Pure Church

If you've been following the posts on "The Costs of Following Jesus" (here and here), you've read about a fictional man named "Brad," a new convert to the faith, father of three with a live-in girlfriend of 13 years. Obviously, Brad has some things to think through if he is going to faithfully follow the Lord. We've been discussing our views.

Today, Carson shared an email post written to a young church planter on this very issue. HT to one of the commenters here. This is very thoughtful, and I hope you'll read it.

I profit so much from this brother's teaching! And I'm deeply grateful to God for him. The first minute or so on longing for the kingdom is moving (HT: Challies).

I use the Bible reading plan in Don Carson's For the Love of God in my personal times of study. One of the chapters for this morning was Jeremiah 16. In the chapter, God decrees judgment against Israel for her sin, but Israel is oblivious as to why. Carson observes:

One of the most striking features of this chapter is that the people really do not seem to be aware of their guilt. They cannot see why they should face judgment. "Why has the Lord decreed such a great disaster against us?" they ask. "What wrong have we done? What sin have we committed against the Lord our God?" (16:10). One of the most terrible indices of how far a people have strayed from righteousness is the degree to which they can no longer perceive their own guilt. Men and women who truly love righteousness and integrity are invariably aware when they breach it. The most holy people are blissfully aware of their corruptions and idolatries. So we must ask ourselves: where on this sort of spectrum are our churches found? Or our culture? Are we characterized by profound contrition, or by a frank inability to think that we have really done anything all that wrong? What does that say of us? What does that say about the Lord's stance toward us?

What say ye?

Today, I pondered the following meditation for some time:

God challenges Jeremiah to find a single honest man on the streets of Jerusalem (5:1), anticipating the search of Diogenes in the Greek world. Even one such person wold have been enough, according to God, to forestall judgment on the city. But of course that is another way of saying how slippery the moral life of the city had become, how extensive the sin was, how insincerity and moral corrosion had damaged the city's children.

Initially Jeremiah thinks that perhaps the negative results of his search could be laid at the door of the disadvantages of the lower classes. Of course, even the poor were supposed to know and keep the Law of God, but it is compassionate to make allowances. So Jeremiah goes off to examine the sophisticated, the privileged, the articulate--and finds no less moral rot there than elsewhere (5:4-5). Intelligent sinners use their intelligence to sin; sophisticated sinners concoct sophisticated reasons for thinking their sin is not sin; upper-crust sinners indulge in upper-crust sin. "But with one accord they too had broken off the yoke and torn the bonds" (5:5).

Carson ends by asking, "How many of these elements are playing out today?"

It's a good question, and one that perhaps we don't consider enough as preachers and Christians. Doesn't it seem that the implicit assumption toward the wealthy is that they're spiritually and morally 'okay' while the poor are obviously the ones with the spiritual problems. Sometimes we might even think the poor are poor because they're spiritually bankrupt. We diagnose 'white collar' and 'blue collar' crime, as though they weren't both examples of coveting, thievery, and "spiritual rot" as Carson calls it.

This'll preach: "Intelligent sinners use their intelligence to sin; sophisticated sinners concoct sophisticated reasons for thinking sin is not sin; upper-crust sinners indulge in upper-crust sin."

And doesn't the Bible tell us it's the rich that exploit and oppress us? Why our love affair with wealth, and our willing complicity with their sin?

The rich man in his comforts takes an air-conditioned ride toward hell. And the poor man in his misery suffers on his way to the same flames.

We need preaching and pastoral practice that isn't deceived by riches, but speaks the truth to power so that all--rich and poor--might be saved.


Quote from For the Love of God, Volume 2.

Some things I trust have benefitted my soul recently:

Mark Dever on "The Pastor and the Church":
The Pastor
The Church

Don Carson:
The Flow of Thought in 1 Timothy 2
Is the Culture Shaping Us or Are We Shaping the Culture?
HT: Titus2Talk
A Holy Nation: The Church's High Calling

Bob Kauflin:
The Fight for Joy (Psalm 42-43)

J. M. Stiles:
Getting the Big Picture (1 Cor. 9:18-27)

From D.A. Carson's essay, "Challenges for the Twenty-first-century Pulpit" in Ryken and Wilson (eds), Preach the Word:

Countless volumes have been written on this subject, of course. Here I shall restrict myself to five observations.

First, preaching is more than the oral communication of information, no matter how biblical and divine that information may be. Rather, we should think in terms of what might be called "re-revelation." Across the centuries, God disclosed himself--he revealed himself--in great events (e.g., the burning bush, the exodus, the resurrection of Jesus); he disclosed himself supremely in the person of his Son. But very commonly he revealed himself by his words. Perennially we read, "The word of the Lord came to such-and-such a prophet." So when that Word is re-announced, there is a sense in which God, who revealed himself by that Word in the past, is re-revealing himself by that same Word once again. Preachers must bear this in mind. Their aim is more than to explain the Bible, however important that aim is. They want the proclamation of God's Word to be a revelatory event, a moment when God discloses himself afresh, a time when the people of God know that they have met with the living God. They know full well that for the Scriptures to have this revelatory impact the Spirit of God must apply that Word deeply to the human heart, so that preaching must never be seen as a mere subset of public oratory. Both the content (the Bible is God's Word) and the transformative empowering (the Spirit himself) transcend any merely mechanical view of preaching.

Second, to remain true to this basic understanding of what preaching is, the preacher must be committed to the primacy of expository preaching. We must take pains to debunk what many people think "exposition" and "expository" mean. They associate exposition with a style that takes not more than half a verse per sermon and casts around widely for every conceivable association, biblical and pastoral. Certainly that is one form of exposition, but that form is not the essence of the matter. Exposition is simply the unpacking of what is there. In a narrative text (e.g., 2 Samuel) or major epic (e.g., Job), fine exposition may focus on several chapters at once. If a sermon takes two or three short passages from disparate parts of the Bible and explains each of them carefully and faithfully within its own context, it remains an expository sermon, for it is unpacking what the biblical text or texts actually say. If we expect God to re-reveal himself by his own words, then our expositions must reflect as faithfully as possible what God actually said then the words were given to us in Scripture.

Third, there is an heraldic element in preaching. The Bible sometimes envisages other forms of oral communication, of course: we may be invited to reason together with the Lord (Is. 1:18), for instance, or enter into a dialogical confrontation with him (e.g., Mal. 1:2-8; Rom. 6:1-2). Yet in the oft-repeated "Thus says the Lord" of the Old Testament is an unavoidable heraldic element--an announcement, a sovereign disclosure, a nonnegotiable declaration. As ambassadors, we are tasked with making known the stance and intentions of our Sovereign; we do not have the authority to tamper with his position.

Fourth, preaching is never an end in itself. It is not an art form to be admired, still less mere high-flown rhetoric that so captures the audience's imagination that the content is of little importance. This is not to deny that artistry and rhetoric may be traced in sermons; rather, it is to keep ultimate ends in constant view. The faithful preacher will care little what folk think of his oratorical skills; he will care a great deal about whether he has faithfully represented the Master and his message. This includes a passionate commitment to make the Word wound and heal, sing and sting.

And that means, fifth, that we must study our own people, the culture of the people to whom we minister. Inevitably there are commonalities from culture to culture, but there are countless distinctives as well. To communicate effectively we must address the people of the time and place where God has placed us. This is a perennially urgent need in the thoughtful and faithful preacher....

HT: Andy Naselli via JT.

Carson, Keller, and Piper chat it up about:

Ministries of mercy...



Evangelistic fruit and loving intentionality in mercy ministries, and looking for prophet, priest, and king gospel character in pastors...



Prophet, priest and king gospel character in pastors (cont'd), mentoring upcoming pastors, and being "gospel-centered" with libertines...



Being "gospel-centered" with libertines (cont'd), Bonhoeffer on cheap grace, and how does the cross help us conquer sin...



Seeing the ugliness of sin in conversion and sanctification, and why God is "stuck with being beautiful"...



True confessions from Piper and Keller...

A few from the Gospel Coalition describe it and dissect it in brief:

When the pressure to 'contextualize' the gospel jeopardizes the message of the cross by inflating human egos, the cultural pressures must be ignored. (p. 34)

"What the world dismisses as sheer foolishness, the foolishness of God, proves 'wiser than man's wisdom' (1 Cor. 1:25). What the world writes off as hopeless weakness, the weakness of God, proves 'stronger than man's strength' (1:25). This is much more radical than saying that God has more wisdom than human beings, or that he is stronger than human beings--as if we are dealing with mere degrees of wisdom and power. Now, we are dealing with polar opposites. Human 'wisdom' and 'strength' are, from God's perspective, rebellious folly and moral weakness. And the moment when God most dramatically discloses his own wisdom and strength, the moment when his own dear Son is crucified--although it is laughed out of court by the tawdry 'wisdom' of this rebellious world, by the pathetic 'strength' of the self-deceived--is nevertheless the moment of divine wisdom and divine power. 'For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength' (1:25).


"For those of us in any form of Christian ministry, this lesson must constantly be reappropriated. Western evangelicalism tends to run through cycles of fads. At the moment, books are pouring off the presses telling us how to plan for success, how 'vision' consists in clearly articulating 'ministry goals,' how the knowledge of detailed profiles of our communities constitutes the keys to successful outreach. I am not for a moment suggesting that there is nothing to be learned from such studies. But after a while one may perhaps be excused for marveling how many churches were planted by Paul and Whitefield and Wesley and Stanway and Judson without enjoying these advantages. Of course all of us need to understand the people to whom we minister, and all of us can benefit from small doses of such literature. But massive doses sooner or later dilute the gospel. Ever so subtly, we start to think that success more critically depends on thoughtful sociological analysis than on the gospel; Barna becomes more important than the Bible. We depend on plans, programs, vision statements--but somewhere along the way we have succumbed to the temptation to displace the foolishness of the cross with the wisdom of strategic planning. Again, I insist, my position is not a thinly veiled plea for obscurantism, for seat-of-the-pants ministry that plans nothing. Rather, I fear that the cross, without ever being disowned, is constantly in danger of being dismissed from the central place it must enjoy, by relatively peripheral insights that take on far too much weight. Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far removed from idolatry."

From D.A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: Leadership Lessons from 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, pp. 25-26).