The New Covenant commission of Psalm 67

May 20, 2013 — Leave a comment

WorldAt the begin­ning, when God cre­ated the heav­ens and the earth, it was so that He could demon­strate His glory. Indeed, Psalm 19 begins, “The heav­ens declare the glory of God, and the sky above pro­claims his handiwork.”

Colos­sians 1:16 reminds us that all of this cre­ation was by Christ — by Him, through Him and for Him — and Hebrews 1:3 declares that Jesus “upholds the uni­verse by the word of his power.”

As Abra­ham Kuyper wrote, “In the total expanse of human life there is not a sin­gle square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sov­er­eign, does not declare, ‘That is mine!’”

All cre­ation is here out of God’s great joy in His glory and His desire to make it known through His Son. Con­tinue Reading…

In Theology
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Making disciples of those in plain sight

March 20, 2013 — Leave a comment

I love this video from Rebuild Net­work.

Mak­ing dis­ci­ples of all nations includes the nation — the peo­ple group — where you live.

In Church Planting, Culture, Discipleship, Evangelism, Life, Mission, Urban Ministry
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Fulfilling the Law of Christ: Applying NCT in church life

March 12, 2013 — 1 Comment

burdenOver the past sev­eral years, I’ve seen, read, and par­tic­i­pated in a lot of dis­cus­sions about what laws or com­mand­ments we need to fol­low in the New Covenant, what a Bib­li­cal The­ol­ogy of the New Covenant should be, or what the escha­tol­ogy of NCT adher­ents should be. (That last one is a par­tic­u­larly volatile one at the moment, with some amills want­ing to kick out the premills.)

In other words, there’s a lot of con­ver­sa­tion about NCT orthodoxy.

But what about NCT orthopraxy?

What should a church that teaches New Covenant The­ol­ogy look like? What are its hall­marks? Con­tinue Reading…

In Biblical Theology, Books, Culture, Discipleship, Ecclesiology, Evangelism, Mission, New Covenant Theology, Theology , , , , ,
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Context, not compromise

March 7, 2013 — Leave a comment

bullhorn guy

Not a good exam­ple of contextualization.

At his blog, It Is Writ­ten, Dr. Bob Gon­za­les has put together an excel­lent series on con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion – a manda­tory tenet of mis­sional churches and the bête noire of John MacArthur — or what can bet­ter be described as “accommodation.”

In his lat­est install­ment, Gon­za­les help­fully reminds us:

[W]e need to accom­mo­date our com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the peo­ple we’re try­ing to reach, to the peo­ple we’re try­ing to edify because God accom­mo­dates him­self to us in his rev­e­la­tion and because the ser­vants of God, like Jesus and like Paul the apos­tle, accom­mo­dated their com­mu­ni­ca­tion to their audi­ence. Broth­ers, if we want to win souls, if we want to see our churches grow, if we want to increase the edi­fi­ca­tion of our cur­rent mem­ber­ship, then we must become all things to all men. We must accom­mo­date (not com­pro­mise) in the area of communication.

Indeed, con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion prop­erly defined and prop­erly done doesn’t water down the gospel; it makes the offense of the gospel as clear as possible.

In Culture, Discipleship, Evangelism, Mission , , ,
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Chan: How not to make disciples

March 7, 2013 — Leave a comment

Some­times there’s an awfully long dis­tance between the head and the heart. Fran­cis Chan shows us the dif­fer­ence between know­ing and doing:

In Culture, Discipleship, Evangelism, Mission , ,
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Rebuild where you live, live where you rebuild

March 5, 2013 — Leave a comment

I’m very moved and moti­vated by what I see the Rebuild Net­work (therebuildinitiative.org) doing to plant churches in urban areas. But there’s more to them than plant­ing, and there’s some­thing to learn from them in all churches who want to focus on dis­ci­ple­ship and mission.

Here’s a video that tells the story of the first church they planted. I just love this.

On Decem­ber 15, 2007, 25 fam­i­lies made the com­mit­ment to move from Den­ton, TX to Atlanta, GA to plant a church that was in the city, for the city, and looked like the city. It became the Rebuild Network’s first church plant—Blueprint Church.

In Church Planting, Culture, Discipleship, Ecclesiology, Evangelism, Mission, Urban Ministry , , ,
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The Trellis and the Vine, revisited …

March 5, 2013 — Leave a comment

About three years ago, we as the elders at our church read Colin Mar­shall and Tony Payne’s The Trel­lis and the Vine. I’m revis­it­ing it now as I’m read­ing it with one of the new dea­cons in some trellis-and-vine style discipleship.

I’m sad­dened to see how poorly we’ve adopted what the authors recommend.

Trellis and the VineChap­ter one pro­vides a beau­ti­ful para­ble com­par­ing the work done in churches to a vine grow­ing on a trel­lis. The authors ask us, are we putting our effort into build­ing a trel­lis (cre­at­ing pro­grams) or cul­ti­vat­ing the vine (grow­ing peo­ple.) The argue — and I agree — that way too much goes into cre­at­ing struc­ture and force-fitting peo­ple into that struc­ture, rather than build­ing, train­ing and grow­ing peo­ple for ministry.

Chap­ter two of the book out­lines the “Min­istry Mind-Shifts” that the writ­ers rec­om­mend and which they flesh out in detail in later chap­ters. They say we need to transform:

  1. From run­ning pro­grams to build­ing people

  2. From run­ning events to train­ing people

  3. From using peo­ple to grow­ing people

  4. From fill­ing gaps to train­ing new workers

  5. From solv­ing prob­lems to help­ing peo­ple make progress

  6. From cling­ing to ordained min­istry to devel­op­ing team leadership

  7. From focus­ing on church polity to forg­ing min­istry partnerships

  8. From rely­ing on train­ing insti­tu­tions to estab­lish­ing local training

  9. From focus­ing on imme­di­ate pres­sures to aim­ing for long-term expansion

  10. From engag­ing in man­age­ment to engag­ing in ministry

  11. From seek­ing church growth to desir­ing gospel growth

Get­ting buy-in on these as prin­ci­ples is not the dif­fi­cult part. Get­ting buy-in on these as actions? That’s where the work is.

In Culture, Ecclesiology, Evangelism ,
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My friend, the ‘God-soaked geek’

January 2, 2013 — Leave a comment

No doubt many of you have seen this video from Desir­ing God about their start through the efforts of my friend Moe Berg­eron. John Piper called him a “God-soaked geek” in a tweet pro­mot­ing this video.

As Dr. Piper wrote, “For decades, Moe was a fac­tory worker and bi-vocational pas­tor on the rugged spir­i­tual soil of New Eng­land. He was one of the first to believe in the power and poten­tial of com­put­ers ‘talk­ing’ to each other, and he may have been the first that dared to dream about a rad­i­cal new way to freely spread the gospel.”

Be sure to visit the site Moe edits: Christ My Covenant and also Piper’s Notes, the orig­i­nal online archive of John Piper.

In Culture, Evangelism, New Media, Theology , ,
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‘And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites …’

April 23, 2012 — Leave a comment

I’ve had the plea­sure this school year of teach­ing the 7-12th grade Sun­day school class at my church in a study through Matthew’s Gospel. We’ve got a really bright bunch of teens who are very good at think­ing deeply about the impli­ca­tions and appli­ca­tions of the text.

We had some espe­cially engag­ing dis­cus­sions in Matthew 6, which begins in verse 1: “Beware of prac­tic­ing your right­eous­ness before other peo­ple in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” We talked about how we should be giv­ing, pray­ing and fast­ing in a way such that we guard against doing it in a way so as to be seen by others.

How strik­ing is the warn­ing of Matthew 6. Yet daily I see pas­tors (and those who aspire to be pas­tors copy­ing those chatty pas­tors) post­ing 140-character per­sonal prayers. Are they not doing the social media equiv­a­lent of stand­ing and pray­ing “in the syn­a­gogues and at the street cor­ners, that they may be seen by oth­ers” (Matthew 6:5)? So that they can be re-Tweeted or like-buttoned?

Why do those need to be on Twit­ter or Face­book? Is it so that they are seen by others?

Encour­ag­ing oth­ers to pray using social media is prob­a­bly just fine. Using social media so that your prayers can be seen by oth­ers? I think Scrip­ture coun­sels against that.

Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.”

Don’t let that be you.

In Life, Sanctification, Theology
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Loving God, loving neighbor

March 9, 2012 — 1 Comment

In Defense of Jesus, the New LawgiverI was revis­it­ing John G. Reisinger’s In Defense of Jesus, the New Law­giver tonight, par­tic­u­larly his dis­cus­sion of Jere­miah 31:31–34.

He is pretty much on the mark (more on that after the quote.) And it’s why in our sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion, we look to Christ and not a check­list, because it’s not a check­list writ­ten on our hearts.

[W]e are just as emphatic that it does not mean that God inscribes a New Covenant list of rules on the heart of a Chris­t­ian. We are skep­ti­cal of any attempt to cre­ate a new list to replace the old list. There is no New Covenant Deca­logue. We dis­avow the way some NCT peo­ple use the term law of Christ. We do not think there is a con­crete, unchang­ing, all-inclusive, revealed list of the spe­cific laws of Christ any more than there was a con­crete, unchang­ing, all-inclusive list of God’s moral law revealed at Sinai. Under the New Covenant, God puts “love God, love neigh­bor” into the heart of every per­son in Christ by the Spirit. There is a sense in which the com­mands to love God and love neigh­bor are as suf­fi­cient as a com­plete list would be.

– Reisinger, John G. In Defense of Jesus, the New Law­giver. Fred­er­ick, MD: New Covenant Media, 2008. Print. p. 117–8.

I say “pretty much on the mark,” because it is the giv­ing of the Holy Spirit to dwell in the heart of the believer that ful­fills Jere­miah 31:31–34. The very nature of God — His love — in the Spirit of Christ is His law writ­ten on our hearts.

In Law, New Covenant Theology, Sanctification, Theology , ,
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