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DeYoung on The Church

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I would highly recommend your listening to Kevin DeYoung’s sermon from Next entitled “The Church.” Here’s a summary from C.J. that came across my feed reader recently:

To close out his Next 2010 conference message, “The Church,” Kevin DeYoung gave a list of suggestions for how to be a difference maker in the local church. He said:

• Find a good local church.
• Get involved.
• Become a member.
• Stay there as long as you can.
• Put away thoughts of a revolution for a while.
• Join the plodding visionaries.
• Go to church this Sunday and worship in Spirit and truth.
• Be patient with your leaders.
• Rejoice when the gospel is faithfully proclaimed.
• Bear with those who hurt you.
• Give people the benefit of the doubt.
• Say “hi” to the teenager that no one notices.
• Welcome the old ladies with the blue hair and the young men with tattoos.
• Volunteer for the nursery.
• Attend the congregational meeting.
• Bring your fried chicken to the potluck like everybody else.
• Invite a friend.
• Take a new couple out for coffee.
• Give to the Christmas offering.
• Sing like you mean it.
• Be thankful someone vacuumed the carpet for you.
• Enjoy the Sundays that “click.”
• Pray extra hard on the Sundays that don’t.
• And in all of this, do not despise the days and weeks and years of small things (Zechariah 4:8–10).

I cannot recommend this message too highly. Please take time to download and listen to “The Church” by visiting the resource page at thisisnext.org.

I would whole-heartedly agree. Many times when people listen to or give a message on the church, it can seem like a rah-rah message at how people need to do what their pastors say. But this message is very even-handed showing that even weak leaders need followers who are interested in bigger things than their own shallow, capricious ideals. This is the stunning reality we see in Scripture about Jesus’ bride, the church. Listen, be profitable and glorify God.

Radical Review and Response..

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In a previous post I spoke of David Platt’s book Radical, which I had the opportunity to read last week. Justin Taylor interviewed Platt about the book and promised more to come. Today, Kevin DeYoung reviewed the book and allowed Platt to respond.

A few things:
1) The message of Platt’s book needs to be heard for many of us who are more devoted to the American dream than we are to the basic demands of the Gospel.
2) The charitable dialogue you will find in the links above reflects what’s best about being Gospel-centered.
3) If you are looking for some other Platt resources:
His T4G Breakout Session is online. But, if you have the time, you could listen to the Radical series from the Church at Brook Hills, where Platt pastors. This would give you the audio content found in the book (in about 8 messages).
RADICAL

Got Guilt?

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If you’re like me, you occasionally feel guilt in living some part of the Christian life. Whether its being more passionate in sharing the Gospel or honoring God in my body, I feel weighed down with guilt far to often. Maybe yours comes in one of these areas:

* We could pray more.
* We aren’t bold enough in evangelism.
* We like sports too much.
* We watch movies and television too often.
* Our quiet times are too short or too sporadic.
* We don’t give enough.
* We bought a new couch.
* We don’t read to our kids enough.
* Our kids eat Cheetos and french fries.
* We don’t recycle enough.
* We need to lost 20 pounds.
* We could use our time better.
* We could live some place harder or in something smaller.

Kevin DeYoung had some great thoughts on this recently in a post entitled, Are Christians Meant to Feel Guilty All the Time? His reasons we feel guilt:

1. We don’t fully embrace the good news of the gospel.
2. Christians tend to motivate each other by guilt rather than grace.
3. Most of our low-level guilt falls under the ambiguous category of “not doing enough.”
4. When we are truly guilty of sin it is imperative we repent and receive God’s mercy.

Take some time and work through this post for your soul’s sake.

That Befuddling Bible…

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Kevin DeYoung offers some practical advice on What To Do When The Bible Baffles:

To begin with, we recall the sovereignty of God. God wrote the Bible and he inspired the hard texts. He breathed out his revelation through Paul. And he willed it so that some things in Paul’s letters would be hard to understand. Hard texts are still God’s texts. They must be hard for a reason.

What to do next? We embrace our finitude. We admit we are not terribly smart, nor all that clever, and so we pray. As the Irish theologian McHammer said, “You’ve got to pray just to make it today.”

And as we pray we work. “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men” (Col. 3:23). So we pour over words and sentences. We read commentaries. We talk to other Christians. We interpret Scripture by Scripture. We ask God for breakthroughs. He wants to teach us. Remember, Paul wrote to slaves and the uneducated, those without wisdom, influence, or nobility (1 Cor. 1:26). They could learn and so can we.

Don’t give up on hard texts or hard doctrines. Don’t settle for platitudes or for bewailing “I’m not theologian.” We must not give up on understanding the Bible without a fight. As C.S. Lewis once remarked, “God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.” We are all tempted to shy away from life’s difficulties, be they hard people or hard texts. But consider the wisdom of Proverbs: “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox” (14:4). In other words, oxen make messes, but they also help with the harvest. If you never think through difficult Bible passages, your life may be simpler, but it won’t be stronger.

God gave us brains so we could be obedient with them. And he has spoken to us in the Bible so he might be more easily known, even when some things are hard to understand.

Give yourself to work, then. Too often we want deep theological truths spoon-fed to us. As the old King James says…”Study to show yourself approved unto God.”

DeYoung on Reaching People…

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I really resonate with Kevin DeYoung’s honest assessment of his heart as he seeks to reach out to others:

There have been times as a pastor where I’ve been discouraged by the slowness of growth in my congregation. I’ve thought, “Why is that church over there so successful? Why did they go from 150 to 1500 in three years?” I’ve even been borderline snippy at times, “Lord, if I get to heaven and find out there was some secret musical style or movie clip or new program I was supposed to use in order to be successful, I’m going to feel pretty bummed.” But in my saner moments I’ve come to see two things: One, it’s more my sin that wants success than my sanctification. And two, the secret is that there is no secret.

He is in the middle of a series on reaching younger people. Here are the five suggestions he offers:

Grab Them With Passion
Win Them With Love
Hold Them With Holiness
Challenge Them With Truth
Amaze Them With God

Some Recommendations…

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I’ve come across some excellent resources in recent days…

Ajith Fernando wrote a work entitled An Authentic Servant: The Marks of a Spiritual Leader for the Lausanne Movement. It is available as a free PDF and well worth your time (especially if you are some kind of spiritual leader).

Mark Dever’s latest 9 Marks Interview is with Kevin DeYoung. The interview begins with Dever pressing DeYoung on his beliefs on infant baptism. I thought Dever was charitable and asked some good clarifications. As a credo-baptist I thought his handling of this issue helped clarify some of the distinctions we have with paedo-baptists. I appreciate Kevin DeYoung so much. This charitable dialogue helped show the unity of the Gospel.

Finally, I just read Arturo Azurdia’s latest book, Connected Christianity, calling us to be “worldly Christians.” One thing that was especially helpful was a discussion on what he called cultural gluttony vs. cultural anorexia. You would be profited by these things and I may have a quote or two from this in a later post.