“A sermon is often a violent act,” says (Doug) Pagitt, a key figure among emerging leaders. “It’s a violence toward the will of the people who have to sit there and take it.”

It can be, if it distorts the Gospel, but that’s not what Pagitt means. He’s talking about how preaching, if it claims an authoritative role in the church, it “perpetuates an image of the pastor as somehow more authoritative or spiritual than his or her listeners.”

I disagree. A preacher’s authority does not come from the fact that he’s standing up front, it comes from the Word of God as it’s being preached. If the preacher exercises his authority properly, then Christ will be glorified through the preaching of the Word, not the preacher.

It is as Billy Graham says, “Throughout the Old Testament, we find Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and the other prophets continually using expressions such as “The word of the Lord came unto me” or “Thus saith the Lord.” The prophets of old gained their authority from this: they were not simply speaking their own words, they were mouthpieces for God.”

Lastly, there is such a thing as a calling and those who have heard the call to preach must preach according to the authority God has bestowed upon them. Not everyone should preach (James 3:1). Only those who have heard the call to preach should preach; but if you’ve heard that call, then preach confidently and authoritatively.

Source: abpnews.com

It is widely recognized that the formal principle underlying the Reformation was nothing other than sola scriptura: the reformers’ diehard commitment to the other great solas was an effect arising from their desire to be guided by scriptures alone. The exegesis and interpretation of the bible was the one great means by which the war against Roman corruption was waged; which is almost the same thing as saying that the battle was basically a hermeneutical struggle. In light of these observations, one could say that the key event marking the beginning of the Reformation occurred, not in 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg; but two years prior to that, when he rejected Origin’s four-layered hermeneutic in favor of what he called the grammatical-historical sense. This one interpretive decision was the seed-idea from which would soon spring up all the fruits of the most massive recovery of doctrinal purity in the history of the Church. We would do well to learn from this: our ongoing struggle to be always reforming, always contending for the faith which was once delivered to the saints, is essentially a process of bringing every doctrine under the scrutiny of scripture. And in order to have the confidence that we are doing so legitimately, we must give much effort to being hermeneutically sound. Hermeneutics is the battlefield on which the war is won or lost.

Read the rest.

“…I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes…”

- Romans 1:16

Highercallingblogs.com has a good post about the importance of teaching our daughters to find their value beyond the surface level of physical appearance, material belongings, and social status. Maybe it’s because I have a daughter on the way, but I can only think of one lesson more important for parents to teach their little girls, and it’s a related lesson - that’s the Gospel of our King Jesus. Here’s the post from highercalling:

I have three daughters. In watching them grow up and deal with peers and popularity and teen-age pressure, I have come to understand that we put an enormous amount of pressure on our girls to concern themselves with appearance. Everywhere our girls look they are told that they are not good enough. And now plastic surgery provides an easy solution. If you don’t like the way you look, you can pay someone to fix you. My wife spent 20 years as a hospital chaplain. She tells me that some parents are now giving their daughters breast implant surgery for their birthdays.

Our girls face enough challenges to their self-esteem without mom and dad reinforcing the message that somehow they need surgery to look good enough.

Tanya Dennis has discovered a rather disturbing book called “My Beautiful Mommy.” It’s a book that helps young girls understand their mothers’ plastic surgery. Something seems terribly wrong with this.

“The mom in this children’s book doesn’t just deal with what went wrong (the extra stretched-out skin); she also gets a nose job and breast implants. She explains to her inquisitive daughter: “[I'll be] more than different … I’ll be prettier!”

I’m against teaching our kids - especially our daughters - that their value is found in their appearance.”… Read More.

In the Dailies - Discovering the extraordinary God in ordinary life.

HT: highercallingblogs

“To succeed in application we must not only exegete the text; we must also exegete our world. Unfortunately, this is precisely where many church leaders fall short. Pastors and church leaders often know a lot about Scripture but very little about the currents of contemporary life. Locked away in their studies, they live in relative isolation, largely unacquainted with the lives of people to whom they minister. Consequently, pastors and teachers often pursue relatively unimportant issues as they apply Scripture. Since they know little about the matters that confront modern believers, they end up approaching the Old Testament with their own needs in mind. Teenagers hear sermons that actually speak to the interests of their middle-age pastor. Business people learn esoteric theological distinctives and never hear how to live for Christ in the marketplace. Nothing could be more debilitating to application than to be isolated from the world of those to whom we minister.”

- He Gave Us Stories by Richard Pratt

I’ll trade you two Martin Luther rookie cards for an R.C. Sproul. More information here.

Some people are inclined to believe that Christians are supposed to seek God’s will as opposed to pursuing their own pleasure. But what makes Biblical morality different than worldly hedonism is not that Biblical morality is disinterested and duty-driven, but that it is interested in vastly greater and purer things. Christian Hedonism is Biblical morality because it recognizes that obeying God is the only route to final and lasting happiness. Here are some examples of this from the Bible:

Luke 6:35 says, “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great.” It is clear when Jesus says “expect nothing in return” that we should not be motivated by worldly aggrandizement, but we are given strength to suffer loss by the promise of a future reward.

Again, in Luke 14:12-14: “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor . . . and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” That is, don’t do good deeds for worldly advantage; rather, do them for spiritual, heavenly benefits.

HT: Piper

“To be a Christian involves a double danger.

First, all the intense internal suffering involved in becoming a Christian, this losing human reason and being crucified on the paradox.

Then the danger of the Christian’s having to live in the world of secularity and here express that he is a Christian” (Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 493).

The book of Proverbs begins, “The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel.” He was a great king and the son of a great king. That means he was famous and powerful and supreme in all the realm. People bowed in his presence. They did what he said. He had immense authority and honor.

How did he treat his mother in this exalted role? You recall his mother was Bathsheba. She had married his father David under very ugly circumstances—very displeasing to God. But she was his mother, and this is what it says in 1 Kings 2:19,

Bathsheba went to King Solomon to speak to him for Adonijah. And the king arose to meet her, bowed before her, and sat on his throne; then he had a throne set for the king’s mother, and she sat on his right.

Read more …

HT: Piper

Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. - Ephesians 4:29

Have you heard this from someone recently? That “WE CANNOT KNOW, with certainty, what God has revealed so anyone who thinks he does is proud? We must, rather, (they say) embrace God as mystery?”

In light of this shouldn’t we be asking the following: Is not this assertion itself a dogma with affirmations and denials? Is not this itself a statement of knowledge? Is “we cannot know with certainty” not itself an assertion of KNOWLEDGE (a dogmatic assertion) as THE WAY to look at Scripture? Whether conscious of it or not, this is what is called “double-talk” and those who believe this are doing the very thing they claim to despise, even in the very speaking of it.

Read more …

This song has been in my head all week - a great reminder that, especially when we’re surrounded by craziness, that the heart of life is good. Praise God for all the ways in which He has blessed us.

What other great and awesome things is God going to do amongst us today? This question is really an effect or response to the transformation that occurs when the leadership and laity work together in love for Christ. This is the question of Joshua 4, Ezra 6, Acts 2 and Revelation 21. It is the question voiced by believers who join in local fellowship in service to their King.

We see throughout Scripture (Genesis 1; 12; Matthew 10; 28:16) that humanity, Christ’s creation, is sufficient to carry out His work. God has not created someone or something more meaningful than humans through whom He seeks to do His work and carry out His purpose on this earth. Humans are His principal agents. Foundationally, all the sufficiency of humanity is based upon Christ the human, the Son of man, whose human blood was the perfect offering before the Father (Mark 15).

In short, all that we do in obedience to God is good enough and sufficient to meet God’s desire and quench God’s appetite to receive continued glory and recognition. God does not think, “I wish I could get more praise and honor than what these sinful humans give to me.” After receiving the offering of our lives each day, God is full and satisfied. God did not and does not seek to create a superhuman or human mutation from the best of humanity and wish that subject to praise Him. He simply continues to create more fallible humans. He finds our offerings on His created earth to be good enough to give Him the glory He desires and deserves.

Read the whole thing.