Sampler Platter: Friday, August 22 2014

Here's a sampling of some of the things I've been reading and reviewing this week.  The hope is that these bite-sized sections of books, articles, blog posts, etc will stand on their own and be beneficial in-and-of-themselves.  But I also hope that some of you will like these excerpts enough that they pull you into the larger work from which they've been taken.

Let's start sampling: 

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John Piper, "Teach Believers What Happened to Them in Conversion" at www.desiringgod.org (posted August 19, 2014): 

"...when a person is saved, they do not know all the glorious things which, in that moment, happened to them — like a person who wakes up from surgery and does not know that the cancer has been completely removed. He must be told.

"So it is the task of parents and Sunday school teachers and small group leaders and pastors to teach people what happened to them. Never assume that people understand how God saved them. All of us have only partial knowledge of this. And most of the New Testament is designed to increase our knowledge of how God saved us (in history and in our souls), and what is true of him and us now in this new relationship."

Click here to see the full post from which this excerpt was taken.  Please note the usual disclaimer, that my recommendation of this post is not necessarily an endorsement of everything else on the site where this was posted.

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J.I. Packer, Knowing God.  InterVarsity Press, 1973. p. 143:

"...the character of God is the guarantee that all wrongs will be righted someday; when 'the day of God's wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed' (Rom 2:5) arrives, retribution will be exact, and no problems of cosmic unfairness will remain to haunt us.

"The truth is that part of God's moral perfection is his perfection in judgment.  Would a God who did not care about the difference between right and wrong be a good and admirable Being? ....Moral indifference would be an imperfection in God, not a perfection....The final proof that God is a perfect moral Being, not indifferent to questions of right and wrong, is the fact that he has committed himself to judge the world."

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Os Guinness, Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times.  InterVarsity Press, 2014, pp. 144:

"Much of the recent debate about changing the world sounded like a clash between those who say, 'Yes, we can,' and those who say, 'No, you can't.'  That at least is an issue that can be resolved.  The true answer is one we must both declare and live out: Yes, we can, because God can - and he has in the past, and he is doing so elsewhere in the world, and he is able to do so again even here in the advanced modern world, because God is God, and his is the last word in human affairs."