Author: Silva

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”  We’ve all heard that and none of us with any age believes it.  It’s a rabble-rousing adage the young toss around to each other to confirm themselves in their youthful ignorance…Or is it?  Most common sense wisdom like this has roots in truth – maybe not unassailable truth, but kernels of truth nonetheless.

I do have a dog and she’s not a pup.  I should test the theory to see if I can teach her something she doesn’t know.  Maybe, however, God made dogs hard-headed in their age to teach a point to their masters: some things are more easily learned and assimilated when we’re young.

I think we could probably tease out the truth of this.  Marriage is more easily fruitful and joyful when it is begun at a younger age (there are so many lessons to learn!  The young have the resiliency).  Parenting is also more fitfully begun and done at a young age (how many of us have seen bedraggled grandparents raising children?).  Military service is definitely for the young (believe me!).

It is also true that the young haven’t had the time to develop the hardness of heart that comes from the vicissitudes of life: hard knocks produce hard skin, to be sure.  Richard Baxter explains that age wars against willingness to submit to and follow Jesus Christ:

Age itself has many inconveniences and youth has many great advantages: and therefore it is folly to delay.  In age, understanding and memory grow dull and people grow incapable and almost unchangeable.  We see, by our every day’s experience that men think they should not change when they are old; that opinion or practice in which they have been brought up they think they should not then forsake.

Besides how unfit is age to be at that pains that youth can undergo?  How unfit to begin the holy warfare against the flesh, the world and the devil?  God’s way is to [en]list his soldiers as soon as may be when in youth; but the devil will persuade them that it is yet too soon; and when he can no longer persuade them that it is yet too soon, he will then persuade that it is too late.

What advantage has youth; they are not rooted and hardened in sin nor filled with prejudice and obstinacy against godliness, as others are.

Do you believe that as you accumulate life experience – hard life experience – that those lessons will more incline you to follow Christ?  I should think not.  Why, after you’ve endured those difficult experiences (in your mind without the help of God) would you then turn to Him?

Friend, it just doesn’t work that way.  Turn now and live.

Pastor Gabe

Callouses on your soul.

If anyone works in the yard for an hour or two and then washing his hands knows: the constant working reveals a hardening of the skin at the base of the fingers.  Throw in some time changing a water pump in car or stacking some wood that’s been split and those hard spots get harder.  Eventually, as we know, the callouses form.

The more pressure we put on our hands, the greater likelihood that callouses will develop.  It’s not an evil result of some sinister yard-god but the simple reality of friction.  If you work with your hands, and you do so vigorously, eventually callouses will develop; count on it.  If callouses prevent you from doing other things, like holding your wife’s hand or driving, then the only way to safeguard those things is to keep from the activities that cause callouses (or wear gloves!).

Unfortunately, we don’t consider the cause-effect action on our souls that regular disobedience to God brings.  Particularly, if you’ve never considered the eternal impact of your soul’s allegiances, you aren’t too bothered by letting it be ravaged – and ravaged it is.

Baxter reminds us that those who don’t believe in and follow Jesus Christ are facilitating the regular hardening of their souls that will lead to eternal loss:

Consider also that sin gets daily victories by your delay….It conquers our persuasions and advice; it conquers all the stirrings of your consciences; it conquers all you heartless purposes and deceitful promises.  And these frequent conquests strengthen your sin and weaken your resistance and leave the matter almost hopeless….So when all means have been tried with you and yet you are unconverted, the case draws towards desperation itself: the very means are disabled more than before; that is you hearts are harder to be wrought upon by them….And it is these very same means and truths that you have frustrated that must do the work or it will never be done.

Friend, stop callousing your soul and turn to Jesus Christ without delay.

Pastor Gabe

What is the cumulative effect of procrastination?  Apathy?  Antipathy?  I think the latter.  Baxter’s comment today has to do with what happens when a person refuses to forsake his sin today believing that there’s more time tomorrow.

The longer you stay [away from  Christ] the harder it will be.  If it be hard today, it is like to be harder tomorrow.  For as the Spirit of Christ is like to forsake you for your willful delays, so custom will strengthen sin; and custom in sinning will harden you hearts and make you “past feeling to work all uncleanness with greediness.

Isn’t it true that what you procrastinate and put-off today, gets harder to do tomorrow?

Every moment I fail to do a thing is an investment in the bank of antipathy: I can’t morphs into I won’t.  And, as long as I won’t, that drive gets stronger day-by-day.  For what is good enough to put-off, can get put-down or put-away (e.g., New Year’s Resolutions).

Man is a remarkable creature in that through his gifts of sense, he would disregard the clear and urgent call of his Maker to repent and believe and be set free.

Do not put-off today what you may not find tomorrow.

Pastor Gabe