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Showing posts with label Paul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul. Show all posts

Five Strategies for Avoiding Intellectualism Interview with John Piper

It has always been a struggle for me to move the knowledge of the Scriptures from the head (intellect) to the heart. I want to feel close to God, but there are many times I read the Scriptures and still feel distant. This article has helped me in very practical ways to move towards a deeper relationship with God. Hope this helps you as well.

In Christ,
Brandon H.

Five Strategies for Avoiding Intellectualism
Interview with John Piper Topic: Study & Scholarship

[Audio Transcript]  Pastor John, you have, for years stressed an approach to Reformed theology that is both hard-thinking and deep-feeling. Each of us will tend to fall on one side or the other, either an anti-intellectual feeling, or an anti-feeling intellectualism. Both are to be avoided. In today’s question, a listener wants to know this: “Dear Pastor John, in your 30+ years of ministry, what have you practically done to avoid mere intellectualism — cold academic study — in your Bible reading and in your exposition?”

1) The first thing I would say is that I need to be, we need to be, deeply persuaded that this really, really matters: this non-cold, non-intellectualistic, warm, practical, affectionate relation to the living Christ. We need to be persuaded. This really matters because there are a lot of people out there — I keep bumping into them — there are a lot of people out there who either for personality reasons or sometimes theological reasons think it doesn’t matter what your emotions do. That is, they think emotions are the caboose at the end of the train. They are just not essential at all. And it sounds like the person who wrote this question is persuaded that they matter, and it might be good to ask why. And here is my reason.

The first and greatest commandment is not to know the Lord our God — which is, of course, assumed — but to love the Lord your God. And that includes with all your heart (Matthew 22:36–37). And Paul says at the end of 1 Corinthians: If you don’t love the Lord you are accursed (1 Corinthians 16:22). Love the Lord. And Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). In other words, the love that we must have isn’t just a kind of dutiful, commandment-keeping love. That is not what you have for your kids, nor your parents. It is the deepest, heartfelt, affectionate, relative kind of love, the kind we have for mother and father and son and daughter — only more, more for Jesus. And if we don’t have it, we are not worthy of Jesus.

So, this is the first thing I would say. We must be totally, John Piper must be totally persuaded that knowing God truly without loving him duly is eternally deadly, deadly. I must be persuaded of that. So, I am trembling at the thought that I could go about my academic work or my scholarly work or my writing work or preaching work or study work in some kind of cold frame with no awakened love for God, affection for God. So, the quest for overcoming what he is referring to as intellectualism is a life and death battle. That is the first thing.

2) The second thing I would say is that we should therefore read all things — Scripture and everything else, especially the word; the Scripture, but also the world and everything in it — we should read everything on the lookout for evidences of God’s value, not just evidences of his truth. The devil owns that God is true and probably knows more true things about God than we do. But the devil will not own that God is supremely valuable and supremely satisfying. The devil values himself above God. God’s presence gives no joy and no satisfaction to the devil whatsoever.

Therefore, our aim in reading the Bible should not be demonic. We are not aiming to rise just to the level of the devil. Our aim is, of course, to see what is really there, what is true about God — but always more, always more; namely, with a view to feeling what is valuable about God, treasuring the treasure that God is. The aim is to see the millions of reasons why God is a treasure, not just the millions of evidences that God exists or has certain attributes. All of our theological refinement should be for the sake of doxological embrace and enjoyment. This affects the way you read. This is what I try to do. I try to read. You read on the lookout for evidences of value, evidences of preciousness, evidences that he is beautiful and sweet and satisfying.

Peter says in 1 Peter 2:1–3, “Long for the pure, spiritual milk” — and I think he means the milk of the word — “that by it you may grow up into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” What is the point of that if: if you have tasted? The point is that all the drinking in the world without tasting will not grow us up into salvation. The aim of drinking the word is tasting the Savior. It is the tasting that is the nutritional encounter with the living God that grows us up into salvation. So, that is the second thing I would say. In all of our reading, be on the lookout for evidences of God’s value, not just evidences of his truth.

3) Which leads now to the third thing that I would say, namely, that the goal of valuing or treasuring or feeling the preciousness of or enjoying the beauty of God in all of our reading confronts me immediately with the impossibility on my part of making it happen. You can’t make yourself value God. You can make yourself read. You can make yourself list off attributes of God that you see. You can make yourself list of ways that God behaves. But you can’t make yourself feel how wonderful they are. That is why the psalmist cries: Open my eyes that I may see wonders in your Word (Psalm 119:18).

So, the third point is: Pray, pray, pray. And we pray not only for illumination to see what is really there about God, but to feel. We pray Psalm 90:14, “Satisfy [me] in the morning with your steadfast love.” Why in the world would the psalmist pray that, except that the human heart doesn’t naturally feel it when it hears and sees the beauties of God? God has to work this. We ask God to make us satisfied in God. So, prayer is absolutely essential not only that my eyes would be open, but that my affections would be awakened.

4) The fourth thing I would say is that, beyond the Bible, I read authors who have understood God deeply and felt him mightily and expressed both the understanding and the feeling with clarity and power. For me, that has been mainly Jonathan Edwards and John Owen and C.S. Lewis and the Puritans. You need to find the great seers of God and the great lovers of God and the great expressers of the seeing and the loving, so that they can feed your soul with true and large affections.

I know you, Tony, would put John Newton in that category and so would I — kind of a latter-day Puritan who saw things deeply and expressed things beautifully and felt things deeply. So that is number four.

5) And then, finally, I would say: Open your mouth and bear witness to family and friends and neighbors and colleagues to the beauty of God and your joy in him. It is precisely in giving expression to our joy that intensifies the joy itself. A shared joy is a doubled joy. God loves mission. God loves witness. God loves sharing. God loves loving people. And he does not love hoarding. Therefore, when we turn on our affections and express them to other people, God is pleased and our joy is intensified.

So, those are my five strategies against cold intellectualism. There are lots more strategies, but maybe that is enough to set the trajectory of discovery.

John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including A Peculiar Glory.

Copyright © 2016 by John Piper. © Desiring God Foundation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Find the original article at http://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/five-strategies-for-avoiding-intellectualism
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"See Or Stumble" - A Vision for 2017

See or Stumble: A Vision of 2017
  

"See Or Stumble" - A Vision for 2017 - Brian Loveless Sermon on January 1, 2017 at Calvary Baptist Church, Grand Prairie, Texas.

 When I tell you that it is a joy to see you, I mean that quite literally. Many of you have been asking about my eye. For those of you didn't know, a few months back I had a little sports injury. I had it for a while and didn't really even know until had started to get darker in my right eye on the periphery. I came in one morning and James, our youth pastor came in, and his face in my right eye was crunched down like a funhouse mirror and I thought something's off. I went into the doctor and they said that I had a completely torn and detached retina. They had to go in and, not trying to gross you out, but take all the fluid out of my eye, pump it full of gas to hold it in the round while it healed. So for the past number of weeks, actually two months, I've had this gas bubble in my eye that's been getting smaller and smaller. It was down to just a little bitty bubble and on Friday disappeared completely. Thank God it's healing up really, really well. I'm very, very grateful that I'm able to read again. It's not perfect but it's almost there.

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Five Ways to Read the Bible via Joe Carter

This week I'd like to share an article that lays out some practical ways you can read the Bible for personal application. I'm sure you can relate to experiences I have had in which I have read a passage of Scripture and thought of very little I could apply to my life. Even when I found passages that were applicable, I often struggled as to whether it applied to me, or just to those it was written to.

My hope in sharing this article is that we as a church would desire to grow in our understanding of how the Bible speaks to us. The steps mentioned in this article are not a "cure all" to understanding the Bible, but they are helpful tools in deepening understanding. Let it be our prayer that the Holy Spirit would reveal the truth of the Word of God to us and that we become whole-hearted followers of Jesus Christ!

In Christ,
Brandon H.

5 Ways to Read the Bible for Personal Application by Joe Carter

The Bible is a book about God, not a book about us. And yet as Paul says, everything in the Bible was written for us:The Bible is a book about God, not a book about us. And yet as Paul says, everything in the Bible was written for us:
For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope. (Roman 15:4, NIV)
How can the Bible be about God and yet be written to teach us? As David Powlison explains,
The Bible was written to others—but speaks to you. The Bible is about God—but draws you in. Your challenge is always to reapply Scripture afresh, because God’s purpose is always to rescript your life.
When we reapply Scripture to our own lives, the Holy Spirit is re-scripting our lives so that we may become more like Jesus.

What Spiritual Formation Is (And Is For)

Every day we are becoming either more like Jesus or less like him. The direction we move is largely up to us, for we don't drift into Christ-likeness. Becoming more like Jesus takes effort and intention; it takes spiritual formation.

Christ-like spiritual formation is the name for that process by which Christians in union with Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit, become conformed both internally and externally to the character of Christ for the purpose of communion with God.

Learning how to personally apply the Bible to our own lives is therefore essential to our spiritual formation.
How then do we personally apply the Bible to our own lives? We generally apply the Bible through five ways:

1. Direct commands

The most obvious passages for personal application are those in which God gives direct commands. For example, Jesus’s command to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:43) is not an optional requirement. When we find such clear, direct commands in Scripture we know they are intended to directly “re-script” our lives.

2. General truths

Scripture frequently provides general truths that are broadly applicable to a variety of situations, and then leaves it to us to discern how they should be applied. In Matthew 22:21, Jesus says to give back to “Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Rather than giving us a list of what belongs to God and what is due the government, Jesus expects us to use godly wisdom to apply this general rule and work out the details for ourselves.

3. Direct analogy

There are many issues of controversy and concern in the modern age that are not directly mentioned in the Bible. In some circumstances, though, we can personally apply Biblical principles to situations that are similar to those mentioned in the Bible.
In his essay “The Place of Scripture in Christian Ethics,” James Gustafson states the commonly accepted method of scriptural analogy:
Those actions of persons and groups are to be judged morally wrong which are similar to actions that are judged to be wrong or against God's will under similar circumstances in Scripture, or are discordant with actions judged to be right or in accord with God's will in Scripture.
(For an example of how to apply direct analogies, see this article.)

4. Indirect analogy

We apply Scripture through indirect analogy when a passage teaches us by example rather than through a stated rule. This is the old-fashioned “Sunday school morality” in which we look to the Old Testament narratives to learn how we should or should not act. For example, in the story of the attempted seduction of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife, we learn to flee from sexual sin and adultery (Gen 39:7-12).
We must be careful, though, not to think the personal application that can derived from such stories is the primary purpose of the narrative. Although Joseph’s actions were a godly example, they resulted in his being thrown in prison — a situation that God used to carry out his larger purposes. Whenever we apply the Bible indirectly, we need to keep in mind the key truth that the while the Bible is for us it is not about us, but about God.

5. Indirect extension

The vast majority of Scripture is composed of neither direct commands nor generally applicable truths. Take, for instance, the various lists of names and genealogies found in the Old Testament. How do we apply those passages to our own lives? As Powlison says,
In one sense, such passages apply exactly because they are not about you. Understood rightly, such passages give a changed perspective. They locate you on a bigger stage. They teach you to notice God and other people in their own right. They call you to understand yourself within a story—many stories—bigger than your personal history and immediate concerns. They locate you within a community far wider than your immediate network of relationships. And they remind you that you are always in God’s presence, under his eye, and part of his program.
The “endurance” and “encouragement” Paul refers to comes from reading the Old Testament and understanding that we are part of God’s story. We can see the promises God made to his people, see how he was always faithful, and be encouraged to endure knowing that he will likewise always be faithful to us.

Application Is for Spiritual Formation

Whether directly or indirectly, by analogy or by extension, the entire Bible is personally applicable to our lives. How it applies may not always seem obvious, of course. But if we seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit the Father will not only open our eyes so that we may reapply his Word, he will use it to re-script our lives to make us more like his Son.
Editors’ note: This is an except from Joe Carter’s new work, the NIV Lifehacks Bible: Practical Tools for Successful Spiritual Habits (Zondervan, 2016). 

Copyright © 2016 The Gospel Coalition, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Find the original article at https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/5-ways-to-read-the-bible-for-personal-application
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