The Gospel Coalition

Please pray. Matt was rushed to the hospital after an apparent seizure which caused him to fall and strike his head.

(via Mark Driscoll)

Update:
Matt updates via Twitter: “Thx for the prayers. I have a small mass in my frontal lobe. date w/ the neurosurgeon early next wk. I am His & confident”

The Village Church has updated that Matt is home resting now.

Please continue to pray. Of the guys in the Bible Belt who are most visible, Chandler is probably the most dangerous to powers and principalities.

HT: Los

I know God’s will for your life:

Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
– 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Always rejoice, always pray, always give thanks. No ifs, ands, or buts.

How?

The key lay in the last verse, which tells us that this is God’s will for us in Christ Jesus. In Christ all things are possible.

If we treasure Christ above all, we will be able to rejoice always, pray continually, and give thanks in everything, because Christ alone is the fountain of joy, intimacy with God, and gratitude.

Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

This is from a message I received yesterday from a lady in our church:

I love having the Gospel preached every week. I’ve been a Christian for over 30 years now (wow! that’s really long), and thought I understood it. And head-wise, I do. But I feel like this is the first time it’s ever been presented in such a way as to really become life changing.

I’ve been receiving variations of this in response to preaching (and to my blogging!) for quite a while. And I am privileged enough to see in my congregation that these aren’t mere words. People are showing the fruit of freedom, from a new light in their eyes to new lifestyles. But this message yesterday is just another needed reminder that the gospel is good news, not good advice, and that the gospel actually creates what the Law requires. The Law can’t do that for itself.

Over at the Evangel blog today, I posted this:

Talking about how the gospel and the law relate to sanctification is no mere intellectual exercise for me. It’s not just one more idea for the blog. It made the difference between the crushing weight of my own sinful failure and the freedom that comes from tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. This is a real freedom, a freedom that makes “good works” a celebratory dance, not a day-laborers’ accumulation of sanctifying sweat equity. That way leads to burn out and bitterness. “Do not again return to a yoke of slavery,” Paul practically yells at us (in Galatians 5:1) . . .

It is counterintuitive, but wakefulness to the reality that the work is done makes us work more and harder. The gospel creates what the Law requires. And when we approach the notion of sanctification from the angle of “How much reminding of the spiritual homework can we do?” we miss the point entirely. It is often because we do not trust the proclamation to be effectual, and we do not really believe that the gospel is power in itself, that it bears fruit of itself.

In the comments there, a fellow (I think) agreed with the post but said the challenge is now then to get people to dance. I think we meet this challenge, though, not by telling them to dance, but by playing the music. That’s what gospel-centered preaching is. Playing the great song of salvation and trusting it has the power to make people dance, as only the greatest of songs can.

As I said, I am committed to gospel tunnel-vision. But it’s not dark inside this tunnel. The glories of the king of the universe are in this vision! Here is Tim Keller:

1 Peter 1:12: “It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.”

Angels love to look into the gospel. They never get tired of it. So what does that mean? It means gospel ministry is endlessly creative. It means you can preach the gospel and never have to be afraid of boring people . . .
Isn’t that amazing? The gospel is not the ABC’s of Christianity, it’s A to Z. It’s not just the elementary and introductory truths. The gospel is what drives everything that we do. The gospel is pretty much the solution to every problem. The gospel is what every theological category should be expounding when we do our systematic theology. It should be very much a part of everything.
Even angels long to look into it. And you should.

Some people will always be bored with the gospel. But pastors, sometimes they are because you’re preaching it wrong. It’s a sin to talk about this one life-giving truth in dispassionate ways.

Related:
The Beautiful Monotony of the Gospel

Because it was good enough for Paul.

Today I was just washing the dishes, staring out the window, and I started thinking about Ray Ortlund, Jr., who became a friend and mentor to me in a crucial time in my life and ministry, and I suddenly began weeping. That doesn’t happen to me a lot. You know, I’m a pretty sensitive guy, but I don’t cry about a . . . well, about a dude.

Ray’s blog Christ is Deeper Still has recently become the latest affiliate blog for The Gospel Coalition, of which he is a Council member. TGC’s addition of Ray to their stable of bloggers is the best thus far. Few preachers and writers are as gospel-fixated as Ray.

If you’re anywhere near the Nashville area — and even if you’re not — you should absolutely try to get to the Death to Performance Conference being held February 10. Speakers include Ray and my friend Ed Stetzer, as well as Acts 29 President Scott Thomas and Journey Church Franklin Pastor Jamie George. Details here. The intended theme — gospel-centered missional ministry in the Bible Belt — is super-important.

Related:
My Tribute to Ray Ortlund
Ray Ortlund’s Gospel Manifesto

“It happens over and over again that the gospel ‘comes alive’ in a way that the evangelist had never dreamed of, and has effects which he never anticipated. The gospel is addressed to the human person as a human person in all the uncountable varieties of predicaments in which human beings find themselves.

The gospel has a sovereignty of its own and is never an instrument in the hands of the evangelist. Or, to put it more truly, the Holy Spirit, by whose secret working alone the gospel ‘comes alive,’ is not under the evangelist’s control. The wind blow freely.”

– Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

The more I press into the reality that, for Paul, the gospel isn’t just an informational proposition but an actual power let loose into the world bearing fruit by Spiritual catalyst, the more I am both confident in gospel proclamation and humble in proclaiming and then getting the heck out of the gospel’s way.

No, this isn’t an ode to church furniture.

There’s a curious and discouraging article in the November 20th Entertainment Weekly magazine about producers’ efforts to “sell” the upcoming film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Christians (by way of their pastors).

[T]he adaptation of . . . McCarthy’s acclaimed novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) traveling through a bleak wasteland is getting the full pitch to Christian audiences . . . Plans include 15 advance screenings for church leaders nationwide, a website featuring free sermon and discussion guides, and a special trailer with extra scenes underscoring the film’s moral message.

This is a relatively new phenomenon, but it has been successful in the past. The most notable film-to-pulpit crossover is undoubtedly The Passion of the Christ, which held advance screenings for ministers and church groups and later supplied resources for pastor use in sermons and group use in Bible studies. The teams that produced Facing the Giants and Fireproof followed suit, although their crossover into pulpit “advertising” was probably considered more acceptable as the movies were made within the Christian subculture pretty much for the Christian subculture. (Hollywood had lesser success but still some crossovers made with the Narnia adaptations and Evan Almighty.)

But The Road has no explicit Christian content. It may very well be the best film of all the films ever marketed for pulpit use, but elements reminiscent of Christian themes are the feeblest excuse for church marketing yet. The money quote from the EW article:

“There are pastors who might not be able to recommend [the film], but would preach about it. I’ve got a pastor right here in Dallas who’s doing a sermon series on the end of the world, and I’m hoping that he’ll incorporate some of the metaphors from this film into his sermons.”

Ah, Dallas: the epicenter of evangelical awesomeness.

Cutting to the chase: The Road will probably be a good movie. Pastors can reference films (and other artifacts of popular arts and culture) till the cows come home. But this is not about helping pastors preach. This is about getting pastors to help impact a film’s box office. None of these guys have impacting evangelical communities as their motivation: they want evangelical communities to impact their bottom lines. We are a market share, a consumer base.

Resist.

And any pastor who affords preaching time to help pitch a film because of some preferential treatment and free swag is a sell-out. I hope you have a congregation that cares and calls you out.

With the double honor of 1 Timothy 5:17 comes the double responsibility of James 3:1.

Matt Chandler, pastor of The Village Church outside Dallas, gave a powerful message at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s chapel service yesterday morning. You can watch it here or listen to it here, and I encourage you to do so. It’s worth anyone’s time, but is especially good for anyone in church leadership or anyone aspiring to be in church leadership.

In his sermon, Chandler quotes from Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity:

For a long time, I have been convinced that I could take a person with a high school education, give him or her a six-month trade school training, and provide a pastor who would be satisfactory to any discriminating American congregation. The curriculum would consist of four courses.

Course I: Creative Plagiarism. I would put you in touch with a wide range of excellent and inspirational talks, show you how to alter them just enough to obscure their origins, and get you a reputation for wit and wisdom.

Course II: Voice Control for Prayer and Counseling. We would develop your own distinct style of Holy Joe intonation, acquiring the skill in resonance and modulation that conveys and unmistakable aura of sanctity.

Course III: Efficient Office Management. There is nothing that parishioners admire more in their pastors than the capacity to run a tight ship administratively. If we return all phone calls within twenty-four hours, answer all the letters within a week, distributing enough carbons to key people so that they know we are on top of things, and have just the right amount of clutter on our desk—not too much, or we appear inefficient, not too little or we appear underemployed—we quickly get the reputation for efficiency that is far more important than anything that we actually do.

Course IV: Image Projection. Here we would master the half-dozen well-known and easily implemented devices that that create the impression that we are terrifically busy and widely sought after for counsel by influential people in the community. A one-week refresher course each year would introduce new phrases that would convince our parishioners that we are bold innovators on the cutting edge of the megatrends and at the same time solidly rooted in all the traditional values of our sainted ancestors.

(I have been laughing for several years over this trade school training with which I plan to make my fortune. Recently, though, the joke has backfired on me. I keep seeing advertisements for institutes and workshops all over the country that invite pastors to sign up for this exact curriculum. The advertised course offerings are not quite as honestly labeled as mine, but the content appears to be identical—a curriculum that trains pastors to satisfy the current consumer tastes in religion. I’m not laughing anymore.)