A couple weeks ago, John Piper linked to Ray Ortlund’s blog and I have really benefitted from his posts. Tonight, he posted on how praise befits the upright. I really appreciate the tie analogy.

A frowning church is ugly. A praising church is beautiful. Think of a man wearing a great suit, with the perfect shirt for that suit, but then he puts on a killer tie that makes the whole thing pop. That’s what praising God does for a church. A spirit of praise beautifies everything.

Boom.

If you don’t already, you should find some way to connect with the Of First Importance blog everyday. Its mission is to “provide a helpful quote to help you remember what’s “of first importance”: the gospel of Jesus Christ. The phrase “of first importance” comes from 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul tells the church in Corinth he delivered what was of first first importance, namely the gospel.

All that to say I found the quotation yesterday very insightful.

“By becoming a Christian, I belong to God and I belong to my brothers and sisters. It is not that I belong to God and then make a decision to join a local church. My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ. This is my identity. This is our identity. . . . If the church is the body of Christ, then we should not live as disembodied Christians.”

• Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church (Wheaton, Ill, Crossway Books, 2008), 41.

I know this is a little old, but Paul Tripp comments on what hinders community in today’s American culture. I think he hits the nail on the head when he says:

“You can’t fit God’s dream (if I can use that language) for his church inside of the American dream and have it work. It’s a radically different lifestyle. It just won’t squeeze into the available spaces of the time and energy that’s left over.”

If the church wants to be a community that stands out in this increasingly individualistic society, then we need to fight for that selfless, sacrificing community. Otherwise, we will be swept along to create our individual kingdoms with everyone else.

Origen, a church father of the 5th century, was the king of allegory. He believed in three levels of meaning: literal, moral, and spiritual, which was the most important. One example is his interpretation of the parable of Good Samaritan, which he assigns new meanings to the various people, places, and objects of the parable.

The man who was going down is Adam. Jerusalem is paradise, and Jericho is the world. The robbers are hostile powers. The priest is the Law, the Levite is the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ. The wounds are disobedience, the beast is the Lord’s body, the [inn], which accepts all who wish to enter, is the Church. … The manager of the [inn] is the head of the Church, to whom its care has been entrusted. And the fact that the Samaritan promises he will return represents the Savior’s second coming.

But he did not stop here. He used this hermeneutic in the Old Testament as well. He took the exodus of the children of Israel and saw it as an allegory of the Christian life. Thus leaving Egypt is the initial salvation of the believer and then crossing over the Jordan river into the promise land as going into heaven.

I find it interesting that many of the spirituals seem to come from this interpretation of Scripture. In the midst of the slavery of early America, the slaves passed on their theology through song and they seemed to view their lives as traveling through the wilderness and they lived with the hope that one day they would “cross over Jordan” and enter the Promised Land (heaven). Note some of the song titles:

• Wings over Jordan
• Roll Jordan Roll
• Get Away Jordan
• On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand

I find it interesting to see the allegorical interpretation of Origen in the 2nd century so embedded into Christianity through the centuries. We even talk about going through the wilderness in some of our language today.

This idea is not too far off track as the wilderness or desert is typically viewed as symbolically representing a time of testing. For Israel was tested in the wilderness (Deut. 8:2) and Jesus was tempted in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1) and Jeremiah uses the analogy of the dry desert verses the lush land as a portrayal of a wicked life verses a righteous life.

Anyway, the more I study the history of the church, the more I see many seeds of modern Christianity planted in prior centuries. It’s really fascinating.

This past Lord’s Day, our church witnessed God work in our congregation by bringing many to repentance. We did not have an altar call. We did not have many make professions of faith. A total of 20 people repented from their sin of being disobedient to Jesus in baptism. They had professed faith in the Lord, but they had not taken the first step of obedience by declaring to world that they are identified with Him and His body. It was so encouraging for church to witness this. We will probably be baptizing for the next several weeks to baptize those who yet need to obey in this area.

When reading through the book of Acts, one striking component of the early church was the immediacy of baptism after conversion. Peter called the people to repent and be baptized. It was so attached together. In fact, one of the more fascinating passages to me is in Acts 8, where the Lord sends Philip to visit the Ethiopian eunuch. Philip asks him if he understands what he is reading and he says, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Philip climbs up into the chariot and starts explaining Isaiah and telling him the good news about Jesus. Then the next verse says, “And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?”

The text does not skip a beat. It goes from Philip sharing the gospel to the eunuch wanting to be baptized. We would ask, “Where’s the conversion?” But we do not need that because it tells us about the baptism. His baptism gives undeniable proof that he professed faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. When writing this passage, Luke assumed the conversion and emphasized the baptism, so often we can turn that around.