Thanks to the kind permission of the Acts 29 Network, I have been given permission to share a number of sessions from the DWELL London conference online on my blog. Today we begin with the first session, one preached by Mark Driscoll. You can download the audio, read my notes below, or watch the video here:



Mark opened the conference, which was subtitled “Grace for the City,” by looking at the gospel and two of its enemies—religion and idolatry.

The gospel is essential—you have to receive it and continue foreword in it to be saved. Many churches believe the gospel, but don't make it essential. Whatever is most important is what we tell them most frequently. Mark listened to another mega-church pastor's sermon who never mentioned Jesus’ name at all, even in the altar call. When Mark challenged him about this, the pastor explained, “Well, I assume they know this.” Don't assume anything! Church is the bride of Christ. It would be tragic if a man's wife didn't even mention him.

Mark stressed once again that we do not make Jesus relevant. We show people how he is relevant. If you want to have a missional church, talk a lot about Jesus. If people hear you talking about his name all the time, you will find that your people will talk about him, too. If it’s all about Jesus, people are not ashamed of him. The negative reactions are not to the real Jesus, but to negative caricatures they have heard.

Driscoll then moved on to the cross and how it saves us. “I believe in substitutionary atonement because I was reading this book and found it” Jesus was punished in our place. Mark explained that he is aware that a certain UK festival split over arguments on this issue and noted that he has been invited to speak at one festival and not the other. People today say that you can’t say that any more. People will react to you. Mark said he would rather be hated than ignored.

2 Corinthians 5:21: The great exchange. Jesus died, was buried, and was raised. We will also die and rise to be with him, like him, and for him, with the effects of sin removed. We have to tell people about eternal life; then they will know how to live now.

We need to tell both Christians and non-Christians about their idols and teach them how to repent of them. This will help everyone to hate you. Driscoll reminded us that Jesus said, “Woe to you when everyone thinks well of you,” and assured us he was about to fix that.

All sin is idolatry says Luther. Something or someone takes the place of God. Two commandments, and the rest are applications. There is only one God—worship him alone. If Jesus is God and not sex, then you won’t run after pornography and adultery. If Jesus is God, you cannot set your identity and worth in a possession or a promotion or a child.

HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH AN IDOLATER?

We all give ourselves to something in worship. We all worship. The only question is—Who or what do we worship? We tend to worship the body—pornography, eating disorders, etc. Some people worship their pets! Success, money, fame, etc. How does idolatry capture us? Idols make promises that are nothing but lies.

What are we most enslaved by? It’s what we love that enslaves us, not what we hate. We can actually worship “good” things, e.g. comfort is good if it simply is left as a good thing. If it becomes the ultimate thing, you won’t be able to serve anyone because they disrupt your comfort. Idols always disappoint—your kids, your wife—they won't satisfy. The idol in Egypt was probably their family. All the other plagues of Egypt are linked by commentators to one of the gods of Egypt. No one seems to link the last one, but the death of the firstborn was probably aimed at the god of family.

Idolatry starts by having a definition of hell and a definition of heaven, and something or someone is put forward as a functional savior. If a twenty year old woman has a definition of hell that is being single, heaven is being married; the boy becomes a functional savior. It can even be a child. “If my child continues to be a drug user, my whole life will have been wasted and useless.” But if Jesus is your Savior, then you will not base your life in that way.

David Powlison: What are you most afraid of? What is the one thing that, if it happens, you will be devastated? What do you long for most passionately? Where do you run for comfort? What do you complain about most? What angers you most? What makes you happiest? How do you explain yourself to other people? What has caused you to be angry with God?

Don't use Jesus to get your real god—that’s idolatry. The deepest treasure must be God. Repentance means turning from idols to God.

HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH A RELIGIOUS PERSON?

Most people think that God has already accepted them. “I’m good enough.” Religious people are aware of the law and that they have broken it. This can be people with a legal background or military who understand a chain of command. Religion says, “If you are a good boy, then I will love you, but not until then.” The gospel says that because God loves me, his Spirit enables me to obey. “Son, I want you to know that I absolutely love you no matter what, and because I love you I want to help you grow up to be a good man.”

Religion controls you by making you live in guilt and condemnation and fear. People are falsely told, “Don't leave the church; otherwise God won’t love you.” Fear, not love, control, not worship, are then the tools used by such leaders. Religion is disgusting and must be repented of. God commands all men everywhere to repent and this includes the religious.

Religion sees the world as good people and bad people. Religion can include things like “What version of the Bible is best?”, which political party, whether you drink alcohol, etc. We have different teams that have different combinations and then blog against each other.

Religious people say they love the Bible, but because they add to it they show they don't believe in it at all. The gospel says there are no good people and bad people, just bad people who have or have not repented.

Religion is what you do. Gospel is what Jesus has done. When Jesus said “It is finished,” we were supposed to pay attention. Religious people can also be hypocritical, e.g. the worship leader who thinks he's saved because he works so hard leading worship, but all the time is sleeping with people.

Religion believes that your sanctification justifies you. People are trying to make God love you. Job's buddies were very religious. Effectively they were saying, “Where is the sin? God wants you to be wealthy and to idolize you because God’s people are winners. “Job, you are a loser, so God must punish.”

But not everyone who suffers does so because they are being punished—Jesus was poor, homeless, unmarried, childless, rejected, in pain, and murdered. It wasn't because God was angry with him as an individual. Jesus was not punished for his own sins!

Religion is about me, the gospel is about Jesus. The gospel is about being transparent, humble, and honest. God hates religious people. Religion leads to pride if you are doing well, or to despair if you are doing badly. Proud religious people stay in the church, despairing religious people stay away. The gospel ends in joy. Joy doesn't come from religion, it comes from Jesus.

Christians have a wonderful opportunity to be humble and happy. The gospel is good news. Religion and idolatry are not good news, but Jesus is good news. The Jews were idolatrous and the Greeks were religious. Both groups needed the power of the gospel.

This little video was used for the New Word Alive 2008 conference and does a great job of summarizing the glorious message of the Bible, which is that God forgives fallen people like you and me!

I recently posted what I trust will be a series which will be about sermons that have changed my life. It is way too early for me to claim that this past Sunday's talk by my pastor and dear friend, Tope Koleoso, will be one of those. But I could do a lot worse than allow myself to be shaped by a talk like this. I have previously shared a list of talks Tope has given that are available online, but much as I loved those talks, I believe this may be the best sermon I have ever heard him preach.

I don't want to give too much away because I want to encourage you to listen to this talk. He weaved such well-remembered verses as "Go into all the world ...", "I am not ashamed of the gospel ..." "How will they hear ..." and "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few ..." into a compelling tapestry that felt fresh and deeply impacting without condemning. He acknowledged that it IS easier to mix with people who are in your own "tribe"— your Judea as it were.

He challenged us that if we are not going beyond that, if all our friends are still very similar to us, we haven't yet allowed the gospel to have its full impact on us. He laid down the challenge that the gospel has two calls to it. There is a call to come, to receive from God. But then there is a call to go. In that going we are called to worship God and to be a witness. He spoke of our mission to reach the world one person at a time. He also spoke of our message. He explained that our message was nothing more complicated than a person—Jesus. We are to teach his cross, his resurrection, the call to repentance, and a promise of forgiveness. Still, today some demand signs and wonders, and others clever reasoning and wisdom, but we preach Jesus and him crucified. Tope also spoke of our methods and our motivation of love. My favorite line in the whole talk was, "If you want Jesus to go with you, go and make disciples."

I was profoundly moved by this talk. What was also exciting is that, once again this Sunday, a number of people made a response to the gospel. We are in the middle of a prolonged season where we have been seeing such responses on a weekly basis. Please pray for us that such things continue, and that as a church this sermon may indeed help to turn our focus outward and that we will see many more genuinely saved. The message is available to download or listen to here:

UPDATE
Although he doesn't know me, the songwriter has been kind enough to allow me to host the file here to download or listen online:



This song was apparently written less than a month ago by a relatively unknown worship leader. But thanks to the Internet and my friend, Dave Bish, I have found myself listening to a rough acoustic recording of it many many times today with tears streaming down my face.

I predict that this will be a massive, massive song. It expresses the gospel better than anything new I have heard in a long time. I dare you to go and listen to this right now. I can't wait until they release a band version, which is apparently coming soon. The music PDF is also available. It was apparently inspired by a Puritan prayer. Here are the words to The Grace of My God.

1. The grace of my God, an unbreakable chain,
   for those He redeems, He in grace will sustain.
   I will treasure the cross and rejoice in the Prize,
   This unspeakable Gift! This the gospel of Christ!
   
   
2. Without Him my eyes would be downcast in guilt,
   And in trembling shame would my lips have been sealed.
   Yet my mouth fills with praise, when I call on His name
   And my eyes may delight in the wonders of Christ!
   
   Chorus
   Yes, wave upon wave of grace reaches me,
   He deals with my sin and He washes me clean.
   And each accusation is drowned by His blood,
   For Jesus has paid with immeasurable love!
   
   
3. Without Him is hell, where His wrath will consume,
   In perpetual fire; an eternity doomed.
   Yet in Him is all love, and my soul is at rest,
   For hell's gates have been barred through His glorious death!
   
   
4. Without Him the darkness is all I can see,
   And the terror of sin would abound within me.
   Yet a boundless horizon of glory is mine,
   When Christ in the depths of my heart is all light!
   
   
5. By grace my affection is drawn to the Lord,
   And by grace I'm renewed by the power of His word.
   It is grace that will strengthen my will and resolve
   To live for my Christ 'til I kneel at His throne!
   
   Matt Giles © 2008. Honeycomb Music Publishing Ltd.
   v1, v2, ch, v3, ch, v4, ch, ch (instrumental), v5, ch.
   

UPDATE
The Dwell Conference talks are now online, and you can download them.

I love the people at Resurgence. They keep sharing more and more video and audio—all for free. After my pastor, Tope, reported his experience in New York I wanted to watch some Tim Keller as, bizarrely, I hadn't yet listened to him or read anything by him. The Dwell talks are not online yet, so I watched Tim Keller's Gospel Coalition talk. I was totally blown away by it! Here are a few of the highlights I picked up.

Early on Keller explained that the gospel-bringer is not like an adviser coming to tell us a set of how-to’s, telling us to fight for our souls. Rather they are a messenger telling us what God has already done. The result of both models might look similar. In both cases you would want to do something in response. But, if the gospel is merely a how-to, you will obey out of fear. If the gospel is a declaration of what has already happened, you obey out of joy. Because it is a message (not a method!) words are critical.

Keller quoted Luther's Larger Catechism in which he claimed that the first commandment comes first because the other commandments are only broken if you have already broken the command to put God first and have your satisfaction in him. Therefore, sin stems from idolatry, making something more important than God. The only way we change is through honoring God, and we learn to do this in worship. This challenged me. We must keep coming back to God in adoration and gratitude to him. If you are not being generous, it is because your heart is not given over to God.

The purpose of preaching is not just to make the truth understandable, but to make it real. It is important that it is crystal clear, but that its is vivid. He quoted MLJ on Edwards’ view of the purpose of preaching. He commented that he doesn't mind if people are taking notes at the beginning of his message, but that if they are still do so by the end he feels he has missed the mark.

Keller also argued strongly that every sermon must be about Jesus. Christ needs to be taught every Sunday. The difference between a lecture and a sermon is that in a sermon Jesus shows up. If a sermon is just about what I should do or believe, people will just feel more guilty. Instead, if you say this is what you must do, but, by the way, you probably can't do it, but there is one who did it on our behalf—if you understand what he did for us—then you will begin to be able to do it, too.

Jesus is our true wealth, giving status, security, and stability. The Bible is basically about Jesus and what he has done, and not me and what I have to do. Tim spoke about how each of the main OT characters are examples of Jesus. For example, Jesus is the true Esther who didn’t just say, “If I perish, I perish” but “When I perish, I perish.”

Even becoming a Christian is not something we do. We are instead converted, something happens to us. We are born again from outside. We must have God reveal to us the state of our hearts. Keller repeatedly quoted Doctor Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and said that he learned how to preach by listening to tapes of the Doctor's evangelistic sermons. He gave the following example, which so impacted me I found myself sobbing real tears alone in my room.

The Doctor apparently said that if he was to come home and someone was to say, “O, while you were out a bill came, so I just paid it for you,” he would not know how to respond. He would not know how happy to be. He would not know whether—if it had been some extra postage, just a few pence—to simply say “thank you,” or whether—if it was hundreds of thousands of pounds—to fall on his hands and knees and kiss the person's feet. We have to appreciate that Jesus has paid a MASSIVE debt for us, and when we do so, gratitude will well up in our hearts. Our problem is that we have become immune to the size of the debt by over-familiarity.

Tim also spoke about the need for us to avoid the twin dangers of (1) isolating ourselves from the world around us through cultural withdrawal, and its opposite (2) cultural assimilation and accommodation. We need to be countercultural, but engaged and caring. Tim explained that in New York people love what the gospel has to say about forgiveness and hate what it has to say about sex, while in some other countries they love what it says about sex and hate the concept of forgiveness.

He also explained in closing that the gospel is not simple. It is not boring. It is infinitely deep and complex and stimulating and thrilling. As Peter says, even angels long to look into it. We therefore need our preaching to reflect the richness of this wonderful truth that saved us.

Even my regular readers may not remember that some time ago I decided I wanted to work my way through John Piper's sermons on the new birth. I know it has been awhile since I mentioned this, but I don't want to rush this process. Watching the second video, I found Piper's love for his people compelling. He describes being eager to comfort and give assurance to the timid new believer, but also wanting to unhinge the complacent arrogant person who falsely believes he is reborn. Oh that such pastoral wisdom and love for others would characterize every Christian! Somehow he reminded me of a quote from C. S. Lewis I shared in the past. Here is an excerpt from Piper's sermon on Nicodemus, which I urge you to go and watch in its entirety.

Apart from God, we are spiritually dead in our selfishness and rebellion. We are by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3). Our rebellion is so deep that we cannot detect or desire the glory of Christ in the gospel (2 Corinthians 4:4). Therefore, we if we are going to be born again, it will rely decisively and ultimately on God. His decision to make us alive will not be a response to what we as spiritual corpses do, but what we do will be a response to his making us alive. For most people, at least at first, this is unsettling.

My Hope: Stabilize and Save, Not Just Unsettle

So, as I begin this series, I am aware of how unsettling this teaching on the new birth can be. And O how careful I want to be. I do not want to cause tender souls any unnecessary distress. And I do not want to give false hope to those who have confused morality or religion for spiritual life. Please pray for me. I feel like I am taking eternal souls in my hands in these days. And yet I know that I have no power in myself to give them life. But God does. And I am very hopeful that he will do what he says in Ephesians 2:4-5, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.” God loves to magnify the riches of his life-giving grace where Christ is lifted up in truth. That is my hope: that this series will not just unsettle but stabilize and save.

What Happens in the New Birth?

So let’s turn now to the question: What happens in the new birth? I will try to put the answer in three statements . . .

1. What happens in the new birth is not getting new religion but getting new life.
   
   
2. What happens in the new birth is not merely affirming the supernatural in Jesus but experiencing the supernatural in yourself.
   
   
3. What happens in the new birth is not the improvement of your old human nature but the creation of a new human nature—a nature that is really you, and is forgiven and cleansed; and a nature that is really new, and is being formed by the indwelling Spirit of God.
   
   —John Piper

Having shared my own thoughts, along with Jesse's view of the worship, and some other events of the evening, as well as his subsequent reflections, we resume Jesse's report today, beginning with more of his reflections on the meeting he attended.

“Fourth, there was not an emphasis on preaching from a doctrinal standpoint; rather, there seemed to be a great emphasis on faith, wholeness, healing, and inner light. Again, many things were said that are true. But I think what was missing was that the gospel was not preached very clearly. Even in its most basic forms—that Jesus died for my sins so that I don’t have to pay for them, even though I have offended a holy God—the gospel was not mentioned. Instead, something to this effect was said: “Jesus bore the crown of thorns to deliver us from our mental infirmities.” Although it’s true that we can be healed of mental illness through the powerful name of Jesus, the teaching left something to be desired. Many past revivals have centered around strong, anointed preaching. This one seems to have little or no strong preaching at all.

I also have a concern about what seemed to me to be a limited understanding of the nature of sin. The teaching in this meeting seemed to be that sin is primarily something that happens to us, and from which we need to be delivered, not something that first and foremost dwells in us. Some passages about healing through the blood of Christ which seem, in context, to refer at least to spiritual healing were applied in a way that made it seem that they referred exclusively to physical healing. There have also been some reports on YouTube and the God TV broadcast that Mr. Bentley has a personal angel called Emma. Again, I'm not speaking from experience, because nothing about angels ever came up the night I was there, but these reports would be concerning to me because I think they could potentially lead people astray.

During worship, I thought to myself, “With this level of anticipation and faith, imagine the impact a dynamic, theologically rich song like In Christ Alone would have!” My heart was aching to sing of the glorious reality of the blood and suffering of Christ, and then the absolute exultation of the line:

“Then bursting forth in glorious day,
Up from the grave He rose again!
And as He stands in victory,
Sin’s curse has lost its grip on me.”
Then, with an amazing realization of the power of the cross, to proclaim:

“No guilt in life, no fear in death—
This is the pow’r of Christ in me;
From life’s first cry to final breath,
Jesus commands my destiny.
No pow’r of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand;
Till He returns or calls me home—
Here in the pow’r of Christ I’ll stand.”

In Christ Alone
Words and Music by Stuart Townend and Keith Getty
Instead, we sang about being a generation who will stand and fight.

So often I can be so theologically sound and doctrinal, but lack a sense of urgency, anticipation, and faith. I am lazy and comfortable with where I’m at. Then, in an environment of real faith and excitement, I think of the power that a theologically sound and rich song and the gospel message would have in that context. I was disappointed because, while I think they do well in the faith category, I think more of an emphasis on the anointed preaching of the gospel and God-centered worship, not man-centered songs, would have a tremendous impact to stir religious affections and motivate a lot of the revival that's being prayed for.

I know some people will think I am quenching the Spirit by desiring more of an accurate theology or a clearer description of who this God is that we’re excited about, but why should we have to choose between doctrine and expectation? Why can’t we have it all? Our excitement is baseless and will never last if it is not grounded in the gospel, and all of our theology, however fine-tuned, will never by itself produce revival. I guess what you’re hearing are the longings of a reformed-charismatic who desires the best of both worlds, yet so often sins by doubting such a thing is possible.”

Continued in part 5 . . .

John 3:7
“YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN”

I have today decided I want to work through a series of sermons John Piper recently finished giving at his church. I would encourage you to join me. There can be nothing more important than to get ourselves clear about being born again, being regenerated. Are YOU sure that you have experienced the new birth? Are you sure you are on your way to heaven? What exactly happens when someone is born again? What changes? What are the results?

Allow John Piper to teach us together about this most critical subject. We must understand well for the sake of our own souls, and for the souls of those we love. So please, join me. The sermons are available in written, video, and audio forms.

I encourage you to watch as many as you can for maximum spiritual impact short of being in the same room. We are looking for a miraculous work of the Spirit to quicken God's words to our hearts and enlighten us. It is not just an intellectual exercise. Don't let's rush this. If you have a blog, consider yourself tagged. Write about this series on your own blog. What else could be more important?

The sermons are available from the Desiring God website, and the series is entitled You Must Be Born Again.

"Another reason I am eager to focus on the new birth is to help you know what really happened to you when you were born again. It is far more glorious than you think it is. It is also more glorious than I think it is. It is wonderful beyond all human comprehension. But that mystery is not because there is little about it in the Bible. There is much about it in the Bible. It’s because when all is comprehended there is still more. So I hope that you will know more and know better what happened to you when you were born again . . .

And the reason I want you to know what happened to you in your new birth and others to know what must yet happen to them is threefold. 1) When you are truly born again and grow in the grace and knowledge of what the Lord has done for you, your fellowship with God will be sweet, and your assurance that he is your Father will be deep. I want that for you. 2) If God would be pleased to bring this kind of awakening to his church, then the world will get the real deal of radical love and sacrifice and courage from the church and not all these fake Christians that live just like the world. 3) If you know what really happened to you in your new birth, you will treasure God and his Spirit and his Son and his word more highly than you ever have. And he will be glorified."

— John Piper, You Must Be Born Again

My grandfather, Edwin Warnock, was an evangelistic tent preacher. He was from Scotland, but came down to England, where he married a Londoner but lived in Suffolk. He had six children—five boys and one girl. Sadly, one boy died young. Each of the other boys married and had two boys. In my father's and one other case, they also had a girl. My auntie also married and had two girls and one boy. Many of those thirteen Warnock cousins of mine are now married themselves and have begun their own families. The vast majority of this extended family continue to go to church and love the Lord. Many of the men have also preached, at least to some extent.

It was a real delight to meet with a significant portion of the surviving descendants of Edwin Warnock and their wives this past Monday—a national holiday in the UK. I was thrilled also to receive a precious gift from one of my uncles. As far as I know, this is the last surviving tape of my grandfather preaching. His passion is clear, even amidst the English politeness of communication that was still common in churches back in 1968. The gospel message is strong and clearly identifiable. I could have preached this message. May God prosper the cause of my grandfather's gospel, which is now mine, and is, of course, also faithfully preached by many millions throughout the world.

You can download the message or listen to it right here:



The following photos are of Edwin and include his marriage to Muriel Driver, a river baptism, his children's camps and the tent he used for evangelism.

I found this great quote about what the gospel is meant to do to our opinions of ourselves from Tim Keller on "theocentricview":

“The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.”

— Timothy Keller, The Reason For God, New York, NY: Dutton, 2008, p. 181.

We have now arrived at the countdown of the top ten most popular posts of all time with readers of this blog. No. 10 appeared on July 19, 2007, and of all the posts I have written, this one is probably my own personal favorite. It is a rallying call to a kind of Christianity that is not ashamed to embrace the best from many different backgrounds.

The last four words of the above title are not new to me, but they are certainly resonating with me at the moment — "I Want It All!" Why should I have to choose, for example, between being enthusiastic about theology and being charismatic?

I know what some of you are thinking as you've been reading my posts on the Together On a Mission conference. You're wondering why it is that someone who is so enthusiastic about what was obviously a very charismatic conference can also be deeply committed to defending and understanding biblical doctrine. I know it's hard for some of you to believe, but it really is the same me who wrote all those posts on the atonement who also was so deeply touched by this latest conference. For those of you who have never met one, I am indeed that rare breed — a Reformed Charismatic.

Too often, however, the temptation for me is to downplay one side of that equation or the other in order to appear "balanced." When I am with the charismatics, my reformed doctrine often appears alien to them, although in the UK, Newfrontiers offers a major exception to that with over 200 churches that are broadly reformed and charismatic. When I'm with the reformed, I'm tempted to soften my charismatic viewpoint and not speak too much of the things I have seen and experienced. Why is it that on this issue, as on so many others, the Church seems to be split in half? Why can't we be both radically reformed and radically charismatic? Why do we see a conflict and therefore try to play down both in order to be "balanced?" I don't want to be balanced, I want it all!

On the one hand there are those who care about theology enough to study God's Word in detail, weigh scripture against scripture, study great theological minds, and preach intellectually stimulating messages that would stretch even a PhD in Theology — which, incidentally, I am certainly not! Why is it that for the majority of us, if we want such a feast for our minds, we must sacrifice certain other things? Why are some leaders in the Church committed to theology almost exclusively? Is even great theology so captivating that it is the only need of the Church? I don't believe it can be, or God would have given us a Bible that was a systematic theology and not the one we have, which is essentially a collection of lots of stories with a few doctrinal portions.

Read more . . . I Don't Want Balance! I Want It All!

No. 25 on the list of the all-time most popular posts with readers of this blog appeared on July 2, 2007, and summarized some of my series on the atonement. It also included links to a number of other posts on the subject. There were many other posts within this series—the most popular of which was entitled "J. I. Packer on the Atonement."

As we finally draw near to the conclusion of this long-running series on the atonement, it has struck me just how the lines are being drawn. On the one hand there are those of us who feel PSA is essential to the gospel. It’s not that we think it’s the only thing—or indeed that every gospel presentation must major on it. It’s just that we think it’s essential, and that gospel presentations can’t deny it.

Just yesterday I heard what, to me, was the best gospel message I’ve ever heard. In fact, it didn't major on an explanation of the exact mechanism of the atonement, but there was a line about the coming wrath of God and how that had to be taken away. I was reminded as I was listening that the gospel shouldn’t become merely a battleground for us to fight over. It should, instead, be something we hold precious. I can't encourage you enough to download and listen to Tope’s sermon on the prodigal son. Many Christians heard the impact of this message of God's love and forgiveness with a fresh insight. Several visitors made a response to the gospel. I loved what he said at the close of the sermon—“It may be free, but it wasn't cheap. It cost the life of his son.”

It seems impossible for those of us who love the gospel of the Savior suffering the punishment of our sins to simply agree to disagree with those on the other hand who claim it is “divine child abuse.” I suspect the divisions in the visible church over this issue will grow more prominent rather than less so. This is just one of several reasons that, as Andrew Cottingham spoke of today, makes ecumenicalism so difficult for some of us who really care.

Today the American magazine, Christianity Today, published an article about the recent UK controversies over the atonement online. They were kind enough to quote me in the article, acknowledging my role in breaking the Word Alive / Spring Harvest story.

9Marks has this month published a whole issue about defining the gospel. They were eager to point out that PSA is essential to it, and the controversy over PSA is mentioned in one of their editorials. Others (including myself) were asked to write 100-word contributions explaining the gospel. I would love to read such a brief outline by someone from the other side of this debate.

There has also recently been an article by D. A. Carson on Penal Substitutionary Atonement which, not surprisingly, comes down firmly on the side of the authors of PFOT and makes plain that PSA is at the heart of the gospel. . . .

Read more of . . . "PSA—Precious Gospel or Divine Child Abuse?"

You can count on John Owen to bring some light and clarity into a debate. The following lightly edited quote was sent in by a reader and is really helpful:

"That which we affirm is that our sins were so transferred on Christ as that thereby he became responsible to God and liable to punishment in the justice of God for them. He was perfectly innocent in himself; but took our guilt on him, or our liability to punishment for sin. He may be said to be the greatest debtor in the world, who never borrowed nor owed one farthing on his own account, if he became guarantor for the greatest debt of others . . .

In order to declare the righteousness of God in this setting forth of Christ to be a propitiation and to bear our iniquities, the guilt of our sins was transferred to him in an act of the righteous judgement of God accepting and evaluating him as the guilty person—as it is with a guarantor in every case . . .

If this be not so, I desire to know what is become of the guilt of the sins of believers. If it were not transferred onto Christ, it remains still upon themselves, or it is nothing. It will be said that guilt is taken away by the free pardon of sin. But if that were so, there was no need of punishment for it at all—for if punishment is not for guilt, it is not punishment."

This is from page 200 of volume 5 of Owen's "The Doctrine of Justification by Faith Through the Imputation of the Righteousness of Christ Explained, Confirmed and Vindicated." (!!)

My reader said slightly cheekily, "I love the way Puritans give the game away in the title to their books. At least you know where he would be coming from in a discussion with Bishop N. T. Wright without having to read his book!"

Many of the opponents of the doctrine of justification and penal substitution criticize us for not being as interested in the resurrection as the cross. I increasingly think that it is not so fair to accuse most evangelical theologians of not having a place for the resurrection in our system of beliefs. I do feel, however, that we perhaps under-emphasize the resurrection at times.

As I was reading this book, I was aware that, of course, Piper was interacting with Wright's views of the cross, so it was perhaps no wonder that the resurrection was featured less. Indeed, Wright's massive work on the resurrection did not feature in the bibliography.

As I was pondering this new obsession of mine with the place of the resurrection, I found myself asking—was Piper wrong not to look at it in more detail in this book? I concluded that probably this was influenced by the constraints of the length of the book. Perhaps an interaction with Wright on the resurrection should be the subject of another book.

I was surprised, however, to note that on two different occasions within the book Piper fell into an all-too-common evangelical trap. On both pages—89 and 212—he cites 1 Corinthians 15:3, omitting to continue the verse to include the resurrection. The Piper quotations omit the bolded phrase below:

"Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,

Now, I suppose I shouldn't get overly legalistic about this, but I wish that we would all learn not to do that with that particular verse. Paul goes on to make the point that without the resurrection we would, in fact, still be in our sins, something that surely undermines any system of theology that does not require the resurrection to perform anything for us, altering our position in any way.

But I should not be unfair to Piper, for as we saw in an earlier post, when he summarizes his position on justification he states the following propositions:

(1) a person is in union with Christ by faith alone. In this union, (2) the believer is identified with Christ in his (a) wrath-absorbing death, (b) his perfect obedience to the Father, and (c) his vindication-securing resurrection. All of these are reckoned—that is, imputed—to the believer in Christ. On this basis, (3) the "dead," "righteous," "raised" believer is accepted and assured of final vindication and eternal fellowship with God.

So Piper, it seems, is NOT guilty of the charge of neglect of the resurrection. I wonder, though, how often do my own presentations of the gospel include the concept of Jesus' resurrection being credited to our account? Do I sometimes forget to even mention the resurrection of Jesus? The samples of Billy Graham's preaching I listened to at the Billy Graham Center certainly did speak of the resurrection of Jesus as part of what he had done for us. The phrase that keeps recurring in my mind from those sermons was simply "He is a living Jesus." Could it be that the preaching of the cross AND the resurrection is more spiritually potent for producing salvation than simply preaching on the cross?

John Piper has delivered an amazing lecture on the vital place of justification to the ETS. The manuscript, video, and audio are available online, and this sets his new book, The Future of Justification, into context. The whole talk is fantastic, but these couple of paragraphs stuck out for me, especially considering his audience!

I’m aware that for some in the academic world, perhaps some of you, this very confession calls my fitness into question as a competent exegete. “This fellow has so much personal and pastoral allegiance to what he believes about justification, and feels such a great need for it, and has so much joy in it, that there is no way he can be objective when he comes to the biblical text, or be open to finding that his view is mistaken.” Well, that may be true. But there is another way to look at a person’s passion for particular truths.

A passion for a particular truth may be a blinding passion. That’s true. But it may also be the very means that God uses to make some truths visible and beautiful. I say that because of what Jesus said in John 7:17: “If anyone wills (or desires or wants, thele) to do God’s will, he will know (gnosetai) whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority.” In other words, Jesus taught that, at least in some matters, right willing precedes right knowing. Jesus is saying, “If you want the will of God, you will have the disposition of heart to recognize it when you see it in his word.” He does not say, “If you don’t want the truth God is revealing—if you have no passion for this truth—and therefore have a measure of objective distance and detachment from the truth, you will be able to assess clearly whether something is of God.” He says the opposite. There are some matters in which prior neutrality does not serve the truth, but serves death.

As we continue looking at John Piper's book we have now reached page 200 and following. I want to highlight Piper's attitude to the law. What, according to Piper, is the purpose of the law?

“The reason the law is not against the promise is precisely that it was designed not to give life but to hold under sin and lead to Christ who gives life. Paul says that if the law had given life, then it would have been against the promise. It would have short-circuited the purpose of the promise to make Christ the basis of life and righteousness. . . .

[Piper then addresses Galatians 5:6, arguing that this verse] tells what kind of faith avails justification. Therefore, love as an expression of faith is not the instrument of justification—it does not unite us to Christ who is our perfection. Only faith does. But this faith is the kind of faith that inevitably gives rise to love.”

[He continues stating that 1 Timothy 1 shows us that] to use the law lawfully (v. 8) is to understand that it is designed to lead people to the gospel of Christ and to indict what is not in accord with the gospel. In this way, the lawful use of the law leads to the transformation of the heart through “sincere faith” (v. 5) and thus leads to love, which is in turn the aim of Paul's preaching (v. 5) and the fulfilling of the law (Romans 13:8). The key defining criterion of the life-change that Paul is pursuing is whether it is “in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God” (v. 11). Using the law lawfully means using it to convict people of living out of accordance with the gospel. . . .

We bear fruit for God (love) by being joined through faith to Jesus, not through the law. That is what the law was ultimately designed to show."

Today I want to share how John Piper brings two passages to bear on the justification debate. The quotes are all from his new book, The Future of Justification, and come from pages 170-180. The two passages are Romans 5 and 2 Corinthians 5. Piper is responding to Wright's slightly odd way of speaking about them. If you are interested in seeing an example of this, there is an article by Wright on 2 Corinthians 5:21 that I must say I found wholly unconvincing. This is what John Piper says about these passages:

Justification . . . happens to all who are connected to Christ the same way condemnation happened to those who were connected to Adam. How is that? Adam acted sinfully, and because we were connected to him, we were condemned in him. Christ acted righteously, and because we are connected to Christ we are justified in Christ. Adam's sin is counted as ours. Christ's “act of righteousness” is counted as ours.

. . . his being made sin is consistent with his being in himself free from sin; and our being made righteous is consistent with our being in ourselves ungodly. What is so illumining here is specifically the parallel between Christ's being “made sin” and our “becoming righteous.”

George Ladd brings this out with its crucial implication for imputation. Christ was made sin for our sake. We might say that our sins were reckoned to Christ. He, although sinless, identified himself with our sins, suffered their penalty and doom—death. So we have reckoned to us Christ's righteousness even though in character and deed we remain sinners. It is an unavoidable logical conclusion that men of faith are justified because Christ's righteousness is imputed to them.

[Piper goes on to quote Hodge.] “There is probably no passage in the Scriptures in which the doctrine of justification is more concisely or clearly stated than in [2 Corinthians 5:21]. Our sins were imputed to Christ, and his righteousness is imputed to us. He bore our sins; we are clothed in his righteousness. . . . Christ bearing our sins did not make him morally a sinner . . . nor does Christ's righteousness become subjectively ours, it is not the moral quality of our souls. . . . Our sins were the judicial ground of the sufferings of Christ, so that they were a satisfaction of justice; and his righteousness is the judicial ground of our acceptance with God, so that our pardon is an act of justice.” (Hodge, An Exposition of the Second Letter to the Corinthians, pp. 150–151, cited in John Piper, The Future of Justification, p. 180.)

Book photo courtesy Tony S. Reinke, The Shepherd's Scrapbook. Used by permission.

In his book, The Future of Justification, John Piper addresses the issue of legalism and the first century Jew. Piper responds to some of the notions of the New Perspectives people who claim that first century Jews had not drifted from the grace message of the Old Testament into legalism. He explains . . .

“In regard to the second objection to the general view that “the Jew keeps the law out of gratitude, as the proper response to grace,” it is important to see that, from Jesus’ standpoint, relational exclusivism (ethnic or otherwise) is rooted in self-righteousness, which means that ethnocentrism and legalism have the same root. This connection between self-righteousness and exclusivism is one of the points of Jesus’ parable that begins, “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous [dikaioi], and treated others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). A deep root of “treating others with contempt” (whether the others are ethnically similar publicans or ethnically different Gentiles) is: “[They] trusted in themselves that they were righteous. . . . In other words, the exclusivistic treatment of others is one manifestation of the self-righteousness that trusts in its own law-keeping. Legalism and ethnocentrism have the same root. They are not separate conditions of the soul. Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector also shows that the branches of this root of exclusivistic self-righteousness can, amazingly, make protests and prayers to the effect that all is of grace. Thus, the Pharisee prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11).

Is this not a clear warning to us that finding grace dependent statements in Second-Temple Judaism does not demonstrate that the hearts of those who made those statements were not at root self-righteous (pp. 156-157).

It is interesting to note this idea that legalism and racism are closely entwined. At their core they are both rooted in pride and a superior view of ourselves and our cultural groups.

There is a very interesting quote from Matt Perman, one of John Piper's students, which Piper includes in his book, The Future of Justification. It addresses N. T. Wright's view that Judaism was not legalistic. Matt argues that there are, in fact, two types of legalism. Speaking of Wright and others he says:

“They appear to be thinking only in terms of hard legalism, which is the notion that either your works bribe God or that they are self-produced by your own effort. But, as you flesh it out, hard legalism does not exhaust the definition of legalism.

There is also soft legalism, which is the belief that your God-empowered obedience justifies you before God, or that you ‘become saved’ by faith but ‘remain saved’ by God-produced works (which includes the idea that final justification is based on obedience). In fact, Sanders acknowledged that the first century Jews believed that they got into the covenant by grace but ‘stayed in’ by works. But he failed to realize that this is legalism. The new perspective—and those taking their initial cues from it—typically conflate legalism and Pelagianism, seeming to think that because they (or the first century Jews) are not Pelagians, they therefore cannot be legalists. It needs to be made crystal-clear that these are distinct issues. You can utterly reject Pelagianism and yet be a legalist. You can be a Calvinist legalist, an Augustinian legalist, a believing-in-grace-empowered-works legalist. . . . This is perhaps the central issue of the debate and is probably a big part of the reason that they are going wrong. The essence of legalism is the belief that our right standing with God is based on, comes by means of, or is sustained by our works—regardless of whether those works are self-produced (hard legalism) or whether they are completely produced by God's grace in us (soft legalism). . . .” (Matt Perman, cited in John Piper, The Future of Justification (p. 152).

Reading that quote, I realized that with the emphasis of people like Wright on the need for us to demonstrate that we have changed in order for God to finally justify us in the end has an interesting effect. It is ironic indeed that in trying to claim Judaism was not legalistic, it is possible to argue that the new perspective has created a new form of what Matt calls ‘soft’ legalism.

In fact, if first century Judaism was not in any sense legalistic this would be most remarkable. Surely they would have been the only religious group in the history of the world who escaped its ugly stain. Anyone with much history within the evangelical movement should appreciate that, for all our talk about grace, we have all too often succumbed to the deceptive allure of legalism. This would most likely not be obvious in a review of our doctrinal statements and other written documents, but would be true nonetheless.

Book photo courtesy of Tony S. Reinke, The Shepherd's Scrapbook. Used by permission.

Anyone who has read anything about the New Perspectives on Paul will realize that one of the key arguments is that we have misunderstood the Pharisees through the perspective of the Reformation. The first century Jews were never legalists, we are told. There are a number of problems with that position. The first is looking at Jesus' own perspective on the Pharisees seen most prominently in Luke 18. The second is that while we should acknowledge that the original message of the OT was one of grace, even if the official documents of the first century do indeed point to grace, that does not mean that grace was what was practiced. John Piper explains this further:

"Legalism may also exist in practice, even if grace is trumpeted in theory. Religionists may easily proclaim the primacy of grace and actually live as if the determining factor was human effort. The history of the Christian church amply demonstrates that a theology of grace does not preclude legalism in practice. It would be surprising if Judaism did not suffer from the same problem. Legalism threatens even those who hold to a theology of grace since pride and self-boasting are deeply rooted in human nature. . . ."

"Theology . . . is not measured only by formal statements but also by what it stresses. Any theology that claims to stress God's grace but rarely mentions it and that elaborates human responsibility in detail inevitably becomes legalistic in practice, if not theory." (Schreiner, Law and Its Fulfillment, pp. 115–116, cited in John Piper, The Future of Justification, p. 147.)

On Friday I introduced a series on John Piper’s response to N. T. Wright in The Future of Justification. We saw that to Piper the most critical difference between N. T. Wright and himself is that Wright does not believe that Christ's righteousness is in any way transferred to our account. This is a vital, vital point. Without this concept of an alien righteousness either credited or transferred to us, ironically, both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic understandings of salvation unravel. Wright seems to believe that he and other modern theologians have discovered something that every theologian for millennia have missed. We should therefore be very careful before we accept such assertions. Men as epoch-shattering as Luther only come along very rarely. Is Wright such a man? Or is he deluded and quite plainly wrong?

This is how Piper elaborates on the dilemma we finished with on Friday:

“The omniscience of the judge implies that the defendant must have a different righteousness than Wright would concede, that is, a righteousness that is more than the mere status of being acquitted, regardless of innocence or guilt. Wright stresses that for the defendant, righteousness is not a character quality (i.e., not a moral righteousness) but a status, namely, that the court has found in the defendant’s favor. The defendant may or may not have committed the crime with which he was charged. Regardless, if the court finds in his favor, he is “righteous.” He has that status.

This definition of “righteous” may work in ordinary human law-courts where judges are fallible and their judgments must stand, whether they are right or wrong. But there’s a catch. In God’s courtroom, the Judge is omniscient and just. Now everyone in the first century would agree that in a courtroom where the Judge knows everything and is just, there can never be a case where there is a discrepancy between the truth of the charge and the truth of the verdict. In this court, what would be the basis of saying, “I bestow on you the status of righteous, and I find you guilty as charged”? How could such a finding be intelligible, not to mention just? One right answer that I think Wright would agree with is that this is what the atonement is all about. Christ died for our sins to provide a basis for this finding, and therefore, though guilty, the court can exercise clemency (or in God’s case, forgiveness) because of Christ and we go free.” (p. 74)

Piper goes on to summarize his understanding of what happens in justification in the following simple, but wonderful way:

“Wherever sins are not counted—righteousness is counted. That is, the forgiven person is not considered by God merely as a sinful forgiven person, but as a righteous person—a person “to whom God counts righteousness apart from works.” (p. 75)

Book photo courtesy Tony S. Reinke, The Shepherd's Scrapbook. Used by permission.

The Doctor defines grace and our salvation in such a way in this quote that I simply HAD to share it with you:

. . . we are Christians entirely and solely as the result of the grace of God. Let us remind ourselves once more that ‘grace’ means unmerited, undeserved favour. It is an action which arises entirely from the gracious character of God. So the fundamental proposition is that salvation is something that comes to us entirely from God's side. What is still more important is this, that it not only comes from God's side, it comes to us in spite of ourselves—‘unmerited’ favour. In other words, it is not God's response to anything in us. Now there are many people who seem to think that it is—that salvation is God's response to something in us. But the word ‘grace’ excludes that. It is in spite of us. . . .

Salvation is not in any sense God's response to anything in us. It is not something that we in any sense deserve or merit. The whole essence of the teaching at this point, and everywhere in all the New Testament, is that we have no sort or kind of right whatsoever to salvation, that the whole glory of salvation is, that though we deserved nothing but punishment and hell and banishment out of the sight of God to all eternity, yet God, of His own love and grace and wondrous mercy, has granted us this salvation. Now that is the entire meaning of this term ‘grace’. . . .

Creatures who were spiritually dead are now alive—how has it happened? Can a dead man raise himself? It is impossible. There is only one answer, ‘By grace ye are saved’. . . .

I must confess it passes my comprehension to understand how any Christian looking at himself or herself can say anything different. If when you get on your knees before God you do not realise that you are a 'debtor to mercy alone’, I confess I do not understand you. There is something tragically defective, either in your sense of sin or in your realisation of the greatness of God's love.

Lloyd-Jones, D. Martyn. God's Way of Reconciliation—An Exposition of Ephesians 2, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Baker Book House, 1972, p. 130.

For more information on Lloyd-Jones, his sermons, books, etc. see the  MLJ Recordings Trust.

During a brief trip to the USA this past week, I had a layover in the Chicago area. I had an amazing few hours. I ate lunch with two great friends who I had never met in the flesh before. It struck me that the impression I had of them when finally meeting face-to-face was almost identical to the one I already had through our electronic communications. I thank God for the people I have been privileged to meet through this blog.

What I want to focus on in this post is what happened next. I hadn't even realized that there was a connection between Billy Graham and the town I was visiting. At my friends' suggestion, I headed to the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

I am well aware that there are at least two different perceptions of Billy Graham among evangelicals. You can read about both perspectives in a 2006 MSNBC interview and the Wikipedia page about Billy Graham. There are many evangelicals who, although they might have some concerns, greatly rejoice in what God has accomplished through his preaching of the Gospel. In Philippians 1, Paul rejoices that Christ was preached even by those who had bad motives. Surely all Christians can rejoice at the preaching career of a man who has been in the media spotlight for five decades and yet has never been accused of a lack of integrity.

Wikipedia believes that 2 billion people have heard Billy Graham preach the Gospel and that 2.5 million of them made a public declaration of faith in response. There is no doubt that Billy has preached to more people than any other Christian minister in the last 2000 years. If there have been some weaknesses about Billy over the years (and certainly Billy himself believes that there are) then surely the fact that God chose to use someone weak in such a dramatic way only underlines the glory of his grace.

The Billy Graham Center moved me profoundly. An overview of evangelical history in America led into a more detailed report of the life of the man often called "America's pastor." The focus was not on his role as personal counselor to every president since Harry Truman. Rather it was his preaching and crusades that were reported in most detail. Walking past photographs of massive crowds while listening to clips of his preaching brought tears to my eyes. It seemed that in every era the extracts of the messages they had playing said almost the same thing, which I have paraphrased as follows:

Christ died, took the guilt for you, became sin for you, and rose again. He's a living Christ. He's here right now. He wants you to repent, trust him, and ask him to be Lord of your life, to come into your life so you can then follow him as Lord and Saviour.

The focus was not just on the death, but also on the resurrection. It was not just on sin and wrath, but also forgiveness and love. He was not content to speak only of God in heaven, but also of Jesus living in our hearts. I stood behind Billy's traveling pulpit and listened to his voice and wept that God would raise up more preachers of Christ in our day who can fill stadiums with the Gospel.

As the exhibition closes, if visitors are in any doubt about who the organizers really want to glorify, you are led through a passageway to the foot of an enormous cross. Then you are taken into a dark passageway clearly intended to be the grave. As you round the corner, a simple inscription is written on the wall "He is not here, but risen!" The passageway then opens into a light room clearly intended to reflect glory. I was quite simply undone by this and had tears welling in my eyes.

I was left with a strong impression of the need for us to preach the simple Gospel of Jesus' death AND resurrection. I also remember reading these words of Billy Graham there (which sadly I did not write down in a notebook, so they may not be 100 per cent accurate, although the sense is definitely there):

I find that when I preach the simple Gospel with authority, quoting the very words of the Bible, the Holy Spirit drives it home into the hearts of people.

The Holy Spirit was a major focus of the exhibition in several quotes. Oh, for a return to such an emphasis on the living Jesus sending his Spirit to convict the world and bring them salvation. Deliver us from an overly intellectual Christianity, oh God. Remind us that the Gospel is indeed simple enough that a farm boy with no theological degrees can become its most prolific ambassador!

The impression left on me was striking indeed. So much so that, somewhat surprisingly for such a fan as I am, seeing the writing desks of C. S. Lewis and J. R. Tolkein, not to mention the wardrobe which inspired The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was frankly an anticlimax!

Hi! It's Mrs.W here again! The stage of life I am in currently involves spending a lot of time caring for my lovely 7 month old baby, George. He is now clapping his hands, rolling over, and sitting up. He also has his first tooth! He is such a cute little boy, and we all love him to bits. But he is also very vulnerable. He needs to be watched and cared for all the time, for he has no idea at all how to look after himself and keep himself safe. In Jesus' time I believe many children would die before reaching adulthood. Jesus made himself that vulnerable for us.


He Chose This Way

There are so very many things
That I will never know
But most of all I wonder why
You chose to stoop so low.

A birth amongst the cows and hay
Your earthly life began
Your babyhood and toddler days
Were all part of the plan.

You walked and talked and laughed and cried
And played as children do
But as you grew you never sinned
Because you were God, too.

Why did you choose to be a child
When you're the King of all
You suffered pain and took my shame
While I cared not at all?

You broke the power of sin and death
And freed me from the law
You rose again to give me life
And joy forever more.

What can I say but 'thank you, Lord'
What can I do but praise?
And by your grace to seek your face
And love you all my days.

— Andrée Warnock

Mark Dever is not a man who is shy of controversy. For example, during my recent interview with him, he stated concerning the book, Pierced For Our Transgressions, "If you don't like that book, you don't like Christianity!" Strong stuff!

Before we leave Mark for awhile, I want to share with you once again some excerpts from what I believe has been his best blog post ever. It was written in 2006 and is entitled "Undermining Tolerance of Egalitarianism." Whatever your views on this subject may be, you will surely see in these quotes his passion and the reasoning behind his strong belief in the crucial nature of the controversy facing the Church over this issue:

". . . it is my observation that those older than me who are complementarian generally want to downplay this issue, and those younger than me want to lead with it, or at least be very up front about it. . . .

The older group is among peers who see women's ordination as an extension of civil rights for people of different races. The younger group is among peers who see women's ordination as a precursor for creating legal categories of gay rights. But having a certain skin pigmentation is to the glory of God; having a sexual partner of the same gender is sin. The younger group is more alarmed not simply by the egalitarian position, but by what it is assumed that will eventually entail, either in those who allow it, or in those who come after them.

There are, of course, many evangelical feminists. Some Christians whom I most love and respect and have learned from are in this category. . . . 'Well then,' you might say, 'Why don't you leave this issue of complementarianism at the level of baptism or church polity? Surely you cooperate with those who disagree with you on such matters.' Because, though I could be wrong, it is my best and most sober judgment that this position is effectively an undermining of—a breach in—the authority of Scripture. As Lig [Duncan], the paedo-baptist, has often said, 'If there were a verse in 1 Timothy saying, 'I do not permit an infant to be baptized . . .' we wouldn't be having this conversation about baptism! There is such a verse about women serving as teacher/elders!'

Dear reader, you may not agree with me on this. And I don't desire to be right in my fears. But it seems to me and others (many who are younger than myself) that this issue of egalitarianism and complementarianism is increasingly acting as the watershed distinguishing those who will accomodate Scripture to culture, and those who will attempt to shape culture by Scripture. You may disagree, but this is our honest concern before God. It is no lack of charity, nor honesty. It is no desire for power or tradition for tradition's sake. It is our sober conclusion from observing the last 50 years."

For more information about Mark Dever, see the following sites: Together for the Gospel Blog, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, and 9Marks.

Last month Mark Dever was on tour. In the middle of central London, somewhere off Picadilly in a large church—complete with organ—I sat with a gathering of church leaders and others eager to hear Mark speak. (OK, so it's been a long time since I sang a hymn to an organ!) Anyway, Mark began the day by turning to 1 Timothy 1:12-17.

True to form, Dever began with the Gospel. Paul reminds his son in the faith of the dramatic call he himself had received to preach the Gospel. He wanted to be sure that his hearers who had decided to spend a day listening to theology were really saved. He established Paul's credentials. It was Jesus who had appeared to him on the road to Damascus. Paul's teaching came with the authority of God. Timothy had also received that call. Timothy's theology was critical. The Bible really is God's words.

Grace was abundantly poured out on Paul. In contrast to his previous life, God gave him the power to preach. Timothy was to be encouraged that God would provide. Christianity is not merely a religious way to talk about self-help, self-effort. Much modern "Christianity" is a-theological. We need God to actually act to change us. He gives us things we don't deserve, and loves us in ways that we can't imagine.

Paul is humble and joyful, yet also hopeful, as he is confessing where he has come from and what God has done for him in Christ. Paul is aware of great sin, but also of great grace. This chapter is almost like a personalized Ephesians 2—BUT GOD!

Paul was a wolf who had become a sheep. A man full of pride became humble. A persecutor became a pastor. He wanted nothing but to serve Christ Jesus. Paul uses the word “sinner,” a word which is rarely said today. He says still I “am” the worst sinner. Dever was anxious to point out that even the best Christian remains in some sense a sinner. Sin has ruined our world. None of us are immune from its effects.

Paul was shown mercy, not because his ignorance and unbelief were mitigating factors—rather his ignorance was culpable. He was shown mercy, not because his sins were more excusable, but precisely because they were so great. So Paul's ignorance was part of what made Paul into the greatest sinner. His very opposition to the Gospel demonstrated God's power. Paul became a pattern for those who would follow. God saved Paul to demonstrate his patience towards sinners to the world.

God uses people we feel are beyond the reach of God's mercy to display his glory to the maximum. It is through us that his glory is revealed!

On Saturday, September 22nd I attended the Theology For All Conference in central London at which Mark Dever spoke. To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive about attending as I wondered if I would be the only charismatic in attendance. Since the concept of Together for the Gospel hasn't really crossed the Atlantic, I almost felt like an interloper.

It was great then to arrive and to feel so welcomed by a good number of my readers who were also attending. It still surprises and pleases me when I meet readers in real life—somehow thinking of them as eyes gazing at a screen is totally different from meeting them in real life. I was also greatly encouraged to discover that apparently my blog is widely read in such circles as the students of Oak Hill or the Cornhill training program. I was just disappointed not to have exchanged contact details with some of the people who I met that day. If you were there, or indeed if you are a lurking reader, feel free to make contact with me via e-mail, or still better, by asking me to be a friend on Facebook.

Listening to Mark Dever was a great blessing, and over the next few days I will share my notes. At the end of the conference I was able to sit with Mark over dinner and we recorded an informal interview. We discussed his latest book, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, among other subjects. The book is a useful introduction to personal evangelism, what it is, and how we should go about evangelizing. I believe the book is a great introduction to the subject, and certainly reading it challenged me to seek God for more opportunities to share the Gospel with others on a one-to-one basis.

The interview was a lot of fun, and at times it felt more like I was being interviewed by Mark! You can download it or listen to it right here:

There are few places where one can go to study church history more rewarding than Dr. John Piper's biographical talks. He has a way of opening up the life of a great hero of the faith and showing us what we can learn from them. I'm finding myself in John Owen's Communion with the Triune God quite consistently at the moment, and am now over half-way through the book. I am finding it to be sweet to the soul and, thanks to Justin & Company, relatively easy going on the eyes!

I thought I would have a look at what the modern John has to say about his namesake. Piper begins his biography by emphasizing just how prominent an influence Owen has had in the centuries since his death. He even quotes approvingly those who elevate John Owen above Piper's other theological hero, Jonathan Edwards! Certainly his list of modern greats who express their debt to Owen is impressive.

But what I want to draw your attention to this Friday is the section which speaks about the experiential nature of an event that happened to John Owen years after he had become intellectually convinced of Calvinism. The event below is often described as Owen's conversion, although Piper, in introdcucing it, expresses some doubt about that. When confronted with events as experiential as those described below, we are faced with a dilemma. Many Christians today never experience this kind of personalized assurance of salvation. For many of those who have come before us, until they knew something of the love of God shed abroad in their own hearts, they could not confidently claim to be Christians.

Thus, one of two conclusions become possible. First, we might infer from reading about previous heroes of the faith that all salvation MUST be accompanied by an experience. Thus, we would have to conclude that many alive today in our churches have never truly been saved. Second, we could infer that while it is possible to become a Christian without any great emotional fireworks being set off, there is a distinct experience of God's Spirit that is available and brings assurance.

Ironically, a doctrine of a distinct experience of God could, in fact, be necessary precisely to allow for the fact that believers differ in the extent of their awareness of the presence and love of God. Far from creating "second class" Christians, it could be that this doctrine is necessary to ensure that people whose conversion expereince is not as dramatic as those outlined below can still be classed as Christians.

Can anyone read these accounts and be satisfied with an inferior experience of God? Or, like me, does reading them make you yearn for more of God? If the latter, let me encourage you to pray that God will reveal himself personally to you in the way he has to so many others before you. Then, read the Bible, sit under sermons, and continue to trust in God irrespective of what you feel while earnestly seeking the God who loved you so much that he came and died for you.

Let's see how John Piper describes the conversion of John Owen, which he writes about in a section detailing five events that shaped Owen's life:

The first is his conversion—or his assurance of salvation and deepening of his personal communion with God. It is remarkable that it happened in a way almost identical to Charles Spurgeon's conversion two centuries later. On January 6, 1850 Spurgeon was driven by a snow storm into a Primitive Methodist Chapel where a layman stood in for the pastor and took the text from Isaiah 45:22, "Look to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth." Spurgeon looked and was saved.

Owen was a convinced Calvinist with large doctrinal knowledge, but he lacked the sense of the reality of his own salvation. That sense of personal reality in all that he wrote was going to make all the difference in the world for Owen in the years to come. So what happened one Sunday in 1642 is very important.

When Owen was 26 years old he went with his cousin to hear the famous Presbyterian, Edmund Calamy, at St. Mary's Church Aldermanbury. But it turned out Calamy could not preach and a country preacher took his place. Owen's cousin wanted to leave. But something held Owen to his seat. The simple preacher took as his text Matthew 8:26, "Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?" It was God's appointed word and appointed time for Owen's awakening. His doubts and fears and worries as to whether he was truly born anew by the Holy Spirit were gone. He felt himself liberated and adopted as a Son of God. When you read the penetrating practical works of Owen on the work of the Spirit and the nature of true communion with God it is hard to doubt the reality of what God did on this Sunday in 1642.

Later in this biographical article Piper quotes Packer to further elaborate on this vital issue of communion with God:

Packer says that the Puritans differ from evangelicals today because with them ". . . communion with God was a great thing; to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely of their daily experience of God."

But God was seeing to it that Owen and the suffering Puritans of his day lived closer to God and sought after communion with God more earnestly than we. Writing a letter during an illness in 1674 he said to a friend, "Christ is our best friend, and ere long will be our only friend. I pray God with all my heart that I may be weary of everything else but converse and communion with Him." God was using illness and all the other pressures of Owen's life to drive him into communion with God and not away from it.

But Owen was also very intentional about his communion with God. He said, "Friendship is most maintained and kept up by visits; and these, the more free and less occasioned by urgent business . . ." In other words, in the midst of all his academic and political and ecclesiastical labors he made many visits to his Friend, Jesus Christ.

And when he went he did not just go with petitions for things or even for deliverance in his many hardships. He went to see his glorious friend and to contemplate his greatness. The last book he wrote—he was finishing it as he died—is called Meditations on the Glory of Christ. That says a great deal about the focus and outcome of Owen's life. In it he said:

"The revelation . . . of Christ . . . deserves the severest of our thoughts, the best of our meditations and our utmost diligence in them . . . What better preparation can there be for [our future enjoyment of the glory of Christ] than in a constant previous contemplation of that glory in the revelation that is made in the Gospel?"

Lest we be in any doubt about how personally challenging John Piper finds the life of Owen, he states:

"Owen was authentic in commending in public only what he had experienced in private.

One great hindrance to holiness in the ministry of the word is that we are prone to preach and write without pressing into the things we say and making them real to our own souls. Over the years words begin to come easy, and we find we can speak of mysteries without standing in awe; we can speak of purity without feeling pure; we can speak of zeal without spiritual passion; we can speak of God's holiness without trembling; we can speak of sin without sorrow; we can speak of heaven without eagerness. And the result is a terrible hardening of the spiritual life."

Piper goes on to quote Owen as follows:

"A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul. And he that doth not feed on and thrive in the digestion of the food which he provides for others will scarce make it savoury unto them; yea, he knows not but the food he hath provided may be poison, unless he have really tasted of it himself. If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us."

This is some notes from a sermon I preached last Sunday. You can download the audio or listen to it right here with this player.

The following notes havent gone through my usual 'tidying up' process and I thought I would share them with you without any real editorial input just so you can see quite how chaotic my mind truly is! If they don't make much sense to you, hopefully the audio will be clearer!

Paul begins this second chapter in the context of a glorious description of the power of God at the end of the last chapter – there were no chapter breaks when he wrote it. As we will see that amazing power of God was necessary to bring salvation to us.

1. the state of the sinner: OUR Problem without God - “Dead in sins”
life without God – is death
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
DEAD to God but alive to SIN. Look pretty alive dont we! But, we are not in the doghouse but dead. God made us for himself! Might feed the hungry and it is still sin - coz not done for the glory of God - Rom 1 falling short of glory .....its all sin if God is neglected our righteous acts are as filthy rags....Until we understand this, we willl never apprecaite our need of a saviour

It is not that we have too low a self esteem but that we dont think badly enough of ourselves without God!

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” (Mat 23:27-28)

What does being dead to God look like?
1. “following the course of this world” (v2)
Lead by peer pressure (the world) Copying others, not wanting to stand out, go with the flow....

Goes deeper than this - behind that peer pressure is the devil.
2. “following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” Enslaved to an alien power! NB devil is as close to us as the air we we cant escape = even as christians easy to embibe satanic attitudes.... This is a world of darkness - how at home do you feel in the world? disobedient to God. We end up with the devil inside us, and become his tool in his battle against God. There are two kingdoms in this world. If you feel at home in the world, you are most likely full of the spirit that inspires it. If it feels alien to you then perhaps you are a believer!

3. “lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind”
In the 21st Century West we live by unfettered desire - our modern culture is based on this! Money (NB the things money reprs), sex, power (promotion, to be the best, etc)
but also FOOD!
NB when we want what we dont get we war with others over it...

So Paul goes on to summarise
“by nature children of wrath” (v3)

BY NATURE sinners BUT WE ALSO CHOOSE TO SIN... FREE CHOICE.\ NO ONE EVER HAS TO TRAIN a child to sin! Sin has been inherited - "original sin" though there's nothing original about sin!

NB - "like the rest of mankind" - removes boasting! Helps us to understand history with all its wars etc

Helps us to understand the size of Gods grace and power -its depth
People live a miserable life - uninterested in God....
WE REBEL AGAINST THE HUMBLING CONCEPT OF THE GOSPEL WANT TO BE SELF SUFICIENT.....

One of the greatest phrases in the whole bible - “But God”
2. The MERCY of God - GOD'S Solution - “But God....by grace..through faith”

Not so much a theological theory of salvation, more a description of what happens to us when we believe!

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
-unmerited mercy undeserved. Not about what I have done, but grace from start to finish – he is RICH in mercy
-grace – because of the great love he has for us, made possible by what Jesus has done NOT
to show “the immeasurable riches of his grace”
by faith but THROUGH faith. Faith is a gift!

3. The Position of believer The Results for the Christian- “Saved, raised, seated in heavenly places”
exact opposite – once were dead, now you are ALIVE, once you were earthbound – following the ways of this world, now you are RAISED to heaven, once you were “walking” and if you were even aware of God you were trying desperately to please him whilst all the time failing in sin, now you are “SEATED” with him! ie - rest, completion, and victory!

– our position is now ABOVE the circumstances!
It is like God the Father looked in a grave saw a stinking corpse and said I want him to live and turned to his son and said will you go live on earth, die, and be raised so that he can live (based on Piper) He was UNITED IN OUR DEATH so we were UNITED IN HIS LIFE

Paul doesn't mention the death of Christ here, partly because he did briefly in chapter one, partly because they would have known about it and partly because the resurrection presupposes Jesus died!

Gods irresistible call that causes rebirth. There are many things I can do, and many things I cannot do. Raising the dead is firmly in the category of things I cant do! I cant save anybody!

BANCRUPTCY AS an example of this.....

Raised together with Christ SYN-Raised etc

How are we united with Christ?
1. as our representative - yes like if our head of state declares war , we are at war even if we disagree! ie he died and was raised on our behalf but also
2. mystical = actually incorporated in Christ’s body in some way... "I have been crucified....I died" (Gal)
3 experiential - We belong to heaven! We have a "second life"....
We can begin to experience the truth of this here and now - that is the role of the Spirit who is the "foretaste" -are you aware of His presence?

NB Must be one or the other....are you spiritually alive or dead? Imagine a doctor "mmm....I think he might be dead" no in between!

ARE you alive to God? Do you have a longing for his presence? Does your heart yearn for him?
If not, how can you be sure that you really are a Christian?

4. The Mission of the Christian “created for good works”
– our evangelism should be driven by a true state of how people are and gratitude for what God has done for us, but more than that for God's glory.
– there are things about God we would never have known if it weren’t for our salvation! Angels marvel at the church, more than creation!
– NB as we have said dead men cant resurrect themselves. It is ALL from God, and it is designed to stop up boasting!
– Good works don’t make us become a Christian, becoming a Christian makes us able to do good works!
– Tim Keller - religion I obey so I can be accepted. Christianity - I am accepted so I can obey...
DONT TURN FAITH INTO A FORM OF WORKS±
WE are NOT saved by faith. We are saved THROUGH faith. But BY grace.
Faith is not the cause of salvation, rather Jesus is.

We are shaped for righteous living,
--11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. 13 Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. (Romans 6:11-12)
● also a DESIGN to match –

GOALS/Respsonse
1. For anyone unsure of their salvation to become sure – know you are spiritually alive alpha..
2. For the rest of us to be more excited about our salvation and eager to share it

My buddy, Mark Moore, has asked us to pray for a friend of his who is a pastor facing persecution in India. See Mark's blog for the full story:

“One of our international pastors in Acts 29, Pastor Sudhakar in India, is facing tremendous persecution, having been drug out of his church on a Sunday morning and beaten by twenty men. He is now standing trial for "converting Hindus to Christianity."

Yesterday I began a series of posts inspired by the introductory materials to the forthcoming Crossway book, Communion With the Triune God by John Owen.

One major preoccupation of this blog which has been overarching much of my writing has been that of the Gospel itself. In an age which tends to assume or even deny the Gospel, I have been eager to examine it again. This major theme has been inspired by the Together for the Gospel Statement, which I will return shortly to blogging my way through. I have also looked at the atonement, which is the foundation of the Gospel, how we are to preach that Gospel, and how we can be missional and share that Gospel. Owen's emphasis on the goal of the Gospel is vital for us today.

The theme of Owen's book is an experiential relationship with God, which is also no stranger to this blog. I love the way that Owen identifies this with the Gospel. It reminds me of John Piper, who insisted in one of his books that it is God himself who is the Gospel.

In the following quote from the Forward of Communion With the Triune God we find the following Owen-inspired definition of the Gospel:

"The gospel is the good news that in Christ there is union and communion with God. According to Owen, communion involves “mutual relations” between God and humankind—a giving and receiving—but it does not follow that God and humankind are equal partners. Only God can bring about the union that establishes and enables the subsequent communion. Humans enjoy fellowship with God, therefore, only by actively participating in what God has unilaterally done for them in Christ through the Spirit. Owen may here have something to teach contemporary theology concerning the nature of human participation in God’s triune life, namely, that participation, like communion itself, is neither a legal fiction nor idle piety, but rather the meat and drink of the Christian life. We appropriate the friendship God offers through the workings of his Word and Spirit in and through our natural human faculties." (page 12)

I pray that the 21st century Church will learn to “appropriate the friendship God offers.” What better description of the Christian experience could there be? Join me tomorrow as I share another gem from this forthcoming book.

Some Christians do not appreciate the value of doctrine. They do not understand why we need to learn so much about God. I fear that the reason for this is that we do not always explain the effects that doctrine can have on our lives. The Doctor was not so foolish. Indeed, he is one of the masters of spiritual diagnostics, and of applying spiritual medicine to us. This example from his work on the book of Ephesians stood out to me. He is speaking about the message of Ephesians 1 and 2, and applies it to our cold hearts and our lack of missional thinking.

Are you worried about the coldness of your heart? I am sure you are, as we all ought to be. Is it not appalling that we can come and eat the bread and drink the wine at the communion table and be so unmoved, that our hearts are not overflowing with love to God? Why are they not overflowing with love? It is because we do not realise the greatness of His love. If you want to love God do not try to work up something inside yourself: realise His love, and pray that the eyes of your understanding may be enlightened, that you may realise the pit out of which you have been hauled up, the depths to which you had sunk, your former terrible, precarious, perilous position, and what God has done for you, by His grace, in Christ. That is the way to realise it. ‘We love him because he first loved us’, says John, and it is the same argument. The understanding of these things is essential to a sense of wonder, love and praise.

But come to something still more practical. It is because we do not realise these things as we ought that we do not feel the burden of the souls of others as we ought. Christian people are but a handful in the world today. The masses are outside Christ, outside the Church, in godlessness and irreligion, and in a terrible state of sin. Are we concerned about them? Does their condition burden us? Have we a missionary sense with regard to our fellow citizens in this country? Does the condition of the benighted masses in other lands weigh upon us at all? Are we concerned about the missionary enterprise? Do we think about these things, do they burden us, do we pray to God about them? Are we asking, ‘What can I do, how can I help, what contribution can I make?’ If we are not, there is only one explanation—we have never realised the truth about people who are in a state of sin. We are just irritated by them, we are just annoyed. But that is not enough; we must be concerned about souls, we must be concerned about sin. We must see them as they are, the children of wrath, hell-bound, in this degradation, in this pollution that the apostle here describes. If we only saw it, our hearts would go out to them; we would see them as our Lord saw them, and He had a great heart of compassion for them. The poorness of our missionary and evangelistic zeal is entirely due to this. We have not seen the position of those outside truly—what they are, what they might be, and what Christ has done.

The third thing that it brings home to us is that if we but saw these things truly it would also control our evangelism. The trouble with all false evangelism is that it does not start with doctrine, it does not start by realising man’s condition. All fleshly, carnal, man-made evangelism is the result of inadequate understanding of what the apostle teaches us in the first ten verses of this second chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians. If you and I but realised that every man who is yet a sinner is absolutely dominated by ‘the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience,’ if we only understood that he is really a child of wrath and dead in trespasses and sins, we would realise that only one power can deal with such an individual, and that is the power of God, the power of the Holy Ghost. And so we would put our confidence, not in man-made organisations, but in the power of God, in the prayer that holds on to God and asks for revival and a descent of the Spirit. We would realise that nothing else can do it. We can change men superficially, we can win men to our side and to our party, we can persuade them to join a church, but we can never raise the spiritually dead; God alone can do that. The realisation of these truths would of necessity determine and control all our evangelism.

Lloyd-Jones, D. M. (1972). God's Way of Reconciliation (Studies in Ephesians, chapter 2) (10). Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.

As regular readers will already know, this week I am swiftly working through the glorious doctrines of grace—the so-called "TULIP." Today we reach the end of our short series with the doctrine of the persevernace of the saints, which teaches that God will insure that genuine believers in Christ remain faithful to the end. I give the last words to Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

". . . the eternal God knows us and is interested in us and has a plan for us. If that is not enough for you, then I despair! The astounding thing I find here is that the eternal and absolute God knows me, that he thought of me before the foundation of the world, not only before I was born, but before he even made the world; that this eternal, absolute Being is interested in me, even me, as an individual and as a person, and that I was in his mind when he conceived this amazing plan that includes the incarnation and the cross, and the resurrection and the ascension, and the reign of his Son at his side that is going on now. What a staggering, yes, but what a glorious thought!

. . . there is therefore nothing uncertain about my acceptance with God, nor about my forgiveness, nor about my sonship. When I realize that I have been brought into God’s plan I know that nothing can frustrate this . . . plan of God which cannot be broken and which cannot fail. It is as absolute as God, himself; he knows the end as well as the beginning. ‘Neither shall any man,’ said Christ, ‘pluck them out of my hand.’ It is unthinkable.

. . . Let me put it like this: God, who is sufficiently concerned about me to send his Son to die on the cross of Calvary for me, is not going to let me down when any difficulty or temptation faces me. My dear friends, there is nothing for you to fear! You belong to One of whom we are told that all power has been given to him over all flesh. You are in the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ if you but knew and realised it, and he controls everything. He controls every human being, all the affairs of nature, he is even controlling the devil himself. All power is given unto him, thrones, dominions, principalities and powers are subject unto him, so you need never fear! You and I have but to realize that we are in those mighty hands, that that strong arm is engaged on our behalf, that all flesh under his power, and that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him."

Lloyd-Jones, David Martyn. The Assurance of Our Salvation: Exploring the Depth of Jesus' Prayer for His Own: Studies in John 17. Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, 2000, S. 65.

As regular readers will realize, this week I am swiftly working through the glorious doctrines of grace—the so-called "TULIP." Today we reach irresistible grace.

Today's first quote comes once more from Charles Simeon:

"A river flowing with a rapid and majestic current to the sea would defy the efforts of the whole world to turn it back again to its source; yet by the returning tide it is not only arrested in its course, but driven up again with equal rapidity towards the fountain-head. It is thus that a sinner, when rushing with the whole current of his affections towards this present world, is stopped in his career of sin, and turned back with an irresistible impulse towards high and heavenly things. Let men, yea, let all the angels in heaven, attempt to effect this change, and their united efforts would be in vain. Who then that witnesses this change, and beholds the believer’s victories over sin and Satan, and his progressive advancement in the ways of holiness, must not adore that power by which so great a miracle is wrought? In this Christ is indeed magnified: “the exceeding greatness of his power is made known;” and the sufficiency of his grace is incontrovertibly established."

Simeon, Charles: Horae Homileticae Vol. 18: Philippians to 1 Timothy, London, 1832-63, S. 25.

The second is from the Doctor, Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

". . . it is the internal operation of the Holy Spirit upon the soul and the heart of men and women that brings them into a condition in which the call can become effectual. And when the Spirit does it, of course, it is absolutely certain, and because of that some people have used the term—which I do not like myself—irresistible grace. I do not like the term because it seems to give the impression that something has happened which has been hammering at a person’s will and has knocked him down and bludgeoned him. But it is not that. It is that the Holy Spirit implants a principle within me which enables me, for the first time in my life, to discern and to apprehend something of this glorious, wondrous truth. He works upon my will. ‘It is God that worketh in you both to will and to do.’ He does not strike me; He does not beat me; He does not coerce me. No, thank God, what He does is operate upon my will so that I desire these things and rejoice in them and love them. He leads, He persuades, He acts upon my will in such a way that when He does, the call of the gospel is effectual, and it is certain, and it is sure. God’s work never fails, and when God works in a man or woman, the work is effective."

Lloyd-Jones, David Martyn: God the Holy Spirit, Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, 1997, S. 73.

I preached the following sermon at Jubilee Church, London yesterday. You can read the notes, download the audio, or listen to it right here:




HEROES—At the outset I should warn you that Jacob is not your typical biblical hero. We often go to the Bible to learn about how to behave. We want to read about great men of God who we can model ourselves after. We want to learn how to behave, how to be a good father, a good husband. Jacob is not that kind of hero. Actually it is fair to say that none of the biblical heroes are without flaws. Jacob, I am sorry to say, had many flaws. He was not a good husband. He was not a good father. In fact, there is very little that we can positively learn from the way he lived his life. He constantly made mistakes. Initially, I wondered why this story was even in the Bible:

1. Because it is TRUE—an evidence for the Bible’s truthfulness we often forget is the terrible flaws of its heroes. No other nation on earth describes its founder in such unsavory terms.
   
   
   
2. It is there to teach us a message—possibly one of the hardest messages we come across in the whole of Scripture.

Romans 9:13 ". . . when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

I guarantee that you will have all kinds of questions about that verse; I know I do But the life of Jacob shows us that what the Apostle Paul says in Romans is true —God chose him not because of anything in him, but because he chose him. God's love for Jacob is so great that in comparison it is as though he hates Esau.

We have to ask ourselves a simple question: If we are a Christian, is it because of something in us or is it because of something God has done for us? When we look at an unbeliever, do we feel superior to them, or does it make us tremble to think that God could also have passed us by and left us in the mess we have made of our lives?

We might say, “Haven't I got free will? Yes, but God’s is freer!” (Terry Virgo)

God is the initiator. He can never be forced to act. He is sovereign and we must remember—HE IS GOD AND WE ARE NOT!

John Piper says it in this way, imagining what God might have said to Jacob:

"I have loved you with free, sovereign, unconditional, electing love; that is how I have loved you.

• My love for you is electing love because I chose you for myself above your brother Esau.
  
  
• My love for you is unconditional love because I chose you before you had done anything good or evil—before you had met any conditions—while you were still in your mother's womb (Genesis 25:24).
  
  
• My love for you is sovereign love because I was under no constraint to love you; I was not forced or coerced; I was totally in charge when I set my love upon you.
  
  
• And my love for you is free because it's the overflow of my infinite grace that can never be bought."

". . . Why do I tell you this?

• To humble you.
  
  
• To take away your presumption.
  
  
• To remove every ground of boasting in yourself.
  
  
• To cut the nerve of pride that boasts over Esau as though your salvation were owing to anything in you.
  
  
• To put to naught the cavalier sense of self-reliance that lets you dally in my presence as though you were an equal partner in this affair.
  
  
• To make you tremble with tears of joy that you belong to God.”

The story of Jacob is the story of God's unstoppable mission. Nothing Jacob can do will stop God's determination to bless him. It’s not about Jacob, it’s about God.

Actually that can be very encouraging for us. As I have been spending time getting to know Jacob, I have been encouraged. Here is a man who makes me feel like saying, If God can use him, perhaps he can use me too!

We see in the life of Jacob that it really is not all about him. We often say in this church that it’s “all about Jesus.” Jacob's life truly was “all about Jesus.” It was all about a plan that God had set in motion to call a people to himself. Jacob’s grandfather had received promises. Despite being a man of faith—the father of faith—he hadn’t really founded a nation. Isaac, Abraham's son, had repeated many of his father’s mistakes (passing off his wife as his sister) and had also not fathered a nation.

Jacob was an “expressive” leader, but he was not always received; he lived in the future, but tried to help God out. He got angry; he told people what to do; he wasn’t reserved. But somehow he was charming. He had strong reactions.

We can look at JACOB’S CHARACTER by examining some of the words he said.

Jacob’s first recorded words: “Sell me your birthright now.” (Genesis 25:31). And also verse 33: “Swear to me now.” He steals from and blackmails his brother, and then cheats him again.

“Behold, my brother Esau is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man. Perhaps my father will feel me, and I shall seem to be mocking him and bring a curse upon myself and not a blessing.” (Genesis 27:11). Not “But mum, that would be wrong!” and then lies to his own dad and steals from his brother.

We then see Jacob, whose name means “grabber” or “supplanter” or basically “thief” running away. When God appears to him, we might expect God to punish him, maybe strike him dead.

“He was in disgrace, had incurred the bitter hatred of his only brother, and had shown himself a thief, liar, and scheming, mercenary wretch.” (McMillin, Bib Sac Volume 91 [1934]: Jacob At Penuel).

But by his grace, God instead reaffirms his promise to bless him. God makes an unconditional promise to an unreliable man.

Genesis 28:13-15: “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

JACOB’S RESPONSE was to make God a conditional promise!

“If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God . . . .”

He would have made a good 20th century Christian—if God will look after me, I will follow him. Too often our faith is about what we can get out of God rather than how we can serve him.

We then see that when he meets the shepherds of Laban, he immediately begins to boss them around and tell them what to do!

He then BUYS his wife! “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.”

Then he was tricked himself as he and Laban try to outdo each other in trickery.

He was a terrible husband (Genesis 29:30-31) “So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years. When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.”

He was incredibly insensitive. “Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel, and he said, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” (Genesis 30:2)

He even let himself be bought for the night.

He had a RIGHTS BASED approach to life. He argued with Laban about who had tricked each other the most. Christianity is not a rights-based religion. Instead, it is about our responsibility.

Finally, having left Laban and heading back to an uncertain meeting with Esau, he humbles himself. His prayer is finally something we can copy!

Genesis 32:9-12 “And Jacob said, “O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O Lord who said to me, ‘Return to your country and to your kindred, that I may do you good,’ I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps. Please deliver me from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him, that he may come and attack me, the mothers with the children. But you said, ‘I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.’”

God never could prevail against one who used the weapons of “weeping” and “supplication.” (McMillin)

Jacob's wrestling with God was in some ways reminiscent of his life—he had been one who fought with God and man. God doesn't get rid of the fighting spirit, but directs it appropriately, and even names his people “one who struggles with God.” Are WE those who struggle with God?

“I will not let you go unless you bless me.” (Genesis 32:26)

“For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” (Genesis 32:31)

Why delivered? It was Jesus who would save him and allow him to be hidden in his brother, not as a deception, but by the will of the father, and not so that he remained unchanged, but that he would be changed by being united with Christ. In fact, he was changed.

God made him say and own his name one more time before it could be wiped away. This is what God wants us to do. It’s not “I had a bad father; he loved my brother, Esau, not me" or even “I am struggling with a problem.” NO . . . it was “I am a deceiver, I am a cheat, I am selfish. I am in need of you. I need your blessing, Lord. I have messed up my life, but you keep blessing me.”

Actually lots of so-called "fighters" are as fearful and weak underneath as we later realize Jacob was. We are just better at hiding it! Fear leads some to be timid, and others to put a brave face on things.

GOD OPPOSES THE PROUD BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE. (James 4:6)

God does take on fighters sometimes. He certainly isn’t frightened of them. If, like me, you are a bit of a fighter by nature, then know that if God takes you on, it might be a painful process. He will bring you low. He will take the brash over-confidence of youth and strip it away like he did with Jacob. As an older man he is almost quite timid, frightened of Esau. Then when God gets you to a timid, dependent state, he will cause you to rise up again—this time in HIS STRENGTH rather than your own, acknowledging HIM as King, and this time because ONE MAN PLUS GOD is the majority. No one will be able to fight against you. Why would you go on fighting against people and God? Why not surrender to the KING and let him lead you to fight on HIS side?

GOD IS GOD AND WE ARE NOT!

Finally became humble. Then he humbles himself with his brother, and is honored for his faith in passing on the blessing at the end of his life.

“The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day, the angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the boys; and in them let my name be carried on, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth.” (Genesis 48:15-16)

I love the way Isaiah 41 describes this way of God handling us:

But you, Israel, my servant,
Jacob, whom I have chosen,
the offspring of Abraham, my friend;
you whom I took from the ends of the earth,
and called from its farthest corners,
saying to you, “You are my servant,
I have chosen you and not cast you off”;
fear not, for I am with you;
be not dismayed, for I am your God;
I will strengthen you, I will help you,
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand . . .
Fear not, you worm Jacob,
you men of Israel!
I am the one who helps you, declares the Lord;
your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.
Behold, I make of you a threshing sledge,
new, sharp, and having teeth;
you shall thresh the mountains and crush them,
and you shall make the hills like chaff;
you shall winnow them, and the wind shall carry them away,
and the tempest shall scatter them.
And you shall rejoice in the Lord;
in the Holy One of Israel you shall glory.

To become a valiant warrior for God we must first surrender to him and recognize we are “a worm.” Some of us have issues we need to resolve with God today.

Illustration of my debate with myself about getting up to go to the prayer meeting. You know what the outcome of this debate is going to be—give up the struggle and walk with God today!

Or, rather do nothing in your own strength. This post appears to be one of those rare posts that I and Dave Warnock (no relation) can agree on! It comes from Mark Lauterbach and is a post everybody should read carefully and fully.

In the last year I have become increasingly convinced that the Gospel makes no sense to the natural man. Not only is it counter-intuitive to the unbeliever but it requires constant reminders to the Christian. I am so deeply self-help oriented that I quickly move on from the Gospel and God's work to save me -- to myself and my work to improve my life.

. . . the Gospel is fundamentally a message that God has undertaken to accomplish by himself alone what the combined sweat and labor of the entire race of mankind has been unable to do -- to rescue us from the evil within us and its consequences. The Gospel comes to moderns with a massive, loud word of "CEASE" -- and it tells us that our efforts are in vain, that the problem is much deeper than we can even imagine. We do not need a better set of how to's, or a better teacher, or a better therapist. All of that is the equivalent to giving swimming lessons to people shipwrecked and floating in water 1000 miles from shore. It may give them a brief sense of power, but it is delaying the inevitable.

God does in Jesus life and death what we could not do for ourselves. Paul says it this way in gal 2:21 -- if righteousness was by the law, then Christ died needlessly. In modern words, if I can attain any measure of freedom from sin/evil in my heart and life, then I don't need Jesus . . .

If people leave my preaching confident in the rules and principles I have given them, I have preached a false Gospel. If they leave the room confident in the faithful grace and power of the Savior to work in them as they seek to obey -- I have preached the Gospel.

Gospel Driven Life

This past Sunday I preached on Abraham. You can download the sermon or listen to it here. I will share some brief notes with you here.

Isaiah 51:1-3
51:1 “Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, you who seek the Lord: look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug. 2 Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him. For the Lord comforts Zion; he comforts all her waste places and makes her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of song.”

We should obey this passage and consider Abraham - we have much to learn from him.

In Genesis 12:1 The Lord said to Abraham, go and leave your fathers house and family to the land I will show you and I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and I will bless those who bless you and those who dishonour you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. And Abraham went...

These verses tell us that we can be in the blessing of God.

We might make a big event involving the media etc, but God starts a mission in other ways. He went to one man and said, 'GO!'

We can feel like an alien, being the only christian in our context. Abraham had to leave all that was familiar.

Summary of God's mission: 'Go, be blessed, be a blessing to others!'

Israel was characterised by being blessed and being persecuted.

God has put us on a mission....its His mission: To start a people.

GOD takes one man to bless the world contrast with what came before. Different nations initially a punishment but throughout the rest of scriptures were seen as a positive thing - multi-coloured wisdom of God.

God always chooses one person to bless the many. The summary of God's mission is this - GO, I will BLESS and then make YOU a blessing! Are we a blessing at school? Workplace? Family?

We will look at most of the words of Abraham since there are few better ways of getting to know someone than examining their words


1. THERE IS A TIME NOT TO SPEAK
Chapter 12

He doesn't speak in first half response to God "so Abraham went"

"So he built" SOMETIMES ITS BEST NOT TO SAY ANYTHING JUST OBEY
Don't give up the habit of meeting together, for example. When the bible says do something, we should do it, and when the bible says don't do something, we shouldn't do it.



2.THERE IS A TIME TO SPEAK MORE OPENLY

The first time Abraham is recorded to have spoken he makes a mistake. In verse 11 he tells his wife to say she is his sister, ie. lies by telling a half-truth. Being economical with the truth is not appropriate!

When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to Sarai his wife, “I know that you are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared for your sake.” Gen 12:11-13

When caught the first time he was perhaps wise to keep quiet and slip off...

Like us sometimes he didn't learn from his first mistake!

Genesis 20:2 And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” And Abimelech king of Gerar sent and took Sarah.

Genesis 20:11-13
Abraham said, “I did it because I thought, There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife. Besides, she is indeed my sister, the daughter of my father though not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife. And when God caused me to wander from my father's house, I said to her, ‘This is the kindness you must do me: at every place to which we come, say of me, He is my brother.’”

He was a man of no tact!


3. THERE IS A TIME TO LAY DOWN OUR RIGHTS

He was meek, despite God having given him the whole land. He did not stand up for his rights.

Then Abram said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herdsmen and my herdsmen, for we are kinsmen. [1] Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left.”

But Abram said to the king of Sodom, “I have lifted my hand [1] to the Lord, God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth, that I would not take a thread or a sandal strap or anything that is yours, lest you should say, ‘I have made Abram rich.’ I will take nothing but what the young men have eaten, and the share of the men who went with me. Let Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre take their share.” Gen 14:22-24

Meekness should be the characteristic of all christians.


4. THERE IS A TIME TO BE 'REAL' WITH GOD

He was honest with God BUT TRUSTED HIM

FAITH- trust but we can be honest "Oh Lord I believe help my unbelief"

Genesis 15:2-3 But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue [1] childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.”

He is not 'making a faith declaration', but is being honest with God. God, you promised, but what is going on here? Abraham faced the facts, yet believed God. Do we face the facts?

....v6 And he believed the Lord, and He counted it to him as righteousness.


FAITH=TRUST and it is THE critical thing to our salvation and our ongoing walk with God.

We have all done things we are ashamed of, but we can still trust in God, like Abraham.

Romans 4:3-5, 16-25 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” 4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. 5 And to the one who does not work but believes in [2] him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness...

That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, 17 as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”
23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, 24
but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.

His faith was not perfect, and he is still called the father of faith despite his struggles TWENTY FIVE YEARS before had son

....v8 But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?”


5. THERE IS A TIME NOT TO LISTEN TO OTHERS! or THERE IS A TIME TO NOT RUSH AHEAD OF GOD

Gen 16:2 And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children
[1] by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai.

Gen 16:6 But Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, your servant is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she fled from her.

6. THERE IS A TIME TO BE BOLD WITH GOD

There is a fine balance - sometimes we need to hold back and be patient, other times we need to boldly press in - knowing which takes wisdom.

Genesis 18:23-25, 27
Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”...

Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?”.......

There is a contrast between when we need to be patient, take a step back and wait for God, and times when we need to press in and be bold. Other wise Christians can help you make that distinction. It is important to make that distinction.


7.THERE IS A TIME TO TAKE MASSIVE RISKS AND MAKE MASSIVE SACRIFICES

Jesus said, that if we will not lay down everything for Him, we are not worthy to be called his disciples.

Remember, we do not have such an accurate route of communication with God. God WILL NOT ask you to copy Abraham by killing your son, but he might ask you to kill your dream. GOD MAY BE BRINGING SOME DREAMS BACK TO LIFE BUT MAY BE ASKING YOU TO LAY DOWN OTHERS.

Sometimes God might ask you to kill a bad relationship, for example, or to kill a good dream. You can sometimes lay down a dream with the faith that it will come back. Later God may say, 'let the dream live again!'

Issac represents the PROMISE OF GOD. Looking at the words of Abraham throughout this story is revealing....

Genesis 22:1 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.”

Genesis 22:5 Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy [1] will go over there and worship and come again to you.”

Genesis 22:7-8 And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here am I, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a
burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a
burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.

Genesis 22:11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.”

Genesis 22:14 So Abraham called the name of that place, “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

ABRAHAM UNWITTINGLY PROVIDES POSSIBLY THE RICHEST PICTURE OF WHAT WILL HAPPEN AT THE CROSS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. THERE IS NO ANGEL TO STAY GODS HAND WHEN HE KILLS HIS SON. THERE IS NO LAMB TO TAKE JESUS PLACE, BECAUSE HE IS THE LAMB WHO TOOK OUR PLACE.

Isacc carried the wood up the mountain, as Jesus carried his own cross, both willingly. We can get caught up with blaming God for not looking after us properly but the truth is the only thing he "should" do is wipe us out the moment we first sinned. Jesus was the lamb who took our place, who took the wrath we deserve. God is more angry with sin than we think He is. It is only because of Jesus that His wrath can be turned away. That love that Abraham felt for his son, God feels for us.

The way Abraham trusted God should inspire us to serve the GOD who sacrificed so much for us and who has made us a part of the people of Abraham and hence caught up on the same mission Abraham was.

God wants us to go from being a consumer, to being a producer, in the context you are in. Have a part to play, however small. It is still a crucial part.

UPDATE
In January 2008, the following post was identified as the 10th all-time most popular post with readers of this blog. The 11th most-read post was The Atonement—Wright Attacks Both Sides of the Debate.

Of all the posts I have written, this one is probably my own personal favorite. It is a rallying call to a kind of Christianity that is not ashamed to embrace the best from many different backgrounds.

***************

The last four words of the above title are not new to me, but they are certainly resonating with me at the moment — "I Want It All!" Why should I have to choose, for example, between being enthusiastic about theology and being charismatic?

I know what some of you are thinking as you've been reading my posts on the Together On a Mission conference. You're wondering why it is that someone who is so enthusiastic about what was obviously a very charismatic conference can also be deeply committed to defending and understanding biblical doctrine. I know it's hard for some of you to believe, but it really is the same me who wrote all those posts on the atonement who also was so deeply touched by this latest conference. For those of you who have never met one, I am indeed that rare breed — a Reformed Charismatic.

Too often, however, the temptation for me is to downplay one side of that equation or the other in order to appear "balanced." When I am with the charismatics, my reformed doctrine often appears alien to them, although in the UK, Newfrontiers offers a major exception to that with over 200 churches that are broadly reformed and charismatic. When I'm with the reformed, I'm tempted to soften my charismatic viewpoint and not speak too much of the things I have seen and experienced. Why is it that on this issue, as on so many others, the Church seems to be split in half? Why can't we be both radically reformed and radically charismatic? Why do we see a conflict and therefore try to play down both in order to be "balanced?" I don't want to be balanced, I want it all!

On the one hand there are those who care about theology enough to study God's Word in detail, weigh scripture against scripture, study great theological minds, and preach intellectually stimulating messages that would stretch even a PhD in Theology — which, incidentally, I am certainly not! Why is it that for the majority of us, if we want such a feast for our minds, we must sacrifice certain other things? Why are some leaders in the Church committed to theology almost exclusively? Is even great theology so captivating that it is the only need of the Church? I don't believe it can be, or God would have given us a Bible that was a systematic theology and not the one we have, which is essentially a collection of lots of stories with a few doctrinal portions.

Also, why is it that those who are most committed to following the Bible in everything also seem most committed to relegating a book like Acts to mere descriptive stories to tell our children? It's not even just the book of Acts; there are swathes of the New Testament that in some theologies become almost entirely irrelevant to us. That was for then, we are told. When I read passages like those found in the book of Acts, I find myself yearning for something more than I am experiencing currently, yearning for a dynamic sense of the supernatural presence of God, longing for God himself to surprise and astonish me by his dynamic actions. Why is it that so often I am left with the impression that we are being encouraged to merely learn about God rather than get to know him? Would I be satisfied if I had read hundreds of e-mails from my wife, but had never actually met her or seen her do anything?

On the other hand, I could find many so-called men of faith who have stories to tell of miraculous healings or of prophecies that have had a life-changing impact. Listening to them, especially if I suspend my natural British cynicism and reserve, I hear tales of powerful encounters with God. Sadly, however, theological truths don't seem to be emphasized at all by most of those committed to experiencing the supernatural presence of God. It is often even implied that it is all right for people to make glaring errors in their teaching or show little interest in what the Bible actually says.

Why is it that so many men who seem on first appearances to have such intimacy with God, such access to his power, such supernatural giftings, and such powerful prophecies, also have much less interest in the words that the Person they often describe as their best friend, the Holy Spirit, wrote 2000 years ago? Why is it that when listening to some of these men, the greatest miracle is no longer what happens in someone's life when they are saved, but rather the latest supernatural healing or encounter with God? Why do we put up with so much flakiness and even blatant deception from figures claiming to have an anointing of the Spirit? How has it got to the point that even hearing the word "faith" seems to raise antibodies in me and make me feel uncomfortable? Why, though, do I feel in honest moments that some of those people with whose theology I most disagree seem to have something that I haven't got, and that I want? Is it so wrong to want to learn more about faith and experience the supernatural acts of God without becoming flaky or doctrinally suspect? Is it not possible for me to both want and get it all?

This desire to "want it all" and have it all in extreme form rather than just a little of everything so as to become "balanced" is not confined to the issue of the truth of God's Word and the experience of the supernatural. There are so many other stalls in the modern marketplace that is the global Church of Jesus. I can see them all before me selling their wares, each of them sure they have the answer to the ills of the Church. How do I choose which one to follow? Can't I have it all? Can't I learn from each of them? Must I choose only one? Where is the person who will overturn all these market stalls and say, “You need a bit of everything — no, change that — you need A LOT of everything — you need it all!”

Let's consider those in the Church who understand the reason we are here on earth. They understand that we are here to enjoy God and bring glory to him by evangelizing the world and producing more worshippers. These guys have such enthusiasm that it is inspiring. Many are also so creative. They split into different tribes, however, sitting as it were at different stalls in the marketplace. There are those who believe in old-style tent crusades, those who want to fill stadiums again, those who knock on doors, those who tell strangers they are sinners, those who befriend sinners in order to evangelize them, those who run seeker sensitive services, those who speak of being missional and incarnating the Gospel, those who run Alpha, and those who preach a certain kind of evangelical "gospel" message every Sunday morning that has to include penal substitution. The different brands may disagree about the methods, but yet they all thrill me with their determination and commitment to see more people becoming Christians. Isn't there room for us to use some methods from almost all of these brands of evangelism?

What troubles me most about so many of these devoted evangelists and missionaries is that so few of them are also deeply devoted to and thrilled with the Church. Why does there seem to be a dichotomy between being "out there" reaching the world and building the community of God such that we love each other so much the world knows we are Jesus' disciples? Also, why does the message of the evangelist sometimes ring hollow in my ears and fail to inspire me like it should? Is there something wrong with me? Dare I even admit that there have been times in the past when I have felt I don't want to hear another "simple Gospel presentation" ever again? Why do the sermons I read in Acts sound so different to the vast majority of evangelistic messages I have ever heard? For that matter, if the Gospel is a handful of reductionistic propositions that we must preach on every occasion, and those few ideas are all that matters, why does so much of the Bible even exist? Much as I believe in penal substitution, it is not to be found in every verse of the Bible. Why are some evangelicals frightened to preach the whole counsel of God? Is it wrong to want to preach the message of the whole Bible?

Why is it, for that matter, that so many of us feel we lack practical wisdom of how to live our lives? I know I have felt like this many times in my life. How can it be that I can work through the Gospel from A to Z, listen to theologically-sound sermons, read the Bible, pray even, and do all the "right" things they tell me to, but somehow not know how to live? Why is it that the breed of practical living teachers are so rare in the Church that many feel they have to learn by watching programs like Nanny 911 because no Christian leader ever taught them how to raise their children? Why are there so few places in the Church to send someone who is struggling with a breaking marriage or with mounting debt? Why, when we find someone in the Church who is valiantly teaching us practical living tips that we should have learned from our parents do they so often sound no different to someone in the world? Where is the teaching that is biblically rooted, yet shows me how to run my life in the 21st century? Isn't the Bible supposed to teach me how to have a good marriage, hold down a job, be a parent, have friends? It's easy to condemn those preaching "self help" in the name of Jesus, but where are those teaching me how God wants to help me live wisely?

Again, why is it that as churches we are not all stirred to activism to help the poor? Adopting a village in Africa, helping HIV victims, befriending single mothers, housing drug addicts — the list goes on and on. Christians who really care, frankly, put me to shame. Why do I so shamefully neglect this? I know that I do give some money that is channeled to such projects by my church, but why do I feel I should be doing much more? Surely we should be demonstrating God's kingdom on earth for the world to see. And yet, why do some of the people who give themselves to this kind of work which is meant to demonstrate God's kingdom seem more like social workers than Christ's ambassadors? Why do we seem to allow the Gospel to be squeezed out of our attempts to help the poor?

I can go on — what of the worshippers? There are many people who love God, feel his presence, and "waste time" with him. Why do I find it so hard to squeeze contemplation into my busy life? Why should worship become an option that excludes other options? Why is meditation considered to be something for Buddhists when the Bible invented it? What about prayer — shouldn't it be more than merely reciting a shopping list of requests to some heavenly slot machine? Shouldn't it be something other than worrying out loud?

And what about a sense of belonging? Of a Church that loves each other and builds a community in this loveless world? Why are there some small churches that really are a family, and yet find it hard to grow? How can large churches retain the feeling that people are there for me and know me? How can we avoid merely having hundreds of superficial acquaintances and yet still feeling totally alone? How can we learn how to do things well for God without becoming just a commercial entity led only by the world's management techniques?

I guess this all leads to a feeling that there is something wrong with the Church. I suspect many of us feel that way as Christians. But what is it that is wrong? Is it, as some would say, "Well, the danger is an overemphasis on feelings, so here we preach the truth of the Bible — that is what we need most." That sounds so good until you hear someone else say something like, "What the Church really needs to do is to learn to care more — we have to love each other and then learn to love the world — that's the problem with the Church," or someone else says, "Your problem is that you know the Bible, but you don't know God — you people just have a form of godliness, but deny its power."

I don't just want balance, however, and certainly not if it means we end up missing EVERYTHING. I thank God that there are those who are attempting to be balanced and have a bit of all of these things. Yet, I am concerned that in an anxiety to be balanced, we end up being mediocre at all of these things. I suppose as individuals we will always be better at some of them than others, but as a healthy local church can't we have it all?

Social action needn't be the enemy of building a nice community, nor should singing be a chore to get through until the preaching starts. Do we really have to wince every time someone begins to prophesy for fear of what our visitors may think? We shouldn't have to be anxious, when preaching, that our people are being bored or that we are offending visitors. These things are not enemies of each other.

Why shouldn't we have churches that are every bit as concerned about doctrinal accuracy and knowledge as John MacArthur, that love relational intimacy with Jesus as much as John Arnott, see miraculous healings that are every bit as dynamic as the ones the tele-evangelists claim to have seen, are as full of vision and purpose as Rick Warren, as skilled in leadership as Bill Hybels, as humble and committed to spiritual maturity as C. J. Mahaney, as relevant to practical life as the author of any self-help book you can think of, that impact social needs in the model of Shaftsbury, tackle political issues like Wilberforce, preach with both the passion for souls of Spurgeon and the passion for God's glory of John Piper, that hear from God as clearly as any modern prophet, are as aggressively missional as Mark Driscoll, have the apostolic drive of Terry Virgo, and yet somehow still feel as comforting as my wife's homemade apple crumble with custard?

Am I being greedy to say "I want it all, and I wish I could become an extremist for all of these things at once?"

One of my commentators didn't like my last post when I said that God really does change us when we become a Christian. I am not going to get into the philosophical arguments he does. As O don't think the Bible All I can say is that when God declares someone to be righteous, in some mysterious way he makes us righteous.

I remember well what Terry Virgo who is one of my theological heroes once said in a comment I read in one of his books. He began a sentance as follows - "When I was a sinner..."

Do you still think of yourself as a "sinner"? Or do you think of yourself as a saint - a holy one? I think it is revealing that this concept of us as made righteous is one of the casualties of the denial of Penal Substitutionary Atonement. For without a notion of Jesus bearing our sins away (Is 53) how can we believe that they are no longer ours?

Lets read together a few verses that speak to this issue of us being made righteous--

• Romans 5:19 "For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous."
• Psalm 51 "Have mercy on me, O God,according to your steadfast love;according to your abundant mercyblot out my transgressions.Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,and cleanse me from my sin. . . Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness;let the bones that you have broken rejoice.Hide your face from my sins,and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God,and renew a right spirit within me. . . Then I will teach transgressors your ways,and sinners will return to you."
• Isaiah 6:7 "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for."
• John 1:29 "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
• Acts 22:16 "And now why do you wait? Rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name."
• Hebrews 9:26 "..he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself."
• 1 John 3 "..Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. . .he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. . .Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous."
• Romans 6 "...can we who died to sin still live in it? . . .our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. . . So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. "
• Psalm 103 ". . .He does not deal with us according to our sins,nor repay us according to our iniquities.For as high as the heavens are above the earth,so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;as far as the east is from the west,so far does he remove our transgressions from us."
• Isaiah 43:25 "I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake,and I will not remember your sins."
• 2 Cor 5:21 "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

If God does not remember our sins, and has cleansed our guilt, then they no longer exist. We have a clean slate. We are free. It is "just as if I'd never sinned" but more than that it is "Just as if I'd always been holy"

Praise God for his wonderful mercy and love that he should provide a way that cost him so much to rescue us from the mess we have made of our own lives. We deserve nothing but wrath from him, and he gives us everything. What love. What grace. Hallelujah! What a Saviour!

Many people criticize Penal Subsitutionary Atonement on the basis that it makes justification into a legal fiction. I suppose such a criticism might be valid if a simplistic explanation of PSA was all that happened because of the cross. We have already seen that is not the case. But, more than that we must not think that nothing actually happens to us at conversion. No, we are united with Christ and a real change happens to us — we are born again. This rebirth is explictly linked to the resurrection. Justification is no mere legal fiction, for when God declares something to be the case, He also causes it to become the case. We need to be united with Christ in his death and resurrection. It is only as we become added to Christ that the benefits of His death and resurrection are applied to us.

• “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8)
  
  
• “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:19-20)
  
  
• “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:5)
  
  
• “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
  
  
• “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1)
  
  
• “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit ...and there were added that day about three thousand souls.” (Acts 2:38-39)

The much beloved wife of Billy Graham has died. There is lots of coverage on the CT Blog

Justin Taylor says it well when he writes "I join others around the world in thanking God for a life well lived in quiet, unashamed, faithful service to the Lord and his kingdom."

I am glad for the work of this couple who have represented Jesus well to the whole world for decades. I wonder if we will ever see their like again. It is astonishing to think of all that they did, and of the selfless way Ruth supported her husbands ministry to the crowds and world leaders.

Billy and Ruth were constants in a changing world. Ruth's passing reminds us no man goes on forever. With Billy now retired, and John Stott to preach only one more sermon a generation of world-class Christian leaders has passed away.

We should pray for world class leaders to be raised up to take their place. I am sure we can all think of several beginning to rise to significant influence. But, I wonder if we will in fact see just one or two rise to such prominence as say Stott and Graham had - between them embodying Evangelicalism to several generations.

My interview with the authors of pierced for our transgressions seems to have created something of a stir. The comments section shows two very distinct reactions to the way I chose to close the interview. When one uses google blogsearch to track the way others have written about it on their own blogs a similar picture emerges.

Now, what is interesting to me is the strong reaction to me citing Paul's curse on those who preach another gospel to him. I did not curse anybody myself, and have no intention of doing so, since I am not given the authority that Paul had. BUT, and this is very important, Paul's words should give all of us cause to stop, and think very carefully about where we stand on the atonement - which is central to the gospel.

The facts are clear. There is an impressive body of people who have taught some form of penal substitution over the centuries. I recognise that there is some variation within that group - for example those who believe sin was punished in Jesus but are reluctant to say that Jesus himself was punished by God the father. But if the gospel is anything it is a message about the seriousness of sin, and what God has done to deal with it and allow us to be considered good enough to get into heaven.

There are some people in the comment section of this blog who have clearly rejected PSA and any form of justification by faith alone, arguing instead that the cross causes us to change, repent and live righteously and it is that change in us that allows God to forgive us.

The previous paragraph sure does not sound like the same gospel I was taught. Indeed PSA is so central to the presentations of the gospel I have heard that it seems to me at least that to deny it is to automatically be preaching another gospel to the one that I am preaching and that my current and historical heroes preach.

It is not as though I am alone in this view. The astonishingly long list of endorsements of the book pierced for our transgressions shows how important many people feel this is. Whatever else went on behind the scenes, the fact is that from next year there will be two Easter Christian conferences in the UK which will have different perspectives on what is essential to believe about the atonement.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones also said we cannot possibly have true fellowship with those who differ with us significantly over the atonement.

In all this we are left with the bald facts. Paul curses those who teach another gospel TO HIM. In this day of different gospels being preached in the church, it is encumbant on each of us - me as much as anyone else - to ask ourselves "Am I preaching a different gospel to Paul?"

I would challenge each of my readers, whatever they believe about the atonement to join with me in examining what the bible has to say about it. Show us why - from the bible not mere deduction and human reason- you feel I am wrong, and what you believe really is the case about the atonement. If it is me that stands in the way of Paul's curse, then you owe it to me to explain why I should believe in a different message of hope than I do. I implore you to show me the error of my ways and save me from my heresy if you believe I am so far from the true message of the bible.

It really saddens me that whilst those of us on this side of the PSA fence have written books and voluminous blog posts on the issue, there is a relative silence from the other side. Steve Chalke ought to be saying a lot more about the subject than he has if I and others are in danger of falling on the wrong side of Paul's curse. His silence has been deafening, and to me speaks volumes about how he views this issue. For his organization to highlight N T Wrights article which claims Chalke believes in something he has himself called cosmic child abuse and then refuse to explain how to square that circle seems just plain wrong to me.

It is not for me to curse anyone, and I have not done so. But I will not apologize for highlighting Paul's curse of those who disagree with him over the gospel. I really do not think it is possible for us to over-emphasize the importance of getting the gospel right. I hope you understand that I am seriously concerned for you my readers and anxious that we all ensure that what we are believing is really the same message that Paul and for that matter Jesus taught.

Almost twelve years ago we finished our wedding service with the hymn, "Amazing Grace." It is probably the best hymn ever written in my humble opinion — not least because it calls us "wretches"!

We sang the hymn accompanied only by the same bagpipes that had welcomed Andrée in to the tune, "My Bonnie is a NutBrown Maiden." I never found out whether it was deliberate or not, but the piper stopped playing at the end of the penultimate verse. As we sang "When we've been there ... " with no instruments, I can well remember my eyes brimming.

Anyway, I said all that to say that I can fully understand the emotional reaction Terry Virgo reports to singing the same hymn at his own son's wedding recently. This post is, I think, the best one he has written so far. Luke Wood has pointed out that in the same post, Terry Virgo also commends marriage to singles.

[Incidentally, please pray for me as I am preaching tomorrow, and as always, these days do not feel adequate for the task. This post has been a great reminder to me of the fact that God's grace is there to equip and enable me — I need lots of it tomorrow, please God!]

The only problem with this latest post of Terry's is that he apologises for it — saying it's a bit too personal. I think we need to tell him that it's just that kind of post that makes for a fantastic blog. I think I've slipped up a little over here on my own blog by not being personal enough lately, so I promise I will try and do so more often, if that's what you want!

I will leave you with this quote from Terry's post — please let me know in the comments section — do you WANT more personal posts from your favorite bloggers, or would you rather that we stick to pure theology? Actually for me, even my theology is theology that I personally care about and am interested in — I hope the real me peaks through from time to time! Here is the quote that I liked so much today:

"... we began to sing. Within seconds I was in trouble. I was fighting back the tears. ‘I once was lost, but now am found …’ I stood in the front row looking past Wendy along the line with three sons; Tim, the groom, Ben and Simon, his two best men, the stunning bride and Joel, our other son, facing them about to conduct the wedding.

Just behind, recently flown in from Cape Town, was our daughter, Anna, with our daughters-in-law, Rachel and Kate, caring for the next generation, eight grandchildren!

As we sang, I couldn’t get past ‘I once was lost …’ I stood there suddenly reflecting on my earlier life, aimless, having no idea what life was all about, hanging out at pubs and snooker halls or going to parties and jazz clubs, often drunk, not knowing that there was a gospel or any kind of purpose to life.

I have no idea where I would have finished up. I can’t imagine the life I would have lived. I cannot believe that I would ever have been loyal to one woman or found a job which brought any satisfaction. How would you raise a family when you have no map or compass? I once was blind!"

— Terry Virgo

Over at Pure Church there is a good article about how we should talk to children about race. It is well worth a read. I have included the headlines here:

1. Talk with your children about ethnicity (the nations) rather than "race."
   
   
2. Talk about ethnicity in a way that magnifies the power and wisdom of God. We should be amazed more often than we are (excuse me for projecting my dullness onto you!) at the sheer power and wisdom of God who can create "difference" and "same" in His creation ...
   
   
3. Talk about the need of all men for the Savior. Not only are we alike in our humanity, but we are therefore alike in our sin, guilt, shame, and need for divine rescue. We are far more alike than we are different ...
   
   
4. Talk about the Gospel and the Church as the plan of God to demonstrate unity across such diversity and to display His wisdom.

There is nothing more important to our faith than justification. Piper via Driscoll is asking for prayer as he finishes his work next week, which will critically examine N. T. Wright's perspective on justification. We need this book, so get praying! I will let Driscoll tell the story. (The rest of his post about the Gospel Coalition is interesting, too.)

The day was very encouraging, and ended with Dr. John Piper graciously allowing me to hang out in his room for a bit with Justin Taylor and David Mathis. Dr. Piper explained that he was in the midst of finishing his latest book which will critically examine N. T. Wright’s new perspective on the doctrine of justification. He said the project has required an enormous amount of research and is proving to be an intense book to write. To make matters more difficult, his computer crashed which cost him a few days of work. Next Tuesday he will begin the final week of writing the manuscript and selecting a title. I asked Dr. Piper if he would mind if I got the word out to those of us who have appreciated his work that May 29th through June 5th would be a strategic time to intercede for him in prayer. He said he would appreciate prayers as he believes this book is very important for the defense and articulation of the gospel of Jesus Christ and has come with some indications of spiritual warfare. So, on behalf of Dr. Piper, your intercession during his upcoming writing days would be greatly appreciated.

A dear friend of mine sent me this quote from G. K. Chesterton concerning what he calls the "dislocation of humility."

"What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason . . . We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." (Orthodoxy, p. 31f.)

In an article posted just this week, John Piper writes about how the cross has efficacy because Jesus lived an obedient life. In the debates about the atonement, some people criticise us for over-emphasising the cross at the expense of the incarnation or resurrection. I have been arguing in my series on the resurrection that the cross and resurrection are an inseparable unit. Here Piper argues that the cross and Jesus’ obedience as a man throughout his life are also inseparable

If you put these ideas together, you come up with the conclusion — which might seem obvious, but nonetheless is worth saying in this climate of debate — Jesus life, death, and resurrection as a unitary event planned before the foundation of the world saved us. If you like, Jesus was our obedience substitute during his life, our punishment substitute in His death, and our rebirth substitute in His resurrection. The doctrine of unity with Christ teaches us that we become united with Jesus in such a way that His life of obedience, death of pain, and resurrection into glorious power are all credited to our account! What a Saviour!

Here is some of what Piper said:

“. . . so the death of the Son of God is sufficient to cover all our sins as the climax of a sinless life. This is no disparagement to the cross. It is not adding to the cross. The New Testament writers saw the death of Christ as the climax of his life. His whole life was designed to bring him to the cross (Mark 10:45; John 12:27; Hebrews 2:14). That is why he was born, and why he lived. To speak of the saving effect of his death was therefore to speak of his death as the sum and climax of his sinless life.

Similarly, the final obedience of Christ in his death is sufficient to justify his people as the climax of a sinless life. It is not likely that the apostles thought of Jesus’ obedience on the cross as separate from his obedience leading to the cross. Where would one draw the line between his life of sinless obedience and the final acts of obedience? Any line would be artificial. Do we draw it at the point where he submitted to the piercing of his hands? Or at the point when he submitted to his arrest in the garden? Or at the point where he endured Judas’ departure from the supper? Or at the point where he planned his final entry to Jerusalem? Or at the point where he “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51)? Or at the point of his baptism where he said, “It is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15)?

It is more likely that when Paul spoke of Jesus’ obedience as the cause of our justification he meant not merely the final acts of obedience on the cross, but rather the cross as the climax of his obedient life. This seems to be the way Paul is thinking in Philippians 2:7-8: “He emptied himself . . . being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Notice the sequence of thought: He became a human. That is, he was found in human form. >>> He humbled himself. >>> The way he humbled himself was by becoming obedient. >>> This obedience was so complete that it willingly embraced death. >>> Even death in the most painful and shameful way—on a cross.

What this text shows is that between “being born in the likeness of men” at one end of his life and “even death on a cross” at the other end of his life was a life of self-humbling obedience. The fact that it came to its climax on the cross in the most terrible and glorious way is probably what causes Paul to speak of the cross as the sum and climax of all his obedience. But it is very unlikely that Paul would have separated the obedience of the final hours from the obedience that designed, planned, pursued, and embraced those final hours . . . .”

— John Piper

Mark Lauterbach (affectionately known as "Gandalf") is at it again with another thought provoking post:

A number of years ago we decided not to ask people if they were interested in the Bible, but to ask if they were interested in learning more about Jesus. In the times we have tried this direction, we find most people are interested in Jesus, for whatever reasons. They think he is wonderful.

But he is wonderful in a way that makes no sense. NOTHING we think of as important or crucial to being a good person is present in his life. He never sought to discover himself, be himself, nurture himself, or love himself. He never made himself #1. He served. He utterly submitted his will and his life to his glorious Father. He took no thought of Himself. He was, in the midst of this, joyous and free and truly loved people. And he never read "Happy Living for Dummies."

. . . [Berkouwer] said concerning Jesus, "His whole life was the ultimate opposite of autonomy." This is shocking. Nothing could be farther from what we moderns think is important. We value autonomy. We want to make up our own life style, our own ethics, our own world. We think that being self-ruled is what is necessary to being authentic.

Jesus was utterly self-submitted. He came not to do his own will, but the will of him who sent him.

In the first post of this interview with Liam Goligher we focused on the distinctives between our backgrounds. In this post we discuss important doctrinal challenges facing the church today which should prompt confessing evangelicals like Liam and myself to stand together. Tomorrow we will address the atonement and Liam's book on the subject.

To Liam, unity is not everything. He reported receiving strong criticism from some prominent evangelicals over his stand on some of the issues we will spend the rest of this article discussing. He was told that he was “creating trouble,” and in his own words, some evangelicals are “crying unity.” Liam became fired up and his Celtic passion was very apparent when he said, “You cannot sacrifice truth for unity!” Liam believes that because of some of the current debates, the word “evangelical” has already become devoid of meaning and significance. He believes that the whole house of evangelicalism is coming tumbling down around us whilst we are doing little about it. Much of our activity is, to Liam, nothing more than rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. Liam believes, “The only substantial resistance to the breakdown of evangelicalism will come from reformed confessing evangelicals, whether they be charismatic or not charismatic, for they are the only ones with the strength and conviction to stand against the assault.”

There are several lines of assault in what Goligher feels is a battle for the very survival of the Gospel. He believes that our children will be left with nothing if we do not boldly defend and declare the Gospel with which we have been entrusted. We briefly discussed each major battle he feels we are facing:

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD

Attacks on the nature of God are occurring on two fronts. Liam is greatly concerned by those who say that God is surprised by events as they unfold. Open Theism denies the essential nature of the biblical God by saying that God is acting without a script. There are also some who claim that the notion of God as almighty or omnipotent is a Greek idea. Liam urges us to go back to the Bible where we see God clearly described as knowing everything and being totally in control of everything. Romans 8:28 really is true – it is not wishful thinking!

JUSTIFICATION

For Liam, any accommodation with those who promote the “New Perspectives on Paul” is nothing short of “redefining what it means to stand right before God.” Justification becomes something that happens in the future and is dependent on our works. Liam is concerned that the works of these theologians are overly complex, and that it seems it simply isn’t possible to popularise their teaching. To him, theology should be capable of a simple explanation that even a child can understand, whilst, of course, it can also be explored and discussed at much greater levels of complexity. Liam feels it is highly suspect that many of these writers constantly claim that their critics simply cannot understand them: “It smells of gnosticism, that is, having a secret knowledge available only to a few.”

THE DOCTRINE OF SCRIPTURE

To Liam, this doctrine — and particularly the sufficiency of Scripture — is undermined by those who propagate the “New Perspectives on Paul.” This is because there is almost a recreation of a “priestly class.” Ordinary believers are told they can only understand the Scriptures if they read the complex writings of certain scholars. This is, according to Liam, counter to the view that Scripture, whilst benefiting from careful study and scholarship, is also simply understood by ordinary people. To Liam, this process is almost a reversal of the Reformation — “We might as well become Roman Catholics,” he said.

Continued in part three . . .

The guys at Together for the Gospel are modeling something VITAL:

"Something that is meant to be different about the T4G conference, and what it may inspire in your own ministry, is that it is built on, and attempts to model and provoke relational networks for encouragement and accountability. So inviting Thabiti was no mere decision of the 4 of us to send him a letter. First, we had to work at building in relationships, and introducing Thabiti to the brothers who didn't know him. So the delay in announcing his speaking reflects nothing on our confidence in him, but rather highlights the different kind of conference this is. From the moment the idea was born, time would need to be set aside for fellowship together and co-laboring. That has now largely happened. And we are delighted not simply at Thabiti's agreement to speak, but at Thabiti's growing friendships with the other speakers involved in the conference."

— Mark Dever

Lig Duncan has been part of a committee that has been considering the teachings of the New Perspectives on Paul (NPP), and especially N. T. Wright, for several months on behalf of the Presbyterian Church in America.

They have now made a number of clear declarations as listed below, and the closing paragraphs of the report suggest to me that they have concluded that to hold these views should become inconsistent with continuing as a minister or preacher in a PCA church. They make a number of requests of the General Assembly which meets later this year which include

"That the General Assembly recommends the declarations in this report as a faithful exposition of the Westminster Standards, and further reminds those ruling and teaching elders whose views are out of accord with our Standards of their obligation to make known to their courts any differences in their views.

That the General Assembly reminds the Sessions and Presbyteries of the PCA that it is their duty “to exercise care over those subject to their authority” and “to condemn erroneous opinions which injure the purity or peace of the Church” (BCO 31-2; 13-9f).

I am not qute clear what happens next if this report is adopted — will we eventually see some kind of exclusionary process for those who hold to these ideas? (HT Justin Taylor)

The Declarations of the PCA Committee
"In light of the controversy surrounding the NPP and FV (Ed = Federal Vision), and after many months of careful study, the committee unanimously makes the following declarations:

1. The view that rejects the bi-covenantal structure of Scripture as represented in the Westminster Standards (i.e., views which do not merely take issue with the terminology, but the essence of the first/second covenant framework) is contrary to those Standards.
   
   
2. The view that an individual is “elect” by virtue of his membership in the visible church; and that this “election” includes justification, adoption, and sanctification; but that this individual could lose his “election” if he forsakes the visible church, is contrary to the Westminster Standards.
   
   
3. The view that Christ does not stand as a representative head whose perfect obedience and satisfaction is imputed to individuals who believe in him is contrary to the Westminster Standards.
   
   
4. The view that strikes the language of “merit” from our theological vocabulary so that the claim is made that Christ’s merits are not imputed to his people is contrary to the Westminster Standards.
   
   
5. The view that “union with Christ” renders imputation redundant because it subsumes all of Christ’s benefits (including justification) under this doctrinal heading is contrary to the Westminster Standards.
   
   
6. The view that water baptism effects a “covenantal union” with Christ through which each baptized person receives the saving benefits of Christ’s mediation, including regeneration, justification, and sanctification, thus creating a parallel soteriological system to the decretal system of the Westminster Standards, is contrary to the Westminster Standards.
   
   
7. The view that one can be “united to Christ” and not receive all the benefits of Christ’s mediation, including perseverance, in that effectual union is contrary to the Westminster Standards.
   
   
8. The view that some can receive saving benefits of Christ’s mediation, such as regeneration and justification, and yet not persevere in those benefits is contrary to the Westminster Standards.
   
   
9. The view that justification is in any way based on our works, or that the so-called “final verdict of justification” is based on anything other than the perfect obedience and satisfaction of Christ received through faith alone, is contrary to the Westminster Standards."

The whole article is well worth a read, but I offer the following excerpts as a taste of the way they strongly criticize N. T. Wright in particular:

• NT Wright’s "...version of Paul’s teaching on election and covenant stands in stark contrast to the confessional formulation of these themes. Both cannot be right as faithful presentations of the Pauline teaching on election and covenant."
  
  
• "We often hear proponents and sympathizers of the NPP and FV who are part of confessional Reformed communities say, that while they go beyond the Westminster Standards in what they affirm, they do not contradict the Westminster Standards. But it is evident that the version of covenant and election taught by the NPP and FV is incompatible with the views of the Westminster Standards. In fact, these two approaches to covenant and election are not complementary ways of looking at the biblical data, but irreconcilably contradictory alternative accounts of the biblical data . . ."
  
  
• "The Committee would suggest that the FV proponents have in effect provided an alternative hermeneutic for interpreting Scripture. They have done so 1) by concentrating their efforts on the “objectivity” of the covenant, 2) by stressing the “covenantal” efficacy of baptism, 3) by focusing on the undifferentiated membership of the visible church, 4) by holding the view that the “elect” are covenant members who may one day fall from their elect status, and 5) by highlighting the need for persevering faithfulness in order to secure final election . . ."
  
  
• "To put it briefly, according to Wright, justification is chiefly the status of covenant membership, the status of belonging as a member of God’s people."
  
  
• "While Wright notes that justification (covenant membership) is a declaration that an individual’s sins are already forgiven, it does not mean that there is a transfer of God’s or Christ’s righteousness to sinners. As he argues, 'The righteousness they have will not be God’s own righteousness…God’s righteousness remains, so to speak, God’s own property. It is the reason for his acting to vindicate his people. It is not the status he bestows upon them in so doing.'"
  
  
• ". . .according to Wright, the traditional idea of 'imputed righteousness, whereby sinners are accepted and accounted as righteous in God’s sight because of the righteousness of Jesus, is incorrect: “If we use the language of the law court, it makes no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or gas which can be passed around the courtroom.'"
  
  
• "Thus, the idea of a “gracious transfer” is simply not found in the biblical texts, according to Wright. In dealing with Romans 4:3-5, Wright understands the “book-keeping metaphor” of “counted” (ESV) as referring to the individual’s “status of being a member of the covenant…according to Wright, the language of Romans 4 does not represent “imputation” of “Christ’s/God’s righteousness” to the ungodly."
  
  
• "The question is then raised, when does this justification occur? For Wright, justification is an eschatological judgment that is applied in the present time “as a proper anticipation of the eventual judgment which will be announced, on the basis of the whole life led, in the future.” This "whole life" includes both the membership badge of “faith” as well as faithful responses by the individual to life among God’s people. The place where Wright argues this most forcefully is in his exposition of Romans 2. There, Wright suggests that the justification of God’s people occurs “on the basis of works” (cf. Romans 2:6). When he describes what this “basis” represents, he suggests that it is not so much the accomplishment of particular works, but rather the “seeking for them”: the godly are “defined in terms of that for which they seek and the means by which that quest is pursued.”"

This sermon was preached at Jubilee Church on Easter Sunday 2007. The audio is available to download (you may need to right click and save the file to your PC) or to listen to online here:

Let’s turn in our Bibles to the book of 1 Corinthians. As you are turning there, you need to know that right now you are in the best place you could possibly be this Easter morning. You are right where God wants you to be. God has made an appointment with each and every one of us this morning. Some of you might be thinking, “Why did I come?” Well, at this moment you have come here to have this book, the Bible, explained to you. You need to know that this is the most important book in the world. If there is one day of the year that is the most important of the Christian year, it is Easter Sunday. You are here on the most important day of the Christian year. If there is one message that is central to this book it is the message of the Gospel. If there is part of the message of the Gospel that is so vital it simply cannot be ignored, it is the good news of the resurrection. We are going to look together today at the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. He is risen indeed!

We celebrate the resurrection every Sunday — for that is the reason why Christians from the earliest times switched to meet on Sundays rather than Saturdays like the Jews. They would gather early every Sunday before the dawn because Christ was risen early on a Sunday morning. Today, this is a meeting WITH Jesus, this is a meeting FOR Jesus.

1 Corinthians 15 — Verses 1-6 and 12-22
There are two groups of people — those who are standing firm in the word of their salvation and those who Paul warns might have “believed in vain.” If I was a “politically correct” preacher, I would begin my message by being inclusive, and perhaps speaking about the brotherhood of man. The trouble is, Paul doesn’t do this. Instead he distinguishes between people, and claims only some of them as his brothers. As a messenger, I have to be true to God’s Word! Paul is clear that there are certain things that are true of those who he can truly call his brothers. You have felt something of the “family feel” of this place, I’m sure, and afterwards you will be most welcome to join us. But I suspect that for some of you right now, you are thinking — what is it about those people — do they have something I don’t? The answer is, “Yes, you are right — we do!”

Some of you right now are thinking, “At least I am a Christian — I might not go to church much, I might not practice my faith much, but I am here today — what more does he want?” The truth is — a recent survey revealed that the majority of adults in the UK still think they are Christians. Paul would have one thing to ask us all this morning, “Are you holding fast to the word preached to you?” For many, sadly, they have not really had the Bible explained or preached to them. Perhaps you are one of them — you go to church for christenings, weddings, and funerals — hatch, match, and dispatch! Perhaps some Christmases and Easter, too.

I want to draw a clear line this morning — not so much between the Christian and the non-Christian, but rather between the Christian who is standing firm in his faith, who is walking with God, who is confident of his salvation — who knows God is pleased with him and he is on his way to heaven. On the other hand, there is everyone else. Paul issues that warning right at the beginning of our passage — “unless you have believed in vain.” Look, as James says, even the devils believe in God. “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (James 2:19)

I want to give you a chance this morning to cross that divide and make your faith sure. There is one place to do that more surely than anywhere else, and it is the place we are gathering this morning. You might expect me to say we will come to the cross — and we will, of course, speak about the cross — but, in fact, we are coming to the empty tomb. For it is at the empty tomb that we meet Jesus — He is not dead, He is risen!

The good news is the story of Jesus and how the events of his life 2000 years ago still have a major impact on us today. What does Paul say is the most important thing?

What is the “good news” or “gospel” according to Paul?

There are three aspects:

• Christ died
  
• He was buried
  
• He was raised from death.

Historians are very clear about two things about Jesus — He existed, and He was crucified. There are no serious thinkers who doubt those two facts. Indeed, the whole edifice of history comes tumbling down if you claim that they are not true for there are no events of history that are better attested to than those. If we cannot be sure Jesus lived and died, then we cannot be sure of any event in history.

But the fact that there was a man who lived 2000 years ago, then died, is not a “hold the presses” news story. The fact that He was a great teacher is not even a major news story. The fact that He was reported to work miracles is not even as totally unusual as you might think. The fact that He founded a religion does not even make Him unique — although, admittedly, fewer people manage that one! Actually the fact that he hung on a cross and was crucified through no fault of His own is not even unique to Jesus — thousands of people were crucified.

• He really died – a professional executioner saw and confirmed it — the spear demonstrated it . . . THERE WAS NO BACK-UP HEART = “Drat! One has gone, just as well I have got another one spare” — He’s not Doctor Who!

There is, however, one fact about Jesus that makes Him unique. There is only one thing that marks Him out as totally different from every great figure in history. That is the fact of the empty tomb! Again, even secular historians admit that there was an empty tomb. So we have seen, there is no doubt Jesus lived, there is no doubt He died, and we can be sure He was buried. We can also be sure that there was an empty tomb and a movement was born in the months and years after His death that claimed He had been raised from the dead and was now worthy of worship.

Something dramatic happened to transform a timid group of good Jewish boys who knew very well that there was only one God and they must worship Him or go to hell. They became a bold set of preachers who would turn the world upside down and do so with a message that said “this man who you crucified God raised him from the dead, and we are now to worship him.” Not exactly a message that is easy to believe is it? Not something that you would make up.

One thing is for sure. If the Jewish or Roman authorities could have lead us to the body of Jesus, they would have done so. It simply is untenable to believe that explains the empty tomb. So what other options do we have — that the disciples stole the body and knew all along they were lying? That simply doesn’t make sense psychologically — for people lie to gain some kind of benefit; if these guys lied, they got killed for it — not one of them broke ranks and said, “Oops, we were only kidding.” YOU CANT SCARE ME WITH DEATH — Jesus already conquered it! No, Paul could point to 500 people who were willing to say “I saw Him.”

Could it have been a hallucination? No, hallucinations don’t happen to a crowd all at once like that.

We also have to explain the amazing phenomenon that has been the Church of Jesus Christ. No religion ever grew more quickly, and no religion today is as widespread. And the one thing the Church agrees on is this — Jesus rose from the dead. Millions of people have claimed to have met Him. Paul is very clear — if this didn’t happen, every Christian who has ever lived is to be pitied more than anyone. Everyone who has, at a funeral, believed their loved one had gone to be with Jesus is deluded if He is still buried somewhere in Israel. The apostles and every believer has falsely testified about God that He raised Jesus from the dead.

And if He is not risen, every great transforming work of the Jesus is somehow a delusion. Every great social reformer like Wilberforce or Newton who claimed to be driven by a call from Jesus should be locked up rather than revered as a great historical figure.

• Without the resurrection, the Christian religion comes tumbling down — like taking the bottom piece out of jenga.
  
• Christianity is the meanest cruelest HOAX if Jesus is still dead — it is cruel and sadistic. Here we are singing to a dead man, praying to a dead man, preaching about a dead man, worshiping a dead man, trusting in a dead man! If Jesus is dead, everything is changed.
  
• The resurrection is crucial. If it wasn’t for the resurrection, we would still be in our sins. How could Jesus work in us to forgive us and make us like Him if He is still dead?
  
• “BUT,” as Paul simply says here, “IN FACT, CHRIST HAS BEEN RAISED!”
  
• Jesus is NOT dead – He is alive. Every other religious leader is dead — no one else conquered death — only Jesus.

The resurrection was Jesus’ justification — it was God’s stamp of approval that He still loved His Son, and that the work had been done. Jesus had died for our sins; now He was being raised up for our justification (as Romans 4:25 puts it). It is not just that our sins are dealt with and that we are made morally neutral before God. It is not only “just as if I’d never sinned,” but also “just as if I’d lived a perfect life for eternity and was as pure and righteous as Jesus!”

Jesus still had merit left after the cross — it is not as if sin swallowed His merit up — quite the opposite! His goodness and merit swallowed up sin so that, although on the cross God couldn’t look on Him, God simply couldn’t abandon His perfect Son to the grave!

THIS IS THE GOOD NEWS! “All the love and acceptance which perfect obedience could have obtained of God, belong to you because Christ was perfectly obedient on your behalf.” (C. H. Spurgeon).

“Remember God has accepted us. The gospel of grace is a message of breathtaking freedom. It must be embraced with faith and thanksgiving. You are thoroughly accepted just as you are. Jesus Christ is your righteousness, and He is never going to change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. When you wake tomorrow, He will still be your righteousness, before you have done anything to enjoy God’s favor. You have to earn nothing. Your spirit needs to bask in the brilliant sunlight of this reality. You need to know it inwardly and celebrate it on a daily basis.” (Terry Virgo).

The resurrection is also the one thing that gives us hope. For if Christ has been raised, then as Paul says here — we, too, shall be raised if we trust Him.

The Bible is not very complementary about us without Jesus — it says we are “without hope and without God in this world.” (Ephesians 2:12).

• We are born spiritually dead.
  
• As we go through life, false hope simply makes us more desperate because every disappointment is like death to hope — “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.”
  
• We go through life feeling something is missing. “There must be more to life than this.”
  
• We are so far from truly living life to the full as God intended it that we are effectively dead already — we are dead men walking.
  
• We spend our lives trying not to talk about death, but knowing it is coming.
  
• When we come face-to-face with the man whom death could not hold, we have a hope. For the Christian, what Peter says in chapter 1 of his epistle, verses 3 onwards, is true.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead . . .

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (1 Peter 1:3–5).

Is that true of you this morning? If not, it can be! You can meet Jesus. You can be born again because of the resurrection. Your spiritual death can be swallowed up

• Sin does not win — Jesus does!
  
• Death does not win — Jesus does!
  
• He really did die for our sin and rise for our salvation, and we can sing to Him today, and can confess our sins to Him because He is alive.

He said — I am God. I have come to take away sin. I will die, and three days later come back to life again to prove it. He did prove it!

Solidify your faith this morning — dwell on this resurrection of Jesus, let it give you a firm foundation. Start with this issue when talking to the unbeliever about the message of the Bible — this is the big one!

What is the outcome for us of the resurrection?

• Our sins are dealt with and we are declared righteous.
  
• Born again — a new beginning, with the old behind us, including our fears and our guilt.
  
• A hope for the future that goes beyond the grace.
  
• A hope for now that transforms our lives.
  
• A relationship with Jesus — we can know and love Him even though we don’t see Him with our eyes.

I have come to the end of what I want to say to you, but let me give Jesus an opportunity to speak. This is what he once said, and I believe He would say to us today:

“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26).

Do YOU believe this?

How do we become a Christian? It is a matter of becoming united with Christ — of putting our trust in Him. Of taking a public stand — “because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Baptism is the way we publicly demonstrate what has happened — we die with Christ, we are buried with Him, and we are raised back to life. The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus — it really is good news. Do you believe it?

BACKGROUND QUOTES

“If the Lord Jesus Christ had not literally risen physically from the grave, we could never be certain that he had ever really finished the work. And what was the work? It was to satisfy the demands of the law. The law of God demands that the punishment for sin shall be death, and if he has died for our sins, we must not only be certain that he has died, but that he has finished dying, and that there is no longer death. He has answered the ultimate demands of the law, and in the same way he has answered all the ultimate demands of God. The argument of the New Testament is that when God raised his Son from the dead, he was proclaiming to the whole world, I am satisfied in him: I am satisfied in the work he has done. He has done everything. He has fulfilled every demand. Here he is risen—therefore I am satisfied with him.

Not only that. The Resurrection proved that he has conquered every enemy that was opposed to him, to God, and to us. He has not only satisfied the law and conquered death and the grave, he has vanquished the devil and all his forces, and hell and all the principalities and powers of evil. He has triumphed over them all, and he proves it in the Resurrection. The devil cannot hold him; death and hell cannot hold him. He has mastered them all; he has emerged on the other side. He is the Son of God, and he has completed the work which the Father had sent him to do.

And all this, of course, is of vital importance to us. It is only in the light of the Resurrection that I finally have an assurance of my sins forgiven. It is only in the light of the Resurrection that I ultimately know that I stand in the presence of God absolved from guilt and shame and every condemnation. I can now say with Paul, ‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1) because I look at the fact of the Resurrection. It is there that I know it.

You notice how Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 15:17 when he says, ‘If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.’ If it is not a fact that Christ literally rose from the grave, then you are still guilty before God. Your punishment has not been borne, your sins have not been dealt with, you are yet in your sins. It matters that much: without the Resurrection you have no standing at all.”

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Assurance of Our Salvation: Exploring the Depth of Jesus' Prayer for His Own: Studies in John 17 (Originally published separately in four volumes, 1988-89, Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, 2000), p. 492.

“. . . though Scripture, when it treats of our salvation, dwells especially on the death of Christ, yet the Apostle now proceeds farther: for as his purpose was more explicitly to set forth the cause of our salvation, he mentions its two parts; and says, first, that our sins were expiated by the death of Christ, — and secondly, that by his resurrection was obtained our righteousness. But the meaning is, that when we possess the benefit of Christ’s death and resurrection, there is nothing wanting to the completion of perfect righteousness. By separating his death from his resurrection, he no doubt accommodates what he says to our ignorance; for it is also true that righteousness has been obtained for us by that obedience of Christ, which he exhibited in his death, as the Apostle himself teaches us in the following chapter. But as Christ, by rising from the dead, made known how much he had effected by his death, this distinction is calculated to teach us that our salvation was begun by the sacrifice, by which our sins were expiated, and was at length completed by his resurrection: for the beginning of righteousness is to be reconciled to God, and its completion is to attain life by having death abolished. Paul then means, that satisfaction for our sins was given on the cross: for it was necessary, in order that Christ might restore us to the Father’s favor, that our sins should be abolished by him; which could not have been done had he not on their account suffered the punishment, which we were not equal to endure. Hence Isaiah says, that the chastisement of our peace was upon him. ( Isaiah 53:5 .) But he says that he was delivered, and not, that he died; for expiation depended on the eternal goodwill of God, who purposed to be in this way pacified.

And was raised again for our justification. As it would not have been enough for Christ to undergo the wrath and judgment of God, and to endure the curse due to our sins, without his coming forth a conqueror, and without being received into celestial glory, that by his intercession he might reconcile God to us, the efficacy of justification is ascribed to his resurrection, by which death was overcome; not that the sacrifice of the cross, by which we are reconciled to God, contributes nothing towards our justification, but that the completeness of his favor appears more clear by his coming to life again.

— John Calvin, Commentary on Romans, chapter 4

Beloved, the dying Christ has purchased for us our justification, but the risen Christ will see that we get it. The risen Christ has come to bring it to us, and herein we rest. Oh, that you would all rest in the finished work of Jesus on the cross, which is set forth to you in all its brightness by his rising again from the dead! Put the two parts of our text together, “Who was delivered for our offenses,” “and was raised again for our justification.” You need them both, trust in them both; trust in the Savior who died upon the cross, and trust in the Christ who rose again, and is now the living Christ; trust, in fact, in Christ as he revealed himself to John in Patmos: “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.” Lord Jesus, as such we trust thee, as such we trust thee now, and we are saved!

— C. H. Spurgeon, Sermon 235

“Our reflections here on the Resurrection need to be set against a broad historical background. As a generalization - no doubt subject to qualification but still fair as a generalization - we may say that in the history of doctrine, especially in soteriology, Christ's resurrection has been relatively eclipsed. In Eastern Orthodoxy, if I rightly understand, the accent has been on his incarnation (with a view to salvation understood as theosis or deification). In Western Christianity (both Roman Catholic and Protestant), especially since Anselm (eleventh century) and the ensuing debate triggered, say, by the views of Abelard, attention has been focused heavily and at times almost exclusively on Christ's death and its significance. The overriding concern, especially since the Reformation, has been to keep clear that the Cross is not simply an ennobling and challenging example but a real atonement - a substitutionary, expiatory sacrifice that reconciles God to sinners and propitiates his judicial wrath. In short, the salvation accomplished by Christ and the atonement have been virtually synonymous.

My point is not to challenge the validity or even the necessity of this development, far less the conclusions reached. But in this dominating preoccupation with the death of Christ, the doctrinal or soteriological significance of his resurrection has been largely overlooked. Not that the Resurrection has been deemed unimportant, but all too frequently it has been considered exclusively as a stimulus and support for Christian faith (which it undoubtedly is) and in terms of its apologetic value, as the crowning evidence for Christ's deity and the truth of Christianity in general . . .

An unbreakable bond or unity exists between Christ and Christians in the experience of resurrection. That bond is such that the latter (the resurrection of Christians) has two components - one that has already taken place, at the inception of Christian life when the sinner is united to Christ by faith; and one that is still future, at Christ's return. From this it will be readily apparent how Paul's teaching on the fundamental event of resurrection reflects the overall already/not-yet structure of eschatological fulfillment in the period between Christ's resurrection and his return.”

Richard B. Gaffin, Redemption and Resurrection: An Exercise in Biblical-Systematic Theology Themelios, volume 27.2, Spring 2002, pp. 16-31. Online here.

Continues with the series "The Resurrection Empowered Life"

This Friday I wanted to highlight again the messages from John Piper's 2006 conference. I realized recently that I had not, in fact, listened to most of them - I guess I just had forgotten somewhere along the line. I am ashamed to admit, for example, that it was only when my friend, Mark Moore, told me earlier this week that Tim Keller had quoted extensively from my hero, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, that I finally listened to his talk.

I am glad I did. Tim explores what we do about preaching the Gospel in the 21st century in quite simply the best way I have ever heard. But, the thing that stood out for me is simply these two abridged and slightly adapted quotes, which I think are fantastic in their pithy simplicity:

"Religion is I obey so I can be accepted. The Gospel is I am accepted so I can obey." (Tim Keller).

Tim Keller also quoted D. M. Lloyd-Jones preaching on Genesis 32:

“How do you know you have met with God? You limp.”

Dr Keller went on to explain this in terms of the sign of Jonah

“He will bring you down if he is going to use you.”

For more from the conference, see also my remote blogging posts:

· DG06 - More from Piper's Final Session

· DG06 - Final Session - John Piper

· DG06 - Session 5 - Don Carson

· DG06 - Photos

· DG06 - When Josh Harris Was Glad He Wasn't Mark Driscoll

· DG06 - A Blogger Responds to D. A. Carson

· DG06 - More from Session 4 with Mark Driscoll

· DG06 - Quotes from a Panel Discussion

· DG06 - Session 4 - Mark Driscoll

· DG06 - More From Session 3 with Tim Keller

· DG06 - Session 3 - Tim Keller

· DG06 - Session 2 - Voddie Baucham

· DG06 - Session 1 - David Wells

· Desiring God Conference Day 1

A few days ago I blogged about having changed my Bible. I remarked on the fact that I now feel liberated to write in it. It has given me considerable cause for reflection. I am now increasingly convinced that I had allowed myself to be ensnared by legalism. Why shouldn’t I write in or underline in my Bible? Somewhere along the line I bought into a lie that stemmed from a desire to honour God's Word. Isn’t that where all legalism comes from?

At one point I even despised Bibles that had study notes in them. Give me the pure, unadulterated Word of God, I would say. Like so many legalists, although I never said this, I even had a tendency to look down my nose somewhat at those who differed from me. I felt a smug superiority knowing that I didn’t own a contaminated Bible.

Now there is nothing wrong with respecting the Bible and not wanting to add to it. But I now realise that I was being hypocritical. After all, I used Bible commentaries, and wrote notes about the Bible – I just didn’t use a Bible with notes in it or write in my Bible. This kind of legalism is so pernicious and deceptive that it has taken me almost two decades to cotton on! This is not to say, of course, that EVERYONE must now write in their Bibles, any more than it is to say that EVERYONE must not.

The question is – What helps one to study and understand the Bible the best? If my experience over the last few days is anything to go by, for me writing in the Bible is going to be an essential part of my Bible study experience for many years to come.

What I want to ask you is this - What legalistic ideas do YOU have? What about alcohol for example – do you accept the biblical teaching that it is OK to drink a little wine (see my post on 1 Tim) or do you add to the Scripture and turn it into a law that you shouldn’t touch the fruit of the vine? Of course, for some who are concerned about previous alcoholism, abstaining is a good idea – but even for them it is important to look at the motives - is it just plain common sense or is there an element of legalism for some of us in our thinking?

What about the cinema? Do you refuse to see any films? Secular music? Certain types of Christian music? The pub? A certain mode of dress? An overly strict definition of gossip that prevents you from going to your pastor for help? What are and are not appropriate ways to spend your money? Tithing? The way you do your quiet time? What kind of car you drive?

The list goes on and on. Whilst a desire to honour God and follow Him is healthy, legalistic bondage isn’t. If the lightness in my Spirit is anything to go by these last few days, then setting yourself free from the bonds that YOU have placed on yourself is a great blessing. God wants us free to DESIRE to serve Him, rather than to be bound by some kind of man-centred rule we have made for ourselves!

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. (Galatians 5:1)

Terry introduced Dave in the warmest possible way, telling us jokingly that if (like me) you have yet to read his book on the church, "you deserve a slap!" The friendship between these two men is palpable.

Dave began by reading large portions of Romans 1, 15, 16. How to begin and end sermons is important - some start by telling a joke or with a story, or thunder out the main point; others will make confessions. Dave made the point that he had been insulted by both of the first two preachers - even Dave would have to admit that his inability to sing or do DIY is legendary, however!

All too often Romans is a book we dip into rather than read from beginning to end. We often ignore the ending of Romans apart from mentioning the personal relational way in which Paul builds. Paul, in his introduction, summarises the Gospel; in chapter 15 he describes his apostolic ministry, and he concludes in chapter 16. They all talk about the same theme the obedience of faith for the sake of his name. Chapters 1:15: "bring nations to obedience, chapter 16 obedience of faith. Thus the objective and theme of Paul's letter to the Romans and his ministry is to bring about the obedience of faith in EVERY nation.

Romans 1:5 - bring glory to God everywhere he has been commissioned to go to the whole world.

What is the Gospel? It is summarised in chapter 1 and worked out in the rest of the book - it is the good news of the now-reigning Christ, and all nations must obey Him. Paul interprets the Old Testament stories in the light of Christ. Adam, Abraham, the prophecies of the Messiah, the suffering servant - all are fulfilled in Christ. Paul says Jesus has come and brought propitiation. Jesus is the reigning Messiah.

Let's preach the Gospel! This king Jesus is now claiming the whole world! By grace and apostleship Jesus calls all the nations to the obedience that comes from faith. Caesar's generals didn't invite people to have an experience; they COMMANDED people to obey. Similarly, Jesus is commanding - not through the law, but through grace. God's undeserved favour is to flow throughout the world.

It is not a matter of telling people 'don't do this' or 'do this ritual.' Instead, obedience springs from faith in the glorious message of faith. We are to obey it from the heart.

Our commission, the commission of EVERY Christian, is the same as Paul's grace and apostleship to bring the whole world to submission. (NB - a note for all the non-newfrontiers readers here. By apostleship Dave means a commission from God to GO into all the world and call people to submit to the Gospel i.e. we are acting as God's messengers, representatives, or ambassadors. Paul was an Apostle, but Ephesians 4 makes it clear that for each of these gifts their role is to get the rest of the church doing the stuff thus we are looking for an apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic, pastoral, instructing people of God where every member feels the need to do all these things.)

Paul speaks of being a slave to the cultures he is trying to reach because of the passion he has for this message. Why did Paul feel there was no room for him to work there anymore? We have to take Paul's drive to preach where Christ was not known seriously. Paul was always keen to plant reproducing churches that could then carry on the work, so he didn't see it as his role to evangelise so that every person would be saved; instead, once the churches were planted, he wanted to move on.

Three reasons to reach the totally unreached: prophetic promise, apostolic passion, and eschatological necessity -the Gospel MUST be preached in every nation. There is also an issue of the contemporary urgency with secularism, the advance of militant Islam, and the needs of the lost. We believe in the power of the Gospel to bring every nation to faith.

Dave is a truly motivational speaker and spent some time sharing fantastic stories of God working in the nations among newfrontiers churches to bring remarkable instances of salvation, which would in themselves make the download worthwhile.

Who are the unreached?
A culture which does not have a self-sustaining vibrant church. Some say it should be defined as a culture where less than 2 per cent are evangelical, and on that definition most of Europe would be unreached. Dave then showed us some selected slides of people groups who have yet to be reached, some of whom we as newfrontiers are already working with or near.

What is stopping us reaching the unreached?

• Non-missional churches - we need whole churches that are missional.
• Culture-bound instead of cultural-challenging churches.
• Identification by Muslims and others of Christianity with the West they feel that Hollywood morality represents what Christians do, and war is between Christianity and Islam. We can only overcome that by planting small communities of Christians that demonstrate that Christians aren't like that.
• Cultural and linguistic challenges.

Church planting is the only way to reach the world. Dave said he was going to preach this message of the nations until we are sick of it, and until we start to go.

Dave closed his sermon with these words:

God has a calling on us - we are together on a mission . . . and that includes going to those who have never heard the Gospel . . . we want to make an appeal similar to that made to Paul - 'Help us, please.' Encourage your people to go, and be willing to support them financially when that is needed. Please come! Come and help us . . . Don't ever say, "We are not working there." Jesus is Lord, Jesus is king, and He will return! Until that time, we are called to bring all the nations to the obedience of faith.

We have reached half-way. The most striking thought is the need to WAKE UP to our responsibilities to PROCLAIM the Gospel, and EXPECT God to act in miraculous power. Boy, if just some of the leaders in this conference really began to focus their lives and ministries on reaching the lost and crying out for supernatural interventions, think what could be accomplished!

I am writing these short thoughts in the hotel as I am about to go and lie down. Ironic, isn't it, that as the next session starts, my shingles pain is the worst it has been so far, just after we heard that faith-stirring talk on healing! I did think about slipping off and telling no one I was missing a session - and then I realised that a gap in the blogging would be obvious!

I also bumped into a couple of people on the way out whom I know, so I am rumbled! One of those was Lex Loisedes, who confessed that he had Googled his name and found my blog through doing it. As he put it, I have made him famous online. I so wish that he would start a blog of his own, or at least get his stuff on the Net for us to listen to. His passion for the lost, for doctrine, and for the miraculous is exemplary and a great influence on many of us!

Anyway, going back to the irony of hearing a talk on healing . . . then going to lie down because you are still in pain . . . this is part of the tension of living in the now, but not yet. Even in the midst of Bible times, Paul could speak of his friend nearly dying, and urged Timothy to drink wine because of his "frequent illness."

Last Sunday, a prophetic guy said to me that God had made me to "limp" so that I would work in team. Ironically enough, just now, as I was about to leave the centre, I bumped into a great hero of mine, and as I was talking about the notion of teamwork with Greg Haslam on the way out of the gents (yes, we men DO sometimes talk in the toilets), I tried and failed to open a door, which it turned out had been built into a wall. I didn't have my door-opening team member with me!

Certainly this current season of weakness is reminding me even more of my dependence on God and others as I serve Him. I only hope I don't need this reminder too much longer.

It is a shame to miss the session, and so sadly you will not see notes from Dave Holden's talk, unless anyone who did make it sends me notes at adrian.warnock@gmail.com, or perhaps someone here lets me have some written notes to look at. Since this blog is a reflection on my own experiences, I suspect that, in fact, I may just not post anything from this session.

I am going to lie on my bed and rest now, and reflect on the great messages I have heard so far. It is no bad thing to be cast back on God and reminded of the fraility of my human body. God can, of course, meet with me as well in my room as in the big meeting place, but those who know me will know how unlike me it is to just SLOW DOWN. Perhaps I can spend some time in contemplative prayer and meditation on Him. They say suffering is the megaphone God uses to teach us lessons we cannot learn in the rest of our lives, don't they!

Here are my notes from this mornings sermon.

The audio is now available for download from the Jubilee Sermons website.

Bible verses
1 Cor 4:1-5; 2 Cor 5:9�6:4; Ro 1:15-17;1 Peter 3:15-16; 1Th 2:4; Col 1:25; 1 tim 1:11-12; Luke 12:48

Now that we have been entrusted with the gospel what should we do?

� LOVE IT!
� LIVE IT!
� GIVE IT!

There are few depictions of stewards in our modern culture � an expception is the film the Lord of the Rings � in some ways it is all about stewardship � every character is entrusted with a task to do � some of them do it well, some of them don�t! I intend to watch the trilogy (extended edition!) again as part of my sermon prep � you can join me if you like!

There is a scene in �The Return of the King�. The Hobbit who is aware of the debt he owes, and gives himself to serve an unreliable master as a result. Compare and contrast the Steward of Gondor who imagines himself to be the king and has set himself on the throne of Gondor instead of guarding it for its rightful owner.

Too often we forget that as Tope said last week we have been entrusted with everything and owe God our very existence not to mention our salvation. How can we do anything else but offer him our �service such as it is��..

A Steward sounds like a strange word these days but the concept permeates throughout our culture we just call it different things�..

A steward is someone who has been given a task to do by someone else or who has been given something by someone else to use for the purposes of the owner. A steward acts an agent of the owner � they are not the owner! They are not free to do whatever they like with what is given to them!

Or as one dictionary puts it �

�someone who manages property or other affairs for someone else�

The key is that when something is entrusted to you, it isnt yours, but belongs to another. The one who entrusted it to you has the right to dictate what you do with it whilst it is on loan to you You may well be expected to use the entrusted thing for his purposes rather than yours.

The person who has been entrusted -eg an employee cannot merely do whatever he likes, but instead has a job to do, with accountability. If the work is not done, then the trust has been violated. If a big task has been entrusted, then we sure better be intentional about how we live our lives in order to get to the end and hear God say "well done, you have acheived the task entrusted to you" This line of thought has been very convicting to me. I pray it will be convicting to you also!

I think there is a wealth of beneficial meditation to be done on that one word entrusted



Start where Tope finished last week

1 Cor 4:1-5 This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. 2 Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. 3 But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. 4 I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. 5 Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive his commendation from God.

Judgement day really is coming. It is coming for all of us � for the non Christian can you really expect to hear the commendation from God. For the Christian, the question will not be �will God commend me� but instead �how much?� �will I have made the most of what he has done for me?

A steward is required to be found trustworthy

What does this mean for us who have been made stewards of the gospel (not gospel music but Gods message for the world?). Lets look at some examples of stewardship at work in our culture-

An employee acts as an agent for his employer � in return for pay he gives himself as a temporary slave to his employer to do their bidding. Imagine if the employer said �Clean that table� or �Answer that email� and the employee said �Well, lets not get too overzealous about this shall we � I mean I don�t want to be over-committed here � I need to be free to make my own decisions�. The answer � sure you are free to make decisions : �my way or the highway!� is the answer!!


WE DO EXACTLY THIS WHEN WE THINK THAT GOD ISNT INTERESTED IN THE DETAILS OF MY LIFE �The non-christian thinks they can live their own way. The professing Christian says �I can have Jesus as my saviour, but not my Lord � and do whatever I want. Lets not get superspiritual�. God says �I bought you! You belong to me!!�

Investment in a bank � imagine if you money instead of being locked up in a safe was taken to a boot fair and laid out on a table to be given away in lovely crisp new �5 notes � all your money being given away to whoever wants to grab it! �Well sir, I knew you were a generous fellow!�

We do this when we make out God is only a God of love � we forget he is a God of wrath and so we give people the impression that everything will be fine � God will accept them into heaven irrespective of what they do � they don�t have to do anything, not even ask for forgiveness. God is kind we say. BUT like the man whos money was given away God might well say �Yes, but not THAT kind�. The offer of heaven does come with some strings attached! We are fools if we think it is wise to change the message to make it more attractive to the world around us! The gospel message is an old one � it doesn�t need to change!

Imagine a builder who built a conservatory at the bottom of your garden instead of attached to the house as you asked him to! �Well I thought I could improve on your plan!�

We do this to God whenever we ignore parts of the bible that don�t fit with the way we want to live our life or build our churches. I am amazed at the blind spots so many of us have � Surely God didn�t really mean it that way � surely it will look better this way � build your life and your church on the plan of God or expect him to say �What did you do with the life I gave you � how come you didn�t build it according to my plan?�

Imagine a commissioned artist who refused to paint what asked but painted something totally different!

If we crash a borrowed car and fail to even apologise to its owner! We do this when we take forgiveness for granted and forget to keep short accounts with God!

If an ambassador or secret agent of a country �goes native� and is so deep in cover that when the call comes for the sleeper to wake up he is sound asleep! We do that when we ignore the call of our master to carry out taks for him � perhaps someone comes our way who is interested in God and we fluff it and are too scared to act � we think of ourselves as citizens of this world rather than the next.

We often deny God not so much by our words but by our lack of words!

Imagine how long a pizza delivery boy would keep his job if whenever he went to the pizza shop to collect customers pizzas he instead took them back to his house to enjoy them with his friends!

We do this whenever we think that God has saved us simply so we can have a good time, and we fail to share the wonder of being a Christian with others. We use what he has given us for our own pleasure only, and we forget that he has contracted us to be the delivery boy for OTHERS blessings � to share the good news!

Imagine a lawyer who spent your deposit money on his own pleasures rather than passing it up the chain so you can buy your house! On completion day you ring up and his secretary says �O didn�t he tell you, hes gone to Spain and said to thank you for the money- hes enjoying spending it in the bar� Meanwhile you have no house to move into!

Or worst of all, imagine a careless brain surgeon who dropped a scapel in someones brain- just because he couldn�t be bothered to put the practice in to make sure that he was equipped to carry out the trust put in him � we do this when we fail to study and pray hard to prepare ourselves for those moments when we are called upon to pass on this life-saving message!

The Amazing thing is God has put his trust in us. He has trusted us with much, but the greatest thing that he has entrusted to us is his message � not just any message but the only message that can save the world.

God will ask us at the end of time � So, how did you do? He wont need us to answer because he will already know!

How amazing that he should rely on us to carry out his work on his behalf. How can God do that with us, unreliable people? Only of course by his sovereignty overruling our feeble fickle wills - hallelujah! We have to cry out to him to help us have the determination to act in such a way that he will be able to say to us �well done�

God doesn�t entrust tasks to people unless he is committed to making them worthy of that trust!



2 Cor 5:9-6:4
�.. we make it our aim to please him. 10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.
11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others�...
��. For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; 15 and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised��.
�.Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. [2] The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling [3] the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
6:1 Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. 2 For he says,
�In a favorable time I listened to you,
and in a day of salvation I have helped you.�
Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. 3 We put no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, 4 but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way

TREASURE PICTURE GOD has GIVEN A PILE OF TREASURE here � don�t lets just admire that but take it cherish it, then give it away!

We have a lot to be thankful to God for therefore we have a lot to be responsible for � what he has given us he expects us not to just enjoy but to do something with it!

What has struck me is that God has been giving us incredible grace over these last months as a church. Surely we will be accountable for how we respond to that. If we are faithful with the little we have then God will give us more!

Luk 12:48 Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more


Other verses that speak of us being entrusted with the gospel

1Th 2:4 �..just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts.�

��.for the sake of his body, that is, the church, of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known�..warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.� Col 1:25-


Titus 1 � through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior�

SO, Now that we are clear that we have been entrusted with the gospel what are we to do with it?

Love it, live it, Give it!

What to do with the Gospel we have been entrusted with?

love it � preserve and protect

We live in a disposable world! The gospel must be treasured not disposed
Even this talk of being entrusted should send us back to our knees � who is worthy of such a task?
Where is the worthy steward?
Who here can say that they have always been faithful to God in living their life consistently with the gospel or in sharing it with others?

The truth is we CANNOT deserve the grace of God
We CANNOT repay the debt we owe God
We CAN only SERVE as GOD enables us.
Realising we have not been faithful as stewards should drive us back to God for more mercy and grace.

1 Cor 5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Jesus is the centre of the gospel. There really is a core to it which is found in this verse, but of course the gospel comprises the whole message of God � What is the gospel? Well it begins �in the beginning God�.� And ends �The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.� It includes the law, it includes Gods story, it includes the church. No one method for sharing it�.. any bit of it has power, but there is a core message�.that is if you like more crucial- because it is closer to the crux, closer to the cross!

When we realise how much God has given us it should make us fall in love with the Gospel that takes wretches like us and makes us sons, and that love should compel us to love others enough to want them to share in the gospel.

What a wonderful Gospel that not only saves us but makes us in a sense as Spurgeon put it �saviours� in that we bring that message of salvation to others

How can we but treasure it?

-live it
We only truly believe what we live!
Behind every sin is a lie that we have not corrected with the truth of the gospel
Eg �I desevrve better treatment than that� so we get angry � who said we deserved better treatment? I thought we believed that we deserved Hell beforfe God gave us grace?

This is why we need to study the gospel because a small misunderstanding of the Gospel can give rise to a MASSIVE problem in our lives. Behind every sin is a lie we believe in place of the truth.

If we live in a manner that is NOT worthy of the gospel how foolish we are, and how poorly we reflect on our master. What a sad figure that steward made � not leading as he ought!
Lets not be the tail but the head! Lets be the one at work people turn to because their life is sorted out

Imagine how one slip up by a member of the church can reflect badly on all of us! We cannot afford not to live it � we must live in a manner that means others will want to listen to what we have to say � we earn the right to speak!

-give it!

Don�t be ashamed of it and try and hide it , instead GIVE it

RO 1 :14- I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. 15 So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, �The righteous shall live by faith.�

Sharing the gospel: �Its costly, its urgent, but its worth it!� Mark Dever

You want to live � trust GOD!
How can we not tell them the truth
If they don�t trust God they wont live for ever in heaven, if they do they will!
Its that simple � it is Gods righteousness that clothes us � how difficult is it to say it?

We are obligued � or under a debt!

We must tell them they are powerless but that there is a power that has worked on their behalf!

The gospel is POWERFUL � let it out of its cage! A power to unleash!

Not just about arguments, but requires a change of heart. Power of the Spirit. Have to pray.

�cannot coerce anyone to become a Christian any more than you can coerce a corpse into dancing!� Mark Dever

�God didn�t call us to argue. He called us to tell� Mark Dever

Its far more powerful than we realise!

SOULWINNER- �You must also believe in the power of that message to save people. You may have heard the story of one of our first students, who came to me, and said, 'I have been preaching now for some months, and I do not think I have had a single conversion.' I said to him, 'And do you expect that the Lord is going to bless you and save souls every time you open your mouth?' 'No, sir,' he replied. 'Well, then,' I said, 'that is why you do not get souls saved. If you had believed, the Lord would have given the blessing.' I had caught him very nicely; but many others would have answered me in just the same way as he did. They tremblingly believe that it is possible, by some strange mysterious method, that once in a hundred sermons God might win a quarter of a soul. They have hardly enough faith to keep them standing upright in their boots; how can they expect God to bless them? I like to go to the pulpit feeling, 'This is God's Word that I am going to deliver in His name; it cannot return to Him void; I have asked His blessing upon it, and He is bound to give it, and His purposes will be answered'"

If we share just a fragment of the gospel with just one person in much fear and trepidation, we should expect it to be just as powerful �for it is the message not the messenger that is important

Imagine if a trembling motocycle courier delivered a batch of blood to the scene of a terrible accident where a single motorist was trapped and bleeding to death, would it be any less a life saving act than if a truckload of blood was rushed to the site of a major disaster?

�the gospel is all about rescue from the judgement of God� it is therefore more important than �life and death� situations!



So WHY do we want to GIVE the gospel?
Why do we want to do this?
� Desire to be obedient
� Love for the lost
� Love for God

� God is slandered in the world!
� God is calling us to turn our lives outwards from focussing on us and our needs to God and his purposes!
� He has a way for others to come to him how wonderful is that!


�Friends, if I believed that, or even a tenth of that, I would drop my job, sell my house, throw away my possessions, and set out into the world burning with the desire to tell others.� Matthew Paris (The Times)

I am not going to ask you to sell your house � but I am going to ask you to take some small steps towards loving the gospel more, living the gospel more and giving the gospel more!

Imagine that we found ourselves at the scene of a Disaster � perhaps a massive hole had opened up in the ground. Someone in authority said �stand here and don�t let anyone past or they may die�. If we failed in that trust and instead went and had a coffee how terrible would that be!

If we fail to warn our friends, if I fail to warn any non-christians here of the disaster that is coming towards them how much worse would that be?

3 Groups
- Unsaved � sorry if we haven�t always been clear with you � please as that passage said we IMPLORE you � get right with God TODAY
-Those who are not living as a Christian now, though they once did � the only way to be sure you are on the way to heaven is to live as a Christian � get right TODAY
-The rest of us to make a commitment to sharing this message.

The Following Quotes inspired me as I prepared this sermon � they all came from �Soulwinner� by Spurgeon AVAILABLE for SEVEN POUNDS

�You must also believe in the power of that message to save people. You may have heard the story of one of our first students, who came to me, and said, 'I have been preaching now for some months, and I do not think I have had a single conversion.' I said to him, 'And do you expect that the Lord is going to bless you and save souls every time you open your mouth?' 'No, sir,' he replied. 'Well, then,' I said, 'that is why you do not get souls saved. If you had believed, the Lord would have given the blessing.' I had caught him very nicely; but many others would have answered me in just the same way as he did. They tremblingly believe that it is possible, by some strange mysterious method, that once in a hundred sermons God might win a quarter of a soul. They have hardly enough faith to keep them standing upright in their boots; how can they expect God to bless them? I like to go to the pulpit feeling, 'This is God's Word that I am going to deliver in His name; it cannot return to Him void; I have asked His blessing upon it, and He is bound to give it, and His purposes will be answered'"


we are not made all that we shall be, nor all that we ought to desire to be, when we are ourselves fished for and caught. This is what the grace of God does for us at first; but it is not all. We are like the fishes, making sin to be our element; and the good Lord comes, and with the gospel net he takes us, and he delivers us from the life and love of sin. But he has not wrought for us all that he can do, nor all that we should wish him to do, when he has done this; for it is another and a higher miracle to make us who were fish to become fishers�to make the saved ones saviours�to make the convert into a converter�the receiver of the gospel into an imparter of that same gospel to other people. I think I may say to every person whom I am addressing�If you are saved yourself, the work is but half done until you are employed to bring others to Christ. You are as yet but half formed in the image of your Lord. You have not attained to the full development of the Christ-life in you unless you have commenced in some feeble way to tell to others of the grace of God: and I trust that you will find no rest to the sole of your foot till you have been the means of leading many to that blessed Savior who is your confidence and your hope.

His word is�Follow me, not merely that you may be saved, nor even that you may be sanctified; but, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." Be following Christ with that intent and aim; and fear that you are not perfectly following him unless in some degree he is making use of you to be fishers of men. The fact is, that every one of us must take to the business of a mancatcher. If Christ has caught us, we must catch others. If we have been apprehended of him, we must be his constables, to apprehend rebels for him. Let us ask him to give us grace to go a-fishing, and so to cast our nets that we may take a great multitude of fishes. Oh that the Holy Ghost may raise up from among us some master-fishers, who shall sail their boats in many a sea, and surround great shoals of fish!�


You may depend upon it that you may make men understand the truth if you really want to do so; but if you are not in earnest, it is not likely that they will be. If a man were to knock at my door in the middle of the night, and when I put my head out of the window to see what was the matter, he should say, in a very quiet, unconcerned way, "There is a fire at the back part of your house," I should have very little thought of any fire, and should feel inclined to empty a jug of water over him. If I am walking along, and a man comes up to me, and says, in a cheerful tone of voice, "Good afternoon, sir, do you know that I am starving? I have not tasted food for ever so long, indeed, I have not;" I should reply, "My good fellow, you seem to take it very easy; I do not believe you want for much, or you would not be so unconcerned about it." Some men seem to preach in this fashion:�"My dear friends, this is Sunday, so here I am; I have been spending my time in my study all the week, and now I hope you will listen to what I have to say to you. I do not know that there is anything in it that particularly concerns you, it might have some connection with the man in the moon; but I understand that some of you are in danger of going to a certain place which I do not wish to mention, only I hear that it is not a nice place for even a temporary residence. I have especially to preach to you that Jesus Christ did something or other, which, in some way or other, has something to do with salvation, and if you mind what you do"�and so on�"it is possible that you will"�and so on, and so on. That is, in a nutshell, the full report of many a discourse. There is nothing in that kind of talk that can do anybody any good; and after the man has kept on in that style for three-quarters of an hour, he closes by saying, "Now it is time to go home," and he hopes that the deacons will give him a couple of guineas for his services. Now, brethren, that sort of thing will not do. We did not come into the world to waste our own time, and other people's, in that fashion.


"We ought so to preach as to make every sinner tremble in his seat; and if he will not come to the Saviour, he ought at least to have a hard time of it while he stops away from Him. I am afraid that we sometimes preach smooth things, too soothing and agreeable, and that we do not set before men their real danger as we should. If we shun in this respect to declare all the counsel of God, part at least of the responsibility of their ruin will lie at our door."

"It is fatalism, not predestination, that makes men talk as if there is nothing whatever for them to do, or that there is nothing they can do. There is no likelihood of anyone being saved while he gives you this as his only hope, "If salvation is for me, it will come to me in due time."

"That is the real difficulty in many, many cases; the man does not come to Christ because he is not conscious that he is lost, he does not ask to be lifted up because he does not know that he is a fallen creature, he does not feel that he has any need of divine mercy or forgiveness, and therefore he does not seek it."

"The people will not be converted while they are asleep; and if they go to sleep, they had better have been at home in bed, where they would sleep much more comfortably."

"Preach, for instance, as you would plead if you were standing before a judge, and begging for the life of a friend, or as if you were appealing to the Queen herself on behalf of someone very dear to you. Use such a tone in pleading with sinners as you would use if a gibbet were erected in this room, and you were to be hanged on it unless you could persuade the person in authority to release you....for they see that then you communicate to them not only the gospel, but yourself also. The kind of sermon which is likely to break the hearer's heart is that which has first broken the preacher's heart, and the sermon which is likely to reach the heart of the hearer is the one which has come straight from the heart of the preacher"

"Let your sermons be full of Christ, from beginning to end crammed full of the gospel. As for myself, brethren, I cannot preach anything else but Christ and His cross, for I know nothing else, and long ago, like the apostle Paul, I determined not to know anything else save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. People have often asked me, "What is the secret of your success?" I always answer that I have no other secret but this, that I have preached the gospel,�not about the gospel, but the gospel,�the full, free, glorious gospel of the living Christ who is the incarnation of the good news. Preach Jesus Christ, brethren, always and everywhere; and every time you preach be sure to have much of Jesus Christ in the sermon. You remember the story of the old minister who heard a sermon by a young man, and when he was asked by the preacher what he thought of it he was rather slow to answer, but at last he said, "If I must tell you, I did not like it at all; there was no Christ in your sermon." "No," answered the young man, "because I did not see that Christ was in the text." "Oh!" said the old minister, "but do you not know that from every little town and village and tiny hamlet in England there is a road leading to London? Whenever I get hold of a text, I say to myself, 'There is a road from here to Jesus Christ, and I mean to keep on His track till I get to Him.'" "Well," said the young man, "but suppose you are preaching from a text that says nothing about Christ?" "Then I will go over hedge and ditch but what I will get at Him." So must we do, brethren; we must have Christ in all our discourses, whatever else is in or not in them. There ought to be enough of the gospel in every sermon to save a soul. "


"I mean those discourses that have had much real prayer offered over them, both in the preparation and the delivery, for there is much so-called prayer that is only playing at praying.... the way to make sermons is to work vital electricity into them, putting your own life and the very life of God into them by earnest prayer......You must anoint your sermons, brethren, and you cannot do it except by much private communion with God. May the Holy Spirit anoint every one of you, and richly bless you in winning souls, for our Lord Jesus Christ's sake! Amen.

From the Soulwinner: "The best attraction is the gospel in its purity. The weapon with which the Lord conquers men is the truth as it is in Jesus. The gospel will be found equal to every emergency; an arrow which can pierce the hardest heart, a balm which will heal the deadliest wound. Preach it, and preach nothing else."

Over on Together for the Gospel: CJ is promoting a talk by Mark Dever on Evangelism. I am so thrilled at the way God seems to use the internet specifically to guide me to the materials I need in my preparation. Thank you CJ - you did not know how prophetic you were being by linking to that talk today of all days. The congregation who will hear me preach on Sunday will be grateful to you - well those of them who read this blog anyway! My title for Sunday is "stewardship: entrusted with the gospel". I am so stirred by this notion of "stewardship". To think that we have been entrusted with a life saving message- how can we do anything else but pass it on to our family, friends and neighbours?

Please pray for me that God will empower me to be a faithful steward of the message that he has for me to preach on Sunday.

Also, if you have any thoughts on this subject, now would be a great time to share them with me in my comments box or via email!!!! God bless you all this weekend.

Today is a day for good news! Freedom for Chinese people is of course tied up with freedom for Chinese bloggers, and microsoft have made a potentially costly decision which I applaud.

Microsoft amends blog shutdown policies "The Redmond software company, operator of a popular blogging technology called MSN Spaces, said Tuesday that it will endeavor to make blogs available to users elsewhere even if Microsoft decides it is legally obliged to block them in a particular country.

The company also pledged to provide users with a clear notice that it has shut down a Web site when the decision to do so stemmed from a legal mandate. Previously, it has simply said the content was unavailable."

Where we'll see whether the policy is meaningful or not is the first time the state comes to Microsoft ... and says, "So you're publishing to the world the subversive political statements of somebody online. Who is it?'" he said. "Does Microsoft fold or stand pat?"

Blogotional: is insightful even for him with this quote "the reception of the gospel is not a one time event, but a lifetime journey."

I think we are beginning to converge. Without wanting to speak for David from Jollyblogger too much I think it is fair to say that neither he nor I would measure our success in preaching by the numbers raising their hands on a sunday morning or joining an altar call. We do call people to make a public response, but what I am looking for is the evidence of a changed heart lived out in a changed life. When I hear that someone who responded after one of our sermons felt that a load of guilt was lifted and that they have begun to make specific changes in their lives I rejoice.

Too many christians get confused about what too look for in salvation- Acts is clear that Repentance and faith, followed by baptism, recieving the Holy Spirit and joining the church are the markers of Christian Birth having taken place. This simple gospel is not just where we start, it is what we depend on to produce sanctifying change in us. We dont start with these things then move to moralism. Thus my preaching SHOULD be about these things, and should therefore be of benefit to hearers who are saved and unsaved.

If you get time please pray for me as I preach once more tomorrow. It still feels like early days since our London Church moved into a cinema. Please pray that all this talk about preaching in such a way that salvation and maturity results actually occurs tomorrow morning!

My lovely wife taught sunday school for 4-7s today (which includes our children Charis and Joel. She explained the gospel, summarising it into 10 points. If the kids can understand this, why is it that certain people want to make it more complicated and won't accept this as it is?

1. Everyone has Sinned
2. God hates sin
3. Sin must be punished
4. Jesus took the punishment instead of us on the cross
5. Admit you have been naughty
6. Believe that Jesus took your punishment
7. Say sorry to God
8. Ask God to be in charge of your life
9. Be baptised (note the order here)
10. Receive the Holy Spirit

My sermon on the message that changes the world goes into some of these things in more detail.

If you are a regular reader of this blog why not express in the comments whether you believe all 10 of these points or which if any you would have a problem with affirming. If you have never believed and done these things- now is your chance!