The Devoted Mind
The purpose of Lundgaard’s book is to draw our attention to the Beloved—to the triune God. It is to draw our attention to Him, not so we can admire Him from a safe and comfortable distance, but so we can truly draw near to Him.
We make a lot of all the distractions that come with life in the modern, always-on, electronic world. And certainly it can be hard to have minds that remain focused for any significant stretch of time before the next beep, the next buzz, the next little burst of dopamine. Yet we do not need to look far into the annals of church history to find that distraction—and especially the kind of distraction that keeps us from being spiritually minded—has always been a challenge and that God’s people have always had to take action against it.
Centuries ago, John Owen wrote a book about issues like this. The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded is not one of his better-known works, though perhaps it should be. But there is a legitimate concern when it comes to reading it today: while Owen’s works were never particularly easy to read, the intervening years have made them harder still. Some of his language has become antiquated and many of his illustrations have become opaque. Thankfully, Kris Lundgaard has done us a service by bringing the best of Owen’s old work into modern times in The Devoted Mind. This is the third time Lungaard has done this with Owen’s books, with the others being The Enemy Within and The Glorious Christ (the first two of which have just been reprinted so the trio now has a consistent and contemporary cover design).
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Well Done, Good and Faithful Servant
Belz, as much as anyone in his life, exemplified a key aspect of Reformed heritage: the interwoven strands of doctrine, piety, and witness. “It’s tempting for those three strands to become unraveled. Some people seem to be all about doctrine, or all about the spiritual life, or all about cultural engagement,” Niel Nielsen said. “Belz held those together. So for the church, the denomination, and especially the Covenant community, he represented the best of Reformed faith and life and faithfulness.”
Joel Belz, founder of WORLD News Group, died Sunday at his home in Asheville, N.C., from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 82.
Those who knew Belz esteemed him as an exemplary son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, elder, teacher, journalist, and publisher. He saw himself as nothing more than a great sinner who had received great mercy.
“Just as it is for every sinner, mine is a story of what God has done for me—not what I have done for Him,” Belz wrote in 2021 in his WORLD Magazine column.
Belz was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 1941, the second of eight children of Max and Jean Belz. His parents prioritized Christian education for their children.
“Daily reading and Bible classes were assumed,” Belz wrote of his childhood. “We took notes on the sermons we heard. And we memorized Scripture—so that all these years later, 20 or more entire Psalms are still stashed away in my increasingly Parkinson’s-wobbly memory.”
Belz’s father was a third-generation grain, lumber, and coal dealer in central Iowa, though he later attended seminary and became a Presbyterian pastor. As a child, Belz joined his dad at annual meetings of the Bible Presbyterian Church, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. Belz attended Cono Christian School, which his father helped found, and later graduated from Covenant College with a degree in English. He earned a master’s degree in mass communications and journalism from the University of Iowa. In between, he did research and traveled internationally for the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation.
Belz taught logic and English at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., briefly before helping to found Lookout Mountain Christian School across the border in Tennessee, which still operates today as Chattanooga Christian School. For decades, Belz served as a board member of Covenant College. Niel Nielson spent 10 years at Covenant as president and worked closely with Belz. Nielson said Belz, as much as anyone in his life, exemplified a key aspect of Reformed heritage: the interwoven strands of doctrine, piety, and witness.
“It’s tempting for those three strands to become unraveled. Some people seem to be all about doctrine, or all about the spiritual life, or all about cultural engagement,” Nielsen said. “Belz held those together. So for the church, the denomination, and especially the Covenant community, he represented the best of Reformed faith and life and faithfulness.”
In 1975, Belz married Carol Esther Jackson, and the couple raised five daughters. In 1977, Belz moved his family to Asheville to work for The Presbyterian Journal, a publication for theologically conservative Presbyterians where he later became interim editor.
Belz believed Christian education was a key to the believer’s life. His involvement at Asheville Christian Academy lasted beyond his youngest child’s graduation. Evidence stands two stories tall at the center of the campus, a building that now houses a reception area, cafeteria, and offices. Head of School Bill George says Belz’s foresight saved the day years ago when other decision-makers wanted to drop plans to construct the space. Belz insisted they finish the outer structure but leave the completion of the interior and the fundraising to the next generation. It sat vacant for years, but now George sees the wisdom in Belz’s determination to forge ahead. He describes Belz, who also served as an elder at his church, as a great counselor and older brother type, one who kept his head on straight even as his accomplishments grew. “There wasn’t a saccharine sort of fakeness with Belz,” George said. “He was the same whether he was in front of an audience of a thousand or just sitting across the table having a cup of coffee with you.”
In 1981, Belz, as he continued to work for The Presbyterian Journal, combined his journalistic experience with his background in education to launch It’s God’s World, a newspaper for middle school students. He later added papers for other age groups. After the student publications received a warm welcome from many families and Christian schools, he received requests for an adult version covering news and current events. Belz then oversaw WORLD Magazine’s launch in March 1986.
“For the next five years, the goal was survival,” Belz wrote in a 1997 WORLD column. “Could we publish one more edition? Could we pay one more week’s postage bills? Could we meet salaries one more time? Yet, during a period when 80–90 percent of all periodicals flunk the test of durability, God let WORLD survive.”
But Belz didn’t know, during those first few months, if the magazine would last. With only 5,000 subscribers, The Presbyterian Journals’ board canceled the new publication in June 1986 after only 13 issues.
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The Power of Song and Testimony in Church Tradition
Our churches need to sing songs of the good news of our great redemption in Christ and the hope that we have because of that truth. However, we also need to sing songs of sojourning in our gatherings to train believers how to walk as pilgrims through this barren land with an enduring faith in God.
The seeds of my faith were sown in a little red brick church building found on a sharp bend of an oil-topped road in East Texas. To the eye that cares more about impressive appearances than anything else, that place is just another little church building, on another country road, in another small town, in the middle of nowhere. If you are looking for a place that depends on impressive, multi-syllabic theological terms, proper light temperatures, and musical builds into thunderous bridges attempting to express deep, abiding faith, then you took a wrong turn somewhere. By these superficial characteristics, it would seem like that red brick church building couldn’t possibly be the soil for spiritual growth.
But it was there–in that little church building—that I heard the gospel of Jesus proclaimed every week. It was there that I was taught to love the Word of God, under the instruction of my favorite Sunday School teacher—my mother. It was there that I heard my dad and other deacons pray and sing “with their chest” as they led us in our devotional period to open our services, showing me that men could lead with deep resolve and display deep emotion in worship. It was there that I learned the value of having older saints around who could testify to the goodness of God. It was there that doctrines of the sovereignty and providence of God—words that I later learned and had to define in seminary—were living, experienced realities. It was there that I learned that God is not a concept to be examined but a person to be worshipped, adored, delighted in, and trusted.
It was in that little red brick church that I learned the power of songs of sojourning and shared testimony. These were a means of reminding of the goodness of God, inviting others to share in our joy and resolute faith in that goodness, and strengthening the faith of those who were having a hard time holding on to faith because of the persistent and unrelenting presence of suffering. I later learned through studying the Scriptures that these rhythms and practices of song and testimony were part of the spiritual diet of God’s people throughout the generations. These rhythms and practices have been critical for my own growth and steadfastness in the faith.
Songs of Sojourning
I recently spent time with a friend who, like me, grew up in a historic black church in the south. As we reminisced about what it was like growing up in that environment and what got instilled in us there, I realized that while we grew up a little over 1,000 miles away from each other, we shared a spiritual hymn book, a heritage passed to us from the generation before us. We both had our seasons of drifting and hardship in young adulthood, and when things became unbearably difficult, our souls turned to the same collection of songs to stabilize and strengthen our faith.
Those songs were sojourning songs. By sojourning songs, I mean songs that tell the narrative of how God meets with, walks with, and sustains his people through the various hardships of life. These songs are part testimony and part prayer, training our hearts to look for and trust God in uncertainty, songs that instill an expectant longing for the fulfillment of all of his promises to us.
Most Sunday mornings, the deacons would come out to open the service with a devotional period where they would pray for the gathering, as we responded by singing lined hymns together in the call-and-response style that is rooted in the Black church. I loved (and still do) when those first lines rang out,
Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,Pilgrim through this barren land
That would be followed by the congregation’s response as we recounted the story of the exodus and asked God to be with us on our own sojourn through this “barren land” on our way to the promised land of the new Jerusalem. My favorite line in the hymn, the one that resonated with me most and brought tears to my eyes as I belt it out to this day, is:
Strong Deliverer, Strong DelivererBe thou still my strength and shield.
I think it was in those lines that I learned that part of God’s unchanging character was that of a strong deliverer. The request to “be thou still,” was a request for God to show up again to protect and deliver me when things got rough. It is a reminder to my doubting heart and an act of defiance against the surrounding circumstances to call on and expect God to be that for me again. It was another seed of faith sown into the soil of my soul.
On most of the Sundays of my childhood, that deacon-led devotional period was followed by the choir singing Albert A. Goodson’s “We’ve Come This Far By Faith.”
We’ve come this far by faith,Leaning on the Lord.Trusting in his holy word.He’s never failed us yet.Oh, oh-, oh- can’t turn around,We’ve come this far by faith.
There is a point in everyone’s journey of faith where the road gets rough, and you can’t see how the Lord is going to get you through. There is an internal alarm that goes off in your soul, saying, “Abandon ship! The journey is too hard this way. Surely there has to be a better way. Surely you can find a self-salvation strategy to get you through.” But I was reminded yet again that the only way that we have even gotten this far is through faith—leaning on the Lord and trusting in his holy Word. He has never failed us, and because he is unchanging, always faithful, and always working all things together for our good, we can trust him with our next step and all the way home.
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When the City of Man Creaks
Written by A.W. Workman |
Tuesday, January 10, 2023
When the city of man begins to creak and groan we may naturally feel a good deal of fear or disorientation. I don’t think there’s any way around this. But this creaking is also an opportunity for humility, for renewed faith in the New Jerusalem, and for identification with the historical and global Church. In this way, no matter if the cracks get worse or if they get patched, we will be able to maintain hope, to serve our brothers and sisters and even the perishing, and to point to what is coming.Eating out just hasn’t felt worth it these past couple months that we’ve been back in the US. While restaurants in the states are open again, most are understaffed and alarmingly expensive. The lack of staff usually means pretty poor service, and even the quality of food usually strikes us as not what it used to be. Hearing others in the US voice similar sentiments means it’s not just those of us who have been living overseas who notice these differences. The food service industry is creaking, trying to lurch back to what it was before the pandemic. There is this sense that—convenience though it is—we can’t count it like we used to.
Food service is not the only system struggling to regain its pre-pandemic efficiency. International air travel has still not recovered either. We’ve never had the kind of travel difficulties that we’ve experienced over this past year. Even business behemoths like Amazon seem past their, ahem, prime. More seriously, crime has also skyrocketed in many American cities, with the understanding in some places that if you are the victim of certain crimes, you are on your own.
The strange thing about all this for highly-educated millennials like us is that we’ve hardly ever known the systems around us to get worse, perhaps with the exception of our elected government. By and large, we’ve only known the infrastructure and services offered in the West to (eventually) get faster, more efficient, and more user-friendly. This was also the worldview of our parents’ generation. Progress in the systems we rely on for life necessities or conveniences has been assumed. The pandemic and its aftermath have challenged this assumption and, whether temporary or long-term, the systems around us are showing their weakness.
Systems don’t last forever. The prophecy of the twelve eagles was right—Rome would fall. The Roman legions would leave places like Britain in 409 and never come back. Which meant the structures of empire that the Romanized residents of Londinium (London) relied upon would have slowly but surely broken down. A thousand years later the Portuguese would successfully sail to India – thereby causing the economic collapse of the Central Asian silk road. Trade routes that were kept safe by the wealth and power of regional regimes would become frequented by violent robbers and be slowly abandoned by the caravans. Empires rise. Empires decline. At some point a certain generation realizes that things are breaking faster than they can be repaired, and life is likely going to get a lot worse before it someday gets better.
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