William Petruzzo

I’ve spent the last few days with Indelible Grace Music. I’m sure some of you are familiar with the project, but others are not. The idea behind the ministry is honorable and frankly, just plain cool. The gist, although over simplified, is to reproduce very old, often forgotten, hymns for a new generation of Christian worshippers and thinkers. Here’s a quick excerpt from the statement on their website:

We want to be a voice calling our generation back to something rich and solid and beyond the fluff and the trendy. We want to remind God’s people that thinking and worship are not mutually exclusive, and that not everything worth knowing happened in the last three years. We want to invite the Church to appreciate her heritage without idolizing it. We want to open up a world of passion and truth and make it more that just an archaic curiosity for the religiously sentimental. We believe worship is formative, and that it does matter what we think.

Pretty cool, right? I agree. I stumbled on Indelible Grace while looking for really excellent renditions and arrangements of old hymns. You’d be surprised how few there really are. In fact, if you search for hymns on Amazon MP3, you’ll come up with several thousand results that all sound more or less exactly the same.

Then, while doing my monthly peruse of eMusic (read about it here), I came across Indelible Grace’s Music. I was stunned. They literally have a plethora of modern hymn arrangements, something like 85 of them. While there are a handful I’m really not enthusiastic about (i.e., really cheesy), the majority of them are performed with a great deal of care and, dare I say, relevance.

Most of the arrangements range from mellow indie-folk melodies, to heavier rock, to full blown southern-slide-guitar country. The performers also range from people I’ve never heard of, to bigger names in Christian music, like Derek Webb.

Indelible Grace also makes implementing hymn arrangements into worship services relatively easy. On their website you’ll find pretty comprehensive listings of hymns they perform, as well as lyrics and chord charts for various instruments.

I would very much like to see churches put Indelible Grace’s hard work to good use in their local congregations. Because the words we sing are indeed formative. And, in many ways they do shape our theologies and our ideas about God. In fact, I fairly often hear people quote songs, thinking they’re quoting scripture. If that is the case, then let’s bring real depth and real substance into our songs. Lets sing hymns.

Here are some of my favorite recordings from Indelible Grace Music so far:

O Help My Unbelief
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

Come Then, Lord Jesus
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

Hear Our Prayer (The Litany Song)
Album: Wake Thy Slumbering Children

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go
Album: Indelible Grace Side B

O The Deep, Deep Love of Jesus
Album: Indelible Grace Side A

O Come and Mourn
Album: For All the Saints

Not What My Hands Have Done
Album: For All the Saints

Lead Me On O King Eternal
Album: Beams of Heaven

Jesus Lover of My Soul
Album: Beams of Heaven

Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah
Album: Beams of Heaven

Poor Sinner Dejected With Fear
Album: Pilgrim Days

This list is in no wise exhaustive. There are many other great recordings on these albums, but this list is a pretty good taste of what’s there. If you like what you hear in these, I would strongly recommend you go ahead and buy the albums. You won’t be disappointed. But, good news!

Get Indelible Grace Music for FREE!

I’m probably breaking some rules somewhere, but I just think that this music will be a great blessing to many, so I’m going suggest it anyway.

On eMusic now, if you’ve never signed up, then sign up! They’ll give you 50 songs for free. They’re yours to keep. When you sign up, you’ll have to give them a credit card so that when the month is over they can start charging you the subscription fee, but it’s a trial. So, just cancel before the month is up and it wont cost you anything. But for the purposes today, the trial will get you about 4 out of 6 of the Indelible Grace albums.

So, get on there. Sign up. Download the Indelible Grace Music. Cancel your account right away. Or, keep the service going. It really is great.

Tim Keller, in The Prodigal God, makes uses the story of the Prodigal son to make some telling statements about the church, and us personally. He says this:

“Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches are appealing to the younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think.

Ouch. Dang. Let’s heed that warning.

I was hanging out with a friend of mine this morning for some unofficial bible study. We ended up in James and inevitably we ended up talking about the condition of the church—something we both agree is not in good shape. During the discussion, I got to wondering what kinds of complaints our kids have for the church we, by then, will foster.

Without a doubt, the church in the coming generation will look different than it did in the last generation. People, especially young people, are leaving the church in exodus—not the faith, the church. So, assuming that God makes good on his promises to keep his own, in 40 years, us young people will be in our parent’s position. We will deciding on how things are structured and how they are executed. And just like our parents we’ll probably be taking some things too far and missing the heart of the matter in some ways.

In fact, we’ll probably be doing some things that we don’t even remember why we started doing them in the first place—or at least why we continue to do them. And, like the generation before us, the new eyes reading the scriptures will see the errors that have become invisible to us.

Therein was my question born. When that day comes, what complaints will our children have, what errors will our children see, what reform will they demand? My friend answered clearly in one short little sentence. It hit me hard—almost like he’d actually hit me with something.

He said this: “Why are you so angry?”

Today, perhaps our generation’s frustration and anger with the current church culture is justified, maybe even a righteous anger. But, will we be able to see the errors corrected, then move on in grace and peace? Or will we, like many generations before us, make the good reform a detriment to ourselves.

Perhaps by the grace of God, perhaps through the word,  perhaps by prayer, their question won’t be such a painful one.

I can’t remember where I first saw this video. I imagine I was probably directed to it by a friend. I don’t expect most of you will make all the way it through this video, it’s about 30 minutes long. But, if you will, I think you’ll be moved—probably to emotion, but hopefully to prayer.

Admittedly, this video is not so much contemporary as much as it is kind of cheesy in its production. But, the preachers are speaking of true, God breathed, prayer charged, revival. Something we should all be hoping and praying for.

It’s worth watching.

In Piper’s The Pleasures of God, he quotes Patrick Johnstone. The quotation is profound. I absolutely had to share it. Piper quotes:

“We are being compelled to return to a more biblical and radical position—that of being a minority in the world not of it… The church deprived of political power is free from the burden of trying to use human power to dominate and influence the world… Our reference point is not territorial or church growth aggrandizement, but building a kingdom that is not of this world, yet which will fill the earth as a contrasting alternative society. We need to return to the concept of a pilgrim Church, the church that will be hated, rejected, despised, persecuted, yet be an incisive, decisive, victorious minority which one day soon, will be ready for its heavenly Bridegroom as the perfected Bride.”

Holy crap. Seriously. “The church deprived of political power is free from the burden of trying to use human power to dominate and influence the world” . Lets take a minute and digest that one. I’m not even sure I fully understand the ramification of that idea, however, it’s compelling and attractive and at the same time frightening.

I suppose that should God deem fit to give us political power, it would be a grace that we ought to steward properly. But, it seems that perhaps we haven’t and that grace is being removed.

Years ago when I was leading a small group I can remember several debates in which someone would say, “God can’t… something, something”. It doesn’t really matter what was said. Maybe, “God can’t lie,” or “God can’t be in the presence of sin”. It was irrelevant. What bothered me was the idea that God can’t something. I saw in it people placing restrictions on God.

Who are we to say what God can or can’t do? I preferred to say, “God won’t”.

Today, I understand things quite a bit differently; more correctly. What I was seeing was a box. A structure around God that dictated what he could or couldn’t do. It would be wrong for us to create such walls around him. It’s not our place, and frankly, even if we wanted to, it wouldn’t work. So, in that sense of the phrase, I still agree. We cannot put a box around God.

But still, I always cringe a little bit when someone says “I don’t want to put God in a box”. Because when someone says this, they’re usually saying, in a subtle way they they don’t want to believe in any kind of concrete theology.

But I see now in hind sight that this reveals something about our faith in God. When someone says, “I don’t want to put God in a box”, what they’re often revealing is that they don’t truly trust God’s word. That’s what the Bible is. God’s word. If God has said he “cannot be tempted” (James 1:13), then he can’t be tempted. If my theology then says, “God can’t be tempted”, I haven’t placed God in a box, God has place God in a box (so to speak) and he will not leave that box.

If you see theology as a box man places around God, then there is a good chance you don’t trust that God’s word is his word. And if that’s true, then there’s a good chance you won’t experience the benefits therein.

The past few days I’ve been surfing around YouTube more than usual. Once I got into the rabbit hole (if you’ve ever wasted time on YouTube, you know just what I’m saying), I started to come across some pretty interesting, funny and encouraging videos dealing with the topic of religion, namely Christianity. I thought I’d take the next couple of days to share them.

The first one I’d like to share is a pretty poignant parody of Rob Bell’s Nooma video about the Bullhorn Guy. In so many words, Rob Bell’s original video short directed his speaking to a man with a "bullhorn", criticizing preachers and teachers for holding firm doctrines and for preaching a hard-nosed gospel of repentance. A parody of Bell’s Nooma video was produced, it seems, by some folks at parishnot.com. I can’t vouch for that organization, but I can vouch for the video. It’s both funny and responds well to Bell’s admittedly absent theological ground.

It’s a bit long, about 6 minutes, but worth watching.

Tonight, I went into my parent’s kitchen and found my mother offering some water to a pair of young Mormon missionaries. As I passed through, I had a very brief introduction, then passed into another room where I began to sort of mentally assault them. Consider them scum, worthy of total hatred.

Shortly thereafter, then departed and it all rushed at me. Jesus desires to give mercy. We are in a time of mercy. He hasn’t yet come for judgement and so I should look at those young men mercifully and compassionately.

Unfortunately, it was too late. They had left and all of a sudden conviction set in. There’s nothing that stings quite like the sin of a selfishly missed opportunity.

So, I went and gathered up my Bible and Gospel Primer and went out onto the front porch to meditate and think and confess. As I sat quietly, reading scripture and the Primer aloud, a couple of things dawned on me about the circumstance.

Walking door to do attempting to share your faith takes guts. Frankly, it’s a humiliation to most of the church that an entire band of apostates would act on their faith so diligently as to actually go door to door to the world. While most of the church wouldn’t share it’s faith if the world came to them.

I also considered the likely hood of them actually coming to believe the Gospel. My mental consensus was “unlikely”. Most of the time the door to door people are out on a mandatory two year mission. At that point they’ve spent months and months sitting in intense (bad) discipleship and are generally more well versed in scripture than Christians are.

But my proud thinking hit me. I don’t have to convince them. Is God bigger than their discipleship? Certainly. My duty was to be faithful to the Word of God. Not to carefully assess my success in evangelism based on the hearer.

But my opportunity was gone. I was kicking myself for being so unloving and uncompassionate. I was praying for a second opportunity, mostly out of my guilt. God provided.

They circled back around and I was able to talk to them for nearly an hour. Based on my performance, no converts were made. But maybe, based on the grace and mercy of the Lord Jesus one of my objections and questions will be lodged well enough to crack the stronghold of lies they’re caught in.

If you feel so compelled, you can join me praying for Bret (19) and Mark (23).

I went to church with a friend this morning. After a long time of worship, it was followed by an (extremely) long set of announcements and then a guest speaker taught from Romans 8:15-30 on the necessity of hope in a life of suffering.

He was careful to explain suffering, so that his hearers would understand that suffering is promised, this side of death. Not just righteous-persecution type suffering, but really all afflictions that come forth as a direct or indirect result of sin. We all experience suffering, almost all the time.

He was also careful not to trivialize the profound sufferings of many Christians, persecuted and martyred for Christ.

The gist of the sermon was that the sufferings this life perpetually serves up calls for a constant and steadfast hope in the work of Christ. Not only that, but hope is not something we have to work to muster, but hope, even hope, is a gift given to us from God as a direct result of Christ’s finished work on the cross. He sure, complete, perfect and sufficient work on the cross.

The speaker ended with a quote from The Heidelberg Catechism:

Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death?

Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, (a) am not my own, (b) but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; (c) who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, (d) and delivered me from all the power of the devil; (e) and so preserves me (f) that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; (g) yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, (h) and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, (i) and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him. (j)

“That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ…” Dang. Seriously, dang.

I immediately thought of Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 6:19-20:

“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”

Dang. Dang. Super dang.

Paul’s word’s are, in one sense abrasive. Something like, “don’t you get it? You belong to God. He bought you. You were very costly; Quit sinning! Do your job and honor him!” But when we look at Paul’s other words, namely those in Romans 8, he clearly has another tone which I often fail to recognize:

God made a very expensive purchase, and besides my own regular failure to protect his purchase He intends full well to do so.

This is the theme of Romans 8. “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1)… For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)”

Hope is an absolute necessity in finishing this “race”. But the good news is, God will be protecting his investments and proving all the hope necessary.