Gospel.com Blog

A few weeks back, the Gospel Coalition posted a short list of four things that make God happy:

1. Giving “stuff” away
2. Creating something
3. Connecting people
4. Doing something new

The original post has explanations of each of the points along with scriptural support.

One thing that I noticed was each item on the list is intimately wrapped up in relationships with other people. When we give stuff away, we provide for others. When we create or when we do something new, we bring joy or ease the suffering of others. When we connect people, we provide them opportunities to become friends.

Is there anything you’d add to this list? Are you good at any of them? Any that you need to work on?

Share your thoughts!

In 1 Samuel chapter 3, God calls out to Samuel in the night. Confused, the boy runs to Eli, his master, and asks him what he wanted. Eli tells Samuel he didn’t call him and sends him back to bed. The episode repeats itself two more times, but the third time, Eli tells Samuel to answer the voice, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.” Samuel obeys and God reveals what is going to happen to Eli’s family.

Sometimes in life the last thing we want to do is listen to God. We get confused by his voice, or we’d much rather listen to the world’s advice. Despite our wayward ways, God patiently calls out to us, and as we see in this devotional from Lutheran Hour Ministries, God is the only one who speaks real truth to us:

God continues to speak to His children through His Word, the Bible. But, at certain moments in our lives, we may turn a deaf ear. Instead of listening to the voice of God, we listen to the voice of the world. God wants to build a personal and intimate spiritual bridge between Him and us. I have experienced God’s intimate love during my lowliness. Learning, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to hear the voice of God through His Word will transform you.

God’s Word is life itself. Through it we find the eternal message of salvation won for each of us through the saving work of Jesus Christ. Yes, God talks to us and calls us to a life of devoted service and obedience.

Read the entire devotional at lhm.org.

Have you ever clearly heard God? Does the idea of responding to God by saying “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening” scare you?

Christians have been debating issues of theology, major and minor, since the earliest days of the church. I can’t count the number of friendly debates I’ve had with fellow Christians over matters of beliefs—late-night conversations in college; dinner-table debates at family gatherings; long-winded email exchanges with friends.

Thinking about these debates makes me wonder which ones, if any, caused me to change my mind about an important issue. Usually I emerge from such discussions with my beliefs unchanged, but I have changed my views at times. Sometimes all it took was a single insightful conversation, and sometimes it was a slowly-dawning realization that took place over the course of years.

Think about the times (if any) that you’ve changed your views about an issue within Christianity that was important to you. Was it a sudden a-ha! moment of clarity, or a long process? Did you come to the conclusion prayerfully on your own, or were you convinced by somebody else?

Share your thoughts!

The offer of redemption is almost incomprehensibly generous… but it’s even more incredible when you realize that God extends this offer to human beings who actively hate and reject Him.

That’s the theme of this devotional from Words of Hope, which looks at the corrupt, arrogant ancient church at Laodicea. This was a church that was busy ignoring every one of God’s commands, but incredibly, Christ still persisted with his offer of forgiveness and restoration:

The church in Laodicea had a high opinion of itself. They felt that they were rich, had prospered, and needed nothing. But to the searching eye of the risen Lord they were “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” Quite a different evaluation!

The Laodiceans were so self-satisfied and complacent, so lukewarm, that the Lord was ready to “spit them out” of his mouth. No other church in Asia had received that kind of withering rebuke. They were in desperate need of repentance.

Yet the Lord wanted to give them true riches, white robes to clothe them and new vision…. Then came the astonishing offer. “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you and you with me.” To even the most proud, nauseating, and messed-up people, Jesus offers his abiding presence and fellowship when they turn afresh to him.

Read the full devotional at Words of Hope.

If you’ve ever worried that sin in your life—or in the life of a loved one—is too much for God to forgive, this is the most reassuring passage in the entire Bible. If God’s offer of forgiveness and love stood for the broken hypocrites of Laodicea, it stands for all of us!

“Love your enemies” is one of Jesus’ most famous—and confounding—commands. Is it possible to feel genuine love for somebody who hates and persecutes you? Are we expected to love our enemies in the same way that we love our families and friends?

Delve Into Jesus takes a thorough look at this passage and explains Jesus’ command:

We don’t usually choose whom we love romantically, and we may fall in and out of love at the whim of our emotions. Since this is the kind of love with which we are the most familiar (and perhaps the most comfortable), we struggle when we hear Jesus speak of “loving our enemies.” A contradiction forms in our mind as we think, “How can I love them? I don’t feel a shred of sympathetic emotion for them at all!”

The love of which Jesus speaks is not a feeling in any sense of the word. It is a decision resulting in action. It is a choice you make that has nothing whatsoever to do with how you feel, and quite often, occurs in spite of a feeling to the contrary. This kind of love judges the needs of a person but never the person themselves, and responds according to the gravity of the need, never the character of the person.

Understand that you must absolutely restrain whatever you feel for a person and treat them with as much compassion and kindness as you would show your own mother or child. This is the kind of love that Christ demands – not a feeling, but rather a spirit of service, selflessness and humility. It is the ability to give to others with no regard to what they can do to repay you, what they feel for you or what you feel for them.

Read the full devotional at Delve Into Jesus.

I’ve found in my experience that this command is easy to accept in principle, but excruciatingly difficult to carry out in practice. Have you recently found yourself in a situation where you had to choose to love someone in accordance with Jesus’ command, despite their behavior?

It’s hard to think of a topic less pleasant than sex abuse, and when that topic is linked to the Christian church, it’s even more upsetting. But unless you’ve managed to completely avoid reading the news recently, you’ve read about the abuse scandals currently plaguing the Roman Catholic Church.

I’m a Protestant, and it’s easy to imagine, while reading these reports, that this is a “Catholic problem.” But human nature being what it is, it’s almost certainly an issue in Protestant churches as well. A report from a few years ago claims that Protestant churches aren’t immune to this danger:

The three companies that insure the majority of Protestant churches in America say they typically receive upward of 260 reports each year of young people under 18 being sexually abused by clergy, church staff, volunteers or congregation members.

The figures released to The Associated Press offer a glimpse into what has long been an extremely difficult phenomenon to pin down—the frequency of sex abuse in Protestant congregations.

Religious groups and victims’ supporters have been keenly interested in the figure ever since the Roman Catholic sex abuse crisis hit five years ago. The church has revealed that there have been 13,000 credible accusations against Catholic clerics since 1950.

Protestant numbers have been harder to come by and are sketchier because the denominations are less centralized than the Catholic church; indeed, many congregations are independent, which makes reporting even more difficult.

In other words, no matter what denomination or branch of Christianity you belong to, your church has to be on guard against abuse perpetrated within its community. The Your Church Blog provides a brief list of things your church needs to have thought through before abuse takes place, as well as guidelines for responding in the horrible event that abuse happens.

Several years ago, not long after the church-abuse scandals of the early 2000s, I noticed a very positive shift in my own church’s attitudes toward the possibility of abuse. Background checks were instituted for church workers and volunteers (even ones who had been volunteering for some time); care was taken to make sure that multiple adults of both genders were present with children in the nursery or other children’s activities; and so forth. I’m not privy to the results of those policies, but I do know that they communicate a clear message that the church takes the issue seriously and would listen if I had a concern along those lines.

What about your church? Have you had to confront abuse in your community? What steps have you taken to ensure that it doesn’t happen, and that if it does, you respond quickly and wisely?

Have you ever seen something so beautiful that it was indescribable? Or experienced a pain so deep it was unexplainable?

We use words to communicate ideas and information, but sometimes ideas and information are too complicated to be encapsulated in words. The Gospel is a perfect example of this predicament. We could spend years describing the minutiae of the Gospel to someone, but until they make it part of their lives any description will be like a poor reflection in a mirror.

A recent post from A Slice of Infinity explores the concept of Jesus as the Word of God. Much like how words can be used to describe concepts, Jesus—the Word of God—came as a revelation of God. Through Jesus we find an understanding of God that goes beyond words:

In Jesus, the Word of God, we see the Word beyond words. As John’s gospel does assert: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1:18). What we can know about God is centrally communicated in a person through his life and ministry. Jesus embodied God’s saving work of redemption in his life, his death, and his resurrection. God is revealed definitively in Jesus who came to seek and to save what was lost.

As one who writes and speaks, I know the power of words. In the defense of the gospel, a carefully crafted argument is often critical to breaking through the barriers of our day. And yet, I am reminded that words have limits, that people must see the gospel lived out, and that they must experience its power. The gospel must be embodied by those who claim to believe it. Francis of Assisi exhorted his band of followers to “preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words.” And if I’m honest, embodying the gospel takes far more creative effort than simply crafting an argument or a well-written sentence.

Perhaps in a word-saturated society such as ours, this early Christian understanding of the Word beyond words will remind us all of the limited power of words. There are divine mysteries so great that words fall short—as they should. And for all of us, this is deeply good news. God’s revelation is personal, embodied in Jesus. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). God acted in a person, and this action speaks louder than words.

Read the rest of the devotional at RZIM.org.

How do you show the Gospel through your life rather than through words?

In a recent post titled Unity in Diversity, Adrian Warnock discusses his approach to listening to voices within the Church that he doesn’t fully agree with.

The impetus of the post is the reaction of some members of the Christian blogging world to Rick Warren’s invitation to speak at the Desiring God conference. That John Piper would let Warren talk at the conference rankled some people so much that they publicly denounced Piper, and even went so far as to question the validity of his ministry.

The specifics of this situation aren’t all that important (if you’re interested, I’m sure google could help you find more information), but it does serve to showcase the sort of disagreement that happens frequently online. When we disagree with an action or statement a person makes, we want to dismiss everything they’ve done.

Warnock’s makes the point that regardless of how much we disagree with certain Christians, we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss them. He points to Mark 9:40 in which Jesus states that “Whoever is not for us is against us.” In Warnock’s view, outright dismissal of people we don’t agree with is rarely—if ever—prudent. At the very least, carefully listening to them might help us learn more about ourselves.

Here’s an excerpt from the end of the post that discusses the value of listening to voices from different cultures within Christianity:

There are many different Christian cultures about. We have each developed our own ways of doing church and doing evangelism. We each have our own languages. This can lead us to misunderstand one another and talk past one another. The truth is, we can learn much from each other. Warren’s roots in a very different wing of the church are, to me, a fascinating thing that offers an opportunity for me to re-examine some of my own assumptions that may be almost unconscious to me. By asking why Warren does things the way he does, without judging him for it, I can learn more about why the people around me do things the way we do. Even if nothing changes in the way we do things, the end result will at least be that we have learned more about ourselves.
[...]
We must learn to function more like one army of Christ, while respecting and maintaining our differences, unless fully convinced by Scripture to abandon them.

Read the entire post over at AdrianWarnock.com.

Have you ever been surprised to find that you agree with someone you previously thought you disagreed with? Do you think that we can learn from someone even if we have deeply theological disagreements?

When’s the last time you thought about your favorite elementary school teacher?

Even though we spent innumerable hours hanging on that teacher’s every word, we eventually forget about them. The memories fade and we forget the advice and knowledge they passed on to us. We might think about them fondly now and again, but not with the frequency that we did when we were younger.

In 1 Corinthians 11:24, Paul recalls the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. As Jesus hands the bread to his disciples he tells them that whenever they practice communion to “do this in remembrance of me.” The idea of having to remember Christ can seem like an odd request, how could we ever forget our savior? But, as Spurgeon points out in this devotional from Morning and Evening, life has a way of distracting us from even Jesus:

Forget him who loved us even to the death! Can it be possible? Yes, it is not only possible, but conscience confesses that it is too sadly a fault with all of us, that we suffer him to be as a wayfaring man tarrying but for a night. He whom we should make the abiding tenant of our memories is but a visitor therein. The cross where one would think that memory would linger, and unmindfulness would be an unknown intruder, is desecrated by the feet of forgetfulness. Does not your conscience say that this is true? Do you not find yourselves forgetful of Jesus? Some creature steals away your heart, and you are unmindful of him upon whom your affection ought to be set. Some earthly business engrosses your attention when you should fix your eye steadily upon the cross. It is the incessant turmoil of the world, the constant attraction of earthly things which takes away the soul from Christ. While memory too well preserves a poisonous weed, it suffereth the rose of Sharon to wither. Let us charge ourselves to bind a heavenly forget-me-not about our hearts for Jesus our Beloved, and, whatever else we let slip, let us hold fast to him.

Read the rest at Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Do you make time to remember Jesus before you take communion?

When a worship service is canceled due to weather, or an urgent prayer request crops up in the middle of the week, or an unexpected service opportunity arrives, how does your church communicate this to the congregation?

My own church has used all of the usual methods that your church probably has. There’s the church bulletin (which is only published once a week); phone calls (which get unwieldy when there are hundreds of people in the congregation); email (which not everybody checks regularly); the church website (which people forget to visit).

Some combination of those tools is usually enough to communicate news or needs to the specific people in the congregation who most “need to know.” But none of these methods reliably reach every member of the congregation in a timely manner. And their inefficiency encourages the church to only make use of them for especially urgent news.

But lately I’ve noticed an interesting trend in my church: more and more of the congregation is popping up on Facebook, and they’re using it to share the sort of information that would normally get summarized in a once-a-week print church bulletin. Every day throughout the week, I see prayer requests (major and minor), updates on hospitalized church members, and the occasional request for help. And I see relatively “mundane” things that add greatly to church life but which wouldn’t show up in the church bulletin: people thanking God for a particularly beautiful sunset, offering a quick word of public encouragement to somebody else, or sharing photos of that help me feel closer to their lives.

Facebook is an imperfect tool at best, and like other communication tools, it will never reach 100% of my congregation. But in its way, it’s increasing my everyday awareness of my church community in a way that the traditional communication methods don’t.

How about you? Does your church community make use of Facebook or other online networking tools to share news and needs? Does Facebook bring something new to church communication, or is it just a passing trend that won’t affect your community?