This is literally on my block: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/video?id=6943180
July 31, 2009
July 24, 2009
My heart has been hard and God is at work in me
“Perhaps the most frightening cases are those where countless sins are committed by many, many people, and God does absolutely nothing about it. For the worst judgment occurs when God turns his back on people, and resolutely lets sin take its course. Far better to be pulled up sharply before things get out of hand” (D.A. Carson,For the Love of God, Vol. 1, July 5).
In light of this I praise God for what he’s been doing in my life lately. I’ve been feeling a callousness in my heart and soul lately towards God and I was asking God to soften my heart but felt very hard towards him. I was tempted to be bitter towards God for not softening my heart. How foolish! But God helped me realize that my awareness of my hardness of heart and my desire, as cold as it was, was a gift from God and that he was graciously working in me. He wasn’t turning his back on me. He wasn’t letting my sin take its course. He was doing something about it, he was informing me and making me aware that my heart was hard, my joy was dissipated, and that I needed to be broken before him. I’m still praying for brokenness and feel calloused toward God in large measure.
July 23, 2009
Church Planting: easy vs. hard
Jeff Vanderstelt has taught me a crucial truth about church planting:
Planting (and planning) services is easy, making disciples (who can make more disciples who can make more disciples) is hard. But planting a church is the latter and not the former.
He talked about this truth in a message called, “Being a Leader who Grow Leaders” and wrote about it in a blog post entitled, “Observations about Church Planting.”
Update: Steve Timmis says the same thing in his own words:
If we think of church as primarily a Sunday morning meeting, an event, then the majority of our effort is going to be invested in putting on that event. That’s what we’re going to be building towards. That’s what we’re going to be focused on. That’s what we’re going to be investing all of our energies into. But if church is not less than that event, but significantly more than that event, then getting everyone togther for a public meeting is the easy step… But seeing a people pulled together, built together, through the gospel by the Holy Spirit, now that’s an altogether different task. That’s of a different magnitude and order. That, though brothers and sisters, is the long haul of seeing an authentic and alternative community that is created that models the reign of Christ by the gospel life that they live that invites others into it by the gospel word that they speak. That’s really what church planting is. It’s not just to put on an event. It’s to build a church, a community of people living under the reign of King Jesus.
Jeff’s words from his post on this topic were:
1. The Bible doesn’t command us to plant churches, but “plant” the Gospel and make disciples. Churches grow up in that soil as Jesus builds his Church – So…Are we making disciples as Jesus defined disciples (Able to do all that Jesus commanded and trained his dis@ <E@ake disciples who make disciples)?
2. It seems that the large costs (referred to above) has a lot to do with planting services (the costs of buildings, supplies, equipment, a preacher, a worship leader, a children's ministry, etc…) and not making disciples who make disciples – Is it possible that Planting Churches could be a lot less expensive if our focus was on Making Disciples and not mainly on starting services? (I am not against the gathering, but my experience has been that making disciples cost less money and produces greater generosity to support the mission).
July 21, 2009
Go into the mind of the Prostitute who Anointed Jesus’ Feet
Here’s one way to think about it that I’ve found stimulating and helpful.
Audio from Timmis, Vanderstelt, and others on Church Planting
From the Acts 29 blog:
Last month we had the pleasure of officially launching Acts 29 Western Europe with a “Church Planting Foundations” conference – a boot camp by another name that was definitely just as sweet! Speakers include Steve Timmis, our new Western Europe director, Scott Thomas, Jeff Vanderstelt and David Fairchild. Check out the audio for these brilliant sessions here.
Steve Timmis, Tim Chester, and Jeff Vanderstelt have been very insightful in helping me think through ecclesiological and church planting issues. Aside from Scripture and the 9Marks school of thought, Timmis, Chester, and Vanderstelt have been the most formative in my thinking and have provoked much reflection. I trust I’ll be edified by this audio resource and may blog on it in the future.
Check out the audio here.
July 16, 2009
New book on serving the poor on sale until Saturday!
I just heard from WTS Books that they are running a special for 48 hours (expiring at 5 PM EST on Saturday, July 18), selling When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself for $4.89 (67% off the retail price).
July 11, 2009
Resources for a Theology of Work
This will help those who hear the preaching at CrossView Church today:
July 10, 2009
Randy Alcorn’s piece of counsel to improve your preaching
From CJ’s blog:
What single piece of counsel (or constructive criticism) has most improved your preaching?
“It is impossible to make a balanced statement.”
You can spend all day qualifying what you’re saying and removing the punch from it. Jesus made many statements that have to be clarified by others (e.g. plucking out your eye and cutting off your hand, and hating your family). But it is a mistake to strip such statements of their power by immediately modifying them and saying what they don’t mean instead of what they do. I think we are free to make prophetic statements without always qualifying them.
July 8, 2009
Lebron James diminishes his greatness by trying foolishly to protect it
Picture taken from here (HT: Dan Steinberg)
It is absolutely horrible that Lebron James, who was one of the players I liked most in the NBA would do another thing that shows his pride and self-centeredness. I must remind myself that as a human sinner, though saved by the grace of Christ and learning to walk in humility, that my wife can point out continuous displays of pride and self-centeredness in my life that I have to repent from and grow out of as I continue to live for Christ. That being said, I must also say that this story about Lebron and Nike confiscating videos of him getting dunked on is immature and displays Lebron’s idolatrous desire to protect his image. Read the story here.
CJ Mahaney would use this story as an opportunity to point out pride, arrogance, and selfishness.
This applies to watching a game as well. So as Chad and I watch the [March Madness] tournament, I will draw his attention to any evidence of humility or unselfishness I observe, as well as any expression of arrogance or selfishness. I will celebrate the former and ridicule the latter. I don’t just watch the game with Chad; I seize it as a teaching moment to equip him with discernment about true greatness in the eyes of God (read the whole post here).
In an attempt to protect Lebron’s greatness before men, he diminishes his greatness before God by being proud and arrogant rather than humbling himself, laughing at the fact that he (like all basketball greats) get dunked on, and moving on in life. Ironically, in trying to protect his image of greatness before men he did not only display a lack of greatness before God, but also before men (as I wathched the ESPN report and read it on a few news sites).
I’m not saying Lebron needs to act like a Christian if he isn’t one, but it still is a display of pride and I’m saddened because I really like Lebron more than Kobe as a personality and think he is now a better player (though I’m a Laker fan and therefore will always want Kobe as a Laker to do better than all other NBA players).
[For the Kobe haters out there, I know Kobe is arrogant too, but this story and post is about Lebron.]
July 7, 2009
A Christian framework on sexuality applied to thinking about homosexuality
I found this essay helpful on many fronts: marriage, sexuality, cohabitation, and homosexuality. Here’s some thoughts on homosexuality based on the framework set out in the article (Read the whole thing here):
5.2. A Test Case: Homosexual Desires
I want to address this question by taking as my example perhaps the most painful and certainly the most controversial issue in contemporary culture wars: “gay marriage.” I choose this, not because it is the only example of desires that are not ordered according to God’s will, but because it is perhaps the most acute of those disordered desires. It is well-known that the past half-century has seen a sea change in social attitudes towards homosexual desire and practice, epitomized in the USA by the decision of the American Psychological Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of psychological disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.60
The Bible regards all same-sex attraction as a disordered desire, and same-sex intimacy as sinful. The arguments of those who wish to claim that the Bible actually accepts and approves homosexual desire and practice have been comprehensively refuted by Robert Gagnon.61
So instead of engaging with that issue, I want to ask two questions. First, what is the origin and cause of homosexual desires? Second, what does the Christian worldview have to say to those who experience them?
5.2.1. The Origin of Homosexual Desires
In Romans 1:21–23, Paul speaks of a terrible “exchange” by which human beings cease to worship the one true God and begin to worship idols of their own choice, created things rather than the Creator. This is followed in verses 24–31 by a threefold “handing over” by God, in which human beings are handed over to the consequences of false worship. These verses give a picture of moral disorder, disordered morality that is the consequence of disordered worship. He chooses homosexuality as his prime example.
But why does Paul take homosexual desire as his leading example in Romans 1:24–27? We feel uneasy because Paul seems to make a minority group his prime target for disapproval.
Before answering this, we need to be clear that he is speaking of all homosexual desire and practice. He is not just speaking of the Greek practice of sex between men and boys, since he speaks of lesbianism as well: “even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another” (Romans 1:26–27). The word Paul uses here for “natural” means behavior that is in line with Creation Order; it does not mean what an individual finds subjectively “natural” for himself or herself.
There would seem to be two reasons that Paul begins with this disorder. The first is that it graphically illustrates an “exchange” between order and disorder. He picks up the word “exchange” from verses 23 and 25, and uses it in verse 26 of lesbian desire. Same-sex erotic desire is one of the clearest expressions of disordered affection. But we must remember that this is not the root of sin; it is but one example of a sin that is a consequence of the fundamental sin, which is idolatry. Further, we cannot draw a one-to-one equation between individual idolatry and individual homosexual desire (cf. John 9 in another context). Paul’s point is that the very existence of these desires in society is an evidence (among others) of God’s handing us over to the consequences of our idolatry. All the other examples in the list also illustrate disordered desire (Romans 1:29–31). All these are the result of disordered worship.
The second reason Paul begins with this is that homosexuality was supremely the Gentile sin. When the Jew looked at the Gentile world, one of the things that most horrified him and made him most happy to be a Jew was the appalling practice of homosexuality. Popular religious books railed against Gentile homosexuality as proof of the moral superiority of the Jews. The Jewish Christian hearing verses 24–27 would have been cheering Paul on, which sets Paul up for the next stage of his argument in Romans 2. He ends chapter 1 by lamenting a pagan society in which people not only do terrible things; they actually give public approval to those who do them (Romans 1:32). These behaviors become accepted and acceptable. Nevertheless, some of his hearers (notably Jewish ones) would have responded to this by saying, “Dear Paul, I quite agree. You may be sure I don’t approve at all of such terrible behavior.” Paul then begins chapter 2 by writing, “You, therefore, are without excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else” (i.e., who don’t approve). In a way, he wants the self-righteous listeners to applaud the argument of chapter 1 so that he can humble them under grace in chapter 2.62
Paul’s main point is that the moral chaos of the world is the visible evidence now of the wrath of God. God’s wrath is neither vindictive nor arbitrary (i.e., not a celestial temper tantrum, as someone has put it), but rather his hot, settled, personal, and utterly necessary and right hatred of evil. How is the wrath of God being revealed (Romans 1:18)? Answer: by moral chaos. As someone has said, “The history of the world is the judgment of the world.” “Look at a messed-up world,” Paul says, “and you will see that God is angry.” This is clearly not the world as it was meant to be. God’s anger is revealed in present degradation, of which homosexual desire and practice is one example. We must therefore be clear that the existence of homosexual desires is one evidence of the moral disorder let loose on humanity by disordered worship. It is but one terrible result of the fundamental human sin of idolatry.
5.2.2. The Gospel and Homosexual Desires
What does the Christian worldview and gospel have to say to those who experience these desires? In principle, much the same as it says to us all who experience disordered desires in other contexts (cf. Paul’s list in Romans 1:28–31).
First, we must not deduce from our desires that this is our identity or that this is necessarily right. The existence of a desire is no evidence of the rightness of that desire, as we readily admit for a desire like greed. Our identity is not defined by our sexuality. We are human beings made in the image of God. If we trust in Christ, we are defined by being “in Christ” and not by anything we feel, desire, say, or do. We learn that as fallen men and women in a broken world we experience all manner of disordered desires, longings, and aversions that are not in line with the order God has placed in creation. For example, we may feel pleasure when misfortune comes on another (being pleased it did not happen to us); this is a disordered affection, one that we ought not to feel. The erotic desire of a woman for a woman or a man for a man is likewise a disordered desire.
Second, we need to recognize that sexual desires go very deep indeed. The teenager especially is vulnerable in that awkward stage of life when they wonder who they are and begin to experience strong and often confused sexual urges. Although it is mistaken to equate sexuality with identity, sexual feelings go so deep that it is not surprising they are sometimes confused with “who I am.” Those who have not experienced strong same-sex desires need to recognize that it is much easier for us to speak about these desires from a distance than it is for those in the midst of these desires to make sense of them.
Third, Christian people must never forget that our message is one of the grace of God in Jesus Christ, which comes to all of us as moral failures and begins with washing and forgiveness rather than with moral exhortation. Writing to a context of sexual disorder in Corinth, Paul says of the Christians there, “And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). In his earthly ministry, Jesus attracted to himself those who knew their lives were a moral mess, but those who thought they had got their morality sorted out found his message of grace offensive. It ought to be the same today.
Fourth, Christian people affirm and believe that the free grace of God in Jesus Christ has the power to change us.
[The grace of God] teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good (Titus 2:12–14).
This power may simply take away homosexual desires. Some testify to a real measure of healing in this regard, and there are wonderful stories of those who were deep in homosexual lifestyles but who now experience natural heterosexual relationships in marriage. Others have to endure ongoing homosexual desires, and it is very painful for them. The Christian faith does not promise a magic bullet to change our desires in a moment. What it does promise and offer is a faithful God whose grace is sufficient to carry us through all the moral disorder of a broken world until Jesus returns.
