Why do you believe Christianity is true?

What's to distinguish from belief in a general God from belief in Jesus as God?  Surely it has to be more than personal experience, saying basically that it "works for me" or because I have "experienced it in my own life."  Surely that has to be more than that, but if you ask the average person (as this excerpt from a radio program attempts to show) this is likely what you will hear.  Now perhaps the people haven't fully thought out their answers, but their imemdiate response says something about the state of Christianity today and how the faith is being defended, or perhaps not defended.  This radio program makes the point that Christianity is true because it is grounded in the historical life, death and resurrection of Jesus and attested to by the reliable books of the New Testament that was written by eyewitnesses of these events.  If Jesus was not raised, then we are fools.  Why do you believe Christianity?

Real Hope

I found out that someone I knew from college died this past Sunday, suicide.  It's extremely sad.  However, my friend Marcus points out where the real hope lies for her, and everyone one day.

My Idea for a Song: Thug Jesus

I can think of few images in all of literature more striking and provocative than that of Jesus in Revelation 19.  I can't write songs for crap, but if I could I think I would write about Jesus in Revelation 19 on a white horse with his title "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" written (or tattooed perhaps?) down his leg, or as has been termed cleverly before, Thug Jesus:




Why haven't there been worship songs written about this text?  I'm aware of none.  Not to denigrate anyone's preferences and likes/dislikes because I respect them and can identify with some of it, but I think an understanding of this text and the picture it paints of Jesus in the reality of his glory and righteousness would change our perception of some of the cheese (my opinion) that's put out a lot of times in the name of Christian music.

Revelation 19:11-21:

11 Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. 12 His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. 13 He is clothed in a robe dipped in [4] blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. 14 And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. 15 From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.

17 Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly directly overhead, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, 18 to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of mighty men, the flesh of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all men, both free and slave, [5] both small and great.” 19 And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him who was sitting on the horse and against his army. 20 And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence [6] had done the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. 21 And the rest were slain by the sword that came from the mouth of him who was sitting on the horse, and all the birds were gorged with their flesh.

Did Jesus rise from death?

Yet another explanation from Mark Driscoll on the resurrection of Jesus.  Overload yes.

Resurrection Q&A

Mark Driscoll answers questions at the end of this sermon on the resurrection of Jesus.

The Hope of Resurrection

Mark Driscoll explains how the resurrection of Jesus is the great and only hope of the world.

Prophecies of the Resurrection

Mark Driscoll shows how the resurrection of Jesus was predicted from Old Testament passages.

What is Resurrection?

Mark Driscoll explains well what resurrection means. It is not, contrary to a near-majority's understanding of the subject, merely life after death where we "go to heaven" as widespread evangelicalism would have us believe, but it is rising back into a bodily existence, as modeled by the prototype of Jesus' resurrection back into his body (be it a newly glorified body).

Objections to the Resurrection

Mark Driscoll answers some of the primary objections to the resurrection as historical fact, discussing some material from N.T. Wright.

 

 

General Thoughts on the Resurrection

I feel like the resurrection of Christ and of people in general tends to get shoved to the back of the line in a lot of Christianity, at least in my experience in churches. It doesn't always seem to be mentioned in such a way as to carry the criticality the Apostle Paul put on it in 1 Corinthians 15. With Paul, it appears to be the very hope of our existence. Jesus' resurrection (along with his crucifixion, death, and burial, since they are all are parts of the same story) is where life of humanity is reborn and what accomplishes for Christians the same promise of life after "life after death", as N.T. Wright has put it so clearly. It is not just life after death, in some disembodied angelic cloud world that so much of evangelicalism has mistakenly preached, that the resurrection accomplishes. The resurrection means that our bodies and the whole of creation will be remade and redeemed by the work of Jesus into that of which it was all intended to become by God's initial act of creation. The way I understand it is that through Christ, we who love and trust in him will have the same: all of man, including Adam onward, will be redeemed back into what God created us to be, to be glorifiers of him in all we do. And not only this, but we will continue on into eternity continually becoming that which he created us to become. This was initially disrupted by the Fall in which the whole of humanity collectively participated in rebellion against God and his creation, and in turn this created all acts of death and decay by God's curse on creation. But Christ's resurrection restores all that was lost and puts man back on the intended path of bringing glory to God and of enjoying him in everything forever.

The weight of this hope I don't feel is always stressed in evangelicalism. It's more of a hope of heaven and a vague "being with God" which to me conjures up images of floating on clouds and wearing diapers and playing harps (which sounds more like hell to me), than it is the New Heavens and New Earth, and our Resurrected Bodies, as it were, where our lives carry on in many ways as they do right now, but without sin, without suffering, only with pure joy in being with Jesus who has saved us and with people we love who do also.

I wish the resurrection of Jesus were more explicitly understood as being the core of the hope of the world. Sometimes this hope is only spoken of as being evident in the bloody death of Jesus, and mention is not always made of his resurrection (often only as a period to the sentence). While Jesus' crucifixion and death are the object of hope for the atonement of sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God (they are!), the resurrection is also our promise that God is not only forgiving us, but allowing us to actually live life in holiness and glory (instead of sin, pain, and suffering) with him forever! This includes not only being with Jesus forever, but participating in the community of saints, singing, dancing, loving, working, and rejoicing always in the lives that have been given to us, indeed redeemed, by Jesus' suffering, death, and resurrection on our behalf.

The Resurrection of Jesus

Happy Easter! This is the day Christians everywhere celebrate the fact that Jesus has risen from death and that it is for those who love and trust Jesus as the Messiah of God and King the impetus of our own resurrection, that we will also rise one day to live forever with him, reigning with him in a new and glorified body over a new creation. What could be better than that?

Also, Mark Driscoll provides a helpful summary of N.T. Wright's book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which echoes some of the things I have been writing about it here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Who's the Hero?

How can you explain the resurrection? 4

I finished the book, fittingly on Palm Sunday in the morning. It has been tremendous to read this wonderful scholarly work on the resurrection of Jesus. There is an enormous amount of information in it, and I struggle to see how anyone could be so dedicated to a topic to devote so much energy into developing an argument such as this one. I am immensely impressed with N.T. Wright as a scholar on this topic and I hope to read some more of his books at some point.

Regarding the content, I am obliged to agree with Tim Keller’s exclamation when he put it down at the end, and say “Wow, it did happen!”

This is Wright’s argument throughout the book, that something did in fact happen on the first Easter, and that something was that Jesus really was bodily raised from death after three days. The explanations modern scholars have come up with simply fall flat when examined, two of which include: what is called “cognitive dissonance”, basically meaning that the “supposed eye-witnesses” simply wanted to believe that Jesus came back; and what is best described as a “spiritualization” of the supposed events, meaning that Jesus didn’t actually rise from death, but the resurrection language used in the Gospel accounts is there because it represents something metaphorical about Christian faith, that Jesus is alive in some spiritual way in the faith of believers, and was not physically brought back from death.

But Wright shows in his next to last chapter how improbable these explanations are in light of the accounts of (1) the discovery of the empty tomb and (2) the appearances of Jesus to his followers, including women as the primary witnesses. Wright shows how (1) and (2) are sufficient and necessary historical conditions for the subsequent belief that Jesus physically rose from the dead.

By sufficient, it is meant that the empty tomb and the meetings with Jesus sufficiently explain the subsequent Christian faith and belief that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead.

By necessary, it is meant that the empty tomb and meetings with Jesus are necessary to explain the subsequent belief in his resurrection from death.

The necessary condition is essentially the attempt at proving that the resurrection is true, though I believe Wright intended it to carry a little less force logically (as he stated in The Resurrection of Jesus, Fortress Press January 2006, pg. 22). I would think though that this is what he truly thinks, that it does in fact serve as near proof of the historical reality of Jesus’ resurrection.

It’s fascinating stuff. I recommend reading this book. It appears to be an almost comprehensive survey of all scholarly work on the resurrection from the perspective of history.

How can you explain the resurrection? 3

I am nearing completion of N.T. Wright's work on the resurrection that's taken me close to 4 months to accomplish. I have read all the way through roughly 650 pages (including all footnotes), except the remainder of the section on early Christian writings (I read the first half or so and saw the development of his point and skimmed through to see that this point was continually supported in the rest of the chapter). I've just now gotten to the "good part", which is to say the part where the accounts of Jesus' resurrection are actually examined. Up until now, it has been regarding only the "pagan" writings (referring to works outside the realm of Judeo-Christian theology, such as Homer), Jewish and pre-Christian writings (including the Maccabees), and early Christian writings (including mainly the Apostle Paul and also all New Testament writers, but also many of the early Christian fathers and those such as Justin Martyr and Ignatius). It is remarkable to say I am about 9/10 through the book and the Gospel accounts have not been directly discussed. I am anxious to hear the remainder of the historical argument, and his conclusions (not that I already don't have suspicions about what that may be). I highly recommend the book if you can handle the in-depth often trudging nature through scholarly work. There are points when I've wanted to check out, but I've stayed with it the best I can and it has been enormously profitable to read I feel.

One point that stands out to me is the view, consistent in all four of the New Testament Gospel accounts, that a few frightened women were the heralds of the news of Jesus' (or is it Jesus's?) resurrection. This fact is unprecedented for the time period since women were not viewed as having any credibility when it came to public (or private I assume) testimony (in a trial or otherwise), and to have THEM be one of the few consistent matters of fact within the all the Gospel accounts is simply amazing. Were the accounts completely fabricated or distorted for political (or otherwise) reasons, as is so often contended by biblical scholarship on the more liberal side, it makes absolutely no sense why anyone would leave in the fact of the women's first testimony. Unless it were all true. I don't see much of any good argumentation against this point, and the most reasonable explanation, the explanation that Wright is putting forth and in my view which we are ultimately forced to consider, is that the account of Jesus' bodily resurrection is simply and historically true according to the eyewitness testimonies in the New Testament. This I feel is the gist of Wright's argument, and I am hard-pressed to see it in any other way.

How can you explain the resurrection? 2

If you don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus, you are taking a bigger leap of faith historically than you are if you believe in it. Since there is virtually no evidence that anything other than the resurrection took place (other than some wild speculation centuries later at best), and that making sense out of the ensuing happenings in the Roman empire and the rest of the world within short time is almost impossible apart from the truth of the resurrection of this man, the only path left for the skeptic is to invent some improbable conspiracy theories about "what really happened", which can only be loosely based in history, if even we can say that (which I would highly doubt).


Sometimes it's discouraging when I look at the world with all its division and problems, especially in the realm of Christianity it is difficult to cope with. But really, it is all simplified down to one thing: that being what happened the first Easter. It screams for a verdict to be rendered. There is no way to avoid it. This one event clears away all the fog and opens the mind to think clearly. As Paul said, if Christ has not been raised then faith in Jesus is futile and Christians are the most pitiful people that ever lived (1 Cor. 15 ). History and reality both hinge on this fact. If Christ is buried somewhere, the stupidest and most pathetic thing you can do is be a Christian, despite some people's attempts at claiming that it does not matter. But if he has been raised from death, the only thing in the world that makes sense is to love and trust Jesus because he is the only one who can defeat the most relentless and unstoppable perils there are: suffering, injustice, and death. And his defeat is once for all. Because he lives, we who trust in him will live also because God was pleased for all humanity in Jesus' life, death, burial, and resurrection. As N.T. Wright has put it, this pattern of life seen in Jesus is the prototype for humanity and hope, and is the pattern that has been promised by God thousands of years ago and that awaits all human beings. He is the human race's representative and imputes his resurrected life into ours if we believe in him through faith.

How can you explain the resurrection?

If you do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus after 3 days of burial following his crucifixion at the hands of the Roman government, what is the explanation for the change of the Roman world from pagan to Christian and the parallel explosion of the church and exponential growth and continuance today? Jewish followers of professing "messiahs" in the ancient world, when their leaders died or were killed, either ceased from following these fakers or found someone new to follow. The movements did not continue. But how can the Jewish movement of Jesus be explained apart from the historicity of the resurrection? Why did those professing Jesus as Lord continue to do so after he was killed if he wasn't raised from a state of death?

I'm currently reading N.T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God. I'm at approximately page 250 of 800, and it's taken me since Christmas to get there.

Religion and Revelation

I was thinking about my statements on religion, and I had a couple more things I wanted to say. More broadly, if you think about mankind in its context in the universe purely from a naturalistic, relativistic, man-centered point of view (as the culture would have us believe), then religion and anything abstract simply becomes comical in its absurdity. That is, if you take a cue from postmodern culture today and believe that all religions, worldviews, and truth claims from the perspective of mankind are in effect the same (or they are all viewed as parts of the whole truth, much as in the popular blind men/elephant parable**), then you are really left with a ridiculous notion. This notion being that religiosity does not extend past the minds of humans; or, more accurately, that religion (or anything abstract that mankind comes up with) is imposing meaning and purpose on the universe that is not warranted whatsoever.

If the universe is just material, having a beginning in time with a “Big Bang”, and extending on until all the matter is sucked back into the singularity from which it began, then there really is nothing else to the universe. It simply is what it is. There is no reason for religion if this is all the universe is; humans are nothing but exceedingly complicated conglomerations of chemical reactions and electrical impulses that arose from highly intricate evolutionary changes, initiated from the inception of life that originated in intensely fine-tuned cosmological, geological, climatal, and chemical circumstances. Now I do not claim to be a biology expert and I do not know the extent to which parts of the theory of evolution may be true, but I do know that if what hard-core evolutionists teach about the nature of life and reality is true, then there is absolutely no purpose or reason that humans, and the universe exist. According to this theory, it all began with a bang, and it will all end with a bang; with silence in between the end of this universe and the beginning of the next one. There will be no life, no love, no religion, no meaning whatsoever; just elements, planets, rocks, collisions, fire, explosions, and eventually more life-forms that will be annihilated when the next sun burns out. How could there possibly be meaning in this? And how dare anyone claim meaning and religion that claims this naturalistic theory?

Meaning is something that must be infused into something. An engineer designing a machine must begin with a purpose for the machine. If purpose is not defined, then the machine will never come to be; or if it is made with an unknown purpose, the purpose will never be discovered unless the engineer explains it. If the universe (like a machine in many ways) made itself, as the aforementioned atheistic scientists will claim, then there is no knowing anything as to the purpose of it, except that it has no purpose because no mind, no designer, created it to have one. If this is believed, then anything that is thought about the nature of reality is absolute bunk. You have no basis for claiming how something ought to be, and you certainly have no basis for being religious, since the foundation of all religion (indeed all rational human thinking) is inconveniently plagued with purpose and morality.

The best any atheist (or anyone for that matter) has done to explain religion is to claim that the mind’s sense of religiosity and pursuit of meaning is merely an evolutionary strategy that has arisen to help us survive (this belongs I believe to Richard Dawkins). The problem with this statement, as Tim Keller has pointed out recently, is that if this is true, if all human thinking and beliefs are merely vehicles for human survival as a species, then doesn’t the act of believing in evolution fall into this category as well? Isn’t the scientist’s cerebral act of believing purpose arose from chance merely an evolutionary trick played on the scientist’s mind to help him survive?

What we are left with if this premise is taken to its logical conclusion is the absolute destruction of all human achievement. If there is no purpose in anything (and we can’t avoid this), then that is all there is to say. All creations of man are in the end are just whimsical and nonsensical ingenuity. We are highly decorated and complicated sticks of dynamite, waiting to explode into nothing and into nowhere. Yippee.

While I do not want to give the impression that I am anti-scientific (because I am not), I do want to maintain the utter ridiculousness of believing that the material is all there is and simultaneously claiming purpose for one’s own life. In fact, if the material is all there is, one can make all kinds of unprovable statements about the nature of reality and there is no objective way to denounce them since there is no outside or universal standard of which to view them. For example, I can say that the only purpose in the universe is for me to eat corn everyday, or to learn how to juggle, or for you to learn how to juggle, or to care for the needy, or to always wear a 3-cornered hat. You cannot prove that these are true or false, just like I cannot prove that they are true or false. But we are both left with the fact that neither of us can prove anything, so there is no reason to judge behavior or truth claims since all there is material.

The same can be said about morality. If there is no universal set of morals, then I am just as pleased to kill, maim, rape, and steal as you are to love, give, care, and thank. There is no reason why killing is worse than loving, since we’re all just bunches of arbitrary chemical and electrical reactions. Who’s to say that one is better than another?

But of course no one who has ever claimed relativism will take it this far, to where it logically demands to be taken. This is because everyone has the knowledge and restraint of morality built into their natures and into their consciences. We are all made in the image of God, and as much as we try to escape it, it never escapes us.

The end of my claim is that God, revealed in the man Jesus, is the only possible source of ultimate truth and reality. Since he is the only one ever to have claimed to “come down from heaven”, and historically proven it to be true in the resurrection of his dead body, he is the only one with the credentials to establish himself as such. Man’s search for truth, redemption, and the promised-land on his own merit is useless. All our attempts to get beyond ourselves and get into heaven are futile in comparison with God’s attempt to come to us, and bring us to heaven. Religion is useless. We need Revelation.

** There are literally dozens of different versions of this story that I have seen briefly by searching the internet, but all are essentially the same. Quoting it in the way it is most commonly done is fatally flawed, as pointed out by Lesslie Newbigin in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society:

In the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, so often quoted in the interests of religious agnosticism, the real point of the story is constantly overlooked. The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of the truth. The story is constantly told in order to neutralize the affirmation of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth. But, of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind there would be no story. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth which all the world’s religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions and philosophies.

(pg. 9-10)

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.