This audio file has already been up on the website for a little while now, but we have just started a “podcast” and this is the first installment.  In the future, I hope to have uploaded to the website the sermons in the podcast as well, so that it will be easier to get new files.

You can listen to this presentation either by downloading it from here, from the website, or playing it with the embedded media player right on this page.

I have finally gotten around to placing the audio and PowerPoint presentation of the Five Solas of the Reformation on the web. Several people have asked me about it, and I wanted to make sure I followed through before it was too late. You won’t be able to edit the file, but you can view it and print it. The files can be downloaded from the new Resources page. (I plan to add more resources later).

Being thankful is not an easy thing. It is especially difficult when we are experience a “frowning Providence” as the Puritans used to say (that is, difficult circumstances). We live in a world where people around us get ill, car accidents occur, marriages break up, children disobey, wars happen, and so on… You only have to look at the evening news or a newspaper to see that the world is not only not perfect, but that it can be a dangerous and sad place. The Bible tells us that there is a reason for this – sin. Because sin entered into the world, because Adam decided that independence was better than dependence on God (Romans 5:12), because people in their pride think that they know better than God, because of all this we experience pain, suffering and death. Sometimes it is enough to make us want to pull the covers over our eyes in the morning and not get out of bed, let alone be thankful!

But thankfulness is a command. It is not just something that should come to our mind when we have an “official” holiday. Paul tells the Colossians that they are to “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.” (Col. 3:15). The Psalms are full of calls to “give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart” (Ps. 9:1); to “magnify Him with thanksgiving” (Ps. 69:30); and to “give thanks to your holy name and glory in your praise” (Ps. 106:47) among other places. In fact, a form of “thank” occurs some 56 times in the Psalms alone (161 time in the whole Bible)! Our Lord Jesus Christ made it a central part of his life to be thankful to His Father. We see this when he told parables, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children” (Matthew 11:25) and when He raised Lazarus, “And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me” (John 11:41).

How can we be so thankful? The Bible helps us here as well. The primary way that we can cultivate thankfulness in our own lives is by prayer. Paul’s life is a wonderful example of this. He writes, “I thank my God in all my remembrance of you” in the context of prayer for the Philippians church and their assistance to him in the gospel (Philippians 1:3-6). The same thing could be said of Paul’s prayers for the church at Colossae: “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you” (Colossians 1:3); and of his prayers for Timothy: “I thank God whom I serve, as did my ancestors, with a clear conscience, as I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day” (2 Timothy 1:3).
Another thing that cultivates thankfulness is evangelism. When we bring the good news of the gospel to others, we cannot help but be overwhelmed by what the Lord has done for us. So when Paul writes to the Romans, he says “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world” (Romans 1:8). Yet another way to grow in thankfulness is through the Word of God. Paul rejoices to hear that the Thessalonian church was abiding in the Word of God proclaimed: “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” (1 Thessalonians 2:13) We also see that the Word of God sung is a spur to thankfulness (Colossians 3:15-16).

John Piper Video

This video has been making the rounds on the internet for about a month now (I first saw it listed on the OPC email list), but it is just too good not to bring to everyone’s attention. I think it is especially appropriate as we approach Thanksgiving Day. Rev. Piper helps us to see how thankful we should be for the “glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).

The Coming Lord’s Day

This week as we come together, let us be thankful also for the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and the communion that we have in Christ. We also need to remember that the source of all our thankfulness is the Lord Himself, as the hymn-writer of “O Come, My Soul, Bless Thou the Lord”

O come, my soul, bless thou the Lord thy maker,
And all within me bless his holy name;
Bless thou the Lord, forget not all his mercies,
His pardoning grace and saving love proclaim.

Pastor Carroll will be preaching the next installment in his series on the book of Haggai this week, “Build My House” (Haggai 1:7-11). I look forward to seeing you all and blessing the Lord with you.

To download a PDF copy of this week’s Bulletin, please download here.

This week we will be singing the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) version of Psalm 51 (“God Be Merciful to Me“). You can find a copy of the bulletin insert showing the song, and you can also download the MP3 sample of the song.

As many of you know, I had the great pleasure of visiting the good folks of Faith Presbyterian Church Reformed in Mesquite, Texas the last weekend of October. The church (formerly known as First Presbyterian Church of Rowlett before the purchase of their new facility in Mesquite) was gracious enough to host a number of ministers from various denominations who spoke on the Five Solas of the Reformation. It was a distinct pleasure to meet Rev. John Owen Butler, who had ministered in Tchula, Mississippi years before I was there.

I spoke on the subject of Solus Christus (Christ Alone) from Colossians 1. Now tapes, CDs and MP3s of all sessions of the conference are available over at the FPCR website. Pastor Richard Bacon and my friend Chris Coldwell do an excellent job getting good Reformed gospel material into the hands of people.

I had the opportunity this week to listen to an old podcast of R.C. Sproul’s Renewing Your Mind broadcast from October 5th. The subject was the philosophy of Pragmatism, which is perhaps the only “school” of Philosophy made in America. Pragmatism is built into the fiber of our country. Two of the leading originators of Pragmatism were John Dewey (the architect of the modern American public school system) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (the architect of the modern American legal system). Neither Dewey nor James “invented” education or law, but they shaped how these areas of American life exist today.

It is important for us to remember that Pragmatism is not just “being practical.” I like practicality as much as the next man — I don’t want to buy products that don’t work, or to take hours to do a task that could be done in minutes. But Pragmatism is much more than being practical. It means thinking about problems, solutions and life in general in only the immediate sense. It also means judging whether something is “right” or “wrong” by whether or not a majority in the community thinks so. The obvious problem with that is that majority votes can change radically over time (just ask John Kerry or George Bush, for example). The Pragmatist has no final standard for judging his actions. He only wants to see immediate results. If it works right NOW, then that is what the Pragmatist does. Never mind the fact that a solution to one problem could cause two new problems. The answer to that is just to find two new solutions; and if the result is four new problems down the road (two per “new” solution), well, then, we’ll deal with that later. A good example of this in American history, Sproul explained, was the beginning of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s. More bills were sent to Congress in the first 100 days of his Presidency than at any other time in American history. If a solution “worked” right away, it was funded and continued. If not, it was cast aside. We are still dealing with the consequential problems created by such solutions.
Why would Pragmatists think this way? It doesn’t seem very practical, does it?

The reason is that Pragmatism provides no hope for the long term. There really is nothing beyond the here and now, and certainly no eternity or God. All that matters is what a majority of people believe will be good right now.

This has obvious implications for the Church. It seems that more and more, the Church at large is being pragmatic. Shelves and more shelves in in Christian bookstores are filled with “how to” manuals on everything, from growing your church to having an effective youth ministry to reaching your community. Solutions are touted as being applicable to every church, whether rural, urban, Northern, Southern or Western. Do you have a problem in your church? Things not going as well as desired? Just buy the latest Purpose Driven^TM book and all will be well. But if we stop and think about it for a minute, situations and people in one given place can be very different from another place. Our ministry hear in Katy will not (and should not, I would say) look like ministry in India, or Egypt or even Buffalo. The gospel is the same, but there are all kinds of people and places that need the gospel put into their context.

We need to be careful that as we go forward in our ministry week seek to be first, Biblical in our ministry, and then second, practical in the execution. We should continually ask ourselves at Christ Church how the Bible would inform our ministry. That may mean more work for us. It may also mean some level of “impracticality” (Paul would call that “the foolishness of preaching”). But that is what we are called to. You may find this week that what you believe you are completely wasting your time doing, is actually making a critical impact on others. The prophet Isaiah helps us to keep things in perspective when he wrote: “For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.”

Moms – you are sowing eternal seeds as you feed children and change diapers
Husbands – you are making a critical impact on your community as you listen to you wife about her day
Children – you are fighting Satan and the demons when you obey your parents, eating your vegetables and cleaning your room

Let us seek to serve God where we are, how we can, with the Bible as our guide. Don’t get frustrated with God or His Church because you don’t see results right away. We wouldn’t think that way if our children did not walk when we first brought them home from the hospital, or if we couldn’t sit in the shade of a newly planted tree! Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Expect accordingly.

This week as we come together to worship, we should seek to be alert to the things of God, shaking off sin and self, as the hymnist writes:

Awake, my soul, and with the sun
Your daily stage of duty run:
Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise
To pay your morning sacrifice.

We will be continuing in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in chapter 3. This week Paul presses home to the Galatians that salvation comes by grace and not by the law by using an illustration:

¹⁵ To give a human example, brothers: even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. ¹⁶ Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. ¹⁷ This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. ¹⁸ For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. (Galatians 3:15-18)

As always, you can download a copy of the bulletin from the website.

This week we will be singing the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) version of Psalm 146 (“Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah“). You can find a copy of the bulletin insert showing the song, and you can also download the MP3 sample of the song.

I was thinking about evangelism a bit this evening, as I sat in a conversation (on an unrelated matter). Just what is evangelism? Can we “master it”? How do we know when we are “doing it”? Often I am afraid that we (I) have the view that evangelism is about memorizing Biblical passages (for the more we have memorized, the less we have to be Procrustean* in our use of them), being unafraid to approach complete strangers, and the like. For that reason, it can be easy to say to ourselves: “I don’t have the gift of evangelism. I think I’ll just invite someone to speak to the pastor about that.”
But in reality, the Bible tells us that life is full of many wonderful opportunities to tell others of the good news of the gospel. The Apostle Peter, who was a man of very poor words and lived with his foot in his mouth before Pentecost (see for example Mark 8:32; Mark 9:5) calls us to live out the gospel in our daily lives, providing opportunity with our actions for words to find fertile ground – “Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.” (1 Peter 2:12)

Then I came across this post by Rev. Phil Ryken on the Reformation 21 (run by my friend and dear teacher Derek Thomas) and I was floored. Did you ever think that the ministry of Christ Church, or your own witness, could be so severely impaired by something as trivial as how much of a tip you left at a restaurant, or how you responded to food that was brought to you? What about how you wait in line at the dry cleaners? Or at the airport? On one level I think we all understand our theology that reminds us that God is omniscient and sees all things. Yet at the same time, I think we ignore the fact that others see a great deal as well.
Something to think about this week.

*Procustean: using an artificial standard with no flexibility. It comes from the ancient Greek myth of Procrusteus, who has a bed of a certain size. He would capture travelers and make them fit the bed – either by stretching the short or cutting short the tall.