Good Friday Service Tonight! (7PM - Winter Garden Theatre)

This is going to be a beautiful, amazing time of worshiping together and remembering the dying love of Jesus on our behalf. A couple of helpful hints for the night:

1. Arrive early – around 6:30 – if you can. The doors open at 6:30, and by all indications from the other participating churches, we could have a pretty full house. The intriguing thing is that we are going to need tickets to get into the event. They are free, and can be picked up at the box office – but to get in, get your tickets and then take the escalator or elevators up to the theatre could easily eat up 15 minutes. 
2. Only take as many tickets as you need. If you are meeting people, let them get their own; the area around the ticket box office is too small and easily will get congested, from what we can tell. Take your tickets and then head up to the theatre up the escalators, and grab some seats for your friends.
3. The service begins with a theatrical meditation on the Cross by a professional actor, Ins Choi. It begins the service – you do not want to miss it! So don’t straggle or you will regret it!!
4. There is a suggested donation of $20 per person to defray the costs of hosting this event. Please come with checks made out to Grace Toronto Church, or if you have cash, please grab an envelope from an usher as you enter the theatre. The envelopes have room to put your info on them for tax receipt purposes.
5. There will be refreshments, for sale, after the service. The theatre is manning these concessions for us.

Good Friday Service - Some Important Updates

The Good Friday service will be framed around the Seven Sayings of Jesus from the cross. AW Pink wrote a great little book on these statements that would be wonderful reading in preparation for Friday. You can find those sayings in these passages:

• The First Word – Luke 23: 32-38
• The Second Word – Luke 23: 39-43
• The Third Word – John 19: 25-27
• The Fourth Word – Mark 15: 33-34
• The Fifth Word - John 19: 28
• The Sixth Word – John 19: 29-30
• The Seventh Word – Luke 23: 44-46

You will need to get a ticket to get in to the Winter Garden Theatre. This is one of the few “double-decker” theatres left in the world and the Winter Garden sits atop the Elgin. As there will be an event going on in the Elgin at the same time, you will need to pick up a free ticket for our service in order to get in the building. Those tickets will be available at the ticket counter at the front of the theatre.

Again, the easiest parking looks to be at The Eaton Centre. Park there and walk across Yonge Street and you will be at the Elgin/Winter Garden.

More important than all of this, however, is what you do today. It is the week we remember the single most important event in human history.

• Have you been reading the Gospels?
• Praying?
• Thinking about Jesus?
• Talking about His death around your family table?
• Confessing sin?
• Remembering that Christ died for your sins and was raised?

Redeem these precious days.

Anticipating great things with you!

Perspective: Your trial is smaller than you think

Have you ever gone back to an old school or the house in which you grew up? Did the place seem a lot bigger in your memories of it?
I popped into my grade school a while ago and was flooded with recollections of seven of the most formative years of my life. But the most shocking realization was how small the building was. In my memories, those halls were hundreds of meters longer.
Today my office is located in a Christian school and just a few minutes ago the First Grade class ran by my window three times. There was a sweet little something trailing pretty far behind by lap three with a look on her face that said, “This is impossible!” I am sure that once around this little school building seems like quite a haul when you are less than three feet tall.
Some day, though, she may come back and chuckle to herself as she sees how short the distance really is.
What will it be for us, Christian, as we look back on this life? The trials that seemed so long and up hill and endless will be puny and insignificant. That can be hard to remember in the middle of your run unless your eyes are set on the finish line.

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4)

Persevere!

Download some great free hymns!

Thank you, Matthew Smith!

Greg Lucas Reflecting on 18 Years of Providence

Standing in that courtroom 18 years ago I would have been absolutely overwhelmed seeing my life as it is today. The failures would be too devastating; the burdens would be too great. But when I stand there tomorrow, looking back over the past 18 years of triumph and tears, I will see God’s hand of providence in my life. I will recognize His perfect plan of love, grace, adoption, rescue and redemption--both mine and my son’s.

If I had a hundred lives to live, I would live every one of them as Jake’s dad, and I would choose to stand in no other place...rather, I would choose to run in no other race, than the perfect providence of God’s great grace.

Good Friday Service Details - Downtown Toronto

My pal Darryl has posted the details to the Good Friday service our church and four other congregations are sponsoring downtown this year. We will be meeting at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre at Yonge and Queen at 7PM.

Click here to see the details since Darryl knows how to post these things and I don't!

John Knight on one of those quiet sorrows of raising a child with disabilities

Read the whole thing here.

In the pile of papers I referenced yesterday were some old test scores. Since Paul attends public schools, they assess his educational progress as mandated by various federal and state bodies.

The things they want to measure, he can’t do. His scores on reading, reading comprehension, math, math concepts and the like were as low as you can score and still be breathing.

The things they can’t measure – like his inherent, God-created dignity as a human being – he excels at.

I used to cry when those came in the mail every year. They still make me sad, not because of how severely disabled they ‘objectively’ show him to be, but because this is the cultural measure of his worth.

And therein lies a danger to children with disabilities not yet born. These are the objective measures of ‘reality’ that doctors and social workers and university professors understand – and which are communicated to parents who live in and breathe the air of this culture. The decision to do away with such seemingly worthless human beings then appears to be obvious.

No, let us talk about what is truly real. God creates some to live with disabilities (Exodus 4:11), he knows all their days (Psalm 139:13-16), he will supply every need (Philippians 4:19), and he knows the end from the beginning (Revelation 21:5-7).

Reflecting the Generosity of God Likely Means Giving Up on the Old "Tithe"

I have really been enjoying Kelly Kapic's book, "God So Loved, He Gave: Entering the Movement of Divine Generosity" (on sale now at Westminster).  Kapic has a great turn of phrase, but far more than this, he has packed this book with fresh and winsome observations on the free giving of God centered in the Gospel.  There have been nuggets all along that have profoundly challenged me and caused me to go back and re-read.

Thinking through Abel's model of giving away his best stuff to God as an expression of his love to God reminded me of this quote from Kapic:

Overemphasizing the tithe above everything else the Bible says about generosity can lead wealthy Christians (including most Americans) into a false sense of self-righteousness; it can also burden those who are truly poor with inappropriate feelings of guilt. By way of contrast, the New Testament praises people who cheerfully and voluntarily express love for God and neighbor by giving at great cost to themselves (Mark 12:33-44; 2 Cor. 8:1-7). In this way they pattern themselves after Christ: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).

Thus, emphasizing a 10 percent tithe as the basic gauge for giving can prove problematic as it can ironically end up distracting from God’s purpose in making us more like him.

(from page 152)

Will Rejecting that God Made the World in 6 Days Make Me Lose My Faith?

I suggested to my flock on Sunday that a person’s view of the origin of life would have a direct effect on now well their faith perseveres through opposition. This concept seems to be taught in Hebrews 11:3 where the author describes persevering faith in this way:

“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

Here are some important observations on this verse.

1. Understanding comes after faith. Did you notice that? Believing that God created the universe is something that can only be fully understood post-faith. People who are not Christians yet may believe God made the world, but that understanding is not complete until God has saved them.

2. That which exists (all seen and yet-undiscovered matter) was made ex nihilo, that is, not out of things that are visible. When I create anything, all I can do is manipulate matter into something else. God is the author of all matter.

3. The word used for “created” is perhaps translated a little more accurately by the phrase “put into order.” God made all matter out of nothing (Genesis 1:1) and over the next six days He “put it into order.” What Hebrews is suggesting is that “understanding” this, coming to a mental agreement with these facts as presented in Genesis 1, is a result of faith.

4. The efficient cause (to steal a phrase from John Owen) of this creative act was the word of God. Reading the Genesis account makes clear that all God did to make light, when light had never before existed, was say, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”

5. This all relates to having a faith that perseveres through opposition. If you take God at His Word, and come to understand that in six literal days He put in order all creation, then you will be sure of these things when opposition comes:

• God is powerful.
• God’s Word is powerful.
• God is faithful to His creation.

If you believe that matter just happened, or that God used a process of natural selection to make all things, then you have already had your confidence in God’s Word shaken. You do not take the words of the Genesis account as accurate or true. That means you are probably much less likely to turn to that Word in trials and persecutions and this in turn leads to faith that does not persevere well.

Someone will likely ask, “Are you saying that people who do not believe in a literal six day creation are not Christians or that they will apostasize?” No. But I am saying that there is a reason the world so often works harder at disproving a six day creation than at insisting on another origin theory. Disproving God’s revealed Truth about how He made everything (an event to which there were no human witnesses), will work against our confidence in the all the hard truths God tells us in the Bible.

For me, this was never much of a debate. Likely because I am not very smart nor do I have a particularly scientific mind. But I have friends who have agonized over it. So I offer these observations to encourage you to wrestle with this text. Your decisions about the origin of life have a lot more effect on you than just your own mental consolation.

Regret - Some Thoughts from Tozer

The subject of regret in the Christian life came up in a few contexts lately that made me want to go back and read this article by A.W. Tozer. I would not say everything exactly the way Tozer does here, maybe making a clearer connection to the cross, but so much of what he writes is dead on in my book.  Don't be shackled by what Christ has freed you from if you are His!

The human heart is heretical by nature. Popular religious beliefs should be checked carefully against the word of God, for they are almost certain to be wrong.

Legalism, for instance, is natural to the human heart. Grace in its true New Testament meaning is foreign to human reason, not because it is contrary to reason but because it lies beyond it. The doctrine of grace had to be revealed; it could not have been discovered.

The essence of legalism is self-atonement. The seeker tries to make himself acceptable to God by some act of restitution, or by self-punishment or the feeling of regret. The desire to be pleasing to God by self-effort is not, for it assumes that sin once done may be undone, an assumption wholly false.

Long after we have learned from the scriptures that we cannot by fasting, or the wearing of hair shirt or the making of many prayers, atone for the sins of the soul, we still tend by a kind of pernicious natural heresy to feel that we can please God and purify our souls by the penance of perpetual regret.

This latter is the Protestant's unacknowledged penance. Though he claims to believe in the doctrine of justification by faith he still secretly feels that what he calls "godly sorrow" will make him dear to God. Though he may know better he is caught in the web of a wrong religious feeling and betrayed.

There is indeed a godly sorrow that worketh repentance and it must be acknowledged that among us Christians this feeling is often not present in sufficient strength to work real repentance; but the persistence of this sorrow till it becomes chronic regret is neither right nor good. Regret is a kind of frustrated repentance that has not been quite comsummated. Once the soul has turned from all sin and committed itself wholly to God there is no longer any legitimate place for regret. When moral innocence has been restored by the forgiving love of God the guilt may be remembered, but the sting is gone from the memory. The forgiven man knows that he has sinned, but he no longer feels it.

The effort to be forgiven by works is one that can never be completed because no one knows or can know how much is enough to cancel out the offence; so the seeker must go on year after year paying on his moral debt, here a little, there a little, knowing that he sometimes adds to his bill much more than he pays. The task of keeping books on such transactions can never end, and the seeker can only hope that when the last entry is made he may be ahead and the account fully paid. This is quite the popular belief, this forgiveness by self-effort but it is natural heresy and can at last only betray those who depend upon it.

It may be argued that the absence of regret indicates a low and inadequate view of sin, but the exact opposite is true. Sin is frightful, so destructive to the soul that no human thought or act can in any degree diminish its lethal effects. Only God can deal with it successfully; only the blood of Christ can cleanse it from the pores or the spirit. The heart that has been delivered from this dread enemy feels not regret but wondrous relief and unceasing gratitude.

The returned prodigal honours his father more by rejoicing than by repining. Had the young man in the story had less faith in his father he might have mourned in a corner instead of joining in the festivities. His confidence in the loving-kindness of his father gave him the courage to forget his chequered past.

Regret frets the soul as tension frets the nerves and anxiety the mind. I believe that the chronic unhappiness of most Christians may be attributed to a gnawing uneasiness lest God had not fully forgiven them, or the fear that He expects as the price of His forgiveness some sort of emotional penance which they have not furnishes. As our confidence in the goodness of God mounts our anxieties will diminish and our moral happiness rise in inverse proportion.

Regret may be more than a form of self-love. A man may have such a high regard for himself that any failure to live up to his own image of himself disappoints him deeply. He feels that he has betrayed his better self by his act of wrongdoing, and even if God is willing to forgive him he will not forgive himself. Sin brings to such a man a painful loss of face that is not soon forgotten. He becomes permanently angry with himself by going to God frequently with petulant self-accusations. This state of mind crystallizes finally into a feeling of chronic regret which appears to be proof of deep penitence but is actually proof of deep self-love.

Regret for a sinful past will remain until we truly believe that for us in Christ that sinful past no longer exists. The man in Christ has only Christ's past and that is perfect and acceptable to God. In Christ He died, in Christ he rose, and in Christ he is seated within the circe of God's favoured ones. He is no longer angry with himself because he is no longer self-regarding, but Christ-regarding; hence there is no place for regret.

The human heart is a funny and deceitful thing. Who would have thought that our regret for our pride might be the surest sign we are still walking in that arrogance?