Why Christmas?

"The real beauty of Christmas...

...is to understand the ugliness that it cures."  -John MacArthur

The Wasted Life...

“It was not always plain to me that pursuing God’s glory would be virtually the same as pursuing my joy. Now I see that millions of people waste their lives because they think these paths are two and not one. There is a warning. The path of God-exalting joy will cost you your life. Jesus said, ‘Whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.’ In other words, it is better to lose your life than to waste it. If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full. This is not…about how to avoid a wounded life, but how to avoid a wasted life. Some of you will die in the service of Christ. That will not be a tragedy. Treasuring life above Christ is a tragedy.

God created us to live with a single passion: to joyfully display his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life. The wasted life is the life without this passion. God calls us to pray and think and dream and plan and work not to be made much of, but to make much of him in every part of our lives.

Most people slip by in life without a passion for God, spending their lives on trivial diversions, living for comfort and pleasure, and perhaps trying to avoid sin. [I] warn you not to get caught up in a life that counts for nothing. [I] challenge you to live and die boasting in the cross of Christ and making the glory of God your singular passion. If you believe that to live is Christ and to die is gain…learn to live for Christ, and don’t waste your life!”

~John Piper

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

let all mortal flesh keep silence

and with fear and trembling stand

ponder nothing earthly minded

for with blessing in His hand

Christ our God to earth descendeth

our full homage to demand

_______________Scripture_____________

"When you understand what you have in your hand and when you treasure this more than gold and when you consider it sweeter than honey, when you delight in it, you will then begin to read its truth. And that's where all effective Bible study begins. Blessed are those, says the psalmist, who keep the testimony of God and seek Him with their whole heart. And how shall a young man cleanse his ways? By taking heed thereto according to Thy Word. David said, "With my whole heart I sought Thee. O let me not wander from Thy commandments." And so it goes. We begin with a commitment to know the Word of God.

I can suggest to you a simple plan that you might follow. In the study Bible I have a Bible reading plan that will get you through the Bible in a year, and many of you do that already. But let me suggest to you something that I've used through the years that's been of real help to me. It's a way to begin to absorb scriptural data at the maximum kind of level that will help you come to grips with what the Bible actually says, which is where you have to start. There's no shortcut to this but there is a way that you can get after it.

Read through the Old Testament at whatever pace you feel comfortable with. Just read through it. Take a chunk of chapters on a daily basis and just read them and when you're done go back and read them again, and just read through the Old Testament in its sort of chronological order.

But when it comes to the New Testament which really gives us the unfolding of the mysteries hidden from those in the past which unfolds the full meaning of the Old Testament, the New Covenant document, you need to read it more repetitiously. And what I have suggested and what worked in my own life early on as I began to come to grips with the need to know the Scripture was to read repetitiously. And here's a little formula that I followed and found very beneficial. I first discovered it in an old book on how to study the Bible by James M. Grey who was a past president of The Moody Bible Institute many, many years ago. Kind of refining off of that process, here's what worked for me.

Take a book of the Bible and read it repetitiously for 30 days. And here's how I did it. I took the book of 1 John, 1 John has five chapters and I read 1 John every day for 30 days, just simply read it in the same version 30 times in a row. In fact I became so enthralled by it that I actually broke the pattern on the first book and read it ninety days in a row. But at the end of 30 days I knew what was in 1 John just because of the repetitious reading. In fact, I began to visualize my Bible and if anybody asked me to this day what it says in 1 John 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 I'm pretty familiar with that because of repetition. That's how your mind retains things. In fact if somebody says, "Where in the Bible does it say,`If we confess our sins He is faithful and just,'" that's easy, 1 John chapter 1 left hand page, right hand column halfway down. You know, you begin to visualize your Bible because of the familiarity of the text as you go over it and over it and over it.

Now at the same time I wrote a one-sentence summary of each chapter and just over the period of 30 days memorized what that chapter was about so that I was locking into my mind an understanding of the chapters and familiarity with the text itself. Well at the end of 90 days I had a fair understanding of what was in 1 John. I didn't yet fully understand all of it. I hadn't gone into the depth of studying it all, but I was familiar with it. And it elevated an awful lot of questions in my mind.

Then wanting to stay within the framework of John, I went to the gospel of John. Now the gospel of John has 21 chapters and that's too much to swallow in one month, so I divided it into three sections of seven. Using seven is about the maximum number of chapters you want to work with. I read through the first seven chapters of John's gospel for 30 days, a second chapter, a second seven for 30, and a third for seven for 30, so in 90 days I had gone through the gospel of John and in the process wrote out a simple little summary of each chapter, each of the 21 chapters. Well, at the end of those 90 days of reading seven, seven and seven, I understood what was in John. And to this day I can still visualize that and that's been many, many years ago, probably nearly 30 years ago and I remember that the wedding at Cana was in John 2 and that the woman at the well in Samaria is in John 4, and that Jesus encountering His brothers and their lack of faith in John 7, and the feeding of the 5,000 in John 6, and John 10 is the shepherd chapter, and John 15 is the vine chapter, and the highly priestly prayer is in 17 and so it goes and so it goes. Jesus in the garden is in 18. Just pure familiarity.

I also began to realize that some of the things I didn't understand in the epistle of John were explained in the gospel of John. And that the best interpreter of Scripture is Scripture itself. And I learned that very early and that's why when I teach you the Word of God, I explain the Scripture with the Scripture, don't I? Because that's the way I learned the Scripture.

And then after that I went back to Philippians and took Philippians which is a brief book of four chapters, read it 30 days in a row and was familiar with what was there. Then I went back to the gospel of Matthew and took 28 chapters, broke them into four sections of seven...seven for 30, seven for 30, seven for 30 and in four months I had a grasp on the book of Matthew. Now at that pace at about seven chapters at a time going from a shorter book to a longer one, in two and a half years you will have done the New Testament. Now you're going to read the Bible for the next two and a half years, I hope. How about reading it so that you produce familiarity? And that calls for repetition. That calls for repetition. And in that process in two and a half years you will have learned that there are parts of the Bible that connect very obviously and you will cease to be a total concordance cripple. You know what I mean. You can't remember where anything is, and so you go chasing through that inadequate concordance in the back of your Bible that never has the verse you're looking for because you will have absorbed that.

Now you can't do that with the whole of the Old Testament. Much of that narrative flow you just read as narrative and its intent and its full rich meaning gets explained so wonderfully in the New Testament. But you need to be familiar with the New. Get yourself on that kind of a reading plan and you will be amazed and astounded to find out what a Bible scholar you'll become in that two and a half years as you begin to connect the Scripture with itself...

I found that that exercise of reading the Bible in that fashion in just a period of two and a half years or so gave me a tremendous familiarity with the content of Scripture. And that became the foundation upon which to build an understanding of that content. And many of the questions that I had early on in my Christian experience were answered not by reading commentaries or studying theology books, but just by absorbing the very text of Scripture itself.

I'll tell you something else. I continue to read Scripture all the time and as I continue to read it all the time I continue to be amazed at what is disclosed in it. There is a basic understanding of Scripture that the Bible defines as the milk of the Word, 1 Corinthians chapter 3. There are not certain milk doctrines and certain meat doctrines. In other words, certain lighter things and heavier things. Milk and meat does not describe different truths, it describes the depth of truth. There is a milk level of understanding and then there is a meat level of understanding. And you go from the milk down to the real steak as you plunge into Scripture and begin to see the profound depth that is there. But you start with an understanding of the Scripture itself. And then from there you begin to ask yourself, "Okay, I know what it says, what does it mean by what it says? Let's go from the milk to the meat."

~John MacArthur  (from "What It Takes To Study God's Word")