Remembering Easter

So it's been over a week since Easter.  Is it still fresh in your head or are you already thinking about the next holiday?

When Jesus cried out with a loud voice "It is finished," one thing he was saying was that the task that he and the Father had agreed upon in eternity, before the world began, was in this sense completed. Nothing more was required for the salvation of believing mankind. The requirement of perfect obedience in order for man to inhabit heaven had been met. The covenant of life broken by the first Adam was "mended"—met—by Christ, the last Adam.

The above is from a fantastic article written by Paul S. MacDonald and it's published in New Horizons Magazine.  Read the entire article found here on the OPC website.

(The author, an elder at Penobscot Bay OPC in Bucksport, Maine, is a member of the Committee on Christian Education. He quotes the ESV. Reprinted from New Horizons, April 2010.)
 

It Is Not Death To Die

"If God has called you to be really like Jesus in your spirit, He will draw you into a life of cruxifixion and humility, and put on you such demands of obedience that He will not allow you to follow other Christians; and in many ways He will seem to let other good people do things that He will not let you do. Other Christians and ministers who seem very religious and useful may push themselves, pull wires and work schemes, but you cannot do it; and if you attempt it, you will meet with such failure and rebuke from the Lord as to make you sorely penitent. Others may brag on themselves, on their work, on their success, on their writings, but the Holy Spirit will not allow you to do any such thing; and if you begin it, He will lead you into some deep mortification that will make you despise yourself and all your good works.

Others may be allowed to succeed in making money, but it is likely that God will keep you poor, because He wants you to have something far better than gold, and that is a helpless dependence upon Him, that He may have the privilege (the right) of supplying your needs day by day out of an unseen treasury. The Lord will let others be honoured and put forward, and keep you hidden away in obscurity, because He wants some choice fragrant fruit for His coming glory which can only be produced in the shade. He will let others do a work for Him and get the credit for it, but He will let you work and toil on without knowing how much you are doing; and then to make your work still more precious, He will let others get the credit for the work you have done, and this will make your reward ten times greater when Jesus comes."

Hudson Taylor - 1874

Reposted from The Centurion Papers

How Do You Break Free From an Addiction to Entertainment?

from Between Two Worlds by JT

John Piper answers this question, writing that "Recognizing [the problem] is a huge step in the right direction" and that " ultimately it's a gift of grace to feel the glory of God." Here are some suggestions of what you should do:

1. Seek the Lord earnestly about it. Pray like crazy that God would open your eyes to see wondrous things out of his law.

2. Immerse yourself in the Bible, even when you don't feel like it, pleading with God to open your eyes to see what's really there.

3. Get in a group where you talk about serious things.

4. Begin to share your faith. One of the reasons we are not as moved by our own faith as we are is because we almost never talk about it to any unbeliever. It starts to feel like a kind of hothouse thing, and then it starts to have a feeling of unreality about it. And then the powers of entertainment have more sway in our life.

5. . . . [T]hink about your death. Think about your death a lot. Ask what you'd like to be doing in the season of life, or hours or days, leading up to meeting Christ. I do that a lot these days. I think about the impact of death, and what I would like to be found doing, and how I would prepare to meet him and give an account to him.