Re: Mark Driscoll

There are lots of people who want Mark Driscoll to fail and fall. I am not one of them. I love and respect Pastor Mark. His preaching helped saved my life. I have profited immensely from his ministry, especially in my early days of church planting and trying to figure out what missional ministry could look like among young adults. I do not know Mark personally. We have never exchanged so much as email messages. But we have mutual friends. He was kind enough to endorse my first book. During my time with the Docent Research Group, I did some editing work on a few of his book manuscripts. When I wrote the piece linked above, he was gracious enough to send a note of thanks and encouragement through his personal assistant. It touched me deeply. I want to repeat: I do not want Pastor Mark to fail and fall. I just want him to walk in step with the truth of the gospel.

I would “confront” him to his face if I could. Even though this is not a Matthew 18 situation, and Pastor Mark has not sinned against me personally, last week I tried to contact him privately through the two avenues available to me, but I received no response. I did not demand or even expect one. I know Pastor Mark is a very busy man, and since we do not really know each other, he has no obligation to me, and I don’t mean to suggest he does. He doesn’t. And if I’d had the opportunity to speak to him, as I requested, I would have done so respectfully and gently. I do hope what I’m writing right now will not be read as unkind or argumentative or ungraciously accusatory.   Continue at Jared Wilson

HOW TO SHARE THE GOSPEL ON YOUR WEBSITE

Hello again from your friends at Church Plant Media. We’re here with a few more ideas for your church website content. With Advent upon us and Christmas quickly approaching, we wanted to encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ to share the gospel online. As we all know, this is the time of year when people are the most likely to attend your church service and visit your church website.

In his book, Gospel Deeps: Reveling in the Excellencies of Jesus, Pastor Jared Wilson writes, “The gospel’s content—Jesus’s sinless life, sacrificial death, and bodily resurrection—is deep and multifaceted… Or we may say that the gospel is a diamond—it is… one precious jewel with many different facets, each with a brilliance and vision of its own.” With this in mind, we acknowledge that there are as many different ways to share the gospel as there are facets on a diamond. But even the beauty of a diamond can be conveyed with simplicity.   Continue at Tim Challies

Attractional Church: All Bait, No Switch

A few days ago I tweeted the following: “At our church we want our music to be as good as it can be without having people come to our church because of it.” Some of the responses were rather telling, some folks reading what I didn’t write, asking me why I want to promote bad music and why I’m against people finding music attractive. For the record, I’m not a fan of bad music (in lyric or tune or style), and I’m not against people being attracted to music (and the arts in general). 

Taking a step back, though, I find a lot of the leaping to hearing what I didn’t say indicative of the fundamental problem. It happens whenever one decries pragmatism and is asked why they want to be impractical. But pragmatism and practicality aren’t the same thing. And neither is the attractional paradigm of “doing church” identical to wanting an attractive church.  Continue at Jared Wilson

How is Predestination Encouraging?

My friend B.J. Stockman guest posts a great piece at Zach Nielsen’s blog on 5 Encouragements from Predestination:

1. God chose you because he loved you. Ephesians 1:4-5, in the ESV translation, says, “in love God predestined”. Therefore predestination is motivated by love. This means that God’s choice of you derives from his love for you. Sovereign choice doesn’t detract from God’s love it is the fountainhead of God’s love. We don’t go deeper into love by sidestepping predestination. We go deeper into love by diving into its deeps. We are familiar with the fact that God so loved the world that he gave his Beloved Son, but need to become more familiar with the fact that God so loved the world that he predestined adopted sons in the Beloved from all eternity (Eph. 1:5).

2. You are a gift of love from the Father to the Son. John 17 reveals that your salvation was planned in the heart and mind of the Triune God before there ever was a you (17:2, 24). This means that God’s love for you is bigger than you. It is tied to the love for which the Father has for his Son. And the reason this is encouraging is because the size of God’s love for you is not to be gauged by his love for you but by his love for Jesus. From his very own mouth, Jesus said, “[Father] you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (17:23). The astonishment that we should feel at being loved by God becomes even more mind-blowing because God’s love for us flows in the same stream as God’s love for God.

3. Your present sins may be many but your future sinlessness is certain. Romans 8:29 tells us that we have been “predestined to be conformed to the image of [Jesus].” As a son of God, you are guaranteed one day to look like the Son of God. Therefore you fight sin in hope not in defeated depression. Your Christlikeness is not dependent upon your performance but upon God’s predestination.   Continue at Jared Wilson

What Does Jesus Do With Sin?

“The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’”

– John 1:29

John the Baptist commands a beholding of the sin-taking-away Lamb. What do we see in this beholding? How exactly does Jesus take away our sin?

Here are 6 things Jesus does with sin:

1. He Condemns It.

Jesus puts a curse on sin. He marks its forehead.

Romans 8:3 – “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.”

Jesus says to sin in no uncertain terms, “Sin, you’re going to die.”

2. He Carries It.

Like the true and better scapegoat, Jesus becomes our sin-bearer.

1 Peter 2:24 – “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

2 Corinthians 5:21 – “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

3. He Cancels It.

He closes out the account. (Even better, he opens a new one, where we’re always in the black, having been credited with his perfect righteousness.)   Continue at Jared Wilson

The Tragic Hypocrisy of Joyless Calvinism

Gospel wakefulness. That's Jared Wilson's term for the Christian's experience of treasuring Jesus more greatly and savoring his power more sweetly than ever before. For some it happens at new birth. For some it's a gradual dawning over time. And for many, it's a kind of spiritual quantum leap, almost like a kind of sanctification warp speed. You'll want to learn more. . . .

So join us this Monday, November 14 at 3PM (EST), for a DG Live interview with Wilson, pastor in Vermont and author of the new book Gospel Wakefulness. We'll ask him all about this reality of gospel wakefulness, its implications, and how to pursue it.

Here's a little sample from Wilson's book:

I have discussed with other Calvinists just where the (well-earned) stereotype of the graceless Calvinist comes from. Shouldn’t belief in total depravity necessitate profound humility? Shouldn’t belief in unconditional election preclude a spirit of superiority? And yet there is a doctrinal arrogance infecting Calvinist Christianity. This culture then produces doctrinaires like Baum’s man of tin: squeaky and heartless.

Cold-hearted rigidity is not limited to those of the Reformed persuasion, of course. You can find it in Christian churches and traditions and cultures of all kinds. In fact, to be fair, I have found that those most enthralled with the idea of gospel-wakefulness, those who seem most prone to champion the centrality of the gospel for life and ministry, happen to be of the Reformed persuasion. So there’s that. But gracelessness is never as big a disappointment, to me anyway, as when it’s found among those who call themselves Calvinists, because it’s such a big waste of Calvinism.  Continue Reading >>>

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Strive to Stop Striving

Galatians 2:17 is the five finger exploding heart death punch of Galatians 2: "But if, in our endeavor to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? Certainly not!"

As I studied for my sermon on Galatians 2:15-21, this verse gave me the most fits. It looks straightforward enough, but it is deceptively complex.

Getting Caught Up in Legalese

First, I am seeing Paul turning the language of the legalistic Judaizers on its head. There is an echo here of "Shall we sin all the more so that grace may abound?" The more I gnawed on Gal. 2:17 the more clearly I could see that Paul is sort of saying, "If justification is not by faith alone in Christ alone, should we circumcise all the more so that justification may abound?" (And in Galatians 5:12 he does kind of say that). Keep Reading...

Pornography as "All That is in the World"