Pursuing Joy

Sermon Notes from Charles Spurgeon:

Romans 6:11-12 — “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.”

How intimately the believer’s duties are interwoven with his privileges! Because he is alive to God, he is to renounce sin, since that corrupt thing belongs to his estate of death.

Sin Wants To Reign Over You

“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.”

1. Sin has great power. It is in you and will strive to reign.
   • Sin remains as an outlaw, hiding away in your nature.
   • Sin remains as a plotter, planning your overthrow.
   • Sin remains as an enemy, warring against the law of your mind.
   • Sin remains as a tyrant, worrying and oppressing the true life.
2. Sin’s field of battle is the body.
   • Its wants—hunger, thirst, cold, etc.—may become occasions of sin, by leading to murmuring, envy, covetousness, robbery.
   • Its appetites may crave excessive indulgence and, unless continually curbed, will easily lead to evil.
   • Its pains and infirmities, through engendering impatience and other faults, may produce sin.
   • Its pleasures, also, can readily become incitements to sin.
   • Its influence upon the mind and spirit may drag our noble nature down to the groveling materialism of earth.
3. The body is mortal, and we shall be completely delivered from sin when set free from our present material frame, if indeed grace reigns within. Till then we shall find sin lurking in one member or another of “this vile body.”
4. Meanwhile we must not let it reign.
   • If it reigned over us, it would be our god. It would prove us to be under death and not alive to God.
   • It would cause us unbounded pain and injury if it ruled only for a moment.

Sin is within us, aiming at dominion. This knowledge, together with the fact that we are nevertheless alive to God, should:

• Help our peace, for we perceive that men may be truly the Lord’s, even though sin struggles within them.
• Aid our caution, for our divine life is well worth preserving and needs to be guarded with constant care.
• Draw us to use the means of grace, since in these the Lord meets with us and refreshes our new life.

(HT: The Resurgence)

“Affliction can sometimes prove a blessing to a person’s soul… There is nothing that shows our ignorance more than impatience under troubles. We forget that every cross is a message from God and intended to do us good in the end. Trials are intended to make us think, to wean us from the world, to send us to the Bible, to drive us to our knees. Health is a good thing, but sickness is far better if it drives us to God. Anything, anything is better than living in carelessness and dying in sin.”

~ JC Ryle

Our mission trip in Brasil is quickly coming to a close. We have two days left of our VBS at the Igreja Batista De Castro Alves here in south Sao Paulo. The words above are from our morning team devotions. God is doing great things in our team and many students are seeing Him “wean us from the world”! We pray that God changes our hearts. Without Him doing the work only He can do, we will come back unchanged. Pray with us and for us during these last few days that our eyes will see and our ears would hear, God would grant repentance and we would have hearts and affections that are truly changed.

The Resurgence, an arm of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, has posted a helpful article outlining John Owen’s On The Moritification Of Sin (you can buy Justin Taylor’s excellent edited version of 3 Owen books combined here, buy the standalone book here or download the original treatise here).  You can also download a 12-page pdf reading summary.  Although Owen is “heavy and hard to read” (JI Packer), it is definitely worth the effort.  Download the reading summary and use the outline to assist as you read through this important work.  It is important because, as Owen says, “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.”

I can empathize with Jon Acuff in this post.  I hate throwing up… its the worst.  He makes an excellent connection between how our bodies expel toxins and harmful elements, but we hardly take this approach with sin.  His site has a different way of approaching things, most times hilarious, but I usually find his commentaries edifying and encouraging.

“The God of biblical revelation has a character.  Divine action flows from that character.  God is love and He is light.  Moreover, He is righteous in all His ways… it is only as we grasp the righteous holy loving character of the God who has made us that we can begin to grasp in some measure the depths of the human plight outside Eden.  And it is only against that dark backstory that the glory of the cross of Christ is revealed as the centre of God’s plan to bring shalom.”

~ Graham Cole, God the Peacemaker, p. 52

When living in Louisville, we heard about Sojourn Church and started listening to their worship albums.  One of our favorites is  Over The Grave: The Hymns of Isaac Watts, Volume 1, with “songs inspired by and adapted from his hymns.”  They hope this album “will point us beyond the music and lyrics to see the glorious Savior who inspires them.”  I believe they have accomplished their mission and the music and lyrics are outstanding.  One of my new favorite worship songs is “Warrior”, based on Watts’ version of Psalm 21, a Davidic psalm anticipating the Messiah.  It is, as they describe it, “a most unusual worship song”:

Honor and majesty divine
Around his sacred temple shine
Grace and might so long foretold
In crowns of glory, not of gold

Your hand shall find out every foe
And as a fiery furnace glows
With raging heat and living coals
They will feel your wrath upon their souls

Oh the warrior will conquer all
The world will fall before His feet

Earth and sea will give up their dead
The nations gathered before Him,
A day of glory, a day of dread
No one dares now ignore Him

That is not your typical Christian worship song!  Great Biblical Theology mixed with a good tune… “With raging heat and burning coals, They will feel your wrath upon their souls”.  But our God is a Warrior and one that loves His glory supremely.  That final day will be one where His glory shines forth, but it is a dreaded day indeed for His foes, for there is nothing they can do when He gathers the nations before Him!  I was reminded of this last Lord’s Day evening during our Reformation Day dinner when Brent, giving his short biography on Calvin, spoke about God’s wrath against sin.

This is a great worship album… one that works hard lyrically and musically to glorify our Great God!  You can listen to it here and buy it here.