Recently in Gospel-Centered Living Category

If you didn't get the chance to hear our interview today on Calling for Truth, you can stream the audio here or download it here. I first posted about this interview yesterday at my adoption blog.

Early today Kevin Boling and Paul Dean interviewed Laura Godwin (Director of Carolina Hope and adoptive mother), Dr. Voddie Baucham (conference speaker, adoptive parent and author of Family-Driven Faith), and me on the wonderful subject of adoption. If I may say so myself, it was an excellent interview. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing and learning from what Laura and Voddie had to say about this topic that is so close to the heart of God.

If you are interested in learning more about adoption and the relationship between spiritual and earthly adoption, let me encourage you to listen to this interview. Also, I am available to speak on theological adoption and its implications for the earthly practice of adoption in churches, Sunday school classes, and Bible studies, as well as conduct workshops. You can contact me through Carolina Hope’s office (go to our website’s contact page).

"The gospel word and the gospel community are essential. My heart needs to hear that word often if it is to be filled with 'inexpressible and glorious joy'. It is among the community of God's poeple that the word will be brought to bear on my life frequently and perceptively. It is through his word and among his people that the Holy Spirit works to break this sinner's heart and renews it so that I love God - truly, madly and deeply" (Total Church: A radical reshaping around gospel and community, p. 203).

Tim Chester on a better meeting place from Hebrews 8-9. He writes:

"At work … In the home … At school … You can be close to God. Maybe work or school feels a million miles away from church … When the pressure’s on at work, you may want to close your eyes, pause for a moment and remember that [you] can meet God in those moments and come before him boldly to find grace and help in time of need."

I love the book of Hebrews.

Check out these two sermons by Charlie Boyd of Southside Fellowship.

How the Gospel Changes Everything: Rescued (Galatians 1:1-5) How the Gospel Changes Everything: No Other Gospel (Galatians 1:6-12)

Timmy Brister announced his blog's gospel-centered resources page. It contains lists of books, blogs, articles, and media to aid in enriching gospel-understanding. His plan is to update it regularly.

You can download Mike Bullmore's "The Functional Centrality of the Gospel in the Life of the Local Church MP3" for free now at Sovereign Grace Ministries Store. It's excellent. Check it out.

One:22 blogs about a "preaching the gospel to yourself diagram."

Download this free sermon from The Crowded House entitled "The priority of the gospel." It's the first sermon from their series on what The Crowded House values. I've been greatly challenged by them the last few weeks. Excellent stuff for sure.

:: click here for the previous post on gospel-centered talk around the blogosphere ::

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis write:

"People need to encounter the church as a network of relationships rather than a meeting you attend or a place you enter. Mission must involve not only contact between unbelievers and individual Christians, but between unbelievers and the Christian community. We want to build relationships with unbelievers. But we also need to introduce people to the network of relationships that make up that believing community so that they can see Christian community in action.

In our experience people are often attracted to the Christian community before they are attracted to the Christian message. If a believing community is a persuasive apologetic for the gospel then people need to be included to see that apologetic at work. People often tell me how they have tried telling their unbelieving friends about Jesus, but they do not seem interested. So they want to know what to do next. My answer is to find ways of introducing them to the Christian community" (Total Church, 56-57).

Tim Chester talks about their book, Total Church, here.

I recently discovered The Crowded House as a result of getting a book entitled The Total Church: A radical reshaping around gospel and community by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis. The Crowded House is a network of missional communities in Sheffield and Loughborough, England, that are committed to church planting. Most of their churches meet in homes and are committed to:

I've only just finished the third chapter of Total Church but have already been deeply challenged by its contents. It is not a book for those who are content with being content to play church or who think of church participation as one activity among others that they are involved in. Tim Chester and Steve Timmis are clearly passionate about the church, that is, about Christian community that is intentionally centered on the gospel and mission. Tim and Steve write, "Most gospel ministry involves ordinary people doing ordinary things with gospel intentionality" (61). "Being gospel-centred means being mission-centred, for the gospel is a missionary word. The gospel is good news. It is a word to be proclaimed. You cannot be committed to the gospel without being committed to proclaiming that gospel" (32).

Here are some quotations I've highlighted so far in my reading of this, what I'm finding to be, deeply challenging book:

"If the gospel is to be at the heart of church life and mission, it is equally true that the church is to be at the heart of gospel life and mission" (37).

"An identity that I construct for myself is far removed from an identity I receive by grace. Churches are full of people trying to earn their identity or prove their worth. As a result we lack assurance or contentment, or put others down to bolster our own self-perception, or are dependent on the approval of others, or are self-righteous or vulnerable to any circumstance that prevents us from fulfilling our ministry. But the key defining relationship for Christians is our relationship with God. Who am I? I am a child of God, the bride of his Son and the dwelling place of his Spirit. And this identity is given to me by grace" (38).

"Divine personhood is defined in relational terms. The Father is the Father because he has a Son. God is persons-in-community. Human personhood, too, is defined in relational terms. You can no more have a relation-less person than you can have a childless mother or parentless son. The trinitarian understanding of our humanity suggests we should define ourselves by the network of relationships in which we live...I am a person-in-community...My being in Christ means being in Christ with those others who are in Christ. This is my identity. This is our identity" (39).

"In our experience, people are often enthusiastic about community until it impinges on their decision-making. For all their rhetoric, they still expect to make decisions by themselves and for themselves. We assume we are masters of our own lives. 'It's my money, it's my life, it's my future,' we say, 'so it's my decision.' In contrast, in The Croweded House we 'expect one another to make decisions with regard to the implications for the church and to make significant decisions in consultation with the church.' A married man must take into account his wife and family, consulting with them over significant decisions. It should be the same in the family of God...In the Christian community we belong to one another and so we are responsible for one another and make decisions together. This is not a process of 'heavy shepherding' where the leader tells people what to do. Our statement does not say decisions are made for people. It says they are made with regard to the community to which they belong" (45).

More to come...

This is so very good and helpful!

“The great gospel imperatives to holiness are ever rooted in indicatives of grace that are able to sustain the weight of those imperatives. The Apostles do not make the mistake that’s often made in Christian ministry. [For the Apostles] the indicatives are more powerful than the imperatives in gospel preaching. So often in our preaching our indicatives are not strong enough, great enough, holy enough, or gracious enough to sustain the power of the imperatives. And so our teaching on holiness becomes a whip or a rod to beat our people’s backs because we’ve looked at the New Testament and that’s all we ourselves have seen. We’ve seen our own failure and we’ve seen the imperatives to holiness and we’ve lost sight of the great indicatives of the gospel that sustain those imperatives. … Woven into the warp and woof of the New Testament’s exposition of what it means for us to be holy is the great groundwork that the self-existent, thrice holy, triune God has — in Himself, by Himself and for Himself — committed Himself and all three Persons of His being to bringing about the holiness of His own people. This is the Father’s purpose, the Son’s purchase and the Spirit’s ministry” (Sinclair Ferguson).

(HT: John Fonville)

My family and I leave today to join Colonial Student Ministries at Teen Valley Ranch Christian Camp & Retreat Center for the week (June 25-29). Colonial's Pastor of Student Ministries, Jason Wredberg, invited me to come and speak five times on gospel-centered living to approximately 250 senior high teens. My sermon titles are:

Session One: The Gospel of God Session Two: The Story of the Gospel (Matthew 1-4) Session Three: Living in the Story of the Gospel (Romans 1:16) Session Four: Preaching the Gospel to Ourselves (Psalm 103) Session Five: The Gospel: Coming Full Circle

I really like what Colonial Student Ministries is trying to do with this group of young adults. You can get an idea of what they are all about by reading this article (Justification of Gospel Centeredness) by Colonial's Director of Student Community, Nik Lingle.

If you think about it, please pray for me as I seek to faithfully preach the gospel to this group and to myself throughout the week.

This excellent post on a recent Tim Keller talk was written by Darryl Dash of Dashouse.com:

Last Saturday morning, I attended the President's Breakfast at Gordon-Conwell. I knew that I wasn't in Kansas anymore when I asked the gentleman next to me how long he'd lived in the area, and he replied that the King had granted his family their property in 1626. Lots of other fascinating stories and some good food, but I was really there to hear Tim Keller.

If you know Keller's ministry, you know that he is going to remind us of the Gospel in relation to whatever he's talking about. I was curious to see what he'd talk about to donors, trustees, and D.Min. graduates.

Dr. Keller gave one insight into ministry. We in ministry, he said, tend to mistake spiritual gifts with spiritual fruit, maturity, and character. It's one of our most deadly mistakes. He then unpacked this in three points: a biblical perspective, practical perspective, and the question, "What do we do about this?"

1. Biblical Perspective

1 Corinthians 13 reminds us that we can have great gifts, visionary leadership, and be active in social justice. If we have the qualities he mentions in verses 1 to 3, our church will likely grow big. But without love, none of this matters.

You can grow your church, and at the same time be almost spiritually dead inside. You can grow a church but it can be driven by insecurity. You can have abilities and talents, and God can use you, but you can lack grace in the heart.

Preaching and pastoring can be effective without grace - but your inner life, your love and character, can't be. Charity and Its Fruit by Jonathan Edwards is helpful in this area.

2. Practical Perspective

In ministry, it's inevitable that we'll have to tell people of the greatness of God when, at times, we don't have a sense of it in our own lives. There are only two ways to respond to this.

One option is to realize that we need a prayer life beyond what we've ever known. What about the dry times? Even in the dry times, there is power in confessing our fragility. It brings us back to grace. We become more dependent, less arrogant.

The other option is to throw ourselves into the busyness of ministry looking for results. It's like a spiritual sugar. It's like eating Twinkies. It fills the hole but not for long, and we're going to need a lot more in the morning. We often try to fill ourselves with ministry success rather than God's grace.

Gifts can't substitute for fruit. We can be do ministry out of fullness or emptiness. Our spouse will know the difference. This is where all the hidden stuff reveals a lot, such as pornography and binge eating.

Practically, grace can even compensate for a lack of giftedness. There are three basic clusters within ministries: public speaking, pastoring/counseling, and leading. Nobody does all three well. Godliness compensates for weakness in any one of these areas. For example, you can be godly and a poor speaker, but your godliness will lead you to keep your message short, and if you are truly godly you won't be boring for 15 minutes. You can be a poor counselor but if you are godly you will be a good listener. Grace compensates for a lack of giftedness.

3. What Do We Do About This?

It's both simple and hard. Spurgeon said don't save souls to save our own soul. Dr. Keller said that he never used to understand this. Now he realizes that it's possible to save souls to try and fill the hole in our hearts.

At one point, Dr. Keller came to realize that he was seeking his own justification through his preaching. He was being his own functional Savior. We often make the mistake of identifying our self-worth with our ministries.

The solution is to use the Gospel on our own hearts.

Before Robert Murray McCheyne died, he preached on Isaiah 60:1. They found a letter by his bedside when he died. The letter was from someone who heard him preach his last sermon. That sermon, the letter said, brought him to Christ, but it wasn't what he said in the sermon. It's what he saw in McCheyne. "I saw the glory of the Savior resting on you."