Month: November 2014

Celebrating Christmas Well – Part I

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Outrageous amounts of family, friends, football and food is just a few days away. Certainly, Thanksgiving is a fantastic holiday all by itself. But, for me, it has always served primarily as the kickoff to the Christmas season. I mean, I think Macy’s gets it right when they send Santa down Central Park West at the end of the parade.

I’ll admit that I love the entire culture of the Christmas season, but Santa is not the reason we celebrate Christmas—Jesus is.

So as we approach the Christmas season, let’s commit to dwelling upon the real reason we celebrate: the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Desiring God has produced a great devotional that I highly recommend for each of you this Christmas. It provides a reading for each day from December 1st-25th as well as a short devotional to read with it.

Focus your celebration of Christmas this year on the person of Jesus by following The Good New of Great Joy devotional.

The Path to Revitalization

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Over the past several weeks, we have examined the declining churches in the book of Revelation. Jesus rebukes the churches with urgency and specificity. But He does not leave the churches without direction. He guides them away from decline and toward victory once again.

In other words, he provides a path to revitalization.

This path involves three primary steps:
1. Listen
2. Repent
3. Hold Fast 

First, the call to listen to Christ’s exhortation is loud and clear. Every letter to the churches includes the phrase, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” One cannot begin down the road to conquering and revitalization without hearing the Word of God. Listening as the Spirit of God speaks through his Word is vital. Next, a step that is not always primary should be considered. In both the letters to Ephesus and Sardis, Christ calls the churches to remember. For some churches in decline, looking back on their rich history of faithfulness to see how far they have fallen is incredibly helpful. Often Satan can encourage doubts of salvation during times of conviction, thus remembering can encourage a church as it sees God’s previous work among them.

The second primary step toward conquering is to repent of the sins that led to decline. All five churches that have experienced decline are called to repent. Recognizing sin is not enough. Churches must turn from that sin and toward Christ.

Once a church has genuinely repented, they have officially taken steps in faithfulness again. Now, they must continue in that faithfulness by holding fast. As discussed earlier, an essential part of conquering is persevering in faithfulness. In order for revitalization to have a lasting effect, churches must not only listen and repent, but also hold fast.

Challenge: Show His Love to the World

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There is no tangible resource to give this week. That’s not because there aren’t great resources available in abundance, but instead, it’s because each and every person who has faith in Jesus with the Spirit living inside them has what it takes to accomplish the theme for this week: love one another.

Instead of a resource, I’m giving a challenge to all my readers: Find one tangible way to love two people this week.

First, love another brother or sister in Christ by serving them, encouraging them, or even going old-fashioned and sending them a thank you note.

Second, love your neighbor. Find one person in your life who doesn’t know Jesus and clearly and tangibly show them the love of Jesus.

That’s your mission: Tangibly love two people this week.

Now go out and do it!

Displaying the Gospel

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Everyone reading this post is viewing it on some sort of computer screen. The millions or billions of images you can see on your computer is pretty amazing. They captivate our attention, and many of them stun us visually. These displays aren’t some magic mirror on the wall, but they are controlled by the computer code feeding into them.

Turn off the display, mask the code. It’s still present within the computer, but it’s effect on the outside world is limited.

Change the code, change the display. It’s that simple.

In a similar way, God has given us a code to be displayed. He has given us the Gospel: the good news that Jesus has lived, died, and rose again for our sake. We are to be displays for this Gospel.

If we do not display the Gospel by the way we live, then the message of the Gospel will be rendered ineffective. God has made us to be the conduits through which his message is spread throughout the world.

This week’s passage, 1 John 4:7-12, makes this perfectly clear.

God made his love known through Jesus’ love, and now we are called to be the displays of that love for the world around us.

In verse 12, John writes: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”

Though, no one has ever seen God, one of the major ways we know and experience Him is through the love shown by fellow Christians. This can also be extended to the world around us. Those who don’t know the love of God can see and experience who God is when our love for one another is evident in our churches.

A major way the Gospel is communicated is through the love we display in our everyday lives.

In addition to this, as I said before, if you change the code in a computer, you change what is on the display. If we aren’t receiving this Gospel message on a daily basis by spending time in God’s Word, and if we aren’t communing with God regularly, then our lives will look differently. For instance, according to verses 7-8, those who know God will love others. There is a very specific characteristic that our lives will display if we are truly connected to God’s Word: Love.

But if we aren’t connected to God through the Gospel, we will not display the fruit of the Spirit, and so prove ourselves to not know God.

However, if we know God, but fail to dwell upon His great love in the Gospel, our lives will fail to display God’s good news for all of humanity.

So let us be plugged into His Word, and most importantly, let us love others that God’s Gospel might be rightly displayed through our lives.

Death by Self-Reliance

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“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” 

These are the words of Jesus to the church of Laodicea.

If you have sat through Sunday sermons for long, you have probably heard the warnings against being a lukewarm Christian. Too often, lukewarm is understood to be mediocrity in the Christian life. Preachers declare that to be hot is to be a passionate Christian, while being cold is to be an unbeliever.

But Revelation 3:14-22 does not seem to support that idea, for in this case, the text would apparently be implying that to be an unbeliever is better than being lukewarm. Instead, M.J.S. Rudwick points first to the contemporary situation in which the Laodiceans, despite being rich, could not obtain hot or cold water of which both have good uses, and as a result, the water supply for Laodicea was used as a symbol to represent their “uselessness” and “ineffective[ness]” for the Lord. Yet ineffectiveness seems to be a symptom rather than the root of the problem.

Instead, arrogance and self-reliance are at the core their decline. Apparently, they believe they are prosperous and “need nothing,” but Jesus asserts that they are actually “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” He calls them to come humbly and rely upon him for their riches. Thus it appears that Satan has sought to develop an attitude of pride and self-reliance in the church at Laodicea.

The pride that leads to this kind of self-reliance continues to be common among churches today, and when self-reliance is present, one will find a declining church or at least, soon-to-be declining.

Reliance upon programs, personalities, and promotionals is deadly for a church. 

Jesus calls us to be reliant upon him, guided by his Word, and powered by His Spirit. When we rely upon our own efforts to create growth, the opposite actually occurs. Sure, some initial growth in attendance may come, but spiritual depth and fruit of the spirit will slowly whither away.

Are you relying upon yourself? Or are you completely dependent upon the Lord? If we’re honest, we all have a bit of a self-reliant streak within us.

May we repent of self-reliance, and instead, draw upon the riches of His power and grace that we might be useful for His glory.

Know & Share the Gospel

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We’ve been focusing a whole lot on sharing our faith lately. We can talk strategies and provide tools for sharing the Gospel all day long, but if we do not know the Gospel deep inside our hearts, then we will not be able to share the Gospel in a natural and contextually appropriate way.

So, this week’s resource is Tell the Truth by Will Metzger.

This is a heftier resource than normal, but it’s worth every moment of investment. Metzger not only provides a thorough explanation of the Gospel and common misconceptions, but he also provides great insights on how to share the Gospel as well. It’s a holistic resource for evangelism, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Check it out here.

Connecting the Gospel to Our Culture: A Lesson from Paul

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If I started this post off with a significant news story or lyric from a couple centuries ago, most of you, outside history or literature buffs, would have no idea what I was referring to. But if I started off by referring to Ebola or wondering if you wanted to build a snowman, then you’d immediately recognize what I’m talking about. I don’t think anyone can forget the Frozen craze—and yes, I’ll be going to see Frozen on Ice in just a couple of weeks, and no I’m not complaining.

The point is communication hinges upon knowing your audience, and this is certainly true for evangelism.

Relevance is vital to communicating the Gospel clearly, and the key to being relevant is contextualizing the message to the person you’re talking to. Paul understood this reality as well as or better than anyone, and he makes that abundantly clear in Acts 17:16-34 as he addresses the people of Athens. In a city that had very little framework for even beginning to understand the Gospel, Paul was able to communicate the Gospel clearly and watch God bring many to faith.

We experience much of the same reality in our culture, especially in NYC. So what can we learn from Paul in this passage?

Know & Connect

Know
1. The Gospel – We must know the full message of the Gospel and continue to grow in our understanding everyday.

2. The Culture – We must observe and listen to the culture so that our knowledge of the culture would equip us to be relevant and contextual. Paul observed their idol to an unknown god, and he knew the poets of their day.

Connect
1. Stories to Truth – Having listened to the Athenian culture, Paul is able to connect their cultural artifacts to the truth of the Gospel. The partial truths that they understood were bridges to the whole truth of the Gospel. We must utilize our culture’s stories to illustrate and connect to the Gospel.

2. Needs to Provision – Paul also recognized that the Athenians were fearful of messing up religiously, so much so that they created an idol to an unknown god in case they had missed one. He ultimately points them to the only lasting hope and peace for their fears: the assurance that God has given to all by raising Jesus from the dead (v. 34).

Let us be constant students of the Gospel and our culture that we might be able to connect their stories and needs to the truth and provision of the Gospel.

Death by Silence

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Silence can be deadly. You’d think something as passive as silence would have very little effect on anything. For instance, think about when someone is getting bullied. Silently standing by can be just as harmful as actually bullying. Another example, if a doctor gets your results back from a test, yet fails to tell you anything, you could very easily be heading toward your death and never know it.

On an even more significant level, churches possess the life-giving message of the Gospel apart from which people will experience eternity apart from the glorious goodness of our great God. When churches are silent concerning this message, people will die, and ultimately, the church will die. This is made crystal clear with the church at Sardis.

G.K. Beale  argues that the church at Sardis has developed an incomplete witness. Based upon the introductory image, which alludes to the idea of witness, and the idea that the church has a good reputation but incomplete works, the church at Sardis appears to have failed to complete their witness and conquer.  (The Book of Revelation 273-274) In whatever form their compromise took, they clearly were lacking in their evangelistic witness to the world. Satan wants nothing more than for the church to fail in this area, and Jesus will not endure a church who refuses to repent of this sin.

The passage isn’t clear whether Sardis was lacking in their verbal or physical witness to the Gospel. Whether their words or their actions were silent does not matter, their witness was incomplete. We must recognize that our witness must be holistic. We cannot allow any part of our lives to be silent when it comes to the Gospel.

Without works that portray the Gospel, our message will likely fall on deaf ears.

But even worse, without the message of the Gospel flowing from our lips, our works will only provide temporary healing and lead people to eternal torment.

May our churches flee death by completely and boldly proclaiming the Gospel through our words and deeds.

Shaping & Sharing Your Story

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On Monday, we considered the power of story both in our culture today and in the story of Paul in Acts 26. I encouraged everyone to consider how you would share your own personal story in order to communicate the Gospel. But many of you may be at a loss as to how to share your story in a clear way.

So, here’s a resource from InterVarsity. This tool provides questions to spark your thinking about how to shape and share your story. It hits the same basic plot points that I discussed on Monday: life before Jesus, how you met Jesus, life with Jesus.

Check it out if you need help shaping your story, and pay close attention to their advice at the end: Keep your story short so it’s easy to tell. You can always expand on something when people ask questions.

 30 Minutes to a Shareable Testimony Worksheet

The Power of Stories

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Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime have all fed the binge-watching tv trend. Certainly, ease of access through online streaming has made binge-watching habits drastically higher, but this isn’t the only reason that so many of us devour show after show.

**I’m as guilty of this habit as anybody. My wife and I are about to finish the final season of 24 after having just started earlier this year.**

Another major reason is our culture’s obsession with stories. Postmodernity has led to a breakdown in the expectation for one overarching narrative that explains everything. In light of that, we emphasize and look for the truth we find in smaller, individualized stories. We wrestle with ideas of beauty, evil, truth, and the deepest questions of life through hearing stories from various mediums (TV, theater, music, etc.).

Stories are incredibly powerful, and our society is constantly searching for new stories to either give voice to their thoughts or bring understanding to the complexities of this world.

As Christians, we each have our own powerful story that communicates the greatest truth of all time: the Gospel—a story in itself.

Our personal story of our life before we met Jesus, our encounter with Jesus, and our transformed life after meeting him is one of the most potent tools for sharing the grace, mercy, love, and forgiveness of our God and Savior.

This week’s text—Acts 26—is just one of several examples throughout the book of Acts of Paul sharing the Gospel through his personal experience.

Like any good story, there are several clear plot points: 
     1. His life before Jesus
     2. His encounter with Jesus
     3. His life with Jesus
     4. His call to respond to the story

People are more often than not willing to hear out your personal story rather than a four point Gospel sermon. So take advantage of the power of your own personal story. Think through these points in your own life and shape how you share your story. Then share it with the same boldness and passion that Paul shared his in Acts 26.

Let the truth of the Gospel shine forth through your life to an unbelieving world.