How Can We Really Know God?

What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance; and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?

In Knowing God, J.I. Packer gives us four ways to seek this “compelling goal” of knowing God:

1. Listen to God’s Word and apply it by the power of the Spirit
2. Take note of who God is, his nature and his character, as he reveals it to you through his Word and his works
3. Say ‘yes’ to his invitations and do what he commands
4. Come to a realization of the fact that God has shown his love to you by  “approaching you and drawing you into this divine fellowship”

What Jesus Did for Our Prayers

In his sermon “The Most High A Prayer-Hearing God,” Jonathan Edwards lists three things Jesus, The Mediator, did “to make way for the hearing of our prayers.”

1. Atonement: By his death on the cross, Christ made amends for us “so that our guilt need not stand in the way, as a separating wall between God and us, and that our sins might not be a cloud through which our prayers cannot pass.”
2. Purchase: By his obedience in life, Christ purchased the privilege we have of having our prayers heard by God. “Our prayers would be of no account, and of no avail with God, were it not for the merits of Christ.”
3. Intercession: “He hath entered for us into the holy of holies, with the incense which he hath provided, and there he makes continual intercession for all that come to God in his name, so that their prayers come to God the Father through his hands….”

On Assurance

“[Full assurance is] when the soul, by the Spirit and word, is so fully persuaded of its eternal happiness and blessedness, that it is carried, like Noah’s ark, above all waves, doubts, and fears; and, Noah-like, sits still and quiet; and can, with the apostle Paul, triumph over sin, hell, wrath, death, and Satan.”

Thomas Brooks – “Heaven on Earth”

How Far is Too Far in Cultural Engagement?

Timely words from Carl Trueman as he looks at Ephesians 5:12:

I have often in the past stood with those who laughed at what we regarded as the ignorant, unsophisticated taboos of the older generation. But now I worry about the ease with which the rising generation talks explicitly of ‘the fruitless deeds of darkness’ in the name of cultural engagement, fear of being thought passé or simply a desire to slough off the legalisms of their fathers in the faith. You can, after all, get to heaven without ever having seen an R-Rated art house movie or having enjoyed a spectacular love life.

Here’s a question: would it make any difference to you, any difference at all to the way you talk, to what you watch, to the way you “engage culture”, if Eph. 5:12 had never been written?