Pursuing Not-Yet-Believers

It Sent Shock Waves Throughout the Campus

As you might imagine, seminaries are full of Jesus-y people, from suit-clad conservatives to library-dwelling linguists to edgy liberals who buck the system by (hold your breath) wearing flip flops to class. Our grad school was filled with religion majors, pastors and interns, and private school teachers. Everyone was religious; most were active in some form of church; many spent spring breaks and summers in overseas missions or student ministry camps. So imagine the bombshell when a student realized he’d never actually known Jesus. Students and professors alike were stunned, then celebratory. In this instance, the student was a son of a prominent pastor, a rising star in the student ministry world, and someone who knew—and could teach—the Bible better than most of his peers. Apparently it happens more than you might expect: God redeems people who are already in seminary. And praise Him that He does!

The shock is understandable: we can easily assume that because someone is part of a Christian school, group, and church, they must be redeemed. But as today’s verses point out, their religion may be misleading. Whether you attend a seminary or Christian school, are involved with a Christian organization, or are simply part of a local church family, you regularly find yourself in some of the most forgotten places everyday mission happens: within “Christian” circles. Today we consider two elements of mission inside the Church: seeing it as an everyday mission field and getting other Christians to join you in everyday mission.

Fruit and Foundation: Marks of Faith

Today is not a license to look under every rock for false prophets and fake Christians. Only God can know the condition of souls for sure, so we approach today with great humility and much prayer. But it should spark an awareness: how many in our own circles look and act redeemed, but are deceived, even intentionally? As we pursue everyday mission in Christian circles, today’s verses offer two concurrent marks of redemption: fruit in our lives, then the foundation of our hearts.

When rightly rooted, our lives flourish with good fruit. In Luke 3, John the Baptist rebukes many who come to be baptized for a poor view of salvation. To put it in a common term today, John calls those who view Jesus as mere “fire insurance”—whose so-called salvation makes no impact on daily life—“a brood of vipers.” His charge is that those who are truly redeemed will bear fruit. The following verses are examples of this fruit: those who were selfish become generous; those who stole become honest (and in Zacchaeus’ case in Luke 19, display the gospel by reconciling brokenness they caused); those who trusted their own ability turn to God for provision. Galatians 5 explains the difference between fruit of the flesh and fruit of the Spirit. Romans 5—7 give marks of the “old man” versus the “new man.” Seen throughout the Bible, redemption leads to fruit.

On the other end of the spectrum, good works—which look like spiritual fruit—can stem from misguided motives. An early song from musical duo Shane and Shane encapsulate well the mystery of not-yet-believers existing in Christian groups: “Your child is busy with the work of God and taking him for granted / Got a lot to do today; kingdom work’s the game I play / Lord my serving You replaced me knowing You.” Religious acts, having the right answers, doing the proper things, and even looking repentant or wise can give the impression that we must be children of God. Those Jesus speaks of in Matthew 7 preached, did great works, and even performed miracles “in your name.” Yet He still never knew them. Anything but Jesus is a failing foundation of faith. Winds of truth expose our misplaced footholds, and “great [is] the fall” of even our greatest attempts. Good fruit is only good if its roots are in the right foundation.

Pursuing Not-Yet-Believers in Our Churches

Due to theological misinformation or indignant misunderstanding of salvation, mission in our churches can be tricky. Claiming that someone might not be a Christian is a bold claim, and can cause ripples. But if people in our churches and Christian circles lack fruit, we have to lovingly pursue them: it’s our responsibility as brothers and sisters who love them more than their opinion of us. Even if they are believers, they need discipleship in areas where disbelief or idols pull them from obeying God. If they are not redeemed, they need loving relationships and intentional discipleship even more. Either way, the gospel needs to redeem at least some area of their life.

Do they exhibit patterns of sinful or unwise behavior? Do they put other authorities over the authority of God? Do they seem unrepentant or uncaring toward their sin? Do they lack the desire to grow in spiritual concepts and practices? Matthew outlines a process to address such questions35. While this passage is often misunderstood, “discipline” has the same root as “disciple”: the goal of loving confrontation, humble rebuke, and gentle questions is stated throughout this passage: that the brokenness in “your brother” would be restored, to God and community. And while the final step of this process is often interpreted, “cut them out of your life,” we see in Jesus’ a far different view of “Gentile[s] and tax collector[s]” (v. 17). He didn’t throw them away; He pursued them, loved them, demonstrated the gospel to them, and sought their redemption. In other words, He encourages us to act the same toward sinners in our churches, as sinners outside our churches. . . .

As much as we acknowledge her beautiful brokenness, we believe in local churches, and their biblical leadership, place in God’s mission, and unity amongst their members. Churches are full of sinners who need to be redeemed, and sinning saints who already have been. Just like you and us. We cannot plead this point enough: let us be wise, humble, and prayerful, both as we pursue God’s mission toward those in our churches, and as we pursue mission together alongside others in them.

—

Ben Connelly, his wife Jess, and their daughters Charlotte and Maggie live in Fort Worth, TX. He started and now co-pastors The City Church, part of the Acts29 network and Soma family of churches. Ben is also co-author of A Field Guide for Everyday Mission (Moody Publishers, 2014). With degrees from Baylor University and Dallas Theological Seminary, Ben teaches public speaking at TCU, writes for various publications, trains folks across the country, and blogs in spurts at benconnelly.net. Twitter: @connellyben.

(Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from A Field Guide for Everyday Mission by Ben Connelly & Bob Roberts Jr. available from Moody Publishers starting June 2014. It appears here with the permission of the author and publisher. For free resources and preorders, visit everydaymission.net.)

The Wellspring of Love

One of the greatest sources of joy in my life is parenting my three young children. It is also one the greatest sources of chaos in my life as well. Yet, I find I can handle the messes, the sleepless nights, and even the 50,000 meals I’ll prepare for them, but what I can’t handle is the bickering. The constant picking. The small arguments over who had what first and who took apart whose Legos and why must brothers be so annoying. (I am seriously thinking about forgoing traditional baby gifts from now on. Instead I’m going to start giving something more eminently suited to parenting—a black and white striped jersey and a whistle.) In the midst of the chaos, I often find myself yelling at the top of my lungs, “Will you all just stop it?!?! Why can you just be KIND to each other?”

Legalistic Love

During one such meltdown, I had an epiphany. Here I was demanding that my children love like God loves without directing them to Him as the source of that love. And yet, the only way my children—those little image bearers themselves—will ever be able to love one another properly is as they encounter and bask in God’s love for them first. In a twisted irony, my call for them to love had morphed into legalism because I had presented it apart from the source of love.

Most of the time we associate legalism with strict adherence to a specific set of rules, but legalism is not simply choosing the letter of the law over the spirit. Legalism is any attempt to model God’s attributes apart from a relationship with Him. Legalism is trying is to be an image bearer without relying on the Image.

When we attempt to “love” apart from God, our love will only be as lasting as the current situation or our own ability to sustain it. This is why forced tolerance, political correctness, and the “just be kind” approach often feel so weak and at times, so artificial. These approaches are artificial because they are not rooted in imago dei relationship. It’s like we’re playing dress-up in our mother’s heels and pearls—clumping down the hallway, mimicking her behavior but never truly embodying it.

Christ Changes How We Love

In order to make us the fully faceted people we were meant to be, Christ must change what and how we love.  He must reshape and reorder our loves to their proper places. And to do that, He must first hold the central place in our affection.

Jesus taught that the greatest commandment is to love God supremely and that the second greatest is to love our neighbor as ourselves. Because God is supreme, we must desire Him and His approval above anything else; we must position Him as the source of our affections and acceptance; and when we do, as His image bearers, we will naturally reflect His perfect love. This is why the Scripture speaks of our new identity in terms of having a “new heart.” When Christ has first place, when we are consumed with His love, we will naturally love like He does.

And yet, unlike some believe, loving God supremely does not mean that we don’t love other things; instead it means that we love other things the way that God intends for them to be loved. This is why the second commandment follows on the heels of the first. You can only love our neighbor properly—you can only love him or her as God does—if you find your source and definition of love from God Himself. In this sense, loving your neighbor actually flows out of loving God and cannot happen in the fullness that God intends apart from Him.

But when we are transformed by intimate daily dependence on the Creator’s love, when He becomes the source, not simply the model, of the love we extend to each other, we will have vast reservoirs of love welling up inside us, overflowing for all. So the way that we come into full personhood, the way that we love as we were intended to love, is not simply to mimic God’s love, but to allow it to transform us from the inside out. And then, only then, will people know we are His disciples. They will know we belong to Him because our identity will be consumed by His; they will know we belong to Him because we will love like He loves.

—

Hannah Anderson lives in the hauntingly beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She spends her days working beside her husband in rural ministry, caring for their three young children, and scratching out odd moments to write. In those in-between moments, she contributes to a variety of Christian publications and is the author of Made for More: An Invitation to Live in God's Image (Moody, 2014). You can connect with her at her blog Sometimes a Light and on Twitter @sometimesalight.

(Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt adapted from Made for More: An Invitation to Live in God's Image by Hannah Anderson available from Moody, 2014. It appears here with the permission of the author and publisher.)

9 Ways to Battle the Darkness

I know from personal experience the difficulty of battling depression, condemnation, and anxiety. The fight can take many forms, ranging from legalism to thoughts of suicide. Whatever the case, it is all overwhelming. I love Jesus and he loves me. But I have struggled with fear, anxiety, condemnation, and even depression my whole Christian life. I actually struggled so much with these issues that I had to resign from my first pastorate. I wasn't eating, I couldn't get out of bed, I was having demonic nightmares, and I was thinking about suicide. I'm not out of the woods yet, but I have learned a few things in going through these struggles about God's grace despite our failures to trust him.

Though each of us faces unique circumstances, here are a few lessons I have learned that I pray will help as you, too, battle depression, condemnation and anxiety.

1. Look to Jesus.

It’s tempting to believe that what you need is to find more answers or to “do better,” or to get yourself out of depression by sheer human effort. But what you need to do is rest in Jesus and his finished work. His job is to deliver you; your job is to rest in him. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. He wants you to rest, allowing him to fight the battle for you, through you and with you. Don’t run to legalism. Run to the Savior who will deliver you when you can’t deliver yourself.

2. Worship.

Set aside time once a week to worship the Lord through music. Anxiety and depression focus your eyes on yourself, as the enemy wants you to focus on anything except Jesus. Worship focuses your eyes on Jesus. Don’t feel as though you have to “get your worship right.” If you don’t feel like singing or your thoughts feel very confused, then just listen to the music. Let God minister to you. You might even set up “worship nights” where you ask a few friends to come over and worship with you and pray for you.

3. Be around community.

The enemy prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Just as a lion wants a gazelle to step away from the herd to destroy it, so the enemy wants you away from people so he can destroy you. When you are facing anxiety, depression and condemnation, being by yourself is extremely difficult. Being alone too long can send you into “self-destruct mode,” and your thoughts can seem to “own you.” Being around people provides a source of community and helps you from keeping your thoughts on you.

4. Don’t answer the “broken record” questions in your head.

“Maybe I’m not really saved.” “Maybe God doesn’t love me.” “I need to clean up this area of my life before God will save me.” Anxiety and depression feed on a pattern of asking the same questions over and over, even if we’ve already answered them satisfactorily. It can feel like, as one man put it, “Vietnam is going on in my head.” Taking thoughts captive is not just a practice for issues like lust or anger. Taking thoughts captive sometimes means not answering the questions or condemning thoughts that pop into your head at all.

5. Talk to God more than you think about him.

God is a person who exists in reality outside of your mind. It is helpful to remember that he understands everything and, unlike you, is not stressed. He is absolutely confident in himself and his ability to save you. Rather than making God a puzzle to solve, remember he is a person. Talk to him. Don’t just think about him.

6. Realize that perfect faith is not required.

Don’t penalize yourself for lacking faith. The opposite of faith is not doubt; it is disobedience. Our faith has never been and will never be perfect this side of eternity. It is okay to have faith the size of a mustard seed and to cry out to Jesus, “I believe. Help my unbelief” (Mk 9:24).

7. Serve.

Service gets our eyes off of ourselves and onto others. Find a ministry that needs help in tangible ways and set aside time to serve. Think hard about the needs in your own home that you could focus on meeting. Are there household chores, child care tasks or maintenance projects you could take on for the sake of serving your family? Who in your neighborhood or community could use your help with a project or cause? Look for ways to shift self-focus through service to others.

8. Meditate on Scripture.

When you’re battling anxiety and depression, your tendency will be to read the Bible looking for everything that is condemning, ignoring the rest. Make a list of verses that point you toward hope and God’s love. Make a list of verses that celebrate grace. Make a conscious decision to approach Scripture through the lens of God’s love and grace rather than his judgment. Ask a trusted friend or mentor to help guide you toward reading that will edify.

9. Get counseling.

You need an outside perspective on what you’re going through. Whether it is at Recovery Groups or at a biblical counselor’s office (biblical counseling versus generic “Christian counseling”), it is helpful to get advice from godly pastors and counselors to help you navigate the path to wellness.

Battling depression, condemnation, and anxiety requires you to embrace a number of reversals: Resting instead of striving. Grace instead of works. Asking instead of doing. It also requires a tremendous amount of patience. God is determined not to allow you to remain in the shadowy valley of worried, anxious Christianity, desiring instead that you would rest in gracious, peaceful Christianity. I know firsthand that he is able to lift your shadows and restore your soul.

Take hope that he remains faithful when we are faithless, for he cannot deny himself (2 Tim. 2:13).

_

Zach Lee is Associate Home Groups Minister at The Village Church and is married to Katy.  Follow him on Twitter: @zacharytlee.

[© 2014 The Village Church, Flower Mound, Texas. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Adapted from “9 Ways to Battle Depression, Condemnation and Anxiety.”]

Festal Sabbathing

If we’re going to have the kind of church that doesn’t underwhelm earnest Christians and encourage them to opt for “community” instead of church, what kind of body of disciples do we need to become?

“Discipleship is never complicated or easy, but always simple and hard.” – Mike Breen

That’s certainly true of this call to discipleship. We’re called to expect that Jesus will give us plenty to receive in each Sabbath feast.

The great London Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon once had a pastor-friend who came to him discouraged. He was upset about the lack of fruit he saw from his preaching ministry. The pastor complained that he was not seeing people come to faith in Christ under his preaching.

“Well,” Spurgeon retorted, “you don’t expect that someone will come to faith in Christ during every sermon, do you?” Sheepishly, the pastor said, “well, no.” “That’s precisely the problem,” Spurgeon said.

SMALL EXPECTATIONS?

We often suffer from abysmally low expectations of what God will do in the power of the Spirit when his people are gathered in his presence.

Growing disciples of Jesus, in contrast, will experience a growing anticipation of what Jesus will do, especially when we come to God in the posture of receptivity. We come expecting that it will primarily be him that does a great work in and among us.

We no longer look at Sunday as the religious version of a dreaded Monday. We no longer see it as a day when we have to get the children up, get them dressed, get them fed, and keep them quiet so that we can say we went to church, and that our kids didn’t embarrass us.

Instead, Sunday becomes one of our favorite days of the week—even if we love going to work on Monday and hanging out with pizza, beer, and a movie on Friday night.

3 LETHARGIC ALTERNATIVES

Some fast-growing churches seem to put all their energy into making the worship experience so spectacular that someone could wander in half-dead and be resurrected by the sheer force of the music, the lights, the preaching, and the crowds.

Other stagnating and declining churches seem to simply go through the Sunday motions, which can make the most zealous Christian comatose ten minutes in.

Some Christians have seen all this at its worst, and have lost hope in ever seeing it at its best. And so they are satisfied with small group gatherings and private devotions.

Our church’s experience of Jesus is dependent on our church’s expectations of Jesus. Will he pour himself out by his Spirit when we are gathered to keep his feast? Do we expect it? Do we believe that Jesus always throws the best feasts and brings the best wine?

So, what’s our challenge? How do we be become an expectant people?

ARE WE EXPECTING?

The challenge for those preparing to lead us in festal Sabbathing is to mine the riches of the gospel of Jesus in its diverse implications for a more abundant life under his lordship. Preachers must prepare with diligence, with prayer, employing all their God-given powers of spiritual imagination to proclaim the gospel with authority and generosity (2 Tim 4:2). They must expect that God will accomplish much through its proclamation.

Those that cook food for the rest of us to enjoy should cook with love, expecting and praying that it will be received (there’s that word again!) with glad and generous hearts (Acts 2:46). Those who watch the young children in the nursery, those who lead music, those who clean the kitchen, and all others who serve at the Sabbath feast should ready their hearts, expecting that their humble service will be used by the Spirit of God to enable others to receive his grace and be transformed by it.

Whatever we bring to the feast, we bring it with the joyful expectation that Jesus has given us the gift, and intends to use it for the edification of the body (Rom 12:4ff).

It is incumbent upon each member of the feasting body to calibrate their hearts throughout the week, expecting that the feast will be satisfying, and that Jesus will delight our souls on the richest of fare.

The challenge for each of us is much like the challenge of our entire Christian lives: to live our week in the hopeful expectation that the best is yet to come, and that each Sabbath feast is a foretaste of the greater feast of the New Jerusalem, which we also expect to enjoy soon.

—

Andy Stager is the pastor and planter of Hill City Church in Rock Hill, SC. Gardens Don't Launch (and Other Church Planting Proverbs) chronicles lessons he's learned on the missional-ecclesial frontier. He co-produces Gospel Neighboring, a weekly podcast, and is co-author with Daniel Wells of Countdown to Launch: 10 Church Planting Rules Worth Breaking. He and his wife own and operate The Cordial Churchman, which makes and ships 100 handmade bow ties each week.

[All rights reserved. Used by permission. Originally published at “The Churched Disciple: Sabbath -- ‘Expect’”.]

Miracles in a Modern Age

Anyone familiar with Jesus knows he spent a lot of time healing people. Those healings seem so foreign to modern disciples, as if from a far away land, the stuff of mythology or fiction. Yet, his healing ministry didn't stick with him; Jesus spread his power to heal into the lives of his followers. Does this mean that we too, as modern disciples, should practice healing? What should we expect when praying for it? Let's take a quick look at the 1st century to get our bearings. Then, we can turn to our response in the 21st century.

Imitating the Healer

To set the stage, there is a three part narrative cycle to Jesus’ ministry (Lk. 5-8): 1) Proclaim the kingdom message, 2) Perform an exorcism, and 3) Perform a healing. It’s a cycle of proclaiming the kingdom message and performing miracles. Jesus starts in this cycle (Lk. 4), calls twelve disciples to join him (Lk. 5-6), and then repeats the narrative cycle: kingdom message/exorcism/healing four times (Lk. 7-8). When we zoom in, Jesus proclaims the kingdom message through the parable of The Four Soils, exorcises the Gerasene Demoniac, heals Jarius’ daughter, and a woman who had a hemorrhage for twelve years (Lk. 8). He is proclaiming the kingdom message and performing miracles.

Then Jesus sends his disciples on a mission of their own (Lk. 9). Notice what they’re doing: “And he called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal” (Lk. 9:1-2). Proclaim the kingdom message, perform exorcisms, perform healings. The same things in the same exact order. Coincidence? Hardly.

It happens again, but with seventy-two disciples instead of twelve--representing Jesus mission to all nations, not just Israel (Lk. 10; cf. Gen. 10). Why the repetition? Jesus does it four times, disciples do it twice. This narrative weight is telling us that disciples of Jesus imitate Jesus. Disciples of Jesus don’t just believe in him for a nice afterlife; they imitate him in everyday life.

Have you ever seen children imitate their parents or younger siblings imitate older ones? They pick up on mannerisms and patterns of speech. They talk and act like them. I recently met someone’s sister, and I knew right away they were related because of shared mannerisms. My wife tells me our son acts “just like me.” As disciples of Jesus, we should talk and act like Jesus, pick up on his behavior and imitate it. Jesus even says as much: “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (6:40).

If you are a Christian, you are a disciple who is being trained by the Holy Spirit to act like Jesus (cf. 6:36). What are we to imitate? Clearly, it’s not everything, like dying on a cross. Jesus is committed to preaching and healing; he’s equally committed to raising up disciples who do the same thing. Luke underscores this “And they departed and went through the villages, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere” (Lk. 6:6). Jesus sends his disciples to preach and heal, not preach and serve or preach and study. As modern people, imitating this part of Jesus ministry often seems absurd, out of reach, unrealistic.

Skepticism of Miracles

Regardless of Luke’s careful historiography, we find this all very implausible today. Demons, exorcisms, healings? Before we can begin to imitate Jesus healing, we must first address our own skepticism. There is a healthy skepticism. We’ve seen enough 20/20 exposes on charismatic shysters who fake healings to rake in tithes. We shouldn’t check our minds at the door. But, as modern people, we also possess an unhealthy skepticism.

Mythological, Supernatural View

Our unhealthy skepticism views healings like Harry Potter magic—mythological, supernatural events. As myth, we think of healing as something from a wild imagination (a potion poured out on a wound for instant healing). We treat miracles as rationally implausible.

We believe that science has proven miracles to be impossible. But this belief, is in fact not a provable fact. The scientific method insists on natural causes for everything. But how then can you naturally disprove a supernatural explanation? You can’t test a supernatural hypothesis with a natural scientific method. This has been compared to a drunk looking for his keys only in the light, simply because he cannot see in the dark. But what if the keys are in the dark? See the contradiction? This shows us that even science, at times, requires faith; that answers may actually lie in the dark.

Theological & Natural View

The theological view starts with belief in God (without ruling out belief in science). It’s natural because miracles have a lot to do with the natural order of things. For Jesus and his disciples, healing has to do with God overthrowing the powers. Luke scholar Joel Green points out that when Jesus encounters disease, he treats it as evil. Jesus rebukes disease like he rebukes demons. He rebukes a fever (4:39) and in the same chapter rebukes a demon (vv. 35, 41). Jesus is confronting, not just the disease, but the power behind the disease. Satan is falling and the kingdom of God advancing as they preach and heal. Disciples are sent to not only preach, but to heal and exorcise demons.

Healings, then, are a direct confrontation of the powers of this world that would have the world undone, broken, and in complete disarray. Peter confirms this theological reading when he says of Jesus: “he healed all who were under the power of the devil” (Acts 10:38). When Jesus comes into the world, he sees right through disease to its origin—evil—and he confronts it. Like a good doctor, he gets past the symptoms to the cause and cures it. Healing is an overthrowing of the powers that propagate suffering and evil in this world, reintroducing us to God.

We are encountering, not the mythological, but the theological, the logic of God against the powers. Miracles aren’t supernatural, but natural. They are about the abnormal becoming normal; the natural order of things being restored; miracles are about restoration of creation. They’re not otherworldly magical events; they are this-worldy natural events.

Jesus restores in two ways. The obvious way is that the sick are restored to health, dead brought back to life. The not so obvious way is their restoration into community. Often when Jesus heals he expresses concern for the damage done to social and communal life. Jesus is concerned with their status, their acceptance, their relationships. Jesus encounters a Gadarene man (Lk. 8), a former urbanite, who now lives in rural graveyards, where he wears no clothing, cuts himself, and is bound by chains, which he breaks over and over again. He wasn’t always this way. He used to be a boy, someone’s son. Imagine what his deranged state did to his relationships, to his community.

The better view of miracles is theological and natural; it overthrows the powers and restores creation and community. Story after story, Jesus not only confronts the powers, but also restores his creation--a widow’s son returned to her from death, a woman marginalized for twelve years restored in peace to her community.  Evil banished, health restored; isolation removed, community recovered.

Miracles for Modern Disciples

So how are we to respond as modern disciples of Jesus? In 2010, I was brought close to the desire for healing, for the powers of disease to be overthrown and creation to be restored. We were in Dallas for Thanksgiving. At 3:30am on Friday morning, my wife thought her water had broken. She was nineteen weeks pregnant. We combed the internet for advice, texted our doctor, prayed for healing, and fell asleep. By 9am, we were at Baylor Hospital’s ER at our doctor’s request. Every possible scenario was flying through our minds—stillborn, miscarriage, birth to an incomplete baby. If there was a time to ask God for miracle, this was one of them.

Our son made it through that scare, but when he was actually born his heart rate kept dropping drastically. Nurses and doctors would burst into the room unannounced in the wee hours of the morning to check on my wife and little Owen. This happened over and over again. I kept praying for healing. We found out that the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and when Robie went into contractions, he would move down the birth canal, tightening the cord around his neck. This sent the monitors screaming. We prayed and pleaded, and by God's grace, the cord came undone and he was delivered naturally, without a scratch.

I've prayed for my son's life and my daughter's eye and they've been delivered, but also asked God to intervene in other people's lives and their suffering only persisted. Sometimes God heals and sometimes he does not. As I’ve pondered healing for today, I’ve come to the conclusion that we should pray with great faith in the power of God to heal and with, perhaps, greater faith in God not to heal. Very often, as we pray, our faith slips into healing and away from God. We get hung up on healing instead of trusting in the Healer.

Even if God does heal, the disease of death is inevitable. Why, then, should we seek temporary healing? What is God doing when he interrupts our lives with temporal relief? Are they displays of deity? In Luke, Jesus’ healings don’t so much prove deity as they do explain the gospel. We are sent to proclaim the gospel and heal. Healing always comes in tandem with preaching. Jesus is showing us that the gospel announces and inaugurates the restoration of all things, restoring the world to the way it is supposed to be. When miracles happen we get a glimpse into the past, the way things were before Satan fell and, and a glimpse into the future, the way things will be when the powers are overthrown once and for all at Jesus second coming.

The gospel is a message of reversal, the reversal of everything back to its blessed, original state—whole not broken, health not sickness, life not death, community not isolation. Disciples of Jesus have stepped into a space and time rift, where the glory and power of God are seeping into our world, renewing people, culture, and creation. The problem is that many of us barely have our foot in the door. Our minds are broken, captive to the mythologized, supernatural view of all things. The gospel liberates us from this to believe and know a God who overthrows the powers and restores creation. Jesus has come to re-integrate the world to a place where there is no supernatural/natural, mythological/rational division. He’s rescuing us from our captivate minds and is pressing his kingdom of new creation back into this warped world. He’s turning it inside-out, showing us the way it’s supposed to be.

If it is true that Jesus is restoring creation, removing the supernatural/natural/sacred/secular divide, then we should reflect that reintegration in our work and play. The future of restoration should peak out, not just in prayers for healing but in ways of working and living. If we are imitators of Christ, we should talk and act like Christ in everything we do. The problem is many of us are bound by the mythological view of Jesus, that he is practical fiction. People can’t tell that the gospel dissolves the sacred/secular divide because we uphold it by the way we live. We refuse holiness; we make shoddy culture; we consume the city; we ignore the poor. Your ethics, your holiness, your language, your dress, your work, your play all say something about Jesus, about the gospel.

Does your life reverberate with the age of restoration? Are we discovering new cures, making breakthroughs in technology, making great art, raising good citizens, displaying the imitation of Christ to our city? The restoration of all things, the reintegration of the mythological and the rational, the sacred and the secular. We are sent, like the twelve and the seventy-two, to preach and to heal, to heal our society through caring for the poor, counseling the troubled, creating great culture, raising great citizens, making great art, living distinct and holy lives. If we are disciples, our lives should demand a gospel explanation. Should we pray for healing? Absolutely. But we should also live the healing, the healing of all creation through the power of Christ is us, the hope of glory!

_

Jonathan K. Dodson (MDiv; ThM) serves as a pastor of City Life Church in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Gospel-Centered Discipleship, Unbelievable Gospel, and Raised? He has discipled men and women abroad and at home for almost two decades, taking great delight in communicating the gospel and seeing Christ formed in others.

Catechisms for Kingdom Warfare

Today, we are at war. Not with flesh and blood, but in soul. Our heart, soul, mind, and strength are in daily conflicts with the Cosmic Powers. How do you fight? The Apostle Paul wants us to be catechized. We need a catechism—a gospel-driven catechism of victory.

Dust off Your Catechisms

Catechizing believers, teaching a set list of questions and answers, is a long-rooted practice of the Bride of Christ. It's one that seems to be waning, if not already gone. It's definitely dusty, but we can recover it. Catechism is a powerful, helpful, biblical method of teaching others—and yourself.

How ultra-helpful are the Westminster and Heidelberg versions? The Westminster Catechism starts by asking:

Question 1: What is the chief end of man?

Answer: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

Question 4: What is God?

Answer: God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

The Heidelberg Catechism’s first question and answer address the entirety of life and death.

Question 1: What is thy only comfort in life and death?

Answer: That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.

Preaching the Gospel to Our Hearts

We need to become experts in the art of preaching the gospel to ourselves. One of the greatest thinkers and pastors of the past 100 years was Martyn Lloyd-Jones, referred to by many as “The Doctor.” He rightly diagnosed why so many Christians flounder in their daily lives and experiences with God. The Doctor said, "Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?" How right on was he? A defeated, depressed, downtrodden, exasperated, exhausted, joyless, burnt-out Christianity is not Christianity.

We need to lay hold of the cross and remember our new life in Christ. We need to preach the gospel to ourselves. We need to catechize ourselves. Catechisms are a turnkey help in the practice of preaching to yourself.

Catechism ought to be in our spiritual discipline gun cabinet.

The long tested spiritual disciplines need a freshening in our perspectives. What can often be seen as a quiet and cute time around a cup of coffee, Moleskine, ESV Study Bible, assorted pens and highlighters—maybe some instrumental music—is nothing short of Kingdom warfare. We don't read the Bible to get a pick-me-up; we read to grow in the knowledge of the holy—yes, and amen!—and we take up the spiritual disciplines as weaponry against the ancient Reptile and his hobgoblins. “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ”(2 Corinthians 10:4–5 ESV). The last thing Satan wants of the Church is to obey Jesus, glorify Jesus, honor Jesus, spread the fame of Jesus—and that should be our first thing, the chief aim of all spiritual disciplines.

Attack With Gospel Truth

When the hiss of accusation, doubt, and fiery arrows draw near, Paul walks us through a catechism of victory in Romans 8:31-39; and if we resist the devil, and draw near to God, the snake will bolt (James 4:7-8). As you read Romans 8:31-39, look for the question marks.

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Paul sets up seven questions (in ten verses!) and gives the answers—what is he doing? He is catechizing us. Romans 8:31-39 may be one of the first Christian catechisms. There seems to be four main questions:

Question: Why should I not doubt God's love and care for me? (vv. 31-32)

Answer: If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

Question: How come charges will not stand against me? (v. 33)

Answer: It is God who justifies.

Question: Can I ever be condemned? (v. 34)

Answer: Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.

Question: Can anything separate me from the love of Christ? Will I ever be unloved by God? (vv. 37-39)

Answer: No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Glory to God!

It All Comes Back to The Gospel

The questions are helpful, but the weapon is the answer. What weapon does Paul give when we are wondering if we'll be condemned? Read your Bible more? Pray harder? No way. He gives gospel truth. Stand-alone spiritual disciplines are not an encouragement; they are a vehicle, meant to help us draw near to God (James 4:8). Spiritual disciplines alone aren't the answer to a struggling heart; they take us to the answer. And each question is answered with gospel glories.

Question: Why should I not doubt God's love and care for me?

Answer: v. 32, He gave us his Son! (Gospel)

Question: How come charges will not stand against me?

Answer: v. 33, It is God who justifies us! How? The Cross & Resurrection (Romans 4:25). (More gospel)

Question: Can I be condemned?

Answer: v. 34, Never! Jesus died for you, is alive for you, is at the Father's right hand for you, and interceding for you. (Yep, more gospel!)

Question: Can anything separate me from the love of Christ?

Answer: vv. 37-39, No! You are a mega-conqueror through Christ. You have victory in him & nothing can separate from him. (And again, more gospel!)

Gospel. Gospel. Gospel. Gospel.

It always comes back to God's love; it's lauded four times in the passage (vv. 35, 37, 39). Always come back to his love. And God's love is made plain and clear in the gospel.

“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6-8)

God wants you to know and feel his love. While else frame every answer with it?  You can never feel too loved by God.

Are you sure of his love (v.38)? That's the point of the catechism, to be sure. Preach to yourself the immeasurable, matchless bounty of God's love for you.

Responsive Reading

Here is responsive reading based off of Romans 8:31-39, that could assist you catechizing yourself with the gospel.

I struggle to believe God's love and care for me. Is there hope?

God is for me. No one can stand against God’s plan for me. He didn't spare his Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

Is it true that God won't cast me aside? I've done some bad things; I'll never be good enough.

No one can condemn me, for Jesus died in my place—more than that, He is alive—and he reigns over my life, and is interceding for me.

My life is heavy; things aren't going as I planned. I thought God loved me?

Nothing can separate me from God's love. Trouble, distress, persecution, poverty, danger, and death cannot remove me from God's grace. In all these things, I am more than a conqueror through him who loved me.

Satan prowls around me. I've sinned too much. I've sinned too big. I'm nervous about my future.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus my Lord.

I confess these truths, clinging to Jesus—I believe and live again.

Christ be praised.

—

J.A. Medders is the Lead Pastor of Redeemer Church in Tomball, TX. He and Natalie have two kids, Ivy and Oliver. Jeff digs caffeinated drinks, books, and the Triune God. He blogs at www.jamedders.com and tweets from @mrmedders. Jeff's first book, Gospel-Formed: Living a Grace-Addicted, Truth-Filled, Jesus-Exalting Life, is set to release this November from Kregel.

Justification and Work

I’ve been writing about how faith applies to the everyday life of our work. I’m learning, just like the rest of us, how the grand doctrines of grace connect, form, and transform my job. Much has been written on how they transform our hearts, ministry, and even family, but I don’t know how much has been written on how they practically invade our workplaces. These doctrines don’t just live in our hearts, or in our churches, but they exist and are active on the street corners, in the restaurants, in our homes, and in our jobs.¹

The Claim

The audacious sounding claim, is that through an act by a Jewish Messiah, humanity in Christ, has been put right before God. We have been “reconciled” (Rom. 5:10, 2 Cor. 5:18-20). This reconciliation demonstrates that not only have we as people trusted in this Messiah, but we also have been found “right” in the sight of God (Rom. 4:5), but that even God’s disposition towards us is one of delight, even to the degree that he delights in his own Son, the Messiah (Mk. 1:11).

Is there any room for us to claim any credit in this process?  Happily we say “No!” There has been nothing done on our part to initiate or cause us to be reconciled before a holy God. The claim sounds audacious, too good to be true even. We live in a culture that operates contractually. 50-50. Fairness is the golden rule now. This claim flies in the face of fairness, and is otherwordly because it is made possible through grace (Eph. 2:8-9). We “ran up the bill” so to speak, and Christ “paid the tab.”

The Christ

This is all possible through the work of the Christ.  What was his work? A perfect life lived, a sacrificial death died, and a victorious resurrection. We, as enemies of God, traitors of the heavenly court, stand in opposition towards God. Christ comes and “stands in our place” (Rom. 5:17). He tell us where we failed and put things out of order. Then he overcomes, and puts everything back in order.  This Messiah went down into our valley’s of sorrow, overcame the temptations of glory on the mountaintops, and broke the power of evil that stains this world.

He literally became the wrath-taker. Paul says he was offered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25). We have the declaration from God, that in Christ, we not only have been forgiven, but we are invited in to the Father’s arms and home. We are invited to the table of Christ to eat, drink, and enjoy him.

I struggle to discipline myself to remember this declaration by God. I can easily get caught up in how I performed at work, then get caught up in how I performed in church, instead of resting in Christ’s performance on my behalf. Recently I went through a season in which, at work, there were people who seemed against me. We’ve all experienced this. During this time, it was easy to use my own performance to justify myself. Sadly the more I did this, the more pride crept into my heart, and the more I cared about what these people thought. I wasn’t able to respond in grace because I was so set on proving them wrong. However, the Spirit reminds me that my identity isn’t “Collin the banker” or “Collin the church planting resident,” but “Collin, God’s son who’s loved in Christ.” Grasping our justification, frees us up to graciously care and love our co-workers regardless of how we’re being treated.

The Consequence

Consequence is usually viewed in a negative light, but it only means the result of something. The consequence of this declaration of God is freedom from listening to the declarations inside our own head that either justify or condemn us. A final word has been spoken, a declaration has gone out; we are right, loved, accepted, forgiven (not merely excused) in Christ. On the flip side, we are in no place to make justifying or condemning statements about others. It is Christ to condemn and justify.

We are no longer bound to be defined by our circle of friends, the work we do, or society’s valuing of that work, but we are bound and defined, in love, in the fellowship and love of the Trinity. We are, therefore, freed from the work of our hands being used to define, justify, or condemn us.

Now What?

We are free to affirm others in the workplace because we are secure in our affirmation from Christ.

• We are free to serve others in our workplace because our justification is wrapped up in the servant Christ.
• We don’t hang on every word or declaration from our employers; our declaration in Christ from the Triune God of the universe sustains us.
• We can live under the umbrella of the declaration of Christ, when the torrential rain of condemnation comes.
• We no longer swing from despair (not good enough) to pride (I am good enough) in our work, but fix our eyes on Christ, because of his goodness and finished work.

Now our jobs are no longer empires we are building, but tools to live for Christ’s kingdom.

Be assured, justification means Christ is for us.

—

Collin Seitz is an almost 30 year old, grateful husband to Allison, father to Hudson and Hannah, learner, and most importantly disciple and lover of Christ and His Kingdom. He enjoys a nice cup of Oolong Tea, reading, playing basketball, and watching his kids grow up. He and his family are currently a part of Austin City Life, and a church planting resident there. He blogs at For Christ, City, and Culture. Twitter: @Collin_Steitz

^{1. I don’t mean to minimize the good news of Christ to the doctrines of grace. I understand that the good news of Christ as Messiah and King will be deeper and fuller than what I have written here.↩}

On Mission Through Submission

Jesus Submits to the Father

As Christians, we all want to be used by God. We want to be able to use the gifts and abilities he has given us for his glory. The question we may ask ourselves is how are we to be used by God? We seem to either not know how to begin or after having begun we don’t know how to keep going. This struggle can become frustrating because nothing seems to be happening. It can also lead us to try and make things happen, which leaves us begging God to bless what we have done rather than doing what God has promised to bless. Whether we are frustrated or trying to make things happen, we are rendered less effective or totally ineffective because our focus is off God’s mission and on ourselves.

Jesus did not try to make things happen outside of submitting to the will of the Father. He was faced with the ultimate call to lay down his life and he “set his face like flint,” toward that which the Father commissioned him to (Is. 50:7, Lk. 9:51). Had he tried to do things in any other way, had he tried to manufacture the Father’s will, or had he given into Satan’s offer for the burden of his call to be lifted, he may have saved himself, but no one else. He leaned heavily on the Father as Hebrews 5:7 tells us and through his obedience he purchased salvation for all that the Father gave him. Jesus’ dependence on the Father kept him on mission and allowed him to save and send out disciples who are also commissioned through submission.

I have experienced this frustration and given into this temptation to make things happen. They only lead to feelings of stagnation and confusion. Throughout my experiences, I have always believed and affirmed that God defines what it is that he actually commissions and equips us to do. That, of course, means that it might not be what we think, what we would like it to be, or when we would like it to happen. “God reserves the right to interrupt your life,” as one of my mentors always says. Yet, I was not always living according to my belief of how God commissions and equips. I was not always submitting to God. That was until I had an opportunity to begin a year-long internship at my church to help discern my call to ministry.

The Church Submits to Jesus

Scripture defines the church as the “body of Christ” among other things. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). Theologically, that concept of the church being the body of Christ is rich and has several implications, but at the very least it means that the church is a representation of Christ.  We see this in how both Paul and Peter describe believers being built together as the church for works of ministry (Eph. 2:19-22, 1 Pt. 2:4-5). These works of ministry are commissioned by Christ for the church to perform and empowered by the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19-20, Jn. 14-16).

Ephesians 5, which is usually referred to for how we look at marriage, offers insight into this issue of submission to Christ via the church. Paul wrote: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands” (Eph. 5:22-24).

While we often look at this text from the standpoint of how the relationship of Christ and the church gives us a picture of marriage, we should also look at what it is saying about submission in the church. When Paul says, “Now as the church submits to Christ,” there is no command there; it is an assumption that the church is submitting to Christ. He refers to those that are submitting to Christ as the church; therefore, believers should be submitting to the church (i.e. being a part of the church, submitting to the leaders and serving) in order to submit to Christ.

Scripture also calls us to submit ourselves to God through offering up our lives. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1). As we offer our lives as a living sacrifice, we are commissioned through submission.

We see this as Paul calls the church in Thessalonica to respect those that are over them in the Lord, “We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you” (1 Thess. 5:12). Therefore, submitting to the local church or the body of Christ is in fact part of our submission to Christ. Through submitting to the local church we are all commissioned to offer our lives to Christ in accordance with our gifts, for the edification of the church, and for our own growth in him.

In Acts 13, the Apostle Paul, when he was still referred to as Saul, was with Barnabas and others at the church in Antioch. “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off” (Acts 13:2-3). Even the Apostle Paul here is submitting to Christ via the local church and it is in that setting that the Holy Spirit sends them out to do God’s will.

On Mission through Submission

When we live according to our nature, which is corrupted by sin, we do not desire to submit to anything or anyone and society affirms in us that fear and dislike of submission. Yet in our attempt to not submit, we end up being slaves to anything other than God and his will. Our lack of submission to God and his church leave us as slaves to sin (Rom. 6). The gospel frees us from thinking that we need to live according to any story for our lives that society, our nature, or any other voice may tell us. We are freed to live according to the story of God, which is sovereign over any other story. In Christ, we are free to submit to God and his church. Submission to God and his church calls us to humility, vulnerability and to be like Christ:

• Humility–Submitting to the leadership of our local church and to God develops humility in us. We open ourselves to those who are over in us in the Lord to evaluate God’s call on our lives along with us (Heb. 13:17).
• Vulnerability–Opening ourselves up to correction, encouragement, and service in the church leaves us feeling incredibly vulnerable. However, it is in that place of weakness that God works in us as he increases our dependence on him and our trust in him (2 Cor. 12:9).
• Christ-likeness–To submit to the church is to submit to the body of Christ and ultimately Christ himself. To submit to Christ is to do what Christ himself did, which was to submit to the will of the Father (Phil. 2:5-11).

So as we seek to understand God’s will for our lives, let us be like Christ. We could say that to understand God’s will for our lives, we have to actually submit to God’s will. Our misconceptions about submission are proved gloriously wrong as we humbly bow before Christ and open ourselves to what He would do in and through us. As we do this, he shows us that though the world, our sinful nature or Satan may call us to submit to things in sinful ways that harm us, Jesus calls us to submit to him for our greatest good and his glory.

—

Nick Abraham (DMin student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) lives in Navarre, OH with his wife and daughter. He serves as an Associate Pastor at Alpine Bible Church in Sugarcreek, OH. He is a contributor to Make, Mature, Multiply: Becoming Fully-Formed Disciples of Jesus and blogs at Like Living Stones.

Liberating Our Teens from Sexual Lies

(Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Preparing Your Teens for College by Alex Chediak available from Tyndale House Publishers, 2014. It appears here with the permission of the author and publisher. For more information and a lengthier excerpt, visit Alex’s site.)

A Biblical Understanding of Sex

Our teens need to have a biblical understanding of sex in order to navigate the challenges that await them in college. For starters, let’s define the term, not on an anatomical level but at a foundational level. Here’s how pastor and author Tim Keller puts it:

Sex is perhaps the most powerful God-created way to help you give your entire self to another human being. Sex is God’s appointed way for two people to reciprocally say to one another, “I belong completely, permanently, and exclusively to you.”¹

And that’s true. But Keller (and the Bible) would go a step further. Sex is a physical picture of a spiritual reality: God wants to dwell among and deeply know his people. God invented sex not just to propagate the human race and to give us enjoyment but to be a picture of the salvation story—Jesus Christ laying down his life for us (his bride) to bring us back to God (see Ephesians 5:25-27; 1 Peter 3:18). Gerald Hiestand and Jay Thomas say it well:

God created sex to serve as a living portrait of the life-changing spiritual union that believers have with God through Christ. . . . God created the physical oneness of sex to serve as a visible image, or type, of the spiritual union that exists between Christ and the church.²

At stake in our sexuality is nothing less than our representation of Jesus Christ’s relationship with those who follow him.

Maybe you’re saying, “This all sounds great for an adult Sunday school class, but is it really practical to explain this to our teens?” While I wouldn’t expect the same level of interest from a 12- or 13-year-old as from a 17- or 18-year-old, I do believe teens need a big-picture perspective on what sexual intimacy represents if they’re going to win the battle for purity in college and throughout their adult lives. And a biblical understanding of sex is the best antidote to the culture’s sexual lies. Our culture believes that sex is all about me. My desires. My satisfaction. It’s about using others, not serving them. But the Bible tells us that sex is all about God and his glorious work in bringing us into relationship with him. In the context of marriage, sex is about giving ourselves to serve our spouse (see 1 Corinthians 7:3-5).

A BIBLICAL MOTIVATION FOR PURITY

A biblical understanding of sex leads to a biblical motivation for abstaining until marriage. I fear that sometimes we motivate teens to sexual purity in small, even worldly ways, rather than in big, biblical ways. I have friends who grew up in Bible-believing churches that faithfully preached chastity, but the rationale was “Hey, you wouldn’t want to get pregnant, or get someone pregnant, or contract a sexually transmitted disease (STD). And watch out for those condoms! They’re not as effective as your health teacher says they are.”

The problem is it’s assumed that teens know that sex before marriage is a sin and little to no explanation is given as to why it’s a sin. Of course, we should want our teens to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancies and STDs, but neither of these is an explicitly Christian goal. You don’t have to believe the Bible to want to avoid those things. Moreover, this argument doesn’t confront the cultural lie that sex is all about self.

If our teens know something about how human sexuality is meant to represent the permanent, spiritual union between Jesus Christ and his bride, it gives meaning and motivation to the prohibition on sex outside of marriage. Sexual intimacy in any context besides marriage dishonors God by telling a lie about how Jesus Christ relates to his people. And it massively disrupts our relationship with God (see 1 Corinthians 6:12-20). In contrast, the fear of the Lord teaches us to hate all evil (see Proverbs 8:13), to abstain from sexual immorality (see 1 Thessalonians 4:3-7), and to be holy because God is holy (see 1 Peter 1:13-16).

Once our teens understand what sex is, what it represents, and why it must be reserved for marriage, they’ll be better able to understand that there is a whole range of behaviors that are sexual in nature and that therefore must all be reserved for marriage. I fear it’s too easy for those with small, worldly motives for “staying pure” to cut corners, focusing on how close they can get to the edge without falling off. For example, ministry leaders in Christian college settings will confirm that a significant number of professing Christian students (like their non-Christian counterparts) do not consider oral sex to be sex. Why not? Because it doesn’t fit their overly narrow definition of “sex.”

But if they had a more comprehensive understanding—one rooted in the perspective summarized above—they would see that of course oral sex is sex. It’s the giving of oneself to another person in an incredibly intimate way. Like-wise, a lot of other physical acts would fall into this category.

Which leads us to the age-old question Christian teens and singles ask: How far is too far before marriage?

AN OBJECTIVE STANDARD FOR PURITY

But your teen might ask, “Isn’t that legalism?" We should anticipate this response. Many Christian teens will recognize that “getting physical” with someone they don’t really know is pure lust and clearly wrong. If they struggle at this point, remind them of 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, the forgiveness available in Christ, and that their past behavior need not determine their future. For others, the clear line of purity gets fuzzy when they develop a mutual attraction. Maybe they agree to be “exclusive,” to be boyfriend and girlfriend. They begin to see this other person as “special”—more than a friend but less than a spouse. So things get a bit physical (i.e., sexual), but they tell themselves, It’s not like we’re having sex, Things aren’t getting out of hand, and We know when we need to stop. And they tell others, “Don’t judge us—you don’t understand.” (As if we never lived through those years.)

Teach your teens what’s wrong with this logic before they’re in the throes of temptation and every ounce of their being wants to believe they have the right to decide “how far is too far.” The idea that Christians are allowed to set their own sexual standards, as long as they accomplish the goal of avoiding intercourse, is dangerous and misleading. . . .

This is not legalism. It liberates our teens from being captive to their own subjective standards, which can be profoundly flawed, especially in the heat of the moment. And we can really help them as parents, because if you’re married, I’d imagine that the boundaries of propriety toward other women or men are pretty clear for you. If our teens are to relate to young men and women “in all purity” (1 Timothy 5:2), they need to have this same clarity.

—

Alex Chediak is an author, speaker, and professor of engineering and physics at California Baptist University. Alex has been involved in mentoring students for many years. He has published numerous articles in Boundless (Focus on the Family), Trak (God’s World News), and Christian College Guide (Christianity Today). He is the bestselling author of Thriving at College (Tyndale House, 2011). Alex and his wife, Marni, live with their three children in Riverside, California. Visit Alex’s site or follow him on Twitter: @Chediak.

^{1. Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage (New York: Dutton, 2011), 223-224.↩ 2. Gerald Hiestand and Jay Thomas, Sex, Dating, and Relationships (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 18..↩}

Create and Restore in Work

Recently at City Seminary, which is put on by City Life Church, we studied the doctrine of a Creator in a material world. As I thought more about God as creator, his purpose in creation, and the value of creation itself, it inspired me to think about how this might affect my job.  Honestly, there are some days where I struggle to find purpose in my job. If I do find purpose, I tend to only think in terms of self-fulfillment, or having my needs met.  There is a far greater, deeper, and glorious truth about the purpose of our work, and it's found in the doctrine of creation. I will follow the outline we used at City Seminary, that we believe creation was created by a triune God, ex nihilo (out of nothing), and goes to Christ.

Triune God Creating

As I meditate on a triune God creating out of an overflow of love, community, and deference within themselves, it inspires me to do work together. I can defer to those who are more skilled than I am, and enjoy seeing them create and work. There is beauty in community accomplishing goals. Working at our jobs can be an expression and exercise of this communal, deferring act of creating. How would my co-workers respond, when instead of trying to stroke my ego, I defer to them and praise them for their skills? Doing this expresses the love of the Trinity in a tangible way and is fundamental for being on mission to make disciples in our workplaces.



Ex-Nihilo (Out of Nothing)

God created a masterpiece out of nothing. Though at times our jobs seem mundane and meaningless, we serve a God who created everything out of nothing. We can trust that he, as Creator God, can take the mundane, and paint a masterpiece for his glory. Rest in his sufficiency to work wonders, and not our own skills. Our creativity at our jobs reflect this aspect of God. How can we make our workplaces a more creative, and better place to work? Think how God might use your skills to create out of the mundane.

 God regularly uses the mundane in redemptive history to accomplish his mission (Matt. 1:18-25 - Mary was an ordinary girl who carried the Savior) and it should be no surprise he uses the mundane as we live on mission in our workplaces.

Purposeful (To and For Christ)

This aspect affected my thoughts profoundly. The purpose of my job isn't found in my needs being met, or my own self-fulfillment, nor is it merely meaningless and mundane. Rather, my job has purpose because it's going somewhere. It's not climbing the corporate ladder, but going to Christ. It's also for Christ (Rom. 11:36). It's not a stagnant job, but, as with creation, it is on a path of renewal, by the Spirit, towards Christ, as he carries and upholds it. My job has telos (goal) because creation does (Rom. 8:18-25).

Ultimately, this is an expression of loving God and loving others well (Matt. 22:37-40). At our jobs, churches, any place of influence, how we work matters, because through it, we can bless others and glorify God. What if we ceased to only think of our jobs as ways to generate income, and instead a way to also create culture, and bless God and others? (Gen. 1:22, 28; 2:15; Matt. 28:18-20).

Practically, this means that by working well for our employers, or working well on projects, we mirror a Trinitarian God who creates and is interested, or better, who is acting in this world to redeem and restore. Our excellence then drives others' attention to God’s final work in redemption and re-creation in the new heavens and earth.

Create and Restore

At City Life, we have a phrase we use called “create and restore.” This is an excellent way to view our workplaces; as places to create, but also places to restore. As disciples of Christ, in an ever increasing transient culture, we can mirror the Trinity's valuing of creation as we value and see our workplaces as places to create in and bless, instead of places to coerce or conquer. 

As Hugh Halter says in Flesh, we must not over-spritualize ministry, and over-secularize our jobs. If this doctrine of creation begins to swallow up our view of our work, we will no longer use our work as a way to create our own god, but instead use it as a way to mirror, and glorify the Trinitarian God who creates out of an overflow of love.

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Collin Seitz is an almost 30 years old, grateful husband to Allison, father to Hudson and Hannah, learner, and most importantly disciple and lover of Christ and His Kingdom. He enjoys a nice cup of Oolong Tea, reading, playing basketball, and watching his kids grow up. He and his family are currently a part of City Life, and he is a church planting resident there. He blogs at For Christ, City, and Culture. Twitter: @Collin_Steitz

Resurrection: Essential or Optional?

Is belief in resurrection essential or optional? All scholars agree Jesus died by crucifixion, but some insist there isn’t enough historical evidence to warrant belief in a physical resurrection. Let’s examine the evidence for the resurrection through: the gospel tradition, skeptical scholarship, and faith.

Gospel Tradition

Concluding his long letter to the church in the city of Corinth, Paul writes:

"Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.”(1 Cor. 15:1)

For the early Christians, church was not something they attended; it was something they were, wherever they went, at home or at work, in groups or going out, they didn’t leave this identity behind— they were family in Christ Jesus. Paul gives us a family reminder of what creates deep community—the gospel. In fact, he says if we deviate from the gospel, it puts us in grave danger “believing in vain.”

Put positively, the gospel is of first importance. This means it has priority over all other teachings and all of your life. It is more important than your career, your friends, your future, your preferences. It is this:

"that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”(vv. 3-5)

The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus for our sins is the essential, life-changing, world-altering gospel message. It announces hopeful news “according to the Scriptures.”Did you notice he repeated this? This is not a way of saying, “See, this was all about Jesus predicted in the Old Testament, so you should believe it,”as if to one-up skeptics with prophecy. Rather, Paul appeals to the Scriptures as a rich, ancient, live narrative about the world, which hinges on the Messiah. “According to the Scriptures” is shorthand for true story. In this true story, the Messiah has come to deal with the sin of Israel and the world. This is why he says: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age”(Gal. 1:4).

According to the Scriptures, Christ is the hero of the world story. He exchanges divine grace for personal sin. He replaces evil with peace. The gospel is the story of God bringing Israel’s messiah onto the world stage to make a new humanity fit for a new world. Now, is this a true story? Well, it isn’t something Paul made up. It is the result of Jesus’s teachings on the Scriptures and is something he received. This is a technical word referring to the transmission of a tradition. Jesus died in the 30s, Paul is writing in the 50s and had already taught it to the church at Corinth, and now says it is Christian tradition. That puts this early creed’s origin around 45 A.D. But for it to become a tradition, it had to be a decade old. So that puts it around 35. N. T. Wright notes it was probably formulated within the first two or three years after the first Easter. This gospel creed is very close to the source. Now let’s take a closer look at this tradition by breaking it into three parts: died for our sins, buried, and raised on the third day.

Skeptical Scholarship

Paul says Jesus died for our sins. Virtually no reputable scholar has an issue with the historicity of Jesus’s death on a cross. It’s an accepted fact. But the claim that this was divine atonement to deal with human sin is another matter. What gives Jesus the right to say he died for our sins? Who says we need saving? Well, our conscience does. Everyone encounters guilt for certain actions. Maybe for how you have treated some person, or things you’ve done in the past.

This sense of guilt is a gift from God. If we didn’t have guilt over things like adultery, murder, or gossip humanity would do them all the time. Why not do them if there isn’t a transcendent standard for human flourishing? Where does that come from? It comes from a transcendent being, God. So while we may not like admitting we need saving, the reality is that our guilt is a gift, to help society, but more importantly to alert us to our need for rescue before God. When Jesus dies for sins, he offers to absorb our guilt. If you accept it, you become guilt-free before God. If you don’t, you will have to absorb the consequences for your guilt in this life and the next.

Next, Paul says that Jesus was buried (1 Cor. 15:4). There is skeptical scholarship regarding this phrase. Bart Ehrman, formerly a believing Christian New Testament scholar but now an agnostic biblical historian, was interviewed on NPR recently and also just released an important book called When Jesus Became God. There has been a response book called When God Became Jesus. Unfortunately, they did not respond to his chapters on the resurrection. Ehrman points out that Paul makes no mention of the empty tomb in this tradition, and contends that the reason for this is that there was no empty tomb, that in fact the disciples who wrote the Gospels, like Mark, made up the empty tomb idea. To prove this, he says the tradition would have had a neater parallel to “appearing to Cephas”(1 Cor. 15:5) if it read “buried by Joseph of Arimathea.”But this reliable tradition cited by Paul does not include Joseph.

Ehrman asserts that Joseph was part of the “whole council of the Sanhedrin”(Mark 15:1) which condemned Jesus to death. Why then would Joseph suddenly become an advocate for Jesus burial? Surely this was made up to make sure there is a tomb story to go with Jesus death, so people can later claim an empty tomb. What really happened, Ehrman suggests, is that Jesus’s body was left on the cross and devoured by dogs. No tomb, empty or otherwise. I honestly find this hard to believe, not on the grounds of theology, but on the grounds of history.

First, it is quite an elaborate, alternate reading based on speculation, an argument from silence (there are no documents supporting this and there would have been clear documentary outcry if this is actually what happened). Second, the more natural reading would be that Joseph, upon seeing Jesus die, converted to faith in Jesus as the Son of God, like his executor did (Mk. 15:39) or that he did not make the meeting. Mark tells us Joseph was “looking for the kingdom of God and took courage”to ask Pilate for the body (Mk. 15:43). This tells us Joseph had a rich theological reason to convert (seeing Jesus as the king of the Kingdom) and personal conscience to follow by mustering courage and go with his conviction against the grain of his peers. Therefore, we have good reason to accept the tradition in Corinthians while also affirming the empty tomb claim of the Gospels.

The third element is that “he was raised on the third day” (1 Cor. 15:4). Here is the bold resurrection claim. To this Ehrman says: “There can be no doubt, historically, that some of Jesus’s followers came to believe he was raised from the dead—no doubt whatsoever. This is how Christianity started. If no one had thought Jesus had been raised, he would have been lost in the mists of Jewish antiquity and would be known today only as another failed Jewish prophet” (emphasis added). Jesus wouldn’t stand out in history if people didn’t believe Jesus rose from the dead. But notice Ehrman’s wording, “Jesus followers came to believe.”He contends that while some believed this; it was based on a vision and not on an actual historical resurrection. Rising on the third day, he says, was just a theological flourish based on Jonah’s three days in the whale or Hosea 6:2. While there are symbolic connections to those texts, this doesn’t mean that the three days or the resurrection isn’t literal. The early Church likely included this phrase to reflect that there was no great delay of time, but in reporting on history, it was actually a specific number of days, which reflects their encounter with an actual, physically risen Christ. In fact, the verb used in the tradition means he was raised at a specific point in time, and that his act of being raised has ongoing effects in the present.

It does not suggest there were multiple visions of Jesus. It says something happened to Jesus’s body in history—raised—and that this event continues to have remarkable impact. The grammar puts the resurrection in history, where Ehrman is doing his work. Moreover, if Christianity is based on having visions of the risen Jesus, then why don’t most Christians have that encounter too? Because Christianity is not based on visions, but on the historic death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s about a person, not a resurrection. This is why Paul goes out of his way to list all the eyewitnesses: Peter, the Twelve, the 500+ witnesses, James, and himself. Hundreds of people claim to have witnessed an actual, physical, resurrected Jesus with nail-scarred hands. Eyewitness testimony is critical to good history. Reporters prioritize this material when writing their story, so do courts. And there is a deafening silence in connection with these reports in the first century. They are uncontested.

Only later, when another religion called Gnosticism flowered, did people begin to reread Jesus as a spirit, which was based on their philosophy of the body being corrupt or evil. Ehrman is simply trying to reread the text based on his historical presuppositions, which he actually admits: “I should stress that unbelievers (like me) cannot disprove the resurrection either, on historical grounds.” In essence, he says the resurrection is a matter of faith, not history, because history cannot admit miracles as a plausible explanations. But isn’t this biased, ruling out the supernatural from the historical record? He says he isn’t anti-supernatural, but as a historian it’s not admissible evidence. This, of course, is based on twenty-first century historiography, which he is imposing on first century historical documents. It is a classic case of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” arrogantly assuming the superiority of his historical moment over the past saying—miracles don’t count. But they did then!

Faith

This brings us to the question: What difference does it make? Well the resurrection doesn’t make any difference if you don’t have faith. But I’m not talking Bart Ehrman's faith, and I’m not even talking about faith in the historic resurrection. The gospel is not mainly a set of dogma to which we pin or do not pin our beliefs. Resurrection?—yes or no. That is a mental game.

Rather, the Scriptures are appealing to your conscience, like they did to Joseph, the centurion, and countless others. The gospel is a rich story about the Messiah absorbing your sin. Our guilt rightfully presses down on us. We are condemned before a transcendent, holy God. But Jesus would have us reach up in faith, take hold of his hand, allow him to pull us up into his forgiveness. That is not a mere mental decision; it is an act of surrender. It is compliance with your conscience to trust, not in the resurrection, but in the unmatched resurrected Christ.

God wants faith (not in a doctrine)—but in his Son. Without this kind of faith, God will condemn you. With it, we receive his grace for our sin. This is what happened to Paul who was once a murder of Christians, unworthy, but made worthy by God’s grace: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain”(1 Cor. 15:10). That’s an identity statement. I am who I am in Christ. Remember the gospel gives us a new identity. Instead of sinner, you become a saint. God sees you not only as forgiven, but as raised up with Christ into his new and radiant life. Faith not only gets you forgiven; it gets you new creation. The guilt is gone and godliness has come. This changes everything. In creating a new identity in Christ, we are motivated to work hard for the kingdom of God. Earlier he said, you received, stand, and are being saved in the gospel. Standing is past action with ongoing effect. You don’t just believe in the past, you keep believing. It’s not once saved always saved. That assumes you only believe once.

This isn’t about pinning your yes or no to a dogma. This is about throwing yourself, your life, on a Person. It’s about love. Faith works through love. When you get married you are saying to that spouse, I choose to trust and uniquely love you, like no other. I am ruling all other men and women out. You don’t know what’s on the other side of the altar. What suffering or hard times may come, but you act in faith out of love and say, “I do.”

That’s what happened to Paul and all the early Christians, and  many of us. “I do Jesus, and I will continue to trust you, obey you, and love you, exclusively, uniquely above all other gods. I put my faith-love in the risen Christ, not simply nod my head to the resurrection.” Then, you become part of his new humanity—fit for a new world. Your sin for his grace, the world’s evil for his peace. The story is still unfolding along its central character—Jesus. And the risen Jesus will return to gather his children into his perfect kingdom. He admits those who continue to stand in faith-love toward him. To those who simply nod their heads over doctrines, he dismisses since they believed in vain.

Like church, the resurrection isn’t something you simply attend; it is something you are, something you become by faith in the risen Christ.

—

Jonathan K. Dodson (MDiv; ThM) serves as a pastor of City Life Church in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Gospel-Centered Discipleship, Unbelievable Gospel, and Raised? He has discipled men and women abroad and at home for almost two decades, taking great delight in communicating the gospel and seeing Christ formed in others. Twitter: @Jonathan_Dodson

Giveaway: Raised? Finding Jesus By Doubting the Resurrection

Jonathan Dodson and Brad Watson have written a stellar book that we want to share with you.

Raised? encourages you to doubt in order to believe. Too often Christians look down on doubt, but in Christ, we see a person who welcomes doubt and encourages faith. Jonathan Dodson and Brad Watson don’t shy away from the hard questions or settle for easy answers. They help you to see how the resurrection offers hope for the future and answers for the life and death questions we all face.

Jonathan and Brad in partnership with Zondervan were generous enough to offer 10 free copies of Raised? to giveaway for FREE to GCD readers. Below you will find a variety of ways to enter to win your FREE copy. Enter all of them for more chances to win. The contest will run until Monday, April 21st at 2PM CST. Shortly thereafter we will email the winners and announce them on Twitter.

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Jonathan K. Dodson (MDiv; ThM) serves as a pastor of City Life Church in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Gospel-Centered Discipleship, Unbelievable Gospel, and Raised? He has discipled men and women abroad and at home for almost two decades, taking great delight in communicating the gospel and seeing Christ formed in others. Twitter: @Jonathan_Dodson

Brad Watson serves as a pastor of Bread & Wine Communities in Portland, Oregon. He is a board member of GCDiscipleship.com and co-author of Raised? His greatest passion is to encourage and equip leaders for the mission of making disciples. Twitter: @BradAWatson

For free resources and orders, visit raisedbook.com.

The Resurrection Life

New Mission: Make Disciples

Matthew 28:18-20 is what Christians call the Great Commission, the dominant marching orders for all who have faith in resurrection. It can sound a bit militant: “Take God’s authority and make disciples.” But remember, these orders are from the one who has laid down his life to save his enemies. Ironically, our orders are to invite through imitation. Our mission is to make disciples through our words and actions. Or, as Jesus said, “teach and obey.” In fact, it is when we experience the riches of renewal through Christ that we become, as Eugene Peterson says, “God’s advertisement to the world.”¹ We make disciples by living resurrected lives and telling people about the resurrected Christ.

There’s not a hint of coercion here. It’s a life of love. Jesus wants us to spread the gospel throughout the world by spending our lives for the sake of others. The power of the resurrection doesn’t end with us; it travels through us. Our commission is invitation. We invite others to join God’s redemptive agenda to restore human flourishing and remake the world. We are sent into the world to share the good news that Jesus has defeated sin, death, and evil through his own death and resurrection. Jesus is making all things new, and he calls his followers to participate in his work of renewal.

Distinctive Discipleship

Part of what makes this command such a “great” mission is its scope—all nations. When Jesus spoke these words, he was reorienting a primarily Jewish audience to a distinctly multiethnic mission. The Greek word used here is the same word that gives us the English word “ethnic.” It refers to the nations, not modernist geopolitical states, but non-Jewish people groups (Gentiles) with distinct cultures and languages. Our commission is not to Christianize nation-states, but to share the good news of what Jesus has done with all ethnic groups. Christ does not advocate what is commonly called Christendom, a top-down political Christianity. Instead, he calls his followers to transmit a bottom-up, indigenous Christianity, to all peoples in all cultures.

We should also note that this command is to make disciples of all nations, not from all nations. The goal of Christian missions is not to replace the rich diversity of human culture for a cheap consumer, Christian knock-off culture. Dr. Andrew Walls puts it well:

Conversion to Christ does not produce a bland universal citizenship: it produces distinctive discipleship, as diverse and variegated as human life itself. Christ in redeeming humanity brings, by the process of discipleship, all the richness of humanity’s infinitude of cultures and subcultures into the variegated splendor of the Full Grown Humanity to which the apostolic literature points (Eph 4.8 – 13).²

What we should strive for is distinctive discipleship, discipleship that uniquely expresses personal faith in our cultural context. Disciples in urban Manhattan will look different than disciples in rural Maehongson. These differences allow for a flourishing of the gospel that contributes to the many-splendored new humanity of Christ. Simply put, the message of Jesus is for the flourishing of all humanity in all cultures.

Jesus informs our resurrected life. He gives us a new and gracious authority, a new identity, and a new mission. With that in view, what does it look like to participate in this task of renewing the world? Where do we begin? Jesus has painted for us a great picture of the new life. Let’s turn now to the daily implications of resurrection life.

IMPLICATIONS: RISKING FOR HUMANITY

If Jesus did, indeed, rise from the dead, we have nothing to fear and everything we need. All that we strive for is fulfilled in Jesus. All that we seek to avoid has been resolved by him. For example, if Jesus rose from the dead, we no longer need to strive for acceptance because we are now accepted by him. If Jesus rose from the dead, we don’t need to fear death, because it has been defeated. This means that we are free to smuggle medical supplies into Burma, even at the risk of death, knowing that our eternal fate is already sealed. We can move to distant countries to invest in development and renewal because Christ did the same for the world. Like the early Christians, we can care for the poor and marginalized in our cities. If we have resurrection life, we will have courage to take risks in the name of love. . . .

This is the power of the resurrected life. Serving others is a sacrifice, yes. But that sacrifice is filled with joy. You won’t be able to imagine living any other way.

Why?

Jesus tells those who follow him to leave all they have behind, to give their lives to the poor, to love their enemies, and to be a blessing to the world. Let’s not pretend this is easy to do. Following Jesus will require your whole life. Not just part of it. Not just your leisure time. Not just some of your budget. No, it requires your whole life. It will feel like death and suffering at times. It will feel that way because you are laying your life down. That’s what the resurrection looks like in daily life. We do not hold anything back—our talents, possessions, or time—because we live with the certainty that death and sin have been defeated.

There is no sugarcoating it. You will lose your life. In its place you will find a vibrant, full, and eternal life. By dying to ourselves we become alive to the power of Christ through the Holy Spirit. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead empowers us to live a life for Jesus. His death and resurrection have become our death and resurrection. Our old life is gone, and we now experience a new authority, identity, and mission. This is why we give, celebrate, and serve: we have died and have been raised again to experience new and abundant life.

Come back tomorrow. We’ll being giveaway 10 FREE paperbacks of Raised? courtesy of Zondervan.

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Jonathan K. Dodson (MDiv; ThM) serves as a pastor of City Life Church in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Gospel-Centered Discipleship, Unbelievable Gospel, and Raised? He has discipled men and women abroad and at home for almost two decades, taking great delight in communicating the gospel and seeing Christ formed in others. Twitter: @Jonathan_Dodson

Brad Watson serves as a pastor of Bread & Wine Communities in Portland, Oregon. He is a board member of GCDiscipleship.com and co-author of Raised? His greatest passion is to encourage and equip leaders for the mission of making disciples. Twitter: @BradAWatson

(Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Raised? by Jonathan Dodson and Brad Watson available from Zondervan. It appears here with the permission of the author and publisher. For free resources and preorders, visit raisedbook.com.)

^{1. Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerd- mans, 2010), 13 – 14.↩ 2. Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 51.↩}

Silent Wednesday

In the traditions of the church calendar, this week is Holy Week and today, Wednesday, is often known as "Silent Wednesday." It's called silent because in reconstructing the events of Jesus' final week before his crucifixion there doesn't seem to be any activity on Wednesday. The Gospel writers are essentially mute on the activity of Jesus' Wednesday before the cross. This might make you uncomfortable. We like God busy, God active, God at work doing things. For Americans it can be the one way we image God the best. Active, responsible, working, engaged, in charge, in control. We like to be known as responsible, busy, active people. In no way does it fit our paradigms that God would be. . . well, inactive.

There are some suggestions that Jesus continued teaching at the temple (Lk. 21:37-38) and that the religious leadership was gathered to plot against Jesus once and for all. But in the calendar of activity we're left with a gaping whole. What did Jesus say on this day? Who did he heal? Who did he confront? How did he act? What are we missing from this Wednesday?

It would be largely presumptuous of me to suggest I know what was going on that day, or why God intended it to be relatively quite in the pages of Scripture. However, the apparent mystery of this day is helpful to us in considering how to walk with Christ. It's a day of mystery, a day of silence, a day where you and I don't get the insiders look at what was happening as we do on other days. We're left, so to speak, in the dark on Jesus' actions.

The Secret Things Belong To The Lord

Are you really comfortable with that dynamic? Let me suggest it a different way; does the thought of not knowing everything that God is up to make you uncomfortable?

If I'm honest, days of silence are really troubling to me. Deep down in my heart I hate being kept out of the loop. If something is going on, I want to know about it. I want to be aware of what is on the horizon so that I can plan my steps and prepare to handle whatever it is that comes. Leave me in a situation without information and I'm very frustrated.

Times of silence from God about my circumstances are even more troubling, especially when things aren't how I envisioned them to be playing out. I want to quickly ask, "God, where are you? Give me a peek at your grand designs in this situation so that I can trust you better." Sometimes those peeks come. Often, I'm still sitting in God's silence, not privy to the information that he has.

This is profoundly frustrating to me.

If you're honest, I bet it troubles you too. We like to think that as Christians we should be in know on God's wise counsel. We might even think that if he was really wise he'd ask our opinion and get our insight so that his wise counsel is even wiser. We know our lives best, after all. It unsettles us when our favorite question, "Why?" goes unanswered.

Perhaps you are sitting in a silence-of-God situation right now. Things are difficult, they aren't what you dreamed or believed they would be or become. Life as you imagined it has turned out incredibly different and you're asking God to explain himself. Maybe you're not that deep into the conversation, but you'd like a little heads up on the events coming around the bend. The quiet of God is deafening. Sure we don't want to be know-it-alls, but we want a bit of a say on how things play out in our own lives. And God isn't answering. Days go by and we're still stuck in the silence.

It might be completely unorthodox for a pastor to say this to someone who is in the midst of God's silence, but, you need it. So do I.

The Remedy of God's Silence

As frustrating as it is to not know what God's designs or will or counsel are in your particular situations, it's also liberating. Knowledge brings with it responsibility. If I know that my car needs repair (because it won't run properly) I'm bound to get it fixed so that it does work. If I know the reasons why my current life-situation are troubling, I'm just as bound to do something about it. We want to get to work, to find a solution and fix our troubles. So as soon as God points out the reason we're enduring these troubles we're off to take care of it.

Perhaps, this is why Silent Wednesday is necessary on our calendars. Today, this day, we don't need to know the why or the what of all our situations. It's possible for us to miss out on the larger issue at hand if we know all that God knows. Instead of realizing who is really in charge we long to hear what's happening and get to work. All the while we believe that we are the one in charge.

We live in a culture that can't handle not knowing things. Just observe what occurs when you in a room talking about pop-culture facts and the question is raised that no one seems to have the answer for. Almost immediately a smart phone is pulled out, the topic in question is googled and instantaneously we have the information we lacked. We can't handle not knowing what we don't know.

This is where we have to bank on what we do know. The revelation that we do have of God anchors and helps us when we stand in the silence of not knowing what he is doing. Tim Chester is helpful in identifying for us the “4 Gs” of God's nature and character so that when we are stuck in the silence we can hold on to the reality of who God is despite not knowing what he is up to or why things are going the way they are.1

We are reminded that:

1. God is great–so we don’t have to be in control.

2. God is glorious–so we don’t have to fear others.

3. God is good–so we don’t have to look elsewhere.

4. God is gracious–so we don’t have to prove ourselves.

If we don't anchor ourselves to the revealed knowledge of God and his identity, we will struggle along trying to come up with answers and realities that might counter the very thing that God is showing us in his silence. When we are in situations where we do not know what's going on, we need to look to what we do know, namely God's character, so that we can walk well through the trial of his silence.

Trusting a Quiet Father

As a boy my parents would sometimes take my brother and I up into the mountains of Colorado to go off-roading on our four-wheeled ATV's. As small children, we loved the exhilaration of being out on the trail, seeing nature, strolling over difficult terrain, and ending up in places where not too many human beings had ventured before. But there were always a few times when I was completely terrified. We'd roll right up to the edge of a cliff for a look-over or find some wild trail that was absolutely frightening to venture on. I was scared out of my mind on several occasions.

I don't, however, remember my dad always telling me why we were on those trails or in those spots. I do, however, fondly look back on those difficult places that we were in knowing that my dad was never going to put me in a situation that would ultimately injure me. My father is a good father who cared well for his sons.

So how much so does our Heavenly Father care for us, even when he isn't giving us the answers or the information. Even when he walks us into the wilderness without any knowledge of why we are there, we have to remember that he is utterly trustworthy.

I have to wonder if the Wednesday of Holy Week was like that for Jesus. The Scriptures record nothing of that day. It's likely that they are telling us that even when we don't know what is going on God does, and he has ordained all things for our good and for his glory.

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Jeremy Writebol(@jwritebol) has been training leaders in the church for over thirteen years. He is the author of everPresent: How the Gospel Relocates Us in the Present (GCD Books, 2014) and writes at jwritebol.net. He lives and works in Plymouth, MI as the Campus Pastor of Woodside Bible Church.

1. Tim Chester, You Can Change, Crossway Books↩

A Season to Fast and Pray

Lent is a time for prayer and fasting. It is a season of spiritual preparation in which we remember Christ’s temptation, suffering, and death. Historically, the church has celebrated Lent as a 40-day period beginning on Ash Wednesday and concluding the day before Easter. It is observed in many Christian churches as a time to commemorate the last week of Jesus’ life, his suffering (Passion), and his death, through various observances and services of worship. Many Christians use the 40 days of Lent as time to draw closer to the Lord through prayer, fasting, repentance, and self-denial. We live in a culture of fast food, instant gratification, and self-centeredness. One of the best ways to get our eyes off of ourselves and back onto the Lord is through fasting. However, fasting has practically been disregarded and forgotten in the comforts of the modern church. Fasting didn’t end in Biblical times, there have actually been proclaimed fasts in America. Fasting is nothing new in American history. The pilgrims held three formal periods of fasting before leaving for the New World. During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress proclaimed July 20, 1775, as a national day of fasting and prayer in preparation for the war on independence.

What is Fasting?

What does it really mean to fast? According to the Oxford Dictionary, fasting means to abstain from food; especially to eat sparingly or not at all or abstain from certain foods in observance of a religious duty or a token of grief.” Fasting and religious purposes cannot be separated because they are intricately intertwined. The Bible gives us numerous references to individual and corporate fasts. There were even certain days that were designated each year for fasting and prayer. Fasting is a gift that God has given to the church in order to help us persevere in prayer. Fasting draws us closer to God and gives power to our prayers. Our central motivation with this lesson is to teach about the reasons to fast, different types of fasting, and then discuss how to fast.

Reasons for Fasting

People have been fasting since the ancient days of the Bible. The Bible records numerous accounts where people, cities, and nations have turned to God by fasting and praying: Hannah grieved over infertility “wept and did not eat” (1 Samuel 1:7); Anna, who was an elderly widow, saw Jesus in the temple and “served God with fasting and prayer” (Luke 2:37). Saul encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus, “was three days without sight, neither ate or drank.” (Acts 9:9). Cornelius told Peter, “Four days ago I was fasting until this hour…” (Acts 10:30). Most people fast for religious and spiritual reasons, while others choose to fast for health reasons. There are several specific reasons that the Bible tells us to fast.

1. To be Christ like. (Matthew 4:1-17; Luke 4:1-13).
2. To obtain spiritual purity. (Isaiah 58:5-7).
3. To repent from sins. (See Jonah 3:8; Nehemiah 1:4, 9:1-3; 1 Samuel 14:24).
4. To influence God. (2 Samuel 12:16-23).
5. To morn for the dead. (1 Samuel 31:13; 2 Samuel 1:12).
6. To request God’s help in times of crisis and calamity. (Ezra 8:21-23; Nehemiah 1:4-11).
7. To strengthen prayer. (Matthew 17:21; Mark 9:17-29; Acts 10:30; 1 Corinthians 7:5).

Types of Fasting

In the same way that God appointed times and seasons to fast, He also designated several types of fasts. Because of certain medical problems, and physical needs, there are different types of fasting. Not everyone can go on an extended 5-7 day fast; in a similar way, not everyone can totally abstain from food and water. A person should exercise wisdom and consult their physician if they have any medical concerns before they fast, otherwise it could actually be harmful to your health. However, there are at least three types of individual fasts: absolute fast, solid food fast, and partial fast.

1. Absolute Fast

An absolute fast is conducted by abstaining from all food and water for a certain period of time. This is also known as the “total fast” because an individual chooses to abstain from all foods and beverages. There are several Biblical examples for the total fast. Moses and Elijah both abstained from food and water for forty days and forty nights. (Deuteronomy 9:9, 10:10, 18:25-29; 1 Kings 19:8). Although the Bible says they fasted for forty days, many people usually only totally abstain from food and water for three days.

2. Solid Food Fast

A solid food fast is where an individual may drink juice and water, but chooses not to eat solid food. Certain scholars and theologians think that Jesus may have drank water while in the wilderness since the Bible doesn’t say that he was thirsty after his forty day fast (see Matthew 4:2). Drinking water while fasting for several days can actually be therapeutic for your body. In any case, you should not fast for more than a week unless you consult a doctor.

3. Partial Fast

To fast simply means to “abstain” from something. A partial fast is where you choose to abstain from certain foods and drinks instead of complete abstinence of food or drink. The Bible tells us that Daniel abstained from bread, water, and wine for twenty-one days (Daniel 10:3). Others may choose to fast from television, computer, newspaper, and hobbies. This will help you free up some time to spend in prayer and reflection.

Jesus and Fasting

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught a lesson about how to fast and how not to fast:

“Moreover, when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your father who is in the secret place; and your father who sees in secret will reward you openly.” (Matthew 6:16-28)

We see that it is important to not brag or boast to others about fasting. The Jews of Jesus’ day used fasting and giving to make everyone think that they were more spiritual than others. But Jesus tells us that fasting should be done in secret so that it can’t be used as a way of bringing glory to ourselves. Fasting should make us humble instead of proud. In the end it is not our works, but our hearts that matter to God.

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Dr. Winfield Bevins serves as lead pastor of Church of the Outer Banks, which he founded in 2005.  His life’s passion in ministry is discipleship and helping start new churches. He lives in the beautiful beach community of the Outer Banks with his wife Kay and two daughters where he loves to surf and spend time at the beach with his family and friends. Twitter: @winfieldbevins

(Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Prayer Life by Winfield Bevins available through GCD Books.)

Mission in Everyday Life

Compartmentalization vs. Integration

Jesus’ activity is helpful as we consider our own. It’s especially helpful to see that most of what Jesus did, He did with others. Yes, there are glimpses of Him traveling and praying alone. A few times He sent everyone ahead and caught up later—once via an evening stroll on the sea. And we see Him pray in solitude. But not always. More often, Jesus traveled, worked, ate, drank, and even prayed alongside and in the midst of His disciples, the outcasts of society, and those in need. And while this is easy to miss, if He did these things with others then He did them with folks who weren’t Christians. Because at the time, that was His only option.

What’s the difference between Jesus and us? One, we’re not God. But two, Jesus integrated ministry and mission into daily life, while nearly everyone we know—including ourselves—defaults to the opposite. We compartmentalize ministry into certain times and activities, separate from the rest of our lives. If we’re not careful, “mission” is relegated to a Saturday morning time slot. We do nice things, check our watches often, then wrap up and go to Chili’s. Saturday morning we go do mission, Saturday at noon we go to lunch. Or we have a certain evening for our Bible study group to come watch a movie, but if a co-worker asks us what we’re doing, we make up an excuse and try to take a rain check. We have Christian friend nights and not-Christian friend nights. And so on. This easy mindset rejects the fact that we are missionaries, and relegates “mission” back to something we either do or don’t, or something we merely do then stop doing in order to do something else.

Mission is not alone; it follows the pattern of Western life: we have work or school hours, social time, a church block, our weekend chunk of time, and so on. When we started The City Church, we introduced people to new identities God gives us in the gospel: in Christ, we are disciples of God, members of God’s family, and missionaries to God’s world. Before we knew how to flesh those out well, many folks became very busy, planning separate events each week for each: discipleship nights, then family nights, then mission nights. We followed the compartmentalization we were used to. When friend and missionary Caesar Kalinowski was in town, he noticed that this separation made us too busy: we were doing many things—some good—but it was wearing us out.

Redeeming Everyday Moments

What’s the solution to compartmentalized, overly-busy mission, in the midst of our compartmentalized, overly-busy lives? Our intentionally cheesy answer that is to ask, with bracelet-wearing church kids of the 1990s, “WWJD?” Jesus didn’t compartmentalize; He didn’t try to fit ministry in between His “job.” He didn’t even seem to have specific events for one type of people, then other events for others. From rich to poor, from the Hebrew Law’s “clean” to “unclean,” and from doctor to fisherman, Jesus integrated people, life, ministry, and mission. He redeemed the everyday, normal moments of His life and used them for God’s mission. As we try to do the same, we can likewise redeem everyday moments and integrate mission into our ordinary lives.

What things do you do every day of the week? What classes do you take or teach every week of the month? What events do you attend you do every month of the year? There are normal, ordinary, sometimes even boring moments in our lives that can be redeemed for God’s mission. Here are just a few of the most common, redeemable moments:

• We eat about twenty-one meals a week: sometimes less, sometimes a few more than we should
• Many commute to and from work or school, or take children to and from school
• Lots of people do yard work or other chores on Saturday mornings
• Depending on where you are in the nation, you might play in your yard many evenings, or go for a stroll around your neighborhood
• Every fall, fans find themselves in front of a TV from Thursday until Monday, between college football and pro games
• If you don’t like football, you end up on the couch for your favorite reality show, comedy, or drama
• You likely eat out, at least occasionally
• You do something like going to the gym, getting your hair cut, oil changed, or car washed, or having nails done or tattoos redone
• You have hobbies: whether movies, train-spotting, music, hiking, surfing, baking, or even gaming, many can involve others
• Someone in your home goes to the grocery store, at least once every couple weeks—and other errands require you to walk, ride, or drive as well
• Many families go on at least a vacation or two each year

Mission in Everyday Life

Everyone in your mission field does at least one of these things, just like you. Each of these moments—and so many more—are chances to weave mission into everyday. Carpool to work or school, or walk or take public transportation. Invite neighbors over to watch the game you’re both planning to watch. Meet your coworkers for breakfast, even if once a month. Set up play dates for your kids’ classmates, with both Christians and those who aren’t. Would you ever consider vacationing with another family?

Just like Jesus did, we each travel, work, eat and drink, and hopefully pray. Each day is filled with ordinary moments and activities, which we often do alone, or with a certain “type” of friend. But even the simplest of activities are opportunities for worship and mission: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” When can we integrate life and mission? Rather than segregating people into different time slots or adding things to busy schedules, everyday mission happens when we redeem everyday moments.

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Ben Connelly, his wife Jess, and their daughters Charlotte and Maggie live in Fort Worth, TX. He started and now co-pastors The City Church, part of the Acts29 network and Soma family of churches. Ben is also co-author of A Field Guide for Everyday Mission (Moody Publishers, 2014). With degrees from Baylor University and Dallas Theological Seminary, Ben teaches public speaking at TCU, writes for various publications, trains folks across the country, and blogs in spurts at benconnelly.net. Twitter: @connellyben.

(Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from A Field Guide for Everyday Mission by Ben Connelly & Bob Roberts Jr. available from Moody Publishers starting June 2014. It appears here with the permission of the author and publisher. For free resources and preorders, visit everydaymission.net.)

Walking Through the Flood

I went and saw Darren Aronofsky’s Noah during the opening weekend with my wife. The point of this article isn’t to review the movie. You can find some helpful reviews from Greg Thornbury, Joe Carter, Brian Mattson, and Kevin McLenithan at CaPC (those will give the sweep of evangelical responses). As they mention, there were positive and negative points about the movie, but the one area where I think Aronofsky pushes into the narrative well is right as the flood starts and the Ark is being tossed about by the wind and the waves. During this scene, you can hear the cries of people mixed with the roar of the waters. You can hardly distinguish the two. That realization that all other humans were being killed by the deluge weighed heavily on Noah and his family. So often when we teach our children about the Flood we do so without letting the weight of the narrative sink in. The deluge was a judgment because “the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every intention of the thoughts if his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5) and “the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and filled with violence” (6:11). God commands Noah to build an ark and to take animals and his family on the ark to preserve life. The waters come; the waves billow; the floods rise. The Spirit says, “And all flesh died. . . . Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (7:21-22). Those are sobering verses.

How do we normally treat the narrative integrity of this story? Just as poorly as Aronofsky does in some points in his movie. We white wash the grief that should press down in our hearts with cutesy flannel graphs of smiling animals and rainbows. We commercialize God’s judgement of the entire world by decorating our baby’s rooms with a happy-go-lucky Noah and family. Can you imagine the inner turmoil and possible guilt Noah might have felt as his family survived this catastrophic flood?

Walking Through the Flood

Christians must sojourn through the deluge. We must submerge ourselves in the Word of God--especially those difficult stories. We must do this as a family. Otherwise, what we are left with is the neutered children stories, flannel graphs, and children decor available at most Christian retailers today--not the actual stories of the Bible.

It’s not just Noah either. We do this with most of the Bible’s stories. Part of the beauty of the Bible is the tension it creates as the gospel narrative unfolds. It’s filled with judgement, death, incest, lies, deceit, homosexuality, fornication, murder, rape, and disobedience. These sinful elements (sin described with straightforward honesty, but without crudeness) create movement. They drive us forward. They keep us asking, “Why?” They keep us looking for Someone who can redeem this world and us.

Reading through these stories with our family provides us the opportunity to have difficult discussions with our children and spouses. It’s a critical part of spiritual maturity. Maturity in Christ cannot be attained without wrestling with the tough questions that the Scripture raises. Multiplication of disciples (Matt. 28:18-20) cannot occur without this collective wrestling. So how can we teach others to obey all the words of the Lord, if we have failed to wrestle with them as a family?

The Darkness Makes Way for the Light

Also, all the sinful elements in Scripture are things that will undoubtedly confront our families--regardless if we introduce them to our children or spouses. Insulation isn’t an option. Is there a better way to introduce difficult topics like death, rape, murder, adultery than in the river of the gospel story? Is there a better way to tackle difficult social issues like abortion, rebellion, or homosexuality than through the sweep of Scripture? A story where these elements are not praised or perverted into something other than they are. A story where these elements drive us towards our need for a Savior.

That doesn’t mean we open our Bibles directly to Judges 19 with our toddlers, but it does mean within the time we have with our family we cover Scripture from front to back. My children are young still, but the best conversation I’ve had with my oldest daughter Claire happened because we were reading through the Passion narrative in Matthew. Claire was so conflicted by the death of Jesus. She felt it was unfair that he had to die. We spent at least the next two hours going back and forth about the significance of the pivotal plot points in the gospel narrative. The conversation went from Jesus died for sinners to “Daddy are you going to die?” to “Will I die daddy?” We discussed the Heidelberg Catechism question and answer one. I encouraged her that for those who believe the promises of God, “Jesus is our only hope in life and death.” I could see the wheels turning and she by the end of our discussion she told me, “Daddy, I believe the promises of God.” I ended with a prayer for God to be faithful to his promises for our family and that he would grow Claire’s faith. These kind of frank conversations only occur when we sojourn together with our families through the deluge.

So don’t be afraid of Bible stories that are difficult. Sometimes it may be ok to just say, “I don’t know why” when our children ask difficult questions. Tell them you’ve struggled with the same questions. Tell them you will pray and ask God for answers as well. Don’t relieve tension in the Scriptures that God inspired. One thing we can be sure of these things--he put many of these stories in Scripture so he can disciple us and we can disciple our families. He put them there to contrast the bad news (that sin and evil runs through each of our hearts) with the good news (the Redeemer has come and is offering a covenant of peace made in his blood). Sojourn through the deluge together.

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Mathew B. Sims is the Editor-in-Chief at Exercise.com and has authored, edited, and contributed to several books including A Household Gospel, We Believe: Creeds, Confessions, & Catechisms for Worship, A Guide for Advent, Make, Mature, Multiply, and A Guide for Holy Week. Mathew, LeAnn (his wife), and his daughters Claire, Maddy, and Adele live in Taylors, SC at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains with their Airdale Terrier. They attend Downtown Presbyterian Church (PCA). Visit MathewBryanSims.com!

A Glorious Expedition

We as men are all called to lead our wives (Eph. 5:25-27), which sounds like a glorious expedition. However, no one knows how to do it practically. Many men want to lead their wives better, but have trouble knowing how to do so. Some men try to preach at their wives (which doesn’t work). Others try to make their homes a mini-seminary (which doesn’t work). Others start reading the Bible and then get frustrated and just give up (which doesn’t work). Other men are discouraged because they don’t feel as though they are godly enough to lead (which doesn’t work). I personally wanted to write this article, not because I’m a good leader in my home, but because I’m not a great leader. I’ve had to talk to men, read, pray, and learn by trial and error on how to lead my wife and I’m still not great at it.

Therefore, I wanted to put together a practical list for leading our wives better on this glorious expedition. Now, some of these tips will work better for some couples than others so feel free to find what works for you and to mix and match. This will be a process of trial and error, but it is worth the struggle to grow spiritually.

1. Lead your wife with love. The most important thing when it comes to guiding your wife is how you act toward her and how you show your love for the Lord (1 Pt. 3:7). Actions speak louder than words. If you are loving, tender, selfless, sacrificial, joyous, and deeply love Jesus, this will have the greatest impact on your family of anything that you could do. Modeling Jesus in your own life will naturally guide your wife. Make sure you make Jesus look beautiful. If you make him look beautiful then your wife will naturally grow in her affections for him. Conversely, if you don’t have personal joy in the Lord then your wife will find it harder to grow in her own personal walk with him as well.

2. Go after your wife’s heart. Many men just do tasks or serve their wife by emptying the dryer (which is good, by the way) but you have to find out who your wife really is and find out how to make her feel loved internally. Going after your wife’s heart instead of just doing tasks is key. Asking questions about her and how she is doing spiritually can be a good way to do this. Don’t just be generic (i.e. “how are you”) but more specific (i.e. “what makes you love Jesus this week?”) in your questions. And be ready to listen.

3. Pray with your wife. This can be tough for many people because it becomes a “task.” One of the things you can do is pray in bed before you go to sleep. The prayer doesn’t have to be long or elaborate and you can both be laying down and just hold hands and pray. An ineloquent prayer is better than no prayer at all. Your relationship with your wife is so important that God mentions that your prayers may be hindered if one doesn’t gently honor their wife (1 Pt. 3:7).

4. Read scripture together (Deut. 6:7). Now, this often turns into a “preaching moment” for most men so instead of trying to be your wife’s professor, just read a chapter of scripture out loud before you go to bed. She can read the next chapter tomorrow night and you can alternate. You don’t have to “teach” the passage, you can just read it and then go to bed. Of course, you are always free to talk about it with each other if you would like.

5. Read a book together. Read a book together or read two separate books and set up a coffee date, once a week, to sit down and talk about what you are learning and what the Lord is revealing to you in your reading.

6. Listen to sermons, lessons, or studies together. Once a week it may be wise to listen to a sermon, lecture, or lesson together. Sermons online or a series (like Tommy Nelson’s “Song of Solomon”) are wonderful to listen to together in your marriage.

7. Worship with you family. Perhaps once a week, or once a month, you can plug in your iPod to some speakers and play some worship songs. Or make your car rides together a time to worship in song. Allow your family to sing, worship, and allow your kids to dance. This not only is a great way to lead your family in worship, but I have found it is one of the most helpful things you can do to grow your wife in the Lord. Worshipping gets our eyes on Christ and allows him to minister to us. We are more apt to love him only after we realize how much he loves us.

The good news is that Jesus cares more for your wife than you do. He also cares more for your marriage than you do. These steps are not a "silver bullet" or a task list to merely check off. The hope in all this is that you would look to the mercy of Christ and depend on him so that he might grow you both. Marriage is a mini picture of the gospel so be encouraged in the fact that Jesus will do all the work, our part is just to be faithful.

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Zach Lee is Associate Home Groups Minister at The Village Church and is married to Katy.  Follow him on Twitter: @zacharytlee.

Converging Marriage and Mission

DIVERGING STREAMS?

Many married people reading this are well versed in two streams of Christian thought: the first stream is that we are God’s people sent into God’s world to carry out God’s mission. From Abraham on, God sends his people into the world–not to be enveloped by the world, but to live–as St. Augustine put it–as the “city of God,” living among the “city of Man” and seeking its good. The other stream is that marriage is the best reflection of the Trinity, and of God’s love for and pursuit of his Bride. Orthodox theology for the past 2000 years has affirmed Paul’s words in Ephesians 5, that the blessed relationship between a husband and wife is the clearest picture of “the mystery” of “Christ and his church.” We’ve heard both those streams; we know both principles; we even believe and strive to live out those truths.

The problem is we often hear, know, believe, and live those streams separately from each other, while God designed them to be one strong, flowing, unified river. We try to live as missionaries and as couples as two distinct compartments of life. As Paul Tripp has said: “But they’re not naturally divided. That’s why you don’t have a huge discussion in the New Testament of the tension between ministry and family. It’s just not there. We have set that up, because we naturally look at these two things as separate dimensions.” Here’s the truth for every Christian couple: marriage is the clearest picture of the gospel in the world today, and your marriage is one of the best forms of evangelism in the world today. We can no longer keep our marriage and our mission in separate, parallel streams–they must converge.

How can God use our marriage for his mission? We can learn much from the Bible’s brief glimpses of one couple, Aquila and Priscilla, in Acts 18.

After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. And he went to see them, and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade. Acts 18:1-3

GOD’S MISSION THROUGH YOUR IDENTITY

Aquila and Priscilla were not pastors and didn’t have seminary degrees. They made tents for a living, working a culturally-normative profession. Yet they saw themselves as ministers of the gospel by opening their lives to Paul. We see at the end of 1 Corinthians that they hosted the local church in their home. Later in Acts 18 they go with Paul on mission for the gospel. In some circles today, Christians refer to “tent-making” as the honorable use of a “secular” job for ministry. For this couple, tent-making carried no great honor; it was simply their job, and a means of God’s provisions, as they lived their lives for the gospel. They were a married couple with a normal life, who used their marriage and life for God’s ministry. Whoever you are, and regardless of your job, city, or profession–or marital status–you are a minister of the gospel.

The God who saved you “by grace through faith” now has “good works, prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:8-10). “God. . . through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18). If you're married, you're probably busy. Whether you’re paid by a church or by Starbucks, FedEx, an ISD, or the government, and whether we’ve been married one week or fifty years, and whether you have ten kids running around the home or are empty-nesters, and whether you deal with the normal messiness of life or struggle with deeper issues, you’re still (primarily) God’s people sent on God’s mission to God’s world. That’s your identity in Christ: you’re a minister of his gospel.

GOD’S MISSION THROUGH YOUR HOSPITALITY

As part of Aquila and Priscilla’s gospel ministry, they opened their home to the Apostle Paul. He didn’t just crash on their couch for a few nights, but moved in with them. Their home was also the meeting place for the local church. If you look at the normative life of the early church in Acts 2, you know that folks didn’t just wander into their home at 10am on a Sunday, stay for an hour, then go to Chili’s. Instead, “day by day, [they attended] the temple together and [broke] bread in their homes” (Acts 2). The church was likely in Aquila and Priscilla’s home a lot.

There’s an old episode of Everybody Loves Raymond in which Ray’s parents purchase a new couch, and won’t remove the plastic wrap for fear of getting it dirty–that’s a great picture of how many of us view our homes. Today we often view our homes as a “refuge” or “retreat” from the difficult world “out there.” That thinking misses part of the point: our homes, like everything God gives us, are gifts to steward for the sake of God's mission. Aquila and Priscilla had a home, and used that home as a generous blessing to others.

Aquila and Priscilla lived as God’s ministers, and in doing so, they used their home as a ministry. In the familial mess of opening your home, doors open for deep conversations. In denying the comfort and convenience a home can provide, others are blessed and cared for.

GOD’S MISSION THROUGH YOUR DECISIONS

Put yourself in Aquila and Priscilla’s shoes. You’re new to town, and you're only there because you got kicked out of your last town. If the local church needs a place to meet, would you volunteer your home? Paul shows up and asks to live with you. While your first impression today might be excitement: “The most famous Christian in the world, the guy who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, the greatest missionary of all time, wants to live with ME?!” We must see the other side too. Paul was also one of the most persecuted, most wanted, most despised persons of his day. “Inviting him in” was a massive danger to yourself!

When we think of “hospitality,” we often mistake it for what the Bible calls “fellowship.” At times it’s easy–or at least, easier–to open your home to other followers of Jesus. But true, biblical hospitality is opening your home to strangers, caring for the hurting and the least. Biblical hospitality means blessing folks who could never bless you back. It is initiating with others and loving people because God first initiated and loved us.

The rubber meets the road in marriage and ministry through the decisions you make each day. Those decisions display what you and your spouse value, love, pursue, and fear. Your decisions display what you and your spouse worship. And those you’re ministering to will watch your marriage and learn from it. How you use your home as a couple is one of those daily decisions.

GOD’S MISSION THROUGH YOUR STEWARDSHIP

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:9: “if in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” If Jesus hasn’t risen, and there’s no hope for the future, then we should be more pitied than anyone in the world. The reason our lives should invite pity from people who don’t know Jesus is that our lives should look strange, illogical, and crazy. People should think we’ve lost our minds. Is that true of the decisions you and your spouse make? What values and priorities do your neighbors see in your marriage? What goals and pursuits does the world around you see in your life?

If God is using our marriages for his mission, it looks completely illogical. For example you might be able to afford the best private school in town, yet send your kids to the less-esteemed, local public one because your family places obedience in mission above an educational reputation. It makes no sense to deny a higher paying job, for one with better hours–but you pursue mission by dwelling with your family and mission field longer. Might we give up a club, hobby, organization, Xbox, or even one of our many Bible Studies, to free up time, money, and energy for those God sent us to? Might we even “cold-call” our neighbors and invite them over for dinner? Would we let them see our imperfections, and bless them without expecting a return? This is the call to display the weird life of gospel implications in marriage.

The key to each of these–living as a minister, opening your home and marriage, and living a counter-cultural lifestyle–is seeing yourself as a steward of your life, possessions, and even family, rather than an owner. Here’s what Aquila and Priscilla understood: everything we have is a gift from God. Everything we have is his; everything is given to us to use and cultivate and use on his behalf. We are the servants in Matthew 25, and one day our Master will look at all he entrusted us with. Will our master be pleased or disappointed in our stewardship?

GOD’S MISSION THROUGH YOUR PROCLAMATION

Our marriages, like everything else God gives us, are gifts from God to steward well for his purposes. Do we take his gift and make it about ourselves? Do we trade his purpose and mission for our selfishness and safety? Do we take marriage–the best display of the gospel to the world–and hide it away rather than using it to proclaim the glory, grace, and goodness of God?

Aquila and Priscilla were so sold out on God’s mission that they later moved to Ephesus with Paul. They stayed there when Paul continued on, and as a “husband-wife team,” directed their ministry into a young convert named Apollos (Acts 18:18-26). The scriptures that speak to this point in history show that that, as a couple, Aquila and Priscilla “discipled” this young man for a season just as they had opened their lives to Paul and the church at Corinth. And like Paul, God used Apollos to produce great fruit and bring himself great glory through the known world.

A CONVERGENCE FOR SAKE OF THE GOSPEL

By their actions, decisions, lifestyle, and their words, Aquila and Priscilla were a couple who proclaimed the gospel. What would your city be like if it was filled with couples devoting their lives and marriages to helping others understand the gospel of Jesus? What would your church be like if it was filled with families who opened their homes to life-on-life discipleship? What would it look like to see our marriages as gifts from God, for the sake of his mission, rather than our own selfish desires?

It is difficult. It battles everything in us that wants comfort, convenience, privacy, and silence. If we deny ourselves for his mission, we should be pitied--if Jesus didn’t raise from the dead. But he did! And in doing so, he transforms both our marriages and our mission; he gives us the only reason for living this way; he becomes the only reason for “intentionally illogical” decisions. In Jesus’ death, resurrection, and call on our lives, his mission and our marriages converge into a story that’s bigger than our own–the writing of which took a greater sacrifice than we’ll ever be asked to give.

In our marriages, we have the opportunity to put that story on display every day. Will we continue to live as married people, who separately, occasionally in our busyness, pursue ministry? Or will the gospel transform our time, priorities, and relationship, and unite those diverging streams into one, as we live out our new identity and converge God’s mission and our marriages?

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Special thanks to Ross Appleton for the foundational concept this article is built on.

Ben Connelly, his wife Jess, and their daughters Charlotte and Maggie live in Fort Worth, TX. He started and now co-pastors The City Church, part of the Acts29 network and Soma family of churches. Ben is also co-author of A Field Guide for Everyday Mission (Moody Publishers, 2014). With degrees from Baylor University and Dallas Theological Seminary, Ben teaches public speaking at TCU, writes for various publications, trains folks across the country, and blogs in spurts at benconnelly.net. Twitter: @connellyben. For related resources, including a FREE eBook by Ben Connelly & Bob Roberts Jr, visit everydaymission.net

Let's Mass Produce Discipleship

Discipleship. Discipleshift. Disciple-Making Disciples. It’s all the rage right now to talk about discipleship and we must. The current state of the declining church is the fruit of our lack of engaging in discipleship in recent history. It’s so bad that few even know what this looks like and so we’re left with a dilemma. How do we disciple all of these people who are in the church and have never been discipled?

In typical western and capitalistic fashion, we have tried to figure out how to mass produce discipleship. Websites, blogs, and discipleship pathways providing content have been developed. Programs and systems are in place to invite people to learn, know, and grow into a disciple, but have we missed the point altogether?

Jesus Could Have Mass Produced Discipleship. . . But He Didn’t

Jesus had the thousands waiting for his every word and the opportunity to mass produce discipleship was available. He could have told them to sit down; he would keep the food miraculously coming; he would download all the information they needed to become disciples and to go make disciples.

But he didn’t. Instead he gathered twelve men (Matt. 10:1-4) , three who were extra close to him (Matt. 26:36-46), seventy that hung around on the periphery and spent years with them (Lk. 10:1-12). He shared more than content, though he did teach them more than anyone else would know. He shared meals, laughter, probably made fun of Peter A LOT; he shared hurts, struggles, tears; he exhorted, encouraged, and modeled devotion; he performed miracles, taught them how, spoke vision into them, and rarely criticized.

He shared his heart, his doctrine, his every step of life, and his platform with them.

What were the results? A viral movement that changed the world.

In Acts, we see this personal viral approach spread beyond the original twelve. Thousands come to faith at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-13), yet the scriptures track the individuals who influenced and shaped the lives of others rather than the mass gatherings.

Pieces of discipleship happened (and continue to) in mass gatherings, house to house, and personal investment, but the development of individuals is the primary concern. As we enter into the letters, Paul references specific people by name (Rom. 16), faithful workers and he didn’t just impart his theology through sermons, mass classroom teaching, online discipleship pathways, and more! No, he gave them his life.

They knew him, his strengths and his weaknesses.

The disciples created a movement without making a movement their aim. They invested in people, discipling them into being like Jesus and sent them to repeat the pattern. It’s because their aim was bigger than themselves and they knew the movement of God did not depend on them.

Have a Long-Term View that is Beyond Yourself!

The innovation that is taking places is good and healthy. New contexts require new approaches, systems, and ideas. But discipleship is more simple than we make it and takes longer than we ever wish it would. It has massive setbacks, discouragements, and slow progress toward great victories. There’s nothing more sanctifying, challenging, and rewarding.

But it requires that we not be in a hurry to mass produce disciples and end up making Pharisees with a massive amount of knowledge, little intimacy, and no holiness. We are trying to reproduce Jesus in people and that takes time. It took the church decades of neglect to get us to this big need and it will take decades of engagement in discipleship to get us out.

Is your vision only for your ministry, your church, and your time on earth, or is it for the next generations?

Jesus’ Master Plan

Learn from the content that is produced out there, but gather four to six men or women near you, invite them into your life, open the scriptures with them to teach them scriptural systematic theology that is transferable, pray with them, and fast with them. Hurt with them, fight with them through their struggles, celebrate their small victories, and give them opportunities to succeed and fail. Speak vision into them.

Take the content and teach it through your own life. It has greater impact in those you are discipling than gathering them around a DVD, curriculum, or teacher they don’t know.

Practically, this looks like Barnabas and Paul, Barnabas and John Mark, Paul and Timothy, Timothy to faithful men, faithful men to others also, and the same goes for women.

This personal discipleship must be combined or supplemental to the engagement in the broader community aims of the local church so it fulfills God’s call for that specific church. It is not a separate system; it is personal, communal, and driven by vision.

We mass produce discipleship by discipling a few who then disciple more and it multiplies. If we try another way, we’re just gathering crowds and assuming that our different variations of sermons will do the trick--that hasn’t worked for decades.

The master, Jesus, has shown us the plan. Let’s follow Him.

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Logan Gentry is the Pastor of Community and Equipping at Apostles Church in New York City. He blogs at Gentrified and has contributed to The Gospel Coalition. He is married to Amber and they have three children. Follow him on Twitter: @logangentry.