...observations and ramblings from a learner and traveler...

24 February 2011

a Prayer for Embarking on a Shepherd's Journey

My Master's joy, Lord, may I share
and weight of glory know fore'er?

Your counsel full may I declare
and walk each day in works prepared?

May my report with joy be fair
with little grief concerning tares?

In heav'n, or earth, Your Name I bear
to magnify Your glories there.
Amen.

MCC, 2/23/2011


21 February 2011

Disciple-making versus a typical model of Discipleship

Disciple-making is spiritual pregnancy and trainer-hood.  "Making disciples" is not simply helping people with spiritual growth; it is teaching people to be Jesus-followers, that is, bringing them to vigorous, new spiritual life.  Making disciples is the intentional process of moving people more deeply into relationship with Jesus Christ through the gospel.  This will involve showing them (by teaching and example) where they are unlike Jesus and how to become like Him, both before and after they have repented and believed in Jesus.  Thus, we are constantly to call everyone around us to be devoted followers of Jesus regardless of their current posture toward the Gospel.

Look at Matthew 28:18-20 - "And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make [devoted followers] of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”"

Here we see that what Jesus gives as the central command, "making disciples of all nations" will involve going under His authority, baptizing those who become His followers, and teaching them to come into complete submission to all that Jesus commanded.  So, true disciple-making will extend from before salvation to the point of full obedience to Christ.

(These thoughts were spawned by our time at Soma School and honed during conversation with friends.

12 February 2011

Christ-centered Christianity - a guest post

As simply as I can state it, my question is: Is Gospel-centered Christianity a subtle deviation from Christ-centered Christianity, making Christ preeminent in everything?

Now, I know that it is impossible and probably undesirable to seek to draw a clear distinction between Christ and His cross-work, but there is a difference. One is who He is—Himself—and the other is what He does/has done—His ways/work. Obviously, His work flows from who He is and is a perfect expression of Who He is. The major point of the work, then, is to reveal Him to us. That means we have to accept and embrace what He has done for us, and due to the nature of salvation and how the cross changes everything, we are rightly overwhelmed and fascinated by the Gospel. What is the Gospel? It is the story of Jesus, the Good News of His redemption and His provision for reconciliation between holy Creator God and rebellious, damned created humans. As the song says, “This is the best news that we could ever hear. More than amazing, it drives out every fear. By trusting in Jesus Christ, in His saving sacrifice, we can be made new.” If we are focused supremely on His work, however, we may never actually follow through to the end that His work intended us to reach: knowing Him, seeing Him, being fascinated with Him, gazing on His face, fellowshiping with Him personally, understanding and glorying in Him. Due to the nature and message of the Gospel, this should never ever happen. But it does.


What does that look like? Well, look around. In a growing, healthy church these days, a growing number people have grasped/are beginning to grasp the earth-shaking significance of the Gospel for everyday life. You hear them. They talk about it. They discuss it theologically and even spin out some of its implications. In fact, they talk about it a lot—especially in specific settings like church… or Bible study… or even with a fellow-believer on occasion. “Spreading the Gospel.” “Preaching the Gospel to myself.” “Living out the Gospel.” Nice phrases (not being sarcastic here!) that we hear a good bit these days, and I am glad of that. I use those phrases, or very similar ones, myself. But then check out the rest of the conversation and look at some of the life choices—not even the “sinful” ones necessarily. Look at the way leisure time is spent, the entertainment choices, the financial commitments, the casual/careless speech, and the personal preferences and delights. Is there a disconnect? (I realize no one is perfect and/or completely consistent.) Usually, the answer is “Yes.” Do they mean to be inconsistent? Usually the answer is “No.” After all, these are people that are striving to be Gospel-centered. When they say they love the Gospel and are committed to living it out, they truly mean it. So why don’t their lives look like little suburbs of Heaven? (Again, not envisioning perfection, but seeking something that matches Scripture’s portrait of how God’s people should live.) There is a disconnect. Due to the nature and message of the Gospel, this should never ever happen. But it does. 

Why? “Gospel” is inherently a “thing” word. The Gospel is a story, a set of facts—a story about a Person, a set of facts about a Person—but not the Person. Gospel and Christ/God are inextricably linked, but they are not interchangeable. (It is the "power of God"...) “God is the Gospel” is not the same as “the Gospel is God.” The Gospel is not the Person, and Christianity is about a Person, not about a story about a Person. (I really hope this does not sound like I am engaging in purposeless, endless semantics.) If the Gospel does not lead you to the Person, you have missed the whole point of the Gospel. When I say “lead you to the Person,” I do not mean that in your examining the Gospel, you occasionally (or even frequently) express your gratitude to God for all that He has done for you through the Gospel. I do not mean that you do not acknowledge the mercy, grace, and love of God so brilliantly displayed at the cross, or that you completely ignore the blazing power of the resurrection. But, you can process all those as part of the “story” without ever allowing them to impact your functional view of God. You can gaze at the Gospel and never quite get around to gazing at Christ and being transformed by the Spirit into the image of Christ. Due to the nature and message of the Gospel, this should never ever happen. But it does.


How does this happen? I suggest that Gospel-centered Christianity is a subtle misuse of the Gospel. Let me illustrate with two word pictures:

1.  The Gospel is a bridge. It is the bridge that Christ built to provide access to Himself and to His Father. You cannot get to God without the Gospel. (Right now, I am not speaking of the salvific sense either. I am speaking of the Gospel as it relates to the believer’s life.) Perhaps it would be slightly more accurate to say that, even as a believer, you will not get to God without the Gospel. You will not get to God without the Gospel because you will be so overwhelmed by your sin, by your slowness to grow, by your lacking performance, by your fears, etc., that guilt and discouragement will cripple you, and you will be, for all intents and purposes, estranged from God. You will lapse back into being afraid of Him, trying to hide from Him, striving to manipulate Him, attempting to appease Him and weasel your way into His favor somehow. Unless you go to the Gospel, you will not get back to God. The Gospel reminds you of what Christ did for you and how what He did gives you perpetual and immediate access to God without fear. It reminds you that your performance has never been the grounds of God’s acceptance of you. It bids you run to God now, just as you did when you first turned from your sin to worship and serve the true and living God. And so you run across the Gospel bridge and throw yourself in the arms of God and stay there, talking with Him, learning from Him, looking at His face, worshiping Him, obeying Him….until you either intentionally or carelessly wander off and find yourself isolated by your sin, having chosen to allow sin to be your master again, though Christ broke sin’s tyranny over you. You long for fellowship with God again, and the Spirit reminds you of the Gospel. In His strength, you run across the Gospel bridge (we might call this preaching the Gospel to ourselves) and back into our dwelling place in God through Christ. The Gospel is the bridge. It is indispensable. It is glorious. It is beautiful. It is an incomprehensible display of the wisdom of God, the love of God, the wrath of God, the righteousness of God, the mercy of God, and much much more. But do not build your house on the bridge. The bridge manifests the character of God in order to point you to God Himself. If you settle down on the bridge instead of actually crossing all the way over and finding your home in God, I think you are misusing the bridge. The Gospel is not the center of the Kingdom; the One sitting on the throne is the center of the Kingdom, the center of life and Life.


2. The Gospel is a beautiful glass window in an otherwise wretched dungeon, a dark, filthy, stench-filled torture-chamber (again, not in the salvific sense, but in the believer’s experience). You can be fascinated by the glass window itself—its beauty, clarity, light-giving properties and so on, or you can look through it and see the sun and the trees and throw it open and climb out of your prison cell back into freedom.


Analogy: From cover to cover, the Bible tells us of God’s relationship with people, and, barring the first two chapters of Genesis and last two chapters of Revelation, His relationship with a sinful, rebellious people in need of redemption. The only reason there is a need for redemption is because God loved sinful man. No sin = no redemption story. So, in a sense, the Bible is about us and our being redeemed. But we know that in a much greater sense, the Bible is about God. It is about Who He is and what He is doing and how everything from eternity past through eternity future is working together to bring Him glory, the glory due to His Name. We can read the Bible as a revelation about us and find some really large, really relevant truth in that. Or we can read the Bible as a revelation of God and practically explode our minds by the little glimpses that we see into the Infinite One and eternity. So we can read the Bible from two different perspectives—both acceptable, though not equally weighty—and get two different results from our reading—both profitable, though not equally magnificent.


The Gospel is kind of like that. You can view the Gospel as the truth about Jesus and His work on your behalf that saves you and enables you to live by grace instead of trying to keep the law and living under guilt and fear, and you can truly and legitimately derive profit and joy from seeing the Gospel like that. You can also view the Gospel as the truth about Jesus, the Savior who saves you  and gives access to God both now and forever, and you can go on to take full advantage of that access to God by living in His presence day and night and knowing Him and admiring Him and growing in your understanding of Him and being transformed by His Spirit into His likeness.


I think that our common application of “Gospel-centered Christianity” leaves us sitting on the bridge, admiring the magnificent window, and content to escape living a guilt-laden life because we have tapped into grace. Due to the nature and message of the Gospel, this should never ever happen. But it does. That is why I think we are missing something… something really essential. Hence the question: Is Gospel-centered Christianity a subtle deviation from Christ-centered Christianity: making Christ preeminent in everything, being His disciple, knowing Him and making Him known?

**This is a guest post by Miriam K. Champlin, slightly edited with her permission.

11 February 2011

May the depth of His mercy engulf the depth of my sin!

The quote below is from John Calvin as he discusses the complete impossibility of confessing all our sins to God.  Instead of trying, we must throw ourselves upon the mercy of God!  But still, notice the last highlighted sentence and beyond, he does not say that believers must not admit and repent of our sin which we are aware of, simply that we must not consider that to be essential to our forgiveness, which would be to dishonor the sufficiency of Christ's work and steal peace from our consciences, as Calvin speaks of in 3.4.27.

"For, while they are wholly occupied with the enumeration of their sins, they lose sight of that lurking hydra, their secret iniquities and internal defilements, the knowledge of which would have made them sensible to their misery.  But the surest rule of confession is, to acknowledge and confess our sins to be an abyss so great as to exceed our comprehension. On this rule we see the confession of the publican was formed, "God be merciful to me, a sinner" (Luke 18:13); as if he had said, How great, how very great a sinner, how utterly sinful I am! the extent of my sins I can neither conceive nor express.  Let the depth of thy mercy engulf the depth of sin! What! you will say, are we not to confess every single sin? Is no confession acceptable to God but that which is contained in the words, "I am a sinner"?  No, our endeavor must rather be, as much as in us lies, to pour out our whole heart before the Lord. Nor are we only in one word to confess ourselves sinners, but truly and sincerely acknowledge ourselves as such; to feel with our whole soul how great and various the pollutions of our sins are; confessing not only that we are impure, but what the nature of our impurity is, its magnitude and its extent; not only that we are debtors, but what the debts are which burden us, and how they were incurred; not only that we are wounded, but how numerous and deadly are the wounds. When thus recognizing himself, the sinner shall have poured out his whole heart before God, let him seriously and sincerely reflect that a greater number of sins still remains, and that their recesses are too deep for him thoroughly to penetrate. Accordingly, let him exclaim with David, "Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults," (Ps. 19: 12.)" (Calvin's Institutes, 3.4.18, page 418; emphasis mine)

If you want to read more, you can find section 18 part way down this page

09 February 2011

a recent description of me by Bethany...

 "And frankly you are an odd pool of random and intellectual knowledge so I never know what you do know."

there you have it...

07 February 2011

Humor: just a sense of proportion

   I was doing some reading about storytelling, because I want to learn to tell The Story better.  The Art of Storytelling by Marie Shedlock comments on "... a sense of humor, which is really a sense of proportion..."  That brought to mind  Psalm 2 where the One who sits in the heavens laughs at those who are plotting His overthrow.  The very idea of the Lord who made the heavens and the earth being destroyed by puny men who sit upon one of His planets is ludicrous... a sense of proportion would make the audacity of these kings and peoples appear as sheer lunacy.  

Psalm 2
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
“As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”
I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.”
Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear,
and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
(ESV)