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YHWH Speaks
I read a post today by John Piper that was a great encouragement to me regarding the all-encompassing sufficiency of the written word of God. May we never waiver on this truth.
The morning I heard the voice of God
He Came to a World at War: O King of Nations
3 hours ago
2 comments:
Make sure you read the entire article...but it was very good...
thanks for sharing...
Thanks for linking to this great article by Piper.
For me, I think that Pipers article has a lot to say to those of us on both sides of the cessationist fence. To the charismatic he is saying "Listen, God really does speak thru the Bible - you better make sure your experiences of Him are rooted in His Word and that you find Him through His word the Bible" To the cessationist he is saying "Listen, God really can speak personally to you in a way you can experience - you better make sure you allow His Word to really affect you".
We have all done God a disservice in our thinking by attempting to divorce His Spirit from His Word. We were always meant to experience God in powerful ways through His Word. God’s Spirit takes the word He inspired and makes it living, active and personal to us as individuals today in the 21st Century.
I fear that the average intellectual student of the bible will have found Pipers experience to be totally alien. In fact I fear that even many of us that claim to be charismatic do not regularly - if ever - have the level of genuine experience of God speaking to us that Piper here describes as routine for him. It is no wonder Piper preaches like he does when he has regularly encountered the person of God in this way. This article is not really about the charismatic issue, although when he is reading aloud for his mp3 available on his site, he adds the following words which I have bolded below:-
"What makes me sad about the article is not that it isn’t true or didn’t happen. Don't put me in that category What’s sad is that it really does give the impression that extra-biblical communication with God is surpassingly wonderful and faith-deepening. All the while, the supremely-glorious communication of the living God which personally and powerfully and transformingly explodes in the receptive heart through the Bible everyday is passed over in silence." - John Piper
There is more discussion going on about this over at my blog
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