AN EXHORTATION TO HOLINESS AND REVIVAL
I have read recently some posts from people like Phil Johnson and his friends who are lamenting the lack of truly Reformed (Calvinist) evangelists. There are those in the churches who feel that Calvinism is either become altogether too scholarly and thus lacking real-life zeal, or that it has become too polemical, that is, interested only in giving their opponents a good drubbing in the Internet boxing ring. The time has long since come for such nonsense to stop being so appropriate in describing those who have been saved by God's great and free grace to sinners.
"Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin." (Hebrews 12:4) We have cried copious literary tears over false doctrines, and we have filled web page and book page alike with rantings about the TRUTH, but we have not yet seen God's mighty power in the evangelistic field, and this is for LACK of STRIVING against sin! We have no business telling the world to repent and turn from sin in between our bouts of chasing after the vanities of Babylon's marketplace! We fill our minds with yet more filth in this generation day after day, yet the things we ingest into our spirits were once in our own cities considered CRIMINAL! The most 'modest' 'decent' 'respectable' or at least 'not that bad' TV programs today lend NOTHING to the increase in holiness that our Lord would see us experience! The tamest and most supposedly benign of the secular music performers out there are simply uninterested in the glory of the sanctified life that is necessarily and specifically set apart unto the service of the Lord! It is the WORD OF GOD that is alive! "Thy WORD IS TRUTH" saith the Master (emphasis mine, although I scarcely believe it is more than His was). We NEED, more now than ever, a resurgence of dependency of the soul of the Christian on the sovereign and almighty power of the Holy Ghost! Enough of all the piling up of the literary accolades, you scholars! Forget the accumulation of your Internet awards and the ranking of your inflated and self-congratulatory blogs, you lurkers in the darkened corners of cyberspace! Where are the tears? Where is the urgency? Enough of this beating of the dead Roman horse! She lacks only the call of the executioner to her place of final judgment; the Whore's fate is sealed. The cry from the seminaries and the pulpits and the web logs must no longer be "ATTACK!", but rather, "COME OUT OF HER, MY PEOPLE!"
I hear the voices clamoring already: Legalism! Legalism! To that charge, I dare say that I have never, NEVER exhausted myself in a full day of prayer and supplication before the Lord I claim to serve! I have NEVER run so far away from the carnival of flesh that is the world that I could no longer hear their siren songs beckoning me! I have NEVER been pressing in to the point of collapse in my intercession for my fellow pilgrim Christians nor for the lost and perishing all around me! I confess! I throw open the doors of my prayer closet and find more dust than desire, more emptiness than enthusiasm, more excuses than excitement! Where is that saint that is ready to lead a new and fearless charge up the hill of apathy to lay siege on the stronghold of Satan? Can I, so swollen with the tiny little bites of sin that I have stolen from the devil's table time and again, shake my fist at an unbelieving world? Can I demand Gospel repentance and holy obedience from a person who sees me sitting in the same ease as all their neighbors? Where, figuratively, are the tattered skins that make for the Baptizer's raiment? Clothes like those are not the finery of princes; they are shredded by years of harsh self-denial in the wilderness of prayer and fasting. Are we, so finely arrayed in our Reformed cap and gown, our Christian silks and ribbons, the progeny of the Brainerds and the Edwards and the Calvins and the Baxters and the Luthers? John Knox implored the Throne of Grace that he MUST have Scotland's souls! Andrew Bonar would watch the world go down the streets, ignorant of the wrath they stored up against the day of wrath. Unaware, every one, and none considering God; Bonar cried to the Lord, "Oh, they perish! They perish!"
"And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake..." (Hebrews 12:21)
Have we had such a terrible and holy vision of God's majesty and Divine justice that we should exceedingly fear and quake? Have we found refuge in our doctrinal diatribes, or are we resting, as the hymn says, each moment in the Crucified? Should our safety in the cleft of the Rock make us any less awestruck at the limitless glory and fathomless power of the great and mighty One we serve as He passes over us, announcing His mercy and compassion solely upon whom He will?
By God's great and awesome grace, I shall be spent at His service. Let us press on.
I have read recently some posts from people like Phil Johnson and his friends who are lamenting the lack of truly Reformed (Calvinist) evangelists. There are those in the churches who feel that Calvinism is either become altogether too scholarly and thus lacking real-life zeal, or that it has become too polemical, that is, interested only in giving their opponents a good drubbing in the Internet boxing ring. The time has long since come for such nonsense to stop being so appropriate in describing those who have been saved by God's great and free grace to sinners.
"Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin." (Hebrews 12:4) We have cried copious literary tears over false doctrines, and we have filled web page and book page alike with rantings about the TRUTH, but we have not yet seen God's mighty power in the evangelistic field, and this is for LACK of STRIVING against sin! We have no business telling the world to repent and turn from sin in between our bouts of chasing after the vanities of Babylon's marketplace! We fill our minds with yet more filth in this generation day after day, yet the things we ingest into our spirits were once in our own cities considered CRIMINAL! The most 'modest' 'decent' 'respectable' or at least 'not that bad' TV programs today lend NOTHING to the increase in holiness that our Lord would see us experience! The tamest and most supposedly benign of the secular music performers out there are simply uninterested in the glory of the sanctified life that is necessarily and specifically set apart unto the service of the Lord! It is the WORD OF GOD that is alive! "Thy WORD IS TRUTH" saith the Master (emphasis mine, although I scarcely believe it is more than His was). We NEED, more now than ever, a resurgence of dependency of the soul of the Christian on the sovereign and almighty power of the Holy Ghost! Enough of all the piling up of the literary accolades, you scholars! Forget the accumulation of your Internet awards and the ranking of your inflated and self-congratulatory blogs, you lurkers in the darkened corners of cyberspace! Where are the tears? Where is the urgency? Enough of this beating of the dead Roman horse! She lacks only the call of the executioner to her place of final judgment; the Whore's fate is sealed. The cry from the seminaries and the pulpits and the web logs must no longer be "ATTACK!", but rather, "COME OUT OF HER, MY PEOPLE!"
I hear the voices clamoring already: Legalism! Legalism! To that charge, I dare say that I have never, NEVER exhausted myself in a full day of prayer and supplication before the Lord I claim to serve! I have NEVER run so far away from the carnival of flesh that is the world that I could no longer hear their siren songs beckoning me! I have NEVER been pressing in to the point of collapse in my intercession for my fellow pilgrim Christians nor for the lost and perishing all around me! I confess! I throw open the doors of my prayer closet and find more dust than desire, more emptiness than enthusiasm, more excuses than excitement! Where is that saint that is ready to lead a new and fearless charge up the hill of apathy to lay siege on the stronghold of Satan? Can I, so swollen with the tiny little bites of sin that I have stolen from the devil's table time and again, shake my fist at an unbelieving world? Can I demand Gospel repentance and holy obedience from a person who sees me sitting in the same ease as all their neighbors? Where, figuratively, are the tattered skins that make for the Baptizer's raiment? Clothes like those are not the finery of princes; they are shredded by years of harsh self-denial in the wilderness of prayer and fasting. Are we, so finely arrayed in our Reformed cap and gown, our Christian silks and ribbons, the progeny of the Brainerds and the Edwards and the Calvins and the Baxters and the Luthers? John Knox implored the Throne of Grace that he MUST have Scotland's souls! Andrew Bonar would watch the world go down the streets, ignorant of the wrath they stored up against the day of wrath. Unaware, every one, and none considering God; Bonar cried to the Lord, "Oh, they perish! They perish!"
"And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake..." (Hebrews 12:21)
Have we had such a terrible and holy vision of God's majesty and Divine justice that we should exceedingly fear and quake? Have we found refuge in our doctrinal diatribes, or are we resting, as the hymn says, each moment in the Crucified? Should our safety in the cleft of the Rock make us any less awestruck at the limitless glory and fathomless power of the great and mighty One we serve as He passes over us, announcing His mercy and compassion solely upon whom He will?
By God's great and awesome grace, I shall be spent at His service. Let us press on.
posted by SFB at 12:57 PM
1 Comments:
A great post!!
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