Category: THINKABOUTIT

>THINKABOUTIT – Why Do People Avoid Church?

>“Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”

– Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God

>Do as He (Did) – THINKABOUTIT

>Much too convicting a study, but I’ll share it anyway:

Eph 4.32 Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

Luke 6.36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

Romans 15.7 Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you…

John 15.12 My command is this, love each other, as I have loved you.

Eph 5.25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.

>THINKABOUTIT – Drifting

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“People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”
– Donald Arthur (D.A.) Carson

>THINKABOUTIT – Crutch or Stretcher?

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I’ve been told my faith is a crutch…to which I reply, “No, man, if it were a crutch I’d be doing something to help; my faith in the Christ of the gospel is more like a stretcher…He does it all (“salvation is of the Lord)!”

Reading a tough book by Michael Horton titled “Christless Christianity” (Baker Books, 2008).

Here’s a quote that reminded me of the crutch/stretcher:

“…grace is primarily seen by evangelicals as much as by the medieval church as divine assistance for the process of moral transformation rather than as a one-sided divine rescue.”

>Body Count Addiction – THINKABOUTIT

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I recognize that my tour-of-duty in Vietnam makes me nervous about “numbers,” “decisions,” also known as “body counts.”

“Fourteen saved, three assurances, and five dedications” is a common refrain amongst evangelicals. Certainly these numbers may provide a glimpse of what is happening; but too often they become an indicator of “success” in ministry.

Thus this is food for careful thought:

“There are evangelicals who are so earnest in calling for decisions for Jesus that they seem to forget to tell people why they should decide for Jesus. I remember listening to a speaker at an evangelistic meeting whose only mention of the death of Jesus was a passing reference in his closing prayer. I was acting as an advisor to follow up on the after-meeting counseling. I spoke to a young couple who had heard the talk, gone out to the front, been ‘counseled’ and then brought to me. They obviously had not heard any gospel in either the address or the counseling. They had no idea about being justified by faith in the doing and dying of Christ. It seems the decision can become everything. People are exhorted to turn to Christ, to receive Christ, to ask Jesus into their hearts, and the like, even when they have been given no substantial idea at all of who Jesus was and what He has done to save us.”

Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel-Centered Hermeneutics, 173-74

>THINKABOUTIT – Is there a Difference between the "simple" gospel and The Gospel?

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This will take some time to chew on; for those serious about the preservation and transmission of truth, it is worth the struggle:

“For complex reasons many in the Western church came to speak of ‘the simple gospel’, by which they at one time meant the gospel summarized in convenient and simple form, usually for evangelistic purposes. The result is that for many today ‘the gospel’ or ‘gospel preaching’ refers not to the glorious, comprehensive good news disclosed in scripture but to a very simple (some would say simplistic) reduction of it. Some churches distinguished between ‘worship services’ and ‘gospel services’: one wonders which term, ‘worship’ or ‘gospel’, has been more seriously abused. Doubtless the motives behind these developments were often excellent. But the fact remains that a variety of serious problems were thereby introduced. For many, evangelistic preaching became identified with simplistic preaching. Worse, ‘the gospel’ came to be associated in their minds exclusively with the initial steps of faith rather than with God’s comprehensive good news that not only initiates salvation but orders all our life in this world and the next.”

–D. A. Carson, “The Biblical Gospel,” in For Such a Time as This: Perspectives on Evangelicalism, Past, Present and Future (ed. Steve Brady and Harold Rowdon; London: Evangelical Alliance, 1996), 82.

>THINKABOUTIT – Fear of God

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“Fear of God has two aspects. The first is reverence. It is a sacred awe of God’s utter holiness. It involves the kind of respect and veneration that results in fear in the presence of such absolute majesty. The second aspect is fear of God’s displeasure. Genuine faith acknowledges God’s right to chasten, His right to punish, and His right to judge.”
– John MacArthur