Underground Exiles

Okay…I freely admit that I’m a bit of a doctrine nazi.  I take doctrine seriously, so I have a bit of a hard time when I hear someone spout bad doctrine.

I hear bad doctrine pretty regularly.  There is a dearth of biblical literacy in the American church, so bad doctrine is all over the place.  All you have to do is turn around and you trip over it.

A good example is the image I’m using in this post.  You have a copy of the AV 1611, otherwise known as the King James Version, nailed to a cross.  The image comes from the homepage of Peter Ruckman, another full blown heretic, who believes that the KJV is the only inspired version of the Bible.  Ruckman belongs in a looney bin, or at the least needs to be tossed out of the ministry.

Tonight I was invited by my girlfriend to attend the Open Heaven’s Conference at her church.  I have some qualms about some of the doctrine I’ve heard there, but overall, it seems to be a pretty safe place.  Then tonight, this wacko worship leader drones on for about 20 minutes before he starts playing; now, I can overlook some of what he said.  Mistaking Asaph (a person) for an instrument, for example.  But then the idiot says this:

“You’ve said You will not share Your glory with another, God; but we are not another!”

One of the most basic understandings we have from studying the Bible is that God is wholly other.  He is entirely other, and while we are made in God’s image and likeness, God is not like us.  And God’s glory is something that we don’t share in.  God’s glory is uniquely His; we aren’t partners in His glory.

Now, even my four-year-old neice understands that when God says He’ll not share His glory with another, it means exactly that.  How is it that an adult can manage to screw that up?

So as I continue reading The Mortification of Sin by John Owen, I find my self struck by this statement:

You cannoy mortify a specific sin that is troubling you, unless you are seeking to obey the Lord from the heart in all areas!

Let me be frank; that statement hurts.  When I first read it, it was like a hard punch to the stomach.

In reality all John Owen is doing is being plain about what is apparent all throughout the Gospels.  Jesus is absolutely ruthless about going after the heart, and anything less just isn’t on His radar.

Read more…

Running from hell | Ubyssey Online.  This article opens as follows:

“The mattock, a close cousin of the pickaxe, is used to dig through tough, earthy surfaces—it loosens soil, breaks rock, and tears through knotted grass. Its handle is a three-foot wooden shaft, twice the density of a baseball bat and its dual-sided iron head is comprised of a chisel and a pick. It was Pastor Fred Phelps’s weapon of choice when beating his children according to his son, Nate Phelps.”

Fred Phelps makes me want to puke…

Here’s hoping that God hates Fred Phelps.

“Do you mortify? Do you make it your daily work? Do not take a day off from this work; you must always be killing sin or it will be killing you.” — John Owen,The Mortification of Sin

The honest answer to Owens’ question is “No”.  Killing my sin is not something that even crosses my mind.

I’m so full of sin that I’m not even aware of my sin the majority of time.  Sure, I’m pretty good at confessing the small stuff - but what about anger?  Or pride?  Or lust?

Read more…

That’s me to the left, and I thought I’d bring y’all up to date on the latest reading material that I’m perusing.

I was told a good number of years ago by the late, great Rev. Leon Nicholson to feed myself a steady diet of dead men’s brains.  What my wonderful, now deceased pastor was trying to impart to me was really quite simple: if a book has lasted for over 200 years, it stands to reason that it has something to say worth reading.

This advice from my pastor lead to me trying to read as much as I could from dead thinkers.  My first great love was with the works of Charles Spurgeon.  I found his sermons to be phenomenal, and when I was 13, Pastor Leon gave me a copy of Spurgeon’s Lectures To My Students.  I don’t think I actually read it all until I was 23.

Then…oh, then I discovered the Puritans.  The Puritans were men that thought deeply, loved Christ greatly, and suffered well.  All of which are goals of my own.

So right now I’m reading:

• An Humble Attempt To Promote Explicit Agreement And Visible Union Of God’s People In Extraordinary Prayer For the Revival of Religion And The Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom On Earth, by Jonathan Edwards
• The Mortification of Sin, by John Owen

as well as

• The Doctrine of Repentance, by Thomas Watson.

So, I’m hoping to blog my way through at least one, if not two, of these books.  I rarely write anything about my personal life, so maybe this will give you a bit of a window into my head.