Into the Life of Jesus

Russell Moore is a good writer. When I read this in the latest issue of Christianity Today my heart lept for joy:

Perhaps we dread death less from fear than from boredom, thinking the life to come will be an endless postlude to where the action really happens. This is betrayed in how we speak about the ‘afterlife’: it happens after we’ve lived our lives. The kingdom, then, is like a high-school reunion in which middle-aged people stand around and remember the ‘good old days.’ But Jesus doesn’t promise an ‘afterlife.’ He promises us life – and that everlasting. Your eternity is no more about looking back to this span of time than your life now is about reflecting on kindergarten. The moment you burst through the mud above your grave, you will begin an exciting new mission – one you couldn’t comprehend if someone told you. And those things that seem so important now – whether you’re attractive or wealthy or famous or cancer-free – will be utterly irrelevant.

The kingdom of God, both now and in the age to come, is ultimately about what Paul calls being ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. 3:3-4) – finding your life and mission in Jesus’ own, not in fitting him into the kingdom you design for yourself. For too long, we’ve called unbelievers to ‘invite Jesus into your life.’ Jesus doesn’t want to be in your life. Your life’s a wreck. Jesus calls you into his life. And his life isn’t boring or purposeless or static. It’s wild and exhilarating and unpredictable.

Seeing our lives now, and the universe around us, as precursors to the life to come, we’re freed from the ingratitude that turns away from God’s good gifts. We pour ourselves into loving, serving, and working because these things are seeds of the tasks God has for us in the next phase. At the same time, we don’t invest any of those things with infinite meaning. My life’s meaning isn’t found in the brief interval from birth to grave – in a happy marriage, a satisfying job, or the kind of ‘success’ my in-laws would recognize at the Thanksgiving table.

Instead, I can give thanks to God for a life, a universe, and a flow of history that are, in the long run, Christ-shaped. I long for the arrival of the kingdom that has long bubbled around us, invisible as yeast. And I yearn for the moment when, an heir to the throne of the cosmos, I join with my brothers and sisters – and our Galilean pioneer – to sing out, ‘Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for yesterday we were dead.’

“A Purpose Driven Cosmos: Jesus Christ embodies the meaning of life, the goal of history, and the pattern of the future,” in Christianity Today (February, 2012), 33.

How We Should Live in the City

The second-century Epistle to Diognetus offers a self-portrait of the early Christian community:

For Christians are distinguished from the rest of men neither by country nor by language nor by customs. For nowhere do they dwell in cities of their own; they do not use any strange form of speech. … But while they dwell in both Greek and barbarian cities, each as his lot was cast, and follow the customs of the land in dress and food and other matters of living, they show forth the remarkable and admittedly strange order of their own citizenship. They live in fatherlands of their own, but as aliens. They share all things as citizens and suffer all things as strangers. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and every fatherland a foreign land. … They pass their days on earth, but they have their citizenship in heaven.

I pray this would describe our church in Chicago!

Advice to Young Pastors

I just finished Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert’s book, What is the Mission of the Church?. The Epilogue is describing a fictional, young, zealous church planter wanting to start “a new kind of church.” In it he has a conversation with an older, seasoned pastor. I thought this piece of advice was especially helpful:

You need to remember that you are not the Messiah. You don’t have to build the kingdom. That’s God’s work. You don’t have to atone for anyone’s sins. Jesus has taken care of that. I know you have big plans and dreams. That’s good. Really it is. But big plans are only accomplished after many days and years of small things. What I’m trying to say is, pray for the extraordinary, but expect the ordinary. Don’t try to do too much right away. This is a big city in a big country in a big world. Get to know your neighbors. Invest in a few key leaders. Work hard at your sermons and don’t fret about changing the planet.

Practice patience. Lots of patience. And a day off every week. Don’t forget that.

Bonhoeffer on Preaching

Here are just a few quotes gleaned from Metaxas’ biography of Deitrich Bonhoeffer on the nature and practice of preaching:

Metaxas’ explanation of Bonhoeffer’s take on preaching – “Anything good must come from God, so even in a sermon that was poorly written and delivered, God might manifest himself and touch the congregation. Conversely in a sermon wonderfully written and delivered, God might refuse to manifest himself. The ‘success’ of the sermon is utterly dependent on the God who breaks through and ‘grasps’ us, or we cannot be ‘grasped’” (81).

In a letter from Bonhoeffer describing his experience in America – “The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events. As long as I’ve been here, I have heard only one sermon in which you could hear something like a genuine proclamation…. In New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life” (106).

“Bonhoeffer took preaching seriously. For him a sermon was nothing less than the very word of God, a place where God would speak to his people. Bonhoeffer wanted to impress this idea on his ordinands, to help them see that preaching was not merely an intellectual exercise. Like prayer or meditation on a scriptural text, it was an opportunity to hear from heaven, and for the preacher, it was a holy privilege to be the vessel through whom God would speak. Like the incarnation, it was a place of revelation, where Christ came into this world from outside it” (272).

Recollections of Bonhoeffer’s best friend, Eberhard Bethge, on Bonhoeffer’s instruction to his seminary students on preaching – “Write you sermon in daylight; do not write it all at once; ‘in Christ’ there is no room for conditional clauses; the first minutes on the pulpit are the most favorable, so do not waste them with generalities but confront the congregation straight off with the core of the matter; extemporaneous preaching can be done by anyone who really knows the Bible” (272).

To his friend Franz Hildebrandt – “A truly evangelical sermon must be like offering a child a fine red apple or offering a thirsty man a cool glass of water and then saying: Do you want it?” (272).

Other advice he gave his seminarians – “We must be able to speak about our faith so that hands will be stretched out toward us faster than we can fill them…. Do not try to make the Bible relevant. Its relevance is axiomatic…. Do not defend God’s Word, but testify to it…. Trust to the Word. It is a ship loaded to the very limits of its capacity!” (272).

“He had once told a student that every sermon must contain ‘a shot of heresy,’ meaning that to express the truth, we must sometimes overstate something or say something in a way that will sound heretical – though it must certainly not be heretical” (364).

In a letter to his parents from Tegel prison – “The occasional appearances of you and Maria, for a brief hour as though from a great distance, are really the thing for which and from which I principally live. If, besides that, I could sometimes hear a good sermon on Sundays… it would still be better” (459; emphasis mine).

Bonhoeffer on Death

I just finished Eric Metaxas’ engaging biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This section of a sermon Bonhoeffer gave several years before his death at the hands of the Nazis I found very powerful:

No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of God, no one has yet heard about the realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existence.

Whether we are young or old makes no difference. What are twenty or thirty or fifty years in the sight of God? And which of us knows how near he or she may already be to the goal? That life only really begins when it ends here on earth, that all that is here is only the prologue before the curtain goes up—that is for young and old alike to think about. Why are we so afraid when we think about death?… Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God’s Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace.

How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world?

Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 531.

Community Idolatry

I long and pray for deeper community in our church in 2012. This is a good heart check on motivations from Bob Thune and Will Walker:

Community is about God. Community exists to declare his praises and to exalt his goodness and to display his excellencies. True community – the community we were made for – is God-centered and God-focused and God-exalting.

The reason our attempts at community are often shallow, stale, and unfulfilling is that we have made community about ourselves. Perhaps we could call this “community idolatry.” Instead of worshiping God, we worship idols. We jump into the vehicle of community and use it to chase our own false gods. The chart below outlines some of the ways our idolatry plays out in community.

Heart Idol // Underlying Desire // What it often sounds like in a “Christianized” or church setting…

approval // I want a community that always approves of me and never challenges my opinions or preferences // “Can’t we all just get along? Why do we have to talk about issues that bring disagreement or conflict?”

control // I want a community that meets on my schedule, fits my priorities, and doesn’t make demands // “I’d love to be in community, but I’m really busy, and nothing really works with my schedule…”

reputation // I want a community that thinks highly of me // “I DO repent of sin, in my own personal life; I just don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about it in a group setting.”

success // I want a community that’s successful – where we’re making progress and ‘getting stuff done’ (according to my criteria) // “This community feels like a waste of time. We’re not accomplishing anything!”

security // I want a community where I am safe, secure, and never threatened // “We need to spend more time together, so we can really grow deep and feel safe with each other…”

pleasure // I want a community that’s always fun and enjoyable and doesn’t take any work // “Meeting every Tuesday night seems really forced. Why can’t we just hang out spontaneously?”

knowledge // I want a community that gives me a platform to share everything I know // “We don’t study the Bible enough in this group; we should talk less about people’s lives and more about Scripture.”

recognition // I want a community where I can ‘stand out from the crowd’ and be recognized for the awesome person that I am // “I’ve led groups like this before… would you like me to lead this one?”

comfort // I want a community made up of my already-existing friends, where I don’t have to work to get to know anyone // “I tried to join a community group, but the relationships just weren’t natural; we didn’t have much in common…”

Underneath all these idols is the basic idol of SELF. Our various heart idols are tightly nuanced forms of self-worship. What kills community is the fact that we love ourselves more than we love God and others. Only the Bible recognizes that what really hinders community is self-worship. Every neighborhood, every city, every society is an attempt at creating community. But the standard human approach to community is external – find better friends, be nicer to people, build a more stable and just society. Only the Bible says: repent and worship God. The path to true, healthy community is the path of repentance and faith. And this path is made possible through the gospel.

HT: Nick Carter

Dare to be a Sinner

This is one of my favorite quotes from a much marked up copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together:

“Confess you faults one to another” (Jas. 5:16). He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, notwithstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final break-through to fellowship does not occur, because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everybody must conceal his sin from himself and from the fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are sinners!

But it is the grace of the Gospel, which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner that you are, to God who loves you. He wants you as you are; He does not want anything from you, a sacrifice, a work; He wants you alone. “My son, give me thine heart” (Prov. 23:26). God has come to you so save the sinner. Be glad! This message is liberation through truth. You can hide nothing from God. The mask you wear before men will do you no good before Him. He wants to see you as you are, He wants to be gracious to you. You do not have to go on lying to yourself and your brothers, as if you were without sin; you can dare to be a sinner.

John W. Doberstein, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 110.

All Men Seek Happiness

From the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (#425):

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both,
attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

And yet after such a great number of years, no one without faith has reached the point to which all continually look. All complain, princes and subjects, noblemen and commoners, old and young, strong and weak, learned and ignorant, healthy and sick, of all countries, all times, all ages, and all conditions.

A trial so long, so continuous, and so uniform, should certainly convince us of our inability to reach the good by our own efforts. But example teaches us little. No resemblance is ever so perfect that there is not some slight difference; and hence we expect that our hope will not be deceived on this occasion as before. And thus, while the present never satisfies us, experience dupes us, and from misfortune to misfortune leads us to death, their eternal crown.

What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.

The Vestibule

Francis Schaeffer on not letting orthodox doctrine be disconnected from a living relationship with the living Christ.

Doctrinal rightness and rightness of ecclesiastical position are important, but only as a starting-point to go on into a living relationship – and not as ends in themselves.

[Take the Reformation, for example.] The Roman Catholic Church had come to teach the wrong doctrines. And I feel that most of the Reformation then let the pendulum swing and thought if only the right doctrines were taught that all would be automatically well. Thus, to a large extent, the Reformation concentrated almost exclusively on the “teaching ministry of the Church.”

In other words almost all the emphasis was placed on teaching the right doctrines. In this I feel the fatal error had already been made. It is not for a moment that we can begin to get anywhere until the right doctrines are taught. But the right doctrines mentally assented to are not an end in themselves, but should only be the vestibule to a personal and loving communion with God.

The danger of orthodoxy, even true orthodoxy, is in falling off the other side of the knife blade: that is, in stating the intellectual position and then placing a period. What we must ask the Lord for is a work of the Spirit . . . to stand on a very thin line: in other words, to state intellectually (as well as understand, though not completely) the intellectual reality of that which God is and what God has revealed in the objectively inspired Bible; and then to live moment by moment in the reality of a restored relationship with the God who is there, and to act in faith upon what we believe in our daily lives.

HT: Trevin Wax

What Is Gospel-Centered Ministry?

I went back a re-watched this talk today that rocked my world the first time I heard it sitting in the chapel at TEDS for the inaugural Gospel Coalition Conference. It still rocks my world and has significantly impacted the way I understand ministry.

Go here and watch it!