You can read a transcript of this video at Crossway’s blog. Apologies for the scary thumbnail.

Blogs

Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus | Srini Pillay, HBR
“In keeping with recent research, both focus and unfocus are vital. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing you to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions too.”

The Best Discoveries Begin as Problems: How to Read Proverbs | John Piper, Desiring God
Why would a book that aims to impart insight for wise living (Proverbs 1:2–3) put contradictory instructions back-to-back? I can think of at least seven reasons.

The Kids Are Not Okay—and Neither Is America | Collin Hansen, TGC
A review of Senator Ben Sasse’s new book The Vanishing American Adult. And Alex Chediak offers his own take in Sen. Ben Sasse’s The Vanishing American Adult Offers Timely Solutions.

Do we really need another book about entitled millennials? Or about the helicopter parents who raise these precious darlings? Senator Ben Sasse’s The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance exceeds expectations. It challenges both parents and our culture, offering compelling and timely solutions.

Andy Crouch on How to Become a Tech-Wise Family | Collin Hansen, TGC
“In order to survive and even thrive in our information age, Andy Crouch believes the church must become more like a family, and the family must become more like a church. His new book, The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place, explains how wise, discerning handling of new-media technology will cultivate wisdom and courage. The home, he says, must limit technology in order to delight in God, neighbor, family, and nature. The church, he says, will not enjoy authentic community unless it disciples Christians in countercultural living when it comes to our TVs, video games, and smartphones.”

I Took a Week Off from Social Media (and Survived) | Brandon D. Smith, Patheos
“…after that week off, I decided to keep my social media accounts, hoping to absorb the good and reject the bad that comes along with them. But in the week I spent almost entirely away from them, I counted the cost of a life with almost no social media engagement, and I was richer for it. And if you asked my family, friends, and people I do offline life with, they’d agree.”

Fast from Food, Not Facebook | Tim Challies
I’m almost convinced by Tim’s argument here:

“…we are to fast from food for this simple reason: Food is something we need, not merely something we want. You may want to use Facebook, but you need to eat food. Thus, in fasting you are withholding from yourself something you need (food) in order to pursue something you need even more (communion with God).”

How the Average Working Adult Spends Days | FlowingData

How I Leverage My Autism for Pastoral Ministry | Lamar Hardwick, CT Pastors
“On Monday, December 22, 2014, I walked into the office of my therapist. I sat down on her couch with my wife by my side. I took a long deep breath and slowly exhaled, waiting for answers to my 36-year-long question. She grabbed her clip board, glanced over the assessments we had completed in weeks prior, looked me in the eye, and uttered three words that changed my life: ‘autism spectrum disorder.’ While the diagnosis didn’t change who I was, it did change my understanding of who I had been. In many ways, I have spent the years since that diagnosis learning myself all over again.”

Kindle Deals

For your non-Kindle book buying needs please consider using Reformation Heritage Books in the USA and Reformed Book Services in Canada. Good value prices and shipping.

The Art of Neighboring: Building Genuine Relationships Right Outside your Door by Jay Pathak and Dave Runyon ($1.99)

Drawn By The Father by James R. White ($2.99)

Judges For You (God’s Word For You) by Timothy Keller ($2.99)

We don’t need to suffer from an illness or a disease to feel at least some of the pain of it. For example, if we see a blind person, we pause, we think about what it must be like to have no sight, we imagine their life, and, to some degree, we feel the pain of blindness.

Same thing happens when we see a veteran with no legs. If we pause long enough to run that experience through our minds, our hearts register pain. That’s called sympathy, which is literally “suffering alongside someone.”

Excruciating Sympathy
Sympathy is the second way that Christ experienced the pain of illness and disease, though he was never ill or diseased (see yesterday’s post). His sympathy with suffering produced suffering through sympathy.

By sympathy, another’s bodily sufferings became his mental, emotional, and spiritual sufferings. “In all their afflictions, he was afflicted” (lsa. 63:9). He experienced their pain and sorrow without experiencing their sickness and disease. He could truly say to every sick person, “I feel your pain.” Thomas Goodwin explained:

By sympathy and pity he afflicted himself with their sickness as if it had been his own…Through a fellow-feeling of it, He took it off from them, being for them afflicted as if He himself had been sick.

Indeed, we can go further and say that he felt more pain than the sick and diseased because he had perfect humanity and therefore a better understanding of the medical problem and heightened sensitivity to the agonies of it.

To illustrate, think of a mother in a doctor’s office with her four-year-old daughter when the doctor breaks the news that the little girl has cancer. The girl had no understanding of this and continues playing on the floor with her toys. The mother feels the pain of cancer so much more due to her maturity and experience. The same thing will happen throughout the surgery, radiation, and chemo.  Though the child will suffer some pain, the mother will suffer more pain.

Expert Sympathy
Christ was an expert sympathizer. People detected his compassion and pity and were drawn to him. They could see that he entered into their sufferings and sorrows as no one else did. He thus qualifies to be a merciful and faithful high priest (Heb. 4:14; 5:2).

Expiatory Sympathy
Christ’s sufferings through sympathy were not wasted sufferings. They were part of his atoning work. When he saw suffering, he suffered “a little Calvary” in his mind and heart, pains that were part of his curse-bearing life and offered up to his father as substitutionary sufferings for his people.

Exhausting Sympathy
Like all sympathy, Christ’s was exhausting. His sighs and groans in the face of human pain expressed the drain of virtue that exited his being and weakened him. Spurgeon explained:

I can say from personal experience, that I know of nothing that wears the soul down so fast as the outflow of sincere sympathy with the sorrowing, desponding, depressed ones. I have sometimes been the means in God’s hand of helping a man who suffered with a desponding spirit; but the help I have rendered has cost me dearly. Hours after, I have been myself depressed, and I have felt an inability to shake it off. You and I have not a thousandth-part of the sympathy that was in Christ.

Yesterday we saw how Christ’s experience of sinless infirmities brought him near to the weak and weary, drawing us to him. Today, we’ve noticed a further drawing power in his perfect pity, his sensitive sympathy, by which he felt more pain by sympathy than the sufferer felt by the actual disease or illness.

Blogs

Should Pastors Use Social Media?
I loved this paragraph by Tony Reinke:

Someone recently asked me, what’s the one takeaway from writing your book on smartphones, about technology and the future of Christianity, and I think it’s this point. The average, ordinary local church plays a significant role in the counter-cultural resistance movement against the most corruptive trends we now face in the digital age. The local church is precious! That’s the summary of three years of research and writing and I hope is an impactful point readers take from my new book.

The Best Way To Avoid Pastor Burnout? Equip The Saints
“Neither information or inspiration is enough. Pastors need to help congregations turn it into perspiration.”

Only Jesus Can Answer Our Call for Personal Identity
We are not what we consume. We are not what we achieve. We are not what others think. We are who we have been chosen to be: children of God!

Christ’s Help for Sabbath-Keeping
“No other day in history has been so set apart and specially blest: make sure that on the Sabbath, you fellowship with His flock, listen to God’s voice, come away with Christ.”

Do We Need to Raise Tougher Children?
“Parents do not need to manufacture challenging circumstances for their children to learn; life produces plenty of them. However, parents do need God’s wisdom on when to let their children endure a difficult situation.”

Is There a Silver Bullet of Sanctification?
Nine perennial candidates that tempt us to think, “This one thing is the secret key that will unlock your Christian life!”

Kindle Books

The Scriptures Testify about Me: Jesus and the Gospel in the Old Testament $2.99.

The Truth About Forgiveness by John Macarthur $1.99.

New Book

Glory in the Ordinary: Why Your Work in the Home Matters to God by Courtney Reissig.

Did Jesus ever have a cold or the flu? Was it possible for him to contract cancer or diabetes?

The answer to that question begins by identifying the four possible states of human nature:

1. Unfallen human nature: The perfect humanity that Adam and Eve enjoyed before the fall.

2. Fallen human nature: The cursed humanity that Adam and Eve experienced post-fall and passed down to all their descendants.

3. Saved human nature: Still a fallen humanity but it’s now in the process of being redeemed.

4. Glorified human nature: Not just restored to the perfection of unfallen human nature but something even more exalted and wonderful.

So which kind of human nature did Jesus have? He didn’t have a saved human nature because he did not need to be saved. He has a glorified human nature now in heaven, but he did not have that on earth. So we’re left with two options – unfallen human nature or fallen human nature. Which was it?

Luke 1:35 supplies the answer. There, an angel told Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.”

Perfect Genetics
Christ had a holy and unfallen human nature. The intervention of the Holy Spirit in his conception ensured that his humanity was without sin and, therefore, without corruption. Jesus did not inherit any mental, physical, genetic, chemical, electrical, or biological infirmity from Mary and none developed in him. He was never infected with germs, viruses, or disease and he did not transmit them either.

In Christ’s Doctrine of the Atonement, one of the greatest books ever written on the atonement, George Smeaton wrote:

He saw no corruption, either living or dead – for sickness or disease could not, as a personal quality attach to the sinless One…Disease could not touch Him, because He did not come within the power of sin in the world; and hence we never read of His contracting any distemper or disease like other men.

His body did not see corruption in the grave and it did not see corruption in life either. He was a lamb without blemish (1 Peter 1:19) and a priest without defect (Lev. 21:17). In a sermon on Matthew 8:16-17, Charles Spurgeon put it like this:

Do not think that our Lord Jesus was actually diseased: he suffered greatly, but I read not was upon him. Probably there was no man in whom there was less tendency to natural disease than in him. His pure and blessed body was not subject to the diseases which are brought upon men through sin being in them.

This being so, we can say that Christ would actually never have died unless he had consciously chosen to voluntarily give up his life to death–which, of course, is what he did (John 10:17-18). He would have aged in the sense of growing stronger from infancy to manhood, but he would not have aged in the sense of growing weaker in his body as the decades passed.

An Alien Christ?
Does this not distance Christ from our experience? Does this not make him an “alien” to us when we need someone to identify with us in our human weakness?

There are two answers to this. The first is to distinguish between sinless infirmities (or weaknesses) and sinful (or sin-caused) infirmities. The second is to understand how Christ can perfectly sympathize with us even without actually experiencing everything that we go through. We’ll explore that further tomorrow but let’s first clarify the distinction between sinless weaknesses and sinful weaknesses.

Sinless Weaknesses
Sinless weaknesses are things like hunger, thirst, and tiredness. These were not caused by sin but were part of the experience of unfallen Adam too (though not to the painful degree we experience them now). They are part of the essence of being limited creatures.

It’s these sinless weaknesses that the Westminster Confession speaks of when it says that Christ “took upon Him man’s nature, with all the essential properties, and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin” (WCF 8.2).

Sinful Weaknesses
On the other hand, there are sinful weaknesses such as colds, cases of flu, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dermatitis, and so on. These weaknesses are sinful in the sense that sin caused them to enter into human nature via the divine curse upon humanity for sin. They are an essential and large part of what it is to have a fallen human nature.

As such, Christ, as the Holy One, did not and could not contract these illnesses and diseases. He experienced sinless weaknesses to the maximum (especially because his perfect human nature was more tender and sensitive than fallen human nature) but he did not experience sinful weaknesses that are part of fallen human nature. He experienced weakness but not all weaknesses, and he did not need to in order to sympathize with all our weaknesses (Heb. 4:15).

Bearing Sin Parallel
In The Heart of Christ in Heaven Towards Sinners on Earth, Thomas Goodwin helps us understand this by paralleling the way in which Christ could bear our sins without being personally tainted and the way he bore our sickness without ever being ill.

It may be said of Christ while he was here below that in the same sense or manner wherein he “bore our sickness,” Matthew 8:17, who yet was never personally tainted with any disease, in the same sense or manner he may be said to have borne our sins.

Tomorrow we’ll look at how Christ’s perfect pity also draws him near to us and us to him.

Blogs

How to Unplug While You Are on Vacation
I love the email auto-delete idea.

How I Research Books
Tony Reinke takes us behind the curtain to share some fascinating insights into his writing process.

You Can Defeat Distraction
Here’s the question

Will we let our age of diversion nibble away at our very humanness? Or will we fight, in the strength God supplies (1 Peter 4:11) by his Spirit, to reset our minds to what really matters, and so makes us truly effective on earth?

The Uncomfortable Subject Jesus Addressed More than Anyone Else
“Some months ago, R. C. Sproul was asked which doctrine he struggles with most. He replied: ‘Hell.’ It’s comforting to know a theological giant like Sproul still wrestles with something I’ve struggled with my whole Christian life. The doctrine of hell is uncomfortable for most of us. However, our understanding of hell shapes our view of the gospel, God’s holiness, and our depravity. If we don’t accept the reality of hell, we won’t rightly understand the glory of the gospel.”

The Revenge of Analog Discipleship | TGC
“A new book by David Sax, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, focuses on recent movement away from digital technology and back toward “real things” like vinyl records, board games, hardcover books, and face-to-face education.”

The Particular Importance of Not Being Particularly Important | For The Church
“Allow yourself to be nobody. Have a seat at the end of the table and you might just find Jesus sitting there too.”

Why reducing sleep makes you hungry
Sleep deprivation affects not only only our minds and our moods but also our waistlines.

Kindle Books

What if Jesus had never been born? by James Kennedy $1.99.

Gospel Wakefulness by Jared Wilson $3.99.

Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Jesus by Jared Wilson $3.99.