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Certain men and women hear from God at key times, and see with eyes that are unimpeded by the smog of culture. David Wells is one such person worth listening to.
Recent Entries
Making Sense Of It AllJanuary 30, 2012
Where are things headed? Is there rhyme and reason to the endless cycle of summer, fall, winter and spring? Is there a plan in place, or is randomness the explanation?
Suffering Saints
January 25, 2012
We get nervous thinking about it - suffering for the sake of Christ. How necessary is it, and what does it produce in us?
George Herbert on Prayer Meetings
January 21, 2012
Prayer Meetings are a thing of the past. Or so it seems. What has been lost? Maybe more than we realize.
When Fear Is Good
January 7, 2012
NO FEAR, we are told. And the point is well taken. But fear can be healthy, at least when it comes to eternal matters.
Happy, Happy, Happy
January 4, 2012
The declaration of independence holds up the pursuit of happiness as a right. Did you ever consider the reading the bible might be the one source that will never let you down?
The Twelve Signs Of Grace
December 22, 2011
Self-examination is not easy to do. The tendency is to let ourselves off easy. But examine we must, for eternity is at stake.
"Ouch!!"
July 22, 2011
Spiritual pride is hard to detect. Jonathan Edwards gives some tips. The process can be painful, but necessary.
A Prophet For Our Times
November 9, 2008
Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets. Amos 3:7
From David Wells, GOD IN THE WASTELAND:
We have turned to a God we can use rather that to a God we must obey; we have turned to a God who will fulfill our needs rather than to a God before whom we must surrender our rights to our selves.
He is a God for us, for our satisfaction - not because we have learned to think of him in this way through Christ but because we have learned to think of him this way thorough the marketplace.
In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well. And so we transform the God of mercy into a God who is at our mercy.
We imagine that he is benign, that he will acquiesce as we toy with his reality and to co-opt him in the promotion of our ventures and careers. Thus do we presume to restrain him in a Weberian cage of this-wordly preoccupation.
Thus do we tighten our grip upon him, And if the sunshine of his benign grace fails to warm us as we expect, if he fails to shower prosperity and success on us, we will find ourselves unable to believe in him anymore.
What has been lost in all of this, of course, is God's angularity, the sharp edges that truth so often has and that he has preeminently. It is our fallenness fleshed out in our modernity that makes God smooth, that imagines he will accommodate our instincts, shabby and self-centered as they so often are, because he is love.
In a psychologized culture such as ours, there is deep affinity for what is relational but a dis-ease with what is moral. This carries over into the church as an infatuation with the love of God and an embarrassment at his holiness.
We who are modern find it infinitely easier to believe that God is like a Rogerian therapist who empathetically solicits our knowledge of ourselves and passes judgment on none of it that to think that he could have had any serious business to conduct with Moses.
This peculiarity of the modern disposition, this loss of substance and vigor, betrays our misunderstanding of God's immanence, his relatedness to creation. We imagine that the great purposes of life are psychological rather than moral.
We imagine that the great purposes of life are realized in the improvement of our own private inner disposition. We imagine that for those who love God and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for their satisfaction and the inner tranquility of their lives. Modernity has secured the triumph of the therapeutic over the moral even in the church.
The face it, of course, that the New Testament never promises anyone a life of psychological wholeness or offers a guarantee of the consumer's satisfaction with Christ. To the contrary, it offers the prospect of indignities, loss, damage, disease, and pain. The faithful in Scripture were scorned, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed.
The gospel offers no promises that contemporary believers will be spared these experiences, that they will be able to settle down to the sanitized comfort of an inner life freed of stresses, pains, and ambiguities; it simply promises that through Christ, God will walk with us in all the dark places of life, that he has the power and the will to invest his promises with reality, and that even the shadows are made to serve his glory and our best interests.
A therapeutic culture will be inclined to view such promises as something of a disappointment; those who understand that reality is at heart moral because God is centrally holy will be satisfied that this is all they need to know.
GOD IN THE WASTELAND David Wells page 114-115
Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts....Hebrews 3:15
From David Wells, GOD IN THE WASTELAND:
We have turned to a God we can use rather that to a God we must obey; we have turned to a God who will fulfill our needs rather than to a God before whom we must surrender our rights to our selves.
He is a God for us, for our satisfaction - not because we have learned to think of him in this way through Christ but because we have learned to think of him this way thorough the marketplace.
In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well. And so we transform the God of mercy into a God who is at our mercy.
We imagine that he is benign, that he will acquiesce as we toy with his reality and to co-opt him in the promotion of our ventures and careers. Thus do we presume to restrain him in a Weberian cage of this-wordly preoccupation.
Thus do we tighten our grip upon him, And if the sunshine of his benign grace fails to warm us as we expect, if he fails to shower prosperity and success on us, we will find ourselves unable to believe in him anymore.
What has been lost in all of this, of course, is God's angularity, the sharp edges that truth so often has and that he has preeminently. It is our fallenness fleshed out in our modernity that makes God smooth, that imagines he will accommodate our instincts, shabby and self-centered as they so often are, because he is love.
In a psychologized culture such as ours, there is deep affinity for what is relational but a dis-ease with what is moral. This carries over into the church as an infatuation with the love of God and an embarrassment at his holiness.
We who are modern find it infinitely easier to believe that God is like a Rogerian therapist who empathetically solicits our knowledge of ourselves and passes judgment on none of it that to think that he could have had any serious business to conduct with Moses.
This peculiarity of the modern disposition, this loss of substance and vigor, betrays our misunderstanding of God's immanence, his relatedness to creation. We imagine that the great purposes of life are psychological rather than moral.
We imagine that the great purposes of life are realized in the improvement of our own private inner disposition. We imagine that for those who love God and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for their satisfaction and the inner tranquility of their lives. Modernity has secured the triumph of the therapeutic over the moral even in the church.
The face it, of course, that the New Testament never promises anyone a life of psychological wholeness or offers a guarantee of the consumer's satisfaction with Christ. To the contrary, it offers the prospect of indignities, loss, damage, disease, and pain. The faithful in Scripture were scorned, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed.
The gospel offers no promises that contemporary believers will be spared these experiences, that they will be able to settle down to the sanitized comfort of an inner life freed of stresses, pains, and ambiguities; it simply promises that through Christ, God will walk with us in all the dark places of life, that he has the power and the will to invest his promises with reality, and that even the shadows are made to serve his glory and our best interests.
A therapeutic culture will be inclined to view such promises as something of a disappointment; those who understand that reality is at heart moral because God is centrally holy will be satisfied that this is all they need to know.
GOD IN THE WASTELAND David Wells page 114-115
Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts....Hebrews 3:15
