A friend in need

My friend Jeff is having panic attacks. He came over last night to seek my counsel. I acted like I could be helpful and for that - now I feel kind of ashamed. He is going to a psychiatrist this morning after not being able to sleep last night.

What do you do when you want to help but you just don't have the resources? What do you do when you're out of wisdom? Can you wait? Can you say, I don't know the answer to that? Can you continue to care even though you are not the source of help? These are the questions I am asking myself. Taking on my friend's burden is unwelcome and unpleasant. But I love my friend. I want him to be well.

And so I hope. I pray. I pray with him. I pray for him. And I wait.

When you have to wait

Here are some photos of people and places. These are posted here because the represent situations in which our family has had to wait. Wait for children to be born. Wait for that first win of the season, what for the weather to clear. Wait for that job opening. Wait.

What are we waiting for? And what do we do while we wait?

Mostly we are waiting on God to move. We think we are waiting on people or circumstances to change. That is because we think that those events depend on secondary causes. But the events that are seen actually are controlled by that unseen Maker. He is the One to whom we must make our appeal. He is the One we must wait upon. So we do . . .

The Calvinistic "world-system"

Abraham Kuyper in proposing that there are five “world-systems” (Pagan, Muslim, Roman Catholic, Modern and Calvinistic) as he calls them, or worldviews as we might say, insists that Calvinism provides the most desirable understanding of the relations of God to man, man to man and man to the world.

He says: “Calvinism has a sharply-defined staring-point of its own for the three fundamental relations of all human existence: vis., our relation to God , to man and to the world. For our relation to God: an immediate fellowship of man with the Eternal, independently of priest or church. For the relation of man to man: the recognition in each person of human worth, which is his by virtue of his creation after the Divine likeness, and therefore of the equality of all men before God and his magistrate. And for our relation to the world: the recognition that in the whole world the curse is restrained by grace, that the life of the world is to be honored in its independence, and that we must, in every domain, discover the treasures and develop the potencies hidden by God in nature and in human life.” (Lectures on Calvinism. Eerdmans, 1931, p. 31)

Is God a maniac?

In a sermon preached in 1877 entitled, "God's Thoughts and Ways Far Above Ours," C.H. Spurgeon notes the absurdity of calling God to account for His "great system of salvation and providence."

He says: "Shall divine revelation be judged and condemned, as men try a thief? Nay, worse than this, these sages so despise the teaching of the Lord, that one would think they were a committe of doctors examining a maniac."

This picture just struck me funny. Imagine the skeptic calling the Creator God of the universe to account for the fact that it rained today when he wanted is sunny. Or that his baseball team didn't win (again).

From this Spurgeon admonishes us: "Let us abhor the presumption of skepticism, and let us be wise enough to know our folly; rational enough to feel that God is to be obeyed, and not questioned; and that His revelation is to be believed and not criticized."

Notice the seriousness of this challenge. Spurgeon uses the word, "abhor" as in, "hate intensely." Who among us despises our own investigative prowess? Who among us takes anything but pride in our ability to see and to know. Ought we not more humbly doubt our own knowing?

Kuyper on the Church

Abraham Kuyper in his "Lectures on Calvinism" makes a distinction between the visible and the invible Church. He insists that we must not allow for an absolute and perfect correspondance between the two. It is not as if everything the visible church does is authorized by the invisible Church. Because we hold that the invisible Church is made up of those the Lord chooses we must allow a plurality of expresssion in the visible church.