The Gospel Coalition

My friend Josh Harris has been posting sermon notes from different preachers (Mark Dever, Mike Bullmore, C.J. Mahaney, and Ray Ortlund Jr.), showing us all how they prepare and what they use in the pulpit. It’s a fascinating series (even for non-preachers).

His final installment is the preaching notes of Tim Keller. Josh asked me to write an introduction for Tim. This is what I wrote:

To be a great preacher, one needs to be tri-perspectival in their exegesis. That is, they need to be committed to the exegesis of the Bible, the exegesis of our culture, and the exegesis of the human heart. Some preachers claim that if you exegete the Bible properly, you don’t need to bother yourself with the exegesis of our culture or the human heart. The problem with this view, however, is that the Bible itself exhorts us to apply Biblical norms to both our lives and to our world.

As a preacher myself, I benefit greatly from listening to a wide variety of preachers. In some cases I learn what to do, and in other cases I learn what not to do. But in every case, I learn something. Some preachers teach me how to be a better exegete of the Bible. Others teach me how to be a better exegete of our culture. And still others teach me how to be a better exegete of the human heart. But no preacher has consistently taught me how to do all three in the context of every sermon more so than Tim Keller. His balanced attention to all three forms of exegesis makes him very unique, in my opinion.

Tim knows how to unveil and unpack the truth of the Gospel from every Biblical text he preaches in such a way that it results in the exposure of both the idols of our culture and the idols of our hearts. His faithful exposition of our true Savior from every passage in the Bible painfully reveals all of the pseudo-saviors that we trust in culturally and personally. Every sermon discloses the subtle ways in which we as individuals and we as a culture depend on lesser things than Jesus to provide the security, acceptance, protection, affection, meaning, and satisfaction that only Christ can supply. In this way, he is constantly showing just how relevant and necessary Jesus is; he’s constantly proving that we are great sinners but Christ is a great Savior.

Personally, I am grateful for Tim’s friendship. His interest in me as a person and a preacher shows a side to him that many perhaps do not see. I know how busy he is and how many demands he has and yet he has always found time to talk with me, advise me, meet with me, and in a thousand other ways, help me out. So Tim, thanks for all you do and for who you are. Preach on brother—we’re all listening!

As I’ve mentioned before, the Work Research Foundation is a think tank located in Hamilton, Ontario. According to it’s website, “The Work Research Foundation’s mission is to influence people to a Christian view of work and public life. We seek to explore and unfold the dignity of work, the meaning of economics, and the structures of civil society, in the context of underlying patterns created by God.” I’ve been learning more and more recently about the Foundation and have been impressed with the work and the research that they do.

This morning I read an article by Ray Pennings, the vice president of research for the WRF. This paper was given in Toronto at “Christian Influence in the Public Square,” a special Toronto Baptist Seminary 80th anniversary event on October 19, 2007.

In it he says:

What’s needed for our time is a Christian witness rooted in sound doctrine, that has a worldview robust enough to answer the questions society is asking, lived out of an ethic of integrity and characterized by a pilgrim spirit that recognizes we’re not trying to build a city here below but that we seek one to come.

I think it’s crucially important for Christians to be able to answer the question, “Why should we be involved in the public square?” In my opinion, this paper helps us do that. 

Please read the whole thing here.  

Os Guinness:

We cannot find God without God. We cannot reach God without God. We cannot satisfy God without God–which is another way of saying that all our seeking will fall short unless God starts and finishes the search. The decisive part of our seeking is not our human ascent to God, but his descent to us. Without God’s descent there is no human ascent. The secret of the quest lies not in our brilliance but in his grace.

Long Journey Home page 191

FYI: Mark Dever recently interviewed Os Guinness about his life and ministry. It’s fascinating. 

(My forthcoming book, Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different, is almost finished. It will be released in April 2009 from Multnomah. Here is an excerpt from my final chapter.)

Both the Bible and history bear witness to the fact that it’s not so much big churches or big ministries that make the biggest impact in our world; it’s big Christians. By big Christian I’m not meaning the Christian whose physical stature resembles Hulk Hogan. I’m meaning the Christian whose spiritual stature resembles Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in the second century A.D.

Around A.D. 161, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius ordered the persecution of all Christians. The story of how Polycarp handled his persecution is, for me, one of the greatest examples of big Christianity this world has ever known. John Foxe in his famous book Foxe’s Christian Martyrs of the World, tells the story best:

Hearing his captors had arrived one evening, Polycarp left his bed to welcome them, ordered a meal prepared for them, and then asked for an hour alone to pray. The soldiers were so impressed by Polycarp’s advanced age and composure that they began to wonder why they had been sent to take him, but as soon as he had finished his prayers, they put him on a donkey and brought him to the city. Brought before the tribunal and the crowd, Polycarp refused to deny Christ, although the proconsul begged him to ‘consider yourself and have pity on your great age. Reproach Christ and I will release you.’

Polycarp replied, ‘Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?’ Threatened with wild beasts and fire, Polycarp stood his ground. ‘What are you waiting for? Do whatever you please.’ The crowd demanded Polycarp’s death, gathering wood for the fire and preparing to tie him to the stake. ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘He who will give me strength to sustain the fire will help me not to flinch from the pile.’ So they bound him but didn’t nail him to the stake.

As soon as Polycarp finished his prayer, the fire was lit, but it leaped up around him, leaving him unburned, until the people convinced a soldier to plunge a sword into him. When he did, so much blood gushed out that the fire was extinguished. The soldiers then placed his body into a fire and burned it to ashes, which some Christians later gathered up and buried properly.

Every time I read that account, I get shivers up my spine. Every time I read “Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?” I’m reminded of what a big Christian is—and how desperately the world needs more Polycarp’s today!

Because religious freedom in most parts of the world is protected, many of us will never face the physical danger that Polycarp faced because of his commitment to Jesus. Most of us don’t have to fear that we will be put to death or placed in prison for our faith in Jesus. But we face danger of another, more toxic sort. Jesus said, “Do not be afraid of that which can kill the body but be afraid of that which can kill the soul.” So while we must never forget the physical suffering of our Christian brothers and sisters in places like Southeast Asia, AIDS ravished Africa, and Communist China, we must keep in mind that the greatest threat to a thriving, God saturated, world transforming faith is not physical danger, but worldliness. 

Worldliness, as I described earlier, is a sleepiness of the soul in which the status, pleasures, comforts, and cares of the world appear solid, stunning, and affecting, while the truths of Scripture become abstractions — unable to grip the heart or guide our everyday activities. This means that the greatest challenge facing most Christians is not “persecution from the world, but seduction by the world.” “Becoming all things to all men” does not mean fitting in with the fallen patterns of this world so that there is no distinguishable difference between Christians and non-Christians. When the sin patterns of this world start to seem normal and the ways of God start to seem strange, we know we’ve been seduced. And when this happens, Christians become radically ineffective. The point I’ve made over and over in this book is that we transform this world by being distinct from it: living against the world for the world. We fail to make a difference in the world when we fail to be different from the world.

I have friends who are foreign missionaries and they tell me that one of the most difficult, hard to get used to, things about being a foreign missionary is the experience of culture shock. Culture shock, according to my friends, happens when a missionary arrives in a foreign field or returns home after being away for a long time. It’s caused when one set of cultural assumptions clashes with another set; when what seems normal to you in one cultural setting seems uncomfortably strange to you in another. After a couple of months, however, the culture shock goes away. Over time they gradually settle into the assumptions and patterns of behavior of the culture around them. As one of them told me once, “Shock eventually gives way to submission.”

The experience of culture shock has always been a helpful image to me as I try to understand the challenge of living in the world but not being of the world. Faithfully following Christ requires that Christians maintain a constant state of culture shock to the sinful patterns of the world. As followers of Jesus, we must maintain what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” to the patterns of culture that undermine our loyalty to God and his unfashionable ways. For Christians to embody a vibrant, world-transforming presence in our culture, shock must never give way to submission; tension with the world must never give way to comfort in the world. My fear, however, is that for many of us professing Christians, it already has.  

How many of us, for example, under the intense pressure to give in and go along, possesses the spiritual backbone to face social scorn and contempt the way Polycarp did? How many of us quickly renounce allegiance to our King and the unfashionable way he has called us to think and live just so that we will “fit in” and be culturally accepted? Seriously. As I examine the spiritual stature of many professing Christians in our day, including me, I really wonder: Where are all the Polycarp’s today? I see plenty of big churches and big ministries, but where are all the big Christians? Are there many Christians left who are willing to die, physically or socially, for God’s unfashionable ways? Are there many Christian’s left who are willing, and desirous, to “leave it all on the field” for Christ’s sake? It’s important for us to remember that Jesus never went looking for crowds. He went looking for disciples. And to get disciples, he explained that any who wanted to follow Him would need to count the cost. Daily Christian living, according to Jesus, meant daily Christian dying: dying to our fascination with fitting in and joyfully becoming a “fool for Christ.”

My suspicion is that if all Christians were similar in spiritual stature to Polycarp, the Christian witness in this world would be much greater than it is. Remember, it only took twelve God-intoxicated men, full of the Holy Spirit, to literally turn the world upside down—or, more accurately, right side up! As E.M. Bounds said famously, “Men are God’s method. The church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.” 

Blue Like Jazz author Donald Miller has agreed to pray the benediction at the Democratic National Convention. Christianity Today interviewed him about it.

When asked, “Where do you stand on issues like abortion and gay marriage?” Miller answered:

The issue of abortion is a very sensitive one and it’s an important issue. I look at from a perspective of, what’s the best that we can do. As we elect a Republican House and Senate, and as we elect Republican leadership in the executive branch, we see very little changes on that issue. We’re electing someone who agrees with us on abortion, being sort of a tragedy in our country, and yet can’t get anything done. It’s kind of like saying, I want a pilot on my plane who feels this way about abortion, but he can’t fly the plane. The executive branch doesn’t have that much power, it has some power, but it doesn’t have much power. You look at the reality of that and say, what can I do to defend the sanctity of all human life, including the living, and the marginalized and the oppressed and the poor? What can we do to better social conditions so that less women are put in situations where they feel like they need to have an abortion. What does looking at the issue holistically look like. I hope the Democrats will listen to those of us who lean toward pro-life and those changes can be made.

In terms of gay marriage, I see it as a constitutional issue. Until we become a theocracy, I think that judges should look at it from a constitutional issue. Whether I think homosexuality’s wrong, personally? America is not God’s country. It’s not considered a Christian nation anymore. You have to look at everybody, not just Christians and say, what are the rights of these people based on this constitution. That’s another difficult issue as well. I get a bit frustrated when the evangelical position is reduced to two issues. So many other issues are not a concern to us. What happened was, in my opinion, the Christian positions has been reduced in order to manipulate us. If we give them these two issues, we can do whatever we want.

Read the rest here.

Reformed people usually get charged with being doctrinal purists who are spiritually dry (hence the phrase “frozen chosen”). This charge depends, though, on one’s defintion of true spirituality. In the “Final Thoughts” column of the May/June edition of Modern Reformation magazine, Michael Horton describes Reformed spirituality by emphasizing that true spirituality is grounded first in what God has accomplished outside of us, not what he performs inside of us. “When we follow the opposite direction”, writes Horton, “we’re swimming upstream–against the current of God’s gracious condescension to sinners.” He explains:

Almost everything that is advocated as “spirituality” or “spiritual disciplines” today is private and focuses on the inner life of the individual, but Christianity is wildly, unashamedly, thoroughly public and focuses on Christ’s historical work and the way that he comes to us by his Spirit–not through private revelations or subjective experiences, but through ordinary human language (preaching), water (baptism), bread and wine (Lord’s Supper). God comes to us in Jesus Christ by his Spirit outside of our reason and experience. His visitation throws us off balance, surprising us instead of simply soothing us or confirming our piety.

So when someone asks us about our spirituality or piety, we typically talk about the public ministry of preaching and sacrament as well as prayer, Bible reading, catechism, and singing Psalms and hymns at home and at church. When the Westminster divines said that “God blesses the reading but especially the preaching of the Word as a means of grace,” they were highlighting this point. From a covenantal perspective, God works from the outside in, from that which God accomplished for us and outside of us to that which he performs within us and through us, from the public to the personal, from what has happened in the past to what is happening in the present. When we follow the opposite direction, we’re swimming upstream–against the current of God’s gracious condescension to sinners.

Since no one is likely to represent all of the views any one voter wants to see promoted, how shall we then vote? Is there a principled way for Christians to cast their ballot? Bill Edgar, professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, writes:

For whom will you vote? My own conviction is, I hope, a wise one: for the candidates who most exemplify character; for the persons most likely to make the right decisions in the face of tremendous pressure; and for those who will look at their office as a trust, not a right.

Read the rest of Dr. Edgar’s article here.

Over at Between Two Worlds, Andy Naselli posts an interview he conducted with my former teacher John Frame.

In answer to a question about the whether or not the problem of evil is as equally problematic for atheists as it is theists, Frame answers:

In order to formulate the problem, atheists have to use the concepts “good” and “evil,” which make no sense in their system. If good and evil are just names for our feelings of approval or descriptions of the pleasure that comes from various events, then there is no reason to assume that God would produce only good and avoid all evil. So, as some have said, if believers have a problem with evil, unbelievers have a problem with both good and evil. For on the unbelieving view, there is neither good nor evil in an objective sense. Still, it is legitimate, I think, for atheists to question whether the Christian faith is consistent within itself. Whatever the unbeliever may think about good and evil, he has a right to ask how the Christian concept of good and evil is consistent with the Christian view of God.

Read the whole thing here.

In this short video, author and pastor Brian McLaren endorses Barak Obama for President.

(HT: Challies)

Reggie Kidd:

In his letter to Titus, Paul offers forty-six crisp verses on theology, social ethics, and personal morality. The letter is a stunning tour-de-force on how Christians are to impact their pagan world. It includes thoughts, I think, that are worth lingering over in a political season.

Reggie concludes with three things he believes the Apostle Paul would have all Christians consider when voting for candidates: 

1. Paul would encourage us to consider what policies and what candidates will make us less a nation of religious liars
2. Paul would encourage us to consider what policies and what candidates will diminish social viciousness and encourage social justice. 
3. Paul would encourage us to consider what polices and candidates will discourage us from being a citizenry of “lazy gluttons.”

Read the rest here.