Author: Teddy Ray

Every good church needs…

every good churchA quick note to church leaders…

We start with several assumptions about what our local church must have. A question to ask: whatever it is you’re talking about, how long has it been a crucial ingredient in the church? Is it a crucial ingredient of all good churches across the globe today?

Some examples:

  • “Any good church has to have a vision and mission statement.” How long have these been essential? More to the point: how did churches survive until the 1980’s without these? See more: “The people don’t perish without a vision statement.”
  • “Any good church has to have a good children’s and youth ministry.” How long has youth ministry been around in its modern form? The Christian Endeavor Society claims to be “the uncontested father of youth ministry.” They started in 1881. We might ask how churches managed without our modern forms of youth ministry for the first 18 centuries.
  • “A good pastor or preacher has to be good at [fill in the blank].” Whatever fills in your blank, ask if any of the great pastors or preachers of the past would be excluded. Which preachers throughout history wouldn’t be expository or charismatic enough to meet your definition? Which great pastors of history would be too blunt or controversial or introverted to meet your qualifications?

None of these things are necessarily bad. Maybe our context has made something nearly essential. But it might be good to question some of our assumptions before we say the church must have _____ to be a good church. Perhaps our options are more open than we’ve assumed.

Ironically, critics of the church’s recent history (i.e. “The church today is losing too many young people!”) are among the quickest to advocate for recent history’s solutions (i.e. “We have to have a great youth ministry to fix this!”).

For the comments: Does the church assume anything to be essential that you think we might question?

Next week: “Absent from flesh––the casualties of bodiless theology (sex, the Church, the Eucharist, and Christian fiction, for starters)“

Want to get the most out of a sermon? Are you listening for these 3 things?

sermonWhen you go to a comedy club, you know what you’re listening for. Same for a classroom lecture, a motivational speech, and a self-help seminar. But do you know what you’re listening for when you hear a sermon?

Three things you should listen for in every sermon:

1 – The person of Christ, specifically the resurrected Christ

The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”[1. 1 Corinthians 15:14, NIV] At the center of the Christian gospel and faith is the resurrected Christ. Any proclamation that can stand without Christ’s resurrection may contain a fragment of the gospel, but it’s missing its core.

In any sermon you hear, ask yourself, “Why does Christ’s resurrection matter here? What here is only good and relevant and true if Christ is risen?”

This goes for Old Testament sermons just as much as New Testament ones. No matter what part of Scripture we read, as Christians, we read it in light of Christ.[1. He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (Matt 5:17; Luke 24:44). On the road to Emmaus, he explained to two disciples “what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets” (Luke 24:27).]

If you’re listening to a sermon about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, ask, “How do I hear this story differently because of Christ’s death and resurrection?”

If you’re listening to a sermon about David and Goliath, ask, “What does this story mean in light of the proclamation, ‘Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again’?”[1. To see how the apostles preached the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, read Irenaeus’ On the Apostolic Preaching.]

When you find the part of a sermon that’s only true and relevant and good if Christ is risen, focus on that above all else. That part will probably lead you to two more things…

2 – A gift from God

In Evangelism in the Early Church, Michael Green says the early preachers consistently proclaimed a gift:

“The gift of forgiveness, the gift of the Spirit, the gift of adoption, of reconciliation. The gift that made ‘no people’ part of the ‘people of God,’ the gift that brought those who were far off near.”[1. pp. 211-212]

When you listen to a sermon, listen for God’s gift. What do all those gifts listed above have in common? They all come directly out of the death and resurrection of Christ. Once you’ve identified why the resurrected Christ matters in a sermon, you’ve probably recognized a gift from God.

Do you see the difference between listening for this gift and listening for self-help advice or personal motivation? Self-help and motivation aren’t necessarily bad. What they offer can be true and helpful, and a sermon might include useful tips and motivation. But these aren’t the gospel, and what they offer pales in comparison. If you’re only looking for self-help and motivation, order a Zig Ziglar tape or a Joel Osteen book. When you’re listening to a sermon, listen for more. Listen for what God offers.

That gift of God leads to one final thing…

3 – An invitation

Early Christian preachers didn’t stop at a proclamation of God’s gifts. They followed it with an invitation to the people.[2. Paul celebrated that God “reconciled us to himself through Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:18), then followed with the appeal, “Be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Jesus proclaimed, “The kingdom of God has come near,” then immediately followed with the invitation/command, “Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15)]

Whenever you hear a proclamation of the gospel, it’s not just something to enjoy, to appreciate, to “Amen!” or nod along to. It’s an invitation.

It’s always, first, an invitation to repent, believe, and be baptized. That’s an invitation to the not-yet Christian and the lifelong Christian, alike. The first moment of repentance, belief, and baptism begins a lifelong process of repentance,[1. John Wesley called this “The Repentance of Believers“] growing belief, and remembrance of our baptisms.

Because the gift of God is a corporate gift––a gift that makes us who were “no people” part of the “people of God”––the invitation is corporate, too. When you hear a sermon, don’t listen only for an invitation to you, listen for an invitation to us. How are we, as the people of God, being made one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world?

How are we invited to share in God’s blessings, to participate in his life and work, to anticipate Christ’s return? How are we invited to go out and proclaim the good news with our mouths and live it out by our actions?

Notice how this invitation is more than an invitation to the new church Bible study or fellowship dinner. You’re listening for an invitation that’s bigger and deeper than those. Perhaps the best next step for you to take is to participate in the upcoming day of service. Do that! And also keep your ears attuned to the bigger invitation that God is offering.

Two Notes and A Frequently Asked Question

Note 1: Don’t reduce the gospel to conversion and “getting to go to heaven.”

I’m not suggesting every sermon you listen to must be a simple, evangelistic message. God’s work in Christ and our invitation to respond go well beyond a moment of conversion. Take a look again at those gifts and invitations listed above. We don’t need to assume that the only impact of Christ’s resurrection is that we “get to go to heaven.” There’s much more here!

Note 2: Not every word is equal.

If you go to hear a comedian, what’s the most important part? The punchline. You know you’re waiting for it. Everything else prepares for it, so each word is important. The comedian couldn’t just spout punchlines without his supporting material. But if (s)he misses the punchline, everything else was a waste of time, and you’ll walk away cold.

Every sentence out of the preacher’s mouth doesn’t need to be pure gospel. Some of it may be helpful teaching, or memorable illustration, or enjoyable aside. All of those can be great supporting material for the gospel. But if (s)he misses the gospel, everything else was a waste of time.

A question: “What if the preacher I’m listening to isn’t preaching these things?”

First, don’t make that assumption too quickly. Give your preacher the benefit of the doubt for a while. Are these things implicit in the sermon? Maybe they’re latent within, and you’ll have to do some more work to recognize them.

Second, if you’re in a position to do it, you might graciously ask about these things. “Preacher, I’ve been thinking about the impact of Jesus’ death and resurrection. What do you think you couldn’t have said in that last sermon if Christ hadn’t risen?”

Sadly, current trends have led well-meaning preachers away from preaching these things. They’ve seen mega-preachers like Joel Osteen replace the gospel with self-help and motivational speeches. They’ve seen popular preachers call themselves “teaching pastors” and replace the word “sermon” with “teaching” (see my full post, “No more teaching pastors!“). Be patient, ask simple questions, and give them some time.

Finally, if Christ’s resurrection is unimportant to the sermons you’re hearing, and if they don’t invite any response to God’s grace… they’re not sermons. They may be great, entertaining, helpful talks. They may even be the kinds of seminary-level teaching I’d eagerly attend. But they’re not sermons. And if patience and encouragement and listening harder on your part doesn’t change that, I would recommend the most drastic of all options: find a different preacher. Do that only after you’ve done a lot of the first two things. But do it if you must. You need to be a part of a Christian community that consistently and clearly proclaims the gospel.[1. I’m heavily indebted to Michael Green’s description of early Christian preaching in Evangelism in the Early Church throughout this post, especially regarding the three consistent marks of their preaching.]

Next week: “Every good church needs…”

——————————–

Personality unchained [Does God want to change your personality? pt. III]

personalityThe most drastic transition in all of life is birth. Think about an infant in the womb. She isn’t far from the outside world—in fact, it’s all around her. She can already see and hear signs of the outside world, but only with veiled senses. She’s inches from the light of this world and yet lives in relative darkness. We can now take snapshots of her in the womb and have an early sketch of what she looks like. Still, we await the birth to get the first true glimpse.

From the moment the child was created in the womb, she was made for life in this world. She’s already very much alive, but for the rest of time, we’ll mark her span of life by the date of her birth, when she came out of the darkness and into the light. The Spanish-speaking world recognizes the significance of that transition––to give birth is to “dar a luz,” literally “to give light.”

God wants to change your personality—drastically

Some of the New Testament’s most common metaphors about spiritual life refer to darkness, light, and birth.

Jesus calls himself the light of the world and says, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”[1. John 8:12]

A letter to one of the earliest churches declares,

God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.[2. 1 John 1:5-7]

That movement from darkness to light comes from a new birth. “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again,” says Jesus to a man named Nicodemus.[3. John 3:3]

I’ve been writing about personality, and in the past few weeks, I’ve defined personality as disposition + mental health + character.

The new birth we’re considering affects far more than our personalities. But as our personalities go, I believe this new birth may be as drastic a transition as our original births.

I shared in an earlier post that we shouldn’t expect God to change someone’s disposition. God has graced you with a beautiful disposition––whether outgoing or introverted, carefree or cautious, especially emotional or logical. Those aspects of who you are should be celebrated and accentuated, not masked or diminished.

I shared in another post why we should see mental health in a category of its own. We do ourselves and others a lot of harm when we confuse a mental health problem for a character problem, or when we neglect to see the way that problem may be distorting someone’s true, God-given disposition.

The drastic change in our personalities comes because of a change in character––a move from walking in darkness to walking in light. Pride is transformed to humility, wrath to patience, greed to charity. Above all, we become people whose character is defined by love. One of John’s letters makes the connection clear:

Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness. Anyone who loves their brother and sister lives in the light, and there is nothing in them to make them stumble. But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them.[4. 1 John 2:9-11]

I believe God very much wants to change this part of your personality. Take any disposition and saddle it with malice, deceit, hypocrisy and envy, and you’ll have a perverted version of God’s original creation.

Overlay the same disposition with love, faithfulness, integrity and kindness, and you’ll see not just a brand new person, but the old person as they were made to be. You won’t see someone who isn’t himself anymore. You’ll see someone who is more himself now than he ever was.

Kill the old self?

In his letter to the Ephesian church, Paul tells them to put off the old self and put on the new self. This may be the cause for people’s belief that their personality—disposition included—requires a total overhaul if they want to be a Christian. “The old self needs to die. Whomever I become should be a different person entirely,” they think.

But look at the full teaching. It urges people “to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” [5. Ephesians 4:22-24] Paul isn’t urging a wholesale change of the person, so that we’ll see no resemblance between the old and the new. He urges a removal of those things that corrupt, so that true righteousness and holiness can shine through.

Yes, die to yourself. Die to all selfish ambition and vain conceit. But don’t kill the creature of God underneath. God’s grace doesn’t kill your personality. It doesn’t change you into someone you’re not. It allows who you really are––who you were made to be––to be seen.

Two common mistakes

We commonly make two mistakes when we think about our character and what God does:

1 – Expect no change.

The church has promoted all kinds of horrible tag lines that ignore the way that God’s grace transforms us.

  • “Not perfect, just forgiven.”
  • “This church is full of hypocrites, but we can squeeze in one more…”
  • “Of course I keep on sinning. I’m human.”

These may contain kernels of truth, but they contain far more to deceive us. To the contrary, John writes things like, “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them,” [6. 1 John 3:9] and, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” [7. 1 John 4:8] If we expect our character to remain unchanged by God’s grace, how small is our faith?

As much as C. S. Lewis is revered today, we haven’t often taken him seriously on this point:

The command “Be ye perfect” is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. …If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through which such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly. His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said. [8. Mere Christianity, 1952; Harper Collins: 2001, 205-206]

2 – Expect instant maturity

A child’s birth is miraculous, but it’s also traumatic. Over nine months’ time, that child learned how to live well in the womb. It can take time to learn how to live in the new world outside the womb––to adjust to the light, to breathe and eat for the first time. The event has brought about a dramatic change, but maturity will take time.

Similarly, we need to be careful not to expect instant maturity from new Christians. They are, in many ways, living in a new world and trying to understand how it works.

From all that I’ve read in Scripture and Christian theology, I believe God’s grace removes all hatred and outward rebellion at once. These are the things of darkness and have no place in the light.

But in our immaturity, we can make foolish and naive decisions. We may rush headlong into new convictions without proper forethought, grace, or tact.

In our immaturity, our selfish ambition and vain conceit may continue to hinder us. By God’s grace, we should expect these to be chipped away in us, but we can’t expect them to be gone at once. Just as with the newborn, the drastic transition from light to darkness precedes a lifelong process of growth. We deny ourselves and take up our cross daily. [9. Luke 9:23]

Yes, God wants to change your personality. He wants to transform your character so that you may be like God in true righteousness and holiness––the way you were created to be from the beginning. Have you experienced that transformation? And are you experiencing it still?

God is not far from any one of us. Though we may see only dimly and hear as if with stopped up ears, God’s call is for us to come out of darkness into his wonderful light.[9. 1 Peter 2:9] He is willing, and he is able.

Next week: Want to get the most out of a sermon? Are you listening for these 3 things?

—————-