Snow, Snow, and More Snow

Somewhere under this blanket of white is my lawn, of course it snowed again today, it snows every third day or so this winter. The good news is that Lake Michigan is up 3 inches on its water-level, but we would need several years of snow like this to bring the water-level to where it should be. I say, leave the water-level alone, we don't want anymore snow! I've raked my roof 3 times this year, so that my gutters won't damn up, but that's of little concern, for you see the first snow storm came 3 days after the old Elm tree decided to dump the last of it's leaves, and where do you think they landed... right, in the gutters.

Getting my mail I noticed that I might want to brush some of my shrubs too, once this fine fluffy stuff starts to melt, it will put too much weight on the branches. Some of the older trees have already lost some of their limbs, as the weight of the blizzard last week was too much for them. The bright side of things is that it finally warmed up a tad, going from -4 degrees yesterday to almost 26 degrees today.

That's life in Wisconsin, love it or leave it... I love IT!! :-)

Should I have only an Electronic Libray, or do I need a hard copy of certain items also?

I think that I’m beginning to get over being a cheapskate, though the battle is tough, but as long as I can give my tithe and gifts to the Lord, and still buy cool stuff like a whole electronic collection of over 24 volumes of John Piper books, I figure it must have been in His plans. That’s perfect logic if you ask me, but anyways, I had mentioned the question previously on why you want to have both a hard copy of a book and an electronic copy. Well having the electronic copy is really easy to demonstrate if you have a wonderful Bible Software program like my Libronix Digital Library System. Notice below I have open in that program both the book, and a search on that book looking for the word “faith”.

So instead of trying to find faith by hoping that it’s marked in the back of the book in the index, I simply click on a search and in 2 seconds it returns me 213 places that the word faith is found in this Piper book.

As I clicked on the first occurrence “The Call to Fight for This”, which had 8 occurrences on page 36, the program went to that place in the book on the left and highlighted the results.

Now if I want to really expand my search on “faith” in what Piper writes, I can define all of his works as a collection, and then search on that collection, really cool!

And bingo, in about 8 seconds, it brought back 4,183 hits on faith in the whole John Piper collection of books.

The key word here is “time” and using time efficiently… I couldn’t even guess at the amount of time that it would take had I to look up faith manually in each book. This is just a tiny example of the power of this software, and the ease of putting together a study, much less an aide in preparing a sermon.

I’ve had this software program for over 15 or more years now (which is a guess, it might be more like 20), actually bought my first copy at one of those software stores that use to be around everywhere, but have now flown the coop. Well it ran much different on first my 386, and then 486 computer models, then to my current Dell that screams with speed, and with storage capacity. Not only has the computer changed, but my Logos is now my Libronix, and as I am growing in the Lord, this program keeps changing too, to keep up with my study needs, and to make those needs easier and more varied in depth.

The reason that I purchased the hard copy of Carson’s “The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God” was because I’m reading it with about 6 other men, and take it to the 1 hour sessions we have to discuss what we have read. While I could simply print out a portion, such as a chapter or two, it is also good at times to have a hard copy to be your companion in your easy chair, as you meditate on your reading and what God is communicating to you through that reading.

If you have an opinion on the matter, let me know, comments are always welcome! I liked doing this so much that I'll probably show more posibilities with the digital library, and hope to get the graphics improved too.

The Love of God Distorted

A question that we often fail to ask is this; what is my perception on the Love of God, and next, what is the perception of this Love of God with those I meet daily? According to D.A. Carson, the love of God is more difficult than we might think, thus the title of the book I’m currently rereading (had it in an electronic format, but recently purchased the book, why I did that could be a subject all of its own) “The Difficult Doctrine of The Love of God”.

In the first chapter titled “on Distorting the Love of God”, he states that “when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. Worse, neither side may perceive that that is the case.” He says that when you tell people that God loves them, that they probably wouldn’t be surprised, “of course God loves me; he’s like that, isn’t he? Besides, why shouldn’t he love me? I’m kind of cute, or at least as nice as the next person. I’m okay, you’re okay, and God loves you and me.”

Not only is the Love of God distorted in our secular society, but it is often also distorted when it comes preached to us from the pulpits of Evangelical America, and Carson notes this as he points to a work by Marsha Witten, “All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Carson quotes from that work, which is primarily focused on sermons about the prodigal son in Luke 15 and says, ‘Nevertheless her book abounds in lengthy quotations from these sermons, and they are immensely troubling. There is a powerful tendency “to present God through characterizations of his inner states, with an emphasis on his emotions, which closely resemble those of human beings.…God is more likely to ‘feel’ than to ‘act,’ to ‘think’ than to ‘say.’ ”  Or again:
…the sermons dramatize feelings of anxiety for listeners over many other (this-worldly) aspects of their removal from God, whether they are discussing in the vocabulary of sin or in other formulations
…Many of the sermons depict a God whose behavior is regular, patterned, and predictable; he is portrayed in terms of the consistency of his behavior, of the conformity of his actions to the single rule of “love.

We in ourselves might say that God loves people, but God said “8Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4:8 (ESV) In this first chapter “On Distorting the Love of God” Carson gives his readers 5 ways that “the Bible Speaks of the Love of God.”
- The peculiar love of the Father for the Son, and of the Son for the Father. John 3:35; John 5:20; John 14:31
- God’s providential love over all that he has made.
- God’s salvific stance toward his fallen world. John 3:16; 1 John 2:2; John 15:19
- God’s particular, effective, selecting love toward his elect. Deut. 7:7–8; cf. 4:37
- Finally, God’s love is sometimes said to be directed toward his own people in a provisional or conditional way—conditioned, that is, on obedience. John 15:9; John 15:10

The one thing that I appreciated most, and which I have dwelled upon for quite some time is when Carson said “we need all of what Scripture says on this subject, or the doctrinal and pastoral ramifications will prove disastrous.” And, “We must not view these ways of talking about the love of God as independent, compartmentalized, loves of God.” Often we are tempted to take one aspect of the Love of God and build our whole doctrine upon it, but to truly understand the Love of God, we must look for it in all of Scripture, and then incorporate what we have found to build upon the relationship we desire with Him, and with those that come into our lives. Carson sums up this first chapter with, “Christian faithfulness entails our responsibility to grow in our grasp of what it means to confess that God is love,” which means that it will also grow in our own actions so as to imitate what we can as His servants in this world that lacks His true love. God’s true love in part rests in what we read in John 3:16 16“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 (ESV)