Salvation 'in' and 'from'

The revelation of a higher code of morals is no Gospel. By works of law no flesh shall be justified in the sight of God. We are not Christians because we have attained to a standard of morals which can truly be called Christian, but because Christ has given us His Spirit. Our hope now, and for the future, lies not in the attainment of a standard which shall make us fit for His grace; but in the assurance that acceptance of His grace will raise us. We often say that "His name shall be called Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins", with the addition: "not in their sin but from their sins." In so saying, whilst we express one truth, we suppress another; for if Christ does not save us in our sins we shall never be saved from our sins. He comes to us in our sins to save us from them. It is of the essence of the Gospel that Christ comes to men in their sins. He came to save sinners.

- Roland Allen, p. 69, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, 1927.

Spurgeon on evangelism

One man in Paul's dream, who said, " Come over and help us!" was enough to constrain him; and here are millions not in a dream, but in open vision, who all at once say, "Come and help us." Did we say, just now, we could not ? Surely we must recall our words and say, "We must." Good Master, we must! If we cannot, we must. We feel our weakness, but there is an impulse within us that says we must do it, and we cannot stop, we dare not — we were accursed if we did. The blasts of hell and the wrath of heaven would fall upon us if we renounced the task.

The world's only hope— shall we put that out? The lone star that gilds the darkness, — shall we quench that? The Saviours of men, and shall we fold our arms and let them die? No! By the love we bear [in] thy name; by the bonds that unite us to thee; by everything that is holy before God and humane in the sight of our fellow mortals; by everything that is tender and gentle in the throbbing of our hearts and the yearning of our bowels, we say we must, though we feel we cannot.

- Charles Spurgeon, from a sermon on Jesus' feeding of the 5,000

Christian spirituality

In the context of speaking about 21st century spiritual trends in the Church that have dislocated spirituality from that of the ancient church, Webber notes how the experiential spirituality of pietism and revivalism have turned into narcissism. He says,

Evangelism's focus on God's story taking experiential root in our lives is in itself not narcissistic. It only becomes narcissistic when one becomes fascinated with his or her own journey and gives priority to self-reflection. Our contemplative wonder and awe is not to focus on the spiritual journey of the self but on the journey of God who creates and became incarnate in his own creation to re-create. And our participation in the spiritual life is not a continuous search for a transcendent experience but the transfiguration of this life through a life lived in the continual pattern of baptism - dying to sin and rising to the life of the Spirit.
-Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace

"The Christian way of knowing [the truth about God]," Webber says, "is reflection on Scripture [God's revelation about himself] within community [that lives God's revelation]."

And "spiritual theology," says Eugene Peterson, "is the attention we give to lived theology - prayed and lived, for if it is not prayed, sooner or later it will not be lived from the inside out and in continuity with the Lord of life."

According to Webber, the problem with much contemporary spirituality, Christian or otherwise, is that it is focused on and preoccupied with the self. In Christianity this is manifest in spiritualities of legalism, intellectualism, and experientialism. True spirituality is not only centered on God revealed in Christ, but proceeds from God's story of creation, incarnation-Christ's birth, life, death, and resurrection, and re-creation through the Spirit.

These differing perspectives will manifest themselves in how we interact over issues from worship styles and environmentalism, to ethical discrepancies, doctrinal disagreements, and relational conflict of all kinds. In short, what is at stake is the Gospel, which is the "power of God for salvation to all who believe, the Jew first and to the Greek."

Prayer for the Church

Let your continual mercy, O Lord, cleanse and defend your Church; and, because it cannot continue in safety without your help, protect and govern it always by your goodness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

HT: Scot McKnight @ JesusCreed.org

I'm glad I'm not one of these... :)

	Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus - Cite This Source - Share This
Main Entry:	missionary
Part of Speech:	noun
Definition:	aide
Synonyms:	Holy Joe, apostle, bible-beater, clergyman, converter, evangelist, glory roader, herald, messenger, minister, missioner, padre, pastor, preacher, preacher man, promoter, propagandist, proselytizer, revivalist, sin hound, teacher
Source:	Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1) Copyright © 2008 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Jesus, the Apostle

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: "Everyone is looking for you!"
Jesus replied, "Let us go somewhere else - to the nearby villages - so I can preach there also. That is why I have come." So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.
- The Gospel According to Mark, Chapter 1

In his letter to the Ephesian church, Paul says that Jesus gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers to the church for the equipping of his people for "works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." Implicit in the analogy is that Christ, as the head of the body (the source from which all the rest grows), is the fullness of the roles of apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher. So, it goes to reason that we would be able to see these roles active in the ministry of Jesus during his first 33 years of redemptive activity.

Someone recently commented to me that those with apostolic calling and gifting are normally pretty busy, under constant demands from others to be and do for them. It's evident that Jesus' life was no different. "Everyone is looking for you!" seems to be a consistent refrain in Jesus' life. Though I might have seen it as a scratch that causes the record to keep playing the same part of the song over and over, Jesus embraced his chorus much better than I.

That being said, it's instructive to see how Jesus, as the chief apostle, handled the constant draw on his time. First, after a full day of casting out demons and healing the sick, Jesus got up early in the morning to find a solitary place to pray. I've often had those plans in the back of my mind, to get up early, before everyone else, just me and God, a cup of coffee, a journal and my Bible. But, rarely does it happen like I imagine, not usually because I get interrupted, but because I never make it up in time! It is encouraging to think of our Lord, as a man, breaking through the weariness and grogginess of the morning to find a solitary place to pray before the day gets crazy. As many have noted, Martin Luther said that he had so much to do during the day that he must spend at least three hours a day in prayer beforehand!

Of course, when "found out" by his disciples (Peter taking the lead, of course, which reminds of the "let us build tabernacles" situation later on...), did Jesus tell them to go away because he was praying? Did he drop everything and go back to all the people according to their requests? Nope. He bolted! He said, "Let's get out of here!" So, secondly, Jesus stuck to his apostolic (and prophetic) mission. If he was only acting as a shepherd, evangelist, or teacher, it would have made sense just to stay there and care for the flock, teach them about the kingdom, and bring more people into his care. But, Jesus just left them there and went to another village! He knew that there would be a time for more shepherding, evangelizing, and teaching, but it was not the time for him. He had a mission to accomplish, that being proclaiming the kingdom in word and deed and accomplishing the initial stage of it through his crucified life and death. His vision was not first for individual villages but for the entire nation of Israel, thereby accomplishing his mission for the entire world.

Another thing that I recently was told about people that are apostolic, is that in their busyness, they frequently appreciate and respond to those who "don't take 'no' for an answer." You can see that when Jesus goes to the next village, and a leprous man comes to him and begs him, "If you are willing, you can make me clean." So, Jesus, indignant on account of the man's believing that Jesus might not be willing to heal him of his leprosy, said, in my paraphrase, "Of course I am willing! Be healed!" Then, in another apostolic move in keeping with his clandestine mission to proclaim an alternative messianic kingdom than what people were expecting, he told the former leper to keep quiet about his healing so that he, Jesus, could keep traveling from village to village without too much trouble and commotion. Of course, that didn't happen, and, as it says, after that "Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere." It seems that even Jesus still had trouble aligning people to his plan of how he wanted his mission to develop!

It seems, just from a cursory reading of this section of Mark, that Jesus fulfilled the role of shepherd, evangelist, and teacher as he went from town to town caring for people through healing and the like, gathering them together, and teaching them about the kingdom, but it was his apostolic (and possibly his prophetic) mission that kept him going from village to village rather than staying in one place. Like Robert Coleman demonstrates in his book The Master Plan of Evangelism, the entire time he was raising up the twelve disciples, primarily, to extend and establish through all the five roles the Gospel of the kingdom. Those disciples, and theirs that followed, were the ones that continued to expand, extend, and establish in a way that even Jesus could not have done on his own as one man. How good it was for him to go away and send the Helper!

Ecclesiastes for the Day

What do workers gain from their toil?

I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil - this is the gift of God.

I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

Whatever is has already been,
and what will be has been before;
and God will call the past to account.

- Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3

Unless a seed falls to the earth and dies

Like seed I am buried in the ground
dead and unknown,
covered over in Friday,
soaked through with Sunday,
that in my dying,
our dying,
there might be living,
his living.

I go to the field called "Mission"
bought with the blood of a lamb,
I go with my deed labeled "Cross"
with good-news seed in hand,
I go to plant a garden
I go to grow a city
I go to harvest new reality
I go to to till new land.

Salvation, spring up from the ground,
in dogwood blossoms
and pomegranates
and cedars to shade,
populating,
a new garden in waiting.

Becoming "Unbusy"

At the beginning of the month I was reading a book by Eugene Peterson (author of The Message paraphrase of the Bible) called The Contemplative Pastor. In it Peterson talks about the need to clarify the role of a pastor with three adjectives: unbusy, subversive, and apocalyptic. Peterson takes much of the rest of the book to unpack those adjectives, so I won’t attempt that for you, but I will describe which one has been on my mind the most, the “unbusy” pastor. In the past couple of years I have become aware of my tendency to get busy doing stuff, especially ministry stuff, so that deep relationship with God and others moves to the periphery of my heart, mind, and schedule. In defining the “unbusy” pastor, Peterson made some observations that I really identified with. He said that often we are busy, not because we are selfless and noble, but because we are vain and lazy. We subconsciously think that we need to have a hand in everything around us, and we do not expend the mental and spiritual energy to focus on the things that God has called us to, saying “no” to the others. As an analogy, Peterson referred to the harpooner in the novel Moby Dick, quoting from Herman Melville’s commentary on harpooning: “To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not out of toil.” Throughout the chaos of chasing the whale across the seas, the harpooner remained still, not caught up in all the activities of the ship, knowing that his time would come to practice his craft, and in order to be accurate he must be still. In reading this I immediately thought of both Psalm 46:10, “Be still, and know that I am God” and Isaiah 30:15, “In repentance and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and trust is your strength.” As I reflect on this past month of so much ministry activity, I wonder at how the Lord was teaching me to focus and minister from a place of still and quiet trust even amidst the chaos of so many things to do. At the beginning of the month I thought He was telling me to slow down, and now I am seeing that it is more a matter of the habits of my heart and intentionality in my schedule than it is about how filled my week is with activities. Now that things have slowed down, my prayer is that I will be busy practicing stillness before the Lord and focused “harpooning” throughout the days as I live out my calling here in Oklahoma.

Patience

Two quotes on patience that a friend of mine shared with me:

“God never hurries. There are no deadlines against
which He must work. Only to know this is to quiet our
spirits and relax our nerves.” A.W. Tozer

“The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to
believe that God is up to something good for us in all
our delays and detours.” John Piper

This is seriously needed, especially in my line of work when job descriptions are over-weighted with the lead-based expectations of "eternal urgency" and "kingdom consequences".

What is required of us but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God in stillness and acknowledgment that He is God and we are not?

Confessions #14: T-shirts

01.12.08
After a long break for Christmas and New Years, I return, with nothing much significant to say, as you'll see.

"With what end in view do you again and again walk along difficult and laborious paths?

There is no rest where you seek for it. Seek for what you seek, but it is not where you are looking for it.

You seek the happy life in the region of death; it is not there.

How can there be a happy life where there is not even life?

He who for us is life itself descended here and endured our death and slew it by the abundance of his life." - Augustine

In the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, the author talks about how Jesus, by "the power of an indestructible life", was ordained into perpetual priesthood. I've always thought that would make a good Christian t-shirt. On the front it would say "indestructible" in those bold blocky letters that are each vertically misplaced giving that "under construction" or "hey-the-ground-is-shaking" feel. Then on the back it would say "Melchizedek style" in a cool script with the Hebrews verse reference on the back. I think it could sell. Does anyone know Mardel's buyer? Pretty ridiculous, I know. Maybe it's obvious I had the idea while working for a church youth group, or maybe I just made it up... It reminds you of a superhero, does it not?

Of course more serious things could be said, things about seeking life outside of the one who is life, things about his life in us being indestructible, breaking through the cracked and dying flesh-skin of the old man, things about how we ought to follow Paul in seeking the fellowship of Christ's suffering and the power of his resurrection..., but for now it's t-shirt ideas. Have I told you about the one that combines Benjamin Franklin and Aretha Franklin?