Many a father has held an infant son in his arms, looked at that child and declared his delight. Yet, sadly, many years later the delight has turned to disgust, the joy to mourning. The son has done something, he has become something, that has driven away his father's delight. I thought of my own delight in my children as I read God’s Word this morning.

There were two times that God the Father declared that he was well-pleased with the Son. At Jesus’ baptism a voice came from heaven to declare "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." Later, as Jesus was transfigured before a few of his disciples, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and that voice spoken again saying, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him."

The Father was well-pleased with the Son. He delighted in him. The Father and Son found joy and contentment in another. The Holy God looked to his holy Son and said, "He is my delight."

But this delight would not last. Not long after that second declaration, after the transfiguration, Jesus hung on a cross and as he hung there he cried out to the Father, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The Father who had once delighted in his Son had now abandoned him and cursed him. What had become of that delight? How could the Son of his delight now be cursed and forsaken? Had Jesus done something to destroy that delight? No. Well, kind of.

It is among the most emotional--certainly one of the most stirring--scenes in The Lord of the Rings. The enemy forces have pressed hard against Helm’s Deep, they have approached in overwhelming numbers, they have raised the siege works and battered the gates and have slowly driven back the armies of the Rohirrim. Hope has grown dim and King Theoden takes to his horse to ride out for a final charge.

Lingering in every mind is Gandalf’s promise, “Look to my coming on the first light of the fifth day, at dawn look to the east.” He has not come, not yet. But the rising sun is only just beginning to brighten the sky. Then, just when all seems lost, heads turn, a hush settles over the two armies.

There he is at last, just as he promised. He comes riding over the crest of the hill, his staff blazing, leading a great company of riders. Down they charge into the confused ranks of enemy soldiers, cutting a great swath. And soon the battle is won, the citadel saved, its ruler victorious.

That is the kind of scene that moves us, a story where the people we love come to the brink of death, where they teeter on the edge of destruction, before being miraculously delivered.

A few days ago my morning reading took me to a very different battle scene. It is a skirmish, really, a brief foray between competing forces. Jesus is in a garden called Gethsemane, spending time with his friends, praying to his Father. A small army approaches in the darkness, led by a turncoat, a betrayer.

There are not too many stories from the life of Jesus that made their way into all four of the biblical accounts of his life. Each of the authors writes for a different purpose or to a different audience and this leads them to different emphases. Yet one of the stories that each of them tells is Peter’s denial of Jesus. Peter’s darkest moment, his greatest shame, was included by all four of the gospel writers. Isn’t it interesting that in an account of the life of Jesus, all four of them veer for a little while into Peter’s life.

This raises two questions in my mind: How did the gospel writers know the details of this story and why do they all make mention of it? This story could so easily be the stuff of tabloids, meant to bring shame to Peter, to cause people to doubt his faith, to doubt that he could be a worthy leader in the early church. Why would all of the authors risk bringing further shame on this man?

All of the disciples were present when Jesus foretold that Peter would deny him, so there were many witnesses to that part of the story, but they had long since taken flight when Peter actually swore and called down judgment on himself if he was one of those men who knew Jesus. His darkest moment happened in the dark of night and he was the only witness to the whole account. How, then, did the gospel writers know what Peter had done? It seems clear that Peter must have told them. Even while this story must have caused him to blush in shame, he humbly told it to point to the Lord’s grace. Even today, two thousand years later, we rarely think of Peter without thinking of him as the man who sinned and was restored.

Why then did all four of the gospel writers include this story in their accounts of the crucifixion? At least in part because Peter’s fall and restoration was a crucial story of the power of the gospel, that even a man who betrayed Jesus, a man who turned away from Jesus at the most hurtful time, could be restored. The gospel could save even a man like Peter.

This makes me ask, Is my gospel big enough to account for a man who three times denied that he knew the Lord? Is it big enough to account for a man who spent all of those years with Jesus, only to desert him in the end? Is it big enough to allow a man like this to be a leader in the church? Is your gospel big enough for all of this?

What if David lived in our day and what if he was a leader in this little segment of the Christian world when he committed adultery and murder. Would your gospel be big enough to say that even a man like that could be forgiven and restored? I am not talking about things done before a person comes to know the Lord, but things done by those who profess faith, by those who have been given light, who see God for who he is.

I thought of Peter and other characters from the Bible after I wrote an article titled The Legacy of Charles Colson. In that article, one I made public only after much thought and prayer and discussion, I wanted to remind people that Colson did not just begin a prison ministry that has borne a lot of fruit, and he did not just help people recover or discover a Christian worldview, but he was also potentially undermining the gospel through efforts such as Evangelicals and Catholics Together and The Manhattan Declaration. His ministry did not extend only in the one, positive direction. For all the good he accomplished, there was also sin.

I have a love-hate relationship with e-books. Among the issues I’ve grappled with most is that of ownership: Which option offers the greater sense or reality of ownership? Is there greater ownership in having a physical copy of a book I can hold in my hand and file on my bookcase, or in having that book available to me anywhere in the world in electronic format? There is a kind of trade-off here.

My brain has not yet been able to fully adjust to digital versus physical ownership. I realized this a couple of weeks ago when I bought a novel in Kindle format. I loved that novel and enjoyed reading it on my Kindle, but at the end of it all I found myself wanting to visit the bookstore to buy a printed version of it, something I could put in my office and add to my bookcase almost like a kind of trophy, a relic that says something about me, about what I’ve loved. I found it interesting that somewhere beyond conscious thought and reason, my brain registers a difference between these things. My brain tells me that I don’t fully own something until I own it physically. Somehow my mind registers owning a Kindle book as something less than owning a book printed in ink on dead trees.

Mortimer Adler points out that there are two ways of owning a book. "The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it." E-books allow you to have some kind of a property right, though this is still very different from owning a book. In reality it is more like owning insurance than owning furniture. In one case the ownership is virtual and even revocable. In the other case the ownership is physical and irrevocable. You can own an e-book, but it seems a lesser form of ownership than owning a book (as Kindle users discovered when one day their copies of 1984 suddenly disappeared). Owning the rights to read the contents of a digital file is far, far different than owning the book that sits on the desk beside me. Then again, those digital files are available anywhere at any time.

I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon and I don’t mean to be insensitive, truly. Perhaps there are rules that govern these things, and I am violating them, or maybe I am just missing some vital piece of information. I don’t know. But I have been to a wide variety of Christian blogs and news sites reading the obituaries and memorials and remembrances of Charles Colson and have been surprised to note that they are have been very nearly uniformly, unabashedly positive. 

I am not convinced that we are doing right here. I suppose I would rather wait a little while to say this, but then the opportunity will be gone. At least to my understanding, Colson’s legacy was both more and less than people are making it out to be. I didn’t really understand the man in all his inconsistencies and complexities while he lived—the combination of good and bad baffled me—and I certainly don’t understand him now that he has died.

Don’t hear me say that Colson was a complete villain, but do hear me when I say that he leaves behind a legacy that is far more multi-faceted, far more multi-dimensional, than most people have been saying. It is a legacy that includes some dark chapters, and not only prior to his conversion.

Charles Colson leaves behind a testimony of a man who encountered grace at his darkest hour. He leaves behind a legacy of a ministry that seeks to extend grace to those who are likewise in their darkest hour. He sought to teach Christians how to think—to describe and define a biblical worldview. And then he sought to lead in the application of that biblical worldview, and this is where things become hazy, where a positive legacy collides with a woeful one, where his work for the Lord encounters his work against the Lord’s church.

The fact is that as we remember this man, we remember someone who labored to strike a significant blow against the gospel, and who time and again called on the church to do the same. And this is what is absent in so many remembrances. He labored for good and positive causes, but he also labored for outright sinful causes.

Last week in Louisville I ended up staying in a hotel that was a little bit off the beaten path, so to speak, just outside the downtown core, out where most of the storefronts were boarded up and only fast food restaurants and strip clubs kept their lights on at night. Every time I walked from my hotel to the conference or from the conference to the hotel, I had to pass by an abortion clinic, a building with a sign that declared it a “Women’s Surgical Center.”

One morning, as I walked by that clinic, passing directly in front of it, I saw that three or four people were just outside, holding signs and passing out pamphlets. I was taken aback; here in Ontario it has long since been declared illegal to protest outside a clinic. Yet there they were, quietly and peacefully protesting.

Standing a little bit apart from those people were two men and a woman, each wearing an orange vest emblazoned with “Escort.” These three people were escorting young women from the parking lot to the clinic, walking them past the protestors, all of whom were behaving peacefully; two were seated on the sidewalk praying, the others were calling to the women and saying, “Please don’t kill your baby. You don’t have to do this!” One young woman walked by them--she couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen--with her mother beside her, her head down. She quietly took a pamphlet and disappeared inside. The people on the sidewalk kept praying. A moment later another woman, perhaps in her twenties or thirties, passed by the protestors and went inside as well.

All of that unraveled in the few seconds it took for me to pass by--a very powerful few seconds. I was shocked and gravely disappointed--shocked again, shocked anew, that we allow this to happen, that our society not only allows this to happen, but is actually complicit in this genocide. And I was so gravely disappointed in myself, so ashamed. I felt no animosity toward those young women. They were doing only what they have been instructed to do, what parents and friends and guidance counselors and maybe even pastors have told them is the happiest outcome. “It’s just like having a tumor removed. It’s just a small surgery; it will be over before you know it. It’s better this way.”

It’s the question I always get from the people who wanted to attend Together for the Gospel but weren’t able to: What books did they give away? Well, I’m glad you asked. Here is the list:

• The Cross and Christian Ministry by D.A. Carson (Amazon | Westminster)
• Fellowship with God by Martyn Lloyd-Jones (not available online; given in both book and CD format)
• Listen Up! by Christopher Ash (Amazon | Westminster)
• Gospel and Kingdom by Graeme Goldsworthy (Amazon | Westminster)
• Health, Wealth and Happiness by David Jones and Russell Woodbridge (Amazon)
• Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow by Carl Trueman (Amazon | Westminster)
• Turning to God by David Wells (Amazon)
• What Is the Mission of the Church? by Greg Gilbert and Kevin DeYoung (Amazon | Westminster)
• Preaching and Preachers: 40th Anniversary Edition by Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Amazon | Westminster)
• How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home by Derek Thomas (Amazon | Westminster)
• The Pleasures of God by John Piper (Amazon | Westminster)
• Church Membership: How the World Knows Who Represents Jesus by Jonathan Leeman (Amazon | Westminster)
• The Church: The Gospel Made Visible by Mark Dever (Amazon | Westminster)
• 1 Corinthians 1-9: Challenging Church by Mark Dever (The Good Book Company)
• A T4G special edition of the HCSB

Several of these were special editions created specifically for T4G (including, for example, the books from Piper and Carson).

The couple hundred people who attended Band of Bloggers also received these titles:

• On Earth As It Is In Heaven by Wyman Lewis Richardson (Amazon)
• Tribal Church: Lead Small, Impact BIG by Steve Stroope (Amazon)
• 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker (Amazon)
• Everyday Prayers by Scotty Smith (Amazon | Westminster)
• Who Am I?: Identity in Christ by Jerry Bridges (Amazon)
• A Holy Ambition by John Piper (Amazon)
• Red Like Blood: Confrontations With Grace by Joe Coffey and Bob Bevington (Amazon | Westminster)
• G.O.S.P.E.L. by D.A. Horton (Amazon)
• Test, Train, Affirm and Send Into Ministry by Brian Croft (Amazon | Westminster)
• Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary by J.D. Greear (Amazon | Westminster)
• Subversive: Living as Agents of Gospel Transformation by Ed Stetzer (Amazon)
• The World We All Want by Tim Chester (Amazon)

How many times have you come across this quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi? "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." I must have read it a hundred times in books, magazines, articles, tweets. It is used by believers and unbelievers to point to the hypocrisy of Christians and to call us to more and to better. Our inability to live what we preach is driving the multitudes away. Or so we are told. After all, that’s what Gandhi said.

We need to stop using this quote and I'm going to give you two good reasons to do so. In the first place, Gandhi was hardly an authority on Jesus. When he says, "I like your Christ" he is referring to a Jesus of his own making, a Jesus plucked haphazardly from the pages of Scripture, a Jeffersonian kind of Jesus, picked and chosen from the accounts of his life. He certainly was not referring to the Jesus--the true and complete Jesus--revealed from the first page of Scripture to the last. He did not refer to the Jesus who stands reading with a sword of judgment, the Jesus who made unwavering claims of his own deity and eternality, who declared that he was and is the only way to be made right with God. Jesus the good man, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the moralist, perhaps, but never Jesus who was and is and is to come.

Whatever Jesus Gandhi liked was certainly not the Jesus of the Bible. Why then should we care if we do not attain to this falsified version of Jesus? I would be ashamed to have any appearance to the kind of Jesus that Gandhi would deem good and acceptable and worthy of emulation. That Jesus would, of course, have to look an awful lot like Gandhi. So there is one good reason to stop using this quote: because Gandhi fabricated a Jesus of his own making and declared his affection only for this fictional character. He never liked the real thing.

Here's a second reason. Gandhi had a fundamental misunderstanding of himself and of the rest of humanity.

Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games is all the rage today; had I known what a phenomenon it would become, I'm sure I would have read the books and prepared a review to coincide with the release of the films. Alas, it is too late for that. But with every twelve-year old I know either reading the books or begging to, and with many of the women I know also reading and enjoying them (along with more than a few men), I began to wonder, what is it that makes this story sell millions of books and 155 million dollars in movie tickets on opening weekend alone? So I read the The Hunger Games (the first book in the series, at least) and watched the movie. And I think I get it. Some of it, anyway.

Now I'll admit from the outset that I didn't enjoy the book as much as many others have. Aileen says I'm just a book snob. I'd tend to disagree, but I suppose I shouldn't just discount what she says. However, even though I wasn't as taken with the books as many others, I do think I see what the fuss is about and why they have such great appeal. 

But first, here in a hundred words or less, is a summary of the book: The United States has been very nearly destroyed and in the aftermath of the apocalypse the Capital holds all the power, utterly dominating the remainder of the country which has been divided into 12 districts. As a form of punishment and control, once per year each district has to send one teenaged boy and one teenaged girl to participate in The Hunger Games, a winner takes all fight to the death. Katniss Everdeen, the hero of the story, is one of those who must battle for her life.

Now here are some of the themes that I believe have contributed to the book's popularity. If you've read the story, I'd love to hear if you think I'm right or if I'm completely missing the point.

Good and Evil. The story clearly delineates between good and evil. There is no confusion about what is right and what is wrong, no difficult or confusing shades of gray. Collins makes it easy on the reader by making the participants in the games either all-good or all-evil. There is one character who may be a little less evil than the rest, but he dies at the hand of one of the bad guys; none of the good guys has to face an agonizing decision about whether or not to take his life. Katniss is good, Peeta is good, Rue is good, every other participant who is developed as a character is evil. We all love a story of good versus evil and this one follows a tried-and-true pattern.

Today is the 224th anniversary of the death of Charles Wesley, one of history’s most well-known and best-loved hymn writers. His contributions to the English-speaking church are remarkable, which becomes apparent when you read the introduction to his brief biography at ChristianHistory.net:

He was said to have averaged 10 poetic lines a day for 50 years. He wrote 8,989 hymns, 10 times the volume composed by the only other candidate (Isaac Watts) who could conceivably claim to be the world’s greatest hymn writer.

Of these nearly 9,000 hymns, you’ll likely recognize “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” along with many others.

Duke Divinity School has done the hard work of putting together an organized collection that provides a “standard for scholarly study and citation.” The collection is organized by date of publication in PDFs that seek to match the original published resources. Each PDF also includes an editorial introduction about the resource.

Another online source for Charles Wesley hymns is, of course, CyberHymnal.org. Though this site only lists 265 of his hymns, each page gives you the option of playing a MIDI file of the tune, which is nice if you’ve forgotten (or want to learn) the melody. Once you’ve done that, you may want to search iTunes or Amazon to find a better version of the song.