Jesus Is the Light of the World… and So Are We
Jesus exposed a lot of things that had been in the dark for a long time. He shined the light on the hypocrisy of the religious leaders of the day. He refused to accept half-hearted devotion to becoming a true follower of God. He called sin “sin” and He extended love and truth with His whole self. But Jesus not only called Himself the light of the world; He passed the responsibility of lighting the world to His Followers.
It’s been said by many wise fathers to their kids that nothing good happens after midnight. The dark is when people get in trouble; it’s when we tend to lose our inhibitions and caution. That’s because we, as humans, were made to live in the light.
If you’ve ever worked the night shift, you know how difficult it is to adjust your internal clock; you have to relearn how to live and even when you do, everything seems opposite of what it should be. That’s because you are going against the natural inclination in you to live and move and work in the light.
Jesus told His followers, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12), and of course, He was. But why did He choose the light to compare Himself to? A lot of reasons, but maybe the most important involves the purpose of light.
In that day and time, light wasn’t meant to decorate a house; no one had a lamp sitting around because it looked pretty. Light was about utility and work; it existed in a limited supply and it was important that a person made the most of the time they had while the light was still shining. That’s because in the light, we can truly see, and can know the true nature of what’s before us.
When a lamp is lit in a darkened room, there is immediate clarity there. Without the light, there is mystery, apprehension, and fear; you can’t truly identify where or what anything is. But with light comes revelation – the light reveals the true nature of what is and what is not. It shows you that a chair is not a bed and the monster knocking on the window is really just the rain.
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Don’t Just Be an Expert in What Things Don’t Mean
Let’s refuse to be those who only know what the Bible doesn’t mean, and let’s find out what it actually means. God’s word is profitable, even those verses that are misunderstood and abused. I’m glad I dug in to learn what Philippians 4:13 meant. It is incredibly encouraging, and I want more to be strengthened and satisfied in Christ alone through it. So let’s be a people who love to know our God and live on every word that comes from His mouth.
In our study of Philippians, I got a chance to teach Philippians 4:10-13. As it is when you dig into God’s word, I was very encouraged to consider Paul’s Christian contentment in every circumstance. And then… there was that verse. You know… the one. The verse that makes it into every pre-game speech and every pre-test declaration. The one that makes you roll your eyes. Even without saying it, you know which one I’m talking about. And you definitely know what it doesn’t mean. And as I was studying it, I had a list of about ten things that it didn’t mean. But here’s the problem: I had to teach that verse. I couldn’t just be an expert in what it didn’t mean. I needed to know what it actually meant.
It is really easy to be an expert in what things don’t mean. I hear that verse, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13), and I immediately have my defenses up. My mind says, “That’s not what that means!” But unfortunately, that’s normally where it stops. All I’ve done is to discard a false idea, while failing to replace it with a true one. That’s the danger of only being an expert in what things don’t mean.
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Faith, Family, and Church Community See Jeff and Mariah through the Challenges of Aphasia
Written by The Mary A. Rackham Institute |
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
“One of his therapists made a very good synopsis, describing someone’s brain before aphasia being a neatly categorized file box but after a stroke, everything gets thrown about and put back in,” Mariah said. “The retrieval part of words that Jeff is trying to communicate is being thwarted.” “It wasn’t until towards the end of his therapy there that we realized, other than miraculous intervention, Jeff would never be able to preach again. This was very hard to wrap our minds around,” shared Mariah.Chapter 1
Jeff Windt enjoyed preaching and working with local families. The tools of his trade were words. For years, Jeff had been a pillar in his community. He was a leader at Second Presbyterian Church [PCA] in Greenville, South Carolina, where he served as the Assistant Minister of Youth and Families for four years. Leading youth groups and bringing people together had always been a passion of Jeff’s. He also has a family of his own, three young boys and a wife, Mariah.
Then, everything changed one night in June 2020. At 44 years old, Jeff had an acute ischemic stroke at home. Ischemic strokes are the most common type of stroke, accounting for nearly 90% of stroke incidents each year.
“I heard Jeff’s phone hit the bathroom floor with a smack,” said Mariah Windt, Jeff’s wife. “That was a bit alarming because it was a brand new phone he had purchased the day before.”
Mariah said Jeff had come home from work that evening and complained of having a headache, but that he seemed normal — for him. She asked him what had happened with the phone, repeating the question when he didn’t respond. He just shook his head and said ‘I don’t know,’” she recalled. “It was a little odd but I didn’t dwell on it.”A Night They’ll Never Forget, Even Though They Wish They Could
The family sat down and ate dinner together. During dinner, Jeff seemed to be acting normal. After dinner, while cleaning up, Mariah noticed Jeff pacing about the house. This again seemed odd to Mariah. It was at this point that she started keeping more of an eye on his behavior.
“I was trying not to overreact about the strangeness of his behavior but at the same time I just felt that something was wrong,” she said.
It was then that a friend called Jeff on the phone.
“They were on speaker phone, and I couldn’t really hear the conversation but I did notice that the other person was talking, but Jeff wasn’t really responding back,” she said. “The other person hung up, and when Jeff held his phone to hang up he dropped it in his lap and was having a hard time picking it back up. It was then I knew something was terribly wrong.”
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Machen on the Necessity of Christian Doctrine: An Application of Christianity and Liberalism Chapter 2 (Part 2)
Written by Fred G. Zaspel |
Monday, June 19, 2023
Because of the sinfulness of the human heart the old covenant could not bring about the righteousness it commanded, so God promised a new covenant that would provide both obedience from the heart and forgiveness for sin. What the law could not accomplish, God has accomplished in us through Christ. Led by his Spirit we have a new freedom from sin and a new enablement in overcoming it (Rom. 8:1–15).Having examined J. Gresham Machen’s arguments in chapter two of Christianity and Liberalism, we now turn to reflect on the implications this seminal work has for our own time. While the old modernism is considered dead today, its effects remain. This matter of doctrinal indifferentism in particular has come to characterize much of professed Christianity, even evangelical Christianity. Popular contemporary Christian songs as well as preaching passionately plead that “just Jesus,” or perhaps “the cross,” is all that is important, not doctrines and not our interpretations.[1] The rhetoric has a certain attraction, and it conveys the happy sentiment that our fellowship is, after all, in the Lord Jesus Christ. But the plea is muddle-headed, for as soon as we ask, “Who is Jesus?” or “Why does he matter?” or “Why is the cross important?” we are into Christian doctrine—the very thing said to be unnecessary. Apart from doctrine and clear biblical interpretation, both Jesus and his cross have lost meaning.
Often this indifference to doctrine is just laziness, an aversion to thinking. But the problem goes deeper than ignorance and muddled thinking. The consequences of doctrinal indifference are severe, and much is lost.
Christian Essentials
The fundamental claim of Christianity is that it is a revelation from God. God has revealed himself and his saving purpose, and this revelation is written for us in Scripture. This revelation—this message—is true, and it is every Christian’s responsibility to propagate this truth to others. This “gospel” is to make its way throughout the entire world not by the sword but by word and witness, both spoken and written. Christianity has, first and foremost, a message to be proclaimed, and God’s kingdom makes its saving advance to the nations by this message.
Machen sums up his argument in chapter two in these terms exactly. He cites the words of the risen Jesus, who said just before his ascension, “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). This commission of Jesus to his followers shapes the character of Christianity as founded on a message. “Christianity is based, then, upon an account of something that happened, and the Christian worker is primarily a witness.” From the beginning Christianity has been “a campaign of witnessing,”[2] and the first Christians understood themselves as entrusted with a message. The book of Acts records for us the first stages of this witnessing campaign, and the New Testament epistles are given to the same purpose—the proclamation and exposition of this message.
The Christian obligation to “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) reflects this conviction perhaps more pointedly, even polemically. The Lord Jesus is God’s supreme self-revelation (John 1:1; Heb. 1:1–3; cf. Matt. 17:5; John 7:16; 14:24), and he entrusted this revelation to his apostles (John 14:24–26; 16:12–15; 17:4–8) who by his Spirit received “all truth” (John 16:13; cf. 15:26–27). The word of the apostles is the message from Christ that the world must receive and believe (John 17:8, 18, 20). The apostles, in turn, claim that their message from the Lord Jesus (e.g., 1 Cor. 14:37; 2 Thess. 2:15; 3:6; 1 Pet. 1:12; cf. Eph. 2:20) has been entrusted to the church “once for all” to be proclaimed, preserved, and defended at all costs (cf. 1 Tim. 3:15; 6:20; 2 Tim. 2:2; Jude 3). In short, Christianity is characterized as essentially a doctrinal religion. And its ministers are therefore commanded to devote themselves “to teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13), to “keep a close watch on . . . the teaching” (1 Tim. 4:16), and to give diligence to “rightly handle the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15).
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