Quote, on How to Glorify a Mountain Spring

From the book that changed my life forever:

"God has no needs that I could ever be required to satisfy. God has no deficiencies that I might be required to supply. He is complete in himself. He is overflowing with happiness in the fellowship of the Trinity. The upshot of this is that God is a mountain spiring, not a watering trough. A mountain spring is self-replenishing. It constantly overflows and supplies others. But a watering trough needs to be filled with a pump or a bucket brigade. So if you want to glorify the worth of a watering trough you work hard to keep it full and useful. If you want to glorify the worth of a spring you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart's satisfaction, until you have the refreshment and strength to go back down in the valley and tell people what you've found."

-John Piper, in The Pleasures of God, p. 208.

Apologizing

Here's a great post on "Becoming a Better Apologizer" from Tim Challies. On the same topic, I have also been reading the blog from Peacemakers Ministry and have benefited greatly from it. Here are their "Seven A's of Confession" when resolving conflict:

1. Address everyone involved (all those whom you affected)
2. Avoid if, but, and maybe (do not try to excuse your wrongs)
3. Admit specifically (Both attitudes and actions)
4. Acknowledge the hurt (express sorrow for hurting someone)
5. Accept the consequences (such as making restitution)
6. Alter your behavior (change your attitudes and actions)
7. Ask for forgiveness

Learning to live at peace not only with Christians but the world is imperative to being a good witness to Christ. Paul said, "Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger...Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you," (Ephesians 4:26, 31-32).

Where do you need to apologize today? Have you let the sun go down on your anger?

Isaiah 53

Pretty cool:



HT: Vitamin Z

A Quote for Good Friday

Quoted in John Stott's The Cross of Christ (page 50), Malcolm Muggeridge, a lifelong socialist, speaks of the cross:

"I would catch a glimpse of a cross--not necessarily a crucifix; maybe two pieces of wood accidentally nailed together, on a telegraph pole, for instance--and suddenly my heart would stand still. In an instinctive, intuitive way I understood that something more important, more tumultuous, more passionate was at issue than our good causes, however admirable they might be...

"It was, I know an obsessive interest...I might fasten bits of wood together myself, or doodle it. This symbol, which was considered to be derisory in my home, was yet also the focus of inconceivable hopes and desires...

"As I remember this, a sense of my own failure lies upon me. I should have worn it over my heart; carried it, a precious standard, never to be wrestled out of my hands; even though I fell, still born aloft. It should have been my cult, my uniform, my language, my life. I shall have no excuse; I can't say I didn't know. I knew it from the beginning and turned away."

Mr. Muggeridge turned back to Christ soon after.

Sinners

Here's an interesting article in USA Today on if people today believe they are sinners, or even if they understand the term, "sin". Here's the opening:

"Is sin dead? No, not by a long shot. Yet as Easter approaches, some pastors and theologians worry: How can Christians celebrate Jesus' atonement for their sins and the promise of eternal life in his resurrection if they don't recognize themselves as sinners?"

It's an intriguing question for us. Though we obviously believe sin permeates us and the world, and is the thing that separates us from God, how do we explain this notion to a world that may have forgotten the word altogether? Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll begin to answer this question at the end of the piece.

HT: Stetzer

Keller at Google

Tim Keller is "on tour" right now, promoting his new book. Here he is at Google:



HT: Reformissionary

TV: A Soul-Contaminator?

Here's a good post on TV and kids from Al Mohler (referencing a NY Times article). I was pretty shocked to hear that some 70% of 3rd graders have televisions in their bedrooms. Though Al understands that there are some benefits of the TV medium, parents must act with great care with their kids and their viewing habits. Al writes:

"For Christian parents, a proper concern must move from the more generalized effects of television as a communications medium to the content of the communication -- the message and the medium. Television is a soul-contaminator, training young souls to want the wrong consumer goods, value the wrong moral goods, laugh at the wrong places, and emulate vacuous and immoral celebrities."

Humble Thyself

From John Piper on what God teaches about humility. Read the whole thing here.

1. Humility begins with a sense of subordination to God in Christ.

2. Humility does not feel a right to better treatment than Jesus got.

3. Humility asserts truth not to bolster ego with control or with triumphs in debate, but as service to Christ and love to the adversary.

4. Humility knows it is dependent on grace for all knowing and believing.

5. Humility knows it is fallible, and so considers criticism and learns from it; but also knows that God has made provision for human conviction and that he calls us to persuade others.

6. Humility is to believe in the heart and confess with the lips that our life is like a vapor, and that God decides when we die, and that God governs all our accomplishments.

A Quote about Praise

From C.S. Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms:

"But the most obvious fact about praise--whether of God or anything--strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought back in to check it. The world rings with praise--lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game...My whole, more general difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards to the supremely Valuable, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value.

"I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses, but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed."

Easter Awesomeness

Too bad we don't have our own marquee.

HT: ZN

Reworking Work

From John Stott on how all work should be glorifying to God, not just vocational ministry:

"In my view, we are due for another reformation with regard to our view of work. Although it's much more subtle, many of us can still perpetuate a sub-biblical view of work. I remember once hearing a student leader suggest that the norm was for Christians to consider themselves called to vocational ministry—and that a calling to a so-called 'secular' vocation was the exception. In other words, the default for Christians should be to go into vocational ministry unless they feel compelled to do something else. But I don't find that idea taught anywhere in Scripture. The result is that we sometimes have people in vocational ministry, not because it is where they have been called by their church, or equipped by God, but simply because they never prepared to do anything else.

"We need to recover the reformational understanding of vocation: all of life in every sphere and in every calling—should be lived to the glory of God and in obedience to his Word. Abraham Kuyper wrote, 'There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, "Mine!"' If that's true (and it is!), isn't it worth our time and effort to think through how to glorify God in the area of work to which he has called you?"

HT: Josh Harris

Fridays are for Quotes

John Piper once said, "What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this. It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two." To that end, I'll try and remember to post a quote each Friday that has deeply affected me, secular or Christian.

My wife pointed this out to me the other night, from The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge:

"Though it is true for the power of God all things are superfluous it is also true that for the mercy of God nothing is."

U.S.A. Missionary

There is a term that has been floating around the church world for a while now called "missional." It is based on the idea that America is now a mission field unto itself. It used to be the case that American churches would do missions internationally and do evangelism locally (in America). Evangelism worked well because most of Americans were, at least to some degree, "Christian-based." The foundations of America are largely Christian. Though millions of people came to America, bringing with them many different types of culture, most them were Christian, monolithically so. Even the part of the population that was not Christian knew about Christianity. So for the church, a one-size-fits-all approach to evangelism worked. It worked well.

But not anymore. We are, for lack of a better term, a "post-Christian" nation. There is no monolithic Christian identity any longer. The influx of different cultures coupled with degrading foundation of Christianity (for different reasons) has truly brought us to the point where millions upon millions of people are not familiar with Christianity. So what does that make America? A mission field. (In some areas, like Seattle, it is really pre-Christian, where a Christian foundation has never been established.)

Our evangelistic task, therefore, is different today. We must literally be missionaries to our next door neighbors, friends, and relatives. Rather than having the church be a place where we draw people in and evangelize them, we must send people out, as missionaries, to spread the gospel. That is being missional. But how do you do that?

I have uploaded a few interviews with Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller, speaking to this issue and what it looks like for a church and it's members. I hope it is helpful to you as you reach out to your community, your mission field.

Mark Driscoll on Seeker Churches vs. Missional Churches:



Tim Keller on Being Missional vs. Being Evangelistic:



Update:

Odd. The same day I posted on missional churches, Christianity Today posted an article on the same topic. Read it here.

I quickly read through it and it looks more like a piece on trying to understand the broad scope of the terms "missional" and "missional church" in their different contexts. Todd Billings seeks, in his article, to discover the true definition of these terms (at least as it was originally intended). Following the book Missional Church, Billings states, "The American church had been tied to a 'Christendom model' of Christianity, wherein the church focused on internal needs and maintaining its cultural privilege in society. The decline of Christendom provided the church an opportunity, they said, to rediscover its identity as a people sent by God into the world as gospel witnesses."

The Jesus Storybook Bible

For you parents out there (and perhaps everyone), you might want to pick up a new book called The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones and illustrator Jago. Tim Keller writes:

"Sally Lloyd-Jones has captured the heart of what it means to find Christ in all the scriptures, and has made clear even to little children that all God’s revelation has been about Jesus from the beginning–a truth not all that commonly recognized even among the very learned."

Read a full review from Ben Patterson here and get a preview of it here.

Though my daughter might not yet appreciate it, I think I'll get a jump on things and buy it now.

Update:

I just read thoroughly through the preview and it is gorgeous and true. Wow.