The Doctor: God’s Accountancy

Sometimes God has been gracious on a Sunday and I have been conscious of exceptional liberty, and I have been foolish enough to listen to the devil when he says, ‘Now, then, you wait until next Sunday, it is going to be marvellous, there will be even larger congregations’. And I go into the pulpit the next Sunday and I see a smaller congregation. But then on another occasion I stand in this pulpit labouring, as it were left to myself, preaching badly and utterly weak, and the devil has come and said, ‘There will be nobody there at all next Sunday’. But, thank God, I have found on the following Sunday a larger congregation. That is God’s method of accountancy. You never know. I enter the pulpit in weakness and I end with power. I enter with self-confidence and I am made to feel a fool. It is God’s accountancy…. He is always giving us surprises. His book-keeping is the most romantic thing I know of in the whole world.

Our Lord spoke of it again in the third parable in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew. You remember His description of the people who will come at the end of the world expecting a reward but to whom He will give nothing, and then the others to whom He will say, ‘Come ye blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you.’ And they will say, ‘We have done nothing. When have we seen you naked, when have we seen you hungry or thirsty and given you drink?’ And He will say, ‘Because you have done it unto the least of my brethren you have done it unto me’. What a surprise that will be. This life is full of romance. Our ledgers are out of date; they are of no value. We are in the Kingdom of God and it is God’s accountancy. It is all of grace.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, pp. 131-132

Tolle Lege: The Treasure Principle

Readability:  1

Length: 94 pgs

Author:  Randy Alcorn

What if books on giving money were as popular as books on making money?

Randy Alcorn’s The Treasure Principle had been on my wish list for some time when I found it at a local used bookstore.  It’s one of those small little books published by Multnomah, think C.J. Mahaney’s The Cross-Centered Life.  There were several copies at the bookstore, along with another one of these little Multnomah books, The Prayer of Jabez.  I think they were there for two different reasons.  People read The Prayer of Jabez, practiced it for a little while, decided it didn’t work and was therefore stupid.  People read The Treasure Principle, decided it was stupid, or extreme, and therefore never practiced it.  I’m saddened that so many copies of such a book would end up back at the bookstore.  I hope as a result of my small efforts here you go buy all the used copies and more to give away.

This little book is stuffed with power, conviction, and joy.  Here is the book in summary taken from the last page of the book.

Treasure Principle

You can’t take it with you–but you can send it on ahead.

 

Treasure Principle Keys

 

1.  God owns everything. I’m His money manager.

We are the managers of the assets God has entrusted—not given—to us.

 

2.  My heart always goes where I put God’s money.

Watch what happens when you reallocate your money from temporal things to eternal things.

 

3.  Heaven, not earth, is my home.

We are citizens of “a better country—a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16).

 

4.  I should live not for the dot but for the line.

From the dot—our present life on earth—extends a line that goes on forever, which is eternity in heaven.

 

5.  Giving is the only antidote to materialism.

Giving is a joyful surrender to a greater person and a greater agenda. It dethrones me and exalts Him.

 

6.  God prospers me not to raise my standard of living, but to raise my standard of giving.

God gives us more money than we need so we can give—generously.

The Doctor: Stop Praying and Think

Let me put this plainly and bluntly in order that I may emphasize it even at the risk of being misunderstood. There is a sense in which the one thing that any believers who are in this condition [spiritual depression due to a particular past sin] must not do is to pray to be delivered from it. That is what they always do, and the more they pray the more they begin thinking about this one sin that they’ve committed in the past, and the more and more unhappy and depressed they become. Now the Christian must always pray, the Christian must ‘pray without ceasing’, but this is one of these points at which the Christian must stop praying for a moment and begin to think. So you must stop praying and think, and work out your doctrine.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, p. 69

The Doctor: The Essence of Sin

The essence of sin, in other words, is that we do not live entirely to the glory of God.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, p. 31

Tolle Lege: Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church

Readability:  3

Length: 155 pgs

Author:  Michale Lawrence

Michael Lawrence’s Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church is one of the most helpful and important books on ministry I’ve read.  I’m not recommending this book for everyone, but for readers who are teachers and preachers I cannot commend it enough.  I already know I want to read it again next year more slowly and purposefully.  As teachers and preachers we are all theologians, but are we Biblical ones.  I think most are not.  Many will use the Bible to support their theology, but that does not make it Biblical.  Many have a segmented theology, they believe this, and they believe that, but if you were to ask what the Bible was about as a whole they couldn’t provide an answer other than a jumbled composite of their segmented beliefs.  Biblical theology is about the whole story of the whole Bible.  Ignore this overarching storyline will always result in taking a text out of context.

The Bible interprets us by declaring what the main events of reality are, and then telling us to read ourselves in light of that story.

This means that the primary question that the historical-grammatical method is seeking to answer is not, “What does that word mean?” but “What does that sentence mean?” In answering that question, we quickly realize that context is king. So the first step of exegesis is to read the text, the whole text, over and over again. Interpretation actually begins with the whole, not the part. Then, in the context of the whole, we work backwards through the parts, back to sentences, back all the way down to individual words. What we learn and discover there then takes us back to the whole with a more accurate and perhaps nuanced understanding of meaning.

The Doctor: Healthy Christians Talk to Themselves

The ultimate cause of all spiritual depression is unbelief. For if it were not for unbelief even the devil could do nothing. It is because we listen to the devil instead of listening to God that we go down before him and fall before his attacks. That is why this psalmist keeps on saying to himself: “Hope thou in God for I shall yet praise Him…” He reminds himself of God. Why? Because he was depressed and had forgotten God, so that his faith and his unbelief in God and in God’s power, and in his relationship to God, were not what they ought to be. We can indeed sum it all up by saying that the final and ultimate cause is just sheer unbelief.

…The main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Far from it. This is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problem of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment [Psalm 42] was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself, ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ he asks. His soul had been repressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you’. Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have but little experience.

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’–what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’–instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet priase Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression

Hymns I’m Angry I Didn’t Learn as a Child (15)

Thelogically rich, Christ saturated, and balancing conviction and comfort; this is why I love discovering old hymns.

Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted
by Thomas Kelly

Stricken, smitten, and afflicted,
See Him dying on the tree!
’Tis the Christ by man rejected;
Yes, my soul, ’tis He, ’tis He!
’Tis the long expected prophet,
David’s Son, yet David’s Lord;
Proofs I see sufficient of it:
’Tis a true and faithful Word.

Tell me, ye who hear Him groaning,
Was there ever grief like His?
Friends through fear His cause disowning,
Foes insulting his distress:
Many hands were raised to wound Him,
None would interpose to save;
But the deepest stroke that pierced Him
Was the stroke that Justice gave.

Ye who think of sin but lightly,
Nor suppose the evil great,
Here may view its nature rightly,
Here its guilt may estimate.
Mark the Sacrifice appointed!
See Who bears the awful load!
’Tis the Word, the Lord’s Anointed,
Son of Man, and Son of God.

Here we have a firm foundation,
Here the refuge of the lost.
Christ the Rock of our salvation,
Christ the Name of which we boast.
Lamb of God for sinners wounded!
Sacrifice to cancel guilt!
None shall ever be confounded
Who on Him their hope have built.

The Doctor: When Indifference Becomes Essential

[T]he liberty that the Apostle allows with regard to things that are indifferent ceases the moment they are regarded as essential.  … We read in Acts 16 that Paul agreed to have Timothy circumcised.  but we find in Galatians 2 that Paul refused to have Titus circumcised.  Was he being inconsistent?  Not at all!  Paul had Timothy circumcised in order not to cause offence – the same principle that we have in this chapter.  But he refused to circumcise Titus when he met the Judaizers, because they said that circumcision was essential.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 14, p. 200

Tolle Lege: Disciplines of a Godly Family

Readability:  1

Length: 155 pgs

Author:  Kent and Barbara Hughes

Disciplines of a Godly Family is the most practical book on parenting I have read while remaining biblically faithful.  The book is honest, simple, personal, and useful.  Eighty years of aggregate wisdom are here for you.  It is worth the small investment of time and money to gain such wisdom.  For those who think children unworthy of such, here is my favorite paragraph form the book.

So consider this:  Though one could travel a hundred times the speed of light, past countless yellow-orange stars, to the edge of the galaxy and swoop down to the fiery glow located a few hundred light-years below the plane of the Milky Way, though one could slow to examine the host of hot young stars luminous among the gas and dust, though one could observe, close-up, the proto-stars poised to burst forth from their dusty cocoons, though one could witness a star’s birth, in all one’s stellar journeys one would never see anything equal to the birth and wonder of a human being.  For a tiny baby girl or boy is the apex of God’s creation!  But the greatest wonder of all is that the child is created in the image of God, the Imago Dei.  The child once was not; now, as a created soul, he or she is eternal.  He or she will exist forever.  When the stars of the universe succumb to stellar destruction,  that soul shall still live.

The Doctor: Faith Is Not Reason, Nor Unreasonable

Faith brings you into the Bible and then you see the great reasonableness of it all.  For Christ is not only the power or God, He is the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), and when you are in it, you see that this alone is wisdom and everything else would be unfair and unreasonable.  If faith were a matter of reason, then only people with great intellects could be Christians.  On the other hand, faith is not unreasonable, because if that were so, no one with an intellect could be a Christian either.  But because it is what it is, it puts us all oin the same level.  We accept this revelation and then proceed to understand.  That is the relation between faith and reason.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Great Doctrines of the Bible, Volume 2, p. 148