On Grief

I've worked as a Chaplain in a Hospital for about a year and have been present for, by my count, about 50 deaths. In processing and attempting to glean some spiritual fruits from the contemplation of death and the finitude of life I have not found very many good resources. I do have a new appreciation for the book of Job, Psalms 13, 22 and 88 and Ecclesiastes. The one exception of a good book outside of the Bible is "Facing Grief." This book was originally titled "A Token for Mourners," written by John Flavel. This English minister experienced the death of a child and his first wife, second wife and third wife. Flavel is one of the few to capture what I have seen with parents: "To bury a child, any child, rends the heart of a tender parent; for what are children, but the parent multiplied? A child is a part of the parent made up in another skin."

Flavel was a man acquainted with grief and so a man whom those in grief can expect not only a true and faithful voice, but one that is appropriately gentle. "Facing Grief" both affirms the necessary place for grief in the lives of believers as well as warning against excessively entertaining grief. As a person experiences the death of a loved one, Flavel gives comfort to the believer and warning to the unbeliever. It took me a while to find something, but if one is looking personally or has been asked for a book on grief, Flavel's book is a great one, especially after the shock has passed and the heavy-hearted reflections begin.

The first paragraph:

"To be above the stroke of passions is a condition equal to angels; to be in a state of sorrow without the sense of sorrow is a disposition beneath beasts; but duly to regulate our sorrows and bound our passions under the rod is the wisdom, duty, and excellency of a Christian. He who is without natural affections is deservedly ranked among the worst heathens; and he who is able rightly to manage them deserves to be numbered with the best of Christians. Though when we are sanctified we put on the divine nature, yet, till we are glorified, we put not off the infirmities of our human nature."

Facing Grief - John Flavel - wtsbooks.com

Facing Grief - John Flavel - Amazon.com

Valley of Vision editor

I had wondered a few times about the compiler of "Valley of Vision," a book of Puritan prayers that has been personally rewarding and our church sometimes uses for worship. Justin Taylor has posted a short biography of the man, Arthur Bennett, that was an evangelist to the homeless and greatly ministered to by the early puritan movement, especially in the piety of prayer.

"Who is Arthur Bennett?"

Bruised Reed

a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench,
-Matthew 12:20/Isaiah 42:3

"After conversion we need bruising so that reeds may know themselves to be reeds, and not oaks...hence we learn that we must not pass too harsh judgment upon ourselves or others when God exercises us with bruising upon bruising. There must be a conformity to our head, Christ, who 'was bruised for us' that we may know how much we are bound unto him. Ungodly spirits, ignorant of God's ways in bringing his children to heaven, censure broken-hearted Christians as miserable persons, whereas God is doing a gracious good work with them. It is no easy matter to bring a man from nature to grace, and from grace to glory, so unyielfing and intractable are our hearts.

-Richard Sibbs. The Bruised Reed.

Reformed Pastor: Sermons must first be preached to one's self

Richard Baxter gave a series of talks to pastors in England from Independent, Presbyterian and Anglican Churches. They were intended to address the manner in which a pastor should be reformed by the Scriptures and God in order to form his congregation. Here is a selection of one imperative for pastors:

"Content not yourselves with being in a state of grace, but be also careful that your graces are kept in vigorous and lively exercise, and that you preach to yourselves the sermons which you study, before you preaching them to others. If you did this for your own sakes, it would not be lost labour; but I am speaking to you upon the public account, that you would do it for the sake of the Church, When you minds are in a holy, heavenly frame, your people are likely to partake of the fruits of it. Your prayers, and praises, and doctrine will be sweet and heavenly to them. They will likely feel when you have been much with God: that which is most on your hearts, is like to be most in their ears. I confess I must speak it by lamentable experience, that I publish to my flock the distempers of my own soul. When I let my heart grow cold, my preaching is cold; and when it is confused, my preaching is confused; and so I can oft observe also in the best of my hearers, that when I have grown cold in preaching, they have grown cold too; and the next prayers which I have heard from them have been too like my preaching. We are the nurses of Christ's little ones. If we forbear taking food ourselves, we shall famish them; it will soon be visible in their leanness and dull discharge of their several duties. If we let our love decline, we are not like to raise up theirs. If we abate our holy care and fear, it will appear in our preaching; if the matter show it not, the manner will. If we feed on unwholesome food, either errors or fruitless controversies, our hearers are like to fare the worse for it. Whereas, if we abound in faith and love and zeal, how would it overflow to the refreshing of the congregations, and how would it appear in the increase of the same graces in them! O brethren, watch therefore over your own hearts: keep out lusts and passions, and worldly inclinations; keep up the life of faith, and love and zeal: be much at home and be much with God. If it be not your daily business to study your own hearts, and to subdue corruption, and to walk with God – if you make not this a work to which you constantly attend, all will go wrong, and you will starve your hearers; or, if you have an affected fervency, you cannot expect a blessing to attend it from on high. Above all, be much in secret prayer and meditation. Thence you must fetch the heavenly firethat must kindle your sacrifices: remember, you cannot decline and neglect your duty, to your own hurt alone; many will be losers by it as well as you. For your people's sakes, therefore, look to your hearts. If a pand of spiritual pride should overtake you, and you should fall into any dangerous error, and vent your own inventions to draw away disciples after you, what a wound may this prove to the Church, of which you have the oversight; and you may become a plague to them instead of a blessing, and they may wish they had never seen your faces. Oh, therefore, take heed to your own judgments and affections. Vanity and error will shyly insinuate, and seldom come without fair pretences: great distempers and apostasies have usually small beginnings. The prince of darkness doth frequently personate an angel of light, to draw the children of light again into darkness. How easily also will distempers creep in upon our affections and our first love, and fear and care abate! Watch, therefore, for the sake of yourselves and others.

But, besides this general course of watchfulness, methinks a minister should take some special pains with his heart, before he is to go to the congregation: if it be then cold, how is he likely to warm the hearts of his hearers? Therefore, go then specially to God for life: read some rousing, awakening book, or meditate on the weight of the subject of which you are to speak, and on the great necessity of your people's souls, that you may go in the zeal od the Lord into his house. Maintain in this manner, the life of grace in yourselves, that it may appear in all your sermons from the pulpit, - that every one who comes cold to the assembly, may have some warmth imparted to him before he depart."

-Richard Baxter. The Reformed Pastor. Pg 61-63

Puritan Prayer: The Broken Heart

The Broken Heart

O LORD,
No day of my life has passed that has not proved me guilty in Thy sight.
Prayers have been uttered from a prayerless heart;
praise has been often praiseless sound; my best services are filthy rags.

Blessed Jesus, let me find a covert in Thy appeasing wounds.
Though my sins rise to heaven Thy merits soar above them;
though unrighteousness weighs me down to hell,
Thy righteousness exalts me to Thy throne.

All things in me call for my rejection, all things in Thee plead my acceptance.
I appeal from the throne of perfect justice to Thy throne of boundless grace.
Grant me to hear Thy voice assuring me:
that by Thy stripes I am healed, that Thou wast bruised for my iniquities,
that Thou hast been made sin for me that I might be righteous in Thee,
that my grievous sins, my manifold sins, are all forgiven,
buried in the ocean of Thy concealing blood.

I am guilty, but pardoned, lost, but saved,
wandering, but found, sinning, but cleansed.

Give me perpetual broken-heartedness, keep me always clinging to Thy cross,
flood me every moment with descending grace,
open to me the springs of divine knowledge, sparkling like crystal,
flowing clear and unsullied through my wilderness of life.

-Valley of Vision pg 150

Faith: Head or Heart?

In making my way through "On Knowing Christ" by Jonathan Edwards, I have found one of the more explicit statements of Edwards' approach to the relation of head and heart in religious matters. Edwards is absolutely right that the head is first engaged to aprehend a truth about God and this is necessary. But then, the heart must be engaged to love that truth and move the affections. The rationalist approach to religion errs in making religion something merely of the mind. The enthusiast errs in believing religion can go directly to the heart without passing through the mind. Edwards stands in the middle and casts a pox on both their houses:

"THERE are two kinds of knowledge of divine truth, viz. speculative and practical, or in other terms, natural and spiritual. The former remains only in the head. No other faculty but the understanding is concerned in it. It consists in having a natural or rational knowledge of the things of religion, or such a knowledge as is to be obtained by the natural exercise of our own faculties, without any special illumination of the Spirit of God. The latter rests not entirely in the head, or in the speculative ideas of things; but the heart is concerned in it: it principally consists in the sense of the heart. The mere intellect, without the will or the inclination, is not the seat of it. And it may not only be called seeing, but feeling or tasting. Thus there is a difference between having a right speculative notion of the doctrines contained in the word of God, and having a due sense of them in the heart. In the former consists the speculative or natural knowledge, in the latter consists the spiritual or practical knowledge of them.

Neither of these is intended in the doctrine exclusively of the other: but it is intended that we should seek the former in order to the latter. The latter, or the spiritual and practical, is of the greatest importance; for a speculative without a spiritual knowledge, is to no purpose, but to make our condemnation the greater. Yet a speculative knowledge is also of infinite importance in this respect, that without it we can have no spiritual or practical knowledge."

-Jonathan Edwards in the sermon Christian Knowledge in "On Knowing Christ"