vintage missionary

The Threat of Grace

Tim Keller, in his book Reason for God, quotes a young woman who is learning the difference between religion and the gospel. The young woman is discovering that free grace - though markedly different than her religious upbringing - has an edge to it:

"If I was saved by my good works then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with "rights" - I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if I am a sinner saved by sheer grace - then there's nothing he cannot ask of me."

Keller goes on to say: "From the outside that might sound coercive, like a grinding obligation. From the inside the motivation is all joy."

As a church, we've been increasingly calling people to the joy of the gospel in everything we do, and many are beginning to experience freedom from religion and performance-based Christianity. And in the very same breath, we are calling people to a radical re-arrangement of all of life around the mission of the gospel, where absolutely every aspect of our lives is in service of Jesus.

The freeness of grace and the costliness of grace always go together, and we flee from the gospel not because it sounds too good to be true but because we recognize it will cost us everything.

Gospel Communities

Steve Timmis of the Crowded House Network recently did a 3 hour workshop at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. The video is now online here, and I highly recommend you take the time to watch all 3 sessions.

So That Your Faith and Hope are In God

According to 1 Peter 1.20-21, the resurrection doesn't just require faith, it actually makes faith possible. Or let me say it like this: apart from the Resurrection of Jesus, despite what we say, our faith is not in God.

The Religious Leaders in Jesus’ day believed their obedience earned them standing with God. Many Christians live like this: you believe you are forgiven, but the day to day is up to you. So you live in performance mode: trying to earn acceptance and favor with God & others. Which means, bottom line: your faith and hope are not in God but in yourself! You look to your own record of obedience to justify you before God and others.

Religious people look to their own performance as the way they are made right with God. This is why they are often judgmental, critical, condemning. They always look down on those who don't perform as well as them. Unfortunately, Christians are often the worst, often known as self-righteous finger pointers. This happens when a Christian still looks to their own religious performance to earn God’s love and favor.

But this is not a Christian or religious problem; it is a human problem. Everyone has a basis or grounds for feeling accepted and approved of.  What is your basis for acceptance? For love? Without God, it is still your performance: sexual appeal, image, money, friends, or causes that you're involved in.  If you find a sense of worth/identity in these things, you'll often end up judgmental/critical, too: of people who don’t recycle, who don’t have your looks/friends, who shop at Walmart, etc. In both cases, whether you're religious or non-religious, we usually live with anxiety & uncertainty, often wondering "Do I measure up?"  You have no stable grounds for your worth or identity, so you're in constant flux, from pride to despair.

Peter says, because of the life, death & resurrection of Jesus (the GOSPEL), our Faith and Hope are in God. The Gospel tells us that it isn’t our performance that saves us, but JESUS’ performance that saves us. Jesus rescues us from our sin and God’s just penalty against our sin: He lives the life we could never live and then dies in our place! But not just forgiveness for sins committed in the past, but we look daily to his work in our place to save us. Our relationship to God is not based on our performance but on his for us, daily! I can look away from myself, and keep my mind & heart in him, and be daily rescued from myself!

This is so key: if you live in performance, your failures lead to discouragement, despair, self-hatred. Failure turns you further in on yourself! Religious people repent when they fail, but it is always self-focused, more about personal disappointment in their performance, dismayed that they could "do something like that!" Non-religious people have the secular version: dust yourself off and try harder next time. In both cases, you justify yourself and promise to work harder next time. When you live in GRACE, your failure gets you more in touch with the source of strength you need. You recognize - all over again - that it has always been God's grace which has saved, healed, sanctified, and empowered you to obey!

The Resurrection means your faith and hope are in GOD, and no longer in your own record or performance.

The Source of Relational Conflict

Almost all the counseling I do comes down to this:

“My daily behavior is an attempt to get what is important to me in various situations and relationships. My choices and actions always reveal the desires that rule my heart… Think about it this way. If my heart is ruled by a certain desire, there are only two ways I can respond to you. If you are helping me get what I want, I will be happy with you. But if you stand in my way, I will be angry, frustrated, and discouraged when I am with you… My problem is not you or the situation we are in together. My problem is that a legitimate desire has taken over my heart and is now in control.” (Paul Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands)

Cancel Your Sunday Service?

Jonathon Dodson has a great post on 4 Reasons to Cancel Sunday Service.  The Vintage Faith Community regularly cancels service for many of these same reasons. My favorite line from Dodson: "Weekend services have actually replaced the church in America." 

We are learning how to be the church apart from organized events and gatherings, without a worship band, without a preacher. We are learning to proclaim the gospel in word and deed, both to each other and to our neighbors. We are attempting to break from religious ritual in order to be about the making of disciples. 

As long as we define Christianity in terms of attendance and serving at a gathering or event, we exempt our people from the adventure of living the Great Commission! We church planters are the worse: we call people into the mission of starting new services, rather than calling them to the making of disciples. Jesus did not give us a mission of building the church - he said he would do that!  He has called us to make disciples, and when we allow our people to believe that they are faithful because they attend, we are encouraging them to remain passive and immature in their faith. They can come and hear message after message, enjoy a little worship in song, and then buckle down for a busy week until they can "do church" again a week later.

We are hoping to become a network of church communities - 10 or 15 people per community - who love one another as God's Family and work together as a team of missionaries. Motivated by God's abundant grace toward us, we want to share his heart for the people of our city, serving and blessing our city, proclaiming the good news of Jesus, and calling one another to live the Great Commission as a way of life.

As If The Very Whips of Their Masters Were Behind Them

This past Sunday we talked about work, and how we might live the gospel in our work. Tim Keller has been helpful (as usual) in talking about what he calls, "the work under the work." As Christians, all work that is good work is service: in one way or another, work is for the purpose of caring for and doing good to others.  Contrast that with our culture, in which finding a job is simply a means to an end: in order to pay the bills, to make a name for ourselves, or to provide a leisurely lifestyle on the weekends. In other words, in our culture work is a means to my own ends.

But for a Christian, the need for security, identity, significance, and comfort that a job might provide is undermined by the gracious provision of God to us in the gospel. I no longer need to find my identity and significance in my job, no longer need to make a name for myself, because I have been "named" by God through Jesus. I am accepted, loved, forgiven, and beloved in Christ. This frees me to serve others for their sake, to do my work for the good of others, and to be a blessing to my boss and coworkers no matter the job or the work environment.

Additionally, because I am free in Jesus from a need to prove myself, work becomes a lot more restful. I can work my job in joy, heartily, with diligence, not from an anxious need to provide for myself, or prove my worth, but from a peaceful, joyful, soul-level rest. I work hard, but it is not anxious toil. In that sense, God's grace in Jesus allows us to return to the garden, where God gave Adam & Eve work to do not in order to earn his love but because they already had his love.

Unfortunately, many Christians - especially those in vocational ministry, like pastors and church planters - still work as if their identity is found in their work. Though they are doing ministry, and perhaps serving many people, just under the surface lies anxiety, fear, self-doubt, and deep pre-occupation with their own performance. It reminds me of this line from Lord of the Rings, when Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli are pursuing the Urak-hai who have captured Pippen and Merry.  At one point in their pursuit, Legolas says, 

"They run as if the very whips of their masters were behind them."

The Freeness of Grace is Costly

Deitrich Bonhoeffer led an underground seminary in Nazi Germany. He resisted the Nazi regime, and was thrown in jail and eventually hanged for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Awesome.

As we continue to study 1 Peter, I've come to realize that as free as grace is, we don't want it. I am not exactly sure why, but partly I think it has to do with what Bonhoeffer wrote about in Cost of Discipleship. The freeness of grace - that is, that we don't in any way earn or merit it - means that there is no limit to what God can ask of us. If we accept his free grace, we become wholly and completely his. As long as his favor is somehow merited or earned by us, we have a sense of control over God, and can limit what he can ask of us: "I only want this much favor, so I only have to obey this far." But when his favor is total, unearned, and thoroughly free, to receive it is to surrender everything to him.

Granted I don't think most people consciously recognize this or could articulate it, but I think it is right under the surface for many of us. So we push him away, distancing ourselves from the only thing that can heal us and set us free, because we don't want to give up control of our lives.

Bonhoffer says a word we all need to hear, absorb, and have our lives dismantled by:

"Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

"Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for which sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

"Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

"Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “you were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.

"Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us."

This Morning in My Closet

From this morning's Spurgeon devotion: "What Jonah learned in the great deep, let me learn this morning in my closet: “Salvation is of the Lord."

Evangelism Revisited

This week in 1 Peter we're looking at what it means to be God's people "that we might declare the excellencies of him who called [us] out of darkness and into his marvelous light." I mentioned yesterday that the only way we'll actively, joyfully, faithfully speak the gospel is if we are daily delighting in Jesus.

Tim Chester speaks to this in a post on Effective Evangelism.

100% Gospel

Jonathon Dodson has a great post over at the Resurgence blog on the "50/50 Gospel" that plagues the church today.

As we've been studying 1 Peter, I've been reminded again that we are not about getting people to act more morally, or even to be more mission-minded or involved more deeply in community. Rather, we are asking God to grip us with the power of the gospel so that we become by grace the kind of people he can use in his world. We aren't simply hoping to do church differently, or take our faith more seriously, or be more honest about our brokenness. Rather, we are asking the Holy Spirit to open our blind eyes and bring to life our dead hearts so that we see Jesus for all that he is. 

We are asking the Holy Spirit to do this work in such a way that our need for comfort, control, and self-absorbed living will be undermined and we can be free to be God's people, "that we may proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2.9).

In the church in America we can get people to do a lot of things: serve as greeters, help with worship, play with kids in sunday school, attend church regularly, go on mission trips, be in small groups, etc, etc, etc. But we can't get them to talk to their neighbors about Jesus unless Jesus is so absolutely amazing to them that they can't keep quiet. 

As that begins to happen, we'll proclaim his excellencies without fear or hesitation, and disciples will begin to be multiplied in our city.