My New Blog

Friends,

Please consider following me on my blog. I am essentially inexperienced in the blogging world, but I want to try it for a few reasons, and I hope that you will join me as a fellow pilgrim on the journey Home into the Father's embrace. Here are my reasons for this endeavor.



1) I am a reader. In fact, if you see my library, you might think I have bitten off more than I can chew, or eat, or whatever the saying is. I take in quite a lot of information because I love learning, but I do not want that information-intake to terminate on myself. I want to, even in my readings, be a means of grace and love to others. I feel tempted to call this blog my humble undertaking at this information-giving-in-love thing, but God knows, I am anything but humble. There are so many places in which the Potter still has to do serious work in this lumpy, misshapen vessel. By God's grace, I am what I am.

I want to use this vehicle to communicate truth. I want to bring people along for the ride, as I tackle Bonhoeffer, Edwards, Schaeffer, and many others, and as I am in turn tackled by the Word. I want to help generate discussion on important topics, knowing that 1) truth is real, 2) that truth is something we discover, not create, 3) that it is important to seek out truth, and 4) that because of my depraved mind, I need the Spirit's help in these things - both individually and within Gospel community. This will be good for me, to flesh out some of the things I am reading. Without discussion partners, I really forget a lot.

2) The written word has great power. God can, in the space of a few short, powerful words, speak into the heart of a man and change his whole life. When we communicate the Gospel, which is "the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes", we are doing it, hopefully backed by a lifestyle of love that proves to the hearer God's glorious worth to us, but God has ordained that the essence of the sharing of the Gospel come through words that are understandable. The Gospel is foolishness to the wise of the world, not because it is gibberish, but because their hearts are darkened. They are without ears to hear, and we know those ears to hear are God's gracious gift to his children.

We don't swallow a pill, we don't do a crazy dance, we don't pray an unthinking prayer devoid of understanding, and we don't do good works in order to be saved. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and we know that, "faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ." (Romans 10:17) Hearing refers, I believe, not necessarily to the physical act of hearing, but to the act of turning our attention, in this case, to an explanation of the Gospel through understandable words heard or read. That could be sitting under a preacher and coming under conviction, or it could be opening the Gideon Bible in a hotel room, reading about Jesus, and seeing him as compelling for the first time. God is pleased to bring salvation through the opening of minds and hearts to truth - that God in Christ is supreme and glorious and beautiful and the only means of salvation. And while feelings and actions probably accompany it and follow organically from it, the Gospel is first good NEWS! and really good news begs to be proclaimed... at least in words and best surrounded by acts of love.

All of that to say, I believe in the written word. God chose, in his great love and wisdom, to reveal himself to creation and to preserve that revelation in the form of a written book. It is reasonable, therefore, to believe that he wants us to be able to read and understand and obey. John Piper made a profoundly simple and powerful point in a sermon in his Romans series: "If God wrote it, he wants us to know it." Duh. And yet I often neglect the Word...

This blog aims, by the written word, to turn hearts and eyes to Jesus in order for people to see him as he really is in all the ways he presents himself to us in the Bible. I am sure this will be a theme running through my blog, but a foundational premise here is that you become like what you behold. As Paul aimed for the "obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations," so I aim for that also, not by making a direct appeal to the will for obedience (which Paul also doesn't do), but by asking people to take a serious, sustained look at the person and work of Jesus, especially in his gracious, life-giving death on the cross. In directing our gaze to him, we will fall more deeply in love with him.

Our obedience shows our love, and if we are disobedient, it is not mainly that we have a disobedience problem, but rather a love problem. And thinking of Jesus as the only beloved of God, I have named this blog, "Beholding the Beloved." May we be serious about beholding God, turning the gaze of our hearts toward our beautiful Creator.

3) I want to become a better writer. I really like writing, though I do not by any means believe I am great at it. However, I can see God refining that gift and using it for his Kingdom. My hope is that this blog would be a humble submission to that process of refinement, and that others might profit from it. I know not everyone reads the books I read and thinks about all the same things I think about, but perhaps this blog will be a means of grace to you by causing you to think of things you wouldn't have thought about otherwise. And may that spurring to dwell on the things of God cause deep Gospel roots to grow in people's lives to the praise of God's glorious grace.

"His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness..." (2 Peter 1:3)

Soli deo gloria!
Daniel