Witness Our Love

"The ultimate goal of building this kind of community - one built on distinctively Christian love that flows from the distinctively Christian Gospel - is to display God's glory throughout our surrounding neighborhoods, our cities, and ultimately the world." (Mark Dever, The Deliberate Church)

Indeed, this is the ultimate goal for our lives here on this earth - to display the glory of God Himself to the world! When you read the Bible you cannot escape this truth; it is there throughout the Old and the New Testaments. It is the reason why the Lord chose the people of Israel as His chosen people - to display His glory to the nations so that people from every tribe, tongue, and nation would come to Him in repentance and faith and worship Him alone forever. When you read about the ten plagues that the Lord brought upon Egypt you will see the Lord's reasoning behind these attacks on the Egyptian's so called gods - see Exodus 7:5, 7:17, 8:10, 8:22, 9:14, 9:16, 10:2. What was the result of these attacks upon those in Egypt who witnessed them? Many believed and followed God (look at Exodus 12:38)!

Going a little further down the road, to the dedication of Solomon's Temple; look at Solomon's prayer of dedication in 1 Kings 8:41-43, 56-61. We see there that Solomon knew and expected people from other nations to hear about God and to come to faith in Him through the corporate witness of the people of Israel.

Likewise in the New Testament we see Jesus telling His disciples at the last supper to "love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13:34-35). The disciples love for one another was a public witness of who God is to the unbelieving world around. Paul also, in his letters penned his prayers for the churches. For the church in Philippi, he prayed that their love would abound more and more (Philippians 1:9) so that ultimately it would be "to the glory and praise of God" (Philippians 1:11).

For the Church today (both the worldwide, universal Church and the local church) our goal is the same - to display the glory of God! What we do as the body of Christ matters. How we act as a church matters greatly. Are we taking the name of the Lord in vain and breaking the 3rd commandment by calling ourselves Christians and living like we want to live? Does the unbelieving world around us that is watching us (and make no mistake thinking that they are not) look and see a group of believers who truly love God and one another or do they see a group of people who call themselves Christians but put on display all sorts of self-centeredness, pride, envy, strife, hard-heartedness, and hate?

Let us heed the words of our Lord Jesus and truly seek to love one another as He loved us. Our relationship with one another and love for one another in the church is predicated upon our relationship with and love for God. Much is at stake if we do not love one another...the greatest of which is the name of the Lord God Almighty! May we honor and glorify Him rather than bring shame upon His great name! That we may know Him and make Him known!

The Deliberate Church and the Word of God

One of the things that seminary instilled in me was a love for reading. Growing up in California, I was always more likely to be outside playing sports than indoors reading a book. Sure I read a few books growing up, mostly novels with a good story plot, but I was never a "Reader". I skimmed my way through books in college and hit the eject button on some of the information that I learned for the tests and papers after I was done. The one book I did read in college, however, was the Bible. That was the one book that I couldn't get enough of. In fact, my good friend Donald, and I would literally spend hours in our apartment reading and sharing about all we were learning from God's Word as we devoured it day after day. Those conversations and that time spent with God and my friend Donald have kept he and I close to this day, even though we are on opposite ends of the country.

Yesterday, I started a new book about church health and leadership called, "The Deliberate Church". This book was written by a well known pastor in Washington D.C. named Mark Dever and his friend Paul Alexander. It is a follow-up book to Dever's previous (and highly recommended book), "Nine Marks of a Healthy Church". The first thing that Pastor Dever mentions is the centrality of the Word of God in the life of the church. He told the search committe when his church was in the process of calling him to be the next pastor that he would be "happy to see every aspect of my public ministry fail if it needed to...except for the preaching of God's Word." This is because God's Word is what the Lord uses to give people understanding of who He is and who we are in comparison to Him, convict people of their sin, instill in the lives of people true faith, repentance, and spiritual life and gives people instructions on how they are to live their lives for His glory and name's sake.

Dever says, "God's Word is His supernatural power for acoomplishing His supernatural work. That's why our eloquence, innovation, and programs are so much less important than we think; that's why we as pastors must give ourselves to preaching, not programs; and that's why we need to be teaching our congregations to value God's Word over programs." It is the Word of God that transforms me and those around me. It is vital that we as the people of God spend time in His Word so as to know Him and to make Him known throughout the world!

Because of this truth about the centrality of the Word of God in the life of Christians and the Church, we in our church have begun in the past year MasterLife groups where we group several men together or several ladies together in a small group as a way to go through life together, not just a 6 week Bible study. The goal is for us to grow together towards Christlikeness. Several of the main things that the MasterLife study pushes is having a daily quiet time with the Lord in His Word and in prayer as well as weekly memorizing and meditating on a Scripture verse. The Christian life can only be lived out if we stay plugged into our Lord through His Word and through prayer! These foundational disciplines will spur us on to love God and love others so that the other areas of our lives will be effected in such a way as to glorify God in all that we say and all that we do (1 Corinthians 10:31).

My hope and prayer is that we would all spend time in the Word of God this week so that we may know Him and make Him known!

Why Read the Bible?

Matthew 22:37-40 And He (Jesus) said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets."

How can we love God and others if we do not first seek to know Him and them? I can say that I love my family, but if I do not spend time with my wife or my daughter then those words will be meaningless. Likewise, if I say that I love God and that I have been bought with His blood and yet do not seek to spend time in getting to know Him then my words and my life are meaningless.

The question then becomes, "How do I get to know God?". The most obvious answer is to grab a Bible, God's Word by which He reveals Himself to humans, and start reading. It is by opening up the Word of God and asking Him to give me understanding as I read it that we will be begin to know who He is and what He wants us to do. It is by spending time listening to Him as we read that we will gain a sense of who He is and who we are in comparison. We will find within the pages of the Bible, not a cold objective list of do's and dont's, but the story of the glory of God and His work to redeem a people to Himself so that He will receive the glory because He alone is worthy of all worship! We will see within the pages of the Bible where we fit into that story of God and how we through His work of salvation in our lives can bring Him glory in this life and for all eternity. The Bible is a God-centered book; it is not primarily focused on humans.

Jesus said in John 14:15, "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments." Just a few verses later in John 14:21 He says, "He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him." So here is where the importance of spending time reading the Bible comes into play. Not only do we have to first know God and spend time with Him in order to show our love for Him, but He says that we show that we love Him by keeping His commandments. And how can we keep His commandments if we do not know what it is that He commands us to do? In order to know what His commandments are we must read His Word.

I truly hope that each of you are opening up the Bible each day so as to know God more. If you don't know where to begin let me direct you to a few resources. First off, in our church we have a publication called, "LifeWalk" which is put out by LifeWay which will take you through each book of the Bible in a year. If you would like to try some other reading plan then you can try one of these Bible Reading Plans. At any rate, please seek to know God because it is the most important issue in your life you will face. Read...so that we may know Him!

That I May Know Him

Philippians 3:7-11 says, "But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead."

This is one of my most favorite passages in all of the Bible. As one who has been saved by God's great grace from that which I duly deserved (death and eternal torment apart from God), I cannot help but echo the words of Paul which he penned to the church in Philippi so many years ago as reminder of who we are striving after. It is not possessions on this earth which I desire; it is Christ. It is not success from a human perspective that I am after; it is Christ. It is not heaven which I await for; it is Christ! And in Him alone, my hope is found!

My desire is that this blog will serve as an avenue to encourage and challenge others to evaluate their own lives and seek hard after God because that is what we were created for! Let us worship the Lord together as we tackle issues of life, the Church, the Bible, books, and other things so that we may know Him!