Ferdinand Bol 1616 – 1680 -- Gideon and the Angel, etching — ca. 1640
I’ll be preaching at Blackhawk Ministries in a few hours on the life of Gideon (Judges 6-8).
Thank you, LORD, for Your grace both to Gideon and to me.
Judges 6-8
Hebrews 11:32-38
This has the potential to be the most innovative film in many many years.
The consensus from Rotten Tomatoes: “Smart, innovative, and thrilling, Inception is that rare summer blockbuster that succeeds viscerally as well as intellectually.”
Thusfar it’s 87% fresh.
There’s very little chance I won’t be seeing it at 24:00 today [tomorrow?].
“It is not that we keep His commandments first, and that then He loves; but that He loves us, and then we keep His commandments. This is that grace, which is revealed to the humble, but hidden from the proud.”
… St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), Lectures or Tractates on the Gospel according to St. John, vol. ii, Marcus Dods, ed., as vol. xi of The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Edinbugh: T & T Clark, 1884, lxxxii.3, p. 308
Professor John Barclay of Durham University discusses the radical difference between grace and the idea of ‘gift’ with John Dickson. Click here for more.
The Scandal of Grace: Part I from CPX on Vimeo.
Not surprisingly, what I’ve always responded to most with this artist is his authenticity. This article from RELEVANT magazine is well worth reading. Particularly interesting were these comments regarding social justice as an act of worship:
“McMillan also believes in seeking social justice as an act of worship. He contributed the joyous “I Dreamed There Was a Fountain” to a benefit album of the same name to support Zao, an organization providing safe drinking water and education to developing countries.
“Literally, they’re preventing wars by digging wells for people,” he says. “I thought, ‘Man, that’s the real kingdom of God.’ Doing stuff that in reality is saving people’s lives. It’s literally changing the whole world for some people. One well gives life to a thousand people.”
“Men today do not, perhaps, burn the Bible, nor does the Roman Catholic Church any longer put it on the index, as it once did. But men destroy it in the form of exegesis: they destroy it in the way they deal with it. They destroy it by not reading it as written in normal literary form, by ignoring historical-grammatical exegesis, by changing the Bible’s own perspective of itself as propositional revelation in space and time, in history, by saying that only the “spiritual” portions of the Bible have authority for us.”
… Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984), Death in the City, London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1969, Good News Publishers, 2002, p. 77-78
“Man cannot make a redemptive art, but he can make an art that communicates what he experiences of redemption as a man and what he knows of it as an artist. God in his infinite wisdom may use an art work as an instrument of redemption, but what serves or can serve that purpose is beyond the knowledge of man.”
… John W. Dixon, Jr., in Christian Faith and the Contemporary Arts, ed. Finley Eversole, New York: Abingdon Press, 1962, p. 6
In the dying hours of Independence Day, I offer this link to you for your consideration. After another Fourth of July celebrated in and around the body of Christ, I am tremendously conflicted.
This is offered simply as a foil to much of what I heard today, and suspect more than a few of you (like me) are either confused or frustrated by this day of celebration.
It is not necessarily an endorsement, but rather the words of a sincere Christian leader in the midst of our (my) inner dialogue.
Just watched this for the first time with my family and am tremendously excited about it all over again. It does indeed (from the trailer, at least), look as if the film will divert from the book in some ways. Regardless, I’m very hopeful that this film will inject some life into the film franchise.
