After our message Sunday night on the value of keeping our eyes fixed on Christ and his return, I found this video very thought provoking and challenging. I would love to hear your response to watching it.
PDF 
4 Comments
- Leave a Reply
- Subscribe and Share
- Related Posts
Andy,
Thanks for the post, I’ll have to get back to you with some more thoughts…that was a powerful display of a broken and contrite man standing fast on the promise of God. Knowing my self, under the same circumstances, I’m afraid I would have given up long before my wife questioned my loyalty to God. But he says “I’m clinging with feeble fingers to the ledge of your great grace”, wow, what a response to devastating loss…not to mention the pressure from your trusted friends and wife to give it up!
I can’t quite process it fully right now.
Thanks again.
Dearest Pastor Andy,
I hope that you’ll forgive me if I am intruding but I was searching for the meaning of “blasted my gourds” from Newton’s hymn as I am writing a paper on this hymn and your site is the only place that I found to explain it. The RUF version (Reformed University Fellowship) changes this line to “cast out my feelings”, I believe.
Nevertheless, I very much appreciate this site and admire the energy you’ve spent putting it all together. Maybe one day our Lord will see fit that we meet. I plan on attending seminary soon and hope to be used by the Lord anyway that he sees fit. Having lived a life not dissimilar to Newton (Memoirs) I am fortunate to be alive and not to have remained in that place of “judicial harness”.
Yours,
Art in Panama City
Art,
Glad you found the blog. RC Sproul also has an article on the gourd plant in Jonah that is helpful. He writes
“After Nineveh repented and converted to Yahweh, Jonah was angry at God. He went outside the city and made a booth to shade himself from the burning sun. The booth was not enough, so God caused a large plant to spring up to give him more shade. Jonah was comforted that something was finally going as he wished. Then the plant withered, and the sun blazed down on him, and Jonah became angry again.
God explained the object-lesson to Jonah this way: The plant represented Nineveh. The plant shaded and protected Jonah from the sun. Just so, the converted Ninevites would shade and protect Israel from tribulation. just as the plant sprang up overnight, so Nineveh had converted overnight. if the plant died, Jonah would be scorched. Just so, if Nineveh fell away from the faith, Israel would suffer. Therefore, it was a blessing for Israel when the Gentiles received the gospel.
It was true that by converting Assyria God was raising them up to be a mighty power. It was also true that God would use that mighty power to punish Israel in the future and that Israel would go into Assyrian captivity. But when the Israelites were deported to Nineveh, they would find groups of true believers there who were still clinging to Jonah’s message preached a century before. These people would shelter the Israelites in their captivity.”
Great quote!
Do you have a link to (or title of) Sproul’s article?