Vintage Church: Mark Driscoll

Vintage Church is the second in the 'vintage' series from Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears, following Vintage Jesus from last year. In twelve chapter and an appendix and 315 it covers a wide range of topics relating the the Church, from 'Why is preaching important' to 'how can a church utilize technology' to 'how can a church express love' It follows the pattern of the duos last two books with the chapters written by mark, and Gerry following up with answers to common questions at the end of each chapter.

It's excellent. Really really good. I'm so pleased Re:Lit exists, if only for this sort of well presented, well designed book. Of course, that wouldn't matter if the content was no good...but it is. Driscoll shares with passion and candour a mix of gleaned wisdom and experience, taking a look at the major areas of the traditional church, as well as a couple of chapters on technology and multi campus churches, which i really enjoyed. What is, possibly, one of the most remarkable things about this book is that we get to page 91 before there's a joke. 'Death by Love' was obviously a book with serious subject matter, but i'd assumed that Driscoll's usual humour would be worked through this book, as with Vintage Jesus and his two earlier books. It just isn't. There are funny moments, but they are far fewer than i'd expected. Does this make it easier to read or better? I'm not sure, but i thought it was interesting.

I loved this book. The chapters are in depth and lengthy but readable, it's helped clear and clarify my thinking about a couple of areas of church life, given me a refreshed vision for my own service my church and The Church, and, most importantly, made me excited about gathering with my church tomorrow.

I probably had four favourite chapters; 'who is supposed to lead a church,' 'why is preaching important,' 'what are baptism and communion,' and 'how can a church change the world?' the last chapter. I think it's worth buying the book for the last chapter alone. In it Mark discusses how to change the world the Church must look beyond changed individual hearts, and towards changing the way culture involves. If culture is a river, the Church needs to be pumping the Gospel in at the source, rather than in the middle. Culture rarely changes from the bottom up. This is why Acts 29 is so city focused, because cities are where the people that form and inform culture are.

Whether or not you agree with all the conclusions reached in the book, especially the last chapter, Vintage Church is still an excellent, excellent read. Like i said, it's made me excited about going to church, serving the church, and being part of The Church, so in that sense, it must be considered mission accomplished!

Buy it here

On mountains and camps

I've been reading the book of Hebrews this week in preparation for Sunday school this coming weekend. I've loved spending time in it, going slowly through the book to see what he says about Jesus (that is, a lot) and how he affects my relationship with God (that is, in every way!)

It also got me thinking about mountains and camps. I can't tell you why, it just happened... There's not much about mountains in Hebrews that i can immediately think of, but here's what i've been thinking about this week.

God meets people on meetings, serious things happen on mountains. Abraham took Isaac up a mountain, (the LORD will provide) God gave Moses the law on a mountain, Israel headed for the mountains when they entered the promised land, Moses commissioned Joshua on a mountain overlooking Canaan, Jesus was revealed in all His transfigured in all His glory on a mountain, Jesus (the greater Moses, the Moses-to-come) gave the Great Commission on a mountain, Jesus went to Calvary, a mountain, to die on the cross for our sins. Cool things, great, glorious things happen on mountains...

And, let us go to Him outside the camp? Why outside the camp? That's where the lepers were, the non Israelites, those cursed by God. Jesus went outside the camp to bare the reproach that we all deserve. He went outside the camp to reverse the tree-curse. So we can now follow Him. There's no reproach left to bare, it's all been borne. So now we can risk great things for Him. Why? The cross bought all the future grace we will ever, ever, ever need.  

Let's go outside the camp, up the mountain, to Him.

Piper: be courageous Mr. President

Jeremiah and the cube

I'm working my way though a series of talks by Don Carson on Jeremiah. I think my ears could listen to his voice all the day long, but my brain can barely stand up to fifty minute bursts. Today i listened to his talk on 3:4-4:4...Long chunks are probably the only way with this book, and Jeremiah says something very interesting about the Ark of the Covenant.

Bare in mind where we are. Israel, to the north, was transported into exile by the Assyrians one hundred years previous. Judah has not learnt this lesson, described in the first section of the book as like a camel on heat, willing to get into bed with any false god it can find. 3:4-4:4 serve as a reminder/warning to Judah, and a forecast from the Lord about the time when Israel repents. The middle section, which refer to the Ark, are some of the most gloriously hopeful verses in the book.

Jeremiah 3:16 says: And when you have multiplied and increased in the land, in those days, declares the LORD, they shall no more say, "The ark of the covenant of the LORD." It shall not come to mind or be remembered or missed; it shall not be made again. 

Is that not a bit weird? Isn't the only hope for the remnant in Judah, or the returners from the north the temple worship around the Ark? Isn't the problem that too many people have forgotten the Ark? That it is not being remembered or missed? When Ezekiel reports this turn of events it is horrible news, so why are these verse of hope? The key must be in the first few words... 'when you have multiplied and increased in the land'. When you return, but not just when you return, when the nations return (v17). This verse goes far, far, millions of years beyond Jeremiah's time.

When will finally the lack of an Ark be good news? Verse 17 gives us a clue 'at that time Jerusalem shall be called the throne of the LORD'. When will Jerusalem be the meeting place of God and man? When will Our God finally dwell with His people? Revelation 21 and 22. There the city has no need of son or moon for the glory of the Lamb is the lamp. They city is a cube, but have you ever seen a cubed city? As long as it is wide as it is high? Of course not. But the cube of the Old Testament is the holy of holies. Behind the veil where priests fear to tread but once a year. In that final and great city, we will always be behind the veil, in the cube, in unobstructed ecstasy with Jesus.

But what about now? Well, 'tear down this temple and in three days i'll rebuild it.' No wonder Jesus' disciples didn't have a clue what He meant when He said that. But here and now for us, Jesus is our Temple, Jesus is our meeting place, Jesus is where we flee, His blood shed for us, He the Passover Lamb. And now Jeremiah's words make sense. Who wants an ark when you can have Jesus. Why settle for the shadow when you can have the substance.

The Doctor on John 4

I love this from Martyn Lloyd-Jones, via Justin Taylor:

Possibly one of the most devastating things that can happen to us as Christians is that we cease to expect anything to happen. I am not sure but that this is not one of our greatest troubles today. We come to our services and they are orderly, they are nice ‒ we come, we go ‒ and sometimes they are timed almost to the minute, and there it is. But that is not Christianity, my friend. Where is the Lord of glory? Where is the one sitting by the well? Are we expecting him? Do we anticipate this? Are we open to it? Are we aware that we are ever facing this glorious possibility of having the greatest surprise of our life?

Or let me put it like this. You may feel and say ‒ as many do ‒ ‘I was converted and became a Christian. I’ve grown ‒ yes, I’ve grown in knowledge, I’ve been reading books, I’ve been listening to sermons, but I’ve arrived now at a sort of peak and all I do is maintain that. For the rest of my life I will just go on like this.’

Read the whole thing here.

This surely is the answer to the struggle of the Christian life. Come to Jesus! We need to get on our knees over Scripture and ask that the Holy Spirit would illuminate the glory of God in the face of Christ in the text. We should go to the spring of living water, and drink, search for the bread of life, and eat. Gorge ourselves on the glory of God.

I'm following a chronological reading plan this year. The more Scripture i read, the more i want to. The more i discover, the more i want to discover. Jesus Christ satisfies. But how? Only with a deeper hunger for holiness and Him, only by slamming the doors of sin shut in our hearts and opening up wide, deep, long avenues of grace will we be satisfied. Sometimes we plateau, but this isn't to be considered the norm...Jesus Christ appears, and our hearts come alive...

The Inauguration

Never one to be behind the times, today's probably the last day i can get away with writing something about the inauguration. Tuesday was snow day, so we were able to watch it all, which i'm really pleased about. I didn't want to have to tell my grandchildren that i kept up to date by pressing F5 while pretending to work!

Was it an historic moment? Yes, a hundred million times yes. Going from segregation to inauguration in just about a generation is amazing... Has the press gone a bit bonkers over it? Yes, a little bit. There were nowhere near two million people in Washington watching it, it's probably closer to about half that number. But that's still pretty good.

Will Obama actually be a good president? Who knows to be honest. He's hasn't had much experience of leading Illinois, never mind America. He's probably the first president to take over a country in decline rather than on an upward curve, and coupled with the fact that there's probably more expectation on him than any other President in US history...It's going to be tough. He's ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay (probably not a bad thing) and repealed Bush's policy of not spending federal money on abortions (a terrible, terrible thing...four days in!). His economic plans could well create a huge number of jobless people relying on government pay outs, which is about as far away from the American dream as you can get...It's going to be an interesting four years.

I though Rick Warren really did pretty well with his prayer. I'm no fan of his, but i thought with the exception of a couple of cringing moments, he did as well as anyone could have done. And i'm sure every time i pray in church there are a couple of cringe moments, and that's just in front of a couple of hundred people, never mind nearly a million!

I really hope Obama is a good, financially responsible, morally upstanding President. But more than that, i hope he comes to saving faith in Jesus Christ, the One who always has, and always will rule America. We need to pray to that end...

Genesis 21:7

The story progresses in verse 3: ‘Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him Isaac.’ It’s hard to imagine what Abraham had been though in the last few years. A quarter of his life had been lived in the light of the promise of the child he now held in his arms. Twenty five years of waiting for a son by his wife was over. Abraham called him Isaac, just as God had commanded in 17:19. Isaac means ‘He laughs’. I love this part of the story, and it’s significant for reason’s we’ll come back to. You can imagine that upon the birth of the long awaited son Abraham would be full of laughter so maybe this was an obvious name. But why did God tell Abraham to name his son Isaac? I think, as we’ll see in a moment, this is part of how we make sense of this story today.

God’s plan is marching on. We notice again in verse 5 that we’re told ‘Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him’. Why more repetition? Surely for the same reasons that there was repetition in verses one and two. One commentator says that ‘there is great emphasis in the repetition… For he thus retains his readers, as by laying his hand upon them, that they may pause in consideration of this great miracle.’ The next time we ask whether it’s possible for God to do something we need to really ask ‘how big is God?’ Here we see a huge God keeping His huge promises.

The last two verses are given to Sarah, and it’s probably a song. Verse six says: ‘God has made laughter for me, everyone who hears will laugh over me.’ With this miraculous visit and fulfillment, God has turned Sarah’s laugh of disbelief into a genuine laugh of joy. And, of course, as we’ve already seen, the name Isaac means ‘he laughs’. God wanted Isaac to be called Isaac so that every time Sarah looked at her son, she would remember what God has done, and laugh for joy about it. Not only Sarah would laugh, but those in her household and also, those who read this story. Israel would have been expected to laugh with a similar joy when they read this story, because, in a very real way, Isaac’s birth signaled the birth of the nation of Israel. If Isaac had never been born then there would have been no Israel, no nation of God’s people.

Like ancient Israel we can also laugh with joy at what God has done in our lives. Once we were not God’s people, now we are God’s people, once we did not call on His name to save us from our sin, no we can think of no other sort of life. Just as God miraculously called Isaac into existence He has miraculously called us into faith. This is why I started this morning asking why we were here. It’s so easy to get relaxed about being a Christian or coming to church, but our salvation is a breathtaking miracle. It’s a bit like flying. Imagine sitting in a metal tube a few miles above the surface of the earth and traveling at about six hundred miles an hour, only slightly slower than my voice is traveling to you right now. It should be the most thrilling way of traveling that we know, and yet, because flying is such a normal thing today we spend our time reading or watching movies or sleeping, and grumbling when our plane is delayed. We mustn’t let ourselves end up like this about the church, about knowing Jesus. We need to remember that our being saved is a joyful, miraculous thing. Like a ninety year old giving birth, it should be something that we barely dare to believe.

In verse seven Sarah’s song, and our story ends ‘and she said, who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have born him a son in his old age.’ Well Sarah’s right, who indeed would have thought this would happen. And yet it did. A son was born, then a nation, and then another Son.

Who would have thought that a virgin could have given birth? Who would have thought that a homeless carpenter was the Son of God? Who would have thought that His death would bring life to all who believed in Him? Jesus brings the final fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Abraham was promised not just that he would father Isaac, but that he would father a multitude of nations. Jesus pours out His Spirit on his followers so that we would ‘make disciples of all nations.’ Jesus shed His blood for the nations that they might be saved. In the birth of Isaac, we see the initial fulfillment of God’s promise to make Abraham a multitude of nations, fulfilled in Jesus and then through us.

So why is Isaac’s birth recorded in the Bible? To stir up faith among God’s people at the wonderful work of our miraculous God. To leave Israel, and then the church, in wonder at what God has done in saving His people, so that we would laugh for joy like Sarah and not become tired in their love for the Lord.

To teach us that His promises are to be trusted. As we saw earlier, Abraham didn’t trust God’s promises and tried to make them work his own way. He didn’t believe that his aged wife could give birth, so he had a son by Hagar. He didn’t believe that God would keep him safe in a foreign land, so he told the king that Sarah was his sister and let him marry her. God wasn’t going to fulfill His promise though Ishmael because Ishmael was possible. Isaac was impossible! All of Abraham’s efforts only took him further away from what God was ding. All God requires of Abraham, and us, is to have faith in His promises.

To remind us that read now that God promised to make Abraham a father of many nations, through the death of Christ this has been made possible, and so to remind us of our responsibility to play our part in the great commission.

Genesis 21:1-7

Part one of my script from sunday school last weekend

I wonder why we’re at church this morning. I guess our answers would range from the spiritual (‘I want to worship God though Jesus in Sprit and truth’) to the relational (‘I want to spend some time with my friends and church family’) to the more mundane and honest (‘this is just what I do on a Sunday morning’). None of those are bad reasons for coming to church, obviously, but I wonder if sometimes it’s easy to get blasé about being part of a church, about being saved, about being one of God’s sons or daughters though faith in Jesus. Maybe it seems to us that being a Christian isn’t worth it. We seem distant from the days when everything was new and we’ve grown tired of the daily routine of Bible reading and prayer.

I wonder if often times this was how Israel felt. They had lost the wonder of the early years, they had all heard the stories of what God had done generations ago that we read about in the early chapters of Genesis, and maybe, by the exile they felt like we do sometimes. In need of a fresh reminder at the wonderful power of God. In need of a revelation of the purposes of God, and how wonderful it is to be part of His people. Maybe they simply needed to remember that God is always in control, and always working for the good of His people. Maybe we need that reminder this morning as well.I think the story we’ve just read would have served all of those purposes for the Israelites that read it, and hopefully it will do the same for us as well.

Genesis 21:1-7 forms a complete story, about the birth of Isaac, but it’s part of a larger story, the conclusion of a story that started 25 years previous and took many diversions and hit many problems along the way. Before we can understand and enjoy this story in it’s full colour we need to see this back story, so lets take ever such a brief look at the last 25 years of Abraham until this point. The story starts in Genesis 11:30, right after we meet Sarah we’re told ‘now Sarai was barren, she had no child’. Shortly after that God calls Abraham and tells him in Genesis 12:2 ‘I will make you a great nation…’ Genesis 12:4 tells us that Abraham was seventy five years old at this time. Shortly afterwards God visits Abraham again and tells him, in Genesis 13:16 ‘I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth…’ and in 15:5 ‘as the starts of the sky.’ All this time as these promises become more and more incredible Sarah is still barren. So she suggests that Abraham tries to conceive with Hagar, thinking that this must be the way that God was going to fulfill His promise to them. Hagar gives birth to Ishmael and it seems that the wait is over and the tension is relieved.

Abraham and Sarah are happy with this state of affairs for thirteen years until chapter 17, when God appears again to Abraham and says if Sarah in verse 16: ‘I will give you a son by her’ In Genesis 18 God gets more specific about the promise of Isaac saying, verse 10, ‘I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a sin.’ Sarah overhears this from her tent and, perhaps understandably, verse 12 ‘laughed to herself saying ‘after I am worn out and I am old shall I have pleasure?’’

So that’s where we are prior to Genesis 21. So far it’s a story of God making big promises, and His people not believing Him and trying to make God’s plans happen themselves. Sometimes people say that the Old Testament is no longer relevant, but that sounds just like my life sometimes. Lack of faith leading to inappropriate action. It gets even worse in Genesis 20 when Abraham passes Sarah off as his sister to protect himself from King Abimelech. It’s from this point our story starts, twenty five years after God’s first promise, thirteen years after the birth of Ishmael, and a year after Sarah laughed at the idea of bearing a child.

So with out context set, lets look at verses one and two together: the Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised. And Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had promised.’ The tension is resolved, Abraham has a son! This is a huge step forward in the story of Genesis, in the search to find the serpent crusher, and the story of how Abraham was to become the father of many nations. We can see the emphasis in these verses is all on God’s action. The phrases ‘as He had said,’ ‘as He had promised,’ ‘at the time of which God had spoken to Him,’ demonstrate where the author wants to draw our attention here.

Onto God. Onto the LORD of Israel keeping His promises even down to the smallest details. Again we see, clear as a bell from scripture that God is gracious because God is gracious, not because we deserve it or because we have done something to impress Him. God makes a promise and He keeps it. This is a firm rock on which to set our feet. This is what should wake us up every morning thrilled to be a Christian, because today, and tomorrow, and every day, God will keep His promises. This is good news!

Bible Delight: Christopher Ash

Sometimes modern technology is very good. There's a feature on amazon that you probably already know about where new books/general purchases are recommended based on your previous purchases. And that's how i found this book. Also, i really like Christopher Ash, and have ever since i went on the Cornhill Summer School in 2005. He said it was a treat to spend eight hours a day in the Bible. He was right, and he is right.

So what is 'Bible Delight'? It's a 200 page, 20 chapter journey through Psalm 119, for Bible hearer and Bible teacher. Ash takes a stanza of the psalm in every chapter, with two more on reading and understanding the context of the whole psalm. The aims of the book are three fold. To see whats written, to understand what's written and to sing what's written.

That's what i appreciated the most about this book. Ash is not providing a commentary, though it does provide that function, or a study book, though it does that as well, but a resource four the readers' heart, that we would live and breath Biblical life with more passion, and more delight. Each section is described and applied warmly and pastorally, with Ash never forgetting his initial premise to help us sing.

It's really good: go buy!

Two (more) blogs i've just discovered

On this, so far, very productive snow day i've spent a good amount of time browsing two blogs i've just found. The first, leithart.com is a veritable mine of Biblical articles. Including this excellent one on Matthew and pretty much all his stuff on Genesis. Plus, he has an excellent beard!

Also, give your iPod a birthday, and check out the faith by hearing audio blog. Especially their best audio of 2008 post. Excellent stuff.