Sunday, December 19, 2010

The Hidden Life of Prayer

This book is short in pages but large in content and you will not be disappointed. You can read it online for free but the book is packed with footnotes that are also rich in content. I would highly encourage you to pick this book up. You can find it online for about $10.

These endorsements for The Hidden Life of Prayer: The Lifeblood of the Christian—originally published in 1891—make me eager to get it, read it, and put it into practice.
“God brings books at their appointed times. The Hidden Life of Prayer arrived late but well-timed. This little jewel-strewn tapestry has done for me at 64 what Bounds’ Power Through Prayer did at 34. I could be ashamed that I need inspiration for the highest privilege. But I choose to be thankful.”
—John Piper, Senior Pastor, Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota

“”I have read The Hidden Life of Prayer again and again since Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia first gave it to me when I visited there as a prospective student forty years ago. Every time I read this book, the Lord uses it to deepen my prayer life and encourage my faith. I strongly recommend it!”
—Wayne Grudem, Research Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies, Phoenix Seminary, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

“It was in 1971 I first read this book I was shown a copy in Al Martin’s home and he told me how he used it, which plan I took up enthusiastically and have used ever since. I have read it through aloud during a week of morning meetings with various assistants and with deacons before they have started work. . . . Every time I read it I discover something fresh, convicting and helpful. The book does not make you afraid of prayer. It has a fragrance of Disruption times and the Awakening in the middle of the 19th century, in fact the author was born in that great year of 1859. He later married the daughter of Andrew Bonar and that warm piety and close walk with God characterizes this, McIntyre’s best book.
—Geoff Thomas, Alfred Place Baptist Church (Independent), Aberystwyth, Wales

Merry Christmas

Dear Faith Family,

This time of year provides lots of opportunities to stop and reflect on the months that have flown by and to think about the ones that, if the Lord wills, we will live to see in 2011. Every review of the past testifies to the truthfulness of the hymn-writer's words based on a letter from the Puritan pastor, Samuel Rutherford,
With mercy and with judgment my web of time He wove,
And, yes, the dews of sorrow were lustered with His love.
("The Sands of Time Are Sinking")
One cannot live without some regrets. The presence of sin in the world and in our hearts means that we have not yet finished a day in which everything we did was exactly right. But one cannot live as a Christian without thanksgiving that overshadows the sorrows. Don't you find it to be true that, when you look back over your life, you see many reasons to praise and thank the Lord for His grace and goodness to you? We see how He has been faithful in keeping His promises and gracious in dealing with us kindly.

Past mercies help undergird our present hope for the future. As we consider God's ways with us over the last twelve months, we are encouraged to trust Him for whatever He brings into our lives in the year ahead. As we consider how the Lord has helped us thus far, we are strengthened in our faith to depend on Him as we move into the future. Past grace guarantees future grace.

The foundation of this hope is found in what I believe is one of the greatest promise in all Scripture – Romans 8:32. He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Paul is saying to us, "Look back at all that God has done in giving us Jesus Christ." He did not spare His only begotten Son, which is a calculated way of reminding us that He did send Him to the horrible death on the cross. God "delivered Him up" to that painful and shameful death so that we, His people, could have our sins forgiven and lives transformed.

If God did not spare even His Son in order to provide for us, how can we think for even a moment that He would fail to give us anything we need in the future? The Cross of Jesus Christ guarantees that God will graciously provide for us all that we need both in this life and the life to come. That is why Jesus Christ came to earth. That is why He was born.

So as you celebrate Christmas, with whatever traditions and activities that you and yours enjoy, take advantage of the opportunity to praise God afresh for what Paul calls the "unspeakable," gift of His Son. It’s unspeakable because there is nothing that comes close in comparison. If you have Christ you can be sure that, from your heavenly Father's kind hand, you have and will have everything you need.

Have a blessed and merry Christmas!

Igniting a Passion for Christ,

Thursday, December 16, 2010

O Little Town of Bethlehem

One of the highlights for me during the celebration of our Saviors birth is the singing of Christmas carols.  One of my favorites (I say that about all of them) is “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.  Below is a little background on this wonderful Christmas hymn.
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.... Luke 2:4
This beloved Christmas carol is from the pen of one of America’s outstanding preachers of the past century, Phillips Brooks. In his day he was often referred to as the “Prince of the Pulpit.” His many published volumes of sermons have since become classics of American literature. He is said to have won the hearts of people with his preaching and writing as few clergymen have ever done.

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” was written in 1868, several years after Brooks had returned from a trip to the Holy Land. The experience of spending Christmas Eve in Bethlehem and worshipping in the Church of the Nativity, thought to be the place of Christ’s birth, made an indelible impression upon the young preacher. Three years later, while pastor at the Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he was searching for a new carol for his children to sing in their Sunday School Christmas program. The still vivid memory of his Holy Land visit inspired Brooks to write this text.

Brooks gave a copy of the newly written carol to his organist and Sunday School superintendent, Lewis H. Redner, and asked him to compose a simple melody that children could sing easily. Redner was known throughout the Philadelphia area as a devoted Christian leader in Sunday School work as well as one deeply interested in church music. He struggled for a considerable time to contrive just the right tune for his pastor’s text. On the evening before the program was to be given, he suddenly awakened from his sleep and quickly composed the present melody. Redner always insisted that the tune was a gift from heaven. The carol was an immediate favorite with the children, as it has been with children and adults around the world to the present time. It was first published in 1874. Although Brooks wrote a number of other Christmas and Easter carols especially for children, this is the only one to survive the test of time.

Bibliography:

Kenneth W. Osbeck, 101 Hymn Stories (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 1982), 187.

Monday, December 13, 2010

To Treasure and Ponder

Well it’s a snowy blustery day and as I look out my window it’s just breathtaking.  The blog today is simply a prayer that is taken from the blog by a pastor Scotty Smith in Franklin Tennessee.  The prayer says, “It’s always been easier for me to do ‘productive’ things for you, rather than spend undistracted, unrushed time with you. I confess this as sin.” I know far too much about this, about doing in place of knowing. “An informed mind is not the same thing as an enflamed heart… by any stretch.” Amen! Maybe you need to pray this too.
Gracious Jesus, the juxtaposition of images in the nativity scene are almost too much to wrap my tiny heart around. Your mother, Mary, is just beginning to nurse and know you. Even as I write these words I realize what a holy mystery and immeasurable condescension your incarnation was. You, the very God who created all things… the Lord who sustains all things by the power of your word… the King who is making all things new… as a baby you drew life-sustaining nourishment from a young maiden’s breast. I’m stunned by your inconceivable humility—a humility that marked your life from cradle to cross.
Shepherds ran off to spread the word of your birth, while Mary “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” “Hurrying off” like a shepherd to tell others about you has always been easier for me than sitting still and letting you tell me about yourself. It’s always been easier for me to do “productive” things for you, rather than spend undistracted, unrushed time with you. I confess this as sin, Jesus. This simply isn’t okay, for knowing about you is not the same thing as knowing you. An informed mind is not the same thing as an enflamed heart… by any stretch.
To know you is eternal life, and I do want to know you, Jesus… so much better than I already do. I want to treasure you in my heart and ponder who you are. I want to contemplate your joyful life within the Trinity, from all eternity. I want to marinate in everything you’ve already accomplished through your life, death and resurrection… and everything you’re presently doing as the King of kings and Lord of lords… and everything you will be to us in the new heaven and new earth—the Bridegroom of your beloved Bride.
O, blessed circuit board overloading and breaking glory… there’s so much to treasure and so much to ponder. It’s not as though I’m a stranger to treasuring and pondering. I treasure and ponder a lot of things, Jesus—things, however, that lead to a bankrupt spirit…an impoverished heart… and a spent body.
Jesus, this very Advent season, by the power of the gospel, slow all of us down… settle us afresh… center us on yourself, that each of us might say with awe and adoration, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And being with you, I desire nothing on earth. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Ps 73:25-26).” So very Amen, we pray, in your peerless and priceless name.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

The General: William Booth

We will be “ringing the bells” again this year and I thought it would be good for us to know a little history behind the Salvation Army.  By the way, there is still some slots left to sign up. 

William Booth was born in economic and spiritual poverty, yet he founded a worldwide organization dedicated to their eradication.
by Norman H. Murdoch
Few would deny William Booth the title “The Prophet of the Poor.” He is best known today as founder and first general of The Salvation Army, an organization that exists to bring a better life to the poor through both social and spiritual salvation.
Booth urging sinners to repent. Booth preached in naphtha-lit tents on disused burial grounds (shown here), haylofts, rooms behind a pigeon shop—anywhere to fulfill his famous words, “Go for souls and go for the worst!”
Pawnbroker’s Apprentice
Yet Booth did not come to this high appellation by a direct route; he was not to the manor born. Rather he was born in relative poverty, in Sneinton, a Nottingham, England suburb, on April 10, 1829. One biographer described William’s father, Samuel, as “an illiterate speculative builder.” His mother, Mary Moss Booth, was Samuel’s second wife. The Booths were at best laboring class, with little education. His father, “a Grab, a Get,” by William’s definition, died when William was just 14. By that time William was helping to earn the family income by working as a pawnbroker’s apprentice. Mrs. Booth ran a small shop in a poor Nottingham district where she sold household wares.
Life-Changing Influences
After his father’s death, a Wesleyan couple invited William to attend chapel. William’s family had not been religious, although they had had William baptized at the Sneinton parish church (Anglican) two days after his birth. William’s conversion at age 15 cannot be fixed in time or place. Various biographers describe it as coming in the streets of Nottingham, in the Broad Street Wesleyan Chapel where evangelist Isaac Marsden was leading a revival, or in a small prayer meeting. William did recall a long siege of conviction after he had made a profit in a transaction with a friend. He remembered the relief he felt when his guilt was removed.

Soon after his conversion William had another life-changing experience: hearing American revivalist James Caughey, who led “a remarkable religious awakening” at Nottingham’s Wesleyan Chapel. The rush of souls to hear the gospel led Booth to see that “soul-saving results may be calculated upon when proper means are used for their accomplishment.” Booth went on to make a lifelong commitment to the scientific revivalism methods of Charles G. Finney.

With Caughey’s example fresh in mind, Booth and a group of friends set out to evangelize the poor of Meadow Platts. They held nightly open-air addresses, after which they invited people to meetings in cottages. Their use of lively songs, short exhortations calling for a decision for Christ, visitation of the sick and of converts (whose names and addresses they recorded) all anticipated methods Booth would write into Salvation Army Orders and Regulations thirty years later.
Mission to Military Movement
In 1854 William was ordained in the Methodist New Connexion. By 1861 he found that “settled ministry” did not suit him, and he resigned. He and Catherine became itinerant evangelists in Wales, Cornwall, and the Midlands, Britain’s “burned-over” districts.

Booth had seen no career for himself in urban evangelism when he left the New Connexion. But an invitation for Catherine to preach in London in 1865 led him to accept support from lay-run East London missions as a temporary solution to his vocational quandary. He soon organized his own East London Christian Mission which, by 1870, resembled a Methodist society. His mission failed to attract the “heathen masses,” however. So in 1878, he energized it by giving it the name “salvation army,” an idea he borrowed from the successful British Volunteer Movement in which thousands of working-class men found that civilian soldiering during their leisure hours gave them new status.

The Salvation Army struggled to win converts in London’s East End and other urban areas in which Irish mobs attacked Wesleyan intruders into their neighborhoods. So Booth again found a popular idea that solved his problems. Women Salvationists, working in slums since 1883, convinced him that reform activities would save sinners from a heathen urban environment and breathe new life into his mission.

Booth agreed, which ultimately led him to become both the leader of a worldwide evangelistic mission and a renowned social reformer. At the time of his death on August 20, 1912, the Salvation Army had become a family-run Christian empire, with seven of the Booths’ eight children (one daughter was retarded) taking leadership positions. (Four of these were women, and one, Evangeline, became the Army’s fourth general in 1934.) William Booth bequeathed to his son Bramwell the generalship of the Salvation Army, a religious and social service organization whose 15,945 officers “occupied” 58 countries and colonies. Today, following the pattern established by the first general, the Salvation Army marches on with over 25,000 officers in 91 countries.

Bibliography:
Christian History Magazine-Issue 26: William & Catherine Booth: Salvation Army Founders (Carol Stream, IL: Christianity Today, 1990).