Seedplots

Ed Stezter (Southern Baptist Researcher and Missiologist), in an article written for Duke Divinity school, was asked to answer the question, “What are your greatest worries about the Church?”

I found his answer insightful…  and a sober warning.

1. The loss of focus on the gospel
Much of the current church scene has become an exercise in moralism without an appeal to gospel transformation.

This is true in traditional church settings (which teach what you should NOT do) and contemporary church setting (which give you five things you SHOULD do). The difficulty is that neither focus on a life shaped transformed and shaped by the gospel.

2. A lack of discipleship
I doubt I need to list the studies (including Reveal by Willow, The Shape of Faith to Come but LifeWay Research, and others) that indicate discipleship is in rough shape.

If the churches fail to produce robust disciples, we will continue to lose the next generation to nominalism and will fail to engaging people without Christ who will find out lives (and thus our faith) unappealing at best, and hypocritical at worst.

3. The danger of cultural captivity
I am one who thinks that the church has to look similar to the world and live different. That is not the pattern we see. Today, many churches look more like a past era than a transforming gospel. Thus, I think that churches need to engage their cultures through their service, actions, forms, and approaches.

If not, they obscure the gospel to a world that believes being a Christian means changing your music, your clothes, and your political party affiliation, rather than being changed by the work of Christ on the cross.

Here is the link to the entire article.

Sinclair Fergson highlights an important truth for those who serve God:

“We do not preach “the atonement” as such, or “salvation,” “redemption,” or “justification” as such, but Jesus Christ and him crucified. These blessings were accomplished by Christ and are available only in Christ, never abstracted from him.

“We must learn to avoid the contemporary plague of preaching the benefits of the gospel without proclaiming Christ himself as the Benefactor in the gospel.

“We do not offer people abstract blessings (peace, forgiveness, new life) as commodities. Rather we preach and offer Christ crucified and risen, in whom the blessings become ours and not otherwise. We preach the person in the work, never the work and its blessings apart from the Saviour himself.”

– “Preaching the Atonement” in The Glory of the Atonement (Hill & James, eds), p. 437

I’m trying to better understand the relationship between the Gospel and Christian living. The following comments by Don Carson on 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 helpfully clarify the link between the two,

[Notice] how Paul’s exhortation about giving and money is tied to the Gospel.  In chapter 8 Paul invokes the example of Christ’s self-giving:

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (8:9). [Then] in chapter 9 Paul says that, if the Corinthians come through with their promised gift, people “will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity” (9:13, italics added).

In any case Paul never lets Christians forget that all our giving is but a pale reflection of God’s “indescribable gift” (9:15), which of course lies at the heart of the Gospel.

So much of basic Christian ethics is tied in one way or another to the Gospel. When husbands need instruction on how to treat their wives, Paul does not introduce special marriage therapy or appeal to a mystical experience. Rather, he grounds conduct in the Gospel: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25)…

We must avoid the view that, while the Gospel provides a sort of escape ticket from judgment and hell, all the real life-transforming power comes from something else—an esoteric doctrine, a mystical experience, a therapeutic technique, a discipleship course. That is too narrow a view of the Gospel. Worse, it ends up relativizing and marginalizing the Gospel, stripping it of its power while it directs the attention of people away from the Gospel and toward something less helpful (D. A. Carson, For the Love of God : A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word. Volume 2 (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1998). 25.)

This week I surveyed the New Testament verses where the three primary Greek words translated “preach” or “proclaim” occur.  I looked for the object of the verbs, i.e. what was preached.  It was a vivid reminder for me of the centrality of Christ and the gospel in the New Testament.

What I had just studied was further reinforced for me when I ran across these comments in my daily RSS reading later the same day (from Pastor DeYoung),

After wrestling with the nature of preaching for 25 years, T. David Gordon (Why Johnny Can’t Preach) has concluded that the content of Christian preaching should be the person, character, and work of Christ.

Kind of makes sense. Of course, preaching will included moral exhortation, but it is never appropriate, says Gordon, “for one word of moral counsel ever to proceed from a Christian pulpit that is not clearly, in its context, redemptive. That is, even when the faithful exposition of particular texts require some explanation of aspects of our behavior, it is always to be done in a manner that the hearer perceives such commended behavior to be itself a matter of being rescued from the power of sin through the grace of Christ” (70-71).

So much for all our “relevant” messages helping us live more fulfilled lives. So much for emergent kingdom rhetoric that fails to mention the mercy of the King. So much for more than a few of my sermons over the years.

Gordon sees four alternatives to this type of gospel preaching:

• Moralism
• How-To
• Introspection
• Social Gospel / Culture War

That is, instead of preaching Christ crucified and the grace of God, we end up preaching “be better” or “here are three steps to being better” or “are you really a Christian?” or “we need to do more to fight the bad guys out there.”

It’s not that we can’t do any of this as preachers — Gordon says there is a place for three of the four (everything but the how-to) — but “the pulpit is almost never the place to do this” (91).

What must predominate in our preaching is the person, character, and work of Christ. And everything else should manifestly flow from these things.

Don’t leave the congregation wondering where grace come in to play. Don’t make them assume you are rooting this application in the person and work of Christ. Connect the glorious dots for them.

Here’s the original posting.

Last summer a missionary working in the Balkans recommended the following article.  I read it, was struck by its message, re-read it and then shared it with my wife.   Then I copied it and filed it away.

Yesterday I ran across it and re-read it once more.  Again it challenged me.  I’m not sure why it resonated with me like this.  Perhaps because here in the Balkans, where I live, spiritual transformation in people’s lives usually does not occur quickly.   In the hope that the article will encourage and challenge you as it did me, I share it with you:

You have to trust the Gospel to do what it promises to do…  [There are] two mistakes to avoid:

• Making your own agenda the “To do” list for the Holy Spirit. That’s a big leap: from “I want it to happen” to “God wants it to happen.”
  .
• Turning to other motivations – like guilt, condemnation, guilt, manipulation, guilt …  – to get the work done.  Really. This is so important and so true.

If the Holy Spirit isn’t going to produce it by constant, earnest presentation of the Gospel to the people of God, then does it need to happen?  And if the Holy Spirit isn’t the primary motivator, how can other motivations – like guilt and condemnation- actually do anything worthwhile?

I love Paul’s advice in Ephesians 6.  Take up the whole armor of God…and having done all, just stand there.  That’s so good. Put on God’s resources, God’s vision, God’s heart. Do all that the Gospel commands and demands.  Then … stand.

We take this and do something like this: We use some of God’s resources, and things don’t go the way we want. So we start doing things our way, and finding what does work. Or we just get frustrated and start beating ourselves and other people up with guilt and condemnation for what’s not happening. They we are upset at people, ourselves and God because nothing’s working.

Scripture has a better way. Stay with the Gospel. Speak the truth in love. Design a path of radical loyalty to Christ, specific repentance and clear obedience. Does those things and do them God’s way.

Then stand.

I believe that part of the method of Paul in I Thessalonians was to do his ministry God’s way and to then look for the resulting work of the Holy Spirit and to ENCOURAGE GOD’S PEOPLE with what he saw the Spirit doing.  Even when Paul is strongly correcting the church, he does so from the standpoint of the grace of God in the Gospel, never by resorting to guilt.

That’s very different from setting the agenda, living in frustration that things aren’t working, then resorting to beating up yourself and other Christians in hopes something will change.

Life is too short, folks. Grace is the good stuff. Stay with it. Don’t quit and take the road back to legalism as so many do. Preach yourself happy in God, then encourage, persuade and exhort God’s people in the grace of Jesus.

Here’s the original link.