RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Weekend A La Carte (March 29)
My gratitude goes to 21Five for sponsoring the blog this week. If you are a Christian reader in Canada, you may want to look at their site and consider their Easter specials.
Today’s Kindle deals include some newer titles and some classics as well. Also, Westminster Books is offering an ESV Study Bible at 63% off.
(Yesterday on the blog: New and Notable Christian Books for March 2025)
Is it possible for God to withdraw his presence from us? As John Piper explains here, the answer can be both yes and no.
This article provides a helpful illustration that explains why there are four gospels instead of one.
Trevin explains what we can glean from some of the different ways that Christians celebrate the Lord’s Supper. “Whatever you call it, however you celebrate it, there’s much to be gleaned by reflecting on the symbolism of your church’s traditions when observing this meal together. Treat the moment with reverence, with joy, with gratitude, with faith.”
“The bottom-level, unchangeable truth about your life is not that it’s hard (though maybe it is) and not that it’s painful (though that’s probably true too). The truest, most unchanging thing about your life is that you have a God who is worthy of your trust in every tiny circumstance you encounter today.”
We all need wisdom for those difficult conversations we need to have from time to time.
“For real and rich friendship to develop, we need time and the wisdom to know whom to spend it on. And on this side of eternity, our time is limited. What do we do when cell phones, Wi-Fi, and economy airlines conspire to make the number of friendships we could ‘keep up’ feel virtually limitless?”
Their frailty is to be met with sympathy, their inability is to draw the love and help of Christ’s whole family. Their weakness is to be their strength as it draws the love and care of the entire household.
The best kinds of ministry are, more often than not, long term and low key.
—Christopher Ash
Free Stuff Fridays (21Five)
This weeks giveaway is sponsored by 21Five.
Have you heard of 21Five? 21Five is Canada’s newest Christian bookstore curating a collection of the best gospel-centred, God-glorifying books and products. It can be hard to find affordable, Reformed Christian resources, especially when Christian bookstores across Canada are closing their doors. 21Five is able to ship a variety of materials across the country at great prices to help you deepen their faith and embody it in all areas of life. You can shop online at 21Five.ca or in person at their physical location in Ancaster (Hamilton), Ontario.
On the road to Easter, 21Five is offering a number of seasonal promotions. Save 10% on their entire Easter collection. Additionally, until April 17, get free Canada-wide shipping on orders of $50 or more (lowered from $75).
Easter Giveaway
For Free Stuff Fridays, 21Five is hosting a book giveaway! Five winners will receive a book of their choosing from 21Five’s Easter collection, as well as a faith-based bookmark.
This contest is for Canadian residents only.To enter, fill out the form below which automatically subscribes you to 21Five’s monthly e-newsletter. Newsletter subscribers are the first to hear about promotions, sales and new products.
Friends Come and Friends Go
“It was nice knowing you.”
The words didn’t come from a sneering supervillain, nor did they contain a hint of sarcasm. Up until that moment, I’d heard the phrase only in action movies and comedy skits. But there I was, standing before not just a real-life person but a longtime, eighty-year-old friend. She was smiling, reaching out for a hug, and telling me with the utmost sincerity, “It was nice knowing you.”
I returned her warm expression and embrace, but my speech faltered. It was nice knowing me? I was switching churches, not countries. Sure, our family planned to move out of the neighborhood at some point, but not now. Wouldn’t we see each other around? At the very least, we could keep up via text and exchange Christmas cards. We were still friends, weren’t we?
Yes, we were friends — but also human. Limited creatures with limited resources. And sometimes it takes veteran saints to bring social media savants gently back down to reality: in a fallen, finite, and seasonal world, friendships come and go.
Every Friend a Seed
Consider likewise the counsel of King Solomon, whom God granted great wisdom and a long life spent pondering “everything that is done under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:14). In Ecclesiastes 3:1, he utters the poetic equivalent of my elderly friend’s words: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” I imagine Mark Zuckerberg frowning. Facebook thrives on friend requests that are casually, endlessly accepted — not on people who know that relationships, like a garden, take careful, selective tending.
In any garden, seeds yield crops because the gardener minds the seasons. Seed in spring, water in summer, harvest in fall — and then, in winter, make a plan to begin all over again. There is “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted” (verse 2). Part of creating and sustaining a new life is knowing when to move on from an old one, and the gardener who scatters a thousand seeds yet watches and waters none is no gardener at all.
So it is with friends. Whether it’s a change in church, city, or country, a new job, marriage, or child, as our lives naturally move and morph, our relationships must shift with them. But who among us likes letting good things go — especially when those good things are people we love, perhaps for years on end? As hard as the thought can be, what’s even harder is attempting the impossible. Deep relational roots — the kind most ripe for abundant gospel fruit — cannot be maintained across a thousand people (though an online profile may attempt to boast otherwise).
For real and rich friendship to develop, we need time and the wisdom to know whom to spend it on. And on this side of eternity, our time is limited. What do we do when cell phones, Wi-Fi, and economy airlines conspire to make the number of friendships we could “keep up” feel virtually limitless?
Every Gardener a Creature
For one, we recognize that faith working through love (Galatians 5:6) — not emojis working through texts — is the warp and woof of Christian friendship. “A friend loves at all times,” says Proverbs 17:17, “and a brother is born for adversity.” The more we tether realities like love, time, brotherhood, and adversity to friendship, the more we will refine our concept of what constitutes real friendship, and the more we will see friends as people we commit to and regularly invest in. Sharing posts does not sharpen us; iron does (Proverbs 27:17).
For another, we remember that each day holds no more than 24 hours, and in humility we sleep for approximately a third of that time. There is only one Man whose capacity to love and befriend has no constraint (Ephesians 3:18–19), and that’s because he’s also God. So, instead of attempting the impossible, we praise his all-sufficiency, we confess our limitations (including our blindness to our limitations), and we ask him for wisdom in our relationships.
“If Jesus never lost sight of the deeply human need for deep human friendship, neither should we.”
Which friendships should we continue to water? Perhaps a few older friendships have not flowered for some time, as they lie too far from life’s regular reach. Would our love and time be better spent on people God has newly planted in our lives, especially those beside us in pews and on park benches? Maybe we should spend some time, as a gardener does in winter, laying out our life before the Lord of the harvest and asking him, “O God, where should I labor?”
And not only where but how. No two plants are exactly alike. No two people have exactly the same needs and desires, capacity and personality. Do they need soup tonight, or do they need a few hours to pour out their soul? Over time, some friendships become like pine trees: the roots are deep, the needs few. The evergreens in our lives, some scattered a thousand miles away, help to make room for us to care for the roses out front. “Father, grant me the wisdom to know which friends are which right now!”
As we ask and answer such questions about others, we also do well to consider the weather conditions in our own lives. Do our spirits feel dry? Is marriage under heat? How dark and thick are the clouds of suffering? Now may not be the time to scour the neighborhood for new friends but to lean into the support of old ones. When the storm came upon the twelve disciples, they turned to each other and especially to their Lord (Matthew 8:23–27). But in other seasons, we may feel more like Joseph, standing in the midst of seven years’ worth of sunshine, peace, and plenty. Our hands freer, our sleep deeper, it’s probably time to work the relational plow.
Christ the Friend
More than any other saint, we see this dynamic present — perfectly so — in our Savior. Watch him in the Gospels. Jesus welcomes people both by name and in masses. In one moment, he’s drawing four fishermen to himself (Matthew 4:18–22); in the next, he’s ministering to “great crowds . . . from Galilee and the Decapolis, and from Jerusalem and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan” (4:25). He teaches friends who sit at his feet (5:1) and heals strangers who kneel before him (8:2–3). His public ministry in full bloom, Jesus could be found saying, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (19:14).
But as hatred for him thickens, the circle around him grows smaller. The night before his crucifixion, Jesus is dining not with tax collectors but with the twelve (26:20). Then, in Gethsemane, we can count on one hand the friends on which he relies: “He said to his disciples, ‘Sit here, while I go over there and pray.’ And taking with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled” (26:36–37). The tighter the spot, the greater the need for his tightest friends.
Even then, as one disciple after another abandons him, Calvary does not keep Christ from making rebels into friends. (Indeed, we know the very opposite is true!) Cross at his back, blood spilling from his body, Jesus spends what little time and energy he has left on earth to welcome a thief into paradise (Luke 23:42–43). When it comes to the Son, no season of suffering is so desolate, no heart too barren, for his voice not to call forth a field of evergreen friendship (Isaiah 55:10–11).
And the Spirit of this otherworldly Friend of Sinners dwells among us, lives within us, longs to use us! Whatever season we find ourselves in, however unskilled we feel at nurturing relationships, the risen and reigning Christ can and will wield our lives for his glory and the good of others. Where we are weak friends, he is the strong and all-satisfying one.
Abide, Invest — and Wait
There is a reason why, in his life on earth, Jesus didn’t call twelve hundred disciples. He called twelve. Then, within those twelve, he drew still closer to three. Oh, he would lavish compassion, conversation, and teaching on anyone near and willing enough to receive him! Yet he would abide in the relationship he cherished most (with his Father), and he would invest in the relationships he considered choicest for bearing fruit (with his disciples).
If Jesus never lost sight of the deeply human need for deep human friendship, neither should we. When my friend smiled and said, “It was nice knowing you,” my knee-jerk reaction was to feel surprised, even insulted. But far from being uncaring or pessimistic, she was being humble and wise — and Christlike.
Couple a biblical vision of friendship with a clear-eyed sight of our creaturely limitations, and we see that friendships don’t endlessly come. Sometimes, friendships prayerfully, kindly go. Contrary to the times I’ve tried to keep every old friendship, I now wonder if the gardener most loyal to her modest plot of earth is the one who ends up most pleased with it.
New and Notable Christian Books for March 2025
As you know, I like to do my best to sort through the new Christian books that are released each month to see what stands out as being not only new but also particularly notable. I received quite a number of new books in March and narrowed the list down to the ones below. I have included the editorial description for each. I hope there’s something here that catches your eye!
Wiser with Jesus: Overcoming the Temptations That Hinder Your Relationships, Steal Your Time, Mar Your Decision-Making and Thwart Your Purpose by Zack Eswine. “The biblical book of Proverbs exemplifies how to live life on this earth in the best way possible. However, rather than giving us step–by–step instructions on how to live a more efficient, productive, and successful life, the ancient book of Proverbs encourages us to meditate on the person, posture and pace of wisdom. In our pursuit of wisdom as Christians, we find that ultimate wisdom is embodied in Christ. We must pursue wisdom as we would a person, relationally and with love. The posture of wisdom is one of humility and teachability, and the pace of wisdom encourages meditation rather than immediate action. In this valuable book, Zack Eswine shows us how these things play out in our everyday lives. He emphasizes the importance of relating wisely to people, including to ourselves, before considering how to grow wiser in life skills. But to grow wiser of heart, whether with people or with life skills, wisdom invites us to prayer and community. Biblical wisdom invites us to seek wiser hearts in communal rather than lonely ways.” (Buy it at Amazon or Westminster Books)
Paul: Apostle of Grace by Frank Thielman. “In this fresh and engaging survey, Frank Thielman introduces readers to the life and world of the apostle Paul. Drawing on the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s canonical letters as well as noncanonical sources and archaeological records, Thielman constructs a vivid picture of the complex historical period and fascinating cultures in which Paul worked. At the same time, Thielman guides readers toward a deeper understanding of who Paul was, what he believed, and how he carried out his ministry. Solidly grounded in Paul’s own writings as well as scholarly research, the book explores a wide range of compelling questions. … Addressing these questions through careful and conservative research, Paul, Apostle of Grace is a worthy successor to F.F. Bruce’s classic study and an essential resource for scholars and students of the Bible today.” (Buy it at Amazon or Westminster Books)
The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory by Robert S. Smith. “Understand society’s shifts in thinking and talking about sex and gender; Discover how biological sex guides gender; Recognize how the Bible speaks to gender and transgender; Respond to affirming interpretations of Scripture; Answer gender confusion with clarity and compassion. In The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory, Robert S. Smith argues that God intends a person’s gender to be grounded in the reality of his or her biological sex―the body God has given. In making his case, Smith critiques the central claim of transgender theory: that the sexed body does not determine the gendered self. He also evaluates contemporary changes in thought and speech about sex and gender, responding to modern confusion with biblical conviction and compassion. God speaks clearly, both in his word and in his world.” (Buy it at Amazon or Westminster Books)
Disrupted Journey: Walking with Your Loved One Through Chronic Pain and Illness by Nate Brooks. “When your loved one’s life is wracked by illness, your life changes too. This honest, deeply personal book helps readers to biblically process their own upended lives, relationships, and spiritual walk. Whether you’re a parent, spouse, child, or friend, when your loved one’s life is wracked by illness and pain, your life changes too. This honest, deeply personal book helps caregivers and companions of hurting people to process their own upended lives, relationships, and spiritual walk—while keeping their gaze on the comfort and hope offered by Scripture.” (Buy it at Amazon or Westminster Books)
Good News at Rock Bottom: Finding God When the Pain Goes Deep and Hope Seems Lost by Ray Ortlund. “We all long for a life worth living. So when we receive news of a frightening diagnosis, suffer heartbreaking loss in our family life, or get trapped in a cycle of our own sin, we might wonder about God. Where is he when we need him most? With wisdom from Isaiah 57:15, Good News at Rock Bottom helps readers discover that Jesus is hard to find in the comfortable lives we prefer. Instead, he meets us at rock bottom―where he is waiting for us with open arms. With grace and empathy, author Ray Ortlund opens a door for readers to go deeper with God and get closer to faithful friends when life is hard to bear. You will discover that, at rock bottom, Jesus is more satisfying than any comfortable life without him.” (Buy it at Amazon or Westminster Books)
Romans: The Glory of the Gospel by Lydia Brownback. This is the newest volume in Brownback’s excellent Flourish series which many of the ladies in our church are using. “Why is Romans considered the greatest letter ever written? In this New Testament epistle, the apostle Paul provides the clearest explanation of the gospel and the eternal hope for a humanity marred by sin and death. Through King Jesus, God reveals his righteousness, redeems his people from their sins, and unlocks the floodgates of his mercy. In this 10-week Bible study for women, Lydia Brownback examines Romans verse by verse to explore how God works through his Son and in the hearts of his people. Written for individuals or groups, each lesson helps women understand important doctrines of the faith, such as justification, propitiation, and redemption, on a practical and accessible level.” (Buy it at Amazon or Westminster Books)
Fake Christianity: 10 Traps of an Inauthentic Faith (and How to Avoid Them) by Jed Coppenger. “Fake Christianity is deceptive and deadly. And, unfortunately, it’s very much alive today. We can easily recognize problems and hypocrisy around us. But it takes humility and courage to face the error and deception within us. With a pastoral heart, Jed Coppenger shows us how unnoticed hypocrisy, like prayerlessness, neglect of the Bible, gossip, bitterness, and every form of ungodliness, compromise our heart and weaken our Christian witness. In Fake Christianity, Coppenger looks to the teachings of Jesus that address a culture remarkably like our own. He exposes ten traps of inauthentic faith and provides a gospel-centric response. The best way to tell a fake thing is to look at the real thing. That’s true when looking at gems. It’s also true of the Christian life. If we want to understand what’s true and good, we must look to Jesus. And we must listen to Him.” (Buy it at Amazon)
War of Words: Getting to the Heart of Your Communication Struggles (Second Edition) by Paul David Tripp. “Underneath the normality of daily speech lies a great struggle—a war of words with high stakes and life-changing consequences. With characteristic vulnerability and Christ-centeredness, Paul Tripp shows that the gospel can utterly transform the way we communicate. The Word made flesh offers us hope for our words—giving us the power to speak words that restore, words that heal, words that bring life. In our war, the Lord Jesus is the one who gives us the victory. With the aid of personal assessments and discussion questions, use this incisive book to renew your reliance on your heavenly Father’s abundant grace and better pursue speech that honors Christ and benefits others.” (Buy it at Amazon or Westminster Books)
Pastoral Theology: The Pastor in the Various Duties of His Office by Thomas Murphy. “Whether newly ordained or nearly retired, every pastor will benefit from the wise counsel of this book. Based in part on his experience as a pastor for over twenty-five years, and in part from his notes from Archibald Alexander’s Princeton Seminary class on pastoral ministry, Thomas Murphy sets forth the duties of the pastor in expansive and practical detail. Though written twelve years after the end of the US Civil War, this work remains relevant. The chapters on the pastor in his closet and the pastor in his study are alone worth the price of the book.” (Buy it at Westminster Books)
Walking in God’s Will: Demystify God’s Plan for Your Life and Make Decisions with Confidence by Costi W. Hinn. “Do you feel paralyzed by major life decisions because you’re afraid of missing God’s plan for your life? Do you wonder how God’s will works in tandem with your choices, experiences, and desires? In this timeless guidebook, pastor and Bible teacher Costi Hinn offers readers an expansive map of what Scripture says about God’s will. As you read, you’ll learn to overcome common decision-making cripplers, distinguish God’s voice from your own, and experience peace, joy, and confidence with each life choice, big or small. Whether you’re praying through a specific decision or simply curious about how God’s providence works, Walking in God’s Will is the book for you.” (Buy it at Amazon)
Colossians, Volume 44A: Second Edition (44) (Word Biblical Commentary) by Clinton E. Arnold. “The Word Biblical Commentary series delivers the best in biblical scholarship, from the leading scholars of our day who share a commitment to Scripture as divine revelation. This series emphasizes a thorough analysis of textual, linguistic, structural, and theological evidence. The result is judicious and balanced insight into the meanings of the text in the framework of biblical theology. These widely acclaimed commentaries serve as exceptional resources for the professional theologian and instructor, the seminary or university student, the working minister, and everyone concerned with building theological understanding from a solid base of biblical scholarship.” This new second edition comes with a wide range of endorsements: Thomas Schreiner, Constantine Campbell, Eckhard Schnabel, and so on. (Buy it at Amazon)
Drive Through the Bible: A 30-Day Journey by Colin Smith. “The Old Testament. The New Testament. Proverbs and Psalms. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. When traveling, we rely heavily on maps and navigation systems to take us through the countryside and to our destination. Drive Through the Bible is a 30-session guided tour that explores the beautiful and treacherous landscape of the entire Bible story. With the pastoral guidance of Colin Smith, this book brings you into the valleys of the Old Testament, the peaks of the glory of Jesus, and the ups and downs of the Christian life. This journey spans thousands of years, but its simple, guided approach makes it feel like a quick drive up the road.” (Buy it at Amazon)
A La Carte (March 28)
Today’s Kindle deals include a few noteworthy titles like MacArthur’s From Ordinary to Extraordinary and Thorne’s Walking with Domestic Abuse Sufferers. On the general market side there’s a Malcolm Gladwell book that’s a fun read. Also, I have it on good authority that April is going to be an epic month for Kindle deals, so consider following my dedicated accounts on X (@challiesdeals) or Facebook (Challies Deals).
Logos users, be sure to take a look at the final Logos March Matchup deals before they’re gone. Deals go as high as 60% off.
This article considers IVF and helps Christians think well about it. “The rightful ache for a child of one’s own that we and so many others share with Hannah is a key reason why reproductive technologies like IVF were developed. Trump’s executive order appropriately recognizes the importance of family and the government’s role in helping promote and support the bearing and rearing of children. However…”
Simon Arscott considers a little word that is of outsized importance.
Because of Christ’s death and resurrection, we live in an age of life, redemption and hope. One of the ways we can stay grounded in this truth is reading about Christ’s work on the cross. For gospel-centered books and products, check out the Christian bookstore 21Five! Their Easter collection is 10% off and contains a variety of affordable devotionals, books and children’s titles! (Sponsored)
“Television shows and movies are like sermons. They teach. They illustrate. They exhort. They persuade. The productions that possess a conviction beyond profit have a truth they mean to impart, an impulse they mean to cultivate, a reflex they mean to train.”
Brianna Lambert: “How has God shaped your loves? I’m not talking about all the activities you think you should be doing. Though it’s tempting, we don’t want to be driven by aesthetics like I was in my own childish career aspirations asking: How can we impress? What looks good? Once we throw off this noise, we’ll find the gifts of our Maker.”
This is a good outline of what’s involved in preparing and delivering a sermon.
Robb Brunansky outlines three of the ways conflict is harmful to the church. “Since we cannot avoid church conflict, we need to know how to handle it biblically in order to resolve it in a way that honors Christ and preserves the unity of His body.”
It is no small thing to allow ourselves to be wronged and then to meekly suffer the consequences. It may be one of the greatest challenges we are ever called to face. Yet we can be equal to the challenge if we take hold of the grace God offers us.
When God’s Word isn’t internalized, it becomes trivialized in the practical moments of life.
—Sam Luce & Hunter Williams
Does God Withdraw His Presence from Me?
Audio Transcript
On Monday we heard from Elina, who wrote to express her struggle with feeling like an outsider to the faith, treating the Bible as literature and Christianity as a social culture without a personal relationship with Christ. She asked how she can move from this place of spiritual detachment into a genuine relationship with Christ and a close walk with God. This is a very common question we get every day now. How can I have a genuine relationship with God? How do you get one? How do you keep one? And as you develop this relationship with God, you can expect to meet another question, eventually: Why does God sometimes withdraw his presence from us?
This topic of abandonment comes up as we wrap up our Bible reading for the month of March. Maybe you’re still catching up. That’s what I love about the grace period in the Navigators Bible Reading Plan. Those final days of the month are when you can catch up. I know a lot of you also appreciate that feature that helps encourage you along, month by month. Well, if you are caught up with the March readings, you will know that we just read two interesting texts that seem to conflict with one another. On the 25th, we read the promise that God will never leave us nor forsake us, in Matthew 28:20. But on the 22nd, we read the psalmist cry out to God, “Don’t leave me” (see Psalm 69:17). So, does God abandon us sometimes, or not?
This question about desertion is a big one. Pastor John joins us over the telephone to take this question from Mikala, who writes in: “Pastor John, hello and thank you for taking my question. In an early episode of APJ” — way back in APJ 19, over twelve years ago — “you said that God sometimes withdraws his presence from us. How does that not contradict God’s new-covenant promise to us that he will never leave us nor forsake us in Hebrews 13:5?”
I love that kind of question because, to me, the best questions are how things fit together. What’s helped me most, I think, in my study of the Bible is seeing when things seem not to fit together, seem contradictory, and then — instead of walking away from the Bible and assuming, Well, it’s a bunch of double-talk — digging down to the root so they come together. Then you realize, Oh, these two plants are not opposites; they have the same roots. I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.
The New-Covenant Promise
First, we need to think about kinds of presence of the Lord. The Bible talks about different kinds of his presence. For example, most of us would agree that God is omnipresent. There’s no place where he’s not. Paul said, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). He’s quoting a pagan poet there to agree that, yes, everybody is in God, held in being by God. And Jeremiah 23:24 says, “Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him?” God is talking. “Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord.” So, I think the first and most basic sense that we need to talk about is this: He’s everywhere. God is omnipresent, including in the lives of believers and unbelievers, holding them in being, knowing all that they do firsthand.
“There is a presence of God, a keeping, that will never fail for God’s elect, for those who are in Christ.”
And then Mikala points out — and she’s absolutely right — there is this special presence, which she calls the “new-covenant promise” of God’s presence. In Hebrews 13:5, it says, “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’” Or we could go to Matthew 28:20: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Or we could go to 2 Corinthians 4:9: “[I am] persecuted, but not forsaken.” So, you’ve got these New Testament, new-covenant promises that God is never ever going to abandon or leave his people.
The one I love most is Jeremiah 32:40, where it goes over the top and says, “I will make with them an everlasting covenant” — this is now the new covenant — “that I will not turn away from doing good to them.” And then he adds, “And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.” This new-covenant promise is not only that God won’t walk away from us; he won’t let us walk away from him. So, I want to say to Mikala, yes, yes, yes, yes! She’s right that there is a presence of God, a keeping, a staying-with, that will never fail for God’s elect, for those who are in Christ.
The Old Testament View
But (here’s what she picked up on) there is another way that the Bible talks about the presence of God. Psalm 69:17: “Hide not your face from your servant, for I am in distress; make haste to answer me.” His sense is that God is distant, that God is hiding from him. Or Psalm 143:7: “Answer me quickly, O Lord! My spirit fails! Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit.” Or Isaiah 64:7: “There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us [your covenant people], and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.”
Now, when I read these, it occurs to me that Mikala might say, or others might say, “Wait a minute, those are Old Testament prayers. Maybe the saints had to pray like that in the Old Testament. ‘Don’t hide your face from me. Don’t go away from me.’ But we are new-covenant people; would we ever pray like that?” And there are a couple of problems with that objection. One is that, in the very text that Mikala quoted, where it says, “The Lord has said, I will be with you; I will not leave you” (see Hebrews 13:5), it is quoting from Joshua 1:5. So, he’s quoting an old-covenant promise and applying it to New Testament believers.
And the other problem is that the Old Testament abounds with promises to God’s people that he won’t forsake them. First Samuel 12:22: “The Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake.” Psalm 37:28: “The Lord loves justice; he will not forsake his saints.” Psalm 23:4 (we all love Psalm 23): “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” In other words, even in the worst of horrible, dark times, my Shepherd is with me. Those are Old Testament statements.
The Manifest Presence of God
So, here’s my answer to her question. The old Puritans put it all together by talking about the manifest presence of God. And they were using that phrase manifest — the experienced, known, tasted presence of God — to distinguish it from the omnipresence of God and from the covenant-keeping presence of God, which may or may not be experienced intensely from time to time. I think this is really, really helpful.
In other words, sometimes God withdraws his presence from us. That’s the statement I made that Mikala stumbled over. She said, “How can that be?” When I say that sometimes God withdraws his presence from us, I don’t mean that we are forsaken by our covenant God. I mean that the manifestations of his presence are limited. He doesn’t withdraw his covenant commitment to us or his sustaining grace from us. What he withdraws is the sweetness of his fellowship from time to time, or the conscious sense of his power. And he has his reasons for doing this. I think maybe there would be another time for us to talk about that. But surely, one of his reasons is to make us feel our desperate need for him so that we fly to Christ and to the cross, where we hear the covenant promise afresh.
A La Carte (March 27)
May the Lord be with you and bless you today.
Today’s Kindle deals include a book for moms, a book for men, and several other good picks as well like a helpful book on personal finance.
(Yesterday on the blog: Are You Binding the Wound or Aggravating It?)
Joe Carter: “Most pastors and church leaders know exactly what to do when members face a health crisis or the loss of loved ones, but we’re often less equipped to address unemployment. In a culture where ‘What do you do?’ is typically the first question we ask on meeting someone new, the loss of employment can feel like the loss of self. We need to do a better job of acknowledging that unemployment isn’t merely an economic hardship but a spiritual problem that often triggers a profound identity crisis.”
“I don’t know what God’s doing, but I feel like He’s calling me to do something. What does Jesus want me to do?” Most people ask these questions at one time or another. Here’s some guidance on answering them.
Jacob celebrates his messy house and what it means.
Casey McCall laments what he sees as a rise of a Nietzschean form of Christianity. “Professing Christians—mainly online—are presenting a twisted version of Christianity that champions Nietzschean values in the name of Christ. Every week, I encounter online personalities using the name of Jesus in pursuit of Nietzschean ideals and goals.”
Rachel calls us to stop and marvel at the wonder of the local church.
“MrBeast not only seems to have missed the social critiques of Squid Game but has taken them one step further and inverted them. Beast Games doesn’t challenge greed, materialism, or predatory entertainment. It revels in them. Despite being billed as clean fun for the whole family, it teaches a twisted message: The love of money is the root of great entertainment.”
The way your church allocates its financial resources tells so much about what you value most and about what you mean to accomplish in the name of Jesus Christ. A healthy church will demonstrate health in its finances.
You cannot be a perfect mom, but you can be a prayerful mom.
—Melissa Kruger
Story Time with Uncle Jimmy: The Acts of Paul and Thecla
As promised on today’s program I read through The Acts of Paul and Thecla, commented on the Orthodox veneration of Thecla as a saint and “equal of the Apostles,” and what we can learn about the context of the origination of this apocryphal mythology from the second century. By the way, here is the article I mentioned from the OCA website about Thecla.