My friend John Chandler is sending out tweets during Passion week to remind us of what Jesus was doing this week leading up to the cross and the resurrection. Follow him @passionweek for reminders throughout the week to focus on Jesus this Easter season. He explains:

Throughout the week, the @passionweek twitter account will post a brief glimpse of what Jesus experienced at the time he would of experienced it. The timing is mostly estimated. Regardless, I hope it can give you reason to pause throughout the week to reflect and anticipate the crucifixion on Friday, the silence that follows, and the resurrection on Sunday

Go here for a list of Scriptures that describe what happened on Wednesday of Passion Week.

D. A. Carson’s recent contribution to the growing, informed discussion regarding Christ & Culture is a worthy read. However, Christ and Culture Revisited is not without its shortcomings. In a series of posts, I offer a critical reading of Carson’s well-researched book in an attempt to further good thinking and practice on the topic of Christ & Culture.

• Revisiting Christ & Culture Revisited (Part 1)
• Revisiting Christ & Culture Revisited (Part 2)
• Revisiting Christ & Culture Revisited (Part 3)
• Should We “Redeem” Culture?

Continuing the Prologue to MissionSHIFT, Ed Stetzer raises some important questions about the scope and focus of salvation. He writes:

Should the definition of “salvation” be expanded beyond personal redemption of sins to include social justice through the reformation of economic and political institutions? We are not debating here whether we think social justice is right or wrong but rather should it be included in what we mean we we talk about “salvation.” Evangelicals have generally said no and mainliners have generally said yes.

Another way to ask this question is:

Are social justice, political reform, cultural renewal implications of the Gospel or actually part of the Gospel?

What do you think? What does the Bible teach on this?

——————–

Others participating in the conversation:

Ed Stetzer
Rick Meigs: The Blind Beggar
Bill Kinnon: kinnon.tv
Brother Maynard: Subversive Influence
David Fitch: Reclaiming the Mission
Tiffany Smith: Missional Mayhem
Jared Wilson: The Gospel-Driven Church

Viral Hope: Good News from the Urbs and the Burbs (and everything in between)

“ViralHope is a bold call to reject any and all reductions of the Gospel that minimize it to ‘cosmic fire insurance’ on the one hand, or on the other, to reduce it to ‘social action.’ This is a full Gospel and a vision that our world desperately needs to hear.”

- Jim Belcher, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emergent and Traditional Church

Reading through the Pastoral letters of the New Testament, I’ve been struck by the fact that if I don’t insist on Gospel-centered doctrine in my church, then I will fail you in at least five ways. If I don’t insist on Gospel-centered doctrine, then…

1. The church will devolve into a socially-minded non-profit or a consumeristic Groupon. The gospel of Jesus Christ is what sets the church apart from any other organization or community. If I remove the gospel, or don’t insist on its centrality in everything we do, then you do not need the church. You can find social service outlets with better non-profits and community with Groupon gatherings.
2. You will lose a substantial reason for living in community and on mission. Though anyone can experience community and mission outside of the church, it is a gospel-centered church that keeps mission and community from becoming your raison d’etre (reason for being). If community becomes your reason for being, then your community will likely become ingrown, selfish, snobbish, cliquish NOT inclusive, diverse, generous, growing, and vibrant. If mission is your raison d’etre, they mission will eventually become optional or so essential that you will look down on others who aren’t on mission. Only the gospel can call us away from these two extremes because it reminds us that Jesus Christ is our raison d’etre. Bottomline, community and mission will always fail you but Jesus will not. You need a church that reminds you of that.
3. I will become unfaithful to what the Bible teaches and misrepresent historic Christianity to you. This is intellectually dishonest, historically unfaithful, and theologically untenable. You need a pastor who does not see doctrine as an end in itself, but that the gospel is the end of every doctrine.
4. I will remove the one Person that consistently loves you, satisfies you, beautifies you, and releases you into your created purpose–to glorify God by enjoying him and calling others into a life of spreading that gospel joy over all the earth.
5. I will remove the very Person and principle upon which the church was formed–Jesus Christ. Not only is this inconsistent, it is a genetic fallacy, distorting something from its designed purpose, tampering with its DNA.

Westminster Bookstore is running a great deal on two great books. For One Week Only get both books for $14.50! (50% off retail price).

Offer expires on Thursday, April 1st.

Buy both for $14.50
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• Click here for the first chapter of What is the Gospel?
• Click here for second chapter of You Can Change.
• Click here for all the posts I’ve put up regarding You Can Change. We put all our City Groups through this book last summer!

Darrin Patrick, pastor of The Journey Church in St. Louis, shares some helpful reflections on his own spiritual journey wiht prayer and Scripture reading. He points us to George Muller, a great man of faith who started five orphanages on Ashley Down and filled them with hundreds of abused, neglected, and abandoned children. He had the faith of ten thousand church planters, but beneath his great faith and prayer for God’s provision was a goal even more noble that housing and caring for orphans, a goal greater than ministry or church planting. This goal was to be happy in God, and to bring others into that happiness. Darrin shares some of Muller’s thoughts on this:

Darrin on Mueller

I have always struggled with prayer as a Christian. I was sharing my frustration one day with my seminary professor and spiritual disciplines guru Don Whitney. Dr. Whitney shared with me a quote for George Müller, a godly giant of the faith who also struggled with prayer. This is from an entry in George Müller’s diary, dated May 7, 1841.

Mueller on Happiness in God

I saw more clearly than ever that the first great primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord . . . not how much I might serve the Lord, . . . but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man might be nourished. For I might seek to set the truth before the unconverted, I might seek to benefit believers . . . and yet, not being happy in the Lord, and not being nourished and strengthened in my inner man day by day, all this might not be attended to in a right spirit. Before this time my practice had been . . . to give myself to prayer after having dressed myself in the morning.

Now, I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God, and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed; and that thus, by means of the Word of God, whilst meditating on it, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with the Lord.

Check out the helpful interview between Stetzer and Vanderstelt regarding the upcoming MissionSHIFT conference. Jeff will be leading a lab at the missionSHIFT Conference titled, “Transitioning a Church to Missional.” An excerpt from the interview gives us a glimpse into the “real time” mission going on in Jeff’s live. He’s not just a theorist; he’s on mission:

This looks like meals together with believers and unbelievers 2-4 times a week; cleaning up the yard of our widowed neighbor next store; serving at the elementary’s auctions, community events and after school programs; going through “The Story of God” 1-2 times a year with unbelievers to introduce them to the Gospel; sharing our house for others to live with us and join us on the mission; having an “open door” policy to our neighbors and friends; throwing parties regularly to meet more people who we hope will also come to faith in Jesus; etc… We focus on demonstrating the change the Gospel makes in our lives through tangible expressions of serving and declaring the reason why we live this way by sharing the Gospel.

On Sunday, I shared how we can consistently see through our sin to our “identity of the moment” (Know your Sin), put that false identity to death (Fight your Sin), and turn to Christ for life and joy (Trust your Savior).  Here are three easy steps to fight for true joy in Christ!

1. Know Your Sin: Look for the sinful patterns in your life and trace them to “identity of the moment” that you are looking to for worth, meaning (good pastor, faithful parent, creative person, successful entrepreneur). For instance, your sin could be sulking and your false identity could be victim. Acts 29 has recently posted some helpful “X-ray Questions” from David Powlison, which help us see through our sin to our misplaced sense of identity.

• Identify sinful patterns
• Trace patterns to your “identity of the moment”

2. Fight Your Sin. Once you know your sin/identity issue, you can begin to fight it. There are two primary ways God calls us to fight our sin. First, confess your sin to God and ask for his forgiveness for your God-belittling desires and decisions (1 John 1:9). Follow your confession to God with confession to community so you can experience healing and encouragement of the church (James 5:16). Second, encourage one another to take sin seriously, to “put sin to death” (Rom 8:13; Col 3:5). Don’t let identity-twisting sin just roll off your back. Get tenacious about glorifying and enjoying God!

• Confess your sin (to God and one another)
• Get serious about fighting for true joy

3. Trust Your Savior. Trusting our Savior for gospel identity instead of an identity-of-the-moment is the most difficult and important part of being a disciple. Robert Murray McCheyene said: “For every look at sin, look ten times at Christ.” How does Christ offer you a better identity than the false identity? My sin was sulking and my identity was victim. 2 Peter 1:3 reminds me that my identity is godly, a partaker of the divine nature. I was sulking in ungodliness because I thought I deserved better circumstances. I felt weak. Peter reminds us that we have “divine power granted to us for life and godliness.” This scripture reminded me of my identity—godly—but it does not stop there. It also offers us a Savior to trust, a counter-promise of divine power necessary to live a godly life, not a sulking life. What a relief! Our identity is godly, and our promise is divine power!

• Find your Gospel counter-Identity
• Trust your Biblical Promise

We’ve outlined these basic principles are in Fight Clubs: Gospel-centered Discipleship, a community-based, gospel-centered approach to following Jesus. Pick up a copy, find some friends, and start fighting for true joy!

According to Arius, the Son was created before time. In other words, he was not co-eternal with the Father. As he put it, “Before he was begotten or created or appointed or established, he did not exist; for he was not unbegotten” (Letter to Eusebius). Furthermore, the Son was not of one divine substance with the Father. He was rather of a similar substance with the Father (homoiousios). On this view, the divine qualities of the Son are given to him by the Father.

Read more about this historic Theology Fail.