Ortlund and Whitefield - The Archaeology of Repentance

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/rayortlund/2012/02/15/the-archaeology-of-repentance/

The archaeology of repentance
In a sermon preached during the First Great Awakening, George Whitefield laid bare the four archaeological layers always uncovered in true repentance. Preaching on “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14), Whitefield said that before we can speak peace to our hearts:

One, “You must be made to see, made to feel, made to weep over, made to bewail, your actual transgressions against the law of God.” The dawning of realism. Honesty. Brokenhearted self-awareness. “Was ever the remembrance of your sins grievous to you? Was the burden of your sins intolerable to your thoughts? Did ever any such thing as this pass between God and your soul? If not, for Jesus Christ’s sake, do not call yourselves Christians.”

Two, “You must be convinced of the foundation of all your transgressions. And what is that? I mean original sin.” We realize that, even when we haven’t acted on our impulses, the very fact that our hearts rise up against God is itself damning. All self-hope stripped away. “When the sinner is first awakened, he begins to wonder, ‘How came I to be so wicked?’ The Spirit of God then strikes in and shows that he has no good thing in him by nature.”

Three, “You must be troubled for the sins of your best duties and performances.” Our righteous self-images start to unravel, our excuses, our rationalizations, our entitlements. Every self-invented refuge collapses. “You must be brought to see that God may damn you for the best prayer you ever put up. Our best duties are so many splendid sins. There must be a deep conviction before you can be brought out of your self-righteousness; it is the last idol taken out of the heart.”

Four, “There is one particular sin you must be greatly troubled for, and yet I fear there are few of you think what it is. It is the reigning, the damning sin of the Christian world, and yet the Christian world seldom or never thinks of it. And pray what is that? It is what most of you think you are not guilty of, and that is the sin of unbelief.” Treating God as unreal at a functional level in our hearts and lives and churches and strategies. “Most of you have not so much faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as the devil himself. I am persuaded the devil believes more of the Bible than most of you do.”

“One more then. Before you can speak peace to your heart, you must not only be convinced of your actual and original sin, the sins of your own righteousness, the sin of unbelief, but you must be enabled to lay hold upon the perfect righteousness, the all-sufficient righteousness, of the Lord Jesus Christ. Then you shall have peace.”

Select Sermons of George Whitefield, pages 75-95.

Discipleship 101

Discipleship 101: How to Disciple a New Believer

How do you disciple new believers?

Discipleship involves a lot, but one of the most important things you can do with a new believer is read the Bible with them–teaching them how to read, understand, respond to, and apply God’s Word.

There are two men in their 20s who came to faith in Christ in recent weeks through the ministry of our church. I’m discipling these guys right now. I baptized them a few weeks ago. One of the core ways I’m discipling them is through weekly Bible reading meetings. This is how I do it:

-Every Wednesday night these guys come to my house to join in our Neighborhood Group with a bunch of other people from our church and neighborhood.

-I have the guys come 30 minutes early so that the three of us can read the Bible together.

-Each week we read one paragraph of Scripture together and talk about it. Right now we’re reading Philippians because it’s the book I’m preaching through, it’s the book all of our Neighborhood Groups are studying, and because I think Philippians is a pivotal book to master for new believers.

-Each week I ask the guys two questions about the text: 1) What did this text mean in its original 1st century context? 2) What does this text mean for our lives today? As we work through these 2 questions I connect our thoughts to Jesus and the bigger storyline of Scripture.

-From 30 minutes of Bible reading and these two questions we end up covering a ton of theological and practical ground. Last week’s study of Philippians 1:3-11 led to conversation about the Trinity, the second coming of Christ, how to pray, and God’s sovereignty and human responsibility.

Most believers have never been intentionally discipled and most believers have no clue how to go about discipling a new believer. The problem is that people don’t have a good understanding of what discipleship is. Here’s a definition for you:

Discipleship is truth transferred through relationship.

It’s that simple. What I’m doing with these two men on Wednesday nights is transferring truth through relationship. I love these two men, and they know it. In relationship with them I’m teaching them the truth, and at the center of that process is teaching them how to read, rejoice in, and apply God’s Word.

What are you waiting for? Find two people you can start doing this with.

http://www.justinbuzzard.net/2012/02/15/discipleship-101-how-to-disciple-a-new-believer/

Budziszewski on Sex

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=18-06-022-f

Highlights:

Naomi Wolf, in her book Promiscuities, reports that when she lost her own virginity at age 15, there was “something important missing.” Apparently, the thing missing was the very sense that anything could be important. In her book Last Night in Paradise, Katie Roiphe poignantly wonders what could be wrong with freedom: “It’s not the absence of rules exactly, the dizzying sense that we can do whatever we want, but the sudden realization that nothing we do matters.”

....

Sex is like applying adhesive tape; promiscuity is like ripping the tape off again. If you rip it off, rip it off, rip it off, eventually the tape can’t stick anymore. This probably contributes to an even wider social problem that might be called the Peter Pan syndrome. Men in their forties with children in their twenties talk like boys in their teens. “I still don’t feel like a grown-up,” they say. They don’t even call themselves men—just “guys.”

...

The first objection is that it is rubbish to talk about natural purposes, because we merely imagine them; the purposes of things aren’t natural; they are merely in the eye of the beholder. But is this true? Take the lungs, for example. When we say that their purpose is to oxygenate the blood, are we just making that up? Of course not. The purpose of oxygenation isn’t in the eye of the beholder; it’s in the design of the lungs themselves. There is no reason for us to have lungs apart from it.

Suppose a young man is more interested in using his lungs to get high by sniffing glue. What would you think of me if I said, “That’s interesting—I guess the purpose of my lungs is to oxygenate my blood, but the purpose of his lungs is to get high”? You’d think me a fool, and rightly so. The purpose of the lungs is built into the design of the lungs. He doesn’t change that purpose by sniffing glue; he only violates it.

...

The second objection is that it doesn’t make any difference even if we can ascertain the purpose or purposes of the sexual powers, because an is does not imply an ought. This currently unquestioned dogma, too, is false. If the purpose of eyes is to see, then eyes that see well are good eyes, and eyes that see poorly are poor ones. Given their purpose, this is what it means for eyes to be good.

Moreover, good is to be pursued; the appropriateness of pursuing it is what it means for anything to be good. Therefore, the appropriate thing to do with poor eyes is to try to turn them into good ones. If it really were impossible to derive an ought from the is of the human design, then the practice of medicine would make no sense. Neither would the practice of health education.

7 Tips for Talking with Your Neighbors About Jesus

http://theresurgence.com/2012/01/16/7-tips-for-talking-with-your-neighbors-about-jesus

Carson on Hell

"The reason people think that when you move from the old covenant to the new, the depiction of wrath is downplayed, is because people don't believe in hell. We're far more afraid of famine, sword and pestilience than we are of hell."

D.A. Carson

Sermon: New Perspectives on Paul - Part 3

about 23 minutes in.

Escape from Nihilism

http://communiquejournal.org/q5_nihilism.html

by J. Budziszewski (Boo-jee-shef-skee)

My editor--may he forgive me for quoting him--thinks my dismissal of my previous rationalizations as elaborate nonsense seems too pat. Is it really that simple? Well, yes, it really is. In my present opinion (though not my opinion of seventeen years ago), modern ethics is going about matters backwards. It assumes that the problem of human sin is mainly cognitive--that it has to do with the state of our knowledge. In other words, it holds that we really don't know what's right and wrong and that we are trying to find out. Actually the problem is volitional--it has to do with the state of our will. In other words, by and large we do know the basics of right and wrong but wish we didn't, and we are trying, for one reason or another, to keep ourselves in ignorance. Is this an ad hominem argument--that because my motive was bad, my nihilism must have been false? No, it is a diagnosis, with myself as case in point. My nihilism was false because it was self-referentially incoherent. (There certainly may exist nihilisms that are false for reasons other than self-referential incoherency, but I am speaking only of the version I held myself.) The motive was bad because although I knew this to be the case, I embraced the incoherency rather than give up the nihilism. What one must do with such a fellow as I once was is not to tell him what he doesn't know (because he really knows it), but to blow away the smokescreens by which he hides from the knowledge he has already.

See above for (unintentional) discussion of depravity and corruption of the will.
...

But the main reason I was a nihilist, the reason that tied all these other reasons together, was sheer, mulish pride. I didn't want God to be God; I wanted J. Budziszewski to be God. I see that now. But I didn't see that then.

...

It is a matter of awe to me that God has permitted me to make any contribution at all. His promise is that if only the rebel turns to Jesus Christ in repentant faith, giving up claims of self-ownership and allowing this Christ the run of the house, he will redeem everything there is in it. Just so, it was through my rescue from self-deception that I learned about self-deception. He has redeemed even my nihilist past and put it to use.