The Battle Cry of Christian Hedonism

Resolved:  To endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness in the other world as I possibly can, with all the power, might, vigor, and vehemence, yea violence, I am capable of, or can bring myself to exert, in any way that can be thought of.

- Jonathan Edwards

(quoted by John Piper in his book, Desiring God, pg. 159)

This resolution from the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards is perhaps the craziest thing I have ever read in my life. Edwards speaks as a man who has tasted of indescribably excellent things and is absolutely heaven-bent on obtaining as much of these divine excellencies as possible. Like Asaph in Psalm 73, God is the sole object of his desires and his portion forever!

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

(Psalm 73: 25-26)

A Powerful Parable About Helping The Poor

I've been reading a book called The Hole In Our Gospel by Richard Stearns, and I came across a very powerful parable about helping the poor. I thought I would share it since it had an impact on me. Here is the parable:

One early morning, after a fierce storm had hit the coast, I strolled to the beach for my morning walk. Horrified, I saw that tens of thousands of starfish had been washed up on the beach by the winds and waves. I was saddened by the realization that all of them would die, stranded on the shore, away from the life-giving water. Despairing that there was nothing I could do, I sat down on the sand and put my head in my hands.

But then I heard a sound, and I lifted my eyes. There, in the distance, I saw a man bending down and then standing up, bending down and standing up. Curious, I rose and walked toward him. I saw that he was picking up the starfish, one at a time, and throwing them back into the sea.

"What are you doing?" I yelled.

"Saving the starfish," he replied.

"But don't you see, man, that there are tens of thousands of them?" I asked, incredulous. "Nothing you can do will make a difference."

He did not answer me but instead bent down, picked up another starfish, and cast it back into the water. Then he smiled, looked me in the eye, and said, "It made a difference to that one!"

(The Hole In Our Gospel, Richard Stearns, p. 162)

To Live Is Christ

Check out this awesome video posted on the Reach Records website! The video is a "typography" of a song by Trip Lee called "To Live Is Christ" (from the 13 Letters album). This album features songs for all 13 of the Pauline epistles, with the above song detailing the book of Philippians.

The Glory of God & True Contrition

The other night I was reading a sermon by Jonathan Edwards called "Praise, One of the Chief Employments of Heaven." As Edwards spoke about the "transcendent glory and divine excellency of God," I had a revelation of how right John Piper is when he says that true remorse for sin only comes from beholding the glory of God. Here are some thoughts I wrote down at the time:

Man can be made to see that his actions are evil in relation to other men, but this pales in comparison with the profound sense of shame and humiliation he will feel when he sees the infinitely bright and glorious excellencies of Christ and realizes what he has traded them for — the complete and total opposite. This is why evil men will hide their faces in shame when the glory of God is displayed to them at the Judgment. Imagine people seeing all of the infinite perfections of God, his infinitely glorious and sweet love and mercies, and realizing that instead of pursuing and embracing Him, they sought satisfaction in Jerry Springer and South Park. As Paul Washer says, "They will melt like wax figurines in front of a blazing furnace." Imagine how the man will feel who, while beholding the supreme beauty of Christ, realizes that he has spent his entire life excelling in things that God utterly abhors and leading others to do the same. Hugh Hefner's soul will implode into a million pieces when he stands before the glorious throne of the Almighty and fixes his eyes on the breathtaking beauty of Jesus Christ!

Stunned by the Beauty of Christ

When you think of great religious leaders and what they are like, what comes to your mind? You may picture Moses and his miracles, the Pope and his piety, or perhaps Gandhi and his non-violent reform. But what I would like to do in these next few paragraphs is show you something that stunned me about the greatest religious leader that ever lived—Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God.

In Luke 7:36-50, Jesus sits down to dine with a Pharisee, a strict religious man among the Jews. A “sinful” woman (or prostitute) comes up and stands behind Jesus. She then begins to weep over his feet, wet his feet with her tears, wipe his feet with her hair, kiss his feet continually, and anoint his feet with perfume. The Pharisee objects, knowing that she is a prostitute...but how does Jesus react? Does he preach against prostitution? Does he stay quiet? No. He defends her and loves her with intensity. He tells her, “Your sins are forgiven”—a powerful declaration of his love—and finally, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Jesus—being one with God the Father—is perfect in righteousness, complete in holiness, and fierce in wrath against wickedness. But this same Jesus also loves contrite prostitutes. He loves those who are sorrowful over their sins, even if they have committed unspeakable acts against him. He loves them intensely and personally. He is not unwilling to befriend the lowest and most despised of our world. He humbles those who are proud and raises up those who are humble. When I read this passage from the gospel of Luke, I could not help but be struck with the beauty of Christ as he—the supreme leader of all religious leaders—condescended to this sinful woman and loved her openly among the Pharisees. And when I compare this wonderful blend of perfect righteousness and compassionate love to the gods of other religions—Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.—I am stunned with the all-surpassing beauty of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Be Afraid You Women!

2:04 am

I woke up from a filthy dream tonight. Graphic, perverse lewdness passed through my mind that makes me angry and causes my heart to cry out, "Why does this filthy distortion of God's creation of sex run so wild and free in our world!?" Unchallenged and unpunished in most cases. But these men and women are storing up wrath for themselves on the day of God's wrath (Romans 2:5, as I once was too, but so thankfully my Lord delivered me). Oh, how I hate the lewdness of ungodly women! Men, I know, are perverted even more, but you perverse women! So pure, so delicate, so sacred has God made your sexuality - meant to be given purely and beautifully to your husband for the glory of God. But NO! You have fallen captive to the desires of wicked men and succumbed to the crowd of other vile women! Such perverse distortions of the goodness and holiness of godly sexuality. It makes me want to cry and burn with anger at the same time.

But my sinful flesh enjoyed it (at the time)! What tragedy! What corruption of a pure and holy spirit. I craved more, I wanted to hear, to see, to know. Why no conviction in this dream world tonight? No eschewment of sin, no sensitivity to the Savior's repulsion of it?

Wicked things passed through my mind: the way disgusting women dress, the way they flaunt their sexuality to their "lovers," the way they talk about perverted private things so openly and freely. SEX IS MEANT TO BE ENJOYED PRIVATELY BETWEEN MAN, WOMAN, AND CHRIST! Do not trample the sanctity of it and thus dishonor your God by publicly talking about private things!

Women walking about in Frederick's gear! Women describing their sexual exploits and desires! Women defiling their bodies with other women! I hate it!!

But why, O sinful flesh did you enjoy this so? Had you been exposed to this horrific lewdness while awake, you would have burned with hatred...or perhaps been utterly repulsed by its sickening and complete ungodliness to say the least...or vomited.

But now I have a renewed passion for upholding God's sanctity, God's supremacy, and God's authority over His design and gift of sex. An unmovable zeal for the repulsion of sick, sexual distortions and an upholding of sex inside of heterosexual marriage. I now quake at the thought of dishonoring my God by recalling one of these filthy images. May God receive the glory for His creation of sex, and may man receive the gift in a holy fashion, as a reflection of what intimacy and love is like with Christ. In this and in unflinching devotion to purity before marriage, I am convinced lies the most fulfilling way to experience the gift of God.

A Description of 2nd Century Christians

Listen to this description of what 2nd century Christians were like, presented by the Christian philosopher Aristides to the emperor Hadrian in A.D. 125:

Those who oppress them [the Christians] they exhort [with the Word] and make them their friends. They do good to their enemies. Their wives, O King, are pure as virgins, and their daughters are modest. Their men abstain from all unlawful sexual contact and from impurity, in the hope of recompense that is to come in another world.

As for their bondmen and bondwomen, and their children, if there are any, they persuade them to become Christians; and when they have done so, they call them brethren without distinction.

They refuse to worship strange gods; and they go their way in all humility and cheerfulness. Falsehood is not found among them. They love one another; the widow's needs are not ignored, and they rescue the orphan from the person who does him violence. He who has gives to him who has not, ungrudgingly and without boasting. When the Christians find a stranger, they bring him to their homes and rejoice over him. When a baby is born to one of them, they praise God. If it dies in infancy, they thank God the more, as for one who has passed through the world without sins. But if one of them died in his iniquity or in his sins, they grieve bitterly and sorrow as over one who is about to meet his doom.

Such, O King, is the commandment given to the Christians, and such is their conduct. As men who know God, they ask from him requests which are proper for him to give and for them to receive; and because they acknowledge the goodness of God towards them, lo! on their account there flows forth the beauty that is in the world. The good which they do, they do not shout in the ears of the multitude, that people may notice; but they conceal their giving as a man conceals a treasure. They strive to be righteous as those who expect to behold the face of their Messiah and to receive from him the promises.

(taken from Richard Wurmbrand's book The Answer to the Atheist's Handbook, pp. 48-49)

This glorious description of the lives of 2nd century Christians shows that they were clearly obeying Jesus' words found in Matt. 5:16 -

"In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven."

Let us examine ourselves and ask this question - If a philosopher from our age gave a detailed description of our lives, would the description resemble that of the 2nd century Christians, bringing glory to our wonderful Creator, or would it instead bring shame to the beautiful face of Christ?

Letter to the Addict

My heart breaks for you. You are dead. Yet you live as though you are alive and healthy. I just want to scream WAKE UP!! To try to wake you from your coma of drugs and lies before it is too late. Oh Jesus, I've never experienced anything like the agony of hopelessness and emptiness I see in an addict's eyes. You don't fool me, and you don't fool yourself. Your soul is writhing in misery. Why do you try to satisfy the deep longings you have with drugs, pornography, alcohol, anger, sex?? You are a child of God, made in His image to portray who He is to His creation. Such potential for beauty, but such capacity for evil. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. Oh, how I pray you would be broken! That your heart would break under the unbearable shame, guilt, fear, and pain you have. Pain and suffering do more to reveal the heart of a person than anything I've ever seen. They strip you of everything and leave you bare. You see how weak you really are. How you desire to be beautiful and clean and good. And how you can't! Oh the desperation to discover yourself. What a wretched person I am, you will say. But thanks be to God that He broke through the realm of His creation and entered as a man, Jesus Christ, and redeemed for Himself a people to be spotless and blameless through His blood. Spotless! Blameless! Guiltless! Do you see how your soul longs for this? Do you see that even after all your hands have wrought, He forgives? And that He does so by taking on Himself all the nasty, disgusting, embarrassing, humiliating, regretful, painful, evil things you have done?

Please. Look around you. Look up! We live in a world that screams "Glorious is our God." The sky sings of His beauty and expanse. The wind boasts of His mystery and power. But you are the loudest of all. Of all creation, only mankind was created in the image of God and shares in His emotions, spirit, desires, beauty, and glory. Please look deep into your heart. You were made for Him. You will find satisfaction in nothing else. Please consider my plea.

Dearest Jesus, may you open their eyes to your beauty, take away their despair, and satisfy their souls for the sake of your Name.

With tears and trust,
Rian