A Gospel-less Sermon is No Christian Sermon

Nathan Finn, church history professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, blogs poignantly on whether the SBC has a future:

Some have suggested that Southern Baptists have not lost the gospel. Normally what they mean is that their church has not lost the gospel, which may or may not be true. I suspect that most of our pastors really believe the gospel. Unfortunately, many of them don’t preach it. Sometimes they actually preach sub-Christian sermons that are really just baptized versions of moralism, New Age spirituality, or especially self-help platitudes. I have heard gospel-less sermons in chapel services at all of our seminaries, either live or online. I have heard gospel-less sermons at our pastor’s conferences and evangelism conferences, either live or through other media. I have heard gospel-less sermons in our churches. And yes, I have heard many of them at the SBC annual meeting itself. Maybe these men are just taking it for granted that their audiences already understand the gospel and so they don’t have to articulate it. Maybe. But I know this much: a sermon that does not include the gospel is not a Christian sermon, no matter who preaches it.

HT: Founders

Keller on Christ in all of Scripture

More sermons for you. Tim Keller at the Reform & Resurge Conference 2006:

Is the Bible basically about you and what you need to do, or is it basically about Jesus and His salvation? Which is it?

For example, when you're preaching about David and Goliath, what is it basically about? Is it basically about 'the bigger they come, the harder they fall;' 'if you have faith, you can move mountains;' 'God and you can handle anything;' 'you can face the giants in your life'? That's the way it's usually preached - in which case, it's basically about you.

But, now, if you come with a bias that says every theme, every single theme, eventually comes out in Jesus Christ. You can trace all the threads, whether it's the thread of the temple, or the covenant, or the hero, or every prophet or every priest or every king - every thread, if you run all the way through the Bible, in the end, is Jesus.

We would do well to digest that kind of Christ-centered theology.

Piper Video on the Prosperity "Gospel"

I've seen this video a couple times, and it's still grace-giving, idol-rebuking, and heart-gripping.

Thanks to Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds for posting it.

The Church is Burning

Professor David Wells blogs over at 9 Marks on how the church is burning while we watch:

The problem, though, is that the consequences in our churches of increasingly vapid biblical teaching, personality-centered pastoring, invasive individualism, contempt for the past, and an egregiously non-theological kind of evangelicalism have now been accumulating for years. And this makes for easy-pluckings by anyone who seems to have a better idea or who offers more for less.

Wells' God-centered, God-given, thoroughly biblical insights on modern Christianity make his books well worth picking up.

Dever on Subjective "Guidance"

Pastor Mark Dever blogs over at Together for the Gospel on how many contemporary believers wrongly practice decision-making:

The desire for such a subjective sense of leading, however, is too often, in contemporary evangelical piety, binding our brothers and sisters in Christ, paralyzing them from enjoying the good choices that God may provide, and causing them to wait wrongly before acting.

Indeed.

(HT: JT)

Teaching Men Under Her Husband's Authority

CBMW outlines the situation and gives the case against this anti-Biblical practice.

What Will You Tell Your Boys and Girls?

A great post by Pastor John Piper got me thinking - what will you and I tell our children about men and women? How will explain how God made us? How will we explain our differing roles? What will we tell them is important about a man being a man and a woman being a woman? What will we tell them that men should not do and that women should not do? What will all this say about the God who made us so?

Now some of my questions are obviously weighted and weighty, but the question remains for you - what will you teach your children? The way that you teach and display gender roles to your sons and daughters tells them a lot about how they should view not only the world, but most importantly, God.

As Piper points out, how we understand God as masculine - yes, the Bible does use exclusively masculine pronouns and exclusively masculine descriptions of God in all three persons - matters for how we understand His character, worship, missions, gender relationships, marriage, preaching, leadership, singleness, and the Christian life, just to name a few.

So I had to ask myself, and now ask you, what will we tell our children about the way God made men and women so beautifully different and yet complementary? Our words will speak volumes toward how they will understand God Himself.

Worshipping Man at the Mall

On some nights and weekends, I work at a local mall. This weekend, my mall is having a "model & talent search," so yesterday they decided to set the stage up five feet from my kiosk. Needless to say, I've gotten a good look at this modeling extravaganza.

What's sad is that everyone claps and claps and laughs and laughs whenever some little cutie struts the stage. It is ridicule-worthy. What is to applaud when a child simply wants attention? Why are we clapping for children who simply say a few lines and walk across a stage? What is the big deal?

Then I realized that this is the worship of man, plain and simple. The Bible says in Romans 1:21-23,

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

We fail to honor God, even though we know Him, and fail to give Him thanks, so we become worthless in our thinking and our hearts become blind and wicked. We think we are wise and knowledgeable, but we actually have become fools. Then we trade in the infinite glory of God for worthless worship of mere man. We trade out gold for shrapnel, filet minion for rat poison, living water for sewage.

And we do it every day. We care more about what people think of us than what God thinks of us. We want to think about novels and poetry and romance books more than we want to think about God's own Word. We look for ways to make ourselves look better to others instead of trusting God to make us happy in Him. Our foolish hearts are very dark indeed. Come Lord Jesus, come change us by Your Spirit, that we would worship in the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh.

God: In Charge But Not In Control?

Baylor theology professor Dr. Roger Olson,

In response to your recent essay directed against the "Calvinist view" of God's character over at the Baylor Lariat Online, I must ask, how can God be "in charge but not in control"? We are talking about the God of the Bible, aren't we? The God who brings calamity, who exalts kings and takes them down, who burned whole cities with fire from heaven, who exercised His wrath on His only-begotten Son - this is the God of the Scriptures.

You say concerning "the God of Calvinism" that you're "not sure how to distinguish him from the devil," but are you sure how to distinguish your own understanding of God from a mere man? How can the God of the universe, Creator of the ends of the earth, the Sovereign over all creation, not be in control of all things that happen in His universe? He is still GOD, isn't he?

You address the Minneapolis bridge disaster, but the Bible says in Amos 3:6, "Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?" So God clearly ordains and brings disasters upon cities, and it is right for Him to do so for at least three reasons:

1. This is His world, so He can do with it as He pleases.
2. This world is full of wicked sinners, so He can judge us - even using disasters - as He pleases.
3. God uses the frailty of this world to point people in repentance to His never-failing Son.
   

It seems as though you've sacrificed God's true sovereign control at the altar of your false conception of His goodness. Your theological concerns are mainly relieving "God of responsibility for sin and evil and disaster and calamity," but those four things are not the same. God bringing disaster and calamity, like the Minnesota bridge collapse, isn't the same as Him doing sin and evil. He does bring disaster and calamity, and yet He does not sin or do evil. We must affirm both truths about God's character and therefore His work in the universe.

Again I say, it is totally right and good and holy for God to bring disasters upon this world.

Unlike your article, Jesus doesn't tell the worried people in Luke 13:1-5, "Oh, it's okay, God didn't do those terrible things;" He says, "No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." He then offers another disaster as an example!

You, especially, Dr. Olson, have a special charge in this world of helping train those who will teach His Word to the church and to the world. How can you so deny His abundant truth? How can you give your students such hurtful, deceptive answers? I love Jesus and His people, so it hurts my heart to read your article.

You close your essay by commenting about God's sovereignty that, "In light of all the evil and innocent suffering in the world, he must have limited himself." But it seems that the LORD would instruct us first to consult Him on matters of His own character, before we go building conclusions on what our faulty, frail, fallen eyes see in this world.

He has not limited Himself in any way, sir, and I pray that you see and love God in truth, not lies, for His sake and for yours and for the people you serve,

Britt Treece

Arminianism is a Path to Universalism

And I mean this in a philosophical sense - Arminianism is a primrose path to universalism.

Why?

I know tons of believing Arminians, who hold that God saves man, somehow through is own free choices, while still trying to attribute all the glory to God (which free-will "theology" can never do). But still, they try. But I also know several questionable Arminians, who struggle so much with their conception of God's "love" and man's "free will" that they concoct and erect theologies of universal love and salvation.

So what is the link between Arminianism and universalism? The answer is quite simple: their failure to understand of Biblical grace.

The Bible teaches that, because we are all wicked rebels before God, He would be completely just to send anyone to eternally painful punishment. But He chooses to save those whom He will, and that act is all of grace. It is the very definition of grace that He saves some underserving - antideserving! - sinners and does not save others. Both groups, all people, are rebels; yet God chooses whom He will graciously save and whom He will justly damn. It is the heart of Biblical grace.

But Arminians and universal-leaning Christians fail to realize that everyone, whether they "have the opportunity to hear the Gospel" or not, is a God-hating sinner. God has not promised that we will all hear the Gospel. Hearing the Gospel is not a prerequisite for damnation, but it is a prerequisite for salvation.

True theology, then, should push us on to carrying the happy news of God's happy Son to all who will listen, even to the ends of the earth. Universalism, however, is rather lazy. It would rather stay at home and save everyone through a lie than do the hard work to preach the Gospel and see God save people through His truth.

Let us reject the laziness of lies and instead take hold of one Man, singing His truth the world over.

The Shepherd and the Flock

By the providence of God, I have met several older pastors in my recent days here at my job. These genuine, God-loving men tend to be "walking the mall" to stay in shape in their latter years. It got me thinking: What does it look like to be a minister of God? So many men (and women, unfortunately) do it poorly that we have forgotten most of what it means to be an earthen vessel with the treasure of the Gospel and an undershepherd of God's flock, especially in the midst of such theologically-troubled and misguided church in a crooked and perverse generation.

Then, again by the providence of God, I stumbled across an excerpt of an interview with Joel R. Beeke, who is "pastor of the Heritage Netherlands Reformed Congregation in Grand Rapids, MI, president and professor of systematic theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, and author of numerous books including The Quest For Full Assurance and Meet The Puritans."

Here are several points worth pondering:

How should a minister keep his own heart, mind, and will from theological error?

• Keep yourself deeply immersed in the Scriptures, and pray daily to be willing to surrender all to their inerrant truth.
• Surround yourself with sound, godly colleagues and lay people who love you sufficiently to be honest with you, so that iron will sharpen iron.
• Read the best, sound, scriptural, classic books, especially those by the Reformers and Puritans, that address your mind with clarity, convict your conscience with poignancy, bend your wills with conviction, and move your feet with passion.
• Meditate on those truths preached that do your people the most good; in every case, you will discover that they are biblical truths.
• Develop the hide of a rhinoceros so that you won’t be tossed about with every criticism and wind of doctrine while maintaining the heart of a child, so that you will be a tender undershepherd to the needy.

Calvin said that ministers have two voices. One is for the sheep and the other for warding off the wolves. How have you struck the right balance in this regard in your pulpit ministry?

I suppose that one can never be absolutely certain that he is striking the right balance on this critical subject, but here are four guidelines that I find helpful:

• Pray daily for biblical balance in all areas of ministry.
• Love your sheep. Love has a way of balancing out our often imbalanced personalities. Those in error can receive much more from a minister who obviously loves them than from one who comes across as combative.
• Be patient with your sheep. Be willing to teach them the same truth repeatedly, just as the Lord has done with you (cf. Phil. 3:1; 2 Peter 3:1–2).
• Let your "voice for the sheep" always receive the primary accent of your ministry. Truth must ultimately be positive in nature to win the day with a congregation. Many ministers have focused too much on polemical and apologetical theology, often setting up and beating upon straw men in their congregation to the detriment of the flock. Polemics and apologetics must have the proper place of a minor accent in the ministry, so that no error is left unexposed.
• But the minister must expose error wisely, forthrightly, humbly, compellingly, not by lording it over the sheep (2 Tim. 4:1–2; 1 Pet. 5:2–3).

This is sound, Scriptural advice for loving the Lord Jesus and loving His people put under our care. And every believer, not just "pastors," has a ministry to hurting people who need God, be it in the church body or outside.

Is Inclusivism Compassionate?

John G. Stackhouse Jr. is a professor of theology and culture at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He writes in a recent Christian Vision Project essay that, "it is obvious that one does not have to know about Jesus to adopt this posture that results in salvation." Doug Wilson's response to John Stackhouse's inclusivist essay is excellent. In it, he makes the strong point that:

Ironically, this is why the inclusivist position requires us to start minimizing (in our own imaginations) how screwed up the world actually is. If we believe that millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists are groping their way to God in the dark, then we have to look out at the world as though it were jammed full of good intentions. And the problem is that it isn't.

So we don't proclaim Jesus because we are fixing the problem of "not having heard about Jesus." We proclaim Jesus because we are addressing the problem of death, genocide, hatred, murder, rape, slave prostitution, senseless war, snarling greed, and as they say on television, much, much more. The problem with the inclusivist position is not that it is eager for the people to be included -- every Christian wants that. The problem is that when we define the standard downward like this, at the end of the day we find that we have included much more than the people -- we have opened the door to great wickedness as well. This may sound outlandish, but there it is. Tender-hearted accommodation leads to great hardness of heart. And a hardline conservatism at this point, ironically, is tender-hearted.

So when I feel like being compassionate, do I point people to Jesus, or do I pander around their sin? What do you do? What do you believe? Let's expose the heretic inclusivist within and kill him by the Spirit of Jesus.

(HT: JT)

PS - Stackhouse's essay is just another reminder that not every writer (especially on the internet) who has cool graphics, an ultra-hip swagger, and a penchant for nifty God-monikers is telling the truth. Deceivers can take all kinds of forms. Emergent readers beware.

Pride in the Ministry and on the Internet

Thanks to Pastor Thabiti Anyabwhile, I came across this humbling, helpful, and heart-exposing discussion on 1 Timothy 5:1-3 by Carl Trueman in an interview with the Against Heresies blog. My ministering and writing brothers, it is well-worth the read:

What signs of potential doctrinal drift and danger do you need to keep an eye out for in ministerial students?

I am increasingly convinced that pride is the root of problems among students. I was convicted recently by a minister friend quoting to me 1 Tim. 1:5-7 (ESV):

The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.

My friend made two observations about this passage. First, the drift into dubious theological discussion is here described as moral in origin: these characters have swerved from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith; that is why their theology is so dreadful. Second, their desire is not to teach but to be teachers. There is an important difference here: their focus is on their own status, not on the words they proclaim. At most, the latter are merely instrumental to getting them status and boosting their careers.

Thus, what concerns me most is that students may simply desire to be teachers. If that is their motivation, then they have already abandoned a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith, and their theology, no matter how orthodox, is just a means to an end and no sound thing. It is why I am very sceptical of the internal call to the ministry as a decisive or motivating factor in seeking ordination. Nine times out of ten, I believe that the church should first discern who should be considering the Christian ministry, not simply act as a rubber-stamp a putative internal call which an individual may think he has.

Further, such students whose first desire is to be teachers are more likely to try to catch whatever is the latest trendy wave. Orthodoxy is always doomed to seem uncreative and pedestrian in the wider arena; if the aim is to be a teacher, to be the big shot, then it is more likely that orthodoxy will be less appealing in the long run – though there are those for whom orthodoxy too is simply a means to being a celebrity.

If a prideful desire to be a teacher, to be a somebody, is the fundamental problem, then one other aspect which is increasingly problematic is the whole phenomenon of the internet. Now anyone can put their views out for public consumption, without the usual processes of accountability, peer review, careful editing timely reflection etc. which is the norm in the scholarly world and has also been the tradition in the more theologically responsible parts of the Christian publishing industry. The internet has few quality controls and feeds narcissism. Again, I have a friend, a minister in a North American Presbyterian denomination who says that, as he reads many blogs, his overwhelming feeling is one of sadness as he sees men seriously undermining their future ministry through the venom they pour out on others. I think he is right.

Of course, all young theologians and aspiring church leaders say stupid and unpleasant things. I still blush about comments I made 15 or twenty years ago which now seem arrogant and offensive, and certainly unworthy of a Christian. But for those of us who are older, the sins of our youth are thankfully now long vanished from the public sphere; yet such sins committed today can live on indefinitely in cyberspace. I shudder for those who have not yet grasped this basic fact and who say some frightful things on the internet which will come back to haunt them the very first time a church googles their name as part of doing routine background checks on a potential ministerial candidate. But more than that: I shudder at the kind of self-appointed arrogance among ministerial candidates and recently-minted graduates which the internet can foster and intensify.

Paul’s words to Timothy seem prophetic in times such as ours. Students should cultivate pure hearts, good consciences, and a sincere faith. That way they will safeguard their theology from becoming idle speculation.

Wow. So why do I write? Why do you? Do you and I want to speak and teach God's truth so that others may be encouraged and built up and saved in Christ? Or do we want to be teachers? Do I love the status, the name, the feeling, more than I love God? Do you? Oh, brothers, may our souls make their boast in the Lord Jesus(Psalm 34:2).

My Bad Theology of Forgiveness

Reading Pastor Chris Braun's excellent article on atonement and forgiveness, I realized that I have been believing and practicing a false theology of forgiveness. It goes like this - when I feel ready, then I will forgive.

What I fail to see is that the cross is absolutely nothing like this, and it demands absolutely nothing short of completely committed forgiveness from me, the believer. God made a plan, He acted on it, and He forgave! Once and for all! All of His chosen!

God forgive me for thinking that my forgiveness of someone else is dependent on my feelings more than the cross where You forgave me! May I not read such therapeutic, flimsy-handed "feelings" into the atoning death of my Lord!