God Actually Spoke To Me

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Article by Tim Challies – original source here.

I want to hear God’s voice. I want him to speak to me in a personal way. I want to know that it’s really and truly him. Is that too much to ask?

It’s not too much to ask. In fact, it is God’s joy to communicate to each one of his children in the most personal and intimate way. Our Father speaks to us. He speaks clearly and he speaks personally. He really does.

John Piper wrote about this once, describing a vivid encounter with God during his early-morning quiet time:

Let me tell you about a most wonderful experience I had early Monday morning … God actually spoke to me. There is no doubt that it was God. I heard the words in my head just as clearly as when a memory of a conversation passes across your consciousness. The words were in English, but they had about them an absolutely self-authenticating ring of truth. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that God still speaks today.

As I prayed and mused, suddenly it happened. God said, “Come and see what I have done.” There was not the slightest doubt in my mind that these were the very words of God. In this very moment. At this very place in the twenty-first century, 2007, God was speaking to me with absolute authority and self-evidencing reality. I paused to let this sink in. There was a sweetness about it. Time seemed to matter little. God was near. He had me in his sights. He had something to say to me. When God draws near, hurry ceases. Time slows down.

He goes on to share some of what God said to him in that time together—God spoke of his deeds, of his power, of his authority and sovereignty. And then, “Think of it. Marvel at this. Stand in awe of this. The God who keeps watch over the nations, like some people keep watch over cattle or stock markets or construction sites — this God still speaks in the twenty-first century. I heard his very words. He spoke personally to me.”

Now, what did this do in Piper? How did the shock of receiving this word from the Lord affect him? This is where he springs the big surprise.

It has increased my love for the Bible as God’s very word, because it was through the Bible that I heard these divine words, and through the Bible I have experiences like this almost every day. The very God of the universe speaks on every page into my mind — and your mind. We hear his very words. …

And best of all, they are available to all. If you would like to hear the very same words I heard on the couch in northern Minnesota, read Psalm 66:5–7. That is where I heard them. O, how precious is the Bible. It is the very word of God. In it God speaks in the twenty-first century. This is the very voice of God. By this voice, he speaks with absolute truth and personal force. By this voice, he reveals his all-surpassing beauty. By this voice, he reveals the deepest secrets of our hearts. No voice anywhere anytime can reach as deep or lift as high or carry as far as the voice of God that we hear in the Bible.

It is a great wonder that God still speaks today through the Bible with greater force and greater glory and greater assurance and greater sweetness and greater hope and greater guidance and greater transforming power and greater Christ-exalting truth than can be heard through any voice in any human soul on the planet from outside the Bible.

Piper heard God’s voice and experienced genuine relationship with him through the Bible. Was it an impersonal experience? Did it leave him longing for something else somewhere else? No, not at all. It increased his intimacy and communion with God. It increased his confidence in the power and beauty of the Bible. It satisfied his desire to commune with God, yet made him long to experience even more of God in the pages of his Word. Continue reading →

If You Really Care For The Innocent

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Symbol of law and justice in the empty courtroom, law and justice concept.

Summer Jaeger:

One of the greatest books of our time is about a man accused of a crime of which he was not guilty, and how people come out and support “their side” when the narrative befits them. Atticus Finch defended a man accused of rape. The man was not guilty of rape but the mob, with their many prejudices, didn’t care. It made Atticus a hero. It made the false accuser slime.

Yet everywhere I turn now, the message we are hearing is one of, “I believe you, no matter what.”

The point of due process (which is a biblical concept), the point of witnesses, the necessity of reporting crime when it happens, is to *protect the innocent*. Because God cares for justice, we must act justly. We do not get to believe whoever we want to believe because we know that frequently, he who states their case first seems right, UNTIL someone comes to examine him (Prov 18:17).

If you love victims, if you truly care for the innocent, obey the Creator of justice Himself and stop with the nonsense. You’re no better than the mobs of Maycomb who wished to have Tom Robinson’s life. False accusations create victims of the accused. False accusations harm real victims. THAT is why we must protect the innocent the way the God who cares for us demands—by seeking justice, and crying out for it when we are wronged, like Scripture prescribes. God doesn’t take sexual sin lightly. Championing decades of silence followed by public defamation that can’t be proven isn’t teaching our kids how to protect themselves or pursue true justice if something awful happens to them.

I understand the world isn’t perfect, and that’s why God told us how to deal with sexual assault in the first place. And it looks nothing like what’s happening now. Losing your job was never God’s prescription for sexually deviant behavior….it was taken more seriously than that.

Of course I want people talking about this. But the world has no solution to sexual deviance because they are full-on embracing and celebrating deviance at every turn, parading perversion in the streets and redefining marriage and murdering children by the millions so that they can continue on in their sexual deviance. Don’t confuse their moral outrage as them finally finding a compass. Hollywood will continue to protect sexual predators because they don’t even come close to having an accurate definition for healthy sexuality in the first place.

Don’t bring your false empathy. No one wants it. Bring the Gospel. Love victims, the ones of sexual assault and the ones of false allegations, by pursuing justice how God prescribed, not how our godless nation prescribes.

Reformed Theology Vs. Hyper-Calvinism

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Article by by Michael Horton (original source here)

Before the average believer today learns what Reformed theology (i.e., Calvinism) actually is, he first usually has to learn what it’s not. Often, detractors define Reformed theology not according to what it actually teaches, but according to where they think its logic naturally leads. Even more tragically, some hyper-Calvinists have followed the same course. Either way, “Calvinism” ends up being defined by extreme positions that it does not in fact hold as scriptural. The charges leveled against Reformed theology, of which hyper-Calvinism is actually guilty, received a definitive response at the international Synod of Dort (1618–1619), along with the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.

Is God the Author of Sin?

The God of Israel “is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he” (Deut. 32:4–5). In fact, James seems to have real people in mind when he cautions, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one” (James 1:13). Sin and evil have their origin not in God or creation, but in the personal will and action of creatures.

Scripture sets forth two guardrails here: On one hand, God “works all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1:15); on the other, God does not — in fact, cannot — do evil. We catch a glimpse of these two guardrails at once in several passages, most notably in Genesis 45 and Acts 2. In the former, Joseph recognizes that while the intention of his brothers in selling him into slavery was evil, God meant it for good, so that many people could be saved during this famine (vv. 4–8). We read in the same breath in Acts 2:23 that “lawless men” are blamed for the crucifixion, and yet Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God….” The challenge is to affirm what Scripture teaches without venturing any further. We know from Scripture that both are true, but not how. Perhaps the most succinct statement of this point is found in the Westminster Confession of Faith (chap. 3.1): “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass;” — there’s one guardrail — “yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creature; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established,” and with that, the second guardrail. The same point is made in the Belgic Confession of Faith (Article 13), adding that whatever God has left to His own secret judgment is not for us to probe any further.

Is the Gospel for Everyone?

Isn’t it a bit of false advertising to say on one hand that God has already determined who will be saved and on the other hand to insist that the good news of the Gospel be sincerely and indiscriminately proclaimed to everyone? Continue reading →