The Modern Church

from Today's Gospel:  Authentic or Synthetic by Walter Chantry:

"Much of modern preaching is anaemic, with the lifeblood of God's nature absent from the message.  Evangelists centre their message upon man.  Man has sinned and missed a great blessing.  If man wants to retrieve his immense loss he must act thus and so. But the Gospel of Christ is very different.  It begins with God and His glory.  It tells men that they have offended a holy God, who will by no means pass by sin.  It reminds sinners that the only hope of salvation is to be found in the grace and power of this same God. Christ's Gospel sends men to beg pardon of the Holy One.

There is a wide difference between these two messages.  The one seeks to blaze a trail to Heaven for man while ignoring the Lord of Glory.  The other labours to magnify the God of all grace in the salvation of men."

A Christian Challenge

Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season;

reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and 

instruction.  For the time will come when they will not 

endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears

tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers

in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their

ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths.

2 Timothy 4:2-4

Why I Left Facebook

1) Facebook steals time from my life. Without question, some of the time spent on Facebook is edifying and life-giving.  It is possible to keep up with someones courageous struggle with a disease or donate to  charity/cause through Facebook. It is possible to witness/evangelize on Facebook (as of this date). But most of the time spent on Facebook is gone with no value added. How many hours are wasted posting pictures, comments, likes and viewing page after page? The more friends we accumulate the more we have to keep up with. Minutes turn into hours turn into days.  I wonder how much time we actually lose of our precious lives every year.

2) Facebook friends aren't really friends. Well, some are, but the majority of them aren't. Do you really think you have 256 close friends?  We see how many friends we can accumulate in order to make ourselves feel good. The sad part is while we are on Facebook trying to convince ourselves we have lots of relationships, we are ignoring relationships that are physically in the same room or house.  Maybe that Facebook time would be better spend with a spouse, child, sibling or parent.

3) Facebook brings out the worst in people. How easy it is to respond angrily or critically then revel in how many "likes" we get over it. Tempers flare over politics, religion and social causes. We say things on Facebook that we might never say in person.  How easy it is to "hit and run," offending others and walking away. After all, if you don't have to see them face-to-face ever, who cares! We run the risk of being misunderstood, too.  It's hard to tell the real meaning when you can't hear voice inflections or see facial expression.

4) Facebook creates monsters. Do people REALLY care what we ate for lunch today?  Or that we went to the beach? Do they really want to see yet another picture of our daily life? Our egos are growing at an astronomical rate with social media. News flash - maybe we should be living life in the moment and not recording every second of it to share with others.  Share it with those that are actually with us! Stop the endless photos that say "It's all about ME!"

5) Facebook provides a false view of our lives. We see posts of vacations, fun times, parties, dinners out, etc. No one ever posts, "my day sucked and I didn't do anything." We feel pressure to live up to those lives we are viewing or something is wrong with us.  Why do "they" have all the fun?  What's wrong with me and my life? I never get to go on vacation or eat out.  What is posted on Facebook is a snapshot of a moment in time that is not necessarily accurate. It's like making a movie - how many takes end up on the editing room floor?  We put out there only what we want people to see in order to create an image of ourselves and our lives. Looks glamorous but rarely is that the truth.

6) Less is more. What ever happened to a simple life?  Or just a simpler life?  A slower life that can actually be consumed and not just tasted? Can you imagine if we Christians spent the time wasted on Facebook reading our Bibles? Praying? Calling someone who needs to hear a voice? Visiting someone who needs their hand touched? We love to say "I'm really busy" as if it's a badge of honor yet much of that "busyness" is actually spent sitting in front of a computer screen viewing what others are doing or posting what we've done. The enemy competes for our attention and some days I think he's winning that battle.

For those of you who demonstrate self-restraint and can actually limit your time on Facebook, bravo.  I can't. I have to go cold turkey and completely disengage. The temptation is too great for me. This is my last post which I will leave up for a few days and then I'm done.  So bye-bye Facebook!  To my true friends - let's go out to lunch or dinner soon.  Send me an email or text - I'm still connected to the world, just not as much ;-)

Our Sufficiency in Christ

Just started John Mac Arthur's Our Sufficiency in Christ and already loving it!  Here are some excerpts from the prelude:

I am concerned with the current erosion of confidence in the perfect sufficiency of our spiritual resources in Christ.  As Christians, we find complete sufficiency in Christ and His provisions for our needs.  There's no such thing as an incomplete or deficient Christian.  Our Savior's divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness.  Human wisdom offers nothing to augment that.  Every Christian receives all he or she needs at the moment of salvation.  Each one must grow and mature, but no necessary resource is missing.  There's no need to search for something more.

When Jesus completed His redemptive work on Calvary, He cried out triumphantly, "It is finished" (John 19:30).  The saving work was fulfilled, completed. Nothing was omitted. And all who are recipients of that salvation are granted everything pertaining to life and godliness through the true knowledge of Christ (2 Peter 1:3).  In Him we have wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption (1Cor 1:30).  His grace is sufficient for every situation (2 Cor. 12:9). We are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Him (Eph. 1:3). By one offering He has perfected us forever (Heb 10:14). We are complete in Christ (Col. 2:10). What can anyone add to that?

So to possess the Lord Jesus Christ is to have every spiritual resource. All strength, wisdom, comfort, joy, peace, meaning, value, purpose, hope, and fulfillment in life now and forever is bound up in Him.  Christianity is an all-sufficient relationship with an all-sufficient Christ.

The church is in dire need of a renewed appreciation of what it means to be complete in Christ. The failure of modern Christians to understand and appropriate the riches of Christ has opened the door to all kinds of aberrant influences.  Bad doctrine, legalism, libertinism, humanism, and secularization - to name a few - are eroding the foundations of the Christian faith.  Those satanic assaults are more subtle and therefore more dangerous than the liberalism that splintered the church at the start of this century - and they are succeeding with alarming effectiveness.

In the past two decades or so, for example, theology has become more and more humanistic.  The focus has shifted from God to people and their problems, and counseling has replace worship and evangelism as the main program of many churches.  Christians are becoming more and more dependent on therapists, support groups and similar groups.

This shift in the church's focus did not grow out of some new insight gained from Scripture.  Rather, it has seeped into the church from the world.  It is an attack at the most basic level, challenging Christians' confidence in the sufficiency of Christ.

Contemporary opinion is more utilitarian, valuing physical comfort more than spiritual well-being, self-esteem above Christ-likeness, and good feelings over holy living. Many churches have de-emphasized preaching and worship in favor of entertainment, apparently believing they must lure converts by appealing to fleshly interests. As if Christ Himself were in some way inadequate.

"When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"  Luke 18:8

Dross or Gold?

He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and shall purify

the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver.  Malachi 3:3

What do we prize in a day when values are slipping:  the dross of human cleverness and worldly resources, or the gold and silver of divine origin and redemption through Christ?  Many things in Christianity have become cheap today, but there is no easy shortcut to spiritual worth.  Preaching, prayer, witness, these may not seem difficult, but to be of value they will be costly in years and blood and divine discipline.  God's "vessel unto honor" is the man who has waited for the Spirit to teach him, and who has not been ashamed meanwhile to admit he does not know.  For there comes a day when the true character of things is tested.  Preaching, in an hour of departure and confusion, is of little value unless men see God in it.  At such a time they can tell whether the speaker has really been taken by God through the things of which he speaks.  What has not already touched him deeply will have little power to touch others in that day.

Watchman Nee, A Table in the Wilderness

God's Wisdom

from Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Barton . . . . 

Love is the deepest calling of the Christian life, the standard by which everything about our lives is measured.  It is the standard by which Christ evaluated himself at the end of his life. "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end " (John 13:1). Any decision-making process that fails to ask the love question misses the point of the Christian practice of discernment. Discernment is intended to take us deeper and deeper into the heart of God's will:  that we would follow God passionately into love - even if it takes us all the way to the cross.

God does communicate with us through the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is given to help us know the demands of love in our situation. At the end of his life, Jesus said that it was to our advantage that he went away, so that the Holy Spirit could come and live with us, closer to us than our own breath. Christ asked the Father to send the Holy Spirit to be a counselor and a guide for us - one who leads us deeper into truth right here, right now, as we are able to bear it.  In this way the Holy Spirit expands Christ's teaching, taking a particular teaching beyond the moment when he gave it in a particular setting to the moment we are in right now.  The Spirit is given to help us answer the call to love in ways that are consistent with and flow out of our own personality, gifts and calling within our particular situation. We are called to live love in the context of our own destiny as freely and authentically and wholeheartedly as Christ did.

The practice of discernment begins with a prayer for indifference. "I am indifferent to anything but God's will." This is a state of wide-openness to God in which I am free from undue attachment to any particular outcome and I am capable of relinquishing whatever might keep me from choosing for love.  Gaining indifference is one of the most demanding aspects of the discernment process.

Just like everything else that is of significance in the spiritual life, God must accomplish this for us. The question that is most pertinent at this place in the discernment process is, What needs to die in me in order for God's will to come forth in my life?  All we can do is pray and wait:  say to God "I know I am not indifferent. I know there is till something in me that is clinging to my own agenda.  If I am to become indifferent, you will have to do it in me."

The movement toward indifference is the threshold between two worlds:  the world of human decision making and the world of discerning the divine will.  In this waiting room of the soul we are ready to pray the second prayer - the prayer for wisdom.  "If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and grudgingly, and it will be given you" (James 1:5). Here we begin to understand why the prayer for indifference was so important: the wisdom of God is foolishness to this world. Discerning people are able to recognize God's guidance sometimes by the very fact that, to some onlookers, it appears at some level to be foolish.  But because we have come to a place of indifference, it doesn't matter.  When we have died to our need to be wise in others' eyes or to prove ourselves according to human standards, we are finally ready to ask for God's wisdom and receive it.