The Gospel Coalition

Video intros to the first slate of study guides in Crossway’s new Knowing the Bible series have been added to their website. I was honored to have contributed the installment on Paul’s letter to the Romans. Below is some of my rambling about the roaring ocean waves of grace in that great epistle.

Via The Lookout:

On March 11 2005, Kevin Berthia wanted to take his life. He had climbed over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge and was prepared to take a fatal jump into the San Francisco Bay when he heard a voice calling out to him from above.

It wasn’t the voice of a spiritual presence, but rather that of California Highway Patrol (CHP) Officer Kevin Briggs. The two talked for 60 life-changing minutes before Berthia decided to climb back up the bridge and give life another chance.

Eight years later, the pair reunited as part of an emotional ceremony honoring Briggs and other members of the CHP whose job is to verbally persuade suicidal men and women from jumping off that bridge.

“It was phenomenal,” Berthia, 30, told Yahoo News about his reunion with Briggs at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention public service ceremony.

May I be vulnerable with you for a moment? I anticipate some pushback if only because of those names you see up there in the title, but this is part of my story, part of my gospel wakefulness, and it is a part I will never deny or disavow.

I have met John Piper just once, a couple of years ago, when I was in Minneapolis to record some material with Desiring God Ministries in promotion of my book Gospel Wakefulness. On the way to what would be a brief visit to his home, I clutched in my hand a copy of my book to give him. I was told I ought to sign it, because he’d like that. I don’t remember what exactly I wrote inside that front cover but I know it included this line: “God used you to save my life.”

That is not an exaggeration. I don’t mean that Piper’s work was instrumental in my conversion. I professed saving faith in Christ as a child, before I’d ever heard of the man. I mean he saved my life. In my twenties, mired in the rotten fruit of my sin — the wreckage of my marriage, the dead-endings of my aspirations, and the bottoming out of my spirit — I spent a lot of hours feeling nothing and contemplating taking my own life. I dare not describe all of that to you, but I was in a bad way. We had a church but the teaching we received there was in the order of “seizing the day” based on inner potential. I had none of the latter so I could not manage the former. What kept me alive?

I was clinging to the hem of Christ’s garment then, sleeping in our guest bedroom, by which I mean living in the guest bedroom and spending plenty of nights face down on the carpet groaning. I was picking up the crumbs where I could find them. Two sources of bread. The podcasts of the aforementioned Pastors Mark and John. I was getting a vision of a very big Jesus with a very big grace for sinners from them. And the Spirit used their preaching in those days to work a gospel renaissance in my life, a miracle really. My wife can attest to that.

I read the story of this fellow talked off the bridge by a friend he didn’t know he had, recently reuniting to thank him, and I think of the strange places we find ourselves in life. I think of sitting down with Pastor John for those few minutes, his thumbing through my book and looking up the Wikipedia entry for Middletown Springs, Vermont on his Macbook. I know I’m not supposed to be a respecter of persons but I can be an admirer of them, and I can certainly be a “thanksgiver” of and for them.

Providence does make strange friendships. A black man in despair and a white cop. Two animated preachers (one a bit on the scream-o side) and a neurotic, depressed, “stuttering wimp” (to quote a girl’s appraisal of me in the 4th grade — still remember that, don’t you know). The God of the Universe and sinners.

Don’t stop preaching the gospel. And if you don’t preach the gospel, start. Then don’t stop. You don’t know whose life you are saving. Not you, really, but God.
God is in his gospel faithfully proclaimed doing his thing, talking people off bridges. Me? I’ll never forget. So I’ll never stop.

“[I]f a king be reigning somewhere,but stays in his own house and does not let himself be seen, it often happens that some insubordinate fellows, taking advantage of his retirement, will have themselves proclaimed in his stead; and each of them, being invested with the semblance of kingship, misleads the simple who, because they cannot enter the palace and see the real king, are led astray by just hearing a king named. When the real king emerges, however, and appears to view, things stand differently. The insubordinate impostors are shown up by his presence, and men, seeing the real king, forsake those who previously misled them. In the same way the demons used formerly to impose on men, investing themselves with the honor due to God. But since the Word of God has been manifested in a body, and has made known to us His own Father, the fraud of the demons is stopped and made to disappear; and men, turning their eyes to the true God, Word of the Father, forsake the idols and come to know the true God.

“Now this is proof that Christ is God, the Word and Power of God. For whereas human things cease and the fact of Christ remains, it is clear to all that the things which cease are temporary, but that He Who remains is God and very Son of God, the sole-begotten Word.”

– Athanasius, On the Incarnation

For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens.
– 1 Chronicles 16:6

“For I know that the Lord is great,
and that our Lord is above all gods.
Whatever the Lord pleases, he does,
in heaven and on earth,
in the seas and all deeps.
He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth,
who makes lightnings for the rain
and brings forth the wind from his storehouses.”
– Psalm 135:5-7

What follows is the manuscript for a talk titled “The Gospel and Marital Sexuality” that I presented at the Men and Women of Wisdom Conference last weekend in Hingham, Massachusetts. The audio of the talk will be released shortly, I am told. I want to stress that this is my preaching manuscript, not a transcript of all I said, so there will be some differences. There is of course a bit more fleshing out in the preaching audio than in what I pre-composed for my reference’s sake. But since I’ve received some requests for the manuscript, I present it below — after the jump, as they say — for anyone’s interest and, I hope, their blessing.
Continue

Today is Ascension Day, traditionally marked on the 40th day after Easter Sunday. The doctrine of Christ’s ascension has many implications. Here are just five.

1. Jesus is really alive.

The reality of Christ’s ascension, inextricable from the resurrection event, tells us that he did not raise from the dead only later to die again like Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter, the widow of Nain’s son, Eutychus, or Tabitha. Jesus’ body will not be found because he took its glorified tangibility to heaven.

2. Heaven is thicker than earth.

We tend to think of heaven as the ethereal place of disembodied spirits. And in a way it is. But Elijah is there. And Enoch. And so is the risen, glorified, incarnate Christ. Jesus is there, taking up material space. He is touchable, present. Clearly, heaven is not less real than earth but more. It is a thicker reality than our four-dimensional space, more vibrant, more colorful, more real.

3. God’s plan for human dominion of earth is being realized.

The first Adam and his helper Eve were charged with filling the earth and subduing it. They screwed it up. But God’s plans cannot be thwarted. Man will reflect God’s glory in dominion over creation. In the Incarnation, then, God sends his only Son to right the course, reverse the curse, and begin the restoration of all things. The second Adam does the job, and even in his glorification, the incarnational “miracle of addition” (see below) persists, fulfilling God’s plan for man to reflect divine glory in dominion over creation. The God-Man, who is the radiance of the glory of God, rules over the earth and is even now subduing his enemies. “The ascension means that a human being rules the universe” (Tim Keller). Just as God planned.

4. The Incarnation is an enduring miracle.

The Incarnation was a humbling of God’s Son, but not a lessening of him. As I’ve argued in Gospel Deeps, the Son maintained his omnipresence even in his Incarnation. (Historical theologians have traditionally called this perspective the extra calvinisticum.) But what the ascension means is that Jesus Christ forever remains the Christ who is Jesus. He did not revert back to intangibility. But his ascended incarnational state then is not an eternal limitation but a part of his ongoing efforts to fill all things. He takes up more space in the heavens and the earth now, not less. The Incarnation is a miracle with no expiration date.

5. The ascension is gospel for sinners!

Why? Because if, among the many things the gospel means, it means we are united with Christ through faith, it also means that where he is we will be also. It means we will go to heaven in spirit, and heaven will come to us in body. The ascension is the full fruition of the promise of Christ’s resurrection being the firstfruits of our own. The ascension means the gospel is better news than we even thought, gooder than good! Because it holds out the promise, the blessed hope, not just of life after death, but as N.T. Wright says, life after life after death. What a gracious God we have!

Pastor Matt Kruse of 7 Mile Road Church near Boston reflects on turning 40 and being spectacularly unspectacular for the kingdom:

I am thankful for men and women who leave a global, historical mark for Jesus.

But for most of us, life will be a lot less spectacular.

And we should be good with that. Wait, thrilled is a better word.

Question: Instead of obsessing about changing the world, what if we just gave ourselves to living in glad obedience to Jesus in the trenches of an ordinary life?

For me, this means:

loving a particular wife (the one I vowed to love, in all of her awesomeness and sinfulness)

raising two sons and two daughters to know and fear and love God with all they’ve got

loving my neighbors as they are given to me in different seasons of life

plying a trade as well as I can (which happens to be, in my case, for some reason, planting a church-planting church that I hope will result in the next 10 years with seeing 1500 Bostonians believing the gospel together, which I am excited about, and which I don’t think betrays the thrust of this post: I am not saying don’t be ambitious about what the Spirit might do through you; I am saying don’t miss the glory of a well-lived, simple life.)

working hard to be a faithful witness to the grace and glory of Jesus in greater Boston for however many years he gives me.

In other words, Matthew Kruse’s “ceiling,” even if I hit it, will not make for a very sexy Wikipedia page.

What it will make for is some small number of people who were not ignored by me on the way to some unattainable pipe dream, but instead loved and compelled to believe and revel in Jesus and His Gospel. I need to be content with that.

Go read the whole thing.

So reasons Time Magazine’s Mary Eberstadt in a piece titled “In Battle Over Christianity, Orthodoxy is Winning”. A selection:

The sexual revolution has accomplished what even the fractious Reformation could not. It has divided Protestantism so deeply that traditionalist Anglicans now have more in common with traditionalist Lutherans or even Roman Catholics, say, than with the reformers in their own denominations. And as the proliferation of stricter Anglican churches of Africa go to show, this traditionalism has gone global.

A second fact embedded in this story also has worldwide repercussions. That traditionalist breakaway congregation in Virginia is larger than the one on the legally winning side — as in, much. Membership on the “losing” side, by one estimate, includes some 2,000 souls, as opposed to some 174 in the congregation moving in. And though exact numbers may not always be available, the larger trend is clear: this numerical division between traditionalists and reformers is also seen around the world. It’s the stricter Christian churches that typically have stronger and more vibrant congregations — as has been documented at least since Dean M. Kelley’s 1996 book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing.

So, for example, the reform-minded Church of England has closed over 1,000 churches since 1980, with some later becoming discos, spas and mosques. The traditionalist Anglican churches of the Global South, on the other hand, are packed to overflowing and still growing fast. Within the Catholic Church, similarly, the most vibrant renewal movements — Comunione e Liberazione, Opus Dei, Juventutem — are also the most orthodox. Meanwhile, African missionaries from both Protestant and Catholic churches are being dispatched to the West in record numbers — in effect, re-evangelizing the very peoples who carried the cross to men and women of the subcontinent in the first place.

One explanation for the resiliency of religious traditionalism in an age of secularization is demographic. As Jonathan Last shows in his recent book What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, if enough people over time decide not to be fruitful and multiply, eventually their churches will disappear. That’s because secular people have far fewer children than do believers. The flip side of that observation is equally suggestive. In the future, it is the believers of all faiths whose children will appear disproportionately in an otherwise increasingly childless world, as political scientist Eric Kaufmann showed in his 2011 book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?

As changing views on gay marriage, among others, go to show, secularization marches on. Traditionalists may be on the losing end of historic real estate, at least for now, as well as booed out of the public square for their views on sex. Down the road, though, they still look to possess something else critical — a growing congregation without which every church, after all, is just a bed and breakfast waiting to happen.

There perhaps is grounds for optimism in this historical and cultural logic, but traditionalist Christians in the West have two other great reasons for some reasoned sobriety about the cultural downgrade: 1) a global perspective, in the now, which shows enormous gain for traditionalist Christianity in Asia and Africa, 2) an eschatologically “gospeled” perspective, in the now and for the future, that Christ’s kingdom has come, is coming, and will come.

(HT: Challies)

Yes.

I love John Piper, as I assume has been evident over the years, but I found his answer to this question lacking at best and unhelpful at most. To some extent, he was directed to go to the biblical outline of gender roles by the phrasing of the question itself. But I think a better answer would be simply to step back, redirect, and consider the nature of a book. Any book. Any kind of book. Written by any author. Period. Female authors and male authors. Even Christian authors and non-Christian authors.

There is only one authoritative book. Every other book we can learn from and draw from and consider, testing all things its author teaches and clinging to whatever truth shakes out, even using what we see true in it in our life and ministry and public sermons.

I do subscribe to complementarianism, which means many things, one of which is that I agree with Dr. Piper that the Bible restricts pastoral authority in the local church to men. (Not just any men, of course, but those meeting the further qualifications for elder.) But the other key word in that phrase, the one that is not “men,” is “local.” Because of this, I don’t read any book, listen to any preaching, or otherwise gather any counsel outside of my church that I consider authoritative over me in the sense the Bible is concerned to restrict to only elders. Because I pastor a congregational church, all the members of my church, male and female, have in some sense authority over me. But only my elders have pastoral authority over me. This means that I don’t even read a John Piper book as if he has pastoral authority over me any more than I would read a Marva Dawn book as if she has pastoral authority over me. And I’ve read both and learned from both and used both.

Perhaps a better answer could have come from a better question. The better question is not “Is using a book by a woman a violation of the Bible’s restrictions on pastoral authority?” but “Is using any book a violation of the Bible’s restrictions on pastoral authority?” And the answer to both is “No.”

Now, of course, we ought to weigh some authors as more thoughtful, more faithful, more biblical than others, but I suppose that goes without saying.

A Minister’s Burden
(John Newton)

What contradictions meet
In ministers’ employ!
It is a bitter sweet,
A sorrow full of joy:
No other post affords a place
For equal honor or disgrace.

Who can describe the pain
Which faithful preachers feel,
Constrained to speak in vain,
To hearts as hard as steel?
Or who can tell the pleasures felt,
When stubborn hearts begin to melt?

The Savior’s dying love,
The soul’s amazing worth,
Their utmost efforts move,
And draw their bowels forth;
They pray and strive, the rest departs,
Till Christ be formed in sinners’ hearts.

If some small hope appears,
They still are not content,
But with a jealous fear,
They watch for the event:
Too oft they find their hopes deceived.
Then how their inmost souls are grieved!

But when their pains succeed,
And from the tender blade
The ripening ears proceed,
Their toils are overpaid:
No harvest-joy can equal theirs,
To find the fruit of all their cares.

On what has now been sown,
Thy blessing, Lord, bestow;
The power is Thine alone,
To make it spring and grow:
Do Thou the gracious harvest raise,
And Thou alone shalt have the praise.