Compelled by Love: The Most Excellent Way to Missional Living was written by Ed Stetzer and Phillip Nation and published by New Hope Publishers.  Stetzer is the director of LifeWay Christian Resources and Nation is a church planting missionary in north Metro Atlanta.

Compelled is broken up into three parts. The first, “Death by Love: God and Mission” looks at how the three persons of the Trinity love and how their love applies to our relationships and ministry. The second part, “Identifying Love: The Church in the World” looks at how we are shaped by love.  This section really highlights the way that love works itself out in the context of the Christian community.  I would say that this is the central argument of the text. The third part, “Formed by Love: Believers and the World” looks at how the church is to interact with the non-Christian world within which it finds itself.  This section I think is the most important as it challenges the presumptions of the status quo.

So, I have this awesome opportunity to read and review books from New Hope Publishers.  It’s a great way to score some free books and have some accountability to read! Anyway, here is review number one (review number two will come today or tomorrow).

Trolls and Truth: 14 Realities About Today’s Church That We Don’t Want to See is written by Jimmy Dorrell.  He is the lead pastor of Church Under the Bridge and also the Executive Director of Mission Waco in Waco, TX. This is a little book and quick read.  It hits on 14 key issues that Dorrell has found to be truths that the first world American church needs to hear.  He argues that most of the American church ignores the poor and broken in their communities.  He is writing from his own experiences as a pastor to those very people.  He tells the stories of 14 different people.  Those stories each function as a parable for a particular truth that he believes the contemporary church can learn from those people who live on the fringe of society. He covers a wide range of issues including appearance, actions, societal barriers, giving, communication, and music.

This is a fascinating article.  I strongly encourage you to give it a read.  What’s most intriguing are the comments by Stephen Baldwin on why someone should get “saved”. Well, check it out.  Tell me what you think.

RELEVANT Magazine – Outsider’s Guide to the Christian Subculture

ht Rob

So it turns that some of the greatest thinkers in the Christian world are coming to the conclusion that the church has missed something.  It has missed “discipleship”.  We are not training, building, developing, and sending mature believers into the world. 

It seems to me that this is the “cost” of the great “evangelical” movement that has developed over the last fifty-five years. Prior to the fifties the church trained people well.  There was a commitment to “catechism”.  There was an emphasis on education.  However, there was a cost.  The cost was that of evangelism.  We were not inviting people into the community of faith. So, were we really training people well? Probably not.

But, now we get the message out and get people saved but we are not building and sending.  We need now not a pendulum swing but a re-centering on the life and ministry of Jesus.  I think that this is a good article and points us back to where we need to be.  However, it’s still a rehash of Coleman’s Master Plan of Evangelism. If we could only master the Master Plan.
NextReformation » The Great Omission

Image via Wikipedia

A few years ago I ranted about my dislike of the Family Christian Store chain.  Well, today I am reminded why I have not shopped there in five years and why I continue to encourage people to steer clear. Below is the link to their section of “New Testament Commentaries”.  I happened to receive a gift cert for the store and thought I would find something on the website. Well, it didn’t really matter.

I think that Christian Bookstores have a responsibility to the Church to help get good study materials into the hands of lay people.  It seems quite clear that Family Christian Stores are not concerned to help this matter much. I am sorry, but the memoirs of Billy Graham, The Message: Promise Book, Promises for Women, and the like are not commentaries.

I was expecting to see Pillar, Zondervan, Baker, or even Matthew Henry’s commentary.  But the kind of pop-culture bubble gum stuff that FCS is promoting as a “commentary” is a joke. Ten clicks on the “Next” button still do not yield a real commentary.

Thankfully, I know an author or two that I am interested and found a few books by them.  But, this is disappointing and sad.
Family Christian Stores

Image via Wikipedia

So, one of the things that has always made living in the actual city of Detroit a difficult thing for many families (and no suburbs are not Detroit, ehem…Redford) is that there have been no real grocery stores there.  That is all about to change with Meijer building a store near 8 Mile and Woodward.  This is a genius move on their part.  With a mayor who has a plan, a city council that could get turned over (through elections or arrests), Detroit might have a chance to become an urban center again and Meijer would be on the ground floor.

There is something to be said for being the first. Well done Meijer.

Meijer signs deal for Detroit store | Detroit Free Press | Freep.com

Doug Walker passed along a book for me to check out and I thought that is was pretty helpful. So, I thought I would briefly review it here. The book is entitled Activate: An Entirely New Approach to Small Groups. The authors Nelson Searcy and Kerrick Thomas are pastors at the Journey Church in New York City. They consider themselves to be a “Church of Small Groups”. It is in this context that they have seen their church grow exponentially and powerfully.

Basically, the content of the book is simple and straightforward. They give a an overview of the subject in Part One. Here they take about 70 pages to give you a fly-over of their small group system.  In Part Two, Searcy and Tomas, then breakdown the system specifically and discuss how to implement the system in your church. They also provide an in depth calendar and very specific how-to’s.

The text is an easy read and did not take very long to work through.  So, if you are looking for something quick that will also challenge and provide you a structure for you to consider regarding small groups this is a worthwhile read.

There are so many thoughts running around in regards to the emerging generations.  These generations are building an ever greater legend for themselves as the “unreachable” generation. They drop out of the faith following high school.  They are all “evolutionists”. They “hate the church”.

The legendary status of this generation is amazing. The only problem is that the stats do not bear it all out. Ed Stetzer over at LifeWay Research is doing some good work. The stat that is most profound is that yes these generations find the church hypocritical.  However, they are very, very open to the Bible. Nearly two thirds of the thousand surveyed said that they were open to having a friend study the Bible with them.

The Bible. It’s still relevant. Who knew?

On the Radio Talking about the Younger Unchurched… – EdStetzer.com

On my vacation I am reading! It’s great!  I just finished The Prodigal God by Tim Keller and am going to wade into Peterson’s Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places next. But, I wanted to get some thoughts out about Prodigal first.

Tim Keller is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. He is beginning to expand his ministry influence through writing over the last couple of years.  He hit the scene popularly with his book The Reason for God. He has recently published a new book entitled, The Prodigal God. This is a short read (I read it in about two and a half hours) but the substance is much weightier (I have pondering it for three days!).

The sermon from July 19 was lost.  So, I am putting up a manuscripted version of it for those that want to take a look at what was said but missed it.  It’s not exact but hits the same points.

Hebrews 12:18-29

We don’t believe that God is who he says he is and therefore we we don’t care.

The question that we are answering this morning is this:

Why is there a deep apathy in the family of God? Why has there been no cry
or repentance for our nation’s sins just as Daniel did for Israel? Romans 1:18-32 speaks of God’s wrath against man because of his progressive downward spiral. Why no repentance?

This question is fundamentally about what we believe. A.W. Tozer said in his remarkable book, Knowledge of the Holy that “the most important thing about you is what comes into your mind when you think about God.”  I think that is one of the most profound statements in Christian literature.  Everything we do and say points to what we believe about who God is.

Consider what Annie Dillard says (from Teaching a Stone to Talk), “Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless
ourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does
o one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a bunch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing cr
sh helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should alsh us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god my draw us out to where we can never return.”

Friends, this is the issue that is at hand.  What is it that we believe about who God is?

The letter to the Hebrews is in many ways a mystery.  Nobody knows who wrote it.  Nobody is really sure to whom it was written.  What seems most likely is that it was a letter written by a pastor to his Jewish congregation somewhere near Rome. There was a large Jewish population there and it is likely that within the city there were multiple gatherings of Christ followers and probably one within the Jewish quarter itself.  The pastor was writing to them on the eve of persecution.  It was about to get bad in Rome and he wanted to encourage his people.  He knew that they could avoid persecution if they would simply set aside this Jesus and go back to their old ways of believing. So, he set out to write a letter to encourage them to stand firm in their faith because Jesus is better than everything else.

So then we come to passage that we are going to look at today. Hebrews 12:18-29. Here the pastor is giving them a graphic image of the God whom they now serve.  He brings to their mind the image of Mt. Sinai and the giving of the commandments.  This is the key event in the story of the Hebrew people.  It was here that their leader, Moses spoke directly to God and would return emanating God’s glory.  The holiness, majesty, and glory of God was so real that they could not even touch the mountain or they would die. The God of the universe was present on that mountain and the people trembled in awesome reverent respect.

He is telling his people this is the God whom they are up close and in person with through faith in Jesus.

But, that’s not all look at what’s next: They come to celebration that is beyond anything they can imagine.  They are inheritors of the living God! This is what it means to be a part of the assembly of the first born. It means that you are included in the inheritance.

The story goes on though.  It comes with a warning.  He says look at this majestic, holy, great God who has invited you into his presence as his own, will you faithfully follow after him?  Will you listen to the call that is on your life? Will you refuse him? H
points to the return of Jesus and says that when that day comes the things that are not eternal will be shaken away and what is real and eternal will be all that’s left. Therefore we are to be grateful for being in this kingdom that will last forever.

What is his application? “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”  He says then, in light of all this, our response to the reality of God in us is that we are to acceptably worship God.

How can we acceptably worship God if we don’t really believe this?

I think that most of us live just like this from the film,  Talladega Nights. Ricky Bobby and his family are illustrations of our silly attempts at making God manageable, trivializing him down to something small and meaningless.  We seek to make him into something that we want. I think that Ray Ortlund describes it well in his brief essay, Jesus Jr.

“Our local deity is not Jesus. He goes by the name Jesus. But in reality, our local deity is Jesus Jr.

Our little Jesus is popular because he is useful. He makes us feel better while conveniently fitting into the margins of our busy lives. But he is not terrifying or compelling or thrilling. When we hear the gospel of Jesus Jr., our casual response
s “Yeah, that’s what I believe.” Jesus Jr. does not confront us, surprise us, stun us. He looks down on us with a benign, all-approving grin. He tells us how wonderful we really are, how entitled we really are, how wounded we really are, and it feels good.

Jesus Jr. appeals to the flesh. He does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him. He is not able to understand them, much less impart them, because Jesus Jr. is the magnification of Self, the idealization of Self, the absolutization of Self turning around and validating Self, flattering Self, reinforcing Self. Jesus Jr. does not change us, because he is a projection of us.”

Our lives, everything we do reflects what we believe about who Jesus is.

Why is there apathy? Why are we not seeing the repentance that we have seen in the past? Quite honestly it’s because we don’t really believe that any of this stuff is real.  We minimize Jesus and create a reflected version of ourselves so that we can remain safe and comfortable.

We say we believe in prayer, right? Well, let’s see on average there’s two or three people who gather prior to the service to pray.  I am not there either, but, I think it’s time I start showing up.  Maybe most of us are praying on our way in, but I doubt it. We simply don’t really believe that praying is effectual.  We don’t really believe that if we pray and ask God to move in our worship service that he will move in our service. No, we believe that we need a great band, a better speaker, maybe some entertaining videos and dramas. But prayer, well that’s not really doing anything.

We say we believe in the Bible right? Well, Romans 1:16 says, “the gospel is the power of salvation to those who would believe.” So, we boldly share our faith and invite people to encounter Jesus right? Oh, wait, no we don’t.  We don’t want to offend them. We don’t want to make them uncomfortable.  We don’t want to appear to be crazy Jesus people. We want our “lives” to “preach” the gospel to them. We think a slick ad campaign will bring them to Jesus. Except that Romans 10 tells us that it is by communicating, speaking our belief in Jesus that leads people to belief.

As Doug and I were planning one day at the Coffee Bean in Plymouth there was a man sitting near us.  He eyed us up and down.  He was listening to what we were talking about.  He would walk in and out of the room.  And finally he walked over and asked, “Are you pastors or something?”

“Yes we are.” Doug replied.

“Do you have any people in your congregation who are sick? With chronic pain? Maybe cancer?” The man asked.

“Yes we do.” Doug responded.

“Oh, man, then have you heard about medical marijuana?  It will change their lives! It has healed me and it’s benefits are endless! You have to tell people about this and help them get the medicine they need!” Marijuana guy exclaimed.

He spent the next fifteen minutes proselytizing us concerning medical marijuana.  He believed that marijuana would change the world and fix the core problems of our society.

Do we believe that Jesus and the life he offers is better than marijuana? Most of our lives would say that we don’t. Or consider this from a man named Penn Gillette.  He is a devoted atheist and a comedian.  You may have heard of him, he is the Penn from Penn and Teller. Well, after one of his shows a man gave him a Bible and this was Penn’s response (click here for the video).

Profound is it not? How much do you have to hate someone to not share the message of Jesus with them?

We look at the statistics of young people walking away from their faith after high school and we try to figure out a better program to make Jesus more exciting.  Yet, what matters most is that kids see their mom and dad authentically living for Jesus.  Second to that is having another adult involved in their life authentically living for Jesus. All of us desire to see children who love Jesus and are getting to know him, yet it’s the same handful of people over and over again who get up an hour early to teach sunday school. If we really wanted kids to walk with Jesus people would be lining up to volunteer and mentor young people.

We see that there are people hurting everywhere around us and then wonder when the “church” is going to begin a program to reach “those” people and yet we forget that we are the church.  There is nothing “out there” that is going to do it for us. What will do it is us falling madly in love with our savior and really believing that we are so utterly broken that there is no hope apart from him. Until we really believe it then apathy and self-reliance will remain.

My brothers and sisters in Christ the reality that we must face is that we would prefer a manageable and safe deity of our own creation.  If we say that we believe in Jesus and yet ignore him and choose to fill our lives with other stuff so that we are too busy to engage in his mission, then what do we really believe?

In this question there is a desire to see spiritual awakening take place. In a little book called Fireseeds of Spiritual Awakening, Dan Hayes lays out the five pre-requisites for awakening.

• God’s people must recognize that there is a desperate need for spiritual awakening.
• God’s people must humble themselves before Him.
• God’s people must confess their sin and repent.
• God’s people must continually and earnestly pray.
• God’s people must call others to join with them to meet these pre-requisites.

We are pretty good at number 1.  It’s numbers 2-5 that we struggle with. It’s 2-5 where things get to close to home and we are faced with the necessity of real change in us and around us.

The bigger issue for me is that if we do these things then history tells us we can expect:

• Holiness of life for believers.
• Obedience to God and His Word.
• Increased power from God.
• A massive movement of God’s Spirit in evangelism.

When I am honest with myself all four of those things scare me to death and excite me beyond comprehension.

What would happen if we lived this out? What would happen if this kind of spiritual awakening took place? We wold be transformed. The world around us would be transformed. God would be glorified.

You see, when we come face to face with the God of the Bible, the God we meet in Hebrews 12:18-29 we are necessarily driven to our knees humbled, praying, gathering to pray, and calling others to join us.

So what do we walk away with? Well that’s really up to each of us. Will we believe? Will we bear out that belief by how we live? How will we choose to live in this world? Will we pray or will we simply go on living as happy, brainless tourists on a tour of the absolute?