Happy Reformation Day! :-)

After darkness... Light!

Embracing Imbalance

If you're the kind of person who is always trying to balance God, always tempering talk of abundant grace with reminders of reverent awe and justice, then read this...

“We don’t need to minimize the intimacy God offers us in order to protect our respect and awe for God, we just need to remember who our Father is!”

and then go here.

Repeating C. S Lewis on the Overflowing Love of God.

Not long ago, I posted this quote from the Screwtape letters. Given what Scott said this morning it bares repeating:

One must face the fact that all talk of his [God's] love for men, and his service being perfect freedom is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself - creatures, whose life, on it's miniature scale, will be qualitatively like his own, not because he has absorbed them, but because their wills freely conform to his. We want cattle who finally become food, He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled. He is full and flows over.

For context and post in full, click here.

Here is Love: Sermon Notes

Presentation only has a hope of making sense when viewed in tandem with the notes.



Numbers below correspond to slides in the presentation.

Parable of Permanence

As my eyes turn more towards thinking about how to prepare for married life (hence the paucity of posts here), I recently stumbled upon a book on marriage by John Piper...

I haven't read the book, and probably won't, but the title alone: This Momentary Marriage - A Parable of Permanence, sums up beautifully and succinctly the joy and temporality of marriage.

I have at times felt a little uneasy about the way we in the church endorse marriage.  (Make no mistake, I think it should be supported strongly. Yet...) It sometimes comes across (probably due to my own insecurities), as an end in itself.

Piper, I think balances the tension well, when he addresses his wife in his acknowledgements at the end of the book. He says:

Noël, if we live another twenty years (till I am eighty-two and you are eighty), the marriage will be sixty years old. And judging from what I see in the Bible and my memory, it will have been a momentary marriage. But it has been so much more than momentary. It is a parable of permanence written from eternity about the greatest story that ever was. The parable is about Christ and his church. It has been a great honor to take this stage with you. What exalted roles we have been given to play! Someday I will take your hand, and stand on this stage, and make one last bow. The parable will be over, and the everlasting Reality will begin.