Paul Washer on prayer meetings

just heard this today. he has some interesting points though i can't say i agree 100%. its a 6 minute clip.

the gospel cont'd

reading further in "In My Place Condemned He Stood" I read this (and thought it went really well with what i posted a few days ago):

One of the miserable ironies of our time is that whereas liberal and radical theologians believe themselves to be restating the gospel for today, they have for the most part rejected the categories of wrath, guilt, condemnation, and the enmity of God, and so have made it impossible for themselves ever to present the gospel at all, for they cannot now state the basic problem that the gospel of peace solves."

Sad but true.

prayer works

...in amazing ways.

This morning I and two high school guys (Jordan and Kyle) went over to Pastor Ray's house and washed his cars. A month or so ago Pastor Ray had quintuple-bypass surgery and has had a couple complications since (pacemaker put in and then a stent put in...so 3 operations total). As a church body we are trying to take as many burdens off of he and his wife, Sharon, as possible since, with his operations, they already have a lot to worry about. So the Elders asked me to organize the washing of their cars every couple week for the next several months. Today was the second time we've done it.

After we washed the cars, Pastor Ray invited us in to visit for a bit. Visits have been generally discouraged because if too many people visit him it will tire him out and not allow him to rest up and heal, but since he invited us in we accepted. It was good to hear how God has been at work. After the doctor put the stent in, he looked at Pastor Ray and said, "God has been at work." The stent needed to be put in because one of the bypasses from the first surgery had become kinked. The kink was more than a simple kink and even the nurse said she had never seen anything like that operation. Pastor Ray had told the doctor, "You have been bathed in prayer for this operation." It showed.

What hit me though was Sharon's side of the story. I have been praying often for them and one of the things I've been praying is for peace for Sharon through all of this. Sharon told us that during his surgery she was anxious and her mind was wandering into what horrible things might happen, but then, she told us, that she felt God saying, "I will keep you in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Me. Trust in Me." That's from Isaiah 26:3. I was amazed when I heard her say that, because that is one of the specific verses I have been praying for her!

In my head I know that prayer works. But when I actually see it work...I am amazed at our God who hears our prayers and answers them. Praise Him!

the gospel

We have all heard the gospel presented as God's triumphant answer to human problems--problems of our relation with ourselves and our fellow humans and our environment. Well, there is no doubt that the gospel does bring us solutions to these problems, but it does so by first solving a deeper problem--the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man's relation with his Maker. And unless we make it plain that the solution of these former problems depends on the settling of this later one, we are misrepresenting the message and becoming false witnesses of God--for a half-truth presented as if it were the whole truth becomes something of a falsehood by that very fact. No reader of of the New Testament can miss the fact that it knows all about our human problems--fear, moral cowardice, illness of body and mind, loneliness, insecurity, hopelessness, despair, cruelty, abuse of power, and the rest--but equally no reader of the new Testament can miss the fact that it resolves all these problems, one way or another, into the fundamental problem of sin against God.

~J.I. Packer
In My Place Condemned He Stood
p. 41

I think so many of us are guilty of this: trying to make the gospel more palatable but ending up preaching something that is not the gospel. I know I am guilty of trying to make the gospel more palatable and missing the main point in the process. The heart of the gospel is that we are sinners who deserve the wrath of God, but God put forth Jesus to receive His wrath so that, when He shows eternal grace to those who have put their trust in Him, He is just...the penalty we deserve has been paid. Anything that does not have at its center the reality of our sin, the penalty it deserves and the provision made by Christ is not the gospel.