Following Jesus

January 4, 2008 | Filed Under gospel | No Comments

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I have been trying to read the Gospels lately with fresh eyes. In doing so I have struggled with where we put the emphasis on what it means to be a Christian in light of the language of Jesus. In only one passage do we find the phrase “born again” used by Jesus. In the dialogue with Nicodemus Jesus states that for a person to see the Kingdom of God he must be “born again.” Hence, the doctrine of regeneration.

I certainly do not want to minimize the supernatural, transforming work of the Holy Spirit in the process of becoming a new creation. Furthermore, I am aware of other passages such as Ezek. 36:26 and Eph. 2:1-5 found elsewhere in Scripture that reflect the doctrine of regeneration, but I ask where is the serious consideration in evangelical circles for the words of Jesus in the following Gospel passages?

Matthew 4:19
“Come,  follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”

Matthew 8:22
But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”

Matthew 9:9
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.

Matthew 10:38
“… and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”

Matthew 16:24
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

Matthew 19:21
Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

Matthew 19:28
Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. More>>

The Gospel of Santa

December 24, 2007 | Filed Under gospel | No Comments

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David Hayward

Searching For God Knows What - VI

October 26, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel | No Comments

donald-miller-2.jpgHere is another excerpt from my favorite chapter of Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller. In this section of chapter 10 Miller is discussing the dominant metaphors used to describe our relationship with God. He argues that many of the attempts we make to explain the gospel somehow miss this crucial relational dynamic.

Miller writes:

“Biblically, you are hard-pressed to find theological ideas divorced from their relational context. There are, essentially, three dominant metaphors describing our relationship with God: sheep to a shepherd, child to a father, and bride to a bridegroom. The idea of Christ’s disciples being His mother and father and brothers and sisters is also presented. In fact, few places in Scripture speak to the Christian conversion experience through any method other than relational metaphor.

Contrasting this idea, I recently heard a man, while explaining how a person could convert to Christianity, say the experience was not unlike deciding to sit in a chair. He said that while a person can have faith that a chair will hold him, it is not until he sits in the chair that he has acted on his faith.

I wondered as I heard this if the chair was a kind of symbol for Jesus, and how irritated Jesus might be if a lot of people kept trying to sit on Him.

And then I wondered at how Jesus could say He was a Shepherd and we were sheep, and that the Father in heaven was our Father and we were His children, and that He Himself was a Bridegroom and we were His bride, and that He was a King and we were His subjects, and yet we somehow missed His meaning and thought becoming a Christian was like sitting in a chair.”

Searching For God Knows What - V

October 4, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel | No Comments

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgHere is another excerpt from my favorite chapter of Searching For God Knows What by Donald Miller. In this section, titled “The Gospel: A Relational Dynamic” Miller is arguing that the essence of the gospel is relational rather than the mental ascent to a set of theological statements or an agreement with a list of bullet points.

Miller writes:

It doesn’t make a great deal of sense that a person who went to Bible college should have a better shot at heaven than a person who didn’t, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense either that somebody sentimental and spiritual has greater access.

I think it is more safe and more beautiful and more true to believe that when a person dies he will go and be with God because, on earth, he had come to know Him, that he had a relational encounter with God not unlike meeting a friend or a lover or having a father or taking a bride, and that in order to engage God he gave up everything, repented and changed his life, as this sort of extreme sacrifice is what is required if true love is to grow. We would expect nothing less in a marriage; why should we accept anything less in becoming unified with Christ?

In fact, I have to tell you, I believe the Bible is screaming this idea and is completely silent on any other, including our formulas and bullet points. It seems, rather, that Christ’s parables, Christ’s words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, were designed to bypass the memorization of ideas and cause us to wrestle with a certain need to cling to Him. In other words, a poetic presentation of the gospel of Jesus is more accurate than a set of steps.

- Donald Miller in chapter 10 of Searching For God Knows What

Where Did We Miss the Person?

September 14, 2007 | Filed Under books, gospel | No Comments

out-of-the-question-into.jpgLast night I was revisiting Leonard Sweet’s Out of the Question . . . Into the Mystery which I read a couple of years ago. Here are a couple of good quotes from chapter one which is titled “Where Did We Miss the Person and Get the Point Instead?”

Over a two-thousand-year period, but especially in the last two hundred years, we have jerked and tugged the Christian faith out of its original soil, its life-giving source, which is an honest relationship with God through Jesus the Christ. After uprooting the faith, we have entombed it in a declaration of adherence to a set of beliefs. The shift has left us with casual doctrinal assent that exists independent of a changed life. We have made the Cross into a crossword puzzle, spending our time diagramming byzantine theories of atonement. How did the beauty of Jesus’ atoning work get isolated from the wonder of restoring an authentic relationship between God and humanity?

And

The church may clutch Jesus to its side, but it no longer clutches Jesus to its insides. For the Jews, the unique place where God encountered humans was the temple and (before that) the tent or tabernacle. For Jesus, the unique place where God encounters humans is the human heart. But the church has embalmed Jesus in rules, codes, canonicities, and traditions that have everything to do with the church’s saving itself and nothing to do with the church’s saving the world.

And

Western Christianity is largely belief based and church focused. It is concerned with landing on the right theology and doctrine and making sure everyone else toes the line. The Jesus trimtab, in contrast, is relationship based and world focused. It is concerned not so much with what you believe as with whom you are following. It is less invested in maintaining and growing an institution and more invested in Jesus’ passion for saving the world.

The Sky is Falling

September 10, 2007 | Filed Under alan roxburgh, books, dmin project, gospel, missional | No Comments

the-sky-is-falling.jpgThis morning as I was reflecting on just how different the church would look if it was really shaped in terms of the missio dei, I ran across these words from Alan Roxburgh:

“Throughout Western societies, and most especially in North America, there has occurred a fundamental shift in the understanding and practice of the Christian story. It is no longer about God and what God is about in the world; it is about how God serves and meets human needs and desires. It is about how the individual self can find its own purposes and fulfillment.

More specifically, our churches have become spiritual food courts for the personal, private, inner needs of expressive individuals. The result is a debased, compromised, derivative form of Christianity that is not the gospel of the Bible at all. The biblical narrative is about God’s mission in, through, and for the sake of the world and how God has called human beings to be part of God’s reaching out to that world for God’s purpose of saving it in love. The focus of attention should be what God wants to accomplish and how we can be part of God’s mission, not how God helps us accomplish our own agendas.”

- Alan Roxburgh in The Sky is Falling

A Holistic Gospel

September 2, 2007 | Filed Under gospel, kingdom of God, missional | No Comments

cross.jpgFor some time now I have enjoyed JR Woodward’s blog dream awakener. Over the past few weeks I have been following a series of posts that he has been doing on developing a holistic Gospel.

Woodward argues that to try to separate personal from social salvation is to argue against the law, the prophets, Jesus, and the Apostle Paul. I would like to hear your thoughts on his perspective. Here are the links to the first ten twelve posts:

A Holistic Gospel - Part I
A Holistic Gospel - Part II
A Holistic Gospel - Part III
A Holistic Gospel - Part IV
A Holistic Gospel - Part V
A Holistic Gospel - Part VI
A Holistic Gospel - Part VII
A Holistic Gospel - Part VIII
A Holistic Gospel - Part IX
A Holistic Gospel - Part X
A Holistic Gospel - Part XI
A Holistic Gospel - Part XII

Searching For God Knows What IV

August 30, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel, scripture, way of Jesus | 2 Comments

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgHere is another excellent excerpt from chapter 10 of Donald Miller’s “Searching For God Knows What.” The title of chapter 10 is “The Gospel of Jesus: It Never Was a Formula.”

Becoming a Christian might look more like falling in love than baking cookies. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that in order for a person to know Jesus they must get a kind of crush on Him. But what I am suggesting is that, not unlike any other relationship, a person might need to understand that Jesus is alive, that He exists, that He is God, that He is in authority, that we need to submit to Him, that He has the power to save, and so on and son on, all of which are ideas, but ideas entangled in a kind of relational dynamic. This seems more logical to me because if God made us, wants to know us, then this would require a more mysterious interaction than what would be required by following a kind of recipe.

I realize it all sounds terribly sentimental, but imagine the other ideas popular today that we sometimes hold up as credible: We believe a person will gain access to heaven because he is knowledgeable about theology, because he can win at a game of religious trivia. And we may believe a person will find heaven because she is very spiritual and lights incense and candles and takes bubble baths and reads books that speak of centering her inner self; and some of us believe a person is a Christian because he believes five ideas that Jesus communicated here and there in Scripture, though never completely at one time and in one place; and some people believe they are Christians because they do good things and associate themselves with some kind of Christian morality; and some people believe they are Christians because they are Americans.

If any of these models are true, people who read the Bible before we systematically broke it down, and, for that matter, people who believed in Jesus before the printing press or before the birth of Western civilization, are at an extreme disadvantage. It makes you wonder if we have fashioned a gospel around our culture and technology and social economy rather than around the person of Christ.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

Searching For God Knows What III

August 27, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel, scripture | 1 Comment

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgPerhaps the reason Scripture includes so much poetry in and outside the narrative, so many parables and stories, so many visions and emotional letters, is because it is attempting to describe a relational break man tragically experienced with God and a disturbed relational history man has had since then and, furthermore, a relational dynamic man must embrace in order to have relational intimacy with God once again, thus healing himslef of all the crap he gets into while looking for a relationship that makes him feel whole.

Maybe the gospel of Jesus, in other words, is all about our relationship with Jesus rather than about ideas. And perhaps our lists and formulas and bullet points are nice in the sense that they help us memorize different truths, but harmful in the sense that they blind us to the necessary relationship that must begin between ourselves and God for us to become His followers. And worse, perhaps our formulas and bullet points and steps steal the sincerity with which we might engage God.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

Searching For God Knows What II

August 25, 2007 | Filed Under books, donald miller, gospel, theology | 1 Comment

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgIt makes me wonder if, because of this reduced version of the claims of Christ, we believe the gospel is easy to understand, a simple mental exercise, not in the least bit mysterious. And if you think about it, a person has a more difficult time explaining romantic love, for instance, or beauty, or the Trinity, than the gospel of Jesus. John would open his gospel by presenting the idea that God is the Word and Jesus is the Word and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not exactly bullet points for easy consumption. Perhaps our reduction of these ideas has caused us to miss something.

- Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What

What Can We Learn From Calvin & Hobbes

August 23, 2007 | Filed Under church, culture, gospel | 2 Comments

ch-adventure.jpgI love the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip written by Bill Watterson. I have C&H on my sidebar gadgets, my laptop screen saver, and we have C&H books scattered in what seems ever room of the house. Like many others, I was disappointed when Watterson made the decision in 1995 to retire from cartooning. Well, I was delighted to discover a wonderful essay by Fred Sanders titled “What You Can Learn from Calvin and Hobbes about the Message and the Medium” over at The Scriptorium Daily. Sanders discusses lessons learned from Watterson and how those lessons should be applied to the way the church communicates the Gospel of Jesus. (HT: Tim Challies)

The Gospel of Jesus

August 21, 2007 | Filed Under books, gospel | 9 Comments

searching-for-god-knows-what.jpgOver the next few days I want to share a series of excerpts from Donald Miller’s “Searching For God Knows What.” I want to focus specifically on chapter ten titled “The Gospel of Jesus: It Never Was a Formula.” Miller makes a wonderful and whimsical case for the relational dynamic of the Gospel. Here is the open story of chapter ten:

My friend Greg and I have been talking quite a bit about what it means to follow Jesus. Greg would not consider himself as somebody who takes Jesus seriously, but he admits to having questions. I didn’t have a formula for him to understand how a Christian conversion works, but I told him that many years ago, when I was a child, I had heard about Jesus and found the idea of Him compelling, then much later while reading the Gospels, came to believe I wanted to follow Him. This changed things in my life, I said, because it involved giving up everything and choosing to go into a relationship with Him.

Greg told me he had seen a pamphlet with four or five ideas on it, ideas such as man was a sinner, sin separated man from God, and Christ died to absolve the separation. He asked me if this was what I believed, and I told him, essentially, that it was. “Those would be the facts of the story,” I said, “but that isn’t the story.”

“Those are the ideas, but it isn’t the narrative,” Greg stated rhetorically.

“Yes,” I told him.

Earlier that same year I had a conversation with my friend Omar, who is a student at a local college. For his humanities class, Omar was assigned to read the majority of the Bible. He asked to meet with me for coffee, and when we sat down he put a Bible on the table as well as a pamphlet containing the same five or six ideas Greg had mentioned. He opened the pamphlet, read the ideas, and asked if these concepts were important to the central message of Christianity. I told Omar they were critical; that, basically, this was the gospel of Jesus, the backbone of Christian faith. Omar then opened his Bible and asked, “If these ideas are so important, why aren’t they in this book?” More>>

Engaging Neighborhoods Where We Live

July 23, 2007 | Filed Under alan roxburgh, church planting, dmin project, gospel, incarnational, missional | 1 Comment

allelon.jpgHere is a link to the latest podcast of the Roxburgh Journal interview with Pete Akins titled “Engaging Neighborhoods Where We Live.”

Roxburgh highlights a creative lay church planting movement taking place in the towns and villages in the UK. I would highly recommend taking 30 minutes to listen and be encouraged by what God is doing through the lives of His servants there. As Roxburgh states on his blog when reflecting on the interview: “I was struck by the power of what God is about in quiet, sustained forms of on-the-ground fresh expressions of kingdom life in rural England.”

Don’t Assimilate Me!

June 1, 2007 | Filed Under culture, gospel, missional | 2 Comments

blind-beggar.jpgHere is a very helpful post by Rick Meigs over at The Blind Beggar where he summarizes the last chapter of Gary McIntosh’s book “Beyond the First Visit: The Complete Guide to Connecting Guests to Your Church.”

While I shared with Rick that I was a bit uncomfortable with couching all of McIntosh’s thoughts in the “what the emerging church does” discussion (because I believe it is bigger/wider than simply what the EC does) I found the points to be right on and in many regards more biblically faithful than our typical modes of operation. I would like to hear your thoughts. More>>

Being Sent Into The World

May 17, 2007 | Filed Under gospel, incarnational, missional | No Comments

gospel-of-john.jpgIn light of yesterday’s post on the sending passages found in the Gospels, here is a sampling of the sending theme specifically from the Gospel of John: 

Sending and the Father

“For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him” (3:17).

“For he whom God has sent utters the words of God” (3:34).

“He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (5:23). More>>

Mosaic and a Missional Ethos

May 4, 2007 | Filed Under church planting, gospel, missional | 1 Comment

mosaic.gifI returned from Origins yesterday. I found the majority of the time to be profitable on several fronts. I definitely have a new found respect for McManus. While I had read three of McManus’ books in the past there were times I wonder just a bit about their philosophy of ministry. I have to admit that the metaphors of wind, water, wood, fire and earth used for Mosaic’s core values didn’t “click” for me in the past. However, after hearing McManus and others from the Mosaic community describe each of their five values I began to understand better the what and why of Mosaic’s ministry. The high level of risk-taking that the Mosaic community is willing to take to connect and share Christ with unbelievers is impressive and inspiring.

A few thoughts (or quotes) that resonated with me through the week included the following: More>>

The Crusades & The Kingdom of God

February 15, 2007 | Filed Under church, gospel, kingdom of God, way of Jesus | 3 Comments

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Over the past several years I have had the wonderful opportunity to teach a course on the History of Christianity at a small college in Wichita. Just this last Saturday we dealt with “The Christian Middle Ages” which covers the time period from 590-1517. I was once again forced to struggle with the atrocities of this time period in the life of the church: the deep corruption within the church, the power grab between pope and emperor, and between pope and pope, the inquisition, and especially abhorrent the seven crusades. While in the past I usually tried to understand the misguided motivation behind the crusades by focusing on the corruption and power struggles that occurred as a result of the melding together of church and state, this time I reflected more on the misunderstanding that they (and we) sometimes have concerning the Kingdom of God.

There is no doubt that the reign, or Kingdom, of God was the central theme of Jesus’ preaching but this theme has been absent from the missionary message of the church for a very long time. There have been, and continue to be, many distortions and dilutions of this theme.  The most obvious, and applicable to the problems of the Middle Ages, was the idea that Christianized Western civilization from Constantine onward was, in fact, God’s Kingdom on earth. Therefore, to “extend” or “expand” the Kingdom by what ever means, made perfect sense to many. If the Kingdom is about physical, geographical reign then by all means “expand the borders.”

But has not that distortion of the Kingdom been replaced by more recent versions? Do we not sometimes understand the reign of God as a particular program of social or economic justice, which we are to “build” as God’s agents? But instead are we not called to “enter” and “receive” the Kingdom of God? (Those are the verbs that are used by Jesus when speaking about the Kingdom; never does He use “expand” or “build.”) We are called to enter into what God is doing in the world. We are called to participate in His activities. We are called to participate in God’s mission of setting things right in a broken, sinful world, and to restore it to what God has always intended for the world.