The Gospel Coalition

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
– Ephesians 5:25-27

1. Put Her First
Sacrifice is in view here, as is the understanding of “sanctify” in the sense of “setting apart for special use,” as in consecration. Husbands honor their wives not among others, but before and above others.

2. “Gospel” Her
Yes, I know it’s not a verb, but you get my meaning here. The passage says Jesus sanctifies the church by “washing” her with the water of the word. The understanding of “sanctify” as “cleanse” is in view here, and a husband who wants to sanctify his wife will share with her the word of God, speak to her the word of God, remind her who she is in Christ, forgive her sins, give her the opportunity to forgive his in word-driven repentance, and in general make sure she is gently, lovingly covered in the Scriptures.

3. Protect Her
Husbands will present their wives in some way to the Lord when that roll is called up yonder as an evidence of their own faithfulness to him. Do we want to be proven true children of God, full of faith in Jesus and his gospel? Then we will show the fruit of faithful husbanding, which is a wife “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.” No, we cannot sanctify our wives the way the Spirit does, and no, neither our salvation nor our wife’s salvation is contingent upon our perfect husbanding (thank God!), but manhood is responsibility-taking, and this means taking the responsibility to shield our wives from sin and its temptations, accusations, attacks, unnecessary burdens, hurtful expectations and assumptions, and the like. This can mean everything from taking on housework so she gets to rest or go out with friends to warding off or rebuking people who take advantage of her. It also means no verbal, emotional, or physical abuse. It means no pornography or sexual exploitation. It means treating her and ensuring treatment of her that is gentle, loving, and edifying.

4. Serve Her
How did Jesus the King position himself over the church as its head? By becoming its servant, sacrificing to the point of death in loving service to her betterment.

5. Lead Her
This encompasses all of the above and more. Male headship requires repetitious repentance, deep humility, desperate God-reliance, and a high, passionate commitment to the grace of God for the glory of God, not the gratification of self for the glory of self. Lead, don’t push. Set an example in speech and conduct. Show yourself flawed but trustworthy but God as failproof. Refuse to make excuses or pass the buck. Shoulder the burdens and take responsibility.

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Coming up: 5 Ways Wives Can Encourage Their Husbands

These aren’t all 2011 releases, as you will see, but they are the ten best books I read this year.

(Honorable Mention: Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I’m 2/3 of the way through it, and it would easily be on this list if I finish it before the end of the year.)

10. In the Woods by Tana French
When I first finished this novel, I wanted to throw it across the room. I tweeted what a ripoff it was and several other readers agreed with me. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And now I’m convinced that the thing I thought the book didn’t reveal was actually revealed, only hiddenly in the book. In any event, no book this year has provoked such disgust in me and at the same time kept me hanging on, searching it out, chewing on it.

9. Reclaiming Adoption edited by Dan Cruver
Short, but comprehensive and powerful. This collection of essays by Cruver, John Piper, Scotty Smith, et.al. show us the shape of God’s heart for us and the outline of the Christian heart for orphans.

8. Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis
Not anywhere close to Lewis’s best work, I nevertheless profited from his writing here as I always do. He is faithful to present with awe and insight the “anatomy of the soul” (Calvin) held in the biblical Psalms.

7. Future Men by Douglas Wilson
I don’t have boys, but I really enjoyed this book on raising them. I used it off and on in our church men’s group, and together we alternately fought with Wilson’s ideas and nodded our heads in vigorous agreement with them. If I had boys, I’d find this book invaluable. And Wilson can flat-out write, of course.

6. The Bookends of the Christian Life by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bevington
The truth about the Christian life — how the gospel works, how we work in the gospel — put simply and succinctly. I would recommend this to every believer. It’s like a hundred books on idolatry, gospel-centrality, and sanctification condensed into one readable little companion that replaces them all.

5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’ve read this classic twice before but wanted a refresher before the latest movie adaptation debuts next year. Fitzgerald at his coy, rhythmic, biting best. I also read his This Side of Paradise this year (for the first time) and found it dreadful — dull and bothersome. I find it hard to believe, actually, that the same guy who wrote that navel-gazing tribute to ennui wrote this insightful indictment of (basically) idolatry. One of a few genuine American masterpieces.

4. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Speaking of American masterpieces, we could talk about the serious Huckleberry Finn, but I prefer the whimsical, engrossing Tom Sawyer. I’ve loved this book since I was a little boy and as I re-read it this year, I found myself transported not just to the Mississippian stomping grounds of scamps and scoundrels but to the floor of my boyhood home and the couch of my grandmother’s house, two places I vividly remember drinking in the adventures of Tom, Huck, Polly, Becky Thatcher, Injun Joe, Muff Potter, and the whole gang. Twain plays on the frequency my imagination is tuned to.

3. Jonathan Edwards on Revival
This is actually the publication title given to this volume containing three of Edwards’ works: “A Narrative of Surprising Conversions,” “The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God,” and “An Account of the Revival of Religion in Northampton 1740-1742.” I first read this book while going for jury duty in Houston, Texas, in about 1995. At that time I was a youth minister for a Willow Creek model church; I was interested in theology and wanted to be interested in Edwards, but I had no mental nor spiritual framework for the material in this book. Nevertheless I have held on to it for all these years. Now I’m in New England and wondering what it might take for God to grant the favor of revival to this land again. Edwards’ book is stirring for the desperate.

2. The Deep Things of God by Fred Sanders
I consider it brilliance when someone says an old (but uncommon thing) in fresh ways, and this is what Sanders has done. For all those who believe in the Trinity but can’t for the life of them see how it might be practical. And for those who think “making the Trinity practical” can’t possibly come out to anything deeply theological. Oh, read the thing. It’s fantastic. Read it in February and thought, “I won’t read a better nonfiction book this year, I bet,” and I was right.

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
My lands, y’all. To my shame, I’d never read this before. I laughed and cried. Literally. In public.

There is a great danger this Christmas season of missing the point. And I’m not referring simply to idolatrous consumption and materialism. I’m talking about Christmas religiosity. It is very easy around this time to set up our Nativity scenes, host our Christmas pageants and cantatas, read the Christmas story with our families, attend church every time the door is open, and insist to ourselves and others that Jesus is the reason for the season, and yet not see Jesus. With the eyes of our heart, I mean.

I suppose there is something about indulging in the religious Christmas routine that lulls us into thinking we are dwelling in Christ when we are really just set to seasonal autopilot, going through the festive and sentimental motions. Meanwhile the real person Jesus the Christ goes neglected in favor of his plastic, paper, and video representations. Don’t get distracted from Jesus by “Jesus.” This year, plead with the Spirit to interrupt your nice Christmas with the power of Jesus’ gospel.

There’s a reason, I think, the Bible makes it a commandment to honor our parents and the New Testament commands us to care for the old folks in our family: God knows we tend to ignore them, which is really a form of hatred.

Yes, I know that sounds harsh. But can anyone doubt that the modern evangelical church has marginalized seniors and the elderly into ecclesiological inconsequence, that we have assimilated worldly culture’s idolization of youth?

I once read in a friend’s Facebook status that all the “old people” are gonna hate heaven if they think the worship music in churches is too loud. You know, because heaven’s worship is going to be exactly like the laser light rock and roll concerts we got goin’ on in evangelicalism right now. /sarcasm

Stupid old people and their lame musical tastes. They don’t get “real” worship, do they?

Oddly enough, I thought about the youth-idolatry and pushing of our elders to the margins once while watching the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. At the end, after the king has been crowned, the entire procession — men, elves, and dwarves — bow a knee to the fat, furry-footed, diminutive hobbits. Why did it make me think of the ageism in the church? Because I think when we do get to heaven, we are going to find that we are honoring the people we wouldn’t think to honor in real life (with any meaningful consideration).

Do we tend to think our churches are better off because we think old people are unbending, unhip, unsophisticated, unable to get “the vision”? As we push for multicultural ministry, do we forget multigenerational? When we get to heaven we will fully realize all the wisdom and experience and authority we not only squandered, but ridiculed. I fear the reason we don’t pour much ministry into the elderly is because we don’t figure we’ll get much return on our investment when it comes to realizing our church vision, filling the seats, etc. (A church of all old people, of course, is just as much in danger as a church of all young people — just a danger of a different kind.)

Yes, some old people don’t “get it.” But a lot of young people don’t either. We just put up with them more and are willing to work with them more because they make our church look cooler.

My friend Darryl Dash wrote an amazing post once titled Don’t Write Off the Seniors. Darryl can write this kind of stuff, because Darryl is a true pastor. A taste:

Don’t get me wrong here. I’ve been part of sleepy churches full of seniors who are resistant to change, and that holds no attraction to me.

But I’ve also seen churches full of loud music and jeans and untucked shirts that have the best lighting and video production, with no gray hair in sight. Is that any better than a seniors only church? I wonder. That holds no attraction to me either.

I have been in conferences in which the speaker has said that we need to change, and if the seniors don’t like it, then that’s too bad. Again, I believe seniors need to flex, but the glib writing off of an entire generation speaks to a serious blind spot in our approach to ministry today.

Darryl closes his post with a reflection on James 1:27, writing:

If our religion is pure, we will look after those who are oppressed and forgotten, and that surely includes a lot of seniors today. I’m increasingly convinced that we need to move beyond generationally divided ministry and take this seriously. And we’ve got to take some of the challenges they’re facing and figure out how we can visit them in their afflictions and actually help.

If we write off the seniors, James says, we’ve failed. That’s a pretty big deal.

True dat.

In our efforts to multiculturalize the church — which is a great effort and a godly one — let’s not forget the need to multigenerationalize the church. Is your church monogenerational? If not, are your seniors second class citizens in your church? If so, what can you do to fix this?

The kingdom of God turns the tables on business as usual, and this includes church business as usual. The countercultural call of the kingdom requires a revolutionary ageism, where we actually honor our elders above ourselves and our youngers, actually honor those we are most tempted to deem having outlived their usefulness.

I have been and always will be doggedly suspicious of pastors who rarely (or never) mention Jesus.

John Piper says, “What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ.”

We ministers of the gospel — and Christians at large — can fumble this commission in three main ways:

1. We speak in vague spiritual generalities. Love. Hope. Peace. Joy. Harmony. Blessings. All disembodied from the specific atoning work of the incarnate Jesus and exalted Lord. It all sounds nice. It’s all very inspirational. And it’s rubbish. He himself is our peace. He himself is love. He himself is life. He does not make life better. He is life. Any pastor who talks about the virtues of faith, hope, and love, with Jesus as some implied tangential source, is not feeding his flock well.

2. We speak Christ as moral exemplar. We tell people to be nice because Jesus was nice. We tell them to be sweet because Jesus was sweet, good because Jesus was good, hard-working because Jesus was hard-working, loving because Jesus was loving. This is all well and good, but you could substitute “Mother Theresa” or even “Oprah” for “Jesus” and essentially have the same message.

3. We avoid the real problem — sin — and therefore either ignore the real solution — the cross — or confuse its meaning. In many churches, not only is sin never mentioned — because it hurts people’s feelings or what-have-you — the cross is rarely mentioned. And when the cross is mentioned, because we don’t want to talk about sin, it becomes instead the great affirmation of our special-ness, rather than the great punishment for our unholiness. The cross becomes not the intersection of God’s justice and mercy but the symbol of God’s positive feelings about our undeniable lovability.

In all of these instances, and others, people are inspired and enthused, but they are moved about God’s recognition of their own awesomeness, not about the glories of Christ. The capacity is enlarged with our growing self-esteem.

Even angels long to gaze into the life-giving riches of the gospel of grace. We prefer to drink deeply from the well into which we’re gazing — our navels.

Pastors, inspiration sells. But only Jesus transforms.

A minister reflects on getting that second-hand criticism. It’s frustrating. A snippet:

“I got a call saying some people are concerned about this kind of thing,” he explained. “Youth group happens in the youth room. Even if there’s only one kid. That’s where you do your Bible study.”

Who called? How many people are concerned? Which ones? And would it be okay to teach them to worship Satan as long as we did it in the youth room?

“I appreciate the concern,” I told him. “If someone else calls, be sure to remind them of my phone number.”

The next day, a friend called, pretending to wonder what the young people did on Sunday night. “Some people are concerned . . .”

The Great A&W Incident, as it’s known around our house, baptized me into the murky waters of church ministry and the sideways, backhanded, upside-down channels we use to communicate with one another in the family. Before The Incident, I assumed we would all talk to each other. Not around each other.

What a naive dork I turned out to be.

It was a small thing, The Incident. But it fit into a larger pattern of crooked-line communication that one day, years later, helped break a church into a million tiny pieces.

For the laymen out there, “some people are upset/concerned” is maddening. Use it only when anonymity is absolutely necessary, as it will cripple your pastor’s confidence. “Some people” might as well be “all people.” Because if we don’t know who’s mad, we are ill at ease with everyone. It leads us to be timid, suspicious, distrusting. (eg. Can we tell this person about our fears and struggles, or is this person the one who thinks I’m doing a terrible job?) There are times when vulnerable people lack the confidence to bring concerns directly, but most other times the biblical mandate to take an offense to someone directly, not to someone anonymously through someone else, is more necessary.

I learned a good line from Andy Stanley in his “Life Rules” series: “Never say something about someone you wouldn’t say to them.” I’d add this rule of thumb: If you can let an offense go, do it. If you can’t, take it to the offender, not to others.

Christmas Eve I saw a stable, low and very bare,
A little child in a manger.
The oxen knew Him, had Him in their care,
To men He was a stranger,
The safety of the world was lying there,
And the world’s danger.

– Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, “The Stable”

The danger in the seasonal celebration is that we cave to sentimentality and rote nostalgia and thus forget that the meek and mild baby in a manger was nothing short of the opening salvo in the kingdom of heaven revolution consisting in God personally invading earth.

We will toss around words this month like “spirit,” “grace,” “peace,” and “hope.” The Bible will not let us have these ideas merely as ideas, as things. They are personal. Thus: “He himself is our peace” (Micah 5:5; Eph. 2:14) and “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Let’s not mess with ethereal virtues, no matter how Christianly gauzed. Leave ethereal virtues to vague saviors. Our Savior is incarnate!

Sinclair Ferguson brings it home:

[R]emember that there isn’t a thing, a substance, or a “quasi-substance” called “grace.” All there is is the person of the Lord Jesus — “Christ clothed in the gospel,” as Calvin loved to put it. Grace is the grace of Jesus. If I can highlight the thought here: there is no “thing” that Jesus takes from Himself and then, as it were, hands over to me. There is only Jesus Himself.

Don’t thingamatize Christmas. Take it personally.

My friend and fellow Forge leadership team member Chris lost his dear wife Janie to cancer a couple of years ago. Chris is an amazing, humble guy, working hard and now raising 3 kids as a single man, and through it all his vision of the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ has been an encouragement and a challenge to all who know him.

Last year Chris started a project called Janie’s Christmas Stocking to both honor his late wife and provide financial and material assistance for some needy local families. This year the aim of Janie’s Christmas Stocking is to build a well for an African village. You have probably heard before of the dire need for clean water in the poorest parts of Africa — it’s not just to satiate thirst but to prevent even simple illnesses or viruses from dirty water that can be deadly to populations ravaged by the immunity-weakening scourge of HIV and AIDS.

Chris (via Food for the Hungry) needs to raise $2500 to build a well. Will you help him honor Janie and show God’s love to our African neighbors in need? Go here and find out how you can donate via check/snail-mail or online.

Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
– Philippians 3:16

There are lots of distractions from and temptations to discard a commitment to gospel-centeredness. Here are just 8.

1. The Devil’s Accusation
Every now and then I will hear some variation of this accusation from the evil one: “How can you get up there and talk about the gospel? You’re a self-righteous hypocrite.” Satan often tries to stifle gospel proclamation by reminding the proclaimer of his unworthiness. The specific accusation may change, but the motive is the same: get the gospel-centered preacher off his game. If the devil can get us to doubt our calling, our legitimacy as ministers, our capability as proclaimers, or merely our authorization to present the gospel, he knows he’s closer to getting the gospel unheard.

2. The Devil’s Insinuation
This word from the accuser is one I hear more often than any other: “This gospel stuff is gonna get old. Don’t you think if you play this same old record every day people are going to get tired of it?” The devil would love to convince us that the gospel is not versatile or resilient, that it is not the every day power of salvation for all who believe.

3. Exasperation
Many times we are tempted to depart from gospel-centrality because we are fed up in not seeing the results we want or expect. Don’t do that. Don’t give up.

4. Rationalization
One distinguishing mark of heresy is just how reasonable it sounds. Paul warns not of wild-eyed malarkey but “plausible arguments.” You may hear from some very sincere, honest, intelligent people who have been believers for a long time that the gospel-centered stuff is all very nice but they know the gospel already and what they really need to know is what the Bible says about getting out of debt or surviving the workplace. Sounds totally reasonable, no? Law-drivenness almost always does, and legalism rarely shows up these days in a three piece suit, red face, and fist pounding on a pulpit but in sweetness and light, from faithful tithers with kids in the youth group.

5. Accommodation
The rationalizers may not be able to get you to abandon gospel-centrality altogether, so they will instead try to get you to adopt “gospel plus.” They’re not saying to stop with the gospel stuff, they’re just saying you need to be, you know, balanced. “Give us the gospel, sure, but also some of this and that too,” they say. But Jesus + anything is not Jesus. Our people need the unadjusted, unadulterated gospel. They need it straight up, not mixed.

6. Minimization
Gospel minimization comes in a variety of forms, and it is itself a form of the error of accommodation. One claim gospel minimists make is that the gospel is not as important as other things, that it’s the ABC’s of the Christian life, perhaps, and what Christians really need to mature is the meat of “deeper teaching,” which can encompass anything from systematic theology to eschatological speculation. Very often minimization comes in the form of gospel obfuscation, by which I mean the insistence that we simply imply the gospel to better make seekers comfortable or tack it on the end of a sermon in a public invitation or save it for a special sermon series or other special occasions. Sometimes minimizers want to dress up the gospel with songs from the radio, dance productions, cool videos, lasers, fog, stage-jumping dirtbikes, glowstick wielding ravers, or any number of other things the idol factory of our hearts haven’t even manufactured yet.

7. Irritation
The same sun that melts the ice, they say, hardens the clay. Some people will just be flat-out offended or irritated by gospel-centered preaching, teaching, counseling, and ministry. A fear of man may lead us to acquiesce to their disgruntlement to keep the peace.

8. Insulation
Here’s a big one, way too often not prepared for. A steady dose of faithful, robust gospel preaching will likely attract fringe-y people. Jesus had a way of attracting “those people.” So it is with Jesus preached faithfully. If you commit to preaching the biblical Jesus and the radical grace of his gospel, you ought to commit to accumulating the kind of people that were attracted to Jesus. And, God willing, if your church grows from gospel preaching, it will change. You have no choice there. It must change. To grow is to change. And then what happens is that people who’ve been with the church a long time, people who may have been a part of your core or at least your core supporters and cheerleaders, may begin to turn on you. Because their church is looking different. Things are changing. And people don’t tend to like change. Because the gospel enables us to obey the Great Commandment and empowers us to join the Great Commission, insulation is the enemy of the gospel.
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(I’ve labeled the first two dangers as belonging to the devil, but all of these temptations to depart from the gospel come from the devil. Let’s stand firm and resist.)