Happy Anniversary, Whitney!

Nine wonderful years! Thank you for your love and friendship!

A citation question...

O.K. Turabian lovers out there. How would you cite the following resource as a footnote or bibliography:

It comes from the website www.link2lead.com. The document you see is a PDF the website produced.

Big prize for any reader who knows Turabian citation well enough to figure out how to cite this report.

The Last Day in the Life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn passed away today of heart failure. His story is one that we do well to remember.

In the closing weeks of World War II, while a young commander in the Russian army, Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to a friend. In the letter, the young man flippantly referred to Stalin as "the man with the moustache." For this act of disrespect, Alexander Solzhenitsyn would spend the next ten years of his life in work camps.

Released following Stalin's death, Solzhenitsyn vividly portrayed the brutality of the Stalin regime. His first work was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

The AP describes his early work and its impact this way:

Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn...devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and
spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

I read "One Day..." while in high school and it had a dramatic impact on me. I still sometimes think about the closing lines of the novel. Solzhenitsyn describes a day in the life of Denisovich, a carpenter imprisoned at a work camp. At the conclusion of the day, Denisovich reflects that the day wasn't as terrible as it could have been: "they hadn't put him in the cells; they hadn't sent his squad to the settlement; he'd swiped a bowl of kasha at dinner; the squad leader had fixed the rates well; he'd built a wall and enjoyed doing it; he'd smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade through; he'd earned a favor from Tsezar that evening; he'd bought that tobacco. And he hadn't fallen ill. He got over it."

And then the haunting final lines: "A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years."

The inhumanity of this system targeted not just political dissidents and those guilty of dissent but believers as well. God used these work camps to create opportunities for believers to reach those they would never have been allowed to reach on their own. Stalin actually aided the missionary endeavor through his imprisonment of believers!

Yet Stalin and the oppresive regimes that would follow, had no intention of being anything but brutal. Solzhenitsyn offered a scathing look at a government that, as Pushkin put it, forced its citizen to become either tyrant, traitor, or prisoner.

Here is Alexander Solzhenitsyn being searched at the gulag where he spent several of his ten years of imprisonment.

The AP has a summary of his life that you might find helpful here: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hlQlcja5nGziVfcrscU-Yip3QduQD92B4I600

Solzhenitsyn was not a great lover of Western governments as well. He denounced the materialism and decadence of our society as well.

I think it is incumbent upon us as both believers and good citizens to read books like "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." As citizens, we do wsell to remember the tyranny inflicted by an immorral government upon her own people. It keeps us humble, grateful, and watchful.

As believers, reading books like "One Day..." helps steel us for the possibly difficult times God may have in store for us if we decide to be obedient to Him. We live at a unique time in human history in a unique place. Most believers have found themselves having to make hard decisions about how to be obedient in an environment that hates God and the gospel.

Just ask our brothers and sisters in China, who are facing intense persecution as the rest of the world looks on with relative indifference.

Beeker enters the worship wars...

When people ask what style of worship we'll have at the church plant, I will now be able to direct them to this video.

Ellie's Adoption Story

For those of you who may not have seen this yet....

Quote from Sunday

Several people have asked me about the MacArthur quote on how to treat your pastor. It's taken from Rediscovering Expository Preaching and here it is in its entirety. I left out the last paragraph from the message Sunday because it seemed a little presumptuous : ). And remember this is hyperbole...please don't really put water in my gas tank:

Fling him into his office. Tear the 'Office' sign from the door and nail on the sign, 'Study'. Take him off the mailing list. Lock him up with his books and his typewriter and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts and broken hearts and the lives of a superficial flock and a holy God.

Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. Engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. And let him come out only when he's bruised and beaten into being a blessing.

Shut his mouth forever spouting remarks, and stop his tongue forever tripping lightly over every non-essential. Require him to have something to say before he dares break the silence. Bend his knees in the lonesome valley.

Burn his eyes with weary study. Wreck his emotional poise with worry for God. And make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone. Burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets.

Put water in his gas [petrol] tank. Give him a Bible and tie him to the pulpit. And make him preach the Word of the living God!

Test him. Quiz him. Examine him. Humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine. Shame him for his good compre­hension of finances, batting averages, and political in-fighting. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist. Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day - 'Sir, we would see Jesus.'

When at long last he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God. If he does not, then dismiss him. Tell him you can read the morning paper and digest the television commentaries, and think through the day's superficial pro­blems, and manage the community's weary drives, and bless the sordid baked potatoes and green beans, ad infinitum, better than he can.

Command him not to come back until he's read and reread, written and rewritten, until he can stand up, worn and forlorn, and say, 'Thus saith the Lord.'

Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity. Smack him hard with his own prestige. Corner him with questions about God. Cover him with demands for celestial wisdom. And give him no escape until he's back against the wall of the Word. And sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left - God's Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down­-street gossip, but give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, sup with it, and come at last to speak it backward and forward, until all he says about it rings with the truth of eternity.

And when he's burned out by the flaming Word, when he's consumed at last by the fiery grace blazing through him, and when he's privileged to translate the truth of God to man, finally transferred from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently and blow a muted trumpet and lay him down softly. Place a two-edged sword in his coffin, and raise the tomb triumphant. For he was a brave soldier of the Word. And ere he died, he had become a man of God.

Don't Waste Your Pulpit

This Sunday, I'll be talking about "God's Glory in the Pulpit." I am a little overwhlemed as I think about all I could talk about. Here are some great words from John Piper.