The Gospel Coalition

In an article titled, Integrity–A Jewel of Great Price, Fred Harburg, Managing Partner of Harburg Consulting LLC and a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum, writes:

When selfishness wins, we all lose. It destroys the very fabric of human civilization. Mutual, well-founded trust is not just a nice-to-have virtue; it is the essential building block of commerce and society—remove it and we all fall down. But wagging my finger at others misses the point. Self-righteous indignation is not the antidote. This is an inside, “internal” job.

Read the whole article here. 

I love this story.

Trevin Wax interviews N.T. Wright on the differences between he and John Piper on the issue of justification.

In response to Trevin’s question, “What would you say are the key differences between you and Piper on justification?” Wright responds:

Well, I set justification within the larger Pauline context, where it always comes, of God’s purposes to fulfill his covenant promise to Abraham and so to rescue the whole creation, humankind of course centrally included, from sin and death. Piper holds that Abrahamic context at arm’s length.

You can read the whole thing here.

Tonight I am reminded of how good God is to give us one day in seven where we get to rest from the activities of this world so that we may engage in the activities of the world to come. The people at New City have heard me say this many times: when we gather together as the people of God on Sunday mornings, we do so not to escape the real world, but to be reminded by God that this present world in its fallen state is not all there is.

The Bible makes it clear that even though we enjoy one day in seven to “rest” from our earthly activities, there is still a rest that remains to be fulfilled (Heb. 4:9). It is the final rest when every day will be a holy day; when every day will be a heavenly day. Until the glory of the Lord fills the earth as the waters fill the sea, until the Kingdom of this world becomes the Kingdom of our Lord and His Christ, every day is not holy. This is the reason that we need Sunday’s—to give us a one-day taste of our future so that we can persevere through the rest of the week. When we worship together on Sunday’s (the Lord’s Day) we enjoy and experience an intrusion of “heaven in the real world.” It is the future being brought into the present. It is in and through our worship together that we, as a church, enter into the very “suburbs of heaven” and get a weekly taste of what will eventually be permanent and eternal. Isn’t that amazing? What a gift!

For a rich meditation to help you prepare for tomorrow read Hebrews 12:22-24.

The elders of New City and I have devoted this day to praying and fasting for God’s clear direction and fierce protection in 2009. So today I have had the opportunity to “get alone.” I have spent most of the day in solitude, praying, studying, reading, preparing my sermon, and otherwise communing with God. O how I need this. An uninterrupted day with God. It’s amazing how clear God’s voice can be when you’re still. In fact, I told Kim that unless I devote myself to extended times of solitude, I’ll never make it. Concentrated times with God, just being with him, is something all of us desperately need. I need it. You need it. In our world of noise and distraction, we need to recover some of the ancient, but proven, spiritual disciplines that Christians before us have practiced: fasting, solitude, systematic Bible reading and meditation (this is, of course, where we hear God’s voice–in his Word), extended times of prayer (a far cry from our “sentence prayer” culture) whereby we listen more than we talk, etc.

I have been amazed at how much I’ve learned about God and myself–the areas in my life that need attention, how to handle the pressure’s I feel, the frustrations I face, and the disappointment’s I fret over. God’s presence, God’s voice, proved once again to be the voice I need more than any other. I have been reoriented, recalibrated, and reordered as a result. God is so good. His mercies are underserved. His grace is amazing. I feel like a new man. 

For the sake of your soul, and those around you, get alone with God. Listen to his gentle instruction. Enjoy his soothing presence. I realized once again that, in the end, God is all I need. In fact, God is all I want. Minimize the noise in your life. Your spiritual life depends on it.

Here is one firm lesson God has reminded me of today: work on Tullian first and foremost and God will take care of the rest.

I don’t do anyone in my life any good if I don’t put my pursuit of God first. Sounds kind of selfish, doesn’t it? Let me give you an illustration.

When I was a kid I used to get so offended by the stewardess on an airplane instructing parents that in case of an emergency they need to place the oxygen mask on their own face first before they place it on the face of their child. How self serving, I thought. “A good parent would put their child’s needs before theirs.” And then one day I realized, “A parent who is not breathing is no help to the child who needs him/her.” In this case, the most loving thing a parent could do for their child is to put the oxygen mask on their own face first.

The fact is, my greatest contribution to God’s Kingdom is not a good sermon or a growing church or the writing of books. My greatest contribution is a holy life. A life lived loving God, fighting sin, serving others, and in a thousand dfferent ways, dying to myself. When Tullian works on Tullian first and foremost, I become, by God’s grace, a useable man. Every effort I put forth before my effort to “work out my salvation with fear and trembling” becomes an effort without the fueling energy of God. And any effort without the fueling energy of God becomes, ultimately, an ineffective effort. The Scottish preacher Eric Alexander once said in my hearing, “God must first do a mighty work in a man before he does a mighty work through a man.” This is true for all of us. Husbands, when you work on you before you work on your wife, you become an agent of transformation for your wife. Wives, when you work on you before you work on your husbands, you become a woman who can now be used by God to change your husband.

Perhaps C.S. Lewis put it best when he said, “When I have learned to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.” Yes. That’s it. Not only as it concerns our husbands and wives and closest friends and family members, but as it concerns all of life. I needed to learn that once again. We all do.

Justin Taylor reports that Richard John Neuhaus passed away this morning in New York at the age of 72. Over the years, Neuhaus has had a profound impact on the way I think about Christianity in the public square. He was an astute observer of contemporary culture and through his magazine, First Things, was able to provide thoughtful commentary on how the church should be living against the world for the world.

He was the co-drafter, along with Chuck Colson, of the highly controversial document, Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Sadly, in some circles, this controversy may be the only thing people remember about Neuhaus. But there was much more to the man. Anytime Neuhaus spoke (or wrote) he was worth listening to. He will be sorely missed. Thankfully, his contribution as a public intellectual will be felt for a long time. 

For those who are unfamiliar with the life and work of Richard John Neuhaus, click here.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I began this new year with a sermon series entitled The Makeup of an Unfashionable Church. This week I am going to be preaching on what unfashionable worship looks like. As I have been thinking about this and praying through it, I’ve decided to preach from Isaiah 6.

Isaiah 6 teaches us something foundational about public worship. If you read the first few verses you’ll notice the first thing Isaiah encounters in the house of God is the glory of God. It doesn’t first say he encountered friendly faces or hot coffee, or soft bagels or a booming sound system. It says he encountered the glory of God. In the Bible, the glory of God is God’s “heaviness”, his powerful presence. It is God’s prevailing excellence on display. In God’s house, Isaiah meets a God who is majestically in command.

What does this mean for our worship services? It means we ought to come, first and foremost, expecting to encounter the glory of God–his powerful presence. We should come ready to sing of who he is and hear of what he’s done. We come to feel the grief of our sin so that we can feel the glory of his salvation. We come, in other words, to see God on display, not preachers or musicians. A worship service is not the place to showcase human talent. It’s the place for God to showcase his Divine treasure.  A worship service that contains the power to change you is a worship service that leaves you with grand impressions of Divine personality, not grand impressions of human personality.

Isaiah did not leave the temple thinking, “What great music, what a great building, what a great preacher.” He left thinking, “What a great God.” This is why songs and sermons need to be about God first. Everything done in worship ought to communicate God because it is God and God alone who can transform your life and mine. Seeing me will not help you. Seeing God is the only thing truly capable of moving you from one place to another. This is why John Piper rightly asks, “How shall entertaining worship services – with the aim of feeling light hearted and friendly – help a person prepare to suffer, let alone prepare to die?” 

David Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum and for many years a senior correspondent for Time, writes about Barack Obama’s overseas challenges. Recognizing that Obama is preeminently a domestic affairs president, Aikman outlines the main foreign affairs challenges that Obama faces:

1. Fighting Islamist radicalism.

2. Iran.

3. Russia.

4. Central and South America.

5. North Korea.

6. Middle East.

Read the whole thing here.

Speaking of Francis Schaeffer, I ran across this Christianity Today article from 2007 entitled Learning to Cry for the Culture. In it, writer John Fischer shows that Francis Schaeffer’s most crucial legacy was his tears. He writes:

Schaeffer was the first Christian leader who taught me to weep over the world instead of judging it. Schaeffer modeled a caring and thoughtful engagement with the history of philosophy and its influence through movies, novels, plays, music, and art. Schaeffer was teaching at Wheaton College about the existential dilemma expressed in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blowup, when movies were still forbidden to students. He didn’t bat an eye. He ignored our legalism and went on teaching, because he had been personally gripped by the desperation of such cultural statements.

You can read the whole thing here.

I don’t know how I missed this a few weeks back, but Harold Fickett reviews Barry Hankins book Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America. Fickett, himself a former student of Schaeffer’s, concludes his review by writing:

The problems within evangelicalism that plagued Schaeffer have not gone away. Because evangelical Christianity’s weak ecclesiology persists, evangelicals must find a means beyond church structures to maintain a consensus on Christian essentials. The usual strategies are to defend a particular view of the Bible, as Schaeffer did, to privilege experience, or to be so busy marketing conversion that the great remainder of Christian life is neglected. The questions of Schaeffer’s life—how to balance faith and reason, doctrine and love, engagement and piety—remain at the heart of evangelicalism’s dilemmas.

You can read the whole thing here.