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Celebrating Christmas Well – Part II

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Christmas is an incredible time of year. The hustle and bustle of Christmas shopping starting on Black Friday (well, maybe even earlier than that now), the vast arrays of decorations on seemingly every street, the ice skating in Central Park, the temporary Christmas markets set up at Union Square and Columbus circle, all add up to create a magical feel in NYC at this time of year. OK, maybe magical is a bit too much, but I simply LOVE Christmastime in this city. There are so many great traditions, and millions throughout the nation and the world celebrate this great holiday, each culture with their own unique twist to the celebration.

But how do we celebrate Christmas well? Without succumbing to a culture of materialism and covetousness?

The key to doing this lies in allowing this entire season to bring us to meditation upon and celebration of an absolutely crucial aspect of the Gospel: the humanity of Christ. I believe this is often a portion of the Gospel that is tragically under appreciated. And what better time than Christmas to invigorate and renew a passion for this essential truth!

The New Testament is full of references to the humanity of Christ, emphasizing the importance of this to the Gospel. 1 Timothy 3:15b-16 makes this incredibly clear:

which is the church of the living God,
a pillar and buttress of the truth.
Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness:

He was manifested in the flesh,
vindicated in the Spirit,
seen by angels,
proclaimed among the nations,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.

Paul sets forth a summary of God’s redemptive plan for humanity, i.e. the Gospel. This is the truth that the Church is to uphold, and very prominently at the beginning of this confession, the humanity of Christ is highlighted. But why is this truth so important to the Gospel, and why are we as the church called to protect this truth?

The Gospel Coalition’s Statement of faith provides several reasons that the humanity of Christ is essential to include:
“1.Christ as our model of true humanity– We realize from this that we weren’t meant for sin. Humanity is sinful because we have fallen not simply because we are human. Humanity was meant for so much more than this fallen world, and we see the image of God in humanity untainted in the person of Jesus. Christ in his humanity is what we were meant to be like.
2.Christ’s representative obedience– In Romans 5:18-19, Paul compares Adam’s representative sin that caused all of humanity to fall with the representative of Christ which provided all of humanity with the hope of being made righteous through His obedience.
3.Christ as our substitutionary sacrifice– Jesus had to be made like us in order to take our place and bear the wrath of God toward our sins. (Hebrews 2:17)
4.Christ as our mediator– Paul emphasizes Christ’s humanity when he discusses His mediatory role in 1 Timothy 2:5. Christ can stand in the gap between humanity and the Father because he has both a human and divine nature.
5.Christ as our sympathetic high priest– Jesus has experienced the hardships of humanity. (Hebrews 4:15-16)
6.Christ as our true example of holy human conduct– In Christ’s life we see what a truly holy life looks like. (1 Peter 2:21)”

Each of these without the humanity of Christ is lost, thus we must realize not only the great responsibility we have in guarding this truth but also the beauty of this truth.

We see the splendor of this truth lead Paul to worship in the short hymn of Philippians 2:5-11:
Make your own attitude that of Christ Jesus,

who existing in the form of God,
did not consider equality with God
as something to be used for his own advantage.
Instead He emptied himself
by assuming the form of a slave,
taking on the likeness of men.
And when he had come as a man in His external form,
he humbled himself by becoming obedient
 to the point of death—even death on a cross.
 For this reason God also highly exalted Him
 and gave Him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow—
of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth—
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Let us turn our celebrations and affections this Christmas season to this integral and beautiful aspect of the Gospel: the humanity of Christ. And let us, as His Church, defend this doctrine, for apart from this, the Gospel crumbles. If we are to redeem Christmas, we must simply celebrate the Gospel.

This doesn’t mean that we must toss out the cultural traditions, but instead, let us celebrate in such a way that our giving and receiving, family gatherings, and other traditions are expressions of our joy in Christ and in His grace, humility, and love that he showed by becoming human for our sake.

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.

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.

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.

Scripture-Focused Discipleship

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On Monday, I talked about the importance of studying Scripture as part of discipleship relationships. If you’ve ever led a Bible study, you may think that the thought of leading a study of a chapter of Scripture every week or two is a very daunting task. And if you’ve never led a Bible study, you may feel like you don’t even know where to begin.

Don’t worry. It’s not as intimidating as it may sound. Simply reading the Scripture and then asking specific questions is all you need. But what questions do you ask?
Discovery Bible Study is a simple method for leading a study of Scripture in discipleship groups by simply asking questions of the text and one another.

To get started leading a discipleship group, you can simply work through the DBS method. As you get more familiar with the gist of it, you will be more comfortable and able to lead without the guide in hand.

For now, check out these great Discovery Bible Study materials.

This is a great guide for leading a discipleship group that fits great into the model we’ve adopted at Gallery Church.

Implementing Intentional Discipleship

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Gospel-centered discipleship has been the theme for the past several weeks. We’ve seen how much of our discipleship is off balanced.

But now, we’ve got to ask, “How do we actually do this discipleship thing?”

Intentionality is key in consistent growth as disciples, and without some tangible, practical handles for implementing discipleship, we will never get around to consistent growth and maturity in our faith. And we as a church have committed to sacrificially invest through intentional discipleship for the fame of Jesus.

In the final chapter of Jonathan Dodson’s Fight Clubs, he provides a few simple, practical tools for intentional discipleship. His model is Biblical, effective, and easily reproducible, which is why we have adopted this as the basic structure of how we are going to pursue intentional discipleship.

So what are these basics?

1. Three Objectives: “Know Your Sin, Fight Your Sin, and Trust Your Savior.”

First, we must work to know our sin, our struggles. We’ve got to examine our hearts and allow others to examine our hearts. What are our sins? What are the circumstances and triggers for our sin? What lies are we believing?

Second, we must be committed to fighting our sin. We do this in the power of the Spirit and by the grace of God, but we must fight.

Third, we must turn from the lies we’ve identified and the sins we are committing as a result, and we must trust our Savior. Identify the promises that Jesus gives us in the Scriptures to counter the lies we are believing. An example of this from Fight Clubs:

“Instead of sexual lust, choose purity of heart: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.’ God is eternally satisfying; lust is fleeting.”

Fighting sinful lies with the promises of God is the kind of fight we are called to in discipleship.

2. Two People: A discipleship group consists of at least two people, but no more than three, who meet together regularly for the sake of intentional times of discipleship.

*Discipleship is not limited to the meeting times and is, in fact, enhanced by living life together in general. But without these regular meetings, intentionality will be lost.

3. One Process: “Text-Theology-Life”

Let Scripture guide your time together, for it’s the one source of truth and life that we can count on. Begin with the text. Study the same Scripture passage and discuss it when you get together. Begin with this to avoid spending all your time catching up. Share how God has been teaching you through this passage.

Next, discuss theology. All this means is talk about what this passage teaches about God and his promises. Dodson suggests asking this question: “How does the person and work of Jesus inform this text?”

Finally, connect this to Life: How do these truths help you to “know your sin, fight your sin, and trust your savior.” Dig into each other’s lives, struggles, and victories. Apply the truths of Scripture to your lives.

**These basics are a summary of chapter five of Jonathan Dodson’s Fight Clubs**

Imagine what God would do through us if we pursue sacrificial investment through intentional discipleship like this. Imagine the fruit he would produce within us as we grow in the grace of the gospel. 

Imagine how God could then multiply these groups if we pour into a couple of men or women for a season and then call them to go and do the same.

If just five of us commit to do that, then ten others would be intentionally discipled. Then, after a semester or year, they begin to pour into others intentionally in the same way. Suddenly there are 45 people in intentional discipleship relationships. Do that one more time, and you have 135 people pointing each other to the gospel on a regular basis. Imagine what God could do with an entire church committed to this!

Let us be a people that sacrificially invest through intentional discipleship so that God would multiply it for His fame and our good.

Beware of Community

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“Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community…. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone…. Each taken by itself has profound pitfalls and perils. Those who want community without solitude plunge into the void of words and feelings, and those who seek solitude without community perish in the bottomless pit of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.”

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together (Fortress Press), 82-83.

This profound truth—the necessity of both solitude and community—infuses our discipleship with a healthy balance of both an individual and community pursuit. In a culture that loves the idea of community, we must avoid idolizing it. As we pursue intentional discipleship, we must recognize that Jesus uses both solitude and community to draw us closer to and increase our faith in Him.

For further reflection on Biblical community, check out all of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together.

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