It’s sexy among young people — my generation — to talk about ditching institutional religion and starting a revolution of real Christ-followers living in real community without the confines of church. Besides being unbiblical, such notions of churchless Christianity are unrealistic. It’s immaturity actually, like the newly engaged couple who think romance preserves the marriage, when the couple celebrating their golden anniversary know it’s the institution of marriage that preserves the romance. Without the God-given habit of corporate worship and the God-given mandate of corporate accountability, we will not prove faithful over the long haul.
What we need are fewer revolutionaries and a few more plodding visionaries. That’s my dream for the church — a multitude of faithful, risktaking plodders. The best churches are full of gospel-saturated people holding tenaciously to a vision of godly obedience and God’s glory, and pursuing that godliness and glory with relentless, often unnoticed, plodding consistency.
My generation in particular is prone to radicalism without followthrough. We have dreams of changing the world, and the world should take notice accordingly. But we’ve not proved faithful in much of anything yet. We haven’t held a steady job or raised godly kids or done our time in VBS or, in some cases, even moved off the parental dole. We want global change and expect a few more dollars to the ONE campaign or Habitat for Humanity chapter to just about wrap things up. What the church and the world needs, we imagine, is for us to be another Bono — Christian, but more spiritual than religious and more into social justice than the church. As great as it is that Bono is using his fame for some noble purpose, I just don’t believe that the happy future of the church, or the world for that matter, rests on our ability to raise up a million more Bonos (as at least one author suggests). With all due respect, what’s harder: to be an idolized rock star who travels around the world touting good causes and chiding governments for their lack of foreign aid, or to be a line worker at GM with four kids and a mortgage, who tithes to his church, sings in the choir every week, serves on the school board, and supports a Christian relief agency and a few missionaries from his disposable income?
Until we are content with being one of the million nameless, faceless church members and not the next globe-trotting rock star, we aren’t ready to be a part of the church. In the grand scheme of things, most of us are going to be more of an Ampliatus (Rom. 16:8) or Phlegon (v. 14) than an apostle Paul. And maybe that’s why so many Christians are getting tired of the church. We haven’t learned how to be part of the crowd. We haven’t learned to be ordinary. Our jobs are often mundane. Our devotional times often seem like a waste. Church services are often forgettable. That’s life. We drive to the same places, go through the same routines with the kids, buy the same groceries at the store, and share a bed with the same person every night. Church is often the same too — same doctrines, same basic order of worship, same preacher, same people. But in all the smallness and sameness, God works — like the smallest seed in the garden growing to unbelievable heights, like beloved Tychicus, that faithful minister, delivering the mail and apostolic greetings (Eph. 6:21). Life is usually pretty ordinary, just like following Jesus most days. Daily discipleship is not a new revolution each morning or an agent of global transformation every evening; it’s a long obedience in the same direction.
It’s possible the church needs to change. Certainly in some areas it does. But it’s also possible we’ve changed — and not for the better. It’s possible we no longer find joy in so great a salvation. It’s possible that our boredom has less to do with the church, its doctrines, or its poor leadership and more to do with our unwillingness to tolerate imperfection in others and our own coldness to the same old message about Christ’s death and resurrection. It’s possible we talk a lot about authentic community but we aren’t willing to live in it.
The church is not an incidental part of God’s plan. Jesus didn’t invite people to join an anti-religion, anti-doctrine, anti-institutional bandwagon of love, harmony, and re-integration. He showed people how to live, to be sure. But He also called them to repent, called them to faith, called them out of the world, and called them into the church. The Lord “didn’t add them to the church without saving them, and he didn’t save them without adding them to the church” (John Stott).
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). If we truly love the church, we will bear with her in her failings, endure her struggles, believe her to be the beloved bride of Christ, and hope for her final glorification. The church is the hope of the world — not because she gets it all right, but because she is a body with Christ for her Head.
Don’t give up on the church. The New Testament knows nothing of churchless Christianity. The invisible church is for invisible Christians. The visible church is for you and me. Put away the Che Guevara t-shirts, stop the revolution, and join the rest of the plodders. Fifty years from now you’ll be glad you did.
www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/glory-plodding/
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Ten Commandments of Preaching - Josh Moody
I recently did a seminar on preaching for the European Leadership Forum in Hungary--http://euroleadership.org/. I used the pneumonic ‘E-X-P-O-S-I-T-O-R-Y’ for the ten commandments of preaching. These are some of the notes from which I spoke.
E—Evangelistic. Gospel preaching must have an evangelist edge. You might not have an altar call but you’ve got to call people to the altar.
X—Excellence. It’s hard work. You need sweat to make it sweet.
P—Proclamation. Certainly, all preaching is dialogic in mood though monologic formally. But there is an essential authority to the preaching of God’s Word. God’s Word need be preached winsomely but must not be preached wimpishly.
O—Organization. Structure and lack of it is the hidden failing of many an otherwise good sermon.
S—Scripture. Preaching is to bleed the Bible. If as JI Packer says the Bible is God preaching then preaching is re-preaching the Bible. All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for: not just the authority of Scripture but the sufficiency of Scripture is the mandate of the preacher (2 Tim. 3:16 etc.)
I—Inspiration. I mean here the inspiration in the sense of anointing, and in the sense of the work of the Holy Spirit. Great preaching has the sense that the Holy Spirit is at work, that God the Holy Spirit is speaking (“The sword of the Spirit is the Word of God”), and that the preacher – mysteriously – is talking about me with a word from God.
T—Teaching. The British preacher Dick Lucas makes the point that the difference between the seed that fell on the good soil and produced many times what was sown and the other soils was that the good soil “understood” the Word. Clarity, teaching, instruction. Preaching is not just a vision moment; it is instruction. Clarity. Crystal clarity. Preach not to be understood but so that you cannot be misunderstood.
O—Oratory. There is a false fake rhetoric, and there is a sublime biblical rhetoric, what the Puritans used to call “Plain Preaching.” Not boring preaching, but plain as in ‘straightforward.’ Paul describes the same thing at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 2 and 2 Corinthians 4.
R—Relational. Preaching as a pastor, and to some extent all preaching, has a relational subtext. Preaching is to be an expression of love (“Christ loves compels us”) not an expression of control. The counseling room informs the pulpit, and vice versa.
Y—You. Having written a book called ‘The God-Centered Life’ this might be a surprising point to finish on. But preaching if it is not merely truth mediated through personality, in the famous Haddon Robinson phrase, is at least a personal encounter. It is “live.” Lloyd-Jones used to say that his ambition was to be himself, or words to that effect. Don’t copy someone else; strive to be you in the pulpit, in the sanctified, Holy Spirit filled, godly sense of ‘you.’
drjoshmoody.com
E—Evangelistic. Gospel preaching must have an evangelist edge. You might not have an altar call but you’ve got to call people to the altar.
X—Excellence. It’s hard work. You need sweat to make it sweet.
P—Proclamation. Certainly, all preaching is dialogic in mood though monologic formally. But there is an essential authority to the preaching of God’s Word. God’s Word need be preached winsomely but must not be preached wimpishly.
O—Organization. Structure and lack of it is the hidden failing of many an otherwise good sermon.
S—Scripture. Preaching is to bleed the Bible. If as JI Packer says the Bible is God preaching then preaching is re-preaching the Bible. All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for: not just the authority of Scripture but the sufficiency of Scripture is the mandate of the preacher (2 Tim. 3:16 etc.)
I—Inspiration. I mean here the inspiration in the sense of anointing, and in the sense of the work of the Holy Spirit. Great preaching has the sense that the Holy Spirit is at work, that God the Holy Spirit is speaking (“The sword of the Spirit is the Word of God”), and that the preacher – mysteriously – is talking about me with a word from God.
T—Teaching. The British preacher Dick Lucas makes the point that the difference between the seed that fell on the good soil and produced many times what was sown and the other soils was that the good soil “understood” the Word. Clarity, teaching, instruction. Preaching is not just a vision moment; it is instruction. Clarity. Crystal clarity. Preach not to be understood but so that you cannot be misunderstood.
O—Oratory. There is a false fake rhetoric, and there is a sublime biblical rhetoric, what the Puritans used to call “Plain Preaching.” Not boring preaching, but plain as in ‘straightforward.’ Paul describes the same thing at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 2 and 2 Corinthians 4.
R—Relational. Preaching as a pastor, and to some extent all preaching, has a relational subtext. Preaching is to be an expression of love (“Christ loves compels us”) not an expression of control. The counseling room informs the pulpit, and vice versa.
Y—You. Having written a book called ‘The God-Centered Life’ this might be a surprising point to finish on. But preaching if it is not merely truth mediated through personality, in the famous Haddon Robinson phrase, is at least a personal encounter. It is “live.” Lloyd-Jones used to say that his ambition was to be himself, or words to that effect. Don’t copy someone else; strive to be you in the pulpit, in the sanctified, Holy Spirit filled, godly sense of ‘you.’
drjoshmoody.com
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