Top 09 Books of ‘09

Well, in a matter of days the first year of the Forerunner Book Contest comes to a close. I for one am very glad to have been held accountable by all of you who have reading along with me and I have been encouraged to see how broadly and how deeply you have been reading over this past year! I didn’t quite make my goal of 52 books this year – as of this post I am 35 books in, with two book more a little over half way read! But I know for sure: I read more faithfully and more broadly than I would have without this contest! So it was worth it and I am looking forward to jumping in again as 2010 begins!

To mark the close of this year, I give you my top 9 books of 2009. I’ll try to put them in some kind of order if you’ll promise to hold it loosely! Also note: not all of these books came out in 09, this is just the year I managed to get to them.

9. Biblical Church Growth: How You Can Work with God to Build a Faithful Church (Gary McIntosh). One of the books I am “in the process of finishing” is The Trellis and the Vine by Colin Marshall and Tony Payne. As wonderfully helpful and biblically faithful as McIntosh’s book is, this new one may soon supplant it on the list!

8. Christ-Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape our Practice (Bryan Chapell). I’m quickly learning that I want to read anything by Chapell! His book on Christ-Centered Preaching is on the short list for the beginning of 2010.

7. Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church (Michael Horton). Ditto for Horton what I said about Chapell. Can’t wait for his Systematic Theology to come out in 2010!

6. The Gospel-Driven Church (Ian Stackhouse). There seems to be something of a theme developing over these last four picks! Throw Why We Love the Church into the mix and 2009 and become the year of revisioning the church through the Person of Christ and the pattern of His Gospel! This kind of work would always be good, but it is absolutely essential in my generation since we have grown up imbibing the seeker/corporate/emergent/blah/blah/blah models that have swept through the American church over the past 20 years or so.

5. There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Her Countries Children (Melissa Faye Greene). This is the book the Lord used to get my heart in touch with the reality of what He had called us to do in adopting from Ethiopia. There is much good here, and some ways of thinking that I would want to challenge. But the way the historical and cultural background of the country is wedded with the individual stories of these children makes this book uniquely powerful.

4. This Momentary Marriage: A Parable of Permanence (John Piper). I read several marriage books this year, but this was far and away the best and the most helpful. I think the reason I was so helped is because Piper didn’t set out to be helpful, but to be faithful to the biblical vision of marriage as it reflects a mystery and a wonder far greater than itself. Human marriage is big, but not ultimate – so the only way to truly “fix” marriage is to take it all the way up to the function God has ordained it to have, namely, to testify to the eternal union between Christ and His Church.

3. Finally Alive (John Piper). This books smells of sweat and tears. Sweat from the thorough, faithful exegesis of Scripture’s message on why we need the new birth, what God does at the new birth, and how we walk as those who have been born again. The tears flow from a pastor’s pleading with his people to come to Jesus – to be born again. This is the most powerful and comprehensive treatments of the doctrine of regeneration I have read.

2. Polishing God’s Monuments: Pillars of Hope for Punishing Times (Jim Andrews). Randy Alcorn came out with a book treating this same question – If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil. I plan to read it soon. I don’t think we can read too many solid, biblical, personal treatments of this issue, it is surely one of the most persistent and important we will face. What I found so piercing about Andrews’ book was the way he wove personal testimony into and around powerful theology. Watching his example helped me see how the truth of the sovereign goodness of God could be felt as a rock to stand on rather than a rock of offense.

1. Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches (Russell Moore). 2009 is the year our dream to adopt became reality – at least the paper part of it! This biblical vision of what adoption is and how to do it (physically) as we have experienced it (spiritually) was both comforting and compelling. Given the ethnic make-up of the church that I pastor (with little faces from all over the world!) I was delighting as I read in the way I experience the heart of the Father (for me!) everytime I am around His family!

Discernment Drill – The New Gospel Part 2

If you have not yet read Shane Claiborne’s article from part 1 of this series, I would encourage you to drop down a post and do so before you read Kevin DeYoung’s response here.

The contours of the “new gospel” that Kevin outlines in the first part of this post will be very familiar for those just coming from Shane’s article! I am most interested in our engagement with the second (Why So Hot) and third (Why So Wrong) parts of this post. Do you find Kevin putting words around your thoughts? Or do you find yourself a bit startled and challenged by his response? Either way, interacting with this kind of material helps us along in our quest to become sober-minded, biblical, clear, culturally-engaging thinkers.

Have you heard the New Gospel?  It’s not been codified. It’s not owned by any one person or movement.  But it is increasingly common. The New Gospel generally has four parts to it:

1. It usually starts with an apology: “I’m sorry for my fellow Christians. I understand why you hate Christianity.  It’s like that thing Ghandi said, ‘why can’t the Christians be more like their Christ?’  Christians are hypocritical, judgmental, and self-righteous.  I know we screwed up with the Crusades, slavery, and the Witch Trials.  All I can say is: I apologize.  We’ve not give you a reason to believe.”

2. Then there is an appeal to God as love: “I know you’ve seen the preachers with the sandwich boards and bullhorns saying ‘Repent or Die.’ But I’m here to tell you God is love. Look at Jesus.  He hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors.  He loved unconditionally.  There is so much brokenness in the world, but the good news of the Bible is that God came to live right in the middle of our brokenness. He’s a messy God and his mission is love.  ‘I did not come into the world to condemn the world,’ that’s what Jesus said (John 3:17).  He loved everyone, no matter who you were or what you had done. That’s what got him killed.”

3. The third part of the New Gospel is an invitation to join God on his mission in the world:  “It’s a shame that Christians haven’t shown the world this God.  But that’s what we are called to do.  God’s kingdom is being established on earth.  On earth!  Not in some distant heaven after we die, but right here, right now.  Even though we all mess up, we are God’s agents to show his love and bring this kingdom.  And we don’t do that by scaring people with religious language or by forcing them into some religious mold.  We do it by love.  That’s the way of Jesus.  That’s what it means to follow him.  We love our neighbor and work for peace and justice.  God wants us to become the good news for a troubled planet.”

4. And finally, there is a studied ambivalence about eternity: “Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in life after death.  But our focus should be on what kind of life we can live right now.  Will some people go to hell when they die?  Who am I to say? Does God really require the right prayer or the right statement of faith to get into heaven?  I don’t know, but I guess I can leave that in his hands. My job is not to judge people, but to bless. In the end, God’s amazing grace may surprise us all.  That’s certainly what I hope for.”

Why So Hot?
This way of telling the good news of Christianity is very chic.  It’s popular for several reasons.

1. It is partially true. God is love. The kingdom has come. Christians can be stupid. The particulars of the New Gospel are often justifiable.

2. It deals with strawmen.  The bad guys are apocalyptic street preachers, Crusaders, and caricatures of an evangelical view of salvation.

3. The New Gospel leads people to believe wrong things without explicitly stating those wrong things.  That is, Christians who espouse the New Gospel feel safe from criticism because they never actually said belief is unimportant, or there is no hell, or that Jesus isn’t the only way, or that God has no wrath, or that there is no need for repentance.  These distortions are not explicitly stated, but the New Gospel is presented in such a way that non-believers could, and by design should, come to these conclusions.  In other words, the New Gospel allows the non-Christian to hear what he wants, while still providing an out against criticism from other Christians.  The preacher of the New Gospel can always say when challenged, “But I never said I don’t believe those things.”

4. It is manageable.  The New Gospel meets people where they are and leaves them there.  It appeals to love and helping our neighbors.  And it makes the appeal in a way that repudiates any hint of judgmentalism, intolerance, or religiosity.  This is bound to be popular. It tells us what we want to hear and gives us something we can do.

5. The New Gospel is inspirational. This is what makes the message so appealing to young people in particular. They get the thrill and purpose of being part of a big cause, without all the baggage of the Church’s history, doctrine, and hard edges. Who wouldn’t want to join a revolution of love?

6. The New Gospel has no offense to it.  This is why the message is so attractive.  The bad guys are all “out there.”  This can be a problem for any of us.  We are all prone to soft-pedaling the gospel, only presenting the attractive parts and failing to mention where Christ does not just comfort but also confronts.  And it must confront more than the sins of others. It is far too easy to use the New Gospel as a way to differentiate yourself from all the bad Christians.  This makes you look good and confirms to the non-Christians that the obstacle to their commitment lies with the hypocrisy and failure of others.  There is no talk of repentance or judgment.  There is no hint that Jesus was killed, not so much for his inclusive love as his outrageous Godlike claims (Matt. 26:63-66; 27:39-43).  The New Gospel only talks of salvation in strictly cosmic terms.  In fact, the door is left wide open to imagine that hell, if it even exists, is probably not a big threat for most people.

Why So Wrong?
It shouldn’t be hard to see what is missing in the new gospel.  What’s missing is the old gospel, the one preached by the Apostles, the one defined in 1 Corinthians 15, the one summarized later in The Apostles’ Creed.

“But what you call the New Gospel is not a substitute for the old gospel.  We still believe all that stuff.”

Ok, but why don’t you say it?  And not just privately to your friends or on a statement of faith somewhere, but in public?  You don’t have to be meaner, but you do have to be clearer.  You don’t have to unload the whole truck of systematic theology on someone, but to leave the impression that hell is no big deal is so un-Jesus like (Matt. 10:26-33).  And when you don’t talk about the need for faith and repentance you are very un-apostolic (Acts 2:38; 16:31).

“But we are just building bridges. We are relating to the culture first, speaking in a language they can understand, presenting the parts of the gospel that make the most sense to them. Once we have their trust and attention, then we can disciple and teach them about sin, repentance, faith and all the rest. This is only pre-evangelism.”

Yes, it’s true, we don’t have to start our conversations where we want to end up.  But does the New Gospel really prime the pump for evangelism or just mislead the non-Christian into a false assurance?  It’s one thing to open a door for further conversation.  It’s another to make Christianity so palatable that it sounds like something the non-Christian already does. And this is assuming the best about the New Gospel, that underneath there really is a desire to get the old gospel out.

Paul’s approach with non-Christians in Athens is instructive for us (Acts 17:16-34).  First, Paul is provoked that the city is so full of idols (16).  His preaching is not guided by his disappointment with other Christians, but by his anger over unbelief.  Next, he gets permission to speak (19-20). Paul did not berate people. He spoke to those who were willing to listen.  But then look at what he does.  He makes some cultural connection (22-23, 28), but from there he shows the contrast between the Athenian understanding of God and the way God really is (24-29). His message is not about a way of life, but about worshiping the true God in the right way.  After that, he urges repentance (30), warns of judgment (31), and talks about Jesus’ resurrection (31).

The result is that some mocked (32). Who in the world mocks the New Gospel? There is nothing not to like.  There is no scandal in a message about lame Christians, a loving God, changing the world, and how most of us are most likely not going to hell.  This message will never be mocked, but Paul’s Mars Hill sermon was. And keep in mind, this teaching in Athens was only an entre into the Christian message.  This was just the beginning, after which some wanted to hear him again (32).  Paul said more in his opening salvo than some Christians ever dare to say. We may not be able to say everything Paul said at Athens all at once, but we certainly must not give the impression in our “pre-evangelism” that repentance, judgment, the necessity of faith, the importance of right belief, the centrality of the cross and the resurrection, the sinfulness of sin and the fallenness of man–the stuff that some suggest will be our actual evangelism–are outdated relics of a mean-spirited, hurtful Christianity.

A Final Plea
Please, please, please, if you are enamored with the New Gospel or anything like it, consider if you are really being fair with your fellow Christians in always throwing them under the bus.  Consider if you are preaching like Jesus did, who called people, not first of all to a way of life, but to repent and believe (Mark 1:15).  And as me and my friends consider if we lack the necessary patience and humility to speak tenderly with non-Christians, consider if your God is a lopsided cartoon God who never takes offense at sin (because sin is more than just un-neighborliness) and never pours out wrath (except for the occasional judgment against the judgmental).   Consider if you are giving due attention to the cross and the Lamb of God who died there to take away the sin of the world. Consider if your explanation of the Christian message sounds anything like what we hear from the Apostles in the book of Acts when they engage the world.

This is no small issue. And it is not just a matter of emphasis. The New Gospel will not sustain the church. It cannot change the heart. And it does not save. It is crucial, therefore, that our evangelical schools, camps, conferences, publishing houses, and churches can discern the new gospel from the old.

Discernment Drill – The New Gospel Part 1

The following is an article written by Shane Claiborne, one of the leaders of The Simple Way, an urban ministry in downtown Philadelphia. It first appeared in the online version of Esquire as a response to the “flak” he has received from the evangelical community for his ministry to the poor. I encourage you to read it discerningly. Take note of your impressions, thoughts and questions as you read. After you finish, read through Kevin DeYoung’s response to Shane’s way of thinking and “compare notes.”

To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity. Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn’s Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn’t quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don’t know Jesus. Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, “God is not a monster.” Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, “I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ.” A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That’s the ugly stuff. And that’s why I begin by saying that I’m sorry.

Now for the good news. I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it’s that you can have great answers and still be mean… and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it… it was because “God so loved the world.” That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven… but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our “Gospel” is the message that Jesus came “not [for] the healthy… but the sick.” And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God’s Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” On earth.

One of Jesus’ most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan… you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I’m sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine… but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David… at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again. After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: “The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you.” And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about “dirty theology” — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man’s eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay “out there” but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, “Nothing good could come.” It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society’s rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors… a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, “I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you.” If those of us who believe in God do not believe God’s grace is big enough to save the whole world… well, we should at least pray that it is.

Your brother,

Shane

A Thanksgiving Meditation – The Value of Christ

Dr. Peter Kuzmic was recently on the campus of Yale University as part of their Faith and Globalization Initiative. During his time there he fielded a question from a student that went something like this:

Some of our readings have suggested that religion can be brought in to humanize the “other.” So, to establish tolerance in a society that has come out of a war, you use religion to make the “other” [the former enemy] appear more human – you humanize them. This humanizing role is vital in helping societies recover from war and preventing further conflict. What replaces this role in a secular society? How do you humanize the enemy in a society that has no place for religion?

When I first heard this question, I immediately assumed that I had nothing in common with the questioner. The way she phrased her question presupposes the idea that religion no longer has a place in modern society. She is assuming that the benefits previously contributed to society through religion can be achieved by other means. In other words, the function of religion can be replaced, its positive effects can be reproduced (and I’m sure she would say surpassed) by another social construct. The question for her is not whether this is true, but only which construct Dr. Kuzmic would recommend to replace religion. I do not agree with any of these presuppositions. As a believer in the living Jesus, to answer the question is to cede her assumptions, therefore the question has to be contested on presuppositional grounds. I am nothing like this young woman…or might my own heart be closer to her question than I imagine?

The sentiment driving this co-ed’s question is the idea that Jesus (she calls it religion) has proven useful. He performs a function. He plays a role. She sees Him like an integer in an algebra equation – He has a utilitarian value such that when you plug Him in for “x”, the equation balances, society works. If, however, we can find another integer that plugs into the equation just as well, and maybe this time without the baggage Jesus carries, then we can replace Him and lose nothing! His value is not inherent in who He is, it is utilitarian, tied to what He does.

It sounds crass to talk about Jesus in these terms. But how often, especially over Thanksgiving week, are we tempted to talk this same way? How much of our giving thanks stops at remembering the gifts Jesus has brought us rather than encouraging the eyes of our heart to ascend in thanksgiving for the Gift of who He is. Test your heart in this Beloved! We give thanks for the bread that He brings, but not for the Bread that He is; we give thanks for the peace that He brings, but not for the Peace that He is; we give thanks for the health that He gives, but not for the Life that He is. And each of us could add to the list.

The more I have meditated on this student’s question, the more I have heard my own heart buried in her assumptions! It is not a large step from concentrating my thanksgiving on what Jesus has brought me to the idea that if I can find someone else to provide those things, Jesus would no longer be necessary. I would never agree to this idea on paper, but my heart can be led there if I am careless with my affections – letting them remain on the product instead of ascending to the Person.

The truth we must keep ever before us in this season is that Jesus is not useful, He is precious! His gifts are not for the purpose of directing us to a product, but to the value of a Person. There is nothing and no one that can replace Him because He does not play a role or perform a function in our life, He is our Life!

May the Father be pleased this Thanksgiving season to pour out on us His Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Jesus! May the eyes of our heart be enlightened to see Him for who He is. And may we give thanks to Him for the precious, glorious, inherent, irreplaceable value of His Person!

“A Day of Public Thanksgiving and Prayer”

Many of you may have grown up, as I did, assuming that Thanksgiving materialized onto our national calendars much like the 7th inning stretch appeared at baseball games – a few pilgrims and indians did it once (celebrating the harvest of 1621), and we’ve done it ever since! Like me, then, you may be encouraged to read how the holiday of Thanksgiving was codified for us as a young nation, and more importantly, the reasoning given behind it – having much less to do with food on the table and much more to do with how great our God is! I have listed the text of George Washington’s 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation below. Notice the flow of thought through the three paragraphs (1) giving thanks to God is right because of Who He is (2) and so we build a time of thanksgiving to God into the national consciousness of our nation (3) having thanked Him for His grace toward us, we continue to look for that grace by interceding for the continuation of His blessing and protection. Not a bad outline to follow around the table with the family on Thursday!

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to “recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Amen! May we take this week and fight through the traveling, eating, football watching (etc) to set aside some quality time to reflect on who our God is and all that He has done. Happy Thanksgiving!

The Surgery of Separating God’s Good from Our Circumstances

As I was meditating on John Piper’s message from this past Sunday, I was struck by how an aspect of his development of Jesus’ sign in John 6 reinforced and further developed the main point of our message on Sunday; namely, the ground of our joy and trust in God must be the good that He has promised to work for us. To put it negatively, when we hope in a promise, like Romans 8:28, that God will work all things in our lives together for good, but then import our own vision of what that good must be, we set ourselves up to be “ashamed” of God and disillusioned” with God (cf. Phil. 1:20). In Philippians 1:20 the same Paul who wrote Romans 8:28 can be confident that he “will not at all be ashamed” when he trusts in God, despite his miserable circumstances, because he has learned to let God define the good. And he has learned to define that good as his joy!

How I long for us to learn these two lessons! God must define the good we hope in Him for, and we must authentically and enthusiastically rejoice in that as good! This passage in Philippians is helping us get there by doing the surgery of separating our confidence and hope in God from our circumstances. If we desire an expanding ministry or a spouse or a child or any number of other very good things, it is so easy to interpret the promises of God as Him working through our present lack, frustration or “captivity” to eventually get us those very things. But that is not His promise to us. He may indeed bring those things about! But His promise to us is that in all things our faith will progress (Phil. 1:25) so that we are increasingly conformed to the image of His beautiful Son (Rm. 8:29), and in all things His gospel will be advanced (Phil. 1:12). This, the progress of our faith and the progress of His glory in the gospel, is how God defines good; which means God can be true to a promise like Rm 8:28 and we may never get the “dream” we were desiring. What we need then, is to see God as He really is. To look to Him for what He has truly promised. To be given new dreams, new appetites, new desires, new hopes, so that we can say with Paul – his mission to Spain interrupted by imprisonment and his apostolic authority undermined by some in the church – “what then? Only that in every way…Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. Yes and I will rejoice” (Phil. 1:18)!

The part of Piper’s message that I have copied in below speaks to this need of our not coming to Jesus with our old appetites and asking Him to use His power to satisfy them. Rather, we come to Jesus and are given new appetites – no longer looking to Him for our bread, but coming to His as our bread. I would encourage you to listen to the whole sermon (he draws some points out in the audio that are only hinted at in the transcript) but at least take the time to reflect through the following points:

Jesus as King

But what about “king”? Is he not a king? Verse 15: “Perceiving that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” Is he not a king? He is. At the end of his life, Pilate asked him in John 18:35 “Are you the King of the Jews?” and Jesus answered in verse 36, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” In other words, yes, I am a king, but not the way you think I am.

When Jesus says that, he doesn’t mean that this world doesn’t belong to him. It does. He made it. He will come again to claim it. What he means is: I have come into the world the first time to rule men’s lives not by being their military captain, but by being their bread. I am going to triumph not by subduing armies, but by satisfying souls. I am going to conquer not with the power of armed forces but with the power of radically new appetites.

Not the King They Thought

And what we see back in chapter 6 is that the crowds did not understand this at all. Verse 26 is the key to why Jesus withdrew and would have nothing to do with their excitement about his kingship. “Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.’” This is why you want to make me king (6:15). To have me as king mean full stomachs.

They hadn’t been changed. Jesus didn’t come into the world to lend his power to already existing appetites. That’s the fundamental mistake of the prosperity gospel. Leave people untransformed in what they crave, and simply add the power of Jesus as the way to get it. That is not the gospel. It is a kind of acclamation that Jesus walks away from. “Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself”. He walks away.

Making Sure We Have God’s ‘Good’ In Mind

Romans 8:28 is a beautiful promise: And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. The scope of this promise is sweeping, both in what it says about God’s sovereignty over the lives of His people and what it declares that we are to believe concerning each event in our life because we are called and kept by such a beneficent Sovereign.

The declaration embedded in this promise concerning the sovereignty of God is so comprehensive that it takes us out of time and into eternity. Paul transcends the temporal plane by hanging the weight of this promise on God’s “call” and His “purpose.” In the following verse, he connects the call of God (which indeed seems to happen in time by His Spirit as the gospel is proclaimed) with the predestining and foreknowing that God accomplished of those same people (the called) outside of time. Thus the Father chose us in Christ “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). When Paul links this promise with God’s “purpose” he transcends time as well, since Ephesians describes this same purpose as “eternal” (Eph 3:11; 1:11). So the “all things” that are covered under the umbrella of Paul’s promise in Romans 8:28 is the same thing, namely everything, that God is working according to the counsel of his eternal will (Eph. 1:11).

This invincible fulfillment of the transcendent, eternal purpose of our sovereign God is the rock that Paul places under our individual lives in Romans 8:28. What we are being asked to believe, and indeed to celebrate, is that when Paul paints with these cosmic, eternal brush strokes, they are not so broad that the details of individual lives fall through the cracks. In fact just the opposite is the case. Both incredible scope and exquisite detail are in view here. This is no austere, mechanical sovereignty we are trusting, but a God who calls us personally according to His overarching purpose, creates and sustains our individual love for Him, and invincibly works “good” out of each and every situation we face. The immanence and intimacy of this promise, surrounded as it is by the Spirit of God groaning with us in hope (8:22-27) and the Father giving up His only Son so that nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ (8:31-39), is every bit as powerful and necessary for Christian hope as its sovereign transcendence.

This, then, is the promise of Romans 8:28 – nothing that touches our lives is so big as to be outside of His control, and nothing within our lives is so small as to be beneath His concern. The joyful confidence that we are meant to receive through this promise however, is not bulletproof. It can be shot down and turned from a ground of confidence in God to offense at God by tripping over the word “good” at the center of it.  So often, we look to Scripture to describe His sovereign rule over our life, we look to Scripture to define His intimate familiarity with our circumstances, and then we look to our culture to delineate the “good” this big God must work for us if He is to prove true to the promise of His word! When we import an unbiblical definition of the ‘good’ He has promised us into the center of this promise, the whole edifice of our faith can come tumbling down around us, and some are never able to pick up the pieces.

Thankfully, Paul not only wrote this promise to the church in Rome but short years later he was able to walk it out in front of them as he wrote the letter to the Philippians from a Roman jail. The overflowing joy that pervades this short letter must be taken as authentic! Paul is not working to put a good face on some devastating circumstances – like physical suffering from outside the church and spiritual desertion from within. Rather, he is walking in the power of the promise recorded in Romans 8:28! Most importantly, he is going to give us some language to fill out the “good” that we can confidently expect the God of Romans 8 to faithfully work in our “all things” as He did in Paul’s.

Paul is bound with chains, and yet he wants the Philippians to know that the word of God is not bound! In fact, what has happened to Paul has surprisingly served the “progress of the gospel” (1:12; cf. II Tim. 2:9). He uses this same word in verse 25 to describe the “progress of their faith” that is being served as he labors (even in absentia) among them. This two-fold “progress” is, I think, the content we should insert into the promise of Romans 8:28. The “good” that God has promised to work for those whom He has called according to His purpose – a purpose that includes their transformation into the image of His Son (Rm 8:29) and the wisdom of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ being made known (Eph 3:10-11; 1:9-10) – is perhaps best described as the progress of their faith and the progress of His gospel.

Paul seems to reinforce this understanding in Philippians 1:20 where he announces that it is his “eager expectation and hope” that “Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.” It should be instructive for us that this declaration comes on the heels of his hoping that through the prayers of the saints in Philippi and the help of the Holy Spirit, he would be delivered from his chains. So it is clear that he wants to be free from prison, and clear that he longs to return to them (cf. 2:24). But the “good” of freedom from prison is not the good that he is confident God will work for him in this situation! He has dreams and longings, but he does not take the route we so often can and assume that the fulfillment of those dreams is ultimately what God must work for us if Romans 8:28 is going to be true in our lives! The “good” he hopes in God for is not deliverance from chains, but that Christ would be honored in his body, whether he is set free or is executed under Nero. And that honoring of Christ, the context seems to make clear, takes place both when our faith progresses and the gospel advances. In this confidence Paul finds genuine joy, even in the midst of an unrelenting incarceration.

The challenge for us, then, is to see the good God has in mind and adopt that as our definition and hope! We have been recruited, as it were, into the fulfillment of His good and perfect purpose for all things. Therefore, He has promised to work “all things” in our life in such a way that they fulfill His overarching purpose for everything. That is “good” according to God. He has predestined us to be conformed to the image of His Son. That good happens as our faith progresses, a progress which can include being led to new levels of awareness of our depravity and dependence on Him, as much as it can include seeing miraculous answers to our prayers for deliverance. He has also ordained that the proclamation of His victory in Christ be sounded to every people. This good progresses in comfortable sanctuaries, but more often through suffering, persecution and deprivation. Oh how often do we turn this “good” on its head – with ease and comfort and widening influence taken as signs of God’s faithfulness in our lives and their lack as God’s falling down on His promises (like Rm 8:28)! May He open our eyes to see our good from His perspective – the progress of our faith, often through dark nights and desperate dependance, and the progress of His gospel – often through suffering saints and unrelenting hostility that may kill the messenger but is, both for the martyr and the message, only gain! As those chosen by God and graciously folded into His sovereign purposes, this is the “good” He promises to powerfully work in our “all things.”

The Lost Symbol – Some Thoughts

Dan Brown’s latest novel is probably his worst. It could also turn out to be his most dangerous. What I mean by “his worst” is that from a fiction novel standpoint the story is a bit canned, the plot a bit too transparent, and the characters surprisingly flat. I say “surprisingly” because I actually enjoyed his previous four books, including the two previous Robert Langdon novels, Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code. Read as fiction, they were interesting stories! This latest offering, however, reads like a Mad Lib of The DaVinci Code – the same basic plot line with different religions, character names and adjectives thrown in. So in that sense it is his worst.

It is also, I believe, Browns most dangerous offering to date. We all remember the flurry of controversy that erupted short years ago when Brown had his protagonists discover that DaVinci’s code pointed to Christ’s marriage and lineage. This thesis – a conspiracy by the Church to cover up Christ’s union with Mary Magadalene and his resultant royal bloodline that ran down through the centuries to the present day – provoked sermons, articles and even book length rebuttals. And rightly so! My fear is that The Lost Symbol will slip by with no such reaction because it seems to center around Masonic lore rather than the Person of Christ and the authority of His Word. In short, its primary thesis doesn’t seem “scandalous” enough. But in fact, while The Lost Symbol does not have a lightening rod like a married Jesus at the center of its plot, the main message of the book is devastatingly at odds with biblical Christianity.

• It talks of man needing to look within himself to find salvation (to become god!) rather than standing in need of a Savior from outside himself.
• It holds up the Christian Scriptures alongside the sacred books and mystical writings of every other religion to suggest that those who are truly enlightened see the sameness in their message(s).
• The God (Architect, whatever you call Him) who is there and who we should worship is not the God of the Christians, or the Buddhists, or exclusively the God of any religion, but is in fact the “corporate consciousness” of the human race.

Here is a small taste of The Lost Symbol’s theology found in a “teaching section” toward the end of the book:

“Robert, you and I both know that the ancients would be horrified if they saw how their teachings have been perverted [meaning, taken as literal truth about God rather than allegorical symbolism pointing toward the great potential in the mind of man]…how religion has established itself as a tollbooth to heaven…We’ve lost the Word, and yet its true meaning is still within reach, right before our eyes. It exists in all the enduring texts, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita to the Koran and beyond. All of these texts are revered upon the altars of Freemasonry because Masons understand what the world seems to have forgotten…that each of these texts, in its own way, is quietly whispering the exact same message.” Peter’s voice welled with emotion. “Know ye not that ye are gods?” Peter lowered his voice to a whisper. “The Buddah said, ‘You are God yourself.’ Jesus taught that ‘the kingdom of God was within you’ and even promised us ‘The works I do, you can do…and greater.’ Even the first antipope – Hippolytus of Rome – quote the same message, first uttered by the gnostic teacher Monoimus: ‘ Abandon the search for God…instead take yourself as the starting place’” (492).

The reason I think the message of this book will not provoke the same outcry that greeted The DaVinci Code is because it meshes so well with the way so many people already think! This is not to say they are familiar with the symbols and rituals that drive the story. Rather it is to say that this way of thinking – that enlightened minds hold great power, hold the key to the future, and that this enlightenment comes by waking up to the fact that we don’t need God and His exclusive self-revelation in the Person of His only Son and in His Scriptures because we have phenomenal power and untapped potential within ourselves – will be taken in stride by many who read it. In a world (and increasingly in a church?!) where the appeal of spirituality is growing while the appeal of doctrine and truth is waning, the words in these character’s mouths could very well be coming out of our own.

When I finished this book I opened the Gospels and read these words of Jesus with a new attention:

• Whoever does not honor the Son [for who He is as God, as the Son of God, and as the only Savior of the world] does not honor the Father who sent him (Jn. 5:23).
• I know you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in my Father’s name and you do not receive me (Jn. 5:42).
• You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also (Jn. 8:19).
• I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also (Jn. 14:6).
• The one who rejects me rejects him who sent me (Lk. 10:16).
• Whoever receives me receives him who sent me (Matt. 10:40).

The Word of God recorded in the word of God makes it unflinchingly and undeniably clear that what you do with Jesus is the litmus test that determines what you do with God. And that “God” is to be known specifically and personally as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! You can’t relate to God without relating to Jesus. If you receive, love, honor and know the Son then you receive, love, honor and know the Father who sent him. If you reject the Son then you do not receive, love, honor or know the Father, but in fact reject Him. This is the unique supremacy of Jesus Christ in our salvation that is denied in every possible way by Brown’s latest book – which is itself only an articulation of what many already believe, and believe must be the case if we are to find hope and peace in this religiously diverse world. Exclusive claims about “your” God have to go. Inclusive claims about enlightened humans becoming their only hope will stay and grow.

Against this prevailing sentiment stands the clear words of Christ and the “lost” symbol of his cross! Contrary to the conclusions drawn in Brown’s book, it is not a mishmash of religious symbols drawn together from across history that show us the way to hope. It is the single, stark symbol of a bloody cross that alone opens the way to God! May we seek it, find it, embrace it, and share it with a zeal that would put Robert Langdon to shame!

The Cruelty of Comforting Children on their Way to Hell

As our adoption has moved forward over the past months Devon and I have been working to better aquatint ourselves with the people of Ethiopia. We have been working to learn their history, their culture, and most immediately the massive blighting of the population that began in the 1970s through a combination of political power struggles, crop failures, and the spread of vicious diseases like malaria and HIV. The need in this one country, let alone the entire African continent, is staggering. And when this need has a face, it is the face of a child. Ethiopia’s children are being orphaned at an astonishing rate. Those who have a parent remaining in the home still suffer the brunt of the depravations and hardships that come with growing up lacking even rudimentary health care, education, or adequate food supply.

The crushing weight of the statistics coming out of Ethiopia is offset somewhat by the stories of self-sacrifice and open-hearted care that are chronicled in books like Melissa Fay Greene’s There is No Me without You. Thankfully, the plight of these children is not being overlooked by many foreigners and many more locals who are re-arranging their life in order to minister to the children dropped off at police stations, left in baskets in front of orphanages, or wandering the streets after AIDS claimed their remaining parent.

As I have read the stories of these care-givers, however, my initial gratitude and admiration has turned toward something like frustration and an urgent sorrow. It is not primarily frustration at the relatively small number of people who are willing to “ruin” their lives to care for these children. It is not primarily frustration at the power brokers who did much to cause this suffering by refusing to admit a famine or refusing to make pharmaceuticals available at a decent price. It is sorrow over the fact that so few of these care-givers know God in Christ and work to make Him known to their children. And it is frustration over the fact that the vast majority of these care-givers are therefore caught up in the cruelty of comforting these children on their way to hell.

That may seem like too harsh a verdict at first glance. The humanism of our culture has trained us to argue reflexively that there must be something inherently beautiful and unassailably worthy about forsaking a middle class life to love on 40 kids who would have otherwise died in the rags they wore when they were dropped off! And in a sense that is true. I have no doubt the Father heart of God is moving many to love on the very children a society paralyzed by misunderstandings about AIDS and how it spreads has declared unlovable. Taking orphans into your home and spending yourself on their behalf is in line with the gospel! But it is not the gospel! On its own it is not enough. If life ends at death, then anything we can do to introduce comfort and ease and joy into the lives of these children is unquestionably the highest good. However, if after death we all rise to an eternity either in His joy or under His wrath depending on what we do with Christ in this life, then providing diapers and formula and toys and mattresses and moms and dads while withholding Jesus is unbelievably, even if unintentionally, cruel. To care for their bodies without caring equally and ultimately for their soul, is not to love them at all. This is the urgency I feel in my sorrow. An urgency to pray for those who are wrapping their arms around the lives of these children, but who are not yet able to introduce them to the One who is their Life! Think of what could happen in these orphanages and on these streets if these precious caregivers were introduced to Jesus and ministered His life to their children!

Jesus came the first time to set us free from our fatal bondage to sin. This is love, that He delivered us from sin, not necessarily from sickness. It is true that during His earthly ministry he did heal some bodies. But those healings where meant to stand as a foreshadowing of what life would be like with Him forever in His Father’s house. Then, every body will be made whole, every tear will be wiped away, and joy will fill every heart. Now, the healings are unto holiness (John 5:1-18)! Jesus manifests God’s great love for us not by setting us free from sickness now, but by delivering us from sin now and from sickness later! For us to participate with Him in His “healing” work means laying down our lives to see orphans and all others delivered from the power of sin even more intently than we lay down our lives to see them delivered from the grip of sickness and suffering. Working alongside Jesus means working to alleviate eternal suffering with as great an energy as we work to alleviate temporal suffering.

May we increasingly be a people who embrace great pain (like adoption, like summers in an orphanage, like a life among the street children) to care for the little ones that Jesus loves. May the love of Christ compel us to use our time and talents in finding new and creative ways to meet their very real, physical, and persistent needs. But may we never get caught up in the cruelty of comforting children on their way to hell. May we never labor only to alleviate statistics, but always to introduce them to their Savior! This is love, and without this, there is no true love.

The Mystery of Christian Contentment

Reading Tim Challies’ blog (see link to the right) over the past months turned me on to a little book by 17th century British Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs called The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. Phil Simpson has an entire blog dedicated to Burroughs (jeremiahburroughs.blogspot.com) and has this to say about his favorite Puritan preacher:

Men like Burroughs were first-rate thinkers; they could take a truth from Scripture, and meditate on the implications and ramifications of that truth, and come back with a veritable treasure trove of jewels, which they then share with their readers. However, their words were not, as they are often mischaracterized, “stale intellect”. Rather, Burroughs and his fellow Puritans were preachers of the highest rank. They would present a truth, apply it practically to the life of the hearer, and then exhort with passion and conviction. The adage which is often ascribed to the Puritans is true; they preached with “light and heat”; They would illuminate the head, then preach warmly to the heart.

Chapter 2 of Burrough’s book is a rich repository of the “treasure trove of jewels” that can be had when men and women who have their minds shaped by long and loving meditation on the whole of Scripture, focus their attention on a single verse. In chapter 1, Burroughs takes Paul’s confession from Philippians 4:11, “I have learned to be content in whatever state I am” and begins to polish and examine the many faces of this increasingly rare jewel of Christian contentment.

He sets up his second chapter by describing “the mystery of contentment” like this:

How to join these two together: to be sensible in affliction as much as a man or woman who is not content; I am sensible of it as fully as they, and I seek ways to be delivered from it it as well as they and yet still my heart abides content – this is, I say, a mystery, and very hard for the carnal mind to understand. But grace teaches such a mixture, teaches us how to make a mixture of sorrow and joy together ; and that makes contentment, the mingling of joy and sorrow, of gracious joy and gracious sorrow together. Grace teaches us how to moderate and to order an affliction so that there shall be a sense of it, and yet for all that contentment under it.

When Burroughs declares this contentment a “mystery”, he means it is something that we cannot understand and apply without being trained in the “art” of it. So he sets out in chapters 2-4 to “open to [us] the art and mystery of contentment.” He proceeds to unpack it by identifying a string of paradoxes that are simultaneously true of the contented Christian. Here are the first seven in his own words:

1. He is the most satisfied man in the world, and yet the most unsatisfied man in the world. A little in the world will content a Christian for his passage, but all the world, and ten thousand times more, will not content a Christian for his portion. A heart that is made for God can be filled with nothing else but God. A gracious heart knows it is capable of God, therefore he is content if he has but a crust of bread and water when that is God’s disposal of him in this world, but he is not satisfied with the promise of all the world, without not God.

2. A Christian comes to contentment, not so much by way of addition but by way of subtraction. Contentment does not come by adding to what you want, but by subtracting from your desires. The world is infinitely deceived in thinking that contentment lies in having more than we already have. Here lies the bottom and root of all contentment, when there is an evenness and proportion between our hearts and our circumstances. [I would want to qualify what Burrough's is saying here by adding that it is because of the infinitely superior satisfaction that we find in Christ that we ratchet down our desires for the things of this world. Otherwise the contentment he is describing here seems little different than a stoic renunciation of pleasure, which is not Christian contentment at all.]

3. A Christian comes to contentment, not so much by getting rid of the burden that is on him, as by adding another burden to himself. What, do you think there is no way for the contentment of your spirit, but to get rid of your burden? O you are deceived. If you got it off, the burden would be right back on you again. The way of contentment is to add another burden, that is, to labor to load and burden your heart with you sin; the heavier the burden of your sin is to your heart, the lighter will the burden of your affliction be to your heart, and so you shall come to be content. If a man’s estate is broken, how shall this man have contentment? By the breaking of his heart. God has broken your estate; oh seek Him for the breaking of your heart likewise. Indeed, a broken heart and a whole heart, a hard heart, will not join together; there will be no contentment. But a broken estate and a broken heart will so suite on another, as that there will be more contentment than there was before.

4. It is not so much the removing of the affliction that is upon us as the changing of the affliction…I mean in regard to the use of it, though for the thing itself affliction remains. “Oh that it may be gone” cries the carnal heart. “No” says a gracious heart, “there is a power of grace to turn this affliction into good, to take away the sting and the poison of it.” Grace has the power to turn afflictions into mercies. Christianity would teach contentment, though poverty continues. It will teach you how to turn your poverty to spiritual riches. You shall be poor still as to your outward possessions, but this shall be altered; whereas before it was a natural evil to you, it comes now to be turned to a spiritual benefit to you. And so you come to be content. Godly men get more riches out of their poverty than out of their revenues.

5. A Christian comes to this contentment not by making up the wants of his circumstances, but by the performance of the work of his circumstances. A carnal heart thinks, “I must have my wants made up or else it is impossible that I should be content.” But a gracious heart asks, “What is the duty of the circumstances God has put me into? Let me exert my strength to perform the duties of my present circumstances. Others spend their thoughts on things that disturb and disquiet them, and so they grow more and more discontented. Let me spend my thoughts in thinking what my duty is.”

6. A gracious heart is contented by the melting of his will and desires into God’s will and desires, by this means he gets contentment. A gracious heart will say, “O what God would have, I would have too; I will not only yield to it, but I would have it too.” So that, in this sense, he comes to have his desires satisfied though he does not obtain the thing he desired before; still he comes to be satisfied with this, because he makes his will to be at one with God’s will. What a sweet satisfaction a soul must have in this condition, when all is made over to God.

7. The mystery consists not in bringing anything from the outside to make my condition more comfortable, but in purging out something that is within. “From whence are wars, and strifes? Are they not from your lusts that are within you?” (Js. 4:1). So if those lusts that are within, in your heart, were got out, your condition would be a contented condition.

Many of these points are driven home with simple and powerful illustrations which I would love to include but which would make a too-long post even longer!  May we each grow in the art and mystery of Christian contentment as we set about what God has given us to do this week! Even if you just pick one of these seven fronts to work on this week, do it in the strength He provides, and with the confidence that He is and He supplies all you need!