Chosen by His Grace: misc

Showing posts with label misc. Show all posts

She Just Happened To Go There And Just Happened To Meet Him…

by MARK ALTROGGE
So she (Ruth) set out and went and gleaned in the field after the reapers, and she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz, who was of the clan of Elimelech. Ruth 2:3

Ruth had recently come with Naomi, her Jewish mother-in-law, from the land of Moab. She was an impoverished stranger in a strange land, just hoping to eke out an existence. God had told Israel that they shouldn’t pick their fields clean in the harvest but leave the droppings and the edges for the poor to glean. That’s what Ruth was hoping to do – to find a field, any field, where she could get permission to glean enough for her and Naomi to survive a few days.

She found a field and she “happened” to come to a part of the field owned by a man named Boaz. She just “happened” to come there. At least that would have been how Ruth saw it. Little did she know, but someday, this “random” happening would lead to her becoming the wife of Boaz, and an ancestor of king David, and Jesus himself.

We can see that this is God’s providence. God was directing her every step. Years earlier, Naomi and her husband “happened” to decide to move to Moab, where they “happened” to meet Ruth, who “happened” to marry their son. Years later, forced by poverty, Naomi and Ruth “happened” to return to Israel, and now Ruth “happened” to come to a particular field.

How many times in our lives do we just “happen” to go somewhere or meet someone and later find out it was God’s wonderful providence? Yesterday as I preached, I saw a family sitting there who years ago, just “happened” to move next door to another family in our church, who invited them to a dinner where they heard the gospel and eventually got saved.

You didn’t just “happen” to meet your husband or wife. You didn’t just “happen” to wind up living where you live. You didn’t just “happen” to join your church. God has been directing your every step.

And life isn’t just “happening” to you. You may work under a miserable boss. You may be going through tough times. You may have just been told you need a hip replacement or have a serious sickness. That unexpected tax bill, that transfer to another job, that tree that fell on your garage…you get the idea. Nothing just “happens” to us. God may have transferred you so you’d meet someone you will share the good news of Jesus with. That tree that crushed your garage? The tree service foreman may someday lead the Children’s Ministry in your church.

The next time you ask, “Why is this happening to me?” remember God’s loving providence. He has you right where he wants you, for your good and his glory. Nothing just happens to us. Not a sparrow falls apart from God’s will. He hand crafts every snowflake and lightning bolt. Our blessings and our afflictions are tailor-made by the loving hand of God.

Keep an eye out for God’s providences in your life. Someday you will say, “Oh, so THAT’S why that happened.” It didn’t seem so good at the time, but if THAT hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be enjoying THIS blessing right now.

And heaven will be the grand review of all God’s providences in our lives. Seeing how God orchestrated events and lives to bring you into the world, and bring you to Jesus and transform and use you for his glory. What an incredible day that will be.

It's Impossible

The Burpo-Malarkey Doctrine

by Phil Johnson

It's odd and troubling that the best-selling evangelical book of the past decade is a fanciful account of heaven spun from the imagination of a four-year-old boy. (Believe it or not, The Purpose-Driven Life and The Prayer of Jabez are both now more than a decade old.) Peddling fiction about the afterlife as non-fiction is the current Next Big Thing in the world of evangelical publishing.

Heaven is for Real, by Todd Burpo, tells the story of Burpo's son, Colton, who says he visited heaven while anesthetized for an appendectomy at age 4. Colton, now 13, says in heaven he got a halo and real wings (though they were too small for his liking). He also claims he sat on Jesus' lap while the angels sang to him; he saw Mary standing beside Jesus' throne; and he met the Holy Spirit (who, according to Colton, is "kind of blue").

More than seven million copies of this book are now in circulation, and the publisher has been assembling a sizable catalogue of spin-off products, including a planned movie version (to be produced by televangelist/prosperity preacher T. D. Jakes).

That book is not to be confused with The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, by Kevin Malarkey—another runaway best-seller. Malarkey's book is about his son Alex, who at age 6 was nearly killed (and left permanently paralyzed) in a devastating automobile accident. In the immediate aftermath, and then during his rehabilitation, Alex says he made multiple trips to heaven and back.

The Malarkeys' version of heaven is considerably darker and not as full of details as the Burpos'. "There is a hole in outer Heaven," Alex says. "That hole goes to hell." The devil evidently uses this portal freely, because he is a major figure in Alex Malarkey's description of paradise. Alex says he has personally seen Satan many times, first at the accident scene and then later in heaven.

Indeed, this is perhaps the most vivid part of Alex Malarkey's whole account: "The devil's mouth is funny looking, with only a few moldy teeth. And I've never noticed any ears. His body has a human form, with two bony arms and two bony legs. He has no flesh on his body, only some moldy stuff. His robes are torn and dirty. I don't know about the color of the skin or robes—it's all just too scary to concentrate on these things!"

Those books are part of a burgeoning genre, currently one of the hottest trends in publishing: imaginative tales purporting to be eyewitness accounts of heaven and the afterlife. (Blogger Tim Challies has labeled the genre "Heaven Tourism," candidly dismissing one bestseller in the category as "pure junk, fiction in the guise of biography, paganism in the guise of Christianity.")

Examples of these works include My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life, by Marvin J. Besteman; Flight to Heaven: A Plane Crash . . .A Lone Survivor . . .A Journey to Heaven—and Back, by Dale Black; To Heaven and Back: A Doctor's Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again: A True Story, by Mary Neal; 90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life, by Don Piper; Nine Days In Heaven, by Dennis Prince; 23 Minutes In Hell: One Man's Story About What He Saw, Heard, and Felt in that Place of Torment, by Bill Wiese; and many others. Several of these titles have appeared on various bestseller lists, and most of them are still riding high.

This is not a totally new phenomenon. Various survivors of near-death experiences have been publishing gnostic insights about the afterlife for at least two decades. Betty Eadie's Embraced by the Light was number one on the New York Times Bestseller List exactly 20 years ago. The success of that book unleashed an onslaught of similar tales, nearly all of them with strong New Age and occult overtones. So psychics and new-agers have been making hay with stories like these for at least two decades.

What's different about the current crop of afterlife testimonies is that they are being eagerly sought and relentlessly cranked out by evangelical publishers. They are bought and devoured by millions who would describe themselves as born-again Bible-believing Christians. Every book I have named in the above list comes from an ostensibly evangelical source. Many of them are old-guard mainstream ECPA publishers, not vanity presses or dilettantes from the charismatic fringe.

These books are coming out with such frequency that it is virtually impossible to read and review them all. But that shouldn't even be necessary. No true evangelical ought to be tempted to give such tales any credence whatsoever, no matter how popular they become. One major, obvious problem is that these books don't even agree with one another. They give contradictory descriptions of heaven and thus cannot possibly have any cumulative long-term effect other than the sowing of confusion and doubt.

But the larger issue is one no authentic believer should miss: the whole premise behind every one of these books is contrary to everything Scripture teaches about heaven.

In an upcoming book dealing with this subject, John MacArthur says,

For anyone who truly believes the biblical record, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that these modern testimonies—with their relentless self-focus and the relatively scant attention they pay to the glory of God—are simply untrue. They are either figments of the human imagination (dreams, hallucinations, false memories, fantasies, and in the worst cases, deliberate lies), or else they are products of demonic deception.
We know this with absolute certainty, because Scripture definitively says that people do not go to heaven and come back: "Who has ascended to heaven and come down?" (Proverbs 30:4). Answer: "No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man" (John 3:13, emphasis added). All the accounts of heaven in Scripture are visions, not journeys taken by dead people. And even visions of heaven are very, very rare in Scripture. You can count them all on one hand.
Only four authors in all the Bible were blessed with visions of heaven and wrote about what they saw: the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, and the apostles Paul and John. Two other biblical figures—Micaiah and Stephen—got glimpses of heaven, but what they saw is merely mentioned, not described (2 Chronicles 18:18; Acts 7:55). As Pastor MacArthur points out, all of these were prophetic visions, not near-death experiences. Not one person raised from the dead in the Old or New Testaments ever recorded for us what he or she experienced in heaven. That includes Lazarus, who spent four days in the grave.

Paul was caught up into heaven in an experience so vivid he said he didn't know whether he went there bodily or not, but he saw things that are unlawful to utter, so he gave no details. He covered the whole incident in just three verses (2 Corinthians 12:2-4).

All three biblical writers who saw heaven and described their visions give comparatively sparse details, but they agree perfectly (Isaiah 6:1-4; Ezekiel 1 and 10; Revelation 4-6). They don't agree with the Burpo-Malarkey version of heaven. Both their intonation and the details they highlight are markedly different. The biblical authors are all fixated on God's glory, which defines heaven and illuminates everything there. They are overwhelmed, chagrined, petrified, and put to silence by the sheer majesty of God's holiness. Notably missing from all the biblical accounts are the frivolous features and juvenile attractions that seem to dominate every account of heaven currently on the bestseller lists.

Every week, I answer e-mails and inquiries from evangelicals who are confused by the barrage of afterlife travelogues. Why Christians who profess to believe the Bible would find these stories the least bit compelling is an utter mystery, but it is a sure sign that many in the evangelical movement have abandoned their evangelical convictions. Specifically, they have relinquished the principle of sola Scriptura and lost their confidence in the sufficiency of Scripture. Why else would they turn from clear biblical teaching on heaven and seek an alternative view in mystical experiences that bear no resemblance to what Scripture tells us?

This trend away from biblical authority was even noted earlier this week by a secular reporter in The New York Post. Consider the implications of this quotation:

Lynn Vincent, who ghost-wrote "Heaven is for Real" on behalf of the young boy Colton Burpo and his father, said that she was initially reluctant to include Colton's description of people in heaven having wings. "If I put that people in Heaven have wings, orthodox Christians are going to think that the book is a hoax." She did and they didn't.
Evangelical readers' discernment skills are at an all-time low, and that is why books like these proliferate. Despite the high profile, high sales figures, and high dollar amounts Christian publishers can milk from a trend such as this, it doesn't bode well for the future of Christian publishing—or for the future of the evangelical movement.

Watch for an all-new edition of John MacArthur's classic book The Glory of Heaven coming from Crossway next spring. The book will include thorough critiques of Heaven Is for Real and The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, plus extended evaluations of a few other bestsellers in the same vein. More importantly, it gives a thorough exposition of what Scripture teaches about heaven.

Spoiler alert: Heaven's a lot more glorious than any of these current bestsellers suggest.

From: http://www.gty.org/Blog/B121018

Science and Free Will

By Jason Castro, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Bates College in Maine

What does neuroscience tell us about free will?

There are some classic neuroscience experiments that were done by a guy named Benjamin Libet - these were about 30 years ago or so. And he found some results that have some really intriguing and, frankly, to some, some slightly unsettling applications for free will. And basically what he found is that there is brain activity that registers our intent to make a decision - a spontaneous decision - well before we've consciously decided to make a decision.

It's sort of like we're showing up a little bit late to the party. We think that we initiate activity and our brains follow suit, but it's actually the other way around. Our brains - the activity is initiated in the brain, and it only registers after the fact.

Does that mean brains have free will, or are they doing something very chemical and methodical, and we don't even know what's going on?

Yes, it's sort of a chemical mechanistic thing that's going on. We feel very much like we're these free-flowing entities that can make these spontaneous decisions, but it seems - the view that science backs - that it's more the case that we're, in a sense, going along for the ride. We're downstream of the process that's actually making decisions and initiating actions.

The Days I Need the Gospel Least

By Tim Challies

Preach the gospel to yourself! Preach the gospel to yourself every day! I think we are all growing accustomed to being told that Christians need to center their lives upon the gospel and that one of the keys to doing this is to be continually reminded of what is true by preaching the gospel to ourselves every day. I’ve been hearing this for years now and to varying degrees have been practicing it. However, just last week I had a bit of a breakthrough in my thinking about it. (Though this is a breakthrough for me, it is may well be one of those things you have understood for years.)

I have always understood that when I have sinned there is value in preaching the gospel to myself. When I sin I am prone to wallow in feelings of guilt and despair, as if negative feelings are in some way redemptive or as if they accomplish something. How could I fall into this sin again? Would a real Christian ever do something like this? In those moments I can summon the truth of the gospel to reassure myself that because of what Christ has done I am not condemned and cannot be condemned. In those moments I simply recount the gospel—that I am a sinner, that Christ died to take away the guilt of my sin and to give me his righteousness, that Christ has defeated sin and death, that I am a new creation, that my sin is no longer counted against me. There is freedom in apprehending and applying the gospel as a response to my sin.

What I haven’t understood to the same degree is the value of preemptively preaching the gospel to myself. I have heard many people say that there is value in preaching the gospel to myself every day, whether or not I find myself carrying the guilt and shame of sin. I’ve always thought of preaching the gospel to myself as a reactive thing, but Jerry Bridges has helped me to see it as proactive. Here’s why: The gospel does not merely correct bad thinking in the past and present, but also prevents bad thinking in the future. The gospel does not just speak to forgiveness of sins, but convicts me of the value of avoiding sin and reminds me that I now have the power to overcome it.

As I’ve read The Discipline of Grace Bridges has called me to see that I can only love God if I believe that God loves me first. “We cannot love God if we think we are under His judgment and condemnation.” Of course this is why I must be continually preaching the gospel to myself. I cannot truly and freely love God as long as I remain unconvinced of his love for me. For me to love him, I must believe that I am uncondemned and that I relate to him by grace instead of by law. “The extent to which we realize and acknowledge our own sinfulness, and the extent to which we realize the total forgiveness and cleansing from those sins, will determine the measure of our love to God.”

This makes the gospel the antidote to the works-righteousness that is always so close at hand, the works-righteousness that tells me that if I just do the right things and avoid the wrong things, I will be acceptable and accepted in God’s eyes. However, when I preach the gospel to myself every morning, I recall to my mind and my heart that I am loved by God, that he relates to me as a father relates to a son, that I am saved by his grace rather than by adherence to any law. This then generates the love that I need to feel and long to to feel and the love that will work itself out in action.

Preaching the gospel to myself reminds me that I am loved and on that basis allows me to love in return. But there is more. Preaching the gospel to myself in a proactive way also generates humility. The gospel reminds me who I am, it reminds me that I am responsible for the death of the Son of God, and it reminds me that I am the recipient of an infinite measure of grace. This must then generate humility. How could I hear such news, how could I see the Son of God slain for me, and respond with anything but humility?

The breakthrough in my thinking is that the gospel has great power when preached proactively. As it reminds me of God’s favor toward me, it gives me the power to live this day overwhelmed by love and grace. As it reminds me of his favor, it generates the humility that allows me to live humbly before both God and man. The days I am convinced that I need the gospel least are undoubtedly the days I need it most.

From: http://www.challies.com/reading-classics-together/the-days-i-need-the-gospel-least