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A week ahead of its U.S. debut, Marvel's The Avengers opened in 39 foreign territories and scored a truly heroic $185.1 million. The movie took first place in all of its markets, and set new opening weekend records in a dozen of them as well.The Avengers had its top start in the United Kingdom ($24.7 million), though that only ranks 16th all-time there. In Australia, the movie's $19.7 million is the second-highest five-day opening ever, while its $15.9 million debut in Mexico is a new record. It also set records in Brazil ($11.3 million), Taiwan ($7.7 million), the Philippines ($6.5 million), Hong Kong ($4.6 million) and seven other smaller markets.While not quite reaching all-time levels, the movie also had very strong starts in South Korea ($12.9 million), France ($12.7 million), Italy ($10.4 million), and Spain ($7.3 million). Oddly, it only opened to $6.7 million in Germany, though looking at past Avengers movie grosses it doesn't appear the Germans are as fond of the team as the rest of the world. Across the 12 markets where estimates are available, The Avengers opened over twice as high, on average, as Iron Man 2, which currently holds the team's overseas record with $311.5 million (a number The Avengers is going to annihilate within the next few weeks). The $185.1 million debut ranks ninth on the all-time foreign openings chart, which on the surface might not look all that astounding. However, it reached that level in only 70 percent of its potential theaters, and it has yet to debut in major markets China, Russia, and Japan. Chinese and Russian audiences get the movie with the U.S. this coming weekend, while the Japanese need to wait until August. Based off this opening, The Avengers could reasonably finish with nearly $600 million overseas, and it could even wind up higher than that.Thanks to The Avengers debut, Battleship plummeted 61 percent to an estimated $23.5 million this weekend. It added $8 million in China and held first place in Russia with $3.2 million (as previously noted, both of these markets didn't have The Avengers). The movie has now made $170.9 million overseas, and should be able to push past the $200 million mark with this batch of territories. The board game adaptation opens in Latin America on May 10, and in the U.S. on May 18.Titanic 3D continued its remarkable run in China by adding an estimated $15.2 million for the five-day weekend. That brings its Chinese total to $126.1 million, which is a little less than half of its $257.6 million overseas total. Thanks to the re-release, Titanic's overall foreign gross has now passed $1.5 billion. American Reunion added an estimated $15.2 million from 41 markets this weekend. In Germany, the movie opened to an outstanding $6.6 million, which ranks second right behind The Avengers. The comedy sequel has so far earned $75.9 million overseas.
In its sixth weekend in release, The Hunger Games earned $7.5 million overseas. That brings its foreign total to $229.5 million, and its worldwide (domestic plus foreign) total past the $600 million mark.Other Notables - Weekend Gross - Gross-to-DateThe Lucky One - $5 - $10.3The Pirates! - $4.8 - $63.2Wrath of the Titans - $2.8 - $208.9The Lorax - $2.2 - $88.2Best Exotic Marigold Hotel - $2 - $69.9Cabin in the Woods - $1.7 - $10.521 Jump Street - $1.4 - $42.2Last Weekend:• 'Battleship' Sinks 'Titanic'Related Charts:• All-Time Foreign Openings• 2012 Worldwide Grosses• All-Time Worldwide Grosses
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Getty Images
Amid reports that Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski may try to practice this week, nearly a month after suffering a broken forearm, he has not practiced yet.
Then again, the week still isn't over.
According to Michael Whitmer of the Boston Globe, Gronkowski is the only player who wasn't spotted at practice on Thursday. He's the only player who didn't practice due to injury on Wednesday, with forearm and hip still being identified as the reasons for his absence.
As Tom Curran of CSN New England said earlier this week on PFT Live, Gronkowski likely will return in the postseason, which if the Pats get a bye will give Gronk another month to heal.
They're doing pretty well without him. When he returns, they'll be even better.

subset: commoncrawl


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EMC revenues explode in Q2
Colossus flops out a stonker
EMC second quarter 2011 results are extremely good with record-breaking, double-digit growth all over the place, and only the Information Intelligence stuff down in the dumps.
Second quarter (Q2) revenues were $4.85bn, 20 per cent higher than Q2 2010's $4.02bn. Net income rose to $546.5m, up a stonking 28 per cent on the $426m recorded in 2010's Q2, signifying that EMC is wringing out more profit from its sales.
EMC is confident about the outlook, suggesting it will surpass $19.8bn for its full year revenues, earn more than $2.44bn net income, and may even pass $28bn revenues in 2014.
Information Storage product revenues grew 19 per cent year-on-year. Within that category Symmetrix revenues, which include VMAX arrays, grew 15 per cent. The mid-tier storage product set revenues grew 27 per cent, with strong VNX revenue growth and more than 600 new VNXe customers in the quarter. Also in the mid-tier, Isilon revenues more than doubled and Atmos revenues doubled.
VMware revenues rose 37 per cent while RSA security revenues rose 13 per cent, respectable although not stellar. In the Data Computing division, Greenplum revenues doubled. We're told there was strong growth in the Backup and Recovery area, although Data Domain revenues were not singled out and identified as they have been in the past.
VCE revenues, gleaned from vBlocks created from VMware, Cisco networking and servers, and EMC storage, were not revealed but we were told that VCE revenues so far this year have exceeded full year 2010 revenues.
A relatively underperforming area was Information Intelligence. As has been the case for several quarters, its revenues of $169.3m represented a relatively flat spot, showing a 5.1 per cent year-on-year decline, although a 5.6 per cent lift from Q1 2011 results. Within that product revenues were a lowly $46.34m while service revenues were $1243m. Documentum, it seems, is in the dumps.
The geographical split was 52 per cent North America and 48 per cent for the rest of the world, with EMEA growing 20 per cent, Asia-Pac 34 per cent and Latin America 43 per cent.
CEO and chairman Joe Tucci said customers were responding well to EMC's big data and journey to the cloud marketing messages. CFO David Golden said EMC was succeeding – again – with its triple play financial objectives: "gaining market share, investing aggressively ... and improving profitability."
What can we say? Apart from the woof-woof from the Enterprise Content Management and Documentum dog, the damn company is a money-making machine grinding out products that customers want to buy. ®


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The "Cobra Spotlight" is a weekly highlight of a student-athlete at Coker College. Each week we take a different athlete from a different sport and display some facets to get more familiar with them. This week we take a look at Ali Ammons & Brittany Burroughs, members of the spirit squad.
Name: Alyssa Ammons
Sport: Spirit squad
Position: Cheerleader/Dancer
Hometown: Charlotte, NC
Year: Freshman
Major: Biology with a pre-medical concentration
Why did you choose Coker? I loved the small-school environment.
What is your best memory at Coker (athletic related)? Basketball games
What is your best memory at Coker (non-athletic related)? The relationships I am making with others over time.
Which athletic team would you play on at Coker other than your own? Women's basketball
Favorite class: Chemistry
Favorite professor: Professor Puffer
Plans after graduation: Go to graduate school and become an anesthesiologist.
Favorite type of music: Alternative
Favorite food: Everything
Favorite color: Black
Favorite TV show: So You Think You Can Dance
Most prized possession: My dresses
What is something people may not know about you? My right pinky was born like Mini-Me's
Do you have a nickname? If so, how did you get it? Ali, because it's short for my full name Alyssa.
One word that describes you: Spunky
Name: Brittany Burroughs
Sport: Spirit squad
Position: Cheerleader
Hometown: Columbia, SC
Year: Junior
Major: Political science with a minor in history
Why did you choose Coker? Coker offered a close-knit family community and small class sizes.
What is your best memory at Coker (athletic related)? When the basketball team won a triple-overtime game against Barton College and we stormed the court.
What is your best memory at Coker (non-athletic related)? I have so many memories, but Bandfest 2013 when the Spiff Kidz performed takes the cake.
Which athletic team would you play on at Coker other than your own? Softball
Favorite class: Constitutional Law
Favorite professor: Dr. Lemke and Dr. Lay
Plans after graduation: I want to attend law school at Denver University.
Favorite movie: Pitch Perfect
Favorite type of music: Anything that I can sing along to.
Favorite food: Pasta
Favorite sports team: Steelers. I literally bleed black and gold.
Favorite color: Pink
Favorite TV show: Pretty Little Liars
Most prized possession: My penguin!
What is something people may not know about you? I am originally from Colorado.
Do you have a nickname? If so, how did you get it? Britt Brat, my sister gave it to me because she said I was spoiled and always got what I wanted.
One word that describes you: Outgoing


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LODI - The mother of a Lodi man implicated in the stabbing death of a Los Angeles Dodgers fan near AT&T Park in San Francisco last week expressed both anxiety and relief Saturday after her son was released from jail.
LODI - The mother of a Lodi man implicated in the stabbing death of a Los Angeles Dodgers fan near AT&T Park in San Francisco last week expressed both anxiety and relief Saturday after her son was released from jail.
Michael Montgomery, 21, returned to Lodi after being set free late Friday night, his mother said. Victoria Montgomery maintained that her son acted in self-defense after being struck with a chair during a melee late Wednesday night, but she said he was saddled with "mixed emotions."
"He's really terribly upset about what happened, but it could have been him who ended up dead," Victoria Montgomery said. "That could have been us having to deal with the loss of a child, and in a way we did lose a child, because he's never going to be a child again after what happened. Just imagine what it's like to have gone through that and have to live with that for the rest of your life."
Michael Montgomery was arrested on suspicion of murder Thursday, a day after Jonathan Denver, 24, was stabbed to death following a game between the Giants and Dodgers. Authorities released Montgomery after San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon asked police to seek independent witnesses and gather more evidence before prosecutors decide whether to file charges.
"We are extremely concerned about the loss of life and want to make sure justice is served," Gascon said in a statement released to The Associated Press. "To meet our ethical obligation in charging this case, we must have a good faith basis to believe we can prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. It is vital for our office to have independent corroboration of the incident."
According to authorities, Denver attended Wednesday's game with his father, who is a security guard at Dodger Stadium, an older brother and two other people. The group reportedly exchanged words about the Giants and Dodgers with Montgomery and his friends a few blocks from the ballpark, leading to a deadly confrontation.
Victoria Montgomery reiterated that her son was not a devoted Giants fan. She said he went to San Francisco to visit a nightclub, not to attend the baseball game.
"The Bay Area news is saying this was a vendetta between two baseball teams, and that wasn't it at all," she said. "He wasn't even at the game."
Montgomery conveyed her sympathies to Denver's family, saying she "wouldn't wish that on any family."
"This is just a nightmare," she said. "It's devastating."
Montgomery said her son was "home safely" and resting Saturday, adding that he is deeply troubled over Denver's death.
"I think he's relieved - really relieved - but at the same time, he's still really messed up about what happened, what he did and what he saw," she said. "How could you ever get that out of your head? It's traumatizing. I'm sure he's relieved that he's not in jail at this moment, but I don't think he thinks it's over, because it's not over."
Denver's father is planning to make a public plea for witnesses at noon today at the ballpark's Willie Mays statue outside the Giants' stadium before the scheduled 1:05 p.m. game against the San Diego Padres. The victim's mother and brother also will be present.
Robert Preece believes someone may have recorded the melee with cellphones, said Preece's sister, Jill Preece Haro.
"We have reason to believe someone recorded this," Haro told The Associated Press, adding that Denver's father and others with him saw bystanders were using cellphone cameras. "We're calling on them to come forward to help both families find out what happened."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Contact reporter Jason Anderson at (209) 546-8279 or email@example.com. Visit his blog at recordnet.com/crimeblog.


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We are happy to announce the arrival of our baby boy - Oskar Coleman Strandberg!
He was born a whopping 9.5 lbs on his due date of Monday, May 4th at 3:39pm. As planned, he arrived at home to his parents who were waiting for him in a pool of water. It was quite an amazing experience. :)
We have a blog where stories, video and pictures are available, please feel free to check at your leisure. We will post periodic updates, but not alert you every time we do so:
We look forward to sharing him with you!
Holly, David & Oskar
Monday, July 6, 2009
2 comments:
MMMM I love big babies. My second was born at home 9lbs 5oz.
I can't tell you how powerful I felt after giving birth to him. No tears! No body can ever tell me what my body can and can't do, ever, again. =)
congratulations to the mommy. She should be proud!
- July 6, 2009 at 10:05 AM
- Thais of Spinach and Honey said...
That's a big baby. Good work!
- July 6, 2009 at 10:22 PM
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Girls on Ice comes to Alaska
Program helps young women
After more than a decade on the glaciers of Washington, Girls on Ice is coming to Alaska.
Girls on Ice is a program in which nine girls spend 11 adventurous days on a glacier with professional women glaciologists and mountaineers. The program is the creation of Alaska glaciologist Erin Pettit, who dreamt up the program not long after she helped lead field trips for inner-city elementary schoolers in Los Angeles.
"They made me realize the impact even a short day hike can have on kids, especially those that haven't had that opportunity with their families," Pettit said.
In the summer of 1999, with help from the University of Washington where she was a graduate student, Pettit organized a trip to Washington's South Cascade Glacier. The program was open to both boys and girls, but five girls were the only ones who signed up. Pettit and her trip co-leader noticed how well the girls interacted in the group and decided to try a girl's-only group. She chose high schoolers because middle-schoolers seemed too young for some of the required hiking, and she wanted to involve girls who were starting to think about their future careers.
Since that start in 1999, Pettit has camped on and explored South Cascade Glacier and Washington's Mount Baker for many summers with a group of nine girls. Participants who are diverse "geographically, economically and culturally . . . over the years I think I've had one of (every type of girl)," she said.
Annie Bartholomew, 21, is a graduate of the program who credits her 2009 experience on Mount Baker as the reason she is now pursuing the study of glaciers and sea ice at the University of Alaska. Bartholomew, who grew up in Juneau, was an intern for Lisa Murkowski in Washington, D.C., when she learned she had been chosen for the program. After flying direct from Washington D.C. to Seattle in summer of 2009, Bartholomew found soon herself in plastic mountaineering boots lugging a 40-pound pack up Mount Baker, a 10,781-foot volcano. During the next 11 days of studying a glacier on the mountain, camping with a group of girls from all over the country and climbing to the top of the mountain, she decided she wanted to combine her love for writing and doing science in exciting places.
"After working at Murkowski's office I thought I wanted to go to law school, but after doing Girls on Ice I learned there was so much more to discover, and the need for someone to communicate science to the public," she said.
"It was such a life-changing experience for me."
"They'll do amazing things if you treat them like adults, trust them and respect them," Pettit said of her students, which now number more than 90 (many of whom still correspond with Pettit via Facebook). "You can go a long way with teenagers if you expect them to succeed. When you do, they have high expectations of themselves."
Pettit and the other instructors of Girls on Ice teach girls how to live safely on ice, roping up to explore areas that accumulate snow and other places where ice disappears. The girls do equations and figure out the health of a glacier just like professional glaciologists. Because none of the girls have experienced life on a glacier before, they all enter a new world for two weeks.
"I'd never even backpacked before," Bartholomew said. "And we taped up our feet beforehand with duct tape (to prevent blisters). That was a crazy experience."
Pettit has withstood the pressures of academia to keep her program alive.
She studies glaciers in Antarctica, Alaska and Greenland and also teaches at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She chose UAF because her supervisors give her the flexibility to get on the ice with students each summer.
"UAF has been fabulous with that," she said.
This summer, for the first time, Pettit has included Alaska in her Girls on Ice plan. She enlisted three Geophysical Institute graduate students - Joanna Young, Marijke Habermann and Barbara Truessel - who are organizing the Alaska version of Girls on Ice. They are still deciding on the perfect Alaska glacier to host themselves and nine girls; they prefer a small one, where the girls can move to different areas and make measurements.
"I'm a little jealous I won¹t get to go, but it would be fun to be a fly on the tent as they teach it," said Pettit, who will again be on Mount Baker this summer for the Washington version of Girls on Ice.
Pettit and her co-instructors are now gathering applications from which they will choose nine girls each for both the Washington and Alaska glacier trips. For the Alaska version, Pettit said they would choose mostly girls from Alaska, but also some from the Pacific Northwest. March 1 is the deadline for applications, which can be found at http://girlsonice.org/.
(This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.)


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Unmarked Grave
b. 12 May 1928
d. 11 Jan. 1929
GPS Location: 33.06566 // -110.74698
Contributed on 5/25/05 by edward.peed
Email This Contributor
Record #: 23270
Thank you for visiting the Arizona Gravestone Photo Project. On this site you can upload gravestone photos, locate ancestors and perform genealogy research. If you have a relative buried in Arizona, we encourage you to upload a digital image using our Submit a Photo page. Contributing to this genealogy archive helps family historians and genealogy researchers locate their relatives and complete their family tree.
Submitted: 5/25/05 • Approved: 5/25/05 • Last Updated: 3/11/19 • R23270-G0-S3


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Reviewed by Katie F. (age 9) and Gina G. (age 8)
I (Katie) love this book because of the creative illustrations. I (Katie) like when Mr. Hartwell said, "Sarah Jane Hartwell, I'm not playing this silly game one second longer. I'll see you downstairs in five minutes." It reminds me of when my mom wakes me up for school in the morning. My mom always says, "Katie, wake up. I'm starting the car and you better be in it in five minutes!" I (Gina) loved this book because I enjoy reading books with surprise endings. I (Gina) loved the part when Sarah said, "My head hurts." She said it so she wouldn't have to go to school. This reminds me of the times I (Gina) tell my mom that my head hurts so I won't have to go to school. Sometimes, my mom believes me and other times she knows I'm faking.
We recommend this book to readers that have jitters on the first day of school and readers who love surprise endings. If your favorite type of book is a picture book, you'll definitely be glad that you picked this one to read.


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The tie ran the Lady Bisons unbeaten streak against North Florida to two games.
With approximately 2 ½ minutes to go in the second overtime the Lady Bisons appeared to have a victory as forward Kate Spellman shot from the left side, hitting the right post. The Lady Bisons attempted to control the rebound for a second shot, but had the ball deflected.
"That was frustrating to have a chance like that," said Lady Bisons coach Jon Ireland. "She made a great cut on the defender, placed it and then hit the post. She was so unlucky. Then we get the rebound and it gets deflected.
"I thought we created some really dangerous scoring chances. They had more corner kicks and more shots, but we had quality chances. We really gave ourselves a chance to win."
The 0-0 tie was the fourth shutout for the Lady Bisons this season. It was also their third shutout in an A-Sun game this season.
"One of the goals this season was to compete better," said Ireland. "Last year we didn't really compete. There were some scores that got out of hand. A lot of times at halftime the game was already over. We have competed this year.
"We have also talked all year about limiting quality shots. In all the games, even the ones we lost, we were so much more organized. That has kept us in every game. We had a very good defensive game again."
Coming off a 2-0 loss Friday night to Jacksonville in which the offense produced only one shot on goal, Ireland stressed the need for more shot production against North Florida.
The Lady Bisons had five shots on goal, two by forward Brandi Besheres. They attempted 11 shots overall.
"Offensively, we are still struggling," said Ireland. "I think that will probably come through recruiting better offensive players."
North Florida had 29 shot attempts with 13 shots on goal.
Lady Bisons' goalkeeper Katie Shelton was credited with 13 saves, adding to her career record in the Atlantic Sun for saves.
The Lady Bisons have two regular season games remaining, traveling Wednesday to Tennessee Tech and closing out the season at home Friday night at 6:30 against Murray State.
Friday will also be "Senior" Night with Shelton and midfielder Sara Green to be honored with their families.
"We would like to have five wins this season," said Ireland. "We are going to take Monday off and regroup Tuesday."
The Lady Bisons are 4-11-3 overall, 2-6-2 in the A-Sun, their best finish in terms of points in the history of the program. North Florida slipped to 6-10-2 overall, 3-5-1 in the conference.


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My husband's grandfather is driving me mad. I thought I'd found him, and his wife Ellen, on the 1901 census.
Aged 28, born Southwark, wife Nellie – which is how she appears on many census entries. But by 1901 they already had their first daughter, Ellen. So where is she?
Some searching found another entry on the 1901 census, for a Robert Ruby (a common mis-spelling), wife Ellen, daughter of 4 months, also Ellen. This is for the Staines area of Middlesex.
This would seem to be the most likely – and I have come across another Robert Reuby who is apparently unrelated. So more for my to-do list.


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Specialized Task Schedulers in .NET 4 Parallel Extensions Extras
.NET 4 offers a default task scheduler for Task Parallel Library and PLINQ. This scheduler uses the improved .NET 4 pool of threads to queue and execute work for tasks and parallelized queries. It is also possible to create a custom scheduler for specific tasks or queries.
However, before doing so, you can consider the 13 customized task schedulers that are part of the most recent version of the Parallel Extensions Extras.
The System.Threading.Tasks.TaskScheduler class represents task schedulers. Its instance represents an object that handles the low-level work of queuing tasks onto threads. Remember that threads support the execution of the new tasks introduced by .NET Framework 4.
The default task scheduler provides an overall good performance and it is sufficient for most scenarios. By default, it considers tasks as short-lived units in order to efficiently support fine-grained parallelism scenarios. These are the most common scenarios for parallel tasks and parallelized queries. However, each task, i.e., an instance of System.Threading.Tasks.Task can also provide hints to help the default scheduler to take better decisions. For example, it is possible to specify that a task is going to be a long running one by specifying the TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning value to its CreationOptions. This value can be specified as a parameter for the Task constructor or the Task.Factory.StartNew method. When the default scheduler retrieves the value for the CreationOptions property and finds this flag, it will work with the task as a coarse-grained operation.
In a previous post, I introduced the Parallel Extensions Extras. These extras provide thirteen additional task schedulers, i.e., subclasses of System.Threading.Tasks.TaskScheduler. These customized schedulers are optimized for diverse scenarios. If you believe that some algorithms that use concurrent tasks would benefit from a specific scheduling mechanism, it is convenient to consider them before creating your own scheduler from scratch.
The TaskSchedulers folder within the ParallelExtensionExtras projects provides the following 13 classes:
- ConcurrentExclusiveInterleave.cs. The ConcurrentExclusiveTaskScheduler class provides a scheduler shim used to queue tasks to an interleave and execute these tasks on request of the interleave.
- CurrentThreadTaskScheduler.cs. The CurrentThreadTaskScheduler class provides a task scheduler that runs tasks on the current thread.
- IOCompletionPortTaskScheduler.cs. The IOCompletionPortTaskScheduler class offers a task scheduler that uses an I/O completion port in order to control concurrency. It is necessary to set the maximum number of threads in the scheduler to be executing concurrently and the number of threads to have available in the scheduler for executing tasks.
- IOTaskScheduler.cs. The IOTaskScheduler class provides a task scheduler that targets the I/O ThreadPool.
- LimitedConcurrencyLevelTaskScheduler.cs. The LimitedConcurrencyLevelTaskScheduler class offers a task scheduler that ensures a maximum concurrency level while running on top of the ThreadPool. It is necessary to set the maximum degree of parallelism desired for this scheduler.
- OrderedTaskScheduler.cs. The OrderedTaskScheduler class provides a task scheduler that ensures only one task is executing at a time. Tasks execute in the order that they were queued (FIFO). It is a subclass of LimitedConcurrencyLevelTaskScheduler that sends 1 as a parameter for its base class constructor.
- QueuedTaskScheduler.cs. The QueuedTaskScheduler class offers a task scheduler that provides control over fairness, priorities and the underlying threads used. It offers many constructors with diverse number of parameters that allow you to control the threads to create and use for processing work items.
- ReprioritizableTaskScheduler.cs. The ReprioritizableTaskScheduler class provides a task scheduler that supports changes in the priorities for previously queued tasks.
- RoundRobinTaskScheduler.cs. The RoundRobinTaskSchedulerQueue class offers a task scheduler that works with round-robin scheduling.
- StaTaskScheduler.cs. The StaTaskScheduler class provides a task scheduler that uses STA (short for Single-Threaded apartment) threads in order to support the execution of tasks. It is necessary to set the maximum number of threads desired for this scheduler.
- SynchronizationContextTaskScheduler.cs. The SynchronizationContextTaskScheduler class offers a task scheduler that targets a specific SynchronizationContext specified as a parameter in its constructor.
- ThreadPerTaskScheduler.cs. The ThreadPerTaskScheduler class provides a task scheduler that dedicates one thread per task.
- WorkStealingTaskScheduler.cs. The WorkStealingTaskScheduler class offers a work-stealing task scheduler. Its default parameters specify twice as many threads as there are processors to support the execution of tasks. However, it is also possible to specify the number of threads to use in the scheduler.
The following lines show a simple example of the creation of a new Task instance, t1, with a WorkStealingTaskScheduler instance, wsTaskScheduler, as its specific scheduler. The constructor for WorkStealingTaskScheduler receives the maximum number of threads to use for the scheduler as an optional parameter. In this case, the code defines the number of logical cores minus one as the maximum number of threads for this scheduler. If you create another Task instance and you don't specify wsTaskScheduler as the scheduler, it will use the default scheduler for the new task. If you want many tasks to use wsTaskScheduler, you have to specify it as a parameter to the Task.Factory.StartNew method.
var cts = new System.Threading.CancellationTokenSource(); var ct = cts.Token; var wsTaskScheduler = new System.Threading.Tasks.Schedulers.WorkStealingTaskScheduler (Environment.ProcessorCount - 1); var t1 = Task.Factory.StartNew( () => RunInATask(), ct, TaskCreationOptions.None, wsTaskScheduler);
Whenever you think that a specialized task scheduler is appropriate for your algorithm that involves parallelism in .NET 4, be sure to check the schedulers that can help you within Parallel Extension Extras. It is very simple to change the scheduler for a task to test the results. However, it is very important to test the results before using a customized scheduler.


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The following sermon transcript does not match the video version of the sermon—it matches only the audio version. Here's a brief explanation why.
John MacArthur routinely preaches a sermon more than once on the same date, during different worship services at Grace Community Church. Normally, for a given sermon title, our website features the audio and video that were recorded during the same worship service. Very occasionally, though, we will post the audio from one service and the video from another. Such was the case for the sermon titled "Losing Your Life to Save it," the transcript of which follows below. The transcript is of the audio version.
One Faith, One Hope, One Lord, words penned by the Apostle Paul, whose model of ministry from one of his favorite books, the Book of Ephesians, Ephesians 4 and 5. We welcome you on a milestone Lord's Day; milestone, the Lord has not yet come. Another week to share our faith with those who are lost. A milestone; another week to worship the Lord in spirit and truth. And a milestone to celebrate the 30th anniversary of John's ministry at Grace Community Church.
We're thankful for God's faithfulness to us and salvation and to us in the pastor and shepherd that he's given to us.
It was February 9, 1969. John and Patricia came to Grace Community Church. He preached is first sermon as the official pastor of the church. They were over in the chapel in a smaller version. The little nursery building had been built. They tell me there were a few chicken coops to finish the architectural tour out in the parking lot, and that was it. And look at what god has done, not in building, but in the lives of people, for which we thank the Lord and celebrate his faithfulness and his blessing in John's life in ministry.
If you talk with John much about the ministry or listen to what he's had to say on multiple occasions, you know that he's frequently said, "I'll work on the depth of my ministry and God can take care of breath of my ministry." And all of that was built on Ephesians chapter 4 verses 11-13. "And he, himself gave some to the Apostles, some profits, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the Saints, for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God do a perfect man to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ."
That's been the biblical foundation of John's ministry and we honor the Lord, we exalt the Lord for what it is that he's done over these past 30 years.
Let's pray together. Father our hearts are filled with gratitude, with Thanksgiving, with Praise. Father may we express now in our worship, our sense of debt, our sense of obligation to you, our sense of deep, deep appreciation for what you mean to us as Savior and redeemer. For the one who's conforming us to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ and promised us that one day you'd come. And we would be called to be with you and be with you forever. Father, receive that that we offer now as acceptable worship in your sight. We pray for Jesus sake and in his name, Amen.
I'm gonna read Psalm 66. Psalm 66, you can listen and follow along as I read. "Make a joyful shout to God all the Earth. Sing out the honor of his name. Make his praise glorious. Say to God, How awesome are your works. Through the greatness of your power your enemy shall submit themselves to you. All the earth shall worship you and sing praises to you. They shall sing praises to your name."
"Come and see the works of God. He is awesome in his doing towards the sons of men. He turned a sea into dry land. They went through the river on foot. There we will rejoice in him. He rules by his power forever. His eyes observe the nations. Do not the rebellious exalt themselves?"
"O bless our God, you peoples and make the voice of his praise to be heard. Who keeps our soul among the living and does not allow our feet to be moved. For you, O God, have tested us. You have refined us, as silver is refined. You brought us into the net. You laid affliction on our backs. You have caused men to ride over our heads. We went through fire and through water, but you brought us out to rich fulfillment."
"I will go into your house with burnt offerings. I will pay you my vows, which my lips have uttered and my mouth has spoken when I was in trouble. I will offer you burnt sacrifices of fat animals, with the sweet aroma of rams. I will offer bulls with goats."
"Come and hear all you who fear God and I will declare what he has done for my soul. I cried to him with my mouth. And he was extolled with my tongue. If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear. But certainly God has heard me. He has attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, who has not turned away my prayer nor his mercy from me."
Join me in prayer. Father we feel like the psalmist, who wanted to come into your house with burnt offerings; burnt offerings of fat animals and rams and bulls and goats just thinking of how lavishly he wanted to sacrifice in acts of worship to you. We bring not animal sacrifices, but we bring ourselves, our songs, our psalms, our hymns, our praise. We come to renew our covenant of obedience. We come to declare what you have done for our souls. We come to thank you for your mercy and Grace. Stream upon stream of Grace and love has overflowed our pathway.
You made us out of nothing and nothing we were in our fallenness. And you recalled us from that far country of sin and judgment. You translated us from ignorance to knowledge, from darkness to light, from misery to peace, from folly to wisdom, from error to truth, from death to life, from sin to eternal glory. O God, we thank you for our high and holy calling. And we bless you for being the giver of all good. We bless you for ministering angels sent forth to minister to us, for the comfort of the Scripture, for the ordinance of the church, for the teaching of the Holy Spirit; his guidance in our lives. We bless you for the communion of saints, for Christian fellowship. We bless you for the history; the recorded annals of Holy lives, who have become patterns and models for us to follow. We bless you for examples of others who, in response to you, have walked obediently and known your power; in whose footsteps we walk.
We thank you that your will is to provide all our necessary provisions, to give us all that pertains to life and Godliness. To grant us all that is necessary to enable us to grow in Grace and to be fitted for your eternal presence. We thank you for Heaven borne faith that granted us a promise of eternal life. Thank you for the new birth and with it that pledge of living with you forever. We thank you that one day we drew near to you only to find that you had first drawn near to us. We ask of you forgiveness, only to find out that you had already elicited the faith in our hearts. We entrusted ourselves to you knowing later that you had already begun to redeem us from sin. We bless you; we adore you - the eternal God for the comfort of all these truths, the joy of all our hopes. We come to add our praise to the psalmists and to all the Saints of all the ages who have glorified you. Hear our praise in Jesus name.
We believe the Lord has been exalted in the history of Grace Community Church. It dates back to 1956. Two couples, Dick and Shirley Smith, Burt and Deloris Mickelson, and others came and settled here on Roscoe Boulevard. For the first 13 years through the ministry of two men: Dr. Don Householder and Dr. Richard Elbey, who it turned out, were literally in the twilight of their ministry. They found themselves without a pastor late in the year of 1968. Had John MacArthur and Patricia and candidate. I think that the candidating message lasted somewhat over an hour and they thought they'd never be invited back again. But they were, and in a sense, the rest is history. God has sovereignly and graciously chosen to pour his blessing out on you as a congregation on John as our pastor, all for his glory.
It would take volumes to record all of the details. If you know anything about Grace Church, it is that it's never the same day-by-day. It's always growing. There's never anything that's repetitive or redundant, except for our love for the Savior and our tenacious teaching of the word of God.
John has been involved in a number of different ministries, any one of which is enough to consume any one individual. And we're gonna ask Matt McArthur, John's oldest son to come and tell us a little bit from his prospective as one who grew up in John's house and who also serves as a board member at Grace to You. Tell us a little bit about the milestones of John as a broadcaster, author, and president of the Masters College.
Thank you Dick. On this momentous occasion it's appropriate to take time out and to give honor where honor is due. Dad, I know you're not fond of accolades, but, being that I am your son, I will take that privilege this morning.
I wanna give two perspectives, if I can, on the ministry that the Lord has given to both you and to Mom over the last 30 years at Grace church. First of all I wanna reflect on your ministry as a board member of Grace to You. And then secondly, as a family member or an insider, shall we say.
Fourteen years ago in 1985 Dad became the president of the Master's College and Seminary. The enrollment today has grown from 285 students to over a thousand; that's a four-fold increase. The majors have increased from 18 to over 50 today. And we graduated nearly 2000 students. Since 1969, over 11 million tapes have been distributed around the world. Radio broadcasts are now heard over 750 times a day. In fact, every hour of every day somewhere in the world the proclamation of God's word is aired. You've written over 70 books. Hard to imagine, Dad, I can hardly read them as fast as you write them. Those books include: The Gospel According to Jesus and Rediscovering Expository Preaching, which most of you don't know this, recent won the Gold Medallion Award. These books have been translated into over 35 languages. You have authored over 110 different articles, and most significantly, recently concluded the MacArthur Study Bible, your life work.
I asked, recently, the leadership of Grace to You to put in writing what the ministry has meant to them. And, if I may, I'd like to read that to you this morning. Ask almost anyone in the evangelical world today who the greatest living Bible expository is, in all likelihood, the reply you will hear, without hesitation, is John MacArthur.
It is certainly true that no one else in our generation has labored so faithfully over a 30-year span to produce such high quality in-depth biblical teaching, covering virtually the entire New Testament, all the while pasturing one congregation. Besides that, he has written dozens of significant books, a series of in-depth commentaries, and a major study Bible. He's been featured worldwide for nearly 20 years on the daily radio broadcast of Grace to You and he is well known for motivating and training other men for ministry. It is clear that if the Lord terries the ministry of our pastor will be remembered by future generations as one of the most significant preaching ministries in 2,000 years of church history.
We, Grace Church, are exceedingly privileged to sit under John MacArthur's teaching. Because a prophet is without honor in his own country, many in our own congregation may not realize years from now what a tremendous blessing the Lord has given us in the person of our pastor. It is good to pause and reflect on these things from time to time so we can give thanks to the Lord.
If I could switch gears for a minute I'd also like to share with you as a family member what I believe has made this ministry, Dad's 30 years of service at Grace Church, so significant. And that is the fact that he has demonstrated in his life uncompromising integrity. Let me put it to you another way. The greatest sermon he's ever preached is his life. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, "Therefore my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord."
Dad and Mom, we, Grace Community Church, and we, the MacArthur family, are eternally grateful for your faithful service and for your long obedience in the same direction. Thank you.
Well, God has done exceedingly, abundantly beyond anything John or you and I could ever ask, or think, I'm sure. Nineteen sixty-nine he started the tape ministry in kind of a fairly amateurish fashion. It was 1971 that a little booklet on demons was published, which wouldn't be his biggest or best piece of writing. It was 1977 that he started on just one radio station. In 1985 he took over as president of the Master's College when it really was kind of in the trough of its experience. In 1986, John became the president of the Master's Seminary and, as you all know, we share your campus, your facility, and have knit our ministries together in a most wonderful way. The attendance was 95 that first year. This spring semester it's 295. Our faculty has grown four-fold, from 14 to 17 in those days. We've graduated 355 men. One out of every six is ministering somewhere outside of the United States in 23 different countries. In America they're in 38 different states and we're looking to graduate 53 more come May.
In the midst of all of that, John's been a Bible conference speaker and has traveled to 38 states in our own nation and to over 20 countries to herald the word of God. But all of that is somewhat secondary to his major focus, his primary love, and what it is that we celebrate today, and that is, 30 years of faithful ministry here at Grace Community Church.
It's hard to believe that John has preached over 2,500 different messages. We were talking in-between the services, probably having preached over 10,000 times in that period of time, which is a lot of preaching. Add to that the 300 bread and cup services that he's presided over here at Grace Church. Not to mention the hundreds of weddings and funerals and baptisms and hospital visits and meetings and all of the rest that goes along with the life of a pastor.
There were several hundred people here when John came in 1969. Over in the chapel today over 7,000 gather in two morning services here in our worship center. The chapel and a little nursery building were the beginning buildings and you can go out and see all the rest that the Lord has built in those years. And today we would welcome a membership of over 4,000, all of that to honor and glorify the Lord. We understand, and John would want me to make it crystal clear, that it is the Lord who, from beginning to end, has sovereignly done this but he's chosen to work through a faithful man; a man who considers holiness of life as the highest priority, and one who supremely believes in the integrity and the sufficiency of the word of God.
The Bible says that we're to render honor to those to whom honor is due. And we believe that today is that particular day. And to do it a little more tangibly, John, if you would escort your lovely wife to the platform we'd like to do just a little more if we could. And while their coming I'm gonna invite Rob Hiberson, whose chairman of our elder board. And Rob, along with, I think, a great deal of help from his wife Dawn, has selected and gift wrapped a present for Patricia.
Well, I must say thanks. This is a beautiful gold necklace that I will wear with pleasure and I will cherish it as a representation of one of the memories we have had at this church with this congregation. Thank you.
Thank you Patricia. No jewelry for John, though. But it is something along the artistic line. And Rob and John Bates are on their way out with it. It is a very very unique picture (and you'll later on wanna take time to examine it thoroughly) that combines all of John's ministry. John is somewhat in the center, the lower left-hand corner is the seminary, the upper left-hand corner are his commentary series (the Moody New Testament Commentaries), to the right, Grace to you the bottom right, the Master's College and in the center, I think you can see the cross that's right behind us; all of that around the core and the hub of the preaching of the word at Grace Church. It magnifies the name of the Lord and the ministry that God's given to John.
Well, this is really overwhelming. I should really be hearing all of this from my casket. You're not applauding my death, are you by any means? I'm really planning on being around for a while but this is really overwhelming and it's such a generous expression of your love. Really, we look at these gifts as just a token of the outpouring of love that we've enjoyed in all the 30 years we've been here. Not everybody, by any means, is so blessed by God as to have a church like this. We have been free of conflict and failure through the years. Maybe the Lord knew we couldn't handle that but God has just poured out blessing upon blessing and you are that blessing. That blessing is people and you have enriched our lives so greatly. Thank you for your prayers and your love and thanks to the elders and everybody who had a part. And thanks to you Dick. God bless you.
I could not help but think if John could hear all of this kind of thing from the casket it would be a greater miracle than the first 30 years. I think I could speak on your behalf, and I know I do for the elders and the staff, that it's been a phenomenal, unthinkable privilege just to be a part and to be a member. To be allowed by God to be a piece of what he's done through Grace Community Church and just to be a part of your life in ministry John. Thank you.
We decidedly and unanimously, as elders, thought there was one man in America who would be the appropriate speaker for this glorious day, Dr. James Montgomery Boice. Dr. Boice is senior pastor of the historic Tenth Presbyterian Church in downtown Philadelphia. If we think we're old at 43, his church was founded in 1829. He's just kind of a young guy there. He's been there 31 years, since 1968. And as you might add up, a year ago celebrated his 30th year of expository ministry at that church. He's also the radio Bible teacher on a Bible study hour, and has been since 1969. He chaired the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, which undoubtedly was the most strategic theological council called in America, at least in this century. And he did that from 1977 until they believed that their mission had been accomplished in 1988. He's been the author of or contributor to over 60 volumes related to Bible exposition and theological subjects. He and his wife, Linda Ann, live near the church in City Center, Philadelphia. They have 3 daughters, 3 grandchildren. James Montgomery Boice could easily be defined as a man who's a staunch defender of the faith. He's an outstanding expositor of God's word. He's also a special friend of our pastor and of Grace Community Church. Let's give a warm welcome to Dr. Boice.
Well, thank you very much. It's a great privilege for me to be here. I've always enjoyed my time at Grace Church. I've been out several times before on, what I think were, significant occasions, but none, of course, are significant as this. So it's, not only a joy to be here, but also a privilege to bring the greetings and congratulations and prayers from our board of elders and the congregation and many individual members who have been blessed by the ministry of John MacArthur over the years.
Whenever I go off to speak we print in the calendar the previous weeks where I'm going so people can pray for me as I go. And we did that a week ago, mentioning that I was going to be here this Sunday for these services. And after our morning service a number of people came up and said, "Please give my greetings to John MacArthur. He probably doesn't remember me but years ago he helped me." And they gave me a variety of stories that literally came from all over this country, some from Philadelphia. I remember one person that had been in Texas at the time and had been blessed by the preaching there and several who have been here as members of this congregation, sat under the ministry, grown under the Bible teaching, and now are with us in Philadelphia. And I imagine it's happened the other way around.
I've had an opportunity this year to speak to pastors in a number of places; encouraged to speak to them about what I consider important, necessary for the pastoral ministry and preaching today. And in several places I've talked along these lines. I've said, "What we need is a recovery of three things: preaching the Gospel, preaching the Bible, and preaching Christ. And I can't think of a ministry that has done that more faithfully, consistently over a greater period of time than that of John MacArthur here at Grace Church. Those three go together. Each one includes the others. Because when you preach the Gospel it comes from the Bible. It's all about Christ and John has exemplified that in what I think is a God glorifying, and certainly much blessed way over the years.
I'm gonna talk about justification by faith, certainly the heart of the Gospel. And, therefore, I think, an appropriate subject for a morning like this. I'd like you to look at Romans 3 verses 21 through 26, which is, you may know, is the initial statement of the Gospel and Paul's writings. Paul begins in the first chapter by talking about a wrath of God being revealed from Heaven. He's shown how that manifests itself in culture. He's dealt with the kind of objections that coming very naturally to our minds when we say, "Well, what you say about the need of a savior is alright for other people but it doesn't apply for me for various reasons." Paul has answered all of those. He summed up our desperate need in the middle of the third chapter, pointing out that none of us are righteous, none of us understand anything about God or spiritual things, and certainly none of us have ever sought God. Instead we run away. But then having shown how desperate the situation is in these verses for the first time, as I said, he begins to unfold the Gospel.
And they go like this, "But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known to which the law and prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ, all who believe. There's no difference. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his Grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus." God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith and his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
Let's take just a moment and pray. Our Father, we know, because we are told in your word, that we are unable to understand spiritual things by ourselves. We have to be taught by your Spirit. And even when we're taught those things, to understand them we need your Grace to receive them into our thinking and our lives so we actually begin to act as Christian people. So as we begin to look at this great text this morning we do ask for the ministry of your Holy Spirit in our midst and we might be given that understanding, which leads to salvation and growth and Grace. And then as we leave this place we might go saying. Yes, from the Scripture, by the Spirit we have heard the voice of God." We pray that in Jesus name. Amen.
I wanna begin by mentioning three books, which I came across a number of years ago; all published at about the same time and in one way or another all stating the same message. The first was by Dr. David Wells. He has been a pastor but he's professor of theology at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, north of Boston. And he published a book called, No Place for Truth. The second book was by colleague, Michael Horton, founder of Pure Ministries, now part of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, and his book was called, Power Religion. And then the third book was by your pastor, John MacArthur, and it was called, Ashamed of the Gospel.
A significant thing about those three books is that they were written by men with three very different kinds of ministries: one, a professor of theology, one a founder of a para church organization, one a pastor. And, yet, they were all addressing what each perceived to be a fundamental need of the Evangelical church, namely that the Evangelical church in our day has become exceedingly worldly, repeating in our time for the Evangelicals much of what happened with the liberal church a generation ago. The subtitles of those three books are even more revealing than the titles because David Wells' book, No Place for Truth, bares the subtitle, "Whatever happened to Evangelical Theology? Michael Horton's book, Power Religion, has as its subtitle, The Selling out of the Evangelical Church. And John MacArthur's book, Ashamed of the Gospel, bore the subtitle, When the Church Becomes like the World.
That's what it really is to be worldly. And what these men were saying, each in their own way, is that the Evangelical church has, in many cases, become virtually indistinguishable from the world around it. And in other cases is in danger of becoming so. David Wells in his book says that the Evangelical church, as he understands it, is either dead or dying as a significant religious force because it has forgotten its theology. Now he's not suggesting for a moment that we are fading away as a sociological presence because Evangelical Christianity is big business. We have big churches, we have large budgets, we sell a lot of products. What he is suggesting is that we are ceasing to make a significant religious impact upon our world because we've forgotten that theology, which is really define Christianity, and, until recently, has set the Evangelical church apart.
Where do we begin when we begin to talk about the essentials of the Gospel? A number of years ago, now, this new organization mentioned here a moment ago, The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, held a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We wanted to discuss the problem as we saw it. We were seeking reformation of the church in our day, beginning with repentance for our worldliness. And we said, "If we're talking about a recovery of the Gospel, where do we begin, there are many aspects to the Gospel? And we said, "If we really are thinking in terms of a modern reformation, which we need, a place to begin is with that fundamental definition of the Gospel that took place at the time of the Protestant reformation. Evangelicals have much in common with those that go by the name of Christian in various branches of the church down through history. We have part of our roots in the early Ecumenical councils that define such doctrines as the Trinity and the true natures of Christ and other things along those lines. But, chiefly, our identification comes out of the Protestant reformation.
Reformers did something interesting in their day, they often wrote in Latin, as you know, and they took one great Latin word, the word, Sola or Solos, it means only or alone, and they coupled it to various doctrines, which, of course, were affirmed by the church. You could hardly pretend to be Christian without affirming them in one sense or another. But insisted that properly understood you had to have those doctrines in their purity, that is, undiluted by the traditions of mere men and women. They thought, for example, a Scripture alone. Their phrase was "sola scriptura." It might by that that the Scriptures were the ultimate authority and utterly sufficient in all matters of salvation and faith and Christian life; Roman church of that day, of course, according to the Scriptures. But what had happened is that the people of the middle ages were ignorant of the Bible. The Bible was not properly disseminated.
The priests didn't understand the doctrines, and so all kinds of debilitating traditions had grown up in the church. And when the reformers came along they didn't say, "Well, you just throw out all the traditions." You can't do that. Anytime you have a service there are certain traditions that you follow, certain ways of doing things. But they said, "You have to understand that the unique authority in the church is the Bible because that's from God. All traditions are merely for man." And so they emphasized that by saying, "sola scriptura," Scripture alone. You can have your traditions but if traditions come in conflict with the Scriptures it's the traditions that must be judged and the Scripture must be exalted over all.
Now they called that the formal principle of the reformation. What they meant by that was, it was the doctrine that gave form or substance to everything else. If you say, "What do we believe about God?" the answer is, "What the Bible teaches. What do we believe about Jesus Christ is what the Bible teaches," and so on. And they called that the formal principle.
But then they had three other doctrines that they put together. And they said, "These are the material principle of the reformation." And, again, they used the word, "sola or solos". They spoke, for an example, of Jesus Christ, and they said, "Solos Christas; Christ alone. Now, the medieval church talked about Christ, of course, but they mingled all kinds of human efforts and human attainments with his work on the cross so that one was said to be saved - not by Christ and his work alone, but by the work of Christ plus the merit of the Saints or the merit of individuals, in one way or another, somehow qualified for salvation.
And the Scriptures taught, according, for the reformers, that it wasn't merely Jesus Christ with whom we are concerned but Christ alone. And so they said, "Solas Christas," you don't have Christianity without it. They went onto Grace. They talked about Grace alone. It meant that God doesn't owe us anything nor can we put God in our debt. God saves us. He saves us by Grace alone. And you don't really have the Gospel without that. And, finally, they talked about faith alone, "sola fide," because they said we are saved, not by faith plus works (leading to our justification) but by faith alone on the basis of which were are justified and then begin to live for God producing works, but it's not part of the justification process.
Now, this is what Romans 3 is all about. There are a number of great doctrines in that passage that I read. And, of course, if we have time for in a series, we talk about each one. It talks about a sacrifice of atonement. For an example, many translations use the word propitiation, and, in that case, I prefer those translations than the New International version, which is the one from which I read. It has to do with turning aside the wrath of God. That's an essential element. We forget it today. Don't hear much about it today because people don't really wanna think about wrath. Somehow it's all right to think about the love of God, and then we talk about the love of God without the wrath of God, we have a truncated God. We've got a reductionistic-kind of theology. God is all of those things and many more besides.
Our great problem is that as sinners we stand under condemnation. We are facing the wrath of God in eternity, and what we need is a Savior who's able to turn the wrath of God aside. That's what propitiation is all about; it's done by sacrifice. The ancients were a lot wiser than we are at that point because they understood what propitiation was. They thought if you did something bad, if there's a God, there must be a God who'll get you sooner or later. And, so, in order not to be zapped by God, at some point, what you had to do is get God to stop being angry, so you made a sacrifice. Now that's the word that's taken over into Christianity but with a fundamental difference. And you and I are not able to make any kind of sacrifice that will turn aside the wrath of God, but Jesus Christ, the Son of God, offered up himself as the sacrifice in our place - that propitiation.
And then you've got redemption. That's the word that B.B. Warfield said is the most beloved term in the Christian vocabulary. And the reason for that is that it describes what the Lord Jesus Christ does for his people. Propitiation, you see, is a term that describes what Jesus does in relation to God the Father. He turns the wrath of God the Father aside by his death on the cross. Redemption describes what he does for us. It's a commercial term. It means to buy out of slavery, to set a person free. So Christians who have been set free by the work of Christ, experiencing that Grace in their lives, love that term. And the way B.B. Warfield proved it, it was the most beloved term in the Christian vocabulary, is by quoting, at length, in one of his addresses the number of hymns and psalms that actually use that word.
And then there's this third great word, and this is the one we're chiefly concerned about, propitiation describes what Jesus Christ does in relation to God the Father, redemption describes what Jesus Christ does in relation to his people, justification describes what God does in relationship to us, and it's on the basis of the propitiation. In other words, Jesus does something that satisfies the justice of God and God as the justifier then acts in justifying those who trust Jesus. Let me give you the definition of justification. It's an important one, each part of it matters. It goes like this; justification is an act of God by which he declares sinners to be righteous by Grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone.
Sometimes you hear the phrase, "Justified by faith," and that's what Luther talked about. That was theological shorthand for the longer definition. Luther said, "That's the doctrine by which the church stands or falls." That doctrine you stand firm - you're a true church. If you lose that, well, you can have all sorts of other things right but you're no longer a true church because you no longer have the Gospel. And if we had said to Luther, "Well, come on, Luther, spell that out a little bit. We hear justification by faith; we also hear justification by Grace. Which is it, faith or Grace?" Luther would have said, "All of the above and this is the definition; justification is an act of God by which he declares sinners to be righteous because of the work of Jesus Christ, because of his Grace and received through faith."
And that was a great discovery at the time of the reformation. And the reason is that in the middle ages everybody worked with the Latin Bible. It had been written, translation by Jerome, lived about the time of St. Agustine at the end of the 4th century and into the next century. And when Jerome was looking around for a Latin word to translate the Greek term for justification and righteousness; the two words are linked, dikaioo and dikaiosyne. He settled upon the Latin term justificare. That's where we get our word justification. But it was an unfortunate translation in this respect. If you take that word justification, justificare, in it's Latin form, and divide it into two parts, you've got justice; a righteousness, on the one hand, and focio facari, on the other, which means to make or to do. We had a lot of these words over in English, justice, obviously, and focio facari has given us factory or something is made and manufacturing, where something's made by hand.
And if you take those two parts of the word and try to understand it that way, as undoubtedly people in the middle ages did, what you have is a doctrine by which God makes intrinsically people righteous. And justification by God is something that occurs at the end of that process because it's only then that God, in all honestly, can say that people are truly righteous. _________ gonna do that, that's good news, even in the form that you had it in the middle ages, where you have sinners who, by taking advantage of the sacraments, can have, perhaps, less sin and judgment now then they would have otherwise. And, who, if they are not yet justified by the time they died (perhaps a few of the saints have been) pass into a period of the afterlife and a form of it known as purgatory, where all of the impurities are burned away and righteousness is actually established. Whether that takes a hundred years or ten thousand years, at the end of which, when you actually finally do become just, you're declared just by God and you pass into Heaven. I guess that's good news, not very good news.
And Luther, above all, didn't think it was good news because Luther was trying to do all that. Luther was a very pious monk. He did everything he was told to do. He struggled with it. He confessed his sin so much that finally his superior said, "For Heavens sake, Luther, go home and don't come back until you have something worth confessing." And the more he confessed his sin, the more sinful Luther realized he was. He said, "Even my repenting requires repentance." And as he struggled with it he said, "I was told to love God but I didn't love God. I actually hated God because not being satisfied to terrify us with the law he makes things impossible with the Gospel. Gospel is supposed to be good news. The law condemns. The Gospel is supposed to announce a liberation and salvation, but if the Gospel means actually having to become that over a period of millennia, perhaps in purgatory suffering the flames of purgatory, if not the flames of Hell, that is hardly something in which I can rejoice."
And he had a great spiritual superior; his name was John Staupitz. He said to him, "Luther, you're destroying yourself that way. You're never going to find peace with that kind of reasoning. What you need to do is study the Bible." And so Luther went back and began to study it and what he found out is that justification in its biblical form doesn't mean a process by which eventually we become holy, but it's an act of God by which he declares us holy and it's instantaneous. And what we say is, "Obviously we must. Well, you know, how can that be because God obviously has to do the right thing. God can't pretend that we're holy when we're not actually holy? How can he declare us holy? We might understand how he might want to. We would like to do it ourselves in the same position. But after all the righteous God of the universe has to act justly." The answer was, "God does it but he does it because of the work of Jesus Christ."
You deserve to die for your sin. You ought to be in Hell for your sin but Jesus Christ has taken your punishment upon himself. And in order to stand before God it's not enough to be neutral, you've go to be holy, but you're gonna be able to stand before God because of the holiness of Jesus Christ. And Luther saw that you have a two-fold transaction there in justification. Our sin is placed upon Jesus and punished there. His righteousness is placed upon us, and in that righteousness we stand boldly before the thrown of Grace. And Luther said, "When I understood that, it's as if the bronze gates of paradise swung open and I entered in." And at that point he was able to go out and was used by God, actually, to be the human instrument that brought about the reformation.
Now that's the Gospel. That's what we need to hold onto. If David Wells says we're forgetting the Gospel, that, above all, is the Gospel we must maintain.
Rudyard Kipling, at the very end of the last century, at the time of the great jubilee for Queen Victoria, was asked to write a bit of poetry about it and he did. And it went like this, at least the first of the four stanzas. "God of our Fathers, known of old. Lord of our far flung battle line beneath whose awesome hand we hold dominion over palm and pine. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, lest we forget - lest we forget." The people of that day didn't like it. It was a great jingoistic period of British rule, the height of the empire. The scuttlebutt of the day is that Kipling lost his chance to be appointed poet laureate because he wrote that poem, reminding the British people that maybe they were forgetting God who had actually blessed them and made them great.
Let me suggest we need to hear that today. This is the Gospel. It is what has blessed the Evangelical church. But let us not forget it because we're in danger of doing it. You say, "How in the world are we in danger of forgetting that?" You talk about Christ alone? You can't really understand that we would forget Christ alone. After all, Evangelicals, above all people, talk about Jesus. We talk about Jesus all the time. Yes, but, even in man-centered age, even in a therapeutic age, sin is no longer for most people an offense against the law and majesty of God. It has to do, more or less, with psychological dysfunction. In a climate like that salvation really is wholeness, getting it all together and Jesus becomes a great example. So we talk about Jesus and his teaching about how to live a holy life and be happy and get along with your family and all of that, but Christ and his work on the cross is pushed aside.
This is one of the things that the Cambridge Declaration said. It had a paragraph that went like this, "As Evangelical faith has become secularized it's interested and blurred with those of the culture. And the result is a loss of absolute values, permissive individualism, and a substitution of wholeness for holiness, recovery for repentance, intuition for truth, feeling for belief, chance for providence, and immediate gratification for enduring hope. Christ and his cross had moved from the center of our vision."
And the sociologist polled the Evangelical community to find out what it is that Evangelicals actually believe about the Gospel. The bottom line in our day is this, Evangelicals believe in God helping us to help ourselves. And to that extent Christ and his cross have been forgotten.
And then we talk about Grace. Reformers said, "It's all of Grace. God doesn't owe you anything." If you talk about that today people get upset because, well, we're living in an age that's focused on ourselves. Obviously, we're focused on our own abilities and, may we say it, our own goodness. We think we're really pretty good stuff with God. And if that's the case then God owes us something. Some years ago Thomas Yancy wrote a book for the Evangelicals called, Disappointed with God." He was really hitting it on the head. I read it and I said, "My goodness, how can that be, that Christian people could be disappointed with Almighty God? But, of course, we are. And the reason is we think God owes us something and he's not doing exactly what we think he ought to be doing in our lives. And so we've forgotten Grace.
One of our theologians wrote some years ago about Amazing Grace. That was the great song of the church a generation ago. That great song, Amazing Grace How Sweet the Sound, written by John Newton; the former slave trader that had been miraculously redeemed. And this theologian said, "In our day Amazing Grace has become boring Grace instead." I recall his writing, right, he said, "You know in a normal congregation today you can engage people in conversation about all sorts of things. You can talk about the budget; they have plenty of opinions of that. And the church expansion, and if you run out of that you can always talk about the stock market or sports or something like that." But he said, "Try to talk to them about Grace. What you'll discover is, not that they contradict you, Christians believe in Grace but they have nothing to contribute. It's just a boring subject to them because, of course, what we're really thinking about is our own merit." The more you press these points, the greater seems to be the similarity between our church today and the church of the middle ages before the reformation.
And then there's sola fe da. Luther summarized it by saying it was the doctrine of justification by faith, because faith was the critical thing. And, certainly, it is in this passage in Romans 3. All of the elements that I mentioned are here because this redemption is by Grace and it comes through Christ Jesus. But faith, above all, is emphasized. The word occurs 8 times there in those 2 paragraphs, beginning with verse 21 to the end of the chapter and then we've got illustrations of it in the next chapter from the case of Abraham and David.
What's happened to faith today? Are we in danger of forgetting that? I think so. Because what we've done is shrink it down to something manageable, that doesn't actually require much of a difference in our lives. That's what John MacArthur was writing about in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. It made a tremendous splash in the Evangelical world and produced an awful lot of anger, because, of course, we've reduced faith to mere intellectual _____________ in many cases. And people who were satisfied with that didn't want to think in terms of actually having to follow Christ as Savior. Got angry and said, "Well, you're preaching another Gospel," but he wasn't doing anything of the sort, he was preaching biblical Gospel. Because what John MacArthur recognized, and a number of us were talking about it at the same time, is this, when you look at a mass of Christians, you find many who are not living like Jesus Christ; their not living like Christians.
And you ask the question, "Why aren't they living like Christians?" The answer is what John said in his book. He was courageous to say it. The answer is, "Because they're not Christians." You say, "Well, you know, we came down an aisle, you know, when we're 13. Of course we've lived like the devil ever since. We got to the point we wanted to be respectable. We don't show it too much but, you know, we made a profession, and that was mere intellectual dissent." And those are classic reformers. I always said there were three elements in biblical faith. First, the element of content; you have to have that. The word for it is no te sia. In the classical theology it means what we mean by a notice or notification. It involves information and they said you can't have Christianity without teaching. You have to teach the Bible. You have to go out and proclaim Jesus Christ.
In the middle ages that was the big problem because, of course, there was very little knowledge and people asked the question, "If you're to be saved by faith and you don't actually know what it is you should believe, how do you exercise the faith?" And the Roman church answered, "It's by an implicit faith." What they meant by that is, you don't understand what the doctrines are but the church does so you just trust the church implicitly. And Calvin said, "That's pious nonsense." People aren't saved that way. It's like a man who was being interviewed for membership in the church. He came before the board of elders and they said, "What do you believe?" He said, "I believe what the church believes." And they weren't quite satisfied with that so they said, "Well, alright. But tell us, what does the church believe?" He said, "The church believes what I believe." They tried once more. They said, "Alright, but tell us, what do you and the church believe?" He said, "We believe the same thing." And we have a lot of people that are like that today. They don't understand the doctrines. They don't study the Bible. They don't know what it really is to be a Christian. You have to have no te sia.
But then they also said, "It's more than that because the devils understand that. The devil's a better theologian than you are, and he's not a Christian." What you also have to have is agreement. The word they use for that is, assen ses; it's just like our word assent. You consent to it. You say, "Yes." And some would say, "I think John Pipart is one. He's got a good emphasis here." That also involves, what we would call, falling in love with Jesus Christ and loving God and desiring to glorify God. All of that's an important element. Calvin said, "You know, it's not enough to have the doctrine simply sitting floating around in the top of your brain. They have to sink down to the point where they take root and begin to grow in your heart."
With just even that is not the fullness of salvation because faith in the biblical sense involves, not only the content and agreeing with the content, it also involves that moment when we make a personal commitment to Christ. When we trust him as our Savior because, of course, he's the one about whom the Gospel is all about. So it's like a marriage service.
You've had a couple that have gotten to know one another - that no te sia. They've fallen in love; that's a census. But then the time comes when they stand before the minister and exchange their vows. And that what happens spiritually. It's as if Jesus (the bridegroom) who has courted us when we were fleeing from him and won us through _______ by his love. First of all expresses his vow for us. He says, "I, Jesus, take thee sinner to be my disciple and I do promise and covenant before the Heavenly Father to be thy faithful Savior, bridegroom and Lord. In plenty and in want, joy and in sorrow and sickness and in health for this life and for all eternity." And we come to that moment where we look into his face and repeat the words after him. "I sinner, take thee, Jesus, to be my loving Savior and bridegroom and Lord and God. I do promise and covenant thee for God the Heavenly Father to be my loving and faithful disciple in plenty and in want and joy and in sorrow and sickness and in health, for this life and for all eternity." And, God, the Father, who is conducting that service pronounces us joined to Jesus Christ forever. We came into that service as a sinner, we go out as Christian. We bare his name and now we have to bare it faithfully before the world.
And I do want to add one more illustration. Because the problem with that, of course, is that in a marriage we always bring something on both sides. A husband contributes, the wife contributes, but not in salvation. We contribute nothing. We have nothing to contribute. It's all of God, it's all of Christ, it's all of Grace, and it's received by faith alone.
The Apostle Paul talks about it, in terms of his own experience, in Philippians 3. You all know the passage. He says, "Before I was converted, if anybody had a reason to boast, certainly I did. I was circumcised on the 8th day. I'm the People of Israel, I'm the tribe of Benjamin, A Hebrew of the Hebrews. In regard of the law, a Pharisee. As for zeal persecuting the church. As for legalistic, righteousness, thoughtless, or whatever it was to my prophet, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ." That's a very understandable illustration, using a commercial image. He's saying, "Before I met Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus I had a great big line down the middle of my life and over on this side I had assets and on this side I had liabilities." The word here is profits and loss. And he said, "The way I thought you got into Heaven was by getting more under the column of assets than in the column of liabilities. Doesn't everybody naturally think that way, even today? I'm a good person. When I get to Heaven I'll say, "Well I did so and so. You ought to take me into Heaven." Paul said, "I don't know about everybody else but if anybody had it made I did because, look at all those things. All those things I inherited simply because I was a Jew within the covenant People of Israel, and, more than that, all the things that I acquired for myself. I was a Pharisee - I was a zealous Pharisee. I was blameless so far as the keeping of the law as concerned as I understood it. And it was in that kind of self righteousness that I was out persecuting the church. I'm the son of God."
And then the time came on the road to Damascus when I saw Jesus Christ and his glory and Paul would say, "I learned two great lessons on that road. First of all I learned what I saw what real righteousness was that all these things I've been accumulating would never in a million years add up to holiness. I could have gone through purgatory forever and I would never be holy like Jesus Christ. I learned righteousness ____________, and secondly I learned this, not only didn't add up to righteousness, they weren't even assets. They were actually liabilities because what I was doing was trusting those instead of trusting Christ. And what happened on that road to Damascus, I took that whole column of assets and I moved them over into the column of liabilities because that's what they really were. And under assets I wrote, Jesus Christ alone. Because he's the Savior and he's done it all and there's nothing that you and I can add to it and if we think we can we don't have the Gospel and if we preach it we're not a true church."
And we have to get to that point where we say as Toplady did in our great hymn, Rock of Ages, "Nothing in my hands I bring. Help us look to thee for Grace. Naked, look to Thee for dress. Foul, I, to the fountain fly. Wash me Savior or I die. Rock of Ages, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in Thee. And those who do that are those in whose life God has done the miracle of salvation and we're going to spend eternity saying Jesus Christ alone. Amen?
Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for the Gospel. We thank you for its clarity, its purity. It is so easy to understand, in spite of the fact, that we come to it with all the distortions and prejudices of a simple secular world. And, our Father, grant in our day that as here, also in many other churches throughout our land, we might hear that again. And you might be pleased in our time for your mercy sake to grant us a new reformation. Amen and Amen.
I remember reading a number of years ago a book that was written about churches and they chose our church for one of the chapters in which they defined our church as, "A classroom church," was the term heading up the title, and that we were basically a church that was consumed with the idea of refining Bible teaching. Well, that is true, we are committed to Bible teaching. What you heard this morning is really the heartbeat of this church. This is a church that is committed to the preaching of the true and pure Gospel of Scripture. That has always been our passion. That's why our church as grown. That's why we have seen so many people come to Christ through all these years. The ringing message from this pulpit is what you heard this morning; the clarity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is what we preach and what we will always preach. I trust in God's hand we'll always be upon that Gospel and he will bless it.
I thank Dr. Boice for that tremendously rich word on this - the very core, the very heart of our faith; the doctrine of justification. As I said, nothing is more important than this in our church and nothing is more important than this in any other church. If we lose clarity and understanding of the doctrine of justification we lose the Gospel. That was a great, great word and we're so grateful for it.
Again, my thanks to all of you for 30 wonderful years. Word of special thanks to my dear wife, Patricia, what a treasure, God's perfect choice for me. She knew exactly what I needed and she is the perfect compliment to make this ministry what God has seen fit to do with it. And my thanks to my children and my children-in-law and to grandchildren and cousins. A lot of them were here in the first service; aren't here in this one, but thanks to all of them for enriching my life so profoundly with all their love. And a special word of thanks to my Dad, who's here this morning. Mom is missing. She went to Heaven two weeks before this occasion - three weeks, I guess, now. And would have loved to have had her here. There's a little tribute to her. You can read about it in this morning's Grace Today. But it's great to have you with us Dad. I want you to come up and close in prayer. Would you do that?
I need to say about him, the things I learned from him are what I carried into ministry. He's been on the radio how many years? Fifty six. Fifty-six years. Still on the radio every week. Was on television for many years. I think probably 20 or 30 years. Wrote all kinds of books. I'm just sort of following on in the way he taught me. Lead us in prayer. Let's stand.
Our wonderful Lord how wonderful it is that we will stand in thy presence. Not clothed with any righteousness of our own because we have none. We're clothed with a pristine, pure righteousness of our matchless Christ. How wonderful to know on the basis of that imputed righteousness we are accepted in the Beloved. How we thank thee for the message we've just heard, which reiterated once again what the Gospel is - justification by faith in the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ plus absolutely nothing. And now may the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ - the love of God, the Father, the communion, the fellowship of the blessed person of the Holy Spirit. Rest and abide upon every life in divine presence now and forever more. Amen.
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