Reflections on Lent

The Marketplace of the Word

Lent, the calendar time of late winter and early spring, the forty days—not counting Sundays—leading up to Easter, has been observed as a time for prayer and reflection on the life and ministry of Christ.  Reviewing Christ’s life of humiliation and suffering means: 1) giving attention to His wilderness temptations with Satan, 2) rehearsing the hard-hearted ways of men who resisted His teaching, 3) remembering His poverty and lowliness regarding the comforts of this life and 4) re-reading the trickery, deceit and envy of religious authorities during the week of His passion. Lent drives home: He was faced with the worldliness of the world. What’s the application for us? We can give ourselves to deliberate, sincere reflection on worldly and sinful ways with our own darkened heart.  I remember selling the puritan book, The Sinfulness of Sin. That might be a good selection to read during Lent.  This time of the church year can stir the Christian to go to the market place of the Word and purchase truth about Jesus, His mission in the face of worldliness, and His aim to honor His Father by giving up His life for His people. Hallelujah! What a Savior!

G. Mark Sumpter

Home with Family

Why is Christian Community Important?

God is community. He exists One God in Three Persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God’s Word is community—over 40 authors, with partnering companionship between the voice of the Old Testament and New. God speaks in both. He, Himself converses—Old to the New; New back to the Old. When we were born from above, by the sole work of the Holy Spirit, we were born into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ; as individuals we are born—but into family. Jesus asked, “Who are my brothers and sisters and mother—those who hear and do the will of God.” We are born as members of the Body of Christ. The forgiveness we have received is not just a personal pardon—merely concerned with a right vertical relationship with God; but also the new creation, new-family relationship with one another.

G. Mark Sumpter

Life with Brothers

Thankfulness for Daily Gifts of Fellowship

“Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what He has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily. And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of His grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ? Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparable salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can lie by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together—the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.” Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pp. 28-29.

There’s a phone call with a sister in the Lord regarding answer to prayer.

There’s another phone call from a medical institution who calls giving good news about our financial obligations to them.

There’s an old friend from years back that stops by unannounced—for friendship.

There’s a good long distance talk with a fellow-worker in the Gospel—we both need encouragement.

There’s the fellowship of good, solid, open talk with five others in a small group discussing Calvin’s view of the importance of having and beholding Christ given to us in the New Testament; Calvin writes: “They [Old Testament people] had but a slight taste of it; we [in the New Testament era of the Gospel] can more richly enjoy it.” (see p. 423, Vol. 1 Calvin’s Institutes from Westminster/John Knox Press)

Bonhoeffer says it well, “We thank God for giving us brethren who live by His call, by His forgiveness, and His promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what He does give us daily.”

G. Mark Sumpter

Getting the Gospel Right and Then Some

When the Church Goes Her Specious Way

From the late Vaclav Havel (written in 1978): “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. . . ”

This quote, relayed by OPC Pastor Roger Wagner just after Havel’s recent death, stirs. Below, I do not discount the importance of a Christian’s understanding of Havel’s societal and political assessments—his fine assessments and comments I will add, but I pitch a point or two with respect to ideology as a specious way of relating to the church. The church, too, sports herself all things political. The traditionally reformed, confessional church must be aware of how she can situate herself in the grip of the deception per Havel's commentary.

Let’s do some work.

First, church history shows us that ideology is spelled g-n-o-s-t-i-c-i-s-m.

Presbytery is Next Week—Is This Our Game Face?

Warts, Criticism, Chewing Tobacco and Jalapeño Pepper-Fellowship


This entry is from the book, With Calvin in the Theater of God, see Mark Talbot’s chapter, “Bad Actors on a Broken Stage,” p. 60. The book is a 2010 publication from Crossway Books. Good Stuff.

…Calvin’s letters show that he took his faults very seriously…In fact, it was part of the Genevan pastors’ practice to take each other’s faults seriously.

...T. H. L. Parker highlights this in a passage describing Geneva’s Venerable Company of Pastors, which held a regular quarterly meeting “for mutual frank and loving self-criticism”:

“In the church, as Calvin conceived it, every man helped every other man. If in Christ Jesus all believers are united, then a private believer is a contradiction in terms. Not only are the blessings and the virtues given for the common good, but the faults and the weaknesses concern the other members of the body. There was to be no hypocrisy of pretending to be other than a sinner, no dissembling or cloaking of sins; but, just as God is completely honest with men, and men must be honest with God, so also believer with believer must be courageously honest and open. The quarterly meeting was a little day of judgement when, flattery and convention laid aside, each man saw himself through the eyes of his fellows and, if he were wise, harboured no resentment but knew the uniquely joyful release of voluntary humiliation.”


Dr. Talbot quotes from T.H.L. Parker’s biography of John Calvin, p. 115, Westminster/John Knox Press

G. Mark Sumpter

Seriously Happy in the Local Church

Fruitful Discipleship

“Serious Christians know they need discipleship; they want to be faithful to make a difference. But the fact is, even Christians who understand their personal identity as followers of Christ will not make a widespread difference in the decline and decay around us—unless we have a high view of our corporate identity as the body of Christ… Many Christians have been infested with the most virulent virus of modern American life…They concentrate on personal obedience to Christ as if all that matters is ‘Jesus and me,’ but in so doing miss the point altogether…Christianity, as history demonstrates, depends on a reawakening and renewal of that which is the essence of the faith—that is, the people of God, the new society, the body of Christ, which is made manifest in the world—the Church…there is no such thing as Christianity apart from the church.” Chuck Colson, The Body, p. 32.

G. Mark Sumpter

James Ussher Born January 4, 1581

Stalwart in Reformed Tradition Dates the Origin of the Earth 4004 B.C.

James Ussher, the Irish-born linguist, scholar, pastor-theologian and Anglican Archbishop, was born January 4, 1581. He was reared in Calvinism, and at 13 years of age entered Trinity College of Dublin.

In 1615, Ussher wrote the Irish Articles of Religion which served as the basis of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Catechisms. A.A. Hodge in his Evangelical Theology said this about Ussher’s influence: “[His book] had more to do in forming the Catechism and Confession of Faith than any other book in the world…”

Ussher is likely most remembered for his scholarly analysis of the genealogies of the Book of Genesis which led him to date the origin of the earth at 4004 B.C.

The study of the Bible’s chronology was published in his massive The Annals of the Old Testament, first printed in London in 1650. He later added a second part to the volume which focused on the later Old Testament times up to the Apostolic era with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

Ones like William Shakespeare, Reformer Martin Luther and Astronomer Johannes Kepler espoused similar views as Ussher’s regarding the age of the earth.

There’s the story of a London bookseller Thomas Guy who in 1675 began printing Bibles with Ussher’s study notes and dates printed in the margin. The Church of England in the early 1700s adopted Ussher’s dates for use in its official Bible. From 1700-1900, Ussher’s studies and chronological dates were routinely cited in Bibles and were thought to carry the weight of biblical authority.

Happy Birthday, Mr Ussher.

G. Mark Sumpter

Happy Sabbath

The Steady Diet of the Sabbath

“God’s intention was to bless his people through the constant and conscientious observation of the day, week after week and year after year. Believers are sanctified through a lifetime of Sabbath observance. In other words, the Sabbath is designed to work slowly, quietly, seemingly imperceptively in reorienting believers’ appetites heavenward. It is not a quick fix, nor is it necessarily a spiritual high. It is an “outward and ordinary” ordinance (WSC 88), part of the steady and healthy diet of the means of grace. North American Protestants, we have noted, are generally not in sync with this rhythm. Attracted to the inward and extraordinary, they commonly suffer from spiritual bulimia, binging at big events, then purging, by absenting themselves from God’s prescribed diet. The problem with the spirituality of mountaintop experiences is that no one can live on the mountain. We all have to return to our day jobs. When people leave the retreat or Bible camp, or even the midweek small group, they discover their life is still the same: jobs are unpleasant, marriages are shaky, sickness and disease afflict. In contrast, the Sabbath is supposed to be a discipline that provides an oasis in the desert for pilgrims, whose life is marked by suffering. Unlike the church activities that clutter the rest of the week, the Sabbath is when believers spiritually assemble on Mount Zion to meet with their God, to hear him speak, and to partake spiritually of their Savior’s body and blood.”


With Reverence and Awe by Darryl Hart and John Muether, pp. 65-66.


HT: In Light of the Gospel

G. Mark Sumpter

O Lord, I Repent From Wanting to Get People Saved

Ken Myers writing about C.S. Lewis on method of presenting Christ

“Lewis’s imaginative skills were thus focused less on the mere credibility or plausibility of belief (which are the concerns of most apologists) and more on the ramifications of belief: If the gospel is true, here is how the world would look. Even ‘belief’ had a more comprehensive scope in his thinking than most apologists recognize. The gospel wasn’t just a message about getting saved; it was a message of salvation in the context of a bigger story about the meaning of everything. It presupposed a cosmology and a rich anthropology. As in the Creed, Lewis’s defense of the faith began with a tacit but rich affirmation of the Maker of heaven and earth, who made all things in a particular way, the shape of which his creatures would do well to honor.” Ken Myers in the recent Touchstone Magazine, “Contours of Culture,” Sept/Oct 2010.

Lord, help me show people just how great You are; what Your world is like and what it will be like more and more since Jesus is subduing more and more for His own name, and Dear Father, You show them life in the Big Picture of things—for the glory of Jesus’ Lordship. Amen.

G. Mark Sumpter

1 + 1 + 1 = 3

James Bannerman, the old Scottish pastor, on body life

“According to the arrangement of God, the Christian is more of a Christian in society than alone, and more in the enjoyment of privileges of a spiritual kind when he shares them with others, than when he possesses them apart...The Christian Church was established in the world, to realize the superior advantages of a social over an individual Christianity; and to set up and maintain the communion of the saints.”

J. Bannerman, from the early 1800s, in his 2 vol. set, The Church of Christ, Vol. 1: pages 91-92.

God has made me ready to read something like this, and embrace it. He’s worked on me in this respect for the past 10 years or more. Don’t take me wrong. I have always been a man devoted to the church, but not one dependent on her. I’ve not been one to see that I can only rightly, with great, great enjoyment possess Christ and His benefits in the context of the utter necessity of being dependent on others.

Bannerman says, “superior advantages;” there are higher, deeper things as the church breathes and lives together, as the called-out, gathered people.

O God, give me more repentance from my individualistic superiority.

G. Mark Sumpter

Huffing and Puffing Uphill

Lord, we need Your church in a big way...

“Because evangelicals articulate salvation in such individualistic terms and because modern science and individual reason carry such authority for evangelicals, we do not need the body of Christ for daily victorious Christian existence. In some ways, frankly, we can do without it. We don't need the church to live salvation because we have personal salvation augmented by reason, science, and immediate (charismatic) experience. The church is left with nothing else to do but distribute information, goods, and services to individual Christians. And so, for evangelicals, the church in essence is left to be a sideshow of what God is doing for, in and through individuals. Because of our modernism, we no longer have a need for the church to be the social manifestation of his lordship where he reigns over the powers of sin, evil, death, the prolepsis, the very inbreaking of the kingdom of God.”

From The Great Giveaway by David E. Fitch

G. Mark Sumpter

A Twofer

Two quotes on the communion Christians have with one another in Christ Jesus

“Since all true believers are thus intimately united to Christ as the common Head of the whole body, and the Source of a common life, it follows that they must be initimately united together. If they have but one Head, and all members of one body, they must have one common life, and be all members one of another.”

A.A. Hodge, Princeton Seminary Professor, died in 1886


“Although the Christian has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, it is not a private relationship.”

Phil Ryken, presently the Pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia

G. Mark Sumpter

Preacher, Heal Thyself

It was a dark and stormy night, and all the boys were sitting around...

“The story is not your story or my story or his-story or her-story or some neat story someone read or made up. The story of the sermon and of the hymns and of the processions and of the sacramental acts and of the readings is to be God's story, the story of the Bible. Preachers are the greatest sinners here. The text already is and belongs to the one true story; it does not need to be helped out in this respect. What is said and enacted in the Church must be with the greatest exactitude and faithfulness and exclusivity the story of creation and redemption by the God of Israel and Father of the risen Christ. As we used to say: period.”

Robert W. Jensen in First Things, his article: How the World Lost its Story.

G. Mark Sumpter

Forget About Worshiping at Couch Community Church!

What's Your Reason for Sleeping in and Staying Away From Corporate Worship?

In opening up Hebrews 12:22-24, we get the potent reminder that when we gather in the Lord's presence with His people, we make our way to Zion above, the heavenly assembly! The celebration of God's glory is underway; we get the privilege of joining in the praise and honor of the King. Our voices blend with the saints and angels of glory.

Listen to Ed Clowney on this:

The church is the assembly, not primarily because we meet together in assemblies here on earth but because we have the awesome privilege to gather with the saints and angels with Christ in glory…The author of Hebrews warns us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together (Heb 10:25). As we meet in heaven, so we are to gather on earth. Consider what that means. Our gathering together is not incidental—the church is the assembly of the people of God. Moreover, as we gather we stand in the presence of the Lord. We are in the company of the angels and of all believers. From Clowney's The Living Church, p. 12.

Believer, get up and get moving on Sunday AMs! Forget about worshiping at Beside Baptist or Pillow Presbyterian! Come, join the glorified, eschatological church. The worship of God's people on earth is linked right into the heavenly court of God's holiness and splendor in glory! We've got glory to attend to!

G. Mark Sumpter

Quote for Lent

Loved in Jesus Christ, United in Our Head and Savior!

“What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that HE KNOWS ME. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him because He first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, One who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore when His care falters. This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort—the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates [i.e. does not lose force]—in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.

There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.

There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow humans do not see (and I am glad!), and that He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose. We cannot work these thoughts out here, but merely to mention them is enough to show how much it means to know not merely that we know God, but that He knows us.”

From J. I. Packer’s Knowing God, p. 37 IVP

40 days before Easter, Amen! Lent is a forty-day season before the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the tomb. It begins today on Ash Wednesday, and we reflect on the days of the wilderness-temptation scene of our Lord’s life and ministry. The Sundays are not counted in the forty day period, because each Sunday memorializes the historical reality of His Resurrection. Lent ends on April 3, 2010, the day before Easter.

G. Mark Sumpter

Rolling Up the Sleeves

God's Total Book for Telling it All, for Telling it Well

This is vintage Alan Bloom on the unraveling of the centrality of the Bible for all in American life:

“In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and--as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible--provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing.”

G. Mark Sumpter

Buddies Stick Together

From the Book, Unfashionable---Wise, Faithful Words on the Church Being a Called-Out, Gathered People

“The church is meant to be a God-formed community of people who have abandoned the notion that life can and should be lived in isolation. Christians are connected people—connected with each other by God the Father, through God the Son, in God the Spirit. This is why we make a difference in our community being a different community—Christians working with other Christians, churches with other churches. When we exhibit corporate togetherness, we show the world God's original intention and design, not only for individual human lives, but also for human communities.”

From Multnomah Press, this is the book, Unfashionable by Tullian Tchividjian, see page 110.

G. Mark Sumpter

The Communal Life of Savants

Together the Mind is Renewed

The church communes, shares and participates together as the heart, mind and body of Christ. As far as being the body of Christ, see Acts 9:4; for the mind of Christ, see Phil 2:5; for the heart of Christ, see Eph. 3:17.

We too readily take up the intellectual aspects of Christianity by comforting ourselves with lectures and sermons, along with CDs, blogs, textings and slogans.

Such things can be an individualistic effort. A sermon, a talk, a seminar; there, I've done my duty as teacher or listener.

Harry Blamires penned it well in his book, The Christian Mind, Christianity is emasculated of its intellectual relevance. It remains a vehicle of spiritual and moral guidance at the individual level perhaps; at the communal level it is little more than an expression of sentimentalized togetherness.

p. 16 from Servant Books, 1978

How can we bring intellectual force into our communal life? How can our communal life nurture sound theology?

We must pursue the intellectual faith, but we're to do so communally; and that takes vision and time. 1) Vision to see that our congregational acts of worship (e.g. recitations together, responses, readings, confessions, hymn-singing, gestures, hands raised, knees bent and more) give shape to understanding the faith. 2) It takes time--we must be patient with each other in gaining skills in recitations, for example; and it takes time to learn to sing, read and converse. It also takes time to practice well, and from the heart, bodily gestures as the communal people of God; this too helps us along in learning, acknowledgment and doctrinal maturity.

Isn't it rich, deep theology to read in Scripture of bodily gestures befitting the Lord's presence? When the church participates in such ways as the called-out, together people of God, she grows beyond sentimentality.

Worship must rid herself of sentimentalized togetherness and don the cadence and character of intellectual rigor and triumphal conquer.

G. Mark Sumpter

Called to Something

Here are fresh footprints below by which all should follow. My own interpretation of my background and training was pretty much, Me and Jesus or maybe, Jesus and Me. I have thought for so long that the high ground against 1) spiritual dryness, 2) heresy and 3) want of fruitfulness in discipleship was personal, individualistic Christianity. I heard one of my fellow volunteer hospital chaplains say, "our patients need the church, they really need the church." I nodded in agreement; 8, 10, 15 years ago, I would have shaken my head in disagreement.

At the seminary bookstore, I used to sell this author--he was fairly popular from the IVP book rack.

The gospel call is a call to something, and that something is more than a doctrine or an experience or a heavenly juridicial transaction or the exercise of faith or even, exclusively, Jesus Christ. The gospel intends to call persons to the body of Christ, that is, the community of believers with Jesus Christ as its essential and sovereign head.

Howard Snyder, in his The Community of the King, IVP, 1977.

Lord, help me grow in my practice of the affirmation that when You save, You save Your people; it is Your church--the professing believers and their children--that is the divinely ordained context of Your saving power. Give me Jesus, Give me Jesus that I might stand alongside of others, within His body.

G. Mark Sumpter

Fuss Over Politicization

It's been newsy for the past 30-40 years that ethical issues for our everday living have become politicized. The Supreme Court and Capitol Hill are the sole gatekeepers of right and wrong, and therefore, unjust actions by the powers that be leave Christians without recourse and hope. Politicization, we are told, gives muscle and leverage for the agenda of the unfaithful professing church, the unbelieving media outlets and the wrong-headed legislation on the part of those at the state and federal levels. I fail to see the concern over this. It's only showing us what the Bible affirms. Issues and practice are made law (legislative and judicial government) and reported on (media) and therefore, matters are politicized very naturally because life falls out of, stems from, God's image in man. Dogs bark and cats meow. Man bears the imago religio, the mark and image of being a religious creature. Man cannot help but name (Genesis 2:19), decree (Daniel 3:1-7) and legislate (John 19:1-7). And it's always plainly and inescapably done morally, religiously. The fact that the realms of corporate ethics, federalism, education, and bio-medical research and practice, to name a few, snatch and use the state-craft and political activity of proposed, evaluated, debated, and eventually regulated law only makes the line in the sand clear. Everything is politics, but politics is not everything. We're being shown once again that God is good to provide His restraint so that man does not go his full way into sin, via God's providential watch care and the conscience of man, and at the same time, we're seeing that our God is good, showing us the commission to preach, teach and evangelize. The executive, legislative and judicial branches of public office in the USA need to be confronted with Jesus Christ and Him crucified. If anything, the politicization of issues gives leverage to the Christian. The line in the sand is telling: enmity, division, morality, man's autonomy, God's law, and the gospel. Put me in coach, I'm ready to play. Man is either for Jesus or against Him. Politicization of issues reminds us of the church's primary calling: God's worship, preaching His Word and administering the Sacraments. We either bow to God or we bow to Satan and unbelieving man.

G. Mark Sumpter