Racism Is Sin

A necessary word for the current cultural environment - The Sin of Racism (From Trillia Newbell at Verge Network):

...Racism is a painful word. Nobody wants to be labeled as such. Many actually believe that because we are 50 years past the Civil Rights era, we are somehow magically past racism. Racism is painful because, by definition, it’s another human being who hates another human being based on the God-given color of their skin.

Yet, in God’s economy, we are all created equal. In the beginning, God created man in His own image (Genesis 1:26). So why would fellow image bearers hate one another based on something like skin? Because after creation, sin entered the world and distorted our view of humanity (Genesis 3).

Racism is the result of sin. In order to fight it we have to find the root—we have to do some heart surgery and look for the real problem.

For many, I believe racism is rooted in pride. We can often believe that we are greater than others and think they are not worthy of existence. We can be partial and sinfully prefer those like us over those who are unlike ourselves (James 2: 1-13). And at times, the display of racism is not blatant—it doesn’t manifest itself through racial slurs. It can be hidden away in the heart.

The hard truth is that racism and the way it strips man of his dignity will be with us until the consummation of Christ’s kingdom. This is why the Church must be a safe place for difficult discussions about race. We must not only be unafraid to discuss it, but acknowledging that it still exists in many places in our country and can often be hidden away in our own hearts.

We cannot be passive. Just like all temptations, pride and arrogance toward others must be confronted and fought with the truth of God’s Word. Don’t make the assumption that it is something you or your friends or your congregations can ignore.

Tragedies like what we’ve seen in the Garner case are a reminder of the presence of injustice in the world. It’s a call to speak, listen and pray. Because we are the Body of Christ, we must learn to mourn with those who mourn.

So I ask you, are you ready to join arms with your fellow brothers and sisters to pursue true racial reconciliation that can only be achieved through the cross of Christ?

The Good News of the Gospel

If you’ve realized, as various news stories have unfolded, that you do struggle with racism, that is God’s kindness to you. It’s His kindness that leads us to repentance (Rom. 2:4). If we confess our sin, He is faithful to forgive us and to purify us (1 John 1:9).

The good news is that our struggle with sin is not a fight we have to fight on our own. Like with all struggles, God provided a way of escape and a rescue from that sin. He provided His son, Jesus, who gave his life for the racist. God’s love is great for His children, and He does not withhold good things, including continued, transformational forgiveness. 

This is the good news for you and for all of us—God provides a way of escape through His son (1 Cor. 13:10). A beautiful aspect of the gospel is that it doesn’t stop giving with salvation. God continues to work in our hearts until we are glorified and with Christ.

We can ask the Lord to forgive those who have sinned against us through racist words as well. Can we pursue one another in love, and can we fight against racism? Yes, because we have the Spirit of God. Is racial reconciliation possible? Yes, and it’s a must because we are the Body of Christ. Let’s pursue it.

Myth of a Perfect Church

From Church in A Circle - the Myth of the Perfect Church:

Human beings are created with an inbuilt tendency towards idealism. Fairy tale stories and superhero movies reflect our need for happy endings and superhuman abilities. We grow up with romantic and unrealistic expectations of life, which are often dashed against the rocks of reality, leaving us hurt and disappointed.

You can see this idyllic imagination at work in our searches for a romantic partner. My youngest daughters (age 6 and 4) sometimes take turns being a bride and marrying each other, already living out the dream of “happily ever after”. They don’t yet know that every marriage involves two very different and flawed humans, who will have downs as well as ups, and who will never fully be able to meet each other’s needs and expectations.

When it comes to church, we have the same idealism, only even higher. After all, we have Scripture verses to back it up. We long to be part of an intimate community of people who love one another, accept us as we are and empower us to be all we can be.

Our idyllic notions often take a battering in institutional church, so we turn our hearts towards a romanticised notion of “organic church”. In our minds, this new-and-improved-model-of-church will meet all our needs and bring us towards “happy ever after”. In the real world, organic churches have their problems too – their power struggles, personality clashes and failure to meet people’s expectations.

Organic church life can be amazing. In fact, institutional church life can be equally amazing. However, just like a marriage, any of these relational settings needs to be approached with the right mindset and commitment to playing our part. There are certain characteristics which will create the transformational community we long for – honesty,authenticity, acceptance, kindness, patience, love. The problem is, these things come at a cost. They require effort and truckloads of maturity. They are not always easy and they don’t always feel good.

If you want to find some magical, picture-perfect church community, give up now. However, if you’re prepared to struggle with your own issues, put up with other people’s foibles, and commit for the long haul, you may just find glimpses of the joy and fellowship you crave. It won’t be an easy journey, but along the way you will change yourself and your church community, for good.

No Way

From @DailyKeller

Your Move

Building A Gospel Culture

Interesting excerpt from Ray Ortlund in The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ (Crossway; April 30, 2014). He writes this on pages 82–83:

A gospel culture is harder to lay hold of than gospel doctrine. It requires more relational wisdom and finesse. It involves stepping into a kind of community unlike anything we’ve experienced, where we happily live together on a love we can’t create. A gospel culture requires us not to bank on our own importance or virtues, but to forsake self-assurance and exult together in Christ alone.

This mental adjustment is not easy, but living in this kind of community is wonderful. We find ourselves saying with Paul, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things” — all the trophies of our self-importance, all the wounds of our self-pity, every self-invented thing that we lug around as a way of getting attention — “and count them as dung in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:8–9).

Paul did not regard the loss of his inflated self as sacrificial. Who admires his own dung? It is a relief to be rid of our distasteful egos! And when a whole church together luxuriates in Christ alone, that church embodies a gospel culture. It becomes a surprising new kind of community where sinners and sufferers come alive because the Lord is there, giving himself freely to the desperate and undeserving.

But how easy it is for a church to exist in order to puff itself up! How hard it is to forsake our own glory for a higher glory!

The primary barrier to displaying the beauty of Jesus in our churches comes from the way we re-insert ourselves into that sacred center that belongs to him alone. Exalting ourselves always diminishes his visibility. That is why cultivating a gospel culture requires a profound, moment by moment “unselfing” by every one of us. It is personally costly, even painful.

HT: Tony Reinke via Vitamin Z 

Between Extremes of Solitude and Community

Wisdom from Bonhoeffer on Solitude and community:

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community.

He will only do harm to himself and to the community. Alone you stood before God when he called you; alone you had to answer that call; alone you had to struggle and pray; and alone you will die and given an account to God. You cannot escape from yourself; for God has singled you out. If you refused to be alone you are rejecting God’s call to you, and you can have no part in the community of those who are called. “The challenge of death comes to us all, and no one can die for another. Everyone must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone. . . . I will not be with you then, nor you with me” (Luther).

But the reverse is also true: Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

Into the community you were called, the call was not meant for you alone; in the community of the called you bear your cross, you struggle, you pray. You are not alone, even in death, and on the Last Day you will be only one member of the great congregation of Jesus Christ. If you scorn the fellowship of the brethren, you reject the call of Jesus Christ, and thus your solitude can only be hurtful to you. “If I die, then I am not alone in death; if I suffer, they [the fellowship] suffer with me” (Luther).

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together   (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), 77 [italics and ellipses original].

HT: Justin Taylor

If Jesus Ran Your Small Group

What if you were in a small group......run by Jesus?  What would that be like. Here's some thoughts by Justin Knowles:

If Jesus was in charge of small groups at a church, what would they look like? What would he focus on? Why? What would be his priorities? It actually is really fun to think about and I think it’s relatively easy to figure it out because we just need to look how Jesus lead. I think if we are doing these things, we ought to be doing pretty good.

It’s all about relationships. Jesus had a small group. His disciples. He poured his heart and life out for this group of men. He spent time with them. Ate with them. Lounged with them. Prayed with them. Prayed for them. Yes he loved the crowds and did miracles but a majority of his time was with his small group and he poured into them.

His curriculum was story based with real life application. Jesus is the ultimate story-teller. Everything thing he taught he taught with an illustration and story. He brought up scripture, then a story, then application. “Go and do likewise. Go and sin no more. Truly I tell you…”. When it comes to high school small groups, we need to have Scripture and then stories of real life and then an application they can actually do that has to do with that lesson.

Invested in the core leaders. Jesus had the 3 close disciples. The one who we took on the mountain with him. They were his core. He knew what they were going to do later so he wanted to make sure they were properly poured into. Same with our small groups and leaders. There are some we see have major potential so we want to make sure we pour into the core so they in turn can pour into others.

The Miracle Sitting Next to You

Is there a miracle sitting next to you in church today? From Marshal Segal at Desiring God:

God gave me you to be my miracle.

That’s the banner over our relationships in the church. God performs the miracle of our growth in godliness through people — Holy-Spirit-filled people in our lives and churches.

These are the people sitting next to you in corporate worship this morning. Maybe another morning with the same people at the same building on the same day of the week begins feeling ordinary or natural. But there’s power in that room. What happens when God’s word sounds, his Spirit falls, and our prayers rise shakes whatever hold sin continues to have in our lives.

More Like Jesus

You receive the word with these people. You sing with these people. You give and serve and plan with these people. And you are made holy with this people. We grow in our faith and devotion and purity and joy in the context of this specific community of believers.Russell Moore uncovers the corporate miracle of our sanctification in his chapter of the new book, Acting the Miracle. If we want to be more like Jesus, we can’t leave home without the church. It is God’s indispensible, irreplaceable means of making us holy. And our words play an especially important role in that process.

Miracles That Kill Sin

Moore speaks specifically to the miracles our words can be for one another. He writes, “The word of the church breaks the power of the deception of sin” (122). People all around you — people you love — are blind to their sin and therefore being consumed by it. They simply cannot see the futility and rebellion in which they are living.

And your words might make the miraculous difference. The timely application of Scripture, or rehearsal of the gospel, or warning of what’s to come, or gentle rebuke of sinful behavior, may save someone from eternal bondage, punishment, and death. By God’s grace and power, your words eternally save and sanctify — your words, the one resource we have that never runs dry.

Want Community?

"Two Of The Biggest Barriers To Community" - Pete Wilson

Choose Togetherness

“The bottom line for us all is: Choose togetherness, the radical togetherness of those who know they are inseparably and eternally one in Christ and whose relationship is rooted in praise and prayer together. Choose not to be held back by shyness, embarrassment, social convention or any form of personal inhibition (attitudes anchored not in concern for dignity and good taste, as some make themselves believe, but in a panicky fear of vulnerability). Choose to give and receive love on a basis of humble and mutual openness. Choose to commit yourself to a congregation long term, to identify as fully as you can with its goals and members, to open your life and your home to your fellow believers, and to give help wherever help is needed. In short, choose togetherness, and choose wholehearted, closely bound involvement in the congregation’s worshiping life of prayer and praise as the central element of that togetherness. For this and nothing less than this is the will of God” 

               - J. I. Packer, Praying, 257-58

HT: Sam Storms

Credibility

"How is it possible that the gospel should be credible, that people should come to believe that the power which has the last word in human affairs is represented by a man hanging on a cross? I am suggesting that the only answer, the only hermeneutic of the gospel, is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it."

             - Leslie Newbigin

Taken from Tweets by Thabiti Anyabwile  @ThabitiAnyabwil

Turnout Reality

Hat Tip: The Thinklings

Facebook Transparency

Hat Tip: Shaun Groves

Love in Two Arenas

"...Jesus is saying that the most important thing to God is love. Love, it seems, has two arenas where it is played out - in our relationship with God and in our relationships with people.  What's on God's heart is no a list of rules or commands, but the expansion of love...... All God wants for us in this is that we live in healthy, loving relationships."

- Erwin McManus, Soul Cravings, entry 14

All Interconnected

"We need each other; we need people; we need community; we need relationship; we need God.

They are all interconnected, and it flows in both directions.  We try to fill our vacuum for God with people, and we find ourselves frustrated and empty.

When we turn to God, we find our hearts open to people and discover our need for them more than ever before."

-Erwin Raphael McManus, Soul Cravings, entry 13
 

False Faces on Facebook

From B J Stockman - The "Hotmess" and False Perceptions of Facebook:

You are not your Facebook page, and you don’t need to be. Sure use social-networking, but don’t be unaware of its dangers and deceits. Your friend from college who posts every possible pregnant belly shot possible–doesn’t always look that good. Your old friend from childhood who dates his wife every other day–still has rough patches in their marriage. Your friends who live far away and have those funny and cute kids–aren’t always that funny and cute. O, and neither are you quite that remarkable.

Your Facebook is not you nor is it your friends. Don’t trade the illusions of social networking for the difficulty and beauty of real relationships. What matters most about you is not what is visual–what is seen on the outside via Facebook or whatever–but what is internal.

Facebook tempts us to post things that increase the currency of our like-ability and indulge in the fear of man. The gospel of Jesus rescues you from the need to show how “hot” you are in whatever area of your life you deem important enough to be publicly personified so that people will “like” you. No matter what your Facebook page reveals about you, your life is messy and in desperate need of the life-changing grace and love that Jesus freely gives to those who trust him. The good news is that if you die to yourself and your identity and trust who God is for you in Jesus he gives you a glorious identity: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you will also appear with him in glory.” (Colossians 3:3-4)

When you awaken to the reality of this glorious identity you may still use Facebook but it won’t shape who you are. The glory of your identity–your whole life–being “with Christ” and “in God” empties Facebook of its allure of false perceptions and being liked.

Hat Tip: Facebook, the Fear of Man, and the Gospel

A Church-less Gospel?

Is it possible to be "Gospel Centered" and leave out the church, the Body of Christ? Nope, not really. The excerpt below is from A Church-less Gospel? at| SBC Voices:

When we minimize, indeed, even eliminate the local church from Christian living and following Jesus we have missed the Gospel.

Part of this stems, in my opinion, from our over-focus on a “personal relationship with Jesus.” And while undoubtedly the Christian life is very much about a relationship with Jesus (John 17:3), we must remember what the church is in regards to Jesus: his body, the temple of his Holy Spirit, his bride, his flock, and his household.

Several times over, the Bible calls Jesus the head of the church which is his body—and we are the members. A church-less gospel is like the thumb trying to be in a relationship with the head while maintaining no connection to the hand, the wrist, the arm, the shoulder, the torso, etc. A severed thumb really has no relationship to the body at all, let alone the head.

The Gospel is more about Jesus saving a people (Titus 2:14) than a particular individual. Yes, God saves his people by saving individuals but then he takes them and makes them part of something bigger than themselves—part of a flock, a body…a church.

The Gospel produces the church. And no individual Christian can live a Gospel-centered life apart from belonging to and involvement as a member in a local church....

Much more at the link.

Where You Place Your Love

Here's a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

"If you love the vision you have for community, you will destroy community. If you love the people around you, you will create community."

 Saw this at Cerulean Sanctum, Dan Edelen's web site.  Dan goes on to generalize Bonhoeffer's concept:

I think this can be distilled into a generalization that always works:  If you love the vision you have for {desired ministry outcome}, you will destroy {desired ministry outcome}. If you love the people around you, you will create {desired ministry outcome}.

Think about it:  If you love being missional, if you love being reformed, if you love being "naturly supernatural," if you love being emerging, if you love being relevant, etc, you may destroy what you love.  I guess the best thing is to just love God and love people.  BTW, didn't Jesus say something about that?

(Picture above from Nate Spencer's Site)

Love the Church - For the Right Reasons

Do you love your church? If so, do you love it for the right reasons?

Here's Joshua Harris on Wrong Reasons to Love the Church:

Acts 20:28 tells us that Jesus obtained the church with his own blood. Is this what your love for the church is based on? If it's anything less, it won't last long.

• Don't love the church because of what it does for you. Because sooner or later it won't do enough.
• Don't love the church because of a leader. Because human leaders are fallible and will let you down.
• Don't love the church because of a program or a building or activities because all those things get old.
• Don't love the church because of a certain group of friends because friendships change and people move.

Love the church because of who shed his blood to obtain the church. Love the church because of who the church belongs to. Love the church because of who the church worships. Love the church because you love Jesus Christ and his glory. Love the church because Jesus is worthy and faithful and true. Love the church because Jesus loves the church.

An Imperfect Preview

“The gospel creates the kind of community that is even now an imperfect preview of the kingdom’s marriage feast that awaits us. The church originates, flourishes, and fulfills its mission as that part of God’s world that has been redeemed and redefined by this strange announcement that seems foolish and powerless to the rest of the world.”

—Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life (Grand Rapids, MI; Baker Books, 2009), 11

Hat Tip: Of First Importance