Young, restless and reformed

There is a movement at hand in the life of the church across the world, and I believe that in many ways we're part of this movement here in South Africa. We're a number of years behind the US and England, and in fact many other parts of the world. I believe that this video will be a helpful tool...so sit back, grab a pen and paper and kill some bandwidth :) it's worth watching.

Sola Gracia

We continue our look at the 5 Sola's of the protestant reformation. The five things that stand alone as key truths of our faith.

Sola Gracia means that we're saved by God's grace alone.

We live in a society that values the individual and calls us to think well of ourselves. The self-help thinking that is commonly held by people tells you that you have the power within you to change yourself, the power within you to affect the world and the power within to find peace and meaning.

But the Bible never allows us to say that. We see in Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? and God, looking at the creation shortly after he had created humankind did not think well of us. The Bible records these tragic words: Genesis 6:5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Wow, that does not bode well for us does it? And perhaps the greatest challenge is that in this age of self-confidence those kinds of texts are really jarring. People don't like to hear they are not worthy of God's love or that they can bring nothing to God that is of any worth.

The point of these texts is that we cannot save ourselves. We simply don't have it in us. We may desire to be saved and we may even desire to be good, but anyone who has tried to hold fast to a simple New Year's resolution knows that it is almost impossible to even get that right!

And so the gospel is the good news that God the Father achieved everything necessary through Jesus death, burial and resurrection to get us in good standing with him and to free us from everything that holds us in slavery including our default desire for sin.

God has done it all. God is the actor in human salvation and we only respond. It's called grace.

Hebrews 10:14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

Did you hear that? He has perfected...Jesus does the work in making us perfect before God in heaven!

Colossians 1:20 ...and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Jesus death is powerful enough to reconcile all things to God the father, that means he will save you too.

Romans 5:10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

Grace is the life changing truth that God does the work required in saving us and that there is nothing inherently good in us that merits us being saved. And for those of us who through the work of the Holy Spirit recognize our severe shortcomings in the sight of a holy God, this is good news indeed!

It is this truth that we must continue to apply to people's lives in every way that we can. For God does not love good people, but because of his perfect Son, he loves bad bad people, of whom we are of the worst, and that is good news and all world need to hear it!

It reminds me of the words of a song: 'Only by grace can we enter, only by grace can we stand, not by hour human endeavour, but by the blood of the lamb!'

Sola Christos

We are a reformed church and when the Reformation happened the Reformers came up with the 5 solas, sola being Latin for 'alone'.

1. Sola Christos - Christ alone, no saints, Mary or others are need to get to God
2. Sola gracia - grace alone not good works is the means of salvation
3. Sola fidei - faith alone is the way to access all the promises of God not religious rituals
4. Sola scriptura - scripture alone is the final rule of faith and life for the church
5. Soli Deo gloria - For God's glory alone

I thought it would be helpful to blog through these over the next weeks to remind you of the great truths to which we adhere.

Sola Christos - Christ alone

In this day and age we have an obsession with ‘lite’ things that look like the real deal but have half the calories. ‘lite’ beer, ‘lite’ chips there is an obsession with low calorie foods that don’t have real substance so that we can still fit into last year’s jeans and look good on the beach for summer!

Sadly the church has often become Jesus-lite. It may still look like the real thing, but the one person who should be the centre of everything is often conspicuously absent. In fact at a recent service in a mainline church that I attended, I heard Jesus spoken of just twice: once in a scripture reading the other at the end of a prayer. A church without Jesus is NOT a church at all.

Scripture teaches that Jesus is the centre of all things and the fullness of God as Paul reminds the Colossian church Colossians 1:15–17 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

This means that everything we do revolves around Christ. Whether it is preaching up front, teaching children, spending time in rest or working a 9 to 5 job. Jesus is the centre of the life of a disciple.

Jesus is the head of the church and anything that does not point to the head, Christ, needs to be cut out or reshaped into something that is Jesus-full! Too often the church clouds Jesus in all sorts of other things to the point where he is often almost completely hidden. When Jesus is hidden we've lost everything. The Reformation was a reaction against the church taking Jesus out of his role as the only mediator between God and humanity and placing other things or people alongside or sometimes even above Jesus.

We have nothing else to proclaim and nor do we need anything else to proclaim other than Jesus crucified for sin: 1 Corinthians 1:23–24 We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Those looking for truth need us to preach and teach about Jesus. This narcissistic world needs Jesus, not self-serving religion. The hurting need Jesus power and healing, not self-help. The sinner needs Jesus and not do-good moralism. The lost need the Truth and not feel good story telling. Those who are despondent need the work of the Spirit of Christ and not a pep-talk.

Everything we do needs to point people to Jesus and so the writer of Hebrews reminds us Hebrews 12:2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Our job as Jesus leaders, full of the Holy Spirit is to point people to Jesus as John the baptizer did, and we must become less that He might become more. Jesus is everything. He is a treasure of greater worth than anything and when we’re all for Jesus everything else pales into insignificance! Perhaps we might also get to the point that Paul did when wrote Philippians 3:8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

Jesus leaders should have that kind of passion and priority so that they might lead people to Him!

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action | Video on TED.com

Here is a great talk on how leaders inspire action. Sinek's big theme is that if we lead people well we need to give them a 'why' then a 'how' then a 'what' and his argument makes a lot of sense. Much of what he says is very relevant for us as the church. Most organizations and leaders work from 'what' back towards the 'why' and that does not get us very far. Martin Luther King jr. did not say "I have a plan..." King said "I have a dream!"

The great news is that the church has the greatest 'why' in the world. Perhaps the challenge for us as Jesus church is to sharpen up our 'why' - our 'why' is that Jesus died in our place taking upon himself the punishment that was due to us. Undeserved grace is the great 'why' that empowers the church and it is the single big truth that we need to get people to understand.

Church leaders often lament that many of those who claim to follow Jesus don't live as he calls them to live, they live immoral lives or they don't serve or they don't live generously. Perhaps, in line with what Sinek is saying, we need to keep reminding people of the 'why' in powerful ways. Many outside the church, and too many inside the church believe that right action is what following Jesus means (I spent some time debating with a person like this just last week). But they are wrong, it is right belief that causes right action , it is when we're sold out for Jesus that we can actually do what he calls us to do.

If we want to inspire people to greater action give them a cause to live for, and there is no more worthy cause than Jesus and his gospel. The 'how' and the 'what' of following Jesus changes in every location and generation. It will look different in every household and in each individual, but the driving truth is the same: Ephesians 4:5–6 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

Is church membership biblical?

By Matt Chandler“The spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous; she is uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home; she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church and is joined to an adulteress, is separated from the promises of the Church; nor can he who forsakes the Church of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”

— Cyprian, Treatise on the Unity of the Church, 6.

I was 28 when I became the pastor of Highland Village First Baptist Church (now known as The Village Church). I had had a rough go early on in my church experience, and at that time I was not fully out of my “disenchanted with the local church” phase.

In all honesty, I wasn’t sure at the time that church membership was biblical. Despite that, the Spirit had made it all too clear that I was going to be pastoring this small church in the suburbs of Dallas. That was one of the many ironies of my life in those days.

Highland Village First Baptist Church was a “seeker-sensitive” church in the Willow Creek mold and had no formal membership process, although they were actively working on one and wanted the new pastor’s input. I had a strong understanding of the church universal but wasn’t well versed—and, as I said, somewhat skeptical—about the church local. We started growing quickly with young and oftentimes disenchanted 20-somethings who usually had no church background, or bad church backgrounds. They liked The Village because we were “different.” This always struck me as strange because we weren’t doing anything but preaching and singing.

In conversations with these men and women I began to hear things like “The church is corrupt; it’s just about money and a pastor’s ego,” or “I love Jesus, it’s the church I have a problem with.” My favorite one was, “When you organize the church it loses its power.” Although something occasionally resonated in me with these comments (I, along with most of my generation, have authority and commitment issues), I found them confusing since they were being made to me by people who were attending the church where I was the pastor.

A Tool for Accountability in a Pornified Culture

Pornography is a huge issue and the statistics prove it. And for those who belong to Jesus it is as much a challenge as it is for everyone else, if not more so. The evil one will fight and he fights dirty (if you'll excuse the pun) here is a link to a video with Keller, Carson and Piper who make some helpful comments about porn in relation to the gospel, and they give a link to a on-line tool to assist you in facing this common temptation.

A Tool for Accountability in a Pornified Culture

Reading the Bible

I've been thinking a bit about interpreting the Bible as I've been wrestling with some difficult passages over the last while.

What I am finding challenging these says is people who make biblical interpretation complicated. They push us to get back to the original texts. We've got to look at the context of the passage. What would Jewish listeners at the time have thought? Etc.etc

I believe these are all important and helpful and I would encourage every believer to study and be able to understand the times in which the Bible was written as much as possible.

But what concerns me is that we're making it very hard for the average person to really understand the text and we're using these things to undermine the plain and literal reading of the biblical text.

We use context to ignore passages that call us to live differently from how we currently live...either to do what we don't or to stop what we do.

I just wonder how we would live if we read the bible plainly and just did what it said....

Might be an interesting experiment...anyone care to join me?