Hebrews 2:1-4

Drifting is not intentional but comes rather from inattention and carelessness-which was precisely the problem with the pressured little church (believers). They had become careless about their moorings in Christ. At first, in calm waters, that was not noticeable. But as the storms of opposition rose, some of them were drifting farther and farther away from Christ toward the shoals of shipwrick in their old world of Judaism.
That church’s experience two thousand years ago intersects our lives in this way: drifting is the beseting sin of our day. And as the metaphor suggests, it is not so much intentional as from unconcern. Christians neglect their anchor _Christ_ and begin to quietly drift away. There is no friction, no dramatic sense of departure. But when the winds of trouble come, the things of Christ are left far behind, even out of sight. The writer of Revelation uses different language but refers to the same thing when he quotes Jesus as saying to the ostensibly healthy Ephesian church, “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (Revelation 2:4).
When our anchors begin to lift from our soul’s grasp of the greatness and supremacy of life, we become susceptible to sublte tows. C.S. Lewis sagely remarked: “And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?”.
HEBREWS
An ANCHOR for the SOUL
author: R. Kent Huges
(((PREACHING the WORD)))
Warning against drifting from “what we have heard” (2:1-4)
Warning against disbelieving the “voice” of God (3:7-14)
Warning against degenerating from “the basic principles of the oracles of God” (5:11-6:20)
Warning against despising “the knowledge of the truth” (10:26-39)
Warning against devaluing “the grace of God” (12:15-17)
Warning against departing from him “who is speaking” (12-2529)

The Christian life, in the first place is a warfare, it is a struggle. We wrestle. The whole section is designed to impress this fact upon us. There is no grosser or greater misrepresentation of the Christian message than that which depicts it as offering us a life of ease with no battle and no struggle at all. There are types of holiness reaching that teach just that. Their slogan is, ‘It is quite easy’. They say the trouble is that so many Christian people remain ignorant of the fact, and therefore go on fighting and struggling. That is the essential characteristic of the teaching of the Cults. That is why they are always popular. ‘Quite easy!’ You cannot fit that into this Epistle with its “We wrestle!’ ‘Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand.’ The first thing we have to realize is that the Christian life is a warfare, that we are strangers in an alien land, that we are in the enemy’s territory. We do not live in a vacuum, in a glasshouse. The teaching which gives the impression that the pathway to glory is all easy and simple and smooth is not Christianity, it is not Paul’s Christianity, it is not New Testament Christianity. It is the hallmark of the quack remedy always, that it cures everything so easily! One dose, and there is no more trouble!

But let me state my thesis positively. The claim of the Christian faith quite openly and specifically is that it – and it alone – can deal with this problem. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not one of a number of theories and teachings and philosophies confronting the world. It is unique, it stands absolutely alone. The Bible is not one book among many books. It is God’s Book, it is a unique Book, it is the Book, standing apart from all the others. We must emphasize this because it is the whole basis of the Christian faith. The Church is not one of a number of institutions; she says she is the body of Christ. We speak because we have a revelation. The Bible does not provide us with a theory, a speculation, an attempt to arrive at truth. The position of all the men who wrote the books of the Bible is akin to what the Apostle says about himself in the third chapter of this Epistle to the Ephesians: ‘For this cause, I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles, if you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to you-ward: how that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery’.

The Christian Warfare An Exposition of Ephesians 6:10 to 13

by: D. M. LLOYD-JONES

Pilgrim’s Progress

As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a Man cloathed with Rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a Book in his hand, and a great Burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the Book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying What shall I do?

“But because I speak the truth, you do not believe Me.” Jn.8:45
Jesus

Romans 15:1 (ESV)
The Example of Christ
15 We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

A New Reality

We cannot compare the fact of Christ with other facts, nor can we deduce the fact of Christ from our knowledge of other facts. The fact of Christ comes breaking into the continuity of our human knowledge as an utterly distinctive and unique fact, which we cannot understand in terms of other facts, which we cannot reduce to what we already know. It is a new and unique fact without analogy anywhere in human experience or knowledge.

But let us note: it is only when we actually know Christ, know him as our personal saviour and Lord, that we know that we have not chosen him but that he has chosen us; that it is not in our own capacity to give ourselves the power to know him; that it is not in virtue of our own power or our own capacity that he gives us to know him, but in virtue of his power to reveal himelf to us and to enable us to know him; that is, faith itself is the gift of God. Or let me put that in another way: when we know God in Christ, we do not congratulate ourselves on our own powers of intuition or discovery, and pat ourselves on the back because we have been able to see that there is more in Jesus than meets the eye, that God is there himself. No, we do the exact opposite: we acknowledge that in knowing God in Christ, we do so not by our own power, but by the power of God.
by: Thomas F. Torrance

           For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

(Colossians 1:19-20 ESV)

 

Worldviews Arise Out of Faith

By anchoring human life in ultimate certainty, faith gives rise to a vision of the whole of reality in the light of this ultimate. As James Fowler has recently put it: “faith ‘forms into one’ and comprehensive image of an ultimate environment, or worldview, as the means by which the commitment of faith integrates and guides daily experience.” A worldview gives fundamental, seminal answers to the ultimate questions: Who are we? Where are we? What are we to do? What is good and what is evil? Where are we going? Tolstoy asks in his Confession: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” At the end of his philosophical reflections, Heidegger exclaims: “Why is there a Being at all and not rather No-thing.”
All such ultimate questions, and their answers about life and death, sin and suffering, hope and healing, finally elude our intellectual grasp and strict logical proof. In the end we say simply, “I am doing this because I believe that this is the nature of life and that my ultimate happiness depends on my acting in accord with my deepest commitment and dearest beliefs.” Every philosophy ends the same way, Gilkey argues, by saying simply, “look, is this not the way things truly are?” Likewise, Wittgenstein says, “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” Finally there comes an end to our reasoning, and we answer such end-questions not in terms of proof or demonstration but rather in terms of the affirmation and surrender of faith.

Paper by: James H. Olthuis
Published in; Stained Glass
Editors: Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen and Richard J. Mouw

Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2Co 4:16-18 )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLm1HjqTlH8

 

Psalm 107 celebrates the mighty acts of God, the miracles experienced by the people of God. It begins with a call to thanksgiving because of the steadfast love of the Lord. The redeemed of the lord are called upon to proclaim what he has done (v. 2); he has gathered them from the lands

(v. 3). The psalm then celebrates four typical experiences of deliverance in which God intervened upon hearing the cry of the people.

1. Deliverance from hunger and thirst in the wilderness (107:4-9)
2. Deliverance from dark and distressing imprisonment (107:10-16)
3. Deliverance from (107:17-22)
4. Deliverance from peril at sea (107:23-32)

As Weiser’s commentary on the Psalms describes it, the second part of this psalm glorified the divine saving rule which “continually manifests itself in the baffling ups and downs of life.” Weiser goes on to sum up its hortatory conclusion as follows:

Prudence demands that the gracious acts of God be heeded and remembered, so that they become a lasting possession of faith…this parenthetic warning…emphasizes the educational aspect of the appropriation of salvation.

There is an obvious affinity between Psalm 107 and Mark 4:35-8:26. The analysis of the psalm given above is a generally valid description of the types of miracle stories presented in the Markan section. To the types of deliverance in the Psalm, the following passages in Mark may be compared:

1. From hunger and thirst (6:30-44; 8:1-10, 14-21)
2. From imprisonment (5:1-20; 6:13; 7:24-30)
3. From sickness (5:21-6:5, 13, 53-56; 7:31-37; 8:22-26)
4. From peril at sea (4:35-41; 6:45-52)

With respect to the second category, namely, deliverance from dark and distressing imprisonment, it should be noted that the dominant view of demon-possession was as a sort of bondage from which one had to be released.

Psalm 107 as “Horizon” for Interpreting the Miracle Stories of Mark 4:35-8:26
Article written by:
Robert Meye

Unity and Diversity in New Testament Theology
Essays in Honor of
George E. Ladd

Edited by
Robert A. Guelich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZHN46gsbLc

The Young Church

Jesus has been exalted not only as Messiah; He is also Lord. To understand what this meant to the first Christian community, we must try to recover in imagination their experiences. We look at the entire New Testament through the spectacles of nineteen ceturies of theological discussion and interpretation of the person of Jesus. We read the Gospels and the book of Acts in the light of our understanding of the pre-existence and the incarnation of God the Son. However, the early Christians had no such concepts in their minds. They had no doctrine of the deity of Christ by which they might interpret Jesus. They were not looking for the incarnation of the eternal son of God, the second person of the Trinity, to effect an atonement for their sins. They were looking for the appearing of a mighty Messianic King who would destroy God’s enemies, or for the appearing of a heavenly Son of Man who would bring in the new Age.
However, with the resurrection, hope revived. The early church proclaimed Jesus not only as Messiah but as Lord. By the resurrection and ascension, God exalted this crucified Jesus to be Lord and Messiah. The significance of this proclamation can hardly be overestimated. “Lord” as a religious term to a first century Jew was the name used for God Himself.

The Young Church
by: George Eldon Ladd

This is highly dramatic and picturesque account of the historical events of Good Friday, with which we may find it hard to relate.  Paul’s first readers must have understood it all, and we are encouraged to believe this by the way in which he proceeds to apply the teaching to their new life.  All that Christ did both in submission to death and overcoming his foes has personal and experiential relevance in  the light of Col. 3:9, 10: “seeing that you have put off the old nature…and have put on the new nature.”  The Christians’ “putting off” exactly matches Christ’s “putting off”, and points back to 2:11.  When the Lord consented to yield to the regime of the astral powers and then to triumph over them, Christians too were involved in that representative act and by their faith union with him (expressed in baptism) they were united with him in his death and victory.  The result is clear:  You died with Christ out from under the elemental spirits of the universe (2:20).  They are now an enemy which brings its accusations and indictment against you in vain, for they have done their worst to Christ and been foiled in the attempt to succeed in their clinging attack.  He has neutralized their malevolence and holds them as his spoils of war.

by:  Ralph P. Martin 

Reconciliation and Hope
Edited By: Robert Banks

A Prayer by Michael Quoist, a French Cleric

I have fallen, Lord,
Once more.
I can’t go on, I’ll never succeed.
I am ashamed, I don’t dare look at you.
And yet I struggled, Lord, for I knew you were right near me, bending over me, watching.
But temptation blew like a hurricane,
And instead of looking at you I turned my head away,
I stepped aside
While you stood, silent and sorrowful,
Like the spurned fiancè who sees his loved one carried away bo the enemy.
When the wind died down as suddenly as it had arisen,
When the lightning ceased after proudly streaking the darkness,
All of a sudden I found myself alone, ashamed, disgusted, with my sin in my hands.
This sin that I selected the way a customer makes his purchase,
This sin that I have paid for and cannot return, for the shopkeeper is no longer there,
This tasteless sin,
This odorless sin,
This sin that sickens me,
That I have wanted but want no more,
That I have imagined, sought, played with, fondled, for a long time;
That I have finally embraced while turning coldly away from you,
My arms outstretched, my eyes and heart irresistibly drawn;
This sin that I have grasped and consumed with gluttony,
It’s mine now, but it possesses me as the spiderweb holds captive the gnat.
It is mine,
It sticks to me,
It flows in my veins,
It fills my heart.
It has slipped in everywhere, as darkness slips into the forest at dusk
And fills all the patches of light.
I can’t get rid of it.
I run from it the way one tries to lose a stray dog, but it catches up with me and bounds joyfully against my legs.
Everyone must notice it.
I’m so ashamed that I feel like crawling to avoid being seen,
I’m ashamed of being seen by my friends,
I’m ashamed of being seen by you, Lord,
For you loved me, and I forgot you.
I forgot you because I was thinking of myself
And one can’t think of several persons at once.
One must choose, and I chose.
And your voice,
And your look
And your love hurt me.
They weigh me down
They weigh me down more than my sin.
Lord, don’t look at me like that,
For I am naked,
I am dirty,
I am down,
Shattered,
With no strength left.
I dare make no more promises,
I can only lie bowed before you.
[The Father’s Response]
Come, son, look up.
Isn’t it mainly your vanity that is wounded?
If you loved me, you would grieve, but you would trust.
Do you think that there’s a limit to God’s love?
Do you think that for a moment I stopped loving you?
But you still rely on yourself, son. You must rely only on me.
Ask my pardon
And get up quickly.
You see, it’s not falling that is the worst,
But staying on the ground.

There were two especially significant differences in the way Christians understood the presence of the Spirit. The first arose from the fact that the ancients in general thought that the divine spirit would come on only a few outstanding people. It would be a most unusual experience, reserved for those who were especially close to the deity. But the Christians insisted that all believers have the Spirit. Thus, Paul says positively, “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” (Rom. 8:14), and negatively, “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, this person is not his” (Rom. 8:9). It is nonsense to talk about a Christian who does not have the Spirit. That is a contradiction in terms. It is a distinctive of the Christian way that the lowliest believer enjoys the presence of God’s Spirit within him.
Many see the Spirit as a force, an influence. But Paul seems rather to have understood the Spirit as a person. The giving of gifts looks like the activity of a person, more particularly since Paul concludes his list by informing his readers that the division is made “according as he wills” (1Cor. 12:4-11). He speaks of the mind of the Spirit (Rom. 8:6, 27) and urges people not to “grieve” the Spirit (Eph. 4:30). The love of God is poured into our hearts through the Spirit (Rom. 5:5), and the Spirit produces love in us (Gal. 5:22), both activities being evidently personal.
New Testament Theology
by: Leon Morris