

For a few months now I have been following the cancer struggle of three little girls. It started with Kate McRae, who was mentioned several times by Matt Chandler (who continues his own journey with brain cancer). Then I learned about Susana Whitaker, a little girl whose parents went to Haiti as missionaries only to rush back to the US with a suddenly sick child who was diagnosed with serious cancer. The most recent is Daisy, a little girl with a recurrence of Wilm’s Tumor.

We live in a broken, fallen world and sin makes its presence known everywhere, even in the bodies of little children. Pray for these children. Keep up with them and others like them. It is hard for us to see what they have to go through, but we must see it and we must pray. Make the choice to lift up those who had no choice.

But this post is about something Kate has recently said. Her progress has been encouraging though there is still danger ahead. Kate knows what she has been through, and she knows that others have faced the same battle and lost. The following comes from a recent journal from Kate’s mom.

Kate draws pictures of her friends that have passed away. And I never fail to notice the large smile she draws on their faces. The simple yet profound understanding of a child. She knows their pain is done, and they are free to enjoy an eternity with Jesus. She always adds to me though, “I know they aren’t sad, but I bet their mommies are crying a lot because they miss them.” She realizes the heartache is left to those who must live without the ones they love. Continue to keep these families in your prayers. They walk a very difficult road.

Pray for the love of Christ to fill these dear children with eternal hope. And pray for healing mercies, that God would remove every trace of cancer from their bodies.

Kate McRae

Daisy Love

Susana Whitaker

I’m hoping to have time to write a review of Logos 4 for Mac but in the meantime, enjoy this shameless attempt to win Mac gear from Logos.

Logos Bible Software is giving away thousands of dollars of prizes to celebrate the launch of Logos Bible Software 4 Mac on October 1. Prizes include an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPad, an iPod Touch, and more than 100 other prizes!

They’re also having a special limited-time sale on their Mac and PC base packages and upgrades. Check it out!