Growing in Christ
quotes
The Eucatastrophe of March 25
41 month ago
This is my fifth reading of the Lord of the Rings, and much to my surprise, I’ve actually coincided our calendar dates with the dates of the story. So, I thought I’d share a little bit of Tolkien nerd knowledge with you.
When Samwise wakes up after the destruction of the ring, Gandalf explains what day it is:
The fourteenth of the New Year…or if you like the eith day of April in the Shire reckoning. But in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March, when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King.
Maybe you think dates are an odd thing, and rather silly to mention. However, this is actually a rather important moment of “eucatastrophe” in the Lord of the Rings. A “eucatastrophe” is a word coined by Tolkien himself that he defines as “the good catastrophe, the sudden and joyous turn” in a story. At this point in the story, all things seemed that they would fail, but suddenly the One Ring is destroyed, Sauron is defeated, and Sam and Frodo are saved from the brink of death. So why the date? What does it have to do with a larger meaning of the story? Tom Shippey helps us tie all of this together from a rather sly move on Tolkien’s part:
No one any longer celebrates the twenty-fifth of March, and Tolkien’s point is accordingly missed, as I think he intended. He inserted it only as a kind of signature, a personal mark of piety. However, as he knew perfectly well, in old English tradition, 25th March is the date of the Crucifixion, of the first Good Friday. As Good Friday is celebrated on a different day each year, Easter being a mobile date defined by the phrases of the moon, the connection has been lost, except for one thing. In Gondor the New Year will always begin on 25th March, and the same is true of England, in a sadly altered and declined fashion. When the Julian calendar gave way to the Gregorian in 1752, there was an eleven-day discrepancy between them, so that the 25th March jumped to being the 6th of April. But only the tax year, which no one sees as a moment of eucatastrophe.
25th March remains a date deeply embedded in the Christian calendar. In old tradition, again, it is the date of the Annunciation and the conception of Christ – naturally, nine months exactly before Christmas, 25th December. It is also the date of the Fall of Adam and Eve, the felix culpa who disastrous effects the Annunciation and the Crucifixion were to annul or repair. One might note that in the Calendar of dates which Tolkien so carefully wrote out in Appendix B, December 25th is the day on which the Fellowship sets out from Rivendell. The main action of The Lords of the Rings takes place, then, in the mythic space between Christmas, Christ’s birth, and the crucifixion, Christ’s death.
(Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, p. 208-9)
This moment in the book where Gandalf tells Sam the date – which we see is more important than might be suspected – is immediately preceded by Sam exclaiming:
Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?
I think good’ol Samwise (my favorite character) captures the sense that all Christians should feel about the coming Easter season. Everything sad is coming untrue, by the blood of the Lamb who was slain, by the eucatastrophe of the Cross.
That is not what a star is
15 months ago
I’m in the process of revisiting The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. What a joy! One thing I’ve had in the back of my mind whilst reading has been the observation by Alan Jacobs (in The Narnian) that all of Lewis’s thought can be found in The Chronicles of Narnia. With this in mind, I was staggered by the power in Lewis’s view of the world expressed in this singular line about the nature of creation:
“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”
[Aslan:] “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
― The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Lewis jarred me here, and stirred me from a slumber with this line. It’s the climate of our age to define things by what they are. Atheistic materialism is the default mode of how we see the world around us – a star is a huge ball of burning gas :: a huge ball of burning gas is a star. Beyond the physics of the star, there’s nothing else to it. But Lewis jarringly pulls us back to Scripture by the mouth of Aslan.
[The Lord] determines the number of the stars;
he gives to all of them their names.
~ Psalm 147:4
Each and every star has a name – a name the Lord himself gave it. The stars of the heavens are named by God, which means, if anything, that they are more than merely huge balls of burning gas. They are named by God. Each and every star in the heavens has a name tag on it, given to it by God himself. Those stars constantly stroll the heavens calling us to speak the glories of God back to him.
I regularly frequent NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. This is one of their latest pictures, W5: Pillars of Star Formation. Take in the wonder of this star formation – it’s not mere gas. That’s what it’s made of, but that’s not what it is. If anything, it’s named by God himself. The Lord gave this star a name, and this star has joyfully radiated the praise of the Lord of Heaven since long before we saw it, and will continue to long into the future.
Don’t succumb to the drab, weary, bland world of our age that sees a star only as a ball of burning gas. Thoughts like that poison the heart and will rot out your affections, leaving you hollow – as Lewis would say, a man without a chest.
Rather, we should see each of these gargantuan, massive, named stars hanging nimbly upon the command of Christ to exist (Hebrews 1). The Jesus who names them and owns them, is the same Jesus who tenderly cares for us. The one who names the stars more intimately cares for us. Ultimately, the stars with their beautiful names call us to look to Jesus who is “the bright morning star” (Rev. 22:16 ESV).
A few more quotes on Heaven
16 months ago
I posted earlier today a quote from J.C. Ryle on Heaven. I’ve been looking to compile a few quotes from our fathers in the faith from earlier generations, and hit a gold mine at Nick Roark’s blog Telle Lege. I have to confess that everything I’ve quoted below is merely swiped from him under his Heaven tag. If you enjoy what I post here, chances are, you’ll really enjoy what Nick posts at his blog, so check it out. Without further ado, more quotes on Heaven.
Christ is the very heaven of heaven
“Heaven is not heaven without Christ. It is better to be any place with Christ than to be in heaven itself without Him. All delicacies without Christ are but as a funeral banquet.
Where the master of the feast is away, there is nothing but solemnness. What is all without Christ? I say the joys of heaven are not the joys of heaven without Christ. He is the very heaven of heaven…
To be with Christ is to be at the spring-head of all happiness.”
~Richard Sibbes, “Christ is Best,’ in The Works of Richard Sibbes, Vol. 1 (Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1634/1973), 339.
HT.
Joy is the serious business of Heaven
It is only in our ‘hours-off,’ only in our moments of permitted festivity, that we find an analogy. Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for ‘down here’ is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were place here to live.
But in this world everything is upside down. That which , if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”
(HT: Full quote here)
~C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (San Diego: Harvest, 1964), 93.
Heaven Will Work Backwards
“That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”
~C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarpersCollins, 1946), 69.
HT.
Heaven an Ocean of Love
There, in heaven, this infinite fountain of love — this eternal Three in One — is set open without any obstacle to hinder access to it, as it flows forever. There this glorious God is manifested, and shines forth, in full glory, in beams of love.
And there this glorious fountain forever flows forth in streams, yea, in rivers of love and delight, and these rivers swell, as it were, to an ocean of love, in which the souls of the ransomed may bathe with the sweetest enjoyment, and their hearts, as it were, be deluged with love!
Jonathan Edwards, ”Heaven, a World of Love” in Charity and Its Fruits (Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, 1852/2000), 327-8.
Help each other up the hill towards Heaven
Labor to be much acquainted with heaven. If you are not acquainted with it, you will not be likely to spend your life as a journey thither. You will not be sensible of its worth, nor will you long for it…
Let Christians help one another in going this journey. There are many ways whereby Christians might greatly forward one another in their way to heaven, as by religious conference, etc. Therefore let them be exhorted to go this journey as it were in company: conversing together, and assisting one another. Company is very desirable in a journey, but in none so much as this. Let them go united and not fall out by the way, which would be to hinder one another, but use all means they can to help each other up the hill. This would ensure a more successful traveling and a more joyful meeting at their Father’s house in glory.”
~Jonathan Edwards, “The Christian Pilgrim, Or, The True Christian’s Life a Journey Toward Heaven,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Edward Hickman, 2 vols. (1834; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974), vol. 2: p. 245-6.
Heaven is with Christ. That is all we need.
2We are hosting a retreat at our church this weekend on Heaven, so the subject has been on my mind a good bit while. Bellow is a small but powerful thought from J.C. Ryle on Jesus’ prayer for us about Heaven.
“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” ~John 17:24
We know little of heaven now. Our thoughts are all confounded, when we try to form an idea of a future state in which pardoned sinners shall be perfectly happy. “It does not yet appear what we shall be.” (I John 3:2.) But we may rest ourselves on the blessed thought, that after death we shall be “with Christ.” Whether before the resurrection in paradise, or after the resurrection in final glory, the prospect is still the same. True Christians shall be “with Christ.” We need no more information. Where that blessed Person is who was born for us, died for us, and rose again, there can be no lack of anything. David might well say, “In Your presence is fullness of joy, and at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” (Psalm 16:11.)
From J.C. Ryle’s Exposition of John.
My prayer for our weekend and knowledge of Heaven is that, whatever we learn, our yearning and loving to be “with Christ” would be the highest affections that grow this weekend.
Why you need the Holy Spirit
06 months ago
In doing a little research today, I ran across a section I’d marked in On Communion with God from a previous read that I thought I’d share. I tend to like lists, especially pithy ones that pack a lot of weight into a small amount of space. What I appreciate about what Dr. Owen says bellow is that he hits home on the mundain needs of the Spirit in daily life. We never drift towards godliness, and thus never drift towards a reliance on the Spirit. Thus, daily, I’m either content in Christ or complaining, hardened against sin or wooed by it, puffed up by performance or humbled by grace, taken in by the love of money and our sex-saturated culture, or fretting about the world around me. Without the Spirit, none of those distinctions have hope in them, but with the “consolations” or help of the Spirit there is the power of Christ to walk in wisdom and holiness.
In a word, in all the concernments of this life, and in our whole expectation of another, we stand in need of the consolations of the Holy Ghost.
- Without them, we shall either despise afflictions or faint under them, and God be neglected as to his intendments in them.
- Without them, sin will either harden us to a contempt of it, or cast us down to a neglect of the remedies graciously provided against it.
- Without them, duties will either puff us up with pride, or leave us without that sweetness which is in new obedience.
- Without them, prosperity will make us carnal, sensual, and to take up our contentment in these things, and utterly weaken us for the trials of adversity.
- Without them, the comforts of our relations will separate us from God, and the loss of them make our hearts as Nabal’s.
- Without them, the calamity of the church will overwhelm us, and the prosperity of the church will not concern us.
- Without them, we shall have wisdom for no work, peace in no condition, strength for no duty, success in no trial, joy in no state, — no comfort in life, no light in death.
~John Owen, On Communion with God, Works II: 261.
Other editions:
Puritan Paperback Series: On Communion with God by John Owen (with abridgments and edits to be easier to read)
Communion with the Triune God by John Owen, edited by Justin Taylor and Kelly M. Kapic
Prayer of a weary parent in the morning
07 months ago
Man’s highest happiness consists in holiness, for it is by this that the reasonable creature is united to God, the fountain of all good. ~ Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits, 39.
Dear Lord,
Your goodness crafts and molds every day, even this one that you have awoken me into preceded by restless sleep. By your grace, I do not doubt your goodness in this design, but I do see temptations in the day ahead. Keep my feet on the path of the fear of the Lord that I might not slander your goodness in how you have loved us today. I am disposed to find my pleasure in complaining and grumbling about exhaustion’s headache and sickness’s creaks. Lift my eyes to find Jesus more compelling, and rest in his loving providence for my life. Posture my heart to find my happiness in you, and not the venting of foolish complaints. In such a posture, grow me in holiness, for happiness in you is the source of true, lasting, sweet holiness. In such a posture, like an oak lifting branches to the sun, fill me with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ alone.
I am weary Lord, but you are good. Be my happiness today.
In Christ I come,
In Christ I live,
In Christ I hope.
Amen.
His Providence Controlled by Promises
07 months ago
In the opening pages of John Flavel’s The Mystery of Providence, he makes a comment that helps me see how the Bible affects me today.
Rom 8:28, “and we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” For it is certain, no ship at sea keeps more exactly by the compass which directs its course, than providence doth by that promise, which is its Cynosura and Pole-star.
The promises of God are woven into my life with the precision of the sovereign, loving, providential hand of my Father in Heaven. They aren’t scattered, waiting for me to gamble their power. God aims his promises, like a ship kept on course with a compass, to effectually work their power in my life. God’s aiming and guiding of his promises from Scripture into me is his providence. What else would he do for his beloved in Christ Jesus?
Not only is providence the means of God’s promises meeting me, but providence is controlled by the promises of God. The Lord is good and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. This means that my son waking up at 12am and staying awake for 3 hours is controlled in God’s providential hand by his promises to be good and gracious. That is, my dear soul, that you aren’t being flicked by the Lord, but loved. Loved so much that God’s providence demands you meet God’s promises in your most desperate moments.
A Prayer
I am humbled, O Lord, that you care for the intimate details of my life. You are good and gracious, and teach me your character and promises by your orchestration of my life. You guide my life to know your promises as true and real, and to follow the lines of your promises as they draw your face, that I may know you. O Father, teach me to see your providential care to know your promises more intimately today, that I may be prepared to meet you face to face when, by your plan, death comes to me, and that I might be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, your best and brightest promise.
Amen.
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Photo source.
Carl F.H. Henry on the bankruptcy of Fundamentalism
19 months ago
The real bankruptcy of fundamentalism has resulted not so much from a reactionary spirit – lamentable as this was – as from a harsh temperament, a spirit of lovelessness and strife contributed by much of its leadership in the recent past. One of the ironies of contemporary church history is that the more fundamentalists stress separation from apostasy as a theme in their churches, the more a spirit of lovelessness seems to prevail. The theological conflict with liberalism deteriorated into an attack upon organizations and personalities. This condemnation, in turn, grew to include conservative churchmen and churches not ready to align with separatist movements. It widens still further, to abusive evangelicals unhappy with the spirit of independency in such groups as the American Council of Churches and the International Council of Christian Churches. Then came internal debate and division among separatist fundamentalism within the American Council. More recently, the evangelistic ministry of Billy Graham and [the] efforts of other evangelical leaders, whose disapproval of liberalism and advocacy of conservative Christianity are beyond dispute, have become the target of bitter volubility. This character of fundamentalism as a temperament and not primarily fundamentalism as a theology, has brought the movement into contemporary discredit… Historically, fundamentalism was a theological position; only gradually did the movement come to signify a mood and disposition as well. In its early [years] leadership reflected ballast, and less of bombast and battle… If modernism stands discredited as a perversion of the scriptural theology, certainly fundamentalism in this contemporary expression stands discredited as a perversion of the Biblical spirit.
~ Carl F. H. Henry, “Dare We Renew the Controversy?” Christianity Today, (June 24, 1957), p. 26.
Jesus, Hell, and the Love of God
09 months ago
Hell is a rather popular topic of controversy today. In the little that I’ve read in the discussion, most focus on human value and the victory of the love of God, with little seriousness about the sufferings of Christ. On this point in particular, my (dead) friend John Flavel has helped me deeply. C.S. Lewis commented that reading people outside of our own times and controversies helps bring the issues at stake into perspective through the wisdom of those who have gone (and thought) before us.
The sermon I’m quoting from is from The Fountain of Life. In this chapter Flavel is preaching on John 19:28
“After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, said–I thirst!“
Of the many things he has to say on this passage (which you can read online for free here), these are the sections that I found most helpful in bring the matter of Hell and the sufferings of Christ into clearer focus.
If our mercies must be pure mercies, and our glory in heaven pure and unmixed glory, then the wrath which lie suffered must be pure and unmixed wrath. (I: 423)
None of the damned had ever so large a capacity to take in a full sense of the wrath of God as Christ had. The larger any one’s capacity is to understand and weigh his troubles fully, the more grievous and heavy is his burden. If a man cast vessels of greater and lesser quantity into the sea, though all will be full, yet the greater the vessel is, the more water it contains. Now Christ had a capacity beyond all mere creatures to take in the wrath of his Father; and what deep and large apprehensions he had of it may be judged by his bloody sweat in the garden, which was the effect of his mere apprehensions of the wrath of God. Christ was a large vessel indeed; as he is capable of more glory, so of more sense and misery than any other person in the world. (I: 423-424)
The sufferings of Christ for sin give us the true account, and fullest representation of its evil. “The law (says one) is a bright glass, wherein we may see the evil of sin; but there is the red glass of the sufferings of Christ, and in that we may see more of the evil of sin, than if God should let us down to hell, and there we should see all the tortures and torments of the damned. If we should see them how they lie sweltering under God’s wrath there, it were not so much as the beholding of sin through the red glass of the sufferings of Christ.”
If we should see and hear all this, it is not so much as what we may see in this text, where the Son of God, under his sufferings for it, cries out, I thirst. For, as I showed you before, Christ’s sufferings, in divers respects, were beyond theirs. O then, let not your vain heart slight sin, as if it were but a small thing! If ever God show you the face of sin in this glass, you will say, there is not such another horrid representation to be made to a man in all the world. Fools make a mock at sin, but wise men tremble at it. (I: 425-426)
A penal thirst, is God’s just denying of all refreshments or relief to sinners in their extremities, and that as a due punishment for their sin. This believers shall never feel, because when Christ thirsted upon the cross, he made full satisfaction to God in their room. These sufferings of Christ, as they were ordained for them, so the benefits of them are truly imputed to them. And for the natural thirst, that shall be satisfied: for in heaven we shall live without these necessities and dependencies upon the creature; we shall be equal with the angels in the way and manner of living and subsisting…Luke 20:6. And for the gracious thirsting of their souls for God, it shall be fully satisfied. So it is promised, Mat. 5:6. “Blessed are they which hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled:” They shall then depend no more upon the stream, but drink from the overflowing fountain itself, Psalm. 36:8 “They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of your house, and you shall make them drink of the river of your pleasures: for with you is the fountain of life, and in Your light shall we see light:” There they shall drink and praise, and praise and drink for evermore; all their thirsty desires shall be filled with complete satisfaction. O how desirable a state is heaven upon this account! and how should we be restless until we come there; as the thirsty traveler is until he meet that cool, refreshing spring he wants and seeks for. This present state is a state of thirsting, that to come of refreshment and satisfaction. Some drops indeed come from the fountain by faith, hut they quench not the believer’s thirst; rather like water sprinkled on the fire, they make it burn the more: but there the thirsty soul has enough.
O bless God, that Jesus Christ thirsted under the heat of his wrath once, that you might not be scorched with it forever. If he had not cried, I thirst, you must have cried out of thirst eternally, and never be satisfied. (I: 428-429)
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Image from Tony Reinke’s Flickr feed.
Isaac Ambrose – Looking Unto Jesus
09 months ago
In this knowledge of Christ, there is an excellency above all other knowledge in the world; there is nothing more pleasing and comfortable, more animating and enlivening, more ravishing and soul contenting;
only Christ is the sun and centre of all divine revealed truths, we can preach nothing else as the object of our faith, as the necessary element of your soul’s salvation, which doth not some way or other, either meet in Christ, or refer to Christ;
only Christ is the whole of man’s happiness,
the Sun to enlighten him,
the Physician to heal him,
the Wall of fire to defend him,
the Friend to comfort him,
the Pearl to enrich him,
the Ark to support him,
the Rock to sustain him under the heaviest pressures.
Only Christ is that ladder between earth and heaven, the Mediator between God and man, a mystery, which the angels of heaven desire to pry, and peep, and look into.”
Heaven’s inhabitants will be ever digging into this gold mine, ever rolling this soul-delighting and precious stone, ever beholding, viewing, inquiring, and searching into the excellency of this same Christ.
If I had but one word more to speak to the world, it should be this; Oh! let all our spirits be taken up with Christ, let us not busy ourselves too much with toys, or trifles, with ordinary and low things, but look to Jesus.
Surely Christ is enough to fill all our thoughts, desires, hopes, loves, joys, or whatever is within us, or without us; Christ alone comprehends all the circumference of our happiness; Christ is the pearl hid in the large field of God’s word;
Christ is the scope of all the scripture:
all things and persons in the old world were types of him;
all the prophets foretold him,
all God’s love runs through him,
all the gifts and graces of the Spirit flow from him,
the whole eye of God is upon him,
and all his designs both in heaven and earth meet in him.
Isaac Ambrose, Looking Unto Jesus
HT: Picture
