Dave Kraft who penned the outstanding book leaders who last wrote this helpful post about a leaders vulnerability to evil attack. The Devil is out to get you…seriously! Do you know where he will attack?
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Leaders are targets for the evil one
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Six warning signs we're becoming accidental pharisees
Larry Osborne
Pharisees are more than mere tidbits of ancient history.
The Pharisees’ sad transition from God’s most zealous defenders to Jesus’s archenemies is important for every Christian to understand. As long as our only image of a Pharisee is that of a spiritual loser and perennial enemy of Jesus, we’ll never recognize the clear and present danger in our own life.
I’ve found that becoming a modern-day, accidental Pharisee is a lot like eating at Denny’s. No one wants to go there. We just end up there.
The journey usually starts out innocently enough. It begins with a desire to be at the front of the “following Jesus” line. We step out in faith, make some big changes, clean up areas of sin and compromise, and begin to pursue new spiritual disciplines.
So far, so good. But as we press forward, it’s hard not to notice those who lag behind. And it’s at this point that we have an important decision to make: will we keep our eyes glued on Jesus or will we turn our focus onto those who lag behind?
DON’T LOOK DOWN!
I remember once meeting with a group of men who were passionate about their walk with God. Somehow our conversation turned toward those in the church who were not so passionate. Next thing I knew, they were ripping on the way everyone else raised their children, spent their money, read their Bible, and set their priorities.
Now these were quality men. They were doing far better than most raising their kids, spending their money, reading their Bible, and setting priorities. The problem wasn’t that they noticed the difference. The problem was what they did with the information. They used it to justify looking down on everyone else.
HE HATES HAUGHTY EYES
When I called them on it, they were mildly remorseful, sort of like they’d been busted for a speeding ticket. But it was clear to me that no one felt particularly convicted or determined not go there again. So I decided to take them on a little journey through Scripture to see God’s perspective on the conversation we’d just had.
We started with Satan’s prideful fall and moved on from there. But the shocker for most of them was a list of things God hates. It’s found in Proverbs 6:16–19. Right at the top of his I-hate-it-when-you-do-that list is “haughty eyes,” the disgusted and disdainful look of arrogance that parallels the harsh conversation we’d just had.
There are lots of things that can anger God. Few would guess that looking down on others would be at the top of the list. Yet it is.
Now that got their attention!
But it’s true. Their dismissive and judgmental take on others wasn’t minor chitchat—it was major sin. Top-of-the-list sin.
I wrote Accidental Pharisees because I’ve become increasingly concerned that many in our tribe are making the same mistake. We strive to be at the front of the following-Jesus line. Yet the closer we get to the front, the more we’re tempted to compare ourselves with those in the back.
So here’s a brief list of six of the most telling indicators that we may have inadvertently started down the road of an Accidental Pharisee, looking down on others and trusting in our own righteousness.
1. DISDAIN FOR THOSE AT THE BACK OF THE LINE
Instead of a Jesus-like compassion for those who can’t keep up, we view them with a deepening sense of frustration, cynicism, and a cocky arrogance.
2. A SPIRIT OF EXCLUSIVITY
When thinning the herd becomes more important than expanding the kingdom; or raising the bar becomes more important than helping people climb over it, something has gone terribly wrong.
3. EXTRA-BIBLICAL RULES AND EXPECTATIONS
Few of us would see ourselves as legalists. We think we’ve moved on from old-school legalism because we no longer judge people by what’s in their refrigerator. But the spirit of legalism still runs strong. We now judge people by what’s in their driveway and how big their house is.
4. A PATTERN OF IDOLIZING THE PAST
Whether it’s the New Testament church or the scholars of old, we tend to give them a free pass for their failures. But the present-day bride of Christ and the current crop of leaders whom Jesus has put in place are assailed for their blind spots, failures, and feet of clay. Like the Pharisees of old, we rip on the living prophets and then build monuments to them once they die.
5. A QUEST FOR CLONE-LIKE UNIFORMITY
Jesus had room for Simon the Zealot and Matthew the Tax Collector. Yet sometimes, the more biblically grounded we become, the less room we have for anyone who hasn’t yet learned all that we’ve learned. The result is a circle of fellowship that’s tighter than Jesus’s circle of acceptance.
6. GIFT PROJECTION
“Gift projection” the toxic belief that my calling is everyone else’s calling. It disfigures the body of Christ by insisting that ears become eyes and hands become feet. It looks like passion for the mission, but in reality, it’s candy-coated arrogance.
TWO ROADS DIVERGE
The good news is that even if we’ve inadvertently started down the road of an accidental Pharisee, we don’t have to end up there. We can repent, turn around, and reset our gaze on Jesus. But for that to happen, we have to recognize that we’ve left the path of discipleship. And that’s why I wrote Accidental Pharisees, to highlight the warning signs that we’ve left the path and turned down a dangerous detour that turns well-intentioned zealots into accidental Pharisees.
Monday, October 15, 2012
How to lead young men
All of us men have some other young man in our lifes who we need to lead in their faith in Jesus. It may be your own kids or a family friend, someone at work or in your home group. We need to take seriously Jesus instruction to make disciples (in case you forgot it is in Matthew 28)
Click through for a worthwhile article on How to lead young men
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Hospitality and the Great Commission
The article ties in well with my comments about strategic braaivleis on Sundays Sermon. One of the key ways that we can serve others is by showing hospitality as a family for those who do not yet know the good news of Jesus.
Originally posted at desiringgod.org
The twelve of us sat in silence, on the edge of our seats. You could have heard a pin drop.
I had pilgrimaged from Minnesota to muggy Orlando, and her stifling August humidity, for a weeklong intensive course on evangelism with Steve Childers. Fortunately, Reformed Theological Seminary is as air-conditioned as it is Reformed.
With only a dozen students on board for five 9-hour days with one of the country’s top church-planting strategists, it was a rich week, to say the least. During these precious hours, the Beijing Olympics were playing second fiddle to learning about the advance of the gospel around the world and in personal conversation.
Time and again Childers had thrown us curveballs. He knew how to keep us on our toes. But now he had us nothing short of captivated.
The Key to 21st-Century Evangelism
“You know what the key to evangelism in the 21st-century will be, don’t you?”
He wasn’t talking Global South, but the Western hemisphere — and America in particular.
I’m sure he could see on our faces how eager we were for his answer. Wow, the key, we were thinking. This is huge.
He paused and smiled that memorable Steve Childers world-evangelism grin. He waited. Still waiting. Still paused. Still nothing. Hold it . . . hold it. I was almost ready to burst with, “Just c’mon already!”
Finally he lifted the curtain.
“Hospitality.”
Then another long pause to let it sink it.
Hospitality and Post-Christendom
In a progressively post-Christian society, the importance of hospitality as an evangelistic asset is growing rapidly. Increasingly, the most strategic turf on which to engage the unbelieving with the good news of Jesus may be the turf of our own homes.
When people don’t gather in droves for stadium crusades, or tarry long enough on the sidewalk to hear your gospel spiel, what will you do? Where will you interact with the unbelieving about the things that matter most?
Invite them to dinner.
For several of us in Childers’s class, the lights went on after his dramatic revelation. Biblical texts on hospitality were springing to mind. A theme we’d previously thought of as a secondary fellowship-type-thing was taking shape as a significant strategy for evangelism in a post-Christian milieu.
Love for Outsiders
The New Testament word for “hospitality” (Greek philozenia) comes from a compound of “love” and “stranger.” Hospitality has its origin, literally, in love for outsiders.
One of the more memorable texts is Hebrews 13:1–2: “Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Yes, love the brothers, says Hebrews, but make sure you don’t forget this. Don’t neglect to love strangers as well.
Love for fellow Christians is important, essential — some call it “the final apologetic,” based on John 13:35 — but there’s a way in which it may not be all that impressive. Loving those who love you — “Do not even unbelievers do the same?” asks Jesus (Matthew 5:47). But showing love to outsiders, now that rings of life-change. That has the fingerprints of your heavenly Father all over it.
Seeking to Show Hospitality
In Romans 12, as the apostle Paul points us to important flashpoints for how our lives should look when claimed by the gospel, he says, “Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality” (Romans 12:12–13).
It could be that this charge to hospitality is another way of saying “contribute to the needs of the saints,” but it seems more likely to be a summons to demonstrate kindness to outsiders — like the kind Publius showed Paul in Acts 28:7 on the island of Malta: “Now in the neighborhood of that place were lands belonging to the chief man of the island, named Publius, who received us and entertained us hospitably for three days.”
Outsiders from Around Town
Keep thinking through the New Testament mentions of hospitality, and see that it’s no peripheral theme. Hospitality even finds its way into such a prominent place as both lists of elder qualifications.
An elder “must be . . . hospitable.” (1 Timothy 3:2)An elder, “as God’s steward, must be . . . hospitable.” (Titus 1:8)
Are we listening? When was the last time we turned down a man from joining the council because he wasn’t hospitable? It’s important enough in Paul’s mind to mention it to both Timothy and Titus for their elder selection.
It matters tremendously how the elders orient toward “outsiders.” The elders set the tone for how the church will engage with nonbelievers. The church of yore may be taken aback to read that an elder “must be well thought of by outsiders” (1 Timothy 3:7), but as Christendom crumbles, we begin to see this value in new light. If the elders who are to be “examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3) don’t themselves show up on the front lines to engage with the city’s unbelieving, it’s unlikely the flock will embrace the mission the shepherds are avoiding.
Inviting in the Believing As Well
Lest we swing the pendulum and think the charge to “hospitality” no longer enjoins us to care for fellow believers, 1 Peter 4:9 and 3 John 5–8 stand ready to balance things out. See 1 Peter 4:9 in context with verses 8–10:
Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace . . . .
So full Christian hospitality includes inviting in other believers as well, caring for each other, “washing the feet of the saints,” “contributing to the needs of the saints,” and so on. Not just for making converts, but for the Great Commission task of making disciples as well. And there's more.
Strategic Hospitality
Christian hospitality serves Jesus’s global mission by inviting in traveling missionaries. John’s third epistle commends this kind of care.
Beloved, it is a faithful thing you do in all your efforts for these brothers, strangersas they are, who testified to your love before the church. You will do well to send them on their journey in a manner worthy of God. For they have gone out for the sake of the name, accepting nothing from the Gentiles. Therefore we ought to support people like these, that we may be fellow workers for the truth. (3 John 5–8)
So let your hospitality include not only unbelieving neighbors and co-workers, but also furloughing missionaries sent out for global gospel propagation. John Piper calls it “strategic hospitality.”
Strategic hospitality . . . asks: How can I draw the most people into a deep experience of God’s hospitality by the use of my home . . . ? Who are the people who could be brought together in my home most strategically for the sake of the kingdom? . . .Strategic hospitality is not content to just have the old clan over for dinner again and again. It strategizes how to make the hospitality of God known and felt all over the world, from the lonely church member right here, to the Gola farmers in Tahn, Liberia. Don’t ever underestimate the power of your living room as a launching pad for new life and hope and ministry and mission!
Why We Love Strangers
So Christian hospitality makes room for fellow believers and global gospel carriers, but the note we’re striking here is the evangelistic one — inviting in the outsider, welcoming unbelievers into our space, in hopes of bringing Jesus into theirs.
The reason this is no minor biblical theme is because the streams of hospitality flow deeply from the well of God. Christians love the stranger, because we have been loved by the Father when we ourselves were strangers. Hospitality rises in its purest form when we heed Paul’s counsel, “Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12).
In Jesus, we find ourselves now to be the enemy who has been loved, the sinner who is saved, the stranger who is welcomed. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). And welcomed strangers should be quick to learn to welcome other strangers.
Our love for outsiders runs deep as it flows from remembering ourselves to be outsiders who have been dearly loved by a lavishly hospitable God.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Christian Values Cannot Save Anyone
By Al Mohler, Tuesday, September 11, 2012
originally posted on www.albertmohler.com
A recent letter to columnist Carolyn Hax of The Washington Post seemed straightforward enough. “I am a stay-at-home mother of four who has tried to raise my family under the same strong Christian values that I grew up with,” the woman writes. “Therefore I was shocked when my oldest daughter, ‘Emily,’ suddenly announced she had ‘given up believing in God’ and decided to ‘come out’ as an atheist.”
The idea of a 16-year-old atheist in the house would be enough to alarm any Christian parent, and rightly so. The thought that a secular advice columnist for The Washington Post might be the source of help seems very odd, but desperation can surely lead a parent to seek help almost anywhere.
You usually get what you expect from an advice columnist like this — therapeutic counsel based in a secular worldview and a deep commitment to personal autonomy. Carolyn Hax responds to this mother with an admonition to respect the integrity of her daughter’s declaration of non-belief. She adds, “Parents can and should teach their beliefs and values, but when a would-be disciple stops believing, it’s not a ‘decision’ or ‘choice’ to ‘reject’ church or family or tradition or virtue or whatever else has hitched a cultural ride with faith.”
That is patent nonsense, of course. Declarations of adolescent unbelief often are exactly what Hax argues they are not: rejections of “church or family or tradition or virtue.” Hax does offer some legitimate insights, suggesting that honesty is to be preferred to dishonesty and that such adolescent statements are often indications of a phase of intellectual questioning or just trying on a personality for style.
Hax then tells this distraught mother that she “didn’t throw out what my childhood, including my church, taught me; I still apply what I believe in. I just apply it to a secular life.” In other words, Hax asserts that she maintains many of the values she learned as a child in church, and simply applies these values now to a secular life.
“How can I help my daughter see that she is making a serious mistake with her life if she chooses to reject her God and her faith?,” the mother asks. Hax tells the mother to accept the daughter’s atheism and get over her “disappointment that she isn’t turning out just as you envisioned.”
What else would you expect a secular columnist who operates from a secular worldview to say?
The real problem does not lie with Carolyn Hax’s answer, however, but with the mother’s question. The problem appears at the onset, when the mother states that she has “tried to raise my family under the same strong Christian values that I grew up with.”
Christian values are the problem. Hell will be filled with people who were avidly committed to Christian values. Christian values cannot save anyone and never will. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a Christian value, and a comfortability with Christian values can blind sinners to their need for the gospel.
This one sentence may not accurately communicate this mother’s understanding, but it appears to be perfectly consistent with the larger context of her question and the source of the advice she sought.
Parents who raise their children with nothing more than Christian values should not be surprised when their children abandon those values. If the child or young person does not have a firm commitment to Christ and to the truth of the Christian faith, values will have no binding authority, and we should not expect that they would. Most of our neighbors have some commitment to Christian values, but what they desperately need is salvation from their sins. This does not come by Christian values, no matter how fervently held. Salvation comes only by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Human beings are natural-born moralists, and moralism is the most potent of all the false gospels. The language of “values” is the language of moralism and cultural Protestantism — what the Germans called Kulturprotestantismus. This is the religion that produces cultural Christians, and cultural Christianity soon dissipates into atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of non-belief. Cultural Christianity is the great denomination of moralism, and far too many church folk fail to recognize that their own religion is only cultural Christianity — not the genuine Christian faith.
The language of values is all that remains when the substance of belief disappears. Tragically, many churches seem to perpetuate their existence by values, long after they abandon the faith.
We should not pray for Christian morality to disappear or for Christian values to evaporate. We should not pray to live in Sodom or in Vanity Fair. But a culture marked even by Christian values is in desperate need of evangelism, and that evangelism requires the knowledge that Christian values and the gospel of Jesus Christ are not the same thing.
I pray that this young woman and her mother find common hope and confidence in the salvation that comes only through Christ — not by Christian values. Otherwise, we are facing far more than a young woman “making a serious mistake with her life.” We are talking about what matters for eternity. Christian values cannot save anyone
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)