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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Mathis
Read between
June 6 - June 7, 2016
Your journal is a venue for freshly preaching the gospel to yourself, in your particular circumstances, without parroting the stock lines of truth you’ll default to without pausing to meditate. Capture in your own words what you’re truly feeling, and then look for God’s words that meet your need.
It is unhealthy to always have people around, and unhealthy to rarely want them.
Silence and solitude are not ideal states, but rhythms of life to steady us for a fruitful return to people and noise.
Don’t assume the voices in your head are God’s; assume they are yours.
True fellowship, in this age, is more the invading troops side by side on the beach at Normandy than it is the gleeful revelers in the street on V-E Day.
The medium of our relationship is the message of salvation. When the fellowship is true, the depth of love for each other is not a symptom of in-growth, but the final apologetic: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
Here the charge lands not on the drifting saint to get himself back on the path, but on the others in the community—to have enough proximity to him, awareness of him, and regularity with him to spot the drift and war with him, for him, against the sin.
When the desire to avail yourself of hearing his voice (in the word) has dried up, and when your spiritual energy is gone to speak into his ear (in prayer), God sends his body to bring you back. It is typically not the wanderer’s own efforts that prompt his return to the fold, but his brothers’ (James 5:19–20), being to him a priceless means of God’s grace—the invaluable backstop.
When our fellowship is not simply a network of loose Christian relationships, but anchored in a particular “covenant community” as committed members together in a local outpost of Christ’s kingdom, we come closest to experiencing what those first Christians did, when people didn’t just drift in and out of the community, but were either in or out—and those who were in were pledged to be the church for each other through thick and thin. Covenant community is like Christian marriage in that it is within the framework of stated commitments and promised allegiances that life in relationship is
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Becoming a better listener hangs not on one big resolve to do better in a single conversation, but on developing a pattern of little resolves—cultivating the habit—to focus in on particular people in specific moments.
“Unfortunately, many of us are too preoccupied with ourselves when we listen. Instead of concentrating on what is being said, we are busy either deciding what to say in response or mentally rejecting the other person’s point of view.”
“Just as love to God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them.”
Good listening goes hand in hand with the mind-set of Christ (Phil. 2:5). It flows from a humble heart that counts others more significant than ourselves (Phil. 2:3). It looks not only to its own interests, but also the interests of others (Phil. 2:4). It is patient and kind (1 Cor. 13:4).
It watches carefully for nonverbal communication, but doesn’t interrogate and pry into details the speaker doesn’t want to share. It meekly draws them out and helps point the speaker to fresh perspectives through careful, but genuine, leading questions.
There will be days when the most important ministry we do is square our shoulders to some hurting person, uncross our arms, lean forward, make eye contact, and hear his pain all the way to the bottom.
“Put more emphasis on affirmation than on answers. . . . Many times God simply wants to use me as a channel of his affirming love as I listen with compassion and understanding.”
“We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the Word of God.”
Bonhoeffer warns, He who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life. . . . Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.
While the corporate worship of Jesus by the church universal is an essential element in our great destiny, it is the corporate worship of Jesus by the church local that is a vital means of God’s grace in getting us there.
Corporate worship is the single most important means of grace and our greatest weapon in the fight for joy, because like no other means, corporate worship combines all three principles of God’s ongoing grace: his word, prayer, and fellowship.
Donald S. Whitney, “There’s an element of worship and Christianity that cannot be experienced in private worship or by watching worship. There are some graces and blessings that God gives only in ‘meeting together’ with other believers.”
Perhaps your own experience of corporate worship as a means of grace has, at times, echoed that of Martin Luther: “At home, in my own house, there is no warmth or vigor in me, but in the church when the multitude is gathered together, a fire is kindled in my heart and it breaks its way through.”
Corporate worship is a means of grace not when we’re caught up with what we’re doing, but when we experience the secret of worship—the joy of self-forgetfulness—as we become preoccupied together with Jesus and his manifold perfections.
In Psalm 73, he begins by despairing over the prosperity of his wicked peers (vv. 2–15). But the fog clears as he comes consciously into the presence of God:
While we may admire figures like Athanasius and Luther who seemingly stood alone contra mundum (“against the world”), we must remember God has said it is not good for us to be alone (Gen. 2:18). Such heroes were the product of dire days, and inevitably their stories have been thinned in the collective memory of distant history. Neither Athanasius nor Luther truly stood alone, but were part of faithful communities that fostered and strengthened their otherwise unpopular beliefs.
sanctification can happen “on the spot” as we sit under gospel preaching and engage in corporate worship. There are times—may God make them many—when the Holy Spirit takes the Scripture read, the prayer spoken, the chorus sung, or the truth preached and presses it right to the point of our need. Corporate worship does not merely inform our Christian walk, but heals us or transforms us in that moment.
Corporate worship demands that we discipline ourselves to respond, and not only pursue God on our own terms. It is an opportunity to embrace being led, and not always taking the lead.
As the Swedish proverb says, a shared joy is a double joy.
The act of preaching itself is a picture of the gospel. As the preacher stands behind the Book, doing his level best to reveal Jesus afresh to his people, our Lord is put on display, not for give-and-take and the mingling of our efforts together in some mutual enterprise. Rather, we sit in the seat of weakness and desperation. What we need is not some boost from a trusted fellow to get us over the wall, but the rescue of the Savior for the utterly helpless.
True Christian preaching swallows up the listener again and again not with self or the speaker, but with Jesus and his manifold perfections.
The waters of good preaching are always running downhill to the stream of Christ, who he is, and how he has loved us.
The point of preaching, as John Calvin captures it, is “to offer and set forth Christ to us, and in him the treasures of heavenly grace.”
the ordinances are not just signs and seals, but (like preaching) serve to bring God’s presence near to his
Baptism is not only a blessing to us on that one memorable occasion when we were the new believer in the water.
Like baptism, the Supper gives us a divinely authorized dramatization of the gospel, as the Christian receives spiritually—through physical taste, sight, smell, and touch—the pierced body and shed blood of Jesus for sinners.
Reproof is a fork in the road for a sinful soul. Will we cringe at correction like a curse, or embrace rebuke as a blessing?
Not wanting to “despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof” (Prov. 3:11), we’ll ask, how is it that God’s reproof most often comes to me? Answer: in reproof from a brother or sister in Christ. We’ll beware resisting the reproof of a fellow in Jesus, especially when it’s echoed in multiple voices, knowing that likely we would be resisting the very reproof of God.
One of the most loving things we can do for others is tell them when they’re in the wrong.
Often the subtle expressions of sin we see in others catch our eye because they find resonance in our own hearts. Our indwelling pride is quick to alert us to pride in others. Unconquered greed in our hearts notices others’ love for possessions. A slip of the tongue to which we’re also prone grabs our attention in someone else.
Consider the manner in which you’d want to be approached with such an observation, and give extra effort to make sure it comes off as a word of brotherly correction, not condemnation. “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2).
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The discipler’s own enjoyment of the means of grace (word, prayer, and fellowship) serves to fuel him spiritually for pouring out into others.
“think big, start small, go deep.” Think big: God’s global glory, among all the nations. Start small: focus on a few, like Jesus did. Go deep: invest at depth in those few, so deeply that they will be equipped and prepared to do the same in the lives of others.
“One cannot transform a world except as individuals in the world are
disciplemaking requires that we die to selfishness—selfishness with our time and with our space. To get even more specific, it means dying to much of our precious privacy. Most of us do life alone so much more than is necessary. But in disciplemaking, we ask, How can we live the Christian life together? How can I give this younger Christian access to my real life, not some triumphal facade I put on once a week? It marks the death to much of our privacy. We bring that one or few in whom we are investing into the process and mess of our sanctification as we enter into theirs.
we make disciples to pass on the gospel. We don’t center on ourselves, but on Jesus, who is not only the great model but also the content of disciplemaking.
“Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). If Jesus is in us, then increasingly such an open-handed tendency will be in us as well.
money is a tool that can be used for long-term godward goals, not just short-term selfish purposes. And tools are made to be used. Holding onto money will not satisfy our souls or meet the needs of others.
Generosity is an occasion to look past the small joys of self-oriented spending, and pursue the greater pleasures of spending on others.
. . . not just what is necessary for bare subsistence, but also what is necessary for living a life “becoming” or appropriate to human beings. The point is not to live on crusts of bread with bare walls and threadbare clothes. The point is that a fully human life is lived in a way free from being enslaved to our stuff. Our possessions are meant to serve our needs and our humanness, rather than our lives being centered around service to our possessions and our desires for
