The Gospel Coalition

Ligon Duncan lists ten reasons for reading Calvin’s Institutes in 2009 here.

On Christmas Eve 1968 Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders, astronauts aboard Apollo 8 circling the moon, drew us into their experience by televising what they saw back to earth. In the most watched television event up to that time, they celebrated God’s good creation. We rejoiced with them.

CT: What is the East African revival, and why has it lasted over forty years?

Bishop Festo Kivengere: Can I explain? This is a question I have been asked repeatedly for over twenty-five years, and all I have ever been able to do is to share what I have seen. The only explanation I can give is that it is God’s work. It is not a technique. It is a movement that cannot be contained. It is renewal within renewal. It is an attitude toward the Lord, toward the Bible, toward the fellowship, and toward the Spirit. It has always been open to a fresh touch.

CT: What does this revival mean to the people involved in it?

FK: It is when Christ becomes a living, risen Lord in the life of a believer. For the non-believer, it is when he is brought into a confrontation with Christ and accepts him as Savior, thus completely changing his life morally and socially. In other words, revival is when Christ becomes alive in a life, changing that life. The person is born again, and if he has previously had that experience, then his life is changed in such a way that it affects all his relationships.

CT: Is it visible to an outsider?

FK: Absolutely! Go back to a village a week after a man comes to the Lord in a meeting in the market. The whole village knows something about it. He has paid the debts he owes. He has gone to people he hated and said, “I’m sorry. I’m a changed man.” He has apologized or asked for forgiveness. He’s now telling them what Christ means to him. He has carried his new belief into his business practices. In other words, it isn’t something he sits on as a comfortable experience. If anything, it is terribly uncomfortable.

CT: How has this differed from other revivals in history?

FK: It may be the continued willingness of those who have been revived to be renewed by the Spirit of God. At the Kabale convention last year, celebrating the fortieth year of the revival in that area, we heard up-to-date testimonies from people who were brought to Christ as early as 1930. They had tremendous freshness; yet they had been winning souls for thirty-five or forty years. They have remained open to what the Spirit may want to say to them in the present situation. They learned that when they got into a rut God had to turn them out of it so that they could breathe again. The tendency to get into certain patterns can stifle the work of the Spirit and create pockets of hardness. Continued breaking and bringing new streams of life have been the means God has used.

“The Revival that was and is: an interview with Festo Kivengere,” Christianity Today, 21 May 1976, pages 10-11.

Bishop Kivengere was, after my own dad, the most beautiful Christian man I have ever known.

“Well, what happened to me on that Sunday that I returned to faith was this: I received a glimpse into what I can only call the Infinite Mercy of God. It worked something like this. I realized that none of my theological or social questions really made any difference. I didn’t have to know the answers to these questions precisely because God did. He was the God who made the universe in which I existed. That meant He had made the Big Bang, He had made DNA, He had made the Black Holes in space, and the wind and the rain and the individual snowflakes that fall from the sky. He had done all that. So surely He could do virtually anything and He could solve virtually everything. And how could I possibly know what He knew? And why should I remain apart from Him because I could not grasp all that He could grasp? What came over me then was an infinite trust, trust in His power and His love.”

Anne Rice, in the author’s notes to her novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

HT: Erin Ortlund.

Unable to find the perfect girlfriend, a man has built a robot girlfriend for himself. The story is here.

She even says no. But then he programmed her to do that too, which means total control.

We all face two possibilities — real relationships, in which we become vulnerable, versus fake relationships, in which we set the preconditions and retain control. We can do this, or try to do this, even with God.

Robotics versus relationships. Dominance versus surrender. “I will never be hurt again” versus “If Christ died for me, then pain must be the price of love. So okay.”

“And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” Luke 2:18-19

There was quite a buzz going around about Jesus’ birth. When the angels appeared and the glory of the Lord shone down, the shepherds found the Baby in Bethlehem and it all checked out. They spread the word, and people were blown away.

Years later, when the adult Jesus went public with his ministry, the response was not, “We’ve been waiting for you.” The response was, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” (Luke 4:22). They had forgotten.

But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. “Treasured up” means that she prized and guarded and preserved in her thoughts everything that happened. “Pondering” means that she began connecting the dots between the Old Testament prophecies and now these astounding events, reaching by faith for what it all meant.

The crowds were fascinated. That was not wrong. It was right. But it didn’t last. And it didn’t change them. But Mary went into sustained reflection and meditation and growing understanding.

“My fear is that the modern conception of faith is not the biblical one, that when the teachers of our day use the word they do not mean what the Bible writers meant when they used it. The causes of my uneasiness are these:

1. The lack of spiritual fruit in the lives of so many who claim to have faith.

2. The rarity of a radical change in the conduct and general outlook of persons professing their new faith in Christ as their personal Savior.

3. The failure of our teachers to define or even describe the thing to which the word ‘faith’ is supposed to refer.

4. The heartbreaking failure of multitudes of seekers, be they ever so earnest, to make anything out of the doctrine [of faith] or to receive any satisfying experience through it.

5. The real danger that a doctrine that is parroted so widely and received so uncritically by so many is false as understood by them.

6. I have seen faith put forward as a substitute for obedience, an escape from reality, a refuge from the necessity of hard thinking, a hiding place for weak character. I have known people to miscall by the name of faith high animal spirits, natural optimism, emotional thrills and nervous tics.

7. Plain horse sense ought to tell us that anything that makes no change in the man who professes it makes no difference to God either, and it is an easily observable fact that for countless numbers of persons the change from no-faith to faith makes no actual difference in the life.”

A. W. Tozer, “Faith: The Misunderstood Doctrine,” in Man the Dwelling Place of God, pages 30-31.

“His view of death and his own death was having confidence that life matters and that the world matters. . . . Because of that you fight to live, and because of that you need to go out and carry on the good fight. You do matter, and God does exist. So you put your hand to the plow, you work and you struggle — you do what you can in all different areas, with passion. You don’t sit in a corner somewhere and wait to die. . . . What you look forward to is not death but the Second Coming. You are longing and working for that. Contrary to what people say — that you can’t take anything with you — yes, you do take your work with you. It’s a biblical teaching, that what you do matters and will continue on into eternity.”

Deborah Schaeffer Middelmann, regarding her father Francis Schaeffer, quoted in Colin Duriez, Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life, page 203.

“Once I walked beside a river bank in another flat part of the world — northern Illinois in the US. It was autumn. The leaves were mostly still on the trees. But they were changing colour. Not many were green any more. Their pigmentation was transforming into gold and orange and vermilion and ruby and lemon and primrose. The sun was out. Its rays shone through the trees, sometimes through the bright leaves so they shone like fairy lights. The effect was dazzling. It filled my soul with a sense of overpowering beauty.

Then I realized that God could see it too. And I remembered that God would be enjoying it too: ‘May the Lord rejoice in his works’ (Psalm 104:31). Not less than me but more than me because he could enjoy it perfectly. I started making some calculations. I tried to count the number of leaves on one branch, then the number of branches, then the number of trees in the wood. It was a few billion I think.

I thought how much sheer pleasure I got from looking at one tree and one lot of leaves from one angle. But God could see every leaf from every possible angle and see all the leaves from all the angles at the same time. I felt like my computer when the CPU is 100% loaded.

How much joy God must get from looking at these billions of leaves from all possible angles all at the same time, if I felt this good looking at a few of them from one angle! It made me realize just how great he is and how much capacity for pleasure he has.”

Julian Hardyman, Glory Days, pages 145-146.