Tried With Fire

Kevin DeYoung referenced this quote in Hole in Our Holiness . Here's the original: Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, thinking processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is the system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to their periphery any thought about God. Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are. 1 So how are we doing with worldliness? How am I doing? Am I glad to embrace Christian freedom but without ...

After many months, I finished Above All Earthly Pow'rs by David Wells this evening.  I ended up reading  his books in reverse order probably because I was intimidated by No Place for Truth after I started it.    Losing Our Virtue, Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision is waiting in the queue. I providentially stumbled upon Dr. Wells in 2008 while listening to one of John Piper's biographical talks.  Piper quoted a passage from No Place for Truth which immediately grabbed my attention .     I then listened to Dr. Wells' talks from the 1998 Desiring God Pastors Conference.  All sorts of light bulbs went on in my head when I listened to his assessment of the state of the our culture and its effect on the church.  Oddly enough, Dr. Wells' description of the autonomous self shed light on my personal situation at the time. I highly recommend Dr. Wells' books.  They're not easy reading, but a well-researched analysis of cultu...

Today, however, there is no such sense of unease with our super-abundance because this kind of moral understanding has much withered. In a secularized culture, God has ceased to be a player in regulating our desires and, besides, his regulation, such as it is, has ceased to be moral and has become only therapeutic. The restraints, therefore are gone. Capitalism has no internal logic or morality which will place limits on the abundance and surfeit which it produces. As a result, in the rough-and-tumble scramble for success, our markets are flooded with far more goods, far more choices, than we actually need. If there is to be restraint it has to come from those who are the beneficiaries of such plenty, but we suffer from none of the introspection and doubt the Dutch exhibited in wondering what a moral use of life would look like. America, as a result, has become a paradise of unlimited, endless consumption, where desire now substitutes for the moral norms which were once there. A...

(Sorry for the following rant, but I had first-hand contact with some postmodern pathogens today.) Most people are probably familiar with the Pharisee version 1.0 stereotype. These people examine everyone around them with a microscope to see if others live up to a standard of behavior. The standard can be, "Don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew, and don't go with women who do" and others rules of the same ilk. But it seems Pharisee version 2.0 is available as well. Today, there is overwhelming pressure to not take a stand on anything for fear of offending anyone. The bywords are, "Don't judge me. God accepts me just the way I am and you should, too". Therefore, no one can say anything negative about anything. Even in our language we dance around the word sin by calling things issues . "So-and-so has an issue with authority." Maybe So-and-so really has the sin of rebellion, but God forbid that we would dare say that. I'm not tal...

I finally finished The Courage to be Protestant by David Wells. I first heard his talks from the 1998 Desiring God Pastor's Conference before reading any of his books. It may be obvious to you, but I never realized how much culture, philosophy, and history shapes how we think and act. This book was very eye opening. I need to not be intimidated and finish No Place for Truth. Above All Earthly Powers is on the shelf waiting to be read as well. We have finished the school year for the most part. I want my daughter to do some Algebra at least once a week. So many concepts build on one another so I don't want her to forget them. We finished our last dissection today, the fetal pig. It seems like it takes the longest to get inside the specimen. The girls did a great job tackling this lab. They weren't squeamish at all. I did take pictures for our records, but I won't post any detailed ones here for fear of turning any one's stomach. My daughter is also taking a bit...

Why are we at such odds with the way Scripture sees things? The answer of course, is that we are sinners and, apparently, are unaware of this fact. Americans, as we have seen, do not believe in original sin. Sin, we need to understand, has reality-defining capacities, Defining reality, though, is a divine prerogative, not one that has been passed off to us. The first temptation was a temptation to be "like God, knowing good and evil" (Gen 3:5). Presumably, Adam and Eve were lured by the thought that, like God, they could be in close and intimate contact with evil and remain unpolluted by it. That was a lie. The experimentation with evil, the defiance of what God had said, led to their internal corruption and then their banishment. Angels with flaming swords barred their reentry. We have no such difficulty. The angels have gone. And so has that older, moral universe whose fabric reflected the character of God. We have abandoned that universe and are now in the business of rede...

First, the self movement assumes, in a way biblical faith cannot, that human beings are essentially innocent. That in fact is what a great majority of Americans believe. This goes to the heart of American individualism, which believes that one's self-definition is a matter of private choice and, it turns out, this choice is unencumbered by the gravitational pull, and misdirection, of sin. It is all a matter of choice and not of nature. This is the heart of the self movement, and it is anathema to biblical faith. The majesty of God's forgiveness is lost entirely when we lose what has to be forgiven. What has to be forgiven is not just what we do but who we are , not just our sinning but our sinfulness, not just our choices but what we have chosen in place of God. This belief in our inherent innocence is belied by the kind of life we all experience, and, more importantly, it is also contradicted by Scripture. May I gently suggest that the reason is that the essence of pride...

This is from the section Thinking Biblically in Chapter IV God, page 99-100 ( emphasis mine ). The biblical answer about why we have lost our center is rather straightforward. The center has not been lost. What has been lost is our ability to see it, to recognize it, to bow before it, to reorder our lives in the light of it, to do what we should do as people who live in the presence of this center, this Other, this triune, holy-loving God of the Bible. And so we create our own center, we create our own rules, and we make our own meaning. All of this springs from an alternative center in the universe. It is ourselves. Paul's statement is that, since the fall, we have "worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Rom. 1:25). We will not reckon with our internal sense that God does exist. We also try to ignore our own sense of the moral fabric of life (Rom. 1:18-20, 2:14-15). And we have also made some substitutions. We have replaced the actual cent...