God's Life

What sort of life are you pursuing? A life of pleasure? A life of purpose? A life of significance? A good life? A quiet life? A family life? What sort of life are you pursuing?

Or are you just sitting back and letting life come at you? Are you passively and blindly accepting your every circumstance? Are you just trying to get by? Are you keeping your head down, hoping to stay out of trouble? Are you trying to become invisible?

Those who follow Jesus, those who are his friends here on earth, have received a specific kind of life. God's life. That's right. In Jesus, you have received the life of the one who created life, and created it with no stain of sin or death. Now the question is: How do you live that life?

One of the least read books of the Bible is 2 Peter. Be honest. When was the last time you read 2 Peter? Did you even know there was a 2 Peter? Could you find it in your Bible in less than a minute? It's okay if you can't.

Here's a powerful statement from one of the least read books of the Bible: His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Everything we need. God has given it to us through his divine power.

You already have everything you need to live God's life. You don't need to be more spiritual, you just need to pay more attention to the Spirit that already lives within you. You don't need to be more mature, you just need to apply the wisdom of the Scriptures--which you already have access to--to the trials and failures of your life. You don't need to know more, you just need to press more deeply into the knowledge of God fully revealed through Jesus Christ.

You don't need more hit points. You don't need to level up. You don't need another heart-piece. You already have all you need to live God's life, the godly life in Christ Jesus. You have it through faith in Jesus. You have it because God called you to it, according to his own goodness and glory. You have it because the Holy Spirit lives within you, and he is talking to you all the time. You have it, because as Peter says in the very next verse, God has given you his very great and precious promises. What are those promises? They are Jesus himself!

As if this wasn't enough, Peter goes on: [God] has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. You can participate in the divine nature, right now, on earth, in the same clothes you're wearing today. That's the invitation of God through the fulfillment of his promises--to live his life, to escape the corruption of evil desires. And you don't need anything besides what God has already given you. That's the beauty and power of the Gospel. So go out and live God's life today, and live it without fear or insecurity. When you have Jesus, you have everything you need.

Book Review: The King Jesus Gospel

Scot McKnight's latest book, The King Jesus Gospel, is a revolution for evangelicalism. It is an incredibly important and timely work, one which calls us to leave behind our "salvation-culture" and take up, once again, the "gospel-culture" set forth by the preaching of Jesus and the apostles.

I've worked through a little over half of the book on the blog already. My discussion of the first three chapters, which lays the groundwork by establishing the problem McKnight sets out to address, can be found here. The second post on the book, which dealt exclusively with chapter four, in which he lays out the book's thesis and defines the apostolic Gospel, can be found here. The last post I wrote on the book covered chapter 5, where Scot discusses how salvation overtook the Gospel.

Here is a brief sketch of the main points of the book:

• We evangelicals have mistaken the Plan of Salvation for the Gospel.
• We have traded in a gospel culture for a salvation culture.
• Our evangelism focuses exclusively on bringing people to a point of decision.
• As a result, we do a poor job of making genuine disciples of Jesus.
• The biblical gospel is the Story of Jesus, found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5

In that last post I promised to cover the final two chapters of the book in a future post. So without further ado, I shall keep my promise.

Chapter 9: Gospeling Today

The way that we "gospel", or evangelize, today is different from the way the early believers, including the apostles, evangelized. (Scot likes to use the word "gospel" as a verb, so I'll put it that way from now on.) He sees several points of comparison, the first of which is what gospeling seeks to accomplish. "The gospeling of Acts, because it declares the saving significance of Jesus, Messiah and Lord, summons listeners to confess Jesus as Messiah and Lord, while our gospeling seeks to persuade sinners to admit their sin and find Jesus as their Savior." (133) He goes on to say, "the gospeling of the apostles in the book of Acts is bold declaration that leads to a summons while much of evangelism today is crafty persuasion." (134) Ouch!

I'll skip to the fourth point of comparison between the gospeling of the first Christians and our own evangelism--the problem gospeling resolves. What is the problem that the Gospel solves? Without minimizing sin and the need for forgiveness and reconciliation, Scot frames the solution this way: "The fundamental solution in the gospel is that Jesus is Messiah and Lord; this means there was a fundamental need for a ruler, a king, and a lord." (137) He says much more on this point, and I want to tempt you to get the book and read it for yourself with this quote:

Gospeling declares that Jesus is [the] rightful Lord, gospeling summons people to turn from their idols to worship and live under that Lord who saves, and gospeling actually puts us in the co-mediating and co-ruling tasks under our Lord Jesus. (142)

Chapter 10: Creating a Gospel Culture

So now what? How do we go about creating this gospel culture that we so desperately need? The first thing we must do is become people of the story. "To become a gospel culture we've got to begin with becoming people of the Book, but not just as a Book but as the story that shapes us." (153) Too many of us are functionally biblically illiterate. We are more profoundly shaped by the doctrines and dogmas that we extract from the Scriptures than by the overarching story God is telling within them; and while there are many dogmas, there is only one Story.

We must also become people of the story of Jesus. "We need to immerse ourselves even more into the Story of Jesus. The gospel is that the Story of Israel comes to its definitive completeness in the Story of Jesus, and this means we have to become People of the Story-that-is-complete-in-Jesus." (153) We must return to the four Gospels!

Thirdly, we must become people of the church's story. "We need to see how the apostles' writings take the Story of Israel and the Story of Jesus into the next generation and into a different culture, and how this generation led all the way to our generation." (155) Christianity was not invented in 1865; it has come down to us through nearly 100 generations of believers. There is much we can learn from them. "We have no right to ignore what God has been doing in the community of Jesus since the day he sent the Spirit to empower it, ennoble it, and guide it." (156)

There is more to say on these points, and Scot presents two other important points to create a gospel culture, but this is a book review, not a book report. Here is my review: Read this book!

Now I want to say one thing that Scot doesn't about how to create a gospel culture, and I say this to my fellow preachers out there. Preach the Gospel! Stop participating in the damnable story of American Consumerism & Pragmatism. Stop trying to draw a crowd. Stop preaching the no-Gospel of Success & Self-Improvement. That is not your task. That is not your calling. You are a minister of the Gospel, so preach it!

Your sermons shape your congregation and define its culture, and too many of you are creating a culture that is nothing more than a slightly more moral version of the wider American culture. You're telling the wrong story. You cannot create a gospel-culture unless and until you preach the Gospel. This will most likely take you down a new path, one that you probably won't like. You will have to say goodbye to the Story of Success and Fame and Power. But you'll discover that the Gospel is worth it.

May the Church's preachers become gospelers, that we all might learn to live out the Gospel, boldly proclaiming that Jesus Christ is King-over-All.

Limiting the Gospel

This past week at church I talked about one of the ways that we tend to change the Gospel: We limit the Gospel by thinking it applies to everyone but us. "Sure," we think, "Jesus died for everybody's sins. Everybody but me. I still have to work my way back to God. God will only accept me today if I manage to commit little to no sin."

Do you do this? I do it. Many of the great saints of the past did this. It's easier to believe in God's love and grace for others than for yourself. Maybe we think that's humble, or noble. It's not. It's stupid.

You cannot earn the Gospel. The Gospel is a record of historical facts:

• Christ Jesus died for our sins, according to the Scriptures.
• He was buried.
• He rose again on the third day, according to the Scriptures.
• He appeared to many.

You can no more earn the Gospel than you can earn the American Revolution. It already happened! All that you can do with the Gospel is receive it or reject it. You either receive it as it is or you reject it. Any twisting, limiting, changing, or adding to the Gospel is a rejection of the Gospel. It is disbelief.

The facts of what God has done in the past (the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus) indicate, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God loves you right now. (Unless you go to Mark Driscoll's church, in which case God hates you...at least according to Mark Driscoll.) So quit trying to be noble and self-sufficient, and quit feeling sorry for yourself. The Gospel has happened! Receive it, and let it be the defining story of your life.

The King Jesus Gospel | Part 3

I've been working my way through Scot McKnight's book, The King Jesus Gospel, here on the blog for the past couple of days. I want to recap what I've learned in the first four chapters.

• We evangelicals have mistaken the Plan of Salvation for the Gospel.
• We have traded in a gospel culture for a salvation culture.
• Our evangelism focuses exclusively on bringing people to a point of decision.
• As a result, we do a poor job of making genuine disciples of Jesus.
• The biblical gospel is the Story of Jesus, found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5

What is most impressive about this book is how clearly and concisely Scot paint the American evangelical landscape. His putting his finger on some things that have been brooding beneath the surface for a long time. So how did we get here?

Chapter 5: How Did Salvation Take Over the Gospel?

The early creeds were the Church's attempt to work out the Story of Jesus, the Gospel. They served to create a gospel culture that survived, though didn't always thrive, until the Reformation. "The singular contribution of the Reformation...was that the gravity of the gospel was shifted toward human response and personal responsibility. ...The Reformation said, in effect, that the 'gospel' must lead to personal salvation." (71)

The Reformation did not create this salvation culture immediately, but it set into action processes by which the old gospel culture was discarded, and the new salvation culture was embraced. "The Story of...Jesus became the System of Salvation." (72) Now we have a Christian culture that is obsessed with salvation, which is merely one of the many benefits of the gospel. The fact that we can go to heaven when we die is good news, but it is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Rather, it comes to those who believe the gospel, and in that belief, order their lives by it.

My next post on the book will cover the final two chapters, with a particular emphasis on how we create a gospel culture today. I'm skipping the intervening chapters, not because they aren't any good, but because I feel as though I ought to leave something for you to discover when you read the book.

The King Jesus Gospel | Part 2

Yesterday I began writing about Scot McKnight's excellent new book, The King Jesus Gospel. I covered the prologue and first 3 chapters, and I've written his basic thesis this way: The Plan of Salvation is not the Gospel, and by mistaking the former for the latter we have created a salvation culture that misses the deep truths of the gospel, emphasizes decision over discipleship, and, as a result, fails to make true disciples of Jesus. This insight is crucial for us to understand, and we evangelicals need to make the switch from a salvation culture to a gospel culture if we want to fulfill the Great Commission, which was to "make disciples", not "make converts". Because of the way we (mis)understand the gospel, and the methods we use to present it, we are doing an excellent job of making converts, but we are no better than the Catholic Church at making disciples.

Before I get into the content of the next chapter, I'd like to give some of my own reflections on his book thus far. I believe that we evangelicals have created a salvation culture because we undervalue (or even disdain) life on earth. The temporal pales in significance to the eternal, we say, as though the two were pitted against one another. But this life and the life to come are intimately bound up together within the life of God, which is both infinite and eternal. The life we live on earth is a small but significant part of eternity. The temporal is within the eternal. Salvation is not merely for then; salvation is for now.

We are also simultaneously terrified of and fascinated by hell. Though the most common biblical command is, "Fear not", we use fear as a motivator to get people saved. So much of our evangelistic strategies are built on the motivation to escape hell, and we certainly prey on people's fears of eternal damnation. There may be a time when that is appropriate, but the fear of hell is not what drives the Gospel.

Perhaps both of these lines of thinking could be fleshed out more, but this post is supposed to be about Scot McKnight's book. So on to chapter 4 and a definition of the Gospel.

Chapter 4: The Apostolic Gospel of Paul

If the Plan of Salvation is not the Gospel, then what is? How do we define it? The natural place to begin would be in the Bible. But where do we look? The answer might surprise you. We don't start in Matthew, or Mark, or Luke or John. We start with Paul, and we go to 1 Corinthians 15.

1 Corinthians was probably written before any of the Gospels were written--sometime around 53 AD or so. What we find at the beginning of chapter 15 is "the oral tradition about the gospel that every New Testament apostle received and then passed on. ...This passage is the apostolic gospel tradition." (46) Scot breaks the relevant portions of chapter 15 into three parts: v. 1-2; v. 3-5; v. 20-28. The fundamental gospel, though, is found in the second part:

³For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

This is the Gospel. "If we begin here, we take the first step in creating a gospel culture." (48) This was the Gospel that drove the early church, but we have forgotten it.

The authentic apostolic gospel, the gospel Paul received and passed on...concerns these events in the life of Jesus:
     that Christ died,
     that Christ was buried,
     that Christ was raised,
     and that Christ appeared.
The gospel is the story of the crucial events in the life of Jesus Christ. Instead of "four spiritual laws," which for many holds up our salvation culture, the earliest gospel concerned four "events"...in the life of Jesus Christ. (49)

The Gospel is not, first and foremost, about getting to heaven (or escaping hell). It's not driven by fear. In fact, it's not even a proposition that can be driven by anything. It's the Story of Jesus--his death (for our sins), his burial, his resurrection, and his appearances. The Gospel is not the Plan of Salvation. "Salvation--the robust salvation of God--is the intended result of the gospel story about Jesus Christ that completes the Story of Israel in the Old Testament." (51)

So what? What's the big deal? Isn't it more important that people go to heaven when they die than that we understand what the Gospel is or isn't? No, it's not. Jesus didn't die so you could go to heaven when you die. He died for your sins--the ones that plague you in the here and now and turn your world, at times, into a living hell for yourself and those around you. Here's the warning:

When the plan gets separated from the story, the plan almost always becomes abstract, propositional, logical, rational, and philosophical and, most importantly, de-storified and unbiblical. When we separate the Plan of Salvation from the story, we cut ourselves off [from] the story that identifies us and tells our past and tells our future. We separate ourselves from Jesus and turn the Christian faith into a System of Salvation. (62)

We are not saved by a plan. We are not saved within a system. We are saved by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

How have we gotten where we are? How have we replaced the gospel culture with our salvation culture? More on that tomorrow...

The King Jesus Gospel | Part 1

I've worked my way through the first three chapters of Scot McKnight's The King Jesus Gospel, and I am both challenged and impressed. This is the "wrecking ball" that Rob Bell thought he was writing in Love Wins. Scot is deconstructing the nature of the gospel within evangelicalism, and calling us to a more faithful, more biblical reading of the gospel. Because the chapters of the book are so short, and so dense, I'd like to interact with this book on a chapter-by-chapter basis, rather than write a general review after I've read it.

Prologue: 1971

Scot begins with the story of his first encounter with personal evangelism--it's a story that many young evangelicals can resonate with. The extreme discomfort. The awkwardness. The insecure silence. Evangelism is a horrible and terrifying experience for so many because we can't help but feel as though we're on a high-pressure sales call, and we're the ones making the pitch! Evangelism, in evangelicalism, is about bringing people to the point of decision. This, Scot argues, represents a break from historical Christianity. "Most of evangelism today is obsessed with getting someone to make a decision; the apostles, however, were obsessed with making disciples." (18)

There are dire consequences for our decision-oriented evangelism. "Evangelism that focuses on decisions short circuits and...aborts the design of the gospel, while evangelism that aims at discipleship slows down to offer the full gospel of Jesus and the apostles." (18) We are "distorting spiritual formation" through our decision-aimed evangelism because we are diminishing the importance of discipleship. Scot has strong words for us: "There is a minimal difference in correlation between evangelical children and teenagers who make a decision for Christ and who later become genuine disciples, and Roman Catholics who are baptized as infants and who as adults become faithful and devout Catholic disciples." (20) In other words, we're no better than the Catholic Church at making true and faithful disciples, and much of the blame for our failure can be laid at the feet of our perception of the Gospel and our aims in evangelism.

Chapter 1: The Big Question

The big question facing evangelicalism is this: What is the gospel? Scot claims that we are in a fog regarding the gospel, and I think he's right. For most evangelicals, the gospel is vague. We can't define it concretely, much less biblically. To demonstrate this, Scot offers three exhibits.

Exhibit A is from an emailer who asked the question, "What is good news about the fact that Jesus is the Messiah, the descendant of David?" Exhibit B is John Piper's assumption that justification is the gospel. Exhibit C is a pastor who shared Piper's view and flatly asserted that Jesus did not preach the gospel because "no one could understand the gospel until after the cross and the resurrection and Pentecost." (26) Scot concludes "the word gospel has been hijacked by what we believe about 'personal salvation,' and the gospel itself has been reshaped to facilitate making 'decisions.'" (26)

I think he's absolutely right about this, and I think the view that justification is the gospel is very prevalent due, in large part, to the popularity of the neo-reformed preaching of John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Francis Chan, David Platt, and others. What is more, pastors like Steven Furtick have taken the gospel as "personal salvation mediated through a decision" to its logical extreme, with more than 10,000 "salvations" in the short life of his church. And now we get to the key distinction Scot is making in his book.

Chapter 2: Gospel Culture or Salvation Culture?

Have you ever considered that there might be a difference between the two?

Evangelicalism is known for at least two words: gospel and (personal) salvation. Behind the word gospel is the Greek word euangelion and evangel, from which words we get evangelicalism and evangelism. Now to our second word. Behind salvation is the Greek word soteria. I want now to make a stinging accusation. In this book I will be contending firmly that we evangelicals (as a whole) are not really "evangelical" in the sense of the apostolic gospel, but instead we are soterians. Here's why I say we are more soterian than evangelical: we evangelicals (mistakenly) equate the word gospel with the word salvation. ...When we evangelicals see the word gospel, our instinct is to think (personal) "salvation." We are wired this way. But these two words don't mean the same thing. (29)

We have replaced the gospel with personal salvation. Maybe it's because we're so pragmatic, but all that seems to matter to us evangelicals is where one spends eternity. Salvation is our number one priority, and the only way to be certain of one's salvation is if one has made a personal decision to accept Jesus. "When did you get saved?"

But a salvation culture is not a gospel culture. Think about it. Do you need to be a disciple in order to be saved? How do you answer that question? How might Jesus answer it? The fundamental problem of the salvation culture is that it doesn't require discipleship, and so discipleship doesn't happen. And this is why so many people live nominally Christian existences, blindly ignorant of the Scriptures and the primary tenets of their faith, and ultimately trusting, not in Jesus, but in the decision they made at Christian Summer Camp between 6th and 7th grade--a decision from which they have failed to progress or build upon in the decades following. But "the gospel of Jesus...which created a gospel culture and not simply a salvation culture, was a gospel that carried within it the power, the capacity, and the requirement to summon people who wanted to be 'in' to be The Discipled." (33)

Chapter 3: From Story to Salvation

Before he can define the term gospel, Scot lays out four important categories for understanding the gospel: 1) The Story of Israel / the Bible; 2) The Story of Jesus; 3) Plan of Salvation; 4) Method of Persuasion. To fully understand the gospel, he argues, we must begin with the Story of Israel, which finds it's natural fulfillment in the Story of Jesus, from which we derive the Plan of Salvation. Then, understanding our own context well enough, we create Methods of Persuasion. This is the proper orientation of a gospel culture.

However, in our salvation culture, we have flipped the order. The first question we ask is: "How can we get people saved?"

Our Method of Persuasion is shaped by a salvation culture and is designed from first to last to get people to make a decision so they can come safely inside the boundary lines of The Decided. (43)

So we begin with the Method of Persuasion (4 Spiritual Laws, Alpha, Evangelism Explosion), incorporate the Plan of Salvation, and take bits from the Story of Jesus--mostly about his atoning death. The Story of Israel gets lopped off completely. In fact, I would be willing to bet that most evangelicals don't think you need the Old Testament to share the gospel. "One reason why so many Christians today don't know the Old Testament is because their 'gospel' doesn't even need it!" (44)

Now for the most important point of the book thus far. The Plan of Salvation is, essentially, this: God created humans to be perfect, but we rebelled against him and brought sin and death into the world. We are separated from him, forever. But because he loves us so much, he sent his Son to die on a cross for our sins, as the ultimate atoning sacrifice. Now we can be saved if we believe in Jesus! This is all true, wonderful, and great in every way. But it is not the gospel.

Here's the point: The Plan of Salvation is not the Gospel, and by mistaking the former for the latter we have created a salvation culture that misses the deep truths of the gospel, emphasizes decision over discipleship, and, as a result, fails to make true disciples of Jesus. Upon closer examination, we see that the situation is dire. We must get back to the biblical gospel. But what is that? And where do we find it?

More to come...

Ember Church Core Values: Gospel

One of the things we did, as a launch team, was sit down and discuss what we value as a community. We came up with a list of seven, and at the very top of the list we wrote "Gospel". The Gospel of Jesus Christ is our definitive core value. This is what we wrote:

Gospel

The Gospel is the definitive message of Christian faith. We define it according to 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” The Gospel is the story of what God has done in history to redeem humans from their sin; it is a world re-creating event that continues to live on in the community of Jesus' friends. We strive to center ourselves around the Gospel, letting it define and drive all that we do as a church.

We are Gospel-people, and we are driven to see the Gospel happen in our church. This is a great idea, but really hard to do in practice. The evil, unredeemed desires of our hearts so often compel us to choose selfishness over self-giving love, self-worship over the worship of Christ, and self-exaltation over the divine humility and power so clearly on display in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. But the Gospel teaches us to set aside our own self-interest, as Jesus did when he became one of us, and then died for all of us.

The Gospel is the force by which God's kingdom is breaking into this world, and it happens internally, interpersonally, and communally. The Gospel happens in our hearts when our wicked and selfish desires are transformed and we begin to truly, deeply want the same things God wants. The Gospel happens interpersonally when we choose, often against our natural wills, to show grace to one another. The Gospel happens communally when a church determines that it will, as one person, walk in the light of a love that lays down its life and, through that, spreads the rule and reign of Jesus the King to hearts and homes where it has not been before.

We believe that the Gospel is the most powerful message of hope in the world. There is nothing quite like it:

that the Son of God became a man,
that he died for the sins of every person on earth,
that he rose again from the dead,
that he is currently putting all of his enemies under his feet,
and that he is coming back one day to judge the world and reign forever.

Christians are, by definition, crucifixion-and-resurrection people. We are gathered together, from all nations and tribes, by the crucified Christ who is the risen Lord. We eagerly await his triumphant return. And we live, today, in the strength of the only force on earth that has the power to turn our evil hearts good, to make our broken relationships whole, and to change our dark world into light.

Book Review: The Prodigal God

With the possible exception of the story of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son is probably the most famous of Jesus's parables. You've heard it before. No doubt you've read it. You've even heard it preached on at church. If there's anything in the New Testament that you've got down by now, it's the story of the Prodigal Son. It is absolutely certain that what Jesus means by that parable is that no matter what we do, no matter how far we run, we can always come back to God.

While that's true, that's not all that the parable is about. It goes, in fact, much, much deeper. To discover that meaning, may I recommend to you Tim Keller's excellent book, The Prodigal God. You will never read the parable the same way again.

The key, Keller argues, is to recognize that there are two sons in the story, and both are lost. In fact, the younger brother may have captured the attention of the evangelical mind, but the story is really about the elder brother. It was originally told, after all, to a group of elder brothers called the Pharisees. The younger brother is lost because of his sin, but the elder brother is lost because of his righteousness.

Huh? How can that be? It is because the elder brother tried to manipulate and control his father by obeying all of the rules. "It is not his sins that create the barrier between [the elder brother] and his father, it's the pride he has in his moral record; it's not his wrongdoing but his righteousness that keeps him from sharing in the feast of his father." Like the younger brother, the elder brother never truly cared about his father; he only cared about the estate. While the younger brother was audacious enough to demand it, the elder brother quietly resented his father's presence whilst working slavishly to keep him happy. For elder brothers, "the good life is lived not for delight in good deeds themselves, but as calculated ways to control their environment."

Where Keller goes from here will absolutely astound you, and no doubt leave that impression on your spirit that, at last, this parable makes complete sense! This book will be a valuable resource not only for understanding the parable of the Prodigal Son, but also of discovering how to rightly relate to God.

How We Live the Gospel: Part 2

Yesterday I wrote about the first two of five gospel perspectives that enable us to truly live out the gospel: The Extent and Gravity of Our Sin and The Centrality of the Heart. This is all part of a larger discussion about gospel substitutes and the true gospel, inspired by Lane & Tripp's book How People Change. (For crying out loud, if you read my blog and you still haven't ordered this book yet...I don't even know. You need to read it!) Without further ado, here are the final three gospel perspectives.

3. The Present Benefits of Christ

The Christian hope is more than a redemptive system with practical principles that can change your life. The hope of every Christian is a person, the Redeemer, Jesus Christ. He is the wisdom behind every biblical principle and the power we need to live them out. Because Christ lives inside us today, because he rules all things for our sakes (see Eph. 2:22-23), and because he is presently putting all his enemies under his feet (see 1 Cor. 15:25-28), we can live with courage and hope.

Our hope is not in our theological knowledge or our experience within the body of Christ. We are thankful for these things, yet we hold on to one hope: Christ. In him we find everything we need to live a godly life in the here and now. Paul captures it so well: "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20).

You have Jesus. He is with you through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. Everything you need to live the gospel truly and fully--to live the life God has designed for you to live--is available to you because you have Jesus. You lack nothing because Jesus lacks nothing. Jesus didn't just die for your sins, he rose again from the dead for your righteousness. He is alive and with you in the person of the Holy Spirit.

4. God’s Call to Growth and Change

It is so easy to coast! We have been accepted into God’s family, and someday will be with him in eternity. But what goes on in between? From the time we come to Christ until the time we go home to be with him, God calls us to change. We have been changed by his grace, are being changed by his grace, and will be changed by his grace.

What is the goal of this change? It is more than a better marriage, well-adjusted children, professional success, or freedom from a few nagging sins. God’s goal is that we would actually become like him. He doesn’t just want you to escape the fires of hell—though we praise God that through Christ you can! His goal is to free us from our slavery to sin, our bondage to self, and our functional idolatry, so that we actually take on his character!

Peter summarizes the change this way: ‘Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires’ (2 Peter 1:4).

God has an end in mind, and it is to conform you into the image of his Son. God is out to make you like Jesus. Everything he's doing in you and through you and with you has a singular purpose: Christlikeness. This demands that we never stop growing and changing, because there will always be more of us that needs to be transformed. Never stop growing.

5. A Lifestyle of Repentance and Faith

God has blessed you with his grace, gifted you with his presence, strengthened you with his power, and made you the object of his eternal love. Because we belong to him, we live for his agenda. And if change is his agenda, then repentance and faith is the lifestyle to which we have been called.

There are always new sins for the Christian to address and new enemies to defeat. The Christian life makes God’s work of change our paradigm for living, while we celebrate the grace that makes it possible. ‘For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It 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’ (Titus 2:11-13).

In order to participate with God in his project of the transformation of our hearts, we must be committed to live lives of humility, characterized by repentance and faith. If you think you have nothing to repent of, then you are not working with God--you're working against him.

Remember that sin is extensive and weighty; it is more than just something we do, it is who we are. But praise God, through a lifestyle of repentance and faith, the gospel says, "That is who you were. Jesus is who you are becoming."

How We Live the Gospel: Part 1

I've recently been blogging about the ways in which we try and fail to live out the gospel. There are seven gospel substitutes, all focused on external behavior rather than internal transformation. They are Formalism (Volunteerism) and Legalism; Mysticism, Activism and Biblicism; Psychology-ism and Social-ism. Each of these contain elements of true Christian faith and practice, but they are poor substitutes for the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It would be silly of me to talk about how not to live the gospel without providing some perspective on how we actually do live out the gospel. Once again, I'm going to go back to Lane & Tripp's excellent book How People Change, where they offer five gospel perspectives to counter those seven gospel substitutes. To put all five in one post would be overwhelming, so I'm going to break it up a bit. I'll post the first two today and come back to the other three tomorrow.

1. The Extent and Gravity of Our Sin

The struggle to accept our exceeding sinfulness is everywhere in the church of Christ. We accept the doctrine of total depravity, but when we are approached about our own sin, we wrap our robes of self-righteousness around us and rise to our own defense.

Scripture challenges this self-righteousness with clarity and power. ‘The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time’ (Gen. 6:5), and ‘There is no one righteous, not even one’ (Rom. 3:10). The effects of sin twist every thought, motive, desire, words, and action. This disease has infected us all, and the consequences are severe.

Why is this perspective so essential? Only when you accept the bad news of the gospel does the good news make any sense. The grace, restoration, reconciliation, forgiveness, mercy, patience, power, healing, and hope of the gospel are for sinners. They are only meaningful to you if you admit that you have the disease and realize that it is terminal.

I've quoted from David Powlison before, but I'd like to do so again because this stuff is just so good.

Sin, in this popular misunderstanding, refers to matters of conscious volitional awareness of wrongdoing and the ability to do otherwise. This instinctive view of sin infects many Christians and almost all non‐Christians. It has a long legacy in the church under the label Pelagianism, one of the oldest and most instinctive heresies. The Bible’s view of sin certainly includes the high‐handed sins where evil approaches full volitional awareness. But sin also includes what we simply are, and the perverse ways we think, want, remember, and react.

Most sin is invisible to the sinner because it is simply how the sinner works, how the sinner perceives, wants and interprets things. Once we see sin for what it really is; madness and evil intentions in our hearts, absence of any fear of God, slavery to various passions (Eccl. 9:3; the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live); (Gen. 6:5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually); (Ps. 36:1 Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart; there is no fear of God before his eyes.); (Titus 3:3 3For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.) –then it becomes easier to see how sin is the immediate and specific problem all counseling deals with at every moment, not a general and remote problem. The core insanity of the human heart is that we violate the first great commandment. We will love anything, except God, unless our madness is checked by grace.

How quickly we forget that the only difference between people with Christ and people without Christ is Christ. Apart from Christ, there is no difference between Christians and nonChristians. This seems obvious; if only it were. All seven gospel substitutes fail to deal seriously with sin. But sin is precisely what the gospel deals with so decisively. Failing to take into account the extent and gravity of our sin is to deceive ourselves. Beginning at any other point than the depth of our sinfulness is to replace gospel Christianity with positivist humanism.

2. The Centrality of the Heart

The average Christian defines sin by talking about behavior. For example, what is the goal of most Christian parents? Is it not to get their children to do the right things? We set up all kinds of relational, motivational, and corrective structures to constrain and direct our children’s behavior. These structures are not without value, but if this is your only response to your child’s rebellion and sin, you will leave him defenseless against sin once he leaves home and the structures are no longer there.

Beneath the battle for behavior is another, more fundamental battle—the battle for the thoughts and motives of the heart. The heart is the real or essential you. All of the ways in which the Bible refers to the inner person (mind, emotions, spirit, soul, will, etc.) are summed up with this one term: heart. The heart is the steering wheel of every human being. Everything we do is shaped and controlled by what our hearts desire.

That is why the Bible is very clear that God wants our hearts. Only when God has your heart does he have you. As much as we are affected by our broken world and the sins of others against us, our greatest problem is the sin that resides in our hearts. That is why the message of the gospel is that God transforms our lives by transforming our hearts.

Lasting change always comes through the heart. This is one of Scripture’s most thoroughly developed themes, but many of us have missed its profound implications. We need a deeper understanding of Proverbs 4:23, ‘Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.’

Your heart is not simply your emotional center, it is the core of who you are: thoughts, desires, motives, emotions, your will, etc. This is the place at which change must happen because your heart drives your behavior. Any attempt to control or change external behavior (which is what the seven gospel substitutes attempt to do) will ultimately fail because lasting behavioral change will only come through heart transformation.

Tomorrow we'll look at the final three gospel perspectives.

Gospel Substitutes: Part 3

I've been posting on the seven ways that we falsely live out the gospel, as Lane & Tripp have written in their excellent book How People Change. If you haven't gotten the hint yet...READ THIS BOOK! In the first post I wrote about Formalism (Volunteerism) and Legalism. In the second post I covered Mysticism, Activism, and Biblicism. In this post we'll cover the last two gospel substitutes.

6. “Psychology-ism”

Jen always has a group of people ministering to her. She talks a lot about how many ‘hurting’ people are in her congregation, and how the church isn’t doing enough to help them. An avid reader of Christian self-help books, she is always recommending the latest one to someone. She often says that Christianity is the only place to find real help and healing, yet she doesn’t seem to find that healing herself. Jen spends much of her time discouraged and often leaves church meetings in tears.

Jen is right that our deepest needs are met in Christ, but she sees Christ more as a therapist than as the Savior. Jen is convinced that her deepest needs come out of her experience of neglect and rejection, and so she sees herself more in need of healing than redemption. She is blind to how demanding, critical, and self-absorbed she actually is.

Without realizing it, Jen has redefined the problem that the gospel addresses. Rather than seeing our problem as moral and relational—the result of our willingness to worship and serve ourselves and the things of this world instead of worshipping and serving our Creator (Romans 1)—she sees our problem as a whole catalog of unmet needs. But whenever you view the sin of another against you as a greater problem than your own sin, you will tend to seek Christ as your therapist more than you seek him as your Savior. Christianity becomes more a pursuit of healing than a pursuit of godliness. The gospel is reduced to the healing of emotional needs.

God wants to heal us. But the healing of our emotional wounds is not the end God has in mind for us. God wants to take us through healing and out the other side, toward godliness. Our fundamental problem is not our personal catalogue of unmet needs or emotional wounds--it is the sin of our hearts. All the sins committed against us are exacerbated by our sinful, unforgiving responses. The gospel of Jesus goes beyond psychology in that it both offers and demands forgiveness of sin.

7. “Social-ism”

George was so thankful for the relationships he had found in the body of Christ. They were unlike any friendships he had experienced before. He was so full of joy for his Christian family that he participated in any activity that put him in contact with other believers. George loved his twenty-something Bible study, but he particularly enjoyed going out with the gang afterward. He loved the retreats, the camping trips, and the short-term missionary projects. For the first time in his life, George felt alive and connected.

George’s trouble started when one of his closest friends was transferred out of state and another friend got married. Then his church called a new pastor who decided to de-emphasize ministry to singles. When the small groups at his church were reorganized, George felt that he was stuck with a group of older married people with whom he couldn’t relate. Church wasn’t the same anymore, so he quit going to his small group. Before long his attendance on Sunday began to wane. Going to church, he said, was like going to someone else’s family reunion.

George didn’t realize it, but fellowship, acceptance, respect, and position in the body of Christ had replaced his dependence on communion with Christ. The church had become his spiritual social club, and when the club began to break up, he lost his motivation to continue. For George, the grace of friendship replaced Christ as the thing that gave him identity, purpose, and hope. The gospel had been reduced to a network of fulfilling Christian relationships.

God has called us to live out our faith in the community of other believers. This is often where we see the gospel happen, but the fellowship of believers is not itself the gospel. Neither friendships nor community are an acceptable substitute for Christ himself. As a community of Christ-followers, it is our responsibility to point one another to Jesus, orienting our hearts toward him, rather than pointing each other back to the community. The Church exists for Jesus, not for herself.

These are the seven ways we get the gospel wrong. They are external, behavior-oriented systems of living out your faith. They do nothing to invite the power and presence of the Holy Spirit into our deep hearts, where the truth of the gospel of grace is worked out at the deep level of what we think, what we want, and how we remember. Only the gospel can change our hearts at the level of desire. To attempt to live out the good news of Jesus through any of these false, external-oriented systems is to completely fail to live out the power of the gospel.

Gospel Substitutes: Part 2

Last Thursday I wrote a post called Gospel Substitutes in which I began to outline the seven ways we falsely live out the gospel, per Lane & Tripp's excellent book How People Change. I included two of the seven: Formalism (Volunteerism) and Legalism. I had hoped to get to the remaining five sooner, but a garage sale at home sucked up all my time this past Friday and Saturday, so here are the next three of the seven. I'll post the final two later today.

3. Mysticism

Christine careens from emotional experience to emotional experience. She is constantly hunting for a spiritual high, a dynamic encounter with God. Because of this, she never stays with one church very long. She is more a consumer of experience than a committed member of the body of Christ. Yet in between the dynamic experiences, Christine’s faith often falls flat. She struggles with discouragement and often finds herself wondering if she is even a believer. Despite the excitement of powerful moments, Christine isn’t growing in faith and character.

Biblical faith is not stoic; true Christianity is dyed with all the colors of human emotion. But you cannot reduce the gospel to dynamic emotional experiences with God. As the Holy Spirit indwells us and the Word of God impacts us, most of the changes in our hearts and lives take place in the little moments of life. The danger of mysticism is that it can become more a pursuit of experience than a pursuit of Christ. It reduces the gospel to dynamic emotional and spiritual experiences.

It can be difficult to differentiate between our spiritual and emotional states. We feel discouraged, and therefore we think we are struggling spiritually. But the reality is that our spiritual state is entirely determined by Christ, and he does not change. We are in Christ by grace through faith. Our emotions change depending on the weather, our circumstances, or even our blood-sugar levels; Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

4. Activism

Shirley stands on the right-to-life picket line wondering why more Christians aren’t there. Of course, Shirley feels the same about the protests at the adult bookstore and her work on the coming local election. These causes define what it means to be a Christian. Her constant refrain is, ‘Stand up for what is right, wherever and whenever it is needed.’ There is something admirable about Shirley’s willingness to devote time, energy, and money to stand up for what is right.

But on closer examination, Shirley’s Christianity is more a defense of what’s right than a joyful pursuit of Christ. The focus of this kind of Christian activism is always on external evil. As a result, it can take on the form of a modern monasticism. The monastics essentially said, ‘There is an evil world out there, and the way to fight evil is to separate from it.’ But monasteries failed because they forgot to focus on the evil inside every monk who entered their walls!

Whenever you believe that the evil outside you is greater than the evil inside you, a heartfelt pursuit of Christ will be replaced by a zealous fighting of the ‘evil’ around you. A celebration of the grace that rescues you from your own sin will be replaced by a crusade to rescue the church from the ills of the surrounding culture. Christian maturity becomes defined as a willingness to defend right from wrong. The gospel is reduced to participation in Christian causes.

The trouble with activism is that we lose sight of the evil in our own hearts. We get so focused on the social evils of abortion or human trafficking that we forget about the sinful patterns of thinking, desiring, and remembering that lie deep within the recesses of our hearts. There are many worthy causes that Christians should get involved in, but participation in Christian causes is not the same thing as participation in the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is first and always a gospel of the heart, setting about to transform you at the level of desire by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

5. Biblicism

John is a biblical and theological expert. His theological library includes rare, antique Christian volumes, and he is always seeking to buy first editions. John frequently uses phrases like ‘biblical worldview’, ‘theologically consistent’, and ‘thinking like a Christian.’ He loves the Bible (which is a very good thing), but there are things in John’s life that don’t seem to fit.

Despite his dedicated study of Christianity, John isn’t known for being like Christ. He has a reputation for being proud, critical, and intolerant of anyone who lacks his fine-grained understanding of the faith. John endlessly critiques his pastor’s sermons and unnerves Sunday school teachers when he enters the room.

In John’s Christianity, communion, dependency, and worship of Christ have been replaced by a drive to master the content of Scripture and systematic theology. John is a theological expert, but he is unable to live by the grace he can define with such technical precision. He has invested a great deal of time and energy mastering the Word, but he does not allow the Word to master him. In Biblicism, the gospel is reduced to a mastery of biblical content and theology.

I see nothing wrong with this one. Let's just move on. ...Okay, fine, this is wrong, too. Many Christians are tempted to master God's Word and Theology in their minds. Heck, I have a Masters of Divinity degree! It's one thing to master God's Word in your mind, but it's another thing altogether to be mastered by it in your heart. Ultimately, the Bible is a book that reads you. Treating the Scripture as mere information, however holy that information might be, is to sin against the revelation of God. The trajectory of Scripture is the gospel, and the gospel is not merely information or a story; it is a world recreating event that continues to act in and through God's people today.

I'll post the last two ways we falsely live out the gospel later today.

Gospel Substitutes

In their excellent book How People Change (which I've reviewed here), Timothy Lane & Paul Tripp make the point that Christians often fail to live out the gospel in their daily lives. This is because we suffer from three blindnesses: 1) Our identity as sinners; 2) The all-sufficient provision God has made for us in Jesus; 3) God's processes of change. We are blind to these three crucial realities, and they create a gap in our understanding of the gospel. We inevitably seek to fill this gap with a gospel substitute.

If we do not live with a gospel-shaped, Christ-confident, and change-committed Christianity, that [gap] will get filled with other things. …The most dangerous pretensions are those that masquerade as true Christianity but are missing the identity-provision-process core of the gospel. They have their roots in the truth, but they are incomplete. The result is a Christianity that is mere externalism. Whenever we are missing the message of Christ’s indwelling work to progressively transform us, the [gap] will be filled by a Christian lifestyle that focuses more on externals than on the heart.

These gospel substitutes often look and feel like Christianity, but they are a perversion of it. "The lies that capture us as Christians usually seem to fit well within the borders of our Christianity." We are often at a loss for how the gospel works in our lives because we are living one of these gospel substitutes, rather than the good news of Jesus Christ.

As sinners, we like to be at the center of the universe. We like being the ones who control the agenda. Yet the gospel makes it clear that the only way to really live is first to die, and that those who strive to live, end up dying as a result. When the gospel is reduced to a catalog of isms where I choose the one most attractive and comfortable for me, I can participate extensively in Christianity without much personal sacrifice, and with my self, unchallenged, at the center of it all.

Tripp & Lane list seven gospel substitutes that plague Christians. I'll post two here and the other five in another post. Perhaps you'll find that you have been living a gospel substitute rather than the true good news of Jesus.

1. Formalism (Volunteerism)

If you want to know the church calendar, just look at Jim’s schedule. Whatever the meeting or ministry, Jim is there, Bible in hand. He’s done his stint as a Sunday school teacher and regularly volunteers for short-term missions trips. He is faithful in giving and a willing volunteer when work needs to be done around the church. But Jim’s world and God’s world never meet. All of his church activities have little impact on his heart and how he lives his life.

God railed against the formalism of the Israelites (see Isa. 1), and Christ condemned the formalism of the Pharisees (see Matt. 23:23-28). Why? Because formalism allows me to retain control of my life, my time, and my agenda. Formalism is blind to the seriousness of my spiritual condition and my constant need for God’s grace to rescue me. Jim sees his church participation simply as one healthy aspect of a good life. He has no noticeable hunger for God’s help in any other area. For him, the gospel is reduced to participation in the meetings and ministries of the church.

Formalism is more than just staying busy for Jesus; it's substituting church activity for Jesus himself. It seems innocent on the outside, but it's a false way of making yourself look spiritual while keeping your heart safe from the power of Jesus. The gospel goes far beyond mere participation in various church ministries or committees.

2. Legalism

Sally is a walking list of dos and don’ts. She has a set of rules for everything. They are her way of evaluating herself and everyone around her. Her children live under the crushing weight of her legalism. To them, God is a harsh judge who places unreasonable standards on them and then condemns them when they can’t keep them. There is no joy in Sally’s home because there is no grace to be celebrated. Sally thinks that performing her list gives her standing with God. She has no appreciation for the grace given her in Christ Jesus.

Legalism completely misses the fact that no one can satisfy God’s requirements. While Sally rigidly keeps her rules, her pride, impatience, and judgmental spirit go untouched. Legalism ignores the depth of our inability to earn God’s favor. It forgets the need for our hearts to be transformed by God’s grace. Legalism is not just a reduction of the gospel, it is another gospel altogether (see Galatians), where salvation is earned by keeping the rules we have established.

Legalism is familiar to far too many of us. It is nothing more than the futile effort to live an externally moral life. It's all about the things you don't do. Legalists frown a lot. Like the authors said, it's not simply a reduction of the gospel, it's another gospel altogether.

Book Review: How People Change

God has called us to change, to experience real, heart-level transformation into the image of Jesus Christ. But so many Christians see almost no amount of recognizable change in their lives. Despite the small groups, the Bible studies, regular church attendance, and even counseling, too many people struggle to change their sinful behavior, much less their desires.

How People Change is a fascinating book that presents absolutely nothing new whatsoever...which is why I like it so much. There are no seven easy steps, no 5 p's of progress or ch's of change. All that authors Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp do is present the gospel, thoroughly worked out in the trivial and mundane, but critical, moments of our lives.

The problem for most of us, they say in the first chapter, is that we don't understand how the gospel works right now. We get that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and rose again; we get that he's coming back and we get to spend eternity with him; but we don't understand what all this means for overcoming my anger, lust, pride, envy, and so on. Our trouble stems from three blindnesses: 1) We are blind to the depth and pervasiveness of our sin; 2) We are blind to what God has provided for us to live the life he has called us to live; and 3) We are blind to the process by which God refines our character.

These blindnesses create a gap in our understanding of the gospel, and we inevitably find gospel substitutes to fill that gap. The authors have identified seven gospel substitutes that inevitably focus more on externals than on the condition of our hearts.

1. Formalism | Participating in every conceivable church activity under the sun.
2. Legalism | Always striving to keep the rules.
3. Mysticism | Jumping from spiritual experience to spiritual experience--always looking for that spiritual high.
4. Activism | Getting involved in the most important social causes.
5. Biblicism | Focusing on acquiring biblical knowledge and theological correctness. (Nothing wrong with this one. Move along, move along.)
6. "Socialism | Maintaining and developing friendships in the church through constant fellowship.
7. "Psycholgy-ism" | Seeing every issue in life through the lens of psychology.

These are all false ways of understanding and living the gospel. "The lies that capture us as Christians usually seem to fit well within the borders of our Christianity." (11)

The authors offer five gospel perspectives that will reorient us to the true gospel and away from the seven gospel substitutes that merely focus on externals. These five perspectives are:

1. The Extent and Gravity of Our Sin | "Only when you accept the bad news of the gospel does the good news make any sense."
2. The Centrality of the Heart | "Everything we do is shaped and controlled by what our hearts desire."
3. The Present Benefits of Christ | "The hope of every Christian is a person, the Redeemer, Jesus Christ."
4. God's Call to Growth and Change | "[God's] goal is to free us from our slavery to sin, our bondage to self, and our functional idolatry, so that we actually take on his character!"
5. A Lifestyle of Repentance and Faith | "The Christian life makes God's work of change our paradigm for living, while we celebrate the grace that makes it possible."

And that's all in the first chapter! This is a tremendous book, but it is not light reading. This will take time, but it's well worth it. Many of the most popular Christian spirituality books take shortcuts. This one doesn't. I highly recommend this book to you. Chew it over. Read it carefully. Reflect upon it. You can thank me later.

The Gospel for Osama bin Laden

The news cycle on Osama bin Laden's death is waning, which means that, as a nation, we're pretty much over it at this point. The Facebook statuses have moved back to the trivial and mundane. Christians aren't tweeting and posting scriptures at each other anymore.

Yesterday I tried to collect my thoughts on his death, but, like many of you, couldn't make heads or tails of what was going on in my own heart or mind. I wasn't happy, but I certainly wasn't sad. He needed to die, I think. But it wasn't a tactical strike, as far as I can tell. It was justice. America needed a blood avenger.

As I laid awake in bed last night, I began to wonder what the gospel is for Osama bin Laden. Not what he thinks it is, but how he needs to hear it. Yes, I know he's dead, and I don't want to go all Rob Bell on you...but the question wouldn't leave my mind. What is the gospel for Osama bin Laden. So here's my attempt at an answer. This is how I would communicate the gospel to him.

You are a fraud. You are a deceiver. You are the son of a billionaire, and yet you rail against the evils of capitalist America and prey on the hopelessness, ignorance, and illiteracy of poor young men. You use them as pawns in your sick game. You are a sociopath. You don't even see these young men as humans, and you use women and children as shields. You are a coward. You are a false prophet, and you seek to serve God through violence and terrorism. You approach God through a false system of beliefs. You are a megalomaniac. You hope to be saved by your acts of violence. You are a murderer--the worst kind because most of the murders you committed were by proxy, through brainwashed servants whom you convinced were doing the will of God, but they were really just carrying out your sick perversion of justice.

And yet, Osama bin Laden, the perverted desires of your heart are no different than the perverted desires of my heart. The only difference between me and you is Jesus Christ. You thought he was just a prophet; he was is so much more. He is the Son of God, the King of Creation. You thought he merely swooned on the cross, or that a substitute died there; he was the substitute for you, and for me. You have just died for your sins, but he died for your sins 2,000 years ago. And then he rose again from the dead, conquering it once and for all.

As hard as this is for me to say to you, Osama bin Laden, Jesus loves you. He paid the divine penalty for all of your murderous rage. All of your murders, all of your lies, all of your manipulation, all of your violence are eternally forgiven at the cross of Jesus Christ. When the towers fell on 9/11, and the rubble was finally cleared away, do you know what was left? Two iron beams in the shape of a cross. That cross is for you, Osama bin Laden.

Let me tell you something: You deserve hell, and there are millions of people on this planet who hope you get it. You are in a select group of criminals against humanity, and the human race stands ready to condemn you. Your only hope for salvation is not in pleasing Allah through violence, but in clinging to the cross of Jesus Christ with a repentant heart and a humbled spirit. Only Jesus can save you. You must drop your agenda of violence and take up his agenda of grace. This is your only hope. Turn to Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior of the World, the King of Creation.

Easter Reflections

Jesus was right all along. That's what Easter means. He is who he said he was. He did what he set out to do. And God vindicated him in the end by raising him from the dead. What does this mean?

• All of your sins are forgiven. All the garbage in your life is cleaned up. You are declared innocent in Christ.
• Jesus is King. He has defeated our worst enemies--evil, sin, and death--by rising from the grave. He is the most powerful force in Creation, the true King over all.
• You have real hope beyond the grave. The hope of the Christian is that, one day, we will also rise from the dead and enjoy real, embodied fellowship with Jesus.
• Death has lost its sting. Death lost. Jesus conquered it. It holds no power over us anymore, and we need not fear it. Yes, it will come to each of us, but it no longer has the final word.
• The One who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you and with us. The Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead, and now the Holy Spirit lives in you by faith in Jesus Christ. You have resurrection power within you.

I'm sure this list could go on and on with more good news. Rejoice! Jesus Christ is the first of us to be raised from the dead, and he will never die again. He is praying for you right now, sitting at the right hand of the Father. So rejoice and be glad, for the King Over All is your risen Lord and Friend.

He is risen!

Good Friday Reflections

I suck. There is a lot of garbage in my heart. I worship idols like money, ease, and food. I have a massive ego that is never satisfied, an appetite for praise and accomplishment that can never be satiated. I am proud and arrogant, thinking of myself far more highly than I ought, and desperately wanting others to think as highly of me, too. My sense of entitlement is out of control, and so I want personal greatness at the cost of mediocrity. I sin. I am sin.

People like me make this world a horrible place to live. I spread darkness and wickedness. I encourage the worship of idols. Because of me, and others like me, God is despised, forgotten, and rejected. Nobody pays attention to God, least of all me. I'm taken in by the distracting entertainments of the world--the false gods of fame, celebrity, and leisure. In this idol-infested world, which I helped create and which I perpetuate, there is no room for God.

And yet God made room for himself. The Son of God became just like us, and lived a life like ours, only much harder and far less comfortable than I could ever know. Except that he wasn't like me at all. He was perfect. He didn't spread the darkness. He didn't worship idols. He didn't cower when the moment called for courage. He didn't despise God or anyone else, for that matter. He didn't run from unclean people--he healed them. He didn't condemn sinners--he saved them. He didn't despise rich people--he loved them.

And for all this, we killed him. Yes, we. I killed him. You killed him. It was us, and the crap and wickedness and idolatry and sin we carry around in the deepest places of our hearts that sent him up there on that cross. He loved us; we murdered him.

But he said something as he hung there, something that echoes still through the streets and alleyways of our modern cities. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Even while we murdered him, Jesus prayed to the Father for us, begging that we would be forgiven of deicide, of executing God. And that prayer was answered with an astounding, earth-shattering, "Yes!" on Sunday.

Be forgiven, you murderers. Be forgiven, we killers. And let the mercy of Christ cleanse your hearts and uproot your idols.

The Idols of Our Hearts

A couple of days ago I blogged about David Powlison's X-Ray Questions. There are 35 questions total, designed to unmask the idols of our hearts. Idolatry is real. You may not bow down to idols made of wood and stone, but there are things you worship, hope for, and put your trust in that are not the one true God. These things are idols.

The Bible has a lot to say about idolatry. In fact, idolatry is the chief sin of God's people, and, by far, that which the Old Testament prophets railed against. (Some, today, would have you believe the primary thrust of the prophetic message was against injustice. Not so. Injustice is a byproduct of idolatry. The prophets were after the people's idols.) From God's perspective, it's far better for you to die young than live to a ripe old age as an idolator. Our idols are the revolving door by which evil and wickedness enter this world. Our idols must die.

David Powlison writes, "human life is exhaustively God-relational." In other words, everything we do is related to God either positively or negatively. "Human beings either love God--or despise him and love something else. We take refuge in God--or flee from him and find refuge in something else. We set our hopes in God--or we turn from him and hope in something else. We fear God--or we ignore him and fear something else." That "something else" is our idol(s). You cannot change until you understand that everything you do is either directed toward God or your idol, your God-substitute.

"By seeing the God-relatedness of all motivation, you see that what is wrong with us calls for a God-related solution: the grace, peace, power, and presence of Jesus Christ." The process by which we correct our idolatry is a person: Jesus Christ. Only Jesus, with his gospel of grace, can change you at the level of desire and motivation, where your idols have taken refuge. This is a long process because it is a relationship, a marriage of sorts. Victory is won not all at once, but progressively, as you choose to relate to God through Jesus in the tiny and tempting moments of life, rather than relating to your idol through sinful desire.

Go back through the X-Ray Questions and uncover your idols. Reflect on how you relate to those idols. What happened in that moment when you decided to turn to pornography? Why did you choose to eat too much? What were you really looking for when you gossiped about your friend? Learn to walk back your sin and discover that moment when you decided to turn to your idol. It's a difficult process, but you have to reflect on it. Find that moment when you chose to relate to the idol, the God-substitute, rather than God. When you have found that moment, you can be prepared for the next time, and you can learn to choose the true God rather than your idol. And in that moment when you cry out to Jesus instead of your idol, he is there. Always. He will strengthen you. His grace will teach you to cry out to the living God and to abandon the idols of your heart.

Sin

Just before I left for vacation last Saturday, I attended the Alliance for Renewal Churches National Conference in Toledo. The focus of the conference was Transformation, based on a book called How People Change by Timothy Lane. This is an excellent book, and I've put off reading Love Wins so that I can work my way through How People Change carefully and thoughtfully.

The primary speaker at the conference, Scott Pursley, frequently referred to the work of David Powlison, of whom I had not heard before. Scott quoted Powlison several times on the gravity of sin. Here is an excerpt:

Sin, in the popular misunderstanding, refers to matters of conscious volitional awareness of wrongdoing and the ability to do otherwise. This instinctive view of sin infects many Christians and almost all non-Christians. It has a long legacy in the church under the label Pelagianism, one of the oldest and most instinctive heresies. The Bible's view of sin certainly includes the high-handed sins where evil approaches full volitional awareness. But sin also includes what we simply are, and the perverse ways we think, want, remember, and react.

Most sin is invisible to the sinner because it is simply how the sinner works, how the sinner perceives, wants, and interprets things. Once we see sin for what it really is--madness and evil intentions in our hearts, absences of any fear of God, slavery to various passions--then it becomes easier to see how sin is the immediate and specific problem all counseling deals with at every moment, not a general and remote problem. The core insanity of the human heart is that we violate the first great commandment. We will love anything, except God, unless our madness is checked by grace.

I so quickly forget about the pervasiveness of sin in the world, and especially in my own heart. I don't think about sin being simply how I function--how I perceive, want, and interpret everything around me. I think about sin in terms of what I do, not who I am. But that is insufficient, and doesn't take into account the deep desires that motivate my behavior. These desires are steeped in sin, driving me to participate in the spread of evil and the worship of idols. It is at the level of deep, internal, personal desire that Jesus seeks to wage war against evil, and the gospel of grace and agape love is his weapon of choice.

Are you spiritually frustrated, stuck in the same place fighting the same sins for far too long? Have you tried to change but can't? The only hope that you and I have to see real, lasting change in our lives is if our desires are transformed. Behavioral change follows transformation at the level of desire, and Jesus is the only one strong enough to change us at that deep a level.

I'll post more on this topic throughout the week. In the mean time, open yourself up to what is churning in the depths of your heart. Think about your desires and how they motivate your actions. Invite Jesus into the process to guide you into the depths of your soul.

The Word for the Day

I've been working my way through a Bible reading plan this year, and for the first time in my life I've actually stuck with it for longer than 3 days! The plan has you read four chapters from four different books--two in the NT and two in the OT--as you work your way through each book. There have been several days where the themes of the various chapters have been remarkably consistent, and today was one of those days.

This morning, two of the chapters that I read were Exodus 33 and John 12. I'll quote a selection from each:

And the Lord said, "I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." (Ex. 33:19)

"If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world." (John 12:47)

Isn't it amazing what God says in that Exodus quote? "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy..."; and then we probably expect him to say something like, "...and I will condemn whom I will condemn." But he doesn't say that. Instead, he says, "...and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." God speaks of himself in terms of mercy and compassion, and the verbiage of condemnation is absent.

Then you have the verse in John where Jesus says, "For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world." Jesus didn't picture his mission as one of judgment or condemnation, but rather as one of salvation. (See also, John 3:17) Truly remarkable, isn't it?

Now, we know that judgment is coming for all of us, but it's important to see that the Bible testifies that the first word is mercy, compassion, and salvation. That is the first word. That is the loudest word. That is the strongest word. Judgment is coming, of course, but not until God's mercy, compassion, and salvation have run their course. Jesus goes on to say in John 12 that all who reject his words (i.e., the gospel message) will be judged by those words, and ultimately condemned by them. Sadly, there can be no salvation for those who reject Jesus' word of salvation. If you reject the word of salvation, then all that is left is the word of condemnation.

But Jesus is committed to saving you; he is not committed to condemning you. Maybe you need to hear that today because it sure doesn't seem true. All you've ever heard is that Jesus is coming and he's going to throw all the unbelievers into hell. Jesus' mission is not condemnation. It's salvation. It's grace. We Christians don't often live that truth out. Maybe we need to hear that today, too. Jesus doesn't want to crush you, destroy you, or throw you into the pit of eternal hellfire. What he wants--what he really, really wants--is to save you. He wants that so bad that he was willing to lay down his divine rights, become a homeless peasant, and suffer death on a cruel Roman cross so that he could live life as you live it, and speak to you that word of mercy, compassion, and salvation. Salvation is the free gift of God; condemnation is the end result of your rejection of God, who has exhausted every avenue in his relentless love for you.

Salvation is the word for today. I hope you hear him speaking to you. I hope you can come to terms with your sin and rebellion, set that aside, and trust in Jesus rather than in your own goodness, success, or intelligence. Jesus desperately wants to save you from sin, evil, and death. I hope that you can receive today's word.