for Mintie

Elshof: Kierkegaard on procrastination

...if a person does not do what is right the very second he knows it is the right thing to do - then for a start the knowledge comes off the boil.  Next comes the question of what the will thinks of the knowledge.  The will is dialectical and has underneath it the whole of man's lower nature.  If it doesn't like the knowledge, it doesn't immediately follow that the will goes and does the opposite of what was grasped in knowing...but then the will lets some time pass;  there is an interim called "We will look into it tomorrow".  During all this the knowing becomes more and more obscured, and the lower nature more and more victorious...and then when the knowing has become duly obscured, the will and the knowing can better understand one another.  Eventually they are in entire agreement, since knowing has now deserted to the side of the will and lets it be known that what the will wants is quite right. (Kierkegaard, 'Sickness Unto Death')

Beliefs are sometimes demanding.  Often they break in on us unexpectedly and take to ordering us around like uninvited tyrants.  One minute we're sailing happily through life.  The next we find ourselves with an uncomfortably demanding belief.  This tyrant takes office and issues an imperative with such compelling force that we're unable to look him in the eye and say "no"....While the tyrant will have nothing of direct defiance, though, he can often be appeased by  the promise of deferred obedience.  If we promise him obedience later, he'll often take the bait.  And if we put him off long enough he might just go away.

I Told Me So, p40-41

Image/Word

"A video-streamed sermon on the Incarnation would be ironic at best and offensive at worst." And when most people are consuming electronic media ad nauseum, then the primary medium for a countercultural church must be an unplugged one.

Adopting and baptizing the new visual technologies is a losing strategy as well. The church will never do it as well as the culture. If James Cameron can spend $500 million, invent a new camera and new 3D techniques in order to produce the most visually stunning film ever recorded, and you can't remember a single character's name, do you really think your church budget is going to somehow do a better job of telling the Jesus story with PowerPoint, YouTube clips, or an internally-generated video? Even if you have the budget and artistic talent within your church to make quality films, because it is an image-based medium, it cannot penetrate the surface the way word-based communication can.

The new media techniques being employed in our churches may distract us from being bored in church for a little while, but beyond that they have no staying power because they have little authority. And they have little authority because they reflect the seen reality rather than the spoken truth. Take a great sermon from a hundred or a thousand years ago. When we read it, the message is still authoritative, and often still applicable. But watch a video of your favorite preacher from five or ten years ago and I guarantee it will be somewhat embarrassing. The visuals will take away from the message. Wow, just look at those clothes! The sincerity and theology is obliterated by the dated look of the fashion of the time. The authority of the word is eroded by the overwhelming power of the visual.

Leadership

Tiger Dad

I saw someone at the airport the other day who really caught my eye.

Her beautiful, long blond hair was braided back a la Bo Derek in the movie "10" (or for the younger set, Christina Aguilera during her "Xtina" phase). Her lips were pink and shiny from the gloss, and her earrings dangled playfully from her lobes.

Granderson went on to note that the girl was eight years old and to denounce the corporate executives who planned such a product: "[H]ow do people initiate a conversation in the office about the undeveloped chest of elementary school girls without someone nearby thinking they're pedophiles?" he wondered. The concerned writer and parent reserved his sharpest words for parents, however. "It's easy to blast companies for introducing the sexy wear, but our ire really should be directed at the parents who think low rise jeans for a second grader is cute." Parents, after all, "are the ones who are suppose to decide what's appropriate for their young children to wear, not executives looking to brew up controversy or turn a profit." In the most memorable line of the article, Granderson concluded his denunciation by referencing Amy Chua's recent book:  "Maybe I'm a Tiger Dad," he said.  

CT 

Elshof: attention management

William James said that "my experience is what I agree to attend to.  Only those items I notice shape my mind."  The most common strategies for long-haul self-deception involve the management of attention.  Through habitual and systematic management of my cognitive gaze, I can come to believe things that I wouldn't believe were I to attend indiscriminately to my surroundings.  Through attention management I exercise a degree of control over what comes into my mind.  And this, in turn, affects what I believe.

I Told Me So, p32

600!

It's a tradition now - every centenary I say

THANKS!

 to Dickie Mint for suggesting using a blog in the first place.

Elshof: Satre defining self-deception

Jean-Paul Sartre's characterisation of self-deception is, perhaps, the most concise and helpful for our purposes.  According to Sartre, to be self-deceived is to avoid using rational standards for evidence whenever it suits our purpose.

I Told Me So, p.27

The Books #6

It doesn't give an overall theology of prayer, it moves back and forth between story/biography/teaching points, it has no 1,2,3 guides, nor really any suggested schemes for praying.

But this is the book which has had the most effect on me with regards to prayer.  Unlike many books which systematically lay out what it is and how we should go about it, Cymbala's book leaves me feeling that prayer is real, living, necessary, vibrant - not simply a good idea or a healthy duty.   His simple story of the broken down church he inherited and the dire situation which nearly finished him off but instead drove him to prayer - which led ultimately to the Brooklyn Tabernacle - could have been a shiny, rags to riches, success story.  But instead one is left feeling that he simply found himself on a path which perhaps many of us miss, and it's a path that deep down we have been looking for.

It's not a polished book and, like everyone to whom something big has happened, it occasionally downplays other things God wants us to do.  But it is simply the most motivating book on prayer I have ever read

Prominence in the shot

If something is part of the story, make sure its prominence in the film is in proper relationship to its prominence in the storyline.

CT

Keller: becoming the preacher you can be

...it requires many years and hundreds of sermons before a preacher becomes as good as they have the capacity to be. Some of that means the preacher staying put and becoming involved enough in the lives of the people and city so as to be able to address their questions and issues well from the Scripture. Some of that means coming to understand the Bible well enough to always make it clear. Some of it means years of repentance and prayer that creates an increasingly holy, transparent character. 

Redeemer Blog (as previous post)

Keller: gathered preaching, dispersed ministry

There are indeed many "incarnational" approaches to ministry that do not require a gifted speaker, and we should use them all. In fact, I would argue that in a post-Christian culture, preaching will not be effective in the gathered assembly if Christians are not also highly effective in their scattered state. In our times, people will be indifferent or hostile to the idea of attending church services without positive contact with Christians living out their lives in love and service. Therefore the incarnational "dispersed" ministry of the church is extremely vital and necessary. 

Nevertheless, it is a mistake to argue that people in our society will not come to hear "real preaching." The fact is that, even in a very post-Christian city, if the preaching is of high quality, people will be brought and will come back. They will be shocked at how convicting and attractive the gospel message is, and they will feel like they've never really heard it before (even if they have been raised in a church).

Redeemer Blog

Future Shelf

Luther on the Lord's Prayer

The Lord’s prayer binds the people together, and knits them one to another, so that one prays for another, and together one with another; and it is so strong and powerful that it even drives away the fear of death.

Tabletalk 338

Keller: someone is always mad at you

Leadership brings a steady drumbeat of criticism and misunderstanding, even when things are going well. When things go poorly, people vent their frustration and anger on those in charge. A newly ordained pastor once said to me, “I didn’t know that, once you become a leader, there’s always someone mad at you!”

Tim Keller

1 Corinthians 2:6-9

We live in a world of experts, and many of them have stepped outside the boundaries which once marked the limits of their expertise, limits which once provided a certain humility. The most obvious and hackneyed of these would be evolutionary theorists, who now assume that their field – when combined with the broader “science” – provides our total knowledge about all things. Evolutionary science is not enough: now they have proclamations about life, ethics, meaning, society. You name it, they know about it. This can, I suspect, have a depressing effect on Christians, and generate feelings of inadequacy; this may especially be true for preachers.

In 1 Corinthians 2:6-9 we have a sobering and reassuring anchor point. The ‘wisdom’ which preachers are called to speak, as distinct from that of the wisdom of the age, finds its source outside and before creation as we understand it (v7). I assume this refers to its content, its vehicle (Jesus), and the power and the future of the gospel - God’s work of redemption for humanity. In which case, to feel inadequate is to miss out on the sheer scale of what we preach. It is huge, in that it is outside and in effect encompasses within its understanding all other discovered and derived wisdom (science, philosophy, political theory, ethics...). We may not be experts in those fields and not called to pontificate about them, but at least we do know they are fields: they have boundaries and limits which exist despite attempts to pull down fences. Which cautions people against pretending to be able to tell us authoritative wisdom on questions and issues outside their field. And outside-and-before-the-universe, and how the eternal impacts the now, is definitely, outside their field. Having the wisdom of this age does not qualify someone to pronounce on wisdom that transcends this age.

We should treasure all true wisdom that is unearthed and formulated from this age in which we live. But not uncritically. We can grasp how a lot of such wisdom helps in life, and even feeds into our understanding of the things of God. But not so that we get confused about jurisdiction. We need to see what we as preachers proclaim: the wisdom that is beyond the ages and that will not ultimately come to nothing (v6).

Badger

Deep originality

Strive for deep conviction more than superficial originality, and deep originality will come.

Doug Wilson (via Dickie Mint)

Elshof: acting consistently with belief

In response to the claim "I have trouble acting out my beliefs", Elshof says:

But with very few exceptions, no one has any trouble in acting out their beliefs. You do act in accordance with your beliefs.  More likely, you just don't believe what you've thought of yourself as believing.  Rather than trying to work up behaviour consistent with what we think we believe, we should be begging with the man who wanted desperately for Jesus to free his son from the demon that possessed him, "I believe;  help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

I Told Me So, p21.

Ortberg: Amusing

...we don't want to be merely amusing. I'm using the word here in its classical sense. To "muse" means to reflect and ponder; put an "a" in front of it and you have the absence of reflection. Amusement is a way of boredom-avoidance through external stimulation that fails to exercise our minds. It's mere diversion. It is a kind of performance-enhancing drug for an attention-deficit society. "Amusement" is appealing because we don't have to think; it spares us the fear and anxiety that might otherwise prey on our thoughts.

Leadership

The Books #5

Well...you knew it was coming.  The trouble is John Piper has suffered a little from massive exposure over the last few years, which means his every word has been followed by the people who follow other people's every words - a pressure most of us don't have to live with, nor the consequences.

Anyway, when I bought this:

he had only just turned up on these shores (in fact I bought the American edition straight from DG).  And I can only say: it is the book I wished I had read at the start of my Christian life, it's just that good.  It would have saved me so much trouble - and especially and fundamentally with this: that happiness and Christianity were, to all intents and purposes, not really connected in my mind.  I don't know if someone had said that to me, but as a young Christian and onwards the impression I had got from church, leaders, other Christians was somehow joy was not the concern of Christianity.  Maybe my misunderstanding - but I suspect I wasn't alone.

So having heard him in '98, I got the book and it all fell into place, and powerfully so.  (I told a Christian friend what I had heard in '98 in a 3-minute summary and it is not too much of an exaggeration to say it changed his life).

And yet what we really find here is, basically, traditional evangelical thinking  - particularly, in places, Puritan; and especially and overtly, Jonathan Edwards.  I just hadn't seen it before - but there it was.  And every fella saying Piper was some kind of mad uber-charismatic heretic, simply had not been reading Banner's Puritan Paperbacks properly (as I hadn't).

In this book you get his main thesis (pursuing God's glory and pursuing personal joy is fundamentally the same thing) and then how all the key areas of Christian life fit into that (Bible reading, prayer, missions etc).  And with it such warm-heartedness and passion. Calvinism on fire.

Like anyone with a big idea, it's always possible to go too far and see it everywhere.  Most people with big ideas do.  But there is something pervasive and persuasive about the principle Piper works out here.  To any younger Christian with a good reading ability and struggling through the fundamental questions of the faith, this is the book I would give.

I finally found out...

how I end up with so many responsibilities:  it doesn't matter how long the meeting is or much tea and coffee is drunk, I am THE ONLY ONE who EVER needs the bathroom:
Dilbert