Louder and Bigger

"I don’t care if your music is loud, as long as your theology is louder. I don’t care if your church is big, as long as your view of God is bigger. I don’t care if your stage has bright lights, as long as your love for Christ is brighter. I don’t care if you make a joke or two, as long as you’re serious about the gospel. Don’t get upset about peripheral things; get upset that the gospel isn’t being preached."

- Steven Morales

7 Keys To Life

HT MyBible.com

Hierarchies of Truth

I love C. Michael Patton's charts! This is a good one - Fundamentalists, Liberals, and Evangelicals Charted 

Tuesday night, at “Coffee and Theology” at the Credo House, I taught what might very well be the most important lesson I have ever taught for “Coffee and Theology.” It was over the necessity of creating a hierarchy of belief, helping people learn to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials, cardinal beliefs and non-cardinal beliefs, those things that we should be willing to die for and those things that are less important.

My goal during people’s initial exposure to this subject is not to tell them what the essentials and non-essentials are, but to help them understand that these categories exist in Christianity. Beliefs matter very much in our faith, but not all beliefs matter equally. Part of the discipleship process of any Christian is to begin to work through these differences.

Here is the basic “Concentric Circle of Importance” that I often teach from. I have used it here many times on this blog.



The very center circle represents those issue of the faith that are “of first importance.” Paul spoke in such terms in 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. “Of first importance” for Paul was the person and work of Christ. Who Christ is and what he did come before all else.

Instead of filling in this chart with all that I believe fit in each circle (an impossible task to do exhaustively), I want to show this how this chart might look in differing traditions...

Read it all at the link.

Priorities

Testing Belief

HT:  Vitamin Z

Through My Fingers

“Imagine that you have placed your hand, with fingers narrowly separated, in front of your face. When you attempt to look through your fingers, your vision is obstructed. As long as your hand is in front of your face, no matter where you turn to look, your vision will be altered by your fingers. So it is with an idol in my heart. It will exercise inescapable influence over my life. Wherever I go, whatever I am doing, the idol will influence what I do and how I do it. This is the reason God says, “It makes no sense for me to talk about anything else, because whatever I say somehow, some way, will be used to serve the idol that rules your heart. Therefore, I want to deal with your idolatry. That is my priority.”

                      -    Paul Tripp, Age of Opportunity, p30-31

Quoted at Seeing Life Through My Fingers | SBC Voices

The First Day

Sobering thoughts from Shaun Groves at Shlog:

On your first day on the other side of the grave, do you think you’ll look back on this life and be flooded with gratitude for hours spent watching episodes of American Idol and Lost? Will you wish you’d done more of that? Do you think you’ll look back fondly on the effort and money spent remodeling the kitchen? Will you wish you’d had a nicer home? Do you think you’ll be glad you were up-to-date on the juicy details of celebrity lives? Will you wish you’d read more magazines? Will you regret not spending more time at the office? Will you wish you’d logged just a few more hours every week at work? Will you miss your blog or Facebook? WIll you wish you’d just had a couple hundred more readers, just a few more “friends?”

Me neither.

High Places

I've been reading 1st and 2nd Chronicles recently and noticed a pattern. Over and over a king will be described as doing or not doing "right in the eyes of the LORD." However, most of the good kings are also criticised for not tearing down the "high places."

High places were hill tops, literal "high places," where sacrifices were made to gods or to God. The location of the Tabernacle of Moses at Gibeon (prior to the dedication of the temple) is called a great high place (2 Kings 3:4, 2 Chronicles 1:3-5), proving that the term can be used for places where the Lord was sought and worshipped. I'm assuming that a king who allowed the worship of idols at the high places around Jerusalem would not be called a good king. So what is being referred to in the passages referenced above would be the worship of Yahweh at locations other than the temple in Jerusalem. The Books of Chronicles were written after the rediscovery of the Book of the Law (Deuteronomy?) and Josiah's reforms, focusing on centralized worship at a purified temple, and that perspective controlled the writer's interpretation of their national past.

So, for present day application, what would be our equivalent of a high place? Obviously, any idolatry would be covered. Even though we don't tend to worship statues or pillars, any thing, person or object put ahead of God in our priorities becomes an idol. As Luther said, the human heart is an idol factory.

However, a more prevalent problem today, and for many people then, would be worshipping God in an unapproved way.

I've been thinking a lot about the two forms of religion; or I should say the contrast between religion and Gospel spirituality. Religion says "If I, then God." In other words I control, or try to control, my gods (God) by what I do or do not do. The Gospel says "God has, therefore I." All Gospel based spirituality is a response to what He has done and is doing. He has the initiative. We respond to Him. Religion says I live right to get God's blessing and approval. The Gospel says that God the Father has acted in Christ to save me, the Spirit is drawing me now, and I respond to the Triune God's initiative.

Maybe a high place in my life would be any way I worship God not in accord with the Gospel? What if any time I fall into the "if I then God" form of religion instead of "God has therefore I" faith, I am only creating a high place. I may be worshipping the God of the Bible, but doing so in an unapproved way.

What do you think?

Overwhelmed With Tangible Things?

“If we spend sixteen hours a day dealing with tangible things and only five minutes a day dealing with God, is it any wonder that tangible things are 200 times more real to us than God?”
- William R. Inge

Hat Tip: Gospel Reminders

Lost in Our Goodness

“Here, then, is Jesus’ radical redefinition of what is wrong with us. Nearly everyone defines sin as breaking a list of rules. Jesus, though, shows us that a man who has violated virtually nothing on the list of moral misbehaviors can be every bit as spiritually lost as the most profligate, immoral person. Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.”

- Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God (New York, NY: Dutton, 2008), 43

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From : Of First Importance

Prioities

I've been reading 1st Kings this week, I noticed again the disparity in Solomon's time priorities in the following two verses.

In the fourth year the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid, in the month of Ziv. And in the eleventh year, in the month of Bul, which is the eighth month, the house was finished in all its parts, and according to all its specifications. He was seven years in building it. (1 Kings 6:37-38 ESV)

Compare that to:

Solomon was building his own house thirteen years, and he finished his entire house. (1 Kings 7:1 ESV)

Thirteen years on his house but only seven years on God's house? This shows clearly where King Solomon's priorities were. Is it any wonder that he turned away from the Lord?