I have a new blog up on Blogger.  It's located at http://mustfollow.blogspot.com.  Update your links!

On Friday night I asked Christina to marry me, and she said yes!

I will blog in more detail when I have the time!

God is good!

I have met the woman I'm going to marry.  (Shhh... don't tell her!)

As a result, I'm changing the "Who I'd Like to Meet" section on my MySpace profile, as I sort of think of it as a place where a person might describe what they're looking for in a significant other.  For posterity's sake, I'm "reprinting" that content below, which is a quote from Jonathan Edwards about Sarah, the woman he would later marry:

They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is loved of that Great Being who made and rules the world and that there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight; and that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate on him. . . . She has a wonderful sweetness, calmness and universal benevolence of mind, especially after this great God has manifested himself to her. She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly, and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone walking in the fields, and groves, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her.  (Piper, "A Mind in Love with God")

So, then I was reading in The Legacy of Sovereign Joy.. about when Calvin told his friend William Farel what he wanted in a wife.

The only beauty which allures me is this--that she be chaste, not too nice or fastidious, economical, patient, likely to take care of my health" (p. 131).

It's not as romantic as the previous quotation, I must admit.  Did I mention she came over today (with her eldest niece as a chaperon) to bring me ginger ale and soup and cough syrup?

Recently I had told my buddy Patrick (Christina's brother-in-law) what I wanted in a woman, and noticed that my list of qualifications had become much less picky than at earlier points in my life.  Also, there's the fact that releasing my list allowed God to make the choice rather than me.  And I must say, he's picked a better woman than I could have ever found on my own.  Better than I could ever have imagined.  In case you're wondering, the two things I held out on are as follows: She should be Reformed, and she should like punk rock.  Someone said (maybe it was Pat, maybe it was Jason) that at least I'll know when she shows up because there probably aren't many of those!

(If you want to know what my list used to be... not gonna happen.  I don't even remember.  Which means God's doing a good job changing me!)

You might say, "Wait a minute, what about the woman's character, desire to be a mother, etc...?"  In my humble opinion, these are related to who a godly woman is.  And if a woman is reformed, this means she's a committed believer who has taken a step away from the mainstream of watered-down Evangelicalism in order to step into the deeper, more difficult walk with God where we seek His will above our own and give Him all the glory for everything.  Such a woman would seek to glorify God by living biblically, and therefore would likely be well-equipped (and have the desire) to be a wife and a mother.  This is what I mean when I say that I want to marry a woman who is "reformed", not just any person who claims the name of Christ.

It's only by God's grace that he's gone ahead and met the other of my remaining standard.  We also like Johnny Cash!  There are lots and lots of other reasons why I'm crazy in love with her, but for now, that's between me and her.  I don't want to use up all my ideas for romantic love letters in my blog...

Sovereign Joy Christian Fellowship meets at the Dorothy Johnson Center in Chapmantown, 775 E 16th Street, at 10 AM beginning tomorrow, August 26. Patrick Mathers will be beginning a series of messages on the gospel of Matthew.

If you are not already plugged in to a Bible-believing church, or if you are but are still free to come support us with your presence on our first Sunday, we would love to have you.

So, what's Sovereign Joy all about? Our mission statement is, "to worship God in all of his glory, enjoy him in all of his fullness, spread a passion for his truth to all peoples, that Jesus might be praised forever." And we commonly follow the mission statement with this comment: "To this end, we are committed to proclaiming the whole counsel of God contained in the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible."

We don't seek to "compete" with other churches, or to promote the special "thing" about us that sets us apart or makes us different from them. We desire to preach the gospel of God's grace overcoming sin in the death of Christ on the cross. And all churches should do this.

Okay, now where does the name come from?

Augustine's Confessions, Book IX, Chapter 1:

"Who am I, and what is my nature? What evil is there not in me and my deeds; or if not in my deeds, my words; or if not in my words, my will? But thou, O Lord, art good and merciful, and they right hand didst reach into the depth of my death and didst empty out the abyss of corruption from the bottom of my heart. And this was the result: now I did not will to do what I willed, and began to will to do what thou didst will.

"But where was my free will during all those years and from what deep and secret retreat was it called forth in a single moment, whereby I gave my neck to thy 'easy yoke' and my shoulders to thy 'light burden,' O Christ Jesus, 'my Strength and my Redeemer'? How sweet did it suddenly become to me to be without the sweetness of trifles! And it was now a joy to put away what I formerly feared to lose. For thou didst cast them away from me, O true and highest Sweetness. Thou didst cast them away, and in their place thou didst enter in thyself--sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood; brighter than all light, but more veiled than all mystery; more exalted than all honor, though not to them that are exalted in their own eyes. Now was my soul free from the gnawing cares of seeking and getting, of wallowing in the mire and scratching the itch of lust. And I prattled like a child to thee, O Lord my God--my light, my riches, and my salvation." (emphasis mine)

"True and highest Sweetness" is rendered "Sovereign Joy" in another translation. That's where our church gets its name. Augustine's theology reached its fruition in the Protestant Reformation, with Luther's war-cry of salvation by grace alone. We can't help but do what we desire. And we can't help but seek to do and cherish the things which bring us the most joy. But the Bible teaches that apart from God, our desires are decidedly against him. But God has the sovereign power to overcome our desires for evil and replace them with desires for himself. The Westminster Catechism says, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." He is our ultimate joy, and nothing else will ever satisfy our souls. When he becomes our joy, our desire, we can't help but live our lives in a way that glorifies him. But it cannot be done on our own. It requires a change of heart.

"I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from fall your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules." Ezekiel 37:25-27 (ESV)

Aaron
www.sovereignjoycf.org

Just a while back, I posted a video talking about Mark Driscoll's banned church planting video, and how after I watched it, the Lord convicted me to stop wasting my time playing World of Warcraft, and I started focusing my attention on reading some good theology books, encouraging Pat to take up the mantle of Pastor, spending lots of time with the home group I've been a part of since I moved back to Chico (which I was also a part of before I left!), and learning some old hymns on the guitar; all of this working towards planting our new church, Sovereign Joy Christian Fellowship.

Last Friday I started noting a rapid increase in the number of views my video was getting. Now, I know it's only like one-tenth of a percent of the kind of exposure that people like Nalts or Perez Hilton get, but still—it's a lot for me!

A handful of people from the Mars Hill community in Seattle e-mailed me to thank me for the video, saying it was a great encouragement to them. Scott Thomas, director of the Acts 29 Network, was the one who actually journeyed to Florida to bring the ill-fated DVDs to the conference, and he dropped me a short note to tell me my testimony made the whole fiasco worthwhile!

Then I got another comment from someone on the video team, who was also very encouraged to hear that the video was actually making an impact somehow. From this, I figured someone up in Seattle must have been passing my video around, and that must by why I got so many views... Turns out, Mark Driscoll himself apparently watched it and got a kick out of it, and then he posted a link on their church's private member-only forum!

Awesome! Although I am a little embarrassed now that I know he's seen it, because of all those times I leaned into the camera and said, "This guy's hardcore!" But it's super encouraging to learn that I'm being an encouragement to them, you know? It's like a special kind of encouragement that goes both ways, because when they express how encouraged they are, it reciprocates and I am encouraged right back! This is like a super-cool trick that Jesus designed into the body of Christ that somehow is much too rare these days!

You can watch it here if you haven't already, and make sure you rate it 5 stars!!!

It sure would be nice if the Resurgence would approve it on YouTube page as a video response to the original Driscoll video. That's probably how they found out about it in the first place, because I submitted the video as a comment. But it's not showing up on their page... Oh well. God is sovereign! And it's not about us anyway!

We have a temporary website set up for Sovereign Joy Christian Fellowship, located at www.sovereignjoycf.org (I hope it's obvious what cf stands for).  The website is pretty simple at the moment, with our mission statement, a note about where and when we're meeting, a link to our Sunday night Bible study podcast, and a contact form if you need more information.  But we plan to add a multi-author blog, our statement of faith, a links page that points to a lot of helpful resources and partners in the faith, etc.

Please come and visit us on our first Sunday, August 26!  Pastor Pat is going to being teaching through the book of Matthew, Lord willing, and will be beginning with an overview about the numerous ways God glorifies Himself throughout the book.

These are my thoughts on Mark Driscoll's so-called "banned church planting video" which I saw three months ago. I haven't played WOW since.



Here is the link to the video on The Resurgence along with a blog about why it was banned.

New vlog posted on YouTube.