According to the American Heritage Dictionary the word “peculiar” means something or someone distinct from all others. Belonging distinctively or primarily to one person, group, or kind; special or unique. That is why I have been speaking of “A Peculiar Grace”, because God is peculiar, unique, and in a category all His own. Therefore, everything about Him and everything He does is “peculiar”. When we begin humbly listening to the Word of God and humbly receiving its truths we learn to live with paradox, unanswered questions, mysteries, assurance, security, and a deep faith in His awesome nature.
This has been my story. For a long time I was like a man who had a tree in his back yard and deep down in that same yard was a buried treasure unknown to him. So, he was content with racking the fallen leaves off the tree making sure the yard looked good. Well, the yard looked good, but the treasure was untapped! Then I read John Piper’s Desiring God and realized that there was a treasure of infinite proportions buried in my backyard that had always been there while I had been raking up the leaves of weak theology, popular teaching, doctrinal pride, and my own immature understanding for so many years.
Then a breakthrough came in my life when God showed me that it was time to go back to the scriptures and to see it with new eyes and hear it with new ears. This blog is a testament of deep devotion. It was birthed during a course of the past few years in my spiritual journey where I experienced major shifts in my theological understanding of God and the Christian life. I heard God speak through the scriptures and the writings of deep thinking, God-saturated, Bible bleeding men of great spiritual insight and devotion. Men like Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, C.S. Lewis, and John piper. How thankful I am for God liberating my thinking and feeling by His grace and mercy.
I am calling for a challenge, a call, a pastoral plea for a fresh hearing from God from His divine perspective concerning His own “peculiar” truths. The Apostle Paul says, “Consider what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything” (2 Timothy 2:7).
My blog is meant to provoke worship. I have discovered that there is a kind of hearing that leads to worship or as John Piper calls it “exaltation”. When the mind is engaged with the spirit of God, when reflection is joined with divine illumination, worship results. Jonathan Edwards puts it like this:
God glorifies Himself towards the creatures in two ways: 1. By appearing…to their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in and enjoying in the manifestations which He makes of Himself…God is glorified not only by His glory being seen, but in its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God will be more glorified than if they only had seen it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both in understanding and by the heart.”
I have discovered that there are two components to real worship. First, there is a kind of seeing God like Paul teaches, But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18 ) Second, there is a supreme valuing of what you see of God. When the face is unveiled and God shows Christ for His exceeding great worth, beauty, preciousness, and supremacy; we value or treasure Him. You must truly see God in order to value Him. The fact is you cannot truly see God without savoring Him. It would be like seeing a Kauai sunset and thinking about the ghetto. To see God without savoring Him would be a gross insult to His glory.
True worship involves understanding with the mind and feeling a passion of the heart. For most of my Christian journey I had been taught the importance of orthodoxy, which is right doctrine; orthopraxy, right practice or living according to right doctrine; but I had never been taught, orthopathos, having a right passion based upon the truth revealed in Christ. I’ve discovered that Christianity involves thinking and feeling, study and reflection, understanding and affections. That is why the Bible commands us to think, consider, understand, and meditate, on one hand, and to rejoice, fear, mourn, delight, feel, and be glad on the other hand. Both are critical for true worship.
my blog is therefore, about Orthopathos, gaining a right “peculiar” passion; the kind of passion that glorifies God and gladdens the soul. Oh how God wants to inspire a kind of passion that revolutionizes lives, churches, nations, and history. The kind of passion that sends out devoted men and women to sacrifice everything for the glory of Christ and the salvation of the nations. A passion that comes when a person falls in love, or discovers buried treasure, or the cure for AIDS. It is the passion that was the oxygen in the souls of men like the Apostle Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Clairveux, Martin Luther, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, John Owen, David Brainerd, John Newton, John Bunyan, William Carey, Hudson Taylor, Charles Simeon, John Paton, Charles Spurgeon, Richard Wurmbrand, Jim Elliot, Mary Slessor, Amy Carmichael, R.C Sproul, C.J. Mahaney, John Piper, and a vast number of ordinary, devoted men and women. These are the great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1).
May this blog light a passion within you like it has for me. Please take a new fresh look at the peculiar grace of Jesus Christ. First, I would like to stir you to see God in ways perhaps you have never seen Him. Second, I long to see you moved to cherish God for all He really is and to enjoy God with fresh experiences of delight in Him. Finally, I pray for you to be a fountain of God’s peculiar grace to a graceless, hungry, and thirsty world.
May Christ get all the glory and you get all the joy!
Pastor Bill
A Prayer
Day by day, Day by day
Oh Dear Lord Three things I pray:
To See thee more clearly
To Love thee more dearly
To Follow thee more nearly Day by day
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