Why Born of a Virgin?

From Douglas Wilson at The Resurgence:

...Because Jesus did not have an immediate human father, he was not entailed in sin with the rest of us. Because he had a true human mother, he was as human as we are; because he was without sin, he was more fully human than we are. From this we can see that the virgin birth is not just a random miracle story, designed to impress the gullible. It is a miracle, all right, but it is a miracle like the other miracles connected with the person of Jesus Christ. Like the incarnation itself, this miracle is necessary for the salvation of lost and sinful men.

Jesus Christ was “descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:3–4). The Spirit who worked powerfully in that resurrection was the same Spirit who exercised his power when Mary first conceived. It was the same person, the same purpose and plan, and the very same power (Luke 1:35).

More at the link.

Bored With the Bible?

Some good material on Bible reading and study, from Elliot Ritzema at The Resurgence:

Reading the Bible is a discipline, which means it isn’t always fun.

But we persist in studying because we know that it is God’s Word to us, and because we know that in spite of a dry spell here and there, God’s Word is absolutely dependable (Isa. 55:10–11). Devoting ourselves to Bible study will pay off in the long run. Charles Spurgeon offers us a blunt reminder to not neglect this discipline: “There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write ‘damnation’ with your fingers.” If you need some encouragement to dust off your Bible today, perhaps these words from men of faith can help.

1. You’ll never run out of things to learn from the Bible. No matter how much you study, there’s always more to discover.

Such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures, that even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else from early boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and talents greater than I have, I would be still daily making progress in discovering their treasures.

 —Richard Baxter

2. It’s worthwhile to invest the time to do more than a quick skim.

Remember, it is not hasty reading, but serious meditating upon holy and heavenly truths, that makes them prove sweet and profitable to the soul. It is not the bee’s touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest, and strongest Christian.

—Thomas Brooks

God Wastes Nothing

Good post at the Resurgence by Casey Cease on the meaning of Romans 8:28 - Nothing is Wasted.

The reality is that God wastes nothing. While God does not do evil, he uses all things to bring glory to himself, to draw people to Jesus, and to bring deeper purpose and meaning to the Christian’s life. As I continue to reflect on this truth, I have realized that Paul’s statement in Romans 8:28 is not only true, but also life-giving. God really is able to use all things for good, for those called according to his purpose....

... This is not a call to forget your past. It is an opportunity to allow Jesus to redeem it and use it for his glory and for your enjoyment. Your life can and should be used as an illustration for those who will believe (1 Tim. 1:15–16). This can be a very slow and hard road, but wherever you are on this journey just know, nothing is wasted.

Read the whole think at the link.

Gospel Based Discipleship

I really like this explanation of discipleship:

"A disciple of Jesus is someone who learns the gospel, relates in the gospel, and communicates the gospel. This definition of disciple shows us that the gospel both makes and matures disciples. We see this in Jesus’s ministry. Jesus proclaimed the same gospel to the crowds that he taught to the disciples. He did not have the twelve on a special, gospel-plus track to study advanced subject matter.

The gospel is for undergraduates and graduates because nobody ever graduates from the gospel.

Jesus taught the same gospel of the kingdom to sinners and saints.

Why? Because his agenda of grace is the only solution to our common predicament of sin, Christian or non-Christian. Both desperately need the forgiving, reconciling, and restoring power of the gospel to know and enjoy God, not just once but for a lifetime.....

.....This gospel-centric approach to disciple-making is largely missing from discipleship today, which tends to focus on evangelistic techniques and discipleship methods. Unless these methods are tethered to a robust understanding of the gospel, they will actually sabotage discipleship. What we need is a recentering of Christian discipleship devolving it into forms of spiritual performance.

The Great Commission is not evangelism- or discipleship-centered—it is gospel-centered. It calls us to make disciples by being a people who orbit around Jesus and his blood-bought benefits, not performance and self-made efforts.

Disciples are gospel people who introduce and reintroduce themselves and others to the person and power of Jesus over and over again. A disciple of Jesus never stops learning the gospel, relating in the gospel, and communicating the gospel."

From Jonathan Dodson at The Resurgence
 

Religion and the Gospel

After the discussion about the "Love Jesus/Hate Religion" video, I thought it appropriate to link to and quote from a post on The Resurgence, quoting the always astute Tim Keller, on the difference between religion and the gospel.

RELIGION: I obey, therefore I’m accepted.
THE GOSPEL: I’m accepted, therefore I obey.
RELIGION: Motivation is based on fear and insecurity.
THE GOSPEL: Motivation is based on grateful joy.
RELIGION: I obey God in order to get things from God.
THE GOSPEL: I obey God to get to God, to delight and resemble him.
RELIGION: When circumstances in my life go wrong, I am angry at God or myself, since I believe, like Job’s friends that anyone who is good deserves a comfortable life.
THE GOSPEL: When circumstances in my life go wrong, I struggle but I know all my punishment fell on Jesus and that while he may allow this for my training, he will exercise his fatherly love within my trial.
RELIGION: When I am criticized, I am furious or devastated because it is critical that I think of myself as a "good person." Threats to that self-image must be destroyed at all costs.
THE GOSPEL: When I am criticized, I can take it. I struggle, but it is not critical for me to think of myself as a "good person." My identity is not built on my record or my performance, but on God’s love for me in Christ.
RELIGION: My prayer life consists largely of petition and only heats up when I am in a time of need. My main purpose in prayer is control of my environment.
THE GOSPEL: My prayer life consists of generous stretches of praise and adoration. My main purpose is fellowship with God.
RELIGION: My self-view swings between two poles: If and when I am living up to my standards, I feel confident, but then I am prone to be proud and unsympathetic to failing people. If and when I am not living up to standards, I feel insecure, inadequate, and not confident. I feel like a failure.
THE GOSPEL: My self-view is not based on a view of myself as a moral achiever. In Christ I am “simul iustus et peccator”—simultaneously sinful and yet accepted in Christ. I am so bad he had to die for me and I am so loved he was glad to die for me. This leads me to deeper and deeper humility and confidence at the same time, neither swaggering nor sniveling.
RELIGION: My identity and self-worth are based mainly on how hard I work or how moral I am, and so I must look down on those I perceive as lazy or immoral. I disdain and feel superior to "the other."
THE GOSPEL: My identity and self-worth are centered on the one who died for his enemies and who was excluded from the city for me. I am saved by sheer grace, so I can’t look down on those who believe or practice something different from me. It is only by grace that I am what I am. I have no inner need to win arguments.
RELIGION: Since I look to my own pedigree or performance for my spiritual acceptability, my heart manufactures idols. It may be my talents, my moral record, my personal discipline, my social status, etc. I absolutely have to have them so they serve as my main hope, meaning, happiness, security, and significance, regardless of what I say I believe about God.
THE GOSPEL: I have many good things in my life: family, work, spiritual disciplines, etc. But none of these good things is an ultimate end for me. None of them is something I absolutely have to have, so there is a limit to how much anxiety, bitterness, and despondency such things can inflict on me when they are threatened and lost.

More Than 18 Dollars? Priceless!

Perry Noble posted a cute story of telling his 3 year old that he loved her more than she could imagine. She responds, “Do You Love Me More Than 18 Dollars?” Apparantly, that was the biggest number a 3 year old could imagine. He assured her he loved her more than even $18! He goes on the say:

When I left her room, laughing at how “cute” that moment was, I felt the Lord move in my heart and show me that trying to comprehend his love for me is like Charisse trying to comprehend my love for her; my mind could never conceive it! (Ephesians 3:17-19). God loves his children, not based on their performance, but rather as their position as his children.
If you belong to Jesus, God’s love for you is more powerful than the sin that seems to haunt you:

• God loves you even though you are wrestling through an addiction
• God loves you despite the abortion
• God loves you even though the divorce was finalized
• God loves you even though you can’t stop thinking about your past
• God loves you even though you rejected his love and sought to be religious to gain his approval
• God loves you even though you turned your back on him and ran as hard as you could

He loves you because you are his child (Romans 8:38-39) and the love he has for us is greater than anything we could imagine or fathom. When we try to describe his love we wind up saying really silly things like, “God, do you love me more than $18?” To which he replies, I love you more than you could ever imagine.

If you belong to Jesus, God’s love for you is more powerful than the sin that seems to haunt you.

Truth! Hard to believe at times - but so true.

From Do You Love Me More Than 18 Dollars? | The Resurgence:

Don't Try to Do God's Job!

The default position of every human heart (my heart and yours too) is legalism and self justification. The words below are from an article at The Resurgence entitled I Just Need To Give Myself Grace:

We all create rules to follow that make us feel like we’re closer to God. This is a sin called legalism. We add rules that God doesn’t ask us to follow, feel good when we do them, or bad when we don’t, and in the process we create a new law.

Your laws are a burden

Some people make daily Bible reading into law. They feel justified and holy when they read, but guilty when they don’t. This is messed up because the point of reading the Bible is to draw closer to God, to love him more, understand him better, and have your heart transformed—but it’s easy to take the gift of the Bible and turn it into a burden. It only becomes a burden when you use reading the Bible or any other new law that you create to make you feel righteous, instead of understanding that you are only made righteous by Christ.

You can't do God's job

You can often tell someone has created a new law for themselves when they use a phrase like, “I need to give myself grace.” 

When you catch yourself saying this in your heart or aloud you need to realize that you’re assuming two things:

      1. You’ve created a law you’re not following.

      2. You are assuming God’s position in trying to give yourself grace. 

It’s so easy to use Christian-sounding words in anti-Christ ways. Repentance is a good thing; it’s one of the great gifts the Father gives us, the Son won for us, and the Spirit empowers us to do—but the important question is “who are you repenting to?”

Don’t repent to false gods, ever

When you create your own law and violate it, you are sinning against the false god of self. When you worship money and don’t have enough, don’t repent to it and pour yourself out for the money. When you worship sex and don’t have it the way you want it, don’t repent to this idol and bow down at other altars. When you worship ministry, don’t offer your spouse, kids, and relationship with Jesus on this idol's altar. Repentance to false gods will harden your heart from true repentance....

 More at the link above.

Throwing a Pity Party?

Are you throwing any pity parties lately?  Jonah's party can beat yours any day. 

Picture from a great article about the Book of Jonah at The Resurgence:

What Christians Should Know about Halloween

What Christians Should Know about Halloween | The Resurgence:

Here's a little historical background if you are interested.

What Religion Cannot Do

"The gospel is able to do produce in our hearts what religion never could: a desire for God."

This quote is from a great piece by J.D. Greear at the Resurgence. He goes on to say:

“ 'Rediscovering' the Gospel has given me a joy in God I never experienced in all my years of fervent religion. Now I sense, almost daily, a love for God replacing my love for myself. The jealously that once consumed my heart is being replaced by a desire to see others prosper. I feel selfishness giving way to tenderness and generosity. My cravings for the lusts of the flesh are being replaced by a craving for righteousness, and my self-centered dreams are being replaced by God-glorifying ambitions. A power is surging in me that is changing me and pushing me out into the world to leverage my life for the Kingdom of God."

Good stuff! Much more at the link.

How the Gospel Does What Religion Cannot | The Resurgence:

Killing Moralism With Grace

Great post by Joe Thorn at The Resurgence - Killing Moralism:

"Many Christians have grown up in the church on moralistic preaching; that is, preaching that calls for obedience without connecting the commands of God to the cross of Christ.

This disconnect is dangerous, potentially leading hearers into either self-loathing or self-righteousness. Moralistic preaching is often the ground in which the devil sows the seeds of legalism. Of course biblical preaching will always be relevant and call for a response, but how can we preach the commands of God without reducing our messages to moralism? Is the key to simply jump from the command “pray without ceasing” to the reality that Jesus suffered a vicarious, penal atonement? Well, that’s one way to do it. But, let me suggest three ways of preaching the commands of God that help us avoid the trap of moralism.....

Much more content at the link - please read the whole thing. He concludes:

....So yes, we can and must preach the whole counsel of God. We must call men and women to obey, but not for approval, nor apart from the truth of the God who gives and fulfills the law for us. I believe if we do this when teaching the commands of God we kill moralism and will, by the grace of God, see conviction and encouragement among the people.

Creeds: Living What We Believe

From How the Creeds Helped Me by Winfield Bevins at The Resurgence:

...Christian doctrine is not just for knowing, but for living. The essentials give us a foundation to build our life upon. What we believe about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit shapes and influences how we live and how we see the rest of the world:

• God is the Creator of all things, so I should care for his creation
• Jesus died for my sin, so I must live for Him and share my faith with others
• God created us to live in community, so I need the church

In the end, a creed is not just what we believe but how we live out what we believe.

Grace Wrecked

This is the way I want to be wrecked! Great quotes from Tullian Tchividjian - "God’s grace wrecks and then rescues, not only the promiscuous, but also the pious." -

Nothing is more difficult for us to get our minds around than the unconditional grace of God. It offends our deepest sensibilities. We are actually conditioned against unconditionality–we are told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment precedes acceptance and achievement precedes approval.....

....Grace is radically unbalanced. It has no “but”; it’s unconditional, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and undomesticated. As Doug Wilson put it recently, “Grace is wild. Grace unsettles everything. Grace overflows the banks. Grace messes up your hair. Grace is not tame. In fact, unless we are making the devout nervous, we are not preaching grace as we ought.”....

.....Remember: Jesus came not to put into effect a moral reformation but a mortal resurrection (moral reformations can, and have, taken place throughout history without Jesus. But only Jesus can raise the dead, over and over and over again). As Gerhard Forde put it, “Christianity is not the move from vice to virtue, but rather the move from virtue to grace.”.....

.... Christ offers forgiveness full and free from both our self-righteous goodness and our unrighteous badness. This is the hardest thing for us to believe as Christians. We think it’s a mark of spiritual maturity to hang on to our guilt and shame. We’ve sickly concluded that the worse we feel, the better we actually are. The declaration of Psalm 103:12 is the most difficult for us to grasp and embrace: “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” Or, as Corrie ten Boom once said, “God takes our sins—the past, present, and future—and dumps them in the sea and puts up a sign that says ‘No Fishing Allowed.’” This seems too good to be true…it can’t be that simple, that easy, that real!

Yep, it is that easy.  Yep, it is that real.

Excerpts from Tullian Tchividjian at  Wrecked by Grace | The Resurgence:

Who Do You Reflect?

From Know Your Idols at The Resurgence

"In his book We Become What We Worship, G. K. Beale states the thesis of his book saying, “What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration.”

Because we are created in the image of God, everyone is always, without exception, reflecting either God or a god. If we do not reflect our Creator to our restoration then we will reflect creation to our ruin."

Want to Transform Your Bible Reading?

The excerpts below are from a piece at The Resurgence by Dane Ortlund on how to Transform Your Bible Reading:

A biblical theology lens trains us to place any given passage in the sweep of the single story. This way of reading the Bible gladly acknowledges the various genres in Scripture—narrative, poetry, prophecy, letters. Yet while the Bible is not uniform, it is unified.

Biblical theology reads the Bible as an unfolding drama, taking place in real-world time and space, that culminates in a man named Jesus—who himself said that “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms”—shorthand for the whole Old Testament—“must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44)....

....A biblical theology approach takes the Bible on its own terms—namely, that “all the promises of God find their ‘Yes’ in Jesus” (2 Corinthians 1:20). Result: transforming reading.

Biblical theology invites you to read the Bible by plotting any passage in the overarching narrative that culminates in Christ. The Bible is not mainly commands with stories of grace sprinkled in. It is mainly a story of grace with commands sprinkled in....

...Imagine jumping into the middle of a novel, reading a sentence, and trying to understand all that the sentence means without placing it in the sweep of the novel as a whole. That would confuse the reader, obscure the meaning, and insult the author.

The Bible is God’s autobiographical account of his personal rescue mission to restore a lost world through his Son. Every verse contributes to that message.

The Bible is not a pep talk. It is good news.

You can read it all at the link above. Good Stuff!

Correction:  In the first draft of this post I had attributed the article to Mark Driscoll instead of Dane Ortlund. I have corrected that error above. Both good guys, but want to give proper attribution and credit where credit is due!

Reading the Bible - And Missing Jesus

Can you read the Bible and miss Jesus? (Hint- read John 5:39).  David Dorr says:

So how can you know if you might be reading the Bible, looking for life, but missing Jesus completely? Here are a few clues:

• You read the Bible to reinforce what you believe, not challenge what you believe.
• You imagine yourself as the type of person who believes the things you read about.
• You think the things you read are especially applicable for people you know, but not for you.
• You imagine yourself as the hero of the story, not the person or people who are unbelieving. You frequently ask in your heart, “How could these people be so unbelieving?” For instance, when you read the story of the Israelites wandering in the desert you might say, “How could those Israelites grumble about food and drink when they just saw God part the Red Sea?” But you are completely blind to how you grumble at work or home when you’re afraid of losing something.
• You love the attention garnered from your knowledge of the Bible, but give little thought to how you have applied what you have read.

Maybe the Bible should come with a warning label: “Beware: reading this book incorrectly will make you twice as fit for hell as when you began.”

Don’t miss Jesus. Go to him and find life.

Excerpt from The Wrong Way to Read the Bible | The Resurgence