The Fight Against Lust

By Faith magazine has a great article called, Lust: A Life and Death Matter. I highly recommend that you check it out.

Here is a great excerpt on one of the outcomes lust has:

Second, lust distorts our vision and leads us to see people as objects instead of what they are—unique masterpieces created in God’s image

Read The Rest Here

A Filthy Sponge

What a picture of the love of Jesus on the Cross and new look at an overlooked moment during Jesus' crucifixtion.

From The Resurgence:

Here’s a video clip of Pastor Mark from the first sermon of Mars Hill’s new series, Luke's Gospel: Investigating the Man Who Is God:

Drawn Into The Gospel Includes Suffering

Zach posted this quote, and the more I hear about A Praying Life, the more I desire to read it.

Doug Wolter:

Paul Miller’s book, A Praying Life, has affected me deeply. I cannot recommend it to you highly enough. Here’s one section that grabbed a hold of me and hasn’t let go for days. Next to this quote in the side margin of my book I wrote, “need to meditate on this.”

Whenever you love, you reenact Jesus’ death. Consequently, gospel stories always have suffering in them. American Christianity has an allergic reaction to this part of the gospel. We’d love to hear about God’s love for us, but suffering doesn’t mesh with our right to “the pursuit of happiness.” So we pray to escape a gospel story, when that is the best gift the Father can give us.

The Father wants to draw us into the story of his Son. He doesn’t have a better story to tell, so he keeps retelling it in our lives. As we reenact the gospel, we are drawn into a strange kind of fellowship. The taste of Christ is so good that the apostle Paul told the Philippians that he wanted to know “the fellowship of sharing in [Jesus'] sufferings” (Phil. 3:10).

Christianity Is Against Individualism

This quote is good prep for this coming Tuesday at The Well as we will look at the community that came from Acts 2.

From A Brick In The Valley

Cornelius Plantinga:

Christianity is against individualism. In the Old Testament God made his covenant with Abraham and his descendents, with a whole people. We now baptize persons not because they are individual believers or even because they belong to a family of believers, but because they belong to the extended family of believers – - the people of God. We are all baptized into this community, into a body that existed long before we did. We did not join this body. We are called into it.

When God’s people are called out of the world, they called into fellowship, into what the New Testament calls koinonia. Good words are associated with koinonia: “common,” “commune,” “commonwealth,” “community,” and “communion. We were called into koinonia, which means we have something in common with other believers.

Rather we have someone in common. . . . But, always it is Jesus Christ who is the fount of blessing, the broken bread, the life-giving vine, the head of the body. We belong to him – - and thus to each other. (Beyond Doubt, pages 116-117, emphasis his).

J.C. Ryle: Hold The Here and Now Loosely

“Are you prosperous in the world? Have death, sickness, disappointment, poverty, and family troubles passed over your door up to this time and not come in? Are you secretly saying to yourself, ‘Nothing can hurt me much. I shall die quietly in my bed and see no sorrow.’ Take care.”

“You are not yet in harbor. A sudden storm of unexpected trouble may make you change your note. Set not your affection on things below. Hold them with a very loose hand and be ready to surrender them at a moment’s notice. Use your prosperity well while you have it; but lean not all your weight on it, lest it break suddenly and pierce your hand.”

~ J.C. Ryle

Practical Religion, “Our Home”, 396.

This quote reminds me of what Pastor Ryan Kelly preached about this past Sunday at Desert Springs on worrying over what others think and over possessions.

Click here for that message

Props on Quote: J.C. Ryle Quotes

Religion vs Gospel

Last night at The Well I mentioned the distinctions between religion and The Gospel. I read from a list that comes from Tim Keller of what marks religion and what marks The Gospel. Below is some of the distinctions that comes from Tim Keller that has been compiled by The Journey Church in St. Louis.

Click here for the pdf. version.

Here is a few of the distinctions:

Religion
“I obey-therefore I’m accepted.”

Gospel
“I’m accepted-therefore I obey.”

Religion
Motivation is based on fear and insecurity.

Gospel
Motivation is based on grateful joy.

Religion
I obey God in order to get things from God

Gospel
I obey God to get to God-to delight and resemble Him.

Religion
When circumstances in my life go wrong, I am angry at God or my self, since I believe, like Job’s friends that anyone who is good deserves a comfortable life.

Gospel
When circumstances in my life go wrong, I struggle but I know all my punishment fell on Jesus and that while he may allow this for my training, he will exercise his Fatherly love within my trial.

Religion
When I am criticized I am furious or devastated because it is critical that I think of myself as a ‘good person’. Threats to that self-image must be destroyed at all costs.

Gospel
When I am criticized I struggle, but it is not critical for me to think of myself as a ‘good person.’ My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on God’s love for me in Christ. I can take criticism. That’s how I became a Christian.

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Props: Reformissionary

David Brooks on Our Self Congratulavie Culture

David Brooks is a columnist from the N.Y. Times. He is very insightful and witty as well. The excerpt below is from a column he wrote pertaining to how our country has gone from a humble and modest country to one full of ego driven, me-centric self worshipers.

I agree that the rise of the self-esteem "savior" has led to a generation and culture full of self lovers that are very vocal about it. However, I do not want to have a "good ole days" mentality. Brooks talks about the humble that came out of WWII, we also must remember that this humble nation had seperate schools for whites and blacks. We need to learn from the past, good and bad, that means taking of the rose colored glasses of our current era and past eras as well.

Here is an excerpt from the Column:

Today, immodesty is as ubiquitous as advertising, and for the same reasons. To scoop up just a few examples of self-indulgent expression from the past few days, there is Joe Wilson using the House floor as his own private “Crossfire”; there is Kanye West grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards to give us his opinion that the wrong person won; there is Michael Jordan’s egomaniacal and self-indulgent Hall of Fame speech. Baseball and football games are now so routinely interrupted by self-celebration, you don’t even notice it anymore.

This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.

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