C. S. Lewis has said that every third book you read should be outside of your century. I ran across this quote in a message John Piper gave on Lewis at his annual pastor’s conference (the main messages from the last 24 years are available on the Desiring God website – highly recommend them – this is the message about Lewis). It is good advice. I follow Piper on Twitter and on Sunday he mentioned a resource on Amazon, the complete works of John Owen (the subject of one of his talks at an earlier pastor’s conference). I followed the link and found that for the Kindle app on the iPad my wife gave me for Christmas for less than three bucks.
The first of the 22 books in the set is “A Brief Declaration and Vindication of The Doctrine of the Trinity.” You may not agree with his definition of brief. As I have been reading through the first part of the work, there are several major points that Owen makes that are worth exploring. But I want to highlight one because it is critical to the assignment we have been exploring together here, the centrality of the person of Christ to life.
Owen points out in his introduction that in every instance false teachers will attack and deny the fullness of Christ’s deity and the reality of the Trinity. Philippians 2:5 – 11 asserts in no uncertain terms that Christ was God. John 1:1 does the same. In John 10:30 – 33 the Jews attempted to stone Christ because they understood that He was claiming to be God.
Without this essential truth, Christianity falls apart. The foundation of your kid’s faith will be challenged, rocked, attacked. In this age of “tolerance” Christian truth is not tolerated. We have to arm ourselves and our children with a clear understanding of who Christ is.
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