Great Singing!

“To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, and to devote the will to the purpose of God.” William Temple, Church of England

Dear Faith Congregation, Applegate Community, and Household of Faith Community,

This past Friday evening was especially encouraging to us as worshipers. We witnessed the blending of around 130 voices with the rich expressions of harmonies and melodies. After hearing from different ones about the intensity of the singing at our Good Friday service, I determined to write and continue in that same vein of praise and thanksgiving to God on how He facilitated the hearts and voices for the gathered people of God that night. Here’s what I heard from several:

“Wow. The acoustics brought the singing to life.”

“I sat next to ________________ (family name) and it was incredible. You want to learn how to sing, sit next to them.”

“Fantastic! May Jesus Christ always be praised.”

“The music was marvelous! I was transported by the beauty and majesty. Please let the flautists and accompanists know I was so blessed by it.”

“I had no idea that our voices would sound so rich in this room.”

“When we get together and sing like that, it sure makes for an encouraging time.”

“With the singing tonight, now we know what it is like in our church building to have more worshipers and more voices.”

Isn’t our God good?

To round out this brief note of thanks, I reference a few sentences below that I came across in my reading 5-6 days ago:

“Christian assembles have at all times and in all places read the Scriptures, prayed, and sung. The Christian liturgy was born singing, and it has never ceased to sing…The Church used music and singing in its worship well before it began to ask itself questions about why and wherefore, and such questioning was a first sporadic and empirical, connected with matters of discipline, devotion, and even polemics...”

A few sentences later, I read this:

“The first and most distinctive characteristic of singing would appear to be that of musical time. Singing places man before God as a creature existing in time.”

See the chapter, “Music and Singing in Liturgy” in the book, The Study of Liturgy by Jones, Wainwright and Yarnold Oxford Univ Press, 1978, pp. 440-441.

I am guessing we all see that music and singing in a worship context are to be praise. They also focus on the use of the Word for prayer, praise, confession and instruction. These things are true; however, I am struck by the Jones, Wainwright and Yarnold point that “Singing places man before God as a creature existing in time.” Interesting.

Singing shows God that He is God and we are creatures—His creatures! You cannot get more fundamental and basic than that! He is God. We are men and women. When we sing, we must make use of key signatures, timing, intervals, and volume. There’s submission involved. We submit as creatures to elements and applications of time.

In order to speak with musical expression of God’s God-ness and to show our creaturely-ness, we sing. And it all happens with air exhaling through our throats, bouncing around briefly within the small space of our cheeks and then forced out with rounded or sliced lips. Sounds rush forward for verbal chorus.

We show our limits with time and space; but within our limits, we get to praise our God and Redeemer. O for a thousand tongues—right?

Thanks be to God for this past Friday’s joint worship as congregations. We will treasure the worship for a good number of weeks ahead. Our voices became glory-filled vessels of claps, peals, laments, and tones. It was Good Friday worship—and the worship was good last Friday.

Sincerely, all for the praise of our Redeemer, the Lord Jesus,

Pastor Sumpter

Big Daddy Cabbage

At the Alaska State Fair

Speaking about the size of the vegetables grown in the Matanuska Valley as a sermon illustration has been overused by me, but it still provides an Alaska-size kick in the pants.

See this STORY.

As a kid, we enjoyed getting close to these creatures; obviously, it would take two, maybe three Shaquille O’Neal-size men to get their hands locked around these beasts.

G. Mark Sumpter

Night, Night

Sleep More, and Trust the Lord

Improving your worship and witness by sleeping—sleeping more, and soundly. How?

1. You’re a man, a creature. God is Creator. Sleep. Show God and the world that you know your limitations. You’re a finite creature; He, the Infinite One, never tires.

2. Demonstrate full trust and confidence in Jesus Christ. You cannot watch over your body, soul, home, wife, husband, children, horse, cow, gold fish and emails, but He can and does. Although you sleep, He remains steadfast never taking His eyes off of you. Close your eyes, and snore. He’s there beside your household, your neighborhood, your office, your field and your church.

3. Tell the gospel by sleeping. The gospel addresses us body and soul. Tell the world that your body is weak, but He is strong. Tell the world that your body is growing tired, which reminds us of disease and degeneration. Tell the gospel by showing your spouse and children that you’re anticipating the day when you will get a new body that will never die. Tell of the coming translation from this life to the next. The Spirit will soon revive flesh and blood to be like His glorious body. Sleep, for resurrection is coming!

4. Mimic God’s delight about His Son’s incarnation—that is, the physical body, our Lord’s and ours, remains a good gift. Though our God is the One who never slumbers, nor sleeps, He has experienced sleep. It is not His character to sleep, but He did experience it! Jesus came, and flat-out hit physically exhausting walls! He, like us, knew the ups and downs of full-fledged embodiment. In this way, His own incarnation speaks of how He entered into every area of life for us, and yet, without sin. Sleep telegraphs to the world we live and move in this world, and He came after our pattern, in the very likeness of human flesh. God's rescue provides for our bodies. The incarnation of Jesus tells of the renewing work for the whole world.

5. God rested on the seventh day. He bestows on us the good gift of cocking the head back, even mouth wide open catching flies, to Z-z-z-z-z the afternoon or night away.

Conk out for Christ. Amen?

G. Mark Sumpter

Fatal Attraction

Why We Need Faithful Story-Telling, Story-Thinking

OK. I think a head-gasket just blew. Listen to this quote from the great book, Science and Grace—God’s Reign in the Natural Sciences from Crossway Books.

The authors are talking about the place of the study of science within the story of God’s Hand in day to day providence and His Hand of special revelation: that is, His story of Jesus Christ—born, lived, died and raised. Here we go, Science and Grace, pp. 168-170:

“Our Modernist-shaped instincts lead us to assume that science is and should be exclusively about the ‘seen,’ and the material ‘stuff’ of the universe. But the story is being played out—is being gestated and demonstrated—in both the seen and the unseen, and if science is a part of that story, it must be pursued with both the seen and unseen in view….[This] story metaphor can also help us resist the dominance of reductionism—the idea that we are only making progress in understanding the universe when we break it down into smaller and smaller components isolated from the whole.

Story-thinking forces the relationship nature of created being and rich conception of its contingency to the forefront of the discussion…[this] contingency of the universe is based on a moment-by-moment dependency in past, present and future tense. This dependency is not just interesting background information, but is held to be an integral element of what the universe really is. Created being has its existence and meaning only in relation to its Author and Sustainer and the story He intends to tell in and through it. This Author doesn’t stand outside the story but actually enters into it in the incarnation of the Son and by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Individual characters and settings have real existence and significance in themselves, but they cannot be isolated from the story itself without loss of meaning and significance and even a diminishment of their reality.

In the providence of God, the characters would not be the same without the story, and the story would not be the same without the specific characters. In view of this it makes no sense to contend that if we want to really get to know a character in the story, some feature of nature, we must first try to isolate the character entirely from the story. It makes no sense to contend that a true understanding of the story is advanced by focusing on isolated parts without at some point considering each part in context of the whole or that we want to understand the story better, we will consciously try not to pay attention to the Author’s ‘notes’ and His commentary concerning the structure of the story and His purposes in telling it.”

I am humbled by the goodness and skill of these two authors, Mr. Morris and Mr. Petcher. Over the years, I have thought that by getting down to greater and greater specificity that I am getting deeper and deeper into truth. I am one who gravitates to the study of bits and pieces; for example, in the study of God’s Word, I customarily think that in isolating those bits and pieces, I am somehow digging into deep stuff. I have worked from a wrong assumption: that the small bits contain the really, really important stuff, and I have missed the power of context, the relationality of truths—the place of story. I have missed God’s way of the comprehensive cosmic context. I have missed the meaning of the parts by ripping them out of the context of the beauty and power of the whole!

With this in mind, it is the doctrine of the Trinity to the rescue once again! There is only one true God. This one true God exists as three distinct persons. Each person is fully divine. The Father works of himself, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. The One and the Many: Particularity and Wholeness.

G. Mark Sumpter

Miracles 101

Were the Lord's Miracles A Show of Suspending God's Natural Order?

In class with John Frame, I recall being taught that there's a close relationship, maybe almost indistinguishable one, between God's working of providence and His working of miracle.

Professor Frame would set forth a case for providence being considered a mighty work, a glorious-wondrous work. He would cite texts like the Psalms 104, 107, and others. He would defend his position by saying that a faithful reading of the psalms, for example, shows that God's intervention of glorious works were described not as miraculous, but ordinary displays of His governing, upholding providence.

But now, take in and listen to Tim Keller, he's reflecting on the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus:

The most instructive thing about this text, [Matthew 28: 16-20 and the resurrection appearance] is, however, what it says about the purpose of Biblical miracles. They lead not simply to cognitive belief, but to worship, to awe and wonder. Jesus’s miracles in particular were never magic tricks, designed only to impress and coerce. You never see him say something like “see that tree over there? Watch me make it burst into flames!” Instead, he used miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and raise the dead. Why? We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’s miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.

The Reason for God, pp. 95-96 by PCA Pastor Timothy Keller

God's mighty working, with miracles, shows forth the dawn of the age of Christ's turning back sin, death and the devil, and setting forth the great foretaste of heavenly power.

Indeed, by miracles we taste and see the goodness of God's authoritative word and the power of the age to come.

G. Mark Sumpter

The Science Calvary Coming Over the Ridge

Caution about Inflated Assessments of Human Abilities

I am dabbling in the Crossway Book, Science and Grace, and it's really, really thought provoking. Here's one meditation point from page 163.

Point of Hope: Because Christianity holds to the doctrine of the transcendence of God, that is, He is our great, exalted Creator-God who made everything, then we may rightly conclude that it is a Christian thing to search out and discover all things for the sake of the increase of our understanding. God is our God, we know Him through faith, and so, bingo--we have hope and purpose about investigating all that He has made. It is good to pursue knowledge of Him and His ways in the earth.

Point of Caution: Although the Christian assumption just above about God gives warrant for the pursuit of scientific inquiry, man has ventured into what this book calls, “inflated assessments of human abilities.” The caution comes as Christians think that really and truly coming to know God--like the glorious attributes of His power, wisdom, knowledge and infinity, for example, is predominantly a scientific endeavor. The authors conclude about this: “While most Christians would reject this role for science, we often find ourselves looking hopefully for validation or fearing the ridicule of the science of the day in ways that belie this rejection.”

Good stuff.

G. Mark Sumpter

Interpretation Required

Outside of the city, out in the rural domain of Oregon on a clear night we look up and see that the stars are brilliant. You can't miss their gussy dress delightful in their sparkle and shine. They sing and dance to the music that tells the familiar anthem, To the Glory of God. What about the words of the Bible? What about each word, each and every individual word? Do they sing and dance to the music, To the Glory of God, too? They do. "Your words, O LORD, give light."

Both forms of revelation from God, natural revelation and special revelation, have their job to be self-explaining, self-interpreting. It's tricky to be faithful, as fallen humans, when it comes to explanation and interpretation of general revelation. What about God's special revelation? The words of Scripture are wordy in their explanation! The Old and New Testaments relate to each other and they explain each other. Wordy, they are, as we say.

The non-inscripturated revelation, general revelation, requires the lens of the words of Bible to rightly explain and interpret the creation around us. Calvin spoke of the illustration of the spectacles of the Scripture. Look at the creation through the lens of the Bible, he taught us. Unfortunately, the spectacles of the Bible are put to the side by contemporary unbelieving scientists when they look at creation. Man, it is wrongly taught, can approach the creation naturally, unbiased and factually.

But words? Words need to be interpreted--after all, the Bible is merely a human book we are wrongly told. Therefore, spectacles of some kind are needed for the Bible they say; it needs interpretation.

But how about the creation? The stars, along with the rest of creation, well, they carry an objectivity. They get an immediate respect. Modern non-Christian science requires that we be scientific with the Bible, not so with God's other book--the creation.

G. Mark Sumpter

Laws of Creation

“The laws of creation [are] no more or less sure than the laws of redemption. And these laws of creation are sure precisely because God has covenanted to make them sure as a part of His carrying out His own purposes [see Jer. 32: 16-23; 33:19-22]. If the laws that govern creation are covenantal in nature, we should expect that a study of the nature of God's covenant should give us insight into the character of the laws of creation. Yet at the same time we must not miss Jeremiah chapter 31 echoing the book of Job in saying that God's wisdom in His establishing and working out His purposes in creation is unfathomable to us:

Were you there when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone--while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Job 38:4-7

...By implication, all of creation, though mysterious to us in many ways, answers directly to God who upholds it...We should not expect the world to act entirely predictably as a big machine; we should expect that it holds surprises for us that we will never entirely uncover and comprehend.”

From Science and Grace: God's Reign in the Natural Sciences, p. 104

G. Mark Sumpter