Reform & Revive

I once heard it said that every faith in the world was an Orthopraxy, where “right practice” made you right before God, whereas Christianity was an Orthodoxy where “right doctrine/belief” did. This is incomplete. Most Protestants know right action is inadequate (Rom 2:6, Gal. 2:16), but most evangelicals are told all the time that what you intellectually assent to as you walk down an aisle is what washes your sin and depravity away into the “light of His wonderful face.” But this is not so (Mat. 7:21, Jam. 2:19). Christianity, rather, is an “Orthoontology,” where your “right state of being” is what makes you acceptable to him. Belief and practice are wholly and ultimately inadequate. It is the nature of the being from which these beliefs and practices flow from that matter.

So what on earth, does this have to do with this site and its vision and passion and focus and drive?

Everything.

Reformed Theology begins with the state of being of man (Total Depravity). It says that what needs to change is that state, and man has neither the desire nor the faculties available to him to change himself. He requires then a sovereign act of a Sovereign God to bring that change about. Reformed Theology then ends with the perseverance of that change. As both practice and surety of beliefs may wax and wane at times, the state of one’s being does not change after God has seized it.

But this has implications far beyond the theology of salvation. It means that Christians must have a passion that spills over from this change of being. It means that we must appeal to the whole man to increase their delight in God. It means this site must move from posts on the “Knowledge” of the Holy, to sweeping prose, poetry and musings. From deep theology that reveals who God is to soul-stirring poetry and meditations flowing from men and women forever impacted by their encounters with this revealed God.

These things go hand in hand. A good friend once told me, “you know? The Theologians of the world should be the ones that weep the most.” Let us weep, friends, as we see this God as He has revealed Himself and then get swept up in the beauty and the mystery that can do nothing but call out praise, adoration, and delight.

Join us for the ride. Reforming the mind, while reviving the heart.

Soli Deo Gloria
“to God alone be the Glory”

–paul

When the moon blinds my eyes with its radiance in comparison to the deepness of the blue-black sky, and I attempt to fathom the vastness of the Milky Way and the galaxies beyond…

O for a thousand tongues to sing/My great Redeemer’s praise!
The glories of my God and King! The triumphs of His grace!

But how can I call for a thousand tongues when this one wretched soul cannot even bid every ounce of her being into focus on the praise of His name?

I identify with David when he cried, “Praise the Lord, O my soul!”
Soul! Praise His Holy Name!

Considering the beauty of the sky and stars that sing magnificent harmonies to the Creator, how can this sinful woman praise you?

…You, the King of the Universe.

I know the story. I remind myself daily. The Glorious God, lacking in nothing, chose to create a race of ultimately inglorious men and women.
We are told it was for His glory that we are created (Isaiah 43:1-7, 48:9-11)

With one of our first exercises of will we rebel. We aspired to become God.

Made from the dust of the earth (gen 2:7), with a lifespan like that of a blade of grass (ps 103:15-16), carrying the status of a maggot or worm (job 25:6) when compared to the majesty of God.

A worm! A worm attempted to become God!

Yet we are worse than maggots, more filthy than worms! Have worms rebelled against their Creator? Have they ever strived for autonomy? Have they disdained God by behaving as if He were inconsequential in their lives?

No.

So how can such a rebellious, despicable race as we bring glory to the Creator of the stars?

Listen: He will transform us. He will cleanse us from our sin. He will deliver us from our uncleanness. He will give us a new heart and a new spirit. He will put His laws within our hearts and cause us to obey His rules. And we will be His people and He will be our God. (Ez 36:21-32)

We are the benefactors of His glorification of Himself. Let us be ashamed of our iniquities. Let us not seek to be more than we are! Let boasting cease. Let us be nothing but a reflection of glory of our King.

And let us look to the Savior with Isaac Watts:

Alas and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I
Was it for sins that I had done
He groaned upon the tree
Amazing pity, grace unknown
And love beyond degree

My God why would
You shed Your blood
So pure and undefiled
To make a sinful one like me
Your chosen precious child

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut His glories in
When Christ the mighty Maker died
For man the creature’s sin
Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear Cross appears
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness
And melt my eyes to tears

-amy

I thank Whit for leading us off here at R&R. I think it rather appropriate for us to start off in humility, understanding that God far surpasses our ability to fully comprehend His nature and ways. What we have comes from revelation in the Scriptures and the words that the Spirit moves on our hearts and minds. I simply want to pick up on some thoughts from “I am who I am” and add in some more general ideas floating through my mind right now. I want to briefly unpack that word “knowledge,” focusing on how it relates to faith and our own ideas of R&R’s mission. This will virtually be a copy and paste job from a recent post on my own blog (see the list of contributors for a link):

Tonight, I attended a performance of “Rebirth of a Nation,” a film created by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) that seeks to deconstruct and remix the 1915, W.D. Griffith film, “Birth of a Nation,” a highly acclaimed cinematic venture and historical one of the most controversial films in America. The film led off with a clip of two gentlemen sitting down, each smoking a cigarette and talking about the original film, “Birth of a Nation.” The gentlemen to the left of the frame asked the other man, Griffith himself, creator of the film, “Do you believe ‘Birth of a Nation’ to be truth?” It is what Griffith responded with, what was later affirmed by Paul Miller, that has me most irked and desperate to release these thoughts. Griffith quoted Pontius Pilate’s words to Jesus before allowing him to be crucified, “What is truth?” (John 18:38). This question is the central question of postmodernism as well. What is tragically ironic about Pilate’s statement was that he was looking at Truth. One of the great mysteries of the Christian faith is that Truth is not a set of principles, or morals, or facts to be ascertained; Truth is a person, Jesus Christ. That is not something that can just filed away–that is a thought that begs for contemplation and that ultimately humbles this college student holding knowledge as supreme, and yet constantly mistakes knowledge in the heart with mental propositions. God truly surpasses any attempt by such a finite being to comprehend without revelation. Oh, how far has cultural Christianity erred from this awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping idea into morality!?!

Our American culture has a habit of ridiculing the French, but I think their language (among others) has more to offer in terms of expression, especially when it comes to types of knowledge. In the English language, we are limited to the phrase “I know this/that,” but in French (and Spanish and other non-English languages), there are distinctive meanings to “knowledge” — savoir and connaitre. Savoir refers to knowing “something,” some fact, or how to do something. Connaitre is used when someone knows someone else, another person. Did I get a stellar score on the AP French exam in high school–no! But I think this distinction has actually been the most valuable piece of knowledge I have received from those required language classes. It is a distinction that many of us, me being the worst, fail to understand in the way we approach our faith! Knowing God is about connaitre, not savoir. But in our Western “enlightened” culture, we continually think of our faith by way of savoir. As if knowing enough scripture or reading numerous “Christian” texts gives eternal life. What we need is to know (connaitre) a person, or rather Three Persons in One, the Holy Trinity. Jesus explains the difference to the Jews around him at the time [John 5:39-40]:

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.

Study without prayer (a common pattern in my life) becomes a shallow intellectual pursuit. Jesus shows the futility in pursuit for that knowledge. My hope is not (well should not be) founded on a scientific proof of God, but rather the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, son of God the Father. How often have I reduced my “relationship” with Christ to some combination lock of scripture and pedantic intellectualism?? The knowledge that God speaks of is always a matter of the heart!

My prayer for both us as contributors and for any and all that may comprise our audience is that we would be firmly resolved to proclaim Christ as supreme in all things. I pray that we would have a conviction that the all of the Scriptures testify to Christ, with his name exalted from Genesis to Revelation. For those of you that have not come to know the Lord, I pray that you would not see these words as another argument, but rather a humble attempt to contextualize the Scriptures to our current moment. At the end of the day, our hope is that you would have a real encounter with the God of the Universe and come to know the indescribable love of Christ in your heart.

This is not about more book knowledge to file away somewhere, this is about knowing Christ intimately.

~Stephen Hess

I was reflecting on my first post here and how it might be applied to our lives. And once again instead of using my own words, I will rely upon the help of Mr. Tozer to assist me. Consider his following words when pondering the depths of God and theology:

“Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. ‘What bearing does this have on my life?’ he may ask. ‘What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?’ To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene.”

- Whit Wilson

Well, seems like a good time to get this blog off to its start, so without any further ado, Welcome to Reform and Revive! With this post I hope to encourage and inspire other contributors to the site to get some of their own delicious content going that I myself am so eagerly looking forward to! I don’t have a long post, but hopefully a good one!

In thinking on what to write my first post about, I felt it appropriate to write on that which we should all turn our gaze of attention: the awesomely incomprehensible Living God of the Universe. And as I was thinking about writing about God and who He is, I was reminded of a book that profoundly changed my life and my view of God: The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer. I recommend this book without reservation to ANYONE and EVERYONE. In it Tozer does a superb job, maybe as good as can be done by a finite human being, in beginning to describe the incomprehensible-beyond-human-language nature of God.

In a sermon preached by Tozer on God’s Holiness, he began by telling the story of Leonardo Da Vinci painting the Last Supper. When he was painting, Da Vinci had little problem with anything except the faces. Then he painted in the faces without much trouble except for one: the face of Christ. Feeling helpless to paint him but knowing he must, Da Vinci finally gave in and painted his face quickly. In despair he said that it was hopeless to do any better since he could not adequately paint Christ. Tozer remarked that attempting to talk about God and His Holiness is much like this; he knows he is helpless to be able to do justice with words to describe the infinite, eternal, perfectly Holy God.

With that said, I would like to offer some reflections on a few tremendous quotes by Tozer in this book, particularly relating to God’s self-existence and self-sufficiency, that have changed my mind and heart. Here are a few:

“’God has no origin,’ said Novatian, and it is precisely this concept of no-origin which distinguishes That-which-is-God from whatever is not God…The child by his question, ‘Where did God come from?’ is unwittingly acknowledging his creaturehood…He must be told that God has no origin, and he will find this hard to grasp since it introduces a category with which he is wholly unfamiliar and contradicts the bent toward origin-seeking…” – Pg. 25

“Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something…which indeed they have no technique for discovering.” – Pg. 26

As I was reflecting on this recently it suddenly dawned upon me. God cannot be proven empirically through human methods of scientific or social inquiry precisely because those methods can be applied only to those things which are created and thus, have a cause. A being with no cause or beginning simply cannot be explained through human inquiry or the scientific method. This approach in fact is entirely unable to touch God. Yet so often we (Christians and non-Christians alike) approach God as if He were equal with us, as if “God” were more of a position to be occupied rather than the self-existent, self-sufficient, perfectly Holy, eternal God that He is. Furthermore, these quotes and Scripture really opened my eyes to see the fact that God, unlike us who are entirely contingent upon Him, has no outside source He must consult or rely upon for life or indeed, for anything. He has life fully in Himself and needs nothing. He is the only being that exists that is entirely free in the truest sense of the word. In fact, in the words of Tozer, “The word necessary is wholly foreign to God.”

There is a lot more to mine out of those quotes I am sure, but I will leave you with one more quote from Tozer and a verse. Enjoy!

“To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us!” – Pg. 26

Exodus 3:14 : God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

- Whit Wilson