Sunday's Hymn: O Could I Speak the Matchless Worth

O could I speak the matchless worth,
O could I sound the glories forth which in my Savior shine!
I’d sing His glorious righteousness, and magnify the wondrous grace
Which made salvation mine, which made salvation mine.

I’d sing the precious blood He spilt,
My ransom from the dreadful guilt of sin, and wrath divine;
I’d sing His glorious righteousness, in which all perfect, heavenly dress
My soul shall ever shine, my soul shall ever shine.

I’d sing the characters He bears,
And all the forms of love He wears, exalted on His throne;
In loftiest songs of sweetest praise, I would to everlasting days
Make all His glories known, make all His glories known.

Soon, the delightful day will come
When my dear Lord will bring me home, and I shall see His face;
Then with my Savior, Brother, Friend, a blessèd eternity I’ll spend,
Triumphant in His grace, triumphant in His grace.

—Samuel Medley

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

• I Sing the Mighty Power of God at Field Stone Cottage
• O How I Love Jesus at Rosemary at Home
• The Struggle and more at Gospel Grace
• Day by Day at The Happy Wonderer
• Have Thine Own Way at By Grace Alone
• Lord’s Day 39 at Tried With Fire 
• Lord’s Day 39, 2012 at The Thirsty Theologian
• Faith Alone - September 23, 2012 at The Upward Call
• Your Weekly Dose of Spurgeon at Pyromaniacs: Our Unhurried God
• A Sunday Psalm: The Treasury of David - Psalm 9:7-8 at Theology for Girls
• Psalm 20 at Daily On My Way to Heaven

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.

Reading Classics Together: The Discipline of Grace, Chapter 7

Obeying the Great Commandment

This week’s reading for Tim Challies Reading Classics Together program was the seventh chapter of Jerry Bridges’ book The Discipline of Grace. This chapter is about the great commandment, the command to love God with heart, soul and mind, and how to keep it. How is it that we can genuinely love God?

I’m going to focus on one point in this week’s reading: the place of the gospel in obeying this commandment to love God. Bridges writes,

Scripture … says, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our love to God can only be a response to His love for us. If I do not believe God loves me, I cannot love Him.

One of the things that can keep us from loving God is a guilty conscience. A tender conscience is a good thing when it makes us aware of our sins, but it can also

load us down with guilt, and when we are under that burden and sense of condemnation, it is difficult to love God or believe that He loves us.

This is where the gospel comes in.

[W]e must continually take those sins that our consciences accuse us of to the Cross and plead the cleansing blood of Jesus. It is only the blood of Christ that cleanses our consciences so that we may no longer feel guilty….

It’s only when we are free of the sense of guilt that we can love God with heart, soul, and mind. It’s then that

we are motivatied in a positive sense to love Him in this wholehearted way. Our love will be spontaneous in an ourpouring of gratitude to Him and fervent desire to obey Him.

It’s the gospel that provides us with the motive (the “only enduring motive”) to love God.

Next week’s reading is chapter 8, Dependent Discipline. 

On Our Extraordinary God at An Ordinary Blog

Today I posted on God’s aseity at Out of the Ordinary. Here’s an excerpt:

Aseity is an old word an uncommon one, even in lists of God’s attributes, where you’ll more often find self-existence, self-sufficiency, self-containment, independence, or solitariness used to describe this characteristic of God. But these words don’t all mean exactly the same thing, at least as I understand them. I prefer to to use aseity, because it describes this particular perfection of God more precisely than any one of the other words, and includes within it everything they mean and more. 

Aseity comes from the Latin a se, meaning “from or by oneself.” To say that God is a se tells us that he exists wholly “from himself.” There is nothing else that causes God to exist; rather, he exists uncaused, “by the necessity of His own Being,” to quote Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology. In other words, he is eternally self-sustained and he can’t not exist. Our God, scripture tells us, “has life in himself”(John 5:26). 

The first scriptural evidence of God’s aseity is found at the very beginning of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Creation, we’re told, has a beginning: “In the beginning” when God created. But not so with God. He was there before the beginning, when there was nothing but him, existing eternally in all his perfection from himself and by himself.

Read the whole post.

I plan to be back later with this week’s post on The Discipline of Grace. It should have been posted yesterday, but wasn’t, partly because of The Great Yukon-Wide Communications Black-Out of 2012 and partly because I was too busy. My internet connectivity has been spotty again this morning, so if you don’t see this post from me later today, that might be the reason.