The Sojourn

Author: Burrows

  • Coffee with Jim

    Alister McGrath

    One of the things [the students at Tyndale] particularly treasured about Packer was his willingness to talk theology over the college breakfast table.

    The students would ask him about the great theological questions of the day—the relationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom, to give one obvious example. Packer did not give them pre-packaged answers; instead, he showed his theological working. In effect, Packer taught them how to theologise—how to do theology, rather than simply presenting them with the outcomes of that process. It was a rare gift, and one that Packer would consolidate over his long career as a teacher.

    Alister McGrath, J.I. Packer: His Life and Thought, 51.

  • Side Blooms of the Spirit

    Side Blooms of the Spirit

    With the recent drought, a saguaro cactus copes with the lack of water by conserving its vertical growth and opening unused budding locations further down the side of the cactus. These “side blooms” are both a cause of distress and a rare display of extra beauty.

    Colossians 1:28–29 says, ” Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”

    The work of presenting one another mature in Christ can often seem to be difficult and full of labor. It’s never easy to “warn” and “teach” one another. Sometimes it feels like we see little to no growth. But the Spirit causes us to adapt to this world by bringing beauty out of toil. When we strive with his energy—an energy which only he alone possesses—we can bloom in the most unexpected places.

  • The Most Powerful Help to the Reformation

    Philip Schaff

    Luther’s New Testament was so much multiplied and spread by printers that even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who had accepted this new Lutheran gospel, and could read a little German, studied it with the greatest avidity as the fountain of all truth. Some committed it to memory, and carried it about in their bosom. In a few months such people deemed themselves so learned that they were not ashamed to dispute about faith and the gospel not only with Catholic laymen, but even with priests and monks and doctors of divinity….

    The German Bible of Luther was saluted with the greatest enthusiasm, and became the most powerful help to the Reformation.

    Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, The German Reformation, 350.

  • Adulting

    Adulting

    My First Egg, José Moura Girão, 1914

  • The Happy Land of the Trinity

    This inner life that God lives, in the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is a livelier life than any other life. We know about it because we have overheard Father, Son, and Holy Spirit talking amongst themselves with the intent that we overhear them and be brought into the conversation. Simply knowing that the life of God in itself is the liveliest of all lives is a medicinal correction to our sick, self-centered thinking….

    The crucial thing is that we should rejoice in it. The knowledge that God enjoys perfect blessedness is a great thing. Even if it stays a kind of secret at the back of our minds, as something that we cannot say much about, it nevertheless exerts a tremendous gravitational pull on the rest of our thoughts and affections. Thomas Traherne said, “I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the centre of the earth unseen violently attract it.”

    Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 81–82.

  • The Boldness of New Testament Doctrine

    Is it too bold of us to declare what God was like, or what he was doing, before creation? It requires boldness, to be sure, but only the boldness of the New Testament.

    One of the characteristic differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the New Testament is bold to make such statements. Look, for instance, at the way the New Testament takes a step further back with its declaration of salvation: where God declares in the old covenant, “I have chosen you,” the new covenant announces that “he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.”

    The prophets do not make declarations about what happened “before the foundation of the world,” but the apostles do.

    Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 63.