The Gospel in Real Life

I love this time of year. The fall months are my favorite for a lot of different reasons. The temperature drops below triple digits. I put that one first on purpose. In the fall, the outside temperatures become livable again and we slowly start to creep outside and life on the patio resumes, at least until sometime in May when the temperatures climb back into those nasty triple digits again. Our mild fall days are good for spending time on the patio with an open Bible, a good book, and my first (and only) wife. My favorite holidays – Thanksgiving and Christmas – begin to loom large. My wife’s December birthday looms even larger and is a big deal around our house. The leaves fall off of our trees and then a week to ten days later (literally) they reappear. Welcome to southern Arizona where there are three seasons: hot, not so hot, and a little bit chilly. Then there is football. I decided this year to watch it more and get up to speed with it all. The last few years, I haven’t paid too much attention to it. But this year’s been different. I’ve actually found the time to watch several games, pro and college, and I feel like I know what’s going on for the first time in quite a while.

Then there’s Christmas, that most wonderful time of the year. Yards come alive with amazing decorations and lights. Our cul-de-sac is usually lit up so bright, it’s probably Read more…

What are the Ten Commandments like? What was their purpose and why were they given? Are they a worthy investment of our time and energy in order to get them posted in public places? In some settings where a ―Christian influence is prominent, a preoccupation with the Ten Commandments sometimes surfaces. With noble intentions, we might find ourselves rolling up our sleeves to do battle over posting the Ten Commandments in schools or court houses. But should a believer‘s conscience be bound by the Ten Commandments? Are the Ten Commandments helpful or harmful to the life of the church?

I have posted a new page called The Nature of the Ten Commandments in the Gospel Pictures section of my web site. The issue of the Ten Commandments is an important one and I hope you’ll find me meager addition to the discussion a helpful one. You can see it [HERE] and comments are open and welcome. If you prefer, it’s also available in Adobe PDF [HERE].

I’m off work this week and I’ve had some time to write and catch up on a few things. I’m enjoying re-writing some of my papers from way back when. One of them that I just finished is called, John 15: The Dilemma of an Old Covenant Jew. I thought this paper would be one of the easiest to re-edit, but it turned out to be quite a task. John 15 is that chapter that starts with the allegory of the vine and branches. Several years ago, I became convinced that the more traditional interpretation of that passage (Christian fruit-bearing) isn’t the real focus. If you get a chance, go check it out. It’s a little long, so print out a copy, grab your favorite beverage, and dig in. Let me know what you think!

• Download John 15: The Dilemma of an Old Covenant Jew

None of us enjoy opposition or criticism. I hope I’m speaking for all of us. If you do enjoy opposition and criticism, you’re sick man. Get help. Opposition and criticism are the unfortunate, but sometimes unavoidable byproducts of our attempts to serve God and to please him. They can arise from within the church or they can originate from without, but regardless, we can rest assured that they will arise as long as we are seeking to advance the gospel and please the Lord. The real question isn’t, “Will they arise?” The real question is “How do we respond when they do arise?” Spurgeon was once quoted as saying, “If we cannot believe God when circumstances seem to be against us, we do not believe Him at all.” He’s right.

One of the greatest enemies of effective ministry is the temptation to second-guess myself. I had a friend in high school who was always second-guessing himself and as a result, he never really accomplished anything noticeable. Assuming all else is equal and I’m not moving in an unbiblical direction or running rough shod over someone to get my way or to sinfully prove a point, second-guessing my decisions can lead to paralysis. Not physical paralysis, but to a paralyzing of my ministry. Quite often we find ourselves in the position of having to make quick decisions based on the limited information at hand, and once we do, those who Read more…

I’ve started a section on my web site called Gospel Pictures. My plan is to load it up with papers that I’m writing and some that I’m re-writing, that all point to something unique in the Old Testament that meets its ultimate fulfillment in the New Testament. Since these are a little more technical in nature, I wanted to put them in a separate section on my site and not directly as blog posts. That way, they are easily accessible all the time and won’t get buried in the blog pile as time marches on. Plus, since they are more technical in nature than what I post as normal blogs, I realize that some people might not be as interested in them as they are in the normal blog posts (although I can’t imagine that, considering the author!), so I decided to set them apart. But comments are open on them and welcome. There is also a printer-friendly button if you’re like me and get a little fatigued reading something long on your monitor. Here are the two papers that I have posted so far:

The Abrahamic Covenant – When I began to understand what was happening in the covenant with Abraham, Scripture began to really open up for me and the big picture of how Scripture fits together crystallized.

The Old Covenant and the Law of Moses – When I understood that the Old Covenant was a legal, conditional covenant, it helped me to understand the place of Israel in the Bible and it gave me a deeper appreciation of the New Covenant and God’s grace.

Gospel Pictures – This is the section of my site where you will be able to find the additional papers that I post on this theme. If you visit this section of my site, you will see several links to papers that are on the way. As I post each one, the links will become active, so please subscribe or keep checking back.

This morning I came across a stimulating article by Terry Rayburn at his Grace for Life blog site called The Tare Police. It was an encouraging read for me and I wanted to pass it along. He starts out,

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There is something disturbing that I’ve noticed more and more in the church in America. I hear it in person or on TV, I read it on internet blogs and websites, and I see articles on it in magazines.

More and more, Christians are declaring that other Christians are unsaved or unregenerate.

Some Calvinists think that Arminians aren’t saved. Some Arminians think that Calvinists aren’t saved. Some non-Charismatics think Charismatics aren’t saved and some Charismatics think non-Charismatics aren’t saved. Some fundamentalists think Reformed folks are unsaved, and some Reformed folks think fundamentalists are unsaved. Some think Emergent church folks are unsaved, and some think New Perspective folks are unsaved. Some think Southern Baptists are mostly unregenerate, and some think the Methodists are all unsaved liberals.

Need I go on to the Protestants and Catholics, the Covenant Theology guys, The Dispensationalists, the New Covenant Theology guys, the Auburn Theology guys, the Open Theism guys, or those who commit some horrible public sin?

Read the entire post at Grace for Life>>

It’s Sunday morning and I’m in Prescott, AZ. I’m more of a morning person than a night owl. I love the mornings and this morning was different than most because I usually don’t wake up in Prescott, Arizona for the simple reason that I don’t live here. As I sat in my hotel room sipping coffee, reading scripture, checking email and catching up with the latest chatter on Twitter and Facebook, I noticed a woodpecker on the tree right outside my window. So I stopped everything else that I was doing and watched him for a while. He had no idea I was there, so he kept pecking away. This is kind of a big deal because you don’t see a lot of woodpeckers where I live in the Phoenix area. As I watched him working so hard pecking away at that big tree, a couple of things came to mind. The first was how undisciplined and inconsistent I can be in my walk with the Lord, and the second was how consistent and persistent the Lord is in the work he is doing in our lives. It gave me a renewed appreciation of Read more…

This morning Tim Challies twittered an on-line prayer that he had read, written by pastor Scotty Smith. I took a look at it and ended up staying a long time! These prayers are really encouraging and if you haven’t seen them yet, I recommend them. The one below is from his site and is a prayer about grace that I enjoyed reading.

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For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good. Titus 2:11-14

Dear Lord Jesus, if there’s one teacher I want to excel under, if there’s one curriculum I need to master, if there’s one school I want to do well in, it’s the academy of grace. In the past, I have either Read more…

I was surfing the web tonight looking for some of the old original Paul Clark music and I stumbled across this video of Paul Clark and Phil Keaggy performing Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody. It’s excellent. I haven’t heard these guys play together in 30+ years.

This is the last of three posts that I’m writing about conversations I recently had with two orthodox Jews. One thing that stood out to me most in my time with them was the response I got when I implored them to wrestle with who Jesus is. They remained very gracious and kind when I mentioned the name of Jesus and my belief that Jesus is God and that God became a man in the person of Jesus in order to die a substitutionary death on the cross to pay for the sin of all who believe. As we continued to talk about the gospel, they resonded by telling me that they viewed Jesus as a good example of keeping the Law. Who can disagree with that? Of course he was (is). He kept the Law perfectly as the true spotless lamb of God. On that point we agreed. But when I took them beyond the concept of seeing Jesus as simply a good man who did a good job of keeping the Law, we agreed to disagree. To my surprise, it was then that they pointed me to Matthew 5:17-18:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

To my Jewish friends, Jesus’ words, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” simply meant that he came to keep the Law and little or nothing more. I agree that he kept the Law perfectly, but that is not all that is in view in this passage. In Colossians 2:13-14, Paul gives us more information:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

Ephesians 2:14-16 is parallel in many ways with our Colossians text. The context is the bringing together of Jew and Gentile into one new man, the Church:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

Something happened between Matthew 5 and Colossians chapter 2/Ephesians 2 that resulted in the Law of Moses losing its fatal grip. It was Read more…

This is the second of what will be three posts about a couple of pretty intense conversations with two Orthodox Jews that I had the privilege of being a part of. By intense, I don’t mean argumentative or mean-spirited, but I mean intense in a good way. It stretched me in theological areas that I’ve never been stretched before. Instead of just reading about how Jews under the Law of Moses seemed to think, I was verbally engaged with two of them in live, unscripted conversation. This wasn’t something I had read, say in the Book of Acts, where Paul is engaging a group in a Jewish synagogue on the Sabbath. That’s safe because every time I go back to read it, it ends the same way. No, this was unscripted and quite frankly, I wondered more than once whether I would be up for such a task. I felt more than once, like I was getting in over my head. But looking back, that caused me to trust the Lord even more for opportunities to share the gospel with my two Jewish friends. God grants repentance and eternal life not on the basis of a polished presentation, but according to his sovereign will. But I digress. Let’s begin by looking at Romans 8:3-4:

For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.

I mentioned in part one of this series that much of our conversation was centered around the Mosaic Law’s unrelenting demand for perfect obedience. I found that in the process of presenting my views to my Jewish friends that I am quite spoiled by being able to use my New Testament to support my views of the Law of Moses. Rightly so. It also struck me in a very vivid way how strange it seems to talk about issues surrounding the Law of Moses in the present tense. I’m still not used to that! Most of my conversations or things that I have written about the Law have been in relation to how an Old Covenant Jew at the time of the New Testament would make application to certain things Jesus said or that one of the Apostles had written. I’ve never dealt directly with a Jew who considers himself under the Law today. At least not until now!

The New Testament completes what was begun in the Old and transitions us from picture to fulfillment. But since my Jewish companions do not recognize the New Testament as authoritative Scripture, we stayed within the pages of Genesis to Malachi. I took my Jewish friends to 4 passages from the Hebrew Scriptures (that’s the Old Testament to you and I) that illustrate Read more…