Missional Living in a Complex World
Editor's Note: This is a repost of an article that originally appeared in J.D.'s blog: Missional Living in a Complex World. It appears here with the writer's permission. ---
Missional living is not rocket science. When we look at the great number of discussions and writings about “missional,” it is easy to assume that the matter is difficult to understand – and close to impossible to live out in our world today. This is certainly not the case. Now, while I’m all for such discussions and publications (and have contributed to the conversation), the reality is that missional living is nothing new for the church.
Missional Living Occurs When ...
Missional living occurs when Kingdom Citizens live according to the Kingdom Ethic. People enter the Kingdom of God through the confession that Jesus is Messiah (Matt 16:13-19), and begin to live according to the standard of the King. His ethic transcends the ethics of the kingdoms of this world. Take a look at the Kingdom Ethic Jesus taught:
- “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matt 5:27-28)
- “You have heard it said ... ‘You shall not murder,’ ... but I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.” (Matt 5:21-22)
- "The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. Not so with you. ... The first must be a slave …” (Matt 20:25-27)
- "Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." (Matt 18:4)
The Kingdom Ethic is the standard by which Kingdom Citizens are to live in relation to God (Matt 22:37-40), other Kingdom Citizens (Matt 18:15-20), and those who are outside of the Kingdom (Matt 28:18-20). Packed into this divine rule is what we find throughout the Scriptures. As a Kingdom Citizen, we do not have the option to relate to God on our terms or desires. There are appropriate guidelines by which we engage with other brothers and sisters. This rule instructs us on how to interact with those who have never confessed Christ as Lord.
And while this ethic is to be lived out in covenant with other Kingdom Citizens in what is understood to be Kingdom Communities (i.e., local churches), missional living is specifically directed toward the relationships with those outside of the Kingdom.
(A note: While space will not permit me to address the comprehensive nature of the other two relationships related to Kingdom living, it is important to understand that a breakdown in fellowship in these other two areas hinders missional living. When Kingdom Citizens walk out of fellowship with God and other brothers and sisters, global disciple-making is hindered. When the Spirit of God is grieved, Kingdom expansion is affected.)
Missional Living Requires …
Both actions and words are requirements for missional living. Kingdom Citizens are to “let your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” (Matt 5:16) But Kingdom Citizens must also preach the gospel in season and out of season (Tim 4:2). We cannot do one without the other. While some situations will require that we spend most of the time living out the Kingdom Ethic before unbelievers (1 Peter 3:1-2), we must proclaim the gospel. Without the sharing of repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus (Acts 20:21), no one will be saved. Other situations will require more time spent on our words. Peter’s encounter with Cornelius is an example of this matter. And while Peter spent most of his time preaching, his loving actions as a Jewish man being willing to enter into the home of a Gentile communicated the nature of the Kingdom Ethic (Acts 10).
The following diagram, developed by my friend and colleague, Tim Beougher, reveals the range Kingdom Citizens often find themselves in as they journey through life encountering those outside of the Kingdom. Sometimes we’re closer to the right, other times we are near the left. Many times we find ourselves somewhere between the two poles.
Study this passage, and feel free to use my outline when teaching others.
Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
—Colossians 4:2-6.
Let's consider six principles for missional living from this passage.
1. Missional Living Must be Done Prayerfully
We need to pray for opportunities to connect with people and share the gospel with them. Paul desired prayer for such opportunities. We must also trust in God to open such doors for the message. We need to pray for opportunities, words to speak, and for open hearts to the good news.
2. Missional Living Must be Done with Gospel Clarity
The mystery of the gospel has been revealed; now we must clearly communicate the truth to others. Our language (and actions) must be understood. We are to watch our language and constantly be asking, “How are they ‘hearing’ what I am communicating by my words and deeds?”
3. Missional Living Must be Done Wisely
Literally, we are “in wisdom, to be walking.” This walk is our lifestyle. Do we live wisely in relation to those outside the Kingdom? Unfortunately, many people today are not interested in Jesus because they know some of his followers. Are our lives reflecting the Kingdom Ethic, or do we manifest the ethics of another kingdom?
4. Missional Living Must be Done Intentionally
We must go throughout our day with “Great Commission Eyes.” A wise evangelist of yesteryear once stated, “When I meet new people, I always see an ‘L’ or an ‘S’ on their foreheads. The 'L' stands for ‘lost’ and the 'S' stands for ‘saved’. I assume that everyone has an ‘L’ until I know for certain that they are followers of Jesus.” This is a good practice for us to follow. Missional living does not just happen. We must be intentional about it. We must be intentional about gospel engagement.
5. Missional Living Must be Done Graciously
Paul notes that our speech should always be gracious and seasoned with salt. Whenever people encounter us, do they see grace or a grouch? Humility or a hypocrite? Joy or a jerk? Love or a liar? 1 Peter 3:15-16 is a great verse to memorize:
But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.
6. Missional Living Must be Done Flexibly
The never-changing gospel must be communicated in ever-changing situations. Paul writes that we should know how to answer each person. This means that a customized approach is necessary when it comes to sharing the gospel. We must be students of God’s Word and ready to respond appropriately to others.
Obedience is not a complicated matter. As I said before, missional living is not rocket science. So, let’s take off our white lab coats, put away our scientific calculators, stop analyzing and debating the trajectories as to who gets to go to the moon, and start living out of the calling we have received.
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J. D. Payne serves as the pastor for church multiplication with The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama. He is married to Sarah who is a physician in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, working part-time at a clinic for uninsured populations in Birmingham, Alabama. They have three young children Hannah, Rachel, and Joel.
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To read more about missional living, check out Tony Merida’s Proclaiming Jesus.
For more free articles on this topic, see Living the Mission, by Winfield Bevins, and Transformative Grace, by Jason Seville.
Deep Preaching: Shine - Helps on Revealing the Treasure of Truth
by Steven Smith.
Steven W. Smith is Dean of The College at Southwestern and author of Dying to Preach, winner of Preaching Today’s "Book of the Year" in 2009. He is married to Ashley. They have two daughters (Jewell and Sydney) and one son (Shepherd).
*Editor’s Note: This post is the fourth and last in Dr. Smith’s series, “Deep Preaching.”
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A sea diver finds a treasure that has been buried for 200 years and you get to see it. What do you expect to see? Well, the treasure is in fact a treasure because of its age. No one has really been able to get a good look at this – it’s rare. It also has inherent value because of its beauty. However, when the diver surfaces you can see none of that. It is covered in the oceanic grime of centuries. It is a treasure by itself, the value is inherent, but the beauty of the treasure is not seen until he takes the time to remove the things that show its beauty.
On Monday, a preacher entered the study. He decided not to be superficial, but to go deep into the Word of God. He desperately wanted to mine out the treasure of the Word for his people, so he did not stop until he got to the bottom where the treasure lay. And, wisely, he did it in time. He got the treasure and began to go to the surface. As a result he has a well crafted structure to his sermon that mirrors the structure of the text. He sank for treasure. He surfaced to bring the treasure to the people. But before he enters the pulpit he must polish off the sermon. He must remove the barriers that impede a view of the beauty of Scripture.
How to Polish
Scripture needs nothing added to it. We add nothing. However, the people to whom we preach are so removed from the cultural and theological worlds of Scripture that they need someone to remove the barriers that keep them from seeing the truth clearly. So by "polish" I am not suggesting that we add to the Word. It does not need our rhetorical flourish. Rather, I am using the word "polish" to describe the process by which we remove anything that keeps people from seeing the beauty of the Scripture. Personally, I am an advocate of a plain style of preaching. By that I mean that we need to remove any forced words or structure that keeps people from seeing truth clearly.
However, demonstrating the simplicity of Scripture is not easy. Simplicity is extremely difficult. So here are some strategies to help so show the beauty of the Word:
1. Look for models.
I am not aware of an effective preacher who is not reading widely or listening to other sermons. To steal another’s sermon is a crime. However, we are always looking for ways to say the same things in new ways. The flavor of someone’s communication style, the insight into a text: these things can be learned by humbling ourselves and reading others.
2. Manuscript for clarity.
Manuscripting does not imply that you will preach with the document in front of you, it simple means that you have worked out the key phrases, you have the transitions down, you know how one thing will lead to the next. You know all of this because it is one complete document. The discipline also keeps you on task so that when you read through it you will see where you have gaps in logic or flow, it will really jump out. As a pastor, I rarely manuscripted my sermons, and I think I paid the price in a lack of oral clarity. I leave the manuscript on the hard drive, but the discipline of doing it is very helpful. If I am pressed for time, I will at least manuscript the introduction and the conclusion.
3. Never preach a sermon for the first time.
Once the manuscript is complete, stand up in the study and preach through the sermon. One pastor I know gets to the church early Sunday morning and preaches it from the pulpit. The goal is that when you enter the pulpit, you do so with confidence because this is a sermon you have already preached!
My dad used to tell me that preaching “goes from paper, to preaching, to paper." What he meant was that in the study as we are “writing” our sermons, a thought will come to us. The natural reaction is to preach it out loud. It is often in the vocal working out of this that the thoughts really come together. So we write, we preach, and then we write some more.
4. Listen to the Holy Spirit.
This is so subjective that I hesitate to insert it here. An encouragement to be “sensitive to the Spirit” is interpreted by some to mean "don’t study and just go for it." We don’t mean that. What we mean is that often from the moment of leaving the study to the time when enter the pulpit, the Holy Spirit will prompt us in certain directions. This may happen at any time before or during the sermon. It is often in those promptings that a way to express something becomes clearer. One preacher told me he prints out his sermon, lays it on his bedside, and reads through before he goes to sleep on Saturday night.
Deep Preaching
So, after we sink and surface, we must shine. To do less is laziness no matter how we describe it. So again, when we dive into the text we must leave time to surface by understanding the structure of Scripture, and to shine by removing anything that hides its beauty. After all you risked your life at the bottom of the ocean for this, you want your people to know that the treasure is worth risking their life for. The goal is that when they began to love the words of the Word, they will want to go deep themselves.
A pastor then knows that he is effective when he never dives alone.
Deep Preaching: Surface - Preaching that Brings the Truth to the Top
by Steven Smith.
Steven W. Smith is Dean of The College at Southwestern and author of Dying to Preach, winner of Preaching Today’s "Book of the Year" in 2009. He is married to Ashley. They have two daughters (Jewell and Sydney) and one son (Shepherd).
*Editor's Note: This post is the third in Dr. Smith's series, "Deep Preaching."
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If sinking to find the treasure is the translation of the text, surfacing is the communication of the text. We know we sank deep when we say, “I know what this text means.” We know we have surfaced when we can say, “Now I know how to say it."
In the last post we discussed going deep enough that we know what a text means. This is the preacher’s work in the study with linguistic and exegetical tools. However, there is a danger in going deep, namely staying so long wrestling with the meaning that we never surface to find a way to say what the text means. When people hear preaching and say, “He was so deep, I didn’t understand a thing!” that is not a compliment. It probably means that the preacher did not understand the text himself. Or, perhaps he did understand it, but he stayed so long in the deep murky waters of the study, he did not surface. His problem is never being shallow, but being so deep others cannot understand him. However, when you understand something thoroughly, you are generally able to make it clear.
It goes without saying that we are not advocating shallow preaching. We are advocating going as deep as we can and then coming to the surface in time.
Preaching at its core is the translation and communication of the text. The translation works the text into our hearts; the communication works it out. There are times that we are called upon to say speak before God has spoken to us in His word. Yet there are other times that when God has spoken to us through His word, we understand it, but we have not done the necessary work to find a way to work out what God has worked in. We may gravitate toward the translation side of things because we like the time in the study. Or, we may gravitate toward the communication side of things because we enjoy the preaching moment, the thrill of engaging communication. We all have our strengths.
So when we sink deep enough to find out the meaning of the text, how do we surface in a way that people can understand the meaning?
OK, there are roughly one million things to say here which have been said in thousands of books. However, this list represents some things that I struggle with and things that I don’t think we cover well enough in formal training; so not exhaustive, just a few diving strategies that will help you surface on time.
1. Repent
If a preacher is not willing to bend his will to the text, then it will never live in the pulpit.This may be the hardest part of the process.When we arrive at a text of Scripture and it calls us to change something about our character, confess a sin, right a wrong, we must do so immediately.What is at stake, of course, is our own sanctification.However, what is also at stake is the sanctification of others.This is a heavy thing to bear, but it is no less true.Procrastinated repentance is the foundation on which unprepared sermons are built.Meditate on I Timothy 4:16.
2. Look for a clear structure borrowed from the text.
When we sink to see the treasure of Scripture, a structure will emerge.The structure will be based on the genre.An epistle will have the feel of a lecture or a lesson.It may even be filled with commands like the 50+ exhortations found in James.However, a sermon on an Old Testament narrative does not need points.They simply are not there.The narrative is built around the scenes of the story.A parable will have scenes that are sometimes followed with Christ commentary on the parable, so in one sermon you have narrative (the parable proper), and exhortation (Christ’s commentary on the parable).We don’t have to scramble for a structure for the sermon; we simple borrow the one provided for us by the text.The reason for this is simple: there is meaning at the structural level.So mirroring the structure is actually a part of finding the meaning.
3. Emerge with the spirit of the text in mind.
Every text of Scripture has an embedded emotional design.When we preach we are not just communicating the substance, and borrowing the structure, we are finding out what about the emotional design of the text has meaning as well.Was it the beauty of poetry, the sting of a rebuke, or the rising tension of a narrative?All of those are embedded to help us with the meaning of the text.
Phillips Brooks says that preaching is “truth through personality."I agree with the spirit of this, but my job is not to front my personality.Rather, I can gladly borrow the personality of the Scripture that is imbedded in the genre.
4. Stop studying.
The best preachers know when to stop.They know when they are done with the exegetical process – what the text means, and can move to the communication process – how I say what it means.If God were to give you 100 hours to prepare, this would be a different sermon.But He hasn’t; you just have a few hours.In the few hours God has given you to steward, there comes a point when you are done - you just have to be wise enough to recognize when that is.
At some point you say, “I know what this text means to the best of my ability, now I have to spend time figuring out how to say it."
One encouragement is that every text is different.Some texts demand more exegetical work and others more communication work. For example, if you are preaching the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15, you will find the meaning pretty close to the surface.You will need less time on the exegetical side.However, that parable is so well known that you will need more time trying to figure out how to say it in a fresh way.
If you are preaching the rich man and Lazarus from Luke 16, you will need plenty of time on the exegetical side of things to read yourself clear in that text.The meaning of the text is not near the surface and it demands much more time in the study.
So, you sank deeply to find the treasure, you surfaced with a clear outline that reflects the structure and the spirit of the text. All that remains is to show its beauty, which is the subject of the next post.
Mission: Suburbs
Editor's Note: This is a repost of Mission: Suburbs. It appears here with the writer's permission. ---
The Great Commission that Jesus gave to His disciples is often quoted when discussing world missions. Jesus sends his disciples out to make more disciples.
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.
I remember sitting in a seminary class and the professor began talking to us about the Greek and the idea that the word ‘Go’ in the Great Commission could really be read, “As you go” or “While you are going.” This opened my eyes to an understanding that Jesus' command doesn’t only apply to world missions, but to living our lives as missionaries. As we go, we make disciples.
This truth brings meaning and purpose to those of us who reside in the security of suburbia. This is not written as an opinionated diatribe towards those who live in the suburbs. I live in and minister to people of the suburbs. It’s a reminder that all peoples matter to God, and that you don’t have to go to obscure lands to make disciples. To be honest, if you are not an effective missionary where you are--as you go--then what makes you think you have any authority serving as a missionary elsewhere?
WE HAVE A MISSION IN SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOODS
To serve as a missionary in a suburban context has several inherent complications. People in suburbia enjoy their individuality and privacy. They are busy and often living beyond their means. We need to realize that we have a mission at hand, not in a far off land, but down our street, in our schools, in the stores and restaurants we patronize. There are people all around us who are separated from God and need to know and love Jesus.
The question is whether you will make disciples as you go, or will you wait for other, more professional people, to do it for you?
I often receive questions on how to be a missionary in a suburban context. Here are a few things to keep in mind as we consider our calling to make disciples as we go:
- People Matter to God: This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s good to remember that God has sent us into the world as His ambassadors (2 Corinthians 5:18-20) to bring the message of reconciliation. We are not sent to only reach those like us, but to minister to all whom we come in contact with.
- Places of Impact: We are creatures of habit. We all have places that we frequently go to eat, shop, and play. Remember, the people who work in these places are often dismissed, but this is a great place to start building intentional relationships. Not only is it important to minister to them, but also they can connect us with other regulars.
- Go Out in Pairs: The mission we are on is a communal mission and an individual one. We are not just inviting people to ‘church’, but calling people out of darkness into light, from death to life, from isolation to biblical community. Jesus sent his disciples 2-by-2, so we should be intentional about being on mission together. Examples of this include BBQ’s, play dates, library activities with kids, work out spots, etc.
- The Golden Rule: Remember what it was like to be lost? If not, then you should begin there. Isolation from God may give the appearance of freedom, but ultimately leads to death. We need to do for others what we would hope they would do for us, especially when it comes to sharing spiritual truths.
- People are NOT Projects: One of the most arrogant things we can do is to treat people as projects. People do not need to be ‘worked on’; they need to be loved on. What are ways that you can serve them, speak to them, and treat them in a way that communicates your love for Jesus and your love for them?
- It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint: We never know when God is going to regenerate a person. That’s not our business. What we are to be about is making disciples as we go. Befriending people, serving people, and pointing people to Jesus with our lives and our words. This could take years in some instances. Perhaps it is just as much about your sanctification as it is about their salvation.
- Jesus Saves People / You Are the Mid-Wife: I’m often stunned how bad theology leads to ineffective evangelistic lifestyles. People get paralyzed when they believe that they are the one’s to save people. What I mean is, when people believe that it’s up to them to lead a person to the Lord, they get stuck with fear or prideful with their ‘success.’ Keeping in mind that God is the sovereign King who is able to save even the hardest of people, should give us rest in His provision. Our calling is to be faithful to the Gospel, to share the faith, and to serve as midwives to those who are born again.
FAITHFUL & INTENTIONAL
These points are valid regardless of your context. It is important to note that while we are in a unique context living in suburbia, we are not relieved from the commission at hand. We must be faithful to present Jesus in our lives, words, families, and deeds.
We live in a fallen world that is in great need of redemption and restoration. The question is whether you will make disicples as you go, or will you wait for other, more professional people, to do it for you? Let’s not fall into the suburban stereotype of outsourcing local missions, rather, let us invest into our communities, connect with our neighbors, and continually strive to be intentional about seeing lives transformed by Jesus.
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Casey Cease is husband to his high school sweetheart, Steph, and they have a beautiful daughter named Braelyn and another little girl on the way. He serves as the Lead Pastor of Christ Community Church in Magnolia, TX and travels and speaks throughout the United States. His first book about his tragic car crash and his journey to faith in Jesus, Tragedy to Truth, will be released February 2013 through Lucid Books.
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For more ideas on missional living, check out Tony Merida’s Proclaiming Jesus.
For more free articles on missional culture and neighborhood missions, see What is Missional Culture & Why Does It Matter, by JR Woodward, and The Neighborhood Mission Start Up, by Seth McBee.
Deep Preaching: Sink - The Value of Sinking Before You Surface
by Steven Smith.
Steven W. Smith is Dean of The College at Southwestern and author of Dying to Preach, winner of Preaching Today’s "Book of the Year" in 2009. He is married to Ashley. They have two daughters (Jewell and Sydney) and one son (Shepherd).
*Editor's Note: This post is the second in Dr. Smith's series, "Deep Preaching."
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Deep sea diving is dangerous. You can deplete yourself of oxygen, do permanent damage to your body, and of course die a slow painful death by drowning. These fears are very real to the deep sea diver, and they are no less real to the preacher.
So, why go deep into the meaning of a Scripture?
Consider the risk: the preacher can spend so long in the icy black of commentaries, online resources, and exegetical nuance that he cripples himself by the fear of saying something wrong. He might spend so long there that he picks up words and phrases that do not translate well for surface-dwellers. And, then there is the greatest risk of all – he might not surface on time. Perhaps he is so enthralled in the depth of his study that when he finally looks at his watch, he realizes he does not have enough time to surface! It is Saturday night and he is still a hundred feet below the meaning of this text. He still does not know what this text means. He then enters the pulpit with a half-prepared alchemy of the collected thoughts of others, garnished with a compelling introduction and conclusion.
Besides, we have heard deep preachers before: boring, academic, exegetical – no thanks.
Even though the fears are real, if the preacher is going to dispense truth he must sink deep enough to find the truth, surface in time to present the truth, and polish it in a way that makes the truth accessible. He must sink to find the treasure and surface in time to make the truth shine.
If the Risk is So Great, Why Go Deep?
The reason is clear: the meaning of a text is rarely on the surface. If what our people need was naturally on the surface, then Scripture would only need proclamation and not explanation. A few thousand years have passed since the writing of Scripture. A lot has changed. There has been a shift in the way we communicate and learn – from an oral tradition, to a written tradition, to a literate tradition, to an electronic tradition, and now to principally a visual tradition. The way we communicate, and thus the way we learn has radically changed. To borrow a phrase, these realities separate the modern listener from the ancient text.
Also, when God composed Scripture He imbedded it with meaning in its structure as well as its substance. The way sentences and clauses are shaped carry meaning. Yet, there is also meaning on the macro level as well as the micro level of Scripture; on the structural level of the cannon of Scripture. What superficial, cursory reading of Scripture will see that the Warrior Messiah image of Rev. 19 is directly lifted from Psalm 2? Will the most studious of our people see Psalm 78 is fulfilled in Matt 13? These textual relationships are real. They have meaning. They were meant to be seen. And, they are not on the surface. They must be mined from the bottom with the daunting slough of hard work.
It might be good to stop here and recognize that this metaphor may be offensive to some. After all it suggests that the people are on the surface, and that they are far separated from Scripture. Surely this line of thinking is suspect. Isn’t the word of God for all people? If all truth is God’s truth isn’t all truth for all people? Don’t we all have access to Scripture? Or are we so arrogant to think, as the character Mack bemoaned in The Shack, “God’s voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects.”[1]
I am not sure how wide reaching this line of thinking is, however, the objection is out there and we have to address it. So are we suggesting by this metaphor that understanding Scripture is only for the spiritually or cultural elite? Of course not. Perhaps two responses are needed.
First, we need not confuse God’s accessibility with His intricacy. God is accessible. I happen to believe that giving people a copy of God’s word is a wonderful way to share the faith. In fact, when I have the chance to share my faith I find that whatever text I am preparing or meditating on is a great entry point. This is especially true of the parables. What parable it is does not matter. All of them are about the kingdom and they all ultimately provide a way to share the Gospel. Why? Because God’s Word is accessible to all people at all times in an unlimited number of ways. We are all swimming in the tsunami of grace that was brought to us by the sweet simplicity of God’s accessibility.
This does not mean that Scripture is always easy to understand. There are a number of texts that do not make sense on the surface, or even after a few readings. The majority of these are actually easy to understand if someone has a basic understanding of how Scripture relates to itself or the cultural background in which it was written. In other words, a medium amount of training can equip one to understand most of Scripture. To deal with the other hard texts, one needs a little more training.
So again, God is both simple and complex. And since words reveal character, we anticipate that His word is both simple and complex. God is accessible – therefore His word is accessible. God is intricate, nuanced, and complex – His word reflects that as well.
God Expects Us to Go Deep
But, one might say, doesn’t it bother you that you are suggesting that the average person can’t get the meaning of certain passages at first blush? It really doesn’t. I don’t think it bothers the average person either. My experience is that they want to hear from someone who has thought about these things more deeply than they have to provide insight, wisdom, and counsel. And beyond this lay expectation, there is a divine expectation as well. Scripture is clear about the fact that pastor’s are to guard the sacred trust with their very lives (I Timothy 4:16; 6:20; II Timothy 1:13,14; 2:1-7; Titus 1:9). Nothing is clearer from Scripture than the fact that those held accountable for preaching have a dual stewardship: to protect God’s sheep and protect God’s Word. We keep the sheep safe by keeping the sword sharp. Both stewardships come from God.
So, when we mount the pulpit, God expects us to be deep. Our people should expect that we have gone deep. Not muddled or convoluted preaching, but preaching that demonstrates that we have wrestled with the text long enough that we are clear; we know the meaning to the best of our understanding. This is the objective. When it is clear to us, it has a chance to be clear to them. The greatest compliment one could pay a preacher is when they say, “Now I know what that text means."
We may think of this as a nice, but unattainable, goal for those who are really going to get into their preaching at a high level. But really, it’s what our people want.
People will excuse about any kind of preaching except boring preaching. But remember that there are two types of boredom – intellectual boredom and emotional boredom. Preachers often fear emotional boredom so we try to make people laugh and cry in the sermon. However, it is possible to be emotionally engaging and intellectually boring. This, in my opinion, is a chief reason why more college students are not engaged in church. Their pastor stimulated their emotions; he just did not make them think. He surfaced before he sank.
Deep diving is dangerous. However, the risk of sinking deep is no greater than the risk of staying on the surface. In the first you die, in the second your people die. And at the end of the day, if we have to tell our Dive Master that we almost died while trying to get people deep, He will understand. He’s made that dive before.
[1] Young, William P. The Shack: where tragedy confronts eternity. Newbury Park, CA: Windlown Media, 2007.
Deep Preaching
by Steven Smith.
Steven W. Smith is Dean of The College at Southwestern and author of Dying to Preach, winner of Preaching Today's "Book of the Year" in 2009. He is married to Ashley. They have two daughters (Jewell and Sydney) and one son (Shepherd).
*Editor's Note: This article was originally posted at Theological Matters. Dr. Smith will be writing three follow-up posts for Project TGM as a series entitled "Deep Preaching."
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There are days when the sermon just feels “on.”
The illustrations hit just right. The applications connect. Preacher and people ebb and flow in synchronized rhythm from opening words to closing illustration.
Dismounting the pulpit, you will be shocked if the people don’t hoist you on their shoulders hailing you as the greatest preacher in the world. In fact you’re a little surprised they didn’t interrupt you with shouts and applause like a political rally. (The humble tweet that follows: “God was really good today,” belies the fact that you killed it. Killed. It.)
Yet, in my experience, this is rare. It happens, but not often. Rarely is a sermon, from start to finish, exactly what we want it to be.
How Are We to Evaluate Our Own Preaching?
For those with a commitment to the inerrancy and sufficiency of Scripture, we evaluate our preaching by one criterion: faithfulness. After all, we do not invent messages, we proclaim truth. So we measure our effectiveness by how faithful we are to the text. In fact, this is the only reason I preach. By God’s grace we may mount the pulpit free from any obligation to express our feeling on anything—much less eternal matters. Eternal truth is settled. We are in the business of delivering the message not inventing it. Therefore, we must be faithful.
And yet, this being true, why is it that so many times my best attempt at faithfulness to Scripture falls flat? I really did try to say what the Scripture said and say it the way the Scripture said it, but it just did not work. I am not suggesting there is more than faithfulness; I am suggesting that we who are faithful must constantly re-examine what we mean by that.
If by “faithful” we mean simply getting the text correct, then we have failed. If you’re passionate about preaching, then that last sentence may seem disconcerting, so let me clarify. We know that there is a glut of preaching today that has precious little to do with a text of Scripture. This breaks our hearts. Scripture alone is enough! In reaction to this, it’s possible to swim against the tide of shallow, light, trivial, entertaining preaching by countering it with preaching that is boring, mundane, passionless, and disengaging. Some of us who love Scripture the most are profoundly boring. Just to be clear, I am not saying this as a reformer but a penitent. This might be my biggest homiletic challenge. I want to be so clear about what the text says that often I can be dry. People are disengaged and bored. Of course when I realize this, I justify my ineffective preaching with an internal monologue that says, “Well, at least I got the text right. Those other guys, sure they were engaging, but they never dealt with the text.”
A light, trivial, man-centered sermon is a mix of God’s Word and man’s hubris. But isn’t there as much hubris in preaching that is academic boredom as there is in preaching that is folksy banter? Let’s be honest. We can’t excuse boring sermons because we parsed our verbs correctly any more than we can excuse light fluffy sermons because we entertained.
Scripture is not boring. Therefore, if I preach a boring sermon, then that was not in the text. I brought that. I imposed boredom on the text in the same way those “other” preachers imposed their own ideas on the text.
The entertaining preacher excuses his sin because he made people laugh. The boring preacher excuses his sin because he made people yawn. Neither one has really preached. I know, because I have been both.
So, again, how are we to evaluate our preaching?
Well, first let’s crush the mental metaphor of “balance.” This metaphor gives the idea that we can be too faithful, too expositional, too exegetical, too deep, too textual, too engaging, or too funny—we just need a little of all of it. But that’s unhelpful. Can we really be too faithful to Scripture?
Maybe a better metaphor than striving for balance is embracing the tension. There is a tension in all of us—it pulls us to engage the text while engaging people. This tension does not need to be suppressed; it needs to be embraced. We are called to go deep into the text, and then bring the text to the people. If our exegesis is shallow, we have nothing to give people on Sunday. If when going deep I wait too long to surface, then I give people a dry exegetical exercise that does not help them. After I find the meaning of a text, when do I surface? In other words, when I study a text, how long do I spend on its meaning, and how long do I spend on how to say what it means? This is the tension. And, it will not go away.
Deep-Sea Divers
Now we have backed into a helpful metaphor: a deep-sea diver. The treasure that he wants is not buoyant. It’s not even at 25 ft. If he wants the real treasure, he must sink deep. However, if he stays in the depths too long, he will not have the oxygen needed to bring the treasure to the surface. Even when he does, he has to polish it off so people can see the original beauty of the treasure. If he wants to access the treasure, bring it to the surface, and have people appreciate the treasure the way it was appreciated before it sank, then he must sink, surface, and shine. And here is our task. We must spend time on what the text means, what we are to say about what the text means, and how to say it.
So while there are a thousand preaching rubrics out there, lets at least answer three questions:
1. Did I sink?
Did I go deep enough to find the treasure?
2. Did I surface?
Did I bring the treasure to the surface with illustration, application, and the force of imagination?
3. Did I shine?
Since the truth is beautiful, did I show its beauty or lazily offer it unpolished?
May God give us grace to go deep and be so overwhelmed with what we find that we want to surface in time and show the rich beauty of the treasure, which will exalt Christ and call us to joyful obedience.
The Practicality of Mission
It is the role and responsibility of the local church to reach its community. If the church fails, society fails. The world will find a place or community to have their needs me and we must - for lack of a better phrase - compete for their attention.
For the purposes of this post, I define "mission" as Mark Driscoll does in Confessions of a Reformission Rev. – Christians being a missionary to their local culture.
Simply put, there is plenty of inward-focused discipleship without much outward contextualization in the church today. At best, there is the occasional “special event” in hopes that the congregation brings friends who stay long-term. Don't get me wrong, I am not opposed to discipleship - in fact, I often wonder if we're even doing that very well today in order to train our people to evangelize. And while I’m not against the practice of evangelistic events, I am opposed to lack of dedicated missonal outreach. I once worked at a church that was in a 65% Hispanic community with three Hispanics in attendance on Sunday mornings. This church was also in a community that was in large majority under the age of 40 with less than 20 members under that age (including children). Imagine being a 28-year old Hispanic walking through our doors.
It is the role and responsibility of the local church to reach its community. If the church fails, society fails. The world will find a place or community to have their needs me and we must - for lack of a better phrase - compete for their attention. The natural inclination of the world is to chase the world. We must find a way to adapt to the demographic that we are in while not compromising Scripture. It would be great if you could even be multi-ethnic and flourishing from ages 15 all the way to 75, but let’s start with our community context. It doesn't necessarily have to be a certain school or business (though it could be), but a starting point is to intentionally get to know those within a relatively close radius of your people.
We tend to view missionaries as those who parachute into the remote villages of Africa. We use the excuse that culture doesn’t easily accept the gospel. We let our natural insecurities hinder us. We argue that we do not have enough time. I've even heard people use Satan as an excuse. In fact, we should expect Satan to use all obstacles against our efforts; but Jesus’ command in Matthew 28:19 places mission on all of our lives regardless of where we are. It is a call that the Christian simply cannot ignore.
Here are some practical ways to get on mission (for both the church and the individual):
- Pray, pray, pray – The most obvious and crucial step is to seek God’s will and blessing. You must be on board with his Kingdom and what he is doing, not what you yourself want to happen. There are many (most) times when our plans are not his. Beg the Holy Spirit to empower you.
- Understand your Bible – It is no good for you, your hearers, your church, or the Kingdom if you do not know what you believe. Sound doctrine is crucial to your evangelistic efforts. There is no point in hitting the streets of your community if you cannot answer the hard questions that the seekers, the skeptics, and the all-out opposition will throw at you (Col. 4:6).
- Be well-learned and prepared to reach them – The next most obvious but crucial step is to find out who is in your community, both by getting out and meeting people and by looking at statistics that can be found by a simple Google search. There are more resources on demographics (income, race, age, religion, etc.), becoming missional churches, and everyday evangelism than you could imagine. Find them. Study them. Rinse. Repeat.
- Love them – Perhaps the most difficult part is to simply love people. Our depraved nature prevents us from being naturally drawn toward it, but our new nature in Christ empowers us to do it anyway. In the aforementioned church that I was on staff at, we could not get our older white crowd to get on mission in the Hispanic community because they did not want to love them. It is not our church, our gospel, or our Kingdom - it is all God’s. If you think someone is below your efforts, you are forgetting how low Jesus had to become in order to reach you. The world is looking for relationships, not conforming rules. Let's give it to them!
Meet Jill & Cliff (& The Holy Spirit)
Meet Jill and Cliff. They have a somewhat similar story, yet at this point they have very different outcomes. I have been in a relationship with Cliff for five years now. We met at a local coffee shop. Cliff and I have eaten many meals together, drank hundreds of cups of coffee, and spent hours just hanging out over the past five years. We have built a great friendship. One where we text back and forth about everything from the mundane to the important. Cliff is a guy I could go to if I ever needed anything, and I know he feels the same. I have only known Jill since January. When she heard about our little church plant, she decided to give religion a go. She showed up the second week of our core team gathering. Since then Jill and my family have had meals together, and spent time talking about the challenges and struggles she has had in her life. She is a single mom with three kids and has had a rough life the last couple of years. Church was kind of a last ditch effort to find hope.
Similarities & Differences
I have a deep love for both Cliff and Jill. They are good friends, ones I have been praying for and trusting Jesus to bring to faith. My method has been the same. I have shared the gospel with both of them on many different occasions. They both have had major needs, one is dying of terminal cancer, the other is struggling with a 10+ year drug addiction. Their need for God in their life is present, and both of them would tell you they need God.
Yet, in the midst of all these similarities there is a major difference. About two months ago, Jill put her faith in Jesus, after only being part of our church family for 4 or 5 months. No one person led her to Jesus. She did not say a 'sinners' prayer one day during a passionate plea from me. None of that happened. She just simply came to us and said she had faith in Jesus. She believed in all the things he said he did. She understood he had died for her sinfulness. He had forgiven her. He had risen again. She knew it all, and more importantly she believed it all with her heart and was willing to give her life over to Jesus. The only thing she didn't know was now what. She didn't know if she had to sign anything or say any special words. It was beautiful. The Spirit was working in her life!
Cliff, on the other hand, has heard the gospel. He has seen it at work in my life as I talk about struggles, about my past, and as he has seen me parent my children and love my wife. But he has still not placed his faith in Jesus. He has asked for a Bible and for me to study it with him, but that is as far as it has gone. I love Cliff. Cliff is not a project. He is my friend. He is my friend who I will earnestly seek God to bring to himself. Not for my sake, but for Cliff's. Jesus is the best thing that could happen to Cliff.
Time & Truth
The reason I compare these two friends of mine is that nothing different was done with Jill that wasn't done with Cliff. We did not have some amazing discipleship technique that worked on Jill, which we somehow forgot to use on Cliff. No, it's just how the Spirit works. The Spirit quickens who he will, and he tarries when he wants, and there is nothing we can do about it. All we can do is pray.
This is always a concern we must have when we think through discipleship. We must always factor the Holy Spirit into our equation. It is not that I failed with Cliff and succeeded with Jill. Far from it. God simply works in his way in his time. This is something I need to come to understand better. I need to realize that only by living a life that points people to Jesus will I have the chance to see God work in his timing.
It also gives me a deep hope for Cliff, and everyone else I know who is not submitting his or her life to Jesus. The hope is that the Spirit will work when he will work. It is not in my eloquent speech, or persuasive words. It is when he desires to lead those who he has called unto himself. All I can do is be faithful and pray and proclaim and display the gospel and sit back and wait.
When I think through the difference between Cliff and Jill, I can get frustrated. I remember sitting across from Cliff, asking God, “why?” What had I done wrong? It seemed like I had done everything right, from my limited perspective, yet Cliff’s heart was not changing at all, not in the slightest. I was looking at myself and becoming frustrated that I could not come up with the right things to say, or the right pitch. Later, I was re-reading Tim Chester’s book, You Can Change. Chester points out that, “Behind every sin is a lie.” (pg 73)
When I thought about the different outcomes between Jill in Cliff, I was getting discouraged and down, forgetting that God is good. I was forgetting these truths about Jesus, and believing the lie that it was in my hands to convince Cliff.
In the fifth chapter, Chester looks at Psalm 62.11-12 and points out 4 truths that we need to daily remind ourselves, when the lies assault us.
- God is great – so we do not have to be in control.
- God is glorious – so we do not have to fear others.
- God is good – so we do not have to look elsewhere.
- God is gracious – so we do not have to prove ourselves.
These four truths rushed in and brought comfort to my struggling heart that day. They were the very thing I needed to remember. These four truths are critical for my heart when I am in the midst of a situation as talked about above. We will all be in a situation that has the same storyline. We will fail at discipleship, in our own mind. Yet the truth is that in the midst of what we may label as a failure, God is still great, glorious, good and gracious. Each of us will have people that we invest time, money, prayers, all we have to show them Jesus’ love, and they will do nothing but cause you headaches. Whether Cliff ever comes to know Jesus or not, God does not change. I must never believe the lie that my value and worth is found in my fruit or in Cliff’s conversion.
Josh Cousineau was a youth pastor for over 5 years & is now the lead pastor of Redemption Hill Community, which launched in Auburn ME in 2012. Josh is married to his high school sweetheart, Anna. They have 3 amazing children (2 boys & 1 girl). Their daughter was adopted from Uganda in 2011. Josh blogs at http://joshcousineau.com
For more insights into evangelism & discipleship, check-out Jonathan Dodson's Unbelievable Gospel.
For more free articles on the discipleship process, read Street Grace by Jake Chambers, The Unqualified Disciple by Lindsay Fooshee, & Behold the Beauty by Jason Garwood.
Gospel Centered Religion
These days, it's not polite to speak of the gospel and religion in the same sentence without a "versus" in between. This trend of thinking is unfortunate. In the final tally, we lose more than we gain. Religion is not antithetical to the gospel. Let's unpack this truth.
The Problem
Pitting the gospel against religion stems from two very real and very dangerous problems: self-righteousness and an attempt to please God by good works or good merit. These problems are certainly anti-biblical and need to be called out wherever we notice them.
The False Solution
One popular solution offered in recent books and viral YouTube videos is to castigate religion itself. To show how the gospel of Jesus Christ is actually the antithesis of religion. For the uninitiated, this is what's at play when you hear things like:
"I love Jesus but hate religion." "Jesus hates religion." "Christianity is a relationship, not a religion."
And so on. Note: Being "spiritual but not religious" is related to this discussion as well, though this mantra suggests a rejection of both religion and the gospel.
The Problem with the Solution
The problem with "Gospel vs. Religion" is that it misses the point. This is a case of rightly seeing the problem, but coming up with the wrong steps to eradicate it. Moreover, it is not the perspective of the biblical writers. The Bible never speaks of religion as being bad, in and of itself.
If the problem is self-righteousness, we should couch the discussion using more biblically faithful polarities, such as:
- Gospel vs. False Religion
- Gospel vs. Self-Righteousness
- True Religion vs. False Religion
Gospel vs. False Religion
- "faith without works is dead" (James 2:14-17)
- "be doers of the word, and not hearers only" (James 1:22)
- a doer who acts "will be blessed in his doing" (James 1:25)
- "pure and undefiled religion" (James 1:26-27)
The other two instances the word threskeia occur in Acts 26:5 and Colossians 2:18. The word in Col 2 is typically translated as "worship." Most agree that worship is good, though there can be true worship and false worship. For instance, worship of angels (Col 2) is certainly wrong.
Likewise, in Acts 26, Paul used threskeia as a defense for what a good Jew he was. He certainly wasn't saying his strict observance of religion was bad. It was simply incomplete.
Gospel vs. Self-Righteousness
Passages like Matthew 6:1-24, Romans 9:30-33, and Matthew 23:23 teach on practicing righteousness. In my blog post on Matthew 6, I explain that the problem against which Jesus is warning his followers is not practicing righteousness itself, but one's motive behind practicing righteousness. Don't be afraid to practice righteousness; just be sure to check your heart for the impetus therein.
Similarly, Paul explains why Israel did not arrive at the righteousness they pursued: "Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone ..." (Rom 9:30-33). If our works is the path to righteousness, we will stumble over ourselves. Jesus is the only true way to righteousness.
True Religion vs. False Religion
- We believers should concede no more ground and fight for a return to a biblical understanding of religion. Can religion and gospel be at odds? Sure. But it doesn't have to be; the two aren't necessarily opposed.
- Some words are worth intentionally and unequivocally defining so that people know what we truly mean by them. This is what I've tried to do in my ministry and I have not noticed a surge in people giving in to legalism and self-righteousness as a result. If we are too quick to discard "religion", the net result might be discarding obedience and a healthy ecclesiology along with it.
- We should draw a distinction between true and false religion (cf. James 1). The contrast is between believing and doing things that God desires of us (submission and obedience to Christ) and what is not required of us (e.g., don't dance or drink or watch rated-R movies). This is the distinction all believers should strive to make. It is another thing when the contrast is "faith vs. obedience," which are two things the Bible never pits against each other.
- The gospel is the beginning and foundation of one's journey in discipleship. It is the first step toward true obedience. I'm in full agreement that practicing empty rights and rituals in order to please God is antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ. However, most young believers, new believers, or even non-believers I know don't easily separate empty rights and rituals from all rights and rituals.
Final Disclaimers
For more thoughts on gospel centered religion, check out Tony Merida’s Proclaiming Jesus.
For more free articles on this topic, read: How to Respond to Religious Pluralism, by Jonathan Dodson; and What Is Gospel Centered Ministry, by Winfield Bevins.
God the Judge? Living Condemned
One of the most devastating effects of the pursuit of holiness can often be our propensity to believe that our sin draws God’s anger.
One of the most devastating effects of the pursuit of holiness can often be our propensity to believe that our sin draws God’s anger. This belief will result in a practical theology which assumes that God’s discipline in our lives is punitive; in other words that His discipline is evidence of some displeasure which is earned by our disobedience. It is amazing to me how many believers struggle with this unfortunate theology. This belief is personal because I know how often I’ve struggled with it myself.
The result of this theology is a feeling of consistent defeat, an improper fear of God and general difficulty in making progress in the Gospel. It is a serious and consistent threat to the growth of the Gospel in any church who places an emphasis on growing in the Gospel.
Romans 8:1 reminds us, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus“. This simple truth is incredibly liberating to the believer. It is a reminder that we cannot be condemned for our behavior. Yes, God absolutely disciplines those He loves, but His discipline is not punitive – instead it is imperative that we understand His discipline is corrective. This little truth makes all the difference in the world.
When we view God’s discipline as punitive in nature; in other words God is punishing us because we have disobeyed, we are essentially engaging in a functional denial of the sufficiency of the cross of Jesus Christ. We are denying the importance of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Let me try to explain.
2 Corinthians 5:21 points out “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is a strong reminder that Christ assumed our sins on the cross. He did this in order to carry the wrath of God, toward sin. When Christ died on the cross He assumed the wrath of God for our sin, past, present and future.
When we believe that God is punishing us for our sin, we are essentially denying the death of Christ on the cross and His atonement for our sin. We are arguing that His sacrifice is not enough. We still need more to be right with God. In effect, we become our own functional saviors. We are in essence saving ourselves through our own “deserved” punishment. This pursuit of self-righteousness can also appear in our lives as we mistreat ourselves believing that this is somehow both deserved and right. We can even convince ourselves that God is pleased with our self-treatment because we are “taking sin seriously“. The problem is that while we may think we are taking sin seriously, we are not taking God’s word seriously. We are denying the Gospel in our lives.
So, this theology is profound and extremely important. If we are to progress in the Gospel, to become like Christ, we must recognize that God disciplines His children, most definitely, but that He does so to make us like Jesus, not because He is angry with us. That His discipline is the act of a loving Father shaping us to be righteous, not the act of a condemning judge rightly dispensing justice because we have earned it.
So, let us celebrate the sufficiency of the cross. Let us triumph in the freedom from condemnation, and let us receive God’s loving discipline as a sign of His affection and His desire to help us become shaped like Jesus. (see Romans 8:29) Your very growth in the Gospel depends on it.
Revival: Ways and Means
Editor Note: Revival: Ways and Means originally posted at Redeemer City to City. It appears here with Tim Keller's permission. ---
How do seasons of revival come? One set of answers comes from Charles Finney, who turned revivals into a "science." Finney insisted that any group could have a revival any time or place, as long as they applied the right methods in the right way. Finney's distortions, I think, led to much of the weakness in modern evangelicalism today, as has been well argued by Michael Horton over the years. Especially under Finney's influence, revivalism undermined the more traditional way of doing Christian formation. That traditional way of Christian growth was gradual – whole family catechetical instruction – and church-centric. Revivalism under Finney, however, shifted the emphasis to seasons of crisis. Preaching became less oriented to long-term teaching and more directed to stirring up the affections of the heart toward decision. Not surprisingly, these emphases demoted the importance of the church in general and of careful, sound doctrine and put all the weight on an individual's personal, subjective experience. And this is one of the reasons (though not the only reason) that we have the highly individualistic, consumerist evangelicalism of today.
There has been a withering critique of revivalism going on now for twenty years within evangelical circles. Most of it is fair, but it often goes beyond the criticism of the technique-driven revivalism of Finney to insist that even Edwards and the Puritans were badly mistaken about how people should embrace and grow in Christ. In this limited space I can't respond to that here other than to say I think that goes way too far. However, this critique trend explains why there is so much less enthusiasm for revival than when I was a young minister. It also explains why someone like D.M. Lloyd-Jones was so loathe to say that there was anything that we can do to bring about revivals (other than pray.) He knew that Finney-esque revivalism led to many spiritual pathologies.
Nevertheless, I think we can carefully talk about some factors that, when present, often become associated with revival by God's blessing. My favorite book on this (highly recommended by Lloyd-Jones) is William B. Sprague's Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1832). Sprague studied under both Timothy Dwight, Edwards' grandson, at Yale and also Archibald Alexander at Princeton. The Princetonians – the Alexanders, Samuel Miller, and Charles Hodge – did a good job of combining the basics of revivalism with a healthy emphasis on doctrine and the importance of the church. Sprague's lectures include a chapter on "General Means" for promoting revivals, and his chapters on counseling seekers and new converts are particularly helpful.
Means of Revival
The primary means-of-revival that everyone agrees upon is extraordinary prayer. That's the clearest of all and so I won't spend time on it. The second means is a recovery of the grace-gospel. One of the main vehicles sparking the first awakening in Northampton, Massachusetts was Edwards' two sermons on Romans 4:5, "Justification by Faith Alone," in November, 1734. For both John Wesley and George Whitefield, the main leaders of the British Great Awakening, it was an understanding of salvation by grace rather than moral effort that touched off personal renewal and made them agents of revival. Lloyd-Jones taught that the gospel of justification could be lost at two levels. A church might simply become heterodox and lose the very belief in justification by faith alone. But just as deadly, it might keep the doctrine "on the shelf" as it were and not preach it publicly in such a way that connects to people's hearts and lives.
The third factor I would mention is renewed individuals. Sprague points out how certain church leaders can be characterized by the infectious marks of spiritual revival – a joyful, affectionate seriousness, and "unction" – a sense of God's presence. In addition, often several visible, dramatic life-turnarounds ("surprising conversions") may cause others to do deep self-examination and create a sense of spiritual longing and expectation in the community. The personal revivals going on in these individuals spread informally to others through conversation and relationship. More and more people begin to look at themselves and seek God.
A fourth factor I will call the use of the gospel on the heart in counseling. Sprague and John Newton in his letters do a good job of showing how the gospel must be used on both seekers, new believers, and non-growing Christians. The gospel must cut away both the moralism and the licentiousness that destroys real spiritual life and power. There must be venues and meetings and settings in which this is done, both one-on-one and in groups. See William Williams, The Experience Meeting, a leaders' manual for revival-promoting small group meetings in Wales during the first great awakening.
Creativity & Revival
Finally, Sprague rightly points out that revivals occur mainly through the ordinary, "instituted means of grace" – preaching, pastoring, worship, prayer. It is a mistake to identify some specific programmatic method (e.g. Billy Graham-like mass evangelism) too closely with revivals. Lloyd-Jones points to some sad cases where people who came through the Welsh revival of 1904-05 became wedded to particular ways of holding meetings and hymn-singing as the way God brings revival. Nevertheless, Sprague grants that sometimes God will temporarily use some new method to propagate the gospel and spark revival. For example, under Wesley and Whitefield, outdoor preaching was a new, galvanizing method. Mid-day public prayer meetings were important to the Fulton Street revival in downtown NYC in 1857-58. I'm ready to say that creativity might be one of the marks of revival, because so often some new way of communicating the gospel has been part of the mix that God used to bring a mighty revival.
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Timothy Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, which he started in 1989 with his wife, Kathy, and three young sons. For over twenty years he has led a diverse congregation of young professionals that has grown to a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Dr. Keller’s books, including the New York Times bestselling The Reason for God and The Prodigal God, have sold over 1 million copies and been translated into 15 languages.
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For more ideas on inspiring revival, check out Tony Merida's Proclaiming Jesus.
For more free articles on evangelism & revival, read: For the City-Excerpt by Matt Carter & Darrin Patrick, Taking the Long View by Bill Streger, & What Does Revival Look Like? by Winfield Bevins.
What Does it Mean to Make a Brother Stumble?
One of the things that always comes up when you speak of tattoos, smoking, drinking, et al. is the issue of making a brother stumble to show why one should abstain from doing those things at all.
One of the things that always comes up when you speak of tattoos, smoking, drinking, et al. is the issue of making a brother stumble to show why one should abstain from doing those things at all. When one proof texts and reads current culture into the passages, they seem to have a great point and one that kept me under a heavy yoke for some time. What actually ended up happening is that this so called "weaker brother" kept me under his yoke of conscience instead of me being able to seek out Christ and his easy yoke and burden that is light. I kept trying to refrain from certain things because I was always worried that I would make a brother stumble and was so consumed by this, my life was more about the weaker brother and his issues than the glorifying of God in my actions and actually loving the weaker brother.
We have extremes here that need to be pointed out. One extreme is like the one mentioned above, where we worry about everything, whether it is sin or not and abstain from it all. The other extreme is we say, "screw the weaker brother" and we do whatever we want without care. Like most orthopraxy, extremes suck and fly in the face of Christ and his cross and, so, we need to find the correct balance and test it to Scripture. I want to do some defining to search out how we should live within the context of the weaker brother and what it means to make him stumble.
First, What is a "Weaker Brother"?
We find the main passages concerning the weaker brother in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 and also in Romans 14. The weaker brother is the one who wishes to abstain from certain things. They are not the mature in the body, but they are the weak needing care. These people would be those who abstain from things that are not sinful, such as smoking, drinking alcohol, getting tattoos and of course eating meat sacrificed to idols. But, if you know the context of 1 Corinthians 8, 10 and Romans 14 we are not speaking of people who have merely been told that these things were sinful, but have a deep bond that ties the conscience to them. The weaker brother would be someone who has been addicted to smoking or alcohol, or who has a family history of addiction to these things. The weaker brother would be someone who came from a tribe who used to tattoo themselves for the sake of their pagan gods. The weaker brother is one who was in an idolatrous nation that sacrificed meat to gods for worship. These things are deeply entrenched in who they are and what they are about. These things identify them with the "old self."
The weaker brother is NOT someone who has issue with these things because of their culture and how they were brought up. One is not a mere weaker brother because they have always been taught that smoking is a sin or that drinking alcohol is a sin. Paul goes much deeper than this and is found when he uses the term to "destroy" the weaker brother (which we will handle later).
Paul and Jerusalem Council are dealing with a much deeper issue than someone not liking meat sacrificed to idols, they were dealing with an issue that was deeply ingrained in the people that practiced idolatry in a way that was demonic and part of every day life that associated one with the devil. Again, it would be the same as getting a tattoo for the dead in Leviticus 19:28 to worship some pagan deity. This was binding on the conscience, not because it was "odd" to them, or they were uncomfortable with it, but they were dealing with demonic opposition and something that identified them with their old self when their father was the devil.
So, the weaker brother is not merely some nutcase that wants you to abstain from something they don't like, the weaker brother is someone who is coming from an old life in sin, that is dealing with those things associated directly with their sin. Again, think of pagan worship in sacrifices when thinking of 1 Corinthians 8,10 and Romans 14.
Making the Weaker Brother Stumble
Now that we see what is means to be a weaker brother, we need to look at making that brother stumble. This term stumble is used almost synonymously with Paul using the term "destroy". Paul isn't speaking of making someone look at you in a light that is odd. It isn't making someone uncomfortable, but it is literally making them stumble into sin. It would be like you handing someone a beer that you know is an alcoholic and telling them to drink. You, in your freedom, have made the weaker brother stumble or have destroyed them. The thought is putting something (a rock) in the road that they are walking on so that they will trip and severely hurt themselves.
People use this for all sorts of things, as though we must have a swivel on our heads to make sure people don't look at us and think we are sinning. This isn't what Paul is speaking on. If this is the case, then Jesus was a sinner. He did things all the time that made people think he was a sinner, but he didn't make them sin. Think of the Pharisees of those that wear suits to church, don't drink, don't smoke, don't play cards, don't watch certain movies, listen to certain music. They do this so that they "will not make someone stumble", but in reality are showing that your sanctification and righteousness comes in what you don't do instead of whom you trust in. Jesus was not for this. What is interesting is that the term "stumble" can be both positive and negative. You can make someone stumble into sin, or make them stumble into righteousness.
"See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame."Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, "The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone,"and, "A stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall."They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.
1 Peter 2:6-8
This is the point that no one actually brings up. If someone is trying to be self righteous in their abstention, the best thing you can do is be a stumbling block to them so that they can see that Christ is the corner stone of their faith, not their abstention for self righteousness. This brother, that abstains for the sake of self righteousness (which none of them will admit) is not the weaker brother, but the prideful brother that needs to be shown their sinful acts. This is why Jesus didn't care if he drank in public, ate with the sinners and loved the hookers. He did it partly to show the self righteous Pharisees their stupidity. We find further evidence of this when Peter has his vision and then eats with the Gentiles. Notice what the self righteous Jews do.
So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, "You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them."
Acts 11:2
Did Peter then decide to abstain from eating with them? No, he corrected their self righteous thoughts by telling them the vision of God and using this an opportunity to show the gospel to them. Here is the key: someone who loves Jesus and not their self righteous deeds will react to this by not condemning the brother living in his freedom but will praise God.
When they heard this, they had no further objections and praised God, saying, "So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life."
Acts 11:18
Could this have been a stone of stumbling for these Jews? Yes. Did Peter refrain, or teach? He taught. Their reaction is an insight to their heart towards the love of God. They reject their self righteousness and cling to their new found Saviour.
So, Now What?
How are we to handle this then? You will notice that Paul has a huge point that he makes when speaking of refraining, and it does not mean that he will refrain always, only when he is knowingly among those whom bears a conscience against meat sacrificed to idols. People like to use Paul's hyperbolic term to bear witness against this when Paul says, "Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble." Paul is using this in speaking to someone he is directly in relationship with at all times, not for the sake of believers out there somewhere who have issues with this. Meaning, if Timothy had issues with this, Paul would never eat meat in fellowship with Timothy. He doesn't mean, he will literally never touch meat again. We see this clearly in the following:
If some unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience. But if anyone says to you, "This has been offered in sacrifice," then do not eat it, both for the sake of the man who told you and for conscience' sake — the other man's conscience, I mean, not yours. For why should my freedom be judged by another's conscience? If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for? So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:27-31
Paul states to enjoy your freedom, but to refrain when among someone who has a conscience against something. So, if I am going to a nation of tribes who once used tattoos to worship their god, I will cover up my tattoos. I will do this because this is something that is personal to them and hard for them to take. I will also cover up my tattoos if I go into a home where I know tattoos used to be a way for the person to sin against God in rebellion and they are trying to refrain from such things. I do this with those I KNOWINGLY have deep issues with certain things that is related and identified to their old life of sin. So is the case with having a vegan over to my house, an alcoholic or someone who was addicted to smoking.
But, it doesn't stop here. You don't just refrain when you see these people, but you take the opportunity to teach them. You must teach the weaker, and not allow them to "turn you" into their weaker conscience. This was huge for the ministry of Christ. He was the one teaching the weaker, the weaker were not teaching him to turn to their ways. So, we should deal with the gospel with these people and love and aid them to the grace and freedom found at the cross.
Refrain out of love and teach out of love so that they may be won to the victory of the cross. There is a balance here. But, to throw out the "you might make a brother stumble" has become another way to control the actions of others to make them think they are more righteous. This is sin and contrary to the gospel. Also, those who freely do whatever they want without taking consideration of the TRUE weaker brother and don't take the opportunity to teach them in word and action what the Gospel is truly about, also sin.
We must live and teach the gospel to others without allowing them to bound up our actions so that we find the gospel as a restrictive gospel instead of a freeing one.
"Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light."
Matthew 11:29-30
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Cross-posted from Seth's former personal blog.
How to Cultivate Fresh Faith in the Gospel
Editor's Note: Adapted from Jonathan Dodson's newly revised Gospel Centered Discipleship. There are also discussion questions for the book now available as a free download from Crossway.
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There are times old, memorized Bible promises just don’t help me trust Jesus. I recite them in the face of temptation, but nothing. No power, no belief, no victory. Is this because Jesus isn’t trustworthy? After all, “All the promises of God are ‘Yes’ and ‘Amen’ in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor 1:20). Why aren’t they “amen-ed” in my heart in the face of temptation of dispair? Is there something wrong with my Bible? Or maybe Jesus only occasionally makes good on his promises? That, of course, contradicts God’s Word, and we must always interpret the Bible in light of the rest of the Bible. No, Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He is always trustworthy and his promises are always true. The problem is with my faith. I am like the centurion who cried: “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). In those moments, my faith is temporarily stuck in something other than Jesus. When the truth of God’s promises is set before me, for some reason, my faith doesn’t seize upon it. In those moments, we need fresh faith in the gospel.
How can we cultivate fresh faith in the gospel?
Spirit-led Bible Reading
In order to cultivate fresh faith in the gospel, Puritan pastor and theologian John Owen recommends we return to prayer… but perhaps not as you usually pray. Owen suggests if we consider the Spirit’s working in our hearts by prayer, we may understand much of his working upon our hearts by grace. He is saying that prayerful communion with the Spirit can lead to grace-based transformation of our hearts. How, then should we pray? Owen recommends we pray to the Spirit for three things:
- Insight into God’s promises
- Experience of our need
- Creation of desire
When reading God’s word, all too often we assume we can gain insight by ourselves, neglect to experience our need, and are too proud to ask for God to create desire for him. What if, whenever we read the Bible, we began to talk to the Holy Spirit? What if we asked from help from the divine Helper given to guide us into truth (John 14:16)? The Spirit wants to help us in our reading, experiencing, and desiring before the face of God. He hovers over the deep, ready to disclose the will and presence of God to us (1 Cor 2). He loves to rivet our affection upon the risen Christ. So how should we pray to him?
Whenever you are reading the Bible and feel like you aren’t getting anything out of it, pause to ask the Spirit for insight into God’s promises. What if you paused and asked him: “Lord, you have been given to us so that we can understand all the things freely given to us by God. Will you give me insight into God’s Word right now?” Now, insight isn’t enough. Unregenerate scholars have lots of insight into God’s Word. I’m willing to bet that you have gained an insight in Scripture but not known how to respond? What if, instead of trying to “figure out application” on our own, we asked the Spirit to give us an experience of our need? What if you paused to ask him: “Lord, who knows the heart of man like the Spirit of God, will you help me to experience my specific need for right now?” Perhaps the Spirit will lead you to respond by rejoicing, repenting, interceding, or obeying.
Finally, have you ever read with insight, known your need, but felt no desire to respond to God? You know what to do but you’re flat. Hollow. Cold. Don’t move on or assume you will have the proper response. Pause and plead with the Spirit: “Lord, forgive me for my lack of desire, and create fresh, new desire in me to respond to you.” Then, wait and respond. In order to cultivate fresh faith in the gospel, I first recommend Spirit-led Bible reading. Make a habit of asking the Spirit to give you: Insight into his promises, an experience of your need, and to create desire to respond to God. Approach God’s Word with God’s Spirit. Plead for the lightening of the Spirit while carrying the rod of his Word. Ask the Spirit for these three things to revive an indifferent heart.
Do Gospel Homework!
As you read God’s Word, take confidence that the Spirit longs to give you fresh faith in God’s promises. Now, take that faith in a particular promise and consider how the gospel promises something better than whatever the temptation is promising. Prepare for moments of temptation by doing gospel homework. Gospel homework is a lot more fun that it sounds! When reading the Bible, look for promises of grace to rebuff the promises of sin you find so enticing. Look for the Lord’s instruction regarding a particular temptation. Develop a practice of identifying the promises of sin and line them up against the promises of Christ. Here are few examples:
Sexual Lust: the fight for true intimacy
Instead of trusting sexual lust for intimacy, trust God for true intimacy: “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). When you are tempted to lust, turn to God’s promise for true intimacy, to see God and be ravished with him in Jesus.
- Lust says: “Long for what you cannot have and you will be happy.”
- The Gospel says: “Rejoice in what you do have, in Jesus, and you will be truly happy.”
Vanity: the fight for true worth
Instead of relying on vanity for worth, consider the beauty of God: “What we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3). When you are tempted to find your worth in your appearance, turn to God’s beauty and rest in the beauty you have in him.
- Vanity says: “Perform beautifully and you will have worth.”
- The Gospel says: “Jesus performed beautifully for you; therefore, you have never-ending worth.”
Pride: the fight for true confidence
Instead of trusting in compliments for confidence, believe that your sufficiency comes from God: “Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, butour sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent” (2 Cor. 3:4-6).
- Pride says: “Find and cherish compliments and then you will be confident.”
- The Gospel says: “Your confidence comes, not from your sufficiency, but from God who has made you sufficient in Jesus.”
Get in the habit of comparing the promises of sin to the promises of the gospel. I have found it incredibly helpful to write down a sin promise next to a gospel promise in order to see the staggering difference between the two. When you identify the sin promise, it forces you to search the Scriptures for how the gospel offers a better promise. There’s something about seeing the futility of sin next to the beauty of Christ. Make a habit of doing gospel homework and looking for grace in God’s promises. Memorize the answers. Quote them to temptation. Write them on your heart. Most importantly, plead with the Spirit for fresh faith in gospel promises.
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Jonathan K. Dodson (MDiv; ThM) serves as a pastor of Austin City Life in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Gospel-Centered Discipleship and has written articles in numerous blogs and journals such as The Resurgence, The Journal of Biblical Counseling, and Boundless. 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
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For more information on cultivating fresh faith in the gospel, check out Jonathan Dodson’s Unbelievable Gospel.
For more free articles on missional living read: Invite & Invest to Make Disciples by Greg Gibson, Theology is for Everyone by David Fairchild, and The Gospel & Our Neighbors by Alvin Reid.
Evangelical Realism
Colorado wildfires consumed inhabited acreage like the ground was covered with lighter fluid earlier this summer, and a then guy opened fire in a full suburban Denver movie theater. Tragedies are to be expected in a world east of Eden. Saying so is not calloused. It is realism—biblical realism. And yet realism is a thing that must be handled with care when reality is particularly harsh. This is not a scientifically verified opinion, but I gather from making my way in the world with others that most people don’t “do” the harsher realities of life well, for many reasons. That the default mode of many in the Aurora movie theater was to assume at first the shooter was some kind of actor is only a small proof of the overall percentage. The shooting, even as it really happened, seemed surreal. What does this say? It says most of us are in but not of reality.
Frankly, this aggravates most thinking Christians, similar to how the general population’s preference for portliness aggravates the disciplined nutritionist. But if the nutritionist chooses to denounce American eating habits amid the Tuesday evening crowd at Golden Corral, taking her stand for dietary righteousness between diners’ second visits to the chocolate waterfall and cotton candy machines, she’s seen to be spoiling the pig-out. Likewise, if the Christian’s response to a nationally attuned tragedy is to scold the American public for their blinkeredness regarding fallenness—You’re shocked this happens? This is the stuff of a world in rebellion against God, people!—we’re seen to be discourteous, insensitive, and harsh, leveraging the nation’s grief in order to make an ontological point.
Everyday Evil
Yes, this stuff does happen in a world in rebellion against God. Just so. The marvel, really, is that it doesn’t happen more regularly. I think of John Piper’s NPR interview some years ago after a tsunami devastated parts of South Asia. He handled that harsh reality with great care. After establishing a perimeter of gospel theodicy for why the world is subject to various travails and hemorrhage, and that God subjected Himself to it personally in the sufferings of Jesus, Piper said (with Luke 13 in mind) that every such occurrence of tragedy in the world is a call to repentance, a repentance he practiced too. The comfort is found in the call. God gives grace to the humble.
Other Christian leaders have spoken to Aurora kinds of reality with similar incisiveness. That will continue. It’s needed every time we stare at carnage on TV screens with mouths agape. A less than considerate realism seizes the moment to say, So you want God to stop that evil, but not your own little, everyday evil?
That’s true, of course, and a powerful apologetic. It has a place in discussion. It gets people inside their assumptions, something Jesus mastered. People do indeed assume themselves to be kinder and more merciful than God.
Evangelical Timing
But there is a pace and timing to theodicy. In our what’s-your-reaction-to-this society, too many rush in too quickly to say too much. The best thing Job’s friends did was “sat on the ground with him seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great” (Job 2:13). Then when they spoke…see Job 42:7-8.
The best thing we have to say anytime to anyone is the gospel. It speaks to suffering both self-induced and inflicted, shouts victory over every sin and pain and death. Christians need to hear the gospel over and over again because we never quite fully believe we’re that loved and graced by God, so we fall back into gospels of sin management and behavior modification. Likewise, everyone needs to hear over and over again why we need the gospel because we (the world) never quite fully believe we are that bad or bad off before God, so we fall back into idealisms about human nature and our overall security. As Meister Eckhart put it, “God is at home. We are in the far country.”
Whatever festering ideas motivated the theater shooter—perhaps Satan himself took over James Holmes’ psyche—regardless, James Holmes has personally participated in the Edenic rebellion of old just as Cole Huffman has. James has done so only more spectacularly and nihilistically than Cole. The scope of his damage in the world is greater than mine, not the fact of being damaging.
The gospel thereby doesn’t leverage realism but level it. It gives me empathy and compassion for victims, for that really could be me too. It gives me patience with questioners, even scorners, for I too once was really blind but now I see. It gives me a renewed revulsion of my own sin when I’m repulsed by another’s, for I too have really hurt and damaged others—and could do a lot more damage still but for God’s grace to me and rule over me.
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Cole Huffman has lived in Memphis with his family since 2003. They are known around town as the "Huffman Party of 7 1/2": wife Lynn, sons Caleb and Colson, and daughters Helen, Holly, and Caley Kate. (The "1/2" is the family dog, Cal.) Cole serves as Senior Pastor of First Evangelical Church and blogs at www.colehuffman.com.
Finding God During the Storm
As Hurricane Isaac churned through the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters debated whether to believe a model that predicted Isaac would come ashore in Texas or a different model that indicated landfall in Florida. Maybe the answer was neither. Over the next several days, Isaac continued to defy both models and crawled ashore across the southeastern coast of Louisiana late on the evening of August 28, 2012, bringing with it an uncharacteristically damaging storm surge for a hurricane with only 80 mile per hour winds. In some places around New Orleans, the storm surge associated with Isaac reached 12 feet, rivaling that of Hurricane Katrina. Although final counts have yet to be completed, Isaac has caused at least seven deaths in the United States, twenty-nine more in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and potentially up to $1.5 billion in damage. As people enjoy pointing out, meteorologists have a notoriously difficult time making accurate forecasts of hurricanes. Forecasting and modeling the weather is difficult because of the overwhelming complexity of the atmosphere and its sensitivity to small changes. Being aware of this complexity challenges us to stand in greater awe of the Creator. With Isaac fresh in our memories, we would be remiss to not take this opportunity to reflect on hurricanes and weather modeling and seek to learn about our God. At its root, being aware of our inability to understand, predict, and forecast the weather moves us to greater amazement of the unsearchable riches of Christ.
Uncertainty & The Meteorologist
Before we can begin to perceive how the uncertainties of forecasting and modeling point us to God, we have to understand a little bit about the atmosphere and the way it works. To help give concrete expression to an invisible atmosphere, it might help to picture it as a supremely thin liquid that cannot be felt. It is made up of predominantly nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (20%) and many other trace elements. These particles interact in much the same way water molecules interact with one another in a bathtub, a river, or the ocean, forming eddies, currents, and waves.
If we want to accurately predict how all of these different atmospheric molecules are going to interact - forming the eddies, currents, and waves that we know as high and low pressure, cold fronts, warm fronts, and storms - then we have to first understand that the interaction of these particles is mind-bogglingly complex. Most people are familiar with the idea of the butterfly effect - that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will have profound effects on weather around the world.
Although it would be grandstanding to say that a butterfly flapping its wings affected whether Isaac ended up in Texas, Louisiana, or Florida, it does turn out that even imperceptibly small differences in the state of the atmosphere at one time will have significant effects on weather later on. This in turn means that even imperceptibly small errors in observations and data that we feed into models can create vastly different outcomes. In addition, processes that we do not yet understand play a large role in the intensification of hurricanes. Because of this, meteorologists attempt to analyze and forecast using imperfect data and imperfect models, making imperfect forecasts, and getting made fun of by people around the world.
This doesn’t mean that meteorologists haven’t made huge strides in improving forecasts. In 1922, Lewis Fry Richardson made the first attempt at making a 6-hour forecast for two cities in Germany using mathematical methods developed 15 years prior. Unfortunately, his 6-hour forecast took him over six weeks to calculate by hand and even then it was magnificently wrong. This basically put to rest the concept of making mathematical predictions of the weather until computers came along.
Carl Rossby, using early computers, made the first useful numerical weather forecast in 1954. By the 1960s, several countries were running their own models to make predictions, and by 1974, the first model to cover the entire globe was in use. With ever-increasing computer power, increased ability to collect observations of the atmosphere through satellite and other means, and algorithms developed to more accurately incorporate the data into computer models, forecasts of all types of weather from many weather agencies improved exponentially between 1970 and today. The National Hurricane Center is no exception to this improvement. In 1970, the average error of a 3-day position forecast for a hurricane was 455 miles. Today, it is 105 miles. Although this is over a 75% improvement, even a 105 mile error in a forecast can cause major problems for evacuation decisions and for coastal residents.
God's Complex Creation
We will continue to make improvements in our predictions of hurricanes, but we will always be limited by the sheer complexity and chaotic nature of the atmosphere. So when faced with bad forecasts, devastation, and uncertainty, how can we begin to glean eternal truths about our God instead of criticizing our favorite weatherman?
Difficulty in forecasting weather should serve to remind us that our God is all-powerful, all-seeing, and all-creative. Remember that forecasting is difficult because the atmosphere is a complex, vast thing. Yet our God is the Creator of this unimaginably complex atmosphere. More than that, he created the entire universe without even breaking a sweat.
The psalmist says that “by the word of the LORD the heavens were made and by the breath of his mouth all their host” (Psalm 33:6). Even more, Christ “upholds the universe by the word of his power.” How much more should we stand in awe of the Creator of the universe when we struggle to even understand the atmosphere that he made and sustains so effortlessly?
We are created to experience emotional reactions to and have our affections stirred by the beauty and power of nature exhibited in hurricanes, tornadoes, sunsets, and numerous other destructive and non-destructive natural phenomena. However, to let our awe and wonder rest on the phenomena itself is short-sighted and a distortion of reality. It is like sitting down to listen to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play Beethoven’s 5th symphony, but forgetting to appreciate Beethoven’s skill as a composer. Letting your affections, awe and wonder rest on the power and majesty of a hurricane is like admiring the flight of a 500-foot home run without being awed by the person who hit the ball.
Appreciating the power, majesty, and unpredictability of a hurricane without standing in complete awe of the God who created the hurricane, the whole earth, and universe surrounding it simply by the Word of his mouth is myopic. Be reminded that the beauty, majesty, and power we see is but a shadow and foretaste of the beauty, majesty, and power of God.
Certainty & God
In addition to an all-powerful God, we can know that we rest in the arms of a sovereign God, even when hurricanes and other natural disasters seem capricious and random. It often seems that certain areas receive a disproportionately large share of major hurricanes and natural disasters. Some of it is geography, some of it is random, some of it is associated with typical large scale atmospheric patterns. Behind all of it, though, is a God who is sovereign. God “will accomplish all [his] purpose[s]” (Isaiah 46:10).
There is nothing capricious, malicious, or unplanned about the working of God in our world and our life. The war has already been won on the cross and we can rest in knowing that God’s desire to show us mercy and saving grace cannot be frustrated or thwarted.
As you watch meteorologists struggle with forecasting a hurricane, be reminded that weather is quickly changing and chaotic. God, however, has revealed himself as unchangeable and faithful to his promises. In Scripture, we are told time and time again that “there is no variation or shadow due to change” in the character of God (James 1:17). This contrast between the changing and the unchanging separates created from Creator. Remember the unchanging character of God. He is the Rock of Ages, and Christ is our cornerstone.
We grieve because of the destructive power of hurricanes. We mourn with those who mourn the loss of family and friends. Hurricanes, despite their beauty, ultimately cause death and destruction. By contrast, our God is grace filled and life giving. Jesus tells us to “come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Paul tells us that Christ, through his death, burial, and resurrection “became a life-giving Spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). When we are faced with death, be reminded to run to the life-giving water that Jesus offers.
So how do we begin to work through a natural disaster like Hurricane Isaac with our community of believers, our neighbors, and our coworkers? Start by recognizing that the unsearchable riches of Christ are far more vast, far more beautiful, and far more worthy of worship and awe than the complexity, beauty, and majesty of a hurricane.
Do not be satisfied to simply stand in awe of the storm. Instead have your affections raised for the Creator of that storm. Know that unlike a hurricane, God is sovereign and unchanging. We are fully secure in his hands. Let us mourn with those who mourn, but let us set our sights on our Savior, the Rock of Ages. His purposes are higher than our purposes, his ways are higher than our ways, so take comfort that nothing happens apart from the Word of his mouth nor does anything happen over which he is not sovereign. In the midst of a tragedy that seems unpredictable, unknowable, and destructive, run to the unchanging, grace-filled, and life-giving arms of the Savior.
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Matt Rigney is husband to Kari and father to Eva. He is a former research meteorologist for NASA and physicist for the United States Army specializing in modeling and simulation. Currently, he is completing a church planting residency at Austin City Life in Austin, Texas.
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For more resources on proclaiming the truths of God over all creation, check out Tony Merida's Proclaiming Jesus.
For more free articles on how God challenges our assumptions, read: When is the Gospel not Good News? by Stuart McCormack, Spiritual Strength Training by David Murray, and The Unqualified Disciple by Lindsay Fooshee.
Big Book Giveaway (Round 2) WINNERS
Thank you all for entering! It's a great blessing to be able to provide resources with the help of Crossway (Round 1) and now Broadman and Holman.
Thank you all for entering! It's a great blessing to be able to provide resources with the help of Crossway (Round 1) and now Broadman and Holman.
THE WINNERS:
- The HCSB Study Bible... Thomas Perry!
- The Mission of God Study Bible... Josh Evans!
- Gospel and Embracing Obscurity... Barry Wallace!
- The Church and Tribal Church... Michael Gerald!
- Creation Restored and Seven Daily Sins... Wes Lauderback!
Watch out for more giveaways! We're always working to offer free, gospel-centered resources to our friends.
Is the Bible Blind to Womanly Beauty?
Don’t know if you’ve followed this, but Tim Challies kicked up a bit of an Internet storm recently when he helpfully suggested that it was a good thing for Christian wives to give attention to their appearances for the betterment of their husbands. He was responding to a post a few months ago by blogger Rachel Held Evans, who registered disagreement with Challies’s post. In response to Evans, Southern Seminary professor Mary Kassian suggested something of a middle way in which womanly attractiveness matters but only as a reflection of God’s far more lustrous beauty. I found the discussion interesting and worthwhile not because this is a matter of outsized theological importance but because it relates closely to issues surrounding men, marriage, and beauty, all topics that interest me. Kassian’s theocentric rendering of womanly beauty jibes with material I published with Douglas Sweeney in the book Jonathan Edwards on Beauty (Moody, 2010), part of the five-volume Essential Edwards Collection. Edwards was an aesthetician if there ever was one. Wherever he saw earthly beauty he saw a reflection of God, who was not only beautiful but was beauty himself.
Here’s a snatch from the book which quotes Edwards’s notebook on “types” (page 49-50 of JEOB):
There are some types of divine things, both in Scripture and also in the works of nature and constitution of the world, that are much more lively than others. Everything seems to aim that way; and in some things the image is very lively, in others less lively, in others the image but faint and the resemblance in but few particulars with many things wherein there is a dissimilitude. God has ordered things in this respect much as he has in the natural world. He hath made man the head and end of this lower creation; and there are innumerable creatures that have some image of what is in men, but in an infinite variety of degrees. Animals have much more of a resemblance of what is in men than plants, plants much more than things inanimate.
(Works 11, 114)
One day, the pastor took a walk that unfolded the way natural beauty reflects spiritual beauty (pp. 41-42 of JEOB):
God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon, for a long time; and so in the daytime, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things: in the meantime, singing forth with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning. Formerly, nothing had been so terrible to me. I used to be a person uncommonly terrified with thunder: and it used to strike me with terror, when I saw a thunderstorm rising. But now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God at the first appearance of a thunderstorm. And used to take the opportunity at such times, to fix myself to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunder: which often times was exceeding entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God. And while I viewed, used to spend my time, as it always seemed natural to me, to sing or chant forth my meditations; to speak my thoughts in soliloquies, and speak with a singing voice. (Works 16, 794)
This material reveals that Edwards felt free to find resonances of a much greater beauty in the eye-catching things of this world. In fact, the pastor-theologian made the case for finding “types” in this world. If we buy Edwards’s argument–and I think we should–then surely we can find images of a greater luster in a flower, a sunset, and the face of a loved one.
I love Edwards’s aesthetics. He has a major place for beauty in his theological-philosophical system, so much so that some view him as the theologian par excellence of beauty. By the way, this is part of why he is so relevant for today. We live in an image-obsessed culture (part of the problem Evans rightly decries), and we can use Edwards to point people to a better way, a far more fulsome and healthy vision of attractiveness than one can find in the ambient culture.
The Bible, by the way, has much to say about physical beauty, contrary to what many think. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was beautiful (Gen. 12:11); Rachel was beautiful “in form and appearance” (Genesis 29:17); David “had beautiful eyes and was handsome” (1 Samuel 16:12); Esther had “a beautiful figure and was lovely to look at” (Esther 2:7!); Job’s daughters were the most beautiful of their day (Job 42:15); the man speaking in the Song of Solomon finds his wife “beautiful” to say nothing but the very least; Moses was beautiful as a child (Hebrews 11:23). Beyond all these realities, the Lord, as Edwards knew, is pictured in Scripture as very beauty himself. David wished only to “to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD,” Psalm 27:4. We could go on.
What does this mean? Well, for starters, the biblical authors and figures are not blind to physical beauty. Far from it. They don’t suggest that it is of great importance in itself. That’s clear. Neither, however, do they ignore it, just as we do not ignore it, try or not. We’re all quite conscious of physical beauty. One could say this is because of our genetic wiring, or our consciousness, or perhaps most satisfyingly, our natural understanding of the way earthly attractiveness prefigures God’s magnificence. All of these reasons have credence.
In the context of marriage, this means that it is no bad thing to celebrate one’s attraction to one’s husband or wife. It is in fact a good thing. We should not make the cultural mistake of grounding our spousal love in physical beauty. Anyone who has ever heard a pop song knows how common this is, and how laughable. Those who think that a relationship can stand firm by physical attraction alone clearly have precious little practical experience in actual relationships. Those who are married know that attraction is an important part of marriage–perhaps very important–but that like any covenantal relationship, marriage requires a continual exercise of the will for its flourishing. It is the Christocentric and Christotelic dimensions of marriage that are most significant. Husbands loving wives as Christ sacrificially loved the church, and wives submitting to their husbands as the church submits to Christ in love are the transcendent, indeed transforming, realities of marriage.
But in landing this plane let’s bring our altitude down a bit. Physical attraction matters in a marriage. The Song of Solomon makes this abundantly clear, as any red-faced teen knows in hearing it read in church. No one is suggesting that Christian women should hold themselves up to the (relentlessly airbrushed and digitally edited) cover-girl. It is, however, a good thing for both husband and wife to take the physical dimension of marriage seriously. Men shouldn’t nurse a gut, and women shouldn’t let themselves go. Both should care for the other by devoting a reasonable–and the world’s standards are often unreasonable!–amount of attention to their bodies.
We are not Platonists. We live in bodies. The body is good. God designed the body, manly and womanly, for his glory. He gave sex and attraction and passion to couples for their good and his renown. Marriage in its fullness is to provide the world with a picture of a far greater reality, the devoted loving union of Jesus Christ and his blood-bought church. We do not obsess over our appearances; we do not worry about physical changes over time; we do not obsess over our frames and forms. But we do love one another by caring well for the bodies God has given us. Whatever we do, we seek God’s glory–whether praying in church, church-planting in an unreached land, fixing a leaky faucet, comforting a crying infant, teaching philosophy in a secular college, or running another mile to keep the pounds off (1 Cor. 10:31).
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Cross-posted from Owen's personal blog.
Preaching Today: A Discussion with Jared Wilson and Tony Merida
I have asked two men I highly respect to answer a few questions in hopes of providing a resource and encouragement to men entrusted with preaching the Word of God in our culture.
I have asked a couple of friends to answer a few questions in hopes of providing a resource and encouragement to men entrusted with preaching the Word of God in our culture. The Panel:
Jared Wilson is the lead pastor of Middletown Springs Community Church in Middletown Springs, Vermont and the author of Your Jesus is Too Safe and Gospel Wakefulness, and the forthcoming Gospel Deeps. He also blogs at the popular Gospel-Driven Church and has written Bible study material for LifeWay.
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Tony Merida is the founding pastor of Imago Dei Church in Raleigh, North Carolina and Associate Professor of Preaching at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also the author of Faithful Preaching and Orphanology.
BRANDON: In light of the many aspects of church life (i.e. Bible studies, small groups, age-specific classes/ministries, evangelism, worship through music, etc.), is preaching to the group-at-large from the stage/pulpit the most important? Why or why not?
JARED: I don't know if I would classify it as "most" important, but I'd certainly classify it as indispensable, necessary, and vitally important. The Bible prescribes and we need the Scriptures proclamationally delivered -- with authority, with exposition, with prophetic strength. This can be done one-on-one or in smaller group settings, of course, but we see both under the old covenant and the new covenant the people of God gathered to hear the word of God. Think of Moses' addressing of the people after hearing from God all the way through to Ezra preaching to those gathered in Nehemiah to Jesus' sermons and the addresses of the apostles in the church's court-gatherings. The pattern is not either/or in terms of how the word of God is delivered to believers but both/and, and we have plenty of Scriptural examples of proclamational preaching from one person to a large group, enough to see it as biblically normative and therefore contemporarily necessary.
We have always needed the word of God delivered to us this way, but I think culturally speaking today we need in a peculiar way a pastoral voice under the mantle of God's authority delivering "thus saith the Lord" to us. We are very much drenched in a "did God really say?" society, and some of the ways churches today downplay preaching or turn it into conversational sharing or what-have-you lose the gospel-shape of preaching, which is proclamational and one-directional.
Mark Driscoll has some helpful to things to say on this subject in relation to proclamational pulpit preaching as the "air war" and the day-to-day matters of personal discipleship, fellowship, counseling, and the all-encompassing participation in the mission of God as the "ground war."
TONY: I agree with Jared. We should work to do both “the air war” and “ground war” well. It seems that some (extreme) groups pay little attention to one of these two.
For some, preaching has no place in church life. They think the church should just have dialogue, or groups, or meet in a bar and talk theology. I want to see more emphasis on public proclamation, practicing 1 Tim. 4:13. Public proclamation is patterned for us in Scripture, and public proclamation has the “life-changing-on-the-spot” potential because God saves people through the preaching of the gospel.
On the other hand, there is a group that has such a high view of preaching that they give very little thought to how to do the ground war: how to disciple, train elders, plant churches, reach unreached people groups, care for orphans and widows, etc. Ideally, the church is led from the pulpit with faithful exposition and application of biblical texts, and then ministries are developed and deployed to live out these truths. To do both, public proclamation and practical ministry well, serious attention must be given to both.
BRANDON: Over the course of your ministry, what has been your most consistent focus in regards to how you prepare and ultimately preach a sermon?
TONY: My main focus is that that I want to take the listeners for a swim in the text. I want us to immerse ourselves in Scripture, and my desire is particularly to exalt Jesus as the hero of the Bible – and by extension as the hero of every sermon. I want people to walk away every week and say, “What a great Savior” not “What a great sermon.”
To do this, I use a five step method for preparation that is articulated in Faithful Preaching: (1) study the text, (2) unify the redemptive theme, (3) construct an outline that supports the theme, (4) add the functional elements within each point (explanation, application, illustration), and (5) add an introduction and response.
In terms of mechanics, I want to make sure every sermon is a coherent whole, built around one dominant (redemptive) idea, and then drive that idea through the body of the sermon, pointing people to Jesus.
JARED: I find this very helpful. I think you're right on the money. In particular, I think what is often missing in a lot of preaching and missing in a lot of instruction or shepherding of preaching is the ability to "feel" Scripture. So I like your words on immersion and swimming.
Preaching ought to be exultational, an act of worship on the preacher's part. Many preachers have already discovered that their congregations don't get excited about what their preacher tells them to get excited about but instead about what their preacher is evidently and obviously himself excited about. Our people will start to see how God's proclamational initiative in saving us through Jesus Christ provokes doxological astonishment.
BRANDON: Tony, you are in a unique position in that you teach on preaching in the academic arena. Are there significant benefits to studying preaching academically, or is more of a "born with it or not" gift?
TONY: I begin the first day of Bible Exposition class (the basic preaching class) with a brief talk on “The Making of a Preacher.” I tell them that there seem to be about seven things that shape guys into effective preachers. Most of them involve the work of God and human responsibility, but there are a few important things to learn in an “academic setting.”
- Love for Scripture. I think the Word should drive us to the pulpit, instead of the pulpit driving us to the Word. Good preaching is overflow … an overflow of love for God’s Gospel. Hopefully, in class I can stir up a love for Scripture by the way I handle the Word and speak of the Word, but ultimately, this is a personal dynamic between the student and God.
- Gifts. Obviously, “I can’t put in what God has left out!” Not everyone is gifted to preach. That’s okay; we need guys who are gifted in other areas as well in more priestly and kingly positions.
- Experience. I can’t give students this either, with the exception of a few reps in preaching class. Guys need to be preaching a lot to be effective. Driscoll says in Vintage Church that a guy needs 200-300 sermons before he’s a decent preacher.
- Mentor. I can’t do this either, with the exception of the nine or ten guys that I try to mentor in our elder training program. For some students, these mentors may be from a distance, and for some, they may be a “dead mentor” (ala John Piper and Jonathan Edwards). Preferably, in my opinion, you have all three: life on life mentor, a mentor from a distance, and a dead mentor.
- Models. I really can’t do this in class either, with the exception of showing some sermon videos in class. But I do try to help guide students toward pastoral-theologians that they can learn from, like Jared Wilson.
- Character. This goes with #1, but is a bit different. Here, I’m talking about having a life that reflects a love for Scripture. People need to see the pastor exemplifying his teaching. I can help cultivate love and holiness by emphasizing spiritual disciplines in class, but once again, students must accept responsibility for pursuing God and exemplifying Christ.
- Instruction. Here’s where I try to be of most help to aspiring preachers in class. There are things that students need to learn like: how to exegete a passage of Scripture, how to incorporate biblical theology into expository preaching, how to apply the text in a Gospel-centered manner instead of a moralistic manner, how to preach Christ from the Old Testament, how to prepare a sermon manuscript, prepare a series, look for sermon helps, and on and on. While a seminary is not the only place one could learn these things, it is one place.
With this list, it’s evident that one can’t simply take my preaching class and believe that they’ll become a great preacher. Nope. I can’t promise that at all. I work hard at #7, and help with some of the others, but it’s certainly not all about the classroom. Beyond these matters, I also begin with the caveat that a lot in preaching is “mysterious” and that I can’t explain all the spiritual dynamics involved in preaching. But this list is my humble stab at trying to articulate some of the key things that seem to be present in the lives of effective preachers.
JARED: Tony, you're too kind, but I think I can be extremely helpful especially in providing examples of what *not* to do. ;-)
Love the stuff on "mysterious." We've all heard guys who've been preaching for multiple decades who sound like they're reading a toaster manual. So I think giftedness and personal investment in the text play as big a role in preaching as technical and exegetical know-how. Of course, excellent preachers don't start out excellent and we are all improving over time. But guys with the gift find that muscle getting stronger with use and having better reflexes.
The other side to this, however, is that the power of the gospel that works through the preacher also works in spite of the preacher. And I'm sure we've all experienced examples of our weak, foolish, tired sermon being no hindrance to God's word stirring or changing or convicting or comforting our hearers. We have the privilege of getting better at preaching as we go, but we also have the freedom to know it doesn't ultimately depend on our ability, rhetorical or otherwise.
BRANDON: With the Internet and media outlets that consume our world today, people have more access than ever before to various worldviews and areas of thought. Should apologetics be a large part of preaching in the 21st century?
JARED: I suppose it depends on what you mean by "large part." I think apologetics is important, and some preachers/teachers are more gifted in this area than others. For my part, I don't do a lot of apologetics in my preaching and find it more at home in personal conversations and small group settings. I make some exceptions in sermons -- for instance, I preach the resurrection quite often, but when I preach on it at Easter time, I typically include some historical and logical evidences for Jesus' bodily resurrection, not just to encourage believers in their faith but also because we are more likely to have unbelieving visitors at that time who might find the evidences challenging.
But in general I don't deal in apologetics in my preaching because -- again, speaking *personally* here -- I find myself being led by that into a "let me convince you" kind of mode that I don't find is the primary focus of preaching. I want to proclaim the truth and let the Spirit convince.
But, again, I find apologetics generally helpful and we have used materials from Josh McDowell, Ravi Zacharias, and others in our church and found them helpful. Most recently we had a group studying Tim Keller's *The Reason for God* and they found it both helpful toward their conversations with skeptics and critics -- who can be quite hostile and tenacious in our neck of the woods -- and strengthening of their own faith.
TONY: I think it is very important for preachers to consider the presence of competing worldviews in the audience as they preach. As Keller says, we tend to answer the questions of the people with whom we are talking. And if we are only talking to believers, our preaching will become “ghettoized,” that is, the preacher will tend to address “insiders” only. Few outsiders will show up. But if people hear that a pastor is addressing the questions of skeptics, doubters, and atheists, then they will come – either because they themselves are interested, or because their believing friends will bring them. Keller has really challenged me on this. It doesn’t mean we can’t preach through books of the Bible, or even that we can’t focus on believers; it simply means we need to address some “outsider questions” weekly in our preaching. This requires reading very widely and also intentionally talking with non-believers. Keller says most sermons prepared by seminary students are not any good because they are aimed at other seminary students. I would agree with this, with the exception of those students who are out in the culture talking with people.
The way this works is basically to ask questions as you are working through your text, “what part of this passage would a non-believer reject?” Perhaps this would include something about the presence of warfare in the OT, the idea of wrath, or the exclusivity of the gospel. I think it is very important to address these issues as they appear in the weekly sermon text. Too many pastors (and I am guilty of this) never stop to ask, “What would [insert the skeptic at the coffee shop] not understand or believe about this passage?” Another tip I would give is to address the skeptic in the introduction of the sermon, and to let them know that you are aware of their objections and questions. Mark Dever does this really well. A final note would be to remember to argue appropriately. If you are going to challenge a worldview, you can’t just throw bombs at it. You need to get inside it, understand it, sympathize with it, and then show how it falls flat, and that the gospel is the only answer. You will not connect with the skeptic by misrepresenting their view and spouting “hater-aid.”
None of these ideas require that you totally re-vamp your preaching to do “apologetic preaching,” as much as it means that you prepare your sermon with competing worldviews in mind every week.
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This originally appeared at Brandon's former blog, Modern March.
Spiritual Warfare Prayer
Editor's Note: Two weeks ago GCD received a request from a believer in Ethiopia for biblical teaching on spiritual warfare. My first response was prayer. I ask our readers to join us in praying - as Paul does in Ephesians 3:14-21 - that we might all have the strength to be filled with the fullness of Christ's love, to feel the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Paul's prayer for strength (strength to know Christ's love!) fans the flames of spiritual revival, and this prayer for strength is all the more important when we come under attack from the forces of darkness that are arrayed against us. I've been praying for revival, and I'm doing it knowing what that means to the enemy. I'm praying for revival because we have a victory secure in Christ and because I long to see God's grace renew the lives of the people I love.
As folks here at GCD talked about how best to disciple a new believer in spiritual warfare, Winfield mentioned that Prayer Life has a chapter dedicate to Spiritual Warfare Prayer. To that believer in Ethiopia and to our brothers and sisters around the world, we offer this excerpt. As you read and reflect on the power of prayer, please unite with us in praying that we might all comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ's love, for in this corporate prayer lies both the surety of our salvation and the power to dispel the forces of evil.
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“If you would endeavor, like men of courage, to stand in the battle, surely we would feel the favorable assistance of God from Heaven. For who He giveth us occasion to fight, to the end we may get the victory, is ready succor those that fight manfully, and do trust in His grace.” -Thomas A Kempis
One of the most important aspects of prayer is spiritual warfare. The Bible tells us that we are in the midst of a spiritual battle, and our advisory the devil is like a roaring lion seeking to destroy our lives. Paul says, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12). Satan and his forces of darkness are trying to destroy your life, and it is imperative that we learn to pray against these forces of darkness in order to gain victory in our lives. There are several things that the Bible tells us about spiritual warfare.
What the Bible Says About Spiritual Warfare
- We are in a real spiritual battle (2 Corinthians. 10:4; 1 Timothy 1:18)
- We are to resist the devil and he will flee from us (James 4:7; 1 Peter 5:9)
- We are to take authority over powers of darkness (Matthew 16:19)
- We are to cast out demons (Mark 16:17)
- We are to use spiritual weapons to overcome darkness (2 Corinthians 10:4; Ephesians 6:10-20)
The Bible tells us about great individuals who were victorious in spiritual warfare, all of which are lessons for us today. The battle is either won or lost on the mountaintop in prayer. Throughout the Bible, the mountain is a symbol of prayer and a place to meet with God. Jesus regularly went to the mountains to pray, Elijah called down fire on the mountain, and Moses met with God on the mountaintop.
In Exodus chapter 17, Israel fought against the Amalekites in Rephidim. Moses went on top of the mountain to intercede for the people who were fighting the battle below. Whenever his hands were lifted up, Israel would prevail, but when his hands grew tired and fell down the Amalekites would prevail. It is the same way in our lives, whenever we lift our hands in prayer we will prevail, but when we stop praying we lose the victory. We need to follow Moses example of praying for victory over the forces of darkness on the mountaintop. Don’t grow weary in prayer, but allow the Lord to help you pray for victory in every area of your life.
In 2 Chronicles 20, King Jehoshaphat shows us how to prepare for spiritual warfare. When the great forces of Moab and Amon came to battle against Israel, Jehoshaphat proclaimed a fast in the land. 2 Chronicles 20:4 says, “Judah gathered together to ask help from the Lord.” The first thing you need to do when you are in spiritual warfare is to ask help from the Lord. The Lord reminded them, “Do not be afraid nor dismayed because of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God’s.” (2 Chronicles 20:15). God wants to fight our battles for us. All we have to do is go to Him in prayer and ask for His help.
Steps to Spiritual Warfare
1. Pray Always
Paul tells us to “pray always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance” (Ephesians 6:12). The first step to spiritual warfare is to pray always. This means that we must develop a lifestyle of prayer. Even when we aren’t praying out loud we can still be in a state of union and intimacy with the Lord.
2. Be Watchful
Paul goes on to say that we need to be watchful. This means that we must have an awareness of what is going on around us spiritually. It also means to be sleepless, or wakeful. God calls us to be watchmen and watchwomen who will guard against the devil. In the Bible, a watchman would stay awake at night to make sure that the enemy didn’t attack while everyone was sleeping. It is our responsibility to be watchful in prayer.
3. Have Perseverance
Our prayers should be made with all perseverance! God doesn’t like weak, powerless prayers; rather He desires for us to persevere in prayer. James tells us, “The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much” (James 5:16). The word fervent is energeo, which means energy. We need to be fervent and energetic in our prayer life. Don’t give up until your prayer is answered!
4. Pray in the Spirit
The only way that our prayers will ever have power is if they are in the Spirit. The Spirit intercedes for us and reveals the will of God to us (Romans 8:26). The Holy Spirit gives fire to the incense of our prayer. Jude says that we should build ourselves in the most holy faith by praying in the Spirit. (Jude 20). The Spirit will build us up, guide us in truth, and give us the strength to pray as we should pray. Let the Holy Spirit come and give you the power to pray today.
Reflection Questions
- What are several of the things that the Bible tells us about spiritual warfare?
- What can we learn from the stories of Moses and Jehoshaphat?
- How do their stories apply to your current situation?
- Take some time to discuss the steps of spiritual warfare from Ephesians 6:12.
- What does it mean to pray at all times? Is this possible?
- What does it mean to be watchful in prayer?
- How do we pray in the Spirit? In what ways does the Spirit help us pray?
Concluding Prayer
Lord, teach us to how to use our prayer in spiritual warfare. Even though there is a battle raging between the forces of darkness and the forces of light, we know that You oh Lord are all mighty, all powerful, and all knowing. We acknowledge that you are in complete control over all things in our life. Strengthen our hearts to be strong and grow not weary in prayer. In your name we pray. Amen.
Paul's Email to Ephesus
Paul was in prison in Rome when he wrote to the church at Ephesus:
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. - Ephesians 2:13
I am in my home office in Austin as I write this. If these words reach you online, it will only be through a separation of space, time, culture—maybe even language. I feel compelled to ask what do what do Paul's letters have to do with our emails? How does our understanding of these epistles impact the way we email, tweet, and correspond online?
One parallel is the technological context. Rome had built roads and a hospitality culture—new traditions and rules protecting travellers. Without these new technologies and protocols, Paul couldn’t have reached Ephesus as a church planter. He couldn’t have even written a letter to the church at Ephesus.
The same is true of the Internet. It has opened up communication possibilities that are absolutely revolutionary. At this point, to say that the potential for the spread of the gospel online is unprecedented sounds simply cliché. No brainer. In a matter of months after the launch of GCD, we were reaching people in the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Uganda, Nigeria, and Australia.
In fact, you are no doubt far, far away from me as you read this—on the opposite side of the globe. When you walk out to your day what could possibly tie us together? Paul was in prison—on the opposite side of the Roman Empire. What nearness could he know of a community in Ephesus? And if there is such a potential for the spread of the gospel online, why isn’t it sparking revival?
The answers lie in our various degrees of separation. More than the physical distance, our spiritual brokenness crackles beneath the surface of every human relationship, scrambling signals and preventing clear communication with both my neighbor next-door and my Facebook friends thousands of miles away. If these separations exist in any human relationship, what spiritual obstacles stymie the full communication of the gospel online? What sins creep into our email and status updates? How does the gospel change the way we use the Internet?
iSin
According to iCrazy, a recent Newsweek cover story by Tony Dokoupil the average teen processes 3,700 texts a month. 80% of us bring our laptops on vacation so we can work. (Yes, I’m a statistic, too.)
Technology has crept unquestioned into our homes. After interviewing more than 450 people, MIT psychologist and author, Sherry Turkle reported to the American Psychological Association, “A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother.” Honestly, this breaks my heart because I too am guilty of passing on my online anxiety to my son.
Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine says, “I’ve seen plenty of patients who have no history of addictive behavior—or substance abuse of any kind—become addicted via the Internet and these other technologies.”
In fact when the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is released next year, “Internet Addiction Disorder” will be included in the appendix for further study.
I’m something of a psychology agnostic. I’m suspicious of any science that has historically electrocuted the mentally ill for treatment. I prefer phenomenology. Consciousness is a phenomenon much like gravity or the photoelectric effect—irreducible in the face of scientific method. Understand, I’m not denying that humans have an emotional “inner life.” I’m denying our emotional/psychological singularity. Being created in God’s image means we are made for, by, and in community, but these connections are severed and distorted by the Fall.
By extension, when it comes to questions of our iSanity, I’d say the problem is a sin problem. It isn’t a broken relationship with our individual “psyche.” It’s a breakdown between us and God.
Crazy Busy
Author and cartoonist, Tim Kreider, recently posted about the Busy Trap for the New York Times blog, writing: “If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are… Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
Underneath this business—and this is something I am incredibly guilty of—is the sin of pride and self-importance. Who needs God when they’ve got 900,000 Twitter followers? Look at my inbox. I’m corresponding with the big players. So how can I possibly schedule time for prayer? Better put it in the day planner or its forgotten. Same with my family and friends.
<ERROR: Identity Switch>
A few weeks ago my laptop froze while I was switching between my personal Facebook page and the GCD page. The limbo address read: Identity Switch. Heaven forbid a hiccup in the barrier between my two universes: Ben Roberts Austin hipster and Ben Roberts weird Christian website editor.
The problem with all our virtual identities is the risk of buying the lie of the virtual self and in turn perpetuating the falsehood. I am none of my online identities. There is a foundational fiction that underscores any interaction online, but we are becoming increasingly adept at suspending our disbelief of this falsehood.
The risk of allowing any virtual identity to override our true identity in Christ is enormous. Especially when most Americans spend at least eight hours a day staring at a screen—more time than we spend on any other activity including sleeping.
Ease of Access
Sometimes as I struggle to interact authentically online, the questions just won’t stop coming: How do we keep status updates, emails, and social networks from eroding our real identity? Is it reasonable to ask that we maintain a sense of our true self in an artificial information-based environment? How does this effect the way we interact with each other as believers in spiritual community? Ack! When, the questions become to much, I just have to thank the Lord for the internet’s free and easy selection of far out 1960’s Jesus music.
But I’m learning we need to question everything if only for the inconvenience of it! The problem is convenience quickly becomes a virtue online. How easy is it for me to reply to this email? Does it need a star? How many starred emails can sit in my inbox needing attention before I lose my head? More importantly is pinkjam12@jamchronicle.com a human being worthy of my respect?
I suspect part of the appeal of our online friendships is the ease with which we can write someone off. Unfriend. Unfollow. No problem. Forget loving-kindness. Forget patience. That simply doesn’t increase my Twitter following.
Kill Shot
I could go on and on, listing the increased ease of sin that attends on our increased ease of information exchange, but it all trends toward one terrible abyss. Last month one of my coworkers made the news. His daughter had an argument with her friend online. The differences flared-up and quickly spiraled out of control. So his daughter’s former friend submitted a plea to have his daughter killed in exchange for elicit photos. She posted their address and phone number and personal info on a blog, and within minutes they were receiving threatening phone calls from other states. The police were called in to investigate, and now the girl faces up to thirty years in prison for numerous criminal charges.
When we are too busy to care, when our identities and the identities of others are founded on virtuality not reality, when it's easy to mute any sense of mutual respect, then anger tears loose of its cage, and suddenly we’re on an online rampage, deathmatch-style. The consequences can be devastating to our lives and souls, but according to Christ's teaching, there's no difference in God's eyes between this criminal behavior and writing an angry email.
eVangelism
How can we hope to rebalance this slippery slope of online existence? What truth or righteousness can be found in an environment constructed from deceit and brokenness?
It ain’t too pretty a picture. If we try to rectify these fractures ourselves, we will fail. If we look for honesty and moral guidance from a machine, we move deeper into the web of delusion, depression, and outrage. For all it’s false hope of “global village,” the Internet is just as fallen and messed-up as anything else in this world. Perhaps, even more so because all our awesome devices and apps make the only solution appear primitive and unimaginably hairball. I’m talking about the blood of Christ.
It is only by the blood of Christ that those who are far off can become near and immediate to us. It is only by a loving Son of the Living God killed for our sins that we can seek to renew our online relationships. There’s nothing cool, convenient, or slick about it. For this reason, I take Sundays offline. I need a day to rest in what God is doing in folks' lives through GCD. I keep a journal and write thank you notes. I spend time with my family and spiritual community. Time offline reorients us toward what's ultimate and reunites us with real fellowship.
I’m learning to pray over every email I write. I’m learning to let Christ pound my heart back into shape to find the real person on the other end of the information vortex. They’re there, and they need to know Christ just as badly I as do.
I urge followers of Christ to re-evaluate the way they email and tweet. Paul took great pains to pursue Christ in every letter he wrote. He wrestled with sin in his correspondence. In his letters, we find deep mysteries, powerful admonitions, and graceful words of healing to scattered people, people broken and badly in need of real community—in need of Christ.
Can you imagine the healing that could spread through the Internet if we purposed to pursue Christ more intentionally in our social media contacts and emails? I’ll be the first to admit it was initially so weird, but the leaders of GCD are learning to pray with each other on Google Hangout. Yes, there are barriers, but the Holy Spirit can overcome them.
Paul had these same spiritual divisions in mind when he continued his letter to Ephesus:
For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility... - Ephesians 2:14
I don’t always get my online correspondence right (just the other day, I got into a hurry and called Seth McBee “Josh” in an email for some stupid reason), but with Christ I have been given a powerful connection to believers everywhere—a connection that brings those people once far off right into my living room. It’s not the Internet. It’s the forgiveness and unbreakable bonds of spiritual adoption found only in Christ. In Christ, we’re not just friends, we’re one.
Ben Roberts is the Managing Editor of Gospel Centered Discipleship, a member of Austin City Life, and a follower of Christ. He lives in an amazingly ugly house with his wife (Jessica), son (Solomon), dog (Charles Bronson II), and two very angry chickens. A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, he is currently working on a novel. Twitter @GCDiscipleship
For more on sharing the gospel authentically, check out Jonathan Dodson's Unbelievable Gospel.