The Presence of the Kingdom and Bothering With the Church

While reading The Tangible Kingdom by Halter and Smay, I was impressed with these words from the introduction. Speaking of the struggling consumer church in the West, "The idea of the God's Kingdom is now relegated to the realm of heaven, the afterlife, and we just assume that we won't get to see God and his beautiful redemptive plan until we pass over. The church therefore becomes something we may not need anymore, something that at best is worth only our recreational enjoyment" (pg. xviii). These two convictions, the presence of the kingdom now and the necessity of the church, have been important to me for some time. However, I'd never made the connection that they are related. In Bible college, I was taught pretty forcefully that the Kingdom was the literal thousand year millennium for which we are waiting. Since then I have become convinced that Jesus' life, death, resurrection, ascension and sending of the Spirit are all reasons to believe the kingdom is present in power now and the church is called of God to engage that power through Gospel acts of love and service while we wait for Jesus to come again and bring in the kingdom fully. So what are your thoughts? Can an under-realized dispensationalism that relegates the kingdom entirely to the future be blamed (among many other things) for the optional attitude many "Christians" in the West have toward the church? Interesting.

Ask the Pastor Session 1

Sunday evening we begin our Winter Sessions of "Ask the Pastor." The questions have been submitted, sorted, some of them destroyed and two great questions remain.

1) Why does our church (and most churches in the West for that matter) feel free to basically ignore Paul's command to women in 1 Corinthians 11 to cover their heads on worship? I'm looking forward to the discussion I believe this question will generate. My desire is that our discussion will help us grasp the complexity of taking the Bible seriously.

2) How can we integrate the Pauline teaching of "Justification by Faith" with his equally clear emphasis on Judgment according to works? It is my feeling there is much confusion over what I believe to be a false dichotomy, "Faith vs. Works."

GREAT TIMES AHEAD!

A Thanksgiving Prayer from the BCP

Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery of love.

We thank you for the blessing of family and friends, and for the loving care which surrounds us on every side.

We thank you for setting us at tasks which demand our best efforts, and for leading us to accomplishments which satisfy and delight us.

We thank you also for those disappointments and failures that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.

Above all, we thank you for your Son Jesus Christ; for the truth of his Word and the example of his life; for his steadfast obedience, by which he overcame temptation; for his dying, through which he overcame death; and for his rising to life again, in which we are raised to the life of your kingdom. Grant us the gift of your Spirit, that we may know him and make him known; and through him, at all times and in all places, may give thanks to you in all things. Amen.

Under the Impact Advent 2

As you celebrate Advent and prepare for the coming of our Lord, meditate on these words.

"Because Jesus Christ is God, he not only make God known but what he does is work of God. Hid word and deed is the word and deed of God. His love and compassion is the love and compassion of the Father. When he forgives that is the very forgiveness of God ... 'There is no God behind the back of Jesus.' In other words there is no other God than the one we see in Jesus and no act of God other than the act of Jesus. The word and act of Jesus and of the Father are identical. The deity of Jesus is therefore the guarantee that the reconciliation we see and receive in him is the reconciliation of God himself" (From the editor's introduction to Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ by Thomas F. Torrance).

Under the Impact of Advent 1

In an effort to work ahead a bit, I am doing some reading to prepare for our Church's celebration of Christmas. I need a way to collect highlights from my reading. Here's the first knock-it-out-of-the-park quote. "And so Jesus was born, the Son of the Highest, born from above. Jesus Christ was born into this world, not from it. He did not evolve out of humanity. He came into humanity. Jesus is not the product of man, but the Creator of man. He is not just the best human being; He is the Being who cannot be accounted for by the human race at all. Jesus is not man becoming God, but God becoming man--God incarnate, God descending into human flesh, coming into it from outside and from above, in order to be one of us, and to be one with us" (Thomas Torrance, When Christ Comes and Comes Again, 32-33).

Introducing the Blue Parakeet: On Reading the Bible Well

There are very few authors (presently two), who when they write a new book, I automatically pre-order it through Amazon. One such author is North Park University’s Scot McKnight. He is most widely known for The Jesus Creed, and his blog by the same, name http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/. I didn’t have to pre-order his latest book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible, thanks to an advance reader copy mailed to me by Zondervan (after the release date, by the way). As we review chapter two, we will discuss why he has titled the book, The Blue Parakeet. But now onto his presentation in chapter one of the problem that his book addresses, namely the complicated issue of HOW we go about reading and especially applying the Bible.

Have you ever considered the complexity of applying a document that was not written directly to you? Basically, evangelical Christians are united in their commitment to the authority of Scripture. “We believe the Bible.” “It has authority in my life.” All this sounds simple enough. But how that authority moves from what Moses and Jeremiah said to Israel or what Jesus said to the Pharisees or what Paul and Peter and James and John said to 1st Century Churches to us in a 21st Century Church in Northern Illinois is quite a sticky issue! Conservative evangelicals, who believe in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, often accuse “liberals” of picking and choosing which texts to follow. McKnight, however, demonstrates that all of us deal with the complexity of applying Scripture by taking some texts seriously and conveniently ignoring others, or at least stripping them of their direct authority on us today. For example…

Do you keep Sabbath in a way that is faithful to the biblical command (Exodus 20.9-10)? Keeping the Sabbath according to the OT Law meant not working from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday? Do you obey this command in this way? Do you obey this command in a modified way (e.g. Sunday morning through Monday morning)? Do you ignore the command entirely? What reasoning, if any, leads you to your conclusion?

Do you tithe in a way that is faithful to the biblical command (Deuteronomy 26.12)? Tithing according to Scripture is not giving 10% of your income to a local church or other religious organization. According to OT Law, tithes are supposed to be given to the Levitical Priests and furthermore, to the poor, alien, orphan, and widow. As a Baptist preacher I can’t believe, I’m about to write this but the NT doesn’t even mention the tithe. So how do you respond to the OT command to tithe in the way described above? Again, what is your reasoning?

Do you wash feet in a way that is faithful to Jesus’ command (John 13.14)? In this passage, Jesus tells his disciples that they should wash each other’s feet in the same way he has washed theirs. Do you obey this command? Why or why not (And aversion to others’ feet is not an option)?

After citing several more examples, Scot encourages us to think about and ask questions about how we read the Bible and what method we follow in understanding Scripture and applying it to our context. This is why I have such an appreciation for his ministry. His overarching concern is for the Church to live out the Bible in our day. Because I have the same concern, I encourage you to think about and ask yourself the above three questions. Think about the way you read and apply the Bible. I’d love to hear what you learn about yourself and the story God is telling in Scripture.

On Teresa of Avila's "Interior Castle"

Evangelicals have a one-sided view of salvation. Our understanding of the Gospel is so overly shaped by Pauline justification and his legal metaphor that we often have no room for what Jesus or the author/preacher of Hebrews or the Beloved Disciple has to say about salvation. How does the typical "Romans Road" presentation of the Gospel account for Jesus' response to the Rich Young Ruler? We need a much more biblically nuanced understanding of the Gospel that allows the many metaphors used in Scripture to reflect fully the reality they represent. Basically, I believe we need a more eschatological understanding of salvation. It is imperative that we read the Scriptures to say that salvation is a process that begins at conversion and will not be complete until resurrection. As a 16th-century member of the Spanish Carmelite Order, Theresa of Avila captured the NT orientation of Salvation as a process in her book, The Interior Castle. She understood the soul, when it is united to Christ, as analogous to a great castle with many rooms. Thus, the process of salvation is the gracious movement through each of the rooms until arrival at the center room where the Triune God fully dwells in unhindered love. The presence of God and his grace is evident in each of the rooms ever compelling his child to the center room as the climax of salvation’s process.

Within this castle metaphor, she also compares the process of salvation to the lifecycle of a silkworm. Listen to these words from our amazing sister.

…after the soul has received these favours (God’s gracious gifts that result in saving and transforming grace), it strives to make still farther progress, it will experience great things. Oh, to see the restlessness of this charming butterfly, although never in its life has it been more tranquil and at peace! May God be praised! It knows not where to stay nor take its rest; everything on earth disgusts it after what it has experienced, particularly when God has often given it this wine which leaves fresh graces behind it at every draught.

May God compel in us the grace to engage the restlessness of salvation’s process and to also show mercy to those in our Church community who restlessly struggle with God’s saving grace.