Welcome to MPC Connected! With our church family separated, we will be communicating with you throughout the week in a more intentional way, including emails from Max and Jeff, opportunities to serve others, and more. Enjoy!
Hi everyone,
Jeff here. I hope this sunny day is treating you well. Lots of links and stuff below, so before getting into it I just wanted to share a final thought from Dane Ortlund's Gentle and Lowly, a book that was really, really good and came along at just the right time for me. This is a great book to supplement your Bible reading during this season - short, well-written and worshipful chapters.
Many of us have heard and referenced Isaiah 55:8-9. This section of Scripture says:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
It's easy to read this as a description of the great distance between God and ourselves along with mystery of God's providence. But the context of this passage is actually God's nearness to us. Ortlund says:
(John) Calvin—the theologian most famous for teaching on divine providence—saw that the mystery of providence is not what Isaiah 55 is really after. He notes that some interpret the phrase “my thoughts are not your thoughts” to be a sheer distancing between God and us, expressing the enormous gulf between sacred divinity and profane humanity. Yet Calvin saw that, in fact, the flow of the passage is in exactly the opposite direction. There is indeed a great distance between God and us; we think small thoughts of God’s heart, but he knows his heart is inviolably, expansively, invincibly set on us.
He goes on to quote Calvin:
But the Prophet’s meaning, I think, is different, and is more correctly explained, according to my judgment, by other commentators, who think that he draws a distinction between God’s disposition and man’s disposition. Men are wont to judge and measure God from themselves; for their hearts are moved by angry passions, and are very difficult to be appeased; and therefore they think that they cannot be reconciled to God, when they have once offended him. But the Lord shows that he is far from resembling men.
Isaiah 55 reminds us that God is way, way, way more compassionate and caring for us than we can imagine. As Ortlund notes elsewhere in the book, He is more gentle to us, His children, than we could ever be to ourselves. Fellow Christian, consider reading through Isaiah 55 today and freshly experiencing God's care for you and His promises to you.
Worth Reading
As we have been dealing with all of the hardship brought on by the pandemic, I've been seeing and hearing from many of our brothers and sisters who are suffering in a different way with the news of the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man, in Georgia. It is hard for many of us to understand the pain that these tragedies cause for many of our brothers and sisters in Christ, and it's important for those of us who are part of the "majority" culture to do our best to listen to, learn from and understand our brothers and sisters when they suffer, so we can love one another well and mourn with those who mourn.
As some of you know, the subject of race and the church is one that I have spent a lot of time thinking and reading about, and I'm always happy to talk about it and provide reading recommendations where helpful. For now, here are just a couple of shorter readings that can begin to help some of us think about how the experiences of others are different than many of ours:
The first is by Mark Dever, a pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. He preached a sermon the Sunday after the 2016 election with an introduction that reminded his diverse congregation of the different feelings that people were experiencing at that point. He tells the story of his own experience and then shares the experience of a friend of his:
Let me tell you about a second conversation, again on the street, this one years later. I’m walking along with a friend, and he’s telling me his excitement about a girl he had started to date. I could understand that. I was happy for him. And then, he told me his concern that her parents might reject him because he was black. My initial instinct was “that’s ridiculous! He’s a great guy!” and so I listened for a minute, then re-assured him that, since he’d told me that her parents were Christians, there was no way that would happen. Then he told me simply and clearly, that it had happened to him before.
He shared the story. It was eerily similar to his current situation. My confidence that he was wrong had come because I had learned too much, I had universalized too much from my own history. And his history was different. It told him a different story—and I couldn’t deny that. For me, my natural emotional assumption in life is that I have no enemies! But my friend’s experience had been different. He had people in his life who said they shared his Savior, but because their skin color was different, they wouldn’t share their daughter, or their love. Having done nothing wrong, this friend had found, throughout his life, people who acted as his “enemies.” His history taught him different lessons than mine had taught me. But his probably allowed for experiences like mine, where mine had no place for experiences like his. So I needed to supplement the lessons my own history had taught me, with lessons that history had taught others—hard lessons—like the one my good friend had been taught.
Read the whole thing or listen to it here.
The second short read is from Dr. Eric Mason, who is a pastor in Philadelphia. Some years ago, he wrote an article in the aftermath of the events in Ferguson, MO after Michael Brown was killed:
Even with the outcome of the current case being what it is, you’d expect, “how can I pray?” “Help me understand the emotions you are dealing with”? “Help me to understand how you are processing this?” “I want to empathize, but I’m struggling!” Understand this, all of us interpret facts in light of our social experiences. Even Van Til (a well known Christian apologetics teacher) believed that the Christian and the non-Christian have different ultimate standards, presuppositions that color the interpretation of every fact in every area of life. Because of the experience of many minorities with racism, when there is a scenario that mirrors and reeks of injustice, there is going to be a sensitivity to how “facts” are handled.
So what should we all do? Do this: "Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God" (Jas 1:19-20 ESV).
The article is aptly titled "Good Grief: The Gospel, Race and Our Experiences." Again, give the whole thing a read.
For a longer read, consider checking out Insider Outsider by the outstanding pastor Bryan Loritts. I have read a ton on this subject, and this book is probably my #1 recommendation.
In the meantime, pray for the family of Mr. Arbery, for our hurting brothers and sisters, for justice, and for healing in our nation.
Worth Watching
A couple weeks ago, my favorite seminary professor did a two-part series for a church in Texas on our emotions. Dr. Pennington notes that we all have emotions, and these emotions need to be educated or "sculpted" in a Biblical way. Pennington contrasts Christianity with the teachings of Plato, Aristotle and of Stoicism. I found this really fascinating and encouraging and especially relevant as we are all dealing with varying emotions right now.
