Preach the Gospel to Yourself

No one is more influential in your life than you are. Because no one talks to you more than you do.

So observes Paul Tripp — and in doing so, he accents our need to daily preach the gospel to ourselves.

In our sin, we constantly find our responses to life in our fallen world to be disconnected from the theology that we confess. Anger, fear, panic, discouragement stalk our hearts and whisper in our ears a false gospel that will lure our lives away from what we say we believe.

The battleground, says Tripp, is meditation. What is it that is capturing your idle thoughts? What fear or frustration is filling your spare moments?

Will you just listen to yourself, or will you start talking? No, preaching — not letting your concerns shape you, but forming your concerns by the gospel.   Continue at David Mathis

The Biggest Lie About Law?

One of the commonest errors about law relative to Christian conduct is that God no longer uses fear or laws to promote Christian conduct.

I was born and raised in a fundamentalist milieu that was at times excessive in its proliferation of rules and regulations. I recognize quite freely that this tendency, while commencing as a well-intentioned pursuit of godliness, in many instances offered fertile soil for the wickedness of self-aggrandizing Pharisaism, fear-driven authoritariainism, and the diminution of the gospel of the grace of God.

Still, I was uncomfortable when I read recently that “rules and regulations…bring about a kind of religious moralism that is very far from genuine Christianity” and, further, that such rules de facto reflect a sort of fear that is incompatible with faith.

Why was I uncomfortable? Well, because the New Testament is filled with fear-motivated rules and regulations that function as legitimate self-disciplinary tools for the promotion of true Christian godliness. Note the following:

• “Great fear” induced the early church not to lie (Acts 5:5, 11 cf. 19:17ff).
• Paul exhorts us as believers to “purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of fear for God” (2 Cor 7:1).
• Paul tells slaves to “be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as to Christ” (Eph 6:5).
• Paul tells his readers, “As you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12).   Continue at Mark Snoeberger

Exchanging Fear for Fear

Why is the fear of the Lord the beginning of wisdom? Because the end of folly is the love of the praise of men. Or to say the same thing in a different way: there is no sin so prevalent, so insidious, and so deep as the sin of fearing people more than we fear God.

Think of Saul, that tall Benjaminite who became the first king of Israel. His downfall was the result of misplaced fear. As he explained to Samuel after the whole business with the bleating sheep, “I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice” (1 Sam. 15:24). Here’s this powerful, impressive looking king worried about what people think of him. And it’s not his enemies the Amalekites he’s worried about. Except for Agag, they were all dead. Saul wasn’t afraid of his enemies; he was scared of his friends—afraid that they would desert him, afraid they would revolt, afraid he would he be an unpopular King.  Saul was a head taller with more authority than anyone in the kingdom and yet he disobeyed a clear command from God because he feared people. He was the Lord’s cautionary tale for Proverbs 29:25 (“The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe”) and a preview of Christ’s indictment in John 12:42-43 (“but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God”). Saul is but one of many sad examples of those who counted it more precious to be acceptable and palatable and influential in the eyes of their peers, than to be honored and affirmed and found faithful in the sight of God.

It’s easy to see how foolish Saul was, but each one of us struggles with the same fear of man and love of the praise of man.

• Do you struggle with peer pressure?  Do you give in to things against your will just to go along with the crowd?  That’s the fear of man.  And it doesn’t get any easier when you get older.  Adults just find more creative ways to mask it and more socially acceptable ways to channel it.  We don’t set things on fire as much.  But we still feel peer pressure when gossip starts, or a raunchy movie is on, or bad mouthing someone begins.

• Are you over-committed?  Is it impossible for you to say no? Could be a sign that you love to be loved by others.   Continue at Kevin DeYoung

Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation

A dark room that reeks of the musty smell that accompanies rot. Alone here, your mind wanders nowhere yet everywhere at the same time. A feeling of dread, loneliness or something wriggles through your bones. A sucking feeling in your gut tips you off that you are hungry but you are not sure. It might just be anxiety. All of this happened because of a keen experience of separation from God. A sort of spiritual anxiety. The Puritans described this feeling with the phrase, “the dark night of the soul.” They knew well about the malady of spiritual depression.

Spiritual stagnation is a problem that will bombard everyone at one point or another. Depression, fears and anxiety gush out, because we feel “separated” from God, from grace. We feel alone, sinful, dirty and unloved—or perhaps unloving.

Part of reason spiritual depression occurs, I am convinced, is because we have a wrong view of Biblical Change. We go to God and ask for ways to overcome our problems, our worries. We look to ourselves and our problems and then to God’s word for helps to our problems. Being lost in our issues, we seek help from God.

Not to throw out the baby with the bath water, one should admit a mixture of good and bad rises in this recipe. The good comes when we seek God in our distress. The bad comes about when we try to find the right “trick” to overcome spiritual depression. These tricks are sometimes hidden under the guise of “practicality” or “practical helps” in Scripture.

Sometimes, however, reading the Bible in order to attain “practical” helps or seeking only what is “practical” (a very popular word these days) becomes an Achilles heal for spiritual athletes. That which promises hope results in further disappointment. These aids crush the runner’s sternum causing a desperate gasps for air instead of the promised jolt of energy so-called practicality promises.   Continue at Wyatt Graham

Grace Without Buts And Brakes

When people talk about grace, listen carefully. I’ve listened long enough to listen for certain things. I listen for “buts and brakes.” We often speak about grace with a thousand qualifications which reveal a paralyzing fear that grace will be taken too far. Our greatest concern, it seems, is that people will take advantage of grace and use it as a justification to live licentiously. And since bad behavior is apparently the thing that scares us the most as preachers and parents, we end up saying more about what grace isn’t than we do about what grace is.

Matt Richard describes well how naturally we take it upon ourselves to reign grace in when we fear too much of it will result in lawlessness:

I have found that as Christians we many times attribute ‘lawlessness’ to the preaching of the Gospel. Somewhere in our thinking we rationalize that if the Gospel is presented as “too free, too unconditional or that Jesus fulfills the law for us” that the result will be lax morality, loose living and lawlessness. It is as if we believe that the freeing message of the Gospel actually produces, encourages and grants people a license to sin. Because of this rationalization we find ourselves strapping, holding and attaching restrictions to the Gospel so that we might prevent or limit lawlessness. In other words, the Gospel is placed into bondage due to our rationalization and reaction to lawlessness.    Continue Reading...

Depression and the Ministry, Part 1: The Setup

I was there the week it happened. His wife asked to see me. Tearfully she told me that he had walked into the church building that week and announced to his staff that he was “done.” He said he couldn’t face preaching another sermon; that all that he really wanted to do was to run away from his own life. Sam was 45 and the pastor of a vibrant and growing church.

I am convinced that there are important changes needed in pastoral culture and that the number of pastors who find themselves in the range from discouraged to depressed give clear evidence of this. Let me suggest four potential setups of this discouragement/depression cycle in ministry.

Setup #1: Unrealistic Expectations

I taught a class at Westminster Seminary on pastoral care and was impressed year after year about how unrealistic the expectations of my future-pastor students were. Year after year my students seemed to forget the two things that consistently make pastoral ministry hard. What are they? The harsh reality of life in a dramatically broken world and what remaining sin does to the hearts of us all. These two things make pastoral ministry a day by day spiritual war. Keep Reading...

Why Doesn’t God Take the Fear Away?

I chased the freedom from fear phantom recently, as I made a summary of my 2010 finances for my accountant. I hate tax time. It scares me to death. I don’t like being scared over a silly thing like taxes!

Why Doesn't God Take it Away?

I used to think that if God loved me He’d just miraculously take my fears away when I prayed about them. Now I know more about how He changes people than I did back then. Because He loves me, He’s not going to just take my fears away.

Think about it. When you were a baby, did you just get up one day and start walking? Of course not. You learned to walk one or two faltering steps at a time. You tried hard to stay upright, but you kept falling on your cute little padded bottom until you’d learned how to balance yourself in all circumstances. Keep Reading...

Fear and the Last Judgment

In the excerpt below, Peter Hitchins (Christopher’s brother) explains how God used an artistic interpretation of the Last Judgment to bring him to faith. It’s worth reading on a number of levels: as an example of the power of art to prod and provoke, as a sober warning to the ungodly, and as a story of converting grace.

What I can recall, very sharply indeed, is a visit to the Hotel-Dieu in Beaune, a town my girlfriend and I had gone to mainly in search of the fine food and wines of Burgundy. But we were educated travelers and strayed, guidebook in hand, into the ancient hospital. And there, worth the journey according to the Green Michelin guide, was Rogier van der Weyden’s fifteenth-century polyptych The Last Judgment. Keep Reading>>>

God, Egypt, and the Fear of Freedom

Why You Should Raise Up Preachers in Your Church

I was overcome with joy this Sunday as I listened to a young man preach God’s word in my church: he was faithful to the text, he heralded the gospel of Jesus, he stirred my soul. Tragically, many church planters and pastors never experience this. They never share their pulpits. Fear, pride, and laziness generally drive this, and it harms Christ’s church, and, ironically, the planter himself. Continue Reading>>>

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