Author: Jonathan Dodson

4 Reasons to Not Celebrate Christmas (by C.S. Lewis)

Posted on December 10, 2011

Ahh, Christmas the most wonderful stressful time of the year! C. S. Lewis had a hard time with Christmas too. In fact, in several essays he denounces the contemporary celebration of Christmas. In “What Christmas Means to Me” he lists four reasons he condemns commercial Christmas.

  1. It gives on the whole much more pain the pleasure…Long before December 25th everyone is worn out…They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.
  2. It is predicated on involuntary gift-giving. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost blackmail. Consider the despair and resentment when an unexpected person gives you a gift at the last minute!
  3. The waste of money and human skill in buying gaudy and useless gadgets. Have we really no better use for material and of human skill and time that to spend them on all this rubbish?
  4. The nuisance of it all. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country…in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write it off as charity.

The Pastor_ Identity. Church. Mission.

Posted on December 8, 2011


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I felt strongly about these talks as I wrote and delivered them. Listening to the first talk on Pastoral Identity, I was reminded just how important they are—for me. I hope you’ll find them helpful too.

Session 1 - The Pastor’s Identity: Gospel-formed Leadership
Session 2 - The Pastor’s Church: Shepherding Sinners as Disciples
Session 3 - The Pastor’s Mission: Your Role in the Mission of the Church

Christian “License” is Actually Legalism

Posted on November 10, 2011

Read this helpful excerpt from an interview with Tullian Tchividijian regarding his new book: Jesus + Nothing = Everything.

Legalism: The Enemy of the Gospel

There’s a common misunderstanding in today’s church, which says there are two equal dangers Christians must avoid. On one side of the road is a ditch called “legalism”; on the other is a ditch called “license” or “lawlessness.” Legalism, they say, happens when you focus too much on law, on rules.

Lawlessness, they say, happens when you focus too much on grace. Therefore, in order to maintain spiritual equilibrium, you have to balance law and grace. If you start getting too much law, you need to balance it with grace. If you start getting too much grace, you need to balance it with law. This dichotomy exposes our failure to understand gospel grace as it really is; it betrays our blindness to all the radical depth and beauty of grace.

2 Legalisms

It’s much more theologically accurate to say that there is one primary enemy of the gospel–legalism–but it comes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to “save” themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (I call this “front-door legalism”). Other people avoid the gospel and try to “save” themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (“back-door legalism”). In other words, there are two “laws” we can choose to live by apart from Christ: the law which says, “I can find freedom and fullness of life if I keep the rules,” and the law which says, “I can find freedom and fullness of life if I break the rules.” Either way, you’re trying to “save” yourself, which means both are legalistic because both are self-salvation projects. So what some call “license” is just another form of legalism.

Get the book    Read Rest of Interview