Blogotional

So lame, but a single image could be found on the web. So inane, but a single web entry of our subject could be found. In our seemingly never-ending quest for speedsters, we find Speed Metal! Talk about a lack of job security!

Speed Metal are robots developed in the future that have speed powers. In other words, at that future date the long line of superheores with speed powers are replaced by robots! No wonder some get disappointed.

OK I admit, this is barely worthy of discussion, so why? - simple -- THE LOOK. I defy anybody to explain to me why a machine build for speed needs that much upper body development! Anybody...Anybody...Buehler...Buehler...?

Related Tags: comics, comic books, comic art, speedsters, Flash, Speed Metal

Justin Taylor links to John Piper and a theology of singleness.

Take heed here lest you minimize what I am saying and do not hear how radical it really is. I am not sentimentalizing singleness to make the unmarried feel good. I am declaring the temporary and secondary nature of marriage and family over against the eternal and primary nature of the church. Marriage and family are temporary for this age; the church is forever. I am declaring the radical biblical truth that being in a human family is no sign of eternal blessing, but being in God’s family is means being eternally blessed. Relationships based on family are temporary. Relationships based on union with Christ are eternal. Marriage is a temporary institution, but what it stands for lasts forever. “In the resurrection,” Jesus said, “they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30).

I am loathe to disagree with John Piper on anything, but....

I am in something of a unique position here as I spent the first 20 years of my adulthood single and came to marriage at a very late age. I have a great deal of appreciation for what Piper is saying here, I agree with most of it. I certainly agree with this:

I am declaring the radical biblical truth that being in a human family is no sign of eternal blessing, but being in God’s family is means being eternally blessed.

But my first wonder is why are they mutually exclusive? My wife and I work pretty hard to make sure our marriage and the family it creates is first and foremost a part of God's family.

I have to say that in singleness I had more time to devote to, for lack of a better term, "God's work." But I can also say that in marriage I have learned more about how to be other focused, which is the attitude of Christ which I am to have in myself, than I could ever possibly hope to have in singleness.

Turth be told, I think as with all such questions, to try to decide what's better is the wrong approach. I think it is more of a situations and seasons thing. We cannot forget how often the marriage relationship is used as a model of our relationship with God. There is an undoubted ordained place for marriage on this planet. And yet, singleness has distinct advantages as well.

What worked best for me is to submit to God my station, be it single or married, and to allow Him to bless and ordain the state at the moment.

I think, in the end, that is the real issue - it's not where we are, but being in submission to Him wherever that is. A wife, or husband, can be either a hinderance or a help to that submission - and that is not a question of the behavior of the spouse, but rather how we relate to the spouse. God provides as we need and are ready.

Sometimes I think we let our questons get in the way of our submission....

Related Tags: marriage, singleness, theology, John Piper, submission

THESE ARE VERY FUNNY-----(must be real ....cause who could make them up?????)
ACTUAL WRITINGS FROM HOSPITAL CHARTS:

The patient refused autopsy.

The patient has no previous history of suicides.

Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.

Note: patient here - recovering from forehead cut. Patient became very angry when given an enema by mistake

Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.

On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it disappeared.

The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.

The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1993.

Discharge status: Alive but without permission.

Healthy appearing decrepit, 69-year old male, mentally sharp but forgetful.

Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.

She is numb from her toes down.

While in ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.

The skin was moist and dry.

Occasional, constant, infrequent, headaches.

Patient was alert and unresponsive.

Rectal examination revealed a normal size thyroid.

She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.

I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy.

Examination of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.

The lab test indicated abnormal lover function. Skin: somewhat pale but present.

Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.

Related Tags: Friday humor, joker, humor, medicine

MMI had a great post a while back on the church losing leaders

The church is in such a huge shift. The shift is not about emergent, post modern, modern, traditional, contemporary et al. The shift is this; within the church we are seeing more and more churches unhealthiness exposed because for them leadership is primarily a structure. In the bible leadership is a gift and the leaders God gave the church were supposed to be gifts too. Those leaders functioned in relationship with God and each other with humility and respect. For the past several hundred years the church has been led through a structure regardless of the gifts of those in the structure. This inevitably makes leadership about power not service. God designed the body to be led by leaders, taught by teachers, encouraged by encourager's... But for God’s design to work people must truly know and fan to flame their gifts, they must love the church with passion and must walk closely to Christ...

There is some really good diagnostic work in this piece about what the problems are in the church, but I am not at all convinced that setting up a dichotomy between structure and leadership is the issue.

What this really is is a classic struggle that occurs in any organization between management and bureacracy, and the inevitability seems to be that bureacracy always wins. This happens in the denominations through sheer age - when the rules of the road take precident over the reason the rules were written to begin with. But it also happens in the more entreprenurial ways of doing church out of sheer size. Big demands bureacracy - no other way to manage it.

The leadership leak the MMI piece discusses is generally a result of genuine leadership become frustrated with trying to operate the bureacracy. You want a lesson in this, look at the collapse of Arnold Schwarzenegger's conservative ideals in California - he was simply eaten alive by the bureacracy - he chose to go along to get along. The problem is especially exacerbated when the apparent chief executive of the church - the pastor - is heavily invested in the bureacracy because he came through it to gain his position. Or, in the case of the entrepenurial church, he build the bureacracy as a shield against having his position challenged.

In the business world, this problem is resolved by key dismissals. The head guy just fires enough people in the right positions to send a message to the bureacracy - "You are not indespensible, time to tow the NEW line." The rules of civil service prevent that, thus Arnold's difficulties.

In church we seem to think that firings lack grace and therfore we should not, and generally do not, do them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Removing people from entrenched positions is all about freeing them to actually grow - but then we don't seem to encourage that in the churhc much anymore either.

This dilemma is one reason to minimize as much as possible staff in a church. Then no one's paycheck is at risk. But how do you fire a volunteer. Easy, you don't, you "term limit" them. The longest I have ever done a vounteer job at a church is 4 years, and usually it is only 2. I leave despite what have often been pleas for me to continue for precisely this reason.

Everybody gets upset because of how difficult it is to find someone else to do the job. That frankly, is part of the point. It is that effort, to find new leadership, that is most important to the church -- that is part of the process of developing disciples.

Time to get busy.

Related Tags: church, burecracy, leadership, discipleship, development

Related Tags: Biblical Illuminations

So many people have been so supportive since my parent's auto accident and my father's death. There is insufficient graditude in the world to deal with such a debt.

In all of that; however, I have found one astonshing fact - the closeness that I had with my father is relatively unique. People that did not know us well simply look amazed when I tell them that Dad and I spoke several times a week. People that did know us tell me how blessed I was to be that close to my dad and express how they wish they could have been that close to their parent and/or child. I respond with a bit of incredulity because my closeness with my father was the most natural thing in the world to me. By the way, I am that close to my mother too, but given her dementia....

I will not bore you with the details, but as with all parent/child relationships there was a time when things were quite strained, but we just worked hard to get through it and came out the other side friends. When people ask that is the what I always tell them. Yes he was my father but he was also amongst my closest friends.

Why not - who would I share more perspective with than the man that taught me perspective to begin with?

Among the grief I am currently feeling is grief for those that tell me they wish they could be that close to their parents, or who are simply astonished at how close I was to mine. My heart hurts for the those that express sympathy for the burden my mom's care has become for mostly my sister, but for both of us. It is not burden, it is no duty, it is an expression of the love I feel for Mom.

I guess I want to start a discussion here. Why was/is my relationship with my parents relatively unique? Maybe it is not so good? Maybe it is somehow pathological? I certainly don't think so, I just think it is "small town" - the modern, urban, electronic equivalent of the kid that grows up, gets married and buys the house next door. I also think it bespeaks my parents devotion to the Lord and to my sister and I.

What do you think?

Related Tags: parents, closeness, relationships, growing up

Mark Lauterbach recently wrote about church politics in two parts. Here's the first and the second.

I want to first be sympathetic and then present a challenge. Mark is proclaiming "church politics" as a sin and then seeking methods for dealing with that sin as a pastor. I can relate. Many are the good ideas that end up sacrificed on the alter of "church politics." Many are the ideas that have ended up on the scrap heap because someone "who just doesn't get it," but is in a position of influence, has put the kibosh on it. I have felt that frustration many, many times. Coping with it is perhaps the greatest frustration in ministry.

And yet, when I set aside my personal disappointment at my personal agenda not being implemented and think about things objectively, I want to embrace church politics, not do away with them. I truly believe the wisdom of the whole is better than the wisdom of the individual. Having to put things through a process involving others, and that is all politics is, is a way to capture that better, corporate wisdom.

You see, the problem is not the political process, but the people in it. Too often we place people in influential position who "just don't get it" because we have not been about the business of MAKING PEOPLE THAT DO GET IT.

When church is about programs and plans and budgets and agendas, the unhappy, frustrating, irritating politics are a matter of course. Under such circumstances, everybody is looking to step up to the budgetary teat for their slice for their program or agenda.

But that is not what the church is about is it? The first qualification for leadership should be to understand what the church really is about - making disciples.

Does this mean there will not be conflict or disagreement or that some pet rpoject will not be killed in the process - of course not. But what it means is that the process will not be ugly, and as the disappointed one, you can have a sense of the reliability of the process.

I am all for church politics, but I am also all for making Christ-like leaders to execute the process.

Related Tags: church politics, Mark Lauterbach, process, leadership, discipleship

Related Tags: cartoons, catblogging, Aggie, Flash

A while back, I wrote about information technology and the Christian experience. In that post I said:

I don't think so, the transformation offered by Christ is a spiritual one at base. My closest encouters with Christ, and therefore definitionally the most transformative experiences I have had, have come when I was able to reach a sort of absence of intellectual activity.

The resulted in some interesting comments from a friend of mine, the most pertinent of which is:

This would argue in favor of the transformation being intellectual. I would argue that a transformative spiritual experience in the absence of intellectual activity is a form of Modalism, which, in the end, denies the incarnation.

I thought of all of this when I read this post at Reformation Theology called "Thoughts on Thinking". There is a lot in that post, but let me hit the highlights, with some added emphasis:

13. Therefore, the only way to eternal happiness is through the pursuit of the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

14. Christ may not be seen in his beauty by unaided human reason, any more than a traveler may walk to Mars with his feet. An outside helper is necessary for the seeking thinker.

15. God has provided the necessary outside help, first, by the scriptures which declare Christ; and second, by his Spirit who illumines the human mind. No one may find eternal happiness without these necessary means.

That's a lot of set-up for just a couple of comments. First, happiness comes not through pursuing knowledge of Jesus Christ, but through pursuing Jesus Himself. I am not going to break that down just now because it should be come clear in my next point.

Please recall that I said I had my deepest transformational experiences is a "sort of" absence of intellectual activity. Maybe it is not true for everybody, but I find it extremely difficult to separate my ego from my intellect. When I think about Jesus, it is just too easy to think about Him like I want Him to be as opposed to how He really is. To genuinely get to know Christ, I must put aside my thoughts of Him and simply see Him. That is a sort of intellectual activity, but it is very different from what is commonly referred to as "reason." I will admit we have wandered far from the classical understanding of reason, and were that classical definition even remotely functional in common discourse, we could talk about this differently, but alas.

The key is, I think, the difference between "discovering" and "finding." We find what we are looking for, we discover what we are not. The true nature of Christ cannot be found, it can only be discovered. Too often we treat the Christian life as an organized search when we should treat it as a mapless journey.

It is also important to note that the kind of tranformational experience I am discussing is not the totality of the Christian experience, it is but one aspect of it. It is the deepest experience, it is motivational, but there are some parts of the Christian experience that cannot be handled in this way.

For example, a stance of stem cell research is entirely a stance drawn from classical reason. That said; however, it is the kind of transformational experience I am discussing that first of all gives me the strength to hold the presumptions, or corrollaries, I hold for that exercise in reason and that gives me the energy to not just have the stance but to fight for it. I do not here propose with doing away with reason, but simply giving it a proper place. Reason and faith are not in opposition as is so often said, they are complimentary.

Related Tags: find, discover, intellect, faith, Jesus, Christianity, thinking

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Robert William Dale was born in London, England, in 1829 and died in 1895. His long and fruitful ministry was confined to Birmingham, where he preached with great power. He believed, as he once said, that if a minister had anything from God to say to his fellow men, they would gladly come to hear him. He favored extemporaneous preaching, was a devoted student of English style, and advocated in his Yale lectures a more thorough attention to this important subject. He said:

“There is no reason why, when you have at your service the noblest language for an orator that was ever spoken by tile human race, you should be satisfied with the threadbare phrases, the tawdry, tarnished finery, the patched and ragged garments, with the smell like that of the stock of a second-hand clothes shop, with which half-educated and ambitious declaimers are content to cover the nakedness of their thought. You can do something better than this, and you should resolve to do it.”


There are large numbers of people who suppose that modern science and modern criticism have destroyed the foundations of faith, and who can not understand how it is possible, in these days, for intelligent, open-minded, educated men to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.

There are many persons who are convinced that the ascertained conclusions of modern science and of modern criticism are destructive of the authority which has been attributed both to the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures, that the traditional opinions concerning the authorship and the dates of many of the books of the Old Testament are false; and that most of the writings contained in the New Testament are spurious. Or, if some of the extreme conclusions of the destructive criticism are not regarded as finally established, it is known that great names can be quoted for, as well as against, them. And as it is assumed that the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures are the foundations of Christian faith, that we must believe in the genuineness and historical trustworthiness ot these ancient books, and even in their inspiration, before we can believe in Christ, they argue that, until these discussions are finally closed in favor of the traditional opinions. faith in Christ is impossible. The controversies have not, in any large number of cases, destroyed faith where faith already existed; but where faith does not exist, they appear to very many persons to create an insuperable obstacle to faith.

To such persons, if they are serious and well informed, there is something perplexing in the persistency of the faith of the great majority of Christian believers. Among those who remain Christian there are men whose intellectual vigor, patience, and keenness are equal to their own; men who are their equals in general intellectual culture, and who know as much as they know about the currents of modern thought; candid men; men who are incorruptible in their loyalty to truth; men who have a due sense of the immense import¬ance, in relation to the higher life of the human race, of the questions at issue:

How is it that the faith in Christ of such men is unshaken?

The substance of the answer that I make here to the question, why it is that those who believe in Christ continue to believe, may be given in a single sentence: Whatever may have been the original grounds of their faith, their faith has been verified in their own personal experience.

They have trusted in Christ for certain great and wonderful things, and they have received great and wonderful things. They have not perhaps received precisely what they expected when their Christian life began, for the kingdom of heaven cannot be really known until a man has entered into it; but what they have received assures them that Christ is alive, that He is within reach, and that He is the Savior and Lord of men.

That they have received these blessings in answer to their faith in Christ is a matter of personal consciousness. They knew it, as they know that fire burns.

Their experience varies. Some of them would say they can recall acts of Christ in which His personal volition and His supernatural power were as definitely manifested as in any of the miracles recorded in the four Gospels. They were struggling unsuccessfully with some evil temper - with envy, jealousy, personal ambition - and could not subdue it. They hated it; they hated themselves for being under its tyranny; but expel it they could not. If it seemed supprest for a time, it returned; and returned with its malignant power increased rather than diminished. They scourged themselves with scorpions for yielding to it; still they yielded. In their despair they appealed to Christ; and in a moment the evil fires were quenched, and they were never rekindled. These instantaneous deliverances are perhaps exceptional; but to those who can recall them they carry an irresistible conviction that the living Christ has heard their cry and answered them.

The more ordinary experiences of the Chris¬tian life, though less striking, are not less conclusive. The proof that Christ has heard prayer is not always concentrated into a mo¬ment, but is more commonly spread over large tracts of time. Prayer is offered for an increase of moral strength in resisting temptation, or for the disappearance of reluctance in the discharge of duties which are distasteful, or for a more gracious and kindly temper, or for patience and courage in bearing trouble, or for self-control, or for relief from exhausting and fruitless anxiety; and the answer comes. It comes gradually, but still it comes. We had lost hope. It seemed as if all our moral vigor was dying down, and as if nothing could restore it. The tide was slowly ebbing, and we were powerless to recall the retreating waters; but after we prayed it ceased to ebb; for a time it seemed stationary; then it began to flow; and tho with many of us it has never reached the flood, the wholesome waters have renewed the energy and the joy of life.

Or we prayed to Christ to liberate us from some evil habit. The chains did not fall away at His touch, like the chains of Peter at the touch of the angel; but in some mysterious way they were loosened, and at the same time we received accessions of strength. The old habit continued to trouble us; it still impeded our movements: but we could move; we recovered some measure of freedom, and were conscious that we were slaves no longer. There still remained a mechanical and automatic tendency to the evil ways of thinking, speaking, or acting; but we had become vigilant and alert, and were prompt to resist the tendency as soon as it began to work; and we were strong enough to master it. In the course of time the tendency became weaker and weaker, and at last, in some cases, it almost disappeared.

Some men have appealed to Christ when they have been seized with a great horror through the discovery of their guilt. It was not the awful penalty which menaces the unpenitent that haunted and terrified them. Nor was their distress occasioned chiefly by the consciousness of moral evil. They feared the penalty, and they were humiliated and shamed by the contrast between ideal goodness and their own moral and spiritual life; but what stung and tortured them, sunk them into despair, filled heaven and earth with a darkness that could be felt, and made life intolerable, was their guilt - guilt which they had incurred by their past sins, and which they continued to incur by their present sinful mess.

When once this guise of guilt fastens itself on a man, he cannot shake it off at will. The keen agony may gradually pass into a dull, dead pain; and after a time, the sensibility of the soul may seem to be wholly lost; but a man can never be sure that the horror will not return.

The real nature of this experience is best seen when it has been occasioned by the grosser and more violent forms of crime. Men who have committed murder, for example, have been driven almost insane by the memory of their evil deed. Their agony may have had nothing in it of the nature of repentance; they were not distrest because their crime had revealed to them the malignity and the fierce strength of their passions; they had no desire to become gentle and kindly. They were filled with horror and remorse by their awful guilt. They felt that the crime was theirs, and would always continue to be theirs; that it would be theirs if it remained concealed as truly as if it were known; indeed, it seemed to be in some terrible way more truly theirs so long as the secret was kept. It was not the fear of punishment that convulsed them; they have sometimes brought on themselves public indignation and abhorrence, and have condemned themselves to the gallows by confessing their crime in order to obtain relief from their agony.

Suppose that a man possest by this great horror discovered that, in some wonderful way, the dark and damning stain on his conscience had disappeared; that, although he had done the deed, the iron chain which bound him to the criminality of it had been broken; that before God and man and his own conscience he was free from the guilt of it; - the supposition, in its completeness, is an impossible one; but if it were possible, the discovery would lift the man out of the darkness of hell into the light of heaven.

But to large numbers of Christian men a discovery which in substance is identical with this has actually come in response to their trust in Christ. Nothing is more intensely real than the sense of guilt; it is as real as the eternal distinction between right and wrong in which it is rooted. And nothing is more intensely real than the sense of release from guilt which comes from the discovery and assurance of the remission of sins. The evil things which a man has done cannot be undone; but when they have been forgiven through Christ, the iron chain which so bound him to them as to make the guilt of them eternally his has been broken; before God and his own conscience he is no longer guilty of them. This is the Christian mystery of justification, which, according to Paul - and his words have been confirmed in the experience of millions of Christian men - is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” It changes darkness into light; despair into victorious hope; prostration into buoyancy and vigor. It is one of the supreme motives to Christian living, and it makes Christian living possible. The man who has received this great deliverance is no longer a convict, painfully observing all prison rules with the hope of shortening his sentence, but a child in the home of God.

There are experiences of another kind by which the faith of Christian men is verified. Of these one of the most decisive and most wonderful is the consciousness that through Christ be has passed into the - eternal and divine order. He belongs to two worlds. He is just as certain that he is environed by things unseen and eternal as that he is environed by things seen and temporal. In the power of the life - given to him in the new birth he has entered into the kingdom of God. He is conscious that that diviner region is now the native land of his soul. It is there that he finds perfect rest and perfect freedom. It is a relief to escape to it eternal peace and glory from the agitations and vicissitudes, the sorrows and successes, of this transitory world. It is not always that he is vividly conscious of belonging to that eternal order; this supreme blessedness is reserved for the great hours of life; but he knows that it lies about him always, and that at any moment the great Apocalypse may come. And even when it is hidden, its “powers” continue to act upon him, as the light and beat of the sun pass through the clouds by which the burning splendor is softened and concealed.

Further, “in Christ” Christian men know God; they know Him for themselves. The mere conception of God is as different from the immediate knowledge of Him as the mere conception of the Matterhorn from the actual vision of it as an external objective grandeur; and it is not the conception of God, but God Himself, that fills them with awe and wonder, and with a blessedness which trembles into devout fear. Sometimes the “exceeding weight of glory” is too great to bear, and human infirmity is relieved when the vision passes. At other times God is more than a transcendent glory to be contemplated and adored. His infinite love, to use Paul’s words, is shed abroad in their hearts like the sun’s heat under tropical heavens; it is immediately revealed. How, they can not tell, any more than they can tell bow the material world is revealed to sense; they only know that, apart from any self-originated effort, apart from any movement of their own towards Him, the eternal Spirit draws near to their spirit and reveals God’s love to them. It is as if the warm streams of the love which have their fountains in the depths of His infinite life were flowing round them and into them. They are conscious of that love for them of which God is conscious.

And this blessedness is not the prerogative of elect saints, or of those who may be said to have a natural genius for spiritual thought. It is the common inheritance of all that are “in Christ,” although there is reason to fear that many Christian people rarely reach the height of its joy. But among those who reach it are men of every degree of intellectual rank and every variety of moral and spiritual temperament. It is reached by ignorant men, whose thoughts are narrow and whose minds are inert, as well as by men with large knowledge and great powers of speculation; by men destitute of imagination, as well as by men whose imagination kindles as soon as it is touched by the splendors of nature or by the verses of poets. Men whose life moves slowly and sluggishly reach it,- as well as men who are impulsive, ardent, and adventurous. And where this experience is known, it becomes an effective force in the moral life. Peter, writing to slaves, says, “For this is acceptable, if through consciousness of God a man endureth griefs, suffering wrongfully.”

I have said that “in Christ” men know God - not merely through Christ. It is true that during His earthly ministry He revealed God; so that, in answer to the prayer of one of His disciples, “Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,” He said, “Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? be that bath seen me hath seen the Father.” That revelation has eternal power and value; but there are other words spoken by Christ that same night which suggest that it is not merely by the revelation of God during His earthly ministry that Christ has made it possible for men to know the Father. He said: “I am the true vine, and ye are the branches. . . . Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; so neither can ye, except ye abide in me. lie that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for apart from me ye can do nothing.” It is not certain that when Paul wrote his Epistle to the Galatian Christians he had heard of these words; but what they meant he had learnt for himself. He said, “I live: and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.” In various measures the experience of Paul has been the experience of Christian men ever since. Their relationship to Christ - their conscious relationship to Christ - has been most mysterious, but most intimate and most certain. They have meditated on the infinite love which moved him to descend from the heights of God and to become man, upon His graciousness and gentleness, His purity, This spontaneous goodness, his pity for suffering, His merciful words to the sinful, His patience and His long-suffering, and His fiery indignation against hypocrisy; they have meditated on His teaching, on all the words of His that have been preserved concerning the love and grace of God, concerning the remission of sins, the gift of eternal life, the judgment to come, the eternal blessedness of the righteous, and the doom of the lost; they have felt the spell and the charm of that ideal perfection to which He calls them in His precepts, and which He illustrated and transcended in His own character: but they have been conscious that it was not merely by the power of the great and pathetic story of I-us earthly history, or by the power of His spiritual and ethical teaching, that lie gives to men the life of God, and constantly renews, sustains, and augments it. They shared the very life of their Lord. He lived in them. They lived in Him. And it was in the power of this common life that they knew God.

Nor is it only the immediate knowledge of God that is rendered possible by this union with Christ. Christian men are conscious that they do not receive strength from Christ for common duty, as they might receive strength from One who, while He conferred the grace, stood apart from them, but that in some wonderful way they are strong in the strength of Christ Himself. They are too often drawn down into the region of baser forces, and then they fall; but their very failure verifies the truth of their happier experiences, for it brings home to them afresh what they are apart from Christ; and when they recover their union with Him - which indeed had not been lost, though for a time it was not realized - they recover their power.

The man who has had, and who still has, such experiences as these will listen with great tranquillity to criticisms which are intended to shake the historical credit of the four Gospels, aitho the story they contain may have been the original ground of his faith in Christ. The criticism may be vigorous; he may be wholly unable to answer it: but what then? Is he to cease to believe in Christ? Why should he?

Let me answer these questions by an illustration. Towards the close of our Lord’s ministry, when He was in the neighborhood of Jericho - just leaving the city or just entering it - Bartimaeus, a blind man, who was begging at the side of the road, heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, and He appealed to the great Prophet to have mercy upon him. Jesus answered his appeal, and gave him sight. Now it is possible that Bartimaeus may have been told by some passing traveler, of whom he knew nothing, the story of a similar miracle which Jesus had worked a few weeks before in Jerusalem, and this may have been the ground, and the only ground, of his confidence in our Lord’s supernatural power. If, after he had received his sight, some sagacious friend of his had asked him bow it was that he came to believe that the Nazarene Teacher could give sight to the blind, nothing would have been easier than for his friend to show that, whether the story of the Jerusalem miracle was true or not, Bartimaeus had no trustworthy evidence of its truth. A tale told by an unknown stranger! This was no sufficient reason for believing that Jesus bad given sight to a man born blind. Did the stranger who told the tale know the beggar who was said to have been cured? Was it certain that the man was blind? Had the stranger exam¬ined his eyes the very morning of the day on which he received sight? Was it certain that thc vision was not gradually returning? Was the stranger present when Jesus made the clay, and put it on the blind man’s eyes; close enough to see that no delicate operation was performed during the process? The sending of the blind man to wash at the Pool of Siloam was suspicious: what could that wash¬ing have to do with a miracle? Did the stranger go with the man to the pool, and keep his eye upon him while he was there? Was it quite certain that the blind beggar who was sent to Siloam was the man who came back to the city and declared that Jesus had healed him? Might not one man have been sent to the pool, and another man have come back to Jerusalem? It looked very much as if there were some previous understanding between the blind man and the Nazarene Prophet. The Prophet had rich friends; they could have made it worth the man’s while to come into the plot. Had Bartimeus considered all these difficulties? Was it not more probable that the stranger’s story should be false than that the miracle should be true? Would it not be well for Bartimaeus to suspend his faith in Jesus until he had made further inquiries about the miracle?

We can imagine the answer of Bartimaeus I think that he would have said: “At first I believed in the power of Jesus of Nazareth, because I was told that He had given sight to another blind man; now I am sure of His power, because He has given sight to Inc. It is possible, as you say, that the story about the blind man in Jerusalem is not true. You have asked me many questions which I can not answer. I can not explain why he should have been sent to the Pool of Siloam. I acknowledge that the evidence which I have for the miracle is not decisive. As Jesus has restored my sight, I think that the story is probably true; but whether the story is true or not can not disturb my faith in Him, for if He did not heal the other man, He has healed me.”

And so the faith in the living Christ of those who have had the great experiences of his power and grace which I have described is not shaken by any assaults on the historical trustworthiness of the story of His earthly ministry. Much less can it be shaken by discussions concerning the nature and origin of the ancient Scriptures of the Jewish people. Their confidence in the books, both of the Old Testament and the New, may perhaps have to be suspended until the controversies of schol¬ars are closed, or until, on historical and critical grounds, they can see their own way to firm and definite conclusions about the main questions at issue; but not their confidence in Christ. They may be uncertain about the books; they are sure about Him. Both Christian scholars and the commonalty of Christian people approach the controversies on these ancient records with a settled faith in the power and grace and glory of Christ. Their faith in Him rests on foundations which lie far beyond the reach of scientific and historical criticism. They know for themselves that Christ is the Savior of men: for they have received through Him the remission of their own sins; He has translated them into the divine kingdom; He has given them strength for righteousness, and through Him they have found God.

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