'I don't know anything about that'

This one's simply too rich to summarize, so I urge you simply to follow the link and read Mark Olson's writing of cross and culture.

Working on a pure heart

Eric Jones shares some thoughts on keeping the heart pure:

Let me start out by emphatically stating that the only way we can ever have a pure heart is to

invite Jesus to reside, rule, and reign inside our hearts. He alone is the essence of purity and holiness. So, there’s no hope for a pure heart without God.

But know that in Christ, we now have the ability and responsibility to actively pursue this progressive work of developing a pure heart. “I can do all things through Christ…” My heart can be purified. I am called to "work out my salvation with fear and trembling.” I am called to work on my heart.

There's more in Eric's article.

Serving with joy

Victoria Gaines shares a reminder about guilt, grace, and religious labor:

When a baby is born, we're happy and rejoice! When my three children were born, I certainly cooed over them lovingly, thanking God for such precious life. I didn't look at them and say, "Hmm...I wonder what awful sinful past this baby had?

If we belong to God, He isn't saying that either.

Yet many of us, after being born into Christ, still kick ourselves and drag around a heap of guilt and shame. We worry we haven't pleaded enough for forgiveness, served God enough, disciplined ourselves enough, or think ourselves unworthy because of shame. Listen, none of us were worthy before He saved us! And religious works won't ever cleanse our conscience! But because God loves us, He provided a means for healthy guilt-free living; we just need to receive His provision. Only then will we serve Him with joy and out of this amazing grace in which we now stand.

Thanks, Vicki; those words really hit home.

Credit where credit is due

Plus, no football was ever elected to the Hall of Fame.

Not twittering

I'm glad to see someone else feels the same way: Skye Jethani gives a number of reasons why he doesn't tweet. Here's sample:

SIX

I don’t need another commitment in my life. To quote Bilbo Baggins, I fee like “too little butter spread over too much bread.” I already check email, Facebook, SkyeBox, Out of Ur, voicemail, snail mail, and a number of other websites with obsessive regularity. Frankly, I don’t want another one filling my mind or time.

SEVEN

I’m tired of obeying marketers. No offense to those in the marketing profession, but I’d like to know when we collectively decided to make marketers the high priests of our culture? We listen to them like prophets and obey their instructions like slaves. Every marketer seems to be singing the praises of Twitter and social media. I’m sure they have a legitimate point, but if I did everything a marketer told me…well, it would be a sad existence.

Mr. Jethani's final reason, by the way, is the best of all. And thanks to David Fitch for the link.

Reminder

Much truth is found at both extremes (at the same time).

On Jesus and expectations

John Frye, in his ongoing series on Jesus and expectations, makes a good and painful point about Christian perceptions of our Lord:

Christians are expected to be nice apparently because they think Jesus was nice. To imagine Jesus as a hotly controversial, cultural rebel turns him, in their thinking, into a disobedient child of God. We just can’t have that. We can’t bring ourselves to follow a leader who was labeled crazy, a demoniac, a huckster, a fraud and a danger to society. He was labeled these things not by the secular, atheistic media, but by the honorable theologians of the the day. Godly people, mind you. Yet, we assume that our sweet Jesus was just not any of those things. Jesus was not called those things because he brought pies to the church bake sale. He was called those things because he was an intentional and regular law-breaker.

When we turn to the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), we discover some packaged episodes titled “controversy” and “Sabbath controversy.” Because we are so used to reading “nice church” into the life of Jesus, we do not connect with the shocking enormity of his lawlessness. For religious conservative leaders who idolized the Temple in Jerusalem because that’s where God lived and where forgiveness was granted to hear a scraggy little Galilean Jewish carpenter say publicly, “Son, your sins are forgiven” almost put those leaders into cardiac arrest. Then to their utterly sputtering amazement the little Jewish nobody healed the man to prove that he, indeed, had authority to forgive sins on the spot. No Temple, no priest, no sacrifice. Just a word. To the religious ones, Jesus had to be demonic. Too much of what they stood for was riding on Jesus’ being who he said and acted like he actually was.

You might quibble with a few of John's word choices in this passage, but his central observation is valid: too often Christians try to reshape Jesus into the image we prefer. But as the Pevensies learned, Aslan is not a tame lion.

And here, by the way, is John's conclusion:

A Christian life without controversy is not the Christian life…if Jesus has anything to do with it. I wonder if we’ve lost a generation of youth because the church and parents thought the aim of discipleship was to make “nice little boys and girls”?

Ouch.

Gospel alone

Glen Scrivener reminds Christians that the Gospel is not a good idea. Here's a (rather lengthy) sample:

We all love the phrase: ‘The Gospel is not good advice, it’s good news.’ Or at least, we should love it. It’s an essential reminder that we don’t preach a moral ladder to Jesus. Instead we announce that He has come down.

But I am worried about a similar error in our evangelism. It’s thinking that the Gospel is a good idea - even the best idea. The crowning ‘world view’ among ‘world views’.

In reality this is precisely the ‘good advice’ problem transposed to epistemology. Where ‘good advice’ preaching proclaims a moral ladder to Jesus, ‘good idea’ preaching proclaims a reasoned ladder to Jesus.

Both approaches are just as opposed to the good news as each other. One is moral pelagianism, the other is intellectual pelagianism.

Good point.

The virtues of preaching bad sermons

This advice from Russell Moore's to young preachers is sound:

Your first few sermons are always terrible, no matter who you are.

If you think your first few sermons are great, you’re probably self-deceived. If the folks in your home church think your first few sermons are great, it’s probably because they love you and they’re proud of you. If it’s a good, supportive church there’s as much objectivity there as a grandparent evaluating the “I Love You Grandma” artwork handed to them by the five year-old in their family. . . .

Great preachers are the ones who preach really bad sermons. The difference is that they preach really bad sermons when they’re young, and are sharpened for life by critique.

Amen. Thanks to both Justin Taylor and Paul Lamey for the link.

Related: Are you growing in your preaching?

Of tribes and translations

John Frye: "Welcome to USAmerican evangelicalism. Show me your version of the Bible and I’ll tell you what you think about the role of women in ministry. Can you believe it has come to this?"

'We have no rights'

Adrian Warnock reflects on human 'rights' and grace:

The truth is we have no rights. We deserve nothing except the wrath and punishment of God. The only reason we were even born is that God was gracious to our forefathers and did not strike them down with a great and holy and fully justified fury. And its not as if you and I have done anything to improve our situation. No, we have added to the weight of sin and condemnation we were born already carrying.

Amen (HT: Blogotional).

It's a fundamental shift in outlook, especially on this side of the pond, for Christians to give up the concept of rights. In case you doubt that the entire concept of rights is fundamentally at odds with a Christian worldview, I recommend Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.

Simultaneity and community

Bob Hyatt: Virtual church is still a bad idea.

On touching scars

Short but pithy: the stories of Kirsten & Jill.

God and his glory

"Glory is not a something that God gets. Glory is the display of who God is."

In a world of "blacktopped souls & concrete hearts"

Anthony Esolen shares a few thought-provoking ideas on faith, community, sex, and "the last green thing in the world."

On the North American church

Jared Wilson: "The legacy of license, corruption, and theological superficiality in the modernist church suffocates community by affirming the Self and its prerogatives as the Christian's real gods."

Growing and dying

When it's time for a congregation to die. . .

Learning from disease and death

Barry Maxwell shares some challenging thoughts on faith, disease, and death. Here's a sample:

God intends your disease (severe or not) to be a catalyst for seeking him. He may or may not cure you. In fact, he ultimately won’t in this life. He will let you die despite every guarantee of the world’s finest physicians. God sees to it we face the depth our sin, either now in faith and/or later in death. Will we die with disappointed faces as though we’ve been duped? Or will we rejoice that God promises to all in Christ: “Your dead will live; their corpses will rise. You who lie in the dust, awake and shout for joy, for your dew is as the dew of the dawn, and the earth will give birth to the departed spirits” (Is 26.19)?

Good questions.