Most people know that Rio de Janeiro hosted the 2014 FIFA World Cup. But what they may not kow is that this year's international spotlight on rio de Janeiro is part of a national upturn - an incredible blessing - that started after a group of Brazilian Christians came together to repent.
Rickie Bradshaw, a community transformation leader based in Houston, TX, and one of the many catalysts behind the decade-long prayer movement in Brazil, gives credit to God for this unfolding story of national transformation - both economic and spiritual. "Darkness lingered because of a broken covenant between God and His people," said Bradshaw, summarizing several centuries of Brazil's history. "But once it was addressed in the heavens, God was attracted to the region."
What did this "attraction" look like, and how did it begin? Bradshaw said a milestone came in 2006 with a time of corporate prayer in Recife, a coastal city where 5,000 intercessors met at The Sentinel Group's Transform Brazil conference to learn about revival. As one of six Americans attending the conference, Bradshaw witnessed how Brazilian leaders asked God one question in particular: "Why is the darkness lingering in this region?" They spent time to search and prayerfully wait for specific answers.
Searching for answers meant tracing the darkness to its source. The Transform Brazil team found a telltale clue as they reviewed Brazil's colonial past.
In 1645, there were 1,630 European Jews living in Recife, and under a short period of Dutch rule, these Jews were allowed to openly practice their faith. They thrived and established a vibrant community in the New World Their presence in Brazil boosted the economy through business and trade. However, the prosperity of Brazil's Jewish community made the colony's Portuguese and indigenous populations resentful, and when the Portuguese pushed out the Dutch in 1654, the Jews suffered persecution and were also ordered to leave.
While most of the Jews uprooted to Europe or the Caribbean, a remnant settled on an island called New Amsterdam, now known as New York City. Once again, these industrious Jews built successful businesses and thrived. Today, that island is Manhattan, one of the richest, most significant, and most powerful places in the world.
As the Transform Brazil team uncovered this story of discrimination, they were convicted of the need for repentance. They understood that a great injustice had taken place against a people that had come to create major economic imporvement in Brazil. Had their forefathers been grateful rather than bitter toward the Jews for their prosperity, perhaps Brazil's physical and spiritual landscape woud be different.
The Transform Brazil team pursued reconciliation in a tangible, public way by inviting a group of Jewish rabbis to come on stage while leaders of the converence prostrated themselves and asked forgiveness for what their forefathers had done. In response, the rabbis offered forgiveness and a blessing to the people of Brazil.
This profound act of national repentance and reconciliation galvanized Brazil's Christians. In 2008, Bradshaw returned to Recife for another speaking engagement and reported, "Many people met me on the coast and repented of their sins. I spoke about how the condition of the land directly related to what's going on in the hearts of His people and in a short period of time, thousands rushed to the altar to demonstrate their brokenness and desire for the Kingdom."
Immediately aftger that meeting, a breaking CNN international report on the Petrobras corporation announced the discovery of a giant oil field. The president of Brazil stood on a platform wearing a hard hat and holding a cup of extracted oil, rejoicing that the cup represented the future of Brazil - jobs, education, and medicine.
Coincidence? Bradshaw doesn't think so. He is convinced that repentance is paving the way for healing of the land (Zechariah 1:3 and 2 Chronicles 7:14). Brazil is now number 4 in the global economy (up from number 11) and unemployment is almost non-existent in some cities. Meanwhile, Christian prayer towers are prevalent across the country.
"The World Cup was in Brazil because God wants to bring attention to what is happening there," said Bradshaw. "Christians are giving Him credit. Oil has always been off the coast of Brazil, but nobody could find it - the world's largest oil company struck and missed - and then all of the sudden, when so many repent of national sin, they found it."
(Nichole Arnoldbik, IFA's National director of Communications, Intercessors For America, Sept. 2014,
www.IFAPray.org)
Monday, August 18, 2014
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
The Lessons of Calvin's 1541 Institutes
The lessons of Calvin's 1541 Institutes - What lessons does the author of the Institutes have to teach us?
Historically speaking, two things stand out. The first is the Reformer's debt to the Church Fathers of the third, fourth and fifth centuries, above all to Augustine and Chrysostom. The Fathers were by no means infallible, but they proved to be helpful allies in Calvin's endeavour to show that the evangelical faith was not a chicken newly hatched from Luther's egg. On occasion they articulate vital truths with beautiful economy. In the second place we are reminded of the broad front on which Calvin is obliged to fight. On the right is Rome's massive orthodoxy, refined by Scholastics of the quality of Lombard and Aquinas and super-refined by their less gifted imitators. On the left is a myriad of dissenting movements - Anabaptism, spiritualism, antinomianism, antitrinitarianism and the most shadowy "ism" of all - scepticism. The opposition to Rome and to the papacy is of course fundamental, but it is not exclusive.
On another, more important, level, the Institutes remind us that there is a good and a bad way to do theology. Speculative theology, which asks questions the Scriptures do not answer, or intuitive theology, which works upwards from man to God, is bad theology. The human mind cannot fathom the unfathomable. Calvin is adamant that only God can speak of God, and in words which accommodate themselves to our weakenss. Since we do not recognize God in his works of creation and of providence, we must seek him in his written Word, whose witness is sealed to us by his Holy Spirit. the Institutes of 1539/1541 contains well over two thousand biblical references, widely spread but with a marked concentration on the Psalms, Isaiah, the first and fourth Gospels, Romans and 1 Corinthians. Nor is Scripture a convenient peg on which doctrine may be hung, more or less at will; it is the indispensable foundation on which doctrine rests, the standard by which it is judged, and the rule by which it is corrected.
While election figures prominently in the Institutes as central to the plan of salvation, it is presented as an act not so much of God's sovereign power as of his merciful providence. By itself, election does not exhaust Calvin's understanding of redemption. The Institutes, faithful to the New Testament witness to Jesus Christ, lay much stress on the humanity of the Son of God. The necessity of the incarnation is driven home by a series of rapid questions. How could the Son mediate between God and man and intercede for sinners "if he were not our close neighbour, allied to us, a high priest able to pity our infirmities"? How could we be confident that we were God's children, without the guarantee that God's Son "took his body from ours, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, to become one with us", making ours by grace what was his by right? Who could make satisfaction for sin before a just and holy God, but the one "who bore the penalty for sin in the very flesh in which sin had been committed"? How could death be endured "except by one who is Man, and be overcome except by one who is God"?
Only by embracing Christ can we know God as Father. Only as the Son consents to be our brother does his Father become "our Father". The resulting family relationship - expressed more often by the image of adoption - so binds us to Christ that we are made one with him, grafted into him, joined to him together with all who are born of God's Spirit. "If we love Jesus Christ we will love him in our brothers."
On the cardinal doctrine of justification Calvin is at one with all the mainstream Reformers. For Christ's sake believers are accounted righteous by grace through faith. However, grace which renders us blameless before God but which leaves sanctification to us is not grace in all its fullness. While the pursuit of holiness is incumbent on every Christian, the author of the Institutes insists that justification and sanctification are inseparable, though distinct. God's will, he reminds us, was "to sanctify us by the offering of Jesus Christ made once and for all" (Heb. 10:10). "To receive Christ's righteousness," says Calvin, "we must first possess him. And we cannot possess him without sharing in his sanctification, since he cannot be divided into pieces. By sharing in Christ we are no less sanctified than justified." Our sancitification is therefore complete in Christ: it ought to be manifest in our works. That our works habitually fall short should drive us continually to repentance, to prayer, and to more earnest effort, but not to despair. Christ who is our wisdom, righteousness and redemption, is also our sanctification (1 Cor.1:30).
(Robert White, translator of 1541 edition of Calvin's Institutes, The Banner of Truth, Aug.-Sept. 2014)
Historically speaking, two things stand out. The first is the Reformer's debt to the Church Fathers of the third, fourth and fifth centuries, above all to Augustine and Chrysostom. The Fathers were by no means infallible, but they proved to be helpful allies in Calvin's endeavour to show that the evangelical faith was not a chicken newly hatched from Luther's egg. On occasion they articulate vital truths with beautiful economy. In the second place we are reminded of the broad front on which Calvin is obliged to fight. On the right is Rome's massive orthodoxy, refined by Scholastics of the quality of Lombard and Aquinas and super-refined by their less gifted imitators. On the left is a myriad of dissenting movements - Anabaptism, spiritualism, antinomianism, antitrinitarianism and the most shadowy "ism" of all - scepticism. The opposition to Rome and to the papacy is of course fundamental, but it is not exclusive.
On another, more important, level, the Institutes remind us that there is a good and a bad way to do theology. Speculative theology, which asks questions the Scriptures do not answer, or intuitive theology, which works upwards from man to God, is bad theology. The human mind cannot fathom the unfathomable. Calvin is adamant that only God can speak of God, and in words which accommodate themselves to our weakenss. Since we do not recognize God in his works of creation and of providence, we must seek him in his written Word, whose witness is sealed to us by his Holy Spirit. the Institutes of 1539/1541 contains well over two thousand biblical references, widely spread but with a marked concentration on the Psalms, Isaiah, the first and fourth Gospels, Romans and 1 Corinthians. Nor is Scripture a convenient peg on which doctrine may be hung, more or less at will; it is the indispensable foundation on which doctrine rests, the standard by which it is judged, and the rule by which it is corrected.
While election figures prominently in the Institutes as central to the plan of salvation, it is presented as an act not so much of God's sovereign power as of his merciful providence. By itself, election does not exhaust Calvin's understanding of redemption. The Institutes, faithful to the New Testament witness to Jesus Christ, lay much stress on the humanity of the Son of God. The necessity of the incarnation is driven home by a series of rapid questions. How could the Son mediate between God and man and intercede for sinners "if he were not our close neighbour, allied to us, a high priest able to pity our infirmities"? How could we be confident that we were God's children, without the guarantee that God's Son "took his body from ours, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, to become one with us", making ours by grace what was his by right? Who could make satisfaction for sin before a just and holy God, but the one "who bore the penalty for sin in the very flesh in which sin had been committed"? How could death be endured "except by one who is Man, and be overcome except by one who is God"?
Only by embracing Christ can we know God as Father. Only as the Son consents to be our brother does his Father become "our Father". The resulting family relationship - expressed more often by the image of adoption - so binds us to Christ that we are made one with him, grafted into him, joined to him together with all who are born of God's Spirit. "If we love Jesus Christ we will love him in our brothers."
On the cardinal doctrine of justification Calvin is at one with all the mainstream Reformers. For Christ's sake believers are accounted righteous by grace through faith. However, grace which renders us blameless before God but which leaves sanctification to us is not grace in all its fullness. While the pursuit of holiness is incumbent on every Christian, the author of the Institutes insists that justification and sanctification are inseparable, though distinct. God's will, he reminds us, was "to sanctify us by the offering of Jesus Christ made once and for all" (Heb. 10:10). "To receive Christ's righteousness," says Calvin, "we must first possess him. And we cannot possess him without sharing in his sanctification, since he cannot be divided into pieces. By sharing in Christ we are no less sanctified than justified." Our sancitification is therefore complete in Christ: it ought to be manifest in our works. That our works habitually fall short should drive us continually to repentance, to prayer, and to more earnest effort, but not to despair. Christ who is our wisdom, righteousness and redemption, is also our sanctification (1 Cor.1:30).
(Robert White, translator of 1541 edition of Calvin's Institutes, The Banner of Truth, Aug.-Sept. 2014)
Saturday, August 9, 2014
God Our Saviour
I Timothy 1:1
The fact that here in the Pastorals the name Saviour is frequently applied to God is, after all, not at all surprising, for even in his earlier epistles Paul frequently ascribes the work of saving man to "God"; for example, "It was God's good-pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save those who believe"; "but God . . . made us alive together with Christ....for by grace have you been saved through faith; and that not of ourselves, it is the gift of God"; your salvation, and that from God". To "God" he also ascribes thedistinct acts in the programme of salvation.It is God who spared not his Son but delivered him up for us all. It is God who sets forth his son as a propitiation for our sins. It is he who commends his love toward us. It is God who blesses us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.
Foreknowledge, foreordination, calling, justification, glorification are all ascribed to him. It is he who chose us. It is he who causes the gospel to be proclaimed. It is he who bestows his grace upon us. Faith is his gift. In view of all this we can almost say that it would have been strange if somewhere in his epistles the apostle would not have called God "our saviour". Calling God "our Saviour" is entirely proper. And since for Paul God ever saves through Christ, verse 1 is also a fitting prelude to verse 15: "Christ Jesus came into the world sinners to save."
(Rev. William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary, Banner of Truth Trust, Aug.-Sept 2014)
The fact that here in the Pastorals the name Saviour is frequently applied to God is, after all, not at all surprising, for even in his earlier epistles Paul frequently ascribes the work of saving man to "God"; for example, "It was God's good-pleasure through the foolishness of the preaching to save those who believe"; "but God . . . made us alive together with Christ....for by grace have you been saved through faith; and that not of ourselves, it is the gift of God"; your salvation, and that from God". To "God" he also ascribes thedistinct acts in the programme of salvation.It is God who spared not his Son but delivered him up for us all. It is God who sets forth his son as a propitiation for our sins. It is he who commends his love toward us. It is God who blesses us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.
Foreknowledge, foreordination, calling, justification, glorification are all ascribed to him. It is he who chose us. It is he who causes the gospel to be proclaimed. It is he who bestows his grace upon us. Faith is his gift. In view of all this we can almost say that it would have been strange if somewhere in his epistles the apostle would not have called God "our saviour". Calling God "our Saviour" is entirely proper. And since for Paul God ever saves through Christ, verse 1 is also a fitting prelude to verse 15: "Christ Jesus came into the world sinners to save."
(Rev. William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary, Banner of Truth Trust, Aug.-Sept 2014)
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