theology Thursday

“I would say that God is on a mission to make all things new, that God is on a mission to transform this present world into the world to come, that when Christ came the first time He inaugurated this process of universal transformation. When He comes back a second time, He will consummate or complete this process of universal transformation, making all things new, bring heaven to earth so to speak. But in between the times, in between Christ’s first coming and His second coming, God has called His people, He’s equipped His church to carry on what Christ began and will one day complete. And so, what I tell people like that is God has transformed us to become agents of transformation. He has, He has renewed us so that we would become agents of renewal. There is a reason why Jesus calls His disciples salt and light. We know that salt and light only make a difference when it makes contact. Salt can only preserve something that’s rotting when it makes contact with what it is that it’s rotting. You know, light can only shine in the darkness if it makes contact with the darkness.”
– Tullian Tchividjian

C.S. Lewis on interpreting everything your enemies do, as bad

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 118:

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.

Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.

HT: Between Two Worlds

Do It, Don’t Blog It

From Dan Kimball, writing at Out of Ur in Christianity Today

Do It, Don’t Blog It

Does all our online chatter about being missional keep us from being missional?

The Ground and Motive of Obedience

Very good read (of a blog post – of DashHouse) —

This is the money quote…
“When Paul said, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2), he wasn’t saying he only talked about the cross. He was saying that he couldn’t talk about anything without eventually tying it back to Jesus, and ultimately to his death and resurrection.”

Daily living? “Walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” (Ephesians 5:2)

Sex? “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” (2 Corinthians 6:19-20)

Money? “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9)

Marriage? “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” (Ephesians 5:25)

Our obligations to others? “Do not by your eating destroy your brother or sister for whom Christ died.” (Romans 14:15)

McQuilkin says, “Paul never tires of relating the obligations of morality to the fact that Christ died for us.”
So obvious, yet so easily missed. And so incredibly life-changing as well.

humor Thursday – stop it

tip for the day — don’t go to a therapist, if they are like this…

for my iPhone friends…

I got my Mac on with my iPhone 3GS

theology Tuesday – what believers need

John Stackhouse on what evangelicals need:

“American evangelicals need to escape the narrow (and heretical) idea that God’s Plan of Salvation is to rescue souls from a worn-out planet and whisk them off to a spiritual heaven. Their teachers and preachers need to expand the horizons of salvation to include the physical body, the church, and the whole of creation.

This divine endorsement of the whole world needs to be rooted in a strong doctrine of creation, furthermore, not just of salvation. Thus American evangelicals need to understand and embrace the so-called creation mandate, the command of God to rule over the creation, to cultivate it, to “be as God” to it as the image of God. Thus everything about the “everyday” matters to God. And in this context, politics now becomes godly work – not just for politicians, but for all citizens and all neighbors – because politics is simply the conversation and negotiation about how we’re all going to get along with each other as well as we can.”

on power & Francis Schaeffer

So I was reading my daily texts that gets emailed to me every day, and I came across this in 2 Corinthians 13:3-4 “…since you are demanding proof that Christ is speaking through me. He is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful among you. For to be sure, he was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God’s power. Likewise, we are weak in him, yet by God’s power we will live with him in our dealing with you.”

it struck me of how much I need God’s power to simply live with Him, on a daily basis…

Interestingly, just a little while later — I came across these quotes by Francis Schaeffer (he was a wild-looking guy wasn’t he?)

“Because the world is hard, confronting it without the Lord’s power is an overwhelming prospect.”
“If we think we can operate on our own, if we do not comprehend the need for a power beyond our own, we will never get started.”
– Francis Schaeffer, The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way HT: Trevin

Here is to all of us — that we would really live by His power, and not solely on our own…

friendship & secrets

Had coffee this morning with one of my best ’soul’ friends. Someone that I can be brutally honest, and real with & he with me.

It reminded me of this quote:

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.”
— Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets)

Thanks Tim for being such a ’safe’ friend. We all need friends that are safe. Do you have those kind of friends?

brokenness & leadership

While this is really blesses & encourages me to no end…

“Most churches make the mistake of selecting as leaders the confident, the competent, and the successful. But what you most need in a leader is someone who has been broken by the knowledge of his or her sin, and even greater knowledge of Jesus’ costly grace. The number one leaders in every church ought to be the people who repent the most fully without excuses, because you don’t need any now; the most easily without bitterness; the most publicly and the most joyfully. They know their standing isn’t based on their performance.” (Tim Keller, “What are the risks for evangelicals?” speaking at the Evangelical Ministry Assembly 2007)

However, I have yet to see a community actually do that.
I have found this more to be the case…

“There seems to me to be, however, a systemic issue that stands in the way of this kind of shepherd. Henri Nouwen, rightfully called for church leaders to live in community in all of their woundedness. Yet it feels like most church communities want someone who is successful, competent, and confident not broken.”

HT: . of view