Sunday's Hymn

Praise the Savior, Ye Who Know Him!

Praise the Savior, ye who know Him!
Who can tell how much we owe Him?
Gladly let us render to Him
All we are and have.

Jesus is the Name that charms us,
He for conflict fits and arms us;
Nothing moves and nothing harms us
While we trust in Him.

Trust in Him, ye saints, forever,
He is faithful, changing never;
Neither force nor guile can sever
Those He loves from Him.

Keep us, Lord, O keep us cleaving
To Thyself, and still believing,
Till the hour of our receiving
Promised joys with Thee.

Then we shall be where we would be,
Then we shall be what we should be,
Things that are not now, nor could be,
Soon shall be our own.

—Thomas Kelly (Listen here)

Other hymns, worship songs, sermons etc. posted today:

• Lord of the Church, We Humbly Pray at The Happy Wonderer
• Lord’s Day 25, 2010 at The Thirsty Theologian
• Our God, Our Help in Ages Past at Whatever Is Good
• Before Thee, God, Who Knowest All at Field Stone Cottage
• Praise to the Lord, The Almighty at Hiraeth
• Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us at Conjubilant with Song
• Your Weekly Dose of Spurgeon: Purgatory and Assurance Don’t Mix at Pyromaniacs
• Heart Aflame - June 20, 2010 at The Upward Call
• I Am Not Skilled to Understand at Jam and Books

Have you posted a hymn (or sermon, sermon notes, prayer, etc.) today and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by contacting me using the contact form linked above, and I’ll add your post to the list.

Round the Sphere Again: No Other Gods Before Me

Because ignorance is idolatry.

Two from TFan
Scriptural proof that God does not change. (Thoughts of Francis Turretin)

Explicit and implicit scriptural statements of God’s sin-forgiving ability. (Alpha & Omega Ministries Apologetics Blog)

Two for Your Library
From TGC Reviews on Philip Ryken’s new book, Discovering God in Stories from the Bible:

If you set out to preach to your church or teach your small group a series of lessons on the attributes of God, how would you do it?  Would you collect a series of thematic Bible verses? Would you follow a creed, a confession, or a statement of faith?  More to the point, what resources would you use: A couple systematic theologies? A Bible dictionary? Or a concordance to find key words?

Without replacing any of these methods or resources, Philip Graham Ryken … has provided a wonderful resource for anyone wanting to know more about God and his manifold perfections in his book Discovering God in Stories from the Bible. His express purpose in writing this theological primer is to “know God more intimately” and to help others do the same by studying God’s Word for the purpose of adoring God by the power of the Spirit and in accordance with the truth of God’s revelation….

Read the whole book review.

And from Ligonier Ministries Blog on Holy, Holy, Holy: Proclaiming the Perfections of God, a book adapted from the addresses at the 2009 Ligonier Ministries National Conference:

Tragically, the holiness of God has been obscured in our time, and as a result, the church’s doctrine and ethics have been tarnished, entertainment has replaced worship in many places, the gospel is misunderstood and neglected, and the church assimilates itself to the culture instead of seeking to transform it through the preaching of God’s Word. Holy, Holy, Holy: Proclaiming the Perfections of God is adapted from the addresses at the 2009 Ligonier Ministries National Conference. It unfolds the character of God and the holiness that sets Him apart.

Read excerpts from this book.

Two for Listening
I listened to both of these during home improvement projects this week and recommend them to you.

• D. A. Carson’s talk on God from this year’s NEXT conference. (Update: Here’s the outline of this sermon.)
• Phil Johnson’s recent sermon on God’s immutability.  Grace Community Church has begun a summer-long series of sermons on the attributes of God. I’ve only listened (so far) to this one by Phil, but I’m betting they’re all good.

No Other Gods Before Me (Part 2)

I, the Lord, am your God,
who brought you from the land of Egypt,
from the house of bondage.

You shall have no other gods before me.

The first commandment is a command to worship the one true God and only the one true God. It’s obvious (isn’t it?) that we’re not permitted to remake him, even in our minds, into something different than what he is, because having a remade god is nothing less than having another god before him. Redefining God is a great big no-no and most of us are not quite so brazen in our disobedience. 

On Knowing God
But there’s more to worshiping the one true God than keeping ourselves from shamelessly reworking him into something more like what we want him to be. In order to worship him and only him, we must also know him as he has revealed himself. In its list of things forbidden by the first commandment, the Westminster Larger Catechism lists ignorance and misapprehensions of God right beside unbelief and misbelief.

I’ve known people who get hung up on the idea that God is incomprehensible to us and give up trying to  understand him because it’s too difficult a task for them. They’re right about one thing: God is incomprehensible. He’s infinite and we have finite minds. R. C. Sproul says we are like infants struggling to understand a genius.1 We will never, ever, not in a million years or eternity, understand the whole of who and what God is. 

But God’s incomprehensibility is no excuse for breaking commandment number one by lacking knowledge of God. When God gives this commandment to Moses he identifies himself to them: “I … brought you from the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.” He tells them something about himself, something he has done for his people that they can hold onto when they worship him. They could know him by knowing what he had done for them. We have even less excuse for ignorance than the Israelites did, because in all of scripture, God is defining himself for us. The genius, says Sproul, is speaking to the infant in tbe infant’s own terms.1 God condescends, we might say, to speak to us in baby-talk. That doesn’t make it easy for us but it does mean that can know him—never fully, but truly—because he tells us about himself.

And it’s always worth the effort it takes to understand God’s revelation of himself to us because the more true things we know about our God, the more we learn of his perfections and his actions from his revelation of himself in scripture, the more we are able to see him as he really is. The more we know of him, the more we can hold the one true God in our minds when we worship.

Given this commandment, it’s downright silly to think that we can give up on learning theology, or learning about God, because it’s all too difficult. Likewise, it silly to say that theology matters less than our obedient actions, for this commandment makes knowledge about God fundamental to our obedience. To the extent that we do not think of God in the way he has explained and defined himself, we are idolators. Redefining God is one way, and a flagrant way, to be an idolator; being ignorant of the things God reveals of himself to us is another.

1R. C. Sproul, Truths We Confess