It’s amazing what you find in the paper.  Recently, I picked up a Wall Street Journal and read Barton Swain's review of Thomas Kidd's new biography, George Whitfield.

Born in 1714, Whitfield was just 21 years old when—as he put it— after enduring

many months' inexpressible trials by night and day… God was pleased at length to remove the heavy load and to enable me to lay hold on his dear Son by a living faith.

George Whitfield’s spiritual journey caused him to deeply ponder the subject of conversion itself.   This passion pushed him toward further study, ordination, and an itinerant preaching ministry.  He traveled 14 times to Scotland and came to America 7 times.   In a given week, he often preached more hours than he slept.

And the great English evangelist didn’t sugarcoat his Bible teaching.  “I will not be a velvet-mouthed preacher,” Whitfield once proclaimed.   He made good on that promise with statements like:

Before ye can speak peace to your hearts, ye must not only be sick of your original and actual sins; but ye must be sick of your righteousness, of all your duties and performances.... If ye never felt ye had no righteousness of your own, if ye never felt the deficiency of your own righteousness, ye can never come to Jesus Christ.

Whitfield once spoke to a mining town near Bristol.  By the time he was through, Whitfield recalled “white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their black cheeks.”

A gripping image, isn’t it?  “White gutters made by their tears…”

Have you come to that place where you are finally “sick of your righteousness, of all your duties and performances?”  If so, you are finally ready to receive the forgiveness Christ alone can offer.

Psalms 51:7 “Wash me and I will be whiter than snow.” Jesus is ready to make you clean. Why not let Him do what He does best—right now?

Have you ever felt like you haven’t been properly rewarded for going the extra mile?
I’m guessing Robert Ford might have felt that way.
 
Captain Ford was piloting a Pan Am Boeing 317-B just two hours out of Auckland, New Zealand, when his radio officer relayed the news about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Opening top secret instructions, Captain Ford was told that his aircraft (essentially a flying boat able to carry 74 passengers) was a strategic military resource and must not get into enemy hands.  Toward that end, he was ordered to take “the long way home” to New York City—and fly under strict radio silence.
 
This odyssey of more than six weeks took the crew 31,500 miles from the Far East, to the Middle East, Africa, South Atlantic, Brazil, the Caribbean…and finally home to New York City.
 
They had no suitable navigation charts, no certainty of obtaining fuel, no assurance of spare parts and had to fly under a veil of total secrecy.
 
They endured sleepless nights, the banging of a damaged engine, long flights, gunfire from a German submarine, the danger of a mined harbor, and rifle fire over the Arabian Peninsula.  At one point, they were nearly blown out of the sky.
 
But upon arriving home and debriefing, the crew was given a mere two weeks off before being returned to regular flight duties.
 
When I read this account in Ed Dover’s remarkable book, The Long Way Home, part of me was a bit put off.  These guys were heroes, weren’t they?  And yet, that’s what the war effort called for—at a minimum—heroes.
 
The words of Jesus come to mind: “So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty” (Luke 17:7).
 
You and I are in a spiritual war, make no mistake.  Maybe going the extra mile doesn’t make us heroes after all but rather, “unworthy servants” who “have only done our duty.”

“What’s in your wallet?”

So goes the popular ad campaign.  

But I have a different question for you:

“What’s in your heart?”

With Valentine’s Day in the rearview mirror, I’m reminded of Proverbs 4:23:  “Above all, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

Puritan John Flavel once claimed, “The keeping and right managing of the heart in every condition is the great business of a Christian’s life.”

Peter Moffett staunchly advocates, “Rather look to the defending of thy heart, than to the defending of thy house.” 

To a culture like ours, the keeping of a heart seems a quaint concept more at home in an episode of Downton Abbey than in any personal life strategy.  But if the heart really is the sole entrance to the inner person, oughtn’t our sensibilities to be awakened?

Consider the close attention we give to the doors of a house.  We give them locks, deadbolts, chains, alarm systems—or some combination of all of those.  We even protect the doors that protect us by coating them with paint or varnish.  

Most of us do far less when it comes to securing our hearts.  We underestimate our hearts’ fragility and susceptibility. At the same time, we overestimate our own innate goodness or ability to sift through or reject unwanted evil. That’s when the trouble begins. 

In his treatise, Guarding Your Heart, Arthur Pink offers a quick litmus test for whether your heart has been compromised.  He writes, “It is in the heart that all backsliding begins.  Observe closely your affections and see whether God or the world is gaining ground in them.  Watch whether you experience increasing profit and pleasure in reading God’s Word, or whether you have to force yourself to it in order to discharge a duty.  Observe the same thing in connection with prayer.”

So I ask again, what’s in your heart?

John Flavel was right: “The keeping and right managing of the heart in every condition is the great business of a Christian’s life.”

Red hearts...dark chocolate...diamond rings: Valentine's Day.

With so many getting engaged on February 14, I could hardly resist sharing the findings of a new report from Atlanta's Emory University.  Titled, A Diamond is Forever—and Other Fairy Tales, the report features a survey of 3,000 once or still-married American couples.

Maybe you've heard the “two-month's-salary rule” that jewelers love to foist on couples.  According to this “rule,” you are supposed to save up (or at least spend) two months of your salary for an engagement ring.

Turns out that little rule has worked well for jewelers.  Not so much for couples.

The Emory University report reveals that couples who spend $2,000 to $4,000 on an engagement ring were 1.3 times likelier to end up divorced than couples who spent $500 to $2,000.  These numbers are troubling, given the 2013 national average.  According to TheKnot.com, the average American couple drops $5,598 on a ring.

Apparently, spending big bucks on a wedding holds similarly disturbing results.  Couples who dropped more than 20 grand on a wedding ceremony face a divorce rate that is three and a half times as high as those who spend between $5,000 and $10,000.  By the way, the national average—according to TheKnot.com—is much higher: $29,858.

Big rings and big parties don't appear to guarantee anything more than big debt.

Rather...dis-HEART-ening, wouldn't you say?

As pricey ring is a thing of beauty.

But for beauty that lasts—and almost guarantees happiness—look for a heart.  Not the dark chocolate kind.  But the heart that Ephesians 4:2 describes when it says, “Be completely humble and gentle.  Be patient, bearing with one another in love.”

If you can find that kind of heart (and I have, in Diana), you've got yourself a real...gem!

I am about to ruffle some feathers. Forgive me.

Here’s the issue: I am personally uncomfortable with our commitment to comfort during church.  More to the point, I have a problem with the emerging assumption that drinking coffee or water during the church service is normal—almost a right.

If worship is what we are supposed to be about—the total investment of our energy in the magnifying of another—then where is there room for satiating our own thirst?  Understand, I’m preaching to myself, too, because I enjoy a bottle of water.

Recently I attended a Sunday morning service where communion was offered “self-service,” rather than the elements being passed out.  Different—but certainly not problematic in itself.  But while I was praying, I heard the unmistakable sound of a large candy box being shaken as two people in the row behind me discussed the weather.  

Our unwillingness to suspend creature comforts—like a cup of coffee, or a bottle of water, or a handful of candy for even one hour I find suspect. If we will not allow our worship to cost us the suspension of personal pleasures for an hour, what price will we pay?

I can hear the voices of some folks who disagree.  They’re saying, “Dude, chill out.  We don’t live in the Old Testament anymore.  This is the age of grace!”  True.

Yet 1 Timothy 6:16 speaks of our God as one “who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.”

And I guarantee you that if God were to once again visit Mount Sinai as He did with Moses, you could count on there being smoke and thunder.

Given imagery like that, a cup of Starbucks or a sip of water from a BPA-free plastic bottle seems a bit out of place.

I see the casualness of man and the holiness of God on a collision course.

While we no longer live in the Old Testament, worship itself intrinsically requires a certain personal preparation.  I doubt that a double shot latte is what God had in mind.