Monday, February 24, 2014

patience comes as a deliberate act of humility — Timothy Keller



"A lot of people say, “Oh, I wish I could,” as if … What do you mean, “I wish I could”? “I wish I had patience,” as if patience is like a germ you catch or you don’t. Actually, as far as I understand, the Bible says patience comes from a couple of deliberate actions. First of all, patience comes as a deliberate act of humility. It’s a deliberate act of humility. Patience is always an act of humility. For example, in James 4, we read this.

“Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. […] Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ ” (James 4:13-15) It says you have your plans and you know how things ought to work, but you don’t know. You say, “This is going to happen. That’s going to happen.” But you don’t know. You ought to say, “Well, if it’s the Lord’s will.” (James 4:15)

What does that mean? When things go wrong, we think of our anger. We think of our despair. We think of our worry and our fear as feelings we can’t help. But this is saying those feelings arise out of an assumption of your own omniscience. There’s an assumed omniscience. When you’re really saying, “Oh, this is awful …” “What? Why?” “Because X, Y, Z is not happening. That will be a disaster if X, Y, Z doesn’t happen.”
Oh, you know, huh? You know X, Y, Z has to happen for life to mean … How do you know? It says you don’t know. You’re upset, but you don’t know. Please lay down the melancholy burden of assumed omniscience. It’s such a relief. Even the wisest people do not see all ends. When you are just freaking out because, “This has to happen,” that means you think you know. You’re not omniscient. The freaking out is coming from your certainty that you know. You don’t know. Be humble. It’s a deliberate act of humility. That’s one way to be patient."

—Timothy Keller (2013). The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive. New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

the authenticity and accuracy of Luke's account in Acts — William M. Ramsay



Here is an interesting story regarding the authenticity and accuracy of Luke's account in Acts. It is from William Mitchell Ramsay's book on Paul's missionary journeys.

The following account about Ramsay is from Logos website:

William Mitchell Ramsay is perhaps one of the most fascinating biblical scholars from the turn of the twentieth century, and his writings are full of knowledge and insight that can only come from one who has extensively experienced first-hand the archaeology and people of Asia Minor. Perhaps most well-known for his archaeological endeavors, he traveled extensively throughout Asia Minor, studying the missionary journeys of Paul and conducting archaeological research, writing numerous books on the findings and adventures of his studies, including St. Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen. His original intent in his studies was to disprove Christianity through archaeology, but through his research he realized that the Bible was accurate and converted to Christianity.

The following account is from James M. Boice's commentary on Acts

"Acts 14:6 was an important verse in the life of Sir William Ramsay, whom I have mentioned several times in this book. Together with a few other verses, verse 6 produced a change in his thinking that brought him to a strong trust in the reliability of Scripture.

Ramsay was a classical scholar, somewhat like Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the ancient city of Troy. He came from Scotland, and because classical scholars liked to visit the countries they were studying, Ramsay, who was studying Acts, set out for Asia Minor, what is now Turkey. Nobody knew much about Turkey in those days. Travel was difficult. Many of the ancient sites, which particularly interested Ramsay, had been lost for centuries.

Ramsay began his research, and one of the things he investigated was the boundary line between the ancient Roman territories of Pisidia and Lycaonia that seemed according to an ancient boundary marker to have been between the cities of Lystra and Derbe. That could have been an incidental and somewhat unimportant matter in itself. Boundaries can be anywhere at all. Why should it matter? But there was a puzzle in the case of this boundary in respect to what Luke had written in Acts. When Luke wrote Acts 14, he said that the apostles left Iconium and fled to “the Lycaonian cities of Lystra and Derbe,” thereby putting Lystra and Derbe in the same province. In other words, Luke differed from the apparent evidence and was therefore assumed to be wrong.

Ramsay had been brought up on the liberalism of the nineteenth century. He did not doubt that Luke had made a mistake. He was retracing Paul’s steps, studying the cities he visited and the roads he walked, trying to understand not only where Paul went but also why he went where he did. When Ramsay got to Lystra and Derbe, he discovered that the ancient boundary stone between the two cities suggested they had been in different provinces. But he also discovered that the stone had been moved. It wasn’t where it had been originally. He began to investigate the matter more carefully.
Today, if you read his book St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen and get to his account of Paul’s ministry in these cities, you will find him pointing out that once again Luke is remarkably accurate. This is because Ramsay discovered Lystra and Derbe were in the same province, the province of Lycaonia, between the years A.D. 37 and 72, but not before those dates and not afterward. That is, they were in the same province in the very years Paul was there, as Luke accurately reports.

We find situations like this frequently in serious studies of the Bible. If you want to seem very wise and popular today, you can gain attention by making a career of criticizing the Bible. Show all the places where modern scholarship “proves” that it is wrong—if you are not afraid of looking very foolish about thirty years from now, and perhaps much sooner, when the explanation of the apparent difficulty is found. However, if you want to look wise in the future, though you may be thought foolish now, you should take your stand on the integrity and complete accuracy of this Book. If you do, you will find the same sort of things Ramsay and others discovered."


Sunday, February 16, 2014

the doctrine of election and evangelism — James M. Boice



“and all who were appointed for eternal life believed” — Acts 13:48

"Isn’t it interesting that we should have this statement of the doctrine of election right in the middle of this great evangelistic story? There are people who cannot imagine how anybody can be an evangelist if God decides who will be saved and then saves them. The argument goes, “If God is going to save certain people, God will save them regardless. What I do doesn’t matter. Or, if it depends on me, then it depends on me and you must not talk about election.”
Actually, those who have had the greatest faith in God’s electing power are also those who, by the grace of God, have proved to be the most effective evangelists. Virtually all the famous missionary pioneers were believers in election.
“Why did they go out to evangelize, then, if they believed God was going to save people anyway?”
That isn’t quite the way to put it. If God is going to save someone, God will save them. That is true. But it is not quite correct to say that God will save them anyway, because when we say, “God will save them anyway,” we mean that God will save them apart from our (or another’s) witness, and that is not true. The God who appoints the ends also appoints the means, and the means he has appointed in the evangelization of other people is our witness.
We are to take the gospel into all the world. But as we go we are to know that God will work through that witness to bring to faith those he has appointed.
I sometimes say I do not know how you can evangelize any other way, at least not in a thinking manner. Suppose it does not depend on God; suppose it depends on you. Suppose people are saved because you are eloquent or because you have the right answers or because you happen to be in the right place at just the right time—entirely apart from God’s election. If that is true, it means that if you do not have the right answers, if you are not in the right place, if you do not present the gospel in just the right way, then these people will perish and it will be your fault. I do not know how anybody can live with that.
On the other hand, if you believe that God has appointed some for eternal life and that as you testify God will use that testimony to bring those persons to faith, the burden is removed and witnessing becomes what it was meant to be: a joy, as it obviously was for Paul and Barnabas."

— James M. Boice (1997). Acts: an expositional commentary (pp. 248–249). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.


Thursday, February 13, 2014

the teachings of Jesus — James Montgomery Boice

“The third part of Peter’s summation of the gospel is the public ministry of Jesus: “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him” (Acts 10:38). This ministry involves two things: good deeds and special acts that demonstrated Christ’s power over Satan.

The significant thing about this summation of the public ministry of Jesus is that, as in his previous sermons, Peter does not mention Christ’s teaching. In the Gospels we find whole chapters filled with Christ’s sayings, parables, and discourses. In Matthew the Sermon on the Mount takes three chapters and the Olivet Discourse takes two. Chapters 14–16 of John contain what we call the final discourses. The reason for this omission is that until people come to understand what Jesus Christ accomplished by his death, turn from sin, and follow him, they are incapable of responding to his teaching. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said that his disciples are to be poor in spirit, meek, pure in heart, and peace-makers, to live by the teaching of the Scriptures, and to follow a standard higher even than that found in the Old Testament. These teachings are important and necessary for those who are Christ’s. But if they are taught to those who are not yet converted, to those who are incapable in their unconverted state of doing them, these teachings are misleading and harmful.

If we speak about the teachings of Jesus without first speaking of the need for repentance and faith in Jesus as our Savior from sin, people quite naturally begin to think that Christianity is merely about doing good. It is learning what Jesus taught and trying to put it into practice. This only encourages self-righteousness, a trust in human righteousness, which is harmful. Whenever Christianity has fallen into that pattern of teaching it has made a great mistake.”

— James Montgomery Boice (1997). Acts: an expositional commentary (pp. 183–184). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.