The moment we bow the knee to Jesus, that ghastly spirit of self-fulfillment, which claws and gnaws at our souls, howling “Mine be the glory!” flees back to the hell from which it came. In its place comes sanity, joy, and a peace that transcends every pain and trial. What a happy prayer to pray: “Lord Jesus, thine be the glory!”

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.  — Matthew 6:13 (KJV)

The splintering pain at the core of every human being, and which today is felt more acutely than ever in the West, is precisely the pain of the square peg being bashed into the round hole.
We were designed and crafted to praise Jesus Christ with our bodies and souls. If Jesus is God’s Son, the beautiful Universal King and Savior, then it’s impossible to conceive of a higher, happier, and more expansive purpose. He is worthy of our praise, and it is a delight to give it.
Yet, we insist on battering ourselves into the cramped cavity of self-fulfillment. This leaves us bruised, brittle, and spiritually exhausted.
The doxology after the Lord’s Prayer is a perfectly biblical and correct thing to pray.
The traditional ending of the Lord’s Prayer is not found in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament.[1] A pious scribe, copying Matthew’s Gospel by hand, perhaps could not help adding the doxology after the Lord’s Prayer. It is generally accepted that it is taken from David’s prayer to God in 1 Chronicles 29 where David says similar words.
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The New Testament books are about fulfillment, about promises kept. As Augustine put it, “the Old is in the New revealed.” The climax of the Old Testament is the New Testament. Mysteries are declared, and shadows are swallowed by light. Christians are New Covenant members, yes. But New Covenant believers must not be only New Testament people. We must be whole-Bible people!

A Christian reading of Scripture affirms that the biblical authors do not tell us everything everywhere all at once. Things build, and that takes time. The doctrine of Scripture includes the teaching of progressive revelation.
The Story of God’s redemptive plan is a long story, encompassing sixty-six books and unfolding across millennia. Told in two Testaments, the biblical story is from a Divine Author who has inspired the writings we read therein. Growth in understanding the Scripture will mean paying attention to how the Old and New Testaments relate. Furthermore, the relationship between the two Testaments is a major interest in the task of doing biblical theology—and you know we care about that task here at this site.
Have you ever read Augustine’s famous statement about how the Old and New Testaments connect? He said, “The New is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed” (Questions on the Heptateuch, 2.73).
Augustine’s words concisely describe what Christians call “the unity” of Scripture and its “progressive revelation.”
The Old Testament contains prophecies and patterns of Christ. It contains the mystery of the church and the plan of God to bring the nations to salvation through the work of his Son. In other words, the Old Testament conceals the New.
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Friday, September 30, 2022
…the reality of the Christian life lived by the reality of the indwelling Spirit would suffer. As that reality was diluted evangelicalism kept up the appearances of true spirituality, the Christian life, by external means of organization and methods. It became more fashionable to talk and teach about Christian truth using the world’s categories as Christian truth began to be practiced according to naturalistic methods. In time this changed the ethos within evangelicalism even while the doctrinal statements remained the same. Quantitative replaced qualitative, image superseded substance, emotionalism supplanted theology, cultural relevance snubbed objective truth, while social action masqueraded as faithfulness to Christ.

Francis Schaeffer notes that by the latter half of the 20th naturalism had captivated much of the thinking in the west. In chapter five of True Spirituality he writes: “Our generation is overwhelmingly naturalistic. There is an almost complete commitment to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.” The basic assumption of naturalism is that all that exists is the material world, that everything can be explained by a series of biological, chemical causal chain. Unfortunately, this thinking began to seep into evangelicalism as well. Schaeffer writes: “Surely this is one of the greatest, and perhaps the greatest reason for a loss of reality: that while we say we believe one thing, we allow the spirit of naturalism of the age to creep into our thinking, unrecognized” (255).  When Schaeffer says “we”, he is speaking of evangelical Christians. He concludes that “little by little, many Christians in this generation find the reality slipping away. The reality tends to get covered by the barnacles of naturalistic thought” (263).
This explains why he thought naturalism was a real threat to the Christian way of life as it demeaned the unseen side of reality. One must understand that according to Christian teaching, reality consists of both the seen and the unseen (II Cor 4:18).  It is a fact that the actuality of the Incarnation brought these two inextricable aspects of reality into full view (Jn 1:18). However, as the American Enlightenment rolled into the 20th century, the champions of naturalism started to divide total reality (seen and unseen) into two separate parts where the unseen was separated from physical reality. Eventually, many, especially in the American secular academy and scientific community denied the unseen aspect of reality altogether.
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