It was interesting to read the uproar last week about the salary Manhattan's famous Riverside Church offered its new pastor. The church is infamous in evangelical circles for its pastors that have stretched evangelical tenets to their breaking point--Harry Emerson Fosdick in the 30's and 40's, William Sloane Coffin in the 70's and 80's. It started as a Baptist church but its membership policies were broadened in the 1930's. Today, Riverside describes itself as "interdenominational" and is formally associated with the United Church of Christ and American Baptist Convention.

McKinley, the two bits on sanctification, priceless.  Those have ministered to me this morning and I trust will be showing up all over Grand Cayman in sermon illustrations, counseling sessions, and conversations.  I'm glad you're on the 9Marks payroll!

On another note, Mother's Day is approaching.  Consider this a friendly public service announcement to the prone to forget, prone to miss an opportunity to honor your mother and women who bore your children.  I'm not naming any names; you know who you are.

At any rate, THIS is not a suitable Mother's Day gift for that special woman in your life.  But it is an edifying couple of hours.  The good folks at the Sovereign Grace Pastors' Conference provided two workshops for those dear saints (and by saints, I mean saints; canonize thise women!) who are married to pastors.  For your listening pleasure:

The Pastor’s Wife and Culture: What Feminism Has Done to Femininity (Carolyn McCulley) Listen

The Pastor’s Wife and Ministry Opportunities: Five Great Deals She Won’t Want to Miss (Carolyn Mahaney)  Listen

By the way, how--if at all--will your churches recognize mothers on Mother's Day?

I’d like to take my next three posts to introduce 9Marks readers—pastors especially—to an organization you need to know about: Access Partners.

The name says it all: they partner with missionaries for the sake of helping them get access to countries closed to the gospel, particularly those in the 10/40 window.

As Paul wrote, “But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?” The problem is, the worldviews, cultures, and governments are hostile to Christianity in many nations today, rendering those nations effectively “closed” to the good news.

Missionaries have found that business is one of the few avenues by which closed governments will allow Christians to live within their borders. To serve this need, two members of Capitol Hill Baptist Church created an organization in 2005 called Access Partners.  Access Partners comes alongside church planters to do business for the sake of access into restrictive nations. They build businesses to enable church planting among people least reached by the gospel.

I will post additional information on how you, as a pastor, could become more involved in the work of Access Partners.  For now, take a look at their introductory video.

“Capitol Hill Baptist Church supports Access Partners because they uniquely provide us with an important service. Their knowledgeable and experienced staff enables us to establish new churches in some of the most difficult places in the world.”

- Mark Dever, Senior Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church

“I love the mission of Access Partners. Their zeal for the gospel is matched by their expertise and skill. They’ve given us a practical way to leverage the resources and gifts in our local church to help spread the gospel in closed countries.”

- Joshua Harris, Senior Pastor, Covenant Life Church

Continuing with the 35 statements.  For background and part One, go here.  For part Two, go here.  For part Three, go here.

In the excellent Changing Hearts, Changing Lives video series from CCEF (which, BTW, makes an excellent Sunday School or small group curriculum), David Powlison uses a very helpful illustration about sanctification.  He says (and here I am not quoting the words exactly):

One of the surprises of the Christian life is that as you grow more holy in life and practice, you also grow in your awareness of your own sin and depravity.  In fact, the latter is a key to the former.  As a result, while you are in reality becoming more sanctified, your daily experience is often that of feeling less sanctified.  

Given that I'm the only guy on the 9Marks payroll (metaphorically speaking) who reads the Sports section of the newspaper, I'm pretty sure I've got the scoop here.

Check out You Are Here.

Mike,

To follow up on your point, Mark yesterday told the pastors here in Montreal (through a French translator) that the things which makes the church RELEVANT in any context are the very things that EVERY church in every TIME and PLACE has shared for the last two thousand years, i.e. the Word and the gospel. It's what makes all true Christian churches the same that is MOST important in our ministry. It's amazing, then, how much time we spend talking about other stuff. 

Today I had lunch at the home of a Pakistani man who is a member of our church.  Joining us were eight or nine Bengali men and women who have been coming to the church for a month or two.  They don't know any English, but we are working on helping them navigate getting jobs, finding schools, learning English, etc. and they attend faithfully pretty much every Sunday (even helping to set up!). 

Sovereign Grace has put up their Pastor's Conference audio.  Check it out here, there's a lot of good stuff there.

Greg Gilbert and I are in Chicago for The Gospel Coalition.  Tim Keller opened the conference with a talk on different ways we and our people practice idolatry and how it is important to understand these modern day idols so that pastors can minister (both publicly and privately) to the sheep the Lord gives us.  

Continuing with the 35 statements.  For part One, go here.  For part Two, go here.  My guess is that #15 should generate some comments.

Hey, friends. 9Marks now has a Facebook fan page. Check it out here.

Continuing with the 35 statements.  For part One, click here.

At the recent Sovereign Grace Pastor's Conference, Mark Dever led a seminar on how the church relates to the wider community.  He distributed a document containing "35 somewhat overlapping statements as a pastor to pastors concerning the topic of the congregation’s responsibility for its wider community".  I plan to post those 35 statements here in manageable portions in the coming days.  

If you're like me, you probably get those seductive emails from Westminster's bookstore.  You know the ones, with all the shiny new books that you absolutely must read.  To make matters worse, they've invariably trotted out a member of the Reformed Mafia to tell you in block quotes why this is the best book on the subject since Calvin sat in Geneva.

This piece by William Saletan at Slate is stomach turning.  Almost as wretched is Saletan's complete inability to articulate any kind of reason for his moral outrage beyond gender discrimination.

"When the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons" (Gal. 4:4).

"You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly" (Rom. 5:6).

God impeccably timed the coming of Jesus.  He wasn't a moment too soon in coming, nor a moment too late.  It was "at just the right time."  Things were at their full.  All that had happened before was, in one sense, completed for our instruction, "on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come" (1 Cor. 10:11). 

We should marvel at the precise timing of God in bringing to pass our redemption in Christ.  It was not haphazzard.  It was not coincidental, nor scheduled according to convenience.  Christ's coming was not random or laid back.  Jesus came in the era and moment maximally effective at redeeming His people--"at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly."  The time had fully come.

One of the things impeccably timed with Christ's coming is the setting down of God's word.  Jesus could have come a century or so earlier, before Greek becomes the lingua franca of the empire.  Or, he could have come when the printed word was at its peak and publishing at full tilt.  But had He come earlier, the recording and distribution of holy writ might have met with limited circulation.  Had he come centuries later, when the pubishing was easier and more widespread, perhaps the din of voices would have been too loud to hear the distinctiveness of His own.  Had he come in our video age, how might the pixelated depiction of our Lord and His message have squashed the living dynamism of the word and made static forever all the wrong things?  These are speculations, of course, because He came at just the right time for the inspiration and distribution of His word as well.

A couple implications:

1.  Arguments about the culturally bounded and limited nature of revelation fall short, imo.  He came at just the right time to say just what He wanted to say in the way He wanted to say it to reach all of His people.

2.  Certain things, then, should not be done to His revelation, like twittering the Easter message.  The God-breathed message, fully inspired, wasn't timed for the mediums of our day.  That doesn't mean the message can't work in the medium; it means not every medium is appropriate for the message.  Seems to me a twittered account of the Passion lacks a lot of reverence and awe appropriate to our Lord's sacrifice. 

I'm really glad God sent His Son when He did, accomplishing our salvation, and recorded His word when He did, leaving us an ancient and infallible self-disclosure for the ages.

Greg, helpful and provocative follow-up on RE: the Gospel.  I'm thankful for the piercing clarity you conclude with.  So good I'll copy them here just to be more closely associated with them:

You can see, therefore, why it's so jaw-droppingly ironic when people point to passages like that and say, "I'm going to preach the gospel like that!"  What they're so boldly and courageously declaring is, really, "I’m proudly going to preach the gospel as if I've never fully understood it!  I’m going to preach Jesus' Messiahship as an empty category, void of the content that Jesus himself poured into it through the course of his ministry!  I’m going to preach the gospel in ignorance!”

The four Gospels tell a story, and a significant theme in that story is how the disciples gradually came to understand what Jesus meant when he said, “The kingdom of God is at hand; therefore repent and believe.”  Every phrase of that tightly packed sentence was filled up with meaning as Jesus taught.  And through the course of the story, the disciples moved from ignorance to understanding.  Now, understanding that, I have to ask:  Why would anyone want to go to the part of the story where the disciples are still plainly ignorant and say, “Right there.  That’s my model for my preaching”? 

This is just entirely helpful, along with your exposition of how the developing understanding of the gospels and gospel should help us read briefer statements more fully.

A couple of reasons why someone would look at the disciples in their ignorance and say, "Right there, that's my model for preaching."

1.  Ignorance of our own.  How many have thought about the development of the gospels and the disciples' understanding as clearly as you state it here?  Statements about the disciples' ignorance and unbelief are clear enough in the gospels (John 2:22; 12:16; 14:26; Luke 24:5-8), but I don't knoww that we keep the original disciples' ignorance in mind as we read of their lives with the Lord.  So, an ignorance--benign in intent if not in effect--afflicts our reading of the Scripture, and subsequently our teaching of the Scripture.  And this basic ignorance gets compounded with a more serious ignorance of the Scriptures, of biblical, systematic and historical theology, and of the real needs of our people.  So we tend toward the adoption of messages consistent with our not knowing, our ignorance.

2.  Red letter Bibles and the authority of words.  This is a variation on the ignorance theme, but perhaps some people look to the words of Jesus and the words of the apostles in the gospels as somehow more authentic and paradigmatic.  We see this all the time in "scholarly" circles where critical analysis is king, and effort to get behind the text to the "real" words and meanings.  Red letter Bibles have become the layman's version of this same striving to get "behind" the words to the real or true words with authority.  I remember the first time I heard a Christian co-worker say to me when discussing something in Romans, "Yeah, but we're really just supposed to pay attention to the words in red.  Those are Jesus' words.  The rest don't count as much" or something like that.  That's one way you end up with "jaw-droppingly ironic" preaching methods and messages that leave a lot to be desired.  And among certain pastors, there is an attraction to "authenticity" and ancient forms.  In unsophisticated terms, that attraction tends toward  the simplistic (not simple).

3.  Laziness.  It doesn't require much to preach a gospel empty of the meaning that's placed into it by the whole of scripture.  It's easier to reduce it to an outline.  But to meditate on and preach the riches of the gospel in all their diamond-like light-refracting glory takes work.  How do you get to the gospel from 2 Samuel 18 without tacking on a little outline or plea at the end?  Work.  Application of the whole counsel of God.  Biblical theology.  Systematic theology.  Careful exegesis.  Work.

4.  Trendiness.  Not everyone who takes the approach we lament is lazy or ignorant.  Some are trendy.  It's trendy right now to speak as though this or that camp i ssomehow the theological and methodological descendants of the original apostles and practicing just as they did.  Church buildings are out.  Candles are in.  Done with any liturgy or structure; let's get on with community ambiguously construed.  Reading our NTs or church history for "what the early church did" is fashionable.  Now, that examination has its place and is necessary to our understanding.  But, there exists a kind of "really old is kool" trendiness and shallowness about some of this.  A disdain or indifference toward the contemporary church prompts an odd anti-church reading of the Scripture, and all of that is labeled en vogue, cool, trendy, and a host of other phrases.

5.  Social concern.  A lot of social justice concern is poured into the broader definitions of the gospel and the way it's preached.  The formulation you insist on at bottom, seems to disallow such concerns.  Some think insistence on personal repentance and faith, sin and wrath, and forgiveness and eternal life creates an other-worldly perspective that weakens this-worldly mission.  And to be fair, for too many preachers and Christians this biblical definition and essential message has at least limited social concern to this or that favorite issue, if not removed it altogether.  So the broader kingdom emphasis, with simplicity and ambiguity as handmaidens, opens for some a door for ensuring these important things are included. 

6.  Fear of man.  One can't help but think that some of this attempt to redefine the gospel in terms that downplay substitution, sin, wrath, and the call to repentance and faith finds its impetus in the fear of man.  Let's face it: preaching the gospel has always been and will always be wildly unpopular with sinners and with many professing Christians who love the Lord but who've never thought long about such issues.  If the preacher's soul tires of staring into unhappy and indifferent faces, cowers at offending, or finds resistance to the gospel discouraging, he'll not be long in preaching the gospel with application to individuals.  He'll find "the kingdom" or something called "the gospel" with no personal demands safer ground for his feet.  And he'll stand there rather than outside the camp, at the flaming hot gates of hell, where there is opposition, persecution, slander, reviling, and suffering.

Molly asked a good question in the comments section of my post “Which Gospel?”  She says,

You say, "In the NT, the good news is always the proclamation of forgiveness of sin through the substitutionary death of Jesus, and the call to repent to believe in him."

We're told in Luke 9:6, "Departing, they began going throughout the villages, proclaiming the gospel and healing everywhere."

Just nine chapters later we're told in Luke 18:31-34: "Then He took the twelve aside and said to them, 'Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things which are written through the prophets about the Son of Man will be accomplished. For He will be handed over to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and mistreated and spit upon, and after they have scourged Him, they will kill Him; and the third day He will rise again.' But the disciples understood none of these things, and the meaning of this statement was hidden from them, and they did not comprehend the things that were said."

If the gospel in the New Testament "is always the proclamation of forgiveness of sin through the substitutionary death of Jesus," why does Luke 18:34 say the disciples "understood none of these things"? And if they didn't understand it in Luke 18 (it was news to them then, so to speak), how could they have been proclaiming previously the very thing they were stunned to hear?

A very good question.  I think the answer is that the disciples weren’t proclaiming those things in their fullness.  They were proclaiming the same true gospel that Jesus does in Mark 1, but they didn’t yet understand the full content of the true Gospel they were preaching.

Here’s the deal:  When I say, “In the NT, the good news is always the proclamation of forgiveness of sin through the substitutionary death of Jesus, and the call to repent to believe in him," I don’t mean that all that content came out of Jesus’ lips the first time he preached “the gospel of God.”  Mark tells us that what came out of his lips was “The kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe!”  I think that’s probably what came out of the disciples’ lips, too, in Luke 9.  But that’s clearly a seed form of the gospel, meaning that throughout his ministry Jesus was filling up those ideas of “kingdom,” “repentance,” and “belief” with deep and profound content.  Concerning the disciples, I think they clearly were preaching that seed form of the gospel with no understanding at all of the content with which Jesus was filling it.  But I think Jesus, by contrast, understood the full content of that seed-gospel from the very beginning.  I don’t think he said, “Huh?” when John called him “the Lamb of God.”  And as he ministered and taught, he filled those categories of Kingship, Messiahship, repentance, and belief with meaning.

You have to remember that the gospels are a story that takes place in a particular time—and no normal time at that.  This was the time when the Messiah himself had arrived, but had not yet “finished” redemption. (Don’t get on me here about the consummation—I’m just using Jesus’ word.)  And therefore it was a time when theological categories that had been left untouched for centuries are being emptied out and refilled with deeper, greater meaning.  So what you get in the story of the gospels is this boiling, rolling narrative with all these things being progressively clarified, filled in, and crystallized.  At the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus’ message is “The kingdom of God is at hand, and I’m the Messiah.  Repent and believe in me as Messiah,” and that’s probably the message the disciples were preaching in Luke 9.  But throughout the story, that category of Messiahship is being filled up with meaning.  The angels start it:  “He will save his people from their sins.”  John the Baptist continues it:  “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”  And Jesus himself is moving quickly to fill it up even more until it’s full, and Paul finally says, “Alright, the filling’s done!  What we’re giving you is what we received from Jesus.”

I think the disciples in Luke 9 were preaching the good news as well as they understood it for their very unique time—Jesus is the Messiah; repent and believe in him.  But as Luke 18 makes clear, there was much about that idea of Messiahship that they didn’t understand, that Jesus had yet to fill in for them.

You can see, therefore, why it's so jaw-droppingly ironic when people point to passages like that and say, "I'm going to preach the gospel like that!"  What they're so boldly and courageously declaring is, really, "I’m proudly going to preach the gospel as if I've never fully understood it!  I’m going to preach Jesus' Messiahship as an empty category, void of the content that Jesus himself poured into it through the course of his ministry!  I’m going to preach the gospel in ignorance!”

The four Gospels tell a story, and a significant theme in that story is how the disciples gradually came to understand what Jesus meant when he said, “The kingdom of God is at hand; therefore repent and believe.”  Every phrase of that tightly packed sentence was filled up with meaning as Jesus taught.  And through the course of the story, the disciples moved from ignorance to understanding.  Now, understanding that, I have to ask:  Why would anyone want to go to the part of the story where the disciples are still plainly ignorant and say, “Right there.  That’s my model for my preaching”? 

My friend Matt Merker and I were walking to lunch a couple hours ago and were thinking about the Jonathan Edwards' distinction between the knowledge of honey and the taste of honey, which he uses to help us understand the sweetness of knowing Christ.

But we were thinking about the opposite fact: why is it that we have so little sense for the bitterness of sin?

So we came up with seventeen ideas for how to grow in a godly sense for the bitterness of sin--that we might despise, fight, and flee sin:

1. Spend more time trying to taste what is sweet--Christ. I.e. worship.
2. Fight sin (as you fight it, you'll discover how strong and horrible it is).
3. Pray: ask God to increase your sense of its bitterness; ask God for more brokenness.
4. Meditate on the outcome of sin and particular sins.
5. Avail yourself of the public teaching of the word.
6. Avail yourself of the testimonies of other Christians concerning the ruinous nature of sin in their lives.
7. Help other fight sin--own and feel their struggles with them.
8. Spend more time with non-Christians and consider their hopes and hurts.
9. Read the daily news.
10. Have at least a passing awareness of your own culture and how the fall has manifested itself in your context (through media, legislation, etc.)
11. Confess your own sins daily.
12. For pastors: Plan and execute corporate prayers of confession.
13. For pastors: Make sure at least some of Sunday's music is of the minor key variety, i.e. confesses and grieves sin. For example: Ah, Holy Jesus.
14. Spend time caring for the poor, needy, and victims of injustice.
15. Spend time reading and meditating on the Old Testament--both individual passages as well as the storyline of the whole thing.
16. Watch this video.
17. Meditate often on what this video, like a shadow, points toward.

That, anyhow, is what we came up with over the first 20 minutes of lunch. Do you have anything to add?

Well, technically, I'm still there.  One more talk tonight by CJ Mahaney on I Peter 5.

Speaking of Scot McKnight, he published a post a few days ago in which he asks the question "Which gospel do you choose?"  You can check it out here.

Like many others, Scot has been advocating recently for a "broader" gospel than what I have called "The Gospel of the Cross," and this post, I think, is in the same vein.  Scot quotes two different statements of the Christian gospel, one by N.T. Wright and the other by an unnamed, unlinked, "slightly edited" someone.  I think it's safe to say that Scot's hope is that we will all choose Wright's version of the gospel, rather than the other one.

My own opinion, written about here, here, and here, is actually that neither of the two options Scot lays out is a sufficient explanation of the biblical gospel.  On the one hand, I think it's probably inaccurate to say that the gospel (broadly considered, which it sometimes is in the NT) doesn't include the proclamation of the kingdom, the promise of resurrection, the promise of Christ's return, and many other promises.  But on the other hand, I also think that what McKnight quotes here from Wright is also woefully insufficient, and indeed not good news at all.  Here's what he quotes from Wright:

Here are a few thoughts on why I think this "gospel" is terribly lacking:

First, there is no explanation at all of what Jesus' death on the cross actually did.  Yes, Wright says that Jesus' death won the decisive victory over the powers of evil, but what does that actually mean?  How did his death do that?  I think the New Testament is much, much, much clearer about the significance of Jesus' death than that--and it includes that explanation in the proclamation of the good news.

Second, it's terribly confused as to whom all these wonderful things are for.  On the one hand, it can easily leave the impression that everyone is included, regardless of their spiritual state.  'Good news!  Jesus is "the true king of the world" and "every knee" will bow to him!'  On the other hand, if you don't read it in a universalist fashion, it doesn't include anything about how a person takes advantage of all these wonderful things Jesus has done. In the New Testament, on the other hand, the proclamation of the gospel always includes the means by which one can enter.  "The kingdom is at hand [full stop]," is never---not once---in the NT said to be the gospel.  It is always something more like, "The kingdom is at hand; therefore repent and believe [that is, trust in the crucified and risen Jesus for salvation]."

Third, there's no indication that Jesus' death had any connection with the wrath of God against our sin.  And yet the Bible really couldn't be clearer that: "He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities.  The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed."

I won't rehash here in detail what I wrote in those earlier posts, but I think we can say it simply like this:  In the NT, the good news is always the proclamation of forgiveness of sin through the substitutionary death of Jesus, and the call to repent to believe in him. Sometimes that's all the NT mentions as the "good news"; sometimes it also seems to zoom out to include in the good news all the promises that flow to those who are so forgiven.  What the NT never holds out as the gospel, however, is the bare declaration that the kingdom has come apart from the means of entering it (faith in Christ's substitutionary death).  Speaking biblically, the gospel is either Cross or Cross-and-Kingdom.  But it is never Kingdom alone.

With Scot McKnight, Brett and Alex Harris, Kevin DeYoung, and Tony Jones.  Painful at points, but instructive nonetheless.  Video here.

Pray for the persecuted brethren today.  And each day the Lord grants.

Several stories from Crosswalk.com to stir empathy and prayer:

Various incidents in India.

Religious freedom violations in Morocco.

Destruction of church buildings and forced relocations in Laos.

500 Christians face new Sharia regime under Taliban rule in Pakistan village.

Raids, arrests and harrassments in Uzbekistan.

"Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison.  They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword.  They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated--the world was not worthy of them." (Heb. 11:35-38)

Let's pray for them today.