When the nine-year-old Matthew Henry received news that one of his relatives was sick he wrote a letter in response:
“By this providence we may see that sin is the worst of evils, for sickness came with sin. Christ is the chief good; therefore let us love him. Sin is the worst of evils, therefore let us hate that with perfect hatred.”
Nine years old!
Wouldn’t you love to hear your children say such things? May God give them (and us) such deep and Christ-centered spirituality.
If you’re anywhere in the Grand Rapids area why not consider the Philadelphia Conference of Reformed Theology (PCRT) on March 20-22 where the topic will be Holiness and Honor: A Reformed View of Sex And Marriage. You can find out more here and pre-register here. The schedule is as follows:
Friday
8:00–9:00 a.m. Pre-Conference Registration
9:00 a.m.–3:45 p.m. Pre-Conference: The Gospel and the Song of Songs, Iain Duguid
6:00 p.m. Conference Registration
7:00 p.m. Opening of the 2015 PCRT
First Address: The Goodness of God’s Design for Marriage, Iain Duguid
Saturday
8:00 a.m. Late Registration
9:00 a.m. Second Address: Gender and the Image of God, David Garner
10:30 a.m. Third Address: The Honorable Institution of Marriage, David Murray
11:30 a.m. Question & Answer Session
12:30 p.m. Lunch
2:00 p.m. Fourth Address: The Beauty of God’s Design for Sex, David Garner
3:15–4:30 p.m. Seminars
4:30 p.m. Dinner (at local restaurants)
6:30 p.m. Sacred Concert (MI)
7:00 p.m. Fifth Address: Sexual Sanctification, Richard Phillips
Sunday PCRT joins host church worship for final address.
Sixth Address: The Marriage of Christ and His Church, Richard Phillips
8:30 a.m. & 10:45 a.m. PCRT worships with Byron Center First Christian
Reformed Church, Grand Rapids
A week or so ago, I received an email from Brad Hansen with the lyrics of a song he had composed while in a recent dark spell with depression. I was deeply touched by the words, and asked if I could share his song and story on the blog. He replied: “I would be glad to share my story. I decided long ago that I would open my life and struggles to others, with the hope that people could know that they’re not alone.” So here’s a little of Brad’s testimony to God’s grace followed by the song.
Even an old dog can learn new tricks; and even a depressed dog can be found smiling for reasons which elude the wisest of masters. This is the story of such a dog – old (which I know to be true because my sons say so) and well acquainted with depression, now for about 40 years.
The onset of depression was, for me, like a moment from Jurassic Park – the moment when a distant “thud” creates rings in a nearby puddle. You think it’s nothing, until it happens again, a bit more pronounced. Soon you realize that there is something present more mysterious and threatening than you realized.
The Bottom Drops Out
All this began taking place in my late teens, when I noticed that my mood, my energy, and my enjoyment of life would take a tumble for a few days. It was a bit unpleasant, but it wasn’t long before I was my usual self. But over the next 3-5 years the tumbles became falls hurtling deeper. What once affected my life for a few days here and there began extending to a few weeks, and later still months on end. I had graduated from college, was married, on my way through seminary, and all the while living in a fog from which I had only a few periods of relief. Somehow I muddled through. I graduated from seminary, received a call to a church, and was ordained. It was then that the bottom dropped out.
My memories of that period are (blessedly!) few. But I still remember the pattern. I would begin my day getting up, eating breakfast, showering, getting dressed, and then immobilized in bed for hours. Within a year of beginning this pastorate I found myself hospitalized in a psychiatric unit. I was experiencing what medical people would later call “Bipolar II” – a depression with varying mood swings, most of which are experienced below the water line. In those days the medical arsenal for depression was relatively slim, but I was fortunate to find relief through lithium. After two months hospitalization I was released and returned home.
Burned Out Shell
But I knew that as a person I was mostly a shell, and my inner being was burned out. It’s quite common for people to misunderstand what medication can and cannot do. In my case lithium served to level the playing field, but I had a lot of recovery to do before I began to believe “I got game.” It’s been a journey of 35-40 years with many ups and downs, which continues to this day, when the old dog learned a new trick.
Only a few weeks ago, I sat at a prayer meeting at our church on a Sunday evening. Shortly before prayer began, I felt the darkness descending on me. The best description of what this is like is to remember your last visit to the optometrist. She sets before your face a contraption with any number of lenses, and, with the eye chart out ahead of you, begins the questions: “Which is clearer – 1 or 2? Which is clearer – 3 or 4?” In between those verbal choices, of course, is a moment when the optometrist flips a lens from one side to another. One side (in theory!) is clearer than the other, and becomes so in the wink of an eye. That is what my mood swings are like. One moment, I’m fine; the next moment everything is cloudy or even dark. On that evening I wasn’t able to pray out loud; I prayed silently knowing what was happening to me, and thanking God that he was with me. I attended to some of the spoken prayers as they were spoken. But I knew that I might be in for a dark spell.
Songs From The Darkness
The following morning proved that to be the case. I was down and heavy, and my prayer to God was “Help me to do what I can today.” What happened next is a bit hard to describe. I found myself going to my table with my Bible open to Psalm 42-43, with a sudden urge to write a hymn, and retell the story of the psalmist and his God in my own words, out of my own human condition. Within a half hour I had the result: a hymn which I entitled, “Here, Lord, I Kneel to Pray.” And with hymn in hand, and John Ireland’s music (“Love Unknown”) in my head, the old dog smiled a bit, and contentment (though certainly not euphoria) reigned. My world, and welcome to it.
Since that time, I’ve turned my attention to other texts and theology, both biblical and systematic, to ply this new trade. I’ve discovered that God entrusts to his oft-depressed servants the very songs he has given to them in the darkness, for the building up of the body, to the praise of his glory. And it’s not bad work if you can find it. Cheers!
“Here, Lord, I Kneel to Pray”
Psalm 42
Tune: Love Unknown (John Ireland)
Here, Lord, I kneel to pray;
Yet deep within my heart
There is no joy and darkness clouds its ev’ry part.
The memory of worship sweet
Stands far away while I must weep.
So my soul longs for you,
My Lord, who truly lives,
Whose presence like the flowing streams he richly gives
For thirst do I, and thus I cry.
My tears for food won’t satisfy.
Yet my Lord sings to me
His steadfast love by day,
And through the night his song is with me ‘ere I pray.
Shall he forget the cruel threat
That bids my soul my life regret?
So to myself I speak.
To my soul would I preach,
“Be not cast down, let hope become your heart’s relief.
God shall you save, begetting praise;
His light and truth are yours always.”
If you don’t know the tune, here’s a video to help you learn it.
When I grew up, Catalogues were the Internet. We waited every quarter for 2-3 inch thick tomes in the mail, packed with thousands of color pictures of every possible kind of item. I can still smell the paper as we kids rushed to the toy pages in the Christmas issues. I suppose it was Amazon in paper form – an innumerable number of goods for sale, organized and presented in such a way to ensure as big a spend as possible.
Some younger readers probably have no idea what I’m talking about. But even my fellow oldies might never have heard of a Catalogue of Mercies. Neither had I until I read about it in J. B. Williams biography of Matthew Henry.
Henry wrote this detailed catalogue in 1675, aged 13, a couple of years after his conversion to Christ, to record the progress of religion in his soul together with what he believed were the three evidences of this being a genuine work of God’s grace. These were:
1. Covenant transactions between God and the soul
Henry was confident that there had been such covenanting, but to be sure, said:
“If I never did this before, I do it now; for I take God in Christ to be mine. I give up myself to be his in the bond of an everlasting covenant never-to-be-forgotten…I do this every day.”
What’s interesting here is that although the Puritans have been accused of being overly introspective, the first evidence that Henry focused on was “I have looked to Christ and given myself away to Him.”
2. True repentance for sin, and grief, and shame, and sorrow for it
Again, Henry found evidence of this, “though not in that measure that I could desire.”
“I have been heartily sorry for what is past. I judge myself before the Lord, blushing for shame that I should ever affront him as I have done.”
This evidence of repentance assured him that God had pardoned him, an assurance he based on several Scriptures (e.g. Prov. 28:13; Isa. 1:18; Matt. 5:4, etc.)
3. True love of God
Henry was convinced that he loved God on two grounds – he loved the people of God and he loved the Word of God.
Just like the catalogues of my youth, Henry’s Catalogue of Mercies were skillfully and persuasively organized, all with the great and glorious aim of commending the mercies of God.
Many, O Lord my God, are your wonderful works
Which you have done;
And your thoughts toward us
Cannot be recounted to you in order;
If I would declare and speak of them,
They are more than can be numbered (Psalm 40:5).
Like every lover of God’s Word, I rejoiced to read the reports of the thousands of people who attended last week’s Inerrancy Summit. I salute the stalwarts of the faith who spoke there and earnestly pray that the hoped-for effects of greater respect for and obedience to God’s Word will be wonderfully realized.
I may have missed this, but one note I didn’t hear was one of humble confession, the sound of inerrantists confessing that we too have undermined the Bible. Unlike deniers of inerrancy, we’ve done it unintentionally, but the end result has often been the same – less reverence for and faith in the Word of God.
How so? Let me highlight four areas in which we inerrantists have inadvertently undermined Gods Word.
The Clarity of Scripture
The doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture is summed up in chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith:
“Those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.”
When people (especially those outside the church) see the intellectual gymnastics some evangelicals use to get away from the plain reading of Genesis 1 regarding six-day creation or the uniqueness of Adam as the first human being, it’s no surprise that they often conclude this is an impossible book for the learned to understand, never mind the unlearned.
Preachers, teachers, theologians, and all of us have a huge responsibility to ensure that we honor the clarity of Scripture by demonstrating how even the unlearned using ordinary means can come to a sufficient understanding of the Bible.
The Sufficiency of Scripture
When we let the findings and theories of secular science have priority or primacy in our interpretation of Scripture and in our application of it in caring for people, we undermine the Word of God.
But sometimes, in our zeal to uphold the sufficiency of God’s Word for faith and life, inerrantists have often carelessly overstated the sufficiency of Scripture. For example, in the area of counseling, a concern to keep out dangerous worldly theory and practice has sometimes led to the theoretical rejection of anything helpful outside of the Bible.
There are three problems with this. First, there’s the problem of inconsistency. Whatever counselors have said or written about rejecting anything and everything outside of the Bible, they deny it in practice. No biblical teacher or counselor uses only the Bible in shepherding people. Every single one of us integrates knowledge from outside the Bible into our teaching and discipling. The only questions are how we do it and to what degree.
Second, Although this “bible-only” view sincerely intends to defend the sufficiency of Scripture, it ends up undermining it because the Bible is not regarded as sufficient enough to screen and filter the world of knowledge outside of the Bible, and admit into the care of people only what is consistent with God’s Word. The Bible is not thought to be up to the task and therefore we must not even attempt such an endeavor.
Third, when the sufficiency of Scripture is overstated to rule out any place for science in our interpretation or application of Scripture, it looks ridiculous to many, preventing them from giving a fair hearing to the true claims of God’s Word.
The Authority of Scripture
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones believed that the most important battle in his day was not over the inerrancy of Scripture but over the authority of Scripture. I believe both were and are equally important issues. What’s the point in fighting to the death for the inerrancy of Scripture if we undermine it by rejecting its authority in our lives, especially in our ethics? We end up with a perfect book that has no impact on our lives.
Many different theological systems have been devised that, in effect, displace the role of the ten commandments as an authoritative guide for the Christian’s life. Whatever the scheme, they all end in the same place – freedom from God’s moral law. Especially, freedom from the fourth commandment.
Unsurprisingly, many who want to argue for gay marriage or the legitimacy of gay Christians point out the seeming hypocrisy of our picking and choosing which of God’s moral laws we want to be authoritative in our lives. “Why can’t we do the same?” they ask.
The Practice of Scripture
This flows out of the last point, but a vital part of any Inerrancy Summit should be an Inerrancy Valley, where we all humble ourselves in repentance and contrition and confess how we have all failed to practice the Bible, we have all failed to live up to what we profess to believe about the Bible. This is especially serious because for most people our lives and character are the only Bible they regularly read.
There’s no question that far more people would believe in the inerrancy of Scripture if they could see more practice of Scripture. Errant lives are poor commercials for an inerrant Bible.
The way things are going, many Gospel ministers will soon be forced “out of business” together with various florists, bakers, and photographers, all for refusing to conform to the culture’s demand that we all uniformly celebrate so-called homosexual marriage.
Similar tyrannical abuses have happened in the past, but God has kept His church in the midst of a hostile culture. In his biography of Matthew Henry, J. B. Williams notes that the UK Parliament’s 1662 Act of Uniformity separated 2000 Gospel ministers from their flocks (including Henry’s father), banned them from preaching the Gospel, and “as far as human intent could go, consigned them to oblivion.” This Great Ejection occurred all because they would not conform to Government-defined and Government-mandated “uniformity.”
But 1662 was also the year that Matthew Henry was born, as were a number of other eminent future ministers of the Gospel. Williams comments:
“The constancy of God’s servants was thus rewarded: and provision was made in the ministry, for another generation, for whom, in providential mercy, fairer and more peaceful days were appointed.”
Yes, this modern Act of Uniformity will take its toll on many. Unless we see a miraculous reversal, Gospel ministers are going to experience a Supreme-Court-backed Great Ejection and be consigned to oblivion. We fear for the church and the Gospel; we fear most of all for the souls of our children and of future generations.
But let’s take courage in God’s providential mercy, and believe that even in our days, in labor wards all over the land, God is bringing future Matthew Henrys into the world to minister to the souls of His children, in what we hope will be fairer and more peaceful days.