New Stuff

Holy crap, I have spent the early morning doing nothing but screwing with this freaking blog. Nonetheless, I have added tons of new stuff to it in the hopes of edifying whoever may happen to read this. Lots of media has been added that can be of great help to anyone who is interested. There is a lot of wisdom and help to be gained from the great preachers and teachers represented here. Look into some of this and hopefully I'll hear from you about any thoughts or comments you may have about anything. Enjoy!

Go Where He Leads - Some Thoughts on "Missions" Pt. 3

At this point, I would like to clarify further what I am getting at.

The point behind the Gospel call and “missions” is not to make it appear as if God is in heaven fighting a battle against evil forces and needs soldiers to help win the war. It is not as if we are crucial to God’s mission to glorify righteousness and we must recognize our inherent importance to join God’s side. This sort of thinking is really just man-centered theology, whether we are willing to recognize it and call it what it is or not. Make no mistake about it—God does not need us to glorify righteousness. God has existed in loving community as the Trinity for all of eternity and before the foundations of the Earth were laid. He was not obligated to create man. Some “theologians” have postulated that God had to create man because “He is love” (1 John 4:16) and love must have an object of affection. This is a dangerous statement, because whenever we start prescribing rules about how God “had to do something,” we can slip into faulty doctrine and even heresy real quickly. No, God did not have to create anything. He could have existed for all of eternity; He could have chilled as the Trinity forever without any evil or wickedness manifested. (As a side note, I sometimes wonder why God went to all the trouble to bring us into being and have us go through all this sin, pain, and heartache, and only for many humans to never see the depravity of themselves, never see the greatness of God, never repent from their sin, and spend an eternity in hell tormented in the presence of a seemingly harmless Lamb. I will never understand it, but I must nevertheless trust that God knows what He’s doing). Anywho, God is not obligated to do anything, and He is not in need of wicked sinners.

The point, when all theology and missiology is broken down, is that God is good. He’s holy meaning different than us, He’s just, and He’s righteous but He can also be nice and merciful when He sees fit. He’s loving and gracious. In Jesus He displayed humility in coming down to be His creation (Immanuel = God with us in Hebrew). This tells us that we must not strive to be with God by reaching in futility to heaven like the fools and the Tower of Babel, this because we are powerless in our humanity to please God. Rather, God has come down from heaven as a human to be with us. Genesis tells us that He did so on a stairway to heaven that Jacob saw in a dream while napping with his head on a rock (Led Zeppelin totally ripped off the Old Testament). This Stairway that Jacob saw, according to Jesus’ own words in John 1:51 is the Son of Man, Jesus himself.

God, in His own use if irony and unpredictable graciousness, has decided to defeat evil by using evil, us wicked sinners. He changes us to be different people and empowers us to live differently than we previously did. This only happens by grace. We can only be used for good by His grace. God does not choose us based on our own innate ability, like designating some of us varsity and the rest junior varsity. The Bible tells us that He does not practice favoritism. Rather, He takes crappy people and does amazing things with them. Romans 9 tells us that “He has mercy on whom He wills, and He has compassion on whom He wills.” This is the pattern in the Old Testament, where God takes dumb, unaware, average guys and empowers them to do miraculous things. Abram was just living a normal life like everyone else, likely a pagan, and God showed up in His life, gave him grace, and promised him a son even though his wife was barren and he was passed his child-bearing years. He commanded Abram to leave his hometown and his father’s house to go start a different and set-apart life that would be used to “bless all nations.” The New Testament tells us that this blessing was not only the nation of Israel, a people outnumbering the stars in the sky, but it was Jesus himself who would bless all people with his substitutionary life, atoning death, and powerful resurrection. The Gospel was then spread all over the world and today Jesus’ legacy is a few billion people that worship him as God, the promise made to Abram, a lowly guy from some no-name town, just like all of us who have experienced the great mercy of God.

It is then that we see that the idea of missions is not about us recognizing God’s need for us or lost peoples’ need for us, but really recognizing our need for God. For it is Him that takes us and does great things with us; and I believe that it is not until our hearts are humbled and we realize our utter nothingness without God that we can truly become all things to all people that we may win some to Him. We must trust in Him who justifies us and in His Gospel that possesses His power. Even though the spiritually blind regard the preaching of the Gospel as utter foolishness, for those that believe we know of its power because we have experienced it. And it is the collective privilege of the missionaries, the seminarians, and the pastors; as well as the single mothers, the children, the cubicle trolls, the husbands, the wives, the fathers, and the friends to be about this Gospel in everything we do because we possess the power of God in our mouths, in our hands, and in how we live. Praise God we have such a blessing to give to all people and that we ourselves who believe on Jesus’ name have received this blessing spoken to Adam, Abraham, and Jacob and to all those that trust in the life he gives freely to us lowly people. Amen.

Go Where He Leads - Some Thoughts on "Missions" Pt. 2

I have given more thought to this issue, and I have realized how very important it is how we understand all this. How we answer this question I believe speaks volumes about what we really think about God and His ultimate sovereignty over all peoples, situations, and happenings.

I guess the bottom line question here is, "who's in charge?" By that I mean us to ask ourselves who we think is running the show, who is getting things done in the world, who is spreading the Gospel, who is causing nations to fall to their knees, and who gets the glory? Upon hearing such questions, the obvious Sunday-school answer is, well, obvious: it's God. But the point I wish to make here is, do we really know this and live like it's true? To illustrate this last statement by an example, the great reformer Martin Luther was once asked by his congregation why he continued to preach the Gospel every week in his sermons, as if to imply that they wanted him to give them something more to fill their souls, something that had more "weight" to it, as it were. When asked why he continued to preach the Gospel week by week, he answered: "Because Beloved, week by week you forget it." I think the situation in this German church is similar to what is happening in our world today. We think that because we know about Jesus and we know the Gospel message, that somehow we can now "move on" to more important things, or move on to the good stuff because we're ready, like the Gospel is old hat, it's about Jesus dying on the cross...blah...blah...raised from the dead...blah...seated at the right hand of God Almighty....blah....blah. The problem with such thinking is really quite obvious: we have nothing more. It's not something we have to think real hard about and develop some silly drawn-up application to our lives. The Gospel is what it is, and we know that "it's the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16) and that we should not be ashamed of it for this very reason (rest of verse). I think we have slipped into sin in this area as the Church, at least in some circles. We think there is something more past the Gospel that will really feed us, that will really make our lives better, but the fact is we are ashamed of the Gospel if we deny its power to change lives--from the beginning to the end, for God is the author as well as the finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:2), and His power lies in the Gospel of Jesus.

All this to make the point that I think we, including me, have failed in believing the Gospel, and in believing the Commission, which are both really the same thing if you think about it (i.e. Jesus going after all types of people, so we should also). We have failed to make the Commission our mission (not to sound redundant and lame....ok scratch that). Let me try again: We have failed to obey Jesus Christ, the Almighty Sovereign Lord of the Universe who holds us in His hand as if over a raging fire (keep it simple). Ok, I had to throw in some J. Ed. Perhaps we need some good ol' fear of God back in us. Ok, I've gotten off. I'll try to regroup.

To connect all this rabbit-trailing, what I am getting at is that we have failed to trust God. We have failed to be about the Gospel in all we do. We have failed in many respects in just, well, trusting God. Not to be repetitive, but I think it's really the problem. We have this thing where we say, "God's got everything in control," and then we say stuff like, "we need to preach the Gospel to those guys with warpaint all over them because they will never know Jesus if we don't," as if we are really that important. There's obvious confusion here I think. Now sure, as Paul asks, "how will they hear without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14) But we must be slow to answer the question, "oh we have to do it or else it will never happen," because we're the important guys, right, us Christians, right, we're special, right? Well....not really. We're really just a bunch of people God decided to be nice to and be spared from a righteous and just wrath (read about Noah and the flood that slayed all but 8 people off the face of the Earth if you're skeptical here, a nice children's story I might add.......). We need our priorities straighted out here. God has chosen to be nice to us by giving us Jesus as a sacrifice, so "how will he not also graciously give us all things?" (Rom. 8:32) This includes the empowerment to live as He wills, sanctifying us into the image of His Son, doing the good works God "prepared in advance for us to do." (Eph. 2:10) This includes missions (here we are finally). These are the good works He prepared in advance for us.

Ephesians 2 says that we are God's workmanship, by His grace, and we do good works by His grace, and we have faith by His grace...grace, grace, grace, grace, grace. Get the point? It's all a gift, it's all a gift, it's all a gift. Your faith is a gift, the faith that claims the righteousness of Christ and not our crappy lives is a gift. The faith that boldy trust that God's promises about Jesus taking away our sin is true. It's all just one big gift. Think of all the good things in your life; they're all gifts. James says 'every good and perfect gift comes from God'. Go look it up, I'm tired of looking up the verse numbers.

We must not forget where our power comes from. The power to preach the Gospel comes from the Gospel. The power to see sinners come to the feet of the cross is from the Gospel. The power to live redeemed lives free from the hindering and crushing work of sin is from the Gospel. And it's Jesus who makes all things work together for good for those that love him. It's Jesus behind the scenes giving you a 'calling', a 'personality', friends, coworkers, etc. Acts 17:26 says that God determines the time and the place that you will live, and also provides you the means to accomplish your mission because He is the one who prepared it all in advance for you to do. The message is simple, but actually really perplexing: God's in control, but do your part, because it makes things so much simpler and easier. Like I said before (and not to be oversimplistic because each of these things deserve prayer and contemplation before figuring out and executing), preach the Gospel, go where you like, marry someone that loves Jesus and is with you on the Gospel mission, love your neighbor, etc. And I will say also, what you do, where you go, who you marry, who you preach the Gospel to, who your neighbor is, are all not nearly as important, I would venture to say are not important (again, don't misunderstand me) in comparison to who you worship, because our God is infinitely bigger God than any of our little issues on Earth and all knees will bow to the Sovereign in the end. Thank you Jesus. Amen.

Go Where He Leads - Some Thoughts on "Missions" Pt. 1

I was thinking just a few minutes ago about how we, perhaps moreso in American Christian culture (though I am no expert), view God's call on us to "do missions."

There's a lot of talk in Christian bubbles today about missions. Most of the time the people that are super fired up about missions we regard as some sort of higher breed of Christian, people that are willing to be poor and live off of a steady diet of baloney and/or vienna sausage (that stuff rules by the way) while living amongst natives of far-off "unreached" and primitive civilizations. Oftentimes, from my experience in dealing with and knowing a lot of peers that wish to be missionaries in distant lands, we get this somewhat unrealistic view, maybe not overtly sometimes, that if we don't make this huge move somewhere overseas or in the most remote village in Zbembezedjfd or wherever, that we are somehow not "responding to the call of God." Now I am quick to agree that Jesus commanded to preach the gospel in all nations and to make disciples of all people, but I think it's easy sometimes to just reduce the Commission to the people that do go to other countries and to so-called unreached people groups that haven't heard the name of Jesus.

Or perhaps we can even reduce "the call" to people that decide to go to seminary and be religious "professionals." The problem with such thinking is that it creates this hierarchy of spirituality where we can agree that we are all Christians, but sometimes we who just stay at home and work a mundane job can feel the temptation to exalt these "missionaries" and "seminarians" to a higher status in God's spiritual pyramid scheme where Jesus sits at the top and we can become like him by making the right decisions, gritting our teeth, being moral, and depending on our own will to attain the righteousness of Christ. We view them as spiritual super heroes that somehow never struggle, never miss reading their Bible, never cease praying, and are even never suffering from sin in their lives, both those they have committed and those that have been committed against them. I believe we must resist the temptation to do this because we are focusing so much on other people and our failures to live up to them instead of focusing on Jesus and the righteousness he imparts to us by his death and resurrection achieved according to his own grace and love.

If we get stuck on this type of man-centered thinking, it can distort where we think our righteousness is obtained. This can also happen to the person who is "called" to go overseas or to seminary. We have a strange view of God's "call" I think. We are raised by the institutional American church (usually the mainstream denominations) to try real hard to "hear the call of God," so we say. Granted, this is true, but we must be careful in how we understand this. We must ask ourselves: what is the call of God? Is it different to each person? Should I wait for God to speak audibly to me or give me a vision? In thinking about these questions, we must not overlook some of the clearest commands of God and how we are to respond to His call to us. Primarily, we must not overlook the inspiration of Scripture, and also the speaking of the Holy Spirit to our hearts. Furthermore, it must be understood that the Holy Spirit will never call us to do something contrary to Scripture, for He Himself "inspired" it ('breathed life into it') (2 Tim. 3:16), and for Him to do so it would seem He was either a horrible communicator because He couldn't get the message right the first time, or that He was some sort of whimsical schizophrenic who gives commands based on some ridiculous capricious nature that change from moment to moment. No, we must refuse this heretical teaching.

Secondly, we can have a confused outlook on God's call to us. We can take one aspect of the Gospel call and run with it, while ignoring the remaining crucial parts, for the entire Gospel is to be regarded when obeying Jesus' Commission. We cannot say "we must all be overseas missionaries," or "we must all go to seminary," or "we must leave our homes and spread the Gospel to the unreached peoples because how can anyone know Jesus unless it is us who tells them?" Let me just say, a lot of this kind of talk is nonsensical. Who are we to say what we should be? Who are we to prescribe what the call of God is to us, or more broadly what the will of God is for the nations of the Earth? And how do we know that those "primitive" civilizations don't know Jesus? Can we claim that Jesus can't show up to them and reveal himself? I want to be clear here. God does not need us. He is all-powerful, omnipotent, the Almighty God, however you want to put it. The point is He can get things done without us, but the amazing thing is He chooses to use us and include us in His purposes. Therefore we must approach the "call of God" or the "will of God" humbly and ask God to glorify His name by using us however He sees fit. We must remember who is in charge here. It's not us. We must remember that God will get what He wants done, done. We must remember that God is on a mission also, a much bigger one, and unlike us, He never fails. Jesus was the ultimate missionary. He came to a foreign land for one reason: to save sinners, and he completed his mission to the nth degree. He shouted "it is finished!" from the cross, and indeed it is. He has completed his mission on the cross and from His perspective outside of time, He has already won the battle for our souls. We must recognize by the grace given to us that we must repent from our sin and turn to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Ephesians 2 tells us that we are saved by grace through faith, and both of these are gifts He gives according to the purpose He set out before the foundations of the Earth to glorify Himself, the source of all righteousness.

I think the main point I am trying to make is that we must not get too caught up in "trying to hear the call of God", wondering which country to go to, and being really good at guessing the secret will of God. All people need Jesus, and God will "have mercy on whomever He wills" (Rom. 9:15), so we must rest our hope on Him who is faithful that He will accomplish His purposes and He can use us in any circumstance, in any country, in every moment of time if it be His desire. We must hold fast to the truth, worship God in all circumstances, and preach the Gospel whether in season or out of season. So I say, do whatever you like, go wherever you want, marry whomever you want, work wherever you want, but preach the Gospel, love your neighbor, love your wife, submit to your husband, pray, take up your cross, glorify His purpose, love your enemies, do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God--in your words and how you live, and know that our only source of righteousness does not come from what country we're in or where we work, but from the crimson flow of Christ, Hallowed be Thy Name. Amen.

Ryan Ferguson recites Hebrews chapters 9 and 10

This is really cool. Try to imagine it's the first time you've ever heard it. This video is from the WorshipGod06 Conference Aug. 9-12, 2006. Ryan Ferguson is giving a memorized dramatic recitation of Hebrews 9 and 10 from the ESV Bible. God’s Word is powerful. The Holy Bible, English Standard Version is copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.