update and prayer requests: 6/29/2011

As I’ve written previously (see here and here), I’ve landed in Psalm 84 (my references here are to the NKJV, I know the phrasing in other versions is a bit different) and have been trying to prepare some lessons from that for a women’s group at our church, but it’s been going a bit slowly. For one reason, almost every day, I keep finding more that applies to the Psalm since it deals with such large themes in the Christian life. I’m really only through the first four verses (more or less), and though the pace has been a bit frustrating at times, I am absolutely loving digging into the Psalm!

I keep saying I could pretty much answer anyone’s concerns about the Christian life from this Psalm. Well, perhaps not quite, but these twelve verses of Scripture do cover a pretty wide range of territory and touch on some really meaty themes.

Off my head, here’s a little summary…

First off, an overview of the whole Psalm – the Christian life as pilgrimage. This is key. As soon as we miss this, we may as well say we’ve not really begun and we’re going to fall. We’ve got to keep our heart on pilgrimage (v. 5) and our eyes fixed on Jesus and on things above, like the men and women of faith in Hebrews 11. We’re not going to finish with the race with joy if we’re not looking at the big picture and looking to the final destination. And so, Lesson 1: The Christian Life as a Pilgrimage.

And then in verse 1 we read the Psalmist proclaiming the LOVELINESS of God’s tabernacles and then moves into the courts of the LORD and finally the psalmist Himself says his heart and flesh are crying out for the living God. In other words, the psalmist has come to see God Himself as altogether lovely. Lesson 2: The LOVELINESS of Christ. Do we see God in the ways the Psalmist does? Do we have that overriding passion to be with Him? Do we know a sense of God’s loveliness, like the Shulamite woman in the Song of Solomon, or like Jonathan Edwards described: we can know the concept that honey is sweet, but have we TASTED it – to know it IS sweet indeed?!

Then we have the Psalmist referring to God at the end of verse 2 as the LIVING GOD. How many years of being a Christian did I really have any sense of “the LIFE of God in the soul of man” (using Henry Scougal’s words there, his book with the same title)? A whole host of things on what it means our God is a living God, e.g. – our relationship to Him, our communion with Him, His desire to communicate to us, His life in us to help us to live sanctified lives, to be holy as He is holy, etc. That’s Lesson 3: The LIVING God.

As you know, I love books and one set of books I’ve stumbled onto (thank you, google books) is Joseph Addison Alexander‘s Psalms Translated and Explained (Vol. 1 (Ps 1-50), Vol. 2 (Ps 51-99), Vol. 3 (Ps 101-150) This is not really a commentary but an amplification of the Hebrew, and I’ve loved reading through Alexander on just a few of the Psalms. I don’t know about you, but when I read there are always a few choice words, phrases or sentences that keep at you, things that just won’t leave you alone and you carry with you. For me, there are Alexander’s words about the living God (re: Psalm 84:2 – “My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.”): “The Living God, really existing, and the giver of life to others.”Really existing! Do we live our lives like He’s really existing? How do our churches show He’s really existing? Do we understand He alone is the giver of life to others? What are we doing with the life He’s given us? And so on.

Then verses 3 and 4 of Psalm 84 teach us of the full assurance of our salvation in Jesus Christ and the ongoing rest available to us as Christians, something I keep seeing people missing out on. We see there the wonderful picture of the sparrow finding a home and the swallow a nest. O, by grace through faith, if we are Christ’s, we are already safe in the nest, we have found that home in the bosom of the Beloved! This is the lesson I’ve been working on lately: our peace with God – our justification, no fear in judgment, no condemnation in Christ, our standing as accepted in the Beloved, and then our ongoing peace in Christ – assurance of our sanctification and our trust in His sovereignty at all times and in all circumstances ~ Philippians 4, that nothing can separate us from His love (end of Romans 8), the joy and peace the God of hope wants us to have in believing. Also, that picture of the swallow laying her young in the nest reflects the assurance that we can cast our cares on God, for He cares for us, and so all our requests, all our “young,” we can trust Him with absolutely each and every one of them. As we find that Sabbath Rest in Jesus Christ, and as we rest in that rest, in His yoke, how can we not be blessed and praising our God (v. 4)! God doesn’t want His children to be miserable, He wants us to be blessed with such assurance, and then as we are blessed we will praise Him! Our blessing is for His blessing and the blessing of others. So, that would be a couple lessons on the God of REST and PEACE.

I struggled with assurance years after I was saved, as I came to see my total depravity and was plagued by my sins, guilt and failures. No, I didn’t think I would lose my salvation, but I had no real and true sense of Christ’s peace or rest as I kept churning around my sins and failures over and over and over again. That’s one reason I’ve written so much about assurance & fighting for joy on my other site. The other reason, as I already alluded to, is that I keep finding people who are struggling with having a settled assurance of God’s love, and, as a result, they lack any sense of His peace and rest. So the topic continues to hit home with me over and over again.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten in my preparations, though I’ve been dipping ahead into the following verses about God as our strength, and going from strength to strength, verses I’ve loved for a while now.

As far as the study and the preparations are concerned, I’d appreciate your prayers for focus, since I’ve usually got a lot of thoughts in my head constantly about a lot of things! Our elders have been absolutely lovely about it, and our pastor so encouraging; I spoke with him a little over a week ago. I have three outlines pretty done and am almost finished with the fourth. And then we’ll see how it all unfolds. Please pray for God to put it into the heart of the women whom He is calling to delve into the living reality of Christ to come to the study. And, as always happens, when you do preparation like this, you are more blessed than you can imagine you would be, which is the case with me, in spite of the frustrations, the slow pace and so forth. I feel it a great blessing and privilege to know God and then to be able to study His Word and be allowed to speak of Him and write of Him is icing on the cake, so to speak!

* * *

In addition to the Bible, I always have a small passel of books I’m dipping into. (Small passel – oxymoron, right? ;))

I’ve read through Daniel Webber’s “William Carey and the Missionary Journey” (Banner of Truth Trust) a couple times. (I posted it on it recently on my other site here.) It’s a short book (116 pages), so that’s not saying very much that I read it through a couple times.

As I mentioned those words of Alexander that have remained with me, there were some things that Webber wrote about Carey that also continue to stick with me in my heart. Carey had a great God-given passion for missions, which was pretty much non-existent in the evangelical churches of the day, due to hyper-Calvinism.

Here’s the account Webber gives of a minister’s meeting in Northampton (England) in 1786 (p. 15);

Carey suggested the following motion:

Whether the command given to the apostles to teach all nations was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent.

The reply from the older man came like a thunderbolt:

Young man, sit down: when God pleases to convert the heathen, he will do it without your aid or mine.

At least, this is how the matter was later reported by Mr Morris, minister of Clipstone, who was present at the meeting. This incident serves to provide some ideas of the immense difficulties facing Carey even within his own constituency. The hyper-Calvinism of the day was more than capable of turning the sovereignty of God into a pretext for doing nothing.

And then Webber continues to describe Carey, the “passionate advocate of world mission”:

Discouraged but not dissuaded, Carey embarked upon the task of educating all with whom he came into contact about the great need for missions. He preached about it to his little flock and echoes of the same concern were to be found in his public prayers. At several ministers’ meetings between 1787 and 1790 this was his chief topic of conversation. Some of the older men in particular thought his was a wild and impracticable scheme, but he continued undaunted.

And later (p. 45) Webber adds that

At times it must have seemed to him [Carey] that he was the only one interested in the evangelism of the lost nations of the world. Yet the indifference of others around him did not stop Carey from seeking to rouse the apathetic, nor hinder him from being prepared to go himself.

The portions I continue to come back to are “discouraged but not dissuaded,”“preached about it to his little flock,”“the indifference of others around him did not stop Carey from seeking to rouse the apathetic,” and “a wild and impracticable scheme, but he continued undaunted.”

I run into discouragement regularly, it’s one of my worst enemies – and I’ll add it’s mostly discouragement from my own flesh, and yet I’m not dissuaded or daunted in the end. I keep coming back. I know that’s by the grace of God alone. I would have quit long ago, but by God’s mercies to me. As Lloyd-Jones once said, “I would have been dead long ago if I had depended upon men for encouragement.” That’s exactly it! Though other people can be an encouragement to us at times, our ultimate sustenance comes from God alone. We’ve got to go back to The Vine.

I’m no pastor, and I don’t preach in that sense, but I’m part of a little flock of people God has brought together who have a passion to see the Church revived and return to reclaim her birthright as children of God. Therefore, whomever God gives ears to hear or or eyes to read, Lord willing and by His strengthening, I’ll keep speaking and writing. The concept that God might bring something good out of this Nazareth, this blogging community is certainly a wild and impracticable scheme, wouldn’t you say? But isn’t that just how God operates – delighting to use the foolish, weak and base things of the world time and time again to spark revival in the Church, all so He alone might receive all the praise, honor and glory! Hallelujah! He reigns. Our God is in the heavens. He does all He pleases!

I’m no William Carey by any means, and at this point I have no calling to world missions directly, but rather in some sense to rouse the apathetic in the lukewarm Church to the reality of that lovely and living God I described above, to help others begin to see the all-surpassing excellencies of Christ. On my other blog and in my conversations with people, I keep speaking about the abundant life Christ wants us to have. I do this because when you begin to get a taste of the loveliness and life of God, just a drop of that Living Water or a morsel of the True Bread, you won’t remain the same, and you can’t remain apathetic about God’s glory and God’s Gospel and the condition of God’s Church and world missions. I’ve come to see this living reality of Jesus Christ as true wellspring of evangelism. A revived Church will want to give out God’s Word. They won’t have to be manipulated by men to go out or have to be put on a guilt trip to evangelize, the Spirit will do His work in God’s people and give them the overwhelming desire to make Christ known as they come to know Him as their all-satisfying portion and great reward. This has been part of my journey over the past few years. I was seeking assurance of forgiveness because I was absolutely miserable and ineffective and paralyzed in so many ways. Little did I know where that journey would lead! Now I am seeking revival in the Church. I had no real interest in it, though I knew there was something not right about the Church, but didn’t have the right way to understand it, so I started dabbling in emergent/missional theology, but then, thank God, I landed straight into Reformed doctrine, primarily through Lloyd-Jones’ commentary on First John “Life in Christ.” I had no real interest in evangelism or world mission, and now I’m finally beginning to. Yes, I confess just beginning. But, as Jesus said in John 7, if we are thirsty and we come to Him and drink of Him, the streams will flow. As you begin to know, to experientially know, that loveliness and life of God, you can’t help but want others to know of it – of Him – the God who is altogether lovely, the living God! Come and see! Taste and see the Lord is good! The Spirit and the bride say, “Come, all who are thirsty!”

For those of you who don’t know, besides my naphtali_deer site, I have a site devoted to revival prayer, tent_of_meeting. If you are burdened over the condition of the Church today, I invite you to visit there. I don’t post there as much as I used to, but I still do on occasion. God’s means of reviving the Church have always been through prayer and the ministry of the Word. (You can read more about my passion, vision and holy ambition here, here, here and here.)

Thank you for reading and for your friendship and prayers. My desire is that God might use my words to encourage those of you who are Christians and spur you on to serve in the Body of Christ, and particularly in your local congregation, or in missions, wherever God may be leading you. If there’s any way I can assist you, please comment below and/or message me.

Yours in Christ’s love, for His glory in the Church,
Karen

Habakkuk 2:14.