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The Best Is Yet To Come
Saturday, 23 April 2011 23:43
With Christ’s first coming, God began the process of reversing the curse of sin and redeeming all things. In Christ, God was moving in a new way. All of Jesus’ ministry—the words he spoke, the miracles he performed—showed that there was a new order in town: God’s order. When Jesus healed the diseased, raised the dead, and forgave the desperate, he did so to show that with the arrival of God in the flesh came the restoration of the way God intended things to be.
Tim Keller observes that Christ’s miracles were not the suspension of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order. They were a reminder of what once was prior to the fall and a preview of what will eventually be a universal reality once again—a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict.
In his book This Beautiful Mess, Rick McKinley describes the response of a pastor’s response to the death of a friend:
A pastor friend of mine told me that as he was preparing for a funeral once, he decided to go through the Gospels to see how Jesus dealt with funerals. What he discovered was that Jesus did not care for them much. Every one He went to He raised the person from the dead. Jesus doesn’t do funerals, not even his own.
The resurrection of Jesus is the greatest proof of God’s intention to revitalize this broken cosmos. His rising from the dead was “just the beginning of the saving, renewing, resurrecting work of God that will have its climax in the restoration of the entire cosmos,” as K. Scott Oliphant and Sinclair Ferguson remind us. The bodily resurrection of Jesus “was the first bit of material order to be redeemed and transfigured,” writes John Stott. “It is the divine pledge that the rest will be redeemed and transfigured one day.” Christ’s resurrection is both the model and the means for our resurrection—and the guarantee that what he started, he will finish.
The day will come when Christ returns and completes this process of transformation (read Revelation 21 , for instance). Psalm 96:11 ‑13 gives us a poetic glimpse of what will happen when Jesus returns to rule the earth:
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it!
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
before the Lord, for he comes,
for he comes to rule the earth.
He will rule the world in righteousness,
and the peoples in his faithfulness.
For those who have found forgiveness of sins in Christ, there will one day be no more sickness, no more death, no more tears, no more division, no more tension. For the pardoned children of God, there’ll be complete harmony. We’ll work and worship in a perfectly renewed earth without the interference of sin. We who believe the gospel will enjoy sinless hearts and minds along with disease-free bodies. All that causes us pain and discomfort will be destroyed, and we will live forever. We’ll finally be able, as John Piper says, “to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever.”
So take heart, weary soldiers. The best is yet to come.
Happy Resurrection Day!
The Best Is Yet To Come is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian
Jesus + Nothing = Everything
Friday, 01 April 2011 02:32
In the fall of 2011 my next book entitled Jesus + Nothing = Everything will be released by Crossway. I’m almost finished with it and would greatly appreciate your prayers as I wrap it up. Right now I’m enslaved to it (hence, the infrequent blog posts).
My hope and prayer is that it will serve the church a probing and practical theology of the gospel. It is autobiographically illustrated–using the most difficult year of my life (2009) to show how God revealed to me my own idols and helped me rediscover the emboldening, liberating power of the gospel.
Here’s Crossway’s description of the book:
Jesus + Nothing = Everything is the equation that Tullian Tchividjian took away from a year of great trial and turmoil. In his new book he describes the bitter divisions that soured the beginning of his pastorate at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, and the personal anchor that he found in the overwhelming power of the gospel. The book of Colossians, in particular, forms the basis of Tchividjian’s call for Christians to rediscover the gospel and continually reorient our lives around Jesus.
Tchividjian insists that many who assume they understand the gospel fail to actually apply its riches to their lives. He takes particular aim at self-righteousness, which motivates moral behavior by fear and guilt. In contrast, the gospel of grace, with the radical freedom that it brings, provides the only sustainable motivation for Christians. This book delves into the profound theological truths of the gospel, yet the message is intensely practical—Tchividjian sounds the call for believers to lean hard on Christ in every area of every day.
Stay tuned…
Jesus + Nothing = Everything is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian
What To Preach To Yourself Everyday
Saturday, 26 March 2011 02:55
Because we are so naturally prone to look at ourselves and our performance more than we do to Christ and his performance, we need constant reminders of the gospel.
If we’re supposed to preach the gospel to ourselves everyday—what’s the actual content of that message? What is it exactly that I need to keep reminding myself of?
If God has saved you—if he’s given you the faith to believe, and you’re now a Christian; if you’ve transferred trust from your own accomplishments and abilities to Christ’s accomplishment on behalf of sinners—then here’s the good news. In the phraseology of Colossians 1 , it’s simply this: You’ve already been qualified, you’ve already been delivered, you’ve already been transferred, you’ve already been redeemed, you’ve already been forgiven.
It’s been widely accepted that in the original language of Greek, Ephesians 1:3-14 is one long sentence. Paul becomes so overwhelmed by the sheer greatness and immensity and size and sweetness of God’s amazing grace, that he doesn’t even take a breath. He writes in a state of controlled ecstasy. And at the heart of his elation is the idea of “union with Christ.” We have been blessed, he writes, “in Christ with every spiritual blessing” (1:3): we’ve been chosen (v. 4), graced (v. 6), redeemed (v. 7), reconciled (v. 10), destined (v. 11), and sealed forever (v. 13). The everything we need and long for, Paul says, we already possess if we are in Christ. He has already sweepingly secured all that our hearts deeply crave.
We no longer need to rely, therefore, on the position, the prosperity, the promotions, the preeminence, the power, the praise, the passing pleasures, or the popularity that we’ve so desperately pursued for so long.
Day by day, what we must do practically can be experienced only as we come to a deeper understanding of what we are positionally—a deeper understanding of what’s already ours in Christ.
I used to think that growing as a Christian meant I had to somehow go out and obtain the qualities and attitudes I was lacking. To really mature, I needed to find a way to get more joy, more patience, more faithfulness, and so on.
Then I came to the shattering realization that this isn’t what the Bible teaches, and it isn’t the gospel. What the Bible teaches is that we mature as we come to a greater realization of what we already have in Christ. The gospel, in fact, transforms us precisely because it’s not itself a message about our internal transformation, but Christ’s external substitution. We desperately need an Advocate, Mediator, and Friend. But what we need most is a Substitute. Someone who has done for us and secured for us what we could never do and secure for ourselves.
The hard work of Christian growth, therefore, is to think less of me and my performance and more of Jesus and his performance for me. Ironically, when we focus mostly on our need to get better we actually get worse. We become neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with my effort over God’s effort for me makes me increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective.
You could state it this way: Sanctification is the daily hard work of going back to the reality of our justification–receiving Christ’s words, “It is finished” into new and deeper parts of our being every day, into our rebellious regions of unbelief. It’s going back to the certainty of our objectively secured pardon in Christ and hitting the refresh button a thousand times a day. Or, as Martin Luther so aptly put it in his Lectures on Romans, “To progress is always to begin again.” Real spiritual progress, in other words, requires a daily going backwards.
In her book Because He Loves Me, Elyse Fitzpatrick writes about how important remembrance is in Christian growth:
One reason we don’t grow in ordinary, grateful obedience as we should is that we’ve got amnesia; we’ve forgotten that we are cleansed from our sins. In other words, ongoing failure in sanctification (the slow process of change into Christlikeness) is the direct result of failing to remember God’s love for us in the gospel. If we lack the comfort and assurance that his love and cleansing are meant to supply, our failures will handcuff us to yesterday’s sins, and we won’t have faith or courage to fight against them, or the love for God that’s meant to empower this war. If we fail to remember our justification, redemption, and reconciliation, we’ll struggle in our sanctification.
Christian growth, in other words, does not happen first by behaving better, but believing better–believing in bigger, deeper, brighter ways what Christ has already secured for sinners.
Preach that to yourself everyday and you’ll increasingly experience the scandalous freedom that Jesus paid so dearly to secure for you.
What To Preach To Yourself Everyday is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian
Preach The Gospel
Monday, 21 March 2011 23:52
The other day I was reading through a book that Mike Horton gave me last time I was in San Diego–a relatively new book that he edited and contributed to entitled Justified: Modern Reformation Essays on the Doctrine of Justification. At the end of the book Mike outlines six-core beliefs that define the mission of Modern Reformation and the White Horse Inn (his weekly radio broadcast). While all six of the core-beliefs are foundational, I was struck by the gripping clarity of belief number two on the importance of Gospel-centered preaching. Everything he writes here not only defines my theology of preaching but is, in my opinion, the only type of preaching that will rescue the church from Christless Christianity. He writes:
Scripture is of no use to us if we read it merely as a handbook for daily living without recognizing that its principle purpose is to reveal Jesus Christ and his gospel for the salvation of sinners. All Scripture coalesces in Christ, anticipated in the OT and appearing in the flesh in the NT. In Scripture, God issues commands and threatens judgment for transgressors as well as direction for the lives of his people. Yet the greatest treasure buried in the Scriptures is the good news of the promised Messiah. Everything in the Bible that tells us what to do is “law”, and everything in the Bible that tells us what God has done in Christ to save us is “gospel.” Much like medieval piety, the emphasis in much Christian teaching today is on what we are to do without adequate grounding in the good news of what God has done for us in Christ. “What would Jesus do?” becomes more important than “What has Jesus done?” The gospel, however, is not just something we needed at conversion so we can spend the rest of our Christian life obsessed with performance; it is something we need every day–the only source of our sanctification as well as our justification. The law guides, but only the gospel gives. We are declared righteous–justified–not by anything that happens within us or done by us, but solely by God’s act of crediting us with Christ’s perfect righteousness through faith alone.
Preachers, read that paragraph over and over.
As I’ve said here before, don’t make the mistake of assuming that people understand the radical nature of what Jesus has done so that your preaching ministry is focused primarily on what people need to do.
The “what we need to do” portions of the Bible are good, perfect, and true–but apart from the “what Jesus has already done” portions of the Bible, we lack the power to do what we’re called to do. The good commands of God, in other words, do not have the power to engender what they command. They show us what a sanctified life looks like but they have no sanctifying power. Only the gospel has the power to move us forward. This is why the Bible never tells us what to do before first soaking our hearts and minds in what God in Christ has already done.
The fact is, that any obedience not grounded in or motivated by the gospel is unsustainable. No matter how hard you try, how radical you get, any engine smaller than the gospel that you’re depending on for power to obey will conk out in due time.
So, preach the gospel!
Preach The Gospel is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian
The Gospel Everyday
Friday, 18 March 2011 02:23
I once assumed the gospel was simply what non-Christians must believe in order to be saved, while afterward we advance to deeper theological waters. But I’ve come to realize that ” the gospel isn’t the first step in a stairway of truths, but more like the hub in a wheel of truth.” In other words, once God rescues sinners, his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the gospel, but to move them more deeply into it. All good theology, in fact, is an exposition of the gospel.
In his letter to the Christians of Colossae, the apostle Paul portrays the gospel as the instrument of all continued growth and spiritual progress, even after a believer’s conversion.
“All over the world,” he writes, “this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth” (Col. 1:6 ). He means that the gospel is not only growing wider in the world but it’s also growing deeper in Christians.
After meditating on Paul’s words, a friend told me that all our problems in life stem from our failure to apply the gospel. This means I can’t really move forward unless I learn more thoroughly the gospel’s content and how to apply it to all of life. Real change does not and cannot come independently of the gospel. God intends his Good News in Christ to mold and shape us at every point and in every way. It increasingly defines the way we think, feel, and live.
Martin Luther often employed the phrase simul justus et peccator—”simultaneously justified and sinful.” He understood that while he’d already been saved from sin’s penalty, he was in daily need of salvation from sin’s power. And since the gospel is the “power of God for salvation,” he knew that even for the most saintly of saints, the gospel is wholly relevant and vitally necessary. This means heralded preachers need the gospel just as much as hardened pagans.
In his book The Gospel for Real Life, Jerry Bridges picks up on this theme–that Christians need the gospel just as much as non-Christians–by explaining how the spiritual poverty in so much of our Christian experience is the result of an inadequate understanding of the gospel’s depths. The answer isn’t to try harder in the Christian life but to comprehend more fully and clearly Christ’s finished work for sinners and then to live in more vital awareness of that grace day by day. The main problem in the Christian life, in other words, is not that we don’t try hard enough to be good. It’s that we haven’t accepted the deep implications of the gospel and applied its powerful reality to all parts of our life.
As I see it, there are two challenges for preachers, those of us called to announce this good news. First is to help people understand theologically that the gospel doesn’t just ignite the Christian life but it’s also the fuel that keeps Christians going and growing every day. The second challenge, which is much harder for me than the first, is to help people understand how this works functionally.
I address the second challenge by regularly asking myself questions like this one: Since Jesus secured my pardon and absorbed the Father’s wrath on my behalf so that “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” how does that impact my longing for approval, my tendency to be controlling, and my fear of the unknown?
Where exactly am I experiencing agitation… impatience… unease… anxiety? Why is it there? What’s that really all about? I try to identify where my restlessness is rooted—because that’s where a confrontation with the gospel is needed. Whatever deficiency lies at the deepest root of our restlessness—no matter how big or small, whether it’s life-gripping or comparatively trivial—the missing component is something very specific which Christ has already secured for restless sinners like you and me.
To put it simply, how does the finished work of Christ satisfy my deepest daily needs so that I can experience the liberating power of the gospel every day and in every way?
If you’re a preacher, then God has called you to help others make the connection between Christ’s finished work and their daily life. To do this, we must unveil and unpack the truth of the gospel from every biblical text we preach in such a way that it exposes both the idols of our culture and the idols of our hearts.
Every sermon ought to disclose the ways in which we depend on lesser things to provide the security, acceptance, protection, affection, meaning, and satisfaction that only Christ can supply.
I pray that as you come to a better understanding of the length and breadth of the gospel, you will be recaptured every day by the “God of great expenditure” who gave everything that we might possess all.
The Gospel Everyday is a post from: Tullian Tchividjian
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