Hebrews NET Physical and spiritual growth follows pretty much the same patterns. We grow from the inside out. We need nourishment and exercise to grow. We grow best in a loving family environment. We need to grow in a balanced way. How awkward. So here we are at the end of this wonderful, short letter from the apostle Peter.
Peter has reminded us of so many powerful truths. He has reminded us that God has given us everything we need for life and godliness, and we can make our calling and election sure.
Peter has reminded us we can trust our Bibles because the men who wrote it were carried along by the Holy Spirit. He has reminded us there will be false teachers and we must be on guard.
Peter has reminded us Jesus is coming back, no matter how long His return is delayed, we must be ready. Today we have learned we can be ready by giving attention to three things. What action plan do you need to put into place as you leave here today?
What changes do you need to make to be living a more godly life? What actions do you need to begin to be reaching out to the lost?
Who do you need to invite over for dinner or desert? Who do you need to invite to worship? Who do you need to have a spiritual conversation with and offer to study the Bible with? What steps do you need to take to guard yourself and to begin growing spiritually?
Do you need to be more regular in your daily or weekly spiritual disciplines? Do you need to ask someone to be your mentor or your accountability partner?
Do you remember the reports of air traffic controllers falling asleep on the job? A lone air traffic controller at Washington D. A little after midnight, the pilots of two commercial planes were unable to reach the tower, but they were in communication with a regional air traffic control facility about 40 miles from the airport.
Regional air traffic facilities handle aircraft within roughly a 50 mile radius of an airport, but landings and takeoffs are handled by controllers in the airport tower.
Another incident occurred when an air traffic controller was found sleeping while on duty at an airport in Knoxville, TN. The airport control tower was staffed with one air traffic controller who worked both the radar and tower positions and handled seven aircraft over a five hour period because the radar controller was unresponsive. Unlike the controller at the Washington, D. According an anonymous federal official, a co-worker checked on the controller several times, each time shaking him awake.
The controller would promise to stay awake and do his job, but, each time, he would return to his makeshift bed and sleep. The last thing we want is to be found asleep on the job when Jesus returns. That means we need to be alert and ready at all times. The one who testifies to these things says, "Yes, I am coming soon! Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all.
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Visibility Others can see my Clipboard. Cancel Save. Exclusive 60 day trial to the world's largest digital library. It says that the Church is the only authority. Mat Catholics and the Bible. But Michelangelo, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, also combined biblical teaching and non-Christian pagan thought; he made the pagan prophetesses equal to the Old Testament prophets.
Along the tops of the walls of the Sistine Chapel are people who envisioned Christ before he came. Christ was for all people. The non-Jewish visionaries on the wall of the Sistine Chapel are people caught the vibe and envisioned the coming of Christ before he came. That is what won them a place on the wall of the Sistine Chapel alongside of the Ancient Jewish prophets.
Schaeffer is not of the Hebrew bloodline, yet he claims Christ. We don't understand why he would have a problem with the acknowledgment of non-Hebrews before the time of Christ prophesying that Jesus the Messiah would come. The Reformers wanted to go back to the church as it originally was, with the authority being the Bible only Here is his recurring theme, and the recurring answer is that there was no New Testament in the Early Church.
The early Church put the Eucharist at the centre of the community. More here. On pg. The early Christians had the Eucharist each time they met. They believed in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, unlike Calvin. The Reformers also abandoned praying for the dead which began with the first Christians. Photo: Latin writing in the catacomb of Priscilla that says: "I implore you, brothers, to pray whenever you come here and invoke the Father and Son in all your prayers so that they might save Agape the person in the tomb forever".
The Reformers were not returning to the "good old days" of Christianity, they were going in a new direction that had never been tried before. For the early Christians, unity was everything and it was obtained through the Eucharist and the hierarchy. It is years since the Reform and there is no denomination that looks anything like the reformers vision of the Church.
There are currently 33, variations. That is a stretch of the truth. Catholics don't worship statues That is like saying Evangelicals worship the music that they use in worship services today. This comment confuses us because the book has now completely jumped on the other side of the argument. He says that God's work can shine though in people who don't know him, because God made everything.
That is what he spent 50 pages condemning in the Catholic Church's approach to pre-Christian philosophers. Aristotle and other Greek philosophers stumbled on timeless truths about the nature of Truth.
Even though they did not know that the source of this wisdom was God, they nevertheless found some Truth that Paul, John and other apostles understood and used in the Bible. Here the book bounces over to advocate for Humanism. Galileo was a supreme Humanist. Yet Schaeffer is advocating for Galileo. The reason for that is because in this case Galileo was mostly right.
He found the Truth about the round spinning Earth. Even though he was a Humanist. The reason Galileo got an inquisition is because his thesis was against the all Christian understanding about the Immovable world spoken about in Scripture. Both Protestant and Catholic theologians interpreted scriptural references to the world being "immovable" to reject the idea that the world is spinning.
It should also be noted that Galileo actually taught that the sun was at the center of the universe , not just the solar system; later evidence showed that the sun also orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy; it thus would have been bad if the Church had given an unqualified endorsement to Galileo's theory, for his specific form of the theory turned out to be false.
These creative stirrings are rooted in the fact that people are made in the image of God, the great Creator, whether or not an individual knows or acknowledges it, and even though the image of God in people is now contorted. This creativeness-whether in are, science, or engineering - is a part of the unique mannishness of man as made in the image of God.
In the second half of his book, after the reformation, it is like a different guy is writing the book. Here he is saying you don't have to be a card carry Christian to create beauty or see Truth. Because the Truth and the search for it are written on the hearts of all men. Based on Schaeffer's own logic in the second half of the book, there is nothing wrong with Aristotle finding the Truth about some fundamental things before Christ, and for us to recognize that.
But in the first half of the book he says that non-Christians couldn't have any Truth. The book shows a man who was very divided over the issues, and he was working his way through them. His inner struggles that later led him toward the Catholic Church, are evident. Francis A. The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture In the Evangelical world, perhaps the greatest force against human secularism is Francis Schaeffer, an orthodox Presbyterian who died in Here are some of the things that come to mind that are more "Catholic" in heritage than the Presbyterian denomination he lived and worked in: Schaeffer wanted Evangelicals to take back art which is what Catholicism did during the middle ages He wanted to reinstate moral absolutes He wanted Evangelicals to take back politics he called this Dominionism, which is what Catholicism did after Constantine He wanted Evangelicals to understand that the full use of the intellect is completely consistent with a life of faith and that both the intellect and faith will arrive at the same Truth, because Truth is Truth this is the Catholic exegesis form of theological analysis.
In fact the Pope's recent famous speech where he quoted a 14th century Byzantine Emperor who said Mohammed's deeds were "evil and inhuman" was actually about the relationship of Faith and Reason. Schaeffer's accusations with responses Mr. The Church after Constantine is responsible for the introduction of Greek. Aquinas should never have introduced Aristotle or "reason" into theology The materialism of the renaissance Popes is a result of Aquinas' attention to "reason".
Humanism in the Renaissance was also because of that. Modern Secular humanism is because of that. Rom , Gal , Col The Dogma of the Trinity was defined after Constantine, which is accepted by every Christian denomination.
History of the Bible Much of Christianity up until the sixteenth century was either reaction against or reaffirmation of these distortions of the original Christian, biblical teaching pg.
More about indulgences here. Mat Catholics and the Bible At its core, therefore, the Reformation was the removing of the humanistic distortions which had entered the Church. Photo: Latin writing in the catacomb of Priscilla that says: "I implore you, brothers, to pray whenever you come here and invoke the Father and Son in all your prayers so that they might save Agape the person in the tomb forever" The Reformers were not returning to the "good old days" of Christianity, they were going in a new direction that had never been tried before.
And yet he condemns the Catholics for allowing people to be individuals. To men and women of the time, these were images of worship. The men of the Reformation saw that the Bible stressed there is only one mediator between Toe and man, Christ Jesus. Statues in Church That is like saying Evangelicals worship the music that they use in worship services today. This rested on the fact that the Bible gives unity to the universal and the particulars, and therefore the particulars have meaning.
There is variety yet resolution And it is exactly the Greek language influence and Greek Philosophical concepts found in Scripture i. It is the Augustine and Aquinas influences of scriptural interpretations that make this great unifying factor. We must of course, remember Handel Handel followed the Bible's teaching exactly The book is claiming that Protestant artisans composers, artists, etc were more holy than Catholic ones. No reputable historian would agree with that.
Rembrandt was messed up too. Honestly, most artists, Catholic or Protestant are messed up in some way We can say that because I'm a composer. He shouldn't do the "our artists are better than your artists" thing. We don't think this is "clear" and "transparent" Biblical teaching.
He called the Book of James the "Epistle of Straw. It is not only Christians who can paint with beauty, nor for that matter only Christians who can love or who have creative stirrings. Even though the image is now contorted, people are made in the image of God. This is who people are, whether or not they know or acknowledge it. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us? How then shall we live?? Now that we? There is a flow to history and culture,? This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind? This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity. It is true of their corporate actions, such as political decisions, and it is true of their personal lives.
The results of their thought world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo? As a man thinketh, so is he,? Now more than ever, having tasted the sword of catastrophic terror, what we think about the world will determine how we live. Our family systems, our social and religious systems, the culture in which we live, with all of its marketing and advertising systems, all are forces that influence our inner world, and thus our way of life.
Add to this a dimension of terror and you have a pretty strong mix. But, says Schaeffer,? An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world.? The outer theater of action , though powerful as it may seem, must not be allowed to control, damage or manipulate the inner world.
Paul says,? Do not be conformed to this world don? The inner thought world determines the outward action. I loved the scene in the movie The Shawshank Redemption. The scene is Shawshank Prison and the inmates are all in their prison garb gathered at tables eating their daily ration called dinner. Andy Dufresne, a banker wrongly accused of murdering his wife, sits down to eat after having just spent the last month in solitary confinement. His fellow prisoners ask him how he did it; how he maintained his level of sanity in such harsh solitary conditions.
He says,? They said,? He points to his mind and says,? No, it? No matter what they do to you, they can? You can get busy living, or get busy dying.? Victor Frankl spent two-and-a-half years in Nazi concentration camps. Evil had captured the European world with the Nazi reign of terror.
In the realm of death, says Frankl, one can escape from death only by living. It was in the Nazi realm of death that Victor Frankl concluded that a human being cannot be denied the ultimate freedom of choice: one? In sum, circumstances do not control who we are or who we become. Going back to biblical times, the Romans in many ways were an advanced society.
But they had no real answers to the basic problems of humanity. Their gods godlets were not big enough. Like the Greeks, their gods were nothing but amplified humanity. Their gods depended upon the society that had made them, writes Schaeffer,?
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