Pray for Fukushima First Baptist Church

Want some help in praying for the people of Japan?

Tim Challies' blog has quotes from Akira Sato, a Baptist pastor in Fukushima, near the nuclear reactor with so many problems. His people have endured the worst of the troubles from the quake and tsunami, and some of them work at the nuclear plant facing danger from radiation. Pastor Sato wrote:

Yesterday (Friday, March 18) one member who has been with us since the disaster had received an order from his company and left for work in the nuclear plant. (He is a leader of the plumbing job). As the family of God, knowing the departing pains of his loved ones, in tears we dispatched the brother with prayers. He left here with the Lord. Beside him, there are others, our precious members, who have been working hard at the plant. O, Lord, please protect them with your almighty hand! I beg you, please! ‘Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, ….that thine hand might be with me, and that wouldest keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me.’ (1 Chronicles 4:10)”

Read more about Fukushima First Baptist Church at Challies Dot Com. Let's remember to pray for them. May the Lord be with our brothers and sisters in their suffering, and their service to their suffering community.

Counterfeit Gospels Explained

Here's Trevin Wax explaining the core concept of his new book Counterfeit Gospels:



From: Kingdom People

The Story of "The Crazy Worship Lady"

Have you ever met (or acted like) The Crazy Worship Lady ?

From Parchment and Pen
(Be sure and read the last few paragraphs)

"Confessions of a Beth Moore Convert"

Any Beth Moore fans out there?

At CT's "Her.meneutics" blog, Karen Spears Zacharias has published her Confessions of a Beth Moore Convert, subtitled "Why the Bible teacher with the big Texan hair may just be our female Billy Graham."

Her studies present the Scriptures in a straightforward fashion. She often concedes that there are different ways of considering the matter. "There is a big difference between a head full of knowledge and the word of God literally abiding in us," she warns. She’s funny but never demeaning (which can’t be said for many these days). "Everyday temptation and intentional demonic seduction are as different as a snowball and an avalanche." Anyone who has experienced the two, and survived, knows the truth and wry humor of that statement. Moore's workbooks have the same general theme in that they repeatedly point people to the Jesus who can and will, given the chance, completely transform their lives. I'd go as far to say she is the female Billy Graham, unabashedly falling on her face in prayer in front of the masses.

I have enjoyed some of Moore's books and videos (although her speaking style is not my cup of tea), but I can't agree with the "next Billy Graham" comment. There won't be a next Billy Graham, because he was and is a unique gift of God for one season in history. However, Beth Moore and her Living Proof Ministries have a lot of fans and have helped many to get into the Word more deeply. This article should please her fans and rankle her detractors (but maybe change a few minds).

Confronting Christian Consumerism

Why is the term "Gospel Centered" becoming so prevalent in the Christian blog-o-sphere?

The prevalence of “gospel-centered” language is a reaction to the kind of failed discipleship methods that many of us once thought would sustain our Christian faith. Church leaders haven’t always rooted discipleship in the gospel, so for many Christians the biblical mandate to grow in faith has led to continual frustration. What’s been proclaimed is an endless array of steps, secret formulas, or studies that lead to deeper truth. Therefore, many of us once considered the gospel as essential for believing in Jesus but unimportant for actually following Jesus. So what’s crucial in this gospel-centered movement is its fresh emphasis on Christ’s work for our growth and obedience.

Gospel-centeredness is a critique of our consumeristic culture, in which new is better and the latest is greatest. Contrary to this mindset, Christians don’t grow in faith by discovering the latest formula or completing the program with the newest “truth.” Human growth methods have no power to conform sinners to Christ for the glory of God. What Christians need isn’t something new but something old – the Old Story of Christ Crucified and Risen. So the gospel-centered movement certainly appeals to believers who recognize the spiritual bankruptcy of “Christian” consumerism. There is no greater news, no deeper teaching, than the gospel.

Excerpted from an interview with Mitch Chase, author of The Gospel Is For Christians, by Trevin Wax at Kingdom People.  Looks like another book I really want to read!

No Change

“Whatever cultural shifts take place around us, whatever socio-political concerns claim our attention, whatever anxieties we may feel about the church as an institution, Jesus Christ crucified, risen, reigning, and now in the power of his atonement, calling, drawing, welcoming, pardoning, renewing, strengthening, preserving, and bringing joy, remains the heart of the Christian message, the focus of Christian worship, and the fountain of Christian life. Other things may change; this does not.”

–J. I. Packer, Celebrating the Saving Work of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J.I. Packer (Paternoster, 1998), p. 46.

Hat Tip: Pure Church by Thabiti Anyabwile

The Benefit of Daily Going Backwards

Something to preach to yourself every day (i.e. to remind yourself of on a daily basis):

I used to think that growing as a Christian meant I had to somehow go out and obtain the qualities and attitudes I was lacking. To really mature, I needed to find a way to get more joy, more patience, more faithfulness, and so on.

Then I came to the shattering realization that this isn’t what the Bible teaches, and it isn’t the gospel. What the Bible teaches is that we mature as we come to a greater realization of what we already have in Christ. The gospel, in fact, transforms us precisely because it’s not itself a message about our internal transformation, but Christ’s external substitution. We desperately need an Advocate, Mediator, and Friend. But what we need most is a Substitute. Someone who has done for us and secured for us what we could never do and secure for ourselves.

The hard work of Christian growth, therefore, is to think less of me and my performance and more of Jesus and his performance for me. Ironically, when we focus mostly on our need to get better we actually get worse. We become neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with my effort over God’s effort for me makes me increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective.

You could state it this way: Sanctification is the daily hard work of going back to the reality of our justification–receiving Christ’s words, “It is finished” into new and deeper parts of our being every day, into our rebellious regions of unbelief. It’s going back to the certainty of our objectively secured pardon in Christ and hitting the refresh button a thousand times a day. Or, as Martin Luther so aptly put it in his Lectures on Romans, “To progress is always to begin again.” Real spiritual progress, in other words, requires a daily going backwards.

From Tullian Tchividjian, Hat Tip Take Your Vitamin Z

A Little Known Principle of Bible Study

I am adopting this as my own principle of Hermeneutics:

“Whenever you see someone doing something really stupid in the Bible, do not say to yourself, ‘How can they be so stupid?’ Instead say to yourself, ‘How am I stupid, just like them?’”

From R. C. Sproul, Jr. at Ligonier Ministries Blog

A Testimony to Racial Reconcilation and Healing

The video above from the The New York Times discusses the increase in racially mixed marriages in the southern United States. The second couple in the video attend Grace Temple in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the church my daughter and her husband also attend.  I think this is a great testimony to the Lord's work in racial reconciliation and healing.

The accompanying NY Times article can be read here. I love this quote from the article:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called Sunday morning church service the most segregated hour in America, but one would not know that at Grace Temple Ministries, the neighborhood church where the Norwoods worship and socialize with other mixed-race families. The pastor is white and the assistant pastor is black, and the creative arts pastor is Latino. During a recent sermon, the congregation’s guiding ethos on social issues was clear: “Let us not be guilty of thinking as the culture and society decides,” said the pastor, Dwayne Higgason. 

Praise God for this testimony!  I appreciate and applaud the work of Pastor Dwayne Higgason at Grace Temple.
 

Taking "Seeker" Sensitive a Little Too Far

 From: To Each His Own - The Sacred Sandwich: