It’s been about 2 years since I read Mark Dever‘s Deliberate Church: Buidling Your Ministry on the Gospel. (The book is great; I highly recommend it.) His chapter on “Music,” in reference to music used in corporate worship, still sticks out in my mind. In this post I’d like to share with you a quote from the chapter as well as some of the reflections I had (including some of the notes I took in the margins) when I first read this chapter.
So I’m finally back from T4G. I was unable to find time to write another post while I was still in Kentucky, but I have decided nonetheless to provide a brief wrap-up post by supplying you with my sermon notes as I indicated I would in the previous post. The following are my raw notes (unedited and “un-proofread”) from various sermons given at the conference. Not all of the sermons given at the conference had enough structure in order for me to outline them, so the notes below do not cover every message spoken but only those I was able to take somewhat structured notes on. I hope you enjoy them and find them helpful.
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On January 28th I posted a youtube video of an excerpt of a sermon by John Piper in which he described the real difference between the Arminian view of atonement (unlimited or universal) and the Calvinistic view of atonement (historically called limited atonement). (Click here to see that post). Yesterday I was reading a book by Mark Dever entitled The Gospel and Personal Evangelism. At one point in the book, Dever makes a statement in passing regarding the the decisiveness of Christ’s atonement which really hits at the crux of this “extent of the atonement” debate. Again, instead of being a debate over universal v. limited extent, the centerpiece of the issue is whether Christ’s death was a potential or effectual atonement.
The apostles clearly learned from Jesus how they were to understand his death on the cross; and to teach Christians about this, the Holy Spirit has inspired various images in the New Testament that convey the reality to us: Jesus as a sacrifice, a redemption, a reconciliation, a legal justification, a military victory, and a propitiation.
Kirk E. Miller 