2019, the Year in Review
Once again, I find myself looking back at the year past and peering forward at the one to come. As is no doubt the case with many, this is for me a bittersweet annual experience. By God’s grace, I can say that I have been partially successful in redeeming the time. But a little honest reflection convicts me that I could have, and should have, done better.
Sin, it would seem, is ever present with me, tainting even my best works.
But thanks be to God, for it is not my own works that justify me. Rather, I am acceptable to God “only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to [me], and received by faith [belief] alone.”
Truly, the grace of God is amazing toward sinners! It’s as if God were to say to us wretched rebels, “All your guilt, all your hopelessness, all your fear of death and of righteous judgment and of eternal punishment, these things I have taken away in my Son. Only believe in him and be saved from the wrath to come.”
Now that in itself is the best offer any of us will ever hear. Maybe you’ve had the opportunity to avail yourself of some year end bargain hunting. Certainly, there are some good deals to be had out there. And it’s a good feeling to find something you’re shopping for at a discount. But the best deal you and I could ever find at a store pales in comparison to the extraordinary offer the eternal God of the universe has made in his Son Jesus Christ.
But it gets better.
You see, when a sinner believes the Gospel of Jesus Christ – the Gospel is the good news of what Christ has done to save his people – there’s more to it than just forgiveness of sins, as if that weren’t enough.
No, it gets better. You see, the Lord not only justifies and fully saves his people through belief in his Son alone, but he says to them, “That whole business about wrath and death and damnation, I’ve already taken care of that for you in my Son, in whom you have believed. Don’t worry about it anymore. As the army of Egypt was drowned in the Red Sea no more to threaten my people Israel forever, because you have trusted in my Son, so too has the handwriting of the law which was against you been blotted out.
But for all that, you’re still a man of unclean lips, and you dwell among a people of unclean lips. I have much to teach you. I bid you, come and study my Word and be sanctified. What is more, I want you to go and stand and speak to a dying world. Proclaim to it my Word and be Christ to your neighbor. And you know what? Because I am a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in goodness and truth, a God who loves his children, I’ll even reward you for your efforts, feeble and sinful though they be.”
“Seriously?,” I’m tempted to respond in my flesh.
“Yes, seriously,” says the Lord.
How great is that! Not only are Christians saved from eternal punishment and promised heaven itself just by believing God, they have before them the opportunity, not only to continue to learn from Christ himself, but the honor of working for the King, who will even reward them just for doing his bidding.
Thinking about all that makes it easy to understand why John Newton wrote “Amazing Grace.”
So, why is it I write this blog? Look no further than what I said above. The Lord God has been gracious to me in Christ Jesus far above and beyond anything that I have any right to claim. He has called me forth and saved me through belief in the truth. Further, he has continued to teach me and given me work to do.
Not that my work saves me. My salvation is in Christ alone. It was a done deal the day I put my faith in Jesus Christ.
But just because good works don’t save, doesn’t mean that good works have no place in the life of a Christian. In fact, as Paul tells us in Ephesians, Christians are created in Christ for the very purpose of doing good works: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
“So,” you may be saying to yourself, “that’s all very well and good, but what has all this to do with a 2019 Year in Review post?”
The answer is everything.
You see, were it not for the Lord’s grace to this sinner, I never would have known about salvation in Christ alone. I never would have had the opportunity to read and learn from extraordinary Christian teachers such as Gordon Clark and John Robbins, and I never would have been moved to write this blog.
In 2008, the Trinity Foundation had just published my book Imagining a Vain Thing, a book dealing with the controversy that effectively destroyed Knox Seminary.
It was for me both an exciting time and a sad time. It was exciting to see the book in print, my first published writing and a project that had been a year-and-a-half in the making. It was a sad time, as John Robbins, who had helped me a great deal with the writing of Imagining a Vain Thing, had gone to be with the Lord just a few weeks before the book came out.
I had enjoyed writing the book and didn’t want that to be the end of road for me as a writer. More importantly, I felt a real responsibility to continue to take all I had learned from Clark and Robbins and, as I was able, to continue to keep ideas before the public. But more than just repeating what they had taught, I wanted to develop and apply their ideas as circumstances called for it. The Scripturalist enterprise – Scripturalism is the name John Robbins gave to Clark’s philosophy, which held that the Bible, and the Bible alone, has a systematic monopoly on truth – had only just begun under the leadership of Clark and Robbins. But John Robbins’ passing had left big shoes to fill.
In late 2008, there were very few writers who even knew what Scripturalism was, let alone who were favorable to it, let alone who were actively writing. At the time, the only Scripturalist blog that I was aware of was Sean Gerety’s excellent God’s Hammer, so starting a Scripturalist blog of my own seemed like a good way to do my part to further the work.
On March 22, 2009 I published my first post on my new blog Lux Lucet. The title of that post was Diverse weight and measures. That post was a critique of the Federal Reserve’s then revolutionary program of Quantitative Easing (QE), which was just a fancy sounding term for money printing. QE was simply a new twist on the age-old practice of monetary debasement, a technique governments the world over have used to cover their profligate spending by stealthily stealing purchasing power from their peoples’ money.
This means that in March 2019, Lux Lucet turned 10 years old. Unbelievable!
When I got into blogging back in 2009, blogs were still a fairly new thing, I had very little idea what I was doing, and hoped that somewhere, somehow, someone might actually read what I had written.
As it turns out, they did.
Mind you, not very many. But a few people did read that post and the few other posts I wrote that year. The total number of hits on my blog for 2009? A whopping 547.
But there was another blogging milestone I celebrated in November 2019: The fifth anniversary of writing at least once a week.
For the first five years I wrote Lux Lucet, I was an occasional poster. Sometimes I’d post a few articles a month, sometimes I’d go months without posting. It was in November 2014 that I prayed to God to grant me the strength to blog at least once a week.
Sixty-one months later, I can tell you that God has answered that prayer in the affirmative. In all that time, not a week has gone by that I have not posted at least one article.
To put these two accomplishments in some perspective, consider that, at least according to this article, “the average blog is dead after a mere 100 days.”
With that in mind, to have sustained a blog for over 10 years now, and to have regularly posted for over 5 years, is very satisfying on a personal level.
I don’t say this to boast in my own abilities as a writer, or to say, “look at all the great stuff I’ve accomplished with hard work and determination.”
God forbid that I should boast in anything but the cross of Christ!
The reason I mention this at all is to encourage you. As a writer, as a Christian, I’m nothing special. The truth be known, I’m some guy with a single semester of Seminary training to my credit. If the Lord can take this sinner and grant him the grace and strength to write a Christian blog for over 10 years, he can and will give you the strength to do the work to which he has called you, whatever that may be.
Perhaps the Lord is calling you to write a blog, start a podcast or a YouTube channel in 2020. God knows, we need Christians of sound mind to speak the truth on the internet. If you’ve never done anything of this sort and would like a help getting started, just let me know. I’ll be happy to share what I can with you.
Perhaps the Lord has something else in mind for you in the coming year. Maybe you even know what that is, but for some reason, instead of being an Isaiah and saying “here I am, send me,” you’ve played the Jonah and fled from the face of the Lord.
How did that work out for Jonah?
If that’s you, then you need to repent and get to work.
On the other hand, maybe you’re a Christian at a loss as to what the Lord is calling you to do. For what it’s worth, I’ve been there too. In fact, I still have questions about what God wants me to do concerning this or that situation.
If that describes you, then you need to be in the Word and in prayer. Earnestly seek God’s face, asking him to grant you knowledge of his Word and wisdom to apply it to your life. Ask him direction about how he wants you to serve him now and in the coming year.
He is faithful and he will answer.
In closing, I would like to thank the Father, Son and Holy Ghost for the grace and strength to complete another year of blogging. It has been both a calling and a joy to serve as a writer.
Secondly, I’d like to thank you, the reader, for your support and encouragement over the past 12 months. It has been my prayer that my writing has served to edify and encourage you, and I look forward to serving you in 2020.
Thirdly, I would be remiss if I did not thank Mr. John Bradshaw for the great help he has been to me throughout the year. If my posts are a little more polished with fewer typos than in years past, this has been the result of his efforts.
Now may the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God grant to you and to your family grace and peace, both now and in the year to come.
Amen.