Tried With Fire

My daughter received a birthday card with a quote from a popular Christian author which stated, God has placed His hand on your shoulder and said, "You're something special."    Maybe I'm overreacting (I tend to do that), but my first reaction was that this is the perfect blend of Veggie Tales and Robert Schuller.  This isn't to speak ill of the friend who sent the card.  She's not a critical, wet-blanket Calvinist like me, so she probably thought it was just a nice card.  But this statement is a perfect example of the prevalent sweet-as-saccharine-and-just-about-as-nutritious sentimentality that passes for the love of God. Sadly, there's a view that God is so enamored with mankind that He is desperate to have a relationship with us.  He'd do anything for us, and depending on who is preaching, He'll give us whatever we want. There's nothing God likes more than to forgive, and He forgives whether we repent or not. God exists to please man, n...

After reading Robert Schuller's interview, I needed to cleanse my spiritual palate by listening to this 1982 sermon by John Piper on Isaiah 41:14 "Fear Not, You Worm Jacob!". Here are excerpts (emphasis mine): What, then, shall we say about our own day and the dominance of the gospel of self-esteem—the teaching that traces our problems back to the fundamental cause that we don't regard ourselves highly enough? What can you say to the American church where by and large the ultimate sin is no longer failure to honor God but the failure to esteem oneself; where self-abasement not God-abasement is the ultimate evil; and the cry of deliverance from this evil is not, "O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me?" but rather, "O worthy man that I am, would that I could only see it better"? What shall we say? The first thing I would say is this: Jacob is a worm. And until God has completed the miraculous work of our sanctification and made us perfect, w...

This is transcribed* from the Q&A after John Piper's talk on Charles Simeon: 'The question is would I comment on the teachings of self esteem in the church today especially the comment that before you can love God and others you must love yourself? I think it is extremely wrong headed, and I would treat it much the way Dr. Nicole treated all those inadequate views of the atonement and say there is of course a seed of truth in it. Namely, we must not deny that we are created in God's image, and we must not deny that God in His grace has a great purpose for every person and can use us significantly no matter who we are. But it is wrong headed. I mean, I would have answered Steve Roy's question differently than Dr. Nicole did the other night, and that may just have to do with our relative positions. Steve said "What do you feel about the view that says Christ died to rescue valuable humanity and thus we see a reflection of our diamond-like quality in the price pa...