A Conversation with Alistair Begg & Bob Lepine
Last week I participated in a launch event for Seasons of Sorrow that took place just prior to the Getty Music Sing! Conference. I was blessed to have Alistair Begg and Bob Lepine participate in a discussion, then to have CityAlight and Sandra McCracken debut the song inspired by the book, “In the Valley (Bless the Lord).” Overall I though the entire event went very well and I appreciated receiving quite a lot of kind feedback afterward.
The good people at Getty Music were kind enough to record the event and to then make it available to us. Alistair Begg’s Truth for Life is hosting the media and we wanted to share it with you today in the hope that it will benefit you. You’ll find that it unfolds like this: It begins with the trailer for my book, than with me reading an excerpt. Alistair and Bob join me for a discussion about sorrow and suffering, and then CityAlight and Sandra McCracken lead “In the Valley (Bless the Lord).”
You can watch it or listen to it at Truth for Life. (Note the little “Listen / Watch” switch above the player to toggle between audio and video.)
You can also watch it on YouTube, but please note that this version does not include the performance of “In the Valley (Bless the Lord).”
You can listen to the studio version of the song “In the Valley (Bless the Lord)” at YouTube. It will be available on Apple Music, Spotify, and so on in the next few days.
Finally, you can learn more about the book and find links to purchase it right here.
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Poetry of Redemption
There have been times in the history of the Christian faith in which poetry played a key role in believers’ devotion to the Lord. There were eras in which the work of Christian poets was respected and even lauded. But that was then and this is now. While we still value poetry in the form of songs, most of us pay scant attention to reading or writing poetry. There could be any number of explanations for this, though I am inclined to blame the decline of formal verse (i.e. defined forms of poetry) and the rise of free verse (i.e. neglecting rhyme and meter), much of which is enough to cause the best of us to give up on poetry altogether.
Yet as we dig through the archives of our faith we can find vast troves of lovely, meaningful, skillful, devotional poems. In Poetry of Redemption:An Illustrated Treasury of Good Friday and Easter Poems, Leland Ryken has compiled some of the best of these poems and themed them around the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “This book is an anthology of poetic devotionals on the events of Holy Week and their meaning,” he explains in the opening pages. “Although the entries can be read in the days before and during Holy Week, the book is not organized according to a schedule of daily readings tied to the calendar. One can read this anthology anytime, using any timetable, covering as many of the entries at a single reading as one chooses.”
The poems are divided into three categories which he labels psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. By psalms he means passages that have been excerpted from the Bible and are printed in the verse form of biblical poetry. By hymns he means the familiar songs we sing around Easter time. “We need to remind ourselves that every hymn begins its life as a poem, becoming a hymn only when it is paired with music and sung.” And by spiritual songs he means classic literary poems written by some of the masters of the craft. For each entry he has written a devotional a couple of pages in length.
The theme of the poems progresses throughout the book. The first collection considers God’s eternal redemptive plan and is comprised primarily of poems drawn from Scripture. Next are a number related to Christ’s journey toward the cross and here we encounter works by Theodulf of Orléans, William B. Tappan, and George Herbert. Then comes the accomplishment of redemption upon the cross (Jennie Evelyn Hussey, Isaac Watts, Robert Herrick) and appropriate responses to it (Jacob Revius, Christina Rossetti, John Donne). And so it goes through the application of redemption, life with the cross at its center, the resurrection, and life everlasting.
Poetry of Redemption has value as a devotional work that most people will make use of around the Easter season. But I like it most as a collection and explanation of some of the best of Christianity’s poetic treasures. If you have yet to explore Christian poetry or if you would like to explore it anew, this is the perfect resource.
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What We’ll Discover about God in Heaven
This article is written by Andrew M. Davis and is sponsored by Baker Books. In his new book, The Glory Now Revealed, Andrew paints a dynamic, scripturally-based picture of heaven as a place where we continually discover new aspects of God’s glory displayed in his past works throughout the history of the world.
Who can fully appraise the treasures of God’s glory woven into even a single day of history? We all underestimate the value of those treasures! The Bible makes this amazing assertion about time: “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years” (2 Pet. 3:8). It is as though God sees every single second of history in extreme slow motion. The activity of any single day is utterly mindboggling: all over the world, human beings are speaking, acting, making choices, creating. And God is there, watching and recording everything.
But Scripture goes beyond a simple assertion of God’s presence and awareness. The doctrine of providence teaches that God is acting decisively through the greatest and smallest events to bring about his sovereign purposes. He controls the casting of a lot (Prov. 16:33) and the decisions of a king (21:1). He oversees the death of a sparrow (Matt. 10:29) and the birth of a mountain goat (Job 39:1). He chooses the time and circumstances of our birth as well as our death, numbering all the days in between (Ps. 139:16). He acts in ways that are incomprehensible to us, and his footsteps cannot be tracked (Rom. 11:33). The daily actions of God are immeasurable and worthy of praise: secretly restraining tyrants, directing the complex flow of international commerce, answering the prayers of a child, protecting persecuted house church leaders, convicting Christians of secret sin, orchestrating the initial meeting of a man and woman who will someday be married.
The sovereign salvation plan of God was crafted before the foundation of the world, bought at infinite cost by the blood of his Son, and applied by the Holy Spirit to individuals in every generation and in every corner of the world. Every day, that plan generates unique treasures . . . thousands of years of thousands of years.
But most details of that plan are hidden from human view, forgotten by succeeding generations, lost through the death of eyewitnesses, and buried under the rise and rubble of nations. God is temporarily deprived of the glory he deserves for both his mighty and minute deeds.
The vast majority of God’s glorious deeds in history have never been recorded in any book and never will be. They were performed in the obscure lives of people the world would consider unremarkable. These ranks of the redeemed received amazing grace poured on them, and their stories are well worth learning to the glory of God. Yet not only are those stories lost to posterity but the full dimensions of God’s activities in saving their souls were often veiled from them as well. They never fully realized how God orchestrated providential occurrences in space and time to bring them to faith in Christ and to help them grow in grace after that. But why should God be robbed of his glory by having those works hidden forever, lost in the dust of the past?
Increased heavenly understanding of earthly history will in turn increase our heavenly joy. This eternal education in history will be glorious! We will be so free from selfish concerns for our reputations that we will finally see God at the glorious center of it all—the Redeemer, Protector, Warrior, Ruler, Healer, Feeder, Author, Perfecter—in a word, the Savior worthy of all praise. -
A La Carte (April 28)
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you today.
The FAQs: Anglican Group Calls on Church of England’s Leader to Repent
Joe Carter has one of his FAQs about what’s been happening lately with the Anglican Church.
What Does ‘Salvation” Mean?
“Almost no word so well captures the heart of the message of Scripture as does the word salvation. It appears more than 170 times in our English translations of the Old and New Testament. The related word, saved, appears approximately one hundred times throughout the pages of Scripture. But what is salvation? What does it mean for someone to be saved?” Nick Batzig answers.
Register Now For TRC23 *EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT ENDS APRIL 30 TH *
June 28-29, 2023, with John MacArthur, Costi Hinn & others. Throughout Christian history, the fight for the clear true gospel has existed. Paul warned the Galatian church of a new “gospel” that was no gospel at all. Augustine, Luther, Jan Hus and many others down through history fought for the one true unadulterated gospel. As ambassadors of the gospel go to the ends of the earth, uppermost in the minds of their sending churches should be the question, “What gospel are they preaching?” (Sponsored Link)
Should You Accommodate A Person’s Requests?
“Christians are routinely pressured to compromise their convictions. Sadly, it’s other Christians who leverage a good-faith principle to achieve an unfair end. I want to encourage you, though. If you’re feeling pressured to accommodate a request from an LGBT person that violates your conscience, know that there’s a line you do not have to cross.”
God Delights in You
Lara considers our love for our children and the Father’s love for us.
Themelios
There is a new issue of Themelios available in a variety of formats for those who would like to do some academic reading.
Flashback: Whatever Is Not Christ
When we come to Christ in repentance and faith, we surrender ourselves to the purpose of God and submit ourselves to the hand of God. We are the block of marble and he the artist, we the medium and he the one who must remove from it whatever is not Christ.How…could God remain equally faithful to His love for us and His just judgment of our sins? The glory of the cross, its unimaginable wisdom lies in the way God has devised to provide salvation for His people. —Sinclair Ferguson