Daily Meditation

Moving Out of the Temple

Ligonier Ministries

On the mountain of transfiguration, the disciples were stunned by the breakthrough of the dazzling glory of Christ. What previously was veiled by His humanity, hidden from the sight of mortals, suddenly burst through the veil in translucent radiance. With but one glimpse, the disciples were paralyzed. They had but one consuming desire—to abide in that place, basking forever in the light of His countenance. Jesus would have none of it. As Lord of the church, He commanded His disciples to forget about pitching tents and sent them down the mountain and into the world.

The day Christ died, those same disciples went into hiding. They retreated to the shelter of the upper room, where they huddled together in fear. When Jesus broke the bonds of death, He went to the upper room. In a sense, He broke down the door—not so much to get in, but to get His disciples out. His mandate to them was to await the Spirit and then to go—to move out of the temple and into the world.

The New Testament word for “marketplace” is agora. The agora was not only the shopping district, but was also the center of civic life. The agora was surrounded by public buildings, shops, and colonnades. Here the children played, the idle loafed, lawsuits were heard, and public events were produced. It was public, not private; open, not secret; dangerous, not safe.

The cradle of the church was the marketplace. From the preaching and public ministry of Jesus to the daily acts of the apostles, the central scene was the marketplace.

Coram Deo

Are you actively moving outside the walls of the church and taking your faith to the world?

Passages for Further Study

Acts 17:16–17
Acts 8:5

Daily Meditation

Taking Your Faith to the Marketplace

Ligonier Ministries

I have seen extraordinary examples of laypeople who have taken their faith to the marketplace in the form of ministry.

Charles Colson went from the White House to prison. When he was released from prison, he was not released from ministry. Indeed, from his experience grew a vision to minister to prison inmates in the name of Christ, a ministry that now reaches tens of thousands of people in virtually every country.

Wayne Alderson, a layman, put his faith to work in the violent arena of labor-management relations. He has taken that ministry around this nation ministering to people in corporate boardrooms, coal mines, and labor union halls.

The list could easily include a multitude of ministries that involve the laity. Without the laity, the church would not have conquered the ancient world. The Reformers understood that for real reformation to happen, the laity had to be educated, trained, and mobilized. Martin Luther took a leave of absence from the university in order to translate the Bible into German—so that every believer could personally read the Scriptures.

John Calvin’s Institutes was originally penned as an instruction manual for the laity. Many of the works of Jonathan Edwards were originally composed for the benefit of his congregation, many of whom were known to be studying their Greek New Testaments while they were plowing their fields.

Coram Deo

Reflect on some ways you can take Christ into the marketplace of your occupation or profession.

Passages for Further Study

Acts 8:1–4

Vivid Memory Often Fallacious

The Sink-Holes of  Memory

It turns out that human beings are often afflicted with faulty memory.  Recall can be vivid, but wrong.  Is this a small, infrequent aberration?  Apparently not.

Science Shows People Regularly Remember Things That Didn’t Happen

In 2015, the National Academy of Sciences released a report summarizing decades of rigorous evidence demonstrating that people regularly ‘recall things we never experienced.’

By Edward Archer
The Federalist


“Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.” — George Santayana, “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”

In 1975, a young woman was brutally raped in her home while she was watching TV. Shortly thereafter, she identified her assailant as Dr. Donald Thomson. On the basis of her compelling and apparently credible testimony, Thomson was arrested and charged despite having an irrefutable alibi.

In an ironic and exculpatory turn of events, authorities discovered that, prior to the attack, the woman had been watching Thomson on live TV discussing the inaccuracies of eye-witness testimony and simply confused his face with that of her rapist’s. As bizarre as this incident may appear, false memories in concert with compelling but false testimony is often the rule rather than the exception.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (On Criminal Justice)

False Witness

Douglas Wilson
Blog & Mablog

INTRODUCTION:

For Christians who want to be biblically grounded, the sin and crime of bearing false witness is a very big deal. It is serious for two great reasons. The first is that it is a violation of God’s holy law, which reflects His character. It was by means of this particular evil; technique that the Lord Jesus was railroaded, and so all Christians who love Jesus should hate the kind of lies that took Him to the cross. The first reason is therefore love of God.

The second reason is that the tables of the law are connected, and we cannot love God whom we have not seen without loving our neighbor, whom we have seen (1 John 4:20). But who is my neighbor? as the fellow once asked. Your neighbor is of course the one who might be falsely convicted on the basis of a lie—and this really is a grievous evil.

But our neighbor is also the person who really has been violated, but who has difficulty getting people to believe her story. Genuine victims are abused by the one who abused them directly, but they are also abused by those liars who make every genuine accusation more difficult. And the problem here is not the responsible officials who suspend judgment until the investigation of a reported crime is complete. That is what Scripture requires of them. The problem is made worse by the liars who have corrupted the system. Victims who effectively cannot come forward are the victims of the perpetrators who violated them in the first instance, and in the second they are also victims of those who traffic in deceit.