Thinking and Feeling

John Piper has written a powerful book on the life of the mind entitled Think. Piper is easily my favorite writer, and this is possibly my favorite book of his. Here is an excerpt from the book on why our head and our heart should both be stimulated in our faith:

God has given us minds and demanded that we use them in understanding and applying his Word. And God has given us emotions which are equally essential and which he has commanded to be vigorously engaged in his service.

If we neglect the mind we will drift into all sorts of doctrinal error and dishonor God who wills to be known as he is. And if we neglect the heart we will be dead while we yet live no matter how right our creed is.

Often I run across people who are either more logically-driven or more emotionally-driven in regards to their faith. There are problems that can arise if we focus too much on one or the other.

Thinking Too Much

This can lead to 1) an issue of intellectual pride, and 2) legalism. One problem that exists in theological circles is that people tend to feel that they have so logically figured God out that they frown upon or belittle anyone who does not “get it.” This mindset drives us into idolizing something other than God and causes us to focus on the dogmatic and not the spiritual. Over-thinking makes us a sort of mindless robot, going through the motions but not taking seriously the supernatural, unexplainable work of God. We must be able to live in the tension of our finite minds and God's infinite mind, understanding that we cannot fully grasp his endless wonders. This realization should cause great humility and admiration of our matchless King.

Feeling Too Much

The main issue here is that people get so caught up in their last emotional high that they are disappointed when that high fades out. The Christian faith is not always crying during worship or an insatiable desire to read the Word; often times it is gut-wrenching and plain exhausting. You will not always “feel like” living obediently or dying to self. This is where sound, basic theology of who God is and what he has done can carry us through the dryness of life in a fallen world. We must be able to use our knowledge of God to remind our hearts that his glory is worth fighting for and that he has not lied or drawn us to himself in vain. Emotional reactions to circumstances have led me to a tainted view of a good God.

My prayer is that God would not only tune my mind to him, but tune my heart as well. The gospel frees us to take both our thoughtful doubts and heart-led burdens to the throne of grace. He is there, he promises to provide. If our minds and hearts are both in rhythm with God - albeit imperfectly - we will be a grave danger to Satan’s work in this world.

Patience & Discipleship

There is a virtue that has quickly become endangered in our practice of discipleship today. Few might notice the decline of this species, and it certainly hasn’t happened overnight. Slowly but surely, patience, our grandparents's virtues, has become virtually extinct from our modern mindset regarding discipleship. This virtue is a mark of Holy Spirit vitality in a church and in a people. And it’s something I am not. What I am is an impatient person. Ask people who know me well and they will confess to you that waiting, enduring, and sticking at something long-term is a chore for me. I would prefer instant gratification in regards to just about everything. When it comes to spiritual transformation in myself and in the lives of others I like to say I’m eager for change. The reality is however, that I am impatient. Somewhere in the back of my mind I believe our churches should grow faster, we should see more missional communities develop, and that lost people should get saved right now. Christians should get over their besetting sins today not tomorrow and certainly not next month. Unbelievers on our street should come to Jesus right now, next week is too late.

Pastors are clever and cloak this lack of patience in what we call “urgency.” Somehow the spiritual fruit of urgency is more valuable than the spiritual fruit of patience. Yet only one of those two qualities made the list of spiritual fruits in Galatians 5:22, and urgency isn’t it. Patience is the endangered species we desperately need to recapture in our talk and practice of discipleship.

The Fruit of the Spirit Belongs to the Church

There are countless articles, books, and materials in publication these days on what constitutes a healthy church. Many of these resources are helpful for thinking through the functions and practices of the local church. I have yet to see one, however, that measures the health of the local church on the vitality of the Spirit’s fruit in our midst. Instead of measuring our church health and growth in terms of physical numbers, dollars, and  downloads, shouldn’t we look to the biblical paradigm for health? Could it be that we have failed to understand what makes us healthy and vibrant, and exchanged the Spirit’s work among us for what we can largely manufacture and measure ourselves?

It’s my belief that the list known as “the fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5 is more than just a personal checklist of character traits for the Christian. These qualities should not just be embodied by individuals that make up the church, but are the very qualities the church, as a communal entity, should embody. When we look at the local church, as a whole, we should see a people of love, joy, peace, patience, etc. Things like love, joy, and patience should be prominent traits in healthy missional communities and healthy churches.

To truly say there is a movement of the Spirit among us, we must look for the signs of the Spirit. Those signs are not necessarily rapid growth, large budgets, and cultural influence. We can grow things and call them “spiritual” and understand that the Spirit had nothing to do with them. Nor can we look at small bastions of fundamentalism and “holiness” and concur that they are spiritually healthy either. Chances are that many of these groups are just as deeply mired in the “works of the flesh” that Paul speaks of (like divisiveness) before unpacking the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:19-21). What we must look at as a real measure of true Spirit-led, Spirit-filled healthy churches are the fruit of the Spirit. Do we see love, joy, and so forth as growing and evident as a culture in our churches? This is how we know the Spirit of God is actively at work in our midst.

Patience As Gospel

So what is this thing we call "patience?" Our modern notions of patience often revolve around waiting, delaying gratification, and boredom. Patience is passé if not downright dull. With conveniences like fast food (or quick-service, if you prefer), instant digital downloads, pre-approved loans, and express checkout at your nearest grocery store, the concept of patience is almost foreign to our world. Who wants to wait for a church to grow? We are far too prone to believe that practicing the right methods will convince God to bring in the masses by the thousands. If that doesn’t happen in our church we can become depressed and wonder if we haven’t done it right. We don’t like to wait.

Patience is more than waiting. I like the word that some of the older English translations use for this concept of patience: longsuffering. It is the idea of bearing with someone, enduring the hurt and pain of their failure and sin. Longsuffering calls us to take some hits, get messied-up with failure, endure disappointment. It calls for a long-term commitment. This isn’t our weekend life-improvement project that resolves itself at 6pm on Sunday evening before we head back into a routine week. This is the day-in, day-out grind of shared-life. Longsuffering calls for endurance. We can’t give up at the first failure. We stick with it, we endure the sin, we pray for change, we love the offender.

If anything, patience is a picture of the gospel. The holy God who created all things for his glory has an incredibly long-term view on humanity. Over six-thousand years of the recorded history of grace is evidence of God’s concept of longsuffering. From our first parents' initial rebellion in the garden God has been enduring our mess of sin, failure, rejection, rebellion, and apostasy. And he has suffered because of it. Jesus, the eternal Son of God took on flesh and was patient with humanity day-by-day as they misunderstood, rejected, and failed him.

He was patient with sinners to the point of enduring the suffering of death on the cross. And as the resurrected King he is longsuffering now. Where scoffers would mock his coming and say, “God has forgotten you,” they misunderstand his slowness for what it really is--longsuffering so that they will repent (2 Peter 3:8-9). The gospel is good news of a patient God who is longsuffering with his rebellious people, to the point of actual suffering and death so that we might be restored and rescued from our impending doom.

Patience As a Corporate Culture

If the gospel is a gospel of patience, and the spiritual vitality of a church and people is measured not necessarily by their numerical size but by Holy Spirit fruitfulness, then what place does patience have in our communities? Patience is a corporate culture we’ve largely ignored and forgotten about. We need a perspective change, and I am thankful that the Scriptures give us that change. Where the church in America is commonly compared to or envisioned as a business model, we need to look at farming to understand spiritual vitality.

Last summer my wife and daughter planted a garden in our back yard. They purchased some seeds and starter plants for tomatoes, peppers, carrots, and strawberries. After planting them and initially watering them, my then three-year old wanted to know when we could eat the strawberries. I had to explain that it takes time for these to grow. She was frustrated. She had done all the right things; planted in good soil, watered, fertilized, but the results were not immediate. Even the first “crop” of strawberries were small and not really tasty. Yet as the summer moved on and the plants continued to be watered, nourished, and given proper care, the harvest was good. Even James uses the imagery of the farmer to describe patience (James 5:7-12).

So what does this look like for the church? Practically the idea of patience bears itself out in how long we will endure sinners. I don’t use the term sinners in the sense of “everyone is a sinner.” I mean how long will you, your church, your community group put up with someone who is sinning against you? How long will you bear the blows of a sinner against your life? How long will you endure the frustration of someone who “just doesn’t get it?” How long will you continue to invite over, hang out with, and witness to your unbelieving neighbor before you give up on them and move on to another personal evangelism project? How long will you pray for your spouse to change and grow before you decide they are beyond the effort of grace? How long will you be kind to and love the grumpy elderly man who frumps around at your church gatherings each week? How long will your community group love and serve someone who continues to lose their job and, by the world’s standard, is a social failure? How long will you as church leaders call and pray and meet with the sinner in your body before you give them a letter of dismissal and never see them again?

We need patience as a church in evangelism. We need patience as a church in discipleship. We need patience as a church in repentance and discipline. We need patience in our preaching. We need patience in our giving. More than anything we need patience in our expectations of the pace of justification and sanctification in the lives of other people.

Pastors, let us not put patience on the back burner of spiritual growth and love for the false idols of urgency and influence. Let us love our people well with longsuffering. Christians, let us not treat unbelievers as evangelism projects that expire at the end of thirty days, but let us be longsuffering evangelists to them. Churches, let us not drink from the broken well of immediate gratification and think that only twelve-week programs are discipleship. Let us take the long road of shared-life and endure the sins and offenses of life-on-life because this is what our Savior has done for us.

Is patience endangered in your life? Is it rare and hard to find within your church and missional community? We need the Holy Spirit to produce what he says he will. We need to measure health in our lives and churches by the things the Holy Spirit says are healthy. Patience is the fruit of a Spirit-led, spiritually vital church. Let’s ask God to give us that, and not the modern gruel of fast-food discipleship.

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Jeremy Writebol is the husband of Stephanie, daddy of Allison and Ethan, and lives and works in Wichita, KS as the Community Pastor at Journey the Way. He is the director of Porterbrook Kansas and writes at jwritebol.net.

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To go deeper into living a life filled with the Holy Spirit, read Holy Spirit by Winfield Bevins.

For more free articles about gospel centered discipleship, check out Laying the Foundation for Spiritual Growth by Robert Dukes and Street Grace by Jake Chambers.

Satan in the Suburbs

Satan. Lucifer. Beelzebub. The devil. Whatever you want to call him, most of us treat the adversary as though he is a biblical fairy tale. Historically, it seems as though Satan gets too much play or none at all. We either blame everything (including burnt toast) on him, or nothing. Rarely have we dealt with him in the middle, knowing he's against us, but understanding our Father is greater. For my life, I've mainly dealt with the devil as an afterthought. I have believed in Satan because as the song goes … the Bible tells me so, but I have never believed that he influences my everyday life.  He’s there, but don’t mention him.

Here is what I have found out, practically, about the devil as I have tried to live out the mission of making disciples in my suburban neighborhood:

1. Satan attacks disciple making.
2. Don’t be surprised when he attacks.
3. God is glorious, so we don’t have to fear others, including the devil.

Satan attacks disciple making

What I have found out is that Satan is present among disciple makers who are actually doing the enemy's will masked in God's favor. What do I mean by this?

For years, I never made disciples of Jesus. Did I make disciples? Yes. Everyone makes disciples, it’s either of yourself or of Jesus. This is one way Satan attacks discipleship. Although I believed I was making good little moralist people whom God would be so glad to have on his team, I was actually drafting soldiers that were fighting well against the gospel--making the gospel seem unnecessary. I was doing Satan’s work for him.

A little over three years ago, the tides changed. Stripped of my moralism, the good news was finally … good news.  Although I grew up in the church my whole life, not until the law was shown to be subject to the Savior instead of the savior itself, did I see how beautiful the news truly was. When this happened, everything changed.

I stopped making disciples of  myself (or at least did my best to stop that kind of self glorifying work). I started to do whatever I could to show others Jesus and what he was like. Instead of expecting sinners to come to me, I started to go to them. Instead of expecting sinners to clean themselves up so they could come to the church, I realized I was as filthy as anyone, and that I am the church only because of grace. And because of that grace, I could go to people where they were and show them and tell them the good news in a way that would really be good news to them. To bring the gospel in a way that made an impact on them where they were in that moment.

As my family started to live this out, everything seemed to be going well. Very well. Neighborhood events, dinners, people seeing and hearing the good news in many different ways. Within this picture of gospel community, Satan made a vicious attack on us--spiritually. He attacked us with the very people we were reaching out to.

We have lived in the same neighborhood for eight years. For the first five years, we never did anything to make disciples of Jesus. For the past three, we have done everything we could to self-sacrifice for the sake of making disciples of Jesus.  Have we done this perfectly? By no means. It’s interesting that we were left alone for the first five years, but now during the last three, Satan has been on the prowl like a roaring lion.

Instead of attacking us by physical illness, something Job-like, it came as a knock at the door. It was a neighbor we had been tirelessly reaching out to, trying to show Jesus to his whole family. He came on a Friday, when he knew I wouldn't be home. For twenty minutes, he cussed at my wife, saying he had put up with her for eight years, but in reality had hated her the entire time. He then listed off ways in which he found her to be disgusting. These things he listed--these charges that weren't grounded in reality--though they hadn't really happened, they were the four things my wife had been trying deeply to rid herself of since leaving our previous church where we were once the good little moralists. The only people who knew the depth of these four struggles were myself and my wife. Our MC (missional community) knew most of them, but not the depth of the hurt these four things had caused our souls. God knew everything, and we came to find out, so did Satan.

Shortly after, my wife called to let me know what happened. As a husband, I was furious. I had to decide if I’d go to jail, or respond to my enemy in love. Would I disciple my family and the neighborhood to Jesus, or to myself?

I gave him a call, we spoke, and I called out his lies where they needed to be called out. In the end, I told him we’d respect his wishes for our families not to interact further. I did my best to show him love, all the while wanting to take him to the wood shed. We live literally ten feet apart.

Don’t Be Surprised When Satan Attacks

We are told many times that we’ll be hated, attacked, and despised for living a life of hope and peace. We need to be ready to be attacked. Peter even says don’t be surprised by the fiery ordeal amongst you. Jesus says to know that we’ll be hated because they first hated him.

When my wife was attacked by our neighbor, our first thought was, “Why?”  If I listed all the ways we’d loved this family, you’d think I was making it up. Again, a reminder that we should never be loving others for what we’ll get from them, but only because of how much our Father has loved us.

On the question of why Satan attacks, he attacked us because of what was happening in the neighborhood. We have had so many people see Jesus and hear about Jesus in the last three years in our neighborhood that Satan could not take us being on his turf any more. If he is like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour, who is a lion going to attack? A lion attacks for food or for protection of the herd. I believe he was attacking here because he was trying to protect his herd against his enemy: Jesus.

When you are on the mission field, doing the work of Jesus, Satan will attack to keep the eyes of his herd closed to the glories of Jesus. Instead of merely attacking the work, he attacks those that are doing the work to nip the work in the bud.  If he can rid the neighborhood of us, then he can rid the light from the darkness. Not because we are special, but because we are the workmen of Jesus being used by the Spirit to show off who he is.

Why my wife? Peter tells us to love our wives like a weaker vessel, put in our vernacular, like a prized vase that you take great care of and keep from breaking. Satan figured that if he could take out my wife, she’d crumble and our disciple making would be over. Satan has not only attacked my wife through our neighbor, but he has also shown up in visions and dreams of demons surrounding her, trying to show her his strength against her. I’ll add something to this a little further down.

So, why did this neighbor attack my wife, or really us as a family? This neighbor knows us pretty well, as our family is very open and honest about our struggles and our lives in general. He knows who we trust and the hope and peace we have in Jesus. When you live in such a way where you have an honest hope and trust in something greater than yourself, and there is no explaining it away, you end up showing others that they actually don’t live in true peace and hope. We believe in the end, this neighbor started to see that his life was being threatened by us. He had a view of what Christians were, namely hypocrites that don’t look like Jesus in any way. Now he had people living ten feet away from him, loving him without restrictions, without any strings attached, and I believe it crushed his view of not only Jesus, but of his whole life, which he thought was peaceful and hopeful. When that crashed around him, he attacked because he didn’t know what else to do.

This isn’t some “look how great we’ve been to our neighbor” act, but it is the reality of the Scriptures. Think through this.  Why was Jesus hated? Because he showed the people that their deeds were evil (John 7:7; John 15:18-23). Why will we be persecuted? Because we live godly in Christ Jesus (2 Tim 3:12). When we do these things, we are discipling people to Jesus, and this kicks against not only the individualistic American Dream but against Satan himself.

So, as you prepare to live a life on mission to show off Jesus … be ready. Satan is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. That someone is you.

God is glorious, so I don't have to fear others, including Satan

The beautiful thing about all this is that God is glorious; he is greater than all things and beings and is in complete control. Therefore, we fear nothing or no one, including the devil.

After this happened to my wife, I told her that it was time for us to rest and allow God to defend himself in this matter, and that we didn’t need to defend ourselves. We told no one, besides our MC, as we didn’t desire to spread rumors or slander against our neighbor. During this time, many emotions bubbled up. This was not a time where we were perfect, nor handled it like stoics. There were times of fierce anger, lots of screaming about the situation and asking God why he was allowing this to happen. After the incident on the porch, another time the family attacked my nine-year-old’s character. They were persistent. We didn’t know if we’d ever reach out to our community again because the hurt to our family ran so deep.

We didn’t hide these emotions from each other, God, or our missional community. One beautiful thing about this was the wisdom and insight we received from God through our people. Two women had visions and dreams about our neighborhood and the attack that was happening. One described it as demon possession and that much prayer needed to happen for the family. Not only that, but this woman and her husband offered us up a place to stay if we desired to flee from the devil and his schemes. It was a beautiful time for our MC family. Another woman said that God gave her a vision of not only the army of darkness that surrounded our house, but that God confirmed for her and us that the army of God was protecting us and would one day send us to proclaim the good news again.

One of my elders spoke to us telling us that Jesus had many people that hated him, and he still partied in their midst. Jesus literally was at parties where his enemies were and they would scorn him in front of others. This elder reminded us of the good news of who God is and our calling to love others for the sake of the glory of God.

As we prayed, my wife was given a vision. It was in the middle of the night and she woke in terror. She saw demonic beings up and down our walls seeking to attack her. I was leaving to speak at a conference, and Satan was telling her that when I left, he was going to attack her. That was when another beautiful thing happened: my wife felt comfort. Terror left her. Fear was gone. Peace and joy filled her as she told Satan:

"My husband is not my protector. He is not my savior. He is not the one who ensures my safety. The only one who can protect me, save me, and ensure my safety is the God of the universe. And I call him Daddy.

Through all of this attack, although our emotions were up and down, Satan failed. Jesus won. Our Jesus allowed this to happen to bring us closer to him and to understand why we are on the mission field. It is not about ourselves or what we’ll get from it. It’s not so we can grab attention or get anything from those we serve. There is only one reason we are on the mission field--to show off who Jesus is.

As we show off who Jesus is, the God who is all glorious brings us along in his power and protection so that we’ll press more into him and the understanding of his glory and might and not our own. Satan thought that by trying to break my wife, he’d win. What he did instead was to press my wife even further into the loving arms of her true Savior, her true Protector, her true Salvation. And by doing this, he strengthened my understanding of what it means to love my wife and trust that my Heavenly Dad loves her far more than I do.

When we begin to understand this, we can press even further into the mission of making disciples who make disciples, knowing that Satan is ready to attack, but that our Protector is there and ready at our defense for the sake of his glory.

It’s his mission. It’s his power. It’s for his glory.

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Seth McBee is the adopted son of God, husband of one wife, and father of three. He’s a graduate of Seattle Pacific University with a finance degree. By trade Seth is an Investment Portfolio Manager, serving as president of McBee Advisors, Inc as well as a missional community leader, preaching elder with Soma Communities in Renton, Washington, and executive team member of the GCM Collective. Twitter @sdmcbee

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To go more in depth into the gospel centered life, read Unbelievable Gospel by Jonathan Dodson.

For more free articles about spiritual warfare, read Spiritual Warfare Prayer by Winfield Bevins.

Rethinking Devotion

For the longest time I believed Christianity was all about becoming a better person. I thought the only way to gain acceptance before God was by doing more and trying harder. Boy was I wrong. These thoughts led to a lot of internal focus on my struggles, flaws, and weaknesses. It was all about me. My thoughts were consumed with whether or not I was becoming a “better Christian.” Because that is what Christianity is all about, right? That’s what I thought.

Many of us grew up in the church feeling this burden of performance. I thought that devotion to God looked like rigorous effort and righteous improvement, but we don’t have the ability within ourselves to be fully devoted to God.

Say what?

For performance freaks like myself, we love to convince ourselves that we have the ability do it! We can be devoted to God if we just try harder! But the truth is that the more I try, the more it becomes about me and the less it is about Jesus Christ.

Backward Devotion

We can try all we want, but we will never be fully devoted to God until we are in his presence spending eternity with him. Don’t get confused - we must strive to be devoted to God in our lives; however, we must strive to do so by looking at Jesus Christ and not by focusing on our own personal progress.

Where I fail in being devoted to God every day, Christ succeeded in being devoted every single moment of his life. We are justified by faith in the substitutionary death and perfect life of Christ Jesus. Jesus was completely devoted to his Father. He followed his will perfectly. Jesus Christ loved fully and was always loyal. He was, and always will be, the only man to ever walk on planet Earth who was completely devoted to God. We cannot get it backward.

Outward Devotion

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you - unless you believe in vain. - 1 Corinthians 15:1-2

Reading through 1 Corinthians one night, I recognized the gospel of Jesus was something that we as Christians had received (past tense), something that we stand on (present tense), and something by which we're being saved. This verse revolutionized my thinking. I felt like my eyes had been open to the now-power of the gospel.

But what did this mean for me? I had already been a Christian for a few years, and I thought my Christian walk was about becoming more devoted to Christ. Well that’s true of course, but the way to become more devoted and sanctified in Christ is the tricky part. The gospel of Jesus Christ hit me like a ton of bricks that night and I realized that true spiritual growth was about focusing less on myself and more on Christ. This meant that the gospel essentially turned me outward away from myself and toward Christ and others.

At church, my focus was able to be on God and others because I was covered by the righteousness of Christ. In my family life, I was able to focus on their needs because I knew that all of my needs had been provided for by Christ. Within my community, I was able to love others freely because of the unmerited love I had received on the cross of Christ. The gospel changed everything.

Over time the view of myself diminished and my dependence upon Christ increased. My daily walk with Christ changed dramatically because I spent more of my time focusing on his finished work for me and less on my performance for him. I was able to be more devoted to Christ because my focus was solely on him. This is what gospel-driven devotion looks like!

Rethinking Devotion

The truth is that we are often more concerned with becoming “devoted Christians” then with becoming devoted to Christ, himself. Philippians 3:14 says, “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Our eyes must be focused solely on the work of Jesus and the eternal fellowship that we have gained with God through his death and resurrection our behalf.

The gospel must be our motivation to become devoted to Christ. The gospel is all about the work of God done through Christ! To progress as a Christian is to be grounded in the gospel. The message is completely about Jesus!

This truth freed me from thinking about myself constantly and opened my eyes to the need to look to my sufficient Savior as I progressed in sanctification. I developed an outward outlook and was able to forget about my insufficiencies, my failures, and my flaws. My daily walk with the Lord could now be centered upon loving God and loving others. My eyes were on Jesus and not on myself.  As Tim Keller writes, “Blessed self-forgetfulness!”

After his conversion, the Apostle Paul became one of the most devoted men to Christ throughout Scripture. However, it is interesting to notice that Paul referred to himself over the course of his Christian life as the least of the apostles (1 Cor. 15:9), the very least of all saints (Eph. 3:8), and the foremost sinner (1 Tim. 1:15). Because Paul kept his eyes solely focused on Jesus he was able to admit his lack of devotion to Christ and rest upon the saving grace of Christ Jesus. Paul understood that devotion to Christ was less about him becoming better and more about placing his faith on an unchanging Savior.

Gospel Focused Devotion

If we focus on the gospel and realize that we have already been transferred into the Kingdom of God (Col. 1:13) because of our faith in Christ Jesus, we are able to pursue becoming and strive to become more devoted believers. This is what the process of becoming more like Jesus is all about. Your identity is sealed, so you are able live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel. When gospel truth intervenes in your life, difficult circumstances can be looked at in the light of Christ.

For example, when Christ’s work becomes the center of what you focus on during the day, that horrible job you complain about all the time becomes work you gratefully do for God. Christ has blessed you with it. It means that stay-at-home moms who despise being cooped up in the house all day with three infant kids who are just craving some attention can persevere through their circumstances and rest in the arms of a Savior who whispers, “In you I am well pleased.” It means that students who are being bullied and struggling with depression can find immeasurable peace and hope in knowing they have nothing to prove. Christ has proven everything.

This is what keeping keeping Jesus Christ at the center of our devotion does. We are set free. We become more devoted to God by focusing on the glorious good news. With your identity in Christ sealed, you are able to overcome life’s hardships and suffering because he has overcome! The only truly Christian way to freely pursue devotion to God is with your eyes focused on Jesus.

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Matt Manry is the Director of Students at Life Bible Church in Canton, Georgia and a student at Reformed Theological Seminary. He blogs regularly at gospelglory.net Twitter @matt_manry

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For more resources on devotion, work through Winfield Bevin's primer on the Holy Spirit.

For more free articles on all the particulars of devotion, check out this amazing series about Meditating on God's Word by Tony Merida.

Public Discourse and the Weight of Freedom

*Disclaimer: This post is not in reference to any particular person but rather in response to the innumerable social media updates that daily ridicule those who engage in public discussions. ___

Over the past few weeks, the presidential and vice presidential debates have predictably turned social media into a public debate forum for expounding conservative and liberal viewpoints. Indeed, social media is today's largest and most widely-accessible form of open dialogue. Anyone can own a Facebook or Twitter and offer their opinions without worry of legitimate retribution. Social media is, in just about every sense, the new public forum.

In the midst of this, people are spending equal amounts of time complaining about the aforementioned dialogue on their social media accounts. While many use social media to publish their ideas and convictions about politics and social issues in general, others take to the Internet their desire to banish the conversation and keep their Facebook or Twitter feeds free from bureaucratic exhortation. In both instances, people are exercising their God-ordained and government-allowed freedom to have their voice heard.

Freedom isn't Free, But it is Priceless

As I said in a previous post, people from all over the world flee to America in search of freedoms that they do not experience in their own countries. In many citizens' eyes, these immigrants are a threat to our country because they take American jobs via cheap labor, mooch off welfare, engage in criminal mischief, and are resistant to completely adopt American culture. While there are certainly cases of such behavior and concerns are legitimate, the underlying issue is the simple fact that freedom is priceless. (This would make a great MasterCard commercial, wouldn't it?)

When you reflect on the lives lost in search of American ideals, the weight of freedom is a heavy load to shoulder. People die every day escaping tyranny while others are taken captive in their own countries for owning a Bible or tweeting a negative comment about their government. In the U.S., it is a crime to discriminate based on religion and naysayers unabashedly draw disgusting cartoons, post grotesque pictures, or attach shameful subtitles to photos of our leaders just because they can. Yes, I recognize that this example reveals that there is a severe disconnect between the right to freedom and the abuse of it, but that's an argument for later in the post.

So, how does all of this relate to online political discussion? Let me explain.

A Case for Public Discourse

Elementary education, local news, Time magazine, ESPN, and 140-character tweets all have one thing in common - they provide the opportunity to absorb information and consider others' opinions. I fear that Americans have become inoculated to this precious treasure. As the general population either openly debates or complains about open debate, the irony is that everyone involved is applying the identical principle of freedom of speech. Sarcasm and snarkiness over Internet-based mediums only enhance my point: Americans are free to express themselves. And it's a beautiful thing. People now know your opinion and can assess for themselves whether or not there is a valid proposition to consider. This leads to healthy self-examination of one's own presuppositions and/or assumptions.

Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying, "Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech." There are quite possibly a million theological avenues to go down in this discussion, but for the sake of brevity I want to make two very basic statements about the importance of public discourse based on this quote:

1. "Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom" - Do you know why you know anything? Do you know why you have an opinion about anything? Precisely because you are in a free society that allows public discourse. We have opinion television shows on every channel at every second of every day at some point. Your very conscience in many ways is directly affected by the freedom of thought. As Christians, we believe that God's wisdom is true wisdom,and even that cannot come very easily without the freedom for someone to share it with you publicly.

2. "No such Thing as Liberty, without Freedom of Speech" - There are a plethora of countries around the world in which people cannot express their opinion freely. Do we take it for granted in America? Absolutely! But as with anything else in life, one does not throw the whole idea out simply because it is abused. At the foundational level, freedom of speech is a liberty that cannot quantified and it should be promoted at all costs. Having a personal conscience and a right to be an individual is one of the most paramount rights as a human being. Even as Christians are one unified body under Christ, God in no way made us clones. We should embrace diverse people with a heart to learn from them, whether or not we get annoyed at their (perceived) ignorance to a topic.

Give Me Freedom or Give Me Death

Perhaps those who connect with myself and millions of others on social media are not fond of our love for open dialogue. That's fine. Again, we both have the right to feel a certain way. What we cannot do is stifle the public forum. It may sound like an overstatement and implausible, but if people begin to be afraid of ridicule by participating in public discourse then liberty is immediately compromised. I have learned more from dialogue with others on social media than from any other medium of news transmission. I'd prefer to go ahead and meet Jesus in the clouds rather than live in secrecy and seclusion from others' conclusions.

Grief and the Gospel - Part Two

How do I grieve? Evidently, it matters how we grieve. Paul mentions a godly grief and worldly grief (2 Corinthians 7:10). Believers are not to grieve “as those who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Grief and the Gospel - Part One was on open invitation to align our hearts with the heart of God through the grieving of sin. The gospel tells us that sin grieves God, so it should grieve us, too (sin committed by us, sin committed against us, and the various effects of sin). It also tells us that because Jesus is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, we are not alone in our grief.

But how should we grieve? And more importantly, what should be the outcome of our grief? While social scientists continue to debate the merits of various approaches to grief, the gospel shows itself to be a more than sufficient guide through the process of grief.

Agree with the Father's Grief

The gospel begins with God, therefore grief (along with everything else in life) must begin with God. Remember that sin grieves God, so it should grieve us, too (Ephesians 4:30). Whether you are grieving sin committed by you today, sin committed against you twenty years ago, or the effects of sin committed by Adam at the fall, I believe it’s important to hear the Spirit affirm what we know to be true according to the scriptures.

Ask the Father to speak through the Spirit concerning the particular situation. There’s not adequate space here to do a full treatment on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, but note that the Spirit is sent by the Father in Jesus’ name (John 14:26). The Spirit proceeds from the Father (John 15:26); and the Spirit leads us to the truth about our adoption as God's children, by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” All of this adds up to the fact that the Spirit reveals the heart of the Father to us. When we ask the Father how he feels about sin, his response will always include, “This grieves me.” After hearing this (or at least being reminded of Ephesians 4:30), we can freely grieve along with him. The Greek word that translates as “confess” in 1 John 1:9 means “to say the same thing as another; to agree with.”

Burying our emotions under a pile of self-protection is a common way of dealing with pain. But the gospel invites a much more honest approach. Simply agreeing with God about the grievous nature of sin will be freeing for many. Saying: “That sin committed by me, that sin committed against me, grieves me. It breaks my heart. It’s not the way God designed the world to work.” This is the beginning of confessing our sins. Then we must move on by “agreeing with” the Father’s next thoughts concerning sin, that it is not in line with his holiness, and that it must be dealt with. This is the path to the forgiveness promised in 1 John 1:9.

After simply agreeing with God about the grievous nature of sin, I believe the gospel leads us to pour out our hearts to him. Again, our grief must be about God, or it will become an opportunity for self-obsessed navel gazing and pity parties. 1 Peter 5:5-7 says, “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.

Fixating merely on the hard circumstances of life -- past or present -- is driven by pride. Effectively, we are casting our cares on ourselves. Casting them on God requires humility, an acknowledgment that life is not ultimately about us, but is about him and his glory. The trials of life can cause us to tell our stories with our eyes pointed downward into our cupped hands, looking at our circumstances as if they were an unintelligible pile of garbage. It’s a line with two fixed points --us and our pile of stuff.

The challenge is to humbly bring your pile to the Father, to hold your cupped hands out and lift up your head, gazing not on your circumstances but on the one who is sovereign over them and present in the midst of them. The line becomes a triangle with three points -- us, our pile of stuff, and our perfect Father.

Learn from the Grief Psalms

Many of David’s Psalms are a gripping example of someone pouring out their heart to God, of acknowledging the grievous nature of their circumstances, but doing it in a way that keeps God in the center.

Listen to the words of Psalm 22, which paint a vivid picture of a man who is enduring extreme suffering:

• “I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people.”
• “All who see me mock me…”
• “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within me.”
• “For dogs have surrounded me; a band of evildoers has encompassed me; they pierced my hands and feet. I can count all my bones. They look and stare at me.”

David has been oppressed, victimized, abused, and mistreated. We don’t know the exact details behind some of David’s references, but it’s clear that he’s been sinned against in tremendous ways.

But how does he frame his lament? Where are his cupped hands?

The Psalm 22 begins this way:

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest. Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel."

And he says this near the end:

“I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the LORD, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!”

In all of David's lament psalms (which we could also call grief psalms), he follows this same pattern:

1. he fixes his gaze on God, affirming his sovereignty and presence;
2. he pours out his heart to God without holding back (“This is terrible! This grieves me!”);
3. then he reaffirms his great faith in God and his determination to worship him no matter what.

Your prayer may sound something like this:

“God, I know you are here! I know you are powerful and present. I know you’ve always been present. You know what I did yesterday, and you know what happened to me years ago. And it grieves me! I know it grieves you, too! When I was mistreated and abused, when people made fun of me and hurt me, when I sinned sexually and spoke hurtful words to others, you were there and you were grieved. And it was terrible. I hated it. It made me want to die. But I know you were there, and I know you are in control, and I know you actually do care. I am in pain, and I still choose to worship you. Heal my broken heart.”

Embrace Gospel Grief

If this all reminds us of Jesus (except for the part about confessing sin), it should.  Matthew makes at least four references to Psalm 22 (27:35, 27:39, 27:43, 27:46), providing us with another clear example of how we should grieve even the most unjust suffering we may endure.

According to the gospel, grief is not about morbid introspection. Gospel grief is about accepting the invitation to pour out your heart to your perfect Father in heaven.

One of the most misquoted verses in the Bible is Romans 8:28:

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

Often, this verse is quoted when people are experiencing great difficulty. The idea is that God is up to something, that he’s in control, and that he’s going to bring something good out of this mess. While that’s certainly true, it’s not helpful to send a hurting person out on a wild goose chase for some random “good” that may come of their broken circumstances. We must have verse 29 in order to make sense of verse 28:

“For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”

Now we know what the "good" is that God is always working toward in the lives of his adopted children. He is always, through good circumstances and bad circumstances, through blessing and through trial, conforming us into the image of his Son. That’s the plan he determined to accomplish in our lives before time began. And in his amazing power and sovereignty, he does in fact bring something good out of the mess. Somehow, he uses sin to accomplish this conforming work. I will never grasp the manner in which he carries this out, but I have experienced his transforming work most powerfully in the midst of sin and trial.

So what’s this got to do with grief? Grief informed by the gospel comes full circle when we can say, like Joseph, “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.” Sin is never God’s first choice. Sin is evil, pure and simple. When people sin against us, in some ways there is a plan for our destruction being carried out. But God’s plan trumps that plan, and actually uses sin -- committed by us and against us -- to accomplish a greater, life-giving plan. Your abuser intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.

Embracing this reality, acknowledging the good, Christ-forming work that has been accomplished in your life as a direct result of sinful choices made by yourself and others, is an essential part of grief. Only then do we see that our pain can actually be redeemed -- “bought back” to accomplish God’s purposes.

Jesus has taken the grievous moments of our lives, paid the penalty for the sin that caused them, and redeemed those moments for his purposes. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…” (Isaiah 53:4).

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Abe Meysenburg and his wife, Jennifer, live in Tacoma, WA, where he serves as a pastor and elder with Soma Communities. In 2001, Abe helped start The Sound Community Church, which then became a part of Soma Communities in May 2007. Twitter: @abemeysenburg

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To read about how the Holy Spirit reveals the heart of the Father to us, check out The Holy Spirit by Winfield Bevins.

Also, read the first free article in this series by Abe Meysenburg, Grief and the Gospel - Part One.

Five Ways to Define Revival

Nathan Finn serves as Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Baptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He's a husband, father, elder, baseball enthusiast, and Broadway musical fan.

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On two different occasions, I’ve taught courses on revival and spiritual awakening at Southeastern Seminary, including a PhD seminar. One of the interesting things about the study of revival and spiritual awakening is that nobody can agree upon standard definitions for these terms. In fact, folks can’t even decide if revival and spiritual awakening are synonyms or reflect different (but related) concepts. And what about renewal, resurgence, reformation, etc.? Historians, sociologists, pastors, and other popular writers are all over the map, even within their specific disciplines.

David Bebbington, who has given us the oft-discussed “Bebbington’s quadrilateral” for defining evangelicalism, has also demonstrated at least five different ways that scholars and other students of revival have defined the phenomenon.

1. Revival can mean a personal spiritual awakening experienced by an individual, frequently after a season of spiritual backsliding (think a spiritual “rededication”)
2. Revival can mean a planned series of meetings held by a congregation or a group of congregations (think spring revivals or city-wide crusades)
3. Revival can mean a spontaneous spiritual event that affects a congregation, resulting in greater spiritual vitality and conversions (think Jonathan Edwards’s Northampton church in 1734–35)
4. Revival can mean a spontaneous spiritual event that affects a group of congregations or even an entire region (think the Welsh Revival of 1904–05)
5. Revival can mean a spiritual movement that affects culture at large, spreads to other regions, and lasts for a more extended period of time (think the Transatlantic awakenings of 1739–48 and 1857–1861)

I think this sort of list is helpful. If you’re like me, you’ve heard all (or at least most) of these experiences referred to as revival and/or spiritual awakening. Four of them are various types of spiritual experiences, while the fifth (planned meetings) can be instrumental in bringing about one or more of the other four experiences. In fact, it’s possible that all five of these phenomena could converge into a single, larger experience.

Perhaps we should think of revival as a time of spiritual renewal and numerical growth that can manifest itself in a number of different ways. It can be totally spontaneous, or it can be sought intentionally though various spiritual disciplines (prayer, repentance, etc.). When revival is manifested in a corporate context, it is often a catalyst for innovation and creativity, which is well-received by some and rejected by others. It often, though not always, includes both an element of revitalization and an element of conflict, especially between those with different perceptions about the experience and/or its repercussions. Revival isn’t a permanent phenomenon, but it eventually ebbs, creating a sense of longing and expectation among those who wish to experience it anew. Historical revivals and their results (good and bad) have fundamentally influenced how various evangelicals think about conversion, spirituality, Christian maturity, worship, evangelism and missions, cultural engagement, and just about everything else. Revival movements are having similar effects among evangelicals, especially continuationist evangelicals, in the Global South.

For my part, I’ve experienced the first type of revival and participated in many instances of the second type of revival. I’ve personally witnessed the third type of revival on at least one occasion, though not in a church of which I was a member. I’ve not been a part of the fourth and fifth types of revival, though I study them regularly, both professionally and for my own edification. I pray for revival in my church, in my city, and among American evangelicals in general and Southern Baptists in particular.

For more on Bebbington’s views of revival, including his discussion about various revival definitions, see David W. Bebbington, “Revivals, Revivalism and the Baptists,” Baptistic Theologies 1.1 (Spring 2009):1–13, and idem, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Oxford University Press, 2012).

(Image credit)

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Cross-posted from Nathan's personal blog.

Send Well

When my husband first told me he felt called to church planting, I had no idea what that meant. Does it mean we move every few years, helping new churches get started like Paul did as an apostle? (I was fond of reminding him that Paul wasn’t married with toddlers in tow.) Or could it mean that we simply coach new church plants from our home church, keeping our family in one spot? Are we the ones sending … or being sent? The past decade or so has answered “yes” to all of those questions. We have physically moved twice to help new church plants get started. My husband loves this part of his calling: building something from the ground up. For the most part, I have enjoyed it, too. Even with the hassle of relocating the family, it’s exciting to be a part of a new adventure, something new you sense God wants to do.

Recently, however, the church plant we have served for six years is readying itself to plant another church. Having been sent, we are now discovering what it feels like to be on the “sending” end. It’s certainly exciting as the scent of a new adventure swirls in the air again, but it’s a little sobering, too. This time we are not the ones packing our bags. We’re the ones standing in the driveway, waving goodbye. 

Jesus sent them out

In Mark chapter 3, we find Jesus in the thick of his early ministry. The religious leaders plot to destroy him. The local crowds follow him, harassing him, in their desperation to receive healing. One night he couldn't even get into his own house to have supper because of the people surrounding him and demanding his attention.

Of course, Jesus would want to choose some friends to be close to him. Of course, he would want a small group of people around him who understood his mission and could help him accomplish it. These same friends could help him fend off the pressing crowds and protect him from being crushed by them. They could help him find food and lodging and assist with day-to-day life. Later, they are the ones he would turn to when his life is in danger.

So he called these friends by name and invited them to live life closely with him. We see the names of the twelve disciples in Mark 3: 16-19. Though Jesus did interact with the crowds, he poured himself more intentionally into a few. A handful of guys who were committed to following him and helping him. Companions. Friends. "And he appointed the twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him ..." (Mark 3:14).

But wait. Jesus didn't call his disciples to be with him just so he could have some buddies for support and companionship. Surely that was part of it, but it was much, much more.  I cut off the remainder of the verse earlier. Here's the whole thing: "And he appointed the twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons" (3:14-15, italics added).

Jesus knew his mission depended on the sending. He didn’t gather the twelve for the comfort of having friends he could do life with. He gathered the twelve in order to send them out to preach with authority. To change the world. To push back evil. To transform hearts so that the kingdom could expand.

My struggle to send

I like the gathering part of discipleship. Invite people in, focus on a few, fill their mugs again and again with freshly brewed tea as we talk about life and what we're learning. I like the "so that they might be with him" part.

Honestly, the "sending" is the part of discipleship I don't particularly like. Gather them in and then "send them out."  Focus on a few so they can go and do likewise. Fill all those mugs so that the people sitting around the table can go and pour themselves out for other people who do not yet know Jesus.  I know this is what it's all about. Reproduction. Multiplication. Growing the kingdom. Making disciples.

But I’m learning that sending well is hard to do. It’s hard to let people go -- to send them on new adventures while we regroup and start over. This is what we do as people committed to discipleship. We do what Jesus did. We gather disciples in, invest in them deeply, and then send them out to make more disciples. We wave goodbye.

Any parent of a teenager knows that this is difficult to do well. My oldest is beginning to look at colleges. The "sending out" is coming soon. My husband and I have spent nearly seventeen years investing in him and discipling him, but soon it will be time to let go. To send him on to whatever adventure God has next for him. Sending involves loss. We suffer personal loss, but we trust in great kingdom gain.

Mary’s struggle to send

Maybe that's a little of what Mary was feeling when she gathered up her family and went down to Capernaum to see what in the world her oldest son was up to (see Mark 3:21, 31-35). I'm sure she wanted to grab Jesus by the collar and drag him back home just like any self-respecting mom would want to do. Even Mary apparently hadn't grasped the fullness of the big truth: she had raised Jesus in order to send him out. Maybe she sensed that sending him out would result in his death. In her loss.

I'm sure that in the following years she began to grasp that hard truth. And since we don't have evidence of her continuing to follow Jesus around begging him to come home, she probably did the hard work of letting him go. She knew it was the right thing to do.  The kingdom of God depended, in part, upon Mary sending Jesus out well. Though she grieved deeply at the foot of his cross a few years later, I hope she had the sense of the great gain that had been purchased by her son’s sacrifice. Mary's sacrifice as a mother is a part of that redemptive story.

Striving to send well

A handful of women I have invested in on a weekly basis over the last few years is planning to join the new church plant. During the next few months, they will begin to break away from our community and begin the adventure of starting something new. Realistically, we will not meet weekly anymore. It’s time for me to send them out. We will still be connected in Christ, of course, but inevitably our relationships must change. Though I feel privileged to be a part of a church that is committed to planning new churches, I’m feeling the loss involved with the sending.

Hopefully, our discipleship times together have been saturated by the gospel. Hopefully, I have modeled something worth replicating. Hopefully, these women will carry the truth of the gospel with them to people who do not yet know Jesus. Though the loss of relationship hurts, these hopes breathe life. There might even be joy mixed with the pain of sending.

Let the Gospel Prepare You

The very gospel we have been fighting to believe together will help us through this next phase of discipleship. We remember that because God had so much love for the world, he sent Jesus into that world (John 3:16). God the Father suffered loss as he sent his son to save a people who would brutally kill him. But that loss led to great gain. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection have made a way for many, many lost souls to find their way home. As I remind myself of this gospel every day, I find the strength to release and send well.

Now as I fill the kettle and brew the tea, I remind myself -- the reason I invite people to sit around my table for discipleship is not so that I can gather a group of like-minded people together to live life with. It’s so I can invest the gospel in them, and send them out to do the same with others. It's hard, yes. But it's not about my comfort or my aversion to loss. It's about more and more people being gathered into the kingdom. So let’s enjoy the time around the table together. But let’s also remind ourselves why we’re sitting there: so that many, many more might join us at that heavenly table. Enjoy being together, but don't forget to prepare your heart to enjoy the sending.

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Lindsay Powell Fooshee is married to John, a pastor at Redeemer Community Church and church planter with Acts 29. They are raising 3 great kids in East Tennessee. Lindsay holds an M.A. in Christian Thought from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and blogs regularly at Kitchen Stool.

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To read more about sending out disciples, check out Proclaiming Jesus by Tony Merida.

For more free articles about gospel centered discipleship, check out Is Disciple A Verb also by Lindsay Fooshee and What is Missional Culture & Why Does It Matter? by JR Woodward.

Creature of the Word Giveaway

 

Matt Chandler, Josh Patterson, and Eric Geiger have written a new book from B&H Publishing entitled Creature of the Word. The book essentially speaks to becoming a Jesus-centered church. I was blessed to receive an advanced copy and can honestly say that it is a very unique contribution to the conversation.

Additionally, there will be a live simulcast on October 23 where each author will be teaching a particular topic from the book followed by a Q&A session. (If you are unable to attend/watch this event, we will be live-blogging it HERE!)

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B&H was not only kind enough to send me a copy and a ticket to the event, but they've given us 3 FREE BOOKS and 3 FREE SIMULCAST TICKETS to give to you!

The Goods

There will be three winners who will each get a copy of the book and a simulcast ticket.

Rules of Engagement

Here's how to enter:

• Follow us on Twitter and retweet our tweet about the giveaway
• "Like" us on Facebook and share our post about the giveaway

***Contest ends October 16 at 5:59 p.m. CST***

Psalm 127 & 3 ways to live

Last week I got our bicycle pump out of the shed to fill the tires on our baby stroller, and our four-year-old Samuel wanted to help. He commandeered the bicycle pump, and when I tried to teach him how to use it, he said, ‘No Daddy, I don’t need your help!’ It struck me as insanely irrational of my son to refuse the help of someone who is nine times his age and knows much better than he how to do the job. And then I realized I have often acted just this way toward God.

God does nothing & we do everything

Professing belief in God, I have often lived as a practical atheist. Functionally, I have adopted the motto of the convinced atheist: ‘God does nothing and we do everything.’ In fact, not long ago, I suddenly realized I had not prayed once about the thorny problem I had spent hours fretting and stewing over. Ouch. Faced with a challenge, I had instinctively turned to myself rather than to God.

Solomon seeks to undercut this way of living in Psalm 127:1. ‘Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.’ The key word there is ‘vain.’ (It’s used three times in verses 1-2.) Life without God is fruitless. You might be able to build the house or guard the city - there are, after all, excellent atheist architects - but if you have a big house and a safe city and no God, it’s ultimately in vain.

God does everything & we do nothing

Practical atheism is a big mistake. But so is an opposite error into which we sometimes fall. The motto for this way of living is: ‘God does everything and we do nothing.’ There came a point last week (as Samuel struggled manfully but ineffectually with the bicycle pump) when I finally stepped in and began helping. After a few moments Samuel skipped off to do something more interesting. He figured I was doing everything, so he could do nothing.

We live this way, too, don’t we? Sometimes we wrap our laziness in spiritual garb. We say, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ instead of offering practical help that will cost us something. We might even be tempted to see justification for passivity and inactivity in Psalms 127. After all, Solomon says, ‘It is vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil…’ (verse 2).

But of course, Solomon isn’t minimizing the importance of healthy work (as we see clearly in Psalm 128:2). Instead, he’s speaking of the fruitlessness of painful, anxious, godless labor. Psalm 127 is no advocate for passivity or laziness. As John Calvin says, ‘It is not the will of the Lord that we should be like blocks of wood, or that we should keep our arms folded without doing anything; but that we should apply to use all the talents and advantages which [God] has conferred upon us.’

God does everything & we do something

Here’s a more biblical way to express the role God plays and the role we play: God does everything and we do something. The key to seeing this is noticing the two remarkable verbal parallels in Psalm 127.1: God ‘builds’ the house and laborers ‘build’ the house. The LORD ‘guards’ the city and those ‘guarding’ watch over the city. Does God build or do we build? Yes! Does God guard or do we guard? Yes!

After my son Samuel ran off to do something more interesting, I allowed our two-year old daughter Annie to take a turn with the bicycle pump. She placed her little hand on the pump handle, and I placed my big hand over her little hand, and we pumped together. She was pumping and I was pumping at the same time.

But although we were both pumping, it was clear our contributions were not equal. If Annie had stopped pumping, I would have continued pumping. If I had stopped pumping, Annie couldn’t have continued on her own. Here’s a crucial truth to realize: we do not contribute equally with God. Our relationship with God is assymetrical. It is true to say that, ‘Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.’ But it is never true to say, ‘Unless those who labor build the house, the Lord builds in vain.’ That is heresy. God graciously uses us to accomplish his purposes in the world, but he never needs us. William Carey, the 19^th century Baptist missionary to India and father of the modern missionary movement, got it just right when he said, ‘Expect great things from God. Attempt great things for God.’ The order of those two sentences is crucial. The asymmetry of God’s contribution and ours is the reason we give God all the glory when things we’ve worked hard to accomplish go well. As Solomon says elsewhere, ‘The horse is prepared for the day of battle, but victory belongs to the LORD’ (Proverbs 21:31).

God does everything, and we do something. Solomon concludes Psalm 127 by illustrating this truth in vv 3-5. Where do children come from? Well, of course the readers of Psalm 127 know that mommy and daddy play a part in the procreation of the children. (There’s been only one virgin birth in history.) But there’s a deeper answer to the question. Children are given to parents by God (verse 3). Parents who have tried unsuccessfully month after month to conceive children know they cannot simply decide to have children. God must open the womb, as he is often said to do in the Scriptures. Where do children come from? God does everything and we do something.

As Christians, we’re called to be more active and full of good works than the world. But we’re also called to be more reliant, more humble, and more aware of our need for help than the world. We are therefore to give all the glory to God when he causes our efforts to succeed. Let’s not live like practical atheists (‘God does nothing and we do everything’) or passive slackers (‘God does everything and we do nothing’). Instead, let’s live like prayerful activists. God does everything and we do something.

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Stephen Witmer (PhD, University of Cambridge) is the pastor of Pepperell Christian Fellowship in Pepperell, Massachusetts and an Adjunct Professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He has written for Themelios, Reformation 21, Bible Study Magazine and the Gospel Coalition website, and is the author of The Good Book Guide to Jonah and Restlessly Patient: How to Live in Light of Your Future (forthcoming).

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For more on living in Christ, check-out the free edition of Winfield Bevin's book Grow: Reproducing Through Organic Discipleship available at Exponential.

For more resources on how the gospel changes our relationships & responsibilities, see: Relationships First: Reasons it's Difficult to Share Our Faith by Jonathan Dodson & Messy Discipleship by Jake Chambers.

Toward a Well-Rounded Sermon

*Editor's Note: This was #3 on our Top Posts of 2012. _

There are plenty of great resources explaining the best way to preach a sermon. One can find many books, articles, podcasts, and more to help with sermon preparation and delivery. In fact, we have a great conversation and an in-depth series on preaching on this blog that more than cover all the bases.

As I've preached many times and coached others, I typically come back around to a few major points. My hope is that these practical tips add another helpful wrinkle to the topic:

1. Be faithful to the text - Often times, God will draw you toward a particular passsage of Scripture. Own it. Let your study of the text bring out the truth in it. I have been guilty of forming an opinion about a text despite the text itself. Be careful. Extra study may challenge your opinion, but it will cause a deeper appreciation for the passage. Do not make the mistake that I have made several times by milking the verses to fit a particular illustration or point that you want to make. People will notice if you're stretching the truth to make a point. Even if it isn't as "exciting" as you had hoped, God did not waste a word. Pay attention to context and flow. Trust God with the results; you be faithful in preparation.

2. Make Christ the hero - If your sermon lacks Jesus, you're doing it wrong. Of course, there is ample Scripture that seems totally unrelated to Jesus, but he is the culmination of it as he explained to two people on the road to Emmaus. Again, don't stretch the text, but be aware of how the gospel either applies or enhances the practicality of the message. At the very least, end each sermon challenging your audience to trust Christ for whatever practical application is needed.

3. Think about the lost - No matter the venue, there is a chance that people who don't know Jesus will be present. Plan for that. Ask yourself the question time and again, "If this is the first time that someone heard about Jesus, would I answer the initial questions that will arise from this message?" We too often speak as though everyone listening is aware of the Christian "lingo" and references. Tim Keller argues, “If you don’t preach like there’s lost people present, there won’t  ever be any.” Even if your audience is 100% regenerate, you can strategically build apologetics into their minds by making logical points and answering questions within the message itself.

These may seem like very basic and obvious pointers, but they are neglected every Sunday from the pulpit. If nothing else, apply these techniques to your preparation to make a more well-rounded sermon.

The Implications of Obeying God

Editor's Note: This is a repost of The Implications of God. It appears at GCD with the author's permission. ---

Face in my hands. Elbows on the table. My husband is sitting across from me at our lovely unsuspecting Italian restaurant. He pushes in close, but I don't have words to define the tears hitting the table. He knows. More than two years ago we prayed a prayer  -- God, we will do anything -- and its repercussions are everywhere.

Our anythings seem to be costing us everything. Nothing about our previously sane lives are the same. In the last year we have given up all control, and God has taken us up on those simple and naive little words.

Anything Means Anything

Since we prayed that prayer, God has led us to adopt a three-and-half-year-old little boy from Rwanda, making us a family of six. We sold our house, merged our church with another local church, turned over leadership and our previous roles to others, and for the past year, we have been writing and living three book publication projects -- but that isn't everything. So, we are tired and empty.

My husband moves in even closer to me at the table. Ironically, I'm leaving the next day to be interviewed about the book that is honestly the cause of all of it … all the anythings. Yet, I can't remember why we are doing any of it. I'm so tired and unsure of myself and worst of all, God feels far, far away.

My husband whispers, “It’s been a hard year.” And strangely, it is comforting to admit that following God is hard. I ask myself, "Would I take it back?"

Because of The Gospel

God’s very existence demands these words from us -- I will do anything. If we find ourselves at the feet of a God who made us and set us in our time and space on this planet, which He spoke into being, what other life are we to lead than the one He wrote for us? And if it costs us everything (for the little while we live on this planet) -- comfort and approval and control and ease -- how will we answer?

Jesus did this. He lived all-in, with one foot in heaven and one on this earth. With eternity clear in His mind He said, “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me." (John 6:38)

The implications of knowing His Father was simply to obey Him.

What Obeying Looks Like

The implications of obeying God for us are the same: keep our heads down and listen and do what He says, even if it leads to crying over our pasta sometimes.

And He will probably say things like:

• “Give the lunch you just got from the Chick-fil-A drive-thru to the woman with the cardboard sign outside your car window.”
• “Ease up on your kids -- I am not this hard on you, and I am God.”
• “Get rid of what you don’t need and don’t keep chasing stuff because you won’t be here long.”
• “Encourage and remind each other that I am real, and that I’m worth it. I promise.”
• “Come back to me everyday. I’m really here. I really see you.”

My husband and I aren't going to take it back. I would rather have nights that hurt than disobey. And underneath all the hard is a life that I wouldn't trade anyway. I love my anythings -- even the hardest ones.

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Jennie Allen’s passion is to communicate a bigger God through writing and teaching. She serves in ministry alongside her husband, Zac. They have four children and live in Austin, Texas. Jennie’s blog can be found at www.JennieAllen.com.

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To go deeper into the Gospel, read Unbelievable Gospel by Jonathan Dodson.

For more free articles about Gospel identity, check out The Love of Our Father by Jake Chambers and Spiritual Strength Training Parts One and Two by David Murray.

What the Prosperity Gospel Does to the Gospel

*Editor's Note: This was #1 on our Top Posts of 2012.

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I was reminded recently by a local TV preacher (asking for money in exchange for prayers, of course) how badly the "prosperity gospel" distorts the gospel of Christ. Here are three major things that I think the prosperity gospel does:

1. Cheapens Grace

The gospel of Jesus Christ is built upon the fact that God’s wrath needed to be satisfied by the shedding of blood in order for sinners to be taken out from under this wrath. Jesus did not have your material wealth in mind when he died on the cross. No, Jesus had your eternal soul in mind. Your wealth on earth is judged by others, but your soul is judged by God. Grace is poured out because you are born in spiritual poverty with no hope, not because your 401k is lower than you’d like. Paul proclaims that we are more than conquerors in Christ. What more do we really need?

2. Glorifies Materialism

One of the grossest sins in America is the infatuation with money and reputation. I live in Dallas where everyone is in debt up to their eyeballs in order to be seen as one of the North Dallas elites. It doesn’t matter that you make $35,000 per year as long as people think you make $200,000. It’s a scary place to be to think that God wants your wealth because he is ultimately concerned with your renown and happiness. There is a reason that faithful believers in the Bible struggled at one point or another by earthly standards – God was teaching them to refocus their standards according to his. Wealth is not sinful in and of itself, but should never be sought as though you deserve it.

3. Elevates Moralism

It is pretty clear in any prosperity sermon that you are blessed if you are wealthy. A key phrase for a prosperity preacher is, “Are you broke? Does your car need new tires? Did you only get peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch this week? It’s because you haven’t unlocked God’s ultimate plan for you!” He (or she) proceeds to tell you that if you do this and that, God will bless you. What is this blessing? MONEY. Duh. What more could you need to be happy? Forget reckless abandon for Christ and his Kingdom, as long as you got Chili’s instead of tuna salad this week. God’s blessing is him. You get HIM with no stipulations.

From We to Me?

In a recent CNN.com article Alan Miller took issue with the rising trend of young adults in America embracing a sort of generic spirituality, while eschewing more formal, organized forms of religion. Citing solid research and referencing popular books, Miller suggests that this movement is thoroughly entrenched in American life, but that it is also a “cop-out” and should be rejected. In spite of that, the “spiritual but not religious movement” continues to grow in popularity and, at least to some degree, seems to be a backlash against the excesses and inappropriate behavior that some religious organizations have embraced or engaged in, historically. Christianity is probably the most substantial segment of American religion to feel the weight of this rejection on the part of younger generations. Statistics constantly remind us that the younger the generation, the quicker they are leaving our organized faith behind.

If we are going to be honest about it, we have to admit that our Christian movements have, at times, fed the disenchantment through horrible behavior. Looking back through history to the crusades of the Catholic church, to the more recent examples of pedophilia among the Catholic church’s clergy, and even the rampant racism that used to dominate my own tribe, Southern Baptists, racism which has been publicly relegated to the trash heap in the last few years, but which still has a comfortable seat at the table in too many churches, it is easy to see why many would want nothing to do with it.

I want to suggest one biblical example, however, that indicates that rejection of the corporate expression of the church in the face of this kind of sin is not nearly as helpful to our spiritual condition as many might think it to be.

We live in America. The home of independent, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, self-success often best described by the famous Frank Sinatra song, “My Way“. We love the strong, able hero who can take on the world by themselves and succeed in the American ethic. Because of this ethos, we have so individualized every aspect of our culture, that we have also individualized our worship. We can worship God, and never be involved in organized worship. We do not need others to rightly honor him. But, is this what scripture indicates? See for yourself.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1 ESV)

I want to call your attention to one small detail in this passage, one which various translations have unfortunately missed. Notice the plural use of the word “bodies”, particularly when contrasted with the singular use of the word “sacrifice”. If you were to read a different translation, say for instance the NIV, you would see both bodies and sacrifice as plural forms. Unfortunately, the NIV translators, among others, simply got it wrong. Bodies is intended to be plural, while sacrifice is intended to be singular. Why? Simply put, God’s design for our worship; for our sacrifice, is for each of us to come together, as individuals, and for us to form one corporate act of sacrifice; of worship, to honor Him. Simply put, God has designed us so that we need each other. Put another way, the corporate church is God’s design, not ours.

The corporate nature of the body of Christ can be foreign in such an individualized culture, but it is so imperative in the Christian community. It is on this foundation that activities of the church such as church discipline, communion, baptism and more are built upon. It is because we have lost this corporate element in many of our churches that some of these activities have fallen in to disrepair, or disuse all together. Sadly we do not understand the biblical nature of the church which means we can quickly abandon the biblical practices of the church. We must resist this encroaching individualization of the body of Christ.

Yes, the organized church has made horrific errors. Yes, she has failed time and time again. Yes, there is need for great renewal and reform in many corners of, particularly, the Christian church. However, abandoning the church is not the answer. The church needs you, but maybe more specific to your life, you need the church.

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Cross-posted from Micah's personal blog.

Wes Anderson, The Brilliance of Telling the Same Story a Thousand Ways, & the Church

“He's got one trick to last a lifetime, but that's all a pony needs."-- Paul Simon

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In preaching the Gospel, we are essentially telling the same story a thousand different ways. Movie-maker Wes Anderson seems to understand this concept.

Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson's most recent movie, tells a beautiful story. It's a story of very different people who, oddly enough, have something central in common – they are all broken people who feel cast off, confused, and unwanted. The privileged 12-year-old Suzie Bishop, who lives in an idyllic New England home with her attorney parents and three younger brothers, would seem to have nothing in common with Sam Shakusky, an orphan and recently resigned Khaki Scout, who has been traipsed from one boys home to another many times over the course of his young life.

Suzie's attorney parents – Walt and Laura Bishop - far from feeling grounded and accomplished with their giant home, boat, four children, and successful law practice, are painfully aware that they don’t have what it takes to be the parents their kids need them to be, nor the spouses they need to be for one another.

Laura is having an affair with Captain Sharp. As upset as her husband is when he finds out, he can barely react because he knows their marriage is not working. Scout Master Ward, whose job it is to keep all of his Khaki Scouts safe and productive, is shocked to discover Sam has run away, and even more surprised to find out he’s an orphan. Why hadn't Sam said anything?

The gnawing uncertainties of life are lifted in the unifying pursuit of bringing Suzy and Sam back to where they belong safely. It is not perfect -- people get stabbed with left-handed scissors and dogs get impaled with arrows. But this is not to be judged, just accepted.

"Was he a good dog?” runaway Suzie asks her companion, Sam, as they stand over the corpse of Snoopy, the accidentally arrow-pierced pooch.

"Who's to say," Sam intones, with the detached timber of a yogi.

The Story of Hope

As characters begin to bear with one another and learn to rely on one another, things change. Families are created or reunited. Couples form meaningful relationships.  Kids learn to help other kids, and bullies are overthrown. Each finds a sense of purpose and community when they accept themselves and one another.

The baseline plot won't come as a surprise if you are a Wes Anderson fan. He has the same message in almost every film. It's in the Tenebaum household, among the brothers seeking to mend a family in Darjeeling Ltd.; and among the animals Anderson takes on in Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

It is a message that resonates with me: In a broken world, where things aren't right, love somehow makes it beautiful. People are still broken and, at times, outlandish -- but beautiful.

The Gospel Story and the Church

The reason the Gospel story can be told a thousand different ways is because of its depth. The Gospel tells us the core of orthodoxy, the kerygma of Jesus, the fundamentals of the faith, the statements of the Apostle's Creed – it is the eternality of the Gospel. When Peter declares that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God (Matt:16), Jesus responds, “Blessed are you, Peter son of John, for flesh and blood did not reveal this to you but my Father in Heaven.” The Divine mysteriously interacts with creation and that which is eternal and unseen is made known to mere humans.

The Gospel also tells the story of pilgrimage. It speaks of how we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling. But God doesn't leave us alone in this. First, He is with us. God works within us both to will and to work for His good pleasure (Phil 2:12-13). We have God Himself with us, but we also have His reflections, His people. The other pilgrims are with us.

A pilgrim differs from a hermit. The hermit isolates, while the pilgrim triangulates. The pilgrim heads to a fixed point -- Jesus -- and finds along the way other pilgrims. They come from different places, but join their journeys because they have a common destination. The Church is the gathering of broken people who have encountered Jesus and are journeying together with Him towards home.

The Gospel also tells the story of ambassadors from another kingdom. It tells of how we have become a people unique to God among all the peoples on the earth. It tells us we are a royal priesthood. We are to serve the world around us. The Gospel, through the revelation of God, transforms us so that we demonstrate life in Christ -- in word and deed -- to the community around us. Mission and evangelism are part of the story of this same gospel.

An Eternal Story

We tell this story:

"God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

We tell it in pulpits, at our family table, where we work. It is in how we work, why we work. We tell it in our leisure time. We tell it to our spouse. We tell it to ourselves.

Take time to hear the gospel again. Tell the story so well that you want to hear it again and again. A good message lives in many constructs, and has many iterations. As we live and breath, the Gospel continues.

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Ed Marcelle is Lead Pastor of Terra Nova Church in Troy, N.Y., and Northeast Regional Coordinator for the Acts 29 Network. Marcelle holds a Master of Arts in Biblical Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. He and his wife Diane have four children: Alfonso, Isaiah, Bethany, and Abigail. 

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To go deeper in to the Gospel, read Unbelievable Gospel by Jonathan Dodson.

For more free articles about telling the Gospel story checkout Behold the Beauty by Jason Garwood, and A Story of Gospel Community by Seth McBee.

The Trinity & God the Father

Editor's Note: This is a repost of WDA's Knowing God Pocket Principle 4. It appears at GCD with the author's permission. ---

Most of us can’t remember being a baby. But we all were, even if there is no hard evidence, such as those embarrassing photos parents often bring out at holidays. As babies, we form critical ideas about ourselves and the world around us. Sociologists and psychologists tell us that one of the most basic ideas we develop is the understanding that we are distinct, separate from the world around us. We are different from everyone else, even our parents. Our hands are our hands, not somebody else’s. There is an “us” and there is a “not us.”

This concept of being distinct and separate is also true of God. He is different from His creation.

God is different from us and all the universe. Nothing can quite compare to Him nor entirely explain Him. In order to develop a true relationship with God we need to understand this. We must realize that “God Is Who He Is” (Exodus 3:14). To understand who God is, we must understand what He has said about Himself.

God reveals aspects of His character and rule through the natural world. The amazing complexity, order, beauty, and grandeur of the physical world tell us something of God's majesty. But He especially tells us about Himself through Scripture. One unique way that God has revealed Himself in the Bible involves His three-in-one nature. The Church calls this three-person aspect of God: “The Trinity.” Admittedly this is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is central to understanding Him. We can know God more fully by studying how He has revealed Himself through each person of the Trinity.

The Trinity

Deuteronomy 6:4 declares, “The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!” The Scriptures are very clear, there is only one God. Yet He exists in three eternal and equal persons who are the same in essence, but uniquely distinct from one another. The Scriptures place the three persons of the Trinity together as equals: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19; I Peter 1:2, I Corinthians 12:4-6; II Corinthians 13:14).

The Trinity is a great mystery to us. We cannot fully understand how God can be one God and three persons, because we have no complete and exact comparison for this concept. Many things about our infinite God are hard to understand from our finite, human vantage point (cf. Isaiah 55: 8-9). Yet we can define and believe this because the Bible teaches it. Just as we do not have to understand electricity in order to believe it exists and to use it, so the Trinity exists despite our inability to fully comprehend this truth.

The persons of the Trinity relate to each other in a living and vital way.

Consider water. It is one substance (H20), but exists in three forms: liquid (water), gas (steam), and solid (ice). Perhaps it is helpful to note that in a similar way, God is one being who is expressed in the three persons of the Trinity. Unlike H2O, however, the persons of the Trinity relate to each other in a living and vital way. Generally speaking, within the Trinity, God exhibits three roles: God the Father initiates and plans, God the Son executes the plans, and God the Holy Spirit applies the plans to believers. Within the Trinity, unity is brought about by the Son submitting to the Father and the Holy Spirit submitting to the Son and the Father. God the Father has, in turn, given all authority to the Son to carry out the divine plans.

God the Father

As the first person of the Trinity, God the Father, shows His fatherly relationship toward both believers and non-believers through Creation and His common goodness to all the world. The Scriptures say that God the Father causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. He provides for the animals and the fields, for the people of His Kingdom and even the people who oppose Him (Matthew 5:45, 6:25-33, 7:9- 11; Luke 6:35; Hebrews 12).

Furthermore, God the Father demonstrates that He has a unique relationship with believers. God draws us to Himself, graciously bringing us into His family as children (John 6:44, 1:12; I John 3:1). Indeed, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, so that we may truly call Him, “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:15-16; Galatians 4:6- 7). It is a great and humbling mystery to be called children of the Living God and to be made co-heirs with Jesus Christ the Son (Romans 8:17).

This adoption by God the Father leads to special privileges and responsibilities for His children. In Ephesians 1:3- 14, we see that God the Father freely forgives us and provides every good thing we need. He has special intentions for us—to be holy and blameless—and has revealed His plan to us in Scripture. As a perfect Father, He has assured us of our place in His love by giving us the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of our inheritance as His children. With all the joy and security of beloved children, we have free access to God the Father through faith (Ephesians 3:12).

Likewise, God the Father has endowed His children with responsibilities such as obeying His Word (John 14:21) and representing Him as messengers of reconciliation to the world (II Corinthians 5:20). As members of His family, we are to be a part of His church and to respond to Him in praise and worship (Hebrews 10:24-25; I Peter 2:9).

This adoption by God the Father leads to special privileges and responsibilities for His children.

As we study who God is, we come to understand more of His character and His nature. Through the Scripture, we learn that God is both transcendent (beyond our understanding) in the mystery of His Trinity, and He is immanent (totally accessible) as our heavenly Father. With whole hearts we can call on Him as Lord and Father!

Summary of The Trinity & God the Father

• It is important to understand what God has revealed about Himself in Scripture.
• God is a Trinity, existing in three eternal and equal persons who are one God.
• Although the Trinity cannot be fully understood, the Bible teaches us to believe.
• God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit fulfill different roles.
• God the Father is the first person of the Trinity.
• As His children, we have special privileges and responsibilities.

Application Suggestions

• Meditate on and appreciate the transcendence and immanence of God.
• Meditate on Ephesians 1 and 2 in order to appreciate the privileges God has given to you.
• Meditate on I Peter 2:9-10 and appreciate the high calling God has given to you by entrusting you with significant responsibilities.

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Robert D. (Bob) Dukes is the President and Executive Director of Worldwide Discipleship Association (WDA) headquartered in Fayetteville, Georgia. He serves as a founding member of The Steering Committee for The Pierce Center for Disciple Building at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston, MA.

* Order the Knowing God Pocket Principle Bundle at the WDA Store. 

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For more resources on digging deeper into the truth and mystery of the Trinity, check out The Holy Spirit, by Winfield Bevins.

For more free articles on living out the Trinity in a gospel centered community, read: The Harmony of Community, by Greg Wilson, and Confession Is the New Innocence, by Hayley and Michael DiMarco.

Mission New England (Part 2)

Josh Cousineau is church planter of Redemption Hill, located in Auburn, Maine, and core team member of the Gospel Alliance New England. He enjoys spending time with his high school sweetheart – now his bride since 2002 – and their three children. Josh blogs at JoshCousineau.com.  

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In my first post I talked a little bit about the culture of the Northeast, especially New England. In this post I wanted to put forth a couple thoughts on the 'how' of mission. The question begs to be asked, 'If people do not know their need for a Savior, how do you reach them?' The short and simple is that it has to be a work of the Spirit. If He is not living and active in New England, or anywhere for that matter, then there is no hope and no point to our efforts. But the glorious truth is that the Spirit is at work, especially in the hearts of those who do not know they even have a need for Him.

Preach Jesus - The number one thing our churches must do in any culture, especially one who doesn't know anything about Jesus, is to preach the real Jesus. We need to stay far away from the 'your best life now' Jesus. The Jesus of the Bible will be the only one who can reveal people's need for healing from the brokenness that is this world.

Preach Truth - We need to not waver or wallow in our view of firm Biblical doctrine. Many people will 'water down' things that are clear in the Bible under the name of 'reaching out' to the lost. While this could be considered noble, it misses the point. What is needed in a world full of people who claim truth, is a people who's lives point to an ultimate, life-changing truth.

Be Real - Fakeness has struck many blows to the church. What is needed now is not more hypocrisy, but transparency. People need to hear about how we have failed, how we have messed up, how we have been about us or about an agenda and not about what Jesus was about. We need to confess our sins to those in our midst and show them how we turn to Jesus! Only in our real, brokenness will the world be freed to be broken.

Be Normal - All those things listed above are not to be done on Sunday during an hour-long service, but in our daily, normal lives. We need to be real at our 9-5, when we drop our children off at day-care or school, when we go on a date with our spouse, or sit and play catch at the local park. We also need to preach truth in our dealings with our boss and co-workers. We need to show that the truth we believe in is not simply a good, morally upright set of beliefs, but something that has changed us from the inside out. We need to be people that will hold firm to the truth of the Scriptures and be willing to take it on chin if need be.

Church in New England will never penetrate the culture by meeting for an hour each week, even if it is the greatest show in town. What we will do when we have the greatest show in town is draw people away from the other shows and have them join ours. This drawing is not true conversion, but transplant growth. No matter how great our show is, people that are not interested in watching the show will never attend.

Think of it this way. I don't play disk golf. So if a new course was to open and be the best in town, or even the region, or the world, it would not entice me in the least to go try my hand at it. The most it will do is draw people from the other 3 or 4 disk golf courses around my area. This makes total sense in the setting of something we do not like to do, or care to do. Yet we are baffled when we try it with church and it doesn't work. Here is the reason; you and I love the church. If you are spending time reading this blog, then you love the church. You are the disk golfer who is at the ribbon cutting for the new course. Just replace 'disk golf' with church, and you get the picture.

Yet we, in New England, live in a world that couldn't care less about church, so no matter how much we tell them it is amazing in our advertising, or no matter how 'cutting edge' we think we are, the only people wowed by it are those who are already playing church.

This is where things need to change. We need to take Ephesians 4 and live it out. We need to be pastors and ministers who equip our people to preach Jesus, be real, and stand firm on the truth of what Jesus has done for them.

(Photo courtesy: TGC)

Mission New England (Part 1)

Josh Cousineau is church planter of Redemption Hill, located in Auburn, Maine, and core team member of the Gospel Alliance New England. He enjoys spending time with his high school sweetheart – now his bride since 2002 – and their three children. Josh blogs at JoshCousineau.com.  

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I have heard stories about people who live in the Bible Belt and how everyone down there is a 'Christian.' I have visited the South and been blown away by how many church buildings there are, and how big they are. I grew up in the Northeast and this is my home. I love it, but it is a little (ok a lot) different than what I hear the South is like.

I remember one trip to Alabama where I met with a Southern Baptist pastor for breakfast. When we were at the local breakfast joint, he started to pray for our food. There was nothing special about his prayer, nothing that stood out to me as unusual. During the prayer the waitress came to the table. Now, I don't know if you are like me, but this seems to happen often when I am out with my family or friends for a meal. We pray and almost like clockwork, the waiter or waitress walks up to see how our food is. This is what stood out to me. Not that she walked towards us during our prayer; that was normal. The strange thing was that the waitress stood about five feet from the table, bowed her head, and waited for us to be done praying. This would never happen where I live. More often than not they just walk up and ask you their question. It is not that they are intentionally interrupting your time of prayer, it is that they don't even know or notice what you are doing. In the Northeast, people don't pray before meals.

It is not that those who serve us in the Northeast are slow to notice that we are eating and those in the South are that quick. It is that the thought of praying before a meal is not normal to those who call the Northeast home. Not only do people not pray before meals, but the 'Christian-culture' that so many of us have grown up in and are used to, is non-existent in the majority of people's daily lives.

Gospel-Depleted Culture

To say that we (those who live in the Northeast, especially New England) are in the midst of a gospel-depleted culture would be an understatement. I could throw around statistics about how dry it is up here, but who really cares about statistics. I would much rather talk about real life stories of real people, with a real eternity looming on their horizon. I could point to a local coffee shop where the people who work there are all about spirituality, but this spirituality has nothing to do with biblical worldview. It is actually fully opposed to those beliefs. I could talk about a guy who told me he could not believe in a church that has rooms full of gold and does not care about the poor or the down and out. I am not sure, but my church doesn't have rooms full of gold. The church he was talking about is the Vatican. His view of Christianly and the Church is based only off of what he knows about the Roman Catholic church, not my little church plant, or any other church I know of. I could tell story after story about students, parents, and teachers who do not see an issue with premarital sex, as long as you use protection.

In the Northeast, Christian is more likely to be found on the lips of someone making a derogatory comment, than someone talking about the hope which they live their lives by. Jesus is about as far back in people's minds as who won the medal count in the 2008 Olympics. Not only do the vast majority of people not know about Jesus, they don't even care that they don't know about Him. It is not relevant for them, so therefore there is no need.  See, it is not that they have turned their backs on the family religion, or let their parents down by bailing on the Easter service this year, or the Thanksgiving Eve prayer service. Their parents probably didn't go to church much in the first place, so they don't really care. You would have to go back to grandma, or even great-grandma before you would find someone who actually had a 'Christian-Rhythm' to their life. This is just how life is, and there is nothing one can do about it.

There is Hope

In the midst of this darkness, I find hope. The pastors I talk to have a joyful expectancy upon their lips. Student ministers are eager to pour their lives out for the next generation. To be honest I would rather work with people who don't have a care in the world about God, the Bible, the Church, or Jesus. Because what I find is when these people come face-to-face with the gospel, it changes everything. They are more like the prodigal son who 'comes to his sense (Lk. 15.17 NIV) that living as a servant with his father is better than the life he has now, eating pig slops, than the elder brother who sits by ticked that his sinner brother got back into the family (Lk. 15.28).

No matter if the waitress comprehends that people will pray before a meal or not, the gospel is still the same. That is our only hope. Not that she would see us praying and think, 'oh, I need to be considerate and wait.' No, our only hope is that Jesus is in the business of bringing people to Himself, lost, sick people. People who don't know they are lost or sick. People who think they have it all together. This is what Jesus came to do, and as a pastor and missionary, this is what I cling to. Jesus came to save the sinners.

(Photo courtesy: TGC)

The Love of Our Father

I love the mornings when my boy Ezra wakes up and he just wants to snuggle. He is a year and a half old, twenty some pounds of dynamite and energy. He seldom wants to snuggle. But some mornings he does. I love getting to hold my son and telling him I love him.

And I do love him. I adore him. I am crazy about him and love being his daddy. And he adores me. He loves to wrestle, play, and tell me about the “capuchin” monkeys at the zoo. And he loves to cheer on his daddy. One day I was beating my friend Dustin at backyard soccer, and Ezra was on the trampoline jumping and watching. After I scored an epic goal, Ezra ran to the edge of the trampoline and put out his arms. I ran over to him thinking he wanted down. Instead he just wanted to give me a hug and yell, “Go Daddy!” It was awesome.

I remember the first night I brought Ezra home and it felt like my heart had exploded. I wept with joy and love. Lindsey and I both felt like Will Ferrell in Elf after his first date with Zoey Deschanel. All we could say was, “I am in love, I am in love, and I don’t care who knows it.”

ABBA FATHER – DADDY GOD

Ezra and I have a real relationship. I am his daddy, and he is my boy. That means something. It is a gift, and it is a blessing. Some will read this and be sad they don’t have kids, and some might read this and be sad they had a crappy dad or no dad at all. That is sad and is part of the curse of the fall. We were created to love and be loved. Sin has come into the world and separated us from God and one another. Sin is a relationship destroyer. But God is love. Christ proves his love for us through his death on the cross, and brings us back into perfect relationship back with our heavenly Father.

Our God is a Daddy. He reveals himself as Abba Father. One whose arms we can rest in. One whom we can watch, adore and, cheer on. And he loves us too. We are his beloved children. His kids. His girl. His boy.

GOD’S COVENANTAL LOVE

One of the things I told Ezra when he was born was that he never has to work for my love. That I love him with a covenantal love. I choose to love him forever. It is a love that is not based on his performance. This is the love our Father loves us with. It is an everlasting covenant.

He chooses us, adopts us, creates the way for us to be in his family forever, and loves us in spite of our performance and rebellion. This is a love we do not deserve, and it is a powerful and perfect love. He is not ashamed to love us as he loves us and doesn’t care who knows it!

It can be so easy to forget this covenantal love when you feel the weight of trying to perform — trying to prove yourself to the world and to others and ultimately to God. I remember feeling this way not to long ago. I can often slip into this feeling, and it is heavy and exhausting. One day, I was feeling this weight and some friends prayed over me. One of them had a vision of God looking at me and saying – “I love you. You are my boy. Rest, Jake. The Father loves you. You don’t have to perform, as I am already here with you.” I wept under the freedom of these powerful and loving words. My God is a relational God. He is a Daddy that loves me. And I get to run to him, hug him, and cheer him on – “Go Daddy!”

WHO’S YOUR DADDY?

Knowing our Father helps us know who we are. As Christians we are sons and daughters of a holy and perfect Father. We are not alone. We belong to a heavenly family and will live together for eternity. We don’t have to take on life’s pain and struggles like a cowboy in a Clint Eastwood movie, but instead we get to share our  triumphs and trials as a church praying together to “our Father who art in heaven.”

If you are feeling the weight of loneliness or the pressure to prove yourself, I want to encourage you to confess it to God and to your church family. I want to encourage you to run to your Father’s arms and let him embrace you and tell you the truth of his love for you. Praise and thank him that you are not alone and that you don’t have to perform for his love. Tell some of your church friends to remind you of these truths — that you have a perfect daddy. Rest in this beautiful truth and when the world asks you why you have such peace and rest in a chaotic world, point them to your loving Father!

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Jake Chambers is a member of Jesus’ bride - the church, husband to his beautiful bride Lindsey, and a daddy to his boy Ezra. Jake is passionate about seeing the gospel both transform lives and create communities that love Jesus, the city, and the lost. He currently serves Red Door Church through leading, preaching, equipping, and pastoring. You can read more of his writing at reddoorlife.tv.

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For more in-depth reading about family discipleship, see Family Worship, by Winfield Bevins. 

For more free articles about loving our children with the love of the Father, check out Ways to Love Your Children, by Patrick Morley, and Kids in the Family of God – Part One and Kids in the Family of God – Part Two, by Ben Connelly. 

Kony 2012, Sex-Trafficking, and the Christian Response to Justice Issues

I’m not sure there’s a more amazing piece of storytelling than the Kony 2012 video. It’s worth the 30 minutes as long as you are prepared to cry, be angry, and get fired up. [WATCH: KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo]

As I’ve spoken with a few people about the Kony video and how Christians should respond, I’m struck by a few thoughts.

There is so much brokenness in the world, how can you ever identify where to get involved? It seems that various winds of doctrine have been joined by various winds of mercy and justice initiatives. Paul obviously has negative connotations for the winds of doctrines and it is rare, though not unheard of, to have heretical justice initiatives. Nevertheless, being tossed about by doctrines or justice opportunities can make us completely ineffective if we do not assess ourselves before jumping in.

Every day we are confronted with a terrible issue in our world, whether it be sex-trafficking locally and globally, the Invisible Children, the global orphan crisis, racial inequality, and global poverty. Every time we see a new issue we could jump at the need to get involved but constantly be shifting our focus.

Living in New York City with 8.5 million people, it is easy to both see and be overwhelmed by the need. How should we respond? How should we approach involvement? Are we supposed to be involved in every justice issue? How does the church or the individual Christian approach these initiatives?

The Gospel Motivates and Empowers us to Mercy and Justice

Imagine pockets of people giving themselves to seeing brokenness restored, injustice ended, and local/global issues resolved. This is not our creation of the church, this is Jesus’ vision and mission for the church. We are inspired by these issues because we were created to embody our God’s character toward these issues. When we engage the brokenness of the world we are reminded of God the Father who sent Jesus, publicly declaring His passion in action to initiate the end of brokenness, suffering, and ills caused by the selfish desires that live inside of us. (Ed Stetzer has some good scriptural evidence for us)

Christian faith gives us a view towards the Kingdom of God where Jesus is King and eliminates all tears, pain, and injustice. There is no greater motivation or means of empowerment.

It also means we have responsibility. None of us can stand on the sideline and avoid issues of justice and needs for mercy. We must engage and we must do so led by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Don’t Just “Like” Everything - Settle On and Do Something

Now that Facebook is integrated into everything in the world, I am guily of hitting the “Like” button and settling into armchair advocate of a cause. Causes aren’t changed simply by web-interaction. It helps with exposing people to ideas, making an idea viral, but personal involvement and engagement of the issue is what rallies people to a cause. So choose a cause and focus on it.

Get Informed Beyond a Moving Video

Joe Boyd had a great article about a Christian response moving beyond emotive acceptance to informed action. Storytelling is powerful, so we must be careful to not enter an issue naively assuming we know the simple solution to an often complex reality.

Invest Deep More Than Wide

Real change happens over a generation. The moving video of Kony 2012 was a decade just in the making and could be a decade in accomplishment.

A sustaining impact comes from commitment to the idea which requires that we move our excitement and emotions to lifestyle-changing action.

The diversity of the body of Christ allows for us to find peace in addressing deeply a few issues rather than addressing broadly every issue on a surface level. We need to encourage people to develop discernment in line with their gifts, talent, and passions to mobilize more people for more issues.

These types of movements make me excited about heaven where we will get to celebrate Jesus’ destruction of injustice. I can’t wait.

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Cross-posted from Logan's personal blog.