Knowing how to handle yourself is the key to spiritual living

One week ago I started reading a book I’ve owned for several years now, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, and my previous blog post was about that event.  I tend to occasionally start reading a book somewhere in the middle, and then if I feel like the book is worth the time and effort, I go back to the beginning and read the whole thing.  Such is the case with this book.

Spiritual Depression is actually a series of twenty-one sermons that Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached in the early 1960s on the subject, and I’d wager that almost anyone could benefit from reading through these sermons.  Lloyd-Jones was one of the best, and I’ve rarely been unchanged from reading his words or hearing him preach.  Not only for that reason, but this is a topic that any honest person will admit that they wrestle with: after all, life is not a constant bed of roses for anyone.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on learning to trust a sovereign God in the darkness of trials

I was reading in the book Spiritual Depression by Martyn Lloyd-Jones this morning and came across several paragraphs in the chapter called “Trials” that I thought would probably be helpful to someone out there.  At least they were to me . . .

The doctrine of the Scriptures is, at the very lowest, that God permits these things to happen to us.  I go further, God at times orders these things to happen to us for our good.  He may do it sometimes in order to chastise [discipline] us . . . We must not be surprised if God begins to chastise us.  The argument in Hebrews 12 is as strong as this: ‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.’  If you have not known chastisement I doubt whether you have ever been a Christian.  If you can say that since you have believed you have never had any trouble at all, your experience is probably psychological and not spirtitual.  There is a realism about Christianity, as I said at the beginning and it goes so far as to teach that God, for our good, will chastise us if we pay no heed to the exhortations and the appeals of Scripture.  God has other methods also.  He does not do these things to those who are outside the family, but if they are His children He will chastise them for their own good.  So we may be experiencing manifold trials as a part of our chastisement.  I am not saying it is inevitable, I say it may be so.

Revisiting the Biblical tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility – thoughts from D. A. Carson

Heard a sermon today that left me pondering, among other things, the long-felt tension between God’s sovereignty (and the extent of his sovereignty, but we’ll leave that one alone) and man’s responsibility, primarily in the sphere of salvation.  A book on the subject that I’ve turned to over the years is D. A. Carson’s Divine Sovereignty & Human Responsibility: Biblical perspectives in tension.  For my sake, and perhaps yours, I’ve decided that it’s my responsibility today to record here in this blog several sections from this book.

And lest you, the reader, think that this is one very dry topic and you’ll now turn elsewhere to find something more refreshing, Carson’s handling of the topic is really good, his writing really is interesting, and the topic really is relevant to every moment of your life and mine.

The first quotation comes from the introduction:

God is With Us – Christmas 2010 video from Living Water International

Advent Conspiracy 2010 video – make THIS Christmas REALLY matter