But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one dot of the Law to become void.

“But woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and every herb, and neglect justice and the love of God. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others

From Justin Buzzard’s Training Your Children to Love God’s Word: 1 Key Practice]

As parents, especially as dads, it’s important that we train our children to love God’s Word. Here’s the single greatest way I know how to do this:

Show your children every single week of their lives that YOU love God’s Word.

Chances are high that your children will gain a love and appetite for God’s Word if they grow up observing YOUR consistent and highly visible love, delight, hunger, passion, and desire for knowing and enjoying God through the Scriptures.

Start this practice early. Forge good habits now.

• When your son is one week old, hold him as you read your Bible.
• When your home is wild and noisy with two boys under the age of two, consider not escaping to a hidden corner of the home, but instead having your daily time in the Word somewhere within your kids’ line of sight.
• When your kids are too young to understand what you’re saying, still tell them what you’re discovering/learning, what you’re excited about, from your time in the Word.

Show your children every single week of their lives that YOU love God’s Word.

Great quote from Darryl Dash’s interview with Tim Keller Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture: An Interview with Tim Keller

The first “deeper” issue (that faces the Church) is the one that Lloyd-Jones spoke of in his lectures on revivals. He heard people saying, in London in the 1950s, that the solution to the decreasing church attendance and Christian influence in society was better apologetics, more emphasis on church growth or, in the case of the mainline, adapting theology more to the modern mood.

But Lloyd-Jones, of course, believed the need was for spiritual revival. The trouble with naming this is that, unfortunately, in many evangelical circles, especially charismatic ones, “revival” is always said to be the cure-all for our ills. But Lloyd-Jones was thinking of the historic revivals and of a theology of revival of Jonathan Edwards. This means we must, as in all the revivals, recover the gospel of grace.

I agree with Lloyd-Jones on this, but this is a very unpopular view right now in much of the evangelical world. In parts of the Reformed world, Edwards’ view of revival is under attack as individualistic and inimical to the importance of the Church. Oddly, in the emerging church Edwards’ view of revival is unpopular for the same reasons, because of its emphasis on the “individualistic” views of substitutionary atonement, forensic justification and so on.

I think these attacks on (or indifference to) the importance of revival are very wrong. We live in a society in which revival is necessary. As Peter Berger shows in The Heretical Imperative in contemporary pluralistic societies, everyone who believes a faith has to make an individual choice to believe it. There are no longer inherited, authoritative faith traditions. Whether you raise a child Lutheran, Muslim or Baptist the child at some point will have to choose to make the faith of his parents his or her own. In other words, they will have to have a conversion experience.

When revival breaks out through a recovery of the gospel, three things happen:

1. nominal church members realize they’d never been converted;
2. sleepy, lethargic Christians are energized and renewed; o
3. outsider non-Christians are attracted into the beautified worship, community and lives of the converted and renewed church members.

That’s how it works. We need it.

From Scott Thomas, Acts 29 Director’s post One Point Calvinist

Packer said, “The very act of setting out Calvinistic soteriology [the doctrine of salvation] in the form of five distinct points (a number due, as we saw, merely to the fact that there were five Arminian points for the Synod of Dort to answer) tends to obscure the organic character of Calvinistic thought on this subject. For the five points, though separately stated, are inseparable. They hang together; you cannot reject one without rejecting them all, at least in the sense in which the Synod meant them. For to Calvinism there is really only one point to be made in the field of soteriology: the point that God saves sinners.

“God – the Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Spirit; three Persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of Father and Son by renewing.

“Saves – does everything, first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory: plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies.

“Sinners – men as God finds them, guilty, vile, helpless, powerless, unable to lift a finger to do God’s will or better their spiritual lot. God saves sinners – and the force of this confession may not be weakened by disrupting the unity of the work of the Trinity, or by dividing the achievement of salvation between God and man and making the decisive part man’s own, or by soft-pedalling the sinner’s inability so as to allow him to share the praise of his salvation with his Saviour. This is the one point of Calvinistic soteriology which the “five points” are concerned to establish and Arminianism in all its forms to deny: namely, that sinners to not save themselves in any sense at all, but that salvation, first and last, whole and entire, past, present and future, is of the Lord, to whom be glory for ever; amen.”

J.I. Packer, “Introductory Essage,” in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, by John Owen (London: Banner of Truth, 1959) 4-5.

Listen to this

Think about this

“There are churches, and there are pastors, and there are young evangelical leaders who are saying to us, ‘We ought not be single-issue evangelicals. We ought to be concerned about more issues than simply abortion.’ Which means that we ought to be willing to join ourselves and to vote for and to support candidates who will support legalized abortion, who will deny the personhood of children who are still in the womb, because we are able to support them on other issues . . . Many of them are in a desperate quest to say to their congregations and to people potentially in their congregations, ‘I’m not Jerry Falwell.’ And many of them believe that it is missional to speak to people while blunting or silencing a witness about the life of children so that you can reach them with the gospel. . . Some will tell us there are many other issues: economics, global warming—issues I’m very concerned about too. Previous generations have said that as well. Previous generations of preachers have stood in the pulpit and preached until they were red in the face about card-playing and movie-going and tax-policy and personal morality and tobacco-smoking and a thousand other issues, but would not speak to the fact that there were African-American brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus swinging in the trees! And there is judgment of God upon that. And there is here too.”

From Mark Dever via Michael McKinley

The keys to an effective pastorate (normally): Preach and Pray, Love and Stay.

From an older saint at Capital Hill Baptist to Matt Schmucher via Michael McKinley

young men tend to overestimate how much they can accomplish in the short term, but underestimate how much they can accomplish in the long term.

From Mark Dever at the Embrace Baltimore event via Michael McKinley on how can you develop a God-centered church when most of the people attending aren’t mature believers?

1. Prayer
— Specifically, prayer in the public gatherings.
— Prayer makes it clear that God stands at the center of everything we do. Prayer acknowledges that God is in control and that all of the fruit we hope to see comes from God (I Corinthians 3).

2. Set an example of God-centeredness.
— Part of pastoring is modeling. Live a God-centered life and disciple other believers so that they can do the same.

3. Preach the Word of God.
— Because, after all, the Bible is a pretty God-centered book. People will probably catch onto that if you keep preaching the Bible to them.

4. Patience
— God’s timing tends to be different then ours. But since He’s God, let’s go with His timing.

5. Confidence
— We’ve all read the end of the story. God wins.
— The Word of God is very powerful and effective. God uses it. You can trust it and trust Him.
— God loves the church more than you do. He’s more jealous for the love and affection of your people than you are.

Recommended books from Mark Dever, Mike McKinley, and Michael Lawrence as shared with Embrace Baltimore.

Mark Dever

• Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
• Spurgeon, Autobiography
• Carson, A Call to Spiritual Reformation
• Lloyd- Jones, Preaching and Preachers
• Packer, In My Place Condemned He Stood
• Packer, Fundamentalism and The Word of God

Mike McKinley

• Piper, Future Grace
• Stott, Cross of Christ
• Welch, When People Are Big and God is Small

Michael Lawrence

• Packer, Knowing God
• Goldsworthy, Gospel and Kingdom
• Wells, No Place for Truth
• Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied
• Ferguson, The Christian Life: A Doctrinal Introduction
• Calvin, Institutes (particularly Book 3)”

[From Three Books Church Planters Should Read, and A Lesson in Not Following Instructions by Michael Mckinley]

From Mark Dever’s recent talk at the Embrace Baltimore event

Three Things Church Planters Need to Know

1. The Church is God’s Idea
— Matthew 16:18, Jesus founded the church
— Faithfulness involves less creativity and more repetition. We don’t want to say new things, we want to repeat the things that God has said.
— Christ bought the church with his blood (Acts 20:28), he identifies with his church (Acts 9).

2. The Church is to Reflect God’s Character
— We are about something so much bigger than we think when we meet with church.
— God has always been interested in a corporate collection of people. For example, much of the fruit of the Spirit can’t be exhibited in isolation. Things like kindness and love are tough to manifest in isolation.

3. The Church Displays Jesus’ Character
— John 13:34-35, the church should make Jesus known in its conduct and character
— Biblical life change is the best advertisement for the church.

Ultimately, when we read the end of the Bible we can have confidence that the church wins! [From Mark Dever -- Three Things For Church Planters/Theologians by Michael Mckinley]