Tag: Paul Tripp

thoughts to make your heart sing

“Why does God need us to make a big deal of Him?”

Just take a listen to this devotional (designed for tikes) read by the author, Sally Lloyd-Jones. And then maybe spend some moments thinking about God’s invitation for you into His forever happiness. Today, He is inviting you to glorify Him because he knows what your heart needs to be happy… Him.

Sometimes, the simplest lessons are the most affecting. The mature believer is not one who is found to be the most well-read in doctrine or the most well-versed in competing theologies. No, the mature believer is one found accepting the invitation to glorify the Lord, believing boldly while knowing it is by grace that one receives.

Paul Tripp says it better in this clip, “Knowledge Does Not Mean Maturity.” He is speaking to pastors in the ministry, but I confess my puffed up chest about knowing things and “academizing the faith.”

He says, “You can be theologically astute and be dramatically spiritually immature.” That’s a crazy bold statement and it hits hard with the growing number of reformed thinkers.

And that is why I’m drawn humbly into the pages of a children’s devotional – knowing that I will come before the Lord always as a child. I will always need more of His wisdom, grace, strength, love, and kindness.

And He will always invite me to shake off my pretenses and dance with joy, unashamed, in His forever happiness.

I highly recommend picking up a copy of Thought To Make Your Heart Sing and don’t feel like you have to give it to a little one, either.

let LOVE fly like cRaZy
Posted on by Caroline 0

let us never grow weary of God

Paul Tripp shared his frustration in this post, “No Longer Amazed by Grace” after hearing the director of a national ministry claim nothing excites him anymore. He shared something from B.B. Warfield that has my heart all in rumbles with agreement. Read the whole thing, but here’s the last bit where Warfield sums up his warning to the seminarian who has become numb to divine things due to his constant contact with divine things.

Think of what your privilege is when your greatest danger is that the great things of religion may become common to you! Other men, oppressed by the hard conditions of life, sunk in the daily struggle for bread perhaps, distracted at any rate by the dreadful drag of the world upon them and the awful rush of the world’s work, find it hard to get time and opportunity so much as to pause and consider whether there be such things as God, and religion, and salvation from the sin that compasses them about and holds them captive. The very atmosphere of your life is these things; you breathe them in at every pore: they surround you, encompass you, press in upon you from every side. It is all in danger of becoming common to you! God forgive you, you are in danger of becoming weary of God!

O, that we would never lose our awe of God. No matter how many books, studies, conferences, or personal devotions at sunrise – may we never get bored of meeting with the Creator of the universe. May we always hold this gift of communion with tender gratitude, knowing we have no right to know anything of His mysteries. Every little bit revealed is pure gift.

Several weeks ago, I was babysitting a 6-year-old and his 4-year-old sister. Moments after their parents left, Connor found his sister and I in the middle of a stuffed animal introduction. He picked up some silver Mardi Gras beads and said, “Let’s play a game. Here’s what we do: I drop the beads on the ground and then we see what shapes we make.” He let the beads fall to the carpet and then we all just looked at the squiggles until shapes emerged. Our observations overlapped, “I see a heart!” and “Oh, there’s a butterfly” and “Do you see the snake?”

Once we’d exhausted the shapes, it was someone else’s turn to throw the beads to the carpet. The whole time, I was absolutely giddy with excitement. How many adults would think of such a game? This 6-year-old is brilliant! I loved how matter-of-fact he was about the game and about spotting shapes and about including his sister. I mostly loved the rasp in their voices right before they found something wonderful “..Oh, oh! Look at this flower!” The shapes came alive in those silver dots in a mess on the floor.

And if we can get excited – even giddy – about silver dots, then how much more should our excitement soar at the wonder of creation? How can we be amused by far lesser (yet still wonderful) things, and bored with the greatest and most wonderful things?

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 1

Transforming Grace

If you think God might be tending to other, more important matters today, here is a very necessary reminder: you are the important matter. God is intimately involved in His creation and the process of our sanctification. He cares so deeply and is so relentless in His pursuit of us, that He offers a transformative grace to draw us into His presence.

Sometimes that grace confuses us because it isn’t peaceful and comfortable and full of relief. Sometimes it means getting broken… actually, I would say more times than not. Read this article by Paul Tripp about the beauty of grace and David’s prayer for broken bones to rejoice in Psalm 51.

He writes,

“Although our greatest personal need is to live in a life-shaping relationship with the Lord, as sinners we have hearts that have a propensity to wander. We very quickly forget God and begin to put ourselves or some aspect of the creation in his place. We soon forget that he’s to be the center of everything we think, desire, say and do…

It’s time for each of us to embrace, teach, and encourage others with the broken-bone theology of uncomfortable grace. Because as long as each of us still has sin living in us, producing a propensity to forget and wander, God’s grace will come to us in uncomfortable forms.”

Pack that up in your lunch today,  folks.

Posted on by Caroline 0