Trivializing Good Friday

^{Matthew 7:6a} “Do not give dogs what is sacred…”

Although the passage above normally refers to offering your spiritual gifts, your ministry, your teachings to people who are unreceptive, there is an equally opposite danger that can occur when people are receptive by virtue of being hungry and thirsty for the deeper things of God and those  in leadership fail to provide the spiritual necessities.

In other words, if you can profane your teaching by offering it to people who treat it with contempt and scorn, I believe you can also profane it — and treat it with contempt — by offering less than the best that is appropriate to a particular situation.

One of the ways I think we do this is by failing to really get inside the moment that is Good Friday. If we fail to allow our hearts to capture Christ’s suffering and death on our behalf, then we have nothing to share with others who want that to be the focus of their holy day. We show ourselves to be extremely shallow spiritually.

If you have the responsibility of planning a service for Good Friday — or any part of it — it’s so important to bury yourself in the story and then let the text speak to you as you decide which elements of that story to impart to others. Otherwise, you’re guilty of trivializing the text, trivializing the day, trivializing Christ’s atoning work in suffering and dying for us.

One of the shortest verses in scripture is “Jesus wept.”  We tend to want to reduce the events between His arrest and His resurrection — which we will celebrate on Resurrection Sunday, but in Good Friday, not yet — to a simple text of “Jesus died.” But in reality, it goes on for chapters, in all four gospels, and is the very centerpiece of our faith, and the centerpiece of all of scripture, first and second testaments included.

We dare not trivialize that.

In fact, three years ago I wrote about a familiar passage in I Cor. 11, and noted that really, the betrayal of Jesus what ‘hatching’ in the mind of Judas long before the Passion Week narrative begins. With the religious leaders of the day, Jesus’ death was a work in progress.

“On the night Jesus was betrayed, He took bread and… broke it saying, ‘This is my Body, broken for you; do this in remembrance of me.’”

I didn’t even need to look it up. Here’s what I wrote back then:

As English shifts, modern ears might be getting this as “After Jesus was betrayed he took bread…”

I think a better reading would be, “On the night that Jesus was about to be betrayed…”

Or better yet, “Knowing full well that he was just a couple of hours from being betrayed, he took bread…”

Judas was about to exit the building. His scheming mind hatched the plan needed to locate and identify Jesus with the least interference from the crowd, and bring him before the Romans to mete out the death penalty on charges of blasphemy. There would be profit in this, not to mention a place of honor among both Pharisees and Romans alike.

But before he even left, Jesus says, “This is my Body, broken for you.” He is in control. He is giving Himself.

The Wycliffe Version isn’t the translation on Bible Gateway that most bloggers turn to, but its rendering is unique: “Take ye, and eat ye; this is my body, which shall be betrayed for you; do ye this thing into my mind.” (italics added)

It clears up the verb tense thing as it relates to the order of events, which shall (or will) be broken for you, only it has the surprise element of bringing betrayal in that clause as well: shall be betrayed for you.

Christ’s body was physically broken for us, but his esprit was no doubt broken by the betrayal of someone who He had walked and talked with; someone whom He had taught in the give and take sense of eastern teaching — for three years.

The Amplified Bible is one of the few other translations that addresses the order of events. Note the section I’ve italicized: “For I received from the Lord Himself that which I passed on to you [it was given to me personally], that the Lord Jesus on the night when He was treacherously delivered up and while His betrayal was in progress took bread…”

In a culture that grows less Biblically literate by the day, I think it necessary to sometimes look twice at details of the story that we just assume that people know. Necessary to clarify, to remove confusion.

But sometimes, in the examination, there is discovery, and the familiar narrative continues to take on shades of depth and meaning beyond anything we’d already considered.

Thinking Out Loud, Jan 4, 2010

… To which I add today, that it is in the closer readings, in the rediscoveries, we are drawn deep into those long ago days and less likely to rush through or trivialize the proceedings of a sacred time in our church calendar.

Jesus Said More Than The Lord’s Prayer

^{NIV Mark 1:35} Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. ³⁶ Simon and his companions went to look for him, ³⁷ and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”

³⁸ Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” ³⁹ So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.

Today we have a guest post from Clark Bunch who blogs at The Master’s Table and was gracious enough to write this just for us!

 

Jesus Said More Than the Lord’s Prayer

 

Sometimes as Christians we get this odd idea that the more involved we are in ministry, or the closer to God we feel, the less we need to pray.  Rather than argue against this premise, let’s take a look at the Gospels and once again consider what Jesus would do.  In this case we don’t have to guess, there is plenty of material on the prayer life of Jesus.

 

1. Jesus prayed early in the morning.  In Mark 1:35 Jesus went out to pray “while it was still dark,” in other words before first light.  He made prayer his first priority, before doing anything else.  There’s an old saying about praying when all else fails.  Jesus prayed before trying anything else.  He began each day by connecting with God his father.  

 

2. Jesus prayed before important events.  In this same passage (Mark 1:35-39) Jesus spends time in prayer before beginning his ministry in Galilee.  He spent time in prayer and fasting before beginning his public ministry, and we will say more about his prayer in Gethsemane in a moment; that was the night before his trial and crucifixion.  Before major events that marked a change in his ministry, Jesus spent extra time and energy in prayer.  Before calling the Twelve (Luke 6:12) he prayed all night.  

 

3. Jesus taught his disciples to pray.  The Gospels record the public ministry of Jesus, in which he preached to the multitudes, and also private teachings with a much smaller audience.  Sometimes it’s just the 12 apostles and sometimes he is with a much smaller group than the throng of followers.  His disciples asked him to teach them to pray, and he gave them what has become known as the Lord’s Prayer.  I prefer Model Prayer or Disciples’ Prayer to calling it the Lord’s Prayer.  

The model he gave them was a teaching tool.  He kept it simple to illustrate the important parts one should include in prayer, but that is not the prayer Jesus said each time he prayed. The High Priestly prayer of Jesus (John 17) is how Jesus himself prays, especially in his “new role” as our High Priest and advocate with the Father.  

 

4. Jesus prayed ’till it hurt.  We’ve already mentioned Jesus praying at Gethsemane before his arrest and false trial.  This story is recorded in all of the Gospels, but Luke makes an interesting note in 22:44.  Luke, described by the Apostle Paul as his beloved physician, says that Jesus prayed until “his sweat became as great drops of blood.”  It is possible during times of great physical duress for one’s capillaries to break under the skin and for blood to escape, probably mixed with sweat, through the skin.  Rather than debate if he was bleeding, don’t miss this point: Jesus was not only praying he broke a sweat.  ”Now I lay be down to sleep” is not going to do that to a person.  Jesus never taught lessons until he sweat drops of blood; he never healed the sick, raised the dead, preached sermons, walked on water, feed the crowds nor anything else until he sweat blood.  The only time we see this in the Gospels is while he was praying.  

 

The notion that the closer we get to God the less time we need to spend in prayer is misguided.  Jesus was the Son of God, the very incarnation of God robed in flesh, and he made prayer a priority each day.  No one has ever been closer to God the Father than Jesus himself.  There are many more accounts of Jesus praying than those listed above, but let me leave you with this one: Jesus prayed on the cross.  Even while Roman soldiers drove nails into his hands, and the Jewish leaders watched and mocked, he prayed for those crucifying him.  ”Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  Jesus was literally dying; what’s our excuse not to pray? 

~Clark Bunch

The purpose of The Master’s Table is to promote the centrality of Christ in the scriptures. In the Last Supper, Jesus is in the center. In our lives, churches, Bible study, witnessing, blogging, etc. Jesus Christ should be at the center.

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Image:  Purchase today’s image as an unframed print at Cross Into Your Life.

Oswald J. Smith Quotations

I was blessed to spend some very spiritually formative years, from age eleven to age 21 in The Peoples Church, Toronto; the church founded by Rev. Dr. Oswald J. Smith, although when I attended the torch had already been passed to his son, Dr. Paul B. Smith.  Peoples was and still is a very missions-focused church, so it’s not surprising that many of the quotations here have to do with missions and evangelism.  Oswald Smith was turned down for missionary service because his health was considered too fragile, but in the end, he lived into his late ’90s and traveled the world as a missionary speaker.

One of the things that is most striking here is that although the quotations are short — some critics would say ‘pithy’ — they are totally focused; Oswald Smith was totally driven by his desire to see the gospel taken to the four corners of the earth. It would not be a stretch to say that Oswald’s regard for evangelization was as intentional as that of the Apostle Paul.  .

While the church you grew up in may have had its yearly highlights at Christmas or Easter, at Peoples Church, the World Missions Conference was the high point on the church calendar, and funds were raised not through cash offerings, but through a “Faith Promise Offering” system of giving whereby parishioners pledged to support missions sacrificially through regular giving over a twelve-month period.

Sadly, almost all of the dozens of books Oswald J. Smith wrote are out of print, but with today’s print-on-demand technology, it might be possible to make some of them available in the future.

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God wills the evangelization of the world, and you refuse to support missions, then you are opposed to the will of God.   

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Give according to your income lest God make your income according to your giving. 

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So long as there is a human being who does not know Jesus Christ, I am his debtor to serve him until he does.

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The church that does not evangelize will fossilize.

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This last month I have felt the burden of a city. Its great sorrow has pressed in on my soul. Its vice and sin have bowed me upon my knees in tears. I cried and cried to God to have mercy on the poor fallen girls; and the burden is crushing.

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We talk of the Second Coming; half the world has never heard of the first.

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No one has the right to hear the gospel twice, while there remains someone who has not heard it once.

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Oh, to realize that souls, precious, never dying souls, are perishing all around us, going out into the blackness of darkness and despair, eternally lost, and yet to feel no anguish, shed no tears, know no travail! How little we know of the compassion of Jesus!

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Sources: Biserica, FrontierNet, SermonIndex.net, TentMaker.org, DailyChristianQuote

N. T. Wright on Enjoying the Bible

Thanks to blogger and friend Jon Rising for getting me on to a N. T. Wright video binge today.   Check out Jon’s posting of a recent piece, A Parable About a Parable, especially if you don’t have time for what follows.  Today’s piece is a 30-minute television program produced at Calvin College in Grand Rapids.

Church: On the Other Hand…

Sometimes when we’re reading Christian blogs, we try to read between the lines to figure out where the writer stands on various issues.  If you read this blog and its companion, Thinking out Loud, over the past few weeks, there have been a couple of references to the house church or organic church or simple church movement, as well as an article about how we can get so addicted to all things church that we can miss Jesus; so it would be easy to assume that I’m a bit soft on the whole brick and mortar church thing.

But that would be a mistake.  This week I attended two different morning services and later today I’ll watch two different online church services which are rebroadcasts of brick and mortar church gatherings.  I’m the biggest cheerleader I know of in my local area for what local churches are doing. 

This morning I was reminded of this verse in John 2, which falls at the end of the passage where Jesus clears the temple (the first time) and possible where we get the expression, “Now the tables are turned.”

^{NIV John2:17} His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

The NLT has it as “passion” while the New Century Version uses “strong love.”  The quote is from Psalm 69:9 –

^{NIV Ps.69:9} for zeal for your house consumes me,
   and the insults of those who insult you fall on me.

– which is interesting because it equates zeal for God’s “house” with the seriousness of those who insult God Himself.

Living in Canada, which is nearly 50% nominally Roman Catholic, we’re familiar with the French language which uses “tabernacle” as a swear word.  It’s a rather grievous term, as is any unnecessary mention of God (the French say Mon Dieu) or Jesus, but it betrays its origins in a great respect for the building in which worship is conducted.

Today, many of our church buildings are multi-purpose structures used for a variety of weekly events; having community-friendly or seeker-friendly auditoriums — the word ‘sanctuary’ is no longer in vogue — which are free of crosses or other religious icons or symbols.  People show up in jeans or shorts and t-shirts and are often seen drinking coffee during the songs and sermon, while the kids go running wild before and after the service starts.  It’s hard to imagine that being seen as worthy of generating a swear word!

Maybe those things are externals, and are less important now than they were a couple of generations back because we see those things as superficial when it comes to defining deep faith.  I’m not sure.  But I do think we need to rediscover the Psalm 69/John 2 verse, which the NASB takes a step further, quoting the Psalms passage in John in capital letters:

¹⁷ His disciples remembered that it was written, “ZEAL FOR YOUR HOUSE WILL CONSUME ME.”

~Paul Wilkinson

Christmas Card Theology

If it is true that the DNA of the gospel is found even in the books of the Old Testament, there ought to be no end to the number of verses that can be used on Christmas cards to announce the incarnation; to proclaim that God has come to dwell with man.

I was truly struck by this many years ago when Tom, a graphic artist I got to know briefly, decided to screen print his own Christmas cards.   The passage he chose was the beginning of Hebrews 1, though some (like me) maintain that the reason we can’t 100% verify the authorship of Hebrews is because we’ve got a letter where the first page is missing.   So chapter 1 may not be its first words.   Nonetheless…

¹God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,

²Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds…

Okay, I know I just lost a few people, but I like the unique KJV wording.   Where else do you find “sundry times” and “divers manners” which is exactly the text Tom chose for his Christmas cards.

Here’s the (new) NIV with an extra verse:

¹ In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, ² but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. ³ The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

And of course, The Message:

^1-3Going through a long line of prophets, God has been addressing our ancestors in different ways for centuries. Recently he spoke to us directly through his Son. By his Son, God created the world in the beginning, and it will all belong to the Son at the end. This Son perfectly mirrors God, and is stamped with God’s nature. He holds everything together by what he says—powerful words! After he finished the sacrifice for sins, the Son took his honored place high in the heavens right alongside God…

I like The Message’s in-context use of the word “recently.”   “This just in!”  It’s a new day.  A new opportunity.   A new beginning.

Are there verse that lie outside the typical (i.e. Luke 2) Christmas narrative that hit home for you as they contain the message of Christmas?

The Essence of the Gospel

In certain circles it has become, if nothing else, fashionable to discuss the question, “What is the Gospel?” to the point where I am beginning to think that non-believers will simply know it when they hear it.   I just worry that sometimes we over-analyze something we should simply be living.

That dismissiveness aside,Tullian Tchividjian has been busy on Twitter compiling short statements expressing various aspects of the gospel.  Apparently, the gospel can’t be contained in a single statement.   Blogger Barry Simmons assembled a couple of lists at his blog The Journeyman’s Files both here and here.   I linked to it today at Thinking Out Loud, but thought we’d spell out a few of the statements here for C201 readers…

• The gospel reminds us that we become more mature when we focus less on what we need to do for God and more on all God has already done for us.
• The gospel tells me my identity and security is in Christ–this frees me to give everything I have because in Christ I have everything I need
• The gospel tells us we don’t need to spend our lives earning the approval of others because Jesus has already earned God’s approval for us
• When you understand that your significance and identity is anchored in Christ, you don’t have to win—you’re free to lose
• Christian growth doesn’t happen by working hard to get something you don’t have. It happens by working hard to live in light of what you do have
• The world says that the bigger we become, the freer we will be. But the gospel tells us that the smaller we become, the freer we will be.
• The gospel explains success in terms of giving, not taking; self-sacrifice, not self-indulgence; going to the back, not getting to the front
• The gospel empowers us to live for what’s timeless, not trendy–to follow Jesus even when it means going against what’s fashionable
• Because of Christ’s finished work, sinners can have the approval, acceptance, security, freedom, love, righteousness, & rescue they long for
• The only antidote there has ever been to sin is the gospel—and since we never leave off sinning, we can never leave the gospel.
• Because of Christ’s propitiatory work on my behalf I no longer need preeminence, prosperity, position, promotions, praise or popularity.
• The vertical indicative (what God’s done for me) always precedes horizontal imperative (how I’m to live in light of what God’s done for me)
• When you are united to Christ, no amount of good work can earn God’s favor and no amount of bad work can forfeit God’s favor
• Jesus came not to angrily strip away our freedom but to affectionately strip away our slavery to lesser things so we might become truly free
• The irony of the gospel is that we truly perform better when we focus less on our performance for Jesus and more on Jesus’ performance for us
• The gospel tells us that what God has done for us in Christ is infinitely more important than anything we do for him.
• Isn’t it ironic that while God’s treatment of us depends on Christ’s performance, our treatment of others depends on their performance?
• We need God’s gospel rescue every day and in every way because we are, in the words of John Calvin, “partly unbelievers until we die.”
• Daily sin requires a daily distribution of God’s grace
• The hard work of sanctification is the hard work of constantly reorienting ourselves back to our justification.
• Grace can be defined as unconditional acceptance granted to an undeserving person by an unobligated giver.
• The law tells us what God demands from us; the gospel tells us what God in Christ has done for us because we could not meet his demands.
• Paul never uses the law as a way to motivate obedience; He always uses the gospel.
• When you understand God’s grace, pain leads to freedom because deep suffering leads to deep surrender!
• When we depend on things smaller than Jesus to provide us with the security and meaning we long for, God will love us enough to take them away.
• The gospel is the good news that God rescues sinners. And since both non-Christians & Christians are sinners, we both need the gospel.
• The gospel grants Christians one strength over non-Christians: the strength to admit they’re weak.
• The gospel isn’t just the power of God to save us, it’s the power of God to grow us once we’re saved.
• When we transfer trust from ourselves to Christ, we experience the abundant freedoms that come from not having to measure up.
• The gospel makes wise those who know they’re foolish and makes fools out of those who think they’re wise.
• It never ceases to amaze me that God’s love to those who are in Christ isn’t conditioned on how we behave but on how Christ behaved for us.
• In the gospel, God comes after us because we need him not because he needs us. Only the gospel can free us to revel in our insignificance.
• Mt. Sinai says, “You must do.” Mt. Calvary says, “Because you couldn’t, Jesus did.” Don’t run to the wrong mountain for your hiding place.

Remember these is only about half the list; click on both of the above links to get the full list; and thank-you Barry for compiling this.

The Power of a Testimony

I want to continue where I left off yesterday, but in entirely different terms.

Contemporary church services don’t allow for what was once called “testimony time.”  We did a thing in our church years ago called “The Witness Stand,” which brought individual stories from the Sunday night service up into the morning service, when a greater number of people attended.

These days, you tend to hear stories in church only from people who are (a) being baptized or (b) going to or returning from a missions trip.

Even our songs — much as I love the ‘vertical’ quality of modern worship — no longer tell a story, either literally or poetically.   Maybe you’re old enough to remember:  “I was sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore; very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more.  But the Master of the sea heard my dispairing cry; from the water lifted me now saved am I.”  Or maybe those words just sound quaint and foreign, but they reflected a storyline no longer present in our worship services.

Maybe the words in “Victory in Jesus” that talk about the time “he plunged me to victory” don’t work in the 21st century, but there’s got to be a “before and after” song out there besides “Amazing Grace.”

So when I wrote yesterday about not letting anyone take away your story — or your very name — I wasn’t talking about identity theft.   I meant instead the importance of hanging on to all that God has done in your life.   That may mean keeping a journal or even starting a blog.  (Or writing a song.)

In the NLT, John 21 ends with John affirming his own story:

²⁴ This disciple is the one who testifies to these events and has recorded them here. And we know that his account of these things is accurate.

…but I much prefer what I believe was the older version in The Living Bible which has John boldly affirm — after chapters and chapters of loose references to “the disciple that Jesus loved” — his place in the story with, “I am that disciple!”

What a climax to the story!   In other words he’s saying, “It was me!  I was the one who shared those moments; I was part of that inner circle!   It was James and Peter and I to whom he told those stories and hinted at some of the secrets of the Kingdom.   I was there!”

The biggest lie the Devil would have you believe is that some of the greatest moments of spiritual victory you experienced never really happened.   As I wrote a few days ago, when you “take this bread” don’t just remember all that Christ did on the cross all those years ago, but remember what He did in you and through you because of the cross.

Religion = Bad News

I‘ve used material from Clark Bunch’s blog, The Master’s Table a few times at Thinking Out Loud, but this is his first time here at Christianity201…
Religion is Bad News

If you type “religion, gospel” into the Google search bar, you get 3.6 million results in about 0.22 seconds.  Search on WordPress and the results are even more along the lines of “Religion vs. the Gospel” and such like.  Lots of people are aware of the shortcomings of religion compared to the Good News of Jesus Christ.  But even for the believer, and certainly for everyone else, the temptation is still there to not fully trust in the concept of grace.

In Mark’s Gospel (Mk. 5:1-20) Jesus and the disciples land on the coast of the Gerasenes.   They encounter Legion, a mad man filled with demons.  After Jesus casts the demons into a herd of pigs, the locals are amazed to see the man formerly known as Legion clothed and in his right mind.  Rather than allow him to follow, Jesus commands him to go back to his home town and tell them what God has done.  In this case, the man does so. Ergo: You don’t have to fix all your problems before coming to Jesus. How many people plan to come to church as soon as they quit drinking, stop smoking, get back with their ex-wife, find a job, etc. etc.  We cannot fix our own problems, and if we could then we wouldn’t need Jesus in the first place.  Remember what Jesus told the Pharisees; it is the sick who need a physician, not the well.

The rich young man (Mk. 10:17-22) come to Jesus with one simple question; What must I do to be saved. Religion is about what we do.  We could substitute Law if we were comparing the Law to the Gospel.  Keeping the Law, very religious.  This man claims to have keep each of the commandments since his youth. Unlikely.  David was a man after God’s own heart, and he failed all kinds of ways to keep the Law.  We simply cannot do what is right, just like we cannot in and of ourselves fix what is wrong. Religion is what we do; grace is what God has already done.

We can’t.  That’s the story of fallen man.  We can’t keep the Law.  We can’t be right.  We can’t fix what’s wrong.  Religion is our attempt to either be right or fix the wrong, and we the human people are epic failures at both. Religion is bad news; the Gospel is Good News. Tell the world.

Read more of Clark’s blog here.

I Cor. 1 (sort of)

This morning I began the day reading the first half of I Corinthians.   In the first chapter, I paused at verses 22-23:

²²Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (NIV)

I noticed again the recurring conflict in scripture between grace and knowledge or between word and spirit; only in this case it’s between signs and wisdom.  The Jews expect to see signs and miracles, while the Greek mindset is to look for a philosophy that satisfies the rational mind.

I couldn’t resist a potential contemporary paraphrase:

People with a Charismatic leaning look for signs and wonders, and those with a Calvinist leaning look for great preaching and teaching; but we’re just sticking to the simple story of Christ’s death and resurrection.

Okay, it was stereotypes.   I’ll try to do better tomorrow.   Here’s how Eugene Peterson translates those two verses (plus a couple extra):

^22-25While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. But to us who are personally called by God himself—both Jews and Greeks—Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can’t begin to compete with God’s “weakness.”

More From Plan B by Pete Wilson

I wish I’d had this nearby to answer someone last week.

[Louie] Giglio pointed out that there are really two parts to John 16:33.  First, Jesus clearly says that we’re going to have trouble in this world.  Then he tells us to be brave because he has defeated the world.   Two statements — and if you separate them you have two bad theologies.

For instance, if you just focus on Jesus’ first statement, “in this world you will have trouble,” you could develop a mental framework of “this world stinks.”  Stuff happens, and you can’t do a thing about it.  You live and then you die.

…But what if you only focus on the second half of this verse, where Jesus says, “I have overcome the world”?  If you take just this statement as a mental framework, you start to think there will never be any trouble — or at least no serious trouble.  “Nothing bad is going to happen to me as long as I’m following Jesus.”  If you cling only to this statement, you force yourself to live in a false reality.   Despite all evidence to the contrary, you just pretend everything is great and all the charts of your life are going to keep moving up and to the right.  In the process, you’re probably setting yourself up for a fall because your false reality will eventually be shattered.

But if you take the two statements in this verse and put them together, then you have what Jesus was talking about.  You have a more complete theology.

You are not exempt from trouble, even serious trouble.  You are not exempt from Plan Bs.  But at the same time, you can have confidence that Jesus will win out over trouble.   In that there is hope.

pp. 147-148;  Pete Wilson, Plan B:  What Do You Do When God Doesn’t Shop Up The Way You Thought He Would? (Thomas Nelson, 2010)

Why Should Anyone *Ever* Hear the Gospel?

The church I grew up had a huge missions conference every year in which every available bit of wall space was covered with banners sporting all manner of quotations and slogans.

The one that is most memorable is:

Why should anyone hear the gospel twice before everyone has heard it once?

I’ve often thought about that.   It does seem a bit unfair that North Americans experience so much exposure to the gospel message while in other parts of the world people are still waiting to hear this message for the first time.

Sometimes it amazes me that anyone in any part of the world ever gets to hear the gospel.  What I mean is this:  It is truly amazing that such a message of good news even exists.

Philip Yancey quotes Walter Wink saying:

If Jesus had never lived we never would have been able to invent him.

I would add:

If this gospel of grace, forgiveness, atonement and justification had never been invented, no fiction writer would have ever been able to compose it or conceive of it.

That’s good news.

When with the ransomed in glory
His face I at last I shall see
‘Twil be my joy through the ages
To sing of his love for me.