Little Cliff and the Porch People

Little Cliff and the Porch People
by Clifton L. Taulbert
28 pages
Read: July 15, 2009

A little boy named Little Cliff and he lived near the Delta of the Mississippi. He had a Poppa Joe and Mama Pearl his great-grandparents. Every Saturday his Poppa Joe would take him to Greenville where the ice-cream was 15 cents. But this Saturday Poppa Joe had to visited his Cousin Lulu Harris who was not doing very well at all. He went to pray with her. While Poppa was gone Mama Pearl had a good idea and started making her candied sweet potatoes to surprise Poppa Joe when he returned. But she needed Cliff to help her gather the ingredients to make the wonderful potatoes in her magic skillet. He went to find his great-grandma some butter so she could make her famous candied sweet potatoes. His Uncle Able lived in a brown house and he got to see him cutting and trimming hedges. Cliff's nickname was Cliffy. And Uncle Able called, "Cliffy, come over here boy!" So Cliff went over and Uncle Able gave him some nutmeg right off the tree to take home to his Mama Pearl. Cliff kept on going and next he saw Mr. Boot-Nanny who loved baseball. His favorite team was the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mr. Boot-Nanny called Cliffy to come to him and he gave him some pure vanilla magic cooking potion. The next person that Cliff ran into was Cousin Savannah. She had some fresh grease for him to take back home to help make the magic potatoes. Finally he got to Miz Callie's home where he met her two big dogs in the front yard. Miz Callie called, "Come in!" when he arrived at the front gate. Cliff waited in the front room while Miz Callie went into the kitchen to fetch the fresh butter for him. Once Cliff had the fresh butter he ran all the way back home to Mama Pearl to give her all the things he had gathered on his way. When Cliff got home he watch his great-grandma as she used all the ingredients that she needed to make the magic potatoes. Next Poppa Joe came home and they started to eat and they heard a big knock on the door and little Cliff went to answer it and it was ALL the people that he had seen earlier as he was gathering the stuff for the sweet potatoes. Poppa Joe invited them all to come in and enjoy supper together.

The End!

Book report dictated by Patience Elaine Bixby and typed by her dear loving Mommy!

Unfashionable

Title: Unfashionable, Making a Difference in the World by Being Different

Author: Tullian Tchividjian

Publisher: Multinomah, April 2009

Pages: 175

Begun: July 14, 2009

Completed: July 15, 2009

~ Our eschatology (how we understand the consummation of God's kingdom) dramatically affects our missiology (what we're to do in the meantime). If we don't have a vivid understanding of what the divine objective is, our mission will lack focus, direction, and purpose.  We won't have the sense of identity we desperately need as twenty-first-century pilgrims. ~ Unfashionable, p. 77.

Here is a book that is going to have an impact on many young thinkers who are interested in the things of God; and hardcore fundamentalists are going to be as mad about Tullian Tchividjian's influence on their young'uns as they are about John Piper's as soon as they learn how to pronounce his name (which thankfully won't be real soon!).

This is a book that confronts worldliness head on. It's not about the cultural issues like music and drinking, etc. If you want a good read on those subjects, check out "Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World" edited by C.J. Mahaney. That's a good read. Very practical. Especially for teenagers. 

But Unfashionable goes after a mindset, a culture, and a very helpful definition of worldliness is given and explained throughout the book. "Worldliness is a sleepiness of the soul in which the status, pleasures, comforts, and cares of the world appear solid, stunning, and affecting, while the truths of Scripture become abstractions -- unable to grip the heart or guide our everyday activities."

According to Tchividjian the "greatest challenge facing most Christians is not persecution but seduction." His answer is different. Flinging himself with abandon into the controversy of eschatology, Tchividjian will probably do more damage to the typical dispensational "Left Behind" ideology of evangelical bench warmers than the academic and esoteric attraction of Covenantal theologians which appeals only to critical thinkers, a small minority. In other words, Tullian sounds like a pastor and, wow!, it works as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not saying he's unhinged me from my fairly strong premillennialism, but I will say that he excited me with a big picture understanding of eschatology that makes sense and makes me want to live as if Jesus is King now, not just in the future. Too many times Christians pay lip service to the concept that Jesus is King, but the fact that they have been indoctrinated to believe that the Kingdom is only future has had a dulling effect on their sense of purpose now unless they are a part of the small minority of people that find a constant energy from the purpose of evangelism, a narrow understanding of the Great Commission.

Tullian says fairly convincingly that the goal of God in the world is to redeem the whole world. Most interesting, perhaps, is the fact that he is willing to tell the average person (this book was clearly written for regular joes) that despite what they have believed from their Left Behind Series (I don't think he mentions this series by name), the world is not going to be destroyed. It's not God's pattern and the Peter text doesn't actually convincingly say it. Just like Jesus' body had continuity in its resurrection (and so will ours), so also the new earth. The fire will destroy all that is corrup, but it will not utterly destroy the earth. In other words, as I told Jennie several months ago while we were sitting in the back yard, looking at my un-mowed lawn, "Do you realize" - as I stomp my feet -- "this is going to be heaven? Right here! Just new!" 

How does a Christian live in this world effectively. It's not in being fashionable. It's fascinating to me that the grandson of Billy Graham is calling for uncoolness. He denounces, prophetic like, the American obsession with relevance. "I have good news for all of us who are becoming weary of this pressure from church leaders to fit in with the world: we don't have to." He says the Church has been "seduced by cool" (the title of one of his chapters). The entire book called for living different, for standing out, for preparing to die.

In some ways this book rocked my world. But it wasn't a surprise rocking. My mind has been mulling some of these concepts for a long time and I have found myself drifting into an arena of thinking hitherto closed off to me because of my hyper-dispensational roots. I cried at times. Suddenly decisions that I have made in my past came to the forefront and the regret that I made those decisions was elucidated by the fact that they were made in complete consistency with my theology of the time. I think I would have taken more time just to be a more well-rounded person.

One example: I hurried out of school to save the lost. After all, the only thing that mattered in life more than everything else was to get as many people saved as I could before the rapture. Since finding the Puritans and deepening in my understanding of God's big picture I have mourned to the point of fighting sinful bitterness that I acted so much and so often in devout compliance with my sincerest belief. But God is gracious and I know that it is pure mercy to be a discoverer of His plan, even if in my sinful presumption it strikes me as being twenty years late. Slowly, the eyes of my heart have been opening to a deep-seated worldliness that I thought was pious dissatisfaction with how little I was doing for God because I wasn't getting souls saved or doing "spiritual" work as effectively as others. I would put off time with my children or serving them, not thinking that receiving them was receiving King Jesus; and I would grumble when I had to do mundane things like mow my lawn, not considering it an act of service on the King's lawn. Too many times I have been sinfully frustrated when my ministry didn't have success, not realizing that King Jesus probably didn't want me to succeed. He would have liked me to have understood sooner than I have that the desire to prevail in ministry (even if it is for Him) could be a serpentine worldliness. The poem that Tullian shared captures it brilliantly:

My orders are to fight;

Then if I bleed, or fail,

Or strongly win, what matters it?

God only doth prevail.

The servant craveth naught

Except to serve with might.

I was not told to win or lose -

My orders are to fight.

I told Jennie that I want her to read this book. Or, we'll read it together. For me it has been spiritually forceful. Enriching. I highly recommend it.

The Tartan Pimpernel

Title: The Tartan Pimpernel
Author: Donald Caskie
Publisher: Birlinn
Number of pages: 271
Purchased: Gift from Dad and Mom
Recommended by: Iain Murray used an illustration from this book in a message.
Begun: 6-10-09
Finished: 7-8-09
Rating: ***

Review: Donald Caskie was the minister of the Scots Kirk (Scottish Presbyterian) in Paris at the time of the German invasion of France in 1940. This autobiography recounts his war-time experiences in the country of France. He walked from Paris to Tours with thousands of other refugees, diving into ditches whenever the German and Italian aircraft roared overhead spitting indiscriminate death all around him. In Tours he purchased a bike and rode to Bordeaux. From Bordeaux he was given a ride to Bayonne where the British offered him a ride on the last ship out of France. He refused, giving his place to a wounded soldier.

Caskie made his way to Marseilles where he took over the abandoned “British and American Seamen’s Mission.” From that base he helped 2,000 British soldiers escape from occupied France (2/3 of the total number that escaped).

The story is fascinating and sheds a lot of light on the human ingenuity that can be exercised in times of crisis. As Caskie observes, war brings out the best and worst in man, and both are seen in this book.

There are several remarkable stories of Providential control. In one prison (in Nice, France) Caskie engraved a portion of Scripture into the plaster wall. Later in another prison (in Italy) after being kept in isolation for about a month, another prisoner was thrown into his cell. This new comrade shared with Caskie that while imprisoned in Nice, he was about to commit suicide when reading a portion of Scripture engraved on the wall changed his mind.

Another remarkable intervention of Providence is seen in the way Caskie’s life was spared. He was condemned to death by a Nazi court in Paris and was awaiting execution when a German Lutheran pastor serving as chaplain to the Nazi troops, visited him in his cell. They shared communion together in the cell, and the German pastor told him: “There are opposing camps and God has placed us, one in each, but the link that binds us, my dear friend, is closer than the tie my nation has on me or yours on you. The cross indeed is the symbol of our common faith.” Some time following this meeting, that same pastor put a plea into Berlin that resulted in Caskie’s death penalty being removed.

I found this account of sacrificial risk more thrilling than any adventure story.

Reformed Theology in American, A History of Its Modern Development

Title: Reformed Theology in America, A History of Its Modern Development

Editor: David F. Wells

Publisher: Baker, 1997

Pages: 248

Begun: March 14, 2009

Finished: July 1, 2009

This is a compilation of essays by about a dozen Presbyterian scholars, edited by David Wells. It is, as the title suggests, about the development of Reformed Theology in America and it gives great insight into a part of American Christian culture that those of us from the non-reformed background know so little about. 

There are three parts to the book:

1. The Princeton Theology which begins with an explanation of what exactly that it and then three biographical studies of the three most significant men in this group, men that we would probably all be familiar with: Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen. I really enjoyed this section and felt a lot of sympathy for the theology and views.

2. The Dutch Reformed Theology which started with an essay on the Dutch Schools before going into a biographical examination of an essay a piece on Louis Berkhof, Herman Dooyeweerd, and Cornelius Van Til.  Berkhof is, of course, well know in our independent circles because it is his systematic theology that was used at places like Bob Jones for years. The apologetics of Van Til have become more popular of late, but I had never heard of Dooyeweerd. However, I realized that I have a little bit of a connection to this branch of Reformed through Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools which had close affiliation with the Dutch Reformed. More well-known to us, perhaps, is Beeke.

3. The Southern Reformed Theology. Again, this starts with an essay on the particularities of the Souther Tradition that was hugely affected by the Civil War issues and then by three biographical essays of their most important men. I had to restrain myself to wait until it was the proper order of time to read about one of my all-time favorites, R.L. Dabney, and then trudged through the essay on James Henley Thornwell who apparently was very influential and still has an impact on RTS in Jackson, MO.

It was inspiring to me to read these essays and to wade through their philosophies and theology. These were men of conviction who believed that ideas mattered. The impact of their ideas last to this day in huge segments of conservative and fundamental presbyterianism. It was also fascinating to see that no man, particularly the remarkably great Dabney, could escape being affected by his times. But Dabney was also almost prophetic.

He wrote:

The history of human rights is, that their intelligent assertors usually learn the true grounds of them 'in the furnace of affliction'; that the posterity who inherit these rights hold them for a while, in pride and ignorant prescription; that after a while, when the true logic of the rights has been forgotten, and when some plausible temptation presses them to do so, the next generation discards the precious rights bodily, and goes back to the practice of the old tyranny... You may deem it a strange prophecy, but I predict that the time will come in this once free America when the battle for religious liberty will have to be fought over again, and will probably be lost, because the people are already ignorant of its true basis and conditions.

That is disturbingly even more realistic today.

This is a good read. I'm glad I did it. Opened my eyes to understand my Reformed brothers and their noble tradition even better. It also inspired me to be a thinker.