Year: 2004

Agape

Busy and tired I am I am. Busy and tired I am.

I’m working frantically on school right now. I had to get an extension to get all my work done, so I’m working it for all it’s worth.

But since I haven’t posted anything in weeks, I thought I’d post a snippet of my homework. Below is a part of my interaction requirement for my Theology class. The question I’m responding to is:

>What does it mean to say that God is love (that is, that God both acts lovingly and is in his essential being Love)? How does this relate to (pick one or more):
>1. The doctrine of the Trinity
>2. God’s holiness and human sin
>3. What it means for His creatures to love Him
>4. The cross

My answer is long and meandering because *I* am long and meandering.

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All About You

One of the things we’ve been hearing a lot of in Christendom for a while now is something along the lines of “It’s not about us; It’s all about you” or “It’s all about Jesus.” These phrases are very true, in a certain context, particularly in worship. What kind of worship would it be if our worship was about us? What kind of wife would be said to love her husband, if her way of loving was all about her?

But that’s not to say that *everything* in the heart of God is all about Jesus. For instance, take “thanksgiving.” Just the word itself implies that we have to stop and recognise that somebody did something **for us**. You can’t really be thankful for something that isn’t about you. If it wasn’t done for egalitarian reasons, it becomes difficult to be thankful. Yet we are called to “come into His presence with Thanksiving in our hearts,” and also to “forget not all of His benefits.” Doesn’t that sort of imply that whatever it is that I’m thankful for was all about me?

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Happy Thanksgiving Back

In honor of Thangskiving, I would like to say something about the thing that I am most thankful for: someone whom I am missing very much right now, since she is in Mary-Land, and I have to manage to stay sane here all by myself. Valerie is the only girl I’ve ever loved, that I’ve loved first on the basis of her character. She knows how to love better than anyone I’ve ever known.

She’s also the only one I’ve ever written bona fide love poetry for. So…

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More Calls for Reformation

Here’s a quote from my most recent textbook:

The more one studies contemporary evangelicalism, the more one senses the profound frustration that grips many of its leaders. The statistics say we should be powerful and influential, and we are not. The intellectuals think they should be followed, and they are largely ignored. The entrepreneurs and media stars act as if they will bring in revival, and of course they don’t. The culture is hell-bent to discard the Judeo-Christian outlook that once predominated, and a lot of conservatives feel cheated. Theologians and historians and pastors alike continuously expand the definition of evangelicalism, but instead of drawing in a wider circle they are gutting what is central. The level of frustration is high

But not, I fear, the level of brokenness

D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God (p 489)