The Gospel Coalition

One of the best books I’ve read in recent years is Engaging God’s World by Cornelius Plantinga. Reading it carefully will change you. It’s that kind of a book.

Anyway, I picked it up off of my bedside table last night and read a few pages before I fell asleep. This is what I read on page 143:

A Christian who goes to work for the kingdom (that’s every Christian) simultaneously goes to war. What’s needed on God’s side are well-educated warriors (warriors who know what’s going on). We are now fallen creatures in a fallen world. The Christian gospel tells us that all hell has broken loose in this sad world and that, in Christ, all heaven has come to do battle. Christ has come to defeat the powers and principalities, to move the world over onto a new foundation, and to equip a people–informed, devout, determined people–to lead the way in righting what’s wrong, transforming what’s corrupted, in doing things that make for peace, expecting these things will travel across the border from this world to the new heaven and earth.

What a great way of putting things!

Many Christians talk about the need to transform culture. But many Christians disagree when it comes to how culture is actually changed. I have heard both Andy Crouch and Dick Staub say in various ways that culture changes when people actually make more and better culture. As Andy once wrote, “If we want to transform culture, what we actually have to do is to get into the midst of the human cultural project and create some new cultural goods that reshape the way people imagine and experience their world.” The problem is that even if you believe this, it’s hard to know from a practical standpoint how to do it. How do we create cultural goods that effectively transform our world? It sounds like a daunting, almost impossible, task. 

In this article (published by the Work Research Foundation), Andy Crouch outlines some very helpful, practical ways in which we can skillfully create culture in such a way that our world is genuinely changed and transformed.

Cornelius Plantinga:

People tend to make two mistakes when they think about the redeemed life. The first is to underestimate the sin that remains in us; it’s still there and it can still hurt us. The second is to underestimate the strength of God’s grace; God is determined to make us new.

As a result, all Christians need to say two things. We admit that we are redeemed sinners. But we also say boldly and joyously that we are redeemed sinners.

From Beyond Doubt: Faith-Building Devotions on Questions Christians Ask, pg. 89

Today more than ever before, I am oh so proud to be a South Florida native! Click here to find out why.

Lillian Kwon from the Christian Post interviewed Joel Osteen and asked him about the Presidential candidates and teaching theology.

Lillian asked: ”You said you weren’t called to expound on theological doctrine or every part of Scripture. You calling is to inspire people. I’m sure everyone who hears your message leaves inspired, but do you feel your listeners have a greater grasp of Scripture that Christians should have?”

Read Joel’s answer here.

In the September/October edition of Books and Culture, Gideon Strauss reviews Andy Crouch’s stellar new book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. He writes, “Andy Crouch’s very fine Culture Making will be joining the short list of books that I read again and again, and fervently recommend to others, for insights into how we are to live as Christians.”

Read the whole review here.

John Piper provides a sound, practical, and convicting word on ways in which he and his wife trained their children spiritually: 

Looking back over 31 years of parenting, the things that have been constant are related to the fact that we always knew that the Bible and prayer had to be woven into the life of our family, both between me and Noël privately, and with our children together.

Let me just mention what we aimed to do on a daily basis:

1. We encouraged our children from the very beginning to be alone with the Lord in the morning. That can start as soon as you can prop a child up with a pillow so that he doesn’t topple over and bonk his head. You can set a tape recorder beside him with a song about “Jesus loves me, this I know” or a Bible story.

So a child can have devotions from age 1 on, as strange as that may sound, if you train him to have a little time alone to be with God. He can’t read yet, obviously, and he won’t read yet for another 4 or 5 years. But he can listen and he can enjoy that time. So we did that, and then it turned into Bible stories. Then it turned into giving them their own Bible that they could read, which went on up through teenage devotions.

2. We were at the table together every morning, and I led devotions at breakfast with the children. And if the child is little he just says “Jesus” and that’s all he says. But we used to work our way through the Global Prayer Digest so that there was a missions component. And then we read a short passage of Scripture, and I would pray. It might not take more than 5 minutes, because of the children being little.

3. Then in the evening we had family devotions, which was a little longer. We read a longer portion of Scripture, and all the children–if they were able–would pray, not just me. Noel would pray, I would pray, and each of the children would pray. And as soon as they could talk, we taught them to pray.

4. And then when we put them to bed, we tucked them in, blessed them with this benediction: “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace, and joy, and hope, and love, and a good night’s rest, and someday a godly husband.” (Talitha, our daughter, will always laugh when I say this last line.)

And then I sing a song for Talitha. And then I give her a big hug. There is a very definite routine that we walk through. And there is a word component even as you tuck the child in bed at night.

That has been the routine for 31 years, basically, though I don’t want to create the impression that it is flawless or that we didn’t miss mornings or evenings. We did, but this was the goal and the routine. And pretty much we have been able to keep with it.

Dick Staub (one of my favorite “culture watchers”) uses Sarah Palin to illustrate what a mistake Christians make when we fall prey to the worldly idea that the biggest things happen through the biggest people. He writes:

I remember a few years ago when George Barna identified the centers of cultural influence, concluding that the church did not rate very high. He shared a plan to work with large churches (also believed to be the center of power) in strategic cities (coinciding with the “world’s list” of strategic places) to recruit the brightest and the best next-generation evangelical leadership prospects to mentor them and help them enter the most powerful educational institutions (Harvard, Stanford, Yale) so they could enter the most powerful positions in the most powerful companies in the most powerful cities I the world.

I remember telling George that of the national book award winners I had interviewed, most were from small out of the way places and most hadn’t attended the best schools. They came out of nowhere, riding on the strength of their talent, internal sense of calling and desire to express who they were in their work, starting where they were in some small, out of the way farming community tucked away in some unknown village in the Midwest.

Read the whole thing here. 

Unfashionable (my next book which is scheduled to be released in April) is finished–well almost. I’ll be working with one of my editors over the next month or so on things like tone, style, etc. But the content and the organization of the content is finished. Phew! Below is a section from a chapter entitled Love, not Lust, where I describe the need for the church to be “unfashionable” in its approach to the way this world views other people. As always, your feedback is both welcomed and appreciated.

Oh, and by the way, you can now pre-order a copy of Unfashionable on Amazon. By pre-ordering it now, you can begin to raise awareness of it’s coming. Thanks.   

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There’s no doubt we live in a lust-saturated world. Every single day we’re bombarded by the sexual objectification of human beings. Both men and women are constantly being sold to the consumer as objects for self-indulgence. In our “sexualized” culture, billions of dollars are spent every year on pornography, “an industry that enslaves countless people to the vice of voyeurism and perverts the normal expectations of sexual expression between men and women in marriage.”  Sex is used to sell just about everything from homes to cars, cologne, beer, and clothes. Sexual promiscuity is romanticized and celebrated as the means to true freedom and the ultimate expression of one’s individual right to personal pleasure.

Youth culture is more than ever saturated with the fashionability of lust and sexual licentiousness. From the explicit pictures of Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs, to the half-naked teenage employees who wait on you at Hollister Co., to virtually every reality show on TV and every pop-song on the radio, the message is the same: Sexual promiscuity is stylish—and love is overrated.

But however progressive and cool it may look on the surface, the posture of promiscuity is actually the sad concession of a deeply lonely culture.

In a recent talk given at a Christian college, journalist Andy Crouch showed the connection between sexual promiscuity and the rapid rise of binge drinking among college-age women, 40 percent of whom have had more than four drinks in a row in the last week, according to a survey. “I have a theory about this,” Crouch said. “I believe that drinking for college-age women is largely a way to make sex easier—to ease the pain of hooking up, the pain of anonymous sex. Sex with someone you’ve made no promises to, for whom you haven’t changed your name, is indeed anonymous, without-a-name sex. It’s also storyless sex, with no history and no future. When it stops feeling good, it hurts, because sex is made to change our names, to change our stories. And when it doesn’t change us, it leaves us empty and lost, stranded outside the story we were made to live in.”

Andy’s words show that underneath our culture’s fascination with sexual promiscuity and lust is a deeper, unsatisfied desire for a more meaningful and long-lasting form of relational intimacy. Because the modern world is always changing and never staying the same, millions of people feel disconnected and alone.

It shouldn’t surprise us, for instance, that the meteoric rise in teenage pregnancies is happening at the same time our culture becomes increasingly dependent on modern telecommunications. Technology connects us broadly with others but not deeply, and this lack creates an uncomfortable anonymity that makes people desperate to find relational intimacy anywhere and anyway that they can. And since real love—name-changing, story-changing love—seems hopelessly out of reach (existing only in fairy tales), people settle for what they believe is the next best thing: hooking up. Thinking they can find satisfaction to their hunger for deep relational connection in and through sexual encounters, they become promiscuous—if not physically, then virtually (hence the rise in use of internet pornography and sexual chat rooms). Millions of people jump from bed to bed and chat room to chat room trying desperately to scratch a deep itch that commitment-free sex simply can’t reach.

Promiscuity promises what it cannot pay. We need something bigger, something deeper.

The gospel is the reason why the church is to be a community that embodies and exhibits true self-giving love in a sexually promiscuous, lust-saturated world.

In 1970, Francis Schaeffer wrote an essay called “The Mark of the Christian,” in which he argued that love is the Christian’s fundamental characteristic. He grounded his conclusion in the words of Jesus in John 13:34-35: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Likewise Paul tells us that the church is to “walk in love.” Why? Because Christ “loved us and gave himself for us.” And the apostle John writes, “By this we know love: that he [Christ] laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16).

In a world that cheapens people by objectifying them, dehumanizing them, and viewing them as commodities meant to serve our needs instead of persons for us to serve, Christians are to demonstrate that real love is not out of reach, that in the person of Christ true love has in fact reached down to us, and that this love is, without question, more enchanting than promiscuity. It is name-changing, story-changing love. It’s not anonymous, and it’s not commitment free. It is real, it is deep, it is covenant keeping. It is, in fact, “patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).

We’re to show our lonely world just how much more captivating and satisfying loving self-sacrifice is over sexual self-indulgence. We’re to show that there’s an immeasurable difference between sexual lust and self-giving love: One seeks to use people while the other seeks to serve people; one tears people down while the other builds people up.

We need to demonstrate for the world what human community can look like where people serve one another instead of use one another, and where people find joy in each other’s joy. That’s what love is. As a result of our putting true love on display for the entire world to see, they’ll know there’s something different about us—and it will make a difference.

 This recent article reveals that both inside and outside the church, the term “evangelical” draws confusion and blank stares:

The word “evangelical” floats around in churches, the media and particularly this year’s election but Americans often have no idea what an evangelical is, a new study shows.

As Christians themselves still have a hard time agreeing on what exactly defines an evangelical, Ellison Research asked the average adult American what they believe is an “evangelical Christian.” Thirty-six percent of them said they had no idea.

“I’m not sure; all I can think of is Billy Graham,” said one 40 year-old woman from Florida who does not attend worship services, in the survey.

Read the whole thing here.