Grimshaw's remarkable conversion

Lying on a table in his friend’s room was a book which attracted his attention and finding it was a theological work, he picked it up with quickened interest and crossed the room with it. He stood facing a small shelf of pewter dishes and there examined the book, which he discovered to be written by the Puritan divine, John Owen. ‘Instantly’, a friend recalled in after years, ‘an uncommon heat flushed in his face.’ Puzzled, he turned towards the fire, wondering if the sudden wave of heat had come from a reflection of the flames radiated from the pewter dishes.



Turning again to the volume he now held, he opened it ant the title page and read, The Doctrine of Justification by Faith. As he pondered on the title another flash of heat suddenly passed over him. Astonished by a second occurrence of this phenomenon, he reasoned that this must be a divine indication that the volume would be of crucial relevance to his need and so requested a loan of the book. We can well imagine that he lost little time in finding opportunity to read a book so strangely brought to his attention.

(Faith Cook, William Grimshaw of Haworth, pp 26-27)

This event led shortly and directly to Grimshaw’s conversion, and the remarkable ministry he was to exercise in Haworth. So, what does a crusty old cessationist make of it?

Honestly – nothing at all. It gives me not a single thought that I ought to revise my convictions. Nor do my convictions make me doubt the history. Why should they? What happened, happened.

Proper cessationism – that is, mine (!) does not hold that God never does anything remarkable. It does not even argue that God cannot work miracles today. I simply believe that the ‘sign gifts’ were given for an age, and for a purpose, that has now been superseded.

A cessationist is not a deist – though some of us sometimes, I fear, sound like one. We do believe in God’s direct intervention. We do believe in spiritual experience. We do believe God answers prayer – providentially, remarkably, miraculously at times.

I will admit to this, though: sometimes we are so good at seeing the speck in the eyes of some of our wiser charismatic friends that we do not see the beam in our own.

S H A M E

Conrad Mbewe has a post on his blog today about a fellow pastor who committed suicide after a moral failure.  It is a stark, warm and salutary piece.  The pastor felt his shame so powerfully that he killed himself.

Moral failure.  The blog makes clear enough what that moral failure was.  In the UK, it's an epidemic.  I've grown oh-so-tired  - and, I confess, increasingly angry  -  over one story after another.  And what bothers me most is the inadequate sense of shame.

No, emphatically not; I'm not suggesting that pastors guilty of moral failure should commit suicide.  They need to trust in the mercy of Christ.  They need to work hard to rebuild their marriage (but not their ministries).  They need to do all they can to minimise the disgrace to Christ.

But shame would be a part of that.  An awful lot less of 'well, my marriage had been a sham for years.'  So what?  If it's true, it increases your disgrace: you should have dealt with it earlier.  With Christ and goodwill, miracles are possible.  And true or not, there is no situation to which adultery is the right, proper, godly, moral response.  No situation.  Not a difficult wife, or a cold bed, or rebellious children, or stressful ministries, or a combination of them all.

There should be less, too, of 'Well, these things happen.'  No, they don't.  Measles happen.  Road Traffic Accidents happen.  Storms and hurricanes happen.  Adultery is committed.  You can't catch it by being in the same room as somebody who is affected.  It doesn't come zooming round a stationary car when your visibility is impaired.  It doesn't blow in out of a clear blue sky.  Adultery is planned; it is committed; it is followed up. 

I don't know what the cause of this epidemic is.  I don't know what the solution is, or even if there is a solution.  But I do know that Christians, and pastors most of all, need to learn to take responsibility for the way they live, and stop seeing themselves and their behaviour as victims.

Furthermore...

One of these is good looking, intelligent and by all accounts a capable speaker.  The other one is me.

Or:

One of these has a sponge for a head; the other is Dr Bunsen Honeydew.

Separated at birth?

The mischievous Fr Z has posted these two pics on his blog.

One of them is a muppet. The other appears to be some sort of scary, orange-haired toy.

Has Peter Masters lost it?

My regular reader will know that I have, once or twice, blogged about Peter Masters.  This week, I was teaching my bi-annual session on 'Evangelistic Preaching' at the FIEC's PfS Course.  It's immensely popular - with me, anyway.


Each time, I recommend the evangelistic preaching of Peter Masters as a good example of how it should be - along with some resources from the Tab.  This year, I thought I'd better have a listen to a recent example.  After all, he is no longer a young man: has he lost it?


So, I went to the Tabernacle Website, found the video of last Sunday evening's sermon (November 6th, on Galatians 2:20) and settled down to listen.


Has he lost it? Er, no. To be honest.  He does look a little frailer than I remember - and he's far too much hair to be decent in a man that age... but his preaching was excellent.  Really very, very good - especially the introduction.  No hesitation in recommending the PfS students to go and have a listen.


I gave a different lecture on evangelistic preaching recently at WEST, to a very fine, friendly bunch of students.  Word came back to me that few - if any - agreed with me that it ought to be a regular, weekly, feature of a pastor's ministry.  It bothers me, that: what hope for the nation if good men stop preaching evangelistically?

A fine Brahms

Last night the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra  performed two works by Brahms - the Hungarian Dance number one, and the beautiful violin concerto; Andrew and I were there to hear them both.  The BSO seemed to have quite a few different players and, to be honest, I didn't think they were as good as usual.  But the soloist, Viviane Hagner, was excellent.  I confess I'd never heard of Miss Hagner; she's German-born, 34 years old, very slightly built, and played beautifully.  She'd stood in at short notice for the advertised soloist, Julian Rachlin, who is unwell.

How's that work, then?  A string of musicians waiting for the last-minute call?  At any rate, you would never have guessed that Hagner was a substitute; a great evening.

What the Bible says about Presbyterianism - part 1

What the Bible says about infant baptism - part 1

Blackberry problems?

When stem cell use is ethical

Dr Peter Saunders quotes here from a New Scientist article - the whole article is here - about the ethical use of stem cells  - that is, use that doesn't require killing anybody, born or unborn.

DID you know that you have accessible stem cells up your nose? Or that human fetuses shed stem cells into the fluid around them? Both of these seemingly random facts could spawn novel, personalised stem-cell treatments that, if not simple per se, are simpler than what has gone before.





What marks these treatments out is that they are eminently practical and ethically unquestionable. This is in stark contrast to much previous work, which has focused on human embryonic stem cells, or hESCs.






From the outset, the use of hESCs has been fraught with controversy. Only last week, after years of trying, and the notorious fraud involving Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang, hESCs were finally created through a variant of the cloning technique that gave us Dolly the sheep. This fused skin and egg cells, leaving the nucleus of the latter intact. Unfortunately, human eggs are still required, embryos still perish in the process and in this case the embryos and resulting hESCs had three sets of chromosomes instead of two, ruling out medical uses.






A promising alternative to hESCs emerged in 2006 when researchers produced so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) from ordinary tissue such as skin. But to convert adult cells into embryonic-like cells means genetic reprogramming, for example with a virus, and the reprogrammed cells do not yet match embryonic stem cells.






Now there are different avenues of research that are simpler in many ways. In ‘Diabetic rats cured with their own stem cells’, we report how researchers cured diabetic rats by turning brain stem cells extracted through the nose into insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. They did this without any genetic trickery.






And in ‘Baby repair kit found inside the womb’, we report how congenital defects such as holes in the diaphragm could be patched up using a baby's own stem cells extracted from the surrounding amniotic fluid.

What's worrying is that he concludes by saying 'You won't read about this in any British newspaper'.  Can any of you prove him wrong?

Cranmer on Gaddaffi

Archibishop Cranmer - who knows a thing or two about the death penalty - reflects on the death of Gaddaffi.  Here's a flavour:

To those who object to Gaddafi's execution or the manner of it, His Grace urges you to save us your sanctimony. There are those who say there should be no rejoicing in the death of any man. Well, put yourselves in the shoes of those who have lived under the brutal dictatorships of the modern era - Mao, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, Saddam - and ask by what moral standard you judge the oppressed and persecuted? As you read your newspapers over coffee and lounge in the comfort of your cosy armchairs, reflect on the undeniable fact that some people are just evil. And when the sum total of the suffering they inflict reaches beyond endurance, those who have suffered will feel wholly justified in taking up the sword. Of course, they might themselves then die by the sword, but that is their choice. When the state ceases to bear the sword and justice is no longer seen to be done, judgement will fall somehow from the anarchic baseness of human nature.
What an awful shock death must be for the Muslim.  But in fairness to Muslim friends, I'm not at all sure many of them would want to count Gaddaffi as a faithful one...

Modestly announcing... P R I C E C R A S H ! ! !

Today I received the first copies of my new evangelistic booklet 'Gift', published by Day One.  The blurb says

Few things equal the excitement of a child receiving gifts.  What do those brightly-coloured parcels contain?  Are the presents something we really want, or merely things we will feel the need to be polite about?  Even in adulthood, the excitement persists—the excitement of not knowing and of discovery.

Such gifts, though, often end in disappointment.  They prove to be without any practical use, or to be fragile and unable to last.  Or, often, just to be something we never really wanted at all. 

The greatest gift ever given was given by God, the gift of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Perfectly tailored by God to meet the greatest need we all have, yet God’s great gift is still largely ignored or misunderstood by mankind.  In this little booklet, Gary Benfold sets out to show why we should take God’s gift of Jesus seriously.  What is so special about this gift—and why is it still important, two thousand years later?  He answers these questions by looking at the three questions we all have in mind when we open a new present: who is it from?  What does it do?  How much did it cost?  These important questions are opened up from the Bible itself, and lead to a compelling argument for taking Jesus seriously.

Day One and 10ofthose.com are each offering good deals on multiple buys, and the author (me!) says

Friends  may be interested in my latest evangelistic effort - called 'Gift', Jonathan Carswell at 10ofthose.com is doing a good deal on them, especially for multiple buys.  Small enough (A5) to be enclosed with Christmas cards, and cheap enough too, can I encourage you to get hold of multiple copies and give them away?  They're beautifully produced, in full colour and ideal (says he modestly) for churches to give away at their Christmas services.

In it, I try to answer the questions about the gift of God's Son that we tend to ask ourselves when we get any gift: who's it from, what does it do, how much did it cost?  I hope it's attractively written, avoids jargon and explains the gospel clearly; and I will put an extract up here very soon.  But at only a few pence for an individual copy, you can hardly lose?

PRICE CRASH! ! !
The Day One website says these magnificent booklets are £1 each - they're not!  They are only 50p - and even less if you buy them in quantity...

Never, ever...

The 12-word sermon?

On October 29^th 1941 Winston Churchill returned to Harrow, his old school which had assured his parents that he would never amount to anything.  It was speech day; it was the midst of war.  Knowing undoubtedly more than he could tell the boys about the danger the nation was in and the fragility of our armed forces and carrying more of a burden then he could ever hope to share, the popular version of his speech has it amounting to just 12 words: ‘Never give in.  Never, ever give in.  Never, ever, ever give in.’  The truth is, though it contained words very like that it was, in fact, a little longer – and in the midst of the battle, with ‘the miracle of Dunkirk’ a little over a year ago and D-Day still almost three years away and all the burdens of the free world upon him, he said: we have only to persevere, to conquer.

And so it is with us, though for very different reasons.  Christ reigns on high; his Spirit moves in the world, in the church, and dwells within believers.  The battle rages: but Christ died.  Christ is risen; Christ will come again.  We have only to persevere, to conquer.

Barrage

Barrage are a Canada-based group of musicians.  I include them here partly because the guy clearly visible at 12 seconds is Stefan Defilet, who's since gone on to much greater things.  That is, he teaches me...

They went out from us...

...we cannot be satisfied with a faith that lives most vibrantly in abstract theological concepts and the ease of Sunday-morning services.  We cannot be satisfied with a Christianity that features episodic moments of ministry but otherwise is shaped by the values of the world.  We cannot be satisfied with a Christianity that simply fills another slot in an all-too-busy schedule.  We cannot be satisfied with a Christianity that allows us to live at the centre of our world.  We cannot be satisfied with a Christianity that does not live the biblical hymns we sing and does not apply the biblical exhortations we have heard.
Self-righteous, self-satisfied, and externalistic spirituality is dangerous and must be resisted.  It is not a by-product of true conversion, but flows from the man-centredness of secular thinking.

(Paul David Tripp, in 'Broken-Down House')

Joy - cut-and-paste

This is a genuine cut-and-paste from the Tabernacle website today:

SPIRITUAL JOY - how it may be spoiled or increased (by Dr Masters)


Forgive me, but I found it funny!

Why won't they debate? The fear of God, perhaps?

Well, Monday is the day for humour.  So here's some, of a slightly different ilk.  Polly Toynbee, President of the British Humanist Association, has withdrawn from her debate with William Lane Craig.  Far be it from me to speculate...

What Cranmer thinks of Evangelicals

Over at Cranmer's blog, you'll find this:

• In His Grace’s experience, they are almost universally kind and hospitable; sing an awful lot of Shine, Jesus, Shine; believe the Canon of the Bible was handed down by God; praise the Lord when they find a lost saucepan; rejoice in Middle-East bloodshed and social breakdown, ‘for these things must be’; and their view of Church history begins with Acts and then jumps straight to Amazing Grace. Certainly, His Grace has never yet met an evangelical who grasps the Patristics, understands Chalcedon or appreciates the historical significance of any of the early Ecumenical Councils.

Now, that would be a bad thing, wouldn't it?

Global Warming Shock!

An article on today's Daily Telegraph website tells us that scientists doing proper science have, at last, found the true causes of global warming.


It's - er, well - it's the sun. Now that's an inconvenient truth!


Some of us have long thought that anthropogenic global warming, while containing an admirable number of syllables for only three words, is a myth.


The problem is - living in the UK, we're not sure the sun exists, either.
PS Photo courtesy of Stephen Baird - follow the link for some awesome pics.

Reagan: 'I'm (partly) to blame'