November's Thanksgiving: Participation

I'm thankful for everyone who participated in this month of thankgiving. It was a real joy to see, every day, what others were thankful for. God's provision for us is an amazing thing, and I'm thankful for all the reminders not to take it all for granted.

Rounding up the last of the thanksgiving posts for this month:

• LeeAnn is thankful for bloggers.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for the transforming power of God's word.
• Columbine is thankful for a hat and gray eyes.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for this thankful exercise, too.
• Sam has a list.
  

(I put this together last night, and then accidently saved the post as a draft rather than publishing it. That's what happens when I post late at night!)

Thinking About Faith Alone and Christ Alone, Part 3

The first post in this series considered the relationship between faith and Christ's work: what it means that Christ's work is the grounds for our salvation, and that faith is the means by which we receive salvation. The second post looked at why, if salvation is in Christ alone, there is no other instrument but faith that would fit with it as a receptor for it. In this post I want to begin the discussion of incorrect ways of thinking about faith's role in the process of salvation--ideas about faith that move it out of the realm of means only, and right over into the realm of grounds for salvation.

What I've done is collect a few statements about faith, belief, and salvation that I've seen in the recent past--mostly from discussion boards--that, taken at face value, move faith over into the realm of grounds of salvation. I'll be looking at the statements one or two at a time in order to keep the posts of bloggish length.

I understand, as well, that these remarks may be made casually, without the expectation that they would be examined for their technicalities. However, if this is the way someone thinks about salvation, then they are missing out a little by not understanding the completeness--the perfection--of what was accomplished for them by Christ. It can't hurt, then, to look at the statements critically if it helps us think a little more clearly about the role of faith in salvation.

First up, let's look at this one, which is probably the least subtle way of making faith the grounds for our salvation of all the quotes I've collected.

God knew that no one could keep the commandments, so he required faith instead.

In this statement, whatever it is that keeping the commandments is, faith is a simpler version of the same thing. Whatever it is that keeping the law would do (if we could do it), faith does, too. Since keeping the commandments in order to obtain eternal life is meriting eternal life, this statement puts faith in the cubbyhole labeled merit right along with obedience to the law. Believing might be an easier requirement than perfect obedience for us to fulfill, but it's still a requirement that we must fulfill in order to obtain eternal life.

Thought of in this way, faith becomes something that has value in itself, because it meets a condition in order to obtain something--eternal life--from God. The condition of faith replaces the condition of obedience to the law, as a sort of "dumbed down" form of obedience; and faith becomes grounds for salvation in the same way that, under the law system, obedience to the law is the grounds of salvation. When you hear someone say that a certain way of thinking about faith makes faith a work, this may be the sort of thinking they are referring to.

The more correct statement to make, by the way, would be

God knew that no one could keep the law, so he sent Christ to keep the law and bear the penalty of disobedience to the law.

What directly corresponds to the works of the law is not faith, but the work of Christ. It is indeed true that no one can keep the law, but it took something a whole lot bigger than dumbing down the requirement of perfect obedience to solve that problem. In fact, the requirement that people keep the law, being a perfectly just requirement, could not be made easier, so the only solution was Christ himself fulfilling the law on our behalf. The benefits of Christ meeting those requirements come to us through the means of faith, so faith is indeed necessary for salvation, but it is not a requirement we meet in order to obtain it. All the requirements for our salvation were met in Christ alone.

November's Thanksgiving: Books

On days like today, when I spend so much time waiting for other people, what would I do without books to fill the time? The person with a good book is never bored. Of course books do much than fill time, but today, I'm thankful for their ability to entertain.

Yet more thanksgiving:

• Kim of the Upward Call is thankful for consistant people.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for Bible Reading Plans, for which she shares a link. Go check it out.

What are you thankful for? Their's only one more day of the thankful month left, so I'll wait until tomorrow evening to post my last thanksgiving post. You've got plenty of time to post your thanksgiving, and then send me the link.

November's Thanksgiving: Electric Lights

Life in the winter in the Yukon would be pretty stinkin' dreary without electric lights. I take them for granted, but there was a time when people waited out winter without them. So I'm thankful for the lights I read by, cook by, clean by, keyboard by, maintain my sanity by.

More thanksgiving:

• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for the flexibility of homeschooling and mild weather.
• Lee Ann is thankful for work.
• She's thankful for humor.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for algebra.
• Martin LaBar is thankful for fantasic literature.

Round the Sphere Again

Theology

• The Thirsty Theologian explains what the Trinity is not.
• There's been some talk round the sphere lately about what the Sandy Creek Baptist Churches believed. Here's the answer from the horses mouth (or pen).

Philosophy

• The Parableman is now discussing the problem of evil in his Theories of Knowledge and Reality series:
  

  The Logical Problem of Evil
  Against The Logical Problem of Evil
  The Evidential Problem of Evil
  Explanations for Evil, Part 1

Local News

• Scott of Magic Statistics posts on the retirement of the Yukon's chief statistician, including excerpts and and a photo from a recent write-up in the Yukon News (Free registation required.).
  

  Dr Gerry Ewert is not afraid to speak his mind and rarely reluctant to let statisticians and government policy wonks know when he thinks they’re talking through their hats.

  Gerry is a member of my home Bible study group and my church, and a pretty good egg.

Just for Fun

• The top 100 TV catchphrases


• It's about time I posted a quiz, don't you think? (Unfortunately the quiz results aren't rendering correctly, but you get the idea.) HT: MissM.
  
  

  What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
  Book Snob
  Dedicated Reader
  Literate Good Citizen
  Non-Reader
  Fad Reader
  What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

  
  
  

November's Thanksgiving: The Picture Grace

This seems like an appropriate time to repost this oldie from November of 2004. I'm thankful for this picture, which sits on the living room bookshelves, because it reminds me how important being thankful is.

When I was growing up in the northwoods of Minnesota, it seemed that almost every house had a reproduction of this photograph somewhere on the wall of the kitchen or dining room. I suppose that's not surprising, since the photograph was taken by a fellow northern Minnesotan.

A couple of summers ago I stopped to purchase a print of this photo in the very same studio in the little town of Bovey, MN where the original photograph was taken. I was on my way to Hibbing to pick up my son from his cousins' home, and the highway from Grand Rapids to Hibbing goes right through Bovey, so I thought I'd stop. The studio is in one of those old wooden turn-of-the-century store front buildings butted right up to a sidewalk that is butted right up to the street. It's still a working photography studio--the sort with all the large framed high school graduation and wedding photos lining the walls.

No one was in the lobby, so I had to ring the little bell on the counter. I waited a few minutes before the photographer came out to tend to me. He fetched my print, carefully rolled it, put rubber bands around it to keep it rolled, gave me a little pamphlet with the story of Grace in it and charged me $12.50.

In 1918, the studio was owned and operated by Eric Enstrom. The man in the photograph is Charles Wilden, who showed up at the studio peddling foot scrapers. From the pamphlet:

"There was something about the old gentleman's face that immediately impressed me. I saw that he had a kind face... there weren't any harsh lines in it," Enstrom said in recalling the 1918 visit of Charles Wilden to his studio.

It happened that Enstrom, at that time, was preparing a portfolio of pictures to take with him to a convention of the Minnesota Photographer's Association. "I wanted to take a picture that would show people that even though they had to do without many things because of the war they still had much to be thankful for," Enstrom said.

On a small table, Enstrom placed a family book, some spectacles, a bowl of gruel, a loaf of bread, and a knife. Then he had Wilden pose in a manner of prayer... praying with folded hands to his brow before partaking of a meager meal.

To bow his head in prayer seemed to be characteristic of the elderly visitor, Enstrom recalled, for he struck the pose very easily and naturally.

I remember wondering what was in that bowl! I think I can even remember childhood conversations about what was in it. I had always thought it was soup of some kind, but it's even more humble grub than home made soup--it's a simple bowl of oatmeal.

The photo wasn't noticed much at the photographer's convention in 1918, but it became popular as people driving through Bovey discovered the picture in the window of Enstrom's studio and stopped in to purchase it. As soon as one framed print was sold, he'd make another one to take its place in the studio window.

Enstrom always considered this photo to be his very best out of the thousands that he took over the 50 years he worked as a photographer. He thought he had captured something special, something he described like this:

This man doesn't have much of earthly goods, but he has more than most people because he has a thankful heart.

One morning back in 1918 an ordinary man was doing his very ordinary job, selling things door-to-door, when he met another ordinary man doing his ordinary job, and the results were extraordinary.

I've matted and framed my print, and it's leaning on the book shelves in the living room. It reminds me of my childhood; it reminds me that small things done well can have lasting results. It also reminds me to be thankful for all that I have--even my morning oatmeal.

---

Other thankful hearts:

• Martin LaBar is thankful for cell division.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for her church and her pastor.
• Lee Ann is thankful for food and music.
• Columbine is thankful for on and off again internet.
• She has a long list to make up for all the days she missed.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for the warm weather they've been having. (Meanwhile, here in Whitehorse it was -41C this morning.)
  

What are you thankful for?

Sunday's Hymn: John Calvin

Not to be outdone by that other hymn writing reformer, I suppose.

I Greet Thee, Who My Sure Redeemer Art

I greet Thee, who my sure Redeemer art,
My only trust and Savior of my heart,
Who pain didst undergo for my poor sake;
I pray Thee from our hearts all cares to take.

Thou art the King of mercy and of grace,
Reigning omnipotent in every place;
So come, O King, and our whole being sway;
Shine on us with the light of Thy pure day.

Thou art the life, by which alone we live,
And all our substance and our strength receive;
Sustain us by Thy faith and by Thy power,
And give us strength in every trying hour.

Thou hast the true and perfect gentleness,
No harshness hast Thou and no bitterness;
O grant to us the grace we find in Thee,
That we may dwell in perfect unity.

Our hope is in no other save in Thee;
Our faith is built upon Thy promise free;
Lord, give us peace, and make us calm and sure,
That in Thy strength we evermore endure.

(Sung to Toulane, from the Genevan Psalter. Update: You can hear it sung here, courtesy of the Center for Church Music.)

---

Other hymns, worship songs, etc. posted today:

• How Honorable is the Place and more, at The Thirsty Theologian
• When All Thy Mercies, O My God at John Dekker's Journal
• Praise the Lord, Ye Heavens Adore Him at Jam and Books
  
• May Jesus Christ Be Praised at Ian's Messy Desk
• O Come, O Come Emmanuel at Unity Without Verity
• All My Sins Have Been Forgiven at Seasonings
  
• The Collect for the Sunday Next Before Advent at Magic Statistics
• Brandon of Siris writes his own hymn for the Feast of Christ the King, and then "goes wild", says he, and posts several other hymns as well: Jesus, King Most Wonderful, Crown Him With Many Crowns, O God of Love, O King of Peace, The Eternal Gifts of Christ the King.
  

Have you posted a hymn for Sunday and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by emailing me at the address in the sidebar, and I'll add your post to the list.

Technorati Tags: hymns, hymn lyrics

November's Thanksgiving: My Childhood

Posting those photos of my childhood has reminded me how many positive things there were about it, and I'm thankful for it.

What are you thankful for?

• Phototelegrapher is thankful for Morse code.
• Lee Ann is thankful for safe travel.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for precious memories.
• Columbine is thankful for food and gas.

I'll be continuing the thanksgiving posts until the end of the month, so there's plenty of time left to participate. Tell us something you're thankful for, either in the comments of in a post on your own blog. If you post on your own blog, give me the link and I'll link back to you in the next thanksgiving post.

Saturday's Old Photo

I promise that after this, I'll give you a break from pictures of my childhood. This photo features, once again, my sister and me. My sister is the one hiding right behind the tire swing. In last weeks' photo, I was probably ten or so, and she was seven or eight. In this one, I'd say I'm 14 and, since it looks like it's fall, she's probably just turned 12.

I'm holding my cat Rusty, who'd been hit by a car and lived to tell about it, but as a result, one leg was grotesquely mangled. Perhaps it could have been set properly if he'd seen a vet right away, but he didn't come home until two weeks after his accident. We'd been told of the incident by the woman who hit him. She was pretty sure she'd killed him, and since we couldn't find him anywhere, we assumed he was dead. Then one day, a couple of weeks later, Rusty showed up at home dangling one leg. He managed well on his three good ones, and I loved him all the same, so he spent the rest of his cat years quite happily.

The tree we're standing by was my favorite tree--a huge willow that was perfect for a tire swing and perfect for climbing. I climbed it quite regularly, up as far as the branches would hold my weight, which was high enough that if it were my kid up there, I'd be having a heart attack. I continued to climb it until I was sixteen or so, and then climbed it once later after I was grown just to prove to my future husband that I still could.

But this post is really about the location of the picture. This building next to the tree is Solway Log Chapel in Solway, Minnesota (now called Solway Bible Chapel, and no longer sided with logs), where my father was pastor from the time I was twelve until I graduated from high school. The house you see in the background is the parsonage where we lived. So in this series of photos, you've seen my sister and I together by three different churches, and in each case, we lived in the parsonage next door. Ours was the typical life of the small church pastor's children back in the sixties and seventies, playing all around (but never in!) our church. We knew pretty much everything that went on in the church, not because anyone blabbed to us, but because we lived right next door. Unless we were sick, we were at whatever services were appropriate for us because we lived right next door.

Pretty Maids All In A Row

It's the sort of weather to stay at home by the fire, so I took advantage of the down time and finally gathered all the Yukon wildflower posts from last summer together and linked them under Previous Series in the sidebar. Here they are:

• Still Waiting for Green
• Before the Greening, the Lavender
• Into the Wild Blue
  
• The Blue Belles
• Pretty in Pink
• Hot Pink
• Stopping on Yellow
• Looking Lovely in Lavender
• In the Yellow Palette
• Waving the White Flag

Thinking About Faith Alone and Christ Alone, Part 2

The previous post in this series considered the relationship between faith and Christ's work: what it means that Christ's work is the grounds for our salvation, and that faith is the means by which we receive salvation. In this post, I want to explore faith's unique suitability as the instrument through which salvation, grounded as it is in Christ's work alone, is received. We're looking at why, if salvation is in Christ alone, there is no other instrument but faith that would fit with it as a receptor for it. In other words, it's all about the reason that in Christ alone necessitates by faith alone.

In Christ alone is the refomation slogan that points to Christ's work as the sole grounds for the salvation of sinners. When we talk about grounds or cause, we are introducing the idea of something being earned or deserved, either by merit or demerit. If a worker does a job for someone for an agreed upon price, they have grounds for demanding a paycheck once the work is done. The job well done merits the wage paid. When we talk of grounds for a lawsuit, we're speaking of something done wrong by the person being sued that justifies the demand for some sort of recompense. In this case, it's a matter of demerit or harm done, rather than merit or good accomplished, that comprises the grounds. Grounds are what justifies what we get; grounds are what earns for us what we are owed. So when we say that the only grounds for our salvation is Christ's work, that means that our salvation is merited by Christ's obedience, death and resurrection, and not by anything meritorious that exists within us, nor by anything meritorious that we produce. Christ alone means that our salvation is not earned by us, but wholly by Christ. The entire basis of--or reason for--our salvation is Christ and his work; there is nothing (and no one) else.

And if that's the case--that salvation is unmerited by us, but wholly merited by Christ--Scripture tells us that the only means by which it is possible to receive those saving benefits is by faith. Romans 4:16 says that justification "is by faith so that it may be by grace." In other words, justification is by faith, because justification is God's gift, and as you can probably figure out, if it's a gift, then it is not earned by us or owed to us. Justification being by faith, then, preserves Christ's work as the sole grounds for justification, and keeps any question of our own merit off the table. You might say that faith alone is the perfect fit--and the only fit--meanswise, for Christ alone.

Can you see why that would be? Isn't true faith--saving faith--an acknowledgment of our dependence on Christ alone for salvation? Isn't the cry of faith, "I have nothing; I can do nothing; you alone are my only hope!"? Faith places it's hope, it's grounds for salvation, squarely on the only grounds there are: the obedience, death and resurrection of Christ. It is, at it's core, the negation of personal merit or work, and trust in the merit and work of Christ. The eyes of faith see Christ's work as the center of salvation, the hinge on which it all turns.

I want to quote Herman Ridderbos from Paul: An Outline of His Theology, but first, let me give you fair warning. This book was originally written in Dutch, and translated into English for us, so it doesn't read the same as a book written first in everyday English. It can be a difficult slog--like a long trudge through a deep bog--and this quote is typical of the book as a whole. But your slogging will all be worth it, I promise. So buck up, soldier. Put on your thinking cap and it's forward, ho!

Ridderbos says that the purpose of the phrases regarding the relationship of faith to justification, salvation, or righteousness in Paul's letters, like by faith, through faith, from faith to faith,

is none other than to designate the object of faith as the ground of justification. Faith does not justify because of that which it is in itself, but because of that to which it is directed, in which it rests. For this reason, the exclusive emphasis with which faith is here placed over against works has a negative significance insofar as it speaks of man and his share in justification. Man is justified not on the grounds of what he is himself or has or achieves, but precisely on the grounds of that which he does not possess and which he in himself does not have at his disposal, but which he must receive, obtain, by faith. Faith here stands over against works as that which which is absolutely receptive and dependent, over against that which is productive, which is able to assert itself (page 172).

Did you follow that? Faith does not justify because it is a kind of merit, but because it rests in merit outside of itself. In this way, as the means of justification, faith stand in direct contrast to works or merit*, because justification by faith implies that human beings have no "share in justification", whereas justification by works implies that human beings participate in their own justification by providing at least some of the grounds for it. If justification were by works, then a person would be justified (at least in part) on the grounds of what he possesses or produces; yet since it's by faith, it's the opposite: a person is justified on the grounds of something he doesn't possess or produce, but rather receives. While works produce, faith receives, and it's the receptive nature of faith that makes it the only means by which we can be justified entirely on the grounds of Christ's merit, or solus Christus.

That "by faith" points directly to the work of Christ alone does away with any claim human beings might have that the righteousness that comes to them by faith is of themselves. The "principle of faith" excludes all human boasting, something a principle of works or merit would not do.

Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded! By what principle? Of works? No, but by the principle of faith! (Romans 3:27 NET)

Because salvation is by the principle of faith, all the glory for it goes to God (Soli Deo Gloria) who gave us grounds for salvation by sending his Son to merit it for us.

So, while the point of this series was to consider the relationship between sole fide and solus Christus, we've touched on their intertwining relationships with two of the other solas as well. If salvation is grounded only in Christ's work (solus Christus), it cannot be earned by us (sola gratia); and therefore must be received by means of faith in the work of Christ (sole fide), so that the all human boasting--or any claim that we produce something obtains justification for us--is excluded (Soli Deo Gloria). It all fits together in a tidy little logical package, based in and gleaned from the other sola: sola scriptura.

In the next post, I plan to consider some incorrect ways of thinking about faith's role in the process of salvation--ideas about faith that move it out of the realm of means only, and move it over into the realm of grounds for salvation by making faith a virtue by which we merit salvation, or a requirement that we meet in order to obtain salvation--and then move on to some other wrong ways of thinking about the process of salvation that base it in still other grounds besides faith, instead of entirely in Christ's work.

*This is not to suggest that faith stand in direct contrast to works in every way, but as a means of justification, they stand opposite to each other.

November's Thanksgiving: For the Glory of the Skies

Winter skies have their own glory, as you can see from oldest son's recent photo of the northern winter sky above. Yesterday morning I noticed striking rainbow coloured sun dogs on both sides of the sun, and then last night, as I went out to plug my car in, there were northern lights streaking across the sky. (The northern light photo linked is oldest son's, too.) So while the weather is miserable, the skies are beautiful, and I'm thankful for that.

What are you thankful for?

• Sam is thankful for family in the house, and more.
• Lee Ann is thankful for family, too.
• Randi says ditto on the blessing of family.
  
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for the armour of God.
• Annette is thankful for health, and some other important things, too.
• Joe Carter has a list.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for Christ.
  

November's Thanksgiving: Cell Phones and Heater Fans

I've been doing a lot of chauffering lately since the heater fan in our second car went kaput. That means I've really appreciated our cell phones. I don't have to sit around waiting for the call for a ride home, and I don't have to worry that someone's stranded without a way to get a hold of me. So I'm thankful for cell phones because they've made my life a whole lot easier and much more worry free.

I'm also thankful that the new fan is now installed in the second car and I'll be doing less chauffering from here on out. I'm thankful that oldest son can fix so much of what goes wrong with the vehicles, and that he spent time in the cold yesterday installing that fan.

Other thanksgiving posts:

• Martin LaBar is thankful for the electromagnetic spectrum.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for her full sized stove in the basement.
• Lee Ann is thankful for hard times.
• Columbine is thankful that she's spending Thanksgiving in Odessa.
• Libbie is thankful for the "wherewithal to feed and clothe" her children.
• Juanita has a whole list, including a warm house, a kitten, and much more.
  

What are you thankful for? Post in the comments here or on your own blog. If you send me the link, I'll add your thankful thought to the list.

For Your Amusement

I've had more traffic than usual here today. From perusing the referrals, I've attributed the spike to searches for "Thanksgiving toast." Yep, people want to copy someone else's toast rather than come up with their own.

I'm so glad I can be of help.

Update, November 23: The traffic jam continues today. Eight out of the last twenty hits have been from searches for "Thanksgiving toast/s".

How did Christ humble himself in his conception and birth?

Christ humbled himself in his conception and birth, in that, being from all eternity the Son of God, in the bosom of the Father, he was pleased in the fulness of time to become the son of man, made of a woman of low estate, and to be born of her; with divers circumstances of more than ordinary abasement.[1]

1. John 1:14, 18

   And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
   
   No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

   
   Gal. 4:4

   But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law. . .

   
   Luke 2:7

   And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

Question 47, Westminster Larger Catechism.

Technorati Tags: catechism, Westminster Catechism, Westminster Standards, Jesus Christ

November's Thanksgiving: My Kids

I can't say too much about them, since I have a policy never to blog about them unless they give me permission, and two of them have given me a blanket prohibition. (We live in a small town, you know, and this blog is pretty public.) But they're pretty interesting people, if I say so myself, and the sort that can be counted on when they're needed. So today, I'm thankful for my kids.

What are you thankful for?

• David Hayward is thankful for his American wife Lisa.

  This is how American she is: part native-American (Choctaw), and her father's name, no kidding, was George Washington.

• Catez is thankful for her amazingly warm jacket.
• Juanita is thankful for homeschooling sale boards, and the technology that makes it easy for her to purchase things--like geometry books--there.
• Kim of the Upward Call is thankful for my reminder, through this month's theme, to be thankful every day.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful that God understands.
• She's thankful for her prayer group.
• Lee Ann is thankful for clothes.
• Randi has a short list of things she's thankful for.
• Adrian has several things he's thankful for.
  

How to Dress for Cold, with Weird Winter-Wear Words Explained.

In September I received an email from a reader in Phoenix or Switzerland (I can't remember which of those closely related locations)asking me to post something on what people in the Yukon wear when they have to be outside for a long time during -40° weather. It was still nice out when I got the email, and I wasn't in the mood to think about warm clothing for cold weather back then, but now my son has provided me with a photo of typical Yukon cold weather clothing, so I'm posting the answer to the question.


Here is a picture of my son and his caribou hunting partners. It was cold up there on the Dempster Highway, they had to be out for hours at a time, and this is what they wore. Should you need to inspect things a little closer, you clan click on the photo for the larger view.

As you can see--and I bet you've heard this before--the key to warmth is layers. Pile them on. They're wearing nothing unusual, at least nothing unusual for people who live where they have winter; they're just wearing more of it: tuque or belaclava (the knit or fleece hat or facemask, for those who don't know the language), mitts or gloves, scarf, hood, sweaters or polar fleece tops, long johns, parka. On the bottom half that you can't see they probably have some sort of pants with a water and wind resistant outer shell, and a large cold-weather boot, like Sorels with warm liners.

Do you want to see what I wear for my everyday cold weather activities? That's me, in the background on the left, wearing my Yukon parka. Yukon parkas used to be made right here in the Yukon, but unfortunately, you can't get them anymore. What you see there is made of heavy blanket wool with a satin liner, and fur trim (or ruff) around the hood and bottom. There's an outer liner, too, that I'm not wearing, made of heavy water resistant fabric. That outer liner is called a duffel, while the underneath, warmer wool part (what you see me wearing in the photo) is called the stroud. These were the original two piece-three way coat system that you see all the big outdoorsy brands copying now. I like my Yukon parka because I can stay warm without looking like a marshmallow--like a mini-marshmallow, maybe, but certainly not the larger, campfire roasting sort. (See more northen-made parka styles. My personal favorite is the Mother Hubbard, another two-piece system.)

Now, if I were from Phoenix or Switzerland, and I read all that, the first question that would come to my mind is this one: Isn't it really expensive to outfit yourself like that? The answer is yes, if you have to go out and buy all the stuff all at once; but no, if you've accumulated a whole large closet full of winter clothes over twenty plus years. And it's even less expensive if a good portion of what's in your winter closet was purchased at the local Salvation Army thrift store. Thankfully, fashionablility doesn't play into things when you're dressing for forty below, which means your ten year old boots and Salvation Army parka will do just fine, especially if you buy new liners for those boots every once in a while.

The second question I'd have, I think, would be, "Isn't it tiring to walk around with all that stuff on?" The answer to that is "Yes, and you can't run very fast, either."

Do you have any more questions about cold weather wear? Or any other northern-life questions?

November's Thanksgiving: My Car

It gets me where I need to go reliably, at least once we got that faulty block heater issue resolved. With it I can get my kids to work or school when their own vehicles have issues, and I've been doing plenty of that lately. Without my car, we'd be in big trouble.

Other thanksgiving:

• Randi is thankful for kitchen supplies.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for her daughter's courage, which was an answer to prayer.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for her daughter-in-law.
• Lee Ann is thankful for sunshine.
• She's thankful for variety.
• Columbine is thankful for Christmas decorations.
• Jason Robertson is thankful for scripture.

What are you thankful for?

November's Thanksgiving: Toast

This morning I put meat and vegies for stew in the crockpot. When it came time to make the cornbread to go with the stew, I discovered that the container that holds the cornmeal had about enough to make one corn muffin in it. So we had plain old buttered toast.

And what a hit it was! I could hardly make toast fast enough to meet the demand. So I'm thankful for toast because it was easy to make, it hit the spot, and no one missed the promised corn bread in the least.

That something so simple can be so good is a real blessing.

(Blogger was been misbehaving for me for most of the evening, and now it's late, so I'll add the links to the participating thanksgiving posts tomorrow morning.)

Update:

• Martin LaBar is thankful for carbon atoms.
• MissMellifluous is thankful for frogs, dirty hands, and the anticipation of creativity.
  
• She's thankful for music.
• Lee Ann is thankful for the Sabbath.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for her friend Jules.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for sleep and silence.
• Randi is thankful for her guys.

Why don't you tell us what you're thanking God for in the comments to this post; or, better yet, post your thanksgiving on your own blog, and let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. Then look for a link to your thankful post in the next roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

Sunday's Hymn: John Newton

Supported By The Word

Supported by the Word,
Though in himself a worm,
The servant of the Lord
Can wondrous acts perform:
Without dismay he boldly treads
Where’er the path of duty leads.

The haughty king in vain,
With fury on his brow,
Believers would constrain
To golden gods to bow:
The furnace could not make them fear,
Because they knew the Lord was near.

As vain was the decree
Which charged them not to pray;
Daniel still bowed his knee,
And worshiped thrice a day:
Trusting in God, he feared not men,
Though threatened with the lion’s den.

Secure they might refuse
Compliance with such laws,
For what had they to lose,
When God espoused their cause?
He made the hungry lions crouch,
Nor durst the fire His children touch.

The Lord is still the same,
A mighty shield and tow’r,
And they who trust His Name
Are guarded by His pow’r:
He can the rage of lions tame,
And bear them harmless through the flame.

Yet we too often shrink
When trials are in view;
Expecting we must sink,
And never can get through.
But could we once believe indeed,
From all these fears we should be freed.

(Illustration by Gustave Dore: Daniel in the Den of Lions)

---

Other hymns, worship songs, etc. posted today:

• How Honorable is the Place and more, at The Thirsty Theologian
• Lamb of God at John Dekker's Journal
• My Hope Is Built at Ian's Messy Desk
• Rejoice, the Lord is King! at Unity Without Verity
• That's What Faith Must Be at Chez Kneel
• The Collect For The Twenty-Third Sunday After Trinity at Magic Statistics

Have you posted a hymn for Sunday and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by emailing me at the address in the sidebar, and I'll add your post to the list.

Technorati Tags: hymns, hymn lyrics

November's Thanksgiving: Old Photos

Kim reminded me in the comments on the last post how wonderful it is to have so many old family photos, so tonight I'm thankful for the photos of times past. It's good to remember our past blessings as well as our present ones.

More thanksgiving:

• I've forgotten to link to her past few thankgiving posts, so she has a whole list of them: medical insurance and one good knee; help from her family; the gospel. You can see her thankfulness tree here.
• Lee Ann is thankful for the people she has met because she's on dialysis.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for twenty-eight years of marriage.
• Columbine is thankful for the word of God.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for the writings of the Puritans.
• Randi has a whole list of things she's thankful for: machine quilting; music; cold medicine and doctrine; and more.
  

Why don't you tell us what you're thanking God for in the comments to this post; or, better yet, post your thanksgiving on your own blog, and let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. Then look for a link to your thankful post in the next day's roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

Saturday's Old Photo

This photo continues the theme of last week's old photo. It's another glimpse into my childhood. This one is of my sister and me with two of our friends. Can you guess what we're doing?

We're playing wedding with our dress up clothes. My sister and I didn't have many toys, but we did have a collection of dress up clothes that was the envy of all our friends. My mother had access to a "missionary barrel", which had a never ending supply of interesting items for dress up, and she had a real eye for seeing the possibilities in the clothes found there.

The groom in the wedding is me. I'm wearing a cape made from half of an old black quilted circular skirt. The bride is my sister, wearing a made-over white woman's dress and a curtain panel veil. The bridesmaid is my friend Colleen Emery, and she's dressed in a light blue woman's dress remade to fit a young girl. The little girl peeking out from behind me is Dawn Weinert, who was a few years younger than the rest of us. She did not want to dress up that day--I think the whole idea made her uncomfortable--but she wanted to be in the picture.

(The circular skirt morphed into a cape is a something that my mother repeated again and again. One Christmas she gave my oldest daughter a cape made from a very brightly coloured quilted circular skirt, and oldest son's gift was a cape made from a grey wool flannel circular skirt. Oldest daughter put hers on, stood on the coffee table, announced, "I'm a butterfly!" and took a flying leap. Oldest son, not to be outdone, stood on the coffee table wearing his cape and announced, "I'm a moth!")

And what ties today's photo together with the photo from last week? See that sidewalk we're standing on? That's the sidewalk of Northern Bible Church, which is 4 miles north of Bemidji, Minnesota. We're playing on the sidewalk because we lived next door in the parsonage. The church is still there, but the parsonage isn't.

November's Thanksgiving: Sleep

Youngest son just returned from his night out and I can finally go to bed now. It's been one of those really long and busy days, and I'm so thankful for sleep.

More thanksgiving:

• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for Blogger.
• Lee Ann is thankful she could go home early.
• Columbine is thankful for clean windows.

What are you thankful for?

November's Thanksgiving: Fireplace Insert

I was a very bad girl and did everything else but post my thanksgiving thoughts yesterday. I did think about what I was thankful for, though, and that's the fireplace insert I have in my fireplace. I have an oil furnace, but oil heat can feel hot one minute and chilly the next. Nothing beats the constant warmth of a fire in the fireplace insert, and on cold days, I try to keep a fire going.

And added benefit is that it makes gathering round it as a family the most natural thing in the world.

Still more thanksgiving:

• Juanita is thankful to be feeling better after a cold.
• Amanda is thankful for Gilby.
• Lee Ann is thankful for dialysis, and the nurses and techs who do the work.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for her husband (and he sounds like a gem!) and godly friends.
• Julana is thankful for a good IEP meeting. (Don't know what an IEP meeting is? An IEP is an individual plan for a student's education, and in an IEP meeting, the parents and everyone involved in helping the student meet together to access things and make any adjustments.)
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful that her son has a sense of humour.
  

Consider this yesterday's thanksgiving roundup, and I'll post another one that counts for today's this evening. Why don't you tell us what you're thanking God for in the comments to this post; or, better yet, post your thanksgiving on your own blog, and let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. Then look for a link to your thankful post in the this evening's roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

Thinking About Faith Alone and Christ Alone, Part 1

A couple of weeks ago I posted something on the Reformation slogan Solus Christus, or "in (or by) Christ alone"--a phrase that is used to refer to the truth that our salvation is accomplished by the work of Christ, and by nothing else instead of or in addition to his work. In other words, the whole grounds for our salvation--or the very reason we can be saved--is the work of Christ; or, to put it yet another way, it is Christ's obedience, death and resurrection on our behalf that justifies our justification. Since then, I've been doing some thinking about the relationship between Solus Christus and another of the five solas: Sole Fide. As you might expect, if I've been thinking it, I will eventually blog it, and this is post one on this subject.

Sole fide means "faith alone." It refers to the truth that our justification, grounded in Christ's work, comes to us through faith alone, and through no other means. There are various ways this is explained. It is said that we lay hold of Christ's work on our behalf through faith alone, that faith is the conduit through which Christ's work comes to us, or that faith is the instrument or vessel which receives God's gift of salvation. I think those are all good descriptions of the role faith plays in our justification.

If we are justified through the means of faith alone, it is certainly right to say that faith is necessary for justification, since it's through faith that we receive it; but at the same time, faith is not the grounds for our justification--the basis upon which we can be justified--since the grounds or basis for our salvation is Christ's work alone, not Christ's work plus our faith. Scripture always speaks of faith, in relation to justification, in language that refer to means only, and never uses the language of grounds in relation to it. That's why thoughtful theologians say salvation is by or through faith, but they don't say it is because of faith: they are being careful to maintain the distinction that faith is the means of salvation, but not the grounds of it.

Are you not sure of the distinction? Here's an example that might help. Imagine a parent punishing a child with good cause. When we use the term "with good cause", we are using the language of grounds. We are saying that there is suitable grounds or sufficient reason for the punishment. The child is punished because he or she did something that needed punishment, and that misdeed is the grounds--or the good cause--for the punishment. Let's say, to expand the illustration, that the punishment was the removal of a certain privilege. Going without the privilege is the way the punishment is received by the child. It's not the grounds of the punishment, which is the misdeed, as discussed above, but the means by which the punishment comes. Going without the privilege is, of course, necessary in order for the child to be punished, but we can't say it's the reason or cause or grounds for the punishment.*

So the answer to the child's question, "Why was I punished?" is not "Because you went without the X-box for a day," but "Because you clobbered your brother over the head with your controller." The answer to the question "How was I punished?" is "By going without the X-box." Because, why, cause, reason, and basis are word in English that speak to grounds; how, by, and through speak of means.

(I know we don't always use language in exactly this way or this precisely. For example, we also use cause to refer to something that brings about an event, which speaks more to agency**, and, of course, that's a right way to use the term. However, in the realm of moral, legal, or theological discussion, the word cause is used frequently as a synonym for reason or grounds, and that's the way I'm using it here. The reason it's so important to think through the terms we use is that when we're speaking about important things--like our salvation, for instance--where much can be gained from understanding the relationships between the necessary elements, precise language helps us understand the concepts without confusion.)

The relationship between in Christ alone and through faith alone in our salvation is similar to the relationship between the child's misdeed and the loss of the X-box in our example. It is similar in that the grounds, reason or cause of salvation is Christ alone, and the means through which our salvation comes is faith alone, so that the answer to the question, "Why am I saved?" is "Because of Christ's work on my behalf," rather than "Because I believed." Faith comes in as an answer to the question "How am I saved?"; I am saved "through faith alone."

The distinction between faith as the means of salvation and Christ's work as the grounds of salvation is the background for the rest of what I want to write on this subject. Next up, I'll post on the reason that faith alone as the means of salvation fits so perfectly with Christ alone as the grounds of salvation. After that, I plan to post on some sloppy theological thinking that adds faith to Christ's work as the grounds of salvation.

*This illustration doesn't work perfectly, but it's the best I can think of, so I'm sticking with it for now.
**Faith is not the agent of salvation, either, by the way. But that's a whole nuther discussion.

Frosty Inukshuk

(click for larger view)

Oldest son is slowly posting his photos from his caribou hunting trip up the Dempster Highway. This photo of an inukshuk was taken at around 4:00pm.

November's Thanksgiving: Learning

I've been working on a post that I'm finding really tricky, but I'm learning a whole lot in the process, so I'm thankful that the hard work of writing it helps me learn.

What are you thankful for?

• David Fisher says he is thankful for

  the great group of blogging friends who challenge and encourage me in my Christian pilgrimmage!

• Mrs. J.M. Young comments:

  I am thankful that my morning sickness is not quite so severe.
  
  I am thankful for my husband who showers me with love and care.
  
  I am thankful for friends who continually point me to the Lord and remind me that He should be my first priority.
  
  I am thankful for the Lord that He has protected me and saved me from myself and the consequences from sin I could have experienced from a life of sin. So thankful for His unfailing forgiveness and faithfulness to me.

• Christa Blakey is thankful for prayer.
• Amanda is thankful that she had

  such a fun, peaceful, structured, sheltered childhood. I am thankful for happy memories. But, I am even more thankful for salvation, for a gracious Savior who forgives the sins of little girls who are not as innocent as they appear.

• Julana is thankful she doesn't live in the Yukon.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful that God gave her children musical talent.
• Lee Ann is thankful for sleep.

Why don't you tell us what you're thanking God for in the comments to this post; or, better yet, post your thanksgiving on your own blog, and let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. Then look for a link to your thankful post in the next day's roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

November's Thanksgiving: Hunter Home Safely

Today I'm thankful that the hunter is safe at home. No caribou, but he had lots of fun and got some good photos. I let him tell you more about it all on his own blog
There are others who are thankful too:

• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for cat naps. (The hunter returned at 2AM, so I may need one of those today.)
• Lee Ann is thankful for pastors.
• Amanda is thankful for her parents.
• Juanita is thankful for the freedom that comes with homeschooling--the freedom to take time off for family trips and sick days, etc.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful that she loves the colour she's painted her bathroom walls.
  

Those are all the thankful posts I've found so far, but I will update again after supper, so you have time to get your thankgiving in today's collection of links. You know the drill, right?

November's Thanksgiving: Twenty Below

I'm thankful for -20C temperatures, because it's so much better than what's been predicted in the extended forecast for the last week and a half. Every morning when I listen to the weather report, I hear that there'll be a low of -36C in a couple of days, and every day that prediction gets pushed back a day or two. I'm hopeful that it'll be pushed back all the way to January where it belongs. At that point, it'll okay by me if it comes to town for a day or two, because, goodness knows, we can't have a Yukon winter without some real cold.

As I write this, I'm concerned that this post may sound flippant, but it's not. Every day that we don't have extreme cold is a good gift from a good heavenly Father.

Round-up of other thankful posts and comments:

• Kim C. is thankful for potty training progress.
• At a Hen's Place there's a whole list of thanksgiving items.
• Columbine is thankful for the trash lady.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for her parents.
• Lee Ann is thankful for a full refrigerator.
• Kim of Hireath is thankful for her husband,
• and so is she.

You know the drill by now. Post your thanksgiving in the comments of this post or in a post on your own blog. Give me the link, and then expect to see your bit of thanksgiving included in tomorrow's thanksgiving post.

November's Thanksgiving: Sundays

I'm thankful for Sundays, for too many reasons to list: for Sunday worship, for Sunday rest, for all the participation in the Sunday's Hymn.

A few more thankful hearts:

• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for her church.
• Kim of the Upward Call is thankful for two things. (You thought I was going to tell you what they are, didn't you? Well, think again!
• She's thankful for lessons learned.
• Lee Ann is thankful for good lab results.
• Columbine is thankful for language.

Why don't you tell us what you're thanking God for in the comments to this post; or, better yet, post your thanksgiving on your own blog, and let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. Then look for a link to your thankful post in the next day's roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

Sunday's Hymn: John Newton

Great Shepherd of Thy Chosen Flock

Great Shepherd of Thy chosen flock,
Thy people’s Shield, their shadowing Rock,
Once more we meet to hear Thy voice,
Once more before Thee to rejoice.

Now may Thy Spirit, by the Word,
Refresh each wearied heart, O Lord,
Wearied of earth’s vain strife and woe,
And longing more Thyself to know.

Thine is the heart our griefs to feel,
And Thine the love each wound to heal;
Home Thou art gone for us to care,
Returning soon to take us there.

---Music by Joseph Mainzer (Listen.)

---

Other hymns, worship songs, etc. posted today:

• The Evil Heart at The Thirsty Theologian
• Praise the Lord: Ye Heavens Adore Him at John Dekker's Journal
• Holy God We Praise Thy Name at Seasonings
• Eternal Father Strong to Save at Ian's Messy Desk
• Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee at Unity Without Verity
• Blessed Assurance at Chez Kneel
• The Twenty-Second Sunday After Trinity at Magic Statistics

Have you posted a hymn for Sunday and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by emailing me at the address in the sidebar, and I'll add your post to the list.

Technorati Tags: hymns, hymn lyrics

Saturday's Old Photo

Yes, I know this isn't a very good picture, but I'm using it for a reason. It's the first in a series of three pictures that I plan to post, all of of me with my sister over the years of our childhood. They all sharing a common element--and no, it isn't trikes!--that will tell you something about the sort of childhood we had.

In this one we're tricycling together on the sidewalk of the Presbyterian Church in Belleview, Idaho. (This church, by the way, is mentioned in my very first blog post.) My sister is the one with the smaller trike. She's two and a half years younger than I am, and since we left Belleview when I was 5 years old, she can be no older than three.

We lived in the parsonage next door because my father was pastoring this church. Yes, he was an ordained Baptist minister, but Presbyterian pastors, it would seem, were hard to come by in rural Idaho. In fact, pastors of any sort were hard to come by, and my father preached regularly in another church in Carey, Idaho, a little town 2o miles or so away.

I remember him preaching during the evening in Ketchum, too, but perhaps that was only a one time event and not one of his regular duties. I do remember accompanying him once when he went there, while my mother stayed home with my sister, who was too young for such a late evening. I sat in the front pew by myself while my father led the service. I had a coin for the offering, and at some point I dropped it and it rolled clear across the front of the church; so I tiptoed after it, picked it up when it stopped rolling, and tiptoed back to my seat. I probably wouldn't even remember this incident, except that it pleased my father a great deal that I had proven that I was old enough and well-behaved enough to be counted on to conduct myself properly when left alone in a service.

After we left, this little church in Belleview was eventually supplied with two single women missionaries from Village Missions to run it. Oddly, when I looked up the requirements for pastors/missionaries at the Village Missions site, it looks as if, now, a pastor/missionary must be male, but apparently that wasn't the case back then.

November's Thanksgiving: Freedom and Those Who Fought For It

I'm thankful for those who served in the military to protect our freedom and ensure the freedom of others. I'm thankful for those who are serving right now to preserve and bring freedom and peace. I'm especially thankful for those who have given their lives in that pursuit. I'm thankful for those who have not forgotten what has been done for them in previous generations. I'm thankful to God, who is in control of history and nations and wars and battles.

(I love the poster on the right, which is free for download from Veterans Affairs Canada. I have photos of oldest son and his cousing trying on their grandfather's military uniform, looking very proud.

You can view the Veterans Affairs Remembrance Day Vignette, too, or read the stories, or just listen to the taps.)

Other thankful hearts:

• Columbine is thankful for her family.
• Susan from Zionsville is thankful

  for a 'tweenage' daughter who still wants to hold my hand in public!

• Lee Ann is thankful that her daughter is home.
• She's thankful for veterans and her mom.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for music therapy.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for a hot shower and glasses.
• Juanita is thankful to be home from her travels. She's also thankful for a new car, audio books, snow and the coming winter.
• Ann is thankful for the experience of listing a thousand gifts.
  

Why don't you tell us what you're thanking God for in the comments to this post; or, better yet, post your thanksgiving on your own blog, and let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. Then look for a link to your thankful post in the next day's roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

November's Thanksgiving: My Loud Family

I don't know how else to put it, except that we live largely in our home. We are not a quiet family.

I grew up as a quiet youngster in a active household. We were a loud family even though there were only four of us and both children were girls. There were always other people in and out of my home, and my mother, in particular, was not a quiet worker. I often awoke in the morning to the sounds of pots and cupboard doors banging in the kitchen, and my mom calling out with some little message for my dad who was working in another part of the house.

I didn't realize how loud my family was until I became old enough to begin staying overnight at other people's homes. I often found the stillness of my friends' homes a little oppressive. They probably thought of it as peace; I thought of it as gloominess. I remember, while visiting one friend whose family had four children at home, noticing how silently they all slipped around their house--no banging doors, no stomping feet, no laughter, no shouting, not even a television blaring; just nothingness, as if they were all ghosts.

Then I married someone louder than I was, and we had four kids who all took after him in that regard. When my oldest daughter was in high school, she had a friend Ben who used to live up the hill from us. Ben came from a large family (at least 6 kids), and once in a while his mother would send him to the convenience store down the hill from us for this or that, and he would phone my daughter to see if she felt like walking with him from our house to keep him company. Shortly after that, his older sister rented a room in the house next to us, and Ben mentioned to his sister that he had a friend who lived next door to her. "Oh," she said, "You mean the loud family."

I was embarrassed by that remark, but there really wasn't much we could do about it. By then, the habits were engrained, and it was mostly a personality thing, anyway. Also figuring into our loudness was that our home wasn't just the place we came to sleep at night. We lived and played and worked here. It wasn't as if we were blaring stereos or letting our dog bark all the time. We were just living our lives.

Sometimes it's all too much for me, and I have to go to my room to read or iron in order to restore my inner peacefulness. But today, I'm thankful for my loud family, because their loudness is not the loudness of anger, but of activity and enjoyment and love for each other

What are you thanking God for?

• Lee Ann is thankful that she can stay home today.
• She is thankful for her car.
• Randi has a whole list of things she's thankful for.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for her Kitchen Aid stand mixer. I love my mixer, too, and maybe someday I'll write about how I got it.
  

Why don't you tell us what you're thankful for in the comments to this post; or, better yet, post your thanksgiving on your own blog, and let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. Then look for a link to your thankful post in the next day's roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

November's Thanksgiving: Winter Skies and Northern Opportunities

Lately I've been noticing how beautiful the sky is with the lower light of winter. (Oldest son posted a picture of the sky above Paddy's Pond so you can see for yourself.) Every season has it's beauty, and I'm thankful that seasons change so I can see it all.

I'm also thankful for the opportunities for unique experiences that come as a result of living where we do. Tomorrow morning, oldest son will be leaving on a weekend caribou hunting trip. You can't hunt caribou at -30C just any old place.

Other bloggy thankfulness:

• The Headmistress is thankful she was a little sick. You'll have to visit to find our why being sick can be a good thing.
  
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful that everything went well with her mother's surgery.
• Lee Ann is thankful for her new garage door, and there's a story to this one, too.
  
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for the inventor of penicillin. Don't expect me to tell you who that is! Go read at Kim's to find out the details.
  

What are you thanking God for? Tell us in the comments, or post your thanksgiving on your own blog. Then let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here and your thankful post will be linked in the next day's roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

Sunday School with J. I. Packer, Part 6

These are the concluding notes from the third hour-long Learner's Exchange lesson on the Internal Unity of Scripture given by J. I. Packer at St. John's (Shaughnessy) Anglican Church. I posted notes on the first and second lessons previously, and links to them are listed in the first set of notes on this third lesson, which is here.

The Centrality of Christ in the Bible As Evidence for the Canon
Next up in this third lesson is Packer's discussion of the canon question. You know, "How can we be sure we have the right books in our Bibles?" Packer does not use an argument from history for his answer, but rather, after a brief aside pointing out various small disputes over the canon in history, he appeals to the unity of scripture in it's Christ-centered coherance as the strongest evidence that our canon is right.

The disputes over the canon mentioned include the Protestant/Roman Catholic disagreement over the 12 books of the apocrypha, various groups who want to drop or downplay the Old Testament, and people who think various gnostic gospels, like the gospel of Judas, are legitimate Christian scripture. Packer calls this last sort of people "wild men", and dismisses these sorts of discussions as "People . . . inventing some goofy thing to get excited about."

Why can he believe so strongly that the canon we have is right? Because, he says, if you read the sixty-six books of our Bible together,

you will see that what they are both doing is pointing to the same relationship of faith, repentance, worship and so forth, in and through Christ, which I’ve been trying to talk about so far.

Packer gives many examples of the writers of the New Testament explaining that what they are proclaiming is simply

the fulfillment of Old Testament hopes and promises, and it’s all on the. . . Old Testament trajectory. It’s leading people into the fulness of faith and the life of faith and discipleship which the Old Testament, already, was seeking to lead people into.

Scriptural Examples of the Unity of Scripture in It's Christ-Centeredness
Here is a list of the New Testament scriptures that point to this Christ-centered coherence of the Bible.

• Romans 1:1

  Paul, a Servant of Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scripture, concerning his Son.

• Romans 16: 25-27

  Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations, according to the command of the eternal God. . . .

• Romans 15:4

  . . . whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

• 1 Corinthians 10:11

  Now, these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.

• 2 Timothy 3:15-17

  . . . from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

  (This text is, in the original context, written about the Old Testament, and it's to focus on what it says about the Old Testament that Packer uses it, in order to show that the Old Testament was able to make Timothy wise for salvaton through faith in Christ and equip him to be a "man of God.")


• Luke 24:25-27, 32, 44-47

  And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. . . . They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?”
  
  Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive, but it's enough to make the point. The summary of the argument for the inclusion of all the books of the Bible in the canon is this:

For every Christian and for the whole Christian church, the Bible exhibits a Christ-centered coherence, and those who taste and see find it, and, indeed, are not able to doubt or deny it or miss it. And the Christ-centered coherence of the Bible [is] the result of the ministry of the Holy Spirit inspiring the words and now illuminating God’s people so that they understand it.

And the corollary of that thought, as it would speak to extrabiblical books is:

. . . books that are not numbered among the sixty-six don’t have this same effect, meshing in with all the books in the way that books numbered among the sixty-six actually do.

Built-in Claims to This Affirmation of the Christ-Centered Coherence of the Bible
Packer now speaks of two specific claims that are built into the affirmation of the Christ-centered coherance of the Bible.

1. Jesus Christ is central in world history.
   

   What the New Testament tells us is that the Lord Jesus Christ, none other, is the incarnate person through whom everything came to be. . . The Son of God is the co-creator with the Father. Remember the prologue to John’s gospel? “Everything was made by him. Apart from him, nothing that was made came into being." Paul hammers away at that in Colossians chapter 1:

   By him all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things were created through him and for him. And he is [that is, he exists] before all things, and in him, all things hold together.

   Got it? It’s a breathtaking thing for Paul to say, almost in a throwaway line, but he means what he says. If it wasn’t for the constant upholding ministry of the sovereign God, you and I, and this room in which I am talking; and the world around us; St. John’s Shaughnessy, everything and everybody; simply wouldn’t exist anymore. All things hold together in Christ. Without that upholding action, there wouldn’t be anything, so we wouldn’t be here. It’s a breathtaking thought, but that’s what Paul is expressing when he says, “In him, all things hold together.” So he is, in very truth, the cosmic Christ, as well as being, within that frame, the incarnate Saviour who died for our sins, and now is risen to bring to us the reality of pardon and life from God.
   
   . . . As I’ve already pointed out, in the very last book of the New Testament, well, we are reminded how things are right now. Christ is on the throne and there’s spiritual warfare going on, and the cosmos is increasingly in convulsion as a result. That’s certainly what the visionary chapters of Revelation are telling us. There’s no expectation that that state of affairs will change prior to the Lord’s own triumphant return. Whatever arguments we may have about the details of the meaning of those visionary chapters, there can surely be no doubt that that’s the overall perspective that they’re presenting. Then within that and against that background, the Lord of the church watches over the church, as I said earlier, for admonition; encouragement; correction; promise; and, in the broadest sense, ministry. We serve him, and he, in ministry, serves us. Those who overcome, do so in his strength. Well, that’s Jesus Christ: central in world history.
   

2. Jesus Christ is the center of salvation.

   Jesus Christ is the mediatorial Messiah. Messiah means that he is the one whom God has anointed to be king. Mediatorial is the word that means that it’s through the Lord Jesus that all the blessings of life and salvation are given. He is the mediatorial Messiah.
   
   There is one particular book of the New Testament which highlights this at great length, in great detail, and in great (Really, with overwhelming!) majesty and power, and that is the letter to the Hebrews. First of all, the Son of God is introduced as the divine person that he is; that’s chapter 1. Then the fulness of his humanity, his sharing in flesh and blood, is celebrated in chapter 2. Then there are words of application in the next two chapters. Then you get to chapter 5, where the thread of the person and place of Jesus Christ is picked up again, and the writer says, “Now he is our great high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. What does that mean? Well, you have to move into chapter 7 before you realize that chapter 7 celebrates the fact that in Christ we have a better priest than the Old Testament order of things knew. In chapter 8, we have a better covenant, through the ministry of this priest, than the Old Testament believers knew. In chapter 9, we have a better worship place--a better tabernacle--for approaching God than ever the Old Testament believers knew; and in chapter 10, we have a better sacrifice to rely on for our access to God: one sacrifice for sins forever. That’s spelled out with tremendous emphasis and vividness. It’s a wonderful letter.

   
   The point here is that the Old Testament order of things all pointed to Christ, and Old Testament saints were saved through the Christ who had not yet come, just as those of us who come after Christ are saved through the Christ who has already come.

Summary Statement

So let me come back again to the big thing that I’ve been trying to illustrate; namely, that a Christ-centered concentration is what you have in all the teaching of the Bible, and that the way to enter into this [is], quite simply, to taste. Ask for the help of the Holy Spirit, and soak yourself in scripture, and you will see that it is so. The effect of it, the fruit of it, should be (and by God’s grace will be) that Jesus Christ our Lord, in all his glory, all his graciousness, will fill our horizons also, and we shall see ourselves as his disciples, first and foremost. That will be the deepest element and the identity which we recognize ourselves as having. So we shall become, in the true sense, biblical believers, whose lives show forth God’s praise, and who rejoice in the unique life-giving relationship that the gospel--which is the heart of the Bible, which is the pointer to the Christ of the Bible--takes us into. I don’t know how I can make it more simple, straightforward, and pointed than that.

And that's it for the formal part of the lesson.

Significance of Church Councils in the Formation of the Canon.
In the dialogue time after the formal part of the lesson, a student asked about the significance of church councils in the development of the canon. Packer answered that question this way:

What you have in the decisions of councils is a recognition of what is the case, an expression of corporate certainty that the people in the council shared. The councils don’t legislate; but they testify. What they are testifying to is a consensus that the Holy Spirit gives.

All the councils took place because there were disputes that had to be resolved. The precise contents of the New Testament canon are not expressed by any council that claims to be a general council until you get to the Roman Catholic Council of Trent. But they are expressed in . . . a letter from Athanasius, who is a big bishop; . . . a letter from Augustine; and there is a decision from a North African council in 397 [This would be Carthage]. But the point is, that the consensus was established and these people are now testifying to it. . . . They are recording that this is, as a matter of fact, the list of books that Christian believers add to the Old Testament canon that was fixed in Christ’s day and had been fixed for generations.

In the second century, there were a lot of very tense discussions because there were heretical gospels and epistles and acts being fed into the church by people called gnostics. I’m not going to go into the essence of gnosticism; I'll simply say that it’s a label for a kind of heresy that was very prevalent in those days, and so the church had to do a lot of homework in discussing which books should be received as the authentic New Testament. . . . [N]early all the important books in the New Testament canon were verified at that time.

How did they do it? Well, they said:

• Is it certain that the books were written by apostles, if you do a historical inquiry?

• Do the books contain doctrine that fits in with the teaching of the undoubted books (and that was, for practical purposes, the letters of Paul and the four gospels)? If the books in question don’t teach in line with them, then they’re out.

• Have the books been used in the church for public reading and instruction, and have they proved their usefulness in what I’ve been speaking of as means of grace to people, whereby they taste and see the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ? Have the books established themselves in the church as being useful in that way?

If all those three tests came out on the same side, the churches agreed that this book, that book, is most certainly part of the God-given canon of scripture. This is still a matter of dispute among the scholars, and still a matter of dispute on a popular level. (People love to generate scandals of one sort or another. So that’s Davinci and that’s Judas!)

Want pdf files of the transcipts of these lessons for personal use? Just ask and I'll email them to you.

November's Thanksgiving: Encouraging Words

Recently I've had several emails from people who have never commented on the blog telling me something found here was helpful, and a couple just thanking me for my blog in general. I'm thankful for those encouraging words. They mean a lot to me.

• Missmelliflous is thankful that she didn't get the job. You'll have to hop over to her place to find out why.
• Columbine is thankful for friends, and heat.
• She's thankful for breaks.
  
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for a sunbeam.
• Lee Ann is thankful for the ways her daughter keeps in contact while she's away at school.
• Randi is thankful for her relationship with her dad.
• Update: Juanita is thankful for her family and the good experiences that come with taking a trip with them.
• Sean Carter has a whole Thanksgiving blog.
  

What are you thankful for? Tell us in the comments, or post your thanksgiving on your own blog. Then let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here and your thankful post will be linked in the next day's roundup of thankfulness.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it (or forgot about it)? Please feel free to remind me.

Sunday School with J. I. Packer, Part 5

These are notes from the third hour-long Learner's Exchange lesson on the Internal Unity of Scripture given by J. I. Packer at St. John's (Shaughnessy) Anglican Church. I posted notes on the first and second lessons previously.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

This last lesson starts with a review of the previous two lessons, and then moves to two ponting out two things that give the Bible unity.

The Bible’s Unity of Function: Knowing God

This is something so obvious that is only has to be stated for its truth to appear, but very often it isn’t stated, and people forget the truth that I’m just going to set before you. Every book of the Bible, however much they differ among themselves, was written in order to help people, one way or another, into a closer relationship with the God of grace--a God whom the human writer knew as his God, and whom he wanted everyone else to know as their God. Every book of scripture, Old Testament and New Testament, is rooted in God’s revelation; and in some shape or form is a celebrating of that revelation, and a response to that revelation. But as I say, the thrust of the book, in every case, is not simply to honor God and thank him for revelation, although that’s a big theme in many of the books; but the basic reason why each book was composed is the pastoral reason: that the writer wants others to come into the blessing of knowing God, which he himself enjoys.

Then Packer mentions a corollary to this truth:

. . . as a corollary of what I’m saying, I charge you, brothers and sisters: every time you read the Bible (and I hope you read it daily), pray that God the Holy Spirit will keep your mind on the purpose of what you’re reading, and enable you to receive the invitations that the Bible--the direction that the Bible--is setting before you. That’s the word from the Lord to you and me, to all Christians, and you can’t say it too often or too strongly.

The Bible’s Unity of Focus: Christ

. . . [W]hat you have in the Bible is the unity of a single story--the story of the Creator becoming Redeemer, a story which reaches it’s climax in Christ, and looks forward to Christ’s return to complete the work of salvation that he came to begin for the world and for his people. Not, I mean, to make atonement for sin all over again, but to bring the bodies to match our renewed hearts--the bodies which are promised for resurrection day. . . .[T]he Bible is telling us that one story, and that’s it’s uniting theme. We may now say the Bible, which has this unity of function and unity of story, has a unity of focus all the way through, and the focus is, precisely, our Lord Jesus Christ himself. Here, I may quote what he himself said in one of his long debates with the self-styled religious authorities of Israel, “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (John 5:39-40)” You can’t have life through the scriptures without coming to Christ for it. The scriptures send you to Christ. The scriptures testify to Christ.

. . .The New Testament books specifically, we may fairly say, were written by people whom the Lord Jesus Christ--crucified, risen, ascended, and now enthroned--fills the whole horizon of their life. Everything that their life involves is seen, thought through, and lived out in terms of its relationship to Christ and Christ’s relationship to it. When I say he fills the horizon, I mean that! I mean that the writers of the New Testament don’t see any part of life, or live any part of life, apart from its relation to him, and apart from his will in our handling of it, and apart from his help in our handling of it. “Christ is all, and in all” for these New Testament teachers, and the books that they’ve left us--all twenty-seven books of the New Testament: four gospels, the Acts, which are the history books; all the epistles; and then the visionary book of Revelation--all of these book express that same perspective, and all of them seek to draw us, the readers, into embracing and enjoining that perspective as the rule of our own lives.

Here we are, part of the church of Christ today, in 2006, and we’re to think of ourselves the way that the Lord Jesus from his throne is presented in the book of Revelation as inspecting, watching over, helping, admonishing, guiding and encouraging his church everywhere--the seven churches of the Revelation, you see. You have the acting Lord of the seven churches in the book of Revelation chapters 2 and 3, and the same Lord acts as Lord in all these respects in relation to St. John’s congregation and every other represented here, and indeed, every other congregation throughout the world. Nothing changes there. The New Testament tells us how it is, as well as telling us how it was. The relation of the Lord Jesus to his people is exactly the same today as it was in the first century A.D. Already, following the ascension, the people of God were learning to live in fellowship with Jesus as his disciples, the way that his disciples did when he was on earth. The difference is, of course, that we don’t see him, don’t feel him. The physical dimension of living with Jesus is not reality for us.

. . .[T]he Holy Spirit makes Christ real to us, present with us, and the one who fills out the horizon of our thinking and our living in the way that I’m trying to describe. And that’s Christian existence; that’s Christian experience; that’s the real thing. That’s what all the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are written directly to induce and sustain. That’s actually what the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament are pointing to, and the beginning of fellowship with God in personal life is already there, and in some cases there in great fullness for those who have eyes to see. Yes, this is what it’s all about. The focus of the Bible for Christian readers is the Lord Jesus Christ and the reality the life of fellowship with him.

I'll finish off this last lesson in one more post. Transcriptions of all the lessons are now available in pdf format for personal use to anyone who asks.

What was the estate of Christ's humiliation?

The estate of Christ's humiliation was that low condition, wherein he for our sakes, emptying himself of his glory, took upon him the form of a servant, in his conception and birth, life, death, and after his death, until his resurrection. [1]

1. Phil. 2:6-8

   . . . who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant,being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

   Luke 1:31

   And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.

   II Cor. 8:9

   For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.

   Acts 2:24

   God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.

Question 46, Westminster Larger Catechism.

Technorati Tags: catechism, Westminster Catechism, Westminster Standards, Jesus Christ, theology

Round the Sphere Again

Carnivals

• Last week's Christian Carnival is posted at The Evangelical Ecologist.
  
• This week's Christian Carnival will be at Attention Span.
  
• For lots of laughs, make sure you check out the Carnival of Kid's Comedy at In a Shoe.

Theology

• There's an interesting discussion of Amyraldianism at Reformation Theology.

Ted Haggard
This wouldn't be my favorite subject even if I had heard of the man previous to the scandal (and I hadn't), but here are a couple of posts on the subject that have a little different focus than the majority.

• From Tim Challies.
• From Carla Rolfe, with the girl's perspective, at and his ministers a flame of fire.
  

Humour

• The funniest thing I read round the sphere this week, and it has a point, too.
  

November's Thanksgiving: God's Mercy

I'm thankful that God is the "father of the fatherless and the protector of widows." I'm thankful that he responds in his mercy with help for those who need him.

Thanksgiving today from others:

• candyinsierras is thankful that God is a God of healing and restoration, and she explains it all in a very touching post.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful that she can vote, and that God is ordering all things.
• Lee Ann is thankful for the freedom to vote, too, and she's thankful for those who serve as public servants.
  
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for her big window.
• Randi at I have to say is thankful for her boys.

What are you thankful for? Tell us in the comments, or post your thanksgiving on your own blog and then let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. I'll link to all the posts I become aware of.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it? Please feel free to remind me.

November's Thanksgiving: Busy Days

I'm thankful for busy days like today, when I think I'll never get everything on my must-do list done, and then somehow, by the grace of God, I'm sure, the day is over and everything's done, and I feel tired but not stressed.

But it's late, and (as I already said) I'm tired, so I'll add the items from all you other thankful people into this post tomorrow morning. If I did it tonight, I'd have to hold my eyes open, and that might make it just a little hard to type.

Later than expected update:

• Susan from Zionsville is

  thankful for the beauty of the earth, the glory of the skies, the love which from our birth over and around us lies; the wonder of each hour, hill and vale and tree and flower, sun and moon and stars of light, the joy of human love, friends on earth and friends above, for Thy Church, and for Christ, best gift divine to our race so freely given; For that great great love of His, peace on earth and joy in heaven! (from "For the Beauty of the Earth" which has been resounding in my mind and heart for days now!)

• Columbine is thankful for electricity.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for God's nearness during a traumatic time, and for her son Jacob.
• Kim of the Upward Call is thankful for new days and encouraging words.
• Lee Ann is thankful for her nextdoor neighbour, who took care of the leaves in her front yard.
• She, herself, is adding leaves to a thankfulness tree all month long, so she has a long list of things she's thankful for: silence, cool weather, God's reminders that Jesus is alive, color; discernment; kids and books.
• Randi of I have to say is thankful that God does not leave her alone.

  He lovingly guides me and reminds me that His ways are better than my own. When I fall back into my old ways of thinking, He gently shows me my error and helps me to do things differently--for my own good and the good of those around me!

What are you thankful for? Tell us in the comments, or post your thanksgiving on your own blog and then let me know of your post either by email or in the comments here. I'll link to all the posts I become aware of.

Have you posted a bit of thanksgiving, and I missed it? Please feel free to remind me. (I'll link to the thanksgiving items in the comments of this post later on today.)

November's Thanksgiving: Financial Security

I wrote about my grandma yesterday, and how much she didn't have, and that makes me thankful for what I do have. I have enough to get by; I expect things to stay that way; and that's a great blessing.

• On a similar note, Judy from my real life is

  grateful that there was always food to feed my children. The anguish for so many mothers who don't have the assurance of a next meal for their little ones haunts me. I think of it often when I watch the news from around the world.

• Columbine is "thankful for faithful young men who preach the Word of God."
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for her church.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful that God is sovereign even when our circumstances are difficult.
• Lee Ann is thankful for worship and beautiful weather.
• Missmellifious is thankful for

  sniffles and rainy days and God being in control and me not having to worry. Oh! and mums and surprise presents and words that make you feel snuggly when you are cold.

• Julana is thankful for leftovers, her tricycling son, and her two sisters.
  

are you thankful for? I invite you to participate in November's Thanksgiving. Post in the comments of this post, or post on your own blog, but just be thankful!

If you've been thankful and I've forgotten to link to you, please let me know in the comments or by email. Sometimes I miss things; sometimes I see things and then forget them.

Sunday's Hymn: John Newton

JOHN NEWTON, Clerk
Once an infidel and libertine
A servant of slaves in Africa,
Was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour
JESUS CHRIST,
restored, pardoned, and ap­point­ed to preach
the Gospel which he had long laboured to destroy.
He min­is­tered,
Near sixteen years in Ol­ney, in Bucks,
And twenty-eight years in this Church.

Christ, A Redeemer and Friend

Poor, weak and worthless though I am
I have a rich almighty Friend;
Jesus, the Savior, is His Name;
He freely loves, and without end.

He ransomed me from hell with blood,
And by His power my foes controlled;
He found me wandering far from God,
And brought me to His chosen fold.

He cheers my heart, my wants supplies,
And says that I shall shortly be,
Enthroned with Him above the skies;
O what a Friend is Christ to me!

But, ah! my inmost spirit mourns;
And well my eyes with tears may swim,
To think of my perverse returns:
I’ve been a faithless friend to Him.

Often my gracious Friend I grieve,
Neglect, distrust, and disobey;
And often Satan’s lies believe
Sooner than all my Friend can say.

He bids me always freely come,
And promises whate’er I ask:
But I am straitened, cold and dumb,
And count my privilege a task

Before the world that hates His course,
My treach’rous heart has throbbed with shame;
Loath to forego the worlds applause,
I hardly dare avow His Name.

Sure, were I not most vile and base,
I could not thus my Friend requite!
And were not He the God of grace,
He’d frown and spurn me from His sight.

---Music by Lowell Mason (Listen.)

---

Other hymns, worship songs, etc. posted today:

• Jesus My Glory from the Valley of Vision at The Thirsty Theologian
• The Sands of Time are Sinking at John Dekker's Journal
• Hark My Soul, It Is The Lord at Seasonings
• Rock of Ages at Ian's Messy Desk
• We Praise Thee, O God, Our Redeemer, Creator at Unity Without Verity
• Thy Mercy, My God at New Lumps
• Jesus, Everlasting King at Jam and Books
• Wisdom at Chez Kneel
  
• The Collect for the Twenty-First Sunday After Trinity at Magic Statistics

Have you posted a hymn for Sunday and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by emailing me at the address in the sidebar, and I'll add your post to the list.

Technorati Tags: hymns, hymn lyrics

Saturday's Old Photo

In this week's old photo we have my grandma--my mother's mother--with her sister-in-law, showing the catch from their latest fishing trip. I can't tell what fish those are; some may be salmon, since there were Pacific salmon in the rivers around where she lived in southern Idaho.

My grandma's name is Rosa Mackie Deckard, and her sister-in-law is Beatrice Mackie, who was married to my grandma's brother Hollace. The home would be Beatrice and Hollace's. My grandma's home was not nearly so nice.

My grandma had a difficult life. She moved, when she was only nineteen, from Missouri to Idaho with her new husband in order to make a better life for them there. I wouldn't say she got the better life. She had very little, managing to raise eight children on almost no income while living with an alcoholic husband who was not a good provider and a very nasty when he was drunk. And when she left her family behind, she really left them behind. Trips back to Missouri were not in her budget, and she only made a couple of them over her whole life. Of course, she had her brother Hollace and his family, who lived in the same small town in Idaho.

She was a strong woman and a hard worker, and a lonely woman, I think, after her children left and her husband died. My family lived in a little town 5 miles south of her for a couple of years, and I remember several times when Grandma Deckard came over for an afternoon visit and then just stayed for several days. Then she'd wake up one morning and announce over breakfast that she thought she really ought to go home.

It looks like she had a good time on her fishing trip, and I'm glad for that. I love the overalls, and the bandanas tied round the heads of both women.

November's Thanksgiving: Colour

I straightened my clothes closet last night, and while I was sorting, I thought about how much I enjoy the various colors of the fabrics. What can I say? I love colour, and I'm so glad God gave me eyes to see it.

Other recent thanksgivers:

• Columbine is thankful for sunshine.
  
• Juanita has a whole list of things she's thankful for.
• Kim of Hiraeth is thankful for friends and breakfast with a friend.
• Kim of the Upward Call is thankful for music.
• Lee Ann is thankful for lazy Saturday mornings.

What are you thankful for? I invite you to participate in November's Thanksgiving. Post in the comments of this post, or post on your own blog, but just be thankful!

If you've been thankful and I've forgotten to link to you, please let me know in the comments or by email. Sometimes I miss things; sometimes I see things and then forget them.

Sunday School with J. I. Packer, Part 4

In this post, I am continuing the notes from the second lesson on The Internal Unity of Scripture. This series was given by J. I. Packer in three sessions of the Learner's Exchange at St. John's (Shaughnessy) Anglican Church. Audio of these three lessons is available at the download center of St. John's (Shaughnessy). I also have transcripts that I've made of these first two lessons, and I will send them to you in pdf form for personal use if you ask. Here are the first, second, and third parts of these notes.

In this next part of the lesson, Packer moves to the New Testament, exploring that factors that give unity to the collection of books in the New Testament. The fundamental and all-comprehensive principle the unifies the New Testament is the Lord Jesus Christ

. . . Son of God incarnate, who lived, died, rose, reigns and is returning. He is the center of the horizon. He is the one who occupies all our attention, holds our attention, and shapes what should be going on in the minds and lives of his disciples in just the same way that the projection in the theatre fills the horizon of your vision. You look, and everywhere that you look the picture that is being projected is coming through to you. Jesus Christ, for the Christian, is to be like that. The whole New Testament says so.

. . . In all 27 New Testament books this is the perspective, and he is at the center. He’s central for every Christian. He’s central for the people of God, who in the New Testament are called the church. . . . He’s central, in fact, in importance for the world even though the world doesn’t know this; but the truth is, as is said at the end of Matthew’s gospel, that all authority has been given to him in heaven and in earth. That is to say, he is ruling in the cosmos in his Father’s behalf. He is the channel through whom the providential action of God governing his world takes place. He is the Lord of the world who everybody ought to be worshipping, and meantime, his people on earth are on mission all the time--on mission, sent out--to make known the knowledge of Christ, the knowledge of the way things really are in this world. “Go and make disciples of all the nations,” said the Lord Jesus. And Christians, every day of their lives--that’s you and me, of course--we are to understand that that’s at the very heart of the job that we’re meant to do.

And we are to remember that one day this world’s history will finish; one day the cosmos as we know it will come apart. That’s unimaginable, but that’s what’s going to happen. I think that the best way we can begin to imagine it is to contemplate this thought: There’ll come a moment for everyone who’s alive in the world the way that we are today sitting in this room, and you patiently listening to me--all our environment, human environment, local environment,--all of that will just be gone; and you and I--if we’re the terminal generation, or whoever is in the terminal generation--will be conscious of one thing only: that each of us as individuals on our own, isolated individuals, we are before the Lord Jesus and accounts have to be settled. It’s called a day of judgment.

Themes of the New Testament

• The fulfillment of God’s purposes through Christ.

  What are God’s purposes? Restoration is the word that fits. The world went out of shape as a result of human sin, which put humanity out of shape straight-away because human nature was set in the mold of the transgression into which Adam and Eve had fallen . . . and the world itself . . . was cursed by God. . . . Things aren’t the way that they would have been if man hadn’t sinned, and they aren’t the way they’re going to be when God restores the cosmos. The New Testament says that that’s what he’s going to do through our Lord Jesus Christ. The restoration will bring in a state of affairs in which the people of God are altogether all praising, all enjoying, all in fellowship with Christ and with each other, and all . . . more exuberant and ecstatic about it than words can tell, because they know that this glorious state of being goes on forever. It’s pictured right at the end of Revelation, when, in chapters 21 and 22, one hears of the city of God coming down from God to this world. What’s being talked about, I think (from other passages in the New Testament), is a total restoration of this world--this world order--in some way; and the city of God, a place of fellowship. . . is now with Christ . . . in a place of supreme joy and fulfillment. This is God’s purpose being fulfilled, and it means glory, in every sense of that word, for God’s people.

• The fulfillment of God’s promises.

  All of this, in detail, was foretold more-or-less clearly in the Old Testament, and Paul, at one point, makes a big deal of the fact that in Christ and through Christ . . . all the promises that God has ever given about his intentions, purposes, undertakings, for his people in this world are now fulfilled. Do you know this word from Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 1? “All the promises of God find their yes in him. . . .” Then he says, “that’s why it is through him that we utter our ‘Amen’ to God for his glory. And it’s God who establishes us with you in Christ,” Paul continues, “and he’s anointed us, he’s put his seal on us, and given his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” that in due course every promise of God is going to be fulfilled for each of us.

  Here Packer mentions Mark Dever's book, The Message of the New Testament: Promises Kept, which I reviewed here, because he believes the title, with Promises Kept in large letters is "exactly right."


• The fulfillment of God's patterns.

  [These are] patterns that God gave in action to show his people what was going to be done when Jesus Christ came to fulfill the promises and the purposes of the Father who sent him. Christians have a name--it’s a traditional name--for the patterns. We talk about types, and the study of types is typology. . . . A type is a pattern in action which in due course gets replaced by something better than was there before, but the pattern remains the same.

  Some examples of Old Testament types (or patterns) that are fulfilled in the New Testament:
  1. The offices of prophet, priest and king. In the New Testament, Christ fulfills the patterns of those offices.

     This is his threefold office of our Saviour. That means he’s a better prophet, a better priest, and a better king than any that the Old Testament knows--better, because of what he brings.

  2. Redemption.

     . . .[T]here’s a typical redemption in the Old Testament: God saving his people from slavery in Egypt. For us, too, there’s slavery. . . .We’re slaves of sin and slaves of the devil, who, at the moment, is the ruler of this world. . . . But the Lord breaks in and redeems us. And for centuries, Christians have been picturing the Christian life as comparable to the journey of the Israelites through the wilderness to the Promised Land. . . . Well, that’s how the typical redemption becomes a picture of what we call the antitypical reality of spiritual redemption in Christ. And that which occurs in Christ, or through Christ is greater and more glorious than that which occurred when the pattern in Old Testament times.
     

  3. Sacrifices. In the Old Testament, there are
     

     . . . sacrifices which include the shedding of blood for the atoning of sin. This is a pattern of reality which the New Testament picks up and highlights. Yes, there has to be death in order to atone for human sin. It has to be a substitutionary death, and the Lord Jesus died it. Blood was shed. “Without shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin.” That’s specifically in Hebrews, and that’s paraphrasing what those sacrificial rituals, carefully described in Leviticus and Numbers, in particular, are also saying. This is a pattern that was fulfilled in Christ. This is the meaning of his death in pain and shame on the cross.

  This is one of the bonds of unity within the Bible: typology holding together the preparatory era in which God was teaching his people the patterns; and then the era of fulfillment, the era in which the Lord Jesus comes and everything that the patterns pointed forward to is fulfilled and realized in a perfect form, which doesn’t ever need to be adjusted. This is God’s last word to man; this is the final truth; this is the final reality that we need in order to draw near to God in true worship and fellowship. The Lord Jesus, the living Lord, who made atonement; who fulfills this whole role of prophet, priest and king; who is the mediator of the new version of--the true version of--God’s covenant with man, he is right at the heart of everything. He fills the whole horizon. And that is Christianity.



• The fulfillment of that to which God's propositions pointed.

  In the New Testament, there is a magnificent and amazing theology of prepositions. What I mean by that is just about everything that’s to be said about the Lord Jesus is conveyed by the use of the following prepositions: through, with, in, and then two prepositions, one of which means literally into, and the other means upon.

  1. Through

     Jesus is the one whose shed blood gives us pardon of our sins, justification through faith, acceptance into God’s family so that we are his own adopted children. This is our salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord, and what he has done; and what in his glory, as our intercessor, he still does.
     

  2. With

     But he’s not remote; he is, as I said earlier, the living Lord who, by his Spirit, makes himself present with each of his people, and walks with us, and sustains us, and gives us strength always, even to the end of the world. It’s a fellowship: fellowship with Christ as an abiding dimension of Christian life.

  3. In

     . . . [I]n the New Testament, Paul, constantly; John, in all three of his letters; and the Lord Jesus himself as his words are recorded in John’s gospel, all talk about life in Christ, or, when Jesus talks about it, life in me. “I’m the vine, you’re the branches. Abide (or stay put, as it’s most vividly expressed) stay put in me, and I will stay put in you.” You’ll live in Christ and your life will be a case of “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” a phrase from Colossians chapter 1, of course. What does that word in mean? It doesn’t mean absorption, as if, like they say in Hinduism, when you get into God, you as a person are dissolved away and cease to be. That’s the Hindu and Buddhist idea of nirvana. No, it means union--union whereby you, the person you are, are drawing life from the Lord, and the Lord is pouring life into you, and you are covered by his representative ministry as your representative before the throne of God. That’s what’s in view. It’s a relationship of a particular kind, and it’s hard to find any kind of human analogy. I don’t know how to illustrate it except in terms of the Lord’s own illustration: he is the vine, we are the branches.

  4. Into and upon

     Then there are two more prepositions. One means into, and it’s the preposition that in Greek we use for going into a room, so that if you’ve gone into the room you’re now there. The other preposition is upon, so that if I lift this Bible and then put it down upon the desk which holds it up, I have done what this second preposition expresses: down on so that which goes down on something is henceforth resting on it. That’s the meaning of this word. . . . Well, those are the prepositions that are used in evangelistic contexts in the New Testament. (All the writers use them.) They’re the prepositions used for extending your arms--the arms of your heart to receive and embrace Christ, and then to rest your weight (the weight of your hopes, the weight of your daily living) . . . on him in the sense that you say to him and you mean it, “Lord Jesus, I cannot get on without you. You must hold me up.” And that’s the exercise of faith which brings people into Christian life, in the first instance, and that is also the exercise of faith which we who live our lives in Christ are to be making every day of our lives, so that we are, in fact, living, as they say, in dependence. . . on the Lord.

At this point Packer is running out of time, so he very quickly runs through some of the rest of what he planned to say.

The book of Hebrews

. . . [Hebrews is] a letter in which every point, right up to the final details of the application, is made by exposition and application of Old Testament scripture, demonstrating how the Christian reality fulfills it and is better than the Old Testament original was. There’s a better covenant, founded on better promises, a better sacrifice, a better priest than any of the Aaronic priests, a better country than the promised land in Palestine. . . . Everything for Christians is better.

The four gospels
Packer shows how each gospel reveals

different aspects of the glory and significance of the Lord Jesus as these qualities are displayed in the ministry that he fulfills.

1. Matthew: Jesus as king, as the Davidic king setting up the kingdom.
2. Mark: Jesus as the suffering servant of Isaiah 53.

   Mark proclaims the saviour has come, and Mark has constructed his gospel so that when you read it, it comes across as a journey to the cross. Right from the get-go, Jesus is on his way to the cross. Why? Well, because that’s where salvation is won.

3. Luke: Jesus as healer.

   Luke, telling his story, is particularly interested in focusing on the way in which Jesus changes human lives . . . . Jesus, the perfect man himself, transforming the human lives of other people.

4. John: Jesus as God in person.

   The incarnate Lord--he’s the incarnate Lord--God, come in the flesh. So, where Luke stresses Jesus’ perfect humanity, John stresses Jesus’ full divinity--incarnate divinity. Where Luke had exhibited Jesus in the stories as the transformer of human lives, John exhibits him as, quite simply, as the live-giver.

Closing statement

So it’s Christ in all the scriptures; and it’s discipleship in all the scriptures; and it’s the work of God perfecting his church, his own people, in all the scriptures; and there you have the internal unity of the Bible in itself. And you stand back, and you marvel at the wisdom of God, and you can’t wait to do some more Bible study and inspect more closely this glorious product of divine wisdom celebrating the divine saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

November's Thanksgiving: Grosbeaks

This morning I'm thankful for the grosbeaks that descended on the willow bushes behind my backyard. The view from the window above my desk can be pretty dreary during this season of the year, and the colored flitting of the grosbeaks is a welcome sight.

Other thankful hearts round the blogworld include

• The Headmistress of the Common Room, who has more things to be thankful for than you can shake a stick at.
• Amanda, who is thankful that fall has finally arrived in Taiwan.
• Kim of The Upward Call, who is thankful for female friendships.
• Kim of Hiraeth, who is thankful for Fridays.
• Lee Ann of such small hands, who is thankful for websites that make her smile. The ones she lists are all fashion sites I think I'll be checking out once I've posted this.

What are you thankful for? I invite you to participate in November's Thanksgiving. Post in the comments of this post or post on your own blog, but just be thankful! If you've been thankful and I've forgotten to link to you, please let me know in the comments or by email. Sometimes I miss things; sometimes I see things and then forget them.

November's Thanksgiving: Found File and Thankful Friends

Today I'm thankful for a lost file found. That may sound trivial, but it was not. (Need details? Check the bottom of this post.)

I'm also thankful for the thankfulness (and the participation) of others.

• Carla takes to heart Paul's instructions to give thanks in all circumstances.
• Kim of Hireath is thankful for . . . oh dear . . . I'm blushing. You'll have to go see for yourself.
• Julana is thankful for hearing from old friends and the internet.
• Kim of The Upward Call is thankful for leaves in her yard. In the comments, she says she is also thankful for the good health to be able to walk with a dog.
• Sean Carter has a whole thanksgiving blog.
• Island Sparrow is thankful for her dog.

  My dog is such a little friend - she reads your moods and cuddles up when you are feeling lonely or discouraged. And she is always ready to play or go for a walk.

• Martin LaBar is thankful that he can vote.
• Churchpundit has a whole list of reasons why he is thankful for his church.
• Lee Ann Millinger is thankful for a warm place to work and a good job.

Are you thankful for something? Tell us in the comments or post it on your blog and send me the link.

Sunday School With J. I. Packer, Part 3

These are notes from the second hour-long Learner's Exchange lesson on the Internal Unity of Scripture given by J. I. Packer at St. John's (Shaughnessy) Anglican Church. I posted notes on the first lesson in two parts last week:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Common Purposes of the Bible
Lesson one includes a list of common themes that run throughout all the books of the Bible. In this second lesson, we're given a list of common purposes that God pursues through the whole of scripture.

1. To teach people faith. Through the teaching of scripture and God's actions as recorded in scripture, God's people learn that God "is going to fulfill his word, and his love is never going to fail."
   


2. To edify God's people

   so that they express and embody and practice and perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord. Call it edification; call it the building of the community into it’s final glory.

3. To demonstrate what a God-centered view of God’s world is like.

   We, some of us, use the phrase worldview to describe this total outlook--this view of life with God the Creator who sustains the world and is redeeming us at the center of things. God teaches the God-centered worldview, which is transcultural. Cultures change, and the details of expressing practical godliness may have to change with it in order to stay the same at the level of principle, but the principles of truth and fact on which life in this world is to be built--principle of truth and wisdom . . . about God and what God is doing--those principles are unchanged from one generation to another, and cultural change doesn’t touch them.

4. To teach God's people a vocabulary to help them understand him and understand how they ought to live. These are words

   which either the secular world doesn’t use at all, or uses in a very inadequate, subchristian way when it does use them. Those words have to be properly understood. They are defined not simply by producing a verbal formula like dictionaries do, that define words for us, but by seeing them acted out in the things that God does and leads his people to do.

   Some examples:
   1. Holy

      . . . the Bible’s umbrella word for everything that God is, and that we in our fallen condition aren’t. Understanding the meaning of holiness is a project in itself.

   2. Glory

      . . .which in the first instance means “God on display”. The word, in Hebrew, anyway, comes from a root which means “weight, that which is weighty, that which is awesome, that which is wonderful because it’s so big and breathtaking.” The glory of God is seen as his faithfulness and his love, his justice and his mercy; [and is] exhibited by his dealings with his people, first in the Old Testament, and then in the New. And the people of God learn--again, all sixty-six books are involved here, because the process begins right at the beginning of the human story and continues unendingly--the people of God learn, as they contemplate God’s glory on display in the works of providence and grace that he’s constantly performing, they learn to glorify him. You know that term glorify. It means that you praise God for what you see and you model your own life on the character of God as it’s displayed in what he does.

   3. Love

      The world doesn’t know what love is. Love isn’t primarily a feeling. Love is a resolve . . . to make great the person who is the object of your affection. It’s a resolve; it’s a matter of the will; it’s a matter of what you do. You say, what do you mean by great? Well, when it’s God, you can’t make him great as if he isn’t great at the moment, but you can acknowledge his greatness in worship, and that does honor him in the way that we should honor him. . . .
      
      . . . [W]hen it’s our neighbor, . . . we form a responsible judgment as to what is going to help our neighbor towards the life that God the creator will be pleased to see our neighbor living, and then we do what we can to try and help our neighbor towards that. When the neighbour is our peer with whom we rub shoulders, well, we are prepared to help with material things when there’s a problem, and we seek to share the Lord Jesus with this person, because we know that his or her biggest need, among their many needs, . . . is the need to know Christ and find the new life. So we witness and we help. And if our neighbor is, for instance, like the children in our own family, . . . we drill them in the basics of the faith and the godly way to live, and we pray for them and we hope . . . that as they grow and mature, so more and more they will exhibit godliness as a reality: the life of holiness and righteousness as a reality, the life to which we know God calls them, just as he calls us. That’s making your neighbor great, you see. That’s neighbour love--the second great commandment.

Old Testament as Three Act Drama
In lesson two, Packer gives an outline of the history of the Old Testament, and shows how the wisdom and prophetic literature fits with the historical "backbone". In this lessons, he gives a slightly different way to look at the Old Testament: as a three act drama.

• Act 1: Ruin

  Creation and the goodness of the creation is right at the beginning of Genesis, and sin and judgment come in and fill the chapters from chapter 3 to chapter 11. . . . Mankind has sinned and everybody is off course spiritually.

• Act 2: Renovation

  God chooses a family and makes a covenant with that family. It’s the seed of Abraham, of course that I’m talking about. [I]n due course, [he] rescues that family from the slavery into which they’ve fallen, and legislates in very great detail the pattern of the community life that they must henceforth live as his covenant people, his servants, his witnesses. That takes you from Genesis chapter 12, where God calls Abraham, to the end of the book of Joshua, where the promised land has been entered and occupied, and the Israelites, having been rescued from captivity, are there in the land where they’re meant to be. And as you know, all the detailed legislation for their community life that’s in half of Exodus, and all of Leviticus, and two-thirds of Numbers, and two-thirds of Deuteronomy, as well. God went into great detail to make quite sure that they would know how to live to his praise. So, that’s Act 2: Renovation - Renovation of humanity in the life of those whom God takes as his people.

• Act 3: Relapse

  The story of failure: failure of leadership before there was a king in Israel (that’s the book of Judges); failure of leadership under the kings of Israel. David and Solomon, on balance, did well rather than badly, but nearly all the other kings did badly rather than well. This section of the story picks up in 1 Samuel and goes through to the end of 2 Chronicles. The story of the kingdom is, on balance, a sad story. It’s a story of failure and mistakes as the dominant theme. And then, finally, the people go into exile under God’s judgment because of their sin. Sin is idolatry and immorality together, the prophets having a great deal to say about those two ways of lapsing, each reinforcing the other. Finally, as I said, Israel goes into exile. After seventeen years they return, and there’s a measure of restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah.
  

In the next post of notes on this lesson, we'll move to the New Testament: its principles and themes.

If you are interested in having a full transcipt of these two lessons for your own personal use, I have them in PDF form (including a few typos) that I can email to you if you ask. Update: I have only lesson 2 available right now. I can't find the PDF for lesson 1, but when I do, it will be available, too. Update 2: I found the lost file (Thankfully, I had sent it to my son and he still had it.), so I really do have both files for those who want it.

November's Thanksgiving: Dog Walks

Every day in November I'm going to try to post something I'm thankful for. I did it last year and I'm repeating it this year. Last year I invited your participation and this year I'm asking you to participate, too.

The instructions for participating are exactly the same as they were for Potatofest. Simply mention something you're thankful for in the comments here, or email it to me, and I'll include it in one of the thankful posts; or you may prefer to post your thankful thought(s) on your own blog and send me the link(s), and I'll link up to your post. Feel free to participate as often as you like. After all, we have a lot to be thankful for.

What am I thankful for today? I think I'll start simple, with one of the small gifts, the sorts of gifts we sometimes overlook: I'm thankful for dog walks, like the one I took this afternoon. When winter comes round, it's easy to spend too much time indoors. Having to walk the dog gets me out in the fresh air even when I think I'd rather not. And I rarely, if ever, regret it. Dogs who need walking are a good gift from a good heavenly Father.

What are you thankful for?