Thank a veteran today!

Happy Veteran Days!  Thanks to all who  have served our country in the armed forces!  Thanks for standing for and protecting our freedom! We salute you! Let freedom keep on ringing! Be sure to thank a veteran today!

Diagnostic questions regarding contentment

Are you content?

Where do you struggle with discontentment?

Why are you discontent?

Are you content with the handicaps, the disabilities or other physical characteristics the Lord has given you?

Are you content with your financial position in life right now? If God takes certain things away from you or if He doesn’t give you what you want soon, will you still worship Him?

Are you content with the ministries and the ministry giftedness that God has endowed you with?

Are you content with the vocation He is asking you to fulfill?

Are you content with whatever God does in the future?  Or are you stressed out about what may happen in our country right now?  The economy? Your retirement plans?  What will happen when your kids grow up.

For more on contentment, click here.

 

Battling heresy: our duty

“It is clear from those letters to the churches in Revelation that battling heresy is a duty Christ expects every Christian to be devoted to Whether we like it or not, our very existence in this world involves spiritual warfare—it is not a party or a picnic. If Christ Himself devoted so much of His time and energy during His earthly ministry to the task of confronting and refuting false teachers, surely that much be high on our agenda as well. His style of ministry ought to be the model for ours, and His zeal against false religion ought to fill our hearts and minds as well.”

–John MacArthur,  The Jesus You Can’t Ignore, p. 208.  (I highly recommend this book)

What is contentment?

But what does it mean to be content?  Let me begin by telling you what it doesn’t mean. Contentment doesn’t mean that if you don’t have a job, you don’t seek a job. To be content does not meant that if you have a job that you don’t seek a more challenging or that you don’t seek to better yourself in your job.

To be content does not mean that you are not seeking to better your condition in this world, in your family, at your school or in your church.  Being content does not mean that if you have a physical problem you don’t go to the doctor.  It doesn’t mean that if you are lacking some character trait that you simply say, “I am content!”

Don’t confuse contentment with laziness or complacency, with a lack of fulfilling your responsibilities or a lack of ambition.

So what is contentment.  Contentment means, “I seek to fulfill all my responsibilities biblically and I then leave the results to God!” Contentment is being able to say, “I have enough!  God is enough!  I am totally satisfied!”

Contentment is going to work and working the hardest that you possibly can and trusting God to provide your needs as you are faithful.  Contentment is studying as hard as you can for that test at school and doing the best possible job you can and being satisfied with the grade.  Contentment is developing the best Christian character you can and looking for the best spouse you possibly can and being satisfied if God leads you into marriage or doesn’t. Contentment is taking care of your physical body and exercising and eating properly and getting enough rest and being satisfied with whatever diseases or disabilities God gives you!  Contentment is doing your very best in practice on your musical instrument or on the basketball court and then being satisfied with whatever chair you get in the band or whether you start on the team.

So in a nutshell, Contentment is doing what God wants you to do and then saying, “I am totally satisfied with whatever God gives me!  God is enough!  I don’t need anything more!  I don’t want anything more!” Again as Jeremiah Burroughs has said, “Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition”

Contentment is a beautiful, comforting, wonderful, encouraging, happy, rich, and yet uncommon word.  Rarely do you hear someone say, “I am totally content.  I don’t need anything more!  I don’t want anything more.  I am totally happy with what God has given to me!”

Contentment is saying, “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.  Contentment is saying, “How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.”  Contentment says, “Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands. My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips.”  Contentment announces, “He satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.”.(Psalm 23:1; 36:7,8; 63:3-5; 107:9).

The Greek word here for contentment is “autarkeia” which literally means “self-sufficient.” It was employed by the Stoics who sought to teach that man should live totally dependent on himself—no one else.  But obviously in the context here, Paul is not saying that he is totally “self-sufficient” but rather he is totally “God-sufficient.”  His joy in life was not dependent on external criteria.  He teaches us that our joy should not rise or ebb based on our circumstances, our position in life, our surroundings, our status, our job, our health, our family situation or anything else or anyone else.  Our joy is Christ—who He is and what He has done.  Nothing else should sway our joy.

Did you know? Think about it.

Suffering and God’s sovereignty

John Knight, a father of multi-disabled children,  blogs about suffering and God’s sovereignty. He shares a guest post which he calls one of the best statements he has ever read on the subject.  Here is an excerpt:

Both pain and pleasure are meant to point us to the same reality; namely, that Jesus Christ is infinitely beautiful and so much more than enough for our every need. Living for Him, even suffering for Him, is worth every moment of affliction! Why? Because Jesus shows you such beauty in pain, because He is there and He is carrying us through.

Read the rest here.

(HT: JT)

Steven Curtis Chapman, suffering and the Psalms

Steven Curtis Chapman talks about what God has taught him and his wife over the last year and a half since they lost their 5-year-old adopted daughter in a tragic accident.  He comments especially how the Psalms have sustained them.

Yeah, I was hiding out in the valley of the shadow of death, just crying out to God. Man, I’ve never been so thankful for the Psalms. I’m not sure I really even got the Psalms until I walked through this. Obviously the Psalms were a great comfort before walking through the valley, but all of a sudden, I’m just so thankful for God’s honesty to us, to allow us to look into the heart of a schizophrenic worshiper like David, because that’s what I’ve found myself to be. To go in the same breath, How long, O Lord. Where are you, God? Are you doing anything about this? Do you even hear me? to But I’ll trust you. Your love is better than life. I worship you. I praise you. How can you do that? But I have, and my family has.

I almost get this image of David beating on his chest when he’s saying, “Why are you so downcast within me?” He’s thinking, Heart, come on. Get with it. You know what’s true. Hope in God. It’s like that for me, where my heart and mind are going into this dark abyss. But then I say, Wait a minute. Come back. Come back to your senses. For me, that’s where these songs came from.

In response to another question he answers:

I’ll refer again to the Psalms, specifically those where David is crying out, God, how long before you take away this pain, before you right these wrongs? And then almost in mid-despair, you get this sense of David literally making the choice, again, in saying to his own soul, Why are you so downcast within me? Remember this. Hope in God. Trust in God. This is your anchor. I’ve used that analogy, too, so many times—having this hope as an anchor.

We’ve come to realize dropping that anchor has been, and will continue to be, a daily, sometimes an hourly, process. It’s not a one time thing: I’ve dropped that anchor. It’s, man, wait a minute, I’m getting blown away here by the hurricane of grief and questions and doubt. What am I going to do? Am I just going to drift out to sea? Or am I going to drop the anchor again?

We have absolutely questioned God and had our doubts and said, “Is this whole thing true? Is this real?” I sat on our tour bus last summer and called Scotty Smith, my pastor, after spending a very difficult night of wrestling with God. We were getting ready to go do an interview with People magazine or Larry King or somebody, and I was just in tears, calling my pastor and saying, “Is it really true? Is it really true? Can God be trusted?”. . . . I needed to hear my pastor speak truth again to me. I needed to hear somebody say again, here’s what’s true.

That has been an important process, the whole thing of taking every thought captive and saying, God, this is what I choose to believe. Because I’ve found myself, especially in the first few days and weeks after Maria went to heaven—and there’s still moments of this—that I could almost feel myself being sucked into this black hole of doubt and despair. Of saying, “God, if I let myself keep going in this direction, there seems to be no bottom, no end to this, and I’ll never be able to escape from it.”

At the hospital at Vanderbilt, literally within an hour of knowing that my little girl was in heaven with Jesus, I found myself having to make a choice, when I would start to feel myself and everything in me being sucked into this place, this abyss. I would begin to say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord. You give. You take away. But, God, I trust you. I trust you. You are faithful. You are good. I trust you. I trust you.” And as I would say that, literally just choose to make that declaration in the midst of this, I would almost physically feel myself being pulled back from that place. And I’d start to breathe again.

But it wouldn’t be long before I would go, “But, God, what? How could this happen? How are we ever going to survive?” And it’s like here I go back into that black, dark place.

Full interview is here.

Elusive contentment.

“Contentment is a highly prized, but elusive virtue. Though it comes only from being rightly related to God and trusting His sovereign, loving, purposeful providence, people nevertheless seek it where it cannot be found—in money, possessions, power, prestige, relationships, jobs, or freedom from difficulties. But by that definition, contentment is unattainable, for it is impossible in this fallen world to be completely free from problems. In sharp contrast to the world’s understanding of contentment is this simple definition of spiritual contentment penned by the Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs: “Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition” (The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, p. 19).”

–John MacArthur, Commentary on Philippians

More here

Confronting error like Jesus did? (pt. 2)

Some readers might question whether Christ is really the example we should follow in confronting error. After all, He was God incarnate, with all the wisdom of divine omniscience available to Him. He could see into other people’s hearts and read their thoughts. He knew truth perfectly without any of the limitations we suffer from as fallen creatures. We’re naturally prone to error; He was immune from error of any kind.

And didn’t Jesus Himself say we should not try to separate wheat from tares? “Lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. [But] let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:29-30). He also said, “Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned” (Luke 6:37). After all, “The Father…has committed all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22). Who are we to step into that role and usurp authority that is explicitly given to Christ?

That is exactly right when it come to judging the secrets of men’s hearts—their motives, their private thoughts, or their hidden intentions. We cannot see those things, so we cannot judge them adequately. We’re not even supposed to try. “He who judges me is the Lord. Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the hearts” (1 Corinthians4:4-5). Who are you to judge another’s servant? To his own master he stand or falls” (Romans 14:4). “God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ” (Romans 2:16)

That is the whole point of the parable of the tares: the tares look like wheat in every superficial way. Until they bear fruit and it ripens it is virtually impossible to tell wheat from tares. The tares therefore represent people who look and act like Christians—false professors. They blend into the fellowship of the church, give a fine-sounding testimony about their faith in Christ, and otherwise seem exactly like authentic believers. But they are not authentic. Their faith is a sham. They are unregenerate hangers-on. We know there are tares in almost every fellowship of believers, because Jesus gave that parable as an illustration of what His kingdom would be like in the church age, and because from time to time one of the tares will abandon the faith completely, embrace some damnable heresy, or sell out to some sin which he or she is unwilling to abandon or repent from. In such cases, we are supposed to confront the individual, call them to repentance, and put them out of the church if they steadfastly refuse to repent (Matthew 18:15-18).

–John MacArthur, The Jesus You Can’t Ignore, pp.  202-204  I highly recommend this book!

Former planned parenthood director tells why she changed to pro-life