Did Not our Hearts Burn..

This is from Friday, I was thinking through, how it is we recover a right understanding of correctly using the sword of the word. We are familiar with the term, but I think it today is to often been used as a letter opener. We are so, so clumsy with it. We are gonna hurt each other with it, not intentionally. Some will think it’s a distraction. But it has always been intended to be used to expose the hearts of men and show the need to repent, to turn back to Gods ways, his truth. Like Pilgrims Progress you dont stop. You rest and move forward. From Friday…

It has been a dead day at work. Standing around. Had only one job. Heard how one of the my co workers is gonna loose his home shortly. Lots of time to think.

When a miner is tunneling and finds a vein of gold, he follows the vein, up, down and through the mountain. I am going to keep digging a little further.

So as I have been reflecting today, asking God to show me what I am missing. I know that I will have to give an account. He has put me in a stewardship position , my life, my wife, kids, he has gifted me as a teacher, all will require an account of me. None of it is mine.

I am 50 now, I am more introspective as I get older, I know the time available to me is shrinking. Its about 42yrs walking as a Christian. About 25-30 yrs of it was generic Christianity, "just gotta keep focusing on Jesus and don’t worry about anything else". Trying to love him. I never understood what it meant when Jesus said …If you love me…keep my commandments.

For the most part I have just been pushed along by the culture, both from within the church and from outside it. The word says my kids are “arrows in a quiver”. Arrows don’t just climb out and head off where ever they feel like it. But that’s the Christian model I was shown.

I cannot reduce any of the claims of Christ for any area of his sovereignty. (Thats everywhere and anything.) To do that would be theft. Or my quiet collaboration with some mans usurpation of a part of his kingdom. If I will be like Jesus, that means “I only say what the father says and only do what the father does”. As Jesus was the Word,one with God and all of Gods precepts Laws and judgments are a reflection of his character, his truth, he could do it. Unlike Jesus I will fail badly at this.

The only way I have seen to increase the likely hood of my doing this is to try and take his law, precepts and judgments as found in the word, and hold them up to what is going on around me and by his word see if this is from the kingdom of man or the kingdom of God. It is foreign to me and it is hard. This does mean I have to take in, from a general sense, what is happening around me in our culture. I will have to focus on it and what people are saying so I can have something to even hold up to his word.

Now I have never woken up, or heard Gods voice just interrupt me and just turn on some light in my head so I could now “be always ready to give an answer for the hope within you”. I had to “study to show myself approved”. It has always taken a bunch of the foundational pieces floating around in my head first. Verses, things I had been meditating on, praying about, reading or talking about with someone else. God promises ” that if we are dragged before rulers to not worry about what we will say”. But no where in the word does he extend this promise to life in general. Proverbs says " it is the glory of kings to seek a matter out”.

Think about it. Is it the norm in your Christian walk or of anyone you know where different believers just all of a sudden start giving biblical foundations or understanding for things that were not read, studied and understood by them or taught to them?

Do our pastors just go through the week and out of the blue God just lays out the message for Sunday on principles that they haven’t first dealt with or read about some how? Rob has never stood up in front of us on Sunday and said, “oh hey I want to expound on some precepts that I have never worked through.”

Have any of us ever met a family who just out of the blue pulled their kids from public school because God just showed them to? Without them having studied Gods principles on this, ( my experience is believers can read over every principle the word has for raising children and not once make the connection, “oh I see, we better get them out”.) without having some other family say “hey this is great”, or from their own experience say “there has to be another way”?

There have been so many times where with Rob one of us will tell the other “what about this? Doesn’t this mean this?” So often the other one will say really? I cant see that. But 10 minutes, a week, a month and one thing I think was a year when the other could then say “yes! I see it!” Did not our hearts burn!!!! Rob you have been such a blessing to me, let me just say it for the record bro.

The bible is full of phrases like “blessed is the man who loves the law” and on it “he meditates day and night”. The point of the meditation isn’t an esoteric practice, it is so we can then apply it to the world God has placed us in.

It remains meaningless if you cannot make application from it, to the world around us. And if we cannot make the application of Gods Law, then someone’s, other than Gods principles, are probably being used. Someone else is asserting sovereignty.

But even if you have memorized all of the Law its another thing to apply it with wisdom. This is why it is so messy as we try to bring it to bear on politics, Palin or whatever. We are so not used to doing it. Just because we are so inexperienced at it, and we will! step on each others toes doing it, we must not stop trying.

I am commanded to disciple my children. I must show them how his law is to be a frontlet for their eyes. If I just leave it at that, as just verse’s without showing how it is, how you really do it. Then I have been derelict in Jesus instructions. First I must have some understanding on how we really use his word, his law to assess all we come across in life before I can teach it. How there is no neutral ground. The point isn’t that we have it all packaged and figured out, rather that we can show them the process by which they and their children’s children can do it. Or at least by Gods grace they will not be afraid to keep trying to do it because they heard their moms and dads trying. And Praise God, If I didn’t understand it to show my kids, then by Gods grace it will be the grandchildren I can show it too!

I don’t know how many times people have said “but David, God said he would write his law on our hearts”. But I have never met anyone who has been adept at explaining and showing how to apply his law that hasn’t first studied it. I mean really studied it. Gods Law, its only10 commandments and 600 some case examples. It doesn’t take too many pages in the Bible to list them out to us. If God is going to spiritually implant it in us? If we just automatically get understanding on how to use and apply Gods law then why do we all look like we just got off the short bus as we try? But Praise be to Jesus we are trying!

I don’t think we grasp how much truth is here. Clarkes biblical law from the 1940’s, 370 pgs showing how to apply Gods law. Wasnt that enough? Why did Rushdoony spend 850pgs! with his biblical institutes of the Law vol.1 in 1973. Why did Greg Bahnsen in 1977feel like he could write another 600 pgs of his own, after he had read Rushdoonys. But wait in 1982 doony does another 700 pgs on Law and society and since he wrote the forward for Bahnsen’s book he still thought he had some more to contribute. And then again in 1999 doony does another 215 pgs on just the intent of the Law.

I have just BARELY scratched the surface of only three of these books and I feel like my son Nathan, pointing at the page in a book and going “car, car”

We have a heavenly Father and I as a father am well pleased when my son is trying to do what I tell him to do. I don’t get upset as he is learning, “you fool! you spilled water down the front of your face again!” So too, I believe that our father is well pleased that we are trying to be obedient. Oh Lord we don’t want to hurt one another! But If we allow the stepping on of each others toes, keep us from walking out your word, than we have made of ourselves idols and may it never be so. We will not allow the fear of our inability to do it perfectly, keep us from trying, to be obedient, stumbling forward, trying to walk. That the next generation may run.