Practical Theology

Your Weakness is God's Greatest Gift

2012-01-19T18:16:00.000-08:00

Your weakness is God's greatest gift to you. Let me tell you why.

A pastor who I listen to a lot says (jokingly) that he prays for his enemies to get really drunk and start confessing all of their sins in public places. Now he doesn't really mean this, but the thought behind it is golden. Can you imagine standing in front of all your family and friends and owning up to your deepest darkest sins? The stuff that no one knows but God? The stuff that you're trying to pretend isn't even there? That's a terrifying thought, and it should be.

Sometimes I feel so guilty about my sin (as I should) and I look around at everyone else and see holy smiles and pious countenances and figure "Man, I must be a pretty vile guy!" But you know what I've learned? First, it's true: I'm a pretty vile guy. But second, the holy smiles and the pious countenances are all fake! Everyone is putting on a show, even those who seem to be the holiest and the most moral. And if I'm honest, I'd admit that I put on a pretty good show too. On the inside, each of us are pretty vile guys/gals. Some of us are just better at hiding it. And hiding your sin and your weaknesses is one of the most dangerous things you can do as a Christian.

As I've grown in grace and learned to be more open and honest about my sins, my struggles, and my weaknesses, I've found out that everyone else around me has the same doubts, fears, sins, and temptations. As a matter of fact, there's not a sin that I've confessed or a weakness I've dealt with that someone else I know hasn't struggled with as well. The same is certainly true for you as well.

Confessing our sins and admitting our shortcomings is good for at least two reasons. First of all, it shows us that we are not alone in our struggles and trials. God has given us churches and the Christian family to encourage us. But realizing that everyone else is like us isn't going far enough. In fact, there is a danger in realizing that everyone else struggles with the stuff we do and then thinking we are off the hook. That's a form of self-justification that runs from the cross. Secondly, confession strips us bare of every attempt to be good on our own. When we confess, we are admitting defeat: not only the defeat of giving into sin, but also the defeat of our own attempts to change ourselves outside of the power of Christ. And when we do that, we are dealing with the fact that our best attempts to save ourselves are insufficient and our own power is stunningly scrawny. And that's when we are forced to run to Jesus and rest in His power. But when we are weak, He is strong. As He himself said, "my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor. 12:9). The funny thing about being at the end of your rope is that's where Jesus shows up.

Confession is the act of dealing with the truth about ourselves. In confession, we look at ourselves through God's eyes and bite the bullet of reality. Here, our pride and our self-sufficiency melt away. And that would be a scary thought if it weren't for the cross. Because of the cross, we can be radically honest about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. Jesus took the shame and bore the wrath for us of every sin we've committed. Seen through God's eyes in Christ, we are perfectly just and vindicated. Because of Jesus, we are perfectly loved. And that's the only reason why we can be radically honest: because we know that God loves us unconditionally! If you know nothing can drive God away from you, then you are free to be radically honest, and that's a very good thing! (Rom. 8:38-9).

The same pastor tells the story of how he once had a summer lifeguarding job. One problem a lifeguard can have is when someone much bigger and stronger than he is starts drowning. You can't go and save them because they will pull you down with them! So what do you do? You wait until the guy has given up and is about to go under, and then you rescue him. Only when he's given up on his own efforts to save himself can the lifeguard go and save the drowning man. That's what Jesus does to us. In fact, those are the only terms He will save us on. We would do well to remember that.

Thanks to Steve Brown and Key Life for the examples!

Love is a Battlefield

2011-09-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

Pat Benatar once sang "Love is a Battlefield." That's a truth that anyone with any human relationships can easily relate to. And this is true for all kinds of relationships, from platonic friendships to family ties to romantic relationships. Love is indeed a battlefield, but I don't think we recognize how true those words really are.

Relationships are tough for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of one major reason: Satan is the god of this world, and the world is under his dominion. After the Fall, humanity was under a curse, the curse of sin. And this curse of sin frustrates the way of peace and harmony that the world was meant to function in. For that reason, loving someone is hard. It's a battle, a battle against sin, Satan, sickness, painful circumstances, bad habits, disease, hurt, and wrong done to you.

It's interesting to notice, however, that when we think of the fight of love, we imagine it being against the things "out there." Sure we see love as a battlefield, but we see it as fight against things done to us, circumstances set against our will, and the sin of other people. And that's often true. I think that's what Pat Benatar had in mind in her song. Imagine all the teenage "Romeos and Juliets" out there standing tall against parental pressure or other situations that keep them from being happy together (insert generic RomCom or Taylor Swift song). But what's more certain is that what stands in the way of healthy relationships with other people is the curse found within us. It's the sin, selfishness, and ego inside our own hearts that that provides the most difficulty to loving each other well. And that's the reality that we are far too quick to forget.

What keeps us from loving well are the dark passions and desires of our own heart. More times than you and I can count, if we are honest, we have caused devastation to someone else because of our own selfishness. We want to be vindicated, proven valuable, and have our own pleasures provided for. So we manipulate, maneuver, and control others until we get what we want. In so doing, we put ourselves first, and what's so scary is how easy it is to do and justify. Without noticing, the whole thing has come undone.

Most of us, at some level, recognize this. The question, then, is how do we deal with it? What do we do about it? How do we crucify our selfishness? Well the answer, I think, is twofold, and really just collapses into one Person. The first step is to realize how and why we manipulate relationships to get what we want. In various ways, our selfishness is always seeking to neutralize our insecurities. This, of course, is personality specific. We are each insecure about different things. The guy who doubts his value might seek a dream girl with an impossible checklist to match, while an insecure mother might control her daughter so as to force her love. The second step is to realize that all of these needs are met in Jesus, and we gain access to that by repenting and trusting in Christ. In Jesus, we have been proven valuable by His death on the cross. In Jesus, we have been loved, and loved perfectly and eternally. The call here is to be satisfied in Christ. And when that happens, we begin to seek to control and hurt others less and less, because we satisfied with God's provision and love. This is the only way to find peace in relationships.

Love is a battlefield...and the battle that needs to be fought is against you. The biggest obstacle in your relationships is you. The biggest hindrance is what you want and what you think you need and what you will do to get it. This comes from a mind set on you, rather than a mind focused towards Christ.

But love is a battlefield...and that battle was already fought and won for you. We would do well to remember that.

Weakness Leading to Holiness: 2 Corinthians 12:1-10

2011-06-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

This sermon was delivered on June 26th, 2011

12:1 "I must go on boasting. Though there is nothing to be gained by it, I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. 2 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. 3 And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— 4 and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. 5 On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. 6 Though if I should wish to boast, I would not be a fool, for I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me. 7 So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 10 For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong." (2 Cor. 12:1-10, ESV)

1. The Description of Our Weakness
-I don't know very many of you
-but as a person raised in the church, one thing I know is that all of us in here are or
have been or will be beleaguered by weaknesses
-I've seen all types of weakness in the life of the saints
-elderly people struggling with all sorts of diseases
-people going through financial hardships, esp in this time
-someone in this room is going through some type of unemployment
-some of you are struggling in relationships right now, maybe marriage or maybe
friendships
-some of you just don't feel like you have enough
-in fact, weakness and suffering is as certain as death and taxes in the Christian life
-Jesus promised that there would be suffering of many types
-so what does this passages teach us about it?
-first, Paul doesn't tell us what his problem is...that's strange?
-why? well I'm not sure...nobody can really tell what the thorn in v. 7 actually was
-but what does this tell?
1. because it remains anonymous, it remains accplicable to our lives
2. this shows God's richness and wisdom
-second, it's not sin
-God always grants requests to break free from sin
-Paul prayed for that here
-well, what is it?
-in v. 10, Paul defines it for us:
-insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities
-note: insult denotes someone being proud around you and injuring you
but we take this b.c God in Jesus has already taken it for us
-note: calamity here indicates literally the metaphor "between a rock and a hard
place"
-it means you have no where to go
-what do we do when we find ourselves in these kind of situations?
-we fret, we worry, we become restless, offended, etc.
-when we are insulted, we want to strike back (Piper)
-when we are between a rock and a hard place, we want to get out
-but usually there is nothing we can do; the damage has been done
-essentially what we want to do is make the situation right
-literally, we want to justify ourselves
-we want to correct the insult, fix the financial situation, save our marriage,
cure the disease
-and far too often we want to do it on our own..this is the situation we find
ourselves in

2. The Source of Our Weakness-If you've been struck with affliction for very long at all, the first thing you begin to do is
ask the question "why?" and esp. "Why for so long? I understand for a little bit, but why
for so long?"
-Maybe you've been out of work for a significant amount of time now...6 months, a year,
2 years? and you want' to say how long o Lord?
-well that's exactly what Paul said: v.8 three times I pleaded, take it away!
-Paul, stuck with a thorn in the flesh, prayed, not once, not twice, but three times
-if he asked three times, im sure he was wondering how long
-it's natural to want to ask this question
-we live in a world cursed by sin...not supposed to be that way
-but hidden behind the question "how long?" is another more deeper question: "who's
behind this?"
-cool illustration?
-see v. 7-->messenger of Satan
-see v. 7-->was given
-it was given by Satan, under the sovereignty of God
-this is the way in your life too-->Satan is responsible for the evil, but God is not out of
control
-this is not to say that God causes evil...God and testing trials?
-theodicy of the cross (Ferguson)
-apply it to you life
-so how does this comfort you? b/c God is behind it, working it for good
-if your friend is behind it, you know you can rest easy, no matter how hard it is

3. The Reason for Our Weakness-but I still haven't answered why God lets it go on for so long
-well let's look at the passage itself!
-I think far too often when we examine this passage, we think God doesn't give Paul an
answer to the question: why?
-but He does...in fact, He gives three...lets look at them

1)First, and most obviously, Paul says that it is because of his pride that the affliction is
given
-see v.7-->the messenger of Satan was sent to keep Paul from being conceited
-now in this case, the reason is obvious...God had taken Paul and given him a vision far
more magnificent than anyone else had seen
-the natural inclination of the human heart is to boast in the cool things we've done
-have you ever wondered why so often in your life, when you've done something
awesome and great (in work or at home), that soon afterwards you mess up real bad?
-that's not a bad thing...that's a good thing...that's the grace of God
-its b/c Jesus is wanting us to see that we don't trust in the stuff we do but we trust in
Him
-when you are weak, when you are broken, when you are dejected its hard to take
refuge, rest, and boast in the things that you do
-you can't be proud when you are broken
-u see ur need of Jesus when u r broken
-now some of you may be dealing with weaknesses that don't seem to have any
connection to pride problems in your life
-maybe you've lost your job, but you were never excessively boastful or proud about
work
-well, sometimes its just hard to see why God does what He does...must trust Him
-but the point is that in one way or another, God is removing reliance on the things of
this world and replacing them with reliance in Him, in many different ways and means

2). Second, look at v.9
-when Paul asks the Lord to take his affliction away, Jesus simply answers "my grace is
sufficient for you"
-now that's quite a strange answer, until you realize exactly what the Lord is saying
-when Paul pleads "take it away!" Jesus answers "I have given you grace"
-more specifically, Jesus is saying "I came and lived a perfect life and died on the cross
for you so that you could rule and reign with me"
-more specifically than that, Jesus is saying "I love you."
-so when Paul asks why so long, Jesus responds "I love you."
-when you plead to the Lord over the weaknesses and struggles in your life, His answer
is always this: "I love you."
-now that seems strange, and I know what you are thinking..."If He loved me, then He
wouldn't put this burden on me"

3) But on the contrary, and thirdly, let's finish v. 9-->"my power is made perfect in
weakness."
-what does that mean?
-when Jesus says "His power is made perfect" He certainly doesn't mean that His power
is imperfect...that would be ridiculous...Jesus is God!
-so what does it mean?
-the Greek word here translated "perfect" actually means more along the lines of "being
made complete" or "finishing" or "reaching a purpose"
-let's reread the verse now "My power reaches its purpose in weakness"
-now that is really groundbreaking!
-it is through the weakness, suffering, pain, and failure in your life that God's purpose
comes about in your life
-you see, God values your holiness more than He values your comfort or earthly
security
-it is as if God is an artist, and you are the canvas, and he paints a beautiful picture
using suffering, pain, weakness, and calamities
-and what is His purpose?...see 1 Thess 4:3: "this is the will of God for you: your
sanctification"
-now the word 'sanctification' simply means this: making you look and act more and
more like Jesus
-God's will for your life then, is holiness!
-through suffering and weakness, God is testing you and refining you and getting rid of
all of your impurities
-remember James 1:2-4: "count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various
kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let
steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in
nothing"
-through weakness, God makes us strong in HIm and makes us look more like Him
-and that gives us reason to boast!

4. The Solution to Our Weakness-so we've seen now the definition of our weakness, the source of our weakness, and the
reason for our weakness. Finally, we find the solution to our weakness.
-the way I see it, there's two solutions to our weakness and suffering offered in this
passage, which in the end turn out to really be just one.

1) First, and most obviously, is prayer-see v.8-->"three times I pleaded with the Lord about this"
-Paul prayed to the Lord, and he prayed continually
-now here's what's peculiar-->Paul prayed 3 times, but we don't ever have any record of
God taking this away from him
-I'm sure all of you at one point or another have prayed and prayed and prayed for
something or someone, only for your desire not to be met
-maybe that desire still hasn't been met, and you think your prayer is useless.
-but the reason Paul prayed so much isn't b/c He didn't think God couldn't hear him...He
did! God knows everything
-the reason Paul prayed so much is b/c God wanted Paul to feel his weakness and
inadequacy!
-think about it...if we are honest, I'd bet that none of us in here pray as much as we
should
-as a matter of fact, we usually just pray when we need something or when we've
exhausted all other options
-prayer becomes a last ditch effort and a measure of desperation
-now a lot of us are ashamed when we realize that...I only pray when I'm absolutely
desperate
-the correct response, however, is not simply that I just need to pray more
-the correct response is: I need to be desperate more!
-the problem isn't that we don't pray enough...the problem is that we aren't desperate
enough and that we don't realize our inadequacies enough
-prayer comes naturally from a desperate heart
-remember 1 Thess 5:17-->"pray without ceasing"?
-the only way to do that is to live in a continual state of need and inadequacy before the
Father, realizing how much we simple just cant do
-paulson desperation models the Christian life

2)The second "solution" to our weakness is Christ's all sufficient grace-let's return again to v. 9 "my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in
weakness"
-what is Jesus saying here? what does it mean?
-three things:

1)Jesus gives us little daily mercies and graces to get through tough and difficult times
-these come in many forms, from a kind word from a friend, to a meal, or to
preaching, baptism, and the Lord's Supper

2)As we have already seen, His grace is working to make us look more and more like
Jesus
-concentrate on "for"
-part of God's gifts and grace is hardships, for that is when He is loving you the
most and changing your life the most

3)Resting in Jesus above all else
-recall that I said in weakness, we try to justify ourselves?
-when we are insulted, we want to quip back
-when we suffer, we desire not to be weak
-when we suffer calamities, we just want to get out of it and find shelter
-the truth of the matter is, however, that in Jesus we already have that shelter
-when you are insulted, know that Christ has spoken for you
-in Jesus we have already been justified!
-when you are sick, know that Christ is healing all sickness and is one day giving you a
new body
-when you are unemployed, know that Christ is bringing you into His riches
-when you are in a bad marriage, know that Christ has provided a marriage with Him
-know, that His grace is sufficient
-the call here is to rest in Him...to find our all and all in Jesus and our identity and
meaning and purpose
-it is to trust in what He's done for us, rather than in our next paycheck or in our own
strength
-it is to let go of the idols of our heart and look to HIm
-and we find this in looking to the cross
-this is where His grace is most gloriously displayed...at the cross
-you are saved, you are not the same as you used to be, and you are heading to
heaven, trust in that! and in all the promises of God...set your heart upon these
things and and lean on that with all your might
-not to say that these troubles here are not real or important
-and it's not to say that you shouldn't fight the bad things in your life like disease
and unemployment
-just to say that Jesus is so much better than that
-and it's to say that your future is so much better in Jesus
-when we do this, we begin to trust less and less in our own power and might, and trust
more and more in desperate love on the promises of God
-and when that happens, then we can boast in weakness
-in closing, John Newton's hymn "Prayer Answered by Crosses"

I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;
Might more of His salvation know,
And seek, more earnestly, His face.
’Twas He who taught me thus to pray,
And He, I trust, has answered prayer!
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.
I hoped that in some favored hour,
At once He’d answer my request;
And by His love’s constraining pow’r,
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.
Instead of this, He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry pow’rs of hell
Assault my soul in every part.
Yea more, with His own hand He seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe;
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.
Lord, why is this, I trembling cried,
Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
’Tis in this way, the Lord replied,
I answer prayer for grace and faith.
These inward trials I employ,
From self, and pride, to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou may’st find thy all in Me.
We would do well to remember that.

Finding Your Identity in Christ: Colossians 3:1-11

2011-06-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

This is the full text of a sermon I preached on June 12, 2011:

Please turn in your copy of God's Word to Colossians chapter 3, v. 1-10. Before we begin tonight, I want to take just a few seconds to thank this congregation for everything it's done for me over the past 8 years that I've been a member here. I first of all want to thank you for the opportunity to work with your youth for the past two summers. It has been a great ministry experience, and I thank you for your generosity. Second, I want to thank you for the love and support and wisdom that you've given me over the past 8 years. The love of God's people is always essential to spiritual growth (that's why coming to church is so important!) What you see tonight is really just a product of this church's efforts, prayers, and love. I am forever indebted.

The Apostle Paul, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, writes:

3:1 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your [1] life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: [2] sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. 6 On account of these the wrath of God is coming. [3] 7 In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self [4] with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. 11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, [5] free; but Christ is all, and in all." (ESV)

Let's pray.

"Gracious God and Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to worship you tonight. We pray for blessing upon your Word. Forgive the one who teaches, for his sins are many. Help us to see Jesus and Him only. In his name we pray, Amen."

Introduction

Ever since I've graduated college, I've started to notice the strangest thing about myself. Maybe at some point you've noticed it about yourself as well. I am, without a doubt, becoming more and more like my father. I look like more and more like him every day. To this point I've even noticed that I've started dressing like him. I watch the same movies, appreciate the same things, listen to the same music, tell the same jokes, and I even sound like him. Relatives can't tell us apart on the phone.

Now this might seem strange for a 22 year old to have the qualities of a man over twice his age. But, if you're honest, most of you out there can attest to the same thing. As a matter of fact, this process is natural, all too natural. Perhaps you've noticed that every now and then you'll catch a little of your mother or father in you too. The thing is, I don't try to be like my dad. It's not like I get up every morning and say to myself, "Self, be like dad." No! It's simply just natural. And if you're in Christ, the process happens in much the same way. And that's what I think Paul is trying to tell us here in Colossians 3: that discovering your true identity changes you.

To that effect I have three points that I want to make tonight, all concerning the Christian's identity and how that changes us.

1. What our identity is not:

Did you know that you are suffering from an identity crisis right now? Most, if not all of you, don't actually know who you really are! And if that's true (and it is) then you are most likely often deeply frustrated with the daily dealings of life, whether that be family, school, or work. Why is that? It's because we are attempting to define ourselves and satisfy our deepest desires outside of Christ.

Think about it. What does it mean to define ourselves? How can we tell our true identity? What makes Brian "Brian," and what makes you "you"? Many people go on all kinds of self help and spiritual journeys trying to "find themselves." We see it all the time on daytime talk shows. But what is our identity? Who are we?

Basically, our identity is found in the thing that makes us feel good about ourselves. It is the thing that we use to justify ourselves to the rest of the world. It is the thing which, when we are examined, we point to to say that my life was worth living.

That means that its different things for different people. For some, it is work or job (doing well at work gives you a reason to live). For others, its school (getting an A makes you feel important). For others, its their athletic ability (preforming well on the football field makes shows that their life is valuable). For some, its romance (living for a husband, wife, or significant other gives us meaning).

Essentially, our identity is what we love the most. It gives meaning to the story of our lives. Notice what Paul says in v. 5: "put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry" Here Paul is listing a set of sins. Notice, however, that they are not "things" or actions that you do. Sexual immorality is not an "action;" it is the condition of the heart that causes one to break God's law. Impurity is not action, it is a mindset that causes you to sin. Passion and evil desire are the root of sin, not the angry words we said to our spouse this morning or the actual lie we spoke. And the root of all of this, says Paul, is covetousness, which is idolatry itself! So what does this mean? It means that the problem with sin is not so much what we do as it is what we love. By nature, we love our false identities, whatever they may be, and then those things come to define us. They r the things we latch onto to find meaning and significance.

That's why it often feels like death when we lose our idols, and in part, it's because it is like death! If we've made an idol out of our spouse, when they don't serve us properly, then we get angry and furious. If we've made an idol out of our work, we feel absolutely terrible when we screw up or fail. And when we make an idol out of our athletic abilities, we break down when we drop the pass or miss the kick. Oftentimes we'll just cover it up with lies or facades. How many times have we seen a professional athlete or actor go delusional when their world falls apart? That's why Paul sneaks in admonitions against anger and lies, which seem kind of out of place here. See v. 8: "But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth." When our identities are shattered, we get angry, furiously angry. See v. 9: "Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices." When our false identities are shattered, we lie to cover it up and maintain just a little sense of worth.

Now don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that there isn't God ordained joy to be found in work or marriage or sports or school. There is. Enjoy it, for it is good. What I am saying, however, is that we must not make these things ultimate. They must not become fake identities.

2. What our identity is (in Christ):

So how do we fight this? Where do we get real meaning and identity from? Well what is a Christian's identity? There are three things to look at quickly here, but I wish I had more time.

A. You have died

Look at verse 3: "for you have died." It is a well known fact to you that as a Christian, the old self has been killed with Christ on the cross. You have died in Christ. That's what we symbolize every time we baptize a new believer. When they go under the water, they die to their old sinful selves. That's why we talk about being born again. Jesus, talking to Nicodemus in John Ch.3, spoke about the necessity of new birth. You've got to be born again.

So what does this mean for you? It means a lot of things. It means that you are free from the power of sin (more on that later). It means that you are not the same person that you used to be. It means that you will be with Christ in heaven. But here, for Paul in this passage, it means this: that you are dead to your old identities. No more are you to associate yourself and gain your meaning out of "earthy things." No more are you to seek significance out of spouses or jobs or whatever else you might find. Why? Because that stuff is dead. It leads to death, it has no good road. And you are dead to it. You are cut off from it, and it doesn't have to define you anymore. Your old life and your old identity is gone. You don't have it anymore.

B. You have risen

So where do you get your new identity from? Where do you find your meaning in life? Quite simply, in Christ. See v. 1: "if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God." Now this is a marvelous truth! We all know that we are dead to sin. In sin we have died and are deserving of the punishments of hell. Without Christ, we would be condemned to eternal torture and separation from God, no matter what way we chose. But in Christ, we are risen. We are free from the powers of sin, and we are free to be children of God and bask in His love. So what does this mean for you? It means this: that your identity is found only in that you are risen and in Christ! You are not primarily mother or father, you are risen in Christ! You are not daughter or son, you are risen in Christ! You are not a teacher or a student, but you are risen in Christ! You are not a welder or a mechanic or a banker or a doctor or husband or wife. you are risen in Christ.

That's why Paul says in v. 11: "there is not Greek and Jew, circumscied and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free." He says this because in the presence of Christ, we are no longer defined by nationalities or things that we do. Who we are is defined by this simple fact: that we are risen in Christ.

C. Your life is Christ's

Paul continues to confirm this fact in a grand crescendo in v. 3-4. Here he says three incredible things. First, in v. 3, your life is hidden in Christ. What does it mean to hide something? If I hide my Bible in this pulpit, what do you see? Not a Bible. All you see is a pulpit. In fact, you don't even see a Bible there at all. All you see is a pulpit. It's the same with our life in Christ. We are now one with Christ, sharing all of His benefits and enjoying His salvation. When God looks at you, he sees only Christ. Your life, identity, and meaning is so wrapped up in Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross that it begins to define who you are. I am no longer just Brian the youth pastor and seminary student. I am Brian, the redeemed and saved in Christ, child of the living God.

That's why Paul can say in v. 4 that our life is Christ. In fact, he says it just like that: "When Christ, who is your life..." Because we have died, we have no life. There is no life in our false identities. There is no life in the sins and sinful desires we pursue. There is no ultimate life in putting all our eggs in the basket of our jobs or our relationships or money. But there is life in Christ. There is meaning in Christ. There is purpose in Christ. In fact, in Him is the only meaning and truth. Finding our meaning in Christ is the only pathway to any future.

And what is that future? Look at v. 4: "when Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. Quickly, let's note two things. First, our final future destination is being with Christ. If that is the future to which we are heading, we might as well now begin to center our lives on the reality of that truth. If Christ is our life in the future, He should be our life now. Second, so many of us spend our lives trying to get some type of glory. It could be as grand as winning the NBA championship, or it could be as silly as having a nicer car than the neighbor. But either way, when we seek glory, what we are really seeking is meaning and significance. But Paul says you don't do it that way...you do it God's way. We will finally receive glory when Christ comes again and makes all things new again. And then we will find our meaning in Christ.

3. How This Changes Us

So whats the beef with all of this? How does this change us? Remember my opening illustration, about growing to look like my dad by simply being my dad's son? It's the same way with us and Jesus! You are God's child. You are his beloved. You have been showered with wonders of love and grace. Your best friend came to earth, shed His glory, and died on a cross to set you free. You have received a new life, a new calling, and a new identity in Him. And you've received a new future in Him as well. He has your identity.

So how does this change us? By calling us to simply look to Him. Meditate on God's love for you. Ask Him to reveal more and more of it. Marvel at the fact that your life is now hidden in Christ's, who is sitting beside God the Father! Thats what this whole passage is saying: set your hearts and minds on Christ, Who is above, and Who has done so much for you. Rest in him, and stop running or working or calling or trying or thinking or worrying and simply rest, just rest! Stop trying to define yourself with everything else, and define yourself in Christ! Don't seek the things that are below..they are of no value to you! You are in Christ, and your life is hidden in Christ, not what you do! Rejoice in the reality of God's goodness to you in Christ. Find your meaning and identity in Him, and stop trying to find it in the things of this world. Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light His goodness and grace. We would do well to remember that. Let's pray.

Am I a Preist, Levite, or Good Samaritan? The Answer May Surprise You...

2011-06-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at church our congregation watched a 12 minute modern day interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan. In it, a deacon and a youth worker pass by a beaten and bloodied elderly gentleman on the streets of a non-descript American city and do nothing to save him while a (presumably) Arab taxi driver cleans the man's wounds, drives him to the hospital, and nurses him back to health.

Seeing it portrayed in a modern context catches some of the grittier details of the story that we are wont to forget. Recall that in v. 29 of Luke 10 that the lawyer questioning Jesus is really just attempting to "justify himself" against the requirements of the law. Jesus had just told him that the law was to love God with everything and love your neighbor as yourself. Obviously, if the lawyer had any sense (and he did), he quickly recognized that he hadn't lived up to that standard, so he attempted to narrow the group of people which he was responsible to love, in the hopes of maintaining his self-righteousness.

Yes, this story is about helping others in need. Yes, this story is about loving God and loving people. Yes, this story is racial equality and reaching out to those who may be foreigners in our country. But it's also about something else. Watching the film, I realized what a pain it would have been for the Samaritan to stop and help the man on the road to Jericho. In the film, the taxi driver had to halt his shift (which meant losing a considerable sum of money). He had to go help an unknown old man (which was awkward and uncomfortable). He had to clean the man's wounds (which was gross, bloody, unsanitary, and dangerous). He had to drive the man to the hospital (which incurred more financial cost). Then he had to wait overnight in the hospital (which put everything else on hold). In the original parable, the Samaritan paid for the man's healthcare costs (imagine doing that today!). Overall, it was a tall order to fill.

The final impression to be taken away, however, is that I would never end up doing what the Samaritan did. Most of us would just have called 911 and left it at that. Maybe we would have cleaned his wounds, but we probably would have looked for someone else to take responsibility. Maybe we would have even taken him to the hospital, but we wouldn't have stayed overnight, and we certainly wouldn't have put him on our insurance!

The answer to the Jesus's question "who was the neighbor" is so obvious (even the lawyer knew it) that we usually just assume that, given the situation, we'd do exactly what the Samaritan did. But if we assume that, we are telling ourselves lies and missing the point. Remember that the lawyer was trying to justify himself. He thought he had been loving to his neighbors. But then the Lord told the story of the Samaritan, which deflated the lawyer's pride and self-righteousness. In a sense, the story is ridiculous. What normal person would go to such heights of love? Yet this is what is required of us! When we realize that, we also begin to realize that there's no way that we can ever fulfill the law! In reality, we should identify with the priest and the Levite, and not the Samaritan. Once we see that Christ has done so much to secure our salvation despite our own failings, we begin to love God and love people more. And then and only then do we find the power to become little Samaritans in our own world. We would do well to remember that.

Post-Memorial Day Reflections

2011-05-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

This weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and maybe your church reminded you of that with patriotic decorations, songs, and themes this Sunday. The point of this post is not really to comment on that one way or another. Suffice it to say that there’s been a lot of ink (real and virtual) spilled on that issue. Rather, I just want to delve into the motivations behind why we so often find ourselves singing “God Bless America” in our churches and “Amazing Grace” at our political rallies.

1) The church (especially in the West) has almost always been tied to a political entity

For most of the church’s existence (with notable and large exceptions), it has been tied to geo-political entities. This has been both a good thing and a bad thing. During the Old Testament, the church (Israel) was a definite political entity. It was one nation. After Constantine, the church became an official and crucial part of the Roman Empire. It remained so for the duration of the middle ages and well into modernity, even today. Many European states, including the United Kingdom, continue to maintain a state church.

2) At certain points, the church was meant to be tied to a political entity

The title of point two might seem a little deceptive, but it is true. Israel (God’s Old Testament people) was its own distinct nation. As such, the people of God were defined by certain ethnic and political features (including their election). From its very inception, Israel was meant to be a theocracy run by God.

3) The church longs for political realization

Why do we struggle so much with the church foraying too far into the political arena? This is a problem not only for conservative churches but liberal ones as well, maybe even more so. One obvious reason is that some seek worldly power and glory. But another complementary reason is that part of the ever-present longing of the church is to see the promises of Revelations 21 and 22 fulfilled. The power needed to accomplish such a task, however, is both spiritual power applied to the political realm. Part of the promise of Revelations 21 and 22 is indeed political. The church, however, presently lacks this capacity, so it often (wrongly) turns to the current political realms.

4) What this means for the church today

I think that this means that while at times the church has been a part of the political order and will one day soon be ruled politically by Christ, we must not now seek identification with the current political powers that be. Certainly we should work for the betterment and welfare of nation we find ourselves in and win their lost. Furthermore, we should oftentimes support the policies and direction of our nation. But we should not seek union with them or incorporate the myths of civil religion into the gospel. The powers and principalities of the world cannot save us. Only Christ can. We would do well to remember that.

Why We Can Dance

2011-05-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

"In His presence there's a joy, there's a sweet release
Where grown men become boys with a brand new lease
On this life that is a gift from a Father to His son
An inheritance of love where all that's ever said and done
Is in His presence where guilt and shame have no place
Where the children are forgiven and they finally see His face
And all that they can do is sing to Him -- sing and play and dance in His presence" -Buddy Greene

If we’re His, we can dance. Let me tell you why. If we belong to the King, then that’s the ultimate thing that needs to be said about our identity. Maybe we are a father, or a daughter, or a postman or engineer. Maybe we are single, maybe we are married or engaged. Maybe we are rich, or maybe we are poor. Maybe we are smart or not so bright. But none of this compares to being found in Christ. As a matter of fact, the deeper we grow into the reality of His saving grace, the less and less we care about trying to define ourselves in terms of anything other than our identity in Christ.

Why is this? Because our identity in Christ is such good news. In Christ, we are heirs with Christ (Romans 8). What does this mean? Quite simply, it means that we inherit all good things. If you have been saved from sins, promised eternal life in a perfect world, have fellowship with God, communion with the saints, and eternal joy, what else could you want? How does your 401k or net income measure with that?

Even more, living in the reality of the Kingdom and Christ’s finished work for our sins, we can therefore risk. It becomes easier to admit when we are wrong, because Jesus’ blood has covered that. It becomes easier to cope with failure, because Jesus’ blood covered that too. It becomes easier to repent, because we know we are already covered and there’s nothing that can drive us away from His love. It becomes easier to live in relationships, because our selfishness is crucified and we gladly forfeit whatever “rights” we have here in favor of coming future grace. It becomes easier to make decisions, because we know that being sanctified has a higher priorty for God than making the “right” decision. Living as a citizen of the Kingdom allows us to live freely for the King.

In short, we can dance. We can sing, and sing loudly. We can play and be creative in a world where if we fall, we know God will catch us in His grace provided by the atoning sacrifice of Christ. So dance, and dance for the King and be creative in His world and bring glory to Him. We would do well to remember that.

Living in a New Reality

2011-02-10T15:51:00.000-08:00

But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen." (1 Timothy 6:11-16, ESV)

While I know better, I always implicitly think that sanctification is all about me doing things better. I am a gossip, and in order to live a more Godly life, I have to stop lying. This in itself is not misleading. It's true...in order to be more Christlike, I need to stop gossiping. But if that's all I get, then I've got it wrong. As it were, to borrow from a friend, I'm just stapling on fruit of the Spirit to a body that really isn't more sanctified than when I started. While doing things better and living by the law is certainly a desired result of sanctification, it isn't the mechanism by which we get there.

So what is? How do we become more Christ-like? Well, I don't have all the answers, but this I know is integral to the whole enterprise: living in a new reality. By acknowledging the kingship of Jesus, we also acknowledge that the world we now live in runs by different rules and realities. In the above passage from 1 Timothy, Paul exhorts Timothy to be good: to pursue righteousness, love, faith, godliness, and to fight the good fight of the faith. But attaining these things doesn't simply mean we try harder next time we fail. That's legalism and self-righteousness. What informs, drives, and fuels our quest towards sanctification is actually our love towards Jesus and what He's done for us. It means living in the new reality that He's given us.

Notice what Paul says. Immediately after telling Timothy to be good, he then tells him to take hold of the reality of his eternal life, provided for by Christ. The Greek here indicates that to "take hold" of eternal life means to posses it or own it. I don't know about you, but being told that you will live forever in peace with God and man has a way of changing one's perspective on life. If you really rest on the promise of eternal life, then you start living a different way. You begin to live as a subject of the King Who has both graciously saved you and Who will judge you as well. That changes things. For example, if I know that I have eternal life and that God in Christ is making all things new, then the things of this world grow strangely dim. This new reality begins to eradicate the old idolatrous one that kept telling me to gossip. Someone who truly understands the big picture of God's redemption doesn't gossip anymore because gossiping begins to seem like a silly thing to do when God's grace is so much better. It loses its appeal.

Again, notice that Paul calls Timothy (and us) to live in the new reality that Christ is coming again (verse 14). The problem with you and me and our indwelling sin is not that we haven't tried hard enough to get rid of it or that we're not sorry enough for it. The problem is really only that we don't fully believe and trust the promise that we have eternal life and that He is coming again. We don't fully believe that He is the only God, Who has saved us. It's not a matter of effort, but a matter of trust.

My own immediate personal reaction to this is actually dangerous. If I'm told that I don't have enough faith or trust, then the first thing I want to do is to try really hard to get more faith and trust. But that's actually just me trying hard again and relying on my own power. What I really need is to hear the old, old story again. I need to be told of God's steadfast covanental love over and over again, in sermon and song and book and sacrament and relationship. And through these things, God through His Spirit begins to change my heart into one that trusts His. And then we start to look more like Him. And we shouldn't worry too much that we never have enough faith. Sure, it is sin, but the promise of Scripture is that we don't become perfectly like Him until we get into the New Creation. Rather, our honest cry should be that of the father in Mark 9: "I believe; help my unbelief!" He died for that too, and He'll bring us home in spite of it. We would do well to remember that.

It Runs in the Family

2011-01-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

Have you ever wondered what God meant by the refrain "I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me" (Ex. 20:5, ESV)? What does God mean when He says He will punish multiple generations for a sin they did not even commit? Isn't that unfair?

I doubt very much that it is unfair. It is God's prerogative to punish sins as He chooses, and since we are all in a state of sin, we are all under His judgement, and His judgement is just. We don't get a vote. So if my great-grandfather committed adultery 100 years ago, am I to be punished for that?

Maybe that's the case, maybe it's not. But perhaps another way to look at it would be in expanding our understanding of judgement. In his book "What's So Amazing About Grace," Phillip Yancey tells the story of a grandmother, a mother, and a son, all in the same family, and all struggling with the sin of bitterness. As a young child, the grandmother had grown up in a family of negativity and bitterness. In turn, she had become bitter towards her father, who was oppressive, hateful, and left the family. Resolving not to make the same mistakes with her own kids, the grandmother raised the mother and never left the family, but still cultivated the same environment of hate and spite in her own family. Reacting against the grandmother's abuses, the mother vowed to do things differently, but when her son turned out to be a deadbeat, she refused to love him and became bitter towards him. The grown up son repeated the same mistakes.

The sin of the grandmother (and her father) was passed down to the mother and eventually to the son, and onwards. The sin of spite and bitterness ran in the family and infected it like a disease. For the sins of the great-grandfather, the third and fourth generation had been punished. But not by fire and brimstone. Rather, their punishment was something just as bad, if not worse. It was God giving them over to their own sinful desires, and this is one of the most virulent forms of judgement. And we deserve it.

Sin and judgement can often times run in the family. Your and my idols are likely to be the idols of our families stretching back generations, and this is natural under the curse. The good news is that this makes them easy to identify and that we are not alone. The bad news is that self-awareness is not enough. Self-awareness must be combined with faith and rest in the One who can break the cycle. And through growth in Him, we will by His grace. We would do well to remember that.

Why Taylor Swift Gets It (Almost...)

2010-12-25T21:07:00.001-08:00

Every popular artist or franchise not only produces good art but creates a culture. Jimmy Buffett produced timeless hits while creating a "parrothead" culture that goes along with the hits. The band Tool has almost cult-like fans, or so I'm told. Movie series like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings create sub-cultures too, whether its going to Comic-Con or dressing up like a first year at Hufflepuff. It's the same way with Taylor Swift and all of her fans, and I think there's a good reason why.

I'm man enough to admit it. For Christmas I got Taylor's new album "Speak Now." To my credit, I didn't ask for it. My brother gave it to me as a gag-gift of sorts. At the risk of losing my man card, I'll admit that I listened to the entire album today. And at the risk of being permanently humiliated by men everywhere, I'll even admit that I liked some of it. And of course, I'm not the only one. Everyone from little middle school girls to college graduates (and even college-aged guys) seems to be traveling Swift-ly on the Taylor train. But why?

The reason why is that Taylor understands something fundamental about human nature and incorporates it into her songs. What she gets is that everybody (in the case of her audience mostly girls) has a deep heartfelt need to feel desired, loved, and wanted. I don't think anyone could dispute this, but for good measure let's look at Scripture. In Ephesians, Paul writes that husbands should "let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband" (Eph. 5:33, ESV). Here Paul points out that since men and women are wired differently, each is made to feel the wonders of covenant love in different ways. Notwithstanding the different approaches, the end result of the husband's love and the wife's respect is to make the other feel desired, wanted, and loved.

We've seen lots of songs about girls and boys wanting to feel desired and treasured, so this in itself is not new. What is unique in Swift and so attractive and marketable is the way in which she presents the experience of being loved in her songs. In a majority of her songs, the experience of feeling loved comes at a moment of crisis. At a climatic moment, the boy makes a radical decision to treasure Taylor above everything else, thus adding more value to the feeling of being loved. By sacrificing something great or expressing his feelings in a huge way, Taylor gets the love and care she always wanted.

For example, this can be seen in songs such as:

"Speak Now," where Taylor forces a guy about to get married to choose between his evil fiance and her.

"Mine," where her love interest decides to continue loving her even after a major fight.

"You Belong With Me," in which she longs after a guy who has another girl, all the time hoping that he will dump that girl and get with Taylor, making her feel all the more special.

"Love Story," a story about a dude overcoming Shakespeare-esque odds to fall in love.

"Back to December," in which we find a repentant Taylor longing for a guy that she hurt to find her worthy even though she hurt him.

"Teardrops on My Guitar," perhaps her biggest hit, which basically follows the plotline of "You Belong With Me"

Not all of Taylor's songs are like this. As a matter of fact, some are vengeful and spiteful, addressing wrongs done to her by bad guys or girls competing with her for her man. I think this speaks to the idolatry of guys that her songs flirt with. When your idol lets you down, you tend to get angry.

While sometimes Swift's songs are perhaps a bit fanciful and exaggerated, it does speak to something real in the human heart. We all long, whether girls or guys, to be loved, respected, admired, and treasured. Furthermore, receiving this love at a moment of crisis at great expense to the giver makes it all the more worthy because it makes us seem all the more valuable. One pays a low price for something that is not worth much while one pays a high price for something worth it. This is where Taylor gets it...almost.

Where she doesn't get it is that our longing to be loved can never be fulfilled by earthly things like boyfriends or girlfriends (add fiances and spouses) and how much they can love us. If we make these things to be ultimate, then what once was a "Fairy Tale" will later become a "Picture to Burn." This is to say that they will always let us down. Curiously enough, however, the Bible speaks of One who loves and treasures all those who are His. He loved us so much to take on flesh, leave His heavenly glory, and walk among us. He taught us, showed us, and lived for us. He even displayed His love for us in what we might call many "moments of crisis": in Gethsemane, on the road to Golgotha, and on the cross. He loved us so much that He demonstrated it by choosing His own death over ours. And then He rose on the third day to defeat death and sin forever. In Him our deepest longings for love are met abundantly. In Him we finally feel worthy and desired.

His name is Jesus, and He loves little boys and girls and grown-ups and old people and even college-aged guys who listen to way too much Taylor Swift. We would do well to remember that.

Why Don't We Sing All The Verses of Christmas Carols?

2010-12-24T14:11:00.000-08:00

I love Christmas carols, and especially the older ones. These are what you might call "Christmas hymns." Usually we only hear the first or second verses of these old songs, but I've found if you dig a little deeper, you find more gospel then you'd expect. Here we find one of the central meanings of Christmas: the beginning of the death blow to the reign of Satan. In the spirit of Christmas, I thought I'd post a couple of them. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Hark the Herald Angels Sing:

Come, Desire of nations come,
Fix in us Thy humble home;
Rise, the Woman's conquering Seed,
Bruise in us the Serpent's head.
Adam's likeness now efface:
Stamp Thine image in its place;
Second Adam, from above,
Reinstate us in thy love.

O Little Town of Bethlehem

O holy Child of Bethlehem!
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us to-day.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Emmanuel!

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

"Fear not then," said the Angel,
"Let nothing you affright,
This day is born a Saviour
Of a pure Virgin bright,
To free all those who trust in Him
From Satan's power and might."
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy

O Sing a Song of Bethlehem

O sing a song of Calvary,
its glory and dismay,
of him who hung upon the tree,
and took our sins away.
For he who died on Calvary
is risen from the grave,
and Christ, our Lord, by heaven adored,
is mighty now to save.

We Three Kings

Born a king on Bethlehem's plain,
Gold I bring to crown Him again,
King forever, ceasing never
Over us all to reign.

Frankincense to offer have I.
Incense owns a Deity nigh.
Prayer and praising all men raising,
Worship Him, God on high.

Myrrh is mine: Its bitter perfume
Breaths a life of gathering gloom.
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

Glorious now behold Him arise,
King and God and Sacrifice.
Alleluia, alleluia!
Sounds through the earth and skies.

Sussex Carol

When Sin departs before thy grace
Then life and health come in its place
Then life and health come in its place
Angels and men with joy may sing
All for to see the newborn King

Merry Christmas!

Zombies?

2010-12-24T13:45:00.000-08:00

This post is pretty self-explanatory: why I think zombies are so popular right now. (I'm not the biggest zombie fan in the world, but I do get my kicks from watching them on TV and killing them in video games. So this is really the three reasons why I like zombies).

1. Adventure.

This is a softball answer. The idea of being on your own, running through a city with a shotgun and blasting zombies is kinda fun and it appeals to the American fascination with adventure and intrigue.

2. Desire for a carefree existence.

I think one reason why we love zombies so much is because we all really just want to escape our everyday mundane existence full of stress, responsibility, and tough decisions. (See here). Life can be excruciating sometimes. Not to mention that it's full of hard decisions and tough days. One wrong choice at one point could mean disaster for the rest of your life. A world infested by zombies, on the other hand, alleviates us of the tough decisions we have to make. Instead of deciding how to raise children or how to balance the weekly budget, life's complexities are reduced to two: kill zombies and survive. While this can of course be tough, it's actually a lot easier than real life. Notwithstanding the hard calls one has to make in ensuring survival, living in a zombie world makes life's choices easier. It's kind of like the classic superhero paradigm. It's easier to win a girl's love by saving her from Dr. Octopus or an oncoming train than by dying to self in the little things every day for the rest of your life. Much easier to trap a bad guy in a web than provide for a family.

3. Chance for new beginnings.

Here I think the zombie craze speaks most clearly to our need for the gospel. A zombie apocalypse supposes that the apocalypse has occurred. This means that the survivors (and we always assume that we'd be the survivors and not the victims) live in a world where everything you know has changed. No more corporations, no more governments, no more religions, and no more institutions. Because of these things, one's past is no longer relevant either. The new world order is characterized by a kind of freedom. It gives the survivor a chance to imagine a world where all mistakes have been wiped away and the only thing that exists now is a clean slate. For me this has always been the funnest part to think about. How do we rebuild a world after the apocalypse?

I think zombie fans are on to something here. Everybody yearns for a world where all the bad stuff is gone and we get a fresh start. This is a real and legitimate desire of the human heart. What everybody fails to realize is that this world doesn't get that through brain eating reanimated flesh. Not to say that the zombie craze is morally reprehensible or wrong, but just that it points to a more ultimate need in the human heart. What it points to is fulfilled through Christ and His redemption of the world. Through this, Christ in fact wipes away everything bad and gives us a new world of peace and love:

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Rev. 21:1-4, ESV

What you and I and everyone else has always longed for is simply a chance to start over, forgiveness, and restoration. This is what Jesus gives us through His birth, death, and resurrection. Our love of zombies only points to this greater need. We would do well to remember that.

Pets and Redemption

2010-12-15T20:12:00.000-08:00

I think most of us out there have a heart for animals. I know that I do. Right now as I am writing, my 12 year old Sheltie "Rocky" is curled up by the fireplace trying to get to sleep. Rocky has been my pal for over half of my life now. He's been my playmate, my friend on walks, occasionally my teddy bear, and always excited to see me when I get home. While I'm not one of those crazy dog owners who is nuts about dogs, I think there is something in the bond bewteen a pet and an owner that speaks to our need for the gospel.

Before sin entered the world, animals and man were said to exist in peace with one another, so much so that all the animals obeyed Adam as he named them. Once sin entered the world, the gospel tells us, the natural order changed. Death and decay and predation became the way that things were. After Noah stepped off the ark, God solidified a new relationship between man and beast:

"The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered."Genesis 9:2, ESV

No longer did animals and man co-exist peacefully. Rather, they ran in fear from us and no longer obeyed us. This verse explains today why wild animals are always afraid of us. Because the dominion of sin is now present, the natural order between man and creation has been distorted. Man, God's vice-regent over the world, has lost some of his power and control over creation.

But through Christ, man's place as governor of creation is restored. Speaking of redemption, Isaiah says:

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them." Isaiah 11:6, ESV

This, of course, is the natural result of salvation through Jesus, who sets aright the world and brings peace to it (Is. 11:1-5). When we are fully restored and redeemed and creation is made new, one of the simple results will be the peaceful co-existence of man and beast. Animals will obey us and not shy away from us or our dominion.

I don't bring this up to suggest that pets are really all that important to the gospel. I bring this up to say that perhaps thats why a lot of us like pets so much. If you think about it, it's really not all that natural for a canine or a feline to share a roof with humans. It's even more unnatural that they obey our commands. But this is in fact very natural in a sinless and redeemed world. For some of us, living with a dog or cat, whether we know it or not, is a subtle reminder of the glories of a New Heaven and New Earth that we will one day partake in. Through it we retain just a little reminder of what it is like when the world is as it should be through Christ. It is perhaps just a little tatse of a new world order made possible through redemption. Now I know that this is a bit of a stretch and pets in no way bring us closer to God or make us more spiritual. But I do think that they might be one of God's common graces that point us heavenward to a world that is soon coming. And this points us not to earthly things, but to Christ, who gives us so much more. We would do well to remember that.

The Blog is Back

2010-11-24T21:12:00.000-08:00

After an extended absence for a variety of reasons, I'm planning on bringing Practical Theology back online. My last post was in April 2010, which was almost 8 months ago. I'm not quite sure what to write about next, but that always comes eventually. At any rate, I guess I can wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving with this story from Jack Handey:

"One Thanksgiving my parents did something I don’t know if I can ever forgive them for. We were eating our turkey dinner when suddenly I realized I hadn’t seen my pet turkey all day. “Where’s Mister Gobble?” I asked. Dad seemed confused. “Mister Gobble?” “Yes,” I said. “My turkey. The one I picked out at the supermarket, and then after he thawed out I made him do a funny little turkey dance. Mister Gobble.” Dad’s silence said it all. We were eating Mister Gobble! I ran crying from the table and locked myself in my room. Later, Dad knocked on the door and said he had some dessert for me. When I opened the door, I couldn’t believe it. It was a slice of Pumpkie, my pet pie!"

-Jack Handey, "Fuzzy Memories"

Casting Out Your Inner Wizard

2010-04-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

John Piper quotes this passage in Deuteronomy in his book The Pleasures of God:

“There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” (Deuteronomy 18:10-11, KJV).

I don’t know about you, but I sort of find wizards to be funny. What I find especially funny is the fact that wizards are actually mentioned in the Bible (albeit in a four hundred year old translation). When I think of wizardry and witchcraft, I think of the Middle Ages, Monty Python, silly card games, or live action role playing. It’s safe to say that I don’t take wizardry very seriously.

But the Word of God does, and so must I. Am I claiming that Merlin existed and that people can conjure up spells today? Not exactly. During the Exodus and the settlement of the Promised Land, however, it seems that such a thing was actually a problem. One must remember that Satan has real and tangible power in this world, and it should not surprise us to see examples of that power in real life. But the real key to interpreting this text is not the tangible powers of darkness. Rather, as Piper notes, divination (and I add wizardry) “discounts the guidance and revelation of God, or regards them as wrong or insufficient” (Piper, Pleasures, Multinomah, 2000. p. 240). The sin of divination, wizardry, witchcraft, charming, enchanting, and necromancy is not so much casting spells as it is pretending to know better than God. And that makes it a very relevant sin to our times and to us.

Whenever you and I try to manipulate God, we become witches and wizards. We try to bribe God to give us salvation or something else we want by doing good works. When we trust reason over and against the Bible, we become charmers and enchantresses, relying on the false dictates of reason to lead us into true life. As silly as it might sound, you and I are often wizards by God’s standard. We rely on our own understanding or on the understanding of untempered reason, we abandon the Word of Truth and cast ourselves upon the elemental spirits of this world. And that is why God is concerned with kicking out all the enchanters and necromancers from Israel: because they will not humble themselves before God and listen to His Word. So we must look to Christ to give us the strength to humble ourselves before Him and be open to God’s guidance for us. We would do well to remember that.

Good Friday Meditation

2010-04-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

"Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die." (John 12:31-33, ESV)

A Peace Surpassing All Understanding?

2010-03-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:4-7, ESV).

If you’re like me, then you’ve probably heard this verse a lot. Even when the going gets tough, there is a peace that surpasses all understanding that God gives to His children. When you are down and out for the count, or when the world is treating you poorly, our God infuses us with an unexplainable and almost mystical feeling of comfort through Christ which gives us strength.

Perhaps this is the correct understanding of this verse, and I don’t intend to take away from that popular understanding. But I have a more radical interpretation of this verse that I want to share (take it with a grain of salt). Paul here tells us in verse 4 to rejoice. Rejoicing should always be our attitude, and because of that, we should never be anxious and let everything be known to God in prayer. Why? Because the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard us in Jesus. But what exactly is the peace of God that guards us? Is it a mystical feeling, or is it something else? The answer to that, I believe, lies in the phrase “which surpasses all understanding.”

Generally, when something surpasses all understanding, we call it a mystery. According to John MacArthur, in the NT, a mystery denotes “truth previously hidden, but now revealed, including Christ’s incarnation (v. 16), Christ’s indwelling of believers (Col 1:26-7), the unity of the Jews and Gentiles in the church (Eph. 3:4-6), the gospel (Col 4:3), lawlessness (2Th 2:7), and the rapture of the church (1Co 15:51-2)” (MacArthur Commentary note on 1Tim 3:9). Mystery in the Bible, and I submit here in Phil. 4, denotes not so much a strange and unexplainable feeling of peace as it does the awesomeness of redemptive history. That which surpasses all understanding is God’s entrance into history through Christ to redeem His people.

If peace, then, does not mean a mystical feeling of comfort about our situations, then what does it mean? Here, J.I. Packer is helpful. He says, “The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us. No account of God’s peace that does not start here can do other than mislead” (Packer, 49)*. The peace of God which surpasses all understanding is the fact that God out of His great love and mercy, has been planning throughout eternity to substitute His Son for your sins, thereby making peace with God for you by making you perfect in His sight. Peace with God is not so much a mysterious feeling as it is the fact that no matter what you are going through, you are still covered in the blood of Christ. This joyous salvation should be enough to keep you content when there is more than enough for you to be anxious about.

What is the practical application? If my view is correct, then when the going gets tough, don’t sit and wait for an almost magical feeling of peace from God. Don’t wait to feel “peace” about a certain circumstance. Instead, when the going gets tough, meditate on the riches of your salvation. If you’ve had a bad day or if you’re anxious about a circumstance, “rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say rejoice.” For the Lord has bought you at a price and covered all your sin and constructed a mansion for you in heaven. What more could we ever ask for? We would do well to remember that.

*Packer, JI and Mark Dever. "In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement." Crossway: Wheaton, 2007.

Who Am I? or Whose Am I?

2010-03-03T18:25:00.000-08:00

I’m a philosophy major, so I guess it comes naturally to me, but no doubt you do it too. As I was standing on the center of campus the other day eating a banana, it hit me. I was unsure of who I was. That sounds deep, but it’s not all that bad. You see, I was dealing with questions that we all have to deal with: what am I doing here…what I should do about dating and marriage…what job do I need to take….etc. I was (and still am) dealing with questions of prudent Christian decision making. What decisions should I make for the future? How will they honor Christ?

These are very important questions, and their answers will affect me and those around me for the rest of my life. But as I was standing there peeling that banana, the solution to all of these problems found me. You see, as Christians, when we are concerned about who we are, we always need to first look to Whose we are. Who I marry and what graduate school I go to are really important questions that deserve prayer, meditation, and wise counsel. But ultimately, they aren’t really all that important from a Kingdom perspective. Who I am is not someone who attends _____ school, marries _______, and is friends with _______, _______, and _______. Who I am is a sinner saved by grace whose Lord is God and whose righteousness is Jesus’s! The most important thing in my life is that Jesus loves me and paid for my sins in full. In light of that, all those other things become less important. If Jesus is my righteousness, then I can go to the “wrong” school, get the “wrong” job, and mess up on the city I was “supposed” to live in. Why? Because having a relationship with a God who loves you and promises to change you will bring you more happiness than making the so-called “best” decision. When Jesus is your righteousness, all the other little things start to fall away. We would do well to remember that.

Kuyper on Liberal Christianity

2010-02-22T13:40:00.001-08:00

"A theology which virtually destroys the authority of the Holy Scriptures as a sacred book; which sees in sin nothing but a lack of development; recognizes Christ for no more than a religious genius of central significance; views redemption as a mere reversal of our subjective mode of thinking; and indulges in a mysticism dualistically opposed to the world of the intellect-such a theology is like a dam giving way before the first assault of the inrushing tide. It is a theology without hold upon the masses, a quasi-religion utterly powerless to restore our sadly tottering moral life to even a temporary footing."

-Abraham Kuyper, 1898.

Taken from his "Lectures on Calvinism," Henderson Christian Classics, 2008. p. 166

Questioning the Bible=Questioning Jesus

2010-02-07T12:07:00.000-08:00

As a student at a secular institution of higher learning, it has never surprised me that the Bible is not taken seriously by most of the faculty and students. Even the most conservative religion professors on campus don’t believe the Bible to be God’s Word, holy, inspired, and infallible. What has surprised me, however, is how many people, professors, and students who claim association with a Christian denomination actually don’t believe the Bible to be fully infallible, historically and scientifically accurate, and inspired. Rather, I hear things like “the Bible isn’t God’s Word, but it contains God’s Word” or that the Bible is a “good book written by inspired people, but with some historical errors here or there” or that it simply “wasn’t meant to be taken literally.” Coming from non-believers, this would not be surprising. As a matter of fact, for a non-believer to say things like this, we should be excited. But coming from a Christian, this is clearly not acceptable. Let me show you why.

Most Christians, both theologically liberal and moderate, retreat to a lower view of the Bible out of the best of intentions. After studying the Bible for many years, they claim to have come across inconsistencies, errors, contradictions, and things that just don’t fit historically or scientifically. Therefore, they claim that these are just minor human errors or confusions that don’t distort the overall message of the Bible. I don’t have the time or space here to try and prove that these supposed “contradictions” are not contradictions but rather fit together quite nicely in the inerrant record of Scripture, but I will show that a Christian cannot logically hold that the historical accounts of the Bible are incorrect, because in doing so, they claim to know better than Jesus.

You see, the problem that the moderate-liberal Christian faces is that many of the stories and facts they deny are actually confirmed by Jesus in the Gospels. For example, Jesus actually believed that our first parents were actually Adam and Eve (Mat. 19:4). Consequently, Paul’s whole doctrine of justification is based upon the historical existence of Adam (Rom. 5). Jesus also believed that the flood of Noah happened just as it happened in the Old Testament (Mat. 24:37-39). Jesus believed that the story of Jonah is accurate and that he was in the belly of a whale for three days as told in the Old Testament (Mat. 12:39-41). Jesus believed that Cain killed Abel just as it was told (Luke 11:51). And there are so many more examples. Jesus the Messiah believed literally in the Old Testament histories, even in those stories that seemed the most farfetched and contradict our limited knowledge of the world. If Jesus took the Bible and its histories and science literally, then we should too.

Why? Because when we claim that Jonah wasn’t really in the belly of a whale or that Adam and Eve didn’t really exist in a real Garden of Eden, we claim to know better than Jesus. When we say that the Bible has inaccuracies or contradictions, we pretend to have more insight and wisdom than the actual Author of the Bible Himself! The people who have the real pride and sin about the Bible aren’t the ones who think its inerrant…it’s the ones who think it isn’t! The sad thing is that for most liberals and moderates, this argument doesn’t work because they simply view Jesus as just a good man who wasn’t God, and therefore we can presume to know more than Him. Without the historical and scientific accuracy and infallibility of the Bible, however, the whole message falls apart. What sense is there to listen to a book that tells you not to lie when the book lies about or misrepresents some things? Jesus obviously took the Bible literally and seriously, so should we. A Christian must either believe the Bible in its entirety, or not at all. There is no middle ground. We would do well to remember that.

*For more source material, try this website

If I Could Only Just Talk to Jesus...

2010-01-21T14:38:00.000-08:00

Here’s a paraphrase of something Dr. Russell Moore of SBTS said in a sermon that got my attention a few months ago.

Consider 2 Peter 1: 16-21 (ESV):

“For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

Here’s what Dr. Moore said about these verses. A lot of people say to me, “If only I could just talk to Jesus about this problem in my life. If only I could see Him face to face right now. Then he’d tell me how to love Him more, how to be more sanctified, what to do about my bank account. If Jesus was physically present in my room right now, we could discuss who I should marry, what kind of job I should take, where I should live, etc. If only I could talk to Jesus.”

I think that a lot of us have shared this sentiment at one time or another. Sometimes we earnestly and honestly want Godly wisdom to make Godly decisions in our lives, and to be frank, the Bible doesn’t quite always tell us what we should do. It certainly doesn’t have too many rules about dating or about what job to choose. Maybe if we could just meet Jesus and have a cup of coffee with Him, then everything will be ok.

While honest, this sentiment completely ignores the gist of 1 Peter 1:16-21. You see, Peter and the other apostles actually HAD seen Jesus. They had walked and talked with Him. They had discussed life and politics with Him. They even saw Him in his glory during the Transfiguration. They had seen the Son of God glorified on the mount. But notice what Peter says: “we have something more sure, the prophetic word, to which you will do well to pay attention.” This is an incredible statement! Peter, the rock of the church, has seen Jesus glorified, but yet what is more sure than that is Scripture. What you and I have in our little Teen Study Bibles is more certain than seeing Him during His earthly ministry during the Transfiguration.

Implications? Well first, this should put a stop to any of us complaining that we need a special revelation or a sign from God to help us make a decision about life. You see, the Bible is more certain and sure than any sign that God could give to us, including the remote possibility that tomorrow Jesus might have a cup of coffee and explain our lives to us. This is in no way to say that Jesus is a lair; it simply is to say that we have faulty senses, minds, and hearts that would distort what the Son of God might say to us in a special sign or over a latte.

Second, there is an epistemological (how we know what we know) implication. Obviously, according to the Bible, our main source of knowledge is not our senses, our minds, or reason, but revelation. Revelation is what God says to us and how He interacts with us. This is to say that what God says is always to be more highly valued than any other form of knowledge. This is simply because God is perfect and can tell no lies, while our senses, minds, and reason can all lie to us.

Third, there is a devotional implication. We may cry out for a special sign or to talk to Jesus about guidance, but we actually already have all of that. You see, the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is actually the Word of Christ. Jesus has chosen to speak to you and me through the Bible. Do you want to talk to Jesus? Then you should spend some time in the Scriptures, for that is where He does all His talking. We would do well to remember that.

The Walls of Jericho Fell for You and Me

2010-01-19T13:34:00.000-08:00

My Sunday school teacher said something really interesting the other day. He was teaching on Ephesians, but made a quick side road into doubting one’s faith. Asking us how we were to deal with times of crises and lack of faith, he pointed us to the Old Testament and the Old Covenant. For thousands of years, God has been orchestrating his plan of redemption in history. It began with the Fall, and then Noah. Then God called Abraham, Isaac, and then chose Jacob over Esau. His people were put into captivity, but then were lead out into the Promised Land. Hundreds of years they stayed there, until foreign powers conquered them and displaced them. But they eventually by Divine Providence found their way back. Then the Romans conquered the Jews, and then Jesus came. He died to save the world from its sins, and then set up His church to proclaim Him crucified. Then the truth spread from Palestine to the Middle East, and from there to Greece and then to Europe. From Europe, it spread to Africa, America, and Asia.

My teacher then challenged us that in our next time of doubting our faith to look not on our own faithfulness or worthiness, but on God’s faithfulness to His people. God has done all this to bring people like you and me into the covenant community; do you think He would reverse it all and your election because you are having an existential crisis? Certainly not. You see, having faith is not so much about the quantity or strength of your faith, but is more about the quality of the One in whom your faith is in. Anyone who looks to their own amount of faith rather than to God’s faithfulness for assurance can never find that assurance, because as sinners the strength of our faith waxes and wanes.

The implication from all this, however, is even more incredible. For in one way of looking at it, the walls of Jericho did not just fall so that the Hebrews could cross the Jordan. The walls of Jericho in a very real way fell for you and me. You see, the battle of Jericho or David killing Goliath wasn’t just about setting up an ancient Hebrew kingdom (although this was a major part of it). It was also about completing God’s redemptive plan. Jericho and Goliath had to happen so that Bethlehem and Golgotha could happen. Noah, Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria are all stories about you and me! Throughout history, God has been ordering events so that one day the Son of God would become man and provide salvation for all who would come to Him. Deniers of predestination should be wary here, for in denying God’s sovereignty, libertarian free will nullifies God’s ability to order and arrange history and thereby bring about salvation. Further, nothing could be more comforting than knowing that the God who love us also controls history so that all things will work for the good of those who love God. We would do well to remember that.

Moral Christianity? The Quiz

2010-01-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

Q: Which of these two persons is more likely to be a Christian?*

Person 1: Bill

Bill hadn’t always grown up in the church, but when his dad divorced his mom when he was 12, his mother started going back to church. It took Bill a while to warm up to church with all its cheesy Southern gospel songs and seemingly fake smiles, but after a while, it became his favorite place in the world. By high school, Bill was at the church door every time it was opened. He became a leader in his youth group and was well respected by all the church members and the ministers. He went on all the mission trips and even coached the youth basketball team. Bill never missed Sunday mornings, and only rarely missed Wednesday night prayer and youth services. Bill has a daily quiet time every day and is more consistent with it than you are. He also votes pro-life and pro-marriage. What’s more, Bill is the kind of guy that every father would want his daughter to date. He’s not a drinker or a partier; in fact, he tries to keep his friends away from that stuff. Everyone at school knows where he stands on that issue. What’s more, Bill has never touched weed and he’s a virgin. He even decided to save his first kiss for marriage. Bill generally makes good grades and is expected to enroll in the local Bible college next year to study to be a minister.

Person 2: Phil

Phil is Bill’s next door neighbor, and they are the same age. Phil has always been a little angered at Bill, partly because it is hard for Phil to measure up to Bill’s high level of living, but partly because Bill’s commitment to the truth just irritates him. Phil was never a big church attendee. As a matter of fact, he only went in middle school because some of his friends went. For the most part, Southern Christians tend to annoy Phil, so he stays away from church, even though he is interested. Phil is more like your typical teenager. He has done some weed, and he occasionally attends parties. Sometimes he even smokes a cigarette and drinks a beer, even though he is underage. It can be said that he has a loose trigger on curse words, and he frequents pornography sites. On one or two occasions, he and his girlfriend have crossed the line physically. He’s apathetic about politics and will be lucky to get into tech college next year. He is a straight D student. Phil is not all that rotten though: he’s become a good big brother to a little brother that has autism.

A:

The question was: “Which of the two are more likely to be a Christians?” At first glance, it might seem that Bill is the best candidate. After all, it seems like Bill is doing a far better job at living the morals of the Christian faith. But from these two paragraphs, that’s about all we can tell. The Biblical answer to this question is that we cannot tell who is more likely to be a Christian from this information.

Bill does indeed live a model life. He’s grown up within the graces of the church, and does all the things the Bible tells him to. He’s a good role model for everyone else in the church, but we can’t tell anything about his spiritual condition. In the snippet, we cannot see into his heart. It is entirely possible that Bill has a repentant heart that loves Jesus and that he lives the right way simply because he wants to honor Jesus. But it is equally possible that Bill is a self-righteous Pharisee. Bill could be doing all these things, not because he is actually a Christian (I didn’t mention anything about faith, repentance, and a renewed heart) but simply because he finds his value in doing good stuff. You see, a righteous person can easily be that way because they find their identity in the idol of doing good works. This is a subliminal way of trying to earn our salvation by good works. This may come as a surprise, but anyone can follow God’s law in an external manner just through willpower: doing good stuff, being at church, condemning those that do wrong, not drinking, reading the Bible, etc. Not everyone can follow the law out of a right motivation to serve God out of great gratitude for God’s mercy through Jesus. This requires a divine takeover of our wills, which happens at conversion. The verse that I might give to Bill is this: “Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:2-3).

As for Phil, the answer is the same. There is no way to tell whether he is a Christian based on the information I’ve given simply because you cannot see into Phil’s heart. From one angle, if Phil has never truly met Jesus, then it is understandable for him to fool around with his girlfriend, look at porn, drink, and do poorly in school. If he is not a Christian, then there is no point in him trying to obey the law. But on the other hand, Phil could be the picture perfect portrait of a Christian. This might sound weird, but let me explain. Let’s say Phil gave his heart to Jesus a year ago. Since then, he’s been slowly growing in grace. He doesn’t drink quite as often as he used to, and he’s debunked the porn habit. He currently makes Ds in school, but those are better than the Fs he used to make. He also has returned to church for the first time in 10 years, and he doesn’t do weed as much. Seeing conservative Southern Christians and Bill as annoying in their self-righteousness ironically might even be a sign of Phil’s sanctification. Phil’s life might still be full of sin, but he’s better than he was. Why? Not because of moral willpower, but because he has a deep desire to look like the One who loves him and saved him. So while Phil’s life might still look terrible when compared to Bill, he has grown more because he depends on Jesus more. You see, Bill's life is just as full of sin as Phil's is. Phil's sin might be more outward and external, but Bill's sin could be inward and internal: self-righteousness, pride, and exalting the self.

A quick disclaimer here: even with Phil, we should guard against measuring spiritual growth by good works. Spiritual growth is not measured so much by adherence to the moral law (i.e quitting alcohol) but by love for and dependence on Jesus. It is not the one who lives the moral life that understands the gospel better but the one who learns to crucify the self and draw their power only from Jesus that really gets it.

By way of conclusion, let me give you a little illustration that has been helpful for me. We as Christians are inspired by the lives of the saints, old and new. As someone like Spurgeon or Wilberforce gets older, we might expect them to sin less and less and generally follow the law. While this might be the case from the outside, almost universally, every great Christian man or woman has discovered that as they get older, they see themselves to be even more sinful and depraved then they knew before. As they grew in age and grace, they grew in the knowledge of their terrible sinful estate. But as they grew in knowledge of their sin, they also grew in knowledge and dependence on Jesus their Savior, and became more and more His. So as you grow older, don’t expect to see yourself as morally better. Expect to see yourself and your sin more clearly and truly. Expect to see yourself morally worse. But this is not a bad thing. Oh no, it is a magnificent thing, because it draws us closer into His arms. We would do well to remember that.

*Descriptions of persons do not attempt to describe real-life persons. In fact, in many instances, they probably resemble the author more than anyone else.

Geographical Christianity?

2010-01-03T18:23:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have never heard of William Wilberforce, you should look him up. Born in 1759, he became a Christian man of great respect in England. He is most well known as the man who led the charge, in the name of Christ, to abolish the slave trade in the Western world. He also wrote a classic book (which I just finished) called A Practical View of Christianity. This incredible little work is weighty, but it deserves a good read since it gives us a view into the mind of a man who loved God and who loved to do His work.

Towards the end of the book, Wilberforce speaks about what he calls “geographical Christianity.” Wilberforce claims that a majority of Christians in 18th century England were (in a way parallel with the modern USA) simply Christians in name only, forgetting the love of their Savior and believing that the word “Christian” was “properly applicable to all those who have been born and educated in a country wherein Christianity is professed” (Ch. 7). This view is surprisingly as popular today as it was back then. While I won’t get into the argument as to whether America is a “Christian nation,” it certainly is undeniable true that Christianity is the professed religion of a majority of Americans. According to the CIA World Factbook, around 76% of Americans profess to be Christians, and 51.3% profess to being Protestant Christians. Understanding these facts, it does seem that the United States is a county where, as Wilberforce says, “Christianity is professed.” The question then becomes why so many in America profess to be Christians.

Do most people polled claim to be Christians because they live in a land where Christianity is the majority? Are these simply “geographical Christians” who, living in a world where churches are on every street corner and whose parents were on the rolls of a church, simply assume themselves to be Christians? Are these people who occasionally or maybe even always attend church assuming themselves to be labeled a “Christian” simply because of church attendance? I believe that this and many other scenarios must be the case, for if 76% of the America population were indeed born again Christians, then this country would be in much better shape that it currently is. I think much of the American public doesn’t quite understand exactly what a “Christian” is. Wilberforce is helpful here. He states that a Christian is one who has a “renewed nature, as expressive of a peculiar character, with its appropriate desires and aversions, and hopes, and fears, and joys, and sorrows” (Ch. 7). A Christian is not one who is born in an area where most people are Christians and who associates with Christians (although this is frequently the case). A Christian is one who has been born again, one who was once uninterested or even spiteful towards God, but who now, through the work of the Spirit, has been convicted of their sin and has thrown themselves on the mercy of God through Christ’s sacrifice for sin on the cross. Essentially, a Christian has a renewed nature of love and dependence towards God, not simply just one who lives in a Christian area. So my exhortation to both you and me is to examine our own lives to determine whether we are really born again with new natures of love towards Christ, or if we are merely those who falsely assume ourselves to be Christians because we live in a country where most are Christians. We would do well to remember that.

What Does the US Constitution Have To Do With Biblical Inerrancy?

2009-12-22T11:59:00.000-08:00

Just the other day I was listening to my town’s local conservative talk AM radio station. During one of the afternoon shows, a fellow called in to complain about the so-called “constitutional crisis” we are currently facing in America. The caller, like many before him, bemoaned the never ending increases in the size of government, how the current administration is running roughshod over constitutional rights and provisions, and massive and unsustainable spending. This critique is nothing new. As a matter of fact, sometimes I think talk radio really only has one or two callers. They all sound the same and they all talk about the same thing. In many ways, as a fiscal and social conservative, I agree deeply and profoundly with this man’s critique of the powers that be. What he said next, however, really got me thinking.

It seems that a lot of time nowadays in the “vast right wing conspiracy” is committed not only to complaining about the problem, but finding solutions to it as well. As a way of a poor and comedic example, one man on Limbaugh today said that small businesses should fire 50% of their payrolls in order to flood the unemployment offices so as to overwhelm and bankrupt the federal government. The man I was listening to, however, cited the history of the Southern Baptist Convention as an example of how to give conservatives back the power. In the 70s and 80s, the SBC, in the face of creeping theological liberalism, elected theological conservatives to positions of prominence who ensured a conservative powerbase within the convention that exists to this day. The caller claimed that the USA could do the same thing by electing all conservatives to positions of power. Needless to say, it was an interesting example.

This got me to thinking about the resurgence of strict constructionism in American conservatism. More and more, you will hear conservatives, Ron Paul, and right wing third party people talk about the necessity of returning to the basic principles of the government as outlined in the Constitution. Basically, these people want the government to go back to the letter of the law and follow and do only what the US Constitution says, and nothing else. Using a theological term, these conservatives believe in the total “sufficiency” of the US Constitution.

To me, I’m seeing many parallels in the political conservative thrust to reclaim the authority of the Constitution and the theological conservative thrust to reclaim the authority of the Bible. To me, I think this says something profound about conservatism in general: it tends to find its authority outside of itself, whether it be in tradition, history, a written document, or the Divine. Liberalism, on the other hand, has tended to find its epistemic verification from within. This is to say that its main source of authority is itself (this, of course, is extreme generalizing). To me, it seems that finding authority in sources outside oneself is a more humble way of doing things than trusting in the reason of humanity or oneself. And this is why we as Christians should be at least partially hesitant to fully embrace the “back to the Constitution movement.”

For Christians, there is only one divinely inspired text: it is the Bible. Because it is inspired, it is also inerrant, authoritative, and sufficient for all things. The US Constitution, on the other hand, is clearly a man made document. As such, it was made by erring and sinful men, and is therefore first of all, not inerrant, and secondly, leans heavily on fallen human reason. For this reason, while the Constitution is legally authoritative, it is not practically sufficient. This is to say that since God didn’t inspire the Constitution, it can therefore never be prudent to believe that a return to following the letter of the Constitution will fix America’s problems. And this is the belief I find so often in some of the people who advocate this position. Methodological and institutional fidelity to the Constitution does not necessarily guarantee that America will prosper. Now I don't mean to bash the Constitution. It is a wonderful document and is by far the best of its kind in the world. The American political process secures maximum freedom for the maximum amount of people. I'm just hesitant to give it the almost inerrant and Biblical status it seemingly has among many conservatives today. This is not to say, however, that the people who advocate this position don’t have a political foot to stand on. It does seem evident that the government is bound by law, for better or worse, to strictly follow what the Constitution says, and nothing else. The current administration, and almost every administration before it, has abandoned this principle. This is why I say that the Constitution is legally authoritative, but not practically sufficient.

To sum up my somewhat jumbled argument, we Americans, as flawed people, have legally bound ourselves to a flawed document (a document, mind you, that is not near as flawed as it could have been, for every government is nowhere near perfect). Even though this document is not perfect, it is the rule of law and must be followed. Today and in the past, this has not been done, precisely because the document is flawed and clearly not sufficient. Therefore, as Christians and political conservatives, we have no foot to stand on when we claim that a return to Constitutional fidelity will “fix” America; however, we can claim that the rule of law, when properly interpreted, requires us to return to a strict constructionist and, dare I say, “literalist” understanding of the Constitution. So what then should we do? Work today to bring peace and healing to the land in any way that we can, and hope in the future coming of our King, who will make all things new and perfect, including the political process. We would do well to remember that.

How Fleeting I Am!

2009-12-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

I turned 21 the other day. It wasn’t a terribly big deal for me, but it wasn’t a day of celebration either. I guess that a lot of people get excited when their birthdays come around, but I’ve never been that type. In fact, I’m just the opposite: I tend to get a little depressed every time my birthday comes around. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I guess I’m sorta sentimental and I just don’t like getting older. That’s why I’m glad I ran across Psalm 39 a few days before the big day:

"I said, "I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue; I will guard my mouth with a muzzle, so long as the wicked are in my presence." 2 I was mute and silent; I held my peace to no avail, and my distress grew worse. 3 My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue: 4 "O LORD, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am! 5 Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing before you. Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath! Selah 6 Surely a man goes about as a shadow! Surely for nothing they are in turmoil; man heaps up wealth and does not know who will gather! 7 "And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. 8 Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool! 9 I am mute; I do not open my mouth, for it is you who have done it. 10 Remove your stroke from me; I am spent by the hostility of your hand. 11 When you discipline a man with rebukes for sin, you consume like a moth what is dear to him; surely all mankind is a mere breath! Selah 12 "Hear my prayer, O LORD, and give ear to my cry; hold not your peace at my tears! For I am a sojourner with you, a guest, like all my fathers. 13 Look away from me, that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more!" (Psalm 39, ESV)

It’s a pretty straightforward Psalm it seems to me. David is having an existential crisis of sorts, perhaps even a midlife crisis. Suddenly, something rushes upon him. It is the feeling of his own fleetingness. I’m not sure how old David is here. Maybe he’s up in age and closer to death, or maybe he just turned 21. Nonetheless, he realizes that looking from eternity, a man’s life is nothing: it is a breath and gust of wind. We work for 70, maybe 80 years if we are lucky, chasing the dollar and trying to live a good life, but after those 80 years (which seem oh so long for a youth or even a 40 year old) all our work goes to someone else; someone who didn’t even work for it! Such is the state of man, and such is your state and my state, even if we don’t realize it.

So what solves David’s midlife crisis? Does he go out and buy a new chariot and castle? No he doesn’t; David doesn’t find his security in wealth or things. Does he go out and solve his crisis by finding a new woman to enjoy? Well he tried that once and we all know how that worked out. What about doing things for Jesus? Does he set out in a busy path to evangelize the nations, Give! Give! Give! to missions, and do more religious things and stuff and activity? Surprisingly, he doesn’t even do that. What does David do? He rests. He rests in God, for there is his hope. More specifically, he rests in God’s atoning work for his sins. He doesn’t turn to money, women, or even religious activity, even if that activity is seemingly good and right. David has learned the key that most Christians today, including myself, need to learn. Christianity isn’t about doing good stuff for Jesus. It isn’t about rushing endlessly from activity to activity, because even in those good and right activities, we can hide from Jesus. We can get so caught up in missions work that we not only forget about what Jesus has done for us, but we use that good stuff to hide from His word and even use it as our self-righteousness. This is not to say that missions work and good works are not imperative. It is rather to say that Christianity is less about doing stuff and more about resting in the “stuff” that Christ has done for us (this is from something I ran across the other day). From this flows the rest of the things we must do.

So David finds meaning in what Christ has done for us, and not in what he has done or can do or in any sin. So, echoing a speech I once gave, my question for you and me is where do we go for meaning? Where do we find our identity? Is it in stuff, sin, and ourselves, or is it in Christ? Salvation, justification, sanctification, glorification, and union are the only things that are eternally significant; therefore, they are the only things in this life that can possibly give us meaning and solve our own personal identity and existential crises. That means that someone who is so caught up in sin, idolatry, or religious stuff can’t ever find meaning. That also means that Andy the Atheist or Ally the Agnostic can never find meaning either. Search yourselves; you know it to be true. You work for 80 years, and then you die. Nothing is there. Nothing except salvation and union with Christ. We would do well to remember that.

Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

2009-12-12T19:13:00.000-08:00

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, a friend who happens to not be a Christian and I met to hang out at a local Barnes and Noble. My friend decided that she wanted some coffee, so while she waited in line at the Starbucks there, I found myself perusing the magazines on display at the coffee shop. That week’s edition of the Atlantic didn’t take long to catch my eye. The cover story was: “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” The “crash” they were referring to, of course, was the 2008-09(-10?) economic meltdown. The article, which can be found here, basically argues that the prosperity gospel led many American Christians to continue to spend regardless of circumstance in order to earn their way into God’s favor, since, as the article says, “the rich are closer to God.” For those of you not familiar with the prosperity gospel, it is the idea, found mostly in fundamentalist and Pentecostal circles, that God desires to bless His children economically as much as spiritually. Therefore, a Christian who can spend more money and attain a higher standard of living and wealth has found better standing with God. Of course, this is one of the silliest versions of Christianity I’ve ever heard of. It was the same for my friend too.

Being a professed non-Christian, my friend always has interesting things to say about religion, politics, and Christianity. At this point, it seemed that all three intersected. So I asked her how she felt about the Atlantic’s claim and explained to her the prosperity gospel. Immediately she piped back that all of that was absurd. She said that she thought that Christianity was all about giving up what one had and sacrificing for the poor, not about buying Mercedes and $500,000 houses. Basically, she saw the prosperity gospel to be an aberrant form of Christianity.

In the end, the article never really answers its own question. It makes no claim as to whether Christians are responsible for the recession. And, after all, it seems like this is a silly claim anyways. I seriously doubt that Christians have enough purchasing power to send the American economy into a downward spiral. Rather, I think the article hints that this kind of “spend, spend!” attitude, found amongst all Americans, led in part to the recession. The article also makes reference to the fact that much of religion’s beliefs these days see a disparity between reality and expectation, which is why proponents of the prosperity gospel have no problem with the fact that God is obviously not “blessing” most of them right now. This is an issue for another day. My main point, however, is this: if a non-Christian can easily and immediately see that the prosperity gospel is not compatible with the gospel of Christ, then maybe it should be easier for most of us to see that it is an offense to the Kingdom of Christ as well. We would do well to remember that.

God, Economics, and the Year of Jubilee

2009-11-19T15:10:00.000-08:00

In my political science class, we debate a lot about the best form of economics. Isn’t capitalism more efficient and therefore the best? But what about socialism? Doesn’t that provide everyone with a share of basic human dignity? While I personally tend to lean more towards free markets, as a Christian I’ve always wondered what Jesus had to say about economics. C.S. Lewis claimed that socialism is the most consistent system with Christianity. John Stott seems to think that both capitalism and socialism have their own Biblical flaws (and I tend to agree with him). Countless other conservative Christians have, in the marriage of the religious right and evangelicalism, given full endorsement to capitalism. But what does God have to say?

My humble opinion is that God is less concerned with the system and more concerned with our own heart and social justice. In Leviticus 25, I think we find some economic truth that, if we grasped it fully, would change our lives. Speaking about the Year of Jubilee, Moses writes:

“If your brother becomes poor and sells part of his property, then his nearest redeemer shall come and redeem what his brother has sold. If a man has no one to redeem it and then himself becomes prosperous and finds sufficient means to redeem it, let him calculate the years since he sold it and pay back the balance to the man to whom he sold it, and then return to his property. But if he has not sufficient means to recover it, then what he sold shall remain in the hand of the buyer until the year of jubilee. In the jubilee it shall be released, and he shall return to his property”(Lev. 25:25-28, ESV).

The Year of Jubilee institutes a very interesting economy. For 49 years, the Israelites would work the land, gain money, lose profits, sell and buy. But on the 50th year, all of this would be reversed. Someone who was poor and sold their property to someone well off would get their property back. That loss would again become gain. On the flip side, a man who, doing good business, bought someone’s farm land, would have to give it back free of charge (if it could not otherwise be paid). Now not everything went back to normal, and not all profits and losses were leveled, so this wasn’t a full reversion to the status quo every 50 years, but it does tell us at least, in my brief and inadequate study, two important things.

First, God is a God who is in the business of restoration. In Revelation 21:5, Christ proclaims “Behold, I am making all things new.” The entire purpose of the covenantal work of God throughout the ages has been, from Abraham to the end of time, to restore things back to the way they were in Eden, and even to make those things better and new. By allowing the Israelites to reclaim lost land every 50 years, God was dramatizing His future promise of bringing things back to the way they were supposed to be. Today, Jesus does this, first, in our own lives by giving us a heart to love him, and second, at the end of time when this process is complete in the New Heavens and Earth.

Second, it shows us the value of material possessions. Imagine today that President Obama signed a bill creating an American Year of Jubilee. After 50 years, all property bought over the last five decades from poor people would be returned to them. After fifty years of hard work on Wall Street or in the law firm, you’d have to give over most of your wealth and return more or less of your wealth to those from whom you’d got it. All debts would be canceled, and you’d be at about as rich as you were as a fresh college graduate (now this is a little bit of an exaggeration). How would this change our outlook on wealth, prosperity, success, and the purpose of life? Would we center ourselves around being rich and making money if we knew that by the time we were 50 or 70, it would all be gone. Entire industries in America today are built around retirement planning! How would we think about career choices in college? Would we all still line up for the majors and degrees that will give us the best standard of living? Now this is certainly not to say that making money is a bad thing. But it is to say that it’s not the only important thing in life.

Well, we do live in America, and we don’t certainly don’t have an official Year of Jubilee here, and maybe there are reasons for that. But the haunting truth of the matter is that, while we aren’t ancient Israelites, we are all still universally under the dominion of the Year of Jubilee. For most of us, it won’t come every fifty years. For some of us, it’s only 5 or 10 years down the road, or maybe tomorrow. For many, it’s still 30 or 40 years away. For college graduates, it’s probably about 50 years away. And for a newborn in the United States, it’s approximately 77.7 years away. The fact of the matter is that we all face our own personal Jubilee year, and we commonly refer to that as death. One day, every single one of us will die, and we will lose all our material possessions, no matter what the quantity or quality, or how hard we worked to earn them. In that “year,” we will return all that we have, and we won’t be able to keep one penny of it. If the Year of Jubilee was legislation, then maybe we’d orient our lives around it, but in the light of death, we still fail to live lives with purpose and meaning for our King. Perhaps we should start living our lives in the reality of death and of our own finitude and start living as “living sacrifice[s], holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1, ESV). We would do well to remember that.

Pray for Lottie Moon

2009-11-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

Hey everybody, just a simple reminder that the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for international missions is coming up soon in all of our Southern Baptist churches. Considering the recession, unemployment rate, and all things economic, this year is a crucial year for donations to the IMB. As you might have known, the IMB is having a tough year, and it receives most of its funding from this one Christmas offering. I would encourage us all to pray this year for what God would have each of us individually give and for what Southern Baptists around the US and the world will give. More importantly, I also encourage us all to ask God for a heart for the lost at the ends of the earth.

The Pointlessness of Liberal Christianity

2009-11-12T21:40:00.000-08:00

Often, many people ask me what it would take for me to give up the Christian faith and renounce it. Ok, so actually not a lot of people do this if any at all. I'm kidding. But actually, I ask myself every now and then what it would take for me to be convinced that Christianity is not true. Evolutionary theory or any scientific advancement won’t do it (I’ve dealt with that here). Proof against a Biblical account of history won’t do it (those don’t exist). I think the only way I could ever be persuaded that Christianity isn’t true is if someone could show me the bones of Jesus. I think this is the Biblical answer too.

In the first letter to the church at Corinth, Paul writes that “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.” (1 Cor. 15:14-17, ESV). If someone could prove to me that Jesus was not raised from the dead, then I would recant. And rightfully so, since this is the same condition that Paul places on faith. Central to the gospel message is the fact that a dead Man got up from the grave and walked around. The resurrection of Christ means first, that Christ has conquered death and second, that we can now do so too. While there’s a richness to this passage that I can’t possibly do justice to now, I do think that Paul does say something special here about the content of the gospel, especially with respect to mainline and liberal Protestant ideas of the gospel message.

The gospel is a story that is closely tied to the historical fact that Jesus paid for our sins and then was raised to walk again. The resurrection is so important that Paul claims that if it didn’t happen, then Christianity is meaningless. To me, this means that the gospel has a very obvious relationship to spiritual justification, propitiation, atonement, and the forgiveness of sins. Most liberal Christians that I know, however, tend to see the Christian faith strictly in terms of a social gospel. Jesus was a good guy that didn’t really do many supernatural things, but he lived an exemplary life and helped the poor, and so should we. Now don’t mistake me, this is indeed a crucial part of the Christian message, but it is not the only part. Most liberals (and this is a generalization) don’t think of Jesus’s role as a sacrifice for our sins. In doing this, they act like they’ve already found the bones of Jesus. Jesus didn’t have to be raised from the dead in order for us to have a social gospel. He didn’t even really have to die. But the fact that Christianity sees the resurrection as central to the faith means that we as Christians have to go beyond the social gospel to something more. Liberal Christians, on the other hand, are in part living a Christianity that implies that Jesus never got up from the grave and conquered death and appeased God’s wrath. Liberals, while they may not claim that Jesus is still in the ground, nonetheless act as if they’ve already found the bones of Jesus, but keep on going. Why is this? Paul says that if we don’t believe in a risen Christ, then everything we’ve done is in vain. A gospel that doesn’t focus on sin and Christ’s atonement is foolishness. The sad thing is that many liberals are actually consistent. Many liberals out there (like a Bultmann) actually don’t see Christ’s resurrection as necessary for faith.

But thankfully, this is not the whole story. For Paul continues that “in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:20-22, ESV). Christ has in fact been raised, and our love for Him is not in vain, and neither is His atoning work for our sins. What we as Christians should start to do is live in the glorious reality of that fact. We would do well to remember that.

Hey guys a disclaimer: when I say "liberal Christianity" I don't mean like politically liberal. I mean theologically liberal. Those are two different things. We could actually use more politically liberals within Christianity.

Can Baptists Be Truly Reformed?

2009-11-02T20:32:00.000-08:00

As a Baptist who also happens to be a Calvinist, I often hear the question “can a Baptist really be Reformed?” thrown around a lot on the internet and in my own life. So I’m going to attempt to provide an answer to this question based on a little bit of history and a little bit of theology.

One way this question can be answered is through historiography. Southern Baptists today owe their roots to either the Anabaptists or English Separatists. If the former, then we really can’t call ourselves truly Reformed. Anabaptists had little or nothing to do with Calvin and the Reformed tradition. I, along with many other Baptist historians, am inclined to believe that while the Anabaptist tradition did leave its marks, Southern Baptist really owe their existence to English Separatists that adopted the practice of credobaptism. The English Separatists owe a great deal to Calvin and include amongst their number the great John Owen. Who would deny that Owen is truly Reformed? This being the case, I think there is a strong case to be made that a Baptist can be really Reformed.

Second, we can answer this question theologically. Many Baptists are Calvinists, but are those same Calvinists considered Reformed? The first thing to be determined is whether or not “Calvinist” and “Reformed” are synonymous terms. I am inclined to believe that they are not. One can be a Calvinist, but not Reformed. Why is this? Simply put, one can believe the five points and their soteriological implications without accepting covenant theology. As Van Til notes, “covenant theology is Reformed theology” (Intro to Systematic Theology, 2nd ed, pp.271). So the definition of Reformed must necessarily include Calvinism and covenant theology. I have in mind here the Amyraldian dispensationalist that accepts election but divides redemptive history into seven dispensations. While we could say that this person is a Calvinist, I do not think we could say that they are Reformed for lack of their emphasis on the covenants. However, I do believe that a Calvinist Baptist who thinks in covenantal terms can certainly be Reformed. At this point, the Presbyterian or Anglican might object that it is impossible for a Baptist to think in covenantal terms because we deny paedobaptism. This objection doesn’t fully understand the Baptist position. For Reformed Baptists, there is continuity and discontinuity in the covenants. The primary discontinuity is that the covenant community is made up of regenerate believers and not of the infants of believers (cf. Jeremiah 31). In this sense, credobaptism becomes the true sign of the new covenant. Reformed Baptists, then, do not discredit covenant theology but merely reinterpret the New Covenant along what we see as more consistent lines.

All of this is to say that I believe that Calvinist Baptists can lay a strong claim to not only being truly Reformed, but also of playing a large role in the history of the Reformed tradition. By my amateur estimate, there are actually as many if not more Calvinists in the SBC than in the PCA and the ARP combined. And granted, this is a silly and frivolous discussion that has no real bearing on true kingdom work. When we stand before Jesus at the end of time, we will not be asked whether or not we were Calvinist or truly Reformed; rather, we will be asked whether or not we are truly His. We would do well to remember that.

Reflections on Richard Dawkins

2009-10-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

I suppose that you can say that I have an affinity for Glen Beck characters. You know, the type that says outrageous and controversial things on a consistent basis just to rile up backlash? Well, I think that Richard Dawkins is the “Glen Beck” of the new atheist movement. For those of you who don’t know, Richard Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet, and Chris Hitchens, is considered one of the “Four Horsemen of the New Atheist Apocalypse.” These leading intellectuals are for the first time evangelistic in their message of atheist, actively seeking converts in the same way that Christians and Muslims might. Dr. Dawkins, who teaches at Oxford, is by far the most famous and outspoken of the four.

Last night, Dr. Dawkins delivered a lecture in the middle of enemy territory at the University of South Carolina. Unfortunately for me, while Dawkins was in form during the lecture, there was less back and forth between radical fundamentalists and the radical atheists (each, I might add, as dogmatic as the other). The entertainment value of the lecture was not as high as it could have been.

On a more serious note, Dawkins was essentially at USC to challenge theistic belief, and this he did. As my friend pointed out, Dawkins’s most compelling challenges to Christianity were not his theoretical or high minded ones, but rather his simpler anecdotes and stories. For example, he challenged the historical record of Noah’s Ark. According to Dawkins, if such an ark did exist, then how did all the animals leave from Mt. Ararat and find their way to South America or Australia or the South Pole? It certainly seems like a stretch of the imagination to think that all animal life and diversity can be related to a giant boat thousands of years ago and even harder to think that today’s distribution of animal life can be derived from that. The Christian answer to that objection is twofold, one answer theoretical and the other historical. First, the existence of the Biblical God includes anything in the realm of possibilities. Put simply, if God exists and is who He says He is (all-powerful and all-knowing), then it is totally believable to think that He directed the motions of the animals from the ark. God led, either directly or indirectly, the penguins from the ark to the Antarctic. If God is really as powerful as the Bible says, then this and many other objections fall away. Second, as my campus minister pointed out, it is curious that Dawkins would be willing to challenge the story of Noah’s ark, since this miracle is widely attested to outside of the Old Testament. Noah’s ark isn’t only a story found in the Bible. Most every major religion has a flood story, including even small religious communities. Evidence for a global flood is found in all sorts of religions and histories, even in Native American stories. It seems then that Dawkins is fighting against the historical record.

I did mention that Dawkins was in form on Tuesday night, and this of course meant that he contradicted himself many times, the most blatant of these in the realm of morals. During the Q&A session, a lady asked Dawkins how evolution affected issues like gender discrimination and sexism. His answer was clearly contradictory. Dawkins implied that the reason men do not try to dominate woman anymore or rape them is because we have in our minds the ability to override and control those instincts. This makes no sense however. The purpose of life in an evolutionary framework is to spread your genes as much as possible (maximize reproduction). If this were the case, then it would be to my personal advantage to reproduce as much as possible, and this includes (excuse my crudeness) dominating and raping as many women as possible. How in the world would men have ever evolved a moral sense of right and wrong that tells me not to do harm to women? I would think that the men who evolved that trait would not spread as many genes as they should and be wiped off the face of the Earth.

Clearly, Dawkins fails to see that evolution cannot explain all of human behavior or experience (particularly consciousness, as he openly admitted). For this reason, we should all be very wary of the evolutionary theory. If evolution were indeed true, it follows that it could consistently explain the world, all about mankind, and how things work. But there are obvious flaws and holes in evolution. It cannot explain all of life and all of experience. In that way, belief in evolution takes just as much faith as belief in Jesus Christ. Both worldviews require faith (Christians have faith in the authority of the Bible, evolutionists that life somehow came from nothingness and so on). I submit that the Christian worldview is the one way of looking at things that is totally consistent and true. It seems that evolution finds itself entangled in far too many philosophical, historical, and scientific contradictions to be held as a viable and consistent worldview. Christianity, on the other hand, has none of those things, and that is a testament to the character of the One who made it that way. We would do well to remember that.

Peace with God...On Both Sides

2009-10-08T19:49:00.000-07:00

I was reading John Owen’s Death of Death today when I came across this passage:

Peace, also, and reconciliation with God—that is, actual peace by the removal of enmity on both sides, with all the causes of it, is fully ascribed to [Christ’s] oblation (Book 2, Ch. 3).

It took me back for a second because I don’t think we today think of peace with God just like this.

As evangelicals who believe in penal substitution, we know full and well that God is a God of justice and wrath. Our sins have angered a righteous and just God who cannot stand the sight of sin and sinful creatures. Because of that, God is said to be at enmity with us. We are not at peace with God, since God cannot be at peace with beings that are totally sinful. But the death of Christ appeases, so to speak, that wrath of God. Those found in Christ are seen as perfect in Him, since Christ’s death is a propitiation, sacrifice, and atonement. God then is at peace with us.

This, however, is not all that Owen says here. He notes that peace is the “removal of enmity on both sides.” Sometimes I think we forget (I know that I do) that the unrepentant sinner not only angers God, but that we too are angry at God. The break in the relationship goes both ways. We preach a God of love and peace who will be quick to forgive and save us, and we are good to do so. But we often forget that we as sinners are not always so quick to run to Him. Under the curse of sin, we want to have nothing to do with a holy God. Put quite frankly, we hate God. We are not at peace with him. A sinner’s sin is more than just rebellion against God—it is a sign of his or her inner hatred of God. So in our natural state, not only is God angry at us, but we too are angry at God.

This Biblical truth strikes a crushing blow to the Arminian system. Arminians tend to believe that it is we who choose whether or not to love God. But this obviously cannot be the case. Firstly, we are all in our sinful state hateful and spiteful towards God. How can we love God if we categorically hate Him? Secondly, we would need some form of divine interference in order to change our sinful state. We cannot go from hating God to loving God without the power and regeneration of Christ. It would make no sense. If we could, then we wouldn’t have needed Christ to die for us in the first place. So peace with God, then, is peace on both sides. This is brought about only through the glorious death of Jesus Christ. We would do well to remember that.

Your Love is Extravagant

2009-09-30T09:26:00.000-07:00

The other day I was in philosophy class and we were discussing the use of the Greek word "philia" in ancient Greece. Philia in Greek means friendship. Being a huge fan of the Bible and Lewis's "Four Loves," I naturally asked how the word "agape" was used in ancient Greece, hoping to learn more about the etymology and the Biblical meaning. For those of you who don't know, agape is the highest form of love. It is the love that the each of the Persons of the Trinity has for each of the other Persons. It is also the love that God has for us and that Jesus demonstrated on the cross. It the kind of covenantal love married couples are supposed to have for each other and the kind of love we are supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves with. A good definition is: self-sacrificial love that doesn't worry about consequences and seeks only the best for others.

To my surprise, my professor, an expert in ancient Greek, said that in Greek antiquity (the time of Homer and Achilles and Troy and all the good mythology) that agape was a marginalized word that was rarely used. When it was used, it was used not to describe Christ's love, but to describe the experience one gets when they listen to flute girls play.

Apparently, the writers of the New Testament had to "invent" the word agape in order to describe the extravagant and incredible love of Jesus. No other word could possibly fit the bill. The implication here is simple: Jesus loved us so much that it defied being described by language. No one had ever before seen love like Jesus's, and therefore no one had any word to describe it. God's love for us is so great and incredible that we needed a new word for it. We would do well to remember that.

The Gospel and Conservative Sensibilities

2009-09-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

Aristotle makes an interesting comment on the nature of voluntary and involuntary vice. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he says:

“For we never censure someone if nature causes his ugliness; but if his lack of training or attention causes it, we do censure him. The same is true for weakness or maiming; for everyone would pity someone, not reproach him, if he were blind by nature or because of a disease or a wound, but would censure him if his heavy drinking or some other form of intemperance made him blind” [Ethics 3.5.15, 2nd ed, Irwin 39]

I think here that Aristotle says something that gels with the sensibility of conservatives in America (and, I think, with the sensibilities of most liberals and moderates too). As individualistic Americans, we highly value the kind of person who can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That automatically makes it hard for the gospel to penetrate into our society. Because of this, most Americans and even many Christians might agree with this statement that Aristotle makes.

If you meet a homeless person, you are likely to feel pity for him if he’s just out of luck. There are probably a lot of people out there who, by a combination of bad luck and other factors, currently find themselves out of a home and job and sleeping on the streets. We can’t help but feel pity for them. But what about the homeless person who happens to be the direct cause of their problems? We don’t feel pity for that person, because they could have done things differently. It was their fault in the first place and they deserve what they get. This is essentially what Aristotle says, and I imagine that most conservatives (including myself) and even most Americans think like this, especially when it comes to things like this.

But thanks be to God that He doesn’t think like this, for if He did, then all of us would be out of luck. You see, as much as we may not like to admit, we are like the person who is ugly because of our lack of training and attention. We are the people who are blind because of heavy drinking and intemperance. We are the homeless person who is homeless because of our own doing. We are willing sinners who willingly rebel against God, not because of our environment, or because of bad luck, or because of something someone did to us. We are our own worst problems. You see, the problem with this world is not social institutions, or the distribution of wealth, or our surroundings and upbringings…we are the problem! Our sin and rebellion against God bring God’s wrath upon us, and this is totally of our own doing. We got ourselves into a big mess, and we certainly don’t deserve a way out.

But God, in His loving-kindness, bore our sin when Jesus the God-Man was crucified and took the penalty of sinning against God. He saw that we dug our own hole and that we perfectly deserved to stay stuck there. But then God got down in the hole with us, and lifted us up, even though we dug it in the first place. Such is the nature of the grace of God. We would do well to remember that.

Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own*

2009-09-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

We are all familiar with the classic Bible story of the Tower of Babel. Found in Genesis 11, this old tale tells the story of how the peoples of the Earth came together to build a massive tower that would reach to the heavens. God, in His divine omniscience, knew that this was a terrible idea, and he came and scattered the peoples and confused their languages. As orthodox Christians, we rightly ascribe the beginning of different languages to this event. But I think there’s more here than just a historical explanation for the creation of languages.

As strange as it may sound, as I interpret the passage, I think God is teaching us a political lesson here. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a new political movement sprung up in America. It was called “progressivism.” Progressivism was a political ideology that saw the need for major reforms in American life, politics, and economics. So far so good. Reform is often needed, and there have been many excellent progressive reforms in the past and even today. The fatal Biblical flaw of progressivism (which still is around today) is not that it saw radical reform as right and proper, but that it saw this reform as a means to self-perfection and utopia. Basically, progressives held (and still do believe) that if their reforms are implemented, then humanity as a race will be improved, bettered, and even perfected. The obvious flaw here is progressivism’s failure to take into account the sinful nature of man. Basically, progressives think they can make individuals and societies better by self-improvement.

I know the analogy isn’t airtight by any means, but I think that those who tried to build the Tower of Babel were the progressives of their day. Their idealistic belief in human progress and in their own goodness led them to think that they could build the tower and make a great society through their own means and the works of their own hands. It was their pride that brought their downfall.

But even more dangerous than political progressivism is personal progressivism. Did you know that every human on the face of the Earth is by default a personal progressive? I don’t mean that we are all in support of universal health care or market reforms. I mean that as sinners, we all try to earn our salvation by ourselves. We think we are good enough to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, earn our own salvation, better and perfect ourselves, and raise ourselves to a new plane of existence and living. The bad news is that we are wrong. For one, the Bible tells us so. Secondly, anyone can see from the evidence around us that we are not perfect, will never be perfect, and are in desperate need of something/someone to fix us. We are far too optimistic about our sinful position before God. And unfortunately, if we never repent of our pride, idealism, and rebellion, then God will judge us, just as He judged the people at Babel.

But thanks be to God that He has already provided a way out! Deep down inside, we know that we can’t make it on our own. We can’t make ourselves better, and we certainly can’t change ourselves enough to be perfect in God’s sight. So God, in His infinite love, sent His Son to take all of our punishment and give us righteousness, goodness, and perfection (theologians call this the imputation of active obedience/righteousness). We can’t change ourselves, so God changes us for ourselves by believing and trusting in Jesus Christ. And at the end of the day, that’s far better than trusting in ourselves. Only Jesus can bring about the type of changes that Babelians and progressives thought they could but really couldn’t. Only Jesus can change us. We would do well to remember that.

*I like U2 a lot, and I guess that really you can never make it on your own, not just sometimes

Too Much Billy Graham?

2009-08-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

The other day I bought Billy Graham’s autobiography “Just As I Am” on tape for really cheap. I’ve listed to the first couple of chapters so far, but I can tell that Billy Graham is a great man of God. I also think it’s safe to say that Rev. Graham is the greatest evangelist of the 20th century, brining millions through the power of the Holy Spirit to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. But it dawned on me the other day that maybe American evangelicalism has had a little too much of Billy Graham after all.

Now I’m not trying to criticize Billy Graham in what I am saying here. As a matter of fact, he had nothing to do with this development that I want to describe. Rather, I think that the church is at fault here. A little background. One of the reasons Rev. Graham was so successful was that he found a relevant way to preach the gospel to 20th century America. This method is called a “crusade.” As you may know, a crusade is like an overblown revival. It includes intense evangelistic preaching, cutting edge Christian music, skits, and any other type of eye-grabber that might point someone towards the gospel. Usually these crusades are held in large arenas or football fields. The crusade was a great invention for the glory of Christ. But I believe that some people, pastors, and churches have tried too hard to adopt the crusade model and replace it with the local church.

What I’m attempting to say is that many churches today look a lot more like Billy Graham crusades than local New Testament churches. And this is a bad thing. You see, in Christian life, the church has a central and special function. In a sense, the Catholics were right when they said there is no salvation outside of the church. They were wrong to say that connection to the Roman church alone saves, but they were right to articulate that a Christian has to be connected to the preaching, fellowship, ordinances, and discipline of a church in order to grow in grace. The local church is not a revival. It is not a crusade. It is a place where the ordinances are administered properly and the Word is preached rightly. This is not to say that the local church’s mission is not to save the lost (the purpose of the church is to fulfill the Great Commission), but it is to say that Sunday morning should go deeper than a Billy Graham crusade.

Rev. Graham’s method and message were only meant to save people from sin and never to disciple on a regular basis and help Christians grow. He was an evangelist, which is very distinct from a pastor or elder (there are many different members of Christ’s body). The place of the evangelist is not leading a local church. The evangelist is to be out in the world seeking the lost. The teachers and preachers are supposed to be in the local church, seeking the lost but also building up the found. Sometimes I think we’ve got it backwards. I think we’ve got too much of Billy Graham’s method where it’s not supposed to be. We’ve made the local church into perennial revivals and crusades…into something it was never meant to be. The church should be a place where the Word is preached and the ordinances are administered. We would do well to remember that.

A Generous Wallet

2009-08-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

I was reading this passage the other day and was blown away by its relevance for today:

“We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord, begging us earnestly for the favor of taking part in the relief of the saints—and this, not as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then by the will of God to us.” (2 Cor. 8:1-5, ESV)

In this passage, Paul is commending the Macedonian church to the Corinthians because of their above and beyond money offerings to the work of the apostles. Not only did the Macedonian church give more than they could have, but they also gave out of their extreme poverty. Here were the poorest of the poor matching and beating the contributions of a wealthy and prosperous Roman town such as Corinth.

These days, money is probably a little tighter than it used to be. Perhaps your 401K dropped in value and your nest egg is gone. Maybe you’ve lost your job and have no income now. At any rate, all of us are a little poorer than we used to be 2 or 3 years ago. And yet how has our giving to the relief of the saints been? Have we used this economic crisis as an excuse to drop and lower our contributions to our churches and mission agencies? Or have we “overflowed in a wealth of generosity,” “begging earnestly to take part in the relief of the saints?” Do we still or have we ever disregarded our own means, livelihood, or well being for the cause of the gospel and its advancement into the darkness? Southern Baptists will see a parallel here with the current drop in funding for the IMB. I’m convinced we can never give overflowing with joy in the midst of our personal economic crises and losses if we can’t give overflowing with joy when we are rich, happy, and carefree. And in order to give in times of both poverty and wealth, what we really need is a deep and true passion inside of us that seeks to glorify the One who gave it all for us by making His name famous throughout the world. We would do well to remember that.

Why Evangelism is Better than a Bailout

2009-07-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

I suppose it is fairly worth stating that Mr. Obama’s presidency to this point has been very controversial. But then again, I suppose the nature of the times and of the economy has played a large part in causing that controversy. Since Mr. Obama took office on January, we’ve seen cap and trade bills, bailouts, attempts at health care reform, car czars, and a whole bunch of other things the executive branch is trying to turn into legislation. The one thing in common here is that the Obama administration, along with every other presidential administration in history, has as its purpose the correcting and improving of the status quo. I suppose at the end of the day, that’s the point of politics anyways: to make things better than they were before you entered office.

While politics is a noble and necessary institution, I sometimes think that we as Americans have put too much hope and trust in our leaders and politicians to fix things and give us a better way of life. Obviously, the Obama-mania and cult like status the president has received in the past months is a sign of this, but conservatives have their fair share of all of this as well. They shout, “Now that Obama is in office, things will change!” or “If Republicans could only regain control of Congress, then America will be saved!” I think both of these statements are grossly misguided (not because politicians can’t change things, but because they simply can’t change things enough). Let me try to explain.

The root of the healthcare problem is not that we have a broken system or that we need an overhaul. To a certain extent, all systems are broken (while I suppose that some are less broken than others). The problem with healthcare is that those who run it and those who participate in it are under a curse. You might say, “that sounds ridiculous! Healthcare is messed up because of some hocus-pocus!” No, I don’t mean that kind of curse…what I mean is the curse of sin. The Bible teaches that all people on Earth are fundamentally and ethically separated from God because we are sinful, corrupt, and do not seek after the things of God. Working under those presumptions, we can see that the problem with healthcare is that people approach it as sinful people looking to serve themselves and their own lusts rather than the good of others. HMOs look to only increase profits at the expense o f the little man while participants only look for the cheapest way to get compensation. And the same is true of the bailout situation and the economic crisis. People who sought greed drove the American economy into the ground. For those who don’t remember, the Bible does say that money is the root of all evil.

And so it is with any political issue problem. What we need is not a welfare state: what we need is for people to encounter the life-changing power of Jesus and center their lives around serving others and God and ethical practices. What we need is not for Ron Paul and Austrian economics to win the day: what we need is the American population to come to Christ in mass droves. We don’t need America to reencounter its “Christian heritage” and return to honoring God in some vague sense: we need America’s heart to be broken over sin and for us to find forgiveness and healing in the person of Jesus Christ. We don’t need a bigger defense budget: we need spiritual defense from the powers of darkness. We don’t need climate change, Kyoto, or Copenhagen: we need people to understand the true value of God’s creation and work to conserve it. We don’t need grassroots political activism: we need personal evangelism. We don’t need a Moral Majority: what we need most of all is Jesus.

So my challenge to you is this. Show me a problem that America has, and I will show you that at its roots is not the NRA or the ACLU, but sinners doing sinful things. Show me any problem that this country faces, and I will show you that the root of that problem is you and me. Sin and separation from God is the fundamental problem with America, not Sarah Palin or Obama and their respected political ideologies. America and the rest of the world need one thing only: the personal and cosmic reign of Jesus Christ. Only He is big enough to solve all the world’s problems. We would do well to remember that.

Disclaimer. This post does not intend to undermine the value of political action and participation. Political action is highly valuable, but it lacks power outside of the transforming work of Jesus Christ. For the theologians out there, this blog does not intend to promote either Dominionism or a postmillennial or amillennial eschatological scheme. The author would rather like to note that his American citizenship is less important than his citizenship in the Kingdom of God. He would also like to note that while America needs Jesus most of all, America is not all-important and the completion of the Kingdom does not appear to be complete until Christ comes again.

What the Gospel Demands

2009-07-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

In a few recent posts (found here and here), I attempted to describe the core message of Christianity and what it teaches, especially with a view to those who are confused or unsure of what Christianity teaches. I wrote about and defined the “facts” of Christianity, so to speak. But there is more to Christianity than just facts and history. There is on our part a very real response to make in light of what Christianity teaches. The fact of the matter is that everyone on the Earth must necessarily make a response to Christianity: to accept it and act accordingly or to reject it outright (which, as we shall soon see, is the same as accepting and acting on just some of it). So in this post, I hope to write about and clarify how one must go about the business of believing, accepting, acting, and responding to the message of the gospel, given that one has accepted the message of Christianity and Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

For those seeking to commit themselves to Jesus, the gospel demands two things. The first thing is a turn away from the world, sins, idols, and all its glory. This is commonly called “repentance.” The second thing is a turn towards Jesus Christ and a centering of our lives upon Him. This is commonly referred to as “faith.” Together, the Christian gospel demands two things from the believer: repentance and faith. This is the response necessary to gain eternal life.

So what is repentance? Well first of all, it requires a new birth (see John chapter 3). We believe that we are all sinners and that we love to sin (keep in mind that sin is much more comprehensive than just murdering and stealing…we’re talking sins of the heart like lust and hate too), and because of that sin, we cannot possibly desire to get rid of it. We love sin too much. Therefore, the first step in repentance is for the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to see our sin. And then we have to turn from it. This is something we cannot do by ourselves, but something we have to rely on God to do.

Turning from sin requires a full change of heart. What we once loved (the things of this world, etc) we now hate. What we once hated (God), we now love. We are to turn away from sin, desire it no longer, and do it no longer. Here’s the catch, however. Our turn from sin must be a total and absolute one. There is no going back. This doesn’t mean that we will never sin again or that we will be perfect people (see Romans chapter 7). Rather, it means that we will always in a very real way be fighting a struggle against sin. It doesn’t mean that we will be victorious all the time or even good. But it does mean that we will continually “by the Spirit, put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Romans 8:13, ESV). Repentance is an abandonment of all else in order to gain God. It is like the man who found a treasure in a field and who sold all he had in order to buy that field and gain the treasure (see Matthew 13:44). Why is repentance important? Well because it is the first step in a long process of changing our hearts back to they way they were supposed to be: they were meant to love God most of all. You see, Christianity is not a battle to make people act right or do good things; rather, it is a battle for the heart of people, seeking to change their hearts to love God. Plus, the God commands repentance:

“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”(Acts 17:30-31, ESV).

Repentance, however, is only the first part of the require response to Christianity. The second response is a turning towards Christ that we like to call “faith.” What is faith in Jesus? Certainly it includes mere belief in the facts of Christianity: that Jesus was the Son of God but yet a man, that He died on a cross 2,000 years ago, and that He is coming again). But it is also more than that. It is a trust that Christ is all we need to save us. Because we love so many things that are not God (sex, money, drugs, self-control, attention, etc) we become worshippers of those things. And when we become worshippers of those things, we also put our trust in them to save us. Now that seems strange, but it is very true. And we can put our trust in almost anything. We may not think we trust in, let’s say, premarital sex to save us, but when we commit that sin, it is because we think that sex gives us meaning, happiness, worth, and peace. In that sense, we trust in sex to save us. But the reality is that only Christ can give us meaning, happiness, worth, and peace. What a Christian does when they place their faith in Christ is to say “This world has nothing for me, nor can it really fulfill me! Instead, I lean on Christ and Christ alone to save me, fulfill me, and make me whole. I trust in His work on the cross to save me from God’s wrath and my love for the unfulfilling and evil things of this world and to make me whole!” In this instance, a person puts their trust in Christ’s sacrifice to be the only thing that can save them from God’s judgment and their sin. But you see as in repentance, there is no room for compromise in faith. We can’t trust in anything but Jesus. We cannot save ourselves and sin cannot save us. Only Christ can. Nothing else can make us justified before God or free us from the power of sin but Him. Trust in anything else but Jesus (or Jesus + anything else) means that we are relying on our own good works or merits and not Him. The Christian relies on Jesus and nothing else.

A final word about faith and repentance. First, they are not acts that we do that save us. God doesn’t save us on the goodness or adequacy of our faith and repentance; otherwise we’d be placing our trust in things other than Jesus (namely ourselves). Meeting the demands of the gospel are simply the proper response to seeing Christ for who He really is: they do not have merits of their own that save us. Second, the proper response to the gospel is absolute. There is no turning back. We must commit ourselves to hate and fight sin while at the same time committing ourselves to trust, love, and worship only God.

So what does the gospel demand? It demands submission and Lordship. It demands us to give up sin and commit our whole lives (and not just part of them) to doing the work and will of Jesus on Earth. Every part of your life has to be in the process of submitting to Jesus and becoming more like him. This is a commitment of your whole life, being, and existence to serve the only thing in the world that is worth serving. This may seem like a huge commitment that you might not want to make, but the only way we can find the fullest joy in life, the greatest peace and purpose in life, and eternal salvation and union with God is in that we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior. I believe that you will find that in accepting the demands of the gospel, you will find more joy, peace, and wonder in giving your life totally to Christ than in keeping your own control and freedom. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. We would do well to remember that.

GCR, IMB, Lottie Moon, and Article IX

2009-07-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

Suffice it to say that money is tight these days, but I suppose that’s stating the obvious. Unemployment continues to rise and is preparing to head north of 10%. Retirement plans are disappearing and foreclosures continue. Even Joe Biden had to admit that the economy is a lot worse off than the Obama Administration thought. And as Southern Baptists, we are all well aware that the IMB will have to drastically cut its support of our foreign missionaries in the future due to lack of funds. To me, this is one of the most worrisome statistics of this economic crisis: that Southern Baptists have to cut back on missionary work in the four corners of the globe. What then can be said and done about this sad news to insure that the gospel continues to be spread by Baptists throughout the world?

First, it needs to be noted that this is a very complicated issue. At one end of the issue is obviously the economic crisis: people are giving less in a time that requires belt tightening. It takes about $43,000 to fund a single missionary annually, and it’s getting much harder to do that during a recession. This, however, is representative of a much larger problem, namely, that the average evangelical Christian only tithes 2-3% of their annual income to the church, if they even tithe at all. Furthermore, SBC membership has declined again for the second year in a row, leaving us with less members to tithe. Undoubtedly, however, part of the problem with the IMB crisis has to be denominational and convention structure, to wit, the funds simply aren’t getting directed where they need to be.

This graph shows the convention funding strategy for international missions. At the bottom, the annual Lottie Moon offering goes directly to support the work of our foreign missionaries. At the top, money tithed from local churches to the CP goes to state conventions, where it is passed along to the CP, where it is equally divided between the IMB and the Exec. Committee, the seminaries, NAMB, and other institutions. The problem with this pattern is twofold. First, most churches don’t give much money to the CP, if any at all. This obviously creates issues in IMB funding. Secondly, the state conventions retain far too much of what little funds they actually get. You can see on the graph that the stingiest state convention only gives 14% of its CP income to the CP, retaining the rest for its own ministries. Let me play this out in a scenario for you.

Did you ever give your little kids a $1 to tithe as a way to teach them to give? My parents did this with me. Let’s use this $1 as an example and follow its trail through the convention. Let’s say your church is faithful and tithes 10% of its budget to the CP. Out of that dollar, only 10 cents goes to the state convention. Let’s say you are a South Carolina Baptist (which gives 42% of its income to the CP…fairly generous as state conventions go). Out of that 10 cents, 4 cents goes to the CP. Divided in half, about 2 cents goes finally to the IMB. So for every dollar given, only 2 cents actually makes it to the mission field. And that is a best case scenario. That is purely pathetic.

Article IX of the GCR calls for a restructuring of our state conventions to place funds where they need to be. I wholeheartedly agree, with the addition that we need to start seeing our local churches giving more to the CP in the first place. Article IX, if enacted correctly, can help to streamline our denominational structure and put mission priority on our fund. Until that time comes, I encourage you to look at the bottom of the chart at the Lottie Moon Christmas offering. LMCO provides the IMB with 54% of its annual operating budget. Furthermore, this offering goes 100% unhindered to the IMB and is not taxed or subsidized along the way. The SBC has set this year’s LMCO goal at $175 million, which is $25 million more than last year. I encourage you to advertise, campaign, and support the LMCO offering this year, and hopefully we can send out more missionaries and avoid cutbacks with the help of our Lord.

Finally, a few disclaimers. Missions isn’t just about giving cash to the kingdom. We are a wealthy and large denomination that has plenty of means. But if our only concern and participation with missions is how much money we can give, then we miss the point. I finished reading Hudson Taylor’s (a great English Baptist 19th century missionary to China) autobiography. While in England, he had the opportunity to go to a local church and present the grave spiritual need in China that was being met by his China Inland Mission. Before preaching, he asked the minister to not allow any solicitation of funds or offerings for his venture. Today this seems like quite an odd thing to do. Later he explained himself. Sacrificial giving to missions work should come only from a real and deep concern and compassion for the lost. We aren’t just to give money for giving’s sake. Rather, as Christians our giving should come out of a deep desire to see people meet and be filled by Jesus. As Rev. Taylor said, God always supplies the means for those who are really called to spread the gospel. What we need for a Great Commission Resurgence to occur is a Great Commission Revival which leads people to see Jesus and his mission more clearly.

Secondly and briefly, as the SBC and IMB goes, so the Kingdom does not necessarily go. The SBC, NAMB, and IMB are not essential to the evangelization of the lost. God’s kingdom will continue to progress, for He is an Isaiah 26:15 God who will always increase the borders of His nation. The question of the SBC/IMB/GCR is not fundamentally one of whether the progress of God’s kingdom will be hindered. Rather, it is a question of whether the progress of the kingdom will be diverted elsewhere, to other “Jesus-intoxicated” peoples, churches, and denominations. It is fundamentally a concern for our own sanctification: will we be obedient to the call of the Great Commission? Will our hearts, corporate and individual, cry out and long to see friends, family, and strangers meet the One living God through Jesus His Son? This is really the bottom line. We would do well to remember that.

What Does Christianity Teach?

2009-06-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

In a recent post, I blogged (with the help of a video of Russell Moore) about the true nature of the gospel and the message that Christianity has to spread to the world. In this entry, I hope to get a little more specific about what I know to be the good news of the coming of Jesus Christ. My hunch is that, especially in the South, most non-Christians, atheists, and genuine truth seekers unfortunately know more about an evangelical’s political position rather than the true content of the gospel. Because of that, there are many out there who are confused as to what Christianity really teaches. For that reason, this post is for those people, so here goes:

First, there is something wrong with the world. I don’t think anyone would disagree with this. Look at all the injustice in the world. Look at the way that societies work, look at economic and political systems, look at the state of our culture. It is by far not perfect and deeply flawed. Everyone, including Christians, believes that. Christians, however, go deeper than just pointing out problems with the world around us. Ultimately, the reason that the world is broken is not because capitalism or communism are flawed systems, or because society corrupts us, or because of bad governments. What is wrong with the world are individual imperfections, commonly referred to by Christians as “sin.” The reason that the world is messed up on so many levels is because universally every one of us is flawed, broken, sinful, and depraved creatures that at our core level do not seek after God or the good of others, but seek only to satisfy our sinful desires. We don't just do bad things every now and then, we are essentially bad people who don't seek after God. What’s worse is that we cannot fix this on our own. So first, Christians hold to the undeniable fact that we as humans have rebelled against God.

Second, there is nothing wrong with God. I don’t think anyone doubts that either. God by definition is perfect. In the beginning, God created humans as beings who desired after Him and loved Him. But something went terribly wrong. Out of our own free agency, humans chose to set their hearts on things and idols rather than God (thus, the current situation of the world). And thus it still is with you and me. Instead of seeking after God (that is, following God’s laws and commandments), we follow our sinful desires and choose things that lead to death. Because God is perfect, he cannot stand the presence of imperfect beings that do not seek Him. Therefore, at death we are sent to Hell, away from the presence of God for eternity. This is a crucial step. “Good people” don’t go to heaven because all their good works are like nothing before God. God is infinitely perfect, and we cannot ever earn his salvation by doing good works for all of our lives because these works can never pay back our sin debt or measure up to God’s perfection. This goes for Adolf Hitler just as well as it goes for Mother Teresa and you and me.

Third, God is a loving God. Although because we did in the past rebel through the first humans and rebel today through our own actions and therefore deserve eternal punishment, God loved the world enough to send Jesus Christ, who was and is God, to bear God’s punishment for us. Instead of casting us into hell, God chose to offer us salvation through this Jesus. Jesus lived a perfect life for us (never rebelling against God or seeking sinful things) and then offered himself as a sacrifice to God, taking upon Him our sins. Through His work, he makes us righteous and gives us a perfect moral and legal status in the sight of God. For those who trust in Christ to save them, God grants unto them Christ’s righteousness, which covers all our sins, forgives them, provides us with new righteousness, and then begins the long process of making us beings who truly love God and not the world. This then is God’s plan to restore this flawed world: to save humans and restore us back to what we were always meant to be. Here’s the catch: there is no other way to this salvation than Jesus Christ. If the world is messed up and us along with it, and if God is just and demands perfection, then the ONLY way that we can ever be perfect is through the atoning work of a person who was both a man and God, and not through any other teaching or practice. Only one road leads to God, heaven, and restoration, and that road is Jesus Christ.

In conclusion, what I have done is take the three statements “the world is messed up,” “God is perfect,” and “God is loving,” and prove that Jesus is the only way to heaven. Atheists aside, I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t believe those three statements. However, very few people take these three statements and draw the logical conclusions: that Christ is the only way to fix this mess that we call humanity. If people would connect the dots and were truly honest to their convictions, then I think we’d really understand what it means to see us as messed up, to see God as perfect, and to see God as loving. In light of that, this is the only conclusion that can be drawn: “that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” (1 Tim 1:15, ESV). We would do well to remember that.

In Name Only

2009-06-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a rough unedited version of a message I gave to my old youth group the other night.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7:21-23)

Most of us can recall a time back when we were young when we were afraid of something. I’m not talking about scared one night during a thunderstorm, but something more long lasting. Something like the fear of the boogiemonster or the monster in the closet, or we were afraid of the dark. We were scared that something much more bigger and powerful than us was lurking just around the corner, waiting to get us at just the right moment. And these fears lasted long times. A child is not scared of the monster in the closet for just one night. Monsters in the closet are monsters precisely because they never go away. The threat is always there, and for us, the threat was real. And while we eventually grew out of those childish fears to be afraid of other things (like cooties or first days at school or maybe relationships at home that weren’t right), if we are honest with ourselves, we acknowledge that the fear of boogiemonster cut deep into our souls and haunted our deepest darkest places and chilled our hearts with the cold of loneliness fear uncertainty.

The fact of the matter is, this is the way most of us feel about this verse. For some of you, it may be the first time you’ve ever heard this verse preached. Good for you. Take in the word of the Lord. However, I think that most of us have heard this verse before. And most of us, and rightly we should be, are petrified of it. These words of Jesus are the ones that haunt us at night when we are laying in our beds saying our prayers: “what if on the judgement day, these words become a reality? What if Jesus doesn’t know me??”

I think that maybe we all have a good reason to be afraid of these words. As far as I can tell, these people who say “Lord Lord” look a lot like most of us. First of all, they honor the name of Jesus. In English class, if we want to highlight something, we use an exclamation mark. For ancient Hebrews, the exclamation mark was to say something twice. For example, I go to the University of South Carolina. I love my school, and when I get excited about it, I yell “Go Gamecocks!” But if I were a person in the time of Jesus that went to USC, instead of saying “Go Gamecocks!” with an explanation point, I would say “Gamecocks, Gamcocks.” These people seem excited about Jesus on surface.

Second, they did a lot of good and holy things. As a matter of fact, it looks like they’ve done more holy things than you and I have ever done. They preached and prophesied, cast out demons, and preformed miracles. The last time I checked, I’ve never cast out a demon. And the last time I checked (insert name of person) has never healed someone or brought them back from the dead. So we have good reason to be afraid that Jesus might never know us: these people that Jesus mentions here are more excited about Jesus than we are, and they do even more holy things. That being the case, why would Jesus cast these people out of His holy kingdom? It seems almost ludicrous!

In my opinion, and I think this opinion aligns with what God’s word says, we as church people, especially church people in the South, should be absolutely petrified and terrified by this verse. If we really take seriously what Christ is saying here, then that means that a lot of is in here fall into that category of the condemned. Not everyone who thinks they are going to heaven are going to heaven. There are many of us in here that will say on the day of judgment that “Jesus is Lord” but Jesus will say back to us “I don’t even know who you are!” When we read these words, we should fear for our lives, for Christ is speaking of serious stuff here. So how can we tell if Christ really knows us or not? How do we know that our faith is sincere and that we are one of the ones that Christ will say to “Welcome home my good and faithful servant?” Lets dig into the text to find out!

First, from this text, we can learn that it apparently takes more to save someone than we originally thought. How do I know that? Quite simply because all of these people thought they were saved. Notice the question: “Did we not…?” As you might expect, these people sincerely thought they were going to heaven when they died. After all, they had cast out demons, fed the poor, clothed the homeless, and prophesied. The other day I was on the internet, and I found an article that said that 85% of Americans think they are going to heaven. Isn’t that an interesting fact? To put that in perspective, if you asked 10 random people at your school if they think they belong in heaven with God if they died right now, 8 or 9 people would always say yes. That’s sort of funny isn’t it? We as Christians know that 85% of Americans will probably not make it to heaven. But why do we know that? Quite simply because if we look at American society, culture, television, music, internet, churches, and even ourselves, we know that it is ludicrous to believe that we are going to heaven based solely on our own works. We know that 85% of America will not make it to the throne of grace because the faith that they profess doesn’t match up with the actions of their lives and the desires of their hearts.

But there’s more to this verse then just saying that the drug dealer on the street won’t make it to heaven even though he thinks he will. This warning of Jesus is not just for the evildoers, the rapists, murderers, or thieves who have deluded themselves into thinking that they knew Jesus. This verse doesn’t say “Did we pimp…?” This verse is for the “good” people in society. Quite frankly, this verse is for people who currently sit in the pews of the church and on the floor of the youth room. Now how do I know that?
Well, I know that because these poor souls held had a good theology. Not only did they believe that Jesus was “Lord, Lord” (twice for emphasis, mind you), but I’ve been told that the words for “Lord” in Greek here actually don’t mean only “master” but also Jehovah or God. These weren’t the people you might have encountered who think that Jesus was a good guy but wasn’t really divine or the Son of God. These are the people who are religious, who spend their time in Christian Supply reading all the good theology books. These people that Jesus never knew believed that Jesus was the Son of God:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
He descended into hell. The third day He arose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
They believed in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting.

We believe in those things too, and what’s more, these people did more good works than any of us could have ever done. They even did supernatural things! You know, I’m beginning to think that these people to whom Jesus said “depart from me for I never knew you” were not really that different from you and me. They were good church people. They were in church every Sunday, always went to Sunday school, gave generously with tithes and offerings to the church, went on all the youth retreats, always came to Wednesday night, and did all the right things. As a matter of fact, these condemned people are exactly like us. So I guess the only question we have left to deal with tonight is “Why does Jesus not know these people?” What is it about this group here in Matthew 7 that Jesus did not like? What is it about these people that made them convinced about their salvation but led them to be tragically and miserably wrong? What could it be about you and me that makes us fall into the same category?

I think that if we look closely at what Jesus says here, we can figure out the mystery of what’s going on here and settle once and for all what the issue is. So here are a few points derived from the text that tell us how to avoid being the type of person that Jesus doesn’t know.

First, these people were obsessed with themselves and not Jesus. They were concerned about their own glory and works and not about glorifying God and making God look good. Plus, although they may not have been aware of it, they looked to their own good works to save them. (Elaborate…good works don’t save us). Remember how we talked about them saying “Lord Lord” in order to emphasize the name of Jesus? Well that’s not quite what they were actually doing. Instead of giving glory to God by saying “Lord, Lord” or shouting praises to Christ by saying “Lord!” what these people were actually doing was pointing attention to themselves. Just a few pages over, Jesus says this about prayer in Matthew 6:

Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.
2 “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
5 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (ESV, Matthew 6:1-6)

Jesus tells us to pray and give to the poor in secret because if we do it in public, we are trying to bring attention, glory, and honor to ourselves. Thus it was with the people in our main text, those whom Jesus did not know. Instead of shouting out “Lord, Lord, save me!” they were shouting out “Lord, Lord, look at me! Aren’t I so awesome? Look at all the wonderful things I’ve done. The people that Jesus doesn’t know are the ones who find more joy in bringing attention to themselves by using their religion, good works, and spirituality, than those who really want to serve and honor Jesus.

This point is again backed up by the text just a verse below. When Jesus tells them at the throne of judgment that he does not know them, they are obviously surprised. In response, notice their flawed and awful response: “Did we not?” When Jesus accuses them of not being Christians, their first and only defense is not that they found themselves trusting only in Christ’s death on the cross to save them, but only in what they have already done. In short, they point to their works: “Did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?” What they should have been saying is “Lord Jesus, I am a sinner and my works are useless. Save me!” And we know that works don’t save us, and when we stand before Jesus, we would be stupid to point to all the good things they’ve done. Just a point of clarification: what these people are not doing here is showing that because they loved Jesus they did a bunch of good things. If that were the case, then Jesus would gladly welcome them into heaven. What these people are doing is pointing to the fact that they think doing these things gets them into heaven. Bringing attention to our works instead of pointing to Christ’s work on the cross that actually saves us makes Jesus to not know us.

Second, these people didn’t know Jesus because they had a confession without commitment. Notice how they answer Jesus: “in Your name…in Your name…in Your name.” Certainly they confessed the name of Jesus. They believed he was God. They believed he died on the cross. They believed in the mystery of the Trinity, but yet they weren’t saved. We overlap with them too. So why weren’t they saved? Quite simply because they confessed the name of Jesus without any change in their lives. They said that Jesus was Lord, but they didn’t believe it or act like it. Some of you might know this verse:

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (ESV, Romans 10:9)

These people confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord, but they never really believed in their heart. They believed the facts about Jesus, that he was really God, that he walked on Earth, that he died on a cross for our sins. But that’s as far as it went. They only believed some facts. Imagine it like this: I know that 2+2=4. I believe that that is a logical fact. But I can hate the fact that 2+2=4 is true. I can hate the numbers 2 and 2 and 4. These people do the same. They believe in mere facts, but don’t trust in Christ, don’t put their heart behind Him, and don’t love Him. Saving faith is not just about believing in some historical facts about Jesus in the same way that we believe that our youth pastor is currently in the Dominican Republic right now. Beleivng in Jesus means so much more than just facts, for it is written:

You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!(ESV, James 2:19)

Even Satan himself thinks that Jesus got up from the grave. The difference is that he hates Jesus. And we do the same when we just simply say that Jesus is Lord but actually put our hope, trust, and reliability in our own works. We say we don’t need Jesus when we trust in our works or feelings to save us. But this is what most of us do.

I just recently got back from a trip to Washington DC. I was there for a church conference, and on the last day we had a free day in the city. In big cities like DC, there are subways. So while I was there, I got to ride the subway around DC. Here is my ticket. The ticket lets me get on and off of the subway and lets me ride. You see, I’m convinced (and John Piper is also) that we treat Jesus a lot like a ticket. We keep him in our wallets or purses, or maybe on our bedsides. If someone asks us if we have Jesus, we pull out our little ticket and show that we do, but we really don’t care too much for the ticket. The ticket is only a free pass to heaven anyways. It’s all about us. A professor or teacher would say that we are treating Jesus as a means rather than an end. We use our salvation and faith in order to get to heaven when we die, instead of getting us closer to Jesus. We are more concerned about going to heaven when we die rather than worshipping Jesus while we are alive. And this is a problem. When we treat Jesus only as a free pass or ticket to heaven, we put the focus on ourselves and not on God. And that is precisely what the people that Jesus doesn’t know do.

So I guess the main problem that these poor wretched people in Matthew 7 have is that while they believed that Jesus was God, but that that fact never changed their lives. They believed all the right things and did all the right things and confessed with their mouths that Jesus was Lord, but they didn’t confess with their hearts that he was Lord. If they really believed that Jesus died for their sins, they wouldn’t focus on themselves or the things that they had done in their lives. Rather, they would focus only on Christ’s righteousness to save them. But these people really don’t want anything to do with Jesus. And in that sense, this is not a real tragedy. These people never loved Jesus anyways…they only loved themselves. They use his name and do good works, but they have nothing to do with Jesus except that they use only his name. They are those who have a form of godliness, but deny its power. They are effectively Christians in name only.

Now here is what I am not and am saying. I am not saying that salvation comes by works. We don’t have to prophesy in Christ’s name or cast out demons in order to save ourselves. Works do not save us. Only belief (and believe means many things) and trust that Christ died for our sins saves us. What I am saying is that believing in Christ is much more than just believing in a few facts. It is much more than saying a prayer or simply just saying the words that Jesus is Lord. For not all who say Jesus is Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven. You see, true saving faith is faith that begins by wanting to honor, love and serve Jesus. Elaborate here.

The question is, where do you fall? Does Jesus know you? Do you honor him with your lips but not with your hearts? Are you the kind of person who saves yourself by your good works, or are you leaning on the all sufficient, all glorious work of Jesus Christ and that alone for salvation? Our own works will not stand up to God's measure of righteousness on the day of judgment. We would do well to remember that.

What is the Gospel?

2009-06-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, I just got back from a fascinating and exciting experience at a ministry conference called the Fund for Theological Education. Overwhelmingly, the participants swung moderate to liberal on questions of the faith. Once I organize my thoughts and experiences, I will post about them, but until now, chew on this. One of the major questions in the forefront there was "what is the nature of the gospel?" Below, Russell Moore of SBTS gives his definition of the gospel. The overwhelming consensus is that a definition like Dr. Moore's is wrong. I, however, believe and can argue that Dr. Moore hits the nail on the head in this video. Please take 6 minutes out of your day to listen to what he says.

We would do well to remember that.

Calvinism's Role in a Great Commission Resurgence

2009-06-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

As a young SBC Calvinist, I’ve been dealing deeply with the implications of the Great Commission Resurgence movement within the SBC, as have most members of the Convention. The problem, as with most of us, is not that I don’t support even greater emphasis on missions within the denomination; rather, that I’m just not yet sure how all this will play out on a large scale. At this point I realize that some of my readers will need a little background on the debate.

Most people don’t realize that 30 years ago, the SBC was on the brink of decline into a dark form of theological liberalism. Our theologians, seminaries, and churches had drifted away from the Bible. Fortunately, God saved our denomination through the work of such men as Patterson, Criswell, and Rogers. In the 70s and 80s, these men fought a political battle within the denomination that assured that Bible believing conservatives would stay in control and that Christ would stay in the center.

Thirty years later, in 2009, we celebrate that our denomination remains in large part faithful to God’s witness in the Bible; however, we recognize that we have not been as faithful as we should have been in following God’s “Great Commission” to spread the gospel to the world. In an age where SBC numbers and giving is declining, many such as Dr. Akin are calling the denomination to preserve the original intent the conservative resurgence by refocusing our efforts on domestic and foreign mission work. Dr. Akin has gone so far as to have written a treatise on the issue which carefully outlines his intentions and goals.

I’ve been thinking more and more about this ever since I finished the new book Calvinism: A Southern Baptist Dialouge. As all of us are aware, Calvinism is on the rise in the SBC and we are not quite sure what to do about it. The Great Commission Resurgence acknowledges that there are theological tensions within the SBC (such as the current Calvinist-non-Calvinist debate). The overwhelming consensus, however, is to label these kinds of debates as secondary and tertiary debates, that while important, are less influential to the propagation of the gospel. In the long run, the GCR people argue, we should not let these issues detract us from evangelizing the nations.

At this point, many of us recall Spurgeon’s famous quote that “Calvinism is the gospel.” I tend to agree with this quote, while at the same time acknowledging that much of the work of the church throughout the history of the church and of our denomination has been carried out adequately and appropriately by non-Calvinists. It seems then that SBC Calvinists are at a crossroads: do we accept the methodological emphasis of the GCR on core commitments to the gospel and orthodox Christianity, or do we stick to our guns and recognize that there are possible flaws to the GCR method. After all, doesn’t the GCR just want to put blind commitment to the gospel above theological consensus and thereby commit the same methodological errors that Tom Nettles identifies Mullins and Scarborough making at the turn of the century in By His Grace and For His Glory?

At this point, I think it is healthy to introduce a distinction that Dr. Greg Welty of SWBTS uses in his essay in the Calvinism book. He notes that when talking about doctrines and the gospel that some doctrines pertain to the esse (essence, core, or the sine qua non) of the gospel while others are bene esse (good for the essence and spread) of the gospel. According to Dr. Welty, Calvinism falls into the latter category, meaning that it is not the center of the gospel, but is good for the health and vitality of the gospel. While I tend to see Calvinism as less than the essence of the gospel but more than just good for its propagation and health (somewhere in the middle of the esse-bene esse distinction), I tend to agree with this assessment. And all of us who believe that true gospel work has been done by non-Calvinists are forced to accept this conclusion. While the non-Calvinists have certainly not been preaching what we would see as a full and majestic view of the gospel that places its locus on the full extent of God’s glory, their preaching has in some very substantial way been at least sufficient to be used as a means to bring about regeneration. If people can be saved by preaching from an unreformed and semi-Pelagian bent, then Calvinism cannot be the one, true, and only essence of the gospel. This doesn’t make the five points of Calvinism any less true, but I think it does mean that Calvinists should at least agree with and support most of the GCR and be ready and willing to work with our non-Calvinist brethren in spreading the gospel.

On the other hand, a Calvinist’s criticism of the GCR movement should be its theological nearsightedness. If indeed Calvinism is good for a healthy understanding of the gospel, then only a return to confessional and missional Calvinism within the SBC will actually accomplish the goals that the GCR wishes to achieve. It is Calvinism that turns us away from man centeredness (including man centered evangelism, preaching, ecclesiology, and church growth techniques) and towards a more God-centered approach to all of these things. I believe that a rise in Reformed theology is only good for the SBC because it has the power through God’s grace to purify and reform our convention and place our emphasis back on the Bible and missions in a way that a Great Commission Resurgence, a Baptist Identity Resurgence, a Cooperative Program, a convention name change, or a merging of the IMB and NAMB never could. So my only quibble with the GCR is that the GCR can only really change things insofar as it reorganizes state conventions and money flow. As an institution, it has no power to change hearts or minds, and I think the GCR leaders realize this. Only a return the centrality of Jesus Christ and Scripture can do that, and a rise in Calvinism I believe is one of the best ways to accomplish that. This does not mean that Calvinists should abandon attempts at a GCR because we are a minority opinion. On the contrary, it should encourage us to work even harder, using and offering our gifts and insights in order to advance the glory of God, recognizing that our contributions are incredibly important to the spread of the gospel.

In conclusion, a Calvinist should support the GCR and be willing to cooperate with non-Calvinist lovers of Jesus in order to reach the lost in a time when the lost need to meet Jesus more than ever. On the other hand, Calvinists should realize that a GCR will never occur until we return to the lordship of Christ and the authority of Scripture. It will be difficult for this to occur unless Calvinism plays a major role in a Great Commission Resurgence. I suppose, then, that Calvinism is much less important, and at the same time, much more important to the gospel than we really know. We would do well to remember that.

The Importance of Mentoring Youth

2009-06-15T18:55:00.000-07:00

Here is another awesome blog I would like to recommend. It’s Jarrett McNeely’s weblog, and its main purpose is to share a passion for reaching kids and youth for Christ. McNeely is a veteran youth minister who’s been in the business for almost 15 years in an age where the average youth minister in an SBC church can’t last a year.

On his blog, which can be found here, Rev. McNeely advertises a method of youth ministry called “mentoring.” In a postmodern age where the emergent church is gaining a foothold on the faith, mentoring might sound like a foreign and even threatening form of ministry. But actually, it is an authentic New Testament form of ministering to youths.

Mentoring involves the formation of intentional relationships with lay adults and churched youths. These relationships exist for the purposes of fellowship, prayer, encouragement, and pushing both parties closer to Christ. In a sense, this is the best form of youth ministry. God calls for His church to be full of young and old, interacting and sanctifying each other in love. Far too often, our youth are stuck in youth groups and never get a chance to grow in grace with other church members. As a matter of fact, it’s very likely that we would not have the formal institution of a youth ministry if the lay leaders of the church took enough time to mentor, disciple, and invest in youths. Jarrett’s blog is worth the read: http://jarrettmcneely.blogspot.com

Challenges to Pluralism

2009-06-05T08:43:00.000-07:00

I’m studying religion in college at a secular university. As we all know, religion in America is increasingly a private and personal matter which can make even the most timid of people emotionally charged. As a student of religion and its social aspects, my experience probably already confirms what yours has: while we live in a majority Christian nation, most Americans are still somewhat spiritual and adhere to some form of nominally Christian pluralism or inclusivism.

For those of you unsure of what I mean when I say pluralism/inclusivism, I mean this. Pluralism is generally a movement that seeks to find good and truth in many or all faith traditions. Pluralism comes in many different forms. It could be that a pluralist believes all faiths to be equally true and valid ways of interacting with God and attaining salvation. It could also be the case that the inclusivist sees one faith tradition as more true than the rest, but still sees some value in the others and incorporates their practices, beliefs, and traditions into their own faith. At any rate, all forms of pluralism affirm this: that multiple faiths are valid ways of seeking God and salvation.

Time after time in I hear people tell me that they believe that all the religions are ways to reach God and it is ignorant to try and assert the superiority of one over another. In this way, American society attempts to keep religion a private thing by just assuming all religions are truthful and not asking questions. Well I have a few questions to ask, and these questions concern the epistemic foundations of religious pluralism.

My challenge to religious pluralism is to examine its foundation of knowledge. Namely, pluralists support the idea that there is truth in all religions. However, what is the basis of this knowledge? How does one know that all or some religions are true, even when the truth claims of each religion gravely contradict the others? On what authority does one presume to know that Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism and the rest are all equally true? To say it bluntly, where did you come up with this idea? My answer is that no authority can prove that fact. Most people just assume that all religions are true because they feel that saying that does not offend anyone. Others may appeal to reason to demonstrate that all religions are true.

In each case, these appeals to offensiveness and reason fail. As my campus minister is apt to point out, the unoffending pluralist project fails. In fact, inclusivism is probably the most presumptuous of all religious beliefs. In this case, the pluralist pretends to know more than the practicing Christian or Jew about their own religion. By affirming that all religions are true, one actually claims to supersede the beliefs, practices, and revelations of the respected traditions and assumes to have some special revelation that demonstrates that all religions are true. In the case of the appeal to reason, the defender of inclusivism is once again on shaky grounds. They tend to believe that they know better and more than the Bible, Torah, or Koran. In their case, the appeal to reason attempts to supersede an appeal to the revelations and scriptures of the different traditions, which contradict one another. This once again assumes that human reason is superior to God’s revelation and that human knowledge is better than God’s. In any case, attempts to establish forms of religious pluralism generally tend to favor approaches that put priority on human experience and knowledge at the expense of God’s.

While I may not have been able to discuss all the epistemological foundations of religious pluralism, I do hope that I have shown that it is incompatible with theistic revelation (particularly Christian revelation and Scripture) and is instead a product of human thought. As a student of religion, I have learned that it is best to leave human productions and creations out of religion and instead favor what God’s word says. We would do well to remember that.

Adventures in Missing the Point

2009-05-26T16:18:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is taken from a Tony Campolo book that I never read, but had a cool title.
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As some of you may know, I spent the last few weeks traveling the countryside of southern England in the provinces of Kent, Wessex, and even Wales. This was all part of a class I was taking called “Castles, Cathedrals, and Colleges.” As you might imagine, I spent a lot of time inside England’s greatest and most important cathedrals. I got an inside look, so to speak, (and yes pun intended) at the state of the European church, and I discovered that they are missing the point.

What do I mean when I say the church is missing the point? Quite frankly, that it is failing to fulfill its purpose. A theologian might say that the English church is suffering from an ecclesiological failure to understand and fulfill its missiological purpose. Allow me to explain.

During my time in England, the big cathedrals there were celebrating what is called “Christian Aid Week.” During this week, members of the churches were encouraged to donate money to a general fund that would then donate money to denominational charities that would help alleviate poverty and hunger in the world. By itself, this is all very good. One of the church’s responsibilities is to indeed do all that is within its power to aid the poor. The problem is that I believe the English church took this to be its only and primary task and mission. While helping the poor is wonderful and is certainly the Christian thing to do, it is not the only Christian thing to do.

In Matthew 28, Jesus gives the church its primary and fundamental mission prior to His ascension. This is commonly referred to as the ‘Great Commission’: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” From the evidences I saw (and I could be totally wrong), I was forced to conclude that the English church has either given up or subordinated its primary mission of preaching salvation through Jesus Christ in favor of helping people with temporal and material needs. Now there is nothing wrong with helping the poor and hungry: James reminds us that this is true religion. The problem comes when we see the church only as an agency to rid the world of social injustice with no relation to Christ. Social injustice will only come with the reign of King Jesus, and that only alongside the preaching of sinners to repentance. The church’s mission is first to preach salvation to sinners and then to help the poor and starving, for “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4, ESV). We would do well to remember that.

Downs Syndrome and Biblical Human Identity

2009-05-08T20:34:00.000-07:00

Did you know that on average, 9 out of every 10 unborn babies that have been diagnosed with Downs syndrome are aborted? For those of you not good at math (like myself), that’s 90%! That’s a staggering number, and it has to be statistically significant. It also has to tell us something about our American society, especially the way we as a culture view and value those of us with handicaps.

While this statistic is appalling, I’m not going to rant and rave about the injustice being done to the challenged and the unborn. I don’t have near enough space to do that. Rather, I just simply wish to diagnose the problem from a philosophic point of view.

Why do we abort 90% of those children diagnosed with Downs syndrome? More or less because our society has become infected with a view of human identity called “dualism.” Advanced by such philosophers as Plato and Descartes, dualists believe that humans fundamentally are not bodily or animal creatures. Rather, they believe that we are disembodied minds/souls that happen to reside in bodies for a short time.

Immediately, you might stop to say, “Hey, isn’t that what the Bible says? Aren’t we just ‘jars of clay’ that hold our souls until we meet Jesus?” While this is true, the Bible teaches us that we are fundamentally more than just souls. When God created us, he created us as, to borrow from Boyce, a composite of body and soul, not simply a soul that resides in a body (Abstract XXIX). While this is a very fine distinction, it is of the utmost importance. At the end of times, God has revealed that we will be resurrected. We will have a new body. In heaven, we won’t be souls wandering around, but we will be in perfect bodies that taste and feel and touch just like ours, except they are perfect. What this doesn’t mean is that we don’t have souls but rather that our souls are inextricably tied to our bodies. What this does mean is that humans aren’t primarily a mind or a soul, but an animal body. God created us as animals, and he will sustain and resurrect us as bodily animals at the end of all things.

So what does this have to do with Downs syndrome? Essentially, this: if humans are primarily physical animals that breathe and eat and think and not immaterial minds, then we should treat each other as bodily animals. The reason people disrespect and abort handicapped children is that the minds of handicapped kids don’t operate the same way that most human minds do. Under a dualist view of human identity, we begin to value handicapped people less and less, because they don’t measure up to the wrongheaded dualist criteria of what it means to be human. I submit that we need to change the criteria of what it means to be human back to what the Bible says, and the Bible says that we are physical bodily animals with souls, regardless of our mental state, and not souls that use bodies for a short time. If we start viewing human identity Biblically, then we start to see that all humans are created in the image of God and are valuable, no matter the state of mind. When we deviate from what the Bible says about human identity, we start to value people for what they are worth mentally, and that is never good. We would do well to remember that.

At the Foot of the Cross, the Ground is Level

2009-04-27T11:08:00.000-07:00

“And it's man against man, it's black and it's white

It's man against man, it's wrong and never right

It's man against man, it's Gentile and Jew

And when it's man against man

Lord God, it's man against You”

-Buddy Greene

In one of my recent philosophy classes, we’ve been discussing the nature of healthcare and healthcare inequalities. As we’ve all been made aware by the recent election cycle’s emphasis on healthcare reform, a very large portion of the American population is without adequate healthcare. Around 40,000,000 of us don’t have insurance at all, and around 80,000,000 of us are underinsured. It seems obvious then that inequalities in health abound: some will be more healthy than others while others will languish in sickness and disease. Such is the nature of a broken world.

All over societies, even in our great American society, inequalities exist. Some don’t receive justice, fairness, and respect. You could cite racism, income inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor, etc. The list goes on forever. My point here is that sin has caused inequalities, unfairness, and unequal treatment and conditions on this globe. I’m not saying that the people who sin the most get treated unfairly as a result of their sin. Rather, I’m saying that sin in general has corrupted humans to the extent that justice is nearly impossible on this planet.

But the more I think about the cross, the more I see how God’s divine intervention not only wisely plans to save us from our sins, but also plans to redeem our broken societies by redeeming us individual souls. Why does injustice and inequality exist? Because we are sinful people who have created a sinful world with broken systems and societies. Injustice and inequality should be no surprise to those of us who know our Redeemer. At the foot of the cross, however, the ground is level.

Sin and salvation are the two great equalizers of the human race. Some of us might be in better positions than others. Some of us might be more talented. Others might have worse health and less money than others. Still others of us might experience the injustice of racism, bigotry, and hatred. But the one thing that makes us all equal is the fact that we stand in full condemnation in front of a Holy God because of our sin and hatred for Him. And the other thing that makes us all the same is the fact that we stand in full need of a feat of salvation that only He can bring about. When we start looking at each other in light of these two things that all humans have in common, I think we begin to look past race and creed and look at each other like Christ sees us. The other things start to fall away, and the big picture of salvation and the Lordship of Christ falls into place. That’s why Paul can say in Galatians that “in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:26-28, ESV). We would do well to remember that.

“But on a cross of crucifixion 2000 years ago

Blood was shed for the sins of every man and now I know

At the foot of that cross the ground is level and there's no man against man”

-Buddy Greene

I Am the Kings of Israel (And So Are You!)

2009-04-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading a lot of ancient Israel’s history these days. Part of that is because I’ve been taking a Hebrew history class, and we’ve been referring very often to the books of Kings and Chronicles. I realized this year that I knew almost nothing about Israel’s history in the Old Testament, so I decided also to supplement my knowledge by reading through the books of 1 and 2 Kings.

As you may know, Israel’s history is not a pretty one. They were called out of Egypt and led to the promised land. Once there, judges ruled over the people until God allowed Israel to have its own kings. After David and Solomon, the moral record of the kings of Israel is not so stellar. These evil kings led God’s people into idolatry and immorality far too often. They forgot God’s love for them and abused His grace.

I don’t know about you, but when I read the accounts of the reigns of these kings, I can never identify with them. I mean, c’mon! Who could be that stupid! Everyone knows that God is the one true God, and that Ba’al, Asherah, and the like are all fakes. How wicked and immoral and despicable and satanic are the kings and people of Israel! It would be so easy to be in their shoes and do the right thing.

But then I think about idolatry then and today. For them, idolatry simply meant worshipping a wooden or stone idol that was not the One True God. For us, idolatry could certainly include that, but it mostly refers to things we chase after to fulfill us that aren’t God. I could run through a list (sex, control, image, power, laziness, etc), but you know what an idol is now: anything that fills our lives with something that is not Christ and makes the glory of Jesus shine any less. Reflecting on that, it is then that I realize that I am no different than the worst of Israel’s kings.

I am Jeroboam, who made an image for God, but for me, I have made myself my own god. I am Ahab and Jezebel and I have tormented God’s people and openly enticed others to worship idols. I am Rehoboam, who divided and angered God’s people. I am Ahaz and I have made deals with the enemies of God. I am Manasseh and my sin makes God’s people look more evil than the unsaved. And so are we all. We are the kings and people of Israel who sin every day, even though God brought us out of our own Egypt of sin and is leading us towards our own promised land in heaven. So in retrospect, I guess that you and I are every bit as bad as the worst of Israel's kings. That strikes close to home.

But that’s not the end of the story. Despite the evil of Israel, God sent them a savior, even through the bloodline of the kings. And that Savior is available to us today. And when we sin, when we mess up, when we prostrate ourselves to foreign idols, He loves us and atones for our sins. Great is His faithfulness, for he looks over sin after sin of his people. Great is His faithfulness, for He hasn’t forgotten His covenant. Great is His faithfulness, for His love reaches even me (and you). We would do well to remember that.

This Shall Not Tarry Long

2009-04-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

My favorite pastor Steve Brown has a saying for dealing with the pain of other people. He says that when someone cries, you ought to taste the salt. In John 11, Jesus “tastes the salt.” After Lazarus dies, Jesus weeps. I’m sure he is weeping over the loss of a good friend, but most commentaries and theologians will add that Jesus is also weeping over the saddened state of humanity—all that has been lost during the fall. So should we be.

A lot of the time, I think we conservatives don’t view the world in this way. I think we view it with anger, judgment, and condemnation. And I guess to a certain extent we should. We should be angry with sin. Think of the fundamentalists and the culture warriors…while they may be dead on about sin and degradation in society, should our response to such things be as belligerent and militaristic as theirs? I don’t think that was Jesus’s approach. I think Jesus was saddened by the state of the world and longed to restore it. His wrath over sin was always reserved for the religious people (that’s us, by the way). This is not to say that God is not angry with sin. It’s just to say that this fallen world should upset us and that before we are angry with other’s sins, we should be furious with our own first. But I digress.

This being Good Friday, I was reflecting earlier today about the world. So many people are chasing after so many things that do not bring fulfillment. Some chase after drugs, some become enslaved to sex, some to music. But fulfillment does not lie there. Some chase after performance, control, image, pride, fame, money, and honor, but everlasting contentment cannot be found there. Still others look to relationships, family, self-righteousness, freedom, perfectionism, and a whole host of other things to fill the void in their lives. Nothing works.

The bottom line is that none of this saves, none of this works, all of this lets you down. Spending your life on these things is meaningless and empty. And if you do not believe me, then try it for yourself and see how far you get. You’ll be left with an illusion of a life. But thanks be to Jesus, this shall not tarry long. God is in the business of restoring this world. He’s in the business of saving our souls and making us perfect. He’s in the business of fulfilling our lives with the only thing that can fulfill us: the never-ending covenantal love of Jesus Christ, who died for us. So when we look at the world, we should be angry. Angry at sin and all the pain it has caused. But we should also be sad. Sad at all the pain sin has caused and how it has severed our relationship with God. But we should also rejoice, for sin and emptiness and meaninglessness shall not tarry long. He is coming, and He’s coming to make us new. We would do well to remember that.

Good Friday Meditation

2009-04-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
10 I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.
11 As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
12 Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.
13 For I have bent Judah as my bow;
I have made Ephraim its arrow.
I will stir up your sons, O Zion,
against your sons, O Greece,
and wield you like a warrior's sword.

Zachariah 9:9-13 (ESV)

We would do well to remember that.

Divine Child Abuse?

2009-04-03T07:30:00.001-07:00

I think I angered some liberals the other day. I was at a lecture on theology, being delivered by one of the foremost scholars in Biblical criticism who is currently alive. The lecture was on the New Perspective on Paul. For those of you who don’t what that is, it is basically just a position that revises the context of Paul’s writings and letters. My pastoral understanding of the New Perspective is that is defines salvation as not justification by faith from sins, but as inclusion in God’s community.

This is tricky, because salvation does include inclusion and participation in the community of believers, but only on the basis that we are saved from our individual sins (which is what the New Perspective totally misses). So I asked the lecturer during the Q&A session what was the purpose of Christ’s death, if He did not come to save us from our sins? I insinuated that the purpose of Jesus’s death was substituionary, in that he died as a sacrifice to in our place to appease the wrath of God. The lecturer answered that Jesus died out of His great love, but not as a sacrifice. Immediately, the other liberals got up and started noting in their questions that Jesus did not die as a sacrifice. I think I upset them a little bit.

One of the main criticisms of the substituionary atonement (the idea that Christ died for our sins) model is that it is “divine child abuse.” How could a good God send His Son into the world, only to slay Him as a propitiation, when He could have just easily turned the other cheek and forgiven us? I mean, c’mon! God is so big that He didn’t have to die for our sins, right? Wrong! That view of life suggests an incomplete view of sin and of God. Liberals and the world alike think that sin is something small, something never really harmless, and something that doesn’t require forgiveness. But sin is so big because God is so holy. God is perfect and requires perfection (Matthew 5:48). Any one small unimportant sin keeps us from that standard (James 2:10). The only way we can keep the law and become justified is through Christ’s righteousness. The only way we can get Christ’s righteousness is through His death as a sacrifice. If there had been another way, God would have taken Christ’s cup from Him in the garden of Gethsemane.

The bottom line here is that if Christ did not die as a sacrifice, then why in the world did He die? To be our example? To show His love? Because He was a victim of a ruthless political system? Neither of these by themselves, nor any other explanation, makes any sense. Even worse, these views on Christ’s death represent the real divine child abuse. If Jesus didn’t have to die to save us, then why did God make Him die and go through all that pain, suffering, and agony? That is true divine child abuse. We would do well to remember that.

5 Steps to Making Good Decisions?

2009-03-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I attended a youth conference at my home church. The topic of the conference was “making good decisions.” As we all know, making good decisions is very important for our youth today. But even more than that, making good decisions is important for all of us, especially college students like me. I’m not necessarily talking about making good moral decisions: we know the Law and must rely on the power of the Spirit to mortify our sin. I’m speaking of what some may call morally neutral decisions: decisions where there are objectively no right or wrong answers. For example, a morally neutral decision might be what college to attend or even what to eat for lunch.

Many of us have been taught from the beginning that God as a “perfect will” for our lives concerning morally neutral decisions (college, occupation, spouse, number of kids, etc) and that if we deviate from this path, we will “screw up our lives” and get out of God’s will. So you see why we earnestly desire to get the answers to those questions right. After all, where we go to college and who we marry have significant impacts on our lives. Let’s look then at these verses to see what we can say about making good and wise decisions.

“Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses. And I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you. I will make the fruit of the tree and the increase of the field abundant, that you may never again suffer the disgrace of famine among the nations. Then you will remember your evil ways, and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves for your iniquities and your abominations. It is not for your sake that I will act, declares the Lord God; let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel. (Ezekiel 36:22-32, ESV).

I think there are three things we need to take away from this text concerning decisions. They may not seem to connect at first, but stay with me. First, God is the one who initiates the act of salvation. Notice how many times “I” [the Lord] is referred to: I will vindicate, I will give, I will take, I will sprinkle, I will cleanse, I will put.” It is not we that save us, but God.

Second, what is God doing? Here, He is promising us a new heart, one of flesh and not of stone. He is putting His Spirit within us so that we may obey and follow Him. We as Christians call this regeneration, the process of God coming into our lives and letting us see His glory and thereby bringing us to Him. Without this heart, our Christian lives are wasted.

Third, why is God doing this? He says in verse 32 that it is not for our sake that He saves us, but for His own glory. The act of salvation is done because He loves us, but mostly because it makes our God look good and gives him fame and renown. So we see that God is doing an action in us that saves us for the purpose of giving Him glory.

In light of that, we see what the issue is. We don’t need the “5 steps to making good decisions” or the book about “living your best life now.” We don’t need rules or principles or guidelines about how to run our lives. What we need first and foremost is a new heart: a heart of flesh that seeks after God and desires the things that He wants. Furthermore, this heart must acknowledge that God is in control of all things and must long to make God famous in all the world. That’s our issue. We don’t make good decisions because we don’t consider giving God the glory in our daily lives. When we make big life decisions, we must always consider God’s greater glory over our wants and needs, for we were called to Him for the purpose of giving Him glory. And we can only do that with a new heart. We would do well to remember that.

Will it All Burn?

2009-03-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

Last week, I went on a mission trip with RUF to Lagniappe Presbyterian Church in Bay St. Louis, MS. Our focus was rebuilding the Mississippi coast still ravaged by the impact of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. During the week, we laid the foundation for a house as well as framed another one. But was there a point to rebuilding any of these houses or spending our group’s time and energy (we happened to have a lot of energy, by the way)? Won’t all the fruits of our labor be gone when the next hurricane goes through? Or if not then, won’t these houses be gone anyway in a hundred years or so? Even more, won’t they be destroyed at the coming of Christ when this world will burn? It seems we labored in van.

But of course, this is not the case. When we were down in Mississippi, or when we are doing anything for the name of Christ, we are about the business of building Christ’s kingdom. But we aren’t building a physical kingdom of houses for the unfortunate. We are in the business of building a spiritual kingdom of new believers in Christ, and one of the many ways of doing this is to provide these people with houses and basic necessities. Christ would have done the same. The miracles he preformed did meet many fundamental human needs like hunger and healing, but the miracles were never meant for just that. They were meant to point to the One who makes all things new again. In the same way, our works are to do the same.

So will it all burn? Yes it will all burn: the houses, the parks, the gospel tracts, the donated food, and the homeless shelters. But what will not burn is the imperishable inheritance of the Son of God that is awaiting us and all the converts in heaven (1 Peter 1:4). We would do well to remember that.

Live Dangerously

2009-03-19T17:51:00.000-07:00

Here is a convicting video of the highlights of Dr. Mohler's convocation address to SBTS. The implication here is that the Christian life is one of danger for the sake of loving Christ. The music is pretty awesome too!

We would do well to remember that.

Baptist Identity Movement Self-Defeating?

2009-02-24T14:20:00.000-08:00

I live and study at a secular university that has little or no connection to the outside world, especially the world of Southern Baptist insider politics. I try to keep up with developments in my denomination via the Baptist Press and various blogs that I read. The question of Baptist Identity has been lighting up the web this week, so I thought I’d add my humble thoughts to the question at hand. Here’s what I know:

1. A lot of people don’t like Mark Driscoll (but some do)

2. There are two groups up in arms over this issue (Baptist Identity and Great Commission Christians who also happen to be Baptists)

3. The Identity people are concerned with the continuation of the historic Baptist church (and thus have some issues with cooperating with other denominations) while the GCR people have less of a problem. This includes church planting issues.

Here are some recent remarks made by SWBTS President Patterson about the issue at hand, with particular reference to church planting (taken via Les Puryear’s blog):

“There a lot of things that we can do, even with others who aren’t Great Commission Christians,” he said, referring to standing against abortion or for family values with Roman Catholics. “[However], I am constitutionally opposed to doing church planting with anybody other than Baptists. Baptists are paying for it so it ought to be a Baptist church that is planted. That ought to be true in Kenya, and it ought to be true here; it ought to be true everywhere. If we’re going to pay for it, and we’re going to put the people out there to do it, we ought to plant Baptist churches.”

Now I only know what I’ve read from Tom Nettles about SBC history and a little about the Anabaptists from history class, but it seems from Dr. Patterson's (a BI leader and avowed Anabaptist fan) claim that the BI cause is self-defeating. One of the most important and historic Baptist ecclesiological principles is that of the autonomy of the local church. There are many diverse distinctives within the Baptist camp, but this one tends to unite us all. The local congregation is to be ruled over by its own elders and deacons and not by anyone from outside it. In light of that, wouldn’t it be more in step with SBC identity to let each individual congregation that our church planters start (albeit in association with other GC Christians) determine the denominational (or lack thereof) structure within which they wish to participate? To do any other would be to violate our own cherised principle of autonomy, and that is self defeating.

Why should new local churches that we start be forced to become Baptist? Certainly we hope that they would join with us. I’m a proud Southern Baptist and I want our denomination to grow and expand just as much as the next. But we can’t force other congregations to join with us unless they agree to do so as a congregation, no matter if we started the church. That is the essence of the congregational form of church government, and that is the essence of Baptist identity. Again, I don’t profess to know too much about this whole issue and its implications, but I think at the least we should be open to working with others in church planting. Of course, what matters most is that Jesus Christ is glorified in everything that we as a denomination do. We would do well to remember that.

Single Awareness Day '09: Great Single Christians

2009-02-14T09:04:00.000-08:00

And now to celebrate Singles Awareness Day, here is the profile of another great single Christian leader. Last year’s entry was about pastor and theologian John Stott. This year, let’s take a look at one of the early church fathers, St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.

Augustine was born in 354 AD to a Catholic and Christian mother. Much to the discouragement of his mother, Augustine was drawn in by the ways of the world. He joined the heretical sect of the Manicheans and took a common-law wife (concubine). During this time, he became a high riser in the Roman intellectual and political elite. After reading a biography of another Christian, Augustine experienced the moving of the Spirit in his life and was converted to the faith. As a result of his conversion, he gave up many things, including his promising political career and his common law wife. He decided to remain celibate for the rest of his life. He then devoted himself to a life of devotion to God.

He was soon ordained as a bishop, possibly against his will, in the African city of Hippo. Here, he devoted his time to study, theology, and philosophy. His two most famous works were the Confessions and the City of God. The Confessions were a record of his own personal faith story. The City of God was a defense of Christians against those who blamed them for the fall of Rome. Elsewhere, Augustine developed the theories of original sin and just war. However, he is also known to have dabbled into pagan Neo-Platonic philosophy in an attempt to Christianize it. He died in 430, surrounded by Davidic Psalms printed on the walls.

Sinfulness and Insecuritiy

2009-02-03T14:43:00.000-08:00

This is a thought that I’ve had since I was a lot younger. As I grew older, I decided that maybe it was a little too simplistic of a view, but the more I read and learn now, the more I am convinced it’s true: the root of all sin is the lack of love.

Let me be clear. What I don’t mean when I say “love” is mushy gushy feeling love. I mean the familiar agape commitment/self-sacrifice love that always puts the other person before your own interests. The kind of love that Jesus gave on the cross and the kind of love He pursues us with today. But how does all disobedience, sin, and evil stem from a lack of that? Quite simply because we are all insecure.

Insecurity is the state of not being loved, or at least not realizing it. It is a state of fear and, outside of the love of Christ, we are all in it. I’m sure you can easily call into your mind a time when you’ve been insecure: maybe you were afraid of a grade on a test you took, maybe it was about someone’s feelings for you, or maybe you were afraid of a group’s acceptance of you. In each of these cases, assuring love and kindness one way or the other would have erased your fears. I’m not talking primarily about that kind of insecurity though. I mean to say that our entire personalities, indeed even our status as persons/spiritual beings, is one of constant insecurity.

And the insecure person constantly searches for something to assuage their insecurities. We don’t feel loved, we don’t feel accepted, we don’t feel fulfilled, so we try to find love, acceptance, forgiveness, and fulfillment in anything our feeble hearts can get their hands on. For some of you, that might look like disobeying the law, drinking, sexual immorality, or various perversions and lusts. For others who have secret sins of the heart, it might look like having control issues, being manipulative, distant, or overinvovled. And the list isn’t limited to just those. One way or another, we all try to get rid of our insecurities and fill our basic need of love through the sins of the world.

But the only thing that can fully and truly fix us and bring us love is Christ. As John reminds us, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18, ESV). Only in Christ and His love and death for us can we find true satisfaction, true joy, true love, and true fulfillment. He rids us of our fears and brings us new life and resurrection. Insecurities vanish in the arms of Jesus. Are you afraid? Run to Him.

One last thing. Why would God punish humanity for trying to seek security in the things of the world? It doesn’t seem that bad, and after all, we are all just misguided. Nothing, however, can be further from the truth. As sinners, we all chose that having the world would be better than having God. This is essentially spitting in the Creator’s face. Anything that does not give Him full glory deserves to die (because God absolutely demands and deserves our worship on the basis of Who He Is). This is the worst offense. But fortunately, out of His great grace, He has chosen to reconcile us. As the great hymn says:

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.

We would do well to remember that.

Paul on Sanctification

2009-02-03T14:41:00.000-08:00

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

Romans 8:1-11, English Standard Version

Sinclair Ferguson on Sanctification

2009-02-01T14:11:00.000-08:00

"Union with Christ in his death and resurrection is the element of union which Paul most extensively expounds...if we are united to Christ, then we are united to him at all points of his activity on our behalf. We share in his death (we were baptized into his death), in his resurrection (we are resurrected with Christ), in his ascension (we have been raised with him), in his heavenly session (we sit with him in heavenly places, so that our life is hidden with Christ in God), and we will share in his promised return (when Christ, who is our life, appears, we also will appear with him in glory) (Rom. 6:14; Col. 2:11-12; 3:1-3).

This, then, is the foundation of sanctification in Reformed theology. It is rooted, not in humanity and their achievement of holiness or sanctification, but in what God has done in Christ, and for us in union with him. Rather than view Christians first and foremost in the microcosmic context of their own progress, the Reformed doctrine first of all sets them in the macrocosm of God's activity in redemptive history. It is seeing oneself in this context that enables the individual Christian to grow in true holiness."

- Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, 'Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification', Ed. Donald Alexander, Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1988.

Steve Brown on Sanctification

2009-01-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

"Sometimes I look at that picture (a picture of his father) and think when I look in the mirror, that’s me too! I’ve lost all that hair, more often than not I have a cup of coffee in my hand just like him, and I smile the way he smiles. I talk the way he talks. Do you think that I’m that way because I loved him so much and I worked so hard at being that way? Oh no…I didn’t become his son by acting like my father, I was his son! And I smile the way he smiles and act the way he acts and talk the way he talks and walk the way he walks because I AM HIS SON!

We spend a considerable amount of time trying to get people to act like Jesus. We spend a considerable amount of time trying to get people to conform to the mind of Christ. And Paul says you don’t start there. You’re His! And if you’re His, you grow to look like Him."

Taken from his message "Goning Too Far: The Truth of God's Law" give at RTS Orlando Chapel Session

Great Mass Murders in World History

2009-01-22T17:35:00.000-08:00

Killing of Armenians in Turkey by the Turks, 1915: 1,5000,000 dead

Killing of the Chinese by the Japan, 1938: 300,000 dead

Nazi Holocaust, Adolf Hitler, 1940s: 6,000,000 dead

Soviet Political Killings, USSR, 1930s-1970s: 20,000,000 dead

Bosnian Conflict, 1994: 200,000 dead

Rwanda, 1994: 800,000 dead

Darfur, 2002-present: 300,000 dead

Roe v. Wade, USA, 1973-2009, 93rd-111th Congress: 38,000,000 dead

Isn’t it interesting that the greatest genocide in the 20th century occurred in the United States of America? 38 MILLION KILLED! By our laws, our courts, our doctors, our people. If you add up the rest of this list, you will see that the American genocide of abortion has killed more people than Stalin and the Holocaust combined.

Today marks the 36th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since then, on average 3,000 humans are executed every day under legal pretentions. In America, that shining gleam of hope and that city on the hill, of all places! We must pray and work towards establishing the sanctity of human life in the US and thereby grant freedom, liberty, and justice FOR ALL! If not, God will surely judge this nation, which has received much light, very severely. We would do well to remember that.

Pop Apologetics-Part I

2009-01-16T08:25:00.000-08:00

There’s no doubt that we have seen a resurgence of atheism over the last decade. Such great minds as Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins have been busy publishing bestsellers that discredit any conservative belief in any type of faith, especially Christianity. These “four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse” as Al Mohler calls them, have formed a “New Athiesm,” or what I like to call “pop atheism.” Their scientific research is usually very shallow and they generally utilize popular and accessible arguments against God to create a powerful perspective on atheism. This pop atheism presents the faith with a challenge of its own.

One of those challenges is the response that Christianity has so far put forth to their charges. In response to the pop atheists, we have sent to battle the “pop apologetes.’’ A better or more familiar name might be the evidentialists: those who adhere to the evidentialist school of Christian apologetics. This group of people uses scientific and archeological evidence to prove the authenticity of the Bible. It includes writers such as the esteemed Josh McDowell. Their books fill up Christian bookstores with popular arguments for the existence of Christianity along with the newest scientific and archeological discoveries. Their popularity in the Christian community is unquestioned, and rightly so. This group of people does a great service to the faith by equipping the common Christian with arguments to defend the faith. But there can be a problem with this method that needs a closer look.

Let’s say that an atheist contends with a believer that the Bible is not the Word of God, is not inerrant, and is not relevant. The educated Christian could simply point to 2 Tim. 3:16: all scripture is God-breathed. Besides the circularity of the argument, this usually settles the issue for most Christians (leaving our hypothetical atheist most dissatisfied since they don’t believe in the Word). Or let’s say that someone contests that the archeological record of the Bible is not consistent with new or current discoveries and that the stories of the Bible are not scientifically possible. They would say that the Bible is not accurate historically in terms of the creation story and the location of cities. The Christian could point to archaeological finds, history, and scientific evidence to prove them wrong.

What’s wrong with all this? It is good for us Christians to have educated arguments to battle the big men like college professors. The problem, however, lies in where the authority is placed. When someone challenges the faith, we usually point to the Bible as our ultimate authority and standard. But then what if someone questions whether or not the Bible is accurate and factual? Then we point to archeological evidence, science, new Creationist developments, statistics and probability to prove that the Bible is accurate. But that means what our faith is really relying on is statistics, probability, and evidence and not ultimately the Bible. What happens if our statistics and evidence fail? (they won’t by the way). Then we have no basis for accepting God’s revelation in the Bible. Those who rely on evidentialist/pop apologetics run the risk of placing their faith not in what God says but in the newest archeological find. It’s not a very stable option. That’s why I will argue in the next post that reformed presuppositional apologetics (I will explain what that means) is a much safer and much more Christ-centered approach to defending the Gospel than the evidentialist way. That’s not to discredit people like Josh McDowell at all. We can still use what they say in great ways to glorify God, but it’s just not the ultimate answer. It’s just to make sure that our faith is rooted in Scripture. We would do well to remember that.

Billy Graham: South Carolina Baptist

2008-12-29T10:26:00.000-08:00

CBS affiliate WSPA of Spartanburg, SC has reported that the Rev. Billy Graham of Montreat, NC has decided to become a member of the First Baptist Church of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Graham, unquestionably the greatest and most well-known evangelist of the 20th century, was a member of the esteemed FBC Dallas since 1956. For some reason, Dr. Graham has decided in the later years of his life to switch his membership from the “Vatican” of the Southern Baptist Convention to the 7,000 member FBC Spartanburg. This is an interesting development for two reasons.

First, the most famous evangelist perhaps since D.L. Moody or even the likes of Whitefield and Wesley is now a South Carolina Baptist. Rev. Graham has preached to millions across the world, been an advisor to many presidents, and has written many books. Just the fact that he is actually a member of a South Carolina church is pretty astounding. One has to wonder however at the fact that while Graham has lived in North Carolina recently, he has still maintained his church membership at a church in Dallas and now one in Spartanburg. As far as I know, Graham is a shut in and can’t physically attend church anymore so he has to rely on televised preaching ministries (such as the ones at FBC Dallas and FBC Spartanburg). Nothing against Billy Graham, but wouldn’t it be better for him to join a church closer to his home where the people and pastors there can be closer and therefore minister better to him?

Second, this shows us something about Graham’s personal eschatology. Graham joined FBC Dallas when the great W. A. Criswell was pastor. Criswell is well known for his dispensational view of the end times. The current pastor at Dallas, Dr. Robert Jeffress, is a well known graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, that vanguard of dispensational fundamentalist theology. To the best of my knowledge of what I have heard Dr. Wilton, the pastor of FBCS, preach, he too is a dispensationalist. My best speculation is that Billy Graham is one too and as the unifying figure of the evangelical movement he represents an uneasy (if Biblically incorrect) consensus that unifies the evangelical movement. The big question here is whether or not this consensus will remain after the passing of Rev. Graham and whether or not that is a good thing. Regardless of wherever Billy Graham goes to church or what he believes, we must always focus on building God’s kingdom in view of what Christ has done for us. We would do well to remember that.

Joseph: Man of Faith

2008-12-28T16:48:00.000-08:00

18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:

23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”

(which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus. (Matthew 1:18-25 ESV)

It’s a little late for a Christmas post, but technically on the church calendar we are still heading towards the Epiphany season, so I figured I’d write a little bit about how this part of the Christmas story can relate to our lives today. My pastor preached on this text this Sunday and I found within it some interesting things I think we can take away from it.

Obviously, Joseph is the most overlooked character in the Christmas story. Of course there is Jesus, to whom all glory should be given. We make much of Mary as we should, and we remember the wise men who sought Him and the innkeeper who turned Him away. Rarely, however, do we pay much attention to Joseph, and probably because of his steadfast, even-keel, and level-headed approach to the whole event of the birth of Jesus. For a second let’s look at Christmas through Joseph’s eyes.

Can you imagine being Joseph when he found out about Mary? I’ve never been engaged, but I think I speak for all men that a fiancé getting pregnant by some other means than her own fiancé is one of the worst things that a woman could do. What horror must have been running through his head when he discovered that his soon-to-be wife was pregnant…and probably from another man!

Most of us would have lashed out in sinful anger and vengeance against Mary, but the unenlightened “father” of Jesus did not. Instead, seeking his own honor and lovingly “unwilling to put her to shame” decided to do the honorable and just thing…the thing that would bring the least pain to this subversive Mary character. Perhaps this is a model for how we should respond to injustice done to us, both perceived and real.

Fortunately, God had bigger plans for Joseph. An angel of the Lord came and revealed God’s Word to Joseph and told him not to be afraid. He gave him specific instructions on how to handle the whole affair. Wouldn’t it be lovely if God told us exactly what to do in every situation like He did to Joseph here? But special times call for special revelation, and Joseph did what God said. This is the most important thing to take away from this passage. Here was a man who received the Word of God and acted upon it. In this case, that meant marrying a pregnant teenage girl against all other wisdom and worldly standards. Oh that we would be so willing to hear God and act upon what He says in full faith! Joseph, through the power of the Holy Spirit, was able to do so, even to the extent of not sleeping with his wife (not his fiancée any more!) until the birth of Christ. We too, through the Holy Spirit and God’s promise of future redemption, can become like Joseph in his faith in God’s Word. We would do well to remember that.

RUF is Not the Church

2008-12-14T13:35:00.000-08:00

Over the past semester, I’ve found that I’ve been falling in love…with a group of people. RUF has been such a blessing in my life in so many ways, and I’ve been glad to share these last four months with such an outstanding and Christ-centered group of people. I think we may be catching on to this whole fellowship thing.

And in talking and hanging out with all of you, I’ve discovered that a majority of you feel the same way about RUF that I do. Here we can find a group of friends that accepts us for who we are, no matter where we are. We can find mentors and older college folk willing to take us under their wings and disciple us. Here is a campus ministry with a spine that convicts us of our sin, calls us to repent, and then drives us to the open arms of a loving and trustworthy Savior. And, there is a lot of fun to be had along the way. The great theologian of the 20th century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, said in his book Life Together that within the context of Christian community, there is only one way to relate to each other: on the basis of the finished work of Jesus. This is a little abstract and it works itself out in many ways, but it essentially means what Britton has been preaching all semester: we are to be a group of friends who shares a common horizon: love for Christ.

I’ve only ever loved a group like this once before, and it was my senior high youth group back at my home church. And that got me to thinking the other day: what is the difference between a youth group and a campus ministry? In a lot of ways, RUF is just a grown up and more mature youth group, except our youth minister watches Gossip Girl. But there is one fundamental and striking difference between RUF and a youth group: a youth group is connected to a church.

Britton and Soren have repeatedly emphasized the fact that RUF is no substitute for the church. I know we Reformed people all believe that. A church is a place where the Word is preached, the sacraments are administered, etc. all under the supervision of ordained deacons and elders. But do we really act like it? Maybe it’s just me, but I think we are all a little guilty of functionally treating RUF as our church and ignoring the real church. I know for one that I have. How many of us are really and truly connected to a real and fluid congregation in the Columbia area? My guess is that we are all like me: we all go to late service and evening service at First Pres, sit together, sing the songs, and listen in awe to Dr. Ferguson’s exposition. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, except for me, going to First Pres has become more of the Sunday version and extension of RUF rather than my connection to a real and genuine church.

Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology at Southern Seminary, recently wrote an article titled “Jesus Didn’t Die for a Campus Ministry: The Spiritual Danger of Unchurched Spirituality” (the text of which is linked here: http://www.henryinstitute.org/?p=484). In it, he says that a healthy campus ministry should constantly be asking us “Where are you in church—and what’s happening there?” I for one think that Britton and Soren are doing a good job of encouraging that…the question is: how have we reacted to that question? Can you answer that question? Are we really connected to the body of Christ here in Columbia, or are we on a spiritual island?

If you are like me, then we need to figure out something to do to solve this. For me, that means going to Sunday school and then branching out from there. For some, it might look like actually transferring membership to First Pres or volunteering in the nursery. Others of you might need to even stop going to First Pres and start looking for a church community that will be more accessible to you. Maybe you need to start reinvesting in your old home church. Still others of us need to intentionally start befriending the old people. I’ve been told that there are a bunch of good people in the church that are able and willing to help us college kids get involved.

I’m not saying that we should stop doing RUF things and start doing boring old church things. Keep going to as many RUF functions as you see fit, because if you don’t I will miss you all very much. We need each other and we need to fellowship as much as possible on campus, because when we gather, Jesus gathers there with us. I’m just saying that we should “stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:24-25). We would do well to remember that.

The Virtuous Woman

2008-12-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

I was reading the famous “Virtuous Woman” passage of Proverbs 31 the other day and I found that I wanted to get a fresh perspective on the passage by way of a more fluid translation. So I looked up the passage in Eugene Peterson’s “The Message,” and what I found was quite humorous:

Verse 13: “She shops around for the best yarns and cottons, and enjoys knitting and sewing.”

Verse 14: She brings back “exotic surprises”

Verse 16: She “plants a garden” with her extra money

Verse 19: “She’s skilled in the in the crafts of home and hearth, diligent in homemaking”

Verse 23: “She…dresses in colorful linens and silks”

Verse 31: “Festoon her with praises!”

So apparently I need to be looking for a colorfully dressed, yarn-spinning, homemaking, exotically surprising, garden planting, sock knitting, sewing machine of a woman that I can festoon with praises for the rest of my life! What a standard to live up to ladies! And I don’t even know what ‘festoon’ means.

The fact that this translation is so funny is probably related to the fact that Peterson’s translation misses the point. I think there are two important things we can take away from this. First, we need the church. We are called every day to delve into God’s Word and see what He has to say to us for this day. But one man’s interpretation can’t always be right. Essentially, that is what The Message is: one man’s interpretation of the Bible. We would be wise not to put all our eggs in one basket. The church, on the other hand with its years of theology and proven beliefs, provides us with a safety net against heresy, charismatic pastors, and misinterpreted passages. This is nothing against the priesthood of all believers. But, as we all know, there are no “lone ranger Christians.”

Second, I came to the realization that everything I hold to be true about marriage and sexuality is based on this passage written 2,500 years ago by some old patriarch named King Lemuel. Isn’t that strange? What if King Lemuel is wrong? Indeed, the whole world seems to think he is. When we look for a quality woman via the world’s standards, we find the exact opposite of what Lemuel wrote here. My flesh cries out to ignore that truth that “charm is deceitful and beauty is vain.” Certainly things don’t seem to be that way right now. It all comes down, then, to a matter of trust. How much do I trust God’s Word? How much do I trust that the Spirit inspired the words of King Lemuel? How much do I believe on the Bible’s promises? How much do I trust Jesus? The answer to those questions depends on what I do with passages such as Proverbs 31. Can I trust the Bible against the wisdom of the world? Who do you trust? The husband of the virtuous woman’s “heart trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain” (ESV) . And he can only trust in her because she fears the Lord. So believe the Word of God, and build your house upon it. That’s essentially what Proverbs 31 calls for anyways. We would do well to remember that.

Saving Faith

2008-12-03T19:53:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get fed up with the southern church. I think it is pretty obvious that far too often our churches turn themselves from focusing on becoming the body of Christ to being a cultural country club. In the process of doing this, we all too often misunderstand exactly what happens at conversion. I submit that there are many people in the church visible today which really aren’t alive in Christ. What really goes on in the life of a convert when they see the beauty of Christ and turn from sin and sorrow? Now there is something to be said about “understanding” conversion, since when we look at the big picture, conversion is indeed a mystery. There are however, three activities of the soul that are completed during conversion (according to Wayne Grudem and R. C. Sproul). I encourage you to test yourselves to see that you are truly converted.

True saving faith, according to the Word, includes three very important things. The first of these things is simple knowledge of the facts concerning God and Jesus. In order to have true saving faith, we first have to know, intellectually speaking, something about Jesus. We have to know who He is, what He did, and how He loves. It’s hard to have a personal relationship with Jesus if you don’t know anything about Him. You might ask “what of those who have never heard of Jesus?” That is a subject for another blog. As it stands with you, you are perfectly aware of who He is. Calvinists like me can all too often be guilty of just knowing a lot about God and not really knowing Him. So saving faith includes knowing some factual content about God, but that is not enough by itself, for “even the demons believe—and shudder” (James 2:19).

Secondly, you must know the facts and agree that they are good. This is pretty simple. I can believe all the doctrines about Jesus, but I don’t have to agree that they are true, or even agree that they are good and right and beneficial. True saving faith not only knows the content but believes the content to be true, valuable, and good. But knowing and agreeing alone are not enough.

The final and most important part of saving faith is trusting in Jesus to be your personal savior from sin. We can believe all the facts and agree with them, but until we act on our belief and turn to the person of Christ to save us from sin, then we are just sitting on the sidelines and haven’t really experienced salvation. What is faith? Certainly it is belief. But a more accurate view of faith should be something along the lines of personal trust. We trust in Jesus and in Him alone for salvation, not in our own works or anything else. We receive Christ like we receive a guest into our homes. It is a trust similar to the everyday trust we have in other people in life. My friend told me he’d meet me at 5 o’clock, so I trust him and get ready by 5. God told us that He’d save us through Christ, so we trust him and act upon that faith we have in His Word. We affirm God’s Word that He saves us by faith, and then we act on that faith in hope, which is an assurance of things that are not yet. As Wayne Grudem says, “saving faith is trust in Jesus Christ as a living person for forgiveness of sins and for eternal life with God…that comes only when I make a decision of my will to depend on, or put my trust in, Christ as my Savior” (Systematic Theology 35.3). I’m finding myself short on analogies to explain faith and trust, but I trust that it is a simple enough concept to understand. If it were not so, then the children could not come into the Kingdom. We would do well to remember that.

The Ministry of the Word

2008-11-18T13:14:00.001-08:00

I suppose that a pretty foundational question for all of life is “how do we know God?” How do we know that He is, what He is, and what He is like? This is a question that all of us have to approach at one point or another in our lives, and it is especially important for the faithful Christian to deal with. Most of us have two goals in mind when approaching the question of how we know God. The first is: “how do I get closer to God?” The second is “how do I become a better person?” I don’t think any of us would say deny that by getting closer to God, we do become better people. But what is the vehicle that draws us closer to God? What is it that allows us to know Him? For the practicing Christian, it is revelation. It is the ministry of the Word of God.

So what exactly is revelation? Basically, it is anything that God shows us. And anything that God shows us is His Word. As sinful and corrupt humans, we cannot know anything about God unless He shows us and reveals Himself to us. It is not in the nature of the corrupt, imperfect, finite creature to seek the incorruptible, perfect, infinite Creator. Any conclusion about God we can come to without seeking His Word and revelation is useless and probably wrong. Therefore I submit to you that we can know nothing about God by means of our own faculties but only through what He wants to let us know about Himself. And what He tells us about Himself is called His Word.

So practically speaking, if we want to grow as Christians, we’d better be in the habit of frequently encountering, hearing, wrestling, and applying His Word. Where then can the Word of God be found? Well first of all, it is found in the person of Christ. The Bible calls Him the Word made flesh. By having a personal relationship with the Son and reading about the nature of Jesus as recorded in the Bible, we come to know Him better. Secondly, we can encounter the revelation of God in the Bible. The Bible is also the written and inspired Word of God. It contains the message of the gospel: that we are sinners in need of a savior. All of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, points to the salvation that Jesus brought. We can encounter this message in multiple ways.

The first is through the exposition and preaching of the Bible. Preaching can come anywhere these days, from campus ministries to books to podcasts. Probably the best setting for preaching is in a local church in the community and fellowship of believers. Second, we encounter God’s gospel message through daily reading, prayer, and meditation on the Bible. This is commonly referred to as a quiet time. This discipline is often neglected these days, but it brings great reward to those who seek God in this way. Third, we encounter God’s Word through the local church. The local church provides us with spiritual friends and advisors, love, room for growth, fellowship, encouragement, and the ordinances/sacraments. By partaking of all that the local church has to offer, we grow in grace. Fourth, we encounter God’s Word through individual relationships. Friends have a responsibility to confront, love, and correct those who are in error. We must preach the gospel to our saved friends as well as unsaved friends. Or take the case of marriage, in which the two partners are called to minister to one another for all of life.

And the gospel probably comes through many other ways as well. As long as Christ is lifted up on the basis of the Word, then we can be sure that the ministry and kingdom of God are growing. We must also remember that in all of this, the Holy Spirit is allowing us to understand the truths that God reveals to us.

One last thing. We must always remember that the Word is not a system and it certainly can’t be manipulated. You can’t come to the various ministries of the Word just to become a better you. And you can’t force the issue. Manipulating God is the one sin that it is impossible to commit because God cannot be manipulated. Also, sanctification is not a system; it is a relationship that is the job of the Holy Spirit. There are no steps to becoming more in love with Jesus. So go out into the world and dig deeply into His Word in all its manifestations, from preaching and teaching to reading to prayer to fellowship to marriage. And then we might come to understand and love God more. We would do well to remember that.

15 Election Resolutions

2008-11-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

1. Resolved, to thank God always that I was born in a country of plenty: full of freedom to worship and speak, full of prosperity and bounty, full of chances to influence government, and full of opportunities for the expansion of the Kingdom
2. Resolved, to respect the government of the United States in that its authority to rule, as in any government, comes from divine mandate from the Lord and to obey and submit to its authority unless it contradicts Biblical teachings
3. Resolved, to respect, but disagree with, the election of Barack Obama as 44th president of the United States and Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the 111th Congress of the United States of America
4. Resolved, in my criticisms and jokes about the President and the Congress to always keep the highest respect for their office, duties, and humanity
5. Resolved, to celebrate with the African-American community the election of the first black president
6. Resolved, to never incite racial tension, discontent, or hatred on account of the President’s race
7. Resolved, to pray daily for the government of the United States so that it will allow “justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
8. Resolved, to pray and hope that the new administration and Congress will have a change of heart on the issues with which they clash with clear Scriptural teachings
9. Resolved, to continue to fight and lobby for the right to life so that justice will be done to the unborn
10. Resolved, to continue to fight to protect the sanctity of marriage, which is essential to America’s moral and economic success
11. Resolved, to begin to fight for the poor, the downtrodden, and the disenfranchised
12. Resolved, to never and try to bring about the eschaton through political means
13. Resolved, to fight increases in the size of government, recognizing that government is a necessary evil run by evil men and that centralizing power is neither practical nor prudent
14. Resolved, to fight for compassionate, prudent, and just foreign policy that promotes the peace and protects the weak
15. Resolved, to continue to engage in American political life for the purpose of making a more just society, with full hope and trust looking forward to the day when my faith shall be made sight, knowing that when He comes, he shall “make all that is said untrue.” We would do well to remember that.

Election Day Meditation

2008-11-01T14:10:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, millions of Americans will go out to their local church, fire department, school, or town hall to cast their vote for who they think will be the best leaders in the government. I think we can all agree that this election is one of the most important facing our country in quite a while. Barack Obama comes to the plate with his youthful vigor, fresh face, and ideas of change. John McCain brings years of experience and public service along with a proven streak of crossing party lines to do the right thing. On Tuesday we will all go to the polls and vote for one of these two, unless you are voting third party to stick it to the man. Here’s what I want to emphasize however: one of these two men is getting elected based on what the majority of the states find most appealing. If Obama is elected, it will likely be because of some quality or characteristic that the country believes he has, and vice versa for McCain. In other words, their election is conditional.

I probably don’t have to remind you that our election is unconditional. And I’m not talking about any political election now. I’m talking about salvation. We are all familiar with the term “unconditional election.” It’s how we were saved and brought to love Christ. Our election is a lot different than McCain’s or Obama’s however.

Sure, there was an election day. The Bible says that we were predestined unto salvation before the foundation of the world. But there was no campaigning. We didn’t get to parade around in front of God and try to bribe, buy, or lie our way into salvation. There were no campaign promises. Sure, there was a vote, but we didn’t get to vote on our salvation. God did. Most importantly, our election was and is and will be unconditional: i.e. not based on anything we have ever done or anything we ever are or will be. Not on our personality, not on our abilities, not on our gifts, and not because we are the best ones to fit into His plan. If that were the case, he probably would not have chosen you or me. And all this is to show the wonderful power of God. So go to your polling place today, thank God for you freedom to vote, and vote for whoever you think is the best. But remember that God is in charge, and real change in America will only come as God uses those people that he chose for no particular reason other than his great love for us. We would do well to remember that.