"Unfashionable"

Kevin DeYoung gives a helpful summary and review of Tullian Tchividjian's new book, "Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different."

How the Gospel Opposes and Overcomes Our Idolatries

Tim Keller is one of the most insightful, helpful, Biblically-wise pastors I know of, and this message on how the Gospel detrones and de-mythologizes our "idols" is one of the most penetrating, significant and life-related messages I've ever heard.

As I listened, it occurred to me that many professing Christians will ever make any real progress in their spiritual lives until they honestly face the issue that Pastor Keller so wisely describes and diagnoses.

I highly recommend that you take the time to view (or listen to) this message.

Here is what I think was the fundamental truth expounded in this message: "Any life not built on God's glory and grace will be built on the deification of something/someone else."

The Bible's Purpose

“The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life. The Bible’s purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome… religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.”

- Timothy Keller
(HT: Tim Keller Wiki)
posted at "Of First Importance"

D.A Carson: The Necessary Consequences of the Gospel Are Not the Gospel Itself

(I've been out of town for a few days, which included taking a break from blogging, but I'm happy to return by recommending some very helpful thinking from D.A. Carson concerning what the Gospel/Good News essentially is.)

From D.A. Carson's editorial in the latest Themelios:

"[O]ne must distinguish between, on the one hand, the gospel as what God has done and what is the message to be announced and, on the other, what is demanded by God or effected by the gospel in assorted human responses.

"If the gospel is the (good) news about what God has done in Christ Jesus, there is ample place for including under “the gospel” the ways in which the kingdom has dawned and is coming, for tying this kingdom to Jesus’ death and resurrection, for demonstrating that the purpose of what God has done is to reconcile sinners to himself and finally to bring under one head a renovated and transformed new heaven and new earth, for talking about God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, consequent upon Christ’s resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Majesty on high, and above all for focusing attention on what Paul (and others—though the language I’m using here reflects Paul) sees as the matter “of first importance”: Christ crucified. All of this is what God has done; it is what we proclaim; it is the news, the great news, the good news.

"By contrast, the first two greatest commands—to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves—do not constitute the gospel, or any part of it. We may well argue that when the gospel is faithfully declared and rightly received, it will result in human beings more closely aligned to these two commands. But they are not the gospel.

"Similarly, the gospel is not receiving Christ or believing in him, or being converted, or joining a church; it is not the practice of discipleship. Once again, the gospel faithfully declared and rightly received will result in people receiving Christ, believing in Christ, being converted, and joining a local church; but such steps are not the gospel."

Read the whole thing.

HT: Justin Taylor

The War That Starts Inside Us: Desires and Demands

Justin Taylor gives a very helpful summary of Paul Tripp's penetrating teaching about how our self-centered desires keep leading us into trouble:


Paul Tripp, in Instrument in the Redeemer's Hands, unpacks James 4:1-10 and the war for the heart according to the following stages:

Stage 1: Desire. "The objects of most of our desires are not evil. The problem is the way they tend to grow, and the control they come to exercise over our hearts. All human desire must be held in submission to a greater purpose, the desires of God for his kingdom." (p. 85)

Stage 2: Demand. ("I must.") "Demand is the closing of my fists over a desire. . . . I am no longer comforted by God's desire for me; I am threatened by it, because God's will potentially stands in the way of my demand. . . . The morphing of my desire changes my relationship to others. Now I enter the room loaded with a silent demand: You must help me get what I want. . . ." (p. 86)

Stage 3: Need. ("I will.") " I now view the thing I want as essential to life. This is a devasating step in the eventual slavery of desire. . . . To 'christen' desire as need is equivalent to viewing cake as I do respiration. . . ." (p. 86)

Stage 4: Expectation. ("You should.") "If I am convinced I need something and you have said that you love me, it seems right to expect that you will help me get it. The dynamic of (improper) need-driven expectation is the source of untold conflict in relationship." (p. 87)

Stage 5: Disappointment. ("You didn't!") "There is a direct relationship between expectation and disappointment, and much of our disappointment in relationships is not because people have actually wronged us, but because they have failed to meet our expectations." (pp. 87-88)

Stage 6: Punishment. ("Because you didn't, I will. . . .") "We are hurt and angry because people who say they love us seem insensitive to our needs. So we strike back in a variety of ways to punish them for their wrongs against us. We include everything from the silent treatment (a form of bloodless murder where I don't kill you but act as if you do not exist) to horrific acts of violence and abuse. I am angry because you have broken the laws of my kingdom. God's kingdom has been supplanted. I am no longer motivated by a love for God and people so that I use the things in my life to express that love. Instead I love things, and use people--and even the Lord--to get them. My heart has been captured. I am in active service of the creation, and the result can only be chaos and conflict in my relationships." (p. 88)

So what do you do when desire has morphed into demand into need into expectation into disappointment into punishment? The first step must be vertical, not horizontal. Because relationship problems are rooted in worship problems, James's solution, Tripp rightly notes, is
"Start with God":

"Submit yourselves therefore to God" (James 4:7).
"Draw near to God" (James 4:8).
"Cleanse your hands . . . and purify your hearts" (James 4:8)
"Humble yourselves before the Lord" (James 4:10).

Kevin DeYoung on the Serious Problem of Prayerlessness

Here's an excerpt from Kevin's good post on the importance of prayer:

Prayerlessness is the measure of our unbelief. We don’t really believe that God answers prayers. We don't really believe that we have not because we ask not. We don't really believe that God can do more than we ask or imagine. True, God doesn't need to hear from us, but he ordained prayer so that we might be convinced of our need for him and he might be glorified in answering our prayers.

"Christless Christianity"...

In an online article by Collin Hansen of "Christianity Today" -- "Death by Deism," about how no merely civil religion alone can sustain a free republic, Hansen refers to and briefly describes the 'Christless Christianity' ("moralistic, therapeutic deism' -- MTD) that's impacting so much of professing evangelicalism today:

Though they aren't journalists, Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton broke one of the biggest stories in contemporary religion with their 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Conducting the most comprehensive study of religion and teenagers to date, the sociologists discovered a newly dominant creed that they dubbed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). Rather than transformative revelation from God, religion has become a utility for enhancing a teenager's life. Smith and Denton lay out the five points of MTD:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Surely American teenagers did not invent this new religion. A quick scan of bestseller lists, television guides, or public school curricula will reveal MTD's appeal. Indeed, the God of MTD sounds like the "cool parent" teenagers adore.

"God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process," Smith and Denton write.

Hansen concludes: "If orthodox Christianity gives way to MTD, American public life may further degenerate into a feel-good free-for-all. No merely civil religion, especially one shaped by MTD, can long sustain a free republic by itself. A nation committed only to liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be left wondering why life is so unfulfilling."

"In my place condemned He stood..."

“Our sins have been punished; the wheel of retribution has turned; judgment has been inflicted for our ungodliness – but on Jesus, the lamb of God, standing in our place. In this way God is just – and the justifier of those who put faith in Jesus, who ‘was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification’ (Romans 4:25).”

- J.I. Packer, In My Place Condemned He Stood (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2008), 40.
posted at "Of First Importance"

"The Real Struggle Between Science and the Supernatural"

From "The Big Picture"

Harvard biologist, Richard Lewontin, speaks frankly about the way in which a prior commitment to materialism functions in much of the scientific community. Refreshing to read such honesty.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of
the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive,
no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

~ “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 7, 1997, 31.

John Piper's Advice for Pastoral Staffs...

At a recent retreat, John Piper shared these principles for maintaining unity even in the midst of secondary differences.

The specific context was relations between pastoral staff members, but the principles apply in many other scenarios as well.

The only choice

"No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. Consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol."

--Simone Weil, 1909-1943

HT: Ray Ortlund

"He loved me, and gave Himself for me..."

Martin Downes has an excellent post regarding how the truth of 'penal substitution' (that Christ's death was his substituting for us, taking the penalty we deserved) is an expression of God's amazing love.

Here's an excerpt -- a quote from J.I. Packer:

The notion which the phrase ‘penal substitution’ expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory. To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy, peace and praise both now and for eternity.

Don't Worry?

More solid, Scriptural, life-related teaching from David Powlison (via Justin Taylor's blog), this time on the theme of overcoming worry.

"Unfashionable"

Justin Taylor gives a good introduction to Tullian Tchividjian's new book, Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different

On the Fear of the Lord

“Fear of the Lord means that I carry around with me such a deep awareness, awe, and reverence for the power, holiness, wisdom, and grace of God that I would not think of doing anything other than living for his glory. Fearing the Lord means that this worshipful awe is the single and unchallenged motivator of everything I think, desire, say, and do.”

~ Paul David Tripp, A Quest for More (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2007), 126.

posted at metanarrative.wordpress.com