Kaleo - College and Career Ministry for the Murrieta - Temecula Valley

The Christmas Song that Jesus Sang

"For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins."

[After the writer of Hebrews explains our need for a greater sacrifice, he gives us a rare glimpse into the communication between the Persons of the Trinity.  He tells us what song God the Son sang to God the Father as he left Heaven to be born as the boy Jesus.  The song was a portion of Psalm 40 (with a significant alteration) that clearly communicated what that first Christmas was all about.]

"Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said,

"Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, 'Behold, I have come to do your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.'"

Hebrews 10:1-7

The Atonement Applied (video)

Enter the Kaleo Atonement Diagram Contest!

On Sunday December 28 we will be finishing up our doctrine series.  That will be  the deadline to enter the Kaleo Atonement Diagram Contest 2008.  

Here's what you need to do for a chance to win.  Draw a nicer version of the diagram to the right.  Each of the four blocks around the cross need to have an image that represents one of the four images of the atonement: Propitiation, Redemption, Justification, and Reconciliation.   If you have been at Kaleo the last few weeks you know what I'm talking about.

Get creative, they don't have to be the same as mine.

Here what you will win: a 25 dollar gift card to It's a Grind or Starbucks (your choice) and a copy of The Mediator by C.J. Mahaney.  Nice, huh?

So get drawing!  You have until Sunday night December 21st.  

"Redemption" by Johnny Cash (Video)

Death by Love

The Cross and Criticism

"In light of God's judgment and justification of the sinner in the cross of Christ, we can begin to discover how to deal with any and all criticism. By agreeing with God's criticism of me in Christ's cross, I can face any criticism man may lay against me. In other words, no one can criticize me more than the cross has."  Alfred Poirier

Read the whole article: "The Cross and Criticism"

Rembrandt's "Three Crosses" (1655)

(click to enlarge)

The Scream of the Damned

Check out this moving letter that Randy Alcorn wrote to John Piper and C.J. Mahaney about his experience at The Resolved Conference (all three spoke there).  You can download the two messages he is talking about for free (Piper's, Mahaney's).  I would also recommend Alcorn's excellent book on Heaven.

CJ and John,

I wanted to send this to the two of you in gratitude (mostly to God, secondarily to you) in particular for the final night of Resolved. I have been moved to tears and deep worship many times, but not in recent memory to the extent that I was Monday night.

Mark 15 and CJ’s “scream of the damned…for us” touched me at a profound level. The Holy Spirit spoke. And though I prayed and knew that John’s message would beautifully end the conference, I was not prepared for the way it happened.

I have never seen, orchestrated or unorchestrated (in this case orchestrated by the Holy Spirit), one single seamless message spoken by two men with nearly an hour between the end of one and the beginning of the other. I stood that night on sacred ground, as did you.

Yesterday early afternoon, in the Palm Springs airport, I opened to Mark 15 and wept again. I then did something I have done only twice before, once on the day my 85-year-old father, in a hospital bed, repented of his sin and surrendered to Christ. The other time when my best friend from childhood died next to me as I was reading to him Revelation 21-22, leaving this world precisely when I was reading 22:17: “The Spirit and the bride say ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes let him take the free gift of the water of life.”

What I did on those occasions was write a date in my Bible: Feb. 9, 1992 at my Father’s conversion, and October 8, 1992 at my friend Jerry’s home-going between “Come!” and “take the free gift of the water of life.” The date is still there beside the verse I was reading when he died.

Without thinking about this, yesterday at the airport I wrote next to Mark 15:34, “June 16, 2008.” Then something else happened. I wrote after the date, “The Scream of the…” And I suddenly stopped, overwhelmed, breathless, pen frozen in hand. Why? Because I suddenly realized I needed to capitalize the word “Damned.” It was physically hard for me to do it. It seemed almost blasphemous…and so it should.

The unrighteous damned have no right to ask God why He has forsaken them (the reasons are self-evident to all who understand His holiness and our sin), but God’s Son the Beloved One had the right to ask, even knowing the answer and having participated in eternity past in the damning decision. He is the Lamb damned before the foundation of the world. So while the (lower case) damned will scream forever, ultimately there is only one Scream of the (upper case) Damned. Unthinkable. Inconceivable. And yet it happened…for us.

A flood of tears came as God preached the message to me yet again. That Deity would be Damned. That the God who is called upon righteously by the saints and angels in heaven to damn people, and called upon habitually by unbelievers flippantly and unrighteously to damn people, would in fact damn his Son, would (from the Son’s willingness to drink the cup) damn himself…for us. That it could be said of the Beloved One, “God damned Him,” and that He screamed the scream of the Damned….it was too much for me. It is too much for me this moment. And in the ages to come it will continue to be too much for me.

The cup of His suffering has long seemed deep to me, but never deeper than Monday night and the two days since.

Thank you, brothers, for being cleansed vessels, usable for eternal purposes. It was not only 3300 students whose hearts were marked for eternity Monday night. It was mine. You are not celebrities to me, but you are my mentors, in more ways that I can express. Thank you.

And thank you, Lord, for these two men, who you used as one on Monday night—guard their hearts and empower them to finish well, bowing their knees to you moment by moment, day by day.

And thanks forever to the One who screamed the scream of the Damned…and whose praises we will sing for all eternity.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Grateful to be eternally undamned by the Damned,

Randy Alcorn

Via: JT

Let Us Look Again At The Cross

Martyn Lloyd-Jones has some wise words for Kaleo:

"Let us look again at the cross. Let us survey it once more.  When a man like the apostle Paul glories in the cross you can be quite be sure my friend, that it is the biggest and deepest and profoundest thing in the whole universe.  A casual glance at the cross is not enough.  The saints of the centuries have been surveying it, they have been looking at it, gazing upon it, meditating upon it. And the more they look at it the more they see in it....You must stop and look, survey, put everything on one side and gaze at it, and don't stop looking at it until you have seen some of these profundities (deep insights) -- or what Thomas Carlisle described in another connection, 'infinities and immensities' -- in this glorious cross."

~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Cross (p 64)