The Gospel Coalition

“The best way to guard a true interpretation of Scripture, the Reformers insisted, was neither to naively embrace the infallibility of tradition, or the infallibility of the individual, but to recognize the communal interpretation of Scripture. The best way to ensure faithfulness to the text is to read it together, not only with the churches of our own time and place, but with the wider ‘communion of saints’ down through the age.”

–Michael Horton

(HT:JT)

Another great insight from Glenn Lucke:

I am often baffled by the willingness of some grad student believers to bend and blur their beliefs and practices in order to fit in. In countless scenarios I’ve listened while formerly evangelical grad students engaged mightily in what sociologist Erving Goffman termed “impression management.”

Read the whole thing here.

My two brothers Basyle (“Boz”) and Aram Tchividjian (I swear my parents weren’t on drugs when they named us) developed a website about 18 months ago called www.thankyoubilly.com. It was designed to capture the human impact of my grandfathers crusades. People from all over were encouraged to write in and share their stories of how God used the ministry of my grandfather to change their lives in various ways. “The stories poured in, from young and old, near and far–those who once were lonely, addicted, abandoned, sick, suicidal–all sharing how one invitation changed everything.”

Those stories were pulled together and put into book form. Now, through pictures and stories of ordinary people who heard the gospel and responded, Invitation: Billy Graham and Lives he Touched gives readers a glimpse into the sovereign work of a gracious God in using a simple dairy farmer to change lives.

Here’s a description of the book which was just released:

Here is the inspiring spiritual journey of hearts and souls encountering God through the ministry of Billy Graham. From despair to hope, from broken life to renewed spirit, Invitation tells each individual story within the visual context of the Crusade experience.

This new book of images and stories brings together never-before published stories of real people who responded to God’s invitation and as a result found their lives transformed and utterly turned around.

Given my fascination with all things unfashionable, I was delighted to read this post by my friend Glenn Lucke. Glenn writes:

Humans have two paradoxical impulses at work: we want to fit in, and we want to be distinct. Put differently, we want to be normal and we want to be better. Or you might express this negatively: we don’t want to be excluded, but we do want to exclude others.

You can read the whole post here.

(This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different from the World. It comes out in April.)

In a world that’s decidedly anti-God, following God’s unfashionable ways can be wearisome, scary, trying, and intimidating. Some of this is owing to the fact that all of us desperately long for acceptance. We spend the better part of our lives trying to “get in,” to be approved. We think life will be worth living—that we’ll be somebody—to the degree that we can “get in” with the right person or the right group. If we can achieve a certain level of worldly success, we’ll be accepted by those around us; people will conclude that our life matters.

My boys love football. They have the skill for it, the heart for it, and the mind for it. But like their dad, at this point they don’t have the body for it. And sometimes that really gets to them. They’re afraid they won’t be big enough to play the game. One of them was really upset about this recently, and so we talked. I went up to his room where he was crying and said, “I know this may seem deeper than you want to go right now, but this is what’s really causing you to be upset. You’ve come to believe that you don’t matter—that you’ll never be accepted—if you don’t succeed in sports. And you think that your success in sports depends on your size. This means you’re depending on your physical development to give you significance. You think acceptance depends on your size.”

What I told him is also what I have to daily remind myself of: Your deep longing for acceptance can be satisfied only when you’re accepted by the One who made you for himself. If you embrace what Christ has done on the cross for sinners, you’re in. Your hunger for approval will be satisfied because you’ll be forever, unchangeably accepted by the only One who matters. You’ll no longer have to depend on your size, your stuff, or your smarts to get you in so that your life will matter. Once you understand that in Christ you’re accepted by God, you’re free and empowered to live unfashionably—because you won’t need the acceptance of the world around you.

We can also take great comfort in the fact that because we’re united to Christ, all that is his (humanly speaking) is ours. He has made it possible for us to be the unfashionable people God designed us to be.

In his book Grow in Grace, Sinclair Ferguson reflects on the fact that Jesus is the captain of our salvation and the pioneer of our faith. He has beaten down a path for us to follow. Because Christ loved and lived God’s unfashionable ways, we can love and live God’s unfashionable ways. Because Christ dug down deep, we can dig down deep. He’s our great trailblazer, our divine bushwhacker. Ferguson provides this vivid illustration:

Picture an army captain hacking his way through a jungle during a battle with guerilla forces. He leads his men from danger to safety by first facing the dangers, impediments, and tests himself. Similarly, Jesus is the Captain of our salvation. He has not only tasted all of our experiences of temptation but he has gone further. He experienced them in their full strength, when they unleashed all their powers against him. Where we would stumble and fall, he has pressed on. He overcame temptation, conquered death and drew its sting. Now he beckons us: “Follow me, the pathway of faith is trustworthy for all of you to use!”

Our unfashionable Leader has promised that because he has already done it, we can now do it.

Christians throughout history have believed this in their most trying moments, when the temptation to give in and give up was strongest. Robert Glover was a devout follower of Christ in England. In 1555 he was arrested for denying state-approved doctrine, tried for heresy, and sentenced to burn at the stake. Just days before his execution, Robert experienced a sense of God’s dreadful withdrawal, and he fell into despair, fearing that God had abandoned his soul. One of Robert’s friends, Austin, visited him in prison and encouraged him to stay patient and wait for God, saying that God would come back before the end.

The day before his death, Robert spent most of his time in prayer, but he still felt no presence or comfort from God. The next day, however, as his executioners led him to the stake, he suddenly felt God’s presence so profoundly that he started clapping his hands in joy and crying out, “Oh, Austin, he has come! He has come!”

When the pressure to give in and go along seems unbearable, we can bank on our Savior who has promised to never leave us nor forsake us, and who has already fit us with enough grace and truth to press on and strain forward—unfashionably.

John Frame answers the question, “Should Christians go to movies?” He writes:

Some Christians may wonder how a fellow believer can give any support to the film industry, notorious as it is for anti-Christian bias and moral relativism. I would note that there is also a view on the opposite extreme: some Christian critics of culture insist that all Christians have a responsibility to become culturally aware, to become knowledgeable about cultural trends in art, music, literature, film, drama and so on.

I know people on both sides of the spectrum. Most younger Christians today, however, fall into Frame’s second category: they are cultural consumers. In this brief article Dr. Frame helps us to navigate through the waters of these two extremes, showing us how to be “in the world” but “not of it” when it comes to the film industry.