The Scriptures and Christ, by A.W. Pink

Man must contemplate God’s purity and his impurity because the Scriptures testify to Christ’s purity (John 5:39) and our depravity.  Our profiting lay in “mystery of Christ” which is only revealed in the Bible (Eph. 3:4).  Our profiting from the Word of God can then be determined based upon the extent to which Christ becomes more and more real and precious to us.  Pink continues with his typical layout of seven points by which, he believes (and, I think, Scripture deems legitimate), an Individual can know if he or she is profiting from the Word.  He is profiting when:
1)  The Scriptures show the individual his need for Christ.  This is, however, not simply upon conversion, but throughout the sanctification of the believer.
2)  The Scriptures makes Christ more real to the individual.  That is, as Job said, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye seeth thee” (42:5).
3)  When the individual is more engrossed with Christ’s perfections.
4)  As Christ becomes more precious to the individual (I Pet. 2:7).
5)  As the individual’s confidence in Christ increases.
6)  When the individual feels a deepening desire to please Christ (John 14:23).
7)  When the Scriptures cause the individual to long for the return of Christ.
 
Side-note:
The greatest difficulty that many believers have–my self included–is to more and more long for the supernatural knowledge that is spoken of in the Scriptures—that is, that which is “not intellectual but spiritual, not theoretical but experimental, not general but personal.”  The question to continually ask ourselves, then, is “Is it your chief joy to get alone and be occupied with Him? If not, your Bible reading and study has profited you little indeed” (Pink).  (Click here to read it.)

This Project’s Future

This is just a quick update on where this blog’s going. As I see it, I think this blog will slowly be evolving into a more standard blog whereby posts are going to be more along the lines of commentary on things I have read (books/articles/etc) and heard (sermons/lectures/conferences) instead of summaries. I have a few reasons for this:

1) Time. It takes quite a bit of time to summarize, and as the summer comes to a close, I’m finding myself with less and less of it.

2) Discussion-oriented vs. Reading-oriented. I have found that the blogosphere is really not a very effective place to host discussions and so am going to redirect the blog to a more reading-oriented/comment-oriented atmosphere instead of a discussion-oriented one.

3) New academic year. This plays into both #1 and #2. With the starting of school, there will be even less time, but what the starting of school means is that there will be more opportunity for discussion. So what I hope is that the blog will maintain some readership during the academic year and that we can in fact discuss Biblical truths and teaching in person as we see each other on campus, large group, etc.

So posts should resume soon hopefully, but will be taking on a more reading-oriented commentary style. And I hope that the vision of this project can continue, namely encouraging discussion about Biblical truths, into the academic year as we see each other in person and can more easily think through these things together.

So what are the benefits? I can see it being two-fold: first, posts should be more readable and a lot faster to read, so there should be less “i need to catch up” messages; second, posts should be more frequent since writing them will not take as long as summarizing an article/chapter/sermon/etc.

Comments are still welcomed and encouraged, just that dialogue will not necessarily be emphasized (but of course is also encouraged).

Brief Hiatus

Hey, I’m going to be busy with a friend whose visiting me in Taiwan, so I will not be posting anything for a few days. Don’t worry, I’m still alive!

New Subscription Service!

I know many of you have asked if there’s a way to be notified of new blog posts without coming to the blog directly. The unpredictability of when posts are made (although we try to post at least once every 2 to 3 days) is really annoying. So you’ll now notice on the right hand navigation bar, in the middle, there is now a link to our RSS feed (click on the RSS symbol) that you can subscribe to if you use an RSS reader. If you don’t, you can actually subscribe to this blog via email, so whenever a new blog post is made you’ll be notified in the email.

I’m not sure exactly how the email subscription works, so you may just get a notification or you may actually get the blog post in your inbox. If something is wrong with the email subscription system (i.e. not getting emails when new posts are made), please notify me.

Hopefully this will make things easier for those of you who don’t really have time to check blogs frequently!