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This is a question that I guarantee you will get people to butt heads in the visible church. If you read the Bible as the testimony of Jesus, you get to know God’s gift of grace in Jesus, and also God’s gift of a direction of worship for His people centered in His Son Jesus. God provides instructions of faith for His people, in such a way that they learn to offer praises out of the testimony of Christ in the inscribed Word, the Bible, onto God as their Father. And God centers this direction of faith and worship from the inscribed Word onto His Son Jesus, the Mediator of worship, the Holy One of God who makes His people’s praises a sweet offering to God because of Jesus’ atonement for His people’s fallenness from sin at the cross.
As you might see, I’m starting to spruce things up a bit here at “New City.” I’m currently toying around with widgets and testing out blog networks for meeting fellow Christian writers and also to basically get the Gospel message expressed among people to the glory of God, even from my typing fingertips. It is good to seek the salt of the Gospel for your life as part of knowing grace relationship with the Lord, in terms of networking yourself among people and making friends by grace, whether in real life or in communication outlets like the blogosphere. As you increase the righteous presence of Christians in culture, in winning friends to Christ and discipling people in the faith, and in sharing good words of the Gospel of grace among people, you bring the church to good favor before unchurched people in secular culture. And you lead the church to speak the peculiar Gospel into culture in your walk with the Lord. “When the righteous increase, the people rejoice / But when the wicked rule, the people groan” (Prov. 29:2). So in terms of my desire to increase the presence of the righteous Gospel to the glory of God on my blog, you’ll see further experiments with widgets and photos and changed blog appearances and so forth.
Meanwhile, I enclose here to you an excellent sermon-lecture from Tim Keller, “The Grand Demythologizer: The Gospel and Idolatry,” on Gospel exposition or Gospel “exposing” against false spirituality in modern culture, from the Gospel Coalition 2009 National Conference.
One lesson that I learned a long time ago from the Song of Songs – and a lesson that has recently rekindled my interest in reading the Song of Songs again – has been the lesson of speaking righteousness and grace among people as part of my walk with the Lord, my upholding of a name better than wine and better than good ointments of the earth with the Lord. Knowing a real righteous grace-rooted relationship in the Gospel with the Lord means learning to discern your own life to real blamelessness, a life of turning away from sin and counting sin as dead to the cross of Christ and knowing real communion of grace with the Lord by faith, and expressing this life of blamelessness and grace among other people. You learn to speak and do real righteousness in your life by knowing the righteousness credited from God the Father onto His believers, through His Son Jesus, the King of kings for His people. And you learn to speak and do real righteousness in terms of networking these things among other people, shepherding them to these good things of the Gospel for their grasp of rest and contentment with the Lord alone.
I read the whole first book of Peter at the end of last week, and I found that time to be very edifying, particularly as I saw conflicts in the church as a very real reality for my life in my quiet time with the Lord. One passage of the first book of Peter jumped out at me: the apostle Peter’s call for lay members and overall disciples in the church to watch over each other in discipleship and spiritual growth, and these disciples’ moderation of conflicts with each other by the mediating grace of Christ.
As I work on my third commentary lesson on the book of Romans, about knowledge in this life used as an idol and about new knowledge of God that comes in the Gospel message out of Romans 1:18-23, a couple of themes from other books of the Bible have been on my mind. One theme has been longing for the new heavens and the new earth in the second coming of the Lord, and expressing these things in righteousness by faith and in evangelical witness to peers. This theme comes from the second book of Peter. And the second theme has been learning the covenant history and blessing of God onto the church for Christians’ exercising of discipleship between parents and children, and for the church’s corporate witness of the Gospel to unchurched culture. This comes from the book of Proverbs.
Author’s note: This article on Kurt Cobain and the life of Joseph from Genesis was first posted on Friday, April 17, 2009. Further Biblical insights on the life of Joseph are also included in the comment section of this article, thanks to the helpful recommendations of a confessing Christian pastor and Facebook friend, Rodney Queen.
Last week marked the fifteenth anniversary of rock star Kurt Cobain’s death by suicide. I can safely say that when it comes to the arts, no individual artist had such a meteoric impact on my peers than Cobain and his music. MSNBC did an article covering Nirvana and the Seattle rock scene’s influence on the art sensibilities of my generation, Generation X. See the article here.
Knowing the Gospel as a very liberating message of Christ risen from the grave for our grasp of grace relationship with the Lord really involves looking at the clutter of our lives and seeing Christ’s conquest of the power of our false love of this clutter. When Jesus rose from the grave, He declared sin a dead pleasure for those who believe in Him. Christians still live with residual desires for sin, even as they know the power of sin crucified and done away in Christ alone. If we know Christ and Him risen, we have to live out lives of faith that correspond with Christ’s resurrection grace. And one way we do that is by doing battle with clutter in our lives – specifically our false desire for clutter in our lives. This is true not just for lay Christians in the church. It’s even true for ministries in the church as well, whether among lay Christians getting involved in ministries and body life of the church, or among pastors and elders serving their congregations.
The next commentary lesson that I plan to write on the book of Romans has to do with the issue of knowledge – the knowledge of life that we use as our idol apart from God, and the new knowledge of God in the Gospel message that comes from God Himself in His inscribed Word. The commentary lesson is tentatively titled, “New Knowledge of God and the Hardened Knowledge of Idolatry.” The lesson is based on Romans 1:18-23.
If we are to understand faith in Christ and how it connects with people, there are two things we have to understand about the nature of the Gospel. We have to understand that the Gospel shatters boundaries; it shatters strongholds that people erect among each other as expressions of the fall of Adam and Eve. And we have to understand that the Gospel is rooted in the power of God in such a way that God leads people to a real comprehensive saving faith in Christ, based on God’s inscribed Word, the Bible, and based on God’s gift of the witness of the Holy Spirit for the Bible.
New Knowledge of Priestly Grace and the Bible Study Guide
April 24, 2009 in "Disciplina Nostra" Bible Commentaries: "The Gospel Born From Above: A Commentary On The Book Of Romans For Skeptics, Muslims, And The Church", Take a rest; let someone else drive | Tags: english standard version, esv study bible, esv study guide, idolatry, imputed righteousness, knowledge, new knowledge of God, penal substitution, repentance, self-righteousness, substitutionary atonement, the authority of the Bible, the book of deuteronomy, the book of romans, the law and the gospel, thomas chalmers | Leave a comment
One of the issues I’m working on in my next commentary lesson on Romans, in the lesson of knowledge of this life used as an idol against God and new knowledge of God given in the Gospel message, is that we look to the good things of this life, the things of the heavens and the earth that properly give knowledge of God to us for His glory, for our own self-centered purposes. We glorify ourselves with the good things and knowledge of this life. And worse than that, the knowledge that God gives us of Himself in direct saving revelation of the Bible actually becomes knowledge that we use to gratify ourselves in self-righteousness. Knowledge from the Bible becomes a false god to us, a false god created apart from the true God. We use the Bible apart from the God of the Bible in self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is a false god and false savior.
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