Some thoughts

1. Golly, I've gone to a lot of weddings lately. All my friends and family are getting married. It is not a bad thing. The pastor of the wedding I went to today said the following:

Some have the gift of singleness, but for most it is God's will that each man should have his wife and each woman her husband.

That's a good thing to remember. Singleness is blessed, but marriage is blessed as well. The will of God rules over each.

2. I love the way Jerry Bridges spells out trusting God. It takes a threefold knowledge and a threefold belief. First, in the sovereignty of God over all things. If God is in control, than he is able to bring about all that is in his will. Second, in the wisdom of God in its perfection. If God is perfectly wise, than his will is guided towards the end he sets for it, and which his power effects. Third, in the love of God in Christ towards the elect. If God's love is known, than his power, perfectly guided by his wisdom, can always be trusted.

3. I have been thinking lately about a phrase much-loved by John Owen, and taken from II Corinthians 4: the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. It is slightly mysterious, in my opinion, one of those phrases in Scripture we tend to skip over as some variable phrasing, the exuberance of Paul spilling over into a muddled way of saying "saving knowledge."

But the context is dominated by two things: light and beholding. Set before us are the unbelievers, who are blinded by "the god of this age." There is darkness. But God, the God of light, who in his initial moment of creation said, "Let there be light," has again shed light in out hearts, that we might behold something new.

"the glory of God in the face of Christ."

4. I am reading Revelation again, this time with more clarity and a larger view of its structure. Some passages stubbornly remain obscure, most particularly, the millennium reign.

5. Certain things keep coming up in my heart, and my connection to the world is at the center of them. Scriptures emerge:

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world was crucified to me, and I to the world.

Remember the heights from which you have fallen!

I remember those days when I first knew Jesus, the joy and intensity of my love, the sheer wonder of grace! Unmerited favor, him my sin, I his righteousness! These things have been refreshed lately, because the glory of God in the face of Christ is set before my afresh, the knowledge to which his Church alone has access, by faith.

6. Why would anyone want to diminish or shun this glorious doctrine, set before us so clearly in the Word? Why when all good is presented, all joy, all hope?

Here is love, vast as the ocean
Loving kindness as a flood
When the prince of life our ransom
Shed for us His precious blood!