December 2017 – Tri-Valley Baptist Church

“The final One More Move!”

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Dec 312017

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “The final One More Move!”

By: Ron Woodrum

Several years ago I purchased the book The Devil by John Wesley White, Associate Evangelist to Billy Graham. Dr. White’s book on the devil is an excellent treatise of the Biblical doctrine of Satan. It is out of print, but you can still find a copy for a very reasonable price on Amazon. I was fascinated by a story Dr. White told in his book. He told the story of Chess Champion Paul Morphy visiting an Art Museum in Europe, and encountering a painting entitled “Checkmate” by Friedrich Moritz August Retzsch (1770-1857). In the painting a chess game is illustrated. On one side is the devil. He has a confident grin on his face. He is confident that he has the young man sitting across from him trapped with no way out. The young man has a worried look on his face. It appears the game is over and that he has lost. White tells how intrigued Morphy was with this painting. He studied it for hours. Then, as White’s account goes, he called for a chess board, and told the curator of the museum that there was one more move, and that the young man could be saved after all! White went on to say that when mankind seemed defeated by Satan that Jesus, our Master/Savior/Champion came to our rescue in His incarnation and by one last move, on Calvary’s cross cried out in victory “It is finished”, and might just as well cried out “He, (Satan), is finished”, because as Paul says in Colossians 2, at the cross Jesus triumphed over Satan, making an open show of him! Years later I learned that the story was not quite accurate. Truthfully the encounter, according to an article printed in the September 8, 1888 in the Columbia Chess Chronicle, a weekly publication, recounted how Paul Morphy, the world chess champion was visiting the home of Reverend R.R. Harrison in Richmond, Virginia. The painting was hanging above the fireplace in Reverend Harrison’s home. It was originally titled “Die Schachspeiler”- “The Chess Players”. Morphy was so intrigued by the painting that he did observe if for a long period of time. He told Rev. Harrison that the young man’s chess position is not nearly as hopeless as one might first imagine. The two of them got out a chess board and set it up as pictured in the painting. Harrison retold the story by stating that Morphy said, “I think that I can take the young man’s game and win!” Other guests challenged him by saying, “not even you Mr. Morphy can retrieve that game!” To the surprise of everyone, the victory was snatched from the devil and the young man was saved! The young man was saved by the last move of the master!

We just celebrated the birth of our Savior. In I John 3:8, the great Apostle John said that Jesus came in the flesh to “destroy the works of the devil”. In the Book of Revelation Satan is called Abaddon and Apollyon. Those are the Hebrew and Greek names that mean “destroyer”. That is what he has done from the beginning. The root of both words means “to unloose, undo”. Satan destroys mankind, by undoing all the good that God created in the image of God in Man. Paul said it this way, “All have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God”. Man, in the fall, has fallen farther and farther away from what God originally planned for us. Undone by Satan. But when Jesus came he came to “destroy” the works of the devil. The Greek word destroy is the word “apoluo”. It means to “undo”. It is a play on words. Jesus came to “undo” the “undoing” of the devil. When we believe we are “set free” from Satan’s power. We are “born from above” and made partakers of a divine nature. The Spirit comes to dwell in us and overcome the power of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and starts transforming us through the recreation of regeneration! At the rapture that work will be complete when we are given a glorious body fashioned like unto his glorious body (Philippians 3:20). The job will be complete. The undoing of the undoer! Jesus checkmates the checkmater! We have our victory in Him! Someone has said, “Satan has been cross since Calvary!” How true!

The Book of Hebrews tells of our victory: “since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death He might destroy the one who has power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery”. (Hebrews 2:14-15). Jesus spoke of how He accomplished this. Jesus, by the Power of the Spirit of God, cast out demons and freed men and women from Satan’s bondage. The Pharisees said that He did it by the power of Beelzebub, the Prince of Demons. Other times they accused Him of having a demon. Jesus responded by saying that was a ridiculous statement. He said if Satan cast out Satan then his house is divided. A house divided cannot stand. He then stated, “No man can enter a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house.” (Mark 3:27). Jesus was the stronger man, who entered the strong man’s house, and through his death, undid the death that Satan plunged mankind into. He then undid all the undoing the undoer did. He destroyed the Destroyer! So as we celebrate this Christmas make sure we celebrate”that one last move that check-mated our check-mater”, and gave us final victory!

Be Careful not to miss the Grand/Central Miracle of Christianity.

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Dec 242017

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: Be Careful not to miss the Grand/Central Miracle of Christianity.

By: Ron Woodrum

In his book Whistling in the Dark, Frederick Buechner tells how one young Pastor had the real message of Christmas brought home to him in a real way. This is what Buechner says, “The lovely old carols played and replayed until their effect is like a dentist’s drill or a jackhammer, the pathetic banalities of the pulpit and the chilling commercialism of almost everything else, people spending money they can’t afford on presents you neither need or want, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the artificial tree, the cornball crèche, the Hallmark Virgin. Yet for all our efforts, we’ve never quite managed to ruin it. That in itself is part of the miracle, a part you can see. Most of the miracle you can’t or won’t see! The young clergyman and his wife do all the things you do on Christmas Eve. They string the lights and hang the ornaments. They supervise the hanging of the stockings. They tuck in the children. They lug the presents down out of hiding and pile them under the tree. Just as they’re about to fall exhausted into bed, the husband remembers his neighbor’s sheep. The man asked him to feed them for him while he was away, and in the press of other matters that night he forgot all about them. So down the hill he goes through knee-deep snow. He gets two bales of hay from the barn and carries them over to the stalls. There’s a forty watt bulb hanging by its cord from the low hanging roof. He turns it on. The sheep huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling twine, shakes the leaves of hay apart, and starts scattering it. They come over bumbling and shoving to get at it with their foolish, mild faces, the puffs of their breath showing in the air. He is reaching to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is! The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay. The sound of the animals eating. The smell of the dung. He is of course…in real life…AT THE MANGER! He only just saw it! He whose business it is above everything else to have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye! He who on his best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes from that manger, might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that he had himself just been in the manger! The world is the manger. It is only by grace that he happens to see this other part of the miracle. Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed as a matter of cold, hard facts all it’s cracked up to be, then even at our best…our efforts are misleading. The Word became Flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with such vulnerability his life could be snuffed out with one hand! Incarnation. It is not tame! It is not touching! It is not beautiful! It is uninhabitable terror! It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space/time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: ‘God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God…who for us and for our salvation’, as the Nicene Creed puts it, ‘came down from heaven’ “ In his book, Faces of Jesus, he adds, “The incarnation is a kind of vast joke whereby the Creator of heavens and earth comes among us in diapers…Until we too have taken the idea of the God-man seriously enough to be scandalized by it, we have not taken it as seriously as it demands to be taken!”

The great German Theologian Karl Barth, in his Dogmatics In Outline, says, “The nativity mystery conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary, means that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus, his ‘climbing down of God’ is the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God; he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not just similar to us, He is one of us!” C.S. Lewis is even more emphatic about how we should see the Birth and Incarnation of our Savior. He writes, in his book Miracles, these vital words, “The Central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares us for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered about. It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of the strategically coherent invasion-an invasion which intends complete conquest and occupation. The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion in isolation from it is futile!” He also speaks to lowly condescension we often fail to comprehend with the Incarnation. In The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, he writes, “God could, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise we should have missed…all the all-important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it also, except sin. If He had been incarnate in a man of immense natural courage that would have been for many of us almost the same as His not being incarnate at all!”

Charles Dickens observed, “It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a Child Himself!” Lewis gave a final thought about His coming down from heaven that is probably most significant. He wrote in Mere Christianity, “The Son of God became man to enable men to become the sons of God”. That is what happens when He is Born in Us during this season. Come Down From Heaven and Be Born in Us Today!

“Hark the Herald Angels Sing?”

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Dec 172017

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing?”

By: Ron Woodrum

Singing is a vital part of the Christmas celebration. Who has not joined a Church group to go from house to house singing carols to all who will listen and join in the festive occasion? Many Churches celebrate the season with a choral Christmas Cantata. Brother David and Caleb blessed us recently with a concert of some of the most beautiful Christmas music, accompanied with beautiful song, lifted up to bring glory to our Virgin Born Savior! Some Churches even have singing Christmas tree choirs! This is just humanity joining the angelic tradition of celebrating the Savior’s birth with song, as they did the first Christmas night, Or did they? The Christmas hymns seem to say they did. We sing, in O Come All Ye Faithful-“Sing choirs of angels, sing in exultation!” In Hark the Herald Angels Sing-“Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the new born king!” It Came Upon a Midnight Clear-“It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old. From angels bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold!” Angels from the Realms of Glory-“Angels from the realms of glory, wing your flight to earth; ye who sing creation’s story, now proclaim the Messiah’s birth!” That settles it, doesn’t it?

But…recently I heard David Jeremiah tells a story of Pastor Andrew J. Banstra studying for a Christmas sermon called The First Christmas Carol tell of a startling discovery he made. As he prepared his message he discovered, from the original language of the New Testament, that it never says that “angels sing”! In Luke 2:13 it says they were “praising God” (aineo). But it says they did their praising, “saying” (lego), not singing, (Gk. humnos, psaltos, ados”). Dr. Jeremiah did his own study, and concluded with a quote from the great Southern Baptist Pastor/Scholar, Dr. W.A. Criswell, to resolve the question. The quote follows:

“Another thing which is astonishing to me is that angels never sing. Never! When I stumbled into that fact, it was an amazing discovery! I had already made up my mind, before I say these things, that I am going to keep referring to angels singing, even though it is not true. To do so is traditional. After all, did they not sing when Jesus was born? Always people have spoken about the angels singing when Jesus was born. ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth…’you know the angels song. So I turned to Luke 2:13 and read, ‘ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host SAYING Glory to God in the highest’. So it was in the book of Revelation too. ‘And there was a great host of angels SAYING with a loud voice’. Never in the Bible do angels sing. Never! They always SAY. They are in a doxology, in a chorus, they are in a recitative, they are all together, SAYING, but never in the Bible do the angels sing!

That was an astonishing discovery to me. So I began reading, studying, probing and trying to find out why angels do not sing, and this is the best reason that I can find. Always the redeemed sing. God’s blood-washed sing. God’s children sing. But angels do not sing. Here is my conclusion: Music is made up of major and minor chords. The minor chords speak of wretchedness, death and sorrow of this fallen creation. Most of nature moans and groans in a plaintive minor key. The sound of the wind through the forest, the sound of the storm, the sound of the wind around the house, is always in a minor key. It wails…Even the nightingales’ song, the sweetest song of the birds, is the saddest. All this reflects the wretchedness, the despair, the hurt, the agony, the travail of this fallen creation. But an angel knows nothing of this. The major key and major chords are chords of triumph and victory. Surely God has taken us out of the miry clay. He has taken us out of the horrible pit. He has set our feet on the solid rock and put a new song in our souls and new praises on our lips. The angels know nothing of this! An angel has never been redeemed. An angel has never been saved…they see it, they watch it, but they know nothing about it (experientially)…it takes a saved soul to sing!” (Expository Sermons on Revelation Volume III, p. 82-83)

I do not know if that is totally true, that angels do not sing at all. I usually agree with most everything that Dr. Criswell avows! Theologians will debate this question for a long time. It may not really matter. If kind of smacks of the great debate during the Middle Ages, when theologians argued over “how many angels could dance on the head of a pin!” But I do know that they do not sing the song of redemption that flows from a redeemed and forgiven heart. The Epistle of I Peter, our Book for January Bible Study, 2018, tells of how Angels long to look into our experience of Salvation. They rejoice when one soul repents and has their name written forever in the Lamb’s Book of Life. They celebrate God’s Great Grace that comes to unworthy sinners as a freed gift. They are filled with wonder over such Grace. But they do not know what that is like-to be forgiven sinner, saved by grace. We can sign about being saved fully, finally, and forever! They hear our song, but cannot sing along, for they would be trafficking in inexperienced truth! Only you and I can do that. What better time to do it than during the season that celebrates the inauguration of the entire saving life of Christ? Anyone for caroling? Let the Savior and all the heavenly host hear voices of gratitude for the precious gift of Christmas. Paul says in I Corinthians 9:6 “Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable Gift!” Wow! That’s reason enough to SING! Sorry Angels!

“So hallowed and gracious is the time”

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Dec 102017

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “So hallowed and gracious is the time”

By: Ron Woodrum

“So hallowed and gracious is the time”-those are words from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They should be read in context.

Some say that ever ‘gainst the season comes

Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long;

And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,

The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,

No fairy tales, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

These lines from the first scene of Hamlet in a sense say it all. We tend to think of time as a progression, as moment following moment, day following day, in a relentless flow, the kind of time a clock or a calendar can measure. But we experience time also as depth, as having quality as well as quantity-a good time, a dangerous time, an auspicious time, a time we mark not by its duration but by its content. The New Testament speaks of both of these kinds of time by the use of different words. Time measured by the clock was identified by the Greek word “Chronos”- (from which we get our word chronology). But there were times of special significance-noted for the quality of the event occurring-identified by the word “Kairos”. The latter is time marked by its content, not its duration.

On the dark battlements of Elsinore, Marcellus speaks to his companions of the time of Jesus’ birth. It is a “hallowed” time he says, a holy time, a time in which life grows still like the surface of a river so that we can look down into it and see glimmering there in its depths something timeless, precious, other. It is also a “gracious” time, Marcellus says-a time we cannot bring about as we bring about a happy time or a sad time but a time that comes upon us as grace, as a free and unbidden gift. Marcellus explains that Christmas is a time of such holiness that the cock crows the whole night through as though it is perpetually dawn and thus for once even the powers of darkness are powerless.

Horatio’s answer is instructive-“So I have heard, and do partially believe”, he says to Marcellus. Christmas time is a holy and gracious time that reminds us that God has reached out for a relationship with fallen man, through the incarnation of His Son. Even though not everyone opens their heart to the full revelation and salvation that this season brings, there is the initial desire to “partially believe”. The glaring truth of this season is “that this is of all things the thing most worth believing!”

As we experience the holiness and grace of the advent of our Lord we dare not miss out on the full impact of what happened then. The Divine Son of God became the Incarnate Son of Man. The Infinite became an Infant. The Divine second person of the God-head took on humanity. God entered human history with the mission of “reconciling the lost and dying world unto Himself”. The heavenly son of His heavenly Father became the earthly son of his earthly Mother. The unique theanthropic person-fully God and fully man, at the same time came into eternal existence! What we celebrate at this time of the season is “hallowed and gracious” but is also beyond our comprehension. When Isaiah predicted that his name shall be called “Wonderful” we often miss the import of that prophecy. The Hebrew word “pela means “something uncommon or out of the ordinary”. It reflects “a phenomenon lying outside the realm of human explanation; that which is separated from the normal course of events; something that cannot be explained”. That is the reality of the event we celebrate each year at Christmas. Jesus was God’s expression of love and salvation that goes beyond all of our comprehension. We should never get over the wonder of the Christmas story. We should relive it each year in all its glorious truth and excitement. We need to put exclamation points on the virgin birth; the miraculous star; the angelic choirs visiting the shepherds; the wise men journey and worship. These truths should be reaffirmed and experienced with reverence and worship. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Light came into darkness as never before in human history. The hopes and dreams of all the years were fulfilled on this glorious night. But it is to be celebrated not only with reverence but also with reality.

Musician and Theologian Michael Card talks about the Scandal of Christmas. He insists that we have created a pretty significant “myth” about Christmas. Our tradition and celebration of the Christ event has transformed it into something that is a twisted version of the reality of that first Holy night. He says, “That night a homeless king was born in a barn, wrapped in rags, and laid to sleep in an animal feeding trough…we tend to turn the barn into a palace, etc. But I think it’s important for people to get the feel for the degree of sacrifice that began with the birth of Jesus”. Jesus came into a world dominated by an evil world system where Caesar was Lord. Caesar’s taxation was used of a Sovereign God to bring about the fulfillment of His Son’s birth to be in Bethlehem, not Nazareth. But Jesus had to survive the long arduous trip inside the womb of his mother riding donkey-back from Nazareth to Bethlehem. When they arrived they received no welcome. He was born in a barn with no room in the inn. John would later see the significance of his first welcome by saying, “he came unto his own but his own welcomed him not” (John 1:11). Then don’t forget that when he was born that another King, Jesus’ evil counterpart sought to kill Him, by killing all the males born in Bethlehem twp years old and younger! Things are not too different today. Muslims recently sanctified a new Muslim holiday and have demanded its recognition on December 24th. Christmas Eve is the new designated time to celebrate the birthday of Mohammed! Just a reminder that the world in which we celebrate our Savior’s birth this year is a world dominated by the spirit of antichrist and Jesus, in reality, is not welcomed any more this year as He was His first year! But there are still those who like the first shepherds, recognize the one wrapped in swaddling clothes in Bethlehem is the “Lamb of God” come to solve the sin problem of the world. There are still wise men who still seek Him and bring their sacrificial and deserving gifts to worship Him who was Himself God’s unspeakable gift sent from heaven to earth for us to be able to go from earth to heaven through Him and His Salvation.

“The Christian Life-Hard or Easy? Egg Hatched or Bad? Happy Hypocrite? Shaping Saint?”

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Dec 032017

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “The Christian Life-Hard or Easy? Egg Hatched or Bad? Happy Hypocrite? Shaping Saint?

By: Ron Woodrum

I love the passage in Mere Christianity where C.S. Lewis talks about whether the Christian life is hard or easy. “It’s both”, he says, “hard as death in the beginning, and then as his life begins to work within us and transform us, it becomes relatively easy, because He does the work of transforming us. We are to hand ourselves over to Christ, to be ploughed and resown. We are to have the bad tooth out, and a new tooth given us. It is like death. But then, He lives with us and helps us to do impossible things. In that way it is easy! As we experience moments of victory, a new sort of life is spreading throughout your system” and that is the way sanctification works. “At first it is the idea of ‘putting on Christ’…dressing up as the Son of God…to become a real son. This is not one of the many jobs a Christian has to do, or a special exercise for the top of the class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all! The Christian way is hard and easy. Christ says, ‘give me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you! I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it! No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there. I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it…but to have it out! Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires that you think are innocent as well as the ones wicked-the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours’ ““The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing is to hand over your whole self-all your wishes and precautions-to Christ. But it is far easier than what all we are trying to do instead. For we are trying to remain ourselves…and all the while trying to be and do good…which we on our own can never accomplish. When Jesus said, ‘be perfect’, He meant exactly that! He meant we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder-in fact impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: but it would be a jolly sight harder for the egg to learn to fly!-while remaining an egg! We are like eggs at present. You cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad! This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is easy to get muddled about that! It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different aspects- education, building, missions, and holding worship services. The Church exists for nothing else than to draw men to Christ, to make them little-Christ’s. If they are not doing that, all the Cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose!”

Then Lewis alludes to the Happy Hypocrite, (by inference). He says, “The story is told of someone who had to wear a mask, a mask which made him look much nicer than he really was. He had to wear it for years. And when he took it off he found that his own face had grown to fit it. He really was beautiful. What had become a disguise had become a reality!” Frederick Buechner identifies that tale, in his book Telling the Truth, as a story written by Max Beerbohn titled The Happy Hypocrite. Mr. Buechner summarizes the story: “In the Happy Hypocrite Beerbohn tells about a regency rake name Lord George Hell, debauched and profligate, who falls in love with a saintly girl, and in order to win her love, covers his features with the mask of a saint. This girl is deceived and becomes his bride. They live happily ever after until a wicked lady from Lord Hell’s past turns up to expose the scoundrel she knows him to be and challenges him to take off his mask! So sadly, having no choice, he takes it off, and lo and behold beneath the saint’s mask is the face of a saint he has become by wearing it in love.”

The moral of the story, and Mr. Lewis’ reason for making reference to it is this: we are not yet what we pretend to be (Christ like), but the more we desire it, and yield to Him, the more we will become like Him. Virtue by definition is the habit of a right desire. Habitually yielding to Him will eventually form Him in us, by the power of mind-renewing. You may be wondering what is the difference in acting like Christ when we are not yet like him and hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is acting in one way we never intend to become. The man in the Happy Hypocrite was a corrupt man who pretended to be a saint and became a good man. Thus the word “Happy” in the title. The book is worth hunting down and reading. For us what can become a hopeful disguise can and will become a reality…if we let him hatch us and shape us into that saint! It’s hard. Impossible really! But it’s easy!