faith for faith

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Mt. 6:19-21).

The declaration by Christ: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” is one of those that elicits a “No duh” response, for its conclusion is inherent in its declaration. For if one treasures one thing, he by nature follows hard after it with his heart. However, the declaration is a necessary one, for we who would follow after Christ might affirm such with our lips, but our hearts are a different matter. We might be quick as American Christians, whose wealth and health surpasses that of ninety-five percent of the rest of the world, to acknowledge with our minds that Jesus Christ and his Kingdom should be our treasure, however our hearts are far from him. We declare with our lips that this age is passing and that true bliss exists in the Age to come, but, because of where our true treasures lie, we find ourselves investing much more in the things of this passing age than in the coming Kingdom.

Read more…

For those of you who find yourselves outside the inner-workings of Southern Baptist Convention, you are likely unaware of what is being called the “Great Commission Resurgence” that is being headed up by Dr. Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. The premise of this aim at sparking a movement is this, that the “Conservative Resurgence,” that occurred within the SBC some decades ago against the liberalism that had taken over the denomination, stopped short of what it should have been–that the claiming back of conservative, evangelical doctrine in the hierarchy of the SBC and in its seminaries was not enough to remedy the woes of the SBC and therefore a good portion of the American Church.

These claims have caused a great stir in a denomination that is finding itself moving closer and closer to irrelevancy with each passing generation. There is now essentially a great divide within the denomination, between the older, graying members who are content with leaving things as they are and the younger members who seem to care less and less about the conglomerate which is the SBC. Dr. Akin’s proposal as to the reason for this problem is that the SBC has focused too much upon itself and the American Church and that, for this reason, the SBC has lost its vision and vitality about the great mission of the Church–to be about the business of preaching the Gospel in all the world. This loss of focus is the source of a great deal of the problems within in the SBC, and if the SBC were only to reclaim that focus, it would reclaim its relevancy in the church.

Read more…

For those who are well acquainted with the teachings of orthodox Christianity, The Shack by William Young is an easy target. As seen in my evaluation of the theology of The Shack (to which I will likely add even more), its pages are filled with almost incessant heterodoxy. From its idolatry of the triune God, to its distortion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to its man-centered view of God and creation, its heresies are such that they would, as a friend of mine quipped, make Arius blush. And despite these abounding heresies, The Shack has been accepted and even heralded by many evangelical Christians as a great work of Christian literature.

However, The Shack is not the disease of the American church, but its acceptance by the church is merely a symptom of the disease that she has had for years. For, though Young will certainly be judged one day for his heretical portraiture of God, there will be many pastors who fill pulpits in American churches today who will incur a much more devastating judgment. For these pastors have for decades neglected their office by their disobedience of the command of our Lord to the apostle Peter, “[If you love me], feed my sheep” (Jn. 21:17). For these pastors have acted precisely in the manner of the shepherds of Israel whom the Lord condemned through the prophet Ezekiel:

Read more…

Great periods in history are defined by great struggles. Early in the history of the church, there was the infamous struggle for the doctrine of the trinity against the heresy of Arius who, with his followers, denied the full deity of Christ. This struggle resulted in the church’s uniform stance against the heresy and in the composition of the still recited Nicene Creed of 381 A.D. A little over a millennium later, after hundreds of years of false teachings perpetuated by wicked men and the ignorance of the masses in Europe, the Reformation erupted, regaining for the Faith such pivotal doctrines as “justification by faith alone apart from works” and “the priesthood of all saints.”

Today, we find the church in turmoil yet again. All around us, false teachings such as the prosperity gospel and fundamental doctrinal misunderstandings such as that of nature of the trinity (as revealed by the popularity of The Shack) are being propagated throughout the American church. Amid this, we do find the American church struggling with issues facing it, but what issues is it struggling with? Is it the sacrificial and life-demanding nature of the Gospel? Is it the orthodox understanding of God as trinity? Is it the great doctrine of justification by faith alone which we have somehow lost again? No, our “great” struggles in the American church today are concerning the type of music that is being played in our worship services, the buildings we build to house those services, and whether or not Joe Schmoe is drinking a beer while he is cooking a hamburger on his grill. We are so consumed with making sure that Frank is tithing his gross income rather than his taxed income that we have neglected everything that is weighty concerning the Faith which are forefathers fought for with their blood. And because of our neglect we shall be remembered (if we are remembered at all) as the generation that had much potential and resources (e.g. freedom, money, etc.) and yet did nothing with them. Just a thought.

Before I begin, allow me to preface this post by stating that I believe quite wholeheartedly that all things, both good and evil, minute and grand, work together for good for those who love God, which is the riches of his glory accomplished for them (cf. Rm. 8:28; 9:23). Therefore, in spite of our constant failings and in spite of our doctrinal fallacies, God will be glorified, and he will be glorified to the high degree which he has decreed. For whether or not we attribute credit to God appropriately with our petty minds on the matter of our salvation and its accomplishment, God will be glorified fully, be it through our unrighteousness which serves to show his righteousness (cf. Rm. 3:6) or through our obedience which demonstrates our being driven by his Spirit (cf. Rm. 8:13,14).

In spite of the great certainty with which we can be assured that God’s ultimate manifestation of his glory will be accomplished without regard to the fickleness of our wills, we are nevertheless clearly commanded to be holy as he is holy, to be transformed by the renewal of our minds, and to not be carried away by the doctrines of men (cf.1Pt. 1:16; Rm. 12:2; Eph. 4:14). In other words, we are never given warrant to be content in our ill-founded doctrines or in our disobedience knowing that God is and will be glorified in our mishaps. Quite the contrary, we are encouraged not to think as those fools who slanderously charged Paul with “doing evil that good may come” (Rm. 3:8), but we are rather charged to patiently seek for glory and honor and immortality or be met with the full wrath and fury of God (cf. Rm. 2:7,8).

Read more…

USA Today in an article based upon polls has reported that religion in general, mostly Christianity, is losing numbers in the American populous. A co-worker shared the article with me yesterday morning, and I read it with a sort of “duh” mentality, thinking that the information was not really new news. I was shocked, however, when I got to my class at the seminary last night and discovered that some people there were shocked by the news in the article. They did not have a clue. In this way, this article today might be a good thing, for perhaps it will wake up the clueless to certain fatal flaws found in the American church today:

The “Field of Dreams” Model Does Not Work
For the past several decades, the church in America has adopted a “if you build it, they will come” mentality of church growth. This mentality has become so engrained in our Christian psyche that we do not even realize it any more. We demonstrate it with the language that we use (we invite people to “church” and with all our mind refer to a building when the church is by the etymology, “the elect”), in our methods of evangelism (Upward Basketball, etc.), in our “Christian” advertising, in our building programs, and in our measuring of success by numbers not by lives characterized by holiness. It is demonstrated in our focus on liturgy, on music styles, on carpet color, and everything else that Christians bicker and argue about that have nothing to do with the Church. The Church has been watered down, deformed, and beaten into a building where Christians meet on Sunday mornings, instead of being the ekklesia (“kle-”: called; “ek”: out)–those who have been called out by God to be holy as he is holy.

Read more…

Having just completed my one-hundredth post here at blog.xpistou.com, I thought that it might do well for me to revisit my reasons for writing on this site day after day. I have written a post prior to this one entitled, “Why I Write,” and hence the name of this present post, “Why I Write Reborn.” Though I did address the same question in said prior post, it was by no mean exhaustive nor adequate. I hope that this post will better answer the question, Why do I write?

I Write To Glorify God
If you were to press me and ask what verse in all of Scripture drives my life day in and day out, I would tell you 1 Corinthians 10:31. In this well known verse, the apostle Paul writes, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all the glory of God.” In it, Paul uses the most common activities of men, viz. eating and drinking, to demonstrate that every action that we take, no matter how minute or how menial, should be an act of worship to God.

My goal, therefore, is that this blog will be an act of worship to God. I know very well that, because I am a sinful man, this site falls well short of this goal often, but nevertheless God’s glory is the bar that I set. This means by necessity that I write some things that I might should not have written and that I am inaccurate and wrong in some of the statements that I make, and for these things I must constantly turn to God by repentance. Though I do falter often in this regard, I continue to write because I am compelled to do so.

Read more…

Living the Christian life is a particularly daunting task when one looks back upon the history of the church and examines the lives of others who loved and devoted their lives to the Lord. Of course, one looks to (or ought to look to) Christ and how every breath he breathed he breathed to the glory of his Father. Then one can look upon the countless and unnamed martyrs who confessed Christ as Lord and denounced heresy and were thus burned at the stake, drowned, shot five times in the stomach and left for dead on the street, sawed and hacked into pieces, and on and on. Then one could look at those such as John Calvin, John Gill, and Jonathan Edwards who wrote tens of thousands of pages a piece, two of whom, Calvin and Gill, both wrote systematic theologies and commentaries on the whole Bible, and Edwards who still wrote more. These wrote all that they contributed to the Faith, with two of them, Calvin and Edwards, dying at age fifty-five. All of these, from Christ to Edwards, were not idle men and were busy about the glory of the Father.

Read more…

I am growing weary of those who call themselves Christians. If I have to hear one more Christian cry about Obama and the undeserving poor who are taking “deserving” people’s precious tax dollars while they themselves are living it up on the world’s pleasures and by their lavish lifestyles are actively neglecting those poor, I really think that I am going to lose it.

I am growing weary of Evangelicals who think the Gospel is a “Get Out of Hell Free” card and that Christ died “to fund their vanity purchase.”* I am sick of Christians who think that they can honor Christ and the Gospel’s demands while they live in a big house with fancy furniture and stainless steel everything and think it is okay just as long as they host “church” functions from time to time.

Read more…

As Christians in a wealthy and materialistic nation, there lies a daunting task in front of us–to regard as rubbish that which we are taught to love. This task is daunting for several reasons, and any one of them alone can bind us as easily as the several combined.

The first reason our task daunting is that we, even as Christians, possess a flesh that is yet not glorified and that presently and on its own accord desires the things of the world. These desires of the flesh might vary in degree and manifestation from person to person, but they are all of one fleshly root. These desires manifest themselves presently in the love of shiny cars, new technology, large houses, inappropriate lusts, etc., and they all lie in wait to strangle out of us any desire for Christ that the Spirit has put into us.

Secondly, those who are of the world encourage us to gratify of our fleshly desires. Worldly people use their philosophies to justify their own the fleshly pursuits and, to appease their own consciences, operate just as those whom the prophet condemns: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20). With their consciences cleaned by their fantastic moralities, those who are worldly seek then to excite our fleshly longings with advertisements, filthy television shows, etc., and thereby demonstrate the Apostle’s observation, “Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:32).

Thirdly, we are flooded with false doctrine concerning wealth and possessions from those within the church. These false doctrines are not limited to the obvious health and wealth preachers like Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, but it applies to many who quietly embrace the world and its treasures. These teachers are arguably more treacherous than the Joel Osteens of the world because their teachings are so close to the truth that it ensnares many who would be orthodox. These teachers tell us that it is okay to have many possessions just as long as we make Christ number one in our life. Others preach that God only requires ten percent of that which he gives us and that God will bless us richly if we faithful with that ten percent.¹

All around us are these snares that attempt to trap us into loving the world or, very likely, that have already trapped us into loving the world. You might be the one who finds himself already trapped by his love for the world, and you know this and are seeking to rid yourself of it but do not know how. Hopefully, I will be able offer some suggestions that will get you heading in the right direction.

Cultivate a Satisfaction for Christ Alone
There is much in the phrase, “Make Christ your number one,” that seems like sound advice. The problem with it is that we are not called to make Christ number one on a our lists, but we are called to make Christ our all. In other words, Christ is not to be the highest percentage of our affections, but he is supposed to be one hundred percent of our affections. When Christ calls us to take up our crosses daily, this is precisely what he means.

What you must ask yourself then is, “Do I live my life in such a way so that in everything that I do, I do it so that I might enjoy and desire Christ more?” This is a radical question to ask yourself, and it will change how you live every moment of your life. Instead of asking yourself, for example, “What music can I listen to that is family friendly or that does not use curse words?” ask yourself, “What music can I listen to that will make me adore Christ more and bring me to worship him?” Imagine the CDs (including some “Christian” CDs) that would be thrown out from our music collections if we asked that question! What if you instead of asking, “What house can we afford to buy?” you asked, “What house can I buy (or build) that will cause me to desire Christ over my house and will bring glory to his name?” If you ask that, I guarantee you that you will not be buying a $250,000 house any time soon.

If you are struggling with the love of the world, you need desperately to rid yourself of the taste for its pleasures. The Apostle John writes these sobering words in his first letter:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world–the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions–is not from the Father but is from the world (1John 2:15, 16).

1- I know for many of you, red flags are going up. You believe these things–you believe that it is okay to have nice possessions as long as Christ is your number one–you believe that you are being a good steward of your money as long as you give ten percent to your local church. But let me ask you this, after the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and the fullness of prophets has been made known in Christ, how many rich people in Scripture are told that they can keep their possessions as long as they make Christ number one? While you are thinking about that, how many poor people are told the same thing? Also, where do you find in Scripture after Christ (or any where in Scripture) that ten percent of yourself is an acceptable offering to God?