The Gospel Coalition

If you missed Kim and me sharing our stories of God’s amazing grace yesterday on The 700 Club, you can watch it here.

About 6 months ago, when this blog was brand new and our readership was much smaller than it is now, my esteemed colleague, Paul Manuel, posted his thoughts on blogging. Because many of you probably never saw the original post and because I was challenged again this morning when I “stumbled across” Paul’s wisdom, I decided to post these great insights again.  

I’m a blogger. I have almost twenty weblogs bookmarked on my Mac and I read four or five of them almost everyday. I benefit greatly from the conversations going on over the internet and occasionally weigh in myself. But I must admit, I find the sheer volume of material being churned out everyday a bit daunting. I catch myself spending hours a day, reading and writing material on the internet. My question—is this the best way to make my soul flourish?

As in all of life, moderation is key. I shouldn’t overeat. I shouldn’t get drunk. I need to balance family and work responsibilities. And I need to maintain equilibrium between the virtual world and the real world. Reading, writing and viewing on the net can be helpful and wholesome and just plain fun, but I need to remember Neil Postman’s wise words in Amusing Ourselves to Death. What he said about television 25 years ago is true of the internet today. Both have the propensity to make me a shallow version of what I was created to be—a human made in the image of God meant to worship the real God, love real people and be a faithful steward in the real world. Yes, I can glorify God and love people on the internet. I can (and should) be a good steward of my web site and blog posts. But here’s the rub. At times, I find it easier to love God and love people in the virtual world than in the real world of everyday living.  I would rather be having a conversation with someone on the internet than with my wife at home–and that troubles me. Because, although doing life in the virtual world may sometimes seem easier than life in the real world, it’s not as effective.

E-mail is another good example. I use it every day (typically I receive more than 100 emails a day, not counting junk mail). It’s the way I get things done. But there are some conversations that I just can’t effectively have electronically. I have to meet face-to-face.

This is what the Hebrew word for ‘presence’ (as in, “My Presence will go with you” Exodus 33:14) means. God met with Moses face-to-face (see Exodus 33:11). This face-to-face meeting with God was seen to be of such great worth to Moses that he didn’t want to go on with out it. He didn’t want to live life if he couldn’t do it before the face of God (see verse 15). And he didn’t want to lead people unless God’s presence was assured for all of them. (The ‘you’ in verse 14 is plural.) Moses was not only connected relationally to God, but also to God’s people. The same is true of us. Again, nothing wrong with the net, but face-to-face is always best.

So I’ve put these safeguards in place–I’ll strive to keep my posts short and my comments brief. I’ll use the technology of the net for what it’s worth, but I’ll remember to get out there in the real world and live a little. I’ll go out and talk to a neighbor while he walks his dog…visit someone in the hospital or a nursing home…plant a tree or my favorite perennial in some real dirt…talk to the guy in front of me in that long line at Starbucks…take a walk with my family through your neighborhood. I want to keep living life face-to-face.

Kim and I will be the featured testimony today on The 700 Club. You can check air times and channels here. Please pray that many will be reached by our testimony to God’s amazing grace in our lives.

You can read the summary of the interview here.

Chuck Colson was interviewed recently by CBN. He talks movingly about his life, his ministry, and his new book, The Faith. You can watch it here.

“Without a warrant or other legal authorization, uniformed police officers conducted several raids on Faith Baptist Church in Waterford Township, Michigan, and threatened to prosecute several young Christian musicians for disorderly conduct – because the Township prosecutor objected to the playing of contemporary religious music.”

Read the rest of this article here.

Please pray for me as I will be interviewed tonight on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The interview will air tonight at 10 p.m. EST and again tomorrow at 5 p.m. EST. The reason for the interview is to discuss my book Do I Know God? I have no idea what to expect, but my hope is that the message of the Gospel will be expressed loudly and clearly.

Wilfred McClay recently wrote a stimulating and provocative article on education in modern America. After quoting Philippians 4:8, where Paul says, “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things”, Professor McClay writes:

There is a philosophy of education embedded in those words from Philippians. And it’s very much at odds with the prevailing approach of many parents, educators, writers, producers, media providers, and kids. The prevailing view is that no one can really know for sure what is true, pure, and just—that such judgments are strictly individual in nature, and that it therefore would be an arrogant imposition of one’s values or tastes to assume otherwise. Therefore the only really fair and honest way to educate young people is to “expose” them to many things, as many things as possible, respect their “feelings,” and leave it to them to sort it all out.

Read the whole article here.

The word “secularization” is a fancy term used by social scientists to identify the process through which God and the supernatural are relegated to the fringe of what’s important in society.  A secularized society is a society that has determined to make God and the supernatural socially irrelevant even if they remain personally engaging. It restricts the relevance of God to the private sphere only. This has created, according to Richard John Neuhaus, “a naked public square.” That is, God may be important individually but he is rather unimportant socially and culturally. He may be alive and well privately but publicly he is dead. How our culture got to this point is a study that goes way beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say, however, that we now live in a world that has a bloated sense of human ability. What, in an earlier age, people believed only God could do, we have now placed within human reach. This cultural death of God can be seen in just about every sector of society: science, technology, politics, economics, etc. But the one sphere of society where the cultural death of God shines brightest may very well be the sphere of education.

In his book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis noted that if we remove God from the educational process we will leave people without the capacity to make moral judgments about the world. If we are stripped of the ability to believe that some things are ultimately true and others ultimately false, then everything becomes a matter of private opinion. This in turn, says Lewis, creates “men without chests.” In other words, this produces a less than robust person who is too weak to make absolute moral judgments and uncompromising moral stands.

Our society’s unwavering commitment to political correctness and prevailing tolerance does not permit us to pronounce absolute judgments on anything. “In the modern discussion”, says Os Guinness, “it is worse to judge evil than to do evil.” This is one reason why the events of September 11, 2001 had our heads spinning. On that unforgettable morning we witnessed the unleashing of cruelty and violence in a most unspeakable manner. What we experienced that day was downright evil and everybody knew it. But because absolute evils call for absolute judgment and we don’t believe in absolutes, we found ourselves unjustifiably enraged.

The church, then, becomes the sphere of society where the relevance of God ought to reign supreme. The people of God are to be influencing the wider culture by expressing the centrality of God with both their lives and their lips. Jesus called on his disciples to be “the salt of the earth and the light of the world.” In other words, the people of God are to serve the world by acting as a preservative and a lighthouse. We do this by becoming God-saturated, God-intoxicated people, through whom God’s truth and love shine brightly. In order for God to once again become socially relevant, the church will have to exhibit a God-centeredness that shows our culture just how indispensable God is, not only for the individual, but for society as a whole.

Tim Challies posed this question to Chuck Colson:

Protestants have traditionally held that justification by grace alone through faith alone is at the heart of the Christian faith and thus a non-negotiable doctrine for anyone who considers himself a Christian. Yet this is anathema within the Roman Catholic Church. This would seem to be an unbridgeable divide when seeking communion between the two traditions. Is justification by grace alone through faith alone a doctrine fundamental to the faith? What theological distinctives are non-negotiable in determining who belongs to the Body of Jesus Christ?

You can read Colson’s answer here.

Paul Edwards, of the God and Culture daily radio show, interviewed Emerging Church spokesperson Tony Jones yesterday about his new book The New Christians. You can listen to the interview here. On Paul’s website, he had this to say:

With the arrival of Tony Jones’ The New Christians comes all the proof you need that the emergent church is anything but biblical Christianity. These “new Christians” are the products of “another gospel” (Galatians 1), part of a movement Jones descibes as “one manifestation of the coming dramatic shift in what it means to be a Christian.”

Beneath the surface of the emergent church, however, lies the roots of Catholicism, mysticism, and monasticism repackaged in a postmodern pride in uncertainty labeling itself “New and Improved.” What’s old is new again. “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. I’ll get down on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again.”

When I closed The New Christians for the last time one word came to mind: arrogant. Jones attacks historic Christianity with all the passion of the gates of hell, leaving the reader with the impression that nothing of signifiance happened in 2,000 years of church history until June 21, 2001 when he, Brian McLaren, Doug Pagit, Tim Keel, Chris Seay, and Tim Conder singlehandedly birthed emergent.

NewsFlash: The church isn’t emerging. It has a solid foundation on the faith once for all delivered to the saints. It isn’t a stream and it isn’t a conversation. It has had a definable and recognizable identity since the day Jesus declared that he would build it and since the day he purchased it with his own blood.

Amen Paul! I couldn’t agree more.