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The Promises of Christian Community

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Behold, how good and pleasant it is
when brothers dwell in unity!
It is like the precious oil on the head,
running down on the beard,
on the beard of Aaron,
running down on the collar of his robes!
It is like the dew of Hermon,
which falls on the mountains of Zion!
For there the Lord has commanded the blessing,
life forevermore.
-Psalm 133

What a cryptic Psalm! What in the world is David talking about when he uses the images of oil dripping down Aaron’s beard and the dew of Hermon?!?

While this Psalm is short and uses some obscure references, it is actually an incredibly rich Psalm about the community of the people of God. David begins by praising God for unity. Now, in Christ, we have been blessed with community in the church even richer than David could have imagined.

In the following verses, David gives two images that show us why he is so excited about this community. Each image comes with a promise and a product.

Oil of the High Priest

–The Promise – The Presence and Power of the Holy Spirit

The anointing oil poured on the high priest represented the pouring out of presence and power of the Holy Spirit upon the priest for the service he would be performing for the people of God. David is rejoicing that the community of the people of God comes with this same promise. As we live out the community that Christ has made possible, we will experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, and this will lead to something specific in our lives…

–The Product – Growth in Personal Holiness

The anointing oil also set the priest apart as holy. As we experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit through community, we will be able to love one another well by pointing out sin and reminding one another of the Gospel. True community in Christ will lead to growth in holiness as a result.

Springs of Life

–The Promise – Sustainment of Life in All Circumstances

Second, David makes reference to a mountain called Hermon. The water from this mountain provide life in the midst of a normally harsh environment. Not only did life flourish on Mt. Hermon, but the water also provided life throughout the surrounding areas as the Jordan river found its source in this spring. Whether fertile valleys or harsh deserts, life could be sustained along the Jordan river due to the water source at Mt. Hermon. In the same way, David explains that community is one of the primary graces from God for sustaining us in both the good and the bad seasons.

–The Product – Cascading Life

But the product isn’t mere sustainment. Cascading from the springs at Hermon down hundreds of miles along the Jordan, life was produced and thriving. In the same way, Christian community has the power to bring life not only in the lives of those who are part of the community, but also in the lives of those who are closely connected to that community. The ripple effects of community living as Christ calls us to (loving God, loving one another, and love our neighbors) leads to significant impact for the fame of Jesus and the good of man both in our local communities and eventually throughout the world. Just imagine what God could do through your Christian community.

At the Gallery Church, small groups are the best place for us to experience the community that David talks about to the fullest degree. In order to do that, we must recognize that small groups can’t be merely a place or event we go to once per week but rather a people we commit to and love day in and day out.

As we launch into small groups for the fall semester, may we pursue growing and multiplying gospel-centered community for the fame of Jesus and our good. And may we remember that small groups aren’t a place we go to, but a people we commit to.

Christmas: A Message of Joy and Peace

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Few times throughout the year in NYC evoke a unified theme throughout this great metropolis. Such diversity that exists throughout our city provides a constant flow of variety. But it’s as a result of this rich diversity—certainly something to be celebrated—that the city experiences few events that impact almost everyone in the city. Even when hosting the Superbowl this past January, the city practically continued on like normal. But there are a few holidays and events that supersede much of this diversity. Memorializing 9/11 is certainly a somber example. On the other end of the spectrum, Halloween is basically a city-wide extravaganza—kids to adults of all ages.

One other holiday overtakes this city: Christmas.

Decorations have filled stores since just after Halloween. Midtown is covered in lights, trees, and ornaments. You can find Christmas trees for sale on practically every street corner. Everyone is brought into the cultural fervor around Christmas: Christians and non-Christians alike (although, there are certainly many who are celebrating other holidays this time of year).

As a result, we have a huge opportunity to easily bring the message of the Gospel into everyday conversations. Why?

The message of Christmas, the reason we celebrate, is a message of Joy and Peace.

The angels in Luke 2:8-21 clearly declare this message.

The message of a baby in a manger is one of eternal joy and peace. Sounds crazy, but it’s so true. When Jesus came his mission was to make a way out of the brokenness of this world, a way to reconciliation with our God, and thus, ultimately, a way to joy and satisfaction in God and who he made us to be.

He also came as a King to bring peace. He accomplished peace by the blood of the cross (see Ephesians 2:11-22). He made a way for peace between God and man and among humanity itself. He didn’t establish a political peace, but one day he will provide eternal and complete peace when he returns and makes all things new (Revelation 21).

During Christmas, everyone is talking about the holidays. People are talking about their traditions and asking others about theirs. We have an opportunity to share this message of joy and peace by asking simple questions that can spark conversations.. We can ask why Christmas is such a big deal? We can simply talk about our traditions and how Jesus is involved in those.

Take advantage of this season when people are connected to such a Christian event, and use conversations about Christmas as bridges to the Gospel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Living Dead

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We’re turning toward how we are called to sacrificially invest through strategic mission in evangelism—sharing the gospel. And we are beginning by considering just what that Gospel is. So we’re turning to one of the richest passages in Scripture to meditate upon that Gospel message.

The Living Dead (vv.1-3)
Zombies are in. From The Walking Dead to World War Z, we are obsessed with zombies. The idea of the living dead is not new to our society. Zombie movies have been made for decades now, but spiritually, this concept actually reflects a truth that is as old as the Scriptures.
What we find in Ephesians 2:1-10 is that we really are in one sense living dead. In our sin, that is rebellion against God’s good intentions, we are living and breathing and acting in this world, but we are spiritually, relationally, and emotionally broken, more than that, truly dead.

The Disease
It’s not Ebola, nor is it some other virus or biological weapon of most zombie movies, but the disease we are infected with is sin, a rebellion against God and a brokenness in our humanity.
Because of this sin, we don’t flourish as God intends. Instead, we follow the “passions of our flesh.” We are “carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.” Rather than God’s beautiful desires for abundant life, we pursue base, sinful subhuman desires, and we continue in that path as long as we are left on our own.

The Consequences
So, Paul says, we’re children of wrath, which means we have a coming inheritance of wrath from God. As a result of choosing sin and evil, we deserve just punishment from a righteous God. We deserve justice and death.

Again, we’re dead men walking. We are stuck in this pattern apart from intervention. We won’t suddenly snap out of it. We can’t suddenly revive ourselves and avoid the just punishment from our righteous God. We are in desperate need of an outside intervention. And in verse 4, “But God” signifies the beginning of that intervention. The human condition is dire, BUT there is more to the story of the Gospel.

God Gave True Life (vv. 4-9)
Immeasurable Grace
God has intervened because the richness of his mercy and “the great love with which he loved us.” He did not leave us without hope in our horrid condition. Through Jesus, he shows “the immeasurable riches of his grace.” The work of Jesus that this passage refers to is the death he experienced on the cross. He took our disease—our sin—and death—our consequence—upon himself. He made us a way to exchange our inheritance of wrath for his inheritance: abundant, eternal life.

 Through faith not works
Paul makes it really clear that this life we receive has no connection to our works. It’s totally a gift by the work of Jesus. We simply receive this immeasurable grace and life by trusting (having faith) in God and his ability to bring new life.

We’re Alive for a Purpose (v. 10)
Glorifying God by Doing Good
The good news of the Gospel doesn’t just end once we are rescued from death by God’s immeasurable love and grace. In fact, it leads us and empowers us to live truly human lives. God saves us glorify Him by doing good works. This is what we were created for, and now we are freed from the disease of sin to actually live our God intended purpose: experiencing and spreading true abundant life.

Have you trusted in God for true, abundant life, or are you still trusting in yourself and settling for a life far from God’s beautiful intention? Trust Him today. (If you have questions, feel free to message me about any of this.)

Have you been trusting in Him but not enjoying the full riches of this new life because you’ve missed that God saved you for a purpose? Consider how God is calling you to use your freedom and life in Christ to glorifying Him by doing good in the world.

Death by Doctrine

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Doctrine… What an outdated term! At least that’s how most people feel. Hearing the word “doctrine” produces images of tired, old theologians studying ancient, dust-laden books in a decrepit library far from society. Unfortunately, that’s an entirely ill-conceived idea.

Doctrine is simply the set of beliefs one holds as a church. In fact, rather than a conception of irrelevancy and decrepitness, doctrine can actually be life-giving. Doctrine that flows from the Scripture and is centered upon the Gospel is a solid foundation and a source of strength for a church.

BUT doctrine can very easily be a poison that undermines the church and leads to death if it’s not based upon the truth of Scripture. In fact, this is just the death that Pergamum had begun to experience in the book of Revelation. This second church in need of Revitalization is called out by Jesus for giving into false teaching, or in other words, deadly doctrine.

Any church that veers from the truth of God’s Word and the Gospel will experience a decline in spiritual vitality and ultimately death. Some may keep their physical numbers up as they merely tickle the ears of the world around them, but their people will not be receiving life.

Cling to God’s Word and the Gospel as your foundation and authority.

Otherwise, your church will experience the death threatened by Jesus to the church in Pergamum.