Soli Deo Gloria

A Mindset for Ministry

2011-01-20T11:17:00.000-08:00

I know that it’s been months since I’ve blogged and there are probably going to be two total people that read this but I figured I’d throw a post out there for kicks and hopefully do a post each Thursday for the foreseeable future based on what I’m reading in Scripture. Right now I’m reading through the Gospel of Luke and this post is inspired by Luke 5:4-6 in which Luke reports,

“And when He [Jesus] had finished speaking He said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.’ And Simon answered, ‘Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.’ And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking.”

As I read that passage I was struck by what a wonderful mindset for ministry it presents the future disciples that are fishing with Jesus with. As I read I couldn’t help but find myself identifying with Simon and his objections to Jesus’ call to put down the nets into the water. “But Master, we’ve done that already, we’ve done it all night! Nothing’s happening, the fish aren’t responding, we’re tired, and we’re ready to just go home and tell our families we’ve failed, there’s no food for today.” Simon’s objections are reasonable right? What sense does it make to continue to do something that’s not working? My Mom always said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Well working from that definition Jesus is asking Peter to accept insanity. Do the same thing, but expect a different result.

But the reason that Simon isn’t insane, the reason that the same action (letting the nets down) yields a vastly different result is because Simon’s motive changes. Simon goes from fishing for himself using his own technique, to fishing for Christ, using Christ’s technique. And that makes all the difference. You see I think that Jesus was trying to teach Simon right from the start of His calling him about what ministry with Him was going to be like. I think that He was trying to teach Simon that being successful at being a fisher of men was not going to be about his ability to “fish,” to do ministry. Simon’s ministry was not going to succeed or fail on Simon’s perseverance (“Master…we toiled all night!) nor on his strategy, nor on his abilities. It was going to succeed or fail based on his ability to listen to, and obey the Word of his Master. I think that that’s what Jesus wants for Simon (and us) to begin to see here.

Our mindset for ministry should not ultimately be us-centric, it should be about Christ-centric. Our mindset should not, must not, be focused on our abilities. It shouldn’t be focused on what great games we can lead, what powerful talks we can give, or what awesome personal interactions we can have with the kids. It should be based on one simple thing; being able to listen to, and obey Jesus, “At [His] word.” It’s that obedience that makes all the difference. Fellow ministers we can throw ourselves into planning, we can throw ourselves into curriculum, and we can throw ourselves into outreaches, but if we aren’t throwing ourselves into centering our ministries on “Christ, and Him crucified,” the result of our ministries will never be more than, in Simon’s words, “toil.” I pray that all of us who are blessed with the opportunity to minister in Christ’s name will not center our ministry on our own gifts and abilities, but on Christ. Only then will we be freed from wasted toiling and be able to enjoy the blessings of full nets.

Graduation Address

2010-06-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

All right I'm cheating a little bit with this blog post. This is the graduation address that I will be giving to the high school graduates at my Church this week, it's only a 5 to 6 minute talk so that's why it's short. I assume most of you will be blessed by the relative brevity compared to the previous posts though ;) Anyway I'd love feedback if you like it or don't like it, just leave a comment. Forgive the lack of blog output over the last few months, I've been reading a ton which will make any future blogging that much more edifying hopefully. I've also been greatly improving at golf.

Hello everyone, I just want to start by thanking Pastor Morris for this opportunity to address our high school graduates. It’s really a little strange to be here speaking to you guys but it really is an honor. I’m pretty confident that I actually slept through Church this week 3 years ago when I graduated from Centreville so you guys are already a step ahead of the game on me. I only have a few minutes with you guys this morning so my remarks will be short, but as you guys prepare for the next stage of your lives whether it be college or something else I wanted to give you two exhortations and prayers for your futures.

First, I pray that you will all seek the success in the life that truly matters and turn away from the “successes” of the world that you will be urged to pursue. Most all of you will be going onto this stage of your lives with the same mindset that I had going in, you do not want to fail, you want to succeed. The question I would challenge you to ask yourselves though is what kind of success are you seeking? Pastor Tim Kizzian put’s it like this,

“Our greatest fear as individuals and a Church should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”

You see as you all move into this next stage of your lives you will be surrounded by people pushing you to succeed in things that don’t matter at all. In fact to word it even more strongly as the Bible does, you will be surrounded by people pushing you to success that can lead only to hell. Hell is as full of brilliant “success” stories as it is failures, and I have no doubt that there are many rich, well educated and nice college graduates there. When you die God will not ask you how much money you made, He will not ask you how many girls you slept with, He will not ask you what grades you made, and He will certainly not ask you how many Keg stands you did. But He will ask you “Were you faithful? Did you treasure me above all else?” So my brothers and sisters I exhort you in this next stage of your life, do not pursue the “successes” of this world, the sex, money and glamour. But pursue that success which is the only success that matters, the eternal success of faithfulness.

Second, I pray that you will all be intentional in pursuing God during this next stage of your lives. Even after graduating college I still feel like I don’t know much, but if there is one thing that I know to be true of myself it is that my heart will never naturally choose the pursuit of God and holiness. When my heart has to decide between bible reading and SportsCenter I can promise you that it will choose SportsCenter every time. And I don’t think I’m alone in this, in fact the Bible tells us that this is our condition as fallen humans, although created for communion with Him; we will never naturally choose God. Pastor and Professor of Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School D.A. Carson summarizes it nicely like this,

“People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, and obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith…we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”

Perhaps many of you are like me and you have had a subpar relationship with God during your high school years. If you’re like me then you are looking forward to this next stage of your life and assuring yourself that you will grow in your relationship with God then. Let me promise you though, that if you are not intentional about your pursuit of God, if it is not the defining priority of your life, then you will not pursue Him nor will you grow in Him. You will spend your entire lives promising yourself that at that next stage of life, after you graduate college, after you’re married, after you have kids is when you are going to finally pursue Him, and then one day you will be facing Him and He will utter those fateful words from Matthew Chapter 7, “I never knew you; depart from me you workers of lawlessness.” But it doesn’t have to end that way, God has given us the gift of His Word and His Spirit to help us grow in our relationship with Him, and I promise you that if you are intentional about it, you will grow and it will be the most magnificent experience of your lives. You may not have the money, acclaim, or number of sexual partners as your peers, but you will have a joy that they do not know, and you will have an eternal life with your creator to look forward too. Be intentional. Let us pray.

The Wonderful Finished Work of Christ

2010-03-28T23:04:00.000-07:00

First things first, to my incredible weekly readership of two to four people I’m sorry it’s been a little while since I last updated the blog. I was in Florida for Spring Break absorbing some sun and good theology simultaneously as I read over 1,000 pages of good books. I hope to do a blog post or a series of blog posts in the near future reviewing the books. For the curious person the books were Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, Amazing Grace by Jonathan Aitken, Why We Love the Church by Kevin Deyoung and Ted Kluck, Johnny Can’t Preach by T. David Gordon, and the beginning of Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus by D.A. Carson. Now that I’m back from break I hope to be able to get back to updating the blog fairly regularly.

Over break I was reading though the book of Hebrews, some of that reading will be the subject of this post. I don’t know about all of you, but Hebrews was a mysterious book to me for most of my last 20 years. I distinctly remember never reading it in High School because it looked to be way too full of Old Testament references to be interesting or useful. Plus it had a whole chapter about some dude named Melchizedek, a name I could hardly pronounce, much less have a desire to learn about.

Since January of freshman year when God brought me out of Spiritual hypocrisy and gave me eyes to see Him as the treasure that He is I’ve come to cherish the book of Hebrews as the constantly Christ exalting book it is. Hebrews has gone from being a book that was foreign and seemingly terrible to me to being perhaps my favorite book of the Bible. Hebrews has made that jump because it spends 13 wonderful chapters showing how marvelous Christ is. I will be spending the rest of this post reflecting a bit on Hebrews 9:24-26b.

Hebrews 9:24-26b

“For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands…but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer Himself repeatedly…but as it is, He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.”

What struck me so much about these few verses from Hebrews was how emphatically the work of Christ is presented as a finished work. This theme, that of Christ’s finished atoning work on our behalf, is one that is one of the main themes of Hebrews and it runs throughout the letter. The main way that Hebrews establishes this theme is by contrasting Christ’s ministry with the ministry of earthly priest’s. This contrast is drawn out and explicated the most in Hebrews 7-10. Hebrews 7 introduces the theme by drawing on the example of the Priest King Melchizedek from the Old Testament.

Hebrews 7:11 gives us the initial ground for the comparison between Christ’s ministry and the ministry of earthly priests by noting that “If perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood…what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek?” The writer to the Hebrews is basically posing a question that the readers of the Epistle should already be able to answer at this point in the letter. The writer is prompting the readers to answer, “If perfection had been attainable through the old Priesthood there would be no need for another priest to arise.” The writer is prompting the readers towards that answer because it is his intent to show over the next 3 chapters just how perfect Christ’s priesthood is.

The writer to the Hebrews provides more comparisons between the imperfect ministry of earthly priests with the perfect heavenly ministry of Christ as he observes later in the chapter that, “The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, but He [Christ] holds His priesthood permanently, because He continues forever. Consequently, He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for others.” Christ’s atoning work on our behalf is perfect where the earthly priest’s of yesteryears work was imperfect. Christ’s atoning work on our behalf is perfect because it is a completed one. Take a moment to reflect on this marvelous truth.

Salvation: Continuing Work or Completed Work?

Far too often we misinterpret Biblical language about the necessity of repentance or the ongoing daily struggle of sanctification to mean that our salvation is an ongoing process. Far too often we make the Gospel into worthless religion. We do this by thinking about our relationship to God as something that is constantly changing based on performance. But this performance based acceptance isn’t the good news of the Gospel; it’s the damnable news of religion. The Gospel offers us so much more hope, and that hope is so beautifully expressed in Hebrews. Instead of having to worry about making daily offerings to God of good works we can trust in Christ. Who “Has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for His own sins and then for those of the people, since He did this once for all when He offered up Himself.” Our salvation is not something that we are still working on. No, our salvation is something that was purchased for us, once for all, by the perfect atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ on our behalf when He was brutally crucified on a Roman cross 2,000 years ago.

So is our salvation a finished work, or a work in progress? John Piper presents a good insight to this question as he explores the relationship between the one time sacrifice of Jesus Christ for our salvation, and the continuing daily sacrifices of the obedient Christian life that are required of us in Scripture. Writing in his book The Future of Justification Piper observes,

“Our only hope for living the radical demands of the Christian life is that God is totally for us now and forever. Therefore, God has not ordained that living the Christian life should be the basis of our hope that God is for us. That basis is the death and righteousness of Christ, counted as ours through faith alone. On the cross Christ endured for all the punishment required of us because of our sin.”

Stop and read it again to make sure you got it in all its wonderful beauty and clarity. The only reason I can put away my sins daily is because I know and trust that He has put away my sin eternally!

So many of us spend our days trying to earn a mysterious deity’s favor. During the time the letter to the Hebrews was written the people it was addressing would have been trying to earn that mysterious deity’s favor through animal sacrifices. Today we have largely abandoned that practice, although we still try to “be a good person,” “raise a good family,” and “live a good life,” in order that God may be pleased with us. But the Bible shows us just how futile and petty these acts are before a truly good and holy God. Before His righteousness our “righteousness” is but a filthy rag. But there is hope for us. That hope is this Jesus. This Jesus, this Jesus who has offered Himself once for all, in our place, for our sins, to His Father that we may be saved from the wrath to come, this is our savior. He lived the life we should have lived and He died the death we should have died.

His work on our behalf is a finished work. This is the wonderful truth that the book of Hebrews makes so clear. His atoning sacrifice on our behalf gives us a “better hope” (Hebrews 7:19) for our lives than any other worldview can offer. His intercession on our behalf “continues forever” (Hebrews 7:24) because He continues forever! His death was a “once for all” (Hebrews 7:27) sacrifice by which He has forever “put away sin,” (Hebrews 9:26) for those who are His. He has secured for His people an “eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12) and is able to “make perfect” (Hebrews 10:1) those who will draw near to Him.

So I pray that all who have read with me this far will draw near to Him. I pray that we all may increase in our desire for this glorious Christ daily. I pray that we will not lose sight of the fact that our salvation has already been purchased for us through the finished atoning work of Christ as we continue to work at it with fear and trembling.

Better Joy

2010-03-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading through John’s Gospel in my personal devotions these last few weeks. John is a treasure that I cherish being able to read every time I enter into it, and this time of working through it has been no exception. Today I actually got so bogged down (in a good way) in Christ’s wonderful prayer of John 17 that I forgot to pick my fiancée up to drive her to a class! Perhaps the best part about John (and Bible reading in general I suppose), is that I continually discover new truths within it. This post comes out of one of those truths I stumbled upon in John 16 this week. This post will be the attempt of a 20 year old non Greek knowing wanna be Theologian and Pastor trying to exegete as faithfully as possible a wonderful text, I hope that some find it encouraging and helpful and that above all Christ will be glorified.

Jesus in John 16:

“Truly, truly I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” (John 16:20-22, emphasis mine)

John Piper’s ministry has taught me to not just skim over sections of Scripture talking about joy, treasure, happiness, etc. As I’ve learned more and more from Piper I’ve seen that one of the biggest emphases of Scripture is our joy. As Piper is fond of pointing out we are actually commanded to be joyful throughout Scripture. I’ve always loved Anglican clergyman Jeremy Taylor’s observation of Scripture, that in it, “God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy [in Him].” I mention all this because even with eyes that are always looking for these sections on Scripture that deal with the wonderful nature of the joy we can have in Christ I had never thought too deeply on this particular passage before.

What got me thinking about the passage was the uniqueness of the child birthing metaphor and the fact that John just throws it out there and then moves on. When I first read the passage I didn’t realize that John was making a connection between the joy that the new mother has and the joy that we should have as Christians. After reading the passage a few more times though I realized that it’s painfully obvious that John intends to connect the two joys, after all he introduces the discussion of our joy in Christ with the phrase, “So also.” That phrase makes it clear that John intends to connect the joy of the new mother with our Christian joy, the question then to consider is how is John connecting the two joys?

It would be easy to read John’s use of the “So also” to mean that John is trying to equivocally compare our Christian joy to the mother’s joy. In other words it seems like the use of the “So also” shows that John is intending to make a direct comparison between the joy of the mother and our joy. Although I could see how one would come to that conclusion I think that the rest of verse 22 keeps us from going there because in verse 22, although he doesn’t do it explicitly, John is contrasting our Christian joy with the new mother’s joy.

Why the Contrast?

To recap, so far I have argued that in this passage John is:

1) Trying to draw a connection between the new mother’s joy and our joy AND

2) That he does not see that connection as being equivocal (the same joy) AND

3) That he intends to contrast our joy with the new mother’s joy

If you agree with me on those three premises than there are still two critical questions that we have to ask of the text, we have to ask how John contrasts our joy with the mother’s joy, and we have to ask why John contrasts our joy (or what John is trying to communicate through the contrast.) The rest of this post will be an attempt to answer those two questions through the text.

I think that the reason that John contrasts our joy with the new mother’s joy is that he wants to show that we, as Christians have a better joy than the new mother has. I have no idea what the joy of motherhood feels like. I will hopefully one day know the joy of fatherhood, but I will never know the joy of motherhood, for obvious biological reasons, I imagine that the joy is pretty amazing though. Nine months of waiting, countless hours and days spent preparing for the new life, and the pain leading up to the bringing of the life into the world, I can’t even fathom what a joyful experience this must be for the mother. So why would John not want to just say “So also you will have joy like that mother.” Why does he instead say, “So also…your hearts will rejoice. And no one will take your joy from you.” John doesn’t equivocally compare our joy to the mother’s because he believes that our joy is infinitely greater than the greatest human joy. Again, John believes that we have a better joy than the new mother does. But why is our joy better? If John is contrasting our joy with the new mother’s what does that contrast reveal about our joy?

What John reveals to us about our joy is that our joy is better because it is unchanging. Unlike the mother’s joy, “no one will take your joy from you.” John is showing us that what makes our joy in Christ better than the mother’s joy in her new son is that our joy is eternal while the mother’s joy is temporal. A new child is certainly a blessing. But that new child can get sick and die, that new child can be kidnapped, that new child can run away from home and never come back, that new child can grow more and more rebellious against his mother and eventually renounce his family, you get the picture. In all those situations we see the problem with earthly joy, it can, and eventually always will be, taken from us. Jesus said it way better than I can (I’m sensing a trend here…) in His Sermon on the Mount Christ proclaims, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in or steal.” John was taking his cues from Christ in contrasting the passing pleasure of our earthly joy with the eternal and unstealable heavenly joy that God offers us through His resurrected Son.
I like how Sam Storms, pastor of Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City, talks about this better joy we have in Christ. Storms reflects,

"Contrary to what the world may say, there is more joy in Jesus than all fleshly pleasures combined! My aim...is to hammer home with unrelenting zeal that the joys of knowing Jesus are simply incomparable. His capacity to please knows no rival. We must preach from our pulpits and model in our lives...to make this truth known: in the presence of our great God and Savior there is joy that is full, not partial, half baked, measured, or parceled out; at His right hand there are eternal pleasures, not the fleeting, transient, toxic sort that promise so much and deliver so little."

John doesn’t just point to the eternal nature of our joy as the reason it’s better than earthly joy. Instead he explicitly links that eternal nature of our joy to our resurrected Savior. We can’t miss that this whole narrative takes place in the context of Jesus saying, “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again…” Our joy is better joy than earthly joy because it is joy that proceeds directly from the resurrected and exalted Christ. Christ’s work on the cross was a complete work on our behalf, that’s why His last cry from that cross was the triumphant “It is finished!” The Biblical narrative tells us that because He has completed His sin satisfying work on the Cross He is now seated at the right hand of His Father making intercession (praying) for us. As Paul writes, “Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” Christ has completed His earthly work, He will not return again until He returns in His glory in the last days. Because He has completed His work and because He is unchanging if we find our joy in Him, if we get our joy through our relationship with Him, we can know without a doubt that that joy will never be taken from us. That joy will never get sick or die. That joy will never reject us. That joy will never leave us. And it’s when we embrace that joy, that indescribable heavenly joy that we see how beautiful it is. It’s when we embrace this joy that we come to see how marvelous it is that in this world of fleeting pleasures, false joys, and tarnished treasures we are offered an unchanging, all satisfying, unstealable true joy. The joy is ours to have if we will only see our earthly joy as infinitely less worthy than the amazing joy that we are offered in Christ.

I’ll close with a quote from C.S. Lewis and John Piper’s commentary on the quote. The quote is taken from Lewis’ Screwtape Letters which is a dialogue between demons, so bear in mind that when he talks about the “Enemy” he is talking about God.

“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. . . . An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. . . . To get a man's soul and give him nothing in return--that's what really gladdens Our Father's heart."

Reflecting on the quote Piper remarks,

“This means that all the debased enjoyments of the world are echoes of the joys of heaven.”

I really could have just posted that sentence and called this blog post a wrap. All the joys of this world are as nothing when compared to the joys of heaven. That’s all I’ve got for tonight.

Suffering and the Son of God

2010-02-23T17:26:00.000-08:00

I feel like the Spirit has been leading me to write this post for a while. I thought about writing it after reading the last Chapter of John Stott’s “The Cross of Christ.” The chapter was all about how the cross relates to human suffering and it was probably the most comprehensive treatment I’ve seen on the issue. So I thought about sharing that chapter but then put it on the backburner. Then Tiger Wood’s mentioned rediscovering his Buddhism in his statement the other day and that prompted me again to consider writing on that chapter (you’ll see the connection later on). Then Peter blogged about suffering in a wonderfully revealing and personal way, everyone should go read it now over at Film and Grace. Then Peter and I talked about his post and I started thinking more about suffering. Then this morning I was doing my morning devotions and couldn’t find my normal Bible so I grabbed my backup Bible (a must have for every wanna be Theologian) and just flipped to Philippians. When I started reading I couldn’t help but think about Peter’s post as the Spirit showed me how prominent suffering is in the early part of Philippians. So it is that I write this post, the Spirit has been prompting but I’ve been ignoring, this morning was too much to ignore though so here are my feeble thoughts, guided by John Stott, C.J. Mahaney and Shai Linne on our suffering, Christ’s suffering, and their relation.

The Suffering God

The Christian belief that God entered into human existence and endured great suffering, and through that suffering brought Himself great glory is at odds with any other major faiths views about the nature of God. The idea of a suffering God is foreign to many, offensive to some, and strange to all. Stott deals masterfully with the issue as he examines the importance of proclaiming that the Christian God is a God who suffers, to the world.

This language of the “suffering of God,” is language that is fairly new to Theology. In a trend begun in the early Church much of the Christian theological tradition affirmed that Christ suffered (and thus that God in some way suffered through Christ since Christ is the God-man), however the early Church and tradition thereafter wanted to avoid any talk of a “suffering God.” This was because they wanted to preserve the immutability of God. Don’t panic if that word is unfamiliar to you, it’s just a fancy Greek way of saying that God cannot change. The early Church rejected language of a “suffering God” because they believed that if God suffered He was necessarily being disturbed and thus changing because of suffering, thus making the immutable God mutable (the unchanging God changed). To give you a picture of this conviction I’ll quote Iranaeus, a pivotal figure in the early Church who wrote that in Christ the God “who cannot suffer, for our sakes, endured suffering.” To summarize, the early Church and most all of Christian tradition thereafter believed that it was impossible for God to suffer, although He did in some powerful and effective, although removed, way suffer through the person and work of Christ.

I hope that you made it out of that early Church detour, the language and concept is strange to us today but it’s critical to understand if we are to understand what a truly radical idea the Biblical notion of the “suffering God” is. Most all modern Evangelical theologians have rejected this early Church view that God Himself does not suffer although Christ does for a variety of reasons. First if one affirms that Christ suffers while God Himself does not it throws into doubt how much we can know about the nature of God through Christ. Hebrews affirms that the Son is the “exact imprint” of the Father, and Scripture reveals over and over again, perhaps most convincingly in the Gospel of John, that to know the Son is to know the Father. This desire to affirm what Scripture affirms, that is that one can look at the Son, indeed that one must look at the Son, in order to gain clear knowledge of God the Father is why most all modern Evangelical theologians have rejected the traditional understanding that God cannot suffer because He is immutable.

Another more poignant reason that modern Evangelical theologians have rejected the traditional understanding of immutability has to do with the ability of an unsuffering God to truly love His suffering creation. Stott presents that the question related to the suffering of God that we must ask is “what meaning can there be in a love that is not costly to the lover?” We know that God is love from Scripture, and we are reminded over and over again of His great love for us in Scripture, because we know that God is love we must ask ourselves how He can truly love us if He has not experienced that which controls so many of our lives, the experience of suffering. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Were God incapable of suffering…then he would also be incapable of love.” Bonhoeffer also later beautifully wrote to a dear friend from prison that “only the suffering God can help.”

It is this suffering God that we can, and must offer the world to help them as they suffer. No one, not even the most learned Christian theologian has a full answer to the question of theodicy, the problem of evil. No theologian can answer perfectly the suffering one’s objection that a good God could not possibly exist because of their pain. However the Christian theologian can offer the sufferer a God who suffers with them because He Himself has experienced deeper suffering than they. The Christian theologian is uniquely able to offer the hurting world a crucified God, a “man of sorrows.” While we may not be able to perfectly answer the question of why there is pain we can passionately proclaim that our God is a God who did not flee pain, but embraced it, that He may save us from it and heal us in it. As the early Church proclaimed “What He has not become He has not healed.” If God has not experienced suffering He cannot offer us any hope in it or any way out of it.

This is why the Christian Gospel is so beautiful, why it is “the wisdom of God” for those who are being saved, because in it we are presented with a savior who is able to come beside us in our pain and comfort us through it because He has experienced it! As the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews proclaims, “Since the Children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death-that is the devil.” Christ has shared in our humanity, He most perfectly shared in our humanity when He shared in our sufferings, because He did this out of His great love for us we can throw ourselves into His arms as we suffer and know that we are held by one who knows how we are feeling and has promised to be with us as we feel it. As the great hymn proclaims this truth, “Man of sorrows what a name/for the Son of God who came/ruined sinners to reclaim/Hallelujah!”

I’ll close this section out with an extended quote from Stott. This is the quote that inspired this post originally, and it’s the one that Tiger’s return to Buddhism made me think of, he writes about this stuff far better than I can. Stott reflects,

“I could myself never believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the cross.” In the real world of pain how could one worship a God who is immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside His immunity to pain. He entered into our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of His. There is still a question make across human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. “

The Pain of God

Now that we’ve looked at why it’s so critical that Christians embrace their suffering Savior I’ll examine how it is that the Savior suffered. After all I imagine that someone who does not believe in the Christ of the Bible would simply reply “Well even if I grant that Christ is God and suffered, my suffering is greater so his suffering is irrelevant.” The objection is a fine one, but I hope to show in this section that it is ultimately a useless one because the suffering that Christ endured is greater than that of any human. Perhaps that sounds pompous or arrogant, but I hope to show clearly and exactly why His spiritual suffering’s so far surpassed our daily earthly trials.

To think rightly about the pain of God we will have to be thinking through the Trinitarian lens of Scripture and Church history. Christians have always understood (although through much debate about the specifics), that God is three and yet one, this is the doctrine of the Trinity. Christians believe that while there is one God He has revealed Himself to us in human history and exists within Himself as three forms, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Scripture shows us that these three “forms” (and just for the record that’s a horribly human word that doesn’t do justice at all to the Triad), have been present together in a loving and mutual indwelling from time eternal. One place where we see this mutuality revealed in Scripture is right at the beginning of Genesis. In Genesis it’s revealed that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” In the New Testament in Paul’s letter to the Colossians he writes that “For by Him [Christ] all things were created.” So we see the Trinity at work together in the creation of our world.

There is a fancy theological term for this interrelation between the members of the Trinity and it’s the word perichoresis. Wikipedia does the term justice and I know that’s the first place most of you will go to look it up so I’ll quote it here. Perichoresis refers to the mutual inter-penetration and indwelling within the threefold nature of the Trinity. This language serves us well in making the term clear but really fails to communicate the beauty of perichoresis. At its heart perichoresis is intimacy. It is the infinitely intimate relationship, the “cleaving together” of the Godhead, it is fellowship. The perichoresis is an attempt to understand the intimacy that Christ Himself expressed the Godhead shared when he said, as recorded in John’s Gospel, “The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father.”

I hope that you’ve stuck with me through those few paragraphs on the perichoresis. I know that it probably seems like hopelessly ancient academic language that’s far removed from our modern context, but I have come to understand the suffering of God so much more profoundly because I’ve learned about the Perichoresis, and I share about it in the hope that any and all readers of the blog might share in that experience.

So how does the perichoresis relate to the suffering of God? The perichoresis relates to the suffering of God because it was the ripping apart of that eternal perichoresis that most profoundly marked the suffering of God. I’ll now turn to C.J. Mahaney and Christian rapper (don’t laugh, this guys is more of a theologian that I can ever hope to be) Shai Linne to help me explain why that ripping apart of that eternal relationship caused such suffering.

God Alone

C.J. Mahaney helps make the nature of Christ’s suffering clear to us when he uses the category of aloneness to do so in his book “Living the Cross Centered Life.” Reflecting on crying alone in his car after leaving the funeral of his father C.J. writes, “This was the first time that I’d cried alone…but in truth I wasn’t alone, because only two hundred yards away were people who loved me with all their hearts. To be comforted, all I needed to do was turn around and go back to the funeral home. I felt alone-but I really wasn’t.” C.J. also observes that even if he hadn’t had friends and family so close to comfort him he had God there to comfort Him, the God who never changes and whose love is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore.

C.J. then observes that Christ had this same relationship with God except He had it in an even more incredible way as He was more directly connected to God than we are. C.J. writes, “Before being nailed to the cross, Jesus already knew what it meant to be forsaken; He had become intimately acquainted with being rejected or abandoned by men. Yet whenever it happened, He could always say, ‘Though forsaken by men, I am not alone, for my Father is always with Me.’ Christ had been enjoying the amazing intimacy of the perichoresis for all eternity, even when He became incarnate and entered into earth we still see Him frequently withdrawing to be pray and be alone with His Father in the Gospels. Even in the incarnation the perichoresis was unbroken.

But on the cross, at the moment of atonement, this eternal perichoresis was torn apart. Let me quickly explain why. Like I reflected on in my last post the atonement of Christ was essentially God’s way of finding a way to forgive sinners while maintaining his Divine justice. He did this by putting the “price” of sin (death, separation from God, all His wrath) on His only Son, thus making it possible for sinners to be brought to Him through faith in that Son who bore the price of sin that we deserved to bear. The reason that the perichoresis was torn apart on the cross, the reason that the eternal intimacy within the Triad was severed was because on the cross, as Paul proclaims, “For our sake, He [God] made Him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Because God cannot exist in the presence of sin when His own son became sin for us He had to turn His back to His Son and sever the eternal perichoresis. C.J. beautifully expresses this by writing,

“He who for all eternity has never been alone is now wholly abandoned. Such utter desolation has never even existed before in all eternity, because of the infinite love and fellowship of the Trinity, which can never be broken. But now the incarnate Son must be forsaken by the Father because the Father is holy…therefore that Man [Christ] must be utterly removed from the presence of God, utterly separated…Jesus doesn’t just feel forsaken; He is forsaken. In an unfathomable mystery…Jesus is rejected by God. His Father turns away from Him.”

This suffering savior is infinitely worthy of our worship, His sacrifice has made it possible for us to never have to endure the wrath He endured, for this let us praise Him.

C.J. goes on to point out exactly why this suffering makes Christ worthy of worship as he writes, “The personal desolation Christ is experiencing on the cross is what you and I should be experiencing – but instead Jesus is bearing it, and bearing it alone. Why alone? He’s alone so that we might never be alone. He cries out to God, “Why have you forsaken Me?” so that you and I will never have to make a similar cry. He was cut off from His Father that we may boldly say, ‘Nothing can separate us form the love of God in Christ Jesus.’”

Shai Linne is the Christian rapper I had said I would involve in this post about 1,000 words ago. He has a song called “Alone” that wonderfully expresses that what makes the suffering of God so unique is the bitter abandonment and loneliness that Christ had to face. Everyone should go here and listen to it right now, it’s well written, well rapped, and is guaranteed to stop and make you think. Listen to it here For those of you who don’t want to or can’t listen I’ll share some of the lyrics here. Doing “lyrical theology” on the topic of the Atonement Shai raps, “The most mysterious aspect of the Saga/three hours spent under the wrath of His Father/His Dad is who commanded it-His attributes demanded it/the Lamb was doomed to handle this-absolute abandonment/The craziest thing the universe has ever known/For the first time in eternity, God was alone/But I guess the part of it that makes it so heavy/He did it for all of those who cry out ‘Jesus I’m ready.’

I’ll close with a short but wonderful quote from that most preeminent of Evangelical Theologians, D.A. Carson which I think masterfully sums up all that I’ve been trying to convey in this post. Carson writes,

“The God on whom we rely knows what suffering is all about- not merely in the way that God knows everything, but by experience.”

The Christian God is a suffering God, it is what makes Him distinct from all other deities demanding mans worship today. I pray that all who have read with me this far will join with me in offering up praises to the God who endured the harshest suffering this world has ever known in order that we may not have to. I pray that if you are suffering and you don’t know Him, you will seek the comfort that you will find only in Him, and I promise you will find it. I pray that all of us may see the mysterious beauty of the Christ who “Though being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing…He humbled Himself, and became obedient to death-even death on a cross.”

Book Wrap: John Stott's The Cross of Christ (And only 1,300 words this post!)

2010-02-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

I like to read, a lot. Normally I’ll do my Scripture reading in the morning and then read another theology book for 20 or 30 minutes before I go to bed. I started a word document about a year ago to keep track of my favorite quotes from the books I’ve read. That document has now swelled to 39 plus pages and I think a regular feature on the blog will be me pulling out some of my favorite quotes from there and writing a little bit on them. Another reading related feature that I’m introducing today will be book wrap ups/recaps/reviews as I finish books. It’s my intent to do this not to show off my reading, but to help myself think more clearly about what I’ve read and hopefully increase my own comprehension while at the same time hopefully blessing those who swing by with some of the content I found helpful in the book.

This post’s book is John Stott’s classic “The Cross of Christ.” Originally published in 1986 it’s a classic in Evangelical literature as are most things that Stott’s written. The book is thick at 342 pages, one of those where you feel like you’ve accomplished something when you’re through with it. All 342 pages are unashamedly focused on examining the Cross of Christ from every conceivable angle. He organizes the book in three main sections as he examines the heart of the Cross, the achievement of the Cross, and living under the cross.

The Divine Dilemma:

Time constraints will keep me from being able to do any justice to the book, so I’ll be focusing in on what is both the literal and conceptual center of the book. This center is Stott’s dealing with what he describes as “The Divine Dilemma.” The dilemma is presented in answer to the question that skeptics throughout the centuries have asked of the Gospel story, “Why couldn’t God, if he is as powerful as Christianity claims He is, just forgive people? Why is the brutal and horrific death of His own Son necessary? Isn’t this little more than cosmic child abuse?”

Stott argues that the reason God cannot merely forgive our sin is that there is an obstacle standing between us and forgiveness. But what is that obstacle? Stott writes,

“I will argue…that the primary ‘obstacle’ is to be found within God Himself. He must ‘satisfy Himself’ in the way of salvation He devises, He cannot save us by contradicting Himself.”

This language of God “satisfying Himself” may be unfamiliar to many of you, I will spend the rest of this post working through Stott’s argument to try and make that phrase clear while at the same time showing the importance of this fundamental doctrine of the faith to our lives.

The center of the divine dilemma is that because our sin is at its heart a “…inexcusable disobedience of God’s known will [which] dishonors and insults Him,” God cannot simply pass over and forgive that sin without dishonoring Himself. Anselm, , an 11^th century theologian expressed it in this way, “If it is not becoming to God to do anything unjustly or irregularly, it is not within the scope of his liberty or kindness or will to let go unpunished the sinner who does not repay to God what he has taken away.” In other words, God must be consistent with His revealed character. Since we know from Scripture that sin comes with a price God must insist upon the payment of that price if He is to be consistent with His own character. Anselm summarizes, “It is not proper for God to pass over sin thus unpunished.” If God were to forgive sin without demanding the payment of the price He would be being unfaithful to Himself and thus no longer be God. “The way God chooses to forgive sinners and reconcile them to Himself must, first and foremost, be fully consistent with His own character….He must satisfy Himself.”

God of Wrath, God of Love

This doctrine of the self satisfaction of God through His Son Jesus Christ is far from popular today, even in some Evangelical circles. This is because in order to affirm it one must affirm, with Scripture, that our God is not only a God of love, but a God of justice and of wrath. God’s wrath has become a passé doctrine in most Churches today as it doesn’t fit well with our post modern imaginings of a god who accepts and loves all as they are. Many Evangelicals have followed culture in dismissing the notion of God as having wrath as primitive and incompatible with the supposed “God of love” of the New Testament.

Stott refers to this Biblical tension between God’s wrath and His love as God’s “dual nature.” He quotes extensively from Emil Brunner’s “The Mediator” in critiquing those who would reduce God’s Biblical dual nature to the single nature of love. Brunner writes that in our world,

“The idea of the Divine Holiness has been swallowed up in that of the Divine love, this means that the Biblical idea of God, in which the decisive element is this twofold nature of holiness and love, is being replaced by the modern, unilateral, monistic idea of God.”

Stott embraces this “vision of God’s holy love,” because it will “deliver us from caricatures of Him. We must picture Him neither as an indulgent God who compromises His holiness in order to spare and spoil us, nor as a harsh, vindictive God who suppresses His love in order to crush and destroy us.”

The Perfect Mediation of the Cross

It is only when we’ve come to terms with the Biblical picture of God as a God of wrath and of love that we can come to see the cross in all its beauty and perfection. I’ll close this post out with two quotes; one from Stott and one from John Piper that I’ve found always bring me to worship God for the wonder and miracle of the cross. Describing the resolution of the divine dilemma that took place on the cross Stott writes that on the cross,

“God through Christ substituted Himself for us. Divine love triumphed over divine wrath by divine self-sacrifice. The cross was simultaneously an act of punishment and amnesty, severity and grace, justice and mercy.”

The cross is the clearest example we’re given in Scripture of the incredibly diverse nature of God, that’s why it’s such a travesty that the doctrine of Penal Substitution which Stott is describing here has been pushed to the periphery in the preaching and teaching of so many Churches. The tragedy is that the casting aside of this beautiful doctrine cheapens our view of both God the Father and Christ. It cheapens our view of God the Father by presenting Him as a shallow and one dimensional “God of love” while ignoring His other Biblically revealed and worship worthy attributes like His wrath and justice. It cheapens our view of Christ by leaving no room for viewing his sacrifice as anything more than a great example of selfless love that we should follow, it is robbed of its atoning significance. Christ’s sacrifice becomes no nobler than Mahatma Gandhi’s.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the man who has taught me more about God than any other man, John Piper. The quote is the clearest presentation I’ve ever seen of how through the cross God’s satisfies all His different attributes and is thus faithful to Himself. Piper writes,

“The Good news [the Gospel] is that God has decreed a way to satisfy the demands of His justice without condemning the whole human race…[on the cross] the wisdom of God has ordained a way for the love of God to deliver us from the wrath of God without compromising the justice of God.”

The Bread of Life

2010-02-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

Peter has inspired me to get into blogging. I don’t know how long this inspiration will last, but for now I’m looking forward to blog battling Peter, like a rap battle, but nerdier. When I write and preach I tend to just try and make clear and re state what Scripture is saying since inerrant Word>Grant’s words. Following that pattern most of these posts will just be me reflecting on a passage or principle that’s grabbed me out of Scripture, right now I’m in John so this week’s post will focus in on John 6, specifically John 6:11-12, 26-27, 35, 48-51.

Hungry Idolaters or Christ Worshippers:

The first thing that piqued my interest about this set of verses was the horribly earthly motive of those coming to listen to Jesus in this chapter. Let me set the background a little bit, at the beginning of John 6 Jesus was attracting a large crowd because “They saw the signs he was doing on the sick.” Looking over the crowd and feeling compassion for them Jesus miraculously feeds all of them a meal of barley loaves and fish. Jesus didn’t hold anything back in the meal, after eating John reports that Jesus didn’t leave the area until all the people who had come to hear Him had eating “as much as they wanted…their fill.” (Verse 11-12)

After Jesus left the crowds the next day they followed Him across the Sea of Galilee. If you read that and think of these masses of people as devoted followers of Christ you’d be wrong. These people weren’t following Christ because they had seen that He “Was indeed the Savior of the world,” like the Samarians of John 4. Why then? Why were these people literally crossing seas to be with Christ if they weren’t doing it because they believed Him to be divine? Well I’ll let Jesus answer that one. In John 6:26 Jesus rebukes the crowds, “Truly truly I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your full of the loaves.” (John 6:26)

These masses of people didn’t want to worship Jesus because they had seen “signs” that were leading them to believe that He was their Savior. These masses of people weren’t seeking Jesus because they loved Him. No, these masses of people were seeking after Jesus because they were looking for their next meal. Like those seagulls at the shore who continue to flock towards your spot on the beach because you’ve thrown a Boardwalk Fry at one of them, that’s the picture John paints of the crowds following Jesus at this point in His ministry, it's not flattering language. To use the Biblical language the masses were “Sheep without a Shepherd,” on whom Christ had pity.

Bread of Heaven>Bread of Earth

The next part of this chapter that grabbed my attention was Christ’s unrelenting attempts to shift the thinking of the masses following Him away from the desire for earthly bread to alleviate their hunger. Christ doesn’t just rebuke the masses for desiring the satisfaction that bread would bring and leave them hungry and hopeless, but nor does He miraculously create more food and feed them again, why is this? Why is it that Jesus who had all the power and authority of God the Father wouldn’t just miraculously produce some more bread for these people?

In his book “In the Name of Jesus,” Henri Nouwen wrestles with this question through the lens of another text, Matthew 4:3-4. The text is a part of the account of Christ’s temptation by Satan in the desert. In it Matthew records, “The tempter came and said to Him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’ But He answered, ‘It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ Henri Nouwen interpreted this temptation as the temptation for Jesus to be relevant. He writes, “Jesus’ first temptation was to be relevant, to turn stones into bread.”

So why wouldn’t He be relevant? Why wouldn’t he feed the masses and instantly become the most beloved figure in all Palestine? Surely that role would have served Him better than being betrayed, tortured and crucified right? Nouwen doesn’t think so. Indeed he cuts us to the heart as he reveals that all this thinking about relevance is painfully human, and that Christ had much bigger aims than mere relevance, as we’ll see when we return to John 6.

The Crucified King

It’s fortunate that Jesus was brought by the Holy Spirit to deal with this temptation before His ministry began because the temptation to be a relevant and worldly King would prove to be immense as His ministry progressed. In fact right after Jesus first feeds the hungry masses John reports, “Perceiving then that they were about to come and take Him by force to make Him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by Himself.” (John 6:15) But why? Why was Christ so unwilling to become the earthly king that so many wanted Him to be? Why would he march the road toward the crucifixion of Calvary when He could have been put into a palace? In Nouwen’s language, why was Christ so unwilling to be relevant?

Although I would encourage any readers to think through these questions themselves I will present my answer. Jesus refused to make the focus of His ministry feeding the hungry, in other words Jesus refused to make the focus of His ministry relevance, because He had something greater than food to offer and something greater than relevance to strive for. I’ll let John and his narrative fill this out a little bit.

After rebuking the crowds for only seeking Him because He had fed them Jesus passionately pleads, “Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.” In Verse 35 He admonishes them, “I am the bread of Life, whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” Jesus brings these two messages together when he declares in verses 48-51. He declares,

“I am the bread of life. Your fathers at the manna [bread] in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.”

So why wouldn’t Christ make His ministry that much more popular and less personally costly simply feeding the hungry? Because even those who were fed by God for an extended period of time in the Old Testament still “ate…and they died.” You see for Jesus the main problem He’s come to solve isn’t hunger, its death. I love how clearly Jesus puts the problem of hunger in perspective here. First He observes that if He were to make His ministry exclusively about being relevant and feeding the hungry it would be a never ending task because even if our hunger is satiated for a moment (as it was for those whom Christ had fed the day before), we will still wake up hungry the next morning! And even if we’re fed continuously throughout our lives we will still die, and face eternity apart from God at the end. We might die happy and full, but we’ll still die.

It was this problem, this death problem that Jesus came to solve. Christ was concerned with more than the relevance of feeding the masses because He had something better to offer them! While rebuking them for desiring mere food which “perishes,” He offers them “Food that endures to eternal life.” His food will allow those who eat of it to “Never hunger…never thirst.”

So why is this significant for us? Why did I just spend over a thousand words belaboring the point that in His ministry Jesus refused to capitulate to the temptation to be a relevant, worldly leader? Because if Jesus wasn’t willing to make the sole, or even primary focus of Christian ministry the always popular act of feeding the hungry, nor should we. I have a feeling that won’t sit well with the few of you that took the time to read this far. So let me clarify. By no means am I saying that as Christians we shouldn’t care deeply for the hungry and starving of our world. If I were to argue that I would be arguing against the very text I’m trying to defend as Jesus opens up John 6 by taking pity on the hungry people around Him and feeding them. I can’t make this clear enough; my point in this blog post is not to say Christians should not care about the earthly concerns of the billions of hungry people in the world.

Better Bread

My point is that while we never stop caring for those earthly concerns we must never lose sight of the fact that we have something so much better than “food that perishes” to offer to the starving billions of the world! Where secular aid organizations can only offer food that will only temporarily satisfy the hungry we can offer a crucified Messiah who promises that all who eat of His living bread “shall not hunger…shall never thirst….if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” (John 6:35, 51) This is the hope we have to offer the world. In contrast to the fleeting satisfaction of food that the secular world can offer the hungry masses we offer a Christ who has made a once for all sacrifice and is now seated at the right hand of God interceding for those who draw near to Him!

Again this doesn’t mean that we stop giving the starving food, go give some money to Feed my Starving Children, an awesome Christian ministry doing just that, right now. No what this means, what I am begging for us to never forget is that as Christians we have something so much more valuable than food to offer the world. Our hope for the world is not in food, it’s in the God who made food. Our hope for the world is not that we may just meet their earthly needs, no! Our hope for the world is that we may bring them the hope of a God who promises to meet their eternal needs while taking care of their earthly ones (Matthew 6).

My deep concern is that our generation of Christians is a generation that has abandoned this Gospel hope for the cheap hope of the world and their stand alone food programs out of a burning desire to be relevant, loved, and respected by our secular counter parts. I’ll finish out by letting Nouwen speak to this deep desire that I will be the first to admit I still struggle with, the desire to be loved by the world, the desire to be seen as doing something significant in the world’s eyes. Nouwen beautifully writes,

“Aren’t we priests and ministers called to help people, to feed the hungry, and to save those who are starving? Are we not called to do something that makes people realize that we do make a difference in their lives? Aren’t we called to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and alleviate the suffering of the poor? Jesus was faced with these same questions, but when he was asked to prove his power as the Son of God by the relevant behavior of changing stones into bread, He clung to His mission to proclaim the Word and said, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’

Let us not stop feeding the hungry and alleviating the horrific injustice of severe poverty, but let us not forget that we have far greater hope than food to offer. I pray that our ministry will not be driven by a desire for relevance in this world, but by a desire to see all people of all nations brought to the feet of the crucified Christ. I pray that it will be this horribly irrelevant (as per the world’s conception) mission that marks the Church. Thanks for sticking with me for 2,000 plus words if anyone did.

Until next time,

Grant