Round the Sphere Again: More People You Should Know

Prince of Preachers
Phil Johnson’s biographical sketch of Charles Spurgeon was posted last week at Pyromaniacs. It explains, for one, why there was so much gospel in Spurgeon’s sermons.

Frontier Missionary
John Piper on John Paton: 

It wasn’t until 1606 that Spanish explorer Fernandez de Quiros discovered a chain of eighty islands stretched across 450 miles in the South Pacific. Later named the New Hebrides, the islands were inhabited by peoples whose existence had been unknown to the rest of the world for centuries.

It would be another 230 years before two London missionaries made the first earnest attempt to bring the gospel to these unengaged and unreached peoples in 1839. But they were killed and eaten by cannibals only minutes after going ashore.

John G. Paton and his wife set sail to the islands in 1858. But this decision didn’t come without criticism. On one account before leaving, a respected elder chided the couple, “You will be eaten by cannibals!”

Piper’s biography of this courageous missionary is available as a free ebook in several formats.

Thankful Thursday

It’s the end of another busy day. I’m home alone; the house is quiet. I like a little bit of silence now and then, and I’m thankful that I have it tonight. 

Here are a few gifts I’ve received from my Father’s hand this week:

• Some days of perfect summer weather.
• Time with both grandbabies.
• Fresh broccoli from the garden.
• Peaches in season in the supermarket.
• The sound of rain on the roof while I sleep.
• An excellent sermon on taking up our cross.
• Time to finish some chores that have been too long on my to-do list.
• A few lessons learned, or so I hope.
• A new and exciting opportunity.

I’m also thankful that God is just. He will make everything right in the end and that’s a good thing. I’m thinking in particular of a crime that happened several years ago. No one who knew the victim thought the sentence of the court was commensurate with crime. But we don’t have to carry this injustice ourselves; we can leave it to God who will execute perfect justice. I can rest in that and I’m thankful. 

Reading Classics Together: The Discipline of Grace, Chapter 1

I’m reading along with Tim Challies as he reads yet another Christian classic for his Reading Classics Together program. This week we started by reading the first chapter of The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness by Jerry Bridges. 

I’d sum up this chapter by saying it is a short defense of the central role of the gospel in discipleship. Most believers, Bridges says (and I’ll admit I’ve thought like this), feel confident that God will bless their efforts on days when they are spiritually well-disciplined—when they’ve read their Bible attentively and prayed thoroughly and done everything else they are supposed to do, but that He won’t bless them so much on the undisciplined days—when they’ve taken no quiet time and failed in their spiritual obligations.

But this is simply not true, and thinking like this sets us up for failure in one of two ways. Either we will become proud because we think we are doing well, or we will become discouraged because we feel that we are failures. This is the reason we must keep reminding ourselves of the gospel as we pursue holiness. Bridges puts it like this:

Preaching the gospel to ourselves every day addresses both the self-righteous Pharisee and the guilt-laden sinner that dwell in our hearts. Because the gospel is only for sinners, preaching it to ourselves every day reminds us that we are indeed sinners in need of God’s grace. It causes us to say to God, in the words of an old hymn, “Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.” It helps us to consciously renounce any confidence in our own goodness as a means of meriting God’s blessing on our lives. 

Perhaps more important, though, preaching the gospel to ourselves every day gives us hope, joy, and courage. The good news that our sins are forgiven because of Christ’s death fills our hearts with joy, gives us courgage to face the day, and offers us hope that God’s favor will rest upon us, not because we are good, but because we are in Christ.

It is as we rest in God’s grace instead of our performance that we can truly pursue holiness out of the only pure motive there is—love for Christ—and not duty or guilt.

(Read Tim’s  reflections on this chapter.)