Wes Pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church This Sunday

This Sunday Kenwood Baptist Church will enjoy the ministry of the Word from Wes Pastor, who has nearly 20 years of church-planting and pastoral experience. In 1992 he launched Christ Memorial Church, now the largest Baptist church in Vermont, where he remains as senior minister. In 2000 he started the NETS Institute for Church Planting, which trains and supports seminary graduates who want to plant gospel-driven churches primarily in New England. Wes earned his MBA from Miami University and an MAR from Westminster Theological Seminary, and just last year received his MTh from the University of Wales. He has taught adjunct at Westminster, Redeemer Theological Seminary and Wales Evangelical School of Theology, and is an occasional blogger for The Gospel Coalition. Wes and his wife, Sue, have been married nearly 30 years, and they have two married sons, three available daughters, and one perfect granddaughter.

If you’re in Louisville thinking that maybe God has called you to plant a church in New England (or if you’re looking for an available daughter to wed!), why not come hear Wes this Sunday? There will be an informational time on NETS Institute for Church Planting over a pot-luck lunch following the service.

Caveat: we don’t want to take anyone away from their church home or responsibilities you have there, but this is a good opportunity to hear from a great preacher leading a strategic ministry. The worship service begins at 10:45am.

OT Prayers Appealing to God’s Concern for His Own Glory

As I mentioned before, there are 77 tables in God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology, and I have permission from Crossway to make five of them available here for free. Each will be available for about 48 hours.

The one linked in this post (cataloging prayers in the Old Testament that appeal to God’s concern for his own glory) may be the most valuable one of the bunch, though the next one on Messianic Woes is really good, too. They all have value, but the previous one on Yahweh’s intent to make himself known only dealt with texts in Exodus (so it wouldn’t take you long to read through Exodus carefully and find the references for yourself), another one that’s forthcoming on the doxologies in the New Testament wouldn’t be that hard to compile for yourself, and the one I’ll post on the chiastic structure of Revelation partakes of the weakness common to every proposed chiastic structure of a longer passage or a whole book (they are impossible to prove definitively, and they will always be disputed).

I’ll tell you why I think the next one on the Messianic woes is valuable when I post it. Why do I think this one would be valuable for you to download? It saves you it a ton of work.

These prayers that appeal to God’s concern for his own glory show how the believing remnant in the old covenant responded to God’s pursuit of his own glory: they joined him in it. These OT saints adopted God’s priorities and based their prayers on what they understood to be of greatest concern to God himself–his reputation among the nations, the glory of his name, the revelation of the truth about who he is. Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Elijah, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Asaph, Asa, and Jehoshaphat all petition God on the basis of his concern for his own glory.

Incidentally, there is a massively important point of application here: this is how we, too, should pray. The perspective of the biblical authors is not merely to be studied but adopted, embraced, and lived.

These prayers appealing to God’s concern for his glory are applied to a variety of situations and employ a variety of expressions, and they had to be located the old fashioned way, which is still the best way to examine a biblical theme: by reading slowly through the OT, marking them as they appeared, and then gathering them all into one place. So this chart saves you a ton of work, but actually doing this kind of work for yourself is the best way to study the Bible because it demands that you read attentively, remember what you’ve read, correlate new information with what you’ve already seen, and assimilate the results into a coherent whole.

So in this table I list every prayer in the Old Testament that appeals to God’s concern for his own glory; at least, I think I got them all! If you find one that I missed I’d love to know about it.

This table is going live on Tuesday, March 22, 2011, and the link will be removed at the end of the day on Thursday, March 24, 2011.

Here’s the link: Old Testament Prayers Appealing to God’s Concern for His Own Glory [link removed].

 

Free Class with Bruce Ware and Andy Naselli

The good Greg Dietrich has all the details on a free class at Northland International University: “free to all new students who want to check out their Doctor of Ministry or Master of Ministry program.” Andy Naselli provides some bullet points that include an overview of the course schedule.

It would be worth the trip to sit under Drs. Ware and Naselli for a week!

Note these three points:

  • For whom? Students in Northland’s graduate program (esp. DMin students).
  • How much? It’s free for first-time students in Northland’s graduate program (whether or not they wish to remain in the program).
  • Can the credit transfer to other schools? Yes.

More info.

To the Jew First and Also the Gentile

On Sunday, March 20, 2011, it was my privilege to preach Mark 7:1–37, “To the Jew First and Also the Gentile,” at Kenwood Baptist Church.

At the exodus from Egypt Moses led Israel through the Red Sea into the wilderness where they immediately needed water and food. The Lord provided bread from heaven and water from the rock. Then they arrived at Sinai, where the Lord gave Israel his word through Moses. Then Moses taught the people how they were to live to preserve cleanliness and walk with the Lord.

In the new exodus Mark is depicting, John the Baptist has prepared the way, Jesus has calmed the sea and walked on it, he has provided bread in the desolate place, healing for the sick, and authoritative teaching. Now in Mark 7 Jesus will issue an authoritative declaration about all foods being clean.

Jesus conforms to his own standards and helps people on his own terms, and his standards and terms are holy, righteous, and good.

The Pharisees miss the point of the Old Testament and nitpick Jesus’ disciples about handwashings, then Jesus declares that it is what comes from the heart that defiles. After the scribes and Pharisees reject Jesus, he goes to Gentile territory, where Mark shows it’s better to be a dog who gets crumbs than a child who refuses to eat, and then a Gentile has his ears opened and his tongue loosed.

To hear more, click here.

God Is Known Among His People (Psalm 76)

My brother in law sent me the lyrics to this hymn last night. He said it sings God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment. I have to agree. Hear the tune here, and a version with a chorus added is here.

God is known among His people,
Every mouth His praises fill;
From of old He has established
His abode on Zion’s hill;
There He broke the sword and arrow,
Bade the noise of war be still.

Excellent and glorious art Thou,
With Thy trophies from the fray;
Thou hast slain the valiant hearted,
Wrapped in sleep of death are they;
When Thine anger once is risen,
Who can stand in that dread day?

When from Heav’n Thy sentence sounded,
All the earth in fear was still,
While to save the meek and lowly
God in judgment wrought His will;
E’en the wrath of man shall praise Thee,
Thy designs it shall fulfill.

Vow and pay ye to Jehovah,
Him your God forever own;
All men, bring your gifts before Him,
Worship Him, and Him alone;
Mighty kings obey and fear Him,
Princes bow before His throne.

Recommended Book: The Flames of Rome by Paul Maier

On the strength of recommendations from Justin Taylor and Andy Naselli, I bought and read Paul Maier’s novel The Flames of Rome, and now I’m adding my voice to the chorus of recommendations for this book.

Maier begins in the reign of Claudius and takes his reader to the end of the reign of Nero in this “documentary novel.” All the names used are authentic, and at no point is the actual history violated. Maier fills in details that we don’t have to create a story that keeps the pages turning, and he documents each chapter with thorough notes referring to primary sources where the facts can be found.

Maier is a good storyteller, and the history related in this novel is important for anyone interested in the New Testament, as Maier has documented the late AD 40’s through to the late AD 60’s, the years in which the Apostles were on mission and many of the books of the New Testament were being written.

Do you want a window into a world previously unaffected by the good news of Jesus Christ, a glimpse into the growth of the gospel in its earliest years?

The Flames of Rome is a story worth reading in its own right, and it comes with the added benefit of accurately depicting this period in history, giving you the background of the New Testament. So the book is a pleasure to read, and it’s good for you too!

John Gardner on The Art of Fiction

At my friend Brian’s recommendation, I read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. The book is about writing fiction, but what Gardner says can be applied to the writing of anything from a blog post to a scholarly article to a non-fiction book or even to a sermon. William McPherson’s blurb on the back cover is spot on:

“He lays out virtually everything a person might want to know [about] how to say it , with good and bad examples and judgments falling like autumn leaves in a November storm.”

One of the things I appreciate about this book is that Gardner isn’t messing around:

“What is said here, whatever use it may be to others, is said for the elite; that is, for serious literary artists” (x).

I don’t want to pile up all my favorite quotes from this book in one post, so you can expect more autumn leaves from John Gardner this spring.

Yahweh’s Intent to Make Himself Known: Limited Time Offer

The kind folks at Crossway have agreed to allow me to give you, dear reader of this blog, a set of gifts, each of which will be available for a limited time.

There are 77 tables in God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology, and I have permission to make five of them available here for free. I hope they’ll be useful to you.

These tables could be used in your own study of the Bible, as you teach the Bible to others, or perhaps even in course notes. These tables typically gather the sorts of things that computer searches or concordances don’t turn up with just one or two searches. That is, they collect the kinds of information that you have to read through the text carefully to find all the instances of because sometimes the same idea is expressed in several different ways. The Chicago Manual of Style (p. 757, §18.4) describes the kind of biblical theological theme I have in mind:

“A computer can search, record, and alphabetize terms and can arrange numbers far more efficiently than a person. But it cannot distinguish between a term and a concept or between a relevant and an irrelevant statement. At best it can generate a concordance.”

I’d love for these gifts to spur you to buy the book and become a regular here at For His Renown, but you’re under no obligation to do either of those in order to get these tables. They’re gifts. All you have to do is click the link, take a look, and you can decide whether or not you want to save the thing for your own use in the future. If you want it, you will need to save it, because unlike Biblical Theology for Kids!, which is going to be here when you come back, these will not remain available indefinitely.

This first one catalogs statements God makes in Exodus about his intention to make himself known. He asserts repeatedly that he is Yahweh, and he tells Israel, the Egyptians, and Pharaoh that they will know that he is Yahweh.

Here’s the link to the table cataloging these references: Yahweh’s Intent to Make Himself Known [link removed].

This link is going live on Friday, March 18, 2011, and it will go dead at the end of Monday, March 21, 2011.

And may the Lord make himself known to you!

The Difference Between Jesus and Herod

On Sunday, March 13, it was my privilege to preach Mark 6:1–56, “The Difference Between Jesus and Herod,” at Kenwood Baptist Church. It was daylight savings time spring forward Sunday (a pox on the time change). The combination of the time change and my sister’s family being in town made for an exciting morning on which I forgot to put my sermon manuscript with my things! But the Lord stood by me, all glory to his name. He will never leave or forsake those who call on him and trust him.

Israel’s true king confronts sin, conquers demons, feeds the hungry, and walks on water, while the imposter won’t stand for righteousness against a girl.

The people of Nazareth are like the family of Jesus (Mark 3:20) and the people of the region of the Gerasenes (Mark 5:1, 17). The true king is willing to do what is right even if it offends those closest to him (not that he’s being offensive about doing what is right). He loves them by doing and saying what is good for them (Mark 6:1–6).

Jesus offended the people of his hometown (Mark 6:1–6), but rather than keep those closest to him nearby for his own comfort and security, he sent them out to bless others (Mark 6:7–13). The disciples are told not to take money in their belts for the journey (Mark 6:8), but later in Jesus’ ministry they’ll be back with Jesus and they are traveling with money (John 12:6; 13:29). This shows that poverty and simplicity are not ends in themselves but only periodic situations embraced in service of the mission. The disciples are to seek first the Kingdom, whether that means they travel without money, as in Mark 6, or with it, as in John 11 and 13.

Herod does not understand Jesus and gloms onto a comfortable, preposterous explanation (Mark 6:14–16).

Herod has taken his brother’s wife and married her. He is not his brother’s keeper. When the adultery is exposed, rather than acknowledge what is right and repent, his adulteress holds a grudge against the Baptist. Herod, in verse 20, is troubled by John, but he has not the moral courage to do the right thing (Mark 6:17–20).

Herod makes a rash oath, and rather than break it he beheads John the Baptist, whom he knows to be holy and just (Mark 6:20–29). He commits the unjust atrocity of beheading the last old covenant prophet because he is concerned about losing face over a silly oath he swore to a girl at a dinner party! So to save face Herod shows his profile in all its reproachful ugliness.

Herod is an ignorant, immoral coward.

Praise God, there is a true king.

Do you want to serve a king who does not need your money so he will never impose taxes on you?

Do you want to serve a king who will do whatever it takes to meet your greatest need—even if it costs him his life?

Do you want to serve a king who will never perpetrate injustice against anyone?

Do you want to serve a king who deserves to be king? The rightful king?

Back in Mark 6:15 some were saying that Jesus might be one of the prophets. In 6:31–44, Mark shows us that Jesus is a new and better Moses.

Then Jesus walks on water in Mark 6:45–52.

Jesus plants his feet where no one else can. He treads paths no other feet trod. The elements do for him what they will do for none other. Particles that give way under the weight of all other humans, spread out, splash around, receive, and must be resisted lest the weightier object sink, now uphold Jesus; they do not separate, splash, and receive him, but, as if holding him with hands lifted high, they bear up the son of man, son of David, seed of the woman, new Adam.

The water now serves the one for whom the ages have waited, before whom the demons bow and flee, healer of the sick, teacher with authority, the man who has now shown himself bold even in his home town, willing to send out those closest to him to advance the cause: he is the multitude feeder and the wave walker.

This Jesus is the true King of Israel, heir to the world, servant of all and master of the universe. Could he be more different than Herod the immoral, ignorant coward?

If you would like to hear more about Jesus in Mark 6, I give you this link.

Domesticated

Anthony O’Hear (in The Great Books, 2) notes:

“. . . the Plato studied by philosophers of today is a Plato who is almost a colleague or contemporary of ours, with our mentality. The fact that all his thought is framed in a mystical myth of the transmigration of souls between this world and another more perfect world, more real than ours, to which we aspire whether we recognize it or not, is typically overlooked as too embarrassing even to notice, let alone to take seriously.”

Beale the Balsam Tree

I had the privilege of introducing G. K. Beale at his first Gheens lecture here at SBTS today. It was an opportunity for me to heed 1 Thessalonians 5:12–13, and I want to take the opportunity to give thanks to God for Dr. Beale’s ministry by posting my words of introduction here as well:

G. K. Beale is a balsam tree. Balsam is a fragrant aroma or the tree that produces it, and from these trees comes an oleoresin that has medicinal value: balm. G. K. Beale is a balsam tree planted by streams of living water, bearing fruit in season and out, leading people to the balm in Gilead. In my own experience, I was taught that the authors of the NT make illegitimate appeals to the OT in ways that should not be imitated. The two tall scholarly trees that God used to open my mind to understand the Scriptures, to begin down the path of seeing that the authors of the NT rightly understood the OT, were Drs. Thomas R. Schreiner and G. K. Beale.

Dr. Beale’s book The Temple and the Church’s Mission is a paradigm shifting, seminal work, his book The Erosion of Inerrancy in Evangelicalism is a faithful diagnosis from a loving physician, and his forthcoming New Testament Biblical Theology will stand with the titans of the genre.

Now flow the waters, drawn from the well,
Whence floweth our life, breaking the spell
Cast by the foe, that we too may know
Him whose suff’ring and glory the Scriptures show.

Zotero for your MDiv, DMin, or PhD

I’m sitting here grading a paper, and there are problems with the footnotes. All these problems can be easily resolved through the use of a fast, free (open-source) bibliographic management program called Zotero.

Andy Naselli introduced me to Zotero, and it is phenomenal. Once you install the program, you can go to worldcat.org, look up the resources you’re citing, and in the address bar of the webpage there will be an icon at the far right that is linked to Zotero. Click that icon, and voila!, Zotero gathers the bibliographic info on the item and saves it to your Zotero library. Then there are word-processing plug ins that come with your Zotero installation, and you can set up keyboard shortcuts for these. So you go over to your word processor, hit your keyboard shortcut for a Zotero footnote, select the item from your library, press enter, and a perfectly formatted footnote (you choose whatever style you need, author-date, CMOS, etc.) appears. Zotero will update with each new footnote to get all your ibids right.

When you save the bibliographic info, you’ll probably need to take a look at it to make sure that all the info you need is there, and you’ll probably need to edit the place of publication and the name of the publishing house and such. But you do this once for the resource in your database, and then for the rest of your life when you want to put that item in a footnote, it’s in your Zotero database.

Praise God for this software, and praise God that those who use it will make life easier for all who grade papers!

PS: Don’t be afraid to do some reading in their support. The instructions are easy and they have a solution for every problem I’ve run into, or at least an answer for all the questions I’ve asked. Enjoy!

PPS: Notice is hereby served to anyone whose papers I might grade (MDiv, DMin, and PhD students please take note!): you have no excuse for bad footnotes. You can either master Turabian or the SBL Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style (or the SBTS Manual of Style), or you can learn how to use Zotero and let the program do it for you.

Ten Thousand, by John Mark McMillan

Josh Philpot introduced me to this song by John Mark McMillan, “Ten Thousand,” from his album, The Medicine. Matt Damico sang this at the close of the sermon linked in the previous post. He knocked it out of the park. This is what Josh wrote to Matt when he introduced him to the song:

“It’s a great tune and song. Think Ezekiel 37; John 16:33; Ephesians 5 (bride and husband); 1 John 5:4; etc.“

TEN THOUSAND

Ten thousand glimmering like coals in our chest
Ball bearings drawn to the magnetic breath
Of ten thousand weeping with wings on their tears
Amidst ten thousand voices for ten thousand years
For ten thousand graves yawning unlocked and unlatched
Now ten thousand holes with rocks on their backs
Ten thousand tombs gaping wide singing the praise
Of ten thousand bodies unlaced and unlaid

As the ten thousand highways unfold their doors
For the ten thousand standing on Nineveh’s shores
Where the blood of a husband silences wars
For the girl who rises to meet him
And she sings

World, I have overcome you
World, I have overcome you
World, I have overcome
By my song and the blood of a son

Ten thousand rivers run red like my veins
Where the bones of men hum like a rattling cage
For sinew to cling to and wind to remain
In ten thousand lungs for ten thousand days
Breathing like a choir of holes in the ground
Where the cynical have lain, where the cynical go down
Save the gravity of time lets go of her drowned
Like ten thousand sparrows, unlocked and unwound

As the ten thousand highways unfold their doors
For the ten thousand standing on Nineveh’s shores
Where the blood of a husband silences wars
For the girl who rises to meet him

And she sings
World, I have overcome you
World, I have overcome you
World, I have overcome
By my song and the blood of a son