Note: The recorder's battery died so there is no audio recording of the sermon. The manuscript is available, however.
You all know the name of Lewis Carroll. Before writing Alice in Wonderland, Carroll lectured in mathematics at Oxford. To people of a certain cast of mind (few of whom attend this church), some of his best work comes out of the union of his nonsense side with his mathematical side. I speak, of course, of his textbook on Symbolic Logic. That book contains 60 problems in symbolic logic. I bring this up because our text this morning is arranged rather like one of these Lewis Carroll exercises in logic, where premise is heaped upon premise and it is left to the reader to put the premises into a logical order and divine the conclusion. Carrol, for instance, gives us this:
All writers, who understand human nature, are clever; No one is a true poet unless he can stir the hearts of men; Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet"; No writer, who does not understand human nature, can stir the hearts of men; None but a true poet could have written "Hamlet."
According to the answer key, the conclusion from these five premises is the very boring "Shakespeare was clever."
Well, we have a similar problem in symbolic logic before us this morning, but its conclusion is spelled out: Strive to enter God's rest. Nonetheless, we are going to spend some time studying the premises and discussing their implications for us; next week, Lord-willing, we will return and speak more directly about the conclusion of the premises. Today, I hope to show you that the premises add up to this: Now is the time to enter God's rest.
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Caleb Nelson grew up in Ft. Collins, CO. Born into a Christian home, where he eventually became the eldest of 11 children, he has been a lifelong Presbyterian. He professed faith at the age of six, and was homeschooled through high school. He then attended Patrick Henry College...