14 Feb 17

Why did John Calvin preach eight times a week in Geneva? Eight times a week! How did he make the time? Was he not writing commentaries on almost every book of the Bible? Was he not writing treatises on numerous theological and pastoral subjects? Was he not the Reformation’s premier letter writer, writing to hundreds of Christians, kings, queens and nobles as well as pastors and their families? Eight times a week!
Calvin did not think he was doing anything extraordinary in preaching eight (sometimes more) times a week. He was persuaded that if the church was to survive in a hostile world, bombarded on all sides by siren voices saying, ‘Don’t be so serious. Lighten up. Return to Mother Church (Rome)’, God’s people needed to be saturated in the Word of God.
With other Reformers, Calvin believed that only being exposed to God’s Word once or twice a week did little to resist the relentless diet of false illusions emanating from the world. He was persuaded that Christians needed all the time they could give to hearing God’s Word tear down the world’s false illusions.
I wonder if Calvin’s thinking resonates with you. We live in a culture full to overflowing with false illusions. Our TVs and the media as a whole are seeking to deceive us (there are always honourable exceptions). Relentlessly the message goes out, dressed up so seductively, ‘Without this, life is dull. Without this, you are missing out. With this, life will overflow with joy. Join this and you will never be the same man, woman, again.’ And so the litany goes on. ‘This is life’ the music and style icons relentlessly tell us, until we are drugged into thinking it might just be so.
In Romans 12:2, Paul exhorts us not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. He is telling us that if our minds are not being renewed, then we will be squeezed into the mould of this fallen, passing world. Perhaps more than any previous generation of Christians, this generation needs to be saturated in the wisdom, grace, goodness and health-giving clarity of God’s truth. We need our minds de-cluttered and then refreshed by the ‘wisdom from above’ (James 3:15).
We live in a world of deceptive illusions, powerful, seductive illusions that are out to ensnare us and kill us. Calvin was absolutely right: we need every given opportunity to hear God’s living, clarifying, deception-scattering Word.
So my question to you is this: Do you prize every given opportunity to hear God’s Word in your church? You could read this as a rebuke, and in measure you might be right. But see this rather as a loving exhortation to hunt out every opportunity to sit under the ministry of God’s Word. Not because I am worth hearing; but because God himself speaks to us by his Spirit through his Word.
I have a very good friend in the USA who was accused by some church members of being ‘legalistic’ because he encouraged them not to be satisfied with coming to worship once a week. My dear friends, his encouragement was not legalistic, it was the kind, thoughtful, caring encouragement of a pastor set apart to care for Christ’s sheep. May we all be like the Psalmist who wrote, ‘I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord!”’~ Ian Hamilton, Pastor of the Cambridge Presbyterian Church, Cambridge, UK.

It is certain that the use of singing in churches (which I may mention in passing) is not only very ancient, but was also used by the Apostles, as we may gather from the words of Paul, “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also,” (1 Cor. 14:15). In like manner he says to the Colossians, “Teaching and admonishing one another in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord,” (Col. 3:16). In the former passage, he enjoins us to sing with the voice and the heart; in the latter, he commends spiritual Songs, by which the pious mutually edify each other. That it was not an universal practice, however, is attested by Augustine (Confess. Lib. 9 cap. 7), who states that the church of Milan first began to use singing in the time of Ambrose, when the orthodox faith being persecuted by Justina, the mother of Valentinian, the vigils of the people were more frequent than usual; and that the practice was afterwards followed by the other Western churches. He had said a little before that the custom came from the East. He also intimates (Retract. Lib. 2) that it was received in Africa in his own time. His words are, “Hilarius, a man of tribunitial rank, assailed with the bitterest invectives he could use the custom which then began to exist at Carthage, of singing hymns from the book of Psalms at the altar, either before the oblation, or when it was distributed to the people; I answered him, at the request of my brethren.” And certainly if singing is tempered to a gravity befitting the presence of God and angels, it both gives dignity and grace to sacred actions, and has a very powerful tendency to stir up the mind to true zeal and ardor in prayer. We must, however, carefully beware, lest our ears be more intent on the music than our minds on the spiritual meaning of the words. Augustine confesses (Confess. Lib. 10 cap. 33) that the fear of this danger sometimes made him wish for the introduction of a practice observed by Athanasius, who ordered the reader to use only a gentle inflection of the voice, more akin to recitation than singing. But on again considering how many advantages were derived from singing, he inclined to the other side. If this moderation is used, there cannot be a doubt that the practice is most sacred and salutary. On the other hand, songs composed merely to tickle and delight the ear are unbecoming the majesty of the Church, and cannot but be most displeasing to God.- John Calvin, Institutes, Book III, Chapter 20, Section 32

Is there a real Islam? Or just Islams? - John Edward Philips

We live in a world possessed. And we know it, Johan Huizinga, 1935, in Bob Goudzwaard 1967-2007, Idols of Our Time Foreword by Howard Snyder and edited by Mark Vander Vennen, Intervarsity Press, Downer’s Grove, 1984

What is the goal toward which we are heading? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice whose laws have been inscribed, not in marble and stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave who forgets them and in that of the tyrant who denies them.- MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE, THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF TERROR, SPEECH TO THE CONVENTION, FEBRUARY 5, 1794, the Reign of Terror, which ended with his arrest and execution in 1794

3 Jul 10

The longer I live the clearer does it appear that John Calvin’s system is the nearest to perfection.~Charles Spurgeon

Anything that hurts the home is a curse and ought to be hunted down.. ~ Spurgeon

Long before I believed Theology to be true, I had already
decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was
false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it... The
whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed
facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.
Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or
the remotest part obeys the thought-laws of the human scientist
here and now in his laboratory--in other words, unless Reason
is an absolute--all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to
believe this world-picture also ask me to believe that Reason
is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless
matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here
is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept
a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that
conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one;
and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from
having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the
difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare's nest
but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought
from the very beginning. The man who has once understood the
situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific
cosmology as being, in principle, a myth--though no doubt a
great many true particulars have been worked into it.-C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), "Is Theology Poetry?", in They Asked for a Paper, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962, p 162