An Offer We Can’t Refuse?

Can man resist the grace of God? Yes. We do it all the time. In fact, as a result of the Fall (Genesis 3), we are by nature inclined away from God’s grace…and everything else about God. Our desires are contrary to God and we act according to those contrary desires. Necessarily.

So what do we mean by the phrase “Irresistible Grace,” the I in TULIP? Simply speaking, it means that God can and does override our resistance to his grace with his grace in order to change us from being enemies of God to being children of God. In fact, if we are to become children of God, it is necessary that he overcomes our deadness and hatred of him.

These Are the Last Days!

For a couple of months an idea has been percolating and last night it finally turned into a reality. A new blog has been developed to which I will be a contributor. What that means for The UberGoober is this:

• I’ll continue posting through the final two points of the TULIP…because I will simply never sleep again with this undone.
• After this series of posts, I will discontinue posting here and all subsequent posts will be at the new blog site.
• All of the content of this blog has been transferred to the new blog, so you can dig through the archives there and find everything that is here.

The other contributors to the new blog are my friends David Bryant and Al Stout, both formerly of AfterDarknessLight. The content from their former blog has also been transferred to the new blog so there is opportunity aplenty to get acquainted with their writings and personalities.

The new blog (bookmark it!) is After the Handbasket. I invite you to have a look see, comment at will, and tell all your friends. For those of you who have been kind enough to add The UberGoober to your blogroll, changing it to reflect the new blog would be quite kind of you.

15,000 “Thank You”s

Blog Stats

Total Views: 15,000

Just checked the stats on the blog. It hit 15,000 just now. Thanks.

Changes are coming in the days ahead for this blog - changes that I think will be a great improvement and will expose the interested to broader perspectives and more lively (and perhaps controversial) discussion.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

The Solas

Another help in understanding the bases for Reformed Theology is having a grasp of the “Five Solas.” Sola, soli and solus mean “alone” or “only.” The basic formulation goes something like this:

Salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone as revealed in Scripture alone, for the glory of God alone.

1 Sola scriptura (”by Scripture alone”)

2 Sola fide (”by faith alone”)

3 Sola gratia (”by grace alone”)

4 Solus Christus (”Christ alone”)

5 Soli Deo gloria (”glory to God alone”)

More later on the so called Five Points of Calvinism.

Gage, Knox and Grace

A few years ago a friend gave me a short stacks of CDs and said, “You may find this interesting.” I took them appreciatively and placed them on my desk at home where they sat for a few weeks. Finding the time to listen to one CD can be a real struggle - finding the time to listen to eight seemed an impossibility. One night my wife and I managed to settle the house a bit early so I asked if she would mind if we listened to one of the messages. Four hours later, having listening to four of the discs and tired because of the late hour, we were asking ourselves and each other, Why haven’t we ever seen this before? Why hasn’t anyone ever taught us this? The CDs were a presentation given at Knox Theological Seminary several years ago on the relationship between the books of John and Revelation of the New Testament. It was, as I recall, Drs. Warren Gage and Fowler White doing the bulk of the presenting.

One

It occurs to me that things don’t naturally integrate, they disintegrate. As surely as deterioration is the goal of physical matter, fracture and disunity is the inclination of human relationships (extending from our relationship with God to that with others and ultimately with ourselves). To borrow from Murphy, given the opportunity we’ll always fall apart, disintegrate.

Reformed Logs and Non-Reformed Splinters

Frankly, I’ve seen an awful lot of backstabbing, pastoral failure, immorality, pride, pomposity, traditionalism, poor theological arguments, and just plain silliness in the Reformed camp, and I’ve seen many glorious works of God outside that camp. I see no reason to think that Reformed churches are generally more virtuous than evangelical churches, or any less amusing. If it is really important, as Doug says, for judgment to begin at the house of God then to my mind we should begin by judging our own Reformed church life: tugging the railroad ties from our eyes, before performing amateur ophthalmology on our evangelical brothers and sisters. -John Frame

[ripped off from the Boar's Head Tavern]

For What it’s Worth

It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

                                                                       Alfred Adler
                   Austrian psychiatrist & psychologist (1870 - 1937)

Stray Cats

Tony Woodlief does it again. Read this post at Sand in the Gears to see how a stray kitten trains hearts to be sensitive to “the least of these.”

[UPDATE: Speaking of cats...this is odd.]

Mind Tripp

I ripped this off from One Truth (who ripped it off from Paul David Tripp).

“Our thinking always rides on the rails of our questions. Good thinkers like to walk around a topic and look at it from different angles. They like asking new questions and asking old questions in new ways. Good thinkers don’t make uncorroborated assumptions, and they don’t allow themselves to think they know more than they actually do.” Paul David Tripp