Monthly Archives: March 2016

Look in the Mirror

Posted on by under Soul, Theology

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing (James 1.22-25)

When there is only a cursory attention paid to God’s interpretation of things, then you will not remember God’s interpretation of things. The result is that you will be completely out of step with how to interpret things.

  • You can’t see life right.
  • You can’t see people right.
  • You can’t see your feelings right.
  • You can’t see your purpose right.
  • You forget what you are like, without Christ.

You forget. Because you are not taking care to look closely into the mirror. You are so unlike a teenager on Friday night— you’re not looking to see how things really look.

You can only know that through the mirror of the Word of God.

But when you do look intently at the Word, you find that it is gives clarity to you.

And when you get a clear view of yourself and all of life in this mirror, then you can have liberty.  The word becomes this law or principle of liberty. You are confident, because you have seen the way things really are in the Word. You are at liberty because you know what is true, what is not.

God promises that persevering in the Word in this way makes your “Word-ward” life lived in an outward way. This is evidence of grace. It is evidence of God’s blessing upon you. That is James’ beatitude here. “You will be ‘blessed’ in your doing’.

There is a blog run by a group of Australian Anglicans called the Sola Panel. It is a wordplay on the fact that we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone for God’s glory alone.  All of those ‘alones’ in Latin are the ‘Solas’. So they call it the Sola Panel.

But isn’t that what Christians do? They look into the Sola Panel of God’s Word and what do they see?  The blinding radiance of the Glory of God!

The heat, and brilliance and power and energy of God the Son is emblazoned before our eyes in the Word of God, the Scriptures, this great reflective mirror.

And when we gaze at it, something miraculous happens. We become a mirror. We become a reflector of the glory of God. And we join in the church with so many other reflectors so that we may cover the earth with Word of God, written, as Paul says, “not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.(2 Cor 3.3).

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2Cor3.18)

The Christian lives like a walking IPad with a constant streaming of God’s Word for all to see and read.

As Spurgeon said of John Bunyan, “this man is a living Bible! Prick him anywhere—his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the Word of God. I commend his example to you, beloved.”

So if we are confused by how things appear in our world, all it takes is another look in the mirror –the mirror of God’s Word.

St. Patrick knew all about human trafficking

Posted on by under History, World

This is an article I wrote for National Post  a while ago on the issue of human trafficking as it relates to the life of St. Patrick.

With the rise of the slave trade by ISIS, the porn industry, and ‘coyotes’ smuggling people by land and sea, human trafficking grows in today’s barbarity. Praying for the gospel of Jesus to come into the lives of both slavers and slaves.

St. Patrick knew all about human trafficking

Special to National Post | March 17, 2011 3:07 PM ET

By Clint Humfrey
Green beer sales mark the globalized celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and for many who are only Irish once a year little more is thought of.   But it may be time for St. Patrick’s Day to become an occasion of global awareness for something more than the taste of Guinness, namely the problem of human trafficking.

Patrick was only 16 when he was seized by human traffickers.  Removed from his family and home in Roman Britain, he was transported across the Irish Sea to the foreign surroundings of Dalriada  in what is now Northern Ireland.  The traffickers sold Patrick to a local warlord who exploited the young Briton for six years of forced labor.

Patrick escaped and fled Ireland, yet his conversion to Christianity while a slave gave him a mission to return to minister to his former captors.  From that point Patrick’s ministry in Ireland became so significant that his identity and the country’s are difficult to separate.   Yet it is easily forgotten that Patrick’s early experience of his adopted country was as a victim of human trafficking. 

Today when people think of slavery they rarely think of a modern problem, but rather something belonging to earlier centuries. But in the transnational world that is ‘flattened’ modern slavery can take many different forms than those associated with plantations or estates in the Caribbean or American South.

In one scenario, traffickers will promise jobs in foreign countries only to put the victim in a permanent indebtedness so that they must work  without rights and without hope of freedom.  With no advocates in a foreign land of foreign language the victims are forced to rely on the traffickers for their survival.  Long hours of demanding work in unsafe conditions become the desperate reality for these victims that had been promised a job in a land of opportunity.

Another scenario has traffickers offering the allure of marriage or glamorous jobs in modeling or acting in order to force young women into prostitution.  Such exploitation occurs at local levels in every city of  the world but for victims of sex trafficking, the removal from one country to another isolates them further.  Without the language skills to communicate in the foreign country, the sex trade victim cannot seek help even if support services are available locally.

Another horrific product of the globalized sex trafficking economy is the enticement offered to parents to sell their children into prostitution.  The demand to stock child prostitutes for sex tourism destinations such as Thailand is great. In sex trade economics, an unthinkable act by a parent becomes all too commonplace.

Human trafficking is a global and local problem. In order to fight it we need to admit its existence.   Maybe on this St. Patrick’s Day we could take up the challenge by caring less about all things green, and a bit more about the life of Patrick himself.   If we could imagine what life was like for St. Patrick we may have greater empathy for the plight of victims of human trafficking in our communities.

The Gospel Coalition in Canada: A Generational Opportunity

Posted on by under Theology

In October I was invited to participate in a regional conference in Ontario. The theme was on revival and the expositions were very good, especially those given by Don Carson, the Canadian born scholar. The sponsoring group was The Gospel Coalition’s Ontario Chapter.

Now The Gospel Coalition (TGC) was formed in 2005 by Don Carson and New York City pastor Tim Keller as a modest plan to rally about 40 broadly Reformed pastors together in order to assist the church by leveraging resources for teaching and outreach.

Since then, TGC has had conferences and a significant web influence, as well as the beginnings of regional ‘chapters’. In Canada, groups in Ontario, Atlantic Canada and Quebec have started chapters of the US-based TGC.  Yet many Canadian church leaders felt that a separate national group was needed. So discussions began at the TGC Ontario conference to talk about forming The Gospel Coalition Canada.

I was privileged to be asked to participate in those discussions about TGC. I heard Don Carson tell about the history of TGC and how it has grown to have a great influence beyond the US. Carson said that the city with the highest amount of users for the TGC website came from Sydney, Australia! Yet Carson stated that TGC had never intended to be an international ministry. It was a US oriented para-church ministry. So what has happened in response is that groups from different countries have started TGC-like organizations with similar aims, but with complete control in their own hands, not the US group. TGC offered to generously share resources, and branding, but hoped that these other countries would develop their own ministry as they saw fit.

Australia was a test case for this (although Spanish and French speaking groups have begun as well). An Australian Council was established to form The Gospel Coalition Australia. For now, they use a ‘mirrored’ version of the US TGC site, but they are developing on their own, making decisions as they see fit for the Australian context.

So in Canada, there is the possibility of the same thing happening. In the October meeting in Ontario, it was decided among the assembled group that John Neufeld of Back to the Bible Canada, and John Mahaffey, Pastor of West Highland Baptist, Hamilton, would invite an initial council together to consider the TGC doctrinal statement and the prospect of establishing a para-church entity in Canada.

Unlike the US, Canada has very few para-church ministries that are theologically robust, yet unifying across denominations around the gospel. In the US, TGC is just one of many differing ‘Reformed evangelical’ constituencies, which can overlap with other sound ministries. Canada has none. And the evangelical denominations in Canada are losing any distinctiveness in being evangelical, while individual churches are finding more in kinship with churches outside of their denominations than in them. This is where a Gospel Coalition-type of ministry could be helpful in Canada.

I was asked to participate in the Ottawa meeting  last week with other Reformed evangelical pastors in order to establish The Gospel Coalition Canada. This is an immense privilege for me and it touches on a ministry burden that I have had since the early days of my Christian life. Canada needs sound gospel preaching, in sound gospel churches, populated by sound, gospel Christians.

The possibility of The Gospel Coalition Canada is in my view a generational opportunity in this country. It is my opinion that nearly all of the Canadian evangelical denominations will be ‘former’ evangelicals within a generation. This is already happening, so that the ‘coalitions’ of the past, whether Baptist, Mennonite,Reformed, Presbyterian, etc., will all become similar in structure, doctrine and practice to the United Church of Canada or the Anglican Church of Canada. These ‘churches’ are merely social agencies, or advocacy groups who are at best trafficking in the bare husk of confessional orthodoxy.

 

The Gospel Coalition Canada, is not another denomination. However as Dr. Carson made clear in October it is a para-church ministry. It simply comes alongside of the church and helps the church, because the church is the main thing. Nevertheless, such coalition building is desperately needed in Canada where so many churches and leaders feel isolated and unaware of others who may be likeminded. In response to this isolation, many pastors and churches have looked south to the US. They have even begun to develop ministry connections with US based ministries. The more North-South cooperation has happened, the less East-West assistance has occurred.

The Gospel Coalition Canada is an effort to change that.

It is an attempt to share in the ministry of the gospel together across a vast land that stretches from sea to sea to sea. It is a generational opportunity. And in the spiritual lostness of Canada’s great expanse may our prayer be that God  would graciously bless such efforts to promote the gospel of Jesus Christ today and until he returns in glory.

It’s Only A Sermon Away

Posted on by under Preaching

What is one of the reasons why people don’t go to church? It is that the preaching is so lifeless. Even the idea conjured up by the word ‘sermon’ involves something tedious or mind-numbing.

So pastors have to get back to the simple source for spiritual life in their churches, that is seeking the Spirit of Christ in their preaching.  Calvin made the point clearly:

As long as the law is preached by the external voice of man, and not inscribed by the finger and Spirit of God on the heart, it is but a dead letter, and as it were a lifeless thing (1)

But then the same applies to the hearer. Are you seeking Christ, so that the Spirit can awaken life within you? More than that, the Spirit can create new life within you, causing you to be born ‘from above’.

It is the great untried opportunity of this age. Yet it’s only a sermon away.

(1) John Calvin , Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 297.