Reform & Revive

 I fight with pride a lot. As I was telling a friend today: if you take a guy that is fairly smart, can put disparate concepts together, can talk well, and you make him a Christian, you get something very dangerous. He starts believing the press others say about him and begins to think he is much more mature than he actually is. This is me. My entire life people have set me apart for “something big for God.” Being able to understand and communicate even the deepest truths of God and His Word doesn’t equal maturity one bit. Seminary has certainly been showing me just how independent I try to be from God.

But nevertheless, something does resonate within me when I think about my place on the national/world stage. I feel like I’m being tailored by God for big, visible things out there in the world. I don’t know for sure what this means, and I’m fine with it not coming to pass, but I feel like I’m being prepared for a weight I could not bear apart from prior work by God.

But that’s not the point of this post. Now, like I said, I was grabbing coffee with that friend of mine - a friend who is quite visible on the national and international stage. But he’s been struggling with something recently that really struck me. He pointed out that no person ever used by God for really big things ever did it apart from great levels and displays of suffering. His problem was that he shirks from suffering while seeking comfort - the very thing that is antithetical to what he’s called to. I have a similar problem.

I’m only 22 and I feel like I haven’t suffered much. Some really dark family stuff, spiritual dark months of the soul, and severe emotional pains (loneliness and heartache, mainly), but really no classic forms of real suffering. Yet, in spite of this, God has given me a very developed theology of suffering and God’s Sovereignty within it. This terrifies me. I can not get away from this haunting sense deep in the recesses of my mind that severe trials lie ahead of me. So severe that God needs to prepare me now to survive the pains to come.

In one sense this reaffirms my desire to be well-known, influential, and in front of many people. On the other it sobers me, realizing (perhaps for the first time) what it means to “count the cost.” So perhaps all those that have been praising and building me up for big things in the future have actually been painting a target on my soul for the refining pains and trials of God.

So for those of you out there seeking renown, fame, and exposure. Know that if you really are doing it to God’s Glory, then no servant is greater than his Master, and you should expect nothing less than fulfilling in the body the sufferings of Christ, that His life might be seen through your death for your good and God’s Glory.

        Recently I was able to listen to an amazing sermon by a pastor named Matt Chandler. The sermon he gave was entitled “What is Missional Living?” Let me start off by saying much thanks to him for inspiring this post. As I listened to his sermon, I thought back to the time when I first became a Christian. Not long after my conversion I began reading John Piper’s book Don’t Waste Your Life. In it, Piper boldly issues a call to this generation to flee from the idol of the “American Dream” and to lay down our lives for the purpose of making Christ known around the world. By no fault of John Piper’s, I believe I fundamentally misunderstood just what this should look like.

In my head I had grand visions of overseas missions and preaching the Gospel in the midst of third-world poverty. I began to think of missions and evangelism as a trip or event that should be mostly left to vocational ministers or “missionaries.” (My apologies if you are cringing right now) But then I read the Bible:

II Corinthians 5:18-20 : “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.”

John 17:15-18 : “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one…As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”

I Corinthians 9:22 : “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some.”

The first verse here transformed the way I viewed my faith and how it affects my entire life. What Paul is saying here is that God is making his appeal to others through us and that He has entrusted us with both the message and the ministry of reconciliation. Broken people though we may be, we are God’s chosen agents of reconciliation and redemption! Thus, evangelism is not at its heart an event, but rather God working through lives and relationships and our every day living to make his appeal to the lost and reconcile them to Himself. If you are a Christian, you are called by God to be a missionary wherever it is that God places you and to declare and demonstrate the Gospel to those around you. This may not come as a surprise to some, but to other it may.

Is there a call to the church to work collectively to share the Gospel through events and missions trips? Yes. But ultimately God calls us as individuals to be ambassadors for Him in every facet of our daily lives. Our entire lifestyle should be colored by a yearning desire to share the Good News about Jesus with others, both through our actions and our words. We must stop compartmentalizing our faith down to events and allow Christ to truly be Lord of every part of our lives and hearts so that He can change us in such a way that we display his beauty in both our words and deeds to those around us!

So whom has God placed in your path? What connections do you have to certain people that others don’t? Whom has God entrusted you with in terms of the message and ministry of reconciliation? What about that neighbor you wave at on the way out the door? Or the relative of yours who lives alone and doesn’t know Christ? Maybe the barista at your local Starbucks that you see every morning? Or the homeless man you walk by every day? Or maybe the classmates you study with for tests? Or perhaps it’s one of your best friends whom you’ve known for years?

We all know about these different people God has placed in our lives, so here’s my exhortation for you:

Stop thinking of evangelism and missions in terms of events or dates and times. While only some of you will be called to ministry as a vocation, if you are a follower of Christ then you are called to be a full-time minister of the Gospel. Get rid of the compartments in your mind and instead begin to think intentionally about your life, the way you live it, and all the people that you cross paths with every day. How are you displaying and sharing the Gospel to them and with them? How can you allow God to use you as an agent of redemption in their lives?

I once heard it said that every faith in the world was an Orthopraxy, where “right practice” made you right before God, whereas Christianity was an Orthodoxy where “right doctrine/belief” did. This is incomplete. Most Protestants know right action is inadequate (Rom 2:6, Gal. 2:16), but most evangelicals are told all the time that what you intellectually assent to as you walk down an aisle is what washes your sin and depravity away into the “light of His wonderful face.” But this is not so (Mat. 7:21, Jam. 2:19). Christianity, rather, is an “Orthoontology,” where your “right state of being” is what makes you acceptable to him. Belief and practice are wholly and ultimately inadequate. It is the nature of the being from which these beliefs and practices flow from that matter.

So what on earth, does this have to do with this site and its vision and passion and focus and drive?

Everything.

Reformed Theology begins with the state of being of man (Total Depravity). It says that what needs to change is that state, and man has neither the desire nor the faculties available to him to change himself. He requires then a sovereign act of a Sovereign God to bring that change about. Reformed Theology then ends with the perseverance of that change. As both practice and surety of beliefs may wax and wane at times, the state of one’s being does not change after God has seized it.

But this has implications far beyond the theology of salvation. It means that Christians must have a passion that spills over from this change of being. It means that we must appeal to the whole man to increase their delight in God. It means this site must move from posts on the “Knowledge” of the Holy, to sweeping prose, poetry and musings. From deep theology that reveals who God is to soul-stirring poetry and meditations flowing from men and women forever impacted by their encounters with this revealed God.

These things go hand in hand. A good friend once told me, “you know? The Theologians of the world should be the ones that weep the most.” Let us weep, friends, as we see this God as He has revealed Himself and then get swept up in the beauty and the mystery that can do nothing but call out praise, adoration, and delight.

Join us for the ride. Reforming the mind, while reviving the heart.

Soli Deo Gloria
“to God alone be the Glory”

–paul