When you have robed in as many vestries (forgive me) as I have, you begin to notice particular prayer plaques or cards set up by priests that have come before you to help you prepare. I think I have found what I would like on a card to read as I leave the vestry for my prayer desk and the pulpit. It is George Herbert’s poem Aaron written around 1633.

The poem always catches me in how with such few words Herbert reminds me what Holy Scripture teaches: I am as a sinner who struggles in old Adam’s garment, and who I am new in Jesus Christ – it is in his righteous garment that I am now clothed!

Aaron

Holiness on the head,
Light and perfection on the breast,
Harmonious bells below raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.

Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest :
Poor priest ! thus am I drest.

Only another head
I have another heart and breast,
Another music, making live, not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest :
In Him I am well drest.

Christ is my only head,
My alone only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me e’en dead ;
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in Him new drest.

So holy in my Head,
Perfect and light in my dear Breast,
My doctrine tuned by Christ (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest),
Come, people ;  Aaron’s drest.

After a fruitless search on Netflix for the documentary film God’s Outlaw on William Tyndale, Netflix had created a new “Recommended for Henry” list. I then saw the title of this film, sat up and took notice right away: The right time (1564), and The right region (Flanders).

So come, relax with me…

In 1564 Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted “The Procession of Calvary,” of Christ carrying the Cross set in a large landscape:

What does it all mean? A drama film, The Mill & The Cross directed by Lech Majewski (it is also out on DVD as well as Netflix instant-streaming) tries to bring it to life. I have watched the film and the concept itself is fascinating. A reviewer writes, “the narrative is not the point—the extraordinary imagery is. The painting literally comes to life in this spellbinding film, its wondrous scenes entering the viewer like a dream enters a sleeping body.”

For a couple of appreciative Christian reviews, see this one from CT Movies and this one from Christ and Pop Culture. The performances by Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner), Charlotte Rampling (Stardust Memories) and Michael York (Logan’s Run) are subtle. This movie is slow and gently unfolding, but definitely worth the less than two hours of your time it will take to watch.

Make it something for Lent.

The measures uncover a serious flaw in the common assumption of our leadership from parish to diocese to national executive that we are on the right track toward community integration, that community integration is at least possible if not inevitable. Something is terribly wrong.

And that’s where “The Doctor” comes in. Over the summer I slowly studied the revival sermons Martyn Lloyd-Jones (MLJ) preached on the 100th anniversary of the last great Anglo-American revival in 1859. He leads you through many texts of the Bible, explains the context of each verse, and the relevance of each verse to true revival. The first half of the book is dedicated to the habits of humanity that hinder revival, as was the masterful method of The Doctor.

MLJ pointed out that what is needed in revival is an outpouring of the Spirit of God. But, and it is a huge BUT, “…that Spirit of God can only honor his own truth. The Holy Spirit cannot honor a lie.” Our task therefore as preachers and teachers of the Scriptures is to ask ourselves if our position conforms to His truth. We must first, as MLJ alludes to his text (Genesis 26.17-18), “…get rid of the rubbish of the Philistines…the work of the Philistines is that they deny, or cast doubt upon, or neglect, or ignore, certain vital essential doctrines.”

It is a painful process. But if you turn to the historical evidence and read the accounts of all the revivals that have ever been known in the long history of the Church you will find that this getting rid of the rubbish comes first as the people of the Church return in repentance to the vital essential teachings:

1. The truth concerning the sovereign, transcendent, living God who acts, who intervenes, and erupts into the history of the Church, and of individuals.
2. The second truth follows the first. It involves the Bible as the final authority. God has revealed the truth concerning himself, in propositions, in statements, as they are recorded in the Bible.
3. The third is that humanity is in sin and under the wrath of God.
4. The fourth is the person of Jesus Christ. He is central. He is crucial. The Bible is a book about him, because it is in, and through him that God visits and redeems his people, and provides this great salvation through his atonement, his death upon the cross, his broken body, his shed blood and his bodily resurrection from the dead.
5. Fifth is the work of the Holy Spirit, that his supreme work is to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ. He focusses attention on, and points to, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The unique teaching of MLJ is that God sends and ends revival on His own terms, not ours.

I can only conclude that our failure toward integration into our communities is not through lack of trying or the failure of particular methods and efforts (all of my colleagues work long dedicated hours to this goal).

It is because we do not establish our priorities in the light of the essentials truths of Scripture.

We can see for ourselves that the risen Christ himself can berate a church for being too tolerant of false teaching (Revelation 2.20). We must also ask if we truly dealing with “the body of Christ” when people claim to be Christians but have no intention of submitting to that same Lordship.

My experience of the past decade is more like an awkward union between genuine believers and those with not much more than an aesthetic and sentimental attachment to an institution called the church, divorced from revealed and mandated truth joyfully believed, confessed and obeyed.

It may be that you’re groaning and ready to click, but just give me a little minute. I discovered the other day how PBS has uploaded my favorite Hamlet so that you can watch the whole three-hour production online for free. David Tennant (The 10th Doctor, Dr. Who) stars as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek) as Claudius.

I have seen many productions of this play and this one is by far the best and I am not alone.

Edward T. Oakes argues that this release of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet (first on stage, then on the BBC and PBS, and on DVD), “…is a Hamlet that finally makes sense.” He says it is “by far the freshest and most arresting interpretation I have ever seen of the play.”

“To my mind,” he writes, “the success of this new RSC production stems from a host of factors, all of which work together in such a way that, …the play now finally makes sense.”

Here are his points in outline:

• First of all, each line is so freshly delivered that it sounds new (quite a feat for this play!)…
• Second (and this is a negative virtue), this production eschews any Freudian interpretation, which by now has become an empty cliché, and even an embarrassment…
• Third, the setting of the play is the contemporary national-security state, with CCTV cameras everywhere, and from whose tapes we see some of the action (interestingly, the ghost’s outline does not register on the tapes). As world literature’s most famous neurotic, Hamlet’s unstable personality is already sufficiently known by almost any audience; but in this production there is an added reason for Hamlet’s incipient madness besides his own volatile temper…
• Fourth, the soliloquies are not treated as the dramaturgical equivalent of operatic arias, but flow naturally out of the action…
• Which brings me to the fifth and last great merit of this version: here Hamlet truly displays the dilemmas of his personality. It is one of the great mysteries of this play how Shakespeare manages to get the audience to sympathize with his protagonist…

Read the whole thing for more detailed interaction with this new version, then set aside a bit over three hours and watch an amazing play!

Back when I came to faith in the early 1970′s, conservative American Christians who wanted more in their study had to turn to British writers: J.I. Packer, Os Guinness, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and John Stott. And after 39 years as a Christian they are still on my shelf. Rereading them were critical in guiding my return from the wilderness of modernism and liberalism. I was even using Stott’s commentary on Romans (The Bible Speaks Today series) in my personal bible study when I first heard he died on July 27th of last year.

I was therefore very excited to read that Alister Chapman, associate professor of history at Westmont College, had spent the last year revising his PhD thesis studying the life and teaching of John Stott to publish with Oxford University Press.

Tim Keller calls his new book, Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement, “a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand contemporary world evangelicalism.” It is a bit too expensive for me at the moment (am hoping for the ebook version), but that’s O.U.P.!

To get a sense of Chapman’s research, Peter Sanlon recently sat down with him for a 20-minute interview at Oak Hill Theological College in England:

The other week I was asked by one of our life group leaders if I could recommend any films that have redemption as their theme. While going through the DVDs on the shelf and scanning online streaming services, I spotted my favorite Jesus film. The Gospel of John film may be the best films on the life of Jesus. The virtues of the film are many, but the two that stand out to me are:

1. It is entirely grounded in the text of Scripture (the “script” is essentially the Gospel of John, word-for-word from the Good News Translation).
2. Henry Ian Cusick’s portrayal of Jesus. It takes superb acting skills to combine the compelling toughness and tenderness of Jesus—and it’s here that many of the Jesus films are disappointing.

Here is the scene reenacting John 4, where Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. Each time I watch this scene and others like it in the film I am reminded afresh how the gospel becomes clearer and clearer until it becomes REAL in the heart of the believer:

The first time I saw this scene I was knocked over realizing visually that Jesus was pointing to the Samaritans running toward him. Up to that point I thought that when Jesus said “harvest” and “fields”, “reaps” and “plants” he was using the literal fields around them as illustration. Now I saw how “harvest” was linked to the people hungry for the gospel!

An excellent film. If you decide to get it, get the the two DVD version for the entire gospel narrative.

This week I began his chapter that critiques the use of statues and images by the medieval church. Here’s what he wrote about crosses. Read this aloud. You can hear the gentle irony:

Paul testifies that by the true preaching of the gospel “Christ is depicted before our eyes as crucified” [Gal. 3:1]. What purpose did it serve for so many crosses – of wood, stone, silver, and gold – to be erected here and there in churches, if this fact had been duly and faithfully taught: that Christ died on the cross to bear our curse [Gal. 3:13], to expiate our sins by the sacrifice of his body [Heb. 10:10], to wash them by his blood [Rev. 1:5], in short, to reconcile us to God the Father [Rom. 5:10]? From this one fact they could have learned more than from a thousand crosses of wood or stone. (Institutes 1.11.7, Battles 107)

I understand what Calvin is getting at here. It is so easy as a preacher of the gospel to assume that the gospel is understood. We assume too much. If we don’t make the gospel clear the natural inclination of the fallen human heart is to copy behaviors that will make it acceptable to God. When you assume the gospel rather than preach the gospel, the cross becomes silent. What we see are one set of behaviors switched for another. What is missing is the human heart restructured through understanding the costliness and the beauty of the cross.

“How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10.14).

The image of the cross separates the sinful heart from God’s grace. The sound of the gospel message of the cross incorporates.

Her story of sacrifice, anger, salvation, and courage must be seen by every committed Christian. Not only is she inspiring, but her story reveals the undeniable fact that Jesus Christ is building his church even in the most repressive and hostile places on earth. Give it a watch. It is only a bit over nine minutes.

I have just put down a very well-written biography of Charles Hodge. He was the principal Reformed theologian of Princeton Theological Seminary for over 50 years. Irenic and ecumenical, influential Episcopalians John Johns and Charles McIlvaine were Hodge’s lifelong friends.

There is much to commend the biography to you. You really get a sense of the man, the theology, and the era. Biographer Paul Gutjahr has spent ten years in writing this. It shows up on every page. As an example, I was particularly moved by this touching description of Charles Hodge with his fifty-one year-old dying wife Sarah:

The next death that visited Hodge was infinitely dearer to him. On Christmas Day 1849, just four months after her return to Princeton with her daughter and grandchild, Sarah “softly & sweetly fell asleep in Jesus.” She most probably fell victim to uterine cancer.

Sarah’s health had begun to deteriorate soon after her return, and by December her condition was such that Hodge had lost all hope of recovery. In her final weeks, he personally nursed Sarah, spending countless hours simply lying next to her. During these times, he held her hand, and conversed with her when she had the strength. The depth of their love remained so intense that Hodge later commented that “to the last she was like a girl in love.” During her final weeks, Sarah asked Hodge to tell her in detail “how much you love me,” and they spent time recounting the high points of their life together.

Hodge’s last hours with his wife were particularly poignant. As her life ebbed away, Sarah looked at her children gathered around her bed and quietly murmured “I give them to God.” Hodge then asked her if she had thought him a devoted husband to which she replied as “she sweetly passed her hand over” his face: “There never was such another.” (Charles Hodge, 258)

I am planning to return to Princeton October 21 to search out Hodge’s grave. His remains are located in Princeton Cemetery, not far from other of my Reformed heroes: Jonathan Edwards (yes, the Jonathan Edwards!), B.B. Warfield, and Archibald Alexander. That will just leave Gilbert Tennent in Abington and the cenotaph of Theodore Frelinghuysen in North Brunswick to finish my Great Awakening pilgrimage begun in 2009.

He along with others pointed me to The Letters of Samuel Rutherford, that great Scots Puritan. Rutherford’s Christ-centeredness is breathtaking. The renowned 19th century pastor-evangelist Charles Spurgeon wrote of Rutherford’s letters: ’When we are dead and gone let the world know that Spurgeon held Rutherford’s Letters to be the nearest thing to inspiration which can be found in all the writings of mere men.’

The work he is quoting below from is Letter 181, 1637 from The Letters of Samuel Rutherford. This is really cool. Just like me you can get a copy FREE at Googlebooks. Here is the Googlebook link to the letter.

And here is Douglas’ post:

When looking for the passage quoted in the last post, I came across a sentence of Rutherford’s which at first sight seems puzzling, but is actually very valuable to all struggling Christians. He says: ’I think it manhood to play the coward, and jouk in the lee-side of Christ; and thus I am not only saved from my enemies, but I obtain the victory’ (Letter 181, p. 352).

My attempt to paraphrase it would be something like this: What might be thought cowardly, namely, to hide behind Christ, I find to be the manly course, or the best course a man can take, for in doing this I not only escape my enemies, but overcome them.

This is expressive of a great truth: that real wisdom for helpless sinners like us is not to try to be brave and strong in ourselves, but to flee constantly to the Saviour, for when we are hidden in him, our enemies are powerless, and we are victorious.

The old Scots word ‘jouk’ makes it all the more expressive. It is often explained as meaning to duck, but the way I have heard it used conveys more the idea of a rapid sideways movement, like a boxer avoiding a punch, or a football (soccer) player dodging a tackle. It is a quick evasive movement; but in this case into the protective shadow of Christ, so that he absorbs the assault, and we, in him, overcome our attackers.

The lee-side of Christ reminds me that ‘a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest . . . as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land’ (Isaiah 32:2). When our enemies approach – they may be fears about the future, doubts, temptations, fiery darts of the wicked one – let us, without delay jouk into the lee-side of Christ. He has already borne the full force of every assault the enemy could make against us at the cross. It all stems from sin, and he has borne sin. He has died and risen again. Let us not be such fools as to face the enemy on our own, or try to do over again what the Lord has done once and for all!