The story is told of Johann Sebastian Bach and his own reflections about diligence. He was asked about his growth in skill, his proficiency and expertise as a musician.
Occasionally he was asked what measures he had undertaken to reach so high a degree of skill in his art. He usually replied: "I have had to be diligent. If anyone will be equally diligent, he will be able to accomplish just as much." He did not make much of, even as he did not depend on, his superior native endowments. From the book, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Master and His Work
Dick Kaufmann, my pastor and professor in Escondido, often exhorted us to turn away from laziness and sloppy work. If you don't want to work, don't go into the pastorate. Exacting diligence is required. I often found Dick having 3 X 5 cards upright and visible, attached to his car dashboard; he was rehearsing, meditating on, and re-working texts and thoughts of sermon notes. It was like looking at a GPS. Diligence to the 10th power.
G. Mark Sumpter
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
This past week, I spent nearly 18 hours at a seminar on the basics of Christian growth. It's the first seminar I've been to where nearly half of it was the public reading of God's Word, the Bible. Genesis 1:1-Revelation 22:21, paragraph after paragraph, verse after verse, nothing but reading. The instructor introduced the topic, then called on the readers. We read the same English version. Moments were allowed for finding texts, and then there would be the reading. A moment or two was allowed for focus and thought.
The reading of the texts of the Bible was stunning. It was so very instructive and edifying.
Paul told Timothy: Till I come, give attention to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. 1 Tim. 4:13.
G. Mark Sumpter
TAKE A WALK IN THE STREETS AGAIN IN YOUR MIND AMERICA…REALLY BEAUTIFUL? SO MANY UNKIND THE HOMES WITH PAIN, AND VARIED WITH NEED, EDUCATION, BUSINESS, AND GOVERNMENT GREED BIO-ETHICS, SAME-SEX UNIONS, GUNS AND DEATH PASTORS AND PORNOGRAPHY, KIDS AND METH IS JESUS REALLY RULING? REIGNING? WHERE IS HIS CHURCH? I THINK SO….I SURELY HOPE SO… WE’RE ALL IN A LURCH. IS THERE ANYTHING TO TRUST AT THE END OF THE DAY? WHERE CAN I GO, WHERE CAN I TURN, WHAT CAN I SAY?Jesus is addressing faith in John 14:12-following, “Truly, Truly, I say to you, He who believes in Me the works that I do, He will do also….” What is faith? Is it being positive about life? Is it an ability that faith itself has? Maybe it’s a quality that triggers the can-do work of God? What is this thing, faith?Faith is the instrument, the means that God has appointed by which He places the gift of salvation and its fruit into our hands. More than a placement into our hands; it is the reality and security of being united to Jesus Christ. It is being in Him, and He being in us!What is this salvation? What fruit? It’s the saving person and the saving fruit of the person and work of Jesus Christ. By the means of faith, He gives us Jesus Christ. It’s Christ being ours and at the same time Christ quickening us to abandoned fleshly works.In having Jesus, our God provides the Holy Spirit (vss. 17-18), by Whom and through Whom there is fruitfulness. Please note the fruit as displayed in the Book of Acts.Why fret over the world and its fruit? Our Master told us, Let not your heart be troubled. Let us go from faith to faith: asking, claiming, yielding, repenting, trusting and stepping out.G. Mark Sumpter
When the church says to the world, “Hey, come up to God's high ground...,” we do this for the purpose of keeping the line of the applications of God's standards clear in order to press home the very matter that God has standards.
We don't want to de-fang the witness of faithful worship. Biblical worship has the teeth that the world is spiritually hungry for. People are spiritually hungry, but the reason for their hunger is because they continue to refuse to eat the food God has prepared. We need to serve up God's meal that meets man's need.
We must not shrink back from saying that the church's call is to have her worship culture out in front and center. Every church has a culture. Is it a biblical one?
Worship cultures are inescapable. And also, every realm of society has one---education, entertainment, business, neighborhood support groups, the medical community, volunteer clubs, athletic groups, charitable organizations, etc, etc, ----everyone has a culture (language, dress, rituals, forms of protocols and rules, leaders and followers, mission statements, etc, etc.).
The church is chiefly the organism to set the standards of her own culture that informs and transforms others. Every other sphere of society---relative to the home and to the state must take their cues from the church. She is at the center of God's witness. She needs to be different for the very purpose of being God's city on a hill; and to be His salt in the earth.
G. Mark Sumpter
Back to the matter of the church being a mimic to the world----back to the point relative to Paul's evangelistic methodology and missionary strategy: Our greatest downfall in making attempts to relate to the world happens while having well-meant intentions and sincere applications of practice, but lowering the bar of exacting discipleship. Exacting discipleship is about being torn away from self, getting rid of self. First and foremost it is to tear self away from self in that we're to remember that we stand before our holy God. For some examples with respect to public worship, 1. When we lower the bar about dress and clothing in worship and we say casual dress is OK; 2. When we lower the bar about suitable propriety in worship of the body's posture of standing, sitting or kneeling, and we say bar stools, lawn chairs and coffee bars are OK; 3. When we lower the bar on the primary means of the physical ear being what God over and over again addresses as the priority entry-gate into man for gaining His people's attention; and so we lower the bar and say it is OK to start making the physical eye disproportionately more important than the ear, so we have mini-dramas and skits, dialogs for sermons, and the like, and such things are OK.In these cases, we lower the bar and right away, almost automatically, surrender our witness to the world. This is the primary danger of lowering the bar in the name of relating to the culture. The worldly culture already has her dress, posture and eye-gate interests. Why would the church want to mimic the world on like matters? When we do, we surrender God's moral high ground.G. Mark Sumpter
I see public worship as the dominant, most important application and expression of ways and means to relate well, and to relate righteously, with the world. I think of the predominant and repetitive exhortations to Israel to be who she is in the world as a faithful worshiping people. The world is a worshiping community--either for God or against God. When God's people worship well, they both mimic the world and subdue the world. G. Mark Sumpter
In order to properly get in touch with the world, to be in it, to be like it, and to be immersed in it for witness and ministry's sake, the church is NOT to allow the isolated texts of Scripture about Paul's missionary methodology to drive our application. For example, when Paul had Timothy circumcised--Acts 16:3 or when Paul spoke of himself as being like those without the law--1 Cor. 9:21, I am not convinced that these texts ought to be the ones that should chiefly characterize our mimic and likeness unto the world. They may at times be the things that we do--and they might at times be the attitudes that we show forth. But I do not see them as the dominant orbit around which our relating to and our witness to the world spins. I do not see these as the dominant points of mimic from Paul. We, today, for some reason are enamored with these texts; we are given to using them as tell-tale dominant paradigms from which to derive or give shape to our ability to be in the world in a righteous way. I'm not persuaded of their dominant role. G. Mark Sumpter
“We are finite beings and therefore cannot be self-sufficient. We are utterly dependent upon others, and the longer we live, the more we feel this fact. He is a fool who thinks he can live by himself. It is impossible. Nevertheless, many people are very attracted to the Romantic idea of escaping into the wilderness, living by themselves, and not depending on anyone else. It is attractive because God alone is self-sufficient, and every rebel wants to be like Him. There is something in the heart of sinful man which dislikes being indebted to anyone. If man is indebted, he is obligated to show his gratitude, and sinful man is not grateful. Instead, he wants everyone to be indebted to him. But God will humble and teach anyone who thinks in this way. He will teach him, one way or another, that he cannot be independent and that God alone is self-sufficient.” From “Friendship: Its Necessity and Obligations,” a chapter out of the book Face to Face, Meditations on Friendship and Hospitality by Steve Wilkins, Canon Press, 2002.
When is the last time you've thought of the hunger for a getaway to a cabin retreat as rebellious, typifying self-sufficiency with respect to wanting to have your space, ample distance from others? Maybe if I saw people more and more as God's good gifts to help me along in my growth in dependency, the foolish longing to escape from others would be properly corralled.
Life is not only coram deo; it is also very much coram populo.
G. Mark Sumpter
“
We must recover the Protestant confidence in the comprehensibility of this world. Rather than pursuing superstitious worldviews that focus on cosmic battles between demons and angels, we should regain our love affair with the material world of God's creation--not in the sense of replacing our hope for heaven with a satisfaction with earth, but in the realization that the entire focus of Christianity and its biblical text is the unfolding of God's purposes right here in this world, in real human history.”
From Michael Horton's chapter, “
Christianity and Modern Science: Can't We Be Friends?,” found in Where in the World is the Church, p. 135
G. Mark Sumpter
As St. Louis All-Star first baseman Albert Pujols boldly keeps talking of the walk he has with the Lord Jesus Christ, he will get tested more and more about his profession.
He'll be in the hometown limelight tonight and tomorrow night with the 2009 Major League All Star campaign going on. Walk that talk, Albert, walk it out.
He commented today in USA TODAY that's he clean, that he doesn't do "that crap," referring to roids. May God draw near to him and give him an increasing faithful testimony before a stage that is so racked with hypocrisy.
G. Mark Sumpter
I plan to offer quotes and commentary based on the writing and speaking of OPC ministers, teachers, pastors and ruling elders from time to time. We'll call it, OPC Cooking. Supper's on boys, come and get it.
Below is a quote by the late Charles G. Dennison, an OPC pastor. I have greatly valued his writing and speaking. If you get a chance to pick up and listen to his lectures on the OPC's history and culture done at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, I believe he did these lectures back in 1992 or 1993, get em. They're superior scholarship, well-delivered and practically insightful.
OK. To Mr. Dennison's paragraph from an OPC publication,
...all in the covenant legally speaking are beckoned and judged by the covenant "communionally" speaking. At issue here is not just an accounting for covenant desertion but more positively an approach to covenant children. They are in the covenant and at the same time beckoned and scrutinized by the covenant in its ideal form. The sign and seal by which they are included in the covenant is a testimony to the radical character of sin and God's grace. Far from a witness to their superiority, it evidences a common heritage in sinful humanity from which they have been separated by a gracious covenant for fellowship with God. From the book, Pressing Toward the Mark, "Thoughts on the Covenant," pp.10-11.
Comments:
1. Commonly, theologians refer to the legal arrangement of the covenant in that there's a bond between two parties. Simply put, there's a legal tie between the parties; it's an agreement.
2. Next, theologians speak of the intimacy, closeness, fellowship or communion between the two parties of the covenant. Mr. Dennison calls it the "communional" aspect. The parties of the covenant are to draw near, come close, and enjoy the sweetness of living fellowship. Only the eternally elect know this closeness with God.
3. Mr. Dennision speaks of the role that the communional aspect plays with the legal. His point? The absence of the communional aspect is telling. When a man, woman or child does not tend to the conditions of drawing near to God, he or she backslides, grows cold, maybe eventually hardens himself or hershelf and falls away from the covenant. Such ones desert God, cutting off themselves from intimacy and fellowship. In the words of Jesus, fruit is missing. The presence or absence of covenant communion becomes a standard of judgment---is this person walking with Christ or deserting Christ?
4. Next, Mr. Dennison speaks of covenant children. What strikes me here is how Dennison speaks of baptized covenant children as a model for all humanity, for all ages over the span of life. All covenant members are being summoned about something seen in the sign and seal applied to covenant children. Along with other reasons, the sign of water baptism is applied to children to make sure all of us grasp two things: 1) our sin is ugly, real and must be continually brought under God's love and forgiveness over one's lifetime, 2) God's grace is beautiful, real and must be relied on over one's whole life. Once again, Dennison is saying: Covenant communion judges our walk with the Lord--do we keep acknowledging our sin and need from cleansing, from the start of our days on earth? Do we keep acknowledging that where sin abounded, grace abounds more and more, deeper and deeper from start to finish, from our earliest age to our last breath?
5. Baptized children show us the truth about all humanity. Children, right from the get-go when a baby comes into the world----boom----right out of the womb, from the youngest days of life, carry the billboard sign: Sinners Need Washing.
G. Mark Sumpter
