Francis Chan and John Piper are messing with me

Brief summaries to follow...



Speaker: John Piper
Date: 10/19/08
Filling Up What Is Lacking in Christ's Afflictions



Speaker: Francis Chan
Date: 11/9/2008
Living Sacrificially
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The Glory of God

Exodus 33:18 paraphrased
Lord! Show me why you matter to me!

The Lord literally shouted back in a mighty way.

Exodus 34:6-7
"The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands of generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

In God's words this is His glory, His significance to us, His weightiness... A question that shouts form this passage is how can He both love and forgive unfailingly AND be ultimately just, never excusing the guilty?

Jesus was the only way. Our Advocate Priest who promises that not one whom the Father gives to Him will EVER be snatched out of His hands (John 10:25-30, beware of the warning in Matthew 25:31-46!) and who He will lead until we are all face to face with Him to the end of the age.

Jesus attracted the "non-church folk"

"Jesus' teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders [that] Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren't appealing to younger brothers [irreligious], they must be more full of elder brothers [religious] than we'd like to think."
-- Tim Keller, Prodigal God

"But when he heard it, [Jesus] said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”
-- Matthew 9:12-13

Today our churches all face a strong pull toward religion and morality and away from the Gospel preached to lost, irreligious people. Christianese is the common language of the Church and it is barely intelligible to the outsider looking in. If our preaching does not offend the religious, as Jesus' often did, then the irreligious are by nature repelled. Jesus sought those that are repelled by the current message of the American Church. He spoke often with love to the non-religious type, but to the religious with strong condemnation... may there be reformation in the Church where that the irreligious repent of their sin and (equally as important) the religious repent of their religion.